I wrote an essay that appeared in the Atlantic yesterday. Based on the research for my book on unemployment, the piece talks about the debate over Denmark in last week’s Democratic presidential debate—and how the real debate should be over Canada:
Clearly, America won’t expand its social safety net to anywhere near the scale of Denmark’s over the next president’s time in office. Judging from their rhetoric in the debate, though, Clinton and Sanders both agree that government can and should play an important role in extending economic opportunities more broadly. Canada’s approach to policy shows us some of the practical ways a country can do that—without having to go far from our roots as a New World society of dreamers and strivers.
Today’s federal election in Canada should be interesting: will Canada move in the direction of America, or vice versa? (That said, as my friend Barry Eidlin reminded me, the provinces have a lot of say in putting forward policies of their own—to help the employed and unemployed alike—and so some things probably won’t change, regardless of the outcome.)
Unfortunately, writing the headline for this post put the South Park song “Blame Canada” in my head. Here is the video, so that you can share in my pain (NSFW, obviously):
I participated in Marshal Zeringue’s Page 99 Test at the Campaign for the American Reader. The blog is based on a quote by the writer Ford Madox Ford: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” New authors talk about the ninety-ninth page of their book and what it says about its larger themes. Here’s what I wrote about my book Cut Loose:
Page 99 talks about how the unemployed deal with the depression and anxiety that come from losing part of their identities. Work is central to our sense of self—it’s often the first question we ask someone we meet—and during the workday we build friendships that sustain us throughout our lives. Many of the people I interviewed felt isolated. Friends could no longer relate. Relationships with spouses and children became strained. Unable to provide the way they used to, they found themselves mired in blame and doubts.
One smart way to help the unemployed is used extensively in Canada: action centers. When a layoff hits, the government sets up a help center for the company’s workers and trains some of them to work there. Unlike strangers at a government agency, peer helpers can assist their former coworkers with a personal and personalized touch. Lynn Minick of the National Employment Law Project points out that America’s social safety net for the unemployed largely helps the assertive and self-reliant. For those who might otherwise fall through the cracks, it makes a big difference if they have someone willing to step up for them, he says.
While policies are important, they’re not enough. As I write on page 99:
Individuals internalize society’s belief that being unemployed is degrading, and their mental health and social ties suffer as a result. Regardless of how much they receive in benefits, the unemployed are less satisfied than those with jobs. Even in countries with generous unemployment insurance, the unemployed tend to die at a younger age.
Society treats the long-term unemployed—whose numbers have remained at unprecedented levels since the recession—as lazy and useless. My book focuses on unemployed autoworkers, many who had worked hard for decades and, thanks to good wages and benefits, achieved a middle-class lifestyle. Now, suddenly, they are failures. Some became suicidal because they felt they had let their families down.
Our society attacks the “takers” who live off government aid or the “pampered” union members who had the gall to attain a decent quality of life. It’s obsessed with performance and proficiency, self-improvement and success. But in a culture that values winning at all costs, the long-term unemployed are the ultimate losers. The solution, I argue, has to involve changing that culture.
In The Graphic Canon, comic artists reimagine dozens of classic works of literature, philosophy, and religion. The result, says creator Russ Kick, is like The Norton Anthology with pictures, drawn by an army of emerging artists who provide their personal — and sometimes unexpected — gloss on the world's great books.
The Graphic Canon (Vols. 1–3) By Russ Kick
Seven Stories Press. 1,600 pages.
More than a decade before Julian Assange and Edward Snowden became poster boys for information freedom, Russ Kick was a pioneer of using the Internet to heighten government accountability. If you’ve seen the video of then president George W. Bush reading “The Pet Goat” with a second-grade class in Sarasota, Florida, as terrorist attacks were underway on September 11, 2001, you can thank Kick for posting an uncut version of the footage on the web.
While he was an editor at the Disinformation Company, an online publisher of “the most shocking, unusual, and quirkiest news articles, podcasts, and videos,” Kick produced a number of anthologies that exposed untruths and challenged conventional wisdom. His most popular collections are Everything You Know Is Wrong and You Are Being Lied To. When a decade of media-based, information-freedom advocacy began to take its toll on his well-being, Kick knew it was time for him to switch gears.
While visiting a bookstore in Tucson, Arizona, Kick’s chance encounter with a graphic novel sparked a new direction. For the last three and a half years, he has been working with comic artists to reimagine classic works of literature, philosophy, and religion for a three-volume collection called The Graphic Canon. This summer, the final volume was released (the first and second volumes were released last year), and the trilogy will be available as a box set in October.
I spoke with Kick about how going in a new direction can be both daunting and gratifying, and why his current project adapting children’s stories is unsuitable for kids.
Part of what makes The Graphic Canon intriguing is that it does two things at once: elevates comic art while making classic literature more accessible to contemporary audiences. What led you to take on this ambitious project?
It was so depressing to produce these sociopolitical books, but I knew I wanted to keep writing and editing anthologies. So, I returned to some of my other lifelong interests: literature and art. One day I was in was in the graphic-novel section of a bookstore in Tucson and found a full-length, graphic adaptation of The Trial by Kafka. It struck me that there should be an anthology of graphic adaptations of classic works of literature. I thought it should be like The Norton Anthology I had dragged around in college. That was the moment the idea was born, and it seemed so obvious to me once I had it.
When did you become interested in graphic novels?
I’ve read comics all my life. Once I signed the contract with Seven Stories Press, I started approaching my favorite artists to ask them to be a part of this project. Then I branched out from there. One of the most fun parts of working on The Graphic Canon was discovering new talent. It is unbelievable how many talented illustrators and comic artists are out there. It was great to find people who are essentially unknown and give them the opportunity to be part of this collection.
Animal Farm as reimagined by Laura Plansker.
Reinterpreting iconic works of literature must be intimidating, and some of the chapters are closer renderings than others. Did you feel a responsibility to maintain these works’ original forms?
Because this is an art project, I started out by making the decision not to place limits on what the artist could do. I wanted the result to be a real collaboration between the original writer, their work, and the artist. By giving talented artists the greatest source material possible, I knew the result would be amazing.
A part of editing an anthology is learning to let go of control. It’s a process of chance and synchronicity. Some things you want at the start never materialize, and you end up with other things you’d never even considered that are just brilliant. It’s like looking into a kaleidoscope; what you see is always unpredictable yet interesting.
The Graphic Canon isn’t just works of literature. You also include philosophical writings from people like Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche and excerpts from religious texts. How did you decide what to include as “the canon?”
I started with a list of what I considered to be the most critical works of literature. These were stories that would leave a noticeable gap if they weren’t included, like The Iliad, The Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Tale of Genji. But I also wanted to go beyond what was predictable and bring in unexpected things. That’s why I included the Incan play Apu Ollantay.
I also had a wish list of things I wanted to see adapted because I thought the story would work really well visually. Some of the artists I worked with told me they’d always wanted to adapt a certain work, but they never had a reason to do it. That’s what happened with Rebecca Dart and Paradise Lost, which are these stunning full-page illustrations and beautiful hand-lettering. It also happened with Rick Geary and the book of Revelation. Being a part of this project gave those artists the excuse they needed.
“Jabberwocky,” as reimagined by Eran Cantrell.
There’s a lot of diversity in the collection, stylistically and in how the artist approached the material. Some adaptations are straightforward and use the original text, while others are more abstract interpretations of a partial or whole work. What does this diversity bring to the collection as a whole?
People have told me they were pleasantly surprised with The Graphic Canon because it is so multilayered and features so many different artistic styles. A few times while I was editing, I was surprised when an artist brought something out of a story that I’d never noticed before. Even though some of these works are hundreds of years old, they still have really relevant things to say. The themes are so timeless and universal, and the artwork helps to get that across.
Every chapter begins with an introduction you penned that serves to contextualize the work and familiarize the reader with the comic artist. What did you learn by writing those introductions?
Too many amazing writers and poets died in total poverty, and only gained recognition for their work posthumously. In the chapter introductions, I talk about why the work is important and give some interesting facts about the writer or poet and the history of the work, to humanize it. A lot of times the backstory of a writer’s life and career is as interesting as the work itself. There are a lot of fascinating stories about pieces that were either completely ignored during a writer’s lifetime or torn to pieces by critics when it was published. I almost got tired of having to write that again and again. But it did teach me to never give up hope.
You mention the possibility of a fourth volume a couple of times in The Graphic Canon. Is that something you have in the works?
I am working on another anthology right now, but it won’t be a fourth volume. It will be graphic adaptations of children’s literature. Originally, the publisher and I thought this would be a book for children and adults, but now that the artwork has started coming in, I realize the book isn’t going to be appropriate for kids. It’s well known that a lot of what we consider to be children’s stories are really dark and violent, so you can imagine how the artwork might be disturbing. The artists and I won’t be watering these stories down like they do at Disney.
The Examined Life By Stephen Grosz
W.W. Norton & Company. 240 pages.
I didn’t expect a collection of stories about the inner struggles of psychoanalysis patients to be so much like a detective novel. Yet, in The Examined Lifeparallels abound.
Clues are uncovered slowly in each chapter and a mystery unfolds. Hidden motivations are unearthed by identifying the meaningful in the mundane. The skillful narrator walks the reader through his ruminative process of making sense of the clues. A truth is revealed that appears to have been there are along.
Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz has penchant for storytelling. He knows when to showcase his professional proficiencies and when to let the tale tell itself. The truth, after all, is somewhere in-between.
What was your motivation in embarking on this project?
I am sixty. I have a ten-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son. My father had two heart attacks by the time he was my age, and my mother died when she was sixty-four. If I’m not here when my children are teenagers or young adults, I thought about what I want them to know.
The thirty-one stories in The Examined Life address what I think of as some of life’s biggest problems — problems we all face. More than that, I wanted to portray a way of thinking, a disposition towards oneself and the world that might be useful to them and others. Also, psychoanalysis requires time and money, and many people won’t be able to afford it. I wanted to set down some of the important things I’ve learned in a way that may be helpful to those who are unable to have psychoanalysis or therapy.
Given that you have a twenty-five-year history to draw from, why did you choose to include these particular stories?
I chose these stories because they have a kind of urgency, and I felt I had something to say about these fundamental life issues. My patients had taught me something that I wanted to get down on paper. Of course, I also write with my patients’ privacy in mind. Confidentiality plays an important role in what I choose to write about, and how I write.
In some ways, The Examined Lifedemystifies psychoanalysis, which has become a part of popular culture — and not always in an accurate or respectable way. How did this influence the way you told these stories?
Psychoanalysis has become something of a joke in our culture. In the book, I try to set all that aside and just give a simple picture of what psychoanalysis really is — and what actually happens between an analyst and patient.
The truth is, the people who come to psychoanalysis are in pain, and usually part of the pain is that they can’t articulate it well. They don’t have a way of telling their story. The author Karen Blixen said, “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” But what if a person can’t tell a story about their sorrows? What if the story tells them?
In my work I try to hear the story my patient cannot tell and then to help them to tell it. To me, all the highfalutin psychoanalytic language — which is not in my book — is a diversion from the directness of our speech. So, I try to tell stories I think are important as plainly and directly as possible.
Change is a recurring theme in the book. People come to you because they desire change, because they have experienced an unanticipated or undesired change. People resist change. People succeed and don’t succeed in making changes in their lives. Does hearing other people’s stories of change make it easier to do so ourselves?
“I want to change, but not if it means changing,” a patient once said to me in complete innocence. Change is difficult for many reasons. One reason people resist change is that all change requires loss. This can be hard to see, and even harder to accept. But there are many things that help us to change. I believe one of those things is hearing other people’s stories.
Some stories touch our heart. A good story can help us to think differently. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree — these recent books made me think differently. If you are able to think in a new way, you can act in a new way. Thinking differently is the first step towards change.
In this excerpt from her recently published book Generation Roe, pro-choice activist Sarah Erdreich talks with women who had an abortion and discusses the complicated set of emotions they bring to the abortion debate — even decades after the procedure.
By Sarah Erdreich
Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement By Sarah Erdreich
Seven Stories Press. 272 pages.
When people know you work in the pro-choice movement, the stories come out. All of the sudden, you’re a safe person. You can be trusted to hear personal stories about terminating a pregnancy because you won’t judge or criticize. When you go through life hearing such stories, one thing becomes quite clear to you: all kinds of women have abortions. According to the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute, one in three American women will have an abortion before the age of forty-five.
Rachel (not her real name) is one of my mother’s oldest friends. I have known her and her husband practically all of my life. But it wasn’t until I told them I was writing a book about reproductive rights that Rachel opened up about her own experience with abortion, back in the mid-seventies.
Several years into her marriage, Rachel became pregnant. She had already had two healthy pregnancies, but this pregnancy didn’t progress normally. Rachel was vague on the details when she recounted her story to me, but she made it clear the abortion was medically necessary.
Had I not been offered that option, I very well could have lost my life.… There will always be doubts if I did right or I did wrong, but the right thing is that people can make the choice. I was fortunate that I had good medical care, and I was able to understand my options. But not everyone has that liberty.
“I’m not the least bit ashamed of what I did,” Rachel added. “In fact, I feel somewhat empowered by the choice because that was my right.” Yet Rachel only agreed to be interviewed if her real name was not used.
The day after I spoke with Rachel, I spent some time with a longtime friend of my father’s family. Toward the end of our visit, she mentioned that she had had an abortion many years earlier. Months later, Vicki (also a pseudonym) told me the whole story.
In the early seventies, Vicki became pregnant. Her husband threatened to leave her unless she had an abortion. They were living in a city that was hundreds of miles from her parents, siblings, and closest friends – and in one of the few states that had liberalized its abortion laws by then. “It was [the state’s] law to first see a psychiatrist,” Vicki said. “I remember I told the psychiatrist that if my husband wasn’t in the picture I would not consider abortion, but I guess obtaining the husband’s approval was routine.”
The entire procedure was covered by Vicki’s health insurance. After it was done, her husband — who, she said, had “badgered” her to get the abortion — called her a murderer. She later divorced him.
Vicki never told her family about her abortion.
My ex-husband is the only one who knows. I wanted to tell my mother, but that wasn’t news I wanted to break in a long-distance telephone call. That was back when long-distance calls meant something.… If I’d had more confidence to trust my feelings, and realized I was capable of supporting and raising a child on my own, I would not have had an abortion.
When I worked for the National Abortion Federation, I heard many women express gratitude that they could legally have an abortion, even as they regretted the particular circumstances — an unstable relationship, economic hardship, age, or a lack of education — that made abortion their best choice. To appreciate the right to make your own decision, even as you deplore the circumstances that led to that decision, is a complicated set of emotions that established pro-choice organizations haven’t always successfully addressed.
Groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the National Abortion Federation generally stick to messages about how common and safe abortion is, but they don’t offer a great deal of in-depth discussion about the range of emotions women may experience after having an abortion. Instead, they offer first-person stories, which overwhelmingly talk about abortion in positive terms. While studies have shown that most women feel relief after their abortions, women who have more ambivalent feelings afterward may not find comfort or support in these stories and messages.
The anti-abortion movement has been incredibly persuasive in its insistence that if a woman has mixed feelings following an abortion, then abortion itself must be unethical. In testimony before Congress in 1981, pro-life advocate and therapist Vincent Rue coined the term “post-abortion syndrome” to refer to an adverse physical or emotional response to abortion. While neither the American Psychological Association nor the American Psychiatric Association recognize post-abortion syndrome as an official diagnosis, the term quickly gained traction in the anti-abortion community.
In 1987, Ronald Reagan asked his surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, to write a report about the effects of abortion on women. An avowed opponent of abortion, Koop believed that the procedure traumatized women. He had even coauthored a book, Whatever Happened tothe Human Race, which discussed post-abortion trauma. Even so, he was reluctant to do as Reagan asked. Koop was careful to distinguish between his personal beliefs and scientific evidence, and he refused to let ideology pressure him into taking a stance that the available evidence did not support. Answering Reagan in a January 1989 letter, Koop wrote that he could not conclude one way or another whether abortion was harmful to women.
Koop’s position shocked and incensed his fellow conservatives. President George H. W. Bush declined to appoint him secretary of health and human services in the new administration, and Koop left office one month before the end of his second term as surgeon general.
In 1988, the American Psychological Association commissioned a study to review the research on the psychological effects of abortion. After a survey of over two hundred studies, a panel of six experts found that only nineteen or twenty met what they considered reliable scientific standards. Based on those studies, the panel concluded that “legal abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in the first trimester does not pose a psychological hazard for most women.”
While some women did experience distress, they were in the minority. One study found that “seventy-six percent of women [who had a first-trimester abortion] reported feeling relief two weeks after an abortion, and only seventeen percent reported feeling guilt.”
It is important to note that women seeking later abortions reported more distress after their abortion, as did women who had difficulty making their decisions. While eighty-eight percent of abortions are performed within the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, women who have the procedure done in the second or third trimester overwhelmingly say that the timing was due to a delay in making the necessary arrangements — including raising money and securing an appointment. Fetal abnormality is another reason: many birth defects that are incompatible with life are not discovered until the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy, or even later.
My college years were shaped by the experiences of several close friends who chose to have an abortion following unplanned pregnancies. I learned from their situations that no matter how deeply pro-choice someone might be, it is still normal to have mixed feelings about having an abortion.
“I would never fault a woman who had an abortion for not wanting to share that with other people, because it’s too difficult,” Shannon Connolly, a medical student at the University of Southern California, told me. “But I hope they would be able to. Until abortion is normalized and people are able to say it’s just another part of health care, we won’t be able to talk about it in a meaningful way.”
Sarah Erdreich is a women’s health advocate, writer, and pro-choice activist. Her work has appeared in On The Issues, Lilith, Feminists For Choice, and RH Reality Check.
This excerpt has been slightly edited to adhere to In The Fray‘s style.
Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature By Jodi Eichler-Levine
NYU Press. 253 pages.
As many Americans cling to the prospect of a post-racial society in the wake of its first African American president, children growing up in the United States may find they are unable to fully comprehend the significance of this political milestone. For young Americans today, an unburdened, limitless, and diverse reality is all they’ve ever known. But identities are complexly crafted from a variety of different sources, and many children’s understanding of their position in America will start with the books they read.
In Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature, Jodi Eichler-Levine, an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, warns us that “books for tots are anything but innocent.” She takes a fair and scholarly approach to the way Jewish and African American stories transmit core cultural beliefs to the children and adults who read them, and opens a dialogue about America’s complicated — and often brutal — history of racial, ethnic, and religious oppression.
But what is the cost of passing on tales of Jewish and African American sacrifice and suffering that are whitewashed or inaccurate?
A chronological look at Jewish and African American children’s literature shows that cultural assimilation became synonymous with patriotism. From the American Revolution to 9/11, minorities have had to align themselves with a largely white, Protestant American population in order to distance themselves from a perceived enemy. One way this was achieved was by writing children’s books about Jewish and African Americans that minimize their cultural differences to white, Protestant Americans. This cultural downplaying stripped away anything that might portray a black or Jewish child as “too ethnic” by watering down Judaism or reimaging black stereotypes as comical and, therefore, non-threatening.
Children’s books are often the way white Americans are introduced to Jewish and African American history and culture. This is problematic because, while a black or Jewish family may have family or oral histories to add dimensions to the readings, most white children must rely only on what a story conveys. Eichler-Levine makes it clear that all children are in danger of absorbing messages about minority groups that are manipulative and sometimes downright false.
For example, in Crispus Attucks: Boy of Valor (1965), Dharathula Millender attempts to make African Americans a part of the founding narrative of the United States by portraying Attucks as a patriot. While the goal is commendable, how it is achieved is troubling.
Many historians believe that Crispus Attucks, an ex-slave, was the first person killed during the Boston Massacre in 1770. This event is widely viewed to have prompted the American War of Independence five years later. However, as Eichler-Levine points out, little is known about the circumstances of Attucks’ life and death. His entire childhood is imagined by Millender in order to create a story that will appeal to and reinforce national pride in young readers. Creating a fictional childhood for an American hero isn’t new, but in this case it is done to portray Attucks as a martyr who is willing to die for his country’s freedom.
Millender’s biography isn’t the only book about Attucks to emphasize his supposed patriotic motives. In The Cost of Freedom: Crispus Attucks and the Boston Massacre (2004), Joanne Mattern invents dialog where Attucks says he fought for American liberty because he had been a slave: “I was a slave long ago, Matt. It is a bad life. Now it seems the colonists are slaves to the British. This can’t go on. People need to be free.”
While it may be clear to an adult that this dialog is make-believe, a child might understand it to be an authentic part of history. Without addressing the reality that many blacks fought for their own freedom rather than the freedom of the country, stories like Mattern’s not only gloss over the history of American slavery, but also of African American resistance.
Suffer the Little Children is an incredible resource for teachers, historians, and writers of children’s stories who want to correct the distortion of Jewish and African American histories in the stories for a new generation. The best way for a child to understand and welcome a mix of cultures and religions isn’t by promoting their erasure through assimilation, but by creating a society where diversity is embraced. In a society that favors acceptance, we have a better chance of moving toward a country that truly values liberty and justice for all.
Sakena Patterson is a freelance writer based in her hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She returned to Pittsburgh after a seven-year spree in Los Angeles, where she earned an MFA in fiction from Antioch University. Twitter: @misspatterson Tumblr: sakpatt.tumblr.com
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Over the last thirty years, Americans have seen an infusion of market thinking into areas that were previously governed by collective ethics and morality. Today, the drive to make a profit dictates the way we view things like health, education, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, and even procreation. In What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Harvard University professor Michael J. Sandel argues that markets have become detached from morals, and that it’s time we reconnect them. The book is an engaging exploration of where to draw the line between having a market economy and being a market society.
In the introduction, Sandel makes it clear that providing definitive answers to the questions he raises is not his intention. Instead, he views himself as the kickstarter of a much-needed, public debate on markets and morality, and offers a philosophical framework in which we might have the conversation. The inquisitive title of Sandel’s book reinforces this position. For now, his focus is on highlighting the questions we haven’t been asking over the last three decades, but probably should have been.
So, what does economics have to do with morality? Since he’s the expert, I’ll let Sandel explain:
“Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if we turn them into market commodities,” Sandel argues.
If the role of markets were simply to allocate goods, Sandel would be hard-pressed to find an ethical objection to using an economic rationale to solve all our problems — but, he explains, the reach of markets goes beyond goods allocation to express and promote attitudes toward whatever is being exchanged. It is our job as members of a just society to interrogate what those attitudes are, and whether they reflect the values we want to promote in our culture. If we determine that the values are out of sync with the ethical standards of our culture, then we need to regulate the markets to avoid the unintentional promotion of morally questionable social norms.
For many Americans, regulation is a dirty word. But Sandel asks us to consider the idea of regulation in the context of the parameters we’ve already placed on things that currently cannot be bought and sold, such as human beings and civic duties. For example, it is illegal in the United States to sell one’s vote in an election or a child through adoption processes. These boundaries were not established by the rules of economics; they were established by our moral compass as citizens in a participatory democracy.
So, what values do our markets presently exude? And are we satisfied with that? Because Sandel isn’t. He believes we need more robust engagement in civic discourse around these issues.
“When we think of the morality of markets, we think first of Wall Street banks and their reckless misdeeds, of hedge funds and bail-outs and regulatory reform,” he writes. “But the moral and political challenge we face today is more pervasive and mundane — to rethink the role and reach of markets in our social practices, human relationships, and everyday lives.”
As funny as it is intellectually engaging, What Money Can’t Buy is an excellent point of entry for those concerned with addressing the challenges of markets and morality. It will augment your view of laissez-faire economics and what is a stake in our society if we don’t intervene.
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness By Susannah Cahalan
Free Press. 288 pages.
What does it feel like to go insane and not know why? In her memoir, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, author Susannah Cahalan describes what it is like in terrifying detail: “My body continued to stiffen as I inhaled repeatedly, with no exhale. Blood and foam began to spurt out of my mouth through clenched teeth.… This moment, my first serious blackout, marked the line between sanity and insanity. Though I would have moments of lucidity over the coming weeks, I would never again be the same person. This was the start of the dark period of my illness, as I began an existence in purgatory between the real world and a cloudy, fictitious realm made up of hallucinations and paranoia.”
At the time, Cahalan was twenty-four years old and working at the New York Post. Having climbed up slowly from an intern to a full-time news reporter, she was young, ambitious, and known for being confident and professional. Cahalan’s future was bright when she was suddenly struck by an affliction that stumped her, her family, and most medical professionals.
Cahalan uses her reporter’s skills to knit together the incidents surrounding her downward spiral. She tries to piece together a time about which she has little or no recollection. Her few existing memories range from fuzzy half-truths to full-out hallucinations. She recounts the experience of paging through her father’s diary like she was reading about a stranger.
Cahalan deftly weaves together intimate moments with intricate medical explanations of her condition, which at times reads like a detective story. By meticulously retracing her own footsteps through seizures, rampant paranoia, and delusions, Cahalan engages with her passion for research. She walks readers through her various misdiagnoses — including one doctor who insisted that alcoholism was to blame — and eventually reaches the point of an accurate diagnosis, treatment, and recovery.
Brain on Fire makes for a gripping read. As Cahalan describes in her introduction, the book is “a journalist’s inquiry into that deepest part of the self — personality, memory, identity — in an attempt to pick up and understand the pieces left behind.”
After interviewing a host of doctors and experts around the globe, Cahalan was able to report every aspect of her illness and treatments — including her own brain surgery — in detailed yet accessible terms. “With a scalpel, Dr. Doyle made an S-shape incision, four centimeters from the midline of the scalp over the right frontal region. The arm of the S extended just behind my hairline,” she writes. “He parted the skin with a sharp blade and gripped each side with retractors.… The whole procedure took four hours.”
Divided into three parts, the first section of Brain on Fire leads us from the murky confusion of Cahalan’s initial seizures and bouts of paranoia through the fragmented and reconstructed memories of her time in the hospital. Cahalan writes with flagrant honesty, piecing together hospital records, her parents’ shared diary, video footage from her time in a monitored epilepsy ward, and her own disjointed scribblings. This timeline of events is combined with the narrative occurring within Cahalan’s own distorted mind, which is set apart in italics to differentiate the two realities.
During these highly personal accounts, Cahalan describes her hallucinations and paranoia. At one point, she obsessively searches her boyfriend’s apartment for proof of his alleged infidelity. We feel her panic and confusion escalate as the book progresses, and Cahalan struggles to maintain a sense of her authentic identity. “No one wants to think of herself as a monster,” she writes.
As Cahalan’s situation worsens, the heroic Dr. Souhel Najjar arrives on the scene. After seemingly endless tests using the highest technology, Dr. Najjar is able to solve the puzzle. Cahalan is diagnosed with a little-known, recently discovered autoimmune disease called anti-NMDAR encephalitis.
“Her brain is on fire,” Dr. Najjar tells Cahalan’s parents. “Her brain is under attack by her own body.”
Cahalan goes on to detail her bumpy road to recovery, in which she deals with the burden of “survivor’s guilt” — a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder — and a fear of relapse that is said to occur in twenty percent of cases. It is frightening how little is known about this rare disease, and as Cahalan writes, “It just begged the question: If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?”
Aside from being an excellently written memoir, Brain on Fire is also a valuable case study of a rare neurological disease. Cahalan is the 217th person to ever be diagnosed with anti-NMDAR encephalitis, and her diagnosis occurred just two years after the disease was discovered. Brain on Fire and “My Mysterious Lost Month of Madness,” the article from which the book emerged, have been instrumental in helping more people receive a correct diagnoses and treatment for the disease.
Cahalan’s work raises many questions about the root of “madness” and how easily we sling the term about. For those struggling to make sense of a disease like hers, Brain on Fire offers guidance and understanding. For the rest of us, it’s a fascinating and well-told cautionary tale.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Sticks and Stones By Emily Bazelon
Random House. 400 pages.
Emily Bazelon began reading about the way young people treat each other online in the most apt location: the Internet. The mother of two adolescent sons, Bazelon was interested in how using technology to bully peers made the experience different for contemporary youth. She was deeply curious about how her own children’s lives were affected by bullying, and decided to write a book to aid a generation of parents who grew up without social media or texting.
In this interview, Bazelon spoke with In The Fray about how the Internet has transformed bullying and why Americans have only recently begun addressing the problem in young people’s lives.
Although bullying has been around for centuries, how did the Internet create a new incarnation?
Prior to the Internet, if you were a target of bullying, you would get a break from the harassment when you came home from school. You had a chance to put yourself back together. The social media aspect of bullying can be really devastating because Facebook and Twitter make kids feel like bullying is happening 24/7. Also, there’s a sense that a lot of other kids are witnessing your humiliation, and that is really difficult for targeted kids to deal with.
Are all bullies the same?
There are different types of bullies. One type is physically dominating, the old-fashioned big kid who steals your lunch money. Another type is what we often think of as “mean girls” — though they can be boys also. These bullies use a particular kind of harmful aggression in order to score social points. They are mean to become more popular, and they’re often the hardest for adults to spot because they’re clever at manipulating people and disguising their behavior.
Then there are kids who are both bullies and victims. These kids tend to have the biggest emotional problems, and they all struggle socially. They end up doing the dirty work for the mean kind of bullies. It’s important to understand the distinctions and figure out which intervention makes the most sense for each kid.
How does bullying in the adult world affect adolescents?
Adults are modeling a culture of enormous conflict and aggression for kids. When they watch [characters on] Jersey Shore, and see the uncivil way people comment anonymously online, they learn people can be incredibly cruel. Kids absorb that from adult culture, and it makes it seem like it’s okay for them to talk and act in those same ways.
Why is it important to show that bullying isn’t just about victims versus offenders?
Almost all kids are capable of empathy, but kids who act like bullies are cutting themselves off from those feelings. I wanted to understand why this behavior is going on and what motivates it. It’s only when we understand kids’ detrimental behavior that we are able to help them stop doing harmful things.
A recent study shows that, twenty years after childhood, the people who were bullied, or people who were both bullies and victims, are more likely to have depression, anxiety disorders, and suicidal thinking. That is the best evidence we have of bullying having long-term, adverse psychological consequences, and it underscores the importance of taking this problem seriously.
Facebook has put various methods in place to oversee cyberbullying. Should they be doing more to regulate what is happening on social media?
I was struck by the enforcement challenges in addressing cyberbullying. For example, Facebook has a rule against bullying, but millions of complaints come in every week, and they have a relatively small staff to monitor those complaints. This raises questions about what Facebook’s responsibility is to enforce their own rules.
Also, Facebook cares a lot about building brand loyalty among teenagers and doesn’t want to do anything that’s seen as uncool. But it wouldn’t be that hard for them to have an early warning system, or even respond more quickly when schools complain.
What role do school administrators and teachers play in preventing bullying?
Schools can effectively reduce bullying if teachers and administrators take the issue on. Adults are really crucial and set the tone of the school. They can help kids by leading the way, setting a good example, and responding when they see bullying. We still have the problem of adults turning a blind eye.
The most important thing a school can do is figure out which problems are worth addressing and come up with a strategy. Isolating the problem makes it more manageable and allows the school to throw more resources toward the kids who are acting out.
The second step is giving kids the tools to regulate and express their emotions. Some families do this intuitively and don’t need a curriculum, but other families are doing less in this domain, and the schools have to figure out how to do more.
Susan M. Lee Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Talk of climate change seems to be everywhere these days. From elected officials in Washington, DC, to the farmers of rural India, people hold wildly divergent opinions about the ways climate change is affecting our lives, and the impact it will have in the future. In spite of widespread disagreement, many people are already seeing the consequences of climate change in the form of more storms, less rainfall, and severe flooding in their countries. Although the slower-onset disasters may be imperceptible to some, the rising sea levels, higher global temperatures, and food shortages are being endured by many.
In a deeply unjust twist to this story, the people who are most vulnerable to climate change’s harshest effects are those who contribute to the problem the least: millions of the world’s poor. A 2009 report by the Global Humanitarian Forum estimates that 315,000 people die every year as a result of climate change. The injustice of the equation is striking, and so far action to solve the problem has been insufficient compared to the need. Fortunately, there is still time to turn some of the impact of climate change around and solve what some world leaders are calling the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time.
In their book, The Human Face of Climate Change, Swiss photographers Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer present a glimpse into the lives of people who have suffered various hardships brought about by climate change. The images and stories of people from sixteen countries across all continents are at once beautiful and heartbreaking.
In Santa Barbara, California, sixty-six-year-old Christine Powell had to move in with her child after a wildfire destroyed her home and all her belongings. “The morning after the fire, everything I owned was suddenly gone,” she said. “I woke up in the middle of the night and cried in a way I had never done before.”
A forty-year-old fisherwoman from Havana, Cuba, lost her home and possessions in a hurricane. “We have gone through the toughest time,” said Estrella Sosa Osorio. “Even if we pray to God, I don’t think the hurricanes are going to stop.”
Shortages of water and food threaten the lives of people whose means of subsistence are tied to the regularity of the seasons. A fifty-nine-year-old farmer in Chad explained, “There are no more fish and no water. The rainy season is late. It takes three hours to walk to the lake from here. We are all tired of this situation, but have nowhere to go.”
These harrowing stories serve as a reminder that tackling this global challenge cannot wait. With the world continually shrinking, it is our collective responsibility to do what is necessary for the sake of all humankind.
Watch this short video made by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation featuring some of the photographs and stories from The Human Face of Climate Change.
I discovered I had bibliophilic tendencies when I was a child, and though I’d like to attribute this trait to precocious proclivities, it was more likely the personal pan pizza BOOK IT!® awards my elementary school gave out for reading. I grew up on a household where fast food was a luxury my single mother could not afford. So, in order to earn a dinnertime treat for my sisters and me, I would obsessively read.
The incentive program eventually paid off in more than individual-sized pizzas; it turned me into a lifelong, avid reader. Today, I actively read no fewer than four books at a time, with a stack of ten or more in reserve. I keep fiction in the mix to maintain creative sanity, scholarly writing to encourage new ways of thinking, memoir fulfills my desire to hear intimate stories, and bestselling nonfiction is excellent fodder for conversation among strangers. I like to have a variety of options from which to choose depending on my mood, and I keep books in various locations — my bag, next to the bed, in the kitchen — so I can access them with ease.
Books are both a comfort and a challenge. Although the completest in me makes every effort to read each one from beginning to end, pragmatism alleviates the guilt of setting a partially finished novel or dry bestseller aside. Life’s too brief to trudge through prose you don’t find pleasing or short stories that put you to sleep. On Saturday I entered my thirty-third year, and I’m celebrating by sharing thirty-three quotes from works I’ve gained something from reading. Perhaps you’ll gain something by reading them, too.
“She wanted a book to take her places she couldn’t get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.” ― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
“Being comically generative and having a sense of humor are one and the same thing. The former is among the least important things in the world, while the latter is among the most. One is a handy social tool, the other an integral component of human survival.… Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.” ― David Rakoff, Fraud: Essays
“Empathy has the potential to be the first, crucial step on the way to solidarity — not just feeling someone else’s pain, but working together to try and cure it.” ― Gary Younge, Who Are We ― and Should It Matter in the 21st Century?
“It’s alright that there are things you do not get over, not really. You just go on, knowing that the things you love could be stripped from you at any moment, remembering to love them now. It makes you human. You try to be decent and treat people gently, knowing that they, too, have their scars and madnesses that, like yours, do not show.” ― Joy Castro, The Truth Book
“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’m gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter.” ― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
“If you’re an introvert, find your flow by using your gifts. You have the power of persistence, the tenacity to solve complex problems, and the clear-sightedness to avoid pitfalls that trip others up. You enjoy relative freedom from the temptations of superficial prizes like money and status. Indeed, your biggest challenge may be to fully harness your strengths. You may be so busy trying to appear like a zestful, reward-sensitive extrovert that you undervalue your own talents, or feel underestimated by those around you. But when you’re focused on a project that you care about, you probably find that your energy is boundless. So stay true to your own nature.” — Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
“Even in the moments when you don’t think you are moving forward, you really are.” — Claire Bidwell Smith, The Rules of Inheritance
“Writing is hard for every last one of us.… Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.” — Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
“Don’t push too hard; your last chance to see a person the way you wanted them to be may come at any moment.” — Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
“Dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world, through which people constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of arrogance. How can I dialogue if I am closed to — and even offended by — the contribution of others? How can I dialogue if I am afraid of being displaced? Dialogue requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human (which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all).” — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
“I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.” ― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
“The experience of cross-cultural living reminds us, not in an intellectual way, but in a firsthand way — full of wincing, shame, hope, and disappointment (and often laughter, both at us and by us) — that, in fact, we know very little about the way things really are.” — Sarah Davis, Being There: Learning to Live Cross-Culturally
“We must find a way to continue dreaming of each other. If it seems simple, it should. If we could just rest our minds a minute, it might even be easy. The more difficult it gets to clear the necessary space, the more necessary that space becomes.” — Michelle Orange, This Is Running For Your Life
“We do not need to become each other in order to work together. But we do need to recognize each other, our differences as well as the sameness of our goals. Not for altruism. For self-preservation — survival. Every day of your lives is practice in becoming the person you want to be. No instantaneous miracle is suddenly going to occur and make you brave and courageous and true.” — Audre Lorde, I Am Your Sister
“The assumption that if somebody commits a serious crime they have to go to prison is based on the idea that crime is a deviant form of behavior and criminals should be separated from the rest of society. I understood crime as a process, not an isolated action or deviance from correct behavior, but rather the consequence of a system that produces a criminal class and also benefits from it.” — Jana Leo, Rape New York
“They stood up, his hand still in hers, and went inside. Somehow, without saying anything, it had turned into this. Into an exchange of confessions — the little ways they’d hurt or disappointed each other, and themselves.” — Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” — Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“I took it as a given that women like me would have to do it the hard way, steal time away from my day job, work without an editor or ready reader, and never have any confidence that what I was writing would be anything that anyone would want to read. But I never considered not writing.” — Dorothy Allison, An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots
“She placed both hands on his shoulders and gazed at him for a long time with a deep, rapturous, and at the same time searching look. She studied his face to make up for the time in which she had not seen him. As at every meeting, she was bringing together her imaginary idea of him (an incomparably better one, impossible in reality) with him as he was.” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“A society’s social policies should support morally justified reproductive needs and choices and provide assistance in acting on them. Individuals making choices about procreation should not and cannot be regarded as acting in a social void.” — Christine Overall, Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate
“I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the quality and the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.” — June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die
“There is no way to do it right. You cannot have it all. Something has to give. You won’t know what it was you gave up until it is too late to recover.” — Danzy Senna, You Are Free
“One morning I awoke to find that, during the course of the night, my mind had completely ejected the names of all the streets in Pakistan, as though to assure that I could not return, or that if I did, it would be returning to a loss.” — Sara Suleri Goodyear, And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women
“Growing up in a house full of siblings and failing to make the most of that lucky accident of birth is like inheriting a thousand acres of fertile farmland and never planting it. You can always get your food elsewhere, but think of what you’re allowing to lie fallow.” — Jeffrey Kluger, The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us
“The demand for women’s safety is inevitably articulated in terms of surveillance and protectionism and contributes to reducing rather than expanding women’s access to public space.” — Shilpa Phadke, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets
“At first, as they stood there, their hands were clenched together. They relaxed slowly until during the walk back home their fingers were laced in as gentle a clasp as that of any two young girlfriends trotting up the road on a summer day wondering what happened to butterflies in the winter.” ― Toni Morrison, Sula
“Writing is an activity that colludes with you. It’s absorbing, gratifying, and creates the powerful illusion of escape to another world, another existance. At the same time, it’s keeping you exactly where you are, wasting time, not really changing anything. But the alchemy of publication can sometimes achieve that.” ― Carrie Jones, Cutting Up Playgirl
“The language of choice invokes free will based on individual freedom, obscuring the interplay between social constraints and human activity. Choices are primed by larger institutional structures and ideological messages.” ― Irene Vilar, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict
“This was what I required of love: an equality in which no one accused the other of being an irrational female, or an oblivious male. We both understood that we shared the burden of being flawed.” ― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl
“For us, writing isn’t a career so much as it is a vocation, a life saver, a way to prove, to ourselves at least, that we actually exist, that our struggles aren’t for nothing, that our lives are meaningful, are triumphant. We write to release old injustices and abuses, to make sense of them, to contextualize ourselves. We write to tell the truth…so that we can finally see our experiences portrayed honestly, in many dimensions.” — Michelle Tea, Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class
In her deeply personal account of life in post-earthquake Haiti, journalist Amy Wilentz looks at how outsiders' distorted views of the country have misrepresented its culture and history and encumbered its progress.
Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti By Amy Wilentz
Simon & Schuster. 352 pages.
Amy Wilentz first visited Haiti in 1986, when she was a writer for Time magazine and the ousting of dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier was underway. Admittedly, Wilentz was not the type of foreign correspondent who traveled from war zone to war zone, or from one uprising to the next in pursuit of a grand and dramatic news event. Rather, Wilentz’s journalistic demeanor ran more along the lines of observational witness; she was a spectator of all that surrounded her, and sparked her imagination and curiosity.
Yet, when it came to Haiti, there was something “eternal” about the country that called to Wilentz. She had read The Comedians, Graham Greene’s 1966 novel about the reign of Jean-Claude’s father, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and scenes from the book remained etched in her mind.
Elected president in 1957, Papa Doc Duvalier is one of history’s most unforgettable political figures. His fourteen-year reign was the longest and most brutal in Haiti’s history. To quash political dissent, and protect himself from being overthrown, Duvalier created the Tonton Macoute, a personal police force that terrorized citizens and assassinated anyone Duvalier thought was a threat. In 1971, when Jean-Claude succeeded his father as president, Duvalier-style despotism continued.
From her office in Manhattan, Wilentz perused the daily news written by Haitian exiles in the 1980s, which heralded Baby Doc’s impending departure from power. Wilentz felt an impulse to witness the end of the Duvalier era. Plus, she wanted a firsthand look at the Tonton Macoute, which was still in use by Baby Doc. With guns tucked into their waistlines and hats lowered over their sunglasses, the Tonton Macoute haughtily prowled Haiti’s streets to search for so-called troublemakers.
Thus began Wilentz’s love affair with Haiti. Her decades-long relationship with “La Perle des Antilles” (“The Pearl of the Caribbean”) has been anything but straightforward, simple, effortless, or predictable. In her first book about Haiti, The Rainy Season, Wilentz chronicled a nation and a people that were oppressed by the Duvalier regimes’ terror and totalitarianism. In her latest book, Farewell, Fred Voodoo, a deeply personal narrative about post-earthquake Haiti and Wilentz’s connection to the place, she revisits the country to listen to Haitians and recount her astute, unvarnished impressions.
Hello, Fred Voodoo
Wilentz’s experiences on her initial trip to Haiti commenced her “Haitian education,” and introduced her to stereotypes of Haitians invented by the outside world. One stereotype that persisted was the idea of “Fred Voodoo” — a dismissive term used by many reporters to refer to the ordinary Haitian man (or woman) on the street. “Fred Voodoo” could be a presidential candidate, a market lady, a renowned academic, a taxi driver, an unwed mother, or an Army general.
In 1986, Wilentz routinely interviewed Haitians, who told her what it was like to not have enough food for themselves and their families, and who wondered what it was like to live in a real house, not a shantytown shack. They discussed what it would be like to live freely and vote openly for a president who cares about ordinary Haitians and their suffering. They talked about democracy.
That was in 1986.
In 2010, after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck, many Haitians Wilentz interviewed still said a lot of the same things. Although this time they added more details of death and dying, blood, pandemonium, loss, amputation, starvation, and fear.
Returning to Haiti almost didn’t happen for Wilentz. She knew an abundance of international relief groups with “their money [and] their development résumés” would descend on a nation that already had more than ten thousand aid organizations in operation before the earthquake. She wasn’t sure she could tolerate a “salvation fantasy” from the international community, in which well-intentioned, post-disaster relief workers insist their presence would solve Haiti’s unmanageable, centuries-old troubles. Exasperated by the media’s reductionist portrayals of Haitians in despair — which she calls “the objectification of the Haitians’ victimization” — Wilentz wondered if she could “bear to watch the difficult lives of most Haitians rendered even more unbearable by this dreadful event.”
But she could not stay away. Within two weeks of the earthquake, Wilentz was back in Haiti for what may have been her thirtieth or fortieth visit. (She lost count after so many years.) The experience was consequential. She explains:
This book in your hands, then, is my attempt to put Haiti back together again for myself, to understand why all the simplest hopes and dreams of the men and women [that outsiders] call Fred Voodoo have been abandoned, and to stack the pieces flung apart by the earthquake back up into some semblance of the real country. I wanted to figure out, after so many attempts by so many to uphold democracy, why Fred and all his brothers and sisters have become, in our eyes at least, mere victims, to be counted up on one ledger or another as interesting statistics, casualties of dictatorship, of poverty, of disaster, of outside interference, of neglect, of history — of whatever you want to point a finger at — rather than as active commanders of their own destiny.
Amy Wilentz. Paula Goldman
“Nothing You See Is What It Seems to Be.”
The long-standing misapprehension about Haiti and Haitian identity has everything to do with the country’s history, religion, culture, isolation, and relationship to the United States. As Wilentz discusses in great detail, and with keen insight: “[Haiti] defies categorization.… It’s eccentric and unexpected. At every corner, in every conversation, with every new event, Haiti makes you think, it challenges you.”
One of the many indeterminable stereotypes about Haitians is that “ninety percent of Haitians are Catholics, and one hundred percent are voudouisant, or voodoo worshippers.” Wilentz attended several voodoo ceremonies, during which various African gods were worshiped and spirit possession occurred. At the end of these “stunningly theatrical and participatory” services, she wondered whether Haitians really believe in voodoo, or if its practice is more tradition than conviction.
Wilentz knows this question is formalistic, and the answer is as enigmatic as the country itself. “Tou sa ou we, se pa sa,” a Haitian proverb warns. It translates to: “Nothing you see is what it seems to be.” Still, Wilentz doesn’t sit back and leave a gap in her analysis. She delves deeply into voodoo’s cultural importance.
“For most Haitians at a ceremony,” Wilentz asserts, “this is community, escape, entertainment, and as much transcendence as is allowed to them. For others, the ceremony represents Haitian patrimony and inheritance, and they take pride in it even when they have little or no religious belief.… This is a culture that values theater and a certain degree of artifice, even a great degree. Artifice and duplicity were natural and necessary survival methods during slavery.… How much of what the white man sees in Haiti is specifically a show for the white man to see — and this not just in terms of voodoo ceremonies, and not just today?”
Although an answer is unattainable, a look at Haitian history is instructive. In 1804, after obtaining freedom from France in the only successful slave-led revolution in history, Haiti became the first independent black nation in the Western world, but its legitimacy was suspect because it was ruled by descendants of slaves. After wresting power and prosperity from a European colonial power, Haiti was regarded by many as a nation that “never really had the right to exist.” As Frederick Douglass said in a speech at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, “We have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.”
Haiti is much like the U.S. and France, countries whose histories cite revolution as a defining force that established sovereignty and national identity. Haiti’s revolutionary forefathers — Henri Christophe, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines — maintain a presence in many Haitians’ minds similar to that of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson for Americans. Folklore has it that Dessalines “ripped the white stripe from the French tricolore in order to create the new red and blue Haitian flag, [sending] the message [that] the white man will have nothing to do with [Haitians’] destiny.”
It wasn’t to be.
For more than a century, France forced Haiti to pay reparations for the loss of the slave economy, while the slaveholding U.S. imposed a burdensome embargo that crippled the fledgling nation’s integration into the world economy. The U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and it has meddled in the country’s affairs ever since.
Wilentz explains that, for almost all of the twentieth century, only U.S.-approved Haitians were allowed to become president in Haiti. She also cites a U.S.-led military intervention in 1994, Operation Uphold Democracy, that re-imposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (Aristide had been overthrown by the Haitian Army just three years before the U.S. intervention.)
“I cannot recall another U.S. military deployment that performed regime change by reinstating an unseated leader,” Wilentz writes.”But Haiti is always singular, and so is America’s long, torrid relationship with it.”
Wilentz continues:
How Haiti works in general has historically had more to do with foreigners than is the case in most other countries, and this has never been so obvious as in the post-earthquake era. With so many coming down to assist in relief and reconstruction, so much of it concentrated in the capital, it has sometimes felt as though the country is being taken over by a new occupation, by a different kind of army.…
Rather than disrupting old ways of thinking about Haiti, the earthquake allowed many commentators, political analysts, and columnists to restate what they’d always imagined to be true about the world’s first black republic. The white Western world has a tendency, when confronted by Haiti’s intractable problems, to fall back on easy stereotypes and a deep-rooted, unconscious racism that suggests to them that this is all “depressing” and “hopeless,” and that somehow all the problems are the fault of this irresponsible, ungovernable people, with their weird old African customs and religion. It’s all Fred Voodoo’s fault.
But in fact, this depression and hopelessness come from “experts” who don’t understand Haiti, don’t acknowledge its strengths (and don’t know them), don’t get its culture or are philosophically opposed to what they assume its culture is, and don’t know its history in any meaningful way.
Despite billions of dollars in aid that flowed into Haiti, and thousands of relief workers who donated their time, it’s no secret that the country remains in disrepair. Wilentz is unsparing in her criticism of the failures of the international community and the Haitian government, and her writing on their dereliction is superb. She is unafraid to ask whether it is worth continuing to provide humanitarian assistance to a “kleptocratic” country that lacks a “functioning government that works for the people.”
Two Westerners who receive indisputable praise from Wilentz for “getting Haiti” are Megan Coffee, a doctor who cares for tuberculosis patients at her perpetually under-resourced Port-au-Prince clinic, and actor Sean Penn, who ran a refugee camp and moved refugees to real housing within days of the earthquake.
In the end, the most profound and perplexing question Wilentz asks, and tries to answer, is: “All the outsiders who come to Haiti, and come again, and never absolutely leave … what is it they get out of Haiti? This is the mystery I was trying to solve, after all. What do I get out of Haiti?”
At this point, Farewell, Fred Voodoo comes full circle. Wilentz’s love affair continues, yet it is changed. Indeed, Wilentz is changed. After “years of being schooled by Haiti,” she realizes the lessons have exacted an emotional toll.
“This book is … what I’m doing to relieve the pain,” she confides. “Putting down these marks across my computer screen: I can feel the release.… Yet what I’ve done in Haiti, what I’ve achieved with marks on paper, I cannot help but feel is useless, especially in the wake of this terrible disaster.”
Is Farewell, Fred Voodoo Wilentz’s goodbye letter to Haiti? For both her readers and a country that has been misunderstood for so long, I hope it is not so.
We use cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the site. Cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser, as they are essential for the working of the site’s basic functionality. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this site. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent, and you have the option to opt out of using them.
Necessary cookies are essential for the basic functionality and security features of this website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that are not necessary for the website to function and are used to collect user personal data via analytics or other embedded content are termed non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to using these cookies.
I wrote an essay that appeared in the Atlantic yesterday. Based on the research for my book on unemployment, the piece talks about the debate over Denmark in last week’s Democratic presidential debate—and how the real debate should be over Canada:
