Tag Archives: interviews

 
Blog

The Brutal Beauty of Sister


Sister film posterAt the heart of Sister, Brenda Davis’s documentary debut, are three inspiring stories of an Ethiopian health officer, a midwife in rural Cambodia, and a traditional birth attendant in Haiti. When Davis met Goitom Berhane in Ethiopia in 2008, she was taken with his vivacious personality and dedication to solving the maternal health crisis in his country. Berhane’s example encouraged Davis to explore women’s health as an international human rights issue. Eventually, he became a central figure in her film.

We meet Madame Bwa in the poverty-stricken Shada neighborhood of Cap-Haitien, Haiti. An aged woman who struggles with basic survival, Madame Bwa has delivered more than 12,000 children with no formal medical training.

In an area of Cambodia that is littered with land mines, Pum Mach puts her own life at risk so that geographically isolated mothers and their children may live through the common event of childbirth. In one of the more ghastly moments of Sister, a nineteen-year-old girl delivers her baby by caesarean section thanks to Mach identifying the child as breech and securing transportation to the nearest hospital, which is several hours away.

These moments make Sister as beautiful as it is brutal. The film showcases the passion of health workers who overcome incredibly difficult circumstances to combat the alarming rate of maternal and newborn deaths occurring around the globe — deaths that, with adequate care, are almost entirely preventable.

In The Fray spoke with Davis about her family’s experience with child mortality and the challenges of filming a tragic topic.

When did you develop an interest in maternal and child mortality?

My grandmother gave birth to sixteen children in rural Nova Scotia. Four died during childbirth and one died at the age of two. She lost her first child when she was nineteen and her last at thirty-nine. I remember my cousins coming together to buy a gravestone for all the children my grandma lost. They spoke about it casually because this happened a lot where my grandmother lived, but it had a lasting impact on me.

Why did you choose to explore this topic for your film?

As an artist, I’m interested in storytelling. If a subject is compelling to me, I want to pursue it, but I don’t want to speak for people. I want them to tell their own stories.

I was very fortunate to find people willing to tell their stories in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Haiti. We were able to show similarities in women’s experiences, despite entirely different cultures, while also focusing on local strategies. The unifying theme to every story is a lack of access — access to basic health care, access to emergency obstetric care, and access to family planning.

How are health workers attempting to close these gaps in access?

It’s difficult to articulate just how important health workers are, and in many instances, it goes beyond the service they’re providing. In Ethiopia, Hirity Belay is a young woman who walks to places where there are no roads to provide women with the care they need to have healthy babies. While that service is invaluable, you must also consider what an amazing example she’s setting in these small villages. One of the things that inspired the name of the documentary was Hirity’s relationships. The women would often call each other “sister.” I thought this was so beautiful and warm.

Madam Bwa, a traditional birth attendant in Shada, Haiti.
Madam Bwa, a traditional birth attendant in Shada, Haiti.

In the case of Madame Bwa, being a traditional birth attendant has been passed down through her family. The work she does is important to her community, and for the most part Madame Bwa lives off donations from the families she helps. Traditional birth attendants fill a gap where there is nothing. I’m not a medical professional, but I don’t understand why so many people want to eliminate traditional birth attendants. They’re making a difference, and with a bit more support, they could be making a much bigger impact.

I found many of the scenes hard to watch, not because they’re graphic, but because they are heartbreaking. How do you approach filming people’s intimate tragedies respectfully?

In Ethiopia, we spent time in the hospital without cameras and became a familiar presence. The women often didn’t understand why we were filming or why anyone would be interested. I’d explain that we wanted to show what was going on in their communities.

Sister was definitely difficult to film, and the director of photography and I constantly struggled with the fear that we may be invading a woman’s privacy. When you’re meeting people in such intense and difficult circumstances, you constantly grapple with whether or not you’re being sensitive and respectful.

In some respects, I feel like Sister is a war movie. Women everywhere — but especially in developing countries — are fighting for their lives. What you see was exactly what was happening. The women, health workers, midwives, and birth attendants all speak for themselves and tell their own stories. It was a conscious decision not to narrate or pretend to know the answers.

What do you hope viewers take from the film?

I hope Sister encourages people to think critically about what the United States does that affects other countries — from a its inability to grow food to being littered with land mines. People should think about how they’re connected to what’s happening in other places, or how they’re complicit in it. Donating funds is awesome, but it’s not enough.

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:
 
Interviews

The Graphic Canon: Literature Gets a Modern Kick

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.


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.

George Orwell, Animal Farm
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.

The Graphic Canon, Jabberwocky
“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.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

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:
 
Blog

The Stories We Tell Ourselves


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 Life parallels 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 Life demystifies 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.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

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:
 
New York
Interviews

Born Again: A Conversation with Writer Joy Castro

Best of In The Fray 2013. At an early age, Joy Castro ran away from an abusive home and renounced her faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. What she found instead was a new set of beliefs and truths for herself.


When Joy Castro was fourteen years old, she ran away from her abusive family, who had adopted her at birth. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, in an environment where she was to proselytize “the truth,” Castro sought refuge in the church. But after the church failed to protect her from the emotional and physical anguish she endured on a daily basis, Castro reached beyond their teachings to forge her own path to salvation.

This past year has been a busy one for Castro. Her 2005 memoir detailing her childhood, The Truth Book, was re-released. This coincided with the publication of Island of Bones, a collection of essays that continues Castro’s story of survival and resilience as she moves through adulthood. In addition to her nonfiction work, Castro’s debut crime novel Hell or High Water also recently hit the shelves.

In The Fray spoke with Castro about letting go of traditional concepts of faith, becoming a parent, her attraction to the crime fiction genre, and her definition of truth.

You were raised in an environment where the concept of “truth” was steeped in paradox. What is your understanding of truth now?

When I was growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness, “the truth” was the short-form term we used to refer to the belief system of our religion. Someone was “in the truth” or “not in the truth.” From infancy, I was taken to the Kingdom Hall for five hours each week, and my mother read to me regularly from Jehovah’s Witness literature at home. We went preaching door to door. I prayed morning and night and before every meal in the way I had been taught. So, it was pretty much a full-immersion experience.

I was a believer. Another option was impossible for me to conceive when I was a child. It was only as I got older — ten, eleven, twelve — and had been exposed to enough contradictory material at school that I began to question the tenets of our faith. I ran away at fourteen and stopped attending the Kingdom Hall at fifteen. As we know, “truth” is something that’s energetically debated by political and religious systems all over the world, so it wasn’t as though, when I was fifteen, I moved from a brainwashed state into one of clarity. Truth remains up for grabs.

Now, I just prefer to believe in kindness, compassion, the attempt at honesty about one’s experience and perceptions, and the effort to create justice. As a species, we need a variety of competing voices, competing subjectivities, in order to be able to figure out the best strategic ways forward.

You’ve written about there being freedom in accepting one’s own imperfections and inability to conform to social expectation. As a woman who grew up in poverty and a survivor of childhood abuse, how have you learned to constructively carry the confines of your personal history?

It has meant relinquishing the dream of having had a beautiful childhood — or, within academia, the psychic comfort of having an intellectual pedigree. I cannot compete with people who sailed or had families full of love or went to Harvard. I cannot compete with people who were not raising a child in poverty or riding city buses or doing without. By writing transparently about my own experiences and making them public, I’ve gradually let go of the desire to have been someone else, someone more socially acceptable.

How did unintentionally becoming a parent influence this process for you?

Becoming a parent at twenty, while perhaps not ideal in terms of timing, was overwhelming and transformative for me. Parents will tell you that their souls broke open when they had children. That was true in my case. That radical empathy, that willingness to sacrifice and defend, that compulsion to make a better world for all children — it’s so powerful.

For me personally, it was an opportunity not to neglect, not to abandon, not to abuse, not to commit suicide — all the things my own [adoptive] parents did that left my brother and me damaged and bereft. It was a chance to face down the deep, brooding fear of becoming an abuser. It offered a long series of moments in which to choose to say “yes” to love and growth. While that sounds like a positive, obvious, easy thing to do, it’s not so easy for people who’ve shut down after multiple traumas. For me, opening up and committing to someone in such a profound way was risky and difficult. And, ultimately, so worthwhile.

Before my son was conceived, I was never the sort of person who consciously longed to have a child. Unexpectedly becoming pregnant derailed what I thought my life would be, but in a good way. It carved out a kind of generosity and compassion in me that probably would not have otherwise developed.

My son is twenty-four now, so I’ve been this person for a long time. Lately, my focus has been on changing into someone who does not have a child, like a compass that steers all her choices, at the center of her life anymore. That has been the real challenge for me for the past few years. I think I’m getting the hang of it.

For those of us with unenviable pasts, writing can be a kind of coping mechanism employed to escape or manage the darker realities of our lives — which makes writing both painful and necessary. Has this been your experience?

For me, writing has been a beautiful gift, an escape — as you say — and a way to manage painful truths. It has also been one of the most profound pleasures of all. Using our imaginations to shape and reshape the world is a magnificent gift. What power! And hearing our own voices and exploring our own thoughts in a noisy world is such a soothing, beautiful, private thing that writing allows us to do. I’m grateful for it.

You’ve recently published your first crime novel, Hell or High Water. Does writing crime fiction allow you to explore issues in a way your previous work did not?

As a child and adolescent, I loved reading mysteries. I enjoyed the puzzles and the suspense. I still do. But now, as a writer of crime fiction, I’ve come to appreciate how devoted the genre is to issues of justice. Writing crime fiction has been a method for translating the insights of the academy for a broad audience. I’m not sure crime fiction provides additional freedoms; it’s just a different vessel for exploration.

Joy Castro head shotYour novel is set in New Orleans, a place known for its stark contrast between the lives of blacks and whites, rich and poor. What do you find compelling about placing a struggling Latina journalist in this post-Katrina backdrop?

There are a couple of reasons. First, like many people, I love the city of New Orleans. My husband grew up on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and he lived, went to college, and worked in the city as a young adult. When we met in graduate school, he took me home to meet his family, and I fell in love with the city as I was falling in love with him. I’ve been going there regularly for twenty years now, and my affection and respect for New Orleans made me want to set a novel there.

You’re right about the black-white construction of race and ethnicity in New Orleans. While there has famously and historically been a great deal of mixing, it has usually been defined along a black-white continuum, though the influx of Latino construction workers and their families has shifted the demographic somewhat since Katrina. I was interested in exploring how a character lives her Latinidad in an environment where there’d been almost no Latino community.

You have personal experience with that as well.

Being a Latina without an ethnic community was my own experience growing up. Though I was born in Miami, we quickly moved to England, where we lived for four years when I was little. Then, after two more years in Miami, we relocated to West Virginia, where I lived until I graduated from high school. In the 1980s, I was the only Latina student in my high school, and my Spanish teacher was the only Latina I knew outside my family. Being culturally isolated is something I knew well. So, I wanted to tell a story about cultural isolation, and the strange pressures and loneliness that come with that.

There are similar feelings of isolation that come with “escaping” poverty and climbing the social ladder that your main character contends with throughout the novel.

I don’t see [the main character] as a social climber in the negative way we usually construe the term: someone who sacrifices her ethics and true feelings to attain prestige and wealth. She’s a newspaper reporter, after all, because she believes in justice. But it’s true that she did climb her way out of poverty, and she did leave some people behind, which she regrets.

Bright, poor, ambitious people in our society often live that painful story. Our social structures frequently push gifted young people to choose between pursuing their talents fully and remaining in the community that raised them. Either way, people sacrifice. It’s unfortunate.

A theme in your writing is finding redemption in telling the truth, though the result is not always a victory. Why do you embrace the mistakes people make?

It just seemed more realistic, more true to what I’ve experienced in the world. I have failed in ways that schooled my soul. Even when we’re trying, we make mistakes. We have blind spots. Knowing that about myself helps me to be compassionate with others who fail.

It’s often the case that various forces — commercial forces, political forces — don’t want uncomfortable truths to become public, and they sometimes have the power to squelch those stories. Other times, the route to a public hearing is beautifully clear. It’s a process, and it’s a choice. There will be hits, and there will be misses. The important thing is to keep telling your truth.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

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: