What's going on? -- Marvin Gaye
by Jerome du Bois
TPB, Esquire, the lawyer with heartfelt depth and impeccable taste over at Unbillable Hours, has a précis on his sidebar about The Best American Essays 2003, which includes this warning:
There's a particularly bad and frustrating essay by John Edgar Wideman in here that I recommend avoiding. It's his take on 9/11, which can be boiled down to "since white people had slavery, they deserve 9/11." His writing style is atrocious (i.e., he uses strange structures that lack rhythm and often seem to need a different form of punctuation than what was given), and his views are absurd and hateful (against Jews in particular, and whites in general).[my emphasis.]
Well, this sounds familiar. Catherine King, of this blog, just got done posting a long piece on the HairStories art exhibition at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA), the catalogue to which contains vicious black racist and anti-American statements by African-American academics, artists, writers, and businesspeople. She has confronted one of them, Arizona State University's Dr. Neal Lester, about these words, but he, after contacting her first, has ducked down into some professorial spider hole. (Have you seen that brother, baby, supine in the shadows?) Earlier, Ms. King's profile of painter (and ASU professor) Beverly McIver uncovered similar ugly sentiments. And now I learn that Wideman recently gave a lecture (at SMoCA) as a Distinguished Visting Writer (at ASU).( How cozy. Dots, connect yourselves; I've got other matters to attend to.)
I got the book and read Wideman's essay, and the volume's introduction. Then I traced what I could of the reactions to it since the original publication, in the March 2002 Harper's magazine. I found only two subsequent substantial objections, plus a third in a letter, which I'll cover below.
I'll also show how, despite being one of the most-honored American writers in our nation's history, TPB nailed it: Mr. Wideman has written a terrible essay, which disgraces and degrades our beautiful language; and, as one who has lived a life of tenured privelege since at least 1984, I'll show how he has hypocritically, ungratefully, and viciously spit in the face of the country which made it possible for him to go after every award and honor he possesses. John Edgar Wideman -- called "The Astonishing John Wideman" by Look Magazine in 1963 -- disgraces his own history.
[UPDATE: Dr. Neal Lester sent us an email. You can read it, and our response, in the Comments section.]
You can read "Whose War" (in the magazine it was subtitled "The Color of Terror," but not in the book) online for free, but I bought the book because I needed the introduction, where the editor gives reasons for his or her choices. This year's editor, Anne Fadiman of The American Scholar, writes in her introduction (page xx):
There were many essays about September 11, 2001. I chose Elaine Scarry's "Citizenship in Emergency" and John Edgar Wideman's "Whose War," two polemics that couldn't be more different from each other, because each made me look in a new way at something about which I had thought originality was no longer possible. I concluded that the best work on 9/11 was probably written not in 2001 but in 2002. Time allowed these writers to shake off the conventional responses that would have come more easily and find something hard and brilliant and uncomfortable underneath.[my emphasis]
She actually enjoyed Wideman's essay more than most of the others. I know, because she chose five passages from five essays (out of twenty-four) to showcase "the glories of essays," as she put it. Here is Wideman's passage, from the beginning of the second section (page 322):
Hear what I'm saying. We ain't going nowhere, as the boys in the hood be saying. Nowhere. If you promote all the surviving Afghans to the status of honorary Americans, Mr. President, where exactly on the bus does that leave me. When do I get paid. When can I expect my invitation to the ranch. I hear Mr. Putin's wearing jingle-jangle silver spurs around his dacha. Heard you fixed him up with an eight-figure advance on his memoirs. Is it true he's iced up to be the Marlboro man after he retires from Russia. Anything left under the table for me. And mine.
This is godawful, and the content is sophomoric indymedia conspiracy buzz. Worse, Ms. Fadiman actually includes an interesting section in her introduction that reproduces the minutiae -- the sublime nitpicking -- of editing, word by word. So why is her judgment so bad here?
Here's another passage, chosen by me, from the essay's fifth paragraph, with Wideman in a reverie in his Lower East Side apartment, thinking about writing his essay:
And the man standing at the window retracts his long arms from the top of the upper pane he's lowered to rest on as he stares. Then all of him retracts. Picture him standing a few moments ago where there's emptiness now. Picture him rising from a couch where he'd been stretched out, his back cushioned against the couch's arm, then rising and walking to the window. Now visualize the film running backward, the special effect of him sucked back like red wine spilled from the lip of a jug returning to fill the jug's belly, him restored exactly, legs stretched out, back against the couch's cushioned arm. Because that's who I am. What I'm doing and did. I'm the same man, a bit older now, but still a man like him, restless, worried, trying to fashion some tolerable response with words to a situation so collapsed, so asphyxiated by words, words, it's an abomination, an affront to dead people, to toss any more words on the ruins of what happened to them.
This is godawful and embarrassing and dishonest, as this Rhodes Scholar goes ahead and affronts dead people, ignores what he's just written, and blithely tosses many more dull, asphyxiating words on our ruins. Picture him receiving the MacArthur Grant. Picture him receiving PEN/Faulkner (twice!), Lannan, and the American Book Award. What's the matter with those judges? And pass that red wine! Here's a little more:
I, too, return to the couch, return also to the thought of a person alone singing in the shower. A sad thought, because all writing pretends to be something it's not, something it can't be: something or someone other, but sooner or later the writing will be snuffed back into its jug, back where I am, a writer a step, maybe two, behind my lemming words scuffling over the edge of the abyss.
I know how they feel. This is one long short essay. Doesn't anyone edit this turkey? Notice the beginning of the deconstruction bait-and-switch, with the something someone other or not nonsense. He's setting the reader up for his redefinition of terror, terrorism, and especially terrorist. Right after this piece came out, in the March 2002 Harper's, Stanley Kurtz at NRO jumped on it. In a March 7 column he put it this way:
Wideman is desperate to disallow the reality of the terrorist threat. He can't do it through an analysis of Islamic society, the technology of mass destruction, or homeland defense, so instead he tries to conjure away the terrorist threat with standard-issue techniques of deconstruction. We use the word "terrorist," Wideman says, to deny the possibility of "reasoned exchange" with our foes, to project the evil in ourselves onto a despised "Other." Funny, I thought it was the terrorists themselves who'd traded in reasoned exchange for murderous scapegoating.
Wideman finally leaves the window and gets to writing. After dragging out the old discredited vocabulary --
The designation terrorist is produced by the one-way gaze of power.
To label an enemy a terrorist confers the same invisibility a colonist's gaze confers upon the native.
-- he really turns on the fog machine:
For those who don't lose a child's knack for perceiving the aural archaeology within the sound of words, words carry forward fragments, sound bites that reveal a word's history, its layered onomatopoeic sources, its multiplicity of shadowed meanings. Terror embeds a grab bag of unsettling echoes: tear (as in rip) (as in run fast), terra (earth, ground, grave, dirt, unfamiliar turf), err (mistake), air (terra firma's opposite element), eerie (strange, unnatural), error (of our ways), roar-r-r (beasts, machines, parents, gods). Of course any word's repertoire is arbitrary and precise, but that's also the point, the power of puns, double entendre, words migrating among languages, Freudian slips, Lacan's "breaks," all calling attention to the unconscious, archaic intentionality buried in the words.
La, la, la-de-dah. Five months after Mohammed Atta puts the pedal to the metal and vaporizes thousands of us, this knucklehead denigrates them all and wastes precious time saying nothing, nothing, nothing -- and then worse. Here's the payoff:
Those who mount a challenge to established order are not the embodiment of evil. Horrifically bloody, criminal acts may blot the humanity of the perpetrators and stimulate terror in victims and survivors, but the ones who perpetrate such deeds are not the source of the terror within us. To call these people terrorists or evil, even to maintain our absolute distinction between victims and perpetrators, exercises the blind, one-way gaze of power . . . [my emphasis]
There's more, but I have to clean the vomit off it first. (By the way, "blind, one-way gaze of power" is incoherent -- if it's blind, how can it gaze, how can it be powerful, and how many ways can one gaze anyways?) Okay, here:
. . . perpetuates the reign of the irrational and supernatural, closes down the possibility that by speaking to one another we might formulate appropriate responses, even to the unthinkable.
K.J. Walters of Monroe, NY, has got your appropriate response right here:
I do not mean to trivialize Wideman's anger. He reminds me, however, of the indignant adolescent idealist on first discovering that the world is not perfect, or of the street-corner preacher, a man as free as any other, proclaiming himself to be a slave and pointing his accusatory finger at all of the people around him, people neither more nor less enslaved than he is.
And I have your inappropriate response right here: Fuck you, John Edgar Wideman. They made them jump, Jack. These creatures you want to promote to the status of people drove hundreds of innocents to a horrible Hobson's choice between incineration and a heart-stopping death plunge. So, for starters, fuck you.
Now come back to your window, John Edgar Wideman; slide up the pane, breathe in the complicated living air, then lean out over your nine-story Lower East Side view, and, with your eyes wide open, just breathe in, and out . . . about three thousand times . . . And just to be clear: I'm not interested in changing your mind; I simply want to shame and disgrace you, you dishonorable man.
CODA: Now, of course I don't anticipate any response from Mr. Wideman. As I said, I don't care what he thinks. But I already know the kind of pubescent sniveling to expect. Ann Marlowe, a fellow New York writer to J.E.W. [?!], wrote an open letter to in March 2003 that referred to the Harper's piece of the previous year; and his response to her letter, although enraging, is unintentionally hilarious -- it has a sputter-factor of about nine point five -- and recalls Mr. Walters's prescient indignant adolescent image. First, an excerpt from Ms. Marlowe's letter:
In your Harper’s essay you tried to assimilate terrorists to oppressed people of color, writing “to label an enemy a terrorist confers the same invisibility a colonist’s gaze confers upon the native.” You further claimed that calling someone a “terrorist” is “a refusal of dialogue, a negation of the other.” This is casually outrageous: what do terrorists do if not refuse dialogue and murder others? It is simply untrue that “anybody or everybody” could be lumped in as a terrorist. The word does have particular meanings and it is wise to keep them in mind.
Ms. Marlowe's essay is available free online, but Mr. Wideman's response requires money, so I'll leave it to the reader to both trust me, and to fill in whatever blanks he leaves below (and put down that drink):
I have appended an exhausting but not exhaustive list of examples of how your racialized prospective [sic] distorts. Speaking of being proleptic, the problems exemplified by your essay plague us all. The important point is to acknowledge that we are victims of an unsavory history -- colonialism, gender prejudice, class prejudice, etc . . . etc -- and only through constant self-examination and criticism of ourselves and others can we hope not to free ourselves of prejudice but to stay alert and minimize the damage we do.
The phrase "race is something we are all born with" racializes biology and human nature. The phrase "celebrated black novelist and academic" racializes literature and learning. The phrase "minority-group tic" racializes culture. The phrase describing American foreign policy "there has always been a moral dimension to our talking about such matters and this is part of our national identity" racializes nationality. The phrase "you dishonor the real victims of racism" racializes human suffering by suggesting a hierarchy of suffering. The phrase "no white writer could get away with your charge" racializes criticism. The phrase "specter of lynching" (lynching is your word, not mine) racializes violence. The phrase "if your feud with Powell were between Jews, my dead uncles would be clucking "self-hatredself-hatred" racializes disagreement between members of minority groups as well as trivializing a group's self-critical capacity. (Must it always be my race right or wrong, Ms. Marlowe?) The phrase "attacking one's own more harshly than any outsider would" racializes controversy and lumps together all members of a group in a demeaning, reductive fashion, as well as perpetuating the notion of an uncrossable racial line dividing "outsiders and insiders." The phrase "no bottles of Chateau-Lafite have yet become strange fruit" racializes symbolism and metaphor by suggesting no semantic parallel, no shared threat of evil intent, no equally dire consequences, no potential for nationality-baiting to escalate dangerously.Ask any teacher of a multi-culti fourth grade, and he or she will tell you how often and how quickly they whip out the race meme (which functions as a free pass on bad behavior): "You're just racist, you're just racist." Is that a racist statement? No, it's a human one, spoken from experience.
But John Edgar Wideman, sixty plus years old, should be ashamed of himself. He just brings out that tired old hammer, racialism, but it doesn't have that much weight anymore; in fact, it looks ridiculous.
I have a feeling, though, that this will never stop Mr. Wideman. I hesitate to refer to one of his latest short stories, because it will sound as if I am picking some extreme example simply to tar him, so to speak, with one of the ugliest images I've run across, and I've read widely. But he proudly publishes it under his own name, so . . . you've been warned.
Published on the UPENN online magazine crosscurrents, the story is called "hunters." The first, very short section, describes how two white hunters out in the woods shoot, perhaps accidentally, but certainly mortally, two black women; and then they decide to rape them before they die. (I skimmed the rest.)
I'm sorry to leave my readers with that image, but when Wideman comes out after the battle is over to bayonet the wounded, I reach for a rule I heard from a real veteran:
When they bring it to you on a forked stick, you take it back under under a black flag.
And I've also got some questions for the judges of our intellectual awards. Don't you?
Posted by Jerome at December 30, 2003 04:22 PM | TrackBack