Modern Language Studies — Issue 53.1 — Summer 2023

Each day

Walking to the market from my room

Giants watch me slowly ramble by No judgments, just head in sky

With me as an afterthought.

It’s amazing how good it feels

Seeing the mountains after a storm Covered in snow

And it’s even more amazing

Considering how miserable it would be To be there freezing.

Venus too is beautiful From a distance.

I turn the corner as I head down to the market And face the I-90 from a slight elevation. Across the freeway, the angel Moroni atop the Mormon temple With his golden horn proclaims

The gospel of the Golden Plates

That a man named Smith discovered In New York,

A place I love to visit But would never want to live in again.

From this distance

The I-90 feels hopeful

A way to escape the confines of my room And start fresh.

East to the Cascades

West to the Olympics

Nowhere in between.

On a clear New York fall morning

My father held my hand

As we rode the subway downtown to where he worked. I spent the day watching him,

Breathing the musk of books and boxes in an old office

With a big window that looked out from the twenty-third floor

At the lines of buildings moving in parallax

Against the blue sky and long shadows clipping the streets

Where all those things I’ve read about

In poems, novels and memoirs happened.

The tiny people down there

Fit neatly in the crosswalks, bus stops and store fronts

A busy diorama destined for the attic

To be revisited when there’s no more room for memories

In the living room.

My breath fogged the window

And I wiped it to keep watching the coursing crowd. I couldn’t see their faces well enough

To know what they might be feeling

And my father painted a smile or a frown here and there Whenever I asked a difficult question.

And I listened and questioned and listened and questioned. Fifty-eight years later he was still explaining As I held his hand

To help him cross the street.

The sun is beautiful when it’s clear

And the moon reflects the sun. We weren’t made to be there

Only to appreciate it from a distance.

Al Roth

VOLUME 53, NO. 1 SUMMER 2023

LAURENCE ROTH EDITOR

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ANN MARIE SHORT, Saint Mary’s College Diversity Caucus President

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ITA (SUNANDITA) MEHROTRA

is an educator, researcher, and critically acclaimed visual artist based in New Delhi, India. Her nonfiction comics, such as Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection and “The Poet, Sharmila,” have been published by some of the strongest independent publishing companies in India, including Zubaan Books, GoetheInstitut, Yoda Press, and AdAstra Comix, among others. She is currently the Director of Artreach India, a nonprofit organization that provides arts and artists to underserved regions with limited access to traditional education. In that role, she frequently travels to far-flung villages and towns for research and to set up and deliver Artreach’s programs. By exploring the unique stories of these places, she uncovers and engages in the socio-political changes currently wracking India, transforming her experiences into graphic narratives, illustrated texts, and animation.

Mehrotra attended the Mirambika - Free Progress School, a groundbreaking experimental educational setting that strongly supports holistic development, learning through the arts, and independent study. She graduated from St. Stephens’ College, University of Delhis, with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy (Hons.) in 2010. She was given the opportunity to participate in a student exchange for one year at Sciences Po, Paris, where she obtained a diploma in French Art History and Culture Studies. She went back to India to complete her master’s degree at the Ambedkar University Delhi, School of Culture (2014). Mehrotra’s 2017 MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Arts and Aesthetics focuses on feminist graphic narratives in modern India.

I talked with Mehrotra via Skype to discuss contemporary feminism in India in connection with her career, focusing on the memories of her visit with poet Irom Sharmila in the Imphal Central Jail, an experience that she illustrates in the comic “The Poet, Sharmila” in the anthology entitled Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back! (2015). The autobiographical comic “The Poet, Sharmila” depicts Mehrotra’s feelings during her visit to her mentor, Irom Sharmila. As a poet who has fought peacefully for the abolition of the army that fails to protect residents, Sharmila has become a symbol of liberation in India. The strips show Mehrotra visiting the Imphal Central Jail, where the poet was participating in a hunger strike following the Malom Massacre, in which the AFSPA massacred ten innocent bystanders. My interview with Mehrotra examines the difficulties Indian women encounter while expressing their artistic vision through literature, and the integration of feminist education into the Indian curriculum. The interview was held at 1:00 PM (GTM + 2) on June 15, 2022, and then the audio recording was transcribed and lightly edited for clarity.

Raisa Rafaela Serrano Muñoz: You work as a visual artist, art researcher, and educator. Is it possible to educate the population through art starting from when they are young?

Ita Mehrotra: I think it’s specific to the kind of communities I’m working with in India. They are communities with a lack of resources, which have low access to mainstream education. Actually, mainstream schooling is too high-pressure and has so many subjects that the students are not able to deal with them because there isn’t enough help. Whether it’s because the parents do not have enough education or because the school doesn’t give students enough attention, a lot of children in India and in other developing countries who are first-generation learners just don’t fit into the mainstream education system. In these places, when you go in with creative media, visual storytelling, and theatre with games, they work really well. They are useful not just for traditional skills, such as reading and writing, but also for building children’s confidence in saying, “Oh, yeah, we can do this” and “Oh, we love to learn because learning isn’t about pressure and scolding; it’s also fun. And it’s something we can use and make something of ourselves.”

So, we make programs within village schools as well as in urban slums in Delhi. I’m based in Delhi, and my team works mainly in Delhi. From experience, I know artwork as a way to show children that they can do things themselves and also that these creative skills can go a long way to even finding a career.

There are photographers who come out of our programs; there are designers ... Mainstream education won’t offer you that. Even if you get through school, you’re stuck. These young children from low-resource areas have to start earning, so they get stuck in these kinds of low-skilled jobs, which are really frustrating because they don’t like it.

As we’re talking right now, after COVID-19, after the extended lockdown in India where a lot of the children couldn’t access online learning, in this country we are seeing an increase in the education gap between the few who have access to private and online education and the many who have no such access. At the moment, the organization where I work has demanded and claimed that our program and art could play a massive role in bringing back these children who have dropped out of the system, together with offering them well-being in connecting this kind of holistic way of thinking and education, so that the whole body, the child, is growing. Both the brain and the mind are growing and learning skills.

From the experience of the work I’ve done and the work that other educators and artists have done with me, it goes to show that art has a huge role in education. In my own life, if I hadn’t been introduced to art in school, I would have been a wreck.

RSM: You have experience in publication with independent publishers such as Zubaan Books, Yoda Press, and AdAstra Comix. Is it easy to publish feminist concerns, such as gender violence and resilience, in India?

IM: It’s really good that there are these strong independent publishing houses in the country, and many of them, like Zubaan Books and Yoda Press, are run by feminists themselves. As an organization, they promote this kind of work. Neither mainstream publishing nor mainstream media anywhere in the world encourage women’s work in telling hard-hitting realities of misogyny and oppression. There is a strong feminist movement in the country that has led to feminist media houses, and they’re very popular; they sell very well. Whether it’s academic institutions, students, or libraries, they will house these books. It plays a role in the way culture is shaped. They influence popular mainstream media as well, to a certain extent, so it’s a tussle.

I don’t think the mainstream media is a feminist media that encourages women to speak out. If so, we wouldn’t need things like #MeToo. There are people who will encourage it, and you have to find them. I wish there were more. There are quite a lot in cities, especially in New Delhi, but not in all of India because it is very diverse. If you go to a small rural town, you probably won’t find a lot of these, but even in smaller areas, there are very strong media houses. There’s one called Khabar Lahariya, a rural press media organization that has women reporters in very rural areas in backward parts of the country, such as Bihar or Jharkhand. These women report on the ground in these villages about rape, harassment, and women’s work, among other topics.

So, what do women in villages do? The understanding is that men are laborers, farmers, and the ones who do all the work. So, there are very interesting traditional roots in our rural economy. In a city like New Delhi, and even in other metropolitan cities like Mumbai or Bangalore, you’ll find really strong feminist-led organizations. There is a voice, and it’s powerful. There are new women comics creators, storytellers, and podcasters who are finding their way and giving different opinions.

RSM: With the publication of your work in English, you can reach women worldwide and inspire them to live the life they want. Are you aware of the importance of language in your comics? What about the importance of images, since everybody, including illiterate people, can get the message?

IM: Focusing on Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back! (2015). At that point, I definitely felt that images had a power that got through to everyone more than words, or at least in conjunction with the text. It’s like words that are created when visuals and text meet. It’s all-encompassing. You feel embedded in the sentiment of what’s being said; you’re not just reading a description.

I’ve always felt this is also my language. It’s what I do. It’s not just about what others might feel. It’s about how confident I feel about a certain way of working. For me, it’s always been about withdrawing into our text, and the words matter to me a lot.

I find language accessible to me as a way of walking through, talking about, or coming together on difficult issues. Bringing visuals and text together in a graphic narrative format is something that has stayed with me and grown into a journey for many years now. It’s grown from my first work, and in Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back!, I felt I could bring this together as a story, and definitely the hope is that different people, younger and older, who are maybe not so comfortable with reading a book, might read something that has pictures with a bit of text.

In this context, there is little text on a page. It’s literally 250 words or something like that. What happens when you use such little text is that only the significant things can be written, so you won’t have extra words. You really have to boil it down to find the essence of what you want to say. That also becomes powerful because you don’t have 10,000 words to use. You have 250 words that mattered the most to you, and that’s why you kept it there. So, when somebody’s reading it, you’re only showing very poignant bits of text.

It’s engaging, because if you don’t say much with words, you read a little bit, and you have little bits of drawing in between, so you’re given clues. And if it’s a difficult story about your work, like my story, both drawings and text help. My story is about activist Irom Sharmila, and it could be a really big book. There are books about her, but if it’s just this little bit of text and bits of drawings, fragments of the story, it means I’m inviting you to enter this world and fill in the gaps with your imagination. There’s no right or wrong in that. I’m not saying that you’re making fiction out of it, but as a viewer-reader, the power to place yourself within the narrative is where the work of thinking together can begin. I don’t just want to give information. I’m not making propaganda. It’s a way of putting things out there and thinking of what might happen when somebody else is thinking. That, for me, is a much more interesting dialogue than just lots of text or just a big painting.

RSM: You are used to traveling to different cities in India to help children in education. Do you think feminist education in the Indian curriculum is possible nowadays?

"I DON’T THINK THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS A FEMINIST MEDIA THAT ENCOURAGES WOMEN TO SPEAK OUT."

IM: It’s so far from reality. Mainstream education itself has only taken more right-wing turns. We have a right-wing government, and it is bringing in an extremely aggressive, male, and misogynistic environment. Partly due to its Hindutva ideology and the promotion of Hinduism at the cost of other religions, they see women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and any of that as radical and not positive. They’ve made changes in textbooks as well, only giving examples that are anti-secular and misogynistic, which show men working more than women. Women are meant to run the family. That’s very much what this government believes, and in every little cultural production or educational aspect, what they keep saying is that women are supposed to raise their children and run the family. That’s what is driving the country backwards at the moment.

Education is controlled by the government, and the massive drive is backward, not forward. There is the education here, but there is also segregation. There are some elite private schools that follow international standards, like anywhere else, so they follow international baccalaureate programs. But those are only for a few of the rich, so the masses of the country go to government schools. Schools that are government-affiliated follow the government textbooks, and those are the ones that have gone backwards in the current system. There are really good alternative schools run by activists, NGOs, and artists, and these are sometimes for rural children. However, there are very few. The masses in the educational system are using backward textbooks. Education is not going forward.

Is India any closer to a feminist education system? Right now, not at all. In the mainstream system, I would have to say that, sadly, there are artists and activists who are struggling to carry out their work. There is always an undercurrent, which is very strong. Activists, artists, writers, and theatre people are always pushing at the system. We’re an argumentative country, we love to debate, and we love to protest, so there’ll always be the other side. But we have to acknowledge that, at the moment, there’s a very backward push by the forces that are very strong on the right.

RSM: Comics and graphic novels are pretty new formats in literature. Can we offer alternative education through comics and graphic novels? Do you think this format is easier for sending the message to youth?

IM: Using visual stories works especially well in developing countries where there are first-generation learners who have dropped out of education. I strongly believe that seeing the work I’ve done, whether in cities or villages across the land, not just for very young children but for those who are grown up and haven’t had access to education, is really gratifying for me, as it’s something they can do immediately and something they can also look at, as it’s very visual. It can work for adults and children.

RSM: In India, many supporters still support the Hindutva ideology, a doctrine that elevates Hindu religion and mythology to the center of society by reinterpreting Indian history in accordance with its own preferences. With this background, what are the challenges that Indian women face when they want to express their art and focus their work on achieving equality and empowering other women?

IM: The government controls the educational system at present, and this backwardness is turning into an aggressively patriarchal state, which is something you can see in the streets right now. I go out into the streets of New Delhi, and there are more and more of these aggressive gangs of boys only, who have been given free rein to move around like sharks, blaring Hindu music, and they look like they’re ready to beat people up: they’re very aggressive. And this is the top leadership of the state at the moment. They literally claim that the size of their chest is a sign of how great they are. It’s a backward turn. It’s not just about being anti-secular, but about being extremely patriarchal, and that is definitely not an environment that supports the work of women as feminist voices in cultural production. The work never ends.

My recent work, Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection (2019), is about the past. It came out three years ago. The book documents the movement against anti-secularism, in which Muslim women have organized across the country. These protests started at a place called Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, with Muslim women saying they are completely against the law brought in by the government that makes it impossible for a Muslim immigrant coming to India to seek citizenship but invites immigrants from other countries or other religions to seek citizenship. It singles out Muslims, and even Muslims within India, who are saying that India questions their citizenship, even if they’ve been here for generations. At this time, it’s not possible to do any work, bring out a book, and find the right publishing house. There are voices when I go into these places, like the Shaheen Bagh women. They are the ones who are leading the country. At this moment, I feel justified when I see these women who have organized enormous protests against what the government is saying. So many thousands of people are gathering across the country. The government is not helping at all to promote the voice of women. Nevertheless, despite the authority and patriarchy of the state, feminist voices are surging.

It would be great if the government allowed a free voice, but as the opposite is true, women are rising up against the government. When the government was pro-feminist, feminists were doing other things. They were working for education, peoples’ rights, housing, and various things that are still to be done. But at this moment, those voices are having to fight against the curbing of basic human rights in the country. The work of feminists continues, but what it’s doing, how it’s asking for support, how radical it is, and the nature of it at the moment is focused on challenging state oppression.

RSM: Do you use online platforms such as your website and social media to discuss feminist issues and raise awareness among your readers? What are some of the most common misconceptions about feminism in India that you have encountered?

IM : I don’t use online media so much because I like to do things a little more slowly. I sit with paper and my drawing equipment. It takes me a little more time. Publishing in books or in independent scenes for small exhibitions, books, and publishing houses is what has worked for me. I’ve also done small jobs on essays for new websites, and that’s given me more work.

There’s one called The Wire, which is a perfect media house in India, where I published something at the same time, Drawing the Line . The same activist, Irom Sharmila, was the protagonist of a second story that happened a few years ago.

There are artists who are challenging work every day, and many of them choose to go online, and it can work. Using Instagram only really does work. Using Twitter to gather support and post things also works. I don’t usually use all kinds of media, but I used it when the protests broke out against the government two years ago in India in the winter of 2019. That’s when I started relying on it. There were very few artists and people writing about the protests, so I just made a few posters at that time and posted them on Instagram and WhatsApp, but just to friends. It was fascinating to see how it went to many more people than I thought. Just telling people this was happening was a call to action. I saw people going to the protest afterwards, so sometimes these sites can be a mobilization tool, just by saying, “Oh, tomorrow there is a protest or something is going on, and we need to get there just to channel people into doing something.” Currently, it’s also very effective as a way to organize and spread the word that it has worked. I have used it at times for these specific moments. I don’t really like my own website. I hardly have anything going on there, so I really shouldn’t keep it going.

RSM: One of the ways of approaching and understanding gender identity is through the deconstruction of traditionally feminine and masculine roles that have been established as conventional. With this argument in mind, how would you define the concept of identity? What is Indian identity for you?

IM : I don’t think there is a single answer at all. I definitely think a person’s identity goes through life with endless stereotypes and conventional thinking of what genders are supposed to be and whether the labels given at birth are based on gender in every life experience.

I constantly criticize it, and the feminist movement across the world criticizes it too. Our lives are governed by these boxes and classifications. Moving out of them is an extremely difficult task because you first have to realize that they’re not natural.

On the other hand, I lived in France for a year, and I don’t think it’s true that India is more gendered and has more stereotypes than any other part of the world. They [are] just different kinds of stereotypes. For instance, in the kind of clothes that women and men wear, the differences within that are still extremely prevalent around the world. Even something as simple as how you dress, how you look, and how you’re supposed to behave are things that cut across the developed and underdeveloped parts of the whole world.

In the Indian context, there is, of course, a rigid patriarchal structure, beginning with family and marriage, which is moving into women’s work in education and the public space. Throughout one’s life, you either accept those limitations and therefore propagate them because the moment you accept them, you are also part of keeping that system intact, or you don’t accept them. If you don’t accept them, then you’re always fighting against them. You’re always having to question it and come up against various rules, whether it’s in the family or in a public space. Things happen when traveling through the city, when you’re in your educational space, in your workspace. Even in French circles, the way guys behave is different from the way girls behave, so you’re constantly tackling the problem. I see myself in that space of constantly questioning and confronting.

This idea of Indian identity is almost a conventional stereotype that the mass media and mass culture would like to promote. In Bollywood, there are stereotypes of how an Indian woman might behave and what she does throughout her day, with a lot of family values. It just doesn’t show the reality of women’s work and how they actually are in the country. They live, survive, and work. There are many of us who go against these stereotypes and challenge them every day in our work. The question is not what Indian identity is for me; the question really is whether or not there is an Indian identity. It’s such a binding constraint to think of. Even the person who grows up here saying, “India is the biggest secular democracy in the world,” is contradicted by the notion of

the modern state, which is extremely controlling. Especially right now, nationhood is a term that’s used by the right wing to claim that there are no different Indian identities. Feminists claim that they don’t want to say they are good Hindu Indian women.

I appreciate my culture very much and my association with this country, the diversity of voices, and the diversity of women’s work. It’s amazing how women are able to organize, not just in their own lives with the children and family they support through their work, but also their voice, which is very clear about the economy and politics. It’s great to see the way women actually are in this country because not only are they strong in shaping the economy and history, but they also have the strength with which they speak about what politics should be. That’s what I associate with India: diversity and resilience, not any sort of mass stereotype at all, and these challenges as well.

RSM: In your comic “The Poet, Sharmila,” you describe the memories of your visit with Sharmila in the Imphal Central Jail. And you explain how she altered your ideas about nationhood, struggle, unity, and the body. Can you explain in what ways you changed your ideas about these concepts?

IM: It’s been about ten years since I traveled there. She was in a part of the country that’s quite far from New Delhi, in the northeast of India in a state called Manipur. She was in the jail of the capital city of Imphal. She was in prison because she was on a hunger strike against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), but they were saying that she was trying to commit suicide, which is illegal, so they dumped her in jail. Then, they force-fed her through a tube.

The point is that growing up in New Delhi, you’re given this idea of the country as being one unanimous whole, as a big democracy of unity and diversity where everyone loves the country, with a sort of picture of almost everybody speaking the same language, reading the same newspapers and literature, and so on. You grow up with that kind of sensibility, and as Delhi is a metropolis with people coming to find work from all over, you see people from the North, South, East, and West, all living together. One of the most important parts of the experience with Irom Sharmila was the change and traveling to a region that is worlds apart from what I’ve grown up with. It was very important for me to be able to shatter this idea of a unanimous country that is fed to us, which is instilling a forced patriotism without our consent. Knowing that there are very different parts of this country and that they don’t connect in many ways but are actually against each other if we go into the northeast, as in the state of Kashmir, there are politically challenging spaces because the ethnic communities in the northeast don’t want to be associated within the democratic nation of India. They want to be separate, so there are military groups that are armed and underground, and they create threats, but the threat is something a lot of the people will support because they don’t have their basic rights met from the country.

So, it’s very complicated, and in answering the problem, instead of using dialogue and democracy, as is supposed to happen, the Indian state goes in and forces the region to be part of the country, and they use that force not just once but every day. Therefore, you need armed forces to be surrounding the entire area, but this heavily militarized state, which is not protecting against another army or infiltrator from another country, is actually going against its own people to control the country—to be able to secure it, to tell the world that we have a nation. You’re actually continuously creating a nation by force, and the army not only does this, but it also rapes, loots, and has free rein to do what it wants.

So, the meeting with Sharmila shattered the idea that I was fed for a very long time, and it showed me that common people need to take measures which are so radical and extreme, like going on hunger strike for years on end just to be heard, because otherwise you wouldn’t get any news from these parts of the country. If you’re in the controlling center of the country, like New Delhi, you tell people that we’re a good, happy democracy, but you don’t show what’s happening, the struggles of the people in that country. When activists like Irom get international support, then people in India know what’s happening.

That’s what happens when you get an award for peace. She got The Magsaysay Award [ ed. note: honors those who have demonstrated service leadership to Asian peoples] as a peace activist, and then even people in India noticed a lot more. Of course, the surroundings, the geography, the military context, and being in that space with an informer helped me break away from this idea of nationhood. Then, going into the jail to meet her and seeing what an activist needs to do to their body to be heard and so on.

It was a whole second portion of it. Moreover, there was another important factor involved. It was a difficult time for me because I was 17 or 18 years old and had just finished high school, and it’s that transition period in life where you’re asking who you are and what you are going to do, and then you come across the fact that everything you believed in, in terms of democracy and nationhood, doesn’t exist. So, these experiences shaped me as a person and my radical ways of thinking. For that reason, it was crucial, and I am thankful that I could do it because otherwise if you grow up in New Delhi and you have a privileged education with good learning, you think you’ve learned everything, but you can basically not know anything. So, at least I had some understanding from the kinds of books I read and by listening to activists and authors. It’s a whole different thing to travel, to visit a prison and so on.

RSM: In “The Poet, Sharmila,” Sharmila explains the story of her grandmother fighting against the British in 1939 during the Second World War. How important is a heritage to you? Do you think that when history is taught at schools, it is altered?

IM: I only got to know this story when I went there, and the researcher I was with was writing a book. For me, I was learning firsthand from meeting people there, from the museum. It was all about history, which I knew nothing about, and I think it’s so important. Also, there were so many strong people at that time. Women fought these wars and defeated the British. Also, just the fact that women were able to do this is incredible. I wish they were part of every history textbook, at least in school. People would know that this happened. It’s wrong not to include it. These are huge parts of history, so it’s not there in the textbooks, for sure. It’s not in our school curriculum, and I wouldn’t have known about it if it hadn’t been for researchers, going on this trip, and reading the book later. I hope these events will be there, but it’s going to take some time for that to happen to have this true history in textbooks.

RSM: One of the messages of your comic “The Poet, Sharmila” is the importance of sisterhood. We see it in the story of Sharmila’s grandmother and your feeling of friendship while speaking to Sharmila. How important is sisterhood among women?

IM: With activists like Sharmila, it’s something infectious. It’s really powerful to imagine that somebody can take on the state and bring so much attention to the issue and to carry out these struggles. I remember it so clearly, how she was in jail, being force-fed through a tube, and yet she’s laughing and talking about food and things she loves. All these images she’s hung in her jail room, which are cut-outs from magazines and newspapers. There’s a deep human connection. There’s definitely a sisterhood and a friendship that has led to all the later protests organized by women, with women interviewing female leaders of different movements, protests, and struggles. In some way, it’s not just about them at all. They’re so open about sharing what they’re doing, saying who they are, and also about really giving space to others. That’s something that women also have to understand early on. Because when they’re organizing things

"I REMEMBER IT SO CLEARLY, HOW SHE WAS IN JAIL, BEING FORCE-FED THROUGH A TUBE, AND YET SHE’S LAUGHING AND TALKING ABOUT FOOD AND THINGS SHE LOVES."

for the family and society, it’s always through this interdependence. It’s through coalitions because the only support that many women have had is from each other, especially in rural, developing countries. It’s a type of situation where if a woman takes a stand, the only way she can do it is if she knows there will be another woman to help because it means sometimes going against your family, your parents, friends, and bigger networks of organizations. That definitely creates a very strong feeling of comradery, of friendship.

RSM: The way Sharmila struggled against the AFSPA was through resilience. In fact, she became an icon for the feminist movement worldwide. However, it might be frustrating for her that after 16 long years of a hunger strike, there is still sexual abuse against women by the army. Paradoxically, AFSPA is a group that is supposed to defend the nation. What’s your opinion about this point? What’s the next step in approaching this fight?

IM: There’s so much politics involved. It includes the northeast states, I think six of the states in the northeast, and then Kashmir, and in a way it’s a similar situation, where the national armed forces are in control, and they have the upper hand in Kashmir and in the northeast. But then there are very different pictures about what the politics and the issues are in the northeast. There are a lot of ethnic groups and minorities, many different kinds. Each ethnic group has its own militia and underground organization. Then in the north, in Kashmir, there’s a fight against what they claim are terrorists trained in Pakistan, who are supposedly controlling the Muslim military and organizing these armed attacks on people who are from Pakistan.

On the other hand, the Indian government has a claim on Kashmir and Pakistan. Then, there are separatist movements in Kashmir, so the thing is, obviously, there’s no one response to what should happen with our AFSPA. But, yes, as you said in your question, the national army forces are raping and looting, and they harass the common people, both women and men, and they sexually abuse underage women, married women, and even older women in their homes and in the streets. This is also because they’re from the army that goes into the north from other states. They go in from very different cultures and are sent to the northeast, where they have no association with the people. If you go from the south of India or from the north of India to the northeast, you don’t know the language, and you don’t understand the food, the culture, or anything. They’re posted there for a long period of time, and of course they’re very aggressive, and they know they have the upper hand, so they can avoid lawsuits if they have enough reason to shoot someone on sight.

Obviously, even if there is a threat from separatist groups and ethnic struggles, the fact that the army has these powers and that they are not accountable for rape and looting has to be challenged, and the courts have to take action. Now, just like in the past, these actions cannot be justified by blaming separatist groups and militias and saying that they are the ones who are tearing the country apart. No, it’s the army who is doing this, and there is absolutely nothing that can justify the way the army has behaved and is continuing to behave to the present day. Every day there’s something on in the news, some cases of shooting people, some cases of rape, and in most of these cases we will never know how many people were raped or killed or what happened.

The law has to take responsibility for this situation, and these soldiers need some major sensitivity training. Also, there’s absolutely nothing [to be gained] for aggressive men with guns who are sent off to a culture that is not theirs, and this kind of life is obviously deeply frustrating for these men as well. None of this justifies what they do, but this is the situation, so how do we train people to be human beings? How can this kind of vile and extremely aggressive military system control army training of their own people that will change their attitude through education, sensitivity, and gender training for the people sent there? Also, the judiciary and legal systems have to charge people if a case is reported. It’s very difficult for a woman to accuse a soldier of a crime. The bigger challenges of our AFSPA are much more complicated political questions such as political questions, such as how can you eliminate a defensive army completely in a nationalist climate? Other countries might claim Indian territory. China is always waiting to claim Indian territory on the northeast side, so can the army completely go away? Will Kashmir be taken by Pakistan? By China? Those political questions are much bigger, and I honestly don’t think I can even get into all of that or even answer it. But in terms of what to do about rape and harassment by the army, I think anyone could say that enough wrong has happened and that basic measures could be put in

place, but they aren’t in place. Rape is a crime, but it’s there, and it’s legal. What the army is doing is not okay, so it’s a question of putting into action what needs to happen, but that doesn’t happen. We’re a very corrupt country.

RSM: How do you think the feminist movement in India has evolved over the years? What do you think are the most effective ways to tackle gender-based violence in India? Have you noticed a change of mind in new generations toward the feminist movement?

IM: From the little experience I have about the feminist movement in India in the 1980s, there was a huge rise, especially in New Delhi, in feminist groups and organizations. They used things like street theatre and did a lot of work to build awareness and bring up these questions. There were also laws that were passed against rape and dowry, so they were very instrumental in the 1980s as organized collectives in shaping rules and rights for working women.

Over time, I feel there’s now—at present, it’s very dissipated. There’s no organized collective feminist movement like those, and it’s much more diluted. But the use of social media has helped individuals to raise their voices. The same types of movements can happen again with something like the #MeToo online movement. It was an enormous call that went out to academics, artists, media personalities, and people in the government.

The feminist movement is very active, and there are a lot of artists and young creative professionals who cannot even say whether it’s a movement or not. Women today feel freer to speak up at some level, and this is more likely to happen now than even 20 years ago. The tools are here, and the ability to use social media and connect with platforms is something that wasn’t possible in the recent past, so some progress has been made.

RSM: What are the most pressing issues facing women’s rights in India today? How do you see the future of the women’s rights movement in India?

IM: Because of this really strong, fascist, right-wing government, one of the biggest challenges is what Muslim women are facing in the country. It’s something that we can’t shy away from, which is the threat to Muslim women’s education in the country. Nowadays, education is not even available to these women in many parts of the country. If Muslim girls wear a hijab, they are not allowed to sit in the classroom, they can’t come inside, they can’t study, and they can’t take their exams.

Every day there’s a new protest in a new part of the country against an attack on a Muslim woman. If she’s a protester or if she has been part of student activism, she and her

family are severely harassed. The case we’re following right now is that of an activist in Uttar Pradesh, whose house has been broken into and her family arrested (this is an especially large threat to Muslim women in the country): it’s a double threat, because they are Muslim, and because the Hindutva government is hunting down Muslims. Also, as a woman in a patriarchal state, the government just can’t accept the fact that Muslim women are speaking up. At the moment, we are giving support and solidarity any way we can, and we are trying to tell this government that not everyone believes what they say.

So, that’s a major one, and in general, as we were talking about earlier, there is a rise in misogyny because the regime is so strongly patriarchal, so it will take a long time to bring back what happened in the course of history with the feminist movement in the past so that women today will have more voice and public recognition. You can see that there’s been a backward movement and an attack on these freedoms, and that’s been a global problem since the lockdown. There’s been a worldwide attack on those who spoke up in the #MeToo campaign. At the moment, there is a bit of a backlash from the patriarchy. It’s amazing how big these waves can be. At present, there is a rise in patriarchal misogyny, so you feel like Muslim women are definitely under this enormous threat, as also the Hindu system. There’s the upper caste, the lower caste (which is the lowest level), outcasts, and Dalit women because it’s a Hindu government, but it’s [not] for all Hindus. It’s a government that is only for a certain sector of upper-caste Hindus, so again here we see a growing attack on Dalit women’s rights and more rape cases are coming out. The police are also turning a blind eye. You can’t report cases, so when it comes to minority women, they’re extremely under attack at the moment by the country. It’s been that way forever, but it has sharply increased under this regime. Because of that, the failure of the economy and the lockdown as well have made things much harder. When there are hard economic conditions, this kind of fascism really breeds because people don’t have what they need and are struggling for their basic rights. Where are they going to turn? To the courts? To the police? It’s the perfect time to oppress people. We have to see these sharp realities on the ground. It’s about minority communities at present and what women are facing with the convergence of anti-secular and fascist policies [and] with the oppression of women within the country.

"YOU CAN SEE THAT THERE’S BEEN A BACKWARD MOVEMENT AND AN ATTACK ON THESE FREEDOMS, AND THAT’S BEEN A GLOBAL PROBLEM SINCE THE LOCKDOWN."

NAVIGATING PUBLIC SPACE IN NEW DELHI IS OVERWHELMING—WITH ITS LACK OF WALKING SPACE, NOISE, CONSTRUCTION, POTHOLES AND CATTLE, THAT GENDERED GAZE AND THE CLASSISM.

Over 2023, in addition, India is host to the prestigious G20 summit of various national heads coming together to ‘think’ about international finance and climate change. But to ready the city for it, Delhi literally clears out slums, slum dwellers, shanties, beggars, and without a thought as to where they will go, once forced out.

—I.M.

poetry+fiction

g.c. waldrep

GLORY-SONNET TO THE AVIARY AS PUBLIC LITURGY

1

I follow the phantoms of April through the slick avenues. Make the child bear the host upon its narrow shoulders, skim the milk-depth of pine’s translucent skin which remains unpierced. The offense of glass, its lucid resistance. Collapse the wound into its constituent folds, its origami testament. I fed the blinded sparrow in its cage for awhile. It was not a child. It is not a voice. The repetition, the brevity, & the goal. We will feast, they say, in the hall of the comedians, vacant now. We will train our hawks. Theirs is a literal haruspexy, starkly legible, glistening. Someone else’s livid indiscretion. 2

Measure the aviary by its oiled hinges. To what degree does form in music obscure truth? The golden ratio, demesne, we don’t have to believe—we can polish the blackened silver, we can suborn the witnesses. Worship as an acoustic space, absolutely. Opening and closing, a larynx, the recessional logic, curve of the beak of a Cooper’s hawk pressing into the vole’s taut viscera. I was wrong, you should have bought the mirror, exchange genuflecting to the vertical axis. You too can contemplate flight, you too can provide forms to structure attention. You can bend at the neck, the waist, or the knee. 3

Collect of the cottonwoods’ transverse floss set for calcite, emblem, antigen. Christ as the living dust, quickened in season. Sand writing into sand, convocation of shamed departures. Empathy demands an oblique plane in which words may slumber or at least rest. Economies of bone suture object to gesture, as motion. Rim of the glass on which I place my canted finger’s blade, is it wrong to imagine it attracts light: rim, blade, each lung’s inverted funnel. Strewn on the cinder path to the new clinic not a garment, but blinding garment’s eye / I walk both towards & away from, Master.

mount moriah

Throne : filament : throne. I transubstantiate this knowledge, castrato to my body’s slow decline. God holds a mirror in His hand to massage our unbelief.

I shear the rough wool from my body which is like His body, dull foam of pasture-wrack. This filament casts no shadow, I’ve been told & verily believe as some better man breaks me from the brush.

We cannot all be spared, is the hymn they teach us. Seep-clot, breath-clot, I tat my body into fire’s

epic lace. It feels good, a lotioning forest offering up its debit-praise. I char as I unbriar.

O vicar of astonishments, false positives—

let me steal this much: your face as an evening bell. A heart, a lens, a tone.

hive artifact

wheat pours through the mirror without mercy (what we think of as mercy) time is something distant, inklike what is written in wax dies in wax, says an old proverb

soon I (my image) am completely overrun by wheat

I could stop looking I could turn away from the mirror this is the problem with representational language the mirror exists why don’t you ask it, you say so I ask the mirror

when I look down at myself I find the grain become a quickening, live, a cape of wasps

MEDITATION ON DÜRER’S SUDARIUM HELD BY ONE ANGEL

Mica silvering the mortar at dusk, faint wail of an ambulance shaking up the distance, yellow panes against which I brushed & burned myself beyond which hunger thrived, & hunger’s banquet, the sea.

There is nothing new here— accumulations of roses & stones, wrack & the affinity for wrack.

I left you inside a motet by Lassus, in lieu of some better prayer, socialism perhaps at the depth of the pine’s broken root where the entitlements flicker.

I recall every copper instrument I have ever touched, or owned—

the sprains that ran through them—

church of the laughing kings.

Go ahead, extract the blood I’d been saving, my widower’s mite.

The world remains faithfully out of reach. I blink towards it like an Aldis lamp, I wound the sleeping animal.

It kicks inside its dream. It has not borne the fiery constellation. It leans into our comfort, our amethyst observances, every architecture where matter paused, or seemed to, as if it were resting.

MARIA D i FRANCESCO

DIGGING THROUGH WHAT’S MINED

Anyone can see it’s a game, because it is. At the molten core, it’s commerce cut loose from chance, from risky margins, where there are cogs mining in invisible tunnels, searching for Eldorado: everything you don’t have. Focus on strategy, on technique, because the goal is to find an uninterrupted path to the cache and then more cash. Hinder operations. Obfuscate. Obtain by any means. Intervene. Muscle in. Win.

Justify what you must.

Kill procedures. Whatever you do, don’t let on that you know that they know–Machiavelli was restored in the matrix, too.

Nonconformist is what they called them because most only live once, or twice if you’re willing to count on baby Jesus.

Penance on the way to Canaan comes with a price. Quests necessitate action, and even rest is a strongly restless verb when you’re preaching to the bleary. Stay focused on the target, set your eyes on the pearl of great price.

Unbelieving are the ones at mass on Sunday. You smell rotting flesh. Validate, appreciate only when they’re watching in their holy robes, otherwise just let xyloid handled chalices and candles speak dove peace.

Young colliers will not talk back at the tunnel temple, and zinc deposits that echo brimstone won’t fuss in dark fantasies.

Dubliners

Alison reads our tarot on her apartment floor.

Next morning we take a train to Howth; Sam sleeps at the apartment, hungover, while Alison and I climb beside the sea, eat fish and chips vinegarlogged,

raise our pints to Nora Barnacle, Blow Job Queen. We will lose touch, mute our friendship; still possible in the digital world. But this morning no futures exist, no potentials for loss. Just the hills of Howth and last night, seventies American pop songs we sang with locals on guitars in Dublin pubs. Witness greater than genius.

American pop music in Europe so charming: ever a decade outdated, sometimes much more.

ANNIE DIAMOND

if i do not die, does this violence earn empathy?

or must i bleed he walked into me he said, he said Get out of my fuckin’ way, China!

drunken, stumbling, sharpening his teeth on the last two syllables, grey strands uncombed carcinogens subtle in his sentence, wanting me less than invisible existence undone

such a gentle beast when there is no blood, and yet i hurt

Eileen— can you can you tell me what it takes to stop my silence from assaulting me, to remember those words have nothing to do with me, they were not born because of me

all selfish love and liquor

he was selfish love and liquor and that hurt me more

亲爱的爱玲

Eileen—

it isn’t the first time. it isn’t the first time i tell myself i am too sensitive.

silence wields no mongoose fangs, no dragon breath, no jade claws pressed together at the edge of an alter swirling with gilded incense amen amen i don’t pray to god they say i don’t look like the people He made the say, God bless you

[sometimes i pray to that god] in the silence

my shoulder blades are pressed against porcelain rose water shimmering with bubbles soft against stomach, thighs, chest

i bleed petal juice beautiful, magenta

Eileen—

i will not crack like this petals pressed into cheekbones of China dolls shatter into pearls beneath your pen steaming

i found my blood written into textbooks stating: it is innate it is innate tastes like lotus seed, sweet cream reddish scales and phoenix feather embarrassed this is all i know

1979,1999

only daughter only daughter

you wrote yourself into two languages

tell me how tell me how

you are unbreakable unfound

color pales in comparison to you

Eileen—

I do not know my birthday but I do know why the rabbit came in fourth. Oh, how clever the rat was jumping off of the ox’s head! And I know how the rabbit sacrificed itself for the Jade Emperor earning a place on the moon with mortar and pestle making medicine from moon rock.

Its body was all it could give and so it earned eternity.

may i earn eternity

You’d say: You are your own diaspora

You are your own so become

INCARNADINE

i remember the fool’s gold against my lips little shavings like white onion skin, papery as tears flowed into the divots of my dimples your hand pressed each curled golden sliver further, further past my lips

and you said: swallow

i swallowed down the taste of dry citrus and stone as the pieces scored black lines down my throat

i fell to my knees in the fountain water up to my waist soaking the skirt of the white dress embroidered in sea foam lace

i stood and droplets traced diamond and fell each one a refraction of sour disbelief dampened by my own disdain towards the green in your eyes looking through me

you cupped my cheek and said: embody the beautiful things and you will be worthy

i remember crushed pearl spread across my eyelids irises dyed aquamarine, cheeks brushed with blush fingers and wrist made slender, collarbone muted, neck slimmed all to your liking

graceful, delicate, brilliant

your hand tilting my chin up, painting my lips incarnadine before you sealed them closed—

your scalpel pared my legs until my skin shone like the cracked underside of a clam shell still smooth beyond water you thinned my waist, thickened my hair, carved my nails into soft edges like snow shell and it felt like the nights the darkness condensed the moon

every night you neglected to carve me tongue or teeth

you said:

i was everything you needed but not what you wanted Galatea, Galatea you are beauty but i want love

i wondered if love was something of one’s own making until three months passed and you never once asked my name

the night i took your scalpel, i owed you mercy for the simple desire to make something of your own—

my soul desire became incarnadine and your breathing body your spoken word

my touch was soft enough to keep you sleeping my knife sharper than your gem-cut consciousness

i carved out pieces of you to fill with fool’s gold so you could shine, too

i liked the way you bled out for me and all the words that flowed red from your tongue, your tongue that i made into mine

AT FIRST HE SPOKE AS ANY OTHER CHILD HIS AGE, clutching the few words he had in his gummy fist—“mama,” “ball,” “star,”—til the evening he pointed to a motley four-legged creature dashing down the road in front of our farm, a wild look on his upturned face: “d-d-d-og.” Originally, Anna thought excitement must have caused the halting appellation, but when he tried to reference the event the very next morning, the catch, the lurch, remained: “d-d-d-og” just as before. Over time, I admit that a small part of me almost came to believe that scrawny flea-bitten scalawag which passed by our house that cold April night was an apparition, some specter sent to drag a curse across our doorstep, for after it had crossed paths with the boy, the pauses between words as well as repetitions of singular letters (and then whole phrases) began to increase—a fate which seemed much too severe a punishment to dole out to a young soul who did nothing more than stand out on the porch at dusk and try to name one thing upon the earth.

BY JENN BLAIR

Anna and I weren’t the only ones to notice William’s plight. While we were still up in Salmon River, a man in a brown bowler, who introduced himself as Rev. Swable, came to our door one afternoon to inform my wife he’d heard a seven-year-old boy in our household was suffering from “talking trouble”—news gleaned from our overly loquacious neighbor Mrs. Buxton, who’d sent him hither. Declaring himself a faith healer from Portland, Maine, the Reverend apparently boasted he aimed to visit our great Province as many times as the Apostle Paul ministered to the Ephesians, adding that he’d already met with several spectacular results on this, his second tour there, a tally which included healing two cases of gout, un-pickling an alcoholic’s liver til it lay in his body smooth as a teetotaler’s, and curing one depressive who used to stay in his bed sobbing for weeks at a time but now was up, dressed, and loudly praising God at all times, the newest tenor in his congregation’s choir.

Skeptical but intrigued, Anna believed it could do no harm for us all to attend one of the man’s services, so the very next evening found us attending the revival—held under a canvas tent a few kilometers inland from the Bay of Fundy. On the way there, Anna informed the boy that we were going to meet an esteemed man of the cloth who might be able to help him with his words. After singing and shouting of various (and, at times, unwieldy) stripes went on for the better part of two hours, the healing part of the service finally commenced. There at the front, Reverend Swable asked the grocer’s wife, Mrs. Orund, a woman with a noticeable limp, to come up and lean forward, then suddenly slapped her across the back, bidding her crooked spine to straighten, causing her to lose her balance and almost tumble into the dirt—her beet-colored shawl flying up almost completely over her head as her two lazy excuses for sons yanked her to her feet and the Reverend emphatically declared her healed.

As her sons shuffled the poor woman back to her seat, the good Rev. Swable beseeched the crowd to produce him more suitable candidates, and Anna bit her lip as she always did when she was uncertain, tentatively raising her hand. Upon spotting us there near the back, the Reverend’s face lit up: “Welcome! Come right down to the front! Make way, everyone, for a little child shall lead them. The Lord showed me in a vision that you’d be here tonight! Everyone, start praying that this young man’s lips be loosened to more clearly profess that beautiful name which is already in his heart, the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” After we’d joined him on the small plywood platform, the Reverend took out a linen kerchief, bare but for a trio of letters embroidered upon it, then asked the boy if he loved God. After William nodded his assent, Reverend Swable instructed him to stick out his tongue, shouting out supplications while simultaneously grabbing the unwieldy animal in question and briskly squeezing it through the handkerchief as Anna and I tried not to wince: “Let this tongue sing your praises O Lord! Un-fork it and weave the divergent faltering, polluted streams back into one fresh river which flows mightily to the sea of your generous promises!”

“Indeed,” Reverend Swable gave the offending member one last hearty yank before finally letting go, “flows so mightily, deeply, and clearly, that others may also sail upon its bright certainty to the one true King!”

When the Reverend urged William to speak a word to the gathered crowd, he politely demurred, glancing over at his mother for help.

“Sir, maybe he’s not ready,” my wife feebly offered, “maybe there’s not yet been time for it to take.”

“Son, son. Listen here.” Completely ignoring us, Reverend Swable placed his hands on his thighs and bent down to our son’s level. “The old is gone. The new has come. Will you not let those who might need to see a miracle tonight apprehend the New

Creation?” Seemingly resigned, William, who wouldn’t look at either Anna or I, stepped forward to face the crowd, both hands grimly clasped behind his back.

“P-P-Praise G-G-G-od!”

But the worst wasn’t over. For some reason he decided to start clapping, softly at first, then harder and harder, almost as if willing everyone else to clap. When he saw no one was joining, the poor boy decided he should try at least one more time.

“I s-s-said p-p-praise…p-p-praise…G-G-G-o-o-o-d!” As he clapped, a lone tear rolled down his right cheek. Anna was the first to oblige him, clapping so hard her pagoda sleeves began quivering and then I joined in too while glancing over at the “reverend” in question—my pointed look assuring him I would strangle his throat if he didn’t also start pumping his useless lily white too thin to hold a rake or hoe or any other honest implement hands; upon seeing my fierce look, the despicable charlatan also began applauding til all the people gathered out front began miserably clapping along, everyone faintly thanking the Lord for His mysterious ways, ways so inscrutable as to possibly include humiliating an innocent child.

Anna and William had already scurried away, the crowd mostly dispersed, when I took my chance to address the fraud directly: “Tonight you made my flesh a sideshow. If I ever see you around here again, I’ll shout your sins all day long then come find you with my rifle and swiftly endow you, right between those two good-for-nothing legs, with the most dazzling opportunity to be healed. Understand?”

After I’d spoken my piece, I forced myself to behave as Anna would want and made myself walk away before he could even reply. Drawing nearer our wagon, I heard the boy asking his mother through sobs why God hadn’t healed him—what was wrong with him—even as she dabbed at his tear-stained cheeks: “oh my love,” telling him that there might yet be a cure: remember, Jesus spent forty days and nights in the wilderness being tempted, undergoing hardship only to be refined for a nobler purpose. I stood back til she had finished. Anna was eternally patient whereas I continually struggled with outbursts born of anger, and though I never could have admitted it out loud, the same flashes of temper which used to cause my mother to put her finger up to her lips: shhhh—though we were both already silent, bracing ourselves as the doorframe began to rattle—my father coming home late again, most likely with an over-sweet stench on his breath. The three of us were so miserable that particular evening that no one ventured to say another word the whole ride home.

Though I felt sympathy for William’s predicament, I admit there were times I also felt ashamed. Ever since I’d arrived in New Brunswick from Belfast, I’d worked hard to shave off the roughest edges of my own syllables, but whenever the boy spoke, his unwieldy, faltering words clung to sides of the air and remained; burred, stubborn thistle which stuck out past any hope of fitting in. But Anna never gave up. After we’d moved south to Eau Claire (lured there by an old neighbor who’d promised there was

decent work to be had in the many sawmills along the banks of the Chippewa), she kept doing everything she could to find a cure: tinctures and tonics laced with soothing peppermint and some foul-smelling rum-colored liquorice lozenges she had William suck on shortly before reading his primer out loud. The year William turned nine, she took him to an expensive physician, known in the area for attending to several of the families of the biggest lumber barons, only to find the esteemed doctor had nothing more innovative to suggest than squirting lemon then placing a few granules of cayenne pepper right on the tongue, stinging then shocking it into obedience. A preacher at a Lutheran church we attended a short while had other ideas about what was ailing our son, confidently blaming the demon of self-pleasure and telling us to look in on the boy at night as he slept: were both hands still resting above the coverlet? Riding home after the service, Anna looked over at me, indignant, and I just shook my head, relieved that, despite her great piety, she’d found the theory almost as ridiculous as I. While Anna consented to try almost any snake oil any peddler was proffering, I continued to hold out hopes for a cure a bit more scientifically informed, and thought I’d actually come into possession of one shortly after I’d been promoted to foreman at the mill, the November morning one of the company’s main investors sent a New Englander for a firsthand tour. My own supervisor (Andreas), clearly irritated by the ongoing parade of visitors the company had been sending lately, asked me to show the guest (one Daniel Uber) around in his stead. Clearly of means, this Mr. Uber was also quite affable—and we found ourselves freely chatting as I took him on a tour around the grounds and holding ponds. When my twelve year old’s predicament happened to come up, my charge, almost dandyish in a raisin-colored frock coat, briefly threw up his hands before excitedly telling me about a surgery his oldest niece Abigail had recently undergone back in Boston, still a somewhat controversial procedure, but one already returning “some very promising results, indeed. And Abigail, I….well, she’s a new girl almost! So much more confident, and, I believe, for the first time, happy. ”

After Mr. Uber had gone, I mused over his account all the rest of the afternoon, still pondering it while inspecting several piles of wood recently set aside to air-dry and helping a pair of especially jovial Norwegian twins, Lucas and Karl, strip some extra stubborn bark off a pile of pine logs our company had floated down the Black River Valley a few days before—and by the time I arrived home that evening, I admit that the prospect had all but seized hold of me. An exacting cut, cruel but quick, might very well make the words roll off our boy’s tongue smooth as cream. It would not be cheap but perhaps I could work some extra shifts at the mill. Mr. Uber had told me the name of the surgeon and even insisted on taking down my details that he might telegraph some more information in time. I think it had struck us both that our crossing paths, he with his answer and I with my question, had something almost providential about it. As I schemed, I fondly began imagining the procedure to be the rough equivalent

of the famous contractor William Dargan cutting through the bends in the River Lagan in Belfast, letting out the seams of water far enough that the grandest ships could finally come into port then sail all the way back out to the North Channel and the Atlantic.

But when Mr. Uber actually remembered to send on the details as he had promised, his dutiful following through emboldening me enough to finally make my case out loud, Anna barely listened. Unimpressed by news of the pioneering German surgeon who’d recently diverted his attention from muscles in the human eyeball to those in the tongue—(attacking them, yes, but only to prevent future spasms!)—she told me, “No John, absolutely not” outright, before proceeding to inform me that the very same night we’d encountered the false prophet in a bowler hat she’d taken a solemn vow that no one would ever physically lay hands on our boy again. God was a God of unlimited might and power and He, through his emissary and ambassador the great Holy Spirit, had, more than once, proven he could work through other means. Was it not unholy anger, despair, and even outright disdain of heaven which led Moses to strike the rock? She was sorry, truly, but she could not hear of it. Though I sulked for a while, I eventually bowed to her wishes. Consequently, the boy’s tongue remained whole and un-sliced, a sorry lump of meat in his mouth that did not work.

As the years passed, we always tried to help William as best we could, busy as life was with our three boys. Though our second son, Thomas, arrived less than two years after William did, the two boys never seemed that close. When our third son, John, came along five years later, however, Thomas almost flew to his side, relieved, the pair eventually becoming so conjoined later in life that they often were mistaken for twins. They not only mirrored each other physically (having inherited my compact frame, shorter stature, and barrel chest), but also turned out to be much alike in temperament. Possessed of a loud and boisterous nature and scared of nothing, they laughed loudly and often while pulling endless, good-natured pranks. William, by contrast, was not only quieter than them but much bigger—and taller—blessed or cursed to possess an almost gargantuan stature that made any blushing, stammering, or hesitancy on his part stand out even more. His size left him nowhere to hide. Boys and girls his age weren’t cruel to him insofar as they ignored him, which, Anna once remarked, was its own kind of cruelty. In lieu of true companions, he spent a great deal of time outside in the fields and stables and grew especially skilled at carving animals, boats, and other shapes out of whatever pine scraps I could manage to bring home from the mill with an old silver-gilt whittling knife that used to belong to Anna’s father. In school his teachers usually allowed him to write out any speeches he must give then have a kind or irritated classmate read them on the appointed day, grading him on composition rather than elocution, and he wrote many thoughtful pieces Anna was proud to save. The same went for memorizing scripture in Sunday school. He earned his leather Bible and framed certificate with all the rest, not through recitation but sitting at a table out

in the vestibule and scribbling the verses from memory to prove they were etched on his heart. But what would become of him after there were no more kind petticoats or sympathetic schoolmarms to issue special allowances, we did not know.

The year our youngest, John, turned four, Anna began feeling distinctly unwell, complaining she was even more weary than a ramshackle farm and three active boys allowed for, but we did not think about the most likely culprit quite as quickly as we should have, believing that time long past. When we began sharing our surprising news, our neighbor Mrs. Sutter remarked, “Ah, you’ll have your girl now” with a knowing nod, but if that was Anna’s secret hope, she was too circumspect to admit it, only allowing that “a healthy child is all we pray for.” Though the nine months passed fairly uneventfully, the actual laboring part was a beastly affair that stretched out over two and a half days, almost as if my wife’s poor body had forgotten how to do what it had managed so easily thrice before. Some of those sounds she made. They will never leave my mind. When the red squalling creature was finally out, the creature spared no pains letting us know of her rage and displeasure, as my exhausted wife stared at the wall, eyes dulled, mouth turned downward.

After the midwife cut the tiny devil’s cord and swabbed out its throat, she quickly turned her attention back to Anna, tasking me with taking anger incarnate out into the front sitting room where its fury continued. I stared at the possible changeling in despair until William, who must have been silently watching all that time, came over and reached out his arms. As soon he nestled the small, indignant bundle against his bosom, there was quiet. Only quiet. Initially, one might dismiss the sudden change as mere coincidence, but over time, their enduring bond became apparent, despite the fact William was a boy, Anna a girl, and a chasm of twelve years lay between them. As the years passed, my wife increasingly relied on our firstborn to assist her with our last, a predilection which led me to warn her one evening, “Let us not geld him completely,” advice which didn’t fall upon an especially receptive ear: “I’m not as young as I once was, John. I don’t think you understand how much I need his help.”

After that, I vowed not to meddle in the matter any further, silently hoping William would not become irreparably domestic. As the years continued to pass, however, we began to sense that Anna watched out for her brother almost as ardently as he watched out for her; as I observed the two of them picking blackberries one languid July evening, laughing and joking, slivers of their silvery bucket flashing through the thicket’s gaps, a shiver ran down my spine, a premonition, and for the briefest moment I detected my mother’s face right behind my son’s face, her eyes staring out of his, her lips trembling right underneath William’s, speaking, but what was she saying? Heart racing, I ran to the well at the back of the yard and peered down. Though I saw nothing, her message had already pierced through every one of my bones: Keep them together, Always.

Later that night, I held the same rosary my failing mother had pressed in my palm

a few days before typhus took her, trying to ask her more questions while her spirit still lingered, to no avail. It wasn’t the first occasion. After her death, I’d never let more than a few days go by without taking it out, noticing that I held it more and more tightly the older I became—my longing seemingly growing even more keen and my queries more childish and urgent as my own end approached. As Anna and I continued to contemplate (and sometimes heatedly argue) about how to best unspool the last decent thread of our lives, our children continued to make us proud, William staying back to help his mother and sister oversee matters on the farm while Thomas and John joined me at the mill. Meanwhile, newspapers we barely had time or energy to read began opining in more and more strident tones, their headlines arriving in even bolder and larger print, as if Gabriel’s angel had started to sound the final trump on the regular hour and half-hour. Though I’d never considered myself overtly political, I thought our latest President (from our part of the country!) a fairly sensible man and found myself growing concerned at the increasing vociferousness of the southern states. We were not all alike, and we did not all think alike, true, but was the present discord reason enough to end the noble experiment which everyone (hitherto) had seemed so proud to be a part of? Worse yet, was it, as Anna said, to be ended by those who kept themselves willingly blind to the fact that every human, regardless of the hue of their skin, possessed a soul of equal worth in the sight of God? (Perhaps my own background played a large part in my beliefs. Let no one with one ounce of Irish blood running in their veins believe it ever tolerable to be ruled by another!)

Sharing my dismay over the rebellion which seemed to be brewing, Thomas and John signed up a mere four months after Fort Sumter fell, mustering into the 8th Wisconsin Company C on the 23rd of August in 1861, eager to put their alacrity and convictions to some greater purpose. And over the next few years, they would do much to distinguish themselves, both (at different times) having the honor of caring for the Eagle “Old Abe” who proved to be such a popular mascot that the Eau Claire Badgers became the Eau Claire Eagles in the blink of an eye. Through Thomas’ letters (John wasn’t ever much of a writer), we learned Old Abe soon traveled into battle on a special perch beside the flag, his celebrity status inflating him to the point that he began to scorn the salt pork and hardtack the men tried to offer him, refusing it with a squawk. Not all their news was that light-hearted. My wife dropped to her knees in lamentation and praise when Thomas wrote us that John had been shot in Corinth, briefly captured, left for dead against a tree, then been miraculously found alive eight miles away—eight miles he’d somehow managed to stumble and crawl across before his brother fell on his neck, shouting and weeping loud as the father of the prodigal son.

As the war smoldered on, the government grew so desperate for new fuel it resorted to a draft in the spring of 1863, when it was decreed that any man between the age of twenty and forty-five must sign up unless he could provide someone else to go in his

place. A man could hire another man, but at three-hundred dollars, the purchase did not come cheap. One of the papers reported that even our Commander in Chief had taken formal steps to procure himself a substitute (though I supposed the gesture was largely symbolic as he was old enough and high up enough to be spared the trouble). I confess I found it somewhat of an uncomfortable business, the idea that if a man was rich enough he didn’t have to suffer or die. That said, it seemed every household should still try (to the best of its abilities) to do its fair share.

“I’m so thankful, my John,” Anna murmured in bed one evening shortly after the Enrollment Act had been announced, “that you’re an old man. How close you came to obligation for yourself. But since you’re forty-seven, you are free. Free to do as you decide, I suppose.”

“Yes. True. My grey whiskers and aching back have no appetite for that sordid mess.”

I then turned over on my side, wondering what she would say next, almost daring her, I confess, to fill my silence with the utterances she was thinking but feared to say out loud. In all truth, I was thinking exactly what she was, but hadn’t quite purposed yet what do. Despite the thirteen dollars or so I’d receive each month, could we temporarily do without my wages from the mill? More importantly, did William need to take this step on his own? Perhaps (if he did not die!) it would be the spur which would finally lead him into a fuller life than the one he currently possessed. But it continued to worry me—how tall and awkwardly sized he was—a veritable long lost (albeit somewhat gangly) descendant of the nephilim. What if a sniper singled him out just for the diabolical pleasure of seeing something so large and unwieldy toppled? (Whenever he ran, he almost appeared tied to his own body—like two jostling schoolboys briefly yoked at the ankle for a three-legged race). And, if he did escape bodily harm, there was still the matter of his tongue. Would its regular failings cause others to heap ridicule upon him? I had no idea if such an experience would cause him to inexplicably thrive or, if he did manage to survive, only turn him more dispirited and inward.

If I had thought I could dance around the matter a while yet, that hope was dashed before the week was out. The evening after skirting Anna’s trembling tendrils, I was walking out to check on a sickly goat when I inadvertently came across my daughter in the corner of the backyard, weeping, her back to me, face in her hands as her brother sat beside her so close their shoulders almost touched. I stood there, moved then sickened at the high keening sounds, the wails of my darling girl, for she was fourteen, an age which her mother recently confirmed to be an especially fearful, confusing time, the worst year she could remember having to toil through when she was an adolescent herself. Only a few days before she’d asked her mother for a Garibaldi shirt similar to the one her best friend Lizzy had—and I’d loudly scoffed that after all the sacrifices her mother and I had made to make certain she and her brothers were Americans it was a

slap to our face—her wanting to playact at being Italian. She didn’t reply but rushed away in a manner I’d considered spoiled. But she always did her share of the work on the farm and rarely asked for a personal item. Perhaps I had been too hard. Just as I was about to turn back for the house, however, I realized something: Anna’s shoulders weren’t shaking but William’s. I had been so firm in my view of the world that if I’d realized they were his wails from the beginning, I would have scorned him as foppish, un-manly, weak. But, right as I stumbled onto the scene, quick moving angels must have altered the chords of air, tricking me into granting the grace I held in my outstretched hand to a distraught twenty-six-year-old man. Either give it or throw it on the ground, cursing him outright. Confused, I turned and hurried away, my cheek burning in astonishment.

That evening, I waited til we were both in bed and I was sure we’d be alone and could talk freely that I told Anna what I purposed.

“I prayed you’d do this, John. God forgive me, but I prayed you would. Can you ever forgive me?” Anna sighed as we dully stared up at the familiar lantern circle flickering on the low hanging plastered ceiling. “He would never ask you, never expect you to. He’s planning on going. But he’s worried about everyone else laughing at him whenever he tries to speak. He’s been so distraught he’s vomited almost every day since the announcement.”

“I didn’t know.”

“He’s not confided in me, mind you. It’s only because of her that I know about the upset stomach at all. It seems that Thomas said something rather careless to William... about a year ago...that spring when he was home on leave...something about how he didn’t think William should bother volunteering because of how rough it is to gain respect at the first. Well…it was either careless, or full of care. I think Thomas was only trying to help. But...you shouldn’t feel obligated.” She turned to face me. “Anna says he knows his duty and is determined to do what is required of him despite his nerves. I know it’s his duty too. I promise you I do.”

“No one is forcing me, woman,” I gathered her in my arms as she began to softly weep.

“I don’t put his life over yours, I don’t,” she sniffed, casting her face into her worn, lovely hands. “But I don’t see what other choice we have. I’ve felt so…so useless when I try to think of what my part might be, to try and ease his burden. I wish I could go for him.”

“And it’s a shame they don’t take you.” I put my cheek against hers. “It would all go much better, if they let women do the soldiering. Your lot would probably just talk it out, sensible-like, without even firing a single shot.”

When I went in search of William the next morning, I found him out in the barn, polishing some leather bridles and halters.

“High time that was done. I thank you,” I offered as I stood in the doorway, staring at the slightly rusty pitchfork hanging on the wall behind him.

He didn’t say anything, only looked up briefly and nodded before resuming his work.

“Well...I’ve come to tell you something.”

“Oh?”

“I aim to take your place.”

“Wh—whh—at do-do y-y-ouu-y-ouu mean?”

“I mean, I’m going to enlist.”

I couldn’t look him in the eyes as I spoke the rest of the words I’d carefully rehearsed.

“I only ask that, if something befall me, that you take care of your mother. And Anna too of course, at least until she’s grown and marries.”

“I-I-I c-c-c,” he shook his still lowered head, “I c-c-c-c—”

“It’s fine. Fine,” I put up my hand, “To be honest, I’m kind of looking forward to the chance to pick off a few Rebs, maybe even the very ones who shot at your brother!”

For it made me more comfortable. To talk of revenge than love.

Later that day, after I’d returned from the mill and was sitting out on the front step examining a strange plum-colored blot which had recently dawned in my right thumbnail bed, I suddenly thought I detected a presence behind me.

“I c-c-c-c-a-a-an’t. Th-th-tha-a-ank y-y-you e-e-nough. E-e-nough.”

I made certain to wait until he had finished before I turned and nodded, still rueful over how I had cut him off earlier in the day.

It’s strange, but after I signed the papers, writing my name and then William’s carefully as I could lest there be any mix-up, Anna and I became more affectionate again, in a manner that almost rivaled our courtship days. She said she thought I would look rather debonair in my uniform, now a proper blue instead of the unfortunate grey a few Wisconsin regiments had worn in the past (marching into small towns to boos as some in the crowds gathered believed the hue the sole property of the enemy—there was even a rumor one soldier home visiting his family was shot in the arm in his own front yard, felled by an elderly neighbor who didn’t recognize him til the man’s wife turned and screamed, “You killed my husband, you fool!”). The morning I left to muster in with the 36th Wisconsin in Madison, I kissed both Annas, then shook my oldest son’s hand: “Well then. Remember your promise.”

He didn’t reply, save to place his right hand on his chest and nod at me as I nodded back, then waved once more, and was gone.

It felt strange to be apart from them all, especially Anna. All company was poor set next to her, but I made do. At first I thought I might receive more than the usual share of guff for being long in the tooth but I found that most men were respectful, save for Clark Gibbons, a private from Monroe with a painfully large Adam’s apple who

took to calling me “ole’ skunk-a-lunk” on account of the white stripe quickly widening in the hair at the front of my head, a moniker which rankled at first. Once I grew familiar with his boisterous ways, however, and saw how everyone he met for more than two minutes came away with a nickname regardless of their age (Fry-Cakes, Boygan-Bobby, Side-winder Sam), I realized his ribbing wasn’t personal so much as an innate part of an especially jovial personality. Our Colonel, Frank Haskell, was an officer from Vermont who’d been at Gettysburg then been able to return to the same spot four months later to the cemetery’s dedication. A fancy lawyer of some sort in his previous life, Haskell had apparently been inspired enough by all the events he’d just lived through to write down his own personal account then sent the manuscript to his brother who was still endeavoring to find a printer. As of yet, it seemed no publisher wanted to waste the ink. If the Colonel was disappointed the world was not waiting for his words, I never observed him taking it out on any of his men. Our failed author was generous and fair as any superior I’d ever had the chance to observe.

What little free time I had was mostly spent alongside a good-natured soldier named Benjamin, a young man exactly Thomas’ age who’d seemed to naturally gravitate towards me. By the time we truly began conversing, he’d already become somewhat infamous for whistling Foster’s “The Merry, Merry Month of May” whether he was cleaning his musket or warming his hands and feet by the evening fire. I know it irritated some of the other men but I stopped registering it after a while, to tell the truth. If it kept him as congenial as he was, let him hum it to the ground. Hearing it was a small price to pay in order to be in the company of such an affable soul. The day we left the capital to march through the countryside of Virginia, I found myself stealing glances at some of the men, wondering if they were scared as I, not that I would have ever admitted it out loud. I desperately wanted them to see that despite my age I could still pull my weight—to show Thomas and John their old codger of a father still had some mettle in his spine—the remarkable courage they’d already displayed coming from a distinctly traceable source.

Unfortunately, we weren’t the first to Spotsylvania. By the time we arrived, Lee’s men had already constructed an impressive display of log transverses then dug in to wait for us, but, as I understood it, we were to overwhelm them with our relentlessness, with wave after wave of us attacking, a tactic Colonel Emory Upton had recently employed to some success. Though

we had drilled and marched plenty, it would be quite another task to surge forward as a group, yelling as we hacked at their limb piles and pooled round their fortifications, possibly actually able to observe the faces we determined to hate, to see the fear writ on them and know they had full view of the fear in our own eyes as well. The events which transpired there shortly thereafter showed me I had been sorely mistaken to picture a comfortable margin between our firing muskets and theirs, our firing cannons and theirs, the twin lines nothing more than polite puffs of white smoke. In the midst of the hand-to-hand fighting at Mule Shoe, men cursed and jeered, jostling and wrestling, slapping, kicking, and pinching and pulling hair as the rain kept falling, turning the ground to mud, so many of us who wore blue pouring forward at one point that we almost started toppling over of each other and became confused as to where we were even supposed to step.

Those of us who finally regained our bearings most likely lost our souls. One poor cornered fellow started sneezing, five, six, seven times in all as Dan Worrell stood there and let him finish: “bless you,” before plunging the bayonet in his chest. Another soldier with blood spurting out of his neck screamed, “States rights, Goddamnit!” as Clark Gibbons yanked his sword out of its scabbard to finish him off. Not all deaths were as quick. Later, I heard tell of one man on our side (a baker from Appleton who attested to the wonderful versatility of potato flour) who, even after his head had been cut clean off, jerked and flopped around a while like a chicken, his frame running a few smaller then smaller concentric circles before it finally toppled. Many of the wounded slowly suffocated under the dead as others groaned out for water, those who were able crawling to pools of rain and blood, cupping their trembling hands to scoop the crimson liquid to their bruised mouths.

At one point during the fray, I confess I invited all the anger and hate flying through the air to clamber inside my body, needing to tap into it for courage, for energy—suddenly finding myself pushing men aside until someone hit me in the back with a club then whirled me around and spat right in my eye. Wiping the spittle away with a shriek, I screamed again, hit my offender in the groin, then clambered off to seize a discarded Colt rifle lying on the ground I could only hope was loaded when I fired once-twicethrice in the direction of his chest, felling him graveyard dead, or so I thought. After he stumbled backwards, I thought I saw his right hand, prostrate, but near his trouser pocket, suddenly twitch, which spooked me enough to grab the knife out of my boot and plunge it straight into the place I thought his heart was, again then once again. As

I stood up again, shaking, I tossed the knife on the ground like a burning coal and saw, out of the corner of my eye, another soul wayward as I who’d picked up a rock and was repeatedly smashing it against his prostrate victim’s head. I stood in a trance watching, til at some point I came to my senses somewhat and went over and tried to tell the poor devil with the rock to stop, stop, the job was done, the job was done, but he would not relent, keeping at his task so ardently that some brains spattered across my teeth as I yelped and jumped back.

Afterwards, I sat on a stump examining my stained trousers and coat and the knife I’d picked up off the grass and felt a great shame rise up. The yelling and screaming. The wild glee which must have contorted my face. The strange mixture of exultation and dread as I quickly wiped the blade clean on the very trousers of the one whose blood had soiled it. If I were to ever tell Anna about the animal I briefly became, she would weep then frown and tell me she and I could no longer be together on earth or in heaven. When I tried to sleep that night, I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking underneath the standard Union issue wool blanket.

“What happened here? What happened here?” Benjamin whispered out loud to some untraceable source as he lay on his roll beside me. “What happened?” Though he remained unfailingly polite to all those around him, I never heard him whistle again.

Next, we ended up at a backwater crossroads named Cold Harbor, another undistinguishable dot on the map, significant primarily for its location: a mere ten miles north of what Grant probably dreamed of every night: Richmond. A few days before we arrived, Major General Phil Sheridan’s cavalry had seized the crossroads, but by the time Major General Hancock and the second corps were able to join them, his exhausted men needed time to rest, delaying any further action. Now that more of us had arrived, our superiors hoped we could finally finish what Sheridan had tried to begin. Thankfully, the 36th ended up being placed under the direction of Francis Barlow. I had already caught a glimpse of “The Boy General” once as he walked through camp conversing with Haskell one evening at Spotsylvania, appearing as if one of the boys’ old tin soldiers had sprung to life, only a rag-tag one wearing a flannel shirt, tattered trousers, and a kepi so squashed one could fancy he found it discarded on the road (completing the look, a cavalry saber it was said he bandied about whenever he thought a particular moment required an extra flourish hung at his side).

Though I heard Roger joke we all had pieces of hardtack in our haversack older than the thirty-year-old Harvard graduate who’d entered as a private then climbed the ranks at breathtaking speed, his exploits were already legendary. It was said he had a knack for it, war, and wasn’t above being willing to change plans once the plan had actually commenced, even rushing to tell Hancock at Mule Shoe that he must stop funneling more men in. Strangely, it made me almost optimistic, him almost being closer to the age of my children than myself. Perhaps he was still young enough to have

a certain flexibility of mind, versus the rictus of a General in his dotage sticking to his original plans even when real life suddenly proved the most elegant scheme untenable. There were other reasons for cautious hope, perhaps. Men who’d returned for another round of duty had said they’d never seen anything like what had happened at Spotsylvania, so maybe the worst was behind us and this next battle, heartless as it would be, would not descend to the same level of incivility.

The night before the charge found us tucked in with Barlow and several other units at the southern end of a seven or so mile line rumored to begin near a church by the name of Bethesda and end at the banks of the Chickahominy, all the Union men splayed out between God and water. The units right around us seemed in fine fighting form, and I felt a strange, sudden lilting up of my spirit. At the first. When Haskell and the other Colonels actually spoke to us, however, the plan sounded disappointingly familiar. It didn’t take a military scholar to understand the set-up. Lee’s Rebs had been skirmishing here long enough now to dig deep into the earth—ticks who’d already been sucking on a sow for weeks and were now so stuffed full of blood they were about to pop, just as they had been at Spotsylvania—and just as at Spotsylvania—we were to stream across the open ground while being fired upon, trying to dislodge the ticks from their breastworks before they could suck up all our own blood as well.

“I’d like Grant to come see it. The lay of the land. I’d just like him to stand here beside us and see it for himself,” Dan Worrell muttered to Benjamin and I later that evening.

“Where’s the logic?” he whispered as I briefly placed a hand on his shoulder. We all saw what Dan saw. We just didn’t see as there was a choice. That night around the campfires, some men who couldn’t forget Spotsylvania’s horrors sat there fastidiously writing their full names and addresses on slips of paper then pinning them to the back of their coats. As I watched Benjamin tuck a sheet of paper inside an envelope he then placed deep inside one of his pockets, a young man named Mordecai, a quiet boy whose cheeks were always flushed as if he’d just run miles, shyly offered me a strip of paper torn from his journal as well as a pencil-nub. I took the materials and thanked him, then caught sight of a robin in a lower tree branch, following his compact rust-colored belly hopping up and up and up through the branches, following that flash of orange til I couldn’t see it anymore. For some reason, I decided to hand the pencil and paper back, a refusal which seemed to wound the Giver. When I turned to thank him once more, he had already gone.

The evening of June 2, we’re told not to get too comfortable. We’ll attack at dawn. Lying on the ground fully dressed, I drift off in spurts. In one dream William stands before me in a white robe and offers me a scroll. After I refuse to take it, he slowly unrolls it

himself so I can see three letters emblazoned upon it: “PWC.” By the time I recognize them as the same three letters stitched on Reverend Swable’s handkerchief back at the tent revival in New Brunswick, he’s already rolled the scroll back up and put it in his mouth, furiously chewing as a flame suddenly overtakes the top of his head and then the rest of his body. I cry out, terrified that by saying no, I’ve sealed his fate. When I start to rush towards him, however, he puts up a burning hand, each finger a stern flame. Come no further.

Why didn’t I say more to him. That day out in the barn. I had a chance but I wasted it, only talking about picking off Confederates as if they were squirrels or jays. Anna once told me, after we’d argued and she’d tried (in vain) to draw me out, that I was not altogether unlike a glass bottle she’d seen once in the window of a crockery shop in Ipswich back when she was a child, a bottle holding an intricate wooden ship. “It’s one of the reasons I fell in love with you,” she shook her head, “It’s all lying there inside you, I know it is. I’ve always known. The rigging and sails, proud hull, gleaming deck. The problem is that, most all of it stays in there, stays inside, and...sometimes...sometimes…I’m just thirsty.” After I’d proposed to take his place, William had started to say something. He’d said that he couldn’t...couldn’t what? Later, he’d told he couldn’t thank me enough, but was that what he’d originally wanted to say? What if he’d actually been trying to tell me that it was important he do this thing himself? What if, by my refusal to listen, I’d taken his one precious chance?

While it’s still dark, whispered hisses begin to interrupt our slumber: our superiors sometimes resorting to rough shaking in an effort to rouse all the exhausted bodies snoring loudly. About half an hour later, while fog still lies thick under the trees, Barlow utters a few words about courage and honor, dark enough still that I look to the left and right then quickly cross myself, wishing I had my mother’s rosary. After the bugle blows, the first wave of men sent out quickly overtake a sunken road, and we soon exult to see a few hundred prisoners coming our way, hands over their heads. By the time our own group is ordered to charge, however, the Confederates have reconnoitered, offering up nothing but a relentless withering fire. There’s no thought in my head, just a repeated message for my feet, a threat: Run the right way, run the right way. As someone to my left screams, I drop-drag like a worm across the earth til I can join a cluster of bodies clinging to the crest of a small hill. Hunkered down there, we do our best to return fire for either three or four minutes or all of eternity.

Our ammunition supply is running precariously low. At one point, I dare to raise my head just a smidge to see if any reinforcements are coming and find a sudden bolt of fire electrocuting one of my legs. Chastened, I fall back to the earth and lie there, whimpering, fading off to a place far far away, back in the bedroom at our home, watching beads of sweat forming on Anna’s upper lip as our only daughter resists coming into this world. Somewhere near the very end, my wife abruptly stopped struggling,

un-focused eyes rolling up towards the ceiling, searching for something which wasn’t even in the room til I grew certain I was losing her. As I try to call her name, the ground below me shifts and even though I might be a corpse, I still manage to croak “watch it!” to whoever’s bravely dragging-bumping me back to safety.

Who is that talking now? I’m dizzy with pain, drunk on it, barely able to understand whatever voice is trying to speak, informing me that I’ve been taken to a dressing station the shrapnel most likely exploded directly into your right leg, shattering the bone just above what was your kneecap. We need to try and find the exit wound. Failing to find it, they tilt my head up, to pour a slug of whiskey down my throat. Here. Bite down on this. In my delirium I spy a hesitant shadow with a scraggly thin mustache hovering right above me. Hopefully this will go quick. I sink my teeth deeper into the leather and at one point ponder rising up off the table to claw away the mustache. I can’t tell whether it’s a miniè ball, or another type of shrapnel, but whatever it is, it will have to stay. It’s lodged too deep. For now, bandage it as best you can. Grateful to be left alone, I drift in and out of consciousness til I’m suddenly being hoisted off my pallet, a monotone voice that doesn’t sound like it’s ever been surprised, about anything, ever, calmly informing me I’m going to be sent to the hospital at Union Point, every stone in the road rattling the ambulance wagon’s frame. Anna-William-Thomas-John-Anna-Anna. Mama. Mama. As the wagon creaks to a stop and a pair of steady arms grabs ahold of mine, depositing me on another solid surface. When someone begins probing my wound, violating my private temple of pain, I scream, trying my best to swat them away before quickly passing out again.

Next time I wake, it’s to a pleasing softness lightly brushing against my cheek—Anna? Sadly, my wife’s caress splinters to fringe attached to a green sash tied round a stranger’s waist. The surgeon in gold spectacles, leaning over me, concerned, a bit of dried blood from one of his previous patient flecking one of his cheeks. I’m sorry but it will have to come off. It’s already stayed on too long. I nod, still trying to figure out what kind of man he is a few minutes later when his assistant curtly orders me not to move, putting a sponge full of chloroform against my face.

When I come to again, the job has been done. I dully stare at my bandaged stump a while, then head back to the mercy that is sleep. That evening, after they’ve brought everyone supper, a man with an empty left sleeve in the cot beside me informs me that his name is Saul and that he and I are among the fortunate ones because our surgeon, one doctor Abbott, is especially skillful at flap amputations. A few minutes into our conversation, I make the mistake of asking him what he knows about the war. Baaahhh!! At this point, he’s much more concerned with the new rumor going round that the government might find a way to outfit us with artificial limbs, to help compensate for any inconvenience we might encounter once we return to our farms and shops. We did what they asked. That we did. Now it’s their turn to take care of whatever’s left of us. A man with heavily pockmarked cheeks lying in bed on the other side of me, Harris,

seems to know more. Sadly, his news, delivered between two of the biggest burps I’ve ever heard, brings scant relief: it seems Grant and Lee are still laboring over minutiae, writing elegant letter after elegant letter asking for certain distinctions and clarifications of dubious phrases as injured men who’ve had the misfortune to fall between the trenches continue to lie alongside the dead, exposed to the elements, men crying as the sun blisters their faces, boys with scorched eyelids sobbing for a drop of water as they slowly succumb to open wounds where gnats and flies have already come to roost.

I don’t know how long I languish there, drifting in and out of consciousness. A few days after my surgery, I hear news of another private from the 36th, Leroy Gobble (“Wobblin’-Bobblin’-Bob-Gobble”), who’s been brought in with shrapnel in his shoulder. Please. I want to see him. Please. They say they’ll try to bring him by for a moment. John, brother, it’s good to see you. We tried. We did our best. But there are too many gone. Too many gone. Though he’s only able to speak a few words through his chattering teeth, he manages to tell me Dan and Haskell are dead and Benjamin still unaccounted for. After he’s carted off to another tent, I begin pestering every nurse I see. Every volunteer. Has there been a truce yet? Perhaps Benjamin is still out in the dew-spotted grass alive, maybe even suffocating beneath a heap of corpses like at Spotsylvania. I think I’d almost convinced him to tell Emily how he actually felt and stop his incessant worrying she would reject him simply because he was a little shorter than her. It was a useless fact to be bothered by. She had told him that before herself! But now he must finally believe it. I know you gave it up I whisper, but just please whistle one more time Benjamin. Louder. Loud enough so they can hear you. I mutter and rant, a hot coal and a block of ice both pulsating-condensing in my chest so that I freeze and boil and boil and freeze.

Anna?

No. Margaret, Sir. But I know you’ll see her soon.

Anna.

Margaret.

Anna.

Yes?

I’m sorry.

One afternoon while they’re changing my dressing, I use all of my strength to prop myself up just enough to steal a quick glimpse: the puckered flap of skin on my stump seems even more angry, more livid and swollen than before. Shortly after the new bandage has been put on, one somber nurse remains near my cot speaking quietly to another. Low as her voice is, I still manage to pluck a few stones from the current: infection. pus. blood. When I try to ask her about it outright, however, she grins and pats my shoulder and tells me to keep resting. No need to worry because I’m doing very well. So well they move me to another tent where the groans are even louder than before, a space filled with even ranker odors than the last. I close my eyes and dream

I’m back at the mill watching men prodding newly stripped logs along with metal rods so they don’t jam, my taken-off leg suddenly floating just inside the circumference of the slow moving pile. Wait! Stop! But whenever I jump in to try and fish it out, it keeps disappearing to the middle. Later, the stout volunteer at my side who’s been helping me write a letter to Anna rushes away then returns later, informing me that she was regretful to leave so abruptly, but a new group of wounded men were brought in a few hours ago, some of them quite badly off. A full six days after we’ve charged, a truce has finally been arranged.

“We can finish the letter…later. Could you tell me if there was anyone they brought in…just now…named Benjamin? Can you find him for me? Just make free to look in his pocket…his right pocket,” I use up my last dribble of strength to whisper. “He won’t mind. Please can you go look?” The kindly woman, whose dark hair is pulled back in a snood just like Mrs. Buxton used to wear, seems flustered by the request. Goodness. She stands up and smooths her skirts. She doesn’t know but she’ll try ever so hard to find out. I never see her again.

The next morning, the sky is so grey the pale thin slant of light which usually slashes across my bedcovers at roughly the place where my one knee is and other knee was, has vanished. To my left, a dark-haired boy (from Rochester?) lies in his cot, suffering, I think, from some terrible abdominal wound which seems to allow him no respite night or day. Whenever they lift up his nightshirt it smells like the devil’s piss and shit roiling together. Right now a minister is at his side, leading him as he tries to say the Lord’s Prayer, faltering, repeating himself: “Yea though I walk. Yea though I walk through the valley…the valley of the shadow….”

He’s either stumbling through it because he doesn’t know it well or because he senses that if he comes to the end of it, then the thing will be done. I close my eyes, regretful I still haven’t finished my letter home. I want Anna to have the Rosary as long as she likes then pass it to Anna. She would care for it. Keep it safe. Something presses against my arm.

“Would you like me to help you say it too, Sir? The Lord’s Prayer.” Too. Tired.

“Shall I say it for you then, Sir? Only if you’d like, of course.”

As I wordlessly nod my assent, the minister clears his throat. Shortly after he begins speaking, I hear another voice.

“Our fa-fa-fa-ther who ar-art...in heav-heav-en.”

Anna informs me it’s my duty to help our eleven year old with his catechism lesson this afternoon; I promised her I would two days ago. Did I forget? I lie that I didn’t, then grimace. I’m busy, busy and angry about the mold I’ve just detected in my most recent crop of hay, so spoiled Mr. Willard told me this morning he didn’t think he could sell it. I’m not a farmer. Not a decent one, anyway. But God strike me dead if I came all the way here just to end up as poor as my own father was! Whenever I thought I couldn’t endure the cold dripping of the treacly substance leaking from the oak casks stored just above my head any longer, I prayed to my mother, vowing to her once again that I’d outlast it all, just as I endured the yelling (and subsequent whipping) when they finally discovered me onboard. I kept my eyes fixed on her face when the belt began striking my back—determined not to cry out but grateful for the elderly passenger who stepped in yelling enough! For Godsakes. Unhand that boy at once! Didn’t he just say he was twelve years old?! I’d decided, even then, that it would be worth it, no matter how many lashes they gave me, if it meant my own unborn children would never know what it felt like to have their insides gnawed out by hunger and if my mother, wherever she was, could see I’d turned out better than the man who’d deserted us even though he never left, who slowly drained every last drop of her hope and goodwill. I need to be by myself for a while so I can think on what to do next but instead I have to sit here and listen to sounds that, to my ears, sound like failure. Rank, abject failure. The more helpless I feel, the angrier I become, til I suddenly bolt up from the table.

“This is sorry business. This is sorry business. What ails you, boy? What ails you? Just spit it out.”

William looks at me, startled. “I’m t-t-trying.”

“Try harder.”

The more pressure he feels, the worse his stuttering becomes:

“Ha-ha-ha-ll-ll-owed b-b-be, Ha-ha-ha-ll-owed b-b-be, thy, thy, N-n-n-ame.”

"I HUFF OUT, LEAVING HIM STILL SITTING THERE IN HIS CHAIR HEAD BOWED DOWN.

AFTERWARDS, I THINK ABOUT APOLOGIZING TO HIM, OFF AND ON, BUT THEN I NEVER DO."

But I’m so deep in my fury, my own selfishness by then that I see no choice but to finish driving the stake in. I start pacing back and forth, throwing up my hands.

“Goddamn it, Goddamn. You can’t even drag yourself to the starting line to toss your carcass across it, can you?! From now on you must content yourself to say your prayers in your head. Providence will hopefully allow you the indulgence of Him taking an extra step to retrieve them; I own He would rather crawl in your skull and snatch them there then have to listen to you slaughter His precious name yet again. Don’t we give you enough attention?”

Nothing.

“Answer me boy. Don’t we give you enough attention?” Eventually he nods, chin quivering.

“Then stop wasting my time, wasting all our time with this nonsense. Just spit it out. Spit it out! It’s not that difficult. You make it out to be, but I tell you it’s not. Maybe your mother will keep on trying, rest her soul but as for me, I quit. I’m done. Finished. You need to toughen up, do you hear me? The world will hand you no favors, boy.”

“I-I…c”

“Enough! Enough. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

I huff out, leaving him still sitting there in his chair, head bowed down. Afterwards, I think about apologizing to him, off and on, but then I never do. I know he never tells his mother about it. There would have been a change in her tone towards me, a darker spark in her eyes that I watch for and watch for, but never detect.

By the time the voice says, “Amen,” and gently pats my hand, I’ve already closed my eyes and fallen under the stream—flowing forwards and backwards, drowning and spluttering and surging ahead til I see two balding men and a grey-haired woman standing at the ocean’s edge, chatting, about a hundred yards away from four beautiful girls in calico dresses, four young women, to be more correct, who giggle as they discuss if any of them are brave enough to put their hands in the tide-pools which sit under a nearby lighthouse with a fine Fresnel lens shipped all the way from Paris.

A librarian-naturalist who happens to be visiting the beach’s strange, black round cobblestones at the same hour urges them, Ladies, have you never been here to Yaquina before? Let me assure you, it is safe. Still hesitant, they call their Uncle Will to come over and be the first; eventually, after some urging (and good-natured ribbing) from the women’s parents, the gentleman in question obliges, walking towards the pools, then bending down, plunging his hand through the water’s seam to touch a purple urchin, touching it so gently neither party shrinks away as the stream carries me seven years past even this outing and a cemetery in Camas, WA, where two gravestones sit a few feet apart from each other, the brother’s just to the left of the sister’s, their expiry dates only three months apart, the man’s granite stone holding nothing but his birth and death dates and his name and the woman’s pink marble stone containing her name and dates, as well as the following inscription: I have found rest on the everlasting shore— tumbling backwards the very same second my eyes fall on the last letter, yanked back and back a little farther til I’m a young man sitting on the edge of our bed waiting as a new mother busies herself washing her thick auburn hair in the tub I’ve set out in the kitchen before slowly drying and braiding it, delighted in her new role yet thankful for the short burst of privacy. Since I can’t observe her directly, I try to content myself with picturing her beautiful naked back, her slender shoulders, her pale slim neck, breasts swollen with milk, stomach still protruding out in a shape she hates though I think it the loveliest curve of all. As she squeezes the end of her braid after tying it, I imagine water droplets falling back into the basin as well as one droplet which manages to escape, splashing directly onto the floor. She took me as her own, this girl from Ipswich who stood looking at windows at dishes and clocks and fine Wedgewood vases her family could never afford, this somber girl whose slowly unfolding smile is a sudden flash of unexpected sunlight, this girl with hazel eyes and a slightly sad mouth who came with her terrified family from all the way over the sea, hoping for better, though all she found was me. I’m still sitting there at the edge of our bed, musing, when a cry rises up from the oak cradle. I go over to it and stand, peering in for a minute before pulling off the thin muslin blanket Mrs. Buxton made and taking out my firstborn, my son, holding him in my arms as he stares adoringly up. I have not yet broken his spirit.

Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration

Teresa M. Bejan

Harvard University Press, 2017. 288 pp. $35.00/Hardcover

Randy Robertson, Susquehanna University

Teresa Bejan has the rare ability to use history while still respecting it. In Mere Civility, she proffers a lively defense of libertarian free speech principles, drawing on seventeenth-century models (and foils) such as Roger Williams, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. The titular phrase, “mere civility,” is double-jointed: on Williams’s theory of toleration, people owe one another only “civil worship,” not religious deference, and mere “common civility,” not courtly politeness. In a Williamsite polity, you can cordially tell your neighbor that he is going to Hell.

Given the intensity of religious division in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eirenic projects of comprehension proved impractical. After the failure of Erasmian attempts to restore concordia in Christendom, new methods of dealing with conflict emerged. Bejan offers a penetrating analysis of several proposed solutions, most of which revolved around new notions of civility. She convincingly paints Roger Williams as a hard-nosed pragmatist, effectively demolishing Martha Nussbaum’s Pollyanna portrait of Williams. Nussbaum “presents Williams as an attractive alternative to Locke as a proto-liberal, even proto-multiculturalist, theorist of toleration” (50-51). But Williams’s notion of civility, as well as his respect for difference, was “minimalist” (80); “mere civility” allowed for raucous disagreement and the harsh judgment of others, as long as the interlocutors maintained a basic level of civil respect. Far from being an

“eirenicist,” Williams was a proud “schismatic” and “enthusiast” (49). Bejan dryly remarks of Williams that “[b]y the end of his life, he worshipped in a congregation of two, him and his wife—and he may not have been entirely sure about her” (53). Andrew Murphy aptly calls him “an intolerant tolerationist” (54).

Williams’s austere redefinition of civility as a “floor” for social interaction rather than a “ceiling” had far-reaching consequences. Civility, for Williams, had nothing to do with Christian caritas, despite what many commentators have suggested. Indeed, he “argued that although ‘Spirituall’ and ‘Civill Goodnesse or Virtue’ were complementary, to confuse ‘impiety or ungodlinesse’ with ‘incivility’ would lead inevitably to ‘heapes upon heapes in the slaughter houses and shambles of Civill Warres’” (60). Mirroring the distinction between civil and religious virtue, Williams erected a “wall of separation” between church and state in Rhode Island that endured in Charles II’s royal charter of 1663, which granted the colonies of Rhode Island and Providence free exercise and disestablishment (50-51).

If Williams represents “mere civility” and “antagonistic evangelism” (65), Hobbes stands for “civil silence.” Hobbes thus stood at the opposite antipode from Williams: where Williams prescribed minimally civil argument and ardent evangelism, Hobbes prescribed censorship and self-censorship on political and religious issues, along with much else.

The Erastian Hobbes notoriously fused church and state, subordinating the former to the latter: “Hobbes insisted that ‘a commonwealth [civitas] and a church [ecclesia]’ were ‘exactly the same thing under two different names’ […] and that the sovereign was thus the ‘Supreme Pastor,’ ‘Soveraign Prophet,’ and God’s ‘Vicegerent on Earth.’ […] He was also its chief censor, with the authority to regulate doctrine to ensure its conformity with ‘Publique Reason’” (84). The magistrate could even suppress “true” opinions in the interest of civil order (92). Hobbes nevertheless supported a heterodox form of toleration. In Leviathan—the book and the thing itself—people might differ from one another but never openly disagree, as such contests invariably threatened the public peace (85, 96-97).

Locke, for his part, advocated “civil charity.” Locke famously evolved from his early Hobbism, becoming a strong proponent of toleration. Bejan notes continuity as well as change: “even in [the Two Tracts on Government] Locke acknowledged that toleration would be an attractive policy, if only people were more tolerant” (120). Any expansion of toleration would require a proportionate rise in civility. Although Locke repudiated William Penn’s legislation banning “persecution of the tongue” in Pennsylvania, and with it Hobbesian censorship, he underscored the importance of civility as a virtue (125-26, 170-71). The model for civility that Locke

had in mind was the gentleman’s club or the “informal philosophical society,” hearkening back to “Erasmus’s ideal of colloquy” (129). Indeed, toleration entailed a moral duty of civility: “’Charity, Bounty, and Liberality’ across religious differences, as well as ‘Equity’ and even ‘Friendship,’ must ‘always mutually … be observed.’ […] In particular, individuals must forego all ‘rough Usage of Word or Action’ and maintain always ‘the softness of Civility and good Usage’ in their disputes” (130). In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke urged tutors to instill such values in their pupils, and in his own “Dry Club” he insisted on enforcing rules against anger (“warmth”) in debate (134). Locke required disputants not merely to behave civilly but to match their inner temper to their outward conduct, a stringent mandate that, one might add, inverts his contention that intolerance breeds hypocrisy, the outward profession of what one does not believe (135-36). For Locke, apparently, one’s beliefs could not be changed at will, but a charitable disposition could be cultivated and even enforced through norms.

All three figures—Williams, Hobbes, and Locke— learned from the civil wars that had rent the British Isles, yet they drew different lessons from them. Bejan contends that Williams embraced a more capacious idea of toleration than did Locke, who “infamous[ly] exclu[ded] […] Catholics, Turks, and atheists” (51). Here, one is inclined to cavil.

Locke did not exclude “Turks” from toleration, and his concerns about Roman Catholicism center primarily on “Popery,” the subordination of civil to religious authority, along with the threat of foreign (Roman) sovereignty that it posed.1 What is more, even “mere civility” could be constricting: as Larry Eldridge observes, “In 1647 the Rhode Island Assembly declared it a crime ‘for any man to use words of contempt against a chief officer, especially in the execution of his office.’ Any defendant convicted by a jury had to post a three-month behavior bond.” Although there is no record of any prosecution in the 1640s, the law may have exerted a chilling effect, and it was renewed in 1663; Eldridge remarks that “the number of Rhode Island seditious speech cases went up notably in the 1660s.”2 Bejan takes no note of the 1647 statute or of its renewal.3

Nonetheless, Bejan’s exposition has a tonic, gimlet-eyed realism. She argues forcefully that Hobbes’s Leviathan and Locke’s civil polity are quasi-utopian schemes, scarcely more realistic than Plato’s republic. Hobbes’s civil silence is impossible, as is the level of mutual respect demanded by Locke. Bejan brings her street fighting skills to modern political theorists as well: the theories of Rawls and Habermas may be aspirational, but they also seem utopian. Take Rawls’s description of “reflective equilibrium”: Wide reflective equilibrium (in the case of one citizen) is the reflective equilibrium reached when that citizen has carefully considered alternative conceptions of justice and the force of various arguments for them. […] Think of each citizen in such a society as having achieved wide reflective equilibrium. Since citizens recognize that they affirm the same public conception of political justice, reflective equilibrium is also general: the same conception is affirmed in everyone’s considered judgments. Thus, citizens have achieved general and wide,

or what we may refer to as full, reflective equilibrium. In such a society, not only is there a public point of view from which all citizens can adjudicate their claims of political justice, but also this point of view is mutually recognized as affirmed by them all in full reflective equilibrium. This equilibrium is fully intersubjective: that is, each citizen has taken into account the reasoning and arguments of every other citizen.4

The public is an Aristotelian god, an ideal thinking itself. In defending their political theories, Rawls and others are, in essence, defending religious creeds. Even the term “reasonable” has a hymnal quality in Rawls; phrases such as “reflective equilibrium” form part of a larger liturgy. An air of mystery hangs about them; they mean something important, but in practice no one knows quite what. None of this is intended to deny the elegance of Rawls’s theory, nor even the cogency of much of it, but it would be exceedingly hard to implement.

But is the Williams model more practical than the others? Consider Rousseau’s comment that “[i]t is impossible to live in peace with people one believes to be damned.”5 Williams was exceptional in this regard, peaceably telling his neighbors that they were damned; Rousseau’s attitude seems more plausible. Williams made his experiment work for a time in Rhode Island, but through much of the world, Rousseau’s insight has proved prophetic.

Bejan’s political theory shares some features with that of Chantal Mouffe, including a bracing realism that accepts political conflict rather than seeking to overcome it. Bejan’s Williamsite formula of “agonistic evangelism” (69) is, presumably, an echo of Mouffe’s “agonistic pluralism.” The solution that Bejan offers, however, based on Roger Williams’s idea of “mere civility,” sounds strikingly like the situation that prevails today: “mere civility” is

consistent with flaming rudeness, zealotry, bigotry, tribalism, ethical preening, and moral exhibitionism. Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey can now repose and judge the world that they have created good. The only difference between Bejan’s proposal and the status quo—and it is a significant one—is that parties to any conversation in a Williamsite polity would need to toughen up. Mere civility “shifts much of the burden […] from the speaker to the listener, requiring the latter to cultivate, among other things, insensitivity to others’ opinions and an identity separate from that immersed in debate” (162). What distinguishes this idea from “sticks and stones” sophistry is that, as Bejan shows, Williams made such a model work, for a time. In her argument, Bejan underpins theory with history.

Yet, as she acknowledges, the model did not endure for the remainder of Williams’s life. Various conflicts with the Narragansett and other tribes in the 1670s escalated into martial conflict, “King Philip’s War,” which resulted in the burning of Providence and the sundering of the once peaceable parties. The reasons for this tragic breakdown of relations, to be sure, may have less to do with the limitations of “mere civility” than with the “land hunger” of Rhode Islanders like William Harris, for all Harris’s protestations to the contrary.6 Still, Williams’s “mere civility” blueprint, with its overlay of “agonistic evangelism,” reinforces the zealous, religious character of passionate debate, something Bejan explicitly endorses in her “Epilogue.” Such a model has a dubious track record. Preserving channels for the expression of dogma surely forms but one part of upholding a culture of free speech. What about the role of doubt, including self-doubt, which Samuel Bailey and JohnStuart Mill place at the center of healthy debate? Even Locke, whom Bejan casts as a polite evangelist, stressed human fallibility in A Letter Concerning Toleration. How would skepticism, a cornerstone of

liberalism and of liberal free speech theory, fit into a Williamsite polity?

Bejan distinguishes one’s debate persona from one’s core identity (162); the former is a tough hull that protects the latter in the cauldron of public controversy. This distinction seems fair enough, but Bejan also acknowledges that the chances of persuasion and conversion in Williams’s Rhode Island system were slim (79). If the goal of debate is neither consensus nor compromise, then what is the point of debate? Simply to let off steam? Her point on the practicality of “mere civility” is well-taken (164), but “agonistic evangelism,” millenarian fervor, and the like have led as often to bloodshed as to a working peace.

At best, Williams’s prototype seems a recipe for loud identity politics, which we already have in abundance.7 Exhorting us to develop “insensitivity to others’ opinions” (162) seems especially infelicitous as a formula for progress; it is an extreme response to the Habermasian and Rawlsian concepts of public reason. And in fairness to Rawls, even though he underlines consensus (“overlapping consensus” in Rawls’s idiom), there is no Rawlsian duty to civility in the informal public sphere.8 Not everything is geared toward simple consensus or concord. The notion, however, that we should cultivate “insensitivity to others’ opinions” seems gratuitous. It conjures a "bat" model of the public square: screaming as we close our ears, in effect shrieking to hear our own echo.

I am deeply sympathetic to Bejan’s project of fostering a robust public sphere. We live, regrettably, in a censorial age. Bejan brilliantly excavates early modern free speech conflicts and draws incisive parallels between them and modern-day problems. She adroitly practices “historically informed political theory,” a term coined by Andrew Murphy (14). I remain skeptical, however, that the template for free speech she outlines can provide a suitable remedy for

the crisis of modern discourse: the violent polarization, the indifference to truth, the zealous expression of dogma that brooks no contradiction and ignores countervailing evidence. What is more, the radical extent of her free speech libertarianism may give even the most stalwart free speech champions pause.

Indeed, are there any limits to expression in Bejan’s Williamsite polity? What would she do with Alex Jones (who, praise all that is good, recently lost two libel suits)? Presumably, Russian bots would not get a pass in her republic, though even that point is not definitively settled (some scholars are defending bots’ right to free speech and the public’s right to hear bot “speech”).9 She discusses a few exceptions to Williams’s policy in Rhode Island: Williams despised Quakers, for example, even suggesting the legality of suppressing such an uncivil sect, though he “never called down the civil sword” upon them (75). (Quakers were a spicier, rowdier lot in the seventeenth century than they would become in later years.) It is not clear how Williams’s strictures against the Friends’ “inner light” would apply today. In discussing rules of civility, Bejan points out that, happily, in Williams’s New England, sex with cows was not permitted (157). That is one form of civility. But regulating our relations with cows will not get us very far. For one thing, we are not the agrarian society that we once were.

Eighteenth-century British culture was in many ways an answer to that of the previous century: politeness became an ideal, as Lawrence Klein, Marvin Becker, Elspeth Jajdelska, Isabel Rivers, and Keith Thomas, among others, have noted. Ferocious

debates still took place, but the overall tone was somewhat less bellicose. There was still plenty of war, but less civil war (at least in England and Prussia; civil strife persisted in Austria—and France, of course, erupted in revolution toward century’s end). Bejan observes that eighteenth-century European civility was “irredeemably imbricated with colonialism and empire”: Europeans justified colonial violence by citing the need to civilize the “savage” other (9). No doubt, “civility” can be wielded as a weapon to silence, to exclude, and even to dominate. Codes of civility can devolve into gag orders. But the suggestion that civility is “irredeemably” tied to censorship and imperialism seems overdrawn. If a more robust notion of civility wards off civil war or reduces violent polarization, it is an invaluable tool. Lockean theory might help where Williamsite theory falters. Perhaps we await our own, postcolonial version of the eighteenth century, and Williams’s model will have to do in the meantime, but some will have reservations. Many of us hope that we do not need to wait until the twenty-second century to overcome internecine quarrels on Twitter that divide political parties into sects and sects into tribes. The solution may reside in norms and not law, but we need not be complacent with the status quo. Bejan is right that the mere form of words and the polish of etiquette will not solve deep problems (21), but they might keep the conversation going, in Richard Rorty’s sense. Williams’s model of discussion, “agonistic evangelism,” promotes just one kind of discourse. Illiberal, dogmatic, and self-righteous, evangelists often promise us heaven and deliver hell instead.

"ILLIBERAL, DOGMATIC, AND SELF-RIGHTEOUS, EVANGELISTS OFTEN PROMISE US HEAVEN AND DELIVER HELL INSTEAD."

NOTES

1. Indeed, Bejan herself cites a passage in Locke’s Third Letter for Toleration granting civil rights to the “rational Turk or infidel,” along with the “sober sensible Heathen” (136). See A Third Letter for Toleration, in The Works of John Locke (London, 1824), Vol. 5, 298-99.

2. Larry D. Eldridge, A Distant Heritage: The Growth of Free Speech in Early America (NYU Press, 1994), 25-26.

3. In fairness, “the increase in prosecutions [after the Restoration] probably reflected the leaders’ concern that all go smoothly in their bid to have the colony charter renewed by a restored Charles II. Indeed, the king’s commissioners had come to New England precisely to assess the situation in general and the acceptability of such petitions in particular” (Eldridge 26).

4. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Expanded Edition (Columbia UP, 2005), 384-85n16.

5. Quoted in Rainer Forst, Toleration in Conflict (Cambridge UP, 2013), 283.

6. A Rhode Islander reports on King Philip’s War; the second William Harris letter of August, 1676. Transcribed and edited by Douglas Edward Leach (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1963), 11; Harris Papers, vol. x, (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1902), 165-66; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s. v. Roger Williams. Williams and Harris were nemeses.

7. See also Rainer Forst, Toleration in Conflict, 185, on the question of why non-Protestants would accept Williams’s grounds for tolerance without an independent justification.

8. John Rawls, “Political Liberalism: A Reply to Habermas,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 92, no. 3 (Mar. 1995):140n13; cf. Bejan 20 on Rawls’s “duty of civility.” It should be noted that in the formal public sphere the “duty of civility” is a moral, not a legal, duty, just as it is for Locke. Additionally, the “duty of civility” is a term of art in Rawls’s writing; a succinct definition can be found in James Gordon Finlayson, The Habermas-Rawls Debate (Columbia UP, 2019), 216.

9. See, for example, Ronald K. L. Collins, David M. Skover, et al., Robotica: Speech Rights and Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge UP, 2018).

contributors

Jenn Blair ’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Rattle, The Southampton Review, Appalachian Review, and The South Carolina Review among others. A former recipient of Broad River Review’s Ron Rash Poetry Prize, her poetry book Malcontent is out from Press Americana and her poetry book Face Cut Out for Locket is out from Brick Road Poetry Press. She teaches at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Annie Diamond is an Ashkenazi Jewish poet, Joycean, and breakfast enthusiast living and working on the traditional unceded homelands of the Council of the Three Fires, sometimes called Chicago. She has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, The Lighthouse Works, and Boston University, where she earned her MFA in 2017. Her poems appear and are forthcoming in No Tokens, Yemassee, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere.

Maria DiFrancesco is a Spanish professor at Ithaca College whose primary area of expertise is contemporary Spanish literature and film. She is interested in disciplinary theories that foreground gender and sexuality as well as space and place. She is currently at work on a collection of poetry and a memoir, both of which focus on teaching, learning, and masked identities in higher education.

Emily Anna King (锡萍芳) just completed her MA in creative writing at University College Cork in Ireland and is currently teaching writing at an international high school in Massachusetts. Her most recent publications are in Tír na nÓg, Massachusetts Best Emerging Poets 2019 (Z Publishing), Pamplemousse, Lily Poetry Review, Paragon Press, and Otherwise Engaged Journal. While her work often explores the Chinese American adoptee experience, she is also passionate about investigating the intersectionality between language and music. Besides writing, she loves spending time with family, playing piano, playing tennis and hiking.

Raisa Rafaela Serrano Muñoz holds a bachelor’s degree in English Studies, a master's degree in Teacher Training in Obligatory Secondary and Upper Secondary School Education, Vocational Training, and Languages (English as a second language), a master’s degree in English for Professional Qualification, and a Ph.D. from the University of Córdoba in Languages and Cultures with a focus on Gender Studies. Currently, she does research and works as an English teacher.

Al Roth teaches math at Renton Technical College in the Seattle, WA region. Born in 1958, he has witnessed horror and miracles. He often hikes, bicycles, and plays his guitar.

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021); and The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, forthcoming 2024). Recent work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Yale Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University.