Spring/Summer 2019 Issue—China/Japan Focus by Weber—The Contemporary West

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CHINA/JAPAN FOCUS INTERVIEW FOCUS

Spring/Summer 2019 | Volume 35 | Number 2

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Deriving from the German weben—to weave—weber translates into the literal and figurative “weaver” of textiles and texts. Weber are the artisans of textures and discourse, the artists of the beautiful fabricating the warp and weft of language into everchanging patterns. Weber, the journal, understands itself as a regional and global tapestry of verbal and visual texts, a weave made from the threads of words and images.

Wat the Kilowatt Wat Misaka was the first non-white player to be drafted into the Basketball Association of America, a precursor to the NBA. A Nisei and Weber State Wildcat who was born and raised in Ogden, Utah, he was not only the very first collegiate draft pick in professional basketball history, but also the first draft pick of the New York Knicks, in 1947. His electrifying energy on the court earned him the nickname “Kilowatt,” and eventually a spot with the Harlem Globetrotters which (unlike Ogden’s second, non-white sports legend, Willy Moore) he turned down. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, when U.S. anti-Japanese sentiment was at its peak, Wat’s reputation as an emerging star player—among them, two championships with the University of Utah—spared him the humiliation of being incarcerated at Topaz, one of the 10 internment camps where more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry were concentrated at the time. Instead, he served two years in the United States Army, where he was charged with determining the effects of repeated bombings on civilians following the nuclear blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In more senses than one, the Kilowatt is part and parcel of America’s complicated history of World War II and beyond. For a recent documentary of his life, see Transcending, The Wat Misaka Story, https://www.watmisaka.com/

Front Cover: Setusko Winchester, Freedom from Fear installation at Minidoka, Idaho, and Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, New York; Mao Xiaojian, 听瀑图 Listening to the Waterfall, 2015. Ink on paper. 70 cm x 46 cm.

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VOLUME 35 | NUMBER 2 | SPRING/SUMMER 2019

EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR

Michael Wutz ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Kathryn L. MacKay Russell Burrows Brad Roghaar MANAGING EDITOR

Kelsy Thompson EDITORIAL BOARD

Phyllis Barber, author Jericho Brown, Emory University Katharine Coles, University of Utah Diana Joseph, Minnesota State University Nancy Kline, author & translator Delia Konzett, University of New Hampshire Kathryn Lindquist, Weber State University Fred Marchant, Suffolk University Madonne Miner, Weber State University Felicia Mitchell, Emory & Henry College Julie Nichols, Utah Valley University Tara Powell, University of South Carolina Bill Ransom, Evergreen State College Walter L. Reed, Emory University Scott P. Sanders, University of New Mexico Kerstin Schmidt, Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt Daniel R. Schwarz, Cornell University Andreas Ströhl, Goethe-Institut Washington, D.C. James Thomas, author Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, author Melora Wolff, Skidmore College EDITORIAL PLANNING BOARD

Bradley W. Carroll Brenda M. Kowalewski Angelika Pagel John R. Sillito Michael B. Vaughan ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Shelley L. Felt Aden Ross G. Don Gale Mikel Vause

Meri DeCaria Barry Gomberg Elaine Englehardt John E. Lowe

LAYOUT CONSULTANTS

Mark Biddle Jacob Hansen EDITORS EMERITI

Brad L. Roghaar Sherwin W. Howard Neila Seshachari LaVon Carroll Nikki Hansen EDITORIAL MATTER CONTINUED IN BACK

CHINA/JAPAN FOCUS

VOLUME 35 | NUMBER 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ART 28 Setusko Winchester, Freedom From Fear

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39 Mao Xiaojian, Space of Emptiness Mai Mang, On Mao Xiaojian and His Art (essay)

POETRY 81 Wang Jiaxin, Marginalia 94 Xiao Kaiyu, Fields Tattered and Worn 102 Lan Lan, On Landscape and other poems 109 Mai Mang, Seven Poems 116

Mao Xiaojian.....................39

Vera Schwarcz, A Country Without Memory and other poems

ESSAY 24

Ha Jin, On Chinese Patriotism

51 Greg Lewis, Searching for Identity in Maoist China—The CCPIT and its Leadership, 1952-1966 62 Laura Anderson, Cliff Nowell, and Li Tang, Weber State & Shanghai Normal—Three Perspectives on 20 Years of Partnership 15 Marie Geraldine Rademacher, Following in Von Humboldt’s Footsteps—The Representation of Nature in A Journal from Japan

Wang Jiaxin........................81

6 Nibs Sakomoto, The Road to Minidoka—An Exerpt from a Memoir of Internment 70 John Whittier Treat, Stuttering in Foreign Languages, or What the Japanese Stammer Teaches Us

CONVERSATION 119 Michael Wutz, From Idaho to Confucius, or from the American West to the Far East—A Conversation with Mary de Rachewiltz

READING THE WEST

Nibs Sakomoto...................6

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INTERVIEW FOCUS 137 Toni Asay, Going to the Heart of Understanding—A Conversation with Sue Monk Kidd 144 Brianne Hadley, Tyler Mortensen-Hayes, and Abraham Smith, How to Be Human with Words—A Conversation with Robert Hass 156 Christy Call, On Climate, Religion, Politics and Money—A Conversation with Naomi Oreskes 165 Adrienne Andrews, Geneaology of Hope—Returning to the Traditional—A Conversation with Cornel West 175 Judi Amsel, Narrative Structure, Storytelling, and Cultural Meaning-Making—A Conversation with Daniel Mendelsohn

Cornel West...............................165

E S S A Y

ミニドカへの道— 強制収容回顧録より抜粋

THE ROAD TO MINIDOKA— An Excerpt from a Memoir of Internment NIBS SAKAMOTO

Piercing Through the Silence For many years our family rarely discussed “camp.” Growing up, I didn’t know that my great-uncle Nibs and his brother and two sisters (one of whom is my grandmother, Chiz) had been imprisoned during World War II. In the ’60s and ’70s, our family experiences revolved around idyllic holiday gatherings, backyard barbeques, and fishing from the piers in Seattle.

Executive Order 9066 February 19th, 1942: a date that changed the lives of a group of Americans forever. On this date, the President of the United States signed Executive Order 9066, permitting the roundup and imprisonment of over 100,000 people in their own country, forcing them into remote and Spartan living conditions scattered all across the United States. They were all of Japanese ancestry, and the majority were American citizens. One of those was my

What was it like to get on the school bus and see your dear friend wearing a pin that said I’m Chinese to make sure people didn’t mistake her for Japanese? What was it like to be an American citizen, yet feel like an enemy of the only country you’ve ever known?

I’ve since come to understand that for years most Japanese families were fairly silent about the internment, and only recently have the internees begun to open up about their wartime experience. What Nibs and other Japanese Americans endured during WWII could have sent anyone into a tailspin of despair. But one senses from these stories that the camps were seen as just another trial to overcome; life was not easy before the camps, during the internment, or while re-integrating after the war. The detainees overcame these challenges through individual determination and strong multi-generational family bonds. If I can offer any perspective to Nibs’ stories, it is that he and the rest of our family went on to become productive, caring, humble, and upstanding citizens, utterly lacking in resentment or bitterness. But let’s also not lose another perspective that these stories offer: our family and thousands of others were imprisoned, denied their basic rights as citizens, and forced to forfeit their jobs and property at the hands of their own government. By contrast, the country I’ve known all my life has, for the most part, meant open doors, prosperity, and expanding opportunities. My relative good fortune affords the freedom to reflect on the parts of our family’s journey that Nibs’ generation didn’t have. I often find myself

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great uncle, Nibs Sakamoto. He, along with my mother, grandmother, great grandmother, and other members of my family, were forced to leave their homes, businesses, and most of their belongings behind and relocate to internment camps, such as the one in Minidoka, Idaho. These American citizens had to survive behind barbed wire and guard towers because their own country assumed they were a threat to the security of the United States. I have been lucky to hear stories from my surviving family members about life in the camps, and I have asked questions about that time in their lives. For Uncle Nibs, what was it like to be a young boy in Seattle and to be forced to leave everything behind and move to a desolate area of Idaho? For his sister (my great aunt), Hatsune, what was it like to get on the school bus and see your dear friend wearing a pin that said I’m Chinese to make sure people didn’t mistake her for Japanese? For all of my relatives who were sent to the camps, what was it like to be an American citizen, yet feel like an enemy of the only country you’ve ever known? Reading my Uncle Nibs’ recollection was a learning experience for me and hopefully can be for others. I often reflect on my family’s challenges as a reminder of the ease of my life. I am grateful for the grit and determination my family and so many others exhibited. Their strength and resilience is a reminder of the sacrifices made by previous generations—sacrifices that enabled those of us who followed to have an easier path with more opportunity.

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E S S A Y thinking about ethnicity, identity, and the challenge of being a citizen in the always-complex United States. I’ve utilized these stories from the past as fuel to become more informed and active in the present day. My hope is that readers will discover the same through this excerpt from my greatuncle’s memoir—written decades ago, but only now seeing the light of day. Mike Ellis Yonsei, 4th Generation Japanese- American September 2018

Executive Order 9066 was called a morally repugnant order by the current Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet even today we are focusing our anger and hostility toward those who are different as a way to soothe our fears. We would be wise to listen to those who have lived through such discrimination, and to learn from the mistakes written into our country’s history. Jason Ellis Yonsei, 4th Generation Japanese- American September 2018

Dad were in no position financially to own a house. Also, because of existing laws, it was impossible for any Japanese immigrant to own real estate in Seattle. Dad cooked for a restaurant in Pike Place Market, where many local Japanese farmers would bring their produce to sell. I like to think that he owned the restaurant, but more likely, he was just the hired cook. Growing up, I remember playing baseball with the neighborhood gang. I also remember camping along the Cedar River with the older guys and hopping on the West Seattle trolley to Alki Point to swim in salt water and play among the boulders along the shoreline. Another fun thing was to walk down to the waterfront near the foot of Yesler Way and fish off the docks for rainbow perch and poggies, or “shiners.” We didn’t have any poles or fancy reels, just hand lines which we dangled off our fingertips. Did we speak English or The extended Sakamoto family in the spring of 1944 just before Joe left for the war in Japanese at home? Initially it Europe: Mom or Bachan (left, front row); married and widowed sister, Chiz (center, back row); her two children, Jim and Jane (center, front row); a second younger sister, Hatsune or was mostly Japanese, but as “Hats” (right, back-row); and the older brother, Sunao or “Joe” (right, front row). In the rear we started attending school, row, left side, is Nibs, who was 15 at the time. Photo courtesy Nibs Sakomoto. I was born February 24, 1929, to Kiyo Nakamura and Naokichi Sakamoto, who immigrated from Kumamoto Ken, Japan, in the early 1900s to start a new life in America. Sadly, I know nothing about their heritage other than that her maiden name was Akamura. I know that Mom had only a grade school education and came over to marry Dad as a picture bride several years after his arrival. By the time I came along, the family was settled in Seattle. Mom and

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we tended to speak more and more English at home, so our language morphed into a mixture of mostly English with bits of Japanese. Mom never did manage English, and our communication became increasingly more jumbled as I grew up. I remember many times I would have to call on my older siblings, Hats or Chiz, to “tell or ask”Mom for this or that. If the war and forced evacuation and internment hadn’t come along, I am not sure where we would be now. In some ways the whole war and incarceration thing was a blessing in disguise, as it insured our extended family a roof over our heads and some regular meals. December 7, 1941. I was 12 years old, so I should remember that day. But the only thing I recall is hearing over the radio that Pearl Harbor was under attack by Japanese aircraft. We went to school the next day, and everything was normal, at least for us junior high kids. Some Chinese students were wearing I am a Chinese button, but that was about it. Then the FBI began rounding up all male persons holding office in martial arts, business, or social clubs related to the Japanese community. Anybody in a leadership role in the Japanese community was suspect. These men were sent to detention camps, some as far away as Texas. Our Dad was not a part of this FBI roundup since he was seriously ill with tuberculosis and confined to a sanitarium. Even if he was in good health, he would not have been picked up or “arrested,” as he was just an ordinary hard-working family man with no particular influence in the Japanese community. My brother Joe, essentially supporting our family, was working for one of the bigger fur companies in downtown Seattle. The morning after the Pearl Harbor attack, he was told he no longer was needed. Luckily, Joe had a friend who worked in a watch shop making watch crystals and was able to get Joe a job so he could provide for us.

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An order soon came for all persons of Japanese ancestry to turn in any radio capable of receiving shortwave broadcasts and any weapons such as rifles and pistols. Our Dad had a samurai sword, which he treasured and displayed proudly around our house. We thought that this sword could be construed as a weapon, so we dutifully turned the sword, together with our radio, in to the local police. We never saw our radio or Dad’s sword again. On February 10, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible removal of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, whether American citizens or not, with as little as 1/16th Japanese heritage, from a 300-milewide zone paralleling the Pacific coastline. On March 24th, the first of several Exclusion Orders was issued and affected the 274 people of Japanese ancestry on Bainbridge Island. This order directed them to register, pack their belongings, dispose of their property, and be ready to leave in six days. On Monday, March 30th, at 11:00 a.m., they boarded a ferry to Seattle, where they transferred to a train, which then transported

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E S S A Y them to the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Their evacuation from the Island was to be the model on which other Japanese communities were evacuated. Our evacuation followed within months. For most of the Japanese community, it was a fire sale. We had to liquidate our property for whatever a buyer would pay. Under these circumstances, most families received only a fraction of the true worth of any real property such as cars, furniture, appliances, etc. Our family didn’t have a car; we also did not have expensive furniture or appliances, so getting ready for internment was mainly a matter of disposing of personal items. When the time came to leave our homes, we all assembled at a designated area and boarded buses. If anything stands out from that day, it was that we were allowed only the clothes that we were wearing and one suitcase or carry-on bag each. Boarding the bus that morning as the Sakamotos was Mom, my brother Joe, my sister Hats, and myself. My oldest sister, Chiz, was by then married and living with her husband and two toddlers, Jim and Jane, and would be interned separately. Our first stop was the Puyallup Assembly Center, also known as Camp Harmony. The barracks in which we were housed were just plain, unfinished pinewood buildings. We were provided wooden fold-away cots and bags which we filled with straw for mattresses. We ate in community mess halls staffed by evacuees and showered and relieved ourselves in communal bathrooms. My guess would be that about 8,000 of us from the Puget Sound area were at Puyallup. Summer had just started and school was not in session, so life in a camp for this 13-year-old was pretty boring and stress-free. Two sad events, however, marred that summer of ‘42. First, my Dad, who had to stay behind in Seattle because of his tuberculosis, passed away. He was only 56 or so. Several days before he died, we were

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all given the opportunity to visit with him one last time. I remember being driven in a military sedan up to the sanitarium for that one last visit. To make things even more tragic, Harry, Chiz’s husband, was diagnosed with stomach cancer and died in a hospital in Puyallup. The two deaths were actually only days apart and a joint funeral was held for the two. Chiz and her kids, Jim and Jane, moved in with us to make us an extended family of seven. Jim was less than two years old and Jane a very young infant. Toward the end of that first summer, we were notified that we would be moving soon to a permanent camp in Idaho. When we arrived at our new camp, “Minidoka,” we drove through a gate manned by military police. The camp opened toward the vast desert and was essentially unfenced. As we headed toward our new home, we could see a stretch of open desert and row after row of black tar-papered wood frame barracks. Now an extended family of seven, we were assigned one of the bigger rooms, still only about 20 x 24 feet. We hung up army blankets to partition the room and create some privacy. The interior walls separating the rooms were constructed of wallboard, bare and unfinished. The ceiling, however, was complete with wallboard so the rooms were essentially finished and there was a bit more privacy. The entrance door to our apartment opened to a common hallway we shared with our neighbors. This hallway was about the size of a large coat closet, so we quickly learned to live with our neighbors. A coal-fed potbelly stove provided the heat for the cold Idaho winters. We had no running water or individual cooking facilities, but conditions there were much better than in Puyallup. Our first task was to put together makeshift “furniture.” Every bit of scrap lumber left over from the construction of the camp was salvaged. Some basic hand

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My first impression of Minidoka was that we were out in the middle of nowhere. It was hot and dusty, and shortly after we arrived the first of several dust storms hit us. It was late summer, so the desert was extremely dry, and when a fierce wind storm picked up, it stirred the sand everywhere. I remember sand blowing into our “apartment” through tiny openings and cracks around the window sills and wooden framework. We had to stay inside with the windows tightly closed whenever these dust storms occurred, and on hot summer days it was an unbearably miserable situation. The worst part was that these storms occurred regularly. Consequently, we just adjusted and lived with the storms. When the hot sun and winds finally passed on, the rains came and the desert sand turned to muck. We were then confronted with walking through the goop to get to our mess halls or, worse still, to our bathrooms. tools such as hammers and saws were provided by the authorities, but we had no power tools. Simple things like discarded wooden crates were turned into a bookcase or an end table. Some of the older men went out into the desert to find what was called “grease wood” and created ornate pieces of sculpture or other knickknacks for decorating the rooms. We were issued seven military-style metal cots with mattresses and khaki army blankets. We strung some rope and hung blankets for privacy. It was extremely tight quarters for seven people. My first impression of Minidoka was that we were out in the middle of nowhere. It was hot and dusty, and shortly after we arrived the first of several dust storms hit us. It was late summer, so the desert was extremely dry, and when a fierce wind storm picked up, it stirred the sand everywhere. I remember sand blowing into our “apartment” through tiny openings and cracks around the window sills and wooden framework. We had to stay inside with the windows tightly closed whenever these dust storms occurred, and on hot summer days it was an unbearably miserable situation. The SPRING/SUMMER 2019

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worst part was that these storms occurred regularly. Consequently, we just adjusted and lived with the storms. When the hot sun and winds finally passed on, the rains came and the desert sand turned to muck. We were then confronted with walking through the goop to get to our mess halls or, worse still, to our bathrooms. Our bathroom facility was much like what we would find in a high school gym: adequate but with absolutely no privacy. The worst part was that the facilities were separate from our barracks, so that to use them we had to face the elements, whether in the middle of the night or during a cold winter storm. One of our first tasks was to prepare for the coming winter. I was 13 years old and only of average build, but I was able to get a temporary job with the coal crew until school started, shoveling coal out of railroad cars onto trucks, transporting the load, and then stockpiling it at sites around the camp. It was an exciting job for a young kid who got paid all of $16 for the month’s work. Dining in the mess hall became a ritual. The younger guys like myself would start lining up outside the entrance to the hall

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E S S A Y about 30 minutes before dinner hour, because it gave us an excuse to congregate and hang out. Inside the mess hall we lined up along a counter to get our meals, and then sat and ate on picnic-style tables and benches. We had white porcelain dishes, but these didn’t make our dinners any more appetizing. They were still pretty austere. We had all the rice we wanted and a lot of beef stew with very little beef. Also, many meals featured Vienna sausages, the kind that are square and about three inches long and come in a can. The worst dinners, though, were the Columbia River smelts, which were too soft and mushy for my taste. Other than going to school and attending classes, my time as a 13-year-old without any serious responsibilities was mostly spent hanging out in the laundry room with my block buddies. We were all “Block 26ers.” We ate in the same mess hall, showered together, sat side by side on the commodes, and hung out in the same laundry room. Age was definitely not a determining factor in our bond. At 13, I was probably one of the younger ones, while the older guys were probably 25 and beyond. This age span could easily have been a negative influence on the younger guys, but to our Block 26er’s credit, it was not. Maybe it was because there was no beer to be had, and cigarettes were too hard to come by to be shared with any of us younger ones. Hanging out in our laundry room, we needed some identity to separate us from the other groups in camp, so one of the older guys came up with the word “Umbriago” from Jimmy Durante’s famous phrase for “friend.” Thus we became known as the Block 26 Umbriagos. To solidify our identity, we purchased blue felt warm-up jackets with Umbriagos emblazoned on the back. Being accepted by this fraternity was really a big thing for a 13-year-old like me. A lot of us, especially the younger guys,

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Hanging out in our laundry room, we needed some identity to separate us from the other groups in camp, so one of the older guys came up with the word “Umbriago” from Jimmy Durante’s famous phrase for “friend.” Thus we became known as the Block 26 Umbriagos. To solidify our identity, we purchased blue felt warm-up jackets with Umbriagos emblazoned on the back. Being accepted by this fraternity was really a big thing for a 13-year-old like me. A lot us, especially the younger guys, were tagged with nicknames like “Eight-balls,” “Bosco,” and even “Dimwit.” I was tagged with “Nibo,” a shortened version of “Nibosuke,” or “sleepy head,” in Japanese. Eventually it got shortened to “Nibs,” but the name stuck and to this day the local Asian community knows me as “Nibs.” were tagged with nicknames like “Eightballs,” “Bosco,” and even “Dimwit.” I was tagged with “Nibo,” a shortened version of “Nibo-suke,” or “sleepy head,” in Japanese. Eventually it got shortened to “Nibs,” but the name stuck and to this day the local Asian community knows me as “Nibs.” We were constantly looking for ways to avoid boredom. I remember walking 3 or 4 miles across the Idaho desert to the little town of Eden. There was absolutely nothing in Eden but a gas station and some farm houses so we had no real purpose for taking these hikes other than sheer boredom.

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How did we just walk away from a supposedly guarded camp? The camp was fenced in with barbed wire only around the administration area and the main gate. The two sides of Minidoka as well as the back or furthest end of the camp were totally unfenced, and only open desert deterred escape. There was also a large and deep irrigation canal flowing partially along the south side of the camp, which served as a natural barrier. So to hike out of camp and escape into the desert was really not a challenge. The way to get away from the camp for a day was to use the day pass for a trip to nearby Twin Falls. To obtain one of these passes, we simply applied to the powers that be. With this pass in hand, we hopped on a bus and scooted out the main gate past a single armed guard. These trips were mainly to give us an opportunity to shop for essentials but, not having enough money to shop the stores, we usually just took in a movie and an inexpensive dinner. It was always nice, though, to walk on concrete sidewalks and have to watch out for cars, so even for only a day, these trips were always a treat. Socially, the most exciting events around camp were the block dances. These occurred on a regular basis, usually weekends. With us Umbriagos in charge, Block 26 was known for having some of the best dances. On dance nights the furniture was

shoved to the side and the concrete floor was sprinkled with spangle to slicken the floor. Several of the older guys in our block, including my brother, Joe, had put together sound systems and provided the music. These systems consisted of a turntable, which played 78 rpm records, a vacuumtube amplifier, and a huge wooden speaker box housing at least three speakers. It was the era of big band performers like Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey. Dancing to the music of these great orchestras was memorable. Unfortunately, I was only 14, so I mostly sat and just watched the older guys have the fun. By the time we left camp, though, I was old enough (and brave enough) so I did dance some with the girls. Jitterbugging was the in-thing, but I never really got the hang of it. Some of the older guys, including my brother, Joe, got pretty good at it and on occasion partnered with another guy to put on an exhibition. They were always a hit and a crowd pleaser. Looking back now, it’s hard to imagine Joe jitterbugging, but in his younger days he was really quite nimble. What I remember most vividly about these block dances was the evening’s last dance. It was always Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade,” and to this day, whenever I hear that song on the radio, I think back to our camp days and chuckle to myself, “last dance.”

When the war started, several hundred Niseis were already serving in the military within the continental United States. However, in early 1942 the War Department announced it would no longer accept persons of Japanese ancestry and would henceforth consider us “Undesirable Enemy Aliens.” Those already in service were either discharged or relegated to non-essential duties. In October of ‘42, a military board recommended to President Roosevelt that Japanese Americans be allowed to enlist and serve in the Army. The groundwork for the formation of the all Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team was laid.

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E S S A Y When the war started, several hundred Niseis were already serving in the military within the continental United States. However, in early 1942 the War Department announced it would no longer accept persons of Japanese ancestry and would henceforth consider us “Undesirable Enemy Aliens.” Those already in service were either discharged or relegated to non-essential duties. In October of ‘42, a military board recommended to President Roosevelt that Japanese Americans be allowed to enlist and serve in the Army. The groundwork for the formation of the all Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team was laid. The unit became known as the most decorated unit for its size and was honored with a ticker-tape parade down New York City’s Broadway upon returning from Europe. Sometime during the summer of ‘44, my brother, Joe, got caught up in the draft and was shipped off to Fort Hood, Texas. Then, on April 15, 1945,V-J Day, the war was over in Europe. I guess the Germans must have gotten wind that Joe was on his way and simply threw in the towel. In reality he was on a troop ship steaming toward Europe and would have in all likelihood taken part in combat. However, with the end of the war he was spared this experience and instead assigned to the 7th Armored Division for the occupation of Germany. With Germany defeated and the war in the Pacific going quite well for the United States, rumors started circulating around camp that Minidoka as well as the other nine relocation centers were

going to be closing. Once again we were confronted with the questions, “what are we going to do?” and “where are we going?” Hats had already relocated to New York City and Joe was in the army over in Europe. I was a 16-year-old youngster still in high school. My mom, with her limited English, couldn’t take charge, so it was incumbent on Chiz, who was already widowed with two small kids, to do so. We had nothing to return to in Seattle, so our best bet was to relocate, possibly somewhere in the Midwest. The War Relocation Authority was posting job openings and housing facts. I’m not sure how Chiz managed to pull it off, but she arranged for the five of us—Mom, Chiz, Jim, Jane, and me—to relocate to Iowa. This was sometime during the summer of ‘45, which was fortunate for us, as the camp actually closed down in late 1945. Today, some seventy years later, the only thing that remains of the Minidoka Relocation Center that incarcerated 10,000 of us hapless residents is the main gate and guard tower, sections of some barbed wire fence and portions of the administration building. The rest of the camp—what used to be rows and rows of tar-papered wooden barracks and dusty roads—has been replaced with tidy farm houses and fertile fields. However, the Federal Government, in atoning for this tragic injustice of over half a century ago, has developed what’s left of the camp as a National Park Site, dedicated to remembering those of us who were incarcerated there during the war.

We would like to acknowledge the help of Margaret Rostkowski—former sisterin-law to Nibs’ niece Jane Ellis—in bringing this memoir to our attention.

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フンボルトの辿った道ーマリー・ストープス『A Journal from Japan』における自然描写

FOLLOWING IN VON HUMBOLDT’S FOOTSTEPS— Alexander von Humboldt

The Representation of Nature in A Journal from Japan

Marie Stopes

MARIE GERALDINE RADEMACHER In the Middle Ages, nature was principally conceived of in religious terms. People came to believe that the world was created by God, and thus that its existence was independent of human understanding. The rapid development of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, led to a shift in worldview from primarily religious to essentially secular. Following the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) brought

about important changes that affected the perception of nature. Andrea Wulf explains that as “man began to control nature with new technologies,”—for instance, with Benjamin Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod in 1749 or new medical advances—“humankind began to tame what had been regarded as an expression of God’s fury” and hence lost its “fear of nature” (17). It was in this new Age of Enlightenment that the Prussian

E S S A Y geographer and explorer Alexander von Humboldt grew up. Yet, if these inventions had been instrumental in unravelling the mysteries of nature, and as a result in making one believe that the world was a reassuringly safe and predictable place, scientific progress nonetheless led to important transformations in the environment. Von Humboldt’s observation that “nature, politics, and society formed a triangle of connections which influenced one another” (qtd. in Wulf 188) mirrors the British paleobotanist Marie Stopes’ perception of Japan, whose landscape was subjected to major alterations following the country’s forced opening to the West in 1854. Drawing on von Humboldt’s ideas on the natural world, I analyze Marie Stopes’ representation of nature in A Journal from Japan: A Daily Record of Life as Seen by a Scientist. In her narrative, Stopes reveals herself to be extremely critical of the European encroachment upon Japanese territory, and she denounces the way Western powers came to look at, engage with, and even transform the Japanese landscape. Although von Humboldt and Stopes are separated by a century, her representation of the wilderness strongly parallels von Humboldt’s perception of the natural world.

Von Humboldt and Stopes— Biographical Similarities Alexander von Humboldt was born on September 14th, 1769, in Berlin. His father, Alexander Georg von Humboldt, was an officer in the army and chamberlain at the Prussian court, and his mother, Marie Elizabeth von Holwede, was the daughter of a rich manufacturer. Alexander’s father died at a young age, leaving two sons to the care of his cold and emotionally distant wife, who never really showed affection for her children but instead provided them with a strict and rigid education. She arranged that Alexander and his older brother, SPRING/SUMMER 2019

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Wilhelm, be privately tutored by Enlightenment thinkers, who inspired their love of truth and liberty as well as their thirst for knowledge. Although Alexander was two years younger than Wilhelm, he was taught the same subjects as his brother. Finding the lessons occasionally too difficult for him, Alexander started to believe that he was less gifted. This feeling was reinforced by his preceptors’ doubts in the development of the boy’s “ordinary powers of intelligence” (qtd. in Wulf 14). As a result, Alexander deserted the classroom whenever he could to wander in the village, collecting and sketching plants and insects. As von Humboldt grew up, the “little apothecary” (qtd. Wulf 14)—as he was called—focused on science, mathematics and languages at the same time that his dreams of adventure and his longing to leave Germany intensified. As a child, he read the journals of Captain James Cook and Louis Antoine Bougainville, which contributed to his desire to explore the world. In 1790, he decided to join his friend Georg Forster on a four-month trip across Europe. After his return, he became restless and felt, Wulf explains, “an inexplicable pull towards the unknown, what the Germans call Fernweh, a longing for distant places” (20), but he could not resolve to leave his mother for fear of disappointing her. Overworked, von Humboldt wrote letters to his friends, to whom he confessed being dissatisfied with his current situation: “My unhappy circumstances . . . force me to want what I can’t have, and to do what I don’t like” (qtd. in Wulf 20). Finally, in 1796, following his mother’s death, von Humboldt felt in a way liberated and decided to travel extensively in Latin America, exploring lands where few Europeans had ever set foot and recording his scientific observations in a set of volumes. His friendship with the German writer and naturalist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe certainly influenced his view on nature, which he was convinced had to be experi-

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enced through feelings. He confessed that “he would never forget that Goethe encouraged him to combine nature and art, facts and imagination,” that “being with Goethe . . . equipped him with ‘new organs’ through which to see and understand the natural world” (qtd. in Wulf 43). This mix is essentially reflected in his blending of subjectivity with scientific facts, a method that Marie Stopes also seemed to use extensively in A Journal from Japan. Although there is no clear evidence that Stopes’ writing was consciously influenced by the “Shakespeare of sciences,” as von Humboldt came to be called, it is nonetheless very likely that she was exposed to von Humboldt’s work, which was widely read in British scientific circles, when she worked in the laboratory of professor Karl Goebel, the reknowned botanist at the University of Munich. Von Humboldt and Stopes had similar educational and professional backgrounds. She studied geology and botany at the University College of London and published important works in this field such as Botany, or, the Modern Study of Plants. In 1904, she received her doctoral degree in botany from the University of Munich and, like von Humboldt, she showed a strong desire for adventure. In 1904, she met the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and was planning to accompany him on his Terra Nova Expedition. However, she ended up not joining the expedition, during which Scott died (Maude 59-60). Then, in 1907, Stopes went on a scientific mission to Japan, where she spent eighteen months at the Imperial University of Tokyo and on the island of Hokkaido. There she conduct-

ed important fossil excavations with the intention of solving the dilemma Darwin had described as the “abominable mystery” (qtd. in Essig xiii) of the evolutionary origin of flowers. Three years later, Stopes was also commissioned to determine the age of the Fern Ledges in New Brunswick, hence bringing her to undertake a journey to North America (Falcon-Lang and Miller 227). Besides their joint interests in science and essentially in botany and geology, von Humboldt and Stopes seemed to share similar ideas on nature. His perception of the earth as a web, or one great living organism where everything is connected, and his concerns about the human impact on the natural world parallel Stopes’ concerns for the gradual loss of Japan’s exquisite and pristine landscapes.

Nature, Politics and Society—A Triangle of Connections If von Humboldt is today principally remembered for the way he revolutionized our perception of nature and for his scientific contributions, his role in the liberation of South America from Spanish domination is lesser known and should not be ignored. Indeed, in 1804 in Paris, Humboldt met Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan military and political leader who liberated much of South America from the Spanish Empire. Bolívar’s battle to free his country, as well as Latin America in general, is believed to have been inspired by von Humboldt’s writings, in which (along with his depiction of magnificent landscapes) he

Besides their joint interests in science and essentially in botany and geology, von Humboldt and Stopes seemed to share similar ideas on nature. His perception of the earth as a web, or one great living organism where everything is connected, and his concerns about the human impact on the natural world parallel Stopes’ concerns for the gradual loss of Japan’s exquisite and pristine landscapes.

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E S S A Y strongly criticized colonialism and slavery. Bolívar openly acknowledged that “’with his pen Humboldt had awakened South America . . . and had illustrated why South Americans had many reasons to be proud of their continent’” (qtd in Wulf 171-172). Indeed, Wulf observes that, “as if writing with Humboldt’s pen, Bolívar would use images drawn from the natural world to explain his beliefs throughout the revolution” (172). He invoked, for instance, the image of a “stormy sea” to describe the political upheavals on the continent and would constantly refer to the luxuriant South American landscape to remind his fellow revolutioniaries what they were fighting for (172). Von Humboldt was seen as “the authority” on the South American question and became an important adviser to President Thomas Jefferson, who—as one of the initiators of the American Revolutionary War—was deeply interested in the Spanish colonies, feared despotism in South America, and was worried about the economic repercussions on the fledgling United States, which exported huge amounts of grain and wheat to South America. Jefferson and Bolívar studied von Humboldt’s works, particularly his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, published in four volumes between 1808 and 1810. In this essay, von Humboldt established important connections among his observations on geography, plants, and colonial rule as well as providing information about military defense. Mostly, this treatise emphasized the inequality and the disastrous consequences of colonialism for local populations and the environment while denouncing slavery. He argued that the colonies could be liberated and become independent only if they were “freed from the fetters of the odious monopoly,” and he insisted that “it was the ‘European barbarity’ that had created this unjust world” (qtd. in Wulf 181). This condemnation of “European barbarity” is also evident in Stopes’ diary, in which she voices her concerns for the

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Driven by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, America strongly believed in imposing Western civilization and Christianity on “underdeveloped” Asian nations, while the increasing monopolization of potential coaling stations by the British and French in Asia contributed to President Millard Fillmore’s belief in the urgency to establish commercial relations with Japan—even through the use of gunboat diplomacy, so called, if needed. plight of Japan, which was forced to put an end to its 220-year-old policy of isolation and open its ports to American trade following the Perry Expedition of 1853-54. Driven by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, America strongly believed in imposing Western civilization and Christianity on “underdeveloped” Asian nations, while the increasing monopolization of potential coaling stations by the British and French in Asia contributed to President Millard Fillmore’s belief in the urgency to establish commercial relations with Japan—even through the use of gunboat diplomacy, so called, if needed (J.T Moriarty sees Manifest Destiny as “primarily a justification for satisfying the United States’ lust for land” as well as evidence of its thirst for economic advancement by establishing trade with Asia [5]). Commodore Matthew Perry’s successful diplomatic coup led to established relations between the Western powers and Japan, and thereby opened the way for a political, commercial, intellectual, and cultural exchange between the East and the West. While Japan from the very

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beginning benefited from rapid modernization—for instance, in medicine or in military matters—the country also encountered significant challenges. Stopes opens A Journal from Japan with an ode to her host country by recounting the incursions of the West into the land of “sweet cherry tree[s]” (v). Anthropomorphizing Japan, she addresses the country as the “land that mused” and the “land that dreamed while the nations fought” (v), thereby insisting on the pacifist and isolationist position it used to enjoy. She emphasizes the bucolic landscape and luxuriant nature through her reference to the “cherry trees” and the “irises,” while conveying an impression of untroubled serenity and harmony between nature and humans, who enjoy “spend[ing] hours beneath the cherry trees,/ Or watch[ing] the pointed Iris pierce the ground” (v). This interrelation between humans and their natural habitat is also expressed when she remarks, rather poetically, that the Japanese “cultivated Wisdom on their knees/ And regulated life in ways profound” (v). Then, like Bolívar, Stopes employs the metaphor of a storm to describe the disturbances brought by the West.“Thou didst appear unfitted for the storm/ That broke upon thee from the lowering West” (v), thus essentially justifying Japan’s eventual decision to defend itself from such incursions. Similar to Bolívar, Stopes also describes the richness of the land that is worth fighting for,when she sketches Japan’s abundant and generous vegetation: “another striking thing about this country’s products is the extraordinary richness and variety of the vegetation—palms and pines, bamboos and magnolias, chestnuts and orange trees, rice and roses; the number of plant species in the little Japan alone exceeds that in all Europe” (97). She also rhapsodizes Japan as the “Dreamland of beauty, girt by glowing seas” (v), which may well allude to the ports

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so coveted by American and European powers. Finally, she praises Japan’s, in effect, victorious resistance against the Western powers: “Thou hast risen and conquered/ Thou dost stand, armed as a modern People” (v). Such language points to the discourse around Japan’s peculiar position as a “self-colonized,” rather than colonized nation, since Japan had not been invaded and formally turned into a European colony, but instead voluntarily absorbed Western values and influences. (Alexander Etkind describes this kind of colonization as “domination without hegemony” [119]). Stopes then concludes her ode on a nostalgic tone by pointing to the challenges Japan has to face: “Yet I would rather see thee still apart/ Than soiling thy traditions in the mart” (v).

Political Mutation—From Isolationism to Imperialism Stopes’ claim that “I would rather see thee still apart” expresses her concerns for the changes affecting Japan’s political landscape, essentially its shift from isolationism to imperialism. Indeed, following the country’s reluctant opening to the West, Japan profited from new technological development, modernizing its military and thereby ensuring its rapid emergence as an influential Asian power. This idea is reflected in her allusion to the consequences of the First Sino-Japanese war (1894-5), mainly on Korea. Evoking the Ernest Bethell case, a British journalist prosecuted in Korea for his antagonistic views on Japan’s foreign policy, she observes: Yesterday the Ministry resigned— and the commercial people are on the verge of revolt against the fearful expenditure on army and navy, while the country is so poverty-stricken […]. I have read every word of the cross-

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Stopes’ allusion to Japan’s imperialist policy is also reiterated in her reference to the Ainus, the indigenous people of Hokkaido, whom she describes as “a fundamentally different race from the Japanese” (25). The case of the Ainu, who were dispossessed of their land and forced to assimilate, is a vibrant example of Japan’s colonial expansion following the Meiji Restoration. If on the one hand she appears critical of Japan’s imperialist attitude—unleashed by the West she holds accountable for these profound changes—she seems on the other to be in favor of diplomatic relations with Japan, which had facilitated scientific collaborations between countries and from which she greatly benefited herself. examination and trial of Bethell over the Korean matters; you have probably heard of it at home; in many ways I feel that the Japanese use their catch phrases, “love of country”—“love of emperor,” as cloaks for unscrupulous behavior public and private […]. The Japanese have 20,000 troops active in Korea, and cannot keep order—my only surprise is that any Koreans submit at all without decent open warfare; they were not conquered, but tricked and coerced into having their Government absolutely controlled by the Japanese Government. (181) Stopes’ allusion to Japan’s imperialist policy is also reiterated in her reference to the Ainus, the indigenous people of Hokkaido, whom she describes as “a fundamentally different race from the Japanese” (25). The case of the Ainu, who were dispossessed of their land and forced to assimilate, is a vibrant example of Japan’s colonial expansion following the Meiji Restoration. If on the one hand she appears critical of Japan’s imperialist attitude—unleashed by the West she holds accountable for these profound changes—she seems on the other to be in favor of diplomatic relations with Japan, which had facilitated scientific col-

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laborations between countries and from which she greatly benefited herself. However, she is aware of the suspicions prevailing on Japanese soil when it comes to the presence of foreigners, especially Americans. In anticipation of the American fleet’s parade on the occasion of Admiral Sperry’s courtesy visit to Japan in October, 1908, Stopes evokes the mixed feelings pervading the streets of Ginza. She remarks: There are arches, and bands, and processions, and all manner of things all over the place. Bands of school children go about with flags, and—for the first time since I have been in Japan—I was insulted on my cycle by grown men, not once, but six times in the course of half an hour! Not badly, but in a coarse rude tone I was called out to, and one madman waved a lantern suddenly in my face on the cycle and nearly upset me. I suppose they are over-excited, for everywhere the echo rings with protestations of undying devotion to the Americans, for one of whom I would naturally be taken. (225-26)

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Transformation of the Natural Environment Stopes does not only deplore Japan’s political mutation, but also the impact of modernization on its natural landscapes. This is especially visible in her descriptions, which shift from an emphasis on a bucolic and breathtaking landscape at the beginning of her sojourn to a more urbanized and common portrayal of the environment associated with European influence toward the end. As she is about to dock in Japan for the first time, Stopes is delighted by the exceptional beauty of the country: We lost a good deal of the Wonderful Inland Sea at night, and there is no moon, but all this morning we have seen fairy-like islands. I was up at five, and saw the morning sun lighting the mists. Scattered all over the sea are green islands and little cliffs, sometimes with a single tree on them, perched in just the most effectively pretty attitude. These beautiful lands must have been made on the seventh day, when God was resting and dreaming of Paradise. (1) Here, she emphasizes the supernatural qualities of the scenery, which seem too good to be true. With words such as “fairy-like” or “Paradise” to describe her surroundings, she clearly experiences nature emotionally, and she even ends up anthropomorphizing natural elements such as the moon, which she refers to as female: “Suddenly I felt an electric presence, and looked behind me at a cleft in the hill to see the slimmest silver curve of a new moon that I had ever seen. She rode in the sky so swiftly…” (my emphasis, 169). This is a clear example of Stopes’ poetic way of framing the natural world, just as her assertion that “she could feel the electric presence of the moon” reiterates the von Humboldtian

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idea of anima mundi, or the indivisible coexistence of, and connection between, humans and nature. If her description of the natural environment has a poetic touch, like von Humboldt, she also often blends subjective perceptions with scientific observations. Witness the following remark: The greatest charm of Japan is the way the natives have of inhabiting, even thickly populating, a district without in the least spoiling it—except of course where there is a railway, a few yards on either side are necessarily spoiled a little. The single line of telegraph wire puzzled me not a little to-day. I could not imagine why, when it was raised in the usual way on posts 20 feet or more, it should be made of barbed wire, when I discovered that the effect was caused by millions of dragonflies, perched singly on it at intervals of about 6 inches from each other! I never saw two closer than that, or more than 18 inches apart, for about 10 miles! Now and then one would fly off, or another settle, but most of them sat quite motionless on the wire. So the only “barbed wire” I have seen in Japan was made voluntarily by blue dragonflies who sat there to sun themselves. (45-46) Here, it is interesting to note Stopes’ scientific precision through numbers and units of measurement, which she combines with a vivid imagination. Capable of giving free reign to her imagination, she also demonstrates mastery of botany in her depictions of the Japanese flora: The dominant plant was Sasa, a species something like a bamboo shoot, which reaches 3 feet to 6 in height, and grows over everything, and forms a dense undergrowth all through the forests

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E S S A Y also. Subdominant plants were Vitis, a very luxuriant specimen with huge tendrils, and an extremely prickly shrub that caught one round the feet. A noticeable plant was a very large Viburnum, which has a liane-like habit and clambers up high trees. (15) Using the scientific names of the plants and referring to them as “specimen,” she further emphasizes her scientific approach to the description of nature. Yet, precisely because Stopes is fascinated by the beautiful landscapes that Japan has to offer, she is concerned about the European influence on the Japanese cityscape. While she praises its traditional architecture, she is revulsed by the sight of European constructions— “abominations of buildings,” as she calls them—which she believes have spoiled the “wooden town” of Tokyo (3). She notes that “I have protested my little best against the erection of hideous red brick buildings in this sweet city, a desecration which I see beginning and I hope they will take to heart, and forbid their erection” (7). Here, Stopes expresses the necessity of raising awareness for the preservation of the traditional Japanese building style and landscape. In her view, an exquisite natural setting ought to be untouched by the West, such as the hamlet of Matsushima: This little place, utterly unspoiled by European influence (I did not even see a European hat), is the Japan I have

dreamed of, and had begun to fear I should not find. I cannot describe it here; if anything can move me to write literature some day, it may be that place as I saw it at sunrise. (29) Not surprisingly, it is with a hint of nostalgia that Stopes urges for a return to an uncorrupted natural state of Japanese landscapes. Finally, as she is about to leave the country, Stopes catches a glimpse of majestic Mount Fuji, with its “perfect, peerless, cloudless . . . cone of the snow,” from the ship’s deck, an image all the more important as it constitutes Japan’s national emblem (264). Through her evocation of Mount Fuji and its triangular shape, Stopes ends A Journal from Japan with a strong symbol that stands for Japan’s political power. Embodying as it does social unity and the country’s pristine and idyllic nature, Stopes’ final allusion to Mount Fuji can be interpreted as a subtle reminder of von Humboldt’s triangle of connections among nature, politics, and society, while reflecting Stopes’ admiration for Japan’s natural beauty and military strength. In the end, both Stopes and von Humboldt seem to show similar concerns for the fate of these exotic, distant places. They appear, to some extent, to anticipate today’s ecological discourse and act as a precursor to the ethicopolitical principles that have been promoted in recent philosophical approaches to the environment.

Marie Geraldine Rademacher (Ph.D. Freie Universität Berlin) is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Tokyo, Japan. She is working on the project “Transpacifica: Middle European Observations of a New Global Center,” funded by the Einstein Foundation, which explores the German perception of the relations among China, Japan, and the USA between 1900 and 1945. In her research, Rademacher focuses essentially on travel writing by women who came to Japan in the early decade of the 20th century.

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Works Cited Essig, Frederick Burt. Plant Life: A Brief History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Etkind, Alexander. Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Falcon-Lang, H. J. and R. F. Miller. “Marie Stopes and the Fern Ledges of Saint John, New Brunswick.” The Role of Women in the History of Geology. ed. C. V. Burek and B. Higgs. Bath, UK: Geological Society of London, 2007, 227-246.

Maude, Aylmer. The Authorized Life of Marie C. Stopes. London: Williams & Norgate, Ltd, 1924. Moriarty, J.T. Manifest Destiny: A Primary Source History of America’s Territorial Expansion in the 19th Century. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group Inc, 2005. Stopes, Marie Carmichael. A Journal from Japan: A Daily Record of Life as Seen by a Scientist. London: Blackie and Son, 1910. ---. Botany, or the Modern Study of Plants. London and Edinburgh: T.C & E.C Jack, 1912. Wulf Andrea. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. New York: Vintage Books, 2016. Von Humboldt, Alexander. Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. Translated by John Black, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Colburn Publisher, 1811.

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汉语中的爱国主义

ON CHINESE PATRIOTISM HA JIN We often hear the Chinese people say they love China unconditionally. Many of them are proud of such a statement and won’t hesitate to make it public. They are unaware that the word aiguozhe, patriot, is highly problematic in the Chinese language. In the major Western languages, “patriotism” and “patriot” derive from the Latin word patria, which means “the land of your fathers,” or ancestral land. Patria is the etymological root of patriotism in the West, denoting the common ground of patriots, namely one’s homestead. In contrast, the Chinese word aiguozhe actually has nothing to do with a regular citizen’s existence. It just means “those who love their country,” without specifying any common ground among the patriots. The Chinese word guojia, country, etymologically is not related to a common person’s existence, even though the radical jia (home) forms a part of the word. Originally, in definition, guo refers only to the land of the emperor and the princes, and jia refers to the land owned by high courtiers. In other words, the term guojia is not associated with common people’s life.

It was not until modern times that the effort appeared to make the word also include the meaning of one’s homestead. During the Korean War, the most popular slogan was, “Defend your home and guard your country,” as if the country and one’s home were inseparable, but this was propaganda— a lie. Throughout the history of China, the word guojia was never associated with the existence of common people. It only refers to the domain and privileges of the ruling class. Worse, in Chinese the two concepts of country and state are both contained in the word guojia. This means it is hard for the Chinese to maintain the distinction between the two in their minds, and as a result many Chinese simply view the ruling power as the country. The Chinese government has taken advantage of this verbal ambiguity and tends to make the country and the state identical in people’s perception. The office in charge of China’s national

security is actually named “Ministry of State Security of the People’s Republic of China.” The word “state” here in the Chinese original should mean “nation,” but the word “state” in the English translation signifies the security of the government dominated by the Communist party. This verbal substitute, using “state” instead of “nation,” tends to hoodwink people, since most Chinese don’t make the distinction between the state and the country. Examples of this kind are ubiquitous in China, where the state and the country are not separated at all. If you make trouble for the government, you commit a crime against the country. Stretched from this sophistry, a dissident can be easily labeled a traitor of the nation. More egregiously, Chinese people’s patriotic feelings are further intensified and distorted by half a century’s absence of religious life in the social structure. Because people have had no way to worship and express their religious feelings, they tend to cast their fervent emotions onto the country, deifying it as a sacred entity. They always stand in awe of their country. The owner of Alibaba, Jack Ma, has announced that he is ready to surrender his company to the country anytime. Such an attitude is very common among the Chinese, who view the country as the foundation of their existence and their spiritual underpinnings. Besides people’s spiritual dependence on the country, ever since the Communists came to power private ownership has been banned time and again. This has forced people to rely on the country for their livelihood and survival. As a result, few could live on their own outside of the social structure. Self-reliance is out of the question and, naturally, individualism has become a pejorative word associated with bourgeois ideolo-

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gy. This situation has also made people love their country devotedly and blindly. Few can imagine an existence outside of the order of Chinese society. Everyone depends on the country to survive and prosper, and even to find self-fulfillment. Owing to such a mentality, the Chinese, when confronting their country, tend to be paralyzed and always on the defensive. You cannot accuse your country of any wrongdoing or injustice, because it is above your judgment and can never be the defendant. Such a mental state makes citizens powerless and absolutely obedient when dealing with their country. This kind of psychology is not only a Chinese phenomenon and has been prevalent in other countries as well. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants describes how the Jews obeyed the Third Reich. The second narrative in the book focuses on the schoolteacher Paul Bereyter, who grew up in a small German town and had only a quarter of Jewish blood. But when he graduated from teachers’ school, he was banned from teaching and, as a result, had to

Chinese people’s patriotic feelings are further intensified and distorted by half a century’s absence of religious life in the social structure. Because people have had no way to worship and express their religious feelings, they tend to cast their fervent emotion onto the country, deifying it as a secred entity. They always stand in awe of their country.

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E S S A Y go to France where he became a private tutor in a family. While abroad, his hometown began to persecute Jews and his parents were robbed of their property; both died soon after. Nonetheless, in 1939, when Paul was called up by the Nazi military, he returned to Germany right away and fought in an artillery regiment for six years, moving around Europe. Later in his life, he discovered what had happened to his parents—the truth he’d been too afraid to look into all his life. Then gradually, through reading, he figured out that he belonged to the community of exiles, not to his hometown, where he had always kept an apartment even though he no longer lived there. That realization devastated him. He was already over seventy and could no longer start over or change his life. Consequently he committed suicide on a railroad track. His is a case of an intelligent, sensitive man driven by blind patriotism, and as a result he had lived unquestioningly, inadvertently committing a crime against his family and himself. His tragedy originated in his unconditional love for his country.

To citizens, a country is embodied in its constitution, a set of laws agreed upon by the country and its people. In other words, the country and the citizens are equal as two partners in the agreement. If one party breaches the contract, the other party is justified in getting out of the agreement. This is the basic principle of the constitution, a treaty between the country and its citizens.

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Paul Bereyter’s was not an isolated case. There were more than 150,000 Jews who served in the Nazi army, and over a dozen of them rose to the ranks of generals. According to Sebald, the German Jews were taught in school that the Reich was sacred, similar to “the earth and the sea.” Those Jews in the Nazi military were possessed by the same kind of morbid patriotism which prevails among many Chinese nowadays, especially the zealots of the younger generation nicknamed “Little Pinkos.” Are you entitled to confront your country if it has damaged your family and yourself? Few Chinese dare respond publicly to such a question. But if we are honest and clearheaded, the answer ought to be “yes.” To citizens, a country is embodied in its constitution, a set of laws agreed upon by the country and its people. In other words, the country and the citizens are equal as two partners in the agreement. If one party breaches the contract, the other party is justified in getting out of the agreement. This is the basic principle of the constitution, a treaty between the country and its citizens. Even though there is no direct violation of your personal life, one is still entitled to confront and even betray one’s country, because at times the country is in the wrong. In modern history most crimes against humanity

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have been perpetrated in the name of country. We can take the great Germans Hans and Sophie Scholl as a model. They were not Jewish and their family was not persecuted by the Nazis, but they stood up against the Nazi regime by leading the members of White Rose in Munich in their protests and were executed by “the People’s Court” for their humane acts and beliefs. They betrayed Nazi Germany not out of

retaliation, but out of a deep commitment to universal ethical values. In other words, there are principles more meaningful than the country, and those principles can trump it. When called upon, we ought to have the courage to condemn and betray an evil country, if we want to remain human.

Writing under the pen name Ha Jin, Jīn Xuěfēi is among the most widely recognized contemporary American fiction writers. Born in Liaoning in northeastern China, in 1956, Jin at age 13 joined the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution and eventually entered Heilongjiang University in Harbin, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English. Following a master’s degree in Anglo-American literature at Shandong University, he transferred as a scholarship student to Brandeis University, where he earned a Ph.D. in American literature in 1993, which he then followed with an MFA in fiction writing from Boston University. Jin intended to return to China to pursue an academic career, but the Tiananmen Suppression in June of 1989 forced him to reevaluate his loyalties and the motivations of the Chinese government. As he has repeatedly observed, “The massacre made me feel the country was a kind of manifestation of violent apparitions.” Finding his own beliefs about vesting power in the people at odds with autocratic rule, Jin decided—in long moments of agony—to remain in and emigrate to the United States. At the same time, in a feat worthy of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, Jin shifted linguistic allegiance from Chinese to English, hoping “to preserve the integrity of his work.” By uncoupling the act of writing from a language shod through with a long history of political control, Jin opened up an expressive space for himself free from censorship and weighty ideological baggage. To date, Jin has not been able to return to his homeland. The author of 8 novels, 6 short story collections, and 5 collections of poetry, Jin won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for his collection Under the Red Flag (1997), while Ocean of Words (1996) was awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award. He received the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel Waiting (1999), as well as three Pushcart Prizes for fiction, among others. War Trash (2004), a novel set during the Korean War, was recognized with a second PEN/Faulkner Award, thus putting him into a select group of writers—such as E. L. Doctorow, Philip Roth, and John Edgar Wideman—to have received the prize more than once. War Trash was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His recent fiction includes A Good Fall (2009), Nanjing Requiem (2011), A Map of Betrayal (2014), and The Boat Rocker (2017). He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2014. Jin currently teaches at Boston University, specializing in the teaching of fiction and immigrant literature. SPRING/SUMMER 2019

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恐怖からの自由

Freedom From Fear Setsuko Winchester

黄色のボウルプロジェクト

Yellow Bowl Project © Setsuko Winchester

On January 6, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave what is now known as the Four Freedoms Speech. In it he said that all Americans were entitled to Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. A year later, he would sign EO 9066, three months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which would forcibly remove and imprison over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry into ten American concentration camps. The majority were U.S. citizens. No one of Japanese ethnicity was ever found guilty of treason or espionage. Setsuko Winchester is an American of Japanese ancestry, a ceramicist, photographer, and journalist. In 2014 she began to research the history of Japanese-American incarceration in earnest. What she found was a long history of anti-Asian legislation dating back to the 1800s. In 2015, prior to the 75th anniversary of FDR’s famous speech, she turned to art to bring attention to this as of yet little examined aspect of U.S. history. The Freedom From Fear/Yellow Bowl Project is, first, a personal journey of discovery; second, a journey into American history; and, third, a physical odyssey that included two trips covering over 16,000 miles across the United States. Winchester tells the story of Japanese-American persecution through 120 hand-pinched, yellow tea bowls (one for every thousand individuals)—yellow for the “yellow peril,” as the Japanese were called, and tea bowls because the philosophy of tea celebrates simplicity and the imperfection found in nature. A material acknowledgement of a shared humanity, these tea bowls are an attempt to find beauty not just in the extraordinary, but in the everyday. Winchester took the bowls to the sites of the ten concentration camps and photographed them in situ, to document and acknowledge symbolically what took place there.

She also took the tea bowls to five other locations to bring into greater focus that not all Americans were provided these freedoms enshrined in FDR’s speech. She shows how the tea bowls are excluded on the other side of the wall where the Four Freedoms are inscribed at the Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island. She shows them on the steps of the Supreme Court to recognize the four citizens who took the issue of exclusion before the Judiciary. She sets them up at the Memorial to Japanese American Patriotism in Washington, D.C., to acknowledge the 33,000 men and women from the camps who would go on to serve, many with honors, in the US military, the nurses corp, WAC, and the MIS. She shows how the tea bowls are the object of fear and stand outside the depiction of Freedom from Fear painted by Norman Rockwell in Stockbridge, MA. In 2016, Winchester and “Yellow Peril” were invited to go and create a sitespecific image at the FDR Library and Museum in Hyde Park, NY. The resulting art piece shows the bowls forming into the shadow of a yellow man at the foot of a sculpture of the figure of a man and woman cut out of the Berlin Wall labeled “Freedom from Fear.” In artistic terms, the Freedom from Fear/Yellow Bowl Project takes the online phenomenon of photographing mundane objects—like stuffed animals, the “Garden Gnome,” or the drawing of “Flat Stanley”—and subverts it. Instead of taking objects that are easy to transport, the objects in question are 120 delicate and fragile tea bowls. Rather than traveling to enviable locations—like to the foot of the Eiffel Tower or a pristine beach in Bali—the objects go to places most people have never heard of nor would probably ever go. The images are an optical illusion. Just as the “Garden Gnome“ is not actually as tall as the Eiffel Tower, the “Yellow Peril,“ portrayed by the media and the government of the time as larger-than-life fiends, were very human and, rather than to be feared, had in fact much to fear from their government. History shows that freedom and the idea of America is an ever-evolving process. Never straightforward and often contradictory, Setsuko Winchester’s project is an expression of a wish that the United States can keep the process moving forward, toward hope and away from fear. For more of Winchester’s work, see her blog at www.yellowbowlproject.com.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;H.L. Mencken

ÂŠ Setsuko Winchester

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Abraham Lincoln

ÂŠ Setsuko Winchester

The secret to happiness is freedom . . . And the secret to freedom is courage. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Thucydides

ÂŠ Setsuko Winchester

A R T

SPACE OF EMPTINESS Mao Xiaojian 毛晓剑 is a contemporary Chinese artist who grew out of the rich tradition of Chinese ink painting. Born in 1970 into a family of artists, Mao grew up in Nanjing and started his career early in life. In junior high school he studied woodblock printing, and some of his works were submitted to and displayed at national exhibitions. At the age of sixteen he continued his study at one of the nationally renowned art high schools. At nineteen he was accepted into Nanjing University of the Arts, where for the next four years he majored in fresco painting and tried his hand in a wide range of media and techniques: drawing, Chinese ink, oil, watercolor, gouache, sculpture, mosaics, ceramics, etc. Like many of his contemporaries, he is a comprehensively and rigorously trained artist, well versed in both Eastern and Western art traditions.

MAO XIAOJIAN Essay by MAI MANG Artwork by

ON MAO XIAOJIAN AND HIS ART It is therefore most telling that Mao would eventually commit himself almost entirely to Chinese ink painting. This choice, first and foremost, may be attributed to the unique characteristics of his native environment, which, in a broader sense, has long been referred to as Jiangnan ćą&#x;ĺ?&#x2014; or the South of the Yangtze: The South of the Yangtze is the place where I was born and raised. The moist air, the misty climate, is particularly suitable for poetic expression through the language of Chinese

painting. I grew up here, deeply feeling the attraction of nature.1 Locally produced Chinese painting materials, such as rice paper, are also dear to Mao: The rice paper for Chinese painting is completely handmade with natural materials such as tree skins . . . Rice paper can breathe, and its meaning of life is that of water transforming ink into the very fabric of the rice paper.2

A R T In fact, dating back to as early as the Six Dynasty (222-589) period, when Nanjing was the political capital and cultural center, the region of Jiangnan was producing some of the most famous Chinese poets, calligraphers, and artists, including Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (303-361), one of the greatest calligraphers in Chinese history, whose masterpiece Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion 兰亭集序 is admired to this day. Similarly, there is Xie Lingyun 谢灵运 (385-433), who founded the landscape or “mountains and waters” 山水 poetry tradition, or Xie He 谢赫 (479-502), an artist and art critic whose “Six Principles of Painting” 六法 have been held as the central tenets of traditional Chinese painting. These pioneers have all profoundly influenced how Chinese literati viewed their relationship with landscapes and the universe through literature and art. The inborn, kindred affinity Mao has for Jiangnan, both as an actual geographical entity and a source of imagination, provides him with a precious sense of identity and belonging, which is crucial when assessing his art.

2 Landscape has long been Mao’s most accomplished genre. His landscape paintings are nearly all vertical compositions, very simi-

lar to what we have seen in the old landscape masterpieces, employing the traditional scattered perspective principles such as “three distances” 三远. All the essentials are there: mountains, streams, trees, rocks, clouds, pavilions, which are sometimes half-hidden but always evocative. And, if our eyes move from the bottom to the top of Mao’s landscapes, we find more and more open, empty spaces, where only clouds are rolling and enveloping the mountain peaks, embodying the theme of harmony between heaven and human that is inherited from the tradition but also contemporarily relevant. Chinese critic Li Li 李黎 rightfully comments upon this contemporary, humanistic relevance: We cannot say that “harmony between heaven and human” is only specific to the ancients and not applicable to the current and future generations . . . . Mao Xiaojian issues a plea for peace and tranquility that a rapidly progressing society direly needs to return to. Steep cliffs and waterfalls are like the current time, which pulls everyone into its orbit; but everyone also needs their own place, their own home. Such a constantly repeated expression gives Mao Xiaojian’s paintings a philosophical dimension, reflecting upon the ultimate theme of human existence.3

Echoing this spirit, Mao’s landscapes often come with poetic titles, many of which are derived from classical Chinese poems. From time to time, Mao would even directly inscribe entire poems onto the landscapes. As aforementioned, both poetry and calligraphy are closely intertwined with traditional Chinese ink painting, especially in Chinese literati painting, where quite often calligraphy is considered an indispensable component of the painting itself, which allows the semi-abstract landscape to push far beyond its physical, visual boundaries. For example, in one piece titled Building a Hut in the Human Realm 结庐在人境 (Figure 1), Mao inscribed a poem by another great Six Dynasty poet, Tao Yuanming 陶渊明(365-427), whose first four lines read: I live in town without all that racket horses and carts stir up, and you wonder how that could be. Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself a distant place.4 “Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself a distant place.” I actually see this as Mao’s own idealistic, artistic aspiration and also a practical strategy to negotiate his own position as a contemporary artist living in contemporary China. Fig. 1: 结庐在人境 Building a Hut in the Human Realm, 2016. Ink on paper. 138 cm x 61 cm.

A R T Still, finding one’s own hermitage in nature or in society may not be all that Mao is after. Mao yearns for a further, inner space of completely unconstrained freedom. Hence we encounter the other landscape, titled Floating, Rolling, Infinite 舒卷意何穷 (Figure 2). It is Mao’s illustration of Tang monk-poet Jiao Ran’s 皎然 (730-799) poem that was originally titled “Clouds over Streams” 溪云, which comprises only six lines: Floating, rolling, infinite Staying, flowing, empty Possessing a form, yet not a burden No traces dispersed by the wind Don’t blame them for always being in your company Unattached, they are just like me Perhaps this landscape, along with its inscribed poem even more clearly presents Mao’s ultimate aesthetic aspiration, as symbolized by the swift, rapid brush strokes representing the rhythm of floating clouds amidst and above the mountain peaks. That space of unbound freedom is precisely what Mao calls “space of emptiness” 空的空间. Mao himself explains: So my experience about creation is to create the space of emptiness: “emptiness” 空 refers to the blank of spirit and thought, to the infinite possibilities, whereas “space” 空间 refers to the method of molding, to the unique sense of form. They are two into one, and emotionally interdependent.5

Fig. 2: 舒卷意何穷 Floating, Rolling, Infinite, 2016. Ink on paper. 139 cm x 35 cm.

Fig. 3: 听瀑图 Listening to the Waterfall, 2015. Ink on paper. 70 cm x 46 cm.

A R T 3 Corresponding to this “space of emptiness” is another key concept: “no self”无我. Mao’s landscapes are for the most part devoid of any human figures: there always is an empty pavilion or some sort of abstract building, but humans are absent. One painting, Listening to the Waterfall 听瀑图 (Figure 3), stands as an interesting exception. It directly foregrounds an anonymous ancient hermit sitting upright on an untied boat, facing toward the viewers and away from the waterfall at the background, yet his ears are cocked in the direction of the thundering waterfall, and his face shows no emotion but that of a complete immersion and self-forgetting. In that sense, we might even view it as a spiritual self-portrait of Mao, as Wuwo 无我 or “no self” is actually Mao’s own nom d’artiste in real life, whose actual meaning has been interpreted as such: placing the small “I” into the great tradition and against the even greater expectation, transforming “I” into “none,” that is, “no self.” Such a state of being is Eastern, is that of water, is that of the eternal flow: as long as the sky and as old as the earth.6

Of course, both “space of emptiness” and “no self” are highly idealized scenarios. In reality, in the process of creation I often felt all sorts of emotions surging up: yearning, impulse, confusion, loss, joy, sorrow . . . I often couldn’t be sure which emotion was the one I wanted to express, so unknowingly I would lose myself, just as I would also work relentlessly hard to perfect my composition.7 Indeed, underneath the façade of harmony and tranquility, there lie in Mao’s art various intense, labyrinthine contradictions and tensions: between spontaneity and control, action and stillness, expression and silence, and many more. Such contradictions and tensions may not be readily apparent to the viewer’s eyes, but are definitely there. For example, contrary to the normal perception of “emptiness,” many of his compositions are deliberately filled with brush strokes to the extent that the entire space feels nearly full. By doing so, Mao confesses that his intention is “to create an entirely new space outside the actual painting itself.”8

We can see Mao’s experimental side in some of his recent works, too. For instance, in one of his newest paintings, Uncovered Landscape 未被覆盖的山水 (Figure 4), Mao is clearly pursuing a spontaneous effect of spilling and dripping, and the level of abstraction and expressiveness reaches a much bolder level.

Fig. 4: 未被覆盖的山水 Uncovered Landscape, 2016. Ink and color on paper. 139 cm x 70 cm.

A R T But what attracts most of my attention are those paintings depicting snowing scenes, ranging from Winter Snow 冬雪白絮 to Snow Reflecting on the Wattle Gate 柴门映雪图. Particularly, in Empty and Solitary Mountains 空山寂寥图 (Figure 5), the once painstakingly and meticulously arranged order of mountains and waters is under the assault of the agitated, restless, sometimes violent and overtly expressive swirling of snow flakes, almost at the risk of collapsing and disappearing, with all the once familiar contours and boundaries being blurred, distorted, and overridden. The dramatic stillness is as how the Zen idiom would have it: “silent like a thunder” 一默如雷.

Fig. 5: 空山寂寥图 Empty and Solitary Mountains, 2017. Ink on paper. 112 cm x 51 cm.

4 Nevertheless, Mao is not ready to label himself an experimental artist or identify entirely with the contemporary trend of experimental ink painting. The debate over the future of Chinese ink painting has been ongoing in the field of contemporary Chinese art for the last few decades. For some, the Chinese ink painting tradition is an exhausted mine. For others, a new peak is yet to come. I personally think that Mao should feel blessed for being where he is right now: at a crossroads between the past and the future, the East and the West. On the one hand, Mao has the privilege to take the long view. On the other, precisely because Chinese ink painting is such a splendid tradition, which has offered so many unfulfilled possibilities, and because Mao has studied and learned the tradition so well inside and out, he should feel free and empowered to further experiment and explore that new, not yet existing space of emptiness on his own terms.

The Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera once referred to his reading of a novel by an Austrian author in which the protagonist awakes one morning only to “find the world around him empty, without humans,” and that he is the last and only man left.9 The protagonist goes out to look for the lost memories of the world and himself, but to no avail. In the end he has to kill himself out of unbearable loneliness and despair. Kundera invoked this example to illustrate what he calls “the total rejection of heritage” in modern European context and a bleak but possible prospect that the world and tradition we take for granted may, without any prior warning, come to an abrupt end. Contrary to this oneiric dystopia, however, Mao’s own “space of emptiness” where “no self” inhabits has a completely different connotation: not in the least an abandoned or dead-end world, it is life-giving, inviting, affirmative, and aspirational.

A R T For instance, Mao also has large-scale paintings, such as Golden Plateau 金色高原 (Figure 6), that depict the layered landscapes of high plateaus in western China with impressive use of rich colors, which obviously shows the influence of his fresco painting background. That is, Mao has been embracing, not rejecting, the total heritage of Chinese painting, both ink and non-ink. In that sense, again, although supposedly possessing “no self,” Mao is lucky as he has his own deep and wide roots and is not standing alone. Accordingly, through viewing Mao’s recent paintings, we may also gain con-

fidence that the world of Chinese landscapes, which is as natural as it is human, as contemporary as it is traditional, as empty as it is infinite, will remain and last, ever self-renewing and relevant. After all, the world of landscapes is one that has encouraged, and will continue to encourage, ambitious Chinese artists like Mao Xiaojian himself to strive for a more enlarging, accommodating space for all the lingering human dreams of the past millennia. New London, Connecticut January 15, 2017

The Children’s Hour, oil on board, 16” x 20.5”, 2017

Fig. 6: 金色高原 Golden Plateau, 2014. Color on paper. 200 cm x 200 cm.

Notes 1. Mao Xiaojian, interview with the author, January 14, 2017. 2. Ibid. 3. Li Li, “Amidst Mountains and Waters, Building a Hut in the Human Realm: Reflections on Mao Xiaojian’s Art” 山水天成结庐人间——毛晓剑作品随感, in Contemporary Painting: Mao Xiaojian 当代绘画：毛晓剑 (Nanjing: Jiangsu fenghuang meishu chubanshe, 2015), p. 1. 4. The Selected Poems of T’ao Ch’ien. Trans. David Hinton (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1993), p. 52. 5. Mao Xiaojian, interview with the author, January 10, 2017. 6. Li Li, “Amidst Mountains and Waters, Building a Hut in the Human Realm,” p. 2. 7. Mao Xiaojian, interview with the author, January 9, 2017. 8. Mao Xiaojian, interview with the author, January 10, 2017. 9. Milan Kundera, Encounter. Trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 78.

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寻找毛泽东时代中国的身份—中国国际贸易促进委员会及其领导, 1952-1966

SEARCHING FOR IDENTITY IN MAOIST CHINA— The CCPIT and its Leadership, 1952-1966 GREG LEWIS This essay will focus on institution and leadership of the China Committee for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT) from its inception in 1952 to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in 1966. Recent scholarship links the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) financial institutions and policies to rapid economic growth since 2000. While these works necessarily consider history from a macro, or top-down, perspective, my research examines the implementation of policies and institution-building from the bottom-up. The CCPIT leadership combined the varied skills and personalities of three individuals. Nan Hanchen (1895-1967), the eldest and CCPIT chairman, served as a paternalistic steadying hand over all. A man of few words raised in China’s rural west, Nan rose steadily through Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ranks after 1926 via astute decision-making that ameliorated successive local and national economic crises between 1942 and 1950. Ji Chaoding (1903-1963), also a Shanxi native—though from an elite family—entered the CCP while studying economics in the United States. Verbose

and dramatic, Ji’s capabilities as a technician, organizer, and propagandist were unknown to most CCP members due to his many years underground. Lei Renmin (1909-2005), the youngest of the three, also hailed from Shanxi. He showed great intellectual promise but returned from studying law in Japan to join the CCP at the outbreak of the anti-Japanese war in 1937. A CCP choirboy by the standards of his time, meticulous and affirming of political orthodoxy, Lei’s work in CCP internal affairs and intelligence in some ways made him an unlikely choice as vice-chair in both the Foreign Trade Ministry and the CCPIT. The essay’s focus on interactions within the CCPIT by its distinctive leadership group raises several questions. First, how do the organization’s successes and failures over those fourteen years affirm or refute what we generally know about Maoist China’s planned economy and development? What role might CCPIT’s leadership have played, both individually and collectively, to effect these outcomes? Finally, how might the varied experiences of Lei Renmin, Ji Chaoding. and especially Nan Hanchen dur-

E S S A Y ing those years alter scholarly thinking and perspectives given recent economic development and historiography?

CCPIT Successes and Failures The China Committee for the Promotion of International Trade formed directly after an April 1952 international economic summit in Moscow attended by 48 countries. Nearly 500 representatives gathered to discuss how a U.S.imposed economic blockade and trade embargo affecting China (PRC) and the Soviet bloc might be circumvented to foster international commercial ties. China’s 25 delegates, purportedly selected by Premier Zhou Enlai, outnumbered all except the host nation (Soviet Union). Headed by future CCPIT chairman Nan Hanchen, the China group featured economic experts led by Ji Chaoding and party reliables like Lei Renmin. Sentiment outside the communist bloc for increased free trade brought CCPIT successive agreements with Japan (1952), Sri Lanka (1952), and Britain (1953).1 Despite its early achievements, the CCPIT was overshadowed by Chinese press coverage which touted Foreign Trade Ministry business with the Soviet bloc, much to Zhou Enlai’s chagrin. In the absence of regular media attention when contemplating CCPIT’s significance, one must remember that the PRC had diplomatic relationships with only twenty countries in May 1952. Furthermore, the flexibility given to the CCPIT by virtue of its “unofficial” government status enabled it to interact in several ways with any country that did not recognize the PRC: via groups, enterprises, industries, or even individuals. For example, following a successful PRC goods display in Moscow, an exhibition department designed to both host and set up exhibits

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abroad became a key CCPIT component (with more than 100 PRC exhibitions abroad pre-GPCR, while China hosted more than 30 foreign exhibits in the same period). The CCPIT also expanded operations to include departments in research, legal affairs, arbitration, and training, with the result that it more than doubled in size— to more than 200 employees—by 1956. Despite steady growth in its personnel and scope of activities, CCPIT in another way “flat-lined” in the mid-1950s as contracted-for trade volume, with Japan and Britain especially, failed to materialize. This heightened tensions between the CCPIT and Foreign Trade Ministry, which viewed the fledgling organization as a rival over which it had no formal control. Yet important milestones lay ahead for the CCPIT, which decisively pierced the Western blockade and embargo with trade missions to Britain and West Germany in 1957. These differed substantially from previous CCPIT delegations in that they were stocked with Chinese technical experts, engineers,

When contemplating CCPIT’s significance, one must remember that the People’s Republic of China had diplomatic relationships with only twenty countries in May 1952. Furthermore, the flexibility given to the CCPIT by virtue of its “unofficial” government status enabled it to interact in several ways with any country that did not recognize the PRC: via groups, enterprises, industries, or even individuals.

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and industry leaders able to “cut to the chase” with their Western counterparts in order to facilitate bilateral trade. Amazingly, the CCPIT abruptly shifted away from Western Europe directly following these trade missions, a development that puzzled the many Westerners who had thought they had finally gotten “up close and personal” with the communist-led regime. Several explanations can be offered for the CCPIT’s reorientation during the Great Leap period between 1958 and 1962. First, tensions between intellectuals and orthodox ideological dictates from the Anti-Rightist campaign in late 1957 forced the organization to adopt a more overtly political stance in the form of support for “national people’s struggles” in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Second, rising tensions with the Soviet Union led directly to China’s active involvement in the fledgling Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), as they sought to compete with Soviet influence in the so-called Third World. Finally, the economic reversal of the utopian Great Leap Forward between 1959 and 1962, including declines in foreign trade, somewhat marginalized the CCPIT vis-à-vis the Foreign Trade Ministry and also took it farther afield geographically and even functionally from where it had been. Even so, the CCPIT counted 500 employees by 1959 and moved into its present quarters in Beijing’s western Xidan district the next year. The organization continued to grow functionally, too, adding a full-blown propaganda and advertising arm, enhancing its domestic and international exhibition departments, and developing a current periodicals reading room that attracted so many outside patrons it was eventually converted into a library.2 Once the Great Leap crisis fully receded, the CCPIT resumed contact with

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Western Europe, including Britain (1963), France (1963), Italy (1965), and Austria (1966). This period, known as the Thermidorean Interregnum (or “cooling off” before the Cultural Revolution began), also saw a continuing, vigorous push by the CCPIT—in the form of national commodity exhibitions—in Latin America, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Nan Hanchen, who had spent the better part of five years after 1954 convalescing due to poor health, became the organization’s “go to” delegation leader after Ji Chaoding’s sudden death in August 1963. The shift in the CCPIT’s leadership had predictable consequences for the organization’s geographic focus. As vice-chairman, Ji Chaoding had assiduously cultivated relationships with Western Europe between 1952 and 1958. Although Western European nations did resume interaction with CCPIT after 1962, Ji’s death one year later slowed what might otherwise have been a rapid increase in trade volume and technology transfers within the Eurasian network. Thereafter Nan Hanchen reinvigorated his long-standing connection to Japan, which sent at least five delegations to Beijing in the three years prior to the Cultural Revolution.

CCPIT Leadership Examination of CCPIT leadership usually begins with the actions and philosophy of the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. Zhou believed that people-topeople relations via trade and cultural exchanges would weaken the US-led trade embargo starting at the grassroots level. Eventually these exchanges would smooth the way for formal diplomatic relations with capitalist countries. As Zhou said, “Where water flows, a channel will follow” (shui dao qu cheng).3 Nan Hanchen was the natural choice to chair the organization. Nan’s activist

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E S S A Y

Source: Commemorative Album of Nan Hanchen

CCPIT braintrust: Nan Hanchen and Ji Chaoding, probably in Cairo, 1958.

trajectory dated to the 1911 Revolution. Despite dire family straits, he persevered in educating himself, including during brief stints in the Soviet Union and Japan after joining the CCP in 1926. He then transitioned to wartime institution-building, sometimes as a marked man, before moving to Yanan in 1939. In the ShanGan-Ning border region in 1941, Nan confronted on a smaller scale many of the ills that he faced nationally at the People’s Bank between 1947 and 1950: runaway inflation, a thriving black market rife with speculators and woefully inadequate production and distribution. His stature arguably peaked in 1952 when he was tapped to deliver the keynote address at the Moscow International Economic Conference. If Nan Hanchen was the quintessential homegrown CCP insider, then Ji Chaoding was the classic outsider. Ji came from an educated landlord family, receiving degrees from Beijing’s Tsinghua school, the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1936. Ji joined the Chinese

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Communist Party only a year later than Nan Hanchen, yet his unusual service to the CCP as a student activist and liaison with the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the Comintern, as editor of the English-language CCP monthly China Today/Zhongguo jinri, and from 1941 as a currency and trade expert in the Nationalist government’s Ministry of Finance made him mysterious to almost all CCP members. Though Ji ostensibly renounced his communist beliefs before joining the Nationalists, he transmitted financial intelligence, foreign currency, and pharmaceutical transfers to CCP base areas. In early 1949 Ji Chaoding traveled to Beijing from Chongqing and for the first time was publicly acknowledged as a part of the new communist party-state. He joined Nan Hanchen at the People’s Bank and gained his support while advising the new government about how to attack Shanghai’s speculators, inflation, and black market. Ji was a proven institution builder, with the outstanding examples being the American Friends of the Chinese People in New York (his own propaganda arm for China Today), the Nationalist government’s wartime Exchange Control Commission (19431948), and the economic research department at the Central Bank of China (19441949). He essentially replicated the latter organization at the People’s Bank during the 1949-1950 transition period, employing several Marxist analysts who had contributed to the Central Bank Monthly before 1949. The third member of the CCPIT’s initial leadership, Lei Renmin, was substantially junior to Nan and Ji Chaoding in age and experience. The same year Ji joined the CCP (1927), Lei entered the Young Communist League and began studying law at Beijing University. Lei’s studies took him to Japan in 1934, and he

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joined the CCP in 1937 upon his return to China. By 1942 he was in Yanan, where he studied Marxism and worked in party organization and intelligence. In 1949 Lei became director of CCP internal affairs in North China, and then zealously prosecuted economic and political corruption in the successive Three- and Five-Anti campaigns beginning in 1951. Against all odds, Lei joined the Foreign Trade Ministry as vice-chairman the same year.4 Four initiatives taken by the CCPIT triumvirate in its formative years, especially in 1952, enabled its future viability. First, two important agreements came out of the Moscow conference itself. Nan Hanchen and Lei Renmin leveraged their living experience in Japan to conclude a U.S. $168 million trade protocol with their Japanese counterparts in Beijing directly after the conference. Similarly, Ji Chaoding utilized his contacts from a stint in Britain as a visiting scholar to facilitate a U.S. $56 million Sino-British trade agreement in Moscow. Second, the USSR abruptly withdrew from seeking trade partners outside the communist bloc. They absented themselves from an executive meeting in Vienna in July 1952, essentially leaving delegates from more than two dozen nations to fend for themselves. In the wake of the Soviet absence, CCPIT attendee Ji Chaoding not only affirmed his country’s commitment to trade with even capitalist nations based on the principles of equality and mutual benefit, but personally enhanced China’s leadership role. The final example showing CCPIT leadership initiative is the so-called “rice for rubber” agreement concluded with Sri Lanka in December 1952. The idea for this five-year barter agreement (worth an astonishing U.S. $400 million) originated when Ji Chaoding met Sri Lanka’s trade minister at the Moscow conference. Made aware of this relationship, Zhou Enlai

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ordered the CCPIT to act as hosts for a Sri Lankan delegation when it arrived in Beijing a few months later. With the agreement, Sri Lanka, which exported almost its entire output of rubber and tea to pay for vital rice imports, ensured adequate food for the population and stable employment for its 300,000-strong rubber workforce threatened by prices that had been depressed to a post-war low.5 The CCPIT’s outward thrust in 195253 led to a widening of its institutional structure and scope of activities, and a refinement of protocol. At that time, Soviet bloc countries absorbed 90 percent of China’s exports and were responsible for 97 percent of China’s imports. Therefore, much room existed for trade expansion outside the bloc, a point made by each of the CCPIT’s leaders in various publications throughout the period. With regard to its protocol, a former CCPIT official pointed to the “rice for rubber” agreement as a decisive watershed. Zhou Enlai’s interactions with the Sri Lankan delegation that inked the trade pact in Beijing impressed upon CCPIT leadership that deepening and broadening foreign friendships outside the trade arena first could lead to substantial economic payoffs..6 Accordingly, the CCPIT ramped up its institutional structure from 1953 to approach prospective trade partners more knowledgably. Nan Hanchen especially had formerly led a massive overhaul of the People’s Bank, with Ji Chaoding assisting him in the area of economic research. Together they aggressively recruited finance specialists from the People’s Bank, the Bank of China, the National Customs Bureau, Beijing University, and People’s University. They also assisted these organizations in establishing a two-year vocational school on international finance, trade, and marketing that opened in 1954. Inter-

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The CCPIT’s outward thrust in 1952-53 led to a widening of its institutional structure and scope of activities, and a refinement of protocol. At that time, Soviet bloc countries absorbed 90 percent of China’s exports and were responsible for 97 percent of China’s imports. Therefore, much room existed for trade expansion outside the bloc, a point made by each of the CCPIT’s leaders in various publications throughout the period. With regard to its protocol, a former CCPIT official pointed to the “rice for rubber” agreement as a decisive watershed. Zhou Enlai’s interactions with the Sri Lankan delegation that inked the trade pact in Beijing impressed upon CCPIT leadership that deepening and broadening foreign friendships outside the trade arena first could lead to substantial economic payoffs. nally, CCPIT’s trade exhibition department grew rapidly, as did the number of China’s exhibitions abroad. In this area CCPIT worked well with the Foreign Trade Ministry. Egypt is a prime example: Even before Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, an enthusiastic Egyptian response to a lengthy CCPIT exhibition of PRC industrial and agricultural products led to formal SinoEgyptian diplomatic and trade relations in May 1956. Besides expanding its economic research and trade exhibition departments, the CCPIT broadened its scope of activities in 1954 to include foreign trade arbitration and copyright laws. These came about in anticipation of conducting trade with non-communist nations, and also perhaps because of unfulfilled aspects of the 1952 trade protocols with Japan and Britain.7 In the five years following this organizational expansion, the CCPIT came close to realizing its own hoped-for potential. Ji Chaoding was named CCPIT vice-chair in 1955, an action that not coincidentally paralleled Nan Hanchen’s withdrawal from day to day supervision. Ji assiduously sought to mold the organization

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according to his administrative experience. He personally oversaw the drafting of the Foreign Arbitration office’s mission statement, the hiring of its initial cohort of twenty employees, and, most controversially, the locating of its office in Switzerland in 1956. A year later he followed virtually the same process with the trademark and copyright law office.8 The international arena also briefly favored China after Britain walked away from the “China differential” in 1957, as this action effectively ended the U.S. trade embargo when other Western European nations followed suit. Japan also took advantage of the newly relaxed environment; the third Sino-Japanese agreement generated vital surpluses for China over three successive years. Within China, the CCPIT’s research arm benefited immediately, as its exhibition department and the number of items it displayed expanded. Increased marketing and research led to publication of an 88-page foreign trade quarterly in English and Spanish that was distributed to more than 60 countries. The capstone in the CCPIT’s rise to prominence came in the aforementioned trade missions to Britain and West Germany that featured Chi-

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nese experts in electronics, chemicals, and mechanical engineering. These delegations visited an astonishing 150 factories and did much to impress their Western hosts regarding the possibilities of future cooperative ventures. In fact, Ji Chaoding, who led the delegations, urged that China greatly increase foreign investment funding Source: Commemorative Album of Nan Hanchen An affectionate Nan Hanchen (2nd L) with Lei Renmin (3rd L), with whom and technology transfers, create a technical informa- he shared Shanxi and Yanan guerrilla base area roots. tion institute, and identify time in Cambodia, Cuba, Brazil, Argenand recruit Chinese people for educatina, and Chile, bringing the total number tion in European languages, culture, and of countries the organization had interpolitical economy. acted with to 93. Despite this activity and Ji’s bold ploy came one month after Nan Hanchen’s extensive direct contact the beginning of the Anti-Rightist camwith charismatic leaders Norodom paign (September 1957). With politics in Sihanouk, Fidel Castro, Joao Goulart, command, the campaign’s slogan that and Kim Il-Sung, the CCPIT struggled to “outsiders cannot lead insiders” (waisecure a respected place within the PRC hang buneng lingdai neihang) turned those organizational hierarchy. Domestically with technical expertise on their heads. the shrill anti-imperial tone of leadershipPolitical orthodoxy steadily ascended authored articles only reinforced CCPIT’s during the Great Leap Forward that defensive posturing through 1961. Even followed so that Ji’s proposal became a when trade and exhibitions with Western kind of heresy. A further watershed in Europe resumed with the Thermidorean the CCPIT’s turn away from the West Interregnum after 1962, the CCPIT came with the July 1958 Iraqi revolution. labored to regain the momentum it had When combined with Egypt’s nationalbefore the Anti-Rightist campaign.9 izing of the Suez Canal in 1956, PRC Politics in command did no favors for leadership determined that the emerging CCPIT leadership in the lead-up to the anti-colonial fight in Asia and Africa was Cultural Revolution (1962-1966). Ji Chatoo critical to ignore further. Accordingly, oding, under close scrutiny after 1957, Nan Hanchen and Ji Chaoding traveled nevertheless benefited from the cover of together in 1958 to Cairo, their first such his activities in the World Peace Council joint trip since 1952. and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity The end of Nan Hanchen’s semiOrganization (AAPSO) until embarking retirement in 1958 likely resulted from on a ten-country, six-week CCPIT junket national policies and the vulnerable to Latin America in spring 1963. Tragipolitical status of his vice-chair, Ji, rather cally, it was his last overseas journey. An than due to any improvement in his undisciplined and chronically overhealth. In any event, higher profile CCPIT weight diabetic, he died suddenly of an trade exhibitions appeared for the first aneurism while working in his office in

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E S S A Y August 1963. Meanwhile, Lei Renmin’s antipathy toward Ji Chaoding was common knowledge within the CCPIT. When Ji became CCPIT vice-chair and essentially took over its day-to-day operations, Lei virtually disappeared from the organization in favor of the Foreign Trade Ministry (where he was vice-minister). Finally, Nan Hanchen’s higher profile within the CCPIT after Ji’s death ended, unbelievably, with his suicide in January 1967 during the early, active phase of the Cultural Revolution.

Conclusion Institutionally and politically, the CCPIT appears to offer a direct link between the Maoist and post-1978 economic reform era where capitalism and foreign trade are concerned. However, the apparent disconnect between CCPIT outcomes, its institutional structure, and the unhappy fate of its leadership begs for answers to the questions this essay posed in the introduction. First, regarding CCPIT successes and failures and its adherence to the dictates of the Maoist planned economy: Zhou Enlai provided CCPIT with a viable blueprint for peopleto-people relations and then assembled a leadership group that could realize it. The prior institution-building experiences of Nan Hanchen and Ji Chaoding, and Lei Renmin with internal party affairs, were repeated even more quickly so that a unified and effective CCPIT staff emerged within two years. As an organization with an open-ended agenda and vested with the task of overcoming an overtly hostile embargo and blockade, the CCPIT’s achievements were considerable. Leaders conducted trade with dozens of nations regardless of ideological differences or the lack of formal relations. Several times they also resuscitated floundering agreements with Britain and Japan precisely because

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of their unbounded status. This became less true after 1957, when greater adherence to political orthodoxy caused the substantially different outlooks of Ji Chaoding and Lei Renmin to surface. Second, examination of CCPIT’s individual leaders moves us from a macro, or institutional focus, to something different—from the bottom-up. Nan Hanchen’s activist credentials dating to the 1911 Revolution plus his outstanding service to his nation and party made him a proven financial leader, and within the party his extensive contact with Mao Zedong and Chen Yun conferred upon him both legitimacy and status. Further, Nan’s favorable reputation assisted him in his semi-retirement and again when he re-emerged as active chairman in 1958. His wife worked by his side (at CCPIT) right up until his death, and several of his 11 children maintained ties to the government and the organization.10 Lei Renmin was the closest to realizing the link between eras as an individual. He alone among the three CCPIT leaders lived into the reform era, and explicitly indicated his desire to be associated with China’s post-GPCR economic successes. Self-interest on Lei’s part may account for this, as Lei became Minister of Foreign Trade after 1979. My interaction with Lei in 1997 also reflected this: he played up the successes of the 1949-57 period but didn’t want to deal with the inter- and intraorganizational tensions that increased after 1955. To understand these tensions one has to look to the differing backgrounds and formative experiences of Lei Renmin and Ji Chaoding, especially. Ji Chaoding offers a second exciting perspective on linking the Mao period with the current reform era. Ji was even more aggressive than Zhou Enlai in wanting to increase commercial ties with the West and felt China could rapidly increase both foreign trade volume and

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foreign investment. Ji’s education, knowledge, and near-native fluency made him uniquely qualified for his work. Having cultivated relationships with Western economists and government officials from the 1930s, he conceived and organized CCPIT so that it could transact and compete with the West. Critics like Lei Renmin sought to limit or even curtail Ji Chaoding’s influence. Ji’s years of service to the Nationalist government, his membership in that government’s Guomindang party (which required a corresponding public renunciation of communism), and his use of pseudonyms to disguise his identity all made him politically vulnerable. So did a chaotic personal life that included marriage to an American of Russian descent, a second marriage in China at the liberation, and an illegitimate child he fathered in Chongqing that several CCP leaders knew about. Moreover, Ji had hosted Western visitors like Edgar Snow, Anna Louise Strong, and Lord Boyd Orr in his Beijing home during the lean days of the Great Leap Forward, a breach of protocol that underscored his independent train of thinking. Ji Chaoding’s history after 1957 suggests, finally, the limits of PRC outreach to the West. His proposal of that year remained unacted upon, although arguably he realized his greatest achievement—an exchange of technical missions with Britain and West Germany that placed China on the doorstep of advanced technology acquisitions in a half dozen fields. However, as China’s national focus shifted to Africa and Asia with the AAPSO, Ji was shunted aside, leading trade delegations to Cairo, West Africa, and Latin America. He aged noticeably after 1957 and was dead by the age of 60. For an assessment of the most accomplished and least controversial CCPIT leader, Nan Hanchen, comparatively fresh historiography exists (from 2005). Bet-

ter yet, it is assembled and published by the organization itself. To be sure, Nan’s biographical text is often pedestrian and orthodox, but the work also includes intimate and provocative visual images. Overall, one can readily acknowledge Nan as one who answered when duty called, even in 1958, 1961, and 1964 after his health declined. Though he was absent for key portions of the CCPIT’s heyday before 1958, Nan still moved in and out of the organization without fanfare. Nan Hanchen shared Shanxi roots with both Lei Renmin and Ji Chaoding. Nan’s common Yanan guerrilla back-

Source: Commemorative Album of Nan Hanchen

Cultural Revolution horror: Nan Hanchen’s January 1967 suicide note.

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E S S A Y ground with Lei Renmin fostered a camaraderie that helped enhance Sino-Japanese relations even after 1957. His relationship with Ji Chaoding was more formal and distant, but the two men also shared common culture in the form of Shanxi cuisine, opera, and recreation. The chapter-length narrative of Nan’s death is profoundly disturbing in both its content and presentation. A photo of Nan’s handwritten suicide note—his calligraphy, unsettled and hurried—makes graphic for the eavesdropping reader his physical and mental exhaustion. To be sure, Nan was only one of many veteran CCP administrators attacked in the topsy-turvy days of the Cultural Revolution. Plagued by high blood pressure and heart disease, Nan endured hours-long physical and mental “struggle sessions” for three weeks before ingesting a massive dose of sleeping pills on the evening of January 26, 1967. Nan’s unhappy missive invokes his belief, almost defiantly, in the communist party, socialism, and Chairman Mao Zedong. He wishes the latter a long life and urges his wife to raise their children to respect the Chairman’s “lifetime of revolution.” Unfortunately, this affirmation also

allows for the framing of his story according to accepted historiography. Thus, Nan had not opposed the Cultural Revolution because it was Mao Zedong who had urged the masses to “bombard political headquarters” in the first place. With this, the entire episode shifts from a morality play to political theater, and in doing so, makes a mockery of linking this era with any other. Only after the Cultural Revolution ended, in 1979, could Nan Hanchen be safely rehabilitated politically and personally with a proper funeral. His wife, Wang Youlan, passed silently in 1981. The dissonance between the warmth of Nan’s family photos and the patently unfeeling nature of the writing (not to mention the horror of his suicide) sums up perfectly the CCPIT’s ambivalent attitude toward its history. The CCPIT’s achievements over these years are worthy of our attention and may affirm the important theses put forward in recent scholarship. However, worthy, too, are the contributions of Nan Hanchen, Ji Chaoding, and Lei Renmin. Finally, only by considering both individual and institutional aspects can we begin to write the complete post1949 history of Chinese foreign trade and economic development.11

Notes 1. “贸易先行，以民促官“[People-to-people relations first, government-to-government relations to follow],中国贸易报 [China trade news] (March 5, 1998): 1-2. (Hereinafter cited as MXYC). Two of the four authors of the article are Liao Xunzhen and Fang Yangchun, both former China Committee for the Promotion of International Trade officials. 2. Liao Xunzhen, multiple interviews with Greg Lewis, 1997-2005 (Beijing); Lei Bin,”从平摇古城走出的国家对外贸易部部长—雷任民 Cong Pingyao gucheng zouchude guojia duiwai maoyi bu buzhang—Lei Renmin/From ancient Pingyao city to national foreign trade minister—Lei Renmin (September 19, 2012), accessed via internet Baidu.com, June 4, 2018; [南汉宸纪念册]编辑委员会 Editorial Committee，南汉宸纪念册 [In Commemoration of Nan Hanchen]（北京：中央文献出版社，2005）239, 255. (Hereinafter cited as Nan Hanchen 2005.)

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3. MXYC, 1. 4. Among those with high praise for Lei Renmin’s abilities were interviewees Yang Peixin, who was Nan Hanchen’s secretary (May 23, 1998/Beijing), Zhou Shimin (May 8, 1998/Beijing), and Liao Xunzhen. 5. 当代中国丛书编辑委员会[China Today reference editorial committee]，当代中国对外贸易编辑委员会 [China Today Foreign Trade Editorial Committee]，当代中国对外贸易 [China Today: Foreign Trade] (two volumes) (北京：当代中国出版社 ), 1992, I:257-261. 6. 贸促春秋 [Chronicle of the China committee for the promotion of international trade] (北京：中国财政经济出版社), 2013, 20; Liao Xunzhen interview. 7. 董志凯 [Dong Zhikai]，艰辛起步国际市场的跻身 [A difficult road to foreign trade] (北京：经济管理出版社1993), 168; 董志凯 [Dong Zhikai] 应对封锁禁运—新中国历史一幕 [Being Confronted with Blockade and Embargo—an Episode in the History of New China] (北京：社会科学文献出版社), 2014, 232-241; Lei Renmin, “Trade with Capitalist Countries,” People’s China 5:2 (January 16, 1954): 8-11. 8. “Trade Winds: Foreign Trade Arbitration Committee,” China Reconstructs 5:10 (October 1956): 12; Liao Xunzhen, Fang Yangchun interviews. 9. Nan Hanchen 2005, 65-79. 10. Nan Hanchen 2005, 112, 116, 126-139; 邓加荣，韩小惠 [Deng Jiarong and Han Xiaohui]，南汉宸传 [A biography of Nan Hanchen] (北京: 金融出版社), 1993, 380. 11. 邓加荣 [Deng Jiarong], 南汉宸：开国第一任央行行长 [Nan Hanchen: New China’s First Central Bank President], (Beijing: China Financial Publishing, 2006). It is doubtful that seventeen of 26 new footnotes in this “updated” biography, as quotes from Chairman Mao Zedong’s Selected Works or Karl Marx, were included at the behest of the author. It should be noted, too, that both Deng Jiarong’s biographies of Nan Hanchen are popular rather than scholarly works (with multi-page dialogs reproduced without footnotes).

Greg Lewis (PhD, Arizona State University) is a professor of history at Weber State University, where he has taught Asian and world history since 1999. His research interests center on Maoist Chinese cinema history, foreign trade, and banking. His work has appeared in Twentieth Century China, Asian Cinema, Education about Asia, Pacific Affairs, Shixue yuekan/Journal of Historical Science, and other Chinese publications.

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韋伯州立大學與上海師範大學 — 二十年合作的三面观

WEBER STATE & SHANGHAI Perspectives on NORMAL — Three 20 Years of Partnership LAURA ANDERSON, LI TANG, AND CLIFFORD NOWELL The United States and China are arguably the two most important countries in global politics today. Nationalism is on the rise in both countries, and it has perhaps never been more critical for the U.S. and China to search for ways to understand each other and to join forces to make the world a more peaceful and prosperous place. Universities are in a unique position to ignore the rhetoric and bravado that permeate global conversations and to instead focus on the creation of knowledge, the education of students, and the business of making a better life for all. Two universities that have been working for 20 years to promote mutual respect, peace, tolerance, and understanding are Weber State University (WSU) and Shanghai Normal University (SHNU). Cooperative agreements between U.S. and Chinese universities are common these days, but a 20-year record of building meaningful relationships is rare. Our cooperation has withstood the political and economic ups and downs of two potential rivals and managed to survive, and even flourish, over this two-decade period. Our remarkable partnership stems from the language in our agreement, which seeks to

pursue “the advancement of international understanding” and to “generate learning and strengthen cultural ties.” Both parties agreed, after friendly discussions, to “reaffirm that each institution will continue to work toward the stated purpose of mutually benefiting each institution, its faculty, and students through cooperative programs, projects, and exchanges.” Our agreement is not focused on the amount of revenue generated nor a required number of students or faculty exchanged. Instead, our relationship is based on the principle that cooperation is preferable to competition and the notion that what we achieve together will survive longer that what could be garnered through competition. We have had cultural misunderstandings and problems to solve, but because we have been able to honestly communicate these concerns, we have persevered and jointly celebrated our successes. This essay offers three perspectives on a relationship that began in 1997. After a brief explanation on the structure of our cooperation, we follow with three personal stories that illustrate the principles of our joint stewardship and conclude with

an affirmation that what we do together is important for our universities and for the larger community. The first story is from Ms. Laura Anderson, WebUX instructor in the School of Computing at Weber State University. The second story is from Ms. Li Tang (who also goes by “Claire”), Director of International Affairs, Department of the School of Finance and Business at Shanghai Normal University; and the last story is from Dr. Cliff Nowell, Director of International Programs and professor of economics, also at Weber State University. The agreement has evolved through the 20 years of its existence and has manifested differently in each of our universities. Initially, the idea for a partnership was conceived by a couple from Utah who had connections with the president of Shanghai Normal, at which point the Utah Institute of Science and Technology (UIST) was formed at SHNU. Weber State signed on to the agreement in hopes of providing opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to engage with the newly created institute. The agreement at Weber State was to focus on business and economics, while SHNU arranged for a focus in the area of tourism at the University of Utah, and in secretarial science at Salt Lake Community College. In the first years of the agreement, SHNU faculty came predominantly to WSU to observe Western teaching methods, which are quite different from the traditional, more structured teaching methods

in China. Shortly thereafter, in 2000, the first Weber State instructor traveled to Shanghai with a small group of students, and in 2002, Weber State began regularly sending significant numbers of faculty to Shanghai. Shortly thereafter, UIST merged with the Institute of European Culture and Commerce at SHNU because these two administrative areas were small and had similar missions—a focus on internationalization. SHNU made this strategic decision and formed the College of Finance in 2006 by consolidating several departments. In 2012 the SHNU School of Business merged with the SHNU College of Finance and is now named the School of Finance and Business. Throughout this period, leadership in both the Goddard School of Business at Weber State and at Shanghai Normal changed several times without ever compromising our shared vision of cooperation. The Shanghai administrator stewarding many of these changes was Dean Li Meizhen, who worked hard to build and develop the partnership with Weber State. Not only did she spend vast amounts of time communicating with students about studying in Utah; she also met with many parents who, at this point, were not confident that their children could lead an independent life so far from home. Dean Mao Xuncheng now guides the program and continues to build on the foundation Dean Li created. In 2009 the Department of Economics at Weber State and the College of Finance

Our agreement is not focused on the amount of revenue generated nor a required number of students or faculty exchanged. Instead, our relationship is based on the principle that cooperation is preferable to competition and the notion that what we achieve together will survive longer that what could be garnered through competition. We have had cultural misunderstandings and problems to solve, but because we have been able to honestly communicate these concerns, we have persevered and jointly celebrated our successes.

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E S S A Y at Shanghai Normal began offering a joint program in economics. By this time, over half of the academic colleges at WSU had participated in some form of exchange with SHNU, and the Goddard School had involved every department. At Shanghai Normal, participation was even more remarkable, with faculty visiting Weber State in areas ranging from music, art, and English to science, economics, and business. We exchanged over 50 faculty and staff. The creation of the joint program was the result of two years of laborious planning and was approved by the Ministry of Education in China. As part of the joint program, the curriculum between the Department of Economics at WSU and the College of Finance at SHNU needed to be carefully aligned. The intent of a joint program was, and still is, to provide a targeted teaching experience to students in Chinese universities. In the agreement, Weber State was, and continues to be, responsible for the content of one-third of the core courses taught in this program. Although this does not imply that WSU faculty teach one-third of these courses, it does imply that Weber State manages their content. Students participating in this program end up earning a degree in economics from Shanghai Normal University. Along with this joint program, WSU Economics also began a 2+2 program, where students from the College of Finance study at SHNU for the first two years, then transfer to Weber State for the last two years and earn degrees from both universities. At the point of this writing, fall 2018, WSU has jointly graduated 185 students in the 2+2 program, and, currently, approximately 1,300 students are enrolled in it. Weber State has sent over 40 faculty to Shanghai to teach. Both universities have sent presidents, provosts, vice-presidents, and deans to cement our joint cooperation. As well, numerous faculty from Shanghai Normal have come to Ogden to participate in

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seminars and conferences, sit in on classes, study, conduct research, and give presentations to Weber State faculty and students. Many students, staff, and faculty have been directly involved with this exchange and, in the process, have improved their language skills and understanding of each other’s culture. Students and faculty from both schools have participated in study abroad visits, and both universities offer internships to students from both universities. There have also been economic benefits to both universities and communities. At WSU, the first 2+2 students graduated in 2011. The graduation was attended by administrators from Shanghai and every parent of the Chinese students. Chinese attendance was so high, in fact, that the ceremony was translated into Chinese. Many other Shanghai parents have since attended graduation and visited their students in Utah, and families in Utah have learned more about Chinese food and culture. These are among the many indirect benefits of a successful 20-year partnership.

Laura’s Story In December 2002, Dr. Cliff Nowell and I traveled to Shanghai Normal on our first teaching assignment, and we have since traveled regularly to Shanghai and been closely involved in supporting the program. When we first arrived in Shanghai, we were met at the airport by Dean Li Meizhen—she was holding a sign with our names. We stayed in the Foreign Guest House, a hotel on campus that was near the building we would teach in. Cliff taught economics and I taught business communication. The students were enrolled in both of our classes. After the first week of school, my monitor, Jennifer, invited us to her home for dinner. Of course, I was excited to accept—to go to the home of a local, to meet her family. Apparently, it was also a big deal for her family to host foreign

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professors, because we were served 24 different dishes (I counted!) and—even with China’s one-child policy in place, and Jennifer being the only child—her family was not small. Her grandmother, three aunts, four uncles, and parents joined us. Two of the adult men could speak some English, but the adult women either couldn’t or didn’t want to speak it. Poor Jennifer spent the night translating for all of us! Her translation job became more difficult as I asked her to tell her parents what a pleasure it was to have her in class. Every compliment I said received a humble reply from her mother. The conversation went something like this: Me: Jennifer is very smart. You must be proud of your daughter. Mother: Jennifer is a stupid girl. I’m sorry for the trouble she causes you. Me: Jennifer is no trouble at all. She is a good student who works very hard. Mother: Jennifer is a lazy girl. I’m sorry that you have to be her teacher. Of course, Jennifer’s mother was simply being modest. It is bad feng shui to be prideful. Jennifer’s interaction with Cliff was no easier. Her grandmother stood with Cliff and held his hands, facing him and talking in Chinese. She spoke for several minutes, and Jennifer turned red while the rest of her family chuckled. When grandma finished, Cliff asked what she had said, and Jennifer responded, “Thank you for teaching my granddaughter.” Cliff smiled and replied, “I don’t think that’s what she said,” leaving us to guess what Jennifer had discretely left out of the translation. Of course, we will never know! At the end of the night, as we were leaving, Jennifer’s mother gave me a gift, something that she said would protect my family: a stone lion. This stone lion was facing the door—to bring in good fortune and repel the bad. She explained that this particular statue had been in her home since she was a child and that I needed to make sure that

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the people in my family touched it often. This way the protector would know whom to protect, and would feel appreciated. Following what I had learned was Chinese tradition, I refused her gift three times, telling her that I couldn’t take this personal item; that she needed to keep it for her own family; and that it was too much responsibility for me to care for it properly. The fourth time I accepted it. Since that time, we have welcomed many Chinese visitors to our home. We have hosted them on visits to Ogden, Las Vegas, and Yellowstone Park. I have taken them to the hospital and to the grocery store, and I have visited them in flu quarantine, and taken them shopping in Park City. I have taught them how to cook and how to celebrate Halloween. I have introduced them to local students in the Future Business Leaders of America-Phi Beta Lambda (FBLA-PBL) chapter at Weber State, where they together represented the university at national competitions in San Antonio, Disney World, Nashville, and Chicago.

Claire’s Story I began working at Shanghai Normal University in 2006 when I started in the International Affairs Department of the Institute of European Cultural and Commerce. When the College of Finance was formed that same year, I shared office space with those in the Sino-American program, but wasn’t directly involved in that work. Eventually, in 2017, I was appointed director of this department, which meant taking charge of the SinoAmerican program. One of my first responsibilities was to help plan the 20-year celebration with our oldest partner—Weber State. At that celebration, one student shared her experience with a Weber State faculty member who taught in the program on our campus. The students were just finishing their first two years in Shanghai and deciding whether to finish at WSU or stay at SHNU. This particular student was

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E S S A Y interested in coming to Utah but was the only child of a middle-class family, and the mother worried about sending her daughter to a faraway and expensive place. To assuage the mother’s concerns, the faculty member and his family made a video of the WSU campus and, via Skype, discussed numerous details pertaining to schooling in the U.S. What is more, the professor also immediately offered for the student to live with him and his family at their home, an offer she gratefully accepted. (She is now employed at an international finance company in Shanghai after receiving a bachelor’s degree from Weber State and a master’s degree from the University of Utah.) This professor and his family saw a student in need and helped her, not simply in the classroom and by answering questions, but by opening their hearts and their home. To her credit, and to the credit of her Chinese family, she succeeded in becoming an international citizen, and her world now includes an American family who consider her part of their own. When this student finished her story, many listeners were in tears. I myself was touched as well. Such stories are not rare in our program and are happening with faculty and students to this day—SHNU and WSU faculty and students making longlasting connections. After the ceremony, I reflected on the many experiences I’ve had in my position. Thousands of students’ faces quickly passed in front of my eyes—from a variety of nationalities, ranges in age, and facial expressions—and I recalled stories and conversations with exchange partners from Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Poland, and Mexico, among others. And while many of these partnerships were and continue to be successful, I wondered why our longest and closest cooperation had been with Weber State. After some reflection, I concluded that the founding members of the WSU-SHNU cooperation are also the founders of a particular spirit, which has

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served as a foundation for a healthy program from the start. Those founders—some already retired and some still working in the program—have, with their leadership and example, shaped and directed a program that is flourishing to this very day. This joint effort is the common ground between the WSU and SHNU program contributors—just as SHNU faculty and staff have been hard at work to make our program work, so have WSU faculty and staff on their end. In a Chinese public university, there is a job called fu dao yuan (辅导员). A fu dao yuan is a kind of teacher for a class of students, living with them in the dorm and helping them take care of their studies and their lives—from their first semester until graduation. When students need help, whether personal or academic, the first person they go to is their fu dao yuan. A fu dao yuan takes on the roles of an elder sister/ brother, an instructor, a friend, teacher, and confidant. A fu dao yuan takes time to build close relationships and encourages students to face challenges and solve problems. A fu dao yuan’s cell phone must stay on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. SHNU students smoothly adapt to a brand-new environment in Utah, I believe, because Weber State faculty and staff very much act like a fu dao yuan: they volunteer their time to help Chinese students succeed in all spheres of life. In international affairs, cross-cultural communication is the buzzword. What is often missing from such communication is the importance of shared values, the joint interests of the players on either side of this equation. When we cross different cultures—as the example of WSU and SHNU shows—we can be successful in the long term only if we seek similarity of value. In my work, I pay attention to this similarity. I try to be patient and tolerant and empathetic, especially when communicating with someone from another culture. Trying to understand others, to stand by them

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In a Chinese public university, there is a job called fu dao yuan (辅导员). A fu dao yuan is a kind of teacher for a class of students, living with them in the dorm and helping them take care of their studies and their lives—from their first semester until graduation. When students need help, whether personal or academic, the first person they go to is their fu dao yuan. A fu dao yuan takes on the roles of an elder sister/brother, an instructor, a friend, teacher, and confidant. A fu dao yuan takes time to build close relationships and encourages students to face challenges and solve problems. A fu dao yuan’s cell phone must stay on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. SHNU students smoothly adapt to a brand-new environment in Utah, I believe, because Weber State faculty and staff very much act like a fu dao yuan: they volunteer their time to help Chinese students succeed in all spheres of life. and talk with them, not from a perspective of “I or me,” but from the perspective of “we or us,” is a principle I remind myself of every day. This way, over time, I have become a new me, a better me, I think. If I ask myself who has taught me that skill, I would point to many people around me, of course, such as my directors, my colleagues, and my students, but I would also include my colleagues and students from Weber State—the ones with similar values in heart and mind who have helped shape our cooperation. This new me has changed my attitude toward people and my motivation, and it has changed my personal mental and psychological mindset for the better. Thanks to this program, I have become the person I would like to be: full of appreciation and love in my heart, for my job and our ongoing exchange.

Clifford’s Story I am a reluctant internationalist. When I became a tenured full professor at Weber State in 1998, I had never strayed from North America, and even then, I had never been more than a few miles on either side of the U.S. border. In December 2002 this all changed with a three-week trip to Shang-

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hai, where I taught Managerial Economics of the West at Shanghai Normal University. I arrived in China confident in my own abilities as a teacher and scholar: I had spent weeks preparing course materials; I had 14 years of teaching experience; and I believed I knew how my students learned, understood my strengths and weaknesses, and showed up for class 10 minutes early to get a feel for the room. The feel of the room was cold, not an unwelcoming cold, but a freezing cold. Little did I know that the classroom would have no heat. Noticing that almost every window was open, I closed them, while students entered in winter coats, scarves, and mittens, and immediately opened the windows again. Eighty students quickly got out notebooks, ready to write down the important things I was sure to say—eighty people not knowing what to expect from a foreigner. No one met my gaze, no one smiled at me—nothing. I said, “Hello,” whereupon the class rose and, in unison, said, “Hello, teacher.” A sense of uneasiness crept from my gut to my chest. This was not going to go well. I believe in first impressions and always try to prepare my best lecture for the first day of class. My intent was simple that

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E S S A Y morning: connect with the students at a personal level and tell a story that makes my subject interesting. My plan was to ask about them, try to have a real conversation, show that I care. Next, go over the syllabus if I have time, be personable, and try to make every minute valuable. With any luck, I was hoping that by the end of class students would like me, think the class could be interesting, and know I would do everything I could to help them succeed. I told the students a story I often tell my students the first day in the U.S.: I train dogs as a hobby. I show pictures of my dogs, students ooh and aah, and I explain that training my dogs has helped me be a better teacher. Training my dogs has helped me to understand how animals learn. Teaching the simple concepts of “sit” and “stay” takes patience. The dog needs to first understand the concept and believe the concept is important. The dog needs to be able to apply this concept in different settings, receive feedback in a timely fashion, and be praised when doing well. Of course, the students in Shanghai did ooh and aah when they saw my dogs, and they did connect with me at a personal level. However, I did not know if they believed dog training made me a better professor. After telling this story, I followed my first day of class ritual and tried to engage the students in a discussion of some of the different management styles used to motivate people in the workplace. After a two- or three-minute introduction of the topic, I asked the students for their opinions and observations on how people are motivated. Quiet. Deathly quiet. Nothing. No one looked at me. I wondered, did they understand me? Was English the barrier to communication? I took a few more minutes to explain. I spoke slowly, clearly. Again, nothing. I moved to the syllabus. Nothing. Students were writing in their notebooks, but no feedback for me. This was, I figured, going to be a one-person show, a style of

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teaching I abhor. Still, only 20 minutes of a 120 minute session was done. I ended class after 35 minutes and went back to my office to fret. The worst was yet to come. After a few minutes talking with a U.S. colleague in our shared office, Dean Li Meizhen walked in. She said, “Can I talk with you for a minute? Some of your students came to see me after your class.” The bad feeling that rose from my gut now consumed all of me. What did I do wrong? Was it such a serious mistake to end class early? “Sure,” I said, trying to appear relaxed as we walked to her office. She began somewhat hesitantly. “The students complained that you called them dogs.” I paused, stunned, and did not know what to say. I did my best to explain, and must have succeeded to the dean’s satisfaction. What I learned that day is that what worked in class at home in the U.S. could be a terrible failure in a different country. My self-identity as a capable teacher and classroom facilitator was gone. Everything I thought I understood about teaching was shattered. In retrospect, that teaching moment was profoundly revelatory. I had not understood diversity, truly, until that moment. Society— or, more properly, Western society—was designed for me, a middle class white male. I understood about different learning styles and readily accepted the reality that classroom interactions are influenced by gender, culture, class, and ethnicity. But it was not until I had the opportunity to play the role of an outsider that I was forced to confront the reality that my teaching, in every aspect, was based on a singular cultural experience. At this point I was prepared to become a better teacher.

Conclusion

The world is more connected than it ever has been and there are a few thousand people who are now a little more connected, thanks to 20 years of open hearts, open homes, and open minds. Those people have

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more respect for cultural differences and for hard-working and genuine human beings, like Li Meizhen, who patiently explained to Chinese and Americans alike that people are basically good and have good intentions; people like Jennifer’s mother, who made an American professor feel appreciated; people who, in class, helped a professor understand that cultural differences matter; people like the Weber State faculty member who opened his home to a student in need.

In a world that often seems driven by fear, it is easy to identify an unknown as “other.” As Weber State’s long-standing exchange with Shanghai Normal has shown, time and again, it is much more rewarding to be guided by the confidence that the world is full of wonderful human beings just waiting to connect.

Laura Anderson is an instructor in the WebUX program of the School of Computing at Weber State University. She has also served as a visiting scholar at Shanghai Normal University for over 15 years and as advisor to hundreds of students and host to dozens of faculty from Weber State University’s partner schools. She received her MS in Business Information Systems from Utah State University in 1998. Her teaching interests are primarily computer software.

Tang Li (唐丽)/Claire graduated from Shanghai Normal University (SHNU) with a bachelor’s degree in Advertising and a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics. Since 2006, she has been working in the International Affairs Department of the School of Finance and Business at SHNU in various capacities, including as teacher of Chinese to international students, or fu dao yuan, also to international students. In her position, she has visited universities in the U.S, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Slovenia, the U.K., and Canada.

Clifford Nowell is professor of Economics and Dean of International Programs at Weber State University. He also serves as an honorary professor in the College of Finance and Business at Shanghai Normal University. He graduated from the University of Wyoming with a Ph.D. in Economics in 1988 and has been employed at Weber State University in a wide variety of positions since. His research interests include the economics of education, student motivation, and happiness studies. As part of his duties as Dean of International Programs, he has had the opportunity to form partnerships with many Chinese universities, from Inner Mongolia to Yunnan Province.

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外国語を吃り、あるいは日本語での吃音が教えること

STUTTERING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGES, OR WHAT THE JAPANESE STAMMER TEACHES US JOHN WHITTIER TREAT

veryone stutters, occasionally, but only a few of us are stutterers. And those of us who are stutterers don’t always stutter, just as the rest of you don’t always speak perfectly: we all stammer confessing love; never do when crying out in pain. The well-meaning compliment, “But you’re not stuttering now,” is as hurtful as it is unknowing. How many are stutterers? One percent of us, maybe? Scattered worldwide, yes, and mostly men. So, few of you have ordered an entree at a restaurant you did not want because you were unable to say which one you really did; or not picked up your phone for two years because you could not trust yourself to be able to utter “hello”; or walked thirty city blocks to save yourself the embarrassment of stuttering a difficult address to an impatient taxicab driver; or declined to run for any office that might involve public speaking. I have done all those things. That Egyptian hieroglyph they say refers to us, the Babylonian cuneiform that records a stammer amid its inventories of grain. Then there’s Moses, slow of tongue in both the Hebrew bible and the Koran; and Rosalind in As You Like It (“I would thou couldst stammer, that thou might’st pour this concealed man out of thy mouth as wine comes out of a narrow-mouthed bottle—either too much at once, or none at all” [III. ii.]). We are there from Zola to Joyce to Roth to Rushdie, and, don’t forget, “Th-th-that’s all, folks!”—Porky the Pig on the Saturday morning cartoons (for children) or art cinema shorts (for adults). Stutterers have always been with us, if long ago some were gifted with prophetic pow-

ers. Isaiah 28:11 says to us: “For with stammering lips and another tongue will [God] speak to this people.” But nowadays we’re seldom heroes for all of that. By virtue of our inchoate speech, sometimes we do get to sputter out things that ring uncannily true. Consider Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, or Robert Graves’ Claudius, but of course moments of moral clarity come at the expense of spending the balance of our lives as stuttering fools, court jesters, and clowns. In any case, stutterers in literature are seldom central characters and commonly make early exits: the stammering cowboy in Howard Hawks’ Red River gets trampled early in the cattle drive, and the stuttering Storm Trooper in Murakami Haruki’s Norwegian Wood simply vanishes, to the other characters’ relief. As disabilities studies scholar Lennard Davis has noted, novels embody the “hegemony of the normal” (21) and, at one percent, we are not normal and not long tolerated. Of stutterers, it is said we have a “characteristic leptosomic physique” as well as a “disturbed metabolism”; that we are introverted, that our blood sugar runs high even if “the urinary creatinine coefficient is low” (Bender 1943, 185-86). No diabetic in history has ever stuttered, we read (West 100). Our saliva is overloaded with carbon dioxide and we have poor motor coordination. You’ll find in us the curses of sibling rivalry, suppressed anger, deformations of the tongue, lips, palate, jaw, or larynx; we ate little or no meat in childhood (Bender 1939, 34-36), although, writes one of our chief prosecutors in the modern world of psychiatry, we have “cannibalistic impulses in the unconscious” (Couriat 48). We are lazy, cowardly, selfish, and prone to procrastinate. It has even been speculated that “a stutterer is an individual who in some particulars is less highly evolved that his brothers and sisters in the human family” (West 105).

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But it’s not all bad news. Science reports your average stutterer is more intelligent than “normies,” and social history records that the acquired “Oxford stutter” was once considered a sign of superior breeding and high-class diffidence in England. (John Updike’s own stutter was once described in the Jerusalem Post as “the sort of thing once affected by cavalry subalterns” [79].) Stuttering, alone among disabilities, can be called “charming.” But in the main, writers and other observers of stuttering in the Western world, only rarely stutterers themselves, have taken the affliction to be just the telling tip of an ethical, medical, or psychosocial submerged iceberg; as the register of our moral, bodily, or mental failure. If you are a stutterer yourself, you know we’re often told we’re just not working hard enough to speak right. We are cast as evil, sometimes due to our kinship with the equally sinister left-handed among us. We are traitors—many spies stutter; as one researcher wrote during World War II, “The tricks, starters, props and circumlocutions to which the stutterer is prone are legion” (West 104). Kim Philby is said to have been a stutterer and, not coincidentally, a homosexual, one of the inner conditions an outer stutter is said to flag. The stuttering bishop in the Perry Mason novel by the same name is called “a queer one” (Gardner 20). “None of the [speech therapy] students were girls,” writes humorist David Sedaris of his schooldays. “They were all boys like me who kept movie star scrapbooks and made their own curtains” (9). When, as it has, “poor mothering” is cited as a cause of stuttering (Shell 10), the etiology foretells all kinds of future adolescent “problems,” including sexual inversion. David Halperin perceptively notes that Billy Budd, “happy removed from verbal communication,” enjoys desirability for that in direct proportion, and lacks “almost no subjectivity whatsoever” (215), and is

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ESSAY able to speak without stuttering only with his last words: “God bless Captain Vere!” (Melville 264). Still, we stutterers are very active elsewhere. We can be even terrorists, like the daughter in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. “She never stuttered when she was with the dynamite,” Roth writes of her, nicknamed the Rimrock Bomber and whose stuttering is called “vindictive behavior” (259, 96). Billy Budd is judged a murderer, and Sugar-Boy in All The King’s Men actually is one. Jimmy Stewart’s Rupert says to John Dall’s Brandon in Hitchcock’s Rope, “You always did stutter when you were excited.” The popular understanding of stuttering is as a tell-tale pathology, often attached to whatever suspect social or cultural trend is close at hand. Current thinking has stuttering inheritable and neurological, but current thinking has been wrong in the past. Stuttering, in fact, has been called “the disorder of

Nineteenth-century headgear for the treatment of stuttering. From Murray Katz, “Survey of Patented Anti-Stuttering Devices.”

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many theories.” For Aristotle, it was the failure of our tongues to keep up with our imaginations, but for Hippocrates just too much black bile in our systems. The therapies prescribed for us over the ages have run the gamut from “relaxation and gymnastics” to hypnosis, faith healing, electric shock, “ingesting a Finnish insect repellant normally rubbed on cows, bleeding the lips with leeches, and eating the feces of goats” (Bobrick 87). Relatively benign is the advice to develop a sense of humor since we will be made fun of our whole lives. The Oracle of Delphi told Battus to cure his stutter by raising an army and conquering North Africa. But unless you’re North African, one supposes, the worst remedy is more recent, when nineteenth-century surgeons had a go at us, which the result that no one was cured but some died, bloodied, on operating tables. But perhaps the cruelest therapy was the psychoanalytical claptrap of the twentieth century, where Freud’s foolish dictum that stutterers suffer from some “anal-sadistic” block gave license to actually sadistic clinical practices (qtd. in Glauber 339). At the height of Freudian attention paid stuttering in the 1930s, its heyday, one medical expert wrote of us: “They are rarely happy people; but that they very rarely realize all their potentialities, that their lives are often thwarted and sterile is not so much the fault of the stuttering as of the emotional disability that underlies it” (Smiley and Margaret Blanton 3). Even as good a novel as the Quebecois writer Daniel Alan Cox’s recent Mouthquake makes stuttering all about repression: character Eric says to his boyfriend: “The reason you can’t close your mouth is because you’re waiting for me to shove my dick inside. You want me to face-fuck the stutter right out of you” (Cox 110). Repression, I admit, often makes for a good story. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) may have

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Critics in the West have been guilty of glorifying or romanticizing dysfluency as the manifestation of an idealized distillation of language, in which not being able to speak is construed as superior to speaking. Stutterers, in other words, come in handy when we want to dissent from the Western tyranny of logocentrism. “Is it possible,” Deleuze asks, “to make language stutter without confusing it with speech?” No. renamed stuttering “Childhood Onset Fluency Disorder,” but there are problems with that. Just read Gail Jones’ Sorry, a novel about a girl whose stammer starts with adolescent trauma; or study the shell-shocked veterans of The Great War who came home stuttering aphasics, among them Wilfred Owen. Owen’s stammer is credited in literary history with having made him a better poet, but I doubt it. Nonetheless, alone among all the disabled, stutterers are never asked, “How did it happen?”; it is assumed we have always been this way. Our handicap is still accounted for in myriad ways that might have led to better treatment, were any of the many theories correct. The fact is that we do not know how to cure stammering, other than to simply remain silent, and silence is too often taken as stupidity. Certainly it can spontaneously disappear in many, especially young women. In Samuel Delany’s Babel-17, heroine Rydra was a childhood stutterer who has outgrown it, though Roth’s stuttering daughter Merry has to convert to

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Jainism to effect her rather unlikely cure. Most stutterers in fiction as well as real life simply learn to live with it. In his Barney’s Version, Mordecai Richler writes: “Yankel Schneider, remember him, he had a stammer? So what? He’s become a chartered accountant and drives a Buick now” (6). Driving, yes: my high school guidance counselor once floated the idea that I consider becoming a long-distance truck driver, since I wouldn’t have to talk much to anyone. Literary criticism and theory in the modern West have not done us any favors. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick could write forty pages about Billy Budd, which some think the culmination of the West’s tragic treatment of the stutterer, but she does not mention his stammer once (91-130). Worse is Deleuze, to whom I am frequently referred by well-meaning colleagues. His essay “He Stuttered” declares stuttering a playground for playful thinking about poetic language (107-114), turning us into avant-garde metaphors. Everyone interested in celebrating the stutterer cites Joyce and Finnegans Wake, making verbal dysfunction a mark of high modernism and thus a great thing. “In Joyce,” writes one professor of English and French literatures, “stuttering is more than a speech defect; it is the ‘symptom’ of a new poetics of narrative fiction” (Spurr 121), which it is not. Critics in the West have been guilty of glorifying or romanticizing dysfluency as the manifestation of an idealized distillation of language, in which not being able to speak is construed as superior to speaking. Stutterers, in other words, come in handy when we want to dissent from the Western tyranny of logocentrism. “Is it possible,” Deleuze asks, “to make language stutter without confusing it with speech?” (108). No. I take little of this theorizing seriously, and nor have the Japanese. In the Beginning Was the Word, but not in Japan.

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ESSAY I take little of this theorizing seriously, and nor have the Japanese. In the Beginning Was the Word, but not in Japan. Abrahamic religions make a fetish of speech from the start, but the Japanese have no theology of stuttering, and no literary legacy of it separating humankind decisively from either God or, as Rousseau ruled, the world.… Silence has an honored place in the history of Japanese aesthetics. In Confucius’s Analects one line reads: “A noble man desires to be clumsy in speaking and fleet in actions,” and work by Chinese literature scholar Mark Pitner shows “there has long been a tension in the Chinese tradition over smooth talkers and an analogical counter preference given to clumsy or dysfluent speech. By extension, the dysfluency, at least of those whose lives populate the dynastic histories of early China, was thought linked to their inner virtues and sentiments.” We are not in the Western world. Abrahamic religions make a fetish of speech from the start, but the Japanese have no theology of stuttering, and no literary legacy of it separating humankind decisively from either God or, as Rousseau ruled, the world. Fluency in the West raises humans above the mundane realm,

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the prime token of the rational and spiritual aspect of our nature. In “Prometheus Unbound,” Shelley wrote: “He gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the universe” (qtd. in Couriat 6). Closer to our own time, Bakhtin wrote, “In opposition to the subject there is only a voiceless thing” (161), but silence has an honored place in the history of Japanese aesthetics. In Confucius’s Analects one line reads: “A noble man desires to be clumsy in speaking and fleet in actions,” and work by Chinese literature scholar Mark Pitner shows “there has long been a tension in the Chinese tradition over smooth talkers and an analogical counter preference given to clumsy or dysfluent speech. By extension, the dysfluency, at least of those whose lives populate the dynastic histories of early China, was thought linked to their inner virtues and sentiments” (699-700). We are not in the Western world. If you do know about stuttering in Japanese literature, it may well be due to Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and its stammering arsonist Mizoguchi who, on the eve of his crime, realizes: “The heaviness and density of my inner world closely resembled those of the night and my words creaked to the surface like a heavy bucket being drawn out of the night’s deep well” (247). But Japanese novels about stutterers don’t typically have such existential “inner world[s]”; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is in fact a Western novel written in Japanese. Mishima makes a necessary tragedy out of its stammering acolyte, right at home in the West’s tradition of stutterers as latent criminals whose inner perfidy is publically advertised by the paradigmatic dysfunction of a repeated initial consonant followed by schwa, a weakened vowel: “Th-th-that’s all, folks!” That latency has its roots,

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some say, in our traumatizing denial of something, an early wound or an ongoing block. Note that Billy Budd, Mishima’s Mizoguchi, and Ken Kesey’s Bill Babbitt in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest all have mother problems and are all virgins. They all erupt in violence. The literary history of the Japanese stammer goes back a ways. In the early eighteenth century, Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s puppet play Keisei Hangonkō (The Courtesan and the Spiritual Incense) features a scene that is perennially performed up to the present day in its kabuki version, Domomata, or “Stuttering Matahei.” Matahei, a retainer cursed with a stutter and additionally humiliated by his lord’s refusal to promote him, manages a miracle and earns not only rank but also accolades celebrated by singing and dancing on the stage. There is not always such a happy ending, of course. In Shikitei Samba’s early nineteenth-century parodic novel Ukiyoburo (Bathhouse of the Floating World), his character Butashichi—“PigSeven,” already an object of derision— stutters so badly he is unintelligible. He is teased as a spastic; others mock him by imitating his speech. But, as is true of Japanese literature about stuttering in general, he is not regarded as embodying any human moral failure; or distance from a God. Stutterers in Japanese fiction are indeed still bullied, but are sometimes heroes. In Japan’s best known work of proletarian literature, Kobayashi Takiji’s 1929 Kani kōsen (The Factory Ship), the sole stutterer among the ship’s fishermen crew, in a rousing if still dysfluent speech, incites his fellow sailors into a revolutionary mutiny. The stutterer, as Kobayashi notes early in his novel, must choose his words carefully, and so they are important. Similarly, in Kodera Wahei’s 1964 novella Kitsuon

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shūdan (The Stutterer’s Circle), factory workers who meet regularly to repair their stammers encounter demonstrating students massing at a train station. One of the workers, Taketani, is able to address the demonstrators in a clear and strong voice. “A noble man desires to be clumsy in speaking and fleet in actions,” as Confucius already told us. In Ishida Ira’s 2004 novel Akiharabara@ DEEP, later a wildly popular manga and TV series, the stuttering computer geek Peiji and his fellow otaku (nerds) plot to destroy Japan with high-tech sabotage. What makes these stutterers brave is the courage that comes from

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the lack of anything much more to lose. In The Stutterer’s Circle Taketani’s buddy Sugio, a fellow stutterer, tells us this other side of the story: When as a youth he left his hometown to go to the big city, Tokyo, he stood in line at his local train station, petrified that when his turn came he’d have to say “Tokyo,” a word he found impossible to pronounce. He flees to the public restroom in terror, and when he returns he is granted a reprieve by having to queue up from the start all over again. But when his turn comes a second time, in fact he cannot say “Tokyo,” and so requests a ticket for the more pronounceable “Odawara,” to whence he travels past his intended destina-

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ESSAY tion, transfers to a train headed the direction he’s just come from, and wordlessly pays an adjustment fee at the Tokyo station wicket, costing him three times what it should have (Kodera 47). Many stutterers have had this sort of experience; but how many works in European literature have told it? Why not? I do not know if Kobayashi Takiji stuttered, but Kodera Wahei did, and in an important distinction from Western literature, Japanese authors who depict stutterers are nearly all stutterers themselves. Their characters do not observe stutterers from without but narrate from within. We have our fair share of writer-stutterers in the West, for sure: Somerset Maugham, John Updike, and David Shields, who entitled his stammerer’s memoir Dead Languages. Nevil Shute was a stutterer who wrote a novel about the end of the world. The landscape for us is inescapably bleak if it is not derisively comic. But empathy for the stutterer in Japanese literature far outstrips what we find in English, and remains unjudged by Judeo-Christian thinking. This empathy is a characteristic of not just writers, but even the Japanese state: in the first decade of the twentieth century, long before any nation in the West, the Ministry of Education conducted a national survey of stuttering in the public schools with the announced aim of humanely helping the afflicted. In 1908, for instance, 2.28% of all middle-school boys were said to stutter, though regional differences were pronounced: 5.06% for boys in Yamaguchi, only 0.32% in Miyazaki. The solution, typical and typically useless for the time, was elocution lessons, breathing experiences, and proper hygiene (Izawa 798, 815). But it was never suggested that stutterers are the less-evolved of us among the species; nor were stutterers encased in tortuous head gear, had their larynxes rearranged, or experimented on with mind-altering drugs, or even bovine insect repellant. There are many more examples of sympathetic portrayals of stutterers in Japanese literature: in Oda Sakunosuke’s Osaka tales, and in Nakajima Atsushi’s

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Japanese comic depicting sympathy for stuttering.

stories of colonial Seoul. There is Suwa Tetsushi’s young stutterer in his Bildungsroman, Asatte no hito (The Person the Day After Tomorrow); Kurumatani Chōkichi, Tsukada Tadamasa, Kojima Nobuo, Medoruma Shun, and especially Shigemasu Kiyoshi have written of us: all stutterers themselves, and all insightful witnesses to what goes on in the mind of the stutterer, and not just of what the world thinks of, or does to, us. One writer I want to cite in particular is Kim Hak-young, one whose achievement in portraying stuttering seems a singular achievement, and perhaps not just in Japanese literature. Known in Japan as Kin Kakuei, Kim was an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan. In real life he was a stuttering, alcoholic chemist who, like his similarly afflicted protagonist, Ch’oe Kyu-sik, in his 1966 Japanese-language novel The Frozen Mouth (Koeru kuchi) would consider suicide but actually succeeded at it in 1985 at age forty-six. Kim’s quasiautobiographical novel, thought to have been written to free him cathartically of his anguish, apparently failed to do so. What the novel did succeed in was describing with unusual fidelity the mind of a stutterer. Much of The Frozen Mouth is about the dilemma of being an ethnic Korean (zai-Nichi) in Japan, but it is finally his speech dysfunction that irreparably confines him in a separate world. Unlike being a Korean, Ch’oe insists there is nothing “beautiful” about being a stutterer. It has no origin or cause or history to redeem it. Stuttering, unlike being an ethnic minority in postwar Japan, has no ideology or politics. What it does have is terror, fear, depression, shame, ill-ease and melancholy (16); if not always in the mornings when Ch’oe awakes, then always by the end of his day, when more often than not he drinks alone in

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silence (damatta mama) in a bar on his way home from his laboratory at the University of Tokyo (17). Haunted by the recent suicide of a friend, Isogai, who stuttered far worse than he, Ch’oe feels like an ihōjin, a foreigner, in his own country not because of other people’s existence (sonzai), but their words (kotoba). Ch’oe never revealed the full extent of his own if less severe stutter to Isogai, denying both of them the camaraderie they might have shared. For normal people, Ch’oe observes, thinking something is tantamount to saying it (20). Not so for him. In a perpetual struggle with his stutter, it is his “singular fate,” hitotsu no unmei (26). “Stuttering in and of itself,” Kim writes, “is no great matter. But what terrifies me most is the mental, nervous-system shock, and the insult I receive from it” (23). Later in his novel, Kim elaborates: The stutterer refuses to be understood as a stutterer. The stuttering oneself, the so to speak provisional self, is the self of lies. One’s true self is not a stutterer. The part of the self from which stuttering is excised, that is the part you are. And consequently the stutterer, me, the self, refuses to be understood as a stutterer or to be treated as one. Instead, he detests being regarded as the stutterer, hates being held in contempt as the stutterer. (49) But none of this insight spares Ch’oe from being, as he later reflects, “a human being totally shackled” by his stutter (92). There is no consolation. Others, even Isogai’s sister with whom Ch’oe falls in love, cannot understand his disability as anything other than a concept (102), leaving him sequestered in solitude alone with it, though by the novel’s conclusion

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ESSAY Ch’oe will concede, generously, that perhaps all of us are similarly marooned in a loneliness we each fashion (103). This pathos may seem familiar to us, but Kim Hak-young’s despair is the stutterer’s own, not one conceded by others who do not share his disability. But there is this fact: stutterers in Japanese literature, unlike those of the West, can be and are exemplars. In addition to the stuttering sailor in The Factory Ship, who is cheered rather than executed like our sailor, Billy Budd, there are other examples. The late composer Takemitsu Tōru wrote a work entitled “A Stutterer’s Manifesto” in which he writes: “Stuttering is not a regression. It is a march forward. Medical science would have it a variety of functional handicaps, but in my metaphysics, stuttering is the poetry of revolution” (70). Takemitsu’s contemporary, the poet, playwright, and filmmaker Terayama Shūji, was also a stutterer, and likewise declared stuttering an act of revolution. In one of his films, Sho o suteyo machi e deyō (Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, 1971), the voiceover says: To keep from stuttering I pick words I definitely won’t stutter on, but then I end up saying things I didn’t really want to say.…They told me singing could cure my stutter, so I sang “The Woman From Hakodate” a hundred times. But isn’t stuttering a kind of philosophy? The rising sun stutters its way between the buildings. Beethoven’s Fifth stutters “da, da, da, daaaan.” Peace shudders over the scorched earth in Vietnam. Clouds are stuttering vagabonds. The Straits of Korea are a stuttering borderline, have you seen it! Order and subordination are smooth, but the sun has a stutter, the human heart has a stutter, every kind of resistance stutters, it stutters and stutters and stutters as it shouts (qtd. in Ridgely 85).

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Japanese stutterers are found today in the same range of artists, politicians, teachers, and everyday folks as they are in any country, but the Japanese can count on a literary tradition that shames and insults them less, does not relegate them to a purgatory of the impaired, the corrupt, or the sinful, but gives the gift of choosing their words—their substitutes if lucky, or unintelligible false starts if not—without the censorious judgments of gods, philosophers, physicians, Freudians, or literary theorists to mute them further. One wonders what other literatures in the world, those traditionally outside the West’s equation of the spoken word with human worth, may have to say about us as well.

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Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Translated by Vern W. McGee, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Bender, James F. The Personality Structure of Stuttering, with Special Reference to Col- lege Male Stutterers. New York: Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1939. ---. “The Prophylaxis of Stuttering.” The Nervous Child: Quarterly Journal of Psychopa- thology, Psychotherapy, Mental Hygiene, and Guidance of the Child, vol. 2, no. 2, 1943, pp. 181-98. Blanton, Smiley, and Margaret Gray Blanton. For Stutterers. New York: D. Appleton- Century Company, 1936.

Bobrick, Benson. Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983.

Coriat, Isador H. Stammering: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation. New York: Nervous and Mental Defense Publishing Company, 1928. Cox, Daniel Allen. Mouthquake: A Novel. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015. Davis, Lennard J., editor. “The Need for Disability Studies.” Introduction. The Dis- abilities Studies Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles. “He Stuttered.” Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, London and New York: Verso, 1998, pp. 107-114. Gardner, Erle S. The Case of the Stuttering Bishop. New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1936. Glauber, I. Peter. “Freud’s Contributions on Stuttering: Their Relation to Some Cur- rent Insights.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 6, no. 2, 1958, pp. 326-47. Halperin, David M. How to Be Gay. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Uni- versity, 2012.

Izawa Shūji. Izawa Shūji senshū. Edited by Shinano kyōiku kai, Nagano: Shinano kyōiku kai shuppanbu, 1958. Katz, Murray. “Survey of Patented Anti-Stuttering Devices.” Journal of Communi- cations Disorders, vol. 10, 1977, pp. 181-206. Kim Hak-young [Kin Kakuei]. Koeru kuchi. In Koeru kuchi—Kin Kakuei sakuhinshū. Kurein, 2004, pp. 11-103.

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Kodera Wahei. “Kitsuon shūdan.” Shin Nihon bungaku, vol. 19, no. 9, 1964, pp. 44-61. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd. Edited by F. Barren Freeman, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948. Mishima, Yukio. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Translated by Ivan Morris, New York: Knopf, 1959. Pitner, Mark. “Stuttered Speech and Moral Intent: Disability and Elite Identity Con- struction in Early Imperial China.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 137, no. 4, 2017, pp. 669-717. Richler, Mordecai. Barney’s Version. New York: Knopf, 1997. Ridgely, Steven C. Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shūji. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day. Boston: Little, Brown, 2000. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Shell, Marc. Stutter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Spurr, David. “Stuttering Joyce.” European Joyce Studies, vol. 20, 2011, pp. 121-33. Takemitsu Tōru. “Kitsuon sengen—domori no manifesuto.” In Takemitsu Tōru chōsakushū 1, pp. 67-88. Updike, John. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989. West, Robert. “The Pathology of Stuttering.” The Nervous Child: Quarterly Journal of Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Mental Hygiene, and Guidance of the Child, vol. 2, no. 2, January 1943, pp. 96-106.

John Whittier Treat is emeritus professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale University, and now affiliate faculty at the University of Washington. He is the author of Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb and the forthcoming The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature, both from the University of Chicago Press. He is currently at work on a study of Korean writers under Japanese colonial rule, and a second novel, First Consonants, about a stutterer who saves the world.

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Wang Jiaxin Translated by Diana Shi & George O’Connell

Marginalia Tear up your manuscripts, but those notes you scribbled at the edges from boredom and futility, save them. ~Osip Mandelstam

旁注之诗毁掉你的手稿, 但是, 保留你因为烦闷和无助而写在页边的批注。 —曼德尔施塔姆

Akhmatova 1941, your roof so close to that summer’s fiery planet. I saw it myself, winter 2016. Can’t say the catastrophe’s over, but as the years between us grow, the undeniable looms into view.

阿赫玛托娃那在 1941 年夏天逼近你房子上空的火星，我在 2016 年的冬天才看见了它。灾难已过去了吗? 我不知道。当我们拉开距离, 现实才置于眼前。

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Pasternak In one poem he praised the leader, then felt puzzled: “The devil only knows how it was written!”

帕斯捷尔纳克他写了一首赞美领袖的诗, 事后他也纳闷: “鬼知道它是怎样写出来的!”

Milosz Caught in the headlights a rabbit runs right down the beams. The philosophy I require would help that rabbit flee.

米沃什一只野兔在车灯前逃窜, 它只是顺着那道强光向前逃窜; 看看吧, 如果我需要哲学, 我需要的, 是那种能够帮助一只小野兔的哲学。

Mandelstam As if bewitched, you hummed “My century, my beast.” You searched for a reed flute, but stole instead Sophocles’ hatchet.

曼德尔施塔姆你着了魔似地哼着 “我的世纪, 我的野兽”; 你寻找一只芦笛, 但最后却盗来了一把索福克勒斯用过的斧头。

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Yeats Once I believed your nobility. Now I suspect what made you was its opposite—demonic force.

叶芝从前我觉得你很高贵, 现在我感到造就你的, 完全是另一种魔鬼般的力量。

For Milosz, For Heaney Strange, when I first left the countryside, a post-Auschwitz child, and saw the railway’s wood sleepers, I wondered why beneath such weight they’d seep sticky oil but never groan. Everywhere that fine summer the party’s “struggle sessions” rolled on.

献给米沃什, 献给希尼很怪, 因为奥斯维辛, 我才想起了我从小进县城时第一次看到的铁路枕木, （现在则是水泥墩了）它们在重压之下并没有发出呻吟, 而是流出了粘稠的焦油— 在那个盛大的、到处揪斗人的夏天。

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Dante It’s not that your nose is aquiline, but how the eagle's talons squeeze your eyebrows.

但丁不是你长着一副鹰勾鼻子, 是鹰的利爪, 一直在你的眉头下催促。

Wittgenstein How much pain can stone feel? Can we even address this? Mars must suffer, its rocks in torment. Can you still stroll beneath, so carefree?

维特根斯坦在何种程度上石头会痛苦在何种程度上我们可以说到一块石头疼痛但是火星难道不是一个痛苦的星球吗火星的石头疼痛的时候你在它的下面可以安闲地散步吗

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Brodsky In Peter the Great’s city, styled after Venice, on a bookshelf that divides a room, a small boat's awaited you for years. (Who cast your future?) You lie among the graves of Isola di San Michele, where waves lash rocks for lifetimes, having found at last “an estuary, a mouth,” as if everything proclaimed: Look, the ocean—at last a firm horizon.

布罗茨基在彼得大帝仿威尼斯建造的城市里, 在那道隔开一间半屋子的书架上, 一只小船早就在等着你了, （是谁预设了你的未来?）现在, 你躺在圣米凯莱的墓园里, 那在岩石上摔打了一生的激流, 终于找到了“一个河口, 一张真正的嘴巴”, 仿佛一切都在说: 看, 那就是海— “—道带有概括性质的地平线”。注: 圣米凯莱, 一座位于威尼斯外岛上的著名墓园。

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For Brecht, For Celan Solitary cloud, skyless for Brecht, for Celan. What times those were, when even talk of the weather frightened. Because too little was said, or too much?

献给布莱希特, 献给策兰一朵云, 没有天空, 献给布莱希特, 献给策兰: 那是什么时代, 在那儿甚至一场关于天气的对话也几乎让人恐惧, 因为它包含了太多省略, 太多说出的东西?

Orwell 1948. You wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. Why not Twenty Forty-Eight? Only Big Brother knows.

奥威尓 1948年写的一部小说, 你把它题为“1984”。但为什么不是“2048”呢 ? 这个, 得由老大哥说了算。

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Reading The Gulag Archipelago Before it was written, no one would believe it. Now talking as we walk, what keeps us apart is no longer a fence but barbed wire.

读《古拉格群岛》有些东西没有写出来之前, 谁也不会相信。现在, 我与你谈话, 我们边走边谈, 中间隔着的也不再是籬笆而是一道铁丝网。

Szymborska After her death, a hundred drawers full: saved postcards, cigarette lighters, manuscripts, sewing kits, a model of Noah's Ark, passport, a necklace, the Nobel diploma. And one drawer, when opened, still empty.

辛波斯卡她死后留下有一百多个抽屉: 她使用过的各种物品, 收集的明信片, 打火机（她抽烟）手稿, 针线包, 诺亚方舟模型, 护照, 项链, 诺奖获奖证书, 但是有一个拉开是空的。

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Tolstoy A wild soul, escaping home, last hours at a small rail station, near the end, his hand gesturing indecipherably skyward. Someone said he was writing.

托尓斯泰一个离家出走的疯狂灵魂, 在一个小火车站上, 在弥留之际, 他的手仍在竭力比划。无人可以读懂, 但也有人说: “他朝空中写了起来。”

Josef Koudelka’s "Photos From Prague" Over a balcony or overpass a wristwatch strapped on a wrist, a moment in history, twenty-one past twelve, August 21, 1968, seized but unstoppable. Was this your despair? Unanswerable since there's no answer. Amid iron, fire, the swiveling of tanks and turrets, we hear only this clatter, continuing.

寇德卡 ”布拉格摄影集” 一只从阳台或过街天桥上伸出的手腕上的手表, 定格了历史 (1968年8月21日12点21分) 但却无法阻挡历史。这是否就是你的绝望? 没有回答, 也不会有回答。在铁与火中, 在坦克炮塔的转动中, 我们听到的只是那咔嗒一声, 又一声……

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Pound You’d thought to pitch a tent below Mt. Tai, your soul relishing sweet evenings. I’d rather live in your asylum, babbling, letting others say it’s poetry.

庞德你想象在泰山脚下搭一个帐篷, 度过灵魂的美妙夜晚, 而我呢, 宁愿住进你的精神病院, 在那里嗯啊哈的, 别人还以为那些就是诗。

Auden When water meets fire, something else arises. Autumn ‘73, you died, 66, in a Viennese hotel, at your hand a poem to revise and the last of your martini.

奥登水与火, 合在一起就成了别的。 1973 年秋, 你死于维也纳一家旅馆, 享年66岁。你松开的手边, 是一首还在修改的诗和一杯残剩的马提尼酒。

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Walter Benjamin Died on the run. Died at the border beneath the Pyrenees. Died of the untranslatable. A Jew, quickly buried in a Catholic graveyard. On the plain headstone Walter Benjamin became “Benjamin Walter” as the locals could imagine no other name.

本雅明死于逃亡路上, 死于边境。死于比利牛斯山下。死于无法翻译。

Heidegger

而在你死后, 一个犹太人被草草埋入天主教墓地。简陋的墓碑上, 瓦尓特 · 本雅明被写成了: “本雅明 · 瓦尓特”。当地人说, 他们只能有这样的名字。

Confirmed in your black notebook: in the end one must be true not to philosophy scribbled at a mountain resort but to one’s own blood.

海德格尔你的黑色笔记本最终证实了: 一个人忠实的, 不是他在高山疗养地写下的哲学, 而是他自己的血。

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Eliot If April’s cruel, so is August. How long you’ve kept watch in the dry, stony field, awaiting rain, as your tribe became nomads.

艾略特四月是残酷的月份, 八月也是。多少年了, 你仍守着你那干涸的乱石堆中的田地，并等待着雨。可是你的后人们, 都做了游牧者。

Bonnefoy We know the motion and immobility of Wang Wei, but what of Douve’s, his “motion and immobility,” beside the borders of rock, snow, and fire, a bow at full draw. Note: On the Motion and Immobility of Douve is a poetry collection by French poet Yves Bonnefoy.

博纳富瓦我们知道王维的动与静, 但什么是 “杜弗的动与静”? 杜弗的动与静, 是在石头、雪和火灾的边界上拉出的一张弓。注：《杜弗的动与静》为法国诗人博纳富瓦所著的一部诗集。

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Emmanuel Levinas What unpacks memory? A face. What speaks to me this moment? A face. What retreats into itself? A face. What makes me leave one language and enter another? A face. What makes me weep? A face. What bends at last over our faces? A face we cannot see.

列维纳斯是什么打开了我的记忆? 一张脸。是什么在对我说话? 脸。是什么又“缩回” 到自身之内? 脸。是什么让我从一种语言进入另一种? 脸。是什么使我们想哭? 脸。是什么最终会俯在我们的脸上? 一张我们已无法看到的脸。

Ted Hughes In Newcastle, on a bare peak near Scotland, we've both heard from our beds the cries of the wolf. You with your two boys beside you, and I alone.

塔特·休斯在英格兰纽卡索, 在靠近苏格兰的一个荒山上, 我们都在同一张床上听过野狼的哀鸣, 不过, 那时你身边是你护着的两个幼子, 而我, 孤身一人。

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Bach’s Art Of The Fugue We hardly know how such transcendence can arise from this world of pain, but at the edge of the city, where I drive past mountains of trash, past empty-eyed kids, staring, Bach enters my ears, and I cross into my own country, vast and impoverished.

巴赫《赋格的艺术》在这令人痛苦的世界上, 我们指责不该有这样超脱的艺术; 可我仍忍不住去听, 当我几乎是含着泪, 缓缓驶过垃圾成山、孩子们痴呆相望的城乡结合部, 进入我贫寒而广阔的国度。 Distinguished among contemporary Chinese poets and essayists, Wang Jiaxin has received many awards and been translated into multiple languages. Former Luce Poet-in-Residence at Colgate University in New York, and 2013 resident at the University of Iowa International Writing Program, he is the author of six poetry and ten essay collections, as well as a prolific anthologist. The translator of William Butler Yeats, Marina Tsvetaeva, René Char, and particularly Paul Celan, Wang is currently Professor of Literature at Beijing’s Renmin University. Darkening Mirror: New & Selected Poems, published 2017 in the U.S., is his first full-length volume in English. Diana Shi Diana Shi’s renderings of Chinese-language, contemporary American, and other poetries have appeared widely East and West. With George O’Connell, she edited and translated the 2008 Atlanta Review China Issue. They have also conducted contemporary Chinese-language poetry translation workshops at Peking University and National Taiwan University. Their 2017 U.S. release of Darkening Mirror: New & Selected Poems by Wang Jiaxin was followed in Hong Kong by Crossing the Harbour, a bilingual anthology of ten contemporary Hong Kong Chinese-language poets. Co-recipient of a U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation and two Hong Kong Arts Development Council awards, she also received the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Dawson Lee Memorial Prize.

George O’Connell American poet and translator George O’Connell has taught creative writing and literature in both U.S. and Chinese universities, serving as Fulbright professor at Peking University and National Taiwan University. In addition to numerous U.S. honors for his poetry, including the Pablo Neruda Prize, he has received a U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation as well as Hong Kong Arts Development Council awards. He and Diana Shi co-direct Pangolin House, an international journal of Chinese and English-language poetry and art.

P O E T R Y

Xiao Kaiyu Translated by Christopher Lupke

Fields Tattered and Worn (2007) 1. A Peasant Woman on Double Duty I suffer for myself. I suffer for the regularity of my menstrual disorders in the field. I suffer for the hair of peasant women growing from field to hills. I suffer for their valor, their lack of choices. I suffer for them arising from bed after the lingering night alone. I suffer for their looks, attenuated by cracked lips and tongues. I suffer for the mechanics of the starry night sky as they mechanically play mahjong. I suffer for the elder among them who uses the clothes washer to recall past times. I suffer for the younger among them who use their anuses to target textbooks. I suffer for the idiots among them who levy taxes on those even more idiotic. I suffer for the barbershop girls among them who return home to open their own barbershops. I suffer for the ones who kneel and pray at the sight of a Buddha, their fathers propped against a corner, smoking and panting. Their husbands and sons are laboring and rolling their eyes at who knows what. They sacrifice their bodies to the fields. All they have is quivering souls. Whether real or not, they need the Buddha. I suffer for their lack of song, lack of dance, their lack of all things cultural. I suffer for their homophobia, their fights with mothers-in-law, the breaks with their friends, the Incessance, fiercer and less beautiful, the contests between villages over the lack of peace and fairness, neither leftist nor rightist, their absence of passion. I suffer for their taciturnity and violence, their yardwork, their putting on makeup, their burning incense, their revenge and suicide, the persistence after the punishment of loneliness. I suffer for their expression. Their shallowness is like the fields. They are intimate with black caverns, on the maternity bed, the round-the-clock promotion of fear increases in the price of oil and cereal. I suffer for them. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not worthy to continue writing this. Why should rheumatism be written as an elixir? Arthritis into sugarcane? Wheezes reworked into a blanket? Sugarcane and blankets have passed their prime, not wanted anymore. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not worthy to be called their grandmother. They are worthy. They can. They must. I suffer for them.

破烂的田野（一）双性的农妇我忍受着自己。我忍受着坛坛罐罐的自己在月经不调的农田里。我忍受着从农田向群山茁壮的农妇的毛发。我忍受着她们的雄起，她们的不得已。我忍受着她们的漫漫长夜和独自起床。我忍受着她们看看而说不出话而唇舌干裂。我忍受着她们对着机械的星空机械地玩麻将。我忍受着她们中的长者用洗衣机回顾过去。我忍受着她们中的少小用屁眼瞄准课本。我忍受着她们中的笨蛋为下笨蛋而缴罚金。我忍受着她们中的发廊妹回到老家开发廊。我忍受着她们见菩萨就拜。她们的父亲在墙角抽烟和喘气。她们的丈夫和儿子在天知道什么地方打工和遭白眼。她们的身体献给了农田。她们只有颤颤巍巍的灵魂，无论真假，需要菩萨。我忍受着他们不歌、不舞，不一切文艺。我忍受着她们同性排斥，婆媳吵架、同伴断交、没完没了，比凶而不比美，村子和村子竞赛不平静和不平等，既不左，也不右，也不是一点儿也不色情。我忍受着她们的沉静和暴力，她们收拾院子，打扮一番，烧香、报复和自杀，都在寂寞行刑之后。我忍受着她们的表扬。她们浅薄得跟农田一个模样，以黑窟窿洞为机密，为产床，为一天二十四小时推动粮油和跳楼价。我忍受着她们。我配不上再写下去。我为什么要把风湿写成药酒，把痛骨写成甘蔗，把呻唤编成棉被。药酒、甘蔗和棉被已经过时，没人要了。我配不上称她们祖母、母亲和姐妹，我配不上我的产地。我配不上埋在山坡。她们配。她们会。她们必须。我忍受着。

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P O E T R Y 2. Who Is Rescuing Whom? People old and young lost in the Zhengzhou Train Station. I know their names. There’s no need to read the police announcements. I know exactly where they are. I’ve got their addresses and whereabouts. They are thousands into one. One mind and one body is one idiot. All cheated by the same temporary cheats, The cheats are all one pathetic vermin too. Black hearts when laid-off turn bright white, make for the brick factories of Shanxi, so foolish they can’t think to resist today or any day. They are a people whom our language cannot sustain. They haven’t drunk dry their own blood. Our language cannot sustain them. They mine coal more corporeal than themselves, and it’s worth more money. Their mutilated arms stacked in tall walls that surely aren’t incised with their hard luck. Our cups are transparent, windows are transparent, but our bodies are contrary. Their body temperature bequeaths humiliation that must be encased in cement sealant. Coalpits and brick factories are no more than tearful metaphors, but our epiphora is not grave. No need to mention the tearless walking dead, the coalpits and brick factories here are closed, still open over there. Our inner misfortune and vulnerability requires a dose of numbness to offset their hearts. Our efforts at vegetarian dieting cannot match their hunger and atrophy. Our TV shows are generally improvements that force us to be more conscious and conscientious. Our mulling upon mulling, critique upon critique, is as just as it is generous. Our drinking of spring water eases the burden of our mortgages; our guilt is our whole life’s ranking, Is so-called morality nothing more than rhetorical sanitation? We happen to sort out a few words. Because we happen to know a few characters, and turn onto a different road—not really a different road—not like a brother-in-law blithely on his way to Xinjiang to mine coal, swindled in Zhengzhou, blacklisted in Shandong, rescued on the front page of various tabloids, clarified the implications of language, all upright, I really think it is my good fortune. My gut is loaded with words I can no longer utter. They are all inevitable to me. I am their good fortune. They’re dowdy and so careless, sometimes doing something on the side. Their fates are not equally grueling, ridiculous anarchistic talk and this and that in foreign languages. Bug off, our pain is our humiliation, purely included in the humiliation of no remorse.

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（二）谁解救了谁？在郑州火车站失踪的老少人等，我知道他们的姓名，不必看公安和解救小组的报告，我准确知道他们的下落，我掌握他们的地址和去处，他们成千上万只是一个，同一身心是同一个白痴，上同一伙临时就业的骗子的当，骗子也是同一个可怜虫，一朝下岗黑心就变得雪白，就去到山西的砖场，白痴得想不起反抗和今日何日。他们是我们的语言负担不起的一种人。他们没有喝光的他们自己的血，我们的语言负担不起。他们挖的煤比他们具体得多，值钱得多。他们的残肢断臂堆砌的高墙决不刻录他们的厄运。我们的杯子透明，窗户透明，我们的身体则相反。他们的体温遗臭顽强得很，必须用水泥和涂料封得严实。煤窑和砖场只是两个催泪的比喻，我们的多泪症并不严重，无泪症患者行尸走肉不必提了，煤窑和砖场这里关闭，那里开张，我们室内的可惜和敏感需要他们内心的统一麻木来平衡，我们的素食等减肥措施企及不了他们的挨饿和萎缩，我们的电视节目大为改善迫使我们意识我们的良心之大大，我们讨论又讨论，批评又批评，又是正义又是捐赠，我们喝矿泉水我们松弛下来我们付按揭，负疚成全生活的水准，所谓道德不就是修辞的整洁吗，我们碰巧会安排几个字。因为碰巧认得几个字，拐上了另外一条路——不见得真是另外的一条——没有像乐呵呵的妹夫去新疆挖煤，在郑州被骗，在山西被黑，在各大媒体的头版被解救，整理语言的风向，体体面面，我真的以为我是幸运的，满肚子混账话再也说不出口，诸如他们是我的必然，我是他们的幸运，他们邋遢所以不小心所以偶然地分身，命运并不同苦，无为而治的鬼话和这样那样的外国语去他的蛋，为我们的有感觉而羞耻，纯属无耻的羞耻。

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P O E T R Y 3. The Children Their fathers defied their lots by languishing in odd jobs just to keep a shirt on the back. Their mothers defied their lots by working sundry public bath houses, never saving a cent. Their fathers and mothers were not against marriage but opposed further births to spare the children. They were not born into sanitary conditions in a legitimate hospital. Their parents are a humiliation. They are the scourge of the neighborhood. They wriggle on the backs of their mothers and older sisters making their way on the skywalks across streets. They don’t just sell props for stock footage; they’re part of the footage itself. They grow up together with flies, dead bugs, live rats and dead. They look aghast at the urban-rural fringe as petitions are nullified. They attend schools for the kids of undocumented farm and factory workers helping some of the upright people come up with agitating topics for meetings, like the disconnected essays I write on detritus theory. They play woebegone child-actors in scores of marquee venues, Sometimes even appearing on stage to receive applause and tears. They await their parents’ collapse or the stunned realization of their error and decision to reform. No matter what they want, they return to the countryside with their textile worker parents. No matter what their parents have amassed, the countryside has already become the site of the aged, infirm, ill, and disabled. No matter what their parents think, there is nothing for them to do in the countryside. They are just like their parents, already despising the countryside. Condescending toward local customs. The buildings they build are nothing more than their gravestones. After all, living in the city they have a taste of the policeman’s club. They have felt the scorn of city kids, after all. They have followed their modernizing parents in their move to the county cities. They’ve seen that residents of the county seat are all alike. They know what their parents have saved is not enough to buy a new shirt. They can’t afford good schools. They band together to serve as their own teachers. Their relatives gather rust in the rural villages. They atrophy in a farming village to which they do not belong. They are barely over ten and all they know is infirmity. They latch onto whatever they can, looking for any way to stop the rot. They sneer at the local kids as they work themselves to death. They know they’ve got no chance at even a lousy university, stuck between too good and not good enough, so they eventually return to their villages to waste their whole lives. They know their lives have a prayer of getting better, but they can’t fight their fate. They perm their hair, get tattoos, rehearse their vagrant attitudes, and nothing more. They dream of escape but have nowhere to go. The towns and cities in which they live belong to someone else. They dream of moving to the urban-rural fringe, where they’ve never lived, and where those who roam are not human. They are fraught with the illnesses of the aging and yet still wet the bed.

P O E T R Y

（三）孩子们他们的父亲反抗命运在不同的工地卖命也许保住了手脚。他们的母亲反抗命运在不同的洗浴中心卖淫存了不少钱。他们的父亲和母亲不反结婚但为了孩子应该反反生育啊！他们不是在正规医院里面正规出生的人。他们的父母是他们的耻辱，他们是城市的毛病。他们趴在母亲和姐姐的背上在过街天桥的上面和下面，他们不仅仅是卖毛片的道具而是毛片的一部分。他们与苍蝇和死苍蝇老鼠和死老鼠一起长大。他们在城乡接合部的铁道边眼睁睁地看着上访者趴着作废。他们上非法的农民工子弟学校帮助一些正直的人找到震撼的话题得意地开会，像我煞有介事地写文章，出馊主意。他们在很多有分量的场合扮演受苦的童星，有时甚至出场接受鼓掌和泪水。他们等待父母伤残或者幡然悔悟决定洗手的一天。不管愿意不愿意，他们要跟扛着编织袋的父母回到乡下。不管他们的父母积累了什么，乡下已经归属老弱病残。不管他们的父母怎么想，他们在乡下无事可做。他们的父母和他们同样，已经瞧不起乡下。对于地道的土气他们实在是太洋气。他们建造的高楼不过是他们的墓碑，他们毕竟住过城市领略过城市的警察的警棍。他们自己毕竟被城市的孩子亲自蔑视过。他们跟着洋气的父母住进县城。他们见过的世面与城关镇的居民有得一拼。他们的父母的积蓄不足以购买一个白衣领。他们上不起重点学校。他们和本地的他们联合起来打老师。他们的亲戚锈在农村。他们自己的椎骨死死地钉在不属于他们的农村。他们不过十来岁，历尽沧桑。他们抓住什么就沉迷什么寻找一切变坏的机会。他们冷看地地道道的农村孩子往死里做作业。他们知道了不得考上一个坏大学高不成低不就终将回到乡镇浪费终生。他们知道命运就是现在打打架，将来打零工做小生意。他们知道生活可能改善，命运反抗不起。他们染了头发，刺了纹身，熟练了流氓的脾气，仅此而已。他们也想出出神只是没有地方。他们待过的农村和城市是别人的他们要把这两种地方搬进他们没有待过的城关镇所以流里流气横竖不是人。他们满身老年病但还在尿床。

P O E T R Y Author’s Afterword I’m not qualified to write this sort of lament, but I didn’t have a choice. The last few years I’ve visited rural villages in various provinces. The crops have gotten better, but the land is spent. The chain of production for rural intellectuals has ceased to exist. I still hold out a little bit of optimism, which is based on the fact that students graduating from all kinds of schools are able to find employment only in county towns and in the countryside. Along with the farm workers and their children who are returning to rural areas, these folks have no recourse other than establishing a livelihood in the countryside. When farm laborers are satisfied with living in the countryside, making a decent living, the city truly can be the kind of gift it ought to be for those who choose to live there. And it won’t be a giant cesspool for the forgotten class. I just hope it doesn’t become part of the mad dash to steal anything of value. I don’t oppose the fact that the plight of rural folk is appropriated by intellectuals to assuage their emotional afflictions. I also do not oppose any advocacy for the interests of farm laborers by intellectuals or poets. I believe the only road to resolving rural problems is going to be rooted completely in rural life out in the counties. I agree with European and American intellectuals when I say that the most successful sign is when we have writers living in the countryside. I know that no matter how we describe it, nothing is better than farm laborers accepting their own lives, and this will help us restore our sense of values. Can I accept this future? Xiao Kaiyu (b. 1960) was born in the village of Heping, Zhongjiang County, in Sichuan Province. In his youth he was interested in literature and culture, and he studied Chinese medicine, graduating with a degree in 1979. After several years of practicing traditional medicine in Sichuan, while writing poetry on the side, he moved to Shanghai in 1993 where he worked as an editor, taught in a university, and began publishing. In the late 1990s, he spent several years in Germany, learning the language and reading widely in European literatures. After returning to China, he took up a position as professor of Chinese at Hunan University in Kaifeng. He recently left this position to pursue poetry and write full time. Xiao Kaiyu is among the poets often referred to in China as “intellectual” or “academic.” Yet rather than evincing an ethos removed from everyday life, the “new intellectualism” of his poetry exhibits linguistic density, a layered structure of literary and cultural allusions, and extended control of subject matter. Some of his most distinctive works, such as the long poem “Homage to Du Fu,” are meditations on contemporary life in China, imbued with a consciousness of the nation’s history. In the past fifteen years, Xiao Kaiyu’s writing has become more experimental in syntax and diction, and he appears now to be interested in pressing language to its referential boundaries. His poems, though modern and stylistically avant-garde, exhibit an awareness of China’s rich past, for Xiao Kaiyu’s training in traditional medicine included rigorous instruction in Chinese culture, philosophy, and literature as well. While deeply committed to poetic meditations on contemporary China in the midst of dealing with the Maoist legacy and the impact of capitalism, he views these issues with a sensitivity to the historical sources of Chinese culture.

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补充说明我没有资格写这首颂诗。我不得不写。这几年我去过不同省份的农村，植被变好，地气变得粗鄙。乡村知识分子的生产链中断了。我保留着一点乐观，根据是各类学校的毕业生终将只能在县城和乡镇获得就业机会，他们和回乡的农民工及其子女不得不在这里建设他们的生活。等到农民工在乡镇安居乐业，过上人的日子，城市才能够坦然地称作他们留给城市人口的厚礼，而不是一个个庞大的记载辛酸与罪孽的遗迹。但愿这篇东西不会加入到对农民的剩余价值的再掠夺势力当中。我不反对用农民的不幸治疗知识分子和诗人的心理疾病，我不反对任何使得社会重视三农问题的舆论。我认为围绕县城全面建设乡镇生活是解决农民问题的惟一途径。我认同欧美的这一价值，作家成功的两个标志中的一个是住在乡下。我知道，无论如何描述都不过分的农民工最终安顿他们自己的时候，就是帮助我们实现这一价值的时候。我能够安心地接受这个未来吗？二〇〇七，六月十七至六月十九日，于开封

Christopher Lupke Christopher Lupke (Ph. D. Cornell University) is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta and chair of East Asian Studies. His most recent book is The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion (Cambria Press, 2016). He has published widely on Chinese literature and cinema and also is an avid translator. His translations of the poetry of Xiao Kaiyu, for example, have appeared in New England Review, Michigan Quarterly, Epiphany, E-Ratio, Asymptote, Five Points, Free Verse, Cha, Chinese Literature Today, Eleven Eleven, and elsewhere. He is currently investigating how the traditional notion of filiality has affected modern Chinese literature and film.

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P O E T R Y

Lan Lan Translated by Diana Shi & George O’Connell

On Landscape A range of flying mountains. A galloping patch of linden. Field. Field. This scrap of landscape borne aloft by words. Yet "fruit" dangles in the air. This cannot be. A curious dream soars above rivers, above grasslands my ink’s tinged green— the blurred lips and teeth of words staining the globe of my whole life with the tang of one red berry.

关于风景一列飞驰的山峰。一片奔跑起来的椴树林。田野。田野这一片风景被词语抬起上升。而 “水果” 高悬在半空中。那不是真的。一个奇异的梦在河流和草丛上飞翔被我的墨水染绿一一这模糊的语言的唇齿却接触到给予了我全部生活的大地上一粒红浆果的滋味。

Under the Pillow Under the pillow, beans sprout, in the shells, children hiding, their windows sesame-sized. An old man’s packed train slowly inches backward, a flock of leaves returning like birds to the bough, his time an endless loop. In the marriage bed, beneath the pillow strewn with blossoms, an ink-black coffin, and to snag the tangled toes of the newlyweds, a pair of icy hands.

枕下豆芽儿从枕下拱出孩子们藏在空豆壳里有着芝麻大的窗口老人: 慢慢地一列应有尽有的火车开始退着走落叶的鸟群从地面飞回枝头他的时间一一无始无终的圆周在婚床鲜花堆簇的枕下躺着漆黑的棺木一双冰凉的手突然伸出抓住新人们纠缠在一起的脚趾头一一

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Ruin In ruins, that shadowed figment of freedom paces, coughs, clears its throat, fills with would-be liberation, praising, eulogizing cleared space above the rubble and scrubweed. The serpent glides between stones, its eye upon so many blind, naked heels

废墟废墟里有着自由那奇怪的阴影在徘徊。在咳嗽

bearing sacrifice to the altar. Garlands wither as they must. Crows deliver darkness the powerful require.

清理嗓子

If this poem comes too early, it’s too late—

所以, 它也赞美。

everywhere, the busy world goes on toppling its palaces. The rostrum in the ruin will always be rebuilt, the figment of freedom pacing, coughing,

但是, 只赞美高度

once more behind the mike, clearing its throat.

它也迷恋可能的解放

在瓦砾和低矮的野草之上深处的蛇悄悄游动。盯着无数脚跟的盲目爬上供品的祭台, 花朵枯萎着这是必然的枯萎。这是必然的乌鸦驮来了成功者要求的黄昏。这首诗或许写得太早, 但已经太晚一一世界各处都在倒塌那高大的殿堂。那废墟的主席台还会重建, 因为自由的阴影在徘徊, 咳嗽

在话筒前又开始清理嗓子。

P O E T R Y

Spring Aria Resent no one. Don’t shun your honeycomb. The bee doesn’t speed to its flower carrying dismay. Forgive your heavy water bucket. If you walk toward the peak, your burden will ease. A gust from the deep valley will replace your last look at the landscape. Select your oblivion. Choose a new note book, your name signed in blessing; count your debt to autumn in the seeds you plant; in a face, child or man, find amazement and a tattling clock; Reap where your cries become billows of wheat —if you sense why a barn is silent.

春之咏叹不要怨恨任何人。不要降低你的蜂巢蜜蜂不会带着沮丧奔向它的花。原谅你沉重的水桶。如果你向山顶走, 背负就会变轻。一阵从深谷吹来的风换下你目光里刚才的风景。挑选你的遗忘。挑选你新的笔记本, 署上你的名字在祝福中; 在你栽下的种子里清点欠下秋天的债务; 在孩子和男人的脸上看到惊奇和钟表的走动; 在你被痛苦呼喊成麦浪的地方收割一一如果你理解谷仓的宁静意味着什么。

P O E T R Y

This One Mine In each adult a dead child dwells.

我的这一个每个成人的身上都有一个死去的孩子。

So many simply vanish, say on a certain summer night, or rounding the corner of a house.

无数个孩童就这样失踪: 在某个夏夜之后

Gone where?

或者一栋房屋的拐弯处。

Lost bodies shift owners. A stranger to one’s past fears nothing, narrowing his gaze.

他们都去了哪里?

Torn fences, ragged weeds seize gardens. Snakes coil behind knees.

一些茫然的身体换了人。陌生人

To the child at hide-and-seek with my shadow, keep that grin on your spotless face, let your ten fingers not scheme, but weave soft wind, let stand the frail legs of dragonflies.

没有畏惧, 而他们的眼裂在变窄; 拆下童年的篱笆, 荒芜的草占领了园子; 蛇在他们的腿弯处做了窝。

Believe in ordinary truth: the sun sets before it rises. Believe each of two blooms is exquisite, earth more so. Believe in your grandmother’s yardstick,

可是, 和我的影子捉迷藏的这个一一

its graved incantation taking you back. Believe the old cupboard door, windowpanes laced with cobwebs, fresh footprints, rainy glass.

保持你不懂算计的十个手指

One damp corner of my eye’s a mirror: just now, you stood there.

我要说: 保持天真的笑容, 在你干净的脸上

用它们抚弄毛茸茸的风, 让最小的蜻蜓细细的腿站立。相信太阳落下又能升起这样简单的道理。相信两朵花都很美, 但泥土更美。相信一把外祖母用过的尺子一一在那上面刻有把你呼唤回来的咒语一一老橱柜的门, 结蛛网的窗棂留下了新鲜的鞋印和玻璃雨滴; 我的泪珠大得足够照见你: 一一就在刚才,

你来过。

P O E T R Y

Train, Train Dusk ships off white day. Windows fade from the capital to the sullen twilight of north China. From here to here. On this great earth, roads gash poplar groves. Thunder follows lightning but our mouths are safely stopped.

火车, 火车

The train crosses fields, pages of laboring feet erased. We tremble, speak no more of nodding sheep, the thick smoke of brick kilns.

黄昏把白昼运走。窗口从首都

Wheels plunge through night. From here to here. Imperishable stars attend the long cortège stretched on the rails of our courage.

……从这里, 到这里。

Train. Train. Beyond the headlines, we shiver through numb countryside: this dying man, hoist by his heels, gazing from the sky.

摇落到华北的沉沉暮色中

道路击穿大地的白杨林闪电, 会跟随着雷但我们的嘴已装上安全的消声器。火车越过田野, 这页删掉粗重脚印的纸。我们晃动。我们也不再用言词帮助低头的羊群, 砖窑的滚滚浓烟。轮子慢慢滑进黑夜。从这里到这里。头顶不灭的星星一直跟随, 这场墓地漫长的送行

在我们勇气的狭窄铁轨上延伸。火车。火车。离开报纸的新闻版驶进乡村木然的冷噤: 一个倒悬在夜空中垂死之人的看。

P O E T R Y

Dark Motive The spinach leaf spreading green from earth can’t guess the pitchblack stomach. In February the orchid opens not for a young girl’s hair.

动机的黑暗

Kindness won’t leap upon the scale to find its true price—higher than most imagine.

一棵菠菜从土里长出来时

With such malice I consider the world’s best intentions, and for this am villainous.

它的碧绿不会想到黑暗的肠胃。一朵二月兰的开放也不会为了把它戴在鬓角的姑娘的感谢。善良不会想到跳到秤盘上去找到不差分毫的价格一一甚至比人们认为的更多。我如此恶意地想到了世间有那么多善良的动机。为此我自认是个坏人。

Ten volumes of Lan Lan’s poetry have appeared in Chinese, along with six essay collections and numerous fairytales. One of the most celebrated contemporary mainland poets, her poetry has been rendered into a dozen languages in various international journals. Her poetic drama Borders was recently performed in Greece, where she was also named an honorary citizen of Chios. In English, Lan Lan’s poems may be found in Copper Canyon’s Push Open the Window, in Pangolin House, and in Canyon in the Body, a Zephyr Press collection. From Here to Here: New & Selected Poems, edited and translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell, is forthcoming in the U.S. Lan Lan has been Visiting Professor at several institutions, and Poet-In-Residence at Renmin University. She lives in Beijing. — For a brief biography of translators, Diana Shi and George O’Connell, see page 91.

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P O E T R Y

Mai Mang 麦芒

Seven Poems 诗七首 It Doesn’t Matter Do not give me form Do not give me themes I will create form Create themes Do not give me inspiration Do not give me motifs I will create inspiration Create motifs

没有什么不给我形式不给我主题我将创造形式创造主题不给我灵感不给我动机

Do not give me winter Do not give me sparks I will create Snow in June

我将创造灵感创造动机不给我冬天不给我火花我将创造六月之雪 (2005. 2. 16)

Exile Afternoon, the sun shines on my face. As usual, I sink into a drowsy sleep. In my dream I am surveying from above a vast brown-green map. Here is the land, there are the archipelagoes separated from the land by the sea. All the place names are directly labeled on the landscape of highs and lows, rises and falls. My eyes are greedy, as

流放下午，阳光照在脸上。像往常一样我陷入昏昏沉沉的睡眠。梦里我从上往下浏览一片广大的褐绿色地图，这里是陆地，那里是与陆地隔海的群岛。所有的地名都直接标在高低起伏的地

P O E T R Y if descending upon this earth in person. What differentiates this from reality is that, on this map, the eyes that cannot see themselves, with equal awe, cannot see even one human shadow either; even those spots that are the world’s most bustling cities have also, all of a sudden, stranding in the deep swamp green, been exposed as so remote and desolate.

形之上。我的眼睛贪婪，仿佛亲临这片地球一样。唯一与真实不同的是，在此地图上，看不见自己的一双眼睛也同样诧异地看不见一个人影；哪怕那些标志着世界上最繁华的都市的地方也突然，在沼泽般的深绿色之中，暴露得如此偏僻荒凉。

However, I can hear some woman’s distant voice (faintly I recall her pleasant figure): “You see, when you promised the fine prospects after our separation, you forgot that once one had his or her roots cut off, he or she entered a new world, which in its essence had been completely defamiliarized and turned into a sign, situated at the twisted reverse side of the real world that we used to know. It represents a nightmarish exile of never being able to turn back one’s head, and not an intimate honeymoon that we had once imagined.”

我却听得见某个女人遥远的声音（我朦胧记起她的姣好身姿）：“你看，当你许诺我们分离之后的美好远景的时候，你忘了只要一个人切断自己的根，他或她就进入了一个新世界，而这个新世界本质上已被完全陌生符号化，处在我们一度熟悉的现实世界的扭曲背面。它代表着永不回头的恶梦般的流放，而非我们曾经想象过的旖旎蜜月之旅。”

“But on the other hand you could also say that it’s quite natural.” I don’t remember whether I mumbled and added such a sentence.

“但反过来你也可以说它很自然。”我记不起我曾这么嘟哝补充一句。 (2000. 3. 31)

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Folegandros

Folegandros 荒凉光秃的岛

Folegandros Wild and barren Yet on that island I saw A sky full of stars

然而在岛上我看见了满天星光

I saw a place Farther than the sea

我看见了比海更远的地方

—Please Before I sink —Bring me from inside your body A tiny bit of love

——求求你在我沉没之前 ——带给我一点点你身体里边的爱 (2006. 10. 9)

The Greek island of Folegandros.

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P O E T R Y

Naxos It’s said that Theseus Deserted Ariadne On this island For reasons unknown Man, why did you leave? This land, like the woman, is so fertile It may be ordinary But doesn’t lack olives or wine Honey or peace No wonder Dionysus swooped in And took your place He would not spare the woman He is a god, not a hero

那克索斯据说忒修斯遗弃阿里阿德涅在此岛上原因不详男人，你为何离开这块土地，如同那女人，如此富饶它也许平常但并不缺乏橄榄和美酒蜂蜜与安宁难怪狄奥尼索斯趁虚而入他不会放过那女人他是神，而非英雄 (2006. 10. 15)

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A Different Love I kiss you With inner voice, not lips I embrace you With air, not arms I miss you With an irrigated garden, departing birds, infinite earth and sky, not a narrow cage or heart

别样的爱情我吻你用内在的声音，不用嘴唇我抱你用空气，不用手臂我思念你用灌溉的花园，离开的鸟儿，无垠的天地，而非狭小的笼子和心 (2013. 7. 23)

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P O E T R Y

News in the Rain If You died today No one could adequately comment: it is an insoluble grief If You died tomorrow Yet the messenger is still on the way: it is a disturbing prophecy If You died yesterday Memory of you would quickly evaporate into blank space: as if nothing had ever happened But If you died a long, long time ago You’re not dead: you’ve only changed your name Standing In the rain, silent and unmoving Watching this world that is neither early nor late, neither high nor low, unsurprisingly empty

雨中的消息如果你死在今天无人能恰当评论，那是难纾的悲痛如果你死在明天但送信者尚在途中，那是惴惴不安的预言如果你死在昨天缅怀很快就会蒸发成模糊的空白，几乎什么也没发生然而如果你死在很久、很久以前你根本没死，你早已改名换姓雨中静静伫立，一动不动注视这不早不晚，不高不低，毫不奇怪的空荡人间 (2013. 8. 30) SPRING/SUMMER 2019

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Island in the Sea

大海之岛

Some people Wrote some poems

某些人写出某些诗

Some people couldn’t keep their eyes open all night to write All the poems

某些人，难以整夜睁眼写出全部的诗

Nobody, save the surging waves Some people Throughout their lives have never written a poem

无人，除了汹涌的波涛某些人终其一生未曾写诗 (2014. 1. 3)

*All poems are translated from Chinese by the author. Mai Mang (Yibing Huang 麦芒 ) was born in Changde, Hunan, China, in 1967. He established himself as a poet in the 1980s and received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from Beijing University. He moved to the United States in 1993 and earned a second Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2001. Mai Mang is the author of two books of poetry, Stone Turtle: Poems 1987–2000 (Godavaya LLC, 2005) and Approaching Blindness (Writers Publishing House, 2005). He is also the author of Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He also published articles on and translations of contemporary Chinese poetry in English language journals such as Amerasia Journal, World Literature Today, and Chinese Literature Today. In 2009 Mai Mang served as a juror for the 2010 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and nominated Chinese poet Duo Duo, who became the first Chinese author to win the prestigious prize. In 2012 he won the 20th Rou Gang Poetry Prize in China. Mai Mang is associate professor of Chinese and curator of the Chu-Griffis Asian Art Collection at Connecticut College.

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P O E T R Y

Vera Schwarcz

無憶的國家 A country without memory for Min Han* We are a people, you whisper suffering memory loss, Either we don’t want to remember, or do not allow ourselves, or are forbidden. We are a country without a past. How can you say this about China? You do not answer but push on as if I was a historian of your vanished worlds, as if I could bring back what you lost, a spool of silk unraveled—your past a brocade bereft of its sheen.

Vmenkov

The Tomb of Confucius. As part of the destruction of the “Four Olds,” Red Guards from Beijing Normal University desecrated the burial place of Confucius and other historically significant tombs in November 1966.

We are all suffering. I have seen this, no one dare speak this sorrow’s name, no one, they claim, is dying from poisoned fish of course. I am dying but must not let on. Your country’s express train stuck on well-guarded roads.

*Min Han was a young scholar sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and remains a voice of conscience in China today.

破嘴的丝述自故事 The wrinkled silk tells its own story after a visit to the new Tsinghua University Art Museum

Mute, the outer edge of Ming, Qing scrolls, while curators caress mountains, rivers extolling China’s greatness, yet nothing about the wrinkled silk, cracked after decades of burial beneath a dread of revolution. Not a word about the courage it took to hide this art from the Red Guards bent upon destroying the “four olds”— old people, old ideas, old books, old habits cannibalized by a fear of falling out of step with the masses. Today, the grand new museum sings its nationalistic paean while fragile remnants whisper about the art of each man, each woman who faced the long, dark night consoled by ancients alone.

紙文音樂· Paper Music

for Yue Daiyun*

A young Chinese composer recalls village sorcerers conjuring music from cheap rice paper, bamboo stems flapping, rubbing, blowing, leaves ripping, sobbing, soothing newborns and the dead alike.

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P O E T R Y I remember another kind of paper music born out of our chatter four decades ago: my broken Chinese, spilling like raw rice over your worn English words, polished pebbles rescued from revolution-ruffled waters. Who could have imagined enduring harmonies orchestrated out of such tenuous cacophony, out of a bunch of yellow roses left on the doorstep of my sick room, years before we stared to rattle sheets of poetry between us?

*Yue Daiyun (born 1931) is a pioneer in comparative literature at Peking University. Her husband, Tang Yijie (1927-2014), was a well known scholar of Confucian philosophy. I was privileged to become close friends with them as a couple during my first stay as an exchange scholar at Peking University in 1979.

Vera Schwarcz is a China historian and poet focusing on comparative aspects of trauma studies. Schwarcz received her B.A. from Vassar College, M.A. from Yale and Ph.D. from Stanford. For the past four decades she taught at Wesleyan University, where she was the Freeman Professor of History and East Asian Studies. Schwarcz has also taught several seminars on Chinese and comparative historiography in the MA program at Hebrew University. Her work received several distinguished awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and a Lady Davis Fellowship. Vera is the author of nine books about Chinese intellectual history, including Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory (Yale University Press, 1989), which was nominated for the National Jewish Book Award and, most recently, Colors of Veracity: A Quest for Truth in China and Beyond (University of Hawaii Press, 2014). She has also written six books of poetry including the recent The Physics of Wrinkle Formation (Antrim Press, 2015). For more information about her work, see: between2walls.com.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N

Michael Wutz in Conversation with

Mary de Rachewiltz on Ezra Pound

From Idaho to Confucius, or from the American West to the Far Eastâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; On Explaining a Poet Misguided or Misunderstood Mary de Rachewiltz

nti

lĂł Cara Nicco

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Mary de Rachewiltz and Ezra Pound, following his release from St. Elizabeths Hospital and his return to Italy, at Schloss Brunnenburg, ca. 1958.

INTRODUCTION Ezra (Weston Loomis) Pound may well be the most famous (and perhaps misunderstood) American literary figure born west of the Mississippi. Born in Hailey, then still the Idaho Territory, in 1885, he is often considered to be a chief architect of classical Anglo-American modernism, who helped launch the careers of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. Influential as the foreign editor of several literary magazines in London, Pound is credited (in collaboration with the

poets H.D. and William Carlos Williams, and in competition with the poet Amy Lowell) with developing the poetic aesthetic of Imagism, and of importing classical Chinese and Japanese poetry into the modernist canon. During his further migrations, first to Paris and eventually to Italy, where Pound would spend most of his life (and where in 1972 he would be buried near Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Dhiagilev in Venice), the Chinese philosopher Confucius resides likes a tutelary deity over much of his think-

C O N V E R S A T I O N ing, particularly in his unfinished 120-secwrote the first drafts of what later came to tion epic The Cantos (1917-1969), but also be known as The Pisan Cantos. Eventuin his writings on economics and politics. ally, he was sent to the United States and, It is these writings—especially in the for 12 years, incarcerated at St. Elizabeths form Pound delivered them in a series of Hospital in Washington, D.C., before more than one hundred broadcasts over returning to Italy in 1958. During his Radio Rome, pre-recorded and typically incarceration, aided by influential friends about 10 minutes in length, during World who included T. S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, War II—that have tarnished his reputaW. H. Auden, Katherine Anne Porter, tion, just as they have invited reflection and others, Pound was recognized with on the, always uneasy, co-existence of the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry, which politics and art. Inspired and perhaps unleashed a contentious national debate confused by Confucius’ call to order, Pound about Pound’s poetic merits, his political lambasted especially President Roosevelt convictions, and the general (in)separabiland what he saw as an international ity of politics from art. Indeed, Pound’s conspiracy of bankers, who, in his view, dubious associations, and the controversy used their financial leverage to propagate surrounding the award, may stand for all a war for the benefit of their own enrichthe writers, painters, and artists—and there ment; he concocted a dizzying and vitriolic were many—who pledged allegiance, not to anti-semitic brew that is one-of-a kind the forces of democracy and liberation, but in the annals of modern literary history. to those of dictatorship and totalitarianism. Conversely, he praised the fascist leaderIn the conversation following, Pound’s ship of Benito Mussolini for creating a daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, is graciousstable and well-ordered form of governly giving us a glimpse into her father’s comment that ensured contentment for all and plicated politics, as well as into his role as fostered respect for artistic creativity. a father, teacher, poet, and much more. An Charged with treason on account of accomplished poet in her own right, with his controversial radio work and related several volumes of poetry, in both Italian publications, Pound was, in 1945, first and English, and numerous translations transferred to the U.S. Counter Intelligence to her name, she also authored the memoir Corps headquarters in Genoa, Italy, where—in another gesture of affinity for Asian cultures—he asked that a telegram be sent to President Truman offering his personal diplomatic intervention in negotiating peace with Japan. While there, he referred to Adolf Hitler as “a Jeanne d’Arc, a Saint.” Soon after, Pound was again transferred to the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center Schloss Brunnenburg, above the city of Merano, north of Pisa, where he was home of Mary de Rachwiltz confined to a six-by-six-foot and the Ezra Pound Center for Literature. outdoor cage and where he

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Discretions—Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher (1971), in which she reflects on the complexities of Pound the person, her own experience as a witness to the twentieth century, and Pound’s relationship with the historical moments he traversed, and indeed, helped shape. The tenor of Mary’s observations, articulated in at times nuanced insights, is clear: if my father may have misconstrued, and been misguided by, some of the darker implications of Il Duce, so has the critical community misconstrued, or misunderstood, his intentions. A deep and careful reading of The Cantos (which runs like a fugal counterpoint through many passages of Discretions), she suggests, reveals the true man behind his work. Let me add some explanatory words about the intricacies of Pound’s family affairs, which could be said to reflect the intricacies of his politics and which are necessary to understand some of the references in our conversation. Pound was married to Dorothy Shakespear, an accomplished Vorticist painter, who assumed legal guardianship of her husband while he was imprisoned at St. Elizabeths (1945-1958) and again after his death. During an extended trip to Egypt, from December 1925 to March 1926, she returned pregnant and gave birth to a son, Omar, whom Pound—a man with chivalric sensibilities—took as his own. In the meantime, beginning in 1923, Pound had fallen in love with the classical violinist Olga Rudge, who became his life-long lover. Olga gave birth to their child, Mary, in 1925 in the Italian Tyrol, where she was raised by German-speaking

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foster parents and where Pound and Rudge visited her, as the occasion allowed, before bringing her for longer periods to Rapallo and Venice. There she was educated in a convent and often schooled by her father. Eventually, Mary would get married to the Egyptologist Boris de Rachwiltz, who purchased Brunnenburg Castle in the village of Tirol in the Italian Tyrol. There, now aged 94, she resides to this day and is actively engaged in helping to promote scholarship on her father—and to rectify his reputation. The following interview, compressed and redacted, took place on 15 June 2017, at Brunnenburg Castle. I want to thank Mary for her time and hospitality (including a fine bottle from her family’s own vineyard) in receiving us, and I thank my friend and colleague, Professor Dr. Klaus Benesch at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, for helping me arrange the visit. To this day, Mary is possessed of impressive vitality and spirit and a virtually encyclopedic knowledge about her father and his life’s work. She was the curator of the (never completed) Ezra Pound Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, at Yale University. For a full record of her own literary achievements—translations, poems, and editions, among others—see the official site of the Ezra Pound Society, https://www. ezrapoundsociety.org/. Given the at times allusive nature of the conversation, I have allowed myself to contextualize some of these references in a series of footnotes.

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CONVERSATION Given Pound’s profound interest in technology, what were Pound’s writing practices? When would he write by hand, and when would he make the transition from handwriting to typewriting? As long as he had to write by hand, he wrote by hand. When he got a Füllfeder [fountain pen], he was glad that there was a Füllfeder instead of having to use pen and ink. In Venice, when he was writing Indiscretions (1923), he speaks of having had problems with the pen. He was always glad for the mechanical. He immediately got a typewriter. If he had had a computer, God knows, there might have been a world revolution. (Laughs) Like the lines in The Cantos where he said that the South American Revolution was made possible because the leader traveled on a train, and he could speak because there was a train going from one place to another. Pound was interested in everything. “[F]ree speech without free radio speech is as zero,” says one of the lines in The Cantos.1 Therefore, he thought that since mail didn’t work anymore, or nobody would publish him the moment he started to harp on money . . . which, granted, was not the banker’s language.

I’m thinking about the way in which in some of The Cantos he has Chinese ideograms embedded in the English text. If you take down [pointing to book shelves]— well, not only books but also the facsimiles of the copybooks of his last Cantos. That’s the way he wrote—using several colors, like James Joyce did. There are two or three, by now, facsimiles of Ulysses. There is no facsimile of The Cantos. I am horrified by scholarship.

There is a published facsimile of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. But not of The Cantos.

Yes. Valerie Eliot came, and there is a picture of Pound and Valerie in Palazzo Cini signing The Wasteland. Yes, I know, America and the world are still not reading what Pound wrote. And how Pound wrote. These were the last gasps.

I find Pound’s The ABC of Reading to be a really fascinating text—a writer using reading and the reading process to talk about writing, basically. It might be interesting to ask how Pound read? Was there anything special about his reading habits? Yes, we have examples of his reading. My mother [Olga Rudge] really was one-track minded. She had her God incarnate. She wanted her God incarnate. She never let go. (Laughs) She would put on what you have done here now—a tape recorder—in the house in Venice, and let it run and record whatever happened. She thought that because Pound was entmündet, only the German language gives the idea: entmündet2....And in The Cantos, we have that Aboriginal Australian father who takes the mouth away from his son, because the son, by speaking, created clutter, and clutter is no good for bushmen— and they were still bushmen. If you think of these—almost premonitions—of the poet, I still shudder when I think of this. But people don’t know this is in The Cantos, that it’s all there already. So, my mother did what you are doing now, but only the understandable and best pieces are recorded. She had a whole little valise of cassettes, because in those days it was cassettes. She thought that because Pound being entmündet, and us not being the legitimate heirs—the legitimate heirs were Pound’s wife, Dorothy, and her son, Omar, and I was a Rudge—my mother thought these tapes will be the family fortune. (Laughs)

The Cantos of Ezra Pound, ( LXXIV 452: 14). Further references to The Cantos are to this edition and will appear in the text. 2 Literally, the verb entmündigen (Ms. de Rachewiltz uses the Tyrolean version, entmünden) means to be deprived of one’s mouth. In its figurative, juridical sense, it signifies legal incapacitation, the inability to speak for, or represent, oneself in a court of law. It can be understood as a form of incomplete legal entity. 1

It goes back to a profound interest in Provençal and the minstrelsy tradition of the Middle Ages. But there is also the other Pound who is very interested in industrial noise and how to make that noise into music. I’m thinking of George Antheil, who was championed by your father and also composed three violin sonatas for your mother, and who wrote the score for Ballet Mécanique (1923-4) and numerous other industrial noise-based compositions. Do you think there is tension in Pound’s work? Well, you see, I’m really not competent enough to speak like a professor. There is Machine Art (1996), which has been translated into German. I know that Pound was very interested in photography, for instance, and what they are able to do with photography now is mind boggling. They can change your face. I sometimes wonder if the person speaking is really the person.

Ezra Pound, Cantos: New Directions edition, tenth printing, p. 567.

Oh, that’s why she was doing it. I thought it was to correct you. Well, she wasn’t doing it for that. It was because she really felt that everything my father did was precious. For instance, there’s a note which said that The Cantos were to end with the I Ching.3 Scholars are still debating the end of The Cantos. There is no end to The Cantos—silence.

Speaking of silence, speaking of Pound reading, part of the attraction that we had for Olga was her musicality. She was a concert virtuoso. Yes, The Cantos are music.

Part of my sense about Pound is how to get meaning out of noise. Yes, and that’s the way to read The Cantos. This is what worries me now with these little awkward things, the smart phones, that children have all the answers in their pocket. They don’t know who Homer is; they just click “Homer” and it tells them. That’s one of the reasons I can’t teach anymore: children mumble and I am schwerhörig [hard of hearing]. I don’t want gadgets.

Mary, you mentioned economics at the beginning of our conversation, and how that is important for Pound. He doesn’t speak the language of bankers, but he’s interested in economics. Early, as a child, he moved to Philadelphia, where his father worked for the U.S. Mint. Is that a kind of primal scene, the first contact with money to

A reference to the book of classic Chinese poetry variously translated as the Book of Songs, Book of Odes, or known as the Odes or Poetry, comprising 305 works dating from the 11th to 7th centuries BCE. In 1954, Pound rendered (but didn’t technically translate) this collection in English. 3

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translating.... It’s ridiculous. It can’t be done. Unless you do it the way Pound did it. The way we started, when I said non si dice to him [Italian for “you do not say,” in the sense of, “you don’t say things that way”]. I tried to correct him, his Italian, and he said, “Well, it’s time they did!” (Laughs). You have to be Pound. So we’re waiting. Tell Merwin, when you see him, we are waiting for another grand translateur. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Sketch of Bird Swallowing a Fish, 1914.

which much of Pound’s interest in economics can be traced back, in a sense? Well, it’s an interesting speculation. One can but speculate.

Pound had a steady stream of visitors and admirers at St. Elizabeths hospital, where he was held for a number of years after his return to the United States. One of these admirers was the young poet W. S. Merwin, who would later rise to international prominence as a poet, translator, and allround man of letters. He is still alive.4 Yes, I know. I don’t think I ever met him.

And your father is a crucial figure in Merwin’s evolution as a writer. He said that without Pound, he wouldn’t be where he is. As in your instance, where your father encouraged you to hone your craft through translation. Translation is just impossible. I’ve come to the conclusion that it can’t be done. It just can’t be done. Here I’ve spent fifty years

Merwin said that what Pound told him in St. Elizabeths was that he should be working on about fifty lines of translation a day. That was sort of the daily task. Hone your poetic ear, and you would be able to move more nimbly from one language to another. Is that something you feel as well? You said fifty! Wow! He told us five lines a day. My son had to do five lines a day of Jean Giono’s story, The Man Who Planted Trees (1953), and grew happiness, which of course was translated for the journal Mother Earth into English, though Giono wrote it in French. It was a continuous preoccupation for Pound. Achilles Fang described Pound as a pédagogue manqué (Laughs). He was an obstinate Chinese professor. He did his thesis on The Pisan Cantos—four big volumes. Still, he never allowed them to be published. It is still the most consulted thesis at Harvard—or was in those days. He lived in a kind of igloo of books. He bought every single book and he bought all the Baedekers.5

Mary, you mentioned that I’m sitting in the William Butler Yeats chair.

Beginning at Rapallo, but especially during his institutional(ized) years at St. Elizabeths, Pound had a steady stream of visitors—mostly friends and disciples—while holding court. These audiences, “a system of learning based on reading and a kind of loose tutorial discussion with Pound as presiding Confucian master,” is often referred to as “Ezuversity” (Tytell 218). 4

Achilles Chih-t’ung Fang (1910–1995) was a Chinese scholar and translator known for his contributions to Chinese literature and comparative, esp. German, literature. He moved to the United States and studied and taught at Harvard University. Fang’s correspondence with Pound helped Pound understand the Chinese language and its culture and history. Fang’s doctoral dissertation, “Materials for the Study of Pound’s Cantos” (1958), to date remains a major source for Pound scholarship. 5

It has a story, of course; it’s not invented. The Yeats came to Rapallo, as everybody knows, rented an apartment with furniture in it, or maybe they just bought bits and pieces, that I do not know. But my grandparents moved into the Yeats’ apartment when the Yeats went back to Ireland. The Yeats evidently left chairs

By the end of 1942, I was already steeped in the translation of the Cantos. Their sound, the way Babbo [Pound] had so often read them in Venice, without my having understood a word, was somehow embedded in me, something very harmonious and beautiful. But reading them myself came as a shock. I was like a hungry person with a basket of exotic food in front of me, not knowing where to start, the flavors being totally new. — Discretions 155 behind. When, finally, my grandparents died, and all this stuff, like my father’s chairs, were left behind, it was decided, in 1954, that it was ridiculous to continue paying rent on the Rapallo apartment and that I should just pick up everything I wanted. It contained all the Gaudier-Brzeskas, it contained all the furniture, the frames, it contained Wyndham Lewis’ Red Duet (1914/15), the relics of two generations left behind by previous generations.6 Well, I had a ruin, Brunnenburg Castle, that needed furniture. That’s why you sit there, that’s why you see what is called a Morris chair. I even have a chest over there, which comes from the Rossetti House in London. William Michael Rossetti, the practical man in that family, had two daughters. Both daughters married an Italian and moved to Rome and brought some of the furniture. The chest

comes from Olivia Rossetti Agresti, who said that chest once contained the printing press for the—what were they called—all those revolutionaries that used to gather . . . . the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris.

The Fabians? Yes, they were sort of revolutionaries; Marxism was in that house. I mean it’s there, so.

That’s rather apropos, given Pound’s own interest in the Pre-Raphaelites.—Mary, you mentioned Wyndham Lewis and William Butler Yeats, of course. I am also thinking of T.S. Eliot and others. Do you remember any particular encounters that you had? Well, they all did come to Rapallo sooner or later. Eliot came to Rapallo and my mother

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska carving Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, photographed by Walter Benington, ca.1914.

Born in 1891, French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska is often considered one of the most innovative figures of European modernism. Following his move from London to Paris in 1911, he collaborated with prominent figures such as Pound (who considered him a genius and in 1916 wrote a memoir, GaudierBrezska), fellow sculptor Jacob Epstein, the painter Wyndham Lewis and the philosopher T.E. Hulme. Together, partly in response to Italian Futurism, they in 1914 created Vorticism, Britain’s first and short-lived avant-garde movement. Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in action in 1915, at age 23. 6

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C O N V E R S A T I O N met him there. But if you read the correspondence you know that that was not known because my mother was not supposed to be there. However, that’s their business. I mean, I can’t go into all these stories. No, I saw Eliot the first time I went to England when I went to stay with my uncle Teddy, Edgar Rudge. And Pound wrote to Eliot and to Wyndham Lewis and all his old friends, and hoped that I would go see them. I obeyed as usual. I did go to see Eliot and mention it in Discretions (288). That was the first time I saw Eliot. But I never met Wyndham Lewis. Omar was in London at that time, and I gave him a copy of my father’s first published volume of poems, A Lume Spento (1908). Which proud Isabel, Pound’s mother and my grandmother, wanted him to have because he was Omar “Pound.” So I gave him a copy and he told me that Wyndham Lewis didn’t want to see me, because he wasn’t feeling up to seeing people, which was probably true. He was already blind at

that time. He “chose blindness rather than have his mind stop” (Canto CXV). You see why I can’t write anymore. Because I am afraid of using Pound’s words. If you know The Cantos, and I say he chose blindness rather than having his mind stop, you know I am quoting Cantos. It’s becoming a problem.

Are you saying that your father’s work and words are inhabiting you to a point where it’s difficult for you to separate? Well, it’s so obvious. You can’t say it any better. He said it once and for all.

Le mot juste? Le mot juste. And if you have heard it, it’s music.

You spent a significant amount of your life trying to rectify your father’s reputation, but you’ve also been an active poet of your own, with considerable gifts. I can’t finish anything. I mean, there can be moderate talent; I have moderate talent. But what is important is the honesty of mind. The honesty of mind compels me to refuse gifts or invitations that are due to him. Does that make sense? My gifts are very modest. Pour yourselves some wine and you’ll see more clearly. (Laughs)

I am teaching in Utah at a university that is pretty close to Idaho, and I’ve been to Pound’s birthplace in Hailey. I know that Pound left Idaho early and sort of turned away from it . . . Well, at least in Moscow, Idaho, they did invite me, and that I did accept. They have given me an honorary degree in Moscow when Marshall McLuhan was there. That is when I met Marshall McLuhan.

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He was an early Pound scholar. He actually corresponded with Pound. There are letters.

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Well, I don’t remember the letters but I remember him. Meeting him in Hailey, Idaho. It was very funny at the airport in Milan, where the Italian football team departed for Moscow In partenza l’aereo per Mosca [Italian for “Departure for Moscow”], I thought that Moscow was a football team. I was rooting for Moscow, Idaho. Pound wanted to be buried in Hailey, Idaho. He really wanted—he didn’t quite say so—but my mother thought it would be good to have his original Gaudier-Breszka head in Hailey. They couldn’t find a place for it.

What a shame. They were afraid it might get destroyed, and it could have been destroyed by some idiot.

I know, at least publicly, he always claimed to turn away from the American West to make his life, which is what he did, in Europe. Do you remember him making any commentary about his life as a child in America? He would have liked to go back to America. He would have liked to go back and be buried in America in the end. I think, I still haven’t been able to find the lines, but I know there is a line somewhere. “Lonely as a lonely child.” I can’t find it but I know it’s there. And “Lonely as a lonely child” is that little boy on his grandfather’s knee in that four-generation picture which has been reproduced everywhere. And that is Thaddeus Coleman Pound, who was born in Philadelphia, is buried in Wisconsin, had discovered Chippewa Falls in Hiawatha, the spring water there, and wanted to build a big sanatorium

the way they have here in Merano, the spa. Who tried to put through a railway. The honest well-meaning American who wanted to do things. I think my father remembers his grandfather sitting in a chair holding his

I am writing without hope for an English or American notice of the citation from Confucius made by Hitler in his latest talk, and I don’t even think Hitler himself cited it. The Führer has arrived at a millennial truth through his lively interest in the events of the day: “The place of a country abroad depends exclusively on its organization and on its internal cohesion.” It is thus that history enters in the human mind. — Ezra Pound, in Il Meridiano di Roma, 14 May 1939. head in his hands, because he was broke. You know, I think it’s that loneliness of the American, the well-intentioned settler. Because that’s, after all, what we were. We may have come with the second boat, the Lion, but still, that’s what we were, settlers.7 The honest settler. That’s I think where economics come in, and Pound’s economics.

What about Pound’s economic politics? Well, Mussolini at the very beginning was a socialist. After all, he was instructed by Angelica Balabanoff,8 and Donna (Margherita) Sarfatti, who is famous in Italy and who wrote

In one of her maternal grandmother, Mary Weston’s, genealogical treatises, “Pound read about his predecessors, sturdy, independent Puritans, who landed in New England twelve years after the Mayflower on a ship called the Lion” (Tytell 11). 7

Angelica Balabanoff (1878-1965) was a legendary Russian-Jewish-Italian communist and social activist. She joined the Bolshevik Party during the Russian Revolution of 1917, became secretary of the Communist Third International, and worked alongside Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Emma Goldman. She became disillusioned with Bolshevism and, following her return to Italy in 1922, rejoined the Italian Communists before (under pressure from a rising Fascism) going into exile in Switzerland, where she edited Avanti!, then the daily newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party. At the end of World War II, she returned to Italy and joined the Socialist Workers’ Party, which eventually became the Italian Democratic Socialist Party. 8

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C O N V E R S A T I O N Dux.9 Donna Sarfatti was the literary queen in Italy, and she was Jewish. The Sarfattis are a famous Jewish family. She taught Mussolini how to wear a shirt and a tie and made him presentable. There’s a postcard of Pound to Donna Sarfatti. But anyway, Pound read Dux. So these were the people who didn’t want war. The socialists were interested in breaking up the latifondi.10 Then Mussolini got a swollen head. When he invited my mother for a private audition, the Mussolini family was not in. Pound saw him, not in Palazzo Ducale, but in Palazzo Venezia. See how the mind works. I said Palazzo Ducale, because Palazzo Ducale is in Venezia, but actually it’s Palazzo Venezia in Rome. That’s the way The Cantos work.

They’re very associational. It’s always the association. And the association of sound. Anyway, with Olga Rudge Mussolini talked about Antonio Stradivari, and was very proud that there was an ancestor in England who played the fiddle or was a composer.

And he wrote poetry also. Yes, that’s the problem. Mussolini wrote bad poetry, and Mussolini wrote a very bad novel. It was stupid. L’Amante del Cardinale (1910) [The Cardinal’s Mistress, 1928 ]. Sí, I’ve read it. Vanni Scheiwiller would of course rub it in:

Well, Mussolini at the very beginning was a socialist. After all, he was instructed by Angelica Balabanoff, and Donna (Margherita) Sarfatti, who is famous in Italy and who wrote Dux. Donna Sarfatti was the literary queen in Italy, and she was Jewish. The Sarfattis are a famous Jewish family. She taught Mussolini how to wear a shirt and a tie and made him presentable. There’s a postcard of Pound to Donna Sarfatti. But anyway, Pound read Dux. So these were the people who didn’t want war. The socialists were interested in breaking up the latifondi.10 Then Mussolini got a swollen head. When he invited my mother for a private audition, the Mussolini family was not in. Pound saw him, not in Palazzo Ducale, but in Palazzo Venezia.

Born Margherita Grassini (1880-1961), Donna Sarfatti was a writer and critic of Italian art and especially known for her (political and romantic) relationship with Benito Mussolini. In 1925 she published a personal memoir and biography of Il Duce, The Life of Benito Mussolini, in an English edition, which was released a year later in Italian under the simple authoritative title Dux. The book—a hagiography, in effect, in whose composition Mussolini had a heavy hand—was translated into 18 languages and a big commercial success. In 1934 Sarfatti went to the United States and was officially welcomed to the White House by Eleanor Roosevelt with honors typically reserved for the wife of a head of state. 10 The tradition of latifondo—land tenure on a large estate—existed especially in southern Italy well into the 1940s. Partly analogous to the sharecropping system in the American South, such estates practiced an essentially feudal system in which the landowner was entitled to most of the crops raised on his land. Tenants had no permanent right to the terrain, but typically rented thin strips of land for cultivation. In a kind of agricultural pyramid scheme, richer peasants often sublet such strips to poorer ones. Among the social costs of this system were impoverished living standards (which led to increasing immigration into the United States); the lack of a viable entrepreneurial class that could have financed an economic resurgence; and the rise of the mafia, whereby landowners anxious to retain their economic privilege hired so-called “men of honor” to intimidate upstart laborers. 9

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On the CONfucian system that if you start right, and then go on, start at the root and move upward, the pattern often is simple, whereas if you start constructin’ from the twig downward you get into a muddle. My politics seem to me SIMPLE. My idea of a state OR an empire is more like a hedge hog or porcupine, chunky and well defended. I don’t cotton to the idea of my country being an octopus WEAK in the tentacles and sufferin’ from stomach ulcers and chronic gastritis. . . . What I am ready to fight AGAINST is havin’ ex-European Jews making another peace worse than Versailles with a new two dozen Danzigs . . . . And the sooner all America and ALL England wake up to what the Warburgs and Roosevelt are up to, the better for the next generation and this one. . . . And as an American I do NOT want to see my country annihilatin’ the population of Iceland, as the British annihilated the Maoris. And as for the Australians, they deserve a Nippo-Chinese invasion. Criminals were their granddads, and their contribution to civilization is not such as to merit even a Jewish medal. Why the heck the Chinese and Japs don’t combine and drive that dirt out of Australia, and set up a bit of civilization in those parts, is for me part of the mystery of the orient. . . . Roosevelt is MORE in the Jew’s hands than Wilson was in 1919. . . . Eight years ago he was a-sayin’ nothing to fear but fear. Well, what has become of that Roosevelt? What has he done for three years but try to work up a hysteria on that basis? — Ezra Pound, excerpts from “Those Parentheses,” on Radio Rome, 7 Dec 1941 (“Pound Speaking” 17-19) “Look, that idiot, he wrote that terrible novel.”11 Yes, just as Hitler painted terrible paintings. They were not good artists, and that’s where they made this mess. My mother was certainly instrumental in telling Pound, “Look, you have to go and see him [Mussolini], he’s a nice man. You can talk to him.” So it was all done through another friend who was teaching, and giving private English lessons.

You mentioned earlier, Mary, and obviously it shows, that you are maybe the single most widely-read expert of your father’s

work. I know you don’t call yourself a scholar, but I think you are well-grounded in the reception of his work. How would you describe the current state of Pound scholarship? Well, I don’t understand it. (Laughs) I mean, modernism, postmodernism, pre-modernism. Well, at least I understand the scholarship, but certain terms I have to look up in the dictionary. I still have dictionaries.

So do you feel like the current scholarship on Pound has raised interesting questions

Vanni Scheiwiller (1934-1999) was Pound’s Italian publisher, the third-generation member of an esteemed publishing house with thousands of titles on its roster, including some of the most important Italian and foreign writers of the twentieth century. An editor of Swiss origin with strongly Catholic convictions—hence his critique of Mussolini’s salacious bodice-ripper—Scheiwiller helped built a vast archive—including background papers, correspondence, manuscript drafts, and original typographies—of eminent writers and artists, including materials by Pound. 11

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C O N V E R S A T I O N or deals with the work of your father in ways that are adequate, or do you feel like this is going… I can’t keep up. Now there is this new book The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound by Daniel Swift (2017). Have you seen it? Practically, I won’t say every day, but perhaps certainly every year there are at least three new books on Pound. And I try to read them, and I read. Obviously I’ve read the three-volume biography by A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man & His Work [Oxford Univ. Press, 2007-2015].12 But there are still some details missing.

I think interest in Pound is increasing. He’s increasingly been read, and taught, and… I think it is increasing. I just hope, for reasons that are obvious. . . . I know that the Frobenius Institute (for Research in Cultural Anthropology) in Frankfurt will soon publish The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and the Frobenius Institute, 1930-1959.13 That book by Nancy Cunard, Negro: An Anthology (1934), was not allowed into America, like Joyce’s Ulysses was. I mean, Pound started speaking about the Bauerntum [farming culture] in Africa, making me translate. There wouldn’t be this problem of immigrants now if there had been an increase of Bauerntum in Africa, and African art. Instead they went and pilfered everything. I mean, the first thing I had to

translate was “Il contadinato in Africa,” a chapter on African farming in Erlebte Erdteile by Leo Frobenius (see Discretions 162). Well, of course, Il Meridiano di Roma (1936-1943), which included work by Pound, was published during the fascist regime.14 So we were seen as fascist, we were anti-Semites, we were racist. For God’s sake! This is where I feel that the Pound scholars are not clear enough yet. They still deplore his racism. But it depends on how you interpret racists. Am I a WASP? (Laughs). I wish there was a recording, but I can still hear my father, “They don’t get the irony.” In the radio speeches. “They don’t get the irony.” He was still speaking like his grandfather spoke.

Were you listening to the radio speeches at the time, or were you aware of them? No, he would come up to Sant’Ambrogio [the village within the municipality of Rapallo, where Pound lived with Olga Rudge] and read his speeches. In fact, that was the one correction I made to Discretions. Because I had written originally that as long as he was teaching me Greek, his voice was calm. But as soon as he started reading his radio speeches, his voice became shrill. I think he must have been simply influenced by reading so much of his hysterical, crazy blah blah blah. When I went to Washington and listened to some of those recorded speeches—and they even made a wartime record of famous speeches, which they sold, which I think

With Mary de Rachewiltz and Joanna Moody, Moody also edited Ezra Pound to His Parents. Letters 18951929 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), which was awarded the Ezra Pound Society Book Prize in 2011. 13 This collection, scheduled to be released in 2018, features the complete correspondence between Pound and members of the Frobenius Institut (for cultural anthropology) over a 30 year period. The idea is to illuminate Pound’s long-standing interest in anthropology and ethnography in the context of his controversial intellectual development in the Fascist era, especially how Frobenius’ concept of ‘Paideuma’ influenced his writings, and his growing engagement with the culture of Nazi Germany. As one of Pound’s biographers observes: “Like Pound, Frobenius was an intellectual outsider whose doctoral dissertation had been rejected . . . Like Pound, he was a wandering exile, spending half of his life as an active anthropologist in Africa. Frobenius has been used by [Oswald] Spengler in his study of the systematic rise and fall of cultures, and Pound felt that by going to Frobenius’ writings, he was going to one of the sources of wisdom in his time” (Tytell 215). 14 From May 1939 to September 1943, Pound published more than 90 articles for Il Meridiano, which were, a year later, collected and printed as Orientamenti (Orientations). While most of the copies in circulation were destroyed because of their highly controversial nature, one copy was seized by the FBI in 1945 and translated into English. The copy became part of the FBI’s massive file against Pound. 12

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After reading to us what he had written, it was my turn: I had to recite five lines from the Odyssey and translate. He then read five new lines as my next assignment. And it seemed as though he possessed two voices: one angry, sardonic, sometimes shrill and violent for the radio speeches; one calm, harmonious, heroic for Homer, as though he were taking a deep, refreshing plunge into the wine-colored sea after a scorching battle. — Discretions 150 is funny—I didn’t detect the shrillness. One is influenced by what scholars write. I heard it so often, “his crazy speeches that didn’t make sense, that were so obnoxious and insulting and terrible.” Yes, he did use language that shouldn’t be used anymore.

Did he talk to you or your mother about these speeches when he came back from Rome? No, but in the letters he would say “registered.” In a letter to me he said, le principesse partono per Cortina. He was referring to the wives of the two Italian princes who were working at the radio, Prince di San Faustino and Principe Alessandro Tasca (di Cutò). Their wives had departed for Cortina d’ Ampezzo. Tasca has written his memoirs. Eventually, after the war, he became a film producer. What he says about Pound is very interesting.

He was Pound’s boss. It’s not an important book, it’s rather a silly book.15 If Pound had changed his nationality, like Eliot and Henry James, and become Italian, he would not have been put in the cage. They couldn’t have. It’s his roots. Now, of course, if I say roots, I may sound racist, huh? But it is his roots.

Had that ever been a question for your father—to become a naturalized Italian citizen? No, he never considered it. He wouldn’t dream of changing his nationality. I was given a passport, he was very concerned. In 1939, he did try to get me registered as “Pound.” But, and this I think was because a nun, an American nun from the school in Florence, Mother Francesca Chiara, told him the consequences this innocent little girl would have to face when she was an adult and had to get married. It was a shame to be illegitimate. A single mother was a disgrace in those days. So he tried but, of course, you see, he never thought of the consequences. (And I think that is what is so interesting in his last prose bit, Selected Prose 1909-1965, in which he reflects, “I was out of focus / taking a symptom for a cause.”16 He did not consider the consequences.) He didn’t realize that by giving me his name, I would be automatically Dorothy’s daughter. No wonder my mother became furious and slammed the door in his face. He was so innocent. That was the problem.

There’s a fine line sometimes between innocence and naivety.

A reference to Tasca’s memoir, A Prince in America (2011). Tasca (1906-2000) was born into a titled Sicilian family and a cousin of Giuseppe di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard. He emigrated to the United States, but returned to Italy during World War II, where he was assigned to the Ministry of Propaganda and worked with Ezra Pound at Radio Rome. Like Pound, he was interned in a POW camp—in his case in Padula in Southern Italy, run by the British military. After the war, due to his biculturalism, he worked in the film industry to chaperone Anglo-American productions through the, often byzantine, intricacies of the Italian bureaucracy, working with Orson Welles, John Huston, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Humphrey Bogart, and many others. 16 The full lines read, “Re USURY:/ I was out of focus / taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE,” and conclude his Foreword to Selected Prose. Significantly dated 4 July 1972, they are commonly seen as Pound’s belated apologia for his discriminate economics and for associating the Jewish people with what he saw as a conspiracy of bankers encouraging warfare as an engine of international finance. 15

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C O N V E R S A T I O N Sometimes I feel that maybe I was the cause of his not taking that clipper out of at the last minute.17 And it’s a horrible feeling—a horrible feeling. Because there’s a letter to my mother saying, “never was I so glad for having this daughter of mine.” He was sort of born a family man, I suppose.

I have a very personal question since you mentioned the difficult situation he found himself in with his partner and lover.

strength as a poet. But if I do want to calm down, all I have to do is take the Cantos and read, or I can read even a book about Pound and I am quite happy.

What I think I am asking is, do you see, let me call it, elective affinities between your work and his own? I wish there were. But I also know that that can’t be. I have moderate talent. Let the child walk in her basilica; that’s not his basilica.

“There is no rogue in this play”—remember the line in The Cantos (qtd. in Discretions 188). Like a flower reflected. But egotistical. You can’t explain it any better.

Does language play a role here? When you write in Italian? You have created poems in both English and Italian.

What I am wondering is, this probably put a lot of stress on Pound. On this situation with your mother, on Dorothy Pound.

This is the problem. I switch now; I have to write by hand. I switch from English to Italian and vice versa. What do you do? I have fifty years of notebooks.

Yes, of course. Do you have any idea what (Guido) Cavalcanti and Dante (Aligheri) and those Fedeli d’Amore were up to when it came to women?18 With Marcella Booth, he was quite honest with me. There were the long flanks and the firm breasts of a young woman. That’s a fact.19 Certainly, no man would admit such a thing, especially in front of his wife. (Laughs) Come on.

Mary, you talked earlier about the way in which your father was singularly gifted with le mot juste. You don’t think of yourself as having the same strength as a poet? No, of course I don’t have the same

So in order to put some space between you and your father, would you rather write in Italian? Well, I know I did write in Italian and I was thinking that Pound would be The Great Poet. Then of course, my marital crisis arose and I wanted America. And America intended to have a Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries. When they got the archive, they didn’t want Pound. They wanted his manuscripts.

This is when they hired you, right? At the same time?

Reporting for Esquire in 1957, Richard Rovere wrote: “It’s a matter of record that he [Pound] tried in 1942 to get aboard the last diplomatic train that took Americans from Rome to Lisbon. He was refused permission to board it. He had no choice but to stay in Rapallo” (in Heymann 107). 18 An expression in Dante Aligheri’s Vita Nuova, the Fedeli d'Amore (The Faithful of Love) designate a group of medieval Italian poets practicing an erotic spirituality that sought to translate chivalric ideas (including courtly love) into a regeneration of society. 19 Following his release from St. Elizabeths, Pound returned to Italy with Marcella Spann, an acolyte forty years his junior who, while officially traveling as his secretary, was a new lover. She had visited him at St. Elizabeths, where they began collaborating on a co-edited anthology, Confucius to Cummings: Poetry Anthology (1964). Pound saw in her his last fountain of youth and, with the tacit approval of Dorothy, managed to live in a kind of ménage of trois for a while. Mary alludes to the lines from Canto CXIII: “The long flank, the firm breast/and to know beauty and death and despair/And to think that what has been shall be,/flowing, ever unstill.” 17

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Well, I needed a job. Very, very plainly.

So Yale decided at one point not to go through with the project? So someone withdrew the monies that were already allocated? Well, I mean, I had friends who were the anonymous donors. Texas wanted the archive. Texas would’ve taken the castle stone by stone and built it up (Laughs). It was the famous book dealer from England who came with the director of the center. He saw an old copy of The Wasteland, all rotten away. And he said, “Princess, what have you done to it?! It was a fortune!” It was buried by Dorothy, in a bookshelf. Anyway, it’s all really funny. I was jealous. I was jealous of that beautiful young girl, Marcella.20 Well, she was not up to, I thought, standards. Now we are very good friends. Yes, I was jealous. I thought this is terrible. Here I worked and now he says The Cantos are botched. (Laughs) That was terrible to me, for him not to take an interest in his own work. I wanted him to take an interest in his work. I always thought he was the greatest poet in the world. And then, he just shut up and didn’t talk for ten years.

And he stayed here, in Brunnenburg, for two years? And said it was the perfect frame. Yes, almost as long as he stayed in Hailey, Idaho. (At the time, his mother couldn’t stand the altitude of Hailey, and they had come with the colored help. But the colored help didn’t find anybody in Hailey. She was the only person who went back to New York immediately and so my grandmother—suddenly without help— would stay in a hotel.)

Then he decided to go to Venice? Well, first of all, Ezra Pound, Dorothy Pound, and Marcella went to Rapallo after the first winter here. We all suffered the cold. We still

Scholars have come here and looked at things and written their books and made their bibliographies. There are those eleven or twelve volumes—what was published in magazines, because I had all the old magazines and clippings and everything that was in Rappallo. Pound kept everything. He had such a sane way of filing his letters. But Yale was horrified. His papers had to be punched, you see. He had a punch, and there was a word of Joyce’s that got punched out. This is the mentality of the professional. He shouldn’t have punched! suffer the cold. There was heating according to the standards of Tyrolean castles. But when the doctor came into Pound’s room, it was 20 degrees (Celsius), and he opened the windows and said, “This is terrible!,” because he was a Tyrolean doctor. Twenty degrees (Celsius) is considered unhealthy to sleep in. You sleep in an unheated room possibly with the windows open. Pound, the poor man, had been sleeping in an overheated institution in Washington. Americans, even Dorothy, all complained about the cold. But we couldn’t get it any hotter. So they went to Rapallo, where he was with Dorothy and Marcella. My mother was out of the picture. There were four women. Never get yourself into such a mess. (Laughs) I don’t know anything about your private lives but if you have a daughter, beware. If she loves you, she will be jealous of even the mother, and the mother will be jealous of the daughter,

Marcella Booth was from Texas. Her collection of materials on Pound was acquired by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases/2008/pound.html. 20

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C O N V E R S A T I O N let alone concubines. The way it was respectable to have concubines in Malatesta days [an allusion to The Cantos]. Even in Paris, you had to have a mistress to be anybody.

These days, Mary, do you engage in (daily) correspondence with Pound scholars? It takes me all morning. I start writing and listening to messages, and it takes me all morning to write five lines. And then when I have sent them, I start to say, oh my god, this is awful.

These are Pound’s books in the background. Yes, and you don’t have to read all of them, they are all in The Cantos. They were part of the furniture. I went down with the camion and emptied the rooms in Rapallo—Via Marsala and Sant’Ambrogio. Most of the grandparents’ stuff had already been here.

They would have all gone to Yale if they had opened up the Center . . . Yale wasn’t interested in the books at the time. They wanted the papers. Donald Gallup dedicates his A Bibliography of Ezra Pound (1963; rev.1983)—well, he doesn’t dedicate it, he inscribed it—it says, “this book of ours.” Scholars have come here and looked at things and written their books and made their bibliographies. There are those eleven or twelve volumes—what was published in magazines, because I had all the old magazines and clippings and everything that was in Rappallo. Pound kept everything. He had such a sane way of filing his letters. But Yale was horrified. His papers had to be punched, you see. He had a punch, and there was a word of Joyce’s that got punched out. This is the mentality of the professional. He shouldn’t have punched! Down in the

Pound room [a small museum dedicated to Pound at Schloss Brunnenburg], there are the empty files, and when I went to America in 1953, Pound asked for files he wanted. I went by boat and arrived with a huge box of empty files for him to put all of the stuff that had accumulated in St. Elizabeths.

And all those files would eventually go to Yale as well? Well, eventually, I guess. All those files then were empty. Their content might have gone to Hamilton College, his alma mater.

So he was quite the archivist. He was sensible, he would keep things. His radio speeches were actually based mostly on old articles, in magazines, as he says in one of his speeches. He was envying the BBC that got all the news. I mean, all the Yale professors and Harvard professors were sitting there in London and decoding his speeches, and talking with H.D.’s daughter, and he had his old newspapers.21 There is a recent book, not about the radio speeches but about the propaganda, Matthew Feldmann’s Ezra Pound: Modernist Politics and Fascist Propaganda (Palgrave 2013).

You are exhausted, right? Would you care for lunch? I don’t go out anymore. I don’t eat in public. I have my rules now. I don’t even eat with my family either. I get so nervous. Because they talk to each other, and I can’t keep up. If I eat, I can’t listen, and if I listen, I don’t eat. And that isn’t good! I have my bread and cheese or my doggie bag. I have a perfect cook in the house. My daughter-in-law, she’s a fabulous cook. She cooks for the students [of Schloss Brunnenburg’s study abroad

A reference to Frances Perdita Aldington, the daughter of H.D. (Hilda Dolittle), the fellow Imagist poet to whom the young Pound was briefly engaged in 1907 before leaving the United States for Europe. (Frances was, however, not Pound’s child, neither was it Richard Aldington’s, H.D.’s husband at the time. Rather, the father was the composer Cecil Gray, a friend of D.H. Lawrence, with whom H.D. had a brief relationship.) 21

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programs], incidentally. And I get doggie bags for leftovers. I eat them in front of the television. I have the Italian news for lunch, and I have the German news for dinner. Sometimes there are so-called cultural programs. I see things about the war. That’s my way of keeping a ritual with the world. Because I don’t have time to read the newspaper.

Mary, are you 92 or 29? You know, I am afraid I am 92. I just want to lie down and read and sleep. That’s really all I want to do. I like to get up and make my own coffee, to be sure that I have milk in the ice box so that I can have two big mugs. I want to die in my bed, possibly asleep the way both of my parents did.

Your mother, she lived to…? 101. God help. I didn’t enjoy it, I can assure you. She talked. I found her asleep in her chair at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. And I called the doctor and he couldn’t believe it. The

doctor immediately called—because he had his wits about him—he immediately called the undertaker. And he couldn’t believe that the person he came for was sitting there. It’s all very funny. In the end, she didn’t care. In the end she just lay there, I would feed her, and I would place a mint chocolate in her mouth in place of a Hostie [host], although she was a Catholic. And we did have a very nice ceremony down in my chapel. There was an American boy playing the saxophone with a famous tune, You did it your way. She wanted it in English. She wanted to get up every morning to go to Venice. She wanted to be buried in Venice. We had these enormous three spaces and I am to be there, in the middle. So the reason that I keep the Venice house, really, is so that someone will keep up the grave. When I die, just put a marble slab with “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” on it.

Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Mary.

Michael Wutz is a Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Weber State University and the editor of Weber—The Contemporary West. He is the co-editor of Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology (Cornell, 1997), the co-translator of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, 1999), and the author of Enduring Words—Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology (Alabama, 2009). His co-edited volume Conversations with W.S. Merwin was published in 2015 (Mississippi).

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C O N V E R S A T I O N Works Cited

de Rachewiltz, Mary. Ezra Pound, Father & Teacher: Discretions. New York: New Directions, 1975 (1971). Heymann, David C. Ezra Pound: The Last Rower. New York: Seaver Books, 1976. Tasca di Cutò, Alessandro. A Prince in America (2011). https://www.smashwords.com/extreader/ read/77136/4/a-prince-in-america.

Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber 1964.

---. The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and the Frobenius Institute, 1930-1959. Ed. Ronald Bush, Erik Tonning, and Matthew Feldman. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

---. “Ezra Pound Speaking.” The Radio Speeches of World War II. Ed. Leonard W. Doob. Contribu- tions in American Studies #37. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978.

---. Selected Prose, 1909-1965. Ed. William Cookson. London: Faber & Faber, 1973.

---.(ed). Shih-Ching. The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983 (1954).

---, and Marcella Spann. Confucius to Cummings: Poetry Anthology. New York: New Directions, 1964.

Tytell, John. Ezra Pound. The Solitary Volcano. New York: Doubleday/Anchor Press, 1987.

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GOING TO THE HEART OF AUTHENTICITY— A Conversation with

Sue Monk Kidd Sue Monk Kidd speaks with a soft, Southern lilt. Although she currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, Sandy, and dog, Barney, Ms. Kidd was raised in the small town of Sylvester, Georgia. She projects, even over the phone, an image of Southern graciousness. Her relaxed manner and easy charm make it easy to forget that you should be intimidated speaking to her. This is, you remind yourself, a woman who has sold millions of copies of her memoirs and novels, who has won numerous literary prizes, and whose books have taken up residence on the New York Times bestseller list for astonishingly long periods of time. Her debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees, spent two-and-a-half years on the list, selling more than eight million copies worldwide, gathering fans and awards. The Mermaid Chair followed, another bestseller and award winner. Ms. Kidd’s third novel, The Invention of Wings, debuted at number one on the bestseller list, gaining more honors and being chosen for Oprah’s prestigious Book Club 2.0. In addition to her novels, Ms. Kidd has also written memoirs and books on contemplative spirituality. But bestseller lists and numbers of copies and notable awards don’t define Ms. Kidd. She is simply a lovely person who has, as she says in the interview following, “the need always to be authentic, to have my work be authentic, and by that, I mean to be true to me, to come from me, to be my voice, to be not what I thought would sell or not what I thought others needed me to say, but to say the truest thing in me that needed to be said, that was truly mine to say.” Ms. Kidd was in Ogden in November of 2017 for the Ogden School Foundation Fall Author Event. I had the privilege of speaking with her by phone from her home before coming to town.

TONI ASAY

C O N V E R S A T I O N Ms. Kidd, I’m so happy to speak with you. Thank you for taking the time. I have to admit that a few years ago, I confessed to having an intellectual crush on Neil Gaiman because of his beautiful voice. Today, I’m freely confessing my intellectual crush on you because of your beautiful stories, so I’m a bit nervous to begin. As an icebreaker, could we do a quick lightning round? Can you name three writers who you learn something from every time you return to them? Okay, off the top of my head: Laura Groff, Barbara Kingsolver, who I read a lot, and those magnificent Bronte sisters who I read every year. I have an intellectual crush on them. (laughs)

Wonderful! Making it personal, could you name two or three of the most interesting characters you’ve tapped into—your own characters who have surprised or vexed you. I think I would have to say my character Handful in The Invention of Wings. She was close to my heart but challenging. I think I wanted so much to get her character just right, as a white woman speaking in the voice, the first person voice of an enslaved woman. I wanted to get that right, so she kept me up at nights. But she was incredibly dear to me. I loved her, and finally, I could hear her just kind of singing and talking in my head. And in The Secret Life of Bees—I don’t know why I’m telling you the most challenging ones, but they seem to stand out—the hardest one to write was Lily’s father, T. Ray. I think if I were to write that book over again, I might look at him a little more sympathetically. I’ve learned a lot since then. I kind of waited until the end to write him, to kind of reveal enough of him so that the reader could have sympathy. I think I would do that a little earlier. But he was a hard one to

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write. And my father, who is still alive at 96 and just adored The Secret Life of Bees, was not fond of T. Ray. So I had to make a point of going around telling everyone that he was not based on my real father! (laughs)

What I liked about how you wrote T. Ray was at the end of the book, where you make a point about Lily realizing that he must have loved her mother so much, and when she was gone it just broke him because that does happen to people. As a reader, I was hoping he would say, “No, it wasn’t your fault,” because I wanted her to be off the hook. By not doing that, it was more complicated and layered but more realistic too. It was more like life really is sometimes. Yes, sadly. I really struggled with that because I, like the reader, wanted that resolved. In the end, I left it for the reader to decide. Let’s see, those two seem to stand out for me. You know, perhaps the mother in The Invention of Wings, Sarah and Angelina Grimke’s mother, was a character that I kind of loved to hate, you know?

Yes, you could always count on her to do exactly what you didn’t want her to do. Yes. She was a very hard one, and my daughter pointed out to me once—I had to give a little talk one time about what was in all my novels, a kind of thematic thing that was in all of them—that “You always seem to have a bad parent.” (laughs) And it’s true. She was the bad parent in The Invention of Wings, but I kind of loved writing her because I had learned a lot from writing T. Ray, so I think I was able to write her with a little more compassion. But we still love to hate her!

Turning in another direction, I have heard you discuss what you called a profound experience that you had while reading Thomas Merton. Can you talk about how that changed your perspective or your direction in life?

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Yes, of course. I think I can say that—looking back on that 29-year-old woman who read Thomas Merton for the first time—his work did change my life in a significant way. I wouldn’t have known that at the time probably. But I suppose if I had to distill that into why that was so, it was that his work, his writing, opened my eyes for the first time to this reality that we have an interior life. And I somehow, at 29, did not yet know that. And, for me, it coincided with the awakening of my creative life. I think I was just so busy and stressed at 29 with two toddlers and a husband and working; life was busy, and we didn’t even have social media, and I felt that way. I think it was that I paused to read this book, and it was such an awakening for me of this whole interior realm that felt like the soul. It felt like I had found some place where the soul resided, and in that place was all of this creative life, and it just started pouring out of me. So from that point on, creativity, and I guess you would say, the life of the soul or the spiritual interior life, became linked, and it has remained that way for me, if that makes sense. So, yes, it was an important thing for me at the time to discover the contemplative life, and my writing and my creativity, when it’s at its best, seems to come from some silence inside of me—some kind of contemplative space.

I’ve heard you talk about authenticity in regard to writing. Can you talk about that? I do think that authenticity is important in our lives as just a person trying to be true to what is the deepest thing in ourselves—that place that I was trying to describe that is almost indescribable. I do think that it gives a kind of depth to our work. The thing that really compelled me as a writer was this need always to be authentic, to have my work be authentic, and by that I meant to be true to me, to come from me, to be my voice, to be not what I thought would sell or not what I thought others needed me to say, but to say the tru-

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est thing in me that needed to be said, that was truly mine to say. That was what I truly quested after. I wasn’t always perfect at it. The reason that I probably quested after it so much was because it was hard for me. I think growing up in the South in sort of the pre-feminist world in a small town, I had not learned really how to step outside of the world that scripted me—and we were very scripted. So it was always a little harder for me, but it was important and crucial and so I labored at it.

I think I can say that—looking back on that 29-year-old woman who read Thomas Merton for the first time—his work did change my life in a significant way. I wouldn’t have known that at the time probably. But I suppose if I had to distill that into why that was so, it was that his work, his writing, opened my eyes for the first time to this reality that we have an interior life. I think it was that I paused to read this book, and it was such an awakening for me of this whole interior realm that felt like the soul. It felt like I had found some place where the soul resided, and in that place was all of this creative life, and it just started pouring out of me. So from that point on, creativity, and I guess you would say, the life of the soul or the spiritual interior life, became linked, and it has remained that way for me, if that makes sense.

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I assign my students TED talks and several years ago discovered Dr. Brene Brown’s talks. In one, she discusses how she was very content “flying beneath the radar” because she was happy not “to be seen,” and the courage that it took for her to actually “stand up and be seen.” I connected that with what you have said in interviews about how hard that is, to stand up and— just what you said—step outside of yourself and say to the world, “this is me.” Exactly.

Where did you get that courage? How did that happen? I don’t even know if I could answer it except to say that I think creativity is really just an act of courage, in the end. Just the boldness to reveal oneself not just on the page but in other ways creatively or in other ways as well is just something that has always been inside of me, this need to keep doing it. This is why Sarah Grimke, this character who I was completely enthralled with, struggled to be courageous in a time when the whole world was arranged against her. And she had to find this terrifying vulnerability to live up to what she believed and to put her voice out there in the world. I’m thinking of what the poet David Whyte said, “Revelation [must] be terrible knowing you can never hide your voice again” (Fire in the Earth, 1992). And it seems strange that it would be so ter-

rifying and yet there is something about it that it is so much easier and safer to remain hidden and quiet. But it has always taken courage for me to say what is in me to say.

I was interested in what happened after your “annunciation,” as you’ve called it, to your family on your 30th birthday, that you were going to be a writer. What did you do next? Did you immediately find “a room of your own,” as you’ve said every writer needs? Did you quit your job? Did you go to workshops? What was the process between announcing that and then actually doing it? Yes, well, a lot of work, really. (laughs) I think writers often miss that gap where you become an apprentice. It’s such a quaint idea and yet I think an apprenticeship is important for us. So that’s what I tried to do, just to apprentice myself to it. I took classes—I enrolled in writing classes at the college—adult education type things. I went to writers’ conferences. I read voraciously things that were just so intimidating because I wanted to understand literary art, so I read way above my pay grade. I read things that I could not put on paper myself at the time, but I wanted to set the bar very high inside of me. But I think I learned a great deal by reading. I would break down novels and look at how I thought this author had accomplished what she had accomplished. So I really went for the craft as hard as I could to

It’s such a quaint idea and yet I think an apprenticeship is important for us. So that’s what I tried to do, just to apprentice myself to it. I took classes—I enrolled in writing classes at the college—adult education type things. I went to writers’ conferences. I read voraciously things that were just so intimidating because I wanted to understand literary art, so I read way above my pay grade. I read things that I could not put on paper myself at the time, but I wanted to set the bar very high inside of me. But I think I learned a great deal by reading. I would break down novels and look at how I thought this author had accomplished what she had accomplished. So I really went for the craft as hard as I could to learn it.

learn it. And I read books about writing. That went on for years. But I suppose that the way one really learns to write is by writing, and so I did a lot of writing, trying to find my voice and trying to find the language—so it was just years of that kind of thing.

I am so impressed with what you just said about finding your voice because when you try to find your voice, that’s when you have to actually be courageous and authentic. It’s easy if you have a favorite author to pick up that style, maybe without knowing it, and then say, “How would this author say this?” But then to be able to stop and say, “No. How would I best say it?,” is courageous. Exactly—to be Sue Monk Kidd. One of the books that had a big, powerful effect on me when I was in college was Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening.” And I found myself for a while wanting to write Kate Chopinish or whatever. It was crazy. You tend to want to emulate these authors that you love. But the bravery it takes—you feel sort of skinned and vulnerable but you have to make your way to find your own voice and then have the courage to put it out there and then have the courage to stand by it.

To change direction a bit, people seem to always want to know this—longhand or computer? Does it make a difference? I write by computer. I started writing before computers. I guess that’s true. (laughs) I remember the very first computer I got. It was like the size of a giant piece of furniture or something. I remember the transition of that was very difficult. But I persevered, thank goodness. I write on a computer and it’s the difference for me between beating your laundry on a rock and a washing machine. (laughs) I can’t imagine—it’s so easy to do that. We’re all different, aren’t we? We have to find not only our own voice but also our own way of doing it.

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Yes, that’s true. I once talked with an author who discovered in the process of writing her first book that one of the children was going to die. She said that she put off the scene for as long as she could, and then she wrote it and cried for two weeks. It was heartbreaking for her. Have any of your characters put you through something like that? Yes. Absolutely. I’m often surprised as I’m writing, which I think is probably a good thing. I like to know where I’m going before I set out because it gives me a certain sense of direction. It’s so unnerving when you begin. I think beginnings are the hardest part.

Oh, really? I do find them the hardest part because there are so many possibilities. There are infinite possibilities and the story can go in every direction, and I so want it to go in the perfect direction. It’s very hard to settle on anything and so I struggle with my beginnings, and I try to get so much into the first 10, 15 pages—the whole story like a nugget. So I plot out before I start; I do kind of plot a way. Then I find that my muse wants to go off another way, as I’m

I write by computer. I started writing before computers. I remember the very first computer I got. It was like the size of a giant piece of furniture or something. I remember the transition of that was very difficult. But I persevered, thank goodness. I write on a computer and it’s the difference for me between beating your laundry on a rock and a washing machine.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N writing, and I give myself the freedom to do that, and I do get surprised sometimes. For instance, in The Secret Life of Bees, I had sort of thought this through up until the point where Lily breaks Rosaleen, her nanny/ housekeeper, out of jail. And there they are, and I had no idea where they were going to go or what they were going to do. I thought, “Oh, great!” So for two weeks at least, probably longer, I was completely stymied. I could not think. I was like, “Oh, great, I’ve written just, you know, a quarter of a book or something and I don’t have anywhere…”(laughs) And it came to me in one kind of piece, just falling in my head one day. I wasn’t trying to figure it out. I had done a lot of going in this direction, going in that one, going in another one, and then realizing, “No, no, no.” And then one day, I just walked into my study, and I work with a storyboard, I make little—I guess you call them little collages of my novels. I’ve done that for every novel. I do this at the outset as a way to light or excite my imagination. And I will go through reams of images and little drawings and thoughts and I’ll clip things that I’m drawn to: “Oh, I could see that in a book. I don’t know what it means, but I like it.” And I had made one for The Secret Life of Bees, and it had a big pink house in it. I had no idea why. I just liked the wild, pink house. And it had these three sisters, these three African American sisters—at least they looked like sisters to me. It was just a picture of them that I had clipped out. And as I looked at them, I thought, “Well, that’s where they’re going. They’re going to the pink house where three sisters live and maybe they keep bees.” I had bees there. That came out of that collage. And I think that sometimes these images, if we let ourselves follow our unconscious, what piques our interest, what fascinates us, what our mind wants to play with, that’s what I put on that storyboard, and then I sort of look at it and see what it might conjure up in me. And sometimes that whole little scene or story will come out of an image.

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So you’re both visual and verbal? Yes, very visual. A lot of images that I work with and so much of my story, my narrative, sprouts out of the imagery.

That’s so interesting. Of the many things I loved in The Secret Life of Bees was the image of the wall with the bees inside. Where did the bee wall come from? That is a memory of growing up. I lived in a house where bees lived in one of the walls. It was a country house, an old house that my family renovated, and bees took up—I mean a lot of bees—took up in one of the walls and my mother turned it into a guest bedroom because, you know, what do you do? My father couldn’t get rid of them. He would succeed temporarily and they would return. They made honey in the walls, and it was an old house, and it would leak through a crack or two. (laughs)

Oh my heavens! It’s crazy, isn’t it? But it was a very eccentric house. (laughs) And I tell my father and mother how grateful I am for the “Bee House,” as I called it. But I got that idea, and the whole story, the whole book started with that memory, really.

You weren’t worried about the bees stinging you? Like I said, we were the epitome of a Southern family. We just normalized the whole crazy, eccentric thing, and we just went on. There were bee stings that happened as a result, but we just kept the door closed and just hoped for the best and had few guests. (laughs)

That is so funny. Okay, to change the subject. I remember you talking about that, quite by accident but maybe subconsciously, your characters go through baptisms in your books. Do you feel like, metaphorically, you went through a baptism when

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you became a writer? Is there a memory you have where you felt like, “This is my baptism. The old is going to be washed away. I’m completely immersed in this, and I’m coming out in a new life”? I’m sure that’s true. I did use that language of an annunciation when I decided. You know, you hear the call, really inside of you. We have all of these little angels inside of us that say, “Write, write, write.” And I finally responded to that. But I do think there comes another moment when you have to set your path and walk this path with as much courage, perseverance, doggedness as you can. I’m sure there were moments like that. What comes to me is that when I was taking all of these early classes, one of the teachers had us write a story that we had to send off to an actual magazine. So I wrote a little story, and I sent it off, and it was accepted. I remember that feeling I had of saying to myself, “This is what I’m going to do, and I’m going to do it with all my heart.” And I never looked back from that. I’ve been writing, keeping banker’s hours ever since!

I am so impressed by that. Permit me one more question. When you were talking about your book Traveling with Pomegranates, you characterized yourself as a 50-year-old woman in search of Act III, a description I loved. Do you feel like you’ve found your Act III and if so, do you think you’re the writer, the director, or the stage manager? Oh my, yes. I think I’m probably all of those things. But I do think we have to choreograph this incredible dance we’re doing in life and it does take so many different forms. Yes, I

do feel like I’ve finally found it, what we call the Third Act. And I wake up every morning so passionate about my work. At the time when I was 50, I was thinking, “Can I actually write novels?” I mean, The Secret Life of Bees was published when I was 53. People think that I did that overnight, but no, it was many, many years of working toward that. But yes, it was in the beginning of writing fiction that I wondered, “Could I write a novel? Could I find the courage or the ability to do that?” I had been writing non-fiction for a long, long time, so it was kind of a changing of courses for me. And, yes, it worked out pretty well. And I wake up just so excited to get to my desk and see what’s going to happen.

That is how we should all be. That is very inspirational and tells us all that we should keep moving forward. Well, there’s always another act out there, I’m convinced, and I love when women—and men, but it’s often women who are looking for their Third Act, and they’re finding new freedom all the time—go and find all of this new, creative life inside of them. It’s wonderful.

So, are you working on something right now? I am. I’m working on a novel. I’m in the early phases of it, so I don’t talk too much about it. I’m still in the first, like hundred pages of it. I can say that it’s a historical novel, and I’m truly excited about it.

You have been so wonderful. I’m so grateful to have had this opportunity. I appreciate your time, too. Bye bye.

Toni Asay (Ph.D., Utah State University, 2019) was raised in the Midwest but moved west as a young woman and stayed in the shadow of the mountains. She has a B.A. and M.A. in English literature and just finished her Ph.D. in Education at Utah State University with an emphasis on literacy. She has taught in the Weber State English Department for 14 years and is passionate about reading and her family, and secretive about her writing.

C O N V E R S A T I O N

HOW TO BE HUMAN WITH WORDSâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

A Conversation with

Robert Hass

TYLER MORTENSEN-HAYES, BRIANNE HADLEY, AND ABRAHAM SMITH

INTRODUCTION Robert Hass is a living master of verse. His poetry collections, translations, and criticism form a bedrock upon which generations of poets have found their footing and gotten up to speed. His poetry is a burning meadow whose exquisite emergencies crawl right out into the sea: a metaphysical lightning storm whose flashes find a home in achingly honest appraisals of living bodies full of blood and bones. His luminary translations welcome readers beyond the poems, over the thresholds, right into the nuanced contours of the poets themselves. His critical work holds touchstone status. Hass’s takes and stances have become our own. Like Ezra Pound before him, Hass has extended wisdom’s walking sticks and short cuts and long ways around to so many of us who have come to sound poetry’s moors. It is no stretch to say that through his vast and varied body of work, Hass has taught us how to read— how to be humans with words. Hass is also a most kind, approachable, and genuine person. So, when two of Weber State’s most promising young poets—Tyler Mortensen-Hayes and Brianne Hadley—and I sat down with Hass at the 2018 National Undergraduate Literary Conference, we sat down as though old neighbors, invited to share in bounteous harvests. Great minds circle elliptically, gathering wisdoms in widest arms from across the acreage of time. Great minds dig through to the other side. Great minds alight, flutter, flit, empower, inspire, catalyze. While you will not see in the ink of these answers the interviewers nodding— nod we did, and often—here I offer this

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very accurate translation of our affirmations: Yes, I shall/Go more deeply in/ Change my life even. Robert Hass’s books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems; Time and Materials, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Sun Under Wood: New Poems, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Human Wishes; Praise, which won the William Carlos Williams Award; and Field Guide, for which he won the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass has also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Prizewinning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River, and he penned the foreword to Chinese poet Wang Jiaxin’s Darkening Mirror: New & Selected Poems. Hass is the author or editor of several other collections of essays and translations, including A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry; What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World; The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa; and Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry. He received the 2014 Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry by the Academy of American Poets. Hass served as poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and is Distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Berkeley.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N CONVERSATION Tyler Mortensen-Hayes: In the first poetry course I ever took, the professor gave us a quote from John Cheever. “I lie to tell a more significant truth.” That quote stuck with me. Later I read William Carlos Williams, who says, “it is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there” (“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”). I find it amazing that, while Williams claims that poetry has something to impart that can apparently save men from dying miserably, Cheever points out that often, as writers, we lie, we tell it slant. So even though we’re delivering that significant thing, we’re telling it slant, like Dickinson says. So I wonder, what would you say is the thing that poetry has that can save men from dying miserably? What is that significant truth that poetry conveys? Well, I think it’s probably different for different people, but the simplest thing is that they’re not alone in their thoughts and feelings. There’s a line by Walt Whitman, “I was the man, I was there, I suffered,” which is a line that James Baldwin used as an epigraph for Giovanni’s Room, one of his early novels. So I think that’s the fundamental thing—that really, the whole history of literature is an archive of what people

have thought and felt. And I say that, but it’s not as if it’s like a pill, as you know. It’s not like I prescribe you two Emily Dickinson’s for your depression. The trick is the person who needs it, needs to be able to read. You have to be able to take it in. As you know, as teachers, it’s an interesting thing, both for a writer and a teacher, but you can give people things to read and they really don’t take them in. I think when I started reading a lot of what I thought then was modern literature in the 1950s and 1960s, I didn’t have a clue. It was like standing at the edge of the conversation of strangers at a cocktail party and not knowing what the hell they’re talking about. And then, at a certain point, you’re able to enter the conversation. But with some writers you don’t need to do that at all. I was just at a birthday party, a 99th birthday party, for Lawrence Ferlinghetti. People were saying Coney Island of the Mind, his book of poems, sold 30 million copies worldwide, and I think it’s partly because you don’t need a key to get in. If you are standing there, you get it. And then there’s great stuff, but you really do need keys to get there. But I do think that’s the fundamental thing. I don’t know what Williams meant, but I imagine that’s what he meant, and I often think about that end phrase, “die

I think when I started reading a lot of what I thought then was modern literature in the 1950s and 1960s, I didn’t have a clue. It was like standing at the edge of the conversation of strangers at a cocktail party and not knowing what the hell they’re talking about. And then, at a certain point, you’re able to enter the conversation. But with some writers you don’t need to do that at all. I was just at a birthday party, a 99th birthday party, for Lawrence Ferlinghetti. People were saying Coney Island of the Mind, his book of poems, sold 30 million copies worldwide, and I think it’s partly because you don’t need a key to get in. If you are standing there, you get it. And then there’s great stuff, but you really do need keys to get there.

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miserably,” because he was a doctor—though he was mainly a pediatrician, delivered babies, cared for pregnant women, but he also had a general practice. So I’m sure he saw plenty of people die miserably. And then he would go home at night and bang out his poems.

Brianne Hadley: You travel frequently. Do you think that traveling, or crossing borders in general, is essential to a writer’s experience? Does it help their writing life at all? No, I don’t think it’s necessary at all. A great example is Emily Dickinson, though she did travel a little. Her dad was a congressman, and I think that Congress met in Philadelphia during the years that he was a congressman. So she and her sister traveled to Philadelphia when they were teenagers and went to balls for congressmen’s daughters, and then later she had eye trouble and they sent her to a specialist in Boston for a bit and she visited some cousins there. She would have been twenty miles away, which was not nothing in the middle of the nineteenth century, early nineteenth century, from Amherst to Holyoke, where she went to college. But mostly, she wrote about a thousand of the best poems in the English language and she never went anywhere. So you don’t need to go everywhere. For me, I like to travel. I have liked to travel and I like to see the world and see new things, but basically writers should probably stay home and write. British writers used to, novelists in the twenties and thirties, they would travel to write, that is, book a ship from, you know, London to India. Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh both wrote more than one book on transatlantic or transoceanic journeys, so for some people it works. I’m sure there’s not any rule. But for me and, in general for writers, all you really need—it would be nice to have a rabbit to feed, or something, for some activity.

Abraham Smith: We so often speak of writing as cathartic, therapeutic. But the pleasure in reading any writer seems to be to look for their returns, their obsessions: the dog to the

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vomit, or maybe better to say, the bee to the hive. In your work, I have learned about your mother, and I’ve learned about your brother across the span of your writing career. Could you speak a bit about the pleasures and terrors attendant in the return, in the obsessive quality inside writing? Yes, it’s interesting because I don’t know how many poems I’ve written. More than five hundred. I think I’ve written three about my mother and one about my brother, so I wouldn’t think of it as obsession in that way, but writing about personal subjects has a certain kind of vividness that sticks with people. So there are different ways of answering the question. One would be, what about catharsis and dealing with personal materials? And the other is, is writing cathartic in general in relation to your obsessions? To the extent that your obsession is to write, writing is cathartic. You feel terrible if you’re not writing. You know, Robert Duncan said, “I write poetry the same way other men make love or make war, to exercise my powers at large.” So if, for you, one of the times when you feel alive is when you’re writing, even though it’s a pain and a torture, then it’s cathartic in that sense because if you’re a writer and you can’t write, it’s like not being able to dream. Personal material, writing about it, trying not to fictionalize in the way that John Cheever proposes—you know, I know of places in my poetry where I’ve taken personal situations and transformed them so I can talk about certain feelings and issues. And that’s one of the things that writing does: transpose the terms of something. And it’s necessary to do that. If you think about, say, King Lear, the passage in which Lear curses his daughter’s womb—he’s such a big baby, he’s so enraged, and all this vile, misogynist stuff comes out of him. Shakespeare wrote that. He had to find in himself the place to write that, and he could never say it about his own daughter. He just couldn’t go there. And that’s one of the ways in which it’s necessary to fictionalize. To lie. To tell the truth. That would be one way in which it would be

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Personal material, writing about it, trying not to fictionalize in the way that John Cheever proposes—you know, I know of places in my poetry where I’ve taken personal situations and transformed them so I can talk about certain feelings and issues. And that’s one of the things that writing does: transpose the terms of something. And it’s necessary to do that. If you think about, say, King Lear, the passage in which Lear curses his daughter’s womb—he’s such a big baby, he’s so enraged, and all this vile, misogynist stuff comes out of him. Shakespeare wrote that. He had to find in himself the place to write that, and he could never say it about his own daughter. He just couldn’t go there. And that’s one of the ways in which it’s necessary to fictionalize. To lie. To tell the truth. That would be one way in which it would be true. true. The way that that’s taken, what Cheever said, is often, I have my doubts about that, you know. You know? About, Oh, I’m going to say that my uncle who’s gay was straight but had some other problem. Maybe you can tell the truth that way, but maybe that would be evasion or something. With poetry and personal stuff, this is a relatively new and relatively American phenomenon, that you would write about personal materials. Enough has been written about it to see pretty clearly the way it’s evolved. I think Robinson Jeffers has one poem about remembering his father, and William Carlos Williams in the thirties or forties wrote one poem called “Adam” and one poem called “Eve.” They were sketches of his mother and father. And he has a poem called “My English Grandmother”—she’s dying and being taken to the hospital. She says, “what’s all that stuff out there?,” and he says, “it’s trees, Grandma,” and she says, “well, I’m sick of them.” Her last words. So there’s moments like that, so that is a relatively new thing. And it’s interesting in terms of the history of lyric poetry, because family is the entire subject of drama—they’re all about family arguments. That’s what it’s about. So if you think of the great plays, that’s in one way or another what they’re about. And novels are about families, family life, the

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intimacy and complexity. And then you look over at lyric poetry in its relationship to God, relationship to love, relationship to nature and in the whole history of European, and mostly of Chinese and Japanese literature . . . . The breakthrough in Japanese literature in this way was actually by the poet Kobayashi Issa at the beginning of the nineteenth century, who wrote a journal of his father’s death, Journal of My Father’s Last Days. It kind of disappeared and got revived in the twentieth century and became a central document of the personal going forward in Japanese literature. Anyway, what happened in twentieth century American literature is this: you have the example of masks and personae of Eliot and Yeats and Pound to get at these materials, and so when Robert Lowell wrote about his personal experience or when Sylvia Plath wrote about her father, or Allen Ginsberg about his mother’s commitment to an asylum, it seemed like there was an anthology at that time that said, no more masks. People said, “oh, this can be a subject for lyric poetry.” It could be, you know, by telling it as myth narratives or as ballad forms—Tennyson, talking about Guinevere or Arthur or something like that—but to say my parents . . . this is the stuff I felt . . . People steered away from it, probably for good reason, because it’s really hard to tell the truth. If you think about,

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maybe, the greatest American play, Long Day’s Journey into the Night—it’s a play about a father and a mother and two sons, and the younger, sensitive son who’s obviously the one standing in for Eugene O’Neill, is really a good guy, and everybody else is really troubled and fucked up. How can you possibly be telling the truth when you’re making yourself look so attractive? It’s an amazing play. So it can be done, but cautiously. My relation to it? Well, I was married quite young—my wife and I were twenty-one when we got married and then had a child by the time we were twenty-two, and I was starting to write poetry, and so what was given to me as the subject matter was my life, and so I wrote out of it. I also loved that time of life, that’s what you guys are going to come into, this wonderful time of life, when you have paychecks, your own house; you get to choose what you eat and where you live. It’s quite thrilling, your twenties, in that way. So I wrote about what Roberson Jeffers called “household verses,” poems of ordinary, daily life, also because it felt like a subject to me. Not my personal life, but dailiness felt like a subject. I steered away from my family of origin for material, partly because I didn’t know how to deal with it, but also because it seemed—by the time I got around to it—it seemed like a little bit of a cliché. Everybody was writing about their childhood traumas, so I didn’t know how to go there. It didn’t feel to me cathartic at all to deal with it. Louise Glück has an interesting essay on this subject because she’s written poems about her family, and particularly about her struggles with anorexia as a teenager: suicidal, almost suicidal anorexia. She says the problem with that kind of writing is that the form is given. The form is that you’re a success story because you’re able to write about it, and the implication of most of it is that you’ve triumphed, but people who are damaged are damaged. You don’t come out unscathed. So it’s interesting in the way that Hollywood movies are interesting to show, look at this wonderful person now writing this stuff. But what about the other stuff? Anyway, various strictures were in my head when I found that I needed or wanted to write; I couldn’t go forward

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emotionally or intellectually unless I found some way to deal with certain material in my life. In this case, my mother’s alcoholism was one thing, and then having this pain-in-the-ass, addicted street person brother whom I loved and drove me crazy on the other. Long answer.

Tyler Mortensen-Hayes: I read in another interview that, when you were taking your position as the U.S. Poet Laureate in 1995, the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts was being cut and some environmental regulations were under threat. It seems we’re in a similar situation right now, unfortunately. I know you’ve been involved in various forms of activism. I was wondering, what is the job of poets and artists in the U.S. right now, given our current political, social, and environmental climates? Yeah, you guys ought to be thinking about that. How could you not be? I think I’ve been quoting the same line for twenty years, and that is Robert Duncan saying, “Responsibility is keeping the ability to respond.” So your first job is to stay alive. Almost all the things that we believe, whatever your values are—the ones that are intimate to you, the ones that are nice, and the ones that you would die for—they go dead in us, they become platitudes. So it’s always been part of the visual arts and of music and of lyric poetry to make us respond and stay alive. A Russian critic said, “The job of poetry is to make the stone, stone and the grass, grass by freeing us from the automatism of perception.” So if you did no political activism of any kind and found the metaphor and wrote the song or made the poem or the picture, that reminded people of justice. Or of pity, or of, you know, fairness, or whatever. Reverence. Pick the range of emotion. Righteous rage. Polarity. The small gods of good cooking, you know? That’s the job of a poet. For you young people now, boy did those kids in Florida, following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, set the table. I mean it seemed like there was no particular way forward with any of this stuff, and now it seems like there is.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N When I was in college, one of the writers who was a kind of sage and guru for young activists was Paul Goodman, who was a poet and social essayist and psychologist. I’d been offered a job out of graduate school to do some community organizing, but I really wanted to write, and he said to me, “do what you love, and what gets in the way of doing it well, work to change.” You know, if you want to be an actor and you have to do degrading kinds of commercials, change that. That’s the first way to do politics: to become the kind of person you can become. So that’s number one, and it would be different for everybody, but specifically for you guys, there are things you can do. And the main thing would be to register people to vote, which is not that complicated to do. And there’s a national organization started by Ralph Nader, Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG). That would be one. Another thing you could do that’s not that complicated would be to figure out how to get Ogden utilities to generate electricity through renewables. I don’t know what percent of the lights in here are paid for by fossil fuels, but even now there’s a long, really depressing article in this week’s New Yorker about Scott Pruitt and the undoing of the EPA. I mean, it’s beyond sickening, what’s happening there, and it will make you crazy, but there are things you can do. You guys are probably in dormitories or renting rooms, so you’re not paying your own electricity bills, but you can find out what the main utility

provider here is and how much of their electricity is generated by renewables. As I understand it, the way the electrical market works, is jobbers buy from wherever. Wherever it is. And there are nonprofits being set up across the country to buy and deliver through our current grid, 50, 100% renewable energy. In California, you can, by paying four dollars more a month for a normal house—four dollars!—you can have 100% renewable energy, and in Utah you can have 100% renewable energy generated only by jobs created in Utah. And how do you get there from here? If you set up a card table at a farmer’s market on a Saturday morning and got people to petition for it or sign up for it, that would be a small thing. Do you guys know where illegals who are picked up by the immigration service in Utah are put in jail when they’re picked up?

Tyler Mortensen-Hayes: I don’t. Find out. The immigration service normally pays the county sheriffs to put people in local jails, and they pay $182 a night. It’s way better than the Hilton where I’m staying right now, I’m sure. And so it’s making good money for the counties to hold these people. I know a group of students in Berkeley who just go out every Sunday morning—they call themselves the Human Rights Brass Band—and serenade the people who are in jail and raise money for lawyers for them. Often they are, they say they’re not, but they are picking up DACA kids, or the parents of DACA kids.

I think I’ve been quoting the same line for twenty years, and that is Robert Duncan saying, “Responsibility is keeping the ability to respond.” So your first job is to stay alive. Almost all the things that we believe, whatever your values are—the ones that are intimate to you, the ones that are nice and the ones that you would die for—they go dead in us, they become platitudes. So it’s always been part of the visual arts and of music and of lyric poetry to make us respond and stay alive. A Russian critic said, “The job of poetry is to make the stone, stone and the grass, grass by freeing us from the automatism of perception.”

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My wife has a couple of simple things that she proposes people do, and one is just to moan every time you pump gas. Just stand there and moan at the gas station. And then if anybody asks what you’re moaning about, you could just say, all the blood that is being spilled, and what’s going to happen to the Fiji Islands because I’m putting gasoline in this car? There’s a group of students that just go out to the oil refineries and read poems at the gate. Nobody cares. I’ve gone to Creech Air Force Base (in Indian Springs, Nevada), where the drones are piloted that do a lot of the work in Afghanistan, and I just hold up a big sign saying Violence is Always Wrong, Except Ours. And I have friends who read Gertrude Stein to the desert air. There are all kinds of ways of doing witness, small ways of doing witness. Your main job is to be great students and find your way as writers and fall in love and all of that stuff, and in that follow Paul Goodman’s advice.

Brianne Hadley: So what is the most rewarding part of being a poetry professor? Oh, the students. I’m probably going to retire next year, but I won’t stop teaching altogether, but I will stop teaching full time. To get to read interesting books with bright, lively students. What’s not to like? It’s a huge privilege. The craft of teaching over the years, every once in awhile, I think I’ve learned how to do it, and then five years later I realize I haven’t. It’s that thing we were saying at the beginning. People need what’s in literature, but just assigning it to them doesn’t do it. When I started teaching, an older teacher said, the main thing that you guys are not going to understand is that talking is not teaching. If you get up and say a bunch of things to people, they’re not necessarily going to learn anything. You have to figure out what the difference is. The craft has its interest. I tend to fall in love with the material, you know; whatever you’re working on is just fun. I love to study things and then go deeper in them in that way. This semester I’m just teaching a creative writing class, and it’s so much fun to go in and see what the students are doing.

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Tyler Mortensen-Hayes: I wanted to ask you about translation. I remember a story that W.S. Merwin tells that he visited Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., when he was eighteen. And Pound told him, if you want to be a poet, you’re going to have to learn languages and you need to translate. I know you’ve translated the haiku masters but you’ve also translated Czeslaw Milosz, and I saw in another interview that you didn’t mean for your work with Milosz to make your career, but it kind of did. Which might be a testament to Pound’s prescription that translation is one way of becoming a poet. So along those lines I was wondering, how have your experiences with translation shaped you as a poet and your development as a poet? That’s a question that’s basically impossible to answer because you have to stand outside your own—I don’t know if career is the quite right word for it—life work, perhaps, and see it, and I don’t. But I know certain things. One thing about translation is that it’s a fantastic way to study a writer. It’s just in-depth study to do translation. So can be writing critical essays about them. Somebody asked me to write an introduction to a book of wonderful translations of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and that meant for me really diving in and spending six months doing not much of anything else but reading him. So I went to the haiku poets because I was very interested in ordinariness and dailiness and that was part of the aesthetic of the haiku. And also because of accuracy and specificity of images and also their relationship to the natural world, also their relationship to Buddhism and to those forms of spirituality. So immersing myself in them gave me stuff to think about and ways to think about what I wanted to do in my writing. I think poets, I don’t know if it’s true for fiction writers, but poets are looking for ways to extend their vocabulary. Where you go with a subject, and the more you read great poets, the more they show you possibilities. There are things that I

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C O N V E R S A T I O N know are not in my range. I’m not going to go there, I can’t do that. So that’s one way. With Milosz, he was my neighbor. I was fascinated by his writing from a distance from the time I was in college. I was born in ‘41, so my first ten or fifteen years were saturated by the fact of, and the memory of, World War II. He had been through the middle of it in the way that Daniel Mendelsohn was talking about it today. I knew no Polish and I was studying Japanese, so I wasn’t about to go try to learn Polish, so my translating of him really involved getting together with him and he’d have a rough translation of the poems. I didn’t know I was going to do it for twenty-five years, but I did it—we did it—as he continued to write, and then he won the Nobel Prize and everybody wanted to see his work, so that escalated that process. I ended up in his case really working with a body of work, learning about, watching somebody else’s pattern of growth and his restlessness and range as a poet, the number of things he thought he should be doing, and his constant arguing with himself in his poems. This was all stuff I learned from him, and how exactly it affected my poetry I don’t think I’m the one to say. Seamus Heaney said poets have two relations to translation, and they correspond to the two relations of Vikings to Ireland: the raid and the settlement. And Seamus said, he was a raider and with Milosz I was a settler.

Brianne Hadley: Do you think that writing about our desires is a way for us to consummate our desires or to close the gap of wanting? Oh, that’s so interesting and so smart. What led you to ask that question?

Brianne Hadley: I’m reading Human Wishes right now, and you talk a lot about desire and imagination, and it seems like a lot of it is trying to grasp at something that is almost there but not quite, and sometimes I feel like writing can either help me with that or take me away from it. So I wanted to know your thoughts.

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I just published a little book called A Little Book on Form. It’s about formal imagination, trying to understand it. It was actually a bunch of handouts for classes.

Abraham Smith: We’re reading it in our forms class right now. Look at the stuff in the ode. What occurred to me was, when I started thinking about this, if you skim about the year 1000 BC to 600 BC, when alphabets first allowed us to see what had been going on as song or poetry or whatever, the two or three thousand years that humans have had language, they’re all prayers. And they are blessings. I was raised Catholic. So are you guys Mormons? Raised Mormon? Are there basic prayers you say as a Mormon?

Brianne Hadley: Yes. Bless our food, bless our family. Tyler Mortensen-Hayes: Yeah, there are ceremonial things. Blessing—by speaking, by saying words, you can do something called blessing. Which implies some magical relation to language. Can you curse or excommunicate in the Mormon church?

Brianne Hadley: Yes. Excommunicate them, yes. That’s another form of the magical use of language. “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” The basic form is praise. Go to some power you want to be in right relation to and praise it. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day, thou art . . . .” So you praise the beloved, you praise the power, and then “give us this day our daily bread,” and then you ask. Praise, ask seems like the fundamental human formula way back for how you relate to some desirable good that you want to be in relation to. But if you had it, you wouldn’t need to be praying to it, right? I think somebody said that our first meaningful utterance is Waahh [imitates baby crying]

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and it means both breast and no breast. Which is exactly the relation of poetry to most of the things it desires. “Wild nights—Wild nights” do you know this poem?

Tyler Mortensen-Hayes: He didn’t specify, but I would imagine so. Well, that’s interesting because aren’t people always saying that we’re living in an age particularly barren of poetry?

Were I with thee Wild nights should be Our luxury!

Abraham Smith: Yes.

Futile—the winds to a Heart in port done with the Compass done with the Chart “Rowing in Eden / Ah—the Sea / might I”— subjunctive, she’s not there—“might I but moor —tonight / in thee.” And everybody loves it because it feels like you’ve gotten there, but in fact it’s about wanting to get there. “Western wind when wilt thou blow / the small rain down can rain / Christ if my love were in my arms / and I in my bed again” (Anon.) Same deal. Feels like you’re there, but you’re not there. Is this delusion or what? But this is where the magic territory of poetry is, around this question of desire and language. It’s a big mystery.

Brianne Hadley: It is, but mysteries . . . . You have to have them. Tyler Mortensen-Hayes: They’re part of life. But it does connect to this other thing you were saying: the job of poetry is to refresh values. It’s not going there and doing the same thing every time: to construct meaningful prayer is an interesting thing, which is the ode form, so if you think, well, what if you were a twentieth-century Marxist atheist, what would you pray to? And then you look at Pablo Neruda. Watermelons. Socks. Nice tweeds.

Abraham Smith: Chickens. (Laughs) Tyler Mortensen-Hayes: Interesting. The young poet Kaveh Akbar has recently said that we are currently living in a golden age of poetry. I was wondering, would you agree?

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Does he mean in the United States?

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This is a complicated subject because of all the preconceptions people bring to it. A short way to sort through them is to remind ourselves that in all of world history, only in the twentieth century could very many people read if what we are talking about is written down poetry. When Wordsworth was writing, approximately 40% of English males could produce a signature, which means maybe they had a third-grade education, and 25% of females. Seventy-five percent of all the women in England were illiterate when he was writing. People who read, actually could read stuff, maybe 5% of them, actually the women, because maybe 10% of the population max could read at the level to read literature and produce Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Clare. So what does a golden age mean? Part of the project of literacy, which began in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the same time that cheap printing presses were developed, was that everybody could read, and mostly that was driven in the West by the Protestant idea that you need to be able to read the Bible in order to save your soul, and that got translated very soon into the democratic idea that if you have a democracy people had to be able to read to make decisions about complicated things. That drove America in the nineteenth century in powerful ways, and by the early twentieth century, except for black people, most people could read and write a little, or some, and at the same time newspapers expanded terrifically and they printed a lot of poetry in newspapers in the nineteenth century. Whitman in “Song of Myself,” which was 1855, has this wonderful set of lines in which he says, “Have you struggled so hard to learn how to read, have

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Whitman in “Song of Myself,” which was 1855, has this wonderful set of lines in which he says, “Have you struggled so hard to learn how to read, have you worked so hard to get at the meaning of a poem?” I think this is a picture in my mind of a whole country full of people who are teaching themselves to read. Farm people mostly, with agriculture at 80%, farm people who were teaching themselves how to read around the kitchen table by whale oil lamp all through the nineteenth century.

you worked so hard to get at the meaning of a poem?” I think this is a picture in my mind of a whole country full of people who are teaching themselves to read. Farm people mostly, with agriculture at 80%, farm people who were teaching themselves how to read around the kitchen table by whale oil lamp all through the nineteenth century. So the early twentieth century was a time when it feels to us like people were really reading poetry, and we’ve read stories about Emily Dickinson. After she died, her poems were published and it was a bestseller. So what does that mean? It means that they printed 400 copies and they sold immediately, and then they went through 11 editions of four to five hundred copies, so she sold about four or five thousand copies in a country of about fifty million people, 80% of whom could read. And Robert Frost’s North of Boston was a bestseller. I think it sold a thousand copies, and by that time, actually 1920, there were maybe 60 million people in the country. When I was an undergraduate and starting to read contemporary poetry, finding my way into the basement of City Lights bookstore, I think I could read every book of poems that was published in America in that year. Maybe there would be as many as twenty books, and maybe there were more little, small, local publishers than I was aware of, though I had access to all of the New York and San Francisco mimeograph copy magazines at that time. Now I think somebody said that there were fourteen hundred books of poems published

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in English, including translations, every year. And every college and university in the country, I’m not sure how many there are, has probably two people teaching creative writing fiction and two people teaching creative writing poetry. And there are tons of people and that’s paid for mostly by taxpayer money or philanthropy. So if you compare us to the early twentieth century, when Robert Frost wants to write poetry—he has no idea who, he knows that there are two or three, four, five magazines that he’d like to get in. There was no roadmap for how to do that at all. So you could argue that, unlikely as it is—I don’t know what the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts is, you know, and it’s obviously a contentious thing every year, conservatives hate it, because of their idea of limited government—that this country invests more money in creative writing than it ever has at any time in the past. I think that’s simply true. Not that that many people read poetry or read serious literary fiction. Is the percentage of readers greater now or less than it was in 1880, or among the English when Dickens and George Eliot and Tennyson and Browning were writing? I don’t think that work has been done, so that you could say with any accuracy what the deal is. But in every town in America, in every city, there’s probably a poetry reading tonight. And there may be only twelve people at the poetry reading. And if you look at the past, if you look at Winesburg, Ohio, anybody who had a wild thought

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was running naked through the streets in the middle of the night and getting put into mad houses, you know? And now, now we can all find our way to the other freaks and resisters, so it’s a powerful time, I think, in that way.

Abraham Smith: Speaking of a powerful time, I think we’ve about powered through our time. Thank you so much for your time and wisdom, Bob.

Tyler Mortensen-Hayes is a poet in Salt Lake City. He holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from Weber State University.

Brianne Hadley was born and raised along the Wasatch Front. She plans to graduate with a B.A. in English from Weber State University in the spring of 2019, and aims to pursue a career in creative writing.

Abraham Smith is the author of five poetry collections— Destruction of Man (Third Man Books, 2018); Ashagalomancy (Action Books, 2015); Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer (Action Books, 2014); Hank (Action Books, 2010); and Whim Man Mammon (Action Books, 2007)—and one coauthored fiction collection,Tuskaloosa Kills (Spork Press, 2018). In 2015, he released Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press), a co-edited anthology of contemporary rural American poetry and related essays. He lives in Ogden, Utah, where he is assistant professor of English at Weber State University.

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ON CLIMATE, RELIGION, POLITICS, AND MONEY— A Conversation with

Naomi Oreskes

CHRISTY CALL Naomi Oreskes is a professor at Harvard University in the Department of the History of Science. Though she began her career as a field geologist, her research focuses now on the ways that scientific findings translate to the public. In Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming, Oreskes and coauthor Erik M. Conway look at the tactics of corporations, think tanks, pseudoscientists, and lobbyists to generate fogs of disinformation. In their more recent work The Collapse of Western Civilization, Oreskes and Conway imagine a hot and inhospitable future on a depleted planet Earth. Though technically a creative work, the book

consults an archive of scientific findings as factual basis for the fictional portrayal. Set in the year 2093, a senior scholar within the Second People’s Republic of China narrates the long record of failures that led up to an event called the Great Collapse. It is a key paradox within the story that people of the West, people who consider themselves “children of the Enlightenment,” never heed the warnings issued from a vast consensus of scientists. Oreskes came to Ogden in March 2018 as the featured speaker for Weber State University’s ninth annual Intermountain Sustainability Summit. Her keynote presentation, entitled “Climate Change: What Now?,” reviewed the grim state of current environmental and social conditions while

Federico Del Bene

looking forward to ways of change. In her talk, Oreskes noted the potential of governmental policies to nudge markets in more sustainable directions, as in certain regional cases where solar energy has been incentivized. In response to the common charge that these kinds of interventions render the market less than free, Oreskes underscored the inherent threat of climate change to devastate all unguided economies. Before delivering her keynote, I had the privilege of conducting an interview with Dr. Oreskes. Her visit happened to coincide with an area snowstorm, so our conversa-

tion began with a discussion of her favorite ski runs at Alta. As a member of the nonprofit organization “Protect Our Winters,” and as a dedicated skier, she keeps up on snow totals in Little Cottonwood Canyon. To kick off our conversation in earnest, I asked her about individualism as a type of mythic American creed, and how the concept holds up in an age where consequences cascade across the collective. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

CONVERSATION I’ve been reading The Collapse of Western Civilization, and this idea that you and Erik put forward about the connection between free market ideology and individualism seems crucial to understand. I was wondering if you would talk more about individualism as a concept and the connection that it has with the current iteration of capitalism, neo-liberalism? Sure. Well one of the things that Erik and I have been trying to work through for a long time is this question of why climate change denial is such a big thing in the United States. And it’s not obvious on the face of it as to why this should be the case, especially when you think that most of the key scientific work was done here [in the U.S.]. Many of the most famous climate scientists, people like Jim Hansen, Mike Mann, and Ben Santer, are Americans. The first person to really make a point of it, as a public policy issue, was Roger Revelle, who was (he is deceased) also American. There are other important people, too. Bert Bolin. Stefan Rahmstorf has done important work. But so much of the science was done here in the latter half of the twentieth century, when this issue came to the fore. It’s not obvious why we should turn against our own science, our own people, in a sense.

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And that is how the scientists feel. They feel like the country has turned against them. It’s a very shocking thing. I mean, a different sort of book that I could write, but wouldn’t, is the personal journey of people like Jim Hansen. Jim Hansen has been radicalized because he has been so stunned by what has happened.1 These are people who thought, “We do science. We’re serving society through science. It’s about finding the truth about the natural world. It’s not political. It might have political consequences, but that’s someone else’s problem. We just hand over the information.” So part of my project has been to try to understand this disconnect. What really came out clearly for us when we were writing Merchants of Doubt was the way in which climate change denial is tied to free market fundamentalism, to an excessive faith in the power of markets. And it’s not that European countries aren’t also market based, but that people in Europe have much more of an idea that it’s a mixed economy, that there’s an appropriate role for government. You know, if you look at, say, France, where the electricity industry is nationalized, nobody in France would accuse you of being a communist just because you think there’s a role for government in certain kinds of industries. And even if they did accuse you of being a communist, you can be a communist in France. (Laughs)

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C O N V E R S A T I O N It’s also tied to an American anti-communism from the Cold War. In the United States, just calling someone a socialist is an epithet. In France, it’s not. In Germany, it’s not. In Germany you can be a socialist or a social democrat. In the United States, the opposite of communism is interpreted as extreme laissez-faire capitalism. In Europe, there are people forging a sort of middle way, a social democracy with a strong social safety or social welfare net. Here in the United States, we push in a different direction, much more dependent upon the marketplace, a lot weaker government supports for people, weaker unemployment insurance, and things like that. This accusation also becomes a political tool. If you don’t like what someone is doing, you accuse them of being socialistic. You accuse climate change of being an excuse to bring in socialism.

The label “socialist” stops the dialogue. Right. Exactly. Because now you can’t have an intelligent conversation about what we actually know about the science and what reasonable policies would be to address it. Instead, we’re in a fight about: “You’re a socialist!” “No, I’m not!” But it’s exactly what you said. It shuts down the conversation.

Do you think that religion in this country has served to intensify the focus on individualism? Neoliberal thinkers developed the crucial “neo” component of neoliberalism: the idea that free market systems were the only economic systems that did not threaten individual liberty. . . . The ultimate paradox was that neoliberalism, meant to ensure individual freedom above all, led eventually to a situation that necessitated large-scale government intervention. —The Collapse of Western Civilization, 42, 48

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What really came out clearly for us when we were writing Merchants of Doubt was the way in which climate change denial is tied to free market fundamentalism, to an excessive faith in the power of markets. And it’s not that European countries aren’t also market based, but that people in Europe have much more of an idea that it’s a mixed economy, that there’s an appropriate role for government. You know, if you look at, say France, where the electricity industry is nationalized, nobody in France would accuse you of being a communist just because you think there’s a role for government in certain kinds of industries. No—no. I think that’s the proof that this is not a genuine theological issue. I mean, what major religion in the world doesn’t say in one form or another that we are all interrelated and connected to each other, and we’re all God’s children? I actually have a piece I’ve just written where I talk about my own personal values, because I think it’s really important. I want to break through the whole myth of value neutrality in science and say: look, we do have values, and I think our values are good ones, and that if scientists would talk about their values, people would like it because they would realize that scientists are by and large good people who care about each other and their fellow human beings. I believe straightforwardly that I am my brother’s keeper, and that’s what I was taught in my faith. So I think there’s been incredible political manipulation. I’m teaching science and religion right now, partly because I wanted to understand it better

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myself, and the best way to force yourself to learn something is to teach it. Last year, I started teaching a course called “Science and Religion in the History of America.” There’s a really complicated story in the United States about the history of Evangelical Christianity. Think about the founding fathers. They’re mostly unconventional Christians, right? They’re mostly Deists. Jefferson writes the Jefferson Bible, which is an amazing thing that most Americans don’t know about. He writes a bible where he takes out all the supernatural elements. And even George Washington, we know, wouldn’t take communion. He didn’t believe in transubstantiation. So they’re unconventional Christians, but they’re Christians. They’re Protestants; they come out of an Episcopalian or other mainline traditions, or they’re Quakers, like Ben Franklin. John Adams was Unitarian. But as the country grows, it’s not those forms of religious expression that become dominant. It’s the Methodists and Baptists, and they develop a very different kind of religion that is much more associated with personal truth, a personal relationship with God, adult baptism, and being born again. So there’s a set of theological beliefs that is really different, and that’s fine. There’s no intrinsic reason why either of these views would necessarily be viewed as anti-scientific, but it is the case that the deist Unitarian New England form of religious expression is associated with highly educated people, people who really, I don’t want to use the word “worship,” that’s the wrong word, but who admire science as the highest form of rationality, who believe in rationality, and who believe that where a literal interpretation of the Bible conflicts with science, it is religion that has to yield. People like John Adams feel that absolutely. So someone like John Adams, even though he’s a deeply devout person, does not believe in a literal reading of the Bible because he knows that such a reading is at odds with the findings of science. But then you have the Baptists and the Methodists becoming dominant in places like western Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, you know, the territories that

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become what we now call the Midwest, what they called the West. These are mostly rural people. They’re mostly uneducated. They don’t know much about science, and they don’t care. There’s very little opportunity for most of these people to be engaged with science. And the itinerant ministers who come to their towns tell them: read the Bible for yourself, make up your own mind, develop a personal relationship with God. So—

A strain of individualism emerges. Well, right, exactly—so it’s emphasizing a much more individualistic route of religion. And then, of course, if you’re out on the frontier, you’re having an even more individualistic experience of life in general. I mean, you have neighbors that you have to live with, and maybe you don’t even have a church in town. Maybe if you have a service, it’s just in a tent. Or you have a revival in a tent by the river. But you don’t have a formal institutional structure. Now coming into the 20th century, this, in my view, is cynically abused by a group of people who begin to mobilize the Evangelical movement for right-wing political purposes. They align themselves—and you can find this in a lot of reading, particularly in the 1950s—they align themselves with anti-communist Republicanism. What is the characteristic feature of communism? It’s collectivist, and it’s atheistic. It’s godless communism, right? So because of those godless communists and collectivists, we are going to be godly and individualistic. They define themselves, as many of us do, in terms of their distinction. You identify what you are not and then define yourself in contradistinction. This leads to things like the Moral Majority, the alignment with extremely right-wing policies. Think about the paradox that Evangelical Christians have in supporting Ronald Reagan, who is divorced and not even clear in his belief in God. Yet they don’t vote for Jimmy Carter, who is one of them. Any account of this has to make sense of all that.

Today Mr. Trump professes an affiliation with religion, with Evangelicals—

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C O N V E R S A T I O N Exactly. And Trump is even more right wing. I mean, he’s so—the truth of his brilliance is as a conman. For a lot of people it’s a mystery. How could the Evangelicals vote for this man, who doesn’t attend church, has admitted to adultery, and cheated his employees and students? Well, look at the broad history: Republican Evangelicals, white Evangelical Protestants, are heavily in line with the Republican Party now, 95 percent. So now they come along with this candidate, who they see is on their side on certain key issues, like abortion and gun control, although they were a little surprised this morning —(Laughs. Headline news of the day tells of Donald Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels.)—but they vote for him, even though he’s a philanderer. He’s twice divorced. We know he has cheated. He’s an adulterer. He’s profane. He’s a bully. I mean, he’s so un-Christian, right? He doesn’t go to church of any kind, much less an Evangelical. So—

I think it’s totally predictable. I feel that it’s the reductio-ad-absurdum of thirty years of Republican politics. And frankly, I mean—

in the primary who said anything that was even close to what the scientific position is, and that was Governor of Ohio, John Kasich, who we all knew didn’t stand a chance. And in the previous, was it two elections ago, Jon M. Huntsman, Jr., then-Governor of Utah..2 Same thing. He was the only one in a field of Republicans. Ted Cruz was going around spreading the canard that climate change had stopped. Mark Rubio. All those guys. I mean, they’re all climate change deniers except for Kasich and Huntsman. So this has been the official position of the Republican Party. The last Republican leader to accept that climate change was a real thing was George H. W. Bush. So that tells you. My students don’t even know who he is.

It’s the logical end.

Right.

Well, the illogical end, but, yes! The Republican Party has been flirting with nativism, with outright racism, with irrational and dangerous gun policies, with using abortion rights as a bludgeon to beat down any liberal initiative of any kind for some time. I don’t think anybody can be surprised by Trump. I mean, the surprise should be that people have been paying so little attention as to be surprised by this. And think about climate change. Climate change denial did not begin with Donald Trump. In fact, if you think about the Republican primary, there was only one candidate

So you can’t be surprised by this. Sometimes people say, “We don’t want to make climate change a political issue.” And look, I’m willing to sit down and talk with anybody who’s willing to talk. I have my red state pledge: If I get invited to go to a red state, I have to be there. I think it’s incredibly important to speak to anybody who wants to have a conversation. But I also think that Republicans need to own this.

But the Bible’s his favorite book! It’s the only book he could think of. (Laughs)

So you see the contemporary political moment, you see President Trump, contextualized within a longer, larger historical continuum?

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Is the denial of climate change connected to a broader skepticism about science? Are the deniers today the same people who reject, say, evolution? I’m asking if this is yet another form of American anti-intellectualism?

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Although billions of dollars were spent in climate research in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, the resulting knowledge had little impact on the crucial economic and technological policies that drove the continued use of fossil fuels. A key attribute of the period was that power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong interest in maintaining the use of fossil fuels. —The Collapse of Western Civilization, 36

Well, again, yes and no. It’s a murky issue, and it’s hard to discuss categorically without being incorrect. On the question of science writ large, I think the answer is no. It’s not a categorical rejection of science. We have a lot of data on this, and the American people have no problem with most science. They don’t reject plate tectonics. They don’t reject the idea that DNA carries hereditary information. The issue arises when scientists come to conclusions that threaten people in some way. It could be a threat to your religious interpretations, or it could be a threat to your economic self-interest, or it could be a threat to your ideological commitment to free market capitalism. That is the common theme. So this is what sociologists call implicatory denial— you deny something because you don’t like its implications.

For your own life? For your own life. Exactly! And for your own personal worldview. So as long as science isn’t threatening your worldview, you’re quite content

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and happy with it. In that sense, it is related to anti-evolutionism, although the motivations are different. In the case of evolution, I think there is a genuine theological problem with a certain kind of theology, with a certain kind of biblical literalism. It’s a literalism that even William Jennings Bryan didn’t hold. If you take a literal view of the Bible, that the earth was made, that God did everything in six 24-hour days, you know, then it’s going to be a little bit hard to find common ground with a scientist, right? But the fact is, most religious people don’t think that, actually. Even in the Scopes Trial, Bryan didn’t defend that view. So it may be that there is some group of deeply literalist Evangelical Protestants, Seventh Day Adventists, folks like that, that are going to be really, really hard to reach—but even then, there is an opening because there’s been some really nice work done by some folks at Arizona State University. They have looked at this ques-

The American people have no problem with most science. They don’t reject plate tectonics. They don’t reject the idea that DNA carries hereditary information. The issue arises when scientists come to conclusions that threaten people in some way, and it could be a threat to your religious interpretations, or it could be a threat to your economic self-interest, or it could be a threat to your ideological commitment to free market capitalism. That is the common theme. So this is what sociologists call implicatory denial— you deny something because you don’t like its implications.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N tion of how one reaches students in the classroom who have those kinds of views, and one of the things we’ve learned from their work is that some of it has to do with extreme biblical literalism, but most of it is not that. Most of it actually is implicatory denial. What people don’t like—and Rick Santorum, who I don’t admire but at least he was honest in this case, said this outright—“I don’t like the idea that it’s all just random. I believe that God has a purpose for us. A plan.” Or people say things like, “Well, evolution means that life has no meaning. That life is purposeless.” Of course, it doesn’t actually mean that. So most of it is implicatory denial. That means that it might help if scientists would actually be a little less arrogant and a little more circumspect and say, “Look, I’m not telling you how to live your life. I’m not telling you what the solution to climate change is. I’m just telling you it’s a real thing that we need to talk about.” That’s what I try to encourage scientists to do when I talk with them about the issue.

Your encouragement to them is to talk about the way that knowledge translates to lived experience? Well, it’s just to open up a space to say that evolutionary biology doesn’t tell you how to live your life.

It doesn’t mean that you lose all sense of meaning and it’s all— It doesn’t mean that you can’t believe in God! And then you give examples of ways in which different people have sorted it out. For example, there’s what Ken Miller, professor of biology and Royce Family Professor for Teaching Excellence at Brown University believes: it is called deistic evolution. He believes evolution is the mechanism by which species change and evolve. He also believes in God, and he thinks that God acts through evolution. So that’s deistic evolution, and it’s not incompatible with a scientific worldview. So you can show students that there’s a spectrum; it’s not so either/or. It’s not science versus—

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It’s not a binary. Right! It’s not a binary. You show them a spectrum, and it’s like, “Oh, okay, well, I could slot in here, you know, here are some places where I think I could fit.”

So you encourage scientists to talk about values? Yes, I think they need to because value neutrality is a myth, and most of us know it, and ordinary people know it. Ordinary people aren’t idiots. When you make a claim that’s not plausible, that doesn’t pass the laugh test, and you lose credibility. So I think it’s much better for scientists to say, “Yeah, of course I have values. We all have values. And one of my values is environmental stewardship, and I do this work in part because I really care about the planet, I care about natural beauty.” As I mentioned, I care about skiing. I would like my children and my grandchildren to be able to enjoy winter sports. It’s so beautiful. Whatever it is, whatever it is authentically for

Scientists need to talk about values because value neutrality is a myth, and most of us know it, and ordinary people know it. Ordinary people aren’t idiots. When you make a claim that’s not plausible, that doesn’t pass the laugh test, you lose credibility. So I think it’s much better for scientists to say, “Yeah, of course I have values. We all have values. And one of my values is environmental stewardship, and I do this work in part because I really care about the planet, I care about natural beauty.”

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you, that’s what you need to talk about and not to make up some story about values. This is what this is about for me authentically. Why am I doing this work? And it turns out most climate scientists have a good story to tell about that. They’re not just doing it because they love math or something, right? I mean, some of them are just purely geeks, but—

The articulation of values, that’s a space for the humanities. Yes, absolutely. I’m desperate for humanists to become more involved in this issue because I just think there are so many issues related to culture and values that are crying out for good analysis. So many times I sit in rooms where the scientists start talking about the moral dimension of climate change, and I just cringe because they just do a ham-fisted job of it. So, yes, definitely! Definitely.

You said something yesterday about people not realizing what climate change is going to mean for their lives − Right. If people realize what’s at stake, and then you ask them to change their light bulbs or drive an electric car, then they understand that’s a small act compared to what’s at stake.

I want to move in a different direction. I’m curious what you think of Bruno Latour’s statements regarding the destabilization of truth, a project he sees encouraged in academic training. He has wondered if such a destabilization hasn’t come back to haunt us in terms of climate change. Do you think that a view of facts as social constructs undermines science? Well, I do have views, but I think—you know, this is a complicated space . . . There was something I read a while ago, where somebody was trying to blame science studies for climate change by saying we had destabilized the notion of truth. I remember thinking, that’s just giving way too much credit to a very small

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and non-influential field because I just don’t think that science studies is that powerful. If you think about the destabilization of concepts of truth, it doesn’t begin with science studies. In fact, science studies is just picking up on threads that are already extant in the humanities and literature, in the deconstruction of literature. I think deconstruction in literature has much more to do with this as a culture.

I wonder about that, too. So I think Bruno is giving himself, in a sense, too much credit, if you can put it that way. There was something about this issue right around the time The Republican War on Science came out. I wrote a review of The Republican War on Science where I said that this is not about a bunch of obscure academics having an argument among themselves about truth. This is about a much more giant thing, which is, you know, the organized orchestration of disinformation by very powerful corporations, by think tanks. This is the big story! This is the elephant in the room! This is about the Republican Party aligning itself with corporate forces of disinformation! That is the big story here. There’s a much, much bigger cultural phenomenon, and I think it’s much more important for us to think about. The average person living here in Ogden has never heard of Bruno Latour.

Or Derrida? Or Derrida, or Baudrillard, or any of these people. But that person may well have seen an ad on TV for “clean” gas, or for e-cigarettes, or whatever the latest thing is. And it’s that—that infiltration into mainstream American culture— that to me is the issue. And that’s why I’d love to see more sociologists get involved in this issue, you know, because that’s where the rubber meets the road for the ordinary American.

Thank you so much for your time. It was a privilege.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N Notes 1. Just over thirty years ago, on June 23, 1988, James Hansen testified before Congress about climate change research. To read his statement is to be struck by the accuracy of his findings presented on that day. Hansen argued three main points: first, that the earth was warmer in 1988 than at any earlier time that could be recorded through instrumental measurements; second, that global warming had become substantial enough to present a “cause-and-effect relationship” with the greenhouse effect; third, computer simulations indicated a high probability for extreme weather events in the future. 2. See, for example, Huntsman’s op-ed piece in The New York Times,” The G.O.P. Can’t Ignore Climate Change” (6 May 2014), https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/opinion/the-gopcant-ignore-climate-change.html

Christy Call (Ph.D., Univ. of Utah) is an assistant professor in Weber State University’s English Department. Her dissertation on Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy interpreted the novels from fused frameworks of actor-network theory, new materialisms, and critical animal studies. Call’s research highlights emergent ethical issues in an age of climate change, specifically focusing on how literature and new interpretative approaches may sponsor more just ways of thinking about relations. She is currently at work on a book-length project. Her webpage may be found at http://faculty.weber.edu/ccall2/

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GENEALOGY OF HOPEâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; RETURNING TO THE TRADITIONAL

A Conversation with

Cornel West

ADRIENNE GILLESPIE ANDREWS & WSU STUDENTS

C O N V E R S A T I O N Professor, philosopher, scholar, and self-proclaimed prophet, Cornel West was born on June 2, 1953, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The son of a Defense Department general contractor/Baptist minister and teacher/ principal, West was raised in California where he developed a passion for activism that shaped his personal and professional trajectories exploring the roles of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their “radical conditionedness.” A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard with an A.B. in 1973, and an M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1980) in philosophy from Princeton, West has identified himself as a radical Democrat and nonMarxist socialist who employs a variety of intellectual traditions to explore questions of identity, intersectionality, oppression, and love, including Christianity, the black church, Marxism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism. West has served as faculty at several institutions, including Union Theological Seminary, Harvard (as well as Harvard Divinity School), Yale (as well as Yale Divinity School), the University of Paris, and Princeton. Among his most influential books are Race Matters (1994) and Democracy Matters (2004). He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than 40 texts, the recipient of 20 honorary degrees and an American Book Award. Not limited to the written word, West has recorded three hip-hop/soul/spoken word albums and appeared in documentaries such as the 2008 film Examined Life, in addition to appearances in the popular films The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.

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While lauded as “one of the most recognizable and preeminent intellectuals of his generation,” West is not without his detractors, including former president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, and former student and mentee, Rev. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, both of whom challenge his current scholarship and question his lack of self-reflection. While at Weber State University celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Race Matters and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, West did what he does best: bring together an audience of diverse individuals operating from different experiences, perspectives, and prerogatives, using what may be the greatest tool in his arsenal—love. Radiating warmth, charm, and a capacity to break down walls, West touched hearts and minds and moved people to action and engagement with the communities in which they live, work, and play. The following conversations occurred prior to his keynote address in January 2018 and include students who read Race Matters as part of the Honors Program at Weber State University. We would like to thank Dr. West for his time and effort, and Dr. Scott Sprenger, Dean of the Telitha E. Lindquist College of Arts & Humanities, and his staff, for making this visit possible.

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CONVERSATION Adrienne Gillespie Andrews: We are thrilled to have you here on campus. I am blessed to be here! Weber State University.

I was on Facebook earlier, and people are still trying to get tickets to tonight. Is that right? Well, I’m glad the Lord can use a cracked vessel like me.

I’ll tell you what. Sometimes the best vessel is a cracked vessel because it knows what it is to be broken. Whoa. That’s a fresh word. That’s a powerful word. Because it knows what it is to be broken. (Laughs)

You have your fingers on the pulse of what’s happening in the world today. What are we missing? What in this culture, in this society, are we missing? What should we be paying attention to and doing? We are missing great exemplars of integrity, honesty, decency, courage, and willingness to serve and sacrifice. The market culture has taken over. So it’s all about spectacle, image, celebrity, fame, and money. And that’s spiritual blackout. Because you can’t have human greatness if you don’t have spirituality that’s connected to integrity, honesty, decency, and service to others. But the beautiful thing is that an awakening is taking place among the younger generation—that’s part of the Black Lives movement.

You’re still a big advocate of Black Lives Matter? Absolutely. It’s one of the real signs of hope in the whole culture. They’ve got now, what—over 60 organizations tied to the movement for Black Lives. When they came out with the agenda, they started working so many different contacts all around the country, and are now connected to Latin America, connected to the Middle East and so forth.

It’s mainly a love of black people. That’s really what it is. And what’s interesting, of course, is that for the first time in the history of black people, you’ve got—they would call themselves queer, or I would say lesbian or gay or trans—but you’ve got queer black folk who are playing a fundamental role often in leadership roles. We’ve never had that before.

Well, sometimes we’ve had it, but it’s been undercover. So how do we pull back the curtain and show people that it’s okay to call a racist a racist? And as you indicated before, that’s not something that should be prize-worthy. You’ve got to do it only by example. It has to be done over and over and over again, so it looks like it’s more and more the natural thing to do, rather than some unnatural thing. See, it’s like loving somebody. When you reach a point in a culture that doesn’t cultivate the capacity to love—and everybody’s just lusting, getting overdominating, manipulating—we’ve got a problem. We have to return back to love, first one, then another, and then somebody else starts. It’s a different thing.

It’s spreading the ripple. Yeah, it’s spreading. We saw it in the 60s. You see, black folks were scared. They didn’t want to get out of place because they’d get their neck cut off. Then all of a sudden, more and more folks got out of place. Let me start getting out of place, too. Then, by the time they got to the younger generation, you couldn’t even slow dance with your sister in the garage unless she had checked your revolutionary credentials. (Laughs) Brother said, “Shoot, I better get myself together. I want to slow dance with a sister to The Mighty Dells!” You know what I mean? So it became hip to be courageous. Today it is hip to be bling, bling. It’s a different culture, or a different cultural moment, I’d say.

What is it that unites those organizations?

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C O N V E R S A T I O N What we do know is that this work is exhausting. And it takes a toll physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. How do you deal with racial battle fatigue? Oh, that’s a good one. You got to have some good friends and good family. Definitely. And if you’re religious like myself, then faith plays an important role, too. So at least you’ve got the vertical option. You know what I mean? A lot of folks just got horizontal options. But it doesn’t mean that we still don’t have phases and stages where we’re down and out. All of us have Death Valley experiences. That’s what it is to be human. That’s what it is to be religious.

You are a man who lives as though it could all be snatched away. Do you fear anything? I think that I have fears like anybody else, but courage is not the absence of fear, it’s the overcoming of fear. So, in that sense, I try to go up against anything. I still have my fears, but I want to go up against it no matter what. And it’s primarily because I have been so profoundly loved on so many different fronts and in so many different ways, going back to Mom and Dad, family, the Baptist church. I know that it has nothing to do with me being able to take credit for it. I just showed up, you know? Mom and Dad and them said, “Good God almighty. We’re going to love this little Negro child, you know?” That’s how they’ve been doing it all these years.

Which is spectacular, because we know everybody does not experience that kind of love. It doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, whatever. Because we all have multiple identities. Everybody is not loved. So how do we change that? Especially with the folks who might be perceived or understood as our enemies? Yes, everybody needs love. Neo-Nazis need love. I saw that when they were staring me in the face. They were joyless, feeling loveless, and so forth, a spiritual emptiness. Everybody needs it. But the first thing to do is point out that people have to say it from the rooftops.

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We are missing great exemplars of integrity, honesty, decency, courage, and willingness to serve and sacrifice. The market culture has taken over. So it’s all about spectacle, image, celebrity, fame, and money. And that’s spiritual blackout. Because you can’t have human greatness if you don’t have spirituality that’s connected to integrity, honesty, decency, and service to others. What about speech issues on campus? We have people who are not wanting to allow conservative voices on campus. People who are saying we should restrict speech on campus. Folks who are saying that the only speech on campus is liberal speech. How do we deal with this? What do we do? I think there ought to be a robust dialogue across political lines, across ideological lines, across race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, non-religion, and so forth. But at the same time, we have to be able to make judgments. Because there is such a thing as just low-quality speech. And universities only have so many weeks in each semester, so you don’t need to just bring low-quality speech in, you see. If you’re going to have a conservative speaker, it ought to be somebody who’s thought about these things. It’s not just somebody seen on TV, some little pundit grabbing clichés and coming just to stir people up. It’s the difference between— “Well, we ought to have expressions of black culture on campus,” and then you bring in Rudy Ray Moore talking about Dolemite, like he’s representing all black people. No, no, Rudy Ray needs to stay in Mike’s basement after dark. He doesn’t need to come to Weber State University, you see what I mean? No, you bring Donna Franklin. Now we love Rudy Ray Moore, but he doesn’t belong here.

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And the same is true for the conservatives. They got Meat Loaf, but Meat Loaf don’t need to be at the university either, because he’s not quality! Conservatives have quality thinkers. This place is a place that people have serious quality. (It’s like somebody showing up to give a concert in classical music and they’re going to play scales.) The university is a place where there’s cultivated conversations. It’s not just any conversation. It’s not the barbershop or beauty salon, even though there’s a lot of wisdom there, too. But some of them don’t need to be at Weber State. They need to be in the barbershop and the beauty salon. White side of town, black side of town, brown side of town. But that’s a question of the organizations on campus. So, if you have student organizations that want to bring lowquality right-wing folks just to create and stir up things—that’s not free speech. It’s hate speech and begins to look more and more like shouting fire in the theater. The law doesn’t allow that, not at all. Now of course, how you draw the line is a tough question. You’ve got to go case by case.

You had also mentioned earlier that there’s a cost. What is the highest cost you’ve paid doing this work? Hmmm, that’s a good question. I think it probably had something to do with illness, it had something to do with my personal life, marriages. It’s complicated, but I think there’s a certain cost there. And then of course there’s always a cost in terms of your reputation and popularity. People are going, “Oh, you must be upset because you’re not as popular as you used to be.” Am I still on the love train? Am I on the true train? I fall off, I get back on, fall off, get back on. That’s the measure.

So, not allowing yourself to be seduced by the success. Absolutely. If I show up and there’s six people and I’m speaking from my soul, I’m satisfied. If I show up and there’s fifteen hundred and I’m speaking from my soul, I’m satisfied. And it’s mainly because I’ve got a different standard in

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terms of the calling. It’s vertical and horizontal. People will whisper in your ear and say, Brother West, keep doing what you’re doing. That’s the standard.

Student: Recently you’ve made some headlines about a disagreement between you and Ta-Nehisi Coates about the legacy of Barack Obama’s presidency. I haven’t seen too many responses with your voice put into it, but what do you think President Obama’s presidency should be remembered as? Well, that’s a wonderful question. I’m glad you raised Brother Coates because he’s a very brave brother; he’s a young brother. He’s got an indispensable voice that we need to wrestle with. But Coates and I come out of the same tradition. It’s the traditional struggle for black freedom. And that tradition has the highest standards and all of us fall short. The only greater tradition of black freedom struggle is the black musical tradition. And there you got the highest standards. You see, somebody gets up to the microphone and sings a song and everybody goes crazy, and they say, “Oh, she’s Aretha Franklin!” No, you sound good, but you’re not Aretha. Oh, you sound very good, but you’re not Phyllis Hyman. You’re not Carmen McRae. You’re not Billie Holiday. You’re not Sarah Vaughan. What’s your name? “Oh my name is Sally.” Okay, Sally, you sounded good, but you’ve got some standards in this tradition. And you always got to point to the standards. So that’s what much of the debate Brother Coates and I have is about. What kind of standards do we bring in terms of understanding white supremacy? For me, it’s very important to always connect white supremacy to issues of class, issues of gender, issues of sexuality, and especially issues of empire. One of the worst things you get in discourses was that slavery was America’s original sin. You hear that 99% of the time when people talk about the black experience. And you say, no, that’s a lie. That’s not true. America’s original sin was treatment of indigenous peoples. The dispossession of their land, the violation of their peoples. Slavery was number two. If

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C O N V E R S A T I O N you miss the indigenous peoples, then you miss how 13 colonies became 50 states. And the truth is that the indigenous peoples’ treatment was prior to the treatment of black people. So I’m very critical of Coates in terms of not talking about empire, empirical expansion, and not talking about class. Black elites have different possibilities than black poor people in the hood. They are all wonderfully human, but you still have to be very honest about that. Patriarchy. The black woman’s experience in all of its richness is different than the black male’s experience. Because we got black patriarchy in the black community, in the black church, in hip-hop, and so forth. And the same is true with gays, like James Baldwin, or lesbians, like Audre Lorde, who have to deal with homophobia. And then you got trans folk dealing with transphobia. They’re all black but they still have a different experience. All of the white supremacy has to be connected to these other crucial dynamics in order to tell the truth. Because in the black freedom tradition, the condition of truth is always to allow suffering to speak. Anybody’s suffering, no matter what. And everybody suffers. To be human is to suffer, and shudder, and die. And, you hope, get in a few loves and laughs. So, when I looked at Obama, what did I see? I saw a brilliant brother, sharp—his symbolic victory will forever be in the annals of history as the first black president. A beautiful thing, that’s why we fought so much for him. I was very much a part of his campaign. But there’s symbols and there’s substance. I’m not the kind of person in the black freedom struggle who will become so obsessed with somebody’s success that I don’t want to know how they use their success. That’s greatness. You’re not great because you win. You’re successful because you win. But the greatest among you are those who will be servants for the least of these, that’s biblical. That’s the great ones. And those are the ones that have to take a risk. You have to pay a price. That’s why Martin Luther King Jr. was great. It’s not because he went to Morehouse, a Ph.D.; we got a whole bunch of people graduated from Morehouse got Ph.D.s, and

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they’re just successful, living large, in some vanilla suburb, in their little mansion, sipping tea. I ain’t got nothing against success, but it’s not enough. Not on a spiritual level. Not on a moral level. So, with Barack Obama, the test was what will be your relation to Wall Street? He bailed them out; he didn’t bail out Main Street. Oh, what about the least of these? He gave them three billion dollars every month, interest free. Students don’t get interest free loans. How come you don’t treat students like you treat Wall Street? That upset me, deeply. I was looking for him to hit the issue of the new Jim Crow: mass incarceration. He wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole for seven years. Drone

The black woman’s experience in all of its richness is different than the black male’s experience. Because we got black patriarchy in the black community, in the black church, in hip-hop, and so forth. And the same is true with gays, like James Baldwin, or lesbians, like Audre Lorde, who have to deal with homophobia. And then you got trans folk dealing with transphobia. They’re all black but they still have a different experience. All of the white supremacy has to be connected to these other crucial dynamics in order to tell the truth. Because in the black freedom tradition, the condition of truth is always to allow suffering to speak. Anybody’s suffering, no matter what. And everybody suffers. To be human is to suffer, and shudder, and die. And, you hope, get in a few loves and laughs.

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strikes. A baby in Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan has the same value as a baby in Ogden, Utah, or the south side of Chicago. They denied it and said, “We’re not killing any innocent people.” Quit lying. Then we discover, “Oh, we’re killing some.” How many? Keep track. Those are war crimes. You have a meeting every Tuesday and decide which drones are going to strike. And then you assassinate three American citizens with no due process. That’s authoritarian. That’s fascist. I don’t believe that the Ku Klux Klan ought to be shut down. If they commit a crime, they ought to go to court. Then you send them to jail, if you have a fair trial. That’s what it is to be committed to the democratic procedure. So, with the assassination of three American citizens, that upset me very much. The same is true with surveillance. So what happened was that you ended up with too many black people who were so obsessed with his success that the concern about these other things dropped, and it was just a matter of protecting him against Fox News and other right-wing people. I know Sister Michelle very well. We did much work together at Princeton, and I have great respect for her and their two children, too. One of them is at Harvard now where I teach. I see her walking around and I say, “Hey! I love you. I know I’m just hard on your father, but I love him too!” Because you can love somebody and still be critical of them. I love my aunt, and she’s got a whole lot of work to do. Oh, she’s got a whole lot of work to do. The problem with Coates was that he remained too cozy with Barack Obama. He has some criticisms about Obama’s speech at Morehouse, talking about pulling your pants up and so forth, the respectability and politics, and that was fine, but that’s a criticism. That’s different than a critique. A critique is your relation to the system. A critique has to do with Wall Street. A critique has to do with drone strikes. But then on page 103 (of Coates’ book), this is what really upset me. Oh, I couldn’t take it. I read that text and got to page 103 and he talks about Ossie Davis’s eulogy for Malcolm X. He said he was our shining prince. He embodied all that we aspired for in terms of being courageous, and Coates says, “and for us,

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that’s Barack Obama.” I said, “Sookie Sookie Now.” Barack Obama can’t stand a candle to Malcolm X when it comes to courage, telling the truth, sacrifice, backbone. Don’t rebrand Malcolm for this black successful president. Because Malcolm is not all by himself, he comes out of tradition, people who worked too hard, sacrificed too much. Too much blood, sweat, and tears for Malcolm X. And for anybody to think—you got a whole chapter called The Legacy of Malcolm X—that the culminating legacy of Malcolm X is Barack Obama? Get off the crack pipe. Quick. You’ve got the most impoverished understanding of black history imaginable! You don’t understand what goes into the shape . . . you don’t understand what the analysis had of Malcolm X. You’ve all read Malcolm X, right? You’ve read the autobiography, you know what he was about. You know his break from Elijah Muhammad. You know his critique of empire. You know how they were hunting him down like a dog. And you’re going to connect that to the head of the empire? The black face of the empire becomes a culminating figure of the major critic of the empire? That’s what I said in the piece! I said, Oh no, this younger generation, you’ve all got to have a much more subtle understanding of black history. You’re gonna think that Rhianna is a culmination of Sarah Vaughan! Please! I love that sister from what, Barbados? Antigua? Is that where she’s from? She’s all right, you know, but she ain’t no Sarah Vaughan. Aretha, Lord! No, no, no. We’re gonna keep the standards high. Just like Usher [Raymond] thinking he’s Donny Hathaway. No, negro! You’re just making money and singing! Donny Hathaway is on a different level! Luther Vandross is on a different level. Because if the tradition is in you, then that’s like talking about your mama and your daddy. Oh well, so-and-so is like your daddy. No, no, dad was there for me when nobody else cared. This cat came just the last two years. Don’t even compare the two. That’s what I get very intense about these days.

Do you feel we are in mental slavery? And if so, is this more detrimental than physical slavery?

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C O N V E R S A T I O N Well, both of them are bad. (Laughs) You agree with me. Both of them are bad, but absolutely, a mental bondage, a blinding, a sleepwalking, a refusal to pierce through the surface to see the depths, absolutely. And that’s part of what it is to be educated. To learn how to be free thinking, mind, heart, and soul, but that has to do with courage. The problem is that we live in a time in which, if you’re obsessed with success, you’re more likely to be locked in the conformity and follow the rules in order to be successful, rather than violate the rules in the name of something greater, the way Jesus violated the rules. He said, look, on the Sabbath we’re gonna do this. No, but the law says—no, bunk the law. Love is deeper than the law. But in conformity, everybody goes through the motions. Everybody goes through the motions in order to be successful, get the pat on the back, get the approval. Want to get a TV show? Want everybody to be popular? No, sometimes integrity and popularity clash. Ask Malcolm. You know Malcolm had 3% support among black people when he was alive? 3%! He didn’t give a dang! Just being a Muslim already at that time was difficult, because you know how we black Christians are. We tend to be monopolistic on religion. But Malcolm didn’t care, he was himself. Muhammad Ali was the same way. He became a Muslim. Cassius Clay no longer, that’s right, that’s my Christian name. That’s gone now. I’m Muhammad Ali! Oh Lord, that was crazy. Courage, bearing witness, being true to himself, in that sense. I love my Muslim brothers and sisters, but I’m a proud Christian. But I know courage when I see it. That mental bondage? You have to break it. That’s what that courage is all about.

not afraid, but it seems that some students on campus might be too scared to speak up. I hear you. No, I salute your courage. Well, one is that you say to Weber State University: my hunch is that you’re interested in truth. Is that right? “Oh yeah, we’re concerned about truth. The University is predicated on the quest for truth.” That’s good. Now, do you think it’s possible to engage in a quest for truth about the modern world, about the United States, without talking about the legacy of white supremacy? Without talking about race? Let’s try to understand the truth of what it is to be growing up in Utah, growing up in the United States. Do you think race has anything to do with that? “No, I don’t. I don’t think race has anything to do with it.” Okay, that means that your neighborhood is in a silo in a nice little bubble. Let’s pierce the bubble—that’s what education is about. Because for a lot of people, race doesn’t matter because that’s the bubble they grew up in. Now, of course, here in Utah you could even cast it another way. You could say, “Well, one way of talking about truth is keeping track of the history of persecuted peoples.” Now, were the Mormons persecuted? Hell yes. They were even persecuted by the most popular of all American presidents. Old Honest Abe. Let’s read the story of Abe’s response to the Mormon struggle. “Oooh,

What suggestions would you offer to help make issues about race more accessible? Kind of like speaking up more, or activism? Personally, I am

Cornel West and students at Weber State University in January 2018.

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I thought we were talking about race?” No, we’re talking about truth, we’re gonna get there. Now look at these persecuted peoples. Joseph Smith. Brigham, what’s Brigham’s last name?

Young. Young. Let’s keep track of these folk. Now let’s keep track of Frederick Douglass. Let’s keep track of Harriet Tubman. Persecuted peoples. What kind of parallels do we see? What similarities? What differences? That’s what education is about: breaking that mental bondage. That’s part of the conversation, because if any university is concerned about truth, you don’t have to have black people around to study race at all. “The truth is the truth,” that’s Shakespeare. Isn’t that what he writes? If you wait to have black people around to study race, then your quest for truth seems to be very narrow. You ought to be just as concerned about truth because the truth is the truth no matter what. You think we in Boston can’t study about the rich history of Mormons because there’s not that many Mormons there? You got all these Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics and black folks in Boston. No, we don’t have to say nothing about the Mormons, Joseph Smith, and them, nah, nah, nah. We ain’t got no Mormons around. You’ll never be able to understand the history of the West without understanding the role of the Mormons.

The thing about truth, I feel, can be relative because for some people truth can be what they’ve been told, what the media portrays, what history has told them. So, in that case, you could say there is no such thing as a perfect truth because some of those truths can be toxic. I didn’t grow up here, I’m an international student from Nigeria in West Africa, so— Oh, the great Nigeria! I salute you, brother. I’m sorry to interrupt, but Nigeria, I’ll stand up. Go right ahead.

So the idea of racism isn’t something we discuss back home because we’re just a bunch of black people in our community. It’s our place,

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Do you think race has anything to do with that? “No, I don’t. I don’t think race has anything to do with it.” Okay, that means that your neighborhood is in a silo in a nice little bubble. Let’s pierce the bubble—that’s what education is about. Because for a lot of people, race doesn’t matter because that’s the bubble they grew up in. Now, of course, here in Utah you could even cast it another way. You could say, “Well, one way of talking about truth is keeping track of the history of persecuted peoples.” Now, were the Mormons persecuted? Hell yes. They were even persecuted by the most popular of all American presidents. Old Honest Abe. Let’s read the story of Abe’s response to the Mormon struggle. “Oooh, I thought we were talking about race?” No, we’re talking about truth, we’re gonna get there.

it’s where we grew up. But then I came to the U.S. three years ago and have been identified as African-American because, well, I’m black. So I get questions like, “Do you guys ride lions in Africa?” Someone asked me, “Do you wear clothes in Nigeria? Do you have electricity in Nigeria?” And I realize it’s not their fault because this is the kind of culture they grew up in, and their information has been based on what they’ve been told or what they’ve assumed, or what Hollywood or social media has portrayed, or what you see on an advertisement on poverty. They only use black, poor kids in a very dirty environment. Of course,

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C O N V E R S A T I O N that’s how poverty can be amplified, but they just don’t show the aspect of Africa that’s rich. And so, to the eyes of the world, we’ve been alienated and we’re all poor, and I got put in this position where people ask me all these questions that I feel like I need to have answers to as a black person, to help them understand. But I’ve only been here three years and the history surrounding racism and slavery and all of that dates way back, and there’s a lot of information that is both truthful and not. Because the thing about history is that, if you tell a lie and it keeps on going, at some point that becomes the truth. Well it doesn’t become the truth, it becomes perceived as the truth. You see the difference? Plato draws the difference between doxa and episteme, opinion on the one hand, knowledge on the other. People can say over and over again that all people in Nigeria are poor, but that’s just a lie, no matter how many times they say it. Just like white supremacy. Black people are less beautiful. You can say it all you want, it’s just a lie. You can say it from the White House to a church, mosque, synagogue, university. Still a lie. Now, when you said “perfect truth,” that kind of took me. Because I do believe that there’s a certain contextual quality to truth because, as human beings, we don’t have access to that perfect truth. That’s why we have to be open to revision and conversation and reflection and so forth.

Anytime you’re faced with opinion, you have to distinguish it from knowledge. When you, say, homogenize a group and say all gays are so-andso, or all Jews are so-and-so, that’s just not true. You have to be willing to engage in dialogue and conversation to try to keep track of the difference between opinion, on the one hand, and knowledge, or what we understand more validated claims are, on the other. And what you laid bare, I think, in a wonderful narrative, an eloquent narrative, is the ways in which we in the United States are so parochial. The United States is a big country. Going from Utah to Florida requires a tremendous leap of imagination and knowledge acquisition. Then you go from Africa or Latin America, and you imagine China. Very few Americans get a chance to really immerse themselves in Chinese complexities, African complexities. And I like your mature attitude about it, which is to say: you give them the benefit of the doubt and say, I think you’re in process, but you’ve got a whole lot of learning to do in terms of your perception of me given the stereotype of black men as entertainers and so forth.

Adrienne Gillespie Andrews: Thank you for sharing your perspective.

Adrienne Gillespie Andrews is the Assistant Vice President for Diversity and Chief Diversity Officer at Weber State University. She has two master’s degrees and is completing a Ph.D. in Education, Culture, and Society at the University of Utah. An active speaker on social justice, consensus building, and collaborative partnerships, Andrews’ research focuses on diversity initiatives and outcomes in higher education, diversity, and inclusion efforts in curriculum, and building effective campus and community partnerships with diversity and inclusion as their foundation.

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NARRATIVE STRUCTURE, STORYTELLING, AND CULTURAL MEANING-MAKINGâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

A Conversation with

Daniel Mendelsohn

Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0

JUDI AMSEL

C O N V E R S A T I O N Daniel Mendelsohn was born in New York. Most of the members of his Jewish family had emigrated from the town of Bolechow, Poland, in the early 20th century. He studied Classics at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. His writing spans memoir, translation, criticism, and essays in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and The New York Times Book Review. He teaches literature at Bard College. His books include collections of essays (Waiting for the Barbarians; How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken), translation (C.P.

Cavafy: Complete Poems), classical scholarship (Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays), and personal narrative (The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity; The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic). Mendelsohn visited Weber State University in March 2018, where he lectured and spent time with students during the National Undergraduate Literature Conference. The following conversation took place between a lecture on themes from The Lost and a reading from An Odyssey.

CONVERSATION You are a multifaceted writer, which means that you have to make hard decisions about how to spend your writing time. What motivates you, for example, to write a piece for publication in a non-scholarly outlet about classical texts? Well, I love these texts; they’re so great, and I want to tell people why I think they’re so great. Between the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, I’ve made a career of doing just that. I don’t have to talk the talk and walk the walk of all the academic theoretical gobbledygook. Now, a lot of that is interesting, and I am interested in it, but I think ordinary readers, and I use that term in the formal way— people who are not specialists, but intelligent, ordinary readers—believe in great literature; they believe that it makes their lives better. I think it’s all we have. They want to know why it’s great and what you can learn from it. They don’t want to keep hearing that literature is all a plot by evil authors to hoodwink the public. So, I’ve always avoided theorizing and just try to be clear and tell people what I think. I’m a storyteller, and in my criticism I like to tell a story about the work that I’m writing about.

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That’s what I am particularly interested in. I’d like you to talk a little bit about that, and also a bit about the genres that you have pursued, your various interests, and how they all get folded together. One of the things that I noticed when I scanned through the kind of writing you have done, after having read some of it, was how, no matter what area you are going into—you introduced a film review about Selma with a piece about The Capture of Miletus. This seems to be a common hook for you—a classical hook into a contemporary topic. You frequently do this with a cross-genre allusion or a cross-era allusion. Well, I’m a classicist, I was trained as a classicist. My profile—as a writer, as a critic—is of someone who is thinking about the classics and how they structure the way we think about contemporary, and even popular, culture. That’s what I do. I do it partly to show that these works never stop being relevant (I hate to use the word, but you have to) because they have structured the way we think about the world. I like to show people that you can use these ancient texts to illuminate even contemporary and popular culture. The brief in

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that particular piece, when I was a columnist at Harper’s, was to talk about historical fiction in movies, how movies represent history. Selma had just come out and historical fiction happens to be a genre I’m very interested in, having grown up on all those toga and sandal epics. How do we represent the past? It’s an important question because a lot of what the public knows about the past, or what we think we know about the past, comes from movies.

I don’t think that Cleopatra really had makeup like Elizabeth Taylor. No, unfortunately for them. (Laughs) One way you can start a conversation about the relationship between historical truth and dramatic representation of history is to go back to this famous incident from the history of Greek tragedy about one of the few Greek tragedies that covered a historical event, rather than a mythological event. The Capture of Miletus famously flopped overnight because its representation of this real historical incident was so emotional for the Athenians that they didn’t want to see it. It was too close for comfort.

Too soon? Too soon, yeah. I’ve used that anecdote a few times. I used it, I believe, when I wrote about some 9-11 movies several years ago. I like to show people how the classics are always present. What I mean by that is not just as texts we can think about as being enlightening or edifying—Antigone, say, being about the eternal struggle between state and individual—but as ways of structuring how we think about all kinds of things. I did a very big piece about recent movies— this is a very big interest of mine—about artificial intelligence. There is a wonderful movie called Ex Machina about a robot who rebels against her creator. And that wonderful movie Her about an operating system the guy falls in love with. I started that piece with, “We’ve been dreaming about robots since Homer.” There are robots in The Iliad. There is this wonderful scene where Hephaestus

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I like to show people how the classics are always present. What I mean by that is not just as texts we can think about as being enlightening or edifying—Antigone, say, being about the eternal struggle between state and individual—but as ways of structuring how we think about all kinds of things. I did a very big piece about recent movies— this is a very big interest of mine—about artificial intelligence. There is a wonderful movie called Ex Machina about a robot who rebels against her creator. And that wonderful movie Her about an operating system the guy falls in love with. I started that piece with, “We’ve been dreaming about robots since Homer.” There are robots in The Iliad. has to make a new suit of armor for Achilles in Book 18, and you get to see what the palace of the blacksmith god Hephaestus looks like, and he’s got automata running around . . . .

I always think of the elves in Santa’s workshop at that point. (Laughs) It just goes to show that these things that look so contemporary, that look so cutting edge, have actually always been in the Western imagination. Some people think that I talk about the classics too much, and that’s fine—they don’t have to read me. But I feel that a lot of people are interested in the continuity between classical civilization and the modern world. Of course, all classicists will tell you that we need to focus just as much on the huge differences.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N We sometimes like to think that we are Greece or Rome, politically or in terms of world history, but there are also big differences we have to remember. That’s the sort of thing I do—whether I’m writing about classics, like a new translation of The Iliad or a new production of Antigone, or when I’m writing about some pop thing where I find that thinking about the classics can be a useful way of illuminating that thing.

Do you think that the classics we support today as sort of a cultural or historical focus are maneuvering for position against other cultural focuses . . . . Well, I think it’s not just the classics. I think this is something that people are talking about a lot. I think the humanities in general are having to justify themselves increasingly against STEM. As the son and brother of scientists, I

There’s always this chatter about what’s a practical major? Is history more practical than classics, is chemistry more practical than history? To me, that all derives from a very narrow and unsatisfying definition of practical or meaningful. I can say, if you study finance, that looks more practical because you have a higher chance of getting a job with an investment bank than you do if you have a degree in classics. But when your father dies, your finance degree is not going to do anything for you, but your classics degree will, because you know about death, and fathers and sons, from reading The Odyssey, and so what’s more practical?

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don’t have any problem with STEM, but STEM is just one way of looking at the world. As Bob Hass very eloquently said last night at the banquet for this conference, “What literature is, is the record from its beginning until today. It is the record about how we think about our lives as human beings.” There’s always this chatter about what’s a practical major? Is history more practical than classics, is chemistry more practical than history? To me, that all derives from a very narrow and unsatisfying definition of practical or meaningful. I can say, if you study finance, that looks more practical because you have a higher chance of getting a job with an investment bank than you do if you have a degree in classics. But when your father dies, your finance degree is not going to do anything for you, but your classics degree will, because you know about death, and fathers and sons, from reading The Odyssey, and so what’s more practical? Nothing that you get from a finance degree is going to help you think about your life. If you have half a brain, you want to think about your life. I always say there are only two practical subjects to study, and that’s literature and philosophy. (Both laugh) Otherwise, so what? You’re making $500,000 a year, but you’re not thinking about your life.

Or more than just adding up the column at the bottom and collecting a paycheck. But that’s not a life. I mean, yes, we all have to make a living, but you can do that. There’s a lot of discussion online. On Twitter, I follow a number of classicists and classical discussion boards. Someone, very sensibly, was saying the other day, once you get into the practicality argument, it’s over: “What’s it going to do for your life?” Do you want to think about the values you have? Then your finance degree is the least practical degree you can have. I’m not naive, I know I’m in the minority, but who cares, as long as I’m happy.

An articulate, verbal minority that needs to continue. Yesterday, you talked about The

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Lost and I loved hearing you share the details that felt right in that telling, especially about Meg Grossbard and her reluctance to give away her story, because she would lose control of it at that point. Of course, by the time I told some people about it last night, even you had lost control of it. But that was something that was very poignant and a strong message when I read it, as well as when you brought it out again. I loved the detail—you’re a details guy. You’re a structure person, it seems to me, and also a details person. The details when you described the apartments that the old folks lived in, I could smell them, or the way she was dressed. And even appropriating the descriptions from the survivors.

has to work. There has to be structure, but there also has to be detail. It has to be the same direction—each derives its strength from the other. Having good structure, but no flesh on the bones isn’t going to do anything. Only flesh and no bones isn’t interesting either.

Right. There’s that one instance where I’m in Malcia Reinharz’s apartment in Israel and she’s describing the food in Bolechow, and she says, “Wait, I’ll make it for you,” and she goes into the kitchen and she starts to make her bulbowenik [a dish of potatoes and eggs]. I’m interested in details—the dresses, the hand gestures, the smells, the apartments, the shades that are drawn—because what is this book really about? In a certain sense, it’s an attempt to retrieve a lost civilization, and every little detail is part of that. Just as an archaeologist excavating a site doesn’t throw away some small thing because it’s not important; everything is important. There’s an ethical imperative to talk about the details, like the dish she made me, because no one is ever going to cook that again, because nobody knows how. In fact, I think I connected the dots between that moment and a much later moment in Meg Grossbard’s apartment when she’s suddenly so happy, and she’s making lunch, and she says, “Nobody makes this food anymore, because everybody was killed who knows how to make this food.” So everything, even lunch, is not trivial. The details are important, but they only add up if the structure is sound. It’s like any kind of writing: writing memoir or narrative non-fiction is like writing a novel—everything

Well, it really is a Homeric flow. And I take very great pains in both books to signal to the reader that you’re getting all this information at the beginning, and you may not know why you’re getting this information, but you just have to hang on and it’s all going to add up. Which is exactly how the Odyssey begins. As I say in the new book, the first half of the Odyssey feels twice as long as the second half because you are being

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I will admit that when I first started reading The Lost, and then again when I started reading An Odyssey, I had to focus very consciously to get into the ring composition flow. It’s not your standard, linear . . . it’s your flow. It’s something that appeals to me. I love this notion that history circles back around, stories circle back around, and you’re really in a vortex and just moving up and down all the time.

I’m interested in details—the dresses, the hand gestures, the smells, the apartments, the shades that are drawn—because what is this book really about? In a certain sense, it’s an attempt to retrieve a lost civilization, and every little detail is part of that. Just like an archeologist excavating a site doesn’t throw away some small thing because it’s not important; everything is important. There’s an ethical imperative to talk about the details.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N loaded down with backstory—seeds are being planted that are not going to germinate until the last quarter of the book. I think attentiveness is necessary and one of the ways I deal with that— because most people are expecting a linear kind of narrative, most contemporary writing caters to linear. This is partly because people’s attention spans are so compromised now. Our crisis is attentiveness. Homer composes in the same way, but he didn’t have to worry about losing anyone’s attention, because they are all sitting around a hearth, listening, they’re not looking at their cell phones or trying to remember who they have to call back at the end of the reading or whatever. It’s more demanding in a certain sense, but there’s always a payoff if you stick with it.

So you can build the whole story by the time you get to the culmination. Memoirs, I’d like to talk a little bit about the history side. I loved the connection yesterday to the big story of the Holocaust and what that would look like 2,000 years from now with the parallel of the Haggadah [the text recited at a Passover Seder]—it’s perfect timing, because we’ll be sitting down to seder tonight. It was brilliant because you ask, what’s going to get smoothed out of our story over the thousand years or so that’s going to come before the next big story, or the next big telling of it? What’s the essence? That’s what culture does, that’s what civilization does. Cultures work out what the narratives are that need to be told, and they find a way to tell them. I think the analogy with the Exodus is just irresistible—I was joking yesterday, each of those people who crossed the Red Sea had an amazing story to tell, and all of those individual stories have been forgotten because there’s only one important story to tell, which we read once a year, and that is the Haggadah. And there will be a Haggadah of the Holocaust 2,000 years from now. We don’t like to think about that because we are close enough to this event—it’s only 80 years ago—to feel that every detail

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matters. We knew these people, I saw these people growing up, how could their stories be erased? Two thousand years from now that pain will go away, because no one will have known Herman the Barber or Mrs. Begley.

They won’t have that individual pain. It’s already happening. Already, there’s an annual Holocaust memorial. It’s already happening, because, you know what, you can’t think about it every day. I was talking to the Honors undergrad students at lunchtime, and I was joking with them that, because of our devices, our technology, we’re obsessed with memory. But we aren’t really, it’s not memory, it’s just storage—what we have on our laptops and our iPads and our iPhones. Memory is organic, memory is precisely the thing that allows the Haggadah to become the Haggadah. The memory sifts and sieves through the raw experience to create the necessary narrative. We walk around with these devices, and they are just filled with junk. You have 86,000 pictures of your Hawaiian vacation. That’s not your memory of your Hawaiian vacation. Your memory of your Hawaiian vacation is that wonderful dinner you had in the moonlit cove in Wailea. So we need to think about the difference between memory and storage—in an era that’s obsessed with accumulating more and more storage—and think about what memory means. It makes sense already, 75-80 years after the Holocaust, that the process of smoothing out has begun. We don’t like to think about it, but the fact that there is now an annual event—it’s like Passover. Every year, we devote a day to thinking about this event. Certain stories are told, most stories are not told. In 1946, every day people were still thinking about this, because it had just happened and there were so many people to whom it had happened, who couldn’t stop thinking about it. That’s what time does. So these traditions, and every culture has them in different ways, are exactly the process of acculturation and the way that culture deals with trauma and history and memory

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We need to think about the difference between memory and storage—in an era that’s obsessed with accumulating more and more storage—and think about what memory means. It makes sense already, 75-80 years after the Holocaust, that the process of smoothing out has begun. We don’t like to think about it, but the fact that there is now an annual event—it’s like Passover. Every year, we devote a day to thinking about this event. Certain stories are told, most stories are not told. In 1946, every day, people were still thinking about this, because it had just happened and there were so many people to whom it had happened, who couldn’t stop thinking about it. That’s what time does. in order to make it manageable. That’s what civilization does. It is a way of dealing with experience and turning it into something. I think it’s very interesting to think about. I’m not a Holocaust expert. I mean, there are people who work on memory. I just sort of accidentally got into this business, and I don’t make any great claims. But I think it’s interesting because I am a classicist (to go back to the other point). So, in a different way, the one thing I am an expert about is the classics, and so in fact I do have some perspective on how civilization deals with trauma because I’ve studied the Greeks and Romans, I can see how history happens and is memorialized and turns into literature. So that gives me a certain angle.

I hadn’t thought about this previously, but I’m thinking now about the connection

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between history and mythology—something that you’ve steeped yourself in and have seen replayed in different ways. Well, myth is another way that culture manages human experiences. Not so much history, but archetypal kinds of experience get managed by myth. To take a myth that everyone knows, The Rape of Persephone—in a certain sense, it’s obviously a myth, a cosmological myth about how we get seasons: that myth works out and narrativizes phenomena in nature. On a more interesting level, it’s also about loss. It’s obviously about death: losing someone, how do you deal with it? You rage, you try to get them back, you have a fantasy of retrieval—and finally you get over it. The Hymn to Demeter, our primary source for this myth, ends with laughter and the creation of a ritual. Myth is a way of dealing with primal human experiences that narrativizes them, giving structures and meaning to frightening or overwhelming kinds of experiences. It’s interesting that, whether it’s myth or history, whether it’s the Hymn to Demeter or the Haggadah, what we always want is a narrative.

Some people think that the Haggadah is a myth too. (Both laugh) The distinction is, it doesn’t make any difference; it’s something that helps you make meaning out of an experience. And what does that is narrative. That’s why, both in my critical writing and in all of my narrative non-fiction works, my three memoiristic books, there is a very self-conscious level that’s interested in narrative and how narrative works. In the books themselves, I talk about different types of narrative. I talk about ring composition, I talk about oral traditions, I talk about myth, because I am always grappling with different ways of telling stories. This, to my mind, is the theme of The Lost—I always used to make the same joke when I was on my book tour with that book: I don’t think of this as a book about the Holocaust, I think of it as

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C O N V E R S A T I O N a book about narrative. The best review that I can remember of that book—not best, as in 5 stars vs. 4 stars, but to me the most intellectually satisfying review—was where somebody started out by saying, “This is not a book about the Holocaust; this is a book about how to write a book about the Holocaust.” I found it so fascinating, because that is interesting to me. It’s the thread that connects all three of my non-fiction narrative works together—from my first memoir to the one that I’m about to talk about, An Odyssey. How do we tell a story? To come back to the point I was going to make before—the theme of The Lost—how do you take what happened and turn it into the story of what happened? They are two different things.

So is An Odyssey a book about how to tell the story of your relationship with your father? Yeah. There are things in the book about learning Greek and how exciting that was, but how I came to see the classics as a vehicle for telling a personal story. One could say that’s what this book is about. In an obvious way, there’s a parallelism throughout the book between episodes in the Odyssey and episodes of my adventures with my dad, which are very self-conscious. One could say this is also a book about narrative, it’s about how I learned to use a certain classical narrative as a good vehicle for talking about fathers and sons, and specifically my father. So that’s what I am interested in.

Do you have a flash of recognition? It’s not a flash of recognition. This new book took me a very long time to write. It took me three times as long as The Lost, which is three times longer, and there was so much more involved in writing The Lost—I was on the road for five years, it was crazy and somewhat traumatic. But, very early on in that book I knew what the structure was. In An Odyssey, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to map the story of me and my dad onto the structure of the Odyssey, but just how that was going to

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work was very hard to figure out. It was very funny because I was practically throwing up my hands in despair as late as the summer of 2016. We published in September of 2017. In August of 2016, I was at my wit’s end. I had 600 pages of manuscript—I basically had everything that’s in the book, but it wasn’t in the order that it is now. Originally, I thought I was going to have three sections: the Odyssey seminar from January to May, then the cruise in June, and then my father’s illness and death. But somehow, all lined up in a row, it was just not working. I showed the manuscript to a great mentor of mine, Bob Gottlieb, who was the editor of the New Yorker and ran Knopf for many years, too, and I showed him everything before I turned it in to my publisher. He said, “The problem is, by the time you get to the end of the class, you don’t want to read any further. It’s the class that’s the backbone, he said. You have to figure a way to fold the cruise and the illness into that.”

It’s not actually the class—it’s 24 books that you’re mapping the rest of the world on to. Then I had the flash of inspiration. I thought, oh, I’m making this terrible mistake because I’m writing this book about Homer, but I’m not thinking Homerically. The Homeric way to do it is to fold in, not to be linear, but to be loopy. (Both laugh) So, I thought, of course I want to have this material about the cruise, but I have to fold it into the part of the class where we’re talking about the adventures of Odysseus. I thought, of course I have to talk about my father’s illness and death, but that has to come when we’re talking about the end of the Odyssey and the homecoming of the elderly father. I literally went home after talking to Bob, and I spent 5 weeks just cutting and pasting and smoothing out, and then it was just there. It shows you something that’s very humbling. I started this book—my dad died April 6, 2012, I’d written the proem by September, and that was 2012. So here I was, in 2016, with this massive amount of material, and here I’ve been thinking about ring composition, and Homer, and struc-

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ture—I was thinking about it, but I wasn’t thinking it. I just had to write it as a Homeric narrative.

I had a contentious relationship with my mother. I thought she was very intelligent, but not very creative. It just irritated the hell out of me when she wouldn’t break out of that box. In your relationship with your father, there’s deep love but not always good connection, it seemed to me. There was some jealousy here and there, and I had the feeling that when he sat in on your class, you wanted to impress him and make good with him, but there was a level of discomfort when the students connected with him sometimes. There’s no question. I was close to my father. This is not the story of an estranged parent and child who come together over Homer, although if there’s a movie in that, I’ll do it. They could do it as a musical, as long as they do it. (Laughs) We were very close from my 30s on. We had gotten to a good place, which I describe. We had not been close until I was in my late 20s—with fathers and sons I think there’s always a little . . . it’s the original Freudian principle, there’s always competitiveness. I think there were many motives, many mixed motives. I think he wanted to be in my class because he loved me, and he wanted to understand what I did and wanted to see me in action, but I think he also wanted to because . . .

He wanted to show off. He wanted to show he still had a hand in the game and he could show me a thing or two. I learned a lot from him. I think my teaching was problematized that semester, because I had not only my students, but my father to deal with. I’m a very popular teacher; I’m a very good teacher. I wanted him to see that. I probably tried too hard and it ended up backfiring; I was showing off a lot . . . Gruff as he was, they liked him, as I later learned. He died on Good Friday, which we thought was hilarious, because as you know from the book, he was an atheist. I said, oh, he did this just to ruin everybody’s Easter.

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Well, my mother died on Purim [a Jewish holiday noted for merry-making], so there you go. (Laughs) My father made a comment after he read my first book, in which I talk about becoming a father myself, and how, as a gay person, I ended up being a parent, and using Greek myths to think about it. I’m pretty hard on him in that book. It relates some of the same anecdotes that are in An Odyssey, too, but without the mature wisdom and acceptance I like to think I brought to the more recent book. I was anxious when I showed him the manuscript of my first book. He read it, and he called me. I said, well, what did you think? And he said, I liked it. He said, things are interesting in direct proportion to their complexity. He never mentioned the hard stuff. One of the things that I wanted to give space to in this new book was the complexity of the relationship. It was many things: it was contentious, it was affectionate, it was loving, it was protective, it was envious. I think my father both wanted us to succeed in ways he hadn’t been able to, but also, in an Oedipal way, he could be castrating at times— he wanted to embarrass us, and cut us down. I am very conscious of the virtues of complexity, especially with this generation who live in this world of endless ranking—5 stars, 4 stars, thumbs up, thumbs down, 90 tomatoes, 40 tomatoes (both laugh)—life is not like that. What makes literature interesting is its ability to hold two opposing notions in suspension—that’s how the human heart works. So, I don’t want to reduce any of the complexity of my relationship with my dad. I want this book to be about how complicated it was, and there’s not always an answer, particularly with parents.

What about with your children? I think about this now with my kids who are grown and . . . You may not want to write a memoir about your kids, I don’t know. I wouldn’t because they have to tell their own stories. All parenting is either imitative or reactive. It usually begins with trying to be reactive

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C O N V E R S A T I O N and ends with being imitative—you turn into your parents. Of course, with my two boys, I’ve tried in so many ways to avoid my father’s mistakes, while preserving what was really great about him. I’m sure I’m making different mistakes that they will be kvetching about.

What have you learned from them? You talk about the learning—learning is a wonderful extract—the process is part of the learning, and the product is part of the learning. My two children are very different—they’re not intellectuals the way I am. My older boy is a double English and Classics major, but he’s not going to go to grad school; he’s interested in other things. Thomas is an outdoorsman and a carpenter. Peter was a great baseball star in high school. And one of the things that I bent over backwards to do as a parent, and if I succeeded in anything in life, I hope it’s this: to not visit my interests upon my children—to let them be who they are, not to try to make them be versions of myself. When Peter became interested in mythology, I was happy, but I was equally happy when he was a baseball player and I let him know that. I always try to be good about that, and I have to say, I think my parents were very good about that. They were first-generation Americans; I am, in the classic sense, a second-generation American. They certainly wanted us to be successful, to go to college, graduate school if possible, but they didn’t tell us what we should be interested in. My older brother is a physicist, I’m a classicist. I have a brother who is a filmmaker, my sister is a journalist, and I’ve got another brother who is a photographer. My parents wanted us to be interesting and successful, but they didn’t say, you have to be a dentist, or you have to be an orthodontist, or you have to be a lawyer, or you have to make a living. When I announced to my parents that I wanted to major in Greek, they were perfectly delighted—so I’m trying to do the same favor for my kids and just let them be whatever they are and not demand that they be me.

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Grammar. I want to talk linguistics. We talked about big story, narrative structure, but you said somewhere that you were fascinated by grammar, and when you immerse yourself in a language, you want to get it right. You’re not going to just drop yourself into a country and try to make do at the deli stand. So I wanted to ask you, especially coming out of your background in the classics, about morphology. I remember how excited I got the first time I realized that “education” and Erziehung [German for education] were derived the same way. Well, it means you have a certain kind of mind. Again, I would say that the larger intellectual pattern at work is an interest in structure—the structure of sentences or the structure of narratives—it all boils down to mechanics. If you look at my reviews, if you read my two collections of essays (I’m just putting together a third one now), I talk a lot about the structure of the work. When I was reviewing a lot of theater, my actor friends would always complain that I didn’t talk enough about the performance—because I’m so interested in how the plays work, you know. I think, by the same token, I’m just interested in structure. For me structure is the key to everything—whether it’s a language, a play, a book, a person. How does it work? I remember when I was learning Greek, everything made sense to me. I don’t know how to describe it, but the case endings—I thought, of course this is how it works. I love to tell my students, speaking of morphology, that in Indo-European linguistics, h’s and s’s are essentially, for certain purposes, equivalent: for instance, that’s why the word “super” in Latin is the same as the word “hyper” in Greek. Or to use a funnier example, the word “herpes” is virtually the same as the word “serpent.” Herpes is called herpes, because it creeps along the nerve—it’s from “[h]erpo” which means “to creep” or “to crawl,” which is what a serpent does. When you see these things, they’re just so interesting. A lot of people just

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don’t care, but to me, particularly with respect to language, it’s like you’re x-raying the world.

Sort of a genome project on a language. It’s interesting that we resort to these medical metaphors, but it’s true. It’s like seeing beneath the flesh to the bone. When you are interested in culture, nothing is as expressive as the personality of the civilization as its languages. I’m working on a big article about the Aeneid for The New Yorker right now, pegged to a recent translation. The Romans always had this terrible problem of trying to make Latin fit Greek meters, which is very hard, because Greek has particles, it has elaborate compounds, it agglomerates prefixes and suffixes—it’s much more supple. You can throw in a single syllable particle if you need an extra part of a foot, but Latin doesn’t have that, it’s much chunkier. Now that says something about the reason that Greek is such a great language for philosophy—these things aren’t accidental, they just had a really good language for it. It’s

like being tall and playing basketball. (Both laugh) You can be short and love basketball, but it’s a game for tall people. The Greek language is very supple and handles abstractions in a very sophisticated way. I’m learning Norwegian now, just for kicks, and I just think it’s incredibly cool. It has enclitic articles—the definite article attaches at the end of the noun. When I first went to Norway, when The Lost came out in Norwegian, I was doing a reading at this thing called the Litteraturhuset, the literature house: but what it really means is “Literature house the.” I just think that’s so cool. It’s just about having a certain kind of mind that enjoys this stuff. For me, it’s about structure: narrative, grammar, whatever. When I started going a lot to Norway, I thought, I really should learn this language. It’s Germanic, so it’s not totally foreign. I went out and, instead of buying a Norwegian phrase book, I bought a grammar book.

I want to thank you so much. This has been delightful.

Judi Amsel is a lay leader of the Jewish community in Ogden, Utah. She chants Torah at every opportunity, explaining that the hands-on engagement with its stories of the Jewish people is the spiritual activity she finds most rewarding. Trained in linguistics and cognitive psychology, she received her Ph.D. from Yale University. She works as a software consultant, but her personal interests extend to politics, film, and theater. She has written essays and one-act plays and aspires to become a writer of short fiction.

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READ

read-ing [from ME reden, to explain, hence to read] â&#x20AC;&#x201C; vt. 1 to get the meaning of; 2 to understand the nature, significance, or thinking of; 3 to interpret or understand; 4 to apply oneself to; study.

CHINESE EXCLUSION The commemoration of the 150 years since the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad has encouraged renewed interest in the Chinese laborers who were recruited to help build the track being laid by the Central Pacific from Sacramento to Utah. The Center for Asian American Media was one of the co-sponsors of the PBS documentary film The Chinese Exclusion Act, shown May 2018 as part of the American Experience series. The Center is also facilitating an industry conversation at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The introductory paragraphs of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act are: Whereas in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof: Therefore, Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the expiration of ninety days next after the passage of this act, and until the expiration of ten years next after the passage of this act, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or having so come after the expiration of said ninety days to remain within the United States. Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/chinese-exclusion-act/; https://caamedia.org/

SPIKE 150—CELEBRATING 150 YEARS OF UTAH’S TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD The Chinese Railroad Workers Descendants Association, based in Salt Lake City, is cosponsoring the Golden Spike Conference in May 2019. It is estimated at least 11,000 Chinese laborers worked on the Central Pacific line. However, no Chinese appear in the iconic photo of men brandishing champagne from the noses of the Jupiter and Union Pacific No. 119 locomotives as they met on the tracks in 1869. In May 2018, the Association staged a photo with the train replicas featuring their members. As reported in The Salt Lake Tribune: “That champagne photo . . . has come to symbolize the completion of the railroad, but it also became a symbol of our being erased,” said Sue Lee, retired executive director of the Chinese Historical Society of America, based in San Francisco. American schoolchildren typically learn that Chinese workers were recruited for cheap manual labor. What is less known, Lee said, is the extent to which Chinese laborers supported day-to-day life on the railroad, running camps with exceptional worker health and nutrition even though white workers were paid more and given food and housing. Chinese workers were largely responsible for some of the most perilous segments of the railroad, carving 15 tunnels through the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

goldenspike150.org Chinese laborers working on the Transcontinental Railroad.

Source: Alberty, Erin. “The iconic image of America’s first transcontinental railroad ‘erased’ the Chinese workers key to building it. 149 years later, their descendants are in the picture.” The Salt Lake Tribune, 10 May, 2018; https://www.sltrib. com/news/2018/05/11/chinese-workers-are-back-in-the-narrative-149-years-after-a-celebratory-golden-spike-drivenin-utah-completed-the-transcontinental-railroad-they-helped-build/

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CHINESE RAILROAD WORKERS PROJECT A few years ago, faculty at Stanford University organized The Chinese Railroad Workers Project to give insight into the lives of the railroad workers before and after the railroad was completed. Their efforts have expanded to include an international team of scholars looking at the Chinese in America from both the U.S. and Chinese vantage points. One dynamic of the project has been to digitize payroll records of the Central Pacific Railway Company in order to help answer questions about the 12,000 to 15,000 Chinese workers who eventually labored on the railroad. Scholars heretofore have found little evidence explaining how so many Chinese could be hired by one company and in such a relatively short period of intense construction. How could the railroad company locate so many thousands of Chinese? What did it take to convince Chinese to commit to being employed in this line of work? Who helped the Chinese collect their pay for their work in railroad construction? The Chinese Railroad Workers Project invites interested visitors to open these items in their digital repository and examine the details they highlight. Names, dates, work locations, pay—per diem and in total—may be studied to gain new insight into the business some Chinese formed to manage the payroll for many more Chinese to do the work of constructing the Central Pacific Railroad. Source: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/crrw

CHINESE INGENUITY Charles Crocker was one of the founders of the Central Pacific Railway. In an article written for Wild West Magazine posted on HistoryNet, Robert Foster tells a story about Crocker’s response to his Irish immigrant construction foreman’s protest to using Chinese workers: “Damn it, man!” he shouted. “The Chinese built the Great Wall of China, didn’t they? Certainly they can be useful in building a railroad, don’t you think?” Foster also describes a strategy the Chinese developed to tackle blasting through Sierra Nevada granite: One evening a Chinese headman approached Strobridge and bowed to the foreman. “What’s on your mind?” asked Stro. The man requested that Chinese workers be allowed to tackle Cape Horn. Long ago, back home, his ancestors had built fortresses in the Yangtze gorges, and he believed his people could apply those skills and techniques to the current project. He asked that reeds be sent from San Francisco to the job site so the Chinese could weave stout baskets with which to lower men from the cliff tops to do the blasting. Strobridge had no objections; no one had a better suggestion, and white workers wouldn’t do this risky work. The reeds arrived, and the Chinese wove their waist-high baskets. Then they went about boring 2 1⁄2-inch-wide holes in the rock for the black powder charges. Once the fuses were lit, hauling crews atop the precipice would pull up the basket-borne men before the charges exploded. The Chinese crews set off more than 500 kegs of black powder daily, blasting a ledge on which to lay the rails. The results of the hazardous work at Cape Horn were so spectacular that when passenger trains rolled through years later, they would often halt at the spot to allow tourists to gawk at the gorge and the grade.

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Waymarking.com

Source: Foster, Robert L. “Working on the Railroad the Chinese Way,” Wild West Magazine, 19 January 2018; post on HistoryNet; https://www.historynet.com/working-railroad-chinese-way.htm

EDITORIAL MATTER

ISSN 0891-8899 —Weber is an international, peer-reviewed journal published biannually by The College of Arts & Humanities at Weber State University, Ogden, Utah 84408-1405. Full text of this issue and historical archives are available in electronic edition at https://www.weber.edu/weberjournal Indexed in: Abstracts of English Studies, Humanities International Complete, Index of American Periodical Verse, MLA International Bibliography, and Sociological Abstracts. Member, Council of Learned Journals. Subscription Costs: Individuals $20 (outside U.S., $30), institutions $30 (outside U.S., $40). Back issues $10 subject to availability. Multi-year and group subscriptions also available. Submissions and Correspondence: Editor, | Weber State University 1395 Edvalson Street Dept. 1405, Ogden, UT 84408-1405. 801-626-6473 | weberjournal@weber.edu Copyright © 2019 by Weber State University. All rights reserved. Copyright reverts to authors and artists after publication. Statements of fact or opinion are those of contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or the sponsoring institution.

ANNOUNCING the 2019 Dr. Sherwin W. Howard Poetry Award

to Joel Long

for “Rozell Point Matin” and other poems in the Spring 2018 issue The Dr. Sherwin W. Howard Award of $500 is presented annually to the author of the best poetry published in Weber during the previous year. Funding for this award is generously provided by the Howard family. Dr. Sherwin W. Howard (1936-2001) was former President of Deep Springs College, Dean of the College of Arts & Humanities at Weber State University, editor of Weber Studies, and an accomplished playwright and poet.

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AN INTERNATIONAL, PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL SPOTLIGHTING PERSONAL NARRATIVE, COMMENTARY, FICTION, NONFICTION, AND POETRY THAT SPEAKS TO THE ENVIRONMENT AND CULTURE OF THE AMERICAN WEST AND BEYOND.

SPRING/SUMMER 2019—VOL. 35, NO2—U.S. $10 CONVERSATIONS Toni Asay with Sue Monk Kidd; Brianne Hadley, Tyler Mortensen-Hayes, and Abraham Smith with Robert Hass; Christy Call with Naomi Oreskes; Adrienne Andrews with Cornel West; Judi Amsel with Daniel Mendelsohn; Michael Wutz with Mary de Rachewiltz ESSAYS

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