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In the previous weeks and months I had begun to wonder whether my profession, for all its insistence on the value of facts, was not in the last instance dependent on dishonesty. If I pretended to care about the boy’s discovery of parkour and death metal, it was because I hoped that my kindness would lull him into feeling comfortable enough to tell me about the most painful moments of his life. I had told him and his guardian that I intended to write an article based on our conversations, but my disclosure, though accurate in a strict sense, obscured the nature of my intentions. What I should have said was that I intended to repackage the boy’s trauma into a digestible narrative I hoped would capture the attention of some hundred thousand internet users, who would then surrender valuable information about themselves to one or another technology baron, who would then reward the website for which I worked with a better starting position in the algorithmic rat race, which would allow the website’s owners to convince a handful of investors to keep funding the company, which in turn would allow my editors to pay me a salary, earn me accolades, and, eventually, if all went well, convince the US government that I deserved to live and work in this country. The boy was for me not an end but a means, and lately thoughts of that nature had been bothering me often enough that I wondered whether I shouldn’t do something else with my life.
I sank into the thought as into a pool of oil-slicked seawater. All of a sudden in place of the boy with the spiked hair I saw hundreds of faces, some of which I recognized from the photographs that accompanied the earliest press reports on the concentration camps: children, multitudes of them, some too young to walk, others old enough to understand what was happening, torn from their parents, kept in cages, confined for months on end to makeshift cities where every room was windowless like the room where I sat, where they were neglected, treated like cattle, injected with antipsychotics, expected to follow orders and sign papers in a language that they didn’t understand, lied to, misfed, kept away from fresh air, from joy, from beauty, from the petty miseries that are the daily bread of lives that have not been destroyed by imperialism—the quotidian unhappiness, the vague dissatisfaction, the boring, benign, intolerable anxiety that is the privilege of white people.
Told to BREAK THE SILENCE.
Told to REPORT CONFIDENTIALLY.
Told to GET HELP.
Told to KEEP DETENTION SAFE.
I saw their faces, and the faces of their parents, their uncles and aunts, their siblings, their cousins, their friends, the lovers that some of them would have, the children that some of them would have, the multitudes who had been touched and would be touched by the horror of that crime, and the sight made me furious, because along with the faces I saw with perfect clarity that none of it was preordained, that none of it was necessary, that the destruction of all those lives had been the product of a choice, a conscious one, made by a handful of hateful people empowered by a hateful nation and carried out by an army of uniformed nobodies who had credit card bills to pay. The knowledge that those responsible did not know what they did offered no consolation. If anything, it made the crime more painful to contemplate, because it made it absurd. The world teetered between redeemable and irredeemable tragedy; the stakes were nothing less than life’s worth; every new horror risked plunging humanity into a desert with no way stations at all.
What was this desire I felt to kiss her hands? She was declining to subject me to petty humiliations, it was true, but if that was my definition of kindness then I had lost most of my self-respect. No, I thought, this was not gratitude; it was Stockholm syndrome. I should never have been detained, not even for an hour. In fact, nobody should ever be detained. I lived on a continent shaped by genocide, slavery, and the forced displacement of millions. In light of that history, no fiction could be more false, or more dangerous, than borders. The countries that tried to prevent people from crossing the arbitrary lines between them were acting on no justification beyond brute force, the basest sort of power, that which is born from the jawbone of a donkey or the barrel of a gun.
The story now seemed simple: I had remade myself in the image of the rulers of the empire, hoping that if I came to resemble them closely enough they would welcome me as one of their own. With the years, even I had come to believe my own charade and convinced myself that I had more in common with white Americans than with most Mexicans. As it turned out, I had fooled no one but myself—not the Mexicans, not the white Americans, and certainly not the US government. There was no denying it anymore: I loved America more than myself, but America did not love me back. And yet there I was, standing at the inspection desk in the secondary screening room at the San Francisco International Airport, hoping that America would change its mind.
I should say that, at the time and for many years after, I received almost nothing from this class. I remembered almost nothing, consciously, that Bloom said about all the poems we’d read. My marginalia is incomprehensible and almost worthless; the notebook long since lost in an attic. Only when I’d completely freed myself from academia and abandoned all hope of an academic career, even an academic life, did I return to those poems, again not even consciously, and find not just pleasure in them but meaning, which is also too earnest and defined a word to say what I discovered. And then in those moments I don’t hear Bloom’s voice at all, but I’m aware that the — pleasure is too soft a word — insight I receive from, say, Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” or John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended” takes place in a Bloomian universe: gnostic, agonistic, a beauty with terror in it, clashing structures and strange cohabitations, a poem as a play in as many acts as the poet needs.
If you got the Bloom experience at the right time of your life, as a poet or a person who loves poetry, then he could be perfect. At a crisis moment for such a person, he might also be terrible. There is something to be said for teaching that has no “deliverables,” for which the only answer to the evaluator’s question about what was learned is: “Ask me in five years, then again in ten, then in twenty.” In 1998, I had vague feelings for poetry that I didn’t know were at odds with the academic persona I was trying to cultivate. I put poems into meaning machines linked to my ambition and ground them into dust. Years later, once I’d relinquished the need to definitively interpret anything in such a way that it could be professionally recognized and circulated, in ways that credited the originality and rigor of my interpretations, the poems came back to me as poetry and I could hear them: sometimes as poems that did not transcend themselves; sometimes as individuals marked, as we are, by others living and dead.
[...] Chaudhuri’s antinarrative miniaturism (as per Hilary Mantel), his interest in modest worldliness and the domestic life of a city, won a select but influential cast of admirers, huddled together against the backdrop of the 1990s postmodern resuscitation of narrative. But as Coe’s phrasing suggests (“in that respect”), critics were also left wanting, or just bemused. They would praise the work for one or two thousand words and then, at the review’s end, start peering around the corner, as if suspecting they might have been waiting in the wrong room. The novels were delightful, but slight; elegant, but chilly; arrestingly plotless, but finally still plotless. Chaudhuri’s position solidified. He was a virtuoso of a minor literature, absorbed in the autumnal practice of recording the quiet pleasures of the small and the passed-over and the modern. The world inside, and out, of the bourgeois apartment. A fading afternoon in a past Calcutta, outmoded by globalization.
beautiful
Today we might assume that the presence of churchgoers in the movement was a moderating force. But in the 1970s and ’80s, religious people who had spent time in countries to the south were bringing the teachings of liberation theology back with them. This movement, born in Latin America, insisted on reinterpreting Christian doctrine through the lived experience of the region. For the majority of people there, this was an experience of subjugation and impoverishment. Arguing that Christianity demanded a “preferential option for the poor,” religious workers used grassroots Bible-study groups as a means of radical consciousness-raising, and they organized parishioners into “base communities” dedicated to challenging oppression. Right-wing militaries took this challenge very seriously. By the end of the ’70s, leaflets were being circulated in the Salvadoran countryside reading “Be a patriot, kill a priest.”
Liberation theologians were not afraid to employ Marxist analysis in determining the root causes of exploitation and deprivation. Among the priests who joined the Sandinista government after the overthrow of Somoza, one renowned liberationist, the poet Ernesto Cardenal, became minister of culture, and another, Miguel d’Escoto, a Maryknoll priest, became foreign minister. Although not aligned with the guerrillas, Monseñor Romero — who was declared a saint by Pope Francis in 2018 — believed that a person could not follow the example of Jesus without denouncing injustice. Like Martin Luther King Jr., Romero was well aware that his commitments might lead to martyrdom. Yet he nevertheless gave voice to an uncompromising vision of solidarity: “One who is committed to the poor must risk the same fate as the poor,” he stated. “And in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, to be tortured, to be captive, and to be found dead.” Just weeks before his murder, he insisted, “If they manage to carry out their threats, I shall be offering my blood for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador.”
With the recent return of figures such as Abrams and Bolton to the public stage, this analysis remains relevant. And yet it also does not seem fully fitting today. In the Trump era, the administration’s stance toward Latin America has followed a jumbled set of cues, but has tended toward xenophobic isolationism. In March, Trump announced that he was cutting US aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. “We’re not paying them anymore,” he stated, “because they haven’t done a thing for us.”
This is a far cry from the era when conservatives manufactured elaborate schemes to ensure that funding would flow unimpeded, so they could shape the region to their design. For the current occupant of the White House, El Salvador is not a sign of freedom won but a symbol of another kind: it represents the places and peoples that America must wall out. Should a more coherent isolationism become the defining stance of the Republican Party, El Salvador will be emblematic of the distance traveled between Reagan and Trump.
[...] You don’t end up using a news story about a dead toddler as a peg for white entitlement without a society in which the discourse of righteousness occupies far more public attention than the conditions that necessitate righteousness in the first place.
Here was the opposition principle in action. Through identifying the effects of women’s systemic objectification as some sort of vagina-supremacist witchcraft, the men that congregated on 4chan gained an identity, and a useful common enemy. Many of these men had, likely, experienced consequences related to the “liberal intellectual conformity” that is popular feminism: as the sexual marketplace began to equalize, they suddenly found themselves unable to obtain sex by default. Rather than work toward other forms of self-actualization—or attempt to make themselves genuinely desirable, in the same way that women have been socialized to do at great expense and with great sincerity for all time—they established a group identity that centered on anti-woman virulence, on telling women who happened to stumble across 4chan that “the only interesting thing about you is your naked body. tl;dr: tits or GET THE FUCK OUT.”
It seemed likely that I’d been making this error more generally. For most of my life I’ve believed, without really articulating it, that strange things just drop into my lap—that, especially because I can’t really think unless I’m writing, I’m some sort of blank-brained innocent who has repeatedly stumbled into the absurd unknown. If I ever talk about Girls v. Boys, I say that I ended up on the show by accident, that it was completely random, that I auditioned because I was an idiot killing time at the mall.
I like this story better than the alternative, and equally accurate, one, which is that I’ve always felt that I was special and acted accordingly. It’s true that I ended up on reality TV by chance. It’s also true that I signed up enthusiastically, felt almost fated to do it. I needed my dad’s twenty dollars not as motivation but as cover for my motivation. It wasn’t my egotism that got me to the casting booth, I could tell myself: it was merely the promise of a new flammable halter top to pair with my prize Abercrombie miniskirt and knockoff Reefs. Later on, in my journal, I announce my casting with excitement but no surprise whatsoever. It is now obvious to me, as it always should have been, that a sixteen-year-old doesn’t end up running around in a bikini and pigtails on television unless she also desperately wants to be seen.
same with n tbh