Tuesday, June 25, 2013
An Instep to Someone Else's Heel
There's a wonderful meditation on the endless question of home, which is always worth answering anew, by this poet, scholar and friend.
Because I want reading to be as sensory an experience as possible, I hope the video clip will help you hear his voice as you move through his words grappling with this topic.
I'm happy that my draft board became part of a conversation, and that I can pass it on. That's why we do this thing called writing after all, isn't it? In college, I had a phenomenal professor with the appropriate moniker Professor Bueno. He was good in every way a human being can be, and it was his course on "Literature of Social Protest" that helped me understand the act of writing to break the solitude (romper la soledad) is a political act of solidarity, rather than a selfish impulse.
Orhan Pamuk explains this well, "By nature all good novels are political because identifying with the other is political."
No matter where I live physically, I always enjoy Adele's "Hometown Glory" because her chorus about memories from her hometown being fresh continues by saying,
Oh, the people I've met.
Those people are my most continuous hometown, the one I build that will exist on this earth for about the same amount of time I will.
If you are new to this blog and curious about the theme, check out the post Where I Was From, over to your right.
-CMMOB, June 25, 2013.
The People I've Met Are the Wonders of the My World
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Why A Precious Resource Must Be A Collective Inheritance: Thoughts on "The Decline and Fall of the English Major", NY Times, June 22, 2013
The Decline and Fall of The English Major
This is an op-ed I would have agreed with unquestionably before I began working in writing centers five years ago. It provides interesting statistics on the numerical decrease in English majors. My heart did sink that only 62 students at Yale studied English. My undergraduate major was not only English; it was Creative Writing. For the most part, the ideas expressed here resonate with my experiences teaching undergraduate and graduate students. What I want to offer is a possible step forward to reverse the larger trends the op-ed identifies, one that the title and the framing of the issue by English major numbers does not do justice.
I agree that not knowing how to engage with texts, to think, to 'write into the unknown' - to discover tension - is a weakness. But students don't have to do this via the 'humanities' alone, as staunch a supporter I am of those. They can do this as scientists, economists, businessmen if they learn to write, to think. And the place of writing should be in every department. It is the engine of all knowledge, as it is the public manifestation of thought. The greatest obstacle is that academia has been slow to understand writing is a craft and discipline. Professors without training in it often give unproductive feedback to students: feedback that does engage with the student's project or attempt to grasp at what aspect of humanity is being wrestled with. These professors never learned to write, either, despite being subject experts. The texts students have to read to learn subject matter are often poorly written, bad models that students try to emulate, repositories of information absent of the questions we consider the terrain of 'humanities', vehicles that do not move thought.
Into this world, enter the Writing Center. The way I have seen students of non-humanities independently realign their writing to extend meanings, after interacting as readers and writers with other students outside their discipline, is astonishing. It gives me hope that the next generation of knowledge creators know& value their work explores the meaning of life, too - or can if they frame it so, if they think about its ramifications, a process writing facilitates.
Literature, we have seen science prove, does make us more empathetic. But we don't all have to be English majors to be good people. The fact scientists conducted this study shows they have a capacity for forming clear, profound studies. And there can be a difference between the study of literature's content and the study of rhetoric. My reaction to this essay is one of deep appreciation for its valid fears, but also a desire not to place other disciplines as marginal explorations of humanity. There's a danger in that, too. I know they don't have to be, because my students have taught me that.
Why didn't I know this earlier, in the deep-in-my-bones conviction sense I do know as a professional who engages in the study of how people learn to write, despite the best education anyone could buy? I suspect it is because my college allowed us to 'place out' of the first-year writing course based on test scores. I have no idea of the work that happened in that course, and this creates a separation on campus, a false idea that technical skills of some high schools represents a level of development as writers as agents of their ideas that few high school students have. It's a process that all college students should engage in together, as the only way to participate in a conversation is to be confident enough to speak up. That's a simple way to describe what you might miss by not having a writing course for all students - where engineering students are next to future poets. This is process of standing on the shore and pondering humanity that Verlyn Klinkenborg describes as the purpose of humanities. Isn't that pondering - leading to action in thought or deed - what the purpose of all disciplines should be? After all, we are the ones studying. Any topic we study is necessarily concerned with our methods for conceiving of it, or should be.
Klinkenborg says
Yes. What I'd argue is many professors have been unable to transfer to students the mechanisms of clear thinking and writing that lead one to a lifelong engagement with literature. But I don't mean this in the sense he does - literary. Rather, what I would seek is for students to develop a lifelong engagement with deep writing about ideas, literary or not. I would expand the definition of 'literature' and use it in the sense that scholars in the 'non-humanities' do when they write the literature reviews in their work. In these sections, they explore what other thinkers have said, asked or concluded about the topic the student is now approaching. Inquiry: this is the gift we need to give students. I am not convinced it must come from literature. I find myself shocked to write this, as I do believe literature is how we learn about what we do not experience ourselves. But I am convinced literature is the body of written knowledge humanity produces, whether it be a study of economic principles or of themes in poetry.
And here's where Klinkenborg's essay falls apart for me, or where I diverge most firmly.
Writing well has not always been a fundamental principle of the humanities if we define it as clarity. Have a look at the assignments students in the humanities close-read multiple times to understand what the professor wants them to do. These assignments are written by some extremely bright individuals, widely published in the humanities. But can they form a cogent explanation of a writing task? Not always. Let's move to the next clause of that quote's first sentence. Writing well must become a fundamental principle for mathematicians and scientists. How else will the 'humanities' folks be able to realize the value of what these disciplines do? Maybe Klinkenborg is suggesting everyone should have "rational grace and energy in ... conversation with the world."
But why the emphasis on declining numbers of majors? Spending one's entire academic career in English is not how to acquire this ability, and must not be limited to humanities. Rather, we have to recognize that the technical aspects of writing are partg our thinking. And this must be taught as writing, ideally in writing courses and in every course. The subject can be economics. The subject can be business. If we approach the non-humanities and introduce all students entering them as people who are also standing on the coastline, looking at human existence, we will do much to alleviate the false dichotomy between a major that casts you as someone who has no soul, and one that casts you as someone who has no practical concerns or desires for an income.
No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on the literacy in this article because it is understood as a inheritance that is rare, reserved for one domain. It may be an inheritance, but it takes practice and time to acquire it. I don't think we can ever say we possess it: it is a constantly evolving skill, not a static object to hold or claim as complete. Only when we properly shift our thinking about where and how 'studying what it means to be human' can take place - through the ability to convey ideas in language - will the dollars to fund this start to flow. How far we have to go in doing this can be seen in how little our best universities invest in the very places were students go to engage deeply in engaging clearly with their ideas.
Inheritances that are shared are no less precious than if they are rare. Rather, they are even more valuable for their collective nature. This is what gives them power.
-CMMOB, 6/23/13
This is an op-ed I would have agreed with unquestionably before I began working in writing centers five years ago. It provides interesting statistics on the numerical decrease in English majors. My heart did sink that only 62 students at Yale studied English. My undergraduate major was not only English; it was Creative Writing. For the most part, the ideas expressed here resonate with my experiences teaching undergraduate and graduate students. What I want to offer is a possible step forward to reverse the larger trends the op-ed identifies, one that the title and the framing of the issue by English major numbers does not do justice.
I agree that not knowing how to engage with texts, to think, to 'write into the unknown' - to discover tension - is a weakness. But students don't have to do this via the 'humanities' alone, as staunch a supporter I am of those. They can do this as scientists, economists, businessmen if they learn to write, to think. And the place of writing should be in every department. It is the engine of all knowledge, as it is the public manifestation of thought. The greatest obstacle is that academia has been slow to understand writing is a craft and discipline. Professors without training in it often give unproductive feedback to students: feedback that does engage with the student's project or attempt to grasp at what aspect of humanity is being wrestled with. These professors never learned to write, either, despite being subject experts. The texts students have to read to learn subject matter are often poorly written, bad models that students try to emulate, repositories of information absent of the questions we consider the terrain of 'humanities', vehicles that do not move thought.
Into this world, enter the Writing Center. The way I have seen students of non-humanities independently realign their writing to extend meanings, after interacting as readers and writers with other students outside their discipline, is astonishing. It gives me hope that the next generation of knowledge creators know& value their work explores the meaning of life, too - or can if they frame it so, if they think about its ramifications, a process writing facilitates.
Literature, we have seen science prove, does make us more empathetic. But we don't all have to be English majors to be good people. The fact scientists conducted this study shows they have a capacity for forming clear, profound studies. And there can be a difference between the study of literature's content and the study of rhetoric. My reaction to this essay is one of deep appreciation for its valid fears, but also a desire not to place other disciplines as marginal explorations of humanity. There's a danger in that, too. I know they don't have to be, because my students have taught me that.
Why didn't I know this earlier, in the deep-in-my-bones conviction sense I do know as a professional who engages in the study of how people learn to write, despite the best education anyone could buy? I suspect it is because my college allowed us to 'place out' of the first-year writing course based on test scores. I have no idea of the work that happened in that course, and this creates a separation on campus, a false idea that technical skills of some high schools represents a level of development as writers as agents of their ideas that few high school students have. It's a process that all college students should engage in together, as the only way to participate in a conversation is to be confident enough to speak up. That's a simple way to describe what you might miss by not having a writing course for all students - where engineering students are next to future poets. This is process of standing on the shore and pondering humanity that Verlyn Klinkenborg describes as the purpose of humanities. Isn't that pondering - leading to action in thought or deed - what the purpose of all disciplines should be? After all, we are the ones studying. Any topic we study is necessarily concerned with our methods for conceiving of it, or should be.
Klinkenborg says
What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature.
Yes. What I'd argue is many professors have been unable to transfer to students the mechanisms of clear thinking and writing that lead one to a lifelong engagement with literature. But I don't mean this in the sense he does - literary. Rather, what I would seek is for students to develop a lifelong engagement with deep writing about ideas, literary or not. I would expand the definition of 'literature' and use it in the sense that scholars in the 'non-humanities' do when they write the literature reviews in their work. In these sections, they explore what other thinkers have said, asked or concluded about the topic the student is now approaching. Inquiry: this is the gift we need to give students. I am not convinced it must come from literature. I find myself shocked to write this, as I do believe literature is how we learn about what we do not experience ourselves. But I am convinced literature is the body of written knowledge humanity produces, whether it be a study of economic principles or of themes in poetry.
And here's where Klinkenborg's essay falls apart for me, or where I diverge most firmly.
Writing well used to be a fundamental principle of the humanities, as essential as the knowledge of mathematics and statistics in the sciences. But writing well isn’t merely a utilitarian skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you. No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance.
Writing well has not always been a fundamental principle of the humanities if we define it as clarity. Have a look at the assignments students in the humanities close-read multiple times to understand what the professor wants them to do. These assignments are written by some extremely bright individuals, widely published in the humanities. But can they form a cogent explanation of a writing task? Not always. Let's move to the next clause of that quote's first sentence. Writing well must become a fundamental principle for mathematicians and scientists. How else will the 'humanities' folks be able to realize the value of what these disciplines do? Maybe Klinkenborg is suggesting everyone should have "rational grace and energy in ... conversation with the world."
But why the emphasis on declining numbers of majors? Spending one's entire academic career in English is not how to acquire this ability, and must not be limited to humanities. Rather, we have to recognize that the technical aspects of writing are partg our thinking. And this must be taught as writing, ideally in writing courses and in every course. The subject can be economics. The subject can be business. If we approach the non-humanities and introduce all students entering them as people who are also standing on the coastline, looking at human existence, we will do much to alleviate the false dichotomy between a major that casts you as someone who has no soul, and one that casts you as someone who has no practical concerns or desires for an income.
No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on the literacy in this article because it is understood as a inheritance that is rare, reserved for one domain. It may be an inheritance, but it takes practice and time to acquire it. I don't think we can ever say we possess it: it is a constantly evolving skill, not a static object to hold or claim as complete. Only when we properly shift our thinking about where and how 'studying what it means to be human' can take place - through the ability to convey ideas in language - will the dollars to fund this start to flow. How far we have to go in doing this can be seen in how little our best universities invest in the very places were students go to engage deeply in engaging clearly with their ideas.
Inheritances that are shared are no less precious than if they are rare. Rather, they are even more valuable for their collective nature. This is what gives them power.
-CMMOB, 6/23/13
The Novelist Remains Essential In the Age of the fMRI: My Reflections on the Novel Cities of Refuge
The Rumpus has a feature called The Last Book I Loved, Inspired by that feature, here's my blog on just one book I've loved lately. The last book I loved would be hard to choose. Rebecca Miller's Jacob's Folly is astonishing, for another day. In keeping with my love of sharing literature that comes from beyond the US, I'm starting across the border in Canada. Here are some thoughts about Michael Helm's Cities of Refuge. They've rattled around my typewriter and mainstream press coverage this past week of how reading makes us better people - more empathetic - called this book to mind since it asks us to consider moral culpability of asylum seekers who have participated in violence as children or by force. Is moral culpability the same as legal culpability? Some of my reflections on kaleidoscopic narration, how involuntary habits of the mind function as repression, and why the novelist remains essential even in the age of the fMRI. Home - who can live where and who can decide that, geographically and politically - figures prominently.
Cities of Refuge, Tin House Books, February 2013.
Canadian Michael Helm is not yet included on American readers’ radar as a must-read author. Helm’s oeuvre will make a faster, much-deserved beeline to the top of reading piles in the United States via understanding his writing’s connection with Michael Ondaatje’s: someone we count as one of our standard-bearers, someone who has transcended any one nation’s claim and earned universal gravitas as a writer.
The two Michaels share more than first name and citizenship. Both are editors of Brick magazine, lauded by Chilean writer and human rights advocate Ariel Dorfman with an endorsement that rings true for Cities of Refuge: “so many adventuresome and courageous incursions and crossings of another sort... This is a brick that needs to be heaved right through the windows of every reading mind on the continent.”
Cities of Refuge, Helm’s third novel, was published in Canada in 2010. On its 2013 Tin House Books cover, the other Michael, of The English Patient renown, defines it: “powerful,” “intricate,” “heartbreaking.” These terms fit his peer’s accomplishments but mirror Ondaatje’s hallmarks of emotional impact and structural prowess, what enables plots that would crumble in a lesser architect’s plans to stand firm. Ondaatje isn't the only one intuiting a glimmer of his sensibility in Helm’s parallel, yet unique, literary endeavor. Both authors’ fiction has been nominated for some of Canada and the Commonwealth’s highest literary prizes. Ondaatje received the Giller Prize in 2000; Helm was nominated in 1997 for his debut novel.
With none of this symbiosis known, and only a cursory knowledge of hot topics in the United States - immigration reform, major shifts in ethnic and racial demographics - and in Latin America, where three elderly state architects of coordinated efforts to murder enemies of seven regimes in the 1980s went on trial close to the book’s release, the basic facts of Cities of Refuge could easily suggest news drives the author’s plot and is what makes his book urgent. One could imagine the setting, Toronto, is a stand-in for any number of places where the book’s population of illegal immigrants, marginal in characterization but central in concept, might seek new lives. Both of these assumptions would underestimate Helm as an artist who consistently engages with similar themes of responsibility, searches shadowed by portending deaths and obsessions with unknown figures and whose language to describe them is a master class in lyricism of the real.
The book can be intimate with Toronto’s social and physical geography because the city was Helm’s home for almost twenty years. But Helm doesn't write about Toronto simply because he lived there. Like the other Michael, his material serves evolving questions. It situates what he knows in tension with history, specific enough to fit a character, universal enough to resonate for any reader. It is a dangerous exercise in non-fiction to assume one know’s another motives. Certainly there may be a timely reason asylum policy bubbles in his novel, or Helm could have a political stake, a policy agenda for addressing these issues. Late this spring, Toronto became a ‘sanctuary city’ for undocumented workers by announcing its services would not ask those seeking help about their legal status.
As readers, we are rewarded by the longer view of fiction: what the text can do for us today and ten years from now. This text is of multiple views. Helm, in the Toronto Star, describes it as about “different kinds of belief.” There is no omniscient narrator to guide us, only a swirl of characters deciphering situations, working from different facts and values, sometimes with incorrect assumptions these are shared. Clarity and doubt compete over memory’s accuracy and the righteousness of courses of action; identity construction dominates an epic of unknowing. Truth, transparency and trust - the search for and the lack thereof - are its underpinnings. “Certain events are not time-bound,” says its shifting narrative voice.
Helm’s preoccupation is with the wounds between those who love each other and are strangers to each other, between Kim and her father Harold, who is obsessed with finding his daughter’s attacker. The father-daughter duo’s conflicting efforts to recover after her assault lead to a deadly “physics of shame and regret.” Harold believes her involvement with ‘illegals’ must be why she was attacked. Kim, “batterer of authorities,” bridges official histories containing fact or truth but rarely both, and fictional histories, which become closest to truth.
In a pivotal scene, Kim remembers spying on Harold crying on a balcony when the sun rose. Remembering, watching others in secret, emotions the watcher could not understand because of withheld or merely unknown information: Helms gives us all of this in a childhood memory. In this instant, we know Harold has repressed pain, but not the weight or source of it. Helm presents repression of many varieties: of desire, of knowledge, of responsibility ,of human rights. As “coups and revolutions don’t happen to nations, they happen to people. one by one,” repression doesn't happen only by policy forced upon societies. It happens to individuals through involuntary habits of the mind. The phrase “neurophysiology of trauma” appears when Kim seeks to understand that her attacker “had changed her brain and she needed to change it back.”
Including evolving science is a valuable twist in the novel that seeps into how we consider real asylum seekers, such as young children, who witness violence. Is what they do later fate or science, without intervention? Some current neuroscience in this country seeks to connect criminal responsibility to brain chemistry, and the ramifications are tremendous. Kim senses “ [the attack] had been not a singular event but a kind of sounding within a slow pattern much older than she was.” The man Harold becomes obsessed with as Kim’s likely attacker defends an abused woman, but his familiarity with women’s scared faces speaks of acts he has committed that he cannot erase from memory.
Our long sojourns with Harold and Kim’s thoughts give us explicit knowledge of their feelings about guilt and responsibility, feelings that arise later when the reader contemplates characters whose physical guilt in crimes might be definite, but whose moral guilt is murkier. Michael Gazzaniga, a pioneering cognitive neuroscience, argues against the grain of many peers that physical discoveries do not erode the existence of free will in 2011’s Who’s In Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. His earlier works gave neuroscientists the green-light to openly discuss an issue they had previously tiptoed around: the relationship between physical processes in the brain and what legal systems have, for centuries, evaluated as moral in a separate vacuum disconnected from the body. Concepts of intent have come from a person’s statements and actions. Now that we understand the relationship between these and the chemistry behind those statements and actions, does the equation change?
Language, like chemistry, is not neutral; its betrayals render a commentary on asylum policies, labels bestowed on individuals, and our own tampering with memories, using one situation to stand in for another. Sometimes we read Harold thinking about Chile, and nod our heads thinking, yes, about the Toronto attack. The power to transcend silences with renderings of other sensations - honest indications of sentiment, of connection, of what one values and what places one interacts with - is visceral. A voice is “a physical thing borne upon the metaphysical, the resonant workings of breath and belief.” Readers visualize, hear and even smell characters.
The wounds that Helm is exploring are not surface wounds to one’s leg; they are wounds to one’s emotional capacities, to what some would term one’s legal culpability; to one’s wholeness. Harold demands to know if the book’s ‘true believer’ thinks “he and I and all your undocumented semi literate bloodstained young monsters” are the same. His desperate question is, are we all the same? How? Why? The novelist remains essential in the age of fMRI, insightful to policymakers, profound as the philosopher.
-CMMOB, June 2013
THE BOOK
Cities of Refuge, Tin House Books, February 2013.
Canadian Michael Helm is not yet included on American readers’ radar as a must-read author. Helm’s oeuvre will make a faster, much-deserved beeline to the top of reading piles in the United States via understanding his writing’s connection with Michael Ondaatje’s: someone we count as one of our standard-bearers, someone who has transcended any one nation’s claim and earned universal gravitas as a writer.
The two Michaels share more than first name and citizenship. Both are editors of Brick magazine, lauded by Chilean writer and human rights advocate Ariel Dorfman with an endorsement that rings true for Cities of Refuge: “so many adventuresome and courageous incursions and crossings of another sort... This is a brick that needs to be heaved right through the windows of every reading mind on the continent.”
Cities of Refuge, Helm’s third novel, was published in Canada in 2010. On its 2013 Tin House Books cover, the other Michael, of The English Patient renown, defines it: “powerful,” “intricate,” “heartbreaking.” These terms fit his peer’s accomplishments but mirror Ondaatje’s hallmarks of emotional impact and structural prowess, what enables plots that would crumble in a lesser architect’s plans to stand firm. Ondaatje isn't the only one intuiting a glimmer of his sensibility in Helm’s parallel, yet unique, literary endeavor. Both authors’ fiction has been nominated for some of Canada and the Commonwealth’s highest literary prizes. Ondaatje received the Giller Prize in 2000; Helm was nominated in 1997 for his debut novel.
With none of this symbiosis known, and only a cursory knowledge of hot topics in the United States - immigration reform, major shifts in ethnic and racial demographics - and in Latin America, where three elderly state architects of coordinated efforts to murder enemies of seven regimes in the 1980s went on trial close to the book’s release, the basic facts of Cities of Refuge could easily suggest news drives the author’s plot and is what makes his book urgent. One could imagine the setting, Toronto, is a stand-in for any number of places where the book’s population of illegal immigrants, marginal in characterization but central in concept, might seek new lives. Both of these assumptions would underestimate Helm as an artist who consistently engages with similar themes of responsibility, searches shadowed by portending deaths and obsessions with unknown figures and whose language to describe them is a master class in lyricism of the real.
The book can be intimate with Toronto’s social and physical geography because the city was Helm’s home for almost twenty years. But Helm doesn't write about Toronto simply because he lived there. Like the other Michael, his material serves evolving questions. It situates what he knows in tension with history, specific enough to fit a character, universal enough to resonate for any reader. It is a dangerous exercise in non-fiction to assume one know’s another motives. Certainly there may be a timely reason asylum policy bubbles in his novel, or Helm could have a political stake, a policy agenda for addressing these issues. Late this spring, Toronto became a ‘sanctuary city’ for undocumented workers by announcing its services would not ask those seeking help about their legal status.
As readers, we are rewarded by the longer view of fiction: what the text can do for us today and ten years from now. This text is of multiple views. Helm, in the Toronto Star, describes it as about “different kinds of belief.” There is no omniscient narrator to guide us, only a swirl of characters deciphering situations, working from different facts and values, sometimes with incorrect assumptions these are shared. Clarity and doubt compete over memory’s accuracy and the righteousness of courses of action; identity construction dominates an epic of unknowing. Truth, transparency and trust - the search for and the lack thereof - are its underpinnings. “Certain events are not time-bound,” says its shifting narrative voice.
Timelessness can imprison us by preventing resolution.Helm moves between continents and decades, but his characters only do this in their memories; there, his most exciting work happens. The two characters on the opposite end of the belief spectrum ostensibly share a singular event as the axis around which their other thoughts move. The event is a physical attack on daughter Kim, who volunteers helping immigrants create false documents so they can build new lives, truths, on lies meant to keep them safe. This is our first encounter with appropriating others’ truths - stories copied from real testimonies - for ‘good’ purposes. But where it is transparent that secrets must be kept, trust is both necessary and lacking. The undocumented - “the world [which] gathers at our dumpsters” - are poor, fleeing lives in Africa and Latin America, specifically zones seething with violence where clients could be both victim and perpetrator. Two hundred languages are spoken in Toronto, a hub for those who are “in the world but not on the record. globally...the largest category [of people].”
Helm’s preoccupation is with the wounds between those who love each other and are strangers to each other, between Kim and her father Harold, who is obsessed with finding his daughter’s attacker. The father-daughter duo’s conflicting efforts to recover after her assault lead to a deadly “physics of shame and regret.” Harold believes her involvement with ‘illegals’ must be why she was attacked. Kim, “batterer of authorities,” bridges official histories containing fact or truth but rarely both, and fictional histories, which become closest to truth.
In a pivotal scene, Kim remembers spying on Harold crying on a balcony when the sun rose. Remembering, watching others in secret, emotions the watcher could not understand because of withheld or merely unknown information: Helms gives us all of this in a childhood memory. In this instant, we know Harold has repressed pain, but not the weight or source of it. Helm presents repression of many varieties: of desire, of knowledge, of responsibility ,of human rights. As “coups and revolutions don’t happen to nations, they happen to people. one by one,” repression doesn't happen only by policy forced upon societies. It happens to individuals through involuntary habits of the mind. The phrase “neurophysiology of trauma” appears when Kim seeks to understand that her attacker “had changed her brain and she needed to change it back.”
Including evolving science is a valuable twist in the novel that seeps into how we consider real asylum seekers, such as young children, who witness violence. Is what they do later fate or science, without intervention? Some current neuroscience in this country seeks to connect criminal responsibility to brain chemistry, and the ramifications are tremendous. Kim senses “ [the attack] had been not a singular event but a kind of sounding within a slow pattern much older than she was.” The man Harold becomes obsessed with as Kim’s likely attacker defends an abused woman, but his familiarity with women’s scared faces speaks of acts he has committed that he cannot erase from memory.
Our long sojourns with Harold and Kim’s thoughts give us explicit knowledge of their feelings about guilt and responsibility, feelings that arise later when the reader contemplates characters whose physical guilt in crimes might be definite, but whose moral guilt is murkier. Michael Gazzaniga, a pioneering cognitive neuroscience, argues against the grain of many peers that physical discoveries do not erode the existence of free will in 2011’s Who’s In Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. His earlier works gave neuroscientists the green-light to openly discuss an issue they had previously tiptoed around: the relationship between physical processes in the brain and what legal systems have, for centuries, evaluated as moral in a separate vacuum disconnected from the body. Concepts of intent have come from a person’s statements and actions. Now that we understand the relationship between these and the chemistry behind those statements and actions, does the equation change?
Language, like chemistry, is not neutral; its betrayals render a commentary on asylum policies, labels bestowed on individuals, and our own tampering with memories, using one situation to stand in for another. Sometimes we read Harold thinking about Chile, and nod our heads thinking, yes, about the Toronto attack. The power to transcend silences with renderings of other sensations - honest indications of sentiment, of connection, of what one values and what places one interacts with - is visceral. A voice is “a physical thing borne upon the metaphysical, the resonant workings of breath and belief.” Readers visualize, hear and even smell characters.
The wounds that Helm is exploring are not surface wounds to one’s leg; they are wounds to one’s emotional capacities, to what some would term one’s legal culpability; to one’s wholeness. Harold demands to know if the book’s ‘true believer’ thinks “he and I and all your undocumented semi literate bloodstained young monsters” are the same. His desperate question is, are we all the same? How? Why? The novelist remains essential in the age of fMRI, insightful to policymakers, profound as the philosopher.
-CMMOB, June 2013
THE BOOK
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