Hello everyone! This is the first Melendy Avenue Review of 2023! And it’s the LAST Melendy Avenue Review in its current format!
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CONTENTS
Reviews
Emezi, Freshwater
Jay, Downcast Eyes
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Mithra, Peering
REVIEWS
Akwaeke Emezi, “Freshwater” (2018) (read aloud by the author) - Readers and reviewers spoke of this book as a revelation. I didn’t find it to be that, entirely, but I have an advantage: I’m a genre fiction reader. The idea of a fractured self expressed through mythological/religious tropes isn’t a new one on me, or the juxtaposition of ancient belief systems and contemporary living. So when Nigerian author Emezi has their autobiographical stand-in, Ada, experience possession by multiple spirits – ogbanje, not exactly friendly, not entirely demonic – as a way of explaining what someone steeped in western psychiatry would call multiple personalities, I wasn’t as blown away as the sort of person who usually reads somewhat-experimental fiction given big pushes by mainstream literary publishers with pastel covers might be.
It’s still a decent idea, though. Ada starts her (the character uses she/her pronouns and mostly identifies as a girl and a woman, even if one of the spirits inside her is a man- Emezi is nonbinary, though doesn’t deny the autobiographical element here) journey with the ogbanje early in her childhood in Nigeria. She’s not just a third culture kid, she might be a fourth or fifth, with an Igbo Nigerian father and a Malaysian mother who raise her in a variety of places, even if Nigeria anchors her childhood and America her young adulthood. She’s sexually assaulted by a boyfriend in college (which she starts at sixteen) and that’s when some of the ogbanje come to more or less take over her body for extended periods of time, putting Ada in the backseat.
Most of the book is written from the first person perspective of one or another of these spirits. They relate their perspective, the actions they either see Ada perform or foist on Ada, their conversations with Ada and sometimes with rival spirits inside of her. The spirits are insightful, dependent on their human host while somewhat contemptuous of her (but more so of other people), possessed of some virtues, like loyalty, but no morality to speak of- and hungry for blood and suffering. Ada appeases them mostly by cutting herself and by getting into bad relationships with men. Sometimes, Ada tries to destroy the spirits or rout them from her, other times, the spirits try to get Ada to let them loose into the spirit realm, i.e., kill herself. Neither succeed, and Ada eventually learns to live with the ogbanje, as well as other, less identifiable spirits who seem to have her welfare, or a version of it, more in mind.
At some point, and maybe someone has started already, but someone will have to write about the impact of post-1965 US immigration policy, specifically as it relates to favoring highly-skilled knowledge workers and students, on literature. Immigration, sojourning, exile, etc. have always been themes in literature, and structural aspects of the creation of literary communities. I do think there’s a prominence to immigrant literature, and especially to the literature of immigrants from middle-class (or above) backgrounds today, of third- (fourth-, fifth-) culture kids, in contemporary English-language letters, that’s worth studying. Among other things, this may be the work of a contemporary black author that I’ve read that has the least to say about race, though it has a lot to say about Nigerian and Igbo culture. If anything, the spirits contrast Ada’s experiences and attitudes with those of black American schoolmates more than white people, though Ada does meet plenty of those- though, mostly it seems, international students from Europe, including her main love interest, a dreamy Irish fuck-boy named Ewan. Ada came to America when she was sixteen, and moves across oceans and continents perhaps not in perfect comfort… but her discomfort comes more from being inhabited by spirits and having bad interpersonal relationships than from bigotry, homesickness, dislocation, or the usual woes one associates with immigrant experiences.
I wrote about this some when I discussed Jhumpa Lahiri a few weeks ago. I feel like foreign students and young professionals have been a part of my life more or less since high school or college, if not before, and are a fixture of life for most Americans who go through higher education, probably most inhabitants of the other rich countries as well. The paradox is that, coming from hundreds of different cultures all over the world, they’re the most heterodox bunch imaginable in some ways… but given the ways that schools and employers select, they tend to be much more homogenous in terms of class background, and of course, the experience of migration, of adaptation to the host country, of embedding in institutions that have now, in some cases decades hence, made adaptations to the presence of immigrants, migrants, guest workers and so on, has a certain group-making effect, too.
Here’s a trope I see in both the literature and in conversations both had with friends and acquaintances from the sort of international-student/knowledge worker milieu and have overheard them have themselves: Americans are generally blander, less interesting, less emotionally-alive than “internationals.” The internationals live, the Americans (usually, but not always, white) kind of shuffle through life in a cloud of privilege and occasional disaster. This tracks, I’d say. Among other things, you have to have some initiative to bother schlepping all the way over here. Generations of life as the global hegemon will tend to make the upper-middle-class-and-above scions of said hegemony a little dull, I bet. Combine the aftereffects of WASP culture and the hollowness of consumer culture, and you get people who put their surface feelings up front for all to see (and hear!) but who you don’t really get to know, if there’s anything to know, for years or decades. I sometimes wonder if the real divide in the world is between people whose countries have meaningful historical memories of defeat and occupation, and those who don’t. The unflattering emotional depiction of Americans I just painted can be applied to the next most prominent group of people today who haven’t seen a military occupation for almost a millennium, the English, and inhabitants of its other settler colonies. You could paint it positively – people from countries that haven’t experienced that kind of defeat as more optimistic, or whatever – but it’s hard to sell that pretty much any time after 9/11.
So, Ada lives in America but barely notices Americans. I don’t say this as a complaint, but I do think it’s notable, and I also think it relates to how Ada (and Emezi) treat the ogbanje. Every now and again Ada worries that she’s crazy. But less than you might think! She worries more that she’s in pain, she’s depressed, she has terrible relationships, she can’t find a place in the world. Yes, the ogbanje try to kill her- but they also protect her and give her an odd sort of power. This, whatever else it is supposed to be, is an interesting way to express how a young woman with one foot in a modesty culture and another in hook-up culture might experience her sexual power (and its strict limitations vis-a-vis extracting humane behavior from the men in her life). She doesn’t need to be rid of the ogbanje. That’d be American nonsense, the ogbanje would say, and which it seems Ada, and perhaps Emezi, would accept. Such is life for the alive international versus the dead single-culture and/or Anglo.
The flip side is, in a story told by quasi-demons with little in the way of consistent framework beyond momentary sating of desire, there’s not a great need for continuity. Characters pop up, one of the ogbanje explain that they are very important to Ada, big stuff happens to them, and then they’re gone, for someone else to come along and reflect the relationship between Ada and the spirits for a chapter or two. On top of this, if you’re expecting anything particularly spectacular, even within Ada’s head, as she and her demons battle it out (including demons battling with each other), you’re going to be disappointed. A snake shows up in her bathroom as a baby, there’s some somewhat distended writing, the spirits and Ada argue in the “marble room” of her brain- a fancy waiting room, essentially, Basically, it does seem like the daring-concept tail wagging the literary-execution dog, at times. In keeping with the point I was making earlier, “international” navel-gazing, even from international rich kids, is generally better than the same produced in the Anglo-American world, but it only ever delivers so much without the injection of something more. ***’
Martin Jay, “Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought” (1993) - This was more remedial reading, a book I was supposed to read for my oral comps, which happened ten years ago this fall! Martin Jay was, at the time, arguably the silverback of the subfield of intellectual history. He worked in the primary vein of “respectable” intellectual history – twentieth century European philosophy – and balanced theoretical sophistication with actual historical spadework, failing to go overboard the way some of the early adopters of critical theory in the historical profession were said to have done. There were maybe two or three of his monographs on my comps list, which is a lot. I meant to read this one- I just experienced my first adult depression episode mid-comps-reading and that disrupted my otherwise pretty good pace.
Approaching this ten years after I was supposed to, and not in the midst of a giant reading frenzy before a test that turned out to have little to do with my future prospects, was probably a better way to do it. Among other things, I tend to think distance from the academy and its greasy poles helps a historian take on board the actual content of intellectual history, because the ideas whose history you are studying stop having such immediate status/career relevance. Especially given that the fevers over “theory” and how historians and others should posture themselves towards it had yet to entirely break by the early tens – has it by now? Who knows? – intellectual history in that theory-vein could be tricky to really see.
Ironic! Given that this whole book is about how intellectuals, French ones in specific, came to create whole frameworks around how sight is not, as they would never put it, “all that.” This is a funny thing to think about, for a few reasons. I’m a clumsy Anglo, and to me, disregarding sight, and not treating sight as our primary sensory input and sensory inputs as our main way of understanding the world (and not understanding the world as the main purpose of intellectual pursuits), is utterly non-intuitive. Moreover, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense that the French, of all people, would pursue an “antiocular” agenda, to use Jay’s word. Rene Descartes, one of the fathers of profoundly sight-based scientific methodology, was French; so, too, have been a disproportionate share of pioneers in the visual arts, from painting to photography to cinema, for centuries.
Jay, in an endearing move, grants that he’s not too different- he, too, is a son of the Enlightenment, whose very name implies the primacy of vision. We can’t get away from vision metaphors and visual evidence. But, he says, it’s still worth understanding what is going on here, and he very quickly establishes the importance of antiocular or ocular-skeptic thought in French thinking and in thought more generally. We do have four other senses, and sight, whatever its wonders, is also possible – easy, even – to deceive. Our visual apparatus is pretty impressive – notice how long and hard engineers have to work to get computers to replicate it, versus getting them to vastly exceed, say, our capacity to do math – but it’s not perfect, and moreover, our reliance on it can make it hard to get another perspective to correct for what our sight might not see… as it were (there’s a lot of those “as it were” moments in “Downcast Eyes” as we stumble across – there’s a nonvisual metaphor! – our language’s seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of visual metaphors).
Arguably, the French caught onto this quicker than the Anglos precisely because of the importance that vision played in their intellectual and artistic culture. If you were going to do something new in French thought, for a long time, that meant going against the prevailing Cartesian ocularcentric rationalism, that is, bringing into question the utility and reliability of sight. Religious anti-Enlightenment types emphasized the sense of hearing, namely, what one hears from God (the fact that, like, you can’t really record the voice of God, that it’s less “hearing” than “imagining”... well, it’s not like they record anyone’s voice, not back then…). Later on, philosophical rebels against positivism, like Henri Bergson, emphasized all four of the other senses, but especially touch. Moreover, being early adopters of photography and film, French intellectuals quickly caught on to how different the photograph was from what one sees with the naked eye, and the ways in which photography and especially moving photographs could be manipulated, and manipulate themselves. To say nothing of all the painters who either had to find new rationales after the spread of photography, or else rework and/or re-propagate older, non-documentary/strict representationalist rationales.
All of this played into the full-bore anti-ocularism that came to characterize French philosophy in the twentieth century. This is also where I lose the thread a little. That’s not Jay’s fault. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (respectively highly and gently skeptical towards sight- though given how fucked up Sartre’s eyes were, can you blame him?) are tricky, not easy to read and comprehend. Bataille, Deleuze, and Guattari are pretty hard to understand. Lacan, I tend to think, I cannot grasp because there is nothing there to grasp. Yes, I’m aware that internet-borne children with much less education than I have throw around ideas from all those people (well, mostly the last four) like nothing. Well, I tend to think that’s because they are, mostly, nothing, that by the time you get to Lacan and his followers, it really is a game of meaningless postures that has no relation to external reality. People who learn about Lacan (via Zizek youtube videos, generally) before they knew what the categorical imperative is (or, you know, any history not included in a Paradox Games title) might as well be memorizing Pokemon stats and pitting them against each other, as many no doubt were with the same zeal they eventually took on theory.
I’m not some pragmatist intellectual luddite. I think plenty of figures from “French theory” had a lot to contribute and I even enjoyed reading some of them, though I do think they could have been clearer. That being said, I think even Jay’s lucidity wasn’t enough to lead anywhere productive when it entered the labyrinth of Lacanian nonsense, and Deleuze and Guattari are only a little better. I get that Jay couldn’t afford to ignore them. In many respects, these and their epigones are the end result of the whole project, that they disregarded sight as both a tool and as a symbol, a back-door monkey-paw victory for the counterenlightenment (though, as Jay continually points out, visual metaphors are utterly inescapable, especially given how many different registers – the sight that measures external reality, the flash of insight within the mind, the vision of imagination – in which it operates) in favor of… as far as I can tell, in favor of meaningless palaver. I don’t know- it sounds to me like a case of worthwhile questions leading to whole towering structures of useless non-answers that we’re expected to take seriously because we don’t want to sound like fulminating culture warriors insisting we all go back to “the canon.” So, these star ratings are based in part on enjoyment and utility, and I didn’t get a ton out of the back half of the book. Still, an impressive feat of intellectual history. I can see why they made such a big deal of the guy, back when I was in school. ****
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Mithra, Peering