Day 19: Sonia Sanchez, Mary Robison, Janine Mikozsa
We are at Day 19. Reading a poem, story and essay is so hard to do every day, particuarly because I'm writing about them. Choosing a different author each time, I don't always get a sense of who they are or what their wider work is like, but it is a good introduction for me at least. As usual the following texts are quite dark.
Poem: Sonia Sanchez - Love Song No. 3 (1995)
A really great narrative poem from a grandmother's perspective about her brazen grandaughter, written in African American vernacular english.
here she cum openin the do. comin in wid
him. searchin the room with them eyes that
usta smile rivers, searchin for sumthin to
pick up sumthin to put her 18 years into.
Firstly, I love the way Sanchez's poems look on the page, and the way she formats them. There is always a lot of experimentation, yet they are very readable. I also love the way her poems are both darkly funny and devastating at the same time.
Make sure to read this poem until the end.
Story: Mary Robison - Yours (1982)
Yours by Mary Robison is another nice and very short story like yesterday's one. This is the only thing I have read by this author, who is described as a minimalist.
The story is about two pages describing a husband and wife in the kitchen carving pumpkins. He is a skilled carver and she a novice. She is 35 and he is 78 (!!). Their relationship is quiet, peaceful and loving; the most beautiful part is where he insists that her carvings are much better than his. Then, like the Grace Paley story from yesterday, the story takes a sharp turn.
That night, in their bedroom, a few weeks earlier in her life than had been predicted, Allison began to die.
Then she dies. Time, which had gone so slow in the preceding pages, now fast-forwards immeasurably quick to show the husband alone on (another?) Halloween, looking at his jack-o'-lanterns, thinking that:
He wanted to get drunk with his wife once more. He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing that being only a little special meant you expected too much most of the time, and liked yourself too little. he wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.
He was speaking into the phone now. He watched his jack-o'-lanterns. The jack-o'-lanterns watched him.
I love this silent, desolate, ending. There is so much unsaid in this story. You are left with lingering questions, yet the text only hints very vaguely at answers. I think this lack of explanation is a real strength of short stories. If I think of all my favourite ones, there is a mystery about them. The meaning is felt but can't be explained. Or maybe I'm just thick.
I found this in a book of short stories, and in an anthology of love stories chosen by Jeffery Eugenides. Its a good one
Essay: Janine Mikozsa - How Not to Speak Polish (2017)
I read this today in an anthology of the Best Australian Essays 2017 (whatever happened to these? they were ubiquitous for years and then disappeared). The writer attempts to get to the nature of Trauma - a topic that may elicit groans from anyone in 2026, but still... trauma is worth understanding.
The writer struggles to interview her friend about the bad things that happened to her as a child. The friend does not want to speak about it, so the writer says, okay, we will dance around it and falk more about trauma in general, using you as an example. This sounds rather exploitative, but I only just realised on the second read that the writer is called Janine and the friend called Janina, and that the essay concerns two aspects of the same person. Ah! ok.
Mikosza has also written a novel using this split-personality concept. I'm not so much in a hurry to read it, as I don't really want to hear about anyones traumatic memories - but, she does have a lot of interesting things to say in this essay, although they are mostly from quoted or paraphrased research. I will paraphrase them here.
From Elaine Scarry on the logic of pain:
Unlike fear or love, pain cannot be of or for anything. Pain has no object- pain can only be itself. This is why invisible pain (mental or physical) is so often hard for people to identify with.
When I fell out with a very close friend, I felt like my heart had burst and my lungs had collapsed. My family could not understand my King Lear behaviour, for the friendship was not romantic, nor had the friend died. This level of pain did not have an appropriate object.
A good quote from Vivian Gormick:
"The way life feels is inevitably the way life is lived". This is very true.
There are also quotes from Avery Gordon, Maggie Nelson and Susan Sontag - so many quotes for a personal essay... but why should this be an issue? We expect accreditation in academic essays, but in the personal memoir essay, for some reason we expect the writer's wisdom to derive solely from their hard knocks and lived experience. But I don't believe that this is how insight arises. We learn things from a combination of the wisdom-from-others and from practical experience. These can happen in either order, but are always interlinked.
If you are someone who regularly reads and researches, then quotations end up being a sizeable chunk of your mental apparatus. Whether you cite their authors or paraphrase them to pass them off as your own, it is all a matter of context and style. In common patter the latter is better. People hate the second-hand talker, but in an essay, why not give the author their credit.
I think the patchwork of research, memoir and pseudo interview makes this a really interesting essay on the now too-familiar subject.