ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
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12.1
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Jessica Handler
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I wear the last stanza of Adrienne Rich’s poem “Prospective Immigrants Please Note” on my right wrist.
Why not the whole poem? I don’t remember. Maybe because it’s longer than I thought I had the real estate for. The poem is, to me, about taking responsibility for yourself. I turn to Rich’s work for myself and teach her work regularly, which sometimes means trying to convince students that “Diving into the Wreck” is not about the Titanic. I do this because her work bolsters my thinking about how I want to live in the world. We are in a world right now that’s trading on lies. I often find that my students either don’t know or don’t care where their information comes from. I understand this. Lately, I need entire days free of the news. As I write this, I recognize the urge to put startle quotes around the word “news.” Our dignity as human beings and as allies to other human beings feels fragmented under the weight of what I perceive as a rising sea of dishonesty and demoralization from what many of us have long understood as leadership spaces. But I teach her work because, as Rich wrote in her letter to the NEA, which I will address in a moment: “I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.” We are in a world where Adrienne Rich’s words continue to matter, where students, writers, readers, citizens in general, need to know them. This knowledge, as she concluded in her essay, “Some Notes on Lying,” can lead to “the possibility of life between us.” __________
In 1975, Rich gave a talk at a women’s writers’ conference in Oneonta, New York. That talk was published as a pamphlet by an independent feminist press called Mother Root, and was later collected in “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” in 1979. That talk, now known as the essay, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” is at its core her examination of why women, specifically, in her words and view, lie. And why we are lied to. And why we accept lying and being lied to as a cultural norm.
In that essay, she writes, “lying is done with words, and also with silence.” I believe that not teaching her work is a kind of silencing. Rich is very clear in the piece that she’s “speaking within the context of male lying,” so I recommend that readers view this work in part in the framing of 1970s gender language. That said, once the material is contextualized historically, readers can extend the foundational concepts to this contemporary place and time. When I introduce Adrienne Rich’s poems and essays in a writing workshop, I give my students background not only on Rich, but on the fundamental tenets of the times in which she lived and wrote. The daughter of a physician and a pianist, Rich grew up in Baltimore. She attended what was at the time called Radcliffe College, and won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1951, the year she graduated. She married, had three sons, and as the nineteen fifties became the sixties and then the seventies, her work (and clearly, her worldview) became increasingly political. The essay addresses Rich’s lesbian identity. Part of the question of lying, for Rich, addresses her queerness in the statement that “the institution of heterosexuality has forced the lesbian to dissemble…” which leads to lying. When I assign this reading, I emphasize that being lied to is not unique to women or female-identified people. All of us have been lied to in some way. All of us, I assume, lie. The challenge for readers and writers now, as well as in Rich’s time, is to understand that as artists, we are called upon to interrogate the effects of those lies. She writes, To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep but blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else, more than truth. In speaking of lies, we come inevitably to the subject of truth. There is nothing simple or easy about this idea. There is no “the truth,” [or] “a truth” – truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity…. This is why the effort to speak honestly is so important. Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler, for the liar… In lying to others, we end up lying to ourselves. … We deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. She continues, “It is important [to tell or recognize truth] because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.”
Why does our own complexity matter now, and to our students and to us as writers and teachers? Students—and all of us, readers, writers, citizens—are struggling with trying to determine what’s a lie and what is true, and how true is true? These are complex questions, and we are complex people. Not acknowledging that fact denies our complexity, our ability to reckon with ourselves and our culture. __________
On the subject of not lying, I want to make the leap from “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” to Rich’s 1977 letter to Jane Alexander, who at the time was the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. As you are undoubtedly aware, the NEA is currently being strangled by the Federal Government, in a broad attempt to extinguish free speech in the arts—and it’s necessary to be reminded that while the degree to which this is happening is unprecedented, the push and pull between art and justice, as she points out, is not new.
Here’s Rich’s letter in full: Dear Jane Alexander, The letter itself is brief, an easy read, if you will. Four paragraphs. A good opportunity to teach the power of the epistolary form. In the classroom, I’ve sometimes paired it with Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew.” And yet, Rich’s letter is an opportunity to demonstrate clarity and bravery in language and art, particularly now, and is a launch pad for a classroom or workshop conversation about commitment to upholding personal values and the freedom to make and stand up for your art and yourself. A conversation like this can become an opportunity to learn more about instances of authors and other artists who have declined to participate in events or receive awards that they believe compromise their principles. Painter Amy Sherald’s cancellation of an exhibit scheduled for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery after she learned that her painting of a Black, transgender Statue of Liberty might be censored is one example. Another is playwright Tony Kushner’s stating his intent to donate the prize money associated with his winning the PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance award to Jewish Voice for Peace and UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency.) While I understand that classroom conversations on these topics might turn contentious, I believe it’s the workshop leader’s responsibility to both model civility and to guide that conversation toward awareness of, as Rich said, “art’s social presence.”
When Rich spoke with Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now” about her rationale, she said: My work is informed by the society in which I live. There’s no getting around that. And I believe that that’s true of all art, that it comes out of a social context. It does not simply blossom in some studio or attic away from the polluted air, the fumes, the social conditions of the artist’s own time. __________
Consider this two-part writing prompt: The first part is to list the social conditions of your time—our time, this time—that inform how and why you make art. And to bring “Women and Honor” into the mix, the second part is to write about what prevents you from being truthful about those conditions.
I haven’t yet used these prompts in workshop, but a new semester starts this month. I’m curious how my students: MFA candidates, well-read, curious, supportive of each other in our academic community will respond. Ideally, honest answers to these prompts and related classroom discussion will lead to honest conversation about making art and the responsibilities to the self and the community in doing so. I have high hopes for my students, and in their honesty and ours, high hopes for all of us. |
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Jessica Handler is the author of the is the author of the forthcoming novel The World to See, and the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize, a 2019 “Books All Georgians Should Read,” an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a SIBA Okra Pick. Her other books include Invisible Sisters: A Memoir, and Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss. Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She was the SP ’23 Ferrol Sams, Jr. Distinguished Writer in Residence at Mercer University in Macon, GA, and is a member of the faculty at Etowah Valley MFA at Reinhardt College. Jessica lives in Atlanta with her husband, novelist Mickey Dubrow. Find her at www.jessicahandler.com.
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