ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
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“Biss writes essays,” Robert Polito writes in the Judge’s Afterword of Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, “the way Plutarch and Montaigne did—or if this sounds too classic for her passionate cool, also think James Baldwin, Anne Carson, Jenny Boully, and Luc Sante” (Polito 230). To Polito’s list, I’d add Maggie Nelson, Hilton Als, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Sarah Manguso, but I agree most strongly with his inclusion of James Baldwin in his list, as Notes from No Man’s Land is strongly reminiscent of Notes of a Native Son. Like Baldwin, Biss puts the subject of race at the core of her writing, and, like Baldwin, ties it strongly to geography. Baldwin gave us field notes from Harlem and the streets of Paris; Biss similarly divides her book geographically, into five sections labeled “Before,” “New York,” “California,” “The Midwest,” and “After.” More than just geographic distinctions, however, is Baldwin’s relaxed but sharp execution in his writing and its replication in Biss’s prose. Furthermore, Biss’s writing, however confident, is filled with its own anxiety—Biss, like Baldwin, comes off as uneasy about the subject of race, finding that no matter how well traveled or studied, it’s a complicated and multifaceted subject to report on.
“It isn’t easy to accept a slaveholder and an Indian killer as a grandfather,” she writes in the essay “Relations,” “and it isn’t easy to accept the legacy of whiteness as an identity”: It is an identity that carries the burden of history without fostering a true understanding of the painfulness and the costs of complicity. That’s why so many of us try to pretend that to be white is merely to be raceless. Perhaps it would be more productive for us to establish some collective understanding that we are all—white and black—damaged, reduced, and morally undermined by increasingly subtle systems of racial oppression and racial privilege. Or perhaps it would be better if we simply refused to be white. But I don’t know what that means, really. (32-33) |
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There’s oft-repeated advice from writers like Phillip Lopate about the personal essayist’s execution of voice, and Biss picks and chooses from that advice, knowing when to lean in and speak softly—seductively, even—and when to take the megaphone. Because she can handle both, can easily juggle a loudspeaker (as in On Immunity) and a coffeehouse (as in Notes from No Man’s Land), she comes off in a way demanding of attention. Her tone in Notes is never actually abrasive toward her dear reader, which might be the most necessary ingredient for a book like this one. When writing on a subject simultaneously so intimate and public, perhaps the tone of the writing should be, as well. The megaphone and the coffeehouse should both be kept in mind, and we should be prepared to change our posture should it become necessary to shout at our friends.
A specific instance of this can be found in “No Man’s Land,” which keeps one eye on writing about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life on the pioneer trail, while the other eye looks at Biss’s own life in the Chicago neighborhood of Rogers Park. In both places, white, female narrators learn to look at themselves in their colored surroundings, and perhaps because Biss’s subject is now more animate than that of a telephone pole she finds a greater need to animate herself. She animates herself through a voice much less distant here, and Biss reacts to “the mythology of danger” (153) in a great American city, whether these reactions mean forced reminders to trust the chill of Lake Michigan’s waters or not being afraid of black boys riding by on their bicycles. The book’s overall voice straddles a casualness, through a vernacular designed for an open readership, which makes thinking about issues beyond just the writer’s life (here: race, class, geography) more accessible. This mixes with intelligence, which makes the listening part easy, and we come to know that as we listen we’ll locate something important to consider. For example, in Biss’s essay “Relations”: “Although the two can be confused, our urge to love our own, or those we have come to understand as our own, is, it seems, much more powerful than our urge to segregate ourselves” (22). In an essay so explicitly about race, this is a sharp yet comforting way rendering the moment, a little break from the heaviness of tone that we often attribute to the either subtle or explicit dialogue surrounding racism, and one that might also help us discover whether or not this idea serves as Biss’s inadvertent thesis. It might also, though, just be a way of “looking on the bright side,” or an opportunity for Biss to take a step back from complicated discourse and understand that these concepts can enter gray area. Biss’s readers know that there is different territory to enter if they want a conversation about race the way writers like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. or Frantz Fanon might cover it. And while a writer like Susan Sontag, who also operates in the social nonfiction realm, writes sentences like “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists” (Sontag 18), Biss will give us sentences like “As much as I believe racial categories to be fluid and ambiguous, I still know that there is nothing particularly ambiguous about my features, or my bearing, or my way of speaking” (29), and this leads us to note just how much Biss’s writing can feel like talking, thanks to her use of the first person. It can feel like a friend speaking in a soothing tone during vulnerable conversation over coffee, while still managing to carry the weight of the conversation’s subject(s). This craft strategy isn’t something to take lightly—part of what becomes so successful about nonfiction writing, and especially the essay, is its rhetoric, and Biss is a writer who seems to know just how to talk to us, how to tell us what we need to hear without ever being condescending about it.
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The pervasiveness of these facts is a clear blow to the reader’s gut, and it tells us there’s something we’ve overlooked. Using an essay like this one is a provocative way to start a book of essays, and it gets students in the classroom thinking about what else we’ll surprisingly learn throughout our reading experience. “Time and Distance Overcome” ends up showing students Biss’s vacillation between fact and interpretation, and how facts, when examined from unexpected positions, can give us new insights as writers as much as readers.
Similarly, in “Is This Kansas” Biss surprises again with the inclusion of facts but this time adds her observation. We begin to think differently about the events of our recent past, particularly Hurricane Katrina, as we shift in our seats a little not only out of discomfort but for a new point of view. She writes: Racism, I would discover during my first semester teaching at Iowa, does not exist. At least not in Iowa. Not in the minds of the twenty-three tall, healthy, blond students to whom I was supposed to teach rhetoric. And not, at least not publicly, in the opinion of one student who did not look white but who promptly informed the class that she was adopted and considered herself white. (137) |
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Micah McCrary is a contributor to Bookslut. His essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in Brevity, the Los Angeles Review of Books, MAKE, Third Coast, and Midwestern Gothic, among other publications. He co-edits con•text, is a doctoral student in English at Ohio University, and holds an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago. His manuscript, Island in the City, was a finalist in the Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2015 Essay Collection Competition.
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