book : i think it important that we witness

Best of 09 challenge.

December 4 Book. What book – fiction or non – touched you? Where were you when you read it? Have you bought and given away multiple copies?

For the past four years I have hosted a monthly conversation about books that help us "bridge differences": fiction, memoir, poetry, graphic novels, nonfiction, creative nonfiction–all looking at the differences that link and separate us. Hearing from around the world about realities that aren't mine, but that inform and illuminate and sometimes shock mine, about situations and mindsets and from voices I might not otherwise hear. So many of the books I've chosen and read for that group have stayed with me: Richard Powers' The Time of Our Singing is probably the one that I go back to most (and the best work about race in America I've ever read). Luis Alberto Urrea's The Devil's Highway, Stephen Kuusisto's Planet of the Blind, T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain, and Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese have been standouts for me. (Note: This face-to-face Bridging Differences Book Group continues, and a virtual version has just begun.)

Two months ago, our group read Dave Eggers' What is the What.

I remember waking up one morning right after starting graduate school at the venerable University of Virginia (Mr Jefferson's University) and turning on the radio to hear an endless three-day reading of all the names on the Vietnam Memorial as it was dedicated in Washington, D.C. On that same day, a beloved of mine–a lifelong Quaker–was starting army boot camp. Dead war victims, graduate student, Quaker soldier. Dead war victims, graduate student, Quaker soldier.

As I lay in bed that morning listening to the somber roll call, I remember being jarred by how different reality can be at the very same time for us humans. I was embarking on a luxurious life of reading and writing as I studied the figure of the artist in fiction. Those killed in Vietnam were still dead, their families and a nation grieving beside a moving black slit in the ground. My peaceful Quaker friend was being yelled at a drill sergeant all at the same time. At exactly the same moment.

I felt the same when I read Dave Eggers' brilliant novel, What is the What.

The harshness of the Sudan. Lost Boys. Valentino's childhood. Nothing like my life. Happening parallel to my life, yet so removed. Unimaginable. And yet real. 

I am reminded of some writing I did right after Hurricane Katrina:

I was driving home from a meeting recently and in a rush of emotion, I felt overwhelmed by all that I care about in the world and all the needs that I can’t fix—it breaks my heart that children are abused, that manatees are gnawed up by the motors of unthinking Sunday boaters, that there are people in the world who are literally starving to death as I type this, that…, that…, that…

I felt a physical sense of despair in that quiet moment on Merrimon Avenue between Jiffy Lube and Ingles, a sense that I could never do enough in this world, that it was too overwhelming, the need. Maybe it was the news of three little boys found dead in a car trunk in New Jersey in the next door neighbor’s driveway, or maybe it was the faces of Tsunami orphans, or the suicide of a popular downtown coffee shop owner in the Swannanoa River. It’s all those things, and more. It’s just bloody overwhelming; I feel so ill prepared, so inept, so inadequate to solve the gaping aches around me. And I feel so selfish sometimes when I simply walk away from need, when I close my door, when I say no or turn the channel.

And now, the hell that was New Orleans and Biloxi and their neighbors: unimaginable dislocation, death, destruction, drowning, all that people had in the world floating in an oily brew of stagnant water, including the bodies of loved ones. This is not an inconvenience or a rise in gas prices. No, these are people’s wild and precious lives.

What happens when our infrastructure collapses? Most of us will never know, not in this country, no. But some in the Gulf Coast of the United States know it harshly right now, up close and personal. While I’m brushing my teeth and using too much water in the shower, they know. While I’m talking on my cell phone and emailing this to you, they know. When I’m eating dinner cooked in my own kitchen and watching the waters rise in New Orleans on the evening news, they know. And they will know for a long time to come. And of course, the hardest hit are always those who were already the hardest hit, those who are always the hardest hit: the poor. How can they possibly rebuild their lives when their livelihood has been destroyed, just like their homes? Where on earth will they go when they leave the Superdome, that last safety net before the free fall?

The wave of horror I feel at the world’s pain has been revealed to me as a peculiar form of privilege; there is a sense of horror and a terrible sense of relief at the same time, if I am honest. I am not there, which allows me the luxury to have an intellectual response to this event. I must dig deeper into what it means to be connected to these people who are so affected; it is that intellectual response to tragedy that keeps us immune, that makes these tragedies all the more possible in the world. I manage my reaction to them by keeping them small tragedies, the size of my TV screen—I cannot allow that to happen and I must all at the same time. What am I doing about what’s happening in the Congo? Nothing. What am I doing about what’s happening in the Middle East? Nothing. What am I doing about starving children in the world, about starving children in my town, about the man with no shoes downtown? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing."

What is the What opened me to a reality that, now I have seen it, I cannot pretend I haven't seen.

I think it important that we witness. 

[Image from here]