Men incarcerated at the California State Prison, Los Angeles County examine evergreen sprigs provided for them for a Yule ceremony on December 24, 2014. They observe Asatru, a Germanic pagan religion thought to be rooted in the beliefs and practices of ancient northern Europe. Imam Abdul-Wahab Omeira, a Muslim chaplain who oversees pagan religions at the prison, stands at the door behind them. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

Lauren Pond: Could you tell me a bit more about when and why you became a prison chaplain?

Imam Abdul-Wahab Omeira: In 1990, I moved to Lancaster, California because of the cheap housing, so I could have a house for my family. When I moved there, there was no mosque for the Muslims, so I started with a few friends a project to establish a mosque. It’s called North Valley Islamic Center. As we were doing that, in 1991-1992, the prison was built next door, not too far away from us, about five miles. I said to the community, we have a prison next to our community and we need to try to volunteer and help. I guess there was a former prisoner in our midst who had converted to Islam inside the prison. He told me, “they need a chaplain.” So I went to the prison to see if I could help and volunteer, and they hired me as a part-time chaplain. From 1993 until 1996, I had a full-time job and I was doing the chaplaincy on the side, taking care of the Islamic program.

LP: What was your full-time job?

AWO: It was in the grocery market. In 1996, my supervisor at the prison liked my work ethics and my understanding of my faith, my treatment of the prisoners and the staff. He decided then to convert me to full-time.

LP: Did you have to go through any formal chaplaincy training?

AWO: No. I grew up in Damascus, Syria, and the Grand Mufti — I’m not sure if you know what a Mufti is? In Muslim countries, there is a higher authority, an Islamic authority, where if there is a conflict between religion and politics, or between the secular and religious, he will solve the problem. So, I grew up in his school. I completed high school and my studies under him. When I came to Lancaster from there and I started the mosque, I automatically became the spiritual leader of the community. And so, the state, at the time when I was hired, they didn’t ask me for degrees; they just accepted my leadership of the mosque and my spiritual experience as my background. This is how I became a chaplain.

LP: Did you consider any other forms of chaplaincy outside of the prison?

AWO: I volunteered in the hospital as a Muslim chaplain. When they had a Muslim patient, they called me, and I went and I consoled him. But I have other activities in the community. I established a charter school in 2001, and we grew for over 17 years, and hopefully now we can continue. Our charter has stopped because the board of Palmdale School District refused to renew it, but now we may be getting it back next August. We’re not quitting.

LP: Do you primarily work with Muslim prisoners?

AWO: No, I work with everybody. I find it to be my mission as a chaplain. My inmates — and I call them my inmates, really, because I’m serving them to help them to better themselves — whichever faith they find available, where they’re convinced that this is the place of spirituality they can take refuge in or with, they can better themselves.

The parable, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it: religion is for God, and the country for all. Your religion is yours, but the country is for all of us. We share it. I wish that Muslim countries would do that, would understand the concept of separation of church and state. I appreciate the Constitution of the U.S. I am very, very thankful to our forefathers who have put this together. A brilliant piece of art, I consider it.

LP: I know you also work with Pagan prisoners, including Druids, Wiccans, and Odinists. Could you tell me a bit about this?

AWO: When I first came to the prison, there were no Odinists. In 2004, I was introduced to the Wicca faith by some Wiccan inmates. Unfortunately, the Wicca practitioners in the institution were kind of hidden; they were kind of ashamed because of the stigma behind witchcraft. So there were some brave inmates who decided to take it and work with it. I found a volunteer from the community. She used to come in, and she would take care of their needs. I was only facilitating: bringing her the artifacts, writing the supplements for her, to make sure she had the basic materials to conduct her sabbath. I would escort her back and forth. Lisa Morganstern stepped up to the plate after that young lady stopped coming.

If an inmate tells me, “This cup of coffee is my faith,” I will ask him, “How can I help you to meet your spiritual needs?” I don’t care who it is or what he believes in, as long as he is sincere, as long as he has a sincerely held belief. I find some inmates who are occasional, they like to [move around between] different faith groups until they find a faith that will suit them best. Some have received commutation for their sentence. I consider the success of their spirituality that helped them stay away from the gangs, stay away from fighting, the drugs.

Because when we have a vacuum inside us, we need something to fill it up. I think the vacuum we develop is through the way we’re brought up:  lack of love, lack of care, lack of discipline, lack of appreciation for life. When people see that there is a spiritual apparatus that they can put on themselves, like a rope, it can enhance their life and raise them to be a better human being, a better citizen. We need to do whatever we can to facilitate this.

Imam Abdul-Wahab Omeira, a Muslim prison chaplain, buys Yule feast groceries, including ham, for the pagan prisoners he oversees at the California State Prison, Los Angeles County – a maximum-security men’s facilty located in Lancaster, California – on December 23, 2014.(Photo: Lauren Pond)

LP: Do you consider that to be one of the roles of religion in prisons: helping people fill that void that led them there?

AWO: There are a lot of things we can teach an inmate. We can spend money on teaching him a craft. We can spend money on teaching him how to get a degree. We can spend money on teaching him how to take care of himself physically. But if something that he has never, ever gotten was spiritual upbringing…

I always tell my inmates, there are things that have no answers. They don’t make sense —  the prejudice, the racism, the hatred. Especially when you were incarcerated. Nobody realizes that you have paid your debt to society. They cannot get employment; they cannot get help. Well then, automatically, we’re pushing them back. But if a prisoner has that piece of spirituality to hang on, the rope to hang on to until things get better. With difficulties comes ease.

There are a lot of innocent people in prison as well — some innocent people inside who have not done the crime that they are serving time for. And those people need spirituality to even cope with the injustice that they have experienced.

So all in all, while we try to teach them a craft, how to earn a living, I believe we also need to teach them how to become disciplined and decent, decent, and god-fearing.

LP: Could you tell me more about what you do on a daily basis with the different people who are incarcerated in Lancaster, and which groups you work with?

AWO: We have inmates who ask for books. We have inmates who are hurting and they want to have a meeting. We have inmates who are missing their parents, their loved ones, their kids. On a daily basis, I have to go and read my mail. I have so many inmates requesting me to come to see them. I have to go see them, see what they need. And whether they are Christian or Buddhist or Hindu, I consider it my oath to go and talk to them, give them a shoulder to cry on, or a hand of love.

So, it’s really very difficult, yet rewarding. When you see the plight of a human being in front of you, your brother in humanity, in this situation, and you can give him limited help, but not all the help that he needs — sometimes it impacts us. I developed a metaphor: I call it the garbage disposal of my psyche. When I am stressed, I take all that and I grind it up and I let it out. I receive the problems and the headaches of the inmates. I am human. There are so many miserable stories.  

LP: I remember from our prior conversations you saying that some of the other chaplains didn’t want to help the Pagan inmates. Could you elaborate on that?

AWO: Right now, we have some chaplains who – I don’t want to name what denomination they are – who declare conscientious objection to teaching or taking a role in teaching or sponsoring Wicca.

Two years ago, we were in Sacramento for state-sponsored training. One of the Muslim chaplains raised this same issue. After we were done, I went up to him. I said, “Excuse me young man, if there was a faith on this earth today that people would love for it to vanish, which faith do you think it would be?” And he said, maybe Islam. I said yes, you’re right. Because right now Islam is under scrutiny, under attack. If it wasn’t for [the Wiccans’] right to worship, you would not have a right to even pray. And we need to thank God for the Constitution, and you need to thank God that you have people like that to take care of you.

AWO: Unfortunately for the majority of our country, they think they’re going to go to heaven and close the door behind them. They are insulting the intelligence of God. I said God is just, and if God is just, then we need to look at the dartboard. The bullseye is God, and any road we take to him —as long as we are good citizens, taking care of our country, taking care of our community, taking care of our families and our surroundings, that’s the mission of God.

LP: I find it interesting what you said about feeling like Islam is hated so much right now, and that’s part of the reason that it’s so important to take care of freedom of religion and freedom of expression, and helping these other groups, too.

AWO: I also teach my colleagues and my parishioners and everybody, each and every one of us is representing our prophet, representing our faith. And if I don’t impress you enough, I’m not doing my job and I am not representing my faith. And so it is my duty to come, as a citizen, and give you comfort.

Unfortunately, as a human being, the only thing we see is what we disagree on. We don’t see how much commonality we have between us. I see people, even though they are good on the inside, they are good citizens, they have no racism — but when I am on the plane next to them, and they know I’m a Muslim, they wonder: Is he going to blow himself up? It is my duty to teach them about me.

After 9/11, I took it upon myself to go into the [local] high school district. I went to every school there is. I sat in front of the student body, I gave them a presentation of half an hour about my faith. And I took questions in the rest of the time.

You know the word jihad – it’s misunderstood to mean fighting and killing. But this is the true jihad: self-discipline, self-restraint, and struggling in the way of your country, of your community, of your society. You should be the role model of peace and love in your community.

LP: What’s the difference in working with the Pagan prisoners? Do you do some of the same things with them?

AWO: The Pagan inmates usually take care of themselves. I read a few things, I try to educate myself on a few things from their faith. We stigmatize other faiths that are not ours, and we are ignorant. The more you read about certain faiths, the more you learn to appreciate them. Even though we have had the Halloween things and the witches and all that — when you read about it, you start appreciating it. They’re doing the same thing I’m doing, except in a different format. The objective is the same: for them to get themselves spiritually clean and spiritually connected. I think the way that they perform, they usually take care of each other.

Unfortunately, there are not enough volunteers from their faith to oversee or to help them out. But I try to get them books. I try to get them donations, if possible. And the religious artifacts that through the years I was able to add for them, like the Thor’s hammer.

LP: The Pagans can’t often meet without a volunteer to oversee them, is that right?

AWO: In the institution, fortunately we have inmate-led services. I was able to convince the warden to allow them. Many of the religious groups don’t have volunteers like me and I can’t be in 20 places at one time. Either you allow prisoners to lead their own services, or they’re going to take us to court. The court is going to side with them, and we’re going to have to find ways to provide for them. Because religion is a right; it’s not a privilege.

LP: You said you’ve done some readings from the different Pagan religions. What would you say you have learned most about them — in your experiences with them and in your reading?

AWO: Really what stuck to mind is how many things from Christianity are actually based on the learning and teaching of Wicca. I read an article from a Wiccan newspaper, and most of the holidays that the Christians practice are actually Pagan holidays.

I learned also how they have the circle, and how once you put the circle together like this, there is an imaginary wall that you cannot penetrate until you break the circle. I learned that the Wiccans, sometimes they cast the spirit out and sometimes they cast the spirit in.

LP: How do you think Pagan prisoners receive you, as someone outside of their religion helping them? Have you ever gotten any feedback from them?

AWO: I think many of them appreciate what I am doing. Many of them look at me, not in a sarcastic way, but kind of strange: how is a Muslim taking care of us? The same way that many people would think, how could a Muslim be running the Pagan group? There’s such a huge gap between the two. They just find it odd, but everybody is appreciative of what I’m doing, particularly the group that you met. They’re really nice people. I enjoy serving them.

(Photo: Lauren Pond)

LP: There’s a growing push to counter racism among members of Germanic Pagan traditions such as Asatru and Odinism, especially in prison. I’ve heard from community members that it’s important to ensure prisoners have access to educational resources about these religions and guidance from practitioners on the outside.

AWO: I think that is very good, powerful point: Inside the religion in Odinist and Asatru, trying to get the racists out. Last Tuesday when I had the Odinist banquet, one of the inmates had a swastika all over his back, and he had his shirt out, showing it. You could tell that he still has that mindset. But if you kick him out, you won’t have helped him; if you let him in, probably he will change. His peers will help him change that perspective. Kicking him out of it is not the solution. You’re just helping him to say what he is.

I find in the past, like in 2003, I found a book that they were reading and it had some racist elements. When I meet with them, I tell them, I am very happy to take care of them, I am happy to. But I will not help you to be racist. And if you are racist, please don’t ask me to be your sponsor.

 Humans are good by nature. They are created good. It is the environment that they grow up in that changes their goodness. By the way you were created you are a good person. It doesn’t matter what you believe in. I always tell them that.

LP:  Is there anything specific you would want people to know about prison chaplaincy?

AWO: I think many people appreciate prison chaplaincy, but I would like people to understand that it takes a special person to take care of prisoners. It’s a difficult job. Not everybody can do it. It’s a special calling. I think chaplains as a whole do an awesome job, and they work hard. I hope and I pray that the society as a whole will encourage our lawmakers to make sure that the chaplaincy program will be facilitated, will be enhanced, will be made stronger rather than weaker. It seems like the chaplains are the most disposable department in the department of corrections. But really we do so much.

So, I hope that all people will understand that chaplaincy is a really, really important program, and chaplains are doing a lot of good. It doesn’t matter which faith we are teaching. It doesn’t matter what group we are sponsoring. We’re doing something positive.

LP:  Is there anything else you’d like to add?

AWO: We need to eliminate the mindset of, “Throw them in jail and throw away the key.” It doesn’t matter how horrendous their crime is; there is always rehabilitation.

I think we need to look at solutions. An ounce of prevention is better than a ton of treatment. We can really face our elected officials and ask them to do something good about our educational system and to stop using it as a guinea pig or a pawn to get elected. I have seen many officials who have promised to do miracles for education, and then when they get elected, it becomes a secondary issue. I feel that our society owes it to the future of our country.

LP: Do you have plans to retire?

AWO: I started [working at the prison] in 1993, and as long as I’m enjoying it, I’m doing it. It’s really fun. Doing what I’m doing, to me, is healing. I’ve always enjoyed helping people. I learned this in the United States. Where I grew up, volunteerism was really weak, I guess because of the poverty level. People were more busy trying to make a living. The American people are amazing people. And I learned volunteerism from them. They give up their time.

There is hope. There is always hope. We need to wake up.

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Lauren Pond is a documentary photographer who specializes in faith and religion. She is currently a multimedia producer for the Ohio State University’s Center for the Study of Religion, where she uses photography and sound to study Ohio’s diverse religious communities, including neopagan movements and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. In 2017, Lauren published Test of Faith: Signs, Serpents, Salvation (Duke University Press), a photography book about Pentecostal serpent handlers, which received the 2016 Duke Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.  Lauren received dual Bachelor’s degrees in journalism and art from Northwestern University in 2009, and a Master’s degree in photojournalism from Ohio University in 2014.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post There is always hope: A conversation with Chaplain Imam Abdul-Wahab Omeira appeared first on The Revealer.

This photograph was taken in December, 1978 in front of Marichjhapi Primary School along with the teachers. In the middle Nirmal Dhali (Black shirt), head master of Marichjhapi School.

Upon gaining independence from British colonial rule in 1947, the Indian state of Bengal was partitioned, dividing East from West. The predominately Hindu West was made part of India and the Muslim-majority East was made a province of the newly created nation of Pakistan. West Bengal has remained part of India, while in 1971, East Bengal became the country of Bangladesh. Following the Partition, and the violence that ensued, thousands of displaced and poor Hindu refugees from East Bengal fled their homes and migrated to India. Eleven years later, in 1958, The Indian government implemented the Dandakaranya Project, intended to resettle the incoming East Bengali refugees by developing a home for them on tribal land in central-east India which has been described as “a vast area of primeval forests, uneven rainfall, and stony land.”

The project suffered many challenges. The land in Dandakaranya was considered unsuitable for farming, which was a blow to many of the refugees whose livelihoods had always come from agriculture. Instead of staying in Dandakaranya, many migrated to Marichjhapi, an uninhabited island in the mangrove forests on the southern tip of West Bengal, famous for its Bengal tigers and saltwater crocodiles. Their arrival was immediately met with hostility from the West Bengali leaders. Many were forced to return to Dandakaranya or were resettled in other parts of India. Between eight and ten thousand Bengali refugees, though, managed to remain in Marichjhapi, outlasting the initial removal orders.

Nishikanto fled to the opposite island during the evacuation but he has most vivid memories of their houses burning​.

In an effort to force the remaining refugees out of Marichjhapi, the West Bengal government responded by stopping all movement in and out of Marichjhapi on January 27^th, 1979. The government also withheld food and water from the refugees and sent thirty police officers to patrol the island. In May of that year, police officers surrounded the island, opened fire, and dumped the bodies of the people they shot into the river as others tried to flee. The media was barred from entering Marichjhapi during the assault, and while the government has said that fewer than five people died, some estimates have found that hundreds and maybe even thousands of Bengali refugees were killed in what came to be known as the Marichjhapi Massacre. There is still no official death toll.

Although the media attempted to cover what occurred at Marichjhapi closely at the time, the government’s revisionist history of the massacre dominated the public narrative since the massacre is not openly discussed. Thus, in her widely praised research on the displacement of Bengali refugees, Nilanjana Chatterjee, an anthropologist who wrote her dissertation on the massacre,^[1] has called what happened in Marichjhapi an “event of interpretation.”

Now, Soumya Sankar Bose is attempting to shed light on this story, including new possibilities of what might have happened in Marichjhapi and pointing to the ongoing impact of this event. Bose is a photographer who was born in India a little over a decade after the massacre occurred, and his project about the massacre, Where The Birds Never Sing, is one of the 10 projects funded by the Magnum Foundation that explores both religion and immigration.

Nirmal Dhali(Head master) after 40 years at Dandokaronyo. during the evacuation he was arrested and was in Dumdum jail for eight years now living in a small village of Malkangiri, Orissa.

The multi-media project aims to weave together “several perspectives of the same narrative” with “the facts and fictions” of the Marichjhapi massacre to recreate a memory that Bose believes the government would prefer people forgot — like the actual number of people who died. For him, the ultimate success of the project is more than the digital mural where people can learn about the massacre and interact with what he will be creating and exhibiting in a contemporary gallery in Kolkota.

Success would be a tacit acknowledgment from the government that it even happened.

“The truth should be in front [of everyone]” said Bose.

For Bose, there is an urgency associated with this work. Although survivors have been vocal about what happened in Marichjhapi in 1979, many of the survivors are aging.

“If we don’t document it now, it will be lost forever,” says Bose.

Recreating a memory that many in power want to be erased is a herculean task, but Bose’s methods for achieving it are scrappy and ambitious. He is hoping to track and photograph survivors, as well as family members of those who were killed in the massacre. He will interview them and include their accounts in a growing archive of newspaper clippings, academic writing, and whatever else he can find about the massacre.  In addition to the factual documents he and his partner, Barnali Ghosh, a videographer, will also employ actors to stage reenactments of the incident which they will photograph and film for documentation purposes.

During the evacuation in 1979, due to police firing all the refugee family got scattered here and there. Rabin Biswas’s family was among them. Later, after 30 years he reunited with them in a remote village of Orissa.

Bose’s work aims to recreate an event that happened forty years ago. But we can feel echoes of it in another migration crisis today. As migrants continue to flee Central America for the United States, and millions of asylum seekers arrive in Europe, immigration — and questions about how to represent immigration — is in the public spotlight. Most recently, the photo of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter Valeria face down on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico caused an uproar, with many wondering if a similarly graphic photo would have been published if the victims were white U.S. citizens.

Through her project, Living in Sanctuary, Cinthya Santos-Briones, another photographer who was awarded a grant from the Magnum Foundation for her project on religion and migration, is turning her lens on undocumented immigrants in the United States who have taken refuge in churches to avoid deportation. Santos-Briones hopes to provide a different lens through which we can look at immigrants.

Jorge Taborda, 65 years old, posed for the photograph taken at the Holy Cross Retreat Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he took refuge to avoid being deported since May 2017. Jorge Taborda lives with his youngest son, Steve 15 years old, in a small bedroom at the Holy Cross Retreat Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico. There Jorge works as a volunteer helping in several tasks at the center.
Jorge Taborda, his wife Francia Benítez, and his eldest son, Jefferson, 23, arrived in the United States in 1998, fleeing the armed conflict and violence in Colombia, but their asylum request was denied in 2002. In 2017, Jorge Taborda received a call from his wife after ICE agents detained her at home. ICE also stopped his eldest son Jeff. Both His wife and his eldest son were deported to Colombia in June 2017. When Jorge Taborda was taking his youngest son to school, 14-year-old Steve and an American citizen, ICE agents were waiting for him outside the school to arrest him and take him to the Immigration Detention Center in El Paso, Texas, where his wife, France Benitez, and his eldest son, Jefferson, met. Immigration agents dressed as civilians told Taborda to follow them to the pass and they would hand him over to his wife and son. Initially Taborda had agreed to follow the ICE agents in his car, however, decided to seek refuge in the church of Our Lady of Health in Las Cruces. The ICE agents followed him to the church but did not enter and waited for hours for Taborda to leave. Then, with the help of the Communities of Faith and Action (CAFé), he was transferred to the Retreat Center of Santa Cruz in Mesilla Park, New Mexico, where the Franciscan priest, Thomas Smith, offered him indefinite Franciscan hospitality. December 3th 2018. Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA.

According to CBS News, there are more than 800 churches in the United States that shelter undocumented immigrants and families who are facing deportation; many immigrants have taken up the offer. A 2018 report by the group Sanctuary Not Deportation found that there are at least 36 people currently in churches around the country seeking refuge from deportation.

While the last two years have brought us some coverage of families seeking sanctuary in houses of worship, the intimate images featured in Santos-Briones’s body of work are different.

Santos-Briones husband is a Lutheran priest who works with the New Sanctuary Coalition, a volunteer-led organization based in New York that provides legal support and community services for immigrants and they once lived in a church where a majority of the church’s congregation were undocumented. According to Santos-Briones, there is no question of objectivity in her work. Many of the families she photographs are not only her subjects; they are an important part of her life.

“They are my friends, the parents of my godsons and goddaughters,” says Santos-Briones.

The project is personal for Santos-Briones and often, she goes beyond taking photographs.

“It’s the people that are so close to me that are facing deportation and at some point, I am not only documenting them, I’m also trying to support them.”

“Most of the time the media portrays them as vulnerable, and when I speak with them they say ‘I don’t want you to take a photo of me when I’m crying.’ So I am aware of these things,” she said.

After taking a shower, Daniela, the one on the left, and her sister Dulce, are sitting down in one of the church’s pews, waiting for their hair to dry. “We never thought of living in a church,” says Dulce. ¨I feel there are ghosts all around me and they see me. But I also like living here. It is a beautiful place¨. Since August 17, 2017, Dulce, Daniela and their brother, David, live, together with their mother, Amanda Morales, as refugees in the Episcopal Church of Holyrood, in Washington Heights, to avoid the deportation of their mother back to Guatemala.
For Dulce and Daniela, 10 and 9 years old respectively, to live in a church as refugees has not been easy, given that they had to leave behind their house, school and friends in Long Island. Their mother was the first undocumented migrant, in the last three decades, to take public sanctuary in the city of New York. After they moved to the church, Dulce and Daniela have suffered episodes of anxiety for fear that their mother will be deported and separated from them and her brother Daniel, 3 years old. October 20th, 2017. Manhattan New York,

Her images capture the mundane and ordinary moments of these families’ lives as they make peace with their new homes. There is also a sense of understanding in these photographs; seeking sanctuary is an intentional act, one of preservation rather than desperation. Rather than portraying her subjects as helpless, Santos-Briones is conscious about giving the families agency in her photographs.

Sijutno Sajuti and his wife, Dahlia, both 70 years old, reading the Koran in the room where they live since October 2017 at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Meriden, Connecticut. Sijutno Sajuti and his wife, Dahlia, are Muslims from Indonesia. In addition to praying every day five times a day, they also study the Koran. Although they live in a Unitarian Universalist church, they continue to practice their religion.
An office on the second floor of the church has been renovated as a dormitory for Sijutno Sajuti and his wife, Dahlia, while waiting for Sijutno’s deportation order to be stopped. The room is very small and only has a small window, a bed, a desk and a closet. Sijutno Sajuti and his wife, Dahlia, are known in the city of West Hartford, Connecticut for their focus on cultural education. He is an anthropologist and an educator and his wife teaches Indonesian cuisine and culture. In 2003, a federal judge ordered Sujitno Sajuti to leave the United States. In 2011, he was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and detained for 67 days. Since then he had been living in Connecticut with temporary stay status until October of 2017 when he had to take sanctuary for fear of being deported. October 20th 2018. Connecticut, USA.

Despite the difference in their approach and subject matter, the overarching message Bose and Santos-Briones are trying to convey is essentially the same. Both are making work which directly responds to other, problematic, representations and misrepresentations of migration and the consequences of those portrayals. Bose’s project is in direct defiance of the attempted erasure of East Bengali refugees, and the state-sanctioned violence against them four decades ago that continues to reverberate today. In the United States, where the violence against immigrants coming from the Southern border is fast becoming normalized, Santos hopes to offer a different interpretation of what it means to be an immigrant living in the United States, fully human images that defy how too many people imagine (and fail to imagine) the people trying to make their homes here.

In the center, Amanda Morales, being blessed by the members of Holyrood church congregation, where since August 2017, Amanda and her family live in sanctuary. Every Sunday Amanda attends the Spanish Mass celebrated at 12 noon by Rev. Luis Barrios. “Amanda is the force of our community, the face of many mothers who are being deported and, separated from their children, we bless Amanda with our hands and souls” comments Rev. Luis Barrios while the members of the congregation bless her with their hands. In August 17, 2017 Amanda Morales an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala decided to take refuge in Holyrood Episcopal Church in Washington Heights, Manhattan with her three children, Dulce 10, Daniela 8 and David 3, for fear of she being deported. Amanda lives and works in New York since 2004. Since 2012, Amanda had been under supervision with immigration authorities and was complying with all that she was asked. In early May she was told to present herself with one-way ticket to Guatemala, on August 17, 2017 to be deported. September 26th 2017. Manhattan, New York

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^[1] Chatterjee, Nilanjana (1992). Midnight’s Unwanted Children: East Bengali Refugees and the Politics of Rehabilitation Unpublished doctorall dissertation). Brown University, Providence, RI.

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Ashley Okwuosa is a Nigerian journalist currently based in New York. Her stories on immigration, education, and gender have been published on WNYC, Quartz Africa, OZY, Popula, and Latterly. She is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School where she was a recipient of the African Pulitzer fellowship. She is currently working as a project lead for Maternal Figures, a maternal health research project that documents successful health interventions in Nigeria. The project is supported by a grant from The Brown Institute for Media Innovation

Cinthya Santos Briones’ interest in documentary photography emerged through the ethnographic work that she has done as an anthropologist in indigenous communities in Mexico, where she documented ceremonial and healing rituals, and processes of immigration to New York. Since then, her work has been influenced by the struggle for human rights, focusing on issues of migration, gender, and identity. Cinthya is a graduate of the Visual Journalism and Documentary Practice Program at the International Center of Photography. She received the Magnum Foundation Fellowship in 2016, the En Foco Fellowship in 2017, and was twice a fellow of the cultural arts fund in Mexico. Cinthya has published her work in New York Times, PDN, La Jornada, Vogue, Buzzfeed, The Nation Magazine, among others. Cinthya has worked in pro immigrant organizations in New York as a community organizer. Instagram: @cinthyasantosb

Soumya Sankar Bose completed a one-year diploma in Photography from Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka. His project, “Full Moon on a Dark Night” was produced with Magnum Foundation’s Photography and Social Justice Fellowship in 2017. Soumya is also recipient of India Foundation for the Arts grant for the project, “Let’s Sing an Old Song” in 2015. His works have appeared in The New York Times, BBC Online, The Telegraph, The Indian Express, The Huffington Post, The Caravan and others. Soumya lives and works in Kolkata, India. Instagram: @soumyasankarbose

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Review of “Cultures in the Crossfire: Stories from Syria and Iraq,” University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, April 8, 2017 through Nov. 25, 2018

The last few years have seen a remarkable increase in public activism in decolonizing the museum, especially in critiquing Western museums and their claims to ownership of artifacts from non-European cultures. As a result, some museums have planned nominal repatriation or return of some objects, while others publicly doubled down on their collections. However, the disruptive nature of questioning claims to museum collections—not to mention their financial impact—has elicited a variety of unsatisfactory responses from museums unwilling to consider them.

One of the main justifications for Western museums’ continued ownership of non-European collections, besides mostly unsubstantiated claims to legitimate provenance, has been the Western museum’s role as custodian of artifacts that would have been threatened or destroyed in their countries of origin due to instability or war. When it came to collections from Syria and Iraq, the once highly-publicized destruction wrought by ISIS provided additional justification for such ownership, now euphemistically integrated into the notion of “preservation of cultural heritage.” Thus, rather than acting as a timely response to the then-ongoing threat of ISIS, such framing enlisted ISIS’ destructive spectacle in the service of the claims of museums and other institutes to their collections.

This was the framing which fundamentally shaped the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s exhibit “Cultures in the Crossfire,” which closed in November of last year in anticipation of the Museum’s official opening of its Middle East Galleries on April 21, 2019. However, the uncritical praise of “Cultures in the Crossfire” has allowed the continuation of some of its problematic elements into the Middle East Galleries, where the narrative is essentially an uncritical love letter to the Penn archaeologists who acquired its artifacts from the so-called “Middle East,” including Syria and Iraq. It is thus crucial to revisit “Cultures in the Crossfire” to understand the heart of the Penn Museum’s narrative of its role in preserving antiquities in and from conflict areas.

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A museum exhibit can be a place of tension, a suspension bridge for the many ideologies at work in choosing what to display and how. And it is very evident that multiple hands were at work in presenting their respective views regarding Syria and Iraq’s cultural heritage for the 2017-2018 exhibition, “Cultures in the Crossfire: Stories from Syria and Iraq” at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, billed as a collaboration “between the Penn Museum, the Penn Cultural Heritage Center, and artist Issam Kourbaj.”

However, the exhibit’s overarching theme was evident right from its point of entry. As soon as you entered “Cultures in the Crossfire,” after having passed by the giant standing replica of the Hammurabi code stone monument and struggled with the rather heavy glass doors leading to the exhibit, the first thing you were greeted with were images of destruction – a mosque blown up, an ancient Assyrian palace ruined, a shrine destroyed – all on video loop so that they were destroyed before you over and over again.

A blurb that accompanied this display informed you that you were viewing the results of ISIS’s activities; however, larger text, elaborating on “The Conflict in Syria and Iraq,” noted that the destruction of historic sites in Syria was the responsibility of both ISIS and Bashar al-Asad’s campaign to re-assert his control as ISIS spilled over into an Iraq “destabilized by the Second Gulf War.” Despite this lonely nod to the multiplicity of actors involved in cultural destruction, the exhibit had already established its narrative that ISIS, destroyer of societies, histories, and civilizations, was an arch-villain, alone in its cruelty, and that it is from here that this museum—all museums—must pick up the pieces.

From that entry point, the exhibit directed you to the left, where another video installation, this time by contemporary Syrian-British artist Issam Kourbaj, was playing. It was a close-up of his hand lighting matches, reaching across the video screens to leave the tiny flames to die in an ashen pile on the floor. Opposite the installation hung a placard that listed the co-curators and sponsors of emergency preservation: private institutions, charitable foundations, individual archaeologists, and of course, the Penn Museum and Penn Cultural Heritage Center. It also contained a long column of acknowledgments filled with the various cultural and government agencies of the US government and the coalition forces that had been fighting against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

As you continued walking, you would have passed white mortuary statues from Palmyra dated to the 1^st and 2^nd centuries CE. Across from them, an accompanying BBC documentary, “Ancient Worlds,” patiently waited to inform you of the historic import of these artifacts for “world civilization.” Beside it was a mural-size photo of Syrians in the bustling Damascus market of Souq al-Hamidiyyeh, next to the exhibit’s text proclaiming the rich religious and ethnic diversity of Syria: “Arabs, Kurds, Arameans, Assyrians, Armenians, Circassians, Turkmens, Sunnis, Shias, Druze, Ismailis, Christians, Jews, and Yazidis. All call Iraq and Syria home.” (You might have chosen to ignore the bizarre distinction between Ismailis and “Shias.”) But even this placard’s small attempt at moving beyond orientalist notions of religion in the Middle East being particularly entrenched in violence—a thinly veiled allusion to Islam—was contradicted by the next placard, which grandly proclaimed orientalist truisms such as “Religion occupies a prominent position in Middle Eastern societies. It has been a socio-political force deeply rooted in history,” as if this somehow set apart Middle Eastern societies from any other society in the history of the world. What this statement did, however, was set up the “Middle East”—itself an amorphous concept that the exhibit never problematizes—as the polar opposite of Western secularism and “modernity,” a typical orientalist trope that has historically justified colonialist expansion into these areas, and more recently, military invasion and “rebuilding.”

While the exhibit noted that “every individual, family, tribe, community, and nation claims a multi-layered identity from this diverse heritage,” it provided little context as to the overlap between ethnic and religious identities—let alone political and historical affiliations—that would have given visitors a more thorough understanding of the impact of war and the subsequent exacerbation of its violence in these two countries. The disjointedness of what the thematic placards proclaimed and what was actually on display was consistent throughout the exhibit.

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University museums should be at the forefront of questioning the orientalist histories of their collections, not reinforcing them. In addition to rethinking the museum’s relationship to orientalism, colonialism, and neo-imperialism in light of the context of preservation work, we must also ask: What kind of history is the “West” preserving, and why?

Although this exhibit took great pains to show a different side of the Middle East to American audiences, brief references to the diversity of cultural traditions and their historical coexistence still strained against an insistence on religion as the sole or primary marker of identity.

On the one hand, the curators emphasized the nature of war and its effect on the vulnerable populations of these two countries, their living memories as well as their cultural heritage. There were placards throughout showing how Syrians and Iraqis, including children, were proudly and actively engaged in preserving, restoring, and maintaining their historical sites.

On the other hand, these images did not disrupt the persistent Western gaze which has regarded such areas as places merely waiting to relinquish their ancient artifacts to safekeeping by Western guardians. This tension was most evident in the Daily Life portion of the exhibit, which purported to show how “cultural traditions span generations” and domestic objects “tell the story of how people live every day,” even as its placard euphemistically noted that such activities were disrupted when “families separate or people are removed from their homelands.”

The exhibit then presented a few artifacts—a calligraphic serving bowl, a ladle, and a copper frying pan—whose periods of production ranged from 2400 BCE to the 9^th century CE, a thematic grouping that only drove home the orientalist image of an unevolving Middle East. Another case contained toys and amulets dating from before 200 CE, as well as another lamp, a sandstone mold for spearheads and chisels, and decorative wall tiles that together covered a range from 2400 BCE to the 16^th century CE, a span of nearly 4000 years. What we were meant to understand from this in the context of displacement and war was hard to assess—People have used cookware and lamps throughout history? The Middle East is an unchanging place?—other than the fact that the Penn Museum owns these objects.

The artifacts themselves were also presented in a vacuum: the object, its provenance, and its estimated period of production were briefly described, without any attempt at contextualizing a modern collective Iraqi or Syrian understanding of their place in cultural memory. Barring the photo of the crowds in the Damascus market, there was no real indication of what daily life in Syria was like before the war.

It was clear through the objects on display that the exhibit found itself most comfortable at the points most distant from the daily realities of colonialism and neo-imperialism, such as its presentation of ancient Hellenic and Byzantine artifacts and medieval Arabic manuscripts on science, philosophy, and music. At these points the exhibit provided brief glimpses into ongoing local efforts in the preservation of historic sites in Syria and Iraq. Kourbaj’s art—such as the plaster casts of refugee children’s clothes overlooking an Iraqi tombstone on display, dated between the 1^st and 5^th centuries CE—was interspersed throughout to remind attendees of the current violence and egregious loss of life.

However, no amount of inclusion of Kourbaj’s art throughout the exhibit mitigated the fact that it seemed to sit on top of, rather than inform, the rest of the exhibit. Kourbaj’s “Dark Water, Burning World,” a modern recreation of 5^th century BCE Syrian sea vessels made from matchsticks and recycled bicycle parts, served as a powerful commentary on the changed relationship of Syrians to the Mediterranean as refugees. However, the artifacts used as the point of reference, held by the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, provided their own irony: Kourbaj’s access to his cultural heritage is mediated through a European museum and its own claim over them.

Dark Water, Burning World (Issam Kourbaj’s, 2016)

The “Cultures in the Crossfire” exhibit, furthermore, was severely restricted by its own collection on display, which asserted the value of Syrian and Iraqi artifacts only to the extent that they conformed to the idea of contributing to “Western civilization.” This persistent idea places Westerners as the natural and exclusive heirs to “classical” civilization, and posits a linear progression from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece and Rome, whose ideas were then filtered through the Christian elites of northwest Europe (known generically as the “Medieval” period). Islamic civilization is thus understood as only a brief interlude in this trajectory, in which, as historian of Islam Marshall Hodgson put it, it was “permitted to hold the torch of science, which properly belonged to the West, until the West was ready to take it over and carry it forward.”

The exhibit ultimately reflected the unexamined notion of the universalism of “world civilizations,” justifying Western claims on pre-Islamic Middle Eastern heritage: if certain cultural artifacts can be said to belong to the world, then anyone has the right to claim them. This depiction is most explicitly reflected at the very beginning of the exhibit where Andre Parrot, French archaeologist and former director of the Louvre, was quoted as saying “Every person has two homelands…His own, and Syria.” What the exhibit presented as a love paean to Syria belied the imperialist claim to the dismemberment and appropriation of pre-Islamic Middle Eastern history, even as its current populations are patronizingly allowed to be associated with their cultural artifacts kept abroad. It was also here where we come across the problem of the museum itself: the irony of an exhibit that lamented physical destruction without questioning the framework of antiquities dealing and museum collection that fuels looting, another major form of cultural destruction, or the ongoing US and coalition military strikes that regularly destroyed historical sites in Syria and Iraq.

Between the emphases on ancient history, modern artistic interpretation, and occasional reference to the humanitarian crisis, at no point did the exhibit make reference to any of the history leading up to the creation of ISIS. There was no reference to the periods of British and French colonialism that led to the rise of mandates (later to be carved out as nation-states), of expedient boundaries drawn and rulers appointed as well as overthrown, military coups, or dictatorships. While it is true that an exhibit cannot be all things to all people, the lack of historical context remained a glaring omission that reinforced the notion of the Middle East as a monolithic, unchanging, and especially violent place.

In many ways, the problems that underlay this exhibit can be traced back to its funding through the US government, whereby critique—or even mention—of US military aggressions in the region ostensibly could have no place. Taken together, the art installations and the exhibit’s collection created an abrupt before-and-after panorama in which the destruction unleashed by ISIS was the climax, and in which US aggression, as well as civil war, were conspicuously absent. This type of presentation engaged in a malicious type of politics, depicting ongoing wars as taking place solely between Good Muslims and Bad Muslims, in which Good Muslims are represented by those who participate in the projects of preservation (as prioritized by coalition forces), and Bad Muslims by ISIS.

Even as the exhibit’s text claimed that “this war is a blip in the history of the Middle East,” the almost complete absence of any reference to war waged by external forces, and in the case of Iraq, actual foreign invasion, promoted the idea that ISIS spontaneously emerged as a symptom of the violence inherent to the Middle East.

This depiction is further problematic because ISIS was not the only or even primary force involved in the destruction of Syria and Iraq’s cultural heritage, although it was the one most adept at shaping its propaganda through visual imagery and media. The museum’s laser focus on ISIS as the end-all and be-all of destruction of cultural heritage worked to not only render US military intervention as non-destructive, but to further vindicate it, since US military assaults since 2014 had been justified by the threat of ISIS. This concentration on ISIS was complicit in the very narrative that ISIS itself propagated through its videos of destruction, like the ones on loop at the beginning of the exhibit.

As Syria not only continues to suffer from violence, the question is not one of outside military intervention, but rather, of how the realities of such intervention become obscured regarding basic facts about who the US is fighting and what kinds of destruction the US military, its allies, and its enemies, are perpetrating —both in terms of human lives as well as physical sites.

It may seem harsh to derive such an analysis from what is otherwise a lofty goal—sponsoring emergency preservation work in Syria and Iraq through collaboration between American and local teams, and educating the American public through an exhibit. Indeed, preservation work can be an immediate necessity. But the exhibit made a choice in its depiction of such destruction—a choice that might have been considered prudently neutral, but which was, in fact, deeply political.

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Much like the act of destruction and rebuilding, it is easier to break down through critique than to build up. The exhibit occasionally put forth balanced counter-responses to their otherwise typical, almost classical selection of manuscripts, mortuary busts, and other ancient archaeological artifacts. The choice to display a beautifully decorated Kurdish doll in “traditional” dress did double duty as representation of women’s handiwork as well as the lives of children. This rare intervention was an important reminder of the prioritization of men’s cultural production in the narrative of history and art, including the exhibit’s own selection of a male contemporary artist.

Another important, more fundamental intervention was a small kiosk of audio recordings, tucked away in a “House of Wisdom” wall panel, which invited you to listen to Syrian and Iraqi songs and poetry, as well as the call to prayer of the now severely-damaged Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Two selections gave a glimpse of modern Syrians’ and Iraqis’ emotional and cultural connections to each other: Syrian Nizar Qabbani’s poem to his Iraqi wife, Bilqis, and Iraqi poet Muzaffar al-Nawwab’s “A Poem to Damascus.” It was a shame that this kiosk was so easily overlooked, as it is the more intangible cultural artifacts, like poetry, that give a stronger sense of modern Syrians and Iraqis as real living, breathing people rather than mere artifacts themselves. At least their humanity is preserved in these selected verses by Amineh Abou Kerech, a Syrian refugee who won the British Betjeman poetry prize as a 13-year-old in 2017:

I am from Syria
From a land where people pick up a discarded piece of bread
So that it does not get trampled on
From a place where a mother teaches her son not to step on an ant at the end of the day.
From a place where a teenager hides his cigarette from his old brother out of respect.
From a place where old ladies would water jasmine trees at dawn.
From the neighbours’ coffee in the morning
From: after you, aunt; as you wish, uncle; with pleasure, sister…
From a place which endured, which waited, which is still waiting for relief.

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Raha Rafii received her PhD (2019) in medieval Islamic history and law from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

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Kali Handelman: I want to start by asking you about your research, and about themes and terms that you use in your incredibly rich and far-reaching analysis. Can you tell me a bit about how you came to this topic and your perspective on it? Were you surprised by where your research led you?

Brett Krutzsch: I came to the topic because I was troubled by the popularity of the It Gets Better campaign as a response to LGBT teen suicides. I found it strange that so many Americans supported the idea that life improves for LGBT people simply because they get older. And yet, people I respect made their own It Gets Better videos, as did numerous heterosexual politicians and celebrities. I wanted to think through the messages the campaign promoted that allowed it to resonate so broadly in the culture. Part of the answer for its widespread approval, I believe, has to do with how It Gets Better promotes secular Christian messages that many Americans accept as commonsense ideas rather than as specifically Christian ones. One example from It Gets Better is the idea of redemptive suffering, the Christian idea that suffering and death can have a purpose, and that, like Christ’s suffering on the cross or Christian martyrs in the Coliseum, one’s trials today can lead to a better tomorrow. But there is no guarantee that traumas lead to anything better, individually or collectively. And yet, many people, including LGBT activists and scholars, promote such ideas even though they likely do not see themselves as reinforcing veiled Christian dominance, which, for me, underscores how insidiously certain aspects of Christianity have shaped our culture and political possibilities.

After I wrote an essay about the religious and racial messages that supported the It Gets Better campaign, I started to think about other times in American history when religion, death, and LGBT politics came together. That line of questioning took me to Matthew Shepard’s murder in 1998. His memorialization and “martyrdom” are saturated with religion—far more explicitly than in the It Gets Better campaign—so I wanted the book to consider this interplay of religion, death, and LGBT politics, what it means to make people into martyrs, and how that process has shaped the parameters of LGBT inclusion in the United States.

KH: You do a really outstanding job of analyzing media — news, film, television, theater — in your book. Were you drawn to this subject by that media, or were you drawn to the media by your subject?

BK: Thank you. To understand the cultural effects of various LGBT “martyrs,” I wanted to examine how they were memorialized, reported on, venerated, and condemned. That inquiry took me to diverse forms of media, often with recurring themes across journalism, film, and theater. I was also interested in analyzing media because many LGBT activists have used media to bring attention to their political issues. With this, the book especially focuses on how queer people of color and transgender activists have used film to try to get the country to care about the ongoing violence done to their communities. Beyond that, I wanted to demonstrate the importance of looking for religion in places far removed from temples and churches. Protestant Christianity’s power, I hope the book shows, spreads beyond the spheres of church and home and is all the more powerful because most people are not taking note of it.

KH: I want to ask you a few questions about some of the concepts and terms you use to make your arguments. The first concept I was hoping to hear more about is “the cultural currency of Christianity” which you use to describe what shaped the way American gay rights activists memorialized Harvey Milk, making him (a Jew) into a “ Christianized martyr for the national gay rights movement.” Can you tell me more about what you mean by “cultural currency”? It seems like a really useful way of talking about the power of religion that isn’t narrowly theological or deterministic.

BK: Exactly. By “the cultural currency of Christianity” I mean that some Christian images, ideas, and rhetoric are so well known in the United States that Americans, including non-Christians and LGBT activists, can use them and find that their target audiences have an immediate reference point that establishes possibilities for recognition and, if desired, political alliance. Put another way, Christianity as “cultural currency” can render people, and activist movements, relatable to the “general” American public. Jewish and Muslim traditions do not have the same level of cultural currency. Harvey Milk was a secular Jewish, Yiddish-speaking, anti-monogamist. To make him appeal to the predominantly Christian country, to both straights and gays, activists tapped into the cultural currency of Christianity. That does not mean they turned him into someone who believed Jesus was God. But it does mean that many downplayed his Jewishness, depicted him as committed to coupled fidelity, and presented him as someone whose death, like Christ’s crucifixion, transformed the world. Multiple activists, playwrights, and museum curators memorialized Milk as both crucified and resurrected. By thinking about the cultural currency of Christianity and how it gets deployed in secular spaces, we can begin to see the narrowness of political projects where people are seen as more valuable if they reflect, or can be made to reflect, recognizable Christian images and ideas.

KH: Your book read, in many ways, as a critique of assimilationist political activism. In your conclusion, you describe how the group Gays Against Guns (GAG), formed in the wake of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, “represented a move away from assimilationist tactics and a turn toward a queer ethic of dismantling society’s norms.” Are you, in a sense, offering a queer ethic(s?) as an alternative kind of politics? Rather than assimilation, a queer ethics of anger, frivolity, disruption, and provocation? Does that sound right? Can you tell me more about what this queer ethic would look like? And how might religion fit in? Are there other examples you’d like to share?

BK: Yes, that sounds right. While I’m not an ethicist, the history of LGBT politics does not seem to suggest that assimilation creates vastly greater sexual or gender freedoms beyond the “freedom to marry.” Certainly, assimilation has benefited some, especially white cisgender gays who are interested in monogamous matrimony and serving in the military. But assimilationist political activism tacitly, and often unwittingly, reinforces the white, Christian, gender-conforming nuclear family as the cultural ideal. A queer political ethic would make visible how the nuclear family is one of the most common sites of violence and trauma in this country. From childhood sexual abuse to domestic violence, as well as cultural pressures to love one’s family no matter how damaging and abusive they become, the family is a fraught and, for many, dangerous institution. But that critique gets overlooked through assimilationist politics, which, I should add, feminist scholars have been saying for decades. That is why I write in the book’s Epilogue that if you want to venerate Harvey Milk, make visible that he was a Jew who rejected the Protestant sexual standard of coupled monogamy. He developed his own sexual ethic that emphasized how communities could become stronger if people felt free to love more than one person at the same time, and where people believed they could be honest with everyone about their concurrent romantic and sexual relationships.

KH: On a related note, your book also read to me as a push toward an intersectional critique of respectability politics. This seemed clearest in your chapter on Matthew Shepard, about whom you say:

In effect, references to [Matthew] Shepard as an “all-American,” “kid next door,” and “anyone’s son,” functioned as coded rhetoric for white, middle class, Christian youth, which served to highlight that had Shepard not been gay he would have been part of—indeed, at the top of—the American social hierarchy.

Which made me think immediately of how black boys and men who have been killed by the police are described so differently, if still religiously. For instance, how the police officer who killed Michael Brown said he looked like “a demon” and The New York Times described him as “no angel” (a line we can add to the list of jaw-dropping headlines and phrases you cite from the paper of record). Can the questions you ask in your book help us think about how to move away from respectability and assimilation and toward (a queer ethic of?) fully valuing lives that aren’t white, middle class, Christian, and monogamous?

BK: I really hope so. We cannot think of this country’s race problem as separate from LGBT politics. It is not a coincidence that the vast majority of murdered transgender women—year after year—are people of color. While writing the book, I wanted people to see how “mainstream” institutions like the New York Times can venerate Matthew Shepard, a white gay college student who was violently assaulted, as nearly perfect and then describe black lesbians who were attacked in a homophobic assault as a violent “gang.” I never needed to turn to places like Fox News to make visible how narrow the parameters of LGBT acceptance have been within “mainstream” America and how those parameters have had much to do with race and, importantly, religion. Feminist, Queer, and Religious Studies scholars have not paid nearly enough attention to the role of religion in shaping cultural ideas about which lives and deaths matter. Race is certainly and inarguably a prominent factor. But so is religion. It is also not a coincidence that Matthew Shepard, the first LGBT American whose death mattered instantly to this country, was a practicing Protestant.

“A Teenager with Promise” by Alexandra Bell at Bennington College, provided on December 8, 2017. Photo: Keegan Ead/Usdan Gallery at Bennington College

KH: Throughout the book, I saw you pulling on a discursive thread that uses the language of “epidemics” to describe both the medical/political stories of HIV and AIDS and the social/political phenomena of bullying, violence against transgender people, and guns. Why do you think we reach for this biological language to describe these problems and in what ways is it harmful or helpful?

BK: Biological language has an appearance of factuality that many people take seriously. HIV/AIDS was certainly a medical epidemic. Ironically, as Anthony Petro has demonstrated, throughout the early years of the AIDS epidemic, various people involved in politics referred to AIDS with religious language and described it as a symptom of God’s displeasure with homosexuality. Rhetorically, activists have garnered attention for bullying, gun violence, and, to a lesser degree, murderous violence against transgender women by describing them as “epidemics.” I am less convinced that such rhetoric and recourse to biological language has produced much cultural change. Gun violence remains a nightmare. For that matter, so does violence against transgender women of color. And, as I explore in the book’s third chapter, I am concerned by how the widespread focus on “bullying” as an “epidemic” disproportionately projects anti-LGBT attitudes onto adolescent “bullies” while concurrently allowing average heterosexual adults to avoid taking responsibility for how they uphold values and institutions that reinforce oppressive sexual and gender hierarchies.

KH: I also wondered how you decided on the terminology of “emblems” and “emblemization.” The concept of emblems seems, to me, to activate thinking about civil religion and who/what can be symbolically sacred, but I wonder where you were drawing it from and how you might want to encourage us to think about other emblems?

BK: My thinking on emblems drew from a rich body of scholarship on martyrdom by people like Elizabeth Castelli and Candida Moss. They make the point that martyrs-as-emblems almost always better reflect the people who do the emblemizing than they do the people who have been emblemized. In other words, martyrs-as-emblems can be changed into more widely respectable figures than they were during their lifetimes. They can also be used to advance political positions that they did not address when they lived. This certainly happened with Harvey Milk, but also with other well-known martyr-emblems like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was also informed by Jewish Studies scholars like Jodi Eichler-Levine and Liora Gubkin who have written on why Anne Frank became the emblematic Jew who American Christians posthumously cared about following the Nazi genocide of six million Jews. Their insights shaped some of my thinking about Tyler Clementi and Matthew Shepard. Emblems are tricky, especially when the goal is to appeal to the country’s dominant class of white, straight Christians. On the one hand, someone like Matthew Shepard seems relatable to white Christians. But how much social change can really take place when the major emblems of the LGBT movement, the “symbolically sacred” as you incisively note, have appeared so similar to America’s white, Christian, gender-normative dominant class?

KH: I wonder if you’re familiar with the Instagram account, The AIDS Memorial, in which people share “Stories of Love, Loss & Remembrance” about loved ones who have died of complications due to AIDS. Do you see this as another facet of the story you’re telling, and/or is this an example of ways that commemoration practices can change as media and culture change?

BK: Yes, and I find that Instagram account quite moving. AIDS history is incredibly important and not discussed or taught nearly enough. The AIDS Memorial Instagram page uses social media to add to our collective archive about a profoundly dark period in this country’s recent past. In many cases, people with AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s were despised and, in many other instances, flagrantly ignored. Countless people with AIDS were abandoned by their families, ignored by hospital employees who refused to touch them, and turned away from funeral homes that did not want a reputation for conducting AIDS funerals. There are also remarkable stories of activism that the AIDS epidemic ignited, and countless tales of lesbians who volunteered to care for dying gay and bisexual men who had no remaining loved ones to look after them. But I do not want to suggest, nor would I support any memorial that suggests, a redemptive reading of America’s AIDS history. The history of AIDS in the United States is a story of vitriolic homophobia, pervasive racism, government negligence, and an overwhelming lack of concern about a horrifying epidemic that devastated the LGBT community.

KH: I also have to ask about Pete Buttigieg. You mention at one point that Matthew Shepard’s mother “insisted that no one would choose to be gay because of the prevalence of anti-gay violence. However, critics of the “born gay” perspective warned that it tacitly implied all other [non-heterosexual] sexualities were an aberration.” Which reminded me of a recent piece by Masha Gessen in The New Yorker in which she responds to how Buttigieg has spoken about his sexuality:

The argument on behalf of gay rights that gay people have no choice but to be gay is humiliating because it assumes that one kind of sexuality is desirable and that any deviation is, at best, acceptable. If it were a choice, the argument implies, only one choice would be valid. This is a basic argument for the right of queer people to exist: because they can’t help it. By giving it a religious framing, Buttigieg presented the humiliation inherent in the argument as something else—humility. Given that the argument is the premise of the political gay-rights movement, it is inevitable that the first openly gay Presidential candidate would speak of his sexuality in these terms. It is also chilling that, at a moment when it seems conceivable, at least for a minute, that a gay man could mount a successful bid for the Presidency, he also has to advance an argument for his right to be.

I wonder how you’ve been thinking about his candidacy and what it says about the discourse and history you outline so clearly in your book?

BK: Pete Buttigieg’s success supports many of my book’s main arguments. Pete Buttigieg is basically Matthew Shepard grown up and living a political life. Like Shepard, Buttigieg is white, gender-conforming, and importantly, a practicing Protestant member of the Episcopal Church. He is a safe, “normal” gay, made more palatable to the heterosexual public through his mainline Protestantism. On the national stage, the relatable gay American, it certainly seems, needs to appear religious in ways that align with the ideals of white, mainline Protestant Christianity, which, again, underscores the cultural currency of Christianity. Buttigieg would not have been as successful as the first openly gay presidential candidate if he were a Reform Jew. He frequently talks about his Christianity in ways that resonate broadly. Effectively, the committed gay Christian comforts those who worry about gays and their sexual morality. And therein lies one more significant hurdle for mainstream LGBT acceptance, especially for gay men, and that is the issue of sex. Sure, Donald Trump can have extramarital sex with porn stars, but that would not fly for Buttigieg since many straight Americans, even so-called “accepting” ones, are uncomfortable with queers who flaunt the Protestant sexual standard of coupled monogamy. With Matthew Shepard, LGBT activists dealt with this concern by turning the 21-year-old Shepard into a nonsexual adolescent, frequently calling him a “kid” and “anyone’s son.” Buttigieg avoids prolonged fixations on his sexual habits by saying his marriage to his husband brought him closer to God. Fear not skittish straights, this success story suggests, for Buttigieg is a gay American who will keep his sexuality contained to his monogamous marital bed and obey the vows he made in front of God in his Midwestern Protestant church.

KH: I’d love to hear about what you’re working on next! Do you have something in the works

BK: Yes, I am currently co-editing a book with Nora Rubel that explores the television show Transparent and what that show reveals about transgender representation, queer politics, Jews in America, and religion in the second decade of the 21st century. It takes my interest in media, religion, and queer politics in an exciting and rich direction. I am also co-writing a chapter for an edited volume with Samira Mehta where we are comparing the history of Jewish institutional responses to interfaith marriage with Jewish institutional responses to same-sex marriage. And, I am working on an essay that explores the religious and queer encounters of Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the first black woman to serve as Surgeon General of the United States who President Clinton forced to resign in 1994 when she said children should be taught about masturbation.

KH: Because you are clearly so interested in popular culture and media, I wonder if you could tell us what you have read, watched, or listened to recently that you would recommend readers pick up (once they’ve finished your book, obviously)?

BK: Yes, first, and this is not only because of my current writing projects, but I think everyone should watch both Transparent and Pose. They deal with transgender representation and queer politics rather differently. Neither is perfect, but I recommend both. Transparent’s portrayal of Jewishness—as a religion, as an ethnicity, as an identity rooted in historical trauma—is layered and compelling. Pose does not address religion as much, although religion appears in the series, but it does a fine job of illustrating some queer history from the AIDS epidemic—especially that of black drag, trans, and gay people in the New York City ball scene. For analysis of present-day politics involving gender, sexuality, and religion, check out Jay Michaelson’s writing in the Daily Beast. And, for current takes on contemporary queer life, I recommend following Slate’s “Outward” articles and podcast, and Andrea Long Chu (@theorygurl) on Twitter.

***

Brett Krutzsch is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Haverford College. His scholarship explores religion, sexuality, queer history, and U.S. politics. He is the author of Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019).

The post Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics appeared first on The Revealer.

The Goddess Ambika Leading the Eight Mother Goddesses in Battle Against the Demon Raktabija, Folio from a Devimahatmya (Glory of the Goddess), early 18th century Book/manuscript; Painting; Watercolor, Opaque watercolor and ink on paper, 4 1/2 x 8 in. (11.43 x 20.32 cm) Made in: Nepal Gift of Paul F. Walter (M.70.70) to en:LACMA

I.

“Those of us who live with disabilities are at the forefront of the larger discussion of what constitutes a valued life. What is a life worth living?”

—Kenny Fries, “The Nazis’ First Victims Were the Disabled”

The New York Times, Sept. 13, 2017

Several months ago, I watched an interview with two North Korean refugees about the process of their resettlement in South Korea. They spoke in some detail about their circuitous routes of escape — one through China and Mongolia, another through Vietnam and Laos — as seekers of asylum never fully afforded state protection. I do not know the circumstances behind the video; government-sponsored repatriation is never innocent. But the interviewees spoke openly about their struggles to assimilate into South Korean society: stigmatized for their provincial accents, suspected of espionage and disloyalty, shocked by the sudden transition from pre-industrial to advanced capitalist society — modernity’s most classical narrative.

While describing the difference in values between the two cultures, one of the interviewees revealed that he had attempted suicide in his last years of high school. When pressed, the young man, slender and pale, with a full head of curly black hair, replied that he was driven to despair by having to compete with his fellow students to get ahead in life. Not only was he at an educational disadvantage, he was also chronically ill, he said, since he suffered from hemophilia. When I heard this, my heart sank and my stomach leapt, clashing at the nexus of pity and fear. Hemophilia is a rare genetic blood disorder that affects the clotting process, and requires constant access to expensive medication in order to prevent hemorrhage triggered by small injuries. It’s also one I know well: I have a severe version of the disorder, Type A, Factor VIII deficiency. For this man to have been a stateless refugee with such a condition, whatever the degree of severity, is almost unimaginable. That he mentioned it first in the context of his academic anxiety is, to me, even more troubling. What kind of society transforms disability into desperation? And what kind of political economy structures it?

As an X-linked trait, hemophilia primarily affects men, while women are carriers. The Hindu in me believes that this is karmic retribution for generations of patriarchy. My mother says I was a leech in a past life. Most modern histories of hemophilia highlight its presence in the royal families of Britain and Russia, the Romanovs in particular. For years my only point of reference had been Prince Alexei and his wild starets, Rasputin: the hypnotic healing procedures, the hastening of the end of Tsarist rule, the horrible murders of the royal family. More recently I was surprised to find a hemophiliac in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a gender-fluid librarian who drives a flashy sports car and offers mysterious advice. But there are other genealogies as well. Sanskrit legends tell of the demon Raktabīja, Bloodseed, who fought with the great goddess Durgā in cosmic battle. She sliced him into pieces, but from every drop of his blood that hit the ground, another Raktabīja sprang up, stronger than ever. The goddess finally defeated him by calling upon the dark, ferocious, bloodthirsty Kālī, who sped about lapping up each drop before it sprouted. In this Age of Discord, perhaps hemophilia is Raktabīja’s return. After all, gods and demons reincarnate too.

Having hemophilia was an intensely private thing for me as a child. Of course, my friends knew, and were caring enough to maintain the line between prankish and protective. What I mean by “private” is the sense that what I had was uniquely my own. I never entertained the idea of attending one of the many summer camps for young people with blood disorders that the local children’s hospital offered. Besides the fact that there was little chance of meeting girls at a hemophilia camp, I did not want to meet anyone who presented a different picture of something that I thought was impenetrably individual. What I had could not become an object of shared experience; it was a silent, concealed badge of difference, yet one by which I refused to be defined. For there was also the fear of being marked forever as physically other. Varieties of this fear have pursued me throughout my life. It is easy to understand the teenage turmoil of feeling unattractive and unwanted. But there are also ethical vulnerabilities. As an adult aspiring to solidarity with grassroots activists, I have had to wonder: How do I put my body on the line, when it is the weakest defense I possess?

If I have never thought to reflect openly on what it means to live with hemophilia, it’s because I’m one of the lucky ones. I am fortunate to have the resources, the privileges, and the support I need to sustain a healthy, happy life. I grew up in a comfortable home, never wanted for daily needs, and was supported financially throughout my education. Apart from a strong reluctance to travel, an indefensible hatred of exercise, and a progressive limp from moderate arthritis, the psychological and physical effects of my condition have been manageable. To maintain this fragile equilibrium, however, involves daily intravenous infusions of a wildly expensive synthetic clotting agent. Over the years, veins tire, scars congeal, and, more metaphorically, nerves fray. Some disabilities are only invisible until they show: in drooping eyes, in punctured skin, in hesitant steps. It is not pleasant to think that one encounters the world deficient, that to become “normal” requires daily, painful artifice. But there is no normal, there are only shades of injury, some genetic, some generational. At the clinic I used to attend in New York City, I was the model patient because I could sit with my legs folded. The waiting room was a portrait of old white men in wheelchairs, arthritic black men with pronounced limps, grizzled Latino men with Medicaid wristbands, humorless Asian men with rickety walkers. Blood is the great leveler; disorders do not discriminate.

Capitalism, on the other hand, does, with spectacular brutality. Two years ago, the homegrown plutocracy called the U.S. Senate tried to strip millions of citizens from access to affordable healthcare. As if it were not enough to try and survive in a society that only values humans for their productive capacity. Freedom is a historically hollow word for many people in this country whose bodies have been chained to the unholy machinery of civilization. As for those bodies unable to serve this all-consuming fire, to what god will they appeal? In the case of one Korean student, the stigma of sickness in a capitalist culture nearly killed him, when statelessness did not.

As a professor, then, I am compelled to foreground the health and welfare of my students above all other considerations. What is a humanities education if it does not resist these inhumanities? The pressure to achieve individual success at the expense of others conditions much of contemporary academic life. My disciplinary training compels me differently. Philology, or in the broadest sense, how to make sense of texts, requires collaboration with the living and the dead; one reads with you, the other reads through you. We do not simply work together, but rely on each other, just like I hold my partner’s hand to walk when my arthritis flares up. For years I believed that my choice of intellectual career was separate from my physical condition. Now I wonder, with J.M. Coetzee: Is the act of slow reading meant for a slow man?^[1]

II.

“It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.”

—Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

When I was a child, my Sanskrit teacher, a four-foot-eleven, sprightly woman, with a Ph.D. and a persistent wheeze, told me a funny cāṭu, or clever verse, attributed to the twelfth-century poet and philosopher Śrīharṣa. As a young boy, Śrīharṣa was so prolific and so unintelligible that his uncle gave him some lentil soup to dull his senses a bit. After a while he asked Śrīharṣa how he was doing, only to receive the following complex alliterative reply meant to resemble chewing, one that I still remember by heart:

aśeṣaśemuṣīmoṣamāṣam aśnāmi mātula

“Uncle, I’m noshing on mash so my mind may be mushed.”

Recently I happened upon this hemistich again in a book on Śrīnātha, the poet who wrote a Telugu version of Śrīharṣa’s intensely learned and beautiful epic poem, the Naiṣadhīyacarita. I suspect that the verse, like my teacher, was of Telugu origin. Only what I always thought she was trying to tell me was not that I was precocious, but that it was okay to nibble on snacks while I studied. The misremembered lesson had its own moral, one quite appropriate to Sanskrit culture: learning and pleasure are equally important, and, ideally, they would become indistinguishable. Her kindness and patience with me, and her delight in my unsteady progress, was its own evidence.

The reason I value philological education is just this: that it is pleasurable. The ethics of that pleasure, that opening up and relishing, is clear to me in a world of dangerously narrowing possibilities, in which pleasure, like labor and resources, is squeezed out of the people and redistributed upward for a predatory few. It was the most insurgent philologist of them all, Malcolm X, who exemplified the potent combination of a love for learning widely and a passion for fighting injustice:

You can believe me that if I had the time right now, I would not be one bit ashamed to go back into any New York City public school and start where I left off at the ninth grade, and go on through a degree. Because I don’t begin to be academically equipped for so many of the interests that I have. For instance, I love languages. I wish I were an accomplished linguist. […] I would just like to study. I mean ranging study, because I have a wide-open mind. I’m interested in almost any subject you can mention.^[2]

Malcolm’s activism on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised was enabled by his already extraordinary skill with language, from reading the dictionary cover-to-cover in prison to debating conservative commentators on television.^[3] And yet he sought academic qualification in the subject, not for prestige, but to satisfy his curiosity. He located his humanity — or his princeliness, to follow Ossie Davis ^[4]— in his ability to take back language and history from their abusers, to give them back to the people. Philology was at once pleasure and power. Could it also be politics?

There is a story that circulates among Sanskritists of an apocryphal meeting between Erich Frauwallner, the Nazi German scholar of Buddhism, and Sylvain Lévi, the French Jewish scholar of Indian religion and literature. The story goes that during the Nazi invasion of Paris, Frauwallner accompanied an SS raid in order to seek out the great Lévi. When he found his residence he instructed everyone to wait outside. After engaging Lévi in a long conversation about Sanskrit philology, he departed, and told the guards that there was no one home and they should go on their way.

The meeting was impossible for even more reasons than the most obvious: that Lévi died in 1935, years before the invasion. But I think the moral is more than simply that respect for learning transcends regimes of hatred and violence. It is that when the world is falling apart around you, or you yourself may be complicit in inflicting unspeakable suffering, one of the most radical methods of resistance is to stop. Philology here is not just about slowing down but actually stopping to think, to turn over different possibilities, to debate options, to explore the intertextual archive, to enter the minds of those who stopped long ago.

The late Srinivas Aravamudan, in his book Guru English, likens the study of the humanities under the threat of nuclear war to the setting of the Bhagavad Gita, the philosophical conversation between Krishna and Arjuna, which takes place in between two armies (senayor ubhayor madhye) arrayed for apocalyptic battle (yoddhukāmān avasthitān). It isn’t clear how long time stops, whether they are simply prolonging the inevitable. Krishna says that everyone present has already been slated to die (mayaivaite nihatāḥ pūrvam eva). But in those hours of poetry and questioning, the reader experiences an eternity, from grand cosmic visions to inner moral psychology, that may revise completely what they think is real and true.

Before returning to complete my thoughts on disability and education, I want to share what Sanskrit philology looks like in practice, or, to paraphrase Harunaga Isaacson, “the task of understanding people’s minds.” A few years ago, a colleague and I teamed up to conjecture a fix for a corrupt line in the Gurunāthaparāmarśa, or Remembering My Teacher, by Madhurāja, who was writing in Madurai, in present-day Tamilnadu, some time after the twelfth century. Madhurāja’s poem was in praise of the tenth century Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta, whose writings made their way to the south of India not long after their composition. Verse 29 in the Kashmir Sanskrit Texts Series (KSTS) edition reads as follows:

madhurā maheśva***-kathā-makaranda-dhunī-

parimala-majjana-dhvani-pavitrita-bhakta-janā |

abhinavagupta-nātha-vadanāmbuja-vāg-bhramarī

śiva śiva gāḍha-mūḍham api māṃ mukharīkurute ||

Even without knowing the rather rare seventeen-syllable meter nardaṭaka (aka kokilaka), it is clear that there are problems in the first quarter of the verse. The compound, comprised of individual words separated by hyphens and linked by many possible relationships of meaning, is obviously missing syllables, which I marked here with asterisks. The splitting of the first word from it disturbs what should otherwise be an elegant, elongated two-line compound meant to agree syntactically with the compound in the third quarter. The meter, a fixed pattern of heavy and light syllables, at least provides a structure within which to emplot the required syllables. But what could they be, and where, and why?

What we want the verse to say, what it wants to tell us, is an extended conceit about the bee that is the speech (vāg-bhramarī) perched on Abhinavagupta’s lotus lips (vadanāmbuja). This bee/speech has the amazing ability to turn even a rank idiot (gāḍha-mūḍham) like me (Madhurāja) into an eloquent speaker, abuzz with words (mukharīkurute). For those who hang around it (bhakta-janā) are purified (pavitrita) by its very sound (dhvani), its contented drone of absorption (majjana) in the fragrance (parimala) emitted by the stream of honey (makaranda-dhunī) that is the discourse (kathā) ** the great Lord (maheś[v]a) ** sweet (madhurā) ** … and suddenly it all breaks down. Madhurāja, though, had proven himself a close reader of Abhinava’s works, and frequently seemed to refer to their content. So when, in the course of a completely unrelated discussion, my colleague showed me verse 5 of Abhinavagupta’s Īśvarapratyabhijñāvivṛtivimarśinī, something stood out to me:

pūrṇavyākaraṇāvagāhanaśuciḥ sattarkamūlonmiṣat-

prajñākalpalatāvivekakusumair abhyarcya hṛddevatām |

pīyūṣāsavasārasundaramahāsāhityasauhityabhāg

viśrāmyāmy aham īśvarādvayakathākāntāsakhaḥ sāmpratam ||

Here Abhinavagupta talks about his education as a kind of progressive (and transgressive) Tantric ritual. First “purified by a full bath in grammar study,” he worships the deity in his heart with “flowers of critical thinking, plucked from the vine of wisdom, blossoming at the root of sound logic.” Then, having drunk to his heart’s content “of beautiful literature, the wine of ambrosia,” he now reposes in the arms of his lover, namely “discourse on the non-duality of the Lord (Śiva).” This last quote is what I have bolded in the compound in the final quarter. If we splice that phrase into Madhurāja’s verse, everything makes sense, metrically and semantically:

madhura-maheśvarādvayakathā-makaranda-dhunī-

parimala…

Now the “honey” (makaranda) is clearly metaphorically identified with discourse on the non-duality of Śiva, a mainstay of Abhinavagupta’s philosophical theology. Moreover, the adjective madhura, sweet, can be safely repositioned at the beginning of the compound. Not only does my conjecture fit the meter, it can also be plausibly explained as another of Madhurāja’s clever allusions.

Before we could congratulate ourselves on a historic accomplishment, however, we realized that V. Raghavan’s 1949 edition of the Gurunāthaparāmarśa had more or less the correct reading the whole time. It was simply not typed in properly in the KSTS edition, which made use of two additional manuscripts but apparently little use of proofreading. Raghavan’s manuscript read madhuramaheśvarakathādvaya-, which he emended, a bit heavy-handed, to madhuramaheśatādvayakathā-. I think ours works better; it corrects the original metathesis and it maintains the reference to Abhinavagupta’s verse in the Īśvarapratyabhijñāvivṛtivimarśinī. But in this instance, the scribal error was a thoroughly modern one. I recently coined a German portmanteau for this exact situation, Traurichtigkeit (traurig + richtigkeit = sad-correct-ness): that feeling when you discover that an emendation you made is corroborated by another textual witness, only to realize that you can no longer display your genius in published writing.

There is still a lesson here somewhere. Maybe it is about paying attention to the misprisions of modernity. Maybe it’s just that Raghavan read everything. For my colleague and I to pause, to step out of time and into Madhurāja’s mind (and, in an unintended way, into Raghavan’s), was to break with what Paul Griffiths would call “consumerist reading.”^[5] Although we did not replace it with religious reading, and allow our heart and mind to be nourished by the source text, that did not lessen the experience. For it was enough to think the way another person thought, to bring them into our gathering, to treat them as a companion: an intellectual exercise, begun in friendship, ending in friendship. Philology, as Victor Klemperer knew well, has unexpected consequences.^[6] It may not save us; nothing will save us; but every act that prises truth from the grips of obfuscation is a noble one in these dark times.

III.

“All you who walk by on the road, look and see, if there is any sorrow like my sorrow.”

—Lamentations 1:12

The image of Christ on the cross puts me in mind of a great many things: the ultimate symbol of universal suffering, the rejection of the infinite desirability of mortal life, the terrible consequence of nonviolent resistance to power. But sometimes, when I see that broken, beautiful body, I think of the hemophiliac. Both, after all, are drenched in blood. For the severe among us, the blood spills out spontaneously, not to wash away the sins of the world but to stain it, to remind it of our presence. The more invisible the disability, the more the desire to be seen. The hemophilologist, then, is a kind of secular witness, offering an account of truth, pain, sensitivity, and care, all at once — a virtue of the most humane scholars I have known.

That I once sought to separate my intellectual and physical lives, and now want to integrate them openly, is neither new nor unique. It is simply the sort of reflection I think is urgent for a society — civil, academic, and otherwise — that is so frayed and fractured, unable to reckon with the violence and sickness of its past and present. It is not enough to have had a stable, safe life, though that is the bare minimum that we must demand for all; life, to be life, has to be a flourishing, for the poor, for the weak, for the disabled. If I, motivated by the recognition of the care I have received, am trying to cultivate the same within my closest relationships, I see no reason not to have the same attitude toward the texts I read, the students I teach, and the writing I never publish.

I was born on the wrong end of a genetic malfunction, a code misread, a link snapped off. By no effort or merit of my own, I have been made to feel whole. So I try, and fail, try again, fail again, and fail better, to direct that sense of fullness to others. Sometimes those others are, like me, corrupted texts. Sometimes they are loved ones. And sometimes, because life is unkind, they are just out for blood. I can help with that.

***

^[1] J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man (Penguin, 2006).

^[2] Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, As Told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine, 1965), pp. 387-388.

^[3] “City Desk,” Chicago, 1963: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcjJEgUnsHc.

^[4] “And we will know him then for what he was and is – a Prince – our own black shining Prince! – who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.” Ossie Davis, “Eulogy.”

^[5] Paul Griffiths, Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (Oxford, 1999).

^[6] Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist’s Notebooks (Continuum, 2006).

***

Anand Venkatkrishnan is Assistsnt Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His book in progress, Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa in Indian Intellectual History, examines the relationship of bhakti, religion as lived affect, with philosophy as intellectual practice. It shows how Sanskrit scholars in early modern India allowed personal religious commitments to feature in and reshape their scholastic writing, a genre that was generally impervious to everyday life. His second project, Left-Hand Practice, studies the writings of a set of loosely related religious intellectuals in early 20th C. India who had significant ties with the political left. Anand fills his spare time with sports commentary, pop culture, and translations of Sanskrit poetry at https://apurvaracana.tumblr.com/.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Hemophilology appeared first on The Revealer.

Lisbon

This is a piece about failures.

My failures, mostly, as a thinker and a scholar, but also the failure of my field and the failure of all of us to think what will come in the next ten, twenty, thirty, hundred years.

Before I wrote this piece about failure, I had been failing to write—or failing to finish writing, which amounts to very nearly the same thing—for the better part of a year. I had spent the previous three years as a postdoc at a university that reminded me of nothing so much as the princess in that old fairytale who drops rubies and roses from her mouth whenever she speaks. Everything was nice. The students were attentive, the grounds were immaculate, my colleagues held warm, chatty happy hours, and my research budget let me tip lavishly every time I took a cab (a cab!) at conferences. It was so nice that I was always naively surprised when it rained. In my memory, it was perpetually an early autumn afternoon, with just the right angle of sunlight to fill me with cheerful thoughts of interesting work well begun—a sanitized vanitas painting that was all fruits and lutes, and no skulls. But my field was collapsing, a little faster than other fields, and at the end of my three years I still didn’t have a permanent job. Just a book, written as an intervention into a field I no longer believed in and which certainly didn’t believe in me. Without a place in the profession I had trained in, all of those happy hours turned out to be worth less than I could have imagined, and the people I had spent three years alongside almost without exception vanished from my life. I was someone until I wasn’t.

Look, it’s/ just the old story of a heart that won’t call it quits/ whatever the odds, quixotic. It’s just one that’ll/ break nobody’s heart, even if the grizzled colonel/ pitches from his steed in a cavalry charge, in a battle/ that won’t make him a statue. It is the hell/ of ordinary, unrequited love.

I bring all of this up, not as preface to yet another quit lit piece but because it is important for understanding what happened to me next: I lost faith in thinking.

Oh, I had plenty of things I wanted to think about. I had this project I was starting about the refusal to forgive, not as a sign of pathological resentment but as an ethical stance in its own right. I had a short piece I wanted to expand, which argued that my field’s obsession with Christianity’s persistence in secularism was at once a way of imagining how we would be viewed by future generations looking back on our world after the devastation of climate change and a fantasy of Western culture as something that could never die. Most of all, I had the promise held out by the end of my book, where I argued that all of the forms of critique that had driven academic work had lost their luster because the persuasiveness of critique was the product of a historical moment that was already passing as I wrote. I hadn’t proposed a new paradigm. In fact, I had rejected the hope of a new Derrida or a new Foucault as just another iteration of Foucault’s theory of epistemic breaks. We should, I argued, abandon the fantasy of a savior thinker and fix our gaze on the questions that matter to us. And why not? I was supposed to have a career in front of me to think about those questions with colleagues across the country.

It had all seemed very important when I was dreaming up new projects over lunches with colleagues. But what were these projects worth outside of the academy?  They were mostly different ways to think about the problems with academic thinking. That had been fine—on point, even—when I had imagined a long academic career stretching before me but was I really going to keep writing these sorts of articles after my intellectual community had vanished around me? Did I value these conversations enough to keep showing up in journals and at conferences as “an independent scholar,” hoping the five people left in my field who still had jobs would care? Ought I even continue contributing to academic conversations? I had always sworn that I would not adjunct for a living; the academy could either pay me a living wage or I would leave for something, anything, else. Writing seemed like more of the same. It was labor and I didn’t much feel like contributing any more of it for free to an industry that was cutting full-time jobs for faculty while saddling students with debt.

And so I made progress on none of these projects—not forgiveness, not climate change, not critique. I hadn’t even managed the shorter items on my task list, like reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s Sixth Extinction. Her luminous dying frogs reproached me.

Instead, every afternoon at lunchtime I made the walk from my office to my apartment, where I would wrap my arms around the enormous barrel chest of my short, ginger pit bull, rest my cheek against her white neck, and tell her that I loved her. She filled me with infinite tenderness, this silly little dog who liked to sidle up to strangers and drop down on one shoulder with her rear in the air—this sweet, kind, vulnerable creature who had come so close to dying amid the wails of a concrete kill shelter because people were afraid of her strength. I sometimes suspected strangers thought she was ugly, with her chiseled haunches, hollow cheekbones, and Hapsburg underbite, but loved her all the more fiercely for it. Scratching her chin and looking into her limpid eyes, I told her she was beautiful and I would always protect her. She gave me mute, uncomprehending kisses in reply, and we both were happy.

That autumn we went on long, rambling walks together through the Village. Sometimes I silently raged against everything that had happened in recent months. Mostly I spent my time imagining a heaven I didn’t believe in where I would finally tell my dog in words she could understand how much I loved her and how very sorry I was for all the ways that I had failed her.

***

Sometimes it happened on these walks that we would meet a woman who sold water bottles from a cooler with the cheerful crescendo of an auctioneer. “One dollar, one dollar, one dollar!” I had seen her a few times before we officially met, but absently filed her away as someone who catered to tourists caught off guard by the brutal summer heat. We were both regulars in the park, like the men who played chess for money, or the pair who sang bluegrass with deep burred voices, but according to the silent logic of public spaces our orbits never intersected. One day, though, her eyes focused on Faraday trotting at my side and, without warning, she glowed. I had only experienced something like it once before, when I was twenty and staying in a hostel in Amsterdam. The janitor, a tall, loping man of fifty locked eyes on me and smiled—not hesitantly, as if he thought I might be an acquaintance he was surprised to see, no, but joyously, as if I were his dearest friend from childhood, unexpectedly turned up decades after he had given up all hope of meeting again in this life. That man had spent the next three hours telling me the story of his time in the Black Panthers and the lonely years when he bought a microwave for the novelty of smelling popcorn; this woman dropped to her knees and opened her arms with a ringing cry of, “Hi, baby!” Faraday, who loves nothing better than to launch herself into a stranger’s arms, began skittering her claws and pulling against her leash, looking for all the world like a real life Scooby Doo winding up to bolt across pavement that pinned her obstinately in place.

Her name was Cherelle. It would be going too far to say we became friends, even after she started showing me pictures of her cats and offering me free water for Faraday on those days when our walks barely lasted three blocks because the sidewalk scorched her paws. Rather, for me she became a kind of benevolent embodiment of the city. I knew nothing about her life and I doubt for her part that she remembered my name. But we had singled each other out, among all of the street hawkers and dog walkers, and met as two women sharing a conspiratorial chat about how this obviously was the best dog and this weather really was too damn hot, even for someone who sold water for a living.

Minimal as it was, our relationship grew to have an outsized significance to me in those months. I was burnt out, raw, and lonely, and it helped to have something in my life that was good in an uncomplicated, untaxing way. Two people meet. A puppy capers between them. They smile at her antics and part, each feeling seen. Nothing much has happened, but what has happened wasn’t cruel or burdened with expectations. It was better that we smiled and chatted than not. And how many things could anyone really say that about with certainty?

Only gradually did I realize she had also made a type of thinking impossible for me.

For months I had been trying to write a piece on climate change. I knew how I wanted it to start. Three ships bob on the ocean a hundred miles outside of Lisbon, Portugal. It’s early, maybe half past nine, on All Saint’s Day, 1755. The men are going about their normal morning routine, ropes or mops clutched in their hands, when suddenly they are falling, falling toward a deck that has jumped eighteen inches beneath them. On another ship, all of the cabin windows shatter at once, with the sound of an explosion. On the third, their cannons jump from the force of the shock. The men get up and peer after the enormous wave speeding toward Lisbon, troubled.

In Lisbon, it is one of the busiest days of the year. The rural poor have flooded into the city to celebrate morning mass in the great cathedrals. Those who live in the city have banked their hearths, leaving breakfast to warm over the coals while they are out. An English vicar is out for his morning walk, when he is heaved forward, flailing for anything he can grasp for support. And the city below him crumples.

They have no words for what has just happened. We know now that it was an earthquake, larger than the San Francisco earthquake of 1904, larger than the Haitian earthquake of 2010. But for the people who filed into church that morning, it must have seemed as if the landscape had spontaneously invented a whole new way to die—the way we might feel if oxygen suddenly vanished in San Francisco. So they run for the shore, begging the ships in the harbor to save them from the earth that has revolted against them.

As they reached the shore, an enormous wave—not just a tsunami but a tele-tsunami—came crashing down, washing away those who had escaped to the shore. Numbers are imprecise but scholars estimate that between 900 and 3,000 people were swept away as they awaited help on the shore.

After the flood came the fire, the most devastating in human costs of all the catastrophes. It was started by candles and coals from the hearth, knocked into wooden homes from the earthquake. The temperature grew so high as the fires merged that they began sucking the oxygen into a vacuum. Many of those trapped under the rubble suffocated or burned alive. Some skulls appear to have exploded from the heat. Opportunistic arsonists, looking for a chance to loot in the distraction, made everything all the worse.

My interest, the centerpiece of the climate change piece I had been imagining, was about what happened next.

The Lisbon Earthquake

Lisbon horrified Enlightenment Europe. Horrified it because the devastation was so total; horrified it because it was a reminder of all the things the new advances in science could not protect Europe from; horrified it because it was so senseless. Witnesses couldn’t even take solace in the idea that Lisbon had been singled out for divine retribution because of its especial sinfulness, as a kind of new Sodom. First, because Portugal wasn’t particularly sinful, not really. By some estimates, close to 10% of the population belonged to some religious order at the time, whether a convent, monastery, or priesthood. The people, too, were devout Catholics; the death tolls proved it. Some of the worst casualty rates occurred among those attending mass in the great cathedrals at the moment the earthquake struck. Second, because Portugal had been overtaken by a de facto dictator in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the Marquês de Pombal, who was very interested in rebuilding the city and not at all interested in humoring the cries to prostrate themselves before God. In fact, he was so hostile to traditional theological breast beating that he had an elderly Jesuit priest, Father Gabriel Malagrida, arrested, strangled and burnt at the stake for urging the Portuguese to repent to God. It made no difference to the Marquês that much of the surrounding population considered Malagrida very like a saint. Theology had to give way to state planning.

By far the most famous response to the earthquake was Voltaire’s. Shaken, the great skeptic wrote a poem commemorating the event. “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, Or an Examination of the Axiom ‘All is Well’” has none of the caustic wit and flippancy expected from the man who was reputed to have said on his deathbed, when asked by a priest to renounce Satan, “Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies.” Rather, it is earnest, outraged, troubled. Railing against a pious imagined interlocutor, the narrator asks,

To that appalling spectacle of woe,

Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate

The iron laws that chain the will of God”?

Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:

“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?

What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived

That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?

Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice

Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

The poem traveled.

Specifically, it traveled to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who responded to Voltaire with a letter that has become famous in certain circles. After reproaching Voltaire for snatching away any comfort he might find in the tragedy, Rousseau goes on to argue that even seemingly natural evils, like earthquakes, are typically our own fault. “Without leaving your Lisbon subject,” he begins:

Concede, for example, that it was hardly nature who assembled there twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories. If the residents of this large city had been more evenly dispersed and less densely housed, the losses would have been fewer or perhaps none at all. Everyone would have fled at the first shock, and would have been seen two days later, twenty leagues away and as happy as if nothing had happened. But we have to stay and expose ourselves to further tremors, many obstinately insisted, because what we would      have to leave behind is worth more than what we could carry away. How many unfortunates perished in this disaster for wanting to take—one his clothing, another his papers, a third his money? They know so well that a person has become the least part of himself, and that he is hardly worth saving if all the rest is lost.

Rousseau wrote this frenzied letter five years after his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences won the Academy of Dijon’s essay prize by arguing that advances in science and culture had corrupted, not purified human morals, and one year after his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality attributed the fall of human nature to a diseased need for the esteem of others, exacerbated by the invention of property.  So it is a harsh assessment of the ways luxury and unnatural social relations can distort human priorities, but not the uncomplicated castigation of victims that it seems.

Still, Rousseau has been roundly condemned in the history of philosophy for a response that is read as at once dismissive and cruel. His impulse to view the earthquake as morally neutral is familiar enough but the pivot to blaming victims for their own deaths, however equivocal and complicated that move may be, carries the whiff of self-protective terror. It is a denial of contingency, an assertion that bad fortune could have been prevented if the victim had only known better or lived better or been more careful. It’s a comforting move and it is even a consistent move, given Rousseau’s broader romanticization of pastoral life, but it is a morally indefensible move.

Or so it seemed.

The Lisbon Earthquake

One of the peculiar ironies of the last decade is that Rousseau’s argument has seen a resurgence in conversations about climate change. Few people overtly shame victims of natural disasters for their shallow attachment to material goods, true, but the idea that a disaster is only a disaster because of human action is surprisingly widely accepted. It takes different forms. Some argue that disasters exacerbate income inequality, hurting those who were already economically vulnerable more than their more prosperous neighbors. Others point to Haiti’s collapse in the wake of its 2010 earthquake as an example of a social disaster, made worse by extreme poverty, mass crowding in slums and poor building materials, all due to centuries of slavery, economic blockades, and the reparations the Haitians were forced to pay to the French for loss of property (in which the French included their lost slaves). The tsunami of 2004 was likewise a human disaster, made worse by the decisions to decimate mangrove forests and coral reefs, both of which would have buffered the impact of the storm. Even Obama acknowledged that Katrina was the type of disaster it was because those living in the lowest-lying, most vulnerable areas were often the poorest, with the least resources to leave the city.

And on, and on. Though no one referenced the precedent, Rousseau has been vindicated. The argument that once seemed so self-evidently cruel and immoral before—disasters are only disasters because we insist on living in the wrong places, in the wrong ways—is now skimmed over as a truism by academics on the evening news.  The types of moral failings are different, as are the ways each society has gone awry, but the intuition is the same. Natural disasters are human disasters, created by human moral failings.

Rousseau’s response to Lisbon makes an interesting parallel to the present. His debate with Voltaire raises questions about the role of theology in our current understanding of disaster, our dependence on old explanations for an increasingly new problem, the “correct” vision of society we have deviated from, and our understanding of human action that makes us assume “man-made disaster” is the same as “preventable.” All fascinating, but what of it? What was the actual value of knowing our talking points about disaster had a history stretching back to the eighteenth century?  What can historicizing do or explain about a moment unprecedented in our history? What should I make of my desire to historicize a moment that threatens to destroy history?

Mostly, though, I stumbled when trying to write this piece in those early autumn months because I couldn’t imagine what the value of such a project was to Cherelle. Cherelle, with a washcloth draped over her buzzed blonde head and water dripping on to her lime green tank top, trying to scrape together a living selling disposable plastic water bottles she bought in bulk at Costco to tourists scurrying to the closest air conditioned building. It would be her apartment that flooded in the East Village, her refrigerator that lost power, the same refrigerator I imagined her painstakingly piling water bottles into the night before she packed them into her cooler and hauled them to the park. How would any of my thoughts—true or untrue—help her when that moment came? What will she care about my theories of Rousseau and Lisbon when the water comes?

***

A few months into our rambling walks, I had to give a talk at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). I had been invited to speak at a panel celebrating the end of University of Chicago’s Postmodernism and Religion series. I had very little to say about postmodernism as a category. It had once meant a great deal to me, back when I was twenty and first entering the field. Now, it seemed one more mostly dead debate, Frankenstein’s monster twitching feebly in the coffin while the funeral attendees politely pretended not to notice. Still, the series had been started by one of my graduate school advisers, a complicated, controversial man who nonetheless had shown me great kindness in his own gruff way. I was inclined to be grateful to loyalty where I found it and cautiously pleased by the opportunity to sum up what I thought was being lost with my field. I had always thought of leaving the academy as the inverse of the old childhood trick of imagining your own funeral with your parents weeping and wailing over your tasteful corpse in regret for how cruel they had been. It was a funeral, no doubt, but one where no one attended. What, after all, was one more young scholar giving up the dream of the tenure track?  This talk was, if nothing else, a way to ambush a room full of scholars with my wake. In my exit, too, I was luckier than most driven out of the academy.

And what a room it was! There were at least a hundred people there, possible even two.   The talk itself made something of a stir, not from the content so much as a moment in the Q&A. A man had stood up and asked why it was, when he was a young scholar, that philosophy of religion had been cool but now, twenty years later, it was embarrassing to tell people what he worked on. (I salute you, sir, whoever you were.) With my old roommate and co-panelist elbowing me in the ribs, I stood up and blurted out that the field had died because it hated women and kept giving all its jobs to white men writing books about Hegel. It was true—I could only name three women and two people of color in thirteen years who had gotten tenure track jobs in philosophy of religion (though some had made softer landings in ethics or African-American religions, which most programs in philosophy of religion treated as a separate field altogether)—but in the hubbub that followed, my deeper point was lost.

Philosophy of religion—or religion and postmodernism, or continental philosophy of religion, or Western religious thought, or whatever you want to call it—was a practice of failing. It was a lot of other things as well, of course. Most importantly, it was one of the last places to get a generalist’s education, however imperfectly. I know of no other field where you are required to read Augustine, Derrida, and the whole philosophical-theological canon in between as part of your candidacy exams. It was a way of connecting theory to the history of philosophy, seeing as philosophy departments are often far too squeamish to spend their time on affect theory or new materialism or any of the insights generated by anthropology. It was a way of clawing back the definition of philosophy from philosophy departments, of insisting that the focus on proofs and norms and the internal consistency of arguments leaves out the genuine stylistic experimentation many philosophers have long engaged in. Trying to excise the uncomfortable bits, the pseudo-scientific bits, the experimental literary bits, the historically specific bits so that you are left with a tightly controlled, highly rational canon of figures—this turns the whole philosophical project into an act of narcissism.

The Earthquake of 1755, painted from 1756 to 1792 by João Glama Ströberle (1708-1792). Currently in the National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon, Portugal.

But mostly, for me, it was a space for thinking about failure and thinking as failure. My field provided an opportunity to read the whole, long complicated history of philosophy without having to commit to the idea that these particular theories are true in any strong sense of the word, as a theologian might, but merely to the idea that they are interesting and beautiful, or wrong in telling ways, or psychologically astute while being hopelessly grandiose, or intellectually shattering but morally blind. It looked—or, at any rate, I looked—for the blind spots, failures, unanswered questions and unrecognized contradictions, not to reproach or correct a thinker but because those were the places where it became obvious that the grandest systems were just the product of a human imagination muddling through. And why not?  Wouldn’t it be quite strange if one man in eighteenth-century Königsberg managed to figure out the nature of morality for all time by thinking very hard about it in his living room? No, I took failure to be inevitable, which was just as well.  I would have found the field’s shortcomings sooner or later, even if I hadn’t gone in looking for them.  As a field, philosophy of religion has a very classical white and male canon. It is hard to be too sentimental about a field of study that has argued you lack the capacity to reason for most of its history.

Still, in my own strange way, I loved even the fustiest in the moments of their failure, these old dead men who stacked their thoughts like bricks into rickety buildings that were somehow always missing a door or a window or a set of stairs. I loved to read them and to teach them as flawed people thinking very hard about impossible questions, with hopeless aspirations for how total, how correct their system could be. Artists creating sand mandalas, who imagined they were building the Newtonian laws of the mind—the pathos of it still sometimes has the power to floor me. No matter how bitter or spiteful or arrogant bigoted they were in life, I always imagined them standing in a row of powdered wigs, each smiling dumbly, bashfully before their collapsed pile of bricks, shrugging as if to say wordlessly, And there it is…

That the job market tended not to reward such an approach did not make it wrong.

Who will read us with such sympathy when we are gone?

***

“We are articled to error,” as W.H. Auden once remarked, perhaps now more so than ever. All of these failures are not mine alone, however particular the details. We are living through two catastrophes of thought, neither of which needed to be. The first is the sheer devastation of climate change. What is there actually to be said about the fact that one million species face extinction because of our actions? Truly, what can grasp the scope and particularity of this devastation? Are we to analyze the ways power distributes unevenly, burdening the poorest nations with the greatest suffering, or carefully pluck out the legacy of colonialism? A worthy project, but one that only adds more evidence to a grievance we have been steadfastly refusing to hear for centuries. Are we to call for a new politics? I suppose, but I doubt most of those calling for a new politics were particularly happy with the way politics were tending prior to their interest in climate change. What about preach the end of capitalism? Ditto, ditto, ditto.

These are our old projects from the last fifty years. They are not bad ways of thinking and their points are not necessarily wrong but they are ways of managing the existential threat of climate change (a threat not limited to our species, never forget) by carving it up into the same types of arguments scholars have been making my entire life, this time with a side of planetary catastrophe. These arguments make climate change familiar. It is not. The only category I have found to be of any use in thinking through the world at two degrees, three degrees, four degrees, is the sublime, the sense of greatness beyond all measure that instills fear and awe. The mind folds before the immensity of the tragedy and all there is left to do is helplessly repeat Rilke’s too-often quoted indiction: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern.” “You must change your life”—true but perhaps but not much help for thought.

At the same time that we are thinking and failing to think about our new world with old categories the “we” that thinks is collapsing—at least within the academy. It is petty to bring up my own experience again, of course. I only do so because I think it was not unique. Was I depressed? Certainly. Giving up on career aspirations you devoted the last decade of your life to is depressing. But I was also facing a reality I hadn’t appreciated before. Thinking is communal and our community is collapsing. Perhaps it might be possible to be a painter or a poet working alone in a garret, an Emily Dickinson content to produce art for its own sake (though I am not even convinced of that), but a thinker has to think in common with a broader conversation. Thoughts are her canvas, her paint. There is no intellectual work that does not take place as part of a dialogue with the living or dead. By leaving the academy, I had given up my natural community and it was not clear where I would find my new one.

This was not just a question of who I would talk to. It was a question of what I would talk about. There are very few intellectual problems that are compelling regardless of their context. Anselm needed his brotherhood of monks to make sense of his ontological proofs. Kant needed the Pantheism Controversy to transform his dense work on epistemology into a classic. I needed to be a member of the AAR for my thoughts on the philosophy of history underlying political theology to matter.

Very few of us, myself included, are Kant, but very many of us now must decide how and where to think as the academy contracts. We are losing a community of thinkers at the moment when all of our old modes of thinking are looking increasingly like diversions or repetitions of that which we know too well, while the broader culture dismisses humanists as idiots who forgot to get STEM degrees. At the same time, we are refusing to give those who remain the space to fail, to gawk, to marvel, to stagger in front of the arguments they don’t know how to make, and instead are rewarding the articles and arguments that look familiar in form, if not content. To succeed in academia we demand they fail at failing.

It may be that we fail (and I mean this “we” to include myself) to think anything new about climate change because there is nothing to be thought. Perhaps the danger of climate change is not so different from the threat of nuclear annihilation as the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot once put it in his essay “The Apocalypse is Disappointing”— “an event of enormous size but enormously empty, about which it can say nothing, save this banality: that it would be better to prevent it.”

But I am skeptical of that line. I think the answer is likely simpler: it is hard to think about precarity in moments of precarity. Climate change is arguably the biggest source of global precarity, or soon will be, but the expectations put on academics, tenured and untenured, and writers, established or unestablished, are another. There simply is no room to start a story with no end or a monograph that might not be accepted when on the tenure clock. The financial realities prevent it. The perverse outcome of this increasing precarity in all aspects of life is that we no longer write the types of books we teach. Who could write an Origins of Totalitarianism or Genealogy of Morals today? Not an academic looking for tenure, at any rate. That, more than anything, is what depresses me—that the last moments of an old world will be accompanied by books pared down to a modest, acceptable form by the sputtering of the tenure machine.

My walks with Faraday are shorter these days. She hurt herself jumping around and playing over the winter, so she needed knee surgery. I spent much of the summer taking slow, hobbling walks with her while I struggled to help support her back legs with a sling. Her weight is just a little too much for me but I am happy to bear it. She needs a second surgery on the other knee in a few weeks.

“Just a pit bull weakness,” the vet said with a shrug when I asked. “It would have happened sooner or later.”

The sling has not stopped her from running up to friendly strangers and demanding attention, but it has been months since we have seen Cherelle. This, too, is a type of loss. For my part, I am finishing this essay while applying for 9-5’s outside of academia. I am grateful to have been given the chance to write it but worried that there is so much I haven’t been able to think and say—so much that I might not find the time or energy to say, given the realities of a new job. Nevertheless:

This is my pile of bricks.

And there it is…

***
Liane Carlson is the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University. She received her PhD in philosophy of religion from Columbia University in 2015. From 2015-2018 worked as the Stewart Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. Her book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Meaning and Experience, is now available from Columbia University Press.  She is currently working on a new book on the refusal to forgive.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

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