What If I'm Wrong?
I'm going to share an anecdote that, on its own, probably seems small and possibly even a little petty, but it's my hope that this will take us somewhere.
I went through a period last year of making banana bread regularly. I'm not much of a baker, but banana bread is fairly easy and the recipe in Joy of Cooking has always turned out well enough for me. (This is the thing about Joy: the recipes in that book are never the best or most interesting but they are always at the very least good enough, and, more importantly, they're very achievable for beginning cooks. I learned how to cook a lot of things from my mom's old 1970s copy of Joy when I was a kid, and when I moved into my first apartment, she bought me a copy of my own to help make it a home.)
In any case, one day late in the year I was working from home and decided to take advantage of some down time to make a couple of loaves of banana bread, and when they were done I posted a picture to Facebook with the caption "WFH day." I'm not entirely sure why I feel compelled to post so many pictures of my food to the internet but it's at least in part a sort of proof of life and in part a form of showing off. The loaves were surely imperfect but they were good enough for me, and I was happy enough with them to want to show people.
People usually like my food pictures, so I was a little surprised when a guy I only peripherally knew popped up in the comments to tell me what I'd done wrong. Now, having a relative (or total) stranger come out of nowhere to criticize something I'm happy about is not a new experience for me, nor for most people who spend any amount of time on the public internet. But just because it's a common occurrence doesn't make it a pleasant one, so I responded and let him know that I thought unsolicited criticism is rude, especially when it's about something I'm happy about. To which he responded by accusing me of attacking him, and ultimately him telling me to fuck off and blocking me.
In retrospect, I could have phrased my pushback differently. Instead of framing things in terms of his behavior ("that's rude"), I could have focused instead on how it impacted me ("that hurts my feelings"). That might have gotten a more thoughtful, less defensive response. Still, as much as it might be beneficial to me to be able to consider someone else's feelings when they hurt me, and as much as I do try to do just that, it still always strikes me as unjust.
But, more than that, I can't help thinking how rare it has been in my life to get a real apology about anything. How most times, no matter how I phrase things, telling someone that they have hurt me simply makes the person angry with me for making them feel bad about themselves, and resentful for having to consider my feelings. Or sends them into a spiral of self-loathing that I then have to pull them out of by minimizing my own pain, and that results in no change or real self-reflection. Or results in them simply dismissing me, telling me that I am wrong for being hurt. But how few times it has ever resulted in the person being curious about me, in them making an attempt to understand rather than judge or defend, in them trying to make amends, or at least stop doing the thing that hurt me.
All of this came up for me as I was listening to the latest episode of Between the Covers, in which David Naimon talked with British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad about her recent book, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, and the lecture that it was based on. At one point, talking about moments of recognition and what stands in the way of such moments, Hammad says this:
Isabella Hammad: The lecture I gave is about recognition, but the opposite of recognition is denial. And I think that, first of all, the West is in denial in many ways. Less and less so. More and more people are confronting what's happening, among the populace. But the institutions, the cultural institutions, the universities are denialist institutions. And I think it's quite helpful to talk about denialism as a kind of phenomenon. Which is a denialism not only about Palestine but about structures of empire and genocidal histories which are, you know, not acknowledged. . . . So, there's an ongoing denial about these histories which are now coming to the surface. So, you know, we're seeing sort of the tip of the iceberg but there's huge mass underneath. And there's no wonder that people are in denial, because to confront that reality is to confront many things that structure their lives and structure their societies, and that's really scary. I understand that that's really scary.
Now, I want to be clear: I am certainly not equating an abrasive internet interaction with genocide. That would be wildly irresponsible and harmful, that kind of flattening. What I am saying is that hearing Hammad talk about how hard it is for people to have to confront the uncomfortable realities that structure their lives and societies, that made me think again about how great harms are so easily facilitated by the inability to consider that oneself might be in the wrong, that oneself or one's people or one's state might be the oppressor. How thinking of oneself as the victim can be and so often is used to excuse great harm. And that is true at both the personal level and the global level.
I believe that on some level, conflict is inevitable when people are in contact. On the level of individuals, the closer two people are, the more certain it is that they will hurt each other and come into conflict. And the question, then, is how to resolve that conflict. What do we do when someone tells us "You have hurt me"? In the best of circumstances, I think, we can say "It wasn't my intention to hurt you, but I see that I have." We can demonstrate that we understand why what we've done was hurtful. We can say, truthfully, that we are sorry. And we can commit to trying not to do the hurtful thing again.
In order to get to that kind of real apology, though, we have to be able to take ourselves and our own intentions and how we want to see ourselves out of the center of the interaction. And that is hard to do. It often feels like it's too hard for most people. And so instead we will say, "I didn't mean to hurt you, and you should focus on that instead." Or we say, "No reasonable person would be hurt by that." Or, "Well now you're hurting my feelings, so we're even." Or, "I can't do anything right, can I?" Our own sense of emotional self-preservation keeps us from looking inwards, because to do so would be too painful. And so it keeps us from making amends.
I don't know if fascism and genocide, patriarchy and white supremacy, can be defeated by learning how to apologize on an individual level. Probably not. Probably, those forces are bigger than what can be influenced by anything anyone does individually. And even if these problems could be solved with individual compassion, I don't know how to convince anyone to choose compassion and curiosity in the face of emotional pain. But I know that my own moral journey wasn't able to really start until I was able to first ask "What if they're right and what if I'm wrong?" And at least this feels like something I can get my arms around. The world is too big to change. But maybe I can help a person change themselves, if they're open to it.
Always Returning, Never the Same
What I've Been Working On
Keep the Channel Open
I had a chance to read Rachel Edelman's debut poetry collection, Dear Memphis, this past spring, and I was struck by how familiar the feelings and questions of these poems felt to me. Questions about what it means to be from a place where you and your people are held apart. About what heritage and inheritance mean, about the difference between exile and diaspora and migration. About being part of a minoritized, oppressed group that nevertheless experiences privilege, and sometimes participates in the oppression of others. About what home means. For Edelman's speaker, these questions arise from being Jewish in the South. For me, similar questions arise from being Japanese American. It's not the same, of course, but the way our experiences seemed to rhyme intrigued me, and led to a wonderful conversation about the book, about self-awareness, and about connection through letter-writing.
Hey, It's Me
For September's first episode of Hey, It's Me, I wanted to talk about Chappell Roan's album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. More specifically, I wanted to talk about why it wasn't quite hitting for me, despite being a breakout hit and despite the fact that I both appreciate and admire it. That led to a broader discussion about participating in culture that isn't your own, and how respectful distance can be problematic.
Then, for the second episode, Rachel sent me the audio for a forthcoming episode of Commonplace, in which the guest was her undergraduate photography mentor, Lois Conner. I should note here that that Commonplace episode is still forthcoming, so you can't listen to it yet. But I think that our conversation about the episode is still interesting and comprehensible without listening to Rachel's conversation with Conner, because we're talking less about the details of the audio and more about things like the nature of photography, why we make podcasts, and what it means to give attention (and to want it).
What I've Been Reading
Featured Read: Have You Eaten?, by Sarah Gailey
I have been a fan of Sarah Gailey's writing since before they published their first book, River of Teeth, back in 2017. I'm always happy when I get to read something new from them, in part because, yes, they are one of my favorite writers and I know that it will be a good read in and of itself. But it's also been wonderful and just interesting to watch their progression as a writer, to see their skills continue to grow, and to see what through-line emerges. I think one of those through-lines is the fundamental tenderness that Gailey's stories have toward their characters.
Here, we follow a group of young, queer refugees as they make their way through a near-future America that is in the process of collapsing. There are echoes, perhaps, of Alas, Babylon in the broad strokes of the story and setting, but what's so interesting and vital about the approach Have You Eaten? takes to the post-apocalyptic genre is that each chapter takes place in the in-between. The travel and conflict that we expect from the genre mostly takes place off-screen, and what we see instead are the quieter, more personal moments during which this little family finds ways to nourish each other, both literally and emotionally. What are the ways we take care of each other in a crisis? That's what the story is asking. The answers are sometimes messy, sometimes imperfect, but there is a core of love in every interaction that shines through. The result is lovely. I hope you'll read it.
Here are some purchase links:
Everything Else
- Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, by bell hooks. What struck me most in reading these essays was, first, how brilliant bell hooks was, and how instrumental she was in pushing the discourse forward around art and race and gender. And, second, how little that discourse has changed in the almost 30 years since this collection was published, and thus how relevant these essays remain.
- Find Me When You're Ready, by Perry Janes. I haven't quite gotten my arms around these poems just yet. But I think that at least part of what this collection is doing is trying to find a way to include childhood trauma as part of a coming-of-age story without it becoming totalizing. Some of the poems—the ones that depict that trauma—are harrowing. Others are breathtakingly loving. There are a lot of things happening in these poems. I think it will be worth taking the time to revisit them. (CW: childhood sexual abuse)
Mattered To Me
- Science fiction author Ted Chiang wrote a piece for The New Yorker about why AI isn't going to make art that I found cogent, well-informed, and right on the money.
- Gabrielle Calvocoressi's poem "Miss you. Would like to talk a walk with you." is, well, devastating. Beautiful. But devastating. It is about the grief that comes after the death of a loved one. Though, I can't help thinking how easy it would be to write a very similar poem about the grief that comes after the end of a long relationship. All grief is different, and all grief is the same.
- Perry Janes's poem "Spare Rib with Shiitake Slaw and Scallion Glaze" is included in the collection I mentioned above, but I wanted to show it to you separately as well. "[To] taste means to consume, and who, having eaten / their fill, doesn't eventually mourn / the meal?" That awareness of loss, of the moment slipping away even as it happens, that's a feeling that's at the heart of a lot of what I've written and made over the past twenty years.
Take care,
-Mike