It is with great sadness that I share the news of the death of a Salonista, beloved Agi Katz. When I went back through the records to see what studies Agi had done, I was amazed by the breadth of her participation: she was one of the second tour of Proust, she completed studies on Magic Mountain, Paradise Lost, The Iliad, Absalom, Absalom, The Sound and The Fury, Ulysses, Hamlet, Invisible Man . . . Those who were on these courses with her will remember her lively mind, her extensive knowledge of visual art, her strong opinions and her humour.
I first met Agi at the Kenwood Ladies Pond, where she became for me one of those ‘mother swimmers’ – those seasoned Ladies whose stewardship and advocacy have kept the Pond the unique haven we love. Agi also brought her incredible work in researching and advocating for lesser known European artists (she was the founder and director of The Boundary Gallery) to the Salon: for the Proust studies, she brought original sketches made during the trial of Dreyfus – bringing this pivotal moment in history to life for us.
You may also be interested to read the obituary from the Ben Uri Research Unit, where Agi was a curator for six years before opening her own art gallery, The Boundary Gallery, in 1986.
LLS facilitator Julie Sutherland lives and teaches in Canada. Please note, some of the details in this reflective piece are distressing.
Photograph: First Nations Women, Act On Climate March
How can art teach us? How can it help us unfurl into a more exposed, humane and empathetic version of ourselves? This short piece provides a brief summary of Indigenous Peoples (known in the United States as Native Americans) and considers how art may offer us insight into the lives of the first human inhabitants of the lands to which my ancestors came.
When I say ‘Indigenous Peoples’, I am referring to the first human inhabitants of the lands now called Canada, many of whom have lived on, and in relationship with, these lands since time immemorial. Pre-European contact, ‘North America’ was home to as many as 112 million Indigenous People. However, within a century of Christopher Columbus having arrived on these lands, that number was reduced by as much as 90% – a sobering result of violent displacement, disease and what Canada has now formally recognized as genocide. Officially, Canada recognizes three distinct groups of Indigenous Peoples: First Nations (originally, and now offensively, called ‘Indians’ by white settlers); Inuit (originally, and now offensively, called ‘Eskimos’ by white settlers); and Métis (individuals of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry). Indigenous Peoples are resilient. Today, they are the youngest and fastest-growing population in Canada.
The Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver, which is located on the traditional and unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples, is popularly referred to as ‘the poorest postal code in Canada’. While this isn’t quite accurate, a stroll down East Hastings Street reveals more heartbreak than the average middle class resident of any ‘Western’ country would usually encounter in a lifetime of strolling through their own neighbourhoods. Indigenous Peoples comprise less than 5% of the population in Canada; Vancouver’s DTES has the highest Indigenous population in the city, at 31%.
An extremely high number (over 50%) of the street-based survival sex workers (those who trade in sex out of dire need) in the DTES identify as Indigenous. Between 1978 and 2001, at least 65 women, many of them sex workers, disappeared from this neighbourhood. In a jailcell confession, Robert ‘Willie’ Pickton, a pig farmer and serial killer from a nearby suburb, claimed he had killed nearly 50 women in the neighbourhood, though he was only officially charged with the murder of 26. In 2007, a jury found him guilty on six counts of second-degree murder and he is now serving a life sentence in prison. An official inquiry in the matter identified ineptitude by police and prejudice against racialized peoples as two of several explanations for the delay in apprehending Robert Pickton. The case was a turning point in the nation’s recognition of the tragic issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls not just in Vancouver but also across Canada.
Sarah de Vries was one of the 33 women whose remains or DNA were found on Robert Pickton’s pig farm. Sarah was a poet and artist of mixed-race descent, including First Nations, who lived in Vancouver. She was last seen April 12, 1998. In one of her poems, she asked, ‘Will they remember me when I’m gone / or would their lives just carry on?’
We remember. Sarah was a daughter, a sister, a mother. Her disappearance broke their hearts, and mine. I lived in Vancouver’s DTES and worked for many years for different organizations that aimed to support the lives of survival sex workers in the area. I spent hundreds of hours on the streets with these women, and in safe houses, hearing their stories. I also heard the remarks of others who, not understanding or knowing these women, said hurtful, hateful things about how these women brought this on themselves, how they deserved no better than disease, rape, death. How ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’. I watched cars go by, hurtling raw eggs and bags of human excrement at the women’s bodies, heads, hearts. I saw them held at knifepoint. I looked at photos of their children and visited them in hospital when they gave birth. I saw them ‘tweaking’, overdosing, dying. I also saw them singing, laughing, living.
Reading another of Sarah’s poems presents an opportunity for us to understand ways in which art – and in this case, poetry – can, however disturbing, help readers to learn, reflect, grow and change. It demonstrates how poetry can expose us to new perspectives and encourage us to think about ourselves in relation to the world around us.
Woman’s body found beaten beyond recognition You sip your coffee Taking a drag of your smoke Turning the page Taking a bite of your toast Just another day Just another death Just one more thing you so easily forget You and your soft, sheltered life Just go on and on For nobody special from your world is gone Just another day Just another death Just another Hastings Street whore Sentenced to death
Sarah de Vries, (used with the kind permission of Maggie de Vries)
A poem like Sarah’s may conjure up many negative emotions. We may react in myriad ways. An easy, and understandable, reaction might be defensiveness. How dare she tell us we don’t care? Who is she to attack us anyway? If this is our experience, we might try to reflect on it. Why have we reacted defensively? Is it because there might be some truth to what she says? Have we ever written someone off because of our preconceived notions of their identities?
Such an awareness may lead us to consider our own positions vis-à-vis Sarah’s and try to see ourselves from her point of view. Can she help us to reflect on our own apathy? If we conclude we are not personally apathetic, can she lead us to contemplate apathy (or worse, active racism, sexism, etc.) at systemic and structural levels – perhaps at the levels of media, healthcare, justice, child welfare and education? How can we find more out about lives such as Sarah’s? What else can we read? Who can we listen to? Who can help us shed our prejudices and inspire us to work toward a more equitable, just, caring society?
The self-reflection that creative writing can inspire may be a compelling reason for engaging with ‘off-putting’ art. Critics of this kind of reading may say compositions like Sarah’s fall into the genre of ‘misery lit’ or ‘misery porn’, that is, writing in which central characters endure great hardship. They may say we as readers are merely revelling in the horrors of others. But, in fact, there is a well established body of research that has found that reading all kinds of literature has transformative power. If the studies don’t convince you, look into your heart. Has it changed because of the art you’ve encountered? Has it made you reflect? Has it made you grow? Keep reading.
Copies of Julie Sutherland’s forthcoming book: Bright Poems for Dark Days: An Anthology for Hope (to be published in November, available in Canada, the UK, the US and Australia) can now be pre-ordered. See here for more information.
Why read literature that explores the inner world of monsters – people who are brutal or whose behaviour is monstrous?
I have been thinking about this a lot in the last week as various studies encounter sexual violence, domestic violence, racism and misogyny, psychological battering, grooming . . . and I feel my instinctual repulsion met with my need to justify, both for my own comfort and to explain to other readers, why we should go through this ugliness.
The careful exploration in literature of a subjective psyche affords a complex understanding of how the flaws of a person enmesh with the flaws of the world they inhabit. There is humanity to be gained from the truth of the material—and Joyce (like Faulkner, Proust and others) will not let us look away.
My co-facilitator on our recent study of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Geoff Brown, offered our group his own reflection on our work:
Hello fellow salonistas. I have been reflecting on the sessions we had.
It becomes increasingly clear to me how challenging this text is – not just in the common passive sense of difficult to understand, but also actively challenging in the ways in which it confronts the reader. One of its most forceful confrontations is aimed at our reluctance to recognise and discuss the unacceptable. Horace has spent his life denying the existence of bad things, and the novel dramatises his final inability to sustain that level of dissociation. What Faulkner’s text does is steer the reader into a comparable dilemma: when we ask ourselves questions such as ‘why did he need to put that in?’, we are echoing Horace’s implicit question: ‘why do bad things have to happen?’ Or perhaps we are unconsciously siding with Narcissa – who wears white to pretend to herself that the dirt of the world does not attach to her. But debating awkward questions is at the heart of what the Lit Salon does.
This issue is bound up with Sanctuary’s long reputation. The novel addresses (and I would argue criticises) issues of behaviour and thinking which permeate society, but which society would prefer not to consider itself responsible for. This prompted – and continues to prompt – outraged denial, taking the standard defensive mode of alleging that there must be something degenerate about the author, or alternatively something defective about the work in question (cf. long-standing suggestions that Shakespeare’s ‘difficult’ later plays derived from problems with his sex life).
During most of the weeks of our study, I have been reminded of D.H. Lawrence’s famous dictum: “Never trust the teller. Trust the tale.” What that has always meant for me is that any work deserves to be judged on its own merits alone. Of course that must mean that any of us can decide that Sanctuary is flawed, or unacceptable by comparison with Faulkner’s oeuvre as a whole.
I think there is little doubt that this novel has an insidious quality which gets under one’s skin. It has been a tough project, but like many of the best salon experiences, it has been a ground-breaking one. If you are asking yourselves whether it was worth the trouble, let me offer you the consolation of considering yourselves as pioneers who have traversed hostile territory and reached the other side. It has been tremendously helpful for me to read it with you and I thank you warmly for your participation.
Geoff
And we have received responses from other Salon participants, set out below with their permission.
This is something George Saunders witnessed first-hand while reporting from Trump Tour 2016 for the New Yorker, and attending rallies for the future president in California, Arizona, and Wisconsin, where he spoke to supporters and generally tried to understand what makes them tick and why they’re so damn angry. I ask, in light of the election and everything about it, whether such a thing still matters in the age of Trump—does empathy still matter like it did? “Yeah, I’ve given that a lot of thought,” he replies. “I’m just trying to deepen understanding of what empathy actually is. Because, in my lazy version of it, it means being groovy with everything, and liking everybody. I don’t think that’s quite it. For me, it seems urgent to me that we resist this crap. How do we best do that?”
Saunders says that while covering the rallies, he noticed that whenever people on either side got “strident and emotional,” the conversation shut down. “So, my thing is, if we really wanted to restore our country to what it was, or even better, to get it to what it should be, empathy is a really great tool,” he explains. “It doesn’t mean you’re gonna agree, and I think we liberals have a tendency to think that empathy equals enabling. And I think that’s actually false. That’s not at all what compassion and empathy means. It’s much more akin to a kind of wide-open awareness, which to me is always a powerful thing.”
Alex Mills
On a personal level I feel conflicted between a ‘no platforming’ desire (if I have this book on my shelf, does it mean I am complicit in condoning a male hegemony which sees nothing wrong in predators grooming teenagers for sex, casual antisemitism which is insufficiently repudiated, an objectification of the homosexual as ‘other’….) and alternatively, the wish to take the text in the context of the time and understand the limitations that puts on both the writer and the text.
Curiously, having just completed a Salon on the Book of Job, I am very aware that The Bible poses very similar issues. Some people find the text highly offensive because it appears to condone rape, sexual exploitation, rank homophobia, domestic violence, child abuse, antisemitism, xenophobia and ethnic cleansing. However, some of the poetry is sublime and the narrative, epic.
So, do I read the text in the manner that it was originally intended, or do I read it with contemporary eyes?
Nicky von Fraunhofer (also a Salon facilitator)
When literature reflects real life (even if it’s not our personal experience) and we choose to engage with it, it allows us the possibility to reflect on the realities of others from a safe distance and widen our comprehension of humanity in all its fallibility. This starts with literature like Grimm’s Fairy Tales (cf. Bettelheim on The Uses of Enchantment) and moves through to work like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (the dramatisation of which is terrifying). I think this is important.
Harriet Griffey
I come back to Quaker principles: even in the most horrible people who have done the most hideous things, there is some spark of goodness, buried however deep. People can sometimes be redeemed from evil. Understanding how people become evil gives us a better chance at stopping it happening.
P.S.
My problem with this mode of analysis is that there is plenty of empirical evidence that psychopaths are *not* born like most people; it often seems to me that literature has obscured our ability to both help and deal with them.
S.
We always imagine we could never be that thing we abhor – Nazis, child molesters, etc. Then, as James Baldwin writes, “we read.” Psychopaths, when they exist, were born like me. What do we do with that? The things I hold in greatest contempt fill ME with momentary violence, quickly followed by sorrow…for all of us.
Lisa Lomba
What Joyce and Proust achieve is excavation of thought, language and buried subconscious ideas which is why I feel no revulsion in reading them but discomfort balanced with revelation. They shed light on dark places. De Sade starts off ‘120 days of Sodom’ as if writing a novel but soon it descends into lists of acts he wants to perpetrate, it is obscene, his excited imaginings are so intense that he does not even bother filling it in, just the lists are enough to pleasure himself. I did not get very far with Masoch’s ‘Venus in Furs’, again no attempt at understanding, just written for pleasure.
So it is all about the balance, precise, clean excavation is very different from orgasmic salivation.
The balance between the drive to understand rather than enjoy is the crucial thing. It is why I could not finish de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom.
Georgia Kaufmann
Yes indeed Toby and I like to think of the good and loving examples there are too like George killing Lenny as he imagines the rabbits on a farm rather than letting him be murdered by the men pursuing him in Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck. Or in A Tale of Two Cities when Sydney Carton dies in the place of his look-alike saying ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before.’
Further proof that we all have everything in us! Literature helps us to understand ourselves and develop compassion for those who find themselves in wretched circumstances.
Fear seems to be the motor for ugly action; thinking of the fear of miscegenation in Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!
In the end, I am glad to have a group that can thoughtfully explore these issues and hold the ambiguities alongside the brilliance of the prose and accept the paradox.
