A Conversation Led by the Kenyon Review Fellows
In October of last year, a new associate justice was sworn into the Supreme Court of the United States, despite credible allegations of sexual misconduct against him and the promise he made, given those allegations, that “what goes around comes around.” Across the globe, in India, as well as here in America, the related MeToo movement has effected change, and yet enforcing the law continues to be an arduous and sometimes futile process—one that results in destructive victim blaming even when justice is served. Encouraged by the biased political agenda of the current government, in India, Muslim men have been lynched on suspicion of eating beef, for supposedly kidnapping children—one man’s body dragged in the presence of three policemen, one of whom is casually checking his mobile phone—and sometimes, for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The list of injustices in the last two years against marginalized people could, itself, fill this essay, even were it only to focus on America. A truncated list of American injustice: the “Muslim ban” (Executive Order 13769), the lack of support of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, the ongoing Flint water crisis, the trans ban on American troops, the reinvigoration of ICE, the declaration of a state of National Emergency to circumvent a divided Congress in order to build a border wall. Meanwhile, at the time of writing this essay, in South Asia there is a chance that India and Pakistan—countries with nuclear weapons—might go to war over concerns of terrorism and the fact that the current prime minister of India is using war hysteria as a vote-mongering machine.
What you have just read is only a small sample of the brazen misdeeds perpetuated by the actions and policies, not just in the two countries we—the Kenyon Review Fellows—represent, but which thrive across the globe. So we ask the same question previous KR Fellows Jaquira Diaz and Margaree Little proposed when they created and curated the KROnline special feature Resistance, Change, Survival: what writing is meaningful, now, both to read and to write? How do we, as artists, engage with a world that threatens so many of the bodies of its least protected?
The simple answer is that we continue doing what we have always done. We write. We make art. But we believe one cannot write honestly about the world, whatever the form, without first acknowledging the condition of that world. So, as we cast about for answers, acknowledging that others have asked these questions before us—we turn to literature. We have complained and discussed and read copiously, and in Rita Dove’s book, American Smooth, we found the beginning to an answer. The title of our project is taken from the first line of the first section of the poem “Twelve Chairs.” The thirteen brief poems were inspired by words carved on the backs of twelve marble chairs in the lobby of the Federal Court House in Sacramento, California, which in turn were part of an installation by the designer Larry Kirkland. In the September/October 2004 issue of Poets & Writers, Rita Dove explained that the poems were to serve “as a fulcrum because the [collection] is all about our particular, American brand of justice.” Though we intend to engage in a conversation that actively includes the world outside of America, we are reminded of the multiple readings of “America’s brand” and of one of the roles an artist may take: as an attestant whose writings are an act of witness, resistance, change, and survival.
“Proof Casts a Shadow: A Conversation”—aware that the peoples of the world are irrevocably linked—will respond to policies that threaten the body and minds of populations of America and other nations. We have sought to provide a space wherein personal experience, art, and evidentiary documentation can come together to resist despair. Still, any literary project, but especially small ones, have difficulties in terms of representing the true plurality of actual lived experience. This is true even when one has the best intentions and is especially true when one has no intentions at all. The first difficulty is whom we ultimately publish. We understand that representing diversity of experience demands labor. Therefore, the limitations of a small project such as this fall upon the editors, us, and whose work we are aware of or familiar with, the work we are most moved by (which is shaped, again, by our own experiences), and the artists we are likely even to reach. Open calls can lead to more diverse publications but require some combination of paid “slush” readers, paid advertising, or unpaid labor (whether from our friends and loved ones or social media crowd sourcing). The second difficulty we face in a project of this kind is how much we ask of artists: Are they creating work for us? Are they positioned or feel positioned to speak for many more people than themselves? Has the request for work itself left for the artist adequate time to answer the call? For this special feature, we have reached out to networks with which we are familiar, but unfortunately, this is by no means a repository of responses, and these responses cannot encapsulate every unjust experience. Certainly, this is too much to ask of individual artists, but we hope that our project serves as a kind of expansion of many of the aims of last year’s Resistance, Change, Survival project. We have been moved by the artists that appear in this project, and we are tremendously excited to share their work here with you.
We will publish two new pieces, one each by a poet or prose writer, every month from now through August, with the hope that our readers will engage with every piece of writing individually, as well as within the context of the potential conversation generated among them. The writers will also, in some way, respond to a piece of writing—either as a counter document, so to speak, or as an addendum to an ongoing conversation. This dialogue between texts and writers—contemporary and classic—will channel the ways in which the identities and opinions within the world at large and the world of literature are changing.
Thank you for reading,
Misha Rai and Keith S. Wilson
Kenyon Review Fellows