newyorker--2020-09-07--Pipilotti Rist’s Hedonistic Expansion of Video Art

It took more than two years to make “ Sip My Ocean.
” The underwater scenes were filmed in the Red Sea , in Egypt , with a waterproof wide-angle camera that had only recently come on the market .
“ I longed to film coral reefs , and the first time we snorkeled in the Red Sea I had to come up quickly because I couldn ’ t stop laughing , ” she remembers .
“ What an abundance of endlessly different forms and colors !
” ( They ’ re partly gone now , owing to climate change @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ever Is Over All ” by a year , it showed more clearly where Rist ’ s work was headed , and its impact has been greater .
“ ‘ Sip My Ocean ’ changed my curatorial practice , ” Klaus Biesenbach , a former director of MOMA PS1 , who now directs the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art , told me .
“ I looked at videos differently after seeing it , and I looked at color differently.
” Joan Jonas , an older video artist whose work Rist reveres , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she taught at M.I.T .
“ The lightness , motion , weightlessness , gravity , melancholy , and levitation reminded them perhaps of flying carpets , winged horses , genies , carousels , or , in Rist ’ s words , ‘ the glory of life , ’ where ‘ worry will vanish , ’ ” Jonas wrote , in a catalogue essay .
Growing up in a small village in the canton of St. Gallen , close to the borders of Austria and Liechtenstein , Rist preferred to make her own arrangements @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Elisabeth Charlotte , didn ’ t suit her .
She longed to be a boy , and in primary school , where she was often nicknamed Lotti , she called herself Elisabeth John for a while , and then Pierre .
A few of her classmates took to calling her Pipi , after Pippi Longstocking , the mythically strong and fiercely independent heroine of Astrid Lindgren ’ s children ’ s book series , which had been reborn as a popular Swedish television series .
“ That of course made me proud @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also increased the number of mothers who wouldn ’ t let their children play with her . )
Born in 1962 , Rist was the second of five children ( older sister , younger brother , and younger twin sisters , all of whom still live in Switzerland and see one another often ) .
She was the only one to attend high school and college .
“ The others went to apprenticeships instead , ” she explained .
Ursula , the firstborn , takes care of elderly people in their homes ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cook , and now owns and runs a bar in Zurich called Helsinki ; one of her twin sisters , Andrea , is a photographer , and the other , Tamara , is a seamstress , who often helps on Pipi ’ s video projects .
“ For me , it was very clear , ” Rist said .
“ I was a good student , and being a good student was the one thing that could make my father pay attention.
” Not a lot of attention , though .
Her father @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never seemed to recognize that she had become an internationally known artist .
As a lifelong stamp collector , however , he was deeply impressed when she was asked to design a stamp for the Swiss postal service .
Both her parents were from working-class families in St. Gallen , and both had broken precedent by choosing professions .
Walter Pius Rist was a doctor .
For the first six years of Pipi ’ s life , they lived in the mountains , where Walter ’ s patients were mainly Italian laborers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wife , Anna , was the only teacher in a one-room school for forty-five students .
Pipi remembers “ endless green-brown alpine fields with manifold flowers and vivid little brooks melting holes in snow blocks—also skiing between my parents ’ legs.
” When Tom was born , they moved from the mountains to the village of Grabs , in the Rhine Valley , where her mother had grown up , and then to neighboring Buchs .
“ My mother was such a strong lion , very generous and giving , ” Rist said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ look after others , and she always said if someone did something we liked we should go quickly and make a compliment .
On holidays , she had us bring bread and butter and honey to all the neighbors .
I thought that was a cool thing .
My father was a depressed person , who always had a new partner ” —that is , a mistress .
“ My parents ’ marriage made me swear I would never marry , ” she said .
Both her parents were freethinkers .
“ My @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and considered Africans more beautiful and intelligent than we are , ” she said .
He was also a dedicated environmentalist , who stopped heating the family swimming pool because it used too much energy .
One summer , Pipi , feeling unhappy and misunderstood , spent several nights sleeping in the empty pool , and going to her grandparents ’ house for meals .
Her parents separated , amicably , when she was sixteen—her father moved to the house next door , where he had his medical practice and received his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remained in the family home .
That year , Pipi fell in love with a boy in her school named Thomas Rhyner .
“ Pipi was one class behind me , and the only other person in the village who admired John Lennon and Yoko Ono , ” Rhyner recalls .
Music was their shared introduction to popular culture .
Second-string English rock bands ( never the Beatles ) used to come and play at a hall just over the border in Liechtenstein , and Anna , newly released from her marriage , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at her house .
“ To this day , ” Rist told me , “ if my mother sees a backpacker who looks a bit lost , she will say , ‘ Do you want to stay with us ?
’ ” Rist left home in 1982 , and spent four years at the University of Applied Arts , in Vienna .
Swiss artists have traditionally gone elsewhere to learn and practice their craft—Paul Klee to Munich , Alberto Giacometti and Jean Tinguely to Paris , Urs Fischer to Amsterdam and New York @ @ @ @ @ @ @ becoming an artist , commercial or otherwise .
She wanted to get out of Switzerland and to study physics , which had been her strongest subject in high school , and she wanted to do so in a German-speaking country .
The university in Vienna , whose program was heavily influenced by Bauhaus inclusiveness , offered a wide variety of courses in the sciences and the humanities .
She took theoretical physics and philosophy , studied illustration , photography , and commercial art , and became fascinated with experimental cinema—the poetic , highly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ VanDerBeek , John Waters , and others .
Rist made a few short films in Super 8 , and eventually decided that she wanted to work with moving pictures and sound and language .
After graduating , in 1986 , she returned to Switzerland and registered for video classes at the School of Design , in Basel .
She chose video because it allowed her to do everything herself , from camerawork to editing .
To pay for her studies , she took part-time jobs with Ciba-Geigy and Hoffmann-La Roche , the big @ @ @ @ @ @ @ labs where they made promotional videos .
This put her in contact with current technologies .
Every new technology seemed to come equipped with a guy , a male techie who knew how to use it and kept the knowledge to himself , but at the Ciba-Geigy lab Rist worked for an older man named Erhard Hauswirt , who had been a filmmaker .
He sensed her ambition and talent , and let her use the lab at night .
She more or less taught herself how to operate the equipment , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that launched her career .
It was called “ I ’ m Not the Girl Who Misses Much.
” The title is a slightly altered version of the opening line in John Lennon and Paul McCartney ’ s song “ Happiness Is a Warm Gun , ” which was inspired by Yoko Ono and released on the Beatles ’ “ White Album , ” in 1968 .
“ Lennon sings , ‘ She ’ s not a girl who misses much , ’ and I used to walk on the street singing that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prophecy , ” Rist recalls .
In her video , wearing a low-cut black dress and dancing so maniacally that her breasts keep spilling out of it , she turns the line into a first-person anthem of gutsiness .
She sings it again and again , in a soft , little-girl voice that shifts to falsetto , building to a kind of out-of-control hysteria that ’ s hilarious and disturbing .
Rist knew that it was beyond anything she ’ d ever done .
She said , “ When I found how to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ realized , Wow , this really shows how our lives are sometimes , when you feel like a puppet .
I felt I had found something that had a general meaning.
” She sent the video to the Solothurn Film Festival , in Switzerland , where it was accepted , “ and I guess you can say it was well received .
”

The video was picked up by other experimental film groups, and Basel’s Museum of Applied Arts put it in a group exhibition. “I got confidence,” Rist said. But confidence for what? Rist said that one of her teachers “had recorded me saying, ‘I want to make rooms full of light, where people find and understand each other,’ but I didn’t think that art would be where I did it. I was thinking more about discothèques, or concerts.” (MTV, which had been around since 1981, was not on her mind, either—she hadn’t yet watched it.) She became the stage designer for an all-girl band called Les Reines Prochaines, painting backdrops and projecting slides and Super 8 film clips, and for six years, in spite of acute stagefright, she sang and played string bass and flute with the band. She was still working part time for Hoffmann-La Roche, and making short videos in a studio in Zurich that she shared with another artist. Interest in her work was growing. In Basel, Galerie Stampa, whose main focus was selling art books, showed several of her early videos in 1993. When “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much” was presented in solo museum shows in St. Gallen, Graz, and Hamburg, in 1994 and 1995, three New York galleries contacted her. Iwan Wirth, a young Swiss art dealer who loved her work but didn’t yet represent artists, advised her to go with Luhring Augustine, a mid-level gallery that represented Christopher Wool, Rachel Whiteread, and Albert Oehlen. Soon afterward, she also joined the new gallery that Wirth and his wife, Manuela Hauser, were opening in Zurich, Hauser & Wirth—the two galleries now split her representation. “Anthony d’Offay tracked me down on my honeymoon with Manuela, in some tiny Irish inn,” Wirth said, referring to the British dealer. “He wanted to show Pipi in London. I thought, We’d better grow the gallery quickly, or we’ll lose our artists.”
The one- and two-channel videos that Rist made in the first decade of her career are rarely longer than ten minutes. In “Sexy Sad I” (1987, four and a half minutes), a naked young chap in sneakers dances alone, in the woods, to a piano recording of the Beatles song “Sexy Sadie.” We see him from the neck down, advancing and retreating, his skinny legs kicking out with exaggerated moves that keep his genitals aflap. Male vulnerability is on display in all its comic absurdity. “It looks like he’s dancing, but he’s really fighting the camera,” Rist explained. Female vulnerability gets a workout in “(Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes” (1988, eleven minutes), in which Pipi—I’m tired of calling her Rist—in a number of unflattering dresses and suburban locations, keeps falling down and getting up. I may be alone in seeing this as a tribute to Nam June Paik, whose distortions of the video signal and other deliberate “mistakes” opened the medium to creative innovations. The out-of-focus look and scrolling lines of static in Rist’s early videos are Paik trademarks. Although she never met him, Paik’s attitude toward the medium influenced her deeply. “He used the screen as an eyeball massage and a light thrower—not deconstructing the medium but using it without unnecessary respect,” she said. When Iwan Wirth asked her to write the catalogue note for a 1993 Paik show he was putting on at a bar in Zurich, her text was a declaration of love. “Nam June Paik is a wild dog,” it reads. “He sees a tree, pees on it and the tree lights up. The leaves become monitor screens that gleam and flicker bewitchingly. . . . The electric cables, which no one but him can toss around so artfully, are the roots. . . . He works with an innocent, child-like, earnest smile. One just has to kiss him.”
“And in this corner, still undefeated, Frank’s long-held beliefs!” Cartoon by Ellis Rosen Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Heated discussions in the early nineteen-nineties about pornography and feminism led to “Pickelporno” (1992, twelve minutes), Rist’s attempt to make a porn video that appealed to women. Instead of looking at sexual encounters from the outside, she wanted to convey what the participants were feeling and seeing. Using a tiny surveillance camera designed to be hidden in walls, she worked very close, filming random moments of a nude couple’s imaginative foreplay—fingers exploring body parts, a hand caressing a breast, an erect and friendly penis. She interspersed these with shots of clouds and palm fronds, a lake, a miniature globe of the world resting on a vulva, and extended tongues, set to a soundtrack of rushing and bubbling water and ardent moaning. “Pickelporno” offended no one—it even appeared on Swiss television—but copious flows of menstrual blood (simulated) in “Blood Clip” (1993) made some viewers think that she was taking feminism too far. “That’s ridiculous,” Rist scoffed to one interviewer. “The idea is to get the blood out into the open, to show this red fluid, this marvelous liquid, this flesh-clock.”
To see “Selfless in the Bath of Lava,” which has been on view at MOMA PS1 since 1997, you have to crouch down and look into a small hole in the floor, where, on an LCD monitor, Rist reaches up with both arms and cries for help. She is naked, with white-blond hair, and enveloped in orange-red flames. “I am a worm and you are a flower,” she wails, in German, English, and several other languages. “You would have done everything better! Help me. Excuse me.” According to Rist, the video and its sound loop were inspired by an early experience with religion. The church was not a big factor in her family’s life. Her mother is a relaxed Protestant who occasionally goes to church; her father was a lapsed Catholic who became a church-hating atheist. When Rist was nine, though, religion suddenly overwhelmed her. She joined a Bible-reading sect and spent much of her free time studying Biblical texts. “That lasted three years,” she told me. “Until I began asking, ‘What happens with the people who lived before Jesus?,’ and nobody could give me an answer. Also, God never showed up. I would leave pieces of meat outside to honor God.” In “Selfless,” Rist is in Hell. “It’s a really mean story, that you will be burning forever,” she said. “When I got rid of the need to believe in God, I felt so liberated.”
The morning after my wife and I first visited Rist’s studio, she and three members of her team were in the large back room there, shooting Pierre Mennel’s left eye. Mennel, a strapping middle-aged man who was the male swimmer in “Sip My Ocean,” sat on a chair between two floodlights while Rist, wielding a video camera with a two-foot-long lens, moved it around and uncomfortably close to his retina. Mennel’s son, Nicolas, who is Rist’s intern (and the third generation in the family to work for her; his grandfather Jacques appeared as a performer), held a device that corrected the focus. “The left eye is definitely better,” Mennel père said. “It’s my better side.” (Laughter. They were speaking English for our benefit, instead of Swiss-German.) On the monitor, everything was in extreme closeup. I could see rows and patches of facial hair by Mennel’s eye that were barely visible to the naked eye. “There’s hair all over the body that’s mostly invisible,” Rist explained. “It becomes like a landscape. We have so much respect for machines, but the camera is a very bad copy of the eye system. Did you know that the retina is sending signals in two dozen data streams simultaneously? One is for movement from left to right, and another for right to left.” Rist has often used spy cameras and medical cameras that film inside the body. The long lens on the one she was using that day allowed her to come in very close, without making troublesome shadows. It had become available less than six months earlier, and she said that it “was like having a new boyfriend.” She held the camera in both arms, as if it were an AK-47. After a while, Rist and Mennel changed places—she sat and he filmed one of her cerulean eyes.
Video still of “I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much,” from 1986. Photograph © P. Rist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine
During a break in the shooting, Rist took us over to look at a painting on a nearby wall—a landscape with jagged mountains and huge stones in the foreground. “Do you know the painter Clara Porges?” she asked. (I did not.) “She was a contemporary of Ferdinand Hodler”—the nineteenth-century Swiss Symbolist painter. “She married a Jewish violinist, and they had to leave Austria when Hitler came. I really love this painting.” Rist had just bought it at auction, in Zurich. “It will be the star of my show in Kyoto,” she said. She demonstrated on a computer what she planned to do, bathing the canvas in waves and veils of changing computer colors; she will also project colors onto a group of modern Japanese ceramics. “In the Western world, color is underestimated,” she said. “Color is borderless, it’s dangerous, it’s emotional, like music. Primary colors—red, yellow, and blue—can look stupid by themselves. I’m interested in broken and dirty colors, natural shades. Painting with light, that’s what I try to do. Paul Klee said he wished he could have a color piano, and I am so lucky—I have a color piano!”
The question now, she said, was “Maybe we take your eye?” (My eyes are a different blue from hers, and four decades older.) I agreed, and sat down in the chair. The floodlights were blinding. Rist said that her team would put the camera on a moving support so that I wouldn’t have to worry about the lens touching my eye. That was good news. The shooting began. Mennel was the cameraman, and Rist was the director, telling me what to do. It was important to keep my eyes moving, she said. “You can think of going over there, and going there. And now look up. Yes! Really nice. Beautiful! O.K., one more. Look around—to Vienna, to New York. Cool! Can you close your eyes and then open? Yes! Once again to Vienna, over there. Once again closing. Open. Wow!” When it was done, the whole team applauded. I looked at a replay on the monitor. My eyeball seemed to lie under several layers of liquid, and the overlapping folds of skin under the eye looked like closeup photographs of a crocodile. “We hide that we are animals,” Rist said.
Lunch at the studio is communal. Everybody cooks, or brings a dish from outside, or cleans up afterward. There were seven of us at the table, and the main course was an assortment of curries, lentils, rice, and vegetables from a nearby Indian restaurant, on plates that didn’t match. When Rist finished eating, she picked up her plate and licked it clean. All the others did the same—there were no napkins. I remembered seeing her do this at a dinner party in New York, a year or so earlier, in the apartment of the dealer Roland Augustine. Was this a Swiss custom, I had asked her. “It comes from my mother, who now denies it,” Rist said. “And in my house it is a duty.” Two other guests at the Augustine dinner had tried to lick their plates, amid general hilarity. Rist tends to cause a stir in public. “Like my father, I’m an introvert disguised as an extrovert,” she said at lunch.
Video still of “Pour Your Body Out,” from 2008. Photograph © P. Rist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine
In 1998, to the surprise of nearly everyone in the Swiss art world, Rist was named the artistic director of Expo.02, Switzerland’s first international exposition since the nineteen-sixties, which would take place in four locations around the country. “I have no idea why they invited me,” Rist told me. “I had won the prize at the Venice Biennale the year before, and maybe they thought it would be good for marketing.” Before accepting the post, she consulted several close friends. Expo.02 had been plagued by fund-raising problems and erratic leadership, and its opening date had been delayed—it was originally scheduled for 2001. Iwan Wirth urged her to think carefully about it. “Her career was about to explode,” he told me. “Success is hard on Pipi. She doesn’t trust it. But nobody ever gave an artist this kind of responsibility.” For Rist, who thinks that the purpose of art is to improve people’s lives, the possibilities outweighed the risks. “She said yes, and her friends supported her,” Wirth told me. “And it turned out to be an impossible task. The public loved her. Pipi became a national figure, the goddess Helvetia, but the art world was skeptical, and the press was disastrous.” She spent a year and a half struggling with the bureaucracy and with scathing reports in the press, which ridiculed some of her proposals (such as a marriage bureau for temporary, twelve-hour marriages). Her health also broke down. She’d been having severe stomach pains, and she also learned later that she had hepatitis C. Her friends intervened, and, in 1999, Rist withdrew from the Expo job, and soon slipped into a clinical depression.
“The team of friends then sent me to Los Angeles,” Rist said. “I was one month in Venice Beach, in the house of Lili Tanner, an old friend, whom I cooked for, and who did not allow me to read anything about art.” (Tanner remembers Rist saying that she had walked by a newsstand in Santa Monica, “sniffing the art magazines like someone else sniffing porn.”) Her friends also cut her off from Balz Roth, a Swiss tech consultant she had been living with since 1998. She had become obsessed with the fear that he would leave her. Roth was deeply sympathetic and had no intention of leaving her, but he agreed that he had become part of the problem. Rist, who had always been close to her mother, knew that in some ways she was more like her depressive father, and at the same time determined not to be.
“I’d be fast, too, if I had legs that long.” Cartoon by Amy Hwang Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
After that month in California, the depression lifted. She returned to Zurich, where Wirth found her a room in a secluded hotel, and then she spent a month in Jacqueline Burckhardt’s family house in the countryside near Basel. (Solzhenitsyn had stayed there for a while, after he left Russia.) Not long afterward, she was reunited with Roth. “I did not choose a man who was similar to my father,” she said. “And when I was able to stop taking medication Balz told me he wanted a child. I had never thought about having a child, never, but I was thirty-eight, so I knew it was probably my last chance. Balz promised that he would take care of the child, and he kept his promise.” Their baby, a boy whom she named Himalaya (“my favorite word”), was born in 2002. Rist took a great interest in the process of pregnancy—all the bodily changes—but the birth itself left her “a bit disappointed,” as she put it. “I had thought that the moment you give birth you realize some great philosophical truth, but not at all. It’s still a big mystery. I didn’t believe so much in the mother feeling, although of course that came.”
Rist’s work expanded dramatically in 2005. She had been invited to represent Switzerland at the Venice Biennale that year, and was told that she could choose the Swiss pavilion, on the Biennale grounds, or the Baroque Church of San Stae, on the Grand Canal. She chose the church. “Homo Sapiens Sapiens,” a twenty-one-minute video projection, with music by Anders Guggisberg, turned the high, vaulted ceiling of San Stae into a sensual paradise, teeming with images and perspectives that evoked the illusionistic ceilings of Tiepolo and Tintoretto. “I tried to do a paradise without the fall of man,” she explained. Nude female figures floated in a blue sky, crushed papayas between their breasts or underfoot, and swam slowly among huge water lilies. Ewelina Guzik, a startlingly beautiful dancer and choreographer with red hair and pale, lightly freckled skin, lay motionless on a bed of green foliage, locking eyes with the viewer. Fingers glided through undergrowth, faces and bodies doubled and tripled, and waves of changing colors flowed over and through it all. Mattresses (made by Rist’s sister Tamara) had been provided so that viewers could lie down, immersing themselves in the prelapsarian choreography. After two months, the Roman Curia, which oversees Biennale exhibitions, ordered this one shut down—why it was allowed to stay up for so long is a mystery.
Rist had achieved what Massimiliano Gioni, the artistic director of the New Museum, calls “the technological sublime, in the sense that the sublime has migrated from landscape to data.” It’s an interesting thought—the monumental, nature-worshipping canvases of Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Caspar David Friedrich, and other nineteenth-century artists reincarnated in pixels and moving images. In the multichannel videos that Rist has made since “Homo Sapiens Sapiens,” the technology becomes increasingly complex and inventive. She had learned how to shape video images to fit specific areas, in a process called pixel-mapping, which requires breaking the image down and working with one pixel at a time. For “Parasimpatico,” a show that Gioni invited her to do in 2011, Rist transformed the interior of a huge abandoned movie theatre in Milan into a fantastic world of moving images. The show began in the theatre’s Art Deco lobby, where she hung one of her “underwear chandeliers”—made of female undergarments and a few male ones. Video images were projected on the walls of the grand staircase and on the theatre’s giant screen, which had been one of Europe’s first Cineramas. “Her images were throughout the house,” Gioni remembers. “She wanted them to float away from the screen, flying breasts and mouths and lips and body parts. She said it was a way to caress or stroke the cinema, which had been left empty for so long.”
“Pour Your Body Out,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 2008, brought unexpected new life to the museum’s overlarge second-floor atrium, which was notorious for making even Barnett Newman’s “Broken Obelisk” look puny. It was “arguably the first project to humanize—and feminize—the atrium,” Karen Rosenberg wrote in the Times. Viewers could sit or sprawl on an upholstered mound in the center of the room—it looked like a doughnut, or a giant eye—surrounded by wall projections of eighteen-foot-tall clouds and meadows and tulip fields and underwater bodies and plants and a very large black-and-white pig. Children loved it, and some people came back again and again. “For me, that was a paradigm shift at MOMA,” Klaus Biesenbach told me. “You knew the architecture was at the service of the art.” In the two weeks before the opening, Rist sat in the atrium with a few technicians, reworking and recalculating every detail.
“Pepperminta,” her first attempt at a full-length feature video, fared less well when it screened at the Sundance Film Festival, in 2010. The narrative centered on a young woman (played by Guzik) whose grandmother had assigned her the task of freeing the world from any fears that were not required for our survival. The work, hampered by the absence of a viable script, made little impression, and Rist has not tried this form again. While she was at Sundance, she had several conversations with Robert Redford, and was surprised to find that he had seen “Sip My Ocean” and other works of hers, and knew a lot about video art. “I often think how different it would have been if cinemas had provided places, rooms for videos,” she told me. “For a while, video was floating somewhere between cinema and art, but it was the fine arts that finally embraced it.”
Early in her career, Rist worried that the phenomenal popularity of her work would be held against her. Crowds continue to line up for her museum shows. The Times’ Roberta Smith, writing in 2016 about “Pixel Forest,” at the New Museum, described Rist as “an artist who has effortlessly worked aspects of feminism, the body and performance art into her videos while giving moving images and music an organic unity rare in the art world.” There are critics who assume that work this popular should not be taken seriously, but so far no one has dismissed her on that ground, and there is hope that she will not be punished. It helps that even in her most color-drunk and hedonistic videos there are darker elements—melancholy music, weed-choked water, blood, and muck.


newyorker--2020-09-07--How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda

The messages wishing me a gruesome death arrive slowly at first and then all at once .
I am condemned to be burned , raped , tortured .
Some include a video of joyful dancing at a funeral , with fists pounding on a wooden casket .
The hardest ones to read take aim at my mother , who has been immobilized by the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis since 2014 .
Most of the messages originate in China , but my mother and I live in New York .
As the COVID lockdown has swept the city , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ depends on are to be banned from her facility and take to Twitter to publicize my despair .
But this personal plight as a daughter unexpectedly attracts the attention of Chinese nationalists who have long been displeased with my work as a writer reporting on China .
In short order , my predicament is politicized and packaged into a viral sensation .
“ Has your mom died yet ?
” China15z0dj wants to know .
“ Your mom will be dead Haha .
1.4 billion people wish for you to join her in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ point , I stop scrolling .
The messages I dread the most come not from Internet strangers but from people who know me—my aunt , my uncle , my mother ’ s childhood best friend .
On WeChat , they link to various Chinese-language articles about me and ask , “ Have you read this ?
” The next question would be almost funny if it weren ’ t so painfully earnest : “ Do you know this Jiayang Fan ?
” I do not presume to know this character , but countless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comments describe her as a creature driven by self-loathing .
I find a story about my mother and me in the Global Times , a state-controlled Chinese newspaper with twenty-eight million followers on Weibo .
It has been picked up by the country ’ s most popular news aggregator and then energetically disseminated on various platforms .
The more I read , the more fascinated I become by the creation of this alter ego .
I am watching a portrait of myself being painted , minute by minute , anonymous hands contributing daubs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ better .
“ Jiayang Fan , of Chongqing , China , followed her parents to the U.S. at the age of eight , ” one article begins .
“ Even though her body flows with Chinese blood—the blood of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor—she has decided to metamorphose into an American citizen and denigrate her Chinese face as an indisputable burden !
” Creatively , the same words are used as a voice-over accompanying a video post in which images of my mother ’ s face and mine , culled from social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brush-painting style .
A computerized female voice describes Jiayang Fan as a columnist at the New York Times—evidently , this piece of fact checking fell by the wayside—one who makes a living by smearing her homeland .
Not only have I falsely accused China of being the geographic origin of the coronavirus pandemic ; I also had the nerve to support the pro-democracy terrorists in Hong Kong .
Deliciously , once the U.S. finds itself in the grip of the pandemic , Jiayang Fan gets her comeuppance .
It turns out that her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , when medical equipment runs short , it seems that she is to be summarily unplugged from the machine , as a result of American racism .
“ She might believe herself to be American , ” the article notes .
“ But she never expected Americans would treat her like this.
” Many articles and posts are illustrated with grainy cell-phone screenshots of a woman in her sixties in a hospital bed .
Her face is bloated and shiny with tears ; a thick suction tube protrudes from her throat .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in a smaller box , is a younger woman whose twisted , wailing face matches that of the older woman .
We quickly understand that this is Jiayang Fan in a video chat with her mother .
The articles invite us to behold the humiliation that befits a villain .
There is some confusion about whether Fan ’ s mother has died—she has not—but the moral of the story is clear enough : despite Fan ’ s sycophantic “ worship ” of America , her adopted country does not reward the depraved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reminiscent of the heroes and villains of the revolution that I used to write about as a first grader .
My home town , Chongqing , was briefly a Nationalist capital at the end of the Civil War , in 1949 ; my first school outing , at the age of six , was to Zhazidong and Baigongguan , concentration camps where the Nationalists incarcerated , tortured , and executed hundreds of Communists .
One prisoner in particular captured my imagination : Song Zhenzhong , a boy my own age known as Little @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appeared outlandishly large atop his malnourished body .
The son of high-ranking Communists , Little Turnip Head was less than a year old when he was captured with his parents , and grew up in prison , passing messages to his parents ’ comrades in neighboring cells .
On the eve of the Communist victory , as Nationalists prepared to flee , he was shot , and became sanctified as the revolution ’ s youngest martyr .
By second grade , I ’ d written several “ reflections on the heroism of Little @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in my school primers , I mastered the formula : in my essays , people were forever sacrificing themselves , rescuing injured classmates at great personal cost .
All this moral valor was pretty much the opposite of what I observed in the Army compound where my mother and I lived , where daily life abounded in pedestrian deceptions .
Didn ’ t my mother , whom I idolized , sell her egg coupons on the black market ?
And hadn ’ t she , as an Army doctor , given my teachers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to exempt me from corporal punishment ?
Still , the hagiographies and demonologies of official Party history formed the basis of my education .
“ Jiayang Fan , ” in her small way , bears all the hallmarks of a new villain .
Her crime , turning her back on her motherland , is one I have been taught to revile since I was two , when my father left for America .
It was 1986 , and he had been selected to study biology at Harvard , as one in the first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In my mind , my father resembled America itself , an abstraction that gestured toward a gauzy ideal .
That he was chosen to go there rendered him special , the way that America , the richest country on earth , was special .
At the same time , America ’ s ruthless capitalism and unapologetic dominance also made the country sinister and soulless .
And so , although our government had sent my father to the U.S. , his presence there now made him suspect .
If I had some intimation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our passage to the West , it was hard to reconcile with her public protestations to the contrary .
Although she griped about the red tape hampering our departure , she remained unflinchingly devoted to the Communist Party , whose patriotic hymns she hummed daily while she rinsed the dishes .
In 1992 , as we prepared to leave , adults sometimes asked me if we were going to America .
Were they truly curious , or did they already know the answer ?
Innocent questions were just as likely to be perilous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ watched my mother ’ s eyes for instruction and waited for her gaze to guide me .
When I solemnly shook my head , I felt myself not to be lying , exactly , but deflecting bodily harm .

Maybe such reflexive doublethink shows me to be as devious as my online persecutors alleged. But their fixation on my disloyalty to China does not encompass the existential complexity of my betrayal. For what is an immigrant but a mind mired in contradictions and doublings, stranded in unresolved splits of the self? Sometimes I have wondered if these people knew something about Jiayang Fan that had always eluded me. For them, there is not an ounce of doubt, whereas uncertainty is the country where I most belong.
On July 4th—a date that had no meaning to me except that it was exactly a month short of my eighth birthday—my mother and I landed at J.F.K. Airport, our six suitcases bulging with rolls of hand-sewn bedding, bags of Sichuanese chili peppers, a cast-iron wok, and her stethoscope. My mother now found herself, at the age of forty, living in a tiny studio apartment in New Haven, Connecticut—my father was at Yale by then—with a husband who, she soon discovered, was carrying on an affair. Within a year and a half, he had left us, and she was faced with eviction; she had less than two hundred dollars to her name, and spoke little English.
Now the two of us became the embodiment of the Chinese phrase xiang yi wei ming—mutual reliance for life. My mother knew that in a vastly unequal and under-resourced world she would have to secure whatever small advantages she could. Born to Party cadres who, as soldiers, had been wounded on the battlefield in the quest to realize Mao’s vision of Communist China, my mother had been spared the worst of the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution. A brutal, unsentimental pragmatism shaped her deepest instincts. Her decision to become a physician sprang not from a passion for medicine but from the realization that this was her only path to a college education. My parents met in graduate school and, after I was born, a product of China’s one-child policy, entrenched sexism dictated that she should shift her focus from her career to fending for me, her only child.
Shortly before we were to be evicted, a man with a handlebar mustache came to disconnect our phone. A kindly socialist in his fifties named Jim, he took pity on us and invited us to stay with his family, in West Haven. Desperation burnished in my mother a raw, enterprising grit. In broken English, she told Jim that her one wish was to give her daughter a good education. He revealed what seemed to my mother like a valuable piece of insider info: the best public schools were in the wealthiest Zip Codes. After months of trudging to the local library, where Jim told her that newspapers could be read for free, she answered an ad to be a live-in housekeeper in a Connecticut town that she pronounced “Green Witch.” My mother did not believe herself to be doing something bold or daring. She had simply devised a Chinese work-around to a quintessentially American problem.
In the mid-nineties, Greenwich was one of the wealthiest places in the country, and as blindingly white as the blizzards I was encountering for the first time in New England. A good education had previously been a nebulous concept in my mother’s mind, but, with the help of the local library and her employers, it now acquired the concreteness of a blueprint. Public school in a fancy neighborhood could pave the way for a scholarship at a private school, then boarding school, and a prestigious liberal-arts college—a conveyor belt of opportunities carrying me toward the East Coast élite and away from her.
During my first year at Greenwich Academy, I was the only Asian student in my grade. Early on, a classmate whose mother was friends with my mother’s employer plopped down next to me on the school bus and asked a question whose answer she already knew perfectly well: “So your mother is a maid?” Not long afterward, another classmate, an elfin-faced blonde, asked me how I had escaped being killed in China. “You know,” she said, “because they murder all girl babies over there.” In a current-events class, I was struck by the teacher’s deployment of pronouns: us and them, the Americans and the Chinese. When I tried to answer a question about China, I was flummoxed by the grammar required; as the only Chinese-born person in the room, was I meant to say “they” or “we”?
In the first house where my mother worked, we lived in a maid’s room and shared the bed. Everything resembled brightly wrapped gifts for children: sea-blue toile and salmon seersucker, gingham checks and cabana stripes. Nothing matched, and everything was monogrammed. I had no friends, so I watched a lot of TV. One Saturday night, I was astonished to discover a half hour of news from CCTV, the state channel of the People’s Republic of China. Those thirty minutes, every week, bookended by soaring Party tunes and montages of the Chinese flag unfurling against hammer and sickle, took on an inexpressible sanctity. For a year, my mother and I spent our Saturday nights sitting on our bed under our chintz coverlet, watching the Party broadcast. The day it mysteriously vanished from the air, replaced by programming in English, I wept as if some part of me had been scraped out.
“Are we there yet?” Cartoon by Victoria Roberts Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
The needs of Greenwich households were mercurial, and every few years my mother would have to scan the want ads again. The stress of not being able to find another position close to my school suspended her in a state of near-permanent anxiety. In the mid-nineties, she developed facial rashes, which mapped their way across the planes of her cheeks and blistered on her upper lip. The briskness with which they ravaged her face tormented my mother. It was as if her body were rebelling against the downward trajectory of her life—from a respected physician bestowing small favors on her daughter’s teachers to a housekeeper who dressed her daughter in hand-me-downs from her employers’ children. Soon she was plagued by pains that migrated through her body. When, after working all day, she collapsed on the sofa in our room, she would probe her abdomen—kidneys, liver, bowel—trying to find a cancer that she’d become convinced was there. “The lump is inoperable, an immediate death sentence,” she would say.
My mother’s worries scared me, but she could share them with no one else. Years of having only a useless child for company hardened her despair and loneliness into a rage that could gust into violent, seething storms. Once, out of sheer horror that I might lose my mother, I suggested that she see a doctor. I knew our situation well enough by then—we didn’t have health insurance—to be apprehensive about my boldness. She’d likely berate me for not understanding that a visit to an Official American Institution was too expensive, too complicated, too intimidating. My mother had been sewing a button that had fallen off a tartan skirt, part of my school uniform, and my question caused her eyes to flit up and settle accusingly on me. “Do you think a doctor would get her own body wrong?” she challenged. That it was an illness erupting from the crushing weight of powerlessness and shame was not a diagnosis she could afford to obtain or bear to imagine.
My mother never did develop the cancer she dreaded would kill her, but, in the fall of 2011, at the age of fifty-nine, she received a far harsher sentence: she would be buried alive by a disease she had never heard of. As A.L.S. gradually paralyzed her, while leaving her intellect intact, our years were filled with I.C.U. visits, emergency surgeries, stays in nursing homes, and wrenching conversations with strangers about the logistics of death. Then, in 2014, after my mother could no longer breathe without a ventilator, she was moved to the Henry J. Carter Specialty Hospital, in Harlem, which, I was told, was the only long-term acute-care facility in Manhattan that could take her.
Early on, it was clear that my mother needed more help than Carter could provide. To avoid bedsores, she had to be turned every two hours. The mucus that gathered in her airway had to be suctioned every half hour. Because she was on a ventilator and had had a tracheotomy, she could no longer produce sound, and we had to devise a new way of “speaking.” I would hold up an alphabet chart and trail through the letters with my finger until a blink from my mother told me to stop, and letter by letter a message would emerge. My mother’s English remains rudimentary. Even when she could speak, she often resorted to placeholders like “this,” “thing,” “here,” and “stuff.” Now her sentences wove heedlessly between Chinese and Chinglish, urgent with demands I could neither decode nor meet. I lived on a La-Z-Boy next to her hospital bed, which I positioned so that our faces were visible to each other if either of us happened to open our eyes in the middle of the night. Not that my mother could sleep much. Her body resisted the rhythm of the ventilator, and, several times a day, a rapid-response team had to manually pump air into her choked lungs. Every second that she couldn’t see me left her petrified. I stopped showering.
After a few months, it became apparent to both of us that I needed to go back to work—but how could I abandon her to strangers? I looked for an apartment near the hospital and trained a shifting roster of heath-care aides, Fujianese immigrants and the hardiest, most unself-pitying women I know. Like my mother, they had survived in America by working lowly jobs to support their families, and went about their chores with the quiet stamina of those who never take a penny for granted. Alternating their duties week by week, they tended to her twenty-four hours a day, never even missing Chinese New Year.


newyorker--2020-09-07--Yaa Gyasi Explores the Science of the Soul

One of the most moving chapters in W. E. B .
Du Bois ’ s collection of essays , “ The Souls of Black Folk , ” is a fiction , a harrowing hypothesis titled “ Of the Coming of John.
” It tells the story of two young men bound by the same first name .
John Jones , an African-American full of promise , leaves the small town of Altamaha , Georgia , to get an education .
Years later , he comes home to find himself alienated by his education and limited in opportunity .
From the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” John Henderson , the white , entitled son of Judge Henderson , sails off to Princeton without a thought for his navigation .
The two lives , already linked by name , town , and racial system ( John Jones ’ s sister Jennie works as a maid in the Judge ’ s house ) , intersect one fateful day , when John Jones discovers John Henderson sexually assaulting Jennie in a wood .
Jones kills Henderson , and so leaves town again , for the North .
Du Bois forces @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dramatize their bifurcation : “ Few thought of two Johns—for the black folk thought of one John and he was black ; and the white folk thought of another John , and he was white .
And neither world thought the other world ’ s thought , save with a vague unrest.
” In her first novel , “ Homegoing ” ( 2016 ) , the Ghanaian-American novelist Yaa Gyasi brilliantly renewed and expanded the fiction of double lives .
While Du Bois treats just two people , Gyasi follows two branches of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Du Bois confines himself to America , while Gyasi ’ s novel makes a double-chambered form for the hybridity of African-American history , moving between Ghana and the United States , from the late eighteenth century to the present .
Though fiercely eloquent , Du Bois ’ s story doesn ’ t pretend to be more than a kind of sermon , an allegory of perpetually sundered white and Black fortune .
Gyasi ’ s novelistic enrichment lies in the way she grounds her tale not in stark difference but in uneasy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ descend from the same Ashanti mother : one daughter , Effia , marries a British soldier stationed in Ghana , and lives with him in the Cape Coast Castle ; the other , Esi , is sold into slavery and shipped to America .
The novel ’ s alternating chapters illuminate the various fates of the descendants of Effia and Esi .
Different fortunes , even different races , are seen to exist not on different tracks but within one large family ; and the knowledge that this is indeed one large family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a pressure of completion on the novel ’ s plot , a happy ending that we feel throughout to be inevitable .
Sure enough , in the last chapter of “ Homegoing , ” set in the present day , Marcus and Marjorie—one a descendant of Esi ’ s , one of Effia ’ s—meet at a party at Stanford .
Together they return to Ghana , and visit the Cape Coast Castle : the bloodline is finally going home , even if it is unlikely to stay there .
There is plenty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ published when Gyasi was twenty-six , not least the conviction of its storytelling , which storms sleeplessly through the generations .
Its ambition , if not quite its achievement , seems commensurate with the scale of its subject .
It is also , alas , something of a concoction .
The rapid chapters , each pinned to a different character and time , shallowly inhabit their eras .
Plantation slavery , emancipation , Reconstruction , the Jazz Age , the civil-rights movement—all are quickly notched onto the belt of the narrative , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seems closer to predictability .
The links between the characters begin to feel forced .
The writing lapses into the kind of stick-on prose that often besets the historical saga .
Gyasi ’ s second novel , “ Transcendent Kingdom ” ( Knopf ) , is a very different book , and , I think , a better one—contemporary , personal , acutely focussed on a single family , and intensely felt , where her début was wide and symphonic , its sympathies scored for many parts .
This novel is narrated by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , like Marjorie in “ Homegoing , ” has a Stanford connection and grew up in Huntsville , Alabama .
( Gyasi herself was born in Ghana , grew up in Huntsville , and went to Stanford . )
Gifty is a graduate student in neuroscience .
In her Stanford lab , she works on reward-seeking behavior in the brain : she studies why some mice persist in pressing a lever that they hope will provide them with a sweet hit of Ensure even when they are likely to be repaid by random @ @ @ @ @ @ @ learn their lesson and desist .
Gifty has one of those significant occupations which are almost always thematically overdetermined in contemporary novels .
In fact , such portents surround her .
Her beloved older brother , Nana , a talented basketball player , died of a heroin overdose as a teen-ager , when Gifty was eleven ; their mother sank into a severe depression and tried to commit suicide .
As the novel opens , Gifty ’ s mother has collapsed again , and has travelled from Huntsville to her daughter ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all day in bed , almost mute .
Gifty insists that she took up neuroscience not out of any sisterly duty to Nana but because it seemed the hardest thing she could do , and , she says , “ I wanted to do the hardest thing .
I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle.
” But she also hopes that her research will one day help explain human illnesses like depression , “ where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure , or drug @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” In the course of the novel , she becomes increasingly attached to a particular mouse , an Ensure addict that can ’ t stop pressing the reward lever .
This mouse has a limp : Nana ’ s addiction to opioids began with an OxyContin prescription he was given when he injured his ankle on the basketball court .
“ Transcendent Kingdom ” quickly falls into a back-and-forth rhythm of present and past .
In the present , Gifty struggles to rouse her afflicted mother , tells us about her work , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the emotional undercurrents of her life are always pulling her back to Huntsville .
The two characters at the heart of the novel , Gifty and her mother , nicknamed by her daughter the Black Mamba , are at once blazingly interesting and , by authorial design , frustratingly opaque , for both are studies in repression .
Gifty ’ s mother , a Ghanaian immigrant , has a wary resistance to things American , and a tense anxiety around questions of intimacy and self-knowledge .
As a remembered character—as the young mother @ @ @ @ @ @ @ narrator in abbreviated moments and episodes , stray sayings and opinions .
She is certainly the novel ’ s central triumph , though she is always wriggling to the side of the narrator ’ s lens—in part because her long hours outside the home ( she works as a caregiver for two other families ) mean that she is rarely with her own children .
Her mother became the family ’ s only parent and breadwinner after Gifty ’ s father abandoned them to return to Ghana .
The Black Mamba is also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decide whether her mother is cruel or not .
The woman certainly isn ’ t inclined to the soft overparenting of the West .
( Gifty recalls , “ I ’ d spent my whole childhood slipping teeth under my pillow at night and finding teeth there in the morning.
” ) When her children tell her they don ’ t believe in ghosts , she chides them for becoming too American .
Robustly animistic , she disdains therapy and considers mental illness an invention of the West ( “ along with everything @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Her faith , performed with relish at a local church , is a mixture of Pentecostal Christianity and old-country optimism : “ Bring on the speaking in tongues , the signs and wonders .
Bring on the witch doctor , too , if he cares to help.
” Gifty notes that when her mother talks to friends on the phone in Fante she becomes girlish and gossipy ; in English , she is meek and halting .
What Gifty ’ s mother really desires , what makes her happy , remains unclear ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ relaxation of self-expression or self-exploration .

One of the most moving chapters in W. E. B. Du Bois’s collection of essays, “The Souls of Black Folk,” is a fiction, a harrowing hypothesis titled “Of the Coming of John.” It tells the story of two young men bound by the same first name. John Jones, an African-American full of promise, leaves the small town of Altamaha, Georgia, to get an education. Years later, he comes home to find himself alienated by his education and limited in opportunity. From the same town, “the other John,” John Henderson, the white, entitled son of Judge Henderson, sails off to Princeton without a thought for his navigation. The two lives, already linked by name, town, and racial system (John Jones’s sister Jennie works as a maid in the Judge’s house), intersect one fateful day, when John Jones discovers John Henderson sexually assaulting Jennie in a wood. Jones kills Henderson, and so leaves town again, for the North. Du Bois forces together these two lives in order to dramatize their bifurcation: “Few thought of two Johns—for the black folk thought of one John and he was black; and the white folk thought of another John, and he was white. And neither world thought the other world’s thought, save with a vague unrest.”
In her first novel, “Homegoing” (2016), the Ghanaian-American novelist Yaa Gyasi brilliantly renewed and expanded the fiction of double lives. While Du Bois treats just two people, Gyasi follows two branches of a family tree, across seven generations. Du Bois confines himself to America, while Gyasi’s novel makes a double-chambered form for the hybridity of African-American history, moving between Ghana and the United States, from the late eighteenth century to the present. Though fiercely eloquent, Du Bois’s story doesn’t pretend to be more than a kind of sermon, an allegory of perpetually sundered white and Black fortune. Gyasi’s novelistic enrichment lies in the way she grounds her tale not in stark difference but in uneasy similitude. The two bloodlines she traces descend from the same Ashanti mother: one daughter, Effia, marries a British soldier stationed in Ghana, and lives with him in the Cape Coast Castle; the other, Esi, is sold into slavery and shipped to America. The novel’s alternating chapters illuminate the various fates of the descendants of Effia and Esi. Different fortunes, even different races, are seen to exist not on different tracks but within one large family; and the knowledge that this is indeed one large family, brutally and unnaturally cleaved, exerts a pressure of completion on the novel’s plot, a happy ending that we feel throughout to be inevitable. Sure enough, in the last chapter of “Homegoing,” set in the present day, Marcus and Marjorie—one a descendant of Esi’s, one of Effia’s—meet at a party at Stanford. Together they return to Ghana, and visit the Cape Coast Castle: the bloodline is finally going home, even if it is unlikely to stay there.
There is plenty to admire in “Homegoing,” published when Gyasi was twenty-six, not least the conviction of its storytelling, which storms sleeplessly through the generations. Its ambition, if not quite its achievement, seems commensurate with the scale of its subject. It is also, alas, something of a concoction. The rapid chapters, each pinned to a different character and time, shallowly inhabit their eras. Plantation slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, the Jazz Age, the civil-rights movement—all are quickly notched onto the belt of the narrative, and suddenly the great inevitability of the book seems closer to predictability. The links between the characters begin to feel forced. The writing lapses into the kind of stick-on prose that often besets the historical saga.
Gyasi’s second novel, “Transcendent Kingdom” (Knopf), is a very different book, and, I think, a better one—contemporary, personal, acutely focussed on a single family, and intensely felt, where her début was wide and symphonic, its sympathies scored for many parts. This novel is narrated by a twenty-eight-year-old Ghanaian-American named Gifty, who, like Marjorie in “Homegoing,” has a Stanford connection and grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. (Gyasi herself was born in Ghana, grew up in Huntsville, and went to Stanford.) Gifty is a graduate student in neuroscience. In her Stanford lab, she works on reward-seeking behavior in the brain: she studies why some mice persist in pressing a lever that they hope will provide them with a sweet hit of Ensure even when they are likely to be repaid by random electric shocks, while other mice apparently learn their lesson and desist.
Gifty has one of those significant occupations which are almost always thematically overdetermined in contemporary novels. In fact, such portents surround her. Her beloved older brother, Nana, a talented basketball player, died of a heroin overdose as a teen-ager, when Gifty was eleven; their mother sank into a severe depression and tried to commit suicide. As the novel opens, Gifty’s mother has collapsed again, and has travelled from Huntsville to her daughter’s apartment in California, where she spends all day in bed, almost mute. Gifty insists that she took up neuroscience not out of any sisterly duty to Nana but because it seemed the hardest thing she could do, and, she says, “I wanted to do the hardest thing. I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle.” But she also hopes that her research will one day help explain human illnesses like depression, “where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough.” In the course of the novel, she becomes increasingly attached to a particular mouse, an Ensure addict that can’t stop pressing the reward lever. This mouse has a limp: Nana’s addiction to opioids began with an OxyContin prescription he was given when he injured his ankle on the basketball court.
“Transcendent Kingdom” quickly falls into a back-and-forth rhythm of present and past. In the present, Gifty struggles to rouse her afflicted mother, tells us about her work, socializes with friends and colleagues. But the emotional undercurrents of her life are always pulling her back to Huntsville. The two characters at the heart of the novel, Gifty and her mother, nicknamed by her daughter the Black Mamba, are at once blazingly interesting and, by authorial design, frustratingly opaque, for both are studies in repression. Gifty’s mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, has a wary resistance to things American, and a tense anxiety around questions of intimacy and self-knowledge. As a remembered character—as the young mother of two children—she is captured by our narrator in abbreviated moments and episodes, stray sayings and opinions. She is certainly the novel’s central triumph, though she is always wriggling to the side of the narrator’s lens—in part because her long hours outside the home (she works as a caregiver for two other families) mean that she is rarely with her own children. Her mother became the family’s only parent and breadwinner after Gifty’s father abandoned them to return to Ghana.
The Black Mamba is also temperamentally elusive; Gifty can’t decide whether her mother is cruel or not. The woman certainly isn’t inclined to the soft overparenting of the West. (Gifty recalls, “I’d spent my whole childhood slipping teeth under my pillow at night and finding teeth there in the morning.”) When her children tell her they don’t believe in ghosts, she chides them for becoming too American. Robustly animistic, she disdains therapy and considers mental illness an invention of the West (“along with everything else she disapproved of”). Her faith, performed with relish at a local church, is a mixture of Pentecostal Christianity and old-country optimism: “Bring on the speaking in tongues, the signs and wonders. Bring on the witch doctor, too, if he cares to help.” Gifty notes that when her mother talks to friends on the phone in Fante she becomes girlish and gossipy; in English, she is meek and halting. What Gifty’s mother really desires, what makes her happy, remains unclear; life is generally too tense for the relaxation of self-expression or self-exploration.
The novel is full of brilliantly revealing moments, sometimes funny, often poignant. When Gifty is asked by her science teacher to buy corn syrup for an experiment, her mother complains about the expense. But when the teacher, hearing about the complaints, finds a free bottle for Gifty in her storage closet, the Black Mamba erupts in shame and yells at her daughter to “take it back, take it back, TAKE IT BACK.” When Nana’s gigantic adolescent appetite threatens the straitened domestic budget, the Black Mamba waters down the orange juice and hides food around the house.
At one point, Gifty remarks that her mother lost her native country, her husband, and then her son—an evisceration that has left her in an uneasy and exposed alliance with her daughter. The uneasiness has partly to do with an unacknowledged similarity of temperament. Gifty’s mother responded to Nana’s death by collapsing into a fiercely denied depression; Gifty has responded to Nana’s death by shrinking into a fiercely defended perfection. She wants, above all, to be “good,” and has chosen science because the discipline offers a well-defined path to that goodness. The little girl who at the age of eight read the Bible from cover to cover is no longer a Christian, but she still craves rules and prohibitions. She is censorious, a little priggish, awkward, shy. She goes to Harvard as an undergraduate and boasts to the reader that she built “a new Gifty from scratch.” She tries never to speak about her brother; to a boyfriend at Stanford, she pretends to be an only child. When her mother incautiously (and uncharacteristically) ends a phone call with “I love you,” Gifty laughs at her—“I laughed so hard I started crying.”
One of the most interesting aspects of this novel is, in fact, that its narrator is not an especially sympathetic character. Gifty, whose repressions and cruelties eerily mirror her mother’s, isn’t by any means a systematically unreliable narrator, but she is unreliable enough to remain provokingly vital. That her rigid self-fashioning represents an escape from grief is something that she acknowledges; the subtle question the novel raises is what unacknowledged shame she is also fleeing. After all, the person who built “a new Gifty from scratch” is leaving behind everything that formed her in Alabama: her immigrant mother, the Pentecostal Church, the public school where evolution was not taught, but also the people yelling racist slurs from passing cars.
Gifty tells us that she is too diffident to shine at parties, but that being Black can help: “It’s remarkable how cool you can seem when you are the only black person in a room, even when you’ve done nothing cool at all.” It’s a funny line, but the controlled sangfroid chills to brittleness. Gifty is practiced at pointing to her repressions, in order to repress them even further. She thinks of her mother as callous, and then sympathetically recalls that a callus is “the hardened tissue that forms over a wound,” apparently unaware that she has just described herself. Virginia Woolf said that there is a spot the size of a shilling on the back of one’s head, which one can never see for oneself. Gifty is not about to ask anyone else to look for her.
Unfortunately, “Transcendent Kingdom” has a few shilling-size spots of its own—areas that the book refuses to see with clarity, and in ways that are not suggestive but bewildering. Most important, Nana’s downfall remains blurred and somewhat generic. Gifty insists that no case study in the world “could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live,” but the novel fails to provide the evidence. Perhaps a fall into addiction is all too often a fall into formula, yet it seems important for the novelist to search for the nonformulaic, the brutally specific:
Nana started stealing from our mother. Small things at first, her wallet, her checkbook, but soon the car was gone and so was the dining room table. Soon Nana was gone too. For days and weeks at a time he went missing, and my mother went after him.
We are hardly surprised when Nana punches a hole in the wall and smashes the TV: a continuation of the familiar gestures. At those moments when Gyasi’s prose is summoned to intense specificity, it smears into cliché: “On the nights when he would slink in through the back door, coming down from a high, reeking to high Heaven.” “He’d skulk off to his room and hide there until the entire event had to be repeated.” “Nana rolled his eyes and stomped off, and my mother sighed a heavy sigh.” On the night that Nana has been found dead in the parking lot of a Starbucks, Gifty can tell us only that “we were blindsided.”
Cliché is our original sin, the thing we all try to escape, but the offense is not merely aesthetic or musical; it is epistemological—cliché blocks our apprehension of reality. In place of singularity, it substitutes commonality; in place of the private oddity, it offers the shared obviousness. What is striking is that words fail the novel at those moments when it is most critical that they succeed. Is it too speculative to suggest a failure of authorial nerve here, as if, for Gyasi, the most burning material cannot quite be stared at? One sometimes has the sense, here and in “Homegoing,” of the great pain of her chosen subject matter—slavery, addiction, suicide—being soothed into the generic:


newyorker--2020-09-07--The Injustices of Aging

The Injustices of Aging

Life is short , it is said , though not as short as the vast majority of novels would have us believe .
Youth is the plaything of the novel—certainly of the bildungsroman , with its lost illusions and great expectations , and of the midlife novel , whose characters cast off the shackles of adulthood to claim the symbolic passions of an earlier age .
Even novels about growing old look back more intently than they look down at the flesh and blood of seventy or eighty .
In Saul Bellow ’ s “ Ravelstein ” and Philip Roth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” the spectre of death quickens and focusses memory .
It compels reminiscences , flashbacks ; drives wheezy little men into the arms of younger women whose beauty and vitality they cling to like Odysseus to his rock .
There such novels hang , too , amid the misty romance of the past , fearful that the red-hot glow of rapture no longer waits faithfully on the horizon .
Or as a character in Sigrid Nunez ’ s “ What Are You Going Through ” ( Riverhead ) says , “ But after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bliss—doesn ’ t happen , it can ’ t happen.
” Nunez ’ s novel wants to be an exception that proves the rule .
Its task is an unenviable one : to strip old age of whatever illusions the novel has imparted to it ; to verify the truth and significance of aging and dying by turning the cool white light of Nunez ’ s prose on every vein , every wrinkle .
The plot is simple , wandering , and loosely associative : an unnamed , first-person narrator , “ a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ keeps the company of a friend who is dying of cancer .
In the beginning , the friend is in the hospital in a college town .
Unlike most college towns , this one is curiously devoid of anyone young .
The people the narrator encounters are not merely old but aging badly , with a self-consciousness that makes them pitiful , impious , and occasionally vulgar .
The host of her Airbnb is “ a retired librarian , a widow , ” a “ mother of four , the grandmother of six @ @ @ @ @ @ @ slack face , and is ashamed to be grieving the death of her only companion , her cat .
The narrator attends a talk about environmental collapse delivered by a famous writer , a man whose arrogant features—his “ stark-white hair , beaky nose , thin lips , piercing gaze ” —evince the look of entitlement “ that comes to many older white men at a certain age.
” The woman who introduces his talk is a professor , also “ a familiar type : the glam academic , the intellectual vamp ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phrase echoes mockingly through the early chapters of the novel , which find the narrator relaying conversations she has with other unnamed women about growing old .
Irony occasionally swells into contempt , though the contempt hardly belongs to the narrator alone .
Disdain for the elderly is a distinctly modern form of brutality , difficult to imagine before the nineteenth century , when great gains in life expectancy turned aging into a moral and aesthetic project .
No doubt women are its primary targets .
No doubt they suffer more for it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ aging gracefully ” ( the phrase appears as early as an 1894 newspaper article promising that old ladies “ are a thing of the past ” ) in a culture where productivity and reproductivity are the measure of a woman ’ s worth , women invariably fail to do so , and either make a spectacle of their failure , like Nunez ’ s intellectual vamp , or shrivel into invisibility .
That modern societies , and Anglo-American society in particular , treat the elderly as unseemly and disposable should come as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the news for the past six months .
For all Nunez ’ s knowing humor and dispassionate tone , her narrator embodies the injustices of aging that estrange women from social life , from one another , and from themselves .
The narrator ’ s gentle disdain for her Airbnb host ( who looks “ like a frightened toddler , ” she thinks ) , her open hostility toward the glam academic—these reactions would have been easily comprehensible to her intellectual predecessors .
Growing old , according to Simone de Beauvoir , transformed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” with the same anguish and irresolution that first becoming a woman did .
“ As men see it , a woman ’ s purpose in life is to be an erotic object , ” de Beauvoir wrote in her 1970 book , “ The Coming of Age.
” “ When she grows old and ugly she loses the place allotted to her in society : she becomes a monstrum that excites revulsion and even dread.
” Nunez ’ s friend Susan Sontag repeated de Beauvoir ’ s claim in her 1972 essay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” adding that women often internalized other people ’ s revulsion as their own shame—a self-loathing made more unbearable for the high premium they had once placed on their youth and beauty .
Nunez ’ s first novel , “ A Feather on the Breath of God , ” published in 1995 , ends by foreshadowing this irony .
That book ’ s narrator tries to explain her sexual recklessness to an older woman , “ a stout , shapeless , housemother-type , with a homely manner of speaking and an even homelier @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and think : How can she possibly understand ?
This woman has never been ravished.
” Twenty-five years later , the Nunez narrator is no longer young , and her face is more ravaged than ravished .
Now she wants to look at the faces of the elderly women she meets , and , setting aside both sentimentality and her contempt , try simply to listen ; to pay attention ; to understand what they are going through .
What Nunez requires of the novel is a formal commitment to impersonality—or as close @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still writing in the first person .
The narrator reveals little of her life , and rarely betrays her emotions .
Her voice is calm , direct , aphoristic ; at moments , humorously affectionate .
She walks among other elderly women , summoning powers of concentration and perception to make their suffering coextensive with hers .
“ Flaubert said , To think is to suffer , ” she muses .
“ Is this the same as Aristotle ’ s To perceive is to suffer ?
” Through her thoughtful gaze , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to all who are aging gracelessly in this modern world—which is to say , everyone .

Life is short, it is said, though not as short as the vast majority of novels would have us believe. Youth is the plaything of the novel—certainly of the bildungsroman, with its lost illusions and great expectations, and of the midlife novel, whose characters cast off the shackles of adulthood to claim the symbolic passions of an earlier age. Even novels about growing old look back more intently than they look down at the flesh and blood of seventy or eighty. In Saul Bellow’s “Ravelstein” and Philip Roth’s “The Dying Animal,” the spectre of death quickens and focusses memory. It compels reminiscences, flashbacks; drives wheezy little men into the arms of younger women whose beauty and vitality they cling to like Odysseus to his rock. There such novels hang, too, amid the misty romance of the past, fearful that the red-hot glow of rapture no longer waits faithfully on the horizon. Or as a character in Sigrid Nunez’s “What Are You Going Through” (Riverhead) says, “But after a certain age, that feeling—that pure bliss—doesn’t happen, it can’t happen.”
Nunez’s novel wants to be an exception that proves the rule. Its task is an unenviable one: to strip old age of whatever illusions the novel has imparted to it; to verify the truth and significance of aging and dying by turning the cool white light of Nunez’s prose on every vein, every wrinkle. The plot is simple, wandering, and loosely associative: an unnamed, first-person narrator, “a female of a certain age,” keeps the company of a friend who is dying of cancer. In the beginning, the friend is in the hospital in a college town. Unlike most college towns, this one is curiously devoid of anyone young. The people the narrator encounters are not merely old but aging badly, with a self-consciousness that makes them pitiful, impious, and occasionally vulgar. The host of her Airbnb is “a retired librarian, a widow,” a “mother of four, the grandmother of six”; she has a fat, slack face, and is ashamed to be grieving the death of her only companion, her cat. The narrator attends a talk about environmental collapse delivered by a famous writer, a man whose arrogant features—his “stark-white hair, beaky nose, thin lips, piercing gaze”—evince the look of entitlement “that comes to many older white men at a certain age.” The woman who introduces his talk is a professor, also “a familiar type: the glam academic, the intellectual vamp”:
Someone at pains for it to be known that, although smart and well educated, although a feminist and a woman in a position of power, the lady is no frump, no boring nerd, no sexless harridan. And so what if she’s past a certain age. The cling of the skirt, the height of the heels, the scarlet mouth and tinted hair . . . everything says: I’m still fuckable.
“A certain age”—the phrase echoes mockingly through the early chapters of the novel, which find the narrator relaying conversations she has with other unnamed women about growing old. Irony occasionally swells into contempt, though the contempt hardly belongs to the narrator alone. Disdain for the elderly is a distinctly modern form of brutality, difficult to imagine before the nineteenth century, when great gains in life expectancy turned aging into a moral and aesthetic project. No doubt women are its primary targets. No doubt they suffer more for it. Obliged to learn the art of “aging gracefully” (the phrase appears as early as an 1894 newspaper article promising that old ladies “are a thing of the past”) in a culture where productivity and reproductivity are the measure of a woman’s worth, women invariably fail to do so, and either make a spectacle of their failure, like Nunez’s intellectual vamp, or shrivel into invisibility. That modern societies, and Anglo-American society in particular, treat the elderly as unseemly and disposable should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the news for the past six months.
For all Nunez’s knowing humor and dispassionate tone, her narrator embodies the injustices of aging that estrange women from social life, from one another, and from themselves. The narrator’s gentle disdain for her Airbnb host (who looks “like a frightened toddler,” she thinks), her open hostility toward the glam academic—these reactions would have been easily comprehensible to her intellectual predecessors. Growing old, according to Simone de Beauvoir, transformed a woman into an “Other,” with the same anguish and irresolution that first becoming a woman did. “As men see it, a woman’s purpose in life is to be an erotic object,” de Beauvoir wrote in her 1970 book, “The Coming of Age.” “When she grows old and ugly she loses the place allotted to her in society: she becomes a monstrum that excites revulsion and even dread.” Nunez’s friend Susan Sontag repeated de Beauvoir’s claim in her 1972 essay “The Double Standard of Aging,” adding that women often internalized other people’s revulsion as their own shame—a self-loathing made more unbearable for the high premium they had once placed on their youth and beauty. Nunez’s first novel, “A Feather on the Breath of God,” published in 1995, ends by foreshadowing this irony. That book’s narrator tries to explain her sexual recklessness to an older woman, “a stout, shapeless, housemother-type, with a homely manner of speaking and an even homelier face. I look at that face and think: How can she possibly understand? This woman has never been ravished.”
Twenty-five years later, the Nunez narrator is no longer young, and her face is more ravaged than ravished. Now she wants to look at the faces of the elderly women she meets, and, setting aside both sentimentality and her contempt, try simply to listen; to pay attention; to understand what they are going through. What Nunez requires of the novel is a formal commitment to impersonality—or as close as one can get to impersonality while still writing in the first person. The narrator reveals little of her life, and rarely betrays her emotions. Her voice is calm, direct, aphoristic; at moments, humorously affectionate. She walks among other elderly women, summoning powers of concentration and perception to make their suffering coextensive with hers. “Flaubert said, To think is to suffer,” she muses. “Is this the same as Aristotle’s To perceive is to suffer?” Through her thoughtful gaze, the novel begins to extend its imperfect grace to all who are aging gracelessly in this modern world—which is to say, everyone.
“What Are You Going Through” takes its title from a line in Simone Weil’s extraordinary essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” Written in 1942, the essay traces the tender, joyful relationship between attention and grace that Nunez’s novel also unfurls. Weil held that the proper aim of school studies was to learn to increase one’s power of attention, so that, eventually, one could turn one’s whole attention to God in prayer. Classroom exercises helped to cultivate the habit of attention, though the pure, intense, and untired attention that Weil believed brought God nearer to us did not emerge from hard work and outward ambition, from “the kind of frowning application that leads us to say with a sense of duty done: ‘I have worked well!’ ” Attention was an effort, but it was a “negative effort.” It called forth first the inherent pleasure of contemplating something external to oneself—an equation, a poem, another human being—and then the willingness to wait, neither seeking a problem nor desiring a solution but simply allowing the truth to arrive. “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object,” Weil wrote. The void created by attention would be filled by the full flow of grace: the abandonment of the self to the beauty of the surrounding world.
References to Weil’s philosophy appear throughout Nunez’s books, from “The Last of Her Kind” (2006) to “Sempre Susan” (2011)—a memoir of Sontag, who introduced Nunez to Weil’s writing—to “The Friend” (2018). “What Are You Going Through” is the only one to elevate Weil’s doctrine of attention into an organizing principle, shaping its structure, its narrative voice, and its temporality. Each conversation the narrator has is an exercise in attention: an occasion for her to shed her sense of self and to wait to receive the being she is looking at, just as she is, in all her truth. The slackness of the novel’s plot and the simple, unmarked quality of Nunez’s sentences are part of the narrator’s self-effacement. Every trace of her particularity, of her imagination, must be vanquished. Only then can she catch and turn into words the spirit of the women she encounters. That most of these women are elderly or sick, disgruntled and often unpleasant, makes her task even harder. “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing,” Weil wrote. “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.”
That the narrator will fail, or that she will not succeed entirely, is a given. She is not God, the only true source of grace. She cannot suffer fools gladly. But as the novel progresses she learns to fail better. The tension that animates the narrative is her transformation of the “I” into a porous figure, capable of speaking for and through others, in what becomes almost a collective expression of affliction. In the beginning, the women she meets arouse her scorn. They appear before her as types rather than as distinctive human beings: there are even two characters she calls Woman A and Woman B. At the gym the narrator attends, she examines another familiar specimen: the once beautiful woman. “In middle age she is toned but overweight, her precise features have blurred, the dazzle is gone,” the narrator observes. “In the locker room she sits hunched and swathed in towels with a look of grievance on her face.” Yet, as the narrator turns to another once beautiful woman, physical description and the frame of conversation begin to fall away. Now this once beautiful woman’s “I” is allowed to merge with the narrator’s:
I remember, the elderly and once beautiful woman said, after I reached a certain age it was like a bad dream—one of those nightmares where for some reason no one you know recognizes you anymore. . . . I’d never been in the position of having to work at making people like and admire me. Suddenly I was all shy and socially awkward. Worse, I started to feel paranoid. Had I turned into one of those pathetic people always trying to get others to like them when everyone knows that that’s just the sort of person other people never do like?
Why should one heed this woman and women like her? For Weil, the highest purpose of attention and its erasure of the self was to draw closer to God. Nunez focusses her attention instead on nature—“and through her, God,” Thoreau might have added. The inevitability of environmental devastation looms over the novel. Nature, too, is a once beautiful thing that time has ravaged, that men have defaced. Its decline is also characterized as a problem of attention. “People’s attention remained elusive,” the writer who gives a talk on climate change complains. He blames first the creative, well-educated types who embraced “personal therapies and pseudo-religious practices that promoted detachment, a focus on the moment”; then the child bearers, eager to affirm life no matter the cost to the planet. What crisis requires is not compassion, the writer insists, but “a collective, fanatical, over-the-top obsession with impending doom.”
Against such dreary prognostications, “What Are You Going Through” offers no grandiose claims about how its ethic of attention might drive collective human action. Nobody communes with giant redwood trees. No desert landscapes shimmer with an incipient consciousness. Yet Nunez has been drawn to the minds of animals since at least “Mitz” (1998), a mock biography of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s marmoset, and never more so than in “The Friend,” whose plot turned on its narrator’s relationship with a melancholy Great Dane named Apollo. Now she uses Weil’s mysticism to model how paying attention to the dying body might train one to pay attention to the dying planet and all its suffering species. One night, the narrator speaks—or dreams that she speaks—to a kitten named Booger, adopted by her Airbnb host to replace the cat that died. Booger recalls his first home; the fire that destroyed it; the boys who found him wandering the streets, frail and hungry; the dumpster they threw him in after abusing him. “I began to cry, making my voice as big as possible, said the cat, and very big indeed it sounded to me in that void, but no one heard, no one came, and soon I had no voice left to cry.” The narrator draws no distinction between how one might listen to a person and how one might listen to a cat. Why should she? The void they cry into is the same. Their need to be seen and saved is identical.
The first time I read “What Are You Going Through,” I was neither impressed nor moved. Nunez seemed to be writing herself into a lineage of writers who took the power of attention to be the ethical imperative of literature. The novel nods at Virginia Woolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Elizabeth Hardwick, writers whose techniques of attentiveness work, in their different ways, to dissolve interiority into exteriority, mind into world. But Nunez doesn’t have Woolf’s ecstatic sensuality or Bachmann’s philosophical rigor or Hardwick’s swashbuckling flair. The novel’s spiritual imagination certainly interested me—it sent me in search of Weil’s essay. But aligning the novel’s aesthetics with its ethics seemed to demand too great a sacrifice on the altar of style. Frequently, my mind wandered.
Then I read the novel again. Perhaps my distraction had been a defensive pose. “Most people are in denial about aging, just as they are about dying,” Nunez writes. Perhaps writing about a novel cultivates a practice of attentiveness that replaces the subjectivity of one’s initial judgment with a more undesiring form of argument—and, through it, appreciation. Rereading “What Are You Going Through,” I was dazed by the novel’s grace: its creation of a narrative consciousness that, by emptying and extending itself to others, insured that its vitality would never dwindle, never dim. Nunez had captured what Woolf, in her exquisite story on aging, “The Lady in the Looking Glass,” describes as life’s “profounder state of being,” “the state that is to the mind what breathing is to the body.” Could one fault Nunez’s novel for its imperfections? For leaving its strands a little frayed and thin? “I have tried,” the narrator thinks. “What does it matter if I failed.”


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Dear Moderators,
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