Race, again and again and again
In her essay collection “No Man’s Land,” Eula Biss’ approach to race is fueled by a quest for intellectual clarity so intense that it takes on a spiritual tone
By Donna Blumenfeld
Published: March 18th, 2009 | 2:20pm
Let’s get over the obvious and all that it signifies: a white female professor has written a book about race, from a personal and historical perspective. But the story is so much more complex than your immediate reaction to that statement, or anyone’s reaction, for that matter. Eula Biss writes, regarding our inextricably mingled genetic heritage, “Race is a social fiction. But it is also, for now, a social fact.” The problem is how to gain an understanding of a complex and thorny historical situation from within.
Eula Biss’ approach is multi-layered. One of her essays, about a white woman who was accidentally implanted with the fertilized ovum of a black couple, and who subsequently gave the baby up to his biological parents, is interlarded with references to the history of the Barbie doll as well as Biss’ own childhood memories of her beloved “Black Doll.” The essay “Letter to Mexico” is a melancholic travelogue in which Biss relates the history of NAFTA while musing on the meaning of shame. Any situation in which relations of power can be examined is of interest, and it’s clear from her analysis that no one consistently occupies a single position in the spectrum between victimizer and victimized. All are complicit in systems that do violence to what is best and most compassionate in us.
Although plenty critical examinations of race already exist, Biss’ approach to the subject is fueled by a quest for intellectual clarity so intense that it takes on a spiritual tone. These essays are also confessions, the revelations of a disappointed and sensitive thinker. She welcomes disillusionment again and again, a process both painful and transcendent. Her epiphanies carry personal consequence. After a year of teaching in a public school, she writes, “I did not have the stomach for what went on in schools where children were herded from one subjugation to another.” Looking back on living in Iowa, where her race allowed her fit in invisibly, she interrogates her own complacency: “…it would be years before I would lose the comfort that certainty gave me.”
Biss shows that a lack of comfort is necessary to reveal the truth of all our relations with each other: everyone, regardless of origin and background, is “mixed,” and everyone lives inside more or less strictly circumscribed cultural zones. Transgression outside these zones is punished whether we are conscious of our role or not, whether we are in the mainstream or an outsider by dint of race, class, or behavior. The tension between the fact of our diverse ancestries and the social fiction of an “us” and a “them” informs every relationship in this world. That’s what makes us all citizens of no man’s land, and what makes this collection relevant across all types of borders.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
By Eula Biss
208 pages
$15.00
Issue #27
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