Do People Of Color Consider Flannery Oconnors Fiction To Be Racist

Our stories well-nigh disease are imprinted with the words of those who suffered earlier us. These writers—exist they among the dead, similar Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf, or among the living, similar Anne Boyer, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Sonya Huber—bear witness united states information technology's possible to access our experience, if only the way a line touches the exterior of a circle. They model for united states ways of externalizing a fraction of the pain, dysphoria and joy that narrate a chronic life. Where a doc reduces us to diagnostic criteria and lab tests, a author takes her time, exploring the minutiae of the pained body, the crisis of the self. Every bit someone who lives with chronic illness and writes, I hunger for more than linguistic communication, a poetics of hurting that's not for pure poetry's sake, but for healing, albeit metaphysical and short-lived.

I know that in this hunger I am not alone. Traces of other writers appear in many of the chronic illness memoirs on my shelf. Some traces are faint, like Porochista Khakpour'due south nod to Woolf and Sontag in Sick. Some traces are bold, similar Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's tribute to Gloria Anzaldúa in Intendance Work. Some traces are bones that nosotros selection with other writers. When Anne Boyer pulls Sontag into the foreword of The Undying, she does so to suggest at that place's something odd about a cancer patient taking herself completely out of an illness story; in contrast, Boyer observes, Lorde liberally uses the first person, blending introspection with "a call to artillery." Offering a close textual analysis of Elaine Scarry'due south The Body in Pain, Sonya Huber highlights the points of agreement and disagreement, such as on the question of the patient's attitude toward her own pain in Pain Woman Takes Your Keys.

I could proceed considering my bookshelf is weighted past such echoes and grapplings. At that place is no mutual experience when it comes to disease—merely moments of recognition and alienation. This is why we slice together, borrow words and invent new ones. What the books on my shelf tell me is that, as writers who are ill, we long to not but exist seen but also to witness and be in dialogue with those who shaped our understanding of illness through testimony and aesthetics.

Having lived with lupus for over a decade, I've long turned to writings on illness and disability, but avoided the one author in American literature associated with the incurable illness—Flannery O'Connor. That avoidance had to exercise with my discovery of the connection. I was in graduate school, studying Russian and Jewish literatures. O'Connor was non on my literary radar, though I knew her to exist role of the American canon. I learned that she had the disease from reading a review of her biography in The New York Times. In it, critic Joy Williams simply states, "She spent the last 13 years of her life in Milledgeville, most of them on crutches, her bones and joints ravaged by lupus. She died of lupus, her father besides."

I read these words a mere two months subsequently getting my diagnosis and they shook me to my already inflamed bones. It was a Sun. I was sitting in my junky armchair, drinking coffee and reading the paper equally a pause before communicable up on work. The irony was that I was already desperate to come across some other person with lupus, even in the context of literary history. Only I didn't want it to be like this, not with the phrase "basic and joints ravaged by lupus," followed past the fact of her expiry, within the span of 2 short sentences. My eyes skimmed a few more paragraphs, jumping back to the photo of O'Connor on her crutches. Would this be my fate too? I put the newspaper away, staring into infinite.

Dorsum then, I did this on a regular basis—read a little, stare into space. I'd read from my handbook for lupus patients that ninety pct survived the starting time 10 years after their diagnosis, then stare into space. I'd pick upwardly a novel to distract me, for case Irene Némirovsky's David Golder, larn that the protagonist was ill with a deadly illness and close it, staring into space. Prognosis, lifespan and expiry obsessed me and I saw their signs everywhere. I performed nonsensical calculations in my head, haggling with fate nearly how much time I had left and what I would leave behind. I was 26 at the time of diagnosis. O'Connor was 27. She got to live 12 years with the illness. Would I get more or fewer? Thinking virtually O'Connor, for even the minutes information technology took me to skim the article, made the hypothetical too specific. It relieved none of my confusion most the nature of my disease, none of my grief for my pre-illness self, none of my dread about the possibility of an early on death and the hope of lifelong pain. I yearned to run into my disease represented, but this early glimpse made me recoil.

O'Connor, in her letters, presented me with some clever musings and poignant articulations of chronic life. She gave me language I could've used. Simply that language does not exist in a vacuum.

I didn't intentionally revisit O'Connor for many years, but she regularly entered my peripheral vision of lupus. She makes appearances in books for patients. The Georgia branch of the Lupus Foundation includes her on a list of "some of our lupus heroes and champions." O'Connor's story also imprints the words of writers, ordinarily female and white. I writer, Hailey Hudson, who identifies as having chronic fatigue disease, refers to O'Connor as a "lupus warrior"—a common phrase in the illness community. Some other writer, Caroline McCoy, who struggled to get a diagnosis for diverse autoimmune symptoms, writes on the significance of O'Connor'southward life story and body of piece of work in helping her bear "the emotional burden of trying to live in the shadow of illness." McCoy confesses, "I kept reading O'Connor, searching her messages and her fiction for confirmation that sickness had damaged her spirit, too. I wanted proof of a twin wound and a model for mending it." I understood McCoy's want for "proof of a twin wound" simply connected to shy away from earthworks up that proof.

In some ways, the proof was already at that place by the time I read McCoy's essay. Though I didn't use crutches, my joints showed years of inflammation; bug with mobility had become a feature of life. But since O'Connor managed to atomic number 82 what, to my express knowledge, appeared to be a creatively fulfilling life afterward her diagnosis I too  couldn't help simply wonder if she could exist a model for how to accept and even make the most of my chronic condition.

O'Connor'due south disease and early death are central to her mythology. Countless literary scholars and creative writers make a point of noting that her career was cut curt by her illness just that this didn't stop her from condign one of the almost beloved authors in the American canon. There's a romance to the image of O'Connor as a nerdy, sickly woman who pushed on, writing about violence and death. The dissimilarity is powerful. I knew all of this without having read her piece of work. Her importance as a writer with lupus was difficult to ignore.

When, in 2018, I published a personal essay almost suffering through an peculiarly long and painful flare, I quoted O'Connor. I felt that I had to. In fact, my initial drafts didn't include any reference to the author, merely when my editor greenish-lit the essay for publication, I felt obligated to include her. How could I erase Flannery O'Connor, the lupus patient of the American letters, while quoting Sontag, Marcel Proust and Roxane Gay? That would exist admitting that I had spent years reading around her, too agape to get close. So I included a quote but felt similar a coward, considering I knew that my refusal to engage with her writing was entirely near my fear of dying from the affliction.

Almost exactly a year ago, I began to read work by and about O'Connor. It was summer and I had the time. I was also starting to stabilize after many months of being in pain and danger, as my inflammation moved into organs information technology had left solitary in the past. As much I depended on the words of writers who had other illnesses, such as cancer, endometriosis and lyme, I also wanted specificity, more language for writing about lupus. Being a scholar of fiction I began with Wise Blood, then moved to the stories, getting to know "the hits." Writing is e'er embodied and, like the many critics before me, I was curious about the ways in which illness could filter through her imagination. My observations about O'Connor'due south piece of work were inappreciably unique. There are numerous studies that make connections between O'Connor'due south fiction and her feel with illness. Those studies leaned heavily on her biography and personal writings, whetting my appetite for the nonfictional stuff.

As I turned to O'Connor's biography and letters, specifically those nerveless by Sally Fitzgerald in The Addiction of Existence, I strategically read for details pertaining to lupus, getting a sense of why her story appeals to and so many who live with chronic illness. When mentioning lupus, O'Connor is often stoic and sardonic though she tin can also strike a sentimental note without soliciting compassion. She knows how to turn a phrase. When she informs friends that she has lupus, she does so while insisting on her potential and drive to proceed creating: "I have enough free energy to write with and every bit that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted accept it all in every bit a approving." That final argument is peculiarly quotable because it captures a sense of resilience without delusion, a gratitude for a life marked by a disease, one that proved to exist fatal. In reference to this quote, one author confesses, "Flannery has taught me how to invert my artistic gaze and see the powerful potential in every experience, no matter how hard."

As much I depended on the words of writers who had other illnesses, such equally cancer, endometriosis and lyme, I also wanted specificity, more language for writing about lupus.

This is a reasonable interpretation, as O'Connor farther clarifies: "What you lot accept to measure out, you come up to notice more closely, or so I tell myself," indeed communicating that living with illness (and presumably other forms of strife) tin sharpen our perceptions, brand the states pay better attention, appreciate what we run across in richer detail. O'Connor's words can also exist simultaneously elegiac and reverent virtually her condition. "I have never been anywhere but ill," she writes to a friend, "In a sense sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's a identify where there's no company, where nobody can follow." This view of sickness, as both isolating and educational, speaks to me as someone who has learned, since diagnosis, the extent of my internalized ableism and our culture'south failure to acknowledge and create access for the sick and disabled. Without social back up, chronic disease indeed spells loneliness and smaller chances of survival.

But O'Connor was not entirely without visitor when it came to her sickness. The collected letters show that she confided in 1 writer friend who was diagnosed with lupus, Elizabeth Fenwick. To her, O'Connor spoke about her health problems with irreverence, for example, when writing, "it galls me to accept supported lupus for four years and then to be crippled with rheumatism (a vulgar illness at best) of the hip." When learning that Fenwick had produced a book in six weeks, O'Connor quipped "…I take been thinking well the lupus was good for her. Why don't it practice something for me? But at present as you tell me it was simply an old corny nervous breakdown, I guess I'll take to change my theory." This kind of annotate implies a level of comfort with her situation, an power to brand light of information technology, though unfortunately, at the expense of the mentally ill. On learning that she would demand crutches to support herself due to bone problems, she joked "I will henceforth exist a structure with flight buttresses," thus creating a beautiful cyborgian paradigm.

"An air of not giving a fuck" has long been part of the O'Connor persona. I even remember getting a glimpse of that prototype from my initial encounter with her lupus story. The photograph in The New York Times review showed her on crutches, but with artillery crossed, smirking. Information technology's a hitting epitome and, looking at information technology last summer, I appreciated being able to linger on it. My fears of sharing a "twin wound" had been dulled by years of surviving with the disease and learning, though always temporarily, how to adjust to its mercurial expressions.

Looking closely at O'Connor's writings a decade afterward my diagnosis, I didn't recoil at our shared illness—I recoiled at her racism. As I read around her comments about disease and inability, I plant a white woman who was not afraid to damn Martin Luther King Jr. with faint praise ("I don't remember he's the age'southward great saint just he'due south at to the lowest degree doing what he can practise & has to do"), and who seemed to almost revel in the use of the n-word. Speaking of James Baldwin, O'Connor had few positive things to say. Writing to her friend Maryat Lee, O'Connor opines, "About Negroes, the kind I don't like is the philosophizing profesyzing pontificating type, the James Baldwin type. Very ignorant but never silent." There'due south a tendency, across her letters, to put Black people in their place, to tell them they vest in some spaces but not in others. "In New York it would be nice to meet him; hither it would not… Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia," she states, despite admitting that she but read i of his stories and fifty-fifty enjoyed it. O'Connor's cruel dismissal of Baldwin, whose politics, artistry and queerness can't be separated, fabricated any charitable engagement with her writing impossible.

The cultural reckoning with O'Connor's racism has yet to fully occur. In that location are comments about her views on race in biographies, introductions to her messages and academic papers, but they tend to be asides, not the main points of discussion. And excuses are everywhere. "In her letters, she uses the prevailing locution of the Southward equally easily and as unmaliciously, as it often occurs there, amongst blacks and whites alike. It was simply natural to her in her fourth dimension and place," writes Emerge Fitzgerald in her introduction to the collected letters. This long-winded justification of O'Connor'south coincidental usage of the northward-word hits the familiar notes—she didn't mean annihilation bad by it and Black people did information technology too. The common tendency is still to acknowledge the writer's racism while attempting to redeem her image nevertheless.

A new academic book, written by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, focuses on race in O'Connor's body of piece of work but uses the term "ambiguity" in the championship, which in literary studies is a common euphemism, fifty-fifty for the flagrant racism of a honey national author. In his essay for The New Yorker, Paul Elie questions the ultimate impact of the study, suggesting that O'Donnell's confrontation with O'Connor'southward racism is undermined by the portrayal of the canonized author as "prone to lapses and excesses that stemmed from social forces beyond her control."

Having spent years studying and teaching Russian literature, I'yard intimately familiar with all kinds of rationales behind the desperate desire to protect so-called geniuses. Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Solzhenitsyn—these are known antisemites but I, a Soviet-born Jew, and precariously employed academic, was expected to teach them in my courses anyway. In discussion with students, I talked extensively about the authors' trend to denigrate Jews in their public or private writings. Even with this approach I was uncomfortable but I accepted the bargain. Including them while addressing their racism suggested that they were withal worth talking about, that the racism was non a curricular dealbreaker. But I didn't have to wrestle with my dilemma for too long because my career as a Russian professor came to an end.

Equally disappointing equally that was, I also breathed a sigh of relief at not having to explain, contextualize, or feel hostility from students who only wanted to marvel at The Brothers Karamazov in a class setting. This is all to say that, in my readings about O'Connor, I perceived the attempts at "nuance" about her racial attitudes with a skepticism shaped by years of dealing with racist apologists in my academic field. Every bit Elie deftly puts it, speaking of O'Connor, "All the contextualizing produces a seesaw effect, as it variously cordons off the writer from history, deems her a product of racist history, and proposes that she was as oppressed by that history as anybody else was." Such a mentality, Elie suggests, really robs the author of her agency, an agency that, to me, is impossible to deny. For example, O'Connor maintained a friendship with the leftist queer playwright Maryat Lee and, despite the intellectual sparring that shows up in their correspondence, O'Connor chose to dig her heels into racism—in her words, to "notice the tradition of the gild I feed on."

"Your fave is problematic" is not only a former Tumblr page and cyberspace meme only a common theme in our encounters with artists as human being beings whose actions reverberate through history. Virginia Woolf, a beloved vocalisation in literature about illness, as well wore blackface, a fact that must be acknowledged in whatever give-and-take of her contributions to civilisation. Despite non being one of my literary "faves," O'Connor, in her letters, presented me with some clever musings and poignant articulations of chronic life. She gave me language I could've used. But that language does not be in a vacuum. Information technology is surrounded by other language—words that were and continue to be used to repress Black liberty for the benefit of white supremacy. That language no dubiety corresponded to behavior. Even in themselves, those words were acts. When I call back well-nigh them, I detect myself feeling no ambivalence, no need to twist myself into a pretzel to attempt and merits her, to salvage the legacy of someone who could clearly not intendance less about the legacy of her swain author, Baldwin, one of the nigh relevant voices in American literature to this 24-hour interval.

What makes the anti-Blackness racism of a public figure with lupus especially roughshod and harmful is the fact that the disease disproportionately impacts women of color, especially Black women in the United states of america. I don't know what O'Connor knew about the medical injustices affecting, literally killing, Blackness women during her era, possibly very little. In general, the author's messages comprise near no acknowledgement of structural problems within the healthcare arrangement; the nearly O'Connor does is state that in that location was "no insurance for lupus" which made her "all for Medicare." To uncritically engage with O'Connor'due south words today is to miss of import opportunities to middle the intersections of race, course, gender and geographic location that shape all of our experiences with chronic affliction. Writing this essay in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Thing protests, I meet these opportunities equally incommunicable to miss. This is why nosotros must confront and repudiate O'Connor'south racism, be it in conversations about literature or lupus.

Representation is not the solution to racism or medical injustice. Neither is finding the language to articulate our experiences with affliction. And yet both of these are important for our personal and public struggles, our creative writing and our advocacy. Because of this, I continue to search for lupus narratives. I still get excited about excavating even the mention of the affliction in an old letter or a short blog mail, such as Imani Perry's piece on living with lupus. My hunger remains. I desire more language and more conversation partners to construct my story. My writing longs to be imprinted, but not with just anyone's words.

Do People Of Color Consider Flannery Oconnors Fiction To Be Racist,

Source: https://lithub.com/on-flannery-oconnors-chronic-illness-and-chronic-racism/

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