Isak

On Re-Reading

I don't do it very often. That is, I regularly scour through books I've read, walking with them again for a paragraph or a chapter, but re-reading from beginning to end? Not short stories or individual poems, but full-length books? It's a very occasional act, one that I think of with the same wistfulness that I think about traveling to Ghana or learning Arabic. "I should do that someday." I am serious, and I am fanciful. For me, re-reading something that has provoked me or culled my love is a wonderful idea that gets waylaid by my ominous knowledge that I will die before I read all the books I want to read. I have a long way to go, and switch-backing down a path I already passed stalls my journey, it feels. I have toyed with the idea of dedicating one of the twelve months to only re-read books, but there it remains: an idea.

But I'm making an exception right now. I read Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov my sophomore year of college, in a Russian literature class that my then-boyfriend and I took together. He had already been a lover of Tolstoy. In fact, one of the greatest gifts he ever gave me was to bring me to the great Russian writers. It changed my life. I'd been down with a few Tolstoy short stories before he and I were together, but there was one evening, in my lamplit dorm room in East Quad, when I sat on a floor and began reading the first chapter of Anna Karenina, and he looked down at me from the couch, where he was (notably) re-reading the same novel. He exclaimed: "Look at you! You're reading your first Tolstoy novel!" He was aglow: tender and thrilled for me. I felt the promise of what was coming next curling in my belly.

Thanks to him, I remember the beginning.

We read The Brothers Karamazov together, both for the first time, he at a quicker clip than I. (I remember trying to keep up, so that we could talk and talk and talk about what we'd read.) He finished when we were seated in the hushed reading room of the student union, and he felt compelled to run outside and scream into the sky a scream I heard, in muted fashion, as I continued to move through the final pages of the novel from my perch inside. I finished in the quiet of my own room, alone in my blankets. It was March. Another friend of ours became curious and soon joined us in the glow -- we got a postcard from him as he spent the summer in Peru, in which he told us of how he read the novel's last pages at Machu Picchu. "Tears, my friend," he wrote. "Tears."

It is an astonishing book. Like many people, I hesitate when asked what books are my favorite, but if I must, I name The Brothers Karamazov. It is a murder mystery with the simultaneous scope of the great existential and religious texts. It admits suffering and failure and error, and very much humor. It is a book of the sacred and profane, told to us by a mysterious, nearly-invisible, first-person narrator that understands how drama works as the verb that moves us between here and there. This is a book of the young and the old. And to think that my encounter with such a novel came in community! It was a shared experience, but right at the time in my life when the power of my choices and my possibilities were first plain to me. (See: the discussion of heroes here.) I wanted to re-think God. I wanted to believe in justice. I wanted to be a good writer. I wanted a great love. I wanted to live a good life. And then here comes The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's last and greatest work, provoking me on every point. This was heady brew.

This is so. And yet, over the years, a reference to The Brothers Karamazov may slide by me. A character's name comes up blank. Somebody, a current reader, will enthusiastically raise a plot point, and I can only listen. I am forgetting things.

I'm making a pact, then, to read The Brothers Karamazov at least once every ten years. I'm stretching it a bit to clock in my current reading as being within a decade of the first, but I'm sticking with the round number all the same. The hope? I want to measure the book against my life. What resonates with me now, at 31, that I glanced over at age 20? I was only a year or two into my work in prisons when I read the novel; how will the law and incarceration scenes play to me now, after many more years? How will the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation from 2002 differ from the Andrew R. MacAndrew version from 1970 (which I first read)? What, really, is going on with the Grand Inquisitor, and Ivan kicking the devil under the table, and Zosima's body decaying? Is it as I remember it?  What is changing? How is different? What is as it always has been? What does my memory, and mis-memory, reflect what I'm reaching for?

One bright measure: that friend who sent the postcard from Peru is re-reading the novel alongside me this season. We'll get to once again embed it into our conversations and connection -- but this time with a glass of whiskey that is now legal to us, and with about twelve years of friendship behind us. That in itself fills my heart.

 

Related:

• My interview with rock-star translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in The Millions.
• "Book Review: The Double"
• "White Nights and Dostoevsky's Underground Man"
• "The Russians Steal My Heart"
• "Oh, Those Intoxicating Russians"
• "Waiting with Baited Breath"*

 

* You know, it wasn't until I listed all these posts together here that I realized the sexual understones of the titles I tended to choose for them -- a tendency that has, it seemed, spanned years. That is hilarious.

The Current Moment in Political Broadcast

Current TV is putting itself out there as the next great leader in political broadcast television. My new article at AlterNet looks at how it is doing, and most particularly compares Current with MSNBC, its most obvious competitor -- and model.

While I offer a big-picture take on the network narratives, my favorite part of the piece is something of an ode to specificity.

It really is a surprising move by Current to make the charismatic two-term governor of a struggling Midwest state the sole host of new show that stands alongside the established enterprises of “Countdown” and “The Young Turks.” While “The War Room” specializes in Election 2012, (Jennifer) Granholm is elevating key stories that have a national resonance, but are approached with a Michigan perspective. Her discussion of the racist Superbowl ad by Pete Hoekstra, a U.S. Senate candidate from Michigan, included her admission of using similar “China will take our jobs” rhetoric in one of her own gubernatorial campaigns, for example. It was an effective strategy in a state that saw its unemployment rate hit 15% during the worst of the recession.

Similarly, “The War Room” also featured an interview with UAW president Bob King. He and Granholm discussed collective bargaining, right-to-work laws, and unemployment in a distinctly Michigan context. (Most networks rarely bring leaders of the labor movement on to speak.) King contended that Mitt Romney – a Michigan native, whose father once served as the state’s governor – cannot win the crucial state in this year’s primary because of his hostility to labor and union rights. Notoriously, Romney opposed the auto industry bailouts in a 2008 New York Times op-ed headlined as “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” As Romney’s campaign for president heated up last year, which included fundraising in Detroit, Granholm retorted with her own op-ed in Politico: “Let Mitt Romney Go Bankrupt.”

Granholm’s experience in a key swing state gives her an insight that simply is not replicable by any other pundit. While MSNBC often turns its attention to significant local stories around the nation, such as Indiana passing right-to-work legislation and the movement to recall Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin, it most often stands by a slate of national issues that are fixed in no particular location. There is nothing wrong with this: from the political battle for birth control to the national budget debate, these are important stories. But with “The War Room,” Current is deepening the focus on a region often eclipsed by national media, belying its significance. ... Granholm brings her show inimitable expertise and an uncommon take on which stories matter.

Book Review: The World of a Few Minutes Agoby Jack Driscoll

I really like how Jack Driscoll's new story collection surprised me: it pushed harder in its voice, its scope, and its storytelling than I anticipated. As I wrote in my new review in The Detroit Free Press, these ten tales "hinge on the circularity of memory and place." When I spoke with the author, who lives in Interlochen, he expanded on this in interesting ways:

I've never dealt so specifically with the motif of time. Everything is in a state of vanishing or commencement. The past and present are not really separate. I make use of flashback and memory in my stories -- to understand the present is, of course, to understand the past."Another function of time is the narrator. Here, I have one as young as 14, who doesn't have a large past, and as old as 77 in the title story, which is the anchor of the book and placed last -- that one takes place over one night, as he stands outside and relives his past as an AP war photographer and a photographer of mass suicide. He remembers being on the parallel bars at (the University of) Michigan, where he was a gymnast. This is the way the mind works, measuring our present against our past.

Speaking to the Seats

I'm really pleased to be a political media correspondent for the Columbia Journalism Review through the presidential election: reporting on the reporting, and bringing a distinctly Michigan vantage as a contributor to what CJR calls The Swing States Project. If you are a regular reader of Isak, you know that CJR is one of my favorites, a presence here from the very early days of the site to, well, two weeks ago. One of my all-time favorite pieces from CJR was featured here last spring in a post headlined "They Wanted Journalists to Say 'Wow'": Karen Rothmyer wrote brilliantly on the intersection of American journalism and NGOs in Africa.

What I mean to say is: it's an honor to be a CJR contributor.

In my first piece, I look at the coverage of Republican candidate Mitt Romney's speech on the 35-yard-line of Ford Field yesterday -- coverage that skewed towards the optics of empty seats nationally, and, in the Detroit area, tilted toward local storylines about whether or not Romney allies himself with the state where he grew up (sometimes at the expense of more significant issues).

Gil Scott-Heron's Last Holiday

Sometimes I bring music into my creative writing classes with Detroit high schoolers (via the InsideOut Literary Arts Project). Unlike with the poems I put before them, their reactions to my music is immediate, visceral, and, most of all, one hundred percent certain. It amuses me: they know what they like. John Lee Hooker and Miles Davis collaborating on "Murder" is not it. John Coltrane is not it. Ask them to freewrite to the masters of blues and jazz, and you'll get a lot of journal entries to the effect of: "Oh my god, kill me now."

But Gil Scott-Heron: that went down differently.

I wrote before about "a thesis statement for Gil Scott-Heron," or my experiments in teaching composition at a community college with the help of his music. In my poetry classes with high schoolers, his music was an opportunity to talk about metaphor, about litany, about voice, about the image that is concrete, hold-able.

But before we got to all that, we just listened. The ninth-graders laughed when their regular teacher whooped at the sound of Scott-Heron's beats and eased into a groove while sorting their papers. An eleventh-grader nodded his head along while staring at his desk. A friend of his wanted me to hook up my feeble computer to louder speakers. "What's he talking about?" asked a tenth-grader while the song slid forth. Another responded: "Man, he's talking about revolution." One kid heard the word "brother" in the music, and hooked on that. "I like that one," said one girl, after the songs were all done. It was high praise.

The Last Holiday is Gil Scott-Heron's memoir, and it's just published. Pop Matters has an excerpt from what appears to be the preface. He focuses on his life as a musician, and a writer, in the making.

I always doubt detailed recollections authors write about their childhoods. Maybe I am jealous that they retain such clarity of their long agos while my own past seems only long gone.

What helped me to retain some order was that by the age of ten I was interested in writing. I wrote short stories. The problem was that I didn’t know much about anything. And I didn’t take photos or collect mementos. There were things I valued, but I thought they would always be there. And that I would.

Long Live the Bookninja

For a couple years before I started writing Isak back in 2006, I was a regular reader of a handful of literary blogs that, as it turned out, were my inspiration for getting in on the game. I remember discovering that lit blogs existed, these remarkable portals of smart, funny, bookish news and commentary, and how immediately I knew them to be a home. These blogs were the first beat of my day in the mornings. I made up an excuse to talk to many of the folks behind these blogs via interviews for an article I agreed to write on spec (never again) for a certain writerly publication, and as I asked them about the rhythm of their lit blogging, their contributions to the literary conversation, I think I knew all along that I was really asking for guidance to what I wanted to do myself.

Among my early initiators and mentors, whether he knew it or not, was poet George Murray of the belated and beloved Bookninja. Bringing a brilliant and distinctly Canadian voice to the public conversation on literature, Bookninja came alongside my cup of black tea each morning.

But the site abruptly ceased a year ago this month. My constant refreshings did nothing to stimulate new content. In the National Post, Murray writes about the project of Bookninja, as well as why, finally, he moved on.

At its peak, Bookninja’s unique brand of comedic literary commentary reached more than 10,000 people a day. It seemed like everyone in the publishing industry, from writers to editors to publicists to librarians, was reading Bookninja. We were mentioned, quoted and profiled in newspapers and magazines not just in Canada but around the world. I was invited to speak at conferences. Publishers lined up around the block to get their books mentioned on the site — the number of free
review copies got so overwhelming that I held parties at my house during which I’d put out Rubbermaid tubs full of books and demand people leave with at least three or four.

[...]

Over the years, I’d been in talks with various bigshots about buying the site, but the problem with selling a brand like Bookninja is that the brand is, well, me. So, a year ago Saturday, I posted one last time. There was no goodbye message. No real explanation of why I was calling it quits. To the readers, it must have seemed like the site went out with a whimper, but it was a shocking relief to me.

[...]

In the end, it was a good run, and lots of people had fun. A successful poet in Canada can count on between 500 and 750 readers over the life of a book; a mid-list novelist doesn’t get many more. My brand of literary stand-up comedy was earning thousands and thousands of readers each day. It wasn’t translating to sales at the till (it’s poetry, people, come on), but it certainly made me feel good at parties when people came up to say hi. Do I miss it? Sometimes. But mostly not. To paraphrase The Doors when they were told they’d not be invited back on The Ed Sullivan Show: Hey, man, I was the Bookninja.

I appreciate Murray's honesty in plain-saying that he doesn't particularly miss Bookninja, even as the rest of us do. There is something -- well, poetic about calmly understanding that sometimes it is time to stop.

I don't think I ever publicly thanked Bookninja or the other sites that lured me into what has been nearly six years of adventure and joy here at Isak, so let me do so now. Thank you, Bookninja. And thank you too, Moorish Girl (Laila Lalami now occasionally blogs here), The Elegant Variation, Literary Saloon, Bookslut, Maud Newton, the site now called Reluctant Habits), and Beatrice. You meant more to me than you know.

I am so grateful.

Book Review: Sula by Toni Morrison

Sinking into Toni Morrison's fiction is like sinking into loamy earth. She writes novels that are ground heels-down into a planet of soil and water and stone. She writes novels of blood, bone, sunlight.  Sula is in kind.

For a slim book -- Morrison's second, from 1973 -- the narrative reads as an epic. (Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping has the same sort of dissonance between length and scope.) Sula unfolds almost entirely in Ohio, in a tiny community called the Bottom that actually sits in the hills, above the valley-dwelling white people of the city of Medallion. We peek also into France, where Shadrack fights in World War I, loses much of his mind, and returns with the idea of bringing a National Suicide Day to the Bottom, so that people might find a bit certainty for death. There is also a long train ride to New Orleans, into a Creole-speaking home of a grandmother who dies just before arrival.

We barely see the title character until about halfway through the novel, and even then, the vantage of Sula Peace is so searingly archetypal, it must be divided with the vantage of Nel Wright, Sula's kind of friend. They grow up in very different homes in the Bottom, one of fire (such fires) and the other of watchfulness. Nel marries after high school, gives birth to children, and becomes a leader in the small community that she never leaves (excepting that single New Orleans trip, when she was a child). Sula disappears just after Nell's wedding, and doesn't return for ten years. It was a time she spent wandering, learning, confronting, explaining nothing, and establishing a strange relationship with remembrance. When Sula returns, this woman with the strange mark upon her eye, she is understood by those living in the Bottom as the incarnation of evil. She carries a bluntness about her -- not only a disregard for social conventions, but a willingness to invade them, even when they impact her old, and only, ally.

The epic reach of the novel is in part revealed in how the text moves well beyond Sula's death in 1940, after the Bottom's singular location for evil is eliminated, and therefore unleashed.

An epigraph from a Tennessee Williams play called The Rose Tattoo opens the novel: "Nobody knew my rose of the world but me. . . . I had too much glory. They don't want glory like that in nobody's heart." The line's subtle bleakness and sky-high outlook suits this novel. And I am intrigued by the gap between the epigraph's first-person and the novel's aggressive omniscience.

Sula was nominated for the National Book Award after it was published. It was also a latter-day Oprah's Book Club pick, by the author that is America's most recent Nobel laureate in literature. And, finally, the New York Times Book Review piece on Sula was written by Sara Blackburn in December, 1973, and included a few odd turns. The italics are mine:

Toni Morrison is someone who really knows how to clank a sentence, as the novelist Irving Rosenthal has put it, and her dialogue is so compressed and life-like that it sizzles. And Morrison's skill at characterization is such that, by the end, it's as if an enormous but too severely framed landscape has been unrolled and inhabited by people who seem almost mythologically strong and familiar; like the gorgeous characters of Garcia Marquez, they have a heroic quality, and it's hard to believe we haven't known them forever.

Yet the comparison can't be extended: Morrison hasn't endowed her people with life beyond their place and function in the novel, and we can't imagine their surviving outside the tiny community where they carry on their separate lives. It's this particular quality that makes "Sula" a novel whose long-range impact doesn't sustain the intensity of its first reading. Reading it, in spite of its richness and its thorough originality, one continually feels its narrowness, its refusal to brim over into the world outside its provincial setting.

As the author of frequent criticism and social commentary, Morrison has shown herself someone of considerable strength and skill in confronting current realities, and it's frustrating that the qualities which distinguish her novels are not combined with the stinging immediacy, the urgency, of her nonfiction. This last is a classically unfair carp on the part of a reviewer, but Toni Morrison is far too talented to remain only a marvelous recorder of the black side of provincial American life. If she is to maintain the large and serious audience she deserves, she is going to have to address a riskier contemporary reality than this beautiful but nevertheless distanced novel. And if she does this, it seems to me that she might easily transcend the early and unintentionally limiting classification "black woman writer" and take her place among the most serious, important and talented American novelists now working.

 

UPDATE: So says Toni Morrison. Hat tip to the always-amazing Randa Jarrar for clueing me in to this video.

 

 

Literary & Media Indulgences - 2/18/2012

 

-- Along with many, many people, I am shaken by the death of Anthony Shadid at age 43 in Syria, where he had been covertly investigating the resistance to the brutal rule President Bashar al-Assad. The longtime New York Times foreign correspondent was one of the most essential reporters throughout the Arab Spring; he was one of the four Times journalists kidnapped in Libya last year. (See Shadid's NPR interview about being one of the narrators of the Arab Spring here.) Shadid won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work as "a gatherer, an observer, a listener." One of his last stories, on the rise of Islamism in Tunisia, was published after his death. Just a couple weeks ago, Mother Jones ran an interview with Shadid, where he discussed growing up Lebanese in Oklahoma City and his understanding that "I don't think there's any story worth dying for, but I do think there are stories worth taking risks for."  Longform collects his greatest dispatches. Shadid's book, House of Stone, was to be published in March. It has since been scheduled for an earlier release.

-- Ahdaf Soueif on "Cairo, Hers Again" in Guernica: "A month before, a week before, three days before, we could not have told you it was going to happen."

-- The poetic legacy of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper founded in 1905.

-- Gish Jen (whose title story in Who's Irish? is a favorite of mine) talks up Linsanity in the New York Times.

-- Author Sara Levine, interviewed: "No one asks this of male narrators, to be likable.”

-- Bookforum interviews Sergio González Rodríguez, the journalist whose work on female homicides in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez inspired Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marias.

-- Jonathan Franzen appears to think that readers have trouble loving Edith Wharton's novels because she was both privileged and, according to him, unattractive. I beg to differ, but Steve Donoghue has the best response (albeit one that is far harsher in the overall assesment of Franzen's character than seems fair -- the new incarnation of Norman Mailer he is not). (Thanks to Chris M. for the initial link.)

-- Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the influence of fonts in urban development.

-- The Houston Chronicle looks at the role of "snitches" in journalism, or the "a legacy of secret government informants." See also, in The New York Times, "a high-tech war on leaks."

-- While I'm partial to The Michigan Daily, Roger Ebert is right to champion The Daily Illini as one of the greats in campus reporting for 140 years. And it needs our help.

-- Roxane Gay's extended comment in response to "On Getting Paid: Literary Magazines and Remuneration" in The Millions is the best part of the article.

-- Andre Dubus III on "love in a class-riven America." A lot of this rung true for me.

-- Second-grade field trip to the parking garage: a fascinating New York Times article on the value of field trips in education, particularly in, as Dubus would put it, a "class-riven America."

-- A new book examines the survival of beauty, pattern, mimicry, and camouflage in nature.

-- "The trials of Greg Mortenson." That's the Three Cups of Tea guy, and that's Outside magazine doing the rigorous follow-up to the case of literary fraud.

-- MacArthur awards for "creative & effective institutions" have gone to The Moth for its dedication to the art of storytelling. Detroiters, hit up Cliff Bell's the first Thursday of the month to experience it live (Theme: "Gangs, Cliques, and Crowds"). There's also an upcoming Moth in Ann Arbor this month. (Theme: "Bosses.") Other notable MacArthur winners include the Center for Investigative Reporting and the National Juvenile Defender Center.

-- What is the impact of Hollywood success on Michael Chabon's fiction? Tablet investigates.

-- The decline of the arts has been greatly exaggerated, says Jed Perl.

-- Poet Mary Oliver is seriously ill. The new blog Dear Mary is collecting letters from her readers.

-- "The new world of William Carlos Williams."

-- "The unsung maestro of East African literature."

-- Vladmir Putin is proposing a new Russian "great books" program.

-- From one of the most recent Three Percent podcasts: "on books and being alone."

-- It's an honor to give writer Cheryl Strayed credit for her wonderful work as the Dear Sugar columnist, which she wrote passionately and anonymously up through Valentine's Day. The New Yorker profiles Strayed after her coming-out. See my posts provoked by Dear Sugar, including: "There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit-hole of your own bitterness except your own desperate heart" and "Whatever it was that wouldn't let us go: On Writing and Necessity."

 

Image Credit: The New York Times

Poetry for the Science Fiction Fan

Over at io9, Rebecca Ariel Porte takes on two "suspect" genres of literature that she loves, and invites readers of one to crossover into another.

Of course there are scifi readers who already really like poetry—and poetry readers who really like scifi—but we tend to exist (however passionate we are about our sestinas and our ray-guns) in the fringes of both communities.

Porte questions the assumption that science fiction and poetry have never intersected, while acknowledging that to retroactively apply modern genre labels to literature that pre-existed them is limiting.

My guess is that when I write "science fiction," the first things that come to mind aren't Lucretius' De rerum natura (1st century B.C.) or Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth century sonnets about atoms.

When I write "fantastical literature," I suspect that most readers will think of The Lord of the Rings before S.T. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" or Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market."

... What I want to establish is that there's a long history of English language poetry on both scientific and fantastical themes and that these themes are still active concerns for contemporary poets.

Porte goes on to profile poetry books "for every kind of science fiction fan." It's actually a list of only five books. But there are some interesting choices, among them A. Van Jordan's Quantum Lyrics, which links to the Isak interview with Jordan on "where poetry, physics, and politics collide." (Thanks, io9!). Missing from Porte's list: Nikki Giovanni, who writes a lot about space and has fascinating ideas about humans traveling to Mars.

Where Porte oversimplifies: she seems to be equating "science" with "science fiction," and "science fiction" with "futuristic outer space." There is overlap, of course, but these are not literary synonyms. The reasons I, for example, am head-over-heels for the Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red Mars review here) was partly about the patient and exciting science of the novels, but it was also about the deep storytelling about what it takes to create large-scale community; or, the moral and technical and emotional stakes of acting on the belief that an alternative world is possible. Porte tossed off "ray-guns" as an aside in her post, but, it implies one single kind of fan-dom of one single kind of science fiction, and a rather dated one at that. A more expansive approach to what draws readers to science fiction would have made for a more nuanced rundown of the poetry that could set their (our) imaginations alight.

 

About the image: Red Mars, via GOOD Magazine. Looks like the perfect place to bring a bottle of wine, a blanket, and a dog-eared copy of Marianne Moore, no?

Poems of Love

They have something of a bad reputation, don't they? Carrying a whiff of the sentimental, the overwrought, the one-dimensional hyperbole? The scent of the idealized, the self-serving, the hyper-adjectival? Love is not only a difficult emotion to articulate, but a difficult one to imagine.

Nonetheless, a host of authors over at The Guardian -- from Ahdaf Soueif to Jeannette Winterson to Seamus Heaney to Hilary Mantel -- choose their favorite poems of love. So does The Boston Globe: fourteen poems for February 14. The Chicago Tribune looks at the "poetry" of missed connections. And the Poetry Foundation has put together a "sampler" of classic and contemporary poems that it invites you to (it says with a sly wink) share.

And here is one of my favorites, translated by Mark Eisner, that appears in none of those special-for-Valentine's-Day features.

 

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
By Pablo Neruda

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,   

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:   

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,   

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries   

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,   

and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose   

from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,   

I love you directly without problems or pride:

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,

except in this form in which I am not nor are you,   

so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,   

so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

The Public Health Emergency in Eastern Burma

 

 

There's a lot going on in Burma these days, from a possible ceasefire between the government and the Karen National Union (KNU), to the release of political prisoners, to Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi running for parliament in Rangoon. It's a time of exciting but cautious promise, as we wait to see what change takes.

I have a short article over at RH Reality Check about how families in the particularly ravaged area of eastern Burma are experiencing both the political transformation and the very long legacy of human rights abuses. I'm drawing from the significant new report, "Separated by Borders," which details why this region has the worst pregnancy outcomes in all of Asia. Access to contraception is virtually nonexistent, and maternal mortality is extremely high -- in part the consequence of the military policy of denying certain ethnic groups healthcare, though there is more than that to the story. I'll be digging deeper into this via an extended interview with one of the doctors on the ground in eastern Burma that will appear eventually in Guernica.

 

Image Credit: Alisa Tang