Category: Uncategorized

In 2018 Junot Díaz was swept up in the #MeToo reckoning. His was a complicated case: Díaz’s writing often speaks truth to power and gives voice to those underrepresented in mainstream literature; he himself was a victim of sexual abuse—as he revealed publicly just before the controversy erupted. So how, then, do we make sense of his response to the women who came forward and accused him? This is the subject of an essay I published in Persimmon Tree, “The Reckoning of Junot Díaz” in the fall of 2019: https://persimmontree.org/fall-2019/the-reckoning-of-junot-diaz/.

If you’d like to take a look, I recently posted a video clip from a performance of The Devil Be Familiar, a play about the hanging of my ancestor Margaret Stephenson Scott at Salem in 1692. In this clip a youthful Melinda Lopez, now a well-established playwright and actress, takes the part of Margaret’s daughter Mary Decker Scott in her soliloquy that ends the play. This performance on September 19, 1992 in Rowley, Massachusetts commemorated the 300^th anniversary of the hanging: https://youtu.be/cbsrelR1I0s.

For the full text of the play, see https://speakwoodstonewhisper.com/beyond-the-novel/the-devil-be-familiar/.

After the June 12^th massacre in Orlando, when the ever-demagogic Donald Trump jumped into the fray, accusing the president of somehow showing his sinister side by not immediately branding the shooter “an Islamic terrorist,” I understood Obama’s angry response and continued refusal to fuse the two words “Islamic” and “terrorist” into an epithet. Given the intensifying vilification of Muslims here and abroad, drawing a firm line between the vast majority of Muslims and those few who slaughter innocents in the name of the prophet made good sense.

And yet….when Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, followed up by declaring of those who commit terror in the name of Islam, “They are not Islamic. No religion condones the killing or terrorizing of innocent individuals, certainly not the religion of Islam,” I had to step back.

I’d actually started thinking about all this when ISIS was busy destroying the ancient city of Palmyra. I’d long marveled at those ruins which had survived into modern-day Syria, and even used them as the homepage image on the website for my novel set in the ancient Mideast. So while these treasures were being systematically obliterated, I kept asking myself, What possibly could inspire someone to do something so senselessly destructive? How could anyone believe that remnants from an extinct culture were a threat all these thousands of years later?

But of course I knew. Those Muslim zealots didn’t arise out of nowhere; nor did their urge to destroy. After all, the Bible tells a similar story when Moses famously comes down from the mountaintop and orders the Israelites to smash their idols. And in the patriarchal narratives when my novel takes place, Jacob too orders his family to bury their idols to appease his god. Yes, destroying false idols for the sake of the purity of the cult was a very long tradition.

But now, in the wake of the massacre in Orlando, and with ISIS’s ongoing slaughter of innocents in the background, the question had hit us again—with a vengeance. What possibly could inspire someone to do something so vicious and unprovoked? Should we simply call it senseless, denying a link between these acts of terror and true Islam, as Earnest had? Or should we target and condemn all Muslims, like Trump? Those seemed to be the two options.

Or maybe we could go vaguely mystical—as the charming Muslim woman, Mona Haydar, did post-Orlando when faced with the question: “Is Islam homophobic?” Demurring with, “Islam is nothing… a person with a Muslim identity can do whatever they will…”

Yes, clearly they can, I thought, but no, Islam and the Koran are certainly not “nothing,” nor is the Torah, nor the Bible, to which fundamentalists cleave with such vehemence. And they have consequences.

Because if we look broader and deeper, to the long history of patriarchal monotheism—the link between Islam (and Christianity, and Judaism) and terror is undeniably there. Who could say, for instance, that the Crusaders and the Inquisitors weren’t terrorists, or that they weren’t true Catholics? Or who could say that the Puritans didn’t terrorize the native tribes they called savages and heathens as they exterminated them, as well as the victims of the witchcraft delusion whom they hanged at Salem for conspiring with the devil? Nor does it make any sense to say that those Protestants who’d endured so much to come to the New World to preach and practice their religion weren’t true Christians.

Or what about the KKK, whose members, exclusively white and Christian, chanted at a recent rally in Georgia “White power!”and “Death to the ungodly! Death to our enemies!” Are these not Christian terrorists? As the Black transgender political activist, Cazembe Jackson sees it, “In my experience, Christian religious terrorism has been slowly killing me and friends for over two decades — the amount of time that I’ve been out.”

Then what about the Jews, those original monotheists? And here the story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob, the narrator of my novel, comes into play, as she revisits the massacre her brothers carry out, slaughtering all the men of Shechem—that first religiously-inspired massacre reported in the Bible. Was this not terror? And were Simeon and Levi, who perpetrated this terror, not true Jews—sons of Israel himself, who spawned the Jewish nations? It would be hard to make a case, here, against “Jewish terror.”

Of course not all terror is God-inspired. Nor are all religious warriors worshippers of a solitary Father God. In Myanmar, Buddhist monks terrorize Muslims, in India Hindus do. But it’s difficult to deny the link between the belief in one true God and the terrorizing of infidels who ignore the strictures of His word; to chalk this up to nonsensical aberration. Islam and its close monotheistic relatives, Christianity and Judaism, really are implicated in a good deal of the terror that has pervaded our world. And this terror in its many forms, inspired by religious zealotry, still goes on today just about everywhere. In truth, at least as it appears to me, religion and terror actually go together like fist and glove. And, as with most truths, we are not well-served by denying it.

I’m a newcomer to the writers’ world as it exists on the internet, and I’ve only dipped my little finger in, and not very far. But this word keeps coming up, that much I’ve noticed: “hybrid.”

The first time I encountered what felt like an authentic example of this rising fascination with mixing modes, and genres, and medias was only a couple of years ago when I binge-read lots of Lydia Davis.

But you see, that just shows how much of a mole I am. Because I teach at MIT. And if there’s anywhere in the world that’s more geekily into hybrid than MIT, I don’t know of it. I do admire some of this geeky front-end of hybridness at MIT, and don’t generally mind travelling in it as a peripheral element up above my head. But I’m not part of it, I travel below, along the basement corridors of the Infinite Corridor, or so it sometimes feels.

Still, that said, in my own ungeeky way, I guess I’m also into hybrid. Speak Wood, as it turns out, is hybrid—at least as far as I understand the basic meaning: It has more than one kind of material, or genre, in it. There’s “found language”—the ancient myths and poetry, and Genesis; there are photos of found artifacts and art, maps I drew, and even a kind of architectural blue print of an old palace from 4,000 years ago (the sacred quarters of Shechem, where Dinah’s story culminates) which I created using the archaeological ruins as my template. So all that qualifies, I guess, to make it “hybrid.”

But most important of all there is poetry and fiction, the true hybrid core of the novel. The language morphs in and out of poetry—in something like the way the Bible does. What inspired it, probably the most? Being steeped in the cadences of ancient oral verse from that period when written language was just being invented alongside the stark story-telling of Genesis. The languages of oral tradition as they first were written down. The cadence, even in the prose, that’s often so close to song.

But one thing that’s interesting about this particular example of “hybrid” is that I wasn’t particularly motivated to write it that way. It’s what happened while I was writing. Hybridness evolved from what I was looking at, what fed the project, what I did to make it clear for myself.  To put it more formally, hybrid (as a form) arose organically. I didn’t even think to use the word “hybrid” to describe the novel until very recently.

So, what’s wrong with the current fascination with “hybrid”? Not really anything. Genres are fluid; we should all have permission to go ahead and cross their boundaries. But I’d add only as long as the impulse stems from a core conviction, a thought, a motivating impulse, an authentically creative core; as long as it truly originates from what we’re trying to do or say; as long as our intent is to enrich and clarify. As long as it’s not just faddish.

Because when things become fads, when people set out prematurely to write something “hybrid,” before they know what they have to say or what they’ll find to help them say it, form gets disconnected from meaning, overrides content; meaning loses precedence; motivation gets disconnected from true intent. In short, stuff gets gimmicky.

Welcome, and thanks, subscribers, for signing up. I’ve posted a new essay, “Occupy the Marriage Bed,” about one of my favorite artifacts featured in the novel. I’d be interested to hear what you think.