"In 1898, in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir City, Kansas. And in Brookhaven, Mississippi. And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the hanged man was riddled with bullets."
Eula Biss writes this novel focusing on America’s somewhat unsettled race relations by following the concurrent establishment of telephone poles throughout the U.S. and the extensive “American invention” of lynching. In one alarming plummet, the ever-present and practical telephone pole becomes a representation of the racial violence that has taken place on America. As Biss notes, “It was only coincidence that [telephone poles] became convenient as gallows, because they were tall and straight, with a crossbar, and because they stood in public places.”
In No Man’s Land Biss reminisces about her move to the ethnically diverse neighborhood of Rogers Park in Chicago and being told by others that she had just settled in a “pioneering neighborhood.” Biss eventually views the word “pioneer” as foreboding, for it “betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West....the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited.” For Biss, an casual commentary or a medical switch-up can make accessible, an outlet to distinguishing the common wisdom about race, the generalizations and effortless divisions that level race as we actually experience it in Brooklyn or in Chicago, walking alongside a mixed-race cousin in Fort Greene or riding a bicycle alone in Rogers Park. As the context shifts, so do the various appointed meanings assigned to our skin.
No comments:
Post a Comment