To be in Both a Time of Traditionalism and Progressivism 

To be woken up by the shrillness of the alarm. To stay in bed until the last possible minute. To button up my shirt and button my pants. To frantically cover up the hickey on my neck. To construct the identity of “the boyfriend” who gave it to me if anyone asked. To pack my lunch. To get on the train. To hear a gay joke made once again. To smile and laugh. To hold back tears. 

To sit through another fifty minutes of religion class. To witness another “abortion is murder” debate instigated by my teacher. To exist in the silence of my classmates as no one dared to argue. To hear yet another homophobic remark made by this teacher said to us so casually. To wonder “he must know some of us are gay, right?” To stop in my tracks: “does he know I’m gay?” 

To rush to the dining hall. To overhear my friends talking about prom. To be asked who I am taking to prom. To be so fucking sick of pretending. To say “my girlfriend.” To be asked “Oh, which friend?” To retreat back into pretending. 

To rush to my car after the final bell. To drive the grueling forty-five minutes in Chicago traffic to rehearsal. To smile for the first time of the day as I see my loving friends. To be asked “how’s the girlfriend?” To smile even bigger this time. To feel heard. To feel recognized. 

Process notes: I wrote this poem as a reflection of a day in my life in high school. When being at my conservative Catholic high school, I hid my queerness as best as I possibly could and tolerated the homophobic remarks being thrown my way. However, when I left school and went to band practice, I was able to remove this mask and embrace my queer identity fully. This poem represents the persona I had to inhabit daily in order to protect myself. It felt as if I was living in a traditional and modern world at the same time.

To be witness to a collaboration of photography and writing felt somewhat odd to me, as these two forms of expression usually stand alone and accomplish different goals of the photographer or writer, which is seen through Now Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee points out these differences in the introduction in the beginning of the text, in which he describes “honest journalism” (Agee, 7), and the ways in which writing and photography can depict a true version of what actually occurred. 

Agee strikes up a fairly negative tone throughout this introduction as he discusses the limitations of writing (specifically his own) and the lack of respect for the subjects of these photos. He writes that the camera is “the central instrument of our time; and is why in turn I feel such rage at its misuse: which has spread so nearly universal a corruption of sight that I know of less than a dozen alive whose eyes I can trust so much as my own” (Agee, 11). It is through this “corruption of sight” as Agee describes it, that photography, and writing about this photography, presents a depiction rooted in untruth. 

Personally, I took Agee’s claims with a grain of salt, as I believe writing and photography can reveal the truth in some capacity. I believe that these two things together, though, complicate the truth more than they would if they stood alone due to the personal bias of the writer and photographer. To elaborate, photography, especially without captions, presents an objective image that can be interpreted in many different ways by the viewer, while when writing about a photograph, the writer’s perspective is taken to be fact. However, the angle the photo was taken, the subjects chosen or not chosen, as well as the editing of the photograph in photography, as well as the writer’s subjective reaction to the photo can present a reality that is not the truth.

To Be in a Time of Subtle (In)Equality

To wake up, to feel exhaustion. To snooze the alarm, to hear it go off again. To decide between snoozing once more or having time to put on some mascara. To decide between feeling good and looking good. To decide between feeling sane and feeling beautiful. To resent the fact that you can’t have both.

To go to calculus. To watch your professor command the room. To wish you could answer her questions with the same confidence that she asks them. To wish you could answer her with the same confidence as the boy behind you, even when he’s wrong. To leave the room. To hear him call her a bitch on the way out. To know that she gave him the grade he deserved. To say nothing. 

To come home, to wonder if “home” is the right word.

To move cautiously and with restraint. To fight for a laugh. To fight for a gaze. To fight to be heard. To wonder if your success is impressive or a threat. To check your phone, to stare at the screen, to put your phone down. To walk to the bathroom, to step into the shower, to run water through your hair, to feel beautiful. To look in the mirror. To doubt. To rub off the mascara streaming down your face. 

To write, to reflect, to feel better. To remember to turn your brightness down, to flip the paper over, to have a secret.

To go to bed, to wake up, to feel exhaustion. 

Process Notes:

My goal in this piece was to take the reader through the day of my “subject.” I attempted to capture some of the more subtle injustices that women experience on a day-to-day basis for two reasons. The first is that the social issue I’m choosing to focus on this quarter is gender inequality that specifically surfaces through microaggressions or other subtle offenses. The second reason is that in centering my focus around the day-to-day, I felt like I could simultaneously avoid the mistake of being overbearing with my message. Also consistent with this goal, I attempted to embed subtle suggestions about what’s happening throughout the piece. For example, in the first stanza, I mention the conflict that the protagonist experiences about whether or not to put on mascara. Later in the poem, I include a line that the mascara was running down her face after her shower, insinuating that she decided to put some on. 

To Be in the Best Time to Be A Woman

To get out of bed with a new, red blemish on my chin. To go to the mirror. To be frustrated. To open my make-up bag. To hold up my concealer. To decide it’s better for my skin to let it breathe. To put on eye liner because I still want to distract from the pimple a little bit. To put on jeans and a sweater. To put on flat-bottomed shoes. To lock the door tight. To walk and only look over my shoulder once. To go to a café. To smile at the barista. To receive a smile and nothing else in return. To order a decaf, oat-milk latte. To find a comfy chair. To pull out my laptop and do work for my boss. To hear a shout: Does anyone have a tampon? To turn my body to the inquiring woman and smile knowingly. To glance around and see other women also smile. To glance around and not see any men get angry. To let out the tiniest exhale. To say: Sure, here you go.

To walk into the ivy-covered building. To get lost. To take the elevator to a floor I should have walked to. To get lost again. To knock on the door. To worry about smudging the prestigious glass window that apparently is the door. To walk in. To sit down. To pull out my laptop. To say: Oh sorry, should I get the door? To see his brow furrow. To hear: Close it to your comfort level. To be very, very confused. To have no time to figure out this riddle. To stand up unsteadily. To close the door halfway because the truth is always somewhere in the middle. To look back for affirmation. To receive no eye contact. To sit down and pull out my laptop again.

To put on my favorite red lipstick. To put on my favorite red top. To have a glass of my favorite red wine. To laugh with my friends. To feel lightheaded, bubbly, tipsy. To explain my friend John that this is a girls night. To bounce into an Uber or Lyft or taxi. To see the lights blaze by. To feel liberated. To tune into the driver’s voice because she’s asking: Where are you ladies off to tonight? To giggle and not worry about the sound. To stand in line at the club. To get the front. To fish out my ID. To be enveloped in the side embrace of an arm that I do not know. To smell cologne. To hear: Let’s get these girls inside, they’re barely wearing any clothes. To hear: You don’t need to pay a thing, honey. To put my money away. To take my friend’s hand. To walk away into the pulsating lights.  To not look back.

Process Notes:

I really liked this assignment because I think it forced me to pay more attention to the little details of ordinary life. I think that when I write, I tend to focus on the big dramatic moments, and it was really helpful to challenge myself to think about the little moments that happen each day that are equally valuable. It also made me think about how to use those little moments to be more poignant in my social commentary.

I was struck by how much this work conveyed to me in a non-literary sense. It was like the experience of a poem – where the words are creating a feeling, sometimes more than a clear narrative – but throughout an entire book, which seems to be an impressive feat. I think Agee and Walker’s use of text shape and pause were incredibly successful in creating evocative moments.

There were two clear emotions that I pulled out of this work. The first was an intense sense of being an outsider. Even in the Preface, I was struck by how the authors seems to feel like their subjects were almost an alien species. The scenes on p.31 and p.42, which both involve the authors surveying “normal” people, make clear the enormous tension and awkwardness they felt while trying to observe. The result was a painful reading experience for me.

The second emotion I felt came from the character of Emma, who is a joyful character with a tragic fate. It seems like her role in the narrative is to be a yet-untarnished, optimistic young woman who is dragged away from her family by her older husband and seems destined for a depressing existence. She seems to epitomize that in this harsh reality, nothing truly alive will last. Her future is my worst nightmare,

I also wanted to note a quote about art from the beginning of the work that I really enjoyed and that I am honestly still pondering: “’Above all else: in God’s name don’t think of it as Art. Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another. The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor.”

A PERSON

How many persons does it take to make an entire group of people feel unwelcome in their own homes?

One to tweet? Several million to vote?

MY HOUSE

At the Thanksgiving table, the family sits divided. There is only one table, but cousins sit worlds apart. This place did not used to be this way.

PLACE

Born and raised. Immigrated. Married in. Everyone has their own relationship to place. For some, their relationship is defined by territorial boundaries or literal roots, for others it is by the climate and things less tangible.

WEATHER

The weather has decided to reflect the mood on the ground: existentially challenged, reactionary, exclusionary.

Does the place change when the climate does? Or is it the other way around?

Process notes: I have vaguely settled on the rise of populism as my topic. I chose to adopt the style and paragraph headings from one of Adnan’s poems; I felt that these headings could be appropriate for my topic and it was easier to work within more specific guidelines, though I did change the order of the paragraphs few times. I connected the paragraphs by including a concept connected to the following paragraph title in the previous paragraph in order to make the poem flow better. The questions at the beginning and the end add parallel.

I am curious how having a visual component as part of Agee’s story telling process effected the way he thought about constructing Now Let Us Praise Famous Men. When there are no images to accompany the text, it is the responsibility of the author to construct the image in the mind of their readers; for Agee, he already knew what those images would be. I think that because the images were available to the readers, Agee was able to focus more on the feelings he hoped to produce in his readers. For example, when describing people sitting on a porch, Agee wrote, “The young man’s eyes had the opal lightings of dark oil and, though he was watching me in a way that relaxed me to cold weakness of ignobility, they fed too strongly inward to draw in a focus: whereas those of the young woman had each the splendor of a monstrance, and were brass.” This description is more about intangible qualities than tangible ones.

I think it’s interesting to compare between this week and last week’s reading the difference between writing for fictionalized versus real characters. In both Keene and Agee’s writings, the authors are giving voices to people who would not have otherwise existed in the minds of their readers. The authors also are both exercising creative control over the narrative of their characters whether or not they are fictional. I think that as long as the authors are honest about their writing, this is not an issue. For example, when Agee writes, “I might say, in short, but emphatically not in self-excuse, of which I wish entirely to disarm and disencumber myself, but for the sake of clear definition, and indication of limits, that I am only human.”

When reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I found myself wondering how the piece could be classified. It starts off with several photographs for which Agee provides no accompanying text, and then leads into writing that is a mixture of prose, reporting, and personal interjections of the author. After reading the text, I became more conscious of the implications of photography like that of Evans. Agee delves into the moral dilemma intrinsic in a project of this nature, explaining “these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings as these which are taking place over their heads; and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered, and loved, by other quite monstrously alien human beings” (13). I think that Evans’ photography highlights this dilemma almost more strongly than the writing itself. The text prompted me to consider the level of intimacy reflected in the photographs, and the invasion of privacy and vulnerability on the part of the subjects that is involved with that intimacy. I wondered if photography as a medium, because it depicts and replicates the situation exactly as it appears in real life, doesn’t allow for the artist to leave gaps and make room for the unknowable that Keene and Hartman advocate for. 

In reference to the less disputable truth portrayed by photographs, Agee says, “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement” (13). While I agree that photographs shift the responsibility of interpretation from the artist to the viewer/reader, I wonder if they still present the issue of the ethics of a project like this in a different light. I found Agee’s decision to occasionally interject with his feelings regarding the issue to be an effective way to remind the reader to be sensitive and aware while processing the piece. When viewing the photographs, I found it much easier to look at them and immediately feel pity on the basis of unfounded assumptions fueled by my own biases. Agee’s writing, however, held me accountable in this respect. This is one of the reasons why I believe the two mediums complemented each other well.