Facing It Part IV: Faith / Face

It was difficult to think of a title for today's installment of this series, "Facing It."  And so, at some point in the future, the title may be exchanged for something less dramatic.  Below are three quotes from Annie Dillard's  "Holy the Firm," an essay/story about a writer's quest to locate meaning in the tragic burning and disfigurement of a seven year old girl.  The narrator  conveys the extreme suffering of the child as well as her own agonizing quest to find an answer to a philosophical question: "What is God's relationship to the  substance and experiences of this world?"  If the question seems rather pedestrian, the sort of question on which people typically reflect (or worse, pontificate upon) in the aftermath of tragedy--the narrator's  insights prove less so.  She offers neither the voice of complete reassurance nor the voice of abjection.


The first quote links very closely to my two earlier entries, here and here, in which the role of the face is clearly a public one:

"How can people think that artists seek a name?  A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone."


And here is the second:

"You might as well be a nun.  You might as well be God's chaste bride, chased by plunderers to the high caves of solitude, to the hearthless rooms empty of voices, and of warm limbs hooking your heart to the world. Look how he loves you!  Are you bandaged now, or loose in a sterilized room?  Wait till they hand you a mirror, if you can hold one, and know what it means.  That skinlessness, that black shroud of flesh in strips on your skull, is your veil.  There are two kinds of nun, out of the cloister or in.  You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.  Forget whistling: you have no lips for that, or for kissing the face of a man or a child.  Learn Latin, and it please my Lord, learn the foolish downward look called Custody of the Eyes." 

And finally, in a last segment, the narrator imaginatively assumes the sacrificial role for the young girl:

"Julie Norwich; I know.  Surgeons will fix your face.  This will all be a dream, an anecdote, something to tell your husband one night: I was burned.  Or if you're scarred, you're scarred.  People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home. You'll dress your own children, sticking their arms through the sleeves.  Mornings you'll whistle, full of the pleasure of days, and afternoons this or that, and nights cry love.  So live.  I'll be the nun for you.  I am now." 

--Annie Dillard, "Holy the Firm" (1977)

Facing It Part III: Concealment

Today's quote is taken from Nella Larsen's novel Passing, published in 1929.  The book focuses on the relationship between two light-skinned, racially mixed childhood acquaintances, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry.  Reunited after a number of years, Irene, a New Yorker,  learns that Clare is passing for white in Chicago and has married a racist white man who does not know of her past or her identity. He jokes that Clare is getting "darker and darker" and refers to her by the pet name of "Nig."  Clare lives in fear of being discovered yet keeps taking considerable risks to reunite with the African-American community she left behind.  In this scene, Irene describes the "polite insolence" as well as the mystery conveyed through Clare's unusual features:

"[...] she'd always had that pale gold hair, which, unsheared still, was drawn loosely back from a broad brow, partly hidden by the small close hat.  Her lips, painted a brilliant geranium-red, were sweet and sensitive and a little obstinate.  A tempting mouth.  The face across the forehead and cheeks was a trifle too wide, but the ivory skin had a peculiar soft lustre.  And the eyes were magnificent! dark, sometimes absolutely black, always luminous, and set in long, black lashes.  Arresting eyes, slow and mesmeric, and with, for all their warmth, something withdrawn and secret about them.
     Ah! Surely! They were Negro eyes!  mysterious and concealing.  And set in that ivory face under that bright hair, there was about them something exotic."

--Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)

Facing It Part II: Putting on a New Face

Today's quote comes from a New York Times article on the first U.S. face transplant that took place in December 2008 at the Cleveland Clinic. The exact date of the 23 hour surgery, the identity of the recipient and the donor, and the cause of the woman's facial injuries are not identified in this article.  However, it does offer surgeon Maria Sieminonow's matter-of-fact insight on the value of a face,  generally speaking:

"'You need a face to face the world.'"

Sieminonow's commentary seems almost too direct and too reductive when compared to the nuanced and elegant treatment of facial trauma as expressed in Lucy Grealy's account, which I wrote about in my last entry.  Nevertheless, her commentary proves interesting in that it suggests a gap between the identity of an individual and his/her face. So significant are the injuries of face transplant patients that a passable face--even one that bears little resemblance to the original face of the patient--is a prerequisite for "facing" others.    You need a face. The cadaveric face--a permanent mask of sorts-- is a prop for negotiating the world.

--Lawrence K. Altman, "First U.S. Face Transplant Described," New York Times, December 17, 2008

Facing It Part I: Mirror Image

In the first quote from this multi-part series on faces, writer Lucy Grealy describes the "habits of self-consciousness" to which she succumbs in the years following her lengthy bout with Ewing's sarcoma of the jaw.  Diagnosed at the age of nine, Grealy endures 2 1/2 years of chemotherapy, the removal of a third of her jaw,  and dozens of reconstructive surgeries--none of which prove successful.  In this scene, Grealy describes her surprise at seeing her own reflection in a mirror following one of her reconstructive surgeries--an image that immediately dismantles her false sense of confidence by confronting her with a reality that does not coincide with her own perceptions.  What is perhaps most remarkable about this quote is the way in which Grealy uses the mirror image to suggest exposure as opposed to reflection--the gap between how she imagines herself  and how she is seen.  The mirror offers only a temporary answer to the question: "What do other people see when they look at me?":

"Spending as much time as I did looking in the mirror, I thought I knew what I looked like.  So it came as a shock one afternoon toward the end of that summer when I went shopping with my mother for a new shirt and saw my face in the harsh fluorescent light of the fitting room.  Pulling the new shirt on over my head, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror that was itself being reflected in a mirror opposite, reversing my face as I usually saw it.  I stood there motionless, the shirt only halfway on, my skin extra pale from the lighting, and saw how asymmetrical my face was.  How had that happened?  Walking up to the mirror, reaching up to touch the right side, where the graft had been put in only a year before, I saw clearly that nost of it had disappeared, melted away into nothing.  I felt distraught at the sight and even more distraught that it had taken so long to notice.  My eyes had been secretly working against me, making up for the asymmetry as it gradually reappeared.  This reversed image of myself was the true image, the way other people saw me...That unexpected revelation in the store's fitting room mirror marked a turning point in my life.  I began having overwhelming attacks of shame at unpredictable intervals" (185).

--Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face (1994)

Grealy granted Charlie Rose an interview in which she discusses her book. 

Hair Part VI: Honor Killing

I have selected today's quote from a New York Times article from 2004 by Hadil Jawad and Lauren Sandler.   As Sandler explains, the tradition of honor killing "gives family members the right to kill a woman who has sexual intercourse (even if it's a case of rape) without her family's permission."  In her interview with Ms. Jawad, included in the article in translation, she attempts to capture how this practice affects the family dynamic in surprising ways. 


Having read accounts of women who have been disfigured and killed through the practice--many of these accounts quite graphic---this particular quote captured my attention for its directness as well as its understatement of what this practice can entail.  As Ms. Jawad recalls:

"When I was a young woman and still living with my family, I once went out to the market and let my hair down my back without tying it up.  My brother saw me, and when I came back home, he hit me repeatedly with a hard plastic hose.  I nearly died.

My brother was very difficult to live with and would not allow my five sisters or me go out of the house or wear trousers.  My father was also strict.  My mother was helpless; she could not open her mouth."

The reference to hair appears only in passing, and yet in conjunction with Ms. Jawad's reflections on her mother's muteness, it suggests how we assert ourselves through our bodies as well as through our words. Although the exposure of hair might suggest the importance of modesty, conjoined with muteness and helplessness it also suggests the importance of containment, and the threat of self-expression.


Ms. Jawad later fell in love with a married man with children, and the two eloped, eventually becoming refugees in Pakistan, and finally returning to Baghdad after Saddam Hussein's regime ended.  While Ms. Jawad's actions seem to suggest a sense of agency, her testimony reveals her curiously bifurcated feelings about her family upon her return to her homeland:  

"I was terrified that someone from my family might see me.  Yet at the same time, I was eager to see them. I heard that my sisters are married now, and that my youngest sister married an old man who was married and had a big family. When I walk down the street, I worry  that someone from my family will recognize me and kill me.  I try not to show it but I am terrified. I have no objection to death, but it seems unfair: my only crime is that I fell in love with someone and wanted to marry him."

--Hadil Jawad and Lauren Sandler,  "When Love Is a Crime," New York Times, October 7, 2004

Hair Part V: Big Hair/Bald Head, Or, An Allegory

Today's quote comes from Charles Chesnutt's short story "The Goophered Grapevine."  This story was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887, and was reprinted in Chesnutt's collection The Conjure Woman (1899).  In this tale, a plantation owner has the conjure woman, Aunt Peggy, put a "goopher" on his scuppernong vines to prevent them from being eaten by slaves from other plantations in the vicinity. The "goopher" is supposed to cause those who pilfer the grapes to die within twelve months.  Unfortunately, one of his own slaves, Henry, eats the scuppernongs.  While the overseer takes Henry to Aunt Peggy to remove the goopher, she is only able to partialy remove it.  Henry's state of heath begins to follow the life cycle of the grapes--he waxes in the summer and wanes in the winter.  His master, seeing an opportunity to capitalize on this new situation, begins to sell him during his waxing period and re-purchase him during his waning months.   Gradually, Henry begins to fade away in a story that is an allegory of slavery's misuse and destruction of both land and bodies.  This quote describes Henry's new life cycle in terms of the growth of his hair.  While initially "bald as a sweet potato" as the story goes, he begins to exhibit hair that resembles the grape vines--unmanageable "grapy hair,"  the "biggest hair on the plantation":

"So Henry 'n'int his head wid de sap out'n de big grapevime des ha'f way 'twix' de quarters en de big house, en de goopher nebber wuk agin him dat summer.  But de beatenes' thing you eber see happen ter Henry.  Up ter dat time he wuz ez ball ez a sweeten' 'tater, but des ez soon ez de young leaves begun ter come out on de grapevimes, de ha'r begun ter grow out on Henry's head, en by de middle er de summer he had de bigges' head er ha'r on de plantation.  Befo' dat, Henry had tol'able good ha'r 'roun' de aidges, but soon ez de young grapes begun ter come, Henry's ha'r begun to quirl all up in little balls, des like dis yer reg'lar grapy ha'r, en by de time de grapes got tipe his head look des like a bunch er grapes.  Combin' it didn' do no good; he wuk at it ha'f de night wid er Jim Crow, en think he git it straighten' out, but in de mawnin' de grapes 'ud be dere des de same.  So he gin it up, en tried ter keep de grapes down by havin' his ha'r cut sho't [...]

But de mo's cur'ouses' thing happen' in de fall, when de sap begin ter go down in de grapevimes.  Fus', when de grapes 'uz gethered, de knots begun ter straighten out'n Henry's ha'r; en w'en de leaves begin ter fall, Henry's ha'r 'mence ter drap out; en when de vimes 'uz bar', Henry's head wuz baller 'n it wuz in de spring, en he begin ter git ole an stiff in de j'ints ag'in, en paid no mo' 'tention ter de gals dyoin'er de whole winter.  En nex' spring, w'en he rub de sap on ag'in, he got young ag'in, en so soopl en libely dat none er de young niggers on de plantation couldn' jump, ner dance, ner hoe ez much cotton ez Henry.

--Charles Chesnutt, "The Goophered Grapevine," In The Conjure Woman, Ed.Richard H. Brodhead

Hair Part IV: High (or Low?) Resolution

In today's quote taken from Margaret Edson's play W;t,  Professor Vivian Bearing reflects on the briefing she receives from her oncologist regarding her upcoming treatment for Stage IV ovarian cancer:


Kelekian: The antineoplastic will          Vivian: Antineoplastic. Anti:
inevitably affect some                           against. Neo: new.
healthy cells, including                          Plastic: To mold. Shap-
those lining the gas-                              ing. Antineoplastic.
trointestinal tract from                           Against new shaping.
the lips to the anus, and
the hair follicles. We                             Hair follicles. My
will of course be reyling                        resolve.
on your resolve to with-
stand some of the more                        "Pernicious" That
pernicious side effects.                          doesn't seem---


Kelekian:  Miss Bearing?


Vivian: I beg your pardon?


Kelekian: Do you have any questions so far?


Vivian: Please go on. 

--Margaret Edson, Wit: A Play, (1999)

Hair Part III: Assimilation

Today's quote is taken from Sioux Indian Zitkala-Sa's "American Indian Stories."  This scene describes one of  her experiences as a student at a Quaker mission school in Wabash, Indiana--an institution that required assimiliation.  In this scene, Zitkala-Sa is hiding under a bed at the mission, and is forceably removed for a haircut:

     Women and girls entered the room.  I held my breath and watched them open closet doors and peep behind large trunks.  Some one threw up the curtains, and the room was filled with sudden light.  What caused them to stoop and look under the bed I do not know.  I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly.  In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. 
     I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids.  Then I lost my spirit.  Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities.  People had stared at me.  I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet.  And now my long hair was shingled like a coward's!  In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me.  Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.

---Zitkala-Sa ("Red Bird") (b. 1876), American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, Edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris

Hair Part II: Pieces of Me

Today's quote for this multi-part series on Hair  is taken from Helen Sheumaker's fascinating study, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America. This study traces the rise and fall of hairwork (hair jewelry, wreaths, portrait miniatures including locks of hair) as an object of sentiment and devotion as the once hand-made fanciwork became increasingly commercialized:

     In the eighteenth century, the sentimental associations of hair were obliquely displayed; by the nineteenth century, hairwork and the sentimentality it conveyed was worn for others to observe. This practice revealed a paradox about sentimentality. While display of one's sentimentality was essential to being regarded as sentimental, that same exhibition could easily be construed as ostentatious, vulgar, and insincere. Fashion was constantly in flux, it was superficial, and it was self-aggrandizing. It opposed the sincerity that women in particular were supposed to possess. Fashion was expressed with goods, and therefore was opposed to the domestic sphere. Thus, those constant fluctuations in styles threatened to undermine the premise of sentimentality itself.
     Even as hairwork revealed the dissonance between genuine emotion and frivolous fashionableness, it attempted a remedy.  Hair's undeniable relationship to an individual asserted a sincerity of character that transcended the hypocrisy that fahionableness implied.  The mid-nineteenth century was the height of the popularity of hairwork perhaps because as fashion was criticized as being particularly hypocritical, hairwork's genuiness was being asserted.  On the one hand, hair jewelry was very much a commodity, buttressed as it was by marketing and salesmanship; on the other hand, it was exactly that which could not be completely commodified.  Hair jewelry provided a way to forestall the apparent effects of fashion in the market and in the social world" (20-21).

--Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America, (2007)

Hair Part I: Sweet Tensile Strength

Last week's entries on the boundary between life and death have prompted me to think about material memory, sentiment, and the body.  Along these lines, the entries for the next few days will focus on one particular bodily manifestation of sentiment, memory, selfhood, sexuality & health: hair.  The first entry is taken from a familiar fairy tale:

"One day, after three years had passed, it happened that a young prince who was hunting in the forest passed close to the tower and saw Rapunzel standing in her window singing and brushing out her hair.  She sang so sweetly that the prince fell in love with her at once.  But since there was no door to the tower and no stiarway or ladder, he despaired of reaching her.  Still, after that day, he went to the forest again and again and made his way to the tower and listened to her songs. One day, as he was standing concealed in the shadowy wood, he saw the wtich come down the path and call, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy hair."  And she, thinking it was the witch, let down her hair, not braided now, but flowing like a golden waterfall, and drew him up."

--"Rapunzel," in The Magic Carpet and Other Tales, Retold by Ellen Douglas with the Illustrations of Walter Anderson (1987)

Boundaries Part VI: Inconceivable

In this final selection for "Boundaries" I offer you the gift of a poem by Donald Hall from his collection, Without, which documents his wife Jane Kenyon's bout with leukemia and eventual death in 1995 at the age of forty-eight. Today's quote is the third section of "Song for Lucy." It features an object--a tourmaline ring--that underscores the boundary between life and death, the material embodiment of their desperate hope.

     Alone together a moment
on the twenty-second anniversary
     of their wedding,
he clasped her as she stood
     at the sink, pressing
into her backside, rubbing his cheek
     against the stubble
of her skull. He gave her a ring
     of pink tourmaline
with nine small diamonds around it.
     She put it on her finger
and immediately named it Please Don't Die.
     They kissed and Jane
whispered, "Timor mortis conturbat me."

--Donald Hall, Without, (1998)

Boundaries Part V: Dead Bodies

Today's quote comes from Michael Sappol's study of the rise of anatomy as a medical discipline in the nineteenth century and its relationship to racial, gendered, and class-based identity politics. This study moves fluidly from the dissection table to the funeral parlor, dime museum, and literary works and treatises to trace the complex way in which nineteenth century persons located identity within the body. Here Sappol considers the role of funerary practice in securing the meaning of selfhood:

"If death was a haven in a heartless world, then here the anatomist and the grave robber willfully transgressed. Against the invasion of the body snatchers, the living struggled mightily to protect the honor of their dead, to safeguard the material integrity of their helpless dead selves, to narrate their lives and therefore their deaths. For them selfhood did not terminate with death; rather, death stripped away the duplicitous masks and inessentials of being, leaving an existentially pure residue. Post-mortem photoportraiture, which from the earliest days of photography emerged as one of the most popular genres of the new medium, was intended not so much for spectatorship, but to freeze the self into an iconic last frame--many of the pictures were tucked away as keepsakes, never meant to be displayed, viewed only infrequently or not at all. Nineteenth-century Americans of all classes took this very seriously: how one died fixed symbolically how one lived"(39).
--Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Ninteenth Century America (2002)

Boundaries Part IV: Incarnation

Today's quotes come Myra Jehlen's essay "F.P." in which she recounts the death of a friend. The first quote captures her encounter with the permanence of death, something she discovers through the unmalleability of her friend's body:


"They said to choose clothes in which they would 'prepare' her. I thought, having had to die, she shouldn't have to undergo being prepared and said I would dress her, not knowing how difficult it is to dress a dead person. To begin with, I couldn't pull out the intravenous tube that still connected her to a morphine drip. The tube had been inserted into a catheter through which she had been undergoing a chemotherapy. When I tried to pull out the tube, blood seeped from the opening of the catheter. So instead I cut the tube and so doing saw that she was dead. I had wanted her to wear a favroite gray cashmere turtleneck, but I couldn't put it on her. She was too heavy, although she weighed less than eighty pounds, and too stiff, so I dressed her in a shift and pants. She looked terrible, yet fully and definitely herself. You're never so wholly incarnate as in death.
When I was dressing my friend, I expected her to help. The utter stillness of her arms and legs filled me with hopelessness."

In the second quote, Jehlen describes her own feeling of being "stuck" in the memory of a last excursion with her friend and "stuck" in the night before she died. But in an interesting twist, she juxtaposes another story of a woman who is "stuck" in the night of her child's birth. As Jehlen muses:

     "You get stuck, then, when you meet up with something that makes the limit of your perpetual motion just too obvious.

     Stuck, you turn back. My friend didn't appear to me, so I made her appear: one night, I dreamed she had come back to life, or rather that she hadn't died. At first, in my dream, she was as she was in the moments before she died. But, in the dream, as I bent over to see how she was, she grew better and better, until, in the dream, I called out to the doctor to do something, since something could be done."


---Myra Jehlen, "F.P." in Raritan, Spring 2002

Boundaries Part III The Harlem Book of the Dead Part II

This third installment of quotes focusing on the boundary between life and death (and the second installment of quotes from The Harlem Book of the Dead) features a portion of the interview between Camille Billops and James Van der Zee conducted in his 91st year of life. Van Der Zee not only photographed dead strangers, but also his own mother (who died at seventy-five) and daughter (who died at the age of sixteen). If Van der Zee's responses seem strange to modern ears for their pragmatic viewpoint towards life and death, they also offer a strange comfort in their refusal to make too much of either of these states of being--or perhaps too much of a distinction between either state of being.


The conversation begins with this comment from Van Der Zee:

"Why should a spirited mortal feel proud, when like a swift, fleet meteor or fast-flying cloud, man passes through life to his rest in the grave?" They've asked me, "How do I feel?" I told them that there's nothing to it; you do things the way they ought to be done. I don't see anything to be proud about. It's pretty difficult for a man to feel proud when knowing as he does the short space of time he's here and all paths, even those of our greatest glory, lead but to the grave. So it is very difficult to feel proud when Death says this. You're here today and gone sometimes today."

His description of his feelings about the death of his one-year old son, Emile seems to illustrate a surprising detachment, and yet this word does not capture the whole of his sentiment:

"I think he came when we was living in the Victoria Apartments on Lenox Avenue [in New York City] at that time. He only lived a year, and I didn't get a chance to know too much about him."

Not troubled by his role, he relates a mildly humorous dream that he had about a photographic subject. The humor emanates from his own response to the curious behavior of the subject. But in referencing a dream world Van Der Zee's commentary also draws attention to a space that seems to reside between life and death...the surrealist dream world:

"One time I dreamed I went to make a picture of a dead woman who reached in her chest and took out her heart and threw it over here, then she reached in there and took out something else and threw it over there. I just waited to see if she was going to take out something else...but I wasn't scared or nothing like that in the dream."

And finally, his thoughts on death in general.

Billops: HOW DO YOU SEE DEATH, MR. VAN DER ZEE?


Van Der Zee: So when one more clean shirt lasts me the rest of time. When I pass out on this long journey that I shall ever make and I cease to soothe with soft words and song a heart in which there is an ache, I trust that tears will dim few eyes and those who do weep will soon forget.


Billops (editorial note): (At this point, Mr. Van Der Zee lights up his cigar.)



--Camille Billops, Owen Dodson, & James Van Der Zee, The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)

Boundaries Part II The Harlem Book of the Dead Part I

Continuing with the theme of the boundary between life and death, today's group of quotes are taken from Owen Dodson's captions for The Harlem Book of the Dead, an experimental documentary published in 1978. The work as a whole is comprised of commercial funerary images from Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s taken by African-American photographer James Van Der Zee, an interview with Van Der Zee conducted by Camille Billops, and, as mentioned, poems and captions by Owen Dodson. While it is impossible to fully grasp the power of this text without displaying the images, a few brief quotes offer a sense of its strangely pragmatic and yet poignant viewpoint towards death--and life.


Owen Dodson's startling poetic captions illustrate the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia,--revitalizing the dead by allowing them to speak again as in this quote, which accompanies a photograph of a dead man posed by Van Der Zee with the prop of a newspaper:

"I prayed that on the day I died
Nobody else prominent would be dead
The obituary page was supposed to be all about me today.
Florence Mills, the greatest, died on my day
Look-a-here Lord,
I was a faithful servant
Over many a money year."

In others, such as ones featuring parents holding their dead infants, the living address the dead with the hope of reunion:

"You'll always be my baby now, Johnella. Dream sometimes of Papa.
When you marry an angel boy,
The very best,
I'll attend your wedding."

Sometimes the dead speak to each other, as in this caption which accompanies a double funeral (and one of the most resonant of the work):

"We grew so far away from each other
And got lonesome. Please was
Our only vocabulary.
Now and again: Will you be with me please.
A word with a vegetable sound:
Please..."

Tomorrow, excerpts from Camille Billops' interview with Van der Zee...

---Camille Billops, Owen Dodson & James Van Der Zee, with a foreword by Toni Morrison, The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)