🔥 topic: writing ?
-i80
ok i have such a hot take for this one... and it is MESSY.
writing that tries to be unproblematic will never resonate with me the way writing does that writes towards the problem. a piece of lit with a glossy sheen, characters who talk like they just got out of therapy, and no one saying anything REAL bc they're all afraid to offend genuinely offends me more than speakers who say things that are wrong.
bc this is truly a hot take. but let's look at the poem "daddy" by sylvia plath...
sylvia plath was a notorious antisemite and racist and xenophobe. obviously, terrible, terrible things to be. i don't think she should have had the framework she had for viewing the world. and yet, when i read "daddy," i think - wow. if she hadn't been such an antisemite, if she hadn't hated the jew -
An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew.
"i began to talk like a jew/i think i may well be a jew" so i mean. the jew is not an ontological state of victimhood. and in its most literal terms, it is not a way of speaking, a way of being, accessible to sylvia plath as a gentile. AND. this is obviously like. egregious, right? egregious to compare her state to the state of victims of genocide.
AND YET. this poem is sooo fucking messy it's getting into it it's like. it's like. i don't even have the words for it but it's beautiful to me. it's writing towards the problem. it's this woman who hated jews sitting down and seeing her state as comparable to the state of a jew. "jew" becomes a metaphysical state of being.
and that is wrong!! idk. that is wrong. "jew" is not a metaphysical state of suffering, a theoretical victim or a fantastical ethnic metaphor BUT. this poem works for me. it works for me so much more than a book written by an author who thinks they're morally pure and antiracist (often while being super racist). bc the author was writing towards a problem. the power of the poem comes from its danger.
