Month: January 2017

Resistance, Duly Noted

~ Donna Drew Sawyer ~ 4 Comments
Women’s March Washington DC by VeryBusyPeople via Flickr

We have been here before. Now is not new – it is not even original or unique. It just seems that way because it is happening to us. It is our turn. The methods (twitter, executives orders, alternative truths, etc.) may be today’s tactics but sadly, the strategy is the same. Divide the people and conquer the country. Set one group upon the other by promoting erroneous beliefs: if you have more, that means I have less; if I make you feel small, that makes me bigger; if you’re different from me then you are against me; compromise, collaboration, and compassion are weaknesses—might is right.

These beliefs have never been true and they never will be. However, all of the unrelenting reporting of half-baked breaking news from unreliable sources reverberates the rhetoric in an echo chamber of unproductive partisan communication. We are not talking to each other, we are talking to ourselves.

When we turn off the television’s not-news noise, ignore the fake headlines on our electronic device screens that are only crafted to make us click, and look to literature, we’d see the well-worn path around the same issues. The questions and concerns we have today have been explored and exposed, reasoned and wrestled with, asked and answered. Yet, here we go again.

In my search to help me understand what is going on in America today, I came across a 2012 blog post from OnlineUniversities.com entitled “The 10 Best Protest Books of All Time.” It is a wealth of literary protest gems worth revisiting because they show us who we were then, where we are once again and maybe, what we can do to get ourselves out of this recurring mess.

Henry David’s Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience advocates public resistance to unjust laws and acts of government and is so appropriate for these times it could have been written on January 20, 2017. Building on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and Simone De Beauvoir (The Second Sex)  Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique positions women’s rights as human rights, still a battle cry for this generation. Ralph Ellison’s, Invisible Man, a classic from 1952, still speaks for and to us about civil rights and the intolerance of white privilege. Though it may be remembered as a book about the atrocities of food processing facilities, the journalist Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to addresses the treatment of immigrants. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring sounded the alarm for environmental justice and public health that continues to warn us about the callous treatment of our planet and, Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn is still a relevant read of America’s socioeconomic situation. W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk; Poems, Protest and a Dream: Selected Writing by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Harriet Beecher Stow’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and, Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House round out OnlineUniversities.com’s list.

 Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana

Once again we are in a struggle for America’s heart, mind, and soul. In the protest literature of the past, there’s wisdom, inspiration, courage, and perhaps a way to inch us further forward so we won’t end up in the same place—again.  Never has it been more important to read, research, reflect, act and repeat.

In the comments box below, please share any protest literature that you’d add to this list. We’ve got four years of hard work to do on these issues.

 

 

The Fictional Life of A Very Real Man

~ Donna Drew Sawyer ~ Leave a comment
Sergei Schukin by Dm. Melnikov (1915) (WikiCommons)

It is a story that invites the envy of this writer of fiction. A Tolstoy-worthy tale replete with unimaginable wealth, unbounded love, profound loss, revolution, a daring escape, theft, intrigue, and a treasure trove of the world’s most remarkable art. Sergei Shchukin, a Russian textile heir, and magnate began buying art on trips to Paris. His love of the unconventional art and artists he found in Paris after the Great War lead him to start his collection. However, the deaths of his wife, sons, and brother led him to try to fill the void created by their loss, with art. His grief led to Shchukin’s frantic collection of more than 275 Impressionist, post-Impressionist and Modern paintings including multiple works by Monet, Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse and Van Gogh.

As it is in Russian tragedies, Shchukin would not only lose his family but his country, home, art collection and ultimately, his name. When Lenin began his purge of the bourgeois during the Russian Revolution, Shchukin, fled to Paris — his opulent home and prized art collection were seized by the state. The new Russian government had no use for Shchukin or his decadent art; they planned to dismantle the collection and destroy it. The wife of the director of the Hermitage was thankfully a lover of modern art and convinced her husband to distributed the collection to Russian Museums away from Moscow. For nearly 100 years, the magnificent paintings languished in obscurity. Shchukin’s name was erased from the collection’s provenance and from the history of commerce and art in Russia.

Foundation Louis Vuitton by Christine und Hagen Graf via Flickr

Shchukin’s story is the stuff of fiction, except that it is real. And in August of 2016, through his grandson’s efforts, the collector and the collection once again made art history in the landmark exhibition, “Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection,”  at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. The exhibition, featuring 130 Impressionist, post-Impressionist and Modern works from the collection of this early 20th-century collector, is scheduled to close on March 5, 2017. If, like me, Paris is not on your itinerary, Richard Nahem, an ex-New Yorker who writes his I Prefer Paris blog from “a fabulous 18th-century apartment in the fashionable Marais district of Paris,” has taken some stunning photographs of the showstoppers in the exhibition.

Every art collection tells the collector’s story but rarely is one as vivid in art and as exciting and tragic in life as that of Sergei Shchukin; a story so real, it seems the stuff of fiction. Though I did not know about Sergei Shchukin when I wrote my novel, Provenance, the similarities between Shchukin and my protagonist, Lance Henry Withers, are striking. Because of government persecution, they both sought refuge in Paris. Shchukin and Withers lost the countries of their birth, their homes, and their names. They used art to heal the profound loss of home and loved ones. Influenced by Gertrude and Leo Stein, they became lovers of what was unpopular art during their time in Paris—Impressionism, post-Impressionism, and Modern art. And by collecting art, they found a way to once again experience love and life. They were truly kindred souls—real and imagined—in life and in art.

The Significance of Black Bodies—Buried

~ Donna Drew Sawyer ~ Leave a comment
©Brian Palmer/brianpalmer.photos

  In my novel, Provenance, secrets are buried, and revealed, in Richmond, Virginia’s Evergreen Cemetery. The same can be said for the cemetery itself. When slavery ended and African-Americans in the South could claim a final resting place, approximately 5,000 African-Americans chose Evergreen Cemetery. Now the two historic African-American cemeteries in Richmond, through neglect and civic indifference, lie under decades of overgrowth and underbrush. The same freedoms that made black cemeteries possible also became reasons they turned into woodland—families moved away, some migrated North establishing a home place away from the segregated south. In time, some folks forgot or just never knew the significance and the secrets buried along with black bodies during the early 20th century. However, through the efforts of some people in the 21st century, secrets long kept and compacts long hidden are being revealed.

One of the diligent excavators of the secrets within Evergreen and East End Cemeteries is Brian Palmer, a photographer, writer and adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. I discovered Palmer’s work while doing research for Provenance. Through his photographs, Palmer tells the story of people and situations that he knows might otherwise remain untold—Evergreen and East End Cemeteries are such stories. In a recent New York Times opinion piece, Palmer uses his pen to illustrate and illuminate complicit compacts in states like Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi. These states award thousands of taxpayer dollars annually to preserve the burial sites and erect monuments for traitors and oppressors while ignoring American citizens who were oppressed. Read Palmer’s eloquent opinion piece, For the Forgotten African-American Dead, where he calls on the Virginia General Assembly to pass House Bill 1547 and provide some taxpayer support to preserve historical graves and cemeteries of African-Americans. 

In The Significance of a Final Resting Place, I wrote about Palmer’s work, the prominent African-Americans buried in Evergreen Cemetery and, how the historic site became a pivotal scene in my novel. You can see more of Palmer’s work at http://www.brianpalmer.photos/

If you live in Virginia, contact your state legislative representative and insist that they vote for House Bill 1547. If you live in other states turning a blind eye and providing paltry or non-existent funding for African-American historic sites – speak up on behalf of history for all of us.