Friday Muse: Estranging the Familiar
Fourth of July, Robert Hayden, and estranging old narratives. And a prompt!
I stayed inside yesterday (July 4th), thinking I might read all day, but mostly binge-watching a show on Netflix in which Kiefer Sutherland unexpectedly becomes president (Designated Survivor). My son is in the mountains with my parents for a few days, and I’m trying to find the right mix of getting things done, letting my brain drift around in a creative way, and letting my brain just … rest. Anyway, Designated Survivor had the right mix of diverting entertainment and end-times panic to make it feel like a good choice for Independence Day.
While I watched, I thought about what art can do at a time like this. (Here we are at another time “like this.” Still/again.) The arts and entertainment can be diverting, sure, but they play other roles. For example, I recently listened to RuPaul (on the Ten Percent Happier podcast) discuss the connection he felt with Monty Python as a young person. RuPaul has discussed this elsewhere, as well, the way Monty Python helped him understand that there were others in the world who get the importance of irreverence and fun in this life— who, perhaps, understand that societies and identities as we’ve constructed them are just that, constructs. As such, power structures can continually be reexamined, at times through satire and camp and absurdist comedy. (Lest you think I’m making too much of comedy, think about Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, which brilliantly showed the ridiculousness of the fascist dictator. Now think about the value of living in a society in which these kinds of critiques are even possible.)
I was also thinking about the poem “American Journal,” by one of my favorite poets, Robert Hayden. The poem describes American society from the point of view of an alien sent to report back. Here are the first two stanzas:
[from “American Journal” by Robert Hayden]
here among them the americans this baffling
multi people extremes and variegations their
noise restlessness their almost frightening
energy how best describe these aliens in my
reports to The Counselorsdisguise myself in order to study them unobserved
adapting their varied pigmentations white black
red brown yellow the imprecise and strangering
distinctions by which they live by which they
justify their cruelties to one another
What Hayden achieves in this poem is a “defamiliarization” of our usual ways of looking at American society. Through the conceit of the alien’s report back, as well as the wonderful poetic “report” language of Hayden’s narrator (“the imprecise and strangering/ distinctions by which they live”), we can see the violence, the “noise,” the “restlessness” of American culture anew.
The end of the poem wonderfully, strangely captures the odd mix of fear, overwhelm, and feeling of being (confusingly) charmed that this nation can engender:
confess i am curiously drawn unmentionable to
the americans doubt i could exist among them for
long however psychic demands far too severe
much violence much that repels i am attracted
none the less their variousness their ingenuity
their elan vital and that some thing essence
quiddity i cannot penetrate or name
We can look to Russian-Soviet literary critic Viktor Shklovsky for a discussion of the role of defamiliarization in art. Here’s a passage about Shklovsky from Ben Ehrenreich at The Nation:
The point for Shklovsky was to find a way to shake ourselves out of this collective stupor so that we might see the world in all its startling brightness and, presumably, act on what we see. (An unacknowledged politics hides behind Shklovsky’s poetics, a quasi-anarchist insistence on permanent revolt, but that is an argument for another essay.) For this, “man has been given the tool of art,” which—and this is where ostranenie [defamiliarization/estrangement] comes in—employs various tactics to defamiliarize the world, to allow us to see it as if for the first time. If it is anything, art is oppositional and insurrectionary, and literature an authorial conspiracy to overthrow anachronistic modes of thought. “Art,” Shklovsky wrote in A Sentimental Journey, “is fundamentally ironic and destructive. It revitalizes the world.”
Of course, the Soviet Union developed into a place that lacked the artistic freedom and irreverence that Shklovsky valued. Per Ehrenreich, “Shklovsky’s Formalism made him, in the words of an unnamed KGB interrogator … , ‘an enemy of the real world and [of] socialist realism in literature.’”
So, in thinking about what it means (or can mean) to be American and to be a poet/artist, I’m thinking about the constant need to estrange the familiar narratives, to look at our history and ourselves with fresh eyes. To seek a nuanced and compassionate understanding of what our society has been and can be. To speak while the speaking’s good …
Writing idea:
Try using the form of a haibun to estrange the familiar.
Via poets.org, the haibun is “a form that originated in Japan, is a work that combines haiku and prose where the prose poem typically describes an environment and precedes a haiku.” (Here’s a post by Aimee Nezhukumatathil about how writing contemporary haibuns that align with the more traditional description of environment and evoking of the Japanese concept of aware, or “the quality of certain objects to evoke longing, sadness, or immediate sympathy.”)
I’m suggesting that you experiment with the form of a prose poem plus a few short lines haiku-like lines of poetry in a way that perhaps evokes this concept of aware, but also shows the reader something new about “Americanness” as you understand or experience it. (Or, if you’re not American, you can write about your own nation or general human society, if you like!)
Below is a haibun-like piece I wrote that is set mostly in summer 2020, but also references my response to the events of January 6, 2021. It orignially appeared at Rise Up Review.
News: An American Haibun
(after a poem by Alexis Orgera)
*
My son waters the grass in one spot, the graceful parabola of questionable play that buys me a few minutes. I tell him that after I finish my sketch, he can mist me with the hose. Only mist.
“I’ll put it on FLOWER,” he says, turning it to JET.
*
I’m a white woman running from a small brown boy laughing. Both of us laughing.
*
Two men clean someone’s Mercedes on the street. I have never seen this car before. The people across the street have two or three expensive cars, but I don’t know where this one came from. But then, my mind often skims over automobiles. Mercedes, Audi … “My other car’s a Range Rover.” Where, these days, do we rove?
The men cleaning the car are Black, and one laughs with us while the other doesn’t seem to want to look. A white man comes out to give them instructions.
*
I allow this play for something to do. During the pandemic the country burned and choked. Two men washed another man’s car. My son sprayed me with a hose.
We go inside. I close the blinds, dry us off. Feed him dinner. Build an elaborate fort.
*
All spring we stay—all summer—through the autumn we stay—winter—
*
Dear all of us,
There is no graceful geometry
to this grief. National
fabric, that veil.
Scritch and skitter
in the night. Or—
scaling walls
in daylight. Bad
apples. Death
spiral. Same
nightmare wearing
the flag.
We.
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