Fair Matter

The New Alphabet That Never Was

By Beth McCoy

On Christmas eve 1976, I found J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit on a cinder-block bookshelf in my Aunt Francie’s apartment. Feigning repeated bathroom trips as an excuse to leave the dinner table, I sped through the book. By the time I was caught by dismayed parents who knew that a golden box containing both The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy awaited me in the morning, I had already finished the book, despite an over-long stop in Rivendell.

The surprise wasn’t ruined, though. Indeed, I found the trilogy to be hypnotic. Too young to understand the racism driving the books’ vision, I was half in love with Strider by the time Frodo left Bree. And the end of The Return of the King yielded even greater love: appendices explaining Elvish languages and alphabets that Tolkien conjured seemingly from the air. 

I was eleven and audacious. If Tolkien could make up new alphabets, I could, too. So I grabbed crayons and paper and threw myself upon an avocado-green rug amid walls teeming with yellow and orange flowers. I set upon my quest.

When I tell this story in the classroom, it’s at this point that students begin to smile. They realize suddenly what’s coming.

At the Crossroads of Politics, History, & Literature: Turks & Jews Since 1492

By Beyazit Akman

One of the most underrated terms of our times is “Abrahamic” religions (as opposed to “Judeo-Christianity”). In the post-9/11 era, it may be difficult for many to see the roots linking the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam. It may be even more difficult to see the rich history of Judeo-Islamic alliance.

This history perhaps is most visible in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Jewish people from central Europe and the Ottoman Empire’s Sultan Bayezid II rescued more than 100,000 of those expelled. Known as one of the most devout Muslim rulers in history (his title “Sofu” means “the Pious” in Turkish), Sultan Bayezid invited Sephardic Jews to the center of his empire at a time when Jewish discrimination and expulsion were instituted in such European metropolises as Amsterdam, Paris, and Venice. While the ships of Columbus were initiating the transatlantic slavery route to be used for centuries by major European colonial powers, the Ottoman navy was carrying victims of Christian oppression to Muslim lands.

Why did an Ottoman sultan help the Sephardim? For those of us who have a myopic understanding of historical events and who evaluate Judeo-Islamic relations in the restricted context of Israel-Palestinian conflict, the fact of the help may seem surprising, even unbelievable.

Feminism in Fashion Again?

By Katherine D. Harris

I'm teaching an Introduction to Literary Criticism this semester – well, I teach it every semester – and always at this point in our readings, the students breathe a sigh of relief to have finished their meanderings through Formalism, Structuralism, New Criticism, Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, some Foucault, Barthes, Saussure, and even a little bit of the Russians. Now, we get into the identity politics and some fun with Freud before we launch into Anglo-American Feminist Studies where the conversations can't help but veer towards the political spectrum of critical theory, even in a literature course. Identifying phallic symbols always seems to crash that glass barrier, and they begin to see structures of power even in their daily lives. This year, though, the conversation has been particularly engaging, I think because of these recent satirical videos:

“Bic Pens for Women”

“Body Form Responds: The Truth”  

Inauguration

By Misun Dokko

Lately, Richard Blanco’s “One Today,” a poem written for and read during President Obama’s second inaugural ceremony, mingles with moments of my daily rushing and reflecting.  The passage of time from yawning dawn hours to the end of the workday frames the poem. Blanco suggests that the ordinariness of activities performed—negotiating traffic, preparing for commerce, doing a job, and going to school—can be a common point of reference for Americans. It is a conceit that appeals to me because there I am, during my own rushed and reflective commute, thinking about a poem that honors un-extraordinary moments in a daily routine such as a drive to work that invites introspection.

Dionne Brand and the Book as an Object

By Beth McCoy

Recently, I was fortunate to see Dionne Brand read from a work-in-progress titled The Versos of the Blue Clerk, or what is withheld. My notes say that Brand says that her “job” as a writer is to “to notice...and notice that you can notice” (Brand is such a marvelous reader of her own work that I noticed that rather than take further notes, I gave in to listening entirely).  

Some of the versos appear in Brick, but Brand said that it’s unlikely that all will be published as one work. Who, she wondered, will print a book with poems only on the left-hand page?

I became familiar with Brand because scholars cited so often A Map to the Door of No Return, a meditation on dispossession in the Atlantic Slave Trade’s wake and waking dream. This dream, Brand observes, produces in the African Diaspora “a set of stories which never come into being, never coalesce.” What, then, she wonders, “can be called organization let alone a schema” save the “persistence of the spectre of captivity”?

 A Map to the Door is also a meditation on books as objects that carry literature.