Loading

#JamisonDuke

IMG_2765-1024x356
The Leslie Jamison Do Lunch.

Author Leslie Jamison’s visit to Duke as the second Kenan-CDS Visiting Writer in Ethics, Society, and Documentary Art was a two-day whirlwind that engaged undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, and Triangle community members. Taken on face value, this description would suit just about any campus residency involving a high-profile practitioner, artist, or scholar. But this one felt singular, in a way; as a professor and mentor of mine said, Jamison’s visit, which centered on her much-awarded, lauded, and widely read essay collection The Empathy Exams, “touche[d] so many needs and nerves across campus.” I think this was due, in part, to the issue at the heart of her work—empathy—which prompts (and prompted) such wide-ranging micro and macro reverberations.

A Team Kenan Do Lunch on Wednesday brought Jamison and 20+ students together to explore questions surrounding the anxiety of expertise in storytelling, gender and writing, and the challenges of crafting a healthy relationship between creative work and everyday living. Staff book club, which convened on Thursday morning with Kenan and Center for Documentary Studies staff members, prompted a lively conversation about the metrics of empathy—When do we give? How do we position ourselves in terms of the needs of others?

IMG_2783
Jamison at the public reading.

Jamison’s panel discussion at the Forum for Scholars and Publics on Thursday, for which she was joined by Jehanne Gheith (Associate Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and MSW), and Lauren Henschel (Duke senior and documentary photographer), was, in one audience member’s words, “awesome, moving, powerful, transformative.” The panel, entitled “Ghost Pain: Caregiving, Documentary, and Radical Empathy,” allowed the trio to share their experiences encountering pain and engendering empathy in their respective practices. Another audience member praised the discussion’s “grounded personal moments of vulnerability.” Their reflections on each others’ work felt electric and connective (and they said as much afterward).

At her public reading on Wednesday night, Jamison read “The Broken Heart of James Agee,” a short essay from a small collection of essays—”Pain Tours II”—within The Empathy Exams (a version of “Agee” was published in The Believer in 2012). About Agee’s infamous Let us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400+-page genre-bending, hulking textual thing that attempts to write about sharecroppers in the Deep South but instead writes about how hard it is to write about, and therefore document, anything, Jamison writes:

Empathy is contagion. Agee wants his words to stay in us as “deepest and most iron anguish and guilt.” They have stayed; they do stay; they catch as splinters, still, in the open, supplicating palms of this essay. If it were possible, Agee claims, he wouldn’t have used words at all: “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here.” In this way, we are prepared for the four hundred pages of writing that follow. “A piece of the body torn out by the roots,” he continues, “might be more to the point.”

CAez3zwUYAAaR3u.jpg-large
Jamison, Gheith, and Henschel after the FSP panel.

Jamison’s visit was about writing, but it was also, and fundamentally, about so much more. It was about presence: it was about different folks coming out to one or more of her events, and connecting with each other—I had no idea I’d see you here!—and connecting with Jamison in turn (she wrote personal notes in the books of attendees, and they signed her copy of The Empathy Exams). It created a space where global health students met English students; where scholarship became public and personal; where Triangle community members mingled in academic building, talking about what they do, where they work, and how they encountered Jamison’s work. This visit, much like Eula Biss’s in the fall, had a pulse, and that pulse had—has—indentations. Those indentations will live on in our shared conversation, in our shared air—the latter of which, as Jamison said, is as ubiquitous as instances of, and possibilities for, empathy.

—MD

A Taste of Empathy (Exams)

It’s no coincidence that the person who initially introduced me to the work of Leslie Jamison is now the one with whom I’ve conspired to bring the author to campus next week. About a year and a half ago, thanks to my former professor Duncan Murrell, who directs the writing program at the Center for Documentary Studies, I began seeing mentions of something called The Empathy ExamsI was curious, but wary; it felt as though there’d been a slew of mainstream media reportage of late that broached the topic of empathy, usually producing absolute conclusions—whether to say that “rich people just care less” or “reading literary fiction improves empathy.” The latter take was, and is, especially popular (and especially controversial, insofar as such a topic may be deemed controversial). Around this time, I was very kindly sent an article with a headline reaffirming literature’s empathy-inducing qualities. Next to it I annotated, with a healthy dose of snark, “breaking news!”—both to signal my agreement that, yes, I think reading literature can allow us to better visualize, understand, and therefore care about the lives of others; but also that the undercurrent of so many writings on empathy seemed to prefer, and promise, shortcuts over what we surely must understand by now as the messiness and nuance of human experience. The subjective spaces where we try, and fail, to empathize. The spaces where we promulgate the merits of empathy but cannot give our full attention to another.

smallerjamisonposter
The poster for Jamison’s upcoming visit on March 18 and 19.

And then I read an excerpt, in The Believer, from this forthcoming something called The Empathy Exams, and immediately I knew I felt something different. Here was a writer writing against herself, against her minute actions and her macro-histories. The essay, also called “The Empathy Exams,” is about Jamison’s experience as a medical actor. She writes about getting paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose. She also writes about herself, as Leslie Jamison, about her pregnancy and subsequent abortion at age twenty-five, about her drinking, her boyfriend, her ailments, her loves. About her ability and inability to minister care, and about her expectations to receive it, and frustrations in not receiving it. She interweaves the instructions for her “standardized patient” with an imagined set, for “Leslie Jamison.” She concludes with the latter. An excerpt:

You wake up from another round of anesthesia and they tell you all their burning didn’t burn away the part of your heart that was broken. You come back and find you aren’t alone. You weren’t alone when you were cramping through the night and you’re not alone now. Dave spends every night in the hospital. You want to tell him how disgusting your body feels: your unwashed skin and greasy hair. You want him to listen, for hours if necessary, and feel everything exactly as you feel it—your pair of hearts in such synchronized rhythm any monitor would show it; your pair of hearts playing two crippled bunnies doing whatever they can. There is no end to this fantasy of closeness. Who else is gonna bring you a broken arrow? You want him to break with you. You want him to hurt in a womb he doesn’t have; you want him to admit he can’t hurt that way.

I read these essays one by one in Dublin last summer, upon returning each night to my living space from long interviews with a lot of people I’d never met before. I would catch up on food I hadn’t had time to eat earlier, lie down, and open the book. The combination of these practices just fit. In one of her essays, Jamison visits Texas to attend a gathering of people claiming to suffer from an elusive condition called Morgellons Disease. In another, to support her runner sibling, she attends the Barkley Marathons, an almost unbelievable constellation of treacherous runs through the woods near Wartburg, Tennesse. She travels to Mexicali and consorts with radical poets; she gets punched in the face in Nicaragua; she slips into a “gang tour” in Los Angeles; she writes about stereotypes of “wounded women.” In these essays Jamison doesn’t prescribe or moralize; her voice undulates across the circumstances in which she both plants herself and finds herself. She creates space by exposing the connections between events, texts, relationships, assaults, proclamations of guilt and innocence. This is the writing of someone who moves through the motions by refusing to move forward until she works out why and how she enters these motions in the first place. In her own words:

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own. To say “going through the motions”this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind.

Jamison visits Duke on March 18 and 19 (she will give a public reading on Wednesday, the 18). It’s funny—this post began as a mechanism to link to some samples of her work for those who might be interested (speaking of, you can find lots more here, here, and a nice interview here). It evolved into my own re-reading of some of her work, and an emotional weightiness, and charge, in feeling myself identify. And that feeling—or my moving through the motions of it—gave rise to more questions. This is, I think, the bare motion prompted by experiencing material—be it artistic, scientific, spiritual, or perhaps all three—that is powerful, worthwhile, and unique.

—MD

Looking Ahead: 2015

The year 2014 ends at the end of tomorrow. This is the season to cast judgments on the seasons that preceded it; it is also a time for gathering (read: mustering) optimism for the year ahead. This optimism will inevitably flitter and fry and become barely perceptible by the time next December, and especially the end of December, rolls around. But I don’t think this pattern precludes optimism, or hope, or anticipation in the first place; this is the material of which conversations are made, and had. These are the things that will sustain us over the next 12 months, and beyond. In that spirit I’ve rounded up several events and programs Kenan will present, or have a part in presenting, this spring semester; I have great hope that these events will get people talking, and sharing, and creating new resolutions that may not necessarily begin with the new year.

  1. Kenan’s new Practitioners in Residence program: In many ways, the 2014-15 academic year seems a boon in residencies for Kenan. In the fall, we hosted author Eula Biss, and starting this spring we’ll ring in a new practitioner-in-residence series that aims to engage professionals from various fields whose work intersects with ethics in interesting ways. In January we’ll be visited by civil rights attorney Shavar Jeffries, and in February we’ll host Jon Favreau, former speechwriter for President Obama.
  2.  Speaking of practitioners in residence, acclaimed author Leslie Jamison will visit Kenan, Duke, and Durham as part of the inaugural Kenan-CDS Visiting Writers Series. Jamison’s essay collection The Empathy Exams has landed on just about every “best-of-2014” list imaginable (and, it’s worth noting, so has Eula Biss’s On Immunity), and we’re excited she’ll be here to participate in a public reading as well as several other events open to the Duke and local communities. KIE’s Communications and Advancement Manager Katherine Scott made a short video in which I talk all about Jamison’s residency; you can watch it here.

    Tony-Johnson11-300x225
    Tony C. Johnson and dancer rehearsing.
  3. Last year it was the American South; this year it’s New York, Havana, and Dublin (among others). Spring 2015’s Ethics Film Series, “Sound Beliefs: Music, Ethics, Identity,” will examine the intersections of music—as performed, written, and embodied in public and private space—and identity. As it happens, these themes often collide in cities, and global cities at that. We’ll begin the four-film series with the 2007 feature film The Visitor, and continue with a very timely presentation of the documentary Buena Vista Social Club in February.
  4. The Language of Genocide and Human Rights, a Humanities Writ Large and Bass Connections jointly funded project, will continue to meet throughout the spring months and will culminate with a series of events including a conference and exhibition coinciding with Holocaust Remembrance Day. Read more about the project here and read a field paper authored by one of its participants here.
  5. Keep a lookout for programming created by the newly formed group of Student Human Rights Fellows, a program supported by the Duke Human Rights Center at KIE. First up is “Embodying History Through Dance: The Civil Rights Movement,” a performance and discussion with local choreographer Tony C. Johnson and AAAS and Dance professor Thomas DeFrantz.
  6. More Ethics Book Clubs! Since a recent article in Working at Duke, the Ethics Book Clubs have been a hot topic. The spring will mark the beginning of a new staff book club in the Program of Education and the Service Learning Program. Stay tuned for more.

There will of course be our yearly standards, including What is Good Art competition and exhibition, spring Campus Grant applications, and co-sponsored events, residencies, and programs. Check out our current listing of spring events here. And, of course, I’ll be here on the Insider to write about whatever else happens, as it happens.

P.S.: Here are two end-of-2014 lists I enjoyed reading: literary website The Millions’s Best of the Millions 2014, and Rebecca Solnit’s roundup of women speaking up and out in 2014.

—MD