In our lyrical essay we were challenged to capture someone’s story into a combination of prose and poetry.
Lyrical Essay
It’s been over a year since your old pastor left the church. Stone- faced members ready their ballots.
“All those in favor?”
250 solemn hands break the silence
“All those not in favor?”
Your hand sticks starkly out in the crowd. Four others join you, but your painted nails contrast with the rugged, calloused fingers around you.
“Motion passed.”
The tension breaks like a wooden switch.
An organ plays joyfully as you walk into church. You sit among your friends as He ascends into the pulpit, silencing the melody. Your voice, lifting up praises, sounds out awkwardly as the congregation falls silent. Ten minutes pass by and then a noise in the back pew. A woman arrives late and sits seemingly as far from the front as possible. She has bags under her eyes and shifts nervously. Fire and brimstone from the pulpit makes her shake at each syllable. A trapped mouse.
When you talk to her later you learn she is the pastor’s wife.
Unease starts to spread its bitter roots
The associate pastor asks you if you want to get lunch. You leave teaching early to meet at a diner. You like him and hope he asks about the new pastor.
Instead, his fingers wander nervously over his cup of coffee. The man admits this meeting is because He has told you to step down from your leadership position in the welcoming committee. You ask why.
“He and I talked. You’re too happy after your divorce.”
“You should be devastated.”
His words strike you like an open palm. The betrayal leaves you hurt but without words.
Never mind you had quietly suffered for years afterwards and the wound had only just begun to heal.
You call the other leaders of the Welcoming Committee later that day only to find out that many others had similar conversations with the associate pastor.
Your diverse, dedicated group has lost all of its female members.
You stand in His office with the four other dissenting hands. Somehow He found out about your resistance. Like a pitbull at the end of a leash, spittle flies from His mouth as He roars. You stand in front of him, chest out.
You are done being chastised, determination swells up in your breast.
He will not intimidate you.
Eventually His tirade ends. The “enemies of the church” leave the room but you are called back. His flinty eyes meet yours as he tells you you are too powerful for your own good. You don’t belong in this office. You need to step down.
You don’t.
Two months later you and the hands get a letter. It tells you that you are no longer welcome on church grounds.
A special letter is sent to your fiance recommending him against marrying you.
“She does not know her place.”
You stand outside the church, your kids running to their youth group. You are reminded of your first day in church school, children playing, saying whatever came to surface in their psyche. A tear sneaks its way out of the corner of your eye.
You miss those days.
Eventually, you find a new church on the other side of town for you and your family. You become involved in the congregation, setting up events, planning communion services. You start to feel at home again.
You can’t help but feel some guilt, however, when you hear He has just asked (told) the female elders to step down.
In Honors, we also worked on a paper that compared the two writing styles of famous authors Eula Biss and Claudia Rankine.
Biss and Rankine Response
Themes to Explore:
Apologies (Both in All Apologies and the story about the therapist, among other microaggressions)
Inherent Differences (Hyper visibility in both Relations with the black baby with the white family and Flower de Amistad stuff)
Both of these themes are tied with the fractured racial history of our past.
Inherent differences, talk about color blindness and how not looking at these differences isnt a solution
Salty sea spray gleams in the air. A cargo ship cuts through the water, sailing for the New World. Within it are hundreds of African prisoners, ready to be sold for a profit in whatever port the ship stops at first. For decades the African Slave Trade brought tens of thousands of people from their homes and forced them to be slaves on plantations and farms. Today stands in stark contrast with the slavery that existed hundreds of years ago, but even now African Americans carry the social, economic, and cultural scars from their ancestors’ past. Both Eula Biss and Claudia Rankine explore these scars, focusing on the inherent tensions between white and black people through the lens of apologies. At the same time they both acknowledge the inherent differences between the two races that was brought about by the history of slavery. All of this is rooted in the idea that our racial history is full of atrocities and violence which fractures today’s relations.
One intersection between Citizen and No Man’s Land is their examination of how past transgressions create tensions in today’s interactions, specifically with apologies. Rankine writes about this most clearly in her stories about microaggressions. In one story Rankine is berated for trespassing while trying to go to her therapy appointment. The therapist is quick to take back what she did, but the deed was done. Through this, Rankine shows that a simple apology is not enough to make up for what is, at its core, a harsh and vindictive racial profiling. For Rankine, apologies are not enough. Biss argues a different point in her essays. In the essay All Apologies, Biss writes about the many different situations in which US Presidents have apologized for their actions. She writes about how President Clinton apologized to Hawaii for colonization and to South Africa for acting with “complicity to apartheid.” Biss paints a picture of how apologies can be meaningful instead of just something to try and make up for racist remarks. She writes on how apologies can start to bridge divides between different people. Both texts, however, acknowledge the deep rooted tension that leads to these apologies. Rankine describes how inherent racism can lead to apologies, while Biss connects apologies to people making up for past atrocities (often race related ones). Even though they take different stances on apologies, they both acknowledge they are given because of events that took place in the past and remain a divisive issue today.
Both Biss and Rankine agree that this past trauma has led to the formation of unique black and white cultures. Rankine examines this culture warily when she writes about Hennessy Youngman and his assertion that any flower painted by a black artist will be seen as a “slavery flower.” The past of slavery in our country has led to the formation of a black culture that is constantly associated with slavery. Biss takes a more neutral stance on these different cultures in her essay Relations where she writes about how a black baby was mistakenly implanted in a white woman, and that, in the end, the black woman ended up with the baby. She determines this decision was made both to try and undo a history of white people taking ownership of black children and also because of how hypervisible the child would feel growing up in a white household. In a perfect world, anyone could grow up in any family, but our world isn’t perfect. There is a unique black and white culture, one that started forming back when white plantation owners could decide whos child belonged to who. By separating that black baby from an environment he could grow up feeling included in, he may end up becoming more damaged.
Both Biss and Rankine examine current racial differences and tensions. These tensions can lead to apologies, which can be received poorly or well depending on your perspective. Some may consider these apologies insulting while others may see them as the beginning of reducing racial tensions. Perhaps the different perspectives lies in each author’s own upbringing. Biss appears white while Rankine does not, so Rankine may have had a much more personal experience with racism than Biss. Despite their differences in belief, both Biss and Rankine examine in their essays how past atrocities have a ripple effect that still makes race a factor in today’s interactions.