Episode 1 of “The Beautiful and Banned,” which I wrote about in my last newsletter, officially launched Tuesday! It’s about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned (which is where we got the name for our podcast—thanks to my agent, Mackenzie Brady Watson!). This first episode goes back to the 1920s and the censorship that artists like Fitzgerald skewered through his criticism of The Comstock Act and extreme reactions to art they called ‘comstockery.’ It’s the most fun word and I learned so much in my research about how the roots of our current moment go back through the centuries—subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts! Next Tuesday: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (Christine made me cry—it’s so good!)
Can you write a self-help newsletter using art, poetry, and philosophy? Because I’m going to try. I’ve spent years in a complicated, twisty kind of career: I interview people and research the past and learn stories about systemic abuse and oppression, about profound trauma, about some of the worst things that can happen in the world. And then I turn them creatively into stories—two books, a thousand social media posts, various articles, speeches at colleges and other venues. My goal is always to connect people who care about the world around them with real stories of people who are affected by policies.
It’s simple to say, and also feels impossible to do most days. Here is one idea that tethers me to the world when I feel like I’m going to drown in despair at how awful things are. If it helps you, I’m so glad.
(My caveat as I begin is that this isn’t mental health advice—that’s up to you and the people in your life and your therapists/doctors; I’m always in favor of getting what help you need and of any kind of prescriptive interventions and of taking a break when you need it. And always when I’m talking about hard things, including this post, take care of yourself.)
This is Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus, from 1920. Klee was a fascinating painter and the story of this painting is interesting in its own right (read more here if you love a good internet rabbit hole). This painting is sort of goofy looking, if I’m being honest; Modernists were kind of a weird bunch. But it caught the eye of a German philosopher and critic, Walter Benjamin, who bought it in 1921.
Benjamin—which any theory bro will tell you is pronounced “Ben-YA-meen,” not Benjamin like Americans say it—was a Jewish political theologian who wrote philosophical reflections on literature and linguistics and history and all kinds of things. He was prolific, and he informed the thinking of a whole generation of people, including Hannah Arendt (whose writing has been having a moment the last decade). Much of his writing focused on the dangers of fascism and totalitarianism.
In the 1930s, as Nazi Germans were rising to power, Benjamin was deeply critical of them. He fled to France and then Spain, hoping to head to the US at some point as a refugee. Everywhere he went across Europe in those years of writing against fascism, of begging politicians and academics and citizens to care about the plight of the Jewish people and other groups targeted by Nazis, he took Klee’s painting.
“The Angel of History” became an important concept to Benjamin. He called the painting his “most treasured possession.” In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin wrote:
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
Walter Benjamin wrote those words in early 1940. By September of that year, at the border between France and Spain, he learned he was about to be handed over to the Gestapo. He chose his own death rather than to face Nazi retribution.
Losing his brilliant minds and words remains a tragic loss. The idea of the “Angel of History” would impact generations of writers and thinkers. I first discovered it through one of my all-time favorite poets: Carolyn Forché.
In the years when I was interviewing Hasna and Mu Naw for After the Last Border, I was honestly just trying to figure out how to keep my head above water while I heard their stories and others of abuse and war and cruelty. Our interview process was especially intense; we talked for two to eight hours every two weeks for almost two years. With Hasna, it was always with a translator and always over coffee or food.
After our conversations, I spent days researching the war in Syria to fact check Hasna’s account. I realized a couple of weeks into it that I could only keep going if I had a heavy blanket around my shoulders and if I took long walks in the sunshine. My hands began to shake while I watched video after video of the beginning of the war in Daraa, as I saw the murder of children and the torture of innocent civilians on Youtube and Reddit and everywhere citizen journalists could upload their videos. I began having awful dreams about the stories Hasna told—it’s like I ingested her memories, like they became a part of me. To this day, one of my worst nightmares comes from those interviews; it’s that my family is asleep in our home when suddenly, we’re struck by a white phosphorous bomb. The effects of white phosphorous are horrific; it’s outlawed by international law, but it’s still used all the time in war against civilians (including recently in Palestine).
Hasna’s greatest fear was of being melted from the inside out by white phosphorous.
I know, of course, that her fear, and the real lived experience of so many people who have endured such cruelty is the most important thing to focus on when telling these stories, which I’ve done in my books and articles. But in this newsletter, I’m talking about the fact that it’s important for those of us who serve as witnesses to identify the effects on us of hearing these stories.
Now I know that needing a blanket and walks, and that typing with shaking hands, were signs of pretty serious secondary trauma. I got the therapy I needed to make it through that work. That was step one, and the most critical part of how I’ve been able to keep going.
But another key concept was this idea of the “Angel of History.”
Carolyn Forché is a journalist and poet who lived in El Salvador in the 1970s, which she wrote about in her incredible 1981 book of poems, The Country Between Us, and then her recent memoir, What You Have Heard Is True—truly one of my favorite books in the least decade. I got the title for my first book, After the Last Border, from one of her translations of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems.
I learned about the idea of the “Angel of History” from Forche’s book of poetry, which has the same title.
It was sitting on my shelves and I picked it up one day while I was trying to find a distraction for my brain while writing After the Last Border. I took it with me to my couch, and then laid it beside my bed that night. The book is sitting on my desk while I’m writing this. It’s got coffee stains and watermarked pages. I’ve underlined and written all over it with pencil.
Can you have an emotional support book of poetry? Because that’s what this has become to me. I’ve read it dozens of times. Forché calls it: “the opening of a wound…a gathering of utterances…from my own encounter with the events of this century.”
Forché, following in the intellectual line of Klee and Benjamin and others, is an “Angel of History.” Her role is to witness what is happening. As Benjamin wrote, the Angel would like to “stay, awaken the dead, make whole what has been smashed.”
(I feel that line throughout my body. If only we could make whole what has been smashed. If only we could bring back the dead. If only we could stay and fix things.)
But those are not possible for Forché or Benjamin or Klee or the many, many other outsiders who write about and report on but cannot fix the catastrophes which “keep piling wreckage” at our feet.
All we can do is to witness.
For Forché, that meant giving “a glimpse of the hushed gray world of a war without end.” It was writing about “a map drawn from memory of the spectacular itinerary of exile.” It was saying, to her Czech grandmother, Anna:
"You loved the shabbiness of this world: countries invaded, cities bombed, houses where roofs have fallen in, women who have lost their men, orphans, amputees, the war wounded. What you did not love any longer was a world that had lost its soul."
There are so many of us who love the countries that have been invaded, who love people who have lost so much—many even people we’ve never met. We greet their stories with love. And we turn our anger on a world that seems to have lost its soul.
Forché’s book helped me articulate the role that was available to me, and tethered me to others who taught me what I could do.
It’s not that those lines of poetry and philosophy gave me some tricks and tips to help me make it every day. I would never reduce their artistry in the face of catastrophe down to some bullet points. But for me, their work told me something that matters more to me than almost anything else.
I am not alone.
I know I’m not alone in my life; I have the most wonderful community of advocates around me, and I’m so grateful for my friends and family. But there is something so purpose-giving about knowing that the work that we do in recording and witnessing and speaking out and advocating for and caring about others is not isolated.
It’s not isolated now, and it’s not isolated over the centuries.
This idea of a long line of people who see the catastrophes in the world and who refuse to be silent has been deeply comforting to me. My reach is small, my contributions are small, my life might be small. There’s only so much any of us can do.
We cannot make whole what has been smashed.
But we can love and keep loving—the countries invaded, the cities bombed, the homes lost, the women and children and men who are wounded by war.
We can speak out in every way—through paintings and poetry, philosophy and narratives, social media and conversations, every way we can think of—against a world that has lost its soul.
Because we have not yet lost our souls. There are so many of us still who care enough to witness it. There are more of us than we sometimes recognize, both today and in the past. We’re working together, all the time, always.
I don’t know if our collective action will make a difference. But I find profound hope in knowing I’m not alone in this work. In learning from people who have done it before me. In connecting with others doing it now. We will watch and witness and love, not just for a few minutes but for lifetimes. And we will pass our knowledge down to those who come after us.
Together, we are the “Angels of History.”