The Irish novelist and essayist Anne Enright s contributions to the
London Review of Books and
The
New York Review of Books offer, to my mind, some of the best writing about religion in recent years sympathetic but skeptical, alive at once to the poignancy and cruelty of the thirst for supernatural transcendence (and to the comedy, too). Born-again in her youth but long since fallen off the path, Enright is clear-eyed but not condescending about the oppressive cultural politics religious orthodoxies can give rise to. Her 2018
LRB essay on Genesis (the book, not the band) was a twisty meditation on the shapes of myth and the gender of sin. It should have won a prize.
Why We Need Literature to Document Atrocities at Home and Abroad
Toni Morrison bore witness to the lasting legacy of slavery through her writings. Courtesy of Guillermo Arias/Associated Press. by Daisy Hernández |
January 11, 2021
For a long time, I cringed whenever I heard someone talk about a novel or a poem bearing witness. The word “witness” bothered me. It felt hollow and privileged. It felt like something an entitled American writer would say, a writer who could author a book and walk away. I was not that person, or at least I didn’t want to be.
And I was not the only one who had reservations. The poet Natalie Diaz observed in an interview that “bearing witness” is a curious phrase. “Most people don’t bear it at all,” she said. “They just look, they just look with their eyes and write with their eyes, and go to sleep.”