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• 1 2024-07-07T07:53:51-07:00 Emily S. Lee's New Book, "A Phenomenology for Women of Color" 26 plain 2024-07-19T02:03:28-07:00

  Reviewed By Robert Bruce Scott

  
  Racism and Bias from a Critical Phenomenology Perspective

  My first exposure to phenomenology was in reading Kevin Splichal's doctoral thesis, "Lived Experiences of Two Pre-Service Teachers from a Midwestern Rural University During Internships," in which he defined phenomenology as "...an interpretive theory of philosophical and methodological inquiry that seeks to uncover the multilayered, transformative, subjective, and intersubjective experiences of others who create and negotiate those lived experiences with other members of the shared culture" (Splichal, 2015, p. 98).
  
  Recently I enjoyed listening to a “New Books in Philosophy” podcast, during which Emily S. Lee, author of “A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference” (Lexington Books, 2024), was interviewed by Sarah Tyson, of the New Books Network. One thing that caught my attention in that hour-long podcast was hearing that Lee, a professor of philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, started this writing project in order to examine a widely accepted definition of racism as “bias.” I spent the month of June slowly, painstakingly reading and re-reading, sometimes outloud to myself and/or others, the entire text, only skipping what looked to be her reprehensio, chapter four, “Three Criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology,” in order to stay focused on Lee’s main argument as presented in chapter one, “A Phenomenology of Perception: Racisms as Bias and Multiplicitous Subjects”; chapter two, “The Phenomenological Structure of Experience: The Ambiguity of Intersectionality for a Group Identity”; chapter three, “The Body Movement of Historico-Racial-Sexual Schema”; chapter five, “In the Face of Indifference: The Phenomenological Structure of Identity-in-Difference”; and the four-page Conclusion. There are copious notes at the end of each chapter and a solid bibliography and light index in the back of the book. And the book starts with a 15-page Introduction (plus three pages of notes), which includes a useful overview chapter-by-chapter synopsis.
  
  In justifying her emphasis on explicating “race,” Lee explains, “...there is no unanimous accord on the influence of race. How race matters varies among different people; race has meaning but not one meaning for everyone, everywhere during any one period of time” (p. 1). “These different understandings of race lie at the heart of the controversy over Black Lives Matter and racist police violence, the value of teaching critical race theory and remembering the history of racism, and how to understand the periodically recurrent waves of hate crimes…” (pp. 1-2). She argues that “[a] phenomenology of race aims to understand race as changing, as ambiguous–as dynamic–and as a persistent feature in our social world. The structure of race corresponds to the framework of phenomena” (p. 2).
  
  A central concept throughout Lee’s text is the ambiguity of human experience. According to her argument, “phenomenology forwards that experiences of the world are negotiations between the subject and the world, between the intentions of the subject and the givens of the world.” Furthermore, she posits, “acknowledging the perceptual situatedness of subjectivity, and that the world never presents itself in pure objectivity, renders experience and knowledge of the world as ultimately ambiguous” (p. 4). 
  
  Lee uses as a starting point, or premise, a working definition of racism, as “essentialistically [holding] as static the racialized other” (p. 7), in contradistinction to Lee’s preference for José Medina’s attribution of “fluidity, dynamacity, and interconnectivity that our racial consciousness should aspire to” (Medina, 2013, p. 201, cited by Lee, 2024, p. 7). “In other words,” explains Lee, “racism foregoes acknowledging race as a social construction and as such that the structure of race is open-ended, changing, and relational. Racism rebuffs the phenomenal structure of race” (Lee, p. 7).
  
  In defending her considerable dependence upon and use of insights on ambiguity, temporality, and perceptual bias in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1964, 1968, 1993), Lee states that “although this book engages a dead white male philosopher, my endeavors are not to develop his work, but only mine his work as a useful springboard to think through the concerns of women of color thinkers more deeply” (Lee, 2024, p. 7). According to Lee, while the term “women of color” is widely acknowledged in an American context, its association with Western and U.S. perspectives gives its use “colonizing” connotations among women in international settings. Nevertheless, she has chosen to utilize this term in solidarity with its use by the Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective, “as a political-identity formation and not simply an identity-marker” (Kao, 2015), a usage attributed to Lauren Ross, from a speech she made at the National Women’s Conference in 1977. Lee argues that the term women of color “aims to represent numerous different women–African American, Latin American, Asian American, Native American, and so many more, that in my inability to name all their specificities, I fear causing harm” (Lee, p. 8).

  The term “women of color” aims to respect diversity, and name them as a unity….I treat the term primarily as a self-ascribed term, a term a person uses to self-apply….I utilize the term in this book, admitting that the term faces controversy especially in an international context, but for its initial solidarity sense, in its aspirational context, for its political identity formation.    
                                                                                      (Lee, 2024, p. 8)

  Lee calls her mode of analysis in this book “critical phenomenology,” in a newly emerging field of study introduced by Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon in their book, “50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology” (Northwestern University Press, 2020), and cites their definition of critical phenomenology as “[mobilizing] phenomenological description in the service of a reflexive inquiry into how power relations structure experience as well as our ability to analyze that experience” (Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon, 2020, pp. xiii-xiv, cited by Lee, 2024).

  Perception, Bias, and Multiplicitous Subjects

  Lee begins chapter one by looking into why racism persists in society despite there being laws and moral guidance against racism, arguing that “the concept of race is not just an unfortunate development from interactions among societies, but weaved into the very formation of societies by delineating which populations can and cannot potentially participate in society” (Lee, 2024, p. 21). She cites research by Elizabeth Anderson (2011) which distinguishes “attention bias” (our tendency to notice and remember evidence supportive of stereotypes and not notice or recall evidence not supportive of those stereotypes) and “attribution bias” (our tendency to attribute “stereotype-confirming behavior” to an individual’s internal factors such as genetics, but to attribute “stereotype-disconfirming behavior” to external factors such as assistance from others). Lee adds to these biases, “cultural bias,” described by José Medina (2013) as “selective blaming of cultural factors for social problems when they appear in out-groups but not when they appear in the in-group” (Medina, 2013, p. 165). 
  
  Yet Lee also incorporates into her argument the research from other philosophers of race – namely Helen Ngo (2017) and Jules Holroyd (2012) – who insist that unconscious implicit racism in society does not excuse anyone from personal responsibility for working towards individual long-term goals of identifying and removing our own biases from our understanding of phenomena in the society, communities, and groups within which we live and act.  Lee sees bias and stigma as highly relevant to her discussion of perception from a critical phenomenology perspective.

  I dwell in this language of stigma and bias not only because this language dominates philosophy of race’s present focus, but this language of stigma and bias illuminates the ways in which even though we have consciously decided that racism is immoral, racism persists in our society unintentionally, unconsciously. I find fascinating the pervasiveness and persistence of racism despite widespread agreement against it. For this reason, rather than attend to overt racism, this focus on bias and stigma – on unconscious racism – philosophically intrigues me.
                                                                                           (Lee, 2024, p. 23)

  Whereas Merleau-Ponty, according to Lee, brought together Gestalt theory’s figure-in-a-background in developing a framework of perception in which a subject (the perceiver/experiencer), objects/figures, themes and a background/horizon are interrelated and interwoven spatially and temporally, as well as inextricably connected with other subjects/perceivers/experiencers, it is Lee’s departure from Merleau-Ponty that she introduces into her argument a concept from Lugones (2003) and Ortega(2016) of subjects such as women of color who “travel” through two or more “worlds,” and thus perceive figures and themes within multiple horizons, giving them multiple perspectives and heightened sensitivity to the biases that influence, limit, and shape human perception. Lee refers to these women as multiplicitous subjects, and can be thought of as addressing her arguments most directly to them.

  I appreciate the conceptual framework of world-traveling for highlighting that for women of color, for multiplicitous identities their worlds are not limited to the dominant world. Although the dominant world is powerful and hegemonic, it is not absolutely encompassing. Whether the second…world exists separate from the dominant world, overlaps with the dominant world, or survives only as a bubble within the dominant world, the notion of world-traveling clarifies that women of color do not live within one context, in one world. The occupation of more than one context, one world, is the source of both pain and insight.
                                                                     (Lee, 2024, p. 26)

  The Ambiguity of Experience as a Source of Knowledge

  In chapter two, on experience as phenomena, Lee first deals with concerns regarding whether experience itself or accounts of ones experience truly can be considered sources of knowledge. She reminds the reader that this is always a criticism lodged against phenomenology itself as a legitimate analytical framework within philosophy as a way of understanding reality. Citing such “post-structural” arguments from Joan Scott (1991) “question[ing] the epistemological value of experience in-itself,” Lee acknowledges that “experience itself only ensues within and through socially constructed, ideological frameworks,” while “immediate, direct, ‘actual,’ experience, as pure access to the circumstances of the world remains elusive” (Lee, 2024, p. 57). 
  
  Instead of delving further into that argument over the validity of experiential data – the heart of phenomenological analysis – Lee provides rationales for valuing experience and accounts of personal experience, especially in cases where without such accounts oppressive conditions might not have been noticed or remedied in a world dominated by subjects whose status and biases prevented them from attending to the experiences of the subjects being oppressed. She also provides insights regarding the value of such “autobiographical” accounts of experience being shared between multiplicitous subjects in the contexts of intersectional identities, of which women of color stands as a prime example wherein individuals find commonality on the basis of their “open and ambiguous experiences of both racism and sexism” (Lee, p. 62). Intersectionality is a not a simple term to understand, and Lee explicates key facets of this concept, mostly in order to assist the reader in understanding that group identifiers do not imply that each member of a group has the same experiences, a misconception called essentialism. Yet these intra-group differences, according to Lee, serve to underscore the importance of sharing personal accounts of experiential data.

  All women of color do not undergo uniformly the same experiences, but the experiences may be identifiably distinct in their complexity. Because of such distinct complexity, the notion of intersectionality relies on references to experience, more so than those who experience single-axis oppression of only gender, race, or class…. Serious social, economic, and physical harms result from neglecting the intersectionality of racism and sexism. 
                                                                                     (Lee, p. 62)

  Lee refers to these collaborations between similarly oppressed subjects across differences by using a term she attributes to Patricia Hill Collins (1998), heterogenous commonality, yet also warns that “experience of one marginality does not guarantee understanding of another marginal position,” which she reiterates by quoting Medina: “a heightened sensitivity with respect to one kind of insensitivity does not at all guarantee any special sensitivity with respect to other forms of insensitivity” (Medina, 2013, cited by Lee, 2024, p. 69).

  How to attend to the idea of internal homogeneity or heterogenous commonality while conceptualizing group identity and keep in mind each group’s different organizing strategies….the problem of essentialism persists with any group identity. Group identity, structurally, inherently, has commonalities and differences in the fluidity of prioritizing any one individual and group features…. The question of which features to emphasize and which features to de-emphasize depends on the project at hand, whether it is political, to change society, for community building, or for personal survival.
                                                                                     (Lee, 2024, p. 69)

  Having established the practical value of experience as a source of knowledge, that is, its epistemic value, Lee proceeds to outline the three structural components, or features, of experience for its use in critical phenomenology: “the world in its materiality and its meaning-structures”; “subjects”; and “the temporality of all three features” (Lee, p. 70). “Experience is not reducible to simply the natural world or to purely the ideas of [humans],” she explains in summarizing the thoughts of her “springboard,” Merleau-Ponty (1968), for whom “phenomenology conceptualizes the world by denying the possibility of separating or delineating the materiality of the world and its meaning-structures” (Lee, p. 70).

  To separate the world into matter and ideas commits the experience error.... belief in the certainty of complete perception of the object.... In place of conceiving experience of the world as reducible separately to either matter or ideas, Merleau-Ponty writes, “[the] task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual, and motor contents and the form given to them or the symbolic function which breathes life into them, a relationship which shall be neither the reduction of form to content, nor the subsuming of content under an autonomous form” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 126). Human beings ambiguously experience the physical and the cultural world. This ambiguity defines the human condition of being-in-the-world.
                                                                                     (Lee, 2024, p. 71)

  The first component, or feature, of experience – the world in its materiality and its meaning-structures – having been explicated, Lee turns to the second feature, subjects. “[T]he subject does not simply passively receive experiences, but structures her experiences,” explains Lee, “....[and] hermeneutically develops from her experiences” (p. 71), that is, she interprets (and learns and grows from) her experiences. According to Lee, “Merleau-Ponty writes that after the subject reflects on herself, the subject understands–no, experiences–her experience differently” (p. 71).

  Completing the hermeneutic circle, the development of the subject’s emotions, psychological state, and self-understanding impacts the subject’s intentions and engagements with the world. So parallel to the world, the subject changes. But not parallel to the world, the subject’s changes partly arise from self-reflection, and hence are partly self-produced. Such growth further hermeneutically influences the subject’s experiences of the world, illustrating the intricate co-mingled development of the world, the subject, and experiences.
                                                                                     (Lee, 2024, p. 72)

  The third structural feature of experience, according to Lee, is time, or the temporality of experience, including “a sedimented history of material and ideological conditions,” the past, the present situation, and forward movement towards the future. “Ultimately even horizons are subject to time’s flow, facilitating the synthesis of horizons,” she argues. “The flow of time structures personal experiences, including the horizons of the world” (p. 72).

  Because of time’s flow, and the simultaneously presence and absence of the past and the future, an incomprehensibility lies at the heart of experience. This incomprehensibility describes the inessential ambiguous structure of experience. This inessential structure parallels the structure of perception, phenomenologically understood, that defies atomistic and essentialistic conceptions.
                                                                                     (Lee, 2024, p. 73)

  Lee finds further aspects of ambiguity in our understanding of experience in exploring the distances that separate these three structural features from each other.

  Three distances constitute an openness at the heart of the structure of experience: 1) the distance between the subject and the world which includes other subjects that the flow of time conditions; 2) the distance between undergoing the experience and reflecting upon the experience; and 3) the distance between the experience and the language within which to understand or to communicate the experience. Grasping the ontological [existential] structure of experience demands more fully understanding these distances, rather than eliminating them. These distances uphold the nonessentialistic structure of experience, forming its ambiguity.
                                                                                     (Lee, p. 73)

  Embodiment Within an Historico-Racial-Sexual Schema

  In chapter three, Lee’s philosophy takes a significant leap into what she suggests is the most radical aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, the “proposal…that the subject is embodied” (Lee, p. 91). “Between the facticity of the material world and the ideas of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty recognizes that the body-subject epitomizes the complex relation between the two spheres without splitting into duality,” writes Lee. “The integration of the materiality of the body and the consciousness of the subject implicates the subject as integrally situated in the world” (p. 91).

  The features of the body function as one of the major reasons, if not the major reason, for the particular experiences human beings encounter. Patricia Williams explains, “[t]he simple matter of the color of one’s skin so profoundly affects the way one is treated, so radically shapes what one is allowed to think and feel about this society, that the decision to generalize from such a division is valid” (Williams, 1991, p. 256). Deidre E. Davis writes that “[w]e cannot hope to understand the meaning of a person’s experiences, including her experiences of oppression, without first thinking of her as embodied and second thinking about the particular meanings assigned to that embodiment” (Davis, 1997, p. 192). The truth-value of the body features, as well as the significance of the different body features, change historically, but the body features steadfastly remain meaningful..
                                                                                     (Lee, 2024, p. 92)

  “Because features of the body convey meaning,” suggests Lee, “one’s body ‘inspires’ distinct reactions from other surrounding bodies” (p. 92). She lists a number of situations in which, due to the hypervisibility of body features such as skin color or gender markers, these “reactions” are attitudes or behaviors that cause emotional or physical harm to racialized and sexualized subjects, for example, putting women of color at risk.
  
  Close to home, Wichita USD 259 Public Schools reached a settlement recently with the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division after being found to have “discriminated against students based on race and disability,” as reported in the Topeka Capital-Journal (July 6, 2024). Findings included: “black students [being] disciplined more frequently and more severely than white students engaged in similar conduct”; “black students more likely to receive disciplinary referrals and suspensions than white students [and] also more likely to be referred to law enforcement”; “black girls more often disciplined for ‘being insubordinate’ and for dress code violation”; and “the district frequently [relying] on restraint and seclusion when responding to the conduct of students with disabilities….when [student behaviors posed] no safety threat.”

  I explore Merleau-Ponty’s work [on embodied subjectivity] to trace the consequences of embodied subjectivity for agency and freedom. For I am in search of an account of agency and freedom that takes seriously the weight of racialized embodiment, but does not leave racialized subjects floundering without a means to respond to such oppressive circumstances…. One of the most important and obvious consequences of embodied subjectivity is that embodiment already conditions the subject’s relation with the world.
                                                                                     (Lee, 2024, pp. 93-94)

  “As a reflexive subject, the psychic, the intellectual, and subjective intertwines with the material, biological, and natural features of embodiment,” argues Lee, adding that in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, “Plato and Descartes’s dualism” is rejected. “Merleau-Ponty’s framework denies the dualistic separation of the body and the subject,” she states, proclaiming him “triumphant” in light of research by Shaun Gallagher, reporting “[o]ne important mark of the contemporary cognitive sciences is the explicit and nearly universal rejection of Cartesian dualism” (Gallagher, 2005, p. 134).
  
  Without an assumption of a separation between a subject’s mind, or consciousness, and body, there are, according to Lee, implications for our understanding of body movement. For example, not every movement can be broken down into a conscious impulse stimulating each specific motion, an understanding that implies impulses, which Lee terms motivations, within Merleau-Ponty’s framework, can initiate movement from any point in a mind-body mesh-like entity. Thus, thoughts might be initiated or motivated from physical impulses, that is, the body-in-motion shapes our consciousness reflexively as our consciousness also guides our movements as subjects in the world and figures on one or more horizons. This is the creative openness and ambiguity at the heart of Lee’s (and Merleau-Ponty’s) critical phenomenology.
  
  Lee insists on recasting Franz Fanon’s historico-racial schema (1967) as a potentiality she terms “historico-racial-sexual schema,” with openness and ambiguity enabling positive, reaffirming, creative motility and growth. Lee alludes to Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy when she argues that “[t]he phenomenological challenge to Sartre’s dialectic framework explains Fanon’s own agency, and the transcendent–not only surviving–but life affirming, thriving behavior of black people throughout history” (Lee, 2024, p. 96).

  Women of color acquire a historico-racial-sexual schema, “sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring,” embodied knowledge of the racialized and sexualized meanings of embodiment. To be clear women of color’s historico-racial-sexual schema do not only mature from the gaze of whites, but also from the gaze of other women of color, from men of color, from inhabiting multiple worlds…. Ambiguity defines embodiment for women of color in the experiences of welcome, respect, and desire felt from some and the experiences of being ignored, dismissed, and repulsed from others…. [H]ypervisibility alone does not define women of color’s historico-racial-sexual schema. Additionally, gender practices encourage drawing attention to embodiment at times. Women of color do not all submit to these gendered practices; we express ambivalent reactions to gendered expectations of visibility, at times demonstrating a simultaneous desire to defray attention to one’s embodiment. Hence, depending on the embodied presentations of hypervisibility and gendered presentations, the historico-racial-sexual schema for women of color vary…. [A]mbiguity defines the historico-racial-sexual schema of women of color because of different presentings of embodiment. And importantly, women of color participate in perceiving women of color. With and from other women of color’s regard, women of color undergo centered and enabling experiences of embodiment. But these experiences ambiguously intermix with experiences of objectification, contributing to disbelief, shock, and confusion about how others perceive and read one’s embodiment and subjectivity. Because so many contradictory meanings circumscribe women of color’s embodiment, our historico-racial-sexual schema could not but hesitate and wait….ambiguity, confusion, and not yet understanding the scenario one finds oneself in also conditions such waiting.
                                                                                     (Lee, 2024, pp. 100-101)

  Lee seems to find solace and inspiration from Merleau-Ponty’s “insightful and remarkable conclusion that body movements generate significance” (Lee, p. 106). “The body schema depicts the body as establishing the first coordinates to anchor oneself in the world,” she explains. “The possibility of generating significance inevitably follows from body movements that move centrifugally into the possible, abstract future, a conclusion that needs and deserves a more thorough investigation to appreciate” (p. 106).

  A New Multiplicitous Subject

  In chapter five (I have not yet read chapter four) Lee’s argument seems to reach a crescendo, as she posits a critical phenomenology that embraces our interactions with other subjects who, even from within our own identity-group or sharing one or more horizons in common, will inevitably differ on the basis of perspectives, experiences, and schema. Recognizing denser heterogeneity in superficially homogenous identity-groups, as well as heterogenous commonalities across identity-groups, a human being as a subject/perceiver/experiencer is stimulated to learn, grow, and change through openness to difference, and thereby becoming a more vibrant identity-in-difference instead of staying isolated or indifferent. Sharing personal accounts of varied experiences, women of color and other multiplicitous subjects can discover opportunities to collaborate on community-based projects to address and repair unsatisfactory or unsafe conditions, according to the way I understood Lee’s call for thought and action. Her concluding statement conveys to the reader that she is a new mother, and that the understanding she herself has developed in writing this project is informing her sensitivity to the needs of a new multiplicitous subject’s earliest experiences of life.

  References

  Anderson, E.,  (2011). The Imperative of Integration. Princeton University Press:
            Princeton, NJ.
  Collins, P.H. (1998). Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice.
            University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.
  Davis, D.E. (1997) The Harm That Has No Name: Street Harassment, Embodiment,
            and African American Women. In Critical Race Feminism, edited by Adrien
            Katherine Wing. New York University Press: New York, NY.
  Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skins, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann.
            Grove Press: New York. 
  Gallagher, S. (2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford University Press:
            Oxford.
  Holroyd, J. (Fall, 2012). Responsibility for Implicit Bias. Journal of Social Philosophy,
            46:3.
  Kao, G.Y-H. (Aug. 11, 2015). Does the Term "Women of Color" Bother You? Feminism
            and Religion. https://feminismandreligion.com/2022/01/16/from-the-archives-
            does-the-term-women-of-color-bother-you-by-grace-yia-hei-kao/ (link)
  Lee, E.S. (2024). A Phenomenology for Women of Color. Lexington Books:
            Lanham, MD.
  Lugones, M. (Summer, 1987). Playfulness, "World"-Traveling, and Loving Perception.
            Hypatia, 2:2. 
  Medina, J. (2013). The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial
            Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations.
            Oxford University Press: New York.
  Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith.
            Toutledge and Kegan Paul Ltd: Great Britain.
  Ngo, H. (2017). The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and
            Racialized Embodiment. Lexington Books: Lanham, MD.
  Ortega, M. (2016). In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity,
            and the Self. SUNY Press: Albany.
  Scott, J.W. (Summer, 1991). The Evidence of Experience. Critical Inquiry, 17:4,
            773-797. 
  Shine, T. and Cameron, K. (July 6, 2024). Wichita Public Schools Disproportionally
            Discipline Black and Disabled Students: DOJ Says. Topeka Capital-Journal, 
            https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/education/2024/07/06/wichita-
            disproportionally-disciplines-black-and-disabled-students-doj/74292651007/ (link) 
  Splichal, K.L. (2015). Lived Experiences of Two Pre-Service Teachers
            From a Midwestern Rural University During Internships.
            https://krex.k-state.edu/items/179fe658-607e-457a-9faf-83db3d7a9507 (link)
  Weiss, G., Murphy, A.V., and Salamon, G. (2020). Editor's Introduction. In
            50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, xiii-xiv. Northwestern
            University Press: Evanston, IL.
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            Press: Cambridge, MA.

  About the Reviewer

  Robb Scott

  Dr. Robert Bruce Scott, Ed.D., is a motivational speaker and education consultant with expertise in TESOL, Disability Rights, and Cross-Cultural Communication. He earned his doctorate in special education at Kansas State University and a masters in TESL at the University of Kansas. Dr. Scott has lived, taught, and trained teachers in Kansas, Colorado, New York, Quito, Riyadh, Tokyo, Niigata, and Kasugai. Most recently he visited Capetown for his own cultural enrichment. Dr. Scott has been a co-editor at the C2C Digital Magazine since 2021 and often serves on C2C's SIDLIT conference steering committees. 
  
   
• 1 2024-07-16T06:32:18-07:00 Celeste Ng's Novel, "Our Missing Hearts" 3 plain 2024-07-17T20:21:47-07:00

  Reviewed By Robert Bruce Scott

  Is This a Futuristic or Just a Hyperrealistic View of Our Society?

  Our Missing Hearts (Random House, 2022) is the first novel I have read by Celeste Ng, whose direct, matter-of-fact style reminds me of two of my favorite English-language novelists, Ernest Hemingway and Leslie Marmon Silko. The starkness of Ng’s prose, particularly in the early pages of this novel, where the sociocultural setting was being developed around the daily lives of two key characters – Bird “Noah” Gardner and his father, Ethan – gave me a feeling at first that I must be reading about a dystopian society on some other continent or planet, but not present-day America. 
  
  As a reader, however, I could not ignore the continual references to locations and institutions firmly placing the three main characters – including Margaret Miu, Bird’s mother and Ethan’s wife (whose influence is pervasive in their home and community despite her absence) – in the United States of America and a gnawing realization that our society may be already transitioning into the kind of a setting that novelist Celeste Ng depicts in this story. Through Ng’s artful writing, a reader begins to recognize familar aspects of American life which perhaps would remain unacknowledged within our routine frames of reference, beyond conscious awareness, if not for this kind of literature.
  
  Our Missing Hearts could be termed a novel of “praxis,” as this concept was described by Freire (1970):

  [The oppressed] must acquire a critical awareness of oppression through the praxis of this struggle. One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge [a person’s] consciousness. Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.                                                                                                              (Freire, 1970, p. 36)

  In Ng’s alternate American reality, competition between the U.S. and China has escalated to the point where China (and any person who appears to be Asian) is now a scapegoat so that federal and local governments, instead of working to resolve social and economic problems, simply lay blame and restrict free speech while promoting patriotic slogans and clamping down on any counter-cultural messaging with swift, targeted, and inexorable force, buttressed by vigilante violence and a heightened neighborhood-watch mentality.
  
  Ethan and Margaret meet and fall in love in New York City at a time when the socio-economic system is faltering, and certain trends like book-burning and removal of children from home environments deemed subversive have only just begun. The birth of their son, Bird, inspires them to move out of what is becoming a violent and unpredictable city, and, because of Ethan’s family connections, they are able to relocate to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he joins the linguistics faculty at Harvard. Margaret, a first-generation Chinese-American immigrant and counter-cultural free spirit,  fills their son Bird’s early years of life with lots of creative play, nature walks, and storytelling, and, continually, starting with the early months of her pregnancy, she feels inspired to write poems, which are collected together into a book called “Our Missing Hearts,” also the title of the final poem in that book, published when Bird is three years old.
  
  At that age, Bird and Margaret and Ethan are living an idyllic life, with all the chaos of the rest of society seemingly very distant. Here is a description from novelist Celeste Ng of the special world Bird’s mother was creating for him:

  She taught Bird to catch fireflies: hands cupped, lemon-lime light flashing in the cracks of his fingers. And then to let them go, spiraling into the night like a dying spark. She taught him to lie still in the grass and watch the neighborhood rabbits nose in the clover, so close his breath stirred the fine white fluff of their tails. She taught him the names of flowers and bugs and birds, to identify the low “coo-coo-coo” of the mourning dove and the brash scream of the blue jay and the singsong “phoebe” of the chickadee, clear and fresh as cold water on a summer day. She taught him to pluck honeysuckle blossoms from the vine and touch the end to his tongue: such sticky sweetness. She pulled the shell of a cicada from a pine tree’s trunk, turned it over to show the neat slit down the belly where, having grown, it had wriggled out of its old self into something new.
                                                                                           (Ng, 2022, pp. 237-238)

  In school, Bird learns, beginning in kindergarten, the ideas considered essential by the nation’s authorities, all revolving around the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act (PACT), which he is first taught as “We promise to protect American values. We promise to watch over each other.” At age nine, with no explanation to him from his parents, Bird’s mother, Margaret Miu, leaves the home, never to return. When the novel begins, he is now 12 years old, so that traumatic event is three years past. Much later in the novel, the sub-plot of why his mother had to leave is explained. Celeste Ng’s skill at integrating so deftly between an omniscient narrator and a character in the novel becoming very much like a first-person narrator reminds me of another of my all-time favorite authors, Joseph Conrad. 
  
  The true starting action, then, of this story is about midway through the novel, a recounting of when Ethan and Margaret saw a photo in the newspaper with the caption: “Protester Marie Johnson, 19, a first-year student at NYU from Philadelphia, was killed by a stray bullet in police response to anti-PACT riots Monday.” That photo and the news report are Ethan and Margaret’s first indications that the phrase from her book of poetry has become a rallying cry for a civil rights movement protesting the growing number of child-removals from families and homes for alleged infractions of PACT laws, and that the media frenzy and political fallout from the popularity of her poem is going to put Margaret – and anyone associated with her – in danger.

  The night before the march, Marie bought sheets of posterboard at the drugstore. With fat-tipped scented markers, she jigsawed words onto the sign, sketched the solemn face of a child below. After the march, they’d found the markers and the rest of the posterboard on the floor of her dorm room, blank and unused, beside a spread-eagled copy of Margaret’s book…. People googled those words, and up popped the name Margaret Miu, the title of her book [“Our Missing Hearts”]. The poems she’d  written while pregnant, in a sleep-deprived haze nursing Bird  late at night, watching the sky turn from black to navy to bruised grayish-blue….Not even her best line, she’d always thought, not even one of her best poems, and yet here it was. Clutched in this  dying child’s hands.
                                                                                               (Ng, 2022, p. 248)

  There is something hopeful in this novel and it has to do with never giving up on fighting for anything that is essential in your life: for Bird, this is his quest to find his mother; for Margaret, it is her desire to broadcast the personal stories and family memories of parents who have lost their sons and daughters because of the PACT system. It would be trite for me to say this is a story about human freedom or democratic values. But at the same time, the novelist Celeste Ng has managed to bring her readers vicariously into the mindsets of people for whom life has become a constant struggle to maintain and/or regain their human dignity. In a cogently worded postscript, she lists significant analogous events and oppressive conditions, in America as well as global settings, some historical and others ongoing today.
  
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