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Grand inquisitor
Eula Biss asks unanswerable questions about race in America.
When Eula Biss was in graduate school, one of her professors called her a problematizer. We don’t know if the professor meant it as a compliment, but after reading her new book of essays, Notes from No Man’s Land (Graywolf, $15)—a rigorous and enthralling inquiry into family, race and class in America—we have a sense of what he meant.
“Unfortunately, my strength is more in asking questions,” Biss, 31, says with a laugh. “I would find that great, too, if I were able to come up with a solution, but I tend to generate problems, not fix them.”
The subjects of Biss’s essays don’t typically lend themselves to easy answers. In “Watch Out for Land Mines,” Biss recounts her move to New York City in her early twenties, taking a job as a creative-writing instructor in some of the city’s most neglected schools. She tells the various harrowing tales of teachers overwhelmed by students, including one who was run out of the classroom by his marker-throwing, epithet-tossing horde. When Biss sees the enormous, echoing cafeteria of a school in the Bronx, she sees a holding pen for children. The way students are treated with both fear and condescension recalls for her the paternalistic impulses of the first public-school system, put in place during Reconstruction to help control and “train” recently freed blacks.
“I lost, in those buildings, all the easy answers I had ever heard put to the problems of schools,” she writes, “but I still persisted in believing that there had to be a better way to educate children.”
What’s most admirable about Biss is her fearlessness in discussing race and confronting the fear that even a discussion of the topic engenders. Her opening essay, “Relations,” tackles a topic that comes up throughout the book, though rarely in conversation: the notion of whiteness, both as a confused racial concept and a cultural standard. “What it means to be white seems to elude no one as fully as it eludes those of us who are white,” she writes. When Biss was a child, she and her sister had two baby dolls, one white and one black, the black one known as Black Doll. This despite the fact that Biss comes from an extended racially mixed family, and whose artist mother adopted an African religion early in Biss’s childhood.
“My mother exposed us to lots of different lifestyles and cultural approaches, and if I hadn’t had that exposure, I don’t know that all of the subsequent experiences would have invited my same thinking,” she says. “It’s a mistake to think racism doesn’t hurt white people. It strains and complicates their relationships and their potential for intimacy with all kinds of people.”
When Biss moved to Chicago a few years ago—she took a job teaching nonfiction writing in Northwestern’s creative-writing program—she and her husband settled in Rogers Park, a neighborhood once known as No Man’s Land and a part of town her colleagues and other acquaintances warned her of, citing gang activity and other crime. In this sense, Biss has materially profited from her questioning of racism and prevailing thought—because fear has kept similarly situated professionals out of her neighborhood, she is able to afford an apartment close to the lake: “And so, my feelings about fear are somewhat ambivalent.”
Ambivalency, ambiguity, the slippery nature of nuance in issues of race and class, all of these make Biss’s essays inconclusive in the most satisfying way. The persistent raising of questions, rather than feeling unfinished, reveals the connectedness of the various inquiries; all of those question marks hook together to bind those issues to each other.
“The way in which race has tangled with gender, and with class, race is tangled up in lots of other issues, and it’s unfair to untangle it and think of it on its own,” Biss says. “It becomes a tougher question to think about.”
Biss reads from Notes from No Man’s Land Thursday 19 at Powell’s.
