Re: Trees at night — stunning Rorschach silhouettes from the 1920s + Toni Morrison on borders, otherness, belonging, and the meaning of home + more

[jbloocher at gmail.com]

Many many thanks David!

Jb

Sent from my iPhone

> On 11 Aug 2019, at 15:31, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
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> [image: Welcome] Dear David Morris, welcome to this week's edition of the
> brainpickings.org
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0cbcc7f78a&e=085ac54fc2>
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> YOU. Trees at Night: Stunning Rorschach Silhouettes from the 1920s
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8e50751dd0&e=085ac54fc2>
> 
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight.jpg?fit=320%2C488]
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8b8a049cc3&e=085ac54fc2>
> 
> Walt Whitman considered trees the wisest of teachers
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6000349e48&e=085ac54fc2>.
> Hermann Hesse found in them sweet consolation for our mortality
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6411420508&e=085ac54fc2>.
> Wangari Maathai turned to them as a form of resistance and empowerment
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b4f6d61589&e=085ac54fc2>
> that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. “The tree which moves some to tears
> of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the
> way,” William Blake wrote in his most beautiful letter
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=361e8b3b18&e=085ac54fc2>.
> “As a man is, so he sees.”
> 
> A century after Blake, the artist, writer, and activist *Arthur Henry “Art”
> Young* (January 14, 1866–December 29, 1943) originated a sumptuous new way
> of seeing life, looking at trees.
> 
> In his forties, Young had risen to prominence with his political cartoons,
> criticizing capitalism and war, railing against racism, and advocating for
> women’s suffrage and the abolition of child labor. During World War I, they
> had rendered in prosecuted on a charge of conspiracy to obstruct
> recruiting. With some of Thoreau coursing through his veins, Young made his
> art both an instrument of civil disobedience and a lens for contemplating
> nature’s transcendent beauty.
> [image: artyoung.jpg?resize=680%2C927]
> 
> Art Young
> 
> In his fifties, Young’s imagination fell upon a subject both wholly natural
> and wholly original — the expressive humanlike shapes, states, and emotions
> emanating from the silhouettes of trees at night. He began rendering what
> he half-saw and half-imagined in pen and ink — haunting black-and-white
> drawings full of feeling, straddling the playful and the poignant. These
> visual poems, replete with the strangeness and splendor of nature and human
> nature, become the kind of Rorschach test one intuitively performs while
> looking at the sky, but drawn from the canopy rather than the clouds. While
> the sensibility is faintly reminiscent of Arthur Rackham’s unforgettable
> trees
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1b525269e7&e=085ac54fc2>,
> the concept is entirely Young’s own — no artist had done anything like this
> before.
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight2.jpg?resize=680%2C1072]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b551de6bbd&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight6.jpg?resize=680%2C1061]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a6e1d7503f&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight7.jpg?resize=680%2C1070]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d940eb061c&e=085ac54fc2>
> 
> First published as a series in the *Saturday Evening Post*, Young’s tree
> silhouettes were soon picked up by mainstream magazines like *Collier’s*
> and *LIFE*. They drew impassioned letters from readers — some sharing poems
> inspired by his art, some enclosing tree photographs they hoped Young would
> draw, some simply thanking him for these uncommon portals into an unseen
> world of beauty and emotion.
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight9.jpg?resize=680%2C1059]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=7973bff713&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight10.jpg?resize=680%2C1058]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4b6aea22d1&e=085ac54fc2>
> 
> In 1927, Young assembled the best of his arborescent silhouettes in the
> slim, lovely out-of-print treasure *Trees at Night*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e44d183ac5&e=085ac54fc2>
> (*public library*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=68bf29ce9c&e=085ac54fc2>).
> Upon the book’s publication, Brooklyn’s *Daily Eagle* exulted that it
> “places Art Young in a class by himself” and Baltimore’s *Evening Sun*
> lauded him as “one of the few real native talents that this country has
> produced in art.”
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight3.jpg?resize=680%2C1056]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e2ff55b509&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight15.jpg?resize=680%2C1083]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=71e22f69bc&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight5.jpg?resize=680%2C1059]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=5358b38e9e&e=085ac54fc2>
> 
> Printed on the opening page is an excerpt from an early-autumn entry in
> Young’s diary:
> 
> [image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]In common with most people
> of artistic perception, I like trees. While looking out of my window toward
> the wooded hills one summer night, a caravan of camels seemed to be humping
> along the sky. They were trees of course but enough like camels to key my
> imagination up to discover other pictures in the formation of foliage. The
> rest of the summer nights I enjoyed hunting for tree pictures against the
> light of the sky or thrown into relief by the glare of automobiles, and
> drawing them next day. It seemed to me that this silhouette handling of
> trees at night had never before been done by any artist. I felt that I had
> discovered something.
> 
> After the caravan, I saw “a woman and a fan” and other subjects followed.
> Any night I could walk or ride along the road and see interesting
> silhouettes made by tree forms, many of them so clearly defined as to need
> no improvement on my part. But aside from the appearance of a tree by day
> or night, is it not kin of the human family with its roots in the earth and
> its arms stretching toward the sky as if to seek and to know the great
> mystery?
> 
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight4.jpg?resize=680%2C1048]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f9f083ccd4&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight16.jpg?resize=680%2C1046]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8d13e53c94&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight14.jpg?resize=680%2C1081]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d2455568be&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight13.jpg?resize=680%2C1023]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a7f9ae0e98&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight12.jpg?resize=680%2C1065]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4db2b105e4&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight1.jpg?resize=680%2C1074]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1d7fdad7eb&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight11.jpg?resize=680%2C1034]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c79924cd90&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight8.jpg?resize=680%2C1079]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=398831437e&e=085ac54fc2>
> [image: artyoung_treesatnight17.jpg?resize=680%2C506]
> 
> Available as a print
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=42a91e1778&e=085ac54fc2>
> 
> Complement Young’s *Trees at Night*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0b2cdb09be&e=085ac54fc2>
> with something he never lived to know but would have cherished knowing —
> the fascinating science of what trees feel and how they communicate
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=37fe8c2c24&e=085ac54fc2>
> — then revisit philosopher Martin Buber on what trees teach us about being
> human
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=49c45468e6&e=085ac54fc2>
> .
> Forward to a friend
> <http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b6aca43034&e=085ac54fc2>
> /Read Online
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2bef7bb783&e=085ac54fc2>
> /
> [image: Like
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> <https://mailchi.mp/brainpickings/toni-morrison-marilyn-nelson-art-young?fblike=fblike-b698f733&e=085ac54fc2&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3Db6aca43034%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2019%252F08%252F06%252Ftrees-at-night-art-young%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2019%252F08%252F06...>
> donating=lovingI pour tremendous time, thought, heart, and resources
> into *Brain
> Pickings*, which remains free and ad-free, and is made possible by
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> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=338b338e6e&e=085ac54fc2>
> Faster
> Than Light: Marilyn Nelson Reads Her Exquisite Poem About the Purpose of
> Life and How Our Impermanence Both Frustrates and Fuels Our Creative Drive
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b2b4d1b28a&e=085ac54fc2>
> 
> [image: fasterthanlight_nelson.jpg?fit=320%2C480]
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d09c967c2c&e=085ac54fc2>
> 
> “It’s so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,” the astronomer and poet
> Rebecca Elson wrote in her spare, lovely poem
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6cdbcc8835&e=085ac54fc2>
> celebrating the genius of Einstein’s theory of relativity — genius at the
> heart of which was his bold and, at the time, countercultural decision to
> fix the speed of light as an immutable constant around which all the other
> variables converged to construct his groundbreaking model of spacetime,
> which revolutionized our understanding of the universe.
> 
> The speed of light and the vibrating mesh of our understanding and
> misunderstanding of the nature of reality come alive with uncommon
> originality of thought and feeling in the title poem from Marilyn Nelson’s
> 2012 poetry collection *Faster Than Light*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ba28badc19&e=085ac54fc2>
> (*public library*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=232c9a64ce&e=085ac54fc2>),
> which she read at the third annual *Universe in Verse*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=28e46d8a52&e=085ac54fc2>.
> It is a long poem, a beautiful and poignant poem, a soaring, meandering
> meditation on the nature of reality, the purpose of our existence, the way
> in which our impermanence both frustrates and fuels our creative drive.
> Enjoy:
> 
> [image: c0a07cab-8422-4a02-9e02-8ef1c022f649.png]
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9854571cda&e=085ac54fc2>
> 
> [image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]My poems: a handful of dust
> trying to get back to supernova.
> Like every longing, everything alive.
> 
> How lovely, too, that Nelson’s altogether magnificent *Faster Than Light*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b393c40076&e=085ac54fc2>
> opens with the perfect tryptic of epigraphs, straddling two and a half
> millennia of culture at the boundaries of science, philosophy, art, and
> activism:
> 
> [image: nelson_epigraph.jpg?resize=680%2C659]
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=55c94f4b6a&e=085ac54fc2>
> 
> For other highlights from *The Universe in Verse*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=bde42dd7fc&e=085ac54fc2>,
> savor U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith reading her ode to the Hubble Space
> Telescope
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b29aafc0a2&e=085ac54fc2>,
> astrophysicist Janna Levin reading Maya Angelou’s cosmic clarion call to
> humanity
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=72f435aed7&e=085ac54fc2>,
> Amanda Palmer reading Neil Gaiman’s tribute to Rachel Carson
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1e6213a5de&e=085ac54fc2>,
> poet Marie Howe reading her stirring homage to Stephen Hawking
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c4b267b287&e=085ac54fc2>,
> and Rosanne Cash reading Adrienne Rich’s tribute to Marie Curie
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=11ec293e67&e=085ac54fc2>
> .
> Forward to a friend
> <http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b6aca43034&e=085ac54fc2>
> /Read/Watch Online
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=10145a9461&e=085ac54fc2>
> /
> [image: Like
> https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/08/05/faster-than-light-marilyn-nelson-reading/
> on Facebook]
> <https://mailchi.mp/brainpickings/toni-morrison-marilyn-nelson-art-young?fblike=fblike-d17fa33b&e=085ac54fc2&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3Db6aca43034%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2019%252F08%252F05%252Ffaster-than-light-marilyn-nelson-reading%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2019%252F08%252F05...>
> Borders
> and Belonging: Toni Morrison’s Prescient Wisdom on the Refugee Struggle,
> the Violence of Otherness, and the Meaning of Home
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=5d0a9edfd7&e=085ac54fc2>
> 
> [image: thesourceofself-regard_morrison.jpg?fit=320%2C483]
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=99d3039639&e=085ac54fc2>
> 
> What does home mean and where do we anchor our belonging in a world of
> violent alienation and alienating violence? I use “alien” here both in the
> proper etymological sense rooted in the Latin *alienus*, “belonging to
> another,” and in the astrophysical sense of “from another planet,” “not
> human,” for the combined effect of a dehumanizing assault on belonging
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b507412a69&e=085ac54fc2>
> for those treated and mistreated as alien to a country or a community.
> 
> That, and some hint of the remedy for it, is what *Toni Morrison* (February
> 18, 1931–August 5, 2019) — one of the titanic thinkers and writers of our
> time, and the first black woman to receive
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=db110ac14f&e=085ac54fc2>
> the Nobel Prize in Literature — returns to again and again throughout *The
> Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=7e7dd49953&e=085ac54fc2>
> (*public library*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=22c36d48c2&e=085ac54fc2>),
> the final nonfiction collection that gave us Morrison on the singular
> humanistic power of storytelling
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=74a3141820&e=085ac54fc2>
> and the search for wisdom in the age of information
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=77508710bd&e=085ac54fc2>
> .
> [image: tonimorrison.jpg?resize=680%2C428]
> 
> Toni Morrison (Courtesy Alfred A. Knopf)
> 
> In a timely piece titled “The Foreigner’s Home,” originally delivered as a
> lecture at the University of Toronto in 2002, Morrison reflects on the
> notion of foreignness and the traversing of borders in light of our own
> disquieting feelings of otherness, whatever our national origin and
> citizenship, and the tremors of our crumbling belonging in an increasingly
> chaotic world:
> 
> [image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Excluding the height of
> the slave trade in the nineteenth century, the mass movement of peoples in
> the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the
> twenty-first is greater now than it has ever been. It is a movement of
> workers, intellectuals, refugees, armies crossing oceans, continents,
> immigrants through custom offices and hidden routes, speaking multiple
> languages of trade, of political intervention, of persecution, exile,
> violence, and poverty.
> 
> […]
> 
> The spectacle of mass movement draws attention inevitably to the borders,
> the porous places, the vulnerable points where one’s concept of home is
> seen as being menaced by foreigners. Much of the alarm hovering at the
> borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to me, by (1) both the threat and
> the promise of globalism and (2) an uneasy relationship with our own
> foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging.
> 
> [image: shantellmartin_borderless.jpg?resize=680%2C647]
> 
> Cover art by Shantell Martin for *Borderless Lullabies*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=833521c2b1&e=085ac54fc2>
> — a charitable compilation of musicians and writers raising their voices in
> defense of refugee children
> 
> With an eye to the central questions of belonging — how we decide where and
> whether we belong, what convinces us that we do, what constitutes
> foreignness and why it is so perturbing — she writes:
> 
> [image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png][There is an]
> inside/outside blur that can enshrine frontiers, and borders real,
> metaphorical, and psychological, as we wrestle with definitions of
> nationalism, citizenship, race, ideology, and the so-called clash of
> cultures in our search to belong.
> 
> African and African American writers are not alone in coming to terms with
> these problems, but they do have a long and singular history of confronting
> them. Of not being at home in one’s homeland; of being exiled in the place
> one belongs.
> 
> Morrison takes up the crux of this search for belonging — the meaning of
> home — in another piece, titled “Home” and originally delivered as a
> convocation address at Oberlin College in 2009:
> 
> [image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]What do we mean when we
> say “home”?
> 
> It is a virtual question because the destiny of the twenty-first century
> will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world. The
> question of cultural apartheid and/or cultural integration is at the heart
> of all governments and informs our perception of the ways in which
> governance and culture compel the exoduses of peoples (voluntarily or
> driven) and raises complex questions of dispossession, recovery, and the
> reinforcement of siege mentalities. How do individuals resist or become
> complicit in the process of alienizing others’ demonization — a process
> that can infect the foreigner’s geographical sanctuary with the country’s
> xenophobia? By welcoming immigrants, or importing slaves into their midst
> for economic reasons and relegating their children to a modern version of
> the “undead.” Or by reducing an entire native population, some with a
> history hundreds, even thousands of years long, into despised foreigners in
> their own country. Or by the privileged indifference of a government
> watching an almost biblical flood destroy a city because its citizens were
> surplus black or poor people without transportation, water, food, help and
> left to their own devices to swim, slog, or die in fetid water, attics,
> hospitals, jails, boulevards, and holding pens. Such are the consequences
> of persistent demonization; such is the harvest of shame.
> 
> [image: overtherooftops2.jpg]
> 
> Art by Nahid Kazemi from *Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b0f2e07836&e=085ac54fc2>
> by JonArno Lawson — a lyrical illustrated meditation on otherness and the
> consolation of finding one’s belonging
> 
> Noting that the violent handling of populations at and across borders is
> not new, Morrison considers what history so clearly teaches us about the
> consequence, if only we have the conscience and courage not to turn a blind
> eye to it:
> 
> [image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Forced or eager exodus
> into strange territory (psychological or geographical) is indelible in the
> history of every quadrant of the known world, from the trek of Africans
> into China and Australia; to military interventions by Romans, Ottomans,
> Europeans; to merchant forays fulfilling the desires of a plethora of
> regimes, monarchies, and republics. From Venice to Virginia, from Liverpool
> to Hong Kong. All these and more have transferred the riches and art they
> found into other realms. And all these left that foreign soil stained with
> their blood and/or transplanted into the veins of the conquered. While in
> their wake the languages of conquered and conqueror swell with condemnation
> of the other.
> 
> Two decades after Audre Lorde’s surprised encounter with the German women
> of the Diaspora prompted her to ask the crucial question of otherness and
> belonging — “How can we use each other’s differences in our common battles
> for a livable future?”
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6d7d0aa3b0&e=085ac54fc2>
> — Morrison considers how the global fragmentation of identity has affected
> our private experience of belonging:
> 
> [image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]This slide of people has
> freighted the concept of citizenship and altered our perceptions of space —
> public and private. The strain has been marked by a plethora of hyphenated
> designations of national identity. In press descriptions, place of origin
> has become more telling than citizenship, and persons are identified as “a
> German citizen of such and such origin” or “a British citizen of such and
> such origin.” All this while a new cosmopolitanism, a kind of multilayered
> cultural citizenship, is simultaneously being hailed. The relocation of
> peoples has ignited and disrupted the idea of home and expanded the focus
> of identity beyond definitions of citizenship to clarifications of
> foreignness. *Who is the foreigner?* is a question that leads us to the
> perception of an implicit and heightened threat within “difference.” We see
> it in the defense of the local against the outsider; personal discomfort
> with one’s own sense of belonging (*Am I the foreigner in my own home?*);
> of unwanted intimacy instead of safe distance.
> 
> [image: youbelonghere2.jpg]
> 
> Art by Isabelle Arsenault from *You Belong Here*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=160fb80ed6&e=085ac54fc2>
> by M.H. Clark — an illustrated antidote to our existential homelessness
> 
> In a sentiment of chilling of prescience, offered a decade before her own
> homeland barbed its borders with unprecedented violence, racism, and
> inhumanity, Morrison adds a sobering admonition:
> 
> [image: 2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]It may be that the most
> defining characteristic of our times is that, again, walls and weapons
> feature as prominently now as they once did in medieval times. Porous
> borders are understood in some quarters to be areas of threat and certain
> chaos, and whether real or imagined, enforced separation is posited as the
> solution. Walls, ammunition — they do work. For a while. But they are major
> failures over time, as the occupants of casual, unmarked, and mass grave
> sites haunt the entire history of civilization.
> 
> Complement this particular fragment of *The Source of Self-Regard*
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=cd4835a649&e=085ac54fc2>
> with Amin Maalouf on conflict, belonging, and how we inhabit our identity
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=89e29887e3&e=085ac54fc2>,
> David Whyte on how to be at home in yourself
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e0c7a0effa&e=085ac54fc2>,
> and Hannah Arendt on the refugee plight for identity
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0018f9d6c8&e=085ac54fc2>,
> then revisit Morrison on the deepest meaning of freedom
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0af3d141d2&e=085ac54fc2>
> and her spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech about the power of
> language
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a2928eab13&e=085ac54fc2>
> .
> Forward to a friend
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> /Read Online
> <https://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0b7451bc6e&e=085ac54fc2>
> /
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