Finding Beauty in a Broken World
- Home
- / Join our programs
- / Learning Resources
- / N4 Reads
- / Finding Beauty in a Broken World
|
“I remember, years ago a friend said to me, Terry, you're married to sorrow. And I said no, I just choose not to look away. And I believe it's about bearing witness to both that which is beautiful in the world and that which pains us in the world, that on one hand, we have this beauty. On the other hand, we have this destruction. How do we bring these two hands together in prayer. And for me, it is about bearing witness. I think oftentimes, we think bearing witness is a passive act. I don't believe that. I think bearing witness is an act of conscience and consequence. And by bearing witness, we bring forth action based out of our own lived experience. And I think so much of a spiritual life is about bearing witness.” Terry Tempest Williams In this collection of teaching ideas around Terry Tempest Williams' essay collection Finding Beauty in a Broken World, N4 founder and novelist Colum McCann offers a variety of ways of exploring how Williams' work "ties us all together" providing understanding in an era of disintegration. How can we be honest about struggle and move forward? N4 Teaching Fellow Natalie Croney and N4 artist Dolen Perkins-Valdez offer insights and interdisciplinary activities around Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.“You are your best thing.” Toni Morrison
Why Read Finding Beauty in a Broken World?Nina McConigley is a fiction writer and an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming. Born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming, she is the author of the short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians (FiveChapters Books, 2014), which is an exploration of the rural immigrant experience in America. Her work is concerned with questions of race and narratives of the American West. By the time Toni Morrison published Beloved, her fifth novel, she had already won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was an acclaimed novelist. Yet it was Beloved that catapulted her career into the stratosphere, so much so that Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for her body of work. This immense critical acclaim alone is enough to warrant our attention. Yet each of us readers must, at some point, approach the novel for ourselves, forming our own opinion.
When a reader first encounters Beloved, it has a similar effect of being set down in the middle of a corn maze. There is no clear path through, and the effect is profoundly disorienting. Even Morrison commented upon this initial encounter with her work, suggesting that she wanted readers to be thrust into “compelling confusion,” likening our placement into her literary world to the same kind of disorientation of an African being kidnapped and thrust into a completely foreign place.
When I first read the book, I experienced that very confusion. I didn’t understand what I was reading, but I understood it was something momentous. At the end of the second chapter, I flipped back to the beginning of the book and started over. I needed to more fully comprehend this 1873 Ohio setting, this Sethe and Paul D and Baby Suggs. What was this Sweet Home place?
I kept returning to a line of dialogue uttered by Sethe in just the first few pages of the novel: “I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running—from nothing.” Ooh, Sethe! Now this was a character fully formed from the very first page, a Black woman both powerful and vulnerable, filled with pain and rage, but also with the single-minded clarity of a survivor.
Let’s be clear. There is significant trauma in the novel. No wonder it is often referenced by the misguided folks who like to ban books. The story of a family struggling with the memories of enslavement is not a fairy tale to be enjoyed like a warm glass of milk on a cold winter night. In some ways, one might even call the novel an American horror story. It certainly contains elements of horror and gothic and the supernatural. The house on Bluestone Road is haunted by a ghost. In African American parlance, we call them “haints.” But Baby Suggs, the mother-in-law of the main character Sethe, declares there is no point in moving. “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief,” she says.
That legacy of hauntings is taken up again in Angela Flournoy’s 2015 novel The Turner House, when one of the main characters, Frances Turner, disputes the idea of a haunted house in 1958 Detroit. “There ain’t no haints in Detroit,” he insists. Yet if you have read that contemporary novel, one written in the literary legacy Morrison left behind for all writers, but especially for African American writers, you know that our country is still haunted by its history and many old houses still possess some version of cultural memory.
Yet Beloved is not a novel lacking hope. The characters are rebuilding their lives after a painful past, and in that gap they try desperately to hold on to the tenuous threads that connect them to each other. Morrison does not offer simple platitudes for her characters’ faith in the future; instead, she embraces their full humanity and complexity.
As my grandmama would say, You say that to say what, child? What I’m saying is that this is the kind of book that can change the way you think of history, the way you think of America, and the way you think of yourself. It is a book that reminds us of the resilience of African American people, the strength of spirit in all of us who call this country home.
In every book I have written, I have tried to capture that remarkable spirit. In my latest novel Take My Hand, I have crafted two sisters whose love for each other and deep connection sustains them throughout the book. When my main character Civil Townsend first meets them in the excerpt you will read, she is only just beginning to understand how the bonds of family will empower these young girls to survive a life-altering event.
It was as if Morrison was saying to me, to us—let me tell you what the novel can do that no other art form can accomplish. Let me show you how a painful tale can be told with heartrending beauty. Let me speak to you of communities and the individuals that inhabit them. Morrison taught us that history was not something to sweep away and dismiss as something shameful. In Beloved, the greatest historical novel ever published in the English language, Morrison challenges us to more fully understand what it means to be American.
When I was 16 years old, I was lost. Bi-racial and growing up in a very white Wyoming, I didn’t know my place in the world. Like many teens, I looked outward, and I discovered the natural world. I stumbled on birdwatching by accident and took comfort in a world where there were clear categorizations, in which I could use a pair of binoculars, and be able to write down with certainty what something was. I discovered Terry Tempest Williams by accident. In my birding circles, I heard about this writer that wrote about birds. But also, who wrote about women, and the West, and about family. I read my first book by her, and then read another. And then I did what many angsty teenagers do – I wrote Terry a six-page handwritten letter. Telling her about how I hated high school. How cedar waxwings were my favorite birds. How I was brown and always the minority wherever I went. That I loved mountains but was not a good outdoorsman. I told her how I loved books and yet I had received an “F” on a Scarlet Letter assignment. I told her I was volunteering at a bird rehabilitation center. How I loved this little saw-whet owl. I wrote everything in my heart and sent it off to Utah to an address I had been given by someone whose cousin knew Terry. I never expected to get a reply. Weeks later, a thin mailing envelope was in the mailbox. I opened it. It was just after the new year, and enclosed was a calendar of the desert. Enclosed was a notecard. Across the top in block letters: TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS. The note was short: Dear Nina: Cheers to 1992! Enjoy this calendar with images of the desert in the midst of your mountains. A day later a letter arrived. And Terry Tempest Williams told me something that no one ever had: “Please don’t give up your dreams of creating works of beauty with words.” She told me you are a writer. She took me seriously. She talked to me about writing, my path, and she told me to look twice at my saw-whet owl for her. And she signed off with a quote from H.D., “Let me never utter words less than heart beat.” Terry Tempest Williams writes with not only heart, but with a wisdom about this earth and our place in it. In the same way that she guided my teenage self, in Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Terry Tempest Williams guides the reader into the ways that human worlds and nature strike each other, and how in that brokenness, we find meaning. Finding Beauty in a Broken World moves from Italy to the American Southwest, and then to Rwanda. In each place, Williams uses ecology and art to direct us to places that are full of community and inquiry. In Ravenna, Italy, she learns mosaic art, “A mosaic is a conversation between what is broken,” she says. She asks us to make unity out of what has been shattered. In Utah, she contemplates prairie dogs – she watches them and observes their schedules and practices. She sees their vibrant communities, and notes, “To regard any animal as something lesser than we are, not equal to our own vitality and adaptation as a species, is to begin a deadly descent into the dark abyss of arrogance where cruelty is nurtured in the corners of certitude. Daily acts of destruction and brutality are committed because we fail to see the dignity of Other.” And lastly, the book travels to Rwanda, to communities torn apart by war. She connects with a community healing after genocide, piecing together a memorial from the wreckage of war. This book is a kind of meeting place, of the lyrical and poetic with meditation and action. An ode to things that are fractured and imperfect. This is Williams’s gift – she finds beauty and meaning in things that others do not. She writes with grace about the hard things, and challenges us to find beauty in worlds that many find damaged. In the book, she says, "Finding beauty in a broken world becomes more than the art of assemblage. It is the work of daring contemplation that inspires action." Williams inspires us to act, she inspires us to know there is meaning in creating beauty with words. Questions and Understandings for a UnitStudents could investigate the following questions: What happens when the past and present intersect? What is the impact of our history on our present identity?
How does what we remember reveal who we are?
What does it mean to heal? What does one need to begin healing, even while in the midst of suffering?
How do we create and maintain a community?
How does the social outcast help us understand what we’re trying to ignore? What do they ask us to change in our communities and in ourselves?
How do we cope with deep longing? How do we move on? How do we decide when it’s time to move on?
How does an environment influence populations of people over multiple generations?
What does it mean to be free?
What responsibility (if any) does the individual have to the family? When does that responsibility end (if it does)? When should it end (if it should)?
Students could investigate the following understandings:
Stories we believe about ourselves impact the way we navigate the world.
Becoming free is a process. As Morrison said, “[f]reeing yourself is one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self [is] another.”
Communities are integral in shaping and reshaping the stories that humans share.
Stories are living and ever-evolving. Students could explore the following questions:
Students could investigate the following understandings:
Sample Teaching Ideas
CREATIVE WRITING Story Exchange Between a Prairie Dog and Killer
Character Narration
Starting with Chapter 20, there are a series of chapters narrated by individual characters. We get to hear Sethe, Denver, and Beloved through their own words. What makes the characters sound different in these chapters?
ACTIVITY List the distinguishing characteristics of each character’s voice. Discuss with a partner the elements that make each of the women’s voices distinctive.
Next, select a neutrally-narrated chapter and rewrite a portion as if it were narrated by a character. For example, you may write about finding Sethe in the woods from Amy’s perspective, or you may allow Sixo to explain his thoughts about freedom as he walks to meet the thirty-mile woman. How would Amy sound? How might Sixo explain the principle behind his trips? What would their verbal tics be? Would they use witticisms, religious imagery, or humor? Use what you gather from observing and listening to your selected character to inform your writing.
As you experienced in an earlier section of this Mod, Narrative 4’s signature tool is the Story Exchange. Narrative 4 often uses the story exchange to help two seemingly disparate communities find common ground, or at least hear and listen to each other’s stories. Narrative 4 has run exchanges between white residents of Fargo, North Dakota and immigrants resettled in the area, pro-gun activists and victims of gun violence, students at a public school in the South Bronx and students at a $43,000 a year private school in the same borough, and many more. What would a story exchange between a prairie dog activist and a prairie dog killer look like? Write an account of the story exchange. What story would each choose to share? How would they each respond to each other’s story? Would they tell the other’s story in good faith? Would they be able to find any common ground? ART Cloud WatchingMost of us don’t take enough time to look up at the sky. So, go somewhere, lie flat on your back, and stare up for at least twenty minutes. Terry Tempest Williams does this while watching prairie dogs. “Enormous cumulus clouds float above the plateau in the shape of turtles. Always turtles. They are moving so slowly, almost imperceptibly, makes me dizzy. The ground is stable, but the sky is in motion. When do we have the time in our lives to notice these things so fully? I remember when Steve first learned of his diagnosis, we stood in the corner of his library and he said, “Something had to give I was working too hard, moving too fast.” I was right there with him, understanding both personally and precisely what he meant. Why must we wait for the body to speak before we hear what we really need? From this peculiar vantage point, my body feels the Earth in rotation as my eyes sense the curvature of the planet simply by the bend in the horizon.” After your cloud watching, write a reflection in the style of Williams. What shapes did you see in the sky? Where did your mind wander? What about watching water, or the patterns of the wind? Have we neglected the natural world in favor of our phone screens? See what you see on an afternoon without your phone. ARCHITECTURE Genocide Memorials
Lily Yeh’s crew of artists in Rwanda were engaging in a, sadly, common art form—genocide memorials. Memorials for genocides are found far beyond the borders of the country where the genocide happened. Consult these lists of genocide memorials for the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Armenia. Choose at least one memorial for each genocide. You are encouraged to add other genocides to this project. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum maintains a non-exhaustive list of countries that have experienced genocide and other major atrocities. For each memorial, examine:
|