Reviews tagging 'Genocide'

Figuring by Maria Popova

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brnineworms's review

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3.5

Figuring is a book which is difficult to appraise, but I think I’m happy with the three and a half star rating I eventually settled on. I have a lot to say about it and I’ll start with its flaws. I don’t want to give the impression that this is a terrible book – it isn’t – but I do think it’s important that I address these issues frankly.

Figuring has no patience for religion or spirituality. When the topic comes up, the reader is bombarded with cringe-inducing lines like “she could no longer accept the dogma that crumbled in the face of her experience and critical thinking.” The relentless yet pointless dunking on faith reminds me of my teenage antitheist phase. It’s especially odd here, though, considering the book’s reverence for love and beauty and art, which are surely just as “unscientific” as religion, and just as human. Why is poetry celebrated while piety is mocked?

Whiteness is centred throughout, with people of colour like abolitionist Frederick Douglass being mentioned but ultimately sidelined. The problem is deeper than a lack of representation, however. Sentiments like “here was a successful and self-sufficient queer white woman celebrating the dignity and growing cultural power of black men” exemplify the tendency to applaud white people for doing the absolute bare minimum, and to treat racism as an abstract issue rather than actually engaging with those who experience it firsthand.

Unfortunately, the questionable exclusion of minorities doesn’t end there. In a passage about Emily Dickinson, Popova notes that the poet would use masculine pronouns and terms like “boy,” and in one poem expressed the following:
Amputate my freckled Bosom!
Make me bearded like a Man!
I don’t know Dickinson’s gender and I never will, but the way they’re very pointedly interpreted as a cis woman made me uncomfortable. Popova refers to Dickinson’s desire for a flat chest as “a violent transfiguration” and their use of masculine pronouns as an attempt to “fit the heteronormative mold,” echoing two major TERF talking points weaponised against trans people and transmascs in particular – the framing of surgery as mutilation, and the notion that trans men are actually lesbians who wish to escape lesbophobia.
I’m aware that both myself and Popova are projecting our own identities and experiences onto this historical figure. Perhaps Dickinson was a woman after all. Even so, the subject ought to be handled with more care so as to avoid regurgitating transphobic rhetoric and granting it legitimacy.

Am I calling Popova an irredeemable racist and transphobe? No. I think these issues are more likely to be oversights than deliberate acts of hostility. But the book does have its fair share of problematic elements, which should be acknowledged even if they’re genuine mistakes. Impact is just as important as intention, if not more so.

Now, the writing style.

Figuring is verbose, not in an academic way but, rather, in a poetic way. Sentences are long and meandering, laden with metaphor and evocative imagery. The purple prose can begin to feel a little saturated at times – I found myself having to take a break after each chapter. But when I was in the right mindset, I was able to appreciate the beauty of the writing which I would otherwise dismiss as pretentious and dense.

Here are three quotes which stuck with me:
  1. “Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams.”
  2. “The ecstasy of having personally chipped a small fragment of knowledge from the immense monolith of the unknown.”
  3. (on the topic of labels like “queer” and “Uranian”) “The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them. We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a beautiful impulse—to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves.”

I’m glad I’m able to finish this review on a positive note because, though I must acknowledge its shortcomings, I do cherish this book. It’s undeniably fascinating and I certainly learnt a lot, and I feel enriched having read it. I doubt I’ll reread the whole thing cover-to-cover but I’ll likely revisit the odd chapter here and there.
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