White Flights by Jess Row

Author:Jess Row [Row, Jess]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-881-5
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2019-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

This is a variation of the same sentiment, even the same vocabulary, embedded in Robin Passafarro’s self-effacing description of her urban gardening project; it’s easy to imagine Franzen writing this scene, making it his version of the contemporary city. But it isn’t his city: someone else is listening. The proxemics of the scene flow in more than one direction. The reader knows nothing about Noor other than her name, which suggests a Middle Eastern origin, and her tension. How does her tension suggest itself? The narrative doesn’t say, which is to say, in a casual elision, it passes the moment over to the reader’s imagination.

This is a tiny moment, so tiny it might easily pass unnoticed. The contemporary term for what the woman is doing is a “microaggression,” which is to say, causing offense by acting and speaking normally and not paying attention to who is listening. Microaggressions, as anyone who has read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen knows, cause an acute sense of spatial stress. One person’s experience of comfort becomes another’s agony. Microaggressions, that is, lead to micro-observations: realism on a very minute scale, where every choice—to describe, not to describe, how to describe—becomes fraught. In this moment, Lerner performs a silent and almost imperceptible trick of inclusion, turning to the reader, and saying, effectively, “You know what I’m talking about.”

In the wake of the Brexit vote and during the run-up to Trump’s election, a graphic (designed by a French artist named Maeril) began circulating widely on social media describing “what to do if you are witnessing Islamophobic harassment.” The graphic, showing an (apparently) white woman, a Muslim woman in a hijab and long dress, and her harasser, an angry white man, demonstrates an exercise in what might be called proxemic substitution: to disarm the (verbal) attacker, the white bystander stands or sits next to the Muslim woman, and engages her in conversation, speaking over the man’s voice while ignoring him completely. “Keep eye contact with them and don’t acknowledge the attacker’s presence,” the guide says.

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