BookFabulous
  • Home
  • The Blog
  • Meet the Author
  • Beyond The Blog
  • About

The Blog

‘The Reckonings’ by Lacy M. Johnson - A Review

30/10/2018

0 Comments

 
by Rana Asfour
Picture

​

Last week I described ‘The Reckonings’ by Lacy M. Johnson on my Instagram account as timely given the current political climate in the US. Today, I describe it as a crucial, essential read that offers ‘radical hope’ to kick-start an urgent conversation about the justness of America’s society and the stories its citizens tell each other in a culture obsessed with retribution.
---------------------------------------------------------------
When during the Kavanaugh Hearings a few weeks ago now, Dr. Blasey Ford spoke of the two front doors she insisted on during their house’s renovation in spite of the fact that it rendered the property aesthetically unpleasing, I wasn’t surprised. That same morning I’d finished reading Lacy M. Johnson’s essay entitled ‘Girlhood in a Semibarbarous Age’, one out of the twelve-essay collection recently published by Scribner this month under the title ‘The Reckonings’. In this particular essay, the author describes her peculiar office habits. She writes:
 
‘I leave the lights off in the room where my desk is so I can see anyone who comes in before that person can see me. It’s one in a set of self-protective habits I have, all of which I do without thinking. There are scissors in a cup near my monitor; I keep them visible and sharp’.
 
By now we all know that Dr. Blasey Ford’s story was about a man who she alleged had hurt her. Johnson’s story is also about a man; a man she once loved very much, so much so that when he first abused her with his words and then with his fists, she still stayed with him.
 
‘I told myself I could fix him,’ she writes. ‘That this wasn’t who he was, not really. I let him keep showing me who he really was until I finally believed him and left.’
 
In 2014, Lacy M. Johnson, penned her memoir, ‘The Other Side’ published by Tin House Books in which she wrote about being kidnapped and held in a soundproofed room in a basement apartment her boyfriend - who she had left - had rented and fitted for the sole purpose of raping and killing her. She escaped and he fled to Venezuela where he is now married and has two daughters. He has yet to face justice for his crime.
 
Now Johnson has written ‘The Reckonings’ - a collection of self-reflective essays inspired by the recurring question she is often asked about the ‘justice’ she would like the man who hurt her to receive as well as questions about the nature of that justice in a culture obsessed with retribution. Her answer draws from philosophy, art, literature, mythology, anthropology and other fields as well as personal experience to consider how our ideas about justice might be expanded beyond vengeance and retribution to include acts of compassion, patience, mercy, and grace.
 
In the opening essay entitled ‘The Reckonings’ which shares its title with that of the book, Johnson writes that in all the movies ‘… the person who has done a terrible thing falls from a very tall building, or is incinerated in a ball of white-hot flames, or is shot in the dark by police, or at the very least is led away in handcuffs’. None of those have been forthcoming scenarios in Johnson’s case as her assailant lives his life a free man.
 
Nietzsche, who the author draws upon in the same essay supposes that when an assailant imposes a crime on a victim that crime becomes a debt, the criminal a debtor, the victim his creditor ‘whose compensation is the particular pleasure of bearing witness to a cruel and exacting punishment’. In layman’s terms: when someone does something bad, something bad should happen to that person in return preferably exacted by the victim. Shockingly, it is not this type of reckoning Johnson seeks for herself. That is not to say that she does not want a reckoning –she does - only not so much one that comes laden with more ‘blood, guts and gore’. She fights back against a ‘justice’ secured by ‘transforming a suffering to take a pain we experience and changing it into the satisfaction of causing pain for someone else’.
 
‘Would I cheer, and cry, and jump up and down if the man who kidnapped and raped me were kidnapped and beaten, if I could grind him down with my rage until there was almost nothing left of him … To be honest, I’m not sure what justice is supposed to feel like,’ she writes.
 
The most profound message one gets from Johnson’s writing – whether you agree with her views or not, is that this is a woman who refuses to be a helpless victim who waits behind bolted doors for a hero who will bring her the reckoning all of us believe she deserves. Instead, she is the hero of her own story. This fiercely brave survivor has taken the world head on searching for her own version of a satisfying reckoning defying many who might consider her views idealistic, if not utopian particularly in the maelstrom of the increasingly aggressive rhetoric and in some instances physical violence being launched between disagreeing parties.
 
In her case, Johnson’s reckoning manifests in the creative non fiction classes that she teaches where she encourages her students to engage in the current social and political issues of the moment in order to have an active role in forging a world where everyone can speak truth to power without fear of violent retribution or pathological apathy; it appears while on a job teaching writing in a pediatric cancer ward where she tells us the heartbreaking story of ‘the girl with the yellow wig’ that reminds us we are all human.  It comes in writing about how Hurricane Harvey affected her family and how her husband risked his own life helping his neighbors as they in turn helped others. She writes of broader societal wrongs such as the BP oil spill, government malfeasance and police killings. Through all this she finds and maintains her own justice, one that makes way for joy not violence, for love not hate and one that defies the plan once hatched by a man she once loved to silence her so that it fails over and over again.
 
As I post this today, it has already been four days since the MAGAbomber was arrested for sending homemade pipe bombs to 13 high-profile Democrats who had views that clashed with his own, and a day since the senseless deadly shooting inside a Pittsburgh Synagogue that claimed the lives of 11 innocent Jewish worshippers and injured several others because their shooter ‘hated’ all Jews.
 
In her essay ‘Goliath’, Johnson writes that ‘we learn to see evil in others because we do not wish to acknowledge a painful truth: none of us is as good as we imagine ourselves to be … I see how we teach ourselves to hate one another and, in our hatred, to destroy. I believe in the harm that stories can do, but also in their power. If people can tell stories that cast shadows where there are none, perhaps stories can also shed light where there is darkness, and can promote an understanding where there is confusion and fear’
 
Two weeks ago I described ‘The Reckonings’ on my Instagram account as timely given the current political climate in the US. Today, I describe it as a crucial, essential read that offers ‘radical hope’ to kick-start an urgent conversation about the justness of America’s society and the stories its citizens tell each other. It is a conversation the American public can no longer afford to delay. As Johnson puts it, the time has come for a ‘shift in intellect, a change in perspective, a new way of seeing that is then impossible to unsee’.
Lacy M. Johnson is the author of the memoir 'The Other Side' which was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, and the CLMP Firecracker Award in nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Tin House, Guernica and elsewhere. She lives in Houston and teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

    Professional Reader
    Challenge Participant
    Paperblog

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    January 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    January 2018
    September 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    October 2013
    June 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    October 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    May 2011
    January 2011
    September 2010

    Categories

    All
    Abu Dhabi
    Adrian Mole
    A Humument
    Akhil Sharma
    Ali Smith
    Amman
    Andrew Thompson
    Annabel Kantaria
    Arabic Books
    Arabic Releases
    Arab Reading Challenge
    Archie
    Archie Comics
    Armenia
    Armenians
    Art Exhibitions
    A Song For Issy Bradley
    Author: Aaron Vlek
    Author: Abdo Khal
    Author: A.D.Miller
    Author: Ahdaf Soueif
    Author: Alastair Reid
    Author: Becky Wicks
    Author: Caitlin Moran
    Author: Carys Bray
    Author: C.J.Moore
    Author: Cynthia Ozick
    Author: Dale Carnegie
    Author: David Walliams
    Author: E.L.James
    Author: Emma Straub
    Author: Gail Tredwell
    Author: George Saunders
    Author: Helen Smith
    Author: Howard Curtis
    Author: JoJo Moyes
    Author: Kay Burley
    Author: Liane Moriarty
    Author: Mark Haddon
    Author: Martin Suter
    Author: Michael Morpurgo
    Author: Patrick Sfeir
    Author: Paul Craig
    Author: Rabih Alameddine
    Author: Rhonda Byrne
    Author: Ruth Field
    Author: Sabina Mahfoud
    Author: Sarah Waters
    Author: Sayed Kashua
    Author: Simon Montefiore
    Author: S.J. Watson
    Author: Stacy Gregg
    Author: Steven Galloway
    Author: Susan Hill
    Author: Tahir Shah
    Author: Tara Palmer Tomkinson
    Author: Terii Guiliano Long
    Azazeel
    Banipal
    Ben Lerner
    Book Awards
    Book Events
    BookFabuSNAPPED
    Book Recommendations
    Book Reviews
    Books In Arabic
    BritCrime 2015
    Burning Man
    Cancer
    Children's Literature
    Chloe Combi
    Chris Ewan
    Circassians
    Claire Fuller
    Colm Tóbín
    Comics
    Coming Home
    Competition
    Cookbooks
    Costa Coffee
    Country: Jordan
    Crime Novel
    Dark Tides
    Dave Eggers
    David Lagercrantz
    Dawn Anahid MacKeen
    Diana Morgan Hill
    Dr Seuss
    Dubai
    Dystopian
    Egypt
    Emirates Festival Of Literature
    Emma Healey
    Events
    Features
    February 2015
    Fiction
    Film
    Fiona Neill
    Fitness & Health
    Folio Prize
    Funny
    Genocide
    Hala Malhas
    Hope
    Imagine Science Film Festival
    Inspirational
    Interviews
    In Time For The Weekend Reading Picks
    Issy Bradley
    Jenny Offill
    Jesus Of Arabia
    Jesus Of Arabia Review
    Jocelyn Henderson
    Julia Miles
    Justine Crow
    Katarina Bivald
    Laurie A Nelson
    Laurie Nelson
    Lebanese Authors
    Lebanese Films
    Let Our Fame Be Great
    London Literature Festival
    Mandarin
    Margret Atwood
    Marsh Award
    Miriam Toews
    Nadine Labaki
    New Releases April 2015
    Non Fiction
    NYU Abu Dhabi
    NYU Events
    Oliver Bullough
    Orange Prize For Fiction
    Patrick Dalton
    Paul McKenna
    Peter Swanson
    Poetry
    Politics
    Rachel Cusk
    Ragnar Jonasson
    Rana Asfour
    Reading Campaigns
    Reading Year
    Real Men Read
    REVIEWS/Fiction
    Reviews/Non Fiction
    REVIEW/Young Reader
    Saheer Asfour Habash
    Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize
    Saira Shah
    Samar Barraj
    Saudi Arabia
    Self-Help
    Self Publlished
    Sex And The Citadel
    Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid
    Shereen El Feki
    Simon Callow
    Snowblind
    Sophia Ledingham
    Sreyus Palliyani
    Suleiman Al Hattlan
    Summer Exhibition 2015
    Summer Reads 2015
    Susan Barker
    Sylvia Plath
    Talks
    Terrorism
    The Ambassador's Wife's Tale
    The Date Night Manifesto
    The Desmond Elliott Prize 2015
    The Folio Prize
    The Girl In The Spider's Web
    The Good Girl
    The Gulf Wife
    The Hundred Year Walk
    The Little Book Of Nits
    The Millennium Trilogy
    The Samuel Johnson Prize 2015
    The Uncommon Type
    Thrillers
    Tom Hanks
    Weekend Choices
    Women's Prize For Fiction 2013
    Writing Competition 2016
    Year Of Reading 2016
    Year Of Reading UAE
    Yosri Fouda
    Young Fiction
    Youssef Zeidan

Search Engine Submission - AddMe
Our Disclaimer
Proudly powered by Weebly
Photos used under Creative Commons from byzantiumbooks, Dmitry Karyshev, GalacticWanderlust, quietlyurban.com
  • Home
  • The Blog
  • Meet the Author
  • Beyond The Blog
  • About