Why We Need Literature to Document Atrocities at Home and Abroad
Toni Morrison bore witness to the lasting legacy of slavery through her writings. Courtesy of Guillermo Arias/Associated Press. by Daisy Hernández |
January 11, 2021
For a long time, I cringed whenever I heard someone talk about a novel or a poem bearing witness. The word “witness” bothered me. It felt hollow and privileged. It felt like something an entitled American writer would say, a writer who could author a book and walk away. I was not that person, or at least I didn’t want to be.
And I was not the only one who had reservations. The poet Natalie Diaz observed in an interview that “bearing witness” is a curious phrase. “Most people don’t bear it at all,” she said. “They just look, they just look with their eyes and write with their eyes, and go to sleep.”
We posed the following question to 22 writers and public figures: “What book would you recommend Joe Biden read to inform his presidency?” Here are their answers.
Luster, the debut novel from Brooklyn-based writer Raven Leilani, who previously told British
Vogue its success has “surpassed what I could have dared imagine”. (“Someone please collect me from the floor,” she said of her latest endorsement from the former President of the United States).
Also included in the eclectic mix:
The Undocumented Americans, an exploration of the hidden lives of US immigrants by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, herself one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard; Liz Moore’s heart-pounding thriller
Long Bright River; and Brit Bennett’s bestseller
The Vanishing Half, which HBO has swiftly snapped up the rights to.
December 22, 2020
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Karla Cornejo Villavicencio at her home in New Haven. (Photo credit: Nathan Bajar)
After the U.S. presidential election of 2016, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, an undocumented American from Ecuador and Yale doctoral student, decided it was time to write her story. Beyond that, she wanted to write the story of other undocumented immigrants who play such an important part in American society but whose lives are often little understood.
The result is “The Undocumented Americans,” published in March, which captures the day-to-day lives and resilience of undocumented laborers she met across the country. The book was recently named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review and was among 17 books listed by former President Obama as his favorites from 2020.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio grew up seeing caricatured and clichéd representations of migrants in books, television and movies. What she didn t see reflected in them was her parents immigrants from Ecuador or herself, a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA).
When Cornejo Villavicencio was a senior at Harvard University, she wrote an anonymous essay for The Daily Beast about what the publication wanted to call her dirty little secret that her parents did not immigrate legally. Immediately, literary agents started asking for a memoir. It made her angry because she knew it wasn t about her writing; they wanted a rueful tale about someone defying the odds and getting into an Ivy League school. But she was 21; she wasn t ready.