Houston-based Lacy M. Johnson’s recent essay collection, The Reckonings, grapples with vital questions: the concept of evil, police killings, the BP oil spill, and the complexity of speaking truth to power. Finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in the category criticism, Johnson’s essays move between the personal and the political with deftness and precision. This interview was conducted via email where we talked about Johnson’s curatorial project, the Houston Flood Museum, her activism, and the tension—in the space of individual essays—between telling the truth about the epidemic of violence against women and the reproduction of spectacle. Johnson is also the author of The Other Side, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography, as well as the author of Trespasses: A Memoir, excerpted and anthologized in both The Racial Imaginary and Literature: The Human Experience.
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Kathryn Savage: In “The Precarious” you trace the etymology of the words autopsy and atrocity which share an ancient root and from which words like panopticon are derived. I’m thinking about sight. You write that “both autopsy and atrocity require a witness—someone who survives, who sees for herself, with her own eyes. But the violence changes the person who looks.” How and in what ways does the violence change the person who looks? Also, how do you feel this constant quality of surveillance, which seems to saturate American civic life at this point, move through you? How does it affect how and what you see?
Lacy M. Johnson: When I look at images of extreme violence, which are everywhere, I feel injured—a moral and emotional trauma, as it were. I feel the need to care for the wound that violence makes (others’ wounds as well as my own) but I also feel regret, for having arrived on the scene of the violence too late, when it seems there is nothing to do but grieve. Because there is no public space or forum in which to grieve public deaths, my response has typically been to dissociate. Who among us has not learned to preserve the self in this way? We are asked to look at so much violence so often that nearly everyone is post-traumatic these days, though some carry more trauma than others because of the way certain forms of suffering are routinely denied, ignored, or downplayed in structural ways. The constant surveillance, the constant saturation of what is visible with the spectacle of violence, encourages us to see one another only as potential assailants or potential victims, but never as fully human people. It teaches us to fear one another, and it’s a fear we must resist. I’ve learned over the last several years to look away from the spectacle of the violence, from its display, and to look instead for the people who have committed that violence, who are almost never in the same frame as the harm they have caused.
KS: In both “The Reckonings” and “The Precarious” you write about that shut place. In “The Precarious” you say something that I underlined a million times about terror: “There is only one kind of terror, and it feels like a terrible loneliness.” I don’t have a memory of ever encountering terror and loneliness in the same sentence but this pairing feels so deeply true to me. I wonder if you could talk more about the relationship between what you name that shut place, terror, and loneliness?
Simon & Schuster 2018.
LMJ: I think of “that shut place” as the enduring consequence of terror. It’s another way of describing the traumatic experience of dissociation, I think. There is a version of myself that is a more vulnerable and tender person than the one I reveal to the world, who is, as I said before, wounded. “That shut place” is a form of self-preservation, or self-protection, which I keep hidden away from the world and its horrors because I believe that by doing so I might be able to protect myself from certain kinds of harm, or at least protect myself from experiencing it again. It is a little naive, I admit, but it is also a reflex, a response. It is innate and instinctual and I don’t know how else to be. It means I am less vulnerable to the world, and though it feels somewhat safer, it is also terribly lonely.
KS: I first read “Speak Truth to Power” in a frenzy. I read it in my car, in the grocery store, on my phone screen while cooking dinner for my son. I couldn’t stop reading it. I read it the week of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and I couldn’t stop listening to the hearings too. You write about, as the title suggests, what happens to women and girls who come forward to voice accusations against men—powerful men, famous men, and regular not-famous assholes. You quote Baudelaire: “The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.” You quote Susan B. Anthony: “No advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public. For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized.” You write something I found quite hopeful: “We all know that men have power as a group, but I want to be clear about something: women as a group do too.” What do you feel are some clear ways for women and other historically marginalized people to grapple with the difficult work of dismantling and decolonizing, taking power back, claiming more of it?
LMJ: I think we’ve seen this work in action over the last several years through movements like Black Lives Matter, actions like the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock, and throughout the many waves of #MeToo. What these movements teach us, over and over, is that we have so much to gain from believing one another’s experiences of violence, harassment, and intimidation, and working together in allegiance and solidarity in order to promote accountability, community, and collective healing. The fact is: violence pivots on many axes, and power always seeks to undermine the credibility of its victims—whether we’re talking about sexual harassment by an employer in the workplace or racial harassment during a traffic stop by police. Our collective power resides in working together toward our collective joy.
KS: Yes, I agree, and this recalls for me your essay “Against Whiteness” where you speak to the desire to find forms of solidarity that promote community and collective healing along the many axes of violence that persist. You write that “Whiteness is a moral choice: if it is learned, we must unlearn it.” I’ve been thinking about the dangers of the notion of exceptional victimization and the imaginary, reading your work beside Saidiya V. Hartman (Scenes of Subjection), Ella Shohat, Claudia Rankine, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Angela Pelster. In Pelster’s recent essay, “White Artists Need to Start Addressing White Supremacy in their Work,” she writes that white artists fail to center “themselves within the violence of their own whiteness.” Fail to place their imaginary in the position of “the aggressor instead of the victim” and I feel there’s much truth here. You are a Houston-based professor, curator, and activist. I’m curious how your curatorial work and activism overlap and intersect with your writing and teaching, specifically with relation to finding forms of solidarity that promote community and collective healing?
LMJ: My approach to my curatorial work and activism has been informed by the field of social practice—sometimes also known as “social sculpture,” a term coined by Joseph Beuys in the 1970s to name a mode of art making that takes place entirely in and through the social realm, using primarily the “materials” of engagement and participation. Beuys believed that by changing the nature of the relationship between artists and spectators into a collaborative one, art could transform society through the release of popular creativity—anyone could be an artist, he believed, and a life lived with intention and purpose could be a work of art. Since the early 1990s a growing movement of artists working in this field have transformed social practice from a theory of experimental art-making into a strategy for social change. Although this work might sometimes involve specific, staged interventions, the art itself is a way of living and working that emphasizes community, prioritizes relationships, challenges power, and spans disciplines, ranging from urban planning and community work to theater and the visual arts, often at the same time.
In Houston, where I live, one of our most pressing issues is how certain communities are routinely and disproportionately devastated by catastrophic flooding along lines of wealth inequality and racial disparity. My project, the Houston Flood Museum, was created in response to this structural and infrastructural problem. At first glance, HFM appears to be primarily a website that exhibits digital artifacts, such as stories, poems, audio and video recordings, photographs, documentaries, articles, and other digital ephemera. However, launching the museum meant forming new partnerships with arts organizations and other community partners, and for many of these organizations, this partnership meant pivoting their work and mission toward issues of environmental and racial justice in ways that were new for the organization or were made newly explicit. That work continues, and as a result a broad network of artists, scholars, activists, academics, architects, urban planners and elected officials are working together to first acknowledge and then repair the harm for which we bear individual and collective responsibility. This network is a “social sculpture” and is one form my art-making takes. I work in this mode because an ongoing question for me has been: how can I spend my time and leverage my energy, power, and privilege in transformative ways, not only in my writing, but in everything?
Tin House Books 2014.
KS: The Houston Flood Museum sounds fantastic! Not to turn us away from it, but I have a persistent question about representing violence in art I want to ask: In Lydia Yuknavitch’s 2015 Guernica essay, “Woven,” after describing her ex-husband’s attempt to murder her, Yuknavitch writes: “In America, it’s tricky to describe violence without it turning into entertainment.” Let me tell you something from my life. The first funeral I attended was my second cousin’s. She was murdered by a stranger after he abducted her. To protect my cousin’s memory, (and, perhaps, in conversation with the difficulty of representing violence against women without further enacting objectification, that Yuknavitch describes), I’ve spent my life barely speaking about my second cousin and the tragedy of her murder, though I think of her often. In “The Reckonings” you write about the figure of the woman at the back of the room at the reading with her final question. I think your essay is, in part, about the anxiety of speaking, particularly after long bouts of silence, (perhaps internalized silences?), and my question has to do with breaking silence. A troubling tension I think about, as a writer, is that trouble of telling. How to do it in such a way so as to not further objectify and violate? I identify with the difficulty Yuknavitch writes about in “Woven,” that difficulty of describing violence against women in a representational art form. Do you feel this tension also, as a writer doing the important work of speaking out about violence?
LMJ: Thank you for sharing this story about your cousin with me. I don’t think you are committing violence against her, or her memory, by telling the truth about the violence that claimed her life. I agree that there’s something troubling in the way that many readers are drawn to stories like this—stories that let us look at violence from a safe and comfortable distance. Readers, on the whole, are far more interested in reading about the thousand forms of violation they like to call “unthinkable” than they are in imagining the forms justice might take.
I think, though, that when we are telling these stories, that there’s a world of difference between bearing witness to violence and to reproducing its spectacle. For me, it’s a question of allegiances. My allegiance as a writer is always to those who have been harmed. When we focus on the harm itself—when we describe every bruise and gash and meaty abrasion in stomach-churning detail—we are producing spectacle. It does nothing to address the trauma and in fact can often re-traumatize.
But in my work, I want to talk about the harm as a starting place for a story that moves upward along the chain of causality, all the while asking how the harm became possible, where and how and by whom it became permissible. Every person who harms another feels like their circumstances are exceptional in some way, and that this exceptionality means they have permission to do something they have been taught is wrong. They didn’t learn this in a vacuum. I want to show how no one is excused, no one should be let off the hook. The narrative we have of justice is of the single person who makes an evil choice, and that person should be punished without fail. In my experience, it is never that simple. There is always more to the story, always more than one person who bears some measure of responsibility or blame. I think we need a new narrative.
KS: Your point about allegiances is so insightful. I love the word allegiance here rather than empathy, which is something I’ve been troubling lately.
LMJ: Yes, I think empathy is different from allegiance. Empathy is a feeling, for one thing, and every feeling is fleeting and temporary—something that begins and ends—but allegiance is a commitment. Ideally, it becomes a conviction.
KS: A related question: I feel I’ve been conditioned to think of silence as something protective, something that can keep me safe. Have you also? If so, what do we do with that? What actions can people take to stop the silences that might grow within and around us, and keep us in that shut place?
U. of Iowa Press 2012.
LMJ: I have most definitely been conditioned to believe that silence is protective, but I have realized that silence protects the people who cause harm, not the people who suffer it, and those people who cause us harm do not deserve our protection.
KS: “What We Pay” turns to the environment, looking at the BP oil spill, and at pollution happening along the Gulf Coast. In it you describe taking a group of students to protest at the BP compound in Houston. There is a feeling of futility in this essay—and I don’t mean that critically—but as a reflection of your skill at rendering an honest measure of consequence. Do you feel we are at a point of no return, with regard to environmental ruin? If so, how to live with that? How to teach into that moment? How to parent under such sobering conditions of reckoning?
LMJ: People talk a lot about this “point of no return,” but lately I have been wondering: a return to what? There is no time within the history of the industrialized world, or even since we began believing that the earth belongs to us and we can do what we want with it, that we have not been heading toward exactly this moment. I find it is more useful to look forward, and we have not yet reached the point where we cannot look forward. It is still productive to ask how we can change our relationship to the world in such a way as to live with it and one another more harmoniously. There is still time to imagine a relationship to the earth and one another that is not extractive but generative. These questions drive my parenting and my teaching. There is always time to ask how we can change our lives for the better, and then to live that change.
KS: “Girlhood in a Semibarbarous Age” has a predator-prey quality, which you bring full circle at the end, likening your guarding your home with your dog’s suspicious growls at what lurks outside the door. There’s so much seeing in this essay. Your gaze, your daughter’s. I wonder if you can talk about the role menace plays in the essay, as an organizing principle, and also the role of sight in relationship to gender violence?
LMJ: Living together in this essay are the events of one day and at the same time the entire recorded history of human civilization. I am trying to think through the idea that I often hear repeated (mostly by men) that the relationship of men to women as predator to prey is innate and biological. This idea is ridiculous and is mostly a convenient narrative to justify the violence of the present moment and an alibi for the violence of recorded history. I want to challenge that narrative, but this essay is about not knowing where to begin because the idea is so pervasive and is so widely taken as fact. How do we challenge what we are told are the “facts”? Where do we look for evidence of their fabrication when all of visual culture reinforces this false narrative? Yes, there is a sense of menace that runs as a current through this essay, but I think there is also a deep skepticism that I should fear it, and a desire to wade into that current, upstream and toward another way.
KS: Turning to how you’ve put the collection together, The Reckonings notes section is vast, eighty-six pages. It forms an illuminating fragmentary set of micro-essays. I wonder if you could talk about your organization process for this collection. Why did you include a notes section like this, and what do you imagine your ideal reader’s relationship with it being? How are the notes in conversation with the essays?
LMJ: I like to think of the notes section a bit like the network of mycorrhizal fungi that connect trees in a forest to one another. If the essays are the trees—the story and overstory, as it were—the notes are the understory. It’s also simply a record of my work. I like to show my work in particular, because it’s not as if I just sat down and typed these essays. Each is the product of months of research, and each leans heavily on the ideas and writing of those who have come before me. My notes section is intended to honor that, and also to elaborate on secondary or tertiary narratives that were too much of a digression to appear in the primary text, but which I think provide an important and complicating layer of consideration.
KS: I love this idea of the notes as the understory. As a reader, it felt that way but I didn’t have the language for it. Okay, last question: “Make Way for Joy” explores notions of injustice and justice connected to joy (that an injustice can get between a person and their joy, that joy can be a form of justice). In some ways, I think joy is relational, the opposite of “a safe and comfortable distance.” Perhaps joy is also connected to allegiance in this way, and a counter to spectacle. What do you think?
LMJ: Yes, joy can be relational—and justice can also be relational. Joy is all consuming (which is not to say it’s completely pleasurable) and there is no safe distance from which to observe it because joy is all or nothing. There is no partial joy, or fractional joy. If we work in allegiance with someone, their joy can multiply and become our own. This is, to me, is what justice looks like: working in collective allegiance toward our mutual joy.
Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and is author of The Reckonings and The Other Side. For its frank and fearless confrontation of the epidemic of violence against women, The Other Side was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, the CLMP Firecracker Award in Nonfiction; it was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writer Selection for 2014, and was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus, Library Journal, and the Houston Chronicle. She is also author of Trespasses: A Memoir, which has been anthologized in The Racial Imaginary (Fence Books, 2015) and Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2013-2018).
She worked as a cashier at WalMart, sold steaks door-to-door, and puppeteered with a traveling children’s museum before earning a PhD from University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she was both an Erhardt Fellow and Inprint Fondren Fellow. As a writer and artist, she has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Houston Endowment, Rice University’s Humanities Research Center, Houston Arts Alliance, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Kansas Arts Commission, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Inprint, and Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Tin House, Guernica, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Sentence, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.
Kathryn Savage is a recipient of the 2018 Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize. A hybrid writer, her work appears in American Short Fiction, Poets.org, the