Notes From No Man’s Land by Eula Biss

#ReadIndies naturally made me think of my unread pile of Fitzcarraldo Editions. I’ve yet to buy any of the blue fiction titles, but am amassing the white non-fiction – mostly spurred on by how brilliant This Little Art by Kate Briggs is. I don’t remember why I picked Notes From No Man’s Land – originally published in 2009, and published by Fitzcarraldo in 2017 – but I’m glad I did, because it’s excellent.

Let’s address the elephant in the room first of all: this is a collection of essays about racism by a white woman. At one point she refers to her family as ‘mixed’, but this turns out to be largely about the people her mother and aunt married, not her biological relatives. Well, her mixed-race cousin is her blood relative, of course, and there is an interesting essay on their relationship that I imagine would be very different if the cousin had written it.

Anyway, when I picked up the book I had assumed, from the title, that Eula Biss was herself mixed race – the no-man’s land perhaps being between two communities. That is not the case. Biss lives in various different places throughout the essays in this collection, and sometimes she is in a racial minority and sometimes in a majority, but she is always a white woman looking at an issue that affects other people far more than it affects her. That might mean you wouldn’t want to read Notes From No Man’s Land, and I’d understand that. What I will say is that she doesn’t claim to be anything more than an observer – of current day, of her lifetime, and of history.

The opening essay is a powerful example of the latter. ‘Time and Distance Overcome’ was initially intended to be ‘an essay about telephone poles and telephones’, exploring how people reacted to have poles and wires festoon their neighbourhoods and skies. We take them for granted now, but, as Biss writes:

The idea on which the telephone depended – the idea that every home could be connected by a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart – seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through a wire.

The essay starts out looking at this dawn of a new technology. But Biss’s searches for ‘telephone pole’ in newspapers of the early-to-mid 20th century revealed something else: how often they were used for lynchings. With a judder, the essay turns to lynchings instead. Biss doesn’t over-editorialise, but lets the horror of the facts speak for itself. In this essay, she shows something she is very good at throughout Notes From No Man’s Land: resisting the narrative urge to draw everything into a structured conclusion. Whether her essays are mostly facts or mostly subjective, and this collection mixes the two, she doesn’t tie a neat bow.

The first essay is the most objective of the lot. In others, Biss’s own experience is centred – living in so-called dangerous areas of New York, and trying to establish why they have that reputation; moving to Mexico and trying to improve her Spanish; being a teacher in New York during 9/11, and being a university professor at an insignificant university in Iowa. Some of her insights in the latter were among the most interesting things in the book – how clueless most of the students were about racism, but also how university students (en masse) fulfil many of society’s fears about ‘othered’ groups, but somehow without being the target of discrimination and fear.

I loved the way that Biss interwove the personal and the historical in many of these essays – sometimes jarringly, to great effect, and sometimes much more gently. A child custody case flows in and out of Biss’s frustrations working for local media; a Nina Simone song plays during a car journey and melds with thoughts on Irish racial identity; Biss’s experience as a teacher come alongside the idea of education post-slavery. Again, even when these comparisons jolt the reader, or seem poles apart, Biss doesn’t overplay her hand as an essayist. It doesn’t seem an affront to compare ex-slaves’ education with her teaching experience, because she never directly compares them. They are just both there, in the essay, allowing each other room and creating a landscape which the reader can explore.

Chiefly, Biss is a woman driven by curiosity, compassion, and an ability to see how seemingly disparate elements exist within the same universe. Here she is on ‘diverse’:

Walking down Clark Street I pass a poster on an empty storefront inviting entrepreneurs to start businesses in Rogers Park, ‘Chicago’s most diverse neighborhood.’ It takes me some time, standing in front of this poster, to understand why the word ‘diverse’ strikes me as so false in this context, so disingenuous. It is not because this neighborhood is not full of man different kinds of people, but because that word implies some easy version of this difficult reality, some version that is no full of sparks and averted eyes and police cars. But still, I’d like to believe in the promise of that word. Not the sunshineness of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it.

And perhaps that’s what I liked best about this book. It resists any ‘easy version of this difficult reality’. It recognises complexity, and celebrates the un-simple.