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Notes from no man's land : American…
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Notes from no man's land : American essays (edition 2009)

by Eula Biss

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3581071,398 (4.25)6
"Acclaimed for its frank and fascinating investigation of racial identity, and reissued on its ten-year anniversary, Notes from No Man's Land begins with a series of lynchings, ends with a list of apologies, and in an unsettling new coda revisits a litany of murders that no one seems capable of solving. Eula Biss explores race in America through the experiences chronicled in these essays--teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting from an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. What she reveals is how families, schools, communities, and our country participate in preserving white privilege. Notes from No Man's Land is an essential portrait of America that established Biss as one of the most distinctive and inventive essayists of our time."--Back cover.… (more)
Member:rivkat
Title:Notes from no man's land : American essays
Authors:Eula Biss
Info:Saint Paul, Minn. : Graywolf Press, c2009.
Collections:Your library
Rating:****
Tags:nonfiction, whiteness

Work Information

Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays by Eula Biss

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Summary: A collection of American essays connected to four places the author lived, all exploring the realities of race in which we all are implicated.

Telephone poles. An essay on the introduction of (and resistance to) telephone poles on the landscape becomes an essay on lynching. It turns out that telephone poles were used to hang many black men. Biss writes of how she once thought the “arc and swoop” of phone lines a thing of beauty. Now she comments, “they do not look the same to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.”

This striking comment captures a theme running through this book. Wherever we go in America, if our eyes are open, we recognize that we are implicated in our nation’s racial history. Nothing is innocent. And yet what also comes through in these essays is that Biss is not resigned to this state of affairs–repentance, a turning, is yet possible.

In her essays we follow Biss from New York to San Diego (and trips into Mexico), Iowa City, and the Rogers Park neighborhood of north Chicago. She describes locking kids into a Harlem school where she is teaching on 9/11 and how New York depleted her. In an essay sharing the title of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” she speaks of how “New York took everything I had” and like Didion, she left, but unlike Didion, she has not returned, and questions how Didion tolerated so many myths about the city.

She moves to San Diego, working for an African-American newspaper. One of her most telling essays describes Eve Johnson’s struggle with Child Protective Services to gain custody of her own grandchildren, and the repeated barriers she encounters because she is “too black” and her persistence. She notes that she never saw such stories in the New York Times.

Her next move is to Iowa City. She writes about her research into the Black company town of Buxton, no longer in existence that seemed idyllic. There was a fabric of community organizations and a strong sense of identity and self-respect among the black residents. She dares to wonder about the kind of “integration” in which Blacks are a small minority in a sea of white, as was the case with dissatisfied Black students at the University of Iowa. Is such integration really a form of assimilation rather than an affirmation of identity? She also discusses the race blindness she encounters as people decry “looting” after Katrina, but downplay thefts by students after a tornado tore through their city.

The title essay, “No Man’s Land” is set in Rogers Park, a neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, bordering Evanston. It was originally called No Man’s Land because of its location. It is also highly integrated with no racial majority, yet she writes both of the racial fears that persist among whites like her in this diverse community and of her husband’s hope that “more white people don’t move here.”

Her concluding essay is titled “All Apologies” and explores the meaning of apologies both in personal life and in our racial history. Amid this is her telling observation: “Some apologies are unspeakable. Like the one we owe our parents.”

Biss dares to explore both our implicatedness in racism, and the ambiguities of living among one another with all that history. She recognizes the ambiguity in her own family, the mixed racial ancestry that gives her a cousin able to move between white and black communities, even while on the basis of appearance, she cannot. Her essays reveal a very different version of our national character from what many would have the textbook versions to be. She sees both the beauty and value of people and cultures, and the blindness, the hardness, and the obfuscations that sustain these disparate versions of America. In her spare, reflective prose she does not offer answers but invites us to sit with her and see. ( )
  BobonBooks | Jan 5, 2022 |
As beautiful as you can possibly imagine an essay collection about race, crime and our collective responsibility to one another as Americans can be. When you think Baldwin or Didion or Fadiman, now also think Biss. I will be giving copies of this magical book to everyone. ( )
  Smokler | Jan 3, 2021 |
One of the best books of essays I've ever read. Really stunning. "Is This Kansas" and others manage at once to be one of the most lucid and insightful essays I've read maybe ever. I understand Sherman Alexie's judgment, that it manages to be "so wildly wrong and right" at the same time, but found myself agreeing more than disagreeing with Biss.

This is the kind of book that I see myself returning to again and again. ( )
  jshttnbm | May 14, 2020 |
Notes from No Man's Land is an elegant collection of essays. Biss has a sharp intellectual insight that she applies to her experiences intertwined with issues of race in America. The book is divided into parts by location and I found this construction to be helpful in following Biss through her own discoveries. Her use of form is particularly striking as all the threads in each piece cohere and support the idea of the essay, this is particularly striking in "Relations." ( )
  b.masonjudy | Apr 3, 2020 |
Essays about whiteness, and the precarious ways in which white Americans play out their guilt and denial. Some great moments in here, although some of the essays are too short to work up a real head of steam. Also some real shockers, as when Biss talks about starting out to write an essay about telephone poles and then changing when so many of the newspaper stories she found using the words in the first few decades of the twentieth century were about lynchings. ( )
1 vote rivkat | May 25, 2016 |
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For my baby, who doesn't have a name yet.
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"Of what use is such an invention?" the New York World asked shortly after Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated his telephone in 1976.
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This system was designed specifically for the education of freed slaves, and established public education in America as the method we use to manage large populations of our own people who frighten us. (p. 45)
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Wikipedia in English (1)

"Acclaimed for its frank and fascinating investigation of racial identity, and reissued on its ten-year anniversary, Notes from No Man's Land begins with a series of lynchings, ends with a list of apologies, and in an unsettling new coda revisits a litany of murders that no one seems capable of solving. Eula Biss explores race in America through the experiences chronicled in these essays--teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting from an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. What she reveals is how families, schools, communities, and our country participate in preserving white privilege. Notes from No Man's Land is an essential portrait of America that established Biss as one of the most distinctive and inventive essayists of our time."--Back cover.

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Book description
The word pioneer betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West—the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited. To imagine oneself as a pioneer in a place as densely populated as Chicago is either to deny the existence of your neighbors or to cast them as natives who must be displaced. Either way, it is a hostile fantasy.

Eula Biss grew up in what she calls a "mixed" family. Though she identifies herself as white, she shared a childhood with cousins whose father was from Jamaica, and learned about the Yoruba religion as her mother was initiated into the faith.

In this series of forthright essays, Biss sets out to examine issues of race and identity in America through the lens of history and of family. She makes links between lynching and the spread of the telephone, both of which required tall straight poles in public places. She considers the legacy of Reconstruction in public school systems, particularly the New York City classrooms where she teaches, and questions the instruction to make her students "better people." She remembers the white and black dolls she shared with her sister in light of the famous Doll Studies of Mamie and Kenneth Clark, and she rereads Laura Ingalls Wilder as she settles into the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago.

Throughout, Biss acknowledges her own assumptions and privileges. Never hesitating to ask difficult questions and face the sometimes-embarrassing answers, she still remains hopeful about the possibilities of diversity.
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