Editor’s Note: Others
by Albert Kapikian
Are you in line? is perhaps the only generally accepted way to address the other today, a pretense to disguise our irritation, an ever ready to deploy, ever ready to be heard and understood question that, depending on which word is emphasized, and whether or not prefaced with an Excuse me, conceals a barely disguised irritation, even contempt. There is a normative to which the other is always vestibular, and today that other lives somewhere in the gap between how we act and our moral convictions, often embedded in our emails, if not in our own behavior. We other to find community, and when we feel othered, we other others.
The idea for this themed issue was conceived on a moderate enough scale. The response, however, was anything but moderate, and suggested, in particular, a latent concern about violence towards that other, however defined. Some wrote of the annihilation of the boundaries between individuals; others seemed to suggest that the moment “I” was spoken that “I” itself was an other, a dialogic subject not the subject of its own sentence, but already spoken for, and sunk by that otherhood.
In some of the pieces that follow, strangers meet and if not build then at least discern connections, working symbiotically to provide safety, sanctuary, a home. “He was a stranger, someone she didn’t know and had no intention of knowing,” writes Alexandra Persad, in “Redacted.” “But something had occurred in his own life, fragmenting it in a way that could unite them in a different lifetime if she were not herself.” In “The Changing Dynamic of Poetry About Birds,” Jayant Kashyap invokes Olivia Todd’s description of “tiny birds work[ing] with buffalo to warn them of approaching wolves,” and observes “that sometime between ‘then’ and ‘now’ we’ve stopped making an effort to imagine the evolution of scarecrows in scaring the crows better and started wanting to home them instead.”
Whether that other, however defined, helps in an evolution from an individual perspective to a more collective one, or creates something closer to its opposite, it is language, language that is utilized to see the other as also-I, as well as language utilized to produce the scandal of the other, that either lifts up or destroys. Only through language can we even imagine the possibility of solidarity with all people, including the lonely, and the lost, but some contemporary forms of othering seem to have no literary antecedent. If, for example, the apprehension that one’s own life is cut off from others by the very ideology of “connection” promulgated by the technology-bearing class, no clear literary antecedents exist for that form of violence. Why read a novel by someone else if it can be tailored to you? —artists, always first responders to whatever is abroad, now locked out by the algorithmic trance.
To master the other by calculation will never open us to the possibility that the other is the source of all the mysterious energies created in literature, and since it is literature that works with these energies, no wonder it is in eclipse. This kind of violence, hidden in plain sight, is even harder to see wherever those who serve the greater cause make the cause serve them and the values spoken of are simply there to justify what is and virtue-signaling stands in for actually doing something. A community that encourages us only to think about our rights doesn’t have the wherewithal to produce the richness of community life that respects, and loves, the other. In America, at least, we hold ourselves to a standard of a common life. How is the face of the other deformed when algorithms are conflict driven?
To meet the other is to have the idea of literature. I like to think that the community college makes a case that such a thing is still possible. If the pedagogy of “giving a shit” has any meaning, here some try to other-mother, other-father, other-brother and other-sister. In “Dan’s Gone, Too, Now,” Nathaniel Lachenmeyer seems to write of other-sonning, to coin a term for what “Dan,” a homeless man, does for the author’s father—a kind of othering that seems to reenchant the world while at the same time changing the nature of that reenchantment.
From education we need something more than the encouragement of individualism to nurture the seeds of how to get along with the other, that is, to learn our duties as well as our rights. The community college is one place, perhaps because of its open admission policy, the only place where the pedagogy of caring for the other is modelled and learned and encouraged. Since it is the only place in every county in the country where there is little principle of separation, our poisonous division is addressed de jure and de facto, interaction with all kinds of supposed others for a prolonged period still taking place, collapsing distinctions in a palimpsest of collectives, histories and identities—a prerequisite now, given our polarization, for any form of excellence.
In any literary journal, the slush pile signifies open admission as well, but here it is all we choose to have, representing in itself the mutual responsibility, communal space, and hospitality, even within instability, of our college—and itself not inconsistent with excellence. There is something, an other, that wants us to find it. At the community college we sit with the other in an assumed and an assuming enmeshment and have learned countless times that by rejecting the other we come to deprive ourselves of the blessing that otherness intends for us, that once we neglect or objectify the other in our midst, we have eradicated the one who bears our blessing. In “The Loneliness Zone,” Bill Marsh, who quotes from the Surgeon General’s 2023 “Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connections and Community,” writes that “the loneliness conundrum cannot be solved with ‘simulations,’ even high-tech, post-internet simulations that take need gratification and the pretense of social connection to a whole new level.” If we do not learn how to choose fellowship, we become lost and alone. We can deny our own alterity, but there is nothing we do alone.
For the artists and the writers in this issue, the problem of representing the other was invoked before it was evoked, a constant generalized problem around which they were called to position themselves. On our cover, the straight line in the photograph morphs into circles, an aesthetic designed to capture a good kind of friction, a productive friction, grounded in the world, in precious contact with the other, and thus with a shared reality. The bee and the flower, though not the same species, not even the same kingdom, inhabit the same ecosystem, the flower offering sustenance and hospitality to the bee’s odyssey and eventual homecoming—impossible without contacting alterity. As a bookend to this note, Viola Clune, once an intern at Potomac Review and now an undergraduate at Yale University, offers her perspective, citing Toni Morrison and Hortense Spillars in the context of Mark Twain’s oft-quoted dictum, “write what you know.”
Literature’s subjectivity is formed through subjection to the other, the other’s proximity and distance both strongly felt, the trace of the other the shadow of something great, mysterious, not knowable, that cannot be made an object of the self. In “Unwholly Other,” Chris Arthur does not like the term “wholly other,” because “it shrugs off all elucidating comparisons and enlightening metaphors.” If something is wholly other, would we be able to apprehend it? As he puts it, “to label something as other in this sense is emphatically not the kind of othering that sees what’s different from us as inferior.”
To topple our imperialistic subjectivity, literature counter-offers with an experience of the other—literature and the other, mutually determinant, absolutes with whom we walk into the far country, obeying their exile, no longer someone else’s, but our own, demonstrating our uttermost fidelity by following them all the way, in complete solidarity, to their final page. We cannot prove that exposure to literature is essential to love of the other, or that we cannot understand the other without art, or the humanities, but we can at least say that literature is almost magical in overcoming obstacles to its purposes in its skillful attention to the specifics of the other, its creative imaginings that make that other irresistible.
In Jamie Holland’s “The Sound of People Leaving,” a lonely college student receives, and finally accepts, an unexpected invitation over the holiday:
“You should go,” I said. “Traffic could be bad.”
“You should come with me.”
“Where?”
“Home,” she said.