The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  I felt my own uncertain, multiple “I” enlarged by all the essays you’ll find here. I was taken to corners of the world I hadn’t imagined, or hadn’t been able to imagine; corners of the world I had tricked myself into believing I’d imagined, but had gotten wrong—or only partially understood. I was corrected. I was expanded. I was bothered. The power of the essay lives in a certain kind of impulse, a gaze that overturns the easy story and seeks the unseen. When Jason Arment looks at two shallow graves in the Iraqi desert, he sees one meant for his POW and one meant for himself—whatever would be left of him, once the war was done.

  What will you find in these pages? You’ll find a scientist wondering, What happened before the beginning of the universe? You’ll find three miner brothers who preserved their lungs in glass jars as proof of the silicosis that killed them. You’ll find a female professor describing her decision to make an amateur porn film with her partner. You’ll find people who are not walking thesis statements but actual human beings—ecstatic, contradictory, imperfect, hurting, trying again.

  In “Dispatch from Flyover Country,” Meghan O’Gieblyn describes watching a communion on the shores of Lake Michigan—in golden, gauzy dusk light—and catching sight of a drone hovering over the water. In “Cost of Living,” Emily Maloney narrates the fiscal aftermath of a suicide attempt—survival as debt, survival in debt, a woman paying for the hospital stay her insurance did not cover.

  So yes, the personal is political. When a woman buys a cake to celebrate another year of living on the anniversary of the day she did not die, and can barely afford this cake because she is in debt to the medical system that kept her from dying—this is both personal and political. The brief glimpse of that cake—the kind of impactful specificity, or telling detail, that I am always demanding from my students—suggests we might want to imagine and implement a system where such debts did not exist. I believe in essays because I believe that it matters to narrate the particular stories of particular debts, rather than simply Debts Writ Large—so that we might access broader truths through the fissures of these heartbroken lenses. Every piece of cake has its politics, and its price.

  Political discourse can make us forget that abstractions like “rape culture” are actually the accumulation of millions of particular, lived moments of terror, degradation, disrespect, dismissal, and violation. But in “White Horse,” Eliese Goldbach doesn’t let us believe for a moment that “rape culture” is just an abstraction. In this essay, rape culture isn’t just a phrase; it’s a narrator trying to figure out how to narrate her rape in the aftermath of a disciplinary committee that listened to her story—the story of being drugged at a party, dragged into the woods, and forced into intercourse—and told her she wasn’t raped at all. “White Horse” uses the particular tools of the essay—formal experiment, ruptured narrative, a voice that admits doubt and questions the terms of its telling—to fight silencing. Masterful form is often a question of well-managed rupture.

  In “‘We Are Orphans Here,’” Rachel Kushner revisits her own notes from a visit to Shuafat Refugee Camp in order to question the narrative her memory has sculpted from her time there. It’s this willingness—to return to the original encounter, to question her own story, to reveal its elisions—that breaks her piece open. This is the prerogative of the essay: as it witnesses, it investigates the terms and fragility of its own gaze.

  In the months following the election, I went to an exhibition of paintings by the artist Kerry James Marshall, and found myself particularly moved by one called Slow Dance. It’s an acrylic painting, about six feet square, that shows a couple in their living room: a man in a wifebeater, his wife’s light-catching nails on his dark back, music made visible as notes swirling across the room, a candle glowing in a wine bottle, their dinner plates on the coffee table, each plate holding a few stray green beans. It was immediately clear to me that those green beans were everything. They were my favorite part. They turned a constellation of brushstrokes into two particular people with particular appetites, people who had decided to get up—in the middle of dinner, their vegetables unfinished—and start dancing, because the music had moved them, because they needed a pretext to bring their bodies close together.

  Is it ridiculous if I say that’s what the essay is, those green beans? The green beans are the detail that recognizes a particular humanity, and helps bring us close to that humanity for a moment—from an oblique angle we wouldn’t have expected, an angle we couldn’t have imagined for ourselves. What we can’t imagine for ourselves: that’s why we need to see the world—for a spell—through someone else’s eyes.

  An essay lives in its details, and argues through them: a little girl dressing up in the stiletto heels sent as charity relief in the aftermath of a disastrous flood, or a woman tasting bitter oranges in the backyard of James Baldwin’s home in France, taking stock of what remains from his life there: “a dozen pink teacups and turquoise saucers.” This is Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, who takes a trip to Baldwin’s home as part of a larger inquiry into “how his memory abides,” and finds it abiding “on the scent of wild lavender like the kind in his yard, in the mouths of a new generation that once again feels compelled to march in the streets of Harlem, Ferguson, and Baltimore.”

  An essay lives in those high heels, those teacups, that lavender. A Coke and a sticky bun, straight from the oven, on a long day in Harare. A boy dreaming of busloads of Africans on a highway to America, straddling an entire ocean. All kinds of longing. All kinds of violence. A girl playing with a white plastic horse. A woman dreaming of being saved by a man who rides one. A boy weeping at a pile of rocks. A pair of lungs in a glass jar. An addict with vomit as viscous as cake batter. You’ll find that addict and his vomit in Sarah Resnick’s essay, “H.,” in a hospital waiting room, along with a nurse who says the man doesn’t deserve help because he brought this on himself. But the essay believes something else. It believes his story holds more. When I talk about the politics of the essay, I am talking about that—an essay’s fidelity to nuance, and its belief in the infinitude of every life.

  An essay can be a chorus. It can crowdsource. For instance, I could send an email to my students and tell them I’m trying—I mean, essaying—to write an essay about essays. I could ask them: What can an essay be? I could spur them on: It can be a protest, a betrayal, an eyesore, a hack job, a salvage yard, a trash fire.

  When I say, I could ask them, I mean, I did. The essay is more like a student than a teacher anyway. Andrew said: An essay is what happens when an unfinished thought doesn’t get away—it’s the fisher-person’s story of reeling that thought in. Sometimes we cry: “Bullshit!” Kate said an essay could be a tapestry, a dishrag, or a plea. Joseph just said: An essay can be selfish. Nick said: Some essays seem to sweat. Lisa said the best kind of essay reaches you like a letter from an ex-lover. Zoe said: Not sure what an essay is or can be, now that you mention it. It’s the five-paragraph, in-class bane of existence in high school. What it becomes after that? Not a “trash fire” that’s for sure. Our president-elect is a trash fire. What else? Does anyone know? No one even gets what I’m saying when I tell them I’m writing essays in graduate school. I’m going to keep thinking on it whether you need me to or not.

  I thought: Good. Do that. An essay is the thing that refuses to be done too soon. It’s all of the above: a suitcase, a tapestry, a dishrag, the fisher-person’s story. It’s always somewhere, sweating. It’s the second grave, the one that holds what’s left of you. It’s the drone over the water, the sudden glimpse that says, This has always been public. It’s a plate of uneaten green beans. It’s a search for just the right metaphor for an addict’s vomit, which is made of the same stuff as anyone else’s.

  The essay resists the easy binaries we might draw between interior and exterior, self-indulgence and curiosity, beauty and ethics, aesthetics and politics. It implicates itself in what it critiques. It makes wild moves but holds itself accountable to truth—and always, also, to spell ca
sting and enchantment. It’s the subway-car dancers I saw just this afternoon, on my way home from work, riding the Q train over the late-sun-spackled water of the East River, while I was indulging some foggy reverie about the Statue of Liberty and the hypothetical people to whom it promises refuge, when I was interrupted by the actual bodies of actual people beside me, in motion—dancers spinning on poles and twisting in the air, hanging from metal bars touched by the hands of a thousand strangers. The essay isn’t made of distant abstractions but proximate lives and bodies. It disrupts the car. It might kick you in the face. It uses the materials of the ordinary world, things you might see every day—railings and poles and sliding doors—to create a particular choreography that hasn’t happened before and won’t ever happen again. It turns the common world into generative constraint, into sheer possibility.

  America is the Q train at twilight . . . America is a line of barges on the East River . . . America isn’t the Statue of Liberty but the subway dancer who blocks your view of the Statue of Liberty. The essay knows that. It knows that America isn’t the iconic body of a woman in robes, larger than life, but the stranger’s body right next to your own—the stranger’s body in headphones, daydreaming, or in the midst of a cell phone argument. The essay lives in moments of disruption. It lives in the belief that no beauty is innocent, no ugliness is fixed or simple, every life is bottomless, and no experience is ever only private. An essay doesn’t simply transcribe the world, it finds the world. It makes the world. It remakes the world. It puts a boom box right on the floor and starts playing.

  Leslie Jamison

  JASON ARMENT

  Two Shallow Graves

  FROM The Florida Review

  I met a man who was soon to die. The man had been a farmer or herder in the desert before the war broke out in Iraq; that’s what I assumed, anyway, as professions were extremely limited in the middle of the desert. I couldn’t see his hands to tell if heavy calluses and cracked nails marked him as a manual laborer because they were zip-tied behind his back, and I couldn’t see his feet either since he was on his knees. His head bowed low, he trembled as he sobbed, the noises muffled by the sandbag over his head. What set this man apart from all the other people I met in Iraq who died soon after—Iraqi police at checkpoints who would disappear into the dark hours of night or become balls of flame during the day; Marines I met in passing who would barbecue in their Humvees; Iraqis I barely noticed who’d get run over or fall ill or disintegrate in a hail of gunfire—is that none of them knew. This man did.

  Echo Company had driven many, many miles north of Hob—“a shitload of klicks,” as a Sergeant had put it during the half-assed company mission briefing. Enormous swaths of the desert were to be swept for Bomb Makers and other, lower-profile insurgents who would carry out the violence. During the brief the Captain had instructed Echo Company to keep an eye out for terrain models, copper plates disguised as ashtrays, wires, and chalky substances while searching peoples’ houses. When the company’s convoy finished the long trek out to the middle of nowhere, taking from dawn until midday, the gun trucks formed a large circle and faced outward. All of Weapons Platoon stood post in turrets and driver’s seats of vehicles for days while the rest of the platoons went hunting. Finally, Third Platoon brought someone in.

  The man was guilty; his crying gave it away. The Iraqis we brought in who cried were guilty. They knew they were going to be turned over to the Iraqi Army or the Iraqi Police and from there they would, as the Marine Corps saying goes, be in a world of shit. The IA’s brutality toward POWs passed from Marine to Marine as lore, an oral history from those who’d walked into IA or IP prisons outfitted with meat hooks hanging from the ceiling, who’d watched the IA attach jumper cables to scrotal flesh; senior Marines passed these stories to those in their charge. The Marine who told me about the jumper cables coercion also remarked on smelling burnt meat and hair, like a farmer recounting a hog being slaughtered, while the Marine who’d seen the meat hooks just sounded sad when he talked about it. Both Marines were my superiors, veterans of the invasion. Crying wouldn’t save the Bomb Maker. It only let us know he was guilty beyond a doubt—the guilty POWs always cried, the innocent never shed a tear. Not that there was much of a doubt after his house was swept for contraband.

  Third Platoon found a terrain model of an Iraqi Police station built to a scale on par with ambitious sand castles. Third Platoon also found bomb-making materials: wires, explosives, copper plates, cell phones, beepers, and wind-up timers from old washers and dryers. When Third brought in the man they called him the Bomb Maker, and that’s what he’d been known as since. Third also called him a PUC, Person Under Custody. If we called him a POW, Prisoner of War, in any paperwork, the prisoner would have been granted rights under the Geneva Convention. The man on his knees wouldn’t have his status change from PUC for about forty-eight hours, when the United States felt it appropriate, and he would become a POW. The seemingly ambiguous number of hours being how far the U.S. was willing to bend the rules of war.

  “Who put him on his knees?” I asked Ulrich, who had been pulled off of post to watch the PUC.

  “Nobody,” Ulrich said, walking forward out of a vehicle’s shadow. “He wants to pray.”

  “He’s praying, huh?” I said. “I wonder what he’s saying.”

  The desert’s night breeze blew between us with a gentle hiss of sand moving. The man’s prayers, interspersed with crying, sounded like nothing more than whispered Arabic to me and I doubted they would save him; it would be left to Allah’s vengeance, sometime in the future, to show He had not forsaken His people. How his head bowed made sense now. He was trying to prostrate himself before Allah, but the restraints held him upright. I would like to say that I felt for him. But I didn’t. I watched his tears plunging down to become black dots on the desert floor. Great forces had moved us into opposition. I stood on the side of might, and therefore right, while he rested on his knees in the sand with a bag on his head and his hands bound. It was like watching a man being swept out to sea by a rip tide; there was nothing I could do to save him, even if I was as complicit as the moon.

  Looking back now I wonder how it didn’t weigh more heavily on my mind then, how I remained so aloof. I knew the man’s fate as well as he did, knew it to be morally wrong and a mistake by the standards of agreements and policies written long ago. This knowledge obligated me to do something to stop it. I didn’t though. I found acquiescence to be a refuge even as I was troubled in a way that touched me deeply. But it’s easy for me to forget the hunger, the sun pounding down, sleeping in full gear, the night breeze cracking my skin, how I quenched my thirst with water as hot as a locker-room shower, and the intense solitude of fifteen-hour posts behind a turret staring out into the desert for ten days straight. Right and wrong had boiled down to survival. At this point in the occupation, insurgent tactics revolved around actions by lone wolves. I wasn’t worried about FOBs being overrun, as had happened with one of 2/24 Battalion’s FOBs during its first time over—another company in 2/24, Fox, had been overrun, but Echo had been spared the baptism by fire. My main concerns were snipers and copper-plate IEDs. This put the man across from me directly at odds with my existence.

  As far as I knew this guy had personally made the bombs that killed the guys in Fox earlier in the tour when they ran over an IED and roasted in their vics after being sent out on a fool’s errand by their CO. The man fit the profile of a Bomb Maker who would funnel IEDs and munitions to the hearts of conflict in the al-Anbar province. Aside from having the setup and paraphernalia, the man lived far away from the cities where he wouldn’t have to worry about the Iraqi Police stopping by his house to discover the large terrain model of their station, nor the blasts from the devices he created. The man had nothing to worry about until Echo formed up its hunting party in a circle facing outward onto the desert plain. Now here he was, on his knees, sobbing prayers to a god that had turned his back on the land between the Tigris and Euphrates. Maybe the m
an thought about it while he was on his knees, how Saddam’s audacity led him to write Allah’s name on Iraq’s flag as if he had the power to command Allah’s blessing; then the Westerners had come with their gun trucks and their young men and their thundering aircraft. War had descended on the land, bringing with it destruction, desolation, pestilence, and finally despair as the Marines rooted out the insurgency.

  The Bomb Maker was a “no-joke bad guy.” A mujahedin in the language of the Arabs, a “freedom fighter” in my own. He’d be put to death as certainly as the harsh desert sun would sweep westward over the sky in the morning. The same sun that had watched his fathers build and prosper would watch as the IPs loaded him into a truck and took him to a bitter end.

  Ulrich and I stood long together in silence; at this point in our tour in Iraq, we’d become like an old couple, able to be quiet in each other’s company for days. As with most old couples, the shadow of death never left us. The war was wearing us down in body and mind. Backs ached from supporting body armor for ten days straight. Compacted disks groaned and creaked from the stress. Heels rubbed raw from never leaving their boots. From what I gathered in fleeting glimpses of my reflection in rearview mirrors of trucks, I looked like a street urchin. Ten days of sleeping on the desert sand or in the bed of a truck without washing my hands had left dirt smeared across my face, hands, and forearms. Splotches of darkly discolored skin peppered my body. Unbeknownst to me then, I’d picked up a fungus that liked the damp seams of my uniform and the sweatiest part of my body armor along the collar. After the war I’d go to a store every few months in search of some kind of foot cream to slather over my neck and chest; the rash never went away, though, only went back into remission. Ulrich’s filth was only noticeable by how light-colored the desert’s fine dust made him. Instead of a deep mahogany, his skin looked like a powdered doughnut, a kind of reverse blackface.