'New Beginnings Are Born of Brokenness': A Conversation With Prof. Michael D. Jackson

HDS Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions Michael D. Jackson is an anthropologist with extensive fieldwork experience in West Africa and Aboriginal Australia. He is the author of 40 works of anthropology, poetry, fiction, and memoir, and his academic work has been strongly influenced by critical theory, American pragmatism, and existential-phenomenological thought.

Below, HDS student Emily Farnsworth speaks with Jackson about his book, The Paper Nautilus, published in November 2019 by Otago University Press. The book provides a vivid image of the interplay of death and rebirth since, for new life to begin, the beautiful but fragile shell that sustained a former life must be shattered.

Harvard Divinity School: How did you settle on The Paper Nautilus as the book title?

Michael D. Jackson: I felt moved to write a book about separation and loss. Not an academic treatise, but a work that combined memoir, essays and fiction, but relied on images rather than ideas to convey its theme. As I reflected on the vicissitudes of my life, the lives of my close friends, and the lives of the people I have gotten to know in the course of my fieldwork in West Africa and Aboriginal Australia, I was struck by the many ways that new life and new beginnings are born of brokenness. The paper nautilus provided a vivid image of this interplay of death and rebirth. A fragile shell buoys the eggs of the pelagic octopus to the surface of the sea whereupon it is blown into inshore waters. There the angelically beautiful brood chamber breaks and the baby octopuses begin their life cycle.

HDS: How does this book compare to or relate with your previous publications?

MJ: I have published 40 books of poetry, fiction, and anthropology, but in recent years, have experimented with juxtaposing academic essays, ethnographic descriptions, personal reminiscences, and creative non-fiction in an attempt to do fuller justice to my themes. Barawa (1986), Harmattan (2015) and The Genealogical Imagination (in press) are examples.

HDS: What made you choose to make this a three-part, multi-genre work?

MJ: The short answer is that some of my favorite books transgress genre boundaries. Such classics of philosophical fiction as Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nauseé, Albert Camus’ L’Etranger, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness all juxtapose showing and telling. I thought it might be more reader-friendly and illuminating to interleave the distilled and generalized knowledge so characteristic of the academy with the more aporetic, eventful, and non-discursive forms of literature.

I also drew inspiration from a Kuranko perspective in which there is a complementary relationship between foundation myths (kuma kore, lit. ‘venerable speech’) that are held to be ‘true’, and antinomian tales (tilei) that are admittedly make-believe. While myths support the status quo—the authority of chiefs, the wisdom of elders, the alleged inferiority of women, the importance of tradition—folktales play with reality, challenging hierarchy, reversing roles, and exploring fantastic possibilities for righting wrongs and redressing injustices.

HDS: Who are the Kuranko?

MJ: They are a Mande-speaking people who live in the remote north of Sierra Leone and across the border into Guinea. I have been doing fieldwork there for 50 years, and my book, Allegories of the Wilderness (1982) was a study of Kuranko storytelling as a form of ethical discourse.   

HDS: Did you find that certain genres were better suited to expressing or developing certain ideas?

MJ: I would say they offer different perspectives on critical experiences. In life as in art, events appear differently to different participants or observers, and this Roshomon effect makes truth relative to who is speaking, and what their interests are.

All human beings react to catastrophic loss in similar ways. The fight or flight reaction, or the bereavement action reflect our phylogenetic makeup. But the ways in which these instinctual reactions find expression will differ from person to person. This is why one sometimes feels a need to complement the general findings of science with a focus on individual situations and experiences, or even switch between factual and fictional versions of the same reality. Besides, our views of reality change over time, and just as our memories are constantly being reworked in the unconscious, so our views of ourselves and our significant others are subject to revision. 

Paul Auster observes that "it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author." This claim reflects Auster’s view that every person comprises several selves, and that a fiction writer fleshes out some of these shadowy figures in his work, as well as events that might have come to pass had he taken a different road in life. The same is true of an ethnographer whose work is peopled by figures that are, in part, projections of his own unconscious. 

HDS: This book’s epigraph, from Arabella Kurtz’s The Good Story, makes a distinction between “an I-and-you truth” or “a relational truth” and a “pure and lonely truth.” What did you learn about the value of this relational truth in writing the memoir and fiction sections of this book, which draw so heavily on your life’s most significant relationships?

MJ: One of the characters in my book cites Heraclitus. Everything is in flux (panta rhei). One cannot step into the same river twice, for neither self nor river stay constant over time. We are always changing in life, in relation to the people we are with and the situations we are in. Although we have a sense of ourselves as constant over time, with fixed destinies as heroes or victims, my interest is in our interpersonal lives, our relationships with one another, with our histories, and with our environments. Accordingly, we are never in sole possession of the truth about ourselves, or for that matter, the truth about others. The truth lies in between, which is why it is so mercurial.

HDS: In a letter you wrote, included as part of one of the book’s memoirs, you cited Nietzsche’s assertion that all philosophy is disguised autobiography and suggested that the inverse is also true. Since much of this book is intentionally autobiographical, how would you summarize the philosophy that is disguised in this book?

MJ: My thinking has been strongly influenced by William James’s and John Dewey’s pragmatism, Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism. I am fascinated by the relationship between the world and the world we call our own, the world beyond our ken and the world that lies within our grasp, between worlds for which we have no words and the worlds we encompass with language.

Working out how we can negotiate the gap between our immediate sphere of being and beings who are non-identical with us is as central to ethnography as it is to religion. In spite of being aware that eternity is infinite and human life finite, that the cosmos is great and the human world small, and that nothing anyone says or does can immunize him or her from the contingencies of history, the tyranny of circumstance, the finality of death, and the accidents of fate, it seems to me that every human being needs some modicum of choice, craves some degree of understanding, demands some say, and expects some sense of control over the course of his or her own life. Writing, like ritual and storytelling, is, in my view, simply one of the many techniques human beings have devised for creating the illusion of control. However, it is a necessary illusion, for without it we would be lost.

HDS: The fictional section of this book pulls many of the book’s themes and characters together through a series of seemingly fated coincidences. In one of your essays earlier in the book, you discuss the problem with tidying life up into a narrative, that when one does so “an inner voice reminds the writer that he or she is violating the truth.” How did your experience turning personal memoir into fiction answer or not answer these ideas about narrativizing the “complexity and chaos of existence?”

MJ: I tried to be faithful to my view that fiction, religion, and explanatory models in science should never presume closure or certainty. Every essay in understanding should respect the limits of human communication and acknowledge the provisionality of one’s worldview. If this imparts a somewhat incoherent, unfinished, character to the book, so be it. Life itself is never coherent or finished, even though people die, and the future of human life on earth is in the balance. The paper nautilus is as fragile as the environment of which it is a part.

HDS: One of the varieties of loss discussed in this book is that of the expatriate’s separation from the land of their birth. This sense of loss is demonstrated through your many vivid depictions of the New Zealand landscape. Did you write any of this book in your homeland or were you working from memory?

MJ: I worked from memory, which is often as vivid as it is flawed. But you are right. I suffer recurring bouts of nostalgia and it pains me that the Covid crisis has forced me to defer a planned trip home this fall. An unresolved question haunts every expatriate: "Am I longing for the years of my youth or for the country where I was young?" As Horace observed, Caelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt (They change their sky but not their soul who cross the ocean). In my new book, Quandaries of Belonging (2020), I explore indigenous Māori relationships to the land, the sea, and one another as well as raise questions about my relationship, as a Pākeha (a New Zealander of European descent) to my country’s violent history of dispossession, systemic racism, and social injustice.

HDS: Do you teach any courses on topics that overlap with the ideas in this book?

MJ: I teach a course called "The Shock of the New," based on current research on primary intersubjectivity (the formation of vital relationships in infancy), the bereavement reaction, and separation trauma. And my course, "The Politics of Storytelling," touches on the ways in which storytelling helps us cope with loss by sharing experience and recovering a sense of control over events that rendered us powerless and bereft. 

Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) has been a constant source of inspiration in my teaching and writing. Coping with loss is not a matter of heroically beating the odds, or triumphing in the face of adversity, but of our human capacity for new beginnings. Arendt speaks of this capacity as natality. "The life span of [human beings] running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action, like an ever-present reminder that [human beings], though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin." 

It is worth adding, I think, that we are constantly preparing ourselves for such moments in our everyday fantasies of embarking on another life somewhere else, in our search for a soul mate, a heavenly home or a panacea for all our ills, or in our nightly dreams, as we clear away the debris of our yesterdays in order to freely enter the day ahead. 

HDS: What kind of reader do you anticipate will benefit from or find interest in this book?

MJ: I have no idea who will read or benefit from this book. Writing is an act of faith—the faith that others have shared one’s experiences and may find in one’s own account of loss a way of coming to terms with their own. I love those lines in Orhun Pamuk’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble each other, that others carry wounds like mine—that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble each other. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center."

HDS: What kind of projects are you working on now?

MJ: I have just finished a new work of fiction called Reunion, inspired by the responses of people I know to the Covid-19 crisis, and I am now working on an intellectual autobiography.

—by Emily Farnsworth, HDS correspondent