https://twitter.com/AnitaFelicelli/status/353222891468365825
Last Friday, while most Americans were enjoying the long weekend, novelist Joyce Carol Oates tweeted the following question: “Where 99.3% of women report having been sexually harassed & rape is epidemic–Egypt–natural to inquire: what’s the predominant religion?” I was more than a little taken aback. This tweet didn’t sound like the highly intelligent author Joyce Carol Oates.
That Joyce Carol Oates knows violence, is smart about describing violence, understands violence as something that could erupt from all kinds of human beings, including Americans, including non-Muslims. I tweeted, “UGH. This should be beneath you.”
It’s routinely open season on Islam (and for that matter anything associated in the popular imagination with brown or black people) in America. But with the nature of her oeuvre, I expect more humanity from Oates. But maybe I’ve been misreading her novels?
In a 2012 interview with Salon, she said, “there is the pretense that history hasn’t been a sequence of bloody wars and that it’s an aberration of some sort in a writer or artist who perceives the obvious fact that there is indeed “violence” in the world — which is to say, in the human heart.” At her best, Oates understands violence is a human problem and phenomenon.
[pullquote]At her best, Oates understands violence is a human problem and phenomenon[/pullquote]
A few other people tweeted their dismay at her train of thought, but Oates kept going. She tweeted, “Rape culture” has no relationship to any “religious culture”–how can this be? Religion has no effect on behavior at all? How possible?”
This tweet, of course, was misdirection designed to set thinking people back. Religion is prescriptive. As Oates tweeted, if it does not affect culture, what good is it? Religion as interpreted by fallible human beings does affect behavior, of course. But that does not rationally lead to the claim that rapists are doing so because of religious influence — she need only look at America’s appalling rape statistics to know why someone might be disturbed by the causal relationship implied in her tweet.
I wondered what Oates would say if I focused on something that the media reports as being a big problem in an America dominated by Christianity — the regular mass school shootings of children. I tweeted (rhetorically) “Do you also think that mass gun violence in schools bears a relationship to Christianity?” I thought faced with absurdity she might course-correct.
Instead, Oates tweeted to me, “Yes. There is a Christian Crusade culture. All religions are “militant.” Secular law needed to restrain them.”
I don’t know if Oates said this to save face or because she really believes it, but wow. With my own set of biases, I’d assumed she was doing what seems to be popular right now — tossing off pithy and unfair generalizations about cultures and religions related to brown people. Whatever her original motivation for the first tweet, she was quite willing to throwing stones at all religions, making their most radical movements synonymous for the entire religion.
Meanwhile, on Salon an article had been posted calling Oates’s tweets Islamophobic. So was her comment on Christian Crusade culture an earnest tweet or a disingenuous effort to save face after being accused of Islamophobia? Liking her writing as I do, I want to believe it’s the former, but I’m afraid it’s probably the latter.
Oates’s response doesn’t make much sense in light of her opening tweet about Islam. If Oates believes all religions are militant and give rise to violence, why does it matter which religion is dominant in Egypt? Why is it “natural” to wonder what the dominant religion there is? According to her tweet about Christians and schoolroom shootings, it could just as well be any religion.
When violence is local, like an American school shooting, those who comment usually focus on the fact that the perpetrator was different, didn’t fit in. In fact, even when there is no mental illness involved, the public makes an effort to manufacture one, to explain away the evil as an aberration of the culture rather than a symptom of it. If it’s a local rape, we see from Steubenville coverage that our mainstream media reports more sympathy for the boy rapists, than the rape victim.
But when the problem is farther away, like in Egypt or India, the small-minded pick on the otherness itself as the problem, whether it’s a country’s dominant religious beliefs or as David Brooks put it, their “intellectual DNA.”
I knew two nerdy young men in high school in Palo Alto who expressed on several occasions that “all women” should be raped, deserved to be raped when they talked back to men. They happened to be Israeli and Russian by birth and ancestry, though they grew up in America. Both were Jewish.
Most people understand immediately that it would be inane and anti-Semitic for me to suggest that it was these young men’s Jewishness that led to their belief that all women should be raped. But in America, you need only see the comments section of the Salon piece on Oates’s Islamaphobia to know that it’s not only okay, but praiseworthy to make these nonsensical claims about Muslims.
[pullquote]We know there are permutations of violence that are culturally sanctioned[/pullquote]
We know there are permutations of violence that are culturally sanctioned. But religion and culture are not equivalent. Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism are incredibly complex, even in their ideal rather than as-practiced forms. The dark hearts of people of all faiths and cultures pervert and twist whatever is handy to justify, beget and sustain their violent acts.
Is it natural to ask about a country’s predominant religion? Maybe. It is natural to possess biases, prejudices and random half-baked ideas. But natural is not the same thing as good. And natural is not the same thing as rational. Few of us expect a feminist literary force to casually air and luxuriate in what reads as bigotry on Twitter. Maybe it is natural to indulge in one’s worst cognitive errors in response to violence, but it is also depressingly small. [pullquote align=”right”]Few of us expect a feminist literary force to casually air and luxuriate in what reads as bigotry on Twitter[/pullquote]
Perhaps Oates would agree. A few days later she tweeted a possible course-correction: “Blaming religion(s) for cruel behavior of believers may be a way of not wishing to acknowledge they’d be just as cruel if secular.”
Anita Felicelli authored the novel “Sparks Off You” and “Letters to an Albatross,” a book of poetry. She can be found on Twitter @anitafelicelli.
If you’re familiar with Oates, I’m surprised that you assume bad faith on her part — “a disingenuous effort to save face” — regarding her reply about school shootings and Christianity. Consider what she’s said about Christianity before, both in her novels like Son of the Morning and in interviews:
Playboy (November 1993) ‘I’m not a person who feels very friendly toward organized religion. I think people have been brainwashed through the centuries. The churches, particularly the Catholic Church, are patriarchal organizations that have been invested with power for the sake of the people in power, who happen to be men. It breeds corruption. I found going to church every Sunday and on holy days an exercise in extreme boredom. I never felt that the priest had any kind of connection with God. I’ve never felt that anyone who stands up and says “Look, I have the answers” has the answers. I would look around in church and see people praying and sometimes crying and genuflecting, saying the rosary, and I never felt any identification. I never felt that I was experiencing what they were experiencing. I couldn’t figure out whether or not they were pretending. . . . Organized religions such as the Catholic Church are the antithesis of religious experience. . . . The persistence of crackpots, pseudoscientists like astrologers, suggests the failure of science and education. How can people still be superstitious, still believe in nonsense and astrology and grotesque demonic religions of every kind, every fundamentalist religion crowding us on all sides? How can we have these phenomena and say that science and education have not failed? That’s embarrassing.’
The New York Times Magazine (25 December 1994): ‘I was never very religious, so I look upon the phenomenon of religion as interesting. But religion has been used by people in power for their own ends, which are pretty transparent, and they are men. So there are different ways of experiencing religion. I mean, obviously, the inner and the spiritual are very different from what I’m talking about.’
For anyone who thinks that Oates would be negative about Christianity only as a way to seem consistent, as a way to cover up some particularized bigotry against Islam, I recommend reading http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/JoyceCarolOates.html
In actuality, Oates like many atheists tends to blame religion for all acts committed by purported followers of the religion and even for acts committed by those who live within the culture shaped by the religion. By all means, condemn that sophomoric viewpoint, but it’s simply ignoring decades of Oates’s statements to pretend that she only hates Islam.
I don’t “assume bad faith”- weighing her words, I reasoned out that there was at least some bad faith. If she’s equally against all religions, there was no reason to single out Islam in the first place in connection with rape. And I’m aware she has said she is “skeptical” of religion—so am I—but there’s a tremendous leap from being rationally “skeptical” of something to labeling it the cause of school shootings or rape. It’s been a long while since I’ve read anything by her. In We Were the Mulvaneys, she criticizes Christianity in the victim and her family, but not in the rapist, at least as far as I recall. In Foxfire and other short stories I’ve read, I don’t recall that a faith in Christianity was an impetus to rape or other forms of violence. Thanks for these quotes and interviews, though, they are enlightening as to a side of her, that as you can see, I’m not familiar with.
Thanks for your reply.
If we’re weighing words and not making assumptions, then note that Oates didn’t “single out Islam in the first place in connection with rape.” She didn’t say which religion she meant. The order of her tweets was:
* Something dispiriting about “Brotherhood” political parties–wonder what it is.
* Where 99.3% of women report having been sexually harassed & rape is epidemic–Egypt–natural to inquire: what’s the predominant religion?
And then everyone decided she must be bashing all Islamic belief as promoting rape.
If we read contextually, she appears to be speaking about the predominant religion of Egypt not as a generic Islam, encompassing everything from Sufism to Ismailism to the Wahhabi movement, but as that specifically endorsed by the Muslim Brotherhood. And surely certain Muslim movements (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/world/middleeast/muslim-brotherhoods-words-on-women-stir-liberal-fears.html) and politicians (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/world/middleeast/egyptian-women-blamed-for-sexual-assaults.html) and preachers (http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2013/02/07/264982.html) DO promote rape culture as being part of Islam.
Oates has not treated all Islam as worse than all Christianity in her past writings; see eg her admiration for Muhammad Ali: “Ali was the Muslim pioneer through whose unwavering example such athletes as Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul Jabbar were allowed to change their names and present themselves explicitly as members of a distinctly non-Christian and non-traditional religion.” Or her praise for Ali as memoirist: “In the Autobiography of Malcolm X, for instance, a chapter concludes bluntly: ‘All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did. If I hadn’t, I’d probably still be a brain-washed black Christian.”
Frankly I’m puzzled by the idea that one can get a good idea of what someone’s own views are based on her fiction writing. Writers often create characters with whom they have a kind of sympathy without treating the character as a mouthpiece for the author. Surely one wouldn’t try to gauge Nabokov’s views on statutory rape laws based on Lolita.
In Oates’s case, there’s lots of nonfiction in which *she*, not a character, states what Oates believes. She’s been writing and speaking for many decades, so she no doubts contains multitudes and contradicts herself. But if all you know of a writer is her fiction, then I’m not surprised that you were surprised by what she says when she says what she thinks.
(Incidentally, re: Oates’s being a “feminist literary force,” she’s said of “We Were the Mulvaneys”: “The novel is not basically feminist; it has no ideology; it is a story about individuals, not a tract.” Oates’s writing may strike you as feminist but I’m not sure it’s what she’s trying to do.)
Given the kinds of information you find relevant, I can see why you’d feel frustrated and need to take it out on a 1000 word essay. I see Oates primarily as a fiction writer– her fiction is what she means to leave behind, not her publicity materials. If you don’t think there’s much to be gained from her fiction then why bother to read her interviews, tweets in such detail? Why is she important as a public figure, but for her fiction?
Your idea that I think characters are mouthpieces for the author is naive from the perspective of both literary analysis and cultural criticism. If you were as careful and sophisticated a reader as you are a diligent information gatherer, you’d know why I see humanism and feminism in Oates’ novels and it has nothing to do with her characters being stand-ins for her and everything to do with the way she handles story, prose, narrative distance, exposition, resolution etc.
This is intended to be a short treatment, a 1000 word essay, and you’ve gone outside the scope in order to educate me on things that you assume I haven’t considered for myself and dismissed for good reason. You’re fighting a straw man and you would do better to simply write your own essay with the starting points you think are critical. When an anonymous Internet commenter feels the need to throw in a Lolita reference and a Walt Whitman reference apropos of nothing, they’re trolling, not engaging. We’re not kindred spirits, so it’s a waste of time to attempt to discuss further on the merits.
Since I am commenting in good faith, I’ll answer your questions like they were posed in the same.
“If you don’t think there’s much to be gained from her fiction then why bother to read her interviews, tweets in such detail? Why is she important as a public figure, but for her fiction?”
Oates is important as a public figure for her fiction. That doesn’t mean you can understand HER based on her fiction, or really know much of anything about her from it other than the breadth of her knowledge on the detailed facts embedded in her stories. Your tone of disappointment (“I was more than a little taken aback. This tweet didn’t sound like the highly intelligent author Joyce Carol Oates.”) and reasoning out that she must have replied to you in bad faith are indicative of someone who thinks she “knows” Oates in some way that makes Oates’s tweets appear out of character.
What I can gain from a writer’s fiction (or a musician’s songs or an actor’s performance) has very little to do with the creator of the work. I have emotions and resonances about the work that have nothing to do with the creator. [Warning: I am making the following pop music references to give specific examples of my overall abstract point, not to troll. If they are somehow trollish, I apologize in advance.]
Before Wikipedia, I thought the Fastball song “The Way” was inspired by Tennyson’s “The Lotus Eaters” and John Mellencamp’s “I Saw You First” by The Great Gatsby. Now I know better, but when those song come on the radio, I still have my own thoughts and nostalgia for reading those works as a teenager at the same time those songs were becoming popular. My feeling about them isn’t dictated by the songwriter’s. These differences between what a work means to the creator and what it can mean to someone else are how you can have a radically different “Dancing in the Dark” from Mary Chapin Carpenter than was originated by Bruce Springsteen, and the listener gets utterly different sensations from each.
Whatever Oates is or says or does shouldn’t change how you feel about her fiction. It can only change how you feel about her as a person — and based on your apparent lack of interest in learning about Oates-as-person until she caused a Twitter firestorm, your prior feelings about her were based on very little fact.
I’m sorry you take literary references to be trolling (kind of a bizarre view for a writer, but OK…). If the only discussion you find meritorious is with people you deem kindred spirits, the internet must be a harsh place indeed — its standards are usually at best civility and honesty, neither of which I’ve breached.
I am puzzled as to why you initially said I was providing new-to-you information (“Thanks for these quotes and interviews, though, they are enlightening as to a side of her, that as you can see, I’m not familiar with.”), but now imply that you knew it all and dismissed it for an unstated good reason. I’m not personally attacking you (if only I could say the same were true vice versa), so there’s no need to get defensive.
If you think I am wrong and that a writer’s fiction is a better guide to what that writer thinks than what the writer has said in her copious nonfiction, and thus you know Oates well enough to judge what is out of character for her or when she is being disingenuous or dishonest, feel free to argue that point and I won’t be offended.
I understand now why you’re confused by my snippy response- I apologize if it bothered you, I was writing it from the ER. In any event, I didn’t write the title to this piece- editors often write titles of articles you read. I didn’t know that until I started selling pieces to magazines and so I would go into a piece primed to think that was what it was expressly saying. My words were “taken aback”. And as I noted in my first response to you, I had not read those particular quotes you pulled up in order to back up your point. I have read other nonfiction by Oates and I knew she doesn’t believe in God. If you do your research a little better, you’ll see that she also doesn’t expressly doesn’t like to consider herself an atheist. She tends towards secular humanism (if you’re curious, this is one of many examples: http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/JoyceCarolOates.html.)
Secular humanists (I am one myself) don’t necessarily target single religions as the source of any particular wrong- they tend to see problems as multifaceted, more complex. That’s why I was taken aback. And you’re right, if I read the quotes you presented me with years ago, I might have been less so, I can’t say.
As for our other disagreement, I went to the trouble of finding out about Oates the person in high school because I liked her fiction- it was supplemental, not a replacement. Moreover paragraph 4-5 of your comment I agree with wholeheartedly– but again, outside the scope of my piece. What I find trollish is writing long dissertations in the comments section throwing in quotes in order to impress, instead of sticking with a close reading of their essay in order to explain why you think whatever it is you think. I see why someone who does that doesn’t find that trollish and in fact, this exchange has been absolutely fascinating and useful to me, but I do think you’ve made your point articulately and yet it simply isn’t one I agree with for the most part. Best, Anita
I’m currently working as a journalist, so I’m familiar with the phenomenon of having a headline on one’s writing that wasn’t written by the author. However, I write about law and not personal experiences, so a headline can’t erroneously describe what I feel, however far off the mark it is from the content of my analysis.
I hope that if you think this piece was somehow mis-titled (though I would have thought “UGH. This should be beneath you” indicated disappointment in Oates), you address this concern with the editors of this website.
“if you’re curious, this is one of many examples” — Yes, that’s the exact same link that was the only link in my first comment.
Oates says in response to the question, “Do you identify as an atheist?”
“I’m not averse to acknowledging it, but as a novelist and a writer, I really don’t want to confront and be antagonistic toward people. As soon as you declare that you are an atheist, it’s like somebody declaring that he is the son of God; it arouses a lot of antagonism. I’m wondering whether it might be better to avoid arousing this antagonism in order to find–not compromise–some common ground.”
I have no idea why you read that statement and thought, “she also doesn’t expressly doesn’t like to consider herself an atheist.” She expressly said “I’m not averse to acknowledging [my atheism].” She said she doesn’t “declare” herself an atheist — she doesn’t like *other* people to consider her an atheist — because “it arouses a lot of antagonism.” This is an outward-facing concern, not a problem of internal identification.
I think we’re applying different kinds of analysis. My training in reading texts is both as a lawyer and a student of literature. As I’m sure you know, lawyers don’t “throw in quotes in order to impress,” we do it to provide the direct textual source for our arguments where we fear that paraphrasing would cause our citation to lose some force. (It seems ridiculous in the age of the internet and cut-and-paste to be *impressed* by quotes.)
I find it helpful, if we both think that Q&A tells us something about Oates and atheism, to put the words in front of us and figure out why we got such totally different things from them. Maybe I’m reading them too literally? Maybe Oates is referencing something else she’s said or written that changes the meaning of her words — I certainly haven’t read everything Oates.
To you, this quoting may seem like an attempt to impress, but I don’t know why because these words are equally accessible to anyone with an internet connection — they’re not some special possession of mine. I find the accessibility of texts these days to be a great leveler.
Relatedly, the way I was taught to do close reading while getting a BA in English literature was to look at the actual words and not what my mind supplies, which is why I went back to what Oates actually tweeted instead of what many minds had supplied, i.e. that she must be talking about all Islam. Instead, I posited that maybe she was making a specific criticism of the kind of Islam preached by the Muslim Brotherhood. You ignored this part of my second comment — perhaps you have some source of knowledge that I lack, that makes you certain that you know exactly what Oates meant and therefore my hypothesis must be incorrect.
But this difference in how we deal with text does make it very difficult for us to communicate.
I quote in order to make clear the source of my argument. You regard quotes as attempts to impress.
You make claims without citing your basis for them, e.g. saying “you were commenting on me as a person with your first response,” without pointing to *what*, exactly, in what you call a “long dissertation” was the comment on you as a person. I regard this as frustrating the purpose of communication, because it obfuscates instead of clarifies.
I write at length here because I realize that what I am saying may be controversial. Unlike a fictitious work, where it’s fine for people to get something very different from it than what went through my mind creating it, I *don’t* want people to misinterpret an argumentative or analytic text that’s become ambiguous due to brevity. So I supply a plethora of quotes, examples, etc. to maximize the likelihood that someone reading in good faith will understand the points I’m making. This hypothetical generous reader may well understand and decide that I’m wrong, and that’s fine — I hope that such a person responds and tells me why I’m wrong, preferably in a generous way that makes the source of the disagreement clear.
I don’t need an excuse to comment on this website beyond the fact that it’s one of three blogs that I bother to read and comment on regularly (and the only non-legal one), because the administrators generally get good writers and I want to support their efforts to build an audience. You’ve clicked on this page however many times now because people have commented, and hopefully this discussion has been interesting to other readers. That sort of effort, to me, is worthwhile in an online community.
I’m trying to find a way to articulate this thought, but it’s not coming easily. I hope this makes sense. If a public figure makes a negative comment about Christianity or Christians, we generally assume they are coming at that from an atheist/agnostic or, at least, very secular place. Bill Maher does this all the time. He’s not, generally, thought of as hating white people or hating all Christians. Beyond a few very fringe Fox News types, we don’t really even have a word for anti-Christian sentiment in our discourse that’s equivalent to Islamophobia. Yet, when Maher makes a similar comment about Islam, he does get called Islamophobic by many commenters on the left. We’ve seen similar things with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, etc. They’re viewed as a bit on the extreme end, but acceptable when talking about Christianity, but get the whole lefty book of insults thrown at them when they make a similar comment about Islam. There is a double standard. Now, of course, there’s a contextual power dynamic thing, too. I think it’s difficult to separate the idea that in the recent history of international affairs and, as immigrants to ‘western’ countries, Muslims often get the shaft from the idea that they are the dominant power and often an oppressive one in their own home countries. There’s a tension there. I think there’s something similar at work here with Oates. She made a pointed and unfortunate comment, but I hardly think it proves that she’s islamophobic.
Grow up. Any wrongdoing by Israel gets a million times more outrage from Muslims then similar wrongdoings done by Muslims. She was spot on. Muslims and Arabs criticize the west, Israel, and Zionists obsessively. Then they have a temper tantrum when anyone notices anything unpleasant about their culture. Writer Alice Walker has made far more bigoted comments about Jews and Israel without any objection from Muslims or leftists.