The Hidden Wound, by Wendell Berry

(Warning, very long post, this one.) For more on Berry, go here.


From an earlier post:

Wendell Berry's writing holds a resonance for me that . . . I don't know what. Can't say right away, shortly. He's a kind of long lost great grandfather to me, being from Kentucky, where my father's family is from.

The Hidden Wound is about slavery. About his family's history. His family's complicity. And what damage that complicity entails. Most probably, my own family's complicity, as well. I think this book will take history out of the abstract for me. A giant can of worms in my soul. Read the first few pages here.

And from a comment I made to that post:

I trust Berry to speak the truth.

From the excerpt: "If I had thought it was only the black people who have suffered from the years of slavery and racism, then I could have dealt fully with the matter long ago; I could have filled myself with pity for them, and would no doubt have enjoyed it a great deal and thought highly of myself..."

Speaking of the inclusion of the facts of slavery in his family's stories, "There is a peculiar tension in the casualness of this hereditary knowledge of hereditary evil; once it begins to be released, once you begin to awaken to the realities of what you know, you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and in the events of your own life."

I've grown accustomed to expecting Berry to throw me into episodes of deep thought and reflection. This post is mostly me trying to explain why.

I guess the thing he's best at is reminding me that I do have historical roots. I think it's easy, having grown up a white guy in California, to think of yourself as being devoid of any real historical roots.

I’ve searched in vain to find a suitable quote to summarily explain my fascination with this book, The Hidden Wound, and Wendell Berry. Try to describe a fractal, or explain a fractal, and you might run into the same kind of problem I have always had in trying to describe the writings of Wendell Berry. I don’t where to begin without just giving you the whole thing to look at yourself. How do you summarize a man who writes eloquent exegesis of our history, our culture, our national psyche, on individual levels? There’s a shape to it, but the scale is hard to judge, zoom in and out from broad generalizations to minute details and back again, and it’s hard to particularly explain the difference in perspective you’ve just been shown.

I said before that Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound was about slavery, but I’ve come to see that was a kind of mistake. If this book was truly just “about slavery” it’d be similar to that kind of textbook on cancer that is put categorically in its correct place on some obscure shelf for only so-called “experts” to refer to. And I think Berry’s The Hidden Wound is much more helpful and handy than that.

But I can't hope to accurately summarize or condense, so here are a few quotes, to hopefully convince to at least try out any essay by him:

“Detached from real issues and real evils, the language of religion became abstract, intensely (desperately?) pious, rhetorical, inflated with phony mysticism and joyless passion.”

“. . . we send a bulldozer or a bomber to do our dirty work as casually, and by the same short-order morality, as once (in the South) we would ‘send a nigger’, or (in the North) an Irishman, or (in the West now) a Mexican.”

“A true and appropriate answer to our race problem, as to many others, would be a restoration of our communities”—but, “The root [problem of our failing communities] is in our inordinate desire to be superior—not to some inferior or subject people, though this desire leads to the subjection of people—but to our condition. We wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything—of ourselves, of each other, or of our country.”

Yes, he’s preaching a kind of self-reliance, but not the same kind that "the Right" in this country’s preaching. He’s talking about actual physical sweat. Which is what always causes me to take my self-reflection to a whole new level when I ever read Berry. He wants me to ask:

Is it healthy to expend as much trash as I do?

Is it right that my food comes from so far away?

Is it healthy that I have no real, committed sense of place?

Is it right that I feel no real responsibility to any community?

What about my life is infected by the same moral and spiritual blindness of the white South's slavery system? What is still atrophied in me because of that system?

Reading Berry always forces me to expand my definitions of racism, prejudice, unhealth, and health. He doesn’t let me keep racism and slavery at arm’s length, showing me the extent to which it’s practically in my DNA. But also, he doesn’t demonize me, and actually gives me some hope, instructing me to do things that I can in fact do: make steps to be responsible for myself, my community, my world.

". . . community integrity, and the decentralization of power and economy that it implies, is antithetical to the ambitions of the corporations. The government's aim, therefore, is racial indifference, not integrated communities. Does this mean that our predicament is hopeless? No. It only means that our predicament is extremely unfavorable, as the human predicament has often been."

I get the feeling, as I write this, that a lot of these quotes feel disjointed and out of place, but you can't take sentences out of a book to make sense of the whole thing. Similar to the fact that you can't remove slavery from America's identity, and I think Berry does a good job of proving that in this book (not to say that others haven't also).

What to take away from this very long post?: I will ever be willing to have my definitions of racism, the affects of slavery, community, and health expanded because of Berry's writings.

I can't escape him. (And I'm tired of working on this post, for now.)