A Penitent Midwestern Regionalism
A Midwesterner reviews Kwame Dawes’s Nebraska alongside Phil Christman’s Midwest Futures.
Review by Matt Miller
In a recent lecture series for the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, art historian Matthew Milliner examines the visual history of Midwestern religion in light of the region’s violent history of the removal of indigenous peoples. In sites around Chicago, Milliner discovers the image of Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, and proposes her as the north’s answer to the Virgin of Guadalupe, a multicultural “Mother of the Midwest.” Walking the Potawatomi Trail of Death and examining both Native and European depictions of Mary, Milliner seeks to uncover a “penitent regionalism”—grappling with the bloody history of a place as well as its living hope.
Two new books about the Midwest offer literary resources for such a Midwestern penitent regionalism. Kwame Dawes’s collection of poems, Nebraska, offers an outsider’s discomfited attention to his present residence in the Midwest, while Phil Christman’s volume of essays Midwest Futures seeks a hopeful outlook for the region from the perspective of a grieving native. Both works can help us imagine a properly chastened love of place in the Midwest.
An immigrant born in Ghana and primarily raised in Jamaica, Dawes begins Nebraska with an epithet drawn from the state’s recent, successful tourism campaign: “Honestly, it’s not for everyone.” While the state meant the slogan as a cheeky acknowledgement of Nebraska’s limited reputation for tourism, for a new arrival like Dawes the message lands differently in “The Enemy of Memory”:
And though we are not most people, we know enough to know that most people
are not most people. It is another motto for this state that has tired of its own insecurity
and inferiority, and to preempt the jokes, have enshrined a new motto—Nebraska,
it’s not for everyone—which is funny only if you are not an alien arriving for the first time…
To Dawes, Nebraska’s self-deprecation appears more exclusionary than amusing; he detects more than a hint of a threat in the state’s ironic boast. Too often, after all, places in the Midwest have been “not for everyone”—those redlined neighborhoods and sundown towns that would have met a Black man like Dawes with something more threatening than a joke.
Discourse that treats the Midwest as tedious and unremarkable thus participates in the systemic division and destruction of the place.
So it is unsurprising that Dawes finds himself a perpetual alien in Nebraska. He cannot warm even to the land. In “The Messiness of Place,” he looks at the sky and finds it strange, inscrutable, with a “flat postapocalyptic glare.” In “Chadron,” he confronts “a dry prairie cruelty” as “a strange statue in the wind.” He will never be native to Nebraska. Dawes positions himself in “Chronicler of Sorrows” not as “the guardian of the earth,” a localist at home in his place, but rather as a “chronicler of sorrows.” His story is that of the immigrant, the outsider—not a hillbilly’s elegy, but the lament of the person who is not most people.
Yet despite Dawes’s estrangement, his posture as the chronicler of sorrows has much to offer in care for Nebraska. For instance, in “Sponge,” Dawes laments the suffering brought to the state by the 2019 flooding: “Flying over this county, the gray Platte spreads over land, consumes / houses, slowly, a canker to the soul, a casual devouring of the land / teaching us the pace of the tragedies of our days.” Dawes testifies thus not just to his own sorrows in Nebraska, but to those the state itself has undergone. This open-hearted grappling with “the messiness of place” reflects a commitment to the complexity of the real dwellings of human beings. Dawes tells the truth about the wrongs done by and to Nebraska. In so doing, he pursues “the language of healing on days of lamentation” and encourages us to “live these days as priests in garments of mourning” (“The Enemy of Memory”).
Mourning also characterizes Christman’s Midwest Futures, which examines treatments of the Midwest not so much as a place but as a fund, a site made into “square after square of liquidity, to be bulk-purchased . . . as capital dictates.” Drawing on Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a neatly gridded American landscape, early land speculators described the Midwest as an endless resource base—a vision that justified colonial violence and ultimately undermined our ability to see the place for what it is.
To this day, Midwesterners see in a kind of double vision: a place of our own, and the depersonalizing and abstracting layer of the fund. Accordingly, we downplay the uniqueness of the region—it’s the boring old Midwest. Yet Christman points out that the Midwest is in fact “naturally rich, productive. But that is not a normal thing to be; it is precisely a gift, something generous and prodigious. That we take such a good place for granted, as though its usefulness for human life were proof of its dullness and interchangeability, allows us to misuse it, and ourselves, and each other, who are marked as boring by having come from this boringly good thing.” Discourse that treats the Midwest as tedious and unremarkable thus participates in the systemic division and destruction of the place.
A penitent regionalism, then, must first be penitent; it cannot turn away from the responsibility that even a much-loved place bears for violence and exclusion, environmental degradation and economic injustice.
Yet Christman, like Dawes, does not succumb to despair; for him, “the unbearable truth” of the Midwest is that “the picture-postcard city where neighbors pitch in during a storm and the sundown town are the same place. The Minneapolis that welcomes immigrants and the Minneapolis that allows its police to beat the poor are the same place…. One does not disprove the other. One is not the underbelly of the other. One will not finally triumph over the other. We have to reckon with both simultaneously; or we must admit to being both simultaneously.” A penitent regionalism, then, must first be penitent; it cannot turn away from the responsibility that even a much-loved place bears for violence and exclusion, environmental degradation and economic injustice. We cannot make excuses or whitewash the past. At the same time, any grappling with the injustices of a place that aims to effect meaningful change must do so not out of bitterness and disdain but must rather come from affection and hope.
Where can such hope and affection be found in a Midwest that has so often proclaimed itself “not for everyone”? Christman finally makes a moral appeal, both for his readers to work towards a more just Midwest and for them to love their enemies—making the Midwest a livable place for everyone, even those with whom we disagree. Yet his most original contribution to an account of a penitent Midwestern regionalism is one he shares with Dawes—his attention to the Midwest not as an everyplace or an emblem of America but as this particular place. He notes that “Specificity accosts people; it surmounts our little credibility tests. If you ask a person if they have any spare change, they’ll say no; if you ask them for forty-seven cents, exactly, they’ll fish in their pocket without thinking.” Specificity also fosters affection; nobody loves a fund, but they may come to love a specific place, with whatever penitence that love requires.
We will only win through to a real love for the Midwest in a penitent attention to its quiddities, a vision that attends, like Milliner, to the history of the Trail of Death as well as Our Lady of Sorrows. With such a vision, aided by writers like Dawes and Christman, we may yet make the Midwest a place for us all.
Matt Miller writes from Reeds Spring, Missouri. He is currently at work on an essay series about the liturgy and the garden year titled A Habitation, and can also be found at matt-miller.org.
Nebraska by Kwame Dawes was published in October 2019 by the University of Nebraska Press. You can purchase a copy on their website here.
Midwest Futures by Phil Christman was published on April 7, 2020, by Belt Publishing. You can find it on their website here. Fare Forward thanks Belt Publishing for providing a review copy.
