Notes From No Man's Land

Eula Biss begins with the telephone. In a series of facts and headlines she offers a brief history of Alexander Bell’s famous invention and the so-called “War on Telephones Poles” that ensued in America in its wake. But “Time and Distance Overcome” is not an essay about property rights. It is not an essay on telephone poles as symbols of urban blight, or the miracle of invention, because “Even now it is an impossible idea that we are all connected, all of us.” Instead, it is an essay on the dark lining of an alternative history. A history that has to do with a black man being hanged from a telephone pole, and then another, and another. And the list of facts and headlines turns to a litany of hate crimes and the invention of lynching.

In this manner, both artful and unexpected, Notes from No Man’s Land explores the intricacies of race relations and identity in America. “There is no biological basis for what once we call race,” Biss writes. “It is a social fiction. But it is also, for now at least, a social fact.”

Biss herself is a white woman, born to white parents, but she often identifies her family as mixed. “Mixed” in the sense that both her mother and her mother’s sister lived with or married black men, and that Biss grew up alongside black stepsisters and biracial cousins, an adopted sister Cherokee, another sister Chinese. Biss is a white woman, yet her cultural and familial experience colors her essays with a unique perspective on American diversity.

In her essays, Biss creates seemingly effortless connections, constantly infusing the past and the present, as she escorts her readers through the various corners of America. We see New York City, California, and points in between. When a storm hits Iowa City interrupting the drunken debauchery of the university neighborhood where Biss resides, she ruminates on the villains and victims of the hurricane in New Orleans, and, in a gestures subtle but sure, Biss turns the common dialogue of race relations on its head, challenging the role of diversity in higher education, questioning even, the nature of integration.

If Biss were merely an observer, then her historical references and careful musings about telephone poles, the gentrification of a lakeside neighborhood in Chicago, or reparations for slavery would be interesting, albeit yet another white perspective on the collective memory of race in America. Instead, Biss daringly and unapologetically inserts herself directly into her essays.

In “Relations,” a story hits newspapers about a Long Island woman who gave birth to twins—one white, one black. Though both the woman and her husband were white, the black baby was a result of an error at a fertility clinic in which a second embryo was accidentally implanted along with that of the couple’s biological son. The event led to a fierce custody battle, stirring public debate over to whom the black child rightfully belonged. Within the framework of such events, Biss explores relevant points in history—both her own history, and the country’s—including her personal reflection on how, as children, she and her sister played with one black doll and white one; the “doll studies” of 1939 conducted by a Woolworth store in Harlem, which monitored demand for a more multicultural selection of dolls; Mattel’s release of the classic white Barbie in 1959, and subsequently, the alternative black Francie doll in 1967.

In the same way Biss’s prose reflects the range of environments in which she has lived, she too utilizes the array of jobs she has held. In “Landmines,” she draws from her experience as a teacher in the New York City public school system. In “Black News” she writes of being a reporter in all black neighborhoods in San Diego.

In California, Biss considers the metaphor of urban spaces while weaving in the science of succulents, crafting a meditation on gardens and cities, and the lasting symbolism of the ancient tales of Babylon. “Babylon could stand for any city—” she writes, “for New York, for Oakland, for California, for the United States—for capitalism, for imperialism, or simply for excess.”

Though her writing is straightforward and direct, Biss manages to create starkly powerful images that pack a lingering impression: a black and white topsy-turvy doll in the antebellum South; the green streak across a fellow teacher’s face after his class hurled a round of open-capped magic markers at him as he fled the room; the sight of a used refrigerator on the front stoop of her Harlem apartment; a young black boy donning a pair of hillbilly teeth issued from a gumball machine.

Biss writes with other senses as well: of the aroma of Oakland, “where bougainvillea climbed the telephone poles and huge hibiscus flowers poured over the front yards of all the little houses;” of the sound of Don Henley’s “Hotel California” filtering through a sleepy bar in Mexico; of the soulful vocals of Nina Simone while Biss drives with her husband through southeast Chicago, contemplating the plight of the Irish Americans and the black Americans while they dream up names for their yet unborn children.

Notes From No Man’s Land is a collection that takes on human exodus in all its forms, that observes life on the boundaries, the borders, the boroughs, and between: between New York and California, between privilege and consequence, between white and black. Through this profound grouping of essays, Biss presents the American fabric as a woven synthesis of migrations that created the landscape into which she—into which most of us—were born.

In the endnotes to her collection, Eula Biss describes her first encounter with the concept of a No Man’s Land after learning of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wall had been surrounded by a stretch of gravel and anyone that entered that “no man’s land” would be shot. “What I learned from this lesson,” she writes, “was that it was not so much the wall that divided the city as it was the no man’s land around that wall.” This understanding guides many of Biss’s essays, because it is not so much the physical or cultural distinctions that keep us apart but the way we create our own perceptions of those differences and guard ourselves against them.

In her opening meditation on the telephone, Biss admittedly writes, “When I was young, I believed that the arc and swoop of telephone wires along the roadway was beautiful. I believed that the telephone poles, with their transformers catching the evening sun, were glorious… I believed that the telephone itself was a miracle.” And who wouldn’t? Yet one of the most striking aspects of Biss’s collection is the clarity she has gained as a woman about the American experience. At any point when the essays threaten to stray too far, at any point when she seems to draw forced or exaggerated connections, Biss regains an understated and graceful tone that marks her collection with an intuitive, visceral maturity.

“The children’s game of telephone,” she writes “depends on the fact that a message passed quietly from one ear to another to another will get distorted at some point along the line.” It is the space we maintain around us that colors the world where the messages, the innocence of youth, and the question of identity, become lost in the vast No Man’s Land of our own perceptions.

~ Jericho Parms