A Fulsome Ides Revisited
The Tragedie of Guerinca a year later. Considering the “fulsome explanation” and clarifications from the former editor and the magazine’s founder.
The origin of every fortune is a crime.
The ides of March are a dangerous time.
from David Lehman’s “The Ides of March”
Ah, the Ides of March. A dangerous time indeed, but it seems pretty dangerous all the time now, doesn’t it?
I usually don’t post multiple times a week, but the date reminded me that I wrote something last year that may interest you since the readership of The Beauty of Things has increased quite a bit over the last 12 months. I wanted to offer you an edited version of an essay about the March 2024 controversy at Guernica.
For those who don’t remember, Joanna Chen, a British born Israeli essayist caused a firestorm when she wrote “From the Edges of a Broken World” which triggered a mass resignation at the literary magazine. When the piece was retracted it there was a huge public outcry over the issue of free speech. A “fulsome” response (notable for its questionable word choice) was promised, and on April 12, 2024 it was delivered by the magazine’s co-founder, Michael Archer. The essay, “Moving Forward: On Joanna Chen’s essay, it’s retraction, and Guernica’s new publisher” attempted to address the furor. Chen’s essay was subsequently republished on April 18, 2024 in the Washington Monthly. 1
In “Moving Forward” Archer stated his initial reservations about the essay,
this piece felt jarring in both its timing and its approach. Rather than mine the personal to expose the political, individual angst was elevated above the collective suffering laid bare in the extensive body of work Guernica has published from the region. [emphasis mine]
I do not believe that the approach was jarring (please read the original essay), and I wonder, given everything that has happened over the past year, whether the magazine would have ever found a suitable time in which to publish Chen’s essay. Nor do I believe that the original work elevated an Israeli’s pain over the collective pain of the Palestinian people. I acknowledge that people may feel strongly otherwise; however, the way to peace is not through silencing the author (even if the writer herself is self-silencing, post-controversy, with likely pressure from outside sources which would make it more akin to coercion) but through dialogue. Sometimes people express things that are uncomfortable, but it is necessary to hold a sense of goodwill toward someone who is trying to do what they think is right. Conversation often does not entail complete agreement among all parties, no matter what the subject.
On April 5, 2924, Jina Moore, the former editor of Guernica who resigned, elaborated her position in “My Resignation from Guernica” and I believe Moore when she writes, “I anticipated that Guernica, with a long history of publishing Palestinian writers, would be able to hold space for such conversations.” Chen’s piece did not try to silence Palestinians but added a respectful, empathetic Jewish voice. The magazine could publish more Palestinian perspectives to counter Chen’s if they wanted to.
On July 22, 2024, Archer wrote an extensive defense of the journal’s actions in LitHub, “The Cofounder of Guernica on Free Speech and the Retraction of the Israel-Gaza Essay”, where he contended,
Missing from the spirited debate was the same thing missing in the essay igniting it—a consideration of the lopsided power dynamics upholding the structures of media, specifically, and public discourse, at large. This first-person essay didn’t, as far as I know, break any of the traditional rules, standards or laws that require a retraction. The content wasn’t fabricated, plagiarized or libelous. Yet the essay was ultimately removed from Guernica’s pages for the same reason I assumed the author invited its retraction—it was, there was a strong sense, further wounding a historically silenced community already under siege.
He also says that the essayist did not object to a retraction if this is what the editors thought was best. This may be true, but Chen’s suggestion came only after a vitriolic outcry and a mass resignation of the magazine’s staff. She likely didn’t want to cause more hurt for the journal or the political climate than was already evident.
Archer’s impassioned plea, “Is freedom of speech all that much to hold onto if one has no forum in which to put that speech forward?” would seem genuine if it weren’t for the fact that Guernica, as a well-respected literary forum, could have responded by publishing even more work from those who were suffering from this lopsided power dynamic — without retracting the initial essay. The cry seemed like a disingenuous act of posturing. However, from the look of things, Guernica seems to be moving on, and that is all for the best. Good luck to the new editor-in-chief, the French-Lebanese writer Youmna Melhem Chamieh, who has joined the publication as of the start of this year.
I wonder if it is possible for us to have compassionate dialogue through thought provoking essays. I hope my words from last year will help people understand what is at stake. In the piece from last year I quoted Phil Klay in The Atlantic, “Peace is not made between angels and demons but between human beings, and the real hell of life, as Jean Renoir once noted, is that everybody has their reasons. If your journal can’t publish work that deals with such messy realities, then your editors might as well resign, because you’ve turned your back on literature.”
From my original post on March 15, 2024…
Lately, my news feeds have delivered something other than Roman history and Shakespeare but just as ominous as the Ides: the cancellation situation at Guernica.
at writes a good summary on the state of affairs on her recent post:This week, a scandal rocked what’s left of the literary world. Guernica, a long-respected journal, bowed to pressure from its all-volunteer staff and on Monday retracted an essay it had published on March 4 (an archived version can be found here). “From the Edges of a Broken World,” written by Joanna Chen, a British-born Israeli who works as a translator of Hebrew and Arabic literature and for years has driven Palestinian children from the West Bank into Israel for medical care, describes a torrent of conflicted emotions in the aftermath of October 7.
I have read the essay and chatter surrounding it. Joanna Chen is a very good writer, and I encourage everyone to read her work in full. Unfortunately, the staff at Guernica felt differently and staged a public protest and mass resignation, which caused the literary magazine to archive the essay and publish the following statement:
Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.
Such an odd word to use, isn’t it? It is so novel that it must have been chosen deliberately and yet, according to Dictionary.com, “fulsome” is an adjective that has quite the range of definitions:
offensive to good taste, especially as being excessive; overdone or gross: fulsome praise that embarrassed her deeply; fulsome décor.
disgusting; sickening; repulsive: a table heaped with fulsome mounds of greasy foods.
excessively or insincerely lavish: fulsome admiration.
encompassing all aspects; comprehensive: a fulsome survey of the political situation in Central America.
abundant or copious.
As of this writing, no such fulsome explanation has been published so I can’t tell what meaning the editor was going with, but in the meantime you can bide your time by reading some commentaries at the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New York Times.
Coincidentally an article was published this morning from The Washington Post about Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece from which the journal Guernica gets its name. The WP described the historic event that inspired the art:
The bombing of Guernica was intended by Hermann Göring, commander in chief of the German Luftwaffe, as a birthday gift for Hitler. The attack was delayed by several days because of logistical issues, but Hitler was pleased nonetheless. The plan was to maximize civilian casualties. Col. Wolfram von Richthofen, who was in charge of the attack, achieved this by pausing after a brief initial bombing, then, after civilians had come out of their shelters, launching a devastating second wave. People were trapped in the open, incinerated, asphyxiated and strafed with machine-gun fire. An estimated 1,500 civilians were killed. Guernica was leveled.
Sounds familiar. An atrocity that focussed on civilian deaths. Dresden, Hiroshima, 9/11, Ukraine, October 7, Gaza…
But read Chen’s essay. She doesn’t condone violence or militarism.
In a statement to The LA Times, Chen said,
“Removing any stories and silencing any voices is the opposite of progress and the opposite of literature.”
“Today, people are afraid to listen to voices that do not perfectly mirror their own,” she said. “But ignorance begets hatred. My essay is an opening to a dialogue that I hope will emerge when the shouting dies down.”
Critics of the essay accused the author of “both-sidism” but the problem is that there are many sides because there are many people, and in the end they all have to live with each other if there is ever a time of peace—which I certainly hope will be the case.
In The Atlantic, Phil Klay, National Book Award winner and former Marine who served as an officer in the Iraq War, writes that the retraction of Chen’s article is “a betrayal of the task of literature, which cannot end wars but can help us see why people wage them, oppose them, or become complicit in them.”
Empathy here does not justify or condemn. Empathy is just a tool. The writer needs it to accurately depict their subject; the peacemaker needs it to be able to trace the possibilities for negotiation; even the soldier needs it to understand his adversary. Before we act, we must see war’s human terrain in all its complexity, no matter how disorienting and painful that might be. Which means seeing Israelis as well as Palestinians—and not simply the mother comforting her children as the bombs fall and the essayist reaching out across the divide, but far harsher and more unsettling perspectives. Peace is not made between angels and demons but between human beings, and the real hell of life, as Jean Renoir once noted, is that everybody has their reasons. If your journal can’t publish work that deals with such messy realities, then your editors might as well resign, because you’ve turned your back on literature.
“Removing any stories and silencing any voices is the opposite of progress and the opposite of literature.” - Joanna Chen
At the end of
’s Ides of March post the author, Barry Strauss, concludes:There are many lessons to be learned from the stirring and terrible events of the era of Caesar and Augustus. One is the law of unintended consequences: the men who killed Caesar on the Ides of March thought they were saving the Republic, not hastening its end. The other is the need for political sagacity, for fine-tuned political skills, in order to persuade people to accept reform. And finally, we can’t overstate how fortunate we are to live in a society where political disagreements are settled by debate and not by arms, by ballots and not bullets.
The tragedy is that we are not as fortunate as the Strauss’s essay would have us believe. The case at Guernica is proof of that. The volunteers who protested the essay and quit are not saving Palestine or literature. They are participating in an act of assassination that they think is for the good for the people. And some, dare I say, may be doing this for the sake of their own egos and reputations within their elitist intellectual enclaves.
On Strauss’s second point we also find political sagacity lacking. Hardly anyone believes in political compromise anymore—the art of the possible—which is one of the ways that we may have a chance to find a tolerable solution to this.
And the third point about how we live in a society where political disagreements are settled by debate and not by arms, by ballots and not bullets. Make no mistake, those protesting the essay are not interested in debate. They are engaged in the silencing that they accuse others of doing to them. The age of cancellation has ruined people’s reputations and livelihoods. And yes, it kills people.
The Ides of March always comes around, like a ghost who is trying to remind the living of what treachery humans are capable of. And remember, the senators who murdered Julius Caesar ultimately did not fare well themselves. Those who hold the dagger are short-sighted.
Caesar entered the Senate knowing what could happen to him, but he was not going to live in fear.
It seems like writers with any type of backbone will need to write with the same amount of fatalism if they truly care about the future of literature, culture, and society.
Just because you are stabbing Caesar doesn't mean you are saving the Republic.
- Subtitle from my original post
And now I leave you with Antony’s speech performed by the Damian Lewis:
I read Chen's article. I don't understand the controversy. It's a beautifully balanced depiction of those living in the middle of an historically ceaseless quagmire where no one wins and the innocent always lose.
Thank you for this. Joanna and Raz, her husband, have been personal friends for nearly two decades. I spent Rosh Hashanah at their place, three weeks before Oct 7, 2023. It is extremely disingenuous, if not gaslighting, for Archer to suggest that the idea to retract came from her, and it is outrageous to suggest that her views align with those of "mainstream media", so that she will be fine. In fact, she represents an increasingly sidelined minority voice in Israel, left-wing Jews, and being de-platformed by people who she thought were her friends was and remains a hurtful thing. She still volunteers to transport Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals, still promotes Palestinian writing, and still helps and interacts with Palestinians from all walks of life practically every day, and she does all this here, where it is astronomically harder than it is to sit and type out a column in New York expressing solidarity with the oppressed who only exist as free floating ideas in people's heads, and is becoming even harder. As you say, it is also weird to frame this as a competition, as if paying attention to Joanna has to come at the expense of listening to "the preferably unheard." And while we are at it, part of what I get from all this is that people like Joanna are also "the preferably unheard." And that is a massive own-goal.