// creative //
Fall 2016
Paterfamilias
Mitali Desai
Claude Lévi-Strauss arrived at Columbia University in 1942 quivering with anticipation. His idol, Franz Boas, father of American anthropology, fellow escapee of a war amounting to good versus evil, was the University’s Anthropology Department chair. On December 19th of that year, after delivering a talk about the dangers of phrenology, Boas looked up at the chandelier in the room, the fly hanging delicately onto the stone carvings, then keeled over into Claude’s arms and died. Claude had bought a burgundy tie that morning for the occasion. This was a metaphor. There are ghosts all around us.
I wake up at 4:30 a.m. to a message from you. It says you want to talk either before or after Yom Kippur. I say, there are 364 days in a year that are not Yom Kippur. I say, you might as well call before so your name will be inscribed in the Book of Life. Isn’t this what you want? This is a joke. You ask if we can talk in person. I go back to sleep. I will not see you until I stop wanting to see you. This I have promised myself. I am only going to think about you in Spanish. Feeling gets tired in translation.
Claude threw out the tie. He did not want to be a myth. All he had wanted was to ask Boas question after question, to absorb him story by story.
On a day that is not Yom Kippur it rains. You tell me over the phone as I step off the bus and into a puddle that you are in the city to see your cousin. She just had a baby. You want to see me. Dinner? I say coffee. We negotiate and plan for lunch.
At the root of anthropology is empathy. We have to know ourselves to know each other. We have to see the other to know ourselves. Even when people who live in the jungle do things like bury their babies alive and live with the bodies of their dead, we have to say, in you, I see me. We have to think about weather patterns and crop cycles. There is a reason for all of this. Jews say we are all made in the image of God, b’tzelem elohim. And it’s true that we are like God—we all do terrible things to our children.
Margaret Mead was also a student of Boas. She cared about things like motherhood, childhood, sex, the home. Things men brush off their shoulders like molted feathers. Her work caused scandals. Margaret married a few men who disappointed her one way or another. She was quiet and painful and gentle; they wanted to hold her until she proved too difficult to catch. Before she left for Samoa, Boas wrote her a letter in which he cautioned her to be careful about her health, given her fragility and monthly ailments.
I cannot say his name, so I will call him Z. Perhaps Dr. Z would be more fitting--he did, after all pay for every cent of his Yale PhD and all the schooling that led up to it, but Z will do. I was his student. His teacher was e.e. cummings. In this way, I was inculcated into a lineage of rough-edged, smooth-talking, whiskey-drinking geniuses. If I have a daughter, I will tell her, if a man reads you Elegy for Jane in a room with a closed door, run. Do not worship idols. There is a reason mourning is for fathers and lovers.
Boas did not die in Margaret Mead’s arms.
I think about that one moment: when it was raining and Z, ever so gently, with the tenderness of a priest or a mortician, brushed my hair out of my face. That flicker of wrongdoing. I think about how the reason I did not tell you or anyone, except my mother years and years later, was that even as I wanted to pull back, I thought about e.e. cummings, and I thought about family trees and kinship diagrams and the precarity of my name hanging tremulous like a puppet. Even when what he whispered in my ear pulled at the floor of my stomach, I imagined the strings being cut.
You walk into the cafe. I got my way. We are having coffee. When I see you my body aches, like a bruise touched too often. Your hair is longer, hands rougher. You are wearing a shy blue sweater. I wore that sweater when we walked through the forest in Canada. I was wearing that sweater and nothing else when you cried in front of me, when your brother died. That year I loved you so much I shed my skin and crawled into yours.
I do not fast on Yom Kippur.
At the cafe you apologize for how you left. You do not say, I am sorry I said that it was your fault. So I do not apologize for screaming at you on the street— "if he had touched me, would it have been my fault?” You do not consider that when he asked me to undress myself I thought it was to make something beautiful.
Later, when I come with your face earnestly pressed between my legs, my body is screaming don’tdon’tdon’t; and I stare at a water stain on the ceiling that is shaped like Peru.
Claude Lévi-Strauss returned to France to aid the war effort in 1939. In 1940, he was stripped of his citizenship. When he walked to get his breakfast one morning, a man spat at his feet. “Dirty fucking Jew.”
We kiss. You leave. My name cannot be in the Book, but at least yours will be.
If you apologize three times, it’s known, you are absolved regardless of whether or not the other person has forgiven you. You do not know yourself and this is why you cannot know me. This is why you cannot see me. I think I am forgiving you. Like God, we hurt the ones we love.
I wake up at 4:30 a.m. to a message from you. It says you want to talk either before or after Yom Kippur. I say, there are 364 days in a year that are not Yom Kippur. I say, you might as well call before so your name will be inscribed in the Book of Life. Isn’t this what you want? This is a joke. You ask if we can talk in person. I go back to sleep. I will not see you until I stop wanting to see you. This I have promised myself. I am only going to think about you in Spanish. Feeling gets tired in translation.
Claude threw out the tie. He did not want to be a myth. All he had wanted was to ask Boas question after question, to absorb him story by story.
On a day that is not Yom Kippur it rains. You tell me over the phone as I step off the bus and into a puddle that you are in the city to see your cousin. She just had a baby. You want to see me. Dinner? I say coffee. We negotiate and plan for lunch.
At the root of anthropology is empathy. We have to know ourselves to know each other. We have to see the other to know ourselves. Even when people who live in the jungle do things like bury their babies alive and live with the bodies of their dead, we have to say, in you, I see me. We have to think about weather patterns and crop cycles. There is a reason for all of this. Jews say we are all made in the image of God, b’tzelem elohim. And it’s true that we are like God—we all do terrible things to our children.
Margaret Mead was also a student of Boas. She cared about things like motherhood, childhood, sex, the home. Things men brush off their shoulders like molted feathers. Her work caused scandals. Margaret married a few men who disappointed her one way or another. She was quiet and painful and gentle; they wanted to hold her until she proved too difficult to catch. Before she left for Samoa, Boas wrote her a letter in which he cautioned her to be careful about her health, given her fragility and monthly ailments.
I cannot say his name, so I will call him Z. Perhaps Dr. Z would be more fitting--he did, after all pay for every cent of his Yale PhD and all the schooling that led up to it, but Z will do. I was his student. His teacher was e.e. cummings. In this way, I was inculcated into a lineage of rough-edged, smooth-talking, whiskey-drinking geniuses. If I have a daughter, I will tell her, if a man reads you Elegy for Jane in a room with a closed door, run. Do not worship idols. There is a reason mourning is for fathers and lovers.
Boas did not die in Margaret Mead’s arms.
I think about that one moment: when it was raining and Z, ever so gently, with the tenderness of a priest or a mortician, brushed my hair out of my face. That flicker of wrongdoing. I think about how the reason I did not tell you or anyone, except my mother years and years later, was that even as I wanted to pull back, I thought about e.e. cummings, and I thought about family trees and kinship diagrams and the precarity of my name hanging tremulous like a puppet. Even when what he whispered in my ear pulled at the floor of my stomach, I imagined the strings being cut.
You walk into the cafe. I got my way. We are having coffee. When I see you my body aches, like a bruise touched too often. Your hair is longer, hands rougher. You are wearing a shy blue sweater. I wore that sweater when we walked through the forest in Canada. I was wearing that sweater and nothing else when you cried in front of me, when your brother died. That year I loved you so much I shed my skin and crawled into yours.
I do not fast on Yom Kippur.
At the cafe you apologize for how you left. You do not say, I am sorry I said that it was your fault. So I do not apologize for screaming at you on the street— "if he had touched me, would it have been my fault?” You do not consider that when he asked me to undress myself I thought it was to make something beautiful.
Later, when I come with your face earnestly pressed between my legs, my body is screaming don’tdon’tdon’t; and I stare at a water stain on the ceiling that is shaped like Peru.
Claude Lévi-Strauss returned to France to aid the war effort in 1939. In 1940, he was stripped of his citizenship. When he walked to get his breakfast one morning, a man spat at his feet. “Dirty fucking Jew.”
We kiss. You leave. My name cannot be in the Book, but at least yours will be.
If you apologize three times, it’s known, you are absolved regardless of whether or not the other person has forgiven you. You do not know yourself and this is why you cannot know me. This is why you cannot see me. I think I am forgiving you. Like God, we hurt the ones we love.