One essay in Sadiqa de Meijer’s superb new collection In the Field refers to Agnes Varda’s film The Gleaners and I. “To glean from farms or garbage is a method of survival,” writes de Meijer. “Gleaning from life might be as consequential; here are the grains I choose to take and plant again.”
It’s tempting to think of the experiences described in de Meijer’s nine essays as grains gleaned from her past, but the comparison diminishes the substance of her recollections. The essays in In the Field tell of exhuming bodies from the earth; biking through Amsterdam “over the hills of bridges, feeling the velvet rain on my face”; providing medical care to prisoners; logging aquatic insects at ponds in southern Ontario; retracing the footsteps of a great Holocaust diarist; embroidering questions with blue thread in white cloth; dissecting human cadavers. The stuff at the centre of a de Meijer essay is more hard gemstone than errant bit of corn.
It is what de Meijer does with her memories that aligns with the spirit of gleaning; that is, her choice, her move “to take and plant again.” She describes the past beautifully, yes (places from her past, past encounters with art, past jobs and beliefs, and so on); but, more importantly, de Meijer gives the past new life through language, bringing recollections into contact with her inimitable powers of self-reflection and sense of social justice.
For instance, the essay on treating prisoners while in medical school is, while never announcing itself as such, also a brilliant analysis of the role of the clinic and the prison in a sprawling network of social violence. When you read the essay on Etty Hillesum’s laughter, patience, intelligence, spirituality, and love in the face of Nazi mass slaughter, Etty’s “almost incomprehensively holistic vision,” you cannot help but wonder about the pain Etty would’ve felt living in a time of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The title essay recalls a summer job de Meijer had identifying plants and animals across wetlands near Kingston. Its rendering of pondlife is enchanting: “The pattern of light refracted through the wings of a turquoise dragonfly at rest on the end of a reed, in its irregular alternations between bright angular stars and a diffuse oval glow, might become interpretable.” Yet without ever losing touch with the heat and the stench and the melodies and the squish of swampland underfoot, the essay is also always about the role of taxonomy in Canadian colonialism, the pervasive threat of gendered violence, the nature of received knowledge, and what it is to know. Every essay planted in this collection is nurtured, grown, and shared with the reader with such precision, insight, and beauty that reading this book becomes, like gleaning, a method of survival, of feeling less alone, less confused, and less chronically misunderstood in a dangerous world, as a result of seeing that world together with de Meijer.
The thing that makes reviewing In the Field so difficult is knowing that no superlative, no line of effusive praise (and I’ve effused my guts out here) could come close to conveying the book’s brilliance. The collection is a work of art, both in the sense that the thing in itself is sublime, and the sense that, by integrating experience, poetry, and (what CW Mills called) “the sociological imagination” just so, the book models how the essay form can push against the limits of human expression.
A bilingual, award-winning poet (and if you haven’t read de Meijer’s reflections on moving from speaking Dutch to speaking English, which are reflections on identity, landscape, and family – alfabet / alphabet – read it now), de Meijer’s passion for and knowledge of language, her belief in the potential of words on a page, conjures up a material and social world layered in sensory detail and the contradictions of human history.
In In the Field’s “The Singing Bone,” de Meijer stands in the cemetery where her grandparents are buried, shaded by mature trees. “Wood resembles bone,” she writes, “outlasting the life that made it. The instruments of bone surgeons – mallets, chisels, saws and screws – are reminiscent of carpentry. But at the core of a living tree trunk is heartwood, dense and compact, no longer a conduit of fluids, while bones are tunneled with damp factories. The root of the word marrow is the word for brain; they have their fat, gelatinous textures in common, they hold versions of cognition. In bones: homesickness, imprints of what your ancestors knew, and the way you might sense, once or twice in a lifetime, that the phone is ringing with earth-shaking news.”
There is earth-shaking news in this book.
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