the art of losing essay

I Couldn’t Handle Failure. So I Decided to Embrace Losing.

Losing was the best way to get over my fear of failure.

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I’m in a hotel ballroom in Stamford, CT, surrounded by 500 people, and everything in my body is telling me to leave. My hands are shaking, my stomach is roiling and under my mask, my skin is turning beet-red from nerves. I’m in this state of abject terror because I’m about to knowingly destroy my relationship to something I’ve loved deeply my entire adult life. I’m a rookie at the 44th annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament , and I came here to fail. On purpose.

The night before, I’d asked ACPT director Will Shortz, the longtime editor of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle, what advice he might have for a rookie like me. “Make sure you fill in all the letters,” he replied. “That’s a really common mistake.” At the time, I’d wondered if that — like the fanfare about the difficulty of Puzzle Number 5 — was perhaps a bit of a joke. But now that I’m sitting here, it seems very possible that not only could I forget to fill in some of the letters, but that I might forget every word I’ve ever learned, too.

The tournament consists of seven puzzles over two days, followed by a championship round for the highest-ranked. Each puzzle is allotted fifteen to forty-five minutes, depending on size and complexity, and our paper grids will be scored for accuracy and speed. The first puzzle is handed out, face-down. After several delays — someone spilled a coffee, a lefty needs a second puzzle — Will finally says “go.”

Five-hundred pieces of paper are turned over at the exact same moment. The sound ruffles gently through the ballroom, and I bow my head, press a trembling pencil to paper and start solving.

Eleven minutes later, I raise my hand, turn in my puzzle and walk out. Hallway small talk reveals within seconds that I’ve made a mistake, flubbing the abbreviation for “Postal HQ” and surprisingly, so did a lot of other people. “I only knew the right answer,” a woman later tells me, “because my husband was a postmaster.”

I wait for my heart to fall; for the familiar feelings of disappointment and embarrassment to take hold. Yet, there is only joy. Still, there’s six more puzzles to go. Six more chances to fail and to feel shame, and six more opportunities to change my reaction to failure by sacrificing something I love.

I needed to balance my self-worth and ambition

Over the past several years, I’ve been undergoing a one-woman experiment to discover if I can extricate my sense of self-worth from my ambitions. Thus far, the drive to succeed has influenced the course of my life above else. My partner and I have, time and again, put work first, changing cities, homes and communities as our professions demand. And we’ve achieved a lot.

But, as so many of us learned during the pandemic, when a person’s professional life becomes their entire life, their self-esteem depends on its wins, and becomes pathologically averse to its losses. During the publication of my first two novels, I believed I was old enough, and had done enough therapy to understand what it meant to submit yourself for a performance review in public. Naturally, I was wrong: instead of responding with grace, I observed, with horror, as my standard for regular, go-about-your-day-self-worth became "ecstatic praise from others." Anything less was a catastrophe, one that left me feeling trapped in the double-bind of resenting myself for failing and for feeling like a failure, too. When your minimum for “OK” becomes “be the best,” it’s impossible to have a healthy relationship to anything, or anyone. Most of all, I felt like I'd lost my sense of joy. And I wanted it back.

I initially tried to manage this with the obvious: talk therapy. CBT. CBD. Meditation. Running. Drinking. Not drinking. All of these things worked until they didn’t; they were fine Band-Aids, until they fell off. The deeper problem — that my sense of self was fused to my ambitions — couldn’t be solved by breathing exercises, so I did the only other thing I know how to do: I wrote about it.

Using the desire to be special to drive the emotional tone of my third novel, The Force of Such Beauty , I worked my way through the problem until I understood that ambition was a core part of my identity, one that that I probably couldn’t change. But I could change what I was ambitious for . If I could move my focus from outcomes to experiences, maybe I’d finally understand that winning was for suckers, and participation trophies were the most valuable things I could earn.

Exposure therapy could acclimate my brain to failure

Unfortunately, my brain continued operating under the same conditioning I’d always given it: ambition meant fear and adrenaline, followed by stratospheric reward or paralyzing shame. Months passed as I continued to have the same reactions to the same problem. But I had one final arrow in my quiver: CBT’s theory of exposure therapy, a technique that uses a safe practice of the exact thing we’re afraid of in order to change our reaction to it. I started exposing myself to failure. I started easy, with a footrace I knew I wouldn’t win, and after I bombed that, moved on to applications to fellowships and grants that my cynical mind told me I had no chance at receiving. The failure piled up; the rejections rolled in. I found every challenge getting easier. It was working, but it didn’t seem like enough. The stakes had to be higher or my brain wouldn’t learn. That left one beautiful, pure, therapeutic, private, personal thing.

Crosswords.

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The year I was 21, I lost my home in an electrical fire, and experienced the death of two extremely close friends: my roommate and a recent ex-boyfriend (both tragic, both unexpected, and unrelated to each other and the fire). Though my experience of loss was not unique, I was young enough that it was unusual, and as a result, extremely isolating. I didn’t know how to let go or say goodbye; I didn’t know how to move on. As I struggled to breathe in the undertow of so much grief, I mostly sat alone in my room and did hundreds of New York Times crossword puzzles. Within the confines of the grid, I was protected from the hard realities of chaos and tragedy. I remember ripping out the puzzles when they were complete and watching them flutter across the floor, as if I was papering my life back together. Reducing my thoughts to a single set of clues and answers brought peace and comfort when nothing else did. It brought me back to the world.

Since then, I’ve done puzzles almost daily, even constructed a few and submitted them to the Times (rejected, but with more feedback and care than I’ve received from most editors in my career). I’m good at it, for a regular person. At the most competitive tournament in the nation, though, I’m a guaranteed loser.

This time, failing publicly didn’t break me

In Stamford, waiting for the second puzzle, my anxiety is somehow worse. What if that post office question was a fluke? What if this time I fail where everybody else succeeds? I try to comfort myself by noting that it feels exactly like getting an email from a publicist with a new review of my book enclosed. If I feel this bad, I’m definitely on the right track.

The timer starts, and we’re off. This time I notice that hands go up three, four minutes in. These are the champions, the speed solvers who will face off at the final championship round tomorrow on gigantic whiteboards, as shown in the documentary Wordplay . I can’t fathom how they can complete the fill so rapidly, much less read the clues.

It turns out they don’t. A music teacher ranked 40th — this is extremely high — later tells me that he only reads about a third of the clues, then deduces the rest with a combination of experience, instinct, and the NYT’s specific crosswordese .

But the flood of champion hands doesn’t bother me, and the clock doesn’t trip me up, either, although this one is harder, with 25 minutes allotted. I’m too busy solving, going up again and again into the space between clue (“Landlocked African nation”) and solution (Mali). I’m high on the drug of a collective consciousness. It feels like someone took the essence of a library, turned it up to 11, and scattered it over us with a magic wand. It feels like heaven.

After that, I don’t wonder if I’ve made any errors. I don’t care. I’m simply happy to be here.

Even the pros cheered on my efforts

The ACPT Rookie FAQ had provided a fair number of important tips — bring a clipboard because the tables have tablecloths; don’t wear perfume because some people hate it — but it turns out the most salient piece of advice was the very end: “TL/DR: people are friendly.”

People were better than friendly; they were sincerely excited to be among kindred spirits. I had a moving conversation about grief with a scientist whose specialty is the moon; I got a pep talk about rejection from the youthful editor of Spelling Bee , Sam Ezhersky , who has been publishing puzzles in the Times since he was a teenager. Once people hear I’m a rookie, their eyes get kind, and they tell me that it’s so good that I’m trying . Nobody means this in a condescending way. I learn in the final tally that out of 500 cruciverbalists (the preferred phrase) who enjoy doing crosswords enough to travel to Connecticut and stay in a broken-down Marriott for an entire weekend, only 32 will complete all seven puzzles without making an error. The margins are narrow, even for the pros.

The Force of Such Beauty: A Novel

Puzzle 5 is, as advertised, devastating, and I only complete a quarter of it. Puzzle 6 is a digestif, a satisfying end to a full day. I take myself out to dinner at the steakhouse across the street and strike up a conversation with another competitor, nervous to be alone in my hotel room with only my self-consciousness for company.

But when I go to sleep, all I can think is that I can’t wait to be in the ballroom again. Life is short and full of trauma. I want to experience these days of comparative peace and plenty with every ounce of my being; I want to be present, to live the gift of my life without wishing for it to be different. I want to be in the mix, for better or worse. After the 7th puzzle, I come in 46th out of 117 rookies, squarely in the middle, a sign that I was there.

On my train ride home, all I feel is grateful. The next morning, I hang my ACPT name badge in my office. Then I log in to the Times and tackle the day’s puzzle. Accepting that winning was impossible didn’t ruin my relationship with crosswords. It only deepened it, and I can’t wait to go back another year and fail again. I think my experiment might be working.

Barbara Bourland is the author of Fake Like Me , a finalist for the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Novel. Her third novel, The Force of Such Beauty comes out in July 2022. She lives in Baltimore. This essay is part of a series highlighting the Good Housekeeping Book Club — you can join the conversation and check out more of our favorite book recommendations .

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Print or web publication, the art of losing.

The end of the war in Afghanistan shows the danger of our commitment to perpetual optimism

Like English professors everywhere, I suppose, I love to teach “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle about “the art of losing.” I teach it to first-year cadets at West Point every spring, even though I have the impression that the poem’s deepest anxieties are largely lost on 18-year-olds. They tend to fixate on Bishop’s first few examples of things lost—misplaced keys and forgotten names are proof to them only of their elders’ tedious muddles—while passing over the losses that follow: the “realms,” the rivers, the continent, the beloved “you” of the final stanza. The dread of metaphysical loss is alien to them. As a result, they tend at first to miss the gradual amplification of the speaker’s insistent refrain, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” until it becomes impossible to ignore the catastrophe of accumulated deprivation. Bishop’s alchemy turns loss into literary gain, but the mastery achieved by the poem’s end is not in any obvious way a victory. The villanelle is a form of stalemate, a testy negotiation between despair and the need to carry on. It is a blueprint for the inconclusive.

Then, too, I suspect my problem is exacerbated by the fact that I teach this poem about loss to a bunch of winners. My students are learning how to live and work within military culture—how to figure out exactly what it is—a culture that seems unable, by virtue of both temperament and circumstance, to contemplate the possibility of losing: noble sacrifice, betrayal from within or sabotage from without, yes—losing, no. I’m not sure it could be otherwise, nor do I think it would be prudent to nurture defeatist attitudes in those who are preparing to be soldiers. The stakes of war are too high, the odds of survival too low, for that. But there is a grotesque cost to imagining that every scenario is winnable or that the troubles of this world can be distilled into wins and losses, its people into winners and losers. And the failure to acknowledge that cost on the part of those institutions that bear authority for sending people to war strikes me as the height of irresponsibility.

Of course, war seems to many observers the arena in which such winnowing is easiest to do, but that’s no longer the case (if it ever really was). War, an increasingly murky activity that has its own perilous momentum, unfolds a story with an end that seems, maddeningly, to be in constant retreat. This was clearly the case in Afghanistan, where the opening gambit to destroy al-Qaeda and punish its Taliban protectors drifted, almost haphazardly, into a series of ill-fated priorities, all of which have now been abandoned in the wake of the American withdrawal from the Kabul airport, concluded at the end of August. Subsequent missteps led many in uniform and out to believe that the original mission might have had a discrete, achievable end, but the intervening years have obscured even that certainty. My colleagues and former students used to measure victory by not losing anyone in their commands; the new metric seems to be the number of people we were able to evacuate. Anything to avoid calling the whole enterprise a defeat.

Among the many revelations contained in the Afghanistan Papers, the cache of interviews and memos The Washington Post began to publish in 2019, was the fact that military and civilian officials continued for years to prosecute a war some privately acknowledged to be unwinnable. The reasons behind this apparent mendacity must have been many and various: cynicism, delusion, self-preservation, a desire for advancement, ideological zeal, perhaps even a strange kind of naïveté. But underneath them all lies what might be described as a psychological compulsion—strong in Americans but overwhelming in American military culture—to perform optimism.

“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” On my way to work the day after Colin Powell’s death was announced on October 19, I drove by a digital billboard tribute emblazoned with this quotation, one of his favorites. It appears at the end of his autobiography, My American Journey, as one of “Colin Powell’s Rules.” Perpetually optimistic leadership, Powell once explained to an audience at Whitworth University, can make a “force more powerful than the design of the force would suggest it is.” Americans seduced by the idea that optimism is magic can find Powell’s maxim for sale everywhere on the Web: on refrigerator magnets, T-shirts, aluminum signs, coffee cups, totes, bottle openers, even facemasks. I don’t doubt that Powell’s faith in optimism was genuine. I have heard less eloquent versions of this philosophy from countless military officers over the years. In part, it is informed by old codes of masculine honor and prowess, but it also reflects a mentality that must prepare itself to meet apparently insuperable odds. The cult of optimism makes failure seem, always, a matter of will or choice.

And as much as the military seeks refuge in its legal status as an instrument of civilian policy, don’t think for a minute that all that optimism doesn’t have policy consequences when it infuses the advice given to civilian leaders. As Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, and Adam Goldman reported in The New York Times in August, “Part of the problem, according to former officials, is that the can-do attitude of the military frequently got in the way of candid accurate assessments of how the Afghan security forces were doing. Though no one was blind to desertions or battlefield losses, American commanders given the task of training the Afghan military were reluctant to admit their efforts were failing.” On the subject of this reluctance, one friend who served in Afghanistan observed, “Do you think anyone was going to get promoted if they ‘left Afghan forces worse than they found them,’ even if it amounted to just correcting a report? My suspicion is that something like that logic played out a thousand times. We had no great battlefield loss, just death by a thousand little lies and omissions.”

The mid-20th-century cultural critic Robert Warshow illuminated American optimism from a different angle when he examined the phenomenon of the gangster film in a 1948 essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” The genre offered a tragic counterpoint to what Warshow regarded as a national commitment “to a cheerful view of life,” common to all modern egalitarian political systems. “If an American … is unhappy,” he argued, “it implies a certain reprobation of his society, and therefore … it becomes an obligation of citizenship to be cheerful; if the authorities find it necessary, the citizen may even be compelled to make a public display of his cheerfulness on important occasions.”

Warshow recognized that an anxiety lurked beneath the forced smile of American optimism: “Whatever its effectiveness as a source of consolation and a means of pressure for maintaining ‘positive’ social attitudes, this optimism is fundamentally satisfying to no one, not even to those who would be most disoriented without its support.” Warshow read the gangster film as part of “a current of opposition,” expressive of the “sense of desperation and inevitable failure which optimism itself helps to create.”

Warshow’s anatomy of the gangster picture suggests the depths of self-deception necessary to preserve American optimism. Nowhere is this need more powerful or more potentially tragic than in military culture. The Post’ s series on the Afghanistan Papers accused officials of “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” I would suggest a more complicated dynamic: that some officials knew or could admit in certain circumstances that the war could not be won but felt it their duty to say otherwise—that it would have constituted a betrayal of those who had already died to conclude that they had “died in vain.” In some cases, the blindness might have been willful, but in others, I believe, it was simply a product of successful cultural indoctrination.

To the perpetual optimist, war is a deadly endurance sport that can be won if only we possess the virtue and stamina to keep on playing the game. “Winning Matters,” Army Chief of Staff James C. McConville likes to say: “We win with our People doing the right things the right way.” After all, the army’s mission is “to fight and win our Nation’s wars.” In 2019, shortly after being sworn in, McConville told the Army News Service, “When we send the United States Army somewhere, we don’t go to participate, we don’t go to try hard. We go to win. That is extremely important because there’s no second place or honorable mention in combat. … We’re a contact sport,” in which soldiers “need to make sure that they can meet the physical and mental demands.”

Analogies between sport and war have become commonplace in U.S. military culture. Americans borrowed this idea from the British. One popular expression of it can be found in Sir Henry Newbolt’s terrible 1892 poem “Vitai Lampada.” Newbolt takes us from a public-school cricket pitch to an unspecified desert of the Empire. Each situation calls for the same refrain: “Play up! play up! and play the game!” This is the kind of sensibility that turns certain descriptions of war, to borrow the military historian John Keegan’s phrase, into “jolly genre scene[s].”

It is the Duke of Wellington, the victor at the Battle of Waterloo, who is most often thought of in connection with this sentiment. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, several formulations are attributed to him, and even though they are generally considered to be apocryphal, they have unequivocal staying power. The first attribution dates from 1856, when Wellington is said to have declared on a visit to Eton, “It is here that the battle of Waterloo was won!” The sentimental musings of old Etonians have always been ripe for ridicule, and the Dictionary traces a line of critics from Matthew Arnold to George Orwell.

Arnold alluded implicitly to Wellington in “An Eton Boy,” an essay on the “harm” of English secondary schools published in 1881 in The Fortnightly Review . Among the products of these schools Arnold describes is a figure he calls the “aged Barbarian.” This hidebound, uncultured traditionalist was in his “far more amiable stage” a beautiful, exuberant Eton boy who excelled in the steeplechase or became Master of the Beagles. Should he survive into old age, this man will “mumble to us his story how the battle of Waterloo was won in the playing-fields of Eton. Alas!” Arnold laments, “Disasters have been prepared in those playing-fields as well as victories; disasters due to inadequate mental training—to want of application, knowledge, intelligence, lucidity.” During World War II, Orwell, discerning “the decay of ability in the ruling class,” pulled on the same thread: “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”

Jan Willem Pieneman’s painting of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo. The Duke of Wellington is in the center of the canvas. (Prisma Archivo/Alamy)

At West Point, the connection between sport and war is epitomized in former superintendent Douglas MacArthur’s observation: “Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that, upon other fields, on other days, will bear the fruits of victory.” I most recently saw this old saw on an academy social media account accompanying the photograph of a football player. Those who employ the analogy are oblivious to its original connections to class and empire, although I’m quite certain the aristocratically minded MacArthur well understood them.

And for those who do not find congenial the orotund sentiments of a MacArthur, there is always the earthier style of George Patton, preferably in the version to be found in the 1970 biopic, at the beginning of which George C. Scott, as Patton, appears before a giant American flag to harangue the troops in his unforgettable baritone. Some of my acquaintances remember watching the film’s opening scene during their first West Point summer. In the midst of the Vietnam War, thousands of moviegoers witnessed Scott deliver these lines:

Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war, because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

I cannot omit a counterpoint, all the more surprising because it comes from another American proponent of sport, war, and winning, Theodore Roosevelt, who always proves to be more complicated than he seems. Despite his boyish zest for sport, cultivated during a sickly childhood, and an often-unseemly enthusiasm for war, Roosevelt did not, at least privately, confuse the two endeavors. Indeed, he expressed a certain mistrust of the primacy of sport in a 1903 letter to his son Ted, who had written urgently to report his being cut from the second squad of the Groton football team (and who would go on to a successful military career). “I am delighted to have you play football,” the president told his son. “I believe in rough, manly sports. But I do not believe in them if they degenerate into the sole end of any one’s existence.” The father continued:

I need not tell you that character counts for a great deal more than either intellect or body in winning success in life. Athletic proficiency is a mighty good servant, and like so many other good servants, a mighty bad master. Did you ever read Pliny’s letter to Trajan, in which he speaks of its being advisable to keep the Greeks absorbed in athletics, because it distracted their minds from all serious pursuits, including soldiering, and prevented their ever being dangerous to the Romans? … A man must develop his physical prowess up to a certain point; but after he has reached that point there are other things that count more. … I am glad you should play football; I am glad that you should box; I am glad that you should ride and shoot and walk and row as well as you do. I should be very sorry if you did not do these things. But don’t ever get into the frame of mind which regards these things as constituting the end to which all your energies must be devoted, or even the major portion of your energies.

This is not a Roosevelt most at West Point would immediately recognize. It is not the Roosevelt of the centennial commencement address at the military academy in 1902, in which the president chose to include a jolly genre scene with a happy ending that demonstrates the magical power of optimism. A cadet “having his holiday” from the academy had joined Roosevelt’s regiment in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Shot in the stomach before an assault, the cadet declared, “ ‘All right, Colonel, I am going to get well.’ I did not think he was,” Roosevelt continued, “but I said, ‘All right, I am sure you will,’ and he did; he is all right now.”

“Winning Matters.” Of course it does. But what happens when you lose? And I’m not talking about losing your spot on the football squad at Groton.

West Point’s rhetorical emphasis on winning intensified during the war on terror and seems only to have increased since our engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq began increasingly to look like failures. People used to speak of pursuing excellence; now all the talk is about winning. Fostering “a winning culture” is a prominent part of the academy’s character development program. We are enjoined to help cadets learn how “to pursue excellence and win in a manner consistent with Army Values and good sportsmanship.” Pursuing excellence seems to me a far richer, more expansive (even Aristotelian) idea than winning. But the obsession with winning—especially with winning in athletics—has become all the more energetic as a strategy for not talking about losing.

Everything has become something that can be won. Devotees of the cult have long signed their emails, ended their speeches, and greeted each other with “Beat Navy!” “Beat Someone!” or “Beat Everyone!” Nor is this rhetoric confined to sporting events, where it has at least the potential to create esprit de corps. It bleeds into other realms, a reflexive coda even in those circumstances when such exhortations seem at best sophomoric, at worst inappropriate. Cadets are encouraged to do well academically, as if studying itself were a kind of sport, with the phrase “Beat the Dean!”

During the pandemic, a virus, too, has been turned into something that can be beaten the way a conventional adversary might be: “Stay Positive! Test Negative! Beat Everyone!” read one mass email I received. Another praised cadets for adhering to safety protocols by likening their situation to that of Joshua Chamberlain making his stand at Little Round Top. They were instructed to remain vigilant against a lurking enemy. “As Chamberlain did at Gettysburg,” it closed, “we must hold the line!”

A great deal is eclipsed by a worldview that imagines we can always secure a win, for it confuses the ambiguities of life with the clarity of sport. Commentators have often remarked on our inclination to turn every problem into a war: the war on crime, the war on poverty, the war on cancer, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on Covid-19. As the philosopher Rebecca Gordon notes, this tendency isn’t unique to the United States. But it is very strong with us, and it carries with it a host of implications, ranging from the ethical to the practical.

What licenses this rhetorical move in the first place is an understanding of war as a deadly sport that can always be played to a decisive conclusion, rather than a violent, indeterminate collision of vast and uncontrollable forces. Some wars end in draws; others in Pyrrhic victories; still others, as seems to be the case with our recently concluded expedition in Afghanistan, almost where they began, with little to show but losses: of life, treasure, reputation, and moral standing.

But almost no one is talking about that. When acquaintances ask me what my students and colleagues are saying about events in Afghanistan, I have little to report. Sometimes it almost feels as if it never happened, so deep is the silence, which runs all the way to the top.

Around the time of our nearly coincident late August departure from Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of September 11, senior Department of Defense leaders sent the force-wide messages customary on such occasions. Billed as opportunities for “reflection,” these messages typically end up in self-congratulation. They can begin on a somber note, but they must always end in optimism. They take pride in sacrifice: “The sacrifices you’ve made,” declared one, “will be a lasting legacy of honor and commitment for all to remember.” The September 11 “attacks,” it continued, “reminded us of the true strength of our Nation and our military.” Sensitive to the fact that some “teammates” might “be struggling with the unfolding events,” it urged solidarity in a “tough time,” but it also reminded readers that they had joined “the best Army in the world.”

Another message to the force also alluded to “challenging times” before turning attention to patriotic achievement: “Together, wrapped in the cloth of our Nation, you project strength, safeguard peace, and carry compassion throughout the globe.” An emphasis on “compassion” and protection is characteristic of such letters, which tend to divert attention away from the fundamentally destructive nature of the military’s work. Declaring that “our military mission” in Afghanistan “has come to an end,” this message assured its readers that “you can hold your head high” by asserting unequivocally (and without evidence) that the military had “prevented an attack on the United States homeland.” A third missive similarly called attention to the humanitarian aspects of the military’s work: “Our service members … provided medical care, food and water, and compassion to people in need. They flew tens of thousands of people to safety, virtually around the clock. They even delivered babies.”

It is safer to abstract particular “acts of bravery and sheer determination” from the longer narratives of which they form a part. By focusing on the heroic efforts of military personnel during the evacuation itself, these messages didn’t have to address the many missteps that landed them there: “Your actions honor the sacrifice of our brothers and sisters in arms who lost their lives or were wounded in Afghanistan.” The success or failure of the larger mission becomes beside the point when the purpose of every military action is defined as honoring a previous soldier’s sacrifice.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin came the closest to admitting that something went wrong: “As we look back as a nation on two decades of combat and struggle in Afghanistan, I hope that we will do so with as much thoughtfulness and humility as we can muster. And I know that we will wish for a brighter future for the Afghan people—for all their sons, and for all their daughters.” But then came the obligatory coda: “I am proud of the part that we played in this war.”

Animated by a faith in American exceptionalism and a belief in the inherent virtue of democracy’s military might, validated by our victory in World War II, Americans will one day weave stories about Iraq and Afghanistan similar to those that have grown up around Vietnam, which some construe as a winnable war betrayed by a lack of American will, squeamishness on the part of civilian leaders, or a disloyal press. Congressional oversight hearings on the withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer have already started to shape that narrative. For example, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma seized on the revelation that the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, informed his Pentagon superiors of the need for additional troops on the ground. “Clearly,” Inhofe concluded, “President Biden didn’t listen to all the military advice.”

Explanations of failure tend to conclude that Afghanistan simply wasn’t ready for democracy. In September, Secretary Austin told Congress that despite the bravery of many Afghan soldiers, “in the end, we couldn’t provide them with the will to win. At least not all of them.” Here, too, was a celebration of the quantifiable success of the evacuation itself: Although plans had been made for the evacuation of between 70,000–80,000 people, the number of evacuees eventually exceeded 124,000. “At the height of this operation, an aircraft was taking off every 45 minutes. And not a single sortie was missed for maintenance, fuel, or logistical problems. It was the largest airlift conducted in U.S. history, and it was executed in just 17 days.” Such enumeration focuses on the local at the expense of the systemic.

A friend who served in Vietnam anatomized the winner’s tragic predicament this way:

The Army avoids talk of loss by never leaving the battlefield. The Army lost lives but never a battle. In Vietnam the Army lost its reputation but never a battle. In the last 20 years, the Army lost the strength to tell itself the truth and to tell that truth to the civilian leadership, but the Army never lost a battle. Endless military victories cannot prevent losing. They perversely prolong the fighting and magnify the loss. I fear that the Army will forever welcome the opportunity to prove its prowess and will avoid the Washington truth-telling that may—just may—prevent otherwise inevitable loss, truth-telling that puts Army leaders at far greater risk than they would ever face on the battlefield. And, of course, the Army has no medal for that kind of courage.

Fostering a “winning culture” is a prominent part of West Point’s character development program. (World Politics Archive (WPA)/Alamy)

Is this inevitably what happens to a culture consumed with winning when it is confronted by loss? Must it search for wins wherever it can? Does a sort of shock set in? I cannot help but think of the Athenians after their disastrous Sicilian Expedition, undertaken in 413 BCE during the war with Sparta. Thucydides, a participant in and a historian of that war, records that the Athenians were ignorant of the terrain as well as of the nature of the island’s inhabitants, both Hellenic migrants and (non-Greek) barbarians. They were also too ready to believe in reports of the magnificent spoils awaiting them. Thucydides notes their confused, even disingenuous motivations: “The Athenians were now bent upon invading; being ambitious in real truth of conquering the whole, although they had also the specious design of aiding their kindred and other allies in the island.”

Thucydides paints the Athenian decision to go to Sicily as a contest between an optimist, the charismatic, unscrupulous Alcibiades, and a pessimist, the experienced commander Nicias. The glory-seeking Alcibiades reassures his countrymen of the unworthiness of their prospective opponents, the Syracusans, while the dour Nicias reminds his countrymen that they have only just had “respite” from both a plague and an intense phase of the war with Sparta. Too far away to be a threat, the enemy, he explains, is likewise too numerous to be conquered.

Plutarch, a Greek writing in a Roman world 500 years later, notes that Alcibiades convinced the Athenians that Sicily was the key to expanding their empire to Carthage, Libya, and—most appealing to a city whose pride was its navy—“the seas as far as the Pillars of Hercules.” Once these conceits of glory had fired the Athenians’ imaginations, Nicias’s warnings that Alcibiades was embroiling the city in “foreign dangers and difficulties, merely with a view to his own private lucre and ambition … came to nothing.” Roused to war, the Athenians prove incapable of hearing reason. Alcibiades’s cavalier attitude sorts perfectly with their blind self-regard. And Nicias ultimately miscalculates. Thinking to dissuade his countrymen by emphasizing the expedition’s magnitude, he succeeds only in obtaining carte blanche to organize as large a force as he requires. And for his pains, he is appointed alongside Alcibiades as joint commander of the expedition.

Before the Sicilian Expedition, Nicias’s success as a commander had been considerable. He had proved himself strategically astute and devoted to his country. In Sicily, however, he makes a series of poor decisions and exhibits a superstitious overreliance on soothsayers. The Athenian military disintegrates over the course of the expedition. Regarding the invasion as the watershed event of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides calls it “the most brilliant of successes for the Syracusans,” “the most calamitous of defeats” for Athens, and altogether “the greatest action that we know of in Hellenic history.” Athens would never be the same, nor would the balance of power between it and Sparta.

A series of miscalculations leads to the complete demoralization of the Athenians. After losing a naval battle to the Syracusans, the Athenians, “defeated at sea, where defeat could never have been expected,” are “plunged deeper into bewilderment than ever.” Eventually the sailors are “so utterly overcome by their defeat as no longer to believe in the possibility of success.” They won’t even obey Nicias’s orders to reboard their ships to attempt an escape. As a result, the entire force is condemned to retreat overland.

On the march, the debilitated Athenians left behind not only the dead but also the wounded, who, according to Thucydides, cried out and clutched desperately at the retreating survivors so as not to be abandoned. Repeatedly attacked on the march by the Syracusans, an exhausted remnant of the Athenian force meets its gruesome and chaotic end at the Assinarus River. Eager to escape their attackers, the Athenians trample and drown one another in their attempts to ease their thirst at the river and then to ford it to safety. They make easy targets for the enemy, positioned atop the steep bank, and Athenian bodies ultimately lie in heaps in the streambed.

By the end of this expedition, the Athenians no longer know who they are; they began it by failing to understand whom they were fighting. For the first time, the people they were trying to subdue did not want what they were selling—namely, Athenian democracy as opposed to Spartan oligarchy. “These were the only cities that they had yet encountered, similar to their own in character, under democracies like themselves, which,” Thucydides explains, “they had been unable to divide and bring them over by holding out the prospect of changes in their governments.”

When I read this passage recently, I could not help but think of something the friend who served in Afghanistan shared with me. He told me about an insult frequently thrown around by Americans there: “You can’t buy an Afghan,” it ran, “but you can rent one.” This insult about Afghan ethics—about the fickleness of their loyalties—entirely missed the point while also ignoring our own corruption in trying to buy loyalty. “Why should it be the case,” my friend asked, “that the Afghans should want what we were selling in the first place? Why should we condemn them for refusing a bargain they never asked for?”

There is a coda to the tragedy of the Sicilian Expedition. It may not be factual, but it has the undeniable virtue of human interest. The survivors of the Athenians’ calamitous retreat were penned in stone quarries by the victorious Syracusans. Exposed to the elements, forced to subsist on a daily ration of half a pint of water and a pint of grain, the Athenians had to endure the stench of the piled-up bodies of those who succumbed. It is Plutarch, trying to come to terms with Athens’s transformation from republic to deluded empire, who appends the coda. He records that some Athenians were sold into slavery—branded, too, with the image of a horse on their foreheads—yet some

were saved for the sake of Euripides, whose poetry, it appears, was in request among the Sicilians more than among any of the settlers out of Greece. And when any travelers arrived that could tell them some passage, or give them any specimen of his verses, they were delighted to be able to communicate them to one another.

It is just like Plutarch to provide us with this piece of information—and it is the promise of such gems that keeps a literature professor reading him so enthusiastically—but, also characteristically, he doesn’t tell us what to do with it, what to make of the fact that the enemy’s love of Greek poetry is the means to Athenian salvation:

Many of the captives who got safe back to Athens are said, after they reached home, to have gone and made their acknowledgments to Euripides, relating how that some of them had been released from their slavery by teaching what they could remember of his poems, and others, when straggling after the fight, had been relieved with meat and drink for repeating some of his lyrics.

Absent a larger point, it is difficult to explain Plutarch’s digression. The tale has no organic significance to the narrative beyond highlighting a symptomatic difference between the Athenians and those peoples they would swallow up. In political as well as military disarray by the time of the Sicilian Expedition, the Athenians have allowed ambition to lead them far away from themselves and from the potentially instructive mirror of their own cultural achievements, while their enemies manifest at once military superiority and sophisticated literary taste. Plutarch wants his reader to know that it was to the writer of tragedies, the exiled Euripides—and not to the city, by then engulfed in its own tragedy—that the Athenian survivors owed their eventual repatriation.

The Sicilian Expedition is on my mind not because it provides a perfect analogy to Afghanistan—it emphatically does not—but because it anatomizes a psychology of loss. The narratives of Plutarch and Thucydides dramatize the shock of defeat and its potential for producing not only a military but also a social, cultural, and political unraveling. When I read them now, in the wake of our losses (different in degree and kind), I cannot help but wonder whether there is some middle course between the paralysis of the Athenian forces, on the one hand, and on the other the present-day insistence on salvaging wins from the wreckage.

An 1890 print depicting “The Retreat of the Athenians from Syracuse,” in “the most calamitous of defeats” for Athens (The Print Collector/Alamy)

The Sicilian Expedition is also on my mind because I’ve been reading it with cadets in a seminar. As it happens, this class, a survey of ancient to early modern literature organized around the idea of barbarians and borderlands, is all about loss. The collisions it creates for me almost daily between the ancient world and our own are so many and so various that I have felt exceedingly self-conscious all semester because I don’t normally gear my teaching to current events, and I have always rejected choosing texts solely for their direct relevance to the news as a shortsighted strategy that does not play to my discipline’s strengths. Early last spring, when I was designing this course, I didn’t know what the summer would bring.

I have long been aware of the pedagogical (to say nothing of the political) limits of analogy. When things are going well, we like to think we have outstripped the past. But analogies always return with a vengeance in eras of change and upheaval. And nothing attracts the analogists like a crisis: Afghanistan is like Vietnam, war is like a sport. Analogy is a natural way to connect our own particular experience to someone else’s. But analogies are slippery, and the flaw is that such tests often yield a false positive for universals. We can hardly avoid drawing analogies; it seems to be part of our hardwiring. Yet we can be on our guard against being misled by them. The ancients themselves depended on the process of reasoning through analogy to make sense of their universe, but they also recognized its limitations. Plutarch, whose own biographies were predicated on the idea of analogy—of parallel Greek and Roman lives—acknowledged the ease with which historians misconstrue accidental resemblance as evidence of meaningful “design.”

And so I understand the texts I selected—Thucydides, Plutarch, Sappho, and Virgil among them—as presenting a world full not of analogies but of imperfect parallels, which, when read in a thoughtful rather than a superstitious way, show us to ourselves in an unfamiliar mirror if only we have the courage to look. It is the Aeneid, more than any of these texts, that haunts me. I first worked to understand this poem at school in the original Latin, and while my translation skills have deteriorated over the years, my connection to the poem has only intensified.

I have never found it at once so difficult and seductive as I have on this encounter because it discloses with a clarity unmatched by anything I have ever read what it means to lose. Throughout much of the poem, the Trojans’ labors are almost entirely profitless. Despite occasional infusions of intelligence and treasure from sources human and divine, the Trojan enterprise operates at a nearly constant loss. Aeneas himself must lose everything—honor, family, friends, an entire city and with it his cultural identity—before he can gain an empire for his descendants. In the end, it is by no means clear to me that this victory in prospect offers anything like adequate compensation.

Winning is inextricable from losing. My students have been particularly struck with Aeneas’s transformation in the second half of the poem from a dutiful, rather cool and restrained protagonist to an enraged berserker who adorns his chariot with the decapitated heads of his enemies. Virgil’s feat, as the critic David Quint has eloquently argued, is to turn losers into winners. But the emblem of Aeneas’s victory is a sword plunged “in fury” into the chest of his enemy, Turnus, and the poem’s last line is devoted to the indignant flight of Turnus’s soul from his groaning body to “the gloom below.”

Aeneas is harried throughout by the supernatural wrath of Juno, who while unable to derail destiny does her utmost to delay its fulfillment and to increase its price. He is confronted repeatedly with tantalizing prophecies that are misread, partially understood, or somehow true in unanticipated ways. Robert Fitzgerald, whose translation we have been reading, repeatedly uses the word baffling to describe the world in which Aeneas operates.

I find my world baffling just now, and periodically, prompted by one ancient text or another, I have tried to discuss that fact with my students. But they do not—or cannot—immediately hear all those resonances that strike me so profoundly. Each day in the classroom this semester, after a year of remote teaching, I have had to navigate an alarming silence about all that has recently transpired. The military establishment writ large has signaled its reluctance to speak of it. The cadets, for their part, certainly have questions and concerns, but some seem reluctant to ask their instructors, many of whom have spent so much of their careers engaged in this war, while my colleagues, as several have confirmed, need to talk about it but feel constrained and thus do so privately, almost surreptitiously, absent institutional support or context for such discussions. The consequences of not talking about what has just happened—of making it seem less like a loss and more like the triumph of military virtues over circumstance—strike me as grave.

One friend who remembers watching the opening of Patton when he first arrived at West Point as a new cadet also screened Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers together with the entire corps in the early 2000s in the largest auditorium on post. Black Hawk Down in particular, he notes, “fed something in cadets who were struggling to imagine what their futures might look like. Of course, the point of making us watch films that dramatized these tactical and strategic losses was that they weren’t actually losses,” he adds.

They sublimated loss into moral victory, romanticizing the Shakespearean band-of-brothers mythology. … It’s a point that eluded many of us for a long time (some still haven’t caught on). It’s a very insidious—and sentimental—form of indoctrination. I didn’t fully apprehend the extent to which it had captured my imagination until my third deployment, when I finally saw that “mythology” for what it always was, and I discovered that this consoling narrative had been a fiction all along. It’s why I’m so skeptical of the rhetoric surrounding the Afghanistan withdrawal. So dangerous. It’s not hyperbole to say that it almost destroyed me—was a greater trauma than any of the death or violence I encountered.

Few of us have the poet’s ability to reckon with the loss that inevitably surrounds us. We live now amid even greater loss than usual—losses tangible and intangible; losses permanent and temporary, which will nevertheless leave enduring traces; losses occasioned by a pandemic; losses brought about by two decades of bootless warfare. And so when I teach Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” again in the spring to a roomful of the military’s newest members, it will be with a consciousness of the need to grapple with loss and our almost total incapacity to do so. We are confronted with an opportunity to speak honestly and openly about the truth that there are things that cannot be won, losses that cannot be undone by calling them victories. And in the process, maybe we can reduce the odds of finding ourselves once again in this particular game, in which nothing but poetry can help us find our way home.

The editorial views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Elizabeth D. Samet  is a professor of English at West Point. Her latest book is Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness.

● NEWSLETTER

The Audacity.

The Art of Losing

A guest essay.

It’s a Monday at 10 p.m., and I’m sitting down to edit an essay. I always start with a ritual.

First, a crackling fireplace on YouTube. Second, a song on repeat: this time, Cautious Clay’s “Shook.” Third, a cup of tea. Fourth, a candle. Fifth and final, a tin of theraputty in my lap, something I can knead when I need kinetic movement.

Now: the work.

Tonight’s essay, by Uma Dwivedi , is about how the series Fleabag , with its commentary on how we cope with desire and its avoidance, is indeed a love story, as Fleabag tells her audience in episode one. But it’s also a story, notes Uma, about the particular experience of being trans.

“Fleabag ,” writes Uma, “feels evocative of the specific complexities of love and desire when you are trans: repression, the performance of built identity, a distrust of the body and what it wants.” This is early in Uma’s essay, before their elegant description of the show’s finale, that fated moment when the Priest tells Fleabag of her love: it’ll pass.

The frame of Uma’s essay is like an MRI of a body. The sentences surrounding this one give her essay vitality and heft, like blood, like muscle. But this sentence about the complexities of trans love and desire is something more: it speaks to something deeper, something beneath the blood and muscle. This sentence is part of the heart of this piece.

We’re not ready for the weight of this yet, I think.

I want to suggest moving it, but where? I scan the essay again, and I see it: there, just after the description of the scene. It’ll pass.

The sentence teases out the emotional nuance in the priest’s words and introduces the seeds of Uma’s ideas about religion. I comment: I think we have the seeds of this here, but we need a specific transition between this and the next paragraphs where you move back to religion - this is one of the other reasons I moved this paragraph here. I think it gives a great start to that transition.

I’m confident Uma will write more to facilitate this transition. I move the sentence, and it slides into the necessary place like a heart into a chest cavity.   

I like to joke that I’m an editor with x-ray vision. When I edit a piece of writing, I see through the skin and the muscle to the vulnerable heart of it. I understand the gravity and responsibility of this, so I have rules of engagement: treat the work with tenderness and empathy. Be rigorous; pare the excess back and leave the heart beating. Ask questions to encourage the writer to make that heart more visible.

I’ve worked hard to hone these rules, this skill over the years. And as I’ve honed, I’ve discovered that part of what makes me good at this work is that I’m very good at losing things.

A brief list of things I’ve lost since my divorce in 2019:

one house, which now belongs to my ex-husband;

one rental property, which my sister asked me to move out of;

dozens of friends;

every cap to every tube of toothpaste;

my job as a university teaching assistant and my health insurance;

the indentation in my finger where my wedding ring used to rest;

all retirement and savings;

two sets of keys;

a ruby ring my mother gave me;

half of my marital property;

the wolf spider who made a habit of camping out above my bedside lamp;

one partner, who told me he’d spend the rest of his life with me;

my therapist;

five unmatched socks;

hours and hours of sleep.

In November 2020, days after my former partner broke up with me, I sat in the middle of the bed in the room I’d moved back into at my parents’ house, and I wrote this list. I watched the leaves fall from the trees. I curled up in the bed and hugged my knees to my chest, and I cried. Outside, there was a pandemic. Inside, there was no one I could trust to comfort me. For a while, I believed I’d lost nearly everything.

I keep this list on the Notes app on my phone. I’ve never shared it with anyone. For months, every time I looked at it, I felt ashamed at the things I couldn’t hold onto, at the things I obsess over, at the things other people have that I don’t.

When I started this list, one thought kept me going: I may not have much but I have my writing. I’ve written my way through a lot of difficult things. I can write my way through this. And so I started this essay. At the time, I felt helpless, like writing about it was the only measure of control I had. I told myself I would write the particulars of every loss, chronicle every single pain, so people could understand the magnitude of what happened to me.

Fitting that, just like our lives, our writing often doesn’t turn out the way we intended.

I’m taking a break from editing Uma’s essay, and my “To Do” list tells me I’m supposed to be writing this one. But this essay is killing me. I can’t focus, and it’s partly because of the news I just received. This morning, I was officially diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve suspected it for a while: my difficulty with impulse shopping; my struggle to stay organized; the way that writing and editing both operate more smoothly when I set them to a soundtrack because I need the beat to harness my mind. But now the diagnosis is real, and so is my anger. I’m 44 years old. I’ve managed my entire life without treatment, including completing a PhD. It didn’t occur to a single person in my life that I was neurodivergent. I think of the trick I unknowingly played on people for all those years, all the ways I learned to cope and kept it together: all the rigid schedules I kept, all the lists, all the late-night ruminations as I lay in bed in the dark for hours, worrying about what I’d missed. Because I’m a hard worker, most of the people in my life presumed my competence and even sometimes my perfection. And the problem with that presumption is that when you are a woman—high-achieving, hard on herself, a perfectionist who is anything but perfect—who one day finds her ability to project perfection has sputtered out, who finds herself scraping bottom and realizing there’s no competence left, the people around you don’t assume that you need help, because you’ve never really needed help before. They assume that your mechanics have malfunctioned, and so nearly overnight you morph from supermom to fuckup, to hot mess, to deeply flawed. And then you realize that the only trick you’ve played is on yourself.

And of course, this is the first thing my brain tells me: here’s another loss for the list . 

But I know this is my brain’s way of coping—catastrophizing and distraction—and when it’s looping like this, there are few ways to center it and direct it towards strategy. I go for an old reliable: I read Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” for the thousandth time. For years, I had this poem posted on the wall above my office desk but I haven’t had a place of my own for over a year now. I carry the poem with me. I run my eyes over it, prodding its gaps and its wrinkles, looking for the places where I can insert myself. Sometimes I need to wear it like a skin, to remind myself that loss is familiar, that I am now better able to manage how I lose things.

I’m not a Bishop scholar, but I’ve started reading scholarly articles and essays about her. It’s become a habit after I read the poem. It calms me. Today, I start with Brett Candlish Miller , who tells me Bishop wrote “One Art” in 17 drafts over the course of two weeks in late October and early November 1975. Miller notes that the poem—which is believed to be inspired by the death by suicide of Bishop’s partner Lota de Macendo Soares as well as Alice Methfessel, Bishop’s companion, caretaker, secretary, and lover for the last eight years of her life—shifts focus during the drafting process. Initially, it focuses on the speaker’s need to choose, but by the final revision, “the poet lets go of her need to choose” and the poem only offers resolution.

“More than once in the drafts of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems,” Miller writes, “one finds that she came to express in the final draft nearly the opposite of what she started out to say.”

I wonder if this peace, this sense of resolution, has anything to do with the vastness of Bishop’s losses, and so I read Claudia Roth Pierpoint next. The first loss, says Pierpoint, was Bishop’s father when she was eight months old. The second was her mother, destroyed by the loss of her husband, to a mental institution. Bishop was then transported from her home in Nova Scotia to her father’s home in Massachusetts and raised by his parents.

“It seemed then that she had lost a country, too,” says Pierpoint.

What it must feel like to lose a country, to lose a love that felt as big as one, I think, and then I remind myself: I’m not the only one with a list of losses. We’ve all lost two cities, lovely ones. Two rivers. A continent. A person, that gesture that we love. Gone. 

In the second draft of Uma’s essay, they’ve made an addition. “The Priest,” they write, “is trying to convince himself that he will survive the self-imposed restriction of his desire for human love and happiness. He is trying to convince himself that any indecorous bulging or bleeding of his own heart will pass simply because it must, because he has left himself no other choice.”

When I read this, the curtain I pulled shut across my marriage is pulled clean open, and I see myself—intractable, nailed to that misery, relishing it in a way, because it was so much easier to martyr myself than to do the hard work of searching for happiness—and I have to shelve my editorial eye for a moment. Part of the reason I’m grappling so much with loss now is because for a long time, I held on to things—a marriage, friendships, jobs, visions of the future—far past their natural end. For years I believed that one of the biggest signs of my worth was in my constancy, but I wasn’t constant at all. Most of the time, I was a coward. I couldn’t admit that I was terrified of change. I can feel the creep of tears underneath my lids, at the back of my throat, and I swallow until they disappear.

This too is part of editing with X-ray eyes. Sometimes my beautiful, expansive, wandering brain—the brain that is so bad at executive function but so good at invention and intuition and empathy—finds a sharp pinpoint of pain. Sometimes I read something that sounds like it’s exactly about my losses—which I used to always see as failures—and it hurts me down to the bone. I think of Bishop, how her first sentence, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” didn’t change at all in seventeen drafts. How with each reading it must have reminded her of the things that slipped away. How she kept it anyway. I know this is a lesson: sometimes I have to lean into the hurt places, because that too is a kind of centering. Once a hurt place is broken open, I often have to steep in it for a while rather than trying to spackle it over. The only way I can gain any sense of perspective is to submerge myself in the hot liquid center of it and sweat the pain out, to force myself to face every indelicate, embarrassing, irrational instinct I have. Then I can give myself permission to move on.

And sometimes—often, in fact—the pain isn’t at all about me. 

I take a break from editing. I read essays about people’s marriages, and I cry. I cry because I’m glad I’m not married anymore but also because I wish I’d had a happy one. I cry too because I know some of the things these people are leaving out.

So many people come into my DMs and whisper to me. One writer came to me four days before her wedding and stayed, and stayed. After a while, she told me she loved me. She told me she was lonely. She told me we could never be together. She said there were parts of her that her spouse would never understand. She puts none of those things in her work.

Another writer came to me and told me how much he misses sex. He told me how hard he’s holding onto his marriage. He told me he hopes opening his marriage will keep it alive and bring sex back to him. He doesn’t put any of that into his work either.

I don’t know why people tell me what they do. Maybe they’re just lonely. Maybe it’s because they know I won’t tell. Whatever the reason, I wish they’d write these things instead because I think it would strengthen their work and help them make sense of whatever they’re struggling with. But I know people are writing the corners and edges of their lives instead of writing the center because the center is too hard, because the center feels lost.

I know because I did it too. I know because sometimes I still do.

In December 2020, I wrote dozens of pages about love and loss for this essay, most of them terrible. I stared for hours out at the snow. I saved pictures of beautiful dresses I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to afford, which didn’t matter, because I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to wear them anywhere. I applied for jobs. I took on freelance editing projects to keep a slow trickle of money coming in. I only left my bed when I had custodial time with my children. I made a header for my Twitter profile from the last scene in Fleabag between Fleabag and the Priest . I love you. I know. I love you too. It’ll pass.

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One Art Summary & Analysis by Elizabeth Bishop

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

“One Art” was written by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. The poem is a villanelle , a traditional form that involves a fixed number of lines and stanzas and an intricate pattern of repetition and rhyme. Through this form, the poem explores loss as an inevitable part of life. The speaker considers what it means to experience loss over and over again, and whether it is truly possible to “master” the experience of loss and grief. “One Art” was included in Bishop’s final collection of poetry, Geography III , which was published in 1976.

• Read the full text of “One Art”

The Full Text of “One Art”

“one art” summary, “one art” themes.

The Inevitability and Pain of Loss

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “one art”.

The art of ... hard to master;

so many things ... ... is no disaster.

Lose something every ... ... hard to master.

Then practice losing ... ... will bring disaster.

Lines 10-12

I lost my ... ... hard to master.

Lines 13-15

I lost two ... ... wasn’t a disaster.

Lines 16-17

—Even losing you ... ... shan’t have lied.

Lines 17-19

It’s evident ... ...  it!) like disaster.

“One Art” Symbols

• Line 10: “I lost my mother’s watch.”

“One Art” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Line 1: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master;”
• Line 6: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”
• Line 12: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”
• Line 18: “the art of losing’s not too hard to master”
• Line 3: “to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”
• Line 9: “to travel. None of these will bring disaster.”
• Line 15: “I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.”
• Lines 18-19: “the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like ( / Write /  it!) like disaster.”
• Line 1: “losing”
• Line 3: “lost,” “ loss”
• Line 4: “Lose”
• Line 5: “lost”
• Line 6: “losing”
• Line 7: “losing,” “losing”
• Line 10: “lost”
• Line 11: “loved”
• Line 12: “losing”
• Line 13: “lost,” “lovely”
• Line 16: “losing”
• Line 17: “love”
• Line 18: “losing’s”

End-Stopped Line

• Line 1: “master;”
• Line 3: “disaster.”
• Line 5: “spent.”
• Line 6: “master.”
• Line 7: “faster:”
• Line 9: “disaster.”
• Line 11: “went.”
• Line 12: “master.”
• Line 13: “vaster,”
• Line 14: “continent.”
• Line 15: “disaster.”
• Line 19: “disaster.”
• Lines 2-3: “intent / to”
• Lines 4-5: “fluster / of”
• Lines 8-9: “meant / to”
• Lines 10-11: “or / next-to-last”
• Lines 16-17: “gesture / I”
• Lines 17-18: “evident / the”
• Lines 18-19: “master / though”
• Line 5: “lost door keys, the hour badly spent.”
• Line 7: “losing farther, losing faster:”
• Line 14: “some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.”
• Lines 16-17: “(the joking voice, a gesture / I love)”

Alliteration

• Line 1: “losing,” “master”
• Line 2: “many”
• Line 3: “lost,” “loss”
• Line 7: “losing,” “farther,” “losing,” “faster”
• Line 10: “lost,” “watch,” “look,” “last”
• Line 11: “last,” “loved,” “went.”
• Line 14: “realms,” “rivers”
• Line 16: “losing,” “joking,” “gesture”
• Line 17: “love,” “lied”
• Line 19: “look,” “like,” “like”
• Line 1: “art,” “losing,” “isn’t,” “hard,” “to,” “master”
• Line 2: “so,” “many,” “seem,” “filled,” “intent”
• Line 3: “lost,” “loss,” “disaster.”
• Line 4: “Lose,” “something,” “day,” “Accept,” “fluster”
• Line 5: “lost,” “door,” “badly,” “spent”
• Line 6: “art,” “losing,” “isn’t,” “hard,” “master”
• Line 7: “practice,” “losing,” “farther,” “losing,” “faster”
• Line 8: “places”
• Line 9: “to,” “travel,” “will,” “disaster.”
• Line 10: “lost,” “my,” “mother’s,” “look,” “last”
• Line 11: “last,” “loved,” “went”
• Line 12: “art,” “losing,” “isn’t,” “hard,” “to,” “master”
• Line 13: “lost,” “two,” “cities,” “lovely,” “vaster”
• Line 14: “realms,” “owned,” “two,” “continent”
• Line 15: “it,” “wasn’t,” “disaster.”
• Line 16: “losing,” “joking,” “ gesture”
• Line 17: “love,” “lied,” “It’s,” “evident”
• Line 18: “art,” “losing’s,” “not,” “too,” “hard,” “to,” “master”
• Line 19: “it,” “look,” “like,” “Write,” “it,” “like,” “disaster.”
• Line 1: “art,” “hard,” “master”
• Line 2: “things,” “filled,” “with,” “intent”
• Line 3: “disaster”
• Line 7: “practice,” “faster”
• Line 8: “places,” “names”
• Line 10: “lost,” “watch,” “last, or”
• Line 11: “last”
• Line 12: “art,” “hard,” “master.”
• Line 13: “cities,” “vaster,”
• Line 14: “rivers,” “continent”
• Line 15: “miss ,” “it,” “disaster.”
• Line 18: “art,” “losing’s,” “too,” “hard,” “to,” “master”
• Line 19: “like,” “Write,” “like,” “disaster.”

“One Art” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• (Location in poem: Line 1: “master;”; Line 6: “master.”; Line 12: “master.”; Line 18: “master”)

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “One Art”

Rhyme scheme, “one art” speaker, “one art” setting, literary and historical context of “one art”, more “one art” resources, external resources.

The Bishop Archives at Vassar College — Elizabeth Bishop attended Vassar College and her papers are now stored in Vassar’s Special Collections. Visit the Vassar Archives & Special Collections website to learn more about Bishop’s papers stored at the library. 

Audio of “One Art” in Reaching for the Moon — A 2013 Brazilian film, Reaching for the Moon, explores Bishop’s life in Brazil and her relationship with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Although the movie misinterprets the poem “One Art” as about Bishop’s relationship with Soares—the poem was, in fact, about Bishop’s last partner, Alice Methfessel—the movie includes a recitation of the poem by the actress Miranda Otto, who played Bishop. In the scene, Bishop reads the poem to her friend Robert Lowell.

Biography of Elizabeth Bishop — Learn more about the poet's life and work.

The Drafts of “One Art” — Read more about Bishop’s writing process and how “One Art” changed over the course of 17 drafts in this essay at Modern American Poetry.

"Elizabeth Bishop's Art of Losing" — Read this article from The New Yorker to learn more about Bishop’s life, including the circumstances that gave rise to the poem “One Art.”

LitCharts on Other Poems by Elizabeth Bishop

Crusoe in England

Filling Station

First Death in Nova Scotia

The Man-Moth

The Mountain

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — One Art — Elizabeth Bishop’s Poem One Art: Accepting Loss

Elizabeth Bishop's Poem One Art: Accepting Loss

• Categories: One Art

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Words: 767 |

Published: Mar 14, 2019

Words: 767 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Works Cited:

• Bynum, T. W. (2008). Computer and information ethics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-computer/
• Floridi, L. (2013). The ethics of information. Oxford University Press.
• Kizza, J. M. (2013). Ethical and social issues in the information age. Springer Science & Business Media.
• Martin, C. D. (2019). Virtue ethics: An introduction. Routledge.
• Nissenbaum, H. (2004). Privacy as contextual integrity. Washington Law Review, 79(1), 119-157.
• Quinn, M. J. (2011). Ethics for the information age. Pearson.
• Rachels, J., & Rachels, S. (2019). The elements of moral philosophy. McGraw-Hill Education.
• Rees, J. (2018). Cybersecurity ethics: An introduction. Routledge.
• Spafford, E. H. (1992). Are computer hacker break-ins ethical?. Journal of Systems and Software, 17(1), 41-47.
• Spinello, R. A., & Tavani, H. T. (2016). Readings in cyberethics. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.

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The Art Of Losing Poem

This essay is mainly focused on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art, and the recurrent theme of “losing”, depicted as an art, or as the poet might say: “the art of losing”.

This paper will also focus on the poem’s form and the way in which the usage of certain conventions, such as tone, language, syntax (adjectives, adverbs and verbs) and form help to convey the poet’s message, which suggests that loss can lead to the mastery of “the art of losing”.

The poem’s title conveys the suggestion that its contents deal with the theme of art, which may be considered an irony; in the sense that as the reader goes through the lines he realizes that the poem is not about art, but about the “art of losing”. This “art”, as suggested in the poem, resembles an acquired and accomplished skill that results from the experience of losing insignificant things, which will lead, throughout the experience gained, to an art of losing rather important things in life.

The art of losing and the poem’s form

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem is structured in a way in which one may notice the poet’s struggle in expressing herself. It seems as she is trying to state something different to what is being expressed. Chief among these conceptions there is a powerful sense of loss. She is able to achieve all this throughout the manipulation of language and form. Even the tone of the poem seems to avoid the real intended argument that the form of the poem tries to put forward (which will be discussed throughout this essay).

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As mentioned before in the introduction, most of the poem is filled with irony.

Art Of Loosing

The first and most important indication of such irony is depicted in the refrain line: “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” (line 1). Throughout this ironic indication it becomes obvious that this poem is not about art, but about the “art of losing”, which becomes a skill that can only be acquired and accomplished through countless hours of practice. The irony held in the poem becomes evident by revealing that losing is an art. Without a doubt, it is ironic to see how a frustrating and difficult part of life can be considered an art. The tone also changes in each of the stanzas.

In the first stanza, Bishop speaks in tones of a rather experienced woman who has gone through situations which lead her to assert that “with the intent to be lost [… ] their loss is no disaster” (lines 2-3). This, however, resembles the daily loss of keys, and time. Such parallelisms of lost things provide a temporary distraction that repels the reader away from the force built in the poem. Apparently the poet tries to hide her pain caused by the loss of a dear one, thinking that by embracing loss, she can master the art she is longing to obtain, “the art of losing”.

In the second stanza Bishop suggests the reader, throughout the usage of imperatives, to “lose something every day” and “accept the fluster” (line 4). Through the usage of imperatives and by sounding dominant, Bishop tells the reader that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master”. The only thing that is left is to “accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent”(lines 4-5). Up to this point it seems as if the poet is trying to provide the reader with a guide devoted to the mastering of “art losing”.

Suggesting that by following her simple advices, the reader can, too, achieve such art. It seems as if Bishop is trying to put forward the philosophical reflection of the first stanza throughout imperatives and a second person speaker. The third stanza intensifies the intention of the previous stanza in being developed as a command with a simple shift to “then”(line 7). Bishop puts forward an increasingly dynamic agenda devoted to loss, she commands the reader to “practice losing farther, losing faster”(line 7), but now she is not losing simple things.

Bishop goes from losing simple things to losing “places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel” (line 8). It appears as if she is simply shifting the tone to a confessional one, since it has become evident, up to here, that Bishop is the one who speaks, which will become evident in the following stanza, she addresses the reader and shares her own experiences. Throughout the poem, the changes in tone and speaker bestow the poet’s efforts to cover up her true feelings.

She goes from denying the importance of losing significant, but rather essential things, to the loss of personal belongings. The usage of colloquial language intensifies the poems emotional power that has been hidden until now. The rhyme scheme Bishop employs and the usage of the “villanelle” appeal to put forward the intention and message of the poem, apart from lessening the seriousness of Bishop’s true feelings. The poem in the fourth and fifth stanzas gains intensity, since the poet refers to the loss of properties, and places.

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The art of losing

By Daphne Beal

• Aug. 5, 2008

It was a given that we would be conspicuous. We were four distinctly un-European females - my Midwestern mother; my mentally disabled and legally blind sister; my 14-month-old daughter; and me - going to Brussels and Paris on a pilgrimage of sorts. My sister, Cecily, had long dreamed of visiting the country where she was born and spent her early childhood, and also France, for which she'd always felt an affinity because her birthday is Bastille Day.

We lived in Brussels for four years, because of my father's job, and moved back to Wisconsin when I was almost 5 and Cecily was about 4. Cecily now lives semi-independently in a community near my parents, where she helps take care of the severely handicapped. Recently, at an evaluation meeting, one of the "goals" she articulated was to visit Brussels. It was a trip that would require serious planning. She is awkward getting around and needs to be considered as a child does: Is she fed and rested? Is she sufficiently entertained, at ease?

Somehow I always knew my mother and I would go on this trip with her. My daughter was the obvious fourth. In Brussels, our days were filled with touristic excursions - the Grand' Place, the Atomium (a 102-meter-high model of an atomic crystal) - and sentimental ones. We visited the house where we lived, now an old-age home; the park where we once fed swans; and our babysitter from those years, now 87. Unintentionally (I think), we drove past Ste. Elisabeth Hospital, where Cecily was taken when she went into a coma - a few hours after a routine vaccination at the age of 4 months. When she regained consciousness five days later, she was completely altered from the healthy, normal infant she had been. Our family has never dwelled on the topic, but we carried the fact of it through the city like a small and heavy piece of luggage.

For our group, with two of us needing attendance, plus a stroller and other gear, just getting out of a cab could become a complex operation. So maybe it's not a surprise that my mother and I kept losing things - wallet, keys, sunglasses, maps, guidebooks and so on. An Elizabeth Bishop poem sang through my head: "The art of losing isn't hard to master; / so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster." But the item always eventually turned up.

Then on our last day in Brussels, I went to the front of a tram to buy us tickets while my mother took care of Cecily and the baby. A few stops later, my mother said: "My wallet's gone. It has my passport in it." This time it was gone for good. Later, standing in the center of town and asking for directions to the U.S. Embassy, I thought, I cannot believe I am that American.

My sister took it hard, though she blamed my mother. "You'd think after getting her wallet stolen last year, she would know better," Cecily said to me as my mother filed her police report. It was true that my mother, generally savvy, was pickpocketed on a trip to Chicago on Super Bowl weekend. I told Cecily that it could have happened to any of us. But my sharp tone, betraying my own impatience, made her cry.

We did eventually get to Paris. In contrast with Brussels, it felt like part of the present, not just a stolid setting of the past, marred by things lost and taken. When we took my daughter into the crowded chapel at Sainte-Chapelle, she looked around and proclaimed, "Wooow!" inspiring a young guard to get on his walkie-talkie to cheerfully report the incident. Then, at the airport, I went with the baby to the détaxe window to get my sales-tax refund. My mother insisted I take my belongings in case we got separated. When I returned to check in, at a different counter from my mother and sister, I looked down at the luggage cart to see that my backpack was gone, with my laptop inside it.

This time, I was not that American, so much as that person, the one you pity in the airport. I was something of a spectacle. People tried to help, but there was nothing to be done. An agent told me: "When something like that is stolen, all the bad energy goes with it. So let it go. Your daughter is fine. That's the important thing." I nodded, sniffling, already feeling chagrined, when I saw my mother and sister approaching - perhaps the two people in the airport who didn't know of my mishap. On top of their cart was my backpack, where it had always been. I put it on the stroller handle and said nothing. Later, I would wonder about my outburst, and if it was only that I needed to say, in the most visible possible way: Lucky as I've always been in my life, I lost something, too.

Daphne Beal is the author of a novel, "In the Land of No Right Angles," which will be published later this month.

The Art of Losing in One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

This essay about Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” explores the theme of loss and resilience. Through Bishop’s masterful use of language and imagery, the essay examines how the poem portrays loss as an inevitable part of the human experience. It highlights Bishop’s repetition and imagery as key elements that convey the myriad forms of loss, from the mundane to the profound. Ultimately, the essay emphasizes the poem’s message of acceptance and resilience in the face of loss, reminding readers of the beauty and strength found within the human spirit.

How it works

In Elizabeth Bishop’s renowned poem “One Art,” the journey through loss is akin to a delicate dance, where every step navigates the labyrinth of human emotion. Through her deft strokes of language, Bishop unveils a tapestry of experiences, weaving together the threads of mundane losses with the weight of profound grief. At its heart, “One Art” is an exploration of the human condition, offering a glimpse into the intricate web of resilience and acceptance that defines our existence.

Bishop’s choice of repetition serves as a rhythmic heartbeat throughout the poem, echoing the relentless cadence of loss in our lives.

With each refrain of “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Bishop invites readers into a space of contemplation, urging them to consider the myriad forms that loss can take. From misplaced keys to shattered relationships, each stanza peels back the layers of human vulnerability, revealing the fragility that lies beneath our carefully constructed facades.

What sets “One Art” apart is Bishop’s keen eye for imagery, painting vivid portraits of loss that resonate with readers on a visceral level. Through her words, we are transported to moments of heartbreak and longing, where the weight of absence hangs heavy in the air. Yet amidst the wreckage of loss, Bishop finds moments of beauty and resilience, offering glimpses of hope amidst the darkness.

Ultimately, “One Art” is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a reminder that even in the face of loss, we possess an innate capacity for healing and growth. As Bishop poignantly reminds us, the true art of losing lies not in avoidance, but in acceptance – in embracing the impermanence of life and finding solace in the fleeting moments of beauty that grace our existence.

In essence, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop is more than a mere poem; it is a profound meditation on the human experience, inviting readers to confront the complexities of loss and the resilience of the human spirit. Through its masterful use of language and imagery, “One Art” reminds us that even in our darkest moments, there is beauty to be found – if only we have the courage to look.

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The Art of Losing in “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop Essay

Art in its various forms often becomes a leading theme in the works of different authors. The latter do not stop investigating the mysteries of this human skill to produce an aesthetic result. The poem of Elizabeth Bishop titled One Art is also concerned with this problem. But it focuses on a rather peculiar art form that the author herself invents. The poem is concerned with “the art of losing” (Bishop Line 1). The concept of loss is examined by the author through different perspectives and is shadowed by the pain and sadness that she experiences.

The main claim that Bishop makes is that “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” (Line 1). What strikes the reader at once is that losing something is considered art by the author. And like any other art, it needs to be mastered by the one engaged in it. Contrary to the author’s statement about the art of loss that she repeats in four stanzas out of six the point of the poem is that the art of losing is hard to deal with, but as one commonly faces this problem he or she becomes more and more proficient in it.

The line “the art of losing’s not hard to master” that is often repeated by Bishop makes the reader think of her losses. At the beginning of the poem, the author is rather careless about losing objects. She argues that losing is not a big deal and is a too trivial thing to pay much attention to. But as the poem goes on, Bishop realizes that she had lost so much. Though she does not speak directly of the effects that the loss has on her and even claims that “it wasn’t a disaster” the reader feels that it does affect the author as well as everyone on Earth (Lines 13-15). What contributes to this understanding is the author’s use of hyperboles. Bishop says that she has “lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.” (Lines 13, 14) Though no concrete object is mentioned by the author one understands that the loss is very significant to her.

The stanza that comes after this one contains another repetition of the line that one meets throughout the poem. But in this case, the reader observes the shift in the author’s attitude to the problem. Here she adds “too” to admit that she is rather ironic for herself in her loss. The author seems to convince everyone starting with herself that losing things or people is not hard and one can easily adjust to it. What is more, the experience of loss, as the author suggests, is commonly practiced grows into art that one can perfect every time. The author even resorts to the biblical “Write it!” (Line 19) that draws the reader’s attention to her claim and means to remember, not to forget. Still, we are inclined to think that the author fails to convince both herself and the reader of the unimportance of losing things in one’s life.

Several peculiarities of the author’s style deserve special attention from the reader. The losses described in lines 1-15 are mostly trivial and are not important that much for the author. But as the poem develops the author speaks of some great loss which might even be the loss of a beloved person (lines 16-19). The author’s consideration of the losses in terms of the increase of their importance suggests that no experience of losing trivial things can prepare one for the loss of a person.

The author uses different persons in her poem. The first three stanzas are told in the second person. The author’s appeal to “lose something every day” (Line 4) sounds like a command to practice the art of losing things. The next three lines use the first-person narration. If at the beginning of the poem the author explains her views on the problem, in the next three stanzas she justifies them by giving examples from her life. The poem is thus made more subjective but encourages the reader to define one’s position as far as the problem is concerned.

We suppose that in this encouraging the reader to reconsider one’s attitude to losing things the main value of the poem is rooted. Though one can learn how to have control over losing, the loss will not become less painful because of this. What can be launched not to suffer is to do one’s best not to lose the things so precious for one’s happiness and life as a whole.

Works Cited

Beiderwell, Bruce & Wheeler, Jeffrey M. The Literary Experience. Heinle, 2007.

Bishop, Elizabeth. One Art. Web.

Troyka, Lynn Q. & Hesse Doug. Quick Access, Reference for Writers. Prentice Hall, 2006.

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IvyPanda . "The Art of Losing in "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop." October 8, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-art-of-losing-in-one-art-by-elizabeth-bishop/.

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Book Review: The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter

Prix Renaudot-winning author Alice Zeniter’s newest book to be translated into English ‘The Art of Losing’ ( L’Art de Perdre ), translated from the French by Frank Wynne, is a sweeping, intergenerational exploration of the ongoing tensions between Algeria and its former colonizer France. 

‘ The Art of Losing ‘ is a literary phenomenon. It has won half a dozen of literary prizes, including the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, says Sophie Marie Niang for Bad Form Review . … And people keep talking to me about this book [‘The Art of Losing’], many think it was my first: it can be daunting, and at the same time it’s fantastic, says Zeniter.

Though the book begins and ends centered on a modern-day woman named NaÏma, large swaths of the narrative follow her grandfather Ali and her father Hamid through their lives in mid-century Algeria to their tenuous assimilation as refugees in France.

The book is divided into three parts that roughly follow each generation of the family: – first Ali’s pre-war Kabylian utopia (‘Papa’s Algeria’), – then Hamid’s young adulthood as a refugee in peripheral France (‘Cold France’), and – finally NaÏma’s less than triumphant return to the old country (‘A Moveable Feast’).

Inspired to learn more…

Like any good historical novel, ‘ The Art of Losing ‘ combined historic details and even publication of historical documents with vividly created characters. inspiring in me a desire to learn more about the Algerian War for Independence while also introducing me to the Kabyle culture, a Berber ethnic group that I was regrettably unfamiliar with prior to reading this book.

The publication of ‘ The Art of Losing ‘ in English comes at a time during which France appears to be reckoning with its complex history with Algeria, shown not only by diplomatic gestures from the French government, as described in a recent Economist article, but also by recent French media, such as the comedy television series ‘A Very Secret Service’ (Au service de la France). Zeniter’s novel is a needed contribution to the dialogue, offering a perspective on the immigrant experience and specifically of the plight of Harki’s and their descendants.

As defined by Encyclopédie Larousse and quoted within the novel, harki is defined as both a soldier who served in the Harka auxiliaries or as a family member or descendent of a harki (defined by Wikipedia as Algerians who served as auxiliaries to the French Army or at the very least who supported their colonial rule).

‘ The Art of Losing ‘ addresses how countless individuals who had no personal connection to the Algerian War faced prejudice from both the French and the Algerians—the choices of NaÏma’s grandfather mean that even two generations later, she is seen as an outsider to the French and as a traitor to the Algerians. For the Harkis themselves, they went from identifying as both Algerian and French to realizing that neither country wanted to claim them regardless of any current or past loyalties. They’re simply “unclassifiable” as Hamid’s wife later tells him.

The all-knowing narrator frequently slips in hints of the history that the characters will never know, providing the reader not only with a more complete picture of that period in time but also with more empathy for the characters in regard to decisions made under the guise of knowledge. Beyond the rich history she provides, Zeniter has a deft grasp on language that has been skillfully translated by Wynne. Chapters frequently begin with blocks of sensory text that paint the setting, taking the black-and-white of history and transmuting it into the vivid colors of present time: 

The rock face of the gorge rises vertically and cascades down as scree…[the river] is verdant with festoons of greenery and mossy cushions. Delicate early poppies spatter the slopes blood-red with their petals. Fishes and eels glide, flashing silver in the current… In the early twentieth century, the gorges to the north of Palestro attracted many tourists and contributed to the development of the town: inns and cafés flourished, catering to hikers who wore soft leather boots and pastel hats…

Why should you read it?

As a whole, ‘ The Art of Losing ‘ is a masterful saga that provides a window into one fictional family’s experiences of the Algerian War and its aftermath.

At 431 pages, it’s on the longer side, yet every time I picked it up, I found myself immediately immersed in the world that Zeniter built—a perfect read for lovers of family narratives or for anyone looking to learn more about the multiculturalism of modern-day France. Published by Macmillan Publishers .

You can buy The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter here :

Have you read any of Alice Zeniter’s books, especially ‘ The Art of Losing ‘? Please share with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @MaVieFrancaise

Further reading: 1. Read about Alice Zeniter’s other awards and other award-winning French literature. A French literary Season by Michael Pasquier. 2. Interview with Alice Zeniter by Sophie Marie Niang of Bad Form Review

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Philosophy , Psychology , Short Articles

The Art of Losing

Article by gilad sommer.

posted by USA-NC, March 24, 2021

Except when you don’t. Because, sometimes, you won’t.”

(Dr. Seuss, “Oh, the places you’ll go”)

Everybody likes to be a winner;

Nobody wants to be a loser.

We all dream of ourselves conquering the trials of life, winning every game and competition, being the best of the best.

And yet, whatever field we may practice or dabble in, there is always going to be someone better than us – now or in the future -, there’s always going to be a goal we cannot reach, a circumstance that topples us, at least temporarily.

We will all certainly go through experiences of losing – being passed over for a position, being rejected by a love interest, failing an exam, or simply losing a game.

Whether we want to accept it or not, losing is a part of life.

As philosophers, we can ask ourselves: if losing is a part of life, can it be so bad? Can we learn something from losing? And, is it possible to lose well?

In the history of our language, we find the phrase “poor loser”, meaning, one who takes defeat with bad grace.

Interestingly, the term grace is also associated with being a good loser, as in a graceful or gracious loser. The word grace brings up the ideas of elegance and dignity. A gracious person is not ruffled by difficulties, has poise, and expresses humility. A good loser, then, is someone who takes their loss in a graceful way, with equanimity and humility.

When we lose, however, we can feel shame and frustration; we sometimes want to scream and climb the walls. The shame and frustration of losing, in fact, have nothing to do with the person or circumstance which defeated us, it is our inner resistance to accept the fact that we are not perfect and that we need to continue and train ourselves; It is a resistance to the fact that in this lifetime we may not be able to achieve everything we dream of. But when we let go of that resistance, we discover, as Emerson said, that “To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” In other words, the journey is more important than the destination.

To lose means to come face to face with our limitations, whether temporary or permanent, it is a humbling experience that teaches us to find our place in life, to recognize everything we still need to conquer. To win, one must lose many times.

To lose is to be humbled.

A loser who is not humbled, is humiliated.

A loser who is truly humbled, awakens a sense of respect.

If we don’t know how to lose, we will not know how to win, we will not be able to enjoy life in its fullness.

After all, knowing how to lose is to win a victory over oneself.

Image Credits: By GR Stocks | Unsplash | CC BY PD

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Too lazy to be a writer – too egotistical to be quiet, ‘the art of losing’ by alice zeniter (review).

***** The Art of Losing is an impressive novel chronicling the experiences of three generations of a family, from their roots in Algeria to their migration to France and the life they develop there.  The book is enjoyable and well-paced, taking the reader along on a fascinating journey, showing how the various events described are felt by different generations.

After a brief prologue, the novel is divided into three distinct parts.  ‘Papa’s Algeria ‘ provides us with a brief history lesson, before focusing on Ali, a young man growing up against the backdrop of war in Europe and unrest in his homeland.  At the height of his success, he finds himself unable to enjoy his life because of the growing independence movement, and in his house in a mountain village, he weighs up two options, knowing that neither can bring total peace.  In the end, his choice costs him his past, sending him into an uncertain future.

‘Cold France’ then moves the story on to Europe and describes the family’s experiences as migrants.  This time Ali’s son Hamid, born in Algeria but raised in France, is at the centre of the story, and we see the happy-go-lucky child of the first part grow into a troublesome teenager and an angry young man.  Zeniter portrays the fraught relationship Hamid has with his father, and his desire to spread his wings and leave his family burdens behind.

In the final section, ‘A Moveable Feast’ , it’s Hamid’s daughter, Naïma, who takes to the stage.  She’s French, but not enough in some people’s eyes, and she’s also an Algerian who has never seen her ‘home’.  As it turns out, this is an itch she needs to scratch, and thanks to her work, an opportunity to do so arises – so why is she so unsure about making the journey?

As you’d expect, in many places The Art of Losing is a story of (de)colonisation.  Ali’s ties to France because of his military record produce a crisis of identity, and in the background, Zeniter, via her mysterious unnamed narrator, drip-feeds us historical details, such as the atrocities committed by both sides during the uprising.  When we move on to France, there are problems of a different kind, shown through scenes of the harsh life in the camps:

The camp is a makeshift city, hastily erected over the ruins of the previous one.  Hardly have the new barracks been built than they are inadequate.  Every day – or rather every night, since the shipments are done in secret – the camp grows still bigger, fed by the continual flow of covered trucks arriving straight from Marseilles, or coming from the Larzac camp, where numbers are being reduced to avoid a humanitarian disaster. p.151 (Picador, 2021)

And that’s not mentioning what happens in Paris when the twenty-first century rolls around…

The theme of identity is a crucial one, with many of the characters struggling to reconcile two worlds in one mind.  The many Algerians in Paris bemoan the world they see around them, yet they never seem ready to try to return, whether through fear and inertia, or for more practical reasons.  This is also the case for the main characters of the novel, each struggling in their own way with their split identity (Ali’s withdrawal, Hamid’s youthful seething rage, Naïma’s reluctance to engage with the issue).  In truth, this identity is not easy to define:

“You know what you are?  You’re unclassifiable…” Hamid pulls a face and throws up his hands: there is nothing he can do.  Clarisse is not the first person to have to deal with the absence of a label that fits him.  Perhaps it is this very absence that led to the years of silence – when you are missing the main noun, how do you build a story? (p.309)

How indeed?

Works like this, chronicling event after event in a family saga, can become a little dull after a while, but Zeniter manages to keep it interesting throughout, with very few lulls in the plot.  This is partly due to the way the characters are drawn, but there’s also some nice writing, including plenty of quotable morsels:

When the newcomers become restless inside this great belly, the History of France pays them no more attention than might a man who hears his stomach rumbling.  He knows that digestion can be a slow process.  The History of France marches shoulder to shoulder with the Army of France.  They move as one.  History is Don Quixote, with his dreams of greatness; the army is Sancho Panza, trotting alongside him, taking care of the dirty work. (p.12)

It’s the little passages like these, interspersed with more serious accounts of events, that prevent the story from ever becoming flat.

Like all good stories, The Art of Losing hangs around just long enough to make us sad to finish it, but not long enough to make us want to kick it out.  It was surprisingly overlooked for the IBP (it would have been eligible for the 2021 prize, and I can think of a quite a few books I would gladly have thrown out to make room for it on the longlist…), so I’m happy it was eventually recognised elsewhere.  In the end, it’s a beautiful story of a family and their search for an identity somewhere between two countries.  As you’d expect, they’re not always successful in their quest, but overall Zeniter’s novel is a story of people managing to find their own happy ending.

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7 thoughts on “ ‘the art of losing’ by alice zeniter (review) ”.

I want to get to this soon. As for the IBP 2021, it couldn’t be considered because Frank was chairing the prize. (There’s an official word for it, though I can’t remember what it is.)

Lizzy – As far as I can see, it came out in Feb 2021, meaning it was eligible for the 2021 prize (but Frank chaired the 2022 prize…).

You’re right. If only prizes would coordinate their eligibility criteria ….

Like Liked by 1 person

…. but that cover! It must surely be near the endgame, the apotheosis of the steroidal sans-serif that’s out to destroy the art of jacket design?

Andrew – Not a fan, I take it? 😉 It is rather chunky text, it’s fair to say…

This is a very good review, Tony. Thank you

Kevin – No worries, glad you enjoyed it 🙂

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Introduction to The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

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           I have begun to believe in, and even to preach, a poetry of necessity. This is a recognition not just of the necessity of poetry to our lives, but also the fact that necessity is what drives most of the poetry that matters, or the way that it matters. The best poems, it seems to me, evince their origins in the need to speak, or to write; to render a complex fate simply; to render chaos as chaos; or to examine the unseen complexities of seemingly simple, even everyday, experience. A poem must be willing to be unwilled, beckoned by need.              No one wants to write an elegy . I presume we simply must, the death of someone dear—or even a stranger—calling forth words that fail to explain, but sometimes provide our only comfort. It is out of such need, and for its consolation, that I have gathered the poems in this anthology: to reveal the many ways poets seek to find words and form to contain loss; and to fulfill the reader’s need for comfort and companionship in the words of another. Often, in death, everything else fails. We are left only with the music and the meaning of poetry.            The Art of Losing gathers together some of the best contemporary elegies—mainly those written in the twentieth century and after—with a particular focus on recent poems. I have included one or two nineteenth century poems that seem to me absolutely necessary and remarkably modern—as with the powerful work of Emily Dickinson and the “[Carrion Comfort]” of Gerard Manley Hopkins —but have for the most part tried to stick to poems that are contemporary classics, or soon ought to be. The poems here focus on grief and its healing, however tentative or untold.           Truth be known, I was surprised not to find this book already on bookstore shelves. There have been a few academic studies of the history of the elegy, and a few collections of poems about mourning, featuring some of the more familiar lines— John Donne ’s “ Death be not proud ,” for instance—that may come to mind when someone dies. But it seemed time to engage our current day’s perspective on loss, which, while it draws on a long history of understanding bereavement, also attempts to interpret it anew. Indeed, one key aspect of contemporary elegy is the desire to represent the experience, to re-experience it through language—to evoke, that is, and not just describe, the pain of passing. In doing so, these poems focus less on the often formal process of mourning and instead on the personal and often bewildering process of grief.             In a way, the process of grief, I have found, can mirror that of writing: it is surprising, trying, frustrating, daunting, terrifying, comforting, chastening, challenging, and at times, heartening; grief can provide fellowship with others interested in the experience; it brings out the best in us, and at times the worst, if only because it is utterly human. It can feel inevitable, but it is so personal, so differently pitched for each, that it can reside across a great gulf. Yet poetry, like grief, can be the thing that bridges the gap between us, that brings us together and binds us.            The music of the modern elegy has no set form. It can be short or long; a well-wrought outpouring like Donald Hall ’s “Without”; or an almost mute rendering of the stunned shock of loss, like Brenda Shaughnessy ’s “Ever.” Modern elegy encompasses the formal restraint of W. H. Auden ’s “Funeral Blues”—its tight rhyme, like that of the blues form, fighting the feeling of being blue—and the stark emotional restraint of Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—.” This “formal feeling” of mourning recognizes that public mourning, with its rituals and rites, can often rescue us from overwhelming feeling. Such traditions provide their own comfort, and the elegy’s long tradition its feeling in form-proves no different.            Yet elegies are not ideas. They are experiences, carved out of our individual perspective and our collective journey through this life. It is tempting to say this is true as well of most good poems, but that might  be overstating it—there are, after all, many significant and even moving poems about thinking, about the meditative parts of human nature. When it comes to grief, however, thinking alone is no good. To lose someone close to you is to enter an experience no amount of forethought or hindsight can free you from. You must live through grief. You cannot outsmart it, nor think through the fact of someone’s being gone, and forever. You must survive the sorrow. This does not mean that the elegy cannot contemplate; indeed, with luck, one emerges from grief not just with emptiness, but wisdom—though of a kind you’d gladly unlearn for your loved one to return.          After my father suddenly died, killed in an accident, I would have given near anything to have him return to us, even for just a moment. Instead, I waited for him to visit me, in dream if that’s what was meant to be. He never did. I realize now that such visitations, as Natasha Trethewey ’s poem “Myth” enacts, bring their own sorrows—the stark light of morning reinforcing the ongoing mourning—despite dream’s temporary reprieve.          I was asleep while you were dying. It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow I make between my slumber and my waking, the Erebus I keep you in, still trying not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow, but in dreams you live. So I try taking you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning, my eyes open, I find you do not follow. Again and again, this constant forsaking. What grief tells us is that you don’t always get a chance to say good-bye. And yet in many ways, the poetic elegy does just that. Sometimes it says So long ; sometimes See you ’round ; sometimes the poem’s filled with anger, asking Why? ; other poems say simply, Wait . Galway Kinnell ’s poem of that name, “ Wait ”—an entreaty for someone to stay in this world, not to leave too early—can also be read as a desire to console the living about the experience of loss: Wait, for now. Distrust everything if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become interesting. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again; their memories are what give them the need for other hands. Though dedicated to the dead, in a crucial way elegies are written for the living. Honoring the departed, these poems connect with the idea of loss in a way that may comfort those left behind, if only as companions in grief. To lose someone today is to go into strange realms of “bereavement specialists” and sympathy cards and funeral arrangements—things you suddenly realize have been going on for a good while, without you, in something of a parallel world. The world of grief can feel like that, a limbo realm that at the least gives you a strong perspective on the everyday world: Why are all these people walking around, oblivious to loss? Why am I still here while my loved one is not? Surviving any death can carry its own guilt. It also brings on a slew of cliches, often offered in lieu of sympathy, that can sometimes cause more anxiety than comfort. It is hard to know what to say. The poems here seek to avoid cliche, in order to say what needs to be said. And also to say that it is the everyday, not the epic; the unexpected, not the well-worn phrase that the modern elegy may find most comforting.         In my own grief it was and is the smallest kindnesses that still stick with me: the man who gave me my father’s dry cleaning for free, refusing my repeated offers to pay; the dry cleaning I’d had to drive all over town looking for, using old tags found on other of his still-plastic wrapped clothes as a guide. How to explain “I’m looking for my dead father’s clothes, things he’ll never need,” yet that, duty-bound, you do? Death brings with it a duty and devotion that cannot be explained to those who don’t know it. Why, after all, would you keep his crummy plaid shirts and give his good suits away? Why do material things matter at once less and more? Why, in the void, does ritual, both inherited and invented, rush in?        The poems in this collection consider less than this, and more: duty, hindsight, sorrow, fury, frustration, acceptance, even transcendence. I have structured the book something like the journey of mourning—not the now—classic stages of grief (as laid out by Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross in her groundbreaking On Death and Dying ), but something more like the range of responses to it. And if in its movement from Reckoning to Regret, through Remembrance to Ritual and Recovery, this book doesn’t necessarily resolve the grieving process with simple acceptance, it does end with a kind of Redemption, much as in Kinnell: Hair will become interesting . And with it, life. The countless little details that make life up—that in the throes of grief seem at once unbearable and meaningless—may become interesting again.        These details are expressed in every section of the book. Reckoning, the book’s first section, encompasses the immediate reactions to a death, whether long expected or sudden—an experience where the world is both more present, and far less. “Stop all the clocks,” “Do not pick up the telephone,” “Do not go gentle into that good night,” “Let evening come”: no wonder the voice here is often imperative, still reeling, arguing, and even denying as it takes comfort where it can.         Reckoning gives way to Regret, a section where wishes meet memory, from one last look to “forgiving my father.” The third section, Remembrance, further considers the relationship to memory—for memory is grief’s parent and its offspring. If Reckoning is filled with orders to “Let evening come” or resist going gently into the dark, then Remembrance is often filled with questioning as well as comfort: What did I know, what did I know/Of Love’s austere and lonely offices? That is, grief spawns memories of the departed, which, in turn, can spawn more grief—but just as often these memories are a balm to mourners, who gather and recollect, who tell tales and perhaps even laugh about those missed.        Such gathering is at the heart of this anthology and also of its fourth section, Ritual, which considers both the public and private sides of the various rites of mourning—from cleaning out a loved one’s closet, to pall bearing, to prayer or its attempt, to refashioning a new set of traditions, to sharing the memory of the departed in conversation or over a last meal. Memory may indeed be like the food found after a wake, whether in the African American tradition of repast or the feasts that follow many a memorial service. This breaking bread afterward is a form of ceremony every bit as crucial as the service itself. Remembrance and the rituals of mourning sustain us individually even as they bring us together.         I am struck here that in our times of need, or high celebration, we reach for poetry just as we do food. It seems that the music of poetry whether a love poem for a wedding or a verse of whatever holy book we believe in—helps us mark an occasion, to recognize its importance, and even to help set it apart. While this might seem to relegate poetry to mere monument, I think it is in grief that we need some reminder of our humanity—and, sometimes, someone to say it for us. Poetry steps in at those moments when ordinary words fail: poetry as ceremony, as closure to what cannot be closed. Even healing hurts. Ritual may eventually give way to Recovery, the title of the fifth section of the book-recovery not being something inevitable, but something that can surprise us survivors, what Jane Mayhall calls “this complex, heartbreak survival.” One need not be a poet like W. S. Merwin to experience the shock of finding oneself “in life as in a strange garment”—but we may need his description of it. Like all elegies, in some key way this section is for the living, who may go on to seek the kind of Redemption found in the last section of the book, which opens with Philip Larkin 's “The Trees”: The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. The greenness of grief—its returning, like the leaves—seems to me one of the best ways to understand it as an experience. It is perennial, yet ebbs and flows, “Like something almost being said.” Even grief’s lessening can be something to be mourned; ironically, there are days when, by not feeling so bad, we fear and feel we are betraying our loved ones.         This attempt to remember, speak of, argue with, and honor the dead is exactly what the elegies in this volume chart. Full of forms and full of fury, these poems are reconciled and inconsolable, ragged and raw and filled with revelation. This book’s title comes from a poem that itself is about trying to cope with loss, Elizabeth Bishop ’s “ One Art ,” with its famous last lines:                                                   It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like ( Write it !) like disaster. This convincing of the self, a self-conscious mustering of courage, is one thing that may separate the modern elegy from those that went before, though most elegies seem to require an appeal to someone, or something, some force of nature greater than the self in order to help say the words being written. Elegies often get their power from declaring they have none.          You may have already noted that Bishop’s “One Art” is not technically an elegy—at least, its impetus is not strictly speaking a death, but the end of a relationship. (And more.) Yet the “loss” discussed by Bishop, if not a literal death, seems in the poem a symbolic one. So I have decided to include it.          The thing about death is: it isn't symbolic, but very real. Yet in our elegiac age, the tone of elegy, however varied, has been borrowed to discuss everything from lost childhoods to the loss of childhood friends. Apart from one or two instances, I have resisted too broad a definition—! have generally not included poems, say, of illness or other difficulties or life passages, simply because there seems nothing quite like bereavement itself. And yet on a few occasions, such as “One Art” or Joseph Brodsky ’s “A Song,” when a poem seems somehow to transform in the light of loss, where missing the Beloved can be read in a way that sheds light on the Departed, I have included it.         I have chosen, I should note, not to include one of the strongest strains of elegy: the poem mourning or celebrating a famous person or literary or popular figure after his or her passing. This is the source of many of our most powerful elegies, from poems about jazz musicians to those dedicated to fellow poets—often people who weren’t mere icons to those writing the poems, but friends and loved ones. Especially as I have previously included some of these in my Blues Poems and Jazz Poems anthologies, I made a decision early on to focus here on the personal, rather than the iconic, side of elegy.       Working within such parameters we may miss out on W. H. Auden ’s beautiful “ In Memory of W. B. Yeats ,” with its powerful descriptions and its claim that “poetry makes nothing happen”—a declaration that seems belied by the poem itself. Yet we gain Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” which I think is one of the heights of the form and which may indeed inaugurate the contemporary elegy. Its dispassionate testimony, its unerring grief, its blunt riffing off the musical form which Auden seems to capture quite well, the strictness of his form substituting for the blues’ repeating phrases and tragicomic humor—all seem part of the modern elegy. So too, Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” which describes everyday suffering in a way many readers have found redemptive in their own reading, painting as it does a view of how suffering often happens while we’re not looking. Or worse, looking away, and on. One modern aspect of elegy is the way in which death seems our one certainty, and yet the one thing we cannot easily discuss. These poems seek to remedy this.       Since Auden’s time, the contemporary elegy as represented here has allowed itself to be heartbroken, but also humorous; metaphoric, but also visceral; comforted and, as in Auden’s own “Funeral Blues,” beyond comforting. Sometimes an elegy does this all at once. The contemporary elegy offers testimony that both describes and defies what Auden speaks of in “Musee des Beaux Arts”: “About suffering they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters.” The new masters of the elegy here agree with the notion that the world goes on without noticing loss, even as their poems disprove it. For my father’s first funeral, in Kansas, where he died—before his subsequent burial and a second funeral in Louisiana, where he was born—I actually asked my earliest writing mentor to read “Funeral Blues.” To some it may have seemed a bleak choice, but for me it represented one key side of grief: the shock, surprise, and short shrift one can feel upon hearing such news, as expressed in the book’s Reckoning section:           He was my North, my South, my East and West,           My working week and my Sunday rest,           My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;           I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. I hadn’t picked Auden arbitrarily, as he was a poet my father liked—indeed, the only poet I know of his buying. (With my books, he didn’t have a choice, as I sent them to him!) Among his things, and the books and notes I sent him, several of which I didn’t even remember sending, was an Auden volume he’d bought. In the front of the Collected Poems my father had copied out two lines:          If equal affection cannot be,         Let the more loving one be me. It strikes me now that this one piece of poetry my father found moving enough to scrawl in his own hand might be said to speak to the mourner’s wish: to love more, to continue loving even when one cannot hear from the beloved any longer. Indeed, it is too often that death clarifies a love that was there all along.        It is my sincere hope that these poems, the best of our time, may help us on our journey—not just in contemplating death, but in living our lives. They may remind us, as a source as seemingly unlikely as Philip Larkin does, that ”we should be kind/While there is still time” and to “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.” Elegies are just as often for the living, remember. And while these poems chronicle loss and its rituals, elegies also celebrate life—and ask us to care for ours, if only by honoring others. And, in that way, “death shall have no dominion.” © Kevin Young, 2013, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing , Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.

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The Haiti That Still Dreams

By Edwidge Danticat

I often receive condolence-type calls, e-mails, and texts about Haiti. Many of these messages are in response to the increasingly dire news in the press, some of which echoes what many of us in the global Haitian diaspora hear from our family and friends. More than fifteen hundred Haitians were killed during the first three months of this year, according to a recent United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights report, which described the country’s situation as “ cataclysmic .” Women and girls are routinely subjected to sexual violence. Access to food, water, education, and health care is becoming more limited, with more than four million Haitians, around a third of the population, living with food insecurity, and 1.4 million near starvation. Armed criminal groups have taken over entire neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas, carrying out mass prison breaks and attacks on the city’s airport, seaport, government buildings, police stations, schools, churches, hospitals, pharmacies, and banks, turning the capital into an “ open air prison .”

Even those who know the country’s long and complex history will ask, “Why can’t Haiti catch a break?” We then revisit some abridged version of that history. In 1804, after a twelve-year revolution against French colonial rule, Haiti won its independence, which the United States and several European powers failed to recognize for decades. The world’s first Black republic was then forced to spend sixty years paying a hundred-and-fifty-million francs (now worth close to thirty billion dollars) indemnity to France . Americans invaded and then occupied Haiti for nineteen years at the beginning of the twentieth century. The country endured twenty-nine years of murderous dictatorship under François Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, until 1986. In 1991, a few months after Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, took office, he was overthrown in a coup staged by a military whose members had been trained in the U.S. Aristide was elected again, then overthrown again, in 2004, in part owing to an armed rebellion led by Guy Philippe, who was later arrested by the U.S. government for money laundering related to drug trafficking. Last November, six years into his nine-year prison sentence, Philippe was deported by the U.S. to Haiti. He immediately aligned himself with armed groups and has now put himself forward as a Presidential candidate.

In 2010, the country was devastated by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake, which killed more than two hundred thousand people. Soon after, United Nations “peacekeepers” dumped feces in Haiti’s longest river, causing a cholera epidemic that killed more than ten thousand people and infected close to a million. For the past thirteen years, Haiti has been decimated by its ruling party, Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (P.H.T.K.), which rose to power after a highly contested election in 2011. In that election, the U.S.—then represented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and the Organization of American States helped the candidate who finished in third place, Michel Martelly, claim the top spot. Bankrolled by kidnapping, drug trafficking, business élites, and politicians, armed groups have multiplied under P.H.T.K, committing massacres that have been labelled crimes against humanity. In 2021, a marginally elected President, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in his bedroom , a crime for which many of those closest to him, including his wife, have been named as either accomplices or suspects.

The unasked question remains, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in “ The Souls of Black Folk ,” “How does it feel to be a problem?”

I deeply honor Haiti’s spirit of resistance and long history of struggle, but I must admit that sometimes the answer to that question is that it hurts. Sometimes it hurts a lot, even when one is aware of the causes, including the fact that the weapons that have allowed gangs to take over the capital continue to flow freely from Miami and the Dominican Republic, despite a U.N. embargo. Internally, the poorest Haitians have been constantly thwarted by an unequal and stratified society, which labels rural people moun andeyò (outside people), and which is suffused with greedy and corrupt politicians and oligarchs who scorn the masses from whose tribulations they extract their wealth.

Recently, at a loved one’s funeral, in Michigan, the spectre of other Haitian deaths was once again on the minds of my extended family members. Everywhere we gather, Haiti is with us, as WhatsApp messages continuously stream in from those who chose to stay in Haiti and can’t leave because the main airport is closed, and others who have no other home. In Michigan, during chats between wake, funeral, and repast, elders brought up those who can’t get basic health care, much less a proper burial or any of the rituals that are among our most sacred obligations. “Not even a white sheet over those bodies on the street,” my mother-in-law, who is eighty-nine, said, after receiving yet another image of incinerated corpses in Port-au-Prince. At least after the 2010 earthquake, sheets were respectfully placed on the bodies pulled from the rubble. Back then, she said, the armed young men seemed to have some reverence for life and some fear of death.

Lately, some of our family gatherings are incantations of grief. But they can also turn into storytelling sessions of a different kind. They are opportunities for our elders to share something about Haiti beyond what our young ones, like everyone else, see on the news. The headlines bleed into their lives, too, as do the recycled tropes that paint us as ungovernable, failures, thugs, and even cannibals. As with the prayers that we recite over the dead, words still have power, the elders whisper. We must not keep repeating the worst, they say, and in their voices I hear an extra layer of distress. They fear that they may never see Haiti again. They fear that those in the next generation, some of whom have never been to Haiti, will let Haiti slip away, as though the country they see in the media—the trash-strewn streets and the barricades made from the shells of burnt cars, the young men brandishing weapons of war and the regular citizens using machetes to defend themselves—were part of some horror film that they can easily turn off. The elders remind us that we have been removed, at least physically, from all of this by only a single generation, if not less.

We are still human beings, the elders insist—“ Se moun nou ye .” We are still wozo , like that irrepressible reed that grows all over Haiti. For a brief moment, I think someone might break into the Haitian national anthem or sing a few bars of the folk song “ Ayiti Cheri .” (“Beloved Haiti, I had to leave you to understand.”) Instead, they hum the music that the wozo has inspired : “ Nou se wozo / Menm si nou pliye, nou pap kase. ” Even if we bend, we will not break.

Except we are breaking. “It pains me to see people living in constant fear,” the Port-au-Prince-based novelist and poet Évelyne Trouillot recently wrote to me in an e-mail. “I dream of a country where children are not afraid to dream.” Internationally, U.S. deportations continue , Navy ships are ready to be deployed to intercept migrant boats, and Haitian asylum seekers could once again end up imprisoned on Guantánamo, as they did in the early nineteen-nineties. In conversations, whether with strangers or with younger family members, someone inevitably asks, “Is there any hope?”

I have hope, I say, because I grew up with elders, both in Haiti and here in the U.S., who often told us, “ Depi gen souf gen espwa ”—as long as there’s breath, there’s hope. I have hope, too, because the majority of Haitians are under twenty-five years old, as are many members of our family. Besides, how can we give in to despair with eleven million people’s lives in the balance? Better yet, how can we reignite that communal grit and resolve that inspired us to defeat the world’s greatest armies and then pin to our flag the motto “ L’union fait la force ”? Unity is strength.

The elders also remind us that Haiti is not just Port-au-Prince. As more and more of the capital’s residents are forced to return to homesteads and ancestral villages, the moun andeyò have much to teach other Haitians. “Historically, the moun andeyò have always been the preserver of Haiti’s cultural and traditional ethos,” Vivaldi Jean-Marie, a professor of African American and African-diaspora studies at Columbia University, told me. Rural Haitians, who have lived for generations without the support of the state, have had no choice but to rely on one another in close and extended family structures called lakou . “This shared awareness—I am because we are—will prevail beyond this difficult chapter in Haitian history,” Jean-Marie said.

Finally, I have hope because in Haiti, as the American writer and art collector Selden Rodman has written, “ art is joy .” This remains true even as some of the country’s most treasured cultural institutions, including the National School of the Arts and the National Library, have been ransacked. In the summer of 2023, Carrefour Feuilles, a district in Port-au-Prince that many writers, visual artists, and musicians call home, was attacked by armed criminal groups. The onslaught led to a petition that collected close to five thousand signatures. It read in part, “How many more hundreds of our women and children must be raped, executed, burned before the public authorities do everything possible to put an end to the plague of gangs and their sponsors?”

A few days later, the homes of two of the signatories, the multimedia artist Lionel St. Eloi and the writer Gary Victor, were taken over by a gang. The last time I saw St. Eloi was in 2019, in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince’s Centre d’Art, where he had a series of metal birds on display, their bejewelled bodies and beaks pointing toward the sky. Allenby Augustin, the Centre d’Art’s executive director, recently described how some artists, afraid of having to suddenly flee their homes and leave their work behind, bring their pieces to the center or keep them in friends’ homes in different parts of the city. Others add the stray bullets that land inside their studios— bal pèdi or bal mawon —to their canvasses.

St. Eloi, the patriarch of a family of artists, had lived in Carrefour Feuilles since the seventies, working with young people there. “The youth who were neglected or who could not afford to go to school were taken in by our family,” one of St. Eloi’s sons, the musician Duckyns (Zikiki) St. Eloi, told me. “We taught them to paint, to play guitar, and to play the drums. Now they are hired to run errands for gangsters who put guns in their hands.” In spite of what has happened, he still believes that art can turn some things around. He recently sent me a picture of a work by his younger brother Anthony—an image depicting gang members wearing brightly colored balaclavas and holding pencils, a book, a paint palette, a camera, and a musical instrument. “If there are gangs, we’d be better off with art gangs,” Zikiki said. “Gangs that paint, make music, recite poetry. Art is how we bring our best face to the world. Art is how we dream.” ♦

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Disney technology chief aaron laberge exits for cto role at espn bet partner penn entertainment, npr editor resigns in aftermath of his essay criticizing network for bias.

By Ted Johnson

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UPDATE: The NPR editor who penned an essay criticizing the network for what he saw as bias in its coverage of Donald Trump and a host of other issues has resigned.

Uri Berliner , who had been a senior business editor and reporter, posting his resignation letter to NPR CEO Katherine Maher on his X/Twitter account.

A spokesperson for the network declined to comment.

Berliner had been temporarily suspended from NPR after publishing on essay for The Free Press that called out the network for losing “an open minded spirit” and lacking viewpoint diversity. He cited, among other things, audience research showing a drop in the number of listeners considering themselves conservative.

While Berliner’s essay was immediately seized upon by right wing media as evidence of NPR’s bias, some of his colleagues criticized him for making mistakes in his piece in for using “sweeping statements” to make his case, in the words of NPR’s Steve Inskeep. Maher criticized the essay in a note to staffers, writing, “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”

But Berliner’s essay did trigger some discussion within NPR, as some voices on the right, including Trump, called for defunding the network.

PREVIOUSLY: NPR has put on temporary suspension the editor who penned an essay that criticized the network for losing the trust of listeners as it has covered the rise of Donald Trump and coverage of Covid, race and other issues.

Uri Berliner has been suspended for five days without pay, starting last Friday, according to NPR’s David Folkenflik.

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“That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model,” Berliner wrote. He also wrote that “race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace,” while claiming that the network lacked viewpoint diversity.

His essay set off a firestorm on the right, with Trump blasting the network and Fox News devoting extensive coverage to the criticism, along with calls for ending government funding for NPR.

In his essay, Berliner wrote that “defunding isn’t the answer,” but that its journalism needed to change from within. The network’s funding has been a target of conservatives numerous times in the past, but lawmakers ultimately have supported public radio.

Berliner shared his suspension notice with Folkenflik, who wrote that it was for failure to seek approval for outside work, as well as for releasing proprietary information about audience demographics.

Katherine Maher, who recently became CEO of the network, published a note to staff last week that appeared to take issue with Berliner’s essay, writing that there was “a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.”

“Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions,” Maher wrote. “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”

Maher herself has become a target on the right, with some figures citing her past social media posts, including one from 2020 that referred to Trump as a “deranged racist sociopath.” At the time, she was CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. In a statement to The New York Times , Maher said that “in America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen.” “What matters is NPR’s work and my commitment as its C.E.O.: public service, editorial independence and the mission to serve all of the American public,” she said.

An NPR spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment. The network told The Times that Maher is not involved in editorial decisions.

Some of Berliner’s colleagues have been vocal in their own criticism of his essay. Eric Deggans, the network’s TV critic and media analyst, wrote that Berliner “set up staffers of color as scapegoats.” He also noted that Berliner “didn’t seek comment from NPR before publishing. Didn’t mention many things which could detract from his conclusions.”

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Letter from London: The Art of Losing at Art

While the real world was still bombing itself to oblivion last week, I found myself reading up on the exploits of a freshly released British-born American art dealer called Indigo Philbrick, who has just spent time in a low-security federal prison in Philadelphia. This was for the largest art fraud ever committed in US history. (The estimated cost to his victims was $86 million.) Basically, super-wealthy collectors bought from Philbrick percentages in high-value art pieces which in fact he was selling multiple times over. (Some discovered they didn’t have a stake at all.) With an interesting backstory including American parents in the East End of London, a father who became director of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, dealers such as Jay Jopling, who Inigo Philbrick worked for and who later became one of his victims, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips, another victim in a Saudi prince, all the fun of the art fairs, his tale was swiftly reading to me like a Hollywood movie. As if Inigo Philbrick didn’t know that.

Not that art was always a plaything for the rich or wannabe rich. Over forty years ago, painting the walls of a temporary art space on Edinburgh’s freezing Royal Mile for Richard Demarco, I remember people waxing lyrical about artist Joseph Beuys not money. There was talk of nuclear disarmament, striking miners, feminism, gay liberation, UK race riots, Northern Ireland, but never about how much an artwork was worth. Even outlier art dealers like Robert Fraser in London who was selling works by Claes Oldenburg, Bridget Riley, Ellsworth Kelly, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Bellmer, Richard Hamilton, Brian Clark, Jim Dine — old footage of ‘Groovy Bob’ recently featured in Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back — possessed mischief rather than dollar signs in his eyes. That said, Francis Bacon had unsettlingly dark qualities which one or two people I knew found uncomfortable.

As the soft blue waters of the South Pacific Ocean lapped around Inigo Philbrick’s ankles before his capture on the island Vanuatu — despite the fact Vanuatu had no extradition treaty with the US — I wonder what kind of art still inspired him. Was it the Trinidad paintings of Peter Doig? Or a book, instead? How about Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence loosely based on French artist Paul Gauguin, with its own escapee of sorts in its principal character Charles Strickland settling in Tahiti? Or was it all those still awaiting lawsuits, claims, and asset-seizure orders? A colorful character, indeed.

Cut to balmy summer evenings on Cork Street in the early 80s before Philbrick was even born. This was where most of London’s contemporary art was being bought or sold, including at the hugely important Marlborough Gallery (presently shocking many people by winding down its operations). Back then, you might see a real-life bearded Peter Blake collaged into the crowded street like his Sgt Pepper album cover, or Craigie Aitchison with his pink and blue poodles. If really lucky, you might catch a glimpse of a reliably colorful David Hockney. Whatever you did, you were there to celebrate art. If sales were becoming king on Cork Street, alcohol not greed was still its lubricant.

In New York by 1984 the young artist Keith Haring was already taking regular Concordes to Europe. A superbly talented Jean-Michel Basquiat, some of whose work would get caught up in Philbrick’s art fraud, was having his first show at Mary Boone’s SoHo gallery. Dollars were falling out of some artists’ pockets like confetti. I was labelling slides at Grace Mansion Gallery in the East Village, plus attending an art fair in London with curator and artist Sur Rodney (Sur). Gracie’s business model placed her artists first, so any adoration of money over art was muted. Lebanese-born British art gallerist Edward Totah meanwhile was looking for help as he opened up his own space opposite Paula Cooper on Wooster Street in New York’s SoHo. Though Totah-Stelling Art was meant as a celebratory hub for mostly British artists, darkening clouds were descending on the art world from all directions. Even the Basquiat-Warhol exhibition at nearby Tony Shafrazi’s gallery was slammed by critics. (Warhol and Basquiat were seen one night bickering at the restaurant Indochine close to the Joseph Papp Theater.) More importantly, the natural exuberance of the East Village art scene with its long nights at 8BC and happy days of selling art began faltering in the face of a full-blown AIDS epidemic. (Touchingly, Haring had just stated in public that he hoped to heal himself by painting.) Extraordinarily, people’s tastes seemed to shift to consciously ‘unfeeling’ art such as found in the Neo-Geo movement and artists Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton and Haim Steinbach of International With Monument. In the uptown art world, meanwhile, dealer Andrew Crispo was implicated in the sadomasochistic ‘death mask murder’ of young Norwegian fashion student Eigil Dag Vesti, with Crispo’s assistant Bernard LeGeros given 25 years to life for murder. Following the awful death of artist Carl Andre’s Cuban-born artist partner Ana Mendieta, who fell from the 34th floor of Andre’s apartment only a few blocks away on Mercer Street, Paula Cooper appeared rocked, though Andre would later be acquitted of murder.

Only one person to date has been implicated alongside Inigo Philbrick. This is Robert Newland, Philbrick’s former business partner, who last September was sentenced to 20 months in prison. (Newland also worked for Jay Jopling.) According to Philbrick’s fiancée Victoria Baker-Harber, there are still others who remain at large: ‘There are major people who are complicit and have evaded any consequences so far, aided by Inigo keeping his silence. These others that come to mind must now be very nervous,’ she told one reporter.

Back in the mid to late-80s, people still looked to artists over dealers, though figures like Leo Castelli commanded high profiles. Elsewhere, cracks were becoming large fissures. Inexplicably, artists like David Wojnarowicz were suddenly losing their appeal. This was the market playing tricks. (His prices are high once again.) One of Edward Totah’s most successful artists was Derek Boshier. He kindly invited me down to Houston to give a talk on the rise and fall of the Lower East Side. As if in honor of the fall, I would quit the art world shortly afterward. Nor was it any surprise to me years later when I would hear the 80s described as the decade that changed the art world forever. As Rob Goyanes wrote in 2018 about a retrospective of 80s art at the Hirshhorn in Washington DC, ‘These works and artists represent the subsumption of pop and capital into art, but also the radical transformation of the art market itself: the complete commodification of the artwork, enabled by New York’s bursting one-percent and the stratospheric ascendance of artists as celebrities and financial elites.’

The art world of course continued and continues. In London in 1988 was Damien Hirst’s seminal Freeze exhibition. Just as Jeff Koons had begun to explore his corporate nous if not always creative genius, Charles Saatchi — along with Jay Jopling — was beginning to navigate Hirst through shark-infested waters. Instead of the lunatics having taken over the asylum, the magnates had sequestered the studios, or become artists themselves. It was no longer Joseph Beuys in a room with a coyote (‘I Love America and America Loves Me’). It was a giant beast moving slowly through the water devouring everything in its way — from collectors crushed by the fact someone had outbid them in public, to artists themselves.

Of course, Indigo Philbrick is already riding high again. He shows more nerve than many of today’s artists. He is also riding at speed towards a Hollywood showdown with talk already of a three-part box-set called The Real Inigo Philbrick Story — A Tale of Fortune, Fame and Fraud. So don’t forget the artists, Inigo, as you gallop across the plains. When you eventually make camp, as I hope you do, I hope you will still see beauty in a sunset. I hear on the grapevine you might even want to become a dealer again. Would this be for the sequel?

Peter Bach lives in London.

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NPR editor Uri Berliner resigns with blast at new CEO

David Folkenflik

Uri Berliner resigned from NPR on Wednesday saying he could not work under the new CEO Katherine Maher. He cautioned that he did not support calls to defund NPR. Uri Berliner hide caption

Uri Berliner resigned from NPR on Wednesday saying he could not work under the new CEO Katherine Maher. He cautioned that he did not support calls to defund NPR.

NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner resigned this morning, citing the response of the network's chief executive to his outside essay accusing NPR of losing the public's trust.

"I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years," Berliner wrote in an email to CEO Katherine Maher. "I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay."

NPR and Maher declined to comment on his resignation.

The Free Press, an online site embraced by journalists who believe that the mainstream media has become too liberal, published Berliner's piece last Tuesday. In it, he argued that NPR's coverage has increasingly reflected a rigid progressive ideology. And he argued that the network's quest for greater diversity in its workforce — a priority under prior chief executive John Lansing – has not been accompanied by a diversity of viewpoints presented in NPR shows, podcasts or online coverage.

Later that same day, NPR pushed back against Berliner's critique.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff . "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

Yet Berliner's commentary has been embraced by conservative and partisan Republican critics of the network, including former President Donald Trump and the activist Christopher Rufo.

Rufo is posting a parade of old social media posts from Maher, who took over NPR last month. In two examples, she called Trump a racist and also seemed to minimize the effects of rioting in 2020. Rufo is using those to rally public pressure for Maher's ouster, as he did for former Harvard University President Claudine Gay .

Others have used the moment to call for the elimination of federal funding for NPR – less than one percent of its roughly $300 million annual budget – and local public radio stations, which derive more of their funding from the government.

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

Berliner reiterated in his resignation letter that he does not support such calls.

In a brief interview, he condemned a statement Maher issued Friday in which she suggested that he had questioned "whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity." She called that "profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning."

Berliner subsequently exchanged emails with Maher, but she did not address those comments.

"It's been building up," Berliner said of his decision to resign, "and it became clear it was on today."

For publishing his essay in The Free Press and appearing on its podcast, NPR had suspended Berliner for five days without pay. Its formal rebuke noted he had done work outside NPR without its permission, as is required, and shared proprietary information.

(Disclosure: Like Berliner, I am part of NPR's Business Desk. He has edited many of my past stories. But he did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Earlier in the day, Berliner forwarded to NPR editors and other colleagues a note saying he had "never questioned" their integrity and had been trying to raise these issues within the newsroom for more than seven years.

What followed was an email he had sent to newsroom leaders after Trump's 2016 win. He wrote then: "Primarily for the sake of our journalism, we can't align ourselves with a tribe. So we don't exist in a cocoon that blinds us to the views and experience of tens of millions of our fellow citizens."

Berliner's critique has inspired anger and dismay within the network. Some colleagues said they could no longer trust him after he chose to publicize such concerns rather than pursue them as part of ongoing newsroom debates, as is customary. Many signed a letter to Maher and Edith Chapin, NPR's chief news executive. They asked for clarity on, among other things, how Berliner's essay and the resulting public controversy would affect news coverage.

Yet some colleagues privately said Berliner's critique carried some truth. Chapin also announced monthly reviews of the network's coverage for fairness and diversity - including diversity of viewpoint.

She said in a text message earlier this week that that initiative had been discussed long before Berliner's essay, but "Now seemed [the] time to deliver if we were going to do it."

She added, "Healthy discussion is something we need more of."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

• Katherine Maher
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The origin of all things: Kyotographie 2024 – a photo essay

The 12 th annual Kyotographie photography festival features 13 exhibitions staged in striking locations across the Japanese city of Kyoto. Photographers from around the world submitted pictures on the theme of ‘source’

• The Kyotographie international photography festival runs until 12 May

S pring in Kyoto ushers in cherry blossom season, but it also marks the return of one of the biggest photo festivals in Asia. Kyotographie, now in its 12th year, fuses the past and present with its striking images and unique locations. The 13 exhibitions are staged in temples, galleries and traditional private homes across the Japanese city, showcasing the work of national and international photographers.

The festival is loosely centred on a theme – and this year the directors, Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi, asked participants to focus on the word “source” by delving into the essence of beginnings and the nexus of creation and discovery.

The Yamomami struggle. Photograph by Claudia Andujar

The source is the initiator, the origin of all things. It is the creation of life, a place where conflict arises or freedom is obtained; it is the space in which something is found, born or created. It is a struggle Claudia Andujar and the Yanomami shaman and leader Davi Kopenawa know too well. The Yanomami Struggle is the first retrospective exhibition in Japan by the Brazilian artist and activist Andujar with the Yanomami people of Brazil.

It is more than 50 years since she began photographing the Yanomami, the people of the Amazon rainforest near Brazil’s border with Venezuela, an initial encounter that changed their lives. Andujar’s work is not just a showcase of her photographic talent but, with Kopenawa accompanying the exhibition to Japan for the first time, it is a platform to bring the Yanomami’s message to a wider Asian audience.

The Yanomami Struggle. Photograph by Claudia Andujar

The first part of the exhibition features photographs taken by Andjuar in the 1970s, alongside artwork by the Yanomami people and words by Kopenawa. The second part narrates the continuing violence inflicted by non-Indigenous society on the Yanomami. The project is a platform for the Yamomani people to be seen and protected from ongoing threats. The exhibition, curated by Thyago Nogueira from São Paulo’s Instituto Moreira Salles, is a smaller version of one that has been touring the world since 2018.

The Yanomami Struggle, by Claudia Andujar, and artwork by the Yanomami people.

The Moroccan artist Yassine Alaoui Ismaili (Yoriyas) is showing new work made during his Kyotographie artist-in-residence programme for young Africans. The images from the Japanese city feature alongside his project Casablanca Not the Movie.

Children Transform the Sheep for Eid al-Adha into a Playground in Casablanca. Photograph by Yassine Alaoui Ismaili (Yoriyas)

Yoriyas gave up his career as a breakdancer and took up photography as a means of self-expression. His project Casablanca Not the Movie documents the streets of the city where he lives with candid shots and complex compositions. His work, which combines performance and photography, encourages us to focus on how we inhabit urban spaces. The exhibition’s clever use of display and Yoriyas’s experience with choreography force the viewer to see the work at unconventional angles. He says: “The camera frame is like a theatre stage. The people in the frame are my dancers. By moving the camera, I am choreographing my subjects without even knowing it. When an interesting movement catches my eye, I press the shutter. My training has taught me to immediately understand space, movement, connection and story. I photograph in the same way that I choreograph.”

The contrasts in Casablanca take many forms, including social, political, religious and chromatic. Photograph by Yoriyas

From Our Windows is a collaboration bringing together two important Japanese female photographers, both of whom shares aspects of their lives through photography, in a dialogue about different generations. The exhibition is supported by Women in Motion, which throws a spotlight on the talent of women in the arts in an attempt to reach gender equality in the field. Rinko Kawauchi, an internationally acclaimed photographer, chose to exhibit with Tokuko Ushioda who, at 83, continues to create vibrant new works. Kawauchi says of Ushioda: “I respect the fact that she has been active as a photographer since a time when it was difficult for women to advance in society, and that she is sincerely committed to engaging with the life that unfolds in front of her.” This exhibition features photographs taken by each of them of their families.

Photograph by Rinko Kawauchi.

Kawauchi’s two bodies of work, Cui Cui and As It Is, focus on family life. The first series is a family album relating to the death of her grandfather and the second showcases the three years after the birth of her child. Family, birth, death and daily life are threads through both bodies of work that help to create an emotional experience that transcends the generations.

Rinko Kawauchi and Tokuko Ushioda at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art

Kawauchi says: “My works will be exhibited alongside Ushioda. Each of the works from the two series are in a space that is the same size, located side by side. The works show the accumulation of time that we have spent. They are a record of the days we spent with our families, and they are also the result of facing ourselves. We hope to share with visitors what we have seen through the act of photography, which we have continued to do even though our generations are different, and to enjoy the fact that we are now living in the same era.”

Ushioda’s first solo exhibition features two series: the intimate My Husband and also Ice Box, a fixed-point observation of her own and friends’ refrigerators. Ushioda says: “I worked on that series [Ice Box] for around 20 years or so. Like collecting insects, I took photographs of refrigerators in houses here and there and in my own home, which eventually culminated in this body of work.”

Entries from Tokuko Ushida’s series Ice Box.

James Mollison’s ongoing project Where Children Sleep is on display at the Kyoto Art Centre with a clever display that turns each photograph into its own bedroom.

A child portrayed in Where Children Sleep, Nemis, Canada.

Featuring 35 children from 28 countries, the project encourages viewers to think about poverty, wealth, the climate emergency, gun violence, education, gender issues and refugee crises. Mollison says: “From the start, I didn’t want to think about needy children in the developing world, but rather something more inclusive, about children from all types of situations.” Featuring everything from a trailer in Kentucky during an opioid crisis and a football fan’s bedroom in Yokohama, Japan, to a tipi in Mongolia, the project offers an engrossing look at disparate lives.

From Where Children Sleep, Nirto, Somalia

Joshim, India. Photographs by James Mollison

Phosphor, Art & Fashion (1990-2023) is the first big retrospective exhibition devoted to the Dutch artist Viviane Sassen . It covers 30 years of works, including previously unseen photographs, and combines them with video installations, paintings and collages that showcase her taste for ambiguity and drama in a distinctive language of her own.

Eudocimus Ruber, from the series Of Mud and Lotus, 2017. Photograph by Viviane Sassen and Stevenson

The exhibition opens with self-portraits taken during Sassen’s time as a model. “I wanted to regain power over my own body. With a man behind the camera, a sort of tension always develops, which is often about eroticism, but usually about power,” she says. Sassen lived in Kenya as a child, and the series produced there and in South Africa are dreamlike, bold and enigmatic. She describes this period as her “years of magical thinking”. The staging of the exhibition in an old newspaper printing press contrasts with the light, shadows and bold, clashing colours of her work. The lack of natural light intensifies the flamboyant tones of the elaborately composed fashion work.

Dior Magazine (2021), and Milk, from the series Lexicon, 2006. Photographs by Viviane Sassen and Stevenson

Viviane Sassen’s immersive video installation at the Kyoto Shimbun B1F print plant. Photograph by Joanna Ruck

The source of and inspiration for Kyotographie can be traced to Lucien Clergue, the founder of Les Rencontres d’Arles, the first international photography festival, which took place in 1969. Arles, where Clergue grew up and lived all his life, was a canvas for his photography work in the 1950s. Shortly after the second world war, many Roma were freed from internment camps and came to Arles, where Clergue forged a close relationship with the community. Gypsy Tempo reveals the daily life of these families – their nomadic lifestyle, the role of religion and how music and dance are used to tell stories.

Draga in Polka-Dot Dress, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, 1957. Photographs by Lucien Clergue

Little Gypsy Girl in the Chapel, Cannet 1958

During this time, Clergue discovered, and then helped propel to fame, the Gypsy guitarist Manitas de Plata and his friend José Reyes. Manitas went on to become a famous musician in the 1960s who, together with Clergue, toured the world, including Japan.

Kyotographie 2024 was launched alongside its sister festival, Kyotophonie , an international music event, with performances by Los Graciosos, a band from Catalonia who play contemporary Gypsy music. Meanwhile, the sounds of De Plata can be heard by viewers of Clergue’s exhibition.

The Magic Circle, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, 1958, by Lucien Clergue.

Kyotographie 2024 runs until 12 May at venues across Kyoto, Japan.

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