I grew up in a conservative Christian home. My parents claim to this day that I’m the person who introduced them to Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio. For most of my childhood and adolescence, I would alternate between attending Catholic Mass with my father on one Sunday morning and Pentecostal Sunday School the next. As a teenager and college student, I identified as a Pentecostal, complete with strict guidelines for behavior, dress, media consumption, and more.
My parents remain conservatives to this day. In fact, my Dad converted, so both now attend a fundamentalist Pentecostal church together. Two of my three brothers are preachers in that same denomination. My other brother works too much and owns a lot of guns.
My family doesn’t talk much about world issues when we get together. It’s easier to rehash old Boy Scouts stories and fawn over the two grandchildren.
I enjoyed college, and my classes were taught by professors across the political spectrum. I never felt persecuted for my religious beliefs by the more liberal professors. They simply encouraged me to do the course reading and engage in classroom discussions with an open mind. Having a strong belief system was a good thing, but they didn’t want me to reject information out-of-hand because it didn’t immediately fit into my worldview.
I graduated from college in 2001 with a degree in Political Science, complete with minors in Economics and History. My beliefs had changed – not because I’d been indoctrinated by liberals and leftists – but because what I’d been taught about the world as a kid didn’t match what I’d learned in college. And it took me several years to understand how to make sense of that cognitive dissonance.
“You’ll become more conservative when you get older and have kids.”
I’ve had some version of that old adage whipped my way several times in the past two decades. It’s as if such a platitude is the only way people can justify to themselves my slow crawl leftward. Hell, I’m not sure the 25-year-old version of myself who left the Pentecostal church would recognize the 40-year-old version of myself who’s joined the Democratic Socialists of America. But while my journey hasn’t been all that revolutionary – much less very smooth or predictable – I also know I haven’t been alone. As in, many people can relate to the overarching trajectory of my story, if not the actual details.
To me, that’s what made Socialist Realism by Trisha Low so damned compelling.
Released in Summer 2019 on Coffee House Press, it’s a hypnotic and magnetic tale that’s equal parts travelogue, retrospective, and coming-of-age narrative. Over the course of 158 pages, Low weaves together several seemingly divergent themes, ideas, and strands of thought into a single essay that explores the interplay of identity, art, and nostalgia.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that the entire project was a creative treatise on the classic exploration of “Nature v. Nurture.” Low gives considerable space to swirling discussions about the idea of what constitutes family – including definitions that are biological, cultural, and socioeconomic. For each sprawling digression about an avant-garde art installation that provides a critical lens into postmodern expression in the 21st century, there’s an equally intense passage about Singapore, colonialism, or her mother.
When viewed through the lens of belonging, identity, and purpose, the book ultimately asks three pertinent questions:
- What is home?
- Where is home?
- Who is home?
Low seeks out answers through a series of interconnected lenses, including:
- A cross-country move
- Gender identity
- Sexual expression
- Cultural determination
- Economic anxiety
- Political activism
As each concept was introduced, it was lain atop the others, but instead of clouding the reader’s vision or obscuring the direction of her argument, it sharpened the thrust of the overall thesis, while never providing a clear answer. Which I found enchanting, enthralling, and curiously hopeful – especially in a world that doesn’t give me much hope these days.
Let me try and explain:
To me, belonging has always provided some sort of identity, some sort of purpose or definition in this life. If I felt part of the right group – or any group – it meant that someone (or several someones) understood me just enough to like me hanging around. It also meant I had someplace and some people who gave me value, especially when I had trouble finding value in and of myself.
That then meant I could overlook imperfections, falsehoods, untruths, and downright ugly actions on behalf of the group that accepted me because, if they were wrong, then I was wrong. More importantly, if I thought the group was wrong and wanted to leave, I still had trouble leaving, because if I did, then I wouldn’t have an identity because I didn’t belong to anyone or anything.
That’s why it’s easy to return to the past when you don’t know where to go in the future. It’s simpler to go back to places of belonging and acceptance because even if you know you really don’t belong there, it’s easier than seeking out something new or different. Because that would be hard, even if it’s right.
Hence, when Trisha Low talks about her new life, beliefs, expressions, and activities with her family and her friends, I fully resonate with how uncomfortable she feels. I recognize the tendency to fall back into old patterns, language, and actions with the people she used for identity in the past because it’s comfortable. I understand what it’s like to not want to have hard discussions with those old groups, simply because part of your identity is wrapped up in those people, places, and things.
Because we all want to belong, even though we also fear intimacy. We fear struggle. We fear not to be accepted. We fear that we’ve made the wrong choices in life, even if they were for the right reasons. We fear to change in the present, even when we know the changes will lead to a better future.
The siren song of the past is compelling. It’s powerful. It’s dangerous. It’s deadly. It’s also hard to ignore it completely because to do so would be to excise your own personal growth. You can’t live into who you are today – much less become an even better person in the future – without recognizing who you used to be and what you left behind.
Forgive me if I’ve talked more about my feelings about this book than about Socialist Realism as a book. It’s just that Low dredged up such emotions, questions, queries, and ruminations inside of me. Reading her words was like listening to a new friend tell her life story and recognizing how much you have in common, even though your paths through life appear to be quite different on the surface. That’s the power of both good ideas and good writing about those ideas.
The most trenchant aspect of this book surrounds Low’s use of quotes and bibliographic references to leading lights in political science, art criticism, and communications theory. Thinkers, artisans, and activists as diverse as Orwell, Freud, Munoz, Fryer, Burden, Malevich, Arendt, Boym, Steka, Baldwin, Derrida, Hanna, Jameson, Hawking, Malik, Monroe, Jurassic Park, and The Talented Mr. Ripley all receive equal chance to speak. It makes me wonder if this is what Zizek could be in 2019 – if only he hadn’t turned into someone more interested in smelling his own farts than actually connecting with his readers.
It’s as if she wants the reader to know how much she knows (which is a lot!), but she couches the entire exercise in a conversational tone. It sets the reader at ease, even as she delves into unsettling questions and scenarios about sex, sexuality, sexual expression, political disenfranchisement, suicidal ideation, and plain ol’ alienation.
Trisha Low has crafted a trenchant, moving essay about intimacy, belonging, and the power of nostalgia. She’s fearless in how she expresses her fears. She’s hopeful in how she discusses her lack of hope. She’s artful in how she debates whether or not art can ever have any real impact in political life. Ultimately, Socialist Realism is about the will to change – your life, your memories, your status, your world, and your sense of where you are in that world. But it’s also about facing the fact that there are several moments, days, weeks, months, and years when even thinking about the prospect of change is really fucking hard.