In the Field by Sadiqa de Meijer
I’ve been slowly savouring the essays in Sadiqa de Meier’s new book, In the Field. Social media, for all its evils, still does the job of alerting you to wonderful books and art that you might not otherwise have had on your radar. I followed Sadiqa at some point because we share a publisher and I liked that her book seemed to be the same size as my The Flower Can Always Be Changing (photo at the bottom of the post) also published by Palimpsest Press (where there’s a sale on my books rn btw).
When Sadiqa posted on Instagram about an essay from the collection about Etty Hillesum, I knew I had to read her book. I’ve written about Etty here and here.
The librarian in me wants to start off by giving you some read-alikes. If you liked The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, or Pathologies by Susan Olding, or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I think you’ll like these essays. If you’ve read my Rumi and the Red Handbag you’ll enjoy the Amsterdam connection between us (I was surprised to read the name of one my characters, Florine!, on her page 113), and I’m always kind of surprised but not surprised about how the thinking around patients and the medical coincides with library thinking. (We have similar interactions with similar people. We visit prisons, we tend to the broken and broken hearted, we decipher what needs repair, how to be of use, how to help).
I don’t write reviews here per se, as you know, but I’m going to pull a few quotations from the book, and just otherwise say, I loved reading it. I think you will too.
from In the Field by Sadiqa de Meijer:
— “We’re breakable, our hearts should make music. We’re breakable, somebody has to repair us.”
— On Amsterdam: “I was born here. I’ve returned to study a feeling. A quiet electricity, a blurring of edges between ourselves and our first places.”
— “Questions of the spirit seem almost ornamental when life is untroubled, and then become essential when it’s not.”
— “This is a beautiful principle in medicine: the idea that every wound deserves the same quality of attention, no matter who bears it.”
— On Etty Hillesum: “At home, her words and ideas live in me as I do the laundry, or shovel snow, or wait in the lineup at the grocery store.” And: “I’ve heard others confide, though only rarely, a text of similar significance to them: A Room of One’s Own, Anna Karenina, Beloved.”
I used the term AI Sloppola recently and was applauded. It’s getting harder and harder to escape the stuff. I’m not sure what the solution is, but I think books, reading, art, literature, music, human creation is obviously part of it. To keep our mental health, I think we’ll be visiting book stores more, libraries maybe, museums, art galleries, live music. I say that, but I also realize I live in a total silo of artists, writers, book and art lovers. So I’m not sure. And I’m not sure what to do about any of it, especially as we all navigate the traumosphere.
Our temps are dipping below zero at night now and there is less sitting out in the garden hamming it up as a book influencer. Still, it’s something we can do. (Both going outside, and sharing books we love). I hope you are reading a book you are fond of these days, too, and I would love to hear what it might be.
