As someone whose ancestors survived the middle passage and the genocides of smallpox and European imperialism, as someone whose living ancestors survived warfare and migration, I sometimes pray to my ancestors for strength and wisdom. This is a common practice for many people of color I know. We pray to those who sacrificed everything so that one day their descendants could know something more than mere survival. If we romanticize our ancestors, it is only to balance the grotesque stereotypes of them popular in American culture. In writing prompts, it is common to ask young writers of color to reflect on their lineages and share their histories of survival.
That same writing prompt lands differently when given to a white person.
When white people romanticize their histories and feel proud about their ancestors, it’s complicated. American bootstraps narratives and manifest destiny abound, frequently blithely turning the eye away from the masses of enslaved Black bodies, massacred Indigenous bodies, and silenced Queer bodies left in their wake.
When people of color turn to their ancestors for strength, there is something holy, even if simplistic. When white people turn to their ancestors, there is sometimes a reckoning, the dance of positionality has more chances for missteps.
As a teacher, I have wrestled with how to best teach my students how to reckon with their heritages. For my students of color, there is often the need to validate, to empower, to bring to light; for students of color farther along their identity development, I challenge them to complicate their histories, to stop performing their histories cleanly for white people. There are plenty of models I can point my students towards to develop their writing in this way. In the past, however, I have been somewhat at a loss for how to best direct my white students when wrestling with their cultural legacies. Books by white people that reckon with the weight of the legacies of racism and imperialism in ethically satisfying ways are harder to come by perhaps or they have somehow escaped my attention. Too often, the conversation ends with How to Kill a Mockingbird.
I was excited to read Before Us Like a Land of Dreams by Karin Anderson, because it seems like one of the few books by white people that strives to find a way to ethically narrate and thereby define a spiritual relationship with white history. By chance, I read Anderson alongside William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Reviewers of Before Us Like a Land of Dreams are fond of comparing Anderson’s novel to As I Lay Dying. The obvious connection is the shifting first-person perspectives in which the novels are narrated, as well as the authors’ shared ambition in encapsulating a region’s history and culture. The obvious connections end there. While Faulkner’s novel is driven by a clear conflict—the Bundren family’s desire to bury their mother in a faraway town—the conflict in Anderson’s novel is less clear. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams covers five different sets of characters from distinct generations, whose conflicts don’t necessarily interact with one another. In this sense, Before Us Like a Land of Dreams more closely approximates The Glory Field by Walter Dean Myers than As I Lay Dying. The impetus for Anderson’s novel seems to be derived from the author’s mid-life crisis after a divorce—from a husband and a religious history. Like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, the novel starts with non-fiction and ends in the imagination: Anderson moves from narrating a mid-life crisis to voicing the stories of her ancestors as a way of finding herself anew in the world. While Anderson compassionately retraces the family histories of several branches of her family tree, Faulkner exposes his characters for the amusement and derision of his readers. Reading As I Lay Dying is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. With this in mind, both novels perhaps offer two contrasting ways of engaging the legacy of whiteness: by Anderson’s approach, compassionately humanize the ancestor in all their flaws and shortcomings, tracing the limits of their strength and desire; Or by Faulkner’s approach, expose the callousness and depravity of your kin without erasing the ache that makes them human. I don’t think it’s fair to call Anderson’s approach redemptive. Rather, much like the Matthew Arnold poem from which the novel takes its name, Anderson seems to nod to the fact that much of the love and light in the romanticized narratives of Mormon history are an illusion.
In Faulkner, we find a fiercely poetic prose with descriptions and moments that will steal your breath. The slim narrative hits you like a bunch of knife jabs. Anderson’s novel is much more sprawling and unfocused. Each voice in Faulkner’s novel clearly pushes along the narrative arc. Each voice in Anderson feels like the beginning of a new novel. Both novels beg for rereading in order to fully appreciate the rich switches in voice. Reading these novels side-by-side is miserably dizzying, although rewarding.
I first engaged with Anderson’s novel in a panel at Southern Utah University. What captivated me the most then was the novel’s attempt to compassionately narrate unspoken parts of Mormon history, such as the forced removal of indigenous peoples from Mountain West, queer figures like Julian Eltinge, and so forth. I am deeply grateful this novel exists, because it narrates the stories of a Utah concealed from the public. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams is a solid counterpoint to all the romanticized stories about pioneers young Mormons are fed in church and public school. A large part of our conversation in that panel was a discussion about how to best represent marginalized stories in Mormon history without losing the ears of our devout community members. I have mixed feelings about how successful Anderson was in that count. There are moments where the autobiographical narrator’s callousness towards the religion makes her seem a tad biased and I can imagine that offending the devout. When the same callousness comes in the voices of the ancestors, it feels more acceptable to me. It’s harder to lay blame on the dead.
On a formal level, Anderson’s novel is worth reading for the explosions of brilliance scattered throughout the novel. There is an absolutely fantastic four-or-so page scene where circus elephants leap off a cliff and into a river—and survive! Equally impressive is the story of a drag performance in rural Idaho that wins the hearts of the conservative community. Then, there’s the story of the white boy who helped Natives steal a herd of farm animals. Time and time again, Anderson narrates these unlikely stories in a way that makes them utterly believable.
I recommend Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to anyone interested in studying perspective in fiction. I recommend Anderson’s Before Us Like a Land of Dreams to anyone interested in Mormon Studies, history of the American West, perspective in fiction.