Fear Icons
Essays
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- £13.99
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- £13.99
Publisher Description
“Who are we to each other when we’re afraid?” Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel asks in Fear Icons, her moving and original debut essay collection. Her answer is a lyric examination of the icons that summon and soothe our fears. From Donald Trump to the Virgin Mary, Darth Vader to the Dalai Lama, Schlegel turns cultural criticism personal with bracing intelligence and vulnerability as she explores what it means to be human, a woman, an artist, and, in particular, a parent: what it means to love a child beyond measure, someone so vulnerable, familiar, and strange. Schlegel looks at fear and faith—the ways the two are more similar than we realize—and the many shapes our faith takes, from nationalism to friendship, from art to religious dogma. Each essay is woven through with other voices—Baldwin, Ashbery, Du Bois, Cixous—positioning Schlegel’s arguments and meditations within a diverse and dynamic literary lineage. Fear Icons is a vital and timely inquiry into the complex relationship between love and fear—and the ways that each intensifies the other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this impressionistic, reflective series of essays, Schlegel explores how various famous people serve to either instill, assuage, or represent fear to ordinary people and how fear can both skew and heighten one's humanity. She describes a shooting-range simulation in which patrons pay to reenact the killing of Osama bin Laden using a mannequin and proposes that, in wartime, people believe "violence is a form of safety." The iconography of the Virgin Mary prompts thoughts about the inherent fears of motherhood, with Schlegel reflecting, "In making my child's life, I had made his death." In one of the strongest pieces, "Dick, About Your Heart," Schlegel considers former vice president Dick Cheney's heart problems as a metaphor for his misdeeds. While not especially novel, Schlegel's tack is clever ("You take a drug called warfarin that I pronounce war-faring' ") and admirably empathetic. She further discusses how xenophobia can enter a person through cultural osmosis, and uses Liberace's closeted existence to explore fears of deviance from gender and sexual norms. The author makes her motivation plain when she states, "I don't want answers. I want description." This is precisely what Schlegel presents, but the very act of naming and elucidating fears can dissolve their power, and that is a worthwhile (and timely) enterprise.
