David Sklar’s journey across borders and return to La Clinica

 

David Sklar's mid-life quest for meaning to him back to the Mexican community where he had leaned to be a doctor.

 

 

Earlier this decade, David Sklar resembled Dante Alighieri. 

 

Dante’s dark woods were Sklar’s home and the hospital where he worked in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but, like the fabled Italian poet, he found himself adrift midway through his life’s journey. 

 

Sklar’s marriage to his wife Laura was disintegrating, his body bore more and more signs of wear and tear and the path of finding meaning through being a doctor no longer sustained him. 

 

His response: to return to the village in rural Mexico where he had begun his medical career in the early 1970s. 

 

Sklar’s recounting of his memories of his earlier experiences and attempts to grapple with his life changes constitute the two major threads of La Clinica: A Doctor’s Journey Across Borders, a book that largely engages the reader even if it disappoints on several accounts in the end.

 

Sklar’s recollections of his first stint in the village supply much of the book’s best material. 

 

At times demonstrating impressive powers of description-the book’s opening section about watching two young men die is a particularly strong example of his abilities-Sklar depicts both the grinding poverty he encountered in the village near the Sierra Madre mountains where he spent time during his early 20s and the healthy stock of idealism he brought to meet them.

 

He needed all of it.

 

As he recounts his time, the village challenged Sklar, pushing him far beyond the limits of his knowledge and previous beliefs.  When his patients at the clinic talk about miracles and witches, he must fight his skepticism and listen with respect.  When a man comes into the clinic with discolored blotches of burnt skin, Sklar consults a textbook about discover what to do.  He even takes a turn as a dentist, waging a lengthy battle over the course of two days to yank an elderly man’s tooth from its socket before it becomes infected and potentially deadly. 

 

Carl Wilson, who wears blue jeans and t-shirts and sports a bushy beard, is the clinic’s founder and Sklar’s mentor.  Sklar finds himself drawn to the older man, who, despite being an outsider, has managed to earn universal respect from the village residents because of his commitment to their care. 

 

But Sklar’s relationship toward his guide becomes muddied when he realizes eventually that not only does Wilson have no medical credentials, he also maintains a sexual relationship with at least two of the young men in the village.

 

Yet, as disturbing as this revelation is, Sklar does not act on it in any meaningful way during his initial stint.  While he deserves credit for not omitting this unflattering choice, his lack of action does come off as a sin of omission.  Even when he sees Wilson years later, in an episode described in the book’s epilogue, Sklar does not appear to express much outrage toward him, but rather wonders about what both men’s legacy will be. 

 

This lack of moral courage is not the book’s only problem.  

 

The information about the dissolution of Sklar’s marriage provides a necessary backdrop for his return to the village to find some clarity about the next stage of his life as well as how he had arrived at the point of confusion.  Still, the book contains more descriptions about the couple’s initial courtship and Laura’s new apartment than is necessary and, in fact, ultimately serves to lessen the book’s impact. 

 

These weaknesses aside, La Clinica does contain some provocative material for those who are concerned with social justice and health as well as for those who have at some point felt themselves unhitched from life’s moorings.  And, while Sklar does not reach paradise like his Italian counterpart did many centuries ago-the book’s ending is far more ambiguous-he deserves some credit for having taken the journey and shared it with the reader. 

 

Black History Month: John Edgar Wideman on Fatherhood.

For Italian Renaissance writer Dante Alighieri, feeling himself alone in a dark wood midway through his life’s journey prompted a trip through hell, purgatory, and, ultimately, to paradise-travels that resulted in the Divine Comedy.

For John Edgar Wideman, the feeling was the same, but the journey was to Pittsburgh, South Carolina and Western Massachusetts.  His companion for part of his quest for understanding was not Beatrice, but his father, Edgar Wideman. 

Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society, a short, kaleidoscopic and life-affirming book, is the record and result of Wideman’s travels.

The author of Brothers and Keepers is 52 when the story begins, well into a highly successful writing career and living in Western Massachusetts with his wife and family. 

His hairline beginning to recede, his awareness of life’s finitude growing, Wideman realizes that he wants to connect more deeply with his father.    “Perhaps it’s inevitable,” he writes. “Age brings you to your father.”

It’s not an easy arrival.

Wideman writes about the profound ambivalence and distance he must traverse to forge a stronger relationship with the man responsible for his birth.  To begin, his father left the Wideman house in Homewood, Pennsylvania, the setting for much of Wideman’s writing, when the son was young.   The departure left a gap between father and son that has not been breached when the book begins.

Beyond the physical separation, though, lie more fundamental sources of emotional separation. 

Whereas Wideman’s mother’s core belief was in love, Edgar Wideman believed indisiputably that we are alone in life.  Whereas his mother signified connection, his father denoted limits and boundaries, and, at times, punishment.  Wideman recounts a time when he called his father a spoor at the dinner table-a name which elicited a stinging slap on his cheeks designed both to hurt and to humiliate.

Race compounds these barriers.  In both the introduction and the main text of Fatheralong, Wideman offers a strong indictment of the whole construct of race-a formulation which has particularly negative consequences for young black men and their father.  “Are you proof he’s less than a man because you’re not able to give him what men give to their sons at birth: full, unquestioned, unconditional citizenship.” Wideman asks during a fictional exchange between a black father and son.  “The paradigm of race works to create distance between sons and fathers.”

The gap between Wideman and his father is significant. Upon reflection, the younger Wideman realizes that for decades he has squeezed time with his father into time in Homewood largely spent with his mother, at  a bar for a drink or two, or on the way to the airport. 

Wideman works to reduce that space by initiating a trip with his father to his family’s roots in South Carolina, including a visit to the aptly named Promised Land. 

The trip is a fruitful one.

Motivated by a hunger for connection and self-knowledge  so that he may feel more free, Wideman learns more about the land that formed his father and ancestors while still grappling with race’s everpresent power and slavery’s brutal legacy. 

Bowie Lomax, an elderly white professor who provides Wideman with information about his family’s history elicits fury from the author, who must restrain himself from bashing the older’s man head into oblivion.  “Didn’t mastery of Abbeville’s history, the power and privilege to tell my father’s story, follow from the original sin of slavery that stole, then silenced, my father’s voice,” Wideman writes. 

These challenges notwithstanding, the trip to South Carolina gives Wideman some of the information for which he was looking.  His son’s wedding provides more.

Wideman’s father is unintentionally left behind twice during his grandson’s wedding to a woman from Sierra Leone-first on the way from Pittsburgh, then from the hotel in Western Massachusetts to the wedding.  The delays elicit anxiety in the younger Wideman, who is the master of ceremonies and must eventually move the event forward without his father’s participation.  

This precipitates an intense feeling of loss and mourning in the younger Wideman-he calls it a “sudden grief so strong it would have shut out the wonder of my son’s wedding if I hadn’t been able to call upon my father.” Fortunately, Wideman is able to summon within himself a part of his father and does appreciate the wedding’s beauty.  For his part, the elder Wideman arrives after the ceremony has concluded, looking dapper if slightly anxious, and ready to enjoy himself.  

The book’s final section is a collection of father stories, memories of being a father and a son and husband, that swirl around in Wideman’s head and find their way onto the page. 

Wideman remembers a moment where he thinks he is playing tenderly with his daughter Jamila, who he is carrying on his shoulders, when in fact the girl is terrified of the leaves that he is carrying her near-an insight that propels Wideman back to his childhood fear of feathers.  He recounts the terrible morning when his son Jacob as a teenager killed a fellow camper and the seven years that have followed. 

And he remembers his Wideman ancestors.

The barriers to connection between black men and their fathers exist still, Wideman writes, “like a shadow, like a wall between my grandfathers and myself, my father and me, between the two of us, father and son, son and father.

So we must speak these stories to one another.

                                                                                  Love. ”

Love and stories against history’s destructive power.  His adoption of  his mother’s creed and the practice of story used by his African ancestors to meet the burden of race and slavery’s legacy.  Wideman’s journey ends with insight,  internal resolution and enduring struggle. 

Fatheralong has many of the strengths of Wideman’s other books: the grounding in place; the fearless honesty with which he interrogates himself and others; the musical riffs and rhythm; the meticulous attention to detail; the inclusion of other authors; the refusal to provide cheap comfort either about America’s history; and the representation through words of life and its episodic, contradictory and non-linear nature. 

A different and less emotionally powerful book from Brothers and Keepers, Fatheralong nevertheless does move the reader along through Wideman’s recounting of his and his father’s story and journey.