Jennifer Banks’ book opens pathways and unveils vistas
Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth by Jennifer Banks. W. W. Norton, 2023. 272 pp., $27.95
Some books have the potential to change public discourse for the better. In this moment, when people on both sides of the political divide can agree that human life and dignity are under threat, a book on birth—natality—seems to be just the kind of book we need.
*
The hope for hope
I was pregnant. I knew, I explained to my mom, because of some impossibly subtle uptick in my own sense of buoyancy and a vague feeling of creativity. Still two days from a missed cycle, I was nonetheless certain enough to confide in the woman whose own body had housed the earliest instance of my own. She offered a tempered congratulations, at once trusting me to know the still-hidden workings of my own body, while also counseling an unspoken caution. Even if it were true in the moment of my shared news, it might not be tomorrow. Her joy contained reticence: a preparation for the possibility of despair. Between us was only, so far, the hope for hope.
“And so I’d witness them, mothers gathered in private, sharing birth stories the way veterans share war stories, like a secret upon which a society depends but which lingers in its shadows,” writes Jennifer Banks in the introduction to Natality. I know this sharing well.
Three days after confiding in my mom, I clicked into a Zoom call full of women convened by Banks. We were to discuss, without much more of a prescriptive agenda, birth. Together.
I hadn’t known I was craving “a philosophy of birth.” I hadn’t even realized birth was a conversation largely ignored. I recognize now my ignorance was in part because the topic of motherhood is diffuse—though, more often than not, motherhood is reduced to clichés or seized upon for product sales. And yet there is nothing untouched by birth, no topic that does not intersect with it: spirituality, politics, knowledge, power, gender, economics, science, art, and on and on. In Natality, Banks offers a stunning starting point for moving the conversation of birth from the private sphere, where it has long been whispered and wondered about, more fully into public discourse, where it belongs.
I am grateful to Banks for heeding the inkling that arose thirteen years ago to explore this topic, and grateful for the way she delicately begins to unfold the fraught and mysterious reality of birth, a subject that is, she says, “unthinkable, indescribable, quaint, graphic, sentimental, dangerous, exploitative, enraging, and downright embarrassing.” I am grateful for this book—and indeed for this group of women who continue to meet monthly—for taking seriously the very beginning of everything.
Ellen Koneck is the executive director of Commonweal. She lives in Minnesota with her husband and two sons.
***
The sight of life
Early in her richly thoughtful new book Natality, Jennifer Banks quotes Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death.” Death, Banks observes, has been a—perhaps the—central preoccupation of Western philosophy, religion, and imagination. As Banks puts it, death has been “humanity’s central defining experience, its deepest existential theme.”
Banks’s insight triggered for me a cascading memory of texts evidencing her claim, among them T. J. Clark’s book The Sight of Death, which chronicles Clark’s experience of looking at two paintings over the course of a year. The title refers to the paintings’ subject matter, but it also suggests the contemplative stillness of the one spending hours upon hours gazing at art. The dead materials of canvas and pigment presenting the subject of death to the viewer stilled by its sight—it’s an image that underscores death’s dominion over Western thought. But this dominion is not the whole story. Banks spins a secondary plot—one in which birth, not death, animates a relation to and view of the world. What does the world look like when seen through the lens of natality?
What is so interesting about the story Banks tells is that when birth is central, it does not eclipse death in the way death has dominated birth. Instead, it brings death into sharper focus. Woven through the stories of Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Toni Morrison, among others, are the stories of stillbirths, lost children, dead parents, abandoning lovers, lost potential selves. Death attends birth. And births occur amidst death and its analogs. Birth, as Banks describes it in her meditation on Adrienne Rich, confounds the binaries. It is as if instead of erasing death, birth gives us a new way to perceive it—which is also to say, a new way to frame it.
As birth reframes death, so too does it shift our frame for philosophizing about art. In centering natality, Banks attends not just to the arts and texts her central figures have produced but to the birthing of these artifacts in their lives. We catch sight of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, for example, birthing their philosophies and novels amidst lives riddled with deaths, losses, and births. They create amidst the constraints of their lives and the creative agency these constraints bring to them. Their art-making speaks to life as much as death; it shows how moments that might look like the one can also yield the other. In a world where deaths are inevitable and births are possible, the aim of art-making, we might reply to Tarkosvky, is to prepare for birth.
What might art-birthing suggest about art’s own aims? How might Banks’s recovery of natality even help us to see anew Clark’s Sight of Death—to see not just his contemplative stillness directed at death but also the stillness gestating his own creative work, a man who will come to conclude not just that he has glimpsed death but that such sight is the “victory of dawn over darkness”? To reclaim natality with the stories Banks gives us is not to deny death nor to dispel darkness but rather to find that the sight of death is never the whole story. Near such sight, entwined with it perhaps, as if in struggle, is also always the sight of life.
Natalie Carnes is Professor of Theology and Affiliated Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at Baylor University. Her most recent book is Motherhood: A Confession.
***
We never stand alone
Jennifer Banks’s Natality opens with a stark fact: There is no such thing as a lone individual. As she writes in her introduction,” We may die alone, but we were never born alone . . . Our births were made possible by other people and were conditioned by the material world we arrive in, a world that is materially altered by our births.”
We begin our lives in a vertical, asymmetrical relationship. When we place natality at the heart of what it means to be human, we can begin to discern how to approach the many relationships, chosen and unchosen, that will develop throughout our lives. It can be tempting to deny our dependence on others or to reframe our relationships to all be equal and symmetrical. But the asymmetry of natality persists throughout our lives—we never stand alone, and our relationships are rarely exactly equal.
Banks assembles a sisterhood of women who wrestled with natality in a world that neglects our ties to each other. She sets up a dialogue across generations, observing how Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sojourner Truth, Toni Morrison and more each spoke for the dignity and reality of natality. As they each observed, when we give mothers the dignity they are due, we all benefit. Each of us is, as Eva Feder Kittay puts it, some mother’s child.
Leah Libresco Sargeant is the mother of two children on earth and six in Heaven. She runs Other Feminisms, a Substack community focused on the dignity of dependence.
***
Study birth always
Isn’t it strange that birth is all around us but still somehow invisible? It is a bit of private life that matters massively for a moment to a couple of people; the moment of our big arrival is like something huge cast into water—with no ripples.
Humans have a beginning and an end. We are born and we die. That second fact rightly inspires reflection. Jennifer Banks persuades that we do not get nearer to the truth of things by forgetting the first fact.
Keep death always before your eyes, monks say. Study death always, say Roman Stoics. Sure, being human is shaped by mortality, but Banks shifts the focus to natality drawing on Hannah Arendt and six other writers. Arendt considered birth the “miracle that saves the world” from ruin, resonant in politics, not just in private life. Banks explores what we discover when we focus on the fact of beginning rather than ending, whereas philosophy conventionally centers death. What would human society be like if we thought this: “From the time we are born, we are being shaped by birth.” Or, “Study birth always: it takes an entire lifetime to learn how to give birth or to come to terms with our having been born.” Natality is a revelation.
Natality gives knowledge we need because of the way birth is both everywhere and secret. Birth’s elusive character marks Banks’s metaphors for birth: a grand room whose door is locked; a pearl; an ocean. The ocean is my favorite of these: birth like an ocean “constantly moving and changing shape, ebbing and flowing,” brimming with life and not in our control. Birth is no niche topic, suited just for pregnant women.
Does Banks mean birth as verb or noun, I wondered. Does she mean to describe with this term what a woman does in bringing a baby out to life? Or what happens to every person at the start? The answer: Yes. Birth “confounds” binaries, she says. It is not just liminal, as everyone says; it connects. Natality brings together “love, origins, revolution, tradition, the future, miracles, democracy, mistakes forgiveness, imagination, happiness, freedom, and the common world of human plurality, among other topics.”
From the first pages of Natality I felt something rare in adult reading but familiar from childhood—of wanting to live inside this book. I don’t just mean lingering longer with Banks’s voice, the poetry and precision of her sentences, or sharing the company of writers she introduces. The feeling was more literal than that of wanting a wardrobe or porthole that would allow habitation here. I don’t think this feeling was an accident. Banks makes arguments and reminds us of what we already (should) know. More than that, she is “birthing a new imaginary,” as she, crediting Adrienne Rich, writes. Different paths get built because of what birth shows us; different music comes in the echoes of what we hear. This is the space humans should live in.
What Banks offers is true perennially. More, what she says is acutely important to hear amid the fatalism of our time. Even when not named explicitly, the virtue of hope courses through Natality: “Each new thing we add to the world is another birth; our having been born is what guarantees us the ability to act, to work as agents in our societies.”
Agnes R. Howard teaches in Christ College, the honors college at Valparaiso University, and is author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us about Being Human.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.