“american symbolism” by Brandon Taylor

By Sylvie Raymond

“american symbolism,” Brandon Taylor’s recent sprawling essay, is a good read. Taylor moves from discussing his feelings on end of the year round-up-posts to the derangement of encountering videos of ICE brutality to a thought provoking encounter with his tennis coach. He weaves together these threads neatly without being heavy-handed, and the piece possesses one of the more elusive and admirable qualities of the essay form—the ability to make the reader feel as if her own thoughts are being mapped out on the page, that she herself is making the connections the essay puts forth, lucidly, organically, in real time.

Taylor is wary of making people into symbols. He points out that it’s not a partisan issue in America, that we all do this to a certain extent, but that the power and political will undergirding this act of flattening matter. But perhaps the most engaging part of this piece, to me, is Taylor’s return to the flesh. A fairly graphic description of his grandfather skinning deer is rendered as metaphoric for the experience of enumerating ourselves online. “That’s how it feels to watch people post about their year behind and their year ahead. Like they’re processing their soul the way we used to process deer out in the cold.”

The only way he can make sense of what he is seeing is through an all-out reversal: to obliterate the symbol and resurrect the body. On the topic of ICE maiming and kidnapping people on the street, Taylor writes: “I keep thinking about the smell of those vans and those cars. The sweat and the blood. The ticking of the turn signals and the wheeze of the bruised people locked in the back.”

I, too, find humanity—or in this case, inhumanity—in these smallest of details. They are what send shivers down my spine and keep me up at night. They remind me that I am a body, that I am not a story, that I am here.

Sylvie Raymond is co-editor of The Mirror. She lives in Delaware.