Barbara Kingsolver Literary awards range from the South African National Book Award to the PEN/Faulkner Prize.
On May 8, 2023, she added: Pulitzer Prize to her praise.
Her winning novelThe Bronzehead Demon” is greater than only a reimagining of ” “Charles DickensDavid Copperfield” Casting an opioid-addicted Appalachian orphan in the lead role, Kingsolver sheds recent light on one of America’s biggest health crises.
Understandably, the Covid-19 pandemic has overshadowed media coverage and national concerns about the opioid epidemic; nevertheless, opioids remain an enormous public health problem, and I imagine that the creator’s attention to this problem is each welcome and essential.
Taking on the topic, it connects artists related to Appalachia like the bluegrass guitar phenomenon Billy Stringsthe singer died John Prine and photographer Stacy Kranitzall of whom used their art to focus on the devastating impact these drugs have had on their region.
How artists can regain their place
As a professor of American studies who teaches courses on each country music and images of rural America, I see this groundbreaking work through a lens cultural geographywhich explores the relationship between culture and place.
A region can encourage unique forms of art, music, literature and architecture, in addition to the work of a geographer Edward Soja helped show how this work can defy stereotypes.
In 1996, Soja published “Thirdspace: Travels to Los Angeles and other places real and imagined”
He argued that stereotypes about the region’s inhabitants and landscape can result in harmful politics and policies. For example, outsiders’ views of the “inner city” as a hotbed of poverty, crime, and broken families led to the implementation of racist Public housing policy of the Sixties.
Soi’s book was a call to arms for artists and marginalized people: in what he called the “third space” – the place that exists at the intersection of the real and the imagined – they’ll reclaim and reformulate visions of their region, presenting different identities and experiences.
Appalachia is a region that has been under its control for generations economic oppression, class stereotypes and environmental and medical recklessness. Pumping opioids into rural communities represents one other chapter on this story of exploitation.
But artists and writers like Kingsolver can show that the region’s inhabitants are greater than just backward, powerless victims – they’re complex individuals with the same goals, longings and fears as the rest of us.
More than a drug addict
Kingsolver, who grew up in rural Kentucky and now lives in Virginia, had a profound vision for Copperhead. He weaves the story of the economic consequences of the tobacco industry and coal mining into his hero’s story.
But her primary concern has at all times been the opioid crisis.
As she told The New York Times in October 2022“I wanted to say, ‘Listen, it’s still there, something was done to us and we didn’t deserve it.'”
Czarny Ptak bookstore and cafe
This is the life story of the Demon. An orphan who experiences poverty, abuse in the foster home, and social isolation finds freedom and glory on the soccer field, only to suffer a devastating knee injury.
Pressured by his trainer and the townspeople to play together with his pain, he blindly takes OxyContin prescribed by local Dr. Feelgood, only to have the addiction cripple him physically, mentally, and emotionally.
And yet, in all this, the Demon is greater than just his habit. Kingsolver foregrounds his humanity, sense of humor, and potential for goodness in a way that makes him greater than “just an addict.”
In doing so, Kingsolver uses his connection to the region, empathy for its people, and awareness of stereotypes about Appalachia and addicts to avoid portraying it in a reductive manner. Instead, it creates a practical and still not despairing vision from the inside.
This approach – the example of Soi’s third space – is, in my view, the strongest tool artists must counteract the impulse to distance themselves from the struggle with the ongoing epidemic.
Filling the void
What Kingsolver does in prose, Billy Strings and John Prine do in song.
Strings, whose hit was “Dust in the bag“, is a portrait of methamphetamine addiction, deals with the topic of opioids in “Enough to depart”, a song from his album “Home”.
Written in memory of two friends who overdosed on fentanyl-laced heroin in the same week. song Is haunting recall of regret for those left behind when addiction takes its toll:
Enough to kill ya, enough to place you down
Seems like every way you turned was like a tough wind comin' down
Enough to depart me, enough to depart me here
And though the room is empty now I can almost feel you near
The same goes for Prine’s “Summer’s End” from his latest album, 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness.
The music video for this song was directed by West Virginia filmmakers Kerrin Sheldon and Elaine McMillan Sheldon. depicts an aging grandfather and his young granddaughter they struggle with on a regular basis life after the death of their daughter and mother. A single frame shows a news headline about the opioid crisis, shedding light on the source of their suffering without overshadowing the regularity of their each day activities.
The film brings to mind a line from Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel “Unnamed“: “You must move on. I can not go on. I’ll go further.
Debunking the ‘genetic collapse’ theory
Words, music, and images all became powerful tools in the third space of reading opioid-affected Appalachia.
Like Sheldons, Kentucky-born photographer Stacy Kranitz offers gritty, complex, and beautiful photographic portraits of Appalachia.
She wrote about how she wants her work to be a corrective to Kentuckiana’s negative portrayals of Appalachia Harry Caudill and a New York Times reporter Homer Bigart in 1960.
Caudill, who emphasized the economic exploitation of Appalachia, also agreed with William Shockley’s view dysgenic theoryarguing that “genetic decline” amongst Appalachians helped perpetuate their suffering.
Their work brought Appalachia to Johnson administration awareness. But it also reinforced national perceptions of the region and its people as backward, helpless and ripe for exploitation.
Kranitz’s engagement with Appalachia—particularly her refusal to come back to terms with Caudill’s stereotypical views of its inhabitants as backward and regressive—offers a third-space revision of the region and its people. Her series “As it was given to me” juxtaposes a burning cross at a Klan rally with the image of a beautiful, innocent girl holding a lit sparkler. Not afraid for example the ugliness of the region, Kranitz strives with equal emphasis to seek out its beauty.
Like these artists and musicians, Kingsolver set out in “Demon Copperhead” to grapple with the region’s complex history and its current social issues.
In this she succeeded.
We hope that the Pulitzer Prize’s recognition of the novel will prompt others not only to learn more about Appalachia, but additionally to participate in the work needed to repair the harm these drugs have done – and proceed to do.
