Woodbine’s beautiful narrative is extraordinarily self-aware, and deeply humane. Haskins’ own voice is strong, active, present throughout. I had not planned to read it in one sitting but I literally could not put it down. Only a couple miles northwest of Haskins’ Roxbury, in the mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood of Chestnut Hill near Boston College, there is a totally other religious and cultural world. This is the place of white priests, educated Catholics, lecture halls, and the circuits of urban Catholic power. Particularly in the 1960s and 70s, it might as well have been another planet from Afro-Caribbean Roxbury.
Is it possible to consider an askesis of otherwise imaginaries without falling prey to the ascetic ideal?
All three texts concern lives: the formed life, the deformed life, and a life without a why – a useless life freed from subjection to transcendence.
This intervention invites to think active dis-imagination, in mystical and contemporary traditions, as a grounding political force.
