I have mixed feelings about the poem "C.V." in the last NYRB, by Iman Mersal (trans. from Arabic by Robyn Creswell). The first line is arresting and resonant. The topos is "pathé mathos," perhaps, knowledge through suffering (la letra, por la sangre entra). An academic career is based on renunciation of real life.
At the end, she writes "A life overstuffed with accomplishments / scrubbed free of dirt / proof that she lived / has cut all ties to the earth." I understand the sentiment, and to the extent she is writing about her own experience in the 1st person, I can't argue with it.
It is the notion of the shadow c.v., all the things left out: "Where are all the wasted days?," she asks. I think of this poem, now, being listed on her C.V. !! You can imagine the conversation.
"Hey, my poem just came out in the New York Review of Books!"
"Great! That will look good on your c.v. What's it about?"
"Its title is 'C.V.,' actually. It's about the vanity of having a c.v at all."
Where I resist the message of the poem is in my feeling that one ought to own one's accomplishments rather than seeing them as stuff or "stuffing."
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Or own all one's accomplishments, even those work related ones that wouldn't go on an R1 CV (and that you might not actually write on your R2 or less CV either, but that will come up in a narrative description or a conversation).
I used to think of academic things as part of the interesting things I did in life. I'd still like to, rather than say they were fake and the rest was real. But this was before I got terrorized by the idea that academic and "real" life were different, that academic accomplishments were really hard to get and if I got any it was unfair because I wasn't the person who should get them, etc., and also before I began to associate work with mobbing and got so scared of it, had it become a PTSD trigger, etc.
(I've been in heavy PTSD about work since December. I'd really like it if this could be the last of it, if I could by centripetal force have it all fly away like a comet.)
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