Patrick James Response : David Borkowski, Chapters 1-4

[Sondra Perl]

#628

One of the most interesting qualities of Borkowski’s memoir is the way he directly confronts the main concern of his book. In the first chapter we learn his secret–right from the very beginning: “a real cop with a real gun with real bullets shot me” (3). This opening is jarring, shocking, and highly engaging. Older and wiser, Borkowski considers the crisis with hindsight, processing the many variables, the fallout; and through these reflections, the experience turns out to be the impetus for a deep reckoning: “That night in the ER I became internally centered and whole” he writes. “Ex-ternally, I felt dislocated and incomplete, to rectify that I had planned on doing big things with my life, saving pieces of the world, or perhaps saving other lives, as mine had been saved. I wanted to remake myself, to better myself, for the betterment of humankind. I had really big plans in mind” (6). Something of a conversion narrative, the rest of the memoir negotiates the ramifications of Borkowski’s shooting, illuminating how it allowed him to change the trajectory of his life, eventually leading him to become a college professor.

From the initial scene of trauma, Borkowski’s story unfolds in a winding, discursive manner, full of fascinating descriptions of his childhood in Staten Island during the 1960s. The author’s writing voice is conversational, informal, frequently oscillating between his own bildungsroman narrative and various digressions on culture. This loose structure allows Borkowski to comment on everything from mid-twentieth century consumer culture to the extensive racism of his Staten Island community. “The United States is really terrible at turning boys into men” (40) is one such reflection. In fact, masculinity and violence are two important themes throughout Borkowksi’s memoir–one of the most fascinating aspects of the book is how he bravely explores the complexities and texture of homosocial relationships, often with a highly critical eye: “Socially and culturally I was raised by a big bully. I learned to ‘be a man’ at the feet of the Great White Father. Doubling its impact, this puffed-up period in American history developed alongside a culture long obsessed with guns and violence” (39).

At the heart of these swirling digressions, Borkowski tries to make sense of his shooting: the reasons behind it, the ways it affected his life, the ways it affected the people he loved. He probes the past, trying to reconstruct it, all the while searching for causal connections to explain his painful experience: “I’ve examined, reexamined, deconstructed, re- constructed, and re-deconstructed my past, pulling the pieces apart and putting them back together again, Humpty Dumpy style,” he writes, “in order to figure out how I ended up on that old lady’s lawn perforated by three bullets” (39). The memoir is acutely interested in transparency, in the performance of questioning, in revealing a mind at work. Consequently, the writing is invested in opening inquiry into the shooting, more so than shutting it down. Many questions get asked, but very few are definitively answered. This sense of questioning is one of the most engaging aspects of Borkowski’s writing. Through this rhetorical mode, the memoir shows the self-reflective capacities of the genre, the way in which an author uses the act of writing as mode of questioning, engaging with mystery, a mode of understanding the self (see Professor Perl’s essay for more on this).

Having read the first four chapters, I am interested in the trajectory of the rest of the book. I can’t help but wonder how Borkowski will get from lying in the shrubs of a Staten Island lawn, wounded by three bullets, to the halls of academia. The juxtaposition of these two identities is extremely interesting. And I suppose this is the point of the book, the tension that fuels the dynamic of Borkowski’s story: how a petty criminal will become an intellectual, a teacher, a professor, and a highly adept writer.

[Website Services Admin]

#662

What your response made me think of is how things are set up to be seemingly opposite, but as the story is told, they fold together. With this sense of questioning and digression there also seems to be purposeful contradictions in the story, that maybe have to do with questioning these binaries in the first place?

[Author]

Posts