So already, a week into
2022, I opened The Boston Globe and
saw the capitalized word “MONSTER.” It was in the middle of a half-page ad thanking
contributors to the paper’s annual Globe Santa fundraising drive. Globe Santa provides
gifts for many Greater Boston children who might otherwise receive no presents at
Christmas. Monster, a global job application business and platform, was
among the corporate contributors being thanked.
Had I not just
finished Tiphanie Yanique’s novel Monster
in the Middle, and were I not partway through Joy Harjo’s memoir Poet Warrior, I probably wouldn’t have
paid any attention to “MONSTER.” But
both books contain powerful “monsters” that must be reckoned with, so monsters
were on my mind.
In Poet Warrior, the “monster” designation
carries with it a sense of threat. Harjo uses it in relation to her stepfather,
explaining that she “can’t sleep because I was trying to keep away from the
monster now married to mother,” and also to people and forces that drove people,
including her own Muscogee people, from their homelands (68). As she explains
in “Sunrise,” the poem that opens “A Postcolonial Tale,” the third section of
the book,
We
struggled with a monster and lost.
Our
bodies were tossed in a pile of kill.
We
were ashamed, and we told ourselves for a thousand years,
We
didn’t deserve any of this— (99)
The encounter
with the violent-displacement monster didn’t just shame and kill the vanquished
“We” who speaks in this poem; it dominated its thought and conversation for “a
thousand years.” We’s shame and anger had to have begun being passed from
generation to generation long before the European colonizers and settlers
arrived in the Americas.
Was there
always a monster? Is there always a monster?
For the
father of Stela, the female main character in Yanique’s novel, there is always
a monster. Or rather, there are always monsters. Some of them are human—“For
even [my mother, your grandmother] . . . is a monster—and her mother, too,” he
tells Stela (134). And some aren’t: winter is a “Cold monster” (134).
More
importantly, they are everywhere at every moment.
The
story of the monster on my back, the monster on your back, is not just one of
fathers and daughters but also mothers and sons and mothers and daughters and
even grandparents and aunties and first loves and second and third loves and who
knows what else. It’s all there. Meeting you in the middle, . . . Where you
always are. This is how the whole of history works, sweet girl. And you and me
and the whole of us, we aren’t anything separate from history. (138)
Harjo would
concur with Stela’s father’s thoughts about history and people’s need to live
in connection to it.
But if
monsters run rampant through Stela’s father’s remarks to his daughter, so too
does gratitude. Sometimes, the two are linked, as they are in his recollection
of his first night in the military: “That night, I shivered. So loudly that a
bunk mate threw his blanket on me. Thank you, mate monster. Generous monster.
Thank God” (135).
Harjo also
expresses some monster gratitude. Monsters are not as ubiquitous in her world
view as they are in Stela’s father’s, but stories are always important to her,
as are dreams and spiritual life:
 |
. . . Jo Jette says, writing about Medusa
|
I
did not ask for this stepfather. . . . I do not want his story here with mine
even now. Yet he is probably one of my greatest teachers. Because of him I
learned to find myself in the spiritual world. To escape him I grew an immense
house of imagination. . . . I found the ability to construct dreams with many
kinds of materials. I saw the future; I saw the past. I battled monsters, then
sat with them at the table to hear their stories. Everyone has a story. Even
the monster has a story. (92-3)
“Sunrise” also
takes a restorative, life-affirming future-oriented turn, but without going so
far as to give thanks to the monster.
And
one day, in relentless eternity, our spirits discerned movement of
prayers
Carried
toward the sun.
And
this morning we were able to stand with all the rest
And
welcome you here.
We
move with the lightness of being, and we will go
Where
there’s a place for us. (99)
After
centuries of pain and anger, a day arrives on which We experiences a shift in
perception and purpose; soon thereafter, on “this morning,” We acts in new
ways, even foresees and plans. The same could be said for Harjo's Native American artistic community:
As we discussed among ourselves, we began to
consider ourselves to be a king of hybrid: not the confused, worn-out trope of
Indians caught between two worlds, but committed artists rooted in our
individual tribal nations who created with a dynamic process of cultural,
conceptual interchange of provocative ideas, images, and movements. (104)
The monster has ceased to be in control, a
wonderful development, but hardly an easy one. We’s ruminations during
“relentless eternity”--or the years of feeling the pulls of tradition and change, in the case of Harjo and her fellow artists--must have seemed arduous and endless, a steep, necessary price
to pay for deliverance.
Are monsters
just one more example of those things that, if they don’t kill us, will only make
us stronger? Would we be lesser human beings if we didn’t encounter monsters
and somehow manage to defang or otherwise handle them? After some thought about
heroes and monsters in mythology, I wondered if the origins of the word
“monster” might help answer my two questions.
The Online Etymological Dictionary provided
the following information:
 |
From the Urban Dictionary
|
early
14c., monstre, "malformed animal or human, creature afflicted with a birth
defect," from Old French monstre, mostre "monster, monstrosity"
(12c.), and directly from Latin monstrum "divine omen (especially one
indicating misfortune), portent, sign; abnormal shape; monster,
monstrosity," figuratively "repulsive character, object of dread,
awful deed, abomination," a derivative of monere "to remind, bring to
(one's) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach,"
from PIE *moneie- "to make think of, remind," suffixed (causative)
form of root *men . . . "to think."
The
information about the Old French and Latin origins of “monster” didn’t contribute
much new to my thinking. I’d already understood from ancient literature that a
monster’s physical malformation, cast upon it at or before birth, marked it as
the harbinger, if not the agent, of god-anticipated and even god-sanctioned
suffering and adversity. Poor monster, as Stela’s father might have said.
 |
"Landed Like Icarus" by Scott Ketcham
|
But
the information about the PIE (Proto-Indo-European) roots of “monster” did
offer me something new—the idea of monsters being more for us than against us. Could
our encounters with them serve to “admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach” us?
Could their function be “to remind” us of
what we already know somewhere deep inside but have managed to forget?
The
notions that we humans easily become estranged from what know and that it takes
either effort or crisis to return us to that knowing is at the heart of several
religious traditions. A monster can be or can precipitate the crisis that leads
us back to knowing and, in so doing, leads us forward. Clever, helpful monster,
Stela’s father might have said.
And
Harjo would probably have agreed. But she also would have reminded him of how
terrifying, prolonged, destructive, and sometimes fatal struggles with monsters
can be. Monster encounters might yield wisdom, but we’d crazy to seek out
monsters. If anything, we should feel relieved and fortunate when they don’t
set their sights on us.
Still
curious about Monster, I called the company to ask about its name. While there
are imagined evil creatures of all shapes and sizes, monsters are often envisioned
as the largest. Was the name "Monster" simply meant to convey that the company
was global and huge?
When
no one at Monster answered the phone at the number given on the company
website, I turned to Facebook and Twitter; perhaps of my friends or contacts
could explain its name.
First
to respond on Facebook, my businesswoman cousin theorized that Monster was so
named because, like the Sesame Street cookie monster, it had aimed to gobble up all the cookies—the smaller job
application companies—in the cookie jar.
But a
little later one of my former students posted the real answer:
"Yes. . . . when [Monster] came out (and of course, I was
there at the time), it was a hip and suitably wacky and irreverent name. Like
Yahoo! or Google (then known as a play on googol). It had that fun Pixar-style
mascot. Looking for work is fun and wacky! The idea didn’t age well. On the
other hand, it outlasted thousands of contemporaries, so… "
So
Monster’s founders weren’t trying to stress the advice-related aspects of the PIE
roots of “monster”; they were just being unbelievably hip and trendy.
A few
comments later, a Facebook friend thirty years my junior reminded me that people
raised on Sesame Street were more apt
to find monsters “cute or funny” than to fear them. Shades of all those
Brothers Grimm fairy tales that were purged of their most gruesome,
fear-inducing original elements. Meanwhile, my cousin’s cookie monster analogy was
even more apt than she knew.
A couple of weeks after I saw MONSTER in the newspaper, the word
“monster” appeared again--on Wednesday, January 19, this time on the front page.
The governor of New Hampshire had used it to refer to the father of missing
seven-year-old Harmony Montgomery (Say her name). Adam Montgomery, currently in
jail, has “a violent history” and “previous convictions including [for]
shooting someone in the head and a separate attack in two women.” Montgomery
sounds like a far more deadly monster than Harjo’s stepfather.
The
January 19 Boston Globe reminds us
again there are always monsters. In the adult world, they vary from “wacky and
irreverent” to the last thing you’d ever wish on a fellow human being. They’re
not always people, though it’s usually people who create them. And it’s usually
people whom they afflict. They exist in the eye of the beholder, sometimes the
eyes of multiple beholders, and they are real.
The unwelcome
ones that show up complicate our lives, knocking us off course. Sometimes they
challenge us to survive or evade or defang them, as Joy Harjo’s did; other
times, they challenge us to acknowledge or even integrate them into our selves
and worlds, as Stela’s do. When we’re lucky, we learn from monsters, but the
learning is always hard—often too hard, too exacting.
We’re better
off not seeking monsters. Besides, they will find us anyway. If we’re lucky,
they’ll be the kinds that are more interested in our cookie jars than in us.
Arnett,
D., & Koh, E. “Sununu Points to Mass. in Girl's Case.” (2022, January 19). The
Boston Globe, 19 Jan. 2022, pp. 1, 8.
Harjo, J. (2021). Poet warrior: a
Memoir. W. W. Norton & Company.
Monster.
Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved
January 18, 2022, from https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=monster.
Monster.com. In Wikipedia.
https://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/WIKIPEDI/W110114M.pdf
Soble,
J. (2022, January 18). Does anybody know why
the company MONSTER, "a global leader in connecting people and jobs,"
is called MONSTER? On its [Comments on status update]. https://www.facebook.com/joan.soble.1. Yanique,
T. (2021). Monster in the middle. Riverhead Books.
