Monsters All Around . . .

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.