NATALITY

A studied exploration of birth’s myriad forms through the lens of the lives and work of seven poets, novelists, activists, and philosophers.

Banks, a senior executive editor at Yale University Press, uses the word natality not according to its definition as birthright but rather as synonymous with birth and, as Hannah Arendt described it, the “miracle that saves the world.” Banks breaks her debut book into portraits of Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sojourner Truth, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Morrison. Collectively, writes the author, “these are people wrestling with natality throughout their lives, exploring how their experiences with birth and their ideas about it shaped what they thought and how they lived.” These seven people, Banks explains, “were all shaped by birth and they in turn have shaped our collective understanding of what it means to be born human. Birth helped them see how we are more than history’s bi-products; we are instead creative participants in history, nature, and time.” The author’s contribution isn’t providing new information about her subjects but rather illuminative, variable insights via her particular, occasionally amorphous lens. Regarding Morrison’s switch to Catholicism at age 12, Banks writes, “Conversion involved baptism, a rebirth through the church’s holy waters. It also entailed a renaming. Other people give us names at birth, but in a chosen rebirth we can name ourselves, as Sojourner Truth and Nietzsche did.” The strongest sections concentrate on Arendt and Rich. Of the former’s work, the author writes, “Birth taps into life’s fresh and ever-running waters and is accessible to all people.” Of the latter’s, she delineates “a succession of brief, amazing movements, each pregnant with some tenacious, natal seed.” Banks identifies Truth and Morrison as Black, which stands in contrast to the less common use of racial descriptors for her other (all White) subjects.

This ambitious thesis will appeal to readers of thematically linked historical biographies.