Three Songs of Salvage

Eula Biss

Notes From No Man's Land

The piece is divided into three sections. The first is about keeping track of ones life. What is worth remembering and how does one wish to remember it? With emotions? With facts? The second is about her mothers enthusiasm and whole bodied devotion to the Yoruba tradition and the last is about loss and reclaiming either a new form of the lost or something new all together. The three sections are tied to together through quotations from religious pamphlets Biss has been handed while on the street and descriptions of those who publicly advertise and sell spirituality.

Biss is able to grasp some fundamental ideas of what religion means to people through unconventional means. She juxtaposes the people who hope to help her find salvation through God pamphlets with how she actually came to understand it. "The more distance my mother put between herself and what she knew, between her mind and the words it understood, the closer she felt to the unponderable."

Compared to the other pieces of Biss's I have read this far this one is significantly more personal. Even the more factual elements, quotations from pamphlets and the history of relatives, come from her life.  The essay is wonderfully descriptive. Biss uses imagery since her thesis seems to be that experience is where spirituality comes from she places the reader in the moments she has had in order for them to grasp her full understanding. "We watched the drummers sweat and the dancers shake, and we ate salty beans and rice with the other kids."

Questions:
Why did she begin collecting the pamphlets she had been handed?
How did her mother come accross the Yoruba tradition?