The Witch of Eye

December 1, 2020
In poet and nonfiction writer Nuernberger's history of women who saw things differently and dared not to be silent and silenced by power structures, readers will find Titiba (aka Tituba) of the Salem Witch Trials, voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, Christian mystic and Catholic saint Hildegard of Bingen, and many fascinating others. Many of these women's only recourse, readers will discover, may have been to fling themselves to the outer reaches of highly strictured societies and turn suppositions of witchcraft on their head. To think about witches, Nuernberger says, is to think about ""shifting perspectives and the transformation of reality."" And shift perspectives, she does. The author explores the way society tries to control ""other"" voices and to make them seem dangerous. These women dared to be dangerous and unapologetic. This book is a social history, threaded through with folklore, mythology, current events, and glimpses into the author's own marriage. It is a poetic and hypnotic trance of a read. Women's-studies aficionados and literary book clubs should check this out.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020

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Starred review from February 1, 2021
An award-winning poet wonders what it means to be a witch. There is an idea that those who describe themselves as witches are following traditions that can be traced back to an ancient, woman-positive, nature-based religion--and that those who suppressed its practices were afraid of anyone who didn't fit neatly within a patriarchal society. This is the version of the past Nuernberger was seeking when she first started reading histories of witchcraft and the transcripts of witch trials. What she discovered was more complex. As she explores the lives of women accused of witchcraft, the author investigates the relations among their experiences, her own life, and contemporary American society, and she brings both a poet's intuition and a philosopher's insight to the text. For example, writing about Agnes Waterhouse, the first woman executed for witchcraft in England, Nuernberger quotes Foucault and mentions Frazier v. Cupp--in which the Supreme Court ruled that police can use deception when interviewing a suspect--as she considers the phenomenon of false confession. As Nuernberger shows, many of these women were often broken by torture and forced to confess to their "crimes," a process that reflected Christian ideas about evil prevalent during their time rather than relics of a matriarchal prehistory. There are a few exceptions to this pattern, though, and the author ends with one of them. As the "Voodoo Queen" of New Orleans, Marie Laveau (1801-1881) has been transformed into tourist kitsch. There is no question that Laveau practiced rootwork and other spiritual modalities informed by African and Native American beliefs, and it would be wrong to discount the value of these practices among communities of color in the 19th-century South. However, as Nuernberger explains, Laveau also possessed a keen understanding of how to work within a legal system designed to make even free people of color live like slaves. As it turns out, her greatest magic may have been her mastery of property law. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, entirely fascinating.

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