In the News

By ANNIE BOKEN

Last Thursday, about 140 people joined Saint Louis University professor Mark Chmiel, Ph.D., as they shared in the memory of the late Mev Puleo, a SLU alumna, at “The Impassioned Eye: A Reading of The Book of Mev.” Participants relived Puleo’s work as a photojournalist and student of theology, her passion as a social activist, her Catholic faith and her battle with cancer.

In The Book of Mev, which was published in 2005, Chmiel tells the story of his life with Puleo. She died in 1996 at the age of 32, 21 months after she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Puleo and Chmiel had been married for three-and-a-half years.

Thursday’s reading marked the first time that Chmiel, a professor of theology at SLU since 1997, held a reading of the book at SLU.

SLU students Jenny Thumann, Erica Irwin, Julie O’Heir, Tina Moode, and Poornima Shah, along with VOICES staff member Katie O’Brien and SLU alumna Anna Paszyna, took turns reading passages from The Book of Mev. All of the young women were, at one point in time, students in Chmiel’s Social Justice course. Their participation recreated the plurality of voices that come together to form the narrative.

“I didn’t want the reading to be just my voice. I have something to say, of course—I wrote a book to say it,” Chmiel said. “But I’m aware, when I’m in a group of that many people, I’ve got one story, and others have other stories.”

That’s why Chmiel invited the audience to talk with those around them, posing discussion questions before presenting each passage from The Book of Mev. The event was less like a book reading and more like a session of the popular, discussion-based theology course on social justice that Chmiel teaches.

“I wanted people to be thinking about their own experience before we shared ours,” Chmiel said. “That makes it more explicit, the linking of the reading with their own life. This is what we ought to be doing more and more of.”

Chmiel described the book as “multi-textured,” as its brief chapters jump from Chmiel’s memories of Puleo to excerpts from Puleo’s journal to transcripts from interviews that Puleo conducted.

“You certainly get my narrative, but you also hear her speaking to me,” Chmiel said.

The chapters also include accounts from friends and human rights activists, and all of these voices manifest themselves in different forms—prayer, poetry, conversation, love letters and eulogies.

Also essential to the book are the subjects depicted in Puleo’s photographs, whose faces speak of suffering and injustice, while conveying beauty and strength. Puleo used photography to connect the impoverished populations of the Third World to the affluent communities in the United States—like Ladue, where Puleo grew up.

“There are many people in that book’s pages,” Chmiel said. “It’s not just about a couple, the narrator and protagonist. It’s about different communities; it’s about people in other countries; it’s about saints; it’s about prophets.”

Chmiel said he had some difficulty finding cohesion and structure among all of these elements as he wrote the book, a process that took more than three years. The turning point in the process was discovering a structure used by two Latin American writers, Eduardo Galeano and Reinaldo Arenas, which yielded the “memoir-scrapbook-biography,” as Chmiel describes it on the book’s Web site, www.bookofmev.com.

The book’s chapters are arranged in chronological order and divided into three larger parts. The first part, what Chmiel called the “health” part, is the longest; it follows the development of Chmiel and Puleo’s relationship, their graduate studies in theology and their travels to, among other places, El Salvador and Palestine. The second part chronicles Puleo’s suffering and death, after she is diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.

In the third part, Chmiel copes with her death and gives thanks for her life.

One of the triumphs in completing the book was, Chmiel said, finding “an admittedly idiosyncratic way of telling a very simple story. You know, two people meet, they fall in love, they have a great time, something happens.”

And while there are so many extraordinary elements to Puleo’s story, the element of the commonplace also lends strength to the narrative and universality to her suffering. At one point during the reading, Chmiel asked that people raise their hands if a family member or close friend had battled, or died from, cancer.

It was difficult to find a hand that was not raised.

“What she went through and what she experienced strikes a chord with a number of people,” Chmiel said. “That pleased me a lot.”

Sharing the book with students, both in the classroom and in the readings that he has held, has given him hope, Chmiel said.

“So many of my students unwittingly helped me in my own healing,” Chmiel said. “That passion, that spirit, that fierce indignation … that love of life—for a while, I thought it just died…but it’s everywhere.”

Last Thursday’s reading, held in the Knight’s room in Pius XII Library before a standing-room-only crowd, was sponsored by VOICES, UNA, Amnesty, Pax Christi, Micah House, Halo and the College of Arts and Sciences.

This article was first published in The University News, January 26, 2006.

by Andrew Ivers
University News
January 19, 2006

In a recent discussion about his memoir-biography, The Book of Mev, theology professor Mark Chmiel compared the experience of creating this collection to the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—meaning that even though his (and his subject’s) name landed on the cover, hundred of other names and faces lay behind it.

For those who know Chmiel, the analogy isn’t surprising. Both in and out of the classroom, he almost always prefers to do things “with a little help from his friends,” as Paul McCartney sang.

In his popular social justice course, Chmiel asks that students make the same effort to understand each other that they make to understand the subject matter itself. And the two are often one and the same.

Indeed, most students find that the compassion advocated by Chmiel’s course readings comes alive in the little acts of community that crop up throughout the course—the conveying of personal stories, or the sharing of music, poetry or a short walk across campus, to name a few.

The same will be true for those who attend tonight’s Book of Mev reading at 7:00 p.m. in the Knights Room at Pius Library.

Designed to “reflect the polyvocal nature of the book,” as Chmiel put it, the reading will feature seven female students, as well as the author himself.

It will also allow for an intermission during which participants can mingle and share their thoughts with each other.

The story of Chmiel’s late wife, Mev Puleo—a SLU alumna, photojournalist and social justice activist—The Book of Mev is partly an elegy for a woman who died of a brain tumor at the young age of 32, partly a love story told in letters and memories, partly a catalogue of a blossoming life of faith and career in photojournalism told with her photographs and interviews.

Not only a celebration of a beautiful life, this reading, if it is anything like the two that have preceded it, will be a continuation of the communion that Mev’s legacy demands of those who read her words and view her photographs.

It might seem insignificant to some, but this kind of event is unique even at a place like SLU in that it radiates a compassion stronger than any prejudice, a patience that could cool any anger.

When we think of courageous underdogs, folks like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., often come to mind. Yet in a small way, the little acts of community building we engage in can be just as powerful, can just as completely change the lives of those around us by emiting hope and purpose in a seemingly-bleak world.

Two years ago, Chmiel spent 10 weeks in occupied Palestine. Upon returning to St. Louis, he gave a talk about his experience, in which he invoked John Donne’s famous “Meditation XVII.”

He sounded a single chime on a small bell, then let the tolling fade into the silence of the room.

Then he reminded us: “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

It’s a lesson that has stuck with me ever since—and one that will surely take me years to comprehend, let alone live.

Yet I have complete faith that each of us can strive to find that part in us that is connected to the larger human family, that part that states, as Donne did, “any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde.”

In short, we can all work in our own ways to fasten the bonds of compassion.

As Mev wrote, “I truly believe that my camera is an instrument of communication that can help build community.”

Most of us won’t be leading any great social movements this afternoon—or anytime soon, for that matter—but we can engage great tasks in little ways, one of which is attending what will surely be an energizing event—this reading that will remind us life is not about a single voice crying out in isolation, a single face floating through unfamiliar crowds, but a chorus whose members complement each other, a congregation of individuals who each mean something special to each other, and to the whole—which, if we look hard enough, encompasses every human being.

iversja@gmail.com

This commentary appeared in the Jan. 19, 2006 issue of The University News.