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.
