“What do we do with a history we’d rather forget?” asks Sean Enfield in his debut collection of essays, Holy American Burnout!. Exploring the condition of burnout through the collection, Enfield’s essays take on topics that haunt the public dialogue in today’s america: race, police brutality, familial rupture, grief and rage, education, and even sports.1 Enfield’s memoir-esq essays are mostly set in the place he calls home, Dallas, Texas, and based on his experiences during his first year of teaching at a private middle school that served Muslim students. Heartfelt, clever, and, at times, bitingly funny, Holy American Burnout! is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read this year, and was, for this educator, a balm for my own burnout.
Enfield is fearless in playing with strict structural conventions in this collection. The chapter “To Pimp a Mockingbird – A Lesson Plan,” for instance, takes up a genre familiar to any educator: the lesson plan. Including “Overview,” “Objective,” “Required Materials,” “Instructional Plan,” and “Reflection” sections, “To Pimp a Mockingbird” — like much of the collection — takes up the topic of education in america. This lesson plan, however, covers more than Enfield’s notes to self or to his supervisor, justifying the lesson plan for a group of Muslim middle school students. The collection also includes personal reflection on the interview process, claiming that the “Objective” is to “survive, mostly.” But by that he doesn’t just mean Tom Robinson from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a character ultimately murdered by prison guards. Enfield also means survival for himself and his students: to survive the school year, to survive an america focused on profit over people, to survive the next presidential cycle. Enfield wants to survive in a place like Texas, where 77% of public school teachers in a random state-wide survey have seriously considered leaving the profession in 2022, a 19% jump from 2020. Citing low pay, little support from the community, elected officials or supervisors, and excessive workloads, teachers in Texas are fleeing the profession. They are, I think Enfield would agree, experiencing mass burnout.
Another chapter, “Teacher, Don’t Teach Me Nonsense,” takes up the theory–practice learning model. On the left side of the page are a series of direct quotations from decolonial scholars, philosophers, and educators such as Paulo Freire, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiongo’o, Gayatri Spivak, bell hooks, Edward Said, and Beverly Daniel Tatum. On the right side, Enfield writes the theory into practice, letting the reader draw the connections between the theory and the practice.
In “God is a Moshpit,” Enfield shares both his entry into Christianity and the punk music scene as a teenager. Alternating left and right justified text paragraph to paragraph, the chapter stylistically mimics the “unstable body” “shoving and stumbling across a venue” like a “seesaw.” The seesaw of balance extends beyond the metaphor of the moshpit and his faith to the balance and lack of equilibrium experienced by Black people in an america where balance is hard to keep. He similarly writes about his love of Prince and Frank Ocean — both of which hold sonic power over his psyche.
In yet another chapter, Enfield organizes his narrative into Acts, layering William Shakespeare’s Hamlet with another great american tragedy: the Trump campaign (or was it the year 1607 when the first colony was established on inhabited land?). Ruminating on the affective effects of these repeating tragedies — grief, rage, fear — Enfield weaves Shakespeare, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and the comments of his Muslim students into a five-act play that, thankfully, does not end the way Shakespeare’s tragedies always do: death.
The chapter, “Call Me Coach,” describes Enfield’s sudden entry into the world of coaching middle school basketball after the actual basketball coach quit mid-year. Having little to no experience playing basketball, let alone coaching it, he explains the challenges he faced as a newly minted coach alongside a poignant analysis of the 1994 film, Hoop Dreams, and the I Promise HBO series. The chapter entitled, “Song of the South, Reprise” ruminates on Enfield’s mixed-race ancestry, his very white grandmother’s love and racial biases, and the 1946 Disney film, Song of the South. In a later chapter, Enfield recalls W.E.B. DuBois’ infamous remarks about the line, writing that “the color line burns for all to see” and that america is “at another phase of the color line.”
“Paper Shackles,” an especially riveting chapter, reframes the concept of burnout. Enfield recalls, during a lesson about the middle passage in the seventh grade, making and decorating paper shackles out of construction paper and sitting in two boat-like shapes in the middle of his classroom. Sitting in this make-believe boat with paper shackles on, surrounded by white classmates, Enfield feels the “sun beat against [his] flesh,” knowing it would “make [him] darker.” When the teacher asks, “could you imagine?” the suffering experienced by people stolen and transported to the new world as property, that is all Enfield can do: imagine his “horrified frame huddled over paper shackles” and a “sun that will burn and burn and burn.”
And yet, even in this burning, even in this ever-looming burnout, Enfield finds pockets of love, inspiration, and hope. Between moments of deep uncertainty about his efficacy as an educator, he receives hand-crafted gifts from students and emails with links to Spotify playlists. Even while he sits frustrated by his inability to answer student’s questions about america’s uncertain political future, he finds space to encounter and re-encounter those questions here, in this book. Even as he burns and burns and burns — from being an educator, from being Black, from living in america, from living — he “ain’t burning out” because, in the disembodied words of his students, “it isn’t over yet, dummy.”
NONFICTION
Holy American Burnout!: Essays
By Sean Enfield
Split Lip Press
Published January 5, 2023
- On the contents page of Enfield’s collection is an author’s note stating: “From here until the end, america — and other agents of state-sponsored violence — are written in lower case.” Enfield makes this choice because, “names, of course, have power” and by “de-capitalizing of these colonizing names, [he] aim[s] to wrestle some sliver of that power away from them and back to Black folks, as well as Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups, who have historically—and to this day—been oppressed by this country.” In honor of his developing practice in Holly American Burnout!, I also take up this practice here. ↩︎
Southern Review of Books 