The Empathy Exams

Ex-Votos

Jamison describes the artist Frida Kahlo’s reliance on plaster corsets to keep herself upright due to an injury that damaged her spine. She painted them to make them beautiful even as she desired her need for them to vanish. Jamison then describes Kahlo’s relationship with her husband Diego Rivera and copies snippets of the artist’s journals discussing her partner. Jamison describes the amputation of Kahlo’s leg and her endless affection for her doctors, who tried so hard to keep her body functioning after surviving polio and the streetcar accident that crippled her. She describes the accident and then Kahlo’s Catholic faith and her collection of saintly pictures called ex-votos. The pictures represent the artist’s physical anguish contrasted with her mental fortitude, which is further explored in the final diary page Jamison describes, in which two women face each other and are torn between hate and pity.

Servicio Supercompleto

Jamison recounts Joan Didion’s Salvador, in which she goes to the mall for water purification tablets and finds aisles and aisles of imported goods. El Salvador is in the middle of a civil war based on the idea of avoiding the outside influences of foreign countries as Didion looks at the imported items and grapples with the irony of their existence there. Jamison walks a similar path to Didion when she goes to a Bolivian supermarket and takes notes on her observations. Two months after her visit, she hears news that sex workers are protesting outside of a health clinic because of the vandalism and violence they have been experiencing. Jamison then describes the Bolivian Alasitas festival, where people purchase miniatures of the items they believe they need the most and offer it to a statue of the god Ekeko. They believe this god will bring them their desires, and Jamison compares the god’s item-pinned poncho to supermarkets where ordinary objects have been made representative of longing.

The Broken Heart of James Agee

Jamison recounts drinking in a bar and reading the Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee. She describes the novel as being mostly about guilt and longing and provides the historical context for the novel. Agee was supposed to be writing an article about sharecroppers in the South, but his article was rejected, and he proceeded to turn it into a book. It is a disjointed but beautiful book that Jamison compares to her emotional state after having her nose broken in Nicaragua. Jamison, when thinking about her life and experience, thinks of the homeless boys she tutored. One of the boys fell asleep on her steps one night because it was a safe place, and Jamison feels a moral conflict because of her reaction to him, which was not to help but to simply move him from the door. Agee’s sadness and morals are so different from Jamison’s that she finds comfort in his work. His descriptions of poverty and difficult living conditions creates an empathy that is like a “contagion” (158). Jamison compares the emotions Agee writes with to her own emotions as she tries to navigate a world after she was mugged. She also discusses Agee’s bravery in his efforts to write with clarity and honesty while Jamison still struggles with being brave.