The best-written recent nonfiction: Sanctuary by Marina Warner
Read the opening pages below.
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Introduction
quo me cumque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes (wherever the storm drives me, I am carried as a guest)—Horace
On Saturday mornings in London in the 1950s, a neighbour’s daughter would come round to take me to the ‘flicks’; it was exciting to be allowed to go out with this stranger, who seemed almost grown up – she was fifteen, I think. It was a first taste of independence. We saw newsreels, mostly, but one of the features opened with an unforgettable scene: a young man in doublet and hose, his face a mask of terror, was being chased; with the hue and cry hard upon him, he seized hold of the knocker on a cathedral door and cried ‘Sanctuary!’ The door opened a crack, and he slipped inside. He was safe now; this was a holy place where a fugitive would find welcome and hospitality: a sanctuary.
This exciting sequence does not quite record the medieval facts – our hero may have been about to join Robin Hood’s Merry Men in the green wood – but it caught the spirit of the ancient right to sanctuary, which radiates outwards from the most sacred spot inside a church, the site of the high altar, to reach the portal, where hangs a knocker, that hinges between one regime and the other, and envelops the suppliant in a protective halo. Sanctuary can be found in a temple or a chapel, a glade or a grove, a temenos or place apart, somewhere that is hallowed, sacred. But as in ‘sanction’, a word from the same root, which can mean both to approve and to forbid, sanctuary implies something to be treated with profound respect, not trifled with or defiled – in other words, haram, in Islam, or taboo, itself a concept borrowed from encounters with non-European societies. In a most suggestive play on words, the geographer Marcus Doel contrasts hollowed ground and hallowed ground. Hollowed ground has been drained of meaning by violence and history’s erasures; hallowed ground is filled with meaning that has been infused by tradition, ritual, tales, legends and agreed memories.
The idea of sanctuary has become synonymous in legal circumstances with asylum, a word which combines the Greek root syl-, from a verb meaning to seize or plunder, with the privative prefix a-, modifying it to mean ‘not to be seized’. A sanctuary thus spans ideas of a refuge, a shelter, a retreat, even a lair, an inner sanctum, a precinct, a stronghold, a place of safety from harm and a space reserved – ‘asylum’ as in a mental hospital. It is an Other Place, a heterotopia. A convent of enclosed nuns is a sanctuary – for the community, to which very few are allowed admittance; yet so is a public park, one of the vital urban spaces still free and open to all. As the sculptor Antony Gormley rather grimly expressed the paradox, ‘Is a refuge a prison? Is a sanctuary a cell?’.
The concept of sanctuary that I am attempting to propose in this book emphatically does not stand outside society but stands inside it; it may embody certain principles that differ from mainstream values, but it aims at inclusion and belonging, sees perils of exclusion in the separatist tendencies of identity politics, and hopes instead to enclose a safe place through mixing and mingling, not dividing, segregating and isolating.
To achieve this ideal, it matters very much how such a place is perceived. How its story is told shapes the significance, the experience and the function. ‘A boundary is entangled with history,’ James Crawford writes in his book about borders. ‘It is never simply a line, a marker, a wall, an edge. First it is an idea. An idea that is then presented as a reality. It doesn’t just exist in the world. It can only ever be made. It can only ever be told.’
The ancient laws of sanctuary have prevailed in varied forms since classical Greece and biblical times, and subsequently in Anglo-Saxon and medieval Britain, until the Reformation in Europe. Many efforts continued the practice through the Vietnam war to the present day, culminating in the current vigorous movement to establish Universities and Cities of Sanctuary in different parts of the world.
Sanctuary does not only designate a reprieve that might be short-lived or a temporary suspension of the rules. It broadens into ideas of home. When arrivants reach a new place, where they hope no longer to be in danger and where they can seek asylum, the problem of estrangement remains. Taking refuge is not the same as feeling at home, of belonging. The sanctuary can be a harbour, where the fugitive can find safety, but it is not a permanent residence, even when an end to the period of homelessness is in sight and the refugee is given leave to remain. Being ‘out of place’ lingers: the phrase has been sensitively modified by the poet Susan Stewart to being ‘lost in place’.
More on the book»
Nonfiction titles considered this month
Beastly Britain by Karen R. Jones
Three Revolutions by Simon Hall
Witness in a Time of Turmoil by Ian Mayes
Sanctuary by Marina Warner
A Trick of the Mind by Daniel Yon
The Sexual Evolution by Nathan H. Lents
Artists, Siblings, Visionaries by Judith Mackrell
A Song for Olaf: A Memoir of Sibling Love at the Dawn of the HIV-AIDS Pandemic by Jennifer Boulanger
Exhibitionist: 1 Journal, 1 Depression, 100 Paintings by Peter Mendelsund
The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future by Keach Hagey
Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church by Kevin Sack
The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance by Bernd Roeck; translated by Patrick Baker
The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994 by Thomas Mallon
Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara by Judith Scheele
How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir by Molly Jong-Fast
Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System by Brando Simeo Starkey
Charlottesville by Deborah Baker
Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream by Megan Greenwell
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
Claire McCardell by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog: And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science by Carly Anne York
Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers' Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda by Nathalia Holt
The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford by James McWilliams
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