Through an intimate examination of his experience as an educator and as a student, Sean Enfield’s Holy American Burnout! is a collection of powerful essays whose goal is to deconstruct ideals of whiteness, challenge capitalism, and confront the power structures in education.
Through Enfield’s writing, we, the readers, can sense a series of uncomfortable knots his hand has been forced to untangle as a biracial man, a teacher, and a student. Enfield considers his role in the present: what information; what personal point of view can he offer his students using his own experiences of recent-but-heavy American history? He does not seek to reconcile his past and this present. Instead, he tells his readers, “I’m never quite sure how other people see me.”
Yet, he demands that we see him. In the opening essay, Enfield laces us into his shoes through his use of the second person pronoun. We experience his first few weeks as a teacher in lockstep. His writing—often wry, humorous and vulnerable—conveys a conspicuous tension between his role as an educator, his deep love of knowledge and literature, and the scars that his own education left on his psyche. Enfield is acutely aware of the seeming impossibility set before him: the decolonizing of his mind and others’ and the celebration of Black identity. But even when it would be less painful to turn away from his truths, Enfield’s fearless intimacy does not allow us to cower or to hide.
Throughout this collection, there are distinct traces of Enfield’s poetic education, evidenced by his use of repetition and rhythm, and his keen attention to word choice. He also breaks form, sometimes delivering an essay in the form of a lesson plan (objectives and all) or a five-act play. Enfield cleverly moves through historical and cultural references, deftly weaving a web from the words of W.E.B. DuBois and Kendrick Lamar, and Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her stylistically lowercase pen name of bell hooks.
Just as hooks brandished her own reeducation through renaming, so does Enfield. He stops capitalizing words that represent institutions of oppression or “state-sponsored violence,” words like “white,” and “america.” This stylistic choice is striking when encountered in the written form. Equally striking is Enfield’s attitude. In this world, which often promotes apathy and bitterness, Enfield’s prose shines with empathy, understanding, and tinges of hope for his students ...and for himself.
