Review: Holy American Burnout! by Sean Enfield

Reviewed by Anna Chotlos

Split/Lip Press. 2023. 174 pages.

Like essayists, teachers must also craft personas, transforming the unwieldly complexity of the self into the concentrated, condensed version most relevant to the contexts and narratives of their classroom. Essayist and teacher merge in Holy American Burnout!, Sean Enfield’s timely, formally inventive, debut essay collection, forthcoming from Split/Lip Press. The essays center his experience teaching English to primarily Muslim middle schoolers at a preparatory school in Dallas. However, the essays aren’t limited to the classroom. Teaching functions as Enfield’s point of entry to examine the larger tangle of ideologies that converge in the American classroom, including race, class, religion, politics, capitalism, and environmentalism.

The collection also offers a perceptive, layered portrait of Dallas and its suburbs, from Enfield’s formative years in North Texas’s sun-scorched, concrete sprawl to his burnout-accelerating commute to school down a notoriously difficult stretch of Interstate 35. Enfield strikes a masterful balance, interrogating his own experiences and Black and biracial identities while presenting cultural critique, looking outward at his classroom and the world beyond for answers (and often uncovering more questions.) His essays inhabit a lively array of forms—a lesson plan, the acts of a play, columns, lists, Facebook posts, overlapping revisions.

As a reader, I was particularly drawn to the arc of persona development Enfield crafts from essay to essay. In the first few essays, we are invited to witness a new teacher experimenting with his teaching persona, through a process of trial and error and revision: Is he a teacher with hip-hop lesson plans? A basketball coach? The teacher who can answer students’ difficult political questions without fumbling? The strict disciplinarian who miraculously raises low test scores? Alongside these experiments, Enfield reckons with his own memories of being a student while navigating the personal and physical tolls of the job.

At the midpoint of the collection, there is a visible shift in syntax, accompanied by a more subtle change in the balance between personal narrative and cultural criticism. In an author’s note, Enfield explains that in the second half of the collection, “america—and other agents of state-sponsored violence—are written in lower case… as a means of honoring the victims of america’s state-sponsored violence while not granting the ‘proper’ name to the perpetrators of their marginalization and murder.” In “To Be (or not to be) in a Rage Almost All the Time–An Essay in Five Acts,” Enfield describes attempting to teach Hamlet to his class of eighth-grade boys amid the encroaching shadow of the 2016 election and proliferation of racist and Islamophobic rhetoric: “In our classroom, something rotted in the state of Denmark, and so too did rot occupy the american state.” The play’s themes of truth, reality and manipulation merge with Enfield and his students’ increasingly anxious struggles to understand both the play and the world. Enfield renders these conversations in the classroom surrounded by persistent self-reflection—in these moments, James Baldwin emerges as a primary influence and inspiration:  

At the time, I’ll confess, I still didn’t think he would receive the nomination, though I had James Baldwin’s words firmly etched upon my conscience. “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time,” Baldwin had said on a 1961 radio show, and still the words resonated fifty years later. I knew the history of this country; I knew what racist evils we had perpetrated and what hateful leaders we had elected to carry them out. So my Black ass probably should’ve told those worried students that the descent [Trump] had already won. He was etched into the very constitution of the country. Nonetheless, it is impossible to speak truth to a student if you’re lying to yourself.

Enfield’s willingness to grapple with the complexity of the self—to examine the veracity of his own narratives and interrogate what those stories mean for the persona he presents in his classroom and for his students—sets this essay collection apart from other teaching-centered essays and memoirs.

The essay “Do You Commute?” explores burnout as a uniquely American entrapment. The landscape of Texas emerges as a contributing factor, mirroring the persona’s mounting exhaustion at work:

There’s not much space left in the dallas area; much of the region is covered in fast food restaurants, bars, and superstores, but what little space left is flat and colored by light brown dead grass. The commutes, then, are monotonous affairs in which the land drones alongside you like a tape reel cycling through a short loop.

From inside that “short loop,” plagued by a series of transportation woes—a car totaled after falling asleep at the wheel, biking on roads built for cars, the inconveniences of public transport— Enfield observes:

I love how much I hate the word burnout. It’s perfectly visceral. I can feel the burning of my muscles and the heated tension in my spine. Still, the machine grinds on, setting the transmission ablaze—burnt out. Burnout is frequently attributed to teachers, first year teachers especially, but it seems to me the greater american condition, bestowed upon anyone with a commute.

The burnout Enfield experiences at work and on the road is compounded by the burnout of witnessing of repeated injustice and violence—images and videos of police murdering Black people, replayed over and over on news and social media. Beyond burnout, the complexity of bearing witness emerges as a central preoccupation of the collection. The penultimate essay, “The Revolution Will Be Revised” expands and comments on an earlier essay, written in response to the shootings following the Dallas Black Lives Matter protest in 2016. The piece’s exploration of form includes screenshots of Facebook posts and comments, tracing the development of a fraught conversation between Black and white friends and family members, activists and scrollers of social media feeds. Grappling with his own relationship to activism, Enfield characterizes himself as a “revision-obsessed witness.” By making visible these layers of thought and revision in his writing, Enfield creates an intimate self-portrait of an artist at work, learning and rewriting:

It is hard, as both educator and writer, to get traction along the slope between solidarity and voyeurism. Always, I occupy a space outside activism. Wherever I go, distance. “Witness,” I offer as explanation. The question remains, then, how meaningful is my gaze—if at all. Still, I wrote that it will always do [my] heart good to see Black bodies mobilized. Even if [I’m] not among them. Even though, in my half-Blackness, [I] feel like [I’ve] never been. This, too, I still feel.

What really makes someone a good teacher? An effective activist? How do we take care of each other amid widespread burnout? Through deep engagement with intellectual tradition and personal experience, Holy American Burnout! showcases the power of the essay to offer nuanced answers.

Anna Chotlos’s essays and poems have recently appeared in HAD, Split Lip, Hotel Amerika, Sweet Lit,  River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and elsewhere. She holds an MA from Ohio University and now teaches and writes in Denton, Texas, where she is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas and the Managing Editor of American Literary Review. Find her online at annachotlos.com.