In the U.S., immigrant and citizen migrant farm laborers work behind the scenes every day to ensure the planting, harvest, and shipment of the food and other agricultural products we rely on. Their work is an essential part of our daily lives—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—but their voices don’t usually get a seat at our tables.
We had the great honor of co-editing a portfolio of writing and art from twenty-seven contributors with roots in the farmworker community. It was recently published in print and online in The Common magazine, and a celebration with farmworker readers was held at Skylight Books in Los Angeles. Almost all the contributors are debut and emerging authors, many of whom worked the fields as young children, or to pay their way through college, or to send money to families back home. They shared their lives with us, and, in many cases, shared hard truths, secrets kept for many years.
We learned so much reading their work, and all the incredible work that came in through our call for submissions. But our portfolio was only possible because of the earlier work of other immigrant voices, creating a long tradition of powerful farmworker literature. In this tradition, there is so much more to read, to learn from, and to consider. What sort of lives are the workers who plant and pick and package our food able to live, in a country that does not always welcome them, even after several generations of work?
This list of books, assembled with our personal reading and suggestions from our farmworker contributors, showcases the richness and range of the farmworker experience. The struggle of it—the physical and mental strain, the mistreatment and low pay and food insecurity—but also the beauty of it: the pride of quick, skilled hands, the radiance of an early morning sunrise in the fields, the fierce love and resiliency of a close-knit family.
Like the portfolio, this list is only a glimpse into the wider farmworker community, which is too deep and diverse to capture in a few stories. We hope our portfolio, and these new and classic titles, will start important conversations not just at the dinner table, but at all tables.
This story collection from Graywolf Press won the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Before its author, Manuel Muñoz, was named a 2023 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, he spent time working in the fields, from second to sixth grade. Consequences is his third story collection, focused on Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in California’s Central Valley in the 1980s. His rich, nuanced characters run the gamut—parents and children, women and men, gay and straight, U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants—and show the full complexity of life in and out of the fields. (To hear Muñoz say this much better himself, read this interview in The Common with his mentor and longtime friend Helena María Viramontes, who also appears on this list.)
Cornell professor Helena María Viramontes grew up in East LA, working summers in the fields of Fresno with her family—work they had done for generations. Under the Feet of Jesus centers on Estrella, a teenager who picks crops with her family. The novel beautifully evokes the physicality and sensations and settings of farmwork, but also teems with other life: Estrella falls in love with a young farmworker, and must fight back to protect him against the exploitative system they are all part of.
García was born in a migrant farm labor camp owned by the California Packing Corporation, in the San Joaquin Valley. This vibrant and visceral collection of poems is her debut, and won the American Book Award in 2001. With exquisite sensory details, García tells the stories of many different lives and characters—men and women, sometimes struggling, often sassy, and always complex, breathing, alive.
In 1948, a plane crashed in California, killing 32 people. 28 of them were Mexican field workers being deported after immigration raids, but only the white crew members were identified by name in the news. Tim Z. Hernandez spent years researching and reconstructing the incident, and the lives of those farmworkers. Finally, in 2018, All They Will Call You names and explores the individual lives and losses that were only a number for seventy years.
This story collection for young adults, published by Grove Atlantic in 2021, is set in the 1970s, in the farmworker camps and towns of Watsonville, California—first made famous by author John Steinbeck, and also where author Jaime Cortez grew up. Gordo, a misfit first in camp and then in town, made fun of for his weight and for his deficient masculinity in a hypermasculine community, narrates most of the collection. The stories follow Gordo as he begins, slowly, to understand more about the world and people around him, and about himself.
Bulosan’s celebrated semi-autobiographical 1946 novel was revived by Penguin Classics in 2022. Set in the 1930s, it follows a young boy from his childhood in the rural Philippines under U.S. imperialism to a life as a migrant worker in the fields and orchards of California and the Pacific Northwest. In close first-person narration, the novel wrestles with the paradox of the migrant farmworker’s experience: alienated and criminalized in the U.S., but still drawn to the promise of the American dream, despite all its shortcomings.
This in-depth 2012 history of farmworkers, racism, and resistance in Southern California covers the early development of the agricultural system that exploits immigrant workers, and the eventual strikes and unions that emerged to fight back against that system. Most interesting is the exploration of moments when farmworkers from different racial and ethnic backgrounds banded together to create more powerful unions that could look after the rights of all workers, not just their own.
This 1996 autobiographical novel, geared toward younger audiences, is actually twelve intertwining stories that chronicle Santa Clara University professor Francisco Jiménez’s childhood, starting from the moment he illegally crosses the border with his family at four years old, in 1947. They follow their “circuit,” moving to a new labor camp for each crop—picking cotton, topping carrots, harvesting strawberries—and then repeat the cycle, as their family grows from four to ten, and endures each hardship together.
Rivera’s 1971 novel is made up of a short stories and vignettes that play with the idea of memory and fragmentation. The English translation by Evangelina Vigil-Piñón came out in 2015, ten years after a film adaptation by the same name. Rivera follows a community of Mexican migrant farmworkers in South Texas in the forties and fifties, dealing with racist, cruel, and inhumane treatment in the fields, in school, and in town. The novel is a classic in the farmworking community, because it dared to speak about things that were never spoken aloud, or shared with outsiders.
The Plum Plum Pickers by Raymond Barrio
Barrio’s 1969 novel is set in the fictional town of Drawbridge, in Santa Clara County, California, where the Western Grande fruit plantation exploits its immigrant workers. It’s a place that highlights the irony of abundance: a farm with so much wealth and food, but nothing but scarcity and struggle for its workers. Barrio chronicles the complicated moment when farmworkers must decide if unionizing to fight back is worth risking the wages that feed their families.
From 1994 to 2007, Beat poet Janine Pommy Vega led writing workshops at migrant farmworker camps in upstate New York, sponsored by the Geneseo Migrant Center. With editors Sylvia Kelly, Bob Holman, and Marjorie Tesser, she gathered their poems for publication in this 2007 volume from YBK Publishers. It’s hard to find these days, but worth the search; Mexican and Central American migrant farmworkers reflect on their long hours and hard labor, the comforts of their families, the complications of home and border crossings and being on the move. Poems are presented in both Spanish and English, thanks to Vega’s translations.
Every five weeks or so, I look over at her and whine, “I think I wanna go on T.” Usually, we’re in the car; I’m driving. Sometimes we’re walking out of the grocery store. Occasionally she finds me in the bathroom, stuck in front of the sink, squinting at my chin.
A year ago, this announcement would make her tense up: her shoulders might have jumped half an inch toward her ears and the trace of blue in her neck would spasm like a fish quivering under a thin sheet of ice. Then I had top surgery. After ferrying me across Brooklyn, across Manhattan, to and from New Jersey—before the surgeon even had a chance to remove the thin plastic tubes hanging out of my chest—she’d found that her desire for me, for my body, had coalesced. A dense swirl of light at the center of a newborn solar system. “Not that I didn’t find you attractive before,” she says. “It’s just now…”
I get it, I say.
And yet.
She’s heard this complaint half a dozen times. We rehearse the same lines, the same call-and-response:
HER: What do you want out of T?
ME: My voice is so high-pitched.
HER: You can train it lower.
ME: It would be nice to fill out. To get stronger.
HER: Do you want the facial hair?
ME: I already have facial hair. I already have to shave.
HER: Do you want to pass?
ME: I don’t know.
HER: Do you want the face-shape stuff?
ME: No.
HER: Do you want the skin stuff?
ME: No.
She knows what to expect: a few days of wallowing before I admit that no, I’m good. Early male-pattern baldness runs in my family. There’s a thin spot blossoming on the back of my brother’s head, and he’s only 25. I’m too vain to lose my hair.
We always just call it T. A secret weapon. An old friend’s nickname. The callsign of some vintage, West Side Story gangbanger. A mere ingredient. One more thing to pick up at the store.
Is it possible to get addicted to masculinity?
Before I had surgery, we talked extensively about our fears. These were primarily logistic. But occasionally the conversation drifted. Dot dot dot hung in the air, palpable as rain. I had convinced a whole succession of psychologists that my discomfort was real and persistent. Even when my last psychologist, a gentle man badly scarred by acne, who by all rights should have been gay but wasn’t, reassured me that it was alright to have doubts; that anxiety about the procedure or the outcome was normal and admitting it wouldn’t disqualify me; even then I was resolute.
I’m not concerned about regret, I said. But to her, I added, What if it’s not enough?
What if I do this and I still feel unfinished? What if I need more and more…
Is it possible to get addicted to masculinity?
By “masculinity,” I mean a mode of expression, a movement that adheres to the surface of the body.
Unfortunately, past a certain point, to affect the surface of the body—its form, its contours—you have to operate from the inside out. You have to take the subcutaneous approach.
Jack Halberstram published Female Masculinityin 1998, when I was four years old. At the time, Jack could still assert, in the course of introducing his book, “I was a masculine girl, and I am a masculine woman.” I read Jack’s work like an instruction manual tossed out the back of a fast-moving boat. I’m bobbing around in the wake, watching Jack speed into the horizon. I know that, at some point, in some shape or form, I’ll almost certainly have to swim out to meet him there.
Because of its reliance on notions of authenticity and the real, the category of butch realness is situated on the sometimes vague boundary between transgender and butch definition. The realness of the butch masculinity can easily tip, in other words, into the desire for a more sustained realness in a recognizeably male body.
— Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity
In a strange way, it has become harder to be butch.
This, despite the slew of statewide protections that have come into effect over the last twenty years; despite a seismic shift in public opinion; despite a record number of young people identifying as LGBTQ+; despite Obergefell v. Hodges; despite Bostock v. Clayton County; despite new rules requiring many insurers to cover gender-affirming healthcare; despite the proliferation of pronouns in email signatures; despite Target’s gender-neutral children’s clothing line.
In a strange way, it has become harder to be butch.
When I say harder, I don’t mean more dangerous. I don’t mean that life as a butch person has become tougher. With the relative paucity of beatings and arrests, my personal experience of gender nonconformity (compared to, say, Leslie Feinberg’s) has been pretty mundane. Rather, at some point over the last few years, it became more challenging to be recognizeably butch. And butchness, like all modes of gender expression, must be apparent and legible in order to be meaningful when moving around in the world. Butchness, like all forms of female masculinities, is a relative counterproduction of gender. And when it becomes easier to modify or mask the way we look (boobs, beards, height, hips), it means that, for those who can’t or don’t want to medically transition, the butch “lifestyle” is reduced to something like dress-up. A game of pretend.
Then again, maybe I just never had the butch swagger. Maybe I simply couldn’t carry it off.
Jack Halberstam would be the first to retort that masculinity doesn’t have to be naturalized in the body to be made apparent. The biological is not the arbiter of realness (as in drag realness—a measure of authenticity which is anything but, which is assumed, donned, applied). Halberstam, for instance, trawled drag king competitions to study how masculinity could be outdone through parody and imitation. But other examples of “denaturalized identification” were popping up elsewhere. They were busting out of late-night subcultures. They were appearing in kids’ films. Take, says Halberstam, the 1995 movie Babe. The one about the pig.
“There was a time,” a deep voice intones, “not so long ago, when pigs were afforded no respect, except by other pigs. They lived their whole lives in a cruel and sunless world.”
I wish I had a voice like that.
Babe is narrated from a kinder future. A more enlightened future, one in which pigs are no longer confined to spotlit patches of straw in a Benthamite industrial farming warehouse. A version of the future that has never come to pass.
For what it’s worth, I don’t eat pork. This probably makes my viewing experience a little bit easier. It means I can focus on the fact that Babe is obviously, clearly, a butch-trans allegory instead of rethinking my dinner plans.
TITLE CARD: “The Way Things Are”
(Babe)
I am reading this film on the surface. I am not inspired by its unconscious processes. I will not claim that the film is “symptomatic” of the repressive cultural impulses which police non-normative sexualities and genders. I am asserting that the film is what it is, and what it is is gay and trans.
In the darkened barn, Fly, a Border Collie, inspects the newcomer.
FLY: What is your name?
PIGLET: I don’t know.
FLY: Well, what did your mother call you to tell you apart from your brothers and sisters?
PIGLET: My mother called us all the same.
FLY: And what was that, dear?
PIGLET: She—she called us all ‘Babe.’
I waited until almost the last possible moment to tell my mom I was having surgery. She said, “Oh.” I added that I wouldn’t be coming back to California for the holidays. “Oh,” she said again.
The sage Clydesdale watches the piglet snuffling in the straw.
“I want my mom,” Babe sobs.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t, uh, talk too much about, uh, family,” says the horse.
I am asserting that the film is what it is, and what it is is gay and trans.
Here are the broad strokes of the film. Babe, the titular pig, a small orphaned runt, is won by quiet and eccentric Farmer Hoggett at a county fair. He’s soon adopted by Fly, a sheepdog, and her litter of puppies. Babe has no notion that pigs are “for” eating. He has no idea that the helium-voiced Mrs. Hoggett is eagerly fattening him up for Christmas dinner. Babe is too busy getting to know the other animals on the farm—including Ferdinand, a duck who is trying to out-rooster the rooster, and a kindly flock of sheep. The sheep live in terror of the sheepdogs tasked with herding and guarding them. These “wolves,” as the sheep call them, are cruel and haughty and won’t hesitate to bite. Whereas the sheep, Fly explains, are “definitely stupid.” Just like pigs.
Babe is keen to imitate Fly, but he has no natural aptitude for herding à la dog. He’s too gentle, too sweet. The sheep, however, like Babe. He’s courteous and good-natured and they’re happy to do whatever he asks. When watchful Farmer Hoggett begins to suspect that the pig has an uncanny knack with the sheep, and an uncommon bond with the sheepdogs, he enters Babe into the national trials—but not before a jealous housecat informs Babe of a pig’s true “purpose” on the farm:
CAT: The truth is that pigs don’t have a purpose. Just like ducks don’t have a purpose. Oh, alright, for your own sake, I’ll tell you. Why do the bosses keep ducks? To eat them. So why do the bosses keep a pig? The fact is that animals that don’t seem to have a purpose really do have a purpose. Bosses have to eat.
Babe runs away. He’s found the next day, wet and shivering. Hoggett nurses Babe back to health, and he goes on to win the herding competition. Presumably, he has earned himself a permanent place on the farm. Babe “the sheep-pig” will be allowed to live.
And oh, isn’t it just too nice that a film that invokes transness culminates in a sporting event? And that a key delay would hinge on Babe’s contested eligibility? After all, “What’ll we have next year, eh? A laughing hyena doing show-jumping I suppose.”
Babe does not ask to be called a sheepdog. He asks to be allowed to perform sheepdog. At the same time, Babe’s attempt to actually do sheepdog is hilarious to everyone—humans, dogs, and sheep alike:
MAA: Young’un! Stop this nonsense. What’s got into you all a’sudden? I just got finished telling what a nice young pig you be.
BABE: Maa, I was just trying to be a sheepdog.
MAA: Hah! ‘Nuff wolves in the world already without a nice lad like you turnin’ nasty. Ya haven’t got it in ya, youn’un.
Babe does not ask to be called a sheepdog. He asks to be allowed to perform sheepdog.
Babe can do the dogs’ jobs, but not like a dog would. In Halberstam’s words, Babe does “‘dog’ with a difference.” In this sense, “dog” isn’t just a role, but an activity, a posture. Dog is a process, a mode. Sheepdog is an end, a vocation; dog is one—but not the only—means.
“I can do boy, I’ve got the teenage boy thing down,” I say to her. “I just don’t think I can be a man.”
“Yeah, well,” she says doubtfully, “You’re not.”
Babe is supposed to be a funny movie.
A straight, cis audience understands the film to be hilarious because the central conceit is so outlandish. (“If it’s not a duck that thinks it’s a rooster, it’s a pig that thinks it’s a dog!”) A trans audience is not so sure. A trans gaze can’t help but linger on the cross-stitched adage framed in the shack where Farmer Hoggett processes the unfortunate animals slated for slaughter: “What you eat today walks and talks tomorrow.”
A trans viewer knows that any boundary, whether social or biological, isn’t ever as impassable as it might seem.
Early in the film, a “terrible crime” is committed. The crime is trespass. Terrified of being replaced by Mrs. Hoggett’s new alarm clock, Ferdinand the duck cons Babe into infiltrating the farmhouse to steal the “mechanical rooster.” Together, pig and duck enter a forbidden zone, the domestic heart of the farm.
Species distinctions are enforced at the entrance to the farmhouse by humans, dogs, and cats alike. What butch hasn’t been there with Babe, standing confusedly outside the doggie door, the bathroom, or the changing room stall, waiting for permission to join the others inside?
“Respecting the rules,” Rex says, means adhering to the farm hierarchy, the distinctions and divisions between companion animals, working or laboring animals, and livestock. It means accepting, for instance, Babe’s intended fate furnishing the Christmas table, or the “natural” consequences of a duck’s limited use-value. Upsetting these divisions results in the destruction of the Hoggetts’ sitting room—including the dollhouse Farmer Hoggett has been meticulously assembling. Babe and Ferdinand’s “crime” not only brings anarchy indoors, but also trashes the domestic ideal made manifest in Hoggett’s model home.
There’s restorative, liberatory potential in a scene like this. Queers bash back! The trouble is what follows. The other shoe always drops; the social mandate is violently re-established. Rex decrees:
Being a duck, [Ferdinand] must behave like a duck. None of this crowing nonsense. He must accept what he is and be thankful for it. That goes for all of us.
Babe and Farmer Hoggett are brought together at a charity booth at the local fair when Hoggett is asked to guess the pig’s weight. Their partnership begins with an act of observation and estimation. Hoggett is, essentially, asked to “read” the pig. Nervous, the little piglet begins to pee. As the camera pans down to show a splash of urine landing between Hoggett’s leather brogues, the farmer quickly revises his guess. “Sixteen pounds, five…two ounces.” Hoggett is minutely attentive to Babe’s embodiment. At no point, from that moment on, will he forget that Babe is a pig. (“That’ll do, Pig,” is his favorite refrain.) But Hoggett’s attention isn’t just precise. It’s also flexible, responding to an unexpected change in Babe’s body weight. Hoggett wins Babe because he is able to describe Babe exactly as he is at that moment in time.
Hoggett wins Babe because he is able to describe Babe exactly as he is at that moment in time.
The first few days after my surgery, I was still too drugged up and sore to do much on my own. A scopolamine patch caused my pupils to dilate so widely I couldn’t read; I could barely see. My love took everything in hand. She sat me down, every two hours, to empty the red fluid collecting in the drains. The hospital had sent me home with a little plastic measuring cup. She’d hold it up to inspect the units printed on the side, and carefully note the volume. Everything, those first few days, was incremental: standing, eating, bleeding. She was patient and exact. She’d make a fist to expel the air out of the rubber bulb at the end of each drain before replacing the stopper. The bulbs squealed when she did that. I watched her, eyes hopelessly wide.
As the herding trials approach, Hoggett faces an ethical dilemma: choosing a name for the pig. Hoggett, a Kantian through and through, is disinclined to lie under any circumstance. Luckily, the entry form for the National Grand Challenge sheepherding trial only asks for the NAME OF ENTRY.
NARRATOR: He had been worried, for he was a truthful man, that the heading might say “NAME OF DOG,” and then whatever he put would be a lie. But as it happened, luck, for the moment, was running with him.
Hoggett’s name-of-entry for Babe, “PIG,” follows the one-syllable naming convention of working sheepdogs. It publicly commits him to a reinterpretation of Babe’s role on the farm, and to a deconstruction of the significance of the species labels “dog” and “pig.” Like a teacher using a student’s stated pronouns, or a parent adopting their kid’s chosen name, this comes with its own risks. Now, it’s not just Hoggett’s wife who finds him odd or deluded—everyone can see that Hoggett is actively subverting “The Way Things Are.”
48 young pigs played the role of “Babe.”
For visual consistency, each pig had to be 18 inches tall. Because pigs grow so quickly, this meant filming could only take place when the pigs were 16 to 18 weeks old. Six Large White Yorkshire pigs were bred every three weeks to meet the production team’s needs.
Babe, the pig, is a composite—they are properly plural.
Although all the pigs that appear on-screen are female, the film never specifies Babe’s gender.
Sometimes it is not a question of what the visible hides but how it is that we have failed to see certain things on its surface.
—Anne Cheng, “Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility”
Forget the popular narrative that the trans experience is one of confinement and interiority, of “being trapped in the wrong body” like a freak matryoshka. Transness is superficial in the sense that it plays out in a hall of mirrors. Transition is the process of modifying one’s reflection. And yet, transness and trans narratives present a paradox when it comes to surface reading, the critical practice of apprehending “what is there” instead of excavating, unearthing, or querying what is not.
I said I would read Babe on the surface. I said I would affirm the obvious, the evident. On the one hand, surface reading asks us to accept gender as we see it expressed—and to acknowledge transness where we encounter incongruity. But it’s easily corruptible. After all, when a transphobic reader clocks a person visibly assigned female at birth wearing “men’s” clothes and adopting a “male” affect, what they see is an unsuccessful act of subterfuge. Surface reading erases anyone who passes and fails everyone who relishes the in-between.
Transition is the process of modifying one’s reflection.
Babe’s “species dysphoria” is plain. The butch-trans dynamic of the film is overt, unhidden; it leaps out to a trans viewer, to a fellow sheep-pig. I walk around Farmer Hoggett’s yard. I stop and peer inside the farmhouse door. But, if surface reading asks us to accept the literal meaning of a text, then it also means missing genders and sexualities that have been historically defined by subtlety and discretion, symbols and codes.
Does no one know how to read me anymore? Is everyone so unsatisfied with the way things seem that I have to double, triple down on masculinity in order to be legible?
I’ve spent years cultivating, performing ambiguity. Is that what I stand to lose if I go on T?
Does Babe ever get tired of doing sheepdog, and, to simplify things, decide they just want to be a dog?
We are rewatching Hitchcock’s Suspicion. We are an hour and twenty five minutes into the film. Dinner is in progress. Johnnie (Cary Grant) and Lina (Joan Fontaine) are visiting Isobel, a local crime novelist, in her country home. They have been joined by Isobel’s brother, a tweedy pathologist—and a woman in a black tailored suit.
You can tell it’s tailored when the camera lingers on her as Isobel describes how a piano could be rigged as a murder weapon. The shoulders slope neatly; there’s no gape behind the collar, which is pinned into place behind a sharp black tie. She has parted her hair down the center and twisted it back into a low, unobtrusive bun. The waves slicked around her forehead gleam with Brilliantine.
She barely says anything at all, although she does call Johnnie, “My dear chap.” Isobel, casually, affectionately, calls her, “Phil.”
We have a few pet names for one another. Because I gave her some homemade bread on our first date, I was entered into her contacts as “Brioche Boy.” When she texts me, her name still shows up as “Aileen from Lex.”
But mostly, we just call each other “Babe.”
In 1998, the same year Jack Halberstam published Female Masculinity, an international bunch of film aficionados got together on Google Groups to discuss the possibility of a lesbian couple in Suspicion.
Kari S., from Turku, Finland, writes:
I think I’ve found something in Suspicion that I hadn’t noticed before.
Am I saying something about a film, or something about myself?
The dinner scene at Isobel’s (the mystery writer) house raised some questions.
There are five people in that scene: Grant, Fontaine, Isobel, a man who is identified as her chemist brother (who Grant tries to pump information concerning no-trace-leaving-poisons from)
AND a woman wearing a men’s suit, complete with a tie. She is not identified at all.
She takes part in the conversation and fills the wine glasses [sic] so one kind of gets the impression that she’s the man in the house…
I wonder if anyone else has noticed this.
Poor Kari S. is quickly shot down. A Dutch man named Michel writes back:
Lots of heterosexual women wear suits. Lots of homosexual women do notwear suits.
Lots of heterosexual women take part in conversations and pour wine. Lots of homosexual women do not take part in conversations and do not pour wine.
Lots of heterosexual women act as if they are the ‘man’ in the house.
Lots of homosexual women do not act as if they are the ‘man’ in the house.
Are you telling us something about that film or about yourself?
Am I saying something about a film, or something about myself?
In the 1940s, queer women, especially prototypical butches, wore signet rings on their pinky fingers to signal to their interest in other women. Patricia Highsmith wore one. The ring invites an alternative reading of the wearer by those in-the-know. It is subtle, but it is there, worn outside the body, the signifier of a discrete but not-so-secret code. The ring is a confirmation of what otherwise might only be intimated or suggested. You were right the whole time, says the ring.
I take a screenshot of the dinner scene, and blow it across my laptop like this is an episode of NCIS.
Phil tips the wine out of the carafe. Everything is black and white. The wine is a ribbon as dark as Phil’s suit. There.
A ring winks brightly on the pinky finger of her right hand.
Some things, whispers the body, are exactly as they seem.
Note: The author of this essay has since gone on T. It feels amazing.
In January 2020, Bookshop.org was created as an online retail alternative to Amazon. Since then, the platform has raised more than $29 million for local bookstores. The books we feature on the site link directly to Bookshop, with 10% of the profit from each sale going to support our mission as a literary nonprofit.
In celebration of Bookshop’s 4th anniversary, we’ve decided to look back at the 10 most purchased books on our website. The books that our readers bought are a diverse mix, spanning countries such as Chile, India, and Ireland and genres including graphic novels, political histories, and short story collections. Despite their wide-ranging forms, dates of publication, and countries of origin, these books are linked by their eclectic nature: many are considered forgotten, rediscovered, or modern classics, and nearly all are formally inventive and experimental. There’s something for all of EL’s readers here, from the gothic horror of Shirley Jackson and Carmen Maria Machado, the thought-provoking histories of India’s 1947 partition and the Black Panther Party, and postmodern novels that pay tribute to Latin American surrealism and magical realism. Whichever our readers chose, EL is proud to play a key role in introducing them to a vast range of new authors and new stories.
Here are the 10 most purchased books on Electric Literature, starting from the most popular:
Is it a surprise that the book our readers loved the most is We Have Always Lived in the Castle? After all, Shirley Jackson’s haunting final novel is widely considered to be her masterpiece and if we know anything about our readers, it’s that you guys love weird, subversive stories about women rebelling against society in their own messed-up ways.
The novel follows 18-year-old Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood, who lives on an isolated estate with her older sister Constance and ailing uncle. A tragedy that resulted in the deaths of the rest of the Blackwood family six years earlier has isolated the surviving members from the rest of the village, who believe that Constance is responsible. When the sisters’ estranged cousin Charles arrives and threatens to destroy the family’s fragile existence, Merricat is driven to new extremes.
Read an essay about how Shirley Jackson predicted America’s fetishization of the murderess here.
Widely considered a lost American classic, Sleepless Nights experiments with form by collaging fiction, memoir, essays, and letters to form a moving meditation on womanhood in the 20th century. After leaving her home in Kentucky, the narrator arrives at a bohemian hotel in New York City to discover a new life filled with friends, parties, and love affairs. Hardwick’s luminous prose paints unforgettable portraits of the people she encountered over her long life and literary career in this groundbreaking autobiographical novel.
The first of Bolaño’s novels to be published in English, By Night in Chile is narrated by the ailing and elderly Father Urrutia over the course of a single evening. A feverish, hallucinatory monologue narrated by the failed priest, this short narrative touches on wide-ranging topics including the Catholic Church, falconry, and Chile’s political history. Famously, the entire book is written without paragraphs or line breaks, except for the final sentence. Here are more brilliant short novels you can read in a sitting.
Cormac McCarthy’s third novel is set in Sevier County, Tennessee in the 1960s and tells of the story of the violent outcast and serial killer Lester Ballard, who the narrator describes as “a child of God much like yourself perhaps.” The controversial book established McCarthy’s interest in representing human experience through isolation, violence and moral degradation. McCarthy also experiments with the absence of literary conventions such as quotation marks and alternates between descriptive, poetic, and colloquial narrative styles.
Carmen Maria Machado’s celebrated short story collection won the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, receiving rave reviews from readers and critics. These eight inventive short stories blend psychological horror, science fiction, and queer theory to explore depictions of gender relations, female monstrosity, and desire. Drawing upon diverse sources such as folklore and urban legends, Her Body and Other Parties is a thrilling collection poised to become a modern classic that expands the boundaries of the horror genre.
In this essay, Jane Dykema writes about “The Husband Stitch,” the first story in Her Body and Other Parties, and how it brings up big questions about who we believe and why.
One of Ireland’s best-loved novelists, Flann O’Brien’s five novels are collected here in a tribute to his off-kilter humor and intertextual satirizing of Irish life and literature. At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, and The Dalkey Archive all combine hilarious fantasy and a riotous cast of recognizable characters from Gaelic legend. A key figure in modernist and postmodernist literature in the vein of James Joyce and one of the country’s best-loved 20th-century literary talents, O’Brien’s influential works are introduced here to a new audience.
The partition of India into two countries, India and Pakistan, in 1947 caused the displacement of over 12 million people and one of the greatest political and social upheavals in history. Yet over 75 years later, little is still known about the human impact of the event. Through a series of interviews conducted over ten years and a close examination of primary sources such as diaries, letters and parliamentary documents, Urvashi Butalia investigates the the stories of how people on the margins of society—women, children, and the lower castes—were affected by the violence of partition and brings their hidden narratives to light.
For more books about The Partition, check out this reading list by Anjali Enjeti.
This vibrant and groundbreaking illustrated history of the Black Panther Party explores the organization’s foundation in Oakland, California in 1966, its social impact through educational and healthcare programs designed to uplift the Black community, and its ongoing clashes with police brutality and the FBI. The book’s graphic retellings of major events and illustrated profiles of key figures capture the story of the party’s major leaders and political evolution, as well as its enduring cultural and political legacy in the civil rights movement and American society.
Read an interview with the author and the illustration of the book here.
In Rivka Galchen’s debut novel, Dr. Leo Liebenstein becomes convinced that his wife has disappeared and been replaced by a double, so he sets off on a quest to find her with the help of his psychiatric patient Harvey, who believes he is a secret agent who can control the weather. This obsessive journey takes them from New York to Patagonia to investigate the Royal Society of Meteorology and the mysterious Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, among other unexplained phenomena. At once a love story, psychological thriller, and portrait of psychiatric disintegration, Atmospheric Disturbances investigates the mysteries at the heart of human relationships.
This astonishing debut novel pays tribute to the magical realism of Latin American literature by weaving together a cast of characters including a monk, a gang of carnation pickers, and a woman made out of paper. After his wife leaves him, Federico de la Fe and his daughter Little Merced must start a new life together in California among a community of flower pickers. While Little Merced becomes dangerously addicted to limes, Federico becomes engaged in an even more sinister battle against the planet Saturn. The book is famous for its experimental form featuring columns of text running perpendicular across the page, blackouts, and a name that is literally cut out of the novel.
Mirna caught Piss Pants hanging around her car when she returned from the superstore. His pants were soaked as usual, but it was hard to tell if the stains were old or from a more recent incident. For as long as Mirna had been living out of her car in the parking lot of the abandoned Spring River Shopping Center, Piss Pants had been sneaking over to wave at Mirna’s baby. The baby wailed at the strange man. Mirna marched towards him, gripping the plastic bags filled with diapers, potato chips, and buy-two-get-one-free sodas. The purchase had eaten up most of whatever money she had left. Piss Pants made kissy faces through the window and put his lips against the glass. She hollered, and he ignored her. He mumbled some nonsense to the baby, who cried louder. Mirna shouted and ran at him, dropping some of her bags. Piss Pants scurried off to the abandoned shoe store he called home, and the baby continued to cry for hours after.
Several others had set up camp in the shopping center, living either out of their cars or one of the empty shops. They wandered the parking lot looking for change, food, and cigarette butts. Mirna had given them all nicknames based on their worst features. Piss Pants, Shit Pants, Toothless, Lazy Eye. She watched them amble between the stores as she ate chips and drank soda from the removable cup holder she used as a mug. The baby looked up at her from the old diaper box that Mirna had repurposed as a bassinet. He began to cry again. She jingled her keys for him and said “It’s okay” over and over in a baby voice until he piped down.
That night, Mirna woke to Shit Pants and Toothless knocking on the car roof. They pulled on the door handles and spit on the windows. Thick ropes of mucus ran down the glass. Mirna hit the lock button over and over, hoping the sound would scare them. “Let us in, baby,” they begged. Mirna told them to get fucked. “We’re cold and it’s raining,” Shit Pants said. It was neither cold nor raining. They banged their fists on the hood. Mirna continued to curse at them. The baby began to cry. “Wah, wah, wah,” the men said. Mirna waved her tire iron at them. Shit Pants exposed himself and, when he got tired of tugging on his limp penis, peed on her front bumper. Toothless pushed on the car, rocking it back and forth. She turned on the engine, and Shit Pants kicked her passenger-side headlight out. She put the car in drive and peeled out of the parking lot, leaving both men on the ground.
She pulled over after a few miles and fed the baby while she ate potato chips. Crumbs rained down on the baby’s head. When he finished, he nestled against her chest. She did not want to name him yet because she felt that she didn’t really know him, and how could she give a little stranger a name he’d carry forever? He was much smaller than any baby she’d held before. His eyes drooped so low they were nearly parallel with his nostrils, and the space between his nose and mouth was completely smooth. When he cried, he felt like a vibrating cell phone. He’d gained some weight in the two weeks they’d lived at the shopping center but not much.
The baby lay in his box in the backseat as Mirna drove down the coast. She could not return home with the baby. They’d know just from his face that she had tried more than once to drink him away. All she could do was drive. She took caffeine pills instead of pulling over to sleep because there would be a new Shit Pants and Toothless waiting for her in every parking lot.
Mirna followed the parkway south and passed through several shore towns in the throes of late summer. In the distance was the purple and green glow cast by Ferris wheel lights. Every few miles, she turned on the light and cooed at the baby to make sure he was still alive. She had a quarter tank left, and twenty dollars on the pre-paid debit card in her purse. She had another ten in cash from pan handling the day before. She didn’t want to think about gas and money, so she didn’t. When tolls came up, she just drove through the express lanes, and the digital sign screamed TOLL UNPAID in red letters. The exit signs counted down. Exit 10, Exit 9. What happened after Exit 0? Would the car fall into the ocean? Would they have to doggy paddle all the way to Delaware?
The car ran out of gas somewhere near Atlantic City. She put a rag in the window and walked south, carrying the baby in his box and a duffel bag of their things. Cars rushed past them. The draft they threw off nearly knocked Mirna over. She made it two miles before a tractor trailer pulled over in front of her. The truck driver jogged towards her. He shouted something, but she couldn’t hear him.
“Jesus Christ, girl, you’re lucky I was paying attention,” he said. “You’re going to end up in someone’s windshield.” The baby, who’d slept through the entire walk, began to cry once the man came near. The driver peeked into the box. Mirna pulled the blanket over the baby’s face. “Is that a—just get in the truck.” Mirna’s shoes were starting to come apart and her ankles were on fire. The baby’s box grew heavier in her arms. She followed the driver.
She and the baby rode in the sleeper cab. He had so much hair already and still smelled a bit like blood. She needed to do a better job for him. She wanted him to remember the warmth of her body, her smile, the scent of her hair. Mirna remembered her own mother as screaming, crying, or breaking dishes, then apologizing the whole next day for her behavior. She hadn’t been feeling herself, she’d say. She’d had, had a long week.
The truck driver kept asking her questions. What was her name? Where was she from? Where was she going? She told him to keep heading where he was heading.
“I just dropped off a shipment of shellfish to one of the casinos,” he said. “You should’ve seen all the oysters. I had a damn ocean-load.”
The truck driver was a long man. The headrest of the driver’s seat came up to the base of his neck. It was hard to tell if he was trying to grow a beard or had just forgotten to shave. He must’ve been in his thirties. When he wasn’t talking, he squirmed in his seat or ground his teeth. The baby cried, and Mirna rocked him. She didn’t need to hide his face anymore. The truck driver wasn’t smart enough to figure out what it meant.
He talked on. “You know, you wouldn’t believe how far some food travels. When I long-haul, I take stuff that already rode a boat over from China and drive it from California to New York City. I’ve met heads of lettuce that’ve seen more of the world than me. I’m Mike, by the way.”
“Mirna.”
“And what about the little ‘un?”
“He doesn’t have a name yet.”
“No name,” Mike said. “Can’t go through life with no name. Why not just name him after his dad?”
Mirna cut him off before he could continue. “I don’t know the father.” Mirna did know the baby’s father. Explaining the whole thing felt like too much. No, he wasn’t actually her cousin. He was the son of a family friend, so she called him her cousin. Everyone at the bonfire was drunk, and she’d snuck off to the woods with him. Every girl back home had gone into the woods with a boy at some point, and that hadn’t been her first time either. She had read online that an abortion was seven hundred dollars, and there was no way in hell she or anyone she knew had that kind of money lying around. That’s why she’d tried to drink him away. That’s all there was to it.
“Hm, well he wouldn’t be the first kid to not know his dad,” Mike said. “My dad—”
“Can you take me up to Hamilton?” Mirna asked. “I got an aunt there. Might take the train to New York.”
Mike agreed to take her but continued his story about his father marrying Mike’s first-grade teacher. Mirna looked into the baby’s face and tried to think of a name. His face revealed nothing but her past misdoings. The baby could be left at an orphanage, and Mirna could just go home, but there were no orphanages anymore, no nuns bringing foundlings in off the front step. And if there were, when the baby grew up, he would only have to look in the mirror to know that even before he was born, he hadn’t been loved. If she held onto him, she could at least tell him that once she’d had him, she never gave him up.
Mike spoke of his father, how he only used to see him twice a year and would be made to sleep on the couch, where in the early morning he would awake to the sound of his father and stepmother having sex. After they hit 42 North, he burned himself out on memories of his father and stayed quiet. Mike changed lanes often, and when he shifted gears, the truck let out a deep sigh like an old man being turned over in bed.
“There’s no aunt, is there?” he asked finally.
“How’d you figure?” Mirna said.
“Just a hunch. If you need somewhere to stay, I have a finished basement with a pull-out couch. I can’t let a young mother wander the streets. Just ‘til you figure out what you’re doing.” He described the layout of the basement to her in excruciating detail. How they could move furniture around to make things more comfortable. How the basement was always cold no matter what, and his theories as to why. “I’ve got space heaters though. No crib, obviously. That box will have to do.”
The truck came to a stop, and Mirna woke up with her head against the window. The baby squirmed in his box. Across the street was a brick apartment complex. Two dozen doors decorated its face.
“I’ve gotta see a friend real quick,” Mike said.
“You’re just gonna leave me in here?” Mirna said.
“Well, I’d invite you in for a drink, but Dave’s place isn’t the best for babies.”
Mirna rocked the baby just so she’d have something to do while she waited. She’d had a friend, Ann, who got pregnant their sophomore year, and Mirna had helped plan the shower and buy the baby toys. But once the kid was born, Mirna stopped seeing Ann because it was always such a hassle. She would either bring the little noise machine along or complain about how he’d kept her up all night. Then she’d be stuck staring at tired, rundown Ann and thinking about how her whole life was over at sixteen.
Mirna made sure the baby was lying on his back in the box. He wriggled and flexed his hands. He still didn’t have the strength to grip her finger. She hopped out of the truck and went after Mike. In the apartment, the only light sources were a cloudy fish tank and TV with a laptop plugged into it. Next to the kitchen was a pool table and cues where a dining room table belonged. Mike sat on a couch with two other guys who looked much younger than him. They watched a pirated movie that played on both the TV and the laptop. The two men, one of whom must’ve been Dave, stared at her through glassy eyes.
“What about—” Mike said.
“I just fed him,” she said, “and he can’t go anywhere.”
Dave led Mirna to the fridge. They had to squeeze between the pool table and the wall to get there. She took two wine coolers from the fridge’s deli meat drawer. “One for the road,” she said, but Dave gave no response.
She sat next to Mike on the couch, and he started up again. His tongue flicked every idea in his head out into the world. “I’m still thinking about how that kid has no name,” he said. “I mean it ain’t right.”
“I’m going to name him Baby,” she said.
Mike laughed. “What about when he’s forty-five?”
“Well, when he’s like four, I’ll change his name to Boy. At eighteen, he can be Man.”
“My grandfather had a dog he just called Dog,” Mike said. “What if you named him Dog?” Only he thought this was funny.
They talked a little longer and drank a little more. Mike didn’t take over the conversation this time. Mirna felt like she’d been granted a great permission. She told him about her parents and how they drank all day, and how even when they split up, they still argued on the phone weekly.
“Hey, hey, don’t cry,” Mike said. “Drinks getting you down. You need a little pick-me-up.”
They did a couple of bumps off a bread knife, and Mirna felt like she was strapped to a towline being pulled by a pack of wild dogs. Dave had fallen asleep on the couch. The third man threw chips at Dave’s open mouth. Mike got Mirna another wine cooler and kept ranting about how he didn’t know what his next move was and that he couldn’t spend his whole life driving; at one point he referred to the highway as his mistress. When he grew upset talking about having to give away his dog because he was barely home, Mirna decided she’d play some music on the small wireless speaker she found atop the fridge, but Mike just shouted over it. Mirna grabbed a pool cue and demanded Mike teach her to play, and he said he didn’t feel like it, so she mocked him until he taught her how to shoot. He guided her from behind because he was incapable of being subtle. They played one game, and he let her win, but she didn’t care because she still won, which meant she must have learned something, right?
Baby was fussing in his box when they got back to the truck. They picked up formula from an all-night pharmacy and drove to Mike’s place. “I’m sorry I was gone,” Mirna said to her son, “but I have a name for you now, Baby.”
Mike lived in a row home a few blocks from the Delaware River. Down the river, on the opposite bank, there was evidence of the Philadelphia skyline. Mike’s town was made up of row homes and corner storefronts with current lottery jackpots hanging in the windows. In the kitchen, Mike fed Baby from one of the bottles in Mirna’s bag. He rocked the child as he ate. Baby fell asleep nestled against Mike’s chest. Mirna watched them from the living room.
“All my half-siblings are a lot younger than me,” he said. “I learned how to do this stuff pretty early on.”
He found a bigger box for Baby and more blankets. He went into his coat closet and retrieved a small teddy bear, which he placed in the box. Mirna snatched it from him. Her cousin had a baby that had rolled over in the night and suffocated on a plush frog. Once she got Baby to stop squirming, she joined Mike in the living room. They drank a six pack together and watched some late-night movie. Mike kept turning away from the TV to look her up and down.
“You should sleep in my room tonight,” he said. “I’ll take the couch. Wouldn’t be much of a gentleman if I didn’t offer. Go ahead. Upstairs on the left.”
Mirna changed her clothes and threw out her blood-specked underwear. She wiped Baby clean with a damp piece of toilet paper. Little bits of it stuck to his face. Touching him was nerve-racking. He was like a fragile lamp that had already been broken once before. He sneezed and Mirna wiped the snot off him with a hand towel and then hung it back up.
He was like a fragile lamp that had already been broken once before.
Mike’s room was a hodge-podge of furniture he must’ve been given or had found in the trash. The dresser and one nightstand matched, but the other nightstand was a TV tray table covered in soda cans and cell phone chargers. Mirna slept on her side with Baby’s box on the floor next to her. She let her arm dangle from the mattress and stroked Baby’s chest. Beneath his sternum it felt as if something was dying to break out of him.
Mike woke her up when he climbed into bed next to her. “Can’t sleep on that couch after driving all day,” he said. “Don’t worry. You won’t even know I’m here.”
Mirna wiggled to the edge of the mattress. Throughout the night, Mike got up several times to spit in the bathroom sink and pee. Baby cried, and Mike mumbled for her to shut the kid up. Other than that, he and Baby slept through the whole night while Mirna lay awake listening to the dissonant music of their breathing.
Mike’s Wi-Fi password was a dozen numbers and letters stickered to the back of his router in the living room. It took Mirna several tries to type it into her phone. She searched her name and the word “missing.” A Mirna Rockford had been missing in Richmond, Virginia twelve years ago, but that was it. None of Mirna’s family or friends had posted anywhere that she hadn’t come home for over two weeks. Once you were eighteen, no one cared where you went. In her town, disappearing meant you had run off with a boy and would come back home in a year with a baby in your arms and your belongings in trash bags.
Mirna looked over at Baby, still lying in his box, and her duffel bag filled with the few things she owned. Mike snored away upstairs. In the daylight, it was hard to ignore the mess. Plastic bags and padded envelopes were thrown in the corners of every room. Dust and hair collected against the baseboards. There seemed to be crumbs everywhere, as if a farmer had come through and sown them all throughout the house.
There were two smaller bedrooms. One was filled with boxes of clothes and papers. The other just had a folding table against one wall and an old laptop charging on the floor. Mirna changed Baby’s diaper on the folding table. She did her best not to look at his face, and even considered getting a paper towel to cover it. Mike had yet to say anything about how Baby looked, but he’d only handled him in the dark.
Baby’s breathing was strange. It was shallow at times, and then he would fight to gulp down big breaths. Maybe he just hadn’t figured out how to do it yet. It was only his sixteenth day on Earth after all. Or maybe his inside was just as twisted up as his outside.
Mirna watched TV with Baby’s box next to her. She was uneasy about taking him out of it, as if all he needed to be safe from the world was a little cardboard. He cried; she held him, fed him, changed him again. She changed but didn’t use the shower. There was no telling when Mike would pop up.
He woke in the afternoon, left without saying a word, and returned with a half dozen grocery bags. He put the food away and sat next to her and Baby on the couch. Mirna hugged him. It had seemed like something she should do until she did it. He studied Baby.
“Is that normal?” Mike asked. “His face, should it be like that? It looks like he’s having a rough time breathing.”
“It’ll straighten out,” Mirna said. “Newborns have squishy faces. Sometimes they need to settle.”
“Like dough.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, never mind.”
In the nights that followed, Mirna and Baby moved to the couch. No matter what Mike had promised beforehand, he would appear at the foot of the bed every night, complaining of his back and slide in next to her. In the mornings Mike played some kind of football game on an ancient video game console that was caked in dust. It buzzed, whirred, and would eject the disc at random. Mirna fed and changed Baby while she watched Mike curse at the game. When Baby didn’t need to be fed or changed, she felt like she was just waiting for him to need her again.
At night, they ate frozen entrees that Mike put in the oven and often forgot about until he smelled them burning. No one called Mirna looking for her. Someone she used to work with at the dollar store texted her what’s Jameel’s brother’s name? followed by sorry, wrong number. Mirna let her phone die.
After almost a week, Mirna returned to Mike’s bed where Mike tried to spoon her. She told him to get the fuck off, and he rolled over, pretending he had been asleep when he’d grabbed her. The next morning, he took up a weeklong haul. He left her with a pack of diapers and several cans of formula. “You should start figuring out what your next move is,” Mike said before leaving. “When I get back, you’re gonna need money if you want to stay longer.”
Mirna gave him her ten dollars in cash, and he left with it in his pocket.
The first few days alone with Baby were fine. It was just like when Mike was there, minus the distorted, crackling soundtrack of his old video games. She couldn’t figure out how to use the oven, so she only ate pretzels and crackers. Baby’s breathing grew worse. A little wheeze would come from his box, followed by coughing, and then he’d start to cry. “Shhh, little boy,” Mirna would say. “You’re too handsome to cry.” If he died, she didn’t know what she would do with him, but she guessed it didn’t really matter. She and Mike were the only ones who knew Baby existed.
She used Mike’s laptop to check her card balance. She had sixteen dollars and forty-eight cents left. A bus ticket home was twenty-two. She looked around Mike’s house for spare change. She found a handful of ones and walked to a station two miles away, carrying Baby’s box in front of her. The prices on the website were outdated, and twenty dollars would only get her halfway home.
Instead, Mirna took a local line to a nearby fertility clinic she’d found online. They had to transfer twice and walk the last thirty minutes. It was Tuesday, and it was raining. Mike would be back on Monday. If she could get rid of Baby, maybe he’d let her stay for free a bit longer. She could get a job and save up money to move to New York City. She could live in Queens. She could get stuck in traffic in the tunnel, or Mike could take her with him to far-off places like Arizona. They could drop off okra, whatever that was, to restaurants all over America.
Mirna waited in the clinic parking lot for a couple to show. Every now and then a nurse came out to smoke or have an argument on the phone, and Mirna would duck behind a dumpster.
A couple didn’t arrive until noon. Mirna approached them, holding Baby. “Excuse me,” she said. The couple kept their heads down and went inside. So did the couple after them. An hour passed until another came.
“Excuse me,” she said. The husband was much older than his wife, who seemed to be pulling him through the parking lot like a child out on errands with his mother. The husband made eye contact with her.
“Gerald,” said his wife, pulling him along by the sleeve.
“Are you guys trying to have a kid?” she asked Gerald and not his wife.
“Well, we came to—”
“I have a boy here,” Mirna said holding out the box. “He’s got a breathing problem. I can’t afford to take care of him. I’m sure they’re charging you a lot in there. Just give me like two hundred dollars, and you can have him. You won’t ever see me again.”
“Do you need help?” the wife asked while Gerald pulled a crumpled five-dollar bill from his pocket.
“You seem like nice people,” Mirna said. “I think you’d all be very happy together. You don’t even have to pay me.”
“My friend volunteers at a shelter in Lawnside,” the wife said. “I can call someone. They can help you and your little boy.”
Mirna was paralyzed by the wife’s offer. To Mirna, a shelter meant an auditorium filled with beds of snoring, handsy men. It meant a social worker carrying Baby off to a foster home. It meant her and Baby being passed around from one underfunded program to another until there was nothing left of them but bones and hair.
The wife got in the car and made a phone call. She spoke, waited, then spoke some more while looking at Mirna.
“I’m sorry,” Mirna said. “It’s been a hard few days. I’m going to miss my bus.”
She ran. Baby cried as he bounced in his box. They hid in an empty retention pond and rested in the mud. Baby’s crying attacked Mirna’s ears. She covered his mouth with her hand and let him suckle her finger. “Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry,” she sang until he fell back asleep. When she grew tired of hiding, she closed the flaps of Baby’s box to protect him from the rain and walked back to the bus stop. After all the bus fare, she had nine dollars and some change left.
Mike’s basement was just as cluttered as the upstairs. Power tools with frayed electric cords decorated the floor. In a corner sat a pile of potting soil and concrete mix bags. There was an attempt at a home gym shoved off to one corner. Mirna beat the dust and dead bugs from the cot’s mattress. She changed Baby on the tool bench before lying down with him. Mirna didn’t leave the basement for the next two days except to fetch crackers and soda. She doted over Baby, hoping to make up for nearly giving him away to strangers. She did not raise her voice when he kept her up all night. She let him lay on her chest and not a single minute went by without her kissing the top of his head. Against her lips, his faint hairs felt like dandelion puffs.
Producing mucus seemed to be Baby’s only activity. He didn’t react to Mirna’s singing or baby talk anymore. In one of the many boxes in the basement, she found a bulb syringe and used it to drain his nose. The next two days were spent keeping Baby’s sinuses clear and watching the ankles of passersby through the basement windows. She plugged her phone in, turned it on, and waited for texts, missed calls, or voicemails to come in. The only messages were coupon code texts from stores and robocall voicemails warning her that her car’s extended warranty had expired. Her thumb hovered over the contact for “Home.” If her mother answered, she would have to shout, “This is Mirna, your daughter” because otherwise her mother would say, “Mirna who?” She’d probably huff and ask, “Do I have to come get you?” Mirna’s older sisters had run away from home all the time as teenagers. She and her mother would go to the bus station to pick up either Sara or Masha; they would always be wearing some guy’s sweatshirt. If her mother did come get her, she would do nothing but scream at the child the second he became even a mild inconvenience. She’d spit vodka-soaked threats until Mirna and Baby would be forced to run off again.
Baby started to wheeze. Mirna burped him and rocked him. He spat up a glob of mucus on her shoulder, but the wheezing persisted. He could only breathe easily if he was held upright and bounced on Mirna’s knee.
The day before Mike returned, Mirna wandered the neighborhood in search of somewhere to work. She filled out an application for a pizza place that also sold loose cigarettes and phone cards. Afterwards, she filled out another application at an all-night pharmacy. By the register was a rack of small stuffed animals. Baby had nothing of his own. Even Mirna and her sisters had had toys. Somewhere in her mother’s rowhome, Mirna’s childhood companion, Poofy Pig, was still stashed away. She bought a stuffed cardinal for Baby for five dollars and tried not to think of the single digit balance on her card.
In Mike’s basement, Mirna dangled the stuffed cardinal over Baby’s box. “Say hi to Mr. Cuddly Bird,” she said over and over, shaking the toy. Baby mostly looked through the bird. Mirna made chirping noises and danced the toy along the rim of the box until Baby gave her a reaction. Eventually he stretched his mouth into a shape that she told herself was a smile.
Mike returned on Friday, and the floorboards groaned beneath his weight. Mirna listened to him move from room to room in search of her. To look busy, she started changing Baby’s diaper, even though it was empty.
“What are you, a vampire?” Mike said, flicking on the basement light.
Mirna focused on Baby’s empty diaper. She hoped he would not ask her if she had a job or a plan.
Mike stood close. “I thought about you a lot while I was driving,” he said. His breath smelled of chewing gum and cheeseburgers. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and pawed at her hips and thighs. Baby winced, and Mirna hoped he would cry. He couldn’t seem to muster up the energy. Mike put his hand in Mirna’s pants pocket. She pried herself free.
“I have to put him down for a nap,” she said, and Mike retreated upstairs.
Every board and brick belonged to him, and she had spent enough time there that now she belonged to him too.
Even when he was gone, Mirna could feel Mike against her back. He had imprinted himself on the threads of her shirt. His scent was stuck in her nose. She changed and used the bulb syringe on herself. There was no getting rid of him. The entire house was covered in years of Mike particles. Every board and brick belonged to him, and she had spent enough time there that now she belonged to him too.
Mirna rocked Baby inside his box. She kept a dishrag on her shoulder for when he began to wheeze. It seemed like he’d never run out of mucus, like there was some oil drill in him, digging up endless yellow snot. At night, slants of moon light fell through the basement windows. Two men argued about money outside. Mirna dreamed of using Mike’s tools to tunnel into the neighbor’s basement; if she didn’t like that one, she’d dig to the next one, and the next one after that, until she dug into the side of the Delaware River and all of its murk cascaded over her and flooded every house in town.
Baby continued to wheeze and howl. Mike came back downstairs. She braced herself for his cheeseburger breath and wandering hands, but he just stood at the bottom of the stairs. “What the hell’s that sound?” He looked into Baby’s box. “There’s something wrong with him. You should take him to the ER. I think his face might be stuck like that.”
“He’s fine,” Mirna said.
“Listen, Tuesday I’m leaving on another long haul, then I’m picking up another shipment there and bringing that up to Canada, then I got another job lined up in Texas. Might pick up another shipment there. I don’t know yet.”
“Okay,” Mirna said.
“I don’t think you understand. I can’t be gone for almost two months and have a runaway and her baby in my house. You guys gotta get outta here, preferably tomorrow.”
“I just applied for a job at the pizza place.”
“Just go home. I’ll give you bus money. Shit, I’ll even drive you back myself. I was trying to do something nice, but this is too much.”
“I could work at the pizza place during the day and get a job somewhere else at night.”
“How old are you even?”
“I’ll be nineteen in two months.”
“Jesus Christ. You know if home’s bad, they got shelters and group homes and stuff like that. Look at this place. It ain’t in any shape for you two.”
“The road is my mistress,” Mirna said under her breath.
“His name is Baby. He lives in a box, for Christ sake,” Mike said. “Tomorrow, I’m taking you home.” He stomped upstairs.
Mirna rolled around on the bed for a bit. Baby began to wheeze and hack again. “Just shut up,” Mirna said. She found a spot on the basement floor to sit and cry, but she couldn’t throw a proper fit with Baby there. She remembered the month after the HVAC repairman had dumped Mirna’s mother, how she’d spent several nights crawling on the floor and wailing after drinking a bottle of peach schnapps. Sara and Masha would try to get her to go to bed or drink some coffee, while a ten-year-old Mirna called her mother a gross slut.
Mirna had spent so much of her life hanging out, drinking and watching her mother drink. She did not know where cities and states were, how money was made, why babies cried, or how you made them stop. Baby cooed, and Mirna played with his toes. “Is this a little piggy?” She wished she was smart. She wished she knew how to do things.
When Mirna came out of the basement, Mike was sprawled out on the couch playing a shooter game. Everything on the screen consisted of sharp polygons. The console struggled to keep the disc spinning, and the game froze for a moment. Mike ignored her.
“I want to give him away,” she said.
“You can’t stay,” he said without looking away from the TV. “Motherfucker!” he yelled at the game.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I named him Baby, and he lives in a box.”
Mike still refused to turn towards her. She thought about throwing her shoe at the TV. “I wanna leave him in a nice neighborhood. Something is really wrong with him. Something I don’t know how to fix. He’ll die in foster care.”
“Don’t do that for me,” Mike said.
“It ain’t for you, and it ain’t for me either.”
“We can go tomorrow night,” Mike said. “I’m too tired to do anything else today. You know, this is the first thing you’ve done since you got here that’s made any sense.” He patted the seat next to him, and she sat there, watching him play his game.
On their last day together, Mirna tried to find something to leave Baby in. If it was cold or raining, the box wouldn’t be enough. She thought about putting tin foil over the top, but there wasn’t much she could do about keeping the sides from turning soggy. Mike had refused to give her money for a car seat with a cover.
She found an old pet carrier in the basement. She soaked one of her shirts with soap and hot water and scrubbed out the carrier before lining the inside with bath towels. To test it, she put Baby inside with a blanket and checked on him every minute. With her face in the door of the carrier, she tried to tell him a story, but she couldn’t come up with names for the characters or made-up places, so she settled for humming “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
That night Mike took her to a neighborhood about an hour north. He said a lot of New York City commuters lived there: editors-at-large, Wall Street guys, startup bros. It was the first time she’d seen Mike’s actual car, a beat-up sedan with a trash bag and plastic wrap where the rear passenger window should’ve been. Mike wouldn’t let her sit in the passenger seat and made her sit in the back with Baby. “He’s gonna be alone all night,” Mike said. The floor of the car was filled with old fast food bags that had grown stiff with grease. Mirna stepped on a paper cup and felt soda seep into her shoes. The whole ride, Mike’s makeshift window billowed.
They pulled into a subdivision of large brick-front homes with long driveways. One had a fountain in the front yard lit up by landscaping lights. Mike stopped in front of one of the first houses they passed.
“Not here,” Mirna said. The house was nice, and the family probably was too, but she knew to always turn down the first boy to ask you to dance. She had Mike drive all through the development. Streets with French-sounding names branched off the main road every hundred feet or so. An assortment of luxury SUVs were parked in every driveway. Over the fences, Mirna could see inground pools and gazebos. She never thought this many people with that much money could exist in one place.
“Here,” she finally said.
The house wasn’t the biggest or the nicest on the block. The grass was higher than the other lawns, and the white siding was turning green. The owners seemed to have a little less—or maybe just cared a little less—than everyone else in the neighborhood. They didn’t need everything to be perfect. Mirna thought maybe they would be okay with Baby’s face. She put Baby in the pet carrier with his blankets.
“Be quick,” Mike said. “These neighborhoods, everyone is suspicious of a car like this.”
Mirna followed the sidewalk to the front door. She opened the ceiling hatch of the carrier to make sure Baby was okay, then set him down on the welcome mat. She stroked his face and chest as she cleaned his nose one last time with the bulb syringe. He grabbed onto her finger and gummed it. Soon he would have teeth. In some years’ time, those teeth would fall out and be replaced. The front bottom teeth would most likely come in crooked, just as Mirna’s and her sisters’ had. She left the stuffed cardinal in a freezer bag atop the pet carrier.
She took her time walking back to Mike’s car, despite his waving at her to hurry up. She waited to hear a cry from Baby, one last request to have his nose cleaned or see her face hovering above him. She waited and waited, but he didn’t make a sound.
Mike opened the passenger door for her. He looked her up and down before she got in. “You get a call from that pizza place you can pay half the electric bill,” he said. “There’s some furniture in the attic. We can dust it off and get the basement a bit spruced up.”
Mirna stopped listening to him and his plans. They passed the exit for Mirna’s hometown. Mike clicked his jaw and ground his teeth. “You know,” he kept saying but would lose his train of thought.
When they got home, Mike called Dave, who came over with a case of beer. Mirna started to head towards the basement, but Mike begged her to have just one beer with them. Take her mind off things. She sipped on a lukewarm can while Mike and Dave played the football video game. They hooted at one another and spilled beer all over the coffee table. Dave pulled out a wireless speaker and started playing music. The speaker was blown, and the song playing sounded less like music and more like mechanical malfunction. Mike took Mirna by her hands and pulled her from her seat.
“Dance,” Dave hollered, so she danced with Mike for just a moment.
Then Mike sat down and said, “Come on, show us your moves.”
Mirna wiggled a little for them.
“Turn around show us what you got,” Dave said.
She spun around for them once, hoping they would now leave her alone, but Mike put a ten-dollar bill in her pocket and smacked her butt. The two men laughed and pretended to throw invisible money at her. Mike pulled her onto his lap and kept trying to kiss her.
Mirna fought him off and retreated to the basement. Baby’s box was still in her bed. It was damp with pee and speckled with diaper powder. She slept next to it and traced her fingers from corner to corner. Out of habit, she woke up every now and then to clean Baby’s nose but went back to sleep when she remembered the box was empty.
In the morning, Mike broke down Baby’s box and tossed it in the recycling while Mirna was in the shower. On Friday he left as planned, and on Saturday the pizza place left her a message to schedule an interview.
She didn’t hear from Mike until he got to Michigan. He called to give her a list of chores. “I’ll talk to you when I get to Kansas City,” he said. “Bye, babe.”
That week, she took Mike’s recycling out four days early.
Around 15 years ago my friend Erik interrupted me while I was talking about my workday to say, “Stop being boring.” He was always a bit brash and maybe my feelings were a little hurt, but it became lore, a story I told about him. With time and distance, I can see that he was right. I have historically conceived of myself as my job. For years I was a property manager, and after work I would talk about tenants and owners and vendors, describing phone calls and apartments in detail to friends over drinks. Then I was a graduate student and spoke mostly to other graduate students. Now I’m a professor and struggling to shape who I am both in work and outside of it. Work seeps into other parts of my life, takes up space mentally and emotionally.
It’s this push and pull that formed the essential idea of The Cleaner. The book follows a woman who makes her job her entire life. She draws all happiness and meaning from her work, which causes her to overinflate the importance of her job. You might say she oversteps, but she wouldn’t say this, because of course she sees her domain as expansive. If your job spills over into every moment of your life, it makes perfect sense to intervene in everyone else’s lives to help them do better. While none of her supposed coworkers see her because she works at night, she believes she pulls the strings and if they just saw her, truly saw her, they too would know how important and meaningful her work actually is.
What follows are eight books that explore invisible women and their labor.
Mickey Hayward is overlooked and poorly treated in her job at Wave, a media company in New York. But she still dreams of writing something that will matter. She believes she might find meaning in her work, that she might be seen and appreciated, or at least she does until she finds out she’s being replaced. After she’s let go, Mickey uploads a letter to twitter, decrying the racism and sexism that was in abundance at her workplace but unfortunately her letter is quietly received. In turn, she seems to give up on being respected or valued by this in-crowd and flees to her hometown to stay at her grandparents’ house. Her letter resurfaces during a media scandal, which provides her with a platform to speak and be truly heard, but she must grapple with what it is she wants to say, and how she wants her life to look.
Grief is so often quiet or hidden away, but in this novel, we see how powerful a mother’s grief can be. After her son Santiago dies, his mother Magos “wants to learn one last secret from her son. What part of a person’s body is inextricably themselves?” So Magos takes a piece of her dead son’s lung, leaves her husband, returns to Mexico with her mother, and begins to grow Monstrilio from this bit of lung. As this new monstrous iteration of her son matures, she keeps him hidden, not letting anyone else know about the fruits of her labor. In a novel where readers might ultimately focus on the character Monstrilio (and for good cause—I find him exhilarating) it is his mother’s desperation, labor, and secrecy that drew me in. What can one woman do when she’s not being watched? What horrific power might she unleash?
Damani is a ride-share driver who isn’t exactly treated or seen as a person by the people she provides services to. Between mourning her father, who died working at his fast-food job, and caring for her mother, Damini cannot participate in the protests going on in the city that are ostensibly for people like herself. She can only view them at a slight remove as she does the necessary work of keeping herself alive. This novel hinges on Damani’s new relationship with Jolene, a white woman who has considerably more money and privilege than Damani. Damini has her doubts about Jolene but on the surface, Jolene appears to be an ally, seems to understand where Damani is coming from. As the novel unfolds both Damani and readers will wonder not only if Jolene really sees Damani but if they’re even looking at the same world. This anti-capitalist novel examines classism and racism and how people of privilege fail to see those they purport to “save.”
Jade Nguyen visits her estranged father in Vietnam and pretends to be a member of a traditionally happy family, one which doesn’t truly exist in this case. She can’t allow her father to see who she really is because she needs money from him in order to pay for college. So, her visit is a performance. But it turns out, the house is full of ghosts, and she cannot convince her sister or father that anything strange is happening. Readers will raptly follow her as she works to prove the house is a danger to them all. Tran writes painful moments of familial difficulty, where Jade’s father clearly doesn’t understand or want to understand her. There’s a increasing awareness that no matter what Jade does, it won’t be enough to make a difference. This atmospheric novel gives voice to characters who are deeply real and flawed.
In a kind of wonderous fluke, Holly stumbles into a job at Paradise, one of the town’s oldest cinemas. At first, she sweeps and cleans toilets, all while being ignored by her coworkers, a seemingly impenetrable clique who even live together. She wants desperately to be seen and to belong among the group of poorly paid workers. Just as the customers of the cinema don’t appreciate or see the humanity of the workers, the cinema’s workers also see the customers as a means to an end, necessary for their true home, Paradise, to exist. Holly bides her time and keeps her head down, doing the work as it’s prescribed until she can become a true part of Paradise. But once she’s fully integrated into the cinema and its coterie of workers, will Paradise be sustainable? Under capitalism, is it possible to draw meaning from even the most magical of workplaces where rooms may appear and disappear at random?
Diary of a Void follows Ms. Shibata who starts a new job to escape the sexual harassment of her old job, only to find that as the sole female employee, everyone expects her to complete the company’s most menial tasks. In a move to avoid these assignments, she tells everyone that she is pregnant. After they make allowances, including permitting her to leave work at five each day, she explains, “What seemed of greatest concern to my bosses, rather than when I would clock out, was the question of the coffee. Who would make it? Who was going to deal with the cups? Where was the milk? They asked me to type up step-by-step instructions.”
These men rely on the women in their lives, even those on the periphery, to do the kind of essential labor that shapes their days, their weeks. With her newfound freedom Ms. Shibata is able to live a fuller life including both hobbies and relaxation. This satire brilliantly displays how a woman only becomes worthy of personhood and humanity once she is serving as a vessel for life. How many women have I known who finally discovered life-changing diagnoses once these issues were linked to their fertility? Why is this the moment when women begin to exist? Yagi’s novel is a thrill and delight.
The Woman in the Wall by Patrice Kindl
In this novel, the protagonist is quite literally invisible. Unless she stands the right way and has the proper light, her family can’t even see her. She has to give a little wave or a shout to get their attention. Teachers and classmates can’t see her, so it makes sense that she should stay at home. And she loves this—she makes herself small and reconstructs parts of her house so she can slip along behind walls and reside in closed off rooms. Readers will delight in watching her secret life, which she spends caring for those around her. All the while she watches the lives of her family, as well as friends of her sisters who come and go, and all the activities that make up a life where one is seen.
The Wall features the last surviving human on earth, or it might as well, because she certainly feels alone. With her cow, bull calf, cat, dog, and a series of kittens, she undertakes the labor of keeping them and herself alive. It’s work that no other human sees or appreciates. She’s responsible for herself and frequently wonders at how well made she is for this kind of work. Perhaps it’s what she was meant for. In these harsh moments of fantasy, it’s easy to understand what it might mean to a woman in the 1960’s, or now, to do things in her own way and own time with no one to oversee or threaten her. Still, it’s lonely work and the book is full of quiet and perfectly rendered heartbreak.
The first page of Hisham Matar’s latest novel is so emotionally perplexing, so masterfully crafted that I promptly screenshot and sent it to several reader friends. My Friends begins with the end. Two old friends are parting ways, and we are left wondering about the weight on their chests, all the unsaid.
Khaled, the narrator, is a young Libyan who moves to the U.K. to attend college, but taking part in anti-Qaddafi protests in London dramatically alters the course of his life. Fellow student Mustafa and older writer Hosam, both also Libyans, become companions in his forced exile. The narrative covers years and geographies, leaping back in time and into the future, hinting at what’s to come and what could have been avoided, taking the friends all the way through to a midlife built on a string of personal choices, in the shadow of real-life events—an embassy shooting, crackdown on dissidents, Libya’s revolution, and the killing of Qaddafi.
As the political tide turns each man must choose for himself what allegiance to their country means. “A revolution requires a great deal of imagination,” Hosam tells Khaled. But so does the life of an émigré who has had to situate himself vis-a-vis his native country and his adoptive one and learn to make a home in the in-between. For Khaled then, a return to his hometown would mean a re-envisioning of the painstakingly built sense of self. “Bengahzi was the one place I longed for the most, it was also the place I most feared to return to,” he says.
This novel is an ambulatory meditation on the passing of lives, on being far from the homeland, and on the complexity of friendships. Here friends are receptacles of trust, dispensers of pleasure, interpreters of the world. They are mirror images, reflecting the person one fails to become just as they are custodians of the memory of our past selves. Matar’s novel is also a moving portrait of family. His characters have the sagaciousness of inhabitants of old lands, knowing what words to choose to fend off lurking danger, what words to soothe the sorrow of separation. Do you recall the old fig tree in the courtyard? Khaled’s father asks his son rather than pressing him to come back to Libya. “It’s suddenly blooming.” My Friends, at once gentle and ravaging, is a work of great beauty, and an infinitely wise book.
I spoke with Hisham Matar on the eve of the publication of his book. We discussed male friendships, assessing history, time and temperament, the distance between one’s chest and the world, and exile as a form of death.
Ladane Nasseri: I’ve heard you say you initially thought the idea for this book came in 2012 but going through your archive you found a few lines you had written about it in 2003 already. What was the known element about this story in the midst of all the unknowns of starting a novel?
Hisham Matar: The first idea was to write a book about friendship, particularly male friendship, and I wanted the human events to be central, but I wanted them to be subjected to history, to politics, to different desires of intimacy, the tension between feeling at home in a friendship but at the same time trust being contingent because of the situation. And also questions of competitiveness. I think on some level my work is fascinated by masculinity. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a man for a long time. These are some of the things that have been accompanying me.
LN: It seems this book has been in you for quite some time. Why is that?
HM: the books I write I feel that in some way I am written by them. It feels that the book arrives or suggests itself, very faintly. And it seems that it has its own way with things, its own attitude, also its own appetites, the things that it wants to think about, so it really does feel like an independent agent and that I have to lend myself to its will. The options seem limited, I either do that, or I just don’t write it. So, in the beginning it’s almost like a half-remembered dream and I’m trying to make myself available to it. It then starts to dictate its own pace and with this one it arrived very, very, slowly.
There were other reasons for the delay that had to do with history. I knew my characters had something to do with the events of the Arab Spring, and what followed and I couldn’t write in the ways that I wanted to write about them so close to the event. I’d written journalism around that time, it’s a very different register, but to write a novel time needed to pass to build a certain degree of passionate ambivalence towards these events. It’s an oxymoron—I feel you need to write about things you are passionate about, but you need a certain kind of ambivalent distance to it so as to pull in all the contradictions. The scene of the killing of Muammar Gaddafi… I would have never been able to write that closer to the event. I was bewildered. So, this book took a long time because I needed to find a way to it, but also because of history.
LN: The events were happening as you were writing…
HM: Yes, and you would know this, if you know people really well, people you grew up with, close friends, members of your family, and you watch them as they’re subjected to these very extreme historical upheavals, you notice how differently they respond. They can start at the same place politically or ideologically or even ethically and end up in different places largely influenced by questions of personal temperament. I thought the novel is really the place for temperament. It’s very hard to talk about temperament on the political stage but it seems to me that temperament is something that’s really at play here.
LN: This novel is an exploration of friendship, and an ode to friendship. You mentioned temperament, but I wonder whether the three main characters, or four if we want to count Rana, are not different facets of Khalid himself—all the people he could have been or that he holds within him. Did you also aim to portray the different facets of an exile?
HM: Not consciously. I didn’t mean for it to be sort of a survey of archetypes of exile. The novel is motivated as you say, by a meditation on what friendship is because it is to me an open question and a fascinating one, and I can’t help but for the book to be on some level in critical praise of friendship. But I had so many intentions, they are hard to account for. I had an intention of writing a novel that was epic in scale, but really about the most intimate things. So, not about revolutionary political drama, but actually about the drama of the heart. I also wanted to write a novel that reciprocated some of the reading pleasure that I get from books, when you’re on the edge of your seat, you can’t stop, you want to know what’s going to happen, at the same time, for it not to do that at the expense of a meditative or a philosophical register. I wanted all those registers. I tried it in different ways, but I found that the restrictions of Khaled’s gaze, the things that he knows and doesn’t know, became incredibly fascinating to me. So, we never really meet Mustafa, Hosam, Rana. We are meeting them through Khaled, through how he sees them. The book is thinking about the distance between what’s in your chest and the world. That’s why it starts with a preoccupation, and it’s motivated by that throughout the book. The desire to know and the impossibility to know, that you can be sitting next to somebody you know very well, looking at the same view or painting and you have no clue what is happening inside their chest. That to me is such a simple, commonplace, everyday occurrence but it’s so phenomenal and bewildering.
LN: You talked about the companionship of books. Books and writers form a thread throughout this novel. Books are physically present, like Khaled’s library or the books Hosam takes with him everywhere he goes. The characters also have a lot of conversations about authors. So, there’s the friendships of Hosam and Mustafa but also the companionship of all these dead authors and their work. Does the title My Friends also refer to these books?
The novel is a space where all the doubts and the contradictions can be articulated.
HM: Yes, very much. It’s a very good question and a good point. I agree. For Khaled the companionship has been obviously those friends, but also very much those books. One of the most moving parts when I was writing was when he discovers that he can walk into a public library without being asked anything and he then uses it as a space for experimentation. Reading has on some level always been that for me. Khaled is a curious character because he is at once very free, he feels that all culture belongs to him, at the same time, he’s very much trapped or stuck. I couldn’t quite figure out as I was writing whether this was the portrait of someone who is truly courageous or the opposite. I still don’t know for sure. I do think it’s quite amazing what he does.
LN: How so?
HM: I think there’s a lot of temptation in a situation like that to go into the past, or to run into the future and both seem to be incredibly legitimate things to do. It’s very difficult to remain with the present specially such an austere present. I don’t even know if that’s a good thing, but I know it’s not easy. Before I wrote books, I thought authors write books when their knowledge about the subject has fully matured, that they write out of a sense of mastery. But from my experience you write a novel exactly at the point when you don’t have words for the thing you’re feeling or thinking about. The novel is a space where all the doubts and the contradictions can be articulated.
LN: One of the main themes in your novel is exile. Some artists grapple with a serious dilemma: having the inspiration that comes from being in one’s own land or prioritizing freedom by leaving. I’ve had many conversations throughout the years about this with Iranian artists, especially filmmakers. Some tell me the day they leave Iran is the day the well dries up, and others say they must leave to be able to pursue their art. In My Friends, the main characters talk about the need to remain connected to the motherland or “the source” as they call it. What has been the role of exile in your development as a writer?
HM: It’s a very good question, a very hard question to answer. The overwhelming majority of my life I’ve lived outside of my country. I was a young child when we left so I came of age, and I became a man abroad. And right now, I feel we need another word maybe because technically I’m not an exile if exile means that you want to return and cannot return. That’s not my situation right now. I have this bifurcated sense of identity or an accumulation of different things. I used to worry ‘am I less because of this?’ or ‘am I more because of that?’ I used to think in those terms. I don’t anymore. It is what it is and I’m certainly much more at ease in it than before. But if you’ve come of age in your home country, and your work is fed and nourished by it such as some of the filmmakers I admire, all this becomes very complicated. Anyone who judges someone for not leaving has no idea how difficult it is. It can be a form of death. But for me it’s not like that because I’ve been away since I was very young, and this book is also about my love affair with London. Although Khaled and I are very different we share the fact that London has been nourishing and hospitable.
LN: The narrative device in this novel is Khaled’s walking itinerary in London. He steps into the past by revisiting defining places and scenes and as a reader it made me very much aware of the slipperiness of time—Time passed and time passing. This book has such an elaborate, intricate structure and because it starts with the end as soon as I finished reading, I wanted to return to the beginning and start again with this new perspective. You have said that the structure of your memoir, The Return, hardly changed compared to how you wrote it. Did you have a similar experience with My Friends?
I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a man for a long time.
HM: Structure to me is integral not only to how the book is read, but to how it’s written. It’s written from its structure rather than, say, writing it linearly and then mixing it up. Obviously, there are many drafts and things move around and get cut, and other things are added. But the mode it is in right now is the mode in which it was written. In fact, the first thing I wrote was the first page and I wrote it years ago. It’s been with me for over a decade, not knowing who’s speaking, why this tone, why is this farewell so significant. But it was structurally written in that shape, and it adheres to some of the things I always think about with time. A protagonist in this book that is even more important than London is time. How it’s managed, how it exists as he is walking.
LN: So, you were clear on Khaled’s walking meditation from the start?
HM: Yes, I knew that it’s told on a walk. I just wasn’t sure what will happen in the walk, where he will go or whether he’ll meet anyone. I was in it. I was moving with the characters. In some ways, writing is easy because all you have to do is be aware of the false notes. When you hit a false note, you take it out and try to find the right note. But there were times when I thought this is not a book or I’m not listening properly. There was a moment, about a year into the book, when I put the 150 or 200 pages I had across my studio—quite a long way into the book for you not to know whether it’s working!—I put them across the whole wall, down the corridor. I needed to see them visually, I needed to know what is happening here. So, I don’t want to give you the impression that it was just an easy…
LN: Walk in the park!
HM: Walk in the park! Exactly! But it worked as long as I stayed in that space. Not trying to see beyond what I know. It’s a bit like in any relationship. If you’re with someone and you’re constantly thinking, about whatever end target you have decided, friendship, or marriage or business partnership… it spoils it because it pre-determines what’s going to happen.
Growing up, I often thought of my mother as a collector of people. She collected people the way other people collect things. So it was never just us five—my parents and their three girls. Instead, people appeared, staying for various periods and disappearing: the live-in helpers; teens and young women my mother helped through some difficulty or family crisis; boarders who lived in our home and attended a neighborhood high school or community college; the gardener’s children who spent weekends and summer holidays with us and who my sisters and I helped with reading and math, much the same way we lined up our dolls on the verandah for our version of school.
For a large part of my youth, my “family” was a combination of people with various social and economic circumstances—some vastly different from my own. Caribbean family stories are often like that, stories of biological and found families, people who come together and pull apart for various reasons.
Often, the novels that are most transformative for me are those that explore atypical family dynamics and transcend conventional family stories. These eight Caribbean family sagas portray families formed by biology or culture, proximity or shared experiences.
The Saroop family dynamics begin to fall apart when Hans Saroop gets a new job serving as night watchman on the Changoor farm after the wealthy owner goes missing. The Changoor farm offers Hans comforts he doesn’t have at his home in the dilapidated barrack where he lives with his wife Marlee and son, and a host of other poor Hindu families. When Hans Saroop falls for his employer, he sets in motion questions about loyalty, sacrifice, and what it takes to get ahead, and upends both his biological family and the family living in the close confines of the barrack.
Land of Love and Drowning follows three generations of the Bradshaw family living on the Virgin Islands in the early 1900s—all descendants of Captain Owen Arthur Bradshaw whose ship sinks around the time the Virgin Islands are transferred to American rule. The book revolves around his three children: Eeona, who is exiled to the island of Tortola after her mother discovers the captain has had an incestuous relationship with his older daughter; Annette, who considers herself the historian of the family; and Jacob, born to the captain’s mistress. Each child has a magical gift that they rely on once they are orphaned, a gift that can either save or destroy their lives.
When Dinah, a domestic worker, becomes pregnant in her late teens, she gives up her baby to a wealthy expat couple working in Jamaica. The couple disappears and eighteen years later, when a young man, Apollo, visits the family for whom Dinah now works, Dinah is convinced the young man is her long-lost son. Apollo is also curious about the strange woman who thinks she knows him and his Jamaican heritage, which his parents do not discuss. Class and race collide in this saga about biological and adopted families.
Rosa Rendón would rather work on her family’s farm than do domestic work. But when the British capture Trinidad and it becomes clear that free black property owners will lose their land and their freedom, Rosa leaves the island and heads north to live among the Crow Nation in Montana. There she marries a Crow Chief but her son Victor increasingly realizes his mother has kept many secrets about his family ties from him. In this multi-generational saga, Rosa has to retrace her own journey to help her son forge his own path to manhood.
Spanning four generations, this novel begins in 1962 with Iapetus, driven mad by the memory of watching his brother, Cronus, murder their father. Cronus encourages Iapetus to forget and later takes in Iapetus’ son, Atlas. But Iapetus and each generation of his descendants remain tied to Cronus even after Cronus dies. Atlas shelves his dream to leave Barbados to study and instead takes on a role helping his cousin manage the hotel Cronus owned. We also meet Atlas’s teenage daughter, Calypso who falls for and has a child with a much older Canadian real estate developer, who is in business with her uncle. And Calypso’s son, also raised at the hotel, battles with his own sense of identity and his mother’s movement in and out of his life. With echoes of Greek mythology, this novel explores the sometimes impossible task of shedding family legacy and forging one’s own path.
When Eleanor Bennett dies, she leaves behind a long voice recording for her children, Byron and Benny, along with a traditional black cake. Eleanor’s message describes a swimmer who escapes her island on her wedding day just after her new husband collapses and dies, and a baby born during her time in England. Estranged siblings, Byron and Benny, are both reeling with the secrets their mother has chosen to disclose only after her death, the new family stories they uncover, and their own broken relationship. The book explores how family stories can both upend and unite a family.
Marisol’s ghost wants the story of her disappearance during the Cuban Revolution told. To do so, she haunts her nephew Ramón, floating through the book and shadowing her nephew through every public and private aspect of his life. Through Marisol’s haunting, Ramón uncovers his family’s buried history, Marisol’s capture and imprisonment during the revolution, and his family’s escape to America. As Ramón learns Marisol’s story, and the reasons his mother prefers not to talk about this period in her family’s life, he engineers a family reunion no one thought possible.
Growing up in a struggling family in the Dominican Republic, fifteen-year-old Ana Canción is pushed into a marriage with a much older man as part of her mother’s plan to move her family from their poverty stricken community to America. Juan Ruiz, who has been living in New York City, marries the teen to obtain the Canción family’s land. When Ana moves with her new husband to New York, she finds a rundown apartment and herself in circumstances that don’t allow her to take care of her family financially as her mother expects. This family saga is one of determination and desire, and a young woman finding her way out of circumstances set up for her to fail.
I’m in Chicago, two hours ahead of my twin brother, Christopher, in California. At eleven at night, I brush my teeth and get into bed. Then our nighttime routine begins.
I keep myself awake for the next hour by scrolling through Twitter. Christopher settles on his couch and also scrolls social media. He itches and needs to distract himself. He plays a word in our game of Words With Friends.
It’s now midnight in Chicago. I listen to a podcast to stay awake and play Words With Friends back with Christopher. I flutter my heavy eyes and play a word. I keep refreshing to see when Christopher plays one back. He’s refreshing, too, playing word after word instead of succumbing to the itch.
I spend another hour alternating between fighting the sleep, losing, and waking up again. I’ve got to stay awake for Christopher.
Around two in the morning, my time, I can’t take it anymore. I give in to the slumber.
Back in California, it’s midnight. When the plays from me on Words With Friends cease, Christopher takes a scratch. He pours himself a small glass of Jameson and sugar-free ginger ale. He sips while he listens to a podcast and ignores his thoughts. He finishes the drink by the podcast’s commercial break and pours another. He’s finished that glass by the next podcast break. He can still hear his thoughts, so he pours another. He flutters eyes that have grown heavy.
Christopher feels warm and numb. He’s had enough when he passes his litmus test of no longer hearing himself say he doesn’t deserve nice things because he’s an alcoholic. He feels calm and safe when he hears nothing but his deep breaths.
He spends another hour watching thoughts come in and out but not stick. Then he gives into sleep.
Twins are supposedly bound more tightly than other siblings. That was true for Christopher and me. We were linked by the same birthday, interests, friends, teachers, classes, and bedroom far past an appropriate age. Since I can remember, I felt bound to take care of Christopher. I was the older twin by one minute. Protecting him was my job as firstborn.
I took this responsibility seriously. When we were in the second grade, our teacher summoned our mother, who’d immigrated from Belize, to a parent-teacher conference. She left work right away, worried we were struggling in school.
Thankfully, it wasn’t about our performance. Christopher and I were hitting all the benchmarks. It was me. I was doing everything for him, coddling him, stifling him.
We were linked by the same birthday, interests, friends, teachers, classes, and bedroom far past an appropriate age.
The teacher’s efforts to address my behavior had failed. She separated us since sitting beside each other made it too easy for me. “I’ll tell them to turn to a page in their poem books,” the teacher said to our mother, “and your daughter will turn her page and then turn her brother’s. Christopher’s not learning.”
But the distance didn’t stop me. When the teacher moved my seat across the room and told us to turn to another poem, I turned my page, walked to Christopher’s desk, and turned his. I huffed back across the class to my seat. I waited for the next instruction minutes later and did the same thing.
“It’s very disruptive,” the teacher pleaded. “Please tell your daughter she can’t do everything for her brother. Your son has got to learn to do things on his own.”
My mom waited until we got home and pulled me aside. She acknowledged that independence wasn’t valued in our Yoruba culture as much as it was in the States. But, she asked me to let him figure things out himself. Let him turn his own pages, write his own chapters, live his own life. I didn’t grasp what she meant, but I told her I’d try.
I winced when I looked across the classroom at Christopher rifling through the pages of the poem book. The teacher’s glance implored me not to get up. I remained seated and stared at the floor, unable to bear seeing whether Christopher had succeeded.
Later that year, school got out early for an administrative day. We sat on a blue bench in front of the building. It was a hot day in Southern California, so we picked the only bench in the shade. Soon, all the other kids had been picked up, but there was still no sign of our mother.
The teacher peered down at her watch every so often. Christopher and I sensed her impatience. She muttered about getting to her meetings.
“Don’t worry, we can make it home, Miss,” my brother assured.
It was the early ‘90s, and, apparently, that was all the teacher needed. She released us.
“I don’t know how to get home,” I whispered as we walked away, not wanting to expose us.
“I do,” he took my hand. “I’ll lead the way.”
I squeezed his hand, and we embarked on our journey home.
Her look of horror caused me to let go of all of the tension I had been holding.
Nothing looked familiar on our route. Not the streets, houses, or businesses. With each turn, Christopher said, “Almost there,” to allay me. He led us from road to road, through crosswalks and neighborhoods.
As we weaved around another corner, and I was sure we’d never make it, I saw, then, the blue and white garage door of our house at the end of the street. I squealed.
“See, told you we’re almost there.” Christopher hurried us along.
We scurried to the front door and rang the doorbell. My mom opened the door.
Her look of horror caused me to let go of all of the tension I had been holding. I peed all down my legs, drenching my overalls and socks.
My mother dropped down to embrace me. She removed my shoes and soggy socks, hoisted me by my armpits, and brought me inside. Christopher walked in calmly, giggling at my mess.
The power of experiencing formative events exactly when another person does is unique. As a twin, you are alone in nothing. You have a lifelong consultant for every rite of passage and milestone. When Christopher and I turned ten, we confided we were not excited to be big kids in middle school that fall. When we turned sixteen, we wished to win the high school basketball championship blowing out the candles on our joint birthday cake. On our twenty-first birthday, we did what I thought was both of our first shots of cheap tequila. And at thirty, we wondered if we’d ever own a home.
For our thirty-fifth birthday, I went to visit Christopher in California. We had each married a few years earlier, but our spouses were away at work. Decades had passed since it was just us. I returned to my childhood routine and responsibilities. I looked around my brother’s apartment for confirmation that he was well. Lights were on, so bills were paid. The refrigerator was full, so he had disposable money. He looked thin, but not too thin, so I thought his health was fine.
As a twin, you are alone in nothing. You have a lifelong consultant for every rite of passage and milestone.
He put the grocery bag he was carrying on the kitchen counter. A 200-milliliter bottle of Jameson fell on its side.
“Oh, is that for tomorrow’s birthday festivities?” I inquired.
My brother didn’t look at me while answering. “No. That’s to get me through tonight.”
He said it so casually that I thought I had misheard him.
I asked him to repeat himself. He did and added: he was an alcoholic, had been for 15 years, started binge drinking to cope with being racially profiled on his lily-white college campus, and never stopped.
We talked for a couple of hours while I peppered Christopher with questions. He answered them with the same nonchalance. No, he didn’t drink and drive. No, he didn’t drink at work. No, I didn’t need to stop drinking around him. No, he didn’t drink all day. Yes, he did drink from nine at night to one in the morning because it helped him sleep. Yes, he was going to keep drinking. No, he didn’t think that was a problem.
I acted calm while sinking deep into my chair.
I returned to Chicago feeling heavy. So much for a special twin connection. I’d failed at the first job I ever had.
Without thinking, I switched into caretaker mode. Christopher claimed he didn’t want to get sober, but surely he didn’t mean it. I browsed articles with headlines like “How to Help An Alcoholic Stop Drinking,” but none of the advice seemed applicable. The reports described Christopher as high-functioning, a personality trait that would make quitting hard because drinking worked for him. He had a good job, owned a house, appeared happily married—why stop drinking when things were going well?
So, I came up with the Words With Friends solution. Since bedtime was most acute, I stayed up with Christopher, hoping to keep him focused on something other than drinking for as much of the night as possible. Fewer hours and drinks remained between him and falling asleep. I didn’t need to sleep; I needed to ensure we reached the rest of life’s milestones together. I panicked, thinking of turning forty, fifty, or sixty alone. Every night I stayed up was another chance at another night in our old age together.
Scientists love to study twins. Identical twins are the most coveted, but fraternal twins of different genders present a unique opportunity to tease out the influence of the environment on life outcomes. Christopher and I were a useful experiment. Besides gender, we shared everything else. I could see the future study: What happens to first-generation Black girl and boy twins brought up in the same immigrant household?
The Black girl develops the tenacity she sees in her mother. Her mother, very familiar with racism, taught her how to fight it. She thrives. She graduates high school as valedictorian. She attends Ivy League schools and, already used to defending herself, pushes against racism at every turn. At every school, in every job, in every relationship.
He had a good job, owned a house, appeared happily married—why stop drinking when things were going well?
The Black boy doesn’t think his mother’s tenacity applies to him. He has no idea how to fight off racism. It bothers him, but he feels resigned, powerless to escape it. He graduates high school with okay grades and gets into an okay college. But the racism there intensifies and infuriates him. To his fortune, the college’s binge drinking culture is the perfect coping mechanism. Most nights, he disappears at dorm room parties into a boozy nirvana. Soon, he measures his days not from waking to sleep but from yesterday’s drink to tonight’s. He marries his high school crush, who didn’t balk at his disclosure that he’s an alcoholic. She was raised by alcoholic, high-functioning parents and is accustomed to living with substance abuse. She doesn’t enable Christopher, but she doesn’t encourage him to seek recovery on his own, either. He gets a sales job where he can’t ignore the racism; he just takes it. Then he drinks every night to forget.
One weekday several months after our birthday, I called Christopher. It was part of our new routine. We talked once a week for two to three hours. I liked to keep Christopher talking, hoping he’d offer some clues about how to help him stop drinking. But he usually didn’t talk about his substance abuse.
Two and a half hours into this phone conversation, Christopher asked, “How come you’re not like me?”
I didn’t understand.
“Like, why aren’t you an alcoholic?” He sniffled. “We had the same childhood. How come I’m the only one who’s like this?” His speech was slurred as he choked up. “I don’t deserve to be happy. I’m an alcoholic who deserves to suffer.”
I hadn’t seen or heard my brother cry since we were small. I didn’t even recognize it until his sniffling became sobs.
I wasn’t prepared for this to be the entrée into talking about Christopher’s alcoholism. There was no time to pull up the websites on how to respond. I spoke from the heart.
“There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re doing your best with what you’ve got,” I said.
Truth was, I didn’t know why I didn’t abuse alcohol or some other substance. My best guess was that I was fortunate enough to not be a Black man in the U.S. I’d never had to appear less scary or threatening. I’d never been asked why I was in this store, this car, this neighborhood. I didn’t have to drink away those indignities to make it to the next day.
We got off the phone. Hours later, we did our bedtime routine. I struggled to stay awake to play one more word, to keep one more sip at bay. At midnight Central and 10 p.m. Pacific, I drifted to sleep.
My mother told me recently that she’d had a separate conversation with Christopher that afternoon when our second-grade teacher called her to school.
She asked him if he was having trouble in class. My brother said he wasn’t. Then why did his sister have to turn the pages in the poem book for him? Did he have a difficult time finding the poems?
“No,” my brother had told her. “I know how to do it myself. But Sister likes doing it for me. I want to make her happy.”
It all became clear.
In Yoruba culture, the second twin is considered the elder twin. According to the Yoruba, the second sends the first twin to judge if the world is fit and beautiful before the second twin descends.
Here I thought I was the elder twin responsible for the caretaking. But Christopher was the older one, and he’d also been taking care of me.
I called Christopher back right away. “You deserve happiness, whether that’s sobriety or something else for you. I won’t try to do it for you—not like I could, anyway. You are capable on your own.”
That night, I fell asleep earlier than usual and missed the bedtime routine.
I dreamt Christopher and I were on a tropical beach. We looked older. Christopher’s salt and pepper beard matched the strands of silver at the roots of my hairline.
Here I thought I was the elder twin responsible for the caretaking.
Christopher dipped his toe in the crystal blue water. He flinched at its warmness. He was used to the cold, choppy waters of addiction. He’d been treading water for so long that he didn’t realize how much it took to keep from drowning. At least he was alive.
He walked farther and farther into the water, mesmerized by its glorious warmth on his skin. He’d thought there existed only chilly, turbulent seas.
He’d never experienced anything like the balm of the ocean. He kept walking until the water reached his neck. His feet ceased to touch the ground. He didn’t struggle to stay up. He was buoyant.
I followed him out into the water, a few feet behind him, and yelled, “Lead the way.”
My first semester in graduate school for my MFA in poetry, I locked myself in my room in the apartment I shared with five roommates in the Lower Haight in San Francisco to write a paper about Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, the book widely considered to kick off the confessional movement in American poetry. I still have the Robert Lowell paper saved deep in a folder within a folder on my hard drive, and I pull it up to see what 23-year-old me had to say about the confessional. Here’s part of my thesis: “While it is certainly true that Lowell’s autobiographical writing in Life Studies has greatly influenced some escapist, arbitrary, and amateur confessional writing, Life Studies itself is filled with much more than arbitrary detail, and extends far beyond escapist writing.” Escapist, arbitrary, amateur. This list of words used to deride and dismiss the confessional—to which my present-day self would add, self-indulgent, overly emotional, hysterical—strike me now as very gendered. It’s interesting to me that I—a self-proclaimed feminist then and now—was using the poetry of a white cis man to argue that a poetic mode primarily associated with young women’s writing—and one that I used in my own grad school poems about female friendship, music, lip gloss, walking around in the mall in the 1990s—can indeed be valid, powerful, and even political. By arguing that Lowell’s personal poems were in fact astute social commentary, was I also arguing this same case for my own?
Life Studies may have been one of the first books to introduce confessionalism into American poetry, but the term confessional is most often linked with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and other women poets whose writing is too commonly misread and dismissed as autobiographical gushings of emotion rather than crafted, intentional social commentary. My new book of poems, DIARY, interrogates these ideas about the confessional and gender. Rather than engaging in the acrobatics of trying to come across as not too emotional, not too messy, not too personal; always measured and buttoned up and chill and universal, the poems in my book indulge in the mundane, the feminine, the bratty and sad and bodily and TMI. I’m so excited and inspired by other contemporary writing by women and gender-fluid poets who push back on antiquated and sexist ideas around the confessional by doing the same. Here’s a list of 8 books in this vein:
Speaking of graduate school, this necessary book digs into “the tendency of MFA programs to teach women that their lives aren’t worth writing about.” These crafted, conversational poems insist on the power and merit of everyday speech in women’s writing, referencing the free-wheeling poetics of both Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems and Paule Marshall’s “From the Poets in the Kitchen.” Gravitas interrogates an academic space that closes its eyes to a serial abuser professor on staff while chronically dismissing poems about the everyday by women: “Believing that poetry about the life of a young woman lacks gravitas / believing that the life of a young woman lacks gravitas / enables a certain cognitive dissonance.”
The followup to McClure’s 2015 book Tender Data, The Gone Thing explores family history, class mobility, labor, and loss in elegant, unflinching poems. One of my favorite things about Monica’s work is how her speaker fucks with us, calls the reader to task, and plays with our assumptions: “Yes I am talking about being poor in America / Suck my dick I am no longer poor I’m high-salaried”. Pastoral beauty and designer perfume mixes with despair, disgust, filth, and astute commentary on systemic oppression, work and labor.
Written during the years when the author cared for her mother at the end of her life and after her mother’s death, mahogany subverts conventional narratives around grief and the confessional with haunting poems about family, loss, and the struggle to make it through each day. Lewis weaves pop culture, politics, contemporary and historical literature into poems that draw their titles and inspiration from songs by Diana Ross and The Supremes or Ross’s solo career: “my mother used to clean houses / as a child / some days I can barely / get out of bed /in my mind / she’s like diana ross / scrubbing the white lady’s stairs / in lady sings the blues / except prettier / and with green eyes”
Printed in vibrant full color and blending poetry, prose, photography, and other visual elements, Tamayo’s radical book connects the dots between cycles and systems of violence in U.S. history—from the genocide of native people that the country was built on to the American poetry world’s colonialist roots. Interspersed with images of U.S. immigration forms doctored to tell the poet’s own family story, bruise/bruise/break digs into familial and global histories while blasting open conventions around genre, grammar, gender and respectability.
Zoe Tuck’s poems break the fourth wall, inviting in talk about everything from work and money to friends and even commentary on the poems themselves: “I’m sick of the I / I wish I could just write about mythological and historical themes”. Accounts of everyday life—cooking dinner on a phone call with a friend, planning how to make “like $1,000 this month,” staying up late watching Encino Man—are balanced with reflections on the French Renaissance, tarot, Ancient Greece, Hannah Arendt, The Odyssey, The X-Files, “The Thong Song.” The result is a constellation of references that builds on itself into the size of a whole life.
Killing Kanoko by Hiromi Itō, translated by Jeffrey Angles
Groundbreaking Japanese poet Hiromi Itō has been writing about feminist issues surrounding sexuality, reproduction and the body since the early 1980s. Turning away from the formal poetic conventions of the era, her poetry uses colloquial, sometimes childlike and vulgar language which brought to her being considered a “shamanness” pulling her language “from some mysterious source deep within.” In Killing Kanoko, originally published in 1980 and translated in 2009, Itō writes about childbirth, menopause, abortion, and ambivalence around motherhood in ways that still feel very much taboo even today.
Diana Whitney’s quietly explosive collection of poems explores womanhood, motherhood, grief, the spaces where being the parent of a girl child and being a woman overlap with scars left over from childhood. There’s “danger everywhere” in these moody, atmospheric poems that bring a modern, feminist spin to the pastoral as they conjure the natural world, dark skies, early morning gardens and frozen rivers. Time passes and everything grows so fast and also in slow motion—chickens, lilacs, girls, relationships strained by the years. As Whitney’s poem “The Long Goodbye” asks, “How can you savor what you have / when it demands so much attention?”
This book’s speaker tells us, “I once wrote on a fellowship application that I write poetry because it is the only way I can scream. I didn’t get the fellowship.” This is just one example of how these powerful poems exploring queer Filipinx identity, trauma, immigration, colonization, and art call into question the rules of academia and the so-called rational world. In a white supremacist patriarchal culture where science and logic are so often privileged over the spiritual, emotional, and intangible, these poems insist the full spectrum of humanity has a right to exist, thrive, and be taken seriously.
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