You Can’t Raise a Daughter on Hope and Junk Food Alone

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“A New World” by Kristen Gentry

Parker stares at his niece Zaria’s stomach, covered by a stretched-out white tank top. Her belly is a dingy full moon creeping on the horizon of the kitchen table. She carries a whole new person, a whole new world. Zaria, sixteen, sits with Parker’s daughter, JayLynn, who is fifteen and wears a new hickey on her neck. It’s smaller than the last one, which was actually two, neighboring islands that were fading by the time Parker saw them. The new one is the size and shape of a fingerprint. It glows red like the legs of the woman in the champagne glass on the sign for that strip joint on Seventh Street when you pass it at night. Parker can’t remember the club’s name. It’s next door to a liquor store that’s next to another strip joint. And there’s another one a little ways down. They go on and on down Seventh Street, heading away from Churchill Downs. The legs of the woman in the sign spill over the glass’s rim. One stretches out, kicking the dark.

The hickey demands Parker’s eyes when they’re not on Zaria’s belly or the sad dinner and dessert he packs in saved, doubled-up plastic bags from Kroger. He’s eager to streak out of the house and get to his job at Louisville Gas & Electric, someplace where he can make things work. He’s a stationary engineer and runs the boilers that create the steam that turn the generators and bring light and warmth to people’s homes. On his lunch break this evening, he will eat the canned beans and franks, the package of bright orange cheese crackers with pasty peanut butter, and a roll of lemon crème cookies while he jokes and complains about wives along with Jim and Terry like he’s still got one.

Claudia called him last month after seeing the first hickey(s), like it was his fault, asking him what the hell he was doing over there. Over there, like the house and life she’d lived with him was far, far away. He hates this and his understanding of that sense of distance from places and people once known, hates that his wedding ring is coupled with dropped pennies, a fallen button, and other junk stored in the top drawer of his nightstand for unlikely repairs and reuse. Once Claudia finished yelling, Parker told her he’d never let any boys come over and hadn’t seen any hickeys, but he figured JayLynn’s boyfriend was who had marked her up. He’s never met him, but he knows his name. Michael is always popping up in JayLynn’s conversations with Zaria. She swirls his name in pink and purple ink on notebook paper. Parker didn’t tell Claudia that as much as she sleeps, the boy could have walked right into her apartment. He and JayLynn could have snuggled up in her bed and watched a whole movie before they started kissing and Parker doesn’t want to know what else. Part of him itched to say this, but the much bigger part didn’t want to fight or hurt Claudia and suggested dinner as a solution. She’d come over, he’d cook, and they’d sit down together to eat and talk to JayLynn.

“She’s already having sex, Parker.” Claudia sighed. “I’m taking her to the doctor next week to put her on birth control.” After that, Parker said nothing he remembers, nothing coherent or helpful before Claudia hung up. He appeared as dumb and naive as she believes him to be, someone who couldn’t save anyone from anything.

The girls are talking about ways to induce labor. Zaria’s due date was July 17, nine days ago.

JayLynn runs her finger down a page of the library copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting spread open on the table. “We can take a walk,” she suggests before crunching into a slice of her frozen pizza.

Parker cracks ice from a tray and drops the cubes into his extra-large thermos. He doesn’t jump in to ask if the girls intend to take this walk soon or what they plan to do if their efforts are successful since he’s about to leave and there’s no telling what street Zaria’s mother, Dee, has lost herself on chasing today’s highs. Dee and Claudia, sisters, spend their days disappearing, each in their own spectacularly common ways. If Claudia is home from work when Zaria’s contractions begin, she will most likely be buried in her bed covers and won’t answer the phone. She might even have the ringer off. Parker doesn’t know much about the baby’s father, Travis, but from listening to the girls’ conversations, he’s learned that the boy has pretty hair that Zaria wants for the baby, but no car.

Zaria groans and slumps in her chair. “I’m tired and it’s hot. I just walked from the bus stop to get here. Does the book say anything about taking a nap to induce labor?”

“You know it doesn’t, but the way you snore could probably get him out of there. I’m surprised he hasn’t already pushed his way out. The last time you slept over I swear I wanted to punch you. Matter fact, I hit you on the arm and you still didn’t wake up.”

“Leave me alone, I’m pregnant.” Zaria rises to reach for the family-size bag of Cool Ranch Doritos she brought with her. Half of her arm is lost as she digs for a chip.

The girls’ hunger is relentless. They are always eating— fat dill pickles that smell up whole rooms, bags of barbecue Grippo’s potato chips, fish platters with lots of fried batter crunchies from Long John Silver’s (where Travis works), and frozen pizza. Parker is forever buying frozen pizza. Sometimes it seems he’s spent his whole life carting the flat red boxes from his truck to the house, as if Claudia and her fried pork chops and greens were only a vivid, delicious mirage. When he looks at the girls, he feels like he’s stepped into a carnival of mirrors. Claudia and Dee ghost on their daughters’ faces. They roam in their eyes and mouths, in the tiny moles marking their cheekbones. Crack has hollowed Dee, snatched her few meaty parts. If Parker didn’t know about the baby and how the world works, he could believe that Zaria’s rounder cheeks and chin, her swollen breasts, and all that belly are the stolen pieces of Dee. He can imagine Zaria picking up the trashed chunks and patting her mother onto herself like makeup, rubbing her in like lotion.

He is thankful JayLynn doesn’t have her mother’s body. Claudia in a pair of red shorts—the cocoa-butter sheen of her coffee skin stretched tight over the just right muscle- to-fat ratio of her thighs—led him out of his booth at Blue’s restaurant and away from his plate of the best fried chicken he’s ever eaten. JayLynn is skinny, a straight line with no brake-smashing bumps, but today it seems she’s doing her best to show what she’s got in lace-trimmed, blue-jean shorts so short he’s grateful for the strip of extra material the lace provides even though it reminds him of nighties and bedroom whispers. Her hair is pulled up in a bun on top of her head, as if she’s showcasing the hickey right along with the tiny gold-plated Nike earrings she begged him for last Christmas. He regrets buying them and supporting the company’s slogan to Just do it.

JayLynn is skinny, a straight line with no brake-smashing bumps, but today it seems she’s doing her best to show what she’s got.

The Wednesday before last, JayLynn left her new birth control pills on the bathroom counter. Parker thought she’d be back the next day to get them, but every morning he’s been brushing his teeth glaring at the butter-colored plastic compact. He thought that when JayLynn came over yesterday afternoon that would be the end of that, but this morning he scrubbed his mouth into a slobbery white foam and spat staring at the compact. He imagined its pale yellow spread on nursery walls and crib bedding. He opened the compact to find the “THU” pill still nestled in its slot.

“It is Fri-day!” the DJ on the radio announces as Parker fills his thermos with tap water. Some of the cubes snap and split clear bolts of lightning on the inside when the water hits them. “TGIF am I right, y’all?” JayLynn’s boombox, perched on the kitchen counter, is always playing some song about sex or love or both, reminding Parker of all he’s lost. When the girls sing Mary J. Blige’s “Not Gonna Cry,” they begin quietly, but by the time they reach the song’s climax about no guarantees in love and not getting the part about being left, the words are rising from their guts, their eyes are shut tight, and they belt that song like women who have been married to lying sons-of-bitches for years and years. JayLynn can carry a tune, but Zaria has the worst voice Parker has ever heard. He thinks she must be tone deaf. It’s painful to hear her cracking love songs into pieces.

When the DJ fades into the music, Parker recognizes the intro of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads.” He’s no more relieved to hear this than whatever song would have the girls singing about shaking butts or broken hearts. When the synthesizer zigzags the intro, the girls don’t gasp and jump to turn up the volume. “Tha Crossroads” is the only video that plays when they watch The Box. Over and over, the Bone Thugs walk down streets with friends who vanish before their eyes, lost to another world. The song plays on B96.5 (the only radio station JayLynn and Zaria will listen to) at least once an hour, making every day funereal. The girls are getting over the hype, but they sing along. Even half-heartedly and without knowing most of the words, they get the haunting sentiment of loss and vulnerability just right.

Claudia moved out in November, two months after she left rehab. Clean of the Vicodin, she said to Parker, “This isn’t working,” and Parker thought it was just the depression talking. The words weren’t backed with the passion he thought someone would have if they were really planning to get a divorce. Yet, she got a job at the plasma center downtown, packed, left, and Parker thought it could be a good thing, that more physical space could help Claudia work out whatever was going on in her head. He now knows that was stupid. As if she actually needed to wrestle her demons, launch into a tornado of fists, elbows, and feet rumbling through room after room. As if she had a better chance of winning without him jumping in and helping her fight.

He stayed in the house, in the Shively suburbs, surrounded by homes decorated with leftover Halloween pumpkins whose carved smiles melted to rot. For Christmas, he bought a real tree like he always did, and he and JayLynn filled it with the ornaments he pulled from the basement. When he came home from work, he vacuumed the fallen needles and watched his neighbors’ candy-colored lights blinking out of synch in the cold black.

Claudia and JayLynn moved to an apartment in the Highlands, just off Bardstown Road with its stretch of cafés, bookstores, and vintage boutiques roamed by punk rock white boys who look like whips of black licorice, white girls with pink hair, black girls wearing blue lipstick. The shops sell “Keep Louisville Weird” bumper stickers to remind the outsiders and outcasts to stand proud and firm.

Claudia hired a divorce attorney in February and Parker followed suit. He signed the papers without a fight, as if he’d never loved her, because he loves her so much. He wants her to be happy, but when he asks JayLynn for updates, he finds that nothing’s getting better. He knows Claudia’s embarrassed about stealing pills from the hospital and regrets losing her nursing license. He likes to imagine she misses him.

When he came home from the grocery store yesterday to find JayLynn on the couch, she reported, “She’s still depressed,” in a bored monotone before he could even greet her or ask about Claudia. JayLynn used What to Expect When You’re Expecting, resting on her lap, as a makeshift table as she painted her fingernails in steady black stripes.

“Somebody drop you off?”

“No. TARC.”

“I told you I don’t like you catching the bus. I could have picked you up. I was just out.” He walked to the kitchen, set the bags on the table, and began putting the frozen pizza, milk, and eggs into the refrigerator.

“I can ride the TARC, Daddy, it’s fine,” JayLynn called to him. “I’m not a baby. Plus, I told you I don’t want you coming to get me anymore because you can’t ever just honk the horn and wait. You always gotta knock and come in and peek around and knock again at Mama’s door and beg her to talk or get coffee, and it only makes things worse. Plus, asking her to get coffee is lame anyway because neither one of y’all drink it, and the whole thing is just sad.”

Parker left the rest of the groceries on the table and went back into the living room so JayLynn could see him when he said, “It’s not sad; it’s love. I love your mother,” but she was wiping a black smudge from her pinky with a neatly folded pad of toilet paper.

She spoke while looking down at her hands. “I know, but she don’t want all that. Plus, it ain’t helping her and you’re playing yourself, doing all this loving for somebody who ain’t trying to love you back.”

Parker has heard JayLynn throwing her two cents to Zaria about running back to Travis after he’s spent days ignoring her calls and pages. She says, “Wouldn’t be me. You a good one.” All this tough love disappears when they’re talking about Dee. “She’ll be back,” JayLynn says when Zaria tells her how many nights Dee has been gone. “It’s the drugs, it’s not her,” she said when Zaria told her Dee found the money Travis gave her to buy baby stuff. She forgives their mothers for all trespasses. When she visits Parker, she never stays longer than two nights before returning to the apartment to check on her mother. Parker is sure JayLynn likes Michael and wears all that greasy-looking, strawberry-scented lip gloss for him. She probably thinks she loves him, but she doesn’t love him enough to go running across town just to be there while he sleeps, not enough to do things she said she would never do.

The word “sex” from JayLynn’s mouth sends a tremor through Parker’s hand. Some of the water in the ice trays he’s refilled splashes onto the floor.

“Shit,” he curses so softly the girls don’t notice.

“It’s too hot to do it,” Zaria whines.

Parker sets the trays in the freezer and goes to grab a paper towel.

“Look, it’s summer, it’s hot, get over it. I’m sure they got air conditioning at Travis’s house. I don’t think you have to do it for that long,” JayLynn says.

“The book says you’re supposed to have an orgasm to get your muscles contracting and stuff and that would probably take a looong time. You know Travis be like . . .” Zaria rata-tat-tats on the table with her fist, and the girls burst into laughter. Parker winces at the knowing tinkling in the notes that float from JayLynn. “The doctor said the man’s thing doesn’t hit the baby’s head, but I don’t see how it doesn’t, especially now. The baby’s probably, like, right down there, all ready, and I don’t want him traumatized with Travis beating on his head, denting it all up. Plus, I ain’t even feeling Travis like that right now. I told you, Cindy said she saw him walking down Broadway with some light-skinned girl the other day.”

Parker wipes the floor and wonders when the idea of his daughter having sex won’t startle him so much, though he’s already grown more accustomed to it than he’d like. The girls’ conversations around him have gotten increasingly frank. With Zaria’s pregnancy and JayLynn’s birth control pills, he guesses they figure there’s nothing left to hide; they’ve laid their cards flat. Bluntness has risen in JayLynn like a fever.

Last night, she was curled on the couch with her knees nearly tucked under her chin, gazing at the TV in a blank way that made Parker’s stomach turn. When he asked her if something was wrong, she told him, “Cramps. I’m bleeding in clumps,” without taking her eyes off the TV.

“Jay,” he’d groaned before he could stop himself.

She laughed. “I know. It’s gross.”

He feels bad about that groan, the chastisement. He acted like a boy. He should have handled the situation better, been comforting like she was when she looked up at him, said, “I took some Pamprin. I’ll be alright,” and gave him a quick, close-mouthed smile before turning back to the TV. She drops this token of reassurance that she’s not her mother and only gets a normal kind of sad when he catches her contemplating things he can’t see in the tumble of boiling water as she prods a block of Ramen noodles with a fork or lying on her bed staring into a book. Claudia used to lock their bedroom door, and Parker had to open it with a bent bobby pin, but JayLynn always keeps her door wide open. He can walk right in. He knows he should be happy about this. She wants to talk the darkness away so it won’t catch them too. She wants to know that they’re okay, but they’re not, and he doesn’t know what to say about that.

Now, he drops the paper towel in the garbage and watches JayLynn’s black fingernails flash as they flip through the book’s pages. She’s the one who checked the book out from the library. She reminds Zaria to take her prenatal vitamins. She wouldn’t just forget to take her birth control pills, not with Zaria big and pregnant, the baby any minute away. The abandoned pills are another card face up, plans being announced.

The baby JayLynn’s trying to have is for Claudia. It’s a lastditch-effort baby, a poked-hole-in-the-condom-when-heleft-the-room baby, what Parker and his friends used to call a Jesus baby—a baby that will fix all the problems, save the world. This phrase was coined before any of them had kids, when they could laugh at somebody else who had gotten the wrong girl pregnant, when losing a woman didn’t turn them into piles of shards. Parker has only seen one successful Jesus baby.

When his friend Buggie’s girlfriend, Theresa, came up pregnant, everybody but Buggie knew what that was all about. They humored him when he bragged about his super sperm busting through the fortress built by years of birth control pills. Theresa was a decent girl, so nobody said anything. She was good for Buggie, too good for him really. No one knew why she’d want to stick around with him, but she gave him a son that straightened his wandering eye and made it see all her magic. They’re still married, both happily, it seems.

Sometimes Parker thinks if he could do it all again, he would flush Claudia’s pain pills down the toilet, get in her face and yell instead of convincing himself she knows what she’s doing. He wishes he hadn’t loved Claudia like a puppy, all pant and rollover. Sometimes when he can’t stand the open space in his bed and spreads himself wide to fill it, he feels all his regrets buzzing neon yellow.

But he keeps doing stupid shit. Keeps walking past those birth control pills and not saying anything. He could live with the discomfort of knowing he’s still the same coward, but he knows he’s worse than that.

He has imagined the child JayLynn could have. Claudia will blame him. Even if he doesn’t tell her about the pills on the sink (and he never will), she will make the baby his fault. He will deny, defend, and take all her insults like bullets. He will accept their lodge deep inside of his white meat. Claudia’s anger will fade like a headache when she sees the girl with JayLynn’s baby face—big, glossy eyes and dimples poked into cheeks.

JayLynn had a grown woman’s belly laugh at eight months. She would laugh so hard at Claudia peek-a-booing at her that she would sigh, slumping back sideways into her swing with a crooked grin on her face, catching her breath after the surprise of her mama returning to her world. Claudia loved this, couldn’t get enough of it. She would always call him to watch, and he never got tired of hearing her and JayLynn’s laughter jumbled up and spilling out.

Parker has dreamt about him and Claudia together as grandparents, showing JayLynn how to change a diaper, helping her bathe the baby in the sink. He’s seen Claudia rocking from side-to-side, gathering calm from the warm, milky smell of the baby’s crown. He’s given the baby JayLynn’s laugh. He’s heard Claudia calling to him, seen her playing peek-a-boo and laughing so hard she’s unable to steady herself for another disappearance.

“Come out, come out, little one!” JayLynn is bent down speaking into Zaria’s stomach. Her mouth nearly touches the small knob of Zaria’s belly button. “You’re gonna be so cute and fat and squishy, and I’m gonna eat you all up.”

Zaria puts two fingers to JayLynn’s forehead and pushes softly, slowly, nudging her backward. “That’s probably why he’s staying in there. Back up, weirdo.”

JayLynn turns back to her plate and takes another bite of pizza. “But he’s gonna be so cute!” she squeals through her mouthful.

“Alright, girls. I’m gone.” Parker grabs his lunch and thermos. “Call me if you need me.” He plants a kiss on each girl’s forehead. When JayLynn raises her head for him, he gets a closer look at that damn hickey.

“I just wish you were having a girl,” Parker hears her tell Zaria as he walks to the front door.

“I know. Me, too.”

“I’m having a girl.”

“You get what you get,” Zaria says.

“Well, I’m getting a girl.”

“Alright.”

“I’m serious. You have to do it in the missionary position right after your period every day until four days before you ovulate and eat a lot of—”

Parker closes the door. He will talk to JayLynn as soon as Zaria leaves. He will figure out what to say.

JayLynn calls Parker at ten, an hour before his shift ends, to tell him Zaria’s having contractions, they called Dee, and now they’re at the hospital. He’s surprised that Dee was at home and more surprised to see her at the hospital when he arrives. She looks worse than he remembers. He saw her just a couple weeks ago when she dropped Zaria off, but her deterioration is like a stunning beauty that slaps like new every time. Even her hair—brushed into a stiff, dry ponytail—is skinny.

Dee cocks an eyebrow. “What you doing here? They said it’s okay for Jay to go to the delivery room when it’s time, though I don’t know why she wants to. Ain’t nothing pretty gonna happen in there.”

Parker doesn’t tell her he’s come to see how things play out because the baby already seems to be working miracles. “Support.” He shrugs. “I was up anyway. Just got off work.”

Dee smiles, showing her rotting teeth. “That’s real nice.”

Parker wants her to close her mouth. It’s hard to look at her.

“The doctor said she’s got a while to go. She’s still dilating and worrying my nerves, about to drive me crazy. Travis ain’t even up here. We been calling and calling. His mama said he ain’t home, and she don’t know where he is. Ain’t that something?”

Parker wags his head in a that’s-a-shame shake.

“Come on down here with me. I told this girl I was gonna get her a Popsicle.” Dee starts scooting down the hall and Parker walks beside her. “You’re a good man,” she says, smiling again. “Claudia’s stupid.”

After they reach the nurse’s station, Dee asks one of the three nurses for a Popsicle and turns to Parker. “She just did this because she hates me.”

“Claudia?”

“No, Zaria.”

For a second Parker thought Dee had answers about his marriage that he didn’t. He manages to climb out of that disappointment to offer her reassurance. “That’s not true,” he says.

“She thinks it’s gonna be easy. Like it’s a doll.”

“Naw.” Parker shakes his head and chuckles. “It ain’t easy.” “That’s what I try to tell her. She thinks I don’t know nothing. Nothing. All that kid stuff is out the window.”

“Sure is.”

The nurse returns with a Popsicle and hands it to Dee, who holds it out to Parker. “Give this to her. I need to go get something to eat. The chips from the vending machine ain’t cutting it.”

Parker doesn’t move. “I can pick you up something to eat.” He stares into her eyes and sees the itch crawling all over her.

“Naw, I got it. I’ma be back.”

“Dee . . .” He’s never spoken to her about the drugs before; it’s never been his business.

“I’m coming right back. She ain’t even ready yet.” She sets the Popsicle on the counter and turns to leave.

Parker grabs her wrist and speaks quietly, “Stay.” This word is a plea, and he hates the way it sounds, the way he always sounds—nice, understanding. But he doesn’t understand. Nothing makes sense. “You are killing yourself.” As he says the word “killing,” he feels the tight scrunch of his face, the rise of his top lip and nose. The face has to contort into a snarl, teeth have to be bared, to speak it clearly, to emphasize it. He needs her to get it. “Killing yourself,” he repeats, “and that shit’s not worth it.” His eyes are locked with hers, but she breaks the connection to flash squinted eyes down to his hand wrapped around her as if trying to make sure what she’s seeing is real.

The face has to contort into a snarl, teeth have to be bared, to speak it clearly, to emphasize it.

“Nigga, you crazy? Get the fuck off me.”

“Don’t—”

“Get the fuck off me!” Dee’s raised voice gets the nurses’ attention.

“Is there a problem?” The redheaded nurse reluctantly rises from her chair. She looks young and afraid but prepared to handle the situation.

Embarrassed, Parker releases Dee. He watches as she stomps away in her beat-up shower shoes, cursing to herself, and disappears through the double doors. The nurse’s chair creaks as she sits back down.

JayLynn pokes her head out of Zaria’s room. When she sees Parker and no Dee, she looks confused and hurries down the hall. “What happened? Where’s Dee?” “She left,” Parker says.

“Just now?” Her eyes dart in the direction of the double doors.

“She’s not going to stay,” Parker says to keep her from bolting down the hall.

“What’d you say?”

“I asked her to stay.”

“But is that what you said? ‘Stay’? Was she just about to leave and that’s when you came?”

“I said she’s not going to stay. Let her go.”

“Don’t get mad. I’m just saying, you’re not the best person for persuading people.” She sighs. “You’re right, though. She was probably gonna go anyway. Zaria’s gonna be so hurt.”

“That baby wasn’t ever going to make her stay.”

“But you would think she’d be thinking about being there for Zaria and seeing her first grandbaby being born.”

“Dee needs help.”

JayLynn nods slowly and looks grave. “Yeah.”

“A baby’s not going to help your mama, either.”

JayLynn’s eyes flash to the nurses before she whispers, “Dee’s a crackhead. Mama’s not taking those pills anymore; she’s just depressed. It’s different.”

Parker’s not surprised that JayLynn doesn’t deny her plan, she’s hidden nothing, but he’s startled by her conviction that the plan is reasonable.

“Your mama’s an addict, just like Dee.” He hates admitting this, but knows he needs to speak the words for himself as much as for JayLynn. “Just because she went to rehab doesn’t mean her problems with drugs are all over. It’s not that simple. And depression is a serious illness. It’s more than being sad, Jay.”

JayLynn rolls her eyes. “I know that.”

“Well, act like you know the next time you want to jump in bed with your boyfriend without taking your birth control.” The words come out harsher than Parker intends, but he adds nothing soothing.

JayLynn swipes the Popsicle off the counter. “I gotta take this to Zaria.”

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” Parker asks.

“Yeah,” JayLynn mumbles and glares at the floor.

“Do you hear me?” Parker leans forward and bends down so her gaze falls on his eyes staring up at her.

She wipes the tear sliding down her cheek with the heel of her hand not holding the Popsicle. “Yes, god.” She rolls her eyes again. “This is melting.” She raises the Popsicle.

He feels the jarring smack of déjà vu as he watches her walk away.

Zaria snores loudly over the juicer infomercial playing at whisper volume on the TV mounted in the corner of the room. Parker watches JayLynn staring down at Malik in his hospital bassinet. Parker’s so tired, his eyes are burning like the room is full of smoke. He appreciates the way this helps to nearly blur JayLynn’s hickey into nonexistence, but he wants to go home and sleep. Before sleep, he wants a shower. He needs the clean slate, the fresh start. He wants to wash last night. All his hope has gone foul and embarrassing, like his breath.

He called Claudia last night.

He was relieved when Zaria turned down his offer to stay in the delivery room because it would be too weird, but he thought she should have somebody other than JayLynn, who wouldn’t be prepared for the shit, the blood, and all those other intimate and uncomfortable smells. More than this, he was lonely and missed Claudia, and it was dark and he wanted to follow the day’s opportunity to the end of its unraveling. The phone rang and rang. Claudia must have heard it. He told himself that was it, the last time, but watching the sun rise, dousing the city with light, made him itch. Every day spins a new world of possibility; that spool of thin thread seems to have no end. There is always another day, another hour, another minute when he thinks, Maybe now. Maybe today.

But right now, he sits in a new day stinking with yesterday, and JayLynn doesn’t want to leave while Zaria is asleep. He is tired of everything being his problem. He doesn’t want this for JayLynn even though she seems intent on this fate.

“Was I that little?” JayLynn looks at him.

“Smaller,” he answers. She already knows this. She was a preemie, born nearly a month early.

“Were you scared?”

He smiles as he remembers. “Terrified.”

“Was Mama?”

“Oh yeah. You know how your mama worries.”

JayLynn’s mouth twitches in a quick frown before her attention returns to the bassinet.

The baby manages to find rest in Zaria’s noise until he doesn’t.

“I’ll get him,” JayLynn says when Malik starts mewing.

“Alright, now. Be careful.” Parker rises from his chair to stand beside her. “Hold his back and neck.”

JayLynn’s movements are stiff and slow as she takes Malik in her arms. The baby manages to work his fists out of his blanket’s loose swaddling. One wrist is wrapped in the mate to Zaria’s hospital bracelet. Parker thinks about this link— the thick, inescapable knot of mother and child. He thinks the sunrise must scream to JayLynn. Go! Go! Go! Now!

Now! Now! Save her! He imagines this is the call of every mirror when she only wants to brush her hair or wash her own face and sees her mother’s staring.

Parker warns, “No book can prepare you for this,” though this is weak, hardly a deterrent against a baby, and certainly not convincing proof against JayLynn’s undying faith in their magic. Learning how to hold a baby is easy, and JayLynn demonstrates this by gathering Malik securely in her arms and cradling him to her chest. When she softly kisses the top of Malik’s head through his thin beanie and breathes his warm, baby scent, Parker can see how much she already loves him and how so much of that love is tied to her wants and wishes. She can’t fathom him not being just as irresistible to Dee who hasn’t seen, smelled, or held him yet. To JayLynn, he is a bundle full of firsts and cuteness that could keep his grandmother amused, proud, home, happy, and Parker is grateful that he hasn’t stopped fussing.

“Hey, little man. It’s okay,” JayLynn whispers, but Malik’s whimpers turn to tiny, sputtering coughs. She bounces slowly, bending at the knees, and taps his back. “Hey, hey, hey,” she coos while Malik tries to shake his head from her palm. He finally finds the air he needs to grow his coughs into wails. JayLynn looks to Parker for help. This is another opportunity to teach a lesson. He will take every one he gets. He will not and does not step in to take the baby.

He only offers, “He’s probably hungry,” and he and JayLynn turn to Zaria, who doesn’t stir. Her breaths fall heavy and undisturbed.

A Black Father Illustrated the Importance of “The Talk” in His Graphic Memoir

Posted on by Jo Lou

Darrin Bell didn’t set out to write his much anticipated graphic memoir, The Talk. He’d initially sold another project delving into the lives of three generations of men in his family, all descendants of an enslaved man named Addison Bell, in a two book deal to Henry Holt and Co. But as he was working on the original project, George Floyd was murdered and the Black Lives Matter protests began. “My editor Retha called me,” Bell explained, “And she apologized and said, ‘I think maybe we should put this book on the backburner and do another book that deals with what’s happening right now with George Floyd.’” We talked for about an hour and over the course of that conversation, she asked me for incidents in my life that could have gone a bad way, incidents where I experienced racism. Toward the end of the conversation, I told her, “You know, it’s funny, I was six when my mom gave me the talk, and just now my six-year-old son asked me ‘who’s George Floyd?’ and I don’t know if he’s ready to have the talk.” My editor said, “That’s the book.”

Bell took all the memories of growing up half-Black and half-Jewish in California that came up in that conversation, which he viewed as puzzle pieces, “Because I knew there was a reason why I brought all these things up in that conversation. I just had to figure out what that reason was along the way.” The Talk explores key events in Bell’s life where he experienced racism personally or witnessed what was happening nationally, tracing his journey from when he received the talk from his own mother, to experiences in school and college, to becoming the first African American creator to have comic strips syndicated nationally, to when he received the Pulitzer prize, making sure to recount incidents when he too felt complicit in contributing to the racial status quo. “It was almost like a two and a half year therapy session,” Bell told me. “I think that’s why the book feels so honest. Because I was actually going through it while I was writing it.”

Deirdre Sugiuchi: It was really interesting to read The Talk and watch your evolution regarding racism, and learning different messages that you’ve gotten from the different sides of your family regarding race and processing it and developing this awareness. A lot of your references are integral to the Gen X experience. We’re a smaller generation but our perspective is integral to understanding America today. Can you discuss why, as Gen X writers, it’s important to share our perspectives and experiences?

Darrin Bell: At this point in history, we are the children of the generation that’s starting to die out right now. We are the parents of the generation that’s coming of age. We are the middle link in a chain, the link that people are not paying attention to. We’re like the hub of a wheel. We grew up observing our parents congratulating themselves for being part of the civil rights generation and the counterculture, Woodstock. But we also saw their hypocrisy. We can also see the narcissism of our children’s generation, the one that’s raised with the technologies that we created, that we were dumb enough to create, social media, especially. 

DS: I thought your book did a great job of explaining the importance of the protests that arose in response to the police beating Rodney King. You traced the initial undoing of affirmative action in California via Prop 209. You revisited how thousands of Black voters were expunged in 2000 in Florida, making us think about that impact. You talked about the prejudice your parents experienced just to date. You laid it out—this is how we got here. 

DB: Like any younger generation, they think the world is the way it is because that’s just the way it’s supposed to be. I was hoping with that stolen election chapter to remind them that ‘No, the world is the way it is because people made a choice.’ People make choices all along the way to let bad stuff happen.

DS: In this book, you’re delving into this dichotomy between how your Black father and grandfather addressed racism, versus the way your Jewish mother advocated for you. Can you discuss how being biracial contributes to your understanding of how whiteness and power operates in America?

DB: Well, first of all, I got to see how both sides of my family censored themselves for different reasons. The Black side of my family would say things around each other that they would never say if a white person was around, not for fear of offending white person, but for fear of the white person doing something to them. White people inherently have power. If they said something offensive, a white person could somehow figure out how to ruin their career, how to get them fired, how to get the police to come over. They could lie. They could twist their words and it would have real, concrete effects on their lives. 

The white side of my family, I think sometimes they would forget that I was there. As part of the family, I would see casual racism. They’re Jewish—I’m sure it’s worse with people whose family are white and aren’t Jewish. I’ve heard from a lot of those people directly in the form of hate mail. I know what kind of things they say. But Jews are a little different, because they’ve been discriminated against too.  They’ve had atrocious things happen to them, barbaric things. So, they know that what they’re saying is wrong, but they sometimes say it anyway. But whenever my grandmother would seem to realize or remember that I was in the room, she censored herself, but I could tell it was only to preserve my feelings. It wasn’t because she was afraid I would ever do anything to her. She knew I didn’t have any power over her. 

Other white friends I’ve had, I’ve seen them walk on eggshells sometimes, like whenever racial issues come up. I can tell they’re trying to say the right things and I appreciate that. But I also know that it’s again only to protect my feelings. I think it doesn’t even occur to them that there’s ever anything I could do to sabotage their lives because of what they said. So that’s a fundamental difference.

DS: One theme of your work has been linking the fight for marriage equality and LGBTQ rights with the Black Lives Matter movement. Can you discuss the importance of this especially right now?

DB: I think social justice is social justice and when you get people in the habit of expecting justice to happen, like when one group achieves justice, it can galvanize the fight for everybody else. Jewish people for instance were a big part of the civil rights movement for Black people. They were still being persecuted at the time and knew justice for one was justice for all. I’m thrilled whenever I see anyone of any group achieve justice. When I saw reparations for justice paid to survivors of the Japanese internment— that was thrilling. The whole struggle for gay marriage—I was very outspoken about that in my work from day one. I always knew in the back of my head that this isn’t just about gay people being allowed to get married, if people start to see what justice is, they’ll become accustomed to it, that maybe this will spread to Black people, to Native Americans. I thought it could change the world. 

I don’t think I took into account the backlash that would come from it. Intellectually I knew that there might be one, but I didn’t think it would move the whole country until I saw Donald Trump get elected, and I realized there are more of these people who are part of the backlash then I thought there was going to be. There are tens of millions who lost their damn minds when gay people were allowed to get married and when a Black person was elected President. 

DS: I was raised Christian nationalist and it’s baked in (the prejudice). I went to a Christian reform school. I should have known. But even with all the knowledge, I didn’t. I put all I knew into this messed up box of bad things that only happen in Mississippi.

DB: I think it’s because we all, people who are not regressive and not bigoted, tend to buy into what Martin Luther King Jr. said, about the arc of the moral universe being long but it bends towards justice. We tend to think of things getting better, but the years tick by inevitably. Maybe that’s not the case. There’s no guarantee that things will get better. They didn’t get better for Germany. They thought that tolerance was increasing in Germany. They thought they were cosmopolitan. They valued academics and the arts and their liberalism— and then came the Nazis. Things don’t always get better.

DS: Nope. My son’s girlfriend is Jewish and I was with her parents recently, and we were talking about how my father-in-law was in an internment camp, and they both had stories of their grandparents in the old country seeing close friends and family being murdered, and my great-grandmother— don’t get me wrong, I’m descended from enslavers, and I suspect one of my great-great-grandfathers took part in the  Leflore County Massacre— but the other was murdered for trying to stop a lynching. 

We tend to think of things getting better, but the years tick by inevitably. Maybe that’s not the case.

DB: Wow.

DS: My great-grandmother would reenact it when I was a little kid, still traumatized. She would talk about the horses’ hooves coming up and landing on his chest after he was shot…but this is essentially the conversation we had, about all of us being related to people who had experienced extreme trauma due to racialized violence, but yes, we want to believe the world is going to get better. We want to believe there is an arc of justice. 

But you have kids, four of them. Obviously, you have some hope in the future. 

DB: Yea. I’ll be 49 in January. I’ve gotten more cynical. I was very hopeful before all of this, in the ’90s and the early 2000s. Now I’ve placed all my hopes in the kids, in their generation. I think maybe every generation does that. Maybe every generation gets so disillusioned by their generation and their parents’ generations, that all they have left is a Hail Mary into the younger generation. They throw all their hopes over there and maybe it will pay off.

The only thing I have abandoned hope in is the certainty that I will be alive to see things change for the better, because the last time there was such a huge backlash to social progress it lasted a hundred years as Jim Crow, and that was just a few years after Reconstruction. We’ve had a generation of progress on voting rights, on electing Black people to office, on Black people becoming wealthy—there’s still a huge disparity of incomes but there are more Black people becoming wealthy than ever before. 

DS: And Black creators. 

DB: There’s me. There are hundreds of authors and poets. This has been a generation of progress, not just a decade, and if a decade of progress has led to a century of backlash, I am scared of what a generation of progress is going to lead to. 

DS: I like what you said to your son when you explained you won a Pulitzer for pointing out what’s broken. There’s hope in that. When you have the talk with your son, you point out that the way forward is for people in America, many of whom identify as white, to no longer lie about the past. You are publishing this truth at a time of rampant book banning of materials which reflect the lives and experiences of people of color and LGBTQ people. What do you see as being the responsibility of socially engaged creators at this moment?

DB: I think back to the chapter where I showed myself in college, where we were discussing slavery, and all those people were telling me you can’t judge people in the past by our standards. I think the responsibility of socially conscious creators is to recognize that we might not change things tomorrow, we might not change things in our lifetimes, but we are leaving a hard, concrete record that we did know better. No one a hundred years from now is going to be able to look back and say we can’t judge them by our standards. 

Choose Your Own Autumnal Journey

Posted on by Jo Lou

We’re celebrating peak fall with this interactive choose-your-own-journey which will let you decide where the story goes, with book recommendations for each chapter! Apple picking or pumpkin picking? Haunted house or Halloween party? Make up or break up? The choice is yours and every answer leads to a different story.

The full list of books and stories is linked below.

Short stories:

Mary Robinson’s Minimalist Sorcery

My Slut-Shaming Ghost Can Go to Hell

Don’t Trust a Guy Who Promises You the Moon

I’m the Wrong Ghost for This Haunting

A Wax Man Lit a Fire in My Heart

A 5-Star Blender Review That Affirms Love Is Real

Truth Not as a Set of Answers but a Field of Openings

Posted on by EL Assistant2

From trees and mortality to colonialism and FaceTime sex, Charif Shanahan’s Trace Evidence investigates a restless range of subjects with a truth-finding precision that would be breathtaking for a single poem but is present here across an entire collection.

What unites this book is the question of how to speak when one’s personhood or subjectivity is assumed to be nothing and nowhere—when one can’t be plotted on the neat graph of normative racial categories. Further, how does one provide an account of oneself when both account and self are either supposed blank spaces or forever in flux? These concerns are as much about the events of a life as they are about the language that one can use to describe life, which includes a passionately searching inner life. As Shanahan puts it in the book’s centerpiece, a long poem about surviving a bus crash in his mother’s birth country of Morocco: 

“Where does the inquiry begin  Does it begin in my particular body

In my particular mind  Does it begin centuries before me

Does it begin in my mother  Does it begin in all these places  At once”

Trace Evidence is an inquiry-driven book, unafraid to sit with ambivalences, uncertainties, unknowns. Truth here is not a set of answers but a field of openings. It felt very fitting that my journey with this book continued in the form of asking its author some of the questions that reading and rereading sparked for me.

Charif Shanahan and I corresponded over email, discussing the collection’s themes, forms, surprises. Oh, and love. There’s a lot of love in this book, by which I mean a recurring subject across poems and also the depth of care in the crafting of each line.

Chen Chen: As someone who also writes a good (obsessive!) deal about his mother—or his perpetually complicated relationship with his mother—I’m curious about your approach to writing about this particular figure, this central dynamic, and how that approach has evolved over time. What keeps you going back to the maternal (and by extension, “the motherland”) and how do you keep pushing in terms of your craft and inquiry?

Charif Shanahan: As a subject, what makes my maternal lineage (and “the motherland”) of interest to me are the complex questions of identity that I have inherited through that line of my family. The layered imperial histories of North Africa mean that race maps onto my family in ways that challenge and/or disrupt the system, which makes it a fertile subject for poems. The instability of my family’s racial experience, not only in terms of mixed-race embodiment, but across national and cultural boundaries, is constitutive of my self-concept and interpersonal possibility; however, what has kept me going back to the subject is my belief that work that would appear to be about a particular relationship is, in fact, about something larger and relevant to all of us. 

An easy (and finally wrong) argument about the treatment of the mother figure in my work is that she is objectified. That argument is wrong to me because simplistic: if the mother is objectified, it is not by the speaker, but by the systems of the world in which these individuals live. And, ironically, I find that individuals who have argued (as some have to me) that I am objectifying my mother are, in a way, objectifying me: that I be an accommodating little mixed-race child, quiet about the issues of central import to his life. Of course, in offering this advice (and it is often offered as “advice”), the person must believe that these issues I explore in my work aren’t relevant to them, too—or that I’m only writing these poems for myself. 

There is unavoidable overlap in a mother’s and her child’s stories; as I say in one poem—“As though my story is not inside / her story, as though when she hides, / she does not hide my face with hers.” The point at which the mother’s story ends and the speaker’s begins is in agency, in choice, in deciding that what the shared materials of their inheritance meant to her need not mean the same thing to him. The overlap of their stories, put another way, doesn’t foreclose agency and choice for the speaker, even as the system of race (white supremacy) might suggest otherwise. 

To that point of systems—and certain readers nod vigorously and say of course, in response to what I am about to offer, while others are skeptical—I genuinely do not think of myself as “writing poems about my mother.” I am writing poems about systems, about the structures in which we live that would generate, in the first place, such an interpersonal possibility as the one that exists between the speaker and the mother figure in this book. It’s less about them, and more about how they could come to exist in this world at all and what that means for all of us. 

All that said, I do think with Trace Evidence something for me has closed thematically. I remain interested in human divisiveness, the unnameable or unnamed dimensions of human existence, and am continuing to write about those subjects, but through different thematic vehicles. 

CC: I’m struck by all the times therapy and therapists show up in these poems. I’m thinking, for instance, about “Countertransference,” “Psychotherapy,” and that part of “On the Overnight from Agadir” where two therapists are “fired” by the speaker. While I agree with poets who argue that poetry is not the same as therapy, I do find some aspects of the reading and writing of it to be therapeutic, and I appreciate therapy as a layered subject in poems. What are your thoughts on poetry’s relationship to therapy and why was it important to you to write from or through experiences with therapists?

CS: I’ll take the second part of that question first, since my answer is shorter: in this book, I wanted to show that there was no space—no matter how intimate or sacred—that was untouched by race, racialization, and racism, that even in the therapy a speaker might seek for race-based trauma, a speaker might face further race-based trauma (as in “Countertransference”). Relatedly, the pursuit of therapy is, for the speaker, actually a disempowerment, a relinquishing of control, an opening himself up to further violence or erasure, when he had already possessed the clarity he needed.

For the rest, I’m with you in the belief that writing and reading poetry can have therapeutic value. I also think it’s obvious—and, respectfully, an argument barely worth making—that poetry and therapy are not the same thing. Of course, they aren’t!

A more interesting question to me is why we assume that a poetics of emotional transparency is being written as therapy, rather than as art—and why that assumption is almost always made when arguing against the value of a certain kind of poem. Emotional transparency is an aesthetic quality, not a personal compulsion. We choose it, as makers, even if unconsciously at first, in the way we choose line length and figuration, this word over that one. I also personally see no aesthetic distinction between an emotional transparency of boredom, or even joy, and one of pain or grief. It’s not the emotion itself that dictates the aesthetic, but the means by which the poem treats the emotion. 

To me, it’s an interpretive and imaginative failure—and wholly ungenerous—to assume that someone’s poem about [insert traumatic subject] is motivated by a misguided effort to pursue their therapy on the page. Maybe the poem is an offering. Maybe the narrative events of the poem emerged from the poet’s imagination, not their lived experiences. Maybe it’s because they’ve done their therapy in therapy that they can write the poem at all.

Also, do folks not experience or pursue joy in therapy? I do. I celebrate my beloveds, my gifts, my victories, my dreams. It isn’t all pain all the time: that doesn’t sound very therapeutic to me! For me, therapy, like poetry, must hold space for the full spectrum of human emotion. The difference between the art forms—and I do believe that therapy is an art form—is in their function, their objective, and while those objectives are different, the acts themselves can still be mutually beneficial. If writing poetry can have therapeutic value, I think it follows that being in therapy can have poetic value. In my own life, that value has been expressed as an elevation in consciousness that gave me access to new subject matter and material, and as an empowerment that, ironically, made writing poems about traumatic subjects possible in the first place.

CC: “Inner Children” is one of my favorite poems in this collection—I’m so moved and surprised by how you’ve braided together this narrative of walking in Asilah, Morocco with ruminations on the mother’s past in that country and also “FaceTime sex” with a former boyfriend. How did these threads come together as one poem? What does it mean for you to situate land, family, and race alongside queerness and contemporary forms of communication?

CS: Well, this poem, like so many of mine, began as a chunk of language that I threw down into a word document after that trip to Morocco. (Chronologically, it was after the accident, though it appears before it in the book.) When I sat with the language, it struck me that the eventual poem’s questions orbited around three figures—the speaker, the boyfriend and the mother—in three places—contemporary Morocco, the Morocco of the mother’s early life, and the elsewhere of the boyfriend—and that kind of triangulation gave life to the tercet form, as I began shaping the language into a poem. The language, as it first emerged from me, was mostly about the adult-child speaker and his quest in Morocco, which naturally gave way to the portions of the poem that are of memory and about the mother’s early life. The boyfriend was present only tangentially in the initial gesture. However, in considering the shape and texture of that trip, I came to understand that the speaker’s relationship was a necessary portion of the poem, almost as a mirror or an expression of the “out of reach” content of the other thread. So—land, family, race, and queerness were already merged, in the speaker’s consciousness, in a way that it took me some time to see and eventually tease out of the conscious material. 

As for the contemporary forms of communication—Facebook and FaceTime—a younger Charif might have resisted including them in a poem, but one process of maturation I’ve experienced as a poet is letting more of the world—the actual world—into the poems, in liberation not only of myself as their maker, but of the poems themselves.  

CC: I love “Little Red Lighthouse,” a longer poem that comes later in the collection. I love the recurring images of rooms (domestic spaces), forests, and the breath—how these images allow you to examine time as both a human construct (a “fiction’) and a social reality the speaker must navigate. In this way, time shares qualities with race, and indeed, at the end of the poem, there’s a scene in which the speaker asks a teacher, “If at the onset of this nation / Race and class were merged… // Does it follow then / You have time if you can breathe?” Could you talk about why the poem ends with this scene? And why it ends abruptly, seemingly mid-sentence, after “You try your hand at speaking / About it all and it goes well for a while / Until it doesn’t and it ends suddenly and you”? I’m wondering, as well, about the poem’s form—this crown of sonnets in which last lines become first lines—and what that may have to do with writing about time in relation to racialization?

CS: Your questions are gorgeous, Chen! Thank you for your brilliance and for your thoughtfulness.

It’s an interpretive and imaginative failure to assume that someone’s poem is motivated by a misguided effort to pursue their therapy on the page.

I turned to the crown form somewhere in the drafting of this poem, because it provided a propulsive energy to the making and also would link each step in the meditation in a way that felt germane to the poem’s subjects, as the hinge lines performed a repetition of time marked by a continuity and a modification at once. However, because the speaker in the poem struggles with asserting his being—with being in the first place, even before asserting it—it began to feel untrue, thematically and spiritually, to dismount and execute a formally perfect landing. So, even as I had drafted so many lines and stanzas for the crown that “completing” it was a formal possibility, somewhere along the way, I knew that the crown would do more work by being broken. I also knew that not completing the crown, conventionally, could invite a cynical reading of the poem—that I couldn’t finish it, rather than choosing to break the form–but what was best for the poem itself won out, as it should have. (Additionally, there are stand-alone sonnets elsewhere in the third section of the book that are also “broken,” though differently than the crown, which became a nearly thematized formal gesture underpinning the ars poetica.)

The question remained, though, of where and how to exit the crown. The specter of race is all over the poem, given its placement in the book, but race and systemic classification are not mentioned until the final section. When they are mentioned, it comes in the form of a question that no one can answer, which felt like an ideal non-closure on which to end the poem. 

CC: At the end of “Thirty-Fifth Year,” the speaker recalls a “dear older friend” reminding him, “You are actually very good at joy.” This recollection comes after a series of existential dreads, daily anxieties, and mundane distractions. I was startled by this ending, the way I’m sometimes startled, completely taken aback, by the appearance of true joy. Was that the effect you were going for? Where does joy come from, according to this poem or to your writing more generally?

CS: For me, grappling with extremely difficult subjects, emotionally, socially, philosophically, I experience joy in the act of finding the language that articulates and enacts the questions that have occasioned the poems in the first place. Even when the poems are at their heaviest, my spirit—truly—is at its lightest. For me, writing a painful line is a joy, if it’s a true line. 

Joy comes from lots of places that have nothing to do with poetry, too, of course. Deep, abiding friendship, travel, food, music, kinship, love, my boo.

7 Poetry Collections By Women Of Color That Shatter The American Sentence

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Since Walt Whitman, the American sentence has shape-shifted in and out of forms, from race-car lyrical lines that drive off the page, to fields of hailstorm words floating in white space in a way that resembles visual art, and back to semi-formal stanzas that lilt and groove around a pentameter-like beat.

I’ve designed my poetry collection Tiny Extravaganzas around experiments that push against the boundaries of the American sentence. There’s a quiet thrill in being part of a tradition that turns away from the English iambic pentameter line and tries to define the characteristics of a sentence that is uniquely American. We’re at a time when the sentence has virtually no limits. I can build an entire stanza around one transitive verb, so the verb is fixed and the stanza is free. I can use pauses to force the breath to shorten over three monosyllable words, and then speed up or get talkative to create the drama of conversation—and interrupt or end it abruptly after the first word following a line break, just when you feel the line is getting started. There’s a way to gently push white space around words, stretch a melody out. Manipulating pacing across syntax, and hearing the tiny explosions that result, is a puzzle and a thrill.

My sentences focus on identity, dialect, and cadence—often indirectly, but in a radically democratizing vernacular that pulls toward and away from the lyric. I’m interested in chasing rhythm and chopping it up, and generally finding new ways to shatter the traditional American sentence with style and verse. I veer from talkative to incantatory, with tone shifts from jazz to lament. I work on a presumption that the sentence is political and a woman must move the sentence in new directions.

Here are collections by women working the American sentence relentlessly, applying power through acoustics and rhythm while documenting harsh histories. Some poems are elliptical or visually fragmented, and others seem orderly on the page but the sentences are boiling inside. Some pretend to be prose, but they are not. Like me, all of these poets are working in a style that is closer to music and chant than to conversation.

Arrow by Sumita Chakraborty

Chakraborty language is so cosmological and expressive that you can’t help but wonder if her larger project is to about language fails to express. “Some bright and sun-kissed, some dark and pulp-dashed, / your and our blood across the burnt orange schist,” she oozes. Her tone is effusive, her diction lush. But below her sweepingly lyrical lines and her conversational intimacy is linguistic play and argument. The heart of Chakraborty’s collection, and a showcase for her radiant talent, is her eleven-page poem lament for her sister, “Dear, Beloved,” and possibly the most poignant and skillful short epic in contemporary poetry. Her book exists in the liminal space of grief, but it is grief that gives shape to the book. Her high emotional pitch is bracketed by poems in conversation with other writers—grief does not sideline her intellectually, and she is determined to make something of it. O Spirit extracts and remixes words from Melville’s Moby-Dick; another poem refracts Rilke’s Les Fenêtres. Her riffs create a feeling of improvisation but she is the middle of an intellectual conversation. Language outside of time is the argument she hinges the book on. Chakraborty makes her case through Michel Foucault: “The original title of The Order of Things is Les mots et les choses, or Words and Things. The substitution of Order for Words speaks to one of our most pervasive myths, that words have a clear order.” As she weaves a myth of her sister into an epic dirge that includes a Greek creation myth, Chakraborty is telling us that language is meaningful, even if time is disorderly. She is working out what pain is. “Please leave the window unlatched,” she says.

West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal

Rekdal’s project is a hybrid multivocal poem documenting two histories: the transcontinental railroad and Chinese migrants detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station during the Chinese Exclusion Act. The book is part oral history, part “translation” in which she turns the American sentence into a document of witness. The poems often locomote down the page, without stanzas, as in Soil: “General, / we worked your grading to Monument Point, in thousands / drilled and blasted, rent the very foundations / of the earth until these hills swarmed with our fresh / encampments.” She takes different approaches to educate us. One poem is a list of questions to show us what it feels like to be Chinese and suspected: “How many water buffalo / does your uncle own? Do you love him?” She is graceful about filtering the voices of migrants through her own. In Lament, on the invention that is the train, she recreates the American sentence: “the buckskin ties tamped tight / to their irons, / shadowing his canvas margin.” The snap and lyricism is her precision style; she inclines to lyricism naturally but defers to journalism for this book. She works in dialogue, correspondence, photographs, illustrations of torn maps or torn notes, and miniature essays or elegies. The prose sections reveal how the railroad enabled industrial expansion, political rallies, the transfer of munitions, and human settlement. At every step, she complicates the narrative by connecting immigrant stories to ways the railroad creates conditions of power or powerlessness. In Close Eye: “Between 1854 and 1929, over 250,000 children were sent by train from New York City to the West to be adopted.” After children arrived in the “orphan trains” were they protected or harmed? “Perhaps, like me, you are afraid to find out,” she says.

Grief Sequence by Prageeta Sharma

Every variety of mood appears into Sharma’s sentences, which are sometimes so interior that they are uniquely beyond the American line and sentence—yet still materially in it. Sharma’s sequence combines lament, letter, diary, conversation, and obituary. It is heart-shatteringly good and accessible. Sharma expands the tradition of lament in verse, as original an experiment in understanding and processing grief as anyone has written. The sequence mimics the cycles of grief itself, an intimate meta-journey into the riddle of sorting out what time is when your lover no longer exists. As she writes, and writes, trying to find the life in her, and the life of an expression in the form of a sentence, you cannot help but wonder what a sentence is, if not an act of duration. And when the sentence is over, what memory stays? Sharma brilliantly creates memory through her sentence, shattering any grief-cycle that has come before. She has created, artlessly, a theory of sentences. The senses blur and combine in Sequence 1: “Memories curved and then sounded: were sibilant and jest, and from not-his-mouth, and not-his-teeth, and the breath grew so sharp and he grew so thin and gaunt that he was buried in a slander his body made of him.” Because many of the poems are presented as lists or prose poems, within the framework of a chronology of dying and death, you can easily fooled that Sharma is writing prose sentences rather than verse—but she takes care with her sentences and is fiercely intellectual. She shines when she loses the encumberments of line breaks, which seem, in her deft hands, altogether unnecessary to the American sentence.

The Beloved Community by Patricia Spears Jones

Spears Jones’ imagistic internationalist, docu-political sentences resemble conversation but stop you in your tracks. Her opener in Celia Cruz Snow Angels electrifies: “The Great Gatsby jazzed the sorrows of summers where the wealthy misspend their wealth.” In one sentence she sums up the tone and sweep of the novel, soused partiers, and the way they “misspend” their sad, rich, empty lives. She is deeply invested in the ability of American speech, both conversation and slang, to reveal the consequences of materialism: inequity, poverty, murder, violence, masculinity. In Poverty, she marries her diction and sentences to the spareness of the condition itself: “[Poverty] Is a broken tooth / No smile— // Is bone poorly reset / Weak limbs, medicos various.” The tooth remains broken, the shoddy medical care creates lifelong problems. She is expert at shaping the way a sentence sounds around its content, especially when pain of family secrets and histories come into play. In Cousins, the stanzas shorten from seven lines to four, as if narrowing in on a secret. From the first line (“What genes we carry this making of Americans”) to the last (“cousins many times removed”) is about discovering, or hiding, an uncomfortable ancestral truth. Chillingly, she demands to know: “Who grabbed the girl and made her pregnant? / Who walked away when her father was lynched? Who snatched / whose land?” And when Spears’ diction is easy, you know something else is coming. Adornment begins: “Red cap / Red scarf / Red balloon // phalanx of protesters / quarrel of militia—off camera.”

Blood Snow by dg nanouk okpik

What syntactical tension electrifies Okpik’s poems! The poetic throughline is the metaphor of flight. Her sentences mimic it by moving forward while monosyllables pile up and slow you down, pull your attention back to earth, to a single syllable. It forces you to look, recite, listen. Her sentences are dense while the book has an emotional spaciousness about it. Some of this is pure technique: multiple beats on a line. Her pile-up of heavy beats and strong diction recalls Gerard Manley Hopkins’ amplified speech, measured by duration in what he called “sprung rhythm.” She is as close as anyone has come to approximating that technique with contemporary elan. Lovely and rare is the way her diction takes a multitude of sounds from the natural world, evidenced by the way a sentences forces your mouth to twist and your tongue to move around your mouth to get the sounds right: “pistils of bear grass, stamen of indian paints, / ovules of Mozart’s string quartet” in I want to believe. Birds and other winged creatures string the collection together expertly. Mosquitoes, hornets, geese, a woodpecker, bluejay, hawk, duck, raven, ptarmigan, magpie, flea, and grouse have cameos. Where there are no winged animals, there is wind and storm in motion. Over the sentences are an aerial view of imagistic land formations, and contemplations on the inheritance of land. And, as in any aerial view, sentences unwind in long expanses in one poem and abbreviate in short, abstracted views in another.

Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

One thing to know about Nezhukumatathil’s poems, even when they resemble fragments on a visual plane, is that she is always writing clear sentences whose meanings turn back on themselves or which slowly reveal more of the narrative. The craft of storytelling with an unreliable narrator shows up continually. The way she turns her sentences turn into poetry is through the breath. It’s a lyrical device to breathlessly roll along your sentences, and it becomes a poem when the breath enters—in her case often breathlessly—and adds emotional color or reshapes how you hear and where you pause. Part of her technique is a jazzy stream of consciousness populated with words that jam up in your mouth: tar, asphalt, fistful, thistle. Her sentence jolt because they are simultaneously propulsive and balanced, a feat because to balance a line is to risk making it flat—but the diction engineers something unusual. In When Lucille Bogan Sings “Shave ‘Em Dry” she upshifts over a line break, and charges forward on the verb: “When I say flower I mean how her song // blooms in the electric Mississippi light.” And Nezhukumatathil has a flair for thickening sentences with meaty sounds such as “shushing tassels” and inserting consonant-connected phrases (“crystals of chalcopyrite”) in a poem packed with easygoing monosyllables. The Whitmanesque title poem Invitation should be read on repeat, for the sounds, but also as a lesson in how to intensify a sentence and refuse to let up: “Clouds of plankton hurricaning in open whale mouths will send you east and chewy urchins will slide you west.”

suddenly we by Evie Shockley

Shockley’s homophones and verbal play shred the sentence into its most basic units. The result is as charming and fun as it is political. Her book probes inheritance: what we inherit from history and from language. She undermines the value of language itself with slick technique. Her poem v is a pun in a square: starsarewh / atshinesinthe / spacesmadeb / etweenuswhe / nwegetcloser. How experimental she pretends to be! She wants us to look closer, read slow, insert spaces between words. The larger project of this tiny poem is getting closer figuratively; by the time this poem concludes, we understand Shockley better. She is an elaborately smart lyric poet. Her sounds are expert, and with lowercase letters and experiments as a distraction, she adores styling a proper line: “my pose proposes anticipation. i poise / in copper-colored tension, intent.” It’s a winning approach. When she writes about segregation, her sentences expand as a way of say that American can limit your body but not your mind. She plays with opposites and form in carolina, a beautiful poem with alternating quatrains and tercets: “I’m dark except where I’m / darker,” followed by a memory catalogue to show us how resilience works. It is a rare collection in which poetic forms vary this much from one page to the next. No sentence in this language, Shockley indicates, will ever be enough. Lines are captive in stanzas, spliced open, indented. She is not afraid to use and reuse words every which way: “the jitterbug got the jitters,” she says in Rose.

I Loved “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Before I Loved Myself

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I have a set of cigarette burns zagging up my right arm. I don’t talk about them to friends—there are mainly two reasons you get burned in that particular way, and neither are good. They’re red and angry-looking, like wasps’ stings, and they’re right above my wrist which means I can’t hide them. The burns sit out in the open for everyone to see. I could say they’re beautiful, but there are some things that should never be recuperated. I will say the cigarette burns are stunning, though. As in: they stun. They stun others when they realize what they are, and they stunned me when I put the cigarette to my arm. They stunned the staff at the psych ward as they completed my intake paperwork. The anti-burn cream smeared onto my arm every morning stung when it touched me, and I’d wince as it was applied. 

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remake came out one day before the United Nations affirmed, for the third time, the importance of US troops in Iraq and the duty of the rest of the West to contribute to the war as well. On TV, commercials for the 2003 movie aired between those for dive-bombing jets, armed forces rappelling down a rock wall, desert fatigues. The film reflected all of that, MTV-style sheen slicked across the screen and dirty browns and tans running everywhere and gore filling every second. It opens with a hitchhiker who seems to have been sexually assaulted—blood running between her legs—blowing her brains out in the back of the main characters’ van. Then, the film escalates to a menacing sheriff licking his lips over her dead body with a necrophiliac longing. Watching the movie on Netflix years later with a friend I was fucking—a girl who whimpered during the scary parts, liked to be hit hard, and walked with me to get ice cream the first time we had sex—I shut it off after thirty minutes. I couldn’t bear any more.

I didn’t even think it was a unique misery: everyone hated their bodies, I thought.

Maybe I hated it so much because the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the one that came out almost exactly fifty years ago, is my most-loved movie. It’s not the one I often tell people is my most-loved: the title tends to turn people off. What they picture is something closer to the remake: a blunt object, a leering gaze, a body turned into an object to be fucked or cut up with nothing in-between. Instead, for the longest time, I’d tell people I loved art-house films most: the movies of Apitchatpong Weerasutakhul or Ingmar Bergman or Terrence Malick or any other director who specialized in long, winding, thoughtful shots and barely restrained emotions. And I do love those films. But of all the movies I’ve seen, I’ve seen Chain Saw the most—a revving engine of a film, sick and quick and all deep reds. 

This is how it worked: first I loved it, and then I loved myself.

I first watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre  in high school during the brief window when full movies were first uploaded to YouTube, the image 240p and broken up into six parts to circumvent YouTube’s then-fifteen-minute video limit. I lived at a residential school then and started it in my dorm room between second and third period, finishing the movie after chemistry lab. I was miserable in school but it was a misery I couldn’t even name. I didn’t even think it was a unique misery: everyone hated their bodies, I thought. Everyone pictured themselves sliding into a lake and not coming out again. I watched the movie because it had been framed online as an endurance exercise; if I could endure The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I thought, it would distract me from the life I was trying to endure too.

What I didn’t expect was how the film looked, shining bright even through digital grain. Fields of tall grasses rippled slowly in the breeze. A car rumbled down the highway, exhaust exhaling behind it like a ghost. And at the moment that Sally Hardesty, the movie’s beleaguered protagonist, is held captive at the cannibal family’s dinner table, grandfather preparing to hit her with a hammer, the film zooms in unexpectedly on one of her eyes flitting around in fear, and the iris was the most verdant green I’d ever seen.

I hated the South, feared being Southern myself even.

I had been in North Carolina for just over nine years at that point. I hated the state. I missed the icy sharpness of Pennsylvania, the way Lake Erie froze over completely every winter, waves still mid-crest. I missed the emerald jungles of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where I spent the first four years of my life. North Carolina didn’t have the cold beauty of the Northeast and it didn’t have the shimmeringly blue seas and white beaches of the Caribbean. It just had swamps on the eastern part of the state where my parents lived and brush and loblolly pine in the middle where the school was. And worse than that, everywhere you looked there were hicks, drawls hanging off their words like a busted door hinge. I expected Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with its rural cannibals and grindhouse title, to just reaffirm my existing prejudices. The South was ugly, I thought; it looked ugly, and its people acted ugly, and I wanted a film that would reflect that. I watched to endure it, but also to confirm what I already knew: my new home sucked.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was short, straightforward, part of the reason I was able to finish the movie in just two chunks between classes. A group of hippies from the local college town set out to visit their grandfather’s old property. They pick up a hitchhiker, who sets a picture of them on fire and tries to slice at them with a knife; they kick the hitchhiker out of their van. They stop at a gas station to fill up and have a brief conversation with the proprietor, who’s also a barbeque cook; the man leers as they drive away. They visit their grandfather’s house, and then slowly everyone drifts to the house behind their grandfather’s, where a family of workers laid off from the local slaughterhouse live. The hitchhiker is there. A grandfather who looks centuries old is there. Leatherface, a six foot seven murderer in cowboy boots and a mask made out of human skin, is there. Eventually the gas station cook is there. Quickly, everyone but Sally dies, leaving her screaming and laughing alone, splattered in blood, in a flatbed truck speeding away from the house at dawn. It’s over in just eighty minutes.

At the residential school, we looked at slides of pond water through multi-chambered microscopes donated by Duke University up the road. We picked apart frozen cat bodies, peeling back the muscles on a leg one by one to reveal the femur, the tibia, the stiff ankle bones, the phalanges. It was a free school, built on the run-down grounds of a former hospital, and one that had been wiggled into the state university system: our student IDs, we were told, could get us into any library or science lab we wanted access to. We were the pride of the state, the best it had to offer. I’d wake every morning to birdsong.

I pictured the plains and thatchy backwoods of Texas, and a preemptive longing for where I already was crept over me.

Because of its low budget, much of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was shot with natural lighting, which is part of what lends an eerie prettiness to the surroundings: their world, with its scrabble of brush and dust smeared everywhere and slowly setting sun, looks just like ours. A couple in their mid-twenties gently pushes the long amber grasses to the side to explore a neighbor’s house. House spiders weave webs, fibers shining in the afternoon light. At night things purple under dim moonlight, and in evening the film is heavy with sun, bright and sticky as a melting blood orange. Texas isn’t North Carolina, but at that moment I started to see both as not just ugly but gorgeous as well, decentering in their breadth. There, the trees and low shrubs have seen everything. There’s nothing that doesn’t promise to blossom, in one way or another, into an intimacy intractable in its depths.

I entered the movie wanting to be scared because I dealt with my problems at the time by being scared. Otherwise, I’d feel too needy, too vulnerable and exposed. But that which entrances us and frightens us is so often the same. I hated the South, feared being Southern myself even, but in Chain Saw, everyone talks with an accent—even the heroes. Everyone walks through the grasses, runs through hardscrabble Southern trees. It’s not whether you’re from the South or not that matters, the movie seemed to be saying: it’s what you do with it, and how you or others are hurt despite it. The South is like everywhere else: both fucked and beautiful, indefensible and resplendent at the same time.

I don’t know if these themes were intended. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a film notoriously shot on the fly; director Tobe Hooper stayed up all night shooting the last twenty minutes of the movie, and no one washed their clothes through the whole shoot because they couldn’t afford second outfits and were scared of them being stolen from the local laundromat. All the rotting animal parts in the film were real and by wrap day everyone was nauseous from the smell. The film couldn’t even afford stunt people, so in a scene where Sally Hardesty jumps out a second floor window, the script consultant pulled on a blonde wig and did the jump herself, twisting an ankle in the process. I don’t even know if the movie was intended to look as beautiful as it does; maybe its starkness just came from a budget constraint that aged especially well, the same way that the cheaply-recorded folk albums from the ’70s sound less dated than the studio schmaltz a big budget could get you. In filming, it seems, there was little thinking involved; the whole movie instead just existed as an experience. When the shoot was over, the rumor goes, the crew made shirts that said “I survived shooting Texas Chain Saw Massacre!”

But ultimately I’m not interested in intention. I felt things watching the movie, and those I showed it to also felt things. We talked about it afterwards, everyone offering their different interpretations as to what Chain Saw—loud, intimate—was about. With a girl from my MFA I would start dating just weeks after we watched the movie, Chain Saw became a film centering animal rights abuses. We had just shared a joint, wound up and electric with energy. “See?” I said, pointing to the shots of a slaughterhouse where the cannibal family used to work. “They’re treating the humans like cattle. Anyone who can’t keep up with the demands of an ableist society gets killed.” With an ex I fell back in love with over the pandemic, it was a film about feminized labor, and even transness. Leatherface, the person who ostensibly does the killing in the family, is also the softest member. He wears masks made of human skin but covers them in eyeshadow and lipstick and is viciously bullied by his siblings for not fitting into what they think a man should be. “He dressed up for you,” Leatherface’s brother cries mockingly to Sally as she’s held captive at the dinner table, and it’s hard to say who he’s making fun of more. My partner and I saw the film as being about disability and being different. There are two families in the movie, the killers and the killed, and both of them have disabled characters at their core. Franklin, Sally’s brother who rides in a van with the rest of the victims, uses a wheelchair and is constantly berated by his peers. Leatherface, who doesn’t even speak or show his face outside of a mask, appears to have some sort of developmental disability, and is kicked and hit and beat by his older brother as he whimpers in pain.

More than anything, though, I saw a movie about the South, and coming to love it despite everything fearful that happens there. Maybe this wasn’t the film’s doing, but something changed in me the first time after watching it. As I’d walk down the sun-dappled streets of Durham, where the residential school was—sometimes heading to my therapist’s office, sometimes just walking to get a lavender milkshake from the malt shop on West Broad Street—I pictured the plains and thatchy backwoods of Texas, and a preemptive longing for where I already was crept over me. Around me sprang tall reaching trees and bullfrogs. Cardinals and thrushes chirruped from telephone poles, sun-warmed cricks everywhere. From the instrument repair shop run out of a trailer off Broad, staticky country music drifted over the radio. My parents moved to North Carolina for work when I was in third grade, and it wasn’t until I saw the movie that I realized the South, not Pennsylvania, not St Thomas, was my home. Chain Saw felt like something emerging, fully formed, from a bog, and I was emerging too, albeit much more slowly. And who hasn’t fallen in love with the place where they realized who they were? Who hasn’t made a home out of fear without in some way loving that fear, too?

There are marks that are left on us, and there are marks we leave on ourselves, and I’m not sure there’s a significant difference between the two. The South shaped me, and the South hurt me, but I’m Southern nonetheless. Maybe there’s no difference at all. To know a place is to be hurt by that place and to grow up is to hurt that place in its own ways too. Until I turned sixteen, I treated the South with a smug superiority, one that cut me off from who I was. Because I grew up there, the South left its sticky summery marks on me, and then once I rejected it I left my marks on me too.

When I set out to watch the movie, I wanted it to hurt like I hurt me.

Texas Chain Saw Massacre also drew me in because of how unrelenting it is in its cruelty. Leatherface spends the film’s end in pain, accidentally chainsawing through his leg after his brother is killed by an 18-wheeler chasing Sally, blood splattering over everything. The twenty-something protagonists are menanced and turned into meat with alacrity. Even the heroes are cruel. Sally’s brother Franklin is brilliant, funny and anticipates everything that happens in the movie—but the other people in the van, the ones who die first, hate him. “Franklin’s no fun,” goes the refrain, even though our introduction to Franklin is him being blown out of his wheelchair from the backdraft of a semi and no one rushes to help him as he tumbles down a steep hill into a ditch. Even though Franklin is dragged around to ancestral mansions with steep steps he can’t get his wheelchair up and then left behind as his friends run off to go swimming; even though early in the movie he’s cut by the deranged hitchhiker; even though at the halfway point is sawed in half, the most violent death in the movie, by Leatherface. Even the audience hates him: I’ve read review after review about how insufferable and annoying Franklin is, although consistently he’s the only one doing everything right.

When I first watched Chain Saw, I’d creep into the shared dormitory bathrooms at 2 or 3 AM to hit myself until I started crying and then hit myself more until I stopped feeling anything after that. I’d practice cruelty against myself that crept into cruelty against others; a stiffened unapproachability, a studied distance intended to prevent anyone from getting too close. When I set out to watch the movie, I wanted it to hurt like I hurt me. And the movie is cruel, but it’s beautiful too. I found myself in that beauty, but at the time didn’t even know I wanted to be found.

Chain Saw was remade again—or remade-cum-sequel’d—in January 2022. In it, like in every other one of the 8 miserable sequels and remakes, splays of gore and pop nihilism replaced everything I loved in the original. A group of woke teens are massacred on a party bus. A woman’s life is saved due to the Second Amendment, firing away at Leatherface with the shotgun she scorned earlier in the film. It’s all reprehensible in a crypto-Republican way, but more than that it’s boring. It’s an old story at this point: Hollywood finds a film that’s striking and decides it’s striking for the wrong reason, and then capitalizes off that mistaken assumption. That was actually why my friend and I watched the 2003 film: we wanted to see if what we had just seen, the most recent one, was the nadir of the franchise. But there’s always a lower level one can sink to.

With each rewatch of Chain Saw, I got further away from the me in high school and closer to a me that was loved and safe.

But even despite this endless progression of worse and worse movies—and I don’t doubt there will be more, worse movies to come—it doesn’t take away from what I love about the original. This is because what I love about the original, at least in part, is the way it taught me to love. At the end of the film, Sally is escaping on a speeding flat-bed truck. Her brother is dead, chainsawed out of his wheelchair by the only other disabled character in the movie. Her boyfriend is dead. Her friends are dead. But the movie doesn’t end. As she’s laughing in fear and relief, the film cuts to Leatherface who, limping and illuminated in the rising sun, raises the chainsaw first to his side and then above his head and starts to pivot his body like a ballerina. Soon, he’s fully pirouetting, clearly hurt and angry and sad and confused himself. As the chainsaw brushes against the camera, the film cuts to black, and then finally it’s over—nothing left but his pain and her relief and what they made together from both. I am sixteen, staring at my laptop in between classes. Someday I will stop hurting myself, but not yet. Someday I will learn to love everything I find gorgeous, including myself.

I don’t believe that a film’s legacy can really be defined by what happens afterwards towards it—sequels or prequels or bad-acting fans or whatever. I think anything you love exists, at least partially, in the moment you first love it. Maybe that’s why I’d go on to watch the original Chain Saw with so many people I’d love. Beauty can stun too, and sometimes the only thing to do with that is to share it. There can be a thin line between enduring something and finding intimacy with it, after all. With each rewatch of Chain Saw, I got further away from the me in high school and closer to a me that was loved and safe and in the gleaming present, whole and uninjured.

I loved Texas Chain Saw, I think, before I loved myself. And maybe the two aren’t related, but one did follow the other. 

Outside, a cuckoo warbles and the mid-day sun crescents through the dorm’s venetian blinds. Throwing on my heavy denim jacket, I vault down the stairs to class, arms bruised but not yet burned. As I leave the dorm building, I look at the state around me—greening leaves, rickety pines, kudzu creeping up the side of a building—and for the first time see it as something not just harsh but also irreducible, beautiful. I brush against a stairwell too abruptly, hit a bruise, wince, air sharp and cool as I inhale. It comes into me like birdsong, and eventually I will be free.The croak of leaf-roller crickets starts up, and from a distance they almost sound like a chainsaw’s hum. I’m starting to know what it means to care so much about something that you share it instead of holding it secret. I’m starting to realize that everything about my life will have to change. It’s bright and yellow outside and the air smells like pine. Soon the sun will set, and there will be nothing between me and what will come next. Already the scariest parts of Chain Saw are starting to flash across my eyes: a man pancaked by a semi truck, a body dripping on a meat hook. Soon, I will leave the state, hurt myself again in ways I can’t hide. My bruise aches as I breathe in, winding my way towards the dilapidated biology hall. There is no place I’d rather be, and that knowledge stings as it comes in. Soon I will rewatch the movie again and again. Soon, I realize, I will be beautiful too.

Myriam Gurba Isn’t Afraid of Being a Disruptor

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

In Myriam Gurba’s latest essay collection Creep, the Mexican American author interrogates both those who deceive, exploit, and oppress others as well as the culture that enables them. “People who hurt other people can be charming,” Gurba notes in the title essay. “It works in their favor.”

In Creep, Gurba moves beyond the memoir she became known for with 2017’s critically acclaimed Mean “to writing family history, and in some senses also genealogy. I’m locating myself within literary genealogies and also pedagogical genealogies related to education,” she tells me. Creep’s eleven essays address, among other topics, femicide, the criminalization of survivors of sexual violence, the racial grammar of Joan Didion, and racism in public education. Speaking out against such bigotry led to Gurba, a former high school psychology instructor, exiting the profession a few years back. Gurba was passionate about her former career, but acknowledges that now “exiled from that world, it’s incredibly difficult to talk about it, because that wound is so profound.”

I spoke to Gurba about the importance of bearing witness, her activism, and tracing how an abusive relationship unfolds.

Deirdre Sugiuchi: When you were forced out of the classroom, I was following your Twitter thread. I’m sorry to say this, but as a former educator, it was helpful for me.

Myriam Gurba: No, I get it. I would receive messages from teachers or former teachers who had been in similar situations. There’s a measure of comfort that comes through the validation. This is not a unique experience. This is an experience that is shared by many of us who choose not to conform to the bullshit policies that we are expected to happily obey, not just obey, but with a smile. They want to protect the institution, and they think that the best way to protect the institution is to make its reputation unassailable.

So often when I talk to adults about this, especially parents, they want to believe that the problem that I’m describing is unique to the district that I worked in, and I’m like, “No, this is standard across the United States. I’m talking about a problem that exists in the school district where your children go to school.” This is not unique to me, but people really, really want to reject that truth.

DS: The thing I love about your writing and your activism is you’re saying things that people, particularly women, are conditioned out of saying, but does it ever wear you out to have to be a disruptor?

MG: Does it ever wear me out? Absolutely. Engaging in that kind of behavior and doing that sort of work is very tiresome, especially when that work is being done alone. One of the regrets that I do have about functioning as a whistleblower is that in some situations, I wish that I had chosen to work collectively with others because if you’re just an individual woman functioning as a whistleblower, it’s easy for you to be vilified. It can be tiring, but doing that sort of work is also something that I remain passionate about. The energy ebbs and flows.

DS: Your essay, “Itchy,” which addresses racism in public education, begins with an anecdote about your father, who was an educator and later an administrator. Your mom was also an educator. Can you discuss how your parents inspired you to be an activist?

MG: My father and mother both worked as bilingual school teachers in California, and then my father became an administrator. One of his administrative tasks was the management of a bilingual education program in the Santa Maria Valley. He also had a federal position as the director of the migrant education program. Some of my father’s work involved organizing parents of migrant school children. Through the example that he set, I came to understand my role as a teacher, as one that also doubled as an activist and an organizer. I also understood that my role as a teacher in California also required me to engage in anti-racism.

My father also often acted as my protector, as did my mother. When I would encounter bigotry in the classroom, I was very fortunate to have two parents who were both teachers who were both anti-racist who could advocate on my behalf. As an adult, I felt that it was my duty to pay that forward with my own students.

DS: In “Locas,” you write about your cousin, who, you write, is “one of many Latinas who lost more than a decade of her life to prison thanks to the War on Drugs.” Can you discuss the impact the War on Drugs had on your cousin?

MG: My cousin is a survivor of sexual violence. She’s an incest survivor, and that perpetration began when she was six years old. It carried on for a very long time, and it was very violent. When she turned to adult family members for help, she was met with denial that substantiated what her abuser told her, “You’re never going to be believed.”

What my cousin most longed for was safety. She found safety in a few places, and when she did locate safety, it existed through relationships. She also experienced what she believed to be safety through the numbing provided by drug use, and so she began to self-medicate. That continued for a very, very long time. The criminalization that she experienced was a result of that attempt to numb the pain and also the rage that she felt. When she was inside many of those jails and prisons, she was given more reasons to self-medicate, because, as she explained to me, she moved from one abuser to another. So while the abuse initially began in the context of the domestic sphere because it was perpetrated by family, the next abuser became the jailhouse, then the next abuser became the prison, because she faced sexual assault there too, and sexual coercion, so that criminalization is largely tied to drug use.

DS: You’re haunted by Sophia Castro Torres, the woman who was murdered by the same man who assaulted you. You had to access police reports to even learn about the facts of her life. Can you discuss the importance of bearing tribute to Sophia through your work?

If you’re just an individual woman functioning as a whistleblower, it’s easy for you to be vilified.

MG: I felt compelled to write about Sophia so that she will not be forgotten. Since learning about her death, I have been haunted by her presence. In her case, I wanted to restore some dignity that the perpetrator Tommy Martinez worked very hard to destroy, but that had also been tarnished by certain reporters in the way that they had characterized and also mischaracterized her. I think about Sofia’s death as a death that one person is not responsible for. There are many institutions that also bear some of the responsibility for her premature death. For example, all of the women who Martinez attacked survived except for Sophia, and the difference between her and the rest of us is that she was homeless, and we’re not. Had there been accessible public housing in the community where I grew up, that could have prevented her murder. She wouldn’t have been walking in a park after midnight, or it’s a lot less likely that she would have had that experience. I wanted to restore some dignity to her and at the same time I did describe what I imagined her death to be in this very graphic way because I wanted people to understand the brutality. I have been critiqued for the graphic description that I give of her death in Mean, but I wanted people to really understand how brutal it was. Those details and that sense of haunting has lessened over the passage of time, but I still have a sense of her being with me. I imagine that she’s going to be somebody who I return to over and over again because I’m incredibly committed to keeping her memory alive.

DS: In the title essay, you write about intimate partner violence. You were trapped in a relationship with a man who assaulted you. In the essay, you recount how people ask, “How does something like that happen to someone like you?”

MG: It’s just such a bizarre question. I very much do get the sense when I’m asked that question that the person who’s asking it is drawing a very firm line between me versus them, that’s the insinuation I hear, that there must be some character flaw that is drawing the abuser to me, and that is serving as some sort of obstacle that is preventing me from being able to resist these battles.

What I find so strange about that question is that battering is the most pervasive form of gender-based violence that exists on planet Earth, and gender-based violence happens because of misogyny. I’m a female person. That aspect of my existence is not something that is turned on and off. It doesn’t matter what kind of female person I am. Whether or not I’m a perky, combative female person or this acquiescent, obedient female person, perpetrators have all sorts of different tastes. Some perpetrators might be attracted to somebody who they perceive as being easier to dominate. Then you also have perpetrators who envision themselves as these sportsmen who want that big fish and seek out what they perceive to be a woman who’s more difficult to tame because she presents a challenge. I’ve actually heard abusive men talk that way.

DS: Yes. I feel as a society we’re constantly pretending that gender-based violence is not happening.

Seeing my experience reflected on the page gave me veritable permission to name what was happening to me as intimate partner violence.

MG: The more vulnerabilities that are heaped onto a woman’s shoulders, the more likely she’s going to be targeted for this type of mistreatment. You’ve got intersectional oppression and you’ve got intersectional domination. In my case, I’m this person who is female. I’m queer. I’m the daughter of an immigrant. I have Mexican heritage. I’m also a person of Indigenous ancestry. I have a slew of phenomena that create vulnerability, and that make me this prime target. I think that part of the insinuation—how could this happen to somebody like you?— is also motivated by a misinterpretation of the way that queerness functions in battering relationships. There are a lot of folks that imagine that queerness or feminine toughness insulates a person from battering, when in reality, it makes the person more vulnerable. Queer people are more vulnerable to all sorts of violence. When it comes to LGBTQ folks, bisexual women report a lifetime prevalence of stalking, rape, and battering at rates of 61%. For bisexual women, it’s not a matter of if you are going to be stalked, if you’re going to be raped, or if you’re going to be beaten by an intimate partner, it’s just a matter of when that’s going to happen. That’s the case in certain targeted communities. This is again, something that goes undiscussed, that there are targeted communities.

DS: Can you just discuss the importance of art for bearing witness and the ways it can empower not just the writer but the reader?

MG: I wrote the title essay, because seeing my experience reflected on the page gave me veritable permission to name what was happening to me as intimate partner violence, as coercive control. It was almost like I had to see it mirrored. Once I did that, it set into motion my escape. What I’m attempting to do through the title essay is to offer other survivors an account of captivity from start to finish. I wanted to trace how such a relationship unfolds, what sociological factors are marshaled in order for the entrapment to occur. I really wanted to give explicit and nearly granular descriptions of the violence, because I want to help in any way that I can to set other victims free. Sometimes we need other victims to hold the mirror so that we can see ourselves reflected and we can see our predicament accurately reflected.

When I was reading that forensic literature (on intimate partner violence) when I was trapped in that battering relationship, some of that literature made me doubt whether or not I was experiencing violence, but it was the literature that was very graphic that underscored for me and validated that I was experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV). I do think some representations of IPV become very euphemistic. I also think that the pendulum has sort of swung in the direction of emphasizing the sort of psychological abuse and psychological terrorism that is endemic to all battering relationships. But I think that that psychological violence then eclipses the very injurious bodily violence that so many of us are subjected to.

Again, when we compare and contrast various groups of survivors, our experiences with physical and sexual violence are very different. Heterosexual women report IPV at rates of 35%, lesbian women at 44%, and then bisexual women at 61%. When bisexual women report IPV, we tend to report extreme violence. I was experiencing extreme violence but not finding records of that in the literature. It’s ironic that it was the extreme violence that I was experiencing that made me wonder whether or not I was actually experiencing intimate partner violence. Because so frequently, there was an emphasis on psychological aggression, but my abuser also broke my tooth. I’m not reading about women having their heads pounded against tables and I’m having my head pounded on the table. I do think that, unfortunately, I had to see myself reflected in women who were experiencing similar injury to be able to name my plight, so I’m attempting to give that reflection to whoever needs it.

I Survived a Lot of Edwards and Now I’m Team Bella

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I met Bella Swan in the middle of 2008, when the anticipatory Twilight movie poster circulated at my school. I took her home and hung her on my wall, blacks and grays covering the coral paint near my headboard. She gripped the folds of Edward Cullen’s dark denim jacket. They both looked like teens, but anyone who’d read the books knew he was a vampire, ninety years older than her. Edward looked off to the distance, to abstracted danger, to the movie’s simultaneous bomb and success, too busy to think about anything besides how the woman—girl—at his side reinforced his being a man. 

But Bella looked right at me. 

She was familiar. She could be anything I wanted her to be. Chestnut hair and dark eyes, a soft glow. Blank skin blank face blank canvas, her skin fine-toothed paper. I was envious of her beauty. I wanted to bask in it. She was too sweet, and I was too young to have my own story. I looked to her for answers. She looked cold. I wondered what it would feel like to hold someone, to share their warmth. To be desired. I wanted to be the apple cradled in her hands.  

The text on the poster promised that nothing would be the same. 

At Hot Topic, past the racks with Jack Skellington’s face stitched onto black book bags, past the clerk who preened her electric blue highlights in the reflection of the body jewelry showcase, I found two rows of shirts. All sizes, all black, with white lettering: Team Edward and Team Jacob.

It was my freshman year in high school, and everyone was divided. People who hadn’t seen Twilight, people who had, people who didn’t want to care found themselves unwittingly subscribing to either side of the binary. I came to school with Edward’s name branded on my chest. I was in the minority. My friends, most of whom would go on to choose healthier relationships later in high school and college, chose Jacob. 

Over the next ten years, I chose a lot of Edwards. They were tall and short, monied and broke.

Over the next ten years, I chose a lot of Edwards. They were tall and short, monied and broke. They spoke Spanish and Italian and came from Columbus and Ft. Meyers and Perth. After the flowers and fine dining came a bounty of brooding, clipped responses, and slammed car doors. They showed up uninvited to my house. They held phone calls hostage with self-absorbed monologues or punishing silence. My friends and parents despised them. They all had charisma. They knew how to convince me that while it was forbidden to be with them, they were precisely what I needed. They knew how to convince me that I was special but also disposable. They lured me into the forest, called themselves Lion, and named me Lamb. The percarity was intoxicating. They knew I’d chosen Team Edward without ever needing to see my T-shirt. 

When I gave in and made them the center of my world, they gave up. When they said they loved me, they would disappear. Their skin did not shimmer. 

I chose Team Edward because Bella chose Edward. 

In 2009, First Boyfriend Edward dumped me so he could reunite with his ex-fiancée who lived somewhere in Michigan. I was 14, he was 18. Age wasn’t supposed to matter, but suddenly, it did. Of course it did. It wasn’t a 90-year age gap, but it was something. 

I locked my bedroom door and sulked like Bella did in New Moon, after Edward abandoned her “for her own good.” Breakup protocol called for me to delete our texting history, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Loss had my stomach bottoming out. I sat at my desk, which overlooked the front yard, and my questions yawned into the night. 

What had I done wrong? How had I failed? 

I convinced myself that this breakup would mean that I was now free to find my real, true match. I had to let it all go. My laptop screen glowed dim and blue. On iTunes, Paramore’s Hayley Williams mused on “Decode”: 

Do you see what we’ve done? 

We’re gonna make such fools of ourselves… 

Bella had found her Edward, after all, and so would I. 

Between the Edwards, there were the Rosalies. They were electric, beautiful, accomplished. They floated in and out of my life, suggestions made in a language to which I did not have the code. Toronto Rosalie liked to ask me to come to MAC with her to try on lipstick. Soccer Rosalie was from Montenegro, well over a head taller than me, with a full tattoo sleeve and Amazonian features. During her English tutoring lessons, I was always the one who got tongue tied. When I ran into Cheerleader Rosalie in a bar after high school, she asked how I had been doing, and I responded by promptly spilling an entire glass of water down my shirt. I wanted to sparkle for each of them. 

Toronto Rosalie and I were in Dublin when she let me kiss her on the lips. We were in a club called Dicey’s Garden, drunk on Guinness. She tasted like strawberry chapstick and malted barley. We smiled, sheepish, half-embarrassed that we had done it, that we had enjoyed it. We were friends, so we never spoke of it again. 

My mind could not write a happy ending for Team Rosalie, although I could feel her interest each time through the foggy haze of my self-denial. She wanted me, but she didn’t need me. There was no trap door behind her smile. My inability to interpret her openness, coupled with a heteronormative society that lacked the visibility of queer romance, was enough to let her iterations slip away again and again. 

First Boyfriend Edward came back after things didn’t pan out with his Michigan ex. It was a ten-year cat-and-mouse, between all the other Edwards. He often brought me to the bar and left me near the tap, making sure I saw him flirt with all the blondes who wanted a piece of his shiny new police badge. 

She wanted me, but she didn’t need me.

There was Writer Edward, who waxed poetic about Eros but was never interested in my creative writing, who took me into his arms after a steamy Miami evening in his bed, only to say, “I don’t think I could ever love you.” 

And of course, there was Abuser Edward. In a spontaneous moment of mania, he insisted on whisking me away to Venice for a weekend filled with a gondola ride and fine dining, only to lash out later, accusing me of being a “financial burden.” I put up with it, knowing that even if he was mad at me, that it meant he wasn’t talking to other women, which was his near-constant compulsion. Sometimes, on the phone he would say: “When I’m inside her, I’m thinking about you. Can you feel it?” 

Different faces, same name, same ending. 

In my senior year in college, I watched the Twilight movies with my friends. We all piled on the couches in the living room, boxed wine in coffee mugs. Everyone—my roommates, their boyfriends, and a few guys trying to become my roommate’s boyfriends—laughed at her, Bella for staying with a clown like Edward. 

This was the same time that I was compulsively checking my phone for a message from Abuser Edward, wondering what I had done this time to get the silent treatment. He lived in Australia, but we had met during my study abroad semester in Dublin. In the same breath Abuser Edward had been swearing he wanted to marry me—he’d even lived with my family for a month the previous summer—he’d claimed he needed to get back with his old girlfriend in Perth to “let her down easy.” I soon realized that this girlfriend hadn’t known that Abuser Edward was gallivanting around Ireland with an American ten years his junior for several months. I had become the Other Woman, growing dizzier by the second as I watched Bella spin through the seasons, alone in her bedroom. 

The same friends who were gently urging me to dump my abuser were now laughing with disbelief that Bella had fallen into an unrelenting depression, sitting in her room for months after Edward had disappeared from Forks. Their sensitivity for the situation evaporated as they fell into a harsh, albeit valid criticism, of the movie. 

Bella’s so ridiculous, what the hell? I can’t believe this. Who would ever do something so sad? Get over it, girl, move on. 

And I probably curled into my part of the sofa, feeling self-conscious, even though everyone’s eyes were trained on the screen. My heart had probably started hurting, a sharp pang had been the trend back then, and I wiped my palms on the legs of my jeans. But she loves him, I thought. She’s waiting for him. What’s so silly about that? 

I wondered if the thoughts my friends shared with the screen were the thoughts they shared in private, to each other, when I wasn’t around. 

Twelve years after its release, I would watch Twilight again in 2020, this time with a guy named Adam. After an agonizing breakup from Abuser Edward, I didn’t know who I was, only that I wanted to write. I moved from my hometown in Maryland to Miami, Florida to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing. Adam had used his miles to fly down from Maryland for a visit. 

After an agonizing breakup from Abuser Edward, I didn’t know who I was, only that I wanted to write.

The movie’s saturated grays and deep blues washed my West Miami apartment with uncharacteristic maudlin. Adam and I were still in the dating phase, marked by a respectful distance between us on the bed. Later I would find out he suggested watching the Twilight Saga because one of my college girlfriends told him it would get him points with me. It did.

We were at the point in New Moon where Edward is telling Bella that she shouldn’t leave her house. She plans to resist him and leave anyway, but doesn’t get far. The thin veil of protectiveness tears to reveal his controlling, obsessive nature. Somehow, he’s managed to deflate the tires of her 1953 Chevy. A snake twisted in my stomach. This scene hit differently from when I was a teen. 

I asked Adam which team he would choose. I realize now that this question was a test. Edward is toxic, he said, point blank. Besides, Jacob is better-looking. Just look at that hair. He ran a hand through his own black coils, which had sprung to life in the late summer heat. It was probably the queerest thing he’d ever said, and would ever say again.  

Right around this time in 2020, I started to read Stephanie Meyer’s newly-released Midnight Sun, which is really just Twilight, but retold from Edward’s point of view. In an ironic, self-referential twist, law-school dropout Glasses Edward had given me Midnight Sun as a gift. Sensing things were getting serious with Adam, Glasses Edward had started dropping poems in my mailbox every day for the past few weeks. He was “just happening to be in the neighborhood” with all of my favorite groceries in hand. He brought me to his apartment, blindfolded, to reveal his studio transformed into a bistro for two, complete with stringy-lights and a three piece tuxedo. Against his deep anxiety over phone calls, he had started ringing me when I stopped responding to his texts. 

As it had with any Edward, this one’s gallantry had broken away into the vampiric fear that his emotional supply was leaving him. So I silenced my phone and, with satisfaction on a sunny afternoon, pulled out his gift and started to read.

Too quickly, a shroud of dismay overcame me. I had expected the prose to be lackluster, and it was certainly that. But even still, there was supposed to be something magical going on. Not even my nostalgia could salvage my expectations for this book. The way Edward described first seeing Bella in the school cafeteria was wooden, even less than an object. She was like a granola bar half-chewed and left for birds to pick at the fragments. It was all about Edward’s hunger. Stephanie Meyer was selling the same insidious story. I could only stomach the first three chapters before I put it down for good. 

I made myself find Adam. I really did. 

In a rebellious fit against Glasses Edward, I thought of the nicest person I knew and dared to believe for a moment that I deserved someone kind. Adam came to mind, with his shy sideways grin and starry brown eyes. We’d met at a mutual friend’s birthday party six months before, but I doubted he even remembered me. We had nothing in common – or so I thought – as he was the founder of a non-profit internet service provider, and I was, well, me. I was close to broke, writing pages and pages of a novel that nobody else had seen. In spite of this, I asked a college girlfriend to set us up. And to my shock, he agreed to meet for a date. 

While walking together around the Baltimore neighborhood of Fed Hill – it was the middle of the pandemic and we kept a polite distance – Adam wouldn’t look me in the eye. Or look at me at all. Being so used to Edwards raking their eyes over me, I thought perhaps this was a mistake, that he didn’t even want to be there. It took a moment to realize he was trying to be respectful. 

He was kind to me, he asked questions, and actually, actually listened. I let him in. I told him about my Nana who was grieving the recent loss of my Pop Pop, about how my passions for Irish history and queer desire had made their way into my novel-in-progress. After a while I would sputter, wondering why the spotlight was still on me, how it hadn’t yet been yanked away for a self-indulgent monologue. I truly didn’t know how to continue, and attempted to remove myself to the sideline of conversation. But Adam held space for me, encouraging me to keep talking. I was baffled. I had no script for this. We walked and talked for eight hours and shared a pizza on top of Fed Hill. Below, the city twinkled quietly. 

It was normal. It was a gift. 

As an adult child of alcoholics, my neurological destiny had been written; a narcissistic, ego-driven Edward could sniff out my anxious attachment from miles away. I had been conditioned to look for thrills, to expect them, alongside the uncertainty. The headrush of the love-bombing, the bottoming-out from the emotional withdrawal. Edwards were a project for me to fix; they were damaged goods that I could cure with my unending love. My voice had become small. I covered my brittle confidence in eyeliner and a busty tank top. I saw in myself only what I could give — my energy, my body. 

But Adam is not an Edward. He is self-effacing and kind. Motivated and curious. And startlingly, unbelievably silly. He was the chaotic kid in school who had the messy backpack filled with loose papers. He was a running back for his high school football team. He’s a Runescape legend and knows how to build his own computer. He’s an uncle. He has a Greek tortoise named Buddy that likes to get massages with a toothbrush. He’s my best friend. Adam is not a mystery, he is not a trophy, he is not larger than life. He is life. 

We understand that Bella is nestled somewhere between the spaces of my ribs. That this is my story, and I am learning how to be the center of my own heart. We know that it’s my task, this work towards self-loving. We affirm to each other that a healthy relationship is the joyous third entity shared between two self-assured people. His hands are ever-warm, like the world under his skin is constant sunshine. 

Nearly three years later, Adam and I strike out to Forks for my birthday weekend getaway. We had relocated to Seattle six months prior; it was the only way we could convince his Muslim parents that we should live together, by coincidentally getting jobs in the same city on the other side of the country. 

For those first six months, we—meaning I—talked of visiting Forks. By the time we got our car onto the Kingston ferry, the trip was taking on the glow of a pilgrimage. February is the gloomiest month out here in the Pacific Northwest, and this trip was no exception: the forecast called for rain and gusting wind. Rows upon rows of bleak coniferous trees ebbed into mist. It was perfect, because this was the weather that vampires went to school in. 

I wondered how many of us end up marrying our Edwards because we don’t see any other path for ourselves.

Forks is a small logging town in the northwestern corner of the Olympic Peninsula. Bella wasn’t kidding when she said she “exiled” herself there to live with her Dad. Only in my research en route had I discovered that the Cullen house, and other notable landmarks, had been filmed in Oregon. When we got to Forks, the main street held fuzzy street lamps, under which black lifted trucks and huge vehicles with felled trees rumbled through an insistent rain. The Twilight fandom had breezed through this town and dried up after the series ended, leaving behind old posters in storefronts and a shuttered cafe once called The Twilight Lounge. Adam and I grabbed reheated carry-out pizza from the only open restaurant. We ate on a concrete bench under an awning, watching the mist. He joked, not without edge, that he might be the only brown person on the entire peninsula. 

Eventually we found Native to Twilight, the only fan store still open. 

Inside the store, beyond kitchy coffee mugs and signed posters and movie props for sale, there was a giant cardboard cutout of Edward and Bella on their wedding day. They stared at one another with a vacant sort of passion, and the fluorescent lights cast a synthetic glow around them. There they were, and there I was with Adam, foils of what had been, what could be. 

I wondered how many of us end up marrying our Edwards because we don’t see any other path for ourselves. I had seen firsthand how an Edward can masterfully distort reality to make leaving them feel like theoretical self-annihilation. But it’s all a selfish mirage, constructed from their own fears of abandonment and inadequacy. If we settle for the familiarity of hurt, what do we end up sacrificing in return—our dreams of safety and validation? 

I wanted to gently take Bella’s hands, and tell her to look, look at Adam, see how tender he is. There is no danger in his eyes, but a promise of adventure, yes, and of warmth. There is room for you here. It is possible. I wanted to take Bella to Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park, where the spruce and hemlock and cedar trees have shallow roots. It rains so much that they don’t need to dig deep. All they have to do is reach hundreds of feet into the sky, and trust the rain will come. 

On the drive home, the sky in front of our windshield is gray, the tendrils of low clouds hover over the evergreens that march up the mountains. No thunder echoes through the valley, but it may as well have, because it does in my mind. I scroll through Spotify and play Supermassive Black Hole for the umpteenth time, reliving the scene where the Cullens play extreme vampire baseball under the cover of a thunderstorm. 

Again? Adam’s guessing there’s a Twilight connection. He’s mildly mystified, and charmed that I can’t let these notes go. He knows this is more than a fandom. While I am bobbing my head to the song, his hand is a warm anchor on my thigh. 

I really don’t like Forks, he says. 

I laugh. I don’t think I do, either. 

Then Bella’s Lullaby is the next track to play, and the delicate piano notes drip like rain onto the hood of the car. 

I suspect the world will always need Twilight. In the years to come, Twilight will be a model for what not to do when looking for love. It will be a comedy of wooden acting and a poorly written screenplay, a time capsule of de-fanged nostalgia to share with friends. I will continue to learn from and laugh at Twilight, yes, but not at Bella—never at Bella. If I did, then it would mean I would be laughing at myself, at others who have been completely consumed by a toxic relationship. 

Edward and Bella, they failed me. They were supposed to meet me here, at the end of the world. They were supposed to grow with me, out of themselves. All there is, of course, is trees. And flat, cardboard characters. Adam’s hand is reassuring on my leg. I turn up the music, and open the window so the rain can tap my skin. 

But the trip to Forks wasn’t totally a wash. In front of the cutouts of Edward and Bella was a registration book, where fans could record where they were visiting from, and of course, which Team they were on. My heart sank as I flipped through the pages. Not a single person in hundreds had written they were for Team Bella. 

So I picked up the pen, set it to the next blank space, and did what I should have done fifteen years ago. 

I chose Team Bella. The sun is going down and the clouds steadily darken. Perhaps, in a way, Edward and Bella had met me here at the end of the world. This music is mine, this romance is mine, I re-write it with every re-visiting. I tell Adam, which is to tell myself, all the ways they got it wrong. The rain doesn’t sting, it’s a blanket of mist over me. In spite of them — and perhaps because of them — I’ve found something deeper, richer, than twilight.

The Many and Various Uses for Mayonnaise

Posted on by Wynter Miller

The Many and Various Uses for Mayonnaise

One little pale fresh tennis ball of rain
bounces across my forehead. Fifteen-love.

I have very bad posture. An only somewhat
inquiring mind. But they tickle me

the many and various uses for mayonnaise
considering there is only one use for poetry.

To lose money. To lose money. Toulouse Monet.
I think we just connected, you and I.

We’re inside of really quite a touching moment.
Balloons lost in the trees. Balloon fruit.

Rottenway

the rotten the rotten way you therotten
way you look in the morningthe rotten way
the bedroomrotten in the morning the rotten
bright wind the rottenbrightwind in the trees
the bright wind opens a gate in the trees

I am wide awake the rotten way you look the breath

the apple is a white dumpling the rottenway
you look in the bright wind morning opens

wide awake and whitesoft and blossomy

I close the window and really it’s a thrill

lopped off on the wet grass this bloody rose
your crown of moss your moss-wings

how dreadful to find out you’re awake
that it all carried on and without much fuss

The Lying Nude

When I say this view is bananas
you know I mean it’s gorgeous.
I tried pointing an app at all that sky.
My phone said result type: masonry.
You have a face like a face being torn to shreds.
I fucking love you so much right now
my hair hurts and there’s fancy mustard
where once upon a time I had a belly button.
When I say you you know I mean
thee. One fine meadow offers clemency.
The stubborn red tulips make keystrokes
in the paltry breeze and I think
whoever built the first arch was crazy smart.
Oh your dirty elbows. Hello.

I Was Too Quick To Call Out Cultural Appropriation

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I don’t remember exactly when I first heard it but it was in high school sometime in the early nineties. I was listening to the radio after school but before my parents returned home from work. Rock music was the sound of my teenage rebellion. It was forbidden in our house so I had one ear on the radio and the other on the garage door. Suddenly I heard a familiar twang in an unfamiliar place. It was the distinct sound of a sitar, but in a rock song: The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” How strange to hear the sitar alongside English rockers crooning about a long-lost love? As a first-generation Indian American who spent my weekday afternoons illicitly jamming to pop and rock while doing homework and my weekends at Indian classical music concerts, I found myself constantly humming the tune. 

But even that didn’t prepare me for when I turned the radio dial and blaring back at me came, “Ha-re Krish-na, Krish-na Krish-na, Ha-re Ra-ma, Ra-ma Ra-ma.” I couldn’t believe chants to Hindu deities Krishna and Rama, which I was accustomed to hearing in the sanctity of a Hindu temple or uttered by my grandmother in prayer, were being sung in a rock song. That was my introduction to the iconic hit song “My Sweet Lord.” 

In truth, I couldn’t yet admit to liking the song because it felt a bit like when white girl rockers like Gwen Stefani wear a bindi as a costume. Doing so, I felt, might make me a bad Indian, betraying my culture by falling prey to the wiles of a culturally appropriative yet masterful performer. Yet, this song oddly captured my essence—a little bit Hindustani, a little bit rock ‘n roll. And the lyrics about the singer’s search to find and be found by his “Sweet Lord” spoke to my own quest to find my identity and be seen in my totality as an Indian-American—a person formed by these two bold, and often opposing, cultures. It would still be a few years until I learned that one musician was behind the Indian influence in both of these songs: rocker George Harrison.

This song oddly captured my essence—a little bit Hindustani, a little bit rock ‘n roll.

These perplexing feelings would come rushing back to me during my initial interview with Grammy-nominated, Hindustani singer Lakshmi Shankar—the subject of my first book—when she mentioned that she went on a fifty-city stadium rock ‘n roll tour and sang alongside George Harrison. I was stunned. I had known Lakshmiji, as I affectionately referred to her, my whole life, had been to dozens of her concerts from the age of five onwards, and counted her amongst my most favorite singers. Her repertoire of Hindustani ghazals, thumris, and khyals were imprinted in my mind, part of the indelible soundtrack to my childhood. 

Lakshmiji had pulled out a cassette tape, during our interview, and had played me, “I Am Missing You,” a sweet ballad where she implores Lord Krishna to show himself, confessing she is missing him terribly. In all the years of listening to her music, I had never heard Lakshmiji sing in English. Yet, here she was not only singing in English but accompanied by a rock band—keyboard, saxophone, bass guitar, and drums! Lakshmiji flipped the tape over and a second version of the song played, this time her voice was accompanied by Indian instrumentation—santoor, bansuri flute, and tabla. She called “I Am Missing You” a “Hindustani pop song”—it was unlike anything I’d ever heard. 

Ravi Shankar, renowned sitar player and her brother-in-law, composed the song and none other than George Harrison produced it. “This is amazing, you’re a rockstar, Lakshmiji!” She laughed as I sat in disbelief wondering what else I didn’t know about this traditional Hindustani singer, close in age to my grandmother, always clad in a sari and a bindi. In that moment, I had a dawning realization that my assessment of George and his relationship to Indian music and culture might be, at best, incomplete, and at worst, unfair.

In truth, before embarking on writing Lakshmiji’s biography close to ten years ago, I had already made up my mind about George. I believed he and all the other white rockers of the late 1960s, casually strumming the sitar or playing guitar riffs inspired by Indian ragas on their rock songs, were cultural appropriators. They were indiscriminately poaching and misappropriating Indian music with little regard for its significance or context to Indian culture. For them, it served merely as a trendy “exotic motif” to spice up their music and image. 

Before embarking on writing Lakshmiji’s biography close to ten years ago, I had already made up my mind about George.

I wasn’t entirely wrong. For many rock bands of that era featuring Indian musical and cultural motifs, playing pentatonic scales while donning kurtas and malas cemented their appeal with hippie and counterculture audiences.

But as I delved deeper into my research into the journey of Indian music to the west and George’s role in this cultural transmission I began to realize that perhaps he had transformed himself from a cultural appropriator to an ambassador for Indian music as he evolved his own understanding and appreciation. My feelings and beliefs about George as an artist and as a person began to shift and evolve, as perhaps his own feelings and beliefs about Indian music had. Admittedly, it had certainly been easier for me when I could consider George solely as a cultural appropriator and cancel him in my mind. However, this experience had now complicated my thinking on cultural appropriation, making it more complex and nuanced, more gray rather than starkly black and white. 

I had been working in racial justice when I began to be haunted by the need to write the life story of Lakshmi Shankar, a Grammy-nominated singer who was the most prominent Indian female musician in the movement that brought Indian music to the west in the 1960s, a movement sparked by her own brother-in-law and frequent collaborator, sitar maestro Ravi Shankar. Yet, it was white rockers like George Harrison and the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and The Byrds who received the most attention and accolades for making Indian music hip and cool, even when it sometimes came at the expense of stripping it of its cultural context. One of the more insidious ways that racial injustice works is by erasing the stories and contributions of those already marginalized by society. Through my biography, I had hoped to remedy what I saw as the racist and sexist historical perspective of white chroniclers who had left her out of the history books.

And as far as I had been concerned, George Harrison and his appropriation of the sitar and Indian music was part of this biased history. 

George, I learned, first came across the sitar on the set of The Beatles’ movie, Help! in 1965. Like many movie depictions of Asian culture at the time, Help! featured a problematic, Orientalist plot about the Beatles trying to escape the clutches of an Indian swami and his cult. George picked up a set musician’s sitar and began strumming it. Soon after, he would ignite a “sitar craze” by plucking out the indelible melody of “Norwegian Wood” (1965)—one of the Beatles’ most iconic songs—on the sitar.

At this stage, George was like most white rockers, who in their search for the newest sounds, was drawn to the exotic, mystical scales of Indian ragas and the tinny, harp-like sound of the sitar—a faraway cousin to the guitar. There’s no escaping the irony of cutting-edge rockers turning to a foreign musical tradition dating back hundreds of years to find their latest sonic trend. But in doing so, most of them didn’t bother learning much about the culture of its origin or the theory or techniques of Hindustani music, satisfied to just appropriate from the tradition to score their next hit song.

At this stage, George was like most white rockers, who in their search for the newest sounds, was drawn to the exotic.

Then again, this wasn’t surprising given that both The Beatles and the Rolling Stones had appropriated the sounds of Black musical traditions, including the blues, soul, and gospel, in creating their own “trademark” sound. And history rewarded white artists including The Beatles and Elvis by crediting them as the “inventors” of rock ‘n roll rather than Black soul rockers, James Brown, Little Richard, or Sister Rosetta Tharpe. 

In my mind, cultural appropriation by white artists and erasure of indigenous artists by white cultural gatekeepers were twin blades working together to diminish indigenous cultures and artists and their role in the world. Hence, irrespective of his artistic intent, I viewed George as an appropriating white rocker who fetishized and capitalized on Indian musical motifs.

George went on to compose other songs as part of the Beatles repertoire, which reflected his growing interest in Indian music, including “Love You To” (1966) and “Within You Without You” (1967). The Indian influence on these songs is boldly evident from the melodies, to the instrumentation, to the metaphysical lyrics inspired by Hindu philosophy. In fact, Indian musicians from the Asian Music Circle, including a sitar player, tabla player, and others play on these tracks. Also boldly evident is the erasure of these Indian artists given that none of them are credited in the album liner notes. 

What is more emblematic of bald-faced cultural appropriation than the biggest rock band in the world using indigenous musicians to create their distinct sound while erasing them from musical history?

I needed to know, was he an appropriator of Indian culture and music or was his relationship something more complicated?

But as I delved further into my research for Lakshmiji’s biography, I also found myself falling more deeply into the wormhole of George’s music, becoming obsessed with trying to discern George’s true motivations. I needed to know, was he an appropriator of Indian culture and music or was his relationship something more complicated? Something harder to label?

Even as I labored on my own biography seeking to lift up the story of an overlooked Indian female artist who helped bring Indian music to the west, I couldn’t completely deny that the Indian-inspired songs composed by George and recorded by the Beatles had helped bring Indian music to legions of new fans. Appropriative or not, their interest in Indian music and culture, helped set off a broader cultural curiosity and hunger which would have a lasting impact in the west. 

But perhaps more is revealed by the impact Indian music had on George. It became clear to me that experimentation with Indian music helped George find his voice and served as inspiration for him as a composer and lyricist in a band where Paul McCartney and John Lennon were understood to be the de facto songwriters and singers. Just as importantly, his exploration of Hindu spirituality helped him make sense of the world and his purpose amidst his helter-skelter ascent to fame and fortune.

In his memoir, I Me Mine, George talks about the influence on his songwriting of Indian ragas, which are more like musical moods than the key signatures of western classical music: “… it really did help me as far as writing strange melodies and also rhythmically it was the best assistance I could have had.” And he went on to elaborate, saying, “It seems to me that for a certain type of writer, it is not so much what he feels or stories about what he is going through, but it is more like a craft. This Indian music we are listening to now is directly conveying the feelings of the player. So to try to write a song is, to me, more a case of being the vehicle to get over the feeling, of that moment, of that time.” 

In truth, reading George’s account of the impact of Indian spirituality and music on his life and music, I begrudgingly realized how much I related to his journey towards finding deeper purpose and meaning and to finding his own voice as a singer and songwriter. I only became a writer close to the age of forty, sparked in large part by my mission to tell Lakshmiji’s story. But to do this meant I had to get over the fact that despite committing myself to writing full time and to telling Lakshmiji’s story, I still didn’t see myself as a writer, and neither did many around me. I didn’t have the educational credentials of a writer or the experience, just a deep-seated desire to express my perspective on the world through my words.

My hypersensitivity around cultural appropriation was rooted in the fact that I came to writing after having worked in racial justice only to find that the literary and publishing realms were unbelievably undiverse and inequitable. Writers of color, including myself, were struggling to publish our own authentic stories because they were often viewed by gatekeepers as too niche, while white writers’ stories were framed as universal and culturally relevant. When Black and brown writers wrote of their experiences being marginalized, it risked being viewed as grievances, while when white writers wrote about marginalized communities outside of their identity and experiences, it was often hailed as heroic.

When white writers wrote about marginalized communities outside of their identity and experiences, it was often hailed as heroic.

But this was not my first encounter with cultural appropriation. I had found my way to yoga in my early twenties as it was growing in popularity across the country and globe during the late 1990s. I had come to treasure it as a practice that strengthened my mind and body, while connecting me to my culture and Hindu spirituality. At first, I was glad to see this aspect of my native culture find a place in American society but I soon became uncomfortable as I watched yoga be increasingly severed from its cultural and spiritual roots and appropriated and commodified by white, upper-class influencer “yogis.” 

My first yoga teacher was, in fact, white and approached the practice and teaching of yoga with great respect. But she soon became the exception. When a white yoga teacher, who had anointed herself with the name Parvati—the name of a Hindu goddess—fetishized my “brown skin” and “exotic name,” I abandoned yoga, only finding my way back to it twenty-five years later, amidst the pandemic. 

George’s interest in Indian music didn’t dissipate after “Norwegian Wood.” Instead, he craved a deeper understanding of Indian music so, he sought out Ravi Shankar, whose mastery over the sitar was earning him international attention. Ravi and George first met in London in 1966 and George asked Raviji if he would teach him the fundamentals of sitar and Hindustani music. 

George made trips to India—with The Beatles and on his own—during the height of his fame, in order to learn more about Hindu spirituality and Indian music. Explaining the importance of his relationship with Raviji as his conduit to Indian music, George said in Ravi’s memoir Ragamala, “(Ravi) was the first person who impressed me in a way that was beyond just being a famous celebrity. Ravi was my link into the Vedic world. Ravi plugged me into the whole of reality … The moment we started, the feelings I got were of his patience, compassion and humility.” But beyond this, George also valued Raviji as a close friend as captured in Martin Scorsese’s documentary, George Harrison: Living in a Material World: “Just to be able to be his friend is an honor and a joy.”

I couldn’t deny the power of George and Raviji’s enduring friendship and collaboration.

I couldn’t deny the power of George and Raviji’s enduring friendship and collaboration. Theirs seemed, to me, like an unlikely musical brotherhood between a rock star and an Indian classical musician, transcending cultural identity, a friendship based on mutual admiration and affection, rather than exploitation.

With the dissolution of The Beatles in 1970—a breakup that shook the whole world of rock ‘n roll—George was finally free to pursue his own musical interests, and he continued to follow his passion for Indian music and spirituality. His first solo album, All Things Must Pass, whose title itself refers to the temporality of life, a conceptual bedrock of Hindu spirituality, featured “My Sweet Lord,” a song unlike anything heard before or since, fusing the musical chanting of the Hindu Krishna Maha Mantra, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama,” with the sounds of Christian gospel through a refrain of “Hallelujah,” with rock instrumentation. The spiritually-focused song featuring a choir of Hare Krishna devotees, (at the time, Harrison was involved with the Hare Krishna spiritual movement), became an unlikely yet resounding hit climbing to #1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and staying in the Top 50 for four consecutive weeks before being certified gold by RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). 

Even today, more than fifty years later, I’m in awe that George could create a rock song centered on spirituality rather than romance or desire, the stuff of most rock songs, one that included both Christian gospel and Hindu chants, and have it become the most popular song in the country. 

George knew he was taking a big chance in making “My Sweet Lord” but felt it reflected where he was spiritually. “I wanted to show that ‘Halleluja’ and ‘Hare Krishna’ are quite the same thing. I did the voices singing ‘Halleluja’ first and then the change to ‘Hare Krishna’ so that people would be chanting the Maha Mantra – before they knew what was going on! I had been chanting ‘Hare Krishna’ for a long time and this song was a simple idea of how to do a Western pop equivalent to a ‘mantra,’ which repeats over and over again, holy names.”

My understanding of George’s musical legacy, however, would once again be complicated by appropriation when I learned that George ended up being sued for plagiarizing “He’s So Fine,” a 1963 hit song by The Chiffons, a Black, all female group. The judge found the musical themes of George’s “My Sweet Lord,” and The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” uncannily alike and George was eventually found guilty of “subconscious plagiarism.” While the judge noted that he didn’t think George had set out consciously to plagiarize, it still constituted plagiarism. 

George had to pay more than $1.5 million in damages and the case haunted him as a songwriter and musician.

George had to pay more than $1.5 million in damages and the case haunted him as a songwriter and musician. “I wasn’t consciously aware of the similarity between ‘He’s So fine” and “My Sweet Lord’ when I wrote the song as it was more improvised and not so fixed, although when my version of the song came out and started to get a lot of airplay people started talking about it and it was then I thought, “Why didn’t I realise?’ It would have been very easy to change a note here or there, and not affect the feeling of the record.” 

When I thought more about the case and its outcome, I wondered if perhaps white artists, like George, can grow so used to appropriating the sounds of marginalized cultures, that perhaps they start to subconsciously believe that those sounds are their own or, at the very least, they’re entitled to them.

Raviji approached George deeply distressed about the death and suffering from the war engulfing Bangladesh, homeland of his musical guru, Ustad Allaudin Khan. As a Bengali, who shared a language and other cultural aspects with Bangladeshis, Raviji wanted to put on a concert to raise funds to aid the people of Bangladesh and hoped George might participate. Instead, George responded by taking the reins, inviting an incredible line up of rocker friends including Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, and Leon Russell. 

George composed and performed a song “Desh,” about how everyone can and must find a way to help the people of Bangladesh while Raviji performed his own original composition, “Bangla Dhun” alongside master sarod player, Ali Akbar Khan, who was Ustad Allaudin Khan’s son and Ravi’s own brother-in-law, accompanied by his favorite tabla player Alla Rakha. The August 1, 1971 show sold out so quickly that organizers added another show on the same day, which also sold out.

The recording of the landmark Concert for Bangladesh featuring a chock full of rock ‘n roll heavy hitters and performances by George and Raviji ended up winning a Grammy for Best Album of the Year. But just as importantly the Concert for Bangladesh, itself, raised millions of dollars in aid for Bangladesh, becoming the model for future rock benefit concerts, including 1984’s Live Aid and the ongoing Global Citizen concerts. 

Burned in my mind are the images of emaciated Ethiopian children playing on loop over a soundtrack of “Drive” by The Cars.

Detractors may unilaterally frame efforts like the Concert for Bangladesh and Live Aid as the work of “white savior” rockers. It’s true that organizers, who were overwhelmingly white, often promoted these events using “poverty porn,” problematic images and rhetoric, which tended towards reductive portrayals of countries like Bangladesh and Ethiopia in paternalistic and monolithic ways, emphasizing poverty and destitution rather than acknowledging their cultural richness or the complexity of the crises they faced. This is evident in the stark cover image of The Concert for Bangladesh vinyl box set, which features a beleaguered young Bangladeshi child beside an empty plate. 

My father was born and raised in Bangladesh, a country so often overshadowed by its neighbor, India, so George’s monumental, even if imperfect gesture, holds particular significance for me. Although I wasn’t born in time to witness the impact of the Concert for Bangladesh, I remember watching the live telecast of Live Aid while staying at my parents’ closest Bengali friends’ home in London, en route to India. Burned in my mind are the images of emaciated Ethiopian children playing on loop over a soundtrack of “Drive” by The Cars. They reminded me of the malnourished children I witnessed begging on the side of the roads during our trips to India. My friend and I felt compelled to scour her parents’ house for spare change to donate. 

While it’s undeniable that the framing of these events smacks of cultural arrogance and insensitivity, I wonder, is it not a different type of cultural arrogance to summarily dismiss the life changing impact these musical events had in raising awareness and lifesaving funds for often ignored regions of the world? Ultimately, through the Concert for Bangladesh, George and Ravi, demonstrated how friendship and music can be forces that change our world for the better and provided a model for future humanitarian endeavors by artists.

George created his own record label, Dark Horse, and was busy working on pushing out his second solo album of the same name. He had launched his label with the vision of putting out records by eclectic artists he loved, such as Black gospel singer Billy Preston and an ensemble album by Raviji and fellow Indian classical musicians, including Lakshimiji. 

But George went further. He approached Raviji with the radical idea of doing a combined, cross-cultural tour for his new Dark Horse album and Raviji’s Music Festival from India ensemble album.  

As I immersed myself in researching the 50-city Dark Horse tour, reading chronicles of it in Rolling Stone and elsewhere, I found myself desperately wishing I could have been a fly on the wall for this breakthrough musical event that brought together both of my cultures. It’s especially uncanny and poignant that this tour was launched November 1974, the month and year I was born. Whenever I wonder what was happening in the world as I arrived into it, this is the event I come back to, time and again.

Raviji, Lakshmiji, and several of the best Indian musicians set out on a cross-country tour alongside George and his stellar rock ensemble, including the likes of singer Billy Preston. I was mesmerized by the behind-the scenes photos Lakshmiji shared with me, including a photo of the chartered plane George had custom emblazoned with an “Om” symbol. Snapshots of Indian musicians in their saris and salwar kameez rehearsing and hanging out with rock musicians clad in mostly bell-bottom jeans and t-shirts. I paused when I came to a tender photo of George and Lakshmi hugging each other. 

She talked to me about how George had been a kind man with an “Indian soul” who took such good care of all of them and how she had loved feeding him her home cooked dishes on his visits to India. Lakshmiji was both one of the most talented musicians I admired as well as one of the warmest people I knew and I felt compelled to reconsider George through the lens of her deep affection.

George, a chief villain of my story, had unexpectedly become one of its unlikely heroes.

Some critics weren’t kind in their assessments of the tour, the Dark Horse album, and George’s voice, which had been strained from working furiously to complete his own album and produce Ravi’s ensemble album. They saw the Indian ensemble as an exotic and unnecessary distraction for American rock fans who were itching to see George perform, especially since he was the first Beatle to tour the U.S. since their break up in 1970. 

When interviewed mid-tour by Rolling Stone, George offered his sanguine take on some of the criticism of the tour: “At every concert,’ he said, ‘something good has gotten across to the audience. There’s been bad moments in each show, but I mean it doesn’t matter, because the spirit of everybody dancing and digging it. And if you get 50 drunkards who are shouting, bad-mouthing Ravi or whatever, … you get 17,000 people who go out of there relatively pleased, some of them ecstatic and some of them who happen to get much more from it than ever thought …”

Why had George undertaken this grand endeavor of a cross-cultural tour, the likes of which had never been attempted before, putting his own musical reputation and resources at stake, if not to promote Indian music and musicians and to demonstrate the power of musical collaboration? 

I had envisioned the chapter in my biography of Lakshmiji about this breakthrough era when Indian music made its way to the west as a chance to call out white rockers like George who had appropriated Indian music for their own artistic ends. But then, George, a chief villain of my story, had unexpectedly become one of its unlikely heroes. When I close my eyes and think of that legendary tour, I have a vision of Lakshmiji clad in a sari, her serenely smiling face anointed with a large, round bindi, standing next to George in front of a mass of screaming fans, their voices soaring in unison.

Ever since Lakshmiji played me that cassette tape of “I Am Missing You” and I learned of the remarkable cross-cultural Dark Horse tour, I’ve grown more and more confounded and fascinated by George. It’s true, George seemed to have begun as a cultural appropriator but I believe he transformed into one of the most passionate and dedicated cultural ambassadors for South Asian music and culture through his words, his deeds, and of course, his music. 

George was someone who brought people and cultures together. This was evidenced by the range of performers at the historic Concert for Bangladesh in 1974 and decades later at the 2002 “Concert for George,” which marked the one-year anniversary of his death, where his son Dhani and Ravi’s daughter Anoushka performed. And it was obvious at George’s posthumous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony concert in 2004, where Prince, the great Purple One, himself, paid tribute to George with the most epic guitar solo to George’s Beatles ballad, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” 

These days, I often have George’s music on rotation, whether on digital or vinyl, captivating me with his melodies and inspiring me with his lyrics about the temporality of life, the essentialness of love, and the belief that periods of difficulty and darkness often precede those filled with joy and light. His songs have never been more relevant and comforting than during the recent pandemic. In 2020, during the harrowing days of the pandemic’s peak in New York City, one hospital began a tradition of playing George’s uplifting “Here Comes the Sun,” as they wheeled discharged COVID-19 patients through their lobby and into the waiting arms of family and friends, after long and frightening recovery periods. So, it’s fitting that “Here Comes the Sun” made history recently by becoming the first Beatles song to hit one billion streams on Spotify, beating out iconic songs from McCartney and Lennon.

Sometimes as I listen to his music, I allow myself to imagine if I had come of age as a teenage girl when The Beatles burst on to the stage. I can see myself swooning over George, “the quiet Beatle,” especially during his hippie phase, with his gorgeous long, brown, locks and stark cheekbones making him look part rock god, part Indian ascetic. 

I admit, George has frayed my intellectual resistance; he has changed my mind through his music and his life. Yet, the irony is not lost on me that it was my deep dive into researching the life of an overlooked Indian female musician that opened me up to understanding how a celebrated white male rocker’s relationship to my own culture transformed and blossomed in ways that brought the world a bit closer together.

I’m less interested in erasing or excusing George’s acts of appropriation, but instead more interested now in seeing them in the context of his own evolution as a person and as an artist of his times. George’s life and work has offered me a new, more complicating lens, for examining and revising my own understanding of cultural appropriation while reaffirming my belief in transformation, that one can start out a cultural appropriator, and then if open to listening and honoring the voices of a culture, one can evolve into a cultural appreciator. George sang of how “all things must pass.” Just as they can emerge into existence, they can evolve. And, so can we.