Jenny Fran Davis’ debut novel Dyketteis indisputably, vibrantly, hilariously queer. Dykette follows three couples (and a charismatic pug) on a ten day, pressure-cooker trip to Hudson, New York. The oldest of the couple, Jules Todd (a news anchor who reads like a fictional Rachel Maddow) and her partner Miranda, a therapist who seems perpetually wrapped in a cashmere, invite two twenty-something couples to their upstate house to admire the domesticated bliss of conventionally successful middle aged dykes. The third-person narrative closely follows the high femme, PhD in “the feminine miniature” candidate protagonist Sasha and her boyfriend Jesse, a very nice, handy and resourceful butch and Darcy and Lou: cool, beautiful, artistic, down for whatever, vaguely internet famous as they spend the holidays together.
Three femmes and three mascs go to the woods, what could go wrong? If you answered “a lot” you’re correct. Dykette reads like gossip from your favorite, albeit somewhat messy, friend—it’s full of cunty observations, bizarre situations, performance art, high femme antics and jealousy. There’s competition amongst femmes, butch/femme dynamics, photo shoots with the sexy Grinch filter and a lot of gay sex. Yet at its heart, it’s about flawed people who are desperately trying their hardest to be liked by one another, to find in each other the queer utopia that is community.
I spoke to Jenny Fran Davis by phone about being femme, desire as a driving force and the allure of the butch/femme dynamics.
Ariél Martinez:The book opens with a sexy Grinch filter photo shoot. What does the Grinch mean to you?
Jenny Fran Davis: I feel like the Grinch didn’t hold particular meaning for me as a kid. I don’t really remember thinking about the Grinch until the Grinch filter came along. The Grinch filter was pretty pivotal for gays in general in the past few years. I began to think about the Grinch as bitterness and cockiness and just having all around a bratty attitude. And I think that’s probably part of why we as gays think that the Grinch is so sexy. I was also thinking of the Grinch and his redemption arc as being aspirational to Sasha in the book. His heart can grow two sizes and he comes around at the end and sees the beauty of Christmas or whatever. That was fun to play with also and just thinking about this character that we’re supposed to see evolve in a pretty specific and wholesome way. I was thinking along those lines in terms of Sasha’s arc, playing with whether she was able to embody the same loving, forgiving, wholesome attitude of the Grinch. And I don’t necessarily think she does, but I think that is an interesting aspiration for her, at least at the beginning of the book.
AM: I haven’t read that many books with a blatantly queer femme protagonist like Sasha. Can you talk about your relationship to being femme and how that factored into the writing of the book?
JD: I’m so happy to be talking to a fellow femme about this. It’s so interesting because being femme feels so native to me. It just feels like the lens through which I see everything, think everything, say everything, experience everything. So in a way I wasn’t really thinking about it. I was just feeling my way through it. And I think that was a really interesting way to practice writing and maybe something I haven’t done as much in the past, but letting myself be more impulsive and perform a little bit more dramatically on the page and really channel this character of Sasha who definitely resembles me in a lot of ways, but also isn’t quite me. Navigating writing this character who in some ways is an exaggerated version of myself in some ways, but has different motivations, yet shares this fascination and obsession with being femme was really interesting to play with. And it gave me a lot of leeway to experiment and try things out and take ideas and impulses a little bit further.
In terms of being femme in general and the femme protagonist thing, that’s something I feel like I’ve been thinking about more since finishing the book and thinking about its reception. Throughout the process of writing, it really just felt normal and unremarkable just because it’s so in my bones. Starting to contend with how people read the book and experience the book and then taking it a step further in how they will experience or think about me as the writer has been a more explicit way of thinking about being femme and the way that I’ve been afraid to express myself in certain ways for fear of derision and judgment and all of these things that I’m sure writers of all genders feel.
AM: Another thing that struck me in Dykette is the different women and their very different iterations of being femme. I was wondering how you thought about these characters and their relation to their femininities.
JD: The dynamics of the femininities among Miranda, Sasha and Darcy was the most fun I had writing this book. Part of what’s so fun about being femme is sort of scrutinizing other femmes. That’s been such a joy of my life and my work and my writing is just studying how other people are doing that and being envious and in awe of, and judgmental of, and jealous of and oftentimes extremely turned on or turned off by something another woman is doing. It consumes so much of my personal thinking and writing. And it was so fun to to think about how these characters are relating to each other in all of these different ways and trying on different parts of each other, seeing what might work for them, what they might want to take, what they might want to reject in themselves, what they recognize and hate, what they recognize and love.
A big part of writing this book was leaning into things that feel trite and frivolous and superficial and stupid and taking those things if not seriously, then at least spending time thinking about them and putting them on the page. That was a way that I wanted to both resist the urge to shy away from writing about things because I thought they were trite, but also to not to not try to make what feels trite and frivolous feel unnecessarily weighed down or serious, like let those things be light and fun.
AM: I wanted to ask you about humor. Are you just a funny writer or was it something that you consciously brought into the writing process? Did you always envision it as being funny?
JD: It was really important to me to write something that felt joyful and fun. I want it to feel like dessert or gossip. Like those things that are so delicious and so fun because to me being gay is so fun and so funny. I wanted to translate the joy and the manic humor that I often feel with my friends onto the page. And that was an important thing for me to not lose. Not that writing the book was translating a real life story, but I feel the way that I was thinking about what I wanted to faithfully represent from my own life was the element of joy and fun and lightness.
There’s so much humor and double edged serious and funny elements to all of my friendships and relationships and also to my relationship with myself. I find that embracing humor eases every feeling. And that was important to me to translate into writing. Even in the super tense or serious situations among the characters are real feelings of betrayal and jealousy and loneliness and pain. And all of these things are rarely, at least for me, just that. I was trying to capture the way in which there can also be a perverse joy to feeling jealous. It was important to me to capture the complexity of some of these feelings. It ended up opening a lot of doors in terms of plot and structure also.
AM: I feel like desire is so present in this book in so many different directions. Did you think of desire as being a plot force?
Being femme [is] the lens through which I see everything, think everything, say everything, experience everything.
JD: Totally. Desire is kind of the plot force in this book. It’s kind of a cliché of writing fiction. Like, think about what the characters want and that has to be the most central thing. I don’t know that I explicitly started out thinking in those terms but very quickly, it became clear that every interesting thing I was writing had to do with what a character wanted and what they were willing to do to get it. I think all of the characters want multiple things. It’s not like they each have this one desire. Sometimes you really want two things at once. And pursuing one of those will mean that it’s a lot harder to get the other things. I feel like that opened up a lot of doors too, just embracing the complexity of desire. Both really wanting something but also not wanting something at the same time. Desire was super, super top of mind as I was finishing the book and then revising and making sure that desire was both thematically and plot wise, woven into basically everything the characters do and say and feel.
AM: There’s a lot of sex in the book, and then there’s also these kind of nebulous sexual experiences too. Did you know you wanted queer sex in the book? And did you want to see these more nebulous situations?
JD: I definitely knew that there had to be sex in the book. I was also really nervous about that because it’s so easy to be so cringe and to write the most humiliating sex scenes. I was really scared of being cringe. I was experimenting with writing sex without a ton of editorializing and kind of just saying what happened without overwriting the meaning or the feelings surrounding it. I was interested in the mechanics of the sex that was happening. I thought especially because the book is written in the third person, what if I withheld that a bit and just described the acts that were happening without immediately divulging what the characters thought and felt about those acts. I think that was a way that I thought around feeling so cringe as I was writing and also tried to capture the ambiguity or ambivalence of a lot of those sex scenes.
AM: What did you know you wanted to communicate in writing butch/femme dynamics and what obstacles, if any, did you face in writing those?
JD: Butch/femme dynamics are… I love them. I think they’re so fun. I think they’re so fun to be in and experience and play with in my life. And also so fun to write and read about. So I knew that that would be a big part of this book.
Contending with the recent and past history of the way that people think about butch/femme dynamics as mimicking heterosexuality, which I definitely want to mostly reject, is really interesting. I think there is sometimes a joy in perverting heterosexual dynamics, even when that looks like imitating them in some ways. Playing with them would be a better way of putting it. I think that aside, the more intellectual debate or intellectual legacy of butch/femme dynamics aside, I just think that they’re very definitely underexplored. I know there are a lot of really amazing representations in literature, but I guess I’ve found that in recent queer fiction, I just haven’t come across many depictions of it. Not that my project’s goal was at all to represent everyone or to include every possible iteration of queer relationships. But I also didn’t want butch/femme dynamics to be the only queer dynamics that I explored.
And so although that dynamic is really present for the protagonist, Sasha and her boyfriend Jesse, I don’t think that that’s necessarily the case for Jules and Miranda or for Darcy and Lou. It was fun for me to think about how the really, really strong butch/femme dynamic of Jesse and Sasha is being seen by other queers and delighted in but also challenged at certain times. And just the way that this dynamic exists within a relationship, but also how it kind of works in the midst of other queer relationships that don’t necessarily have that same masc/femme thing going on. I was really interested in that dynamic being subject to the pressures of the current moment that it finds itself in, but also the friends surrounding that relationship and the other dynamics surrounding that relationship and the coexistence and push and pull among all of these relationships and how they change in response to one another. That was something that I was really excited about exploring. I wanted to write such a joyful and fun butch/femme dynamic because in my experience it is so joyful and fun. Which is not to say that it doesn’t have its challenges and that it’s any better or worse than any other sort of dynamic. It was really generative and fun for me to write about, like all of the ways that it’s such a delightful dynamic because in my experience, it really is.
AM: I was describing your book to a friend and my friend who—I love them so much but they’re not a big reader—was like, wait so is it Rachel Maddow fan fiction?
JD: Oh my God. I was about to say that.
AM: I thought that was so funny but can you just talk me through how Jules came to be?
I think there is sometimes a joy in perverting heterosexual dynamics, even when that looks like imitating them in some ways.
JD: I think Rachel Maddow fan fiction is a really great way to put it, but also because I’ve never met Rachel Maddow, it’s also just all of the sexy 40-year-old butches that I’ve ever known in one person who’s also total dork and really cringe, but also irresistible to Sasha in that way of being being 15 years older and having a successful career and being kind of famous and having a bunch of money and having this sexy, distant partner who Sasha’s really intrigued by. It is totally fan fiction. And then as things happen between them, there’s a disillusionment with Jules. It was really important for me to work through that in the writing because people are very rarely how we think they’re going to be or how we want them to be.
AM: What’s your favorite part of the book?
JD: I think the part where Jesse is accusing Sasha of trying to be a reality star. I feel like that gets at a lot of the inner workings of their relationship. And it’s also this moment where things between them come to a place where the performance hasn’t quite ended. I think that part of the book shows that we’re always performing and something can be both very performed but also very real. When Jesse yells out “who do you think you’re trying to be? You’re not Stassi Schroeder from Vanderpump Rules. You’re not this reality star brat caricature.” That’s a breakthrough moment where it punches through some of the overperformed dynamics between Jesse and Sasha. But it also brings us back to the reality TV world that we live in where we’re all performing ourselves all the time. And even in that accusation, I feel like Jesse is performing something too. That spat between the two of them really opened up something that I had been writing towards the whole time. And then in that moment of extreme tension and anger and hurt between the two of them, something gets exposed but also doesn’t get exposed to a point where they’re no longer performing. We see the performative nature of even vulnerability and raw emotion.
To do so, he only has to jostle and vibrate the particles in his body. That’s it. This then frees them from the confines of the man’s emotions, specifically the failures (which he has extensively catalogued) and the desires (which he has extensively desired) that masquerade as his soul. Once jostled and vibrated perfectly, the man renders himself something other than alive, but certainly not inert, and he is free to pass through the nearest wall. While in this not inert but also not alive state, he can forget his poor performance review and the extra weight at his midsection and the half-empty bags of last year’s Easter candy in his filing cabinet. It doesn’t even matter that Courtney in accounting turned him down when he asked her to coffee last week, even though she isn’t dating anyone. Single for over three years she’d told Rachel, also in accounting, during a conversation in the office break room that wasn’t meant for the man to hear.
The man fears that passing through walls is perhaps the only interesting thing about him.
Courtney is unable to pass through walls. Her cells cling to each other with a fervency that can never be broken. She learned that the dust that collects on her tiny dresser and along the windowsill in her bedroom is sloughed off skin cells and as she cleans her apartment every Saturday afternoon she mourns the loss of those parts of her and wonders what memories they take with them. She turned the man down for coffee because she likes her life exactly the way it is. She is not interested in change.
The man, who attacks his loneliness with bags of candy, finds it difficult to understand that for Courtney, another day alone is preferable to an hour spent with the man in relaxed conversation. She feels similarly about the conversations she has with Rachel, also in accounting, every day at 3pm in the break room. He longs to banter with someone like that. Specifically, he longs to banter like that with Courtney in accounting. He wants to be past all the introductions and the life-changing electrical charges that leap between two people getting to know each other. To discover if their cells want to share electrons.
The day after the declined coffee invitation, the man heard Rachel laugh when Courtney relayed the information that he had asked her out. Rachel, as it turns out, would have said yes to a coffee date with the man.
What the man and Courtney could never know is that Rachel’s cells have been losing their magnetic pull, drifting away from each other. She feels less like herself every day. She responds to this lack of vibrancy by over-compensating. Laughing loudly at jokes that aren’t funny, coordinating the office birthday parties where everyone shoves cheap grocery store cake into their mouths as fast as possible in an effort to return to work before too much interaction occurs. All while waiting waiting waiting for someone to excite her. Rachel would take a chance.
The man, in his ignorance, can only feel the slight of Courtney’s rejection. He knows at this precise moment, which is 3:01pm, as he struggles to finish a mindless task at his metal desk, Courtney and Rachel are sitting at the white plastic table in the break room. Just on the other side of his office wall.
A wall that he can pass through.
The man’s body becomes quantum waves, loosening from the shape he loathes in the mirror, and he passes through the atomically small spaces between the wall’s matter. Much like a brick of cheese through a cheese grater. Except that on the other side, the cheese becomes a brick again.
It is always supremely disappointing, after so much effort manipulating himself on a molecular level, that the man finds himself completely unchanged. He reassembles himself, atom by atom, each piece in the exact spot as before he propagated through the barrier. His brain reshapes to have the same thoughts, the same uncertainties.
Courtney and Rachel look up. This is not news to them. The man frequently passes through walls to attend meetings and exchange pleasantries and confirm rumors. The coffee machine gurgles. The microwave hums. The air conditioner rattles.
The women each clutch a mug of coffee. The mugs were brought from their homes. Courtney’s is completely white while Rachel’s has a cartoon picture of a cat wearing a sundress.
“You know . . . .” the man says.
Courtney thinks of the breath leaving his body, the skin cells flaking from where his sleeve doesn’t quite meet his wrist, his accumulated memories with nowhere to go, and how she has no room to carry any of it. There is no available space.
Rachel feels a slight vibration. A rogue cell deep inside is activated. All her other cells wait for a message to be passed. On her face is an expectant look.
The man almost says something ridiculous. Like: “I don’t even like coffee.” Or worse: “I don’t like talking to people.”
But then the man’s gaze shifts. How has he not noticed Rachel before? She’s not just Courtney’s coworker. She’s an important member of the company. More important than most everyone else, in fact. She plans every office party, and once when the man told a joke that bombed while everyone was eating cake, Rachel laughed as if it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. At the time, the man had been too embarrassed to meet her eye, but he will never make that mistake again. Everyone in the company takes her for granted. To be very specific, the man takes her for granted. But he sees her now, and every particle in his body knows he made a mistake inviting Courtney to coffee.
“I was wondering if you’d like to join me for coffee, Rachel?”
The rogue cell deep inside Rachel, the one that has been waiting for a moment like this, alerts another cell and another and another, and they all become charged. The cells dance. There is much to discuss on the molecular level deep inside Rachel from accounting.
The man is waiting. The invitation is nice. It feels nice to be invited. But the man invited Courtney first. If Courtney had said yes, this invitation would have never appeared. It is a secondary invitation. The invitation stops feeling nice. Rachel slowly begins shutting down the charged molecules deep inside of her, one by one. The man seems lovely. He has always seemed lovely. Once Rachel saved him from total silence after he bombed a joke during a party she had planned for a woman who no longer worked for the company.
“I understand,” the man says, Rachel’s hesitation heavy between them. He walks to the door, anxious to leave the break room as fast as he can.
“I’ve never seen you use a door before,” Rachel says.
The man thinks again how passing through walls might be the most interesting thing about him.
Rachel thinks how the man’s ability to pass through walls can’t possibly be the most interesting thing about him. There’s a glimmer of hope. The rogue cell tries one more time to generate a charge.
“Send me an email,” Rachel says. “Let’s set it up.”
Courtney and Rachel share a look. The man can’t decipher its meaning. He expected to feel exhilarated, but he somehow feels even more humiliated.
“A door forces you to go the way everyone else goes,” he says. When the man returns to his office, he’s going to write that email to Rachel. He moves toward the wall that has his office on the other side. Courtney and Rachel watch. He anticipates the moment when he will pass through the wall, back to his cramped office and accumulating work, because he will stop being himself until he reaches the other side. As if he ceases to exist.
When we think of a family business, what springs to mind first is probably a straightforward, even heteronormative, structure: a commercial concern (hardware store; funeral home; shipping firm) passing from parent to child (usually meaning, under patriarchal and capitalist tradition, from father to son). And there are plenty of opportunities for conflict in this simple structure—after all, it depends on children behaving as employees; parents acting as managers; siblings jockeying for promotion. (How does one give one’s daughter a lukewarm performance review? Is it possible to rage-quit one’s family?)
But there is also an infinite world of messiness to tap in stories of family business, beyond this relatively straightforward drama of the play of power between (literal) corporate families. One way to describe my novel Glassworksis as a story of a family business that doesn’t know it’s a family business: each generation of the Novak family thinks they’re striking out on their own, choosing independence, rejecting their predecessors’ legacies; but again and again they end up drawn to the same patterns, the same foundational elements—in their occupations, in their relationships, and in the muddy spaces between the two.
For better and for worse, what we do for a living often has a controlling stake in our waking hours, our mental health, and our identity. Wherever this also gets mixed up with the drama of family—duty and rebellion, guilt and pride, love and resentment—there’s bound to be a fascinating story ahead.
There is a brick-and-mortar family business in this excellent novel of late vaudeville and early Hollywood: Sharp & Son’s Gents’ Furnishings, of Valley Junction, Iowa. Mose Sharp, the eponymous Son (and only boy among six sisters—his father has the store’s sign repainted upon his arrival), is fiercely determined to escape his professional and filial destiny. But even running away to make it as a song-and-dance man, he can’t quite shake the destiny (or is it a curse?) to ply a family trade—whether it’s devoting himself to a doomed double act with his sister Hattie; growing so close to his professional partner that he sees all their films as love stories; or being haunted at every turn (no matter how ancient the guilt, and how successful his showbiz career) by the shadow-self that should be behind the counter in his father’s store. Besides this prodigal son, McCracken gives us beautiful moments with all those sisters—Annie, for instance, who covets Sharp & Son herself and who’s done “everything an heir should have except been born a boy.”
Stevens, a quintessential “real English butler” looking back on his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, confronts long-buried doubts about his lordly employer’s legacy (and his own complicity in it). There’s already a fascinating sense of “family business” to this story—it’s difficult, after all, to think of an occupation with worse work/life balance than butler to an aristocratic country house. But in the most harrowing section of the book (which is saying something), Stevens hires his own father as under-butler. It quickly becomes clear to the rest of the staff—particularly housekeeper Miss Kenton—that “Mr Stevens senior” is in physical and mental decline. The compartmentalization and denial required for Stevens to project-manage his father’s senescence and rapidly failing health while on the clock, and under threat of constant interruption from their pampered upper-crust employers, lead to more than a few scenes so tense you’ll have to read through your fingers.
I could have as easily listed Fowler’s earlier novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, in which (without giving too much away) sisterhood is harnessed as a behavioral science experiment. But I had to give the edge to Booth, which has haunted me in its genre-bending layers—a novel told from many perspectives, about the family of John Wilkes Booth. Many of the Booth siblings are Shakespearean actors (following in their father’s deadbeat footsteps), and they compete bitterly, onstage and off—for roles; for applause; for the next line. And then, of course, there is the trouble with Johnny. Fowler’s treatment of the Lincoln assassination (the inevitable gravitational center of the book, even before the reader cracks the cover) is masterful on a craft level—and with remarkable modern resonance we see the Booth family navigate another set of public performances, at once competitive and collaborative, as they are forced to transition to an entirely different type of household name.
This cult classic takes the notion of a “family business” to grotesque extremes, with carnival barkers Aloysius and Crystal Lil Binewski experimenting with radioisotopes, arsenic, and toxic potions of all descriptions to ensure their children can double as their sideshow exhibits. Sibling rivalry thrives, to say the least, among the Binewski clan (Arturo the Aquaboy; Iphy and Elly the Siamese twins; Olympia, our hunchback narrator; and telekinetic Chick). The small-town America carnival circuit bears witness to their Machiavellian power struggles and the sometimes equally disturbing displays of love that tumble headlong into obsession, with the whole plot literally powered by the ashes of the carnival’s founder and Binewski patriarch—Grandpa’s urn is bolted to the hood of the midway’s generator truck.
Without revealing too much about a novel that relies on its unexpected turns, I can say that each of Trust’s four sections is concerned with families in business together—chief among those “businesses” being the purest distillation of American capitalism itself, in the robber-baron age of pince-nez and unregulated markets. Partners become collaborators become accomplices; parents and children betray one another and their own ideals for the sake of their next project. The tension at the heart of many of the novels on this list is that between duty and transaction on one side, and love (or rebellion) on the other—there’s one painfully beautiful version of this in Trust, with the character Ida’s father refusing to accept a gift from her without offering her a penny as “payment”—narrating as an old woman, Ida says, “I still have the penny that saved us.”
This novel of simultaneously epic scope and deep intimacy runs from eighteenth-century Ghana to the present day, rendering three hundred years’ and two continents’ worth of history in one family’s intricately complex lineage. Generations of descendants work together, and sometimes at odds—farming, fighting, mining, singing; shouldering trauma and striving for peace. From the opening pages, where both marrying and enslaving neighbors are used as strategies for surviving English colonialism, Gyasi examines the inextricable webs of choice and necessity, the relationships both filial and transactional, the fractal spiral of cause and effect that drives nations’ histories no less than individuals.
Among much else, this novel set at the River Valley School for the Deaf is about what happens when the boundaries collapse between work (or activism) and family. February, the headmistress at River Valley, lives on campus with her wife—an arrangement under threat on multiple fronts, both professional and domestic. The chronic simmer of their work/life tension lends dignity to the parallel dormitory dramas of their adolescent charges. Then there are the dynamics of Austin’s family—legends at River Valley, with Austin fifth-generation Deaf on his mother’s side. Austin’s hearing father works as an ASL interpreter, slipping between practiced neutrality in his role as a professional communicator, and full-blown participation in the emotional conflicts of their family life—particularly now that Austin’s newborn baby sister has just sent shockwaves through the house by passing her first hearing test.
A different kind of story about the desperation that drives, and the duty that harries, a prodigal child. Fahad’s brutally charismatic father, Rafik, is determined to toughen up his sensitive son—readying him to inherit his legacies as cabinet minister and landowner of a rural estate in up-country Pakistan, and to defend them against threats from hungry competitors (including extended family). But dysfunction and failure are braided into both traditions, politics and land management, and Rafik’s rabid dedication to his legacy is no guarantee of its longevity. The scale of this deceptively quiet novel is large, and there are in fact many families’ livelihoods caught up in the consequences of Rafik and Fahad’s conflict. “We are your children,” protests one of the farmers who works the family’s land. “Who shall I punish then,” Rafik replies, “if not my children?”
This novel, set in an alternate post-Soviet Russia, has the mesmerizing symmetry and logic of a folktale. Twin brothers Dima and Yarik work opposite shifts expanding the Oranzheria—an enormous greenhouse that, paired with the satellite mirrors that keep the city of Petroplavilsk in twenty-four-hour daylight, squeeze maximum efficiency from nature itself. Work is now both the only thing the brothers have in common and the thing that keeps them ruthlessly separated on opposing schedules—until an encounter with the mogul who owns the Oranzheria changes everything. Dima and Yarik become “the poster boys for opposing ideologies”—one drifting into anarchy to become a folk hero of the resistance; the other rising from promotion to promotion until he’s a modern icon of oligarchy.
An inevitable ancestor of every other book on this list, Dombey & Son is the tale of a hopelessly proud manunable to distinguish his firm from his family (and who therefore dismisses his daughter as entirely worthless). But besides the cold calculations of the title characters/business, Dickens offers us a bouquet of other examples of families “at home in public”—from the many, many characters who literally live at their places of work; to Polly Toodle, the wet nurse who balances longing for her own family with her occupation nursing baby Paul; to the Carker brothers, whose birth order is reversed in their positions at work, leading to scenes of dark comedy with the brother “Senior in years, but Junior in the house” bullied by his malicious younger sibling; to Mr. Dombey tasking his most obsequious clerk with communicating with his own wife, in a new “professional” role as the “organ of [Dombey’s] displeasure.”
When Emmanuel Iduma was growing up in Nigeria, he learned little officially in school about the Biafran War, the civil war that split the country along ethnic lines between 1967 and 1970 when the secessionist Republic of Biafra declared its independence from Nigeria. Nor was the conflict talked about much at home, despite its great personal impact.
“I have no account of the daily grind of my grandparents as they maneuvered to survive the invasion of our hometown. Most of my family’s war stories are hidden from me, as though repressed so long ago they now seem canceled out. I know only this sliver of fact: everyone in my father’s immediate family, except my uncle Emmanuel, returned from the war,” he writes in I Am Still with You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance, and History, an expansive book in which he journeys through Nigeria in search of this lost namesake—at once an intimate memoir, a political reckoning, and a study in the creative process as it intersects with a country’s complex history.
Iduma returns to Nigeria, after a time in New York, to find Lagos erupting with the #EndSARS protests against police brutality. His father has recently died, and his search for the uncle he never knew—across familial hometowns and university libraries, monuments both mundane and overflowing with memory—is imbued with echoes of love and grief for a father’s long-lost brother, and a writer’s recently passed father.
Through a skillful structure and expressive prose, I Am Still With You brings together probing philosophical questions about inheritance, cogent historical and political concerns, and an exploration of the reverberations between personal and collective loss. Finally, the book is about the uneven process of discovery amid the certainty of unanswered questions. “Once it was clear how little there was to know about my uncle,” Iduma writes, “I realized I barely knew what I sought. Hence, chance encounters—not a prepared list of interviews and survivors—were my only approach to the aftermath of the war, my need to learn what I could from a slantwise perspective.” It is this perspective—inventive, tender, and all its own—that gives Iduma’s book such power.
I first met Iduma not long before he planned to return to Nigeria, when I was an editor at the New York Review of Books and we worked together on his writing. I emailed with Iduma about what stories and identities we inherit, love and loss in I Am Still With You.
Lucy McKeon: We worked together on the 2019 essay that was a precursor to I Am Still With You, and I’m struck, rereading it now after reading your book, by how a philosophical kernel of the book was already fully there in the essay: what is the meaning of a life when one dies so young and leaves nothing behind, like the flash of a meteor’s light? And what is inherited? I wonder if you can say more about what this question meant to you, then and now.
Emmanuel Iduma: At the outset, and up to the point of writing that essay, I was quite interested in the notion of brief presences. But in working on the book, I found it increasingly dissatisfying to designate a life in such terms. My uncle’s life was, as far I know, brief. But what could it mean to uncover a sense of his ambitions, to uncover the meanings of his person, to trace and flesh out that brevity?
LMcK:And what do you feel you learned, as a writer, along that journey of discovery?
Since the war ended more than 50 years ago, how do we remain impacted by its catastrophes?
EL: While I researched the book, almost everyone I spoke with recalled a mere handful of details about my uncle. In that sense memory was a blind docent. And yet, a docent it was, leading me to a greater understanding of my family’s past. It wasn’t so much an evolution in my sense of self as a deepening, and even that in a way that didn’t eventually seem cathartic or therapeutic. I felt that I now understood how my identity was not only shaped by the war (and disappearance of my uncle), but also by my attempt to discover the extent of that loss. And so, regardless of how much anyone in my family could remember, by writing the book, I sketched out the terms through which I can now engage, and be at peace with, the unknown.
LMcK: Speaking of inheritance, the book is a beautiful tribute to your late father. It is also a meditation on familial relation: fathers and sons, and brothers, both biological and chosen. Was your search for your uncle Emmanuel always also a gesture toward your father?
EI: Yes, the book is, in every sense, a way to honor my father. His passing gave the book its urgency. I wanted to understand how he mourned his brother, how his brother’s absence shaped him. Considering him in retrospect meant that I made meaning out of his life as it related to mine. This was a form of consolation. I am aware that, as Peter Gizzi writes in a poem, conversing with the dead is the “most honest definition of silence.” Yet I came to my father’s life from what I made of it in his absence, and hopefully every word is one in which I pay homage to his fortitude and spirituality. And yes, since it is a search for my father’s brother, it seemed necessary for me to conceptualize brotherhood as extending from one generation to the next.
LMcK: You’ve returned to Nigeria recently when, in October 2022, the #EndSARS movement launches against the Special Anti-Robbery Squad’s police brutality; and you’re very near, and at one point join, the Lagos protests. You’re also, for the book, amid processing the legacy of the Biafran war and investigating continuing pro-Biafran agitation. Can you say a bit about the fascinating relation between the two political movements and moments, one of many aspects of the book that give it a kind of full-circle feel?
EI: Each generation in Nigeria has had its political awakening. The Biafran war was such a moment for the post-independence generation. It was difficult, perhaps even impossible, for those in the Biafran region not to take a side. The same can be said of the EndSARS protests: my understanding was that the key actors in the leaderless movement were those born in the mid-to-late ‘90s. I don’t intend, with this comparison, to trivialize the acuteness of the war, or to mischaracterize it as similar to the experience of being on the street in protest. Yet it was clear to me while I wrote the book—particularly since that opening section was written after completing two drafts—that the real failure of imagination would be to avoid a reckoning with the histories that led, in part, to the protests. My sense is that political reckonings are cyclic in nature—an event sparks a reaction, a reaction leads to a flashpoint, again and again. It felt necessary to connect those flashpoints, to insist that it would be nearsighted to think in pockets of events.
LMcK:Names are central to the book, most obviously in the fact that you are your lost uncle’s namesake, but in other subtle and surprising ways as well (of your father’s many names you consider “what name his identity was staked at the beginning of his life”). Have you always felt close to your name, and did writing this book change how you identify with it?
Each generation in Nigeria has had its political awakening.
EI: My father had two endearing names for me, “Nwannennaya,” and “Ezeali.” The former, as I mention in the book, translates as “father’s brother.” And the latter is the name of my maternal grandfather, since in my hometown the second son is called thus. In my early adulthood, I grew fonder of those names, especially knowing that my father, in using either name, was deliberate in his affection. In writing I Am Still With You, I hoped to work out, at least theoretically, what it meant to inhabit the identities of both my uncle and mother’s father, both of whom I know little about.
LMcK:We share an interest in photography (and I would just plug your wonderful newsletter on African photography, Tender Photo, here!), and photos are central to I Am Still With You, both in the literal sense of Romano Cagnoni’s reproduced image of men training for the Biafran army and Priya Ramrahka’s early death, as well as your hunger for family photos—but also in your idea of “afterimages,” often appearing in dreams, “the climax of my engagement with the trauma handed down to me,” you write. How did, and do, images guide your process?
EI: When I write about photographs, I am looking for a piece of speculation in my reading of the image that can hint at an idea greater than the sum of the event that led to the photograph being taken. And yet I do not say this to mean that facts aren’t important, or that it is unimportant to state the basic details of where, when, and in what context a photograph was taken. I take those as starting points.
Now that I think of it, my initial attempt to write about the war, several years ago, was through photographs. I had the idea for something akin to Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer, a journal of photographs collected from various sources. But unlike Brecht, who wrote poems, I planned to write short texts in relation to each image. The core of that idea was carried over to my book, which was to consider photographs as central to any speculative reach for the past. Cagnoni’s photograph became the quintessential expression of such a method, in the sense of its invocation of a sea of pensive men going to war, and in the sense that each face can represent a distillation of an unknown fate.
LMcK: What was it like to return to Lagos after your time away?
EI: I returned to Lagos just before the pandemic began, so I spent 2 years living largely in the quiet of our home, visiting only a select group of friends, most of whom weren’t writers. I think this has helped me understand Lagos and Nigeria less as a place where I had to be a writer, but where I had to make a life. I didn’t return to Nigeria because I wanted to change anything about my writing life, but because I wanted to be closer to my family.
By the time I was leaving New York – and I wouldn’t think of it this way at the time – I was thankfully plugged in to a network of editors and fellow writers, which is now global. I have received a steady stream of commissions, mostly to write about art. It would have been difficult to make a living on these terms in New York, given the cost of living, but in Lagos it has been possible.
In Lagos, I have sought to imbue my work with a character and mood that hews closer to narrative than to art criticism. In one sense, this comes out of writing a memoir that has little to say about art or visual culture. I’m still at the early stages of probing that transition from criticism to narrative—or finding a middle-ground between both—but I also think it is my attempt to propose my work to a “mainstream” audience, outside restrictions of predilections or expertise.
LMcK: Can you say a bit about how the Biafran War has been written about in the past, and how this history perhaps influenced your own writing about the war?
EI: There’s, in fact, a good number of literary works about the Nigerian civil war—one need only look at the bibliography of Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which lists nearly 30 titles that inspired her novel. The other relatively recent book to explore the war is Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country, styled as his personal history of Biafra. The distinction I made, as I prepared to write my book, was one between writers who were born before the war (and were old enough to remember its events), and those born afterwards. I belonged to the latter group, and felt our task was to work out our own “personal histories” in relation to the war, and to approach it with a different kind of immediacy: since the war ended more than 50 years ago, how do we remain impacted by its catastrophes?
LMcK: How has your sense of home and family developed over time, and how do you attribute the effects on your writing?
EI: My family moved quite a bit in the years I grew up. Before I turned 20, we had lived in 7 towns. And then, a few years after I left law school, I moved to New York to study. In all that time, I returned to our hometown on occasion. While it is true that my Igbo identity is framed by this itinerancy—that is, by the fact that I have not spent sufficient time in places where Igbo is claimed as a primary culture—I have become more and more interested in using my trajectory as a spark for my writing.
It has meant that my writing has dealt with subjects about home—going and coming through several seasons. The passage of life. These themes have always been electrifying for me. What does it mean to stay away, and then to return? In general, I think a writer is as affected by itinerancy, distance, and estrangement as by permanence and localization. I certainly don’t think that one needs any form of estrangement to write compelling literature, but in my case, much of the writing I have done has been in an attempt to bridge distances between home and elsewhere, and to consider the ramifications of absence.
I’ve been asked versions of these questions about my home country many times when I’ve been abroad. Maybe because I’ve lived almost my entire life in Trinidad and Tobago, I’m used to the inherent complexities of our twin islands. We have a vibrant Carnival culture that sees two days of near-naked revelry in the streets but also a strong streak of social conservatism with powerful religious institutions and large swathes of the population who embrace so-called “traditional” gender roles and romantic relationships. We are one of the wealthiest Caribbean countries, largely thanks to our oil and gas reserves, but our crime rate is the sixth highest in the world. We’ve been independent since 1962, but the shadow of colonialism falls over our laws, our schools, and our thinking.
However, every time I travel, I’m reminded that much of the world sees us as an island paradise tourist destination. I’ve told people that yes, we do get internet. I see the ocean multiple times a week, but I seldom actually go to the beach. And I love fresh coconut water (sometimes stereotypes are true). I think that one of the best ways to know the many faces of our islands is through literature. In The God of Good Looks, I wrote modern Trinidad as I lived it—a place with a booming beauty industry and Carnival creativity but also a rigid class structure and powerful elite who wield their power with impunity.
But every country is made up of a multiplicity of stories. Each of these books shows a different face of my country. They show the beauty, the cruelty and sometimes the absurdity of life on these rocks in the Caribbean Sea. And each of them is a cracking good read.
Recently, someone I loved very much got sick. The doctor said, “five good years, if you’re lucky.” But we weren’t lucky. As I was grappling with the reality of death—both the person’s physical absence and the logistics of burying a body—I read When We Were Birds. This is a novel set in a fictionalized version of Trinidad and steeped in local folklore; Darwin is a down-on-his-luck gravedigger whose life becomes intertwined with Yejide, a woman tasked with helping the dead rest easy. This novel revealed the many faces of death. While death can be scary and angry and uneasy, it can also be restful, like a long sleep, or “like an old lady in a rocker on her front porch settling her skirts.”
This collection of interconnected short stories is a love letter to gay Trinidad and Tobago. Characters receive insultingly bad haircuts, have underwhelming threesomes, suspect a former lover of serial murder, and worry that their Grindr hookup is using them for food. Bagoo writes with familiarity and tenderness about “the cool, pretty boys at Boycode parties, the Muscle Marys at Carnival fetes, the slightly pretentious gays at Drink! Wine Bar, the drunk, sketchy gays at Club Studio, the nerds at his NALIS book club and the artsy, sexually fluid crowd at galleries.” The Dreaming is a book that holds both the joy and tragedy of the queer Caribbean tightly.
“She was a woman, hooked, clubbed, half-dead, half-naked and virgin young.” The titular character, Aycaia, was one of the Caribbean’s indigenous people, cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid. This novel is set on a fictional island that has much in common with Tobago and examines the ways that a certain kind of sensual femininity can be seen as an affront and the sweeping power of colonialism, which extends past foreign ownership of Caribbean lands to encompass the ownership and exploitation of women too. The callaloo of my racial mixedness includes being part Carib—one of T&T’s first peoples—so it was a joy to see some of my history represented here.
It’s 1834 and slavery has been abolished; however, the Emancipation Act has decreed that all former slaves are now apprentices and must continue to work for their planters for six years. “Freedom was just another name for the life they had always lived.” Rachel can endure it no more and flees her plantation in Barbados to search for the children who were taken from her and sold. This novel takes us from bustling Bridgetown to the forests of British Guiana and finally to Trinidad. Shearer’s historical novel reminds readers of the terrible toll slavery took on our islands while also questioning the true meaning of freedom.
Aletha Lopez is about to turn 40. And while she appears to be a poised Port of Spain store manager with a killer dress sense, she’s secretly covering up bruises from her abusive partner and seeking solace by sleeping with her boss. Aletha narrates in sparkling Trinidadian Creole, while flashbacks show us her childhood pockmarked by poverty and the presence of the awful Uncle Allan. This is a devastating read that looks unflinchingly at sexual violence and family secrets, but which also celebrates the enduring power of the human spirit and the life-saving properties of friendship.
Set in the 1940s, during the turbulence of World War II, and nearing the end of colonialism, the Trinidad of this novel was both so familiar and so alien to me. When the wealthy and enigmatic Dalton Chatoor disappears, his young wife Marlee hires Hans Saroop to be her watchman and both families are devastated by the consequences of Marlee’s seemingly innocuous action. Perhaps my favorite part of this novel is Hosein’s description of the natural world. He writes, “The swifts in the darkening sky were moving like a knife slitting the dusk,” and the scene played like a movie in my mind.
One Year of Ugly follows the Palacios family—undocumented Venezuelans—who are thrust into a crime ring thanks to their now-deceased Aunt Celia’s shady underworld dealings. Many novels show Caribbean immigrants experiencing the bright lights of London or New York. But One Year of Ugly is the only book I have ever read that showed Trinidad as a place people immigrate to. The narrator, Yola Palacios, is foul-mouthed, bitingly sarcastic, and socially perceptive as she describes Trinidad from an outsiders’ perspective. Even as this novel takes us on a romantic romp through my country, it shines a spotlight on the challenges facing our Venezuelan immigrants.
Lovelace is a living legend of Trinidadian literature and in The Wine of Astonishment he’s at the height of his powers. The novel follows champion stickfighter Bolo and a cast of characters whose Spiritual Baptist religion has been outlawed by the colonial government seeking to promote more “civilized” religions, like Catholicism. When Ivan Morton defends abandoning his Spiritual Baptist faith by saying, “We can’t be white, but we can act white,” he is parroting the words of all those who thought the only way to succeed was to conform. This fictional account of T&T’s very real history is a monument to our struggles and the brave people who fought to have the fullness of their identity recognized.
V.S. Naipaul has a complicated relationship with his birth country of Trinidad and Tobago, and at his most cruel, he wrote lines like, “nothing was created in the West Indies.” However, Miguel Street is a less bitter, more loving portrayal of one Trinidadian street and the wacky cast of characters who reside there. I first read this book while studying in England and every story felt like home. I knew the characters on a cellular level. I recognized the enormous pressure we place on our children to pass exams (education is your only way out!!!). And I knew, too, that universal striving for a better life amidst a deluge of racist and classist discrimination.
I’ve always lived within view of a church steeple. From my childhood apartment to the living room of the duplex where I received my first kiss from the landlord’s son to the small split-level my parents were able to buy when I was in high school, there was always a church steeple in the distance. Maybe that’s what was missing my first year away at college, all the way across the country in California. When I returned home, the steeple was a comforting sight. Far away, the church looked magical, rising from the pages of a fairytale. Up close, though, one could see the chips in the paint, the cracks in the plaster, the repairs that were so desperately needed.
That’s what we did over the summer, my father and me. Since the recession hit two years earlier, he’d been making money fixing up old homes in the area, doing everything from painting to drywall to roof repair. Because I was home from school, my dad enlisted me to help with his new project, restoring the time-bruised Reformed Church—paint, shingles, shoring up the steeple so it would last another hundred years beyond the three hundred it had already been standing.
The first day on the job, I saw it: the truck with the license plate that read BI6FOOT. It was a mid-sized pickup, the generic type one often sees here in our corner of rust-belt Pennsylvania. The bumper was covered with stickers. I BELIEVE, with a shadowy image of Sasquatch. THEY’RE OUT THERE, with the cartoonish face of Bigfoot. BIGFOOT RESEARCH TEAM. A Bigfoot family, an angry Bigfoot giving the middle finger, an even angrier Bigfoot with a speech bubble saying DON’T TREAD ON ME.
I stood there for a long time looking at the truck. At first I chuckled, and then I felt a sort of sad curiosity. I should have been helping my dad haul paint cans, but I stood staring at the I BELIEVE sticker. The truck was empty, parked on the side of the road next to the church. It fascinated me that a person could believe so unwaveringly in what was almost certainly a myth. How could someone have so much faith in Bigfoot when God and even people were so hard to believe in?
My dad called my name, so I grabbed the last two paint cans and went to help him lay drop cloths over the church’s rose garden. By the time I looked back, the truck was gone.
I saw the BI6FOOT truck again a week later. We were working on the roof now. Many of the shingles had fallen off, but there were a few intact. It reminded me of my mom’s chemo hair when she had breast cancer a few years ago, the little patches that clung to her scalp, stubborn. My dad was up on the roof scraping off those remaining shingles, the ones that had weathered the storms, when I spotted the BI6FOOT truck right before it turned the corner. I caught a glimpse of the driver this time—just a dim figure wearing a baseball cap. I called up to my dad.
“See that truck?”
He paused, looked down at me, wiped his forehead. “What truck?”
I pointed, but the truck was already out of sight. “Never mind.” I picked up an errant shingle that had fallen onto the grass, chucked it onto the tarp with the rest. “Just a truck covered with Bigfoot stickers.”
“Huh,” he grunted. “Yeah, there’s a group around here that goes hunting for Bigfoot. Call themselves the Sasquatch Society.” He coughed, spit. “Funny what people will believe.”
I thought about him and Mom. They made me go to church my whole childhood, get all the sacraments. I hated confession. Why did I have to tell my secrets to a stranger who proceeded to scold me for them? Like the time I told the priest my neighbor had asked to look down my underpants the summer before I turned eleven, and since I pulled them down myself I suspected it must have been my fault, and the priest confirmed my suspicion.
Still, I believed back then. I’m not sure I could say the same for my parents. They brought me because they thought they were supposed to. And when my mother’s father died, she stopped going altogether, didn’t even go back to bargain with God when she was diagnosed with cancer. So my dad and I bargained for her, and he continued to take me to church until I left for college. That first semester, I often joined the other Catholic students at Mass in the quad. Right before spring break, though, I stopped. Something happened that I wanted to forget, something that damaged the part of me that believed, like a scratch in a record so I could no longer hear God’s voice.
I stared at the empty corner where the BI6FOOT truck had turned. “Yeah,” I agreed with my dad, too late. “Funny.”
When I wasn’t working with my dad, I went to parties. The party spot was in a forest called Genevieve Jump. There’s a legend attached to the name, which goes like this: Some servant girl hundreds of years ago is chased by a group of prominent townsmen trying to rape her, and she runs into the woods to escape them. They follow, and she finds herself on the ledge of a cliff. Jump, Genevieve, Jump! they taunt, not thinking she will. But she does. And while the legend says that halfway down she turned into a bird, the truth is she probably just died, dashed on the rocks below. But at least she got a forest named after her.
The woods were dense and blue-green, the floor blanketed with pine and studded with moss-covered rocks, cut through with narrow trails leading to a clearing. That’s where the parties happened. Someone would build a fire. Sometimes someone would bring a keg, but usually there was just a lot of booze in backpacks and coolers. Always there was someone playing guitar. Always there were faces I half-knew in the firelight.
That night, I got a text about a party and drove my dad’s truck to the lot by the woods. As I was walking up the trail, I heard rustling. I stopped and turned toward the noise. I heard leaves crunching and then saw a dark shape, larger than myself, moving through the trees. My heart quickened; I thought of the BI6FOOT truck, the I BELIEVE. I heard another noise behind me then—it was a couple acquaintances from high school, walking up the trail carrying a cooler. I turned back to the shape in the woods, but it was running off, a streak of white. I shook my head, laughing at myself. A deer. That BI6FOOT truck was giving me ideas.
About a dozen other people were in the clearing. I sat on a log beside the couple I’d walked up with, and they offered me a beer. I declined. Over the past year at college, vodka had become my drink of choice, the best drink for forgetting.
I drank with these two, a girl and guy who’d been dating since high school, and we told sad stories: a kid none of us knew too well who’d died of an overdose, another who’d died in a motorcycle accident. When there was a pause in conversation and I had downed a quarter of my bottle and was feeling a glow, my mind went back to BI6FOOT.
“Have you guys heard of the Sasquatch Society?” I asked.
The guy laughed and rolled his eyes, and his girlfriend playfully hit him. “Shut up,” she said. “My uncle’s a member. He goes to the woods and tries to get photos. I think he’s part of some alien hunter group too. People around here are into weird shit.”
“Unemployment,” the guy followed up. “Too much time on their hands.”
I stood up, swayed, stared into the woods.
“Do you guys think he’s out there?”
“My uncle?”
“No,” I said. “Bigfoot.”
“You’re drunk.”
I saw someone playing guitar on the other side of the fire, surrounded by a group of people, some I knew from high school, some who graduated ten or even twenty years ago. I walked over, wondering how they all ended up here. In high school, everyone talked about wanting to get out, but then somehow they all returned, kept showing up at parties like this one. I guess I was no exception.
I was starting to wonder if something was hiding, waiting for me to find it.
In California, the woods were different. The trees—it’s hard to imagine their enormity without seeing them. Like dinosaur thighs. And the smell was unlike any forest I’d been to. The sharp scent of pine mingled with earthy cedar and dank loam. There was magic in those woods, strange bugs and light that danced. When I walked around the ferns, I imagined fairies lived under their leaves. My hometown woods, though, had never seemed full of magic. Until now. Because now, I was starting to wonder if something was hiding, waiting for me to find it. I wasn’t sure I believed just yet. More like the poster hanging in Mulder’s office in the X-Files reruns I sometimes watched with my parents: I want to believe.
I drifted and swayed. At one point I got up and started dancing. Someone grabbed my hips, but I broke away. Then I heard rustling in the woods and wandered over to the edge of the clearing. I made out a sound, low, guttural. I clutched my bottle and walked into the darkness.
Something was moving up against a tree. When I got a few feet in, I felt my heart drop when I realized it wasn’t Sasquatch I was seeing; it was a man, pushing a woman up against a tree trunk, kissing her, rubbing his hands over her body. One breast was exposed, bare nipple to the cool night. My own nipples hardened, arousal or fear, I wasn’t sure.
I stepped back and was about to walk away, but I landed on a twig, and the man turned around. His face had a thick look about it. His eyes burned through the darkness as they stared at me. I was afraid he was going to yell or chase me, but instead he smiled.
Somehow, that was worse.
I met Asher in the darkroom at college, though I didn’t see him at first, just smelled him. It smelled like someone had been jogging through a spice market, and I was attracted to that smell even before he stepped out of the shadows. He had been taking one of his photos out of a developing tray when I came in. He was a photography major, declared, I found out later. I admired that kind of firm decision. I loved photography too, but was still undecided.
After our first meeting, Asher invited me to his dorm, which smelled like him and was delightfully messy, the walls plastered with art. The next week he invited me to a photography exhibit, and then we were pretty much a couple. We went to parties together, because that’s what freshmen did, though I always got so much drunker than him. Asher once told me he liked me better when I was sober, which made me secretly happy even though I acted offended at the time. Everyone else at college seemed to like me better when I was drunk. Asher, to my great surprise, seemed to like me the way I was.
Over winter break, I found myself missing him. When I got back, I told him I was ready. We spent that first night after winter break on his small, squeaky mattress, trying to have sex for the first time. It took a while, and when he was finally able to enter me, it hurt—a stinging pain, sharp and burning. In the days afterward, I took naked selfies and immediately deleted them, trying to see what he saw when he looked at me. But then I remembered he wasn’t seeing me like this; he was on top of me in the dark, too close to see the whole of me.
On the nights I didn’t spend with him, I touched myself, tried to give myself pleasure and succeeded, only to be too self-conscious to come when he was inside me. Still, I enjoyed it—the way he lit a candle, dangerous because it was prohibited in the dorms, and the music he streamed from his computer, always some echoic guitar and sad voice like Nick Drake, the glow of the screen illuminating his silhouette as he leaned over me and asked Is this okay? and Are you ready? and Does this feel good? The answer, with him, was always yes.
Asher was about the same height as me, which hadn’t been the case with my few boyfriends from in high school. It was exhilarating, really, to stand toe to toe with a man and be staring directly into his eyes. He had one hazel eye and one green, and black hair that curled down over the light brown skin of his face, the product of a Haitian mom and an Irish dad. He was sensitive about his height, but I never thought of him as short because he carried himself with such confidence, like the time he stood on a picnic table in the quad during a thunderstorm and did an impression of Prince singing “Purple Rain” to a crowd of drunk freshmen.
One of Asher’s friends from photography class, a blond boy named Erit, was about a foot taller than him. Erit was his nickname, pronounced Errit-Errit-Errit; he said life was about making records, and he was scratching them. Erit was a senior and was a staple at all the parties, in dorms and frat houses and the ones in the quad that got busted, and he always had a new girl, usually a freshman.
One night there was a party in Erit’s dorm. Asher left early; I stayed. There was music, dancing. Someone snorted a Xanax and fainted. We laughed. Erit touched my neck and told me it was small, so small he could probably snap it. Somehow, I took that as a compliment. Plastering the walls were posters of musicians and naked women, not the artistic black-and-white nudes that Asher had on his wall, but glaring, oil-slicked porn stars with impossibly pert breasts. I noticed these naked women more as the crowd thinned out and became just a few of us, and finally just me and Erit. By that point I was drifting in and out of blackout. I found myself sitting on the toilet, not sure how I got there. I was aware of my body only in long blinks of consciousness.
The next morning, I woke up to fuzzy light, dry mouth, pounding head, a sick feeling. I was in Erit’s bed, naked. The significance of that didn’t hit me until he said, his back turned, “You need to get the morning-after pill.”
I tried to remember what happened but couldn’t. The memory was in a locked drawer that I couldn’t open, would never be able to open. I would never know if I wanted it or if I didn’t. At first I didn’t tell anyone, but I wanted answers to those questions, and I figured if I couldn’t answer them, maybe someone else could. I told my roommate, then my RA. They both laughed it off: That’s what happens when you drink too much. I told God, too, and he seemed to call the same thing down to me in his booming, deep voice, and then I began to wonder why God’s voice was booming and deep, and not more like mine or my mother’s. That’s when I stopped going to Mass and swore off ever going to confession, convinced the priest would say the same thing, or worse, chastise me for having sex in the first place.
When I came home for spring break, my mother seemed concerned. Is everything all right, honey? I said yes. My dad sat me down and told me money was tight, and I would not be able to return to school in the fall. Even with my scholarship, tuition was expensive, and so was airfare. He told me this with a grave face, holding his body stiff. Okay, I shrugged. I won’t go back.
I spent my final two months of college drinking as much as I could, trying to forget—but what was there to forget, exactly? I was waiting for someone to tell me I was wronged, but no one did. The only one I didn’t tell was Asher. He texted and left voicemails and finally knocked on my door, asking me what was the matter, but after weeks of me ignoring him, he finally cooled, and since what we had was unstated anyway, there was no messy breakup. We just stopped hanging out. The day I left campus for the last time in May, I was hoping to say goodbye to Asher, but instead Erit caught me in the quad. He gave me a hug, and I hugged him back, even though his body made me feel like retreating into a shell. The last image I had of college was Erit’s face, smiling, and then the feeling of his eyes on me as I walked away.
The morning after the party in the woods, my dad woke me and said we had to work, so I popped a couple Advil, gulped some coffee, and followed him out to the driveway. He stopped short. “Why’s the truck parked so crooked?”
The coffee churned in my stomach. “I was tired, I guess?” I looked down at my hands, tried scratching some of the dirt out from under my nails. “Sorry.”
He stared at me for a long time like he wanted to say something. Finally he just said, “Let’s go.”
I hopped in the truck, and we drove to the church, a five-minute drive through town. We had just finished the roof, so we were moving on to the steeple. My dad said there were only minor repairs. We were going to replace some of the old siding and fix the little vented windows my dad called louvers, but it turned out, for a minor job, there was a lot of work involved. Rather than using a ladder, one of us had to be in a harness attached to a pulley, suspended in between the scaffold and the steeple. My dad set everything up, but when he tried to put on the harness, it wouldn’t buckle over his beer-and-soda-swollen belly, even when he loosened the straps.
“What is this, made for kids?” he grumbled. “I bet that’s why I got it so cheap.”
I watched him struggle with the harness, his big hands fumbling with the buckle. Finally I said, “I can do it.” I needed to do something to make up for drunk driving his truck the night before.
“No.” He shook his head. “I’ll just call Red or Flint.” His buddies always had colorful names. He took out his phone.
“I want to do it, Dad.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, and asked again like a hundred times as he attached the harness to me. Then, as I was being hoisted up, he switched to, “Are you okay?”
At first it was almost fun, like being a kid on the swings at a carnival, but as I got higher I began to feel unmoored. I wanted to grab hold of something, but there was nothing except the steeple, which I couldn’t wrap my arms around. I swayed in the air, imagined myself falling like Genevieve Jump, dashed on the sidewalk. I thought about praying, but could no longer imagine who I’d be praying to. My heart was speeding, pounding against the harness, which was squeezing my chest, making it hard to breathe. Everything seemed brighter. The cars sped by below, so far away but so loud. A car horn blared and a man yelled something out the window at me, making my heart speed faster. I started to shake.
“I’m not okay,” I squawked. And then, louder: “Get me down!”
My dad lowered me as fast as he could and let me sit in the grass still wearing the harness, crying. I knew he was looking at me, wondering what to do, feeling helpless, but I was neck-deep in the muck of my own feelings. Hungover, tired, and trembling, I didn’t even know what I was saying. Later, when he drove me home, my dad told me that I kept repeating, “I wasn’t sure, I wasn’t sure.”
I decided to take the next week off. My dad said the steeple was a bigger job than he’d thought, so he’d get a few of his buddies to help him. I also decided to take the week off from drinking. It was strange, waking up with a clear head. Every morning I got up early, took my camera, and drove my mom’s car to the woods.
For the first few days, I stayed on the trails, breathing in pine, listening to birds. By mid-week, I was venturing off-trail, searching for something I wouldn’t yet admit to myself. I was sure there was magic in these woods, even though we were minutes from a highway. By the end of the week, I had photos of trees, birds, leaves, dappled light, mossy rocks, my own shadow—and nothing else.
I was sure there was magic in these woods, even though we were minutes from a highway.
Then, on Friday, after wandering the woods all morning, I walked back to the lot and saw the BI6FOOT truck. The driver must have been searching for the same thing I was. I went back to the car and called my mom, asked her if it was okay if I kept her car out a bit longer. She said it was fine. She was a kindergarten teacher and was off for the summer, spent her days dipping her feet in the same plastic kiddie pool I used to splash in over a decade ago, her chest flattened under her bathing suit from the mastectomy, a sight that made my knees weak but also made me want to be strong like her. I was about to end the call, but on the other end of the line there was a long pause thick with some kind of question.
“Honey, is something wrong?”
I wanted to tell her. I wanted so badly to tell her what was wrong, but I couldn’t. So instead, I talked about Bigfoot.
“You know that truck I was telling you about, with all the Bigfoot stickers? It’s here. So I’m gonna wait ’til the driver gets back, maybe see if they’re heading over to one of those Sasquatch meetings.”
I could hear the worry lines forming on her forehead. But all she said was, “Just be careful. And be home for dinner, okay?”
I was oddly disappointed when I hung up. Maybe part of me wanted her to give voice to her worries, to confirm what I was beginning to suspect about the world. I slumped down in the seat, waiting for the BI6FOOT driver to return. It took over an hour, but he finally did, a man wearing a baseball cap that shadowed his face and holding what looked, in my first heart-pounding glance, like a gun, but was actually a camera with a very long lens. When the truck pulled out of the lot, I did, too, and I followed it down the road into town. We drove past the church, where I saw my dad’s friend Flint poised in the air, dangling beside the steeple. He was laughing, smoking a cigarette up there, making it look so easy.
The truck pulled into the Elk Lodge lot. I parked on the far end and watched the man emerge from the truck. I waited until he had entered the building to get out of my car. I was in luck: there was a flyer at the door advertising the Sasquatch Society.
When I entered the large hall, I felt eyes on me. I was suddenly too aware of my body. I waved awkwardly, but no one waved back, just resumed their coffee and conversation. The chairs were arranged in a semi-circle like an AA meeting or a therapy group, both of which I had attended very briefly and then dropped in my first couple weeks home from college. I couldn’t tell which man was the BI6FOOT driver, because everyone in the room looked alike, late-middle-aged white men wearing work boots with relatively little evidence of work. There were variations, of course; some had bushy beards, some had scruff; some shirts were emblazoned with Budweiser logos, some with American flags, some with both. They all stood with their legs spread, large men with beer bellies in various stages of gestation, their voices competing for loudness.
I hovered near the refreshment table until most of the men were sitting down, and then I grabbed a powdered donut and sat down, too. I shifted in my seat, pulling at the hem of my shorts. A man stood at the front next to a screen and welcomed everyone to the meeting. I thought he would launch into the slideshow, but instead he pointed at me.
“It looks like we have a new member.”
Everyone stared. I tried to smile. “Hi,” I croaked, powder from the donut stuck in my throat. They examined me for another excruciating moment, as if waiting for me to share something like in the therapy group, but I was as wordless now as I was then. They turned back to the slideshow.
The man up front clicked through slide after slide of fuzzy pictures, the men claiming they saw something at the edges, a snatch of fur, a shadow. I began to find the way they were talking about Bigfoot unpleasant, their voices dripping with hunger. Caught, they said. Caught a glimpse. Caught a scent. Caught on camera. One man stood up and shared his encounter story. He said he rode his motorcycle out to Genevieve Jump in the middle of the night and walked through the woods, off-trail, no flashlight, nothing. He followed every footstep, and eventually he felt his skin brushed by the rough fur of some large beast. He tried to grab hold of it, but the creature growled and ran away. He knew it was Bigfoot because it had a smell like nothing else. A deep musk, more pungent than a herd of deer, like the smell of a wet hairy pussy.
The men laughed. I stiffened.
The speaker looked at me, as if suddenly remembering I was there. “Oh. Sorry, sweetie.” They laughed again.
I had an urge to flee but decided to wait until the slideshow ended. Before I could leave, though, one of the men cornered me by the donuts.
“So you’re interested in Bigfoot, huh?”
I nodded, tried not to look him in the eye. “I guess so.”
He chuckled. “We don’t get many girls here.” He paused, stepped closer, trying to be conspiratorial. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.”
I could smell his breath. Coffee and gingivitis. The fluorescent lights were bright, and everyone around me was moving, voices in the background like mechanical chirping. Without saying anything, I shrank away from the man and ran out of the building. I sat in the car and cried.
Next to the lot was a playground with rusty equipment I used to play on after school. The empty swings creaked in the wind and seemed to taunt me: How could you have believed? I thought about going home but didn’t want to face my parents and their worried foreheads, their unasked questions, the answers to those questions swarming inside me, stinging. I needed something to ease the sting. So I went back to the woods.
That night, I walked the trail until I heard the pop and crackle of the bonfire, the faint music of bottles clinking, sloppy guitar strumming. In the clearing, I saw about a dozen people. I recognized them as regulars, but at the moment they felt like strangers. I sat on a log alone and drank until I didn’t feel alone anymore.
I got up and danced with a red-headed girl I knew from high school. I chugged gulps of vodka until the woods spun around me even when I wasn’t spinning. Eventually the faces at the party blended together, but there was one that stood out. It was the man with the thick face I had seen a week ago pushing a girl up against a tree. The whites of his eyes were red. He smiled and asked my friend to kiss me. She did, and I let her. Then the man took my hand, and I followed him, one foot in front of the other, into the woods.
I tripped and fell onto the damp leaves. The man rolled me over onto my back.
“Oopsie daisy,” he said, looking down at me. He was so tall, a skyscraper. I felt dizzy even lying on the ground. I hoped he would help me up, but instead he bent over me. I made a feeble attempt to rise.
“Where you going?” he asked softly, and began to kiss my neck.
I felt vomit rising in my throat. He unzipped my hoodie and ran his hands over my breasts. Finally I pushed against his chest, and when I couldn’t shove him off, I raised one of my legs and kneed him as hard as I could in his groin. He rolled off me, and I ran.
I didn’t know where I was running. I was deep in the woods before I realized I was lost. I wanted to lie down. And then I heard something. A rustling that sounded like the swish of chiffon skirts. Twigs snapping like wishbones. And I smelled musk, deep and dusky, reminding me of old churches and the basements of childhood duplexes, reminding me of menstrual blood or the scent left on my fingers after I touched myself at night thinking of Asher. I thought of Asher now. I thought of Erit. Then I thought of the thick-faced man.
Had he followed me?
But it was not him.
I saw the shape as it passed. Even in the dark I could tell it was not human, nor was it animal. It was something else entirely.
I always thought Bigfoot would have a lumbering frame, eight feet tall, five hundred pounds. But this creature was lithe. It wove through the trees gracefully, effortlessly, while I followed, clumsy and drunk.
The woods became less dense, and finally there was a clearing, and on the other end of the clearing, a cave. As the figure approached the cave, I was able to get a better look at it, the light of the half moon shining down. Rust-brown fur over the body. Slightly bigger than a human man, but not by much. And a shape that curved outward at the hips, a shape sort of like my mother’s. This creature: it had breasts. She turned to stretch in the moonlight, made a whining growl, a sound of pleasure.
Bigfoot was female.
My fear, which had followed me here, was gone. I stepped closer to the lip of the clearing. I tried to step quietly to avoid detection, but the truth was I wanted her to notice me. I was so alone. I wanted this creature to see me, to know me. She was alone, too.
I stared at her, willing her to stare back. Finally, she did. First it was a head-cocked empty stare in my direction, and then her gaze narrowed, focused, and the darkness of her eyes seemed to capture me in a beam of their light. I wondered how she saw me. Small figure, dressed in black, long hair wild with twigs, I may have appeared to her a kindred spirit. I was, I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell her so many things. But the way she looked at me, the kindness softening her eyes, it seemed like she could smell it on me, in the knowing way that animals do, like a wound. Maybe she was wounded too.
She turned and walked into the cave. Heart pounding, I followed. But when I entered, there was no sign of her. The only thing that remained was her musk. She must have escaped deeper into the darkness, where I wouldn’t follow. I stared into that darkness for a long time, hoping to see her shape, until fatigue took over and I reclined on the cool cave floor. I was asleep in minutes. I may have been dreaming, but I thought I felt my cheek brushed with fur, coarse and warm. I thought I felt arms carry me to softer ground.
When I woke, I was lying on a pile of leaves. I didn’t see any sign of Bigfoot. I walked out of the cave, and in the weak dawn light I was able to find my way back to the trail. I followed it down to the parking lot, where my car was the only one left, and then I drove through the summer morning, cool enough to be misty but with the threat that heat would soon settle in. As I drove down the forest-framed highway, I kept wondering if I’d see a dark shape standing on the side of the road, staring at me as I drove away. I didn’t.
In town, I approached the corner of the church. The work was almost done now. I pulled over and got out of the car. I thought about the many people who had worked on the church over its three hundred years, from the ones who built it to those, like us, who repaired it, the evidence of our hands invisible. Deep magenta slashed across the sky behind the steeple. I had missed this when I was away at college, looking up at steeples, at points converging in the sky, evidence of our blind human reach into mystery like the faith of a girl leaping off a cliff and believing she’ll fly. The church looked fresh and young, new again, paint unchipped, smooth and white like spilled milk, but a scaffold was still erected beside it, a sign of repairs unfinished. A small bird perched atop the steeple cocked its head, as if asking me a question. I stood there a long time searching for the answer.
A truck pulled up to the curb behind me. When I turned, I saw my mom and dad rushing toward me, their faces knotted with concern. They stood on either side of me, a thousand unsaid words swarming, and because I didn’t know how to say sorry, I pointed at the bird.
“Starling, I think,” my dad said after a while. “Shakespeare’s bird.”
“Up close,” my mom said, “they’re iridescent. Green, purple.” She picked a leaf out of my hair. “They’re actually quite beautiful.”
The bird cocked its head again, and this time I knew the answer to its question. I held out my hands, palms up, between my mom and dad, like I used to do when I was little and asked to be lifted into the air. They grabbed hold.
“I have something to tell you,” I said, “and I hope you’ll believe.”
Even with recent superhero blockbusters, Asian Americans in modern media are often presented as traumatized restaurant children with angry parents or as nerds who finally made it into Harvard or Stanford. All these books by Asian American women move away from traditional narratives into stories about unique individual experiences that celebrate and interrogate womanhood, identity, and sexuality while breaking free from societal expectations of how we should be and act.
American Woman is a fictionalization of the true kidnapping of Patty Hearst, granddaughter of a publishing magnate, by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Jenny Shimada, once a radical activist, has largely left the world of radical protesting behind until an old friend asks her to shelter and transport fugitives and their victim, Pauline, the fictionalized Patty Hearst. The novel focuses on the interactions between the group as they attempt to hide from the authorities and concludes with notes on how Asian Americans are perceived in the larger media and who really is the American woman.
Each story joins both the pain and luxury of living across borders between China and America, and explores who we want to be versus who we end up being. Love in the Marketplace follows a woman years after her boyfriend left her for another. In the titular story, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, a Chinese man visits his daughter in America shortly after her divorce and must come to terms with his own failed marriage. Yiyun Li paints the details in how expectations can fail reality and the ways we must come to terms with our values and ourselves.
Min Jin Lee’s debut, Free Food for Millionaires, focuses on hungry, social-climbing Casey Han and her journey to find herself instead of going to the prestigious Columbia Law School. Filial obligations and personal desires clash in this tight novel, especially in the backdrop of the upwardly mobile Korean American community in Queens. Min Jin Lee imbues each of her characters with an anger and a hunger; women do not fade into the backdrop as passive, well-educated beauties, but thrash with spite and longing.
Bliss Montage highlights the apathy of daily life with the fantasy of the speculative. The first story, Los Angeles, originally published in Granta, follows a nameless woman who lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends and comes to grips with the emotional and physical abuse by one of her exes. Peking Duck makes readers question what a story is and who owns a story, especially the story of an immigrant woman who may not have the means to voice her dissatisfactions in English. The women in these stories are imperfect and are often highly aware of their imperfections.
Sneha starts her corporate job in the Midwest and finds herself in a group of young people hoping to find love, meaning, and community in the midst of a recession in a society that values money and monotony. She develops a crush on Marina, a dancer from New Jersey, and deepens her friendship with Tig, another queer person of color, even as she admits that she is only attracted to thin, white women. The book is an honest portrayal of class dynamics and how we can build emotional intimacy despite the quiet chaos of modern life.
An unnamed 18-year-old woman works as a pizza delivery girl in Los Angeles and forms an obsession with a stay-at-home mother who orders pizza with pickles. Combining slacker novels a la Jack Kerouc and Asian American Twitter culture a la Cathy Park Hong, Jean Kyuong Frazier upends the “model minority” myth and presents us a wildly sympathetic protagonist who we understand not because we hope to aspire to her accomplishments, but because we can see ourselves in her faults.
In her debut book, Ada Zhang makes readers question what it means to understand others and thus, to understand ourselves. In Propriety, a young woman loses her virginity after a breakup with her Chinese boyfriend to distance herself from her mother before college. In The Subject, an artist paints the elderly stranger she lives with in Flushing. These stories ask readers how identity, expectation, and loneliness influence our interactions and relationships with the people around us.
Narrator Razia has grown up in the close-knit Pakistani American community in Corona, Queens. While the story is, at its core, a coming-of-age novel about queer desire, it also touches upon religion, patriarchy, and teenage rebellion. As Razia’s world expands, she struggles against her parents’ fears and questions her own expectations and desires.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s second story collection focuses on Bengali immigrants to America and their children. In the titular story, a woman confronts similarities between her life and her late mother’s when her father returns from a trip in Europe. In Heaven-Hell, a woman remembers her mother’s love for her father’s graduate student. The title and the epigraph, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House,” represent both the unpreventable disasters of daily life and the changes we actively choose to implement.
When I first became a single mother, I hid it from everyone, including myself. In my new book, The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays, I track the evolution of my relationship with motherhood, starting as a reluctant mother of two in a married household and ultimately ending as a single mother in suburbia (I openly considered this my personal nightmare for most of my youth, but I’m slowly coming around). Throughout the book, everything I thought I knew gets blown apart, including my belief that I am not a natural mother, or that there even is such a thing.
The stereotype of single mothers is one that reeks of shame and desperation. I knew there was more to that story, but it took me a long time to realize that I was a part of that cliché. I’ve since worked to search out stories of single motherhood that feel more nuanced, intellectual, and, even, joyful. There is plenty of complication and darkness—although single motherhood was a revelation for me personally, there is nothing about any kind of motherhood that is easy or uncomplicated.
Here are a few books that delve into the life of single mothers, both fictional and real:
Sonora Jha is a single, immigrant mother who uses her own hopes and fears surrounding the possibility of raising a feminist son in America to reflect on the stories we tell each other about gender, violence, and love. Jha takes a hard look and offers clear-eyed and realistic blueprints for including social justice and feminist practices into everyday parenting in an effort to help build the next generation of men. She has a ferocious intellect, unstoppable warmth and generosity, and an uncompromising vision. The gorgeous mix of personal story and reporting makes the stakes of this narrative so intense that it becomes about so much more than mothers and sons.
In her mid-30s, Lamott has a child on her own, and the book is a chronicle of the very real mix of dark and light that is life with a newborn, from unending colic nights to the crack of your chest expanding from the overwhelming amount of sheer love. Even in the midst of chaos, she manages to find warmth and humor. Lamott’s vulnerability with her struggles with sobriety, her brand of honesty and self-deprecation, and playfulness are what makes her book such a compelling read.
A thriller and wild romp, we follow the protagonist, Joan, as she at once self-destructs and resurrects in the Los Angeles hills, where she has escaped to after a long history of being used and abused following a tony but tragic youth. While predatory men and a culture of sexualizing women are the focus, Joan is ultimately complicit in unexpected and difficult ways. I cannot give the full reason why I’m including this book in the roundup without giving away too much of the plot, but suffice to say that ultimately the heady mix of female rage, burning love, and cracked open desire is deeply redolent of the most animal parts of motherhood.
As with Miller’s other masterful stories, Galatea is a feminist retelling of an accepted Greek myth, in this case tracing the story of the sculptor Pygmalion who creates his perfect woman in marble. After a blessing from a goddess, the sculpture comes to life, but Pygmalion soon boils over with rage when he realizes that by breathing life into her stone beauty, his creation now also has a mind of her own with desires and independent thought. After giving birth to their child, Galatea can no longer pretend to be submissive and obedient, understanding that unless she leaves, she is locking her own daughter into a cycle of thwarted independence. Galatea breaks free, working to build a beautiful life alone with her child, for a period. This tiny book (all of 64 pages) feels giant, with characters who dig their talons into you and refuse to let go.
When this collection blazed onto the scene in 2020, it won every award possible, putting West Virginia University Press on the map. The nine stories in this shatteringly beautiful collection are all part of a loosely interconnected galaxy in which Black women and girls move through kitchens, bedrooms, and back parking lots, searching for, and often finding, desire, agency, religion, and care. In the“Peach Cobbler,” a single mother is observed through her teenage daughter’s eyes, handing down her family recipe for the dessert, as well as much more than she intends.
Chan’s inspiration for this novel came from a real-life news story about a mother who left her child home alone to go to work and lost custody as a result. Frida Liu, the main character in this hauntingly incredible novel, also risks losing custody of her child to her ex-husband and his hyper-perfect younger mistress after a similar incident. She enters into a dystopian government reform program in an attempt to prove that she can become a “good mother” in the eyes of the state. It’s a kind of Margaret Atwood meets Octavia Butler-esque twist, but unfortunately, this commentary on the sacrifices and hard choices mothers are forced to make every day between providing for and caring for their children feels disturbingly realistic.
After 15 years of marriage, Olga’s husband abandons her and their young children one summer during a stifling heat wave in Italy. Throughout their marriage, her husband shaped Olga’s personality and choices, so much so that when he leaves she no longer knows who she is anymore in his absence. As the story unfolds, and she struggles to continue to care for the children while moving through the black hole of devastation that threatens to engulf her, Ferrante allows the reader such an intense and intimate look into Olga’s mind as she comes to terms with her new reality, and the claustrophobia of caring for children is heightened when the three of them become stuck in their high rise as Olga begins to unravel. Ultimately, Olga comes to understand it is not she who has been abandoned, but is the one who did the abandoning long ago, and Ferrante allows us to view a woman returning to herself: “He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.”
Poet Jane Wong’s gorgeous memoir functions as a love song to her mother. This bi-coastal story flips between Wong’s childhood in New Jersey lived primarily in the family’s Chinese American restaurant and her adulthood as an academic in the Pacific Northwest. Wong’s portrait of her postal worker mother is blazingly beautiful, even and especially after her father abandons the family, disappearing into a gambling addiction. Although there is despair and heartbreak, the resounding note here is one of joy, resilience, and beauty.
In her debut novel A History of Burning, Janika Oza gives us the story of a family, one migration journey at a time. Beginning with indentured labor that leads the first member of the family, Pirbhai, from his home in India to East Africa, we follow four generations across several continents and over one hundred years. In the next generation, Pirbhai’s daughter Rajni faces a second exile when she and her family are forced to leave Uganda during the expulsion of Asians in 1972. The family is set to migrate to Canada, but at the last minute, her revolutionary daughter Latika chooses a different path. Starting school in a new country, Latika’s son Hari feels the weight of these social and personal fissures before he even discovers the whole truth about his kin. The narrative ends in 1990s Canada in the midst of the Rodney King protests, though the family’s arc is far from finished. As Oza puts it, the ending is not an answer, but rather, a landing point.
Oza is a master of time, equipped with the ability to render a historical arc in mere paragraphs or to expand a single moment into the joys and sorrows of a lifetime. In 2022 Oza won the O. Henry Prize for her gripping short piece Fish Stories, originally published in The Kenyon Review. It’s a piece I can’t stop passing around between my students and colleagues, who become equally gripped by its sensory detail, its interplay between reality and grief, and its immense heart.
I had the privilege of reading early excerpts of A History of Burning during a Tin House workshop in 2019, led by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. Even then, the viscerally moving nature of the story leapt from the pages. That same year, a chapter of the novel was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize and published in Prairie Schooner.
Recently, Oza and I sat down to have a conversation about the novel. We spoke about who gets to feel safety and security, writing an intergenerational narrative, and finding inspiration in her family history.
Rosa Boshier González: A History of Burning stays true to its title by cataloging the symbol of fire throughout the novel. Can you unpack this symbol and how it shifts through the book? And why was that symbol of burning important to you?
Janika Oza: I wanted a title that spoke to the themes of complicity and resistance running through the book. I landed on burning because when we think of a burning, what usually comes to mind is something that’s destructive or harmful or violent. Very often that’s true. But a burning can also be something that is purposeful or regenerative, like a controlled burning of a forest to encourage new growth. Throughout my novel, both of those possibilities are there.
RBG: I’m curious about the way that implication works in A History of Burning. Throughout the novel, you very deftly render the prejudices on both sides of ethnic and social conflicts, be it between Asians and Africans in Uganda and Kenya or white Canadians and recent immigrants in the wake of the Rodney King protests in 1991. Without giving too much away, towards the end of the novel there are twin acts of violence between two parties with very different ideologies. Was this a motif you were actively working towards?
JO: Bookending the motif of burning was not something I was actively working towards. But when I was thinking through these questions of complicity and resistance, I came up against questions of security and belonging: Who gets to feel safety and security in these countries? What does it mean for us to find refuge in a place that is also causing harm to other communities? What does safety mean in that context?
What does it mean for us to find refuge in a place that is also causing harm to other communities?
The Rodney King protests in Toronto spiraled into a solidarity movement and series of internally-motivated protests around racial violence and police brutality; that felt like another moment to really dig into those questions of safety, and to consider how different communities are experiencing these adopted homes, which we’re told are havens. In many ways they are and in many ways they are not.
RBG: Can you talk to me about the chronology of the book?
JO: The reason why I wrote it chronologically is partly because of the scope. The novel spans over 100 years. So for pure practicality, I ended up doing it that way.
Something else that was really important to me in the novel was being able to see the movements of, not only this family, these people, but of the movements through the generations of ideas, emotions, of trauma, of memory, all of that making their way through the earliest generation into the final generation in Toronto. The challenges that the first generation was grappling with—when they experienced rupture, when they faced being a part of this colonial construct and attempting to secure a place for themselves while also living true to themselves, while also taking care of their families—those continue through the other generations.
The youngest generation around the time of the protests in the ‘90s in Toronto are also still struggling with those same things and still struggling with how to live on this land and in community, and how to take care of one another and live with intention, and also survive. I could see this thread sort of moving through the generations, through the different times, through the different movements, whether it was independence in Uganda in the ‘60s or what we were just talking about in Toronto in the ‘90s.
RBG: Has writing about social protest movements over the last hundred years informed your thinking around social movements today or your responses to them? Are contemporary social movements something that you’re interested in writing about in the future?
JO: They’recertainly something I’m interested in writing more about. It’s so different today with the internet and social media. Social movements are organized and constructed through these new platforms. Of course, it allows for accessibility and reach, and also brings up new challenges of, like, actually engaging. We see so much performativity in politics. So I think writing about current events, whether in fiction or nonfiction, would be an entirely different kind of challenge, but it was definitely something I was holding in my mind as I wrote A History of Burning.
RBG: This story spans a large amount of time—1898 to 1991—and four different generations. It has a prismic quality to it; we learn something new with each character. Why was an intergenerational narrative crucial to the telling of this story?
Janika Oza For me, the root of that is in my own family history and coming to this novel knowing very little about my family history. Three generations of my family lived in East Africa and then were expelled under Idi Amin’s dictatorship. It was not talked about very much. As I grew older, I became very interested in the fact that we didn’t talk about it. I realized somewhere along the way that I couldn’t write this novel if I wasn’t speaking to my family and my community about it.
When we think of a burning, it’s something destructive. But a burning can also be purposeful or regenerative, like a controlled burning of a forest to encourage new growth.
A lot of the research process for this novel was through conversation and interview. I would speak to people who were in my generation, like me, descendants of this history. Mostly I was speaking to people who are in their 50s, 60s, 70s or even older who had real memories of this time and. It felt really important for me to honor that intergenerational exchange that I was able to engage in in writing this book and to put some of that into the novel itself. There was a lot of love in that research process.
It also felt very important for me to explore the ways that, despite the breadth of time and place, that these characters our continually grappling with these same questions, and also to show the ways that, from one generation to the next, certain experiences, manifest in each generation, even if they’re not spoken about, even if a character has no idea what one or two generations before them went through. It is still somehow a part of their own lived experience.
RBG: This research seems to be a reclamation of the Western understanding of archive.
JO: In my research I soon realized that there was very little written about this branch of history. This was yet another example of the erasure and the rewriting of a community’s history. That is when I realized that I would have to do the hard, scary thing and talk to my family and talk to my community. So I asked for help.
My family connected me with more family who connected me with friends who connected me with temples. It was this chain that spread all across the world and all the places that our people scattered. There were a lot of WhatsApp conversations and Zoom and Skype calls. Going into the research, I would have a few larger points I would want to come towards but I would mostly allow the conversations to go where they did, knowing that it’s a very sensitive history, one that has not been spoken about very much. Sometimes it would take several conversations.
What was so special and beautiful about that process was that it really was this collective remembering and sharing. I still have some descendants of the Expulsion of Asians in Uganda, people of my generation, who will text me and say, my family just sat down and had this conversation and told these stories that we’ve never heard before. So there was this sense of an opening. I think there is a lot of freedom and power in being asked to share your story and to tell it the way that you remember it.
RBG: In the first third of the novel, when Rajni tends to her child while also grieving, she decides that she is “whole enough to go on.” That struck me as a throughline in the book—characters who persevere, survive, and root out joy within their kinship again and again. Can you speak to this orbital resilience?
JO: I think the question of resilience is something that is tricky because ideally we shouldn’t have to be resilient. While resilience can be made to sound like something that is active, it’s actually reactive. It’s in response to repeated pain or suffering.
But it’s also undeniable that the characters in this book have experienced over time fractures and upheavals and are doing the only thing that they know how to do in those situations, which is persist.
For many of the characters, there’s an imperative to go on for the people we love. There are times in the book where this comes at a cost. To the characters themselves, to those in positions of caretaking, like the moment you were just mentioning with Rajni. I think there are times when characters are called on to be selfless or self-sacrificing.
RBG: How did your graduate work and professional background inform your writing?
JO: Yes, definitely. I worked as a refugee settlement counselor and then a school settlement counselor, working with immigrant refugee families and navigating the settlement process, from housing to jobs to everything in between. Much of the time that I was writing this book, I was working in those environments. I was thinking a lot about my own position as someone who was born and raised in Canada, but whose family has come from elsewhere. I was really thinking about what can change over the course of one to three generations. I was thinking a lot about support. I was in a role that was attempting to offer some kind of support to people who are in those very precarious situations. I was thinking about, in the ’70s, when my family and community were going through this, what kinds of supports were and weren’t there, and also all the ways that this is not an equal terrain. Everyone does not receive the same supports or possibilities. The work opened my eyes to the bureaucracy and the actual gritty truth of migrating. I had me thinking a lot about the structures that make community possible, the necessity of that as the most. Integral support when a person has had to leave the place that they know, they often are leaving family and all their networks behind.
RBG: In that same SmokeLong Quarterly interview, you asked, “Who am I fighting for on the page? What language do I need to do that justice?” What were your answers to those questions for A History of Burning?
JO: When I think about language, I think about literally what languages and I using to tell this story. And of course, it’s a book that I wrote in English. But it felt very important for me to also have lines and phrases be Swahili and Gujarati and to not give away a distinction between these languages, because the way that I learned them was very mixed. It comes out in daily life. To this day, there are words that we say at home that I don’t know if they are Swahili or Gujarati. It’s a testament to the places that my family comes from and the ways that our communities integrated and moved. So it felt necessary for me to honor that hybrid language throughout the book.
The other place my mind goes when we talk about language to do this story justice is related to time. It took a long time for me to write this book. I was learning to write a book as I was writing this book, but I was also learning to listen to the stories of my family and my people. I was learning to sit with these histories that were often difficult to hear. I was learning to sit with the discomfort of learning things about my family or the places we’ve come from that I had never known. And all the complexity of being a migrant community in another colonized place. I think I had to give myself a lot of time to distill all of that and to really think about what I wanted to share, w pieces of family history, community history felt necessary to put into this book, what stories I wanted to keep close to my chest, and allowing for there to be purposeful silence. Allowing for it to be an actual choice, what I was writing and what I was not.
“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but a vigilant and insomniac rationality”—Deleuze and Guattari
The fly’s head is rendered in microscopic detail: its bulging compound eyes set above a fleshy proboscis, cradled between its mouthparts. There is, however, something more unusual about this intimate portrait. A pair of finely bristled, jointed appendages protrude from the front of its head. Even to the untrained eye, it is unmistakable: legs are growing from where its antennae should be. It is grotesque. It is uncanny. It is so obviously made wrong.
I learned that this fly was created through the mutation of a single gene. This type of mutation is called a homeotic transformation, when one discrete part of the body is transformed into a completely different one. The animating spark that first drew me to biology was encapsulated by this little mutant. I was captivated by the pliability of the living body, and with it, the promise and possibility of transformation.
I have researched and studied developmental biology for almost a decade now, first as an undergraduate assistant, and now as a graduate researcher. My work often elicits comparisons to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s not completely unfounded—I study organisms in their becoming: how cells become tissue and how tissues become flesh. Many of the early classical experiments in the field evoke a similar sense of grotesque alchemy as Shelley’s descriptions of monster-making, with disparate flesh grafted together and tissues rendered into biochemical essences. The results of this experimentation resembled the eponymous monster as well—the mutant, leg-headed fly just one of a menagerie of lab-made monstrosities: two-headed, Janus-faced tadpoles fused along their shared spine, chimeric embryos formed with the cells of two different animals.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that my thoughts returned to these experiments when I first began transitioning. While a second head wasn’t among the changes I was expecting, I recognized myself in these laboratory creations. I wanted to believe that science would have no trouble accommodating me, that in its strangeness and infinite possibility I could build a space for my existence no matter how repellant it might seem to anyone else. Like every patchwork hybrid and mutant creature of science, I was visibly constructed and obviously made—and to a young scientist, that felt dizzyingly powerful.
Frankenstein proved more relevant to my experience than I’d anticipated. In some ways, this was unsurprising—I am hardly the first trans person to relate to monstrosity. In her 1994 monologue My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix, the historian Susan Stryker explicitly articulates this struggle, positioning herself, a transgender woman, as the monster that society seeks to materially exclude and marginalize:
“Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.”
Stryker’s monologue is an unambiguous reclamation of monstrosity, a celebration and assertion of monstrous sentience and autonomy. Her rage and defiance shone through with total clarity. But it wasn’t the clarity that I felt. I felt as if I occupied the position of both doctor and monster— I didn’t just want to have autonomy. I wanted to be recognized as a scientific agent in my own transition. If I could express the changes that I saw in myself in the language of physiology, of anatomy and of endocrinology, why shouldn’t I be able to? I wanted to think of myself as capable of generating new knowledge, and capable of conveying it in a manner acceptable to the scientific community I’d been part of for almost a decade. I’d first approached transness specifically through the lens of scientific possibility—an expression more in the vein of Victor Frankenstein declaring that he would “unfold the world to the deepest mysteries of creation”, rather than the monster’s desire to simply exist. Yes, it was hubris, but wasn’t that a kind of rallying defiance too? Somehow, the desire for acceptance on these two fronts felt conflicted, but I didn’t understand why. Was it really so impossible to be both doctor and monster at once?
While a second head wasn’t among the changes I was expecting, I recognized myself in these laboratory creations.
But trying to see myself as both proved more fraught than I’d anticipated. In my excitement, I overlooked the nature of experimentation itself. Experiments are carried out by a scientist, on a subject of experimentation. This is not a relationship free of hierarchies. A scientist is not a medium through which the facts of nature simply flow through unimpeded. Experiments are designed and outcomes are interpreted. Ambiguity and uncertainty are resolved, or at least their parameters articulated. Specifically, the scientist (or the scientific establishment more broadly) is responsible for these processes and how they occur. In a scientific culture that is inextricable from, and often an active participant in, maintaining existing societal power dynamics, scientists often act in the service of maintaining hierarchies rather than dismantling them. The laboratory is not a site of liberatory transformation. It is a site of control.
Frankenstein is about science. Not only in its subject matter, but the process of doing modern science— its motivations, its ideals and the specifics of how it should be done. Victor isn’t just a scientist—he is a gentleman of science living in 18th century England. He performs experimental science, a mode of understanding and doing science that was only established about a century before his time. It is in this context specifically that the novel explores the power dynamics of experimentation. Frankenstein is commonly said to be about “transgressive” or “unrestrained” science, but the social context in which it takes place is important in defining what it is transgressing against—the qualities that define “transgression” were not created in a vacuum. Funnily enough, however, it might be said that they were created by one.
In the mid-17th century, the chemist Robert Boyle invented the air pump. Boyle was a prominent member of England’s Royal Society, and would go on to be highly influential in defining the way modern experimental science is conducted. The air pump was a large glass dome, perched on top of a brass base. It had an attachment for a pump, allowing the air inside the dome to be systematically siphoned away, forming a vacuum. The air pump would allow him to make the fundamental discovery that he is remembered for today— Boyle’s Law, the thermodynamically-determined relationship between a gas’s pressure and volume. Boyle saw the air pump as a means to control natural phenomena, to standardize observations and measurements by enabling experimental conditions to be replicated consistently. If the protocols for operating the air pump were judiciously followed, one could expect that its results would be the same during every scientific demonstration. The experimenter then became a messenger for the machine, a purveyor of instrumental readings rather than self-interested opinion. By factoring out human influence and agency, or as Boyle put it, “the morals and politicks of corporeal nature”, experimenters could produce results distilled purely from the laws of nature.
The laboratory is not a site of liberatory transformation. It is a site of control.
Unfortunately, as we see in Frankenstein, “corporeal nature” is not so easily extricable. To me, this is the anxiety that makes Frankenstein a scientist’s horror story—the inadvertent contamination of our observations, the creeping realization that we’ve allowed our objectivity to be compromised. Just as the air pump removes all traces of air from the dome, we are expected to remove all traces of ourselves from our research. There is a special horror, then, in not only recognizing yourself in your experiment, but having your experiment attest to your presence: just as Victor Frankenstein calls the Monster “my own vampire, my own spirit set loose from the grave”, the Monster reaffirms its form as “a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance”. It follows that if the most ideal scientific process is one that can completely separate experiment from experimenter, the most transgressive is one that enmeshes them completely.
I found myself charged with this grievous transgression about two years ago, when I’d only been publicly out for around six months. A professor at my graduate school was posting his views online about the reality of binary biological sex in humans— a discussion that was not the good-faith engagement with biological taxonomy one might have hoped it was. One opinion was particularly derisive:
“Question for scientists who do not believe that humans have two distinct binary sexes: How many legs does a dog have?”
My first impulse was to form a scientific rebuttal. There are many potential approaches to discuss the complexity of sex and gender in biology—the complexity of the human endocrinological system, the inaccuracy (and insensitivity) of calling intersex phenotypes “mistakes”—I might even choose to debate the taxonomical and anatomical definition of “leg”. But I saw the likely futility of engaging. The implied equivalence had already been made: determining sex in humans is as simple as determining the number of legs on a dog. It is an easily-made, individual determination that can be made by sight alone. Any scientist who cannot do so possesses woefully compromised judgment. And, of course, anyone with such compromised judgment cannot possibly be a good scientist.
And therein lies the rub: my desire to be seen as a scientific agent—in my own transition, as a transgender scientist—is at best, according to Boyle’s experimental philosophy, poor experimental design. By this logic, like Frankenstein and his monster, every observation I make, by design, attests to my inextricable presence.
Put simply, I am a bad scientist.
That is the crux of this type of bigotry—it isn’t about empirical truth or falsehood at all. Underlying this complacent declaration of equivalence is an invisible arbiter, the unseen, “good” scientist who is able and entitled to design the terms of discussion due to their neutrality and impartiality. Ultimately, it functions not as an assertion of truth, but an assertion of epistemological control: I decide who is a reliable arbiter of their own experiences.
If my first mistake was failing to live in such an unmarked body, my second was actively calling attention to it.
With the invention of the air pump, Boyle also advocated for a very specific code of conduct for scientists. To confer upon their results a sense of reliability and validity, Boyle proposed that experimenters should always employ restraint and modesty in the presentation of their results. Experimental descriptions were to be minutely detailed, judgments should err on the side of reasonable doubt, and confident assertions should only be used to convey academic consensus. It was humble to the point of self-effacing, refusing to unduly speculate on the theoretical causes of its observations. The resulting academic voice became characteristic of 17th and 18th century scientific correspondences of the Royal Society, codified into institutional and professional etiquette. Through this deliberately constructed image of propriety, Boyle created the ideal of the “modest witness”—a persona that the philosopher Donna Haraway defines as “the inhabitant of a potent unmarked category”. The modest witness was a civic man of reason, able to transcend biasing cultural polemic or political squabbles. In return for this performance, he was given the power to distill objective truth from subjective reality. The voice of a modest witness was the voice of objectivity itself, speaking what appeared to be perfect reproductions of the natural world into existence.
If my first mistake was failing to live in such an unmarked body, my second was actively calling attention to it. After the flurry of biological-sex based opinions had passed, a number of my peers and myself decided to quietly bring the professor’s comments to the attention of another senior professor with some oversight in the department, presenting it as an issue of potential discrimination. The senior professor attentively listened to our concerns. He paused, and looked genuinely thoughtful. Then he spoke.
“I understand, but it’s a divisive subject. It’s like…say, open carry-“
He sounded so earnest. He sounded so painfully earnest.
I cut him off before I could stop myself. I couldn’t bear to let him finish that comparison. “Professor, I am not a gun.”
The meeting went silent. The senior professor looked a little taken aback, awkward and apologetic. It was obvious that he hadn’t known I was trans, or that a trans person would be present at all in this discussion. I quickly launched into a formal spiel about institutional policy and workplace protections. This was my first experience making myself deliberately visible in my role as a graduate student, and all I wanted to do was take it back and disappear again. In the end we were met with expressions of sympathy, but little in the way of action. I did not speak again, nor did I follow up with the complaint. If my desire to exist freely was comparable to an instrument built for violence, what kind of justification could I ever provide for myself? What explanation could possibly suffice? I had received a tiny insight into how others—especially well-established scientists—might perceive transness. At the time, I thought I was the only trans person in my department. Newly out and still grappling with how it might impact my future prospects, even that awareness was enough to decide that being seen was a mistake. I didn’t want to see how I would be reflected back at myself, and I flinched. I am not a gun. I am not a gun.
I gave up on coming out publicly while I was still in academia.
When the Monster reads Victor’s journals, it internalizes Victor’s bitterness and resentment towards it as a deep sense of self-loathing. “Increase of knowledge only discovered to me what a wretched outcast I was,” it says, resenting that its deeply human desire to seek knowledge only leads to greater pain and misery. The tragedy is that the Monster first sees itself in relation to the world through its creator’s guilty eyes—a guilt that Victor projects onto the Monster due to his transgression of scientific and social norms. When I turned the scientific gaze on myself, I assumed that it was mine. I saw it as an exercise of autonomy: I was using my scientific knowledge to understand myself. But the surveilling gaze of science has historically been used as a project of control, seeking to make monstrosity legible through the language of taxonomy, and all too often, pathology. I was trying to see myself through a kaleidoscopic lens, each facet interconnected with innumerable others, the multitudinous inherited eyes of witnesses past. So many of those eyes are responsible for making monsters from the bodies of those too visible for the carefully guarded boundaries of polite society. Subjecting yourself to that gaze, if you are monstrous in any way, is risky—all you might see is the indelible, wretched stain of your ascribed subjectivity.
After the complaint led to little resolution, I removed all mention of transness from most of my public platforms. I deleted the pronouns from my email signature. I put off plans to medically transition. I gave up on coming out publicly while I was still in academia. This incident occurred during what collectively was my lowest and most precarious point in graduate school, and everything seemed to reinforce how thinly my presence was tolerated. An insidious mix of paranoia and shame bled into every interaction, and I began to withdraw entirely, working at strange hours and behind closed doors as much as possible. I envied peers who could so easily disappear into their arguments, who could move through academic spaces without friction. To achieve the same effect I excised whatever I could from my self, deftly performing the bloody surgery of dissecting accumulated feelings of rejection, anger and futility. I was going to be free of the baggage of an embodied existence, free of the corrupted viscera that only caused me distress. I spoke with a voice that I barely recognized. I imagined it as a ghastly hand puppet, a disembodied set of vocal cords that I manipulated by pulling on each tendinous strand. Here is a citation. Here is a scientific graph. Here is all of my heart processed into data, into statistics, into the only way you can bear to see me.
In all my cringing anxiety, I’d made the mistake of operating within the same logical bind laid out in the first professor’s derisive question. An institution that seeks to make monsters is never going to unconditionally welcome one into its midst. Stryker’s monologue is performed with this understanding in mind—it was inspired by a protest held at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Stryker recognized that institutional science saw transness as a project of control, an attempt to stabilize ambiguity and subjectivity, and exert total mastery over the products of its creation. Tellingly, another of the first professor’s posts claimed that this exact project was the agenda of trans and gender-nonconforming people:
“[On the use of gender-neutral pronouns] Those claims are about wielding power over others…He/him and she/her are all that are necessary.”
It seemed so ridiculous at the time. What threatening power did I, a single graduate student, have within my institution, or even my department? I’d forgotten, after so long of being afraid, that monsters are typically the ones who are feared. In experimental science, the purpose of an experiment is to demonstrate empirical truth. The Latin root of “demonstration” is monstrare, which means “to show” or “to make visible”. It shares an etymological root with monster— both derive from the verb monere, or “to warn”. My claim to agency, or even my very presence alone, is perceived as a threat by those who are used to their own claims to autonomy and authority being uncontested. The power and promise of unquestioned neutrality is haunted by the specter of monstrosity, as it threatens to upend the clearly defined and neatly categorizable. And in this spirit Stryker closes her monologue with a monstrous warning:
“I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.”
So much of queer and trans memoir is devoted to the idea of the multiplicity and fluidity of selfhood…
As I had long recognized for myself, Frankenstein captures the scientist’s horror in seeing themselves in their work, and with it, their own constructed nature. But I underestimated how terrifying Stryker’s charge is to those only made aware of their “seams and sutures” through the inconvenient presence of sentient (and opinionated) monsters. This anxiety seems to follow even the most vaunted men of science—on one of the buildings on the Caltech campus (where I am pursuing my graduate degree), there is a relief based on Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Instead of Jesus and his disciples, the great men of modern science—Newton, Darwin, Copernicus, Franklin and the like— gather around a singular figure. That figure is Richard Feynman, the charismatic physicist who rose to prominence during his tenure at Caltech in the 1950s to the 1980s, winning the Nobel prize in physics for his contributions to quantum field theory in 1965. If any one person could be considered an institutional hero at Caltech, it would almost certainly be him. In a quantum physics textbook that he authored, he describes an intriguingly-framed observation about electrons:
“Instead of going directly from one point to another, the electron goes along for a while and suddenly emits a photon; then (horrors!) it absorbs its own photon. Perhaps there’s something ‘immoral’ about that, but the electron does it!”
Again—that moment of monstrous recognition as the electron interacts with itself. That instinctive cognitive and moral recoil from it. The intended meaning of the observation was likely to be a flippant joke about masturbation, but jokes aside, the anxieties are similar: to touch yourself intimately/to be so intimately aware of your own presence is a deeply forbidden thing. For the visibly-constructed, with our obvious cultural ties, our specific relationships with history, the non-normativity of our existence—this isn’t a new consideration. So much of queer and trans memoir is devoted to the idea of the multiplicity and fluidity of selfhood, of the careful attention to how moving through times and spaces changes us as people. But for those whose entire understanding of self is staked on the immovable pillar of presupposed neutrality, the idea that you too are a creature of context—that your perspective, your experiences, the way you understand yourself and others are a product of interactions with the world—can be overwhelming, to say the least.
But selfhood isn’t the only construction threatened by monstrosity. Much institutional power derives in part from its invisibility: the unquestioned ability to judge, stratify, categorize, to enact your will without being seen. Haraway describes how, in Boyle’s time, the modest witness was a composite of social mores prized by contemporary English institutional power— the politesse of gentlemanly conversation, the asceticism and self-renunciation of the Protestant clergy, and the high-status ideals of ethical restraint and discipline. Monstrosity threatens to make these systemic constructions visible, revealing that Doctors are as constructed as Monsters are—but in ways that reinforce the social relations and hierarchies of power of the day, rather than threaten them. It is no wonder, then, that confronting monstrosity provokes such discomfort. Standing above the village of Chamounix, finally face to face with the creation he has restlessly pursued, Victor attempts to rebuke the Monster’s request to listen to its story in an oddly distant manner: “Cursed (although I curse myself) be the hands that formed you”. As with Feynman’s fleeting brush with monstrosity, Victor’s moment of recognition is also pointedly contained in an aside. Finally confronted with the Monster, he can barely look it in the eye.
When I first pitched this piece, I half-heartedly returned to the first professor’s posts, to see if he’d at least deleted them. He hadn’t, but there was a curious addition to his bio: the letters X and Y. They were the very first thing there, ahead of his institution or faculty title. It took me a while to register that they were meant to be a declaration of sex chromosomes in the place of pronouns. On a professional level, this was disappointing. But on a personal level, this gesture fascinated me. If my pronouns were, as he’d put earlier, some sort of epistemological power grab, then this must be a rebuttal, inevitably revealing something of his own beliefs. The scientific legibility of chromosomes seemed to be symbolically elevated to a statement about truth— an insistence that chromosomal sex revealed something essential, or perhaps even metaphysical about people. That no matter what, chromosomes would remain the consistent guiding light, allowing you to navigate the treacherous unknown waters of gender to the safe ontological harbor of chromosomal sex determination. Their presence was almost totemic, as if brandishing them publicly would ward off the nasty unscientific ambiguity of gender identity. As the sole bearer of they/them pronouns in the biology department to my knowledge, I remain very amused that apparently, I specifically, am the hellish vampiric specter that this genomic talisman is meant to ward off. I am sure that this professor would say that this gesture was satirical, that it was simply meant to parody and ridicule irrational flights of gender fancy like mine. And maybe it was, but my accursed sentience leaves me free to find it funny from my own monstrous little perspective as well. Mostly, I was left with one thought: I can’t believe I was afraid of this chromosome-wielder for so long.
I do not think I can explain my transness in a “purely scientific” way, not in the way I imagined that being trained as a scientist would allow me to. I no longer think of this as a failure on my part, because science itself cannot be explained in a purely scientific way. There will be those who feel that same instinctive recoil to this sentiment, who are discomforted by our shared humanity, who would dismiss or ridicule what they do not understand at first sight. But monsters are never truly banished, only deferred. Like the specter of the reanimated dead, our autonomy, our collective wisdom and experience, our personhood already looms in the corner of your eye. Our gaze will meet yours, and the inescapable realization will finally dawn on you—“It’s Alive!”
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