Page 173 – Electric Literature

An Experimental Novel About Malaysian Chinese Lives in the Aftermath of the May 13 Riots

Posted on January 10, 2023January 5, 2023 by Jo Lou

The Age of Goodbyes by Li Zi Shu, translated by YZ Chin, is a wild ride of a novel. It begins on page 513—a nod to the deadly race riots that broke out in Malaysia on May 13, 1969—and follows the ascent of Du Li An from her humble beginnings as the daughter of a street vendor into a formidable matriarch and boss-lady through her marriage to a wealthy, influential member of a Chinese gang society.

While May 13 is a significant date that has been impressed into the minds of every Malaysian (including this reader), no primer on Malaysian history or the Malaysian Chinese community is necessary to immerse yourself in the many worlds of The Age of Goodbyes. Zi Shu, an acclaimed, award-winning writer of Chinese literature, weaves a rich tapestry of the everyday lives of ordinary people in this mining town with the action-filled plot lines, romantic entanglements, and deft pacing of the Hong Kong television dramas that the characters themselves consume religiously.

The book is no less a daring feat of literary experimentation. Braided into Du Li An’s storyline are two Pale Fire-esque threads of meta-fiction involving a teenage boy who co-habitates a sleazy, rundown motel called the Mayflower with prostitutes who’ve seen better days, and a celebrated author who may or may not have written the very book you are reading. By the end, you, as a reader, can’t help but feel like you’ve been enlisted as a character of the novel as well.

I spoke with Zi Shu—her translator YZ Chin valiantly translating as we went along—over Zoom and live text. We talked about female friendships, the challenge of addressing Malaysia’s race relations in a novel, and Mahua literature.

May Zhee Lim: Reading this as a person who grew up in Malaysia, the characters’ backgrounds, their social dynamics, and their relationships felt very familiar to me. We always knew whose parents or neighbors had shadowy connections to mobster groups, just like Steely Bo and the Toa Pek Kong Society. Where did you draw your inspiration for these characters?

Li Zi Shu: I think many of the novel’s characters are drawn from my experience working as a journalist in Ipoh. I was a reporter for about eight years in my hometown of Ipoh. During that time, I had the opportunity to rub shoulders with locals from different socioeconomic backgrounds; I was able to observe their lives, their speech, and their mannerisms. Of course I knew my old stomping ground’s general atmosphere and environment like the back of my palm. All of these naturally surfaced when I wrote the novel. Sculpting these characters was actually the most effortless part of writing this book.

MZL: I think you also captured the gossipy nature of the Malaysian Chinese community. Everybody knew everybody’s business. It’s almost like the Greek chorus. Was that part fun to write?

LZS: Describing the daily lives of ordinary folk was definitely the most fun I had while writing the novel. I felt an especially strong kinship to Ipoh [the “fictional” mining town in the novel] when I was writing the parts featuring Du Li An. I had a chance to revisit the impressions and memories I had of my hometown, which then helped me better confront my relationship to my townspeople. With each character I sketched out, I grew to miss and “love” my home more.

MZL: The Age of Goodbyes was first published in 2010 and it has already won an award abroad but it was only translated into English and published by Feminist Press this year. How does it feel to finally introduce a novel you wrote more than twelve years ago to an English-speaking audience?

LZS: Twelve years ago, I was a young person who approached writing a full-length novel with burning ambition. That’s why I spent many years conceiving and completing The Age of Goodbyes. For a period after its publication, I felt proud of that accomplishment, though in my heart of hearts I still saw it as merely an exercise, a rehearsal. After all these years, I’ve come to develop many more ideas and aspirations for the novel genre so I’m no longer satisfied with the completion of this particular book. But as a Mahua writer, I remain very grateful that I can introduce the book to the English-reading world. I hope the novel draws a bigger readership and more attention to Mahua literature. I’m thankful for the enthusiastic efforts of translator YZ Chin. Without her, I probably wouldn’t have sought out translation opportunities, given my passive personality.

MZL: YZ, maybe you can speak to the translation and publication journey for this novel. How did this book come to be published? Who approached who?

YZ Chin: This book wouldn’t exist without writer and translator Jeremy Tiang. I approached them at a literary event because I greatly admired their novel State of Emergency. They planted the seed of an idea–namely, that I could and should translate. The more I thought about it, the more I found translation to be natural to my state of being. I’m sure you know what I mean. Growing up in Malaysia means being immersed in a multilingual environment. We don’t think twice about slipping between two, three, or four languages.

MZL: Yes, absolutely. It’s very effortless to switch between languages at the dinner table.

Growing up in Malaysia means being immersed in a multilingual environment. We don’t think twice about slipping between two, three, or four languages.

YZC: So thanks to roundabout introductions via Jeremy, I got in touch with Zi Shu on Facebook. I’d actually deactivated my account, but reactivated it just so I could talk to her. I’m fortunate that Zi Shu is so open and a dream to work with. We essentially hammered out the details for my translation over Facebook messenger, and then I pitched Feminist Press, the publisher of my first book, Though I Get Home, which is set mostly in Malaysia. I felt there was a foundation I could build upon to emphasize the importance of a book like The Age of Goodbyes, given FP’s mission to lift up marginalized voices from around the world. It was obviously a great fit for us.

MZL: I want to ask you more about the women in the book. I mentioned Elena Ferrante just now in our Zoom chat because there is something about the intense, complicated, and charged dynamics of female relationships in your novel that remind me of the Neapolitan novels. Can you talk more about this?

LZS: I grew up in an environment dominated by women. At home I only had sisters and no brothers. My father was never around. Later on I attended an all-girls secondary school. You could even say I grew up in a matriarchal world. I’ve always felt that the connections and friendships between women are more humorous and colorful than those between men. When you transpose all this into a fictional setting, dissecting these details and nuances layer by layer, you have more than enough to support an entire novel’s plot. When it comes to writing the world of women, there may not be epic quests or grand narratives with the fate of the universe in balance. But it’s possible to depict–from everyday life–heart-stopping scenes as full of conflict as any battlefield.

MZL: I totally agree. The scenes between women were some of the most memorable ones in the book for me. I was both really touched and saddened by the relationship between Du Li An and her best friend Guen Hou. Even their two decades of female friendship could not escape the subtle, casual, yet painful elements of sexism that the women, and the men, in our society have internalized. Sometimes, you convey all of this in just a single, devastating sentence, beautifully translated by YZ. For instance: “Du Li An thought that if she was fated to bear no sons in her life, then she’d be content with a daughter like Eggplant Face to keep her company.”

The riots’ reverberation throughout society is forever a hidden anguish for Chinese Malaysians.

LZS: I feel that female friendships have always been more susceptible, more easily swayed. Especially so in the era described in the book, when women were oppressed under patriarchy; they had to fight for resources to get ahead in a society dictated by men. Du Li An and Guen Hou’s friendship is challenged time and again by the changes in their fortunes and thus their class and hierarchy. What begins as sympathy morphs into jealousy when their circumstances change, and yet their friendship can be rekindled when one party descends into the depths of despair. In my opinion, setting aside the intricacies of female interiority, this is an inevitable result of scrabbling for limited resources in order to survive.

MZL: Yeah, it seems they can only be friends when there’s a power imbalance between them, even from the very start of their friendship. You do something very similar in the book when it comes to depicting race relations in Malaysia, which was and still can be a fraught topic in our country.

LZS: Malaysia is, after all, a multicultural society. Even though I’m writing about Malaysian Chinese stories in Chinese, it’s impossible to evade the painful and uncomfortable question of racial relations that exists perennially in the background. Though the May 13 incident is brought up and yet never directly addressed in the novel, the riots’ reverberation throughout society is forever a hidden anguish for Chinese Malaysians. I don’t think Malaysia’s issues with racial relations is something any single novelist can truly address or resolve. But since the inception of our country, every generation must find the freedom and courage to seek answers.

MZL: It’s certainly a very complex topic.

YZC: By the way, do we prefer “Malaysian Chinese” or “Chinese Malaysian?”

MZL: I’ve always said Malaysian Chinese! What do you two normally use?

YZC: Yes, same. Sorry to set us off topic!

LZS: it depends, sometimes I want to emphasize the ethnic, sometimes the nationality…

MZL: No, it’s a good point. Let me double check with Electric Literature.

LZS: Malaysian Chinese is fine for me.

MZL: There’s another storyline in the novel that has two male characters: Uncle Sai and the teenage son of the woman who lived in the Mayflower. Why did you decide to set this alongside Du Li An’s?

In Malaysia, there are so few Chinese readers, and the number of them who read literary fiction is shrinking by the day.

LZS: The origins of the Mayflower motel teen are shrouded in mystery. He has a hazy connection to the first narrative strand, that of Du Li An as the main character. What she represents is the initial generation that struggled [for rights]; as for this youth of a later generation, I dropped him into a dilapidated motel and sent him on a quest to discover his roots and find his “father,” which is akin to demanding answers from a history that always remains silent.

What I wanted to address with his section is the issue surrounding the acknowledgement of a Malaysian-Chinese identity. We’re several generations removed from the migration from China to Nanyang; our attitudes toward culture, home, and country are not the same as those of our ancestors. But this country in which we are situated—will it eternally confine us on a “Mayflower,” stranded and wrecked? Will we be chased away at a moment’s notice and exiled to our “homeland?” Though clearly this ship is going nowhere.

MZL: How does it feel to be a Malaysian writer abroad today?

LZS: To be honest, even though I have ample experience living overseas, as a Mahua writer I’ve never considered myself as being “abroad.” I’ve obviously lived outside of the country, and I’ve published in Chinese—and now English—literary circles outside of Malaysia. But throughout I’ve always thought of it as my attempts to carve out more space for Mahua literature. Malaysians who write in Chinese (versus in Malay or English) are used to being marginalized, even within the Chinese literary world. I didn’t feel like I was part of the mainstream when I lived in Beijing for several years. I felt essentially disregarded. Or, put another way, we are basically destined to have trouble blending in with our surroundings. This situation has never changed, even with the considerable sales and great acclaim that my latest novel has garnered in mainland China.

MZL: So I remember always lamenting both the fierce censorship and what I perceived to be the lack of literary or reading culture in Malaysia when I was younger. I felt like I had to leave the country if I wanted to become a writer or pursue my creative dreams. Did you two feel the same way? Feel free to tell me that I’m completely off the mark here.

LZS: In Malaysia, there are so few Chinese readers, and the number of them who read literary fiction is shrinking by the day. If you write in Malay or English, there’s no way it’s bleaker or more hopeless than writing in Chinese or Tamil, right? I keep saying: After you finish writing, the only people who will buy your book are your fellow Mahua writers or certain young readers who are basically your future colleagues—meaning only those who write will read your book, and those who write are vanishing into smaller numbers.

Luckily, we’ve always had the Taiwanese market. Quite a few Mahua authors who moved there have made a name for themselves, essentially opening up a path for other Mahua writers. But Mahua literature being Mahua literature, it’s treated, on a certain level, merely as “minority literature” in Taiwan, which, like any other place, is experiencing a decline in literary readership. The outlook for the book industry is gloomy, which means government support is essential.

All hope isn’t lost for Mahua literature even in such dire straits though. In the last few years, the work of quite a few Mahua novelists have been introduced to mainland China, where they’ve been received favorably by literature lovers. These Mahua writers have managed to draw attention despite not being physically present in China. I believe the future can only be better if we continue producing good work. Because of that I don’t completely agree with what you said about having to leave Malaysia in order to pursue dreams of becoming a writer.

YZC: I’m greatly encouraged by the success of Fixi, Silverfish, and other local publishers. I admire them so much. At the same time, I understand your concerns about censorship, especially if you work in English. I think the philosophical answer is that writing, like any worthwhile pursuit, should be done despite or against hope. And the practical answer is that we each must find what works for our art, art not being separate from “real life” of course.

MZL: OK, I have to end on this question. You’re in a Malaysian restaurant in the U.S. You have ten seconds to decide on a dish. What do you order?

LZS: I haven’t been to any Malaysian restaurant in the U.S.! Well, if I am in one of them now, oh, sure, please give me a bowl of Laksa. Maybe some satays as well?

Each X-ray Erases Me a Little More

Posted on January 9, 2023January 4, 2023 by Wynter Miller

Another X-ray

Any chance you might be pregnant? When was the last time
you wanted to home against another girl’s throat and clavicle,
your mouth taut and mutinous with pearls? What is the name
for a girl who says she doesn’t feel attraction, who staves
her belly with powerlines punctured with birds calling
one minor key note over and over? Which arm would you like
me to use to draw blood today? How long have you been
a casket of steroid pills? Do you have a nice boyfriend? Do you
use birth control? May I ask why not? Is ace
one of those new things they’ve made up these days? What if you
meet the right man and change your mind? Can you
hold still so the technician can try again, please? Can you keep the cross
-hairs of the beam centered on your gut, please?
Are you sure the catheter hurts? Are you sure your gut pain
isn’t just because you’re on your period right now? You see the red
thread your piss like lead lining honey after the nearby cathedral
burned? Do you know how divided a meteor feels, ligatured blue
with flame up in the breathless cold of a million stars arriving
after their deaths? What’s your secret to losing weight?
How often have you found your stool dark lately?
Do you see how your intestine is so obstructed it loops your heart?
When you told your friend you were in hell, did you want
her to come sing you out by holding your tiny wrist, empty
as a halo? Do you know you’re in your prime childbearing years?
What if your husband wants kids? Do you know
when they cut you from your mother she briefly regained feeling
and had to try to wake her tongue, like a cicada under snow?
Do you know the sound a dozen hands make in the dark
kneading a mother’s belly back into place after the C-section,
of how your tongue is a scar that’s proof of the severing?
How many times did your mother teach you to demand
an epidural? How many times did she ask if you imagined kissing girls,
did you imagine lips locking as two people eating matches and silence?
Would you like your mother to draw you churched with morphine
again? What has already begun to nurse your marrow, bladed
with light? When you demanded everyone who love you leave the room
and looked at the NG tube taped to your face, did you call
your dilated pupil a mercury cradle, the hole carved in the shadow
of god that falls across the virgin? Did you call it failure
to tremble for the girl you love, or is that your name
for your ventricles that have learned the art of letting go?
When men running by you yell nice ass
do they know the prismatic dark that hungers down the center
of your eyes? The animal jaws you’ve faithed toward glass
saying love like such a desperate woman falling through your bones?

Elegy for My Mother

I’m sorry, mother, to write you as if you were dead
again. It’s only that I tried to imagine it—
your body on a table for me to prepare
your ashes in a jar for me to carry on my dashboard—
and couldn’t.
Instead, our hands stretched over the electric fence,
the nervous mares pushing their muzzles
into our palms.
Instead, your mother’s gold watch
stopped against your wrist, your hand
guiding ice chips to her mouth.
I’m sorry I’ve been such a hungry throat.
I’m sorry for the C-section scar.
Sorry to always be thinking of the coyote song
you listen to when you walk back alone
to your car at night, of when you wrapped the milk-mouthed kit
in a grease-stained towel. I’m trying to say
I want your arms always, I’m trying to say
that I imagine arranging your hair, your breasts,
your stretch-marked skin, and I thought
of the vulture I saw on the clifftop
swooping between me
and a blue horizon.
Maybe it’s how you cupped my hands
around the dragonfly
after we drowned it
to try to keep the color—how you painted
each faded blue spot back on, showing me
that sometimes the only way
we know how to keep something
is to kill it
so we don’t have to bear watching it
vanish one breath at a time without us
in daylight.

8 Books About the Impact of the Japanese Imperialism during World War II

Posted on January 9, 2023January 5, 2023 by Jo Lou

My native Philippines was colonized three times—by Spain for 370 years, by the United States for 48 years, and by Japan for four years. While the Japanese occupation was the shortest, from 1942 to 1945 during World War II, it proved to be the most brutal.

In the month-long Battle of Manila alone, about 100,000 Filipinos were killed. The Philippine capital was completely devastated. The battle was the beginning of the end of a ruthless reign marked by famine and hardships and replete with rapes, tortures, burnings, and massacres. Estimates of the number of Filipinos who died during Japan’s rule vary, but it could be as high as one million. There’s no official death toll because many executions and carnages were unreported.

The Philippine experience wasn’t unique. The Japanese military regime killed millions between 1931, during Japan’s first invasion of China, and 1945, when it surrendered at the end of World War II. Historian J.R. Rummel estimated that up to 10 million people—Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Indonesians, Indochinese, and Western prisoners of war—died in the hands of the Japanese soldiers during that period.

Emperor Hirohito accepted his country’s defeat in a radio address in 1945, but didn’t apologize for Japanese atrocities. It took 50 years before Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama offered an unequivocal apology for Japan’s colonial rule and aggression.

It’s impossible to fully grasp the depth and breadth of the horrors of Japanese imperialism, but the following books have enlightened me as a reader:

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Japan demonstrated its military might when it won the wars against China (1894-1895) and Russia (1904-1905), but it was the annexation of Korea in 1910 that made it a bona fide imperial power. Pachinko captures the impact of Japanese colonialism on the Korean psyche through the story of one family over four generations. Sunja, plain and poor, loses her father at 13 and gets pregnant at 17. Her lover, slick and wealthy Hansu, is a Korean who works for the Japanese Yakuza. Worse, he’s married with children and he won’t marry Sunja. Baek Isak, a Christian minister who suffers from tuberculosis, marries Sunja to save her reputation and take her to Japan to start anew.

Sunja gives birth, first to Noah, the son of Hansu, and then Mosazu, Isak’s son. Japan is no land of milk and honey for Koreans. The family endures poverty, discrimination, and catastrophes. Sunja connects all four generations in a span of 70 years. She’s transformed from a naïve teen to an indomitable matriarch in this exceptional family saga. The best-selling novel’s adaptation is a popular Apple TV+ series.

Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang, translated by Julia Lovell

Eileen Chang’s 1940s Shanghai teems with socialites married to Chinese men who run the Japanese occupational government, idealistic students, and spies. Wang Chia-chih is a beautiful student and stage actress whose most dangerous role is to seduce Mr. Yee, the head of the puppet government’s intelligence agency. Her mission: to facilitate his assassination. Chia-chih befriends Yee’s wife in order to insinuate herself into the bureaucrat’s life. She poses as the unhappy wife of a businessman so as not to arouse Mrs. Yee’s jealousy or suspicion. She succeeds, and Yee becomes her lover, only to change her mind about betraying him in the critical moment of the assassination.

I read this compelling novella in one sitting. Its plot is what spy thrillers are made of, but Chang wrote it as a tragic yet unsentimental story of a young woman’s impossible love. Chia-chih may be smart and audacious, but she’s ultimately too humane to assume the role of femme fatale. Yee, on the other hand, basks in his lover’s aborted mission as a proof that he possessed her “as a hunter does his quarry, a tiger his kill.”

Chang, also known as Zhang Ailing, was born in 1920 in Shanghai. She experienced firsthand the Japanese occupation. The Oscar-winning director Ang Lee adapted the book into a film in 2007. “To me, no writer has ever used the Chinese language as cruelly as Eileen Chang, and no story of hers is as beautiful or as cruel as Lust, Caution,” he writes in the book’s afterword. Indeed, Chang adeptly blurred the lines between love and ruthlessness, between loyalty and deception in this memorable story.

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

“I was born with the gift of rain, an ancient soothsayer in an even more ancient temple once told me,” says Philip Hutton in the opening line of Tan Twan Eng’s debut. The story takes place in the Malayan island of Penang when Philip is just 16 in 1939. As a biracial boy of Chinese-English heritage, he grows up lonely despite his family’s wealth. He only finds a sense of belongingness after he befriends a Japanese diplomat, Hayato Endo. Philip shows his friend the ins and outs of his beloved island, while Endo teaches him aikido and the Japanese language. The ambivalence of the men’s relationship, with just hints of homoeroticism, keeps the reader guessing.

When Japan invades Malaya, then a British colony, Philip and Endo are torn between their friendship and their loyalties to their respective countries. Malaya is already under Japanese occupation when Philip discovers that Endo is a spy, and everything he’s taught him has contributed to the swift Japanese invasion. The lyrical writing of Tan, a Malaysian writer and lawyer, and the focus on Malaya under Japanese rule make this novel memorable.

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

When We Were Orphans looks like a detective novel, but it’s so much more than that. Christopher Banks is an Englishman born in Shanghai, whose parents disappeared mysteriously when he was a boy in the 1920s. As an orphan, he’s sent to England.

20 years later, Banks has made a name for himself as a detective, but he has yet to crack his biggest case: the presumed kidnapping of his parents. He returns to Shanghai in 1937 amid the ravages of Japanese occupation. He’s drawn to Sarah Hemmings who was orphaned young just like him. What he discovers about his parents shocks him, but ultimately helps him reconcile what he remembers of the past and the reality of the present. He realizes that his desire to find his parents is the “inescapable fate of one caught in the toils of historical turbulence.” In this novel, Ishiguro—born in Nagasaki, Japan, but raised in England—returns to themes he’s known for: memory, love, loss, and social mores.

The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

A family saga reminiscent of Pachinko, this story of four generations of the Tran family is told from the points of view of Huong and her grandmother, Dieu Lan. The family survives famine and the horrors of the Japanese occupation during World War II and later on, the Vietnam War. It’s both refreshing and illuminating to read a Vietnamese story from the perspective of Vietnamese women.

Huong escapes the bombing of Hanoi with her grandmother during Vietnam War. As bad as Huong’s experience is, her grandmother has experienced worse. Dieu Lan’s father was killed by the Japanese during World War II and her family’s land was taken by Ho Chi Minh’s communist regime during Vietnam’s land reform in the 1950s. In real life, the land reform occasioned mass executions, imprisonment, and torture of landowners in Vietnam.

The book’s title comes from a wooden carving of a bird—son ca, meaning “mountains sing”—that Huong’s father had given her. The Mountains Sing is the author’s first novel in English.

The Flowers of War by Geling Yan, translated by Nicky Harman

Originally titled 13 Flowers of Nanjing, this is the story of a group of schoolgirls that find refuge in a church compound run by an American priest. The year is 1937. The compound is located in a neutral zone in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, which is the reason why a group of prostitutes also end up there. They all know they won’t stay safe for long from the rampaging Japanese army. The collective anxiety and individual concerns result in bickering and infighting.

Told from the perspective of 13-year-old Shujuan, the novel depicts good versus evil, innocence versus worldliness in black and white. The lack of subtlety is understandable considering that the story is set against the backdrop of the Nanjing Massacre. Shanghai-born Yan was inspired to write the book after reading about Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary who ran a college in Nanjing during the period. Acclaimed filmmaker Zhang Yimou adapted the book into a film in 2011, starring Christian Bale.

The Last Manchu by Henry Pu Yi, edited by Paul Kramer

I first heard about this book after watching Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 epic film The Last Emperor. The story of the Chinese boy who became an emperor at two-years-old and died a lowly gardener is so hard to fathom that I just had to check out the film’s source.

Bertolucci based his award-winning movie on the autobiography of Henry Pu Yi, also known as Puyi and Aisin Goro, the last emperor of China. He ascended the throne in 1908 and grew up in the Forbidden City among consorts, eunuchs, tutors, and servants. His lavish life was marked by decadence even after the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, which ended the Manchu dynasty. He was forced to abdicate, but he remained in the Forbidden City as a nonruling emperor.

During the Japanese occupation, Pu Yi was crowned the emperor of Manchukuo, imperial Japan’s puppet state. His reign was followed by imprisonment in the Soviet Union after Japan’s defeat in World War II. He eventually returned to China, by then a communist nation, where he was re-educated in prison camps. Chairman Mao Zedong pardoned him in 1960.

It’s fascinating to read about someone who never dressed or brushed his teeth on his own and was served 20 different kinds of food for each meal. Pu Yi’s autobiography reveals a sad life devoid of agency and completely shaped by external forces.

Inheritors by Asako Serizawa

If you’re wondering how the Japanese people feel about their imperial past, this excellent collection of stories features characters grappling with the lessons and consequences of history. Japan’s role during World War II dominates the stories, which span five generations of related characters in Asia and the United States.

Most of the stories focus on the past, such as that of a doctor living in a Japanese-occupied district in China. He’s haunted by the inhumane experiments he and his colleagues perform. But this book also peers into the future with stories speculating about future ecological ruin and what cyberwarfare might look like.

One of Asako Serizawa’s strengths is her ability to find a path away from stereotypical depictions of Japanese imperialism. Inheritors won the 2021 PEN/Open Book Award.

Pete Mitchell Wants the Mere Possibility of a Happier Ending

Posted on January 6, 2023January 16, 2024 by Intern Electric Lit

When I consider the memories that feel, in one way or another, like the definitive conclusion to a segmented period of my life, I usually think in images: sitting around a friend’s front porch just hours before we’d go our separate ways for college; a post-graduation happy hour at the neighborhood bar; a disastrous final performance of an experimental musical that found half our cast stricken with food poisoning, crawling through lines at a sparsely attended matinee as my father dissociates in the back row; a game of truth-or-chug around the campfire; one last round of Bud Light in Isaac’s hollowed living room.

And even if I’m standing on the precipice of a new city, a new job, an empty apartment, I’m never alone. In each of these moments, I’m surrounded.

Then they kiss. And it doesn’t feel earned, exactly, but it feels right.

The original 1986 Top Gun, Tony Scott’s melodramatic, feature-length music video-cum-propaganda machine had one of these exact endings. The final minutes find Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, celebrating his victory against vaguely sketched enemy combatants of indeterminate geographic origin, cheering on a naval airstrip alongside pretty much every surviving character from the film’s nearly two hour runtime. Completely triumphant, it’s not just that he’s saved the day, or even that he’s overcome his daddy issues, professional insecurities, and incredibly recent trauma surrounding the death of his wingman, Goose—it’s that he has proven himself to the entire community surrounding him: his love interest, his mentors, and even his rival, Val Kilmer’s Tom “Iceman” Kazanski. In the film’s coda, Maverick accepts an assignment teaching future Top Gun pilots and resumes his relationship with Kelly McGillis’ character. “This could be complicated,” Maverick says, as she approaches him at the bar. “You know, on [our] first [try at this] I crashed and burned…I don’t know [how it’ll go this time], but it’s looking pretty good so far.”

Then they kiss. And it doesn’t feel earned, exactly, but it feels right. Personally and professionally, Maverick’s story is just about wrapped. He’s entered an unfamiliar situation and emerged having changed. Cue “Danger Zone.” Roll the credits. Turn on the overhead lights. Get home safe and tip your bartenders.

Except for that’s not really the end.

After endless discussion around the possibility of a sequel, we meet Maverick again, nearly four decades later, in last year’s Top Gun: Maverick, which, at the time of writing, remains 2022’s highest-grossing film. Although still rocking Tom Cruise’s superhumanly boyish looks, the film opens with Maverick in a very different position than any we’ve seen him in previously: totally alone.

Following a sepia-toned opening credit montage set to—what else?—Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” Top Gun: Maverick begins in earnest as we reunite with Maverick, eating breakfast (and living?) alone in a Mojave Desert air hanger, a far cry, of course, from where we last saw him in 1986, celebratory and embraced by his surrounding community. Photos of his deceased wingman, Goose, and of his life from the previous movie frame his locker, snippets of a life frozen in stasis, a monument to a bygone past. The portrait painted of his life in these early scenes is one defined almost entirely by his work, with a few requisite social obligations sprinkled across his wall calendar. “October 19^th: coffee [with] Lauren,” it reads. “October 27^th: dinner with Joe.” “October 31^st: Halloween Airshow.”

Even beyond that, it’s immediately clear that Maverick’s post Top Gun existence is significantly emptier than the promise of the original film’s final moments. We learn very quickly that he lasted only two months as an instructor at Top Gun; that he’s barely advanced professionally; that things with Kelly McGillis didn’t work out; that he torpedoed his relationship with Goose’s son. After he’s reprimanded for illegally piloting a jet past Mach 10 speeds, Ed Harris’ (delightfully named) Rear Admiral Chester “Hammer” Cain chews Maverick out, in a scene genetically engineered to make Tom Cruise appear youthful, even if only by virtue of being twelve years younger than his scene partner.

“Thirty-plus years of service,” Hammer tells Maverick as he reads his resume back to him. “Combat medals. Citations. Only man to shoot down three enemy planes in forty years. Distinguished. Distinguished. Distinguished. Yet you can’t get a promotion. You won’t retire. And despite your best efforts, you refuse to die. You should be at least a two-star admiral by now, if not a senator. Yet here you are, captain. Why is that?”

That question, why is that, lies at the heart not only of the new Top Gun, but of any worthwhile years-or-even-decades-later sequel that interrogates a familiar character adapting to a radically different, much bleaker set of life-circumstances than the one we remember them in.

Top Gun’s hero, Maverick, is far from alone in his status as an isolated loner.

Far from an outlier, Top Gun: Maverick is currently the number two film at the box office of this nascent (and, given COVID-19, admittedly quite strange) decade of theatrical releases, sandwiched between two other, similarly nostalgia-baiting sequels. Coming in ahead of Top Gun: Maverick is Spiderman: No Way Home (which saw the return of both Tobey McGuire and Andrew Garfield’s respective Spidermen), and below it is Jurassic World Dominion (which featured return appearances by familiar franchise faces Sam Neil, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum, all three doing their best to ease the landing of a truly lacking script). And, although it’s too early to say, James Cameron’s long-in-development sequel Avatar: The Way of Water seems likely to rival these numbers. In returning to beloved—and profitable!—stories so many years after the original installments, each of these films are representative of the latest trend inHollywood blockbusters, which at long last are beginning to skew (or, at least, ever so broadly gesture) away from superheroic melodrama. Instead, the latest trend centers legacy sequels: heavily belated follow-ups that check in with these iconic characters many, many years down the line from the films that made them famous.

Top Gun’s hero, Maverick, is far from alone in his status as an isolated loner. In Spiderman: No Way Home, for instance, we’re reacquainted with Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker, now a middle-aged, somehow-even-lower-key-than-we-remember-him introvert, still trying to work out his issues with Mary Jane, while Andrew Garfield’s iteration of the character is stuck in a cycle of mourning and violence following the death of Gwen Stacy at the end of his last theatrical appearance. Less contrived but significantly less entertaining, Jurassic World Dominion’s few redeeming moments involve the reunion between Sam Neil’s Dr. Alan Grant and Laura Dern’s Dr. Ellie Sattler. “It’s over,” Dr. Sattler tells Grant, regarding the status of her previous marriage, a minor plot point from Jurassic Park III. “…it’s okay. I’m back to me, my work. It’s good. I’m alone at last. Living the Alan Grant life.”

Grant fakes a smile. “It can be lonely,” he replies, in maybe the single emotionally honest moment of the entire film.

There’s a clear throughline: things have gone to absolute shit since we’ve last seen our protagonists.

These are far from the only legacy sequels to long-milked and/or dormant franchises that open with their protagonists in a state of isolation and defeat. Jason Bobin’s 2011 The Muppets reboot opens with Kermit sulking around an otherwise dormant mansion following the Muppet collective going their separate ways; Ghostbusters: Afterlife posits a status quo in which Harold Ramis’ Egon Spengler is not on speaking terms with his family or fellow ghostbusters at the time of his death; The Force Awakens introduces us to a vision of the Star Wars universe in which Luke has exiled himself to a far-off corner of the galaxy and Han and Leia have separated following their son’s turn to the dark side. Even this year’s follow-up to Disney’s Enchanted is literally called, uh, Disenchanted.

In each of these legacy sequels, there’s a clear throughline: things have gone to absolute shit since we’ve last seen our protagonists.

A great deal of digital ink has been spilled regarding the cheapness, cynicism, and creative bankruptcy that has led to the proliferation of these nostalgic cash grabs. Writing for The Atlantic, David Sims argues that Spiderman: No Way Home, is “…less a movie and more a fun-house ride through our collective memory tunnels.”For The AV Club, Jesse Hassenger accuses Ghostbusters: Afterlife of “…using a particularly craven reboot strategy: [sending] the audience on a journey of assurance, in this case that their childhood heroes were great and the toys they played with were super-cool.” Film critic Christopher Orr wrote that The Force Awakens, “…is in many ways less sequel than remix, a loving mashup of familiar scenes, characters, themes, and dialogue… it’s ensnared in its own nostalgia.”

All of these arguments and critiques are valid—particularly to the films to which they’re applied—but an under-discussed element of the recent glut of legacy sequels is that, due to the demands of commercial storytelling, each of these follow-ups must begin by establishing that the happy ending from the previously definitive installment has been undone in the intervening years. Chip and Dale have gone their separate ways over creative differences; a new Ghostface killer is terrorizing Sydney Prescott; The Muppets all fucking hate each other. The ending that you thought you knew is not really an ending at all.

“We pretend to know good news, but we cannot be sure,” Kurt Vonnegut argues in his essay collection, A Man Without a Country. “Maybe this is because true happiness is mundane, like sitting under an apple tree with a friend on a sunny day.” The mundanity of happiness—and its general lack of narrative urgency—surely has a great deal to do with the narrative choices being made in these legacy sequels, but, for however craven the business strategies behind them may be, they speak to something honest in life and in art that often goes ignored in commercial, big-budget storytelling: there’s no such thing as a happy ending.

At the end of the original Top Gun, Maverick is presented with a carte-blanche, storybook resolution. He gets the job, the girl, and the respect of his peers. And, in the intervening years between installments, he fucks it all up.

In fact, he more than fucks it up. He fucks up so bad that he fucks up storylines that we weren’t even privy to.

“It always ends the same with us, Pete,” Jennifer Connelly’s world-weary bartender, Penny, tells Maverick early on in Top Gun: Maverick, invoking their shared, cyclical history, one that had only been referenced by a stray line of dialogue in the original film. “Let’s not start this time.” Of course, they do end up starting again this time, and, after sleeping with Penny, Maverick climbs out her window like a teenager to avoid being spotted by his ex-flame’s teenage daughter. “This is the last time I go out your window,” he promises. “I mean it, I’m never gonna leave you again.” As he brushes himself off on the grass, Penny’s daughter stares at him through an open window, shaking her head in resigned disapproval. “Just don’t break her heart again,” she tells him.

And Maverick doesn’t even try to protest. Instead, he just stares back, nods to her, and, humbled, staggers towards his car.

What’s so impressive about this scene is that this moment—in which America’s least relatable but most aspirational movie star, Tom Cruise, nonverbally promises a small child that he will not break her mother’s heart again—absolutely lands, even though we have not, in this movie or in the previous installment, seen him break anyone’s heart, let alone Jennifer Connelly’s, and let alone multiple times. In the years since the original Top Gun, the audience may not have witnessed Pete Mitchell ruin any relationships, but the vast majority of those of watching have certainly done so themselves, or had their own hearts broken, or, at the very least, stepped up to the absolute precipice of saying something honest but irrevocably damaging to the people they rely on most.

He gets the job, the girl, and the respect of his peers. And, in the intervening years between installments, he fucks it all up.

For as often as legacy sequels take on the feeling of, say, a small child smashing together their dad’s old action figures, it’s moments like this in which these stories can really sing, when these characters who the audience has imprinted upon and even idolized are forced to reckon with the consequences of having sabotaged their own happiness. And we, as audience members—so often dumb, and easily overwhelmed, and swayed by sentiment or anger or impulse—can’t help but to relate to them, to identify.

Writing about 2021’s Matrix: Resurrections, Vox’s Emily St. James notes, “If we fans demand that our favorite characters return again and again, then we never afford them any sort of final peace or closure. We are asking them to constantly relive their own worst moments, in the name of our entertainment.” Narratively, this is both a blessing and a curse, often perpetuating, as St. James argues, a relatively lazy and cynical trauma-plot narrative, but also utilizing the toybox of multibillion-dollar media conglomerates to tell stories about iconic characters reckoning with mistakes that will be all too familiar to their aging target demographics, from broken relationships to stalled careers to the general monotony of the daily grind.

The best of these legacy sequels, from Matrix: Resurrections, to Twin Peaks: The Return, to—hell yeah—Top Gun: Maverick, embrace the passage of time and the inevitability of failure as a feature, not a bug, in prioritizing their aging original cast members rather than a sequel-baiting passing of the torch to a younger generation of A-listers. “We don’t want you to fly it,” Jon Hamm’s Beau “Cyclone” Simpson tells Maverick early on in the film, presenting him with classified information about a vaguely imperialist mission that you can almost feel the screenwriters hand waving in the same sentence that it’s introduced. “We want you to teach it.”

And in most films, that’s exactly what our protagonist would do: mentor a group of young pilots, and then watch from the sidelines as they successfully apply everything that Maverick has to teach them and carry out the mission.

This isn’t a movie about an aging Tom Cruise symbolically appointing a new generation of movie stars.

That’s not what happens here, though, as, after an anarchic theft of a shockingly expensive jet plane to prove a point to his commanding officer, Maverick himself is appointed as lead pilot for the mission. The specifics of the operation matter less than the opportunity for our protagonist to get back in the game, and the film reveals its true hand. This isn’t a movie about an aging Tom Cruise symbolically appointing a new generation of movie stars; it’s about his character refusing to call it quits, regardless of his age or of the mistakes that have come to define him, somehow rendering a hyper-competent fighter pilot played by Tom Goddamn Cruise into a genuine underdog. And so, when Maverick really does the shit out of everything he sets out to do—flies the mission, saves the day, proves himself to his superiors, reunites with Penny, says goodbye to Iceman, and repairs his relationship with Goose’s son—it feels right. And against all odds, it feels earned.

Following each of those seemingly-conclusive moments that I’ve amassed for myself over the years, there’s come a time, weeks or days or even hours afterwards, that’s felt like the opposite of an ending: an anxious scramble for gainful employment, a flat tire outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, the feeling of smallness that comes from restarting your life in a new city in which not a single person knows your name, an entire season of heartbreak.

For as craven and opportunistic as much of Hollywood’s blockbuster output continues to be, Top Gun: Maverick exemplifies a narratively authentic path forward, blending its target audience’s nostalgia for their bygone youth with an understanding of the cyclical structure inherent to human nature: we get it together and then we fuck it up and then we get it together again, until, probably, we fuck it up once more. And around and around we go until we run out of sequel hooks.

“As improbable as it seems right now, someday you’ll be back in a fighter plane with your tail on fire,” Penny tells Maverick shortly after their reunion, rejecting his lamentations that he’s finally gone and ruined his life for good this time, and casually observing the cyclical nature of his melancholy. In this brief moment, Penny seems to be aware of exactly what sort of movie she’s in, and exactly what sort of audience she’s speaking to—the failures they most regret and the memories they wish they could live inside and the second chances they hope deep down might still be possible. And I get it. There’s a part of me that really believes that one day I’ll close down Bently’s Pub again. That we’ll mount a sequel to our shitshow musical. That I’ll live in the same city as everyone I care about. That nothing is ever really over. Sometimes I think I’ll always want to be everywhere I’ve ever been. More so than any other blockbuster, Top Gun: Maverick understands that genuinely satisfying escapism doesn’t come in the form of star destroyers crashing into planetary bodies or beams of light shooting into the sky—it’s in the notion that one day, too far off to clearly see right now, we’ll get right back in the cockpit and re-contextualize the past as prequel. That, for both the average movie-goer and for Pete Mitchell himself, the possibility of a happier ending remains stubbornly in the cards.

Ten Commandments: Writer’s Edition

Posted on January 6, 2023April 6, 2023 by EL Assistant2

Thou shalt not worship any other gods. But it’s totally fine to fangirl if you meet Margaret Atwood. And go ahead and swoon over Hilary Mantel’s Wolf House. We’d worry about you if you didn’t weep while reading Toni Morrison. And there’s really no need to hide that Colleen Hoover romance behind a copy of The New York Review of Books. What do you think We read during the sermon?
Thou shalt not make any idols, nor binge tired shows like American Idol after you canceled mini-golf with your kid so you could write a secret history of Botox. Nor, after blowing off your best friend’s wedding to edit, shalt thou stream Iron Chef, which is a slippery slope that will surely lead to watching Chopped.
Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain, unless the power goes out and you lose three paragraphs of your post-apocalyptic novel, Pluto’s Revenge: Shouldn’t Have Worried So Much About Asteroids. You didn’t hear it from Us, but the angel Gabriel is a total potty mouth.
Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. Didn’t you say you were taking a social media break to finish your end-of-times fashion essay? So We were kind of surprised to see you in a TikTok video using a penknife to remove a questionable-looking mole. Yes, We realize it got seven hundred thousand views. Still.
Honor thy father and mother, but Jesus, there’s a limit. If your mother’s idea of a festive Christmas dinner was Oscar Meyer on Wonder Bread, you should write about it. The market for memoir is fucking crowded.
Thou shalt not murder another writer’s work in a review, neither in an obscure poetry journal printed on recycled Birkenstocks, nor on that giant on-line retailer whose delivery driver you see more often than your wife, nor even on one of those cruel reader-review sites. Nor shalt thou ever give fewer than four stars. And would it really kill you to give five?
Thou shalt not commit adultery. You have to keep the drama in your life to a minimum. You can’t expect to meet the deadline for your review of Top Gun 2052: Flying on Statins and Blood Thinners if you’re being doxxed by a computer-savvy spouse.
Thou shalt not steal from other writers, unless it’s in an homage or a parody, or unless the idea was pretty much out there in the universe and someone else just wrote it down first, or unless you quote and footnote, or paraphrase and footnote, but that’s kind of awkward in nonacademic writing, don’t you think? Also, is it really stealing if it’s from Wikipedia?
Thou shalt not bear false witness, except when blurbing another writer’s book. Then thou may stretch the truth and tell complete falsehoods and bald-faced lies, using words like “audacious” and “sublime,” and it is also permissible to lie about having read Ulysses and Infinite Jest if you own copies and have displayed them prominently on a crowded shelf, which is pretty much the same thing as reading them.
Thou shalt not covet another writer’s National Book Award, nor their place on the Booker shortlist, nor their two-book deal with a big five publisher, nor their top agent, nor their obscure agent who somehow managed to sell their book to Simon and Schuster, nor their MacDowell residency, nor their MacArthur genius grant, nor their Iowa MFA, unless it is the middle of the night and you are awake. If that’s the case, go ahead and hate them for a while before taking another Ambien. And if you just wished them congratulations on Twitter, you may silently hate them, as long as when you see their good news again on Facebook, you post the gif of Meryl Streep clapping.

America’s Public Libraries Reflect the Systematic Failures and Social Inequality of Our Country

Posted on January 5, 2023December 20, 2022 by Jo Lou

Growing up, the library was not just Amanda Oliver’s favorite place but also her “first beloved destination, first embodied center… it was absolutely sacred.” However, soon after Oliver began her career as a librarian at a Title I school and then in the D.C. public library system, she witnessed how systemic racism, income inequality, the widespread shortage of affordable housing, the opioid crisis and lack of mental health care impacted America’s most vulnerable library patrons, placing the burden on library staff working in high poverty environments to serve as mediators and mental health crisis support personnel.

The constant stress, verbal and sometimes physical abuse took its toll on Oliver’s mental and physical health, causing her to abandon the job she loved and write Overdu e: Reckoning with the Public Library, a heart-wrenching polemic challenging the romanticized ideal of being a librarian.

Like Oliver, I am a former public school librarian who left my once beloved vocation after a trauma—I lost the use of my arms for nearly two years due to repetitive motion injuries which necessitated surgery after being ordered to pack a school library on my own. Around the time I resigned, I encountered Oliver’s advocacy for librarians in an essay. Her words made me realize we saw the same disparities, that I was not alone. Oliver and I recently met over Zoom, where we immediately connected over the mutual challenges we faced in the library, from retrofitting outdated collections featuring predominately white authors, to serving the needs of our diverse clientele on a limited budget, to being gaslit by administrators when we raised valid criticisms about how systemic racism and structural issues were impacting our ability to meet the needs of our patrons, to recognizing how working with limited resources in high poverty environments impacted our physical and mental health.

Deirdre Sugiuchi: In the opening chapters you discuss the mythology surrounding libraries: “It can be uncomfortable to think of libraries as social institutions that plainly tell the many layered stories of racism, classism, and deep-rooted neglect of marginalized and vulnerable populations in our community and across our nation…but to continue to laud libraries and librarians as ever-present equalizers and providers of some version of magic …prevents them from making meaningful changes and progress.”

Can you elaborate on how romanticizing libraries and ignoring systemic issues prevents libraries from making meaningful changes and progress?

Amanda Oliver: I completely understand the mythology and romanticization of libraries. It is obvious, and deserved, why they are so beloved. But when we idealize an institution to the point where we can’t or don’t or won’t look at its faults, both publicly and socially and also within the infrastructures of the institution, that’s a profound problem.

What’s particularly perplexing to me is the almost universally held view in America that libraries are somehow separate, or above, or outside of the many systemic issues impacting our entire country, when in fact our libraries embody them. I think more and more folks, especially in seeing the ways that libraries and librarians worked during the pandemic, started to understand the sheer magnitude of how much community support work was and is happening within libraries. And, again, this was held up as another shining example of the importance of libraries in America. But there’s a few missing pieces to that equation: the why this is the case—why libraries and library workers are tasked with so much and how this is indicative of pervasive inequities in this country—and also the weight of that responsibility being carried out by living, breathing people who are often not trained, capable, or sometimes even willing to do that work.

We so often look at libraries as beloved institutions without fully recognizing that they are not just physical buildings, or symbols of some best version of America…they are run by human beings who are often overworked and burned out from the insurmountable amount, and nature, of work they are being asked to do.

We can’t make progress or change to something if we don’t recognize there is a problem to begin with. And when we do the opposite—when we uplift an institution to the point of calling it things like “the last bastion of democracy” or “the last great equalizer,” as we so often do with libraries—it stops us from looking at them critically. Which, as with anything or anyone we treat this way, stops us from being able to make change or progress. If we don’t see a problem, we certainly can’t begin to see solutions.

DS: You worked as a librarian in DC, which has the largest gap in racial income inequality in this country, at a time when, due to technological shifts from 1980 to 2010, we have seen the demarcation between the social classes grow more extreme. How did working as a librarian in DC help inform your understanding of how class and caste operates in this country, particularly in regard to institutions like the library?

AO: I moved to D.C. right after graduating from my Master’s in Library Science program in 2011 and started working as a school librarian at a Title I elementary school a little over a mile from the White House. The students at that school were predominantly Black, Hispanic, and Mandarin Chinese and many of them lived in low-income housing right near the school. I learned very quickly that many of them were living in one or two-bedroom apartments with 10, 12, 14 other people. They’d come to school exhausted and tell me things like they’d been kept up all night by rats crawling on them. So many of my students lived in ways that I could not begin to really understand and then they still had to show up at school to learn and to take the same standardized tests as everyone else in the district. It became wildly clear to me very quickly how profoundly impactful class was within the K-12 school system, despite all of the reform work people like Michelle Rhea had been rolling out. When I eventually transitioned from school libraries to public I can remember thinking that so many of my adult patrons reminded me of my students and it felt like seeing the impacts of class inequality all grown up.

As far as how all of this plays out in libraries, there is a deep history of segregation in libraries by social class.

DS: You explore the history of the Library Company of Philadelphia, America’s earliest library. How did it shape how public libraries operated?

AO: The earliest free public library in America is generally accepted to be the Library Company of Philadelphia, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731. Franklin formed the Junto Club, which was a group of white, middle-class Philadelphia men who met for weekly meetings to improve their lives, their positions in their communities, and the societies they lived in. They regularly needed to look up information during their meetings and so they pooled their personal books into something of a collection, but eventually they wanted their books back in their homes. Franklin proposed a subscription library, 50 of them agreed to it, and the Library Company of Philadelphia—and the earliest version of the public library in America—was officially born.

When we idealize an institution to the point where we can’t or don’t or won’t look at its faults, that’s a profound problem.

All people of color were barred from accessing the Library Company. When Franklin and his peers founded the Library Company, teaching an enslaved person how to read was still illegal and punishable by death. Indigenous Americans were also forbidden access, though many had already been forcibly displaced and relocated from Pennsylvania to Midwestern territories by then. White indentured servitude was also common in colonial Philadelphia, and people in these groups—mostly women who were cultural and racial minorities, as well as the poor—were regarded as inferior to affluent white men and barred from accessing materials from most early libraries. Literacy was also a limiting factor, as education was reserved for middle- and upper-class White people. Even as access to education became more accessible to lower classes, and more of a public matter of concern, many students had to resign from school early to help work to support their parents and siblings in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Essentially, the very first version of a public library was created by and for middle- and upper-class white men, and this has permeated libraries for centuries.

DS: Can you discuss how libraries historically upheld white supremacy and segregation?

AO: Like I said earlier, our public libraries embody the history of our country, and this of course includes libraries and librarians upholding segregation, white supremacy, and xenophobia. In the early 1900s, when more than fifteen million immigrants were arriving to the United States, libraries and librarians distributed Americanization Registration Cards that required a signature agreeing to things like the use of a common language, the elimination of disorder and unrest, and “the maintenance of an American standard of living through the proper use of American foods, care of children and new world homes.” Librarians and libraries all over the country aided in the eradication of the culture, language, and customs of immigrants. Knowing that Black citizens fared even worse than them, the majority of immigrants chose to embrace whiteness and demonstrate their cultural and biological “fitness” to be white citizens, which further perpetuated and upheld white supremacy and segregation.

There is a deep, deep and lengthy history of discrimination and segregation against Black people in public libraries. It’s worth mentioning some of the brilliant Black librarians like Rev. Thomas Fountain Blue, Clara Stanton Jones, Virginia Lacy Jones, E.J. Josey, and Albert P. Marshall, who fought throughout their careers to desegregate libraries. We so often hear about Andrew Carnegie and Benjamin Franklin when we talk about the early history of libraries in America, but these folks were really leading the way and making change and uplifting libraries as truly public and accessible institutions.

By the 1950s and ’60s there were often still inferior and limited library services to Black people, but beyond that, Black patrons were often subjected to experiences in libraries that were humiliating. And librarians were often at the helm of this humiliation, refusing to give Black people library cards or to provide help for them at the circulation desk and supporting, or being complicit, when white patrons harassed them. These stories are often missing from the profession’s collective history.

DS: Since you left the library in 2018, the culture wars have grown more extreme. What do you think of the challenges faced by librarians now regarding censorship? How does refusing to reckon with our country’s history cause us to replicate the same patterns?

The very first version of a public library was created by and for middle- and upper-class white men, and this has permeated libraries for centuries.

AO: 2022 is on track to see the highest number of book challenges in public libraries in decades. That mirrors what’s happening in our culture at every level and I think everything is in the same vein—when we don’t acknowledge and work from and with a robust, nuanced, and complete truth about our histories, that includes failures and weaknesses and human and institutional errors and patterns, we’re doomed to repeat them.

DS: What kind of response did you receive from librarians when your book came out?

AO: It has been mixed. What I have been told more directly by librarians, usually in emails or at book events or in private messages, is that the book was reflective of, and validating to, their experiences in library work. Those communications have meant very much to me. I ultimately feel like I wrote a book that I wish I could have read when I was doing my Master’s in Library Science. For those librarians who have had dissimilar experiences to mine, they often express gratitude for the book’s contribution to a larger conversation.

What I have been told more indirectly, through online reviews and tweets, is that I was not a librarian long enough to have written the book. That came through loud and clear and was something I had been expecting, but still found disheartening. I certainly spent enough time in libraries and library work to understand on a much deeper level what is happening in our public libraries than, say, someone like Susan Orlean. And I was truly only able to write Overdue because I left library work. There was no way, mentally, emotionally, and, most specifically, legally, that I could have written it while working as a librarian.

So, I wrote the book I needed, and that I felt many others needed, about libraries. And it’s taken a great deal of time, space, and therapy, ha, to accept that I did not need to remain in the job longer to be able to write a “valid” account of my experiences. And certainly the many years of research and interviews that went into writing it are present. The book goes well beyond my personal experiences. Ultimately what I wanted to do was contribute to a more nuanced conversation around libraries and library work and I believe I was successful in that. I genuinely look forward to reading others’ work around their own experiences.

Passing Judgment on the God-Fearing Family Next Door

Posted on January 4, 2023October 8, 2025 by Wynter Miller

“The Catholics” by Chaitali Sen

Sharmila and Laurie spent the Obama years renovating a blue two-story on Chestnut Street, a tall, narrow house with a covered front porch flanked by two giant pines. It was built in 1910 and had only one bathroom when they bought it. A steep slope down to the street made the path treacherous and presented a landscaping challenge. They weren’t able to solve the problem of the slope but now their house had two bathrooms and an extension off the back where they built their master bedroom.

They debated over moving so far from Cornell, which meant they would have to drive to work in their one car, but they couldn’t find anything affordable closer to campus. This was a mixed-income neighborhood with a small complex of rough-looking apartments further down the street. Next door to them was a charming red colonial which they’d thought to be as old as their own house, but according to the records it wasn’t built until 1989. When it went on the market in 2016, they had tried to get Pete and Mario, their close friends from New York City, to buy it as a second home in the country. They weren’t interested, and the people who ended up moving in were Catholic hipsters with seven children, going on eight. The father, Dave, was some kind of freelance computer guy and a drummer in a band. The mother, Kiki, was a long-limbed waif with a belly so swollen it was nauseating. They had their own live chickens and traveled in a school bus, painted sky blue.

Sharmila and Laurie had watched from an upstairs window as the blue bus rolled into the driveway and the brood of children burst out of it.

A few days later, they went over to introduce themselves to Kiki and Dave and their small army ranging in age from fourteen to two, not including the one in utero. Kiki gave them a tour of the property. The kids were polite, not in a creepy way, and their little four-year-old girl was particularly cute, but the many eclectic and colorful crucifixes going up on their living room wall raised some alarm bells. If it were not the twenty-first century, Laurie and Sharmila would have assumed that they were liberation theologists or something like that. But to be so stubbornly averse to birth control these days was suspiciously right-wing.

When they got home, Sharmila said Dave and Kiki were probably Trump supporters.

“Really? They just don’t seem like the type,” Laurie said.

“They’re totally the type,” Sharmila said.

Growing up in Brooklyn, and then spending her adult life among artists and academics, Laurie would not have had as much opportunity to encounter conservative hippies, but Sharmila grew up in Waco—a hellmouth of megachurches that vomited up Chip and Joanna Gaines (exhibit 1), Christian fundamentalists who dressed just like Dave and Kiki. Ostensibly they remodeled derelict houses on HGTV, harmless enough, but in reality they propagated a patriarchal domestication cult that Sharmila was convinced would bring on the apocalypse.

They started referring to the family next door as the Catholics. The kids, loud and raucous and doing fun things in the backyard, were homeschooled by Kiki. From the upstairs windows, Laurie and Sharmila could observe their progress on a large airy chicken coop, an elaborate multistory playscape, and a lush vegetable garden. Sometime in mid-September Kiki had the baby, which she kept strapped to her body as the rest of the kids swirled around her. Sometimes they caught her looking up, maybe at Laurie and Sharmila in the window or just at the sky. They hardly ever saw Dave, who went more often out into the world, even after the baby was born. Once Laurie and Sharmila spotted him on the Commons loading his drums into a bar for a gig. They looked at each other with matching grimaces of disgust. Whose life came to a halt to raise eight kids? Not his.

Nothing seemed to change for them after Election Day. Kiki and the kids were in the backyard continuing their work, building a veritable fortress of innocence and ignorance. On Inauguration Day, Laurie and Sharmila didn’t watch the news. Instead they drove to the city to pick up Pete and Mario and continued on to DC for the Women’s March, a communal event unlike anything they’d ever experienced before. That night, Laurie raised a glass at dinner and said, “This won’t take four years!”

Back in Ithaca, Sharmila remembered Laurie’s prediction as they watched the Muslim ban protests. With renewed hope, they watched the people defying the post-9/11 sanctity of airports, the lawyers hunkering down with their laptops, all the signs and footage circulating over Twitter and Facebook saying immigrants and refugees were welcome, and so soon after the inauguration! If there was a silver lining to Trump’s election, it was that the people were awakened. It was the people who would stop Trump, very soon, before he could even get started.

Their optimism was tempered by a simultaneous and unnerving sense of doom. Sharmila worried about her students at the LGBT Center. It weighed heavily on her that this could be the only safe space these students would have for the next four years. And Laurie coped with her grief by sitting in her office and trying to meet the deadline on her biography of Jacob Lawrence; her progress was slow, as she felt utterly useless and self-indulgent making a career out of art history. In contrast, the Catholics were always outside, claiming the open air with their hammering and laughing and running around.

The only thing Laurie and Sharmila looked forward to was a visit from Pete and Mario, who usually came up to Ithaca once a season and had long planned a trip for the end of February. To get ready for the visit, Laurie cleaned the house and got a fire going while Sharmila made osso buco and apple tart. Pete and Mario would sleep upstairs in the guest room next to Laurie’s office. Sharmila never claimed a room upstairs, since she already had a perfectly good office at the LGBT Center, but if Laurie’s office door was open, it meant that Sharmila could sit in there while Laurie worked on her book. There was an armchair set up just for Sharmila, where sometimes all she would do was drink her tea and stare out the window at the view. She was in love with the geometry of this region, the line graph profile of the horizon, the sharp points of the trees, the dips and waves of the hills and valleys. Right from their house they could see the great unfurling of the Allegheny Plateau. She got the same euphoric feeling here that she got in New York City, rooted in her relief and gratitude that this was not Waco.

Pete and Mario got a late start leaving Manhattan and reached Ithaca around nine o’clock, bringing a case of wine in along with their suitcase. They quickly settled in to their old ways, as if they’d gone back to a year before all this, when they all felt as if they’d chosen to live their lives in accordance with their epoch, a time of progress to which each of them were making a small contribution—Laurie with her scholarly work, Sharmila with the LGBT Center, Pete with his curatorial vision, Mario . . . Mario was a corporate lawyer working on acquisitions and mergers, but as the son of a postal worker and a bus driver, his success provided tangible benefits for his family. They talked about art, about work, about the weather and every few minutes there was something that threw them into fits of laughter. After dinner, they cozied up in front of the fireplace with their glasses of wine and slices of apple tart. They tried to watch Mad Max: Fury Road, which they thought would keep them awake but didn’t.

The next morning, everyone was in a good mood. As she made a pot of coffee, Laurie remarked that she’d had so much fun last night, she’d almost forgotten who was president.

As she made a pot of coffee, Laurie remarked that she’d had so much fun last night, she’d almost forgotten who was president.

“Me too,” said Mario. “I don’t think his name came up once. It’s like we called a moratorium.”

Pete said, “Man, fuck that guy.”

But this broke the moratorium. Once they mentioned the unmentionable, they couldn’t let it go.

“Trump’s too stupid to be that much of a threat,” Mario offered.

“It doesn’t take a genius to burn down a house,” Pete said.

“But it’s the whole regime!” Laurie exclaimed, “It’s a vicious cabal!”

The boys cracked up. “Who talks like that? ‘Vicious cabal’?”

Laurie laughed with them. “It’s true though!”

After breakfast, Laurie and Sharmila took Pete and Mario to Cornell for a look around. They stopped at the art museum, a modern building next to the architecture school that always reminded Sharmila of a Polaroid camera. Laurie wanted to show Pete a participatory installation called Empathy Academy: Social Practice and the Problem of Objects. Students in the art department would be adding their own contributions to the exhibition later in the semester. Laurie loved the idea of a living exhibit and she wanted to curate a show like that with Pete one day, but Pete couldn’t conceive of when or where that would be possible. At the moment, he was a curatorial project assistant for the Whitney Biennial, a freelance position that Laurie had helped him get. She had connections because right out of undergrad she had worked for a brief time at the Whitney, back in 2001 during the last big national disaster.

They had lunch at a new farm-to-table restaurant downtown, then went home for some quiet time. Pete was disappointed that it wasn’t snowing. They always hoped for snow on their winter visits, but snow was not as reliable as it once was in Ithaca. Some years it was still abundant, but this winter was a disappointment. Old-timers could remember when it snowed from the end of October to the beginning of April. Then, suddenly the trees would blossom and a short spring would zip straight into a long, hot, humid summer. A fresh snowfall sculpted Ithaca into something magical, but there would be no chance of that this weekend.

While Mario worked on a brief and Pete went into Laurie’s office so they could talk about her book, Sharmila combed through recipes on Sam Sifton’s blog, What to Cook This Week. She hoped Pete would give Laurie the motivation she needed to finish that damn book. Laurie had a virtual vault full of research, interviews, and digital photographs, and had developed a close relationship with several members of Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence’s extended family. Laurie owed it to them to get this story out into the world, but Sharmila gave up trying to speed things along. Every time she nudged, however gently, Laurie would have a panic attack and stop writing for days.

Early in the evening, Sharmila was in the kitchen pulling out ingredients to make a roast chicken with wild mushrooms. If this house were nothing but the kitchen, Sharmila would not mind. It was huge, even larger than what she was used to in Texas, fitting a long solid wood farmhouse table that the rest of the house, with its tight corners, could not have accommodated. The kitchen was chic and rustic, modern and vintage, masculine and feminine. It was the last room they did after months of deliberating, finally settling on white quartz countertops with black custom cabinets, dark oak flooring, red brocade chairs, and one magnificent crystal chandelier over the table.

Mario came in, opened a bottle of wine, and watched Sharmila arrange a tray of soft cheese, sliced baguette, and olives. This was the first Pete and Mario visit in years that Laurie and Sharmila didn’t have people over for Saturday dinner. All of their friends in Ithaca loved Pete and Mario. Some of the wealthier liberal types went on too much about how genuine and fun and uncomplicated and “authentic” they were. Laurie and Sharmila did not feel up for all that this time, and even Pete and Mario had said they just wanted to watch movies and relax.

All of their friends in Ithaca loved Pete and Mario. Some of the wealthier liberal types went on too much about how genuine and fun and uncomplicated and ‘authentic’ they were.

Yet this cheese tray cried out for a more festive atmosphere. The house felt too quiet, too dark. True to form, Mario figured out how to lift the mood. He paired his phone with Laurie’s surprisingly robust little speaker and blasted their dance song “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” by Beyoncé. Sharmila and Mario had been practicing the moves to this song for years now. The music shook Pete out of his slumber and Laurie out of her office. Now it felt like a party, and everyone remembered that this was a weekend for fun and happiness. Sharmila could remember them all dancing like this in their tiny apartment in Washington Heights. She couldn’t believe how young they were then, and how lucky she was to have found love so easily.

During dinner, they were mellowed by the wine and Sharmila’s succulent chicken and Ella Fitzgerald playing on the speaker. It had been such a perfect day. Then they cleaned up and sat on the couch to binge-watch the Aziz Ansari show Master of None. They were each annoyed by something different yet no one was in favor of stopping it.

“He is so not sexy,” Laurie said.

“His pining after white women is so boring,” Sharmila said.

In the middle of the fifth episode, someone rang their doorbell. It was past nine, later than they’d ever had unannounced visitors. Laurie and Sharmila went together to the door and saw Kiki standing there, jumping up and down in a parka, perhaps in some kind of trouble. Immediately, Laurie swung the door open.

Kiki smiled and said “Sorry to bother you” with utmost cheer. For once there was no baby hammocked to her chest. The temperature outside had dropped and a blast of cold air flew into the house. “Come in, come in,” Laurie said.

“Is everything okay?” Sharmila asked. Kiki looked so young without her kids, like a college student.

Kiki noticed Pete and Mario in the living room and waved at them. The boys waved back, looking intensely curious and somewhat amused, as if they’d been waiting for something unexpected to happen.

“Do you need something?” Sharmila asked. She was not raised to be rude to visitors but she tried to put a little clip in her voice. They’d successfully avoided the Catholics for months now. She could not believe their streak was coming to an end on their one weekend with Pete and Mario.

“Umm, what am I doing here? Argh, mommy brain. Oh, I was wondering if you have anything for a headache? I’d drive into town, but it’s so late and Dave’s not here.”

“Sure,” Laurie said. “What are you allowed to take?”

“Just over-the-counter stuff. The usual.”

Laurie vanished down the hallway to go look in the master bathroom. Pete and Mario emerged from the living room, like animal cubs coming out of their dens. Mario was empathetic and hospitable. “Are you not feeling well? Do you want a drink? A glass of wine?”

“She probably can’t have a drink if she’s nursing,” Sharmila said.

Kiki rushed to say, “I can have a little.”

“It’ll help you with your headache,” Mario said. With that absurd statement, Mario and Pete were co-conspirators. Kiki was marched to the kitchen, seated at the head of the table, and given not only a glass of wine but some French bread and Brie cheese and grapes. She took off her parka, which Pete whisked away to hang on the coat rack.

“Wow, I haven’t been this spoiled in forever. Are you some kind of angels?”

“So where’s Dave?” Sharmila asked.

Kiki washed her bite down with a glug of wine and explained that Dave was in Europe on tour with his band.

“Is he famous?” Pete asked.

Kiki laughed. “I love the way you’ve done this kitchen.”

Just then Laurie appeared, unfazed by the domestic scene at the dinner table. She set down Tylenol, Advil, Aleve, and Motrin. Kiki took two Motrins and smiled at everyone, incredibly alert and lively. She kept fixing her eyes on different parts of the kitchen, the backsplash, the range, the cabinets, the chandelier.

“Dave’s in Europe,” Sharmila announced for Laurie’s benefit.

With more prompting from the boys, Kiki began to talk about Dave’s tour, what kind of music he played and where he was at the moment—Amsterdam.

Pete interrupted. “I have to ask you, your man is in Amsterdam and you are in Ithaca New York, with . . . you have kids, right?”

Kiki blushed. “Yeah, I have eight.”

“No!” Mario exclaimed as if he were hearing this for the first time. “You don’t look like you could have eight kids.”

“Thank you,” she said, “But I do. Ocho.”

“Ocho niños, dios mío,” said Mario.

“That’s actually what Dave calls our baby. Ocho.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that he gets to be in Europe while you’re stuck here with all your kids?” Pete asked.

“I could have gone if I wanted to. I could have left my kids with my parents and just taken the baby. But why would I want to leave my kids? They’re cool people. I like hanging out with them.”

You’re not hanging out with them now, Sharmila thought. Kiki went on to say that her oldest was fourteen and helped a lot, that the baby was sleeping but could sleep until three or four in the morning now. She also said the wine and food and Motrin were really helping her with her headache. By then, they all had glasses of wine. Mario took out his phone and asked if Dave’s band was on Facebook.

“They’re more on Instagram,” Kiki said, sharing their handle, which Mario was able to pull up easily. There was a band picture that he passed around, Dave and three other hipsters in wool hats sitting by a canal in Amsterdam. Pete asked her details about the kids. Names, ages, did they go to school? Kiki explained that she was homeschooling them. When Pete asked her why, she said she thought school was too confining, too institutional. She wanted her kids to be free to explore things at their own pace. If she had any objection to a public, secular education, she didn’t express it here.

“Can I ask if you did this kitchen yourselves? It’s amazing.”

“We did most of it ourselves,” Laurie answered. “We hired people to pull up the linoleum and install hardwood.”

“God, I hate the linoleum. I started pulling it up myself but now there’s just a big sticky mess in the corner of the kitchen.”

“I can give you the name of our guy.”

“I’d love to get a tour of the house one day. We’re planning to renovate next summer.”

“Why don’t you show her the house now?” Pete asked. “You don’t have to rush back, right?”

Kiki clapped with delight. “I would love that.”

Laurie and Sharmila were both raised to keep their house ready for company. They both knew it would have been rude to say no.

Laurie led the way, with Pete, Mario, and Sharmila trailing behind. Kiki relished the tour, taking her time in each room, asking about fixtures and colors and where they got their ideas from. When they got upstairs to Laurie’s office, the least orderly room in the house because the walls were covered with photographs and prints and notes, Laurie explained that she was working on a book about Jacob Lawrence. Kiki’s enthusiasm seemed genuine, though she admitted to not knowing who Jacob Lawrence was. “Who writes an actual book, that’s fucking awesome!”

She went to a different set of pictures on the opposite wall, a triptych that Laurie was writing a paper on for the Arts in Society Conference in Paris. The first picture was a close-up of a group of white people turning their gaze to their right toward the camera, sometime in the 1920s. A different version of that picture could be found on the internet, revealing in the background the charred body of a Black boy hanging from a tree. The next picture was from Nazi Germany, a crowd of thousands on what seemed to be a sunny day, tens of thousands, facing a stage punctuated with towering outsized swastikas. The final photograph was from a Trump rally, resplendent with reds and whites and blues and the rapturous florid faces of his supporters looking at their savior.

Kiki looked closely at the pictures, peering into each one for a long time.

“What do you think of those?” Sharmila asked.

Kiki exhaled. “I mean, yeah, I guess, God, this is so intense.”

For a minute no one said anything. The question of Kiki’s politics went conspicuously unanswered.

“Well,” Laurie said, “that’s the house.”

“It’s awesome. Your house is beautiful.”

They all went back down the stairs. At the bottom, Sharmila planted her feet by the front door. Kiki got the hint. She said she’d better get home before one of her kids woke up and called the cops to file a missing person’s report. She grabbed her parka off the coat rack. But just as Sharmila opened the front door and Kiki stepped toward it, she stopped and faced everyone.

“I don’t know who needs to hear this,” she began. “This may be way out of line. But my heart is telling me just to come out and say it.” She put both her hands over her heart for a brief pause, making eye contact with Laurie and Sharmila. “I just see that you two are so stressed out all the time and I hate that you feel like you have to worry so much. You’re so lucky, you know, and your lives are so great—I mean you made this life that’s so great. No one can take what you have away from you. No one!”

Sharmila smiled and opened the door wider, but Laurie stopped Kiki from leaving. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

Kiki looked at Pete and Mario for backup. “Just say what you mean,” Mario said.

“I mean, I know, or I can imagine, I’m reading the signs that you feel vulnerable right now, like the world is out to get you.”

“Not the world,” Laurie said. “Just America.”

“But that’s what I’m saying. I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to you. Neither would Dave. Neither would my kids, for that matter. But I don’t think you’ll need us. I promise you in four or eight years or whatever this will all be over and you’ll be fine. You’ll be better than fine.”

“And you’ll have four more kids,” Sharmila said. She thought it would sound more jocular than it did. A smile froze on Kiki’s face, and everyone else looked at Sharmila like she’d gone too far, like she’d made motherhood the enemy.

“Okay, I hope I haven’t made a total fool of myself,” Kiki said, and Sharmila, to make up for her flippant comment, told her to be careful on the walkway, realizing too late that anything she said now, even out of genuine concern for Kiki’s safety, would sound sarcastic.

As soon as Kiki stepped outside, Laurie grabbed Sharmila’s hand and squeezed. They’d put off working on the front path because it was not an exciting renovation, but one day someone was going to fall and sue their asses. Thankfully, Kiki made it to the sidewalk and ran the rest of the way home.

After Laurie closed the door, Pete said, “That got weird.”

“What do you think she was trying to say?” Sharmila asked. “That she voted for Trump?”

“I didn’t get that,” Mario said. “That’s not what I got.”

“She never said they didn’t vote for Trump,” Sharmila said. “Instead she lectured us on how lucky we are.”

“That was some bullshit,” Pete said.

Laurie was quiet for a few minutes. When she spoke again, it was an impersonation of Kiki saying four or eight years or whatever, and it was so uncanny they couldn’t stop laughing. They didn’t turn the TV back on, but stayed up late talking about Kiki’s visit. They started going around in circles. Was disengaging a way of fighting, or was it just capitulation? Could they not feel the little gears clicking inside their consciences, making frequent, tiny adjustments until nothing was shocking or outrageous anymore? Were they right to be so afraid, or would they, in fact, be fine?

The next day felt especially melancholy. Pete and Mario were going back to the city where there were at least many diversions and the appearance of a robust world more immune to the vicissitudes of the rest of the country. Sharmila and Laurie did not feel so comfortable up in Ithaca, and three days later, when an Indian immigrant was shot dead in a Kansas bar, they wondered what to do, how much meaning they should cull from it. Then there were stabbings in May—a Black college student in Maryland and three white men defending Muslim girls in Portland.

Wanting to escape, Laurie and Sharmila left the country for the summer. They watched the riot in Charlottesville on French TV just days before their flight back to the US and they didn’t want to come home, even to their friends or to the house they’d spent so much time fixing up.

But soon enough, the semester began and they were busy again. On a Saturday in September when the whole neighborhood seemed to be outside, Laurie and Sharmila went out to the porch with their cups of coffee. A landscaper was coming to show them some designs for their front lawn and walkway. From across their yards, the Catholics looked up from their chores and waved, and Laurie and Sharmila, feeling fine, waved back.

8 Memoirs by Women About Multicultural Identity and Belonging

Posted on January 4, 2023December 12, 2022 by Jo Lou

I was in my twenties the first time I read a memoir set in Lahore, my father’s city, where I’d spent time during my childhood. I was living in Syracuse, New York, then, and I read Meatless Days hungrily, soaking in familiar places and people, and when I finished it, I read it again. I hadn’t yet dared think of myself as a novelist, but encountering someone else’s Lahore made me think my story of belonging might be worthy of the page. My mother was Dutch, my father was Pakistani, I was born in Austria, and I now live in the U.S. The many places I come from comprise a mouthful, and until I read Sara Suleri’s memoir, I couldn’t imagine them side by side in a book that explores identity. In the coming years, I set aside a special bookshelf for memoirs that wove together different parts of the world, as if Cairo or Tehran were a talisman for the books I would one day write.

When I began We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir, I dusted off my shelf and devoured the collection from start to finish. I traveled to the now familiar locations of Port au Prince and Gaza while adding new destinations like Jaffna and Nsukka. For a writer, memoirs set around the world can be examples of place that is as alive as character and confirmation that place, wherever it may be, is story. As a reader, I saw authors weave their cities into stories and themselves. And as someone whose sense of belonging crosses borders, the memoirs gave me hope that I might yet find (and write) the threads that bind Maastricht, Islamabad, and Syracuse to each other and me.

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat

In telling a story of two brothers who are layered by history at birth and in death, Edwidge Danticat details the struggles of belonging to more than one nation—Haiti and the U.S.—at the same time. But Brother, I’m Dying is also a love story, told by a daughter who chronicles the tale of her two fathers, their distinct lives, and her journey between them. In Danticat’s hands, history is not a time or place; it is lodged in love and grief and identity, and crosses borders. Her memoir is powerful and beautiful in its ability to resurrect two men who are dead, but alive in her love.

Dark Tourist by Hasanthika Sirisena

In Dark Tourist, a collection of essays, Hasanthika Sirisena takes us on a journey of self discovery in which identity, history, and places as divergent as North Carolina and Jaffna meet. We accompany her as she revisits her relationship with her mother, who died too soon, and her father, who remarried in secret. We travel with her to Sri Lanka as she visits sites of Sri Lanka’s civil war and grapples with the haunting category of “dark tourism.” All the while, she asks us to consider the beauty of art and the possibility that it might save us.

Looking for Palestine by Najla Said

The subtitle to Najla Said’s memoir, Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family, captures only one side of this engaging and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny book. In the midst of a famous father and a complicated mix of backgrounds, Said’s crystal clear voice tells a wrenching story of trying to make sense of her identities (of which Palestinian is but one) while growing up in New York in private schools where kids rarely look like her. This memoir is fundamentally a story of the in-between place and for those of us who live there, it is a serious breath of fresh air.

Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis 2 recounts a young woman’s struggle with belonging. Satrape is an outsider at home in Iran and, she soon discovers, in Austria where she arrives to study art. The backdrop of Iranian and global politics compounds the personal stakes in this coming-of-age story of a young woman trying to make sense of herself and the world. The voice and illustrations work hand in hand, propping up each other in a spare and sometimes funny, but ultimately devastating narrative.

Belonging by Nora Krug

Belonging, Nora Krug’s graphic memoir, uncovers the mystery of her German family’s history in World War II. The author’s vantage point as a granddaughter and New Yorker effortlessly pulls the reader into her personal journey, a painstaking investigation of the past. Although Krug’s subject is in Germany, she asks larger questions about what it means to belong to history and country. In the process, the reader is given a valuable gift; Krug unveils the mystery of research by showing us what it looks like—photographs, letters, objects, documents, interviews, handwriting, archives.

A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed

In Border Passage, Leila Ahmed stitches together many worlds, including Cairo, her first home, and the U.S., her eventual one. Her story reminds us that immigrants have homelands that follow them wherever they go. Like all memoirs, it captures a time in the author’s life that has come and gone, but it also captures the nation, Egypt, at the end of colonialism (long before the Arab Spring) when Ahmed was a child. She writes movingly about the multiple worlds of Islam, including the one of women who raised her, and suggests we are shaped by history, as much as by people.

Olive Witch by Abeer Y. Hoque

Coming-of-age is challenging, but rarely more than in Abeer Y. Hoque’s self-described cross-cultural memoir. Olive Witch travels three continents, moving from Nigeria to America to Bangladesh, as well as across the difficult terrain of mental illness. Hoque’s prose is luminous, interspersed with poetry and weather conditions, as if to help ground us in this struggle to belong.

Meatless Days by Sara Suleri

Sara Suleri, who settled in the U.S., had a Pakistani father and a Welsh mother, but she writes about her family and Lahore as if Lahore is the magnet that holds her world together. Her connected essays are a lesson in language and craft, while reading like stories in this elegiac book. Written in the shadow of death, it is as much about how memory works as the lives it tries to capture. Memory is story, Suleri seems to say, as she pieces things together later when mothers and sisters are dead.

62 Books By Women of Color to Read in 2023

Posted on January 3, 2023January 4, 2023 by Intern Electric Lit

In 2016, I compiled a list of books I’m anticipating by women writers of color because, as a reader, writer, and occasional critic, I couldn’t find many such titles. If I was having trouble, I thought, then others surely were, too. Perhaps they’d also find the list useful. The first list was one of Electric Literature’s most-shared pieces of 2016. To my joy and surprise, I heard the piece was helping inform other publications’ books coverage, educators’ syllabi, and book-prize considerations.

Finding these books has become, in the last seven years, less difficult, and I continue to hope that American letters will become so inclusive this effort will become obsolete. But we’re still far from that point. I’ll keep hoping.

In the meantime, these are some of the 2023 books that I, personally, am anticipating. It’s one list, inevitably incomplete; I know I’m missing wonderful titles. If you see a book missing and want to support it, please consider preordering it from your local independent bookstore, requesting it from the library, talking about it to others, or all of the above. This piece is also front-loaded toward the earlier part of the year, as there isn’t as much information yet about titles publishing in the fall and afterward. And though I love and need poetry, as a novelist and essayist I’m less aware of what’s forthcoming in poetry, so here I address only books of prose.

Notes on methodology: the term “of color” is a flawed label with ever-shifting nuances, valences, and interpretations. In the past, I’d expanded this list to nonbinary writers; Electric Literature and I then heard from some nonbinary writers that it can be preferable to avoid grouping nonbinary people with women. Accordingly, in recent years, I’ve limited this list to books by women: cis women and trans women, as well as nonbinary women who assented to having their work included in this space. An overwhelming majority of the nonbinary writers and readers we’ve heard from have continued to find this preferable. That said, when it comes to communities that are not mine, I’m strongly on the side of following the lead of people in those communities. If you feel differently, let us know. In the meantime, Electric Literature has also published a piece about anticipated books by LGBTQ+ writers.

Included below are several books from HarperCollins, one of the big five publishers that collectively issue most of the books sold in America. The HarperCollins Union has been on strike since November 10, 2022 to get a fair contract for their workers. You can learn more here about how to support their fight for a fair contract.

Please join me in rejoicing over these upcoming books.

January

Black Women Writers at Work edited by Claudia Tate

Three cheers for this new edition of an out-of-print collection of Tate interviewing Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison and other foundational Black women writers about their work and lives. I have a deteriorating, used copy that has stayed on my bedside table for years, and am thrilled about this reissue. Angela Y. Davis says that “Black Women Writers at Work serves as a much-needed reminder that the imagination always blazes trails that lead us toward more habitable futures.”

Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed

A debut graphic novel about a fantastical alternate Cairo where wishes are sold. Involving angels, monsters, and decades of history, Shubeik Lubeik has received the Best Graphic Novel and the Grand Prize at the Cairo Comix Festival. Mattie Lubchansky says “Mohamed builds a rich and harrowing world—and finds every place a fascinating story might be hiding.”

The Faraway World by Patricia Engel

From the New York Times-bestselling Engel, here comes a collection of short stories that include characters such as a woman in Cuba who’s discovered that her brother’s bones are stolen, a couple hustling in Miami, and Colombian strangers meeting in New York. I’ve long maintained that I want to read anything Engel writes; I’m sure The Faraway World collection will further confirm this desire.

Night Wherever We Go by Tracey Rose Peyton

Peyton’s debut novel is about six enslaved women in Texas who stage a rebellion against their owners. Kiese Laymon says that “Night Wherever We Go has the potential to change how Blacknesses, Texas and the nation are written about forever.”

The Survivalists by Kashana Cauley

In this doomsday novel, a driven lawyer falls for a coffee entrepreneur who lives with a group of doomsday preppers. Deesha Philyaw says it’s “delicious, deeply satisfying,” and Jade Chang calls it “funny and deliciously unexpected—the perfect companion for our chaotic times.”

Loot by Tania James

I’ve eagerly followed James’s writing for years, and this new novel brings to life an eighteenth-century wood-carver recruited to build a gigantic tiger automaton for the ruler of Mysore. Megha Majumdar calls it “a feast—a hugely fun novel with a delicious plot that offers delights and profundities in equal measure,” offering “stunning truths about circumstance and ambition, love and sacrifice, and the fickleness of victory.”

Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks

Minnicks’ first novel, winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, is about a woman named Alice Young who moves to the all-Black town of New Jessup, Alabama. She falls in love with an organizer engaged in work that could risk their ability to stay in New Jessup. “An immersive and timely recasting of history by a gloriously talented writer to watch,” says Margaret Wilkerson Sexton.

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

I’ve been haunted by Ganeshananthan’s fiction since I first encountered it in an issue of Ploughshares a decade ago, and can’t wait to read this novel about a woman who is a field-hospital medic for the militant Tamil Tigers. She’s eventually recruited to join a project documenting human-rights violations. “A beautiful, brilliant book—it gives an accounting of the unimaginable losses suffered by a family and by a country, but it is as tender and fierce as it is mournful,” says Danielle Evans.

Maame by Jessica George

Spending her time in London as a primary caretaker for her father and as the only Black person in every meeting at her job, Maddie Wright wishes to lead a less constricted life. Celeste Ng calls this debut novel “an utterly charming and deeply moving portrait of the joys––and the guilt––of trying to find your own way in life.”

Central Places by Delia Cai

Cai is a senior correspondent at Vanity Fair and the creator of a beloved media newsletter, Deez Nuts. In her first novel, a Chinese American woman from Illinois brings her white fiancé home to meet her parents. I read an advance copy of Central Places months ago, and have not begun to forget its luminous depiction of the complications of relationships with friends, old and new romantic loves, and immigrant parents.

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

A horror-inflected debut about a woman named Mackenzie who wakes up one day with a severed crow’s head in her hands. A murder of crows is stalking Mackenzie, who is grieving her sister’s death. A novel spun from alarming crows, complicated grief, and eerie dreams: yes, yes, and yes. According to Kristen Arnett, Johns “writes the world in all its messiness and terror, while simultaneously remembering to center its tender beating heart.”

Black and Female by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Dangarembga is a writer, filmmaker, and playwright whose novels have received the Commonwealth Writers Prize and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Black and Female, an essay collection, “blazes with her characteristic intellectual prowess, unstinting honesty, and commitment to personal and political acts of resistance and reclamation,” says Nadia Owusu.

February

Dyscalculia by Camonghne Felix

Felix, a splendid poet and essayist whose debut poetry collection was longlisted for the National Book Award, is now publishing a first book of prose reflecting on mental health, trauma, hospitalization, and her relationship to mathematics. Raven Leilani calls it “a frank exploration of pleasure, heartbreak, and reclamation” that “rejects containment and asks instead for care.”

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H

In a memoir-in-essays from a former Lambda Literary Fellow, a queer, devout Muslim immigrant juxtaposes their coming-of-age and young adulthood with stories from the Quran. I’ve greatly admired her short-form writing, and Kai Cheng Thom says the book is “sure to become a queer classic.”

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

Adébáyọ̀’s debut book. Stay With Me, was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction, and her follow-up intertwines the stories of two Nigerian families described as being “caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession, and political corruption.”

When Trying to Return Home by Jennifer Maritza McCauley

This collection of short stories covers a century of the lives of fictional Black Americans and Afro-Puerto Ricans, ranging from a woman trying to rescue her brother to a college student facing off with a nun. De’Shawn Charles Winslow says the book features a “cast of some of the most memorable characters and predicaments” he’s encountered in fiction.

My Nemesis by Charmaine Craig

Craig’s previous novel, Miss Burma, was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In her new novel, a writer named Tessa clashes with Wah, the wife of a philosopher-scholar friend, going so far as to call the latter “an insult to womankind.” According to Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, “My Nemesis is an exhilarating act of defiance, a novel that lights a match and sends the whole question of female characters’ likability up in flames.” As someone who very badly wants the notion of women characters’ likability to go up in flames, I say hallelujah.

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell

“Reader, beware! Our Share of Night is a novel so disquieting, so unsettling that I could neither put it down nor read it late at night,” says Kelly Link. This new book from the International Booker Prize-shortlisted Enriquez is about a grieving father and son who get involved with a terrifying cult in search of immortality.

An Autobiography of Skin by Lakiesha Carr

Carr’s debut novel, which incorporates back-room parlor slots, postpartum depression, and spiritual combat, follows generations of women in the South. “Meditative and powerful in its love for the generations of Black women at its heart, An Autobiography of Skin dives body-and-soul into its characters’ experiences to explore questions about faith, forgiveness, and the fortitude that just living day to day can sometimes require,” says Dawnie Walton.

March

Ada’s Room by Sharon Dodua Otoo, translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi

Reading an advance copy of this highly inventive, unpredictable first novel from the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize-winning writer and activist Otoo, I was astonished by a narrative that jumps back and forth across 400 years and the experiences of four women named Ada trying to survive in West Africa, Victorian England, and Germany. I haven’t quite come across anything like this before.

Saving Time by Jenny Odell

It can seem that almost everyone I know is emotionally and physically exhausted, barely getting through the ever-alarming days. (I, too, am an everyone.) In this new book from the rigorously original Odell, she explores how we experience time, reimagining the clock-based, profit-driven world in which most of us live and continue to burn out. Ed Yong calls it one of the most important books he’s read in his life.

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jiménez

A Puerto Rican family on Staten Island learns that a lost sister might have been cast on a reality TV show, and they set off to bring her home. According to Jaquira Díaz, Jimenze’s first novel is “hilarious and heartbreaking,” and Jiménez “is both storyteller and cultural critic, giving us an unflinching rejection of respectability politics.”

Sea Change by Gina Chung

A relatively specific but ferocious opinion of mine is that there simply isn’t enough fiction starring jellyfish, octopodes, giant squid, and their flexible ilk. In Sea Change, which Mira Jacob calls “a wild blessing of a debut,” the narrator Ro, who works at a mall aquarium, befriends a giant Pacific octopus named Dolores. When Ro’s life as she knows it is tossed overboard, she has to find her way back to familiar shores with the octopus’s help.

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer

Zora and Sasha Porter, sisters living in Brooklyn, are confronted with a buried family secret. Angela Mi Young Hur says the novel is peopled by “Anansi and other folkloric figures and deities of their Jamaican Trinidadian heritage” that transform “from teller to teller, from one generation to the next—at times haunting or healing, seductive or terrifying.”

Who Gets Believed? by Dina Nayeri

In what Robert Macfarlane calls “an interrogation of ‘disbelief culture’ and the injustice that both fuels it and is fueled by it, a form-shifting memoir of an already-remarkable life, and a moving, harrowing investigation of love, loss and care,” Nayeri reflects on who gets believed and who doesn’t, in contexts from asylum interviews to emergency rooms to corporate offices.

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng

Ah Boon, a child in a fishing village in twentieth-century Singapore, discovers a magical ability to find movable islands. The Japanese army invades, and the future of his village is in jeopardy. Heng’s debut novel was fascinating, and according to Julie Otsuka, “The Great Reclamation is both an intimate love story and an epic historical tale that is sure to be read for years to come.”

April

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Ordinary Notes is a book comprised of 248 notes about language, the past, art, photography, beauty, and Sharpe’s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. Alexander Chee says that “Ordinary Notes is like an intellectual ice climb―you move along a careful series of handholds to cross a terrain that might otherwise seem impassable, and afterward, you are amazed at the passage. At once an act of careful attention and a juxtaposition of observations and questions, the result is a powerful vision of American life, drawn from the Black intellectual history and aesthetics that Sharpe has cultivated as the means to her own liberation, so that she might offer it to others.”

A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung

I wept while reading this devastating, radiant memoir, which Bryan Washington calls a “bouquet of feeling” and “a groundbreaking narrative steeped in love, humor, the infinitude of memory, and the essentiality of community.” A Living Remedy is about illness, family, and the terrible losses brought on and exacerbated by financial precarity, this country’s malfunctioning healthcare system, and the ravages of the pandemic.

The Haunting of Alejandra by V. Castro

A woman named Alejandra is haunted by ghostly visions of a crying woman in a white gown, the Mexican folk demon La Llorona. As Alejandra visits a therapist, she starts learning that La Llorona connects her to her mother, grandmother, and other women ancestors, and that she’ll need her foremothers’ help to banish the ghost. According to Lupita Aquino, this novel is provocative, haunting, and packed with secrets.

Blue Hour by Tiffany Clarke Harrison

Blue Hour is a fragmentary debut novel about a biracial photographer grieving a miscarriage whose student, a boy named Noah, is victimized by police brutality. As she visits Noah in the hospital, she learns she’s pregnant again. “A short, beautiful, intensely present work of art,” says Lydia Kiesling.

The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher

In a hospital in the Pacific Northwest, a baby’s skin turns cobalt blue, which the family matriarch believes to be the embodiment of her family’s sacred history as prominent soap-makers. According to Laura van den Berg, Betty Rummani, “born with cobalt-blue skin, into a family rich with ingenuity and secrets,” is “one of the most memorable and original protagonists” she’s come across in a long time.

May

Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby

The wildly hilarious Irby has written a new collection of essays about Hollywood, QVC, bathroom etiquette, and Carrie Bradshaw. Jia Tolentino calls Irby’s writing “stay-up-all-night, miss-your-subway-stop, spit-out-your-beverage funny, as irresistible as a snack tray, as intimately pleasurable as an Irish goodbye.”

Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba

Organizers and movement educators Hayes and Kaba continue their influential, revolutionary work with this new co-authored book, intended to be a “a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.” The book examines questions of mass protest, mutual aid, care, and defense, and includes insights from other experienced organizers.

In Vitro by Isabel Zapata, translated by Robin Myers

Drawing from diary and essay forms, In Vitro is a meditation on pregnancy, motherhood, in vitro fertilization, and pregnancy. Zapata “writes with a fluidity that can only come from wisdom,” according to Alejandro Zambra. “Sometimes it feels like we’re listening to her speak more than reading her on the page; it even feels like we can speak back.”

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

A writer passes off a dead writer friend’s manuscript as her own, a theft made all the more diabolical by the fact that the thieving writer is white, the dead friend is Asian, and the white writer takes on a new name, Juniper Song. My blood is rising already. This novel from the New York Times-bestselling writer of the Poppy War trilogy, nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, promises to be a wild ride of a book.

Soil by Camille T. Dungy

In this new book from the remarkable poet and scholar Dungy, she describes a seven-year endeavor to diversify her garden in a predominantly white Colorado community that restricted what residents could and couldn’t plant in their gardens. “I felt transformed by this graceful and generous book,” says Jami Attenberg.

Horse Barbie by Geena Rocero

Rocero, a former pageant queen from the Philippines, hid her trans identity after moving to the US, and, within a few years, became an in-demand model. In time, she was increasingly pulled toward openly being her authentic self. Rocero’s memoir is described as “a radiant testimony from an icon who sits at the center of transgender history and activism,” and a story “of survival, love, and pure joy.”

Notes on Her Color by Jennifer Neal

In this debut novel, a young Black and Indigenous woman named Gabrielle learns to change the color of her skin. Her mother, who also has this ability, tells her to present as white to avoid upsetting her father, and their whole house, including the food and spices, has been bleached white. Gene Kwak says, “Read this book. Come find me and we can bond over our shared joy. Weep over what we thought we feared.”

Human Sacrifices by María Fernanda Ampuero, translated by Frances Riddle

An undocumented woman answering a job posting that leads to danger, boys drowned while surfing, and a couple trapped in a terrifying maze: this gothic story collection has been praised by Mónica Ojeda as a magnificent book, writing that is “pure horror and aesthetic joy.”

An Autobiography by Angela Y. Davis

First published by Toni Morrison in 1974, this new edition of An Autobiography covers the legendary Davis’s journey from childhood to her work with the U.S. Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and the Soledad Brothers, to teaching at UCLA, to the FBI’s list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. “Still a key work in the areas of prison abolition and feminism, this reissue of a classic autobiography deserves a place of honor in any collection,” says Library Journal.

June

Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie

I’ve followed Xie’s captivating writing for a while, and, this summer, she’ll published a novel about a graduate-school dropout who moves back to her childhood house in Oakland. Her mother, it turns out, is in love with and getting married to a tech entrepreneur, and the daughter helps plan the wedding while finding a new job at a mysterious start-up.

Birdgirl by Mya-Rose Craig

Birder, environmentalist, and diversity and climate activist Craig has written a book that is partly a memoir, partly a bird-watching guide, and partly an account of how birding brought her family solace during her mother’s mental-health crisis. David Barrett says Birdgirl is “an essential read for a new generation of birders and environmentalists.”

Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig

A suspenseful historical novel about a cutthroat pirate queen who, when her husband was killed by a Portuguese sailor, seized power to survive. Kirstin Chen calls Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea “a riveting, heart-pounding exploration of ambition.” Y’all had me at the words “pirate queen.”

Rivermouth by Alejandra Oliva

Oliva is a translator and immigrant justice activist, and Rivermouth chronicles her experiences of interpreting at the U.S.-Mexico border and working on asylum cases. The book has been awarded the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, which describes Rivermouth as being “subtle, personal, and deeply informative” from a writer whose “candid, intimate voice is irresistible.”

July

Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen

I rush to read Beth Nguyen’s writing. At the end of the Vietnam War, when eight-month-old Nguyen and her family fled Saigon, they were separated from her mother, whom Nguyen didn’t meet again until she was nineteen. “Nguyen’s triumph of a book is forged and fed by her searing curiosity about her refugee family’s past and her jeweler’s eye for precise detail—all while navigating the geography of her Midwest roots with a big, beautiful heart. A must-read for all who struggle with or celebrate complicated family,” says Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster by Mirinae Lee

This genre-bending novel, set in the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Korea, is about a shapeshifting trickster who is a spy, lover, mother, terrorist, murderer, and escape artist. 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster is recommended to admirers of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko.

August

Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo

Family Lore is National Book Award–winning Acevedo’s first novel for adults, about a woman who can predict, to the day, when people will die. She gathers and family together for a living wake for herself. “Make room on your shelves, readers, for this strong new voice with an old soul and a deep well of understanding of who we wonderfully are for the brief time we are beings,” says Julia Alvarez.

Forgive Me Not by Jennifer Baker

Baker, the formidable Publishers Weekly Star Watch “Superstar” and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, has written a book about an incarcerated teenager whose drunk-driving accident caused the death of her sibling. In this alternate world, the fate of juvenile offenders is decided by their victims and survivors, and Forgive Me Not is centered on the teenager’s quest for forgiveness from her family, as well as the costs of that quest. (Jennifer Baker is a former contributing editor to Electric Literature.)

Falling Back in Love With Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom

I first came to Thom’s work through her excellent advice column, Ask Kai: Advice for the Apocalypse. In Falling Back in Love With Being Human, this writer, performance artist, and community healer writes through a crisis of faith. The book is described both as a collection of love letters and as a blueprint for falling back in love with being human.

Daughters of Latin America by edited Sandra Guzman

Daughters of Latin America is a collection of writing from 140 Latine writers, scholars, and activists including Elizabeth Acevedo, Julia Alvarez, Carmen Bouollosa, Berta Caceres, Naima Coster, Angie Cruz, Reyna Grande, Ada Limón, Achy Obejas, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Cecilia Vicuña, and more. The book includes winners of the Grammy, National Book Award, Cervantes, and Pulitzer Prizes, a Nobel Laureate, and several writers being translated into English for the first time.

Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare by Megan Kakimoto

This debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women. Kakimoto, says Elizabeth McCracken, “gives us her Hawai’i, as bright as blood, as dark as blood: full of muscle and bone, sex, the body, corpse flowers, Night Marchers, the occasional Elvis impersonator,” in a book that “does not pull its punches; it’s altogether a knockout.”

Lush Lives by J. Vanessa Lyon

Lush Lives is one of the first books from Roxane Gay’s new imprint at Grove Atlantic, and it’s a love story about Glory Hopkins, an artist struggling to find gallery representation. Glory, after inheriting a house that contains a rare manuscript, works with an auction house appraiser to learn more about the mysterious manuscript. Lush Lives is described as “an unforgettable novel of queer love, ambition, and the forgotten histories that define us.”

The End of August by Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles

Yu is a Zainichi Korean playwright, novelist, and essayist who received the National Book Award for her unforgettable, eerie novel Tokyo Ueno Station. In this multigenerational epic, a marathon runner summons shamans to connect with the ghost of an ancestor who was a contender for the Olympics in occupied Korea.

September & later

I Believe in Our Power by Raquel Willis

Willis is an activist, writer, and media strategist who has worked as a national organizer for the Transgender Law Center and the executive editor of Out magazine. I’ve followed her exceptional work for a while, and her debut memoir is about her coming of identity and activism.

This is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara

Vara’s The Immortal King Rao, a show-stopping novel about a Dalit immigrant who becomes extremely powerful, and about his child, was one of my favorite books that published in 2022, and this story collection promises to be at least as good. I first read a story from this collection, “I, Buffalo,” a decade ago in Tin House. It’s a heartbreaking, somehow very funny story about alcoholism, buffalos, and metamorphosis, one I must have reread a dozen times.

And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott

Elliott’s bestselling debut book, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, hasn’t left me since I read it in 2020, and her second book is about a new mother struggling to write a modern retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story. A fictional portrayal of motherhood, mental health, threatening neighbors, surface charm, and denial, And Then She Fell is described as being poignant, raw, funny, and urgent.

The Liberators by E.J. Koh

Poet, translator, and writer Koh’s incandescent memoir, The Magical Language of Others, had me crying and crying, and her debut novel, The Liberators, spans four generations of a family haunted by decisions made in times of war, migration, and dictatorship.

You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker

The dazzling poet Parker is publishing a collection of essays connected by Parker’s years-long attempt at “trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation that accompanies being forever single,” a question that takes Parker through American cultural history as she combines criticism with personal anecdotes.

Evil Eye by Etaf Rum

After having been raised by a conservative Palestinian family in Brooklyn, Yara thinks she’ll free herself by marrying an entrepreneur and moving. But dissatisfaction follows, then trouble, and a curse from the past might be to blame. From the New York Times-bestselling writer of A Woman is No Man.

Magical / Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

I’m a longtime fan of Villarreal’s superb writing, and her next book is a collection of essays about grief tangled with pop culture, as well as the complicated girlhoods of being a working-class daughter of a cumbia musician. Here’s betting the collection will be outstanding.

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Land of Milk and Honey, a new novel from the Booker Prize-nominated Zhang, is about a chef who ends up in a decadent colony of the extremely rich, taking place in an all too plausible future in which food is vanishing. I had the luck of reading a draft of this novel, and can tell you it is marvelous and terrifying and will make you very, very hungry.

What if We Get it Right by Ayana Johnson

Johnson, a marine biologist, policy expert, and writer, has written a book proposing that we ask, “What would it look like if we actually solved climate change?” Such is my emotional landscape these days that even reading that question makes me tear up. I know I’m far from alone, and What if We Get it Right is a call to action and a “vision of the new climate future we can create through community and creative problem-solving.”

Modern Afghan Lives, Across Generations and Countries

Posted on January 3, 2023January 4, 2023 by Jo Lou

A finalist for the National Book Awards 2022, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai interrogates war and carnage in Afghanistan in the name of counterterrorism, and the ensuing trauma and grief that has reverberated through Afghan generations, across the homeland and the diaspora.

The collection, a blend of surreal, absurd and photorealist narratives, opens with “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain”, a second-person narration that follows a young man who scrimps and saves for the latest video game, set during the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, only to have his joy be short lived as his virtual avatar encounters his father and his martyred uncle, compelling him to contend with familial trauma. In “Return to Sender”, grief takes a new meaning as a young Afghan American couple, recently moved to Kabul, receive pieces of their missing son that they start stitching together. “The Tale of Dully’s Reversion” brings war and carnage into the forefront as Dully, a Ph.D. student transforms into a monkey and finds himself in Kabul leading a revolution while his mother fervently pursues the imam she traveled for, in the hopes he could spur Dully’s physical and spiritual reformation. Other narratives such as “Bakhtawara and Miriam” and “Saba’s Story” examine love and friendship in more direct light, juxtaposed against the warfare and its ghastly aftermath that thrums in the background. And yet others like “Hungry Ricky Daddy” and “Enough!” make overt statements, condemning the state of our humanity. Urgent and necessary, Kochai’s work offers a culturally rich lens of Afghans and their diaspora, deftly striving against stereotypes and monoliths borne out of the War on Terror narratives.

Jamil Jan Kochai is from Logar, Afghanistan—the place featured both in his current collection and debut novel, 99 Nights in Logar. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The New York Times, The Best American Short Stories and other places. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Kochai and I spoke over Zoom about Muslim representation in writing, intergenerational trauma, privilege, power and more.

Bareerah Ghani: In Bakhtawara and Miriam, we watch Bakhtwara sacrifice herself thinking it’s her duty to save her family’s honor and reputation. Other narratives also depict this dynamic within the Afghan family where there’s an unspoken demand and expectation from children, especially sons who we see take on the role of providers. To what extent do you think this is a product of the history of war and conflict that has sapped the older generation’s capacity to return to normal life as they know it?

Jamil Jan Kochai: I think that’s exactly what it is. What I see often in a lot of families is this sort of dynamic and this is both in Afghanistan and abroad, in immigrant families, that children are tasked with becoming adults much more quickly and I think that does have exactly to do with that context of years of ongoing war, and oftentimes, intense poverty as well. So you have this situation, where from a very young age, children are attempting to negotiate their parents’ war trauma. It’s one of the things I referenced in “Playing Metal Gear Solid” as well, this feeling that the main character often feels like he’s more of a therapist than he is a son, and I think that’s a circumstance that can occur in many immigrant families, especially families where the parents or the grandparents have suffered war trauma. Your question is getting at a very important point that this isn’t necessarily something that’s sort of intrinsic to the fabric of Afghan culture, but that it does, in fact, have a lot to do with war trauma being passed down generations and with children then not being allowed to develop as children but instead, being tasked to take on these roles as providers, or even in some regards, especially if they have younger siblings, sort of being asked to become parents at a very young age. I really appreciate this question because one of the things I try to be pretty conscious about in my work is emphasizing that context of warfare. Any time I’m writing about an Afghan family, it’s important that I’m being very honest about a lot of the beautiful qualities of an Afghan family, like the love and the care but also sort of the negative aspects of that, whether that’s domestic abuse, child abuse, or whatever else, and that I’m contextualizing all that within this long history of warfare, imperialism and poverty.

BG: I think that’s one of the reasons why the collection spoke to me; at the center of every character, there’s a realness. I’m also enamored because before this, I’ve not interacted with a book or a Muslim writer who’s writing about Muslim characters in the way I perceive and experience Islam. I’d love for you to tell me any authors that have inspired you to write in this manner.

JJK: You know I had the exact same experience. I love the recent development of Pakistani literature. But a lot of it, for me, is intensely secular. Just as you mentioned, even when reading “writers from the Muslim world”, I very rarely see the grasping with the concerns of Islam in the way I view it. So often when I’m reading Muslim characters, they’re drinking beers, or are atheist and all these different things, which is totally fine. I’m not opposed to that. But it’s just different from my own experience.

So for me, in terms of thinking through how to write about Islam, or God, or theology in general, I found a lot of Christian writers helpful. Dostoyevsky, for example, some of his writings and his grappling with faith, in The Brothers Karamazov in particular, really spoke to me. Some of Graham Greene’s writing, both The Heart of the Matter, and The Power and the Glory, to different degrees are dealing with Catholic theology but again, it’s this idea of, how does one grapple with faith, suffering and with God, and religious institutions that can be exploitative, all of that really spoke to me. The book that handled this incredibly, beautifully, in regard to Islam in particular, is This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun. It’s about these political prisoners that attempt the assassination of a king and they’re held for twenty years in this underground prison that’s four feet high, so they can’t stand up for twenty years. It’s factually based. These men are routinely tortured, they’re constantly suffering immense pain and to grapple with that, they begin to pray, one individual does the azaan, they pray in unison, and it’s this method, and they meditate into this method to try to escape their bodies, and it leads to some of the most beautiful passages I’ve ever read about Islam, spirituality, and this idea of transcendence. This was immensely helpful to me in terms of figuring out how one writes in a complicated and beautiful way not just about Islam, but everything that Islam encapsulates, you know, existence, suffering and love.

BG: One of the strengths of your work is how it examines white privilege and association with it, especially in “Return To Sender” which highlights the social currency that comes with holding the American passport and by extension, being granted the privilege of having your life be more important than someone else’s. As a person of color with another nationality outside of being American, how do you navigate this dichotomy in privilege and access to safety based on citizenship and the feelings it engenders for those of us with loved ones living in places that don’t grant them the same privilege?

JJK: I do feel fortunate because I’m able to put a lot of those feelings, doubts, and guilt on the page. And that’s really the main way I grapple with it; I project it onto my characters a lot of the time. It’s very important to me that when I’m writing about Afghanistan, when I’m thinking through issues of privilege, power and positionality, it goes right on the page, that I don’t try to avoid it, that I struggle with it through my characters and through the stories themselves. And that’s what I tell my students as well, because I think it’s fairly common, this feeling of guilt and this understanding that growing up in this country, and holding that all-powerful American passport comes with an immense amount of power and privilege. There are all these ways that can become very problematic when you think about a writer’s position to their subject. And so one of the things I’m doing now is that I’m traveling back and forth between the US and Afghanistan, specifically for the purposes of my writing, specifically to interview family members, relatives and people from my home village, just to sort of understand what they’re going through, their own experiences, and then using that as material for my own writings. I try to be very frank about the fact that it can be a very troubling dynamic, and for me it’s a matter of trying to be very honest with yourself about where those issues can occur, and then working through that on the page.

BG: This makes me think of your story “Hungry Ricky Daddy” which directly talks about the war in Palestine, something people are not willing to talk about. How do you contend with the frustration, heartbreak and helplessness that comes with witnessing the war crimes in Palestine and the erasure Muslims are facing around the world in Kashmir, France, and China? What role does writing or fiction in general play, if any, in all this for you?

What I see often in a lot of immigrant families is this dynamic that children are tasked with becoming adults much more quickly.

JJK: I’ve always felt like I’ve had a responsibility as a writer to make sure, as much as possible, if the circumstances allow, to shine a light upon these different war crimes, atrocities, the different erasures occurring throughout the world. It’s something I feel uneasy about sometimes like with Hungry Ricky Daddy, I’ve immense feelings of doubt and guilt. With Afghanistan, I’ve family members there, my parents grew up there, so I have more of an ability or a claim to be able to write about Afghanistan. But with Palestine that was much trickier because there aren’t those same associations. But at the same time, that was the story where I knew early on that there was going to be this Palestinian character and by having that, I knew I couldn’t then shy away from the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the war crimes and oppression going on there. I try to be as careful and honest as I can be about making sure that I’m shining a light on those issues, and that I’m doing it in a responsible, thoroughly researched way. So, one of the things I did with that story is that I made sure I sent it to some Palestinian friends, writers, and artists, and made sure that there wasn’t anything I was getting immensely wrong there.

If there’s a political objective to my writing, it’d be rooted in an anti-occupation, anti-war position. When I’m writing about Afghanistan, I try not to shy away from the fact that I was immensely anti-US occupation, anti-Soviet occupation when that was occurring, that I’m anti-Israeli occupation. I think fiction writing has to allow for a great deal of gray area and moral complexity. But for me that ends at occupation. For me, there’s no moral complexity about an invasion, about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. To me, that’s pure, unadulterated oppression. And when you do the research, look into what’s actually going on there, that seems immensely clear to me. I remember growing up, you’d read about atrocities being committed in Afghanistan, soldiers killing civilians, and similar things occurring in Palestine and different places, I’d feel so immensely helpless. It was rage inducing. Being able to now write about those things, it’s one of my ways to work through those feelings and sort of filter it onto the page.

BG: How do you write Muslim characters who are complex individuals without worrying about them being reduced to their faith, or without worrying about portraying an untrue image of Islam in how your characters struggle with their faith?

JJK: My strategy is that I start with trying to figure out the character, their main struggles, their background. So it begins on this very personal level, and for me that makes all those other heavier, conceptual, political questions much easier to grapple with. So I’m just thinking about what this particular individual’s relationship is to Islam and I find that for most people, that question can get very complicated once you start to peel back the layers of their character. Once I sort of get the story going, that’s when I’m beginning to think about Islam on a larger level, a global level, on a more political level. And then that’s when I think it’s really important that Muslim writers, or whoever’s writing Muslim characters is very careful about the ways that varying forms of media, varying narratives have been used to demonize, dehumanize and to justify violence against Muslims, occurring across the globe. So it’s sort of this balancing act where I want to make sure that I’m staying true to the views and beliefs of the characters but as the story gets bigger and bigger, it’s also important that I’m maintaining sort of that earlier idea we were talking about, of making sure that we always have this framework of a historical context. So when I’m writing about Islam and about Muslims, I have to have the War on Terror, and the rampant demonization and violence against Muslims across the world. I have to keep that in mind, and it’s one of my issues with some of the writing that’s sort of occurred by “writers coming out of the Muslim world”. Someone, for example, like Khaled Hosseini, and his representation of Islam, of devout Muslims, it’s been used time and again to demonize, to justify violence against Muslims. Writing that sort of work is incredibly irresponsible. And it’s something I try to avoid as much as possible in my own work.

BG: I agree there’s a responsibility attached to writing about Muslim characters, but I do worry about the white gaze. Did you ever worry about that, how it would be perceived?

JJK: Yeah, absolutely. That’s something I’ve struggled with a lot throughout my development as a writer. It’s something I continue to struggle with, especially when I sold my first book, and I began to realize that the majority of my reading audience is going to be white. There’s always going to be this immense pressure just from the market itself, just the way that it’s set up to write to them, coddle them, to guide them through a country, to translate terminology for them, because everything has to be written for them. And one of the realizations that I had is that that type of writing is poor, because you have to keep making these sacrifices within the narrative. At a certain point, you get tired of it, and you’re like, I’m going to write these stories how I want to write them, my audience is going to be my family or my community, and I’m not going to have to explain things to them. At the same time, though, I do think it’s always important for writers of color, and in particular, Muslim writers to understand that as much as you can resist pandering in different ways, in the end the American audience is gonna be white readers. The entire industry is built to serve them and to sell them your work, you have to keep that in mind and understand that your writing can have a real effect upon the larger perception of the subjects you’re writing about.

When I’m writing about the American War and Afghanistan, I know a lot of Americans are going to read this book, so it’s important I don’t shy away from things that can make an American readership uncomfortable. In fact, it’s actually very important for me that I continuously challenge my American readers to question, and ponder upon the crimes that their government and military institutions have committed in these different countries, and that largely, the media wants to ignore, and that they’re gonna want to valorize soldiers and justify these wars. And they’re not gonna want to look at the dead bodies on the ground, the dead children, and for me it’s then very important to make sure you don’t get to look away from that in my work.

BG: In Saba’s Story, we see how Mor faces judgment from Kabuli women for wearing the chador which, to me, is a product of the colonized mindset. I find that it speaks to how sometimes, it can be relatively easy to disregard the white gaze and Institution, but the hardest fight is with your own people. How do you grapple with this issue of internalized racism and how do you think we can dismantle it within our communities?

For me, there’s no moral complexity about an invasion, about the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

JJK: Well, one of the first steps is just being honest about its existence. When we look at the ways that Islam is talked about in Western cultures, and the way there’s this constant association between the more devout someone seems, the more backwards they are, that’s rooted in colonization, in these imperial fears of the mujahid figure, or the crazy mullah. I think it’s important we begin to bring light to it because often someone can be incredibly progressive and they’re rooting their critique of Islam in varying forms of progressivism, thinking like I’m progressive because I don’t wear the chador, because I’ve rejected religion. But at the same time, they’re belittling, dehumanizing and demonizing people who are devout. And people who are devout oftentimes are people coming from some of the most impoverished, war ridden areas of the world. You see this happening within the Afghan community in particular, there’s this urban rule divide that occurs with people from Kabul looking down upon people from the countryside, and then it gets even more complex because there’s ethnic, religious and sectarian tensions. So, it’s a matter of being honest about the ways that these things exist in our society and beginning to think through them, to write about them, shine a light upon them. If we don’t pay enough attention to it, at a certain point it is gonna come to a head within our cultural or literary discussions about Islam, and about how Muslims are depicted and painted within varying forms of cultural production.