Unraveling the Myths White America Tells Itself

Posted on by Jo Lou

When David Mura’s parents were eleven and fifteen, they were forced, along with their families, to board trains from the West Coast to remote camps in Minidoka, Idaho and Jerome, Arkansas, where they spent much of World War II. A few years back I visited what is left of Jerome— the same “camp” where my father-in-law, aged four, was imprisoned during what became known as the internment. The 120,000 Japanese Americans who were forced to leave the West Coast lost all their land and possessions from before. They also lost their cultural identity. “My dad’s white teacher in the Jerome, Arkansas camp said to his class, ‘When you get out of here you should try to be not 100% American but 200% American,’ ” Mura explains, “So in both conscious and unconscious ways, my parents took as the meaning of their imprisonment that their crime was their Japanese ancestry—and this involved both ethnicity and race, since neither the Italian nor German American (i.e. white) communities were subject to mass imprisonment. Accordingly my parents raised me to assimilate into a white middle class identity as they did.” 

As a consequence, Mura learned to “think like a white person…what I wanted to be,” worshiping patriarchal white heroes like John Wayne and Robert E. Lee. However, in his twenties, “as a result of reading Black writers like Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, I finally admitted to myself that I was not white and would never be white.” Mura began a lifelong quest exploring his own racial and ethnic identity through essays, poetry, performances, and his memoirs, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sensei and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity. Throughout his career Mura has been exploring the ways he had been taught by whiteness to think about race, only to realize that these stories were filled with lies, distortions and denials.

In his latest book, The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself, Mura examines works by Faulkner and Frantzen, popular films, as well as foundational narratives of white supremacy—Jefferson’s defense of slavery, the whitewashed history of Reconstruction, slavery’s re-creation via mass incarceration—to show how white identity is based on a shared belief in a false history which allows whites to deny their culpability in present and past inequities. Pointing out how implicit and explicit biases regarding Blackness lead to the murders of fellow Minnesotans Philando Castile and George Floyd, Mura demonstrates why we must as a culture change our internalized narratives regarding whiteness, because this ignorance, as most recently illustrated with the murder of Tyre Nichols, is literally a matter of life and death. 

Deirdre Sugiuchi: You live in Minneapolis/ St. Paul. You raised your family there. How did living in this community, the one time home of Philando Castile and George Floyd, inspire you to write The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself? Can you discuss the urgency you felt?

David Mura: I often drive the road where Philando Castile was murdered; I’ve even received a couple speeding tickets there (it’s a notorious speed trap). But as an Asian American I was never in danger the way Castile was.

George Floyd was also murdered a few miles from my home. My middle son, who works at a nearby high school, knows Darnella Frazier, the brave seventeen-year-old who took the video of Floyd’s murder. The demonstrations at the 3rd Precinct were close enough that I rode my bike there.  

When I began the essay about Castile’s murder in 2017, which started my book, I began reading widely about the issues of race in history, political science, economics, law, etc. I quickly realized how intricately the roots of his murder go back in our history—to the ontology of slavery and the division between whiteness and Blackness; to ideological defenses of slavery by Jefferson; to pseudo-scientific studies in the 19th century which viewed every crime by a Black person as evidence of intrinsic Black criminality (crimes by white people did not cast a stain upon white people but were regarded as the acts of specific individuals, often explained through socio-economic circumstances). The idea that the racism of the past—particularly the racist thinking of the past—has no influence on the systemic racism of the present is utterly false, complete nonsense, and is another example of whiteness gaslighting BIPOC Americans. 

That my book ends with an essay on George Floyd’s murder and a coda on the murder of Daunte Wright, is a tragic, cruel and telling irony— in the time since we have continued to see more murders and beatings of Black citizens. 

DS: Can you discuss how the prescriptions of whiteness, “the behaviors and beliefs that have served to protect and preserve the racial status quo since America’s beginning,” impacts the way white America narrates and interprets not just our racial past but also our racial present?

DM: America began with two contradictory goals: One was to establish freedom, equality and democracy. The other was to institute white supremacy and maintain white oppression of Blacks and Native Americans. White America is fine with telling its history through the lens of the first goal, but is decidedly not fine with telling its story through the second lens. In this, the experiences, consciousness and narratives of Black Americans are deemed un-American or too distant in the past for us to consider, unnecessary blemishes or accidents or even harmful, or at best secondary and minor.

Whiteness, as I define it, is a set of beliefs, ideas and practices which, from our very beginning, established white supremacy as a guiding ideology for white people. White people learn and practice this ideology both consciously and unconsciously—hence conscious or explicit bias and unconscious or implicit bias.

My book examines the epistemology of whiteness: white knowledge is always considered objective, valid, true and official; Black knowledge is considered subjective, suspect or invalid, untrue and unofficial—unless whiteness decrees it. You see this in the telling of our history, in Black patients telling doctors of their pain, and in the differences between the ways whites receive police accounts as opposed to Black accounts of police encounters (whether white or not, police uphold the rules of whiteness). In the past few years, it’s not so much that white America has started to believe the narratives of Black people about the police, but that technology—dash cams and cell videos—caught up with police racism. 

DS: In your chapter “Philando Castile and the Negation of Black Innocence,” you discuss how since 1619, Blacks in America, as slaves, were regarded as property, as less than human or inferior human beings, and how viewing Black people as property led to viewing Black people collectively as criminals. How did this mindset, of viewing Black people as inherently criminal, impact how the police officer viewed Castile? How did such biases influence the way Castile was covered in the media after his death?

DM: My book takes sometimes difficult academic theories, synthesizes them, and tries to make them comprehensible to non-academic readers—Afropessimism, Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, DuBois’s double consciousness, the ontology and epistemology of race, Gates’ Signifying Monkey, Critical Race Theory. I explore these theories because they help us to understand how deeply racial bias and Whiteness are embedded in the American psyche and how complicated that process is. The simplification of race by conservatives and even liberal whites is partly a way to obfuscate the workings of racism and partly a way to silence any racial critiques of whiteness. And yet, BIPOC understand, see and know the reality of racism in America. As one older Black woman said to Wilderson when he addressed a community meeting in the Bay, “I’m not a scholar like you, I didn’t go to college, but when you talked about slavery, that is how I feel. Like a slave.”

The idea that the racism of the past has no influence on the systemic racism of the present is utterly false and is another example of whiteness gaslighting BIPOC Americans.

Officer Yanez, who murdered Castile, had attended a police training, “The Bulletproof Warrior,” which states that the first and primary duty of the police officer is to ensure their own safety and that that the officer’s role is like that of enemy troops in a foreign country—i.e., you are not protecting and serving your fellow citizens. To Yanez there was no possibility of seeing Castile as a fellow citizen, much less “Mr. Rogers with dreadlocks.” Castile was a priori cast in the tautology Black=criminal; whether this association was conscious or unconscious made no difference. Yanez was supposedly responding to his “feeling” that Castile, with his dreadlocks, looked like two Black men who had held up a local convenience store. But Castile was riding with his Black girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter—whom Yanez did not see. In other words, Yanez was incapable of seeing any of the Black occupants in the car. This inability to see the humanity of Black Americans goes back to the original ontology of slavery and white fear of Blacks. 

DS: Can you discuss the danger of proposed legislation like Senator Tom Cotton’s “Saving American History Act,” which prohibits federal funding from being made available to teach the 1619 Project curriculum in elementary and secondary schools, and the various attacks DeSantis has made on education in Florida including the retraining of librarians and refusing to approve AP African American studies. How is this related to racial backlash historically? 

DM: Cotton’s “Saving American History Act” is a prime example of what he purports to not exist—systemic racism. So is DeSantis’ recent attacks on CRT, his administration’s canceling of Florida’s AP African American history, and his working to ban the term “systemic racism” in schools. Both white politicians are trying to silence the experiences, consciousness and narratives of Black people—and this, again, is proof that white supremacy and systemic racism continue to exist, both in our education and government, but also at an epistemological level.   

White America keeps saying the problem is not that white people have abused Black people throughout our history; no, the problem is that Black people keep remembering this history and telling it to white people—which somehow victimizes white people. My verb choice is deliberate: what whites like Cotton and DeSantis exhibit and what whiteness often embodies is the psychology of an abuser, who blames their victim both for the abuse and for not forgetting the abuse. 

Now it’s no surprise that Cotton, DeSantis and white politicians like Trump are engaged in a backlash against racial progress. Obama’s election became a signal to white America of the growing political and cultural power of BIPOC Americans; it made concrete the fact that some time after 2040 white people will no longer constitute a majority. We will all be racial minorities then. And white people are freaking out about their loss of majority status. 

But the same thing happened after the Civil War when, for a brief moment, Black people could vote in the South and won positions in government and began to exercise their rights as citizens. In our schools, we rightly celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. What we don’t examine, though, is how, throughout the post-war South, there were society wide efforts to re-establish the norms and practices of slavery; this involved not only violence and white terrorizing of the Black population, but complicated legal maneuvers and theory, racial pseudo-sociology and medicine, government laws like the Black Codes, discriminatory economic practices, racist organizing and the creation of the myth of the Lost Cause. This myth pictured the ante-bellum South as a valiant, noble way of life; it argued that the true causes for the Civil War were Northern aggression and the defense of states’ rights and not slavery, since Black slaves were not exploited but treated well and were perfectly fine with their lot. Eventually this myth became accepted by the North as part of the bargain the North made to ensure white and national unity. You can see this in the success of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and in Gone with the Wind, both the novel and the film. 

Similarly, after the passage of Civil Rights laws in the 1960s and efforts to desegregate public schools, the South began a campaign of backlash and resistance to these laws. The North followed suit when these laws began to be applied to Northern school systems. There was the establishment of systems of religious or private schools, as well as efforts which continue to this day to publicly fund private schools at the expense of public schools. In the South today there are schools and areas as segregated as they were in the 1950s.

Again white America is fine with telling the American story through the lens of racial progress. But it is not fine with telling the tale of white racial backlash, which has followed each and every move towards racial progress. 

DS: What do you think about the Moms for Liberty, a right-wing affiliated group who claim to be “fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government” and are leading book challenges nationally?

America began in the lie of white supremacy and it still has not abandoned that lie.

DM: In the recent controversies over CRT, conservatives like Moms for Liberty are so afraid of Black narratives that they believe the story of six-year-old Ruby Bridges desegregating a New Orleans school in 1960 in the face of a hostile, shouting, spitting white crowd will hurt their fragile white children— rather than leading to their children to be inspired by a brave young Black girl. And yet these white conservatives never seem to be concerned for the “fragility” of Black children and the fact that almost every Black parent must tell their children narratives of police brutality and killings in order to instruct their children how to respond when they encounter police. White children are oh so fragile and need protection, but Black children, why would Moms for Liberty care about them?

DS: You end your book with a call to white Americans to transform their thinking about race.  You once undertook a similar journey. Can you discuss the rewards? 

DM: We all must work on knowing more, on actively combating racial bias and thinking, both in others and particularly in ourselves.

Baldwin stated, “The question of identity is a question inducing the most profound panic, a terror as primary as the mortal fall.” To question one’s identity is as frightening as confronting one’s mortality. And yet, white America, and indeed all Americans in our increasingly diverse country, are confronting experiences and people in our society that challenge our racial identities, the ways we think about and understand race. For white Americans this involves confronting how the ideology of whiteness has shaped their thinking, their beliefs, their practices, and the conditions of their lives. 

In this process, white America must go through stages much like what Helen Kubler-Ross outlined in On Death and Dying: 1) Denial; 2) Anger; 3) Bargaining; 4) Grief; 5) Acceptance. Most white conservatives are in the first two stages; white liberals in the third. They all are in a state of denial, and this denial keeps them trapped in weakness and self-deception.

America began in the lie of white supremacy and it still has not abandoned that lie. When individual white Americans admit this lie, they experience a sense of grief at first—they’ve lost their sense of innocence about America and themselves. But with acceptance comes not just psychological strength and courage, but a sense of relief: Oh, I no longer have to continue defending against the truth, repelling the truth, and thus, I no longer have to push away the experiences, consciousness and narratives of BIPOC Americans. When a white American does this, they come to see that we have never had a pure white America, that the American story cannot be told without the narratives of all of us. 

The shame white Americans feel over being white can only begin to dissipate when a white American accepts the truth about the racism in our past and the racism that continues to function in our country. What should come up then is less about guilt but responsibility and acceptance that we all have a role to play in making this country live up to its ideals. And then that white person can finally admit that the greatness of our country is due in part to the work of Black Americans to make this country more equal. Black Americans have always been on the right side of our racial history—and yet white America has never turned to Black America and said, “You have always been on the right side of history and white people did not recognize this. So now, in the present, we’re going to listen to you, we’re going to follow your lead.” To use Baldwin’s phrase, part of the price of this ticket is learning what BIPOC communities can teach white Americans about what it means to be an American. 

When white America finally does this, when it abandons its loyalty to white supremacist epistemology and narratives, we’ll know we’re on our way to real change and racial equality. 

8 Novels About Complicated Queer Relationships

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Queer fiction is experiencing a renaissance, with titles abounding across genres: literary, speculative, graphic, romance, YA. There are even a host of children’s books dedicated to introducing kids to LGBTQIA2S+ themes. Republican lawmakers hell-bent on legislating transness and queerness out of existence have (mercifully) no control over what gets published in our gay little corner of the world, and as long as these books keep getting published—and they will—LGBTQIA2S+ readers will continue to find themselves in fiction, a powerful antidote to heterenormativity and the conservative agenda. 

Happily, we’ve arrived at a time where books with queer characters aren’t just about coming out, getting bullied, or suffering dysphoria. That is to say, queer books aren’t always about queerness so much as they’re about queer characters getting up to the same kind of mischief straight characters have always been allowed to get up to. To be living in an age where queerness can be taken for granted in fiction is a true pleasure, because it means that the cishet experience is no longer the default. This opens things up tremendously: now we’ve got domestic fiction about lesbians and hard sci-fi starring trans people and all kinds of things in between. Instead of being the objects of pity, queer people are now allowed to be messy and complex, to travel to other planets, have situationships and exorcize spirits from haunted houses. 

These eight books are about the perils and rewards of relationships—the queerness of those relationships is both incidental and important. Incidental because, like I said above, we’re finally allowed to take queerness for granted in fiction; important because representation both celebrates and normalizes queer complexity. With Confidence, I wanted to tell a story of love and heartbreak that could belong to anyone, but happens to belong to a gay con artist who’s head over heels for a charismatic and unobtainable huckster of a pansexual lover. All of these books inspired me as I was writing, and I know they’ll continue to inspire generations of queer writers to come.

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

Set in the Pittsburgh of the 1970s, this book is like ice cream sprinkled with cyanide: delicious and dangerous all at once. Paul is a shy college student who develops an obsession with his classmate Julian, a lithesome Dickie Greenleaf type who need only walk into a room to become the center of attention. The two become secret lovers, longing to get out of Pittsburgh and start a life together without the nosiness of teachers and parents holding them back. But their love takes them in a truly toxic direction, resulting in an act of violence that had me gripping the book until my knuckles turned white. Think the creepiness of Leopold and Loeb meets the retro languidness of Call Me by Your Name meets the nerdy arrogance of The Secret History and you’ve got These Violent Delights.  

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Mathews’s sparkling debut follows a group of twentysomething friends in late aughts Wisconsin trying their best to figure themselves and their lives out. Sneha, the book’s protagonist, is a queer first-generation Indian American who lands a consulting job at a Fortune 500 company based in Milwaukee. She graduates college and moves to the strange, tiny city, where she lives above her toxic landlord and struggles to infiltrate the local lesbian scene. When she finally does find her way in, she meets Marina, a beautiful dancer whose Americanness both annoys and fascinates Sneha. The two begin a relationship, and, despite the all-consuming sex, Sneha finds herself struggling to match Marina’s needs for commitment and affection. The book’s sentences are like freshly-tumbled gems, and Mathews is a master when it comes to exploring the millennial condition. It’s no surprise this book was a shortlister for the National Book Award.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor

Lawlor brings the early ‘90s to life in this hilariously irreverent picaresque about Paul, a person who can shapeshift among genders at will. At twenty-three years old, Paul is a stud in the Iowa City queer scene whose conquests are too numerous to count. His ability to casually switch out his sex organs allows him to float among in-groups: he goes from holding court with the burly daddies in Chicago leather bars to having some folksy lesbian sex at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Lawlor certainly knows their queer theory: references to Barthes and Butler abound, and Maggie Nelson herself called the book “hot.” Although Paul regularly pines for his dead lover Tony Pinto, the complicated queer relationship in this book is Paul’s with himself— for all his bravado and Tiresian abilities, Paul is still learning who he really is, and that takes quite a lot of trial and error. This book is for anyone who wishes Middlesex had more mixtapes and fanzines.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

This is a well-known classic, and no list of books about complicated queer relationships would be complete without it. David is a young bisexual American living in Paris: when we meet him, his fiancée Hella has returned to the United States and his ex-boyfriend Giovanni is about to be executed. The slim volume is a book-length flashback to the events leading up to Giovanni’s death. David and Giovanni meet in a gay bar owned by the flamboyant Guillame: Giovanni is handsome and penniless and David is compelled despite himself. When the two start sleeping together in Giovanni’s barren and messy bachelor’s flat, David struggles with questions of sexuality and masculinity, ultimately sleeping with a woman to “prove he’s a man.” But Giovanni clings to David, and when Giovanni is fired from his job at Guillame’s bar he becomes desperate, resulting in the commission of the crime that will lead to his execution. Baldwin’s time as an expatriate in Paris clearly informed this elegant and devastating novel, as did the fact that he was a giant of American letters.

Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson

In this captivating novel, a nameless and genderless narrator who has trouble committing to relationships becomes obsessed with the beautiful and dynamic Louise. The narrator leaves their partner to pursue Louise, whose physicality Winterson renders on the page in her trademark sumptuous prose. A problem: Louise is married to Elgin, a research physician who thinks he’s on the verge of a breakthrough in cancer treatment. Another problem: Louise has cancer. Elgin confronts the narrator about the affair, talking them into leaving Louise so she can receive the treatment she needs. Heartbroken but convinced they’re saving Louise’s life, the narrator retreats to a cottage in the woods and takes a job at a nearby bar. When a local lesbian convinces them to go back to the city in pursuit of Louise, our narrator learns that Elgin’s intentions were less than noble, and all hell breaks loose. Winterson is a genius when it comes to understanding the body as text, accounting for every detail of Louise’s body with a bookish lover’s tenderness. 

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

Many of Highsmith’s novels have been adapted for the screen, and it’s no wonder: the books are cinematic in their suspense and thematically timeless. The Price of Salt is no exception—it’s a story of lesbian love in a highly conformist era, when evidence of queerness was enough to lose custody of a child in divorce. Therese is a twentysomething loner in Manhattan with a job in a department store and a boyfriend she’s not attracted to. When Carol walks into the store, chic and self-possessed in her early thirties, Therese develops an instant crush. Carol gives Therese an address to send her purchases to and Therese sends her a Christmas card on a whim. Carol writes back, and an intense love affair begins. Unfortunately, neither of them accounted for Carol’s husband Harge, who’s onto the affair and wants a divorce, and who’s willing to wiretap a room to get it. Things get more turbulent from there, but Highsmith allows us the gift of a happy ending— all too rare in old school novels about queer love. 

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon 

325 years in the future, a giant spaceship called The Matilda is carrying what’s left of the human race to an as-yet-unidentified new settling place. The ship is structured like a plantation, with Black and Brown people toiling below deck and white people enjoying the fresh air up above. Aster Grey is gloriously neurodivergent and queer—like all below-deckers, her body is essentially gender non-conforming, a fact that fuels much of the above-deckers’ policing and abuse of those below them. Aster is a healer, having trained with Theo, a mixed-raced (but ultimately white-passing) above-deck surgeon. Aster and Theo’s non-platonic relationship is strained when Theo asks her to help him save the ship’s Sovereign, who’s suffering from a mysterious ailment not unlike the one Aster’s mother suffered from before taking her own life. In helping Theo, Aster begins to piece together clues left in her mother’s engineering notebooks about The Matilda’s history, a project that fuels Aster’s desire for insurrection. The world-building in this book is exquisite, the essential queerness of its characters and their relationships is wonderful, and the brutality of Aster’s world—a space-allegory for the ravages of white supremacy—is brilliantly wrought. 

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin 

Set in the post-martial law era of late-’80s and early-’90s Taipei, this bittersweet cult classic is about a group of friends at Taiwan’s most prestigious university navigating love, queerness, and Intro to Chinese Literature. The book is structured as a set of notebooks written by a young lesbian who goes by Lazi: she’s head over heels for the resplendent Shui Ling but too lost in her internalized homophobia to keep up the relationship. Lazi and Shui Ling break up and Lazi goes on to graduate, get her first job, and date other women, all while keeping up with her very gay circle of college friends. But Lazi can’t get Shui Ling—who was her first love—out of her head. 

Intertwined with this fraught love story is a surrealist account of humanoid crocodiles that have begun to crop up all over Taiwan. They dress in human clothes and conduct themselves like humans, but they’re noticeably different— not unlike the queer people who populate Miaojin’s novel. There’s much to love about this book, from its punk epistolary style to its tender portrayal of queer friendship to the playfulness of its crocodile metaphor. 

I Dare You To Find the Joke in Pat Benatar’s Music

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I grew up in San Antonio, a place forever stuck in 1999, where nu metal still thrives to this day. When I left for college in 2005, I met a lot of new people and became enlightened and got into real music. My new friends and I listened to Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors—all that classic stuff from the sixties and seventies—and made fun of people who listened to music we deemed to be garbage. We listened to the radio ironically and especially liked to dunk on artists from the eighties. They seemed especially ridiculous. Our favorites included Don Henley, Cyndi Lauper, and Van Halen, but one stood out above all others. One woman pushed the boundaries of lyrical silliness: Pat Benatar. On her 1983 hit “Love is a Battlefield,” she sings “We are young. Heartache to heartache, we stand. No promises or demands. Love is a battlefield.” A year later, she gave the world “We belong to the light. We belong to the thunder. We belong to the sounds of the words we’ve fallen under.” We laughed and mimed belting it out.

There was something unique about her, and I found myself listening to her on my iPod on the way to class and watching her music videos on YouTube when my roommate was gone. I was afraid he’d catch me and wouldn’t understand that I was watching ironically. I couldn’t afford that because I’d recently become a serious intellectual and artist. You see, I was taking Intro to Creative Writing. We read classic literary short stories, stuff by giants of the form like Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, and Edward P. Jones. We were taught the tenets of serious fiction. We learned that less is more with dialogue and figurative language, and to avoid adverbs at all costs. I used another elective spot on a fiction workshop and kept writing. I tried to make sure my characters’ actions were well-motivated and believable, tried to keep things tight.

I tried to make sure my characters’ actions were well-motivated and believable, tried to keep things tight.

After I graduated, I found little time to write but wanted to at least keep reading. Without my professors and classmates, I no longer had anyone to tell me what authors to read next. I started following different book blogs on Twitter and checking out the “Forthcoming” sections on publishers’ websites. In early 2010, I scrolled down my feed and saw a striking black-and-white photo of a woman in a striped shirt, a defiant look on her face. It was a book cover for Between a Heart and a Rock Place by Pat Benatar, a memoir set to be released the following month. I laughed. It’d been a while since I’d thought of her, and all the songs flashed through my head. It was hard to imagine her as a kid, almost like she just came into existence fully formed. After a few weeks, I gave in and preordered it.

When it came in the mail, I dug in right away. Benatar was born into a musical family. Her mother, Mildred, was an opera singer who gave up her aspirations when she became pregnant with Pat. From there, she put her energy into her daughter, involving Pat in choir and theater from an early age. Through the guidance of her high school choir director, Pat became classically trained as an opera singer. She was set to audition for Julliard when her boyfriend decided to enlist in the Army. She writes, “Dennis pleaded with me to stay with him, to just blow off the audition, asking me not to go. And so I didn’t.” They got married and were eventually stationed in the Richmond, Virginia area, and Pat took a job as a bank teller. “Music faded far into the past,” she writes, “something I’d done in another life.” 

I get the impression that well before she left New York, she’d begun to feel disconnected from classical music. She talks about listening to 45s on her Victrola as a teenager with her friends. She writes, “When we were a little older, we got into the Beatles, and became obsessed.” Something about rock music resonated with her in a way that opera didn’t. It was wild and visceral. It broke all the rules she’d been taught about music.

In 2019, I moved to Illinois to begin my MFA. I was excited to have more time and energy for writing after spending the decade after undergrad with hardly any of either. I was back in the workshop setting, but this time with nearly three-hour-long classes and only five other people to help fill them. The tone was more serious. I was also in a class called The Craft of Fiction, where we could spend hours dissecting a single flash fiction piece. 

I learned a tremendous amount from the professors, but the solemn tone of the classes, along with teaching composition, left me in need of a release. I was lucky enough to find that in Chris, one of the other fiction students. We shared a love of fast food, psychedelics, and horror movies. He’d come over to my place once a week, and we’d take turns choosing the movie. I’d go with campy stuff from the eighties and nineties, whereas he favored whatever the newest release was. We usually felt the need to preface our picks with some kind of apology—“I’m not saying it’s a good movie, but…” It was similar to the apology I gave friends before turning on pro wrestling. We talked about watching indie arthouse dramas and Oscar-nominated movies. We “needed” to see them, but we never got around to it. There were too many horror movies to get through first.

We shared a love of fast food, psychedelics, and horror movies. He’d come over to my place once a week.

We started exchanging short stories outside of workshop, stuff we felt would get laughed out of the classroom. I gave him a story about the ghost of a dead SeaWorld orca, and he sent me a 9,000-word story about ghosts who wanted to be more present. They were funny stories, full of camp. I finally had someone to bounce ridiculous ideas off. I came up with a premise involving both D.B. Cooper and Bigfoot, and Chris encouraged me to see it through. These stories were fun but stifled in a way, hard to get through for reasons I didn’t understand. I assumed the premises just weren’t believable and tried to scale them back. I could have D.B. Cooper or Bigfoot in a story, just not both. I eventually set them aside and went back to writing stuff set firmly in reality. I needed to reel it in.

Benatar wasn’t a big Liza Minelli fan, but when her coworkers invited her to come with them to the concert in Richmond, she thought it might be a nice break from the monotony of her life. But it ended up being much more than that. “Something miraculous happened,” she writes. She wasn’t impressed with Minelli’s singing but by her showmanship, the way she performed and held the audience in her palm. Benatar was blown away, but at the same time knew she could do it, too. The next day, she quit her bank job and began seeking out singing gigs.

These moments are some of the most pleasurable for me when it comes to interacting with art, when I suddenly realize what someone is doing and what makes it work. One of these epiphanies came to me one night, sitting on the couch with Chris, eating calzones. It was my turn to pick, and I chose the lesser-known John Carpenter movie Christine. “It’s about a possessed killer car,” I said, and we laughed.

The opening credits played to the sound of a revving engine, and we looked at each other and smiled. We giggled when Christine, the classic cherry-red Plymouth Fury, claimed her first victims at the auto factory, smashing a man’s hand with its hood and killing another for ashing his cigar on the interior. Christine spares Arnie, the unsuspecting teenager who fixed her up, but soon begins to infect his mind. He goes from a nerd to cool to eventually paranoid and violent. Christine becomes jealous of his new relationship with Leigh, the prettiest girl in school.

We giggled when Christine, the classic cherry-red Plymouth Fury, claimed her first victims at the auto factory.

I settled into the movie and found myself rooting for Christine to take vengeance on Arnie’s bullies, and by the final act, I was rooting for Christine to be destroyed. She needed to be stopped. In the movie’s closing minutes, Arnie is killed while trying to run Leigh over with Christine before Dennis smashes Christine with a bulldozer. We then cut to a junkyard where Dennis, Leigh, and the detective watch as Christine is condensed into a cube. The detective looks at the teenagers and says, “I wouldn’t feel so bad if I were you two. You two are heroes.” 

“A real hero could’ve saved Arnie,” Dennis responds. This is incredibly silly, but Chris and I didn’t laugh. We were too worried about Christine coming back. I thought about Arnie before Christine got ahold of him. This is how I choose to remember him.

The legend Robert Ebert writes, “Christine is, of course, utterly ridiculous. But I enjoyed it anyway.” He goes on to nail it down perfectly, writing, “One grin and the mood would be broken. But by the end of the movie, Christine has developed such a formidable personality that we are actually taking sides during its duel with a bulldozer.” 

Listening to Pat Bentar with this mind, I realized why her music works. Melodrama can transcend its genre by refusing to laugh at itself, thereby not inviting the audience to laugh along. We look to the artist’s attitude toward their art to tell us how we should feel about it. Pat Benatar does not wink at us. She isn’t Rick Astley dancing in a Canadian tuxedo or Cyndi Lauper leading a line of dancers through her house. You may still end up laughing at her, but it requires more mental effort to get there—you have to get there on your own. You’re just as likely to get lulled into the story.

Benatar does such a great job of coming off as a singular force of nature, but the truth is it took time for her to build up to this. Of her first demo tapes, she says, “They didn’t sound like rock and roll. My attitude, which I honed through performing, was solid, but vocal delivery was too controlled, too trained.” She wanted to take it further. She wanted to indulge. She only needed the courage to make the leap.

Acknowledging the absurdity of a piece is the creator’s way of preempting criticism, of taking a critic’s ammunition away, but it also places a ceiling on the work. A vision seen through without apology opens itself up to more criticism but allows for a greater experience among a portion of the audience. Benatar’s refusal to wink allows me to get into her music on a deeper level than I would be able to otherwise. It transcends the intellectual mind and taps into the part of me that takes romantic love very seriously.

One criticism I often received in workshop was that key points in my stories felt rushed through or skipped altogether. They were scenes where the reader expected some emotional climax or payoff. In my killer whale ghost story, there’s a point where the narrator and his girlfriend argue over letting a friend stay over, but the actual argument isn’t on the page. There’s the first hint of an argument coming then a section break. We pick up after the argument, with the narrator explaining that they aren’t on speaking terms. I tried to make up for this with humor—the hope being that if the reader is laughing, they can’t be thinking about whatever narrative issue came before. At the core of that hesitation is a fear of feeling exposed. I was afraid of openly trying to pull something off and failing. I’d avoided writing anything that might remotely feel contrived at the cost of being stilted and unfulfilling.

I was afraid of openly trying to pull something off and failing.

Confrontation and sincerity, for me, are the hardest things to write. My professors told me I needed more of it, but it needed to be done with a deft touch. A little bit goes a long way. I think this is great advice, but melodrama offers another option. Instead of dancing around a moment, you can push directly into it. In the video for “Love is a Battlefield,” a clearly not-teenage Benatar plays a teenager who gets kicked out of the house by her parents. “You leave this house now!” her father shouts. “You can just forget about coming back!” This is dialogue I could’ve never written. I would’ve dismissed it as cliche and generic, but the truth is, we use cliches when we’re angry. Regardless of the material, Benatar chooses to just sell the hell out of it.

Recently, I’ve been writing more genre-leaning fiction than purely literary stuff. Last month, I read the first volume of a shared-world anthology set in an eighties pro wrestling universe. It is not a book that aspires to literary acclaim. It is strictly for the enjoyment of wrestling nerds, wrestling nerds like me. I wasn’t sure if they were open to unsolicited submissions, but I knew I had to try. I sent them a noir short story involving an alligator wrestler who may have disposed of a body by feeding it to his gators. It’s a genre story full of genre tropes, set in the already-campy world of pro wrestling. The editors may laugh at it when they read it. They might screenshot segments and send them to their friends to dunk on. They may think it’s a joke, but I won’t help them get there.

Rebecca Makkai’s New Mystery Novel Is Anything But Cozy

Posted on by Wynter Miller

I don’t know if we deserve Rebecca Makkai, but we certainly need her. The author of four novels and a short story collection, she’s been bringing range, depth, and humor to the literary world for at least fifteen years. She’s a regular among the pages of Best American Short Stories and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her 2018 novel The Great Believers . . . you have to wonder if there’s anything she can’t do. (Maybe, you suppose, she can’t publish a delightfully cranky writer newsletter that muses on Zillow mansions where the living room looks into the bathroom—but you’d be wrong.) 

Her latest novel, I Have Some Questions for You, tells the story of Bodie Kane, a film instructor and podcast host who returns to teach at the boarding school she attended decades earlier. One of her students decides to give the Serial treatment to a murder Bodie happens to know a little bit about, that of her senior-year roommate, Thalia Keith. Thalia’s death in 1995 was pinned on the school’s athletic trainer, a man of color, and something about the conviction never sat right with Bodie. She wonders: Could she have done more to make sure the right person went to prison?

It’s a literary mystery, an examination of the power—and fickleness—of collective memory, and a fascinatingly frank attempt to reconcile recent shifts in the way we talk about power, privilege, and abuse with the way many of us grew up. There’s also a Twitter subplot, spot-on 90s references, and characters who feel so current, they might be texting you right now.

I video chatted with Rebecca about what it was like to write a mystery, what happens when she hits a writing wall, and how it feels to come face-to-face with your teenage self on a high school campus.

Kelly Luce: There are a lot of boarding school novels out there, but this might be the first written by someone who lives at one. What’s that like?   

Rebecca Makkai: I actually live on the campus of the high school I attended. It’s so weird: I met my husband in grad school, dragged him back to Chicago, and this happened to be where he got a job. It was originally going to be for three years. It’s been twenty-one years. I don’t teach here. I don’t have any responsibilities at all. I love it, and it’s been a great community for our kids to grow up in.

KL: How long have you been incubating this idea for a novel set at a boarding school?

RM: I think it was inevitable at some point. There’s a lot of movies and shows and books about boarding schools. There’s this aesthetic of like, it’s always October. The leaves are changing and there are ghosts. And everyone’s white and everyone’s in a secret society. All freshmen live in a single room with a fireplace. Everyone’s wealthy. Often these stories are written by people who don’t know what an actual boarding school is [like]. So, there’s always been an impulse to write one, partly from this corrective angle of: oh my God, you guys are doing it wrong.

Isolated groups of people are fascinating to write about. And then there’s the fact that this is where I went to high school. It’s interesting the way layers of memory can be tied to a specific place. I have been in this position of overwriting my relationship to this place. I walk around and see spots tied to things that happened to me as a teenager, but that same place now has new meaning because of something that happened to me there as an adult.

KL: Did you set out to write a mystery?

RM: Yes and no. It was always going to be a story about the past.

KL: I guess all stories about the past are mysteries, in a sense.

RM: Exactly. Now, that doesn’t mean it had to be a murder mystery necessarily, which is what it is.  But it did need to be current, and we’re in a wave of obsession over true crime. It’s been eight years since Serial came out and it’s only getting stronger. Of course, the obsession that the world has with true crime is absolutely not new. You can look back at people’s obsessions from the 1800s and they aren’t any different. Recently, there’s been a new wave of podcasts covering true crime and those have often been problematic. It felt worth exploring. So that made its way into the novel and then a million other things too.

KL: Everything feels so current in this book. What was it like to write something so present?

RM: The pandemic messed things up. I started the novel in 2018 and my original plan was to have all these characters reconvene for this trial. Up until the last minute, I was putting face masks on people, changing sentences from “she smiled” to “she seemed to smile.” Because of masks. It just didn’t work. I had to find a way to write around it, which ended up being what the story needed anyway.

KL: There’s this elegant layering of the main story, where Bodie goes back to her high school to teach a class on podcasting, with a character being canceled on Twitter. And there are lyrical interstitials about violence against women. There’s the occasional direct address to the killer that pops up—there are all these different modes of writing in one novel. I’m curious if that was part of the plan or if one started speaking to you and then the others had to kind of come in?

RM: I marinate in an idea for a long time before I begin to write. And so a lot of different things came together early on, just in my head, before I started writing. I have these “lyrical sections” that are kind of, you know, about violence against women. And the strategy of including those sections was really the solution to a problem. In the world of the novel, I really wanted there to be some big story in the news, something parallel to the Christine Blasey Ford testimony or the Stanford swimmer rape trial. One of those things that really gets everyone’s attention.

I wrote these contradictory sentences, like: “it was the frat guy one,” but no, “actually it was the swimmer one,” but actually, “it was the one where the senator did this thing.” And I realized that I could have those passages live in an alternate space where all those things could be true at once. And of course, they’re not literally all true, even within the framework of the book. It’s not like she’s actually asking us to imagine that all of these acts of violence against women are happening simultaneously. It’s more like: clearly there is one case that everyone’s talking about and she’s refusing to really say what it is because it doesn’t even matter what it is. Because there’s always one happening.  

KL: It sounds like instead of seeing it as a problem, you made it a strength.

RM: I feel like when we hit a wall in our writing, it’s never a sign that it’s a faulty project. There’s really no such thing, unless it’s offensive. Hitting a wall is just a sign that the writer needs to step back and do some analytical thinking. Often when writers get stuck, it’s because they need to stop and outline. But also, you could think your way through the problem by getting more creative. Come up with something weirder, a strange narrative move, something you didn’t plan. So I’m always grateful when I hit a wall because I’m not going to land on the really weird solution when everything is going swimmingly—I’m going to land on a breakthrough when things feel stuck.

KL: Since this is a novel about a true crime podcast, I have to ask, was the first season of Serial an inspiration for you?

RM: Oh, for sure. I was really interested in the logistics of that case. People needed to keep coming back together to testify in these various hearings, they were constantly revisiting these few days from 1999. But they all still seemed to live in Baltimore. And I was thinking, what would it be like if the murder happened in a place like a boarding school, where no one involved was actually from? They wouldn’t run into each other, and then they’d have to reconvene Big Chill style. But in this horrible, horrible way. The original idea for the book was going to be these high school classmates sequestered in a hotel.

KL: I love that. So much awkwardness.

RM: The first pages I wrote were this woman arriving at this hotel, back as a witness in this trial. And then I had to go back into what happened, not only what happened in the 90s, but [also], how did we get to this place where the case was reopened? It was so much backstory. So I said, I’ll write a couple chapters. But then prologue turned into the bulk of the book. Which luckily, like I mentioned earlier, let me avoid the pandemic.

KL: This is a story about kids but anchored in an adult perspective. I like how we’re invited to contemplate: how much can we even know, now, about ourselves as teenagers? Who was that person? And there are dire consequences in a case like this when you’re being called to testify about someone’s guilt or innocence.

RM: One of the weirdest sources of inspiration for this story was this episode of 30 Rock where Liz Lemon goes to her high school reunion. And she’s like, “Everyone was so mean to me. I was this outsider.” And then she talks to people and they’re like, “We were so scared of you. You were so judgmental.” And she just had this completely false impression, not only of herself, but of everybody else. And that touched a nerve. I think I was probably in a similar situation. I think a lot of us were like, “poor me, I’m a freak because I like . . . slightly different bands.”

KL: The teens in the novel are rendered so well—the way they think about relationships, or bodies, or technology, or art. As a non-teen, was that hard to nail down?

RM: Not really. I don’t teach high school, but I’ve visited many high schools to talk about my work and I’ve taught undergraduates. And teenagers really have an entirely different ethos now. A lot of that, of course, came out of what made us reexamine our adolescence and the things that happened to us. And the way that younger people will talk about something like consent on Twitter is one of the reasons that we’re able to look back and go, “Wow. We grew up so, so differently.”

KL: Do you read a lot of mysteries? Did you study mystery structure? How did you approach the question of tying up the plot versus being a credulous storyteller?

RM: I don’t read that many mysteries. I’ve certainly read some Agatha Christie. I would love to be more interested in so-called genre mysteries because I think they’d be very soothing. I read Tana French, Laura Lippman. They’re not formulaic. And you don’t always get the satisfying ending you want.

KL: Being soothed by a genre means, in a sense, knowing what’s coming. Like watching a Hallmark Christmas movie.

To write a tidy ending would have been to tell a lie about the American legal system, about the American carceral system.

RM: The mystery was not the be-all, end-all goal of the process, it was to write a good book. I’ve been telling people it is a murder mystery in the sense that, at the beginning you don’t know who did it, and by the end you probably know who did it. I was resisting some of the more satisfying payoffs that are the conventions of a genre mystery. I felt a little bit allergic to that.

A lot of it is a commitment to realism. If I’m going to write about conflict resolution, which is a big part of this book, and I’m going to write about the stupidities of our legal system, I don’t want to slap fake satisfaction onto that. Things take years and years in the legal system and there’s rarely a tidy ending. To write a tidy ending would have been to tell a lie about the American legal system, about the American carceral system. And that was very much not what I wanted to do.

KL: It was trippy to read this. I think I finished it on the day the announcement was made about Adnan Sayed from Serial getting a new trial. And I was like, oh—I know what a Brady violation is!

RM: It is funny. The whole country learned about it at the same time. It’s one of many cases I followed closely over the past few years. And it’s just so different from the Dateline version of things, where every story ends with the right person being in prison. There’s a sense of satisfaction about it all. And I was just blown away, in that case and in others that I followed, with how absolutely impossible it is to get someone out of a false conviction.

That, and how common false confessions are. I think anyone who’s followed that case or others like it has gotten this little legal education of the process. And it’s not one that makes America look good.

KL: Are you working on the next thing?

RM: I’m writing something historical that has to do with the era around World War II. (No, it’s not a Holocaust narrative.)

You know, The Great Believers was so research heavy. With this book, I told myself I’d write something close to home that I knew a lot about, so I didn’t have to do so much research. And of course, I ended up having to do this legal research—but at least it wasn’t a huge part of the book. With this new one, I’m like: Oh God, I’m back in it now. I’m going to have to look up every single thing. If I write, “this person put on socks,” I have to do research. Like, did they wear socks? What were they made of, what did they look like?

I do enjoy it. This is a big part of being a writer. And there’s a sense where you revert back to that kid who weirdly loved doing research projects in grade school.

Fate Is a Flask Spiked With Acid

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“Queen of Heaven” by Joel Cuthbertson

No one was saying Kyle worshiped wolves. Kyle was especially careful on this point. Maybe he had some paraphernalia. A wolf mask for ooh-la-la, or whatever. He wasn’t crazy. He didn’t want to become a wolf. Chatting with Carolyn, he ran his tongue along his eyeteeth, circling and circling and being very human.

They were at the zoo; her suggestion. Did he need to say more? She understood him. Carolyn was his son Wesley’s second-grade teacher. A gift. A wonder. She was already half raising his boy, which meant Kyle didn’t need to squeeze his mysterious, heroic feelings into a speech for her. Clan. Blood. Fatherhood. Not that a speech would do justice. He wished he could jump in front of a car in Wesley’s stead or beat some bully to jelly. He had this great untapped valor, and packing the kid’s lunch or throwing a baseball once a week wasn’t enough. Give Kyle one school shooter to prove himself, and the world would know.

Sometimes, late at night, even when he was alone, he howled. Naked to briefs, honest in the starlight, he snaked into the yard and raised his head to worship the moon. Neighbors sometimes saw him. One tried to leave a note anonymously, as if Kyle’s doorbell was from 1970. A note, Brad? He’d had to look up “zoophilia,” all because Brad walked his dog every night and wanted to create a big, tough paper trail. Fuck you, Brad. 

“Do you want a swig,” said Carolyn. She was hiding a bejeweled flask in her purse. 

“Yeah. Okay.” The flavor was sugar and burning. Carolyn’s heart face, her billowy skirt, her sharp mouth, waited. He drank. “Oh, shit,” said Kyle. She winked, took some herself, and handed it back to him. He inhaled, the strength of the pull surprising. He almost howled. He checked himself. Later. Let the Alpha come forth on its own.

“What I want from an elephant,” she told him, “is for it to bend down to me. I want to climb its trunk and go for a ride.”

“Like the circus.”

“More like a fairy tale.”

They took a few more swigs. A mother passed them, her child on a leash. This made Kyle furious. How emasculating. How unmotherly. How—but he goggled as an elephant loosed its bowels. Carolyn giggled. The mother watched them, her eyebrows twitching a Morse code of superiority.

“We have to free that kid,” said Carolyn, and Kyle nodded. “There might have been some acid in that flask, by the way.”

He was in awe. Still he did not show her his tattoo or reveal his true wolf name, which he kept secret from the world. There was time.

Together, they stalked the mother, who was an idiot, prim to the point of parody, her hair a single organism, her t-shirt bust-tight. Great ass, thought Kyle. But he corrected himself. He was going to be better around Carolyn. He was going to be chivalrous, circumspect. 

His feet fell into puddles of anti-matter as he strolled. 

Uh oh, he thought. The sidewalk—it’s nowhere.

“Oh my god,” he said. “This is such a good date.”

They entered the reptile house. The fake rock stunk with human grease, its manufactured pores rubbed smooth by a thousand unthinking hands. Alligators. Cobras. Alcoves for the smaller creatures. A kingsnake whose colors rippled down its body, whose lines changed places, hummed. They were jingling at him. 

Kyle took a knife from his boot. He was his own movie. He was surprised that the knife hissed at him, but this wasn’t his first trip. Sometimes things hissed at you. Was he going to drop the knife because it was saying his true wolf name and hissing at him? 

“Fuck you, Brad,” he whispered.

“Here,” Carolyn bent down and collected the knife from the floor. She put it in her purse. Panamanian golden frogs glowed like squat, poisonous lighthouses behind her.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done,” she asked.

“Atelopus varius zeteki.” He was staring at the sign for the frogs, but also at her. He never told women the worst things he’d done.

“I grew up in the country,” he said. “Around real animals. I miss real animals.”

“In my undergrad,” she said, “a sorority made my friend walk barefoot for Chinese food in the middle of February. She got frostbite and lost two toes, so I burned their house down. They never caught me. They never even tried to catch anyone. The whole campus just knew: that house deserved to burn.”

“She only had eight toes?”

“Unless more fell off later.”

He listened to the song of the serpents in their glass homes. “I put a man in the hospital once.”

“Over a woman?”

“Yeah.” He was casual, but this was recently. This was about his last girl, Diana. This was something alive before Kyle right this minute. Diana’s brother hadn’t even known what he was getting into, the little guy simply lunged after Kyle dropped Diana off half naked. That wasn’t Kyle’s fault. They’d been in a parking lot. She freaked when he howled at the climactic moment and yelled at him to take her home. He didn’t know why she was surprised. He’d been wearing the mask. But fine. He took her home. People were always blaming him for things he did for them. That was the world. The brother flew from the porch. His tiny fists. There was hair in the kid’s eyes. Maybe not a kid. Maybe high school? Kyle didn’t hit him but twice. But that was with wolf thunder. He hit him with every morning, every 5 AM metal in his hands, lifted, dropped, re-set. He hit him with the power of routine iron and the kid just sank. Diana had called an ambulance and he’d left. Broken jaw, he’d heard. No police.

Around their heads, the blaze of the world was fading. He didn’t want to ask for the flask. More high wasn’t going to do anything. Carolyn walked her fingers up his thighs, made them skip. Everything she did was so damn artless. And beautiful. 

“Let’s do good,” said Carolyn. She seemed very powerful to him. Someone who could make him better. Kyle considered whether this was the moment to tell her he loved her. He knew it all of a sudden. He pulled his shirt up to reveal the wolf’s paw inked on his side.

“I’m an Alpha,” he said.

“Obviously,” she said.

He rose and pulled her with him and as the voids beneath his steps widened they also emitted soft heckles of laughter. He snubbed them. He was buoyant. There was a worse something he’d done which fell into the abyss as Carolyn walked beside him.

“Where the hell did I park?” 

“I drove,” said Carolyn.

He laid down in the back of her car. He nosed the cloth of the seat and mistook it for anything—it could have been everything, the whole earth. No matter what, he was determined not to vomit.

Carolyn wasn’t drunk. Carolyn was only putting the flask to her lips and winking a lot. She hadn’t known what was in the flask because she’d stolen it from her roommate. “Ah, shit!” her roommate had texted maybe two hours ago. “I put a little acid in that one!!” Such a coincidence was the work of God. 

She was the punishment of God.

On nights like these, rare nights of inspiration, a small corner of her mind remained in awe of herself. Singular with purpose. And lovely. Always more lovely than usual, somehow. She’d seen Kyle for drinks on Monday. Coffee on Wednesday. Both times the same. Both preparing for tonight.

She drove into Kyle’s neighborhood and Kyle nodded in the rearview.

“Yes,” he said. “This is exactly what I was thinking. You’re, like, in my head. This is the best date ever.”

She parked along his cul-de-sac and waited. 

Kyle staggered from the bright, tiny sedan and jogged up the driveway. He looked almost boyish. An unperturbed joy. He walked to the front door and she betrayed nothing when he unlocked it. Nothing surprised her. Not tonight. Not even—okay, she was going to enter his house. This decision happened to her. Even so, she remained resolute, a mercenary set upon the world. Such forbearance wasn’t so different from her work as a teacher, when little S-H-I-Ts like Wesley put their wet fingers in girls’ ears. Rape, she mouthed when they did it. The little rapists.

“Hang on,” said Kyle. He tucked part of her hair behind an ear. “Maybe, you know, straighten up a little bit.” He turned to the empty rooms and filled it with his voice. “Wesley!”

God, she thought. God damn it. 

“Did you really burn a sorority down?” Kyle asked.

She balanced her weight on the balls of her feet and breathed normally. “One girl almost died,” she said. “It would have been terrible if she had. They’d have done an actual investigation.”

Kyle shuddered. A pleasure shudder.

She fingered the edge of his knife in her purse, a long and thin blade, and followed Kyle upstairs.

“Wesley!” called Kyle. “That damn kid.” Not in the guest room or Wesley’s own room or in the bathroom or in the towel closet. “I love him, you know? But I’m gonna kick his ass when we find him.”

Carolyn wanted to ask how often he hit his son, the worst student in her class. She was positive that he beat women.

“It’s wild,” said Kyle, “I have never come down this calmly. I’m seeing snakes everywhere and it’s fine, you know? They’re not here. I understand that.” 

Carolyn’s own high, the pure heat of purpose that entered her like possession, was perhaps wilting. A little. She didn’t want to find Wesley. Wesley, Wesley. The boy filled her inner life. Students did that now and then. None like Wesley, who wasn’t exceptional in the least. Not too smart, not too talented, not thuggishly charming, not endearing. If anything, she hated him. She was scared by how much she hated him, some days. She’d asked out Kyle to understand Wesley and she thought she did. Wesley’s father could be summed up by his gym bag and the bruises he left on Wesley’s neck. Splotches dabbed along the nape were always a paternal pattern.

If she killed Kyle, should she adopt Wesley, to save him? Hm. She wasn’t sure she was enough of a kid person for that. Sometimes she daydreamed about remanding Wesley to a shelter one town over, to a commune with skinny women who smelled like the earth, who shoved kale into their spiritual gaps. Or maybe he could go to a military school. He was not a good boy.

“He could be anywhere,” Kyle said. “That’s what’s so scary about kids. You have so much less control than you think. Almost none, okay? I don’t know what the fuck he does when I’m not looking. I let him roam though. I want him to be strong. He could be doing anything out there. He’s doing it himself though, okay? He’s got time to even out.” 

The boy shouldn’t be here. He mustn’t be.

“Wesley!” Kyle yelled into the master suite. The boy emerged from beneath the bed. Carolyn wanted to sit down, wanted to go inside a dark bathroom for a few minutes to pray and perhaps arm herself.

“I was sleeping,” Wesley said.

“You little punk,” said Kyle.

“Why is she here?” the boy asked. “It’s weird that you’re here. This isn’t school, you know.”

“I don’t live at school.”

“Are you gonna bang her, Dad?”

“Watch your mouth.” Kyle clapped the back of his son’s head.

“Ouch!” Wesley kept speaking to her. “Why are you here?”

She must think less. Even less than thinking little. She must react. There was a boy. They were at Kyle’s house. God had put a knife in her purse.

“I need some water, man,” Kyle said, and stepped downstairs to get a drink.

Carolyn’s voice deepened with authority as she leaned toward Wesley. She was more than herself. “I’m sorry he hit you,” she said. She wanted to share how she was going to rescue him, but the words were evasive.

“I told my friends,” Wesley muttered. “I told them you were probably easy.”

What was admirable in Carolyn was her ability not to slap eight-year-olds when they deserved it. All decent teachers shared this prudence, and it was given to her now in excess. But she also began thinking, thinking, overthinking.

What was admirable in Carolyn was her ability not to slap eight-year-olds when they deserved it.

God maybe wanted her to leave. Who could say. Her mother used to speak with angels and taught math in California. Carolyn kept trying to rationalize to imaginary friends, to projections of real friends—she was loved by many. Why are you here, Carolyn? Why did you keep the knife? You are reasonably normal and we are very wigged at this entire fracas! was how her friends might sound. Wesley was sitting and pouting as if this tension, this terrible conundrum, were happening to him.

Kyle returned with a beer. Wesley ran past him, down the stairs, and out into the backyard. Crying, probably. Carolyn thumbed the knife in her purse as she settled with Kyle at the top of the staircase. She wondered for the first time whether this was simply a date. Maybe she was dating. The beer was shared between them. She’d chosen to be alone with this puppyish, dangerous man—he was ravaging her in his mind, she could see it behind the eyes, the undressing, the forceful imagination. And here she loitered, pondering what she wanted. A date.

“I hit a woman once,” said her date. The stairs were a lean, dark wood beneath them. “Yeah. More than once. Kind of a lot. And more than one woman. That’s the worst thing I’ve actually ever done. But I could tell you anything, I feel like. I need to tell you.” 

“I’d like Wesley to stay outside,” she said. “To give us some time.”

“He’d be nothing without me, you saw him, the little wiseass.”

“I worry about all my students. About Wesley especially.”

Kyle’s eyes glistened. “Me, too. I can’t even explain it. Fatherhood? I cannot explain its perfection, the amount of love I feel.”

“You know, I think all my students, all people, just deserve a chance. Everything is such a lottery. Our preferences, our weaknesses. How can we carve out our own chance?”

“I want to tell you everything. I can feel, you know, I can feel how close I am to being clean. This close. I can get Wesley where he needs to go. People have so many cute little ideas. They don’t believe any of them. Everyone’s a meat-eater at heart, everyone claws the faces from their brothers. Show me the last communist who wasn’t a careerist. Show me a rich man who’s not shitting out the bones of, you know, fucking people like me. Jesus. I’m seeing things. The universe, maybe. What I’m teaching Wesley is that he can survive anything. If he can survive me, he can survive the world. Everyone wants some fucking help, but no one’s strong enough to help themselves. But I’m so close. I’m so close to helping him.” He paused. “Honestly, you’re like a miracle.”

She was shaking, she wanted to say something, but that wasn’t possible. She taught second grade. She was wearing ballet flats. The knife was in her hand. More was happening to her, internal shifts, but Kyle was making too much noise for her to concentrate. He was standing and yelling and cursing and pointing at her hand. He was frightened, careless, aroused, and he slipped. He reached out, clutching, and caught nothing and understood he was falling down the stairs—his face fell first—nanoseconds before the crash occurred. The knife was in her fist. He carried his beer with him and made stains everywhere, himself and the alcohol. She waited for god. For the little god who answered only to the great God, and who spoke to her. He was real. He had taken care of everything. She was unable to bend her knees as Kyle bled in slow slugs from his skull. She closed her eyes, returned to her body, and waited.

“Wesley,” she said.

The boy jumped. Where did she come from? He was on the patio steps, shredding leaves from their stems. He kept failing to detach even one leaf perfectly and this made him want to claw the bark from the tree with his fingernails. Stupid freaking tree. Its stupid leaves. He ignored her.

“Wesley,” she said again. “I thought you and I could go somewhere, just the two of us. We could get some ice cream, yeah?”

No way he wanted that. He couldn’t believe his teacher was here. What if anyone found out? Collin lived two doors down. Even Collin wasn’t that stupid.

“Is Dad coming?”

When she didn’t answer, he followed her to her car and she let him sit up front, which even his father never allowed, and they drove to Dairy Queen. He was disappointed they didn’t go inside. She didn’t even let him order, but got two cones of the same kind, cookies ’n cream. They kept driving and she explained everything that was out the window. This was pretty odd, he thought. He could also see through glass. She explained every tree they passed.

“Why’s it called an elm?” he asked. It didn’t look like “elm.” 

“I have no idea,” she laughed. “It’s totally beyond me. Why are you called Wesley?”

He shrugged.

“I imagine it’s about the same for the elm.” She kept laughing and explaining everything they saw. The different highway signs, the church denominations and their ancient violence, the mountains in the distance, even the clouds, which he liked the least. They’re clouds. They didn’t need individual names. 

It wasn’t until he was thirteen that he asked about his dad again, and she didn’t tell him the truth, but lied kindly, and as often as he wanted to ask, she answered. It wasn’t until he was seventeen that she got caught, a speeding ticket of all things. She tried to explain that she carried a gun for her own safety, but her hands moved too fast and the state police shot her anyway. They had good aim for people who otherwise didn’t know how to use their weapons. He was twenty when he went into the force himself and he never shot anyone, never drew his pistol, never went beyond a uniform or a small-town dispatch. The ladies at the local library loved him, and gave him a fake award for tackling a vagrant who kept slipping lit matches into the book drop. Wesley: Defender of Literature.

What else do you want to know?

There was once a woman he took to Hawaii, and all she did was sit in the sand and complain about the brightness. After that, he lived alone in a white, clean condo. Everyone in the compound knew his story. But Wesley didn’t mind. Each morning, even before he retired, he lowered himself into the community pool and walked its length to the chatter of his own wake. Generations of barn swallows chided him from a nest on his porch, which he never removed. When a neighbor found him in his own bed at the age of seventy-eight, she was surprised he hadn’t killed himself. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t even been asleep. He was mesmerized by a stray memory of that old library award. “Our local hero,” they called him. “Our personal Wyatt Earp.” Kill himself? The thought never even crossed his mind.

7 Novels About Immigrant Mothers Who Defy Societal Expectations

Posted on by EL Assistant2

There are no greater political pawns than immigrant mothers. In some circles, their bodies are seen as threatening. In other circles, they are spoken of as victims, fleeing circumstances, or subjected to state or legislative violence thanks to conflicts or draconian and cruel immigration policies. Around the world, wherever there are mothers traversing borders, despite their differences and individual experiences, immigrant mothers are flattened and stripped of their humanity.   

It’s in the retelling by first-generation children that we get closer to seeing a different side of immigrant mothers. Whole comedy specials are written about overbearing, opinionated, and excessively maternal immigrant mothers. On social media, first-generation kids impersonate or complain about their mothers who don’t quite see the need for personal privacy and professions in the arts, or understand the concept of depression. In literature, it seems that when immigrant mothers make it onto the page, they are often the tireless (or tired) parent who only exists for the sake of their narrator/protagonist child. 

I knew I was writing against the grain in my novel, A Country You Can Leave. It’s a story that centers on the lives of Lara, a biracial Afro-Cuban-Russian girl, and her Russian mother, Yevgenia. Lara, the narrator of the story, has to grapple with the fact that her mother is objectively a terrible parent in addition to being an ungrateful immigrant. Yevgenia is a woman who refuses the maternal role and is deeply dedicated to her sexual freedom, her intellectual pursuits, and going wherever the road leads her next.  

The list below takes seven novels that turn the trope of “sacrificial” mothering on its head. These are stories of immigrant mothers who refuse to play by the rules. 

The Son of Good Fortune by Lysley Tenorio

There isn’t a better novel to keep you company if you love the outrageous single immigrant mothers who defy societal expectations. Excel and his mother, Maxima, are undocumented Filipinos making their way ​in​ the U.S. While Excel does his best to stay out of the glare of immigration officials’ long reach, Maxima, a former B-movie action star in the Philippines, is now running an online scam siphoning money from men. The novel haunts their frayed relationship, where Excel blames his mother for the limitations in his life, especially as Maxima dominates the page with her humor and vitality. 

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Unlike other books on this list, the mother protagonist of this novel, Nazneen, isn’t the object of longing by a child attempting to understand her. She is the narrator of her own story, making life choices that challenge the strict confines of being a stay-at-home mother in a new country, far from her family and former life in Bangladesh. And just when a reader starts to feel the walls closing in on Nazneen, the promise of freedom knocks on the door. And like all the mothers on this list, she chooses herself and follows her desires, while society and her children look on. 

The Leavers by Lisa Ko

In this novel, Deming Gou’s mother, Polly—a dynamic and sharp-witted woman with a foul mouth—doesn’t return home from work one day. For much of the novel, Deming, who gets adopted by a white couple, works hard to remember his mother—not as a woman who merely worked to make his life better than hers, but as a complex individual who had dreams of her own. In the chapters narrated by  Polly,​ readers see beyond the abandoned immigrant mother trope to get a fuller picture of the kind of life that has driven Polly’s motivations. 

Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn

This novel’s beating heart is an immigrant mother, Patsy, who refuses to be boxed into traditional roles or societal expectations. Patsy unapologetically chooses herself by leaving Jamaica for New York in hopes of reconnecting with her first love, Cecily. In order to truly be herself, Patsy leaves behind her daughter, Tru, who Patsy has mixed feelings about. She obviously loves her daughter and feels destroyed by their separation, and yet Patsy isn’t sure if she’s capable of being the mother Tru deserves. Though Patsy’s arrival in Brooklyn doesn’t turn out as she expects, there is a kind of coming of age for Patsy, one that asks readers to stop and pause before they judge a mother for leaving a child behind.   

Mother Country by Irina Reyn

This novel focuses on the life of Nadia, a Ukrainian-Russian immigrant living in Brooklyn, who has made the difficult choice to leave her child behind in a country torn apart by war. Nadia had hoped to bring her daughter to the U.S., but once her papers come through, her daughter Lassika is no longer of legal age to go with her. This forces Nadia to make the decision to pursue her own future, despite leaving her mother and daughter in a war zone. What makes this novel unique is the ways it represents parenting adult children when the family is apart. While Nadia chips away at American immigration laws to reunite with her daughter, she also grapples with the reality of living far from home while loved ones endure Putin’s war of “reunification.”  

The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Joon Kim

When Margot’s mother Mina Lee dies mysteriously, Margot comes back to town only to discover she never knew her mother at all. It’s a novel that’s told in the alternating narratives of the daughter and the mother, and readers are made aware of the fierce and often sad experiences that shaped Mina Lee’s life and, ultimately, her death. Margot is a daughter who didn’t ask too many questions while her mother was alive, and yet it’s clear that Mina wouldn’t have provided the answers anyway. As a mother, her power rests with her ability to hold on to her hurts and control her own narrative, even if it means keeping secrets from her child. 

White Ivy by Susie Yang

This novel is a bit of an outlier on this list, but worthy of inclusion. Ivy’s mother is depicted like most immigrant parents: stern, a bit cold, and preoccupied with her daughter becoming a doctor. But it’s Meifeng, Ivy’s grandmother, who takes Ivy under her wing and teaches her how to get the things she needs—by stealing them. Meifeng’s lessons propel Ivy from yard sale theft to grand schemes and lies that place her at the heart of a wealthy white family who regret the day they opened up their lives to her.  

7 New Southern Gothic Novels by Women Writers

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

In the Southern Gothic, the horror is often just out of sight, masquerading as normal. Commonplace. Safe. There is often tension between what you’ve been taught to believe and what you learn to be true. In a sense, deconstruction is at the heart of Southern Gothic. 

Traditionally, this has been a male-dominated genre. The works from the Southern canon are grand sweeping odysseys about men’s failings and victories, which are often used as metaphors for the fraught and complicated region of the American South. 

But things are shifting. New Southern Gothic novels being published in the 21st century (especially those by women) are less concerned with the region’s position, failings, or significance and more concerned with the intimate realities of ordinary people. The conflict is often internal. The ghosts are private. The secrets run deeper. 

I can hardly imagine a more Southern Gothic setting than the defunct “bomb plant” hidden outside Aiken, South Carolina. It’s like the infamous Ferris wheel of Chernobyl: something so insidious and grotesque as a hydrogen bomb plant mere miles from a charming southern town.

In the first chapter of Atomic Family, one of the central characters recalls how she drove her husband, a scientist with top-secret government clearance, to the security checkpoint at the plant. 

“She thought fleetingly—childishly—of trying to follow, pushing her car through the rail just to see what was there…The plant has always been more than a physical barrier. It is the fourth member of their family, a silent and dangerous presence. It is the horror that haunts the town.”

The books on this list deal openly with the macabre, and all feature Southern settings with various elements of decay or despair—but in a way that is distinctly contemporary and the voices are distinctly women’s.

Revival Season by Monica West

Miriam has a secret. She is the daughter of a renowned Baptist preacher and faith healer—and during this summer’s revival season, something has changed. Her father’s powers don’t seem to be working. Instead, Miriam begins to suspect that she might have the gift of healing…even though the church has always preached that such powers can never belong to a woman. This coming-of-age story set in a Black Christian community in the Bible belt is both tender and haunting, a unique portrait of religious confusion.

The Body in Question by Jill Ciment

She is Juror C-2. He is Juror F-17. Together, they are sequestered with the jury in a sleepy Florida EconoLodge, granted no contact with the outside world as they serve on a high-profile murder case. As the grisly details of the case emerge (a rich white teenager has been accused of murdering her baby brother), the two jurors begin a secret affair. But tensions rise during deliberations when these lovers learn that they’re on opposite sides of the case.

The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir

Essie is 17 years old and pregnant…and her family isn’t happy. They’re the stars of the hit reality TV show Six for Hicks, which features Essie’s father, Jethro Hicks, and his megachurch damnation-style preaching. Everyone is desperate to keep Essie’s news secret. Except for Essie. She needs the truth to get out, and to do so, she finds someone else who’s just as desperate as she is, Roarke Richards. They both have secrets they can’t bear to hide anymore—and in this timely and spine-tingling debut, some walls are about to come tumbling down.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Camille Preaker does not want to go home. She has long been haunted by the death of her sister, Marian, and she was recently hospitalized for excessive self-harm, carving words into her skin. But her work as a reporter sends her back to Wind Gap, Missouri, where she must investigate a recent murder. What she doesn’t expect is how her hypochondriac mother, Adora, and eerily effervescent sister, Amma, might be involved in the grisly business.

Florida by Lauren Groff

It would be impossible to write about the new Southern Gothic without including Lauren Groff. Florida is a short story collection exploring the wild, almost mythic, landscape of Florida—a place too southern to be the “South” but too weird to be anything else. The collection introduces readers to a range of haunted characters, including an unnamed mother who appears repeatedly. She constantly wrestles with the confinement of her life. In the opening story “Ghosts and Empties,” she takes off on a walk in the Florida night to avoid a fight at home. What develops is a book of contemplation and poignancy, a collection that reads almost like memoir and almost like a novel.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Esch and her brothers are storing away food, just in case the hurricane brewing on the Gulf really does hit Louisiana. Their mother is dead, and their father is absent, content to drink himself to oblivion. As Hurricane Katrina gets closer, Esch’s brothers are concerned mostly with their prized pitbull, China, who’s just given birth to a litter of pups. China is a vicious dogfighter and the main source of the family’s lean income. As the storm crashes on land, it destroys everything in its wake, leaving behind terror and confusion and a new life to build from the wreckage.

The Gods of Green County by Mary Elizabeth Pope

Coralee is seeking justice for the death of her brother, Buddy, who was killed at the hands of the local sheriff. It’s 1926 in rural Arkansas, and the Great Depression is right around the corner. Everything changes for Coralee when she starts to see her brother’s ghost around town. Is she crazy? Is she gifted with the sixth sense? One part murder mystery, one part gothic historical fiction, Gods of Green County explores the effect one person has on a community marked by poverty and drought, revealing the impact of having power…and not.

Everywhere I Look, No One Looks Like Me

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When I’m born in May my parents think I look perfect. And I do, at first. But when they  look closer into those newborn baby eyes, they see the black and purple specks floating around the white iris of my right eye—a phenomenon not inherited from my new family. 

As a toddler, my mother wheels me into eye doctor appointments where they force my lids open and drop down orange liquid as I stare up at the ceiling lights until my eyes go fuzzy. These drops make them heavy, like bowling balls rolling around my head. My vision becomes blurry and I can just make out the hot air balloon at the very end of the big hulking gray machine they sit me in front of. I place my chin on cold metal as a doctor flashes bright yellow lights across my vision. He tells me to look at his ear, the corner, the floor, my mom. I do as I’m told. 

I place my chin on cold metal as a doctor flashes bright yellow lights across my vision.

Around ten years old the pigment in my eye leeches out across my skin. “It must have been a result of puberty,” mom says. “The darker skin wasn’t there when you were born. It grew on you.” The spots find their way across my under eye, painting the circle purple and blue and black. People start asking if I’ve been punched. They say things like, “Are you alright?” Or, “How did you get the black eye?” Or, “I’d hate to see the other guy.” These are people in grocery stores, at my brother’s baseball games, people doing my nails on mommy-daughter dates. These are people who don’t know me but feel entitled to ask.

My first job is at my local Goodwill. I man the cash register and put back clothes people try on. One day, a gruff-looking man in a white t-shirt and light wash denim jeans saunters up to my register. He throws the shirts and pants down with a loud thud, puts his right hand on the counter, and leans forward with all his weight. 

“So who punched you?” 

“What?” I ask, convinced that I must have misunderstood. “I’m sorry?” 

“Your eye. Who punched your eye?” 

My body goes hot and I can feel the rising nausea signaling a panic attack. My whole body shakes. I look behind him and around me, begging for an escape, but I can’t see one. My knee goes crazy, banging against the white drawers beneath the table and my left hand darts to my right arm, sharp fingernails digging into my skin as I bring myself back to this moment, back to reality. 

“Uhm, no one. It’s extra pigment; I was born with it.”

“No, come on. You can tell me. Who punched you? Your dad? Disgruntled boyfriend?”

“No, sir, it is extra pigment. I was born with it. I promise I wasn’t punched.”

“Come on. Who did it?” 

I stammer out my answer one last time. It finally seems good enough.

I stammer out my answer one last time. It finally seems good enough, or he got bored, because instead of persisting any further he just shifts his weight, puts his hands in his pockets, shrugs, and says “I guess that’s what we’re calling it now.” 

I’m silent as I ring up his items. He pays, leaves. I turn off my register light. Tears stream down my face before I make it to the bathroom.

I daydream in the car, head knocking against the glass, about laser removal treatments. I don’t have a boyfriend like the other girls in school and I know it’s because of my pigment. Mommy-daughter dates turn into dermatology appointments and makeup counter sessions looking for a foundation thick enough to cover my skin.

Everywhere I look, no one looks like me.

Parts of my body, parts of myself, are always available to the public: my arms, my legs, my stomach, my hair, my skin, my eye. It’s too much. I’d give anything to shrink down, for no one to see or touch this body.

I’m accepted to Skidmore College after bonding with the English chair about our mutual interest in sign language. She has long reddish brown hair, slim features, and a strong face. She immediately intimidates, wearing a stunning silk blouse with black work pants. When she hears I’ve always wanted to learn ASL, she dittos the desire. She tells me that when I get into Skidmore, I must take her freshman seminar, Extraordinary Bodies. “It’s an introduction to disability studies,” she says. “I think you’d really like it.” 

Who gets to decide what is a disability and what isn’t? What about folks with abnormalities?

Disability studies is a new term to me. The DSM-5 teaches me terms like “visible disability” and “invisible disability.” The terms feel familiar and yet alien on my tongue, as if it doesn’t belong there. As if I’m trying to cram it in.

We read Sula in college. I completely miss Morrison’s mention of a birthmark. I tell my professor, “I think it’s because I have a birthmark on my eye, too. I think it was just a normal feature to me. I read it, absorbed it, and moved on. I didn’t recognize it as something abnormal.” 

Sula doesn’t have a disability. Or does she? Did we read Sula for Shadrock alone? Who gets to decide what is a disability and what isn’t? What about folks with abnormalities? Where do they fit? Why do I want to fit? Am I appropriating disability studies? What am I so scared of? 

Later, in graduate school, I co-teach a five week workshop for middle schoolers. My partner is a towering fantasy writer with one hand. For the weeks leading up to our first class together, I chastise myself for wanting to say something. Maybe joke about how the writing institute put the two marked kids together. But I can’t decide if my pigmentation is abnormal enough, or if I’m making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe my whole obsession with defining it and finding community is just disguised narcissism. Maybe I’m not that special.

“Do you think the kids will say anything?” I finally ask, laughing in an attempt to hide fear.

What did I expect Will to say? Maybe look hurt, eyebrows furrowed in distaste. Maybe he’d curse me out for comparing my silly little pigment to his amputated arm. And yet that fear itself is internalized ableism — the idea that he has it worse simply because his body is more different. If I know anything about Will, it’s that he manages. He types, by one hand, thousands upon thousands of words, handfuls of characters that are themselves “abnormal” and disabled in various ways. And when he speaks, he gestures animatedly with both arms. Sometimes, deep in thought, he rubs the stump of his left arm. He’s found his normal. He tells me he hadn’t thought about it, but “They’re kids; they’re curious. I might say something because I’m sure they will. We are marked. No use in ignoring it.” 

The students never mention anything. But Will does use our abnormalities for an example when discussing a prompt with them. They’re aspects of ourselves we can pull on, make meaning out of — but only on our own terms. As the cliche goes, it’s our differences that make our stories more interesting. 

I went to Sarah Lawrence College for my master’s, the same school as Lucy Grealy, an author and person who toed the line between disability and deformity. In her memoir, Autobiography of a Face, I see my own ruminations on perception and sight replicated in someone else. Of wearing a mask she writes, “I felt wonderful. It was only as the night wore on and the moon came out and the older kids, the big kids, went on their rounds that I began to realize why I felt so good. No one could see me clearly. No one could see my face.” And I cry the first time I read it because I see myself, right eye caked in a mask of makeup, aching to go unnoticed. 

Still, I ask myself: What right do I have to compare my experience to Lucy’s?

Eventually, I stop wearing concealer around my black eye. Much like Hannah Walhout, who writes about being an incredibly tall woman in “Attack of the the Six-Foot Woman,” I can’t exactly pinpoint the time things changed. “It was probably, as with anything,” she writes, “a gradual accumulation of minor events and small recalibrations: a conversation here, a casual touch there, time spent, self-talk, moving toward acceptance of the things I cannot change.” It’s two things at once: an ultimate submission to reality, and a deep transformation into empowerment. 

I see myself, right eye caked in a mask of makeup, aching to go unnoticed. 

As a culture, we are constantly altering our concept of normal. Bodies are made into trends and profited off of. For years we have one standard, and then suddenly it changes. Headlines hit the news that “heroin chic” is in again, and we internalize that, molding our bodies from their normal state and into something else. Much the same, disability—as a category we fit people into—is not an inherent mode of existence. It needs someone or something else to be cast as normal, or standard—someone to be ostracized against.

“[The pigment is] what makes your eyes blue or green or brown. I just happen to have more of it. It doesn’t affect my sight.” This is what I actually tell people. Before, I never realized how charged that language is. My entire explanation is an attempt to normalize the pigment for other people, to make it recognizable. What happens if I stop doing this? 

Lucy spent her whole life looking for the next surgery that could fix her jaw. And, yet, at the same time, she was deeply loved, sought after by the community around her. In Sula, the birthmark transforms and morphs depending on outside perspectives of the body it paints. Sula’s not perfect, but it’s not because of the blooming rose on her cheek. And she knows that. Perhaps the weight of our abnormalities depends on how much we give it. 

The social model of disability argues that the environment, not people with disabilities or abnormalities, is at fault.

Markers like “disability” or “ability” are tenuous. The social model of disability argues that the environment, not people with disabilities or abnormalities, is at fault. And that if society prioritized accommodations and change, those barriers would cease to exist. So why am I obsessed with deciding if I can attach myself to the disability community if, by this logic, disabilities aren’t necessarily an innate nature, but rather a response to an inaccessible world? Not that anyone’s experience is invalid or made up, but since the idea of normality is a social construct, then so is any divergence from it. This is something I learned in every disability studies class I took. In fact, the social model is internationally recognized as being the model. I’ve spent so much time using the academic analysis of media and representations, when this maybe explains everything: Our experiences and the way we view ourselves, with disabilities or not, are too often decided for us.

A birthmark is defined as “an unusual and typically permanent brown or red mark on someone’s body from birth.” It’s not a perfect fit for my pigmentation, but it’s close. I think what I’m trying to do is normalize the abnormal, stop attempting to fit my pigment into an already existent reference point while arguing for a change in what normal encompasses. 

When I was younger, I used to tell myself stories to feel better about my perpetual black eye. I’d try and convince myself how cool it was, that I was unique, separated from everyone else. It was that time in my life where all I wanted was to be distinguishable from my peers and so like Sula’s, my pigment transformed into what I needed. At some point, I traded that for a desire to fit in. And the pigment morphed again, into a threat. Now, I want to try something altogether new: let my pigment exist without searching it for meaning.

Why David Cameron Should Read “Empireland”

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

So in the fall of 2015, I went after David Cameron. Not in person, or in any print or visual media (the Daily Mail would have lapped it up). I took my shot on Facebook, back when it was slowly but steadily losing its cultural influence over anyone who would not eventually vote for Trump. Whether my anti-Cameron rant means anything to you (he was prime minister at the time) might depend on how much stock you put in social media, but maybe it was for the best that online was where it stayed. Regardless, I was on fire. Cameron had just visited Jamaica, and in stunning and downright imperial fashion, demanded that we Jamaicans get on with moving past the legacy of slavery—that we stop living in the past. With that trademark condescension he reserves for speaking to people of color, he advised us to “focus on the future.” He then introduced the real reason for his visit, which was to announce that the United Kingdom was about to front a whopping 40% of the cost to build a new prison on the island. That way Jamaicans convicted of crimes in the United Kingdom could be sent back to the country they had supposedly come from, whether or not they were legal British residents. Even by Churchill’s colonial standards, the speech was jaw-dropping. Equally enraging was how the entire Jamaican parliament—based on the rowdy British model no less—seemed to take it like a bunch of house slaves being given a sermon on loving their masters. I couldn’t decide if the speech came from ignorance, arrogance or simple gall.

On my first trip to the UK… I was a little appalled that the British Museum would ask me for a donation to enter.

Cameron seemed ignorant of how much his country’s imperialism, particularly during slavery, had shaped every aspect of the Britain he has lived in, from its magnificent palaces right down to the stunning sense of national entitlement that allowed him to make such a speech. How it was only a few years before his speech that the British people had stopped compensating slave owners for post-abolition losses. On my first trip to the UK four years before, I was a little appalled that the British Museum would ask me for a donation to enter. I couldn’t conceal the sense that I owned the place, or at least that I had earned it through the work of my people, unpaid during slavery, and barely paid after. Looking around Bristol and Liverpool, I wondered how I was supposed to get over all the bad that had been wrought by the empire, while the empire itself held on to all the good. So after David Cameron’s speech, I couldn’t hold myself back:

“Listen David, I feel you. I’m with you on this forgetting slavery business, screw all the haters. I too am all ready to move past slavery and forget the whole thing. I just have one condition: You First. You heard me. I promise to stop bitching about the legacy of Slavery and Colonialism (don’t get it twisted, the latter was even worse) and move on if you also move on, by destroying every building, every landmark, every statue, every port, every bridge, every road, every house, every palace, every mansion, every gallery (Hello, Tate!), every museum, and every ship built with slavery and colonialism blood money. That would mean that London, Bristol and Liverpool would all have to go. Then we’d all be just about full free, David.”

There was Cameron, and by extension Brits like him, surrounded by the empire’s façade of colonial opulence, oblivious to the scars on the back side. So when I came to Sathnam Sanghera’s book, I did so with visceral expectation, saying to myself he better preach. I approached the book with amens in check, ready to dish them out at every fact that I already knew, happy that now white people would learn the truth of what I, and many like me, felt. Except, more often than not, the person doing the learning was me.

I wondered how I was supposed to get over all the bad that had been wrought by the empire, while the empire itself held on to all the good.

If all Sanghera wanted to do was unveil scars, then this book would be only half as effective, half as stunning, half as revelatory. Digging, simply for its own sake, sometimes leaves us with more holes in our stories, not fewer. It makes it easy for people on both sides of history to pounce. History is complicated. Not every forward-thinking movement came from beyond colonial influence. After all, abolition was codified not too many doors down from slavery. And some of the most appalling atrocities done in colonialism’s name came from the colonized, not the colonizers. But Sanghera is more than just a muckraker. Yes, he exposes these sordid legacies. But furthermore, he traces the surprising bloodlines from which these legacies still flow. It never occurred to me, for example, to trace the origins of British racism toward the Caribbean beyond the first landing of the Windrush, back to India in 1857. On the other hand, I used to look at multiculturalism as the great civilizer of our modern times—until, that is, I saw it was a reality of British life that predated the Tudors.

Sanghera’s Empireland is not the historical painting some would like. Paintings aren’t hard to find—that’s what the Jan Morrises and the Niall Fergusons of the world are for. Rather, Empireland is a mirror. Mirrors show truths that paintings do not—messy, complicated, uncomfortable truths. And of course, those messy truths are, in fact, us. This is not a furious book. In fact, much of it is conversational, eager to engage, disarming and sometimes funny. But it will nonetheless provoke downright blinding fury. This is also not a partisan book in the least, but still one that will provoke some readers to take sides, at least until they get to the end of an incendiary paragraph. It’s still a new thing to see imperialism written in this way, refracted through the eyes of the “mother country.” It’s something that Sanghera must have known that we might not have the language for, yet.

Even still, it doesn’t matter if we don’t. The most important lessons do not wait until you’re ready to receive them. And while we may know much about empire’s impact on pre-Commonwealth Britain, its persistent and striking impact on modern Britain is another story, one where denialism intrudes upon the conclusion. Imperial revisionism is nothing new. It sweeps through France as much as it does through Britain. But the vibe one gets from the U.K., at least from those within it nostalgic for empire, is that the country wants to have it both ways. It wants to be the land that ended slavery, that fought the Nazis. But it’s also proud to have given rise to the imperially nostalgic Nigel Farage and the still-present influence of Enoch Powell, a man who Farage cites as a political hero, and whose views were shaped most critically by his time in colonial India.

Sanghera’s Empireland is not the historical painting some would like.

Powell is long dead. But there are many living Brexit voters who still remember the last gasps of imperial Britain. There are certainly enough novels and television shows that romanticize the era, most with a dash of discrimination, offstage violence and the occasional rape to pass the work off as “complex.” And there are many British citizens old enough to have actually sailed on the Windrush (my now gone uncle Errol being one of them) who yet recognize the mix of ignorance and arrogance that continues to make such exceptionalism possible. We’ve read and seen a ton of this recently, revisionist attempts to “complicate” the record of horrible events, the deeds of despicable people, as if the ambivalent lens is the superior one. I read this book feeling as if I had witnessed and sometimes participated in the legacies of the past. But I never felt responsible for them. Sanghera rejects the culturally relativist trick of making everyone feel equally accountable. Empire has left consequences in every single country it touched, and it is important to unearth those consequences, interrogate them, learn from them, so that we recognize the strands that persist within us. Empire left consequences for Empireland as well, and it is because of our failure to recognize these aftershocks that racism is looked upon as a rootless aberration, or denied altogether. You can read this book and concede why Brexit was not an anomaly at all, but an all but inevitable outgrowth of the imperial position. The most Britishly British outcome Britain could have ever granted itself.

Empire has left consequences in every single country it touched

Sanghera often presents these staggering facts as if he has just discovered them himself, and even he can’t hide how much they astonish. He invokes the “I” often because the truths he’s unearthed are as much for him as they are for whoever reads his book. There’s a reason for this. Sanghera makes these consequences feel personal, because we have a personal stake in what he’s found. The stories in Empireland—and the story of empire itself— cannot be told without it becoming personal. History will remain incomplete, full of holes, if it ignores the actual humans it affects. And in reading Empireland, we find ourselves living within this history. Maybe this is how we should have been looking at history all along.

Empireland is a crucial journey of discovery, not just for those within the empire, and not just for those from former colonies granted independence. This journey is also for those from the colony that took independence by force: America, of course, a country that holds its Yankee spirit (see Hamilton, the musical) and its unquenchable Anglophilia (see also Hamilton, the musical) with equal fervor. You don’t have to go too far south to see a country that never figured out what to do with its past other than mythologize it or forget it, each approach chafing against the other. Slavery’s memory still hangs high and swings low in all states, and statements like “heritage, not hate” show how tricky it is to pull nostalgia from the memory of atrocity. The problem is that we haven’t yet discovered an alternative. Empireland suggests one. It shows us a way to revisit the past with eyes unflinching, yet open and generous. We can stare down history’s atrocities, but the key word here is “we.” Stepping into the future is not the work of one person, or one nation. With books like this, maybe we can finally reach that future together.