Even as a millennial growing up in the ‘90s and aughts, it was rare to read a book that featured a queer protagonist, let alone a whole Heartstopper cast. I searched hard, despite not knowing exactly what I was searching for.
Most queer adults I know didn’t have an adolescence or coming of age that allowed them open desire or the ability to name themselves or their experiences. In my twenties and thirties, I sought answers about naming the unnameable in queer coming of age. Queer theorists and academics have described the concept of queer time, a non-linear way of coming to selfhood. Queer coming-of-age isn’t limited to adolescence. It is happening all the time. Sometimes it’s delayed by decades. Sometimes it happens more than once. The books on this list highlight queer coming of age that happens at all ages. Sometimes sexuality or gender is the focal point, but often it’s not. Some stories are focused on other parts of the protagonist or narrator’s life that took precedence. All of these books feel queer to me in others ways, in form, in expansiveness, in seeking answers that don’t fit into an easy or well worn narrative. They create something new.
My debut novel, Body Grammar, describes coming of age as both a person and an artist through the lens of Lou, a genderqueer model who walks runways for men’s and women’s fashion shows, but has avoided pursuing her own creative life past high school. She doesn’t have the language for her desire or her gender, but comes of the age the same way anyone does. Slowly, with stops and starts, and then all at once.
There is something searching, something clear-eyed in reflecting on a queer adolescence and young adulthood. There is pain. There is a hell of a lot of longing. But there’s also beauty and a sense of having reached somewhere, at last. The books below highlight all kinds of coming of age. Into self. Into love. Into family. Into a future that would have been impossible once to imagine.
Jacqueline Woodson’s first novel for adults in several years is a lyric meditation on adolescence, place, and friendship, and memories driven by feelings and girls connecting for a brief time. It follows four friends in 1970s Brooklyn, but some of the memories expand and contract over decades. The narrator, August, tells of everything she and her friends want to be and have, and what they do and don’t get. Like other books on this list, Woodson’s narrator looks back in time at this era of adolescence with a different lens than as she was living it and finds herself to be a different person.
I’d never read a novel that described the shifting of gender how I’d experienced it, all its various and kaleidoscopic possibilities, until I read this book, which takes place in the queer ’90s. The protagonist Paul changes genders and his body and places at will. This book is hot and beautiful and fully itself, just like “various” Paul, and all his routes through and into the world. There’s also a ton of sex in it, all of it fun.
One of the funniest novels I’ve read recently, The Days of Afrekete asks the question of that double coming of age. When you first realize something transcendent about yourself through a relationship, and what happens when you bypass it for another life. The protagonist, Liselle, remembers her past love, Selena, while facing down the dissolution of her marriage and life.
Emilly Prado’s gorgeous memoir-in-essays Funeral for Flaca is both funny and devastating in equal turn. Interlaced with songs that defined her childhood and adolescence, Prado’s essays examine grief, identity, and the nuance of familial love and relationships. She describes coming of age in the aughts (Napster, Hot Topic, The Notebook, and AIM screen names all make appearances) with both tenderness for the kid she was and profound insight into reckoning with past selves and trauma.
If I could describe queer adolescence, it would be this line in Kimberly King Parsons’ debut story collection: “You can’t just wish something and really get it, can you?” Or maybe this one: “…neither of us is exactly sure how to harness what we have.”
This collection is a Texas fever dream of women and girls wanting and not always getting. The story “Glow Hunters” is one of the truest depictions of queer adolescent desire that I’ve ever read, as it follows the buzzing line between friendship and something more for two high school girls. The sentences are pristine and the feelings are plugged into an unstoppable current. In the title story, the narrator describes how “everything in the world that mattered to me was shoved between the last bell and the sound of my mother’s car in the garage.” This collection is that feeling, a million times over.
Tegan and Sara’s music was the soundtrack of countless queer adolescences, and their memoir, told with electric and devastating closeness, is also an artistic coming of age. They discover their songwriting talent and voices, while coming out and having their first relationships with other girls in their hometown. The audiobook features original recordings of their teenaged songs, which is a treat and a time machine.
The relationship between two young men at the center of Bryan Washington’s novel has already dimmed by the opening pages. But both Mike and Benson come of age in different ways over the course of the novel, separately, then together. What begins as a breakup novel transfigures into a moving family story, focusing on the difficulty of coming into selfhood and articulating your own needs and love despite the complexity and pain of the past.
In The Knockout Queen, queer teen Michael tells the story of his friendship with Bunny Lampert, his next door neighbor and closest companion, at least for a time. The story and prose is propulsive and full of dark momentum. Michael doesn’t fit into their suburban community as a boy, and Bunny doesn’t fit in as a girl; both their bodies and home lives mark them as outsiders. When the novel flashes forward to their adulthoods, after a violent event severs the era of their friendship, they have both come of age in profoundly different and illuminating ways.
In 2013, Ostap Slyvynsky, a writer and translator who lives in Lviv, was invited by a composer friend to collaborate on a performance for a music festival in Donetsk, shortly before the city was occupied by pro-Russian militants. “It was very vibrant,” Ostap recalled. “There was a huge arts community there, and they created an arts center from an old factory, incorporating cables, insulation materials, industrial waste.”
For the performance, which was to be called In Preparation, Ostap would prepare the kind of emergency kit that is now second nature for Ukrainians: a change of underwear, a few sweaters, a keepsake, toiletries, pills. The performance involved Ostap counting out pills as if for a prolonged absence, but also as a kind of meditative act—“just to concentrate, just to find balance,” Ostap told me. “One, two, three, four, five.”
Ostap rehearsed for weeks, but the performance in Donetsk never happened. In 2014, after an uprising overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Russian-backed separatists took over Donetsk. The vibrant arts center, made of recycled building materials, is today a notorious prison.
As the first air raid sirens pierced the morning silence in Lviv, Ostap was completely unprepared.
Earlier this year,Ostap’s composer friend contacted him again to see if he would like to resurrect their collaboration. Ostap was no longer interested. Too much time had passed. He could no longer relate to the mood of anxiety that had inspired it. “I said ‘No, I don’t feel it any more—it’s not actual for me’.” He cracks a wry, weary smile. “Who could predict?” he said. A few weeks later, as the first air raid sirens pierced the morning silence in Lviv, Ostap was completely unprepared. He had not, as advised on countless TV channels and in newspapers, packed an emergency kit. On February 24, he found himself jostling for an ATM machine to see if he could still access his savings. He was able to withdraw 2000 hryvnia, or about $68. “I was so happy to have money in my hands,” he said.
Ostap told me this story as we were sitting in Black Honey, a cramped, noisy coffee shop on Halytska Street near the center of Lviv. Outside a slow river of people drifted by in the pale winter sun. We were entering the second month of a war but, on the surface, it wasn’t immediately obvious. There were buskers in the street, balloon sellers, a woman with angel wings who let people take her photograph for tips. But you didn’t have to rub too hard at the surface to see what lay beneath.
On TV, images of war are visceral by necessity. Collapsed buildings, bombed out tanks, an endless parade of hollow-eyed refugees peering through the windows of buses, of trains, of cars. The rescued cat, the forlorn dog. But when you are in a city like Lviv, the images that linger are quieter, less graphic. For me it was a mug in a public bathroom of a small art gallery on a quiet street in Lviv. The mug held random toothbrushes, a tube of toothpaste. A box of tampons sat nearby.
A young Ukranian novelist, Vadym, had taken me to the gallery one afternoon. He was keen to see an exhibition of drawings depicting Russian violence. They were raw and furious and filled with splayed limbs and blood, and I didn’t much like them, but what struck me was the rooms in which the art was projected on a wall. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I could pick out the outlines of abandoned sleeping bags, pillows with soft indentations. Someone slept there last night. A lot of someones. The toothbrushes, of course, were theirs. Later I would see the same makeshift dorms in other public spaces—a yoga studio, a waiting room at the station, a library. A parallel universe, as in a children’s story—on one side the art gallery; on the other, the scrambled lives of refugees unsure if they would ever get home; unsure if home even still existed. Private lives made public.
In a small adjoining courtyard, I sat at a small bistro table with a coffee and watched a young man and his friends fussing over a puppy. They talked in soft voices, smiling, at ease. Would they be sleeping in the gallery tonight?
What he could do, he discovered, was collect the stories of other people while he assisted refugees at Lviv train station.
For Ostap, an intense literature professor in a hoodie, the first few weeks of war interrupted what he considered his writing rhythm. Too much heightened tension, too much adrenaline. What he could do, he discovered, was collect the stories of other people while he assisted refugees at Lviv train station. He was a fan of Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz who had spent the Second World War in Warsaw and translated most of Shakespeare’s plays during the Nazi occupation. Milosz also wrote a series of fragmentary poems, conjuring scenes of his childhood—roosters on fences, fog like a river flood. At the train station, it was these ideas that floated into Ostap’s mind. “Each poem is a kind of definition of a very simple word, like street or house, or—for example—Europe, and how it looks from inside an occupied city,” said Ostap. “I thought it would be interesting to collect this kind of war vocabulary, but from the stories of other people.”
My seventh or eighth coffee of the day had arrived—small, European coffees that I always finished too fast—and as I stirred in my sugar and tried to pace myself, Ostap read a few of his stories. For the letter “A,” a short anecdote about apples in which a woman, Anna recalled trying to sleep in a bathtub in Kyiv during a night of shelling. In the dark she began to imagine the shells as ripe apples falling from a tree, a memory drawn from her early life—a night in the Carpathian mountains, young and in love, in a bed not much more comfortable than that bathtub:
“Now, I was falling asleep to the explosions, and I heard those apples. I wanted so badly for it to be just those garden apples hitting the ground around us.”
On another day, volunteering at a shelter, Ostap watched a woman who had arrived alone, and had chosen not to share any stories. She was from Donetsk. What trauma had she gone through? “All of a sudden she took her phone,” said Ostap. “She called someone and said, ‘Hello, how are you, let’s count together,’ and she began to count.”
Ostap counts above the high-pitched scream of the coffee machine, “One, two, three, four, five.” Then the woman from Donetsk interrupted whoever was at the end of the line. A child, perhaps? “Slower, slower, concentrate, don’t hurry.” She returns to the beginning. One, two, three, four, five.
Ostap thought of his show that never played in Donetsk, counting pills just for balance. One, two, three, four.
Through the window of Black Honey I could see the imposing statue of Danylo Romanovych, the 13th century warrior king of Galicia–Volhynia, and founder of Lviv (named for his son, Lev). It was Danylo who set the city, and the region, on a westward tilt—attracting immigrants from Poland and Germany, as well as Jews from Kyiv, that colors it to this day. A common refrain in Lviv is that its rich bohemian history has long made the city a target for Russian antagonism.
A common refrain in Lviv is that its rich bohemian history has long made the city a target for Russian antagonism.
“They always try to portray my city as a nationalist center,” the writer and poet Victoria Amelina told me one morning, over another cappuccino in a different coffee shop, this one tucked inside a bright, airy children’s bookstore.
Of all the people I meet in Lviv, Victoria is the most indignant, the most scathing of Russia and Russians. She was born the year of the Chernobyl catastrophe, the year the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. “My parents were told that it was safe, and my mom recalls walking me in a stroller through radioactive clouds over Lviv.” Now she radiates quiet fury. While Putin talks about defending the Russian-speakers of Ukraine, Victoria remembers only that her parents made her speak Russian, out of fear. “They didn’t want their children to suffer as they had,” she said. “I’ve had to reclaim my Ukrainian language—it would be easier for me to write in Russian.” At home she has a library of Russian books, mostly classics. She will never read them again. “I can now read Dickens in English, why would I read him in Russian?” she says. How about Dostoevsky? Has reading Crime & Punishment become complicated? “No, it’s not complicated,” she said. “I just understand now that this mysterious Russian soul is not so mysterious: They want to suffer, they thrive on it, and they want us to suffer.”
Viktoria remembered watching the war in Chechnya on Russian TV, as a child in the 90s. “I thought that Chechnya was doing something wrong, not that Russia was killing Chechens,” she said. “So propaganda worked on me, too. I thought that Russians were saving Chechnya, like they are saving me now—thank you so much, but I don’t need to be saved.”This was how our conversation went for an hour. I thought of something Milan Kundera wrote in a 1984 essay for The New York Review of Books that the aspiration of Central Europe was to be a group of nations conceived according to one rule: the greatest variety within the smallest space. “How could Central Europe not be horrified facing a Russia founded on the opposite principle: the smallest variety within the greatest space?” Kundera wrote.
When war comes to a country, it is unequal in its attentions. During the time I’d been in Lviv, and despite daily air raid warnings, and a nightly curfew, and armed police, and monuments surrounded by sandbags or steel barriers, it was sometimes possible to believe you were in a normal city doing normal tourist things. One afternoon, I found myself buying bath salts for friends in a tiny shop near the ruins of the city’s great synagogue, destroyed during the Second World War. “Lviv Souvenir Soap Manufacture,” said a sign on the door. “No days off.” Another day, enjoying the sun, I browsed an outdoor book stall. Later I bought an ice cream.
But, of course, the city is no more normal than that jar of toothbrushes in the bathroom of an art gallery. “I’ve never seen the city more crowded,” Ostap remarked when we emerged one evening into the street. Those crowds are swollen by refugees, at least 200,000 of them. Many are renting, or have been absorbed into homes of families and friends. Many haven’t. You see them at donation centers, rummaging through random boxes of clothes, and you see them around the central station where a reception camp has sprung up to feed the hungry. And there are those moments, just for a second, when you wonder if the war is also coming for you. I was drinking coffee in another café, Kredens, when the lights went out and I found myself being ushered into a basement while the sirens launched into their familiar mewl. There I heard a loud American voice explaining to his companions, “I voted for Biden.” It turns out that even in a time of war, hearing a fellow traveler can still set your teeth on edge.
Like most of us, Ostap grew up thinking his home town was boring. Then he saw what had been before him all along. “One day I woke up and I understood how unexplored this city is, all these invisible ties between cultures,” he says. “It was an illumination.” He imagined Lviv as a series of layers, like an onion, with only the outermost layer visible to most people. But underneath lay the city’s ragged history, back and forth between empires, the vast movements of people, the overarching national narratives of Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, Soviets, princes, farmers.
Nightmare. It’s the word people use again and again. As if language does not have any waking words to describe the texture of war.
Nightmare. It’s the word people use again and again. As if language does not have any waking words to describe the texture of war.
Kateryna Mikhalitsyna, a poet and author of children’s books, recalls celebrating her birthday on February 23. Just her husband, her dog, her three kids. “It seems to me now that it was so quiet, so nice, like a reward,” she says. “And then the next morning we wake up to the sirens, and ‘Mama, it’s war’.” Her children, alerted on their phones not to go to school that day, knew before their parents. Kateryna lets out a frustrated groan, clenching her fists as she does so. “It still seems like a nightmare,” she says.
The next day Kateryna began gathering things for refugees pouring west. She heard a story on the radio about people making hedgehogs, simple anti-tank devices composed of three intersecting girders, so she did the same. Driving from the border to Lviv, I’d been fascinated by them lining entrances to small towns and villages, so evocative of all the war movies I’d see, a throwback to the 20th century, like so much else about this war.
Kateryna presented a watercolor she’d painted for me—a fox on a hillside, looking up to the sky. It was beautiful, vibrant with color. Although she has not been able to find her voice as a children’s writer since the invasion began, she says that poems come to her thick and fast. Shortly before the war, as the violence in Donbas escalated, she reached out to friend in the Ukrainian town of Niu-York, a city named by German Mennonites and the site of a literary festival Kateryna had attended. She wanted to know how they were managing. One of the festival volunteers wrote back, “Everything is usual, a little sun, a little rain.” For Kateryna it was the start of a poem. That was on 18 February, and she is still writing them, tapping stanzas into her phone as fast as they come to her. “They just keep banging into my head,” she said. One arrived shortly before I did, as she sat in the café, and I asked her to read it to me in Ukrainian. Near the end I recognized the same refrain repeated. Could she translate? “I am a target,” Kateryna replied. It is a poem about a shelling in a bread line.
I wanted to know if Kateryna had Russian friends. Only one, she replied—an author that she had translated into Ukrainian. “But she has not been in Russia for many years, and lives in Costa Rica,” Kateryna added. “And she strongly supports Ukraine.” Those Russians in her Facebook feed, she added, were against the assault.
How did she feel about Russians? “Something between pity and disgust,” she said. “I don’t feel hate, that would destroy me. Disgust is the strongest feeling I ever had for another living person in life.” She told a now-familiar story. Her mother-in-law is originally from Russia, but when she speaks to her relatives there they refuse to believe her account of the war.
“Guys, you are bombing us.”
No, this is absolutely impossible.
“I am your sister and I have been in Ukraine for 40 years, and you are telling me what I see out of my own window?”
No, you have this nationalist running wild over there.
As we talk, Kateryna receives a call from her daughter, telling her that Russians are shelling Lviv. Neither of us had noticed the sirens. “It’s not so safe,” Kateryna says when she has ended her call. But we stay there, and finish our coffee.
She recalls a woman and her ten-year-old son standing on the platform, visibly shaking.
Like Ostap, Kateryna also found herself at the train station in the weeks immediately following the start of war. She recalls a woman and her ten-year-old son standing on the platform, visibly shaking. “She just kept saying, over and over, ‘I don’t want to sleep in the station, I don’t want to sleep in the station,’” Kateryna recalled. The woman had fled from Kharkhiv, one of the cities that had been most heavily shelled. “She asked to hug me and I kept her in my arms for a few minutes,” said Kateryna. “She calmed down, and I helped her figure out how to get to friends who lived outside the city. And then I gave her my number in case she couldn’t get to where she was going.”
Kateryna didn’t see the woman again, but a few days later an unknown number popped up on her phone. “I don’t like unknown numbers but since the war started we are all getting calls from unknown numbers,” she said. It was a stranger who told her that he’d heard how she had helped a friend of his. Would she help his family—he was going to put his wife and three children on the train. Could she be there to meet them. Such is the way it goes in war. Every now and then she gets a call from a family in Germany, in Poland, in Slovakia whose path had intersected with hers. “Hello, we are safe, thank you—you are our angel.”
Kateryna smiles ever so slightly. “No, not an angel,” she says. “I’m a human being, and I am a mother and I can imagine what it’s like to be in a strange city with small children and a single piece of baggage.”
This recalled a moment from my journey to the Ukrainian border. We had stopped to pick up a generator at a small Polish school which happened to be for deaf children. It was lunchtime, and the director insisted we have something to eat in the dining room where, perched on small chairs for children, we tucked into large bowls of borscht, pasta with mushrooms and cabbage, a soft drink of indeterminate flavor. The director was a jolly figure, and before we left he pressed ceramic angels made by the students into our hands. “Angels for angels,” he said in all seriousness, a sweetly sentimental gesture that we couldn’t turn down. Those three angels traveled the rest of the way with us, wedged in the front of our van, a strange trio alongside the baby formula and pasta and tins of pet food that slid lethally on every pothole. Those potholes had become so familiar to Marcin that he’d given them names. “These are the Addams Family,” he said on one particularly treacherous stretch.
Here’s a popular Ukrainian schoolyard taunt that Marcin had told me as we drove across the border. “Your mother is so old she learned Russian at school.”
On my last night in Lviv, I made my way through the drizzle, and the now familiar wail of the air raid siren. My destination was a small dance studio, one of a few that has not become a dormitory for refugees. As I pushed open the door, the strains of a tango broke the damp silence. Inside, a small group of women were practicing their moves with two men too old to be on the front lines. Legs hooked around legs, hands settled in the soft indentations of the back. A lady in gold lamé heels was being led by a handsome gent with a ring in his left ear, a fine mustache, and a moon-shaped face.
My destination was a small dance studio, one of a few that has not become a dormitory for refugees.
It was in Warsaw, en route to Ukraine, when I heard about Lviv’s rich tango scene, from an austere looking young man, on the train from the airport. His name was Joshua Von t’Hoff, and he was there from the Netherlands, to attend a tango event. As I was heading to Lviv, he suggested that I connect with the tango “community” there, one of the most vigorous tango scenes in Europe, he said. So I did, spending an afternoon in the back of an Italian restaurant with a group of seven women and a lone man who gathered regularly to drink wine, swap news, and talk shop. Among so many people, conversation was difficult and choppy and often had to be translated, but listening to my recording of that afternoon what I enjoy is the cross-talk, the laughter, the clang of silverware. There was something irrepressible about the dancers and their stories of the Remolino, Lviv’s annual tango contest—Europe’s largest—that had turned their city into a magnet for tango pilgrims. Ten days of non-stop dancing. Although none of those in the restaurant had danced since before the war, there was optimism that might soon change. “We believe we will dance again by summer,” one woman declared to much vigorous nodding. There were eyewitness reports that the dance stage outside Café Diana in Rynok Square was being built again.
How did tango come to Lviv? The question seemed to have as many answers as there were dancers in that restaurant. I was told its roots go back a hundred years, to Jewish musicians between the wars, tango kings like Artur Gold and Jerzy Petersburski. You can hear Petersburski’s The Last Sunday, or the “suicide tango,” in Krzysztof Kie´slowski’s movie, White.
Europe’s Jewish tango scene expired in the flames of the Holocaust (Petersburski had the foresight to flee to Brazil; Artur Gold, tragically, did not), but it echoed after the war, on Polish radio, where the old melodies remained popular, and accessible to those living in Lviv. But what brought tango roaring back to the city was independence and tourism, and a man called Viktor Danyluk, an Argentinian professional dancer drawn to Lviv in search of his family roots. He stayed just one month, but it was long enough. Tango was back. Danyluk’s name is now invoked as something of a legend.
People react with surprise when I tell them that I met with tango dancers in Lviv, but is it so unusual? The Warsaw ghetto had a symphony orchestra, five theaters, chamber groups, choirs and cafés. During the Blitz in London, trains continued to operate, teashops were open. Milkmen made their rounds, blithely scrambling over collapsed houses to deliver milk. There were dances. These, of course, are the stories of resilience we need during war, the Blitz spirit that has an echo in Ukraine today. As it happens, the dancers in the restaurant didn’t have to wait until summer. In May, I received a text message from a friend with a short film she’d recorded on her phone. It shows tango dancers, back in Rynok Square, some in long winter coats, some wrapped in the Ukrainian flag. Two children, perhaps ten or eleven years old, swirl around the square in full evening dress. A small orchestra plays alongside a slow, sad tango with six or seven couples moving gracefully across the granite square as the trumpets unfurl. Then the camera settles on a woman at the edge of the square, dancing solo with an invisible partner–three steps forward, one back, then forward again, a gesture of such tender poignancy that it took my breath away.
Angela Garbes hadn’t planned to write another book on motherhood. Her first bookLike a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy, a reported investigation of pregnancy in exuberant and detailed prose, was published in 2018. But during the isolating dawn of the pandemic, Garbes began ruminating on the question: “What is the most valuable thing I could be doing with my time?” The answer was not writing another article or making a podcast but rather ensuring the wellbeing and security of her family and community: “It is an honor to care for them; they are parts and extensions of myself.” Thus began her journey that resulted (happily for readers) in Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change.
Her definition of mother is not constricted by those who birth children, nor by gender, but rather more expansively and beautifully focuses on the caring of children as the act of “mothering.” She writes that raising children “is a social responsibility, one that requires robust community support. The pandemic revealed that mothering is some of the only truly essential work humans do.” The paid (and unpaid) work of caregiving, mostly performed by Black and Brown women, however, is horrifically undervalued when it is paid for. This number from Oxfam is especially stunning: in the U.S. only, women would have earned (at minimum wage) $1.5 trillion dollars for the unpaid care work done in 2019. The figure for the entire world was $10.9 trillion dollars.
Garbes reflects on the nature and current state of caregiving via her Filipino American family, and the caretaking work done by the Filipinx diaspora around the world, and her personal and communal experience of mothering. She urges for a view of mothering as a radical path towards social change, as well as for universal income for caregivers, in the lineage of the campaign of the National Welfare Rights Organization led by Johnnie Tillmon and other Black activists.
I spoke to Garbes about intimacies, how her mother (and her daughters in the future might see) reads her work, and the sustaining the hope behind her manifesto.
JR Ramakrishnan: What was the biggest insight (or most stunning/shocking fact) you came upon in the research of this book? The one I was taken with was the salary of 300K you’d have for care-taking of your family.
Angela Garbes: The statistic that will stay with me forever—the one that clarified my vision for this book and the need to include my own Filipino American family’s story—is this: Filipinx nurses are 4% of the nursing workforce in America but account for 34% of nursing deaths from Covid. It made the devaluation of care work done by women of color—the very lives of women of color—undeniable.
JRR: You are probably quite accustomed to writing about intimacies after your first book. I was struck though by your speculation of your mother’s childbirth issues. Your husband discussing standing up/lying down type sex/penises with your daughter was so honest, hilarious, and personal. Does your mother read your work, and what do you think your girls will think of all this in the future?
AG: My mother reads my work, though she doesn’t always like it or approve of it! But she is so generous in her support of me and belief that these are my stories to tell. Our relationship is complicated, but her love for me is unconditional and the greatest gift of my life. As for my daughters, I have no idea what they will think! I expect they might be upset with me at some point as they get older, but I trust that we will talk about it. I will listen to them and we’ll figure it out.
JRR: I really related so intensely to the meditations on the body. Your Dance Church experiences cheered my heart. Also, the scene where your daughters remark on you getting fat was just breathtaking in so many ways. Was that difficult to write? Do you think they will be able to hold on to this sense of body positivity for their own bodies and those of others?
AG: It was extremely difficult to write! (As was the knowledge, as it was happening, that I would be writing about it. Writers are such traitors to our families.) Writing about my body, committing those feelings to the page honestly, is one of my biggest challenges, but I believe it is worth it—both for me and for readers.
I honestly don’t know if my daughters will be able to hold on to body positivity as they grow up. Diet culture and fatphobia are so powerful and insidious. If they can’t be positive all the time (and really who can be?), my hope is that they can feel something close to neutral about their bodies and that they will always know they are so much more than their bodies.
JRR: I loved the scene where your daughter’s babysitter Penelope has a t-shirt with a slogan about the brainwashing of European beauty standards and how you proceed to explain it to your daughter. For me, this scene encapsulated so well how the work of mothering is done by so many and those who are maybe not mothers themselves and unrelated by blood to the cared-for, and how radical it can be (in this case, overturning beauty programming early). Your community sounds incredible. Can you talk about how you’ve nurtured yours?
Filipinx nurses are 4% of the nursing workforce in America but account for 34% of nursing deaths from Covid. It made the devaluation of care work done by women of color undeniable.
AG: Yes, I could not survive without my community! I’ve nurtured mine slowly and deliberately, over the course of many years and thousands of meals, playdates, dance parties, work parties, phone and FaceTime calls, backyard hangs, postcards, tears, hugs, texts, vacations, awkward conversations, walks, misunderstandings, and help, asked for and given.
JRR: You write about how you are thumbing your nose at your parents’ version of the American Dream and all its contents (including individualism). I loved this idea that you note about freedom coming from the Indo-European word friya meaning “beloved” and its links to more connection, and not less. Yet so much of the more contemporary construct is still incredibly powerful for many in and outside of the U.S. still (though perhaps waning). How do you think your book would read to someone outside the U.S., a would-be immigrant in/from the Philippines, for example?
AG: Honestly, I don’t know! What I do know is that most immigrants, especially Filipinx, come for economic reasons and remit much of their income back home. So while they live an individual life, it is in service of their beloved families, always maintaining a connection.
JRR: I felt truly your book is such a document of what the pandemic has truly wrought for many: a rethinking on how to be a human being. Are you hopeful for this (seemingly more) communal shift to continue as we move out of the pandemic? Both on the level of communities but also on a policy front (for e.g. Los Angeles Guaranteed Income pilot which called to mind the National Welfare Rights Organization campaign you reference). I am curious as to when you finished writing the book and if you are more (or less) hopeful now in 2022?
AG: I finished writing the book in November of 2021, just before Congress allowed the Advance Child Tax Credit—monthly payments that, since July 2021, lifted nearly 4 million children out of poverty—expire. That is extremely disheartening, as is the Biden administration’s failure to deliver on its promises of paid leave and codifying Roe v. Wade. While things feel bleak, I am hopeful. And what gives me hope is that I can’t afford not to be hopeful. Mariame Kaba says that “Hope is a discipline.” I think about how oppressed people and colonized people still have thriving cultures against all odds, and that gives me hope. My ancestors did not give up and I won’t either.
Duplexes for whatever is the antonym of coming out
When I said full homo, I was
lying. I just meant I loved you.
I lied, saying I just loved you.
There was no such thing as just love.
There is no such thing as just love from me —
I’ve heard that every love out of a queer body is a queer love.
I don’t know if every love out of my queer body is a queer love.
After all, how queerly should I love my mother who does not believe in bisexuals?
I love my mom though she doesn’t believe in bisexuals.
Does your mother know now? Of your homosexuality.
If your mom knew of your homosexuality
we wouldn’t have been able to squeeze onto your daybed past midnight.
I woke from your daybed, squeezed next to you, watching the aftermath of a sleepover in all
our friends across the floor. How I loved you all. How unqueerly I loved you girls.
How I loved you. So unqueerly, and so much.
Then, what mattered most was sure of itself. Demanded it be loved with no shame.
My mother’s love is so sure of itself. I do not shamelessly demand more of
what is already cast in its own infinity. She says I smell like the wind.
Our friendship is cast in its own infinity, smelling of sand and salt and wind. Forever
Arizona kids turning fifteen, fossilized in that field trip to California.
In my mind, you still turn fifteen, turn into summer. But we’ve left Arizona. Turned nineteen.
My mom still blesses me every morning, asking for love in my life.
My mother prays: Let my child be normal and be loved normally.
She doesn’t even consider wishing for my heterosexuality.
I never considered wanting to be straight.
In queerness, I am more like you.
In queerness, I am often lost. I am so unlike you.
And I am still a bad queer. Don’t ask me what I’m afraid of.
I was a bad queer before I even knew I was one, when I was afraid of nothing.
So I said I love you, full homo. The multiple of zero is still zero.
I don’t say that anymore. The quotients of infinity are still infinity.
I may not be a flaming homosexual but I know heat now.
Our love may not have been homosexual, but I know it’s warm where you were.
I just wanted to say I love you. No homo.
In thinking about this reading list, I considered writing about “overlooked” Kentucky writers. I realized, quickly, that this would be redundant. Even someone like Wendell Berry, who is well known in Southern literary circles, is far from a household name. To make any list of Kentucky writers is to call attention to a kind of “underground” literature. There are those who know, of course, that Wendell Berry is one of the 20th century’s finest writers, but if you ask someone in New York about him, they’re liable to say, “Who?” Likewise for Bobbie Ann Mason. The writers from Kentucky who have managed to transcend the limits of the label—Hunter S. Thompson, Barbara Kingsolver, Robert Penn Warren—have tended to turn, in their work, toward America at large, thereby avoiding the connotation of “regionalism.”
I thought a lot about this regionalism as I worked on my novel, Groundskeeping. At one point, the protagonist, Owen, is asked whether he’d like to be thought of as a Kentucky writer or an American writer. His answer is that Kentucky is America, that it’s microcosmic; its struggles and conflicts are America’s struggles and conflicts. Our country’s most antipodal figures, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, were born in Kentucky, and the battles they fought then, both real and ideological, are still with us.
And so, my hope for this list is that readers will turn to the writers I’ve named, not just to learn about Kentucky, but to learn about America—to see our perennial strife reflected in art.
C.E. Morgan
C.E. Morgan is perhaps best known for her novel The Sport of Kings, an epic saga about family, historical trauma, and the beauty and danger of horse racing. But I first encountered her work eight years ago, when I read All the Living. It’s a spellbinding story about a young woman who goes to live with a man who’s inherited a remote tobacco farm in Kentucky. They must struggle not only against the elements, but to understand one another and their fierce, divergent desires. The language is archaic at times, its rhythms almost Biblical, but it never misses the mark, and brings to life the foothills of Appalachia with vivid clarity.
Frank X. Walker
We owe the term “Affrilachia” to Frank X. Walker, and his first poetry collection of the same name interrogates the meaning and the legacy of Black life in Appalachia. The themes of inheritance and history come up again and again in Walker’s poems, specifically the way we inherit narratives that turn out to be false. Two of his most powerful books, When Winter Comeand Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, are retellings of historical narratives that challenge our assumptions and elevate forgotten voices. It’s this motivation—to challenge, to disclose the story beneath the official story—that characterizes Walker’s career. His poems are so important because they treat Kentucky—and by extension, America—as a complex, layered place, a place that can’t be reduced to a simple, univocal story.
Bobbie Ann Mason
It’s always been a mystery to me why Bobbie Ann Mason’s name is not listed alongside Raymond Carver’s and Ann Beattie’s in discussions of the 1980s’ short story renaissance. Her collections Shilohand Love Life are as good as anything the decade produced, and her novel, In Country, is in many ways the definitive story of America’s grief post-Vietnam. Thematically, she often wrote about the confrontation between rural America’s agrarian past and the rapidly metastasizing consumerism of the 1980s. As their culture and traditions disappear, Mason’s characters in small town western Kentucky must reexamine what they believe and how they define themselves. For a sampling of her work, including excerpts from her more recent novels, Patchwork, released in 2018 with an excellent introduction by George Saunders, is a good place to start.
bell hooks
Since her death last year, bell hooks’ work has enjoyed a much-deserved renewal of interest and appreciation. Like many of the writers in this list, the story of her career is a story of coming full circle. She left Kentucky as a teenager, pursued opportunities “out in the world,” and found herself longing to return later in life, to put down roots in the state where she was born. Her collection of essays, Belonging: a Culture of Place, traces this spiritual and artistic journey. All About Love: New Visions, reprinted in 2018, braids many of the wide-ranging interests and themes of her career into one beautiful, culminating text. It’s a book not just about love, but about division and power, and the possibilities for redemption.
Chris Offutt
I think of Chris Offutt as a story writer, first and foremost. Kentucky Straightand Out of the Woods were touchstones for me. The stories are rooted in the concept of home and what it means to belong. Many of his characters try to escape Kentucky, or dream of escape, but find themselves tethered, for better or worse, to the place where they were born. My Father the Pornographer, his memoir from 2017, is a funny, tender book about his father’s career as a writer of erotica. It has, like all of Offutt’s work, a deep generosity and a willingness to look past human foibles. But more than this, it’s a book about the irreducible mysteries of family life and the complicated meaning of home.
Silas House
In the past two decades, Silas House has written some of the finest contributions to Kentucky literature. His ear for dialogue, and for Kentucky’s unique patterns of speech, is unmatched, and his characters are always treated with tenderness and respect. There’s a lot of empathy in his work, but it’s never sentimental. In Southernmost, from 2018, he tells the story of a small town preacher who shelters two gay men in the wake of a flood and must face the judgment and ire of his congregation. It becomes a story about family, acceptance, and forgiveness—themes that run throughout House’s body of work. But it’s the notion of belonging, and what it means to belong to a place, that seems to preoccupy House more than anything. As far as themes go, I can think of none more central to the experience of living in Kentucky.
Crystal Wilkinson
Crystal Wilkinson was named Poet Laureate of Kentucky in 2021, and her collection Perfect Blackcame out the same year. It tells, in fragments, a heart wrenching coming-of-age story about Black girlhood. Her language is often elegiac, but precise, never lapsing into easy nostalgia, and she captures so well how growing up can be a magical, strange, and often frightening experience, especially for a Black girl in the South. One of the things I admire most about her writing is the attention paid to Kentucky’s natural landscapes – not as inert backdrops, but as real, living points of contact. Nature has the power to transform us in her work, to show us glimpses of the mystical embedded in the everyday.
Wendell Berry
No list of Kentucky writers could exclude Wendell Berry, who has written passionately—for more than half a century—about nature, agriculture, and the decline of rural communities in America. There are so many books by Berry I could recommend. The Unsettling of Americais probably his most important work—a fierce indictment of industrial agriculture and the powerful interests that have pillaged our earth, destroying local cultures in the process. But a more complete, and perhaps accessible, compendium of his essays can be found in The World-Ending Fire, which came out in 2017. As the title suggests, Berry has become a kind of prophet among ecologists and advocates for sustainable farming, and his writing has apocalyptic undertones which were not always obvious to me until I read his essays collected in this career-spanning anthology. His message, repeated again and again, is that we’ve lost our way, that there’s a better life available to us beyond consumption and waste, beyond the plunder of nature. It’s a message that transcends the borders of his home state of Kentucky and addresses the world at large. One can only hope that we take it to heart.
Just like we don’t choose who we love, we don’t choose the iconic blockbuster hits of our youth that go on to build up and break down our conceptions of love, relationships, and sexuality. I grew up in rural Texas, in a town so small the high school marching band played when the Home Depot opened. I was surrounded by people who thought they were, pretended to be, or actually were straight. My social calendar was filled with Young Life invites and pep rallies for our dismal football team. I was mainly raised by my closeted gay dad in a homophobic family and I wouldn’t come out myself until I was twenty-three and 2,000 miles away. I look forward to watching the current queer youth grow up with JoJo Siwa and Janelle Monáe to model all the different prefixes to the word “sexual” but for me, queer representation was practically nonexistent. I took what I could get, and that was Meg Ryan.
When people ask me about my sexuality, I say things like: “the friendship to relationship pipeline is big with me” and “I wasn’t interested at all until I read their writing” or “heard her voice” or “saw his passion for esoteric intramural sports” or one of those other million things that draws you to a person regardless of gender expression or initial sexual attraction. Press me further and I’ll ditch the platitudes and throw out words like pansexuality and demisexuality. They line up with my experience well enough.
In my world, physical or sexual attraction almost always comes after the getting-to-know-you phase.
When I tell you I’m pansexual, what I mean is that I don’t care if you identify as a man or a woman or somewhere in-between or beyond—if I’m attracted to you, I’m attracted to you. When I tell you I’m demisexual, I mean that I am seldom physically attracted to someone at first sight. In my world, physical or sexual attraction almost always comes after the getting-to-know-you phase, sometimes years after. Romance wasn’t built in a day. Enter NORA EPHRON.
A name that “sounds like a nasal spray,” a 1978 profile of Ephron declared. These days, it seems that clued-in queers are not meant to like Nora Ephron movies. I’m still waiting for someone to pop out of a dumpster and tell me I’m a bad queer, maybe throw a box set of The L Word in my face. We’re scared of Nora Ephron. There are entire articles written about being too afraid to rewatch Sleepless in Seattle. And it’s a reasonable fear—’90s rom-coms rarely age well and her films, in particular, take place in an almost dystopian world of privilege (full of “New Yorker-reading New Yorkers” wrote The Guardian’s Luke Walpole). But if you’re looking to interrogate the archetypal gender roles and straight white heterosexual cis-gendered bonanza that is every Ephron movie, I’m sure there’s an early 2000s Wesleyan graduate thesis out there for you—this just isn’t it. I won’t deny or excuse the obvious limitations of these movies (read: the invention of the “high-maintenance” woman) but I will wholeheartedly co-opt them for my own queer purposes.
The ‘fact’ of Sally’s attraction is dissociated from a drive for physical intimacy.
Let’s start with my favorite of the Ephron Triple Threat (Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail): the timeless tale of friendship to romantic love, When Harry Met Sally. When Harry Met Sally came out in the summer of 1989 to lukewarm critical acclaim. The New York Times called it “amazingly hollow” and “the sitcom version of a Woody Allen film.” Those critics, however, soon ate their hats as the film came to be regarded as a (if not the) foundational text in the romantic comedy genre. When Harry Met Sally is structured around what Vanity Fair contributor Sonia Saraiya dubs an “inverted” romance. The movie spans twelve years of animosity and friendship until it finally settles into the evergreen promise of the genre — true love.
Physical attraction is addressed and dismissed throughout the film but the two leads have different styles when it comes to swatting away the subject. Harry is blunt from the beginning:
HARRY: You’re a very attractive person.
SALLY: Thank you.
HARRY: Amanda never said how attractive you were.
SALLY: Well maybe she doesn’t think I’m attractive.
HARRY: I don’t think it’s a matter of opinion, empirically you are attractive.
But ultimately the “fact” of Sally’s attraction is dissociated from a drive for physical intimacy: “You know you may be the first attractive woman I have not wanted to sleep with in my entire life,” Harry remarks with his characteristic polish. Sally, however, dodges the question of physical attraction altogether. She disdains Harry from the start. “You think he’s cute?” she quips to her friend, who says she finds him attractive. This is the inverted romance, summed up nicely in the film’s epilogue:
HARRY: The first time we met we hated each other.
SALLY: No, you didn’t hate me, I hated you. And the second time we met you didn’t
even remember me.
HARRY: I did too, I remembered you. The third time we met, we became friends.
SALLY: We were friends for a long time.
HARRY: And then we weren’t.
SALLY: And then we fell in love.
Physical and/or sexual attraction after years of emotional connection. What does it say about straight romance fantasies that one of the most iconic heteronormative romantic comedies of all time is an “inverted” romance? If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a pansexual love story about the beauty of demisexual romance.
Where When Harry Met Sally dabbles in the realm of physical attraction after emotional intimacy and love after emotional bond, Sleepless in Seattle dives straight in, altogether disregarding the myth of physical attraction as a precursor to intimacy and love. Meg Ryan is recast as Baltimore journalist Annie and Tom Hanks begins his Ephron career as the widowed father and architect Sam.
Sleepless is a story of falling in love. Not with come-hither eyes or love at first sight or even the sting of electricity as two hands brush by each other (“Magic,” as Annie’s mother describes it). It is the story of falling for words, voices, and sighs. Jokes and type-written letters, adolescent interventions, and the unfathomable, embarrassing reality of realizing you might love someone you’ve never met — physically. The film is self-conscious of this “abnormal” method of falling which is primarily elucidated through Annie’s dialogue. To her brother, she confides frantically: “I’m having all these fantasies about a man I’ve never met, who lives in Seattle.” To which he responds, of course, “It rains nine months of the year in Seattle.” Eventually, Annie does get a glimpse of Sam but importantly never comments on his physical appearance. Famously, the first time they truly meet (on top of the Empire State Building, no less) is the final scene in the movie. The leads are onscreen together for about two minutes. But by that point, we know and they know it too — true love.
There’s this amazing line early in Sleepless. The classic Cary Grant vehicle, An Affair to Remember, appears several times throughout the film and is the inspiration for the meeting at the Empire State Building. But before that, before the happy ending, Annie’s best friend (played by Rosie O’Donnell) turns to her pining friend and says, “You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.” She’s talking to me, too. But then I’m reminded of this tweet floating around gay twitter, something like rom-coms are like if straight people acted like lesbians. And I have to think Rosie would be inclined to agree with that one.
Ephron takes the earlier concepts of ‘inverted’ romance and loving someone you’ve never physically met and just absolutely goes to town.
Five years after Sleepless in Seattle, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are back with late 90s haircuts to prove it. They reunite as Kathleen and Joe in You’ve Got Mail where Ephron takes the earlier concepts of “inverted” romance and loving someone you’ve never physically met and just absolutely goes to town. It’s 1998 now, so instead of Meg Ryan’s plucky typewritten letter we get dial-up internet, usernames like “Shopgirl” and incoming emails set to the tune of AOL’s not terribly timeless proclamation (and the movie’s namesake): “You’ve got mail!”
If we see these movies as a series, one building off of the other as Ephron refines and calcifies her audience-pleasing depictions of modern romance, You’ve Got Mail is the finale. Here we have two people who fall in love entirely (at least initially) over written communication. Ephron goes to great lengths to emphasize the nature of their romantic connection as something that is cerebral. At the same time that Kathleen and Joe are falling in love over AOL, they are feuding in real life. Of course, the film allows plenty of time for this feud to resolve so that by the time the truth of their identities is revealed, the revelation is that of a desire come true rather than the rude dream-shattering shock it may have been otherwise. The point being that this love, despite the parallel foil plot, is built from something other than physical attraction. Conveniently, of course, they are both extremely attractive people. In the script, Kathleen is described as “pretty and fresh as a spring day” while Joe is “a great-looking guy, full of charm and irony.” What did you expect? Again, this is a late 90s blockbuster we’re talking about.
It is almost impossible to feel out your attraction to someone based on a few photos and some cherry-picked one-liners.
There’s some analogy here to modern dating apps. But mainstream dating apps are sort of a wasteland for the casual demisexual. It’s like peddling around in the ocean searching with your toes for a sandbar that may or not be there. You end up just flopping around for a long time, searching for something solid. It is almost impossible to feel out your attraction to someone based on a few photos and some cherry-picked one-liners. So you text and text and text, waiting for something interesting to happen. Waiting for Meg Ryan in a sweater set to one day meet you at a cafe with a red rose and a copy of Pride & Prejudice because if that’s not gay, I just don’t know what is.
My dad, his husband, and I have a group chat called “Bitches.” (It used to be “bitches” but my dad got bored one day and capitalized all of his group chats.) My dad’s husband sent a photo of his car radio playing the Cranberries’ hit “Dreams.” “Watch out, you’re in a montage in a 90s movie,” I responded. A few days later I realized I was remembering a very specific montage in a 90s movie. At the beginning of You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks bounce to work, walking within blocks of each other yet blissfully obvious of the other’s true identity while Meg Ryan’s voice-over narrates their latest exchange. “Dreams” plays:
“And oh, my dreams It’s never quite as it seems ‘Cause you’re a dream to me”
I have found that in a small town in Texas, you can say you like You’ve Got Mail. You can’t always say you like like Parker Posey.
Queer storylines may not have been top of mind for Nora Ephron in the 90s. She had other things to worry about like making sure the first half of Sleepless didn’t have the color red in it. But she relinquished these stories into the world where they landed squarely in my queer hands. I have found that in a small town in Texas, you can say you like You’ve Got Mail. You can’t always say you like like Parker Posey. These movies brought me narratives that fit my experience in a format that felt safe for my environment at the time. I didn’t have the words “pansexual” or “demisexual” but I did have these characters performing attraction and desire in ways that felt familiar to me. I know now that these ways of existing in the world – from “inverted romances” to the intangible nature of pansexual attraction – are intrinsic to my queer identity. “Never quite as it seems” indeed.
So the next time you’re on a walk, I dare you: bring a pair of headphones and blast “Dreams” as you walk down the street. Stop and smell the deli flowers, chaotically replay lines of old love letters in your head, and imagine you’re Meg Ryan on her way to get her life smashed to pieces by the promise of true love. Feels pretty gay, right?
Outsiders often perceive truths invisible to the majority. They tend to observe the scene more carefully. Like newborns, they must learn how to fit into a new world.
For me, as with many immigrants, it is not always comfortable to be an outsider. After emigrating from The Bahamas—to the United States, India, Spain—the very idea of “home” has become elusive, forever divided: not there, not here. I relate to the Taiwanese film director, Ang Lee, who says “I’m a drifter and an outsider. There’s not one single environment I can totally belong to.” The Caribbean-English word for a person like me, is Nowherian—a person of no fixed abode.
In addition to being Other (as all immigrants are), being queer places me even further on the outside. Unlike many Black immigrants to the United States and Europe, my reasons for emigrating were not economic, nor was I a refugee. Being gay and “out” in The Bahamas means facing strong social and religious stigmas, the potential loss of a job, family, social status, and most of all, loss of dignity. Yet, having arrived in the gay-friendlier countries, I still find myself an outsider. Being queer means that even among fellow immigrants, I don’t belong. I am Other to the other Others. As both queer and an immigrant, I am doubly removed from the dominant culture. And yet, being a queer outsider is an odd kind of privilege. Poised at an even greater critical distance, our vantage point allows for a bird’s-eye perspective; for visions of novel possibilities—and even for possible novels.
My debut novel, Greenland, is the story of Kip Starling, a young Black author writing a novel about the real-life love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed El Adl—in which Mohammed’s story collides with his own. Three of the main characters are queer immigrants struggling to find their own truths while navigating intimate relationships in their new homelands. Each crosses borders of class and race to understand the new territory—with all its burdens and possibilities.
These seven novels collectively give a wide perspective from the queer immigrant’s vantage point. Each has confirmed my own experience, as well as enlightened and inspired me to value this particular and, paradoxically, privileged perspective.
In this groundbreaking novel, Claude McKay—an icon of the Harlem Renaissance, and a Jamaican queer immigrant—fulfilled my fantasies of Marseille as a seedy but beautiful French port city teeming with a vibrant mix of native Francophones and African immigrants (both North and Sub-Saharan).
In Romance in Marseille, we follow Lafala, a Black African immigrant who stows away on a ship from Marseille bound to the United States. On the ship he is discovered, confined, and then tortured to the point of needing one leg amputated upon arrival in New York. With the luck of getting connected to a white lawyer, Lafala wins a lawsuit against the ship company for his torture. Lafala returns to Marseille with the money he’s awarded. He finds America—with its institutional racism and rampant capitalism—uninhabitable for a Black man. Once back in Marseille, Lafala re-enters the world of local immigrants—an array of colorful characters who work in and around the port. Among them are a lesbian couple (an Arabic and an African woman), a gay male couple, and even the protagonist seems open to bisexuality. Romance in Marseille, written in 1933 but not published until 2019 (initially “unpublishable” due to its queer content), is one of the very earliest novels to represent overtly queer people, and queer people of color. McKay’s conversational tone—often poetic, too—manages to entertain and delight while also being a searing commentary on racism, classism, and homophobia.
In this rollicking picaresque novel, Manrique’s protagonist, Santiago Martinez, is a young Colombian poet, navigating his way through the turbulent—and often hilarious—trials of being both gay and a newly-arrived immigrant in New York City in the 1980s. From a rural Colombian upbringing (where bestiality is presented as common place for boys’ sexual initiations), to the social world of the drug-dealing rich Colombian families and their literary politics in Queens, to the life a of a lone gay writer living in Times Square (along with its sex workers and their pimps), we fall in love with Santiago and his take on the new worlds he encounters. In Latin Moon in Manhattan, Manrique brilliantly pulls off a novel that is, at once, literary, social critique, comic, tragic, and heartwarming. Quite a feat.
This novel, set in turn-of-the-20th-century Jamaica, tells the most unusual queer immigrant story I’ve encountered. The protagonist, Lowe, is a Chinese immigrant to the island. Since women were prohibited from traveling alone, Lowe has disguised herself as a man to stow away on a Chinese ship bound for the Caribbean. In order to protect her identity, and for safety, she continues to live as a man in Jamaica. The ensuing action is an intriguing byzantine hall of mirrors. Lowe has children who never realize their father (Lowe) is actually their mother. She/he has lovers who are both male and female—but often present as different genders. And all along, Lowe faces being a triple outsider in the new homeland: Chinese among a Black majority, non-white in a British colonial power structure, and queer. Powell’s writing luxuriates with an unhurried musicality that reminds me of being in the tropics. This novel presents a multilayered look at what it means to be a permanent outsider, and how one survives, or even finds refuge, in such a state.
Salvation Army by Abdellah Taïa, translated by Frank Stock
Abdellah Taïa is a personal hero of mine. In 2006, at 33, he became the first openly gay Arab writer—and the only openly gay Moroccan writer. If you have any appreciation of the courage it takes to come out amidst the virulent homophobia in Taïa’s homeland (and by the time you finish this brutally honest autobiographical novel, you will), you’ll understand why Taïa should be considered a hero. If that were not enough, Taïa is also a writer of exquisite skill. His prose is deceptively simple, even seeming naïve. But he is a powerhouse of a stylist.
In Salvation Army—a work often called “autofiction”—Taïa pulls no punches. He shares the truths of growing up gay in Morocco; his early sexual encounters with older men; his lusting after his older brother; his calculated encounters with European men; and finally, the betrayals from European lovers upon migrating to Switzerland and France. This coming out and coming-of-age novel is an essential milestone in queer history. Taïa’s talent also makes it a powerful, unforgettable literary experience.
Neel Mukherjee may be one of the finest novelists of our day. With his second novel, The Lives of Others, critics compared him to Leo Tolstoy, because of the breadth and depth of his work.
A Life Apart, his first novel, tells the story of Ritwik Ghosh, a gay Bengali man who immigrates to England after the death of his mother. The theme of being orphaned from his family and his home run throughout the novel, both losses ladened with ambivalences. But this novel is not somber. The absurdity and comedy of life with its gritty (often disgusting) details are constantly at play. Mukherjee especially spares no details of Ritwik’s sex life—mostly “cottaging” in London’s public lavatories, or in the cars of anonymous men. But the novel is not pornographic either. The layers are increased by the novel-within-the-novel being written by Ritwik—a mirror to his own migration: the story of an older woman who has emigrated from England to live in India.
In London, Ritwik finds himself “at home” among other immigrants and outsiders. A Life Apart is as complex and layered as the reality of a queer immigrant. In other words, it provides the paradoxically privileged perspective—one capable of revealing some universal truths about the tragicomedy, and sometimes base sensuality, of being alive.
In Chinelo Okparanta’s debut novel, a coming-of-age lesbian story set during the Biafran war in Nigeria, the protagonist, Ijeoma, makes an unusual kind of migration. After her father is killed in the war, and her mother so traumatized she can no longer raise her daughter, Ijeoma is sent off to live with a family in the safety of Nnewi, a town to the south.
Ijeoma’s migration is not from one country to another, yet it is quite another reality into which she is thrust. When she meets a similarly war-displaced Hausa (Muslim) girl, (Ijeoma is Igbo and Christian), they begin a first romance that catapults them into a world of their own—a world they must keep secret since it is not only taboo but punishable by imprisonment or even death. Through the girls’ relationship and its evolution over many decades (being forced to part when discovered, reuniting, marrying men to stay safe), Okparanta gives us a detailed depiction of the myriad difficulties facing queer persons in Nigeria. It is a powerful illustration of what it is like to be an eternal outsider in your own home, forever an immigrant, never truly belonging.
In this widely acclaimed masterpiece, Ocean Vuong has written an autobiographical novel that is as gorgeous and yet brutal as its title suggests. The paradoxes are plentiful: the story is written as a letter to a mother who cannot read; and the narrator is bound by a love to mother who is also his abuser. “You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I.”
Vuong’s narrator, Little Dog, is the son of a biracial Vietnamese woman and an American G.I., born after the Vietnam War. After years of trauma in war-torn Saigon, Little Dog’s mother emigrates to the United States with her son and mother. They all move to Hartford, Connecticut, where they live on the fringes of society in poverty.
This novel is slim but dense—both linguistically and with ideas. Two dominant themes are: the complex relationships to mother and motherland (especially when both have been brutalizing and yet sustaining); and the ramifications of being a “monster,” in society’s eyes, and the subsequent tragedy of internalizing that idea (in this novel, both for mother and son). And yet, in a first adolescent sexual relationship with a white American boy—Trevor who lives with his alcoholic father in a trailer—Little Dog experiences moments of surprising tenderness and finds beauty, even in himself. Trevor eventually abandons the relationship, not wanting to be a “fag.” But with this unique story from a queer immigrant, we are left with a deeply human question: Can the beauty and freedom often experienced in youth ever be sustained? This is a book to savor.
It’s not just public catastrophe, like the HIV or COVID-19 pandemic, that drives us to write. A private catastrophe, one just in our own body, can do the same. In 1976, Susan Sontag sat dying or not dying, and she wrote. Sontag had cancer. She wrote about cancer in Illness as Metaphor. She wrote as she was herself ill. The big C. She wrote, “Today, in the popular imagination, cancer equals death.” She wrote, “As long as a disease is treated as an evil, invincible predator, not just a disease, most people with cancer will indeed be demoralized by learning what disease they have.”
Writing seems a reasonable reaction to the possibility of physical disintegration, to the threat of the annihilation of any version of herself not requiring a faith in the hereafter. Writing is forever. This is a human quality, one that becomes stronger as the end feels inevitable. Perhaps this is the writer’s reflexive response to trauma in the world around us or to trauma within our bodies. We don’t understand, and we are afraid, and we feel alone, and so we seek to explicate, if only to ourselves.
She did not write a journal. She did not write a diary. Publicly, she wrote an essay.
She never claimed her own cancer; she didn’t admit in this book that she was ill, facing her end. She could not write herself well. She could not write away her illness. She wrote away the place her illness gave her in society, a double illness in her mind. She could only cure the word cancer of its myths, which were as deadly as the disease itself. She wrote, “Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character.” She didn’t think she was being tested; she was just sick.
In 1979, Audre Lorde sat dying or not dying of cancer, and she wrote. She wrote for herself, private words. Her work announced itself as private in its very title, The Cancer Journals, when she shared those journals publicly. The stigma of disease, the pain of recovery, the fear, these forces can choke us into silence. She wrote, “I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”
Lorde wrote against and into her pain, against and into her death, against and into her body. Lorde saw other women around her fighting the same disease, but longed for another Black body, a feminist body, a lesbian body, to pull her along. And so she bared her body, her illness, the possibility of her death, publicly. In 1979, breast cancer looked like it did to Sontag in 1976 and to my own grandmother in 1973. Lorde was Black, which made any illness look different, which made and still makes breast cancer more deadly, not because of the biology of race but because of racism.
Lorde saw other women around her fighting the same disease, but longed for another Black body, a feminist body, a lesbian body, to pull her along.
I know stories of my grandmother’s 1970s cancer from my mother watching her mother’s pain, from the matriarchal lineage of memory in my family. I know my grandmother’s almost death, even as her children were just beginning their adult lives. Major surgery, perhaps followed by chemo and/or radiation, or perhaps not.
Lorde was coerced into wearing a puff of lamb’s wool in her bra immediately following her surgery so that her missing breast wouldn’t be apparent to others. My grandmother had a silicone implant put in so that she would look like a “normal person” (her own words) in clothes. Lorde wrote, “I looked strange and uneven and peculiar to myself, but somehow, ever so much more myself, and therefore so much more acceptable, than I looked with that thing stuck inside my clothes. For even the most skilled prosthesis in the world could not undo that reality, or feel the way my breast had felt, and either I would love my body one-breasted now, or remain forever alien to myself.” When my grandmother’s implant burst inside her, the pain was worse than the surgery, worse than the cancer itself. Her daughters caught glimpses of her body rarely, in a mirror. I don’t know if her sons saw her body at all. I know this because her daughters, both, told me.
My fear of cancer, of the ultimate and forever annihilation, of the moment at which all feeling ceases, made me miss one fundamental truth of this particular disease. My research on cancer, how I turned it into a biological problem to be taken apart, to be solved, hid this from me. Or maybe I’m just such a man I couldn’t face the feelings staring me in my face. Cancer hurts. It just fucking hurts. Our bodies are not our own to control. After my grandmother died, I read Audre Lorde on her own cancer, her own almost death. She said what my grandma would not, what my grandma let pass in silence or only told to her daughters. Lorde sat dying or not dying from cancer and she wrote, “There were fixed pains, and moveable pains, deep pains and surface pains, strong pains and weak pains. There were stabs and throbs and burns, gripes and tickles and itches.” My grandmother told her daughters, “It is a pain of 10 out of 10 to lift my neck from the pillow. It is like having a 100 pound weight on me.” My grandmother asked me, “Why am I still alive?”
This level of intimacy and vulnerability models a new way of being in relation not just to writing, but to one another.
Lorde’s private writing showed me things I didn’t know about my own family. This is the power of private writing, of publishing journals, even while we’re living: this level of intimacy and vulnerability models a new way of being in relation not just to writing, but to one another. Our relationship with the text can change how we want to treat, and be treated by, other people, including our family. Sontag explained her choice not to include private writing, or even the details of her own identity as a cancer patient, later in another essay, this time on the metaphors of HIV: “Twelve years ago, when I became a cancer patient, what particularly enraged me and distracted me from my own terror and despair at my doctors’ gloomy prognosis was seeing how much the very reputation of this illness added to the suffering of those who have it.”
“The metaphors and myths,” she writes, “I was convinced, kill.”
She didn’t talk about her own cancer in her book. “I didn’t think it would be useful,” she said, “to tell yet one more story in the first person of how someone learned that she or he had cancer, wept, struggled, was comforted, suffered, took courage… though mine was also that story. A narrative, it seemed to me, would be less useful than an idea.”
But Sontag’s ideas came from her body. For me, as a reader, feeling with Lorde, and seeing the ideas that came from that feeling, changed my mind and body. As a reader, the journal showed me more. Sontag claimed that telling her cancer story would be narrative, common, something we’ve already seen, a story we already know. But I see it differently. It’s not just narrative; it’s embodied feeling. And it’s worth it to feel and think at once.
In her book Funeral Diva, Pamela Sneed writes of attending funerals of Black gay poets lost to HIV in the early 1990s, almost too many to count. But it wasn’t just Black gay men dying of AIDS, it was women, too, like “Pat Parker / The pioneering Black lesbian poet who hailed from San Francisco / [who] like Audre Lorde had died prematurely from cancer.” Parker died in 1989. Audre Lorde died in 1992, at only 58, of breast cancer. Queer Black lives lost from HIV, queer Black lives lost from cancer. A body is a body is a body; White Supremacy produces Black death. How many lives and words were robbed from us not by cancer or by HIV but by homophobia, by racism?
Sontag and Lorde: I cannot read one of these two books without immediately reaching for the other. They are siblings in my mind, twins whose differences seem so stark because the under- lying circumstances are—by definition—so similar. Two women had cancer and wrote it down. One woman wrote an essay, never naming the fact of her cancer. The other wrote a journal, naming it over and over.
And yet, when it comes to signifying illness, I see the vast majority of white writers citing Sontag alone, not even knowing that she has a sibling-book telling an equally essential story.
Scholar José Estaban Muñoz considered Pedro Zamora’s decision to live his private (as queer, Cuban, and HIV positive) life publicly on early reality TV, writing, “subjects like himself never have access to full privacy.” Lorde, a self-described Black, feminist, lesbian, understood that publicly writing the full extent of her private illness was a radical breaking of the public/private binary, a binary that for her—as a queer Black person—had always been a lie.
For Black people, the history of America is one without the possibility of a private life: what right does property have to privacy?
For queer people, as Muñoz writes, privacy is a recent and incomplete right. For Black people, the history of America is one without the possibility of a private life: what right does property have to privacy? Resistance to this dehumanization is a history of languages invented to remain whole as people and a white American public that either violently reacted to or appropriated these languages into the mainstream.
Lorde is, in her book, speaking for herself and on her own terms, sharing her life and world in exactly the ways she wants. She might not have had me as a reader in her mind as she wrote, but I am so immensely grateful that she shared her private life with me in ways that Sontag didn’t seem able to.
Sontag’s book looks exclusively outward, at the world of literature, of ideas. “A narrative, it seemed to me, would be less useful than an idea.” Private writing requires, in my thinking, an ethic and aesthetic of looking inside, of laying the body or life of the writer bare, of looking closely at the self, and claiming that self on the page. If you write it down, it never needs to make its way into public writing; if you don’t write it down, it will never have the option to. The rest is a question of revision, of editing, of choosing what to share. The vastness of life requires editing. You can’t live along- side me; you—the reader—have your own life to live. So what moments from my life birthed ideas? If I want to share boredom with my reader, what bored moments of my life should I focus on and write through? What moments distilled a feeling that meant something to me, or that I learned from?
Our ideas come from somewhere. Lorde’s famous notion that our silences will not protect us, quoted so often and almost always without naming The Cancer Journals as its source? This idea comes from the experience of being a Black lesbian breast cancer patient.
My ideas come from reading Sontag, reading Lorde, and living, and I need to show all that if I want to tell something like the truth.
Growing up in Center, North Dakota—a town with 600 people, no stoplights, and boundless grasslands—Taylor Brorby quickly understood that the coal his family members mined kept him housed and fed even at the expense of his home. But this is all too often the way of the American West’s prairies, a place marked by its simultaneous beauty, grandeur, and harsh extremities. In his coming-of-age memoir Boys and Oil, Brorby perfectly captures the longing for a landscape he clung to as a child while also exploring how there is nowhere to hide when the world around you has been ravaged and scarred by our endless demand for energy.
In lyrical and biting prose, Brorby tells the story of his life up to this point—from growing up gay in the harshness of rural North Dakota to pursuing a larger life and becoming an environmental activist protesting at the Dakota Access Pipeline. He shows us moments of male aggression seeking tenderness and secret romances, as well as the heart of the Bakken oil boom and displays of great resistance. Bound at times by violence but more often by a hopefulness toward what’s possible, these narratives of identity and the environment interlace to create an unforgettable picture of the Great Plains and the people that call it home.
I spoke with Brorby about the intersections between the violence done upon his home and the own terror he’s faced as a gay man growing up in the prairie, advocating for the environment in communities economically tied to oil extraction, and his hopes for the future of literature about the American West.
Michael Welch: Boys and Oil tells the parallel stories about your experience growing up gay in rural North Dakota and your path toward become an environmental activist after seeing the ways oil drilling has fractured your home. How did you see these two threads intertwining and informing the other as you wrote?
Taylor Brorby: They’re so related in the sense that when you’re gay or queer, you don’t fit into what we standardly think of as “rural America.” In that culture, if you’re a boy who likes drawing or anything beyond the standard sort of Friday Night Lights fare, you have to find yourself some place else. For me, that was spending a lot of time out in nature. I didn’t come from a particularly bookish family, and if you were inside, it was sort of like you were going to get musty and die, so I would often be sent outside. My eye was trained on landscapes, and I spent a lot of time fishing and roaming the wheat fields and creeks.
When you’re gay or queer, you don’t fit into what we standardly think of as ‘rural America.’
I found that the prairie is such a diverse landscape, but the mental space of the people that tend to occupy the prairie is so monoculture. It’s so odd to me, because even though the prairie is more diverse than the Amazonian jungle because of all the grasses and interwovenness of it, we view it as “flyover country.” I viewed myself as a little diverse, but though it’s supported by the natural world, it’s not in the human imagination in this part of the world. Flyover country gets destroyed; it’s the place where we only have large fields of soybeans, wheat, and corn. Power plants there are the pride of rural America, and it’s true that it supplies necessary power to cities and suburbs, but the destruction of that diverse landscape seems to me directly related to the violence toward queer people in particular.
MW: Early in the book you describe a piece of coal you kept as a kid, saying:
“I’d hold the universe in the making, layer upon layer of Earth’s history—one part dinosaur bone, two parts bird feather, many parts mystery, compressed by millennia.”
I found that view both beautiful and kind of tragic, as it’s something so tied to the Earth that ultimately is used to harm it. How has this view shaped your writing and activism?
TB: You have to remember that coal is actually many lifeforms compressed into a dense form. It’s stunningly beautiful. To me it’s as precious as emeralds or rubies. The hard thing in the landscape of industrial capitalism is that we’re taught to consume things quickly and have shoddy products. I mean, I’m talking with you with my charging cord that’s only two years old and it’s only holding together with electric tape. But coal, like oil, is a precious thing. I don’t see us in a system yet where we can get off of these things, but they should be used sparingly, judiciously, and with reverence. We forget that whenever I start my Prius, that’s starting a fire. We’re all doing it every day when we get in our cars. For coal to be made even more precious, we must burn it to keep the lights on. But as a kid I always kind of knew that there was a deeper sense of time. Not only did coal come from my part of the world, I knew that dinosaurs roamed these lands. I mean, the printing press has barely been around for a half of a millennia, and we’re using a product that has taken thousands and millions of years for us to come and rip from the Earth and burn really quickly. Our sense of time is off, and to think about deep time helps put the times that we’re living in into scale. Coal is worth protecting just like queer children are worth protecting because of the slew of anti-queer legislation upon us. It’s clear as gin in my mind that these are directly from the same source of destruction.
MW: When we talk about environmentalism and the trauma that fracking inflicts, the pessimistic point of “well, this just is how people make their living” always comes up. While your own family’s livelihood came from fossil fuels, you’ve become a devoted environmental activist against projects such as the Dakota Access Pipeline. How do you respond to that tension—if it even is a tension at all?
Coal, like oil, is a precious thing. I don’t see us in a system yet where we can get off of these things, but they should be used sparingly, judiciously, and with reverence.
TB: I think my job is to put my family out of work in that version that I’ve inherited and turn it into something better and cleaner and more perennial. I grew up surrounded by people who bitched about the type of work they had to do, and I thought “that’s how low the bar is.” That’s why we frame things as jobs instead of careers, because jobs are shitty but careers have a longer shelf life. Jobs are like fracking, because it’s an extractive economy. Careers are much more like the prairie; they’re this intermingled relational way of existence. But you can’t have a career as a coal miner because it’s only been around in my part of the world for less than a century. There’s a finite amount of the work, and it brews cancer in the communities where it’s blossoming. None of that is a perk. What you hope is that you’ve been paid a decent enough wage that—God forbid—when cancer comes knocking on your door, you can weather the storm of that. So we need something better. Rural America deserves that. But instead of embracing the diversity of the land, we’ve diminished it to a one-time harvest.
To say that “I’ve grown up in coal country” is an insult because it’s reduced to its lowest common denominator. And that’s not life-honoring work. So for me it’s not tension but instead great sadness, because of course this is how people have to make their life because this is what capitalism does.
MW: It’s really interesting to hear you talk about how closely the human body and the land are tied, and it makes me think about your time in Dickinson in and around the Bakken oil fields where you frequently came across apparel and bumper stickers reading things like “Going Deep,” “Pumping Hard,” and “Frack That Hole.” What do you make of this co-opting of language about sexual violence against the body with what is a violence against the Earth itself?
TB: Well for one thing, North Dakota is always number one for binge drinking. People are very prideful from the part of the world I come from. I grew up with this myth that everyone told me about how people from across the country love the North Dakota work ethic. But having lived in many places across the country now, I can say that most people don’t even know where North Dakota is. It’s just a lie. People must know that their existence is hard scrabble, so they pump themselves full of liquor and cream and unhealthy food. And every bad idea the country has had has been tested in North Dakota. The genocide of Native American people. The reservation system. Hydraulics, the damming of the Missouri River, and the flooding of indigenous land because of that. Monoculture agriculture. Fracking. Homophobia. There are literally nuclear missiles underneath us because during the Cold War, farmers said they’d willingly give up their land so that we could aim missiles across the ice caps toward Russia. The former mascot of the University of North Dakota was the “Fighting Sioux” that all the white people loved, but when there were actual Sioux in 2016 demanding clean drinking water, everybody came out in their racist stripes. In these spaces, it’s very risky to be a woman, to be a person of color, to be queer. It tells you everything in those bumper stickers that this is how we view people and the Earth. They think the Earth is female, and they use and objectify females. It’s violent.
MW: That has me thinking about the ways violence in language becomes violence in action. You explore how you had to live fear as a gay man growing up in the rural West, and you also mention a few times Matthew Shephard, a gay University of Wyoming student who was killed near Laramie in 1998. How did you see these present dangers affect the way you viewed your home?
TB: Let me be clear: you cannot safely be who you want to be in Center, North Dakota come hell or high water. One of the things you have to learn growing up in rural America is how to code switch. It’s not lost on me that even at this late day in 2022 that if I put my hand on a man’s thigh for long enough in that town of 600 people, I probably wouldn’t be safe getting out of the county that night. And I think that’s actually in a majority of America, because this is just where we are, the narratives we tell, and the violence we allow.
Anyone who’s viewed as different can be a death sentence in the wrong place at the wrong time.
When I think about my Grandpa Hatzenbihler, the first and last thing you had to do when you walked into or out of his house was give him a hug. And I remember one time one of my male cousins didn’t give him a hug because he had a girlfriend with him, and my grandpa openly narrated it and berated him—which brought me great satisfaction! To me what that signaled was that love should be physical and tender, and also that men shouldn’t be hardened toward affection.
Speaking of Matthew Shephard, I once got ran down the hallway in Laramie, Wyoming when I was doing a reading because a guy hijacked my conversation with two women and told me “you can’t fucking talk right now.” This is real life still. It’s not really great to be gay if you’re in Great Falls, Montana or Rawlins, Wyoming. You have to learn how to be someone you’re not, because literally the bar is so low that it looks like survival. Anyone who’s viewed as different can be a death sentence in the wrong place at the wrong time.
MW: That makes a lot of sense, because it definitely seems that all the boys you grew up around were coding their affection to one another through shows of aggression. You even write that “nothing, after all, survives on the prairie being tender.” In an environment where tenderness is received with hostility, where did you find your first examples of what non-toxic love looks like?
TB: I had the great benefit of kind grandparents. I had the world’s greatest grandpas, and I continue to do all of my writing at the desk my Grandpa Brorby made for me when I was eight. He loved woodworking, and every summer he performed in the small town musical. He worked at the coal mines and yet loved joking with men and could fit in while still being creative and passionate about art.
To say that ‘I’ve grown up in coal country’ is an insult because it’s reduced to its lowest common denominator.
And my Grandpa Hatzenbihler was a character for the ages. My favorite thing we did was go pick berries together, and when I say that it sounds so queer in the absolute best way. He was this big, sausage and cream-fed man who was so big in my mind, and he’d lower branches that were too tall for me to reach. I also to this day still can’t touch worms, but my grandpa would never belittle me like other men in my life would. It was this sort of gentle thing, like we don’t even have to acknowledge it or make a comment like “you have to be tough because we live on the prairie.” I’d come to understand that beauty is important because my grandparents recognized it, whether it be sanding and staining a piece of myrtlewood or picking berries. In the part of the world I grew up with, those moments had to be private so that you could present yourself in a different way in public, but as I grew up, I learned that those things could be celebrated.
MW:What do you hope to see in narratives about the West and its land moving forward?
TB: I hope to see narratives where it isn’t just Westerners showing their soft underbellies and saying “take everything we have and we’ll be grateful,” because it’s a one-time harvest. I mean, I hope we see a cacophony of voices. We need stories of staying and understanding. And there are regions in the West that I’m not sure we are meant to have permanence in. I mean people in Phoenix will hate me for saying this, but having a green lawn in Phoenix is just like, oh my god. In Lake Mead just last week, one of the water intake systems that gives to Las Vegas is above the water mark. It’s not the future, we’re in it now. We need to have real conversations about the times we’re in and the amount of people a landscape can support.
What’s troublesome is that it’s always the vulnerable that’s going to be screwed by this. I’m hoping that we see voices rise up that challenge the narrative that says that a first line of defense is for people to write narratives where minority groups feel seen. Being seen is not enough. Being seen has to then launch a second wave of saying “yeah, we’re here and now that wave is rising to challenge and subvert things.” I wrote this book because I wanted it to exist and I wanted it to be on a bookshelf and to feel seen. Now I want queer people on the Great Plains not to overthrow in that cliched term, but rise up and say “we are active and deserve a place at the table.” Our perspective is not only valuable, it’s also the way we need to move forward. It’s the model for compassion and safety in a time where everything is on the line.
A boy has died in the crypt. (I’m told this is what they call the bottom of the mine, now: the crypt.) Benji, my surveyor, has come to tell me the news. As he stands before me, I notice that grime has crept into the folds of his face; that his overalls are stained with streaks of mud. The air conditioning in the trailer seems to unnerve him, bringing him to flinch as it cranks to life once more, a steady breeze causing his shirt to flap upon his chest.
“This is a problem,” I tell him.
Benji nods, knowingly.
“When can he be retrieved?”
“The others refuse to go. They are afraid.”
“Afraid?”
He shakes his head, as though disappointed in himself. “They believe there is something evil in the deposits. That the dead boy has been claimed by a monster. That it would be wrong to bring him back up.”
The air conditioner stops and the trailer falls silent.
“I see,” I say, for many of the boys who work in the gold mines are from the bush, and I know their beliefs to be primitive. Even my own father—who grew up under a hut in a village he came to disdain—took to such nonsense on occasion.
What must be understood is that the executives are to arrive later today. They come to tour the grounds periodically, and there cannot be a corpse rotting away, no matter if it is unreachable, no matter if they will never glimpse the horror themselves, for there are many horrors here, and all of them must be hidden on the day these men come.
“Take me to them,” I say. And Benji, his shoulders falling in acquiescence, opens the door to guide me out.
Few are familiar with the brightness of the sun after a morning spent underground: emerging from the deposits, the sudden prick of heat upon the skin building to a burn, as if in time it might torch you to cinder. I worked the mines when I was younger, under the supervision of my father, and so I know the sensation. Nowadays, I mostly see its power on the faces of the miners when I approach them. They work tirelessly, noiselessly, and yet their fatigue can be gleaned from the way their knees buckle when their wheelbarrows falter on a ridge of stone; in the slouch of their shoulders when the pickaxe grows too heavy on their back as they carry it to storage.
The mine shaft is before us, workers steadily flowing out of the elevator in their yellow hats and suspenders like bees exiting a hive. Benji has us turn towards the smelter—its innards, bright as lava, sending swirls of heat into the air as it is fed endless quantities of ore. The boys in question are lined up under the break canopy, awaiting my arrival. Sweat masks their faces, and I know the feeling of wanting to undress under the weight of the heat: to find the nearest source of water and jump. (There is a perversity here, for when their shifts end, they will find only the chill of the night; and by the time they take to their showers in the barracks, the shiver of the cold will be as unwanted as the sweat that came before it.)
There are individuals versed in retrieving bodies from the mine. It happens, perhaps twice a year, and it must be handled with great care and discretion. It is reported to the attorney for the company that backs us, a man I have never met and know only as a voice. It is of the utmost importance that the matter remains confidential–including the payment to the dead man’s next of kin. So in such an instance, when the boys who are trusted with the task are reticent to do it, the occasion has become delicate enough to require my full attention.
“Boys,” I say. Benji stands at my side, his arms tucked into the pouch of his overalls. I pace before them like their superior officer, telling the same story I have told so many other employees, perhaps these same ones. “Did you know that I worked these very mines when I was your age? That what you fear, I once feared? That my own brother died under rock-fall? I had only waved goodbye to him the very morning of the accident. If I had not been holed up with my father, learning how to manage the books, I would’ve died alongside him. In a sense, we, too, are brothers.” I point at them now. “Tethered by this place. But as I did my duty back then, you must now do yours.”
I stop, then. I face a boy who is staring at me with great resolve. The sun has broken his face into a leathered mask like that of a man twice his age. He is so dark that his skin matches the blacks of his eyes, and it is the yellow of his pupils, the ravages of some burgeoning disease, that shines brighter than the rest of him.
“The body is in the crypt,” he says. “Where the scientists go, we do not.”
I look to Benji, who nods in confirmation. “They say he went on a dare,” Benji tells me. “He fell from the path as he descended.”
So this is what they mean by the crypt. Scientists overtake a segment of the mine each winter, examining microbes in an astonishingly deep vein of earth. The dig goes so far underground that it often makes the news. The boys fear what might be found there. It is wholly irrational, for it is merely another cavity of dirt, but I now understand the problem.
“I need this taken care of quickly,” I say. “I will double your wage for the day.”
The boy who spoke stands tall now, defiantly taking the shirt laid upon his shoulder and wrapping it upon his head as he steps into the sunlight from beneath the canopy.
“The Grootslang lives in the crypt. We do not go there.”
“The Grootslang,” I say, under my breath. An elephantine being with a serpent’s tail. Bush folklore. More nonsense in a day far too full of it.
“It will make you see great horrors,” the boy says. “Torment you in ways you cannot imagine.”
I breathe in, and smell the tobacco on the boy’s breath–then there is the stench of the heat, of the day’s work, like hot piss emanating from his being. I turn to the mine elevator. On certain days, exhausting days when I stay long after the rest have gone home, I have eyed my brother there–waving, beckoning, as though I should come to him. The darkness coalesces then, absorbs the specter whole, and it is gone in an instant. Is this their fabled monster? A child’s fear of the dark?
“What is your name?” I ask the boy.
“Felix.”
“Felix,” I say. “We will speak again soon. And Benji.”
Benji turns.
“Make sure the men carry on working as if nothing has happened. As it must be. Appearances and what have you.”
My employer has called to inform me he is on his way, so I know to wait for him in my trailer. I sit there, twirling my pen, thinking. I had asked Benji if there were any others who would retrieve the body, but all those who might take on the job have formed a pact behind Felix; he is, Benji told me, a reformed criminal, a man who knows death and does not flinch from it. I will need his help. I have to reach him, somehow. Make him do what must be done.
There is then a knock at the door, and they do not wait for me to answer before coming in. There are six men in all, led by Ross Fletcher himself, the face of Tibor Holdings, the largest mining outfit in all of South Africa. He is wearing a polo and khakis. They are all wearing polos and khakis. After this meeting, Mr. Fletcher will take them to a golf course two hours away, an idyllic place of combed sand and green fields, and the other men, prospective investors, will tell their colleagues that their money will not be scrutinized once entrusted to such a conscious enterprise as Tibor Holdings.
“Nicholas!” Mr. Fletcher says, his hand springing towards my own.
“Sir,” I say.
His teeth are immense, his pectorals full, and when the air conditioner turns on once more his nipples appear with a sudden wakefulness.
“These men are from London, Nicholas. They’re eager to see the facility.”
The men, wary, hands behind their backs, nod to me. I nod back. Once this is done, Mr. Fletcher’s presentation begins, an exchange we have had so many times it’s taken on the air of theater.
“This photo, behind Nicholas, that is his father. He was a surveyor here, a wonderful worker . . .” The men are nodding again, eager to consume this narrative. I look back at the photo myself. These visits are the only time I do so. My father in his church suit, his bony jowls and thick lips, eyes beaded, like he cannot make out the photographer before him. The pride in the straightness of his back. Look at me, he used to say. A twig of a man. An African from the backcountry. Yet look at what I have done. Think of what you will do . . .
The men are staring in my direction. It is my turn to speak. “Yes,” I say. “I thought nothing would stop my father from working until that tragedy took place. The loss of my brother was too much to bear. He never stepped foot near the mines again.” I do not say that my father was a near-mute after the accident; that the few words he shared after it were put towards the task of getting me to quit my job right alongside him. That my refusal to do so was the greatest shame of his life behind the guilt of letting his firstborn die.
Mr. Fletcher steps forward, now. He is adjacent to my desk, and I allow him the spotlight.
I am an obedient and nothing more, a man paid to own the deaths of others.
“The least we could do was give Nicholas the chance of an education. In short order he returned and took us up on our offer to become the first African captain of a mine. He runs the entire production. His story is remarkable. I would say it’s one of Tibor Holdings’ proudest achievements.”
He does not say that though this is the only mine of its kind, it is a mere token of significance. I am an obedient and nothing more, a man paid to own the deaths of others.
His hand—a fleshy mound, soft and child-like—is on my desk. The thought of this slab of wood, this wood he owns and allows me to borrow, brings to mind my dinner table at home. My father had it made of African Teak, large enough to sit twelve, running the length of the dining room. He would sit at its head, relishing his authority, deciding who would give their thanks before the meal, declaring his need for another helping and expecting the dish to be placed before him. My brother and I would sit on opposite sides of him. Often, as my father told stories, or gave commands, I would rub the swirling knot of wood upon the tables’ underside, as though it might give me strength, some means to escape my father’s scrutiny, the next command I did not wish to answer to, the next piece of wisdom he would quiz me on in the days that followed. I feel for it, now, under my desk, that knot, knowing it is not there; knowing there is no reprieve from the moment that is upon me.
“We’d love to take a tour inside the mine,” Mr. Fletcher says. “Where are the hard hats, Nicholas?”
The room has grown so hot I feel the need to disrobe, to lie upon the floor and discover the coolness of each vinyl tile I might find there. “We are, unfortunately, conducting a safety review of the mines,” I say. “It is a full-scale, top-to-bottom effort. We can’t have any visitors inside.”
Mr. Fletcher’s gaze finds me, and I feel my insides flinch. His coolness, his ability to show no feeling, frightens me.
“Did you not know we were coming, Nicholas?”
“It is a terrible oversight, one for which I apologize. It will not happen again.”
He is still hiding his teeth, and soon begins to crack his knuckles despondently, some vague assertion of power.
“You will be spending the night at the Prince Grant Estate, no?” I say. “Why do you not take the tour tomorrow, when you come back this way? We will be ready, then.”
“The mine is quite a detour . . .” Mr. Fletcher eyes his guests, but they are silently shrugging, for this is vacation for them, and it would appear they don’t wish to take on any further responsibility than that of a guest. “. . . So be it. Tomorrow afternoon, then. We will work off our breakfast with a walk in the mines! What could be better?”
The men laugh at this so loudly the trailer shakes. There is absolutely no reason for them to laugh this loud. Mr. Fletcher squeezes my shoulder—as though pinching a child’s cheek—and leads them out. He does not look back at me—only waves with the back of his hand.
I arrive home at night, the moon bright in the cloudless sky. The veranda sits empty, the wooden shutters on the windows open just enough that I can glimpse movement inside. Although it is beautiful, I have always found this place strange–a white-washed, colonial home my father had built some distance from town, beside a marsh that holds no life. I have no idea why he enjoyed such desolation, but I am of the impression he treated this place as a sanctuary of sorts; a place he could rule when he had so little power to his name.
I exit the car, and at the sound of my daughter’s voice I can feel my shoulders fall limp, a pressure escaping me.
“Who is this intruder at my home?” I ask. “I’m calling the police!”
She runs wildly, wobbling to and fro so recklessly that I nearly break down in tears. It is remarkable that this can happen every day. That I might never grow tired of seeing her sprint towards me with no care except for the wish to feel my arms wrapped around her.
“It’s me, Lila,” she says, her face falling into the crook of my neck.
“Lila?” I act stupefied. “But my daughter could not grow so much in a single day.”
“I have!” she says.
A silhouette is before the door. The child’s nanny. Lila’s mother and I, although not divorced, live apart. She is a nurse in town with a condominium near the hospital. She works in marathon shifts that last days; she then takes Lila for extended periods, however long she wishes. When she brings her back I often mention that she looks fatigued, that she should come in and rest, and she tells me that I should feel the same sympathy for the mine workers who frequent her clinic with such exhaustion that they cannot keep their eyes open long enough to speak in full sentences. I then once more appreciate the distance that separates us.
Imani, the nanny, informs me that Lila finished her homework earlier in the evening. I see my daughter’s books spread out upon the dining room table and nod. The lights are on in the kitchen, in the living room, as I prefer it. There is no reason a house of such bounty, of such beauty, should be shrouded in darkness. I wish to see it all: the family portraits on the wall; the cabinet with my diploma; my father’s medal of service; the bowl of appreciation that Benji delivered to me after his promotion (inscribed as so: To a fine man, my boss); the long couch with fluffed pillows that I often fall into with a tumbler of whisky.
“Would you like some dinner?” Imani asks.
The smell of the spices waft through the air. She is often making some recipe from her home village, some obscure stew with game meat, the sort of offering you envision being stirred in a cauldron.
“What is it?” I ask. “I imagine you have made something . . . unique for us.”
“Not really, no,” she says. “Just tacos. Lila’s favorites. Would you like some?”
“That would be nice.” Lila is pulling on my pant leg. She asks to draw with me in the dining room while I eat. I tell her to go there. That I will join her soon. When she is off, I inform Imani that she may retire for the night when she has prepared my plate. I then excuse myself to go shower, to cleanse myself from the remnants of the day.
As I eat, I watch Lila draw beside me at the dinner table. I wipe the long curls of her hair from her line of sight, smile down upon her as she pokes her tongue from her mouth in concentration.
“Scrunchy, papa.”
I retrieve a scrunchy from the living room, attend to her hair, putting it up before returning to my meal. I love the child’s hands. I think of my father’s hands, as rough as the paws of a feral dog, calloused over as though boils festered at the root of his every finger. My own callouses have disappeared over time, and there appears to be some evolution, some law of good, that will afford my daughter’s hands to be forever soft: saved perhaps, for gesticulating orders to a boardroom full of executives; or for leading a classroom. She will not be dull like her father. She will not have his scars. The opportunities are endless, and it is the income from my work that has allowed this. There is a life of wrongs made right by this fact, and the nature of this truth is something her mother never understood.
I sit back in my chair, the very chair my father once claimed, and take in the sight he assigned himself when building our home–the marshland that faces out from the back of the property, a small bed of murky water that strings itself to the greater body of the Limraso River. It was a walk my father and I would take on occasion, prattling along the river-bed when it was dry, each footstep locked in a vice of mud, our hands playing against the surrounding reeds. If he was in a particularly good mood, our strolls would become a game of tag. I recall him running ahead of me, out of my line of sight, yet I could make out his head atop the grass, floating off in the distance, bobbing as he sprinted away. When he had reached a clearing, he would turn and point to me with a mocking laugh, and I would enter a sprint knowing he would turn and escape me once more.
There is a life of wrongs made right by this fact, and the nature of this truth is something her mother never understood.
The water is high, now, and the marsh appears as a pond might, the surface twinkling, spotted with the reflection of the stars, and it is no coincidence that my father has come to mind in this moment, for there is a figure–right there, if one looks closely— floating above the marsh, a sculpted void that cuts through the darkness, a shadow that presents itself in the shape of a human, lithe and decrepit, wavering, as though it might disintegrate in the wind.
The figure, as though sourcing life from the light of the moon, molds flesh, grows real, and before I can look away, lanky limbs have protruded from this shadow form—a single hand has risen up from its arm. It points to me before vanishing.
“Papa,” I hear my daughter say. “The picture is done.”
I do not look at my daughter, nor at the marsh, but rather I close my eyes, feel under the table, once more seeking the knot of wood from my youth; and when I cannot locate it, as though time has grooved the table’s contours smooth, I abruptly stand, so quickly my daughter drops her marker.
“It’s time for bed!” I say.
“Papa?”
“Come now,” I say.
“You didn’t look at the picture.”
“I will look as I tuck you in.”
Lila waits as I put my dishes in the sink, standing with her head cocked, the picture limp in her hand. I return, leading her upstairs, each step creaking as we ascend. I’m eager to remain calm, to think of anything beyond what I have witnessed. It is a saving grace that there is life in every corner of this home, pleading to be freed; the walls bleed memories, and they consume you at every turn. To take a step, to touch the handrail, to open a door, offers access to endless recollections: my father’s hand upon my backside as I run from punishment; a glimpse of my mother slipping into her bedroom to nap away the afternoon. Even as I enter Lila’s room, meeting the sweet smell of her candy-scented hairspray, the brightness of the walls, a child’s yellow, I cannot help but strip away the paint, the years, and envision the bedroom that was once mine and my brother’s.
I have her under the covers. Safe, her eyes finding my own as I look over the picture she’s set on her nightstand. There is nothing to it. Lila and her mother and I, holding hands, in the manner all children draw families, one row of stick figures. One row of smiles.
“Your hand,” Lila says.
It is trembling.
“Something has come over me,” I say. And once more, as my mind scrambles for relief, I am lost to the past, thinking only of the silence of my home, the strange quality I felt lying where Lila now lies when I was a teenage boy, of how peaceful it was with my brother dead and gone. Not smelling his odor from across the room. My contempt when he would rise for a glass of water, rousing me when I had only just fallen asleep. Such guilt knows no bounds. Even now, I have the urge to sell this place and start anew elsewhere, only for it to be undone by the shame once more, as I envision the home razed to rubble by its future buyer. This image transforms in my mind to that of my brother somewhere in the shaft of the mine, the walls closing in on him. Rock crushing him flat.
I put the picture down and rise up from the bed.
“Shall I leave the night light on?” I ask Lila.
“But you always tell me I must be brave, papa. That I should keep it off.”
I am peering out the window. There is nothing but darkness.
“We can make an exception,” I tell her.
“I’m brave,” she says.
“Of course you are,” I say, leaning down to kiss her forehead.
I turn off the nightlight and say goodnight without even waiting for her to do the same. I walk briskly to my room as though there is something to run from. And yet before I enter, a noise (could it be laughter?) filters out from Imani’s bedroom, opposite mine. I listen to muffled sounds, and before I can stop myself, I find that I am knocking on the door.
The noise quits. There is a shuffling, the sound of objects being moved. I have never done this before, knocked at such an hour, but something has unsettled me. The floor trembles with some unseen fragility, and the walls of the hallway narrow. Sweat has leaked down the span of my back and into the cleft of my behind. I am not well.
“Imani,” I say.
Her voice is nothing more than a peep. “Yes?”
“May I open the door?
The room is spotless, the bed made, the walls unadorned. Imani is on the floor, sitting before the trunk pressed against the front of the bed. The phone, its cord snaking from the wall, sits on her lap. I’m not surprised by the arrangement. I often used to eavesdrop on her conversations. That was until I heard her, once, speak of my marriage. Saying how I was to blame for the dissolution. The certainty in her voice as she gossiped still rings in my ears whenever we speak. Our distance from each other has been sealed ever since, and if it wasn’t for her closeness to Lila, she would no longer be here. But the question at hand feels urgent. It must be asked.
“I have interrupted something,” I say.
“It’s my mother,” she says, pointing to the phone with an index finger. “Is that okay? You told me it would be okay to call once I have finished—”
“It’s fine. Perfectly fine.”
Her eyes are doe-like. Her skin shines pure. She is a different person here, left alone in this space. A young woman that laughs and cries, I am sure; a young woman of great vibrancy, of complicated personality. A young woman I am now intruding on. And just as quickly as I have spotted this hidden person, I notice her eyes contract, her smile fade, and I realize I have worried her. Not by my presence, perhaps, but by what I might need. By the news I might bring.
“I only have a question,” I say. “I wish . . . to have your opinion. I have heard of a beast. A mythic beast. I believe they refer to it as The Grootslang. Do you believe in this thing?”
The phone erupts in noise, and Imani listens for a moment before lowering the volume, apologizing to me for the interruption. “It is nothing.” Her smile is false. “My mother has outbursts.”
I mutter something indescribable even to myself, some show of acknowledgement, realizing in a single instance how little I know of this girl. That she has an aged mother who screams on the phone; the strange quality in the spartan nakedness of her walls; her ability to hide in my own home and remain so quiet.
“You tend to your mother,” I tell her. “It is late. I should get some rest.” I go to leave, but she says, “Sir,” and I turn back.
“I do believe in it,” she says, with a confidence I find haunting. “But I believe in many similar things. It is only part of our tradition, to believe in the evil that is born from our wrongdoing. It is the mark of our people, no? My mother tells the story of when—”
“That’s all and well, Imani,” I say. “I believe I am too tired to hear such things right now. Perhaps save it for Lila, if it is not too frightening. I shouldn’t have asked.
The start of her answer was more ridiculous than my question. She looks down, then. Her legs, lanky and childlike, are sprawled in a knot beneath her. Her pajamas so large the tops curl over her hands, the bottoms fall over her feet. It is unbecoming, to be speaking to such a young woman in so serious a way. And the moment, if there was one, is gone.
“Goodnight, Imani.”
“Sir.”
I leave the light on in the hallway as I head to my bedroom. She will turn it off when she sees it’s been left on; by then, I hope, I’ll be long asleep.
A phone call wakes me. It is Benji. There is trouble, he says. I should arrive as early as I can. I dress in the same clothes I wore the day before to save time. I decline the oatmeal Imani offers me and leave home before Lila wakes.
It is Benji who sleeps in the barracks, overseeing the boys. I can count on one hand the times he has contacted me so early, and almost all of them involved the birth of one of his children or a matter of equal urgency. I can only imagine how much conflict he must deal with on his own, with two hundred young men in such close quarters, and yet not once has he asked me to be involved in a single quarrel.
The sun is only now rising, and one can glimpse it between the twisted forks of the leadwood trees, bright gasps of orange that follow me as I pass other cars. Soon I am on site. I wind down the path into the bowl of the mine, the descent silent enough to feel like I am floating in my car. As I park beside my trailer, Benji is already approaching me. I wait for him, his legs swishing slowly in his overalls, and as he draws near it is difficult to ignore what lies behind him: an endless stretch of yellow uniforms and yellow hard hats—my workers, standing listlessly as one, staring at me.
I step out to greet him. There are whiskers of a mustache, and this is perhaps more foreboding than the sight of the workers. The man is always clean shaven.
“Perhaps we should speak in my trailer,” I say.
Benji nods solemnly. “To keep up appearances, sir.”
“Yes, Benji. To keep up appearances.”
I offer him a bottle of water from the mini fridge. He declines, and is already speaking as I take a seat behind my desk.
“The worker who has died is beloved. Very well thought of. He has a wife, an infant, a little girl. The others are aghast that his family has not been notified. That he has been left in the crypt —”
“Do not call it a crypt,” I say. “It is a site of science. For heaven’s sake, they are returning in a few months to resume their work. I will not surrender to such language. You shouldn’t either.”
Even I realize how strange my outburst is. Benji blinks once, a cautionary measure, before continuing on. “The others cannot believe he has been left to rot in the site of science. The more religious believe a cleansing should take place in the mine. All of them believe the body must be retrieved immediately. They will not work unless it is done. It is a protest, sir. An organized protest.”
The words are supposed to strike fear in me, but I do not share his concern. In fact, I clap my hands together joyously at the development. “Benji!” I say. “This is good news! Let them do their ritual. Let them get the body. Bring the candles, chant the chants. Whatever must be done.” Already I am thinking of the coroner arriving in an hour’s time; that this will be taken care of by mid-morning, before Mr. Fletcher has even finished his brunch at the Prince George Estates. The mere thought has brought me to near ecstasy. “How quickly can they manage the job?”
Yet Benji merely slouches against the wall, his hands clenched in a ball against his chest. The pouches beneath his eyes are so evident, so full, that I wonder if there might exist a procedure to drain them. He appears defeated.
“They won’t do it themselves.” His voice is so low I can hardly hear him speak. “They believe you have made a bargain with The Grootslang. Brought it into existence.”
“Not this again.” I realize that it is pity that drives Benji’s words. That he is worried about my end, not his own. The task before me is clear. My charge as a leader. The call I must answer.
“I will go,” I tell him. “I will retrieve the body myself.”
There is a sense of resignation knowing what lays ahead of me, and I find that my voice is calm as I ask the other workers where I might find Felix. I smile at them politely. I even offer one man a handshake. And yet when my eyes fall upon Felix himself, under the break canopy, casually eating chips, I am quickly overcome by anger. His eyes, still black as night, are strangely tranquil, looking upon me with an empathy so perverse I have the urge to strike him.
“You are leading a protest,” I say. “I should have you fired. I should put your name on a list. Did you know there’s a list? A list of men who will not get hired at any mine. You have made quite the error.”
His eyes are fixed upon me, and his mouth seems to move independently from the rest of his face. He speaks in one tone, a single string of words, as though all of them, each connected to the one before, have been in a line in his mouth, awaiting my arrival to be unspooled.
“It is you that brought The Grootslang upon us. Your conscious lies with Peter, and so the beast calls your name.”
“Who on earth is Peter?” I ask.
He shakes his head, and I realize my mistake too late. “The boy,” he says. “The boy who died.”
“What do you want,” I ask. “If you were to go down with me—to get the body and have the men return to work—what would you ask for in return?”
There is nothing inside that might save me from what is to come.
He speaks so quickly it’s apparent the thought has been on his mind for some time, if not since the beginning of the whole ordeal. “I wish to be a surveyor. To be paid like a surveyor. To have Benji’s power.”
“I could use another. Consider it done.” My willingness to compromise takes him off guard. And for the first time his eyes wander from me, and I know they have landed upon the elevator at my back. His cheekbones, sharp enough to draw blood, suddenly twitch, and I wonder if it is from the fear that courses through him: the same fear now coursing through me.
“The sooner the better,” I say.
He takes the cap lamp at his side and places it upon his helmet. He mumbles what appears to be a prayer and then smiles wickedly.
“Whenever you are ready,” he says.
I turn my face toward the elevator. There is nothing inside that might save me from what is to come.
In the mine, it is always night. Illumination is key, and yet permanent installations of any lighting system are too burdensome a cost. A few lamps are made use of throughout the primary shaft, the active workings. The rest of the journey must be done by the cap-lamp alone, a light which shines forth seemingly from one’s own skull. A third eye, the miners call it. We do not need our lamps yet, but I know we will soon.
Felix is beside me, the folded stretcher tied to his back. The length of the mine runs before us. To stand still, to witness the thing in silence, creates such overwhelming awe that it exacts the dimensions of a living being. To feel the rock wall is to feel it throb, no different from a pounding heartbeat.
“This is it,” Felix says.
The elevator is thirty minutes to our rear. We have walked some ways. And now we see a small brow of the wall, a crevice expanded to the size of a small human, where the scientists made their own way.
We dip through the hole and find ourselves facing what feels to be an impenetrable shroud of darkness. There is no up or down. Before us is infinity, and there is a pull to it, like the tug of a rope around one’s chest. I quickly reach for my cap-lamp, which casts a bright beam down the length of nothingness before me.
I have surveyed the maps left by the scientists, and so I know to follow the path before us, turning once we reach the far wall. The descent is slow, a sloping trail like any other, and yet there is no end to it. Neither of us look to the side, where Peter has surely fallen, for it is clear the light will meet nothing but further darkness, more dust skittering in the air from the wall of the cave like insects in flight.
“Two miles,” I say.
Felix says nothing.
“There is nothing to fear,” I say. “It is a jaunt in the mine like any other. Like all that have come before this one.”
“But you are scared. More than I am.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “I do not fear creatures that lurk at the bottom of a mine.”
“It is not just in the mine.” His voice is low and certain. “Is that what you have taken from the legend?”
“I do not know the legend. I do not wish to know the legend.”
“The beast is born from our wrongs. It is in you. Just as it is in me –”
“You must quit. I refuse to believe that you go on like this in your private life. That you speak to those close to you in the manner of an ominous sage, dispensing wisdom. I have no time for it.”
A moment, and then the boy speaks once more in a mutter. “You only ask me to stop because you believe my words are true.”
“Is that so?” I ask, holding a hand upon the wall, moisture dripping under my sleeve.
“It is as I said. It is in you, just as it is in me. And perhaps you fear that more than the rest. That we are no different from one another.”
My legs wobble with fatigue. The temperature rises like a warning. And quite suddenly there is water beneath our feet, puddles and ankle-deep mud, announcing the end of the descent. The bottom of the mine.
We stop at once. Total darkness does not speak to what lays beyond this point, what extends before us. It is an absence. A void. The senses, beyond the mud gripping my feet, have nothing to register. I am afloat, wholly and totally, and I only become bound by the touch of Felix, prodding the small of my back.
“We must backtrack to where he would’ve fallen,” he says.
“Just a moment to rest,” I say.
Felix is asking me if I am alright, and by then it is only my heartbeat I can hear, so loud that I wish to scream so I might mask the noise of my own terror.
But he is already moving. I cannot keep on with conversation. It is as though I am progressing through the cycles of sleep, inching towards a dream, a flurry of babble erupting from some crease of my brain that I cannot access on my own volition. I wish for it to stop but it will not. It is then that the sounds meet me: uproarious laughter, recognizable at once as the men from my trailer, Ross Fletcher’s investors, voices jarring enough to make me turn to seek out the source, and yet in the time it takes me to wheel around the noise has minimized itself to a piercing howl, and then nothing at all, and soon Felix is asking me if I am alright, and by then it is only my heartbeat I can hear, so loud that I wish to scream so I might mask the noise of my own terror.
“Are you okay?” Felix asks again.
“Perhaps we should turn back,” I say. There is a desire to sit down. To scrunch up into a ball and allow the mud to envelope me. To be done with this business. Yet as the thought passes, I hear Felix gasp, and I look up, quickly, to find the outline of an object standing before us.
“The scientist’s equipment,” Felix says.
It is a light of some sort, crane-like, perched against the tunnel face.
“Why would they leave it?” Felix asks.
“They are returning,” I tell him, but the sight has emboldened him, and he is running forward now.
“Felix, wait,” I say.
I do not move. I adjust my line of sight to keep him alight, and he is now upon an enormous box, sturdy as the shell of a turtle, unwieldy upon the ground.
“A generator,” he says. “They have left their generator.”
With my cap-lamp, I can make him out before me. Alone in the abyss. So far from me, yet in the great chasm of darkness that binds us, we are closer than any other humans might possibly manage in so vast a space. He has a cord in hand. I can feel dust coating my throat; my body seize. The sound of a motor, of a howling animal, blows over me like hot air. And in the time it takes to blink, the time it takes to gasp for a single breath, a crushing light illuminates the mine with the force of a detonation. There is Felix, his back to me. Behind him, a table of fathomless dimensions; a table of African teak that runs on endlessly into a darkness that supersedes the light. The table is crowded with men. It is only immediately behind Felix, at its head, that I spot my father facing me, his eyes wide with terror, his lips sewed shut, maggots squirming through the stitching, his finger pointing at my chest. Beside him is my brother, his cheeks broken into his skull, blood spilling from his forehead, beckoning me with fingers limp as noodles, flicking towards me pathetically. There are hundreds of miners behind them, standing stoically in their yellow vests. They are all staring, all silent, rotted and grotesque, and it is as though I am looking in a mirror reflecting itself, for I can see it go on so far that the illusion plays upon itself, and at the far end, a dot lost in a canvas of horrors, I spy a figure that could only be myself, for when I raise my hand up to cover my mouth, it is the only parcel of space that moves, and it is then that the light dies, and darkness consumes the crypt once more.
“The body,” he says. “It is right ahead of us.” I hear then, the sounds of him cranking the generator once more. Yet this is of no use. The crypt remains black.
“Did you not see it? Follow me, Nicholas. This way.”
I turn, then. And the voice I hear, demanding I return, calling me back, is only an echo by the time I have stopped running.
I am home before lunch. Felix has retrieved the body. The coroner, I know, is on his way. Full working production of the mine on offer before Ross Fletcher has arrived; just as I hoped.
And now there is a strange comfort to the sound of gravel crunching beneath my car, the sound that signals my return home, to this small plot of safety. Imani greets me at the front door. Her arms are crossed. A stalled and baking heat lingers in the air and I wipe my brow as I approach her.
“What is wrong?” she asks.
I say no words, but rather turn from her, sit on the steps of the veranda, looking off upon the road from which I have just arrived from.
“Tell me,” she says. “Something is the matter.”
“Please sit,” I say, tapping the tiles of the stairs. I cannot help but smell the scent of flowers that leaves her, so welcome after a day at the mines, and I wish to thank her, and yet of course I do not, knowing she could not even begin to understand how welcome her presence is after all that has come to pass.
“You have me worried.”
“What if nothing is wrong?” I ask. “What if things are finally right?”
“But you are here. You should be at work—”
“I have put Benji in charge. He is a fine man. And he has a new surveyor to lead. A very capable fellow. A brave man who has made right by me. They will work well together.”
The trees in the distance are countless, lifeless, so scorched by the sun as to be left without a single leaf. The expanse of dirt is the color of iron. It is endless. And yet from here there is a remarkable nature to the sight; the landscape in the distance converging with the bank of the sky, like two segments of a painting in contrast. A brilliant design. One that will repeat itself endlessly. And the reassurance I draw from this is so great that I feel my shoulders fall, my neck go slack, for the first time since exiting the mine.
“It is strange,” I say. “I don’t know when Lila comes home. How do I not know?”
“The bus pulls up in an hour,” Imani tells. She points, then. Down the road. “She will run from there. Just as she runs to you when you pull in.”
To think I have not once seen the sight of my daughter running from the road up ahead. I imagine it to be even greater than when she greets me after a long day at work, my little dust devil in motion, her lunch box bouncing against her side, her hair one bobbing mess. I know that I will wait right where I’m sitting until I witness it. There is nothing else I wish to lay my eyes upon. Nothing else that might save me from the terrors I have witnessed.
“I should continue cleaning,” Imani says.
At this, the phone inside begins to ring. I know instantly it is Ross Fletcher, ready for his tour. Wondering, no doubt, where I have wandered off to. I tell Imani to let it ring, repeating myself once more as it goes on, and on, until finally it is quiet once again.
“Stay here,” I then tell her. “Please. Sit. Just . . . just until the bus comes.”
She shifts beside me, the bracelet on her wrist clanging like a chime.
“Tell me,” I say. And the words feel random, yet ordained, and altogether urgent. “Tell me your story. Of this village you hail from. Of your family. To have someone under my roof I know so little of. It seems wrong, no?”
A wind pulls over us. Imani looks at me with uncertainty.
“My grandmother hails from a small village south of here. She’s told me many stories, yet most of them are tall tales, as you might put it, although I often wondered if they were true . . .” She does not know what she is allowed to say, and yet silence will not do. Not now. Not with what I have seen still playing in my head. “You really wish to know, sir?”
My heart is pounding. Yet somehow, so far from the mine, so far from my past, I am at peace.
“Imani, it would be an honor to hear them told,” I say. “Carry on. End only when you find it right to. You have my ear.”
Her voice overtakes the air; the wind. Finally, I am able to close my eyes and keep them so. And all that is left to do is listen.
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