Malaya’s Anti-Colonial Struggle Is a Story of Love and Doubt

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I’ve been following Sharmini Aphrodite’s work since 2016. Her fiction is redolent with a devotion to the role that faith, ritual, and desire play in how we move through the world. Sharmini’s debut collection, The Unrepentant, explores the lesser-known histories of the war for liberation in Malaya (now Malaysia). Its fourteen stories (one of which can be read in EL’s own Recommended Reading), ranging from the 1940s to the 2010s, explore how religious faith and personal experience come into conflict with each other amid ongoing anti-colonial political struggle, and how love and faith complicate an already fractured society.

At its heart, the collection grapples with the way acts of love and acts of faith reckon with the very human emotion of doubt. The men and women in these stories—communists, laborers, miners, guerrilla soldiers, priests—persist in their beliefs despite the risks they face. For them, following their convictions can mean exile from community and country; loss of a homeland; or being forgotten by history and their own people. In the face of these dangers, their courage and resilience indicate hope and desire for a future that has not yet arrived. They may not have seen the future they wanted in their lifetime, but their work stretches into the present and cuts across generations of labor movements. The Unrepentant doesn’t offer easy resolutions to these struggles, but rather honors the individual stories that continually shape the future.

Sharmini and I met via Zoom to talk about what drew her to memorialize figures forgotten by history, how different permutations of faith intertwine with the human tendency to doubt, and how enlivening this history speaks to current liberation movements.

Arin Alycia Fong: What drew you to write about the Malayan War and this particular period of history?

Sharmini Aphrodite: Over the years, there’s been much historical research on this period, historical secondary literature that is very strident, very robust, but I was interested to see how this might be manifested in personal experiences.

AAF: Is that why you were drawn to fiction as well?

SA: When I’m doing historical research and writing, there’s so much emotional residue that you can’t feed into an academic analysis. Fiction grants space to explore the interiority of certain characters or certain kinds of people, or even your own feelings related to the history. On the flip side, I actually think having objective distance in fiction has been an interesting thing to explore. A supposedly more “objective” and academic language, when woven into fiction, allows for the story itself to come before language. When you focus on sparse details, those details need to be powerful enough to stand on their own, without gimmick or flourish.

AAF: What comes through is how history is often very personal. Did you feel this growing up in Malaysia—how the past ripples into the present? How is your experience as a Malaysian shaped by this particular past?

SA: My experience as a Malaysian is colored by two fundamental points. In no particular order, one is the fact that I grew up in Johor Bahru. It’s the city that sits on the edge of the world’s busiest land border. Maybe more than 300,000 people cross daily. JB is Malaysia’s southernmost point and a causeway connects it to Singapore.

The context that we’re operating in today is so heavily shaped by the past to the point where the past is continually alive.

The next point is that I was born in Sabah—that’s where my maternal family is from and where they still are. A caveat is that the Bornean territories of Sabah and Sarawak have a very fractious history with West Malaysia, also known as Malaya. Malaya suppresses the Bornean territories culturally in order to extract resources from them. There is also an uneven relationship between Malaysia and Singapore because the developing Malaysia provides the developed Singapore with labor and resources that fuel its economy. These uneven relationships, they’re a product of colonial histories that stretch into the present day. This economic situation and the daily landscape of all three different places, “JB, Sabah, and Singapore,” colors my experience, because I sat at the nexus of all three of them and I saw these uneven layers.

AAF: You’ve mentioned that this collection is very indebted to historical inquiry. What is the most pertinent thing that you discovered when you were researching for The Unrepentant?

SA: What came up in a lot of the secondary literature were the attempts to forge solidarity between race, religion, and language, between all the different places that people came from in the past and where they end up, which in this case is Malaya. I was primarily driven by the fact that the context that we’re operating in today is so heavily shaped by the past to the point where the past is continually alive.

AAF: What are examples of secondary literature that bring this history to life in the present?

SA: Kaatu Perumal: the Folk Hero of Sungai Siput is a collection of oral histories by Dave Anthony. Kaatu Perumal was a real historical figure. He was born and raised around the plantation estates, and then he ended up joining the struggle later in life, and this collection is basically interviews that Dave Anthony did with the people who remembered Kaatu Perumal, whether they had grown up with him or whether they knew of him through secondhand memories, being descendants of workers from that plantation. There are so many small details that struck me, like the fact that he was an avid football player. It draws out that human dimension that we tend to forget.

AAF: The Unrepentant is about bearing witness to stories that were not memorialized by dominant narratives of history. How did you fill in the gaps? How did you come to know what you did not yet know?

SA: I had to first know what is in the historical record to be able to understand what is not. Archival records provide statistics, cartography, but they are produced by an elite class for whom it is integral that the people surveyed, that the landscape and events, remain merely statistics and cartography. All of these histories that we think are forgotten were not so much forgotten but deliberately excised from the historical record. If we understand that archives can only grant us the spine of history, then we also necessarily have to understand that a more complete history––never a fully complete one because I don’t think that’s possible––can only come from outside the archive. Things like weather reports, which might gesture to emotion, or maybe even a sheet of music, photographs. One has to read between the lines of statistics and cartography. What is not in the historical record is just as potent and perhaps even more so because there is a reason that it has been excised.

AAF: What also stands out in The Unrepentant is how love takes on different forms. Love for community, love across religious and ethnic lines, but also a love for this imagined country. For you, how does love shape the politics of liberation?

There is a ritual element to faith that makes it almost like a muscle memory.

SA: I’m thinking of the words of other thinkers and writers who have written about this much better than me. The late Father Gustavo Gutiérrez—he was the priest who penned this seminal text called A Theology of Liberation—said it best: “Love only exists among equals.” Love does come at a cost in the collection. It comes at the cost of belonging, both in this life and the next, but love is also generative.

AAF: Can you speak more to that, about love being generative?

SA: Che Guevara said that “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” To enter into a lot of these movements takes so much out of you. It comes at such a great cost, there’s so much sacrifice involved. You basically pull yourself out of the world that you know, out of the people and circumstances that you love, and you kind of wed yourself to this larger movement. It has to come from a place of love, a place of potentiality as a way to think about the possibility of a world that does not yet exist. It requires a great amount of hope. I think love underpins that hope because you can’t really be doing this for yourself—the cost of it is so high.

AAF: I think that largeness intertwines so much with faith and doubt. I see this in your work, that faith takes on many different shades. You have folk beliefs, and you also have institutionalized religions. What fascinates you about faith in the context of anti-colonial movements?

SA: I was raised religious, and I have found that faith and its language never really leave you, no matter how far you think you might have gone from it. For me, the syntax, the symbols…my touchstone remains, and I suppose will always be, Christianity. That’s the religion I was not just born and raised into, but inherited. Naturally, there is a ritual element of faith that makes it almost like a muscle memory. There’s language, there’s liturgy, there’s landscape and community. In a Southeast Asian context, this is true in terms of folk belief and institutionalized religion. The border between them is porous or non-existent in many cases. The key theme in the collection is how all faith is inherited. It’s the idea that faith is neither abstract nor isolated, but practical and communal. It binds you to both the past and the present.

AAF: How do you see The Unrepentant in conversation with existing literary works on the Malayan War? I’m thinking about Jeremy Tiang’s State of Emergency or Hai Fan’s Delicious Hunger, which Jeremy also translated.

SA: In all of these literatures, one of the key things that pops up is the jungle. It’s something that you cannot escape. The euphemism for joining the struggle was literally going into the jungle. It’s resonant even today, landscapes just beyond the urban border. 

AAF: The spiritual ecology in stories like “The Pawang and the Miner” is really fascinating. How is this intersection between spiritual ecology and labor playing out?

Faith is a product. It sits at the intersection of land and labor.

SA: Tin mines are one of the central features of the land there. In Miracles and Material Life, Teren Sevea talks about the relationship between pawangs, these spiritual practitioners, and the tin miners. The tin miners, having come from China, would’ve been completely divorced from the landscape and everything that they knew, and the conditions of the mines were terrible. They would go to the pawangs for protection, and the pawangs would have all kinds of advice for them. So there’s this relationship that comes up that is based on this spiritual interaction between the miners who came from China and the pawangs who were thought of as local. 

In all of this, the land is fundamental. Spiritual ecology, labor, and the land, they’re all inseparable. That brings me to the larger point of what was important to me about exploring the land as a sort of fulcrum. It’s crucial to the movement, because land and the labor that is engendered by working on it provides the material basis for anti-imperial movements in the book. The manifestation of imperialism is colonialism, which is often spurred by resource extraction. The land transcends modern nation states. It transcends modern realms. It has existed before them and will continue to exist after them. So it’s like faith as well. And I think faith, as it comes up in this collection, is a product. It sits at the intersection of land and labor. The land binds the past and the present, just like faith.

AAF: Going back to Catholic liberation theology, “Antipodal Points” explores this notion of faith and doubt. How is faith still relevant to liberation movements today?

SA: Faith binds the present to the past, but there’s a flip side where it binds the past to the present. The belief in something greater than yourself allows you to situate yourself as a small part of a much larger history, which encompasses not just the past, but also the potentiality of the present. Liberation may not arrive today or in your lifetime, but the work for it stretches across generations. Doubt is only human, right? But it also represents desire, desire for a better world. It also provides the impetus to reach that desire.

AAF: How do we transcend the many contentions you acknowledge in the book? How do we still have hope for a better world?

SA: Part of it is embracing the place of doubt. Things start going awry when people come into contact with doubt, but if we instead try to embrace doubt as a very natural thing, we can be less afraid of it. We can see it, perhaps, as a stepping stone, something generative. Of course, there’s going to be doubt when we are pulling together different faiths, different languages, all of these different backgrounds that people have. Of course, there’s going to be friction. But we can use that as a way to move forward instead of being stopped by it.

Mini Horror Stories for Literary People

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

“Haunted House”


Mary aimed a flashlight at each Emily Henry novel at the Block Island B&B but Great Big Beautiful Life had . . . vanished.

“Mutilation”


When a friend returned Jamal’s Crying in H Mart, pages were coffee-stained and thoughts other than his own were scribbled in the margins.

“Abandoned Area”


The debut author read her work to a dozen empty folding chairs and the bookstore calico. 

“Jump Scare”


Susan leaped off of the public bus to avoid hearing two passengers spoil the end of The Girl on the Train.

“Creepy Kid”


Perched on Chiara’s first edition Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a pink-cheeked toddler ate pasta Bolognese. 

“Cursed Object”


Edmond’s e-reader was always running out of charge and now it refused to download Stephen King’s Never Flinch.

“Paranormal”


Something was removing all the Oxford commas from Professor Johnson’s copy of Dreyer’s English. 

“Mad Scientist”


Gladys tolerated Stan’s ChatGPT love letters, but then he showed her his new novel . . . written by AI. 

“Final Girl”


Babette was the only one in her book club who couldn’t get through Where the Crawdads Sing.

“Carrie” Helped Me Process the Sexual Shame of My Religious Upbringing

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

The movie begins in a high school locker room, camera panning over girls in various states of undress. They towel their hair and fiddle with lockers, skin slick down their backs, breasts bouncing. I almost turn it off. This isn’t what I expected when my husband went out and I decided to stay home to watch Carrie, the 1976 movie about a girl who gets her period in the shower and blood dumped on her at prom. When I was in high school, girls dressed with their backs to the wall and changed bras under tee shirts, but on-screen the girls are comfortable, even the one who has no friends, Carrie, alone under the shower’s stream. She takes her time washing her shoulders, her stomach, and between her legs. A gush of red slides down her thigh. Carrie holds a slick hand to her face and blinks. Suddenly everyone else in the locker room is clothed, and there is only Carrie, naked and bleeding. Carrie lunges at the girls, begging for help. They laugh, pelting her with pads and tampons as she stretches out her bloody hands.

The first time I learned to be ashamed of my body was on an evening in fifth grade when my mother said we should have a talk and my father left the room with his mouth in a flat line. On a piece of notebook paper, she drew a triangle with an opening at the bottom and circles connected by lines on either side.

“It isn’t like regular blood,” my mother reassured me. “This blood is already dead.”

I felt slightly sick. Something in my body was going to die every month. Blood would leak from a place I didn’t know was there. There was nothing I had done to cause it and nothing I could do to stop it. I nodded my grave understanding of the situation then padded back to the TV room to join my siblings, bumping into my father in the hall. 

“Girl stuff,” he said sheepishly, and I felt my face flush. 

When I bled for the first time, I kept it a secret. I snuck a pad from under the sink where my mother kept them and hid the blue wrapper under cotton balls in the trash. My insides felt scraped. At school, I crossed and uncrossed my legs, wishing I’d worn my navy uniform pants instead of the plaid skirt, afraid everyone could smell iron. 

The next day, my mother asked about a pad I’d carefully rolled up and placed in the trash. It seemed to have unfurled on its own, exposing a dull spot of redness. My temples seized with embarrassment. She showed me how to wrap the pad in toilet paper so no one else would see. 

Carrie’s house is dimly lit with pointed archways and faded images of Jesus, like the dusty back room of a church no one goes in. Carrie buttons her cardigan to her chin and tip-toes down the stairs to her mother, who has just come home. Later I’ll learn Stephan King’s inspiration for this story came from a former classmate who wore the same clothes to school everyday, and another whose house had a crucifix so large he thought it could kill a person if it fell. 

Blood would leak from a place I didn’t know was there.

In our Southeast Minneapolis high-rise, Jesus watches over my shoulder from the olive wood cross he hangs on, perpetually dying. He was a present from my Catholic mother before my wedding five months ago, stuck to the wall above the light-switch with an adhesive strip. Now I resent the way he poses, straining for air, stomach sunken, reminding me of the daily pain I cause him. 

Upset by the news of Carrie’s period, her mother slaps her. “You’re a woman now,” she tells the cowering girl. Carrie insists she’s done nothing wrong and asks her mother why she never told her about the blood that made the girls taunt her, that made her believe she was dying. “Don’t you know I can see inside of you?” her mother says, leafing through a book of prayers. “I can see the sin as surely as God can.”

When I was fourteen, a woman from church left voicemails on our home phone, saying she wanted to talk to me about the clothes I wore to Sunday mass. I remember the outfit: black dress pants, a gray cardigan, and a semi-sheer blouse with a tank top underneath. After three messages, my mother insisted I call her back and waited next to me in the kitchen as I dialed. 

I’d never spoken to this woman before, but she wasn’t the first to confront me about modesty. My mother pinched the fabric around my thighs in dressing rooms, sewed the necklines of my dresses higher, and insisted I buy jeans two sizes too big. My body was dangerous, a temptation. Once, after an argument over a two-piece bathing suit, she sat me at the family computer to watch videos about how the male brain perceived the female body with lines that connected and shapes that filled themselves in. 

On the phone, the woman told me the top was too revealing. 

“Men are so visual,” she said in a sympathetic tone. “More than you or I will ever understand.” 

I pressed my forehead into the tile kitchen wall as she tried to convince me to remove the blouse from my wardrobe altogether. I pretended to think about it, though the shirt was one of my favorites, bought from Forever 21 with babysitting money. 

“Some people are more traditional,” my mother said after I hung up. She didn’t see anything wrong with that particular blouse, though she had an issue with another shirt I often wore, one that had a slight downward slope. She joked we should wear turtlenecks to mass the following Sunday as an act of passive aggression. 

The back of my throat stung with frustration at both the caller and my mother. The following Sunday, and every Sunday after, I glimpsed the woman standing like a pillar a few pews behind me. The sight of her drained blood from my face as if I was freshly accused. 

At school, a well-meaning gym teacher finds Carrie moping on the concrete steps and whisks her to a mirror. Gently, she brushes Carrie’s hair out of her face and lifts her chin, forcing Carrie to look at herself. “Look at those eyes,” the teacher says. “Those are pretty eyes.” She suggests adding mascara and lipstick. Maybe a curl to her hair. 

I want Carrie to listen. I don’t like looking at her, shoulders slumped in a plain dress, hiding behind her hair. Pretty means palatable, pleasing to others. Even as my mother forced me to dress modestly, she still wanted me to look pleasing. I wore a new skirt with dangling earrings.  My hair was combed. To combat my friendlessness in high school, I roamed the mall and ransacked makeup counters, wanting to believe there was some combination of goops and powders that would make me deserving. Pretty is an illusion. It must be constantly maintained so no one questions what’s underneath.  

The corner of Carrie’s mouth pulls upward as the gym teacher prods. “You’re a pretty girl, Carrie,” she says with a soothing smile, but there is worry under her eyes. 

In high school, my mother opted me out of sex ed and drove me to an abstinence retreat at a Catholic school in the suburbs, where I scanned the cafeteria of girls I didn’t know and my mother raved about the free bagels. 

The retreat preached messages I’d heard before. My virginity was a sacrificial gift to my future husband. Premarital sex led to disease, unplanned pregnancy, and moral ruin. One woman pretended to cry while telling us about her “friend” who was careless with her body only to discover she was no longer attractive to the kind of good, church-going men she wanted to marry. 

“You are all so beautiful,” another speaker said to a room of sullen teens. “You have beautiful legs and arms and stomachs and breasts, and you have to protect that beauty for your future husband.” 

Even as my mother forced me to dress modestly, she still wanted me to look pleasing.

Most of the talks seemed unnecessarily dramatic. I kept to myself, waiting for it to be over, but during lunch, a group of girls ushered me into their circle. They were giggling over a retreat pamphlet, pointing to a line on the glossy paper, where the word “sex” was blotted out with a black bar.

“We can’t even read the word now?” I said, relieved to have someone to talk to.

“Apparently not,” the girl said, flashing a wry smile before turning serious. “I don’t even know why I’m here. I already told my parents I’m not going to have sex, but they’re like ‘we just want to make sure.’” 

It surprised me how openly she said this, how the other girls agreed. In my public school, I tried not to draw attention to my virginity, though I felt the same as these girls. I enjoyed flirting with boys and was dating a guy on the wrestling team who made my stomach flutter when he kissed me, but there was no part of me that considered having sex. I barely understood the mechanics of what that would entail. Sex was blocked from my mind like that black bar.

Thunder rattles the walls when Carrie tells her mother she’s going to prom. Sitting across a candle-lit dinner table, a portrait of the Last Supper illuminated by flickers, Carrie explains that a boy, Tommy, asked her to the dance. She pleads for her mother to understand, “I want to be a whole person before it’s too late.” 

I love her decisiveness, how she tells her mother rather than asking permission. The year after the abstinence retreat, I made out with boys in movie theaters, parked cars, and pressed against cold basement floors. I finagled my way around my parents and any rule that tried to stop me. One day, our jeans rubbing together, I discovered a pleasure that deepened and burst. I wasn’t having sex, but there was a sexual part of me that was thrilling, though wrong. Afterwards, alone in my room, I was wracked by guilt, resolving to go to confession and never do it again. 

On the night of prom, Carrie fixes her makeup while her mother tears at her dress, shrieking, “We’ll burn it and pray for forgiveness together.” Carrie dismisses her with an edge of impatience. She’s been developing her own power, learning to shatter mirrors, explode light bulbs, and slam doors with her mind. When her mother blocks her path, Carrie flings her out of the way. 

In college, I moved out of my parents’ house and spent my newfound freedom dancing with my roommates in our shared kitchen and drinking wine coolers until my tongue tingled. I was proud to have my life together, paying my own bills, attending weekly bible study. I was in a long-term relationship with a Catholic boy I intended to marry. No one told me what to do anymore. 

But back with my family in the summer for our annual lake-cabin trip, I wore shorts over my swimsuit. My brothers pushed each other off the dock shirtless while I waded in green water, arms glued to my ribs. I told myself to strip off my shorts and get in the water, but as everyone splashed and yelled, I remained frozen in place. 

One July morning, my mother confronted me in the kitchen of our rental cabin, saying my father saw me come out of the bathroom in a towel the day before. At first, I didn’t know what she was talking about, but then I remembered stepping from the bathroom to the bedroom I shared with my sister, wrapped in a thin towel after showering lake water off with hard water.

I wasn’t having sex, but there was a sexual part of me that was thrilling, though wrong.

“I didn’t know anyone saw,” I said, keeping my face blank while my stomach coiled. When I was younger, I pushed limits, testing how high I could lift my shirt to tan my back before my father went berserk. One inch? Two? But this time, I hadn’t meant to offend. I had only been trying to escape the humidity of the sunken-floor bathroom with rung bathing suits above the toilet. 

“What if your cousins saw?” my mother asked, voice pinching with accusation. She brought up my uncle, a priest. “He comes in here to get beer or cards for euchre. What if it was him who saw?” 

“I didn’t think anyone would see,” I hissed to get her to stop. A familiar blood-draining panic swept me back to my teenage body. I had found myself under my parents’ roof again.

The most excruciating part of Carrie is the brief moment she’s happy. The camera circles as she dances with Tommy, as they kiss, as she rests her head against his shoulder. She doesn’t know there’s a bucket of pig’s blood teetering in the rafters. She asks Tommy why he brought her to the dance. Pulling her face back to meet his eyes, she peppers him with questions, as if she can sense something wrong. 

Weeks before my wedding I had a premonition and called my fiancé in a panic. “After we’re married, I won’t be a virgin anymore,” I said. “And everyone will know.” I burst into tears I couldn’t explain. Wasn’t it always the plan to lose my virginity after marriage? But the tears kept coming as I considered losing this arbitrary thing I’d clung to. My virginity was the only indisputable piece of goodness I had. 

The blood falls in one huge splash, drenching Carrie in her prom queen sash and crown. Her mouth gapes, shoulders up to her ears. The whites of her eyes pierce starkly against the stickiness of her skin. For a moment, nobody moves. Then the laughter comes like a roar. 

On my wedding day, I struggled to breathe under a cloud of organza and soft pink peonies. My uncle presided over the mass, and during the homily, he said the purpose of marriage was to have children. “Hopefully many children,” he added, and everyone laughed except the bride and groom. 

At the end of the night, the white dress ballooned to the floor, and we arranged ourselves on the bed for the first time. But everything tensed up. The slightest penetration caused waves of pain. I rolled away heaving, apologizing, telling myself aloud “relax” and “breathe.” But I couldn’t relax or breathe, and the same thing happened night after night, me unable to stand an inch before I cried in pain, my husband giving me space and straightening the pillows, my skin jumpy like live wires. 

A quick Google search revealed a condition that caused involuntary muscle spasms, a physical response to psychological stress. It could result from lack of sex education, negative attitudes about sex, and/or fear of pregnancy. I didn’t understand. I had done everything right—the Catholic wedding, waiting until marriage, confessing my sins. Back when we were dating, I drank up my husband’s touch, wishing I could stitch myself into his skin, but now no matter how gentle he was, the warmth of his body felt like a threat. I was broken. I’d been tricked. I cradled my head in my hands and cried until I threw up, bursting blood vessels in my eyes. 

Doors close and lock of their own volition, and fire hoses unravel, spraying the crowd. Carrie stands rigid, arms tensed as everyone screams and runs. The principal gets electrocuted and the gym teacher crushed by a wood beam. Then the whole building goes up in flame. 

Where’s my revenge? I wonder from the safety of my Ikea couch. During mass, I fantasize about storming onto the altar, pushing over candles and golden dishes. Acknowledge me! I’d scream. Instead, I swallow my anger, storing it deep in the pit of myself until it has gathered into a separate being. Anger claws at me from the inside out, leaving bitten nails, swollen eyes, and ground teeth. I glare around rooms and start heated confrontations that make family gatherings uncomfortable. No one knows the source of this churning undercurrent except me.

The slightest penetration caused waves of pain. I rolled away heaving, apologizing.

But when I look around, I can’t think of a specific place to pin blame. Shame among girls is mundane, daily, and not confined to religious spaces. At my public high school, an administrator threatened to photograph girls who wore rompers to class, “front and back,” before making them change. I draft bitter emails full of childhood resentments that don’t feel productive to send. There are countless girls like me, brought to abstinence retreats by parents enmeshed in a system, hoping to impart the only world they knew. 

There are no buildings I want to burn, no lives I want to obliterate. Carrie drags her sticky limbs through her front door and sends kitchen knives flying at her mother, but I close my laptop, messages unsent. My anger is too broad, my complaints too trite, a collection of small, unspecial moments. I am Carrie in a blood-soaked dress, but the gymnasium is empty. 

Things I’ve tried: yoga, alcohol, and hot baths. My husband massages my back while I visualize sinking into the bed. We listen to guided meditations and imagine inhaling the color blue and exhaling the color red. I lube up a plastic dilator I purchased off the internet and insert the hard wand on the couch with a towel under me. I spread my legs in front of a floor mirror and search for pressure points with my finger until I’m nauseous. None of these has had any noticeable effect.

The pain is compounded by my shame. Sex was supposed to be a gift to my husband, a reward for marrying me, and though I realize that thinking is harmful, I still feel unworthy because I can’t fulfill my role. The Catholic Church considers any form of sex other than vaginal penetration to be a serious sin, which means my husband and I are sinning and it’s my fault. I think if I were a better person, I would grit my teeth and bear the pain. I feel broken in a way no one else is, and I refuse to talk to anyone about it. I want to keep this shame wrapped within me, where no one else can see.

My husband insists he’s in no hurry. He’ll wait as long as it takes. “What if it’s never?” I ask, and I see the gears turning as he considers. “I would have to figure out if I can be okay with that,” he answers seriously. Later, he gently suggests that sex could be easier if I associate it with pleasure. Since childhood, I understood sex as a duty to my husband and the creation of children, an act that would happen to me rather than one I’d participate in. The idea of seeking out and defining my own pleasure is uncomfortable enough to make my vision blur. 

If I were a better person, I would grit my teeth and bear the pain.

Nancy Allen, the actor who played Carrie’s bully, said in an interview that she performed her locker room taunts long enough to internalize her character’s emotions. “[I] did start to feel like I hated her and all of those feelings that you’re supposed to be feeling as a character,” Allen said. “But I remember shaking. It was very disturbing, very very disturbing.” 

I learned to be afraid of sex long enough that my body won’t accept it’s safe. It’s like I’m trapped in a house of mirrors, crashing into my own reflection. Now, I’m running out of calming methods and can’t find a way out of the house. 

At the end of the movie, Carrie haunts her only surviving classmate. In a dream, the girl walks slowly to Carrie’s grave, wearing a long white dress. She sinks to her knees and delivers a bundle of red and white flowers. Suddenly, a bloody hand rises from the earth and grabs her. 

Our nervous rescue cat crosses from one hiding spot to another, and I wonder if I’ll spend the rest of my life haunting the world with my anger. Someday, I might find resolution, but first I have to remove Jesus’ corpse from the wall. I have to stop setting deadlines to get better—six months, one year, more years than I’ll admit. I have to excavate everything I thought I knew, stripping my mind down to the foundation. 

But none of that can happen yet. Instead, I turn off the TV, and in the morning, my husband and I squeeze into the back church pew, holy water dripped on our foreheads. The kneeler creaks under my weight, but I am not there. This bodily revolt is the first thread-pull of an unraveling faith. Even as I sing the entrance hymn, I already know I’m leaving.

My Brothers and I Could Not Be More Different

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

“Brotherhood,” an excerpt from Man Made by Steve Majors

JIM

My search for a father figure begins long before I realize my father isn’t related to me. The man I call Pops, I learn too late, is just my mother’s husband. He’s also emotionally distant and physically unavailable to me—passed out drunk at home, locked up in jail, or out of town with a secret second family. That leaves my big brother, Jim, or Jim-Jim, to fill in. Unlike Pops, Jim-Jim can be counted on to do dad-like things. He mows our huge crabgrass-filled lawn and rakes the leaves into a pile, then burns them with kerosene. Ma depends on him to carry in the groceries when she can afford to buy them and takes on odd jobs when she can’t.

Because I’m little, Jim and I share a bed. I love the way the entire bed sinks under his football player body. At night, zipped into my footie pajamas, I roll toward him from the high outer banks of the mattress into the middle trench where he lies sleeping. I keep trying to skitter myself out of that hollow and toward the side of the bed that hugs the wall, but it’s no use. I always end up next to his body, a hot, heaving mass that feels like a furnace.  

We are both mama’s boys. But we couldn’t be more different. I want to curl up on my mother’s lap for hours, stroking her face and twirling her hair. I lay my head into the crook of her neck, where I smell the talcum powder on her body and the mix of Juicy Fruit, Viceroy cigarettes, and black coffee on her breath. “Get down,” Jim yells when he sees me this way. Ma tells him to leave me be. Jim eyes me with suspicion. He knows I like burrowing my face into small spaces and sniffing hard. All little kids have their tics. But mine are odd. For a year, I line up everyone’s shoes near the kitchen door and go down the line, pulling the dark, dank shoe openings to my nose. I place my tongue across the roof of my mouth and then inhale hard. The snore-snorting sound makes everyone laugh at first.

But Jim only rolls his eyes at me. At least until I place my nose in one spot that finally earns my first punch from him. We are in the basement that day. The few bare bulbs on the ceiling throw weak pools of yellow light across the cement floor. The big kids play ping pong on a table Pops has impulsively and drunkenly bought with most of Ma’s work check.

I grow bored watching the back and forth, so I jump off the bottom step and walk toward a duffel bag in the corner. I recognize it. Every day, at the end of football practice, Jim throws it down the stairs leading to the basement so his sweaty gym clothes are closer to the washing machine. As the big kids follow the ping pong ball, I tug the duffel bag’s zipper back and forth on the bag making my own rhythmic sound. Finally, on the sound of “zuht,” the teeth lay open, and I plunge my tiny hand into the bag. I pull Jim’s cold and wet football jersey out and lift it to my nose and inhale deeply. It smells familiar, just like Jim-Jim after practice. My hands plunge in again and pull out some kind of slingshot. I hold the pouch of damp cloth in one hand and pull two elastic loops back with the other, stretching it like a rubber band. I’m confused by it. I place it back in the bag and pluck up an oval piece of white plastic. It’s shaped like a mask—narrow at the top for my nose and wider at the bottom for my mouth. Without a second thought, I place it over my nose and mouth, then inhale. I hear the paddle slam on the table. Jim-Jim is storming across the basement like a bear, and his fists are curled tight at his side. He snatches the mask off, whips it across the room, and places his face inches from mine. “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?” He punches my shoulder hard, and the other kids burst out laughing. For the first time in my life, Jim-Jim is mad at me, really mad. I feel I’m supposed to be embarrassed by what I’ve done. 

I cry for the boyhood that I have lost. He doesn’t because of the man he has become.

Still, he still refuses to let my siblings or anyone else make fun of me. On the following Saturday, he decides I need to understand football. He carries me on his shoulders while I hold his duffle bag, and we stalk across the practice field. He plunks me on a bench, where I shade my eyes against the sun. I swing my legs back and forth, watching him do drills and scrimmages with his high school football squad. At the end of one practice, a gaggle of white boys follows him to get their water bottles and bags. I sit with my little legs crossed at the knee. One boy sweeps his long, shoulder-length brown hair out of his eyes and looks me up and down. “This your brother?” he asks Jim. “What did you do, dunk him in bleach or something?”

Jim grits his teeth, then slams the helmet in his hand really against the boy’s shoulder pad. “Shut your fucking mouth,” he growls.  

As I grow older, Jim begins to demand something for his protection. He tells me I need to defend myself and throws punches at me. “Clench your fists, goddammit.” I cover my face and cower. Boxing lessons are soon followed by sports practice. He drags me out to the front yard after school and hurls footballs at my chest over and over again. As they slam into my fingertips or right into my chest, I yell in pain and drop them. I back away from his pitched baseballs and wiggle ineffectively beneath his high school wrestling moves. I think back on the days his body cocooned me in sleep, but now it just tries to cow, crush, or suffocate me.

Jim gives up on his athletic dreams for me as the years pass. But he continues his goal of making me a man. There are constant offers to sip his beer, take a drag on his cigarette, have a hit of his reefer, or steer his muscle car from the passenger seat. Each time I fail, but I know better than to cry.  

Decades go by, and our lives grow increasingly apart until we come together to watch our mother die. We are both still mama’s boys, wanting to please and protect her. But this time, we know we have failed. While we have grown over the years, she has shrunken under the weight of an abusive marriage, a demanding job, and far too many Viceroys and cups of black coffee to count. When she dies, I cry like a baby.  

I sit down next to Jim at her funeral and we are shoulder to shoulder, closer than we have been in years. He takes a deep breath and grabs my arm hard enough for it to hurt. “Stop crying,” he demands. “Jesus Christ, be a man.”

In his eyes, thirty-three is too old to sob like a baby. At that moment, I am reminded of the differences between our definitions of manhood. I cry for the boyhood that I have lost. He doesn’t because of the man he has become.

RICK

Childhood declarations of “I wish you’d never been born” mature to teenage threats of “I’ll kill you,” and finally, adulthood vows of “you’re dead to me.” Hate is not too strong of a word to describe my feelings for my brother, Rick, and the man he eventually becomes. Now that he’s dead, I fear how much I might be like him.

There’s no saying what he thinks of me beyond the grave. But his feelings about me as a kid are fresh in my mind. In contrast to my darker-skinned brothers, I have white-looking skin and fine, straight hair.

Rick believes I am an outsider in our Black family. Even I must concede that. Before I was born, he and the rest of my older siblings had survived years of beatings with fists and belts by their father. I had been conceived during a separation in my mother’s marriage and a reprieve from the violence. During that time, she had a fleeting relationship with a white man and got pregnant with a baby who looked just as white as him.

My earliest memories are of Rick sneering at me, making snarky remarks about my effeminate mannerisms, and pointing out the favored status he perceived I was getting because my skin looked white.

Though he is ten years older and we have other siblings, he sets just the two of us up as lifelong rivals for the attention and affection of our mother. I win because his actions make him hard to love. Stolen money. Crashed cars. Run-ins at school. Drug and alcohol abuse. And angry words that cut my mother too deeply.  

Slowly, he grows more and more estranged from our family. But I watch him from afar and strangely envy him. I am in awe of his good looks and masculinity. He stands well over six feet with a smooth, chocolate complexion, straight white teeth, and a sharp jawline.

In seeking to be desired, all we had ever really wanted was to be loved for who we were.

I watch with fascination how he uses his good looks and charm to make others like him. There are multiple marriages. First, there is the shy, quiet country girl who follows him everywhere in high school until he marries her and gets her pregnant. Then it’s the brash, bawdy party girl who pursues him until one day he even leaves her to raise their daughter by herself. Finally, it’s the pious, devoted Christian woman who sets out to save his soul only to have him abandon her and their children. He says he outgrew them all, although I believe it’s always because someone else has found him more attractive. New women are always ready to fall at his feet and into his bed. Even his male best buddy drunkenly professes a desire to sleep with him. As a kid, I am confused. How can this strange thing be true? How can a man desire another man?

The answer becomes clearer to me months later when I discover a framed photo of Rick in his apartment. He stands in tiny black posing trunks with legs spread shoulder-length apart, biceps flexed to the size of baseballs and chest glistening with oil. A bodybuilding trophy sits at his feet. I am proud to see my brother like this but also ashamed, embarrassed, and strangely intrigued.

I think of him many years later as I stand in front of a full-length mirror. I am shirtless and flex my biceps. Softball-sized, I note. Bigger than Rick’s. Years of dieting, weightlifting, and taking supplements have given me a body like his. I revel in how my muscled body can catch someone’s eye and lure them into my bedroom. There is power in being wanted, and for the first time in my life, I understood how addictive the feeling can be. For years, we rarely speak and see each other less. He is off looking for someone, anyone to admire him, and admittedly, so am I.

The final time I see him, he lies dying in the hospital of hepatitis—the result, doctors say, of the excesses of sex, drugs, and alcohol. His eyes and teeth are yellowed, and his frame is now shrunken to just bones under his skin.

But I cannot acknowledge to him how much we might be alike. Where once he had seen my privilege in the world and standing in our family, and I had seen his status as a good-looking man, we now see something else mirrored. We are living reflections of one another. In seeking to be desired, all we had ever really wanted was to be loved for who we were.

MIKE

There are no recovered memories, no flashbacks, no bad dreams, no hard-to-pin-down feelings when I think of my childhood relationship with my brother, Mike. But now that I know his history as a sex offender, a small suspicion emerges in the back of my head. It’s one I fight to grow into certainty. That fear is I may be one of his victims.

There is also no hard evidence leading me to this awful possibility, only the truth of what he’s done to other kids. Mike abuses our younger cousin when he is a teen and then, as an adult, his stepchild. Perhaps there are more victims, including me.  

But all I can summon are a few childhood stories hinting at his interest in the young, the vulnerable, and anyone with low self-esteem.

Though we are eight years apart, we are evenly matched in interests and immaturity when I am seven and he is fifteen. We ride our broken-down bikes in front of our house, watch cartoons together, and build forts out of tents and chairs in the living room. We lie on our grubby bedroom carpet that smells like dirty sneakers and sweaty clothes for hours, thumbing through his comic books. It is here that I first see behind his eyes. Batman, Superman, and his favorite, Aquaman, consume his attention. He tells me they are bigger, stronger, and cleverer than everyone else. My eyes linger over their rippling muscles beneath skin-tight costumes and bulging metallic codpieces while I imagine that Mike pays the most attention to their interactions with women in distress and the masks they use to hide their identities. I wonder now if he saw in himself broken or misunderstood men who learn how to shape people and events to their will.

Soon, I see that these stories disappoint him. Something is missing. I find him hunched over his desk, writing his own fantasies. This time, I’m not allowed to read them. He tears pages of numbered notebook paper out and tries to hide them. I dig them out from the back of his dresser drawer, sounding out the big words and trying to follow the plots. There are heroes, villains, monsters, space aliens, and lots of young girls in peril. The superheroes of these stories want more than just a peck on the cheek in gratitude for rescue. These “do-gooders” want the women to take their clothes off and do things that sound strange to me. It’s only years later that I am old enough to understand these anti-heroes are really my brother in disguise.

As Mike grows more secretive, I grow more suspicious. I rifle through his duffel bag, closets, drawers, and even the case where he stores his band instrument. The magazine pictures are familiar yet alien to me. Women and girls with no clothes. Men with no clothes. And then men and women together naked. I puzzle over them before stuffing them back into their hiding places. One is a ripped-out picture of a man’s huge thing. I repeatedly go back to his hiding place to stare at it, though I’m unsure why. Finally, when I’ve grown tired of it, I take it to my mother.

She calls it dirty and nasty and makes me show her where I found it. I do more than that and take her to all his hiding places so she can burn all the magazines, ripped-out photos, and stacks of notebook paper that he’s been secreting away.

All I can summon are a few childhood stories hinting at his interest in the young, the vulnerable, and anyone with low self-esteem.

Later, he takes me aside privately to take both my arms and shake me furiously. His face contorts with rage. Looking into his eyes, I see that I’m no longer his little buddy but instead a dangerous enemy. My childhood hero’s mask slips for a moment, and I see his dual nature.

Other memories paint a picture of Mike. I am laying belly down on the floor to watch the TV while Mike holds our cousin, the same age as me, on his lap. I hear him say, “You’re going to be a looker when you grow up.” He tickles her all over, and she giggles and then makes odd noises. I scooch closer to the TV and then turn up the volume. I yell over my shoulder, “What are you guys doing?” Mike barks shut up and tells me I’m too young to understand.

Years pass, and my brother finally moves out on his own. 

Then the mask slips again and we learn he’s abused one of his girlfriend’s daughters. In court, he casts his eyes down and takes a plea, agreeing to spare the victim the shame of testifying.

From prison, Mike sends me a book of essays written by prisoners and published by a criminal justice professor. Inside is the story he’s written about himself. I recognize his writing style, but the tone and topic are different. In this story, Mike toggles between victim and hero. He admits abusing his stepdaughter but laments how he is treated in prison. Expressions of remorse for his crimes are coupled with declarations of pride for how he has endured incarceration.

But his personal story ends in a shocking finale. Mike relays in a matter-of-fact way that my mother has told him he was abused as a child—rented out by his father to other men.

Mike is dead now, and along with him, the stories he would have told himself about his childhood and even mine. Without them, there is no one to cast as my possible villain and no way to know if I’m a victim of him or of Pops. For that, I’m strangely grateful. I supposed I’d rather live with the uncertainty than know the truth. After all, some things are better left at rest in the darkness.

Adapted from Man Made: Searching for Dads, Daddies, Father Figures, and Fatherhood by Steve Majors. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2025 by Steve Majors. All rights reserved.

Ha Jin Returns to the Tiananmen Square Massacre in His New Novel

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Ha Jin was six years old when his father, a career officer in the People’s Liberation Army, was labeled “politically suspect” by the Chinese Communist Party and sent away for re-education. Jin was forced to leave the boarding school he’d attended since kindergarten and endure the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. At thirteen, he joined the People’s Liberation Army, because, he says, his other option was farm labor, and the military’s food was better. 

After five years in the military, the Chinese authorities directed Jin to study English. He was in graduate school at Brandeis University when soldiers in the army killed unarmed student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Jin has said the Tiananmen Square massacre was the reason he became a writer. Since then, he has written nine novels and four collections of poetry and short stories. He has won many honors, including the National Book Award, two Pen/Faulkner Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In his arresting new novel, Looking for Tank Man, Ha Jin revisits the Tiananmen Square massacre through the eyes of Lulu, a Chinese student studying history at Harvard in 2008. Prior to her time at Harvard, Lulu believed the official version of Chinese history, which omitted accounts of student deaths at the hands of the military, and depicted the protestors as revolutionaries. Despite growing danger from the Chinese authorities, Lulu persists in uncovering facts suppressed by the government, as well as personal experiences of the protest and massacre in her own family’s history. The book’s title is a reference to the unidentified “Tank Man”—a single, white-shirted protestor who, for an extraordinary length of time, blocked a line of eighteen tanks, and whose image has become an international symbol of peaceful protest.

I sat down with Ha Jin, my former professor in the Creative Writing MFA program at Boston University, to discuss his new novel, life under an authoritarian regime, and reasons for hope in a darkening political climate.

Heather Thompson-Brenner: I’ve been telling people about your book, and if they’re a certain age, they know who the Tank Man was immediately, but they don’t know what event he was protesting. Why do you think that is? 

Ha Jin: People tend to forget, and a lot of people are eager to forget such a historical event. The Chinese government also urged people to look forward. 

I don’t think that the Chinese government expected this, but somehow once the image appeared, it really became iconic, and people celebrated him as a hero. Really it became very public, to the shame of the Chinese government. So there was kind of a popular consumption of this image. But also, it evolved. Over time, it became something different. 

HTB: How would you describe that evolution? 

HJ: People would think this guy was really crazy, or just like a superhero, but in fact he was an average person. A very common person. 

HTB: I remember watching the American coverage on television, of the protests and the massacre in Tiananmen Square. We’re all aware that visual media, photographic or video, breaks through our resistance to facing the horrors of violence. How do you do that in writing? 

I didn’t expect that the Chinese government could be so brutal.

HJ: You know, I have to write patiently, because I provide a lot of details and make them connected. That’s the biggest problem. You have to find a way to link all these episodes and details together. Even the publishers don’t like it too bloody. I want people to remember this moment, and also to think about the implications. 

HTB: You’ve said that your reaction to watching the protest on television was an important event in your life. Can you tell me about that?

HJ: I didn’t expect that the Chinese government could be so brutal. I had served in the Chinese army, and our first principle was to serve the people. Now, everything was reversed; I felt everything was upside down. For weeks afterward, I lived in a trance. I was in shock, a bit. It was very traumatic. That’s why I decided to stay living in the U.S., to immigrate. 

HTB: In the book, Lulu is writing a dissertation about the Tank Man. She encounters a number of witnesses at Harvard who tell their stories about the Tiananmen Square massacre at the beginning of the book, and then there’s a later section of accounts from witnesses when she goes back to China.

HJ: Yes, because she was not aware that both her parents were participants. This was unexpected. So in a way, this is another way of encountering the violence first-hand. It becomes more personal. In the beginning, she was not as invested in it, but as she continues, she gets more involved. 

HTB: Were any of these stories based on actual people’s stories? 

HJ: Yes, there are a lot of books, such as the Tiananmen Square Papers. There are a lot of details, but they’re scattered. I prepared to write it for a long time. The question is, how to organize them, to make them connect? A lot of the details I couldn’t use. This is a narrow, personal perspective. 

HTB: In the novel we also hear the point of view of a veteran, a soldier who was in a tank at Tiananmen Square. He makes a compelling argument that he could not have known what was going to happen, or what was really going on. I felt sympathetic to him. Did you intend that? 

HJ: Yes, that’s the truth. A lot of the soldiers were basically confined in barracks and given a different kind of material. They didn’t understand what was going on. In a way, [the veteran character] adds nuance. There are [also] people who don’t regret what they did, and given the same situation, they might do it again. 

HTB: Lulu is a student, and her friends are students, and the people who organized the protest and were killed were students. I was wondering, what are the qualities of being a student that are so compelling? 

HJ: Students don’t have the baggage, so they are free to act. Also, they are more liberal. I have watched the video a lot with younger people, currently the millennials. They say, “It’s our turn now, we have to protest, we have to take over the life of our parents’ generation.” In other words, the younger ones, they are eager to participate. I was very encouraged. 

HTB: One of the things I thought made Lulu’s situation so compelling is the gathering sense of threat. You also mentioned that some editors thought you could be in danger from writing such a book. What’s the danger? 

As a dictator, there’s no limit. Your power is boundless. Some political figures in the West admire that.

HJ: This is in a way writing against the Chinese government. This book is a story about something they want people to forget. So that’s why absolutely this book won’t be printed in China. Some Americans thought it would be self-destructive [to write it]. But I have a lot of emotional investment in this.

HTB: Have any of your books been printed in China? 

HJ: A few of them. They were published then, but at a book event, I spoke against Xi Jinping. So all my books got banned. All the books were pulled from the shelf. 

HTB: I was really struck by how present surveillance was for the Chinese students in the book, even the ones who were here [in the U.S.], that anything that they were doing or writing was immediately noted. People whom Lulu knows, in 2012, are anticipating that technology will change the way people are watched, that everything will be watched in a cashless society, where your ID could be canceled and your bank account taken away. Has that come true? 

HJ: Something like that. You can’t use cash to buy food, it’s just really impossible. Everybody uses digital. If you are labeled as some bad element by the government, you can’t buy a plane ticket, you can’t buy a train ticket, you can’t stay in a hotel. So it’s very hard, they make your life impossible.

HTB: Lulu is also afraid of being detained, and the result of being detained can be imprisonment. 

HJ: The kind of imprisonment that would be for students, they put you among common prisoners, inmates. So basically, you suffer. They might also have a kind of special status for students; they call them political prisoners. I think the worst part is once you have become a different category, your life is basically over. You will always be treated as an unacceptable person. 

HTB: Reading your book now, I naturally drew parallels between the events depicted, the encroaching authoritarian presence, and the current U.S. government and climate. Do you see the United States headed in the direction of totalitarianism? 

HJ: Not exactly. We are still a society ruled by law. I can see there is oppression, especially the hostility to new immigrants, that’s more intensified. But it’s different—this society is different from China.

We shouldn’t make a book too sad, too hopeless.

In the U.S. we have democratic structures and a humanitarian society. But there are people in power who are willing, [who] are eager, whose minds are open to the possibility [of authoritarianism]. Honestly, some people, I think they have a kind of complex for dictators. As a dictator, there’s no limit. Your power is boundless. Some political figures in the West admire that. They want that kind of power, and the durability of the power, and they study how dictators have accumulated it. And a life-long term. That makes them admirable to some politicians. 

HTB: There’s a way dictators start to be worshipped, like a religious figure would be. I think you said somewhere that patriotism had taken the place of religion in China. 

HJ: That’s true. It’s dangerous. Patriotism becomes the very religion of the state, it becomes the common denominator. Once you say, “I did this out of love for my country,” that is totally justified. But it’s wrong. We know that, right? Because there are a lot of values bigger and greater than patriotism. 

HTB: When I was in your class, you often talked about what makes a great novel. Do you have a few things to say about that? 

HJ: First, tell [a] good story. There also should be some emotional intensity. It’s important to have something to say. That people feel really enriched by the experience. 

HTB: You also told us that when we were writing novels—and maybe any fiction—we should read great examples. Were you reading anything in that vein when you wrote this book? 

HJ: I mentioned often in class the book called Silence [by Shūsaku Endō]. That book really showed me all the technical possibilities, like how to make use of a diary, records, official documents.

HTB: I can think of related stories that are tragedies, like 1984, or other stories where students become disillusioned and the story ends sadly. But this one ends kind of hopefully. 

HJ: Yes, I do want to have a hopeful note. People survive and life continues. We shouldn’t make a book too sad, too hopeless. Then, why go on a book tour? [laughs]

7 Witchy Poetry Books to Read This Samhain

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

As a little girl, I was that kid mashing up plants I found in the garden to make potions and using marbles as crystal balls. My mom, always eager to encourage my interests, even bought me a pocket book of spells from Barnes & Noble. But then a rumor spread around my very conservative, very Christian town that I was a witch. My best friend at the time pulled me aside in school one day to ask in hushed tones, concern and worry etched across her face, if it was true.

I wish I could say I had the moxie back then to proudly confirm their suspicions. Instead, I tucked that side of myself away in the broom closet, channeling my spooky energy into more acceptable outlets like Halloween and scary movies. It wasn’t until the year after I graduated college when I was gifted a tarot deck that I began opening myself back up to witchcraft. And it was another six years until I finally came out of that broom closet and declared myself a witch.

While writing my debut poetry book, I was thinking a lot about the figure of the witch and the ways in which she’s been identified (and so often maligned) in our culture. To me, the witch is the perfect symbol for anyone who’s been persecuted for existing outside the norm—whether because they refuse to uphold the role society dictates for them or because their traditions, language, clothing, body, art, lifestyle buck against convention. I wrote To Love a Fierceness so Bright in response to this, using the witch—as well as many other prominent female figures from history and religion—to explore themes of womanhood, identity, and reclamation. My poems wrestle with the names we’re given, the roles we reject, and the power in re-authoring our own stories.

The 7 poetry books you’ll find below all blur the line between poem and incantation. They resist the mainstream and carve out a space for the mystical, the feral, and the sacred on their own terms. Whether you identify as a witch, resonate with her archetype, or just want something a little spooky to read this Samhain, this list of witchy poetry books is the perfect familiar. 

The Witch, A Play by Thera Webb 

Thera Webb’s The Witch, A Play may open with a “Cast List,” but between its pages you’ll uncover a feverish collection of sparse, evocative poems told through the voices of characters we think we know: the Mother, the Beast, the Children, the Hero, and the eponymous Witch. But don’t let these familiar fairytale archetypes shape how you see them here. In Webb’s hands, the Mother understands that all lions have human faces; the Children arrive bleeding and already covered in the scars of their ancestors; the Hero is lost; the Beast is more prophet than monster; and the Witch just wants to be left alone. Like truths divined from a crystal ball, these poems speak to the wildness, the unknowable, the hunger, the hurt, and the need for resolution within all of us while offering no clear allegory or lesson learned. Like the archetypes themselves, Webb’s poetry shimmers in a liminal, dreamlike space that is both window and mirror.

Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino 

There is sorcery at work in Kiki Petrosino’s Witch Wife, which delves deep into what it means to live in a body, especially a Black, female body. Through traditional and invented poetic forms, Petrosino weaves together memories, personal histories, myths, and dreams into an incantation to summon the dead and conjure the self. Filled with magical tokens and talismans, these poems explore all stages of womanhood—from the darkly magical times of childhood to the emergence of self in young adulthood, and its quiet erosion in marriage and motherhood. Petrosino’s writing is lyrical and expansive, blunt and concise, and faces issues of generational trauma, body shaming, and cultural violence to “wrangle life from the dirt.” These poems are not for the faint of heart. But for those willing to face the dark, Witch Wife offers light and the knowledge that you are not alone. 

All Things Holy and Heathen by Chelsea C. Jackson

This one’s for the eco-political witches. Infused with verve and heart, the electrifying poems within Chelsea C. Jackson’s All Things Holy and Heathen will ignite the pyre of resistance inside you. Broken into four sections—Life, Death, Violence, and Resurrection—Jackson’s searing verse is both an attack on man-wrought violence and an invocation for us to reconnect with the earth that birthed us before it’s too late. For Jackson, this means beginning at the beginning, by rewriting the Christian myth of creation. In her telling, Eve is not a sinful creature, but a holy, natural being. It is mankind, the so-called “divinely chosen, [who has] breathed hot air onto glaciers / bled oil into oceans / burned holes into the heavens.” But Jackson knows the antidote. If we are to heal Gaia, we must “open [our] palms to what the sediment is saying”—we must commune with nature, follow our intuition, and remember the beauty and knowledge inherent within every body.  

fox woman get out! by India Lena González

Woe to any man who tries to control this ferocious witch. With a freedom and fierceness that won’t be cowed, India Lena González’s fox woman get out! demands attention. Like a true witch, she bucks convention, letting these poems rage in all caps, simmer in fractured lines, and call across time in long, sweeping verses. The wanton abandon and feral power of these poems evokes skyclad witches dancing around a bonfire, howling at the full moon. González struggles to pin down her mixed identity in a world that glorifies whiteness and conformity. But like the poems themselves, González is expansive. With deep heartache and profound insight, González carves her indelible image onto the page. In poem after poem, she asserts herself as something larger, deeper, wilder than the structures of white society have laid out. She reveals herself to possess a truer knowledge of self and humanity, which she prophesizes like the Oracle of Delphi. This one’s for the witches who refuse to be silenced or forgotten.

Rose Quartz by Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe 

Any good witch knows that healing is one of the oldest forms of the craft. In Rose Quartz, Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe channels that power into the page. Under her pen, the past and present exist simultaneously—a sensation that is heightened by the absence of any punctuation. These poems, like time, are fluid, shifting, unstable. Here, the everyday is transformed into something magical, though it is a dangerous magic that could wound as easily as it heals. Yet healing is what LaPointe seeks—through color magic, tarot cards, herbs, crystals, moon water, salt baths, and even flying ointment. In these “spells of survival” she attempts to mend the wounds of her inner child, the scars of ancestral trauma, and the violence done to her body, while confronting the contradictions born of her Native American heritage, American culture, and the narrow expectations of womanhood. “Sometimes,” LaPointe writes, “to remember a wound is the way of healing.” And special shoutout to Fumi Mini Nakamura on the bewitching cover art!

Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales by Hannah V Warren 

If you’re in the mood for something darker, Hannah V Warren’s Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales delivers. In Warren’s words, this book is “gruesome and seductive.” Here you’ll find ghosts and skeletons, insects and rotting things, and an entire section devoted to apocalypse poems. Warren explores the unnaturalness of life, the monstrousness of our bodies, and the way those bodies continue to fracture and influence the earth’s story after death. Like a true necromancer, she divines meaning from remains, whether she’s stealing bones from the dinosaur exhibit at the Natural History Museum or reckoning with the South’s violent history. There’s something Frankensteinian in the way these poems are stitched together, an ongoing attempt to reanimate flesh in a decaying world. In the end, we’re left to confront and “live with the horrors of our own bodies.”

Loba by Diane di Prima

No list of witchy poetry is complete without Diane di Prima’s seminal work, Loba. This epic poem spans the ages as it conjures up the wolf goddess, drawing on female figures from historical and religious texts, as well as classic literature. She is Loba, but she is also Athena, Isis, Aphrodite, Nut, and Inanna. She is Eve and Lilith; Guinevere and Morgan le Faye; Helen of Troy and Mary Magdalene. In this way, Loba marks herself as ever-present and eternal. She is not one divine female, but all divine females that have been or ever will be. Di Prima’s goddess will hunt you down in the pages of this book, patiently following you “like some / big, rangy dog” until you turn to confront her. For those brave enough to do so, you won’t find the kindly mother figure of the patriarchy. More akin to Kali, Loba does not offer a refuge from tears, but what she does offer is protection and fierce loyalty. Loba stands “strong patient / recognizably / goddess. / Protectress / great mystic beast of European forest. / green warrior woman, towering. / kind watchdog I cd / leave the children with.”

9 Books That Explore the Unique Intimacy of Sisters

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I grew up in an all-girl household. Five girls in close quarters! Five girls in the bath. Five girls in matching dresses at holidays. Our identities were shaped in relation to each other. Over the years, we alternately despised each other and adored each other, we fought and reconciled, we were cruel and then compassionate. With five girls, there’s plenty of drama.

The first story I ever wrote was, not surprisingly, about rage: Two sisters have a physical altercation over a blob of mayonnaise purposefully spilled on the table. When I showed the story to my parents, they huddled in their room, mumbling as if concerned. In my story, the younger sister pins the elder to the slate floor, holding her by the hair, and bashes her head into the tile. Blood is spilled. Stitches are required. As I said: rage.

When I was ready to write Hello Wife, a novel about sisters, I realized that despite my ample personal experiences, I needed material from other sources. What is the nature of the intimate bonds between sisters? I did a deep dive into current novels that featured women and girls in various stages of development. I noticed some interesting similarities. Intimacy in fiction is often shown in distinct moments of grief, trauma, loyalty, resentment, longing, and dependency. The nature of those bonds, however, is harder to discern. How do sisters relate to one another psychologically? What is the unique dynamic that defines each sisterly bond, and how can we understand the process of creating passionate sister relationships in fiction?

Stories about sisters abound, but few capture the base, emotional nature of those relationships. The sisterly bonds in these nine novels explore the intricacies of trauma, love, conflict, and support between sisters; each story enhanced my own writing and expanded my understanding of sisterhood.

My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud

This novel follows Lucy, the younger of two sisters who grow up in an unstable and often chaotic household. Both sisters carry deep emotional scars, yet their bond remains true. Lucy tries to connect with her throughout their young adult years while Bea, fiercely independent, is drawn to danger. Bea’s recklessness is in contrast to Lucy’s need for stability. The intimacy between Bea and Lucy is based on kept secrets and unspoken understanding. The nature of their bond is fractured. Their lives diverge and then reconnect repeatedly. No matter the conflict, these sisters find their way back to one another. The relationship endures.

All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky

When her erratic sister disappears, the narrator in this story is unable to thrive on her own. She spirals into drugs, sexual experimentation, and crime. Before that event, the sisters share an adventurous and daring lifestyle, and their shared exploits create a sense of complicity between them. Debbie, the elder of the two, is especially reckless, while the younger sister, the narrator, feeds off of that magnetic energy. Like many younger sisters, she craves Debbie’s approval and attention. She admires her sister, and she also realizes that Debbie may well bring them both to disaster. The nature of their bond is toxic and magnetic and has a push-pull effect: The narrator is aware that the bond may, in fact, destroy her. And yet, she is unable to disconnect.

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons

Enduring love is the nature of this sisterly bond. When her younger sister Julie dies suddenly, Kit’s sense of reality is fractured. She turns to drugs and self-destructive behavior to dull the pain of her loss. Kit wants only to regain the closeness she once cherished. She soon finds that closeness in memory. In fact, Kit is haunted by the memory of her sister. She revisits their stories, their invented worlds, remembering their jokes and the rhythm of their voices. This is a bond unbroken by death.

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

Elf and Yoli are sisters who exist in the shadow of their father’s suicide. Elf is a superstar concert pianist plagued by depression—she wants desperately to die. Her younger sister, Yoli, is devoted to her sister and to the intellectual and spiritual closeness they’ve created together. She will do anything to save her sister, and she also respects Elf’s wishes. This conflict is evidence of an extraordinary love that must span the divide between sacrifice and support. The nature of this bond combines nurturing and anguish. Also, check out Miriam Toews’s new memoir, A Truce That is Not Peace, and her latest interview in EL.

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina

After their mother attempts suicide, sisters Edie and Mae are sent to live with their estranged father. While Mae clings to their father, Edie rebels against him, and against their new life. The sisters are pulled in opposite directions for the first time in their lives. Their allegiance is repeatedly tested: to their parents and to each other. Throughout the story, Mae and Edie remain connected, tethered through trauma and despair. The nature of the bond between them is based on loyalty. It can be twisted and bent, but it never breaks.

Yolk by Mary H.K. Choi

When June is diagnosed with cancer, her younger sister Jayne must come to her aid. Theirs is not an easy relationship: it is full of long-honed rivalry, judgement, and old resentments. But illness forces them together, and they find common ground in their Korean American upbringing and experiences. Caregiving solidifies their love. The differences between them recede, and a new closeness forms—one that embraces their imperfections and celebrates a newfound intimacy. This is the story of their sisterly reconciliation.

The Turnout by Megan Abbott

This is a psychological drama of twin sisters who are so enmeshed in each other’s lives, they cannot see outside of their own microcosm. Dara and Marie share a business, a dance academy they inherited from their deceased mother. Like ballet dancers in training, their relationship is about control: control over the body, control over the business, and control over each other. The story is rife with tension and kept secrets, and shows the deep emotional conflict of women in competition. The nature of their bond is characterized by intensity and claustrophobia. 

Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner

Amy, the narrator of this novel, lives in the shadow of her sister Ollie, whose mental health is unstable. Amy is quiet and obedient, focused on academics and navigating the crises that Ollie brings to the family. The bond between them is very strong, and exemplifies the compassion and steadfastness they have toward one another. Amy’s devotion to Ollie is fierce even though her own life is often sidelined by her sister’s erratic behaviors. Hers is a story of endurance, understanding, and extraordinary patience. The bond between these sisters orbits around hope and duty. 

The Float Test by Lynn Steger Strong


When Jude returns home after the sudden death of her mother, she is forced to grapple with long-kept family secrets and face the unnamed tension that drove her siblings apart. This family drama examines how grief has the capacity to unite and also alienate family members. Theirs is a multi-faceted bond that is complex and strained. The narrator, Jude, reveals layers of discord from within their shared memories, and identifies sources of estrangement between them. The family dynamic in The Float Test is presented as a tapestry of opposites: closeness and estrangement, success and failure, impulse and purpose, intimacy and privacy. Love and tension are woven tightly together.

Reframing the Horror Genre Through a Trans Lens

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Zefyr Lisowski’s Uncanny Valley Girls is an urgent, complex debut pulling at the threads of horror, trauma, care, and ultimately the endurance of trans women and queer people at large. Lisowski uses horror films as a prism through which to interrogate her own history and culture—both popular and underground—as well as the intersecting systems that create and crush us. Whether she is reconsidering her feelings about her hometown and its history through Scream and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, fleshing out our cultural appetite for torture porn as it pertains to the Iraq War, or thoughtfully arguing about why maybe trans women are more like werewolves than we think, Lisowski’s debut collection of autobiographical essays never shies away from the messiness of its subject matter or the complexities inherent in fleshing it out. 

Uncanny Valley Girls is deftly tuned to our cultural moment, never missing the opportunity to name the greater systems that shape and impose upon our lives. At every turn, she highlights the nuances of her analysis, looking at its limits and applications across identity, time, and location. That said, these essays are as emotionally-charged as they are astute. Lisowski makes a fervent argument for care, kindness, and understanding between every bloody, hard-to-look at moment of hurt and pain. Through her meticulousness comes a clear, resounding message reminiscent of the horror movies she pulls from: Stay alive.

In the month leading up to the publication of Uncanny Valley Girls, I had the opportunity to speak to Lisowski on Zoom about psych wards, the Southern United States, and “Crazy4Crazy” relationships. 

Christ: You do such a wonderful job putting your personal relationships in the context of the movies discussed in the book, and also in a grander socio-political context. Was that something that happened naturally? 

Zefyr Lisowski: I was interested in first tracking these movies socially and interpersonally, and of course the interpersonal is always framed within the context of the political. So, the politicality of these relationships, especially relationships across intersections of difference, class, ability, and saneism, were all pushed intuitively to the foreground. As the book is fundamentally oriented around themes of survival—our motivators in relationships, and in the movies that I chose to discuss—the ways those show up became more pushed to the surface as well. 

C: So many of these essays are viewed through your affinity for horror movies. Can you talk about your relationship to the genre? 

ZL: I had an interest and fear and anxiety around horror films from a very young age. These movies became [a] way to contextualize an oft-fractious childhood, tensions of grief, and self-actualization that I didn’t know how to articulate. [They] became a way for me to see reflections of parts of myself that I didn’t always know how to express. Like a lot of people who are interested in horror movies, I was an incredibly nervous and fear-ridden child, and they became a way to externalize and build a container for those fears, even as that container was a little bit intense or activating in its own way. 

C: One of my favorite essays in the collection is about Scream and the evolution of your ideas of home. Early in the essay, you bring up relating to films either by reflection or aspiration, and the inevitable disappointment of trying to run away from yourself. Could you talk about the emotional arc of that? 

I had an interest and fear and anxiety around horror films from a very young age.

ZL: So much of this book is centered around the fear and anticipation of finding these modes of salvation, this thing that will save or redeem us, and then realizing the self and these patterns of behavior are fundamentally inescapable. Being forced to reckon with these ideas of escape as someone who grew up white with some class mobility in the rural South is a very particular set of experiences. It was important to think of how I was fed this narrative of escape, of moving out of the South, which is a very common story for a lot of queer people in rural areas in particular. Throughout, I was interested in tracing these throughlines of what it means to want to leave a place. The flip side of that is: Who’s able to leave the place? What does it mean if you are being forced out of a place? What does it mean to assert your role there anyway?

C: The essay on Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows that essay really well, because it’s about the flip side of rediscovering the beauty of where you’re from. 

ZL: I really wanted to put those two things in conversation, and I’m glad that you picked up on that. There is a tremendous amount of beauty to the Southern United States, to North Carolina in particular, and while I really wanted to leave and have left—I’m speaking to you from New York City, where I’ve been the past decade—there still is a tremendous amount I miss about the South, a tremendous amount about the South that is really beautiful and commendable from a political, interpersonal, and geographic perspective as well. 

C: So much of the book is about home and family. How did that come to be? 

ZL: Like a lot of queer and trans people, I have a complex relationship with my family of origin and the idea of home. Moving a lot as a kid and then settling in this small rural town shaped my understanding of what could or couldn’t be a home. It became this place that was really marked by instability and violence, but also in the wake of that there was a tremendous amount of care and bonding that happened, whether in a more positive or negative valence. I was interested in talking about my own experience because of a simple question of representation. I haven’t read any writing by a trans woman from the rural South, certainly not with a major press, and that’s something that I don’t take lightly in terms of a responsibility. It is also something that reflects the stories that are told, right?

The majority of the trans perspectives that we see highlighted in mainstream publishing are white, typically from urban areas, adhere to these conventional beauty standards, and often have [a] middle to upper-middle class positionality or the ability to present that way. I, on paper, match all of those criteria, but I also have experience in a more rural area in having a Southern-grown childhood. It was important to me to think through those points of reflection where I align with the hegemonic norms of what publishing prioritizes, but also to push back and think about the ways in which my story, while adhering to these super-structural schemas, opens up the space hopefully for more counter-hegemonic narratives to come through as well, which connects back to home and family. All of these things are related to places of origin, how we relate to those places, and are the throughlines of an entire system of order. 

C: Films in the book are not only tools for the interrogation of history, but also relationships from your youth that are characterized by longing. Where do you think that sense of longing is born from? 

I was interested in using horror movies to talk about hunger for connection.

ZL: There are a couple of directions that longing comes from. One is this sense of isolation that you get growing up “other” in a community that doesn’t seem to welcome you. There is a long history of writers, especially queer writers from the South, who really engage with this otherness. Beyond the superstructural loneliness, I was interested in using horror movies to talk about hunger for connection. A lot of these movies are fundamentally social encounters. We typically watch horror movies with odd dates or with friends or in this myriad array of contexts, and it became this intuitive counterbalance for these questions of longing and connection. If we watch a scary movie with other people, what are the ways that already prefigure a desire for connection? What are the ways watching these movies together assumes a longing for that togetherness? 

C: It makes me think about how, as kids, before we have the opportunity to bond with people by experiencing hard things together, horror movies can be a facsimile for bonding through adversity.

ZL: Yeah, I love that framework: a kind of proto-trauma bonding through watching, like, Willem Dafoe’s dick get crushed by a millstone. 

C: You don’t shy away from offering complex depictions of trans women who not only endure harm but have perpetuated it themselves. What considerations did you make when writing that history? 

ZL: That’s something that I’ve thought about quite a bit as we’ve been emerging into this even more hostile environment for trans people and trans women in particular. We’ve seen time and time again [that] the political strategy of sanitizing one’s queerness and presenting oneself as a perfect being that is incapable of harm is fundamentally deleterious to larger social movements. This idea that queer people can’t hurt each other, or trans people can’t hurt each other is doing a disservice to the fact that we’re all human, and we have complex relationships with harm done and received. I was interested in laying out some of those complexities as a counterbalance to the impetus to present ourselves as unimpeachable. At the same time, that’s a risky proposition in these times, right? 

So much of this essay is grappling with the framework of the trans woman as a sexual assailant and the idea that trans women are going to hurt you. That’s counterbalanced by the fact that I did experience sexual violence from someone who later transitioned. I was interested in presenting that narrative to think about what if that does happen in a discreet instance. What are the ways we can still form community and assert the importance of our lives despite that harm? That’s really rooted in abolitionist politics. Having an understanding of harm done without ceding ground is incredibly important in this particular moment. Nevertheless, there are still existing ways that I tried to frame this: pushing back that this isn’t a universal narrative and having this emphasis on still forming community and sisterhood with these people who hurt me, even despite that hurt. 

C: In the book, you flesh out a similarity between transness and werewolves that grapples with the complexity of that comparison. How does the concept of a werewolf begin to reveal the complexity of trans people—the harms we endure and the harm we can commit? 

ZL: When I was six or seven, one of my favorite movies was The Wolf Man, and I dressed up as a werewolf for Halloween. I obsessively drew and thought about werewolves. The start of the essay was asking: Why was this so appealing to me? Werewolves have this ambiguous relationship to change. It’s not fully volitional, but something they can find themselves within. There’s a tremendous amount of strength, self-resolution, and self-autonomy that’s required to transition, but nevertheless there is a sense of yielding, of subsumption to something more extensive than you: either the long history of trans people existing against a society that is frequently hostile, or the disproportionate violences that trans people and especially trans women are exposed to, especially Black and Brown trans women. I was interested in using the werewolf as a way to tease out not only those violences but also the unexpected joys of transition. 

This idea that queer people can’t hurt each other or trans people can’t hurt each other is doing a disservice to the fact that we’re all human

There’s a tremendous beauty in the figure of the werewolf: this figure that’s covered in hair, like us but not like us, loping across a field. I had seen this quite lazy formulation, a viral tweet that became this folk-saying: “Trans women are vampires, trans men are werewolves.” What if we complicate that more? So much of werewolves are rooted in this fear of masculinity, of becoming haired, violent. At the same time, it has the counterbalance: It’s not becoming a man, not becoming a woman, but becoming something else. So if we become something else, how can that mirror or challenge existing transition narratives as well?

C: Despite the book’s subject matter, how is there always a turn toward hope and care at every turn in these essays?

ZL: As Mariame Kaba said famously, “hope is a discipline,” right? It’s really important for me to think towards these moments of connection throughout the work because of the larger argument. It’s a book about intimacy, relationships, and horror movies. Most fundamentally, the biggest takeaway of the book is an argument against suicide. It starts at this nadir that I experienced entering the psych ward, feeling this intense overwhelm of suicidality. What follows is an effort to claw out of that space and assert the meaningfulness of our lives as trans people, in community with other queer people. It would be deeply irresponsible for me not to loop towards hope. I also don’t want to sanitize the complexities of that: The ways in which we are hurt and the ways we hurt others isn’t mutually exclusive with the importance of continuing to stay alive.

C: Typically when an author enters a psych ward, it is characterized as a low point. In Uncanny Valley Girls, it’s a moment of love and ultimately freedom. Can you talk about how that section of the book is incorporated thematically and structurally? 

ZL: I had a very particular experience in the psych ward. Understanding it as a site of pain, violence, carcerality, was palliative for me. I wanted to capture that tension. The psych ward itself wasn’t this site of healing, but the people I met there, the ways in which I delved into what I was reading, the relationship I built with myself, and the way that experience necessitated redefining my relationship to care was profoundly transformative. I wanted to respond to and play with the larger tropes of psych wards that you see in horror movies, which is this place of intense violence, abject psychic states, and profound terror. There was a sadness and a loneliness to the ward, but there was also this sense that I had to find ways of changing. While I wanted to highlight the ward itself as this place that facilitated the change, it’s significant that the book doesn’t end in a psych ward. It ends at a writing residency, which is this place of community. Having that counterbalance hopefully mirrors a larger structure the book makes from a place of confinement to a place of expansiveness. 

C: You also talk about what you call “crazy for crazy” relationships in that essay. Why are those important? 

ZL: It ties into what we were talking about earlier around refusing to sanitize these dynamics within the queer community. Finding places of connection with others who have been pathologized and have experiences of trauma and instability is actually a site of profound social and political power, even as it can also be a place where harms are perpetuated. I’m drawing on concepts from the disability justice movement, from the Mad Pride movement, but I also am interested in thinking through connections forged in similarity and solidarity. Finding connection with those like you, especially those whose lives have been deemed less livable—whether that’s because of ableism, because of saneism, because of transphobia or trans misogyny—can be a pretty profound space of change and reflection. I wanted to assert a counter argument to this larger history of someone entering a more normative relationship and becoming saved. That’s something that I reject with every fiber of my being. 

C: In the essay about the artist Greer Lankton, you talk about how often trans women’s art is pigeonholed into the genre of autobiography. In your own words, what is the aim of Uncanny Valley Girls beyond self-explanation? 

ZL: In a lot of ways, the history of trans women’s memoirs, which this book broadly is, is a complex history of disavowal, of market forces, and of subversion. There are a number of collections—Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness is foremost among those—that are responding to market pressures, but also asserting the importance of lives lived and the complexity of those lives in ways that I find fascinating and complex. I was interested in this book fitting into that tradition. An essay collection by a trans woman, a series of autobiographical writing, is perhaps a little bit easier to sell or promote than these more complex or heterodox forms. If we are working within that framework, what spots of subversion are there? What ways can this personal narrative hopefully serve as a larger microcosm that argues not just to a cis audience about the importance of our lives lived, which many of these books do and is an important thing to do, but also what are the ways in which this can speak to subcultural, inter-community readers? In that way, while this is a book about horror movies and about love, the throughline of the anti-suicide message is aimed directly at other trans women and is trying to make the text, and the texts within the text, readable to a more particular audience. Hopefully this is a form of solace or community building for that audience as well.

The Version of the Story the Adults Won’t Tell Her

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

“The Request” by Sharmini Aphrodite

A man has died. The girl knows this because the news has spread through the kampung the way a snake makes its way through the lalang. She had heard it first that morning, smashing her teaspoon against her egg at the table, her parents murmuring over their coffee. They had balik kampung for the holidays, departed from their home in the city almost immediately after subuh, the sky still dark but streaked with dawn light already. She had fallen asleep again once in the cool cocoon of the car, awoken just as they broached the outskirts of the kampung. The familiar rise of the foliage, the press of the thinning jungle. Not even a jungle properly, she knew—just clusters of pokok pisang that grew this way and that, a gnarl of trees and brush.

They had done all the proper things upon their arrival at her grandmother’s house, the expected things. The girl putting her forehead to her grandmother’s trembling hand. The greetings and bestowing of gifts from the city, the visiting of the neighbours and the catching up on news and gossip. She had joined her grandmother and mother in the rest of the day’s prayers, her forehead to the mat, turning her head afterwards this way and that. Syukur Alhamduillah, her grandmother said when she had seen her again, clasping her face between her hands. Syukur. Her voice trailing in a request for the girl’s good health.

So far, things have gone as they always had. As they have for years—as many years as the girl has been alive. But today, she is hearing these whispers that arrived that morning about the death of a man, whispers that spread after the dawn prayers. What she can glean from her parents’ voices is that he was an old man, that her grandmother had known him. The other elders in the kampung had known him too. Might the dead man, the girl wonders, be an old friend of her grandmother’s? If so, she should think of a way to comfort her, but even as she is thinking this they hear the door of her grandmother’s room open, the stuttered cadence of her gait against the floors.

Her parents fall silent as her grandmother enters the kitchen. Her father reaches forwards at the table to prise the lid off a new can of condensed milk for her, her mother gesturing for her to sit. Her grandmother sits next to the girl and leans forward, placing her hand against the girl’s cheek. They look into the others’ eyes, and the girl notices how bright her grandmother’s eyes are this particular morning. She can see her reflection in them.

“Mak—” her father begins, “about . . . about what you said to us this morning . . .”

Her grandmother turns her head. “There is nothing more I have to say.”

The news continues to spread. The girl knows this because she hears more rumours when she walks over to the kedai runcit for a Paddle Pop, the bloom of a rainbow left behind on her tongue afterwards from the stain of the food colouring. An old man has died. He had not been living in this kampung, but he was from here. It is a pakcik standing at the kedai runcit counter who is saying this; the girl interrupts the conversation he is having with the shopkeeper, her hand outstretched with the shilling to pay.

They want him buried here, in the kubur. Where we have been burying our dead for so long.

They fall silent as she stands at the counter, switching the conversation to remark on how tall she has grown and to ask about her parents. But the girl wants to hear more, and so when she gets out of the kedai runcit, she circles it and crouches by the window behind the counter where she can still hear the voices of the men if she concentrates.

So he wants a burial? she hears the shopkeeper say. I thought he might have wanted to be cremated—like the Hindus are, like the Chinese. She hears the pakcik’s voice rise in response; she is taken aback by the emotion that is in it—No! They want him here, they want him to come home . . .

The girl saw a Hindu funeral once, saw the flames leap against a white shroud. The smell of incense rising through the smoke, the cloying perfume of jasmine. A body in there. A person. A body. She imagines this old man, who for some reason she thinks of as her late grandfather, a man she has only seen in photographs, smiling placidly next to her grandmother, his songkok at an angle. Suddenly she does not want to hear any more. She stands up and walks away.

When she arrives home, her parents’ car is no longer in the driveway. She climbs the set of wooden steps to her grandmother’s house and sees a cluster of slippers. Opening the door, she sees a group of makciks whose heads rise to meet her. Her grandmother sits in the middle of them, and for a moment there is silence; she knows instinctively that she must have interrupted some talk. She remembers what she heard earlier: So he wants a burial? Her grandmother calls out to her, and she knows what she must do. She wipes her hands—still sticky from the ice cream—on her baju before she goes around the circle of makciks, her forehead to their hands, and when the greetings are done, her grandmother says to her: Sayang, perhaps it is time for you to take a nap? Perhaps you should leave us for a moment—we are only old women, there is nothing that interesting going on here.

The afternoon is long and hot, and the girl tries to go to sleep. For a long time, she is in that strange place between sleeping and waking, where she is not fully conscious but is also aware that the world is continuing to revolve around her. She can see everything, sense it—as if she is merely on the cusp of this reality. She hears voices through the plank walls but cannot understand what they are saying. In the afternoon heat she feels the bedclothes, her hair, stuck to her damp skin. And somewhere in the midst of this all, she is aware that she is dreaming.

Eventually, she does fall asleep, and when she wakes the sky is heavy with the light of the late afternoon. After a while she peels herself off the mat and makes her way into the living room. Her parents are back. She hears her mother talking on the phone in the kitchen, her voice fussy and precise. She walks out into the living room and does not see her grandmother. Perhaps she is sleeping in her room too. When she was younger she would crawl onto the mat with her, be lost to the world as they slept. Now the thought of that old man rises to her again.

She walks to the window and sees her father fiddling with the car engine. He turns back to look at her and makes a face. She makes one back and feels calmed, emerging briefly from the fog of the day. With a renewed sense of purpose she leaves the window and heads to the door, barrels down the steps and into her father’s arms.

“What is it, sayang?”

She closes her eyes. She is not sure how to say what she wants to say—not sure that she even wants to say it.

“Is there something wrong?”

She unlatches herself from her father, takes a breath.

“An old man has died,” she says. She watches her father’s expression, observes how there is no shock on his face, only a sort of resignation. “I don’t think he is from here, but everyone seems to know him.”

She watches her father’s expression, observes how there is no shock on his face, only a sort of resignation.

Her father does not speak for a moment, only raises his eyes briefly to the open window above them before coming to settle on her. He crouches down so they can speak face to face.

“Yes,” he says, “That’s true. A man has died, and he was from here.”

“Will he be burnt, like a Hindu or a Chinese?”

“Burnt?” Her father is shocked now, she can tell. “What have you been hearing?”

She shrugged. “I went to the kedai runcit just now only, and I heard . . .”

Her father shook his head.

“He will not be cremated, sayang. He will be buried as is usually done.”

“Who is he?”

“He was just a man. His parents were from here, his family. Just like me, like your grandmother. Like your grandfather and her parents. Like everyone who came before them.”

She presses her heel into the dirt.

“Why did he leave?”

“Why did I leave?” her father asked. “Many people leave. It is normal to leave and come back. Dah, perhaps you should go back up—your mother told me just now she wanted you to help with something, go and find her.”

The girl understands that she is being dismissed, even if not unkindly. Her father turns back to the car, and she knows that what he has told her is not the entire truth, but there is nothing she can do.

Her mother has nothing for her to do in the kitchen. She is still on her call. And so the girl decides that she will go out and find someone to play with, perhaps one of the other children in the village. She says this to her mother who bites her lip and peels the phone off her ear for a moment. She has a city-dweller’s mild distrust of the kampung, having not grown up in one herself.

“You will be back before dark, okay? And use the bicycle. And don’t talk to anyone you don’t know. And don’t—”

“Mak . . . I know everyone here . . .”

“Wa, so smart, is it? Okay, go ahead . . . make sure you’re back before dark. If you end up at someone’s house get their mother to call, okay?”

“Okay.”

With that, her mother nods and the girl sets out. She takes the bicycle and makes her way down the dirt path leading off from the side of the house. This is her bicycle, and her father had tied some streamers to the handle for her the last time they had visited. Although the colour has faded from them over time, they still glitter now, pink and blue, beneath the last of the day’s sun.

The girl makes her way around the kampung, calling out to the people she recognises as she passes them by. The wind is in her hair, and the faces are familiar to her after so many years. It is still quiet in the day, and she wonders how many houses the news of the old man has travelled to. Who will tell her what she needs to know? Not one of the makciks or pakciks. This is not the kind of news she can get out of any of the adults her parents’ age. But then as she rides down a slight slope, parallel to a field from which a startled flock of birds now emerges, she sees yet another familiar face—a girl a couple of years older than her, a friend. This other girl is standing at the side of the path, holding a plastic bag that must have come from the kedai runcit.

The girl wheels her bicycle to a stop.

“You’ve come back already,” her friend says.

“Ya. You are going home now?”

“Ya. My mother needs these for dinner.” Her friend lifts the plastic bag, in which the girl can see some eggs.

“Do you want to get on my bike? I can send you home.”

The other girl clambers onto the bicycle, and together they cycle slowly towards her house so as not to hurt the eggs. The light is now turning fiery but soft—evening soaking into the sky.

“Kak,” the girl says—for her friend is a little bit older than her—”have you heard what everybody has been saying today?”

“Everybody?”

“Yes, wherever I go today I’ve been hearing about this old man . . .”

“Oh, the one who passed away.”

“Ya.” The girl feels a thrum in her chest. “The one who used to live here. Do you know who he was?”

“I can tell you,” her friend says, “But you are not allowed to say it, or to tell anyone I told you. Understand?”

“Understand.”

“He left because he was an unbeliever.”

“An unbeliever?”

“Ya. That is what my grandmother said. He was a young man when he left only. Still during British times.”

“What else?”

“I know this only.”

“That’s all?”

“Ya. That’s all.”

The girl drops her friend off and then cycles back home, feeling suddenly weary. The sky is a dusty blue now, and, sure enough, she hears the azan for maghrib wind through the air, wrap itself around the trees, rustle through the grass, dance with the last of the light on a stream she is passing. Her mother usually does not say this prayer as she typically makes her way home from work at this time, but the girl knows that she will be praying next to her grandmother now, just as her father would have gone to the surau for this particular one.

She arrives home as the azan trickles to a close, leaning her bicycle against the wall and running up the steps. The light has been turned on already, a sizzling strip of white fluorescence, but it is still bright outside. She has obeyed her mother’s instruction, to return home before it is dark. She wants to bathe before dinner, and while her mother and grandmother are closing the prayer, she rushes to the outdoor washroom, dousing herself in pail after pail of water. The water is shockingly cold, which makes it pleasant afterwards to wrap herself in her clothes that are somehow warm. She is still shivering when she returns to the house, where her mother and grandmother are puttering about in the kitchen. Her father has said he would buy nasi lemak from outside the surau for dinner, so they are only preparing the drinks—coffee for her parents, and searingly hot, milky milo for her and her grandmother.

She helps them pull out the plates and answers their questions. No, she did not go far. Yes, she met so-and-so and greeted them.

“That’s all?” her mother says, placing the drinks on the table.

I heard about the unbeliever who still wants to be buried, she wanted to say. But of course she does not.

I heard about the unbeliever who still wants to be buried, she wanted to say. But of course she does not.

Her grandmother settles down on the chair next to her and pulls her glass of milo towards her. The girl has seen one photograph of her grandmother as a young woman. She is wearing lipstick that is dark grey in the photograph, and her eyes are gleaming—her youth preserved on the photograph paper. She thinks now about that young woman laughing with a young man. Because she has seen a picture of it once, in a school textbook. She imagines the Union Jack rising from a schoolhouse. Maybe the man was a teacher, she thinks, when he was younger—when he had lived here. A teacher like her grandmother had been. She imagines him walking through the streets she had ridden through earlier, imagines him watching the light play on the water like she herself had done, feeling the evening wind blowing his hair back, his hand raised to greet whoever passes him on his way.

Her father comes home, and they unwrap the nasi lemak, digging in with their hands. He puts the television on in the living room, but only at a low volume so that the sound of strangers murmuring is comforting without being obtrusive.

“How were things at the surau?” her mother asks as her father tears off a chunk of his chicken for her.

“Same only.” He pauses for a moment and then raises his head, looks up at all of them, then at his daughter. For a moment, it appears as if he is thinking of something. The girl watches him, her hand hovering over her rice.

“But they were talking about whether they want to bury the old man—”

The girl sweeps her eyes across the table. Her mother looks wary; her grandmother’s expression has not changed, but she opens her mouth and says:

“It cannot be done. He was an unbeliever.”

“Mak . . . he was not an unbeliever. Until the very end he was a believer. He said his prayers five times a day. He has never touched pork, not a bite—”

“How can you know?”

The girl sits there, not daring to move, not daring to breathe, worried that anything she might do, any sound she might make, would betray her presence there—would break this bond that seems now to exist only between mother and son, the two at this table who knew this kampung most intimately. Just as the old man, the dead man, must have once had.

The girl’s mother now looks askance at her, but something in her face has changed. Her mother will not ask her to leave the table. She will let her hear everything. And in so doing, she will allow her to understand more fully the land and the history from which she comes. This is the pact they are making. There is a bond here now, between mother and daughter. An understanding that something is going to be revealed at this table that there is no turning back from. That even if this knowledge has nothing to do with her, it will change everything.

“He was not an unbeliever, Mak. I knew him. You knew him.”

“What was he doing in the jungles? You think we forced him to leave? He left us first. He allied himself with those who wished to take our God away from us.”

“Mak, that was not what he was doing. That was not what he was fighting for. He was not an unbeliever. I remember being a boy, I remember seeing him at every prayer.”

“That means nothing.”

“Mak, if it means nothing, why does it make you happy when I go to the surau for maghrib?”

“Will you ask me to let my granddaughter marry an unbeliever next?”

The girl holds her breath.

“Mak . . . that has nothing to do with anything. We are talking about this one man, this man whom we knew—whom I have prayed with, celebrated with . . .”

“How can you say it has nothing to do with anything? You unravel a thread, and the whole cloth falls to pieces.”

“Mak, his son came to the surau today.”

“His son. So he has a son.”

“He is a young man, still. Not yet married. He came to the surau and he said maghrib with us. And afterwards, he asked us—”

“I can imagine what he asked you!”

The girl swallows. Her grandmother’s voice is sharp, in a way she has rarely heard, but she can hear it trembling, like her hands are now trembling, like there is a waver in her eyes, her throat.

“It is a small request, Mak. It is only for a man who has died and who wants to come home. All we have to do is spare a bit of earth. You know the time for burial is short; we have only a little time left.”

“There are certain things you cannot turn away from.”

“Mak, I do not believe this is true.”

“He betrayed us.”

“How did he betray us?”

The girl’s mother reaches over and touches the girl on her shoulder. Her father’s eyes follow that movement between his wife and his daughter, and for a moment his expression, too, wavers. But when he speaks, his voice is strong.

“He betrayed no one in this kampung, Mak.”

“He was working with the Chinese. He turned his back on God.”

“Just because that is what you have heard—just because that is what you have chosen to believe—does not make it true.”

“He will not be buried here. I hope that is what they decided at the surau just now.”

“It was what they decided,” the girl’s father says. “It was not my will, but it was what they decided.”

With that, he finally turns his gaze away from his mother, and in silence, aside from the hum of the light and the low rumble of laughter from the television, the meal continues.

After they have washed up, the girl expects that her mother will prepare her for bed, but instead her father asks her if she wants to go for a drive. He asks her mother if she wants to accompany them but she shakes her head, says that it is a good idea that someone stay here with the grandmother, even though she has already retired for the night.

And so the girl and her father get into the car. The radio comes on almost immediately after he switches on the engine, some silly pop song to which he turns the dial so that the volume is reduced—like the sound of the television earlier—to a mere hum. He flicks his eyes to the rearview mirror as he reverses out onto the road, the gleam of headlights thrown back briefly into the car, against the tasbih that has been looped around the stem of the mirror.

“Shall we open the windows? The air is fresh here.”

“Okay.”

He turns off the air-conditioning and pulls down the windows. A rush of wind enters the car, and the girl has to brush her hair off her face. The darkness outside is gelatinous, aside from the flare of the headlights, the occasional streetlamp. All this makes the night—where the light falls away—even more intense. Although this place is familiar to her, it seems vaguely different now, as if it were wearing a different skin.

“I need to explain to you,” her father is now saying, “what all that was about. Because one day you will attend history lessons, and you will open the history books, and you will have to be prepared that not everyone understands what has happened here the same way.”

“Okay.”

“Sayang, you are familiar with the story of Si Tanggang, kan? About that man who left his kampung and became a prince. He came back with a princess for a wife, but he would not recognise his mother; he turned his back on all he had known. And so for this betrayal, he was punished with a storm and turned into stone. Sayang, I promise you that this is not that story. One day, you might remember that you were sitting here in this car, that I was telling you this, and you might want to come to me to ask me again about what I cannot tell you now. And when you are older, I will tell you everything.

“But what you need to understand tonight is this: A man from this kampung will not be buried in this kampung. He will be turned away from us in death for fighting for us in his life. Even though his son came back and asked it of us. I am telling you this story because I do not know what else I can do to make up for a sin such as this. I am telling you this story because this is all I can do.”

The next morning, the girl hears her parents wake up next to her for subuh. It is still dark outside, although there is a faint glance of the oncoming day’s light. She will be allowed to sleep for this prayer as her parents and grandmother unroll their mats. Later on, she knows, her mother will want to fry some keropok, and so she will help. She will not be allowed to touch the stove yet, the belly of hot oil, but she will look at what her mother is doing and perhaps learn from it. So that one day she will be able to do it on her own, without supervision.

The day will continue just as the days have always continued here. But she will know that something has changed, even if she cannot now understand precisely how. The girl wipes the sleep from her eyes and looks outside the window. It has begun to rain. A very faint rain that will churn the earth and make perfume out of the soil. Somewhere, she knows, a son will bury his father, and although it will not be in this very soil, it will be a burial too, in the earth. And no matter where that would be, the rain would come, and it would drench the earth, melting into the soil, becoming a part of it, and this would repeat itself—on and on, until the end of time.