What does it mean to be displaced from your homeland? How are families broken and remade? When people lose everything, how do they find the will to survive?
Both vast and intimate, Tsering Yangzom Lama’s riveting debut, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, begins with the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s, when sisters Lhamo and Tenkyi and their parents are embark on a perilous journey to reach Nepal. The novel tells the story of two generations of their family’s life in exile, seamlessly weaving urgent political and moral questions into the narratives of the sisters, Lhamo’s daughter Dolma, and Lhamo’s childhood friend Samphel.
I first met Tsering in 2009, when we were classmates at Columbia University’s MFA program in Fiction. Over the years, our friendship has included so many meals, pep talks, and reading each other’s drafts. As luck would have it, we’re publishing our first novels in the same year and deriving much joy from watching each other realize long-held dreams.
Tsering and I spoke via Zoom about why it’s important to understand the experiences of ordinary Tibetans in exile, the many effects of colonization, survival, resistance, and spirituality.
Jessamine Chan: I’d love to hear about your journey to this first book. What made this the story you wanted to tell?
Tsering Lama: In a way, it’s the story that’s always been there, being born into the exiled Tibetan community in Nepal. I came to Columbia right after having done a couple of years as a community organizer, having done activist work talking about the Tibetan struggle, and I was missing my art. Starting this book in the first semester of Columbia was a way for me to enter this space through a different lens, to get beyond the headlines and abstract understanding of this historical issue and struggle, and basically what colonialism, exile, dispossession from land means at a human level for ordinary Tibetan people, and for my family specifically.
My grandparents were nomads, my parents were refugees, and I’ve lived in Canada, the U.S., and Nepal. This is a huge change in just a few decades, from a nomadic lifestyle to living in in New York, trying to be a writer. I wanted to understand how that happened, what that’s done to us, and who we are as a result. Like a lot of people from immigrant refugee backgrounds, the past is not a space that people often want to go to. There’s a lot of pain there. I wanted to give myself space to explore the past and to research, imagine, and sit patiently, and try to figure out the story.
JC: Silence is often part of growing up in an Asian immigrant family. I was especially moved by your novel’s depiction of how trauma affects a person’s whole life, which you show through Tenkyi’s mental health struggles. Was this question regarding the unknowable past one of the animating forces for the book?
TL: When I would ask my mom or my late grandmother about their village or what it was like in the early days of exile, I’d get a few words here and there, like a little detail about losing all their yaks or what the landscape look like in their old house, but I wouldn’t get the whole thing.
The power of literature is to be able to enter other people’s consciousness and experiences. There’s nothing like that for my community. There’s a fetishization of Tibetan people which can feel positive because, in the West, Tibetans are thought of as peaceful and Buddhist, and that’s true, but that’s because we’ve cultivated a peaceful Buddhist stance and chosen to be nonviolent in our struggle. That doesn’t mean that that’s innately who we are. Like anybody else, dispossession, being stateless, and living like a refugee has profound mental health implications. Aside from all the work that Tibetan people have done in their Buddhist practice, there’s so much that’s unexplored.
I think a lot of Tibetans in exile feel the need to fight for the people inside Tibet, which is effectively a black box. That’s an additional layer of responsibility, something that we all believe in and want to struggle for because it’s so much worse for people inside.
Think about a group of people that have been essentially fighting alone against a major authoritarian state for decades, then add the fact that many are refugees, then add general trauma. I really wanted to get down to the level of individual Tibetan people, especially women, and talk about all the everyday struggles that don’t get discussed in the national struggle for liberation or freedom or human rights. Colonization and exile have many effects. It’s not just the political or the loss of the land. It’s also interpersonal relationships, including individual self-conception, how we see ourselves and our worth.
JC: How did you contend with writing for a Western audience and navigating the white gaze? That’s kind of baked into our daily life and something that I’ve certainly struggled with in my own writing.
TL: It would be a lie to say that it’s not been a struggle for me as well. Writing in English, living in a country where we’re not the dominant culture or dominant race, that’s part of the tension for every writer from a marginal background. I can’t write straight to Tibetans, for Tibetans in Tibet, because this book is banned before it’s ever published.
When a people who have almost no reason to believe that they’re going to succeed continues in their struggle, it’s because of faith, because we believe in our moral perspective.
At the same time, I do want to speak to the white western gaze without censoring them. There’s interest in Tibet, and a lot of it is well-meaning, but it’s not enough. I’m trying to reach those people and expand their awareness. To expand their imagination and their identification with Tibetan people and with refugees writ large.
Our struggle has not been taken seriously by the West or by a lot of countries. I’m not saying that a novel is going to make people take this issue more seriously, but I’m trying to get people to be immersed in the experience of this very specific struggle.
JC: There’s a scene where Dolma says the West is interested in our culture and our religion, but not our suffering. I thought it was so important that you wrote about the physicality of your characters’ suffering, including frostbite and starvation, and how the homes in the refugee camp are vulnerable to the elements, that people are living on one cup of rice a day, how starvation affects things we take for granted like your teeth and going through puberty and how tall you’re going to grow. Was that part of your initial concept for the book or did it develop along the way?
TL: It developed along the way as my research became fuller and I was reading documents from aid organizations about the refugee settlements. I was finding images online of refugee camps in the 1970s and so that developed as I learned more. Because that’s not been the focus. Our suffering in exile hasn’t been the focus because we’re so concerned with the suffering of Tibetans in Tibet.
I think it’s important to focus on the body, on the physicality, because it tells the very specific story of what it’s like to move across the Earth as people who lose everything. That’s happening right now to four million Ukrainians. That’s been happening to people for thousands of years. It’s happening in Yemen.
I wanted to get beyond that nation-level political understanding of occupation and war and talk about what it’s like for ordinary people. When I could get into that level of detail, that’s how I could also begin to understand how people survived. If you lose everything, you can’t survive unless you have resistance, unless you have that spirit. And that’s coming from people’s bodies, from people’s connections with each other. It’s not coming from the government or military power. It was important for me to show that struggle in order to highlight the resilience and the resistance, to show just how inspiring people were, and continue to be, who face these kinds of deprivations.
JC: One element of your book that really impressed me was the novel’s scale. You cover 50 years of time, but you’re also writing about eternity. Can you talk about the role of faith and religion in the book?
TL: Trying to write a novel about Tibetan characters without touching on our spirituality would be an incomplete project. This is a story about colonization and all of the complex and myriad effects of that violence, not just in terms of loss of land, but also spiritually, culturally, interpersonally, and at an individual level. A land is not just soil and or Earth, it’s also all the things that people imbue that soil with. All the meaning. That’s a spiritual thing for my community. This [idea] is thousands of years old, even before Buddhism came to Tibet 1200 years ago. We believe that there are gods in the land, in the water, in the mountains, specific gods that watch over different communities.
On the one hand, it’s nice to have some Western appreciation for Tibetan culture. On the other hand, it’s painful to see how Tibetan culture has been decoupled from Tibetan people.
When people are forced off that land or have to flee, it’s not just their home that they leave. They leave those gods. They leave that protection. Coming to a non-Tibetan space of exile, there really isn’t a place where our metaphysics or beliefs or ways of doing or seeing or being make sense innately. We have to learn other languages. We have to understand other ways of looking at the world. I wanted that violence to be captured in this story, because that’s a spiritual violence.
At the same time, that spirituality is the source of our resistance. Tibetan monks and nuns are at the forefront of resisting the ongoing subjugation of Tibetans. They’re often at the forefront of protests. When a people who have almost no reason to believe that they’re going to succeed continues in their struggle, I think it’s because of faith, because we believe in our moral perspective.
In terms of the mythic scale, it wasn’t the original intent. I thought I would just write a simple story about refugees, but as I got engaged with my research and learned about the oracular tradition in Tibet and the tradition of hiding texts in the land, I saw the mythic scale of Tibetan thought and Tibetan civilization. I had to bring that in because it’s something that I had been cut off from because I always went to Western schools. And of course, I haven’t been to Tibet per se, except for 15 minutes on the border. So I wanted to study that. I felt my characters demanded that.
JC: Can you talk about those 15 minutes.
Colonization and exile has many effects. It’s not just the political or the loss of the land. It’s also individual self-conception, how we see ourselves and our worth.
TL: In the very early years of writing this novel, I decided to make that journey. I trekked to the border of Nepal and Tibet. That’s a landscape that I really needed to know myself because that’s also the pathway that my parents and grandparents took, that a lot of Tibetans have taken over the years to flee. That land is also an ancient passageway for Tibetans to conduct trade. It’s been cut off because of the occupation. There’s a chain link fence and lots of guards. Honestly, I couldn’t even get into Hong Kong, so I had very little hope for going to Tibet.
There are a lot of Tibetans who can’t even make that trek because it’s dangerous. It’s hard on the body and it requires resources. I thought, why not give myself that? And why not give readers that? As a writer living outside of Tibet and not being able to go there, I can’t very easily access my research. If you’re an American writer who’s lived in the U.S. for generations, you have a wealth of knowledge to draw from. If you’re an immigrant, you don’t necessarily have that.
JC: How did you want your book to push back against Western ideas about Tibet?
TL: On the one hand, it’s nice to have some Western appreciation for Tibetan culture. On the other hand, it’s painful to see how Tibetan culture has been decoupled from Tibetan people. There’s a way in which Tibetan culture can be excised from the struggle of Tibetan people and put in a museum, without regard to where it all that came from, and how that’s all been being threatened. Tibetan culture is still threatened in Tibet.
I wanted people in the West to understand that in the chain of power, the Chinese government has the most power, Westerners have less, but Tibetans have the least. Tibetans can’t move freely. You need to get a permit to move from one area to another, and that’s very difficult to get, especially in more politically active spaces. Tibetans who want to go on a pilgrimage to Lhasa, the capital, need a permit. For Tibetans in exile, it’s very, very hard to get to that. And that’s by design. It’s important to acknowledge and understand those power dynamics.
JC: One of the most surprising elements of the book to me was the role of commerce. For example, you have a Canadian art collector who’s obsessed with otherness, and there are questions regarding where museum relics actually come from. Why was that that particular thread of the story important for you?
TL: I think commerce is a major reason for why the West and China have had such a strong relationship for the last several decades and why China has risen to superpower status. That’s impacted ordinary Tibetan people, Westerners, even Chinese people who want to resist a state that is deeply oppressive. The West can’t simply have feel-good notions about Tibetan culture. It has to examine the Western role. One aspect of that is in scholarship or in material culture like art, in feeling that this is a thing that can be owned, this is a thing that can be taken away. That’s a form of colonization, too.
There’s a line in my novel that says colonization doesn’t just happen in Tibet. It extends into academia and the art trade. It extends into so many spaces and requires a reflection on the ways in which all of us continue to turn a blind eye. I think it’s just another phase of the ongoing colonization of Tibet.
A lot of people don’t have a life fulfilling their personal desires. History is often very cruel to a lot of people who don’t get to fulfill their potential, no matter how brilliant.
In more recent years, this has become a topic for a lot of countries, including China, regarding the repatriation of stolen objects. That’s part of the project of empires—to loot and steal from the nations that they take over. For Tibetans, we’ve had things stolen, not just by the Chinese government, but also by the British. In more recent years through the antiques trade, our heritage has ended up all over the world. I wanted to talk about that and question the idea of what it is that people find beautiful about Tibetan culture when it’s a kind of blindness. They can look at an object by itself and not think about that object’s story or meaning to a community.
A lot of the objects that are taken from Tibet are spiritual objects. They’re religiously significant because a lot of Tibetan art is religious. You can take something and put it in a museum, but that’s a deity. That’s something that is also part of the enormous web of consequences of colonization and exile and displacement.
JC: You write about the dreams that Lhamo and Tenkyi have, their yearning for freedom and choices and education. Lhamo didn’t want to be stuck making tourist trinkets. Tenkyi was a teacher, but ends up a maid in Canada. There’s a line that that really resonated with me where Tenkyi says her work makes other lives possible.
TL: A lot of people don’t have a life fulfilling their personal desires. What I’m doing is fulfilling my dream to be a writer. That’s not a possibility for a lot of people. It might be a possibility for their child or their child’s child if things go well. I was recognizing that basic truth, which is that history is often very cruel to a lot of people who don’t get to fulfill their potential, no matter how brilliant.
In a sense, Tenkyi’s journey is the most heartbreaking, because there’s so much potential, yet the conditions of her existence make it so hard for her to accomplish the things that she could accomplish in a different life. But her life has meaning because she’s still fighting for her family, for her niece and sister and uncle, and that’s very noble and meaningful.
A big topic of my book is actually how families are broken and remade in exile because of the violence of leaving your homeland. People die along the way. For most of the characters in my story, they lose people in their families. But they remake families as well, in the camps. Wherever they go, they find new families and that’s how they survive. Yes, it’s very hard, but in another sense, it’s joyous because it gives us focus beyond our individual selves. And that can be a salve against the loneliness that a lot of people experience, or against a sense of meaninglessness that we can often feel in this really difficult world. Having other people to fight for, having other people to take care of, is a source of meaning for my characters.
One section of Hieronymus Bosch’s massive triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, depicts a hellish chorus singing a song painted on the buttocks of a sinner. -io9
i.
Of course Jesus is there in the garden already looking into the distance at what comes next while he holds, not your hand, but the wrist above, & you look down, trying not to display your boredom, how you’re already tired of the man who sits on his ass all day waiting for the cat to bring him a creature from the pond dreck to roast & eat. He’s looking right at Jesus while you must avert your eyes, grow your hair long & pretend you are happy to be the last in line. You won’t last long despite your best efforts. Seeing the pond from the corner of one eye you can’t wait to muck it all up – massage your body with mud, stain your pale lips with fruit & desire.
ii.
Tips for relieving boredom: Stay naked. Eat a cherry from a bird’s mouth. Cut your hair short. Ride a peach like a boat & sleep in a clam’s shell. Let a bird go. Hug an owl & stand on your head while wearing a strawberry for a dress. Hold a fish like a baby. Poop out a bouquet. Play all day & turn your skin dark with sun & distraction. Let him touch your naked hip, dip you into the clear blue lake & swim like it will never end.
iii.
Now there’s no sign of Jesus & his pink dress, just a city with all its excess, steel & arrows, the avocado lute & machines that don’t make sense. Be careful little eyes, be careful little ears, Jesus has given up on us. The light no longer comes from the sun & our leaders are cannibalistic fish, use our heads as coffee table books, our bodies for their animal lusts. The song you have written on your ass might be our last chance – the last thing the man strung up on the harp will hear as the knife slides between his ears. & this is our one consolation: at least the scene is intriguing this time. Of the usual smooth grass, the perfectly curved neck of the giraffe & Adam’s shapely rib & thigh there’s no sign. This is what you wanted, finally: the chaos. Freedom. The right & the wrong all in one song.
I had a friend—we’ll call her Kinsley—who was as close to me as a sister for nearly 20 years. As we grew older, our values began to differ, but we both agreed that no difference was profound enough to break our friendship. Kinsley married a man she met on a religious website, sending me a text after one month of long-distance dating that read, “This is Christian [not his real name]! We have decided we are in love and getting married!” The following year she began expressing frustration over their inability to conceive naturally; she was ethically opposed to IVF. I was casually dating in New York and contemplating freezing my eggs.
Then, after 17 years of friendship, Kinsley abruptly ghosted me. The experience left me thinking about relationships that break under the strain of womanhood in all its conflicting forms. I have no doubt that for Kinsley and me, the looming pressures surrounding fertility (and our differing perspectives on motherhood, sex, and reproduction) accelerated our falling out. In her eyes, I was misguided (her word)—a black sheep among women. The last time I felt close to Kinsley was roughly seven years ago at a music festival. There was a torrential downpour and we huddled under a tarp, sharing poutine and drinking beer. When we were in line for poutine round two, we playfully debated the morality of birth control (insofar as that conversation can be playful). Even then, the chasm was widening.
For Maeve, the protagonist in my debut horror novel, Just Like Mother, there’s no fitting in. As a young girl raised in a matriarchal cult that reduces men to chattel for breeding, her misplaced affection for a male relative results in tragedy. As an adult, she cobbles together a flimsy existence that appears normal from the outside but conceals her profound loneliness and inability to connect. When her long-lost cousin—the one person who truly understood her in childhood—reappears in her life, Maeve is thrilled to let her back in, stubbornly ignoring every red flag in favor of the emotional intimacy she craves. Andrea offers Maeve everything she lacks: acceptance, stability, and belonging. But Andrea’s love comes with its own set of conditions; and when Maeve falls short of familial expectations for a second time, she faces brutal consequences.
The following is a list of books about characters like Maeve, who are unable to be the type of women their communities expect them to be.
The Perfect Nanny put Leila Slimani on my radar, but Adèle cemented my devotion to her work. The titular character has, by all accounts, an enviable existence: one she is proud of and in theory, committed to. She has a successful career and a loving family. Some might even consider her life the feminine ideal. But Adèle finds herself plagued by overwhelming dissatisfaction; and because of it, she is emotionally isolated. Her efforts to correct her profound loneliness through illicit sexual only enable the downward spiral. Through her discomfiting descriptions of Adèle’sexploits, Slimani makes it clear that Adèle is a woman who desperately wants to want the life she has, but can’t.
Disquiet by Julia Leigh
Olivia is reunited with her brother Marcus and his wife Sophie after she leaves her abusive marriage and brings her two children to the family chateau. But all is not well with Marcus and Sophie, who can’t bear to part with the corpse of their infant daughter. This gothic novella kept me riveted with its nuanced portrayal of dysfunctional family dynamics and motherhood. Anyone who has ever gone home for the holidays and experienced the gloomy push-pull of what remains unsaid will recognize their own in this unsettling story. Julia Leigh is skilled at emotional brinksmanship, sustaining nerve-shredding atmospheric tension through to the end.
Keiko, a woman working at a convenience store in Tokyo, best understands how to function “normally” within the framework of her job at Smile Mart, where social interactions can be learned by studying a manual. Keiko flourishes at the store and achieves a level of contentment she hasn’t experienced elsewhere; but as she approaches middle age, her lack of ambition and marital status (single, uncoupled) become an increasing affront to her meddling family and coworkers. Keiko contorts herself into a desperate emotional pretzel in an effort to appease her loved ones. The resulting decision is comically aligned with her personality—an unusual arrangement that makes her even more of an aberration, at least by the standards of people who care about such things.
Hisako, the daughter of a local physician, is the only survivor of a birthday party turned foul when more than a dozen people die from cyanide poisoning. Hisako is blind and is unable to provide much to the police by way of details about the horrific event. When the main suspect commits suicide, the town is left with questions; and a decade later, all roads seem to lead to Hisako. The story unfolds through various characters’ testimonies. While the ending is somewhat inconclusive and the motives feel a tad thin, this is nevertheless an exciting mystery and fascinating character study. (And the cover is amazing.)
This novel left a profound impression on me when I first read it five or six years ago. Magda, an educated and privileged writer, develops a complicated and potentially co-dependent friendship with Emerence, her illiterate, cranky housekeeper. Emerence charmed me with her hard-won love, and the emotional restraint of this novel makes the eventual revelation more devastating.
Emerence’s house is closed to outsiders. She alone is allowed to enter. What lies behind her door? It’s difficult to discuss this character-driven plot without spoiling it; but this is a novel you’ll want to read twice, and Emerence is one of the more complex, interesting characters I’ve had the pleasure of reading.
Yeong-hye enjoys a quiet, structured life with her husband until she refuses to eat meat, a consequence of her violent nightmares. The decision is an act of unacceptable rebellion, according to her husband and in-laws. What results is domestic horror: a perverse fight for control that becomes more and more extreme as Yeong-hye stubbornly asserts herself. To be honest, I read this one quite a while ago and remember the details as a fever dream, but I loved this uniquely grotesque take on feminine power and the violence that occurs when a woman fails to fall in line.
In Chemistry,we meet another woman with a life that is by all accounts rewarding, yet fails to deliver happiness. The novel’s narrator is working toward her PhD in chemistry—a goal foisted on her by her parents—and her perfectly lovely boyfriend has proposed. But she’s mired in ambivalence about her career and relationship and struggles to untangle her own wants from the wants foisted on her. As the story develops, the narrator reveals aspects of her childhood that led to her present state of indecision. This is a moving, character-driven illustration of what happens when the presence of others looms so large that there’s no room left to develop your own identity.
“I Took My First Date to the Black Lives Matter Protest”—Refinery 29
“I Spent 35 Years Trying To Convince the World (And Myself) That I’m White”—Huffington Post
“I’m Moving My Family to Canada to Save My Black Son from America”—Cosmopolitan
These are all real essay titles, and they’re also the types of writing it’s easiest for a marginalized writer to pitch, place, and publish. In fact, it sometimes ends up being the only type of writing we’re able to publish. Essays about my race, culture, and chronic illness are accepted as often as my pitches on technology, productivity, and the environment are rejected. It sometimes feels as though there is only one thing I am fit to write about—pain—and as Tajja Isen explains, in the process of writing about pain, “you might find more taken from you than you were willing to give.”
By now, Laura Bennett’s concept of “the first person industrial complex” is well-known and much-discussed, but Isen excavates its nuances much further. She writes of the above essay titles (the title being a decision that typically lies with the editor, not the writer) and their ilk: “There’s an anthropological curiosity in their framing…The only ones who need dispatches about what it’s like to live in a certain body in the age of Black Lives Matter are white people.”
In other words, the reason racialized writers are called upon time and again to write about our “identity” is because the intended audience is always already assumed to be white—an identity so normalized that it’s rarely considered to be one, except in the form of a quick privilege disclaimer; a brief moment of lip service.
In Isen’s debut Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service, personal essays are only the tip of the iceberg. Her expansive, deeply-researched text explores everything from the burden of being a “diversity hire” to how legal language propagates the myth of “neutrality” to the pitfalls of “authentic representation.”
Isen writes: “If it’s hard to express something true in language that’s been emptied of value, the flip side is that it’s easier than ever to say something while meaning nothing.” In an era of Instagram black squares, the proliferation of Ukrainian flag emojis in bios, and words like “intersectional” and “decolonization” being co-opted by brands, Some of My Best Friends considers the fault-lines of language, action and power, which are also the fault-lines of our world.
Richa Kaul Padte:In a chapter on the law, you talk about “the violence of neutrality,” which is not dissimilar to an idea I was trained in as a young anti-fascist campaigner: there is no neutrality without complicity. “Neutral” assumes a baseline is possible, a universality that exists before positionality. Elsewhere in the book, you discuss the rise of “relatability”, asking the question: relatable to whom? Do neutrality and relatability thus function in similar ways?
Tajja Issen: I suppose they’re similar in the sense that each performs its own kind of flattening, though I think what each thing aims to flatten is very different. With the way that neutrality operates, as I tried to describe it in the law, the goal is to flatten the realities of circumstance and lived experience to conform to a certain standard. The law, as in the rule of it, is not especially interested in particularity. With relatability, the mechanic feels different to me—only a single subset of voices, stories, and perspectives are allowed admission at all. In the book, I also use the terms in very different contexts—neutrality in the legal field, and relatability in the cultural and literary spheres. With relatability, you can ape the tropes if you want to barter your way in. Neutrality will just shear off whatever it needs to in order to make the thing fit.
RKP:Sakina Jaffrey’s term “patank” refers to the “‘the broad Indian accent’ South Asian actors get asked to do.” It’s also, I realize on reading this, what “a certain kind of listener” actuallythinks the Indian accent sounds like. I wonder if this is further complicated, though, by the fact that actors being cast as Indians on-screen are not, in fact, Indian. Dev Patel does not have an Indian accent in Slumdog Millionaire, neither does Simone Ashley in Bridgerton (by comparison, Kunal Nayyar, who grew up in India, is fantastic in The Big Bang Theory).
If the question of authenticity requires, as you point out, a reconfiguration at all levels—producers, directors, writers’ rooms—shouldn’t this include people who actually belong to the geographic locations in question? It seems like this often gets left out of diversity conversations in the West, but is felt deeply by the rest.
TI: Certainly if authenticity is the goal of a project, geographic accuracy feels like a key part of that, and I agree with you that the West tends to flatten that part of the conversation. My goal with that essay on cartoons, though, was really to trouble the idea of authenticity altogether. I think that well-intentioned people who are aware that their project, or workplace, or masthead, or whatever, has an equity problem—and are really keen to solve that equity problem—can get really fixated on the idea of what authentic looks like or sounds like. Because there’s no one answer, right? Authenticity is a worthy goal, but the problems start when it gets treated as a skeleton key to solving every single problem of equity. What I’ve seen and experienced, especially in spaces like the entertainment industry, is that the pursuit of authenticity can end up calcifying into this restrictive standard that winds up doing the exact opposite of what it was meant to do in the first place. The thirst for a certain kind of representation can too easily turn into caricature. We want to do right by marginalized voices can turn into marginalized voices must sound like x or y. The desire to get it right is well-meaning, but like a lot of the other gestures I explore in the book, it can easily slip into a kind of quick fix that’s really not a fix at all.
RKP: You write about the burden of diversity work, of being the only person of a certain marginalization in the room. Being this person often entails “an honest desire to make things better, [only to] be told to rinse scum from dark corners management obviously hadn’t thought to clean in years.” This work is exhausting and individualizes a systemic problem, but there’s also a deeper issue at work here. You write: “To demand better means better is something an institution is capable of, or deserves our help in becoming. But what if the rot goes all the way down?”
Where do we go from here?
It’s useful to be aware of, and even explicit about, the way our subject position influences our access to power and the way power acts upon us. It’s an important part of coalition-building, of listening, of real change.
TI: Where indeed! I think that, if you’re the only person of a certain background in a majority-white space, it’s so easy to get caught up in the idea that it’s your job to make an institution better. At one time in my life, it was very easy for me to get caught up in that idea, and a lot of free labor was wrung out of me because of it. But I think that believing you’re responsible for bettering a workplace or institution—in addition to being an unfair and untenable project—is simply the wrong goal. To me, that kind of framing feels much more oriented toward optics than action. I think a much worthier project is, as Toni Morrison puts it, getting someone else in the room with you. That’s what I consider my goal, my duty, even, when I enter a professional or creative space. This is, technically, a form of institutional improvement. But that subtle shift in focus, from buffing up corporate shine to actually, materially changing the circumstances of the people who’ve been systemically shut out of it—that’s a world of change, to me, and that’s where I think more efforts need to be concentrated. Stop panicking about how you look and just do the thing—and accept that the thing will take time.
RKP: Something I often think about is how the online sphere has given rise to a sense that saying something political is in and of itself an action towards addressing injustice. I’m not advocating for silence, of course, but I’m no longer sure that endless words are contributing to change (a troubling idea as a writer, I suppose). In 1935, Walter Benjamin wrote: “Fascism sees its salvation in giving…masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” How does this relate to Sara Ahmed’s concept of the “nonperformative speech act,” which you explore so wonderfully in one of my favorite sections of the book?
TI: I’m totally with you, and that’s a point that I keep coming back to in the book—the easy, harmful conflation of speech with action. It’s become easier than ever to say something while meaning, or intending to do, nothing. That makes separating out something like the nonperformative speech act incredibly important, and that’s very much a part of the work that I hope the book does: articulating a pattern that readers have likely noticed in their own lives and worlds and giving them a framework for it. We’ve become so good at spotting these instances of infelicitous speech. When they happen, there’s a distinct sense of wrongness, of what the fuck. Corporations shouldn’t be able to speak, to address us in this way. But the language of social justice circulates so freely that it’s effectively become anyone’s game. This is also why we’ve seen institutions that ostensibly have nothing to do with social justice—like banks or the CIA—spouting the language of inclusion like it’s going out of style. That split between speech and action, which both the Ahmed term and the Benjamin quotes express so deftly, is a murky space in which all sorts of dodgy things can happen. That’s the space I wanted to delve into and muck around in with this book.
RKP: There’s a “line white women walk between privilege and disadvantage,” and you give examples ranging from Lena Dunham’s Girls to pretty much all of Lana Del Ray’s music. You write: “[T]hese creators, having flushed the less convenient forms of marginality from their presence, then exaggerate their own weakness as evidence of their work’s political gravity.” Without having to account for the systemic violence of racism, transphobia or ableism, such works stake a claim to gendered marginalization, while ignoring oppressions that render other women’s pain less prettily packageable. Could you talk a bit about this, including how the supposedly political position of “radical softness” comes into play?
It’s become easier than ever to say something while meaning, or intending to do, nothing.
TI: That argument, from the book’s title essay, is very much in conversation with recent critiques of white femininity by authors like Rafia Zakaria, Koa Beck, and Ruby Hamad. For my part, I wanted to look at how that move—of having access to the structural power of whiteness but being marginalized by virtue of their gender—can lead to certain patterns in art and culture. As I discuss in the book, that tension has come to drive, if not define, so many of the big cultural movements of the last few decades, in genres that span from the ’90s rom-com to the early personal essay. But in trying to account for that tension, something weird tends to happen. In texts like Girls and Del Rey and the films of Nancy Meyers, to take just a few examples, you can see a pattern where white women are often claiming not just their vulnerability, but the fact that they are more vulnerable than anyone else, or whomever is in their immediate vicinity (which is usually just more white women, otherwise that claim falls apart pretty quickly). It can become a weird kind of self-pleasuring hyperbole. Girls has a scene in which two white women are shouting across an apartment about which one of them is truly a “big, ugly wound,” and there’s an obvious kind of glee in it. Something’s Gotta Give has two rich white women talking about how single older women are, “as a demographic, as fucked a group as can ever exist.” As can ever exist? Really? You couldn’t just settle for “fucked,” like the rest of us?
RKP: You write: “Privilege disclaimers are like magic tricks. They can turn complex, awkward material realities—generational wealth, whiteness, the ability to pass within a certain social category—into words, dispensed with as easily as breath.” This is something I think about a lot as an upper caste woman living in India: is the declaration of my caste location a way to demonstrate that I did not get to where I am via India’s favorite falsehood (meritocracy), or is it lip service that allows me to carry on as I was before, i.e. perpetuating caste oppression while reaping the social cache of self-awareness? I, of course, want it to be read as the former, but are privilege disclaimers so inherently messed up that they always lead to a variation of the latter?
TI: I think that, as with anything, especially a statement of your principles, it depends on how you use it. If someone’s trying to use a privilege disclaimer to totally excuse themselves of all wrongdoing or responsibility, like it’s some kind of opt-out clause or waiver, then yeah, that’s always going to be a kind of lip service. But of course it’s useful to be aware of, and depending on the situation even explicit about, the way our subject position influences our access to power and the way power acts upon us. It’s an important part of coalition-building, of listening, of real change.
As a Mexican American, I’ve learned to expect hauntings. That shouldn’t surprise most. The iconography of the Day of the Dead has become well disseminated in American popular culture, from Coco to Halloween face paint to calaveras on sale at Target. For the uninitiated: over two days at the beginning of November, those who celebrate Día de los Muertos welcome spirits of departed loved ones into their homes with ofrendas, altars with photos and offerings of food and mementos. We take time out of our lives to sit with the memories and sometimes presences of family members who have passed on.
But the more I reflect on it, the more I believe that living alongside ghosts is a part of the reality of being Latinx in the United States. Burdened by the so-classic-it’s-cheesy ni de aquí, ni de allá, are we not haunted by the versions of ourselves that we think we should be, the doppelgängers who are American enough, the imaginary doubles who speak better Spanish than us? Likewise, our families are haunted by the sacrifices, traumas, and griefs caused by migration to and life in the United States. Often, these are too heavy to be spoken aloud; they are handed down from one generation to the next like the names that pass through our families, ghostly, silent heirlooms that permeate everything we do.
These hauntings are metaphorical. Others less so. My debut novel The Hacienda imagines the scars left by colonialism as an actual supernatural presence with a bone to pick with the living. When Beatriz’s new husband leaves her at his family’s country estate, Hacienda San Isidro, she is determined to make a home for herself there. At first bemused by the strange behavior of those who live on the property, the sinister darkness of the house after nightfall convinces Beatriz that it is haunted and drives her to seek help from a local priest, Padre Andrés. Like the malicious spirits Beatriz and Padre Andrés face in The Hacienda’s pages, the hauntings that populate the following works are quite tangible. They run the genre gamut from long-buried classics with hauntings-as-political-commentary, to contemporary YA fantasy, to a stiff draught of horror to finish.
“I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there” is as classic a line as “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” but rare is it that the North American reader has encountered Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s slim opus. When narrator Juan Preciado’s mother dies, he promises her to go to Comala and seek out his father, whom he has never met. Upon setting foot in Comala, however, he discovers that all of the rural town’s inhabitants, from his guide to his hosts—all old friends of his mother or enemies of his father—are dead. Comala is, quite literally, a ghost town. And as Juan Preciado travels deeper into Comala uncovering his father’s past, the town might not let him back out alive. Told in fragments that jump between different plots and narrators, the very structure of this novel lends itself to a haunting, disorienting read.
One of the best known Mexican writers of the Latin American Boom, Carlos Fuentes utilizes magical realism and doppelgängers as he grapples with postcolonial identity in Aura. Narrator Felipe Montero, a young unemployed historian, is hired by an old widow named Conseulo Llorente to edit and publish the memoirs of her late husband, who was a general of the deposed emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. This work requires Felipe to live in Consuelo’s old, crumbling house in Mexico City. Though initially reluctant to do so, Felipe’s attitude changes as he becomes increasingly infatuated with Consuelo’s niece, the hauntingly beautiful Aura. He slowly loses his sense of time and identity as he edits the dead general’s memoirs and in his obsession with Aura, with whom he begins a secret nocturnal affair. Prepare yourself for a gut-wrenching twist at the end of this brief novel, but I implore you to go in spoiler-free for maximum shock value.
“House Taken Over” by Julio Cortázar
Most Anglophone readers know Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar for his short story “Axolotl” or his fragmented novel Hopscotch, but few are familiar with the utterly haunting 1946 short story “House Taken Over” (“Casa Tomada”) from the collection Bestiary. A brother and sister live in an enormous house that becomes taken over by a threatening haunting, slowly forcing them to retreat into smaller and smaller spaces in the house. Cortázar imbues his spare prose with tension and dread; though the antagonist of the story is never heard nor seen, you cannot help but share in the narrator’s claustrophobic terror as it draws closer and closer. At the time the story was published (and for many years after), this brief, disturbing story was read as a political text with incisive commentary on the Peronist regime.
In the YA contemporary fantasy Cemetery Boys, Yadriel, a 16-year-old trans boy is determined to prove his gender to his traditional family. To accomplish this, he performs a ritual that only brujos, male witches, are capable of: summoning ghosts. Though Yadriel meant to summon his murdered cousin, the ghost he is stuck with is none other than his school’s recently-deceased bad boy, Julian Diaz, who refuses to be gotten rid of until he finds out what happened to him. Yadriel agrees to help him so that he can get the acceptance he craves and Julian can find closure, but the longer they spend together, the less Yadriel wants Julian to leave. Part murder mystery, part queer romance, the ghost boyfriend trope of Cemetery Boys is close to my heart, but it is the themes of family acceptance—and how complicated that can sometimes be—that make this novel a modern classic.
I’ve learned that not all ghosts mean ill. Some just want to spend a little time with you. Some, like in J.C. Cervantes’s lighthearted but touching YA contemporary fantasy Flirting with Fate, linger because they have urgent messages they need to pass on. When a flash flood and a fender bender with a strange boy prevent teenage Ava Granados from reaching her beloved grandmother’s deathbed, she forfeits the precious heirloom of their family by mere minutes: a magical blessing passed from woman to woman upon death for generations. Days later, apparitions begin appearing to Ava. Her grandmother’s ghost and the ghost of a medieval saint bear the news that the blessing that should have belonged to Ava was accidentally bestowed upon someone else. With the help of these ghosts and her two sisters, Ava goes on a quest to track down the boy who bears her blessing and somehow get back her grandmother’s last gift.
Though well-known in Latin America, internationally bestselling Argentinian writer Mariana Enríquez burst onto the Anglophone horror scene with the 2017 translation of her collection Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego. Here is where my recommendations take a sharp tonal shift: these macabre stories feature settings in which horrific inequality, violence, corruption, and the vanished desaparecidos of the military dictatorship and its dirty war loom large. Not for the faint of heart, these stories tip their hats to Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortázar as they study brilliantly-realized human characters in horrifying situations, such as one in which a group of women set themselves on fire to protest a viral form of domestic violence. My favorite of these—and the reason this collection is on this list—is “Adela’s House,” in which Adela, a spoiled, one-armed girl, is jeered into visiting the neighborhood haunted house, an abandoned, bricked up monstrosity that turns out to be even more horrific on the inside than it appears on the outside.
Whenever someone tells me they loved Mexican Gothic, I always point them toward this lesser-known work of Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I first encountered her work through her short stories, and while I am as much of a fan of her novels as the next fangirl, I believe her unique voice shines brightest in the brief, intense stories of This Strange Way of Dying. The theme of being haunted—or hunted—runs through this collection, which features hauntings by shape-shifting, stalking nahuales, vampires you just can’t shake, döppelgangers, and even Death himself. Moreno-Garcia’s prose is deft, spare but vivid, and nothing short of masterful in its economy as it moves effortlessly from genre to genre. The evocative imagery of gleaming beetles and clicking scorpions will stay with you for years after you shut the cover.
Billed as taking inspiration from The Craft, V. Castro’s Goddess of Filth opens with a stone-cold classic horror setting: the seance gone wrong. As four female best friends, including Lourdes and Fernanda, become increasingly tipsy, they lose control of what they are summoning, and their laughter dies when Fernanda begins chanting in Nahuatl and crawling toward the other three. In the weeks that follow, Lourdes notices that formerly modest Fernanda smears her face with black makeup, shreds her hands on thorns, and sucks sins out of the mouths of the guilty. She has been possessed by the spirit of an Aztec goddess. Determined to save Fernanda from the increasingly predatory attentions of a self-righteous priest as well as possession, Lourdes enlists the help of her friends and a professor to understand what is happening. While still bearing the trappings of deliciously pulp horror, Lourdes’s journey to help Fernanda enables her to reconnect with her identity and heritage in a uniquely feminist and empowering anti-colonial way.
When I started reading Chloe Caldwell’s new book, The Red Zone, a memoir about identity, love, health, and pain, all told through the lens of her relationship to her period, I didn’t think I had period hang-ups of my own to work through. I do have pudendal neuralgia, a nerve pain condition that I’ll get into more later. It doesn’t have anything to do with my period. But the treatment, in part, involves a pelvic therapist getting very up close and personal with everything going on down there, an experience that’s made me comfortable discussing—and sharing—my vagina.
Plus, I’m a 32-year-old woman with a tote bag that supports Planned Parenthood and a boyfriend I regularly send to the store for tampons, facts I assumed meant I was a well-adjusted human who’s not here for society’s period-shaming BS.
Which is all to say, when it comes to something as normal as my period, I thought: How could I have shame about that?
… Until I got my period while reading Caldwell’s book. Normally, that wouldn’t matter, but this time it was important because my boyfriend’s friend was staying with us for the week. And since I didn’t know if it’d be weird for me or uncomfortable for the friend if he noticed my tampon wrappers in the trash can, I decided to really bury them. But when you’re deep-diving through trash to hide the wrapper of a thing used by thousands of people every day, you have to wonder: Is this, maybe, a sign of shame?
From there, forgotten period stories from my life came back to me:
Like the time in high school when a girl who boys seemed to like better than me said that pads were gross because, “I mean, you’re just sitting in it. Ew.” And apparently I agreed that sitting in period blood was gross because I’ve been a tampons-only girl ever since. Shame. Or all the times growing up we pretended we had cramps to get out of gym or a test or swim practice, knowing the adult in the room would be too embarrassed to question us further. Shame. Because it had felt like we were using period stigma to our advantage. And maybe we were. But weren’t we also sort of reinforcing that stigma? And what about the fact that I’d never use my period as an excuse to get out of anything now? No matter how bad my cramps actually are, I just get up and get on with it because, I guess, I don’t think anyone really wants to hear about my period.
Nothing says deeply entrenched shame like the kind you’ve been conditioned to accept for so long that you don’t recognize it by its name. Because yes, of course, all of that is a kind of shame. But the way to deal with shame is to call it out, to normalize the experiences we’re embarrassed by or afraid of. Naming it helps us realize how stupid it is to hide tampon wrappers in our own trash. The way to deal with shame is to share our stories.
The way to deal with shame is to call it out, to normalize the experiences we’re embarrassed by or afraid of.
That’s exactly what Caldwell does for periods in The Red Zone. From bleeding on her boyfriend’s sheets to real talk about blood clots to sometimes hating her period unapologetically, she tells honest, shame-free stories about learning from, suffering through, and simply having a period. And in doing so, Caldwell gives readers the period story we deserve.
Caldwell’s book is specifically about her life with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD, an extreme form of PMS that affects approximately 5.5% of women and AFAB individuals with periods, according to Caldwell’s book. Caldwell didn’t learn about PMDD growing up, which is at least partly why she struggled to make sense of the rage, paranoia, and sadness she started feeling each month after she turned 31, long after she got her first period. She calls these feelings her time in the Red Zone (hence the book’s title), and the book, big-picture, is about learning to understand and live with it in a way where it’s one smaller part of her life, not the thing taking over it.
In writing about PMDD, Caldwell takes what could be the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to degrading period humor—It’s a condition where women act like lunatics on their periods! The jokes write themselves!!—and gives it dignity. She still writes with plenty of humor about things like the rage-texts she sends her partner, Tony, mid-Red Zone, but she’s always in on the joke. And Caldwell takes her episodes seriously, too. Because of course not feeling in control of your body—or your emotions—is terrifying. Because of course emotions caused by period hormones are just as real as any others.
Not feeling in control of your body—or your emotions—is terrifying.
But you don’t have to have PMDD for Caldwell’s book to resonate. There’s plenty about regular ole’ menstruation, including a whole chapter dedicated to people sharing their own first-period memories, which touches on just about every emotion you can feel about a period, whether it’s embarrassed to tell your parents, confused about how to use the menstrual belts of yesteryears or tampons today, or just sick to your stomach with cramps.
There are also brilliant moments where Caldwell calls out the ridiculously half-hearted ways society educates people about periods. My personal favorite: Telling us heavy periods can be bad without actually telling us what a heavy period is. “At least in my middle school or high school, we were never handed three buckets of blood and told which one was light, regular, and heavy,” Caldwell writes as amusing but damning proof. With every story Caldwell shares, she chips away at the shame engrained in so many of us, shame we might not even have known was there.
The Red Zone is the most recent entry into a small but important group of titlesworking to destigmatize the period. TV shows like Amy Schumer’s Life and Beth, in which Schumer’s character is shown bleeding in the shower, or Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, where a love interest marvels at Coel’s bloody tampon and blood clot, show moments of Hollywood doing better. That’s compared to, say, 2007’s Superbad, where Jonah Hill’s character screams he wants to puke when period blood gets on him, or 1976’s Carrie, perhaps the most enduringly bad take on periods ever. Meanwhile, books with “PERIOD” splashed across the cover—such as Kate Farrell’s 2018 anthology—are popping up on TBR shelves, finding themselves part of Caldwell’s larger fight to rewrite the narrative of periods by putting real and honest stories out there.
But while reclaiming the period story is an important step, it’s not enough. When it comes to reproductive health, especially for women, there’s so many more stories we need to be better at telling. From pregnancy to menopause, endometriosis to abortion, these topics are the province of the unexplained, the unresearched, the badly covered. And all of that leads to erasure—many important stories not getting told at all. It leads to pain and curiosity and uncertainty being silenced and, ultimately, turned into shame.
In the case of abortion, it leads to an often-routine medical service being ripped away from those who need it most because a handful of judges say so; and increased inequity for non-white, non-straight, non-cis, non-wealthy people; and a general inability to acknowledge that people who can carry babies shouldn’t have to give up their own rights—and sometimes, their own lives—because of it.
But I digress. This is about stories. And shame. Which brings me to my body, my story.
My story is that for four years I’ve lived with nerve pain all over my feet, my shins, my thighs, my hips, my butt, and my vagina. It took four years of doctors’ visits and physical therapy, five so-labeled “unremarkable” MRIs, and countless injections and medications—none of which worked—to figure out that my pain stemmed from pelvic issues, even though chronic pelvic pain is a condition so common it affects an estimated one in seven U.S. women.
One specific source of my pelvic pain is an aggravated pudendal nerve, a.k.a. my aforementioned pudendal neuralgia. To be fair, this is a much less common condition than general chronic pelvic pain. Before I was diagnosed with pudendal neuralgia, I’d never heard of it. That’s probably because it’s the nerve that supplies sensations to our genitals and anus, words we don’t really like to talk about. If I’m being honest, I hated writing them here. But the fact that I feel that way is exactly the point and is very much the problem. When it comes to body shame, the pudendal nerve really is hall-of-fame worthy stuff. “Pudendal” comes from the Latin word pudere, which means to be ashamed. Truly, you can’t make this up.
When I sat in doctors’ offices for all of those years, I didn’t feel ashamed of my symptoms. I felt desperate for someone to help me.
To be clear, when I sat in doctors’ offices for all of those years, I didn’t feel ashamed of my symptoms. I felt desperate for someone to help me. And when a pelvic therapist finally explained that my pudendal nerve was the big issue, I didn’t feel shame then, either. I felt relieved to have an explanation.
But after reading Caldwell’s book, I’m wondering if it was that deeper kind of shame, the same kind of shame I didn’t realize I held about my period, that played a part in me not getting the help I needed for so long. You know, the kind of shame you’ve been conditioned to accept for so long that you don’t recognize it by its name.
For years, I told medical professionals that my nerve symptoms started in my foot. And I said that because I really thought they had. Now, I realize, what I meant was that when the nerve symptoms showed up in my foot, that’s when I decided they were something worth questioning. It was only after I got my pudendal neuralgia diagnosis that I remembered how, months before the foot symptoms showed up, my vagina would sometimes burn and itch for days. But why hadn’t I remembered that sooner? Why did I never think to mention my burning vagina to doctors?
And what about sex? Not every doctor asked me if I had pain during sex, but some did. In response, I always said I had none. And, always, I thought I was telling the truth. But it was also true that after I had sex, I would feel weird, achy, and uncomfortable all over my lower body—the same places I have nerve symptoms. So why didn’t I bring that up?
Because I didn’t know those experiences weren’t normal.
Because I’d never heard anyone talk about pelvic pain, never mind pudendal neuralgia, before.
Because I’d internalized without realizing it that problems with vaginas shouldn’t be talked about.
Because I didn’t consider how all of that is a kind of shame.
I’d internalized without realizing it that problems with vaginas shouldn’t be talked about.
And because of all of that, I understood those earlier warnings my body sent me about as well as Caldwell understood what it meant to have a heavy period. Which is to say, we didn’t have the information we needed to understand our experiences at all.
I hope this doesn’t sound like I think I’m at fault, in any way, for my health problems. I don’t. I’m also uninterested in pointing the finger at any specific doctors, though I’ll admit, I dealt with a few who were infinitely less helpful and kind than others. But as a general worldview, I think there are very few problems that are best solved by calling out individuals. Most of the time, it’s about systems. It’s about society.
Whether it’s our periods or our pudendal nerves, we have a societal problem of not talking about our most intimate experiences and feelings. Of letting crude humor or less direct, more comfortable narratives dictate the conversation. And all of that is a kind of shame.
But the way to deal with shame is to call it out, to normalize the experiences we’re embarrassed by or afraid of. The way to deal with shame is to share our stories.
Caldwell doesn’t say it outright, but I have to think one of her goals is to help raise awareness about PMDD. Like me, it took Caldwell years to fully figure out her condition. So if someone had only told Caldwell their stories about PMDD sooner, that might have made her life easier. Regardless, her book helped me. And I hope my story helps someone, too.
More people need to start telling stories about the body parts and experiences we’re taught to be ashamed of. Vocalizing our stories and fears and pain is the only way we can get rid of it.
Omani author Jokha Alharthi’s new novel Bitter Orange Tree, translated by Marilyn Booth, is beautifully sad. The book is narrated by Zuhour, a young Omani woman attending university in the cold of England, who is grappling with an unspeakable, internal ache. Her pain could go by many names: depression, nostalgia, homesickness, loneliness, or regret—but it is never able to be fully captured in a singular diagnosis.
As a way of coping with this unpinnable pain, Zuhour sinks into a dreamy web of memories, allowing the past to overlay her present like a palimpsest. Throughout the novel’s image-centric chapters, Zuhour tumbles back into her childhood, and into imagined scenes from her grandmother’s time. She loops back to specific vignettes: a man slapping rice from his son’s hand, the beckoning movement of a crooked black fingernail, a woman’s beaded necklace that trembles with a death to come. Words touch down delicately on each page to evoke these moments, the result of both Alharthi and Booth’s creative labor.
Truly, Alharthi and Booth together make a formidable literary pair. The two dazzled readers worldwide in 2019 with the publication of Alharthi’s novel Celestial Bodiesin Booth’s translation. The multi-generational, women-centric saga of an Omani family won the Man Booker International Prize, and became an international bestseller, garnering a list of “firsts”: Alharthi became the first Omani woman author to be translated into English, and Celestial Bodies the first book originally written in Arabic to win the prize. In a global literary landscape that has long centered on male authors working in English, Alharthi and Booth’s work with contemporary Arabophone literature feels daring and exciting.
Anna Learn: In Bitter Orange Tree, the story shifts from the narrator’s present moment in London, to her memories of her childhood in Oman, to those of her grandmother, and of other women in her family. Jokha, why do you tend to use this fluid and nonlinear mode of narration?
Jokha Alharthi: Actually, I’m not sure that I choose it. It’s just my way of thinking. When I’m thinking about time, I can’t think about it in a linear way. For me, time is open to possibilities. The past is open to possibilities, just as much as the future is open to possibilities. We look at the past differently every time we think about it, or, sometimes we find out new, different information that we didn’t know before, so we start to look at the past differently. Or we grow up, or things happen. We become open to the past in different ways, at different times. I’m always interested in jumping back and forth, and seeing different angles of what happened, in seeing the past from different angles.
AL: Marilyn, what was it that struck you stylistically about Bitter Orange Tree that you wanted to animate in your translation, and what were the main challenges you experienced as a translator?
MB: The main younger characters in the book are a young Omani woman, a young Pakistani woman, and a young Pakistani man who are all studying in the UK. It was quite challenging to deal with their voices as cosmopolitan young people, but [who were still] from certain places. I kept asking myself, “how exactly do I represent that sort of cosmopolitanism?” And also I’m somebody of a certain age, and I do remember a couple of times thinking, “hmm, I wonder if actually getting somebody younger to translate this might be better?” I don’t think the voices of the younger people in Bitter Orange Tree are particularly edgy. In Arabic, their voices are quite standard, they’re not using any kind of youth [slang] or anything. But I did worry whether I was being a little bit too much “of my own generation” to get it right. And that’s a challenge we don’t often think about. We think about, “oh, do I know this society well enough? Do I have the kinds of sensitivities and backgrounds that are needed [to translate a text]?” But I think generation is something that we don’t always think about enough.
AL: The generational difference between the translator and the author or characters is definitely not often discussed! What other issues came up for you?
MB: Another strong feature of Jokha’s writing, that also posed a challenge in translation, is her writing style. She has this sort of deadpan, almost sardonic or abbreviated way of writing. She doesn’t mince words, and she doesn’t waste words. And sometimes, she juxtaposes one sentence with another, and [the reader has] to work a little bit to see the relationship between the two, but it’s very much there. And I really like that—it’s a feature of her writing that I think is very effective. However, the publisher felt that sometimes there were just too many juxtapositions, and that the meaning wasn’t clear enough for the reader. Now, Jokha and I disagreed with the publisher on that. I didn’t want to dilute the effect of her style by adding to it [in order to “clarify” it]. Of course, any kind of writing is a piece of negotiation and compromise… But it was a bit frustrating because I felt like to dilute that aspect of Jokha’s style would be really wrong, and unnecessary. I think that’s just something that happens quite a lot in translation. Sometimes editors want a level of explanation that they don’t ask for in a text that’s written originally in the language of publication, so it can be extremely frustrating for a translator.
AL: Did you consider using an introduction or translator’s note to further frame the book for an Anglophone audience? I ask because, in your academic work, Marilyn, you have also written about the reductive tendency towards “memoir fixation” in the marketing of fiction books by Arabophone Muslim women writers in English translation. Given that Bitter Orange Tree is written in the first person, and that it (mainly) adopts a realist style of narration, do you worry that it might come to be categorized in its English-language reception as a mode of autobiography, muting Jokha’s imaginative capacity as a writer?
MB: Well, that’s a really interesting question. I think if I had decided to use paratext, it would have been more focused on Oman and Omani history… My feeling as a translator is that I’m not responsible for [how readers choose to interpret a book]. If somebody chooses to read it as an autobiography or as autofiction, then that’s kind of their business. All we can do is say, on the front, this is a novel. And then if people choose to read it differently than that, it’s really their issue… First of all, that really drives me crazy when people do that, because it’s almost as if somehow Arab women or Muslim women are not allowed to write fiction. It’s like anything they write is taken autobiographically. And I really, really, really object to that. But also, this is a very persistent, and trans-cultural phenomenon, isn’t it? Women’s fiction in general, across cultures, is so often taken to be autobiographical, as if somehow their fiction is supposed to explain their lives. So it’s almost as if women writers are not allowed to be, you know, novelists of the imagination.
JA: Unless you are writing a crime novel.
AL: I want to talk about the weight that’s put on individual words in this novel. Zuhour, the narrator, regularly thinks about the weight that words carry. She lingers on the meanings of words like “ignore,” “depression,” “remorse,” or “broken” in particular, and describes these words as if they were physical, material things. For example, the word “ignore” is linked to the black nail of Zuhour’s grandmother, a dark presence that grows with time. Jokha and Marilyn, you both have emphasized how important precision in language is to you and in your writing. Were there any words from Bitter Orange Tree that really stuck with you, that you wanted to emphasize, or that you thought a lot about? Was “ignore” one of those words?
MB: I guess for a translator, the problem is that the word in Arabic is always going to be richer than what you can encompass in a single word in translation. I mean, in whatever language you’re translating from [this is the case]. For the word “ignore,” I do think ignore was the right word in the context of [Bitter Orange Tree]. But I also wanted to be able to use both “ignore” and “neglect,” which are not the same thing exactly, but they’re both part of what’s going on in that element of the story. I did decide on “ignore” precisely because I wanted to emphasize the notion that this was an act of choice[by Zuhour to ignore her grandmother]. It wasn’t that Zuhour was sort of neglecting something passively, like she didn’t even notice it. There isn’t that same emphasis on willed action [with the term “neglect”] that I think “ignore” connotes.
Women’s fiction in general, across cultures, is so often taken to be autobiographical—as if their fiction is supposed to explain their lives.
JA: I also just remembered a scene in the beginning of the book when Zuhour wishes that words had strings. She says, “Why don’t words come automatically with threads that we can yank to pull them back inside ourselves?” Thinking about that makes me think that the entire world is made up of words, actually.
MB: And another feature of this in this novel [in regards to word choice] is the question of repetition. It’s clear that in Arabic, a word like “ignore” is important and it needs to be there, and it needs to be repeated in English just as it is repeated over and over in the Arabic. Sometimes, though, the repetition works in Arabic, but it seems a bit clunky in English. So sometimes you have to vary things. I’ve had a few arguments with the editors where I said, No, look, this repetition has to stay there. It’s really, really, really important. And, you know, sometimes just kind of as a matter of style, you’re told, Oh, well, no, it would be better if you vary the vocabulary. And, well, no, there’s a point to the repetition. The author isn’t repeating a word because they don’t have other words to use. If the author wanted to use other words, she would use other words. The repetition is there for a purpose.
JA: I totally agree with Marilyn on this issue of repetition. I think this insistence on avoiding repetition came from all these, sorry, creative writing courses [laughs]. [Students in these courses] are not supposed to use the same word on the same page twice. But when you read classical literature, you see that these great classical authors didn’t hesitate to use the same word again and again, when needed. And for the word like ignore, as you said, Anna, it is a very important word [in Bitter Orange Tree]. Using it more than one time is fundamental for the novel, because [the narrator’s guilt about ignoring her grandmother] is what Zuhour is suffering from, it’s connected to the feeling that she’s fighting. And it’s important for her to, as we say, in Arabic, Marilyn, taqallub ʾiḥtḥmāl ʾlkalima…
MB: [Interpreting] To turn over and sort of reverse and think about the meaning of a word, to let it kind of turn over and generate new things…
AL: Yes, words and names in particular have so much power in this book. What someone is named or how they are labeled affects how they’re treated by others and the opportunities available to them. And often, the act of naming in Bitter Orange Tree is closely tied with violence. Naming almost becomes a form of violence in of itself. For example, there’s the scene in the chapter entitled “The Gypsy Woman” with the ghagariyya in which Zuhour remembers that a woman who came begging at their door was called a “filthy ghagariyya” by her mother. And because the woman was labeled in that way, the community treated her very poorly, and this caused her to end up murdered (in my reading). Marilyn, I’m really interested in your choice of how to convey the really loaded word of ghaghariya in your translation.
Sometimes editors want a level of explanation that they don’t ask for in a text that’s written originally in the language of publication, so it can be extremely frustrating for a translator.
MB: Well, that was really interesting because, to be honest, I started by just using the term “gypsy” in the translation for ghagariyya. I did that because the term “gypsy” is now considered to be a derogatory term. And I thought that “gypsy” would be the term to use, precisely because it’s such a loaded term. It’s not a neutral term at all. But the editor was very nervous about using that term. And I was like, well, they’re using it in a derogatory way [in the Arabic version]. The derogatory element is the whole point. But then I played with it a bit, and tried to use the Arabic language a bit more. It’s also quite a hard-sounding word in Arabic. So I thought maybe [transliterating the Arabic word into English] would be the best way to go. But it was sort of ironic that, you know, the editor was saying, “Well, you can’t use this word ‘gypsy’ because it’s derogatory.” And I’m like, “I know! It’s being used in a derogatory sense in the book!” If it had been somebody speaking respectfully, I might have used the word “traveler,” or something else. That was an interesting example of a moment where my choice of an appropriate way to convey this attitude in a name really made the editor nervous.
JA: Yes, I remember this discussion about the ghagariyya, and it made me nervous as well because [the derogatory use of the term] is meant to be that way. It makes me think of a book I just read. A few hours ago, I finished reading Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. I liked it. It’s a very interesting book. But the point that I want to make is that, in that novel, there are a lot of words that would have to be deleted if treated with the logic [that to use a derogatory word is for the author to condone it]. For example, in Shuggie Bain, Catholics and Protestants who are neighbors are calling each other by derogatory words. And the derogatory word is meant to be there. The character is thinking about it, about people who are different from her, and she is using that word to describe them. So it perfectly fits. You can’t have characters in a novel who all just believe in and only use the modern words that are acceptable. I mean, the normal thing is that we have different people in the world. Some of them look down on other people. And they put certain names on them. And that’s happening all the time, in every culture, just as I said, with the example of Shuggie Bain.
MB: And it is tricky because I mean, obviously, it’s understandable that people have sensitivities towards the use of certain terms. But yeah, this is it. A character has a particular perspective and is expressing it through that use of vocabulary.
I’m told I went catrastic for the first time in 1984, when Jerome Shin (yes, the director) took me up to my bathroom—my gaudy childhood bathroom with the big pink Jacuzzi and mirrors on all four walls—and cut me my first line and asked me to hold his balls while he jerked off. The request was casual, like my stepmother telling me to hold her purse while she fixed her lipstick. “Just hold them?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, pulling down the top of my dress and looking skeptically at my half-grown tits. “Just hold them.”
The pouch sat on my palm like rotten fruit while he worked his sad, skinny dick. It was a year or so after his young wife drowned. He must have been in his early forties then. I was fourteen.
“Now tug them!” he barked, scrunching up his face.
Startled, I tugged until he came onto my thigh and the hem of my dress. (My stepmother’s dress. I returned it to her closet without cleaning it.) My father’s party murmured through the floor and the pipes. All those people milling around, trying to out-fabulous each other, talking about green lights and opening grosses and sex. Probably every bathroom in the house was hosting some variation on our theme. Jerome cast me in his next movie.
My agent said we had to change my name. “No one uses their real name,” he said, “and yours is terrible.” We were at the Polo Lounge; he was eating a Cobb salad. He reached over with his fork and knocked my hand away from my fries. “Actors’ names are just labels you stick on a fantasy,” he said. “You know, like Armani or something. But it’d be nice to keep some reference to your father.” So I went from being Allison Lowenstein-Karr to being Karr Alison. No one could ever explain why we dropped the second l. “It’s a no-brainer,” my agent told me. “Go with it.”
In retrospect, I don’t think I felt catrastic in the bathroom with Jerome. I remember feeling flattered and grossed out and high and sophisticated. Still, my Helpers identified that night as when my system first became seriously susceptible to degradons, when I started to lose track of my Esteem. Jerome, they told me, was a Usurper—which I’ve never quite been able to sort out because Jerome’s movie is what made me famous, and the Church only ever liked me because I was famous. Jefferson Morris himself told me that the Founder says the important moments in life aren’t just points along a single straight line but are moving, swiveling hubs within a three-dimensional web and belong to multiple trajectories, both ascending and descending. When I held Jerome’s balls, I was beginning my descent into fucked-up druggie despectum, but I’d also hooked into that steep skyward line that would bring me to Billy and Jefferson and the teachings of the Founder. But then there was everything else, too. Like I said, I can’t sort it out.
Businessman, computer businessman, Steelers fan, Asian grandmother, clean-cut guy who’s probably a pervert, sullen punk kid, guy with big gold jewelry, retired couple with too much luggage, harried couple with too many children, Texan. They file past my seat, departing souls taking slow zombie steps down a fluorescent tunnel. “Well, I guess it’s hurry up and wait,” an older blond lady says to no one in particular. We’re all in this together, she is saying. A flight attendant squeezes past to get to the harried couple, who seem defeated by the overhead compartment, by their bags and diaper bags and children’s suitcases bursting with pointless junk. “Don’t mind us,” says the blond lady. But I like the flight attendants, their big hair and sexy blue vests and shiny red nails. The guy in the middle seat doesn’t seem to recognize me, which is just as well. I look out the window at the odd vehicles racing around the tarmac, the shadowy people behind the terminal windows, the transparent flutter of jet exhaust.
I am going to my mother’s house. An act of desperation. The last time I saw her, three years ago, we got in a fight before I could even get through the door—
Where’s Helena?
With Billy.
You left her with that loon?
Don’t even talk to me about leaving. And he’s not a loon.
He’s a loon. Him and that Jefferson Starship guy and their LooneyTunes religion.
It’s my religion, too.
It’s not a religion. It’s a roach motel for idiots.
You don’t know. You don’t know anything about the Founder. You’re just a blip.
What’s a blip?
Someone who doesn’t know anything about the Founder.
You’re brainwashed.
You’re a Nazi.
—and then she slammed the door in my face, and I lifted up the metal flap of the mail slot and hollered through it that she was a cunt and a Usurper and I hoped she and her degradons had a very nice life together. But now I’ve left the Church, or the Church has left me, or we left each other, and Billy of course left me, and Quentin is dead, and I spent all my money trying to get Helena back and failed, and I tried to be in a play, and my friends finally, nicely, suggested I should look for my own place to live.
I’m in coach but near the front, and I see a tall man in a white uniform take a seat in first class. My heart flies up like a flushed dove but gets caught and tangled in a net. If I were hooked up to an Aurograph, it would be going crazy. I remind myself that Quentin is dead. Most everyone’s settled down and buckled up now, except for a paunchy guy who’s going to break the plane apart trying to stuff his huge suitcase into the overhead, his round belly assaulting the face of the woman in the aisle seat, sweat stains in his armpits. A flight attendant comes and splays her red nails across the suitcase as though calming a frightened animal. She lifts it down and takes it away. The pilot comes out of the plane’s little locked brain and shakes the hand of the man in white, bending down, nodding and somber as they exchange a few words.
There are all kinds of stories about me and Billy. The Church bought me for him; he’s gay; I’m gay; I was impregnated with the Founder’s frozen sperm; I was impregnated by Jefferson Morris; I was impregnated by Quentin; I was never pregnant at all.
I’d only been out of Cloudvista a couple of months when my agent called, all excited. “Billy Bjorn wants a meeting. Wear something classy. Don’t swear. Be sugar sweet, and try not to act like a junkie.”
“What’s the script?” I asked.
“Who the fuck cares?”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“He wants to meet you alone. They specified.”
Billy is not tall, but he wasn’t as short as I expected. He moved around his office with the same gymnastic energy as the commando squirrels I watched out the window at Cloudvista while they leapt and dangled and corkscrewed, raiding the bird feeders. He has strong, active hands, and I imagined an invisible tail whirling behind him as he poured me a glass of mineral water, then darted to the window to point out a jet taking off from Santa Monica (“I’ve been thinking about getting one like that myself—what do you think? Do you like it?”), then fiddled with papers on his desk, then flopped down beside me on a long white couch and unleashed his grin. Everyone knows Billy’s smile, but you can’t really understand its effect until you’re confronted by it in person. You lean toward those teeth, swim upstream, struggle closer to the origin of all that dazzle, that gush of stardust. Suddenly I was Suzanne in Tin Can Palace. I was that bitchy lawyer in Pleadings who doesn’t want to be charmed by him but is. I wasn’t a washed up twenty-year-old with a pill problem. I was inside a glorious sphere of light. I was a glorious sphere of light.
“You,” he said. “You are special. I can tell. I’ve always liked you on-screen, but now, talking to you in person, just sitting here looking at you”—he broke off and gave his famous trill of incredulous laughter. “Just look at you,” he said, taking my hand. “You just—you—you have so much to give. There’s something about you. I didn’t expect to react this way—I mean, I wasn’t planning—but—just look at you!”
I echoed his laugh and tried to amp up my smile. My smile is not my strong suit, though, and remembering that, I faltered and looked away. He put a finger under my chin and turned my face back. “And you’ve still got a sweet shyness,” he said. “Great. Really great.”
“I’m just so happy to meet you.”
“Yeah?” He shook his head and laughed again, staring at me, giddy. “Yeah. Am I crazy here? Are you feeling this, Karr? Because I’m feeling something—whew—something big.”
I had to turn away again. On a side table stood a framed picture of a young man in a white uniform with gold braid and colorful rows of ribbons. “Is that your son?” I asked, knowing it was. Quentin was the product of Billy’s first marriage, to his high school sweetheart. After her, he married an ethereal movie star, and after her, he married a model from Ecuador, and after her, he married me.
“Quentin, yeah. My boy.” He sprang off the couch and picked up the photo, staring at it for a moment before he dropped back beside me, closer now, our thighs touching. I felt thrilled and twisted. I felt something big. I felt like I was a shred of myself caught on a sharp hook. I felt like a gust of wind. I felt desperate to get high and certain I would never want to be high again.
“I didn’t know he was in the navy,” I said, looking at Quentin’s face, which was a distorted version of Billy’s square bullet of masculinity, narrower and softer.
“He’s not.” Billy took my hand. “Listen, Karr. Do you ever feel like you need help?”
“What do you mean?” Don’t act like a junkie, don’t act like ajunkie.
“Do you ever have doubts? Do you ever worry about rejection? Do you feel like there are people trying to bring you down?”
I thought about the men in suits who had greeted me in the lobby and ridden with me in the elevator to Billy’s office. They had asked after my father and stepmother by name. I said they’d moved to Hawaii and opened a Zen center, but the men already knew. With a pair of synchronized winks they mentioned an interview I gave when I was seventeen in which I had said I wanted to marry Billy.
“I just got out of rehab,” I said to Billy. “So. Yeah.”
His eyebrows squeezed his forehead into a rift of concern. His gaze fried me like light through a magnifying glass. Just when the tension was about to break me, he said, softly, “I can help you.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot says in that twangy, folksy pilot voice, “today we have the honor of transporting the remains of Petty Officer First Class Reginald J. Roberts, who was killed in action in Afghanistan and is being escorted home to his family by Lieutenant Commander Howard Stanton. Out of respect to our fallen warrior, I ask that you remain seated upon arrival until Lieutenant Commander Stanton has deplaned.”
Everyone’s attention goes to the windows. We are curious for a glimpse of the casket being loaded. I can’t see anything. The officer has taken off his white hat, and his bald spot peeks over the back of his seat.
“Do you know anyone who’s died in the war?” the blip next to me says. He looks like he’s in his late twenties but might as well be older. Central casting has printed “Middle Management” on the back of his head shot. A book on how to be an effective leader is stuffed in his seat pocket.
“No.”
“I do. A high school friend of mine. He went into a house and shot a guy who was wired to blow up. Bits of the other guy’s tissue got embedded in him and caused all kinds of infections. That’s what killed him eventually. Imagine having pieces of a dead person rotting inside you, someone you killed, someone who didn’t even speak your language and who’s going to take you with him. Makes me sick. It’s like a horror movie.”
He’s basically describing degradons—invisible little pellets of bad feelings from Usurpers that stick to your body and make their way into your Esteem—but I remind myself that I don’t believe in degradons anymore. I probably never did, not really, but the language of the Church has rooted in me like a fake accent I can’t shake. “Awful,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s weird to think of that poor guy down in the cargo hold with our bags and everything.” He looks at me, and I can see he wants something but I don’t know what. “It’s weird to think of flying after you’re dead.”
Holding his gaze, I uncoil the cord of my earphones from around my phone and put them in my ears.
A word about the Aurograph. People say it’s nothing more than goofy science-fiction wishful thinking, but I can tell you there’s magic in it. You focus on your life, and energy flows out of your brain and through the electrode bonnet into the monitor. Green waves appear on the black screen, spiking when you hit a catrastic moment, showing where your spirit has gotten all gunked up, and when that happens, you get excited; your Helper gets excited; you feel like undersea explorers who’ve just found a wreck. To maximize your Esteem, you have to isolate all those moments and let yourself be helped through them. “You are a hot air balloon,” Billy told me on one of our first nights, his hand on my belly, his breath in my ear, “and all around you are invisible tethers held by people on the ground, people who are trying to hold you down, usurp your Esteem. They don’t want to let go, Karr. They won’t. But you have to snip those tethers. You have to cut yourself loose so you can fly. You can do it—I know you can. You just need a little help.”
“Think about something that has troubled you recently,” my Helper said after my wedding.
I had planned to think about the helicopters that hovered above the château day and night and the paparazzi who clamored at the gates like angry peasants, but instead, Quentin welled up in my mind, standing at the window where I first saw him. A green line climbed the monitor.
“Okay,” said my Helper, “the Aurograph has registered your distress. What were you thinking about?”
“The night before the wedding,” I said.
“What in particular?”
“We had a big dinner for everyone. I was getting ready to come down to the ballroom, and I was alone in my room after I got my hair done, and I thought I heard someone calling my name. So I went and opened the door, and there was Billy’s son.”
“He was calling your name?”
“No. He was at the other end of the hall, looking out the window. I’d never met him before, actually. He’d been away on the Esteem.”
“Who was calling your name?”
“No one.”
“Why does this memory trouble you?”
(“Quentin?” I said, and he turned. He was wearing his white FounderCorps dress uniform, the one he wore in the picture in Billy’s office. Even from the other end of a long hallway, I could tell Quentin was different from Billy. Everything flows out from Billy, whooshing and blasting you back, and you fight to get closer. But everything pulls toward Quentin, and I felt queasy, like I should brace away.
“Should I call you Mom?” he said, not sarcastically but sadly. I was twenty-one. He was twenty-six.)
“I just wish,” I told my Helper, “I’d had the chance to meet him earlier so we could have felt like more of a family at the wedding.”
Already I had begun to understand that the infallibility of Billy was a cornerstone of the Church, and my Helper looked uncomfortable. “Quentin has very important work to do on the Esteem. He helps people reach the highest levels of study.”
The Esteem is the last of the Founder’s ships. According to Jefferson Morris, the Founder says the ocean is the place where we are most open and compassionate. Anyone who wishes to be really and truly free of degradons must spend time studying on the Esteem. I said, “I know. I don’t mean to be critical. It was just a little awkward.”
“Do you resent Quentin’s obligations to the Church?”
“No.”
“Do you wish your husband paid less attention to the Church and more attention to you?”
“Sometimes.”
“I’m going to recommend a class for you—it’s called Overcoming Selfishness for the Sake of the Self. There’s an intensive version available at the Ranch.”
“Okay.”
“Can you think of another moment in your past that troubled you in the same way?”
I reached, as I often did during Helping sessions, for the years between Jerome Shin and Billy.
You’ve seen my first movie, the one Jerome put me in. I think it holds up pretty well. Kind of gritty but still kind of a caper. Not as good as Jerome’s last movie, but Jerome was one of those people who knew he’d do his best work while he was dying.
When we started filming, I didn’t want anything from him—certainly I had no pressing urge to be reunited with his scrotum—but I was still offended he didn’t try anything with me. He was soft-spoken and professional. He made sure I put in my hours with the set tutors. “Allie, are you comfortable with this?” he asked before we filmed my scene in the bath.
Eventually I figured out he was boinking Genevieve Henry. Her beauty didn’t register with me back then. I thought my knobby knees and flat ass were what every man wanted, not Genny’s mouth like a fat berry and her weary eyes. I ditched my chaperone and went to her trailer and asked if we could talk. She was sprawled on a love seat in a black silk bathrobe patterned with white orchids, reading a paperback spy novel. “Sure, baby,” she said, tenting the book on her chest.
A bottle of white wine stood open in an ice bucket on her table. “Can I have some of that?”
“Sure, baby.”
I poured a glass and took a dramatic swig. As I told her what had happened with Jerome, she kept smiling as though I were some pleasant scene she had paused to admire: a children’s playground, a pretty sunset, a string quartet playing Vivaldi.
When I was done, she said, “That’s all?”
“Well,” I said, “I guess so.” I had never told the story before, and out loud it sounded flimsy and quick. “I just thought you should know Jerome’s a child molester.”
She swung her small mouth off to one side and studied me.
Finally, she said, “You’re not a child. You’re already a bad little chick.” She twisted her lips around some more and looked at her book for a minute. Then she turned a page and said, “Baby, if you want to be in the business, you should think about how much you’re willing to put up with, because if you think you’ve been creamed on for the last time, you’re wrong.”
What did she see when she looked at me? When I rewatch the film, I see a gangly, eager girl pretending to be jaded. I see a little circus pony, a raw nugget of pure ego. Those movie people snorted me and smoked me; they cooked me in a spoon. Now they say I’m weak. They say I’m unfeeling to abandon my child to a cult. But you try getting out of that prenup, the one where you agreed to forfeit any claim to your husband’s tens of millions in case of infidelity, where you certified that any and all of your children would be raised in accordance with the Founder’s teachings, regardless of your own status within the Church. And you wanted your child to grow up happy and secure, sheltered from doubt, able to fly above our despectulated world, and you signed it, not knowing you would be labeled a Usurper, and since your child must be raised in accordance with the teachings of the Founder, and the Founder said children must be shielded from Usurpers at any cost . . . Well, you try getting out of that one. Especially if Helena won’t even talk to you. She knows better than to talk to Usurpers.
It was true I hadn’t been creamed on for the last time. People put me in more movies. My father was getting into drugs, so I did too, the way other fathers and daughters joined Indian Princesses or went out to brunch after church. At first it wasn’t anything major. We’d sit by the pool and share a joint when my stepmother wasn’t around. “Kiddo,” he’d say, “tell Daddy how it feels to be a star.” And I’d say something random like, “Daddy, it feels like biting into a dead mouse” or “Daddy, it feels like really bad gas,” and he’d howl, he’d nearly fall off his chaise. But then my stepmother was around less and less—she couldn’t quite bring her self to leave him, not that she had such a high horse anyway, Our Lady of Dexedrine—and we took our show on the road, driving out to house parties in Bel Air or Malibu, Dad looking like Don Johnson in his blazer and T-shirt behind the wheel of his Corvette (ice blue with a caramel interior, speedometer flickering like a flame as he accelerated). We’d cross the threshold together and part like strangers, wading through shadow worlds where the air was thick with bodies and ash and stardust, neither wanting to witness the other’s search for relief. “Catch you on the flip side,” he’d murmur.
Those were times I was catrastic—no question. I had a trick where I could squeeze the insides of my knees against my ears so hard I created suction. I would do it in cars, bent forward, trying not to puke, and I would do it on my back when I got bored with getting fucked. I could see but not hear the guy say, You’re so flexible. I was walking around covered with a thick fur of degradons, and I didn’t even know it. But I also remember the way the night sky looked from the quiet bottom of a glowing blue swimming pool, the shifting membrane of light that separated me from the darkness, the drunks who drifted and murmured like ghosts around the edges.
In the mornings, my father and I would drink coffee in pained silence until our shame burned off like early fog. Soon we’d be back out by the pool, riding the fizz of my stepmother’s speed back to civility, sharing a copy of Variety and a pitcher of mimosas and gossiping about the night before, pretending I hadn’t been a limp and addled baby bimbo and he hadn’t spilled a baggie of coke and morphed into a crawling, snuffling thing, an anteater with a plastic straw proboscis, hoovering up white dust from the grout of some one’s Spanish tiles.
I remember a party at the Chateau Marmont after I got fired from what would have been my fifth film and someone pulling me down from a balcony railing when I pretended I was going to jump, and then the Corvette’s speedometer was flickering and Dad was saying I was a star and fuck ’em, just fuck ’em, and I yelled at him to go faster because faster was hilarious until the spinning began, a real spinning and not just the world running around trying to catch up with me. They found me sitting on the crumpled hood and smoking a cigarette, barefoot, loopy, apparently unmoved by the moans coming from the driver’s seat. His left leg had to be amputated above the knee.
Just try keeping that out of the papers.
A movie star, especially when he has divorced you and stolen your child with his lawyers and his prenup and his riches, is like God. Omnipotent, omnipresent. His huge grinning face looks down over the road to the airport. He waves his invisible squirrel tail on the little TV in the taxi, talking to Regis, pumping his fist in the air about something while the driver dubs him with whatever guttural language he’s chortling into his phone. At the airport, he walks across the newsstands, holding his new girlfriend by one hand and your daughter by the other. He flickers across seatback screens. His voice whispers out of a hundred cheap headsets. The man beside you has recognized you after all; he gives a quick sideways glance when the guy in the aisle seat chooses Billy’s latest. A buddy comedy. It lost money. Billy can be funny, but self-seriousness clings to his humor like mildew. His career is suffering, not catastrophically but noticeably. People think his zeal for the Church is off-putting. They think he is controlling, a megalomaniac, but they don’t feel sorry for me. They only think I am even more of a fool.
A movie star, especially when he has divorced you and stolen your child with his lawyers and his prenup and his riches, is like God. Omnipotent, omnipresent.
The naval officer stands and walks to the lavatory at the front of the plane. I am relieved to see he is not watching Billy’s movie. Maybe he’s not supposed to partake of the in-flight entertainment. Maybe he’s supposed to sit and think about the guy in the box who’s soaring on his back over the Great Plains. For three years I’ve felt like I should be sitting and thinking about Quentin. I wasn’t allowed to go when they scattered his ashes off the Esteem. Jefferson Morris made an official announcement that the Founder had asked Quentin to cast off his body and move into a new dimension, embarking on a fact-finding mission into the afterlife. He is expected to report back as soon as he is able.
Most gossip within the Church centers around whether the Founder is alive or dead. Jefferson Morris says he is in exile, that he wishes to communicate only through Jefferson so as not to interrupt his state of perfect Esteem. Dozens of blip reporters and disgruntled ex-Church members have tried to track down the Founder, to prove he is dead, but the trail goes cold in 1970, after he sailed away on a solo round-the-world trip. His first communication reached Jefferson Morris five months later, announcing he had found perfect Esteem and declaring his intention to remain in exile. No wreckage was ever found; no SOS call was ever received. There is a photo from an Italian newspaper (June 20, 1973) in which a man sitting at a café in the background is either the Founder or his long-lost Florentine twin. The FounderCorps keeps an office waiting for him at every Church center and a house for him at the Ranch, dusted every day and made up with clean sheets and towels just in case he decides to return. I have nothing I can keep ready for Quentin except myself.
On our honeymoon, Billy woke me up in the middle of the night. “Karr,” he whispered. “Karr. I know the secret.”
“What secret?” I asked, woozy, disoriented by the gilded ceiling of our hotel suite.
“About the Founder.”
I rolled onto my side, facing him. His cheek, jaw, and shoulder were blue; the rest of him was dark. “What about him?”
“Whether he’s alive or dead. I know.”
The room was silent except for his breathing and, in the distance, one of those warbling European police sirens that always make me think of World War II. “Well?” I said.
Billy put his hand on my naked side. “He’s both.” I waited. He rolled me lightly back and forth as though trying to shake a response from me.
“I don’t think I understand.”
“He’s found a way to be both. That’s the miracle. That’s perfect Esteem. None of the burden of life, none of the finality of death. He did it, Karr. He’s the only one in the world, in the history of the world.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. Then with true wonder: “Yeah.”
I unbuckle, and Middle Management and the guy on the aisle get up so I can go pee. On my way back, I lift two little bottles of vodka from the drinks cart. Tacky, I know, but I am going to see my mother.
My mother has a talent for disgust and finality, and I’ve always had the impression she left me with my father to prove we deserve each other. But we needed someone who was disgusted with us, someone solid and human who smelled like office supplies. She lives in a small city full of fast-food chains and big-box stores and is a secretary for a personal injury lawyer. After we wrecked the Corvette, she came and checked Dad and his new steel shin and acrylic foot into Cloudvista and took me back with her, driving for fourteen hours straight while I slumped against the door of her Honda, watching the mesas and mountains go by. “No more movies,” she said. “I’m not even going to say ‘not for a while’ or ‘not until you’re old enough to handle it.’ Not ever. Someday you’ll thank me.”
“They won’t forget me,” I told her. “They’ll come find me.”
“Who’s they?” she said. “There’s no one who cares about you in that whole godforsaken city. Maybe they cared about the money you made them, but they didn’t care enough to stop you from flaming out, did they? Your father spent all your money, by the way. Every cent. It’s all gone.”
“No, it isn’t. It can’t be.”
“Gone, Allison.”
I screamed, gripping the dashboard with my fingers. She glanced at me, then back at the road.
She was living with an amiable boyfriend named Tom, who surprised me by not wanting to fuck me. He just wanted to build birdhouses and play the mandolin and bake quiches for my mother. I went to a small school where the other kids were impressed by my celebrity for about a week but then changed their minds when they realized I didn’t have anything to say. After a year, I got called out of history class, and there was Dad waiting in the office to take me away.
“Did you buy this with my money?” I asked about his new black Corvette.
“I’ve got a slam-dunk project,” he said, gunning us away from my school, the speedometer licking up like a green flame, “with a part in it for you. We’re going to get everything back—you’ll see. Daddy just needs your help. Daddy can’t do it without you.”
That was true, and we both knew it. On the other hand, my mother didn’t need us. She didn’t even need us to need her.
When we were back in LA, she called and asked if I had gone with him willingly. When I said yes, she hung up, and I didn’t see her again until I was nineteen and it was my turn to go to Cloudvista. After I got out, she was the one who set me up with the shrink who told me to imagine the tiger. “Imagine a tiger,” he said in his hypnotic voice, “and imagine yourself taming him by feeding him all your doubts, all your worries, all your pain, all your fear. The more he eats, the more he glows. When you find yourself in situations where you’re doubting yourself, just imagine the tiger beside you, radiating light, and imagine everything and everyone else covered with a thick layer of dust.” He had a lot of show business clients. He said he understood the stresses we were under. He told me about an actress who won an Oscar after one year of imagining the tiger.
I want to nap, but as soon as I close my eyes, I have a funny feeling and pop them open. Sure enough, the sullen punk kid in front of me has his phone between the seats and is taking a picture of me. I put my hand over the phone, and it goes away.
“That must be annoying,” Middle Management says.
“Yeah.” People often hit me with a big dose of chummy compassion as an opening gambit, like I’ll be so grateful someone finally understands my plight. Wistfully, I think of Billy’s jet.
“You were amazing in that Jerome Shin movie. We watched it in a film class I took in college.”
“Thanks.” I unscrew the top of one of the little vodka bottles and pour its contents into a paper Starbucks cup I saved. The liquid turns faintly tea-colored from the coffee dregs. I raise the window shade a few inches and look down at a dazzling river, gleaming gold and shaped like a wild jungle vine.
“Is it true they brainwashed you?” the guy asks in a serious tone meant to assure me that my answer would be kept confidential.
I think of a television interview of Jefferson Morris I’d once watched in which he’d said, How do you wash brains? Seriously. I’ve had it on my to-do list to find out, since supposedly it’s all I do all day. Do you put them in a big bucket with some dish soap and scrub? Do you clip them to a line to dry?
“Pretty much,” I say.
“Wow.”
I salute him with my Starbucks cup and empty it. Then I pour in the other bottle.
“Did you believe in Neptunius and all that?”
The sullen punk kid in the next row is watching Billy’s movie too. Billy, his skin slightly orange on the shitty airplane screen, drives a red convertible. He grins and wears sunglasses. He pumps his fist. A man comes down the aisle wearing big headphones and a neck pillow, moving slowly, buoyantly, like he is walking on the bottom of the ocean. The headphones’ cord trails behind him. I crane to see the naval officer, but all I can see is his bald spot. He is the only person on this plane I want to talk to, and so it is to him more than the blip next to me that I say, “The Founder said truth is in the heart of the believer.”
“Who? Oh, right, you mean—right, that guy. X. Genesis Wilderness, or whatever.”
“F. Genesis Inverness. But people in the Church consider it impolite to say his earth name.”
“Isn’t he the one where nobody knows if he’s alive or dead?”
Billy kisses a blond starlet on-screen, and I lean closer to Middle Management and tell him the biggest secret I know. “Actually,” I say, “he’s both.”
He laughs, a high-pitched trill like Billy’s. “He’s both? He’s like a vampire or something? Wait, so, you did believe.” Suddenly, he gets serious, concerned for me. “Do you still?”
“I’m just saying belief isn’t necessarily something you either have or don’t have, like a car or something. You can’t just think ‘Do I believe X, Y, and Z?’ and then go look in the driveway and find out. I mean, do you really believe that book will make you a leader?”
I can see he wants to push his book farther down into the seat pocket. He presses his lips together. He is getting disgruntled, the way people do when our conversations don’t line up with their fantasies. “No offense,” he says, “but it all seems so silly.”
Last year I did a play Off-Broadway, and during previews someone in the crowd shouted when I made my entrance, “Hail, Neptunius!”
I tried to cover the moment by briskly dusting my fake coffee table. My costar’s jaw tightened as he read his fake newspaper. Our plywood living room had been perfectly real a second before, but suddenly its falseness mortified me. What was I doing, a grown woman, a mother separated from her child, dressing up like a fifties housewife and reciting words typed out by a notorious drunk and wife-beater who’s been dead for thirty years? Those people filling up the dark with their glinting eyes—did they pay money to see the play or just to gawk at me? Out in the world, people stare as I go about my business, like I’m a traffic-stopping freak for buying coffee or having lunch in a restaurant. I gaze back at them through the lopsided hole in the Elephant Man’s sack.
What I want to say to the man on the plane is that I’ve spent my whole life believing in silliness.
When we first met, Billy took me on his motorcycle from his office to the Santa Monica airport, and then a helicopter whisked us to Palm Springs, where a big house with a swimming pool was waiting, stocked with foie gras and cold lobster salad and strawberries but no booze. No one heard from me for two weeks, but no one seemed to miss me. After Palm Springs we came back to L.A. and allowed ourselves to be photographed together, the cameras snapping like piranhas, and then Billy drove me in his Aston Martin to the Ranch to meet Jefferson Morris.
“Jefferson,” Billy said over dinner, “I’ve got to tell you, Karr is the most compassionate woman I’ve ever met. She has a real gift for giving and receiving help. It blows my mind. Truly. She’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for. The moment she walked into my office—I don’t know, it was like I reached a new understanding of Esteem right then. I don’t think I was capable of this kind of love before. Maybe I wasn’t ready. But this is the right woman at the right time.”
We were sitting on the deck of a reproduction Spanish galleon that the FounderCorps had built right next to the Ranch’s main swimming pool. Red sails snapped in the breeze; the mast creaked. I half expected us to move, even though we were out in the middle of the desert, the keel fixed in sand, the hot orange sun shooting sideways across the dark horizon as it set. Jefferson looked at me. His four bodyguards in khaki FounderCorps uniforms looked at me.
Jefferson will never say exactly how the Founder communicates with him, if it’s by letter or if they chat on the phone or if the Founder’s whispers travel through the ether from a distant island or another dimension and find their way to his ears. Even oracles have their trade secrets. Blip journalists have tried more than once to tap Jefferson’s phone, unsuccessfully because Jefferson has an uncanny knack for detecting and exposing spies. On the galleon, I first thought that Jefferson was blandly handsome, as harmless as a catalog model, but as he studied me, squinting against the sunset, something in me shifted and sank, like I had just received a blackmail letter.
“Billy needs a gal who can be a strong supporter,” Jefferson told me in a voice that suggested we were negotiating an agreement, just the two of us. “Someone who doesn’t want to get in the way of his faith. Are you that kind of gal?”
“Billy wants to make people’s lives better,” I said solemnly. “I think it’s noble.”
“She’s something special,” Billy said.
“I don’t doubt it,” said Jefferson. “Not for a second.”
At the Ranch, our fantasies popped into reality like toadstools springing from the earth. If I mentioned a food I liked, it would appear in our refrigerator. If Billy admired one of Jefferson’s motorcycles, a duplicate would arrive on a flatbed truck within days. Billy told Jefferson that we had joked about wanting to run through a field of wildflowers together and—poof!—two dozen FounderCorps members were out tilling and seeding the desert behind our villa, laying down rich, dark mulch on top of the sand. The next time we came back, we held hands and ran through a field of wild mustard to a spot where a picnic was waiting for us on a gingham blanket.
Billy pulled me down beside him and said, “If the truth is in the heart of the believer, then you’re my truth. Do you believe in me like that?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “You saved me.”
“That’s all I want,” he said. “All I want is to help you.”
Out the window an enormous moon has risen. We thump across ruts of air, and Middle Management crosses himself. New York buses have little stenciled notices by their doors that say: This Is a Kneeling Bus. When a bus stops to let people on, it lets out a long, sad, hydraulic sigh and lowers itself into the gutter. When I first noticed the sign, I thought it was so beautiful, so artistic how some bus bureaucrat had recognized the buses as kneeling.
I want to talk to the man in white. I want to find out what he knows, for him to help me. We are all on a funeral barge, and he is at the helm. When he leaves us, we will have arrived somewhere; we will have been transformed. In Jerome Shin’s last movie, LA is the afterlife, although no one says so explicitly. I would have been in it, but Billy said no, Jerome was a Usurper. We watched it in our screening room at home. Billy and Quentin sat side by side, and I sat behind them, studying the dark silhouettes of their heads against the bright screen.
The last time I was in bed with Quentin, he said to the ceiling, “Why isn’t it working?”
I touched his chest, the wings of sparse black hair that spread from his sternum. “You don’t think it is?”
“My whole life I’ve done everything they said. I’ve read every word the Founder ever wrote. I’ve treated Jefferson like a god. I’ve disengaged Usurpers—I disengaged my own mother. There shouldn’t be a single degradon left on me. But I feel like my Esteem is just draining away, like I’m nothing but doubt.”
“You have more Esteem than anyone I know.”
“Is it working for you?”
“Have you talked to Jefferson? What does he say?”
“He told me I needed to adjust my attitude.”
We were in my bedroom. One of Helena’s nannies had taken her to ballet. Billy was away on location. The whole staff must have known what we were up to. Probably it was one of them who leaked the story to the tabloids. I hope whoever it was bought a nice house with the money. I hope they didn’t feel too guilty when Quentin hanged himself.
“The first time I went to the Ranch,” I said, “there was this FounderCorps girl who would come collect my laundry. She wasn’t supposed to be around when I was in the bungalow, but one day she was late or I was early and we happened to meet. I had just started dating Billy, and I asked her if she liked being in the Church.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she was born into it, and then she said of course she loved it, that she’d learned so much about herself. And even then I thought, What self? What is there besides what they’ve taught her?”
He looked at me, and I felt that whirlpool sensation, like I was being sucked into him. “That’s what I mean,” he said. “Exactly.”
“Oh, God, sorry, I wasn’t saying—you have a self. You’re not like that. It’s just—sometimes I wonder—”
“What?”
“My mother says it’s wrong to think we’re entitled to avoid bad feelings. She says they’re part of the price we pay for living.”
“No. No one deserves to live with doubt.”
I shrugged.
After a moment he said, “Is she a Usurper?”
“I think Billy’s gearing up to tell me so. It’s okay. She probably won’t notice if I disengage her.”
He was silent for a minute. “But why isn’t it working?” he said.
We lay in silence, two animals that had wandered into the same trap. At the time, I would have said pure lust had drawn me to Quentin, lust and our mutual urge to soil some corner of Billy’s perfect world. But after he died I knew he had been my true love.
“Why don’t you leave?”
“And be a blip?”
“You could do it.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve lived out there.”
“People would help you. You could do it.”
Again the vertigo of looking at him. “Really?” he said. “Someone who’s spent most of his life on a ship or at the Ranch? Who’s never been to normal schools? Who’s never had a job that didn’t involve Jefferson Morris?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I told him about the glowing tiger and the dust that smothers everything else.
“Excuse me.” I flag down a passing flight attendant. “Would you give this to the man in white?”
She takes the small square napkin from me with her red talons and glances at it, reading the message. I can see she recognizes me and that she thinks she likes me. “I’ll see what I can do.” She starts to turn away, then turns back. “That poor boy,” she says. “That poor, poor boy.”
During Helena’s birth, I was asked to keep silent so as not to attach any degradons to her. She would encounter the despectulation of the world soon enough, but being born should not be traumatic.
“Did Billy eat the placenta?” my mother asked when I called to give her the news. “It says in the magazines that they eat the placenta.”
“Can’t you be happy for me?” I said. “Just this once? Just for giggles? And lots of people eat the placenta.”
I think I remember when my parents were together, but I can’t be sure. They never married, and they split when I was three, but I can picture my father in the kitchen of an unfamiliar house, pretending to tap-dance. My mother is facedown on the counter, one hand over her wild hair, one in a fist, laughing so hard the sound is crushed into silence. Her fist beats three times on the tiles, slowly, like an ominous messenger pounding on a door.
I can’t decide if I understood the risk I was taking when I first found myself kissing Quentin in my bungalow at the Ranch. He walked in on me when I was alone and crying on the sofa, and his embrace, instinctive and meant to comfort, pushed us over a precipice we had not known we were standing on. I was crying because of Helena, because she had told me she would never love me as much as she loved the Founder, and I had realized I did not like my own daughter, that I disdained her infantile conceit, her parroting of Billy, her certainty of her place at the center of a convenient cosmology. I blamed her for her gullibility even though she was only a child, even though I had not been brave enough to warn her by screaming as she emerged from me. Tendrils of contempt wrapped around my love, and perhaps they made me susceptible to the dark gravity that bound my body to Quentin’s. Or perhaps I was simply still the reckless girl who was pulled from swimming pools and prevented from jumping off balconies, who climbed unscathed from crumpled Corvettes, who lived at the center of a different convenient cosmology. Maybe I thought I could get fired from my life, take some time to watch the squirrels, and then present myself for absorption by a revised destiny.
Something is coming apart. Grief bears down on me like a black wave that has traveled thousands of miles and now is nearing shore. I look out the window, but there is only the hugeness of the moon and a few lights scattered like birdseed over the earth. I wait for the naval officer to come and find me, but his bald spot stays where it is. I need to talk to him. I need someone to really look at me. I remind myself that Quentin is dead, but I press the orange plastic cube in the ceiling. The flight attendant leans over me, smiling.
“Did you give it to him?” I ask.
“I sure did.”
“What did he say?”
“He said thank you.”
“Will he come talk to me?”
Her smile freezes around its edges, and I can see she already likes me less than she did. “Well, I don’t know. I didn’t ask him that.”
“Will you ask him, please?” I dig deep and come up with a gritty half handful of stardust that I fling at her. “Please?”
She tilts her head and walks up the aisle. I can see her back as she speaks to him, dipping apologetically.
The shrink I was seeing in New York gave me a mantra to replace the tiger: I am not the center of the universe. He sat back in his Eames chair with the satisfaction of someone who’d just laid down a royal flush, and I said, “You mean I should overcome my selfishness for the sake of myself?”
He beamed. “Exactly.”
We’re all on the same team, I wanted to tell him. We’re all fighting a common enemy: bad feelings. But, unbidden, my mother’s voice offers its two cents: “Self-doubt is not the plague of our time. People starve; the planet is dying; people have terrible diseases; people are wrongly imprisoned; people watch their families get murdered; people die because bits of someone else are decomposing inside them.”
I know, I tell her. Shut up. I get it.
Almost six years passed between the wedding and when I conceived Helena, and I could tell Billy and Jefferson were worried. They had equated youth with fertility, but my womb was still hungover from my teens, I think, and preferred to laze around and watch Billy’s seed float harmlessly by. Now Helena is the age I was when Jerome Shin took me into the bathroom. But she is a girl who holds her father’s hand and not the testicles of tragic film directors. When I see her picture in magazines, an excruciating bloom of love opens in my chest, threatening to break me from the inside. I believe she will come to me someday. I believe doubt will lead her to me.
“Ma’am, I was given a note saying I had a friend in this seat. Would that be you?”
“Yes,” I say, staring up at him. “Yes.”
“Is there something I can help you with, ma’am?”
“Can I do anything? To help you? I’d like to help.”
“Thank you, ma’am, but right now there’s not much for me to do but wait to arrive.”
I nod. Middle Management is staring at me. His big vanilla head crowds my peripheral vision. “Do you recognize me?” I ask. What I mean is Do you see me? Do you know me?
He does. I can always tell. Disgust creeps through his serious, respectful mask, and I am filled with longing for my mother. “Ma’am, my duty is to see that Petty Officer Roberts’s remains are treated with the respect they deserve and that they are delivered safely to his family. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better return to my seat.”
“Wait,” I say. He waits. He thinks I am a spoiled movie star. He thinks I want special treatment, to involve myself in something that has nothing to do with me. He thinks I’m jealous of the attention a dead man is getting. I begin to cry. “I’m just so sorry,” I say.
The officer frowns but out of confusion and no longer disgust. “We all are, ma’am. You have my word I’ll pass along your condolences to his family.”
I lean against the window and cry. I fly through the air at five hundred miles per hour. I cry for Quentin, for the dead soldier, mostly for myself. The seat belt sign comes on, pinging a soothing tone. My mother tells me I am out of touch with reality. My glowing tiger prowls the aisle. Dust settles thickly on the other passengers, obliterating their faces, their T-shirts, their laptops, furring the ice cubes in their plastic cups. Sometimes, late at night, my father and I would find ourselves in the kitchen at the same time, and we would pour half-and-half over bowls of Raisin Bran. We lift spoonfuls of dust to our mouths. Faster, I tell him, drive faster. A field of orange lights swings into my window, and I want to run through it and collapse on a gingham blanket. The landing gear squeals out from under the dead soldier. The buses of the world kneel and ask forgiveness.
The word “psychedelic” is rooted in Ancient Greek, and means something like “mind-revealing” or “mind-manifesting.” To me it means pushing boundaries, revealing new corridors of the mind.
When I was in my twenties, I read all the Anglophone fiction about the border by Mexican American/Chicanx/Latinx writers I could get my hands on. What I found the majority of these works had in common was that they were written in an often stark, realist tradition, much in the style of mid-20th-century American novels. I began to notice the weirdness, humor, and surreal nature of South Texas, the border that I’d grown up with, was absent not only from these works, but the entirety of American literature.
That’s when my reading started to significantly branch out, obsessively reading works from other countries, and in translation, searching for a way to get in touch with this type of story I couldn’t find anywhere written by my people. Along the way I discovered the works of Daniil Kharms, Silvina Ocampo, and Amos Tutuola, among others, whose unique visions and work helped inform my developing style at the time.
With the stories in Valleyesque, my debut short story collection, I reflected on the kind of storytelling that comes from the land I live in. Here are seven short story collections I consider to be psychedelic. They do so many more things than merely being strange, weird, speculative, enchanting, or even fantastical. Each of these risk-taking collections shows us fiction can still be unpredictable and morbid in the best ways.
When The Miniature Wife and Other Stories first came out, and I remember being at once grateful and in awe—here was a Brown writer, from the same city I was from, no less, publishing weird, unique stories, with robots, swamp monsters, and Borgesian capsule biographies I wasn’t seeing anywhere else. This was before the fiction of Yuri Herrera and Valeria Luiselli, and most of the “post-Bolaño boom” had appeared in book form. For a person like me, this book was earth-shattering, and brought me great relief. Where else would you find a story with a black market unicorn that drinks beer, as in the story “One-Horned and Wild-Eyed”?
The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova
If you’ve read this book, you unwillingly belong to something like a cult, one where everyone wears ancient wooden clogs that’ve become muddy and mossy. I dare you to find a collection with a shorter, creepier, more impossible-to-describe title story—not to mention the other fictive ingredients, like a sewing machine rigged with special powers; the inner thoughts of a spider; the extraordinary tales of a “sconce,” filled with mermaids and sailors and the sadness of the world. This is a book you’ll want to tell everyone about, as well as keep secret.
I’ll never forget that day, years ago, rummaging through a bookstore’s shelves, when I found There Was Once A Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby. The stories in this morbid collection take place in vague time periods that could be the past, the present, the future, or all three. It has quite possibly, in my opinion, the most punk rock story ever written, “Queen Lir,” in which, among other things, the queen hijacks a bus.
Somadeva: Tales from the Kathasaritsagara, adapted and retold by Rohini Chowdhury
Somadeva: Tales from the Kathasaritsagara illustrates perhaps the oldest (and best?) way short stories work together, flowing into one another in an endless ocean, on the border of the oral and written traditions. All the classic archetypes of demons, kidnapped princesses, magical animals, jealous rich people, fools and kings come alive to enchant us once again. This edition—the first translation of the Kathasaritsagara by a woman—is marketed as a children’s book; and, I guess, it is. But on second thought: is it?
Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov
NYRB Classics has been steadily releasing this previously untranslated Ukrainian-born Russophone writer for a little over ten years now, and every book is worth reading. There’s a story here with a talking white toad from the river Styx; a pianist’s runaway fingers; biblical pieces of silver accidentally “invent” monetary devaluation, or debt. The title story gives a whole new meaning to “autobiographical fiction.l of these stories left me speechless with their audacity, magic, and hidden mathematics.
Body horror, the gothic mundane, an appearance by a whale’s heart in a living room: these are just a few refreshing subjects this book creeps upon. At any turn you’ll laugh, feel unsettled, or be moved with the poetry in Gray’s lines: “I tried to remember myself at her age, but when I tried, I only saw a girl lost in the woods.” I first read Gutshot while listening to The Shaggs, really loud—not sure I recommend that part. Actually, fuck it: I recommend it!
When the galley for this book first fell into my hands, I read it right away, plunging into its world of haunted culinary dishes, and blurred lines between people and feral creatures, such as in “Moses and Gaspar”, where it’s unclear if the titular characters are wild children or beasts trying to be civilized. Dávila manages to describe the indescribable just enough for our minds to fill, and complicate, in those horrors. The intensity and impact of these stories will impact you immediately, and with long-lasting effect.
A sexual coming of age story, Little Rabbit is about a 30-year-old queer writer who meets a choreographer in his early 50s at a residency and quickly feels a spark of desire. The relationship that follows pulls her out of her comfortable life of hanging out with her best friends, working as an administrative coordinator in the Econ Department at Harvard, publishing an experimental novel with a press that immediately folds, and hooking up with women and “firm beta” men from her local and literary circles.
Both the art and the sex that the choreographer brings into her life crack open something new in her. She spends weekends at his apartment in New York and his house in the Berkshires, discovering the pleasure, agency, and power that come with submitting to him sexually. She is captivated by the performances of his dancers, finding his art form uniquely powerful in dissolving the boundaries of the self and making her less alone in her own body, while twining the lovers closer together and drawing them into starring roles in each other’s lives.
Alyssa Songsiridej and I first met as colleagues working at Electric Literature, where she is the managing editor. Though she could never have known it while writing the book, I ended up in a job very similar to her protagonist’s roommate, directing a literary conference in Boston. In our Zoom interview, I asked her about the tensions of being a queer person in a straight-passing relationship, how the truths of our private intimacies are lost in the public faces we present to the world, and how both sex and art allow us to transcend the normal boundaries of our bodies and selves.
Preety Sidhu: The protagonist of Little Rabbit is queer—bisexual or pansexual. And she’s drawn into this powerful attraction with a cisgender man who’s a far cry from all her “firm beta” previous male partners. Because with him, she discovers kinks that make her feel more alive than ever, less alone in her body, perhaps.
How are you thinking about the tension between queer identity, kinky desires, and the appearance of conforming to heteronormative expectations?
Alyssa Songsiridej: I feel like that’s one of the primary anxieties of the book and also maybe one of my own primary and personal anxieties.
Ultimately, I wanted to write a book about self-perception vs. the way others perceive us, and the really murky, inarticulable space between them. And how a person’s lived experience might bump up against the current restrictions of their identity. This kinky relationship was the way for me to play it out in a way that felt empathetic and alive. But I don’t have any clear statements about this tension, I’m just trying to play it out—in fact, I’m really pleased that a lot of people are having different reactions to their relationship, that they’re coming up to me saying, “I don’t know what to think.”
PS: I feel like we keep coming back to the phrase “some man’s little woman” and her not wanting to appear to be “some man’s little woman.” And yet outsiders perceiving that relationship might simply see an older, more successful man and a much younger woman becoming partners, moving in, and sort of taking on those life roles. I think that a central part of the book is that there is some part of her identity that’s not shutting down or getting smaller, but that is opening up or enlarging.
AS: I got the idea to write this book from listening to the Esther Perel audiobookMating in Captivity. There’s a section about women who are strong feminists, but they like to be submissive in bed and so there’s that anxiety of, “Am I a bad feminist for liking this?” And I wanted to write a narrator struggling with those same things, wondering “Am I a bad queer person for ending up in a cisgender relationship? Why do I have those thoughts of what is good or bad queerness?” I wanted her to think, “Where’s all this messaging coming from?” And I wanted to interrogate our assumptions about relationships based on the balance of power between two people. I really think there’s a difference between “power over” and “more power than.” In the first case, you’re getting abuse. But what happens in the second case? In a romantic relationship, it’s impossible to always be perfectly balanced. There’s gender, there’s race and class, someone’s career is going to be going up and someone’s down—there’s always a negotiation of material circumstances. Those differences mean you have to deal with the way that you’re presenting as a couple in public all the time, which is an exhausting phenomenon. Although I guess that has happened a lot less since the pandemic because we don’t really present in public anymore.
So I wanted to focus on a couple that we’re used to reading one way—a friend of mine actually said I took a cliché and made it feel alive. This older man/younger woman relationship that people generally have a lot of assumptions about. It seems cliché; it’s something you’ve seen in Hollywood a lot. We have a lot of inherited assumptions about what’s happening in this relationship. And I wanted to take this relationship and give it a full life, to really inhabit it empathetically and challenge our knee jerk response to what it must be like.
PS: Some characters in the book are named right away, while others have their names revealed only at key moments, which I won’t give away. It’s usually the less important characters who are easily named while the love interests are known by their occupations and the protagonist’s name remains a mystery for some time. What did naming or not naming a character signify for you within the world of this story?
AS: It was really important for me that the two main characters, the narrator and the choreographer, not be named throughout most of the book. They’re only known by their names for each other: Little Rabbit, the choreographer. Because it’s a story about how their private selves—their nicknamed selves—come up against their public selves, the people with their real names. The people who are named, like Annie, are being shown as they present to the world.
PS: The protagonist and her undergrad best friend and current roommate Annie are both attracted to women and proud of their queer identities. From Annie’s first pained response to the choreographer spending the night in their apartment, I wondered if she was in love with the protagonist, and my suspicion only grew as the book went on. But the protagonist herself never explicitly wonders this on the page. What’s going on there? Is there an attraction so deep and buried that neither of them can even voice the question, no matter how much pressure is put on their friendship? Or was it strictly platonic on both sides, and the protagonist had to outgrow it to claim something deeper?
AS: I definitely don’t think it’s only platonic. I mean, I think there are lots of female friendships, even between ostensibly straight women, that can end up being erotically tinged and very intense, especially when you’re really young. And these characters are supposed to have met when they were eighteen and still forming their identities. In my experience, in super intense friendships like that, you end up forming your identities with and against each other. It’s so entangled, it’s hard to name all the parts of your relationship. There’s something almost more threatening about the relationship between Annie and the narrator, in friendships like that, because you’re so focused on the way that you’re similar, it erases the ways that you’re different.
PS: For me, that part made it feel more like a coming of age story. The narrator had this post-college self and was dating around and living the Camberville life with her undergrad friends, and then she sort of outgrew it. That life is no longer big enough to contain her and there’s something more and deeper that she wants, that the choreographer can provide. But then Annie stopped growing up in parallel. Does that sound accurate?
When you hit your late 20s, early 30s, a lot of assumptions about how your life is going to be [is thrown out of] the window. You have to completely start over again. You can’t keep being the person you were.
AS: Yeah, definitely. It was really important to me that this narrator be in her early 30s. I know it might confuse people to be coming of age in your early 30s. But I do feel like there’s something about that time period where you have had some experiences as an adult and you think you’re one way, like you’ve made assumptions about how your life is going to be. And then when you hit your late 20s, early 30s, a lot of that just goes out the window. You have to completely start over again. You can’t keep being the person you were. Otherwise, you get stuck. And I think that’s a big part of what’s happening with Annie and the narrator.
PS: In the first pages of the book, the protagonist is captivated by the dancer Jackie:
“Watching her taught me something I would need years to learn how to say. We’re alone in a body, I thought. Our forms are hollow shells until our souls come to fill them. Then we bumbled, lost to each other, separate and apart.”
Towards the end of the book, she thinks about her relationship with the choreographer and how her “body blossomed into something built by the two of us.” Can you talk more about this idea of being alone in a body and the extent to which the protagonist’s evolving relationship with the choreographer either reinforces or breaks down her sense of aloneness in her body?
AS: 99% of the time we bumble around in the world caught in our own sense of self. We think of ourselves as being separate from everything, separate from—not to sound really woo, but like, the universe. I’m interested in moments that break that aloneness, where we feel merged with other people. Sex is one of those rare moments when you are taken out of yourself, where you get to break the barriers of, or the limits of, who you think you are. I feel like art is similar. When you’re really in the flow of making something, you’re taken out of the lonely sense of being a discrete being. I feel spirituality is another similar experience. I’m really interested in those moments of flow or union, how they help us live our lives. Figuring out how to write about those moments is an important project for me.
PS: It wasn’t like the protagonist had no prior sexual experiences. She had a variety of partners, male and female, but it seemed that the choreographer was breaking open something entirely new in her. How were you thinking more specifically about his character, as opening up possibilities for her in that sense of “aloneness in a body”?
AS: The thing about the sub/dom nature of the relationship is that she can willingly give up control over herself for a discrete period of time. To do that with someone that you trust really opens up a lot of possibilities for experience and pleasure that you might not have if you are 100% always in control, or if you are unable to let go of control. And I think it matters that he does a completely different form of art. He’s had a totally different life experience. Like I said, I don’t think he is the cause of the change in the narrator, but he’s definitely part of it. Embracing their relationship is going to influence her life in ways she doesn’t expect.
Another important part of the book for me is acknowledging the relationship between art and the material world. Like, you have to have money to live, to do stuff. Art takes time, and the way to get time is usually money. I think that’s something the narrator is struggling with. I think she’s a purist and it’s limited her, and he’s muddying the waters for her a bit.
PS: You know that question about her struggling to accept her own desires or work through what her own desires say about her? I feel like she’s on a path to accepting and owning it, discovering it, exploring it, and coming into an identity where she can tell some people about it and even start to see this as just part of her overall life and relationship. Then Annie pops out and pushes back, with what her own previous fears about herself would be. I think that’s why that particular line landed powerfully for me. I was thinking about the worries about what our own desires say about us, and learning to—whatever they might be—claim them as empowering. Do you have more thoughts on that?
Sex is one of those rare moments when you are taken out of yourself, where you get to break the barriers of, or the limits of, who you think you are.
AS: Yeah, 100%. What the narrator’s grappling with, what I wanted to bring to life, is this anxiety and worry about how our—consensual!—desires reflect on how we present ourselves in the world. In some cases, like abuse or hypocrisy, yeah, you should be anxious or concerned. But for the narrator—look, when we talk about kink in mainstream culture, sometimes we operate with ideas that are not quite accurate to the internal experience. I think that’s the case with the narrator. In her relationship with the choreographer, there are lots of ways in which she has more control than he does. It’s a consensual relationship. Everything that he’s doing is for her pleasure, including the domination. So really, he is serving her, you know, and really she is in charge, and she can end up controlling certain scenes. That’s a dynamic I wanted to make clear.
PS: I think she spends a lot of time worrying about how much power he has over her and how her body is responding, and following him all over the East Coast, and how maybe she followed Annie before in a similar way that I think that is interesting. But I want to think about the power she has over him. I really love the scene where they meet Jackie in the dance studio to try and show Jackie something about their relationship so Jackie can better exact the choreographer’s vision for the dance. There’s a great moment where the protagonist drops down in front of the mirror and we’re thinking about the self that she can see in the mirror, the self that she can see as her own flesh, and the bruises even she can’t see under her clothes, what’s hiding there. At the same time, she is kind of torturing him by making some of this public in his professional life. He started it that, of course, but how much of what they’re doing is giving her power over him and more power over her own life? And is it ultimately way more empowering for her than it is about losing power?
AS: In her case it’s definitely empowering. She has to have power in order to give it to him in the first place, and she’s only giving it to him under specific circumstances. There are clear boundaries. There were little things about their not-sex life where I wanted to be clear that he doesn’t have influence over her. Like, he’s a vegan but she’s still eating salami. He wants her to feel equal in their public lives. She can give up power to him in bed because she actually has it. If she didn’t, if she was actually in a disempowered position in the relationship, she wouldn’t be able to really submit to him in the pleasurable way that she does. The fact that it’s a choice and it’s a game actually gives her a lot of power.
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