Andrey Kurkov’s novelGrey Bees takes place in eastern Ukraine, a region that has been at war with Russian separatists since 2014. Translated by Boris Dralyuk, the story follows Sergey Sergeyich, a beekeeper living in what is called the “grey zone,” the liminal space between the warring sides. Sergeyich’s village is all but abandoned except for himself and his frenemy neighbor, Pashka—their electricity is cut and the mail arrives when it arrives. Each day brings obstacles in survival: shoveling coal for a furnace, burying a body of an unclaimed fallen soldier in the snow. What was once a lively town is now silent save the sounds of shelling—sometimes in the distance, sometimes too near.
Motivated to save his bees and harvest honey in warmer climes, Sergeyich makes the decision to venture out of the grey zone, loading up his Lada and trailer in tow and sets off onto an adventure-filled meditation on family, friendship, mortality, belonging and most of all: home.
I had the pleasure of corresponding with Kurkov to discuss his novel, who has remained in Ukraine during the war and its escalation by Russian forces throughout the country.
Kalani Pickhart: It feels impossible asking this question, but how are you? You and your family have had to move a number of times during this invasion. Would you be able to tell us where you are writing from and what your environment is like (even in non-specific terms)?
Andrey Kurkov: I am in the west of Ukraine, I can see Carpathian Mountains and that view is great. I would enjoy it much more if there were no war now, But we are lucky. In the end, a retired lady gave us her small flat and moved herself to her daughter. So we are fine. There is no desk, but there is a small kitchen table which I use. It is sometimes too noisy in kitchen, but I can write there. And I can have tea as often as I want.
KP: What provoked or inspired you to write a novel about the war in Donbas?
AK: From 2014, I started meeting a lot of resettlers and refugees from Donbas. One of them who the opened a cafe in Kyiv, told me he drives back once a month to bring medicine to an almost-abandoned village near the front line where only seven families remained. They were thanking him with pickles and whatever they grow. They lived without electricity, gas, shops, post. This was a moment I realized that life in the grey zone is going on and is the same length as the frontline. Back then it was 430 km. I wanted to give voice to these forgotten people.
KP: Are you able to write at the moment? I’ve read articles and seen interviews of you recently speaking about the war—are you focusing on reportage, or are you also working in fiction?
AK: Before the start of the war, I was working on a new novel about the events in Kyiv during the civil war in 1919. But as soon as the war started, I could no longer write literature. Since February 24, I have been writing only essays, diaries, articles about the situation in Ukraine, about the war, about Russian politics, and the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations.
I would very much like to return to my new novel, but I am afraid that, before the end of the war, this is not possible. Reality is now defeating any fiction with its predictable cruelty. What I have long known about today’s Russia is now known all over the world. Now it is more appropriate to engage in journalism or even philosophy than fiction.
KP: I read Grey Bees only a few weeks ago, shortly before the full-frontal invasion from Russia. I’d read about Ukrainian citizens who had stayed in the Donetsk and Luhansk areas despite the war, but Grey Bees allows the reader to access the “grey area” in a personal way. I was deeply moved by Sergey Sergeich’s story—what drew you to write this story of a beekeeper in Donbas? Why bees?
AK: Majority inhabitants of Donbas are like bees. They work all their life and don’t demand anything. They just live and do what is expected from them. My characters are also like that. Simple people who are trying to follow more laws of nature than laws of state. Sergeich is attached to his bees because he believes the bees are wise and they organized their communal collective life much better than the soviets in the USSR. He is simple but honest and in fact, it is the bees who are in a way looking after him, taking him out of the danger zone, not him looking after bees.
KP: I hope you don’t mind another bee question. At one point in the novel, Sergeich muses about the drone bees:
“Some bees fly, gather pollen, build honeycombs—live like the proletariat from day to day, from birth to death. Drones, meanwhile, just consume and consume. Can a worker bee ever really respect a drone? No.”
I am curious who, if anyone, Sergeich would see as “drones” in human civilization? Because he admires the wisdom of bees, is there a purpose for drones, both bees and humans?
Reality is now defeating any fiction with its predictable cruelty… Now it is more appropriate to engage in journalism or even philosophy than fiction.
AK: Drones fulfill their role in hives and can be considered useful, although they are despised by ordinary worker bees. Sergeich knows this. Drones among people cause only indignation and protest. For Sergeich, such human drones are, of course, the oligarchs, but above all, any “useless” person who does not produce anything from material or non-material values. In some ways, he also considers Pashka a drone, because he, although retired, does nothing useful. He just passively lives his useless life.
KP: A drone bee dies at Sergei’s feet, already a gray color from being starved. Sergei Sergeich translates to “grey” and he lives in a region that is called the “grey zone” because of the war. I would love to hear from you on this emphasis of grey or “greyness” and color (or the absence of it) in the book.
AK: Gray on a gray background is inconspicuous. And that means protected. Such is the psychology of many people of Donbas. They do not want to stand out from the crowd because it is dangerous. It is dangerous when they see that you are different from others. In Donbas, indeed, people rarely painted the fences of their houses in bright colors. This was too risky, too foolhardy. Therefore, the dullness of an urban or rural landscape only intensified the dullness of life and created a dullness of thought. After all, thoughts can also be bright and bold, or gray and boring. Despite this mediocrity, many residents of Donbas always managed to maintain a sense of justice, to maintain their positive moral qualities. It was all in the past. Now even the gray in the Donbas has become black because of the fire of war, because of explosions and fires.
KP:Grey Bees is what many would consider a “quiet” novel in the sense that there aren’t flashy action scenes—this may surprise some readers, considering the novel takes place in a war zone. That being said, there is a lot of tension and this high-frequency feeling of something dangerous might befall Sergeich—nearby bombs and shelling, a missing grenade, strangers at the door, intruders at a camp, a search at a checkpoint, a room with Russian police. This book lingers in the details, and every detail bears significant power. I wonder if you might be able to speak to your decision to write a novel about war in this way?
Only Ukraine is not afraid to fight the Russian army, which is several times larger. Because Ukraine knows that it can lose its independence, its statehood, it can disappear from the map of the world.
AK: Of course it was done on purpose. I did not want to write a novel filled with actions, because military actions are not helping to explain human story, human tragedy. I wanted Sergeich to think about his life and himself, not about the war and explosions. This is about what war brings to ordinary people. And this point is more relevant today during full scale Russian aggression than when I published it first.
KP: As the war continues, are you planning to stay in Ukraine?
AP: I am staying in Ukraine with my wife and two sons—they are all U.K. citizens but they don’t want to leave either. My wife moved to Kyiv in 1988 when I refused to settle in the U.K. The boys grew up in Kyiv and cannot imagine living outside Ukraine. Ukraine is their home.
KP: Many people who were unaware or uninterested in the war in Donbas are now seeing the atrocities throughout Ukraine and want to learn and support Ukrainian writers, journalists, NGOs, and refugees. There are protests around the world and Ukrainian flags are being flown by Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians alike. I have my own complicated feelings, but I wonder how are you feeling and what your thoughts are about this sudden shift in international interest?
AK: Of course, support for Ukraine around the world has grown to an unprecedented scale. This is very pleasing. It’s just a pity that Europe didn’t see before what the Russian policy towards Ukraine is leading to. Europe has been surprisingly naive and sometimes too pragmatic, like Germany. Europe wanted to trade with Russia and turned a blind eye to human rights problems, Europe did not want to notice the trends in Russian politics that led today to total war in Ukraine. Now, before our eyes, a war of the 20th century is being waged with the bombing of cities and villages, with the destruction of the civilian population. And this is happening in the 21st century! Why? Because Putin lives in the past. He wants to restore the USSR and wants the whole world to be afraid of the new Soviet Union. The world is truly afraid. Only Ukraine is not afraid to fight the Russian army, which is several times larger than the Ukrainian one. Because Ukraine knows that it can lose its independence, its statehood, it can disappear from the map of the world. What will happen to the rest of the world then? I’m scared to imagine it.
I remember when I first sought out nature writing. My predominant sense of who got to be a nature writer—who got to take the adventure and arrive home transformed—was as cliched as anyone else’s, and for good reason. I had never known any women nature writers, nor read them. Nor could I find them easily. Decades later, when I sought out “best of” nature writing and adventure writing lists in order to prepare my syllabi for nature writing classes, these lists were still predominantly composed of white men. I had to hunt to enhance my own reading and awareness before I could offer an expanded sense of nature writing to my students.
The root causes of nature writing’s white, patriarchal norm are unsurprising: being out in nature for a prolonged time often takes resources, a perceived sense of safety, and the masculine sensibilities of the historic publishing machine that thrusts a nature writer into the canon. Academia often reinforces the historical canon, and certain texts, like Thoreau’s Walden, become sacred. Kathryn Schultz addresses the Thoreau Problem brilliantly in her essay “Pond Scum.” “Like many canonized works, it is more revered than read,” she writes, as she points out that our reflexive, ill-informed hero worship may be misplaced. We live in a time when we need different heroes, more compassionate and inclusive ways of thinking about our relationship with the natural world.
Women have always taken adventures and developed expertise about the natural world, but their books, if written or published, have rarely made it into the nature writing cannon. We can change that, as well as a sense of who can feel comfortable in wild spaces and join conversations about nature, conservation, and adventure, and we should.
Kincaid—a devoted gardener and sharp observer—always integrates a stunning sense of the natural world in her books. A Small Place dives into the problematic, colonial mindset of tourism, and forever changed the way I think of the ethics of travel. This is essential reading for developing a critical sense of how to move—or not move—in the world.
I hope to one day live in a world where the hero worship and reading of Carson eclipses that of Thoreau. Silent Spring is—perhaps similarly to Walden—referenced more than it is read, and reading it, though unsettling, is an eye-opener. Carson knew the danger of capitalism colliding with chemistry, and the impact of man-made compounds on the environment, and she wrote about it with grace and courage. Written in the ‘60s, this book will convince you of the danger of pesticides, and of Carson’s importance in shaping our collective environmental conscience.
No one has ever written about a rural junkyard in Georgia—and the slash pine forests—with more color, skill, and heart. The New York Times called Ray the next Rachel Carson, but she is under-read. Ray offers a crucial take on the intersection between class and a conservation mindset in this ecological memoir that traces her origins and the essential flow between person and place.
Dungy is a revered nature poet and professor, and I love reading her in essay form. Guidebook is a travelogue, a series of personal essays written largely to her daughter about the past and present, and how to move within it. When I teach this book, students respond to Dungy’s exploration of how it feels to move in the world and outdoors, especially after becoming a mother.
I’ve heard it said that Labastille out Thoreau’d Thoreau—building her own small cabin in the Adirondacks and pursuing a vigorous outdoor life as a guide and conservationist. Woodswoman, one of LaBastille’s several books, traces her journey to self-reliance and the deepening of her relationship with the Adirondacks. LaBastille is a ’70s feminist and an outdoor icon who shouldn’t disappear from our literary consciousness.
Faizullah is a poet, Fulbright scholar, the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, and a fearless writer who looks closely at the experience of women, especially women caught in the throes of trauma and war. In Seam, poet Natasha Tretheway says “we confront the past and its aftermath in the lives of women interrupted by violence and brutality and loss.” Faizullah has an eye for the natural world, and this comes through in the work.
Is anyone better at writing birds on the page? No. I once heard Macdonald read a piece about a baby albatross taking flight; it made me cry and laugh. Macdonald knows how to tell a story, and she also knows how to reach a sublime place in her writing—where things feel awful and wonderful, all at once. Vesper Flights is an essay collection, always in conversation with the natural world, birds, nostalgia, the countryside, and time.
I admire the wonder-forward way Nezhukumatathil writes and creates community. Engaging with the natural world doesn’t have to be a doom-filled task, and she makes space for joy and beauty. These are essays about the ways the natural world can sustain and inspire us.
Sutherland is a little gruff, practical, and full of moxie. Despite her limited time and resources, and four kids at home, Sutherland is eager to get out and swim her way into an adventure and meditation about a woman’s relationship with the natural world. Featured: ecology, survival, and solo female adventure in Hawaii.
You already know this one, and you already love it, and for good reason. I’ve heard Kimmerer speak about how important a shift she made when she allowed herself to move from a purely scientific way of writing into first person narratives that honor emotion and feeling. Braiding Sweetgrass feels like the feminine corrective to a way of looking at natural resources—it prioritizes gratitude instead of dominance, and explains a more tender way of relating to the environment, yoked with illustrative stories from Kimmerer’s life.
Chang, a professor, editor, and poet, gave one of the most affecting nature lectures I’ve ever heard, on race and the pastoral form. She’s a brilliant thinker, and there’s often a spark in her poems, a valid anger in the margins. The poems in Some Say the Lark explore loss, the self, broken systems, and motherhood.
Rush’s book came early in the contemporary climate discussion, and her prose is lush and dark. A lyrical collection of accounts that show climate change is not a future phenomenon, but it’s already happening, and the worsening situations on the coast that have long been problematic.
Ruckduschel is known for many things—her habit of eating roadkill, her storied existence on a barrier island, but also her thousands of necropsies of sea turtles and extensive knowledge of the natural world. Her book on the natural history of Cumberland Island is a life’s work of serious study. This is a scientific reference text, but beautiful in its wholeness and lived perspective.
This book is stunning, the lyric payoff of decades of sustained study. Upstream is a series of lyric essays on place. Oliver’s “Ode to Provincetown” was early in its eulogistic tone for nature writing, and it’s a masterclass in avoiding righteousness.
Up until my early 20s, I had never heard of the Chinese Exclusion Act. I remember taking classes on Mississippi history during my childhood in Oxford, then Texas government, and later the story of the Alamo during my teenage years in Austin. Our history textbooks were heavy and thick, always a pain to take home. Still, for all their pages, they never discussed that period of history when an entire group of people was barred because of the threat they posed to white labor and racial purity. It wasn’t until I took an intro to Asian American studies course in my senior year of college that I was introduced to that significant moment of American history: in 1882, President Chester A. Aurthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act (then known as the Chinese Restriction Act), which banned Chinese laborers from entering the country for ten years.
In my debut novel, Four Treasures of the Sky, Daiyu, the 13-year-old narrator, is kidnapped from her home in Zhifu, China and smuggled across the Atlantic Ocean, where she is sold to a brothel in San Francisco. From there, Daiyu journeys to Idaho, hoping to find her way back home. It is not just the physical journey that stands in her way, however—Daiyu is in America at the height of anti-Chinese sentiment, arriving just on the heels of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. It is this pervasive hatred, this revulsion of the “moon-eyed heathen,” that poses the greatest threat to her return—not the wilderness nor the cold of winter.
The Chinese Exclusion Act is not a singular moment of anti-Chinese action in our history. Years before, for example, came the Page Act, which indirectly banned Chinese women from entering, thus contributing to the lopsided demographics of Chinese immigrants for years to come. Decades before that was People v. Hall, which ruled that the Chinese—following precedence from Section 394 of the Act Concerning Civil Cases—were not allowed to testify against white citizens in court, claiming they were “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior.” When examining the legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act, we must also consider what came before as well as what came after, and the ugly culmination of violence and legislative escalation that leads us to where we are today.
These seven books that follow were instrumental to me during my time writing Four Treasures, illuminating the experiences of Chinese immigrants before, during, and after the Chinese Exclusion Act.
In June of 1870, seventy-five Chinese laborers arrived in North Adams, Massachusetts to work as unwitting strikebreakers in Calvin T. Sampson’s shoe factory. What follows is The Celestials, Karen Shepard’sreimagining of this real event, dubbed Sampson’s “Chinese experiment.” As tensions continue to increase between the newly arrived Chinese and the white townspeople and laborers, Charlie Sing, the only English speaker among them, falls in love with Sampson’s wife and fathers her child. Written in Shepard’s breathless prose, The Celestials highlights with tenderness and compassion a time when assimilation, identity, and yearning were constant questions for early Chinese immigrants.
“Surely the term expulsion doesn’t fully represent the rage and violence of these purges. What occurred along the Pacific coast, from the gold rush through the turn of the century, was ethnic cleansing. The Chinese called the roundups in the Pacific Northwest pai hua–the Driven Out.”
Only a few pages into Jean Pfaelzer’s Driven Out, the reader may find themselves feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of anti-Chinese events that occurred through the West in the 19th century. It is difficult to swallow, even more difficult to look away. Pfaelzer’s carefully researched book is rife with story after story of more than 300 communities that were rounded up and purged by both citizens and politicians in what Pfaelzer describes as “an ethnic cleansing in California and the Pacific Northwest.”
“What made anti-Chinese violence distinct was its principal intent, together with its method and result. The intent was exclusion.”
Beth Lew-Williams’ The Chinese Must Go provides a sweeping view of how American immigration policies incited hundreds of instances of anti-Chinese violence in the West. Chinese expulsion and exclusion, Lew-Williams argues, produced the concept of the “alien” in modern America. This book is a foundational text for anyone who seeks to understand how Asian-America’s status as “perpetual foreigners” derived its roots from the idea of the constantly alien Chinese.
“With time, Chinese exclusion because Asian exclusion as policies first practiced on the Chinese provided a blueprint for laws targeting Japanese, Korean, South Asian, and Filipino migrants in the early twentieth century.”
Considered the companion and sequel to Maxine Hong Kingston’s acclaimed book The Woman Warrior, China Men pays homage to three generations of Chinese male ancestors in Kingston’s family. There’s her great-grandfather Bak Goong, a worker on the sugar plantations in Hawaii; her grandfather Ah Goong, one of the 15,000 Chinese laborers who helped build the Transcontinental Railroad; her father Baba, owner of a gambling house; and her unnamed brother, who fights in the Vietnam War. The book mixes Kingston’s known and unknown family history while placing it against the legal and social history of the Chinese in America, exploring that in-betweenness that so many children of immigrants know all too well. Fittingly, the book places The Laws, a list of U.S. immigration laws affecting the Chinese, at its center.
“As a second-generation Chinese American woman from San Francisco Chinatown,” Professor Emeritus Judy Yung writes in the introduction to her book, “I grew up in the 1950s with very little understanding of my own historical background.”
What follows is Yung’s brilliant collection of primary documents centering Chinese American women in San Francisco. Spanning the Gold Rush through World War II, these photographs, letters, essays, poems, autobiographies, speeches, testimonials, and oral histories (Yung conducted 274 oral interviews) give these women a chance to tell their own stories, offering a necessary view into the diverse lives and experiences of Chinese American women in America.
From 1910 to 1940, the federal government detained thousands of immigrants at Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. The majority of Chinese immigrants who journeyed to the United States were held there, subject to demeaning physical exams, interrogations, and long detentions. The goal? To uphold the exclusion laws that kept Chinese out of the country.
The walls of Angel Island became filled with poetry carved by the detained: poems that echoed their despair, anger, and hope. Initially discovered in 1940, these calligraphic poems are a stark reminder of what it meant to be Chinese in America at the beginning of the 20th century.
First self-published in 1980 (according to Yung, “no publisher at the time believed the subject matter marketable enough to be valuable”), Island eventually found its home at the University of Washington Press for its second edition printing, which includes 150 annotated poems in Chinese and English translations as well as photographs from public archives and family albums.
In four distinct sections, Peter Ho Davies presents the lives of four generations of Chinese Americans (three of which are real figures) and interrogates what it means to be a stranger in your home, in a land that refuses to call itself your own. We meet Ah Ling, who is struggling to carve his way in 1860s California; Anna Mae Wong, the first Chinese movie star in Hollywood; Vincent Chin, a young Chinese American killed in 1982 by a pair of Detroit auto workers for looking Japanese; and John Ling Smith, a half-Chinese writer who hopes to adopt a baby girl in China. Spanning 150 years, this unique novel examines pivotal moments of Chinese American history and the ways in which anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism have haunted the lives lived (and extinguished) along the way:
“This was the season of the sandlot riots, of The Chinese Must Go! The Chinese might have physically united the country by building a railroad across it, but now they were uniting it in another sense, binding the quarreling tribes of Irish and English, French and Germans, Swedes and Italians together against a common enemy.
Aamina Ahmad’s debut novel The Return of Faraz Ali begins with a moment of no return. Born and raised in Lahore’s old city, the young Faraz is forced to leave behind his mother and his sister Rozina. It isn’t until Faraz is an adult in 1968 working as a policeman, that he goes back to the old city to investigate the murder of a young girl who worked as a mujra, a courtesan, last seen with one of Lahore’s most powerful politicians. But the Faraz who returns is a stranger to his childhood home: estranged from his father Wajid, a Lahori bureaucrat who refuses to acknowledge his illegitimate son, his mother, a courtesan herself, and his sister Rozina, a Lollywood star whose career has seen better days.
Ahmad takes up the noir genre in order to explore the scope of Pakistani history from World War II to the 1970s. Faraz’s investigation takes him from Lahori protests against Ayub Khan in 1968, to Dhaka in 1971 at the beginning of Bangladesh’s Revolutionary War. Rozina grapples with her relationship with her daughter and the lies she had to live for her career as an actress. And as a soldier in the Indian Army, Wajid spends his days as a prisoner of war, fighting for freedom as a colonial subject. It’s through the disparate members of this one family, and Faraz’s fraught search for justice and for home, that Ahmad asks: When you’re telling the history of a nation, who is remembered, and who is purposefully forgotten?
I spoke with Ahmad over email about what drew her to Lahore’s Old City, writing a noir, and the legacy of Pakistani literature that suffuses the novel.
Yasmin Adele Majeed: The Return of Faraz Ali takes place across different periods and locations in the subcontinent, but at the core of the story is the Walled City of Lahore. What inspired you to write about the Old City, and about the women who work as mujra dancers who live there?
Aamina Ahmad: I visited Lahore a great deal as a child and my father’s family lived fairly close to the Old City, which has long been home to many of the nation’s famous artists and artisans, its best food, and of course the red-light district. But whenever I visited, I was intrigued by the way people talked about androon sheher, the old inner city, with the sense that there was something singular about this city within the city, a place that felt like a bit of a mystery to outsiders, even to other Lahoris.
The fact that the red-light area housed a community of women whose lives were so removed from the middle-class world I knew also drew me in. There’s a long tradition of romanticizing the courtesan in South Asian film and literature, but I guessed that was pretty far from the everyday reality of the women working there. I wondered how they lived, worked, and survived in such a socially conservative society. The complicated way the rest of society saw them too—sometimes as artists possessed of a certain level of glamor and skill but also, more often, as scandalous and disreputable, felt potentially like a means to explore the harder realities of class, caste, and gender, something those romanticized stories didn’t always investigate.
So, I started to imagine a family of three generations of women, Firdous, a traditional courtesan, her daughter, Rozina who moves into the world of film, and then her daughter who doesn’t quite fit in anywhere in this community. And, of course, Faraz, a boy in this world, who is “saved” by his respectable father and removed from this neighborhood, but ends up being returned there as an adult by his father, a police inspector now and tasked with covering up a murder.
YAM: The novel’s geographic and historical scope is expansive—you take the reader from Lahore during the protests against Ayub Khan, to Dhaka in 1971, to Waziristan in the ’40s during World War II. It is as much a story of Faraz and his family as it is a history of Pakistan as a country. What interested you in telling these interwoven stories?
AA: In some ways, I felt that writing this story was a part of my effort to understand Pakistan as a place, and my place in it as a diaspora Pakistani. But when I started writing, the story ended up stretching through these different time periods, presenting me with all these different pictures of Pakistan. It felt as if whenever I looked at any one moment in time in the story, it became impossible to separate it from a moment before that—a kind of story thread seemed to run from one time period to another, from World War II to the 1971 War of Independence, for example. The soldiers in one war became the generals in the ones that followed.
I was interested in how erasure and collective amnesia operate as nations construct their identities via the stories they chose to tell and the ones they chose not to tell.
Of course, this didn’t make it easy to come to conclusions about Pakistan, to pin it down, as I had hoped. Instead, it underlined how difficult it is to construct a narrative of a place and a people. Places, nations are constantly changing and evolving and there is never one single, clear narrative; there are instead multiple histories and dozens of story fragments loosely tied together by these threads.
For example, I found myself bringing in the history of Faraz’s father, a powerful bureaucrat, but also a man who’s been traumatized by his experience as POW in Libya during World War II, those experiences impacting his choices and subsequent events in the present. So ultimately the novel started to take this kind of a shape where stories leaned into each other and characters who never met one another in the novel were connected by these threads just as one moment in time was connected to a previous moment in time.
YAM: In telling the history of Pakistan, you are writing also about the violent history of colonialism and war in South Asia. The novel is set during many of these periods, including World War II, when the Indian Army fought for the Allied Powers, and the 1971 genocide by Pakistan in Bangladesh. How did you approach researching this history, and were there ethical and moral questions that you considered in rendering them in fiction?
AA: Yes, the story moves around. Faraz, because of his actions, his defiance, is banished and sent to Bangladesh which is in the midst of a fight for freedom that is being brutally suppressed by Pakistan. And his father decades before endured a brutal experience as an Italian POW when he was a soldier in the British Indian Army. In both instances I was interested in how erasure and a kind of collective amnesia operate as nations construct their identities via the stories they chose to tell and the ones they chose not to tell.
Although my grandfather had served in Burma in World War II, even I had no idea about the sheer numbers of Indian soldiers who’d served until I began my research. They’d been absent from all the World War II stories I’d grown up watching in the West, but there seemed to be a similar silence on the subject in Pakistan, and South Asia more generally. Where does a story of your loyalty to empire fit after you’ve freed yourselves from your imperial oppressor? The tension between erasing and owning the past is one the novel plays with again and again, Faraz’s confrontation with his origins a kind of detonation that ripples across time and space.
Of course, writing about the War of Independence, in what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh—and the atrocities that took place there—felt really fraught. Many Bangladeshi writers have explored, and continue to explore, the trauma of the war with an understanding of the history, culture and language that I don’t have. But in the end, I decided that writing about it was a means of resisting the silence around it. There are now generations of young people in Pakistan who have little idea of Pakistan’s conduct in the war, or the scale of the violence unleashed on the people of Bangladesh. This very deliberate erasure feels like a very dangerous kind of forgetting. So I set out to write those sections as accurately as possible, weaving the fictional elements around actual events, using a mix of primary sources, documentation, and the work of numerous, excellent scholars to do so.
YAM: Lahore is famous as a literary city, and the novel is very much in conversation with the literary history of Lahore and Pakistan as a whole. You reference Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the mujra is a form steeped in the Urdu poetic tradition. What was it like to engage with this literary tradition as a Pakistani writer?
Where does a story of your loyalty to empire fit after you’ve freed yourselves from your imperial oppressor?
AA: Lahore has such a rich literary tradition, as you say; Pak Tea House, for example, where Rozina meets her filmmaker friend Bobby, was where the Progressive Writers’ Association came into being and became this incredible meeting point for writers and thinkers, and so it felt impossible to write the story of a city like Lahore without making room for that aspect of Lahori life. And it gave me a chance to explore Pakistan’s incredible poetic tradition more deeply, its enormous range and radical bent which you see in the work of Faiz and Habib Jalib but also in the poetry of later poets like Sara Shagufta and Fahmida Riyaz.
Pakistanis from all backgrounds have such a passion for their poets, such an enormous respect for the tradition, and so many of them create, recite and revere poetry—politicians use poetry as a means to reach ordinary people for a reason—that I really wanted in a small way to honor that very local passion in the book.
YAM: The novel is, in part, a neo-noir that takes on a classic plot of the genre: a conflicted detective investigating the murder of a young girl last seen with a powerful politician. But you open up this classic mystery narrative to explore larger questions about inheritance, exploitation, and class oppression in Pakistan. What drew you to the mystery genre as the form for telling this particular story?
AA: I love noir for its attitude and atmosphere as well as the tight plotting and tension that you see in the work of great noir writers like [Raymond] Chandler and [Patricia] Highsmith. In particular I love the focus on setting, and I thought the Old City, with its narrow alleyways and dark corners, would make as great a backdrop for a noir as Chandler’s LA mean streets did. Given that I also wanted to tell a story that explored Pakistani society, the detective is a really useful figure to do that—they occupy this unusual position which allows them to travel across class and through various spaces, moving from the world of down and outs to fancy houses with relative ease which is why the crime novel has traditionally been such an effective way to explore aspects of larger society.
But I was also interested in playing with the tropes of the genre—I could use the mystery as a means of drawing in the reader in to tell not so much a crime story, but rather a story about a crime, not so much a procedural but rather an anti-procedural, both of which felt closer to the story I really wanted to investigate about power and injustice.
YAM: Although the novel is named for Faraz, the characters I loved most were the many charming, wayward, and headstrong women, especially Rozina, Faraz’s sister, a former Lollywood star who is past the glory days of her career. What brought you to Rozina as a character?
AA: I was very interested in the way the red-light area became a kind of pipeline for the film industry, generating stars, but while it represented a kind of upward mobility in terms of recognition and success, life was still pretty precarious for many of them, as it is for most artists everywhere. And I wanted to write about a woman who really understands what it is to exist in that very uncertain space, how she manages all the roles she must play while striving to protect and support those she loves, that too in a context where she has very few options because of her gender, caste, and class. Rozina’s story is one of “making it out” of the neighborhood on the basis of her beauty, her talents, but they can only take her so far and for so long. But I came to really love her for the way she keeps trying, for her sense of responsibility for those she loves, for her very human moments of anxiety and frustration, and her occasional flashes of defiance.
YAM: Throughout the novel, Faraz wrestles with his disenfranchisement as an illegitimate son and his complicity as an agent of state violence. He’s a complicated and flawed man, one who is both a liar and someone seeking the truth. He is also a careful observer of the contradictions and failures of Pakistan in the early years of its nationhood. What is your own relationship to Faraz? And how did your understanding of his character develop as you were writing the novel?
AA: I think my view of Faraz at the start of the novel is reflected in the way he enters the story: He’s beating a protester in an anti-government demonstration. I saw him very much as an embodiment of state power, a tool of oppression, and I wanted the reader to feel that in those first moments. He knows what’s right and what’s wrong—like most people do—but is so bound to the institutions he serves that he never acts on his feelings of unease. He moves through the world with the confidence that comes with knowing that he and the men he serves will never be held to account.
But he is also a man who is profoundly trapped by his history, his class, and the burdens of the secrets he carries. Allying himself with the power of the state is also an act of self-preservation, a measure that protects him from its violence, and also allows him a rare chance at social mobility. It’s also fair to say that it’s very difficult for most of us to rebel against the institutions that protect us. Faraz does evolve over time and though you might say he is not held to account as he should be, and that he also fails in his attempts to hold power to account, he does achieve a degree of transformation which manifests in his marriage, his relationships, and his way of being in the world. I came to feel a compassion for the ways in which he is constrained and limited, as most people are, and for the ways in which, despite that, he still tries to do better.
We lived for a time in a car, my mother and me, alongside a slow-buzz highway that led to a toxic beach. We had come from the valley to the coast with new plans of making our way as clam diggers. I would spend the summer eating ice cream on the boardwalk, and we would take in a stray dog to keep as our own. My mother said living in the car was just until her dream catcher business took off, and that it would be fine. No, better than fine. It would be fun.
In the car on our first night, my mother slept soundly but I laid awake, keeping watch. At fifteen, it was unspoken between us: I would take care. The next day she woke with vigor and crafted her tiny dream catchers one after another. I had drawn a sign for her business that read MAKE ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE and I held it up while she waved to cars as they passed and talked in loops about manifesting her number one destiny: that a documentary filmmaker would discover her and they might fall in love and he would take us into a new stratosphere entirely, her specialness leading the way. You have to be specific, she always told me. So the universe can hear you.
We sold one dream catcher keychain to a woman who had stopped only because she thought we were in trouble, and my mother felt it was time to celebrate. We walked down to Seashell’s, a little shack bar at the foot of the power plant that had leaked the year before, cracked open in an earthquake. I grew quiet then.
“Bobby, don’t get judgmental,” my mother said. She looked at me and I watched her cross over into the bad way. It hadn’t always been like this. I remembered her picking me up when I fell as a small boy, kissing the hot red bump under my chin. Carrying me around on her shoulders like a little prince. Singing He’s my one and only, who could ever have a boy like this? Me me me me me.
Inside the dim bar, I sat in a corner booth drinking plain soda water and soon enough, as she always managed to do, she made a friend. She had promised me no Seashell’s situations would happen in this new toxic town, but now. Well.
I walked over to them. His arm was already around her shoulders. She seemed surprised to remember I was there at all. I looked at the man.
“She’s a thief,” I said to him. I knew better than to try and convince her to leave. I’d have to convince the man.
“Bobby,” my mother whined. She looked at the man. “Excuse me for a minute.”
She got up and led me back to my booth. “You wanna eat tonight?”
“No. I don’t want to eat. I’m fine not eating.”
“It’s one time and then never again.”
I shook my head. I felt like crying. But I didn’t.
Sure enough she ended up in the blue lit bathroom with him and then back in our car, where his heavy sequined blazer shed stars over the dark fabric of our car seats. She normally never brought anyone back, but she said this one was special, which just meant she wanted more money. While the small car shook in the familiar way, I pretended to be asleep in the trunk but of course I could hear them and life was closing in. I felt it in my chest, sharp heart pains and little heart skips. I couldn’t breathe deep enough. That night the man told my mother what a boy my age could make at Seashell’s and I heard her mind spin with this new information.
I spent the next day alone at the beach dreaming, pushing away what the man had said, floating in the condemned waters on an abandoned raft, letting the sun bake my skin, thinking about the school my mother said I would attend in the fall—maybe I’d make friends, maybe there would be a girl who liked me. Maybe my mother would find meaning in joining the PTA. I was being specific.
But as we walked to Seashell’s again that night, she reminded me it wasn’t her fault the world ran on money. When I said no, anything else, she said, “You want me to leave you on the side of the road? ’Cause I will.” That was my first night working.
After that night I could no longer afford the fantasies we kept up, that my mother was different, uniquely talented, and that someday soon a filmmaker would show up to change our lives forever. She would say to me all the time, “Bobby McGee, imagine the feasts! Dungeness crab for days.” Once I’d asked, “Why a filmmaker? Maybe you could just get a job at like Denny’s or something.” And she’d scowled. “I am a creative, Bobby. How dare you suggest I work like a basic person? Who raised you?” And she’d sort her remaining pills, the ones that kept her up in one pile, the ones that put her down in another, then shove them back in her pockets all mixed together.
Once I started working at Seashell’s, my mother became more affectionate, treated me like a friend, perhaps, comrades finally in the great toil of life. She liked to imagine that I was like her, that I forgot the days as they happened and woke each morning with no memory of us or the things we’d done, but that’s where she had me wrong.
The reason I tell my story is this: while I had stopped believing in miracles, and stopped believing anything my mother told me, what came to pass that summer on the loneliest highway in the world still sits with me as a kind of intervention that could have only been constructed by angels. It is why even on my darkest days, I must revere the possibility of magical fate, of protections beyond imagination.
Because my mother was right. A few weeks after I’d taken up servitude at Seashell’s, a documentary filmmaker did come. The sight of his car parked next to our beat-down Fifth Avenue pulled me from my depressive fog. The filmmaker told us he was on his way to the toxic beach to see if things were as bad as everyone said, and maybe he would shoot a film about how the community had abandoned the beach instead of fixing it. There was a young woman with him and she stayed in the car looking at her phone, and then at her pretty self in the mirror, applying pearled gloss. The young man said he had passed us before during their reporting trips and wanted to know why we were here.
“We’re traveling artists,” my mother said.
She said it as if it explained something, our filth for instance. We didn’t shower, but instead wiped down with paper towels in the Seashell’s bathroom. My mother wore her hair in a matted bun on top of her head and with time it had grown large and larger until it was nearly the size of her face. In it she stored feathers and shells, sometimes a pen. She wore a full face of makeup every day, layering blushes and foundations over each other. I never knew if the drugs came before her mind collapsed, or if she took drugs because of it. I wish I could say she was beautiful, but she was not.
The young man said he was in school for documentary-style art, and his girlfriend was in school for journalism. The beach story was their senior project. He said maybe we could be part of it, to show the world who had been displaced by the nuclear waste spill, how the government had let a mother and son slip through the cracks. I didn’t stop him to say we hadn’t been displaced by any force other than my mother. We hadn’t even been here when the earthquake shook the town into a terror. We were hours away, living on a raisin farm in the Central Valley where we turned plump grapes by hand, letting them shrivel and die on trays, another life my mother had ruined. We never stayed anywhere longer than six months.
The mother and son by the highway, the young man said, would add a human element to his piece.
I watched my mother’s eyes fall in love with him. The girlfriend squinted at us as if she couldn’t bear the full view.
Their names were Andrew and Jean. My mother and the filmmaker shook hands.
I woke early the next day to a camera outside the car window. My mother snored on. She had celebrated the night before, eating uppers a client gave her at Seashell’s, and wouldn’t be awake for at least a few hours. I didn’t know if I should pretend to be asleep or get ready like I normally did, take my piss in the heavy ocean air, brush my teeth with my finger. What did Andrew want to see? I got out of the car.
“Hey, Bobby,” Andrew said. “Just act natural.”
“Are you going to interview me?” I asked.
“Uh, sure,” he said, like he’d just thought of it.
“Of course we are,” Jean said, holding a notebook. She stepped in front of Andrew. She was different than the day before, suddenly present and attentive. “We’re just getting some footage of, you know, the situation.”
The situation: my still-sleeping mother, me eating stale cereal from a box with my hands. I saw my knees, scraped and dirty, and then ran my fingers through my hair to find it was somehow past my shoulders now, matted with sea grease. I’d grown out of my clothes and I spent most of my time shirtless, shoulders peeling and burnt. A mysterious bruise on my rib had turned a muddled green. Sometimes I wore my mother’s floral blouse, but that day I wore only too-large boxers that had appeared from nowhere months before.
I imagined us inhabiting two entirely different worlds. In hers, there was help to be had. In mine, there was only my mother.
My mother was so still when she slept that I imagined her dead each morning and I played a game, wondering what I would do if it were true. She had threatened me my whole life with her death in one way or another, using it for everything. If I didn’t work at Seashell’s, she wouldn’t have money for her pills, and do you know what happens if you abruptly stop taking medication? You die, she said. Do you want me to die? I did not want her to die. But in my imagination, I let myself go high and low, feeling the boil of panic and then, shamefully, the welcome cool relief.
I tried to wake her and she swatted me away. “God willing and the crick don’t rise,” she muttered, still in dream. When she saw Jean and Andrew she sprang up and shook into a manically efficient version of herself.
“Howdy!” she said.
For a few hours they filmed my mother telling them her whole life story. She spoke of a beauty pageant she won as a teenager, how she’d dressed as a pineapple and tap-danced and the glitter from her hairspray stayed on her scalp for weeks, how her mother had stapled her evening dress shut in the back because a zipper broke at the last moment. She smiled up at the cloudless sky to show them the face she’d used when they placed the crown on her head. Maybe she had won the pageant, I thought for a moment, taken with the story myself, but five minutes later she told it again. In the new version she was a runner-up kiwi and her mother hadn’t even shown up. Tears streamed down her face. I saw a flicker of annoyance pass over Andrew as he lowered the camera.
“Let’s try again,” he said. “Just tell me what it was like being in the earthquake. How did it feel?”
“Come ’ere, Bobby,” my mother said, and I stood by her. She shook my shoulders hard back and forth, laughing. “Like that.”
“Were you scared?” he asked me.
My mother squeezed my arms and tossed her head back.
“He’s my boy. He doesn’t scare.”
“Terrified,” I answered.
Jean pulled me aside as they were leaving and asked how we had any money. Her eyes speared me. It was clear Andrew was there for himself and his social media, excited to be holding a camera, but not really engaged with us. But something about Jean’s intensity made me nervous.
So how, she wanted to know, did we have any money to speak of?
“I can’t tell you,” I said.
“Don’t want to get Mom in trouble?”
“I’m almost a man.” I thought of the guy I’d been with the night before who kept saying that to me like a song, You’re almost a man, aint’cha? You’re almost a man. I mean I was, wasn’t I? Only three more years until eighteen.
“If you don’t tell me what’s going on, I can’t help you,” she said. She said it easily, and I imagined us inhabiting two entirely different worlds. In hers, there was help to be had. In mine, there was only my mother.
I wanted to grab her thin wrist then, for her to take me with her, but I couldn’t bear her recoil, not wanting my filthy hand on her, looking at me like people sometimes looked at my mother. With disgust.
“I don’t need your help,” I said.
They drove away and all day I imagined myself standing on a crumbling stone ledge overlooking a swelling sea. I could just jump.
My mother decided she needed new clothes for the film and so I stood outside the men’s room at Seashell’s and waited for the signal, a needful person walking past who would tap his pointer finger three times on the door before he entered. I’d wait a few moments before following him in. No one cared what went on in the bathroom, but the ceremony felt like something sacred to me, a small bit of respect. I waited while my mother crushed pills on the bar top and sucked them up through her nose, before lighting a spiced vanilla cigarette. She wasn’t opposed to working herself for money, it’s just that boys did better on Tuesdays, she explained, stroking my hair.
“How come you didn’t tell Andrew and Jean to follow us here tonight?” I asked her.
She smiled at me, put her arms around my waist. We were the same height.
“The dream catchers are our real job, honey,” she said. “The metaphysical arts. This is only the beginning. Soon we’ll have people following us around, wanting what we have. We’ll be teaching them all our ways. Andrew said I was like a female Jim Jones, the way I talk. I mean, he gets me.”
“Who’s Jim Jones?”
“Well, he meant the good parts about him, not like the making people drink all that Kool-Aid stuff.”
A man walked in and did the signal. “This is our real job. Right here,” I said.
“When you get like this, I just can’t connect, Bobby. It’s like you leave the spiritual realm and you’re just all about reality. I hate it.”
I made fifty dollars and gave her forty, saving ten for gas, something she could never remember to do. We went to the Goodwill situated in a small cluster of shops a few minutes down the road, and she blew it all right away, buying several stretched-out and crisped bikinis, in case they wanted to show us on the toxic beach, and a boxy yellow cardigan and green patent leather loafers she said would make her look professional. Then she picked out a mug with Donald Duck on it that said YOU’RE A QUACK! to give to Andrew as a thank you. She let me buy something with the remaining five dollars and I chose a pack of pens and a book of postcards of old California missions. Maybe I’d write a plea to the God of the toxic sea, send it sailing in the radiation waters.
I didn’t think Andrew and Jean would come back but they did. Every day for a week my mother wore the yellow cardigan over a bikini and every day she told more lies about her life, as well as her ideas for the commune she would start once she had her following. But I started to notice the truth slip in. She told them stories about being a girl, dreaming of the beach. About my father and the concert where they met and how the herbal blend her witch friend made had not worked on the pregnancy, here I was, and she was grateful. “Bobby and I have traveled many lifetimes before this one. There wasn’t anything that was going to stop him from coming into the world.” She told them in a stammer of gestures and clouded phrases about working at Seashell’s, how she sold true connection, something most people did not have these days, and Jean finally said flatly, “Are you a prostitute?”
My mother paused for just a moment, her eyes glancing at me.
“No,” I said before she could answer. “She’s an artist.”
My mother smiled. “Bobby gets me.”
“What is she doing to you?” Jean asked, looking at me, and this time my mother stopped. “Why are you defending her?”
“You said you were here to make me a star,” my mother said.
“Come on, now,” Andrew said, glaring at Jean. “Don’t make a scene.”
“No, I think it’s important, right, like what is going on here? He’s just a kid.”
I looked at my mother and saw her fade. I jumped in quickly. “Did she tell you how I had shark teeth across the bottom when I was little? Two rows of teeth.”
“Usually people with spiritual giftings have crazy teeth, it’s true,” she said sweetly. She pulled back her lips and showed them her loose front tooth. “This will be gone soon.”
“We’re good for today, right, everyone?” Andrew said. He packed away his things and Jean stood there staring at my mother. My mother smiled back at her so purely. “Bobby,” she said lightly. “I think Jean here wants to buy a dream catcher.”
When they drove away from us, I figured I wouldn’t see them again.
After the days with Andrew and Jean, my mother fell asleep early, her body reclined in the driver’s seat, feet on the dash, toe prints on the window, but I felt wired at all hours and would go for walks to the beach and listen to the water pull and push. I could stay there all night, the moon a headlight, and feel outside of myself and wonder if the things that happened to the body could fade away easily and on their own, or if they were facts meant to be carried forever. The touch of a person. Did it ever leave you? It didn’t seem plausible that as humans geared toward survival, as every animal was, that we could be so broken by the movements of others over us. It didn’t seem practical.
On their last day of filming, Jean brought me a brown bag lunch of pasta and salmon, sliced apples, and almond butter. Organic protein bars. She pulled me aside. “It’s not right, you living out here. She’s abusing you.”
“This is so good,” I said, shoving the oily pasta in my mouth.
“Bobby,” Jean said.
“Things have been hard for her.”
“Think about this,” Jean said, poking my chest. “You have one life. One. That’s it. Don’t you want it to be something great? It’ll never be great with her. You’ve got to believe me. I’m older than you, I know.”
I looked over at my mother dancing in front of the camera that Andrew had set up on a tripod. He talked on his phone, but her eyes were on him, crooning Oh, won’t you stay, we’ll put on the day, and we’ll wear it till the night comes . . .
“It’s temporary,” I said, hearing my mother’s voice run through me.
“I’ve heard what goes on at that bar,” she said.
My heart pains started up, and a new fear I couldn’t name covered me.
She handed me her notebook. “Why don’t you just write me a letter?”
I thought of how my mother always said that if I tried to tell anyone from the outside about us, they wouldn’t believe me and I’d end up worse off than I was before. I drew a picture of a waxing moon and Jean sighed.
“There’s a million other ways to live,” she said.
I was quiet and ate.
“I can’t sleep at night thinking about you out here.”
I smiled. “Imagine being out here.”
“I’ll have to do something, you know.”
I didn’t say anything.
When the filmmakers didn’t come the next day, my mother refused to believe everything was over so easily. She wanted her fame to bombard us. She wanted to see the film. She wrote Andrew notes on napkins, confessing her love to him, offering herself to him for free. She buzzed around cleaning the car, moving our stuff to the trunk, asking herself questions about whether or not Andrew would like her to read his palm, or if he was more into astrology. She scribbled numbers on strips of paper and hid them under the seats and in the glove box so she could be surprised by them later. She was obsessed with angel numbers, any triple sequence of the same number. 555 was her special one and she said it meant life was handing over a significant change. We saw 555 all the time on billboards for Little Caesars Pizza, on other license plates. It seemed to me utterly ordinary.
“Bobby, Bobby,” my mother sang as she wiped dust away with a pair of my underwear. “Who knew we could be this happy?”
Perhaps this was my mother at last, the one I’d waited for.
She pressed me to her and we twirled next to the car, sometimes bumping into the hot steel of it, and she laughed. She pulled me down with her and we lay on the sandy ground and everything was clear. Her speech sharp, her eyes steady. Maybe it was good the filmmakers had disappeared, maybe they’d forget what they’d seen. Perhaps this was my mother at last, the one I’d waited for.
“Probably need to get registered for school soon,” I tried.
She squeezed my hand. “I always knew someone would find us and tell our story,” she said.
“What’s our story, Mom?”
“We’re gonna be eating filet mignon every night, just wait.”
“Mom.”
She dropped my hand and got up, went back to her tidying. She held a strip of paper up to the sun. “Bobby! It’s my angel number!”
“I don’t want to go back to Seashell’s,” I said.
Her face shifted. “Riches are on the way but until then you have to work.”
“Please,” I said.
“All the things I’ve done for you,” she sneered and crumpled the angel number up in her hand.
“And all I’ve done for you,” I said. She looked sad then.
“Aren’t you happy you aren’t ordinary? At least you can say, my mom—she was never boring.”
“Jean’s gonna turn you in,” I said. “You might go to jail.”
My mother scoffed but I saw her fear. “You would let them do that to me?”
“I want things to be different. I want you to have help.”
“You want me to be in an institution, but I won’t go. You want to be ordinary, you go ahead. But not me.”
It was a slow night at Seashell’s, the regulars on barstools drinking cans of Bud while two women, one old and one young, stirred cocktails in red cups with long pink straws and stared at one another, tired, waiting for a client. I sat on the stool on the far side of the bar and the bartender set a Shirley Temple filled with maraschinos in front of me. I wanted to be done but not yet. I needed money my mother didn’t know about. I needed money to leave.
“You look just like that mama of yours,” the bartender said.
“I look like my dad,” I said, though I knew my mother had given me her exact face. Our relation was a simple fact of body.
“Where she’s at?”
“She’s home waiting on something.”
“Tell her she don’t come she loses her spot.”
A short man in pressed flared jeans and an aquamarine buttoned shirt walked in and ordered a small glass of whiskey. He eyed me from under the brim of a stiff white cowboy hat while he darted a narrow tongue at his drink and then walked to the bathroom and tapped. I glanced at the women and they showed no signs of moving. The toes of his boots shined, his clothing clean. He probably had money. I finished the Shirley Temple and followed him in.
He sat on the toilet with his head between his legs. He had removed the hat and I could see his scalp shine through stiff combed black hair.
He stood. “My wife loved me, but she didn’t really know me.” He reached in for a hug. His hands spread across my back and it took me a moment to realize he was crying.
“How do you want this to go?” I asked.
“Say you love me,” he said. “Look in my eyes.”
I started undoing my shorts but he pulled my hands up to his face. “My wife is dead,” he said, I think to make me sympathize with him but instead I wondered if he had been the one to kill her. I couldn’t read him. I pictured Jean’s face and I stepped back.
“Just pretend to be her. It’s all I want. I’ll pay you just to stand here and hold me,” he said, and tossed a rubber-banded wad of bills at my feet. I picked it up. I could leave. My mother wasn’t on the other side of the door.
“Please?” he begged. But I ran out the back door of the bar and down to the beach, and as I ran I returned to a secret and comforting thought: that if I looked hard enough I would find my mother’s real spirit. That it was lost somewhere searching for her body and I alone could reunite them. I alone could fix her.
I let the ocean touch my feet back and forth and wondered what parts of it were toxic. Was it the sand caught between my toes that would poison me, was it the air, or the water? But of course, one could not be harmful without the other. They were all one. How long before it would be clean again? How many years would have to pass and what would need to be done?
Back at the car my mother was gone and her things were strewn around on the floorboards. I put on her yellow cardigan and sat in her seat, my feet on the dash. My body wouldn’t run. My body would wait. She was off finding our next opportunity. We would become clam diggers like she’d promised, in the next town up the highway. And what could Jean have meant about a million other ways to live? She didn’t know. This was my only. My mother, my only.
“I dropped from my mother’s mouth with an axe, a net of lemons to which I was allergic, a limp, and a pair of Ray-Bans that fit awkwardly on my nose,” says the speaker of “Waiting in Line with Hemingway,” from Achy Obejas’s recent bilingual collection of poems, Boomerang/Bumerán.
The humor here is mixed with a heavy dose of pathos, a reminder of how the sense-defying circumstances sometimes dealt us can often generate feelings of helplessness, making us believe we have little or no say in our own lives. And yet, Obejas reminds us that we do have at least some freedom of choice, as when, in the opening poem, “Boomerang, After Aime Cesaire,” the speaker declares: “I and I alone choose to be born on this island, to this family, on this day.” This singular sensibility, almost defiant in its insistence on the possibility of creating one’s own reality, is evident throughout this collection, perhaps nowhere more so than in the poet’s choice to embrace a nearly gender-free language in Spanish, a notoriously difficult task, and in so doing, begin to reimagine gendered ways of thinking and being in the world.
Obejas’s identity as a Cuban-American, queer, Jewish woman looms large in these poems, which explore love and desire, questions of memory—both personal and collective—, the possibilities and pitfalls of gender, and the subversive power of poetry as a kind of prayer. Obejas and I spoke over Zoom in February, from our respective homes in Northern and Southern California, and later communicated via email. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows:
Shoshana Olidort:How didyou come up with the title for your book, Boomerang/Bumerán?
Achy Obejas: The book is about this sort of constant return. I always feel like there’s this very cyclical, very circular returning that is always happening in my life in one way or another. I have the same friends from a million years ago in part because I’m constantly returning to those friends, for solace, and also for joy. In 1963, when I was 6, we left Havana in the middle of the night. There were 44 of us on a 28 foot boat. Midway through we’d run into a storm and ran out of fuel and were mercifully picked up by an American oil tanker that then detoured to drop us off. Because the world is very, very small, many, many, many years later, after I moved to California, I met the daughter of the captain of that ship and we became friends. It was a real circular sort of return.
SO: In the introduction you write about how you try to avoid grammatical gender in these poems, which is particularly challenging in Spanish, and you describe the poems as being “mostly gender-free.” I’m wondering if this is in part motivated by a desire to return to some primordial world or a way of thinking that precedes gender.
AO: It’s possible, but for me questions of gender and gendered language came later in life. Part of that is because the conversation has really bubbled up in recent times, part of it may be because I’m so comfortable as a woman that a lot of the questioning of gender has been more theoretical or social, rather than personal. I know I came to these issues very much through language, specifically through translation, not just trying to find and construct terms but also wondering why languages are built the way they are. How did we get here? How do we move to the next and better place?
While this shift de-gendered humans, it left the rest of language completely gendered.
I remember when my students first started asking about preferred pronouns, one of the things that struck me was the very quick adaptation of the “-x” for Latinx in academia but not in the Latino community. The Latino community actually seemed to very actively reject it. You can’t pronounce the x in Spanish, it’s completely impossible to say this term. I remember trying to engage with the white administrators at Mills college, which was my last academic appointment, about why this decision had been made when in fact none of the Latino faculty or staff had ever been consulted. I realized it was a very convenient way for white people to signal virtue and inclusivity, but it had little to do with us. I started noticing that in Latin America the preferred ending seemed to be the “-e” which made so much sense because it’s the space between the feminized “-a” and the masculinized “-o” that signal gender in Spanish. But while this shift de-gendered humans, it left the rest of language completely gendered so that the de-gendered person would be sitting at the feminine table drinking their masculine coffee.
I think the radical part of my book lies not in the use of the “-e” but in the use of the “-e” throughout the language, so that the language is completely degendered except with certain people. When I allowed gender in it was almost always to address a personal issue, an issue around a person. I gendered Ana Mendieta because I strongly believe Ana was marginalized and suffered as an artist precisely because she was a woman and because she was a woman of color. I think if she’d been a man, especially if she’d been a white man, she would have had a very different trajectory in the art world.
I couldn’t de-gender my mother, not just because she’s my mother but because my mother was very much the product of a misogynistic and sexist society. And I allowed Hemingway to stay gendered for very similar reasons. Here’s a man who’s known for his toxic masculinity. To de-gender him really cleans him up, and I think it’s important to deal with what’s there, to talk about what that means.
SO: In “The president of Coca-Cola” there are instances when Ana Mendieta is gendered, but there are also quite a few moments where you do use the “-e,” and I’m wondering about that seeming inconsistency?
AO: I think Ana would have loved the whole discussion about gender that’s so mainstream now. And she was impish and sometimes boyish and I was playing with that, imagining her in today’s context. I think that “inconsistency” is very much a part of her rebel spirit. She was a great, great rule breaker.
SO: Can you describe your translation process with this book. Were the poems written originally in Spanish, or in English?
I don’t believe translators are traitors, I believe translators are bridges.
AO: I made a decision not to talk about the original language, and not to talk about which translator worked on what piece with me, I think people get really hung up on what’s the original, what are you really trying to say. And sometimes I don’t think it matters what the original is. I think some translations get there only 90% of the way, they get 90% of the full effect—the words, the sound, the rhythm, the meaning, and I think some translations actually improve the original. Gabriel García Márquez always said that Edith Grossman did a better job on One Hundred Years of Solitude, that she made it a better book. Grossman understood the work not just in terms of putting words together on the page but in terms of rhythm and sound and meaning and soulfulness.I think the point of origin is beside the point. I don’t believe translators are traitors, I believe translators are bridges. I think translators really make a difference and are actually a part of the possibility of hope in this world.
SO:Can you talk a bit about the differences between the versions you have in English and Spanish, and specifically poems where you preserve some of the “original” language, as in “Volver,” for example, a poem about a return to Cuba, which was originally written and published in English in Bridges to/from Cuba, and which includes quite a bit of Spanish?
AO: A lot of that poem has borrowed text—lyrics from Carlos Gardel’s tango, from a song by Los Tigres del Norte, poems by José Martí. It made no sense to translate them—they’d lose their spirit (esp Martí), and once that door was open, it stayed that way. To be honest, I rarely make a choice to “insert” anything. My everyday speech is very much Spanish and I’m constantly code-switching.
SO:How do you see poetry intersecting with questions of identity?
AO: I think poetry is the form that’s closest to my heart. It’s the first kind of writing that I did. It’s the first place where I felt like English became my language and something that I could manipulate in an artistic fashion, that I could shape and form. It’s also been the one that I’ve least sought to publicize or commercialize. Part of that was because it was always pretty personal. A lot of stuff about identity, a lot of stuff about assimilation. When I was younger of course I didn’t understand it that way, I understood it as me feeling heartbroken about this or that and not fitting in and not understanding why I didn’t fit in.
The thing about poetry is that even if you take on a persona in a poem it’s ultimately autobiographical in a way that prose isn’t. You can actually write prose in the voice of a character that has nothing to do with you. Poetry is much more directly autobiographical and I think it’s read as autobiographical. It also intersects with liturgical texts in ways that are profoundly about identity, because the god we pray to is always a very personal god no matter how we approach our worship.
SO:Speaking of god, and prayer, “Kol Nidrei” is probably my favorite poem in the book. In it, you reimagine this core Jewish liturgical text, the opening prayer of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which, incidentally, has always struck me as very dry and legalistic—it’s a formula for nullifying vows that is said to have originated with the forced conversion of Jews in Spain in the early Middle Ages, as a way of reckoning with their apostasy. And you reimagine it in this way that’s so incredibly powerful and also empowering. Instead of “With the consent of the Almighty … with the consent of this congregation,” you open the poem: “With the consent of no one, we pray among the dykes, the miscreants, the homeless, the enraged …” What inspired you about this prayer, why did you choose to rewrite Kol Nidrei in particular?
AO:Kol Nidrei made sense to me once I understood my own family history, not just the part about being Sephardic and not just about being anusim (forced converts), but my particular family, I learned after I wrote Days of Awe, had actually collaborated with the inquisition in order to save themselves. This was tremendously shameful and shattering. Kol Nidrei is the prayer right before the big day, it’s about apostasy and survival against all costs. I think the biggest apostates of all are women. Women are constantly taking on vows and promises to comfort, reassure, take care of, deal with others—vows and promises that are not true to them or their dreams, vows and promises that compromise their integrity and their own ambitions. I think this has always happened, and so that prayer, for me, can be very much about freeing ourselves from the restraints we take on when we feel duty bound, when we think it’s what we should do. My first encounters with Kol Nidrei were through Sephardic high holiday services, and so the ghost of the Inquisition was always present—Kol Nidrei struck me as a way for all those Jews who pretended to be something else in order to survive to come back, to proclaim their Jewishness, and to forgive themselves, to be grateful for having lived.
SO:I wanted to end with your deeply moving poem about the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, which is written in a form that directly invokes the Amidah, a central Jewish prayer. Can you tell me about your thought process around the writing of this poem?
AO: I think that particular terrorist act and the assault on the Sikh temple in Wisconsin and the massacre that Dylan Roof enacted on those nine people at the Baptist church, all those events strike a very similar cord for me. Obviously I related more to the Tree of Life because they’re closer to my people if you want to call it that. I think people forget that hatred against Jews is one of the earliest of the hatreds. But also, I find these events so beyond my scope, I try to imagine what it would be like to be there.
Is it possible to be in this space of godliness and know that you’re being murdered?
When I think of Tree of Life, I think: What is the hatred that fuels the impulse to do something like that that? And if you’re there and you’re vulnerable and you’re praying and you’re in this space where you think you’re safe and you’re blessed, do you even recognize it as it’s happening? Is it possible to be in this space of godliness and know that you’re being murdered? These are experiences that seem unfathomable. Especially when I heard they were older people, it felt like these people survived everything just to get to this point, they were with their god, they were exposed, they were skinless, and this is how they went.
SO: Is poetry for you, then, a form of prayer?
AO: Yes, poetry is prayer, I go to poetry for a similar feeling that I get with prayer. My own prayer practice is so iconoclastic and not religious in the conventional sense. I read poems every day. Poetry serves as a sort of morning prayer, it does sort of create a space of wonder and a space of calm, especially during hard times. I enter my day with language very much in the forefront of my mind and the possibility of communication, which is important to me. I want to communicate, to connect, to touch and be touched.
When I first saw Cameron Crowe’s 2000 movie Almost Famous at sixteen, wide-eyed and hungry for cinematic coming-of-age, I recognized Penny Lane. Played by Kate Hudson with bouncing golden ringlets and a draping fur coat, Almost Famous’s central female character is iconic. The twinkling gleam in her eye and her aloof charisma make her easy to favor. I’d seen stills of her dancing among rose petals on Instagram, artfully captioned screenshots of her cryptic catchphrases circulating on Tumblr, and outfits inspired by her silky tops and bell bottoms on Pinterest mood boards.
But when she made her first appearance in the movie, half an hour in, stepping slow and controlled toward teenage reporter, William (played by a baby-faced Patrick Fugit) in a midnight parking lot, those images didn’t come to mind. What I knew right away was that I wasn’t supposed to like her, because she’d been dubbed a manic pixie dream girl.
Lists of manic pixie dream girls—an archetype of an unusual, easy-breezy wondergirl who adds quirky joy to a man’s humdrum brooding—abounded by the time I was at the end of the aughts. Accessible sites like BuzzFeed, Refinery29, and even crowd-sourced TV Tropes collected examples of this decidedly unprogressive cliche. Penny Lane was listed alongside Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State, Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, and (500) Days of Summer’s titular Zooey Deschanel role. Once a MPDG was named, my modus operandi was clear: refuse to engage with her work of origin and shake my little head at the weak writing that reduced women to plot devices.
I get how Penny Lane was pegged as a MPDG. Her life is devoted to a revolving door of male-fronted bands (primarily Stillwater and its oh-so-moody guitarist Russell, played by Billy Crudup). She takes inexperienced square William under her wing and teaches him how to be free-spirited. She leads a troupe of equally enthusiastic groupies, calling them Band Aids because they inspire the music, set apart from the rabble. Her mystery extends to the real name she’ll “never tell” and countless high-concept speeches and spur-of-the-moment announcements. Penny Lane doesn’t have a lot of feelings. Penny Lane doesn’t seem to need much—aside from male attention—and if the mood strikes, a glass of something cold and bubbly in her hand. More recently, it’s clear a lot of the manic pixie uproar came from pitifully simplified media criticism. Nathan Rabin, who coined the term in a 2007 Elizabethtown review, denounced it as a “cliché” which “spun out of control” in a 2014 Salon article. He called for “its erasure from public discourse” and “an end to articles about its countless different permutations.”
Susie Banks, a postgraduate student of History and Film and Television, explained to me, “the manic pixie dream girl was scrutinized in the digital age through popular discourse. This accessibility accelerates the process of cultural cycles and their respective opposition. When Ramona Flowers or, I don’t know, that blue-haired girl from Eternal Sunshine, came under fire, not just for their purpose as an object for the hapless nerd to gain, but for their value as hallowed objects being based on being “not like other girls,” the knee-jerk reaction sought to subvert their subversion.”
It’s clear a lot of the manic pixie uproar came from pitifully simplified media criticism.
Penny Lane is a subverted subversion of the trope so accidentally ahead of her time that no one realized it. I agree that billing every lighthearted female character an MPDG is passé, but there’s still something interesting about the archetype. Penny Lane fits the mold, but it’s on purpose. She’s a curated persona, putting on a party girl “lampshade” to remain distant and to fit her role. From a writing standpoint, this choice is unexpectedly progressive for a 2000 film pre-empting the MPDG hoopla. Yet, the movie from William’s perspective obscures the depth Penny Lane has. And there’s the catch: with her consumable one-dimensional persona, it’s not just the characters of the film she fools. It’s often audiences. Maybe we weren’t expecting a subversion of a trope so early in that trope’s life cycle, or it wasn’t clear enough.
Asked about Penny Lane’s MPDG billing in 2019, Cameron Crowe pushed back. He told the Los Angeles Times she wasn’t meant to be a “cipher” but rather “a soulful, selfless, loving person who was super into community and kept herself a little bit hidden.” But the movie is semi-autobiographical, and Penny Lane is based on a real person.
Crowe believed he was writing someone ‘real’ who forces herself to act ‘real’ in a way that ends up not being real at all.
Susie Banks suggested “it lends some credibility to her characterization that the story is tethered to reality and not necessarily narrative conventions.” Still, “given the film’s marketing [the poster features a Mona Lisa closeup of Penny Lane] and the narrative of the film, she is certainly symbolic of something, but in that respect she’s also reduced to an object.” Ignoring Penny Lane’s conscious effort to be carefree is bad faith criticism, but ignoring how the film pays little attention to her depth and how her quirk-level-maximum groupie kin don’t demonstrate the same depth is also unwise. It’s no wonder she confused us. Crowe believed he was writing someone “real” who forces herself to act “real” in a way that ends up not being real at all. To quote the film, “it’s all happening”—authenticity, performativity, and God forbid, performative authenticity.
Audiences are left grappling to determine if Penny Lane is a Well-Written Woman or a Very Bad, No Good Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Are you out of breath yet? I am.
Here’s the thing: figuring out if a trope is subverted well enough is a circular game. Splaying out her parts and piecing them together like autopsy-table wreckage isn’t what matters. What matters about Penny Lane is she’s obscured herself to such an extent that neither the characters in the film nor the audience can determine how much of her persona is performance.
It’s uncool to be an open book. More, it isn’t safe.
Almost Famous emphasizes the mystique of the socially unknown. Characters stipulate what gives rock ‘n’ roll appeal. Russell tells William that rock ‘n’ roll isn’t what you include, but “what you leave out.” Each character plays cat-and-mouse with truth: Stillwater debates what reporter William should know, William lies about his age and takes advantage of misunderstandings, and even the other Band Aids play it cool before flipping their lids as Ozzy Osbourne drives by. It’s uncool to be an open book. More, it isn’t safe. At least it doesn’t feel that way.
Penny Lane lets William see behind her facade every so often. An often-quoted scene has her outline her rules for a happy life on the road: “I always tell the girls never take it seriously. If you never take it seriously, then you never get hurt. If you never get hurt, then you always have fun.” She defers to safe methods of behavior to keep her desirable status. Musicians thrill to see her, shouting her name and begging her to follow them to whatever midwestern city they’re off to next. She throws them off, telling William to “watch” as she pretends she doesn’t recognize them. She might let William see some of her true self, but never for long and never fully. She toys with him to learn his real age (declaring hers to be the same as his every time he modifies). When William clues into the history between Penny Lane and Russell, she overcompensates with an announcement of intent to move to Morocco. Each time the veneer cracks, she repairs it.
The rock ‘n’ roll space is set apart and superior to the “real world.” Stillwater’s singer, Jeff Bebe (Jason Lee) sincerely says when he sees the musicians around him, he knows “one of these people is going to save the world.” Characters feel lucky to be part of this world. That’s why William is drawn to it after being told his sister’s rock records will change his life. That’s why the film shows screaming fans in stadiums and doting groupies at the Riot House. The crux of the rock ‘n’ roll dreamland in Almost Famous is its foolish belief in its absolute sincerity.Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) tells William, “the day [rock ‘n’ roll] ceases to be dumb is the day it ceases to be real.”
The crux of the rock ‘n’ roll dreamland in Almost Famous is its foolish belief in its absolute sincerity.
Penny Lane isn’t dumb and she isn’t real. She’s smart enough to curate her personal performance, but naive enough to not realize she’s getting little in return as she irons bands’ shirts. She acts so mysterious, so strange, so intriguing—it must be Penny Lane being herself. Her winking tricks and rehearsed speeches emulate the authentic love a groupie ought to give.
Being too real is how you “get hurt,” so performing is the only option, especially for a woman. For Penny Lane to have any power, she needs to pretend she doesn’t. Almost Famous is set in the early 1970s, when (second-wave) feminism was more a burgeoning controversy than a pop-fied Instagram axiom. In the film’s rock circle, the roles are clear: men are to be adored, women are to be adoring. Penny Lane understands the dynamic but still refuses to “retire.” Even her name shows her woeful self-determination. Although she’s based on Pennie Lane Trumbull, the association with her namesake Beatles song sticks out. The 1967 song lists the various unusual happenings and citizens of the titular lane. “Behind the shelter in the middle of a roundabout / A pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray / And though she feels as if she’s in a play / She is anyway.”
Knowing she’s acting in a play works until it doesn’t. When she shrugs off Russell ignoring her for his wife and being sold to band Humble Pie for “fifty dollars and a case of beer,” William begs her to admit she has feelings. She doesn’t fold. It’s only when William tracks her down in a hotel room, overdosing on quaaludes, that the audience sees her as fallible. Still, as William waits for EMTs, he keeps her aloft by having her repeat her stock speeches. As she’s on the verge of death, William remains half-convinced by her manic pixie gloss and tries to kiss her as she goes limp. He still wants the artificial. He still half-believes in it.
As she’s on the verge of death, William remains half-convinced by her manic pixie gloss and tries to kiss her as she goes limp.
William is the hero of Penny Lane’s only damsel-in-distress moment. While it’s true that for most of the film she stands her ground, it’s also true that for most of the film the stakes are way lower: relationship troubles, travel concerns, petty arguments. Penny Lane’s life is only at stake once. The film could have shown her crawling independently to the telephone, or a Band Aid hoisting her away. Instead, William gets his chance to assert his masculinity by acting as savior and, as he scatters away the other men in the room, protector.
The manic pixie dream girl is, in many ways, the modern depthless, helpless damsel. She might “save” her male lead from his crabbiness or ennui, but it’s the male lead who saves her when things become grim. Although these men are often unusual heroes—depressed and bumbling Andrew (Zach Braff) in Garden State, every-boy teenager Leo (Graham Verchere) in Stargirl, or plucky and unsure William—they are always allotted at least a moment to assert their traditional masculinity. The MPDG is not a whole woman, but a silhouette of one. From far away, she has the right shape, but when you get too close, she’s just a shadow. MPDGs are a roundabout way for otherwise-unlikely men to access the traditional masculine role. Through her, they get to have heroic moments. Through her, they get to grow.
I almost want to give Almost Famous some credit. Penny Lane has legitimate problems, so she isn’t entirely static. But Crowe’s writing, despite giving nuance to Penny Lane, doesn’t spare her from being a wilting flower in desperate need of water in this scene of vulnerability. Rather than lingering in this exposed moment and letting the viewer recognize that there’s more to her, the film shrinks away and reverts. While her in-universe manic pixie act ends here, the film’s use of the trope is only reinforced. This is William’s coming-of-age movie, and in saving Penny Lane, he becomes a man.
MPDGs are a roundabout way for otherwise-unlikely men to access the traditional masculine role.
After her brush with death, Penny Lane finally reveals her real name and baby-groupie origins to William. In this scene, the pair is outdoors in soft light unlike the previous stark neon dim. He sees her off as she finally steps on a plane. Is she going to break out of her performative ways? Or will she find a new identity to force herself into? After living performatively since age fourteen, it feels unlikely she’ll totally get in touch with her true self.
When I rewatched the movie, I paused it. I dimmed my living room lights, lit a small soy candle, cleared off the magazine clutter on my coffee table, and waited for the perfect frame to snap a photo for my Instagram story. I was so proud of cracking the code of Penny Lane’s performative authenticity! I had to tell everyone. I looked at the photo. I snapped the light back on and stuck my feet on the table with a slouch. I was picking and choosing how to present my life, pretending I hadn’t picked at all. I’m bound to the same self-curation curse as Penny Lane.
Almost Famous came out long before even Myspace, much less Instagram and TikTok. But Penny Lane’s performative authenticity mirrors our contemporary social media trends. Social media might be meant as the space where I’m just “being myself” online, but that’s never been true. Denizens of Instagram and other platforms are hyper-aware of how we present ourselves. I’m not under the impression I’m the first person to have this thought. For a while, we all took it as fact. Selfies over-processed through VSCO and Facetune and carefully drafted not-so-off-the-cuff tweets were internet bread and butter. Lately, though, there’s been a push toward so-called authenticity on the internet.
In 2019, The Atlantic declared the end of the “Instagram aesthetic”—the death of curated feeds and the dawning of the effortless Emma Chamberlain era. Photo dumps (collections of random, unrelated images) are on the formerly highly-produced feeds of Ariana Grande and Bella Hadid. Social media’s casual now! We’re all just posting whatever we want! We’re being so real and authentic, right?
Right?
The careless aesthetic doesn’t achieve authenticity so much as it performs it. I’m guilty of arranging an open book to lie just so, and pulling open the blinds to snap a seemingly candid shot. I want to seem like I’m always charming and unbothered. When I do this, I’m not being myself. I’m acting, setting up a role and filling it. Just like Penny Lane, who puts on the lampshade to fit her Band Aid role, I put on my own hat. I’m working so hard to look like I’m not trying. But who am I if I’ve been doing this for so long?
True feelings don’t fit into the manic pixie role.
Penny Lane’s self-performance created unhealthy distance from others. It might have felt safe to her, but it led to unrecognized turmoil that barely anyone could detect. True feelings don’t fit into the manic pixie role. We as an audience need to know better than to fall for it, especially those of us who find ourselves in a similar position. It’s all happening, and I can’t stop it. The real, the fake, the fake-real.
Susie Banks said, “If subversion becomes the de facto mode of presenting oneself then … where do we go from here? I bet you the next cultural trend will be duckface nostalgia. I don’t see myself joining the ranks of pop culture critics thinking they’re inventing the wheel by pointing out manufactured authenticity. This precarious point in time still has a long way to go before we can make sweeping statements about the impact of social media. There is also the subconscious of outward expression, which is a dumb way of saying ‘people like Instagram because it’s fun.’”
And it is fun! It’s fun, and current, and frankly unavoidable for most. I can’t escape the realm of manufactured authenticity while we’re still all looped into it. After I learned what a manic pixie dream girl was, a strange thing happened. As much as I knew these women were plot devices and not real, I still wanted to be like them. I dressed in Zooey Deschanel kitsch, I pinned vinyl record sleeves to my walls, I skipped over puddles and forced myself to giggle. Maybe I could do it right, I thought. I could be the real version, the whole version, of these fake girls.
Maybe, I thought, if I put on the lampshade, I’ll be the one to have it grow into me and stick. I’ll be the one who never needs to take it off.
How do you fit into a new community of people who see and understand you better than the world at large does? That’s the central question at the heart of Sara Nović’s enamoring second novel, True Biz.
From the opening pages, we immediately empathize with a teenage girl, Charlie, who struggles to hear and fit in. After her hearing parents’ divorce, she is enrolled at River Valley School of the Deaf, a residential school for Deaf students. But not everything is paradise. The headmistress of the Deaf school, February Waters, struggles with the shifting sociopolitical climate and how much she can give to those under her care. Austin, the school’s shining beacon of Deafness, is taken aback when his new sister is born hearing. As Charlie settles in at her new school and starts to master American Sign Language, she begins to fully see the nuances of the world around her.
Inquiries of community, isolation, and social expectations are nothing new to Nović, who is Deaf herself. Beyond her excellent fiction writing, she consistently writes nonfiction about social justice issues, disability, and representation in media, in places like the New York Times, Slate, CNN, and elsewhere. She is a force and an inspiration, both on Twitter and in person. She demands space to ask her questions about the world; in doing so, she makes the world a better place for the Deaf writers who come after her.
I met with Sara Nović over Zoom to ask her about how True Biz took shape; the following conversation was conducted in American Sign Language, and then translated into written English.
Ross Showalter:River Valley School of the Deaf (RVSD) is the central location of True Biz. It’s a Deaf institute, meaning it houses, feeds, and educates Deaf students from kindergarten to 12th grade. It’s an institution with its struggles—financially, bureaucratically, and so on. It’s also fictional, Google tells me. What was the process like of developing that setting?
Sara Nović: That was one of the fun parts of writing True Biz, for me—the opportunity to invent that whole place. That whole town is fictional—it’s not a real place.
When I started writing about RVSD, I wanted to find a balance between invention and being able to show people and the experiences they’d had within an institution. So I did a lot of research. I was also touring for my first novel. I went to different Deaf institutes and talked with the students, which was really fun and probably the best part of the tour. I learned about the way those Deaf institutes were set up. I also interviewed some adults and we discussed their experiences at the institutes because that wasn’t my experience growing up. It was important to go in-depth and see what was important to them about that experience. One thing that kept popping up was racism, biases, and the petty types of cliques that grouped the students away from each other. That changed the direction of some parts of this book, obviously, but that’s only in the book because people told me about their experiences dealing with that.
RS: I’m so curious about one of the book’s central figures, February. February is a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults), and she is the headmistress of RVSD. Where did her character come from? How did you decide to make her a CODA and to put her in a position of power in a Deaf setting, where she has enormous privilege as a hearing person?
The Deaf community as well is having a lot of conversations about who has power and who has privilege within the community.
SN: A lot of my friends in college were CODAs and I was just drawn to their perspective. It was so interesting to me to encounter someone who saw the world similar to me but not exactly. February, as a character, is one of the most surprising to me, where I had no plan for her, but she evolved so much in the process of writing. I didn’t even know she was married and then, one night while I was writing, her wife, Mel, just walked into the room.
RS: I just love that relationship. I love the relationship between them.
SN: Thank you! I was so happy she showed up, but I had no plan. I had no idea she was a part of the book. She walked into the room and I was like, “Okay. Hi. Back up and let’s write you in.”
I think the Deaf community as well is having a lot of conversations about who has power and who has privilege within the community. CODAs and interpreters have both power and privilege, and I wanted to find a way to include all those kind of experiences within the Deaf community. I think February’s interesting because she really will do anything for the Deaf community, but maybe she’s not always thinking clearly because she’s trying to prove herself.
RS: All these characters in True Biz get themselves in conflicts with ableist people and ableist systems and ableist ideas. There are so many conflicts and obstacles throughout this book that revolve around having a disability in a society that largely ignores disabled people. I wonder, now that you’re on the other side of this book, if you find it easier to define what ableism is or if you consider it an insidious thing that’s hard to really pinpoint.
SN: I think the problem in defining it is that there’s always something new. I think when I was writing the book, there were different types and different layers of ableism and bias I had in mind. But, now, the world is just so different from when I started writing the book. Now, we have all these different kinds of biases popping into our consciousness every day. Technology, for example, creates barriers even when it’s supposed to support. Like, when the pandemic started, it was like, “Okay, we’ll have Zoom meetings.” Then when we got there, we realized, “Right. We need accommodations there too.” So I always want to learn things while I’m writing, that’s important to me. But I also have to understand that there’s new things that are going to evolve on their own, and new things are always going to pop up. Things are always changing.
RS: I think in deaf literature and disability literature, Deaf and disabled authors often feel like they have to educate through their work. Authors can feel like it’s their responsibility to teach hearing, abled people what it’s like for disabled and Deaf folks. Do you envision disability literature moving past that starkly educational role?
If a reader is confused about something, my reaction is, ‘You don’t get it? Try harder.’ Try harder and it’s okay for you to feel uncomfortable for one minute.
SN: I believe, in general, it’s not our job to educate through creative writing. We can teach about our experiences without being didactic. I resisted this book for a while, but then I realized it gave me an opportunity to teach because it was set at a Deaf school and a teacher is one of the top characters—why not take that opportunity? It was silly for me to feel like, “I don’t want to teach through writing,” but then I gave myself the space to do that and it worked out. But we should be allowed to write the way hearing people write about the world and tell stories from our points-of-view. Readers do learn from that, and they should, yes. But, if a reader is confused about something, my reaction is, “You don’t get it? Try harder.” Try harder and it’s okay for you to feel uncomfortable for one minute.
RS: Language is a major topic in this book, not only in theme but in form. There’s a lot of super rad ASL lessons peppered throughout the book and asides about ASL slang. Did you envision that from the beginning, or was it something that happened when Brittany Castle (the ASL artist for True Biz) came in?
SN: Yeah, that process took forever. I was writing these characters and their stories and I struggled with wanting to show ASL on paper. How do I do that? There’s so much I could do. So I tried a bunch of things. I tried colors. I tried organization. Then I tried playing with syntax and realized that hearing people would read that and think ASL is nothing but broken English. I really wanted to show for certain characters that ASL is better than English. I decided to use space on the page and show how clear it is for certain characters when signed communication happens, compared to English dialogue. I showed the gaps in lipreading and what the character gets and doesn’t get when lipreading. For signed conversations, I basically tried to orient sign to a specific space on the page, according to a specific character, and essentially use dialogue tags but in a visual way.
But I also wanted to do more in representing ASL in the book. And because Charlie was learning sign, that gave me the opportunity to show ASL on the page and direct readers to look at what the sign is, visually. I took a bunch of signs from the internet that I knew I wanted in the book. I laid them out in the way I wanted them to be in the book and then I asked Brittany Castle to draw like 100 signs. It was a very weird project, but it was important to have Deaf artists depict the signs. I’m really happy that Brittany said yes because I’ve loved her work for a while. And it was so smooth working with her because she knew what I meant with my list of signs and pictures from the internet. A hearing artist would never have been compatible with this project the way Brittany was, because she knew ASL and knew my intention.
RS: There’s this gorgeous thread throughout the book about language deprivation, not having the language for how you feel, and how that often results in miscommunication. I wonder if you could speak to the role of language and miscommunication in True Biz and how much of a role it plays in these Deaf characters expressing themselves.
SN: Charlie’s an interesting character. She has had access to some language, and she’s interesting because of that. She’s an example of what happens to most people like her growing up. She was never fully deprived of language, but the access and communication she has is still too much work for her. She misses a lot. She can’t communicate well with her family. It was important to me to show that middle experience too.
RS: That sort of liminal space that can exist for Deaf folks.
SN: Exactly. I have a friend who’s done very well for themselves, but, back then, she was often put in special education. And I think that is the norm in mainstream schools, depending on where you are in the country or your family’s involvement in your education. That’s an experience many people have because that kind of special education classroom has equipment to engage with behavioral problems, but not the root causes or the student’s actual needs. I think that happens more than people realize.
RS:There’s this interesting dynamic between Austin and Charlie, two deaf students at RVSD. Charlie is the only Deaf kid in her family, has a cochlear implant, and comes to ASL late. Austin is from a Deaf family and grew up with ASL. There’s this moment where Charlie is told that Austin is like royalty, because he came from a Deaf family, and he typically gets what he wants. This sort of prestige, being Deaf and growing up in a Deaf family, has been covered in other media about Deaf people, like the Netflix show Deaf U. What’s your opinion on the role that that Deaf lineage plays in the Deaf community?
SN: That’s something I never really thought about that much. It’s not my experience. When I was at the Deaf institutes, I saw that that kind of family was important to the school. It’s tough, because I think Deaf families are important to the community because they do a lot of the work of passing down the history and the knowledge of the Deaf community. I think sometimes people who live that experience, growing up deaf in a Deaf family, don’t realize the privilege they have. Maybe they look down on other people because that access to sign is automatic to them. Other Deaf people don’t have that automatic access and it’s not their fault because they don’t know. They couldn’t make that choice for themselves and that lack of a choice is a problem. It’s a big problem.
RS:I’m also curious about your opinion on Deaf U and all of the books, shows, and films that look at Deaf people and that are ultimately shepherded by hearing folks. I wonder if it is authenticity or if it’s just Deaf people hiding the hearing mastermind and the hearing point-of-view. Do you think it benefits us to have more media about us, even with a hearing person in charge? Or do you think Deaf stories can only truly be told by only us? It’s a hot-button topic, I’m sorry.
SN: Yeah, no, it’s tough! I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially because we’re working on a TV show for True Biz. It’s still in the very early stages, but if we have the chance to make this show, then it’s really important to make sure there are Deaf people everywhere and in every stage of this process. Deaf people in the writers room. Deaf people behind the camera. We see things differently, and if this gets made, then I hope we can show people that the outcome can be better when you make it authentically. But, I think having Deaf people on screen is valuable. I think it’s cool for Deaf kids to grow up and see Lauren Ridloff as a superhero. That’s cool. That’s important.
For a long time, I didn’t realize I could be a writer, as a job, as a profession. Like, I was studying writing in school and I still didn’t realize, “Oh, this is my job. I can be a writer. I can tell stories, like anyone else.” And I think I would have come to that understanding faster if I’d seen other Deaf writers out there. Representation has value, but I don’t think representation does all the work of authentic storytelling that we need to have happen.
RS: I wonder about the audience that you wrote for, for this book. Did you write this for the Deaf community? For the hearing community? Was that something you had to think about? Or did you just decide to write this book for yourself?
I want a place where Deaf people can see themselves and their experiences, but at the same time, I still want hearing people to see these characters in ways that they can identify with.
SN: A good story always starts for yourself. But, obviously, when I realized, “Okay, this is going to become something I want other people to read,” I had to start thinking about the audience. And for me, it’s a balancing act.
I want a place where Deaf people can see themselves and their experiences, but at the same time, I still want hearing people to learn and see these characters in ways that they can identify with. So, throughout the editing process, I was always cutting and adding so many different explanations. My editor’s really good for winnowing out those explanations, because she’s a hearing woman. But if she had a question or a moment of confusion, it would be a chance for me to ask myself, “Will most people understand this? Do I care if they understand this or not?” So, I had to decide how much I wanted to explain versus how much I wanted to make the reader work for it.
RS:And that’s really the million-dollar question: How much do you want to explain?
SN: Many times, hearing readers ask me for more. Most of the time, I resist. Sometimes, I’ll take their questions and I’ll answer what they want to know. So, I hope I’ve found a balance in that the explanations aren’t boring for Deaf readers, they still enjoy the story, and they’re able to see themselves in the characters I’ve invented. But, if I want hearing readers to empathize with those Deaf characters too, I need to give them a trail of breadcrumbs that they’re able to follow.
Progress—we’ve taken to sunsets at the beach close to
your house. Laughing, I’ve chased you into the waves.
You’re always so patient with me, even when your face
says it all: lips pulled over your teeth, furrow set in the
brow. I love that about you. We’ve been going steady
a year now; today I’m treading lightly. You don’t
need to say anything, love—I know you’re no good
with words; it’s the thought that counts. I’ll say it: sorry
is nothing if it isn’t true, & I’m getting better at
seeing the signs: yesterday, the flush told me the tide
was coming in. Was it your cheeks or mine? Scared,
I hid in the laundry room; I cried before your hand
came down. I understood: I’m only a thing to keep
you above water. You’re always at your most honest
the evening after; how you nuzzle my hair—an apology
says so much less. But love, where has your head gone
now, your shoulders are gliding back, vanishing in
blue. Who needs respect when your hand’s slipping
from my waist, no longer quite solid, the low thrum
frantic, push pull kick, my legs bright, burning—wait,
I need you to get back, I won’t make it far without
you with me—together, distant.
My Therapist Tells Me the Abuse Wasn’t Love
after Taneum Bambrick
You’re not listening to me either. What
you know is what I have done to myself.
You picture a heart gutted from fishing
line; I see the man who kissed me before
it hooked through. I’m in love, not stupid—
a Heaven void of respect is just a dark room
with blood on the walls. That’s not what this
is about. The problem isn’t what’s stained
his hands; it’s defending the boogeyman
for wearing the face of my beloved.
This wasn’t the first thing I’ve done against
my will—I left Heaven in a night
& I yanked the reel clean from my heart myself.
You’re not the first person I’ve explained this to.
When I tell people where I’m from, the reaction is often one of disbelief: “There are Indian people in Appalachia?” Indeed there are, just as there are Black folks in Appalachia, and Indigenous folks in Appalachia, and Mexican and Filipino and Chinese folks in Appalachia. Appalachia, in fact, is a massive region of the United States, as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission. It spans 423 counties in 13 states, and runs from northern Mississippi to southern New York. 26 million people live within its 206,000 square miles of land. But to far too many people, Appalachia is a much smaller, much more homogenous place. If you relied on the narratives put forth by large publishers and mainstream media sources, you would think Appalachia only meant the states of West Virginia and Kentucky, and that its inhabitants were strictly white, straight, poor, and Christian.
My essay collection is entitledAnother Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place. I choose the word “another” with intention, because there are many Appalachias, and many versions of Appalachian identity. My experience—of growing up in southern West Virginia as the child of Indian immigrants, and slowly developing an understanding of my queer identity—is only one. There are so many “anothers” in Appalachia—so many people living in ways that subvert stereotypes, and have been subverting them for generations. And their stories are being written by authors who refuse to let stereotypes define the region, and published by incredible small presses like Belt and Hub City, and by university presses at West Virginia University, University of Kentucky, and Ohio University who are committed to this work as well.
I didn’t always know that Appalachia was home to so many “anothers”. I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s thinking, in many ways, that I was “other”, and not “another”. Subject to Confederate flags and racial epithets, it was difficult to understand where I fit into the Appalachian story. And without visible models of queerness, it was so much harder for me to understand my own burgeoning sexuality. In my essays, I write about what it was like to develop a coherent sense of self and identity in the absence of models. I write about the relationships in my life that have both nourished me and starved me, in my quest for authenticity and integrated sense of self. But it is ultimately through reading that I’ve found my identity as an Appalachian, and that I’ve found a community of readers and writers who both embrace and live out anotherness in Appalachia. This list contains just some of the incredible Appalachian writers who are constructing another Appalachian narrative through their words.
Any list about pushing back on the dominant narrative regarding Appalachia has to start with Frank X Walker’s stunning poetry collection about Black Appalachian culture. Reading Walker’s work was the first time I saw someone who wasn’t white staking out a claim to Appalachian identity, and showing readers how Black culture informed and shaped Appalachian culture as a whole. His articulation of Affrilachia gave me permission to consider the relationship between my own identity and the external construction of what it means to be Appalachian. Safe to say, there would be no Another Appalachia without Affrilachia.
If you haven’t met Dawn Jewell, the badass protagonist of Robert Gipe’s graphic novel Trampoline, your reading life is incomplete. Dawn is a Kentucky teen who listens to punk music and has a destructive streak, but soon finds herself caught up in her community’s fight against mountaintop removal. Dawn is an accidental radical, a kind of activist who is drawn to the fight not because of theoretical politics, but because of the lived realities she and her family experience each day. Her mix of vulnerability and humor, and her deep love of home will carry you through Trampoline and straight into the sequel, Weedeater.
Growing up, I did not know any young people or adults who were open about their LGBTQIA+ identities. In retrospect, I can see that there were folks in my community who were quietly living their truth, but I also know many people for whom leaving was a part of coming out. In The Prettiest Star, Carter Sickels writes about what it means to leave home in search of wholeness and authenticity, only to have to experience the costs of coming home again. Set in Appalachian Ohio during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, this story about how a community responds when one of its members comes home HIV-positive will not leave your mind, even years after you’ve read it.
Besides having quite possibly the best book title ever conceived, F*ckface is about what it means to live in post-coal Appalachia, a place where solid union jobs have been replaced by transient service jobs, and where residents’ bodies carry the toxic traces left by the coal and chemical industries. This collection is a kaleidoscope, with each short story offering readers a different lens into what it’s like to live in communities where work has, by and large, disappeared, but people continue to both struggle and persist.
When the title for my book was announced, the first email I received was from Dr. Turner. He wrote, “If there is anyone who knows what you mean, metaphorically, about ‘Another Appalachia,’ it’s me and legions of family and friends.” Dr. Turner’s book describes the lives of Black families living in Harlan County mining communities during both the coal boom, and the subsequent bust. The erasure of Black communities and Black history from the mainstream narrative around Appalachia has been profound. So profound that as a student educated in West Virginia’s public schools, I didn’t learn about the interracial coalition of miners who united to fight at the Battle of Blair Mountain, or about the fact that the Kanawha Salines, just 15 miles from my home, were mined by people who had been enslaved. Dr. Turner corrects this erasure with his book, centering the stories of Black Appalachian people and communities in a rapidly changing economic context.
Even as We Breathe is the first book to be published by an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, whose home is in the heart of Appalachia. Cowney, the main character in Clapsaddle’s book, struggles with the same questions that arise for so many young Appalachians: What does it mean when our homes simultaneously nourish and stifle us? What do we gain when we leave? What do we lose? Cowney is accused of a crime early in the story, and while the novel follows this plot line through, the larger questions of identity and belonging that Clapsaddle raises feel just as important as the resolution to Cowney’s story.
This anthology is an entire collection of “anothers”—Appalachian writers from a wide range of identities and geographies who share one thing in common: a deep sense of injustice at the way our home and our people are represented in J.D. Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy. Through a mix of essays and creative work, the writers in this collection articulate a much more complex representation of Appalachia, both its beautiful aspects and its messy, hard parts. This book is a necessary counter to both Vance’s oversimplified narrative, and to the rampant stereotypes about Appalachian people that his narrative girds up.
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