The Ice Pop Lady Rules the Neighborhood

Posted on by Alex Juarez

“Flip Lady” by Ladee Hubbard

History:

Raymond Brown hears the sound of laughter. He puts down his book and looks out the window.

Here they come now, children of the ancient ones, the hewers of wood, the cutters of cane barreling down the sidewalk on their Huffys and Schwinns. Little legs pumping over fat rubber tires, brakes squealing as they pull into the drive, standing on tiptoes as they straddle their bikes and stare at the house with their mouths hanging open.

Just like before. Some of them he still recognizes. He made out with that girl’s sister in the seventh grade, played basketball with that boy’s uncle in high school. This one was all right until his brother joined the army, that one was okay until her daddy went to jail. And you see that girl in the back? The chubby one standing by the curb, next to the brand-new Schwinn? She hasn’t been the same since the invasion of Grenada, nine years ago, in 1983.

The Spice Island. When the Marines landed, she was three years old, living in St. George’s near the medical clinic with her mother, the doctor and Aunt Ruby, the nurse. The power went off, the hospital plunging into blue darkness while machine gunfire cackled in the distance like a bag of Jiffy Pop bubbling up on a stove. Oh no, Aunt Ruby said. Just like before.

It’s all there, in the book on his lap. Colonizers fanning out across the Atlantic like a hurricane, not exactly hungry but looking for spice. They claimed the land, they built the plantations, they filled the Americas up with slaves. Sugar kept the workers happy, distracted them from grief. And four hundred years later you have your military invasions and McDonald’s Happy Meals, your Ho Hos and preemptive strikes. Your Oreos and Reaganomics, your Cap’n Crunch.

And Kool-Aid. These kids can’t get enough of it. They sit in the driveway, they shift in their seats, they grip the plastic streamers affixed to their handlebars. One of them kicks a kickstand and steps forward, fingers curled into a small tight fist as he knocks on the kitchen door.

“Flip Lady? You in there?”

Just like before. They roamed the entire earth in search of spice so why not here, why not now?

“Flip Lady? You home? It’s me, Calvin. . . .”

For the past few weeks they’ve been coming almost every day.

Raymond closes the curtain. He shakes his head and turns towards the darkness of the back bedroom. “Mama? It’s those fucking kids again.”

2.

The squeak of old mattress coils, a single bang of a headboard against a bedroom wall. The Flip Lady wills herself upright, sets her feet on the floor, sits on the edge of her bed and stares at the chipped polish on her left big toe. She stands up, reaches for her slippers, straightens out her green housedress, and walks out the bedroom door. The Flip Lady shuffles into the living room where her nineteen-year-old son, Raymond, sits on a low couch, reading. Long brown body hunched forward, elbows resting on his knees as he peers at the page of the book on his lap. In an instant his life flashes through her mind in a series of fractured images, like a VHS tape on rewind. She sees him at sixteen, face hidden behind a comic book, then at seven when his feet barely touched the floor. And before that as a chubby toddler, gripping the cushions with fat meaty fists, laughing as he hoisted himself onto the couch. Without breaking her stride, and for want of anything else to say, she mutters, “I see you reading,” and passes into the kitchen.

The Flip Lady lifts a pickle jar full of loose change from the counter and looks out the kitchen window.

“That you, Calvin?” she says to the little boy standing on her porch.

“Afternoon, ma’am.” Calvin smiles.

She twists the lid off the jar, opens the kitchen door, and squints at the multitude assembled in her backyard.

Calvin plunges his hand into his pants pocket and pulls out a fistful of dimes. He drops them into her jar with a series of empty pings.

“Well, all right then,” the Flip Lady says.

Calvin glances over his shoulder and winks.

She walks towards her refrigerator while Calvin stands in the doorway. He cocks his head and peers past her into the living room. Glass angel figurines and the tea set on the lace doily in the cabinet against the wall; bronzed baby shoes mounted on a wooden plaque; framed high school graduation photos and Sears portraits of her two sons sitting on top of the TV set; a stack of LPs lined up on the floor. A dark green La-Z-Boy recliner and the plaid couch where her younger son sits with a book on his lap. Calvin turns his head again and sees the Flip Lady standing in the middle of her bright yellow kitchen, easing two muffin trays stuffed with Dixie cups out of her freezer.

The Flip Lady studies Calvin’s face as he scoops the cups out of the trays, licking his lips, eyes lit up like birthday candles. She smiles. Her boys were the same way when they were that age, crowding around her back door with all their friends, giddy with excitement as they sucked on her homemade popsicles. She used to hand them out when their friends came over to play after school and on weekends; it was a way to keep them in her backyard where she could watch them from the kitchen window. A good mother, she wanted to get to know how her boys passed their time and with whom. She wanted to memorize their playmates’ faces and study their gestures until she felt confident that she could tell the clever from the calculated, the dreamy-eyed from the dangerous, the quiet from the cruel. She hadn’t done it for money. No one had to thank her, although her neighbors told her many times how much they appreciated her looking out for their children that way.

The Flip Lady frowns. Of course, everything does change, eventually. There comes a time when a mother has to accept that the promise of sugary sweets has lost its ability to soothe all grief. They don’t want your Kool-Aid anymore. They busy, they got other things to do. One day you find yourself standing alone in the kitchen, hand wrapped around a cold cup, melting ice dripping down your fingers as you wonder to yourself when exactly the good little boys standing on your back porch became the big bad men walking out your front door.

She looks at Calvin. “How was school today, son? You studying hard, being a good boy? Doing what your mama tells you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Calvin walks around, passing out Dixie cups to his friends.

“Well, all right then,” the Flip Lady says.

3.

What you get for your money is a hunk of purple ice, a Dixie cup full of frozen Kool-Aid. The girl in the back stares at hers. It’s not quite what she was expecting, given how far they have come to get it. According to the black plastic Casio attached to her left wrist, they’ve been riding for a full twenty minutes in the opposite direction from where she was trying to get to, which was home. One minute she was in the schoolyard unlocking her bike and the next they were standing over her, the whole group of them saying, Come with us. She knew it wasn’t an invitation but an order. They were taking her to wherever it was they went when they sprinted off after class, their laughter echoing in the distance long after they’d disappeared past the school gate. How could she say no? She lifts the cup to her open mouth and runs her tongue along its surface, absorbing flat sweetness and a salty aftertaste.

“It’s just Kool-Aid,” someone says.

The girl closes her mouth. She looks around the parking lot of Byrdie’s Burgers, where they have parked their bikes to eat. Everyone is pushing the bottoms of their cups with the pads of their thumbs, making those sugar lumps rise into the air. They’re tilting their cups to the side and pulling them out, melting Kool-Aid dripping down their hands as they flip them over, then carefully placing them back in the cups, bottom sides up. They’re sucking on their fingers, they’re licking their lips, their mouths pressed against homemade popsicle flips.

“What’s the matter? Don’t they have Kool-Aid where you come from?”

The girl looks down at her cup. She pushes her thumbs against the bottom but presses too hard; the hunk of purple ice pops out too fast and soars over the rim. She tries to catch it, but her hands fumble; it dribbles down the front of her shirt, then lands with a thud on the pavement.

“Now that’s a shame.”

The girl wipes her hands on the front of her shorts, palms already sticky. She blames her upbringing, all those years spent stuck on that rock, how to flip a homemade popsicle was just one more thing she should have known. She got the exact same looks from the kids on Grenada, after she moved there with her mother and Aunt Ruby all those years ago: What you come here for? What you want with this rock, when everybody trying to get off it? As if only white people were supposed to spin in dizzy circles like that, as missionaries or volunteers or tourists on extended leave. She can still see her former playmates in the eyes of her new school’s handful of immigrant kids, with their high-water pants and loud polyester shirts, huddling and whispering to each other as they move down the halls. They look tired, fagged out from the journey, but at least they have an excuse. She’s not even West Indian. Everyone knows her uncle Todd lives right around the block from Henry’s Bar and has been living there for at least twenty years.

“What a waste.”

When her mother said they were moving back to the States she’d been like everyone else she knew, picturing New York or LA like she saw on TV, not some narrow sliver of southern suburbia wedged senselessly in between. Instead she is surrounded by a whole parking lot full of distracted sucking children who don’t like her anyway.

“Go get another one,” someone says. Calvin, the boss around here, although sometimes they take turns.

“It’s only ten cents. Ain’t you even got another dime?”

“What’s the problem? You scared to go back by yourself?”

“What’s the matter? Don’t you want one?”

Of course she wants one. But she wants that one there, already dissolving into a pool of purple ooze at her feet. If she can’t have it then she wants to go home, sit on the couch, eat leftover Entenmann’s cookies from the box, and watch Star Trek reruns until her mother gets home from work at the hospital.

She looks back at the Flip Lady’s house, now halfway down the block. She’s tired of traveling the wrong way, dragging herself in the wrong direction without real rhyme or actual reason. But she also doesn’t want to cause trouble, doesn’t want to make waves. She reaches for the handlebars of her bike.

“Naw, leave it.” They lick their lips and smile. “We’ll watch it for you.”

But they lie: in a few minutes they are going to teach her a lesson about realness, about keeping it. Because even her accent is fake. Because she rides around on a Schwinn that is just like theirs, except it is brand-new. 

“Go on, girl.”

Plus, she’s fat.

The girl nods her head. She knows they are going to start talking about her as soon as her back is turned. They’re a mean bunch; she’s seen them do some terrible things at school. She’s already figured out that it does no good to wander in and out of earshot of this group. Either you’ve got to stay knuckle to knuckle, packed tight like a fist, or else give them a wide berth and do all you can to not draw attention to yourself.

She turns around and starts walking. She can hear them whispering and laughing behind her, a hot humid jungle of bad moods circling her footsteps, gathering in strength with each step she takes. A flash of fear tickles her nose, like when you’re swimming and accidentally inhale water. But she does not stop walking, somehow convinced that to turn around midstride will only make things worse.

She knocks on the Flip Lady’s door, expecting to see the kind face of the woman who answered it not a half hour before. Instead it’s a man, dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a blue T-shirt, a little brown Chihuahua shivering in the palm of his left hand. She stares up at flaring nostrils, dark eyes, eyebrows arched.

“What do you want?” 

“I dropped mine.”

Raymond shakes his head. “No. I’m not doing this. Mama’s not here. Understand? Flip Lady gone. She went out. Shopping. To buy more Kool-Aid, most likely. So why don’t you just come back tomorrow. . . .”

A harsh peel of laughter cuts across the horizon. The girl puts her head down and reaches into her pocket. She holds out a dime like a peace offering.

Raymond recoils. “I don’t want that. What am I supposed to do with that? Girl, you better just go on home.”

He squints into the distance behind her. “Those your friends? Little heathens . . .”

The girl hears the harsh scrape of metal against concrete as the man steps past her, onto the porch.

“Hey, girl. Is that your bike?”

She winces at the sound of rubber soles pounding on the spokes and stares down at the mat in front of the door.

“Hey, girl . . . What the heck are they doing— ”

She shuts her eyes, feels a stiff pressure in her groin, like a sudden swift kick against her bladder, then a sharp tingling sensation between her legs.

“Hey, girl, turn around. . . .”

The girl looks up. “May I use your bathroom please?”

Raymond looks at the child breathing hard with her thighs clamped together, shifting her weight from side to side. He bites his lip then nods and points down the hall, watches her sprint past his friend Tony, who is standing in the middle of the living room grinning from ear to ear.

“You from Jamaica?” Tony says as the girl rushes past. She runs into the bathroom and slams the door.

Raymond shakes his head. It’s all there, in his book, he thinks. It’s always the weak and the homely who get left behind. Stranded on the back porch, knees shaking as they quiver and dance, thin rivers of pee running down their ashy legs.

4.

The girl sits on the toilet in a pink-tiled bathroom, staring at a stack of Ebony and Newsweek magazines in a brass rack near the sink. She’s thinking about her bike, about how much she’s going to miss it. She’s only had it for a few weeks, but still. It’s something she begged and pleaded for, something she swore she needed to fit in at her new school. Now she doesn’t even want to look at it. A few minutes before the Flip Lady’s son knocked on the door and told her he would fix it so she can ride home, but it’s too late. It’s already ruined. She’s already peed herself and run away.

Everybody’s always so busy running, so busy trying to save their own skins, she remembers her aunt Ruby telling her. That’s what’s wrong with this world. We’ve got to stand together if we’re going to stand at all. The girl had liked the sound of that even if she sensed that it didn’t really apply to her. She’d seen her aunt and mother working in the clinic, stood numb and mystified by the deliberateness with which they thrust themselves into other people’s wounds. Stitching a cut, dressing a burn, giving a shot, connecting an IV. It was intimidating, the steadiness of her mother’s hand sometimes. Even now, in the midst of grief. Like some nights when her mother stomped into the living room and cut off the TV in the middle of the evening news, her voice damming the flood of silence that followed with the simple statement: “They lie.”

The girl reaches for the roll of toilet paper and wipes off the insides of her legs. She pulls up her damp panties and zips her shorts. When she opens the door she finds Tony alone in the living room, crouched down on the floor, peering behind the stack of LPs lined up against the wall.

“You feeling better?”

When she doesn’t say anything, he puts the records back. He stands up, shoves his hands into his pockets, and smiles.

“So, what, you from Jamaica?”

The girl shakes her head. “I come from here.”

“Not talking like that you don’t.” Tony walks past her and then stops. He crosses his arms in front of his chest, puts one hand on his chin and stares down at the couch.

“I lived on Grenada for a time but— ”

“What’s that?”

She watches as he kneels in front of the couch. He lifts the cushion and runs his hand underneath it like he’s looking for spare change.

“Another island,” she says.

He puts the cushion back and sits on top of it, bouncing up and down a few times to force the cushion back into place.

Tony nods. “Y’all smoke a lot of ganja down there too?”

The girl shrugs awkwardly. She wonders what about her appearance might remind this man of a Rastafarian. Rastafarians wore dusty clothes, had calloused feet and thick clumps of matted hair. They sat in the waiting room, making the clinic smell like salt and homemade lye soap. Her mother checked their charts while Aunt Ruby rubbed their arms with cotton pads dipped in alcohol. When they saw the needle, Aunt Ruby smiled and told them it was just a pinprick. Don’t worry, it will be all right, she promised. Just look at me.

But, no, she didn’t smoke a lot of ganja.

“That’s all right,” Tony says. “You still got that sweet accent, huh?” He pulls a bouquet of plastic flowers out of a white vase, peers down inside it, and holds the flowers up to his nose.

“I like things sweet.” Tony puts the flowers back in the vase and reaches underneath the table, running his hand along the wood panels underneath. The girl stares down at the books stacked on top of it. And next to the table is an open cardboard box with still more books tucked inside.

The kitchen door swings open. Raymond walks back into the living room, tossing a wrench onto the table, next to the books.

“How far away you live?” He can already see her starting to blink rapidly. “I mean, I tried. But the body’s all bent. You’re going to have to just carry it or drag it or something, I don’t know. . . .”

“Damn.” Tony shakes his head. “What’s wrong with these fucking kids today? Why you think they so evil?”

Raymond looks at the girl: short, stiff plaits of hair standing up at the back of her neck, dirty white T-shirt with a pink ladybug appliqué stretched across the stomach, plaid shorts, socks spattered with purple Kool-Aid stains. He used to feel sorry for awkward, homely girls like that. But now sometimes he thinks maybe they are really better off. “I tried.”

“Why they do that to you, girl?” Tony says. She just stands there, hands clasped behind her back, swaying from side to side.

“You gonna be all right?” Raymond nods towards the front door. “You want a glass of water or something, before you go?”

“Hey, Ray, man, you remember us? You remember back in the day?”

Raymond shrugs. All he knows is that the girl is not moving. She just stands there staring down at the stack of books on the table.

“I think we were just as bad,” Tony says.

“Let me get you that glass of water.” Raymond disappears into the kitchen. The cabinet squeaks open, followed by the sound of crushed ice crumbling into a glass.

She started making those fucking popsicles again almost as soon as he came back to hold her hand at his brother Sam’s funeral.

“And your mama with them flips,” Tony yells from the living room. “When’d she start up with that again? I haven’t seen those things in years.”

“Well, you’re lucky,” Raymond calls back. Just thinking about all those little kids crowding around his mama’s yard is enough to make him wince. She started making those fucking popsicles again almost as soon as he came back to hold her hand at his brother Sam’s funeral. He’s convinced there is something wrong with it, that it is unhealthy somehow, an unnatural distraction from grief. And look at the kind of hassles it leads to. He puts the glass under the faucet and pours the girl her water. All he wants is to get the child out of his house before she has time to pee herself again.

“When did she start charging people?” Tony asks. Raymond closes his eyes and shuts the water off. He knows Tony doesn’t mean anything by it but, really, that’s the part that bothers him the most, all those jars of fucking dimes. He walks back into the living room.

“Man.” Raymond shakes his head. He hands the girl her water. “I don’t want to talk about fucking Kool-Aid.”

Tony shrugs. He looks at the girl. 

“They used to be free.”

5.

There are too many people in the house, Raymond thinks. That’s what the problem is. He can sense that, Tony and the girl filling up the space, making him feel crowded and cramped. For the past five days it’s been just him and the books, the box he found hidden in the back of his brother’s closet. And it shocked him because he’d never actually seen his brother read anything more substantial than a comic book. But he knew they were his brother’s books and that his brother actually read them because he recognized the handwriting scribbled in the margins on almost every page.

The girl lowers her glass and nods her head towards the stack on the table. “Are all those yours?” she asks Raymond.

“Naw.” He shakes his head. “They belong to someone else.”

“Just a little light reading to pass the time, huh, Ray?” Tony says.

He picks up a book and glances down at the cover, assessing its weight. “Looks dry.”

Raymond shuts his eyes. The word “fool” bubbles up in his mind involuntarily, before he can force it back down with guilt. He’s known Tony for twelve years, ever since they both got assigned the same homeroom teacher in the second grade. Somehow, when Raymond went to college, he’d imagined himself missing Tony a lot more than he actually had. He opens his eyes and looks at the girl.

“Why did you ask me that? About the books? I mean, what difference does it make to you who they belong to?”

She points to the one lying open. “I know that one.”

“What do you mean you know it?”

“I mean I’ve seen it. I read it.”

“That thick-ass book?” Tony glances down at it, then back up at the girl. “Naw. Really?”

“Parts of it,” the girl says. “Aunt Ruby gave it to me.”

“Now you see that?” Tony says. “Another one with the books. Now we got two. . . .” He stands up and walks to the kitchen.

Raymond squints at the girl in front of him, rocking slowly from side to side as she drinks her glass of water.

“Look, girl. You’ve been here for almost an hour now. What’s the problem? Don’t you want to go home?” He studies her face. “Are you scared? Worried your daddy is going to beat you or something, for letting them fuck your bike up like that?”

“I don’t have a daddy.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s the bike.” The girl shakes her head, lower lip popping out in a pout. “I don’t want it.”

“What do you mean you don’t want it?” He winces at the sudden loud clatter of pots and pans being pushed aside in one of his mother’s kitchen drawers.

“You don’t want to take it home?”

The girl nods.

“Well, leave it then. You just go home and I’ll keep it in the garage and you can come back for it later, like when Mama’s here or something.”

A drawer slams shut in the kitchen.

“Hey, man, what are you doing in there?” Raymond yells.

“Where she keep it?”

“What?”

“The Kool-Aid. I’m thirsty.”

Raymond frowns. “I told you she went to the store,” he yells back. “What the fuck is the matter with you?”

Tony steps back into the living room, squints at Ray.

“There is no fucking Kool-Aid in this house,” Raymond says.

“I hear you.” Tony nods. He frowns. “Just relax. Hear me? Don’t lose your cool.”

Tony keeps his eyes locked on Raymond’s as he walks backwards to the kitchen, then disappears behind the door.

Raymond looks at the girl. 

“I’m trying to be nice.”

6.

Tony stands in the middle of a bright yellow kitchen, staring at the dimes in the pickle jar on the windowsill, thinking about Raymond losing his cool. Baby brother is clearly not well. Tony could see that as soon as he walked into the house, sensed it just from talking to Ray on the phone. Something about his big brother, Sam, having all those books in his closet really tripped Ray up for some reason. Maybe Ray forgot other people could read, had a right to read a fucking book when they felt like it.

Ray just needs to get out of the house for a little while, Tony thinks.

Ray just needs some fresh air. Have a beer, smoke some weed, take a walk around the neighborhood and relax. Tony has it all laid out in his mind, the speech he’s going to give Ray about how fucked up everything is, how Ray needs to get back up to school before it’s too late. Anybody who likes reading books as much as you do needs to be getting a college education, can’t be fucking up a chance like this. He’ll shake his head and tell Ray he understands wanting to be here for your mama and all, but sometimes you got to just put shit aside and go for yours because how you supposed to help anybody else if you can’t even help yourself? Sam would have wanted him to say all that. Would have said, Listen to Tony, you know Tony got plenty of sense, always has.

He’s going to tell Ray about how proud of him Sam always was. Tell him that as much as Sam rolled his eyes, everybody could see how much he liked saying it. Naw, that doofy herb ain’t here no more. He up at school. The eye-rolling was just reflex. My baby brother, up at college . . . He’ll make up a little lie about how one night he and Sam actually talked about it, tell Ray how ashamed Sam was for hitting him, especially that last time. Knocked his books on the floor, slapped Ray across the face. Now pick it up. And really there was something pitiful about it, big man like Sam hitting a little boy like Ray. Tony could see that even then.

But of course, Tony wasn’t the one getting slapped. Tony was the one standing on the sidelines watching, the one who had his hands out when it was over. The one who dusted him off, handed him back his book, said Here you go, Ray and Damn, that motherfucker is mean. And Ray cut his eyes and said, Oh, that son of a bitch is probably just high, he don’t even know what planet he’s on half the time, which Tony knew wasn’t true. But he let Ray say it because it made him stop crying and sometimes people just say things.

Tony spins around, opens the door to the pantry. Ray’s mama has got all kinds of shit in there: baked beans, Vienna sausages, Del Monte canned peaches, SPAM, a half-full jar of Folgers crystals that has probably been sitting there for years. Tony sucks his teeth, thinking how his grandma is the same way. Can’t throw anything out, no matter how nasty or old. Jars of flour, baking powder, baking soda, cornstarch, cornmeal, sugar. He can see how someone might get confused in a pantry like that. If they were crazy, say, or couldn’t smell nothing because their nose was too stuffed up from crying all the time.

Ray’s mother is not taking very good care of herself these days. That’s what Tony’s mother said when he told her he was going out to visit Ray: Saw her shuffling around the supermarket the other day, poor thing with her wig on all crooked and walking around in that nasty house-dress. Just grieving, poor thing. She not taking very good care of herself these days, looks like. If Tony’s mother hadn’t pointed it out to him, he might not have even noticed. To him, Ray’s mama just looks old. But she always looked like that, even when they were kids.

Tony stands there for a minute, looking up at a jar of what appears to be powdered sugar. He glances over his shoulder and decides that if Ray walks in and asks him what he’s doing he’ll just shrug and tell him he’s got a sweet tooth. He twists the top off the jar and opens a drawer near the sink, looking for something to put it in. He is pulling out a plastic Ziploc bag when he hears a knock on the front door.

He walks back into the living room and sees Raymond peeking out the front window.

“I told you, man,” Tony says. “It’s the changing of the guard.” 

Raymond nods. “Just wait here. . . .”

7.

The girl watches Raymond walk out the front door and shut it behind him. She puts her glass of water on the table and stands by the window. She sees Raymond heading out to a car parked by the curb. An arm spills out of the driver’s-side window and it is a man’s arm, thick and muscular, fingers outstretched to clasp Raymond’s hand. Suddenly Raymond looks different to her: thin and awkward, like a boy.

“That’s his brother Sam’s friend, Sean.” Tony shakes his head and sits down on the couch. “Everybody’s cool now, but let’s see how long that lasts.”

Another man’s hand appears, dangling out of the rear window, holding out a forty-ounce bottle of beer.

“Somehow they got it in their stupid heads that Sam took something that belonged to them and hid it somewhere, maybe right here in his mama’s house.”

The girl watches Raymond take the bottle, twist off the cap, and spill a sip onto the pavement before raising it to his lips.

“And you know what’s fucked up? I mean really fucked up? I’m starting to think that too.”

When the girl turns around, Tony is staring at her from the couch. He lowers his eyes, looks down at the book.

“Hey. You really read this? For real?”

The girl nods. “Aunt Ruby gave it to me.”

“Well, who the hell is Aunt Ruby?”

“Mama’s friend. She came down with us to Grenada, as part of the Creative Unity Brigade.”

Tony picks up the book. Somehow this makes sense to him. Of course there is a Creative Unity Brigade. Somewhere. Full of the righteous, marching proudly, two by two, with their fists in the air. The book is a call to action; he can tell that just by looking at the cover.

“That why y’all moved down there, to that island? Help the needy, feed the poor? That kind of shit? What, you part of a church group or something?”

“Not really.”

He flips the book over and stares at the back cover. Outside he can hear the revving of a motor, music blaring through the car’s open windows, the screech of brakes as it pulls away from the curb.

“Why did you stop?” he asks the girl. “I mean, why did you all come back?”

The girl stares at him. She has to think for a moment about how to answer because in truth, no one ever asks her that. They ask why she went but never why she came back. Most people she has met here don’t even know where Grenada is, except when they sometimes say, Didn’t we already bomb the shit out of that place years ago? And everyone who hears about the Brigade seems to assume that it was bound to fail simply because it did.

“Aunt Ruby. She gone now.”

“Gone where?”

“In the kitchen. She take a bottle of pills.”

Tony turns away from her. Tries to picture the woman, Aunt Ruby, but can’t. So instead he thinks about Sam, someone he had known all his life, someone he loved, truly. He rises to his feet and as he walks across the room he thrusts an abrupt finger towards the cardboard box. “You see all them books? The one who left them for Ray? He gone too.”

He peeks out the front window. He can see Ray still standing on the sidewalk, staring down the block. He has already figured out that Ray is different, that something is not quite right. Him and his mother both stuck in the righteous purging of grief. One had history, the other had Kool-Aid, and from where Tony stood he couldn’t see how either was doing them a bit of good.

He looks at the girl.

“Hey, girl. Look what I found.”

Tony reaches into his pocket and pulls out the plastic bag full of white powder. He opens it up and pokes it with his finger.

“You know what this is?”

One had history, the other had Kool-Aid, and from where Tony stood he couldn’t see how either was doing them a bit of good.

The girl stares down at it, then up at him. If she had to guess, she’d say sugar.

“It’s medicinal is what it is,” Tony says. “Like what the doctor give you when you got a cavity. Like Novocain. Rub it on your gums and the next thing you know, you can’t feel a thing.” He stands beside her and holds the bag open. “Go ahead and try it.”

The girl stares back at him while he nods. She dips her finger inside the bag and rubs the powder onto her teeth.

“You see what I mean?”

A dry, metallic taste stretches up from her tongue, shoots through her nostrils, and clears a space for itself in the front of her brain.

“You see what I mean?”

All of a sudden she’s dizzy. She sits down in the La-Z-Boy, struggling to keep her eyes open. Tony stands there, studying her face. After a moment he backs away from her slowly and sits down on the couch.

“I like you, girl. For real.” He nods. “You just keep your head up. You’ll be all right. You know why? Because you’re cool. I could tell just as soon as I saw you, standing out on that porch.”

He winks.

“That’s why I want you to listen to me, okay? I’m gonna tell you a secret. And don’t tell Ray I told you either. Because I love Ray’s mama and all . . . she’s like an auntie to me. But she also silly simple. You know what I mean?” He twirls his finger in the air near the side of his head. “Something not quite right. And if I were you I wouldn’t drink any more of that woman’s nasty Kool-Aid. You understand? Because I wouldn’t . . .”

Tony shakes his head.

“Not even if you paid me.”

8.

Raymond stands next to the curb, watching his mother’s car pull into the driveway. When she opens the door and the light clicks on he can see the frantic look in her eyes, lips moving as she mutters to herself. She can’t help him, he knows that. It’s all she can do to keep herself upright, drag herself out of bed in the middle of the afternoon, open the door for her little flip babies, collect her parcel of dimes.

He helps his mother unload her grocery bags from the car and listens to her talk to herself. Blaming herself, trying to make sense of what happened. How could she have lost her son? How could things have possibly gone so wrong? What could she have done differently if only she had tried? She looks at Raymond, a quiet hysteria animating all her gestures: “Help me get these bags in the house. I’ve got work to do, I’m running out of time.”

That is what is needed more than anything, he thinks. Time. So much history to sort through, struggling to make room for itself, scribbled in the margins of every page. The books he found in the back of his brother’s closet are full of secrets, the private truths of a man talking to himself, whispering things that Raymond could scarcely imagine his brother saying out loud. Clearly Sam was standing on the precipice of a new understanding when he passed, and now there is no one to finish his thoughts but Raymond. He doesn’t want to be interrupted. Not yet. He still needs time.

“Is that Tony sitting in my living room? Go tell that fool boy to come out here and help me with these bags— ”

When Raymond walks back inside the house he takes one look at the girl sitting with her mouth hanging open and Tony shoving a plastic bag into the pocket of his jacket and knows that something is very wrong.

“What the fuck did you do?” he says, and Tony laughs. Tony laughs, even as Raymond pulls him up by the collar, pushes, and then hurls him towards the front door. Even in the midst of grief, Tony is still laughing.

“Remember what I told you, little girl. . . .”

A door slams. The girl can hear them scuffling out on the porch. She leans back in the La-Z-Boy and stares up at the ceiling, trying to negotiate the shifting rhythms of her own heartbeat. She is in the present, she is in a suburb of the south, and everything is quieter than before. There is no fist in the air, no promise of the Creative Unity Brigade. When she looks up she does not see the words from a book or her mother’s hands or Aunt Ruby’s face or the kids in the yard or the Rastafarians in a clinic waiting room. She doesn’t see a needle or blue lights or even the little brick house across the street from Henry’s Bar, where her uncle lives. When she looks up at the ceiling, she sees something even better.

A blank page.

And just as she is about to smile Raymond appears, hovering above the chair. She stares up at his pursed lips, dark eyes, eyebrow arched. He reaches around, takes her by the arm, and gently pulls her to her feet.

“Little girl? It’s time for you to go home.”

9.

The Flip Lady stands in her bright yellow kitchen, unpacking a bag of groceries. She takes out a large pot, fills it up with water from the sink, and sets it on the counter. She empties a canister of Kool-Aid and stirs. She adds a cup of sugar, watching the powder swirl through the purple liquid then disappear as it settles on the bottom. She thinks for a moment, then scoops out another cup.

“Little heathens.” She chuckles. Just like Tony, always thinking she can’t see past their smiles. But she watches everything from the kitchen window and she has seen it all. Nothing has changed. It’s just like before: she always could tell the good from the bad.

“Bet y’all sleep good tonight,” she mutters to herself. She doesn’t do it for the money. No one has to thank her.

She smiles, thinks about all the little flip babies in this world. It doesn’t last, nothing does. But for now they still come running, gather around her back porch, hold their hands out for the promise of something sweet.

And she gives it to them.

If Everyone Is Traumatized, Is Anyone?

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

In the new year, during a period of great upheaval in my personal life, amid the many great upheavals in all of our lives, I told my wife that I needed to watch The X-Files again. 

For my money, The X-Files is the most important show in the world. Not the best—the most important. When I first watched The X-Files it was a lifeline, a map with which to begin to understand what had happened to me, what was happening around me in the world. I’ve returned to it again and again over the years, when I’ve needed to touch my finger to the pulse of the truth. 

We had recently bought DVD box sets of the second and third seasons, which ran from 1994-1995 and 1995-1996 respectively. Our projector, bought cheap for Christmas the year before, only plays DVDs. The projector went on top of a pile of leftover boxes and library books on the bedside table; it splayed bright light against the bare opposing wall until the first episode began to play, at which point it went dark. The X-Files isn’t shot in black and white (with one notable exception), but it might as well be—scenes are framed in shadow, faces cast in profile, secrets hidden but palpable in every corner and every breath. Through the low-resolution lens of our projector, the grainy, filmic quality of the cinematography, its emphasis on negative space, became rich, textured, replete with meaning. 

The second season of The X-Files opens with agents Mulder and Scully separated and exiled to opposite corners of the FBI world: him to a scuzzy motel to transcribe surveillance tapes, and she to Quantico to teach. Their investigations into paranormal phenomena in the first season led them to an international government conspiracy that may or may not be collaborating with an extraterrestrial force; obviously they had to be silenced. I will confess that the season two premiere, “Little Green Men,” had bored me on past viewings, because Scully (played by a very pregnant Gillian Anderson) barely features in it. Instead, we follow Mulder to an observatory in Puerto Rico, where he finds evidence that renews his faltering faith in his long-held belief: not only that aliens exist, but that, decades ago, they abducted his younger sister right in front of him.

The episode begins in the darkness of space, with Mulder narrating in a low tone. “We wanted to believe,” he says. “We wanted to call out.”

In the dark of our bedroom, I felt a prickle at the back of my neck, a yanking in my chest, near my heart. It’s the feeling I associate with those moments in life when we are approaching a crucial truth that we have not yet realized. 

A satellite—one of the Voyagers, Mulder tells us—tears into frame. The Voyagers carried a message from us, the people of Earth, far out into space in hopes of a response. 

The satellite speeds off, becoming smaller and smaller, until it is gone. 

In that moment I grasped something I hadn’t before, or perhaps something I had only forgotten. In the quest for the truth, for any truth, we can only get so close. The relationship between objective truth and the meaning we make of our lives is asymptotic. But in seeking—in calling out, in trying to believe, in flying out into the dark—we may depart from the plane of what is conventionally known and achieve something greater: a peace with the unknown, with the hidden and vanished, from which all things are possible. 

Almost thirty years ago, The X-Files pilot opened with the case of Karen Swenson, whose body was discovered in the Collum National Forest in Bellefleur, Oregon. (The episode alleged in a title card that the events that follow were “inspired by actual documented accounts.”) Under her nightgown, officials discovered two small bumps in the skin on her lower back, just above the elastic of her underwear. The detective and the coroner exchanged a glance over her inert body, which lay face-down, faceless, in the dirt. Covering her up, the coroner said, “It’s happening again, isn’t it?”

Yes: again and again and again. Karen Swenson, the first dead girl of The X-Files, is an often-overlooked but establishing figure in the series. Her discovery in the pilot’s cold open sets the tone and theme for what follows, over three decades, fourteen seasons, and two movies. 

The detective and the coroner exchanged a glance over her inert body, which lay face-down, faceless, in the dirt.

The X-Files is, in many ways, about violence against women. I would struggle to name a show that isn’t, in part, about violence against women, this being one of the defining logics and mechanisms of our world since the invention of television and well beyond; but The X-Files is not only a show about trauma, but one that is inherently, structurally, narratively traumatized. Beyond all sense or reason or widely-accepted rules of storytelling, the show returns irrepressibly to the site (or sites) of injury. In doing so, it tells a different story than some recent critics of trauma theory and its adherents have sketched: a story about a traumatized world, haunted by its own historic violences, and the people in it who, though harmed and violated and betrayed by this world themselves, try to do something, anything, against the tide regardless. 

The X-Files pilot aired on the Fox network in 1993, in the aftermath of a war many Americans no longer believed in, in the aftermath of a recession, in a crisis of violence as women spoke up about the violence in their homes, and a crisis of memory as accounts of childhood sexual abuse, Satanic ritual abuse, and, yes, alien abduction proliferated. A deeply postmodern show, The X-Files’ relationship to truth was as fraught as America’s at large. In the pilot, Mulder, an FBI agent who believes in extraordinary phenomena against all reason and institutional pushback, explains to Scully, his new partner, that his sister was taken from him as a child. Regressive hypnosis therapy later reveals what he understands to be the truth of his experience: “I can recall a bright light outside and a presence in the room. I was paralyzed, unable to respond to my sister’s calls for help.” Scully, a medical doctor and inexhaustible skeptic, replies, “But how do you know—” Mulder interrupts. “The government knows about it, and I’ve got to know what they’re protecting. Nothing else matters to me, and this is as close as I’ve ever gotten to it.”

Already we have some hallmarks of the emergent field of trauma theory: repressed memories and regression hypnosis unlocking a violent event, so unexpected and paralyzing that it cannot be assimilated into the survivor’s previous understanding of the world and themselves. Cathy Caruth’s 1996 literary and psychoanalytic treatise on trauma, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, outlines a formula: there is an encounter, like a train crash, or an assault, or a genocide. Something so world-shattering that it cannot be held by the conscious mind, and therefore cannot be reconciled and healed. The memory is repressed, or never even made. Because the conscious mind cannot hold it, the injury must try to make itself known and heard in other ways. The wound “cries out”—but because the mind, or soul, or psyche, or whatever you would prefer, is not ready or capable of perceiving it, the wound must continue to cry out, over and over again, a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear. 

“It’s happening again.” In the third episode of the first season, “Conduit,” a little girl vanishes in front of her brother. Mulder and Scully investigate; as Mulder becomes more and more convinced that this is history repeating itself, going to greater and less legal lengths to uncover what really happened, Scully tells him, “Stop running after your sister. This won’t bring her back.” But Mulder can’t stop. A superior hands Scully a tape recording from Mulder’s regression hypnosis therapy. In the session, he tells the therapist that he can hear his sister: “She’s calling out my name, over and over again.” He tells the therapist that another voice, an unknown one, is reassuring him that no harm will come to her, and one day she will return. As Scully listens to the tape, we are shown Mulder sitting in a church pew, crying. Slowly, he lowers himself to his knees, and begins to pray. 

If this all sounds a little hokey to you, you are not alone. Recently, the author Will Self argued in Harper’s Magazine that trauma has become an integral part of modern consciousness, a way that we try to explain the extraordinary circumstances in our own individual lives, but that really only captures the ordinariness of our shared experience of the modern world. If everyone is traumatized, is anyone? Self explores a history of trauma wherein new technologies such as trains and photography created fissures in the commonly held and felt notions of time, of past and present and future. (In this sense, trauma has always belonged to the speculative realm of science fiction.) Our present moment is, in a word, fractured: technologies have proliferated, phones and computers and cars and cranial imaging and diagnoses and the Cloud, and our minds have fractured accordingly. 

Self acknowledges that the psychology we call trauma or post-traumatic stress disorder exists, inasmuch as “the symptoms associated with modern conceptions of trauma are the psychic correlates of physical processes to which the individual psyche cannot consciously adapt: you either repress the posthumous shock … or you rise up giddily into psychosis.” Where he finds fault is in the belief that “a timeless phenomenon […] has affected people in different cultures and at different times in much the same way.” Self points to the “suddenness” of modernity as the root of what we now call trauma. Here he is at least in partial agreement with Caruth, who attributed trauma to “an overwhelming experience of sudden, or catastrophic events” (emphasis mine.) 

Self points to the ‘suddenness’ of modernity as the root of what we now call trauma.

Parul Sehgal also took on trauma theory in The New Yorker, arguing that the trauma plot has taken precedence in contemporary literature, while also creeping invasively into the literature of the past to reframe it for our modern, traumatized eye. “Trauma came to be accepted as a totalizing identity,” she writes, and as such, became the fulcrum for a defined literature. Sehgal sketches the defining characteristics of the trauma plot: a protagonist who is limited to “profile or bare outline,” who is “self-entranced, withholding, giving off a fragrance of unspecified damage”; a formal thinness, limited to the traumatized protagonist as lens; a structural reliance on confession or flashback. Recent examples of such damaged characters include A Little Life’s Jude; Wandavision’s Wanda; Fleabag’s Fleabag. This ubiquity “[exposes] the creakiness of a plot mechanism” rather than any deep and hard-won truths about life, or humanity, or whatever. Trauma becomes a cultural script explicating all ills of all severities, and also explicating the behaviors and actions of all traumatized persons. There is no agency, no autonomy or individuality, only trauma. There is no plot, unless the plot is trauma. 

In some regards, both of these essays are convincing. Trauma is pervasive in our contemporary discourses on wellness and mental health; and admittedly, its history in such discourses is short. These essays may provoke in you, as they did in me, a sense of defensiveness. Their undertone does occasionally veer toward clichés about the younger generation: that we are overly fragile, prone to solipsism and an emotional porosity that blinds us to the greater world. The author Brandon Taylor argues that Sehgal’s analysis of trauma is actually representative of a larger problem with the literature of identity; and, moreover, that if a book, or a Marvel show, is bad, that is not the same as trauma narratives themselves being bad. Also, as he says, “that kind of is the way it is sometimes, no?”

Trauma is pervasive in our contemporary discourses on wellness and mental health; and admittedly, its history in such discourses is short.

Self, to my mind, goes even further astray in his concerned disdain for the younger crowd. TikTok, he argues in closing, is one arena where trauma discourses have proliferated, while the application itself is a medium of the traumatizing, which is to say fracturing, present. “Social media is inherently traumatogenic,” he writes. Our codependence on technology is so intense that “​​It’s estimated that 2015 was the first year in which more than a trillion photographs were taken.” The circulation of images, and selves, and the reliance on timelines, is part and parcel of the suddenness, the in-and-out-of-timeness, that has traumatized the world. But this diagnosis feels as reductive as the traumatic pathology itself has apparently become.

Reading these essays, I was reminded of the sixth season episode “The Ghosts Who Stole Christmas,” in which two psychotherapeutically inclined ghosts explain to Mulder and Scully what’s wrong with them. By their reckoning, Mulder is a “narcissistic, overzealous, self-righteous egomaniac,” not “single-minded” but “prone to obsessive compulsiveness workaholism, antisocialism,” “a lonely man chasing paramasturbatory illusions that you believe will give your life meaning and significance.” Scully suffers from “an awful small life,” “conflicted yearnings,” “a subconscious desire to find fulfillment through another,” and “intimacy through codependency.” Is this the truth? Maybe. What is the truth, anyway?

Like Self, Sehgal, and Taylor, I’m not interested in any kind of trauma determinism. As Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck notes, it is all too easy to position damage as the endpoint in a conversation, rather than the beginning of it. To my mind, trauma is most useful as a way to conceive of the consequence of a reprehensible act or event which otherwise cannot be spoken of, admitted to, or acknowledged, even to oneself. Whether this is a history that has been institutionally suppressed or a category of violence, such as rape, that is socially stigmatized and denied to the point of illegibility, trauma—the body and mind rebelling in the aftermath—insists that something has in fact occurred. In this way, it also becomes a locus of possibility within impossibility. Trauma is an injunction: a call to action, to reach out, to find something-to-be-done. 

Mulder’s dilemma is my own: a desire to seek and quantify, to provide evidence of, the unquantifiable unknown.

Mulder’s dilemma is my own: a desire to seek and quantify, to provide evidence of, the unquantifiable unknown. There is a photograph I took of myself, dead-eyed, on a particular day in 2015 that I return to occasionally. I took it because something horrible had happened, and also because I had gotten a haircut, with bangs, and I didn’t know if I liked it or not. I hold onto emails, texts, screencaps, snippets of poetry, anything that might someday be important when I am taken to task for my understanding of my own experiences—all of which may in fact be worthless, unconvincing, or lost sometime between then and now. And yet it doesn’t matter. What matters is the search. The effort to, as scholar Avery Gordon writes, make “common cause” with the erased and disappeared. In other words, the wanting to believe. 

What’s interesting about The X-Files is the way the show seems to compulsively return to the foundational violences which have defined the United States as a country. In this way, the show not only paints a holistic, structural picture of trauma, but actually enacts it: form following function, the narrative bends into the shape of “the wound that cries out,” the “often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of … intrusive phenomena.” 

The show’s twists and turns often defied comprehension or common sense, from both a viewer’s perspective and a writer’s. I would never claim that this effect is intentional, but it is thematically effective. The show folds over on itself, revisiting Mulder’s sister’s disappearance, Scully’s season two abduction, trying on alternate explanations, holding them up to different lights. Mulder’s sister was abducted by aliens; or, perhaps she was an alien, one of many alien clones; the alien clones are medical specialists working in secret labs that forcibly impregnate women and harvest their infants; or the clones are mute, agrarian drones, endless little girls working secret fields in southern Canada, that have something to do with smallpox vaccinations and an alien disease; or else maybe Samantha was abducted by a serial killer of little girls; or maybe she died alone in a hospital as a child, and Mulder never even knew. 

Meanwhile the alien conspiracy unravels—backwards, as well as forwards. As the show progresses, we learn that the international conspiracy was birthed in the aftermath of World War II, when Nazi scientists were welcomed into America to conduct experiments involving alien-human hybrids. An extraterrestrial entity that looks like black oil and causes radioactive burns becomes trapped in the body of a Russian-American agent of the conspiracy, who then becomes trapped in a missile silo left over from the Cold War. In season two, Mulder finds a train car “packed floor to ceiling” with alien bodies. In season three, Scully finds a camp full of, apparently, leprosy victims, who were subjects of the Nazi-affiliated experiments; outside the camp she discovers pits where “death squads … [dumped] the bodies on top of each other like they were garbage.” The fictional events echo and stretch real historical ones: experimental vaccines are tested on the unknowing; samples of human tissue are taken and registered without consent as part of some secret eugenic scheme. All of this in preparation for the day when colonization arrives: when some of humanity will survive, and most of it will not. 

The fictional events echo and stretch real historical ones: experimental vaccines are tested on the unknowing; samples of human tissue are taken and registered.

In French, The X-Files was called Aux Frontières du Réel, “at the frontiers of the real.” It is in many ways a frontier story: of intrepid heroes running up against unknown space, of secrets buried in the emptiness of the desert. But The X-Files recognizes that the desert isn’t, and never was, empty. In the season two finale, Mulder follows an encrypted government file to so-called New Mexico, where he meets members of the local Navajo community, including Code Talker Albert Hosteen. Albert has his grandson show Mulder the train car, telling him, “nothing vanishes without a trace.” According to Albert, the aliens made contact with Indigenous peoples 600 years ago—the first abduction event. The X-Files’ preoccupation with alien invasion echoes a wound that is not modern, not limited to the twentieth century as Self and Sehgal would have it. The ripples date back to the original American sin: the colonization and genocide of Indigenous peoples on this land. 

The X-Files is a deeply imperfect show. It is often racist and almost methodologically sexist. The less said about the final seasons, the better; it would take more words than I have here to tie their thematic failures to the originals’ thematic successes. Yet even so the pattern recurs: in the revival, which aired from 2016-2018, we revisit World War II, we revisit America’s eugenic regimes, Scully’s pregnancy, Mulder’s sister’s abduction. “It’s happening again.” It will happen, forever. 

I hesitated to write myself into this essay, and yet the work would not move forward without me, without my own incomplete memories. In “Conduit,” Mulder tells Scully: “When I was a kid, I had this ritual. I closed my eyes before I walked into my room, ‘cause I thought that one day when I opened them my sister would be there. Just lying in bed, like nothing ever happened. You know I’m still walking into that room, everyday of my life.” 

That’s what it’s like. 

I am sixteen, being introduced to The X-Files for the first time. Mulder looks at Scully with an expression of revelation and tells her, “I think I know who killed Karen Swanson.” A feeling of precipice, of proximity to something enormous and unfathomable, tingles at the back of my skull. 

I hesitated to write myself into this essay, and yet the work would not move forward without me, without my own incomplete memories.

I am twenty, writing my senior undergraduate thesis. Recent events, and old ones, have forced me to go part-time in my studies in the hopes of forestalling a complete breakdown. I work at the library until close, clicking between episodes, transcripts, PDFs, and my own draft. I forget my credit card at the fried chicken place on the corner at 2 AM. I begin to cry as I write my concluding thoughts on a friend’s couch: 

“The truth will save you.” Setting aside the idea of a single truth, and setting aside the idea that there is only one way to be saved, I find this to be true. … I do not know everything that has happened to me and I never will, but the absences in my memory and the rebellions of my body bear their own meanings, and I work to live with those ghosts. In doing so, I “[interfere] precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed towards us” (Gordon, 2008). In doing so, I haunt, and I find my way. 

I am twenty, and it is 6 AM, and I walk out into the cold spring Toronto morning, heedless of my lost credit card, breathing in the pink sky, aloft on the high of catharsis, my pain left momentarily behind. 

I am twenty-seven. The past has once more become present. Like Mulder, I am looking back at an event that is distant from me now; my former self is almost like a different person, like a little girl who has gone missing from me. I tell my wife, I need to watch The X-Files again.

On-screen, two satellites hurtle into the void of space, seeking the unknown. The show flashes back to the night Mulder’s sister was taken; he watches, paralyzed, as her small body floats into the air and disappears into the light. Evidence burns and is lost, and yet, back on wiretap duty, Mulder tells Scully, “I still have my work. I’ve still got you. And I still have myself.”

Melissa Febos on the Value of Craft for Writing and Life

Posted on by Jo Lou

Even before its publication, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, Melissa Febos’ fourth book and her first on craft, has reignited conversations about the impulse to write—and silence—stories of violation and trauma. But Body Work is not a manifesto for literary suffering. It is an articulate call for understanding writing, especially autobiographical writing, as part of a larger liberatory politics, one that relies as much on deep personal introspection, as on collective and aesthetic engagement. For Febos, writing begins with waking up to the oppressive histories that inform our preconceptions of genre, aesthetic quality, creativity, and, perhaps most importantly, what kind of story is worth telling.

Body Work by Melissa Febos

I read Body Work much as I read her third book, Girlhood: feverishly, drinking up the frankness and nuance with which Febos documents the subtle and secreted pains of living in an unequal world. Though I was already familiar with her work when I first read Girlhood, I was at the time writing about—and therefore unearthing—memories of how my own body had been taken and abused by boys and men. Girlhood felt daring in its simplicity—the courage it had to say, of ordinary and everyday experiences, that is violence.

I corresponded with Febos during the long first month of 2022. We discussed representations of sex and trauma, and how teaching, writing, and the lifelong work of examining how powers structures live within our bodies, are all interconnected practices.

Amanda Montei: In “The Return,” you describe the title of your book Abandon Me coming to you so clearly and certainly that you understood “why the Greeks assigned such moments to the will of powers beyond the self.” You write that despite this feeling that title “was not a gift from any muse” but rather “an intention, a decision come from deeper than my conscious mind, a wish, a prayer.” Can you share how you arrived at the title Body Work for this collection?

Melissa Febos: Tucked inside every book title is another story, invisible to readers, of the journey the writer took to arrive at those few but important words. Each of my book titles has a really different story. Body Work is sort of the least interesting, I think. It came from essentially spitballing phrases that suggested the right mood. I wanted to signal to potential readers that the book was not a typical prescriptive craft book, that it was less about how to deploy any kind of technical skill than how to integrate craft into the other fundamental processes of our lives, and how I’ve done that. 

It’s often been taboo to talk about craft in terms of the personal—our psychology, our wounds, our politics, and perhaps most of all, our bodies.

We don’t talk about writing that way in classrooms, or at least that’s not the tradition historically. It’s often been taboo to talk about craft in terms of the personal—our psychology, our wounds, our politics, and perhaps most of all, our bodies. Of course, we bring all of these to our work, it is all in the work, but it’s considered sort of gauche to talk about in terms of craft, as if craft can and should exist in this intellectual vacuum that isn’t subject to the lower concerns of our beings. Referring to the body seemed to me the most direct way of signaling that I wanted to do an opposite kind of work. I almost titled the book after the first essay in it: “In Praise of Navel Gazing,” but I thought, why just the navel?, let’s step all the way into this exploration of process, let me bring the whole body right onto the cover of it.

AM: You write in detail in your essay “In Praise of Navel Gazing” about how the feminization and trivialization of personal writing is built upon the presumption that a woman who thinks is oxymoronic. Do you think there are elements of these sexist standards in the genre of craft writing as well? 

MF: I think sexism and the false binary between what we associate with the “female” (domestic, emotional, corporeal) and “male” (intellectual) is baked into every element of our society, so, yes, it is certainly lurking within the genre of craft writing. The western canon, which is what most informs our literary methods and standards, is almost entirely populated by white men. How could that not create a masculinist ideal, a hierarchy that reflected the social values that elevated the work of those men?

Women (along with many other groups of people) have been summarily classed as inferior and anti-intellectual for longer than we have not. There are lots of people who have been writing about this for longer than I’ve been alive—I’d point to Helene Cixous’s écriture feminine as a good example, and obviously Virginia Woolf. This has shifted some in the past decade, and that shift is speeding up, as evidenced by the work of writers like Matthew Salesses, Felicia Rose Chavez, and Jane Alison.

AM: I love the section in “Mind Fuck” in which you describe coming to the realization that one “may need to be awake to their own sex” to write an awakened sex scene—a thesis, you say, you were hoping to avoid. Can you share a bit more about why you were hesitant to come to such a conclusion?

MF: I think people get the impression from my writing that I really enjoy and am drawn to processes of psychological awakening. Like, therapy is my idea of fun or something. In a way, it’s true, but almost entirely relegated to writing. Most of my god-given instincts tell me to box up my feelings and shove them into a storage space in my psyche. They suggest that eating candy and smoking cigarettes and watching Netflix is a far superior experience to excavating my own psyche and experience to draw insight that might transform me and liberate my mind and body from patriarchal structures. Those are the same instincts that would have me (and for a while a long time ago, did have me) shooting speedballs and engaging in various criminal activities. Heeding them would have had me dead years ago. So, I have very conscientiously cultivated an alternate set of instincts, ones that direct me to pastimes that will keep me alive. Getting sober at 23 was really the start of it, though I think I was much younger when I understood the artistic process as one of refuge and recovery, a place where I could say the unsayable and tease apart the concepts and beliefs that I otherwise took for granted. 

Many writers never get far because they don’t learn how to counter the internal voices that want to silence them, whose refrains are about self-indulgence and navel-gazing.

All of which to say that the intelligences that I rely upon in my work translate directly to my life. If I want to be empathic in my work, I must ultimately be so in my living. If I want to write about liberation in my work, I have to do that work in my life. And writing is often the route to it. It is one of the main reasons why I will never stop writing, because for whatever reason, I am willing to do that work in myself for art, and not much else. Otherwise, I might sink into a life defined more by disassociation than integration, or awakening. But that doesn’t mean I don’t dread it, you know? My other instincts still cry out for Netflix and jellybeans. That’s what I meant by that dread. It’s the dread I feel before every therapy appointment. Like, ugh, can’t I just float three inches outside of my body forever and never look at anything? But then I go to therapy, I write the essay, I transform myself again and nothing is more important or valuable than the freedom that follows. 

AM: You write that “social justice has always depended on the testimonies of the oppressed” and that it is subversive to write about trauma, “the resistance to memoirs about trauma is always in part… a resistance to movements of social justice.”

Is there a line in your mind between what you call the “emotional confrontation with the self” and autobiography that is gratuitous in its representation of trauma?

MF: Oh, sure. When I was a younger writer, I had this powerful urge to just write it all out, to say the worst and hardest thing and kind of force-feed it to the reader, rub their face in it a little. I think I came by this honestly, and that the desire was twofold. One, I wanted to defy all the messaging I’d received that my worst experiences were tedious, unremarkable, shameful, boring, navel-gazing, attention seeking, unsightly, whatever. Two, I really needed to spell it all out for myself, to reconstruct the story of my own woundings, or simply the most confounding parts of my own experiences. Those desires were valid, right? But they had nothing to do with making good art. 

I think some folks, especially early on in their writing lives, don’t get very far past that stage, particularly of needing to spell out what happened, to simply put words to it. But this kind of storytelling can be rough for a reader. It’s often not worth it. For me, if it isn’t offering something beyond the facts of the trauma, I’m not really interested in suffering through the description of it. It might be compelling, but it isn’t really worth adding to my psychic collection of trauma stories, which is already stuffed. What I look for and value in such stories is the story that comes after the events that drive it; the story of the writer’s survival, how she learned to move through the rest of her life with the legacy of it. How she was shaped by it, or exorcised it. This is not to say that I want every writer to be healed before I’ll read their story, but I do want them to make something out of it. That can be done through narrative, but also through lyric means, through all manner of aesthetic methods combined with the psychological and intellectual. And I’m not interested in universalizing my own limits: my line between worth it and not worth it is simply mine; every reader learns soon enough where theirs is. 

AM: You dedicate this book to your students. Can you talk a bit about how your teaching practice informed the development of the essays in this book?

MF: This book would not exist without my students. It is really my side of a conversation I’ve been having in the classroom for 15 years. It is the book I wished I could give them, but could never find. Which is, I guess, the drive behind every book I’ve written—a desire to create the thing I need most.

When I started teaching memoir to college students I was like 26, and just talking to them about voice and plot and why to restrain our use of adverbs, but as the years passed, the deeper challenges of the genre came more into focus, in myself and in my students. They could learn plot structure, how to “omit needless words” (as Strunk and White advise), and even hone their metaphors, but the elements of craft as I’d learned them did not account for or address or even acknowledge their greatest challenges. Nor had they addressed mine. These challenges arose not from lack of skill or experience but from a lack of confidence, and to a certain extent, a misunderstanding of the artistic value of personal writing. What impeded their work most, what prevented them from even delving into the more technical craft concerns of memoir, was their internalized belief that their stories had no value. That they would be condemned in some way for even trying, for the belief that art made from their own lives might be worth a stranger’s time. 

So, over time, the things I talked about in class began to include instruction not only in metaphors and narrative structure, but the more intimate work of discerning whose beliefs were preventing them from even starting. Many writers never get far because they don’t learn how to counter the internal voices that want to silence them, whose refrains are about self-indulgence and navel-gazing. What I have tried to explain to them is how those voices are so often the internalized voices of social structures that benefit from their silence. The idea that their story isn’t interesting or valuable doesn’t come out of their own experience—they often love personal narratives of lives like their own—but rather, the white supremacist/patriarchal/compulsively heterosexual/ableist/transphobic ethos that we all grow up swimming in. 

AM: The book closes with you writing, so tenderly, about the memoir as monument, as a return to the past to make something new of what was, a redemption, a freeing from “old harms,” and a change of heart that occurs on the page. How did writing Body Work heal or transform you?

MF: Because it’s sort of a meta-work, it functioned differently for me than my other books. It was less about healing than about clarifying my own thinking, and constructing the story of my own becoming as a writer. It was an exercise in making my own motives and insights explicit, both to the reader and to myself. We are always operating on a set of beliefs, sometimes conflicting ones, but we needn’t be aware of it. The work of writing nonfiction is so much the work of becoming conscious. In this sense, it was the most essayistic of my essay collections—I was very consciously working my way through a set of ideas and their origins to figure out what I believed, and how I got to it. The consequence is that it has further freed me from my own insecurities as a writer. There is no way for me to ever doubt again that writing has been the site of immeasurable change, has grown me more than any other single pastime. Also, that my best work is almost inevitably that which most transforms me, and in which I have most challenged myself. 

7 Books That Tell the Stories of Flint and Detroit

Posted on by Jo Lou

Flint, my hometown, and Detroit, where I live now, are both underrepresented in literature and disproportionately burdened with the narratives of outsiders. The usual story, the dying city narrative, goes something like this: cars, white flight, deindustrialization, poverty, blight, undrinkable water. This story usually comes with familiar illustrations: ruin porn pictures of abandoned houses picked clean by scrappers and the elements, the graffitied shells of automotive plants, crumpled water bottles. Occasionally a singular plucky, hopeful story breaks through this expected gloom. Resilience can seem like a backhanded compliment.  

Seldom are these cities treated to full and nuanced portraits. Their rich histories, their contradictions, how privilege and inequity, pride and grief, hope and rage, can all live next door to each other. As someone who’s spent her life in these cities, and as an avid reader, I’m always craving this: a story that both affirms the community around me and teaches me things; that makes me sit with uncomfortable questions and question my positionality. That’s the kind of story I hoped to tell in Chevy in the Hole, a novel that follows two families in Flint from the 1937 Sit-Down Strike at General Motors to the ongoing water crisis. 

There are many books that speak to particular facets of Flint and Detroit’s histories: the rise and fall of the automotive industry, the musical legacies of Motown, garage rock, and techno. There are memoirs of renovating those abandoned houses and delivering water through the crisis. There are novels that anchor themselves in specific moments in time, like Tim Lane’s 1980s bildungsroman Your Silent Face, the historical children’s novels of Christopher Paul Curtis, and Detroit fiction from Joyce Carol Oates and Elmore Leonard to Desiree Cooper and Michael Zadoorian.

The seven books listed below, both fiction and nonfiction, all speak to a greater sweep of history and put the people of Flint and Detroit at their centers.

Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination by Herb Boyd

A history of Detroit through the lens of the Black community, the book begins in the 18th-century with enslaved Black people living as property of French colonizers, then moves through the Underground Railroad, the emergence of the Black middle class, the Great Migration, the uprising of 1967, and the shifts of deindustrialization. Throughout, Boyd weaves labor history, pop culture, sports, and politics. There are especially stirring portraits of some of Detroit’s most celebrated figures, including Motown founder Berry Gordy, Aretha Franklin, and Mayor Coleman Young. 

The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water & the American Urban Tragedy by Anna Clark

This book set itself a seemingly impossible task: to give a comprehensive study of the water crisis as the news was still breaking and damage still being assessed (indeed, four years after this book was published, the pipes are still being replaced in Flint). Clark’s thoughtful handling of the crisis makes it an invaluable guide to understanding the crisis. She provides the historical context on environmental and institutional racism in Flint, lead and water infrastructure in America. She untangles the Emergency Financial Manager system, wherein the state appoints someone to run the city and strips it of its democratic rights. Her eye, too, is on the activists, from pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha to mothers with sick children, speaking out against the state’s culpability and inaction.

The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers by Bridgett Davis

In this memoir, Davis tells the story of her family as part of the Great Migration, leaving Nashville for Detroit, figuring out how to “make a way out of no way.” With an ailing husband and three children, Fannie, the author’s mother, lifts her family into the middle class by running numbers. Davis recounts coming of age in the Black community of the ’60s (the Supremes lived in her neighborhood), but at the core of the book is a portrait of Fannie: a generous, sharp, devout woman who believed in providing the best for her children and in “self-care—long baths, naps, vacations, spending money on herself.” As the backdrop of this family history, Detroit is richly detailed, capturing the swank department stores and glitter of Motown to the tensions of the 1967 uprising and policing.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

In Eugenides’ saga, a family leaves a tiny village on Mount Olympus for Detroit and in the trauma of war and migration, brother and sister become husband and wife. For Calliope to become Cal, that secret moves through generations of the Stephanides family on the east side of Detroit and into Grosse Pointe suburbia. The book sweeps across the 20th century, with Detroit vividly realized at each point, from Ford’s River Rouge plant to the Nation of Islam’s Temple No. 1. Flint even makes a fleeting appearance:

“When a Greek Orthodox church in Flint burned down, Milton drove up and salvaged one of the surviving stained-glass windows.”

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

As widowed Viola Turner’s health declines, her thirteen children have to decide what will be done with her east side house. The novel largely follows the oldest Turner, Cha-Cha, who’s confronting the return of a haint that visited him in childhood, and the youngest Turner, Leah, who’s struggling with addiction, homelessness, and a fraught relationship with her daughter. In flashbacks to the 1940s, we learn Francis Turner left Arkansas and arrived in Detroit with his only pair of shoes and $15 in his pocket, with the terms of Viola following him uncertain. Detroit and generations of Turners each cycle through grief and healing in a story that is told with tenderness and humor. 

Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line by Ben Hamper

Ben Hamper is perhaps best known as the autoworker in Michael Moore’s Roger & Me who describes having a panic attack after being laid off from and hearing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by the Beach Boys. In Rivethead, he writes of coming from a long line of General Motors shoprats; of drugs and booze and classic rock radio while working the line; the constant lay-offs; the sorrows and hilarity of being down and out in Flint:

“Detroit as seen backwards through a telescope. The callus on the palm of the state shaped like a welder’s mitt.” 

Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis by Andrew Highsmith

Highsmith’s comprehensive study of Flint takes its title from a sign that hung on the razor wire fence at Chevy in the Hole, the Chevrolet factory complex in the middle of Flint that since has been turned to a state park. An analysis of capitalism and public policy in Flint, the book chronicles the city from the birth of General Motors to 21st-century activists working to revitalize communities. It illustrates “the interlocking histories of racial and economic inequality, mass suburbanization, and deindustrialization in modern America.” A dense read that is both intellectually and emotionally demanding, but brings a complex city into clearer focus.

Devour My Blackness While I Sit Here Hungry

Posted on by Alex Juarez

I want to commercialize your pain

                                                                             Hear me out:

I watched the... presentation?
            performance?
thing?
             What do you call that there?
                         Is there a name for what you do?

Anyhow, it’s good stuff. Really feisty.
                              One could even say.....
                                     “powerful.”

I’d like to capitalize
on your....
            “feminism.”
“Strong” woman-hood.
            I’d like to bring you in, have you...do....?
                        “perform” the thing
and then use it to discuss
this notion of “feminism”
            with my inmates.

Here’s why this excites me:
These men are a mix of violent
and non-violent offenders.
            Some are even in for violence against women!
Full of backwards ideas, misogyny.
Some are even bigots.
And you’re, well, you know.... look at you. (Wink).
I want you to be the spark
to ignite...

Conversation.
Lively Conversation.

                                                 I will be there to lead the discussion, of course.

This is Portland Theatre

“We Denounce White Supremacy”

A white actor performs in blackface.

Shuckin’ n jivin’ to

the vociferous applause

of an all-white audience.


This is their favorite part.


                                                                       Devouring blackness.

the closest they will come

to entering blackness.

But still safe enough away

to laugh at

to enjoy the spectacle they make

of our misery.

***

“We Unequivocally Support Black Lives Matter”

In his office, on the bookcase, next to

his other trophies, collectibles, and accolades,

a white artistic director proudly

displays a plaque that reads

“honorary black person.”

To him, this is admissible

even bragging territory

I am almost black – black adjacent – honorary – I direct all the black shows – I devour blackness for my own gain and thus – I know what it is like to be you – I am almost more black than you are

***

“We Have Far to Go As A Nation”

a child’s birthday party.

               We are the only black family.

                          We are getting looks.

constantly having to explain

why we are there...

how we know the family.

***

“We Are Poorly Educated About the Truth of the Black Experience”

“diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion”

buzzwords when seeking funding

                                                     suddenly we are marketable en masse

***

POCs are so HOT right now.

***

                         POCs are sooooooooo HOT right now.

***

                                POCs are so HOT right now.

***

                                                  POCs are sooooooooo HOT right now.

***

“We Support Black Artists Demanding Change”

Hyperaware of my blackness

                                                            claustrophobic
                                                                     in Portland.

contrasted

        struck against

               made discordant by

                                                   the stark whiteness around me.

I am on display. I am trying to... I am fitting in? Am I? I am not. I don’t fit. I don’t belong. I am sticking out... I am the only one... again... I am being judged... labeled difficult... demanding...sassy... exotic... I begin to grown silent... microaggressions... the fucking microaggressions...this place will never feel like home.

***

“We Choose to be Actively Anti-Racist”

I am on a plane to New York.
The man sitting in the window seat is named Will.
We share pictures of our kids, laugh about them growing up too fast.
I spill knowledge of the British Monarchy. Wow, you do know your history, he says.
We laugh – just two people 35,000 feet up in the sky.

7 Novels About Maps With Hidden Secrets

Posted on by Jo Lou

Is there anything more alluring, more full of curiosity and adventure, than a map? Inside every one waits a wondrous tapestry of beautiful landscapes, familiar and unfamiliar names of cities and streets, and an invitation to explore and imagine.

Since childhood, I’ve found it nearly impossible to resist the urge to pore over every map and atlas I come across. It was only a matter of time until this love crept into my stories. My second novel, The Cartographers, is about mapmaking and family secrets. A young woman named Nell Young discovers after the death of her scholar father that a seemingly worthless map in his belongings actually contains an incredible, dangerous riddle. She must set out to uncover both what the map and her late father have been hiding for decades. The book was inspired by a real-life cartography mystery, and is set amid old libraries and dusty archives, where plenty of rare, ancient maps lurk in forgotten collections.

If you love maps as much as I do, then you’ll probably agree that the only thing better than a map with secrets is an entire novel about a map with secrets—so here are seven books about mysterious maps:

The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson 

This lush, beautiful fantasy is set during during the reign of the last sultanate of the Iberian peninsula. Fatima, one of the sultan’s favorite concubines, finds the innocent peace of the palace shattered when outsiders from another kingdom arrive to accept the sultan’s surrender and take over his land and people. Caught up in this political turmoil is Fatima’s closest friend Hassan, the sultan’s cartographer. Hassan isn’t just a cartographer, however—he’s also a magician, of sorts. He can draw maps to places he’s never been, or places that don’t exist, and make them real through his art. But when their lives are endangered by the outsiders and they must go on the run, Hassan’s gift becomes much more than a simple diversion. Desperate to survive, Fatima and Hassan decide to journey to the mythical island of the Bird King from one of their favorite stories, with the hope that if Hassan can draw them a way there, and they can survive long enough to reach it, they’ll be safe and free at last. The love Wilson has for cartography, history, and story is clear, gracing every page of The Bird King. By the end, you’ll also believe that Fatima and Hassan’s island is real, too.

The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig 

In the first novel of this YA duology, Nix is the daughter and a crewmate of her seafaring captain father, who sails them not just across the world, but also across time, and even reality itself. As long as he has a map to a place, he can steer their ship to it, even if his destination existed centuries ago, or only in fairy tales or myths. Nix has already followed her father for her entire life, but their journey grows dangerous when he draws closer the object of his obsession—a particularly special map that could lead him back to his long lost love, Nix’s mother—because if he does manage to obtain the map and sail them there, it might undo Nix’s existence. This is a swashbuckling romp through several maps and their places, both real and imaginary, but Nix’s complicated relationship with her father and her other crewmates—as well as the historical and geographic research the author completed in order to write the novel—makes this more than just a simple adventure story.

The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar

The Map of Salt and Stars takes place in two different timelines, one in our modern day and one within a fable set eight hundred years before that. In the ancient fable, young Rawiya runs away from home disguised as a boy, desperately seeking work to help her mother out of poverty. She’s taken in by a mapmaker who’s drawing a map of the entire world for the King of Sicily, and in his employ, sets off on an adventure across the Middle East and North Africa, encountering opportunities and dangers both real and mythical. 

In the present, a girl named Nour loses her father to cancer, devastating her and her mother, a cartographer who produces beautiful, strange maps entirely by hand. Nour’s mother decides to move their surviving family from New York back to Syria, where she presents Nour with a very special map just for her. Nour doesn’t understand its significance, but no sooner than they get settled, the political tension in the country turns violent. Nour and her sisters must flee across the same landscape that Rawiya traveled centuries earlier, encountering opportunities and dangers of their own, and drawing the two stories ever closer together, as Nour struggles to understand the secrets locked in her mother’s last work. The resonances between the two tales, as well as the poignant meaning behind the map gifted to Nour, beautifully highlight how maps are just as much about hope, people, and love as they are about land and distance.

Kraken by China Miéville 

Kraken is a delightfully strange, brilliant mash up of genres, myths, and stories, but in Miéville’s expert hand, it works. It all starts when Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, discovers that his museum’s Giant Squid—a creature roughly the size of a city bus—has somehow, impossibly, vanished from its tank without a trace overnight. He soon discovers that this isn’t merely a baffling theft, but actually the opening moves to an ancient war over the end of the world that has been brewing for centuries. Several dangerous, powerful, and mystical organizations are locked in an apocalyptic battle, and the giant squid turns out not to be a scientific specimen, but possibly a god in a religion that has existed since the dawn of time. This long-dead sea monster, or more precisely, its ink, could be the key to victory or destruction. 

When these forces all realize that Billy might know the location of the squid, he goes on the run, desperate to reach the squid, and maybe save the world, before his enemies can catch up. One of the most delightful scenes in the book is when several characters discover the trap streets of the popular “London A-Z” travel guide book. In the cartography industry, trap streets are roads secretly drawn into maps that don’t actually exist, to mark a work as unique to its maker. But in Kraken, they’re so much more—they’re real, and serve as hideouts where the various magical groups at war are able to escape and regroup safe from notice by the regular population of the city—but you can only reach them if you’ve got a map that shows the way.

Paper Towns by John Green

Paper Towns is a coming of age adventure about places and people who don’t exist. Set in a fictional subdivision in Orlando, Florida, the story follows a high school senior named Quentin, who’s always had a crush on his school friend, Margo. Margo surprises Quentin one night, just before graduation, by climbing in through his window the way she used to when they were young, and inviting him on an all-night dare to play pranks on some of their classmates who she believes have wronged her. Quentin is hopeful that something romantic might blossom between them—but it turns out that Margo vanished after that night, and hasn’t been seen since. 

Quentin is at first worried that Margo might be in danger, but he soon discovers that she left him a series of clues that might lead to her whereabouts. He and his friends set off together, following her clues to abandoned places from their youth, including a closed down strip mall, half-built and forgotten subdivisions, and even an entire nonexistent town. Quentin’s scavenger hunt is good fun, but the eeriness of the liminal spaces he visits—places that can be found on maps, or in city plans, or online, but not fully in the real world—is what makes this book special.

The City We Became by NK Jemisin

The City We Became may be set in New York City, but it’s just as fantastical, if not more so, than all of the other novels on this list. The map that accompanies this book at first looks like a simple tourist map of New York, with some doodles and notes in the margins. What are little monsters doing in Queens? Why is there a list of other similarly gigantic cities scribbled at the bottom? As one reads further, these doodles and notes turn out to mark key points in the book, and, true to form, map a path to follow through the story.

In Jemisin’s creation, cities start out as just cities, but if they survive long enough (on the order of centuries or millennia), they eventually come alive. And not in the metaphorical sense. Cities turn into living, breathing entities—embodied in a person. In New York’s case, each of the five boroughs creates their own human manifestation. But there’s another dark force out there, a power that destroys living cities in order to steal their energy—and it knows that New York is awake now. These five newly-born souls must find each other and figure out how to work together before their young lives, and fierce city, are extinguished.

The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

This last entry is sort of a stretch, because the map is actually a chessboard, but I still count it. A young art historian named Julia is hired to restore a 15th-century painting that depicts players locked a chess game. While working, she stumbles across an inscription hidden under the paint that asks, “who killed the knight?” After some investigation into the original artist and work, she discovers that the chess position in the painting is not just art, but rather a carefully constructed puzzle whose moves conceal a murder that happened centuries ago. Just as Julia starts digging, however, her friends begin to die, and someone begins sending her advice for chess moves based on the position of the pieces in the painting. Desperate to solve the mystery and save herself and the people she cares about, Julia turns to a chess genius to help her solve both mysteries before the end of the game catches up to her.

This is a dazzling, complicated mystery, but one of the most engrossing parts is all of the chess diagrams. As Julia and her friend attempt to play through the chess game in the painting to find the killers, Pérez-Reverte includes a picture of the board at every stage, much like a map, so readers can follow along. It’s thrilling to watch the pieces move from diagram to diagram, drawing ever closer to revealing their secrets.

How Do You Exist In a World that Sees You As Monster or Ghost?

Posted on by Jo Lou

In his debut collection The Gleaming of the Blade, Christian J. Collier resurrects a history that was never truly buried for the Black men whose lives continue to be shaped by its violence:

“Trauma

builds its monsters

from the bones of experience. Blood

records & remembers everything it survives.”

From persona poems that assume the perspective of Candyman to elegies that want again and again for an alternate ending, Collier’s collection draws from elements of horror to show how America made Black men into monsters in order to justify the atrocities committed against them.

Cast to play the role of monster or as ghost, the centuries of dehumanization experienced by the speakers in The Gleaming of the Blade raise the question: What would it look like to survive? I spoke with Collier over Zoom to find out.

Sam Risak: In your book, images of ghosts and monsters combine with violent descriptions of the body to depict the longstanding effects of intergenerational trauma. Given that trauma affects most—if not all—aspects of one’s life, you could have placed these ghosts within a variety of contexts. What made you decide to ground them back in the body?

Christian J. Collier: The body is a route or touchstone in my work. I’m always interested in what the body has the capacity to do, what hovers around the body, what happens to the body after the spirit vacates it. And while combing over the poems, once I paired them together, I realized they started to say different things about the ways that, specifically, a Black body is and is not seen in different capacities and environments. 

SR: Do you ever feel the South has been disproportionately targeted when it comes to conversations about race and white nationalism? That the region has become, in a sense, a scapegoat for issues that are happening on a national and international scale?  

A lot of our capacity to make it from one day into the next means that we not only have to be in absolute control of our emotions, but also how our emotions are perceived.

CC: It depends. For my book, much of it was inspired by real life, by things that actually happened to me. So it can’t be needlessly targeting the South when the South gave me these experiences. But outside of the work, I think it is easy to point to the South and see it a particular way. We look at George Floyd as a tipping point of what’s been dubbed the racial reckoning, and that that did not happen in the South. That not only produced protests all over the country, but all over the world. 

It is easy to lay these things on the South without interrogating the different components of the issue. And race is such a complicated issue, one that’s further complicated because we have never really been willing to collectively have an open and honest conversation about it.

SR: Your collection frequently interweaves the sacred with the monstrous. In your poem “Candyman Blues,” readers assume the persona of the iconic horror figure Candyman who describes how the brutality of others made him both their monster and god. Can you talk a little about this duality and how it might relate to the roles America has carved out for Black men? 

CC: In the Candyman film, you have this Black man who was really just the victim of the time. He’s a visual artist who ends up falling in love with a white woman. He’s brutalized and becomes a supernatural being who comes and murders you once you speak his name. There’s a lot to investigate there. His only crime was loving somebody that society said he could not love, and as a result of that was made into a monster. Nobody thought to question what to call the people who thrust this upon him. 

SR: In “When My Days Fill with Ghosts,” the names of the Black men that the speaker has lost are blacked out because—as I read it—the names that could fill those spots were too numerous to list. Pain then becomes a defining characteristic of the speaker’s reality, so much so that he grows afraid of losing it, “afraid of the release, of feeling empty if it all oceans out.” Seeing as poetry requires one to be vulnerable, I was wondering if you experienced such fear yourself. In writing this collection, you wrote against the stoic Black male stereotype; did you ever worry that, by doing so, you risked losing a sense of yourself?

When we look at horror films or films that deal with the future, you don’t see Black people there.

CC: That’s a good question, but no, not really. When I’m working on poems, I come at it from a perspective that I am essentially a director behind the camera, and I’m crafting a particular shot for whoever is on the other side of it. I want the audience to see and feel something very specific, but I also want to leave a little bit of room for them to walk around and fill in some of the blanks. I want them to feel a little bit of that tension. That danger. Because so much of that encapsulates the Black experience in America. A lot of our capacity to make it from one day into the next means that we not only have to be in absolute control of our emotions, but also how our emotions are perceived. And that’s a certain kind of pressure that your average white person doesn’t experience in their days. I wanted to put people in a seat, and if that’s a new experience for them, then I think that I’ve partially done my job. And the way that we get there is through that vulnerability and through wading into that emotion. 

And if I feel like I’ve ever gone too far, then that poem is probably not going to leave my computer. As much of my experience that I’m trying to bring into the work, I’m also trying to be cognizant of how that could potentially affect people outside of it.

In the poem you mentioned, “When My Days Fill with Ghosts,” one of the reasons that the identities are blocked out is because the people who’ve passed away can’t consent to being in the poem. So how do I preserve their identities? How do I respect that? How do I establish these boundaries? Poems aren’t journalism. Real life things can, and I think in a lot of cases should, inform the work, but they’re not the work. The work is the work. And maybe there is some emotional protection in that.

SR: Several other issues surrounding masculinity arise in the collection, including the hypersexualization of Black men. In “Induction,” the speaker is a bull who sought out by a white couple for sexual acts. While the fetishization in this poem is clear, its tone does not feel angry; in fact, it resolves with the speaker describing the experience as holy. How and why did you decide to end on such a note? 

CC: I don’t write in a linear fashion. I’m not sure if you are familiar at all with the artist Mark Bradford, but I got really big into his work in 2019. His process blew my head apart. I had an epiphany: all text is malleable. And once you have that idea, then everything is fair game. I’ll take poems that I’ve written or had published, and then I’ll completely remix them. I’ll gun them. And human beings, we’re hardwired for narrative. For instance, if I were to take this bottle of vitamins, and put it next to a rock, somebody’s going to walk by and be like: Well, I wonder why these two things are close together. What’s the story here? I like putting different things together because you’re building connections that you consciously would not. “Induction” was a result of that process. At some point, I was dealing with something sexual, and then the bull thing happened, and I was like, Oh, this is interesting. 

Another thing I’ve been trying to do is to incorporate more magic into my work. And once you introduce something that’s magical—be that God or prayer or a dead loved one—you can kind of go wherever you want because you’re no longer dealing in the linear world. So once God popped up [in “Induction”], I thought Well, how can I come back to the bull in an unexpected way? 

I started researching bull fights. At the end of the fight when the Bull has been slain, the arena is filled with all these roses. And in the poem it goes from “would you believe me if I said it was holy? While sinew & bedspring were pushed to near fracture, / she chanted the word God so many times, He hovered into the room, a pale flame with no shadows” to “Would you believe”—not would you believe me, but “Would you believe if I said, when we finished, the light vanished & / forty cut roses were bent in prayer on the carpet.” With that small removal of “me,” it becomes a matter of belief, period: Would you believe in this this divine entity? 

That gave me the chance to continue the bull imagery and also hearken back to the spirit. If I were consciously mapping it out, that would not have happened. And I figure, if it’s something that surprises me, there’s a good chance it might intrigue somebody else.

SR: The bull is one of many references to the monstrous in your collection; another appears in your final poem “Eulogy for Julius Gaw,” which is a nod to Friday the 13th Part VIII. What drew you to this work? To horror more broadly? What about the genre inspires you and what more would you like to see from it?

CC: The Friday the 13th film fascinated me for a number of reasons. For starters, a good part of it takes place in New York, which I think is interesting. But also, Julius is the only Black character in the film, and—I swear that they did not intend this to happen—but Julius ends up bucking that trend in, not just horror, but in Hollywood films, of the Black character being stupid, buffoonish. Cowardly. Julius realizes this is probably it for him on the rooftop. He is out of options, but he doesn’t try to run around Jason and get back down the stairs. Julius squares up. Only after he’s truly exhausted himself, does he look at Jason, and is like: Do what you have to do. I thought that that was such a bold move. I’m sure it went over the head, no pun intended, of most people who watched that film for over thirty years now, but I was just so taken by that. 

So that film was fascinating to me, but so are movies where Black characters just live at the end. Like in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you have the truck driver who stops, and then a woman runs out, and then so does Leatherface, and what does he do? He grabs a wrench, hits Leatherface in the face and runs and leaves the truck. And in 28 Weeks Later, there’s the Black character who flies the helicopter, trying to pick up the characters, and then the infected come, and he’s like, Get off my chopper. These are just little things that real Black people would probably do, but so often, when we look at horror films or films that deal with the future, you don’t see Black people there. We’ve been a part of the story the entire time, so why would we not be there and actively contributing? Our influence has been sewn into the fibers of America—be that through music or what’s cool or the dialect–and still you have those parents who are complaining about critical race theory; I mean, what’s the soundtrack to their kids going to school? It’s crazy to say that, deep into the 21st century, for Black people to be able to think and act their way out of a situation is profound. But I guess that’s what I’m looking for: a future where Black life exists.

7 Novels Set in the Literary World

Posted on by Jo Lou

At the risk of seeming obnoxiously obsessed with ourselves, writers and readers do tend to love books about writers and readers—especially when those fictional writers and readers behave badly. (It’s no wonder, really, why the Bad Art Friend discourse hit a nerve; so many people were frantic with empathetic outrage or gleeful schadenfreude.) 

A Novel Obsession by Caitlin Barasch

In my debut novel, A Novel Obsession, Naomi is an aspiring novelist and indie bookseller cultivating an obsession with her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, Rosemary, who just so happens to also be an editor at a major publisher. As her obsession escalates, Naomi uses their shared love of books to insert herself into Rosemary’s life—and, naturally, to use her as fodder for fiction——with inevitably disastrous consequences. (Bad Art Friends, indeed.)

If you, too, are fascinated by ruthlessly ambitious writer-types, I’ve compiled a list of books set at least partly in the literary world, featuring characters who will do whatever it takes—to find love, to get ahead (or to simply survive) in the industry, to make good art, and/or to lead a more novelistic life. Enjoy the voyeurism!

Last Resort by Andrew Lipstein

Caleb Horowitz, the 27-year-old narrator, is on the brink of achieving his wildest dreams—a life-changing book deal for his novel—when Avi Deitsch, an old college rival and the novel’s inspiration, gets his hands on it. Caleb is then forced to make a Faustian bargain, one that tests his theories of success, ambition, and the limits of art. The book is an often hilarious and ironic skewering of the literary world, and no one is spared. 

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

This book was the talk of the town last year, and for good reason! Just after 26-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers, tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books, welcomes Harlem-born and bred Hazel to the cubicle beside hers, a string of uncomfortable events occur. As Nella starts to spiral over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than just her career. In a brilliant critique of the publishing world’s dark side, The Other Black Girl is a dynamic thriller and a sly social commentary chockfull of twists and turns.

Must Love Books by Shauna Robinson

Nora Hughes—an overworked and underpaid editorial assistant at Parson Press—decides to moonlight for a rival publisher to make ends meet…and maybe poach some Parsons’ authors along the way. But when Andrew Santos, a bestselling Parsons author no one can afford to lose is thrown into the mix, Nora has to decide where her loyalties lie. This book is both a compelling love story and a wise, honest journey of self-actualization. 

Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli

Gripping, immersive, and haunting, Luiselli’s poetic debut follows a young mother in Mexico City attempting to write a novel about her experience working as a translator of a small indie press in New York. There’s a thrilling metafictional blur of fact and fiction as she attempts to piece together her past. Artistic obsession reigns supreme!

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

This list wouldn’t be complete without another literary romp from Emily Henry. In Book Lovers, our heroine, Nora, is a cutthroat literary agent who, according to Taylor Jenkins Reid, is a “fierce heroine who does not apologize for her ambition.” (Yes, please.) Because Nora spends all her time and energy focused on her clients, her beloved younger sister Libby convinces Nora to take a sisters’ trip together to North Carolina as a well-earned break from the demanding job. But then, of course, the publishing world catches up with her in the form of Charlie, a brooding editor from the city. As they continue encountering each other in a series of cheeky coincidences, what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Nearly a year after its publication, this book already feels like a canonical example of Writers Behaving Badly. Jacob Finch Bonner, our antihero, was once a promising young novelist but now struggles to write, let alone publish, anything decent. So after one of his students, Evan Parker, details the wildly compelling plot of the novel he’s working on—and then unexpectedly dies—Jacob steals the plot and writes the book himself. Literary fame quickly follows until, at the height of his successful new life, a terrifying and mysterious e-mail arrives, threatening to expose the source of his inspiration and upend his career. The twisty chaos that follows will blow your mind, as it did mine. Because my debut novel also features an ambitious (and desperate) novelist determined to write a book at all costs, I frequently found myself squirming in recognition while reading The Plot, which is truly the highest form of praise. 

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

So, hear me out: even though this book is largely set at a performing arts school, it also involves an absolutely explosive and thrilling novel-within-a-novel, thus earning it a spot on this list. In the second part of the book, when readers learn that the first part was actually an excerpt from the novel-within-the-novel, it challenges our preconceived notions—not only of the characters we’ve come to know, but also our perception of the ambiguous responsibilities a writer has to their subject, as well as the slippery nature of fiction, truth, and memory. Katy Waldman, in the incisive New Yorker piece “Who Owns a Story,” writes:

“the act of consuming fiction is itself a trust exercise, and Choi highlights how outrageous the novel is as a proposition: a transient agreement that one enters into with an author to pretend that bald fantasy is reality. Her book underscores our trust by breaking it.”

The book, then, ultimately becomes a story about storytelling. 

Modern Narratives of Black Love and Friendship Are Centering Iconic Trios

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Since the wildly popular HBO series Insecure wrapped at the end of 2021, I’ve been obsessed with a behind-the-scenes photograph on Instagram. It shows a dazzling trio—Issa, Molly, and Lawrence—standing side by side at Molly’s wedding. Issa is draped in a scarlet pleated dress, Molly wears a strapless wedding gown in the center, and Lawrence stands on the end in all black. It’s easy to imagine Issa standing in front of Molly, Molly shifting away from Lawrence, Issa migrating closer to him, and how their constant shuffling tells a complex story about Black friendships and love. 

Part of Insecure’s brilliance is seeing Issa, Molly, and Lawrence mess up—and put themselves and their relationships back together—season after season. Whether I’m binge-watching, or patiently waiting for the following week’s episode to air, serial storytelling activates my writer’s mind. When it’s all over, I get to step back and look at a show and figure out how it changed me. I get to ask: how did we get here? That Instagram picture may be one moment in Insecure’s fictional universe, but it has a literary function, too: it’s the show’s very own triptych, telling three distinct, yet intricately braided stories. I can’t help but think of Destiny O. Birdsong’s recently published novel Nobody’s Magic. 

Centering three Black women with albinism striving to make their way in the world, Nobody’s Magic is a triptych novel that uses form to expand its meaning. Like a triptych painting that features three images, each protagonist gets their own section. This format compresses the time in which readers engage the stories of Suzette, Maple, and Agnes. Each woman navigates desire, self-love, and belonging, while reclaiming narratives about her life. The power of the triptych is that it offers three experiences in addition to the fourth, which emerges when all three are viewed or read together. 

Traditionally, the panels of triptych paintings were held together with hinges to enable folding open or shut, and to support easy transport. They were placed on the tops of altars, often telling a story of a grand religious event like the birth of Jesus. As patrons’ eyes passed from one panel to the next, a narrative developed—one with a beginning, middle, and end. The hinge or crease of the painting clearly demarcated a pause, a moment to breathe and prepare to behold the next panel. I like to think of this demarcation as the threshold of change. Across the threshold of a triptych painting, color, shadow, and the images that those elements form, are manipulated to evoke discourse. Panel 1 speaks to Panel 2 speaks to Panel 3. But what are the panels saying to each other? And about what? Within triptych art—visual or literary—discourse revolves around the work’s central themes and crosses the threshold of change at least twice. The effect is thematic repetition. This repetition then illuminates the significance of some message or question.

In Nobody’s Magic, Suzette, Maple, and Agnes all contend with the distorted association between albinism and the magical; stereotypes that say their skin or eyes possess supernatural qualities. Agnes, for example, tries to darken her skin and alter the texture of her hair to gain a kind of physical protection that will shield her from the backlash of being othered. “And the questions they posed, first about her race and, when she told them, her condition, triggered a silent mortification that surged through her body like a riptide, shifting the center of gravity in every room.” In each section of the novel, these stereotypes are interrogated to reveal their harmful imprints, yet we don’t dwell in any trauma narratives, though repetition can lead us into such tricky territory. Always, the protagonist and her self-perception pull focus. 

The Insecure triptych displays a static connection that comes to life in the show. In Season 4, Episode 8 of Insecure—my favorite episode—we see the fluidity of their connectedness. In this episode, Issa and Lawrence unpack the reasons behind their breakup. The episode opens with Lawrence returning from San Francisco where he’d been interviewing for jobs. At the airport he bumps into Molly, whose disastrous vacation with her then-boyfriend Andrew has come to a tense end. Molly and Lawrence exchange pleasantries and then, moments later, Lawrence texts Issa to ask if she’s free to meet up. The transition is smooth and has an ombre effect. Just as colors blend gradually to form a new hue, the scene takes us from one panel of the show’s triptych painting into the next. At dinner, Lawrence tells Issa about running into Molly. He describes the encounter as “awkward.” Issa says, “Yea, probably because we’re not friends anymore.” Even when the show is focused on Issa and Lawrence, Molly haunts the periphery. She is essential to the overall narrative, waiting just on the edge to alter it.

When it’s all over, I get to step back and look at a show and figure out how it changed me. I get to ask: how did we get here?

After five seasons, seeing Issa, Molly, and Lawrence celebrate and achieve many of their aspirations brought about, in me, a new level of earned TV satisfaction—earned, because it did not arrive without its fair share of heartbreak. Insecure reminds us that sometimes your mess blows up so you can assess the wreckage, then rebuild.

In the case of Agnes in Nobody’s Magic, we see a woman who lingers among the debris of the proverbial house (her choices) that has fallen on her. Agnes, a woman with multiple degrees who dreams of a life where she is appreciated and loved, struggles to achieve economic stability. The treatment of Black women in the labor market parallels the degradation she experiences with intimate partners and family members. “Suddenly, she felt exhausted from the obscene amount of work involved with managing other people’s feelings and not being courageous enough to tend to her own.” How does one find refuge from their suffering when door after door closes in their face? Birdsong exposes the humiliating side of rejection, and expertly depicts how that humiliation might lead someone to ignore the internal voice telling them they deserve better.

Insecure reminds us that sometimes your mess blows up so you can assess the wreckage, then rebuild.

Insecure not only disrupted harmful TV industry barriers that limited the presence of Black creatives in front of and behind the camera, but also employed storylines that illustrated lessons on how Black millennials might lean into our talents, and bet on ourselves. It showed us failing, resetting, achieving. Take Issa’s career trajectory: She gradually ascends from a dejected nonprofit worker to a self-assured creative curator. Molly, on the other hand, finds her career lane earlier, taking a challenging role at a Black-led law firm where she struggles to strike a healthy balance between work and personal life. Then there’s Lawrence, who finds his footing within the tech industry after a long season of unemployment. If Issa, Molly, and Lawrence had all stumbled along the same path, Insecure would have fallen flat for viewers. Thankfully we got something more nuanced.

Insecure builds on the tradition of shows like Living Single and Girlfriends by centering Black friendships from the perspectives of young, gifted, and Black characters. Where Insecure differs is in its depiction of its generation: as millennials, Issa, Molly, and Lawrence navigate their lives with a vigorous drive to make new lanes for Black folks, while leveraging technology and diverse social networks. I envision the next phase of this ever-evolving Black media canon to capture broader conceptions of Blackness, including people with albinism, who are woefully underrepresented in media. 

As millennials, Issa, Molly, and Lawrence navigate their lives with a vigorous drive to make new lanes for Black folks.

In my search for triptychs by Black artists, I found Carrie Mae Weems’ Untitled (Black Love), 1999/2001, featured at the Studio Museum of Harlem. In this piece, three humans stand in front of windows. They look out, or in, or into each other. These photographs tell a story of two people before, after, and during an intimate encounter. In the final panel, they embrace, and their silhouettes emanate, for me, desire fulfilled. When I try to look at each panel individually, I find my gaze being pulled to the images right there. Their proximity is irresistible. 

For a while I struggled with Lawrence’s place in the referenced photograph because it forced me to think about the show in terms of a shared spotlight, and not one that Issa solely dominated. I was willing to concede the show boiled down to Issa and Molly. But Issa, Molly, and Lawrence? His character always felt like a mechanism for exploring hardship rather than a vehicle for enlightenment. But if I view this photo, in which Issa rests on Molly’s shoulder while Molly’s hand cradles the base of Issa’s back and Lawrence intertwines his hand with Molly’s, as one possibility for how to make sense of the show, especially in its final season, I see a story about how relationships require intricate support systems, and how the hardship that Lawrence represents is integral to that overall picture. Relationships take time to build. They evolve, and evolution is not a standalone phenomena. 

Relationships take time to build. They evolve, and evolution is not a standalone phenomena.

In Nobody’s Magic, the triptych form asks readers to consider how works of art can resist the idea that there can only be one. While the novel introduces us to three women with albinism, their family structures, socioeconomic status, and desires all differ. There is no singular narrative because there is no singular way for a person with albinism to be. Just as there is no such thing as a Black monolith. By situating the protagonists among other Black folk, the novel asks: when do we consider Blackness at the intersection of albinism? Not often enough. And, as the title proclaims, dispel the notion that anyone can possess another’s uniqueness or self-defined power. I’m amazing because I am. In another scenario we might have been reading a long novel about Agnes or Maple, but Birdsong—whose poetry collection Negotiations was published in 2020—gives us three arresting tales about what happens when Black women take matters into their own hands. In this way, expectations about narrative dominance are shattered.

By the novel’s final pages, I flipped back to Suzette and Maple’s sections to understand how the three stories all come together. Shreveport, Louisiana – their primary stomping ground – shines brightly as a focal point, as does Birdsong’s interweaving of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). When Suzette must try harder than ever before to figure out why the relationships in her life keep making seismic shifts, she says, “Everybody was acting a fool, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do aside from going off on folks. But I was tired of all that. They just needed to let me live. Didn’t nothing else have to change.” Here, language magnifies time and place, crystallizes connections between people, and cuts through any veneer of how people are supposed to sound when they speak.

While Suzette, Maple, and Agnes face stigma and rejection, they also experience pleasure, love, and fierce intimacy with people who act as mirrors in a world set on casting out those who are different. Birdsong’s experimentation with form disrupts ideas about what can be accomplished in the space of a novel, and whose story that novel can be. She gives other debut novelists permission to paint beyond the edge of the canvas.

Imagination, Reality, and Two Very Different Americas

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Qian Julie Wang’s debut memoir Beautiful Country is a compelling and intimate portrait of  an undocumented childhood. Much like Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, we are carried into the heart and mind of a child: this time, a young, undocumented girl in 1990s New York City who shows us an America that is not quite as it imagines itself to be. For little Qian Qian and her parents, each day is a battle for survival from fears and threats both internal and external, real and imagined. 

Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang

With clarity and honest intimacy, Wang’s writing allows us to experience her childhood, taking us to the warm, familial, but constricted confines of her early years in North China, where she was born. We meet her father and mother, two struggling academics longing to raise their young daughter in a place like America, which they imagine to be a place of opportunity, streets paved in gold. With seven-year-old Qian, we discover the cold and hungry realities of being hei, the Chinese term for being undocumented, living fearfully in the shadows of invisibility and poverty. We sit with her and her mother in a Manhattan sweatshop, where little Qian snips threads from clothing her mother has sewn; we smell the stench of rotting fish as we enter a wet and freezing sushi-processing basement, where they sort through fish by hand; we feel the cold squelch of dirty water in Qian’s too-big boots. The fear in her stomach as she navigates the terrifying new world of New York City: constantly afraid of arrest and deportation, she dodges police officers and city workers bearing free food that her empty belly yearns for. 

Reading Beautiful Country as a former undocumented immigrant, I cried and laughed alongside the familiarly deep, endless valleys and small, triumphant peaks of Wang’s years of fear and hiding in New York. In a wide-ranging conversation over Zoom, Qian Julie and I talked about the dangers and blessings of imagination while growing up undocumented, and the emerging canon of undocumented immigrant literatures. 

Jill Damatac: In your book, you often contrast how the American Dream—or what I like to call the American Imagination—actually compares to reality, and that there’s that dissonance: when you were a little girl in China, you heard from family members that America was this land with gold-paved streets. And then you get to America. And as a hungry child, all you can think about is all of the food you ate till you were full in China. But actually, in reality, neither of those things are quite true. Can you talk to me about how the shock of that contrast—what you imagined versus what was real—shaped you into the person you are now, and how it’s shaped your parents, too? 

Qian Julie Wang: Before we left, there were two different Americas painted for me, one paved with gold—and I remember hearing that and thinking, does everyone wear, like, shades and sunglasses everywhere? Because that’s going to be really bright!–and then there’s this other image of everyone just starving and lining the streets, begging for money and fighting over food. And they were, to my mind, equally possible worlds. 

But because what we had been told to expect on both ends was very different from what we faced, and because my parents changed almost overnight, I could not trust anything. I was like, nothing anybody told me to expect is actually happening. I can’t trust what people tell me. I just have to be in control at all times. Take all the cues for myself and just be ready to act, and act perfectly at all instances, because I could not afford mistakes

[My parents] know what I was like before we moved. And so often now, my father tells me to relax. My mom says I’ve faced too much as a child, so now I don’t know how not to work. And it’s true. I don’t know when to stop. I can’t stop. In many ways, even though I’ve slowed down a little bit, it’s very hard for me. And she so wants that child back or wants to preserve that childhood for a bit longer. And that guilt follows her: who would I be today, if we had stayed in China longer, or forever? There’s no telling, but I think that’s it. She carries it with her that maybe I could have lived an easier life if they had made the decision differently. 

JD: One of the things that floored me the most was the contrast between how you saw your mom. At first, you saw your mom in China as this joyful, loving, warm, happy person. And in America, you saw her as this tired, ill, overworked, neglected wife and mother. And it turned out she had this huge plan underfoot this whole time. How did that reshape the way you saw her?

The two selves I had: one that had originally been in me and the other that had been forged in the need to survive.

QJW: I was shocked, because for all of our years in America, she had, to my mind, become my child, even though I didn’t, of course, consciously think it that way. But I was like, “My mother comes to me with questions. I make decisions for her––sometimes very bad decisions!––but I am the person in control. She is not in control. She is not capable of doing something like this.” And yet, here she is in a car outside my school with all of our stuff packed: “I found a way for us to become documented.” And I’m like, “What? We did not run this through me. But let’s just humor her, because she really needs my support, because she really thinks is going to work.” 

And the next day, driving to Canada, I was like, “Oh, this is really complicated. We have documents. It’s a heist. She had a safe house. We got to the border and I expect to jump into my translating. That’s my job, to manage everything. Make sure my mother doesn’t say the wrong thing. And they’re just like, “Go sit over there” and I think, “What? No, I’m in charge. You talk to me. Don’t bully her. If you want to yell, yell at me.” 

And for the first time, I remembered what it was like in China when my mother just told me what to do, I did it, and everything was good. You know, it was two battling selves. The two selves I had: one that had originally been in me and the other that had been forged in the need to survive. They were fighting with each other before coming to a stalemate of “Let’s just see what happens.” 

But time and again, [my mom] kept showing up: she went and got a decently paying job. Almost immediately, she found a house. I’m like, “You didn’t even let me go visit the house with you, to make sure it’s inhabitable.” I was left out, no longer in any sort of control, but still worrying about things. And that worry has very much stayed with me to this day. 

JD: Your book is going to be in the Library of Congress, if it’s not there already. You’re going to be in university and high school curriculums, and there will be kids growing up reading this book. Let’s talk about who you are now: you’ve grown into a love for this country, for America. Beautiful Country isn’t just a memoir of your undocumented childhood. There are people out there who take offense at your book, who see you as unpatriotic, and “You’re ungrateful, and you don’t love this country, and if you don’t like it, get out.” 

But as lots of us know, patriotism takes many forms, and one of them is loving your country enough to want to make it better. To criticize it as a way of making it better. I think your book does exactly what it says on the tin: it is about a beautiful country whose beauty lies in the potential of its people. And in your eyes, America can be beautiful, but only if it faces its own faults first. As someone who has lived in great poverty and has since built a successful life for herself, could you tell me how you think Beautiful Country exposes the imagined exceptionalism of America? 

QJW: I think my story, though singular in detail, shares the very common immigration journey of coming here with stars in our eyes and then seeing that this country––though built by slaves and immigrants––is not really for people of color or immigrants. It currently does not think about immigrants; its health care system and its educational system––the very basic, fundamental poles of  our society––does not consider immigrants.

It’s very comparable how humans evolve and how countries evolve. Neither can grow until they face the stark truth. Until you can embrace everything about yourself, every mistake, every horrible thing you’ve done, every good thing you’ve done–”This is what I’ve done but it does not define me, it was what I did, but I can choose to do things differently”––until you have the safety to do that as a nation or as one person, you will not be able to make different choices, because you remain stuck replicating the subconscious patterns of your past. 

For a long time, I was stuck re-creating the conditions that were handed to me, which was to not let anyone get too close, to manufacture a reality and a version of myself. America has done that for so long. It would like to believe itself to be something that does not yet exist.  And as long as it pretends that it’s already there, it’s never actually going to get there, which is what all of us want. It’s going to take some really hard work to get there, but the starting point is just being honest and examining those cracks. Yes, America did this, this, and this poorly, but those things do not need to define what America is, presently or going forward. And so, I think that if our nation could think about things in that way, our political discourse, our social discourse would be so much more constructive and would bring us closer to that version of America that we all want. Why wouldn’t we all want to live in the country so many claim America to be? 

JD: These ideas shaped the work that you’ve chosen to focus on as an attorney, and that philosophy has kind of infused itself in the book. How did you decide to do what you’re doing now as an attorney? 

QJW: Well, it was really a mirror of that journey. I went into corporate and commercial litigation, because I wanted to pretend that I was someone different who didn’t have this background, and I wanted to pretend that our country was better than it was. Before I went into commercial litigation, I actually interned at Legal Aid, legal services and public interest organizations. And when I saw the reality of what people were still going through, people like me decades later, still dealing with the very same barriers, it hurt. It was hard to see, and it made me feel incredibly guilty and defensive. How dare I live in my house with my books and shoes and handbags when this was still happening? 

It’s very comparable how humans evolve and how countries evolve. Neither can grow until they face the stark truth.

And so I did what a lot of Americans do, which is run away and pretend: “OK, so I’m going to be in this pretty world, this rich world where those things don’t happen. It’s not part of my day-to-day. I don’t need to think about it.” But that can only hold for so long, especially for someone with my background, because I couldn’t go outside without seeing an immigrant child sifting through the trash with her mother. I saw that on my way to work, and as long as our society is the way it is now, I’m always going to run into some reflection of my past life, and it makes me feel incredibly guilty and ashamed for having run away and refusing to be part of the solution. So in the process of writing and editing this book and putting it out into the world, I learned to embrace what I just talked about, which is that I really need to get comfortable and accept the fact that our country is just not there yet. 

What guides me now is thinking about that day that I’m on my deathbed. I don’t want to have any regrets. And looking back, if I have spent my whole life running away from reality and just living in this constructed bubble of “Everything’s fine, I serve the rich people of our country and everything’s fine and dandy, and I’m doing very well and everyone else is doing well, there’s no inequality,” I will not be able to die in peace. And that’s in many ways my self-serving guidance. I feel a moral imperative to push for progress and make inroads whenever possible. And my book is very much about reaching the reachable. I’m aware that a lot of people who most need to read my book will never read it. They may burn it. They may ban it. But any step toward progress is a step closer to living in the country we all deserve. 

JD: You’re building an imagined world into reality. How do you feel about being part of this emerging canon of undocumented memoirs? There’s been a nice buildup over the past decade or so of memoirs written by lots of different kinds of undocumented immigrants. And no one’s experience is similar to anyone else’s. 

QJW: It’s beautiful! I mean, I would not have found the courage to do this without Jose (Antonio Vargas, author of Dear America) and Karla (Cornejo Villavicencio, author of The Undocumented Americans). Jose wrote that essay in the New York Times magazine in 2011 (“My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant”). I was a 2L at Yale Law School on a student visa, then. Very privileged. And yet when I saw his essay and an interview with him, I was like, “Oh my God, he’s so brave.” Just the thought of me sharing that––that I had been undocumented in the past––had me shaking. It was his present! He has made himself so vulnerable to political attacks, to deportation, to everything. And it was so inspiring for me that he could dare to do that. And that was when the seed really was planted in my head: “If he can do it, what are you complaining about? You should be able to put this out there.”

But I had a lot of inner work to do before I could get there, and then of course, Karla’s book came out and focused not just on Dreamers, but on blue collar workers––the frontline workers of our society who are just ignored. And seeing how many people out there are still so impacted by the limits of our immigration system just gave me that final kick to send my story out into the world. 

JD: I think what we’ll probably see is there will be more and more of us [undocumented] authors over time. It’s an honor to be a part of it––I’m kind of in your shoes that it’s not something I have to worry about anymore, but I still feel like I have to somehow protect my parents because they’re still there. But at the same time, I know that if anything’s going to change, the book has to happen. 

Do you have any advice for memoir writers of color? Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote My Struggle, six autobiographical novels about himself. In his 30s! For memoir writers of color, we face a different challenge, in that the way we represent ourselves in the world, we apologize, repress our feelings, we code switch a lot. And sometimes it’s hard to get past that, that code switching tendency when we’re writing our memoir. Any advice on how to represent yourself? 

QJW: We really have to know who we are and stand firm in that, because if we don’t, the world will tell us what to be and what to do. And that is really dangerous. We have to be able to say to ourselves, “I experienced what I experienced, I felt what I felt. And I wrote what I wrote,” and have that be enough; not to justify, not to have to pivot. And as you say, to not code switch, to not to have to explain or apologize or say, “I’m grateful for everything. I’m thanking you for letting me be alive.” Finding that firmness, that foundation of self-determination, is so necessary for anyone going into this field, but particularly for a person of color, for those from marginalized communities, because you will just receive that much more hate and anger. You have to just know that you are doing this because it is important. We are defying systemic barriers that want to keep us silenced, that want to hide our stories. Being a writer of color is an act of defiance. It’s important to remember that. Remember why we came in, remember that we are enough, that we don’t need to apologize.