With this note, I’m inviting all of you, our generous, thoughtful Electric Literature readers, to come with me on a small monthly sojourn. Starting today, I’ll be sending a monthly “from the editor’s desk” letter. The general purview is quite broad; topics will include anything from my pop-culture musings to my take on the latest discourse sweeping literary Twitter, to a recent book I’m loving, or illuminating the behind-the-scenes of our editorial thinking at EL. I’m excited to share this with you.
Just in case anyone is unaware, my name is Denne Michele Norris, and I’m the third Editor-in-Chief of Electric Literature, and the first Black, openly transgender woman to lead a major U.S. literary publication. I’m thrilled to be here, thrilled to contribute my vision to this amazing, boundary-breaking journal.
I am as much an editor as I am a writer—I think this job cements it—and that I am passionate about this duality.
I’m coming up on a decade post-MFA, and this entirely made-up benchmark has been, as the kids might say, living rent-free in my head. I keep asking myself: am I where I wanted to be—where I thought I might be—as a writer and person? After a decade of part-time and volunteer editorial work, I have my first full-time job in the literary sphere, a goal I’d set for myself (in rather vague terms) when I made the decision to make a serious attempt at “being a writer.” So that’s a yes, right? I also thought I’d have published two books by now, because in my youth it seemed so easy to sit down and just write a novel. So that must make it a no? The answer is complicated, one of those “both/and” situations my therapist is so fond of mentioning. What’s become clear, though, is that I am as much an editor as I am a writer—I think this job cements it—and that I am passionate about this duality.
But the reason I bring this up is far greater than those reflections. Last week, I noticed a few tweets reviving the ever-popular MFA discourse. The tweet that set this round off recounted a first-semester male student in a prestigious MFA program describing a female second year’s story as “competent.” I felt the dismissiveness of this comment in my bones, and what emerged was a long-hidden memory from my own MFA.
During my first workshop at Sarah Lawrence, on one of my stories (later published by Awst Press and nominated for a Pushcart), a classmate—a young white woman—advised me to let the reader know upfront that my characters were Black. The story in question was about 20 pages long, and the first time I mentioned race was around page 10. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t thought I’d needed to, but I sat silent, ferociously scribbling my notes while my classmates talked around me. The story didn’t center race as a plot point, so it seemed strange to me that she had assumed the characters were white. But the critique was widely supported, both by my (white) professor, and the other students in the class—though afterward, the lone additional Black student approached me and advised me to ignore this criticism. She literally waved it away, as though it was nothing more than a nuisance.
Over the next few days, my white classmate’s critique continued to bother me. I began to understand it. My characters had Eurocentric names. Race didn’t play a part in the plot. I hadn’t mentioned hip-hop, or soul food, or any other easy—and often lazy—signifier of Blackness. I saw how a white reader might assume they were reading about white characters and then be jarred by the rather innocuous revelation that the family at the center of the story was a Black family living in a mostly white small town. I had not, by the way, intended this to be any kind of dramatic revelation. I had simply written a moment when a Black character acknowledged shared Black experience to another Black character.
What continued to baffle me about this moment was that I was sitting right there in the same classroom, at the same table, with my brown skin and kinky, dread-locked hair. Was I invisible? Was it—upon seeing me, indeed knowing me personally—so inconceivable that I might assume the centrality of people who looked like me in the context of my own writing, if not the larger world?
I had simply written a moment when a Black character acknowledged shared Black experience to another Black character.
That critique sent me into a spiral about how, and if, as a fiction writer, I should even attempt to write Black and queer characters. My takeaway from that workshop was that unless the plot was actively dependent on their Blackness or queerness, there was no value—only confusion and complication—in deviating from the white, cis-het norm. I turned to faculty and fellow students to find the most articulate ways of asking for guidance around this conundrum, one which no one else in my cohort appeared to be facing. I wondered: how could I incorporate my identity into the art I was desperate to create in a way that added value—rather than detracted from it? Were the nuances of the person I was merely potential plot devices, devoid of their own inherent value?
I’m grateful for two of my classmates, Nicole Dennis-Benn and Ursula Villarreal-Moura, both just a few years wiser than I, who pushed me to write characters who were undeniably non-white and non-straight. They read my writing assuming my characters were “raced,”—though I hadn’t intentionally “raced” them—because of the worldview they brought to my work. In their eyes, I found my freedom on the page. Ursula even referred me to VONA, a writers workshop and vast community that exists solely for writers of color. I took a summer workshop there, and came away understanding the value of my own visibility.
How could I incorporate my identity into the art I was desperate to create in a way that added value—rather than detracted from it?
I think of visibility now, as a Black woman of the trans experience, who occupies a role of some influence in her chosen industry. We tell young writers to look at the masthead of the publications where they might consider sending their work. Look at who the editors are, we say. Are there any visible POC? Queer folks? We give them this advice because we want them to have the opportunity to be read, evaluated, and published, by people who will see them as central—at the very least within the context of their own work—as opposed to marginal. Literature is an exercise in imagination, and it’s in that imagination that we get to lay the groundwork for the future that we want. And I want a future where no writer ever has to look at their skin color, or who they love, or the country they come from, and wonder if there is value in writing themselves onto the page. I am the Editor-in-Chief of Electric Literature, and I’m here to tell you that we are not sitting silent in the classroom any longer.
Warmly,
Denne Michele Editor-in-Chief, Electric Literature
Books and tattoos have one major thing in common: ink. Maybe that’s why book-lovers like getting literary tattoos so much. A few weeks ago, I asked our social media followers to send us their literary tattoos. I expected ten, maybe twenty responses. Instead, we got over 250. 250! Our feed was all skin and ink for days. There were so many great tattoos that it was hard to narrow it down for this piece, but ultimately these tattoos stood out in particular against a sea of (over 250) other pieces.
Below, you’ll find some of our favorite pieces, along with the artist’s information and further information about the tattoos from contributors. If you want to take a look at all of the other amazing tattoos (there are so many), check out the original thread here.
Langston Hughes
“My son is named Langston, after the poet. So, I got a tattoo with ‘Dreams’ by Langston Hughes. I’m all about making sure whatever his dreams are come true. (He’s 3 so we aren’t quite sure what those dreams are yet, but I’m sure one day he’ll tell us).” —@ericsmithrocks
“I always wanted a book tattoo but never wanted to commit to one book—I love ‘em all! This design was off of a tote bag I received from Avid Reader Press when they first opened their imprint. I thought it would look dope as a set.” —@BiblioReckah
“This beautiful stick-and-poke is an interpretation of Phillis Wheatley‘s iconic lithograph. She was a true genius in every sense of the word, as well the first Black poet to be published in North America. This tattoo reminds me that I am possible because of her keen mind and enduring heart.” —@NatashaOladokun
Wayside School written by Louis Sachar and illustrated by Adam McCauley
“My brothers and I all read theWayside School series in the fourth grade, and I’ve been telling them for decades that I was going to get a potato tattoo on my ankle like Calvin does in one of the books. It’s a little more elaborate than Calvin’s, but my potato plant has three potatoes, one for each of us siblings.” —@JanineZeeCheng
“Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allen Poe, illustrated by W. Heath Robinson
“The artwork is from a collection of Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry illustrated by W. Heath Robinson. This piece was created for ‘Annabel Lee’, which was one of my favourite poems to read when I was younger.” —@savetheblooms
Angels in America by Tony Kushner & Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Angels in America tattoo:
“My heart stopped when I was 20, leaving me dead for six minutes. The appearance of the angel to Prior Walter in Angels In America has always resonated to me as someone who should have died but didn’t, and my subsequent struggle to find meaning in that.”
“It’s the first line from Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Halltrilogy (hence the Tudor emblem). I began the series at the start of the pandemic, and sinking into a character’s mind so fully, so vividly, kept me from coming to pieces during the nightmare of 2020. It was an achingly human thing to lose myself in a time so distant but so like our own, with its plagues, tragedies, loves, rivalries and resonant, tenacious hearts.”
“I started reading Love and Rockets in the ’90s—it’s one of the few series where the characters actually age in real time and I always related to Maggie, especially to her insecurities (not to mention that I think she was the first bisexual character I ever saw in fiction!) I liked this panel in particular because it reminded me of Roy Lichtenstein and I felt like it was kind of reclaiming that image for comic books.” —@wordnerdy
Bread & Jam for Frances by Russell and Lillian Hoban
“I have the bread and jam from the endpapers of Bread & Jam for Frances by Russell and Lillian Hoban. My daughter Josie has Frances. Why? Because the book is hilarious, suspenseful, warmhearted, and it contains the greatest lunch in all of children’s literature. When Josie was 16 we saw an exhibit about the Hobans’ work at the Beinecke Rare Book Library and Josie started asking if we could get matching Frances tattoos when she turned 18. I figured she’d stop asking by then. But nope. Josie found the lovely artist, Ocean Gao.” —@MarjorieIngall
“It’s a monogram of the letters A-Z and numbers 0-9. Barring some special characters, every book I’ve ever read is in that tattoo and that’s why it means so much to me.” —@ewwwheather
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
“We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson is one my favourite books and I’ve always identified with the character of Merricat a bit too much, so it was only fair that I permanently imprint her into my skin to keep with me forever.” —@merricalico
“The tattoo is from the Beatrix Potter book The Tailor of Gloucester. My mom was an artist who drew the original sketch and the tattoo is meant to honor her and her artwork and my grandmother, who inspired my love of reading.” —@ClaireRoehl
“This was my first tattoo; at the time I was very young and felt helpless and hopeless about the rest of my life looming ahead of me. The line of dialogue this comes from is in The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith when Carol says to Therese, “You’re about as weak as this match…But given the right conditions you could burn a house down, couldn’t you?” I got it to remind myself that even if I felt helpless, I wasn’t.” —@ghost_dyke
“My tattoo a tribute to The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper. I incorporated the mistletoe and hawthorn that are part of key moments in the books, and used a “flame-colored” dahlia to represent the Sign of Fire from the books, along with the inscription from that sign: Liht Mec Heht Gewyrcan.” —@shadowkatie
In Shruti Swamy’s lyrical debut novel, The Archer—a coming of age narrative set in 1960s and 1970s Bombay—Vidya’s formative years are upended when her mother disappears. However, once Vidya discovers the classical dance form Kathak, it becomes her life’s focus, an obsession that lasts even after she leaves for college and falls in love. In The Archer, Vidya grapples with universal questions—can one be devoted to both art and family? Can one transcend a flawed family legacy?
Author Shruti Swamy is a Kundiman fiction fellow, a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, the winner of two O. Henry awards, and the recipient of numerous residencies and grants. Her debut short story collection, A House Is a Body, was shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.
Swamy and I spoke recently by phone and discussed writing about motherhood, publishing during the pandemic, and Swamy’s lifelong love of libraries. This conversation has been edited and condensed.
DeirdreSugiuchi: In The Archer, Vidya becomes obsessed with Kathak, a dance form that had a rebirth in post-colonial India. How did you become interested in Kathak? What made you focus on this time period? The world you built feels seamless. How did you conduct research?
Shruti Swamy: I was born and raised in America. My parents both grew up in Bombay in the 1960s and ’70s, and they left at the end of the ’70s for America. The time and place have been fomenting in my imagination since I was born.
I watched Hindi movies that were set in Bombay and made in the ’60s and ’70s—there were real city streets in the background. I heard stories from my parents, from my relatives. I visited Bombay, Mumbai now. It’s really different from the time I was writing about but it felt mythical and beautiful and romantic and familiar in a way that I wanted to keep exploring.
My mom is a classically trained Kathak dancer. She stopped performing by the time that I entered the age of memory. I’ve never really seen her dance. But there was always that kind of ambient in my household, beautiful pictures of my mother performing, books, and Indian classical music around the house. My dad is an Indian classical musician, trained in both North Indian and South Indian music. He plays the Bansuri, which is a bamboo flute, and he also sings. I grew up in, in retrospect, a beautiful, very rich environment of classical music and dance.
I find Kathak thrilling because, while there are narrative aspects to the dance, there’s also parts that are completely non-narrative, focused on the really rhythmic, intense, precise footwork and really fast, sharp, beautiful turns that felt kind of modernist, pre-narrative, pre-language. As a writer who’s always grappling with language and narrative, it was thrilling to be able to be in another art form that could transcend those limitations.
DS: The legend of Eklavya (a master archer who cuts off his own thumb to please his Guru Drona) is central to The Archer. Did you grow up hearing that story?
SS: There are these comic books called Amar Chitra Katha— my dad would stock up on them when we went to India—that depict these stories from Hindu mythology and Indian history. Some are plainly didactic stories, like Dharma trumps all. But even within that, there’s so much complexity, moral ambiguity.
Eklavya was always a story that I grappled with. I couldn’t understand how if you were a teacher, if you were a guru, that you would not respect your student. Many of the Hindu myths that have been troubling to me, I’ve had long conversations about with my mom, who is a feminist. She’s offered me a different reading on them. I got the ability to look at different angles of the story in part through those conversations.
DS: One of the themes you address is being a woman and a mother in a world which is rapidly changing.
SS: The beginnings of this book came from these stories I was hearing about my family and just imagining that world, but as I went deeper in, I realized what was sustaining my interest in the story was that it was a way of looking at questions that were pertinent to my own life, though the pressures on Vidya are different than the pressures on me.
How to lead a good life and have art at the center of your life? These are questions that I was grappling with as I was writing the book and still am.
Vidya’s very passionate about dance, but she’s not quite sure of how to make a life of art and what that looks like. Not even just in a way that’s fulfilling societal expectations of herself, but how to be a person in the world and make a life of art? How to be a woman in the world? How to lead a good life and have art at the center of your life? These are questions that I was grappling with as I was writing the book and still am, as I think about what our obligations are to each other. To me, that’s really what this book is about, and it explores it in a really specific time and place, and specific cultural expectations and demands, but also it feels, in some ways, close to my experiences in this other time and place.
DS: Vidya’s mother suffers from postpartum depression. There aren’t many depictions of postpartum depression in literature. What inspired you to write about postpartum depression?
SS: Early on when I was writing, I read a really sad New York Times article about a mother who committed suicide by jumping off the top of her building with her child in her arms. Studies show that you’re more likely to experience postpartum depression if you don’t have any child care, if you’re the only parent taking care of a newborn, and you don’t feel like you have a lot of emotional or physical labor support, that that really predisposes you to experience postpartum depression. I think of (postpartum depression) as a societal failure rather than an individual problem. It seems to me, if you were taking care of a child, a newborn baby, and you’ve just given birth, it’s very easy to imagine how somebody could quickly lose all sense of self and perspective and maybe even joy.
There’s other things going on with Vidya’s mother. This whole book, in some ways, is an acknowledgement about the complexity of motherhood and the things that are harder to talk about. This is also a book about a child who has been profoundly failed by both her parents and how that impacts her. I was thinking about it more broadly as what it means to be a mother and what it means to fail as a mother.
DS: I grew up in the Mississippi Delta and early on recognized how the caste structure of India and the deep South are similar. Can you discuss writing about caste and class structure?
I think of postpartum depression as a societal failure rather than an individual problem.
SS: Yeah, it was totally terrifying, but I wanted to tell the truth as I have observed and read about and researched. I also have to acknowledge that I’m American, and I wanted to be sensitive to my position.
I’ve had conversations with people where they’ve been like, “Oh, I didn’t know somebody could be poor and Brahmin,” about Vidya. At the beginning of the book, Vidya’s family is pretty much on the brink of poverty but she is in a position of privilege because she’s Brahmin, and that is something that is invisible to her.
There’s some characters I wanted to pay attention to, but I didn’t want to write outside of my experience. I didn’t want to purport to tell anybody else’s story, but I wanted to make sure that those characters were humans and that I, as the writer, looked at them and saw that those were human people doing these acts of labor.
DS: With the opening, you use language to convey a distance between Vidya and her mother. What were your decisions coming into that?
SS: One of the things that this book is about is how even before you form memories your parents kind of create this little protective structure around you, that you can build a self into, which, in a healthy situation, they take the structure away and then there’s the self, shining there that has been able to just grow in this way, protected. So much of what I feel like a parent does is just looking at that child and saying, “I see you, I still see you.”
If you don’t have that, how do you make a self? Vidya does it through dance.
That she/I switch is really important to me. I was trying to explore where you come into a sense of self. If we’ve been lucky, we come into it gradually, because we’ve had our parents, our caregivers, giving us this story of ourselves. But if you come into it yourself, you come into it all weird, almost violently. Maybe it’s scary, or exhilarating.
DS: I used to be a librarian. I heard on this podcast (with Daniel Handler) that you were once described on a news segment as a “library user” and you loved that, that being a library user was the first way you viewed yourself. Can you talk about libraries?
The library is the aspect of American society that brings me the most hope and the most feeling of real patriotism.
SS: How much time do you have? I could spend hours talking about how much I love libraries.
I was actually just thinking back to the beginning of the pandemic when I was like, “What did I do?” They’d sent an email in March 2020 saying, “The libraries are closing for two weeks.”
I literally ran to the library.
DS: Me too!
SS: I was just supermarket spreeing, grabbing books off the shelves… And then they closed and you couldn’t even return books, which was so wild. I was just living with these random books that I had panic-checked out for eight months or a year or something.
Now I have a horrible sense of what my life would be like without a functioning library system. This is the longest that I’d ever gone without having access to a library. If I bought all the books that I read, I would not have any money for anything else. I’m a voracious reader.
The library is the aspect of American society that brings me the most hope and the most feeling of real patriotism. My parents didn’t grow up with public library systems. They didn’t have those in India. I think they had lending libraries. My mom always talks about crouching down to read, frantically reading for a little while, a book in this lending library, but she couldn’t take the books home with her. When my parents got to America, they were both avid library users. Some of my earliest memories are at the library.
It’s beautiful to me that a governmental institution exists to say that, “Books matter, art matters. That everybody should have access.” If somebody wants to learn how to play the guitar, they should be able to teach themselves for free. If somebody wants to read James Baldwin, or work on their resume, or read a poem, or whatever, we agree this is a public good and that this information and knowledge and pleasure should be accessible to all of us.
It’s so precious to me, and I can’t even, sometimes, believe libraries still exist. Just. I can’t. Words fail me.
Within the confines of a few hundred pages, it can be difficult for a character to be read as bisexual unless explicitly mentioned. Too often, if a character is dating someone of the same sex they are seen as gay, and if not, they are assumed to be straight. These quick judgments further the erasure and harassment bi+ people face on an everyday basis.
In recent years, a growing number of books have openly celebrated the complexities of bi identities. This is in part because of an increasingly queer population and more frequent spaces for LGBTQ writers, but also because bisexuality is finally becoming visible. (GLAAD estimates that over half of all LGBTQ people and up to a third of all people under 35 identify as bisexual, pansexual, queer.)
While young adult, new adult, and genre books have embraced queer characters with open arms, literary books geared towards adults featuring bisexuality can slip through the cracks. The following novels discuss fluidity, love, and connection from the Gold Rush era to present-day New Zealand.
A stolen newspaper begins a lifelong love of journalism for Ivoe Williams, the Black Muslim main character of Barnett’s debut novel. Ivoe wants to change the world with her writing, and so she becomes the first member of her family to go to college. In college, she falls in love with a man, but the relationship falters when he grows jealous of Ivoe’s connection with her journalism professor, a woman named Ona. Together, Ivoe and Ona flee the Jim Crow South and found the first female-run Black newspaper. Set against the tensions of Jim Crow and the Red Summer, this novel explores the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality.
This illustrated novel follows the intersecting storylines of a young man in 1990s Canada exploring his sexuality, and the stories of Hindu gods. As the main character comes of age and tries to understand his gender and sexuality, he is rebuffed by both the straight and gay communities, especially as he begins a relationship with a woman who calls herself She. She of the Mountain is an experimental and nuanced fable about the complexities of identity.
Ava is working as an English teacher in Hong Kong when she meets Julian, an English banker from a posh background. She falls in with Julian and his elitist friends, and soon begins an undefined relationship with him that culminates in Ava moving into his spare bedroom. When Julian has to return to London for several months on business, Ava stays in his apartment, but falls in love with a lawyer named Edith. As Ava’s relationship with Edith deepens, she must decide if she’s going to stay with the dynamic, exciting Edith, or return to the quiet comfort of Julian.
When Regina Gottlieb first arrives at grad school, she already knows the rumors about a handsome professor on campus, Nicholas Brodeu. He’s known for sleeping with his students. Curious, Regina enrolls in one of his classes, and when she’s offered a TA position, she’s suddenly immersed in the lives of Nicholas and his pregnant wife, Martha. Although it was Nicholas who first caught her eye, Regina becomes obsessed with Martha from the moment she sees her, and begins an affair that turns both women’s lives upside-down. This steamy campus novel offers readers an education on sexuality and power.
After a regular at Juan Gutiérrez’s favorite bar dies, it’s his final straw in a stressful year. His college-bound daughter has been increasingly defiant, his boyfriend, Jared, craves more commitment, and the bar is closing. That’s all without mentioning gentrification, the challenges of navigating his sexuality post-divorce, and his relationship with his incarcerated father. A unique tale of late-bloomer queerness, single-parenthood, and latine identity, Big Familia cherishes the families we are born with and the ones we find.
Three women road trip across New Zealand’s North Island for a beach vacation. The narrator is not-quite-dating, not-quite-not-dating Ilana, however, she worries that Ilana is harboring a crush on their third guest, Ashi. As the three women navigate their unique dynamic, the narrator also grapples with her recent break up with an abusive ex-boyfriend. Porter paints a complete picture of not only female friendship and sexuality, but also of modern New Zealander culture and post-colonial guilt.
Rachel is a mid-20s, Jewish, bisexual woman who hates her job in the talent industry. The highlight of her day is sneaking away at lunch for a small cup of frozen yogurt, the only “cheat” in her rigid diet. But after her therapist advises she cuts off contact with her mother, and the cute Orthodox woman working the froyo counter asks her to dinner, her life gets flipped upside down. Full of second-hand embarrassment, steamy sex, and golems, Milk Fed is dedicated to sapphics who love the TikTok audio, “Mommy? Sorry, Mommy?”
When Mina is stopped at the George Washington Bridge by the police, she can’t convince them she wasn’t actually going to jump. Her husband, Oscar, decides that it’s best for them to leave New York behind for his hometown of London. Across the Atlantic, Mina decides that diving into her background in Classics might uncover a new answer for her mental health. But even mythology can’t solve her growing distance from her husband and her intensifying friendship with his childhood friend, Phoebe.
Lucy and Sam are Chinese American siblings living at the end of the California Gold Rush. After the death of their father, they must carry his body until they can find a burial spot. But at twelve and eleven, they also need to survive in a hostile landscape not built for working-class children of color. Zhang masterfully retraces their upbringing, while honoring their heritage and Sam’s queerness and androgyny.
For a time Vidya had not had a mother or a brother, she had only the idea of a mother and a brother: they were imaginary but real in the same way god was. For a time she had not had a mother but an aunt and not a brother but two cousins who had lived with her in the one room flat she shared with her father. The Cousins were girls, older than her, they were not cruel but it was clear they found her irrelevant. They did their schoolwork quietly in the kitchen, whispering to each other, glamorous secrets of movie stars and breasts. The Aunt had rough, worried hands, and yanked the comb through the girl’s hair, which got snarled even in braids. When Father Sir came home from giving tuitions she had gone to sleep but heard the door open and shut.
There was a woman in a room they went to visit every month, a woman with no voice and a face that turned toward the window, but that was not a mother, mothers lived at home with their children. And sang to them.
Now the Aunt-Not-Mother had been put away with the Cousins-Not-Brother, and the Room-Not-Mother had come to live in the house and answered Vidya’s question when is my mother coming home, which she asked out of habit more than hope, with the firm and sometimes angry response of I am your mother. The child put her hands curiously in the Room-Not-Mother’s hair but the Room-Not-Mother brushed her away as though she were a fly. She asked Room-Not-Mother to sing a song to her at bedtime (Aunt-Not-Mother did not sing to her at bedtime, as was expected: she was a not-mother) and Room-NotMother did not sing a song and instructed her to close her eyes. She closed her eyes. In the dark she could hear Father Sir talking to Room-Not-Mother, who answered his questions very simply with yeses and nos. Was the heat making her feel ill. No. Had she heard from her sister. No. Would she write to her again? Yes. Then her mind flattened like a coin and she was asleep.
Now Vidya studied (Room-Not-)Mother as she wiped her face again and again with her sari. Earlier she had been in a frenzy of chopping and frying, but she seemed not to know anymore what motion to provide her restless body. Her eyes were keen and dark and hard, like the eyes of a man. She wore a pale green sari with a pretty gold border, cotton, but her best. Skin pulled taut against the drum of her body, in the strip between blouse and skirt: ribs, like that of an unhappy dog. Outside she wore strange shoes of brown leather and real laces—shoes that made the neighbors whisper—inside her bare feet were big like Vidya’s were big, Vidya’s already three sizes larger than the other girls at school. Father Sir, emerging from his bath, gave a sharp glance to Vidya sitting idle on the divan, swinging her legs. “Are you helping your mother?”
She shook her head.
“Well?”
“I’m finished,” said the Mother.
“Before you sit down you must always say, mother dear, how may I be of service?”
“I said I’m finished,” said the Mother. “I don’t need help now.”
“The girl should learn.”
The Mother turned away. She was preparing the puja plate, and placed a whole laddu beside the tiny holy things necessary for the rite: a pile of uncooked rice, an oil lamp still unlit, kumkum and sandalwood paste to be smeared wetly, and a small brass bell. Vidya was glad that she had not been pressed into service in the kitchen, not because she disliked chores (though she did) but because the sight of so much food, so much food all at once, brought on a kind of fright in her. It was not time to eat yet and she had been scolded out of the kitchen several times—not even a taste—and sat on the divan swinging her legs with anxiety. Would there be enough? What would she eat first? What would this brother be like—would she know him? What if the Brother ate everything, and there was nothing left for her? Recently, the sight of food, food cooking in the stalls along the side of the road—jalebis, bhel, aloo tikki, sev puri—made her feel a wretchedness that was like falling ill. It was dulled only after the morning glass of milk, if she got the morning glass of milk, which, now that Aunt-Not-Mother and Cousins-Not-Brother’s hungry mouths had vanished, she was given every morning, and sometimes in the evening also. Father Sir left before she woke and returned after she was asleep, and on the weekends he would see her and say: well? This made her uncontrollably shy and she would mouse down into her dress and say yes sir.
“What time does the train get in?”
“One.”
“So go, na? You don’t want to make them wait.”
“I won’t make the train come any faster.”
But she was nearly pushing him out the door. He put his shoes on in the hallway. He was laughing and said again, “I won’t make the train come any faster.” Then there he was downstairs, walking through the dusty courtyard, straight through a cricket game of the chaali’s boys; they paused and watched him while he passed, in white, a dhoti and a clean kutra. When Father Sir was gone from the window, Vidya turned to watch the Mother again. She had forced herself down into stillness, sat with her hands folded and gripped hard on her lap. She was muttering something under her breath, barely audible, forbidding vowels. Then she fixed her eyes on her daughter and said, “Come here.” Vidya crossed the width of the apartment to the chair where the woman sat: a distance of no more than a few feet. The woman touched her daughter, fixing, smoothing what couldn’t be fixed or smoothed, the wild puff of hair that fuzzed up the girl’s neat braid, the wrinkles sweated into her good dress. “Do you love your brother?”
“Yes,” said Vidya dutifully.
“Then you must tell him. You must say, welcome home, my dear brother.”
Vidya nodded.
“And you must care for him like a mother.”
No. No. She was to be a not-mother. She looked at the woman with panic.
“I thought you were the mother.”
“Yes,” she said, her tone quickening. “I am the mother. But what I mean is you’ll have to help me take care of him.”
“Why?”
“Because he is your brother.”
“Will I be the mother?”
“No, no. I am the mother.” Then, exasperated, she stopped speaking. The apartment was filled with the smell of food. It was like a dream—or a nightmare—so many smells. Vidya had dreams where she was eating everything, kulfi and handvo and rotis and dhal and kheer. She fell upon her knees and ate like a dog, crying out with pleasure and joy. But in these dreams the food never filled her, it was like eating fistfuls of air. Woke with that hard pain in her stomach, and couldn’t sleep sometimes, until dawn.
She fell upon her knees and ate like a dog, crying out with pleasure and joy
Each minute ripened. It was incredible how much time could be contained in the increments measured by the clock. She thought she would ask again about the food but each time she looked at the Mother she was hushed by the look on her face—it was a terrible look. The Mother was folding herself inward and trying not to cry, and the effort to suppress this monumental emotion was making her eyes red. Vidya looked out the window. The cricket boys had resumed their game, they were calling to one another. Even the littlest ones would not play with her because she was a girl, and spoke to her, when they had to, with disdain. But brothers were different, she was confident of this. In fact, a brother could crack the world of the boys open, and invite her inside. They might never make her the batsman, but surely she could be a minor fielder until she proved her skill. They would rush her, chanting her, she would crow with them: king of the boys! But the Brother? The Brother was a blank, she had no notion of his face (there was a picture kept framed in the house of the Mother holding a baby, but the features were so indistinct it could have been any baby, including Vidya herself), yet she felt him in this moment looking up at her admiringly. King of the boys, she and her brother, but mostly she.
Then, there, on the far corner of her vision, a tonga dropped three passengers off in the street. They were as tiny as toys: the tonga pulled by a toy-donkey, and the three passengers—a man dressed in white, a dark woman in a parti-colored sari, and a child, an almost baby, carried in the arms of the woman. The girl watched them quietly as they crossed the courtyard. The game had to be paused, but it was paused good-naturedly. Father Sir called something out to the boys as he passed, a greeting of some sort, and there was joy in the sound of his voice if not the words it carried. The Mother heard Father Sir’s voice but remained where she was, as though calmed by it.
“Listen, now, when your mother’s sister comes you must tell her how much you love the beautiful dress she sent you.”
“But when should I kiss my brother?”
“After. Say my dress is very lovely auntie.”
“My dress is very lovely auntie.”
“Good, just like that.”
The Mother was smiling and wiping her eyes. The three toys were moving up the stairs but neither woman nor girl rushed out to greet them. The woman took the girl’s small hand and held it tightly, squeezing it. The feeling of being touched by the woman was so lovely, that the time that had moved for ages so slowly began, now, to quicken. Only moments, only seconds before she had a Brother, and her Mother touched her hair. The door opened. Slipping off their shoes in the hall—
The light coming from the doorway darkened them. They were just shapes. Then Father Sir stepped through the door and became himself, and the woman in the brightly colored sari holding the boy became herself, and the boy became himself. Who were they? Father Sir was self-evident, he was tall and thin with a high forehead and beady glasses like Gandhiji. The woman who must be her aunt had a dark face and was weeping. There was a stud of gold in her nose. The sari was checked with green and yellow, bordered in red, the colors that licked the eye. Before she got to the boy who was her Brother she performed her task to the weeping woman’s knees. “MydressisverylovelyAuntie.”
The Mother pulled Vidya away roughly. “Where is my sister?”
“Her son fell ill, madam.”
“So she sends a servant?” said the Mother.
“She didn’t want to leave her son, madam.” She had managed to stop weeping, but was holding tightly to the boy. The boy, the baby, the Brother. Vidya could see his little feet dangling down, bare feet, but he had folded his face into the chest of the woman and showed his sister only the back of his dark head. Sister. She said, “Welcome home, my dear brother,” and then looked at the Mother, now doubtful, to see if she had spoiled this task as she had spoiled the other one, perhaps she had muddled up the words, the order—an adult mystery. But the Mother did not seem to have heard her and was looking now at the boy, hard at the boy. On her face was a tightly concentrated fury. Fury at Vidya, at the Brother, at the other woman? Or, most unfathomably of all, at Father Sir? The Mother held out her arms. The expression on the other woman’s face trembled for a moment and the boy, who had been sleeping, began to wake, transferred from mother to mother: Vidya caught his face, gathering red and splitting open into a cry. He was saying ammu, ammu, as the dark woman relinquished him, twisting away from the woman his mother, back to the arms of the woman who had brought him, who cast her gaze down and squeezed her hands together. The Mother’s face became tender as she held the boy. She rocked him back and forth and whispered to him silly little rhymes, ones Vidya had never heard the Mother utter. He would not calm. He began to kick. Instead of setting him back in the other woman’s arms, which were stretched out to receive him, he was set screaming on the divan. Immediately the boy was up, tottering on his skinny legs, toward the parti-colored woman, who touched him, his head, and began to speak to him gently in a language that no one but he could understand.
The Mother was standing clenched, so upright. Her keen dark man’s eyes were full of red.
“Come, come, let’s eat,” said Father Sir. “We’re all of us hungry.”
Food! And Brother so small and fussy—he surely would not eat very much. But the Mother would not move from where she was standing to ready the meal and offer plates.
Father Sir said, “Wife!”
Fear—the room held it, that the Mother would crack. As she stood, holding her sari balled in each hand, so still, with only the vein at her temple flickering with pulse. Not a sound was made, even Vidya held her breath. And in an instant the room righted itself, an inexplicable shift in weather, the Mother said I forgot to do the puja, and the boy was held again by the woman, calm now, sucking his thumb, while his mother circled his face with the small flicker of light, ringing the small brass bell, then printing his brow center with a smear of red, and fragrant beige, and a single bead of rice, which fell off right away. She broke the laddu in two and pushed the sweet between the boy’s lips—he chewed at it distractedly with nubbly teeth. The other half was given entire to the woman who held him. Laddus: the ferocity of yellow sugar. If Vidya was given a laddu she broke it in her palm and ate each grain. The boy ate his oppositely, fast and unthinking. He looked calm now and didn’t seem to mind being at the center of so many’s attention, tugging the ear of the woman who held him, tiny, a baby, with none of the plumpness of baby, with none of baby’s glowing health. He looked yellow and somehow tough, his skin scaly with dryness.
“Are you hungry?” The Mother pointed her question at the other woman without seeming, exactly, to address her. Her voice was filled with a determined coolness, and she used the familiar, though not the most cuttingly familiar you.
The woman seemed to have trouble with the question and stood for some moments looking uncomfortably at the floor. Then she said,“No, no, please don’t trouble yourself.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Father Sir. “You’ve had a long journey. How many hours?”
“Thirteen.”
“Thirteen hours. Come, wash up, we’ll run some water for you. Then you can eat.”
The woman was brought a towel, she parted from the Brother with reluctance, pulling shut the curtain that demarcated the washroom from the kitchen. He screamed, the Brother, his eyes outlined in kohl: kohl gave his eyes the burning quality of a saint. The woman began to talk to him from behind the curtain as she washed—at the sound of her voice he quieted. The Mother was loath to leave him, but she did, immersing herself in the kitchen to prepare the food while Father Sir seated himself on the floor and waited for the plates to be brought to him. Vidya, reminded, rose to follow the Mother into the terrifying kitchen, which was filled with the noise of food. “Go give this plate,” and she carried it with care, heavy with food, sick with food, kadhi and raita and black chana, and shaak and rotis made fresh, one after the other, by the Mother who squatted by the stove with the shine of sweat across her brow and made them thin with the intelligence of her own fingers, thin as paper, puffed over the flame, fragrant of ripe wheat shined with ghee. Father Sir first, then Vidya was given her own plate, her own roti, while the Mother sat down by the boy and began to feed him with her own hand, food he accepted with a benign indifference. She was smiling now, the Mother, as the boy let her touch his face, though every once in a while he would turn away with an anxious look to the dark woman, who had emerged from behind the curtain and would smile at him, and then he would turn his face back toward the offered food.
Vidya was in an agony of indecision. Faced with so many dishes at once, she touched nothing on her plate, just stared at it—four little cups containing bright circles of food, the perfectly circular roti at the center, cooling. The smell of the food came up to her, it came into her, thrashed against her. Rice was brought out. But the food—her food. Her stomach hurt.
“Eat,” said Father Sir, who had already finished his rice. She knew better than to cry or say I can’t. She could see herself, her little brown hand, come quick down and tear the roti between her fingers, then dip into a dish—which dish, which food?—and bring the morsel into her mouth. But she could not will the hand to do it. She looked away from her plate, and then eagerly back at it, afraid that it had vanished. It was still there. She could not move.
“What’s the matter?” said the Mother. She shook her head.
“What’s the matter, don’t like?”
“No.”
“Don’t like? Don’t eat,” said the Mother, and lifted away the untouched plate.
The Mother did sing. Badly. But not to her. The notes felt curiously sour and wrong, even when there was no other music, and the voice that sang them was uncomfortably naked, like the voice one prayed with, or the body that one bared with honesty to the doctor. She practiced in the full light of day, loudly, after morning’s breakfast, and took lessons on Sundays at the Kalaˉ Sangam Bhavan Classical Music and Dance Complex, bringing the Brother and then Vidya to care for him.
Vidya discovered that the Brother was a good audience for jumping off the Bhavan’s steps; to him, even a jump from the first step was impressive. Gaining confidence she would climb, watching him watch her with admiration as she leapt down the second and then the third step, he laughing in delight at her neat landings. But the fifth was tall, as tall as her, she looked down over the edge. She had jumped from there last week but had forgotten how it felt to be so brave. The sixth! There was a thing called death: you went to another place. You jumped off the highest step in the world and were thrilled into flying. No, death was a bad thing, a lonely thing. A stern grandma had died, you didn’t see her anymore. The loved grandma remained. But death came for all, not only the very old. Death lived maybe on the tenth step.
Against the wall, half-dozing, a watchman in khakis and long wool jerked up and smiled at the Brother, and then at her. She didn’t return the smile. They looked at you like you were the same as other children, they always smiled at you as if you were the same: silly, clowning, social, unserious, playing make-believe or, worse, becoming precious for them. Some of her cousins behaved like this when trying to win the love of Grandma during summer visits and it disgusted her. Her Mother would whisper to her, with delicious scorn, look at that little liar; Grandma was never swayed, but aunties were, which made them not worth loving.
She thought it was the clapping and swirling of Navaratri, exuberant and ordinary.
She skipped the sixth step and went directly to the seventh, where she always stalled; she could climb no closer to death. She sat for a while with her feet over the edge. The Bhavan’s courtyard seemed to exist outside the city, borrowing only its birds, which crossed in lazy flocks the rectangle of sky that capped the compound. Parrots showed green against the blue, but their scribbling noise was muted by the assonant chorus of music lessons, each individual lesson weaving into a new whole that contained an element of the Mother she could not quite hear, but still somehow sense. Through the door, she had seen the Mother’s teacher wince at the sound of her voice, but the Mother had not noticed or cared, and plowed on, heedless. Yes, though, there was another noise, a sense of rhythm, the shivering sound of rain. It was nearer, and then voices too, on the ground floor, and Vidya, now curious, followed the steps toward the sound: the level half underground and half above it, with windows that looked onto the courtyard and the street, letting in a dim yellow light: there were girls moving with purpose in this new secret room; their movements were described twice, by the rhythm of finger and palm against drum (a man played the drums, pulling from it a range of tones both heavy and light, his fingers springing away from the dark cores) and by spoken voice (a woman recited the rhythm in a language of single syllables, mysterious, expressive words both odder and more familiar than English)—and a third time by the bells wound thickly around the ankles of the best girls, and thinly around the ankles of the younger girls, some almost as young as her, some teenagers or even young women, moving with varying grace and control, but all moving with purpose, their bodies taut with the effort of correctness, their feet speaking and their eyes driven inward. Vidya, in the doorway, was not seen, was only seeing, her body lifting unconsciously, straightening itself, wanting to stand and move correctly as she watched a girl at the front of the room moving in a whirling yellow kameez, with short, swift limbs, who made a phrase with her body and was scolded by the woman who had spoken it, who made the phrase again with her body, moving this time her arms in concert with her legs, her bells glistening with hard noise, and was scolded again by the woman, who, in the dim light, had the fierce, kohl-made eyes of a leader and a ferocious bearing, not unlike the Mother’s, even while seated. This woman was beautiful, magnetically so. Her hair, striped with white, was parted down the middle and pinned into a low bun in a plain style so that her opulent face stood out in relief to it, pale and richly colored, her eyes a glinting black as though jeweled. Her hand slapped against her thigh, marking the same rhythm she spoke through that strange language of single syllables, and the moving girl again tried the phrase slightly refined and this time was not scolded by the woman—not praised, but her bearing became prouder, as if she had been praised. The room was incredibly hot: there was no fan, in the corner was a small shrine to Shiva with his foot lifted in destruction, a stick of incense burned to the nub for him and the room smelled of it, and loudly of sweat, the girls’ and the percussionist’s, whose hands seemed to take a precise effort regardless of how quickly or slowly the rhythm was that issued from them, and he held his arms very heavily in order to let his fingers be light. She could be tiny in the doorway: just eyes. Watching the girl move now made her want to be nothing. A thought came to her and it was like the first thought she had ever had: I am nothing. How long she stood there, fixed—moth: flame. Then suddenly coming out of a dream she remembered her Brother and ran up the steps.
Evening had deepened outside but the Mother was not finished. The Brother was sitting by himself on the step she had abandoned, a cry starting to bubble into his face, and she snatched him up and stood in the courtyard listening now to the sounds coming from the building, trying to parse and understand them. What was the language the woman spoke? And to whom were they speaking, exactly? Not with that odd spoken language, not just. With their bodies that they made follow a set of grace rules.
“Ah, you must be a dancer,” said the watchman.
“That was dancing?”
“Of course. What else would it be?”
She thought it was the clapping and swirling of Navaratri, exuberant and ordinary. She sat on the step. To be small was to be comfortable with the world being constantly upended: oh, but she wasn’t. The sun was going and the sky began to bruise from its absence.
“Vidya!”
There she was, the Mother, so tall, in her funny outside shoes, men’s shoes made of brown leather, with laces and too large, in her gray and red sari, descending the steps. The hour’s music had left sweetness on her tongue. In the fading light the Mother looked familiar and fragile, and Vidya ran up the steps toward her, heedless of the trailing Brother: wanting the Mother, wanting no harm to come to her, wanting her hand. She took it, cool, in her hot palms.
In 2012, upon the publication of my first novel, Flatscreen, I was asked to write a short essay about Jewish identity for the website myjewishlearning.com. I chose, as my subject, a single line by the early 20th Century Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel, whose short stories—particularly his autobiographical stories set in the Jewish part of Odessa where my family has roots—had greatly influenced my own work.
The line I chose to write about is Babel’s lovely and cryptic definition of the Jew as someone with “spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.” I liked this definition for its figurative vagary—that is, its poetry—but also for its secularity, for its cleaving of Jewish identity from notions of religious practice or faith. As an infrequently practicing non-believer, Babel’s definition reinforced my personal sense of Jewishness as something more closely related to feeling than to doctrine.
I wondered if there was something more intrinsically Jewish about autumn than, say, spring.
In my essay, I tried to unpack what Babel meant by “autumn in his heart.” I wondered if there was something more intrinsically Jewish about autumn than, say, spring. I suggested that perhaps it had something to do with the High Holidays’ occurrence during that season—the dying leaves, the open book of life, the dangling prospect of death—and also with our history as itinerant agrarians. I ended the essay with an anecdote about my favorite holiday, Sukkot, and the beautiful polka-dot sukkah my artist mother once built. I wrote about lying in that sukkah, feeling humbled by the cosmos. I concluded that this feeling was autumn in the heart.
Nearly a decade has passed since I wrote that essay, yet I find myself still thinking about Babel’s definition, and still attempting to parse it. And while, upon rereading that old essay, I’m not as embarrassed as I thought I would be, I’m not entirely convinced by it either. The essay’s ending feels slippery and evasive, offering lightweight mysticism in place of the concrete.
Julian is our first child, but he was not our first pregnancy.
It also occurs to me, upon rereading, that though I pay lip service to the connection between autumn and mortality, I don’t linger on the subject. I was 29 when I wrote the essay, and, with the publication of my novel, I was on the cusp of what felt like the beginning of a life. I had just moved in with my girlfriend, who would later become my wife. Death was not on my mind. I am 39 now and, along with the rest of the world, as we watch the global death toll increase each day, it’s in my thoughts more than ever. But the thing that has most affected my thinking about mortality, and by extension, my thinking about Babel’s definition, was not the death of a friend or loved one, but a birth. Specifically, the birth, three years ago, of my first child, my son Julian.
Julian is our first child, but he was not our first pregnancy. Almost a year to the day before his birth, my wife had a miscarriage. The miscarriage was early, just a few weeks into the pregnancy, but it was still devastating. We were living abroad at the time, in Amsterdam, which added to our feeling of profound vulnerability. We were in a strange place, far from family and community, far from home.
We spent the summer after the miscarriage traveling in Europe. We visited beaches in the South of France, ate pasta in Italy, and took the Game of Thrones tour of Dubrovnik. The last stop before returning to the States was my ancestral homeland of Poland, where we visited Auschwitz on a sunny August day. Maybe it speaks to the state I was in—after the miscarriage— that what upset and surprised me the most was how pretty it was there, at Auschwitz, on this particular day: how green and florid; how scenic its vista of trees. This was evidence, it seemed to me, of nature’s indifference to human suffering. I had always pictured the camps in winter, but it occurred to me, for the first time, that the camp’s prisoners must have seen days like this, beautiful days, even as they were starved, and tortured, and murdered.
The other image that sticks with me from my visit to Auschwitz, is a display case filled with suitcases, many of which had names and addresses handwritten on them. Some of the names were familiar—Adler is one I remember, the same surname as a friend of mine from college—and, in a different sense, the handwriting samples were too. One, with its whimsical curlicues on the tails of certain letters, reminded me of my mother’s. Another’s angled lefty scrawl reminded me of my own. These people had written their names and addresses on their luggage because they expected to one day return home.
When we found out we were pregnant again—we were back in Brooklyn by this point, without health care, or jobs, or an apartment—Sarah and I were understandably concerned about the possibility of another miscarriage. And though, as the pregnancy progressed, we breathed a little easier with each milestone passed—when we first heard the heartbeat, when we first saw our son’s human shape on the sonogram—we couldn’t completely shake the fear that the worst might happen at any moment. I’d hoped that my fear would subside after a healthy baby was born, but I now understand that the fear I’d felt, that omnipresent awareness of the fragility of human life, is simply a condition of being parent.
These people had written their names and addresses on their luggage because they expected to one day return home.
For the first week of his life, our son would only sleep while being held, not in his bassinet. So Sarah and I took turns sleeping in two-hour shifts, while the other sat on the couch watching Netflix and rocking the baby to sleep. When it was my turn to hold him, I’d lightly stroke his scalp, careful not to press too hard on the soft spot in its center which felt, to me, like a persistent reminder of that very fragility. And on one of those nights, at about five or six a.m., as the day’s first sun made itself known in my Brooklyn living room, creeping in shadow across the floor, I found myself reading aloud to Julian from the poem “Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight” by the definitively not Jewish, American poet Galway Kinnell. The poem, which is quite famous, at least for poem, is narrated by a father and addressed to his young child. It opens with the child’s scream as she wakes from a nightmare, at which point the speaker enters her bedroom to console her. Kinnell writes:
you cling to me hard, as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die
For Kinnell, the small child lives in a kind of perpetual spring, having never seen the leaves fall from the trees or the flower lose its blossoms. His child has not yet learned about death and its inevitability, and so moves, to quote Rilke, “already in eternity, like a fountain.”
It was not only my job, as a parent, I realized as I read this poem aloud, to protect the body of my child, but it was also my job to protect him from the horrible truth of my own mortality. It was my job to keep him, for as long as possible, alive in the illusion that I, his father, would always be there to protect him. And so perhaps, then, what I was faced with, as I cradled my son and read aloud, was not just Julian’s fragility, but my own, not just his mortality, but for the first time, in some deep sense, my own.
As I read on, I found myself weeping. Though I believed the words I was saying—I would “suck the rot” from my son’s fingernails, I would “scrape the rust” from his bones—I knew that these statements were also lies, that there were things in this world from which I could not protect him. And I felt, in that moment, that I understood what it meant to have autumn in my heart.
The question remains: what, if anything, makes this a particularly Jewish feeling? Kinnell was not Jewish, and I’d imagine that the experience I’ve just described—this reckoning with mortality—is a universal one. And yet, I’m not ready to abandon Babel’s definition of the Jew, to cede tribal claim on autumn of the heart.
The literary critic Northrop Fryeposits that the biggest difference between the Old Testament and The New Testament is that the New Testament is the story of an individual—Christ—while the Old Testament is a story of a people, The Israelites. From the beginning, then, there has been such a thing as a collective Jewish identity. And though we live in a diaspora that accommodates an increasingly broad range of Jewish experience, something of that identity remains. In part, that identity is rooted in what I’ve just been talking about—this pervasive awareness of mortality—not just on an individual level, but on a cultural one as well.
Babel wrote before the rise of Hitler, but he knew persecution—he was executed by Stalin via firing squad in 1940, at the age of 45. And before Stalin there were The Crusades, and before The Crusades, there was the Roman destruction of the Temples. And it’s not like Jewish persecution ended with the Holocaust either, as anyone who’s read a newspaper over the last few years is aware.
The Jewish condition, then, I might argue, is not so different from the condition of the new parent. It is a condition of anxiety, of omnipresent awareness of the soft spot on the infant’s skull. Only the skull, in this case, is our culture writ large, and we remain in perpetual wait for the next threat to its existence to make itself known.
It was my job to keep him, for as long as possible, alive in the illusion that I, his father, would always be there to protect him.
I keep thinking of another of my favorite Jewish writers, Grace Paley, and particularly of her story, “A Conversation with My Father,” which concludes with the line, “Tragedy, when will you look it in the face?” For the Jew, I think—the bespectacled and autumn-hearted Jew—the answer to this question seems to be: always. We are always looking tragedy in the face.
The day after Trump’s election, I found myself perusing the shelves of a used, English language bookstore in Central Amsterdam. We had arrived in the city a week before, and hardly knew a soul. Sarah was at a hair appointment that she’d made weeks before the election, planning to celebrate the commencement of our European sojourn by dyeing her hair lavender. She’d kept the appointment, not really knowing what else to do; radical stylistic transformation seemed as appropriate a response to the terrible election result as any.
I didn’t know what to do either, so I did what I usually do in such situations, which is to seek out the nearest bookstore at hand. I walked there in the rain, and arrived soaking wet to find a handful of other Americans quietly, mournfully browsing the shelves. This gave me some small solace. In my own browsing, I came upon a battered, mass market paperback edition of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s autobiography, Hope Against Hope, which chronicles her years in exile from Stalin’s regime alongside her husband, the Russian Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam, and then her many more years alone after Osip was arrested and sent to a work camp where he perished.
Osip Mandelstam is my favorite poet, and I had been interested, for a long time, in reading Nadezhda Mandelstam’s autobiography of their life together, but I felt daunted by the book’s length—not only is it nearly five hundred pages long, but the print is very small—and also by what I correctly presumed was its incredible store of pain and sadness. But finding it there, in this bookstore in Amsterdam, on that particular day, felt like fate.
The Jewish condition, then, I might argue, is not so different from the condition of the new parent.
Let me start off by saying that, despite the promise of uplift offered by its title, Hope Against Hope is an incredibly depressing book, even more depressing than I expected it would be, and I was not surprised when I later found out that Nadezhda Mandelstam had followed it with an even lengthier sequel called Hope Abandoned. I found the first few hundred pages of Ms. Mandelstam’s memoir demoralizingly bleak. But while I wouldn’t say that things lighten up after that—the lives of the members of her circle who weren’t murdered by Stalin, often ended in suicide, such as that of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who hung herself, leaving behind a note that said, “Forgive me, to go on would be worse”—still, I began to draw inspiration from the author’s endurance in the face of such despair.
Under Stalin’s rule, Osip Mandelstam’s poetry was banned. Any copies of his works that were found were to be destroyed by the NKVD. Mandelstam, for the most part, was not a political poet, but he did write one poem about Stalin, a satirical poem called the “Kremlin Highlander”, which describes, among other things, the fascist leader’s stubby fingers, which Mandelstam compares to live bait. It was for this poem that Mandelstam was arrested, and forced into exile, and later sent to the work camp where he died. Mandelstam wrote the poem —which incidentally, is not one of his great poems—knowing full well that it would lead to his arrest and his demise. He wrote it anyway, and he read it publicly at a number of small gatherings where Stalin’s spies were presumably in attendance, in what was, essentially, an act of suicidal resistance. During his exile in the Southwestern mountain town of Veronezh, Mandelstam would later write a poem that, it seems to me, addresses Stalin directly, and speaks to this act.
Having stripped me of my seas, my flight, my running start, And given my feet the platform of the violent earth, How’d you do? Just Great!: You couldn’t still my moving lips.
Even in exile, after his death, it was too dangerous for Nadezhda Mandelstam to keep copies of her husband’s poems, and due to the real threat that all known copies would be destroyed by Stalin’s forces, she set to memorizing the entire corpus of her husband’s work. She memorized the poems—three or four books worth—and she kept them there, safe in her mind, for roughly twenty years, until she was able to return to Moscow in the early 1960s, after Stalin’s death, and have the poems republished.
This act of devotion—devotion not just to her husband, but to his work, which, I might add, is the work, in my opinion, of one of the twentieth century’s great geniuses—seems to me, to also be a great act of resistance. It seems to me to be an act, in fact, of greater resistance than the poem itself. Because, while the writing of the poem may have been the greater sacrifice, leading, as it did, to its author’s imprisonment and death, Ms. Mandelstam’s feat of memorization provides the greater reward, the preservation of a rare and singular voice, a voice that offers comfort, and beauty, and more than a bit of mystery in its surveys of the human condition. Ms. Mandelstam’s act carried out her husband’s promise that no one still his moving lips. And because of this act, I will one day share these poems with my son, and we will read aloud, to better hear their music, to better feel their rhythm. And when he asks me the difficult questions that, one day, he will inevitably ask—when he asks about love, and when he asks about death, as he pushes the spectacles up off his nose, and looks up at me as if, in my fatherly wisdom, I might have an answer—I will be able to look to these poems, as others might look to scripture, and I will quote to my son:
And I will tell my son that resistance can take many forms, but that, ultimately, it is an act of endurance, the endurance of one’s singular voice. I will say to him that your voice, like your father’s voice, carries autumn in its heart, and that’s an okay thing, because, autumn leads to winter, and winter leads to spring, and in spring it will rain, and after the rain the flowers will bloom—let nothing, ever, still your moving lips.
My favorite ex is not really my ex, technically speaking. He was never officially my boyfriend, and we were never in any kind of official relationship. For the eight months we “dated,” we never talked too much about what we were, never had the conversation that my college roommates called the dreaded DTR: the defining the relationship talk. Our relationship ambled on like a toddler in a field, wandering lopsided paths until it simply ran out of steam and plopped down. When my ex and I stopped seeing each other, we couldn’t even figure out how to phrase it. We weren’t “breaking up.” We were “done here,” as if our relationship was a meeting that had dragged on a little too long, until we finally called it. Ours was a classic situationship: all the entanglement, care, and intimacy of a relationship, but without its clear rules.
Given the fact that I have had many situationships and only one official relationship, I should not have been surprised I ended up perusing situationship TikTok recently. There are thousands of videos of mostly young women making jokes about the fact that they are in relationships that exist without the rules of a relationship. In one video, a woman responds no to every question: “Are you guys dating? Can you see other people? So you’re exclusive? So then you’re together? Like friends with benefits?” No…no…no…it continues. Not exclusive, but not seeing other people. Not together, but not single. Yet despite being a form of relationship purgatory, there’s an inherent potential in the situationship: it could become something new! It could transcend the model of relationships! It could become a new form of two people caring about each other with no outdated labels! It could get you really, really hurt.
And although situationships often end by me getting really, really hurt, I still end up in them regularly. Certainly they are more than failed relationships or only relationships of short-term importance. On TikTok, straight situationships are mostly driven by men refusing to commit, holding out on their partner who longs to be official. “What’s a situationship like?” one video asks. “Constant mixed signals.” He calls you for six hours one night but doesn’t respond to your texts the next day. But maybe one day he will! Yet queer situationships, while not immune to power dynamics, are, in my experience, driven by friendship. There’s less will they call! drama and more actual talking, more being in the moment and less angst about not planning. Like Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, where Ava ends up in two situationships: one with Julian and one with Edith. Where the straight situationship leaves Ava regularly in tears, in overthinking mode, her situationship with Edith grows out of a deep friendship. Ava types out a text to Julian, which she deletes: “i think i’m flirting with edith. she seems like someone who flirts with everyone, and so doesn’t really flirt with anyone. i don’t know what’s happening. i’ve known her two months and it feels like she’s the only person in my life who has ever mattered or existed.”
Yet queer situationships, while not immune to power dynamics, are, in my experience, driven by friendship.
It’s this kind of tunnel vision, of knowing someone for only a few months and feeling that they’re most important person in your life, that makes situationships so attractive. The situationship says no to many of the regular rules of relationships: no to “what are we?”, no to meeting your friends, no to planning ahead. Perhaps this is why the situationship gets a bad rap—it seems like the stereotypical casual relationship, where one partner wants to date and the other doesn’t. Romance novels and rom-coms love this trope, a situationship turned into a relationship after both parties realize their feelings. A situationship is the generative drama, a setback for our heroic couple, that leads into the clarity of a relationship. Take Jasmine Guillory’s The Proposal, where Carlos and Nikole fall into a situationship that starts to look awfully serious, full of meeting friends and going on actual dates, until Carlos realizes he is in love with Nikole. There’s a reversal of the TikTok narrative here: the man is in love and the woman has commitment issues. Nikole comes around and they’re happily committed to a Serious Relationship. Problem solved!
You can fall into a situationship, but a relationship requires some conversation, some work. A situationship is largely formless—without the guiding lights of a relationship, there is almost infinite potential. A relationship has a fairly clear trajectory: you talk, you grow to like each other, and then you make it official. It has a form that is societally acceptable, that is easily translatable in conversation. We know what a girlfriend or boyfriend or partner does, what their role is in your life. A situationship lacks all the clarity and translatability of a relationship, lacks the vocabulary to explain its own importance. A situationship leaves you with exes you aren’t even sure are your exes, an archive of texts and calls and moments that felt (that feel!) so important yet remain slightly indescribable to others. You simply had to be there.
Maybe this is why Sally Rooney is the patron saint of the situationship novel: her characters get in important relationships that are impossible to describe to others, except us, the readers. Like me, her characters backslide with their exes, they avoid big conversations, and they end up in situationships that have meaning, and actually make their lives better. In Normal People, Marianne and Connell’s situationship seems to defy the form of the relationship not because they don’t make it official, but because their care for each other transcends the labels of “girlfriend,” “boyfriend,” and “partner.” They are deeply invested in each other’s lives as friends, lovers, and everything in between. When the novel ends, it doesn’t tell us what happens next—did they break up when Connell moved? will they get back together someday?—but keeps Marianne and Connell’s relationship open to interpretation, leaving the reader wondering along with the characters.
Perhaps what Normal People illuminates is the situationship’s necessity for a potential outcome that’s greater than a mere official relationship. A situationship, after all, might be what happens when you execute no pressure on a nascent relationship. It might be what you fall into when one party is afraid of commitment or is holding out for a better romantic option. But also: it might be freedom from the confines of regular relationship rules, a way of saying yes to something for a season without planning for its continuance. A situationship is one way of being with someone without the drag of the past or push towards the future. Without the rules of form, how might two people be there for each other?
Perhaps what Normal People illuminates is the situationship’s necessity for a potential outcome that’s greater than a mere official relationship.
In Rooney’s newest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, the characters similarly fail to lock their relationships into concrete form. One character, Alice, reflects that “At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape…But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour in the water and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions.” A relationship without any preordained shape, running in all directions? Sounds like a situationship to me.
The situationship is by nature singular and particular: without a prescribed form, it can take many shapes. No two situationships are exactly the same, though as situationship TikTok makes clear, there are many common themes. For Alice, her situationship with Felix is confounding: “there is no obvious path forward by which any relation between us can proceed. I don’t believe he would describe me as a friend, because he has friends, and the way he relates to them is different from the way he relates to me…we’re in certain senses closer, because there are no boundaries or conventions by which our relationship is constrained.” This, to Alice, is “the absence of method,” a lack of intention in their relation to each other. There is no “obvious path forward.” There are no rules! But, she writes, “whatever happens will at least be the result of this experiment, which feels at times like it’s going badly wrong, and at other times feels like the only kind of relationship worth having.”
This last sentence is a bold claim, that this sort of experimental, non-labeled relationship might be “the only kind of relationship worth having.” And I agree: some of my most important and formative relationships have been the kind of situationship that burns quickly and dies out. Like the summer I spent with a man about to move across the country—the end date on our relationship meant we couldn’t ask big questions. Every day together was electric and exciting, even takeout pizza dinners, in a way no real relationship of mine has ever been able to approximate. It’s like the passion of Elio and Oliver in André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, a burning can’t last more than one summer in Italy. They have no rules, no boundaries, no future planning: only the beauty of the present moment. Or Lucy and her merman lover in Melissa Broder’s The Pisces, a passion that can’t last beyond her stay in Venice Beach, can’t really make its way onto land. There’s an incompatibility that means that these relationships are formative, important, life-changing—but only able to endure for so long. Perhaps it’s the timestamp that makes them so formative: its the right here right now of great sex, deep late night conversations, a summer I’ve never forgotten.
Every day together was electric and exciting, even takeout pizza dinners, in a way no real relationship of mine has ever been able to approximate.
This is the problem of the novel: plot. All these texts have to wrap the situationship up, and ultimately the options come down to break up or get together. Ava keeps Julian as a friend and gets Edith as a girlfriend. Carlos and Nik start dating. Alice and Felix and Eileen and Simon all couple up—so conveniently it’s almost unbelievable. Oliver goes back to America. The merman turns out to have a dark secret, enough to snap Lucy back to her land life.
Yet my real-life situationships rarely wrap up neatly, rarely make total sense when they’re over. You can be known and cared for by someone who just isn’t right for you in the long term. Perhaps this is why I keep getting into situationships: it’s an escape from the constant what next? of relationships. For me, the potential of the situationship is in its formlessness, in its plotlessness, in the escape from the long term. A novel has to end neatly, and somewhere different from before. Real life rarely follows that neatness. A situationship lets you stay in the here and now for a little longer. If there is value in it, it is in experiencing intimacy without expecting a future—staying with an open question without worrying about it. A novel will move right along, wrap it all up, while the situationship might be refusing to commit, deciding not to decide, leaving the door open for the future.
The time of the situationship is always now. For me—an overthinker—situationships require a kind of presence in the world that I don’t usually give. It’s not about making plans for the next time you’ll hang out, or worrying what it all meant. And it’s definitely not about wondering how it’ll all turn out in the end. You can tune out the anxiety for the future and nostalgia for the past. You can simply let it happen. I am known right now, and that’s enough.
Thirteen years ago, I visited California for the first time as a published author. My first book The Latehomecomer had just come out. After a community reading in a Chinese restaurant in Fresno, a group of women came up to me, excited and proud. One of them said, “We can’t wait for you to meet Mai Der Vang. If Minnesota has produced you. California has created Mai Der.”
Our journeys were linked long before we met. We are both children of the Hmong diaspora, marked by the unnamed war in Laos between the Americans, their ethnic allies, the Pathet Laos soldiers, and the North Vietnamese Army. Our families’ lives were uprooted and ours here in America began because of the same forces: war, colonial greed, the disregard for human life.
When we finally did meet: we knew we were different but we saw the ways in which the bigger world would read us as the same. I was a prose writer building a home in creative nonfiction. Mai Der was a poet finding her place in the world of poetry. We were both Native Hmong speakers writing in English, Hmong American women forging our way into a literary America that did not know it was missing our voices (and that of countless others). More importantly, we knew upon our meeting that our paths would cross many times over in the work we were both committed to doing, the explorations of the histories and realities that have shaped us and guided us.
It is a gift to be in conversation with Mai Der on a travesty where Hmong voices have never garnered place, to speak on Yellow Rain, Mai Der’s new book, and the ramifications of American warfare in countries around the world—little known places full of living people who loved and love each other, still.
Kao Kalia Yang: Why did you decide to write your dedication in the Hmong language?
As a Hmong writer, it is sometimes hard not to talk about the war and its geopolitical implications imprinted into who I am.
Mai Der Vang: The dedication roughly translates as “to the Hmong people” or “to the collective who are Hmong.” To say, read, and write that phrase in Hmong feels so much more evocative for me as there’s a kind of presence and spirit of vitality that gets lost in the English. It’s also not often that we do or create things that we can then dedicate to ourselves and each other. I felt this collection of poems served as a tangible moment in which I could hope to offer that acknowledgement while calling the Hmong diaspora to the page.
KKY: Is there a more conscious international reach with this book that is perhaps different from Afterland?
MDV: One might see it that way. Though most of the time when I was writing these books, I have to admit I wasn’t entirely focused on an international audience. I was trying to do what I felt the poems might need, versus what the audience or the “reach” might demand or expect of it. For any writer, that’s always a precarious balance to negotiate. In my case, doing what is in the best interest of the poem will always win out in the end.
But because the matter of yellow rain happened within an international context, there is an absolute sense of a global reach taking place that naturally becomes entwined with the book’s intention. As a Hmong writer, it is sometimes hard not to talk about the war and its geopolitical implications imprinted into who I am. There will always be an innate sense of a place that is here now, and a place that was once there but is no longer there in the same way. Maybe that’s what imbues a kind of reaching in these works that transcend national boundaries. With Afterland, I was certainly interested in examining the larger spatiality of Hmong movement, but it felt more rooted in the geographic spaces of the spiritual world, which, interestingly, can even be thought to serve as a kind of borderland itself.
KKY: The opening statement to the collection: “I am a daughter of Hmong refugees…daughter who keeps looking back at the sky.” What does it mean to be a Hmong daughter, “among the fled” in these times?
MDV: I was born around the time when my parents were resettled in the States. If they had remained in the camps for at least another year, I would have certainly been born there. The words you cite here are a nod to that history.
I still wonder what it means to be a Hmong daughter, and as I grow older, it becomes less literal and more embodied in the way I view and move through the world. Literal meaning that when I was growing up, there was the literal living as a Hmong daughter who was beholden to certain cultural expectations and duties within a Hmong family, whether it was carrying out household responsibilities or upholding the social decorum specific to my gender. A common experience for many Hmong daughters raised in a traditional family of the 1980s.
I refuse to let these unreckoned histories dissolve into oblivion only to be forgotten or erased.
But as I grew older and where I find myself now, it’s no longer entirely about the quotidian expectations of living and behaving as a Hmong daughter (though that feeling is still very much there) as much as it’s more about how Hmong daughterhood has given me a complicated lens and perspective from which to see the world through, from which to make my own conclusions about what is just or unjust to me, about what hasn’t been heard and needs to be heard, and so on.
KKY: The Radiolab interview you referenced in “The Fact of the Matter Is the Consequence of Ugly Deaths” is one in which I appeared as “niece” to the Hmong man being interviewed. It was a violence I cried to stop—to little significance. When I learned of this book project, I felt a relief in my heart I’ve been harboring since that dreadful day: September 23, 2012. How did the interview impact you and what role did it play in the writing of this book?
MDV: That interview happened during my first semester in the MFA program at Columbia, and I remember feeling angered and saddened after hearing it, but also feeling very emboldened and inspired by you, your bravery to express your truth, your uncle’s earnest telling, and how you stood in defiance of their attempts to invalidate the Hmong. We, as in all the listeners who felt enraged by what happened, were with you in that moment.
So much contextual history had been left out of that interview, especially a proper framing of the Secret War, its genesis and residual consequences shaping the unstable climate in which the yellow rain issue was born into. Put simply, if the Americans had not started a war in Laos, there would be no need to debate yellow rain today nor would there be a need to put us through the grief of being accused and gaslit as “liars.”
During my undergraduate years, when I was researching Hmong history and the Secret War, I had come across yellow rain briefly and felt so unsettled by it all. Years later, the Radiolab episode would happen, and it was then that yellow rain blew everything open in my life. I spent the bulk of that first semester in the MFA, and the following semesters, and part of the summers, scouring online library databases for and copiously reading through journal articles, government reports, books, media pieces, and other writing on yellow rain. It really consumed me because something about it just didn’t feel right. So much was missing, and we were only getting one version of the events. The book came out of a need to offer an extended rebuttal but also to provide another version amongst the many versions that I imagine are out there.
KKY: There is a defiance in these poems, across them, a refusal to submit to death, to the forces that have killed us in the past and present. Can you share with us the emotional/intellectual/spiritual journey you’re on in this book?
MDV: I would agree with that. I did try for poems that were driven by kind of a generational fire in spite of the generational heartbreak that has been endured by our parents, elders, and ancestors over centuries of war, exile, and displacement. I won’t forget something you said in the Radiolab interview about the Hmong heart being broken, and I think it’s so true. When the war ended, the Americans evacuated and abandoned the Hmong to fend alone. It seems to me that war and collective heartbreak always got in the way of our autonomous right to live out, fulfill, and self-determine our futures as a diasporic people. From China to Southeast Asia, it feels like we’ve been continually subject to great upheaval, and never fully allowed to live in peace and flourish. I hope that in this idea of the refusal to die, my poems put up a resistance or an opposition to that heartbreak.
Doing the research and writing the poems was a transformative experience. Years combing through documents, days sorting and categorizing data and other findings, nights drafting poems and visuals. Surrendering to confusion as well, trying to piece it together. I think I set out attempting to find some semblance of an answer to yellow rain not knowing what shape or form it might show itself as. I came out of it realizing that for me, personally, the book itself is my answer. It is my own explanation toward the reality that we may never have the “known” public answers about what happened.
The book is my attempt to collate into one place everything I had been thinking about that I felt was part of the answer. It’s also the stark realization that the privilege of a definitive answer and of knowing, or the privilege to inflict uncertainty on someone or a community, is a privilege that continues to elude the Hmong people. To control, withhold, and obscure truths and answers—this is the work of empire.
KKY: Can you share with us the emotional/intellectual/spiritual journey you hope to take readers in this book?
MDV: I hope that readers walk away learning about yellow rain. There are some Hmong people who don’t even know about the issue, or perhaps they know very little, and I hope that this matter of an unreckoned history comes to the attention of both Hmong and non-Hmong readers. I refuse to let these unreckoned histories dissolve into oblivion only to be forgotten or erased.
I also hope the book sheds greater light on the disparities that exist as it pertains to a community’s right to know something about itself or its history, versus what an outside group will choose to withhold from it. Who in our society has the power to perpetrate uncertainty on another group of people? It frequently is the case that those who are left in these states of not knowing, forced into spaces of constant worry and stagnation, forbidden the right to have an answer or denied the closure to properly mourn their losses are very often people of color, immigrants, refugees, Indigenous communities, and others whose basic human rights have been violated or put at risk. My book tries to reckon with this in its examination of yellow rain, and I hope that comes through somehow.
I further hope that the book offers to readers a way to think about the doing of poetry in all of its wild forms and varied expressions to bring something to the page that can’t necessarily be answered, explained, nor discerned. For me, poetry is the act of pulling something in from the void and then witnessing that awareness make itself manifest on the page.
KKY: The amount of research you’ve done in this book is staggering. How did the research inform the poetic form of individual poems and the communal whole?
If the Americans had not started a war in Laos, there would be no need to debate yellow rain today nor would there be a need to put us through the grief of being accused and gaslit as ‘liars.’
MDV: The research was an instrumental part of the process, and I had to allow myself to completely dive in, which meant having to compartmentalize my process for sanity’s sake. The research came first, and over the years leading up to this, I had already been reading through a lot of the documents. When I finally dove in, I committed myself to a whole summer of just more reading through and categorizing of the declassified documents and other reports. During this period, I didn’t force myself to write any poems, nor did I read any poetry, really. I wanted to create a space for myself to be immersed within the language, the details, the visuals, and the findings from the documents free from other creative entanglements. This process amounted to an accumulation of printed paper filling up multiple three-inch ring binders (I printed a lot of these documents in order to experience them in their most crude and obvious form; commiserations, however, to the environment, all the paper went to a good cause).
What was also really exciting, and distracting at times, was how I would read something in a document, and then it would take me elsewhere, and I would spend the rest of the day investigating that other thing. The structure of the manuscript was driven by the structure of the documents along with some thematic elements that emerged during my assessment of the materials. Once I had arrived at a point where I felt had gone far enough in the research, I took my documents, the ones I wanted to use for the book, and sorted them based on a variety of factors (subject matter, perspective, year, individuals involved, type of document, etc.) to begin shaping the skeleton of the collection. It was difficult to decide what to use and there was certainly stuff I wanted to use that got left out. But I feel that what’s there now in the book represents, to the best of my ability, another way of thinking about the topic of yellow rain. At this point, with everything sorted and coded in its tentative order, I was ready to write the actual poems. And I did that for many months.
KKY: Similarly to that opening statement at the front of the book, at its back, there are these words, “I circle. I pour into the rains. And I will chase them down until the seasons dry out and the clouds unfold before me the light of a new storm.” How do you visualize that new storm?
MDV: I hope it will mean something for present, emerging, and future writers who come from communities that have experienced something traumatic and that which demands a public reckoning, a clearing out and honoring of ancestral grief. For the descendants of immigrants and refugees, for the children growing up now who are witness to the atrocities inflicted by western-backed governments.
As I write this now, Afghanistan has collapsed to Taliban rule and there are chaotic masses of civilians spilling out onto the airport runways in Kabul. Both saddening and rage-inducing, the Afghan people are being left behind similar to how the U.S. left the Hmong behind in 1975. Out of what’s happened in Afghanistan, and anywhere else in the world, really, will come what I hope is a flood of new voices and writers who may choose to contend with the complicated and important histories that they or their elders have had to endure. Even as this work requires literary stamina and playing the long game against erasure, I hope it also creates the possibility for more things to come to light.
KKY: In the closing poem, “And Yet Still More,” there is a great deal of “waiting.” As a refugee child from the same war and history, when I get to the repeated lines, “That wait is the refugee”—I find my breath held, a pause inside of me. You state in the opening, “firstborn in a new land”—how does it feel to be the outcome of the wait in some sense? To inhabit that place of new birth?
MDV: Thanks for pointing that out. I stated earlier that had my parents remained a little longer in the camps, I would have been born there, and yes, I am their firstborn in this country. It feels to me that the act of “waiting” has always been synonymous in some ways with the refugee experience. Waiting to see if conditions in the country improve, waiting for the right time to flee, waiting to make the crossing, then more waiting in a refugee camp with years going by before the possibility of resettlement. The wait goes on, compounded by government bureaucracy, and this idea of the wait endured by refugees was actually inspired by a talk I heard from ethnic studies scholar and educator Yến Lê Espiritu at a conference on Critical Refugee Studies.
Borders are the product of the imperialist propensity to conquer, victor, subjugate, massacre, and displace people from their own land, for the gain of the empire.
To be the outcome of a period of waiting, to make it through after all that happened and could have happened, feels like a lifting and yet not at all, feels like I’ve arrived but haven’t. It’s a continual process of trying to “get there” with no idea as to whether “getting there” has already happened or will ever happen. I don’t know, maybe this particular feeling of limbo is an indication that the waiting is actually happening right now, unbeknownst to the person doing the waiting.
Having been born right at the cusp of when my parents fled Laos to when they arrived in the U.S. feels like being both a refugee and not a refugee. For me, it’s an even more exacerbated version of statelessness that isn’t predicated by a desire to belong somewhere, but on the contrary, wants to resist the need to conform to the idea of belonging as a means to challenge the façade of western integration. Though my birth certificate shows I was born here, I’m tormented by another country I’ve never been to nor lived in, its history lingering in the periphery of my mind.
KKY: If this book—in accordance with this dedication—is for the entirety of the Hmong speaking-reading people of the world, what does it suggest about the nation-state and national boundaries?
MDV: The Hmong have largely been a migratory people throughout history, suffering displacement and fleeing from wars, so the relationship to the concept of “homeland” is a rather convoluted one. And because the orphan archetype is a common motif in Hmong folklore and folk singing, it also seems to me that we can draw connections between the sorrow from the loss of parental presence as possibly representative of the sorrow from the loss of a place, any place. In some ways, we are orphan citizens.
To answer your question, I think it suggests that the notion of nation-states and national boundaries is very much a western-centric invention of the settler-colonialist imagination. Borders are the product and manifestation of the imperialist propensity to conquer, victor, subjugate, massacre, displace, and separate people from their own land, for the gain of the empire. As much as I appreciate the field of cartography and its practical contribution to our lives, I sometimes can’t look at a map nowadays and not consider the implications of who was given the authority to draw the lines on it and how those lines might have been fabricated and/or stolen. I sometimes can’t hear the words “adventure” or “exploration” or “uncharted” or “discovery” or “pioneer” without hearing how the words are all pseudo-forms of colonialism in disguise. This is my attempt to listen deeper, and I can only hope that others do the same.
Aila Kageyama had an obsession for the boneless creatures and objects of this world. An orange-blossom custard for example. Or a rubber swim cap. Or a jellyfish. Even boneless concepts were attractive to her. Cultural appropriation was one. And the myth of model minorities. Whereas inverted totalitarianism was a road covered in bones. She preferred the mouthfeel of words without bones. Words like Lillian and illiterate and willfully were like sardines packed with little un-removable bones. But oboe and mandarin orange were delicate and juicy. A nugget usually was boneless. A succulent lump of white meat she could dip into a tub of honey. Except those Denver Nuggets who were a talented family of bones.
Those were the two classifications pervading her life. Either it was bones or no bones. Freddie Mercury was bones. The strawberry catsuit Britney Spears wore in “Oops!” was no bones. A t-bone steak was obviously t-boned. A portabella burger was a no-boner. It was less about a scientific definition. For Aila, sharks were bones, and dolphins were no bones, even though the opposite was scientifically true. But this was philosophy, not science.
A buttplug was a sort of flanged neoprene bone. But a human butt in and of itself was no bones. A human butt with a buttplug inside of it was definitely a bone-in situation. But a butt with only a tongue in it was boneless. She liked that one a lot. Also an oriental chicken salad was boneless. She ordered them whenever possible, as she liked to study the expression on the waiter’s face when she said oriental. She liked to say it a bit extra. I’ll have the oriental salad with the oriental dressing on the side. And I’ll add those oriental thigh meats on top. Are there mandarins in the oriental? Sometimes the salad showed up with wonton strips or upon a bed of uncooked ramen noodles in which case the experience was sort of semi-boned or bone-studded. A bed had bones, also known as a frame, but a mattress was boneless much like a colossal slab of calamari.
Aila had had sex on an inherited IKEA mattress thirteen times before leaving it with a FREE sign on the street corner. Twelve times at Azusa PU with Ranjit Roshan and the sex was like melting into butter pecan ice cream. The other time was a threesome she’d had back on senior prom night with the actors Sam Rockwell and Laura Linney. This had been in Aila’s sweaty post-prom dream, and she had climaxed twice, once into Sam Rockwell’s mouth, and once more riding atop Laura Linney’s multicolored strapon dildo. Why had she remembered that Laura Linney’s monster kongy-donk was luminous, almost kaleidoscopic, the way she imagined the skin of an archangel’s face? The detail had given the dream an amplified sense of realism. Even in her dream she remembered thinking, Laura’s dildo looks so expensive, so custom. Celebrities will spend on anything and have no regrets. Later while Aila was describing it all in her dream diary, she wrote, So strange to dream objects I have never seen, what does it mean to physically egggasm upon an object that was not physically present? And then she had skipped a line and written, Sex with ghosts possible????
Aila had been valedictorian of her high school. She had been voted Most Likely to Rule the World alongside Charles Rigaud Dalembert. She disliked the idea of ruling, but admittedly her favorite song was “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. Roland Orzabal gave her all the lady-boners. There was a picture of Aila and Charles in the yearbook wearing royal mantles and holding plastic scepters. One girl plus one boy per Most Likely. Wasn’t this tradition a little odd? Who designed these ballots? There was something about it that felt like an arranged marriage.
Arranged or unarranged. Both could be beautiful. After Aila Kageyama dropped out of college she became a phenomenally successful florist. Flowers were the pinnacle of boneless beauty, and a florist did not have to remove bloodstains from her work clothes. “Aila’s Bloomsday” had three shops and thirteen delivery trucks. By her thirtieth birthday, her work had been featured in magazines and on the local news. She was the first of her friends to make ten million dollars.
But Aila’s success went unrecognized by her family. She was the youngest of six children. Five Kageyama children became heart surgeons. One Kageyama child became a florist. Aila was the butt of every joke at family gatherings. Could you cure a mangled heart with flowers? You could not.
As her siblings began to die, Aila designed each of them a unique and exquisite funerary arrangement. Black clamshell orchids were dominant for Reiko. She had died vacationing in Belize. Yellow gladioli for Harry. He was the funnest drunk Aila ever met. He had belted out the Morrissey at karaoke. White daisies for Mariko. She had died a virgin. The saddest no bones of all. Aila’s funerary arrangements always contained four hundred and forty-three blossoms. Aila and her siblings had spent their childhoods like sardines packed into a two-bedroom one-bathroom apartment at 443 Mourning Cloak Way. Her parents had slept on bunk beds in the living room. The children slept atop each other as though skewered. On warm summer nights, Aila had pitched a tent on the Kageyama patio of dying plants. In that Kageyama apartment, the plants and animals were eaten down to their bones. The bones were boiled for stock. The stock was eaten down to its residue. Not much made it to their garbage bins.
In her ninety-ninth year, Aila was the last of the Mourning Cloak Kageyamas to go. She had given careful instructions for how to tend to her remains. She did not want cremation. She wanted to be slipped naked into a thin biodegradable casket sack and buried beneath an apple orchard. She preferred Pacific Roses or Honeycrisps, but Fujis or Pink Ladies would be OK too.
Aila’s children promised to go along with the dead-nude-into-Fujis idea, but in the end they decided to cremate her anyway. Cremation simply seemed the faster and cleaner choice. And Aila’s senior living community was a bit of a one-stop shop. In the final years of Aila’s life, she was moved from one ward to the next, independent living to partial care, partial care to the Alzheimer’s bunkers. From all her apartment windows she could see the tall black concrete tower, the community’s cremation chamber. The air always smelled faintly like a holiday barbecue.
On the afternoon of Aila’s death, her children had not checked the box asking if they wanted their mother’s “complete” remains. They did not understand this meant with or without the bone fragments that survived incineration. They were given the boneless remains, and they placed them inside an ornate cinerary urn. They had felt a little bad about cremating against their mother’s wishes, and so they sprung for the most expensive cinerary urn they could find on Etsy. It was about a four-hundred-dollar purchase, including the discount code for free shipping. The cinerary urn was placed upon a glass shelf in a curio cabinet beside an oil painting of an apple orchard. Aila’s son had done the painting himself, and it was very poor.
Many years later, the curio cabinet and the painting and Aila were sold as a single item in an estate sale. The buyer was Reyansh Roshan, the great-grandson of Ranjit Roshan. Good old bones on this cabinet, he thought, patting it lovingly. Reyansh really hated the apple orchard painting though, and he placed it atop the trash bins with a FREE sign taped upon it. He presumed the cinerary urn was decorative pottery, and so he kept Aila there inside.
A tectonic shift over the last 20 years in how narrative is conveyed—fueled largely by the online journal’s rise from (mostly) irrelevance to somewhere near the top of the literary fiction food chain—has created the perfect environment for disseminating shorter work. The subsequent constriction of literary attention spans and near universal adoption of mobile technology have made 1000-word (or less) stories both ubiquitous and imminently consumable.
At present, many of the best journals are online and even pedigreed print magazines are delivering highly-respected online offerings. But sometimes seeing just what can be done in a few hundred words serves to whet readers’ appetites for a full-length collection.
Here are seven collections of flash fiction you don’t want to miss.
The Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan
While Ernest Hemingway gets credit (not undeserved) as one of the foremost progenitors of writing flash—the vignettes interspersed through his first story collectionIn Our Time are truly outstanding—the first and only full-length flash fiction collection from the in-and-out-of-fashion Richard Brautigan, Revenge of the Lawn, represents a spectacular introduction to the genesis of contemporary flash. Brautigan’s preternatural gift for conspicuous invention is on full display in stories like “The Weather in San Francisco,” in which a woman’s visit to a butcher opens up into a miracle of a tale in a bay city apartment cum apiary. Another high point, “Corporal,” represents a delicious lesson in class and the hard-earned pleasures of non-conformity.
Coming from one of today’s acknowledged masters of the form, it’s no surprise that Sherrie Flick’s Whiskey, Etc. could easily function as a “how-to” for aspiring flash fictioneers when it comes to technique. But even though Flick is inarguably a master technician, this isn’t the only or even the best reason why she’s an important writer. Flick’s Whiskey, Etc. serves up a series of worlds that can’t help but feel familiar as breakfast and yet at the same time spin off-kilter in a way that brings home something funny, sad and very profound about how we’re living now. Flick’s characters are fundamentally, but ever-so subtly, broken right down to their bones, but somehow still manage to move with hearts full of hope. Underneath the wit and flawless craft of stories like “The Paperboy” or “How I Left Ned,” Flick makes a powerful statement about emptiness, about a sense of longing that infuses all. Over and over in this collection, we are led to the realization that something important, maybe the only thing that’s important, is missing. What makes Flick’s balancing act so compelling is that even though its sense of emptiness underlies everything, it’s never in a way that feels sinister or maudlin. This collection is a treasure.
A River So Long by Vallie Lynn Watson
In the opening of No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell opines, “I’d never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin’ if maybe he was some new kind.” While an order of magnitude less sinister than anything out of McCarthy, Veronica—the disconnected protagonist of Vallie Lynn Watson’s flash collection A River So Long—may have readers of a certain age asking the very same question.
As its itinerant main character drifts between hotel rooms, cities, and lovers, Watson’s debut flash collection makes a powerful statement about the myriad dangers of an adolescence that dilates into one’s late 20s. This slight and spare book offers the occasional grace note, but rather than delight, Watson’s stories seem more interested in keeping readers at arm’s length. This, perhaps, shouldn’t come as a surprise, as it tends to be Veronica’s native posture when it comes to experiencing her own life.
For a certain segment of people born in the backend of the 1970s, the book’s Polaroids of attenuated plot, limited description and flattened affect are unsettling—not despite, but because, of their familiarity. Watson’s disturbing little book uses flash to deliver a generational update that serves to illuminate our shortcomings of both character and imagination in ways that can’t help but impel us toward self-examination.
One of the qualities of flash that often entices readers toward the form is its ability to function as a forum for spectacular formal innovation. While Maria Romasco Moore’s ekphrastic collection Ghostographs delivers innovation in spades, it’s a quality that never feels forced or gratuitous, but rather utterly endemic to the world she is building.
Kicking off with one of the smartest and most memorable—one could say even say haunting—openings in American fiction, Moore uses flash pieces to build a ghost town that burns itself into our memories with the singularity of a wedding or national tragedy. Using nothing but found photographs, incandescent language, and her unparalleled imagination, Moore shapes for us a twilight world in which we’ll never quite feel at home. Replete with snake women, an unfathomable abyss and haunted dogs, it’s as if Dali traded in his brushes to turn writer and his first urgent order of business was to fashion a fabulist and strange Winesburg, Ohio. Don’t miss this debut.
Novels written in flash can probably best be thought of as their own unique genre—as the impact of the flashes as individual pieces is often subsumed or overshadowed by the narrative gravity and arc of the overall plot. Sandra Cisneros’s classic The House on Mango Street somehow finds, or more likely invents, a middle ground in which each of its forty-four flashes shines (or by turns devastates) in its own right while at the same time advancing the narrative.
We follow narrator Esperanza on her emotional journey out of childhood after her family’s move to a house of their own that, like coming of age itself, is rarely all it’s cracked up to be. Cisneros’s rendering of Chicana girlhood in working-class Chicago is an object lesson in architecting moments that, while perfectly capable of illuminating a way of being on their own, hold together to shape a character and bring into focus a world.
There’s a reason one of the leading flash fiction journals in the U.S. has named its Emerging Writers Fellowship for author Kathy Fish. Not only has her work been featured in a list of anthologies longer than the rap sheet of a south Florida politician, her stories consistently perform a delicious balancing act—their verbal dexterity supporting their considered narrative arcs.
Her most recent book, Wild Life: Collected Work 2003-2018 gives readers a chance to sample work from nearly 20 years of Fish’s writing. While many writers kick stories off with titles that may draw us in, Fish offers us threads that simply demand pulling. When confronted with “There is No Albuquerque, “Sea Creatures of Indiana,” or “Everything’s Shitty at Price King”—I know where my next ten minutes are going. A hallmark of Fish’s flash—and likely one of the reasons she has been an in-demand workshop instructor for the last decade—is her ability to deploy language that is by turns poetic, exacting or delightfully flat in the service of bringing us to the intersection of met expectations and wild-eyed shock.
If you have the time to read only one collection of flash fiction this month, this decade, or possibly for the rest of your life, the choice is surprisingly easy. Assembled by flash mavens James Thomas and Robert Shapard, W.W. Norton’s anthology Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories represents the ne plus ultra when it comes to assembling the strongest short short fiction written over a 20-year stretch.
Featuring work from literary luminaries like John Updike, Rick Moody, and John Edgar Wideman—you’ll never think of a banana in the rain the same way again—the book also includes flash royalty like Lydia Davis and Pamela Painter but in no way shies away from bringing emerging voices into the spotlight. Wonderfully engaging and inventive stories from G.A. Ingersoll and Jenny Hall delight.
It’s hard to stress enough the degree to which this is a collection to be savored. Each story is so strong that when I first encountered this book, I limited myself to reading two pieces each day. Not only didn’t I want the book to end, but two stories as good as these are… well, as a reader it will take you that much time to savor them. If you’re a writer, you’ll want that much time to learn from them.
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