In what feels like a never ending cycle of disappointing media news, last week we in the literary community were astonished to learn that after two decades The Believer magazine will discontinue publication. (Since 2017, The Believer has been published by the Black Mountain Institute, out of University of Nevada Las Vegas College of Liberal Arts, and was published by McSweeney’s before that.) I was sharing an Uber with another writer on the way to a short residency when we both saw the tweet. In unison, we gasped. I’m sorry to admit that my second thought was a complex blend of gratitude for the feeling of relative job security and the eerie reminder that everything can change in an instant—sometimes for the better, but often for the worse.
At Electric Literature, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, we are funded by a mix of grants, advertising sponsorships, membership fees, and grassroots donations. There are both benefits and drawbacks to this business model. There is no guardian angel waiting on the sidelines, ready to jump in and save us should our finances go awry. On the other hand, we aren’t beholden to any person or institution other than our readers and our leadership. We trade the short to medium term financial security of a sole benefactor for the existential security of knowing that we are not subject to any one person’s whims. This allows us to enjoy a certain amount of freedom; we operate without the oversight of someone holding the purse strings, who inevitably juggles shifting priorities and motivations.
The more people that support a magazine, the freer it is to tell the truth
Earlier this year, EL’s executive director Halimah Marcus and I sat down over cocktails for a virtual live salon. We wanted Electric Literature’s community to have the opportunity to get to know me as an editor and leader. During the Q&A, someone inquired about feeling competitive with peer publications. I said that I don’t feel competitive (other than the rare occasions when we must compete for a piece we want to publish!). So many publications were formative for me—teaching me craft, bringing me through editorial processes that affirmed me as a writer, thinker, and human being. So there’s no joy in the news that another storied publication is closing its doors. Instead, it brings feelings of sympathy for their hardworking and talented staff, and the loss of their vision for the literary community.
But it also brings anger.
I am angry that another journal—which I deeply respect—will soon close its doors. I’m angry that artistic institutions are forced to operate in a cultural context that so devalues art that a single person or institution can pull the plug. It’s exciting to me that the study of writing seems more accessible than ever, with increasingly diverse MFA programs and workshops offered by journals and local organizations as a viable alternative. But I can’t help but wonder about the fate of the platforms where these writers aspire to publish. If literary journals keep shutting down, where will writers cut their teeth? Where will they gain the practical experience of being edited, of signing a contract, of reviewing proofs, and publishing for an audience that engages with their work?
If literary journals keep shutting down, where will writers cut their teeth?
Literary journals are the rigorous proving grounds that early-career writers need; they are the venues that often propel us from early to mid-career. We gain experience and critical credibility in their pages, which often goes a long way when we’re looking to find agents or publish our first books. And given the consolidation that’s happening in book publishing, and the reluctance of major publishing houses to take risks, literary journals are especially important for writers from marginalized backgrounds. They are the first venues to publish us, to affirm our writing, and to help us build an audience. This, in turn, helps us build careers.
I’ll never forget the kind words Ann Rushton, editor-in-chief of Bound Off (RIP!), had for me when I told her Bound Off was my first acceptance: “Well I’m most certain this won’t be your last publication.” I still think of her when I need a boost of confidence. Or a few years later, when Esme-Michelle Watkins at Apogee Journal took me through three rounds of content and line edits so thorough, that at first I worried whether or not she even wanted to publish my piece. But when all was said and done, I realized she had helped me find the best version of the story, and shaped my understanding of the novel I’m now writing, which grew out of that work. It’s the work of literary journal editors that first showed me the value of my own writing, and allowed me to believe that my work was worthy of a readers’ time. If literary journals don’t get the support we need—from readers, from writers, from donors, and yes, from institutions—the decline may be slow, but American letters will fall from excellence. Our work will not be read.
We are at risk of losing our literary institutions. After the Black Mountain Institute announced they would cease publication of The Believer, people were tweeting versions of “can’t someone save it?” But rather than waiting for millionaires and billionaires to fund, defund, and subsequently “save” literary magazines, shouldn’t we rally as a community to support them in the first place? Currently, Electric Literature has 1,200 members who contribute ~25% of our budget. Their support is deeply appreciated and vital, but we still carry debt and don’t have a safety net. What if 5,000 members supported 75% of our budget? We would have a steady monthly income to cover our essential expenses; we could pay writers and staff what they deserve rather than what we can afford, and an advertiser pulling out or the loss of a grant couldn’t throw us into a crisis. The more people that support a magazine, the more democratic and diversified it is, the more safe and sustainable it becomes, and the freer it is to tell the truth.
This letter comes to you in the first week of our $12,000 for 12 years campaign, celebrating Electric Literature’s decade plus of publication. If you love what Electric Literature is doing to make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive, then join us in our mission by becoming a member. Help us safeguard our future!
Speculative, surreal stories can be doorways to imagine both what is possible and the effects of trauma and change on the most vulnerable people. Speculative storytelling is expansive, incorporating horror, science fiction, and surrealism to help readers tackle what we are most unwilling to see, highlighting how systemic oppression can break open and create new realities.
In her collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, author Carribean Fragoza immerses the reader in the experiences of Mexican and Chicana women who are navigating intergenerational relationships, abuse, and changing bodies. While each story stands alone, they also feel very cohesive, as if they are on the same looping timeline in which one person’s story dies to bloom another’s. Each story blends the horrific, the magical, and the ordinary so seamlessly that they reimagine our expectations of reality, asking you to confront the grotesque in the everyday violences of our own lives.
I had the opportunity to speak to Carribean Fragoza about the way that the book deals with experimentation, the body, and where she finds community with other Mexican American artists.
Leticia Urieta: Where did this book begin for you or what does the title of the book mean to you?
Carribean Fragoza: I wrote these stories over the course of many years, some of them as early as undergrad at UCLA. When I wrote “The Vicious Ladies” I really felt like I hit on something that I wanted to continue to push. That’s the story of the young woman who graduates from college and goes back to her neighborhood, not really by choice but she has to because she doesn’t really have any other job prospects. And then she has to join this party crew, and she just kind of gets sucked into this party crew in her neighborhood, but Samira, who’s the leader of the party crew, had this very strong voice that was not afraid to speak her truth, even if it made me uncomfortable. She was so clearly dedicated to protecting and holding and uplifting the girls and the women in her party crew that that became a lesson for me and a real point of departure for a lot of what I’ve written since.
Originally I thought the collection would be titled the “Vicious Ladies” and I always thought of it that way but then in conversation with my editor, Elaine Katzenberg, we thought it would be best to use that title, Eat The Mouth That Feeds You, because it touches on so many themes and ideas that are woven in throughout the entire book, mainly the intergenerational connection. I’m just transferring knowledge through bodies through storytelling across generations of women. There’s a sort of complexity to the title that people can sit with. There’s also the cringe quality that makes people uncomfortable. But I’m okay with people cringing through my stories. I think there’s a little pleasure for me to be honest, in grossing people out or making people uncomfortable with my depictions of death and decomposing bodies and bodies being consumed in different ways. As a fan of certain types of body horror in film, there’s a really great way to use that to depict the everyday horrors of the body, and especially of women’s bodies, from a menstruation cycle to a miscarriage.
LU: That was something I loved most about this book was how you write about the body. There are several stories in this collection that depict aging bodies, dying bodies, the bodies of women being consumed, and bodies in transformation. Why is that something that feels important to you as a storyteller?
CF: Most of my writing is very embodied, and I make it a point to do so. It’s the perspective that we don’t get to see very often in literature, how women’s bodies are depicted usually from an outsider perspective, usually from the male gaze. It felt really important and necessary for me to write it from a very embodied internal perspective, where the body is experienced, not just gazed upon. Having a female body is an experience that I don’t think gets talked about enough. I mean sure, we know about menstruation, but even that is so taboo still after all this time. I would love to read more writing from other women or women-identifying people and just understand more how other people experience their bodies. I have this one body and this is how I experience it, and I want to understand how my characters experience their bodies as well.
LU: I think one of the things that comes out in the stories is trauma’s effects on the body and how trauma could transform and change the body in grotesque ways, but also in kind of beautiful ways. One of the stories that I went back to is the “Mysterious Bodies.” A lot of these stories end with the destruction of the character in some way or even the destruction of the bodies as they were before. Do you feel like that’s one way to depict trauma’s effect on the body, even familial trauma?
There’s a little pleasure for me, in grossing people out with my depictions of death and decomposing bodies and bodies being consumed in different ways.
CF: It’s very important to me to think about how trauma manifests itself in the body, even though we’re not always aware of it, even the trauma of previous generations. I’m also thinking about the life cycle of the body and the transformation of the body from birth to death, especially as a mother of an almost ten-year-old and a two-year-old. I have a two-year-old baby and I watch her grow every day and then I have this almost ten-year-old that’s about to start puberty or is already starting. And here I am, about to turn 40. Here the three of us are, our bodies being in different places.
I wrote “Eat the Mouth That Feeds You” when I first learned that I was pregnant with my first child and shortly before that, my grandmother and my great-grandmother passed away. So I was in this really interesting place between producing future generations and letting go of my predecessors, and trying to locate myself within that, within the family, but also historically. What does it mean to be of my generation, and what are my contributions? I’m giving my body physically to this new little baby. And every time I nurse I’m literally letting her feed off of me. But then also, as a writer what do I contribute to conversations, to actions to change in the world? To be honest, I don’t always know how writing these stories impacts anything, but I think I see something when I get to have conversations like with you or others who feel impacted or touched by the stories.
LU: For several of the characters in the book, such as the narrator of “Eat The Mouth That Feeds You,” or “Me Muero,” there is an acceptance of death, or being consumed. Do you think that there is power there?
CF: I’m trying to think about how the body experiences violence in being consumed, but then also how we navigate that to find some empowerment. I think in all of my stories I’m trying to find a way to empower the characters. I can’t speak for everybody but so many of us find ourselves in and across multiple generations, in situations that are very difficult, and we still live in a patriarchal capitalist, white supremacist society. And we are still in the position that we’re in within those structures, and we’re constantly trying to navigate that and find our places of power. And sometimes it’s in our bodies, sometimes it’s in spirituality. Sometimes it’s in ancestral knowledge. Sometimes it’s in our own family histories. And so I think for each of us, empowerment looks different, and I was trying to find that in each of the lives of my characters and in their narratives, despite whatever their situation is whether they’re a low-level employee somewhere, taking the abuse or shit from their boss, or whether they’re a mom, like an immigrant mother, just trying to have a daughter and live in the United States. I asked, what does it mean to live in these positions, and how can we create openings within our situations to find our place of power within that.
My interest in looking at history in general and our particular familial past is to find the lessons. And sometimes the lesson can be a way to move forward, to not repeat certain situations that our mothers or grandmothers were in, but sometimes the lesson is maybe you don’t move forward, maybe you don’t get to be in a better place than your grandmother or your mother. There’s one particular story where the character is talking about how she feels like she ended up in a place where her grandmother was. Instead of doing better than the previous generation, she got knocked back to a place of poverty and abuse, similar to what her grandmother might have experienced. We learn the lessons and we do hope and expect to “move forward” or progress but maybe that’s not really real for some of us. Then what do you do with those lessons?
LU: Who do you consider your literary ancestors or community members?
We’re constantly trying to navigate [living in a patriarchal capitalist, white supremacist society] and finding our places of power… For each of us, empowerment looks different.
CF: One of my influences is vampire literature, like Interview with a Vampire. As a young person back in middle school, I remember reading vampire novels and writing as if I were a vampire, and how that really nourished my writerly self. It really freaked people out, mainly my teachers, because they were thinking, “oh, Carribean is not well.” Anne Rice was a part of the lineage of Gothic Literature that I gravitated towards and Shirley Jackson as well. When I read her story, “The Lottery,” something changed in my mind. I started thinking more about how maybe unconsciously I’ve been influenced in these profound ways by the genre. I hope that newer writers can find their place in this genre as well.
I have to mention Helena Viramontes who I read and immediately loved. Currently, I also feel really connected to Sesshu Foster, who wrote Atomik Aztex, because he and I are both from East LA and he and I have this vision of revising or rethinking history and thinking towards the future.
LU: Could you talk more about your work as an editor and community organizer? What kinds of spaces are you creating with publication and the arts collective?
CF: With the publication of Vicious Ladies Magazine, I wanted to create a safe space for women or nonbinary writers and cultural critics of color to write in their own unique voices that is not policed by the white gaze. I often struggled to get my stories heard and read as a journalist, and so I hope to create opportunities for mentorship and for new writers to get their stories out there in whatever voice they choose to use. They can sound this hood as they want. They can use poetry to write about an art installation. I want this to be a space of experimentation.
My husband’s a historian and we collect oral histories, we’re building an archive, and we wrote a whole book about the history of my hometown. We started the South El Monte Art Posse (SEMAP), a multi-disciplinary arts collective, which is 10 years old this year. This community has really shaped how I see our stories, and I want to always shout out to El Monte writers like Salvador Plascencia, Michael Jaime-Becerra, Toni Margarita Plummer (Kirkpatrick), and other writers I am in community with like Myriam Gurba. This community and these stories are a way of belonging to a place through these little stories and through connections to small, seemingly insignificant objects and narratives in this archive. So I’m very invested in uncovering new histories, but also in thinking about the future and what we want the future to look like and how does my writing contribute to the future that I want to see not just for myself, because I’ll be gone before you know it, but for all of our future generations, like my kin, my daughters, but also all the new young writers and artists out there.
The world beyond his room had grown mysterious, untrustworthy. He spent whole days alone, his parents downstairs, lying belly-down on the carpet, sketching and coloring images. At first, during his early years, Max responded to the graffiti everywhere he went, the characters and wild styles and throw-ups, the improbable mix of colors that seldom met in the natural world. When he grew older he searched above, up toward the light-saturated night sky. His canvas became larger, moving from school notebooks to A3 sheets. He began to conjure nebulae, solar systems, distant dwarf stars that shone pale milk blue, the lifeless glow of dead planets. His parents grew worried. To them his pictures were of nothingness, empty dead space, cold and isolated. His mother complained to Aunt Lina that he’d lock himself away for hours, rarely coming down to eat; and even when he did, he wouldn’t speak. His father eyed him with sullen concern, mouth opening and closing, cigarette poised by his lips, grasping for language never caught.
Max knew what he feared most: the odd looks, that slow creep away, and in strange, laughable contrast, the trailing six steps behind him in every shop, his newfound size met with awe and some distress. The previous summer he felt people thought him charming, possibly lovable. Without warning all that had changed. Now he was a foreign body causing panic. A threat.
He lay stretched on his stomach painting a watercolor cloud of blue in red when Noel knocked for him. His neighbor lived two streets away, so their mothers made sure they walked to school together, hoping to deter rougher neighborhood youths. When the boys reached their school gates they split like torn paper, staying apart until it was time to go home. Max didn’t blame him. He liked Noel. He was short, not self-conscious, confident and popular with girls, boys, and teachers, humorous and knowledgeable without seeming quirky. Once, at lunch, Noel spent ten minutes stabbing every fry on his plate onto a fork with intent precision while the entire population of the school hall watched, applauding as he crammed the soft-spiked bunch into his mouth.
At the knock, Max half rolled over, knowing who it was. There was nobody else it could be. “Come!”
The door eased open, stopped. Noel’s head appeared. “Yes, Maximillian!”
“Bruv. I told you not to call me that.”
Noel pursed his lips in a closed-mouthed smile. “Yes, Max. You good?”
“Yeah. Come.”
Noel entered. Sagging skinny jeans, fresh black Adidas, a matching T-shirt and black hoodie. Noel always had the manners to remove his snapback when he came in the house, which Max’s mum never stopped going on about. His haircut was barbershop fresh, a day old at the latest, making his small head gleam like a water chestnut. Max, in contrast, had on worn trackies from last year, a fraying polo shirt, and his Afro hadn’t seen a barber in months. His cheeks warmed as Noel looked for somewhere to sit, opting for the single bed. The room was small, barely space enough for the thin bed. A single wooden chair was filled with a pile of folded clean clothes. Posters of street murals, Hubble photographs, and rap stars surrounded them.
“Why you lyin’ on the floor?”
“It’s comfortable. Plus it’s the best place to draw.”
“Don’t you hurt your back an’ shit?”
“Sometimes. I haven’t got a desk, so . . .”
Noel craned his neck, tracking the walls. “Man can draw, fam.”
“Thanks. It’s just practice.”
“Nah, it ain’ practice. I could practice years and not draw like that.”
“Everybody’s got their thing, innit?”
Noel wrinkled his nose. “You reckon?”
“Blatant.”
A wait, the distance between them more apparent with every second. Downstairs, a clang of kitchen utensils. The aroma of melting coconut oil. Frying onions.
“Bruv, I pree something, you know.”
Max rolled onto his back. Noel was staring out of his window. At the underground tracks beyond his garden.
“What?”
“I dunno.”
Max laughed, stopped. There was a thin shadow of hair along Noel’s jaw he hadn’t noticed before. “You dunno?”
“Yep.”
“Where?”
“The industrial estate. It’s proper mad. As soon as I see it I thought, that’s Max. He’ll know what to do. It’s peak.”
His skin began to tingle. It came from nothing, nowhere. He felt pressure in his veins, the sparkling sensation of a dead arm, and realized he was leaning on his elbows. He sat up. The barricade lifted, blood rushed back where it belonged.
“What is it?”
“I can’t explain. You gotta come, trust. You’re the only man I’ll let see this ting, believe me. Everyone else’s too stupid. They’ll ruin it.”
“Is this a joke?”
Noel stared. His eyes were dark marbles. “Bruv. Do I joke?”
It was empty space, the substance he’d stared up at night after night. It was the vision before his eyes when his lids were closed.
They held each other’s gaze, and burst into spluttered laughter.
“Nah, but really,” Noel said. “Do I joke about seriousness?”
Max was already on his feet, easing into sneakers that were blackened like plantains, a sweatshirt lined with creases, and over that, a gilet vomiting cotton from the loose jagged teeth of torn seams.
“Come then,” he said, avoiding Noel’s smile.
They rode single file, in silence. Past the small park used by Amberley Aggy more than anyone else, beneath the quiet thunder of the underpass, and onto the busy main road, which for some reason was called a lane. Even their bikes were nothing alike: Noel’s a gleaming thoroughbred, bright red with thin black tires, Max’s a lumbering matte-black no-name, thick-boned with a wide snakeskin tread, rusting and creaking as its wheels turned slow. They cruised at medium pace, Noel seemingly in no hurry. Traffic was snarled up this close to rush hour, granting the ability to ride single and double yellows in lieu of bike lanes, ignoring the momentary panic on car passengers’ faces, unaware of their relaxed, guilt-ridden calm once they were gone. The day was bright, the breeze chilled as the sun began to fall, Max relishing his mild sweat as he bore down on the pedals. When Noel turned left immediately after the overhead railway bridge, he followed.
Traffic sounds lowered. The rolling shush of car tires became soothing, momentary. There was even the sound of chattering birds. Max closed his eyes, enjoying the sensation. His tires whirred beneath him.
The warehouse had once been some kind of factory, but it had clearly been long abandoned. On the upper floors, steps ascended into thin air and crumbling window frames. The only intact ceilings were on floors one and two, which were dark even though the sun was bright, foreboding even from outside. Noel glanced over his shoulder as he wheeled his bike toward the dusty steps; other than that, he hardly seemed to notice Max. He lifted the bike up, toward the blue factory doors. A scrawl of tags was etched on wooden boards that replaced the broken glass. Max thought the doors were closed, locked, as both were straight-backed and rigid, but when Noel pushed there was just enough space to squeeze themselves and the bikes through their resistance. Inside, he kicked one semiclosed; it barked a splintering protest, stuck. Noel wheeled his bike farther inside and so Max left it be, trailing after him.
The ground floor was vast. He couldn’t see the far end, consumed as it was by shadow, the walls disappearing into gloom much as the stairs above their heads evaporated into sky. Everywhere was dust and rubble, as though an earthquake had taken place, leaving the outside untouched. He saw repeated mounds of white plaster embedded with red brick that reminded him of strawberry meringue. Some mounds touched the pocked and cracked white ceiling. Cathedral arch windows beamed stunted blocks of daylight on either side of the boys, but the center of the hall was dark and difficult to make out.
Max found himself stumbling every few steps; on what, he dared not guess. The smell was of mold, damp earth. It clogged his nose and made his eyes feel heavy. The scrape of their feet caused a sea of dust to rise around their ankles. Every now and then there was a downpour of debris as showers of plaster fell from the floors above, thankfully nowhere near them. He stopped pushing the bike to rub his fingers together; they were rough, powdery, and he could taste a crackle of grit between his teeth. In front of him, the dust fog settled. He could just make out Noel’s shadow. He angled his handlebars in that direction and only knew he’d reached him when he bumped the back of his legs.
“Oi,” Noel said, softer than usual.
“Sorry,” Max whispered, following his lead.
“It’s sleeping,” Noel said.
Max was just about to ask what, but he stepped out from behind Noel, and saw.
Beyond the boys, there was a small pile of rubble as high as Max’s waist. On or spread across the crumbled plaster, it was difficult to tell, was nothing. Or rather it was something as far as Max could see, although exactly what he didn’t know: a black patch, dark ooze where there should have been sand-like plaster. There was an absence of light on the ground before them, a hole-like rip in the earth that led into . . . an abyss. It was empty space, the substance he’d stared up at night after night. It was the vision before his eyes when his lids were closed. The deepest part of the night when he lay in bed, roused from dreams. To see it where it shouldn’t be made Max dizzy with uncertainty and he stepped back with a yelp of surprise. He stumbled on an unseen brick, which shot from beneath his foot and made him fall, the bike clattering to the dust in a racket of gears and wheels.
He blanked out for a moment, trying to collect himself. Through holes in the glass roof, the faraway blue sky spun in slow motion. A wisp of cloud traveled on the wind. Noel whispered, “Shit,” and Max only just heard him, thinking he might be in trouble, so he tried to get up; only when he’d pulled himself into a sitting position, he froze. Everything left him. Body heat, voice, his breath.
The dark ooze had moved. It wasn’t spread out on the floor, it was sitting up like him. No, it wasn’t sitting up, it was pushing itself onto hollow haunches. He could see that what he’d first thought of as a random spread of substance was actually manlike—arms, legs, torso, head, all midnight black, all devoid of features. Humanoid. The creature got to its feet, spreading its arms out wide. A man-shaped silhouette three inches taller than him, around six foot four, a cutout patch of blank shape and inside that, dark void. Max tried to peer into the depths. For a moment there was the sparkle of distant stars: galaxies perhaps? The nothing was so deep it almost gave off its own light. Maybe that was what he was seeing? He leaned forward, yearning for more, so captivated he barely registered Noel say: “See? It’s beautiful.”
The being seemed to hear him. It extended a pitch-black hand, fingers reaching, strained for contact. It didn’t move. Noel stepped forward.
“No,” Max whispered from the rubble floor.
Noel ignored him, inching closer, an exhalation of dust at his feet. He touched the darkened fingers and immediately, instead of grasping them, Noel’s fingers began to disappear. It was as though they’d been immersed into a gleaming pool of thick oil. He made a terrible noise, moaning fear and revulsion, deep-throated, growing louder as he fell deeper into the creature’s body. The darkness covered more of him, his knuckles, wrist, forearm, his elbow, and up one shoulder, Noel’s feet beginning to slide closer into the creature, sending roiling dust puffing high, some of which also vanished into the dark form. Half Noel’s torso, his leg, his face, which turned toward Max and let out a roaring scream, until it covered his shaved head, and the substance filled his mouth, cutting off his voice as though a plug had been pulled inside him.
Max yelled something that wasn’t even a word, his throat raw.
The creature sucked Noel in, took his whole body until there was only a flailing arm, a bent elbow, fingers writhing like windblown leaves, sliding inside the creature with a dull pop. Immersion.
He was cold, and so he climbed beneath his covers fully clothed, teeth transmitting code for his ears alone, the image of Noel absorbed into the void of the creature returning like a DVD glitch; repeat, repeat.
It was still. The void became auditory. It turned toward Max, opening its arms. He picked up his bike, pushing it a meter before him, and leaped on, pedaling hard and fast. He only looked behind once, against his will, believing the creature would come after him, but it stood in the same spot, arms wide, turned in his direction. He made it to the graffiti-stained doors, jumped from the bike, wrenched the doors open, breaking three nails so his fingers bled, and pushed himself outside without a care for bumps or scrapes, throwing himself back onto the bike and sprinting hard. His breathing was a harsh, ragged, quiet scream, ripping his chest like smoke, his expression a wide-eyed mask of shocked fear. He rode so frantically cars veered out of his path to avoid collision, and buses sighed to a stop.
At the small park his muscles could do no more and his legs gave out. He fell onto the grass, bones jarring as they met earth, lucky to have the bike roll away and not collapse on top of him, the whine of his breath like the sawing rasp of an asthma attack, sweat pouring from his face and body, soaking his clothes. Old Man Taylor and Ms. Emmes saw him as they returned from the parade of shops, and assumed he’d been smoking, or possibly injecting, forcing a wide space between themselves and the boy, storing the image of him splayed and panting to recreate for his parents.
Max’s chest rose and fell, looking painful, possibly dangerous. By the time it returned to an even pace, daylight had dimmed. The Amberley Road teenagers arrived, sauntering in no clear direction only to pivot on the spot, palms slapping, barking laughter, passing lighters and curses, heads nodding to smartphone music until they noticed Max; then whispering among themselves as they saw him on his back, motionless. They tried to pretend he wasn’t there, yet his presence muted their voices. The strange kid, even stranger now, possibly drugged or the victim of an attack. Unable to tell and unwilling to check, they left Max alone.
When he rose to his feet sometime later, the youngsters were a darting swarm of burning orange sparks. Max lifted his fallen bike and walked it home, stumbling past, ignorant of their hush; group suspicion clouded by nightfall.
Max hurried to his room, marching away from the calls of his parents, the shrillness of his mum’s voice, though she was not quite panicked enough to remove her sagging flesh from the television and see if anything was actually wrong. With his bike safely stored in the shed at the bottom of their garden, he tried to treat himself similarly, locking his door, collapsing on the bed, energy spent, head revolving slowly as a park merry-go-round, throbbing angrily. He was cold, and so he climbed beneath his covers fully clothed, teeth transmitting code for his ears alone, the image of Noel absorbed into the void of the creature returning like a DVD glitch; repeat, repeat.
Beyond his room, the garden, and the untidy jungle of overgrown slope beyond his father’s greenhouse, the underground tracks caught Noel’s attention: the Central Line to Ealing Broadway or Ruislip going west, Hainault or Epping to the east. Every five minutes there was a mechanical shudder, a screech and roar of trains, the glow of carriage windows creating a cinema reel of lights, illuminating gloom. Hours passed. The darkness gained depth, thickened. His mother knocked on his bedroom door, tentative, though it was easy to feign sleep, closing his eyes to cement purpose, wait until she went downstairs, the soft thud of her footsteps on carpet matching the pulse of his fear, still faster than normal. He opened his eyes only when he felt safe, tracing the patterns of rattling trains on the white screen of his ceiling, absorbing their flow without meaning, lips moving as though in conversation with his consumed friend, a whispered dialect that perhaps only they understood.
He tried to imagine himself doing more. Instead of freezing on the spot mute and powerless, reaching for Noel and pulling with all his strength. Picking up a half shard of brick, pitching it at the creature with all his power. Maybe rushing it with a broad shoulder, forcing it to the floor, away. And yet as much as he tried to conjure images of himself in action, they were solemn fragments, still, unfocused photographic moments at best, patchy and unclear. Whenever he attempted to force them into motion they fell apart or resisted, so he couldn’t see the results. And yet he continued to try, eyes red and stinging, a snail’s trail of tears leaking from the corners, running from his temples and onto the pillow as the dark grew stronger, and the cat’s-eye lights of the trains flickered against his poster-lined four walls, and his body gave in and slept, plunging Max into a subconscious well of nightmares and ether.
Something woke him. He kept his eyes closed. The trains had stopped, which meant midnight had passed. His parents had gone to bed. Floorboards and walls ticked, creaked. Max felt no physical sensation. His body had seemingly dissipated, leaving nothing physical behind, only spirit, the invisible void.
He heard night workmen, their noisy clink of metal, and with that, sensation returned. He’d seen them sometimes, guiding a battered flatbed carriage along tracks, mustard yellow, mottled with vitiligo rust. He lay still, eyes closed, absorbing sounds, imagining slow progress. High points of conversation caught his ears, snatches of swearing, and the beam of their mounted spotlight flooded the room, turning the dark behind his eyelids red. He opened his eyes.
The thing from the warehouse rose at the foot of his bed, reaching, arms wide, seemingly larger now, pure emptiness within. Max tried to scream and nothing came out but a strangled whine. He wanted to move only for his limbs to resist, the thing stretching its arms like dark honey, creeping closer until each encircled the bed, and the thing grew taller, spreading up and out until it was a dark, giant mass above and around him. Max’s heart pounded so hard, his skin was so cold, and his fear so paralyzing he thought he might die.
And yet inside the body, he saw something. Now he was closer and the creature had widened like canvas, he could make out a powdered white terrain, the purple glow of something that resembled sky. The curving glow of moons, the shadow of a planet and on what he assumed was the ground, a series of blocked shapes that looked like plateaus, or cliff tops. There were marks in the sand, a trail of some kind. Curiosity broke paralysis, although a residue of fear still caused him to shake, gasp breath, as he sat up in bed, leaning closer. Yes. Yes, it could be. He kneeled before the creature as if he were about to pray, reaching, touching, feeling the ooze creep along his arm, not the sensation of contact he usually associated with touch, but something else, a warmth that transformed his whole body, stilled his heart, and he wasn’t afraid: he was relieved, filling with joy. He released a monotone groan, understanding this was the sound Noel had made upon contact; it was release, not resistance, letting it wash over him until that warm feeling was everywhere, seeing nothing more of his bedroom, only the thick absence of light that embraced him.
A temporary floating sensation, the pop of air pressure, soft, hardly noticeable. Solid ground beneath shoeless feet. Warmth against his soles. The glowing white land. A purple sky, closer now, everywhere, the spray of stars and the planet, heavy and low, half-dark half-red, bursting with its own weight. Beyond that, faraway moons, twin ice crystals, tiny and bright. The trail he’d seen was of footprints, climbing from where he stood, a dual pattern on the sand, the reversed imprint of sneaker soles. They rose, disappearing behind dunes to reappear farther, toward what he’d thought were flat mountaintops from the unimaginable distance of his bedroom, but were actually looming structures, white as the sand. Turrets or towers, Max couldn’t tell. He turned to look behind himself. The creature’s silhouette; inside the body, a distant view of posters, the dull wooden foot of his bed, the night workmen’s spotlight reflecting on his white ceiling. Home.
He relocated the trail of footprints, eyes rising upward. The structures shimmered in half light piercing the velvet atmosphere, blinking silent reprieve.
Growing up, when asked If your last name is Juarez, where are you from, I learned that answering Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Texas only earned more questions. Even in Southern California, a land that was Mexico less than 200 years ago and is home to millions of people of Mexican descendent, to most people being “Mexican” implies a recent migration from elsewhere.
In the 60s, Chicano activists began protesting for rights and awareness of the growing population of people with Mexican heritage who were born in the United States. While the obvious term seems like “Mexican-American”, Gloria E. Anzaldúa wrote Borderlands / La Frontera to describe how the term can aid to the frequent doubling and dividing that most Chicanos experience. Being from both cultures, yet feeling othered all the same.
Recently, depictions have been on the rise for first, second or higher generation Chicanos. Terms like Xicanx have also gained popularity, the x’s representing both gender inclusivity and a nod to Nahuatl, an indigenous language spoken by the Mexica people (also referred to as Aztec). With shows like Gente-fied, Selena, On My Block, Xicanx stories are being shared with a wider audience. The following books by and about Xicanxs showcase the diversity and talent within our community.
Myriam Gurba and I are both queer, mean, half-Xicanas from Long Beach, California. So needless to say, her memoir hits close to home. Gurba uses the lens of being “mean” to discuss the ever-present threat of misogyny and violence that women (especially women of color) face. This untraditional memoir opens with a recounting of the assault and murder of a Xicanx who shared a rapist with Gurba. The rest of the book weighs assault, sexuality, race, and gender in a way that is like a loving gut punch.
A deeply personal poetry collection that navigates Chicana identity in familial, academic, and romantic settings. Borjas returns frequently to the idea of being a “pocha,” a typically negative word used to look down on Mexican Americans who do not speak Spanish. However, Borjas embraces that identity and dismantles the shame associated with it.
This debut, interlinked essay collection is an ode to the silent yet ubiquitous experiences that every Chicano from California knows, and a look into Valdi’s experience working in tech as the grandson of Mexican farmworkers. In the essay “Getting to Suzy’s,” Valdi describes his ritual of playing jukebox music “that make[s] Chicanos, old-timers, hip-hop-beat purists, ex-cons… and me feel at home.” Later, he mentions The Art Laboe Connection, my grandpa’s favorite radio show that I never imagined reading about in an essay collection.
Focusing on various young Chicanas in Denver and Southern Colorado, these stories highlight the pain of gentrification and the risks of young womanhood. In the titular story, Sabrina is murdered, and Corina reflects on the legacy of violence against the women in her family, including their blind Great-Auntie Doty. In the following story, “Sisters,” we follow Doty in her final week with eyesight. Fajardo-Anstine also made a choice to make the characters both Mexican and Indigenous to Colorado.
For three of the last four years, my Christmas gift to my dad has been something from Shea Serrano. Shea’s bibliography is heavily focused on rap, basketball, and all things Chicano (my dad’s favorite things.) His newest book is an informative illustrated dive into all things hip-hop. With mythos, scholarly insight of Nas’s discography, and flow charts like “Is it your birthday? —> No —> We don’t give a fuck it’s not your birthday,” HOAT closes on an attempt to answer 2Pac or Biggie.
One of the most classic Xicanx texts, this fragmented novella follows Esperanza, a young girl in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. In 110 pages, an entire world is explored. From Esperanza’s friends and crushes to the Puerto Rican girl who spends all day inside babysitting and selling Avon. The House on Mango Street is a poetic coming-of-age story that is expertly woven by a Chicana legend.
This poetry collection is technically a chapbook, but Brown stuffs her poems filled with rage, acceptance, and self-reflection. A queer Black Mexican writer from San Antonio, Brown simultaneously contemplates Black womanhood in modern America and her identity to Spanish and colonization. Her poem, “Dear White Girl in My Spanish Class,” which went viral on YouTube, grapples with being born into two languages that were once forced upon her ancestors.
By the time Cuadros died of AIDs complications in 1996, he had given space to a community rarely discussed within Chicano cycles: queer men and those affected by the AIDs crisis. Two years before his death, he released City of God, a collection of short stories and poems detailing life in Los Angeles for gay Mexican American men. The opening selection discusses Chicano childhood and the buddings of queerness. The second section deals with the internal conflict between Latine families and sexuality, especially as it relates to machismo. The final section focuses on living with HIV/AIDs as a Brown man and how Los Angeles is a reflection of the frailing body.
This past August, two weeks before my first book came out, our childcare fell through, with immediate effect. For the first week, I cadged time off from my full-time job and attempted to meet freelance deadlines—hahaha—while tending to my one-year-old son. The second week was a long-scheduled “vacation,” with my entire family staying in a beach rental to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. I ached to see everyone, and I felt too guilty to skip it, even as I remained terrified we’d all get Delta. The beach house wasn’t childproofed; no, it had been expressly designed to cause injury. Every 10 seconds my son tried to swan dive off a balcony, while the tendons in my neck cranked tighter and tighter and tighter until I could barely turn my head. Then, on the car ride home, the symptoms started. It was not Covid. It was only a bad cold, and still I wanted to lay down in the driveway and stay there, unmoving.
Those were two hard weeks. The last two-ish years have been hard. The pandemic created new stresses; if your life felt even slightly on-the-brink before, it probably feels a little bit closer to the brink now. Twitter buzzes with jokes about nervous breakdowns and “The Great Resignation.” Sometimes my group chat goes quiet for a few days, and it turns out my friends were having mini versions of just such breakdowns, and sometimes—like back in August—I’m the one going quiet.
The pandemic created new stresses; if your life felt even slightly on-the-brink before, it probably feels a little bit closer to the brink now.
This is where Edgar Allan Poe becomes relevant, especially for us writers. Few creative careers that have risen to such heights have also been conducted under so much stress— financial stress, professional stress, familial stress, psychosexual stress—and it shows in his work. Think of Poe’s typical short-story structure: A single narrator caught in some terrible situation, frantically jotting down the horrifying details of his dilemma as his situation only grows worse. This was both a reflection of Poe’s own situation, and an incredibly effective strategy for holding a reader’s attention. It’s why his stories still grip us almost 200 years after their writing, simple as they may seem, at first.
The story of why Poe wrote them is gripping, too. If he had had his druthers, Poe would’ve have been a trust-funder like his hero Byron, scrawling Romantic poetry in between adventures, and maybe, on occasion, turning his attention to some arcane academic question. But his reality was utterly different. In fact, it was positively swollen with suffering. An orphan by the age of 3, he was adopted by a wealthy family—then, in his late teens, cast out and disowned. From then on, Poe never had any money at all, while his beloved wife eventually contracted the same disease, tuberculosis, that had killed his biological parents. Unable to bear the strain of her illness, he became, by his own account, “insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” Between his dire poverty and constant experience of real-life horror, it’s no great wonder that Poe leaned into writing commercial horror. More specifically, the “Blackwood’s” style of sensationalist short fiction, which many American publications were willing to pay for.
Blackwood’s was a popular Scottish magazine in the early decades of the 19th century, influential on both sides of the Atlantic, and the stories it published, as described in Michael Allen’s Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, were “usually structured around a protagonist in some strange, horrific, or morbid situation which is progressively exploited for effect.” Think of Poe’s early story, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” or a more mature work such as “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Each follows the basic model: Someone is telling you about an awful experience, and in such detail that it’s almost as if it’s happening to you, too. In “MS. Found in a Bottle,” a man survives a terrible storm at sea only to find himself thrown onto another, more mysterious vessel, apparently crewed by ghosts. Then that ship is sucked into a whirlpool and goes down, all hope vanishing with it. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator commits the perfect murder, yet goes mad with guilt and confesses to the crime anyway, blowing his best-laid plans.
Had Poe used the Blackwood’s model in a one-note way, however, we might not be reading him now. Instead, his stories loop back on themselves, their hysteria often amounting to satire and meta-commentary. In an 1835 letter, he rather self-consciously described these works as “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful colored into the horrible …. the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
And while scholars tend to focus on the nouns in this description, obsessing about what Poe may have meant by “ludicrous” and “grotesque,” what jumps out at me as a working writer myself—and maybe to you?—are Poe’s references to the movement and development in the stories, the heightening and coloring, of how exactly he’s elevating the dilemmas into metaphors, working in the satire and grander commentary. Because how does a writer both master and transcend a commercial genre, which in our time might equate to romance novels, fantasy epics, how-to nonfiction, or personal essays? That’s my burning question. Maybe yours, too. Wouldn’t we all like to be read, get paid, and eat our satire-cake too?
Wouldn’t we all like to be read, get paid, and eat our satire-cake too?
To that end, what if we adopted some of Poe’s techniques to rivet our own readers? Single narrators. Horrific or morbid situations. A tone that pivots from hysteria to satire. I mean, after the couple of Covid years we’ve all just had, who among us does not have these materials ready to hand?
Fortunately, Poe left us explicit, if also satirical, instructions on using his model. “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” first published in 1838, is a facetious essay apparently written by a ridiculous woman who’s being taught how to write this type of fiction by a pompous professor. So, how should such an article/story go? The good doctor says the steps are easy enough to follow:
Get yourself into a scrape or misadventure (or take drugs and record your sensations).
Next, consider your tone. Be sure to write in a “diffusional and interjectional” style, “all in a whirl.” Short sentences help.
Bring in metaphysics where you can, to give your tale that little soupçon of elevation.
Finally, show evidence of extensive general reading. Quote somebody, or something, preferably in a dead or Germanic language.
Once again Poe’s tone here is self-conscious, self-mocking, ambivalent about his own productions, even as he insists that Blackwood’s fiction should be “our model upon all themes.” And that’s because the stuff sells, he explains. Yes, I have started to say he. I realize you could argue that I’m confusing Poe and the characters in his facetious “How to Write a Blackwood Article” essay, but I swear it’s like he’s breaking the fourth wall, turning and grinning at the camera when he advises: “Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make note of your sensations—they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.”
Considering how recently the “first-person industrial complex” dominated the internet, this advice doesn’t seem all that out of date, either. It even strikes me as hopeful. Maybe these tough, tedious experiences we’re all having might be worth something to us someday. Maybe we can figure out how to burlesque our pandemic times, and even better, satirize popular genres while we’re at it. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my own favorite pandemic reading has been personal newsletters, particularly from mother-writers like Katie Leitch and Evie Ebert. The formula is similar: Dire or at least semi-dire situations. Single narrators. Jokes both explicit and implicit.)
Maybe these tough, tedious experiences we’re all having might be worth something to us someday.
As I write this, my house is half dark, a storm blowing up outside as if to provide some missing gothic motif, and downstairs, my kid is waking up from his nap. A rainy evening indoors stretches out before me, offering plenty of time to worry about whether this essay is any good or not, whether I’ve said what I wanted to say or not—but no more time to work on it. Jetzt haben wir den Salat. Still, if it turns out to be vulgar or pretentious, I guess I can always pretend that I intended it to be. Should you ever find yourself in a similar position, be sure and make note of your sensations—they will be worth to you, well, whatever editors are paying now.
Haitian-Canadian-American author Myriam J. A. Chancy’s new novel, What Storm, What Thunder is about the lives of ten people coping with trauma in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The novel explores the measure of grief that ten individuals experience as the earth fluttered and shook at 4:53pm on January 12, 2010. Even though time has caused some of the memories of the 2010 earthquake to fade, What Storm, What Thunder stands as a memorial to the many lives lost, calling on us all to remember what happened, to never forget.
I was already immersed in What Storm, What Thunder when the 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti’s southern coast on August 14, 2021. I reached out to friends and colleagues to know if they and their families were safe. As the stories emerged of Haitians helping pull one another out from under the rubble before Tropical Storm Grace arrived with floods and her morbidly ironic name, there was nothing else I could do but sit and listen to the characters in Chancy’s novel as they told me their stories of love and loss.
Nathan H. Dize: I want to spend most of our time together talking about this beautiful novel that you’ve written, but I’m wondering if you’d be able to tell us what it’s been like to publish a novel about the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti in a year where Haiti has already seen a rise in kidnappings and civilian deaths, the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake, tropical storms, and many months of deportations of Haitians from the US with Del Rio, TX just being the most recent iteration?
Myriam J. A. Chancy: Well, it’s certainly been a difficult time for Haiti and for Haitians, especially for those residing in the Southern peninsula where the August 14th, 2021 earthquake took place, leaving over 2,200 dead and over a million affected by homelessness, food insecurity and the effects of tropical storms in the earthquake’s wake. I would say that having the novel appear at this time is bittersweet. Certainly, I wrote the novel partly because I felt that the events and aftermath of the 2010 earthquake were being forgotten by those beyond Haiti while the aftereffects remained on the ground but, until this summer, I thought of the novel as historical rather than topical.
At this point, I can only say that the effect of having all these events follow one by one since early July is somewhat despairing, but my hope is that the novel can shed light not only on what happened then but what is happening today and humanize not only the events themselves but the lives of those living through them.
NHD: What Storm, What Thunder is based around the 2010 earthquake, could you take us back to the moment you first learned about it? Where were you, what was going through your mind? What was it like, as a person so intimately connected to Haiti, to experience something so catastrophic?
MJAC: I didn’t learn about the earthquake until a few hours after it had occurred. I was on my way to teaching a literature seminar, a three-hour seminar, when I received a text about Haiti on my phone, but I didn’t have the time to see what was happening as I was heading into class. After the class was over, I checked the news and saw that an earthquake had happened. Honestly, the experience was surreal because one doesn’t expect to hear about an earthquake in Haiti. The last severe earthquake before 2010 had taken place near Cap-Haitien, I believe, in the late 1800s. It was surreal. Very little news came out of Haiti because already fragile infrastructures were wiped out and the death toll so high (around 300,000 dead; the second deadliest earthquake in human history) but when some of the first images coming out of Haiti were of the fallen Presidential palace and of the Notre-Dame Cathedral fallen into ruin, it was clear that this was no ordinary occurrence and that whatever would come next would be terrible. It took two to three weeks to track down family members and then came the work of assisting with rebuilding and aid efforts.
I would say that, for myself, it was both a very isolating experience because I was not living at the time in an area with a Haitian community and most people around me could not fathom the amplitude of the problem while lending what skills I had to aid efforts brought me into closer communication with Haitian groups elsewhere that I found I could help and was a part of. So, on the one hand, I felt very isolated and, on the other, I recognized that I was a part of a collective, that Haiti remains one of my homes.
NHD: To me, this novel reads like a memorial. It’s dedicated to the memory of your mother and the memory of the hundreds of thousands of people who perished in the 2010 earthquake. One of the things Taffia, the little girl named after sugar cane moonshine, says makes also makes me think of the novel this way. She describes living in the wake of the earthquake as “having to live in the after, always, remembering the before.” Do you think of What Storm, What Thunder as a certain type of memorial?
I wanted to honor women who work in the markets all day long, often for very little remuneration, and who often know more—about politics and economics—than they’re given credit for.
MJAC: I definitely think so. One of the things I was trying to do with each of the voices in the novel was to have them reflect on the 250,000-300,000 people we know to have perished, many of whose names and stories will never be known. In some small way, I wanted those voices to give readers a sense of what was lost and might never be regained. For Haitians, certainly, there is a definite feeling of a “before” and “after,” a cleaving caused by the event of the earthquake. I feel that way; I think others do too.
The other thing I was trying to do in having these different storylines, was to individualize the catastrophe for readers, to render how individuals might navigate such circumstances and how responses might defer from person to person. In this sense, my mother’s illness and passing in the years in which I was completing and revising the novel certainly colored my sense of how to write about life and death in a very personal, visceral way.
NHD: The novel is narrated by 10 different people, and yet the novel is stunningly intimate. Many characters are interconnected, and their storylines overlap. Since she’s the only character whose narrative voice appears twice, once at the beginning and once at the end, would you tell us about Ma Lou? Who is she?
MJAC: It was my intent to have the voices overlap and interweave while having some of the characters be related to one another, either by blood or by association. Ma Lou is related, for instance, to two of the other characters, Richard, her son, and Anne, her granddaughter but she is also connected to all of the others through her work in the market.
Ma Lou is an older woman in her 70s who has lived all her adult life working a stall in an open market. She knows everything about the community, and this is why she opens and closes the book. I wanted to honor those women who work in the markets all day long, often for very little remuneration, and who often know more—about local and global politics and economics—than they’re given credit for; she’s also, in a very loose way, patterned after my maternal great-grandmother, who was also a market woman, and a force of nature.
NHD: Even though the novel is set around the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and its impact on Port-au-Prince specifically, the storyline is much more fluid. Some characters live outside of Haiti and their chapters precede or take place after the quake. Can you talk about how time and place function in the novel? I’m thinking about Sara and Didier, for instance.
MJAC: Well, what I was trying to do was to give the reader a wholistic sense of the experience of the earthquake, before, during, after. To do that, and maintain a sense of continuity between the characters, it was important to make decisions about where each character was in time, in the earthquake’s time, so to speak, and this ultimately depended on what each character revealed about what was most important to them about their experience of this event. If a character lost family members in the earthquake, as in Sara’s case of losing her children, then the most important aspect of her story came to rest on her struggle to remain sane after witnessing the death of those she gave birth to and the rupture these deaths cause in her marriage, which, before that time, she thought was unshakeable. It became important to situate her experience in that split between the before that she remembers and the after that she cannot move through: that split reflects the tear in her psyche. While, in Didier’s case, a musician who survives in Boston by driving cabs, and is not in Haiti at the time of the earthquake, the focus shifts to what it was like to be going along in one’s life and to be caught short by an unexpected event. Didier’s section, then, reads more as someone just going along in life when his everyday activities and navigations are jolted by the news of the earthquake. The movements in time through the storylines are meant to give the reader a sense of how disparately such an event might be experienced or remembered by those affected directly by it. Some of the sections contrast each other while others give way to another aspect of a similar story, for example, life in the IDP camps after the earthquake. In a non-linear way, I try to move the reader through a “before, during, after” that encapsulates the earthquake while also reflecting the way such an event disrupts and suspends time.
NHD: The way that you weave vulnerable men, women of different ages and walks of life, children, and even animals into the story made me feel as though the novel is gesturing toward a sense of justice and equity that one finds in feminism, particularly in Global South feminisms. Would it be fair to call this a feminist novel?
I hope that readers will dispense with narratives of ‘resilience’ and ‘impoverishment’ when speaking of Haiti and of Haitians.
MJAC: Absolutely. I would call it a transnational feminist novel since I think of my positionality as a feminist as “transnational” in the sense that I am informed by and invested in feminisms produced globally and feminist conversations that flow between “North” and “South” from French feminisms, for example, to postcolonial feminist theorizing. I think this is evidenced in the novel through the geographical shifts of the characters, from Haiti to France, to Rwanda, to the US, and through the foregrounding of the voices of women, children, and members of vulnerable communities such as the “M” or queer community, represented in the novel by Sonia and her best friend, Dieudonné.
NHD: What Storm, What Thunder is receiving glowing reviews and is already on several notable booklists. For the reader who picks your book up hoping to learn more about Haiti, what do you hope they walk away having understood about Haiti and its people?
MJAC: First and foremost, I hope that readers will, after reading the novel, dispense with narratives of “resilience” and “impoverishment” when speaking of Haiti and of Haitians, including Haitian immigrants and migrants. Haiti is a culture rich in so many things— the visual, literary, culinary arts, to name but a few—but is often remembered only for its historical achievements.
I hope that the novel humanizes Haitians such that they/we are considered for as whole human beings, with flaws and strengths, like people anywhere, from whom “resiliency” shouldn’t be expected or be defining. I hope that, after having read this novel, the next time Haiti is in the news, readers will think critically about what they are hearing, how the narrative of Haiti is framed, and perhaps seek out narratives resonant with the experiences of Haitians themselves. Lastly, for Haitian and Caribbean readers who see themselves represented in the novel (as I have already heard some do), I hope that they walk away from the novel feeling restored, that it serves as a lasting, and healing presence in their lives.
In this story the details of before don’t matter—the how or why he left. It’s the afterward that holds all the weight—the universe shifting, big, then slightly, a little more, and here we are.
A family, busted.
We will always be that, I say—a family. I look hard at Daddy and he agrees. Nods his head. It’s still the three of us in so many ways.
Me and Daddy and you.
We are sitting in The Natural History Museum, trapped in a giant metal ball. The planetarium. And it feels like the hugest of metaphors—too big to even begin to process, until the movie starts with the booming voice of Science, of God, of Neil deGrasse Tyson. He introduces Dark Matter, chooses the path for us, the path of atoms, and off we go. We expand ourselves, open to new pockets of wonder. Time is an endless bendy thing and we understand nothing. Where the sky appears fallow and empty—blip blip blip—infinite universes appear in all directions, blinking beacons, little signals. You sit between us, hold both our hands, and we lose ourselves completely in the origami of black holes, folding and folding. The biggest sign in the night sky—absence. It’s far too literal. But wait! A shaking of our seats. The constellations reversing, a flash of white light above our heads, your hands squeezing ours so tight we laugh, and we are whisked back through time, to before, when everything was stuffed neatly into the head of a pin.
We are made of stardust. Did you know this is printed on our fridge? I bought a magnet at Barnes & Noble right after you were born, slapped it near the bottom in the hope you’d find a spunky God like the one I conjured in my mind. Instead, a terrible premonition. Combustion.
Did you hear? There are infinite universes! What does it even mean?
The room goes black, the lights come on, the booming voice is gone, and we are left alone with this information. We pack up, wander the halls in a daze searching for Diet Cokes, but find only freeze-dried ice cream. So much of it, in fact, we grow frustrated, then a little angry, then utterly unhappy, until finally it’s funny. My eyes catch Daddy’s and we know instantly, telepathically, as if everything is still the same: we will tell you the story of this trip again and again. These bricks of ice cream sealed in glimmering foil? They are everywhere we look! We laugh so hard, you stop—indignant—hands on your hips and ask us, What is going on?
There are infinite universes.
We stand before the bones of extinct fish hung on the wall like paintings when you grab my hand, reach for Daddy’s, grab his too, and pull. One, two, three. A people chain you call us, sing it out, past the dawn of man, past the dodo and out the door.
We head into the street, a gnashing cold. We are on the way to eat soup dumplings, to teach you how to balance a single pouch of pork with black truffle on your spoon, how to bite a hole in the top and let the broth seep out, how to be so, so careful—to explain that some things are unbelievably delicate. We request beginner chopsticks and they come tied with pink ribbon—handed to you with a smile. We ask each other questions from a deck of cards that has been left on the table to initiate conversation. It’s a game, but we are grateful. We need help with this.
If you could go anywhere right now, where would you go? If time and money and other obligations were not a factor. Where in the world would you go? What would you pack? We ask you, prod you, beg you to play along. Explain it all again. If you could go anywhere on Earth right this minute, hop in a cab, and poof! Where would you pick? To the mountains? The desert? The jungle? How about outer space? These are your choices all narrowed down. You complain about your chopsticks, ask if we can help you stab a dumpling like a sword, thread it like a needle. But wait, we say. We want to know. We want so badly to know. Have we spanned the night sky correctly? Did we do this right? Give us some sort of signal. A sign. A blip on the radar. A small blink of your eyes, if your answer would be here.
This spooky season, we’ve curated a reading list for every type of reader. Craving the adrenaline rush of a horror novel full of jump scares? Looking to be spooked on a journey through the dark, haunted woods? What about a twisted retelling of classic Russian fairytales? Here are the books you should immerse yourself in this Halloween:
In a rundown mansion in the English countryside, Frances Jellico discovers she can spy on her downstairs neighbors—Cara and Peter—through a peephole in her bathroom. Lonely and unmoored, Frances soon becomes enmeshed in the lives of the glamorous and mysterious couple, attending decadent dinner parties and drinking her cares away. But as sinister, unexplained happenings start to unfurl, she soon finds that she doesn’t really know her new friends quite as well as she thinks.
Set in the 1880s Manhattan,witches Adelaide Thom and Eleanor St. Clair own a tea shop selling potions and palm readings, offering a refuge for their female customers who are seeking control over their lives. But the arrival of 17-year-old Beatrice Dunn who has the ability to commune with the dead brings grave danger.
A jealous roommate sets up deadly traps for her former friend’s baby in their communal apartment. A hitchhiker on a cold night meets a mysterious woman who offers her life-changing matches for warmth. News of a deadly pandemic knocks on a family’s door. In these dark and strange fairytales, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya paints a bleak portrait of life in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.
What happens after you die? These 100 miniature short stories, at turns humorous and haunting, imagine the multitudes of the afterlife. More hell than heaven, each uncanny microfiction is two pages long and can be read within two minutes.
Spirits Abroad is a short story collection that infuses Malaysian folklore with the pressures and anxieties of modern-day life. Set in Malaysia, England, and “elsewhere,” the stories feature mythological creatures from Malaysian lore: in “The House of Aunts,” a teenage vampire falls in love with a human boy, much to the chagrin of her deceased aunts; in “First National Forum of the Position of Minorities in Malaysia,” an invisible creature from the Borneon jungle demands his right to affirmative action; in “One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland,” Malaysian students newly arrived at a British boarding school must battle English faeries.
Finna is a darkly humorous satire of working a dead-end job for minimum wage at a giant corporation, a must-read for its biting critique of late capitalism. When a grandma falls into a wormhole while shopping at a superstore specializing in low-cost particleboard furniture, it’s up to two minimum-wage employees to save the day. And no, they are not paid enough to traverse across a different dimension while fuzzy chairs are trying their darn hardest to eat them; but sadly the in-house multiverse rescue team was laid off due to cost-cutting. Can the two former lovers hurting over their recent breakup remain cordial for long enough to survive showrooms full of blood-drinking Hive Mothers? Well…
Known as a “South American Shirley Jackson,” Mariana Enriquez’s macabre collection looks at Argentina’s sociopolitical issues through a supernatural twist inspired by Indigenous folklore, the occult, and urban legends. Spanning modern-day Bueno Aires, Barcelona, and Belgium, the stories all feature women—whether it’s teenage girls conducting an Ouija board seance or groupies robbing the grave of their rock star idol—struggling with inequality, gendered violence, and powerlessness.
Stalking the pages of Those Fantastic Lives are teenage werewolves communicating via a lengthy email chain, polygamous merfolk dealing with the turmoil of a new addition to their already-crowded marriage, and children who mysteriously sprout wings and fly away as their parents try to cling on. Bradley Sides uses magical realism to imbue everyday moments in his stories with a sense of eeriness and dread, but the true hauntings aren’t the ghostly apparitions with sharp bared fangs, but the emotional ghosts that we’re trying to outrun.
Jade Daniels is a half-Native teenage girl full of angst, loneliness, and rage. Her life-sustaining anchor is an obsession with horrors movies; slasher flicks provide her with much-needed solace and companionship as she navigates high school as an outcast in small-town Idaho. When dead bodies start piling up (in sandwich bags), Jade feels primed to be the one who uncovers the masked killer. A love letter to classic horror films, Stephen Graham Jones’s novel is a whip-smart commentary soaked in blood and gore about institutionalized violence against Native Americans, gentrification, and displacement.
I’m interested in monsters both literal and symbolic:
Cosmology of Monsters is a Texan horror novel about the secrets and the resentments we harbor as a family. Patriarch Harry Turner’s magnum opus is an elaborately hand-built haunted house in his backyard called the Wandering Dark. Monsters lurk in the shadows of the Turner household, tormenting them with orange eyes leering in the dark and the sound of scratching on windows at nighttime. With shades of H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King and Ray Bradbury, the book slowly unravels back and forth in time as loneliness, illness, and financial precarity slowly tear apart a family.
A nameless woman leaves the Old World behind for a new beginning with her husband and son, only to lose herself in the haunted woods of Puritan New England. Straying from the path while berry picking, she meets three witches and discovers a game in which she must embody the role of each character in a dark fairytale:
“Their favorite had been the game of the wolf eating the little girl. They had gnawed on each other’s ribs and gobbled each other’s entrails and torn out each other’s hearts.”
To get out of the woods alive, she must master the game and embrace the darkness.
In her book, former Electric Lit editor-in-chief Jess Zimmerman argues that it’s time for women to reclaim their monstrosity. She explores eleven female monsters from Greek mythology to show how their monstrosity subverts patriarchal constraints of femininity that seek to diminish and erase women who dare to be loud, ambitious, hungry, and too much.
If I were to list the topics the poems in my new collection Machete dig into, that list would include colonialism, faith, fascism, racism, parenthood, and police violence against the BIPOC community. That’s a lot! But what unites them all is my ongoing exploration on the page with how a person endures suffering that seems endless. If I count my other poetry collections, a book I translated, and my forthcoming memoirLet Me Count the Ways, then the first five books I’ve published have all been my attempt to answer that question: how do we endure?
No surprise, TheBook of Job has always been my favorite part of the Bible. That tale of one man with a mountain of misfortune heaped upon him is one of the presiding spirits of my book. The epigraph of Machete is the old Spanish proverb, “Dios apriete, pero no ahorca.” While the English equivalent is “God never gives you more than you can handle,” my literal translation strikes a different note: “God squeezes, but He doesn’t strangle.” As a survivor of childhood trauma, this question has been at the center of my art from day one. Not surprisingly, as a reader I’m drawn to books about survival in all its many forms. Here are a few books that kept me company while I wrote Machete, and a few that have made it onto my nightstand recently.
The poems of this collection chart how women navigate the violent waters of machismo without drowning. While she writes about women along the U.S. border with Mexico, these women could have just as easily been from my South Texas hometown. How these women find ways to thrive, and not merely survive, is nothing short of heroic.
In this 17-part poem, after the snow leopard sees one of his brothers fall to a hunter’s rifle, he implores us to change our violent ways before that violence corrupts us and the Earth we all share.
What could go wrong on a North Atlantic cruise? If you were on the Viking Sky with Chaney Kwak in 2019, then the answer is everything. With humor and intelligence, Kwak shares what went through his mind, and how he kept his wits, when the engine failed and the storm-battered ship went from nearly capsizing to slamming into the coast of Norway.
In “Time to be the fine line of light,” Fountain writes:
“There are so many things
that destroy. To think solely of them
is as foolish and expedient as not
thinking of them at all.”
While one could say the backdrop of these wise, muscular poems is the Trump presidency and the pandemic, the way they examine parenting small children during times of great upheaval is timeless.
This memoir charts a young and idealistic Cantú’s journey into the ranks of the Border Patrol in order to try and change the agency from within. What results is a harrowing tale of violence and callousness as Cantú mentally suffers in the belly of the beast that refuses to be anything but what it has always been. This is a powerful book about the strength of the human spirit.
These witty, off-kilter poems celebrate missing out on a broken world whose technology encourages us to make it the focus of our obsessions. In “#JeSuisCVS,” Božičević writes:
“Turn around and sleep my love
And I’ll hold you.” I actually
Said this to a body
On this planet where
There are such things as forks
And gods, and police cars on fire.”
The surprises in these poems don’t fade upon rereading, they deepen.
These poignant essays take a scalpel to the moments when racist stereotypes are forced upon us, and how people respond when we refuse to perform the role they’ve given us. In essay after essay, Walker wanders the line between anger and laughter, and in doing so, makes room for them both. These essays sing with all the power and healing spirit of the blues.
In the spring of 2003, I was directing a play in a park in Toronto. I was twenty-five. During a rehearsal break, one of the actors, also queer, made a melancholy comment about the lack of representation for queer people in film or on television, how laughably bad most of it was, how limited in scope. I argued that there was an advantage to barely registering in pop culture. Yes, we were largely invisible, but wasn’t there something to be said for that? Invisibility also meant a kind of freedom to imagine yourself, to not have your emotional and erotic life come ready made, an over-processed and sanitized product that could be sold to you. The world was clogged with popular images of straight life, and I thought it would be disorienting, to have all this directed at you all the time, to have so many models in front of you. These models, these relentless images, didn’t truthfully show anyone’s “real life,” the secret, inner life we all carry in our heads, because pop culture, by definition, is not capable of representing the granular precision of living. It’s just an advertisement for living, showing those to whom it is directed who they ought to be, what they ought to want. Not being advertised to, I insisted, fervently and patronizingly, meant we didn’t have to fit uneasily into a plastic model of ourselves. We were free to make ourselves up, and no one cared, or noticed.
This seems naïve to me now, of course. A luxury. My world was city-dwelling, largely made up of the educated middle class, and largely secular, and while I was cobbling together artistic work and making fun of people with career plans and a thirst for pop culture representation, that was itself a privilege of my time and place. Among other things, mine was the last generation to experience the relatively cheap rent that made it possible to patch together an artistic life in Toronto and still live well—frugally but with time for thinking and making. And while I was familiar with certain kinds of offhand prejudice, I had grown up with basic legal protections that others had fought for at immense risk to their livelihoods and their lives. I dismissed the desire for representation because I was young enough, and lucky enough, to feel very little need for it.
I had been with my girlfriend since university, but we both considered marriage and monogamy capitalist and patriarchal.
One of the most significant things that happened in 2003, shortly after this conversation, was equal marriage; the first queer marriages legally recognized in Canada were performed in Toronto that June, and federal recognition followed in 2005. I remember glancing at a picture on the cover of a newspaper when I went to buy cigarettes. Two couples, hands joined, weeping. I was happy for them, but thought they had nothing to do with me. I had been with my girlfriend since university, but we both considered marriage and monogamy capitalist and patriarchal, a bid to be recognized by the state that was wrong headed at best. I didn’t want the state to bless me. I didn’t appreciate the years of work that had gone into this moment: the setbacks, the derision, the effort of imagining something into being that had once been unthinkable to many people. The figures in the photograph seemed middle aged, hopelessly conventional. Touching, perhaps, but deluded.
Only a few years later, my girlfriend and I sat in a coffee shop in Philadelphia and realized we wanted to make plans, and that our plans were entirely predictable. We were performing at an anarchist puppet festival and staying in a punk house that smelled of raw sewage. We were on a break during the tech rehearsal. I remember the steam on the windows, the smell of the coffee, and what a relief it was to say that we wanted to move in together, figure out how to have a baby, and admit that we, like most people, wanted an ordinary, banal, domestic life in which we could be, some of the time, happy. Happiness was not a bourgeois delusion, or if it was, we wanted it anyway.
We found an apartment and we made plans, which included asking a close friend to be our donor. We took advantage of what was available to able-bodied white people from middle class backgrounds living in large urban centers just before the housing market went haywire. Eventually, we had a baby, got married in our donor’s living room, bought a house, had another baby, went on a detour which involved my wife being a surrogate for our donor and his wife (but that is another story), had another baby, and now find ourselves in our early forties raising three children, ensconced in a neighborhood that was once working class but is gentrifying at breakneck speed. We shake our heads at our obscene good fortune, living in a place where we could no longer buy a house, not in a million years. We are settled in our lives.
We know a number of our neighbors well, ranging from a cohort of other queer parents to the three generations of Portuguese Catholics in the bungalow next door, who have moved, in their attitude to us, from suspicious bafflement to an odd kind of affection. We gossip over the fence. We exchange Christmas presents for the children. My youngest and theirs sit on the curb, talking about basketball. This relationship feels as surprising as anything else my life has given me.
My children live in the knowledge that they can define themselves however they want.
This brings me back to my younger self and my high-handed dismissal of representation. In the time between glancing, a little scornfully, at the picture on the front page, and chatting on the sidewalk with my neighbors, I have found my private life completely and thoroughly advertised to, with the usual airbrushed inanities of all advertising. My children live in the knowledge that they can define themselves however they want. They see this, to some extent, reflected in the images around them. These images skew heavily towards straight-appearing and gender normative, and represent mostly white and improbably affluent people. But at least it’s there. Something vaguely resembling their life is not shown as either a punch-line or a sinister force, if it is shown at all. It’s possible that this helps them to feel real, in some way unimaginable to me, having grown up in a time when the idea of queers raising children was, in the mainstream, outlandish at best.
This brings me to The Kids Are Alright, which I saw for the first time the weekend it came out, with my wife and our second child, who was two months old and came with us to the theatre, where he helpfully slept, though we did change him in the aisle halfway through. I watched it again a month ago. That child is now eleven years old. My wife was working an overnight shift. The children were asleep downstairs. I watched it again partly out of love for Annette Benning and Julianne Moore, and partly out of curiosity, wondering whether I would loathe it as much as I did the first time.
A small recap: The Kids Are Alright is the story of a middle aged lesbian couple with two teenaged children who decide to make contact with their donor. Complications ensue, involving, among other things, one of the moms sleeping with the donor. It is a comedy about extraordinarily self-involved adults, and while it has a satirical edge, I’m not sure, having seen it twice, whether the creators are quite aware of how self-involved these characters are. The two mothers seem entirely conventional in their aspirations for their children, wanting to enclose them in a bubble of their own meticulously curated milieu. I don’t fault that as much as I did on the first viewing, not because I don’t still think it’s a vicious tendency, but because I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit to feeling this myself, some of the time.
There’s a phrase of Zadie Smith’s about privilege being institutionalized luck, and I would be lying if I said that I didn’t want to pass some of that luck on to my children. And I do pass it to them, every day, and it would be ridiculous to claim otherwise, or to claim I wished it otherwise, not as an abstract political conviction but as an act (for instance, one of many, my mother-in-law puts aside some money for their education, every month, though there are a thousand other things we could give that money to instead, and we don’t).
I realized what troubled me, the first time and even more the second time, what was missing from the film, from this representational watershed: Where are the neighbors?
On second viewing, I also didn’t feel as strongly about the affair with the donor, though I still think it’s not a betrayal of the partner as much as it’s a betrayal of the children, who are desperately trying to navigate a confusing new relationship, and I wasn’t sure the writers had considered this very much. But on the whole, I’ve mellowed. I no longer loathed it. But I realized what troubled me, the first time and even more the second time, what was missing from the film, from this representational watershed: Where are the neighbors? The acquaintances? All the people one encounters in the daily course of a life? It’s too much, of course, to demand that every little interaction be shown, but for representation to rise above animated cardboard, the viewer needs to be convinced of the reality of the characters, their texture, and that of the life around them. I don’t think anyone is convincingly real who appears to have no broader reality, beyond their family pod.
The film makes a few stabs at showing friendships that this family has, but I was left puzzled by their context, by what exists around them. They don’t seem, even in passing, to live in a neighborhood, or a city with many different layers, as all cities have. They work, they attend school, they go to restaurants and to parties. But they exist, for the most part, only in relation to one another. And I realized, watching the film after a decade had passed, that what seems to me to still be missing from cultural representation of queer families, is context. Where are the neighbors? Not as antagonists or allies, but as people in themselves, with their own complications, opinions, thoughts. The characters in The Kids Are Alright live in beautiful houses with sunny kitchens and comically large bathrooms (I have never, to my knowledge, met anyone with a double sink so they can stand beside their spouse, companionably brushing their teeth at bedtime), and speak in a kind of shorthand intelligible to members of a very particular segment of a very particular class (“I’m not being my higher self,” “He seems a little untended,” “It hasn’t risen to the point of consciousness for you,” and more of the same), but do not, other than Julianne Moore’s character being casually racist and deeply unfair to a gardener she’s hired, appear to ever, in their lives, speak to someone outside their boundary (unless they are buying something).
This seems to be related to what a family is supposed to be, and how the family, even reconfigured, is imagined. It’s a truism that we—and I use the word loosely, I’m never sure who we is, really—don’t want to simply replicate the nuclear family, so historically and culturally specific, so arid. In the struggle to insist that we are “as good as,” we risk becoming, ourselves, a kind of caricature of the pop culture vision of the middle class straight family: in the fortress, hermetically sealed, smugly and anxiously defending our borders.
Of course, the nuclear family, as depicted in pop culture, is a bogeyman and a mirage. Bluntly, I don’t know any, and not because my social world isn’t full of middle class straight people who are married to each other, apparently happily, raising their children in relatively tidy houses and driving their cars to work after dropping the kids off at the local school. But scratch the surface of any family at all, and complexities emerge. Different arrangements, different histories. No one is an advertisement. When I look at my neighbors, especially the ones who are enmeshed in my life in various ways but are not my friends, I realize there is so much about them that I don’t know.
It’s whoever is around you, and those people may be profoundly different from you, in background but also in belief, in politics, in taste.
Since we began to make our own family, I have thought a lot about that overly malleable word “community” and what it means. Affinity? Identity? Politics? Agreements of taste? It is all that, of course. I would be indulging in a fairytale if I didn’t say I had a “community” of friends with whom I share a bedrock of belief and understanding, and the comfort of shared histories and shared points of reference. But community is also proximity. It’s whoever is around you, and those people may be profoundly different from you, in background but also in belief, in politics, in taste. Some of these differences are overt, and some are not, but they run very deep all the same. And if we want to live together, the strange compromises we make with one another are the sinews of our shared lives. And as I get older, I become more and more impatient with representation that is not interested in context, meaning the relationships between neighbors and acquaintances and people chatting haphazardly in the street, who do not agree with each other, who have very little in common except the proximity that makes them maintain their civility, their awkward truce, which becomes, itself, an important kind of agreement.
I still feel uneasiness about marriage and domestic life, what it means, what it is. The acceptance of my neighbors makes me wonder what we have acquiesced to, who or what we think we are, to them and to ourselves, as we discuss work schedules and pack lunches in little zippered bags with superheroes embossed on the flap. I have done an almost complete about-face from the person who dismissed the couples in the photograph. I have become them. I hope, of course, that there is something radical in the ordinariness of our life, that we, in being married, queer the notion of marriage, which has adapted to us as much as we have adapted to it. That we are not an optimistic mock-up of this institution, but a transformation of it. Yet I’m uneasy with that idea, too: too much, too grandiose, too idealized. I don’t want to represent anything, because isn’t that the point of this normalcy, that we don’t need to be representational, ambassadors or apologists for our own lives? Perhaps my unease is actually a kind of embarrassment with my leap in status, my wholesome respectability, the apparent security and centrality of my social position, which my younger self could not have imagined. I am firmly on the inside. It feels permanent, and solid, so why do I intermittently feel unsure, as if I might be deluded, thinking my life was acceptable? I don’t know if this is a hangover from spending my youth and early adulthood assuming my own invisibility, or if this sense of precariousness is in fact a common experience, a human predicament that no one fully escapes. I suspect it’s both things.
I like to think that we both know that the other one is real, and that part of knowing this is not needing to agree.
There’s a Sam Lipsyte short story which has the line “either everyone is real, or no one is,” which I pedantically copied onto a slip of paper and taped to my desk as a useful piece of advice for anyone trying to write fiction. I think of it sometimes when I watch my neighbor, the grandfather of the family in the bungalow next door, walking up and down our street, which he often does, a bit aimlessly. He is retired, and many of his friends on the street, people who moved here in the wave of Portuguese immigration to Toronto in the seventies, have sold their houses to people like me and moved to the suburbs, or they have died and their children have sold their houses (to people like me). I watch him and think about what it means to be seen, to be represented. Surely this man feels that his neighborhood has become unfamiliar, that he has become invisible? Surely he must at times feel that the world he knew is vanishing? Surely he must often feel at a loss, on the outside? I don’t want to romanticize him or his family. He is sometimes a very angry man, and has terrible fights with his wife, who is often also very angry. Our two families, from experience, tend to avoid politics, and they have expressed opinions I find bigoted and sometimes, if I’m honest, just stupid. I’m sure they feel the same way about me, as is their right. Instead, we say it is a nice day out, or that we’re going to have rain, or I ask how his granddaughter is liking high school, or we complain about the number of houses under renovation, all the noise and dust. I like to think that we both know that the other one is real, and that part of knowing this is not needing to agree.
When I airily denied any desire for representation in 2003, I was an outsider. I could not marry, and when I could my marriage was not recognized when I travelled (and still isn’t, depending on where we go). I sometimes felt unsafe holding my girlfriend’s hand in public. There were numerous hurdles to starting a family, and my girlfriend and I were wary of presenting as a couple when we talked to prospective landlords. Much of that has changed. When my partner gave birth to our daughter, the court decision that meant I could go on the birth certificate without going through an adoption process was less than a year old, and even then we still had to lie and pretend our donor was anonymous. I am keenly aware that the protections we have are very local and very fragile. But with all that, I am now on the inside, and wondering what that means. Wondering if “insider” and “outsider” are as much of a mirage as the nuclear family, a kind of provisional placeholder for something that doesn’t actually exist. I find my relationship to the desire for representation has changed. I am reconciled to being advertised to. I am grateful for it, even, realizing that the relative tolerance of some of my neighbors has been helped by pop culture giving them a sense that we are normal, and commonplace. I sob at the scene at the end of The Kids Are Alright when the daughter leaves for university, because I see our daughter a few years down the road, getting ready to leave us and start her own life, and I see my wife and I, now, like the characters, middle aged, though we are in a different tax bracket and will never have, or want, a double sink. I watch Modern Family with our children, a show I find retrograde in so many ways that I couldn’t list them here, but they love it and I try not to overanalyze it in front of them because it ruins their enjoyment, and I want us to agree to disagree. But I’m still looking for representation of a queer family that is unsentimentally interested in the neighbors, in the web of people who have no affinity, in all the encounters between people in proximity who will never be in agreement. Either everyone is real, or no one is.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
