The history of women hiking in nature is almost non-existent. Instead, Cheryl Strayed is widely believed to be the first woman to boldly walk day after day in remote, unpeopled landscapes. This is a terrible misconception.
Five years ago, exasperated by the male dominance of walking and nature writing, I began researching women walkers of the past for my latest book Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women. It seemed to me that while women had made great progress in public, urban life, the myth of Male Wilderness was harder to shift. The wilds endured as a place for well-heeled white men to prove their masculinity.
But women have always walked. And not merely to carry water and firewood. Like men, women hiked for pleasure, solitude, creativity, and catharsis. During the 19th-century, numerous women hiked solo over mountains and across plains, beside rivers and through forests. Many of them published accounts of their walks—gripping memoirs that have languished in archives or been entirely forgotten.
For several years I immersed myself in hiking travelogues written by women. Here are 8 lesser-known accounts of women walking in the wilderness:
After a traumatic incident in which she was racially abused, Sethi sets out to walk one of England’s wildest, most remote trails: the Pennine Way. On this journey of reclamation, she reflects on issues of belonging and identity, eloquently linking the outer landscape to her inner emotional topography. In the wilderness, she experiences the kindness of strangers, the space to wonder, and the therapeutic properties of untamed nature.
Doubling Back: Ten Paths Trodden in Memory by Linda Cracknell
Cracknell follows ten trails previously walked by others, in France, Norway, the Alps, Kenya, Spain, England, and Scotland. Each walk is a pilgrimage of sorts, throwing up lost memories and buried emotions. But the most moving and dramatic is Cracknell’s account of following the strenuous Alpine route, with its “labyrinth of fog and crevasse,” climbed by her barely known father, 50 years earlier.
The first nonfiction book to excavate lost women walker-writers of the past and return them to the literary stage. Andrews spent over a decade researching women from as far back as the 18th-century in a scholarly bid to prove that women have always hiked in wild landscapes. From Elizabeth Carter to Dorothy Wordsworth to Cheryl Strayed, Andrews argues for a re-evaluation of the genre now known as literature of the leg.
A Walking Life is a series of meanders through the many facets of walking. Malchik is one of the empathetic few to write about walking while attending to those who cannot walk. She makes a compelling case for better public transport, for greater access to wild landscapes, and for more power to the pedestrian, while lambasting the highways that have gobbled up vast tracts of American wilderness. For Malchik walking is a political act—and as someone who grew up car-less, I lapped up her impassioned prose.
The TV presenter and writer, Kate Humble, embarks on a series of walks including an evocative night ramble in France and a solo backpacking week-long hike down the English River Wye with her dog. Humble walks both alone and with friends, often pondering the science of being in nature and noting its benefits on both herself and on others.
Part essay and part memoir, A Good Hike describes a remote walk in which the newly pregnant writer and professor Camille Dungy becomes injured and has to be carried home by her companions. Blending humor, pathos, and insight, Dungy worries about her weight and her sudden loss of control, while mulling her new vulnerability. As she slowly relinquishes all pretense of pride and independence, the walk becomes curiously affirmative.
The Living Mountain is quite possibly the most remarkable account of hill-walking ever written. The Scottish poet and novelist, Nan Shepherd, recounts a life spent walking in the Scottish highlands. Her prose is now considered some of the best “nature-writing” ever penned, as Shepherd shows us how to walk into the heart of a mountain using all of our senses. This slim volume was out of print for decades but is now lauded as a masterpiece.
Part travelogue and part memoir, Among Flowers recounts Kincaid’s three-week seed-collecting trek through the mountains of Nepal in the company of three botanists. I once spent twelve weeks walking through the Himalayas, and Kincaid’s vivid descriptions awakened long-buried memories of my own: the leeches, the pain, the fatigue, the spectacular panoramas, the yearning for home. Kincaid adds her remarkable knowledge of plants and gardening to create a walking memoir unlike any other.
“Whether you want to achieve your potential in a Fortune 500 company, found a small business, or break through the obstacles in an unsatisfying marriage, my guidelines for self-fulfillment can help you identify Signifiers of Flow.”
“The Apple Bush”, authored by a “healer, lifestyle expert, and spiritual counselor,” is the fictional new-age, wellness-adjacent guiding force in A Touch of Jen — Beth Morgan’s gripping debut about the interpretation of the world through an ever-evolving system of signs. Or, in less Saussurean terms, a novel about how Instagram leaks into our lives, changing and shaping how we inhabit our selves.
Following the story of Alicia and Remy—a couple obsessed with the online persona of Remy’s former co-worker—A Touch of Jen invites readers into a world of extreme self-consciousness and class envy, where the “sensation of being on display” is both coveted and dreaded. As the protagonists unexpectedly find themselves invited to a surfing trip in the Hamptons with Jen’s inner circle, they try hard to fit into a group of wealthy, beautiful people.
From here on out, Morgan’s narrative develops a darkly spiraling pace, simultaneously exposing and blurring the distinction between fantasy and reality. All the while, “The Apple Bush” guides the characters’ journeys through its seductively vague platitudes; for example: “details that might seem like trivial parts of your ordinary life are actually signs—Signifiers of Flow helping you to achieve that Consummate Result.”
But the result, or desire, is growing increasingly unclear. As Remy wonders: “What happens next? Do they just keep on talking about Jen forever, until she gets old? Then what?”
Then what, indeed. Morgan’s debut book is, in many ways, the grimmest possible answer to that question—an exploration of how contemporary culture has made self-actualizing structuralists of us all.
Richa Kaul Padte:There’s this constant tension in A Touch of Jen between “authenticity” and “fakeness”, where inhabiting the former and exposing the latter feels like a kind of ethical imperative. Except the more we live by these arbitrary categories, the less sure of ourselves we grow. For example: “[Remy] is so overwhelmed by the sensation of disclosing something true that he forgets what he is saying is a distortion of the truth.” This sentence itself feels like a painful truth that haunts every “vulnerable” Instagram post I’ve ever made. What’s up with that?
Beth Morgan: I think that in trying to communicate any kind of personal truth, it’s inevitable that we unconsciously create narrative. Narrative is something we often view as an inherent good—storytelling helps us live and all that—but there can be something distorting about how narrative allows and even encourages us to prioritize certain facts over others. Whenever we try to write something “true”—and I think this applies to the “vulnerable” Instagram post—we can’t help organizing, smoothing, and simplifying reality.
Whenever we try to write something ‘true’—and this applies to the ‘vulnerable’ Instagram post—we can’t help organizing, smoothing, and simplifying reality.
Personally, I’m someone who doesn’t perform vulnerability on social media—I’m both suspicious of and intimidated by the project of constructing a public persona that is somehow also authentic. (Instagram is more comfortable for me than Twitter because it involves less writing, though of course, it’s not narrative-free.)
As soon as I start trying to express myself as myself, it often feels fraudulent because I can feel myself creating narrative. That’s why fiction is so liberating—I don’t have to worry about expressing a personal truth that may or may not truly exist. If there’s anything that could be called personal truth in fiction, it might have something to do with the specific ways that people’s narratives about themselves break down.
RKP: So much of your book has to do with how the internet and social media teaches us to see. Remy says: “Maybe this will sound crazy. But I have this picture in my head. I think maybe, if I could make the picture real, or real enough, I’ll feel better.” This is Remy’s pursuit through the text, but even when he does arrive at “the picture,” he can’t get “inside it”.
The commonly held idea that we “live on the internet” makes sense—right up until the moment we realize that we actually…don’t. How can we learn to see ourselves outside the logic and grid of commercial social media? (Asking for a friend.)
BM: Social media—especially Instagram—definitely does allow us to place ourselves literally inside a picture. And I think the impulse to imagine ourselves in a picture has something in common with the impulse to place ourselves inside a narrative.
What feeds this impulse is not necessarily just social media. One of the main influences on A Touch of Jen was Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, in which the main character creates these elaborate reenactments that he places himself inside in order to feel like that he’s actually living life—that he’s inside the picture. Early on in the book the character watches Mean Streets and is struck by the way that Robert De Niro—even though he’s acting—seems much more authentic in his movements—less like he’s performing—than people do in “real life.”
There is something that feels much more consummated about actions as they occur in movies, which is why I came up with the phrase “consummate result” for the way the book’s fictional self-help text “The Apple Bush” talks about self-actualization. In a movie, everybody moves gracefully or fluidly, without self-consciousness. And if we’re doing things fluidly in real life we feel as if we’re in a movie. In an early scene when Remy is in the restaurant, he’s briefly conscious of how good he is at his job—how when he gets in the zone, there’s something balletic about the way he moves through space. This contrasts with how socially awkward he and Alicia are—especially around these people who are richer than they are and whose social codes and cultural referents they’re struggling to pick up on.
So I think aspiring to be “inside in the picture” is partly about fitting in or finding a place in the world that makes us feel actualized. Instagram interacts with that desire in a very intense way though I think the fraught nature of this desire is more a problem of competitive individualism and our current economic system than it is of commercial social media specifically, since being “inside the picture” most often means being the protagonist of our own individualistic narrative.
Remy does feel like he’s “in the picture” to some extent when he’s at work—he’s good enough at his job that he’s able to take some amount of pleasure in it. But his job is also low status and low paying. There’s this idea that someone of his background is a failure if he’s working in service. There’s this imperative to stand out and get ahead, not just for the sake of achieving status and respect, but also in order to attain a basic level of economic security. I don’t think that for Remy the problem is his inability to think outside the grid of social media, but the precarity, alienation, and pressure to get ahead that so many people feel today.
RKP: All the platitudes that run through your book—“Flow”, wellness, self-improvement—are annoyingly very compelling. I hate that stuff, but at the same time, when I read a sentence like “the power of something as simple as a positive mindset and openness to the world,” I feel myself getting sucked in. At one point, Alicia speculates whether Jen and her friend Carla “actually practice the self-improvement techniques, or if their interest is purely aesthetic. “ Is that where the power of internet “wellness” lies—an aesthetic appeal?
BM: I find those things compelling too! And despite the distinction Alicia is making, I don’t think that aesthetic appeal is necessarily a damning quality. I think aesthetics are always a component of belief systems. The Catholic Church wouldn’t exist without aesthetics! When I was a little kid at a Presbyterian church camp, I loved my youth retreat t-shirts that said “Fruit of the Spirit” in what seemed like “cool” lettering.
Someone who feels secure doesn’t need to base their sense of self-worth on their internet presentation because they’re getting it from other places.
We’re attracted to aesthetics because we think that they communicate some inherently valuable quality. As for Jen and Carla, I think they enjoy the aesthetics of “The Apple Bush” (the fictional cosmology I introduce in my book) but they also genuinely long for what it promises. If there’s anything I would criticize about “The Apple Bush,” it’s the highly individualistic philosophy—the fact that like most self-help books, it’s focused solely on personal happiness rather than on ethics or collective happiness.
And the way that I envisioned it, there’s actually some irony in Jen and Carla’s approach to the aesthetics of “The Apple Bush.” It’s not supposed to be a self-consciously cool book, but its uncoolness is part of its cachet. Probably what attracts Jen and Carla to a book like this is that it feels authentic and earnest rather than having aesthetics calibrated to reeling them specifically in.
RKP: Right on page 1, we’re introduced to a role-playing scenario that Alicia and Remy often enact, where “Alicia imagines herself morphing into Jen”—and from then on (and sometimes unpredictably), it’s Alicia-as-Jen that Remy interacts with. This seemed fairly absurd and amusing to me until later in the book when Remy observes Alicia “putting on the expression she wears around other women.” This immediately made me wonder what sort of expressions I put on around X or Y people (as T.S. Eliot writes, “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”), and whether role-playing is in fact integral to the way we inhabit identity. Is it?
BM: I would agree with that 100%. We’re only able to communicate with other people through exterior signs. There’s no way to convey the kernel of self in the real world because it gets strained through the cheesecloth of language and manner and all of that. And of course, the translating of the self into language or presentation is a creative act.
Maybe it’s even misleading to talk about a kernel of self because the self does change day-to-day. Obviously, there are different ways of translating your experiences and feelings into a public identity and we can be more or less fraudulent in that translation. But like any translation, it’s always going to be imperfect. There are always things that can’t be translated and things that can’t be understood about the self. But if performance in the world is a creative process, there’s something exciting and fun about that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with performance per se.
RKP:I felt as though a lot of your novel was dragging me, personally, but also my (our?) generation in general. For example: “Cassie isn’t pretty, but aspires to perfect skin as if it’s the same thing.” And later, in a skincare shop: “The customers want to understand how they look to her. They apologize for their oiliness or redness and wait.”
Did you see yourself as an observer and researcher while working on the book, or was it like you were sort of trolling yourself too? (I assumed the latter until I saw Metafilter listed in your acknowledgments as a resource for “anyone who wishes to write what they don’t know.”)
BM: A lot of the lines that read as satirical were just meant to be straight representations of things that felt real to me. While I recognize these moments as funny, I tried not to write them in a spirit of contempt. Which is not to say that I haven’t snuck a few jabs in here and there! But in general, what interests me most about my characters is weakness or vulnerability. It can read as a drag, but I also think that another response available is compassion, or at least curiosity. That image that you cited for example, about the women offering their faces up for examination, I find pretty moving.
RKP:I want to ask you about texting, which is a key landscape in A Touch of Jen, but I also don’t want to give too much away. Suffice it to say that you really give us a sense of its nuances—how it is a language and logic unto itself, but also a shared world built over time between two people.
In her book Because Internet, linguist Gretchen McCulloch writes: “the shape of our language is influenced by the internet as a cultural context.” As more bits of this language—exclamation marks!!!, “lol”s, ellipses—give us what Remy terms “plausible deniability,” does this sea of irony make it harder to discern any form of truth?
BM: I tend to think that language was nuanced and coded in many of these ways even before the internet, though of course, the internet has produced new types of nuance and new contexts and referents.
Is there that much of a distinction between the shared world that people build together over text messages and the shared world that they build together through spoken language? Remy and Alicia’s texting relationship, which becomes important towards the end of the book and which is shaped by their shared experiences, isn’t particularly ironic or coded in a way that seems dishonest. It’s just very intimate in the way that the private language of any couple is intimate. Later in the book, I take advantage of the inherent ambiguity of written language in contrast to spoken language, but I’m not sure this says anything specific about text messages as opposed to emails or handwritten letters.
Remy’s texts with Jen do contain a lot of ambiguous subtext, but it’s an ambiguous relationship to begin with. There’s a level of coding and irony even when they’re interacting in person. Ultimately, I don’t think we’re at the point where all meaning has been drained from reality by the internet. I also don’t know how helpful the framework of irony is for understanding Internet speech because so much of it isn’t ironic. The Internet as a cultural context adds meaning to our language in ways that are as diverse as the impact of cultural context on any language system.
RKP: Remy describes Jen’s picture as “a clear example of a decoy post [: made] at midnight…to act like she doesn’t care about peak engagement times, but she knows that a picture with several tagged people will do well regardless. It’s an illusion of indifference.” Earlier in the book, “Remy tries to convince Alicia and himself that by not posting about their lives, they’re actually superior. ‘It shows we’re not self-absorbed.’”
Is that what we all want our carefully selected pictures to ultimately signify—that we don’t care about their value and performance as content? And that, by extension, other people care more than us?
BM: I think it goes back to effortlessness. Effortlessness means that we’ve made it, that we don’t have to struggle to be happy. So for example, someone with a ton of followers doesn’t need to worry about peak engagement times. Or someone who feels pretty secure in their life doesn’t feel the need to base their sense of self-worth on their internet presentation because they’re getting it from other places.
I think Remy’s snobbishness here is aspirational. And he’s trying to undermine Jen by implying that her performance of effortlessness is fake—though it’s the feeling that she really does do things effortlessly that makes Remy and Alicia so fascinated with her in the first place. There’s this constant question in the book of whether Jen is fake or not. That’s something that I very much leave as an open question for the reader—what’s important to me is less whether Jen herself is real or fake than what this question says about Remy and Alicia, and maybe the reader as well.
I think often, since I started working here, about the appetite for life. For three years I’ve been coming to play in the unit two or three days a month. Each time with someone different. Sometimes a member of the city’s symphony orchestra, in which I’m the first-chair violinist; sometimes a jazz musician, since I’m also involved in that scene. First we play in the family room for the patients who want to hear us, with or without their friends or families. Then we go play in the rooms, only if our presence is requested.
Nine or ten months ago I met a patient, Madame Signy, who I wanted to talk to you about. In her youth, she was a pianist and a music teacher. She never stopped practicing her instrument, and she was a music lover of admirable cultivation and retention. The first time I played for her, she recognized all the classical pieces. “Bach, sonata no. 1, second movement,” or “Tchaikovsky, concerto for violin in D major,” she would say as she hummed along with long passages.
I had a hard time admitting that Madame Signy was seriously ill. She was thin and frail, no question. But there was a striking joie de vivre in her eyes.
After the first time we met, Madame Signy’s husband told me privately that she waited eagerly for each one of our visits, and that she had expressed a desire to him: she wanted us to come play until the last moments of her life. She was imagining her death in the unit. She saw herself in her final agonies with us at her side, playing works by Schubert and Haydn.
This was the first time anyone had asked me such a thing. I didn’t know how to respond. I couldn’t accept on behalf of my companions. I could only accept personally. But accepting meant being called for an emergency, at any hour of any day, to come with violin in hand to the bedside of a dying woman.
To get off the hook, I told Monsieur Signy that I didn’t know whether the service would allow such a thing…Knowing Madame Gosselin as I knew her, I assumed the unit would agree to the request. But I bought myself some time.
Before giving my answer, I talked to Madame Gosselin, who gave her approval. Monsieur Signy continued to await each of my visits anxiously. But the illness was devouring his wife. At first, she talked to me passionately about her favorite quartets: Beethoven’s last ones (especially the thirteenth and fourteenth), Alban Berg’s opus 3, all of Darius Milhaud’s quartets, the very first by Samuel Barber (which is where his famous Adagio comes from) and Leoš Janáček’s Kreutzer Sonata, for instance. It was wonderful to talk about these pieces with her. However, bit by bit, her fervor seemed to dull.
Monsieur Signy made a superhuman effort to bring his wife a bit of lightness. And I, too, played with a bit more ardor than usual.
I nearly even overplayed, which had the unfortunate consequence of creating the opposite reaction in such a sensitive music lover.
I’ll never forget the case of Madame Signy. In the four weeks leading up to her death, she didn’t want to hear anything about me, or my violin, or music in general. She had lost all appetite for the greatest passion of her life. At first, Monsieur Signy and I thought she was feeling rage or disgust, that it was a feeling that would pass. But the most shocking thing was to see her go from that first reaction to complete indifference. One month earlier, she and her husband had made a list of the pieces I would play during her last moments. It didn’t include anything mournful. No requiems, quite the opposite: excerpts from Schubert’s trio no. 2 and Haydn’s last violin concerto.
During the four weeks that followed, I thought a lot about the pieces they had chosen, which I had to adapt to play as solos. I wanted to play flawlessly for her. But above all I wondered about the hidden meanings in her choices. Why, out of all the music in the world, had she opted for those two pieces?
Madame Signy died on a Sunday morning and nobody called me to play during her final throes. She had told her husband that, upon reflection, she wanted only silence at the moment of her passing. Silence and his presence, also silent if possible. When I learned this, I was hurt. I told myself that Monsieur Signy could have at least called me to play the agreed-upon program at his wife’s grave. But that was idiotic and petty. In the midst of his pain, Monsieur Signy hadn’t had time to think of me.
It’s funny, but last week I got an offer to play Schubert’s trio no. 2 in public. I accepted without hesitation. And I thought, naturally, about Madame Signy. If you want to come hear me, I’d be truly delighted. It’ll be in September, at the Rouen Opera. I’ll be playing in homage to Madame Signy. And you can come listen to the music in her honor.
About the Translator
Daniel Levin Becker, born in Chicago in 1984, is the author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literatureand What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language, and the translator of, among others, Georges Perec’s La Boutique Obscure. He has been a member of the OuLiPo since 2009.
Newspapers make excellent settings for novels, as I learned while writing my novel, Her Turn. In a milieu where everyone—even the birding columnist—thinks of himself/herself as an investigative reporter, the default mode is cynicism and rugged individualism. It follows that newsrooms are full of speedy, hyper-ambitious characters, but they are also home to milder characters, such as Liz, the heroine of Her Turn.
Liz edits a column of personal essays sent in by readers, which puts her far down in the newspaper’s pecking order. But when the woman who married Liz’s ex-husband submits an essay, it gives her a ringside seat to observe and even interfere with that marriage. Often in newspaper novels, it’s the person with a peripheral job or stuck in a journalistic backwater or hopelessly inept who becomes the center of the novel and the source of its comedy. That’s another thing about newspaper novels: they’re frequently very funny.
Branching out from Fleet Street—the legendary home of London’s newspapers—to provincial England, Trinidad, small-town Ontario, and Rome, here are novels set in newsrooms:
William Boot, the unworldly, untraveled writer of The Daily Beast’s nature column, gets plucked out of obscurity in a case of mistaken identity to cover a war in the fictional African Republic of Ishmaelia.Waugh’s merciless satire of Fleet Street and the skulduggery of its foreign correspondents has never been bettered.
My Turn to Make the Tea by Monica Dickens
Poppy’s job as a junior reporter on a provincial English weekly is not limited to covering church bazaars, weddings, and traffic accidents. She also fills the inkwells, fetches copy paper, and heeds the editor-in-chief when he says, “Bring us a mug, there’s a love.” But Dickens’ autobiographical novel is more than a genial period piece: she has inherited her great-grandfather Charles’s talent at creating characters around a recurring tic, and she peoples the newspaper and Poppy’s boarding house with memorable eccentrics.
Gloster Ridley has all the usual problems of the editor of a newspaper in a small Ontario city, including clinging freelancers who refuse to retire, powerful locals who expect special treatment, and reporters who think they are novelists. Then one day someone inserts a hoax into the paper—an announcement of an engagement between two people who barely know each other, with a history of enmity between their families. The mystery’s legal complications are dismaying, not to mention the romantic ones, and Davies deftly steers his small-town tempest to an ideal finale.
Mohun Biswas works for the Trinidad Sentinel for a third of his life, evolving as a journalist in tandem with the paper’s transformations. At first, Biswas fits in easily at an unambitious paper that aims to shock and frighten, writing stories about dead babies in brown paper packages and a series about the tallest, shortest, fattest, thinnest, and wickedest Trinidadians. When the Sentinel pivots to greater seriousness (their new motto: “Don’t be bright, just get it right”), so does Mr. Biswas. His vocabulary and the length of his sentences grow, and he becomes a feature writer and later, as the Sentinel’s colonial optimism wanes, the paper’s expert on social welfare. When he dies, he hopes the headline will be “Roving Reporter Passes On.” But fittingly, the Sentinel writes finis to a life of many disappointments and some joys with the bald “Journalist Dies Suddenly.”
Bob Bell and John Dyson could charitably be described as peripheral to their paper’s investigative heart: they edit the daily nature diary, spiritual meditation, and crossword puzzle. But like their more prestigious colleagues, they arrive late in the morning, phone their friends, fill out their frequently mendacious expense claims and then break for lunch at the nearby pub. Their consummate laziness, complaints of overwork, and resolutions to stop drinking at lunch are running jokes in this laugh-out-loud look at the waning days of Fleet Street and the rise of television.
It’s 1997 and newspapers are beginning to fight for their survival. The novel centers on two women at different ends of the journalistic food chain—Honor, an older, admired war correspondent, and Tamara, a young writer of fluff for an entertainment supplement called Psst. Tamara, who specializes in listicles (“The Best Soap Opera Shags”), has never heard of Franco, thinks zeitgeist is a German magazine and assumes Levi-Strauss is a new kind of jeans. Ambitious to climb an increasingly shaky ladder, she tries to write a feature about the flinty and contemptuous Honor. The gap between two generations and two attitudes to journalism could not be starker, or more darkly amusing.
Rachman’s brilliantly original portrait of an English-language newspaper in Rome (based on the International Herald Tribune) proceeds from its founding to its demise in a series of interlinked short stories. Each one centers on a different character, from the obituary writer to the publisher, and the resulting biography of a paper and its staff is funny, poignant, and thought-provoking.
Leave signs of struggle. Leave signs of triumph. And leave signs.
-Cheryl Clarke
I seek out gay bars in every city I visit. In Denver I find myself lighting one cigarette after another at a bright lounge with the writers Vi Khi Nao and Steven Dunn. Vi and I are in town for a reading, the last stop on my book tour. After the event, we pile into Steven’s car and drive towards the highway. The bar’s parking lot is flooded with muddy yellow light. The tarmac empty save a few SUVs with stickers that say “I’d rather be Climbing” and “Who Rescued Who?”
Inside we stand in line at a wide wooden bar flanking a deserted dance floor. Clots of men in khakis and fleece vests lean against mirrored walls and abandoned Plexiglas cages where dancers once writhed under the blue and white lights. I stare up at the motionless disco ball and try to picture the bar as it might’ve looked during its heyday: a fog machine pumping white clouds obscuring a smorgasbord of bodies, bottles, powders sniffed and swallowed on the floor. In this scene, I root through the night with my mouth, awash in blue lights. Every pore an orifice.
I don’t tell her that I’ve always wanted to live in a different world.
When the bartender hands me my gin, I snap out of my daydream. I remember I’m not at that bar tonight. I’m in this one, and there are cornhole boards in the corner. Flat screen TVs blast reruns. Outside by the picnic tables, an oiled tequila ambassador is handing out free shots. I down one as Vi tells me about her many nights at lesbian bars in Vegas in the mid-2000s. “Another time, another world,” she says. I don’t tell her that I’ve always wanted to live in a different world. “Escape,” she says. “The tourism industry in Vegas meant you never saw the same woman at the same bar twice.” A dyke scene without cliques!I lean in. Vi mouths the words, “cowboy boots,” “acrobat,” and “ropes.” I listen until the lights click on. Perhaps I’ve always preferred the story about The Bar to the thing itself.
Like many queer women in my generation, I encountered the lesbian bar first through books. I swallowed whole the boozy opening pages of Michelle Tea’s Valencia, set in the Lexington Club, the last remaining lesbian bar in San Francisco when it closed in 2015. I watched documentaries like Last Call at Maud’s with a distinct sense of saudade. The oral histories I devoured centered the pre-Stonewall era when bars were key gathering places for lesbians in an otherwise hostile society. For many lesbians, the emergence of bar culture in the 1920s and 30s marked a shift from domestic isolation to public social life. The bar’s primacy waned only in the 70s when new avenues for queer socialization opened up thanks to the successes of gay liberation and feminist movements. At this time, many women also established feminist publishing collectives, small presses, bookstores, and newsletters. These materials were often distributed directly through lesbian bars and increasingly offered an alternative to bars as the primary source of information about lesbian culture. By the late 1980s, the lesbian bar was a declining institution. I still mourn this loss.
Most of the bars I visit no longer exist. There are in fact no lesbian bars left in Los Angeles, a common phenomenon in U.S. cities. I tour abandoned parking lots, take pictures of locked doors. In Laguna Beach I eat tacos at Avila’s El Ranchito, the chain restaurant that occupies the building that formerly housed two different gay bars. As I tour these spaces, I begin to wonder why exactly I mourn their loss when I have no personal connection to them. More important, why do I struggle to imagine an authentic lesbian culture outside the bar? To find out, I sleuth the only way I know how: I open one book then another.
For weeks I hole up in bed and read pulp paperbacks from the 1950s. The pages yellow with age. They come unglued as I read. The books, like the stories themselves, were disposable by design. Their ephemerality encouraged experimentation. Enter the lesbian pulp novel.
While most lesbian pulps were initially marketed to a straight, male audience, their authors and readership were increasingly gay and women-identified. As sales increased through the 50s, a subgenre of pro-lesbian pulps emerged. In 1957 Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl Out was a best-seller, and it concerned two sorority sisters, Laura and Beth, who fall in love. Despite Laura’s desire for Beth, Laura doesn’t fully realize, or admit, she’s a lesbian until she walks into her first lesbian bar in the next serial I Am A Woman. In the pulp universe, the bar represents a threshold: Laura’s evolution into a barfly marks her transition from confused sorority girl to certified dyke.
The Bar in lesbian pulps is synonymous with transgression and risk. A place where police raids, voyeurism from heterosexual tourists, and drunken rows between lovers are all pressing threats. A place where desire itself is often experienced as both liberation and violation. Under the red lights, our heroine might discover any number of uncomfortable facts about herself, such as whether she desires women, another gin, or to go home alone after all. Any of these realizations can be unwelcome, disorienting, or freeing. One synonym of risk is possibility.
The pulp novel’s framing of lesbian dives as clandestine sites of risk contrasts sharply with modern depictions of the bar as a safe space. In nostalgia-tinged documentaries like Last Call at Maud’s and The Boy Mechanic, the lesbian bar of the 60s and 70s is a place set apart from homophobic society, free from judgement, abuse, and the lecherous gaze of men. “I felt the bar was the most open, honest, free place a woman could be,” Rikki Streicher, Maud’s owner, told filmmakers in 1989. Patrons likewise call the bar “a kind of home,” “support system,” and “a place to be together.” An emphasis on community also pervades more recent bar tributes. In a 2015 essay Lauren Morrell Tabak describes The Lexington as a “beacon of hope…THAT MYTHICAL PLACE of openness and acceptance, where you could find friends, lovers, community.”
I spend years trying to find these bars. I give up the search when I find a copy of Jane DeLynn’s Don Juan in the Village at a swap meet. As I wait in line to pay, I read the opening page: “I could never quite decide whether going to The Bar made me feel better or worse, and until I had made this decision there was no reason not to go.” I read on. Through fourteen interlocking tales of sexual conquests and failures, the unnamed narrator recounts the many nights she’s spent in lesbian bars over three decades. In Don Juan, the narrator’s love of The Bar is metaphysical. What matters is not what happens in The Bar, or who she meets there, but the stories she tells herself about her nights out.
We need places where we are not only welcomed but desired.
“Disillusionment had already begun to set in,” says the narrator as she approaches yet another gay disco on vacation. She finds the club through a guidebook. Guidebooks were then one of the only resources for the uninitiated to find lesbian-friendly spaces. Inside The Bar she is met with disinterested looks. When she asks a woman to dance, the woman laughs at her and her gold pants. Nonetheless, she persists. “I was dying to leave,” she says, “but I forced myself to go back to the bar and order a drink.”
For Don Juan’s narrator, The Bar is not a site of automatic community but deep ambivalence. Like the other barflies, the narrator assesses the women she meets based on their wit, physical fitness, class position, drug preferences, and other petty things. This impulse disgusts her. Her disgust alone does not stop her. DeLynn shows how toxic social hierarchies, rooted in racism, classism, ageism, and ableism, do not disappear in the lesbian bar of the 70s, 80s, or 90s. As Audre Lorde has pointed out – the society within The Bar “reflected the ripples and eddies of the larger society that spawned it.” In Zami Lorde complicates easy narratives of unity and exclusion within the lesbian bars of New York in the 1950s. While Village bars were the only places where Lorde saw black and white women making “any real attempt to communicate with each other,” those spaces were “only slightly less hostile than the outer world.” Lorde describes discriminatory door policies and her invisibility as a black woman in largely white barrooms, highlighting how places shape not only who and how we desire but also our conception of our own desirability. As Lord and DeLynn remind, we need places where we are not only welcomed but desired.
Desire is why we walk inside. Desire to be seen. Desire to lose ourselves in a drink, dark room, crush of bodies. Perhaps this is why the most thrilling part of The Bar is often the drive over. When the air is thick with possibility. I admit: many gay bars are disappointing. Whether deserted outposts in edge cities or slick cocktail lounges bathed in lasers. I still go. Of going out, Jeremy Atherton Lin says, “It’s not about holding out for a good night, but rather, a letting go – accepting the gay bar’s unconvincing promise of escape.”
I didn’t go out to be myself so much as to discover who else I might want to be.
While some prefer a dive where everyone knows their name, I like spots where I can be anyone. I didn’t go out to be myself so much as to discover who else I might want to be. This was especially the case when I started cruising dating apps in my early thirties. I had recently ended a ten year relationship. None of the bars or coffeehouses where I met dates were designated queer spaces. The port town where I lived, once a popular cruising spot for sailors, was now home to a handful of shotgun dives with names like Rebels. I met my girlfriend at the latter. I took many dates to this bar. The woman bartender wore knuckle rings that spelled out B-I-T-C-H. She never acknowledged me when I sat down on the stool, even when I saw her five nights in a row.
Much has been written about the rise of apps and the decline of gay bar culture. For some critics, apps represent a hostile tech takeover of the most sacred of human experiences. I’m sympathetic to this line. Yet, as Michael Warner has noted, the institutions of culture-building in the gay and lesbian movement have always been market-mediated from bars and resorts to magazines and bookstores. It’s possible to have genuine, life-altering experiences in hermetic corporate spaces, apps or discos: that’s the power of human experience. The body roots out connection wherever it can.
My date spots were places I had visited countless times since moving to L.A. a decade ago. All were transformed when my date walked in the door. The cracked tile floor of the Cha-Cha’s bathroom was no longer the place where I puked while roofied, it’s where my date pulled my hair until I said uhhhnnn. The Santa Monica Beach and Pier was no longer a grid of luxury condos and restaurants but a deserted stretch of sand where I put my fist inside my girlfriend while the Ferris wheel spun red and blue in the distance. I wondered if I would one day write about this time in my life as a “peak.” Would I forget about the date who asked if I had considered eliminating dairy from my diet to cure my cystic acne? Or the brand consultant who spent the first thirty minutes of dinner trying to discern if I rode the bus for ethical reasons or because I couldn’t afford a car? I doubt I’d cut a word. Nostalgia helps me dream, but candid reports from the field help me survive. In the cracks of our disillusionment, we discover what else is possible.
Will these nights one day become the starstuff of our personal and collective queer archives? Our future dreams?
The enduring need for designated POC and working class lesbian bars likeRedz in L.A. betrays past and present fractures within lesbian bar culture along race and class lines. Despite the fraught legacy of The Bar, nostalgic takes often stress unity. While the interviewees in Last Call at Maud’s acknowledge the presence of prejudices within bars and the larger gay community, their criticisms spotlight gay men. “We were building a movement,” one bartender says. “They were having a big, white frat party.” In Don Juan, published around the same time as these documentaries, DeLynn turns the critical gaze back on herself: white, upwardly mobile, urban lesbians. In this sense, the novel can be read as both a sober homage to The Bar and a nod to the challenges of building communities based solely on identity.
Although the narrator’s nights at The Bar are often disappointing, her dissatisfaction does not stop her from pursuing connection. “With the right attitude,” she says, “anybody could be perceived as the most desirable in the world.” Emphasis on attitude. After one tryst, she writes, “I had invented a story for myself about the awkwardness between her body and mine that I had used to convert this awkwardness into something exciting and powerful.” For the narrator, the most interesting part of a night out is the story she tells herself after the bar closes. Her stories not only rescript her experiences in real time, allowing her to feel desire in the face of persistent rejection, but also help her imagine what else she might want from The Bar and the women she meets inside.
Freed from the burden of preserving the legacy of a specific place or scene, literary accounts of The Bar like those in Don Juan and Zami offer unique anthropological portraits of dyke life. In the fictional dive, good times are shot through with bad ones, and we read on, not in search of another fun night, but to discover what might happen next.For me nostalgic portrayals of lesbian bars express not so much a longing for what’s been lost as a dissatisfaction with current offerings for public socialization. In the mythical safe spaces of the past, we find our contemporary desire for such spaces in the future. Yet, as our cities become increasingly unaffordable, and the gap between elites and non-elites widens, we’re left wondering how we’ll preserve space for the most vulnerable among us. “Identity is articulated through the places we occupy,” says Jeremy Atherton Lin. “Both are constantly changing.” Like lesbian identity itself, the meaning of The Bar is not fixed. If there is one constant, it might very well be The Bar’s psychic role as a site of possibility. “It felt like anything was possible in the bar,” says writer Kat Yoas of her five years bartending at the Lexington. In a recent Zoom chat, Yoas tells me she was offered the job after a performance with Sister Spit, the iconic feminist literary tour formed in 1994. Its current iteration is both a throwback to the transient pop-ups of the pre-Stonewall era and part of the ongoing trend towards queer performances and parties at otherwise non-queer spaces like Dynasty Handbag’s Weirdo Night. Will these nights one day become the starstuff of our personal and collective queer archives? Our future dreams? I hope so. I hope there’s also a surly raconteur on the edge of the crowd, their eyes open, drinking it all in.
Rémy Ngamije’s novel The Eternal Audience of One is a coming-of-age story about identity, family, race, and migration set mainly in post-apartheid Cape Town.
Séraphin Turihamwe doesn’t feel at home anywhere. His family fled the Rwandan genocide for Kenya, before settling down in Namibia. He’s hoping that his move to South Africa for university will let him find a new sense of self, and of course, lose his virginity.
Ngamije weaves Séraphin’s story with those of his classmates in Cape Town, his family in Windhoek, and his ever-changing array of love interests, creating a tapestry of voices who are all searching for a sense of belonging and meaning. Relying heavily on sarcasm and the emotionally cathartic experience of curating and sharing playlists, Séraphin tries and often fails to form connections—romantic or otherwise—in the places he lives, but is not sure he can call home. As Ngamije tells me about his characters, they might be more comfortable in the search for home than in any particular destination they find themselves in.
The Eternal Audience of Oneshares a patchwork of stories—ranging from Rwanda to Paris, from millennials to their parents—filling out the world of Séraphin, the nerdy, cool, playlist-making student in search of his place in society.
Frances Yackel: Can you tell me about the genesis of your book?
Rémy Ngamije: The start of the story—the hardest question first, huh? Fair enough.
It is hard to pick out one particular “Let there be light” moment. Rather, in my case, different but connected events helped to usher the narrative from dream to draft—so my genesis story is more like ambient lighting slowly growing brighter than an almighty thunderclap followed by, boom, creation.
I really wanted to write a story about immigrant life in Africa. Most of the books I read had African immigrants moving to the West.
When I was at university in Cape Town, I really wanted to write a story about immigrant life in Africa—specifically, Rwandans in diaspora. This was quite intimidating because most of the books I read had African immigrants moving to the West. Not being afforded that opportunity, I did not think my story was relevant. By 2009 the idea of Séraphin had come to me and taken root. I could hear his cocky voice and I understood his worldview. But that was all—a voice, no narrative.
Around 2011, I wanted to write a story about navigating the complex and confusing world that was student life in South Africa. It proved to be quite hard, though, to write about something I was personally living through; I did not have the necessary distance from the instances of life that were busy unfolding—it was all experience but no reflection.
Then, in 2013-ish, I really wanted to have a multilayered narrative about immigrant struggles, hustles, university life, love, and attraction—you know, all of these grand themes that look wonderful when you list or cite them. I did not have the skill to put them on paper so I just let them float around in my head, in my notes, journals, and voice notes.
Finally, in July 2016, I became frustrated enough with myself to write something. I collected all of my notes, my vague plots, and character sketches with the intention of choosing one to write about at length. Looking at everything, I realized all of them existed in the same universe—all I had to do was arrange the timeline. And that, really, is how it all came together.
But the source, that chaos before time, I really cannot remember the exact moment when I knew this was the story.
FY:As a Rwandan-born man, raised in Namibia, going to school in South Africa where he is frequently racially profiled, Séraphin left me deeply moved by his constant search for a sense of belonging and acceptance:
“Home, to him is a constant source of stress, a place of conformity, foreign family roots trying to burrow into arid Namibian soil which failed to nourish him.”
In fact, all the characters in the novel seem to be on the search for the same thing, as the novel takes us all around the world with auxiliary characters. Can you tell me more about this?
RN: Migration of any kind, really, is moving from one clearly defined source of home to search for another. That search, sometimes, becomes “a home” because everything else is never perfect, never enough to stop the search in the first place. There is this strange phenomenon when the search provides a sense of home because, at least, the search has a certain regularity and certainty attached to it (moving around, adjusting and acclimatizing, realizing that the current milieu is not enough, looking for better—it sound strange, but that search for better, for more is sometimes more constant than anything else) as long as the “new home” has not been found. Séraphin, I think, is the clearest example of the person “in search of”—but every other character is also trying to find their own places in the world, places in which they can be themselves, where they are permitted to live in the full dignity of their respective essences.
FY: What is the significance for you of writing a contemporary novel about young middle-class African millennials, trying to find themselves and their place in society?
RN: I think, as a storyteller, I needed a group of people who were not adequately explored in literature. I know, for example, that Western millennials are the focus of quite a few long-form essays and social commentary. They are, in accordance with the existing structures of representation and recognition, afforded generous spaces in art and literature.
I found African millennials to be a rich source of storytelling. They also allowed a freedom of exploration because they are not regular literary occurrences.
For me, as characters in a story, I found African millennials to be a rich source of storytelling because I could understand their motivations, aspirations, and frustrations—they provided me with some sense of certainty in that regard. But they also allowed me a freedom of exploration because they are not regular literary occurrences. As a strange alloy of old world and new school—with not enough of either characteristic to claim an authoritative place in their respective worlds—they were interesting people to write about. As a work of African literature, I am excited to have The Eternal Audience of One adding to the understanding of the breadth and depth of continental writing and, hopefully, being a compass guide for other contemporary works.
FY:I was fascinated by Séraphin’s interest in and talent for creating playlists. I love the way he sees them as a way of telling a story, or rather, of bringing the listener on a journey. Does music impact or influence the way you create stories?
RN: Songs have moments in them that I wish I could capture through writing—like the opening notes of Sadé’s “King of Sorrow” or the Buena Vista Social Club’s “Chan Chan”. The feeling of those sounds, the emotions they stir immediately upon hearing them, I really wish I could put that into words. I fail, but I try. When I write—even something as seemingly simple as an email—I do not listen to music because it is quite distracting. I need to focus on the work and words in front of me. But before writing something like a short story or a chapter, I spend quite a lot of time listening to music and trying to place myself in the right emotional state of mind to write the narrative I am working on. And once a piece of writing is done, I compile a playlist for it just to see if I captured the general mood of the work. If I can find a rudimentary soundtrack for a story, I am usually on to something.
FY:Do you make playlists yourself, and if so, does your philosophy on playlists mirror that of Séraphin’s?
RN: In many ways, yes. I make playlists for everything. Gym, cooking, cleaning and laundry days, braais (cookouts), games nights, pensive walks, sunny days when university nostalgia is high, cold days for dreaming—I have so many playlists.
Séraphin’s philosophy is that playlists must take you into a mood and take you out of it. I agree. He also believes that a playlist cannot just have “bangers” on it—those are facts, no cap. It is not curating, for example, if all one does is go for what is known or popular: there has to be a sense of exploration in a playlist and the chance for a listener to discover a new song, and there has to be nuance in it, in the sense that a playlist needs to be thought about. What is it trying to achieve? Who is it for? When is it for? That kind of thing. I used to have a rule that any one song could not appear on more than three playlists—just so that I could curate as many songs as possible—but I have bent that rule on occasion. Then, Séraphin also considers it a cardinal rule never to have more than two songs by the same artist on the same playlist. I respect that. Makes making a playlist more challenging. The only exception, really, is when compiling an entire playlist curating an artist’s work—the challenge lies in ordering the songs in an interesting listening order. Trust me on this: there is a way of arranging Britney Spears’ songs that will narrate the sad situation in which she finds herself with regard to her conservatorship, and there are so many ways of arranging Alanis Morissette’s catalogue to tell different stories. I consider playlist-making to be an artistic process. If you consider it as an act of curation, it really changes the way one thinks about music—and any art for that matter.
FY:How has your experience of moving to Namibia informed your career as a writer? Could you talk a little about founding Namibia’s first literary magazine Doek! Literary Magazine?
RN: If there is anything that living in Namibia has bequeathed me, it is a sense of humor. This country, sometimes, feels like a joke without a punchline. There are moments when I cannot help but break the fourth wall and look off to the side, at the camera, and Morse Code blink at the audience, “Save me.”
As a citizen, I hope for better; as a writer, I am thankful for the canvas.
For the longest time, being a writer in Namibia was quite discouraging, because writers from here never appeared in literary magazines or prize shortlists.
For the longest time, being a writer here was quite discouraging because writers from this part of the world never appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, or prize shortlists. Namibian writers, quite simply, do not share the same level of representation that Nigerians, South Africans, Zimbabweans, and Kenyans enjoy in the literary world. Doek! Literary Magazine was an answer to that problem: what and where are Namibian writers, poets, and visual artists, and how does one share their work with the world?
Since 2019 the magazine has been injecting local writing into the national and continental consciousness. It has been hard, exhausting, and rewarding work—now there is a national and international curiosity about the stories that come from this place, and the writers, poets, and visual artists who tell these stories.
FY:What is the literary scene in Namibia like? Has the literary scene in Namibia changed since you’ve moved there? Where do you see the future of the literary scene heading?
RN: The prevalent fact of artistic life in Namibia is that it is harsh, more so than in many other places because the arts—especially the literary arts—are not supported well enough for any one practitioner to make it their sole activity of enterprise. Of course, this is true anywhere—but in Namibia this fact is law.
But even for such a challenging and limited arts scene, very little stays still here. Deserts, for all of their stillness and bleakness, can be quite active sites of life. Thus, there are more participants in the literary scene now than there were when I was in high school, for example. The hard part lies in keeping various artistic circles stable and rewarding to the artists.
There are reasons for optimism, though. Doek, the arts organization that publishes Doek!, launched the Bank Windhoek Doek Literary Awards, the first such awards recognizing literary artists in Namibia. There are also creative writing workshops that seek to nurture promising Namibian writers and poets. In time, with more funding and institutional support, perhaps we can produce anthologies and host festivals. Perhaps these are dreams, but if The Eternal Audience of One can go from Windhoek to the world, then hope remains.
It’s a swirling, crackling kind of pain, as if an electric eel is twisting inside her skull. Luyao saw such an eel in the St. Louis Aquarium during the winter break: the tank lit up every few seconds with lights powered by the eel’s own voltage charges. The flashing lights had, for some reason, felt like blips of pain, and now, they are in her head, silvery, frantic. She clutches the edge of the podium and sees her students’ eyes all set on her, keenly, like some high-pitched chorus. She falls silent, realizing with a sinking heart that she hasn’t been making sense. She has been speaking not in English, but in Chinese, or more likely, a jumble of the two.
“I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well.” She says the English words, but what comes out of her mouth sounds warped, writhing, even to her own ears. She puts a hand to her head, trying to trace the contours of the phrase “class dismissed.” But as her tongue moves to its supposed position, there is nothing left to trace: the words have vanished from her brain.
Luyao does not quite remember what happens next. Only the image of the eel hunting inside her tight skull, its electricity turning words into puffs of smoke.
The diagnosis is a stroke. A blood clot is killing the brain cells in her left frontal lobe—specifically, the region that controls speech. Luyao, at thirty-seven, third-year doctoral student in economics, and mother of a six-year-old, has lost her ability to speak.
When her husband, Gaoyuan, arrives at the hospital, with one of his jacket collars tugged under the neckline, all she can say is one word, hao. The mellow-voiced doctor asks how she feels, she answers hao; asks her to name pictures of dogs, dolphins, and roses, she replies hao. Good, yes, okay. The most common word in Chinese, which must have been so imprinted in her memory it alone has escaped the calamity. She says hao even when she is shaking her head and slapping her hand on the threadbare sheet of the hospital bed.
She wants to ask Gaoyuan where their daughter is. She can voice her daughter’s name in her brain, Xinxin, a name she picked, meaning happy, flourishing, thriving, homophone to the word for heart and the word for new. “You can’t find another sound with so many good meanings,” she’d said to Gaoyuan. But her mouth has forgotten how to make that sound as well.
Gaoyuan does not read her mind. He’s telling her what the doctor has told him. That she’d passed out, her students called 911, and an ambulance took her to the ICU. It could have been much worse. She could have lost her muscle function, or her language abilities altogether. She can still understand what others say, can still read in her head, albeit slowly.
“Xinxin is with our neighbor,” he says finally. “I’ll bring her tomorrow.”
“Hao,” Luyao says, and means it this time.
When she is alone again, encircled by a beige cubicle curtain in a corner of the hospital room, she moves all her body parts and all of them are still movable. She is lucky, they were trying to tell her. She closes her eyes and wonders if she can still cry out loud, or scream. The patient on the other side of the curtain is turning in bed, trailing long sighs with each toss. Luyao covers her ears to focus. The sound of her daughter’s name. Xinxin. Her body quivers, her mouth fumbles, her tongue queries. But no sound except the accursed hao makes its way out into the air.
The next day, clinging to her father’s leg, Xinxin looks at Luyao as though unsure if she is her real mother. The little girl once told Luyao where she had been before her birth: “I was so small,” Xinxin said when she was around three. “I was invisible. I was sneaky, hiding from you. Then I jumped out in front of you.” Luyao had felt both chill and momentary illumination. There seemed to be truth in her daughter’s baby talk—this jump from being invisible to being in front of her, this will to be born and seen. If only she could think it out. But she had no time to dwell. She had been constantly busy since she went back to school, mentally absent from her daughter’s logic and riddles and inventions. Only the afternoon before the stroke, Luyao stretched out an arm to stop Xinxin from climbing onto her lap: “Don’t interrupt me, please. Go read a book or draw a picture.”
“Mama?” Xinxin asks tentatively.
“Hao, hao.” Luyao opens her arms.
Scott, a young speech therapist with perfectly aligned teeth, is singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” He asks Luyao to hum along and swings her arms with his to match the rhythm. He looks at her mouth closely as if expecting something miraculous. When he finishes the song, he moves on to “Happy Birthday.” But nothing comes out of Luyao’s mouth except more off-tune humming.
Scott says that it was an experiment. Rhythm and melody are controlled by the right side of the brain which is not damaged in Luyao’s case. People with her condition can sometimes blurt out the lyrics when they hum along with nursery songs. “But it probably only works for native speakers,” he says.
Luyao learned those songs roughly the same time she started learning English—in middle school, in a small town in China where all her English teachers had learned their English from someone who was also Chinese. With each new teacher, Luyao inherited a different set of mispronunciations and accents, and had to unlearn and learn again. Though she was never particularly interested in English, her father had decided that she would major in the language. He predicted it would be useful, foreseeing more trade between China and English-speaking countries. He himself had majored in Russian when the two countries had called each other brothers. Luyao’s pronunciations and accents continued to morph according to the professors she studied with, most of them also Chinese. She continued to learn the language perfunctorily, memorizing rules and combinations to pass exams. But in her junior year, when she was able to read unabridged literature in English, the language started to make sense to her. What seemed to be randomly arranged letters were able to generate views of far-off places she couldn’t otherwise see.
After seven years of administrative work at an American pharmaceutical company in Shanghai, Luyao decided that was not what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She applied for schools in America and got a student visa to pursue an MA in literature. She met Gaoyuan, a graduate student in math at the same East Coast university. After they graduated, neither of them could find a job, and legally they had only one year to stay. Gaoyuan applied for computer science programs and was accepted by a midwestern university. Luyao was pregnant. She moved with Gaoyuan to the college town, changed her visa from F1 to F2, and took care of the baby while applying for graduate study at the same school. This time, she too had to change majors. Business administration? Economics? Accounting? Management? Marketing? Finance? Gaoyuan made a list.
After gaining an MA in economics, Luyao was given a speaking test at the beginning of her PhD program. A computer voice asked her to open a pamphlet to page one, study a map, and give directions from a gym to a restaurant. It asked her why smoking was harmful, and what her favorite album and TV program were. Luyao had not expected to be asked such irrelevant questions and was irritated by the male voice that kept interrupting her before she could finish. “I have no TV,” she half-yelled at the computer. “Even if I had one, I wouldn’t have time to watch any programs.” The next day, she was informed that she had failed the test. Not only was she not allowed to teach, she had to take speaking classes.
The language instructor, Vickie, spent the next two semesters training her and other international prospective teaching assistants to speak like native speakers, which involved frequent self-recording and redoing until she and her fellow students believed that every syllable they pronounced sounded native. There was also a weekly tutorial during which Luyao sat in front of Vickie and her computer and spoke. According to Vickie, when native speakers spoke, all the words in a sentence were linked together, forming an unbroken purple line on her computer screen. “Focus,” Vickie would say. “If you focus all your energy on the sound of the words, you will be able to do it.” But Luyao would false-start, stumble, stutter. From time to time, she even had the paralytic feeling that she didn’t know any of the words at all—they looked like alien codes, disconnected from any neurons in her brain.
Now the feeling is no longer metaphorical. As Scott dramatically shapes his mouth around the word hello, the words how are you, and thank you, and see you, words Luyao had learned at the age of twelve, with her first English teacher who spoke English as though smacking her lips on candy—Luyao is angry.
She has compromised and strived for nothing.
She is angry that her father had made her major in English, when she could have majored in Chinese and in that case would never have thought of coming to study in America, where a stroke would be waiting down the road. She is angry at Gaoyuan for persuading her to switch majors. How many times when she was reading an economics textbook did she wish she were reading a novel or a book of poetry. How many sleep-deprived nights had she spent writing papers of little interest to her. She is angry at Vickie, whom she was still running into from time to time on campus and, each time, Luyao could see the words she spoke manifest themselves as broken lines on Vickie’s computer screen. She’d fear that Vickie would say to her, “Let’s give it another try. Let’s stand here and do this till you make all the words link.” Luyao is angry that during the year and half when she was finally teaching, she couldn’t help but think that her students were younger versions of Vickie, listening intently, with hidden dissatisfaction, for the unlinked words staggering out of her mouth.
Now she will never teach again, nor will she earn a PhD. She is now a disabled person who can speak no words. Except hao. Which is a mockery. It must have survived to tell her that she has ruined her life by saying hao when she should have said bu hao. She has compromised and strived for nothing.
“How was the therapy?” Gaoyuan asks at dinner.
Luyao says nothing because she doesn’t want to say hao. He continues to look at her, so she gives him a nod. “What words were you practicing today?” This is his final school year: he’s applying for jobs and preparing for defense at the same time. Before the stroke, Luyao had been helping him edit cover letters. Their dinner conversations often had to do with the job market. Now, he doesn’t talk much about it.
Luyao shakes her head, looking away.
“I learned the seasons today,” Xinxin says in English.
Xinxin began speaking English to them soon after she started preschool. Luyao wanted her daughter to be a natural bilingual, an uncompromising one, able to switch between Chinese and English effortlessly, as she herself couldn’t—and most certainly cannot now. She had only spoken to Xinxin in Chinese since her birth, but a few months into preschool, Xinxin began to respond in English, asking why she needed to speak Chinese—no one else at school did. Luyao told her because it was easier to be bilingual now than later, but oftentimes, she found herself speaking English with her daughter, too tired to switch back to Chinese. She tried to make it a rule that the family would only speak Chinese at home, but more and more, she and her husband caught themselves pulled into English by their daughter, who had also started to correct their pronunciation.
“Good, what are the seasons?” Gaoyuan says in English, with a reinforced interest.
“Spring, summer, fall, winter.”
“Very good. What do you know about them?”
“Spring is tornados and kind of warm. Summer is next to sunset. It looks like lots of suns. Pink is fall. Fall means leaves turn colors and the rain is kind of cold. Winter is snow. I like winter the best. No, actually I like every season the best.”
“That’s great, Xinxin.” Gaoyuan rubs her hair.
Luyao wants to ask her daughter to repeat what she has just said. She tries to say the words in her head so that she won’t forget them: Summer is next to sunset…Pink is fall…I like every season the best. So strange and lovely. If only she could stay inside her daughter’s words and never come out.
In the morning, after dropping off her daughter at school, she walks to the park and sits down on a bench. A magnolia is in full bloom, its large pink flowers open deep, like sturdy throats caroling a celebratory song. A robin flits between the branches, warbling away without giving it a second thought.
Yesterday, Scott also taught her to say “My name is Luyao.” His pronunciation of her name was so off it sounded like someone else’s name. Still, she mimicked him. She was learning to say her own name in the wrong way.
During her first speaking class, Vickie had come in one day wrapped in a white sheet, a spiky cardboard crown on her head, a flashlight in her hand. She handed out copies of Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” and read it out loud. Then with more emphasis, she read again the verses containing the words “tired,” “poor,” “huddled masses,” and “wretched refuse.” “You’re the ‘wretched refuse’ in this poem,” Vickie then said to the class. “But this is a great country and we’re here to help you.”
But she was too sure. She had forgotten the Eastern wisdom that the only certainty is uncertainty.
Luyao had to let it go, the way she let go many of those little darts thrown her way. She had to grow thick-skinned, she told herself, and her second-class status was only temporary. In five years, she would get her PhD and become a professor. But she was too sure. She had forgotten the Eastern wisdom that the only certainty is uncertainty. Now, she has indeed become the “wretched refuse.”
The hospital bill comes. Despite her student health insurance coverage, her portion is still five figures. She tears up the bill and throws it in the trashcan. Her and Gaoyuan’s combined stipends could barely make ends meet. Now with hers gone, they won’t be able to pay rent for this one-bedroom apartment, where all three of them are still co-sleeping, on one mattress that covers just about the bedroom’s entire floor. They will have to ask for loans from their families back in China.
She wants to go back to China. She and Gaoyuan had talked about going back many times, and the agreement was to do it if they couldn’t find a job here even with a PhD. They didn’t want to go back defeated, but they were nostalgic. Gaoyuan said the first thing he would do after his defense was to reread all of Jin Yong’s wuxia novels. What Luyao wanted to reread was Tang poems, and she wanted to have the right mindset to read them, which she didn’t foresee having anytime soon. They both knew what they were nostalgic for was not exactly the present-day China, as the country had changed so much in the last decade they could hardly keep up. Nor was it what the country had been when they lived there. But it must be there somewhere.
If it were up to her, Luyao would like to have her Chinese back. She would give away all her hard-earned English just to be able to speak like a normal Chinese again. She forms a conversation with Gaoyuan in her head:
“Can you just get a job in China so we can go back?”
“Are you sure now is a good time?
“Yes, I’m sure. I don’t want to live here another day.”
“But how will living in China be different?”
“I’ll try to get my Chinese back. We’ll be close to our families.”
“Do you really want to go back in your current condition?”
“What do you mean? Am I a disgrace now? Am I making you lose face?”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean then?”
“I’m just being practical. What jobs do you think are available in China for people who can’t speak well?”
“The same kind as here: cleaning dishes, mopping floors, wiping toilets…”
“Do you want to do that kind of work in China?”
“Why? Do you think people will judge me, making me a cautionary tale for those who go abroad?”
“I just don’t see you doing that kind of work in China, with two master’s degrees and…”
“That person no longer exists.”
“Besides, one gets paid higher for that kind of work here than there.”
“I’m not going to be your dependent, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
To that, she can’t imagine how Gaoyuan will respond.
He will probably just shake his head and walk away.
Luyao has waitressed at Chinese restaurants during almost all her summer breaks and has never told any of her friends or family in China about it. It is true that no one will judge her here, as she hardly knows anyone except other Chinese students who are more or less in the same boat—minus the stroke. She will ask the owner of the restaurant she’s worked for the last two summers to let her do the cleaning work that even Chinese students won’t do. Maybe she can bring leftover food home to save on grocery costs. Maybe she will even learn how to cook those greasy Americanized Chinese dishes. “Wretched refuse” or not, she will survive.
Her daughter’s bedtime routine has changed. Now, Xinxin reads a book to Luyao before sleep. She points at each word and reads it out loud, modeling patiently for her to mimic, to work her lips, tongue, and vocal cords into mechanical sounds. Xinxin’s favorite book is A House Is a House for Me, which Luyao had bought at a library sale before her stroke. She’d read it night after night to Xinxin, to the extent that one night after she finished reading, Luyao asked Xinxin to make up verses to the same effect. “What is a window a house for?” she asked.
“A window is a house for outside,” Xinxin said.
“Wow, that’s beautiful…What is outside a house for?”
“Outside is a house for future.”
“Hmm, I like it. And future?”
“Future is a house for everyone.”
“That’s really nice. What about everyone?”
“Everyone is a house for bones.”
Luyao felt her bones rattle, like those skeletons hung in people’s yards on Halloweens. But her daughter’s face was tranquil. The lines had all come out of her mouth without a pause, like she’d known them all along, known them intuitively. And she said the word bones without the least aversion, as if it was as neutral as, say, water or air.
Now, mimicking her daughter saying words from the book, Luyao thinks of Xinxin’s poem again: Future is a house for everyone. / Everyone is a house for bones. She repeats the lines in her mind, and the paradox seems to be making a clearing in its thickets. A small clearing, but nevertheless she feels that as long as she can squeeze in and lie down there, she’ll be all right for a while.
One night after a long day at the Chinese restaurant, about two months post-stroke, Luyao lies on the mattress with her daughter, waiting for her to fall asleep so that she can get up and finish cleaning. That’s all she does now, cleaning. Her forearms shoot pain. Her knee joints feel like two handfuls of nails. The cracks on her fingers never close. Earlier, she wasn’t paying attention to Xinxin’s speech tutorial. She put the book away and gestured her daughter to sleep. She feels sore to the bone. Each of the bones she houses complains.
Xinxin turns in bed. Luyao can tell something is bothering her. Her daughter has not confided in her since her stroke—must have figured that her mother can offer no words of comfort anyway. Luyao pictures what could have happened to Xinxin at school. Maybe another boy walked over to her while pulling down the corner of his eyes, saying, “I’m Chinese, I can’t see.” Or another girl told her she couldn’t be her friend anymore because she didn’t believe in God and would go to hell. Or the girl who told Xinxin that the Easter Bunny didn’t bring her anything because he didn’t recognize her as an American said another damaging thing. Back then, Luyao was able to tell Xinxin that those children were ignorant, that she was born here. She is every bit as American as any other child.
She would give away all her hard-earned English just to be able to speak like a normal Chinese again.
Now Luyao has about thirty words she can form with her mouth. She still has no spontaneous sentences. She draws Xinxin to her arms and kisses her head. Xinxin sighs, and then starts to sing a lullaby. It is the lullaby Luyao had made up for her when she was a newborn. It’s in Chinese. A simple melody with lyrics all about something or someone falling sleep, starting with the stars, then the moon, the trees, the birds, or the streets, the streetlamps, and after every seven lines is the refrain “Xinxin ye yao shui jiao le”—Xinxin is also falling asleep.
Now Xinxin is singing it, improvising, inserting Chinese nouns she knows in the lyrics. Then, she stops. In the quiet, Luyao hears her own voice, clear and supple like water, singing the refrain, “Xinxin ye yao shui jiao le.” Unable to believe it’s true, she sings it again. For the first time since her stroke, she is able to say a sentence, and her daughter’s name, effortlessly.
Luyao and Xinxin are both laughing when Gaoyuan appears at the door. Luyao sings it to him.
“Hao, hao, tai hao le,” Gaoyuan says.
Luyao says hao too, and for the first time, it seems, she feels the immense goodness in this word.
Later that night, after her daughter falls asleep, Luyao cleans the kitchen and takes the trash out of the apartment to the dumpster. On her walk back, she counts seven stars above her head. She knows there are countless others up there, only that the night is not dark enough to reveal them. Like the words in her mind, they are there somewhere, none missing. She keeps her face raised and says Xinxin ye yao shui jiao le to the seven stars.
She looks around the sky and sees more. With care, she says the words she has relearned so far one by one. She says each word quietly, slowly, as if dedicating them to each of the stars. Hello. Thank you. See you. More stars emerge from the infinity.
This is how the story goes: Jake and I were having a playdate. We were at his house. I have no memory of where his parents were. My parents were at work, miles away in the city. Jake and I were young enough to both unabashedly adore Barney and I hadn’t yet been taught what could happen when girls and boys played alone together. My legs were scrawny and my cheeks were chubby. Jake was much, much taller than me. At some point, Jake led me into a bedroom—the bedroom belonging to his parents—and locked the door. Then he grabbed my tiny shoulders and forced a kiss on my mouth.
My parents like to tell this story because it never fails to entertain at a dinner party. People laugh and sometimes blush and almost always raise a glass to what they call: ‘Jake’s gumption’.
After all, we were children.
I flinched the first time I let someone kiss me.
I recently watched Miranda July’s Kajillionaire.The film ends with what I interpret as the protagonist’s first consensual kiss. That kiss feels transformative because it’s the first time this emotionally stunted twenty-six year-old allows herself pleasure. It’s the first time she acknowledges her sexuality without feeling like it’s wrong.
Days later, the intensity of my feelings hadn’t waned. I felt confident that the protagonist, Old Dolio was the victim of sexual abuse. My certainty was guttural. There was something in the way she held herself that was familiar. Watching her felt like looking into a mirror.
Kajillionaire explicitly depicts the psychological abuse Old Dolio experiences, but the presence of sexual abuse is left up to the audience. Early in the film, Old Dolio attempts to return a one-hour massage certificate for cash and instead reluctantly accepts a twenty-minute massage. Before the masseuse’s hands even make contact with her baggy top, Old Dolio’s whole body flinches, recoiling at the prospect of touch. The masseuse makes the tiniest impact and Old Dolio yells out that it’s too much. The scene ends with the masseuse holding her hands above Old Dolio’s back, keeping them there, suspended in the air, giving Old Dolio the only amount of intimacy she can bear.
I flinched the first time I let someone kiss me. He was thirteen and his eyes were the color of ice. I said yes.And yet I was terrified. My body was already programmed to anticipate violence. My mother says that as a baby I couldn’t be soothed. That I cried and cried and cried and nothing she did could end my sobbing. She went back to work soon after my birth and shortly after that, was diagnosed with breast cancer. In every photograph we have from that time, she and I cling to each other. On some visceral level, we understood how little control we had—that safety is imaginary. When you’re deprived of comfort, your body accommodates. Old Dolio’s shoulders slouch throughout Kajillionaire. Her hair hangs almost over her face. She’s trying to make herself disappear. She’s trying to protect herself.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve hunched. Sometimes I tell myself it’s because I want to make myself smaller, other times I acknowledge what feels truer: there is safety in invisibility.
When Melissa Febos’ latest essay collection, Girlhood, showed up in my mailbox, I hid the book under my couch cushion for a week. It was too hot for my skin. I’d read her second book, Abandon Me, the year I blew up my life, the year I left a six year relationship that was headed toward marriage so I could travel around the country. That book forced me to acknowledge that I was horribly unhappy. The prospect of Girlhood dislodging another piece of my certainty terrified me.
Since the #MeToo movement began, I’ve licked my wounds quietly, unsure of how to engage with the cloudy intrusions that haunt my body. I didn’t have the language to name what happened to me. I didn’t know whether my experiences counted for anything. What I did know was that every time I entered a new space, I sought the exit; anytime I got stuck on a crowded subway car, I panicked; most nights, if I fell asleep, I’d wake from nightmares shaking; even with partners I trusted, a surprise touch unraveled me.
When I finally read Girlhood, I learned I was right to be worried. Febos holds a mirror up to the violence of being twelve years old and having “a body like those women in the magazines.” She recounts the many men who were compelled by her because of what they wanted to take from her. “Eventually, I understood the strength that was no strength, that was a punishment no matter what I did or did not do. So I let my friend’s older brother close the closet door. I let the persistent older boy dig under my clothes and between my legs. My once-strong body became a passive thing, tossed and splintered, its corners rounded from use. Unrecognizable.”
I became preoccupied by Febos’ use of the word let: to cause, to give an opportunity to, to permit to enter.To me, that usage meant she was confronting her responsibility, that she was acknowledging the role she played in allowing these intrusions to happen to her body. No one forced themselves upon her.
And yet.
On some visceral level, we understood how little control we had—that safety is imaginary.
The first person I invited to touch me took advantage of me. The irony is not lost on me. The first person I said yes to took my yes to mean permission for anything and everything he wanted. This is common. Over 1 in 3 cis-women and 1in 4 cis-men will experience sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.Those statistics don’t account for people who are transgender, a community who experiences intimate partner violence 2.5 times more frequently.
The boy I let harm me is the first boy to tell me he loved me. Our relationship began in a park that faced onto a busy street. He set the time of our meetings. One day, I arrived late. In his fury, he took hold of my wrist, snaking his knuckles around my veins. I’d made him look stupid, he said. I apologized until I ran out of ways to say sorry; without a word, he let go of me. We didn’t speak for a week. The silence was agony, but I took his anger to mean care. A pattern developed: I’d show up early and wait in that park for hours, sitting on a bench with my back to the entrance. Either he would appear or he wouldn’t. When he did, he’d approach from behind and put his hands in front of my eyes. I found this romantic: The uncertainty, the intensity of newness; I was sick with anticipation. Now I understand this to be the cycle of abuse. He controlled our meetings. He controlled how I spent my time when I wasn’t with him. Later, in his bedroom, with all the shades down, he controlled what I did to him.
He’d start by turning up the volume on the television. In my memory, COPS was always playing. I can still hear the shrill sound of the sirens, the static of the police radios, the particular panic of someone being chased. Then he’d summon me to his mattress. It was a twin bed with camouflage sheets. His father was a veteran with a drinking problem who had taught him to value strength. I don’t remember the first time the boy instructed me to go down on him. I only remember the way it felt when he yanked my hair, the imprints his nails left in a horseshoe around my neck. It was easier to do what he asked. I wanted to make him happy.
The first person I said yes to took my yes to mean permission for anything and everything he wanted.
I turned my body into a vending machine. He paid with promises of love and then selected what he wanted from me.
“Not speaking of a subject can turn it into a secret. Secrets, if initially a source of power to their keepers, often transmute into a source of shame over time. If you act as though a happening is unspeakable, then you begin to think of it as such.” That boy and I were barely fourteen when he knelt on the ground in the park and proposed to me with a Ring Pop. I pretended not to notice that his bright eyes had become bloodshot—that his skin stank of alcohol. The promise of a love that would not abandon me compelled me to disregard the pain and truth of what was happening. I slid the enormous red sucking candy onto my finger and promptly lost myself completely.
At twelve years old, Febos is invited into a bathroom by a group of older boys and subsequently asked to choose one of them. She chooses strategically. Instead of picking the one she has a crush on, within whom she recognizes the mark of violence, she picks a boy with a girlfriend, hoping that his relationship will serve as protection. Predictably, it doesn’t. He takes exactly what he wants from her—well, almost; she artfully negotiates him down to a hand job. Afterward, she reflects: “I felt deeply embarrassed, not only for myself and what I’d consented to but also somehow for him, because I knew he’d done wrong.”
Sexual negotiation ripples throughout Girlhood and is dissected most explicitly in “Thank You For Taking Care of Yourself” an essay that encompasses almost half the book. It centers around Febos attending a Cuddle Party: a social event designed to allow touch-deprived adults to engage in safe, nonsexual physical contact. Before the party begins, the organizer walks the attendees through a strict set of rules, the most important being: “You must ask permission and receive a verbal YES before you touch anyone.”If a person says “No”, the requester is instructed to respond, “Thank you for taking care of yourself.”
The promise of a love that would not abandon me compelled me to disregard the pain and truth of what was happening.
Regardless of this clearly defined framework, once the party begins, when Febos is approached by a man she has no interest in cuddling with, she immediately consents. “I did not hesitate to assess if I really wanted to [cuddle] with him. I had no lucid thoughts about it at all. I simply agreed, and we settled on the chenille-blanketed floor…. I did not think: I do not want this man’s body curled around me. My uneasiness did not occur as a thought at all. It was more like a shift in temperature, a change in the light, a texture inside me that roughened.”
As Febos described the unwanted caresses of this strange man, my entire body tensed. I pulled a blanket up to my chin and cradled my legs against my chest. The moment she said yes, but really meant no, I heard myself saying yes—or, not saying yes, but walking to that boy’s bed when he told me to, slipping underneath his camouflage sheets, unzipping his jeans, opening my mouth, not feeling anything but the dull threat of what might happen if I stopped—what he would do to me, or what I would have to acknowledge about myself.
Febos refers to this as empty consent and understands the imperatives that encourage it as, “the need to protect our bodies from the violent retaliation of men and the need to protect the same men from the consequences of their own behavior, usually by assuming personal responsibility. It is our shame, our embarrassment, our duty alone to bear it.”I’ve never named the boy who abused me. I took responsibility for what happened between us. It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I began to redefine our relationship. I was silent for so long because of my shame. I never told him no. I let myself turn into an object, a source of pleasure that could be poked and prodded until it emptied of value because I believed he loved me. I failed to see that love for what it was, undercutting the possibility of my safety.
I let myself turn into an object, a source of pleasure that could be poked and prodded until it emptied of value because I believed he loved me.
I made the calculation that sharing my hurt wasn’t worth the potential of his destruction. Along with other violence, he threatened suicide when I initially left him. In school he was belligerent, high on pain pills, intoxicated from his father’s whiskey— a father who was likely emotionally and physically abusing him. When the boy started a drunken fight in the gymnasium, I was terrified of what his father might do if he got suspended. I pushed the boy outside and wrestled him onto the grass with the help of our school’s soccer coach.
Afterward, no one asked me if I was alright. I don’t blame them. I never let on that I was breaking.
A part of me still cares for that boy, cares for the broken pieces I know he’s made of. I recognize his fault lines. But if he harms another person, I have to live with my complicity. I google him every few years, mainly to make sure he hasn’t overdosed. His drug abuse is the reason I finally found the courage to leave him—not because of the harm he was doing to me—I left because I couldn’t bear to watch him destroy himself. Last year, when I typed his name into the search bar, I discovered that he saved a toddler from drowning while working as a lifeguard. He trained for his lifeguard certification in the pool at my childhood house.
The primary reason I’ve had trouble talking about what happened to me is because my experience doesn’t fit any description. I know I wasn’t raped. If I brought my allegations to a court, the court would say that I’d consented.
Unlike what we’re taught in sex-ed, saying no does not ensure our safety. On the contrary, saying no invites the possibility of cruelty.
Now, I’ve come to understand that my consent was empty. Febos describes empty consent as “the legacy of centuries of abuse and oppression,” meaning that unlike what we’re taught in sex-ed, saying no does not ensure our safety. On the contrary, saying no invites the possibility of cruelty. Women have been conditioned to appease men, to accommodate their preferences, to use our bodies to provide them service: to cook, to clean, to fuck, to birth their children, to care for those children, to be silent, to make their lives easier by placing ourselves in a secondary role and conforming to their desires.
After reading Girlhood, I finally asked myself: When we were children bonding over a purple dinosaur, why did Jake lock his parent’s bedroom door? Did he anticipate that when he approached my small body, I might say no? Did he consider that his mother might find us—that she might open the door before he could get what he came for? When did he begin seeing me as an object, as something he could possess, as something he could control?
Jake and I wound up at different elementary schools. It was only after puberty that I saw him again, still much, much taller than me, in the halls of our high school. By then, I was already beholden to the boy with the Ring Pop. I once asked Jake if he remembered what happened between us and he looked at me with innocent eyes and said no.
I believe him.
Watching her on-screen, I felt a piercing awareness deep inside my body. When you’ve been mistreated, sometimes the smallest compassion can undo you.
In the writing class I teach, I give my students the option of submitting work I won’t read if they don’t feel ready to share it. I’ve never quite known how to respond to students when they choose this option. I usually write an email telling them that I respect their choice and that I’ll honor their privacy, but it’s never felt like enough. Now, I’ve finally found words that will mean something.
Thank you for taking care of yourself.
In Kajillionaire, Old Dolio is played masterfully by Evan Rachel Wood. She embodies what it means to hold trauma inside you. She’s always stiff with tension, hunching her shoulders and covering her face with her hair. Her voice is emotionally level, evoking a numbness that’s meant to mask her pain. She tries to present herself as unfeeling, but the moment she encounters someone who treats her with kindness, the rawness of her hurt unravels. Watching her on-screen, I felt a piercing awareness deep inside my body. When you’ve been mistreated, sometimes the smallest compassion can undo you.
After the boy with the Ring Pop, I built a wall around myself. Intimacy became an impossibility. When someone I cared for tried to kiss me, I jerked backward. The prospect of being touched, even tenderly, awoke my raw nerve endings. What looks like affection can quickly escalate to violence—I had learned this lesson. So, I closed my body off, depriving myself of pleasure in the name of protection.
Intimacy became an impossibility. When someone I cared for tried to kiss me, I jerked backward. The prospect of being touched, even tenderly, awoke my raw nerve endings.
It’s likely that the intense connection I felt for Evan Rachel Wood’s Old Dolio was magnified by the knowledge that offscreen, Wood had recently come forward with her own experiences of horrific emotional, physical, and sexual abuse from an intimate partner. I’d read every line of her testimony and I understood, in some small way, what it meant for her to speak against her abuser, a man in an enormous position of power.
About the experience, Wood has said “I used to think being strong was not being affected.” For years, I held the same definition. I thought by not acknowledging the countless afternoons I spent letting that boy claw his fingers into me, that they would lose meaning, that their hold on me would weaken. But they didn’t. My resistance was twofold. I wanted to be powerful enough not to let the intrusions disarm me. I was also acutely aware that what happened to me was not that bad, as coined in Roxane Gay’s anthology of the same name. My abuse had an amorphous shape. Yet the toll it took on me, physically and mentally, followed the same path of trauma that so many survivors of violence walk. I’m finally beginning to claim my experience. To name it. But this is only a start.
As Kajillionaire played, projected against a blank wall in my apartment, I watched Old Dolio’s stilted movements and felt Evan Rachel Wood’s movements, and also my own, tip-toeing through a world that has taken so much from us. For the first time in a long time, I let myself sit inside the pain. I didn’t turn away from it. At the end of the film, I felt the heaviness of the hurt temporarily lift when I watched that body—what had become our shared body—find its first true source of comfort.
Suchitra Vijayan’s debut book, Midnight’s Borders, is a genre-bending book of nonfiction—made of stories, encounters, vignettes, and photographs—about home, belonging, and displacement. The book recounts the author’s recent journey across India’s land borders covering 9000 miles over a span of seven years.
In addition to being a writer, Vijayan is an award-winning photographer and a barrister by training who has worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo which provides legal aid to Iraqi refugees.
Even if Vijayan’s debut book centers South Asia, its focus on borderlands as sites of state-sanctioned violence mirror a rising nationalism and consolidation of borders across our increasingly globalized world. As the author says in her book:
“…borders around the world are enclosing and suffocating their people rather than guaranteeing their freedom. What happened in Bosnia was a repeated in Rwanda, and what happens in Palestine is happening in Kashmir.”
The stories within her book hold immense pain, yet they are of a global urgency because they herald a new world order.
Namrata Poddar: What first drew me to Midnight’s Borders was the book’s title, its reference to ideas of home, displacement, nationalism and transnationalism. Also, the title is an obvious nod to Salman Rushdie’s canonical book of postcolonial fiction, Midnight’s Children, that talks about the making of India as a nation space and the Partition as the subcontinent’s painful, colonial inheritance. What was your reasoning behind the book’s title?
Suchitra Vijayan: When we decided on this name I was very aware of the comparisons to Rushdie’s magnum opus—a book that continues to cast a long shadow, especially if you are an author from the subcontinent. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is older than me; the book not only created a new kind of writing, it changed forever the way publishing will encounter South Asians, especially Indians writing in English. “To understand me,” says Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai, “you’ll have to swallow a world.” I think this is true of all the people who appear in the book.
Having said that this is not a literary ode to Rushdie. The years after 9/11 firmly changed that. The Rushdie I loved and cherished is gone. Not just him, so many men and women I respected as literary and ethical figures became willing and eloquent voices of the empire. For instance, a few months after 9/11 he wrote, “America did, in Afghanistan, what had to be done and did it well.” That essay hasn’t aged well.
It is like Nabokov’s lament: “My Gods died young.” Rushdie’s support for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and his refusal to confront the tyranny of the American Empire now puts us in very different political spaces.
There is a clear distinction between speaking against the powerful and claiming to speak on behalf of the ‘voiceless.’
Jawaharlal Nehru India’s first Prime Minister’s speech “Tryst with Destiny” was delivered to the Indian Constituent Assembly in the Parliament, on the eve of India’s Independence shortly before midnight. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” While Nehru was still declaring this victory, the slaughter began. Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. Not everyone lived to see its broken promises. 17.8 million people lost their homes in the aftermath of the Partition of the subcontinent, and what consequently became the world’s greatest migration. In the book, I say we were ambushed halfway to freedom. That question of lost freedom and possibilities still haunts us.
Nehru’s speech ends with, “There is no resting for any one of us till we redeem our pledge in full, till we make all the people of India what destiny intended them to be.” The pledge however was never redeemed. More importantly, as Babasaheb would argue, the political revolution was never accompanied by a social revolution. He writes about how when the Constitution was adopted, “We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics, we will have equality, and in social and economic life, we will have inequality. … How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?”
So here, “Midnight” functions as a moment of violent birth, but also perhaps the foundational violence that becomes codified in various ways, especially in the bodies of people farthest away from power.
NP: 150 million people, or almost half of the USA’s population, live in 111 border districts along India’s borderlands and many don’t have any ID cards to prove their citizenship, your book tells us. I imagine these numbers make India the largest “democracy” that’s increasingly manufacturing foreigners out of its citizens, although as you well remind us, this colonial inheritance of border-making, state surveillance and violence is a global phenomenon.
As an Indian American reading your book, I kept thinking of Trump’s administration, the ICE, detention centers, caged children, and all that’s been happening at the US-Mexico borders for a while now. Given your extensive work in international war crime zones, what drove your narrative decision to leave sustained comparisons of India’s borderlands with other parts of the world? Especially with your current home, the United States, that’s known as one of the biggest military powers of the world.
The idea of ‘bearing witness’ is very problematic. With the phone armed with a camera, everyone is a photographer; we are all witnesses.
SV: The global border regimes are inexplicably connected. For instance, the devastating story of the six-year-old Sikh girl, Gurpreet Kaur, who died in the Arizona desert in 2019 tells a story of another wave of refugees and others leaving South Asia, particularly India, and traveling to South America and making the dangerous journey to the US southern border.
There are also other threads that connect migration, and refugee flows globally. I realized early on that the material I had on the American borderlands needed more time and work. American borderlands don’t begin or end with the Southern border; its tentacles and walls span the globe. I also felt that the story, the history, and genealogy needed to be told through a different lens, the lens of carceral history, slavery, and Jim Crow that connects Attica prison riots to Abu Ghraib.
NP: In the second half of the book, your narrator shares with the reader what prompted her lifelong interest in questions of state violence and justice. She shares an incident from her childhood where her father is brutally attacked within her home city, Madras (now Chennai), and nearly killed by what’s rumored to be state-sanctioned violence. Later on, the twelve members of a gang who assaulted him are acquitted by the Madras high court.
On one hand, I loved your book where the narrator disappears to center stories of people living in Indian borderlands—forgotten subjects of both Indian and global history. On the other hand, the reader in me kept wanting to experience more intimacy with the narrator, to experience more moments like the one where your narrator shares about her father, and connects it to the people and stories within the book. Why was decentering the narrator and her interiority within the book important to you?
SV: The choice of decentering the narrator happened in multiple ways. The first is political. When there is a right-wing authoritarian regime ruling India, as a writer I had an ethical responsibility to respond to the present. What moral and political stands should we as writers take in the face of ongoing oppression? That clarity led to specific form and narrative choices.
In both popular and literary culture in the West the subject—the self is almost always the center. I think there is a reason why we lived through the kind profoundly vacuous personal essay culture that flourished in the last decade and in some ways has returned with a vengeance through other means. It is the capacity to write about the self and reduce everything, even the zeitgeist of our times to a cameo.
One of the things I was told often by editors and agents who I pitched this book to was that I needed to put more of myself in the book. That suggestion, no matter how well-meaning, always made me deeply uncomfortable. As I traveled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. I came with my privileges, also let’s not forget, prejudices. I write in the book:
“It is not my goal to ‘bear witness’ or ‘give voice to the voiceless.’ Such writings have long been implicated in the history of colonial ethnographic practices, where native informants are poised to become the voices of the empire. The people in this book are eloquent advocates of their history and their struggles. My role, then, and this book’s role, is to find in their articulations a critique of the nation-state, its violence, and the arbitrariness of territorial sovereignty.”
For instance, writing about my father happened only in the final round of edits just before we locked the edits on the manuscript. My editor, Ryan, specifically asked why this work and this book are so important to me. He flagged this in the Kashmir chapter. Even as I wrote about this, I wanted to be very clear that what I witnessed, or the violence inflicted on my father, are not the same as what over eight million Kashmiris have endured. It’s not comparable, and should not be compared. While that incident had a profound impact on me, my politics, how I think about violence, its relationship to justice, or the lack of it, this is not the same kind of violence Kashmiris have been subjugated to. I have never lived under military occupation, curfew, or a looming threat of violence. Check posts or bunkers were not part of the landscapes of my home. Finally, there is a clear distinction between speaking against the powerful and claiming to speak on behalf of the “voiceless.” The former is an essential act of dissent, even resistance, especially in these dark times. The latter is an act of violence against people whose voice you are appropriating.
NP: In another poignant moment within the book, when you’re traveling the India-Bangladesh border zone, you witness two young children playing with a kite and a little girl plucking wildflowers within a site that’s notorious for state violence against India’s Muslim minorities. You reach for your camera then refrain from taking a photograph of the children for your book, “an archive of violence.” Why was putting away the camera here important to you as a writer?
SV: Our visual and political culture regularly elevates the storyteller above the stories. The idea of “bearing witness” is very problematic as a concept, as a rhetorical tool, and as a literary device. With the phone armed with a camera, everyone is a photographer; we are all witnesses. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness—we are record keepers, unwitting spies, and voyeurs. This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity to act. Or even a road map to justice.
Representing people on film, photographs or paper is a political act. We need better, more thoughtful responses to the question: what is the function of seeing and documenting? I’m not just talking about the ethics of documenting, but also the limits of stories and images, and their place in our social worlds. As I wrote this book, it became very clear that I wanted to use photographs for a very specific purpose.
This past year, Magnum came under fire and was forced to re-examine its archive after accusations that it held and made available photographs that showed the sexual exploitation of minors. Some important conversations and critique emerged around the function of an archive that holds images of violence and exploitation.
In March this year, the court ruled that Harvard University can hold on to the daguerreotypes depicting enslaved Africans, despite objections from the subject’s descendant, Tamara Lanier. The judge ruled that the “photos belonged to the photographer, not the subjects.” The lawsuit made important arguments about the image, archive and who these images belong to, and who has the moral right to the image shot without “without consent, dignity, or compensation.”
NP:Speaking of power and representation, I was deeply disturbed yet unsurprised when you share stories of poor teenage men who join the South Asian army across its borderlands and learn to kill with impunity because a gun in the hand predominantly means an escape from hunger. This story is so different from the narrative of toxic masculinity we often associate with the military (and rightly so?), a legacy hypervisible in Hollywood and Bollywood too, both within and beyond war movies. Were there any other moments while traveling through India’s borders that enlarged your perception of masculinity within the military?
If we are to survive as a people and as a community, we need to radically reimagine our world, a world where we center human dignity and freedom as the cornerstone.
SV: Absolutely. The military-security-media complex in India grew rapidly in the years following the Kargil war. We also saw civil-military relations change. During the same time, we saw movies and series that construct a new kind of hyper-masculine soldier who is essential to guarding freedom and homeland security. As India became increasingly militarized, it also had to manufacture perennial existential threats. But in reality, the Indian army, like society, is not free of caste, class, or the cruelties it produces. You definitely see toxic masculinity play out with the officer cadres. One story I heard repeated over and over again was stories of suicide. As per official data, in 2018, a total of 173 BSF guards had committed suicide over the period of 5 years.
Second, even while these men join the army for many different reasons, ideas of militarized masculinity definitely structure their social worlds. They are products of a deeply unequal society.
NP: I loved how your highly dystopian narrative ends on a note of hope, on the recent student-led protests across India that are resisting Modi administration’s obvious agenda of promoting Hindu supremacy within the country’s multiethnic, multi-religious reality. It’s a moment, your narrator suggests, that heralds a borderless world, one we must all co-create for our children. Can you share more about your vision of a new world, free of borders? What does freedom in this context look like to you?
SV: This is the age of erosion of citizenship rights, a kind of ongoing attrition against human rights, civil liberties, and in the case of India, an accelerated dilution of fundamental rights. It’s a dangerous moment where the figure of the rights-bearing citizen is being reduced to a consuming subject. The new world we must fight for is not a utopian one, instead if we are to survive as a people and as a community, we need to radically reimagine our world, a world where we center human dignity and freedom as the cornerstone.
Second, freedom and dignity cannot be tied to a state. What I mean by that is, the state should not be the final arbiter of what rights you and I possess. Certain rights are inalienable and exist because we are human. Without that struggle, what awaits us is a world emptied of citizenship rights.
Finally, I want to end the note of gratitude to the women of Shaheen Bagh and the hundreds of thousands of students who took to the streets in the aftermath of the citizenship laws in India. It was a remarkable moment that taught me what an act of community can do in the face of state repression.
It’s our duty to remember, fight and never give up.
The doldrums of corporate culture are a touchstone of contemporary art. For one thing, normal nine-to-fives sustain writers, keeping us afloat; and as the adage goes, writers write what we know. For another, readers love seeing themselves reflected in the books they consume. What’s more appealing than knowing you’re not alone in having a god awful boss? Reading stories that remind you how much worse it could be.
But these books can be hopeful, too. Most protagonists in terrible-boss narratives escape their Faustian jobs. Or they negotiate a way to get what they need out of an occupation they didn’t necessarily want. Whether it’s the conflict between vocation and avocation, boss and underling, or individualism and collective office hive-mind, these texts tackle the clashes inherent in everyday work environments and demonstrate that there can be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Normally, you wouldn’t see the phrases “page-turner” and “scorching examination of race and privilege” together in the same sentence. But that’s exactly what this novel is. When Emira, a young Black woman, is accused of kidnapping the white child she babysits, her boss Alix—the child’s powerful, well-known mother—resolves to make things right. Though Alex is well-intentioned, Emira doesn’t quite trust her to navigate the conflict. Ultimately, the unintended consequences of Alix’s goodwill change both women’s lives. This beautifully-written novel about work, ambition, and white saviorism is a must-read.
In this satirical novel, a young Belgian woman named Amélie signs a year-long contract to work as a translator for a prestigious Japanese firm. Her new boss’ friendly façade disappears almost immediately, and Amélie spends the year sliding down the corporate ladder, stumbling through a series of cultural and workplace misunderstandings that land her at the bottom of the shit-pile—literally. At once rollickingly funny and deeply insightful, Nothomb’s novel takes on the sexism and Sisyphean tasks inherent in corporate culture.
Russo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows Miles Roby, who manages the most popular restaurant in the decaying mill town of Empire Falls, Maine. His manipulative employer has promised to leave the restaurant to him when she dies, but Roby is suspicious. The restaurant isn’t the only thing rooting him in Empire Falls—there’s his weed-growing younger brother, his equally ne’er-do-well father, his almost-ex-wife, and his teenage daughter—an unforgettable cast that slowly reveals Roby’s troubled past and his secrets. This character-driven opus examines America’s blue-collar towns through the lens of work, duty, and family.
For anyone who loves a good journalism novel, consider this book by Jenny Turner, in which the protagonist arrives at a towering office for her glamorous newspaper job having completely forgotten what she does. She spends a good chunk of this novel trying to figure it—and, in turn, herself—out. Ultimately, though, it might not matter what she does; this is the point of Turner’s acerbic comedy, crafted with a distinctly postmodern sensibility and an air of constant defamiliarization.
This novel is an incredible blend of black comedy, thriller, and love story. Josephine has just moved with her husband to a big city, where she finds work putting strings of meaningless numbers and letters into a database. The agency responsible for the database is monolithic and perplexing, but Josephine had such difficulty getting a job that she doesn’t question it until strange things start to happen: her husband disappears overnight, and a series of “delivery failed” notices appears on her door, though nobody has her new address. If such a mystery sounds tantalizing, you can read an excerpt here.
You might remember Casey Gerald’s viral TED talk. His memoir is even sharper, even more stunning. Gerald’s writing is strikingly honest, seldom self-aggrandizing in the way that so many successful businessmen’s memoirs are. He takes readers from his difficult, devout childhood in Texas to his stint as a football player at Yale to his time at Harvard Business School, examining the ways in which Americans treat work with the same blind reverence typically reserved for religion. From Wall Street to Washington and beyond, Gerald reveals how the elite perpetuate mythologies that keep others from rising.
After a stress-induced meltdown, the protagonist of There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job goes looking for employment with the following criteria: no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. From there, she embarks on a series of increasingly meaningless temp jobs that toe a fine line between freeing her and confining her within a sort of self-imposed exile. As her quest for an alternative to a standard nine-to-five existence progresses, she discovers the price of searching for meaning beyond capitalist fulfillment.
Suzanne has worked as a secretary at the same company for thirty years, so when a new one is hired, she’s reasonably upset. But over the course of this novel, her chagrin morphs into an obsession. As she worries about becoming obsolete, resisting every change the new secretary brings to the office, Suzanne’s internal monologue grows increasingly frantic and menacing. Is the new secretary really a threat, or is it all in Suzanne’s head? This novel brings workplace competition to new levels of intensity, exploring how age and habit impact the rhythms of an office environment.
Another Pulitzer-winning work of autofiction, The Caine Mutiny is based on Wouk’s personal experiences during World War II. Willie Keith, Wouk’s protagonist, is a naïve Princeton graduate who’s commissioned as an ensign in the Naval Reserve after signing up for midshipman school to avoid the draft. He ends up on the Caine, a derelict minesweeper with a strict, by-the-book captain who uses his commanding persona to hide the fact that he has no idea what he’s doing. When Captain Queeg orders his crew to flee a battle area, the men decide to mutiny. This novel is widely hailed as the first work of American fiction to grapple with the moral complexities and consequences of World War II.
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