J. B. Hwang’s debut novel, Mendell Station, is a gorgeous book about grieving one step at a time. Like many of my favorite works, it invites an intimate conversation between writer and reader. Miriam has recently lost her best friend, Esther, in a tragic accident and consequently lost her faith in God; years ago, she lost her father. She tells her story, we sense, not to preserve these deep connections, but as a way to seek them.
Her crisis of faith leads Miriam to get a job with the US Postal Service, quickly becoming an essential worker when the nation is thrown into quarantine during the pandemic. She wants a job that is physical, and where she can be alone. Miriam becomes our guide to the invisible ecosphere that is the USPS, taking us on her routes through San Francisco. Her wandering starts to feel like a pilgrimage, the recursive argument she has with herself a meditation for God. She writes letters to Esther that she carries in her satchel, crossing out the address on the envelope and writing in “DEC,” the USPS abbreviation for deceased.
With grace and humor, Hwang gives us a dignified portrait of the job of a mailperson, showing us how these essential workers are so often compassionate towards each other, working overtime to help meet demands. She describes in deft detail the daily labors of postal workers who receive no hazard pay and are often invisible to those of us at home unless we have a complaint. Hwang also calls out America on its conspicuous consumption during COVID, where we stocked up on supplies and hoarded luxuries, rarely thinking about the people who have to lug each of those packages to our doors—and how little has changed since.
Inside the mailer that should have had Janice’s book, USPS dropped an empty envelope at my door with an apology that the mail inside had been too damaged to deliver. It felt right, somehow.’
Annie Liontas:Like Miriam, you lost your best friend. Was writing this book a way to move through grief and a way to remember her?
J.B. Hwang: I wanted to write fiction because I didn’t feel like I could ever fully capture my friend who died, and I didn’t want that pressure. I also didn’t want to talk about our families; I wanted to invent new ones. Fiction gave me more freedom to explore questions of grief and their friendship. One of the conversations between Miriam and Esther is that family is not voluntary—you’re born into it, you don’t have a choice—whereas friendship, you do choose each other. They learned their first lessons of love from their families—in the midst of and through ugliness—but as friends, they can also do things differently.
I don’t think that just because someone is your best friend, they can be with you in every single moment. It was important for me to show that when Miriam has her spiritual crisis after her dad dies, she feels this distance from Esther. And Esther too—when she’s going through her searching period, there’s this gap between them. I think the beautiful thing about friendship is that it can persist despite the gaps between two people. Even death is a gap, some could argue the most unbreachable gap. But Miriam’s love for Esther continues and they’re still friends through these letters, through these conversations in her head.
AL: Miriam and Esther are, at least on the surface level, complete opposites. As someone who has a best friend very different from me, I appreciate the truth in this. We as readers are drawn to these characters in part because they are so drawn to each other.
JBH: I think Esther is such a vibrant, full-of-life character. Her volume is louder than Miriam, who is a quieter person, and she engages with the world in such an intimate way. She is vulnerable and open to it, thoughtful, generous, kind, loyal. She lets everything in—and she also lets everything out. Also, she’s no bullshit. Miriam is spiritual and quiet and contained, more guarded. When they meet each other, they have to meet a little outside themselves. They’re two opposite personalities with the same desire to love. They both need this friendship, they’re both hungry for a deep and genuine connection, and they don’t want to waste time doing things that they think don’t matter. They find weight in each other—the significance and weight of the other that helps them feel fully accepted and free. Rather than being threatening, these differences become a way to grow and be challenged. I think they appreciate the discomfort and the stretching that the other forces them to do, which is not at all like the discomfort and stretching that their families make them do. I think for both of them, it’s spiritual.
AL: Miriam is going through a crisis of faith as a result of her tremendous grief. How do you understand faith? What does it require of us and why has that become so impossible for Miriam?
JBH: What’s interesting about faith is that people think it’s about giving over to something, a blind trust, and that there’s this aspect of “just believing.” But whether or not you’re religious, everyone has faith in something—any framework about what the universe is, what your life is, who you are. Like you could believe in democracy or humanity, the scientific process. Someone could ask, Why do you have faith in yourself? What proof do you have that you should have faith in yourself? And for Miriam, that happens to be God. And I’m a big fan of rationality, but I don’t think it’s everything. After she loses that faith, what Miriam is learning to do is to be in a state of not fully believing in anything, but kind of be in this state of questioning, being unsettled, living through that. And how crazy it is to be alive with all of the dark shit, the things that don’t make sense, the beautiful things that knock you off your feet. She was used to having a much more solid foundation of God and religion, and when that was gone, her physical sensations become really important to her. Embodiedness becomes really important to her.
AL: We really see this after her father dies. Miriam goes from someone who might identify as asexual to a person who seeks out sex with strangers and the “immanence” of “real men.” Her lack of sexual experience is one of the big differences between Miriam and Esther. What does sex offer Miriam in her time of grief, and how does it fail her?
Whether or not you’re religious, everyone has faith in something
JBH: When Miriam’s spirituality—the frameworks underlying it—are shattered, she wants to be flooded with physical sensation. That’s what sex offers her after her dad dies. At that point, she doesn’t have a spiritual crisis in the sense of, like, God doesn’t exist, but she sees her life ahead as so bleak and doesn’t know what to do with it or whether God is good. And one thing that will shut off those questions is the physical sensation, the weight, the heat, of sex. What I find interesting about that episode is that it ends. She doesn’t then go on to engage in romantic relationships or continue to hook up with people.
AL: You were a postal worker in San Francisco at Mendell Station. Can you tell us what that was like?
JBH: In the beginning, before everything becomes automatic muscle memory, it’s actually very hard because you have so many things you need to concentrate on at the same time. You need to walk without falling while your eyes are on your mail. You need to remember where each house’s mailbox is. And then there’s small packages versus big packages. Not only is there the mail in your arms, but you have small packages in your satchel. And you have to remember which addresses had a small package. Big packages are delivered separately straight from the truck. It’s a lot to keep track of. For Miriam, part of what’s so helpful about the job is that she is mentally fully engaged—it keeps her mind on a leash. But also repetitive motions put a wear on the body. There are obvious things, legs and feet; shoulders, especially if you’re carrying weight on heavy days; the sun. It’s a very physical job. And if you’re constantly doing overtime too, it adds up. Even your fingers can get sore. Until then, I’d never had the entire lengths of each finger be sore before.
AL: What was it like to be working for the USPS during the pandemic? What were you and your co-workers facing in that time of uncertainty?
JBH: There is a rhythm to the year—usually Christmas is slammed—so high volumes for extended periods of time was not a new thing for mail carriers. But Christmas lasts a month, and the lockdown wasn’t ending, and it was during a period when your body is supposed to be resting, in the spring. People were ordering so many packages. That change was hard, not knowing if and when it was ever going to end, when your body needs that break. And on top of that, there were staffing issues because people would get COVID. They tried to stagger start times to reduce infection rates, but that was a bummer too, because you normally have camaraderie in the morning, everyone chatting and cracking jokes. So morale was down. But actually, even with the staggered work times, the package volume was so high, everyone was stuck in the station for extended periods of time loading their trucks that you ended up overlapping with your coworkers anyway. It was constant change, new policies, and uncertainty. I was lucky to live alone, but other people who were living with those who are immunocompromised had to be quarantined from their family members.
Doctors and nurses, even outside of [the] pandemic setting, their jobs command a certain degree of respect. But not as much grocery store workers, not mail carriers, not sanitation workers. But that’s wrong. Without them, we’re screwed. We all need each other.
AL: One of the things I most appreciate about your work is that you have this crisp, unadorned style, even as you’re grappling with suffering, whether we’re talking about grief, or the exploitation of workers, or physical abuse between Miriam’s parents, one of whom has muscular dystrophy. Why is it important for the book to look at these moments head on?
JBH: It’s hard to ignore when it’s in your immediate family and surroundings—the scale at which suffering came to our consciousness during the pandemic, especially with the racial injustice that had long been present.When something is so complicated, difficult to describe, and all knotted up—my impulse is to untangle. To try to see what’s there, at the heart of it, the kernel. To clarify what seems unnavigable while maintaining that sense of confusion, grasping.
AL: You write that the USPS is “a service asked to stand on its own while being accessible to all. This was part of its charm and sadness – a service not driven by profits or recognition… the only witness to the Postal Service was itself.” If we lose the USPS under the Republican administration, what do we lose?
JBH: It’s funny, one thing I can agree with is there are inefficiencies in the post office. It’s often the source of humor and absurdity in the story, and there are real things that can be improved and changed. But I think in this age of maximum profits and maximum efficiency, we have to ask who gets left on the wayside. Like our libraries, the post office is such a noble institution that serves literally every person in this country. No matter where you live, no matter how far away or remote you are, you have this lifeline, this connection to community. It’s such a beautiful thing with no glamor and recognition in it. Most people don’t know that the postal service doesn’t take a single tax dollar—it’s fully self-sustaining, and it serves everyone. It gives to all—at cost. Don’t the Christian nationalists see how Christ-like that is, and that it’s worth saving? We as a people need to do everything we can to protect it, to continue being accessible to everyone in this country.
AL: Can you tell us about the dead letter office in Atlanta?
When something is so complicated, difficult to describe, and all knotted up—my impulse is to untangle.
JBH: I love the idea of a place where undeliverable, unreturnable mail gathers as proof of all these thwarted attempts at communication. You would think at some point, [the USPS] would just throw it away. Like, “We tried our best, too bad,” which we do with business mail, ads. It shows the amount of respect and reverence that post office has for first-class mail. We never throw away first class mail—we know it’s precious to someone even if it can’t get to its destination or returned to sender. I think the post office is so charming because of the things that it reveres.
AL: What was the most memorable package you delivered?
JBH: I was always surprised when I delivered liquids—really large quantities of water or juice—because of the way it sloshes, and it’s way heavier than non-liquid packages. I’ve delivered mealworms, probably as food for another pet. I remember the box had air holes. You can also deliver a potato. You can just put an address and postage on the potato, and the postal service will deliver it for you.
AL: I’m definitely sending my best friend a potato!
JBH: [laughs]. I would much rather deliver a potato than gallons of water.
Tuesdays were drag nights at Chasers: “Where the happy people party!” And by the fall of 2018, we were all piling into this gay club behind the Dominos’ dumpster at least twice a week with a pound of makeup on our faces. The stage was sticky, the floors stickier. The scent of cheap fruity vodka hung in the air. The owner kept promising she would stop keeping all the cash in the ceiling tiles and fix the place up, but the sign out front was still flickering and the linoleum tiles on the stage were still loose. A few wilted birthday decorations clung to the walls months after whoever’s party had ended. Chasers wasn’t the swankiest gay bar in Charlotte, but it was ours.
That night, a queen in a floral housedress worked the door, calling everyone “honey” and “bitch” and “Miss Thing,” and the leather-clad femme behind the bar poured the strongest drinks in town—plastic cups brimming with vodka, just a hint of Red Bull. It was HoT (Haus of Terror) Tuesday, my drag family’s signature show. Vegas and Vanity arrived first. The dream couple: Vegas playing horror monster with thick eyebrows and fangs carved out of wax, Vanity playing soft ingénue dusted with glitter in pink faux fur. Vegas hosted the show every other Tuesday, starting at midnight if we were lucky. She was our mother, the center of our drag family, of our little world.
I drove forty-five minutes into Charlotte from my apartment up north after I got into makeup and costume, transfiguring into someone opaque and glamorous, without a past or a future. Into someone who smoked Marlboro Reds out of a costume-store cigarette holder and pretended her diamonds were real. Into Tallulah.
My sisters began materializing, fashionably late as usual. Lychee, bright yellow wig glowing around her face, stumbled in from the gravel parking lot showing off her new holographic pink platform boots, already bickering with Vegas who insisted that she was borrowing those shoes next week and Lychee could shut up about it because she was her mother and what was ours was hers already anyway. Lychee was still rolling her eyes when she pressed a little kiss to my cheek; she almost reached my height in those towering shoes. Another sister walked through the door tossing back her new blue wig and belting something from Phantom of the Opera. Then another toting her giant dollhouse prop, another out of drag in yellow beanie, and the last with her ass out and a blunt in her purse hurried into the club. There still weren’t stall doors in the bathroom, but at least the owner propped up a curtain rod so we could pee half-shielded from the eyes of strangers.
Vanity and I were on the back patio chain-smoking and drinking warm whiskey from our hot pink flask inscribed with “Male Tears” just out of view of the only functional security camera when we heard Vegas muffled on the mic inside:
“How are we doing tonight, Chasers?”
A pause for effect. No response.
“Okay, fuck y’all, you can do better than that! I said, how the fuck are we doing tonight, Chasers??” Her gravelly southern drawl amplified.
Dim shouts and applause vibrated behind the door.
“Much better! Showtime is in five minutes, so get your dollars out! It costs a lot of money to look this cheap!” She cackled.
“Fuck, Van! We gotta get inside, Vegas is going to kill us.”
We stomped out our cigarettes on the cement under our stilettos and stashed the flask back in Van’s purse. There was no need to push our way across the floor; there were only about fifteen people in the bar if we counted the house drug dealer brooding in the corner behind the pool table, and we always counted him. It wasn’t horrible for a Tuesday. With the two of us rushing in, we all barely fit in the small dressing room. Someone needed to borrow lash glue; a queen in day-glow green was humming the song she was about to perform under her breath. Lychee was trying to re-hook a safety pin to her tattered t-shirt dress. Wigs and fabric and limbs, everywhere.
Lychee was still rolling her eyes when she pressed a little kiss to my cheek; she almost reached my height in those towering shoes.
Vegas, covering the mic, hissed: “Tallulah, are you ready? I have you first on the lineup, and we need to start, like, half an hour ago.”
“We’re running on drag time, baby!” Lychee cackled from her cramped corner, her reflection flashing conspiratorially in the streaked mirror.
I nodded, adjusted my bustier, and stuck another few bobby pins in my huge blonde wig, just for good measure. Losing a wig was a crime against humanity in our world.
Vegas stuck her head out of the dressing room curtains and nodded to the DJ in his adjacent booth.
Cue the intro music.
She parted the curtains and strode out into the crowd, her tulle cover-up billowing out behind her, turning her regal.
Uncovering the mic, she laughed, then said, “Okay, Chasers! It’s time for our first entertainer of the evening. Everyone give it up for your favorite slutty Hollywood starlet: Tallulah Van Dank!”
I’d been going out to the bars and watching shows for a few months before I performed in my first drag talent show at Chasers. I had never spoken to any of the performers because I didn’t feel like I could mingle with these sparkling powerhouse personalities. I was just a local college student who spent too much of my time alone in a barren apartment. I watched as these gorgeous creatures glimmered in the spotlight. I loved them from afar. I was stagnant, searching, finally coming more fully into my own queerness.
I started to research drag and its history on my shitty laptop night after night, cigarette ash collecting on my blanket. I eventually came upon the celebratory balls of queer Black folks in the late 19th century that evolved into a vibrant queer and primarily Black and Latinx ballroom scene in the early 20th century and beyond, documented in Paris is Burning, How Do I Look?, and elsewhere. Balls offered spaces where trans and queer folks of all varieties could embody identities, personas, and presentations that were often inaccessible to them in the violence of the external world, where they could live out their dreams in front of an audience, where they could become themselves more completely and maybe even take home a trophy for it. Ballroom culture, despite not always explicitly involving performing in drag, informs so much of current mainstream drag performance, culture, and vocabulary—from “hauses” of queer chosen family to dips and spins and voguing to saying “Category is..” and “Why you all gagging so?” and “Reading is fundamental!”—that trying to imagine a history of modern drag without ballroom at the center feels false and disrespectful to these innumerable queer and trans elders.
As with much of queer history, there are relatively few concrete records of the lives and experiences of drag performers, so we, as a community, have had to make do with those that we do have access to and often operate on stories passed down from older generations. Of course, the U.S. context does not define drag globally, and there are many other rich histories and traditions of drag and similar queer performance art forms across the world, but I was particularly ravenous for the history of the community that I was getting to know.
Drag came to feel like a natural extension of myself. I was raised as a girl, yes, but my exuberant, camp, queer, and sometimes vulgar femininity and sensibilities—my personal brand of femme lesbianism—were certainly not in line with heterosexual societal norms for young Southern ladies. Yet drag embraced them. And drag in the Bible Belt felt like a huge fuck you to the zealots and fascists and “respectable” folks who wanted us all to die or disappear, who decreed that queer and trans people were sinners and perverts, out to corrupt the children and destroy traditional family values. They didn’t want the freaks out in public. It wasn’t good for their image or their immortal souls. But if they were going to call me a freak, I wanted to surround myself with as many other freaks as possible.
I had to try it, just once. To know how it felt to be fully disembodied and then re-embodied into something entirely apart. To become something beautiful and mangled and new.
I pictured myself in a cheap nightclub boudoir, surrounded by feather boas and beaded costumes, dripping in pearls. My mirror was smudged with lipstick, gin and tonic sweating on the wooden vanity. I was Sally Bowles or Velma Kelly or Roxie Hart. I had a string of lovers, a tragic backstory, a drinking problem, a murderous streak.
A name emerged from the imagined cigarette smoke, charged: Tallulah. Tallulah Bankhead had always been my idol—my father always warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine—taking her name was like slipping on a fresh, custom-fitted skin.
I was browsing the Chasers website again one night and saw a flyer for a drag talent show the last Wednesday of July, so I figured I would just show up and see what happened.
The night of the talent show, pressed into my cramped bathroom after the sunset, I glued down my eyebrows with alternating layers of purple glue stick and loose setting powder and shaped my face with grease-paint contour, like the queens did in their online tutorials. White on the tops of my cheek and brow bones, deeper brown carving shadows into my forehead, jaw, and nose. I drew on pencil thin eyebrows that arched in slight surprise. Trying to blend eyeshadow over the eyebrow glue felt like a losing battle, so I just did a little smoky eye and hoped no one would notice the hairs starting to peel up underneath. I glued a single 301 strip lash to each eyelid. Every eyeshadow palette, contour stick, brush, sponge, facial mist, tube of lipstick, and highlighter I owned was scattered across the counter and in the sink. I only half-knew what I was doing. When I applied the last smear of lipstick, I examined myself in the mirror. I definitely looked different, but “good” would have been a bit of a stretch.
If they were going to call me a freak, I wanted to surround myself with as many other freaks as possible.
I shimmied into one pair of shiny drugstore pantyhose, some fishnets, a black tuxedo vest that I had lifted from my college theatre department for this occasion, tight leather shorts, and a red blazer. I didn’t even put on a wig—I was already running late. I just tied up and pinned a thin black silk scarf around my head, hoped it looked vaguely 1940s Rosie-the-Riveter chic, and was on my way.
It was a Wednesday night, but the gravel lot was almost full when I arrived at Chasers. I had to park in the grass. It was never this busy on a weeknight, and the Carolina July heat was not particularly conducive to layers of thick cosmetics. I could already feel my face melting; I did not have a strong enough setting spray for this.
I pulled open the heavy door for the first time as this fledgling persona, and my red heels clicked against the chipped tile. It felt like power. I slipped the queen working the front my driver’s license while I wrote my new name on the posted sign-up sheet in sparkly purple pen: Tallulah. I drew a little heart next to it for good measure. No cover tonight. She handed me back the license and buzzed me in.
When Vegas called my name into the mic, I carefully climbed the rickety stage and walked into my light, center-stage, trying to remember the simple choreography I had practiced in my small bedroom earlier that day. I did my best not to look scared shitless. My music started. As the intro played, I pressed back onto my heels and bent my knees slowly, sinking closer to the ground.
You have to understand the way I am, mein herr.
I peered through the bright spotlight and into the mass of bodies, eyeing the judges table.
A tiger is a tiger, not a lamb, mein herr.
I ringed my overpainted, red lips around each syllable.
You’ll never turn the vinegar to jam, mein herr.
I winked at Vegas, my giant eyelash heavy on my lid.
So I do, what I do. When I’m through, then I’m through. And I’m through…toodle-oo!
I slipped out of my blazer, let it fall to the floor with my back to the audience. And, for the first time, I transcended. I became Tallulah.
I performed the rest of “Mein Herr” from Cabaret in a blur, this packed crowd of other queers screaming along. I even managed to fake the whole verse in German. And when I dropped into my final split with dollar bills suspended around me like confetti, I was born again. Baptism by cash and glitter.
Everyone in the bar, all strangers, congratulated me on my finish as runner-up, wanted to know when I would be back, celebrated my fledgling lesbian drag queen persona. They wanted me here. And I was so hungry to be wanted.
Vegas pulled me aside, wanted to know if I would come back and compete next month. Eventually, she invited me into her family, the Haus of Terror, as one of her daughters. I cried, thick mascara streaking my blushed cheeks.
“Yes. Absolutely, a thousand times, yes.”
My journey into this prismatic queer underworld had begun.
The Haus began with Vegas and her friend Jinx Matthews in 2014. Vegas had been performing in drag in Charlotte and elsewhere in the Carolinas since 2011 and as a club kid go-go dancer before that, but the scene had rejected her initially because she was too “out there,” performing punk rock and metal, wearing giant scene-hair wigs and costumes covered in safety pins. Vegas wanted to embrace a femininity that didn’t hinge on classic beauty or perfect silhouettes. She wanted to be too much and dirty and bloody and loud. She wanted her eyeliner to take up half of her face. She wanted to stomp the stage in her towering platform shoes. She wanted to fuck shit up. And she definitely didn’t fit neatly into the dominant Southern drag pageant systems or their expectations of queens wearing perfectly coiffed hair, stoned costumes, glittering nails, reasonably sized hip pads, and boobs at every event. But when she met Jinx, another outcast of the drag scene at that time, something sparked.
When I dropped into my final split with dollar bills suspended around me like confetti, I was born again.
They were called the “Twin Terrors.” They got into fights, and threw drinks at people Bad Girls’ Club style. But they also dominated newcomer talent shows, brought groundbreaking club kid fashion into Carolina clubs, and changed what drag could look like in Charlotte. They refused to be quiet or invisible.
A few months after the two of them met, Time Out Youth, a local LGBTQ+ nonprofit was staging a protest because a trans woman was harassed and detained for using the women’s restroom at the local community college in the lead up to North Carolina’s infamous “Bathroom Bill,” the first of its kind in the country. Vegas and Jinx went to the protest and met an eighteen-year-old, recently out of the closet and starting to flirt with the idea of drag. Vegas wanted to take them in, guide them, but couldn’t do that if she was lashing out at the bar every week, blurring her pain in the bottom of another whiskey Coke. She and Jinx decided to come together and officially establish their own family that would foster art that deviated from the regional expectations of idealized female impersonation and would allow them the space to heal from their own wounds, to help others heal.
The thing that bound the family together wasn’t a particular uniform aesthetic, though many members tended toward horror and avant-garde influences, but a punk spirit, a “fuck everything” energy, a fierce love for the art of drag and for one another.
It was just a small group for a few years, then they started bringing in more family members. These communities and families are not always stable for many reasons—everyone is navigating their own traumas and identities and sometimes those things are not compatible long term. But even when people walked away from the family or from drag altogether, Vegas stayed: the mother at the center of our family’s orbit.
Lychee’s snoring woke me up at nine AM on Vegas and Van’s bedroom floor the morning after a show. She was passed out in a pile of blankets next to the bed, cuddling a greasy brown paper McDonald’s bag. Babs, my sister who prided herself on being a glamorous alien business woman, was curled next to me at the foot of the bed, stray flecks of glitter stuck to her cheek. Warmth radiated from her in waves, and sweat gathered sticky at my hairline. My back was pressed firmly into a wooden dresser, and my hip ached from lying on the thin makeup-stained carpet all night. Vanity was getting ready to go to work at the salon, smoking a cigarette in the ensuite bathroom. Vegas was also awake, not amused by the freight-train snoring.
“Get the fuck up, bitch!” She yelled, throwing a dirty plastic knife from her nightstand at Lychee’s head.
Lychee shot awake, one of her eyes still half closed, and spotted the cutlery on the ground.
Even when people walked away from the family or from drag altogether, Vegas stayed: the mother at the center of our family’s orbit.
“Oh my god, this slut is trying to kill me!” She whirled around, searching for a corroborating witness. “Did you see that, Tallulah? She tried to stab me in my sleep!”
Even Babs was half-awake now, clawing at the carpet for her glasses. Our dramatics didn’t stop off-stage.
“Vegas!” I gasped. “How could you attempt to murder my sister like that? I’m calling CPS.”
“Can you guys please just calm down? I’m trying to wing my eyeliner in here,” Van called from bathroom.
Suddenly, we could not stop laughing.
We slipped immediately into an easy intimacy. I never doubted if these radiant people were my family; it was as obvious to me as breathing. It made perfect sense to be waking up on a floor in a townhouse I had never been inside before if I woke up to their laughter.
Our Haus was a family. We were more together than we were apart. We had family meals every week. We shared makeup. We shared whispered dreams. We pooled resources when one of us was too broke to buy groceries. We held one another when we cried. We were each other’s worlds. We saw one another for exactly who we were. As queers, even if we weren’t fully disowned by our biological families, many of them would never fully see us, fully understand us. The gay thing was okay, but the drag thing was too much. The drag thing was okay, but the trans thing was too much. Just don’t talk about that here. Don’t cause a scene. Don’t make anybody uncomfortable. Why does this need to be in everyone’s face? Why are you so visible?
If we were lucky, they could love us, but usually not all of us. Just the parts that fit into their imaginings.
Vegas, Vanity, Babs, and I all moved into the same apartment complex next to an outlet mall a few months later. We threw a party at Vegas and Van’s place under the Balsamic Moon. Everyone was there—an official family gathering—screaming along to Slayyyter’s new song, taking shots of Aristocrat whiskey out of measuring cups in the kitchen. Wigs and costumes were scattered throughout the apartment; it was hard to walk without stepping on something drag-related.
The edges of the night started to blur. I was in Vegas and Van’s empty bedroom dancing with Lychee. I was singing show tunes with Babs. I was listening to Vegas tell stories about her brief bout in the local pageant scene. The kitchen was a problem we would deal with in the morning after we had all stumbled to the gas station for Gatorade and new packs of cigarettes.
I stumbled out onto the tiny front balcony with Vanity, lighting the last Marlboro in my pack. I blew smoke into the icy parking lot air and tugged a throw blanket tight around my shoulders.
I turned to look at Van, her soft features wavering in the low light.
“I can’t imagine my life without y’all. Seriously, it feels like y’all are attached to my organs, like I would die if we were separated,” I said, my breaths appearing in little puffs of vapor.
I stared into the dark trees beyond the apartment complex fence and took another drag.
“I never thought people like this, a life like this could happen to me,” I confessed.
“Honestly? Me either,” Van whispered. She wrapped my hand in hers.
Naming our legends and elders is critical in our world. Remembering those who came before us, in whose stilettos and combat boots we stand. Because no one else will do it for us, because these folks are the reason we can exist. I want to name some of these many legends here as a type of imperfect record: Boom Boom LaTour, Toni Lenoir, Kasey King, Jamie Monroe, Tia Douglas, Tiffany Storm, Amber Rochelle, Brandy Alexander, Teri Lovo, Brooklyn Dior, Tracy Morgan.
Showtime at Chasers again. That night, I was missing hairspray or bobby pins, I don’t remember, and dragged Lychee by the hand out to the parking lot to help me find it in the car. We either found the missing item or we didn’t, but we figured we had time for a quick smoke before the show started. The car was parked on the edge of the lot by the street, and we lit our cigarettes leaned against the door, backs to the wind. I was focused intently on not lighting my synthetic candy-floss hair on fire. I had done it once before, and I was not trying to have to stomp my wig out again. The shit was super flammable.
I was in Vegas and Van’s empty bedroom dancing with Lychee. I was singing show tunes with Babs.
Someone in a blue Dominos uniform tossed a trash bag into the dumpster, the stoplight flashed yellow, then red. Chasers was its own island, tucked away discreetly in a plain brick building, no rainbow flags flapping out front. I scoffed at something Lychee said, and her eyes glinted under the streetlight. An old beater rolled up the road, slowing near the parking lot.
A man leaned out of the passenger window and screamed, “God hates fags!”
He hocked a loogie and launched a large water bottle toward us. Thankfully, he had shitty aim. The bottle exploded in a fountain when it hit the gravel.
Our reflexive chorus of “Hail Satan!” rang out as the car peeled around the corner, engine whining.
“I’m a dyke, asshole! At least get the slurs right!” I shouted, as the squealing of tires was swallowed by the night.
I hoped he wouldn’t turn around. We were not in any state to win a fight, and no one could hear us from inside.
Even living in the city, scenes like this were not uncommon. Getting drive-by-faggotted was practically a rite of passage—that, and getting called an abomination in Walmart. Us queers could do whatever we needed to do behind closed doors, but folks didn’t take kindly to us being flamboyant in the streets. What if the children saw? What if the gay was contagious, catching? What if we enacted mass mind control and hysteria by breathing their air?
Lychee and I locked eyes and dropped our cigarettes, each of us trembling almost imperceptibly to the untrained eye. I kicked the water bottle back into the street with a momentary violence. We blotted the liquid off our tights with napkins strewn across the back seat and hurried back into the bar. Waves of heat from the crowd rolled over us as we folded back into the cocoon of Chaser’s dark walls. The show had just started. I squeezed Lychee’s hand, and she pushed through the tightly packed bodies to the lower dressing room. Those fuckers weren’t going to ruin our night.
After the show, we took off our costumes and extensive underpinnings and crowded into Vegas and Van’s bedroom. We stayed in makeup, looking absurd in our sweats, faces still contorted in high-whore drag, but we didn’t have the energy to crowd into the tiny bathroom and scrub off a layer of skin. Bundled up on her bed with Van, Lychee, and I and a bottle of whiskey to pass around, Vegas sank into reverie, monologuing:
“I’m just, like, trying to understand how I got here, how we all got here. I was in high school during peak Myspace era, when skinny jeans and hair extensions and long square nails were in. The rednecks and jocks and whatever at school didn’t get it, but I had the girls gagged online. Being more feminine was kind of accepted, even in my bullshit hometown.”
We blotted the liquid off our tights with napkins strewn across the back seat and hurried back into the bar.
She grew up in rural Shelby, North Carolina, where the center of the town’s activity was a Walmart and a mostly vacant mall.
“I really thought I was thriving. Like, I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t going through the gay thing like the movies where you suck and you hate your life. Bitch, I was eating people up! Girls were quitting school because of me!”
She laughed and tossed her nonexistent hair over her shoulder.
“I was a mean girl. I was a cheerleader and no one could tell me shit. I couldn’t exist anywhere in that town without people knowing who I was. I was always the faggot, the queer, the cheerleader, the this, the that. And, I had to protect myself from the boys, so I was mean to every girl at school that dated a boy and made them feel less than so that they would be scared of me and make their boyfriends not beat me up.”
She paused to hit the blunt that Lychee passed, and her face briefly disappeared into the smoke, shimmering under her twinkling colored lights. To me, perched on the edge of her pink bedspread, she looked like some kind of postmodern angel.
“But, within my family, I learned I was wrong really early, when I was, like, four. I cried because I wanted a pink Power Ranger costume. And, I argued, and I tried to plead my case, but I had to accept the white Power Ranger costume, right? Cause I was a ‘boy,’ and I was being forced to be that. But, I wasn’t a boy. I have never been a boy.”
Her raspy voice shook, her eyes turned liquid. She took a swig from the bottle.
“Nothing about me was ever okay.”
Lychee wrapped her in a hug. We all leaned in. She was trembling, her eye makeup melting into salt tears.
“I love you, Mom,” Lychee whispered. “It’s okay.”
Her eyes turned toward the ceiling, Vegas continued, “I made a space for myself. I lived. And, I’m very powerful. Even when I don’t feel it, I have to tell myself that I am because of what I’ve done. When I started drag, I knew I would be something special. I knew I was gonna change the trajectory of what North Carolina drag looked like. And I have. I have done that.”
She passed the bottle to me, and her fingers wrapped into fists.
“And, by making a space for myself, I made a space for a lot of people.”
She wiped at her eyes aggressively, streaking black across her cheeks.
“Our family is closer than any queer family I’ve met in my whole life. People don’t get that, they think we all just wear a lot of eyeliner and do this weird thing. But, I don’t need any of that. Haus of Terror is built by the amount of love we have for each other, and I’m proud of that shit.”
We touched any part of her that we could reach, grasping at her shoulders, her legs, her back. She had always been our center.
“Thank you, Mom,” I said quietly.
“Oh god, sad Vegas is out tonight. Fuck this whiskey! Let me get it together.”
She hid her face behind her hands, rocked gently back and forth for a moment. When she looked back up, she smiled.
People—both queer and straight, trans and cis—who aren’t from the South or haven’t spent time in community here often look from the outside and see only the tragedy and rejection and persecution of queer and trans people in this region. They imagine that our experiences are made up exclusively of hate crimes and repressive laws and violence. They see us as backwards, as sob stories. They tell us to leave, to “make it out,” that our only option for happiness and fulfillment is to move elsewhere, somewhere they see as more enlightened or progressive, somewhere like where they live. And, these people are usually well intentioned, but they are also usually wrong.
Most queer and trans people here do not have the money to move across the country. Poverty and lack of resources are very real and permeating parts of Southern queer experience, especially for people who are visibly queer and trans and have other marginalized identities. While homophobia and transphobia are absolutely a significant part of life here, so is racism, and when someone is visibly queer or trans and is also Black, Indigenous, or otherwise a person of color, their ability to be stable financially is even more challenging. And, these issues do not magically disappear in a more “progressive” city. New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Chicago and Boston and Portland are not utopias.
We touched any part of her that we could reach, grasping at her shoulders, her legs, her back. She had always been our center.
Relocation is also not desirable for some, or even most, of the community. Leaving a place that we call home for somewhere where we do not have community or family is not a simple choice. The circumstances in the South do not define us. There is so much life and beauty and joy in our communities here, and we are uniquely close and supportive precisely because of where we live. And, queer spaces in the South, at least the ones I have been a part of, are predominantly working-class and made up of people who were born and raised here, people who understand and appreciate our backgrounds without explanation.
I eventually left North Carolina after almost three decades there to enroll in graduate school in Las Vegas, with the financial support of a scholarship and stipend that covered my moving and living expenses. I could not have made that move on my own. But, I do not feel like I miraculously “made it out” or escaped or that my life is immeasurably better now. I would not even say that I am somehow “fortunate” to have left. I miss those spaces and communities every day. I miss my drag family every day. I am still a part of the family, but being away from them is a deeply fraught experience for me. I often wonder if I made the right choice or if I would have been better off having stayed close to them, if leaving is somehow a betrayal. I still don’t know.
There are many reasons that someone may want to leave the South, and those are legitimate, but there are often equally as many reasons to stay. Queer folks exist everywhere. We are loving and fighting and fucking and dancing and building our own worlds and our own families everywhere, especially in the South. And, that is meaningful. That can be worth staying for.
Drag show after-party, but make it sleepy. Vegas, Vanity, Lychee, and me in our pajamas. Our bodies were starting to suffer from being in drag so often. My knees were retaining fluid, and I had permanent blisters along my ribs from tight-laced corsets. Vegas kept pulling muscles in her hips. We definitely did not get paid enough for this, but we didn’t know how to do anything else. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills played on the TV. Van was scrolling Facebook in the loveseat, a wig precariously perched on a Styrofoam head behind her.
As Vegas took a makeup wipe to her face like a power tool, she said, “Lychee, remember when you were still Lilianna and you tried to tell us that you smoked ten blunts by yourself and were totally fine and drove yourself to Waffle House for an All-Star Special? I don’t think Tallulah is fam—”
“Oh, don’t even bring up Lilianna, you whore,” she shot back.
Lilianna was her first drag name. She had changed to Lychee just before I met her.
“I am not, in fact, a whore, I am your mother. Try again,” Vegas said, her eyebrows raised in a mock dignified expression.
“Oh, don’t even bring up Lilianna, my darling mother.” She rolled her eyes petulantly. “Is that good enough for you?”
“Much better. But, it doesn’t change the fact that you just love to lie, girl.” Vegas cackled. “We all know you did not smoke ten blunts in a row. You would have passed out after three.”
“Listen, you know I’m not good with details, diva. It felt like ten.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” I chimed in with a wicked grin.
“Fuck, Tallulah, not you, too,” she groaned, covering her face with her hands.
I kissed her on the top of the head with a drawn out, “Love youuu.”
“Love you, too, bitch,” she said, finally giving in to laughter.
Lisa Rinna and Lisa Vanderpump were getting into it over some fancy dinner again onscreen. Even though I lived in the next building over, Lychee and I fell asleep on the couch in each other’s arms.
One of the stories I was raised on in the Charlotte drag community was about how the Legendary North Carolina queen Tracy Morgan died at The Scorpio in 2007. She was on AZT, which was then the primary treatment option for HIV positive people at the time, but the drug frequently caused thinning of the arterial walls and vascular dilation. Her heart gave out onstage right at the end of her performance. She had just finished collecting tips in her glimmering silver gown, and the crowd was roaring. She stumbled at the top of the stage, hunched over, something clearly wrong. A few people from the club rushed to help her backstage to the cramped dressing room. The crowd went silent. The EMTs arrived and pronounced her dead on the scene. They carried her body out on a stretcher. The next week, the community held a benefit show to raise money for her funeral expenses.
On October 6, 2020, Lychee’s heart also stopped unexpectedly, but in her sleep. Natural causes: preexisting heart abnormality. My body went numb when I got the message, my vision speckled with black. I was gasping for air. Eventually, I screamed and screamed and screamed.I threw my phone across the room, screen splintering when it hit the wall. I pounded my fists into the mattress. I tore a chunk of hair out of my scalp. She had just texted me for boy advice. Her warm hand had just picked up the phone and dialed my number in the middle of the night. I was supposed to see her on Saturday.
The whole family went to Vegas’s apartment immediately without coordinating. We couldn’t exist anywhere else. We sat in a circle on the carpet, our tears hot and coursing. Our ragged breathing was the only sound.
“I don’t want to forget her,” I said into the quiet. My voice was raw.
“You won’t. We won’t. She is so important to us and everything that we are,” Vegas replied.
“I know that, but we can’t help it. We will forget the small things. She’ll start to warp and fade, and little pieces will break off until she is something else, someone else. She is just some electricity in our brains now. We can’t keep her the same way forever,” I whispered, my lips shaking.
I had already forgotten the details of our last conversation. We had talked about drag and this boy and her boss, but it was fuzzy. Now, I can’t even remember what cigarettes she smoked. I bought them at the gas station for her so many times when she looked too horrifying in drag to go in for herself, but the information has disappeared.
I threw my phone across the room, screen splintering when it hit the wall.
We tried to direct our energy, to mobilize. In the days before the funeral, everyone in the family drove down to Rock Hill in shifts and helped Lychee’s mother, Danielle, make memorial photo boards to display at the service, covered in pink glitter and rhinestones. We helped prepare meals. We listened to Danielle tell childhood stories about Lychee, how exuberant and brilliant and ridiculous she had been, even as a child. Danielle saw Vegas as one of Lychee’s mothers, too, recognized how singular their relationship was, that it extended beyond friendship or mentorship and into her soul.
Danielle celebrated every facet of her child: the queer, the tender, the unusual, the exquisite. She made sure that, even in death, Lychee’s entire self was acknowledged and beloved. If any biological family members had a problem with her drag or her queerness or her femininity, she wanted them to know that they could fuck right off.
The Haus dressed as an opulent coven for the funeral, all in black with dark wide-brimmed hats. We could not disappoint. The service was held at a small brick funeral home in Rock Hill. We, and other members of the Carolina drag community, filled an entire section of blue padded pews. The chapel was so full that some people had to stand in the back. As the crowd filed forward to say our goodbyes, to see her for the last time, the song “This Is Me” rang through the speakers.
When I made it to the casket, I saw that Danielle had dressed her in black jeans, a black sweatshirt, a black baseball cap, and her favorite holographic pink platform boots. A classic Lychee look. I remembered her walking into Chasers on a Tuesday night right after she bought those boots, Vegas insisting that she borrow them. I remembered her little body curling against mine on our blanket palette in the drag room at Vegas and Van’s old place, rhinestone stuck to her cheek. I remembered her practicing liquid latex prosthetics in front of the mirror. I remembered her demon crawling across the Chasers stage. I remembered her scaring away the normie patrons. I remembered her yelling Miley Cyrus songs out of a moving car window. I remembered the warmth of her lips on my cheek. Her face was frozen and stiff now, but she still looked like my sister, like my best friend. I smiled as a sob wrenched from my chest.
She wanted people to recognize something bright in her.
While we gathered in the parking lot after the service and stared across the street at the old cemetery, the sky splintered open and rain drenched us to the skin. The bitch had obviously not lost her flair for the dramatic.
In the weeks that followed her death, the family cycled through one another’s apartments and retold stories and held one another as the sun rose behind crooked window shades. Wash, rinse, repeat. She had been so vibrant and alive—our little monster—making extravagant plans for her comeback. She wanted to be loved. She wanted to be somebody. She wanted people to recognize something bright in her. I did. We all did. I just hoped that somewhere, by some miracle, she could know that.
An innate part of queer life, queer family, is loss. A kind of organ-twisting loss that seeps out of our skin—awake, asleep, it doesn’t matter. In some ways, it’s part of our lineage, or if it isn’t, that history is long gone or erased. Our story is woven from absence, from missing pieces and gaping wounds. We have lost entire generations. We have lost friends. We have lost family. To hate and disease and suicide and tragic accidents and natural causes. It doesn’t stop. But this is what we have. We remember. We keep loving anyway.
I say, Maybe next time. Or I love you. Or Goodbye.
Over the past couple of years, there’s been an inordinate amount of controversy about books. Coordinated and effective efforts have removed books about minorities and minority histories from school and public library shelves across the country. The numbers are scary: 9,012 books were challenged in 2023 alone, according to the American Library Association. In response to this rise in censorship and outright bans, Brooklyn Public Library launched Books Unbanned, an initiative that supports the rights of young people to read what they want, and expands and defends access to books by offering free library cards.
From this work, we know that the most commonly censored books are ones that deal with race, sexuality, gender, LGBTQ+ content, and violence. Last year, in order to help readers understand how and why these bans are happening, we created Borrowed and Banned, an award-winning podcast series about book bans that gets at the heart of this historic rise in censorship. We came away from that series with one main takeaway: books have always had incredible power. Why else would anyone go to such lengths to take them away?
Our newest podcast, Borrowed and Returned, addresses new questions: Which books have had the profoundest impacts on our political history? Which books changed the national conversation on things like incarceration, representation, and the environment? And which books are readers turning to now, in order to navigate yet another uncertain moment in our nation’s history? To help us answer that question, we sent out a survey to library workers, readers and writers. We asked them: which books changed you?
This list gathers eight of the books that readers are turning to in order to understand our present moment. They are from all different genres–memoir, speculative fiction, history, children’s books, and graphic novels. We asked librarians and staff at Brooklyn Public Library to write stories about their connections to these books, and describe why they think we should all be reading them now.
In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler’s seminal work of Afrofuturism, a young Black girl named Lauren Olamina lives in a dystopian 2020s California. Olamina’s America is a broken nation ravaged by climate change, poverty, and violence. She was born with hyper-empathy—the ability to feel the pain of others as if it were her own. When Olamina’s walled-in community is destroyed, she is forced to flee into an increasingly dangerous world. As she travels north, she gathers others—those looking for a brighter future. Together with these survivors, she creates a new religion called Earthseed, guided by the belief that change is the only constant, and that their destiny lies beyond the stars. Through loss, danger, and transformation, she fights to build something new—a future shaped not by fear, but by purpose and faith.
—Adwoa Adusei, managing librarian at BPL’s Library for Arts and Culture
The Autobiography of Malcolm X shows up consistently on lists of both classics of American literature, and books banned for being dangerous; it’s proof positive that an enlightened life is an empowered life, but your empowerment can make you an icon, or a target. The biography, as told by Malcolm to writer Alex Haley, details Malcolm’s tragic Jim Crow childhood, his wayward adolescence of criminality, his prison sentence, the spiritual and intellectual awakening he experienced there while reading the Koran, and his ascent into national and international civil rights leadership. This book was first published in 1965, shortly before Malcolm’s assassination, and has been beloved over the generations for its message that leaders can emerge from anywhere, a person can reinvent themself, over and over again, and that sometimes, all it takes is a book to change your life.
—Dominique Jean-Louis, chief historian at BPL’s Center for Brooklyn History
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States challenges readers to confront American history in ways they are rarely asked to do—through a broader and more inclusive lens. Zinn presents the nation’s past from the perspective of groups often underrepresented in traditional narratives: workers, Indigenous peoples, women, and people of color. By foregrounding their experiences and voices, he challenges readers to think critically about whose stories are traditionally allowed to be told, by whom, and why. This book is a foundational read for anyone seeking to better understand the roots of social justice movements and the continuing hard work and struggle toward equity in American society.
When I first opened An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, I wasn’t sure what I’d find. The praise was loud but mostly came from outside the Indigenous community. I’d heard of the author’s once-claimed ancestry, later withdrawn. I entered with questions. What I found was a text that doesn’t just retell history—it disrupts it. It strips away the romance of liberty and progress, revealing a nation built not by chance, but by land theft, genocide, and erasure. Dunbar-Ortiz writes with the weight of fact, but what lingers is feeling: grief, clarity, responsibility. This book is a rupture, a sharp break from the sanitized versions of history we’ve been handed and an invitation to see differently. To see the land we inhabit with new eyes. To confront the stories we were taught to revere. The lies we’ve inherited run deep. This book doesn’t just shift the conversation, it invites us to sit with the truth, rethink, and reimagine what comes next.
—Heyrling Oropeza, librarian at BPL’s Library for Arts and Culture
A young boy named Peter wakes up to a snow-covered neighborhood. Donning a bright red snowsuit, he goes outside, makes snow angels and snowmen, slides down a hill, marvels at the different tracks he can make in the snow, and in a moment of self-awareness, decides he is too little to join in a snowball fight with some older boys. Ezra Jack Keats’ 1962 book The Snowy Day is hailed not only for a simple, relatable story and its collage illustrations, but also for its protagonist. Peter is a little Black boy—one of the first little Black boys in children’s literature to be portrayed positively and without stereotype. The Snowy Day maintains a constant presence on childhood bookshelves, in classrooms, and in libraries to this day.
—Nia Pierre, children’s librarian at BPL’s Crown Heights branch
When Silent Spring was released, it kicked off what we know now as the environmental movement. It moved people to start questioning how they felt about the drastic changes in the environment and man’s attempt to try and mold their world into a picture-perfect place while destroying the landscape. As a Floridian, I felt deeply moved by her love and respect for our birds, our swamps, and the destruction taking place in the Everglades. While her life was tragically short, she emphasized the interconnected systems between the earth, the animals, the people that came before European colonization, and how we need to work with each other to thrive. I carry her words with me, and I hear them in the cry of the heron, the beauty of the mangroves, and the sounds of the springs.
—Assh Albinson, librarian at BPL’s Mill Basin branch
In Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking graphic novel Maus, the author tells the story of his own father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor. Spiegelman recounts Vladek’s life in Nazi-occupied Poland, and how Vladek survives in ghettos, hiding places, and Auschwitz. Through the medium of comics, Spiegelman casts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats in order to capture the horror and absurdity of this moment in history. Spiegelman tries to make sense of the trauma that his father carries, as well as how it has shaped their relationship. In hearing his father’s life story, Spiegelman confronts inherited pain, survivor’s guilt, and the weight of history passed from father to son.
—Adwoa Adusei, managing librarian at BPL’s Library for Arts and Culture
The Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco follows in the footsteps of Art Spiegelman; both have made careers from drawing comics about people living through times of conflict and war. In the winter of 1991-1992, Sacco spent two months in Palestine, documenting in words and pictures the first intifada against Israeli occupation. In the resulting book, Sacco draws himself as the bespectacled, dark-haired interviewer gathering personal histories and tragedies from the people he meets. Because the story is told in graphic novel form, Sacco has the ability to zoom backward and forward in time, layering the story in a way that feels true to the complex history of Israel and Palestine. When the war in Gaza erupted in 2023, there was renewed interest in the book, creating long queues for the title at public libraries and prompting the publisher to order a reprint.
I wake up green, love that we can do that now, change colors, red for grief, orange for shame, new trends, new lies. I ask mother how come purple rice is now both a funeral and a birthday staple?
I wear my sun bubble, a staple to greet the sun and still remain green and inhale my birthdayfuneral purple rice. Every day, everyone changes colors, and the currency relies on lies, but it’s not new that people forget shame.
Paintings have been replaced by rAIsin—a shame, showing off fake art history knowledge is still a staple and that’s one thing the algorithm can’t figure out: useful lies, it doesn’t know of the slyness green, it tries to replicate but can’t change colors fast enough or enjoy birthdayfuneral rice.
The algorithm does help some to hoard rice but that’s not new so there’s no need for shame. And they’ve discovered many more colors for skin inflicted by sun scorching—a natural staple today, and more tomorrow, so more green tomorrow? Yes, you’ll look great in more! A friend lies,
she says the best cash is earned from friendly lies, and what’s better than that over birthdayfuneral rice? Anyways, I put on more green, a brand new wash of shame. Shame has always been my household’s staple, and my mother prefers the old colors over the new colors.
She has never understood the need people felt to change the colors, Grandmother keeps whispering it’s to aid the history book lies, the oppressor writes the history, it’s a staple, it’s a staple, it’s a staple and she asks for plain rice. She sleeps open-mouthed without shame. The next day she wakes up green.
I change colors and turn my grief green, and I sit at the corner of the room with lies and shame, as the algorithm serves me the staple funeral rice.
Obit for Balochi, circa 1970
This poem is a funeral I’m not going to attend / There is a funeral in this poem I’m not going to attend / I’m not going to attend this funeral poem / a funeral is not a poem.
A new bride writes a funeral of her language: Balochi, o rashk-e-qamar, you’re dying on my tongue. A new language blossoms now when I speak of the world, the dead child, the murdered sister, the beloved’s eyes. I keep trying to feed you to my children but they spit you out like a bitter gourd. Sweetest, if I was allowed, I would put you alongside the jaggery jars in the store. But you don’t sell here. You have no capital. So I’m forced to bury you beside my still-born. Give him company. I promise when they unearth the ground, I’ll lay claim to the both of you. Yes, yes, I’m a coward: I say the funeral prayer for something that isn’t dead.
I feel a rupture in the real when I speak your words, a somber preoccupation with final things, empty rinds. They keep asking me to chew you back, remove your fibers from my teeth, mark a final death date in my mouth. In a dream you sleep in my lap, and I sing you a lullaby my root, my root, my root—
Mandy Shunnarah’s resolute and irreverent debut poetry collection We Had Mansions starts with “ars poetica of partridges and palestine.” The connection may sound surprising. Shunnarah’s paternal grandfather, who they call Sedo, once told them, “our last name means partridge.” As the poem progresses, Shunnarah uncovers an illuminating link between partridges, which have many species, and Palestine. They write, “National Geographic says 43 of those species are decreasing / in population; something Palestinians know all too well.”
Throughout We Had Mansions, Shunnarah’s witty associations assert their wholeness. A queer Palestinian Appalachian poet and journalist, Shunnarah had to separate aspects of their identity while growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. The custody agreement to their white mother and Palestinian father’s divorce decreed that Shunnarah could only see their father every other weekend, which limited time with Shunnarah’s Sedo and Teta, what they call their paternal grandmother. A cultural contusion formed from the marital rift and had Shunnarah feeling like “a part-time Palestinian.” We Had Mansions chronicles Shunnarah’s reclamation. Writing in a documentary poetry tradition, Shunnarah draws from source material like 16th century archives recording their family’s life in Ramallah, museum exhibition labels, and nutrition facts for communion wafers. With candid language, Shunnarah reconstitutes their personal history, including their Sedo and Teta’s displacement in Palestine, their father’s opioid addiction in Appalachia, and their pursuit of community in Columbus, Ohio.
Shunnarah and I met during this year’s Tin House Winter Workshop, where we connected over our gratitude for Naomi Shihab Nye and how her writing, which focuses on Palestine, has inspired ours. Picking up over Zoom this spring, Shunnarah and I discussed the poetics of poppies, Arabic’s linguistic possibilities—courtesy of queer communities, and their deliberate decisions in writing about love.
Sumaiya Aftab Ahmed: Your debut poetry collection We Had Mansions spans your Orthodox Christian upbringing in Alabama with your paternal Palestinian and maternal Southern family, the community you’ve cultivated in Columbus, Ohio, and portrayals of Palestine. The titles to your poems indicate the collection’s thematic range, from “jesus was trans,” “marriage, as peaches rot on the counter,” to “palestine is for lovers.” When did you realize that your themes were maybe inextricable from each other?
Mandy Shunnarah: I’d been writing about Palestine for a long time, and nobody would take that writing until very recently. But I just kept coming back to it, as you do when you come from a colonized people. You yearn for the homeland. When I finally started realizing that Palestine is a part of everything I do, that’s when I started seeing the themes kind of connect. It really wasn’t until about maybe a year and a half ago that I started realizing the connections. Mahmoud Darwish is a huge inspiration to me. I’m like, oh, one of the preeminent love poets of the past century is Palestinian! How can I not see love and Palestine as inextricable?
How can I not see love and Palestine as inextricable?
Before I had that “Aha!” moment, I didn’t even really know that I had a poetry book. I just thought I had all these very disparate poems floating around. And I thought, oh, well, okay, I’ve got my nature bucket, and I’ve got my love bucket, and I’ve got my divorce poem bucket. And then I have my queer poems and my Palestine poems and my Southern poems. I thought those were all different collections. But when I thought about trying to pigeonhole any one of those things into its own singular collection, it felt like it wouldn’t be me. All these things are actually intersectional, to use Kimberlé Crenshaw’s word. I had to realize it in myself before I could realize it on the page. Once it hit me, I put all of them on the floor, lined them up, and it felt like the person with the red string and map, connecting everything.
SAA: What is your understanding of why publications are taking your Palestine poems now?
MS: As I got more stuff accepted over time and it just wasn’t the Palestine stuff, I started realizing, oh, it’s not that I’m a bad writer. And I’m not saying that every single Palestine thing I ever wrote was the pinnacle of literature. But at a certain point I started realizing people don’t want to touch Palestine. Post-October 2023, the magazines that did take a very vocal pro-Palestine stand were suddenly very hungry for this kind of work, which I have a lot of mixed feelings about. If you’re going to support my people, I want you to do it not just when we’re the cause du jour.
My voice is not a replacement whatsoever for Palestinians in the homeland, especially Palestinians in Gaza who either grew up there and have had to flee or who are still there writing poetry against the greatest odds imaginable. Now I do think Palestinian poets in the diaspora have an important role too. Being real with you, I tell people, I put the palest in Palestinian. I very easily pass as white, just looking the way I look and from the fact that my family is Christian. I am a “palatable” Palestinian. People will ask me questions that they would never ask people who look more Arab. I try to use that privilege for good.
SAA: How did the title We Had Mansions come to you?
MS: I saw this post from the Institute of Palestine Studies. They had published this academic article by Johnny Mansour about the Pasha mansion. So there was this mansion that had been built by this wealthy Palestinian family. Then of course the Nakba happened. If you’re a colonizer and you see a tiny house versus a mansion, which one are you going to pick? It’s going to be the mansion every time. They were using it for different colonial purposes, and then the “liberal” Zionists said, we should turn it into a theater. But it ended up just being abandoned. And I started thinking about how class impacts your experience of colonization. That’s a conversation that we don’t have nearly enough.
I learned that the last play that they did in the Pasha mansion was Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. It’s like, okay, well, what is the endgame here? These Israeli colonizers got the mansion. Now they’re letting it fall into disrepair instead of letting it house the family that owned it, or literally any Palestinians whatsoever. All this was swimming in my head for weeks, maybe months. Finally, I just sat down and wrote up that poem in the form of a play, and I titled the poem “our people had mansions.” But later after the poem was published, I was like, why did I say, “our people”? Because that’s a little bit of a remove. As a diaspora Palestinian, I’ve never lived in the homeland. But then because the collection as a whole is bringing all parts of me to the table, I was like, no, it has to be, “we.” I have to put myself in here. I felt that poem really encompasses a lot. It also kind of captures my weird and at times experimental style and covers a lot of social issues. Because I don’t want to act like, oh Palestine was just perfect pre-Nakba. No. We had class stratifications like anywhere else.
SAA: My favorite poems in your collection involve Arabic, which does not have a “p” sound. In “only an american,” you point out, “Just like the Brits to rename our country / with a P: a letter we don’t have, a sound / our tongues wrestle to say.” How would you contextualize the decisions of your paternal grandparents, who settled in Alabama after their exile from Ramallah in 1948 and named their first child Patricia, a name “with a letter their mouths refused to speak, / damned to a lifetime calling her Badrisha”?
MS: The Palestinian side of my family is extremely acculturated and was very dedicated to assimilating in the U.S. for a couple of reasons. They moved to Alabama in the 1950s as brown-skinned people. They experienced a lot of xenophobia and a lot of racism. They also had, until the day they died, very thick accents. I think they experienced so much hatred that they were very determined that their kids were not going to experience that. As a way of protecting themselves, they felt like they had no choice but to assimilate, kind of in the same way that I would code-switch and be Palestinian at their house and Appalachian with my mom’s side of the family. They were very Palestinian, but out in the larger world they tried to basically assimilate into whiteness as much as possible. Years ago, I was so angry, like, how did you not teach us Arabic? I felt that language wound. Now, as I’ve gotten older, I have more empathy for them. They kept cultural knowledge away from us not because they were ashamed of being Palestinian but because they didn’t want us to be violently attacked.
SAA: Earlier, you were talking about arriving at your collection’s title from your poem, “our people had mansions,” and I’m wondering if you kept that discrepancy as a record of your thought process. To what extent did you face challenges with using pronouns “we” and “our” with regard to Palestinians and Palestine and incorporating Arabic in your poetry?
MS: I learned to really love myself in the fullness of my identity through this process. I didn’t want to go back and self-edit and make it look like I always had this stuff figured out. We never do right? It’s always a learning process. I want everybody to come out of the womb loving themselves and never stopping. But that’s just not what the U.S. does to your brain.
I learned to really love myself in the fullness of my identity through this process.
I really debated about what pronouns to use in almost every single poem. I’m Palestinian, but I’m in the diaspora, and I don’t want to appropriate the struggle of people in the homeland. That would feel disingenuous. I am not currently experiencing genocide. I have never experienced genocide. I have never lived in Palestine because of the exile and dispossession. At the same time, it would be disingenuous to act like it doesn’t affect me at all. I feel like my heart is divided. Palestinians are such a collective culture. That’s just part of who we are.
The language wound is still there. I’ll never be a native speaker, having never lived in Palestine or any part of the Arab world, and with Sedo and Teta very intentionally not teaching us Arabic. So I’ve been trying to learn as an adult, and it is really, really hard. I found that there are 12 million words in Arabic as opposed to the Oxford English Dictionary, which has 175,000. Trying to heal that language wound as an adult has been a deeply rewarding process, but also a very humbling one.
SAA: In “the hookah,” you incorporate Arabic script as you go through pronouns. The speaker rejects labels like transgender, effeminate, intersex and considers identifying with a third gender, maybe the pronouns you, them or she/he or you/them. I know from studying the language that Arabic grammar assigns a masculine or feminine gender to everything. In your poems reflecting on gender, what insights have you been able to access by referencing Arabic?
MS: As The Queer Arab Glossary shows, there are terms that queer communities have created and kind of extrapolated from this very gendered language all throughout the Arab world. I just thought that was so beautiful that no matter where you go in the world, any time there’s a gendered language, the binary gets broken by queer people. That’s an incredibly cool tradition. I wanted to explore that while also addressing the language wound. Even in the little bit of Arabic I’ve learned, I’ve noticed it’s very gendered. But it doesn’t have to be. I’m learning the language now as an adult, as a proudly out queer person. Why would I not also learn the created language that my queer community has already built? That’s another way that I was very intentionally bringing multiple sides of me to this table.
SAA: The last quarter of your collection swells with love poems. I want to linger with the poem, “you bury me,” especially its lines, “In Arabic, / the language that should have been my mother tongue, one of the ways to say / I love you translates to you bury me,” and, “Can I say it now, having couched & hedged the words? I love you. There are / so many more words for it in the language that should have been my mother / tongue.” When I was learning Arabic in college, I noticed how Arabic texts would repeat words in a way that might sound redundant to a Strunk & White-trained ear. As writers and lovers who primarily use English, should efficiency be the goal? What do we lose as speakers and writers when we focus on concision?
MS: Efficiency should not be the goal, especially not in love. I often feel that’s what the relationship escalator is. I got that term because I’m polyamorous, and you know, I’ve read the poly literature. You’re on this escalator where there’s always a goal until you have kids after you get married. And then it’s like, okay, you’ve plateaued. You’ve done what you were “supposed to do.” When you think about it like that, it is efficient. But the escalator doesn’t always work for people, and that’s why divorce exists. I grew up in the Bible Belt in Alabama, and evangelical culture is very relationship escalator forward, even to the point where I was told many, many times that you shouldn’t even date someone if you cannot imagine yourself marrying them at some point. Like no casual dating. And I realized that the escalator was not going to work for me, unfortunately. I say unfortunately, because there is a little bit of a grieving process, at least for me. When I realized, oh, this marriage is not working out, oh, I don’t know if I want to have kids at all, but if I do, it’s not going to be with this guy, I felt like something was wrong with me. This very efficient process that had worked out for so many different people was not working for me despite my best efforts.
Efficiency should not be the goal, especially not in love.
Once I learned about polyamory, I considered it and read about it for many, many years before I actually became a practicing polyamorous person. And I realized that polyamory kind of throws a wrench in the relationship escalator. You can casually date. And I’m not even talking about hookup culture. I mean long-term, meaningful relationships that don’t have marriage or children as a goal. As silly as it sounds, I was just like, you mean, those relationships can be meaningful and valuable too?! It’s not just frivolous?
The love poems in there were written about multiple different people. I debated on whether to really mention [that]. At the end of the day I decided that it really didn’t matter. The more important thing was that even after being separated and my marriage not working out and being deeply depressed about the genocide, which does not really put you in a dating kind of mood, I found that I still had the capacity to love deeply and I wasn’t going to let the romantic pain of the past keep me from experiencing love in the future. I feel like that resilience and that hope is very Palestinian of me. I started to see the two as very linked. The world’s going to hell. If I’m going to carry on, I’m gonna really carry on. I’m gonna try to live to the fullest.
SAA: Another poem, “in arabic, the word for poppy is pieces,” presents the flower as a metaphor for Palestine. You write, “Any farmer / will tell you they’re weeds—an annual nuisance that can / germinate from seeds planted half a century ago.” In “ode to the hare,” you continue to investigate poppies: “no one ever asks why Britain’s / flower of war is not native to its shores.” Why are poppies such an apt symbol for Palestinians?
MS: There’s so many layers to it. When the Zionists outlawed the Palestinian flag, the poppy arose as a symbol because it is native to Palestine and has all the colors: black, white, red, and green. Part of the reason they’re Britain’s flower of war is because there’s some chemical in the implements of war and the rubble of buildings that is actually a nutrient that makes poppies come up. “In Flanders Fields,” that whole poem is a war poem about poppies. Britain tried to cultivate them for their opiate effect and figured out real quick that you can’t just transport them. I was thinking about how these colonizers think that you can just uproot a thing and put it somewhere else or just take something for your own use and not really consider the environment or consider, do you even need to have this? Like, do you specifically need to have this? Why do you think this belongs to you? I could write a whole collection just about poppies.
SAA: Throughout your collection, you interweave sections of your poems with snippets from other poets including Marwan Makhoul, Mahmoud Darwish, Mosab Abu Toha. Why is it important for us to read your collection as part of a lineage?
MS: It goes back to the collectivist nature of my people and also kind of extrapolating from that, the collectivist nature of poets. I think most of the people who read poetry are poets themselves, whether professional or amateur. We have such a tight-knit community. No poet exists in a vacuum. So I try to shout out my inspirations. I get so much inspiration just from reading other people because they show me what’s possible. Also I want to be in conversation with these folks. I think there’s something really great about that communal aspect of poetry, and I think an epigraph is such a great way of bringing another voice into the room and showing that, oh, there is a lineage here. There’s a poetic tradition here.
At nine, my youngest brother Andrés started drawing abs on himself every day with a sharpie. At first, I was amused. I saw it as an expression of his artistic leanings. Like how he enjoyed drawing cartoons with muscles. A cyborg warrior with a missing arm. A green fighter cat with a skull tattoo on his face. Even a shirtless trimmed-down Santa with gold teeth and a jacked Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with another skull tattoo, as if the pair left the North Pole and hung out at Miami nightclubs. He told me he wanted to be a bodybuilder. He couldn’t summon a six-pack onto his skinny frame, so he drew it on.
If his aspirations were limited to physique, I would have worried solely about body dysmorphia. But I was troubled that along with muscles, he admired aggression and dominance. I suspected he was getting his messages about hypermasculinity from YouTube and society, and because I couldn’t block society, I tried parental controls on devices. When I was at my parents’, I deleted YouTube from every TV in the house. He reinstalled it. I put a passcode on the TVs. Somehow, he still found a way to watch videos of grown men playing Minecraft and yelling crude jokes to one another, which I knew could lead to videos that were even less appropriate for his age.
Then one day, at age ten, and without knowing its name, Andrés drew a picture for our dad—“a place for fighters.”
It was the Roman Colosseum.
Like symbolic creatine, Rome continues to pump males up. In August of 2023, Instagram user @gaiusflavius kicked off a contemporary #RomanEmpire trend by posting a photo of Roman ruins with the caption:
Ladies, many of you do not realise how often men think about the Roman Empire. Ask your husband/boyfriend/father/brother—you will be surprised by their answers!
Hundreds of posts consequently rolled out on various media platforms as women took up this prompt and shared their findings. Apparently, lots of men think about the Romans on a monthly, weekly, even daily basis. When questioned why they think about the Romans, men’s responses included: marveling at Roman engineering feats like the aqueducts and architecture, admiring Roman history and philosophy for the “big life lessons,” and imagining themselves in Roman society.
Another frequent line of response, not surprisingly, pointed to men thinking about the Romans’ glorification of male strength.In one video by @Hannakbrown, her fiancé says, “Men, I think, to our core we’re warriors. We have to be ready for battle at all times. And the Roman Empire is all about battle. It’s common sense.”
I call these male superfans of the Roman Empire RomeBros, and while the social media trend was entertaining, there are real-life consequences to an obsession with Rome when it’s adopted by people with the power to impact governance. I’m terrified of the highly resourced RomeBros who not only admire the Romans but task themselves with continuing their legacy. Billionaire Charles Koch named his conservative think tank the Cato Institute, after the reactionary Roman philosopher. In the tech sector, billionaires with a conquering mindset have been likewise instrumental in weakening democracy, so it’s not surprising that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are also RomeBros.
Zuckerberg has long been obsessed with the Romans, especially Augustus. In a 2018 New Yorker article, Zuckerberg comments on his admiration of the emperor, justifying his ruthlessness as means to an end: “I think Augustus is one of the most fascinating [figures]. Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace…What are the trade-offs in that?…that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things.” That Zuckerberg thinks one person can establish “world peace” reveals the degree to which he idealizes and misreads Augustus, also evident in how he’s trying to live in the model of the emperor’s life. The haircut Zuckerberg used to sport was modeled after Augustus’s. He also had a seven-foot statue of his wife built in the Roman tradition and even named his three children after Roman emperors: Maxima, August, and Aurelia. In 2024, a video boasting the release of a Meta AI version featured him in a white T-shirt, with Latin on the front, referencing a quote from a text written by Augustus: At the age of nineteen, on my own responsibility and at my own expense I raised an army, with which I successfully championed the liberty of the republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction. The line is the first sentence of Res Gestae Divi Augusti (The Deeds of the Divine Augustus), in which Augustusrecounts his exploits butomits that he staged a civil war with help from his peers, Mark Antony and Lepidus. After Julius Caesar was assassinated, the three established the Second Triumvirate (rule of three men) and punished those who had plotted against Caesar. But Augustus couldn’t share power. He pushed out Lepidus and killed Mark Antony. Claiming his adopted father Julius Caesar was a god and he the son of a god, he was the first Roman to officially adopt divinity in his title. With his assumption of the title of Emperor, he also ended the era of the Republic, which had been built on the premise that there would never be single rulers. His ascension to the throne was the beginning of centuries of autocracy to follow. Zuckerberg’s attraction to him finds precedent in Augustus himself, who was inspired by and wanted to be like Alexander the Great, even wearing his image on a signet ring until deciding to wear one with an image of himself instead. Perhaps in a similar move, Zuckerberg has another Latin- T-shirt, which plays on the phrase, “either a Caesar or nothing,” and instead declares, “either Zuck or nothing.”
I’m terrified of the highly resourced RomeBros who not only admire the Romans but task themselves with continuing their legacy.
Elon Musk is on his own mission of conquest, with Mars in his sights and political power at hand. He spent over $250 million to help Donald Trump win the election and championed him on X in order to prevent future attempts at federal regulation on his ventures and to assert political might himself. Whether he sees himself as a sci-fi hero destined to change the future or as a Roman fighter continuing the greatness of an ancient past, he always wants to be in battle. In 2023, Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a physical fight at an “epic location” in Italy after the Colosseum itself was ruled out, even going so far as to contact then-Italian Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, to coordinate. Though Zuckerberg accepted the challenge, the fight never panned out.
Yet, since buying Twitter in 2022 and turning it into X, Musk has turned the site into a battleground of its own. He’s encouraged sexist, transphobic, racist, and xenophobic rhetoric through his own posts and through the logic of the algorithms, leading millions of users to flee the site because of its toxicity. On November 20, 2024, Musk reposted a set of images comparing Roman symbols to those of the US with his own caption: “America is New Rome.” A most liked comment under his post added: “Our colosseum is X.”
II.
The men in the #RomanEmpire trend who imagined themselves in Roman society were likely envisioning themselves among emperors, senators, and gladiators. But most of us would have had no place in Roman society except among the hundreds of millions exploited, plundered, and raped. At the empire’s peak, four out of five Europeans were under Roman rule. The empire existed because it created a war machine. It sustained itself by continuously taking over land and managing the conquered. Drooling over it is a hard sell for me. Why would anyone look to an ancient, patriarchal, slave-holding, and martial regime unless they feel affinity for social dominance?
Roman Empire glorification was once heavily taught in schools but now gets reinforced in more diffused ways. In the US, Greco-Roman culture serves as a symbolic understructure because of its role in Western culture. It influenced thinkers and artists in the Enlightenment, among them the Founding Fathers, who were inspired by Roman governing philosophy (i.e. separation of powers, an emphasis on liberty) and symbolism (i.e. the American bald eagle, the architecture of the US Capital Building). Since the 1960s, Latin has not been widely taught in US schools, and recent generations are less likely to read Roman texts in full, yet Roman culture continues to circulate in movies and shows, in which Romans are almost always played by white actors in spite of the fact that the Empire was heterogeneous, covering parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. A product of dominant value systems, media about Rome is continuous propaganda that glorifies white men. Even in the most recent Gladiator II film, Denzel Washington and Pedro Pascal’s characters exist only to create obstacles for the white gladiatorial protagonist, played by Paul Mescal so that audiences sympathize with him and root for his triumph.
It’s not hard, then, for white men to retrofit the Romans to suit ethnonationalist agendas. Classicist scholar Donna Zuckerberg points out that “although whiteness is not a meaningful concept to apply to antiquity, that conceptual lacuna has not stopped the Alt-Right from using ancient Greece and Rome to fabricate a cohesive transhistorical ‘white’ identity and a continuity of ‘European’ or ‘Western’ civilization for themselves.” (Donna, a critic of how social media amplifies expressions of toxic masculinity, is also Mark’s sister, so I wonder what holiday dinners are like.)
Rhetoric proclaiming to preserve long-established hierarchies can slip easily into fascism. The word fascism itself comes from Roman symbolism: fasces were a bundling of rods with an axe carried by attendants of a Roman magistrate during processions to attest to and enforce his full might and power. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini adopted the fasces as his party’s symbol, but the symbol appears as part of US mythography too: it’s in the seal of the US Senate and can be seen on the wall as bronze fasces in the chambers of the House of Representatives.
As a “politics of hierarchy,” fascism’s utmost value is strength, and fascists nostalgically invoke a mythic patriarchal past for authoritarian ends, argues philosopher Jason Stanley (who is leaving the US for a faculty job in Canada because of the US’s own rising fascism): “In fascist politics, myths of a patriarchal past, threatened by encroaching liberal ideals and all they entail, function to create a sense of panic at the loss of hierarchical status, both for men and for the dominant group’s ability to protect its purity and status from foreign encroachment.” In the US, this kind of status panic seeks soothing and aid from various value systems; patriarchy finds reinforcement through sexism, as well as homophobia, transphobia, racial ideology, classism, and xenophobia. Socialization into one of these value systems can be a gateway into all of them.
When he drew the muscly Santa and Rudolph, Andrés told me that if he worked for Santa, he’d want to be Head Elf. I found it funny but odd, because I never thought of Santa’s workshop as having managerial positions, but I now realize that at age nine, Andrés was already thinking in terms of stratification, which I understand because in most homes, media, and society at large, there are hierarchies. But he wasn’t seeing himself at the top—more as a kind of enforcer of a social order, expressing a mentality upon which fascism depends.
III.
I told my dad about the #RomanEmpire trend while it was unfolding, expecting him to find it disturbing too, but he didn’t respond. I’m used to my dad’s reticence, but this quietness felt especially weighty, so I pushed. Dad, do you think about the Roman Empire? After a long pause: Yes. After more prodding: At least once a month. And finally: Because of Catholicism.
It’s not hard for white men to retrofit the Romans to suit ethnonationalist agendas.
I had not considered the role the Empire played in the spread of Christianity. There’s the saying that Rome didn’t really fall—it just became a church. In his overview on the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon says organized religion became an effective way to manage a heterogeneous population:“the throne of the emperors would be established on a fixed and permanent basis, if all their subjects, embracing the Christian doctrine, should learn to suffer and to obey.”
Despite my attempts to find out more of my dad’s thoughts on this topic, he wouldn’t say. So, I’m left surmising the effects of Catholicism on him and my Mexican family. As a working-class, brown-skinned man with indigenous features, my father has been made to feel wrong his entire life. I see how religion has helped him bear a life of pain. Prayer also offers him an outlet to feel grateful when things go well. But I wonder: To what extent has my dad’s fear-based life been activated by and managed by Catholicism? By Masculinity? Mexican culture? US Culture? The afterlives of empires are not separable.
In 2015, I had coffee with a senior scholar of American Studies on USC’s campus, where I work. I was studying the news tracing people’s reactions to the 2010 Census and the role that fear of demographic change might play in the 2016 election.
I asked my colleague: “Has any country ever experienced the kind of demographic shift projected to occur in the US by the 2040s?”
With a combination of mirth but also seriousness, he said:
“Rome.”
IV.
For the RomeBros of the tech world, what will the ends of conquest be? Their tech-imperialism constantly seeks new markets to conquer, and they benefit from politicians who allow them to thwart efforts at regulation. The 2016 election has been called the “Facebook election” for the ways in which the Trump campaign benefited from Facebook staffers and the ability of the platform’s tools to shape public opinion. The most recent US election likewise reveals the extent to which TechBros can influence politics. In a Guardian article, Carole Cadwalladr argues that the first wave of algorithmic disruption led to Trump’s first term as well as Brexit, but that we are now in a new order where the old rules don’t apply:
Because this, now, isn’t politics in any sense we understand it. The young men who came out for Trump were voting for protein powder and deadlifting as much as they were for a 78-year-old convicted felon. They were voting for bitcoin and weighted squats. For YouTube shorts and Twitch streams. For podcast bros and crypto bros and tech bros and the bro of bros: Elon Musk.
Seeing the radicalization of young men to the far-right, I fear that my little brother Andrés might be socialized into bro-y culture, into that power continuum that is against so many people like our family, a family that is full of people who are undocumented, poor, dark-skinned, queer, and feminist.
It’s playing out right before me in real time. The argument that “demographics are destiny,” and the assumption that the US would become more progressive as it becomes more diverse has been challenged by this past election. In a New York Times op-ed, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom argues that it’s crucial to pay attention to online spaces, writing “Trump did not win over these minority and young voters because he figured out how to appeal to their identity. He excelled at tapping into the information ecosystems—social media, memes and the cultish language of overlapping digital communities—where minority and young voters express their identity.” Oppressive messaging can come from anywhere, but digital culture can be packaged in ways that accelerate acculturation into toxic ideas. While women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities are working endlessly to change the status quo, there’s a growing army of men and tradwives leveraging the tools of social media, weaponizing online communities, and invoking a white-washed, hypermasculine past to prevent a more equitable future.
What’s more,whether Musk and Zuckerberg continue to play visible or more clandestine roles in politics, neither is giving up a conqueror’s mindset. Their control over companies exerting power in and over nations makes them a continued threat to democracies across the world. They’ve also set precedent for others in tech to amass even greater resources. We might be in an interim period where tech leaders still compromise with or outright buy politicians, but at some point, they may no longer be beholden to elected officials. The word limit comes from the Latin word limes, the border areas of the Roman Empire. We are in a world with too many wannabe Caesars thriving on domination and ruthlessly intent on breaking down all limits.
V.
Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy, wrote Ralph Ellison. I have a big soft head, and I’m worried I won’t be able to find a spacious enough helmet.
It’s possible, though, to recognize and break from the forms of socialization we inherited. When I was a child, my dad would have me and my younger brother Miguel draw tightly contained spirals over and over on rule-lined paper to improve our penmanship so we could do well in school. At eight, Miguel had a hard time staying in between the lines. No amount of crying would soften my dad. He wouldn’t let Miguel leave the table until every line on the page was filled. Hours passed with my brother despairing at that table. He reminds me that I would finish the page for him when our dad wasn’t looking. My father was taught to write through spirals, and that’s the way he taught us, but my brother Miguel and I would never teach that way.
Never hugged as a child, my father found it difficult to hug us, especially my brother. When my dad would come home from his factory job, Miguel would run eagerly into the kitchen to greet him, only for my dad to bark, Is your room clean? Did you do your homework?
The coil in my dad’s chest seems to constrict my brother now too, but he can easily hug his children and tell them he loves them. He has no trouble expressing delight at their doings.
In the summer of 2022, my dad and I were standing behind a park fence, waiting for and watching Miguel as he played with his kids. “I’m sorry I was a bad dad,” my father told me, observing how differently Miguel parents. He wishes he had played with us. Knew us better. He’s trying with Andrés, decades younger than me and Miguel.
When Andrés spirals into anger, our father hugs him and says words he never could to us.
It’s OK, just breathe.
VI.
Among the reasons given for the fall of the Roman Empire are internal factors such as corruption and decadence, and external ones, mainly that the Romans were overcome by barbarians, the term Romans used for any non-Romans. Barbarians were the other, those they defined themselves against, who they fought, and whose lands they took over. As the empire grew and amassed land inhabited by those others, they also came to rely on them; they had them fight in their military and incorporated them into their citizenry. But the more expansive the empire got, the harder it was to manage and to protect territories from foreign invaders.
Whether Musk and Zuckerberg continue to play visible or more clandestine roles in politics, neither is giving up a conqueror’s mindset.
The US as Rome analogy is frequently invoked, either to attest to an inherited mandate for dominance, as Musk’s X post exemplifies, or as a warning of an empire in decline. A reigning question right now is what the US will do with all the “barbarians” in and outside of its borders. The US implements tons of defensive tactics to keep barbarians out: immigration quotas, border walls, surveillance, deportations. Yet, it relies on racialized others to keep the economy and armed forces running.
In his book, Are We Rome? journalist Cullen Murphey writes, “The Roman Empire disappeared, of course, as a formal construct, but in other respects it did not entirely vanish,” pointing to how Roman religion, language, culture, customs, architecture, and law are still influential in Europe and the US today. Murphey’s comparison of Rome to the US also recognizes how both entities assimilated newcomers, creating multi-ethnic states. Assimilation is often thought of as a one-way process, rather than how it actually occurs, with arrivals assimilating aspects of a host culture and the host culture assimilating aspects of new arrivals. Culture is never static, even if some might desire for it to be so.
When I hear concerns that western culture is being attacked, that people aren’t assimilating, my eyebrows raise in alarm. Assimilation into which values? Into which stories?
Having now consumed a bunch of narratives about Rome, I understand how they can appeal to desires for a shared text, shared references, shared culture. Once you’re familiar with the grand narratives of the Republic and Empire, reading a book, listening to a podcast, or watching a film on Rome can be like entering an anthology of stories where familiar characters or tropes appear, but from different angles.
The current book bans around the country are attempts to keep the cadre of shared texts small, to maintain existing hierarchies and to police boundaries around race, gender, and sexuality, at the expense of a well-informed public. Growing up, I had to seek out texts not on traditional curriculums or offered by the mainstream so that I wouldn’t hate myself or others like me, people who come from the margins, since schools and media can so often work to educate people into wanting power even by proxy. Those who want a greater diversity of texts are like “the barbarians at the gate,” as Viet Thanh Nguyen once put it, invoking the famous phrase warning of invasion and reframing it as a demand for change.
VII.
Lately, I’ve wondered if, in reading so much about the Roman Empire and RomeBros, I’ve inevitably become a RomeHo. I’ve actually enjoyed reading about the Romans, learning about figures like the emperor Elagabalus, who confounded and angered his critics because he cross-dressed, was called empress, and favored his male lovers, one of whom was called his “husband.” Before this essay’s foray into the ancients, I knew little about the Egyptian queen Cleopatra beyond her death by asp and her portrayal by Elizabeth Taylor. Now I’m intrigued by her political maneuverings which deemed her a sorceress temptress, having beguiled first Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony into her kingdom and bed. I also now know there’s a Hollywood version of Rome—the flashy swords and calls for liberty—and the reality that Rome was a deeply hierarchical society; no matter who was in power, it was run to serve the interests of oligarchies. Yet, there were critics of the empire from within, as exemplified by Roman historian Tacitus’s assertion, “They create desolation and call it peace” referring to Rome’s presence in Britain.
I’ll keep thinking about empires past and present, as well as how defensive masculinity radiates outwards, injuring people within and beyond physical proximity. Boosted by warrior iconography, masculinity gets marshalled to reinforce national boundaries, socioeconomic structures, and battle-mindsets in the next generations.
The battle right now is whether we will have a shared future and who will be included in that “we.” The Bros have intuited that demographic shifts will bring their empire–a historically misogynistic, white, and never truly democratic empire–to collapse. They appear willing to fight to decide who stays in power.
So steeped in the rhetoric of Rome, my barbarian impulse wants to declare, Rome will fall! But what history shows us is that Rome continues, albeit in a different form. As the crisis plays out and people fight to create or contest new social formations, I wonder: on what side will Andrés, my father, all those men in the videos, and so many other people stand?
Andrés’ last name, which is also mine, is Román, which literally means “from Rome.”
In Jeremy Tiang’s debut novel, State of Emergency, which won the Singapore Literature Prize, a young couple meet and marry in 1950s Singapore, only to choose dramatically different political paths as the country and neighboring Malaya seek independence from their British colonizers. The wife joins the Communists’ anticolonial struggle as a guerrilla soldier in the rainforest; the husband is left behind to raise their young children. Decades later, their niece is unjustly imprisoned, accused of conspiring against the Singapore government, and their estranged son tries to piece together his fragmented family history and learn about the mother he never knew. As the novel follows these characters and others over five decades, it illuminates their often wrenching decisions to hew to their political ideals, despite the emotional and sometimes physical costs involved.
Jeremy has also translated Delicious Hunger, a collection of short stories originally written in Chinese by Hai Fan (the pen name of Singaporean writer Ang Tiam Huat), who was one such Communist soldier for thirteen years in the same rainforest. In these stories, a group of impassioned freedom fighters struggle not only against the better equipped British and later Malaysian armies, but also against hunger, romantic “bourgeois” love, and the quotidian frictions of guerrilla life that complicate their vision of a liberatory future. Delicious Hunger zooms in on these characters’ lives as they’re deployed from one secret camp to another, one mission to another, committed to an unglamorous political struggle and its stark, physically demanding rigors.
I’ve known Jeremy for well over a decade, since before either book project materialized. We spoke on Zoom about what drew him to write and translate fiction about these political movements, why women are such significant characters in both works, and how these stories might inform our understanding of the current political moment.
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: You started writing State of Emergency more than ten years ago. How did the novel come about?
Jeremy Tiang: It started as a novel about the Macdonald House bombing [in 1965], and that’s still the very first thing that happens in the novel. But as I started looking into the histories of Singapore and Malaysia, it felt a bit like pulling on threads to see what would unravel. Ultimately, the strand that I kept following was about the Communist insurrection and the related leftist movements, mostly around Singapore, and the guerrillas in the rainforests of Malaya. The novel coalesced around this layer of history, which I couldn’t really engage with without also talking about Singapore and Malaysia’s history of detention without trial—how there’s a kind of continuity with British colonial rule and the actions of the post-independence governments, and a kind of continuity in the repression that was enacted during the Malayan Emergency and subsequently through the first decades of independence. These related things became the backbone of the story.
YB: How much of it is fiction, and how much is drawn from research?
JT: That’s difficult to answer because it’s all imagined. There aren’t any real people in it. Historical figures are mentioned, but none of them put in an appearance. However, if an election happened on a certain date or if the British enacted a particular policy, then that’s all factual. The characters are composites of historical figures that I researched or groups of historical individuals that I aggregated. A little bit of someone’s detention story, a little bit of someone else’s, and then imagination to join the gaps between them. I would say it feels true to me. It’s all fiction, but it’s also consistent with historical events so it could have happened this way.
YB: State of Emergency is also about one specific family who is touched by certain political choices made throughout the years. How did you arrive at this as your way into the story?
The family becomes a weaponized site for oppression.
JT: One of the first aspects of research I undertook was talking to my parents and other family members, so I think family became a starting point for me. We tend to know a bit more about who the people involved in the struggle were in their public lives, be they government officials or leftist activists or guerrillas in the rainforest. We know less about who they were privately. The tension between the public and the private is always very rich to explore, so it made sense for the novel to be about a single family. There are different time periods and narrators with different leanings, but the fact that they’re connected by blood or marriage makes the novel feel more like a single, coherent journey rather than a disparate collection of individuals.
YB: It’s concentrated. The choices made by an individual that seem personal have huge political repercussions across the decades on the family.
JT: That’s a favorite threat of authoritarian governments, isn’t it? How could you do this? Think about your family. The family becomes a weaponized site for oppression. None of these people exist in a vacuum, even if they would like to think of themselves that way.
YB: When the character Stella is being interrogated by the government, the interrogators bring up her immediate family, who is not politically active, and then her aunt, Siew Li, a soldier in the rainforest whom she never knew.
JT: Yes, your family connections can be inherently suspicious. When I was growing up in Singapore, I remember people who were on blacklists, and their family members would find it difficult to find jobs. It still happens today, just in different forms.
YB: Can you talk about your decision to write from six points of view? In particular, you focus on women who are politically active. How did these characters come to you? And did anything from your interviews with family members make its way into the novel?
JT: No one is remotely based on my family, who are very apolitical. Talking to them was more about texture: What did you have for breakfast? How did you get to school? What was it like to take a taxi? It built up the world.
There had to be many points of view because I was trying to cover so much ground. Han Suyin’s novel,And The Rain My Drink, was very influential on me. She lived through this historical period, and her novel weaves together many points of view of people living side by side yet having very different political views of the world. She and I have very different vibes, but she writes in a way that I had never seen before, the astonishing way she’s able to see the entire tapestry and every level of the conflict at the same time.
In my novel, I wanted to have both the English-educated and Chinese-educated perspectives. I wanted us to be in different places: Singapore, Malaysia and London. It was freeing to jump like that. It was more about what I thought the big flashpoints were rather than starting with the people. For example, I knew I had to write about the massacre at Batang Kali [where British soldiers killed unarmed civilians in 1948], and it was more about who was there and whose perspective would I inhabit. For other parts of the novel: who got detained by the Internal Security Department in Singapore, who was in the rainforest fighting? Identifying the storylines I wanted to investigate, then the individuals in each strand to use for their point of view. Then finding ways that these lines would intersect so there would be continuity.
I should say a lot of this is me rationalizing it after the fact. None of this was going through my mind at the time of writing. It was very much about what felt right or necessary at each moment.
YB: Conventional accounts of this historical period are very male-dominated. In your novel, the three female narrators are the ones who really feel pressure from the state, from the patriarchy or the dominant narrative. Like Revathi—people don’t want her to talk about the Batang Kali massacre, but she’s determined to keep digging on her own.
JT: I don’t think the women in all these political movements have been given as much prominence as the men, but there were a lot of them. Early in my research, I read Agnes Khoo’s oral history of the female comrades, Life As the River Flows: Women in the Malayan Anti-Colonial Struggle. There were also many female politicians on both sides of the government. There were many female student activists. Among the 1987 detainees in Singapore were many women. Conventionally these would be male-dominated narratives, but that was not borne out by my research. I ended up fifty-fifty, three male and three female narrators. I didn’t stop and think, oh, I need more women here. I did the research, and that’s how the story unfolded.
YB: Who did you write this novel for?
JT: I wrote it for myself, in the sense that these were the things I wanted to unravel and think through. I knew about these individual pockets of history but not how they all joined together. I had to write the novel to find those connections, to make sense of it all and to spend a sustained period of time in that world. Even if it had never gotten published and never found readers, it would still have been worthwhile because it was a process I wanted to go through.
I don’t think the women in all these political movements have been given as much prominence as the men, but there were a lot of them.
I almost never start out wanting to tell a particular story. I’m kind of figuring out what it is as I go. If I started out already knowing the story, if I know where I’m going to go, I don’t need to write ninety thousand words to get there. I want to get somewhere new that I didn’t know was at the end of the path. I don’t even necessarily know what the path is.
YB: Do you remember what you did not know about that path as you were writing?
JT: I went back and read some early drafts, and I had no memory of them. I think when I found the thing that worked, it became the story, and I mentally discarded any other version. In previous drafts, there were false starts and things that didn’t work or that were going in the wrong direction. But I don’t think I could at those points have said, oh, this is what I don’t know. It really is just stumbling through a field full of fog, and you have no idea what you’re groaning towards until you are.
YB: It’s very interesting to hear you say that, because the final version that we read seems intentional.
JT: A lot of art is the thing that you didn’t know that you were heading towards until you found it. Then it feels so right and natural that it must always have been this way. The reader hopefully never knows. It seems effortless, it seems to just have always existed in the shape of that. You know when you’ve found the right one, so you have to forget all the other things.
YB: Okay, let’s turn to Delicious Hunger. How did you come across Hai Fan’s writing?
JT:Delicious Hunger was different to any literature I’d seen before about the Malayan Communist Party. Hai Fan wrote it long after everything else that dealt with the topic. It’s not like the Jin Zimang or He Jin stuff from fifty years ago. The idea that in 2017, there was a new work of literature about that history out—obviously, I’m going to be fascinated.
Hai Fan wrote when he was in the rainforest, and he’s still producing new work, writing one book every couple of years. To be translating him as he’s writing—like, why wouldn’t I?
YB: What were the literary qualities in the Chinese that attracted you?
JT: There’s a directness and lack of pretension that I really enjoy. It’s also very human. None of the characters are mouthpieces for ideology. At the same time, none of them are there to be reflexively cynical or critical of their circumstances. It’s a very honest depiction of how life was in the rainforest for everyone who sincerely believes in what they’re doing and what they’re fighting for. But it’s also very clear-eyed about the difficulties surrounding them. They get into petty disagreements with their comrades and are unhappy about the conditions of their lives and have feelings that are unruly. All the while, they’re surrounded by this gorgeously realized rainforest that never feels overwritten.
Related to your point about women in political movements, there are a lot of women in Delicious Hunger. I don’t think that’s a contrivance by Hai Fan. There were a lot of female comrades.
YB: Delicious Hunger feels like it takes place in an enclosed world, a microcosm with its own rules and expectations.
JT: That’s all good fiction, the world has its own internal logic. It’s also Hai Fan’s view of that part of his life.
YB: I was wondering how much of the grueling difficulties he experienced.
JT: There wasn’t a lot of individualism in the rainforest. Comrades were almost never alone, you were always with other people. It was a very communal life. I don’t know if he would say, this character is me. I think he would say these people are us.
YB: Can you talk broadly about how you translate, not just Chinese into English, but also in approaching a historical context like this?
A lot of art is the thing that you didn’t know that you were heading towards until you found it.
JT: Whether you’re writing or translating, if you’re embodying any kind of minoritized perspective or challenging the official narrative in any way, it’s really easy to slip into using the official lexicon. Like people in Singapore use the term, “Hock Lee Bus riots.” It’s the phrase we’re used to, without stopping to think how calling it a riot is already making a value judgment or positioning it in a certain way. I like to interrogate these uses of words. Am I bolstering certain ideas or narratives by using a particular vocabulary, and is there a simple adjustment I can make that would pull away from that? Because there’s such a dominant narrative in Singapore, a singular point of view that’s been enshrined at so many levels of society that it’s really easy to fall into that way of thinking, that use of language and not even realize you’re doing it.
In my essay in the Margins about translating Delicious Hunger, I talked about using the word rainforest instead of jungle. I agreed with the analysis that jungle has resonances that aren’t helpful. I also realized that Hai Fan has consistently used yŭlín (雨林), which literally means rainforest. Then I thought, should I go back and change all the instances of jungle in State of Emergency? I didn’t because I think the book is the book, and if I start pulling on threads, it would all unravel and I’d have to write it again from scratch.
YB: How much did you explain political context while still keeping the story true to Hai Fan’s voice?
JT: I didn’t do much scaffolding at all. The comrades were very wrapped up in their day-to-day lives and what they were doing at the moment. Anything that needed to be explained, Hai Fan explained, because it’s not like present-day Chinese-language readers are necessarily aware of that history.
YB: I wonder whether that’s why the stories reverberate so deeply. Even if you don’t know anything about Malaya or that period, everything the characters are going through is very real.
JT: They’re living difficult lives, and the conflicts are very, very clear. There’s no ennui. No one has the time to be depressed or vaguely dissatisfied or feel empty. They have very concrete goals. How are we going to carry this wild boar back to camp? How am I going to find food to survive? How are we going to escape those snipers? Definitely we get to know what’s going on inside them, their inner lives, but I think it does push against a certain genre of contemporary literature, about the upper middle class person whose life appears to be going great, but they feel empty inside. Those books often become very interior. The characters are going to Whole Foods, but inside they’re struggling.
YB: You were involved in the cover design for both books. Can you tell us about them?
JT: The Singaporean artist, Sim Chi Yin, has some amazing photographs related to the Malayan Emergency and the rainforest. I love all of Chi Yin’s photography, and I suggested her work to Tilted Axis for Delicious Hunger. I’m very happy with the prosthetic limb on the cover. A lot of prosthetic limbs are mentioned in the book because there were landmines in this war. Without that cover, when you read prosthetic limb, you might envision something more contemporary and professionally produced, not this essentially handmade prosthetic limb that they rigged out of whatever materials they could get their hands on in the rainforest.
For the cover of State of Emergency, World Editions wanted to use a mural that I photographed when I was at the Friendship Village [in Thailand, where former Communist soldiers now live]. It’s very representative of the comrades, for sure.
YB: How do you think State of Emergency and Delicious Hunger speak to our present political moment?
JT: Both of them are set in periods of history that are very different to the world we’re in now. Both are about people who believe very much in something and fight very hard to make that thing happen. There’s a tendency to think that the struggle failed because they didn’t turn Malaya Communist, but I don’t think the comrades see it that way. They created a society in the rainforest that wasn’t in thrall to capitalism and that allowed them to live communally on their own terms, and they did that for decades. I think they created the society they wanted to see in the world, and they got to live out their principles, which most of us don’t get to do.
Perhaps that’s a useful corrective to today’s focus on outcomes. We often think about where we want to end up and focus very hard on that, rather than on seeing your life as a kind of intentional practice and living your life according to the principles you want to espouse.
For a week, the boy had nightmares. His parents woke to him bursting, crying so hard, his hair was soaked through. He was so young, the father thought, that his sweat didn’t smell.
When the mother asked what the nightmares were about, their son said, “I died. I remember how I died.” He stared at the painting of pears on the wall. The mother poured too much milk in his cereal.
At first, they thought nothing of the word remember, just a boy searching for the proper way to express a new and terrible feeling. But instead of eating his cereal, he held the spoon in his mouth like a teething toy, and the mother asked how.
“My plane got shot.”
“Your plane?”
“I went in the water.”
The mother pushed for more, and the father pushed away from the table. He’d be late for work if he listened to any more of this. It was simple: dreams amounted to diet. The mother should decrease his cheese intake before bed. He was sure there was science to support this. He drank his coffee too fast, and the inside of his mouth pulsed the entire drive to work.
But a dairy free month did nothing, and the mother eventually took the boy to see their pediatrician, who recommended a specialist in Atlanta. Now they sat in a psychologist’s office where the tables and chairs were child-sized. Winnie the Pooh and his friends paraded across the wall. The father had no idea what this was going to cost, this on top of the gas crisis.
The child psychologist said, “I’m going to show you some pictures, and you tell me the name of what you see, okay?” He did not have the kind, stooping manner of their pediatrician. He had the coiffed gray hair and sideburns of a successful man who’d never had children. His suit was tailored, the belled trousers pressed with sharp creases. His wrinkles sloped downward.
The cards were mostly simple things any three-year-old would know. Dog, train, tree, cup. The boy didn’t know bison. He didn’t know blender. But he knew wrench. He knew propeller. He knew aircraft carrier, which made the mother suck her teeth.
The child psychologist put his cards away. “And what kind of plane was it?”
“A Warhawk,” the boy said.
“And where was it?”
“The Pacific.”
“The Pacific Ocean?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes, sir,” the father said, and his wife squeezed his arm. They were supposed to quietly observe from the adult-sized chairs in the corner.
“Yes, sir,” the boy said. “The Saratoga.”
The child psychologist looked over the boy’s shoulder at the mother.
“We didn’t know that,” the father said, also looking at the mother, searching her blinking for signs she’d kept something from him while he was at work. “We didn’t know that.”
The child psychologist wrote something in his notebook and asked the boy, “Who’s America’s greatest enemy?”
“The Japs.”
The child psychologist looked not at the boy’s parents, but at the mirror, and the father wondered who was watching them from the other side.
Afterward, boy raced wooden blocks along a wire track, while his parents sat at the child psychologist’s mahogany desk. “Could anyone have told your son this story?” he asked. Could this be a memory the boy claimed as his own?
The mother said their family didn’t talk about the War. Besides, they’d been stationed in Europe or had stayed home.
“And do you or members of your family believe in reincarnation?”
The father wondered why his wife didn’t answer with an immediate no, but she was probably just as surprised by the question.
“You’re not implying—”
“I only ask because these types of cases are more prevalent in communities that do. In India, for example.”
“Do you think that’s what this is?” the mother asked. “A past life?”
“We don’t,” the father said. “We’re Christian.” For some reason, he didn’t say Catholic.
The child psychologist sent them home with paperwork to enroll their son in a study. There were other children like their boy. When the mother asked if he could help ease the nightmares, he referred them back to their pediatrician, and the father wondered what kind of doctor offered no remedies.
That night, the mother pushed the comforter to the end of the bed and slid under their lightest sheet. She wanted to pursue the study.
“We could get some answers,” she said. But the father didn’t think these were answers they wanted, their son crazy at age three. And if not crazy, then what?
“Well, at least consider it,” she said, turning off the bedside lamp. She used to wear a lotion that smelled like flowers, but lately she’d been using one that smelled like medicine. He couldn’t get it out of his nose.
The father didn’t sleep well that night, his own father in his head. The boy’s grandfather, a man who’d immigrated from Ireland as a child, often spoke about his second-class citizenship in the South. “We were basically Jews,” he’d say.
But the grandfather was young enough to lose his accent. Their last name was not recognizably Irish. He only had to hide his family and his faith. Still, he insisted his children go to Mass every week. He prayed over their meals and kept a Bible hidden in the drawer of his bedside table. None of this made sense to the father then, though now he supposed this assimilation was what earned them the house in the suburbs, the Plymouth, and the pension.
After he retired, the grandfather went to Mass every day to atone for denying Christ in public. He’d made it into one club. The next was heaven. He must have known he was sick.
At that point, the father was in college, taking philosophy and physics classes, sleeping in on Sundays. He’d started to think of religion as man’s answer to death’s question. He felt like a child outgrowing Santa Claus. He pitied his simple parents who now hung a framed print of a guardian angel above their couch, her arms outstretched to protect two little children as they crossed a rickety bridge.
But even though logic said God couldn’t exist, the father could feel Him in his dorm room, in lecture halls, in his head listening to his doubts. And during the grandfather’s last rites, the father felt His presence thick as humidity. He watched the priest place the Eucharist on the grandfather’s dry tongue, wondering how the body of Christ could possibly dissolve. He was afraid the grandfather would choke, that Christ would be his death and salvation. But he also saw a peace smoothing the grandfather’s face, a certainty in the new life that awaited him. What awaited men who believed in nothing?
This death brought the father back to the Church, where he met his wife, who had an unshakable faith he found naive and comforting. He attended Bible study and became a Eucharistic minister. He volunteered to help with the Church’s bookkeeping. He held his wife’s hand on Sundays as she sang along to the processional unembarrassed. It was a relief to have a faith again.
In bed, the father propped his head on his forearm and tried not to think about his doubting Thomas phase in college. He listened to his wife’s wet breaths. How could she fall right to sleep? He wanted to ask her the question that had been on his mind since the child psychologist said reincarnation. Was this some kind of test? Could a study like this bulldoze everything the father had rebuilt? Because while he’d been faithful for years, he still doubted. Because he wasn’t sure he could call what he had faith. These days, he prayed that he could time it like his own father had, hold out long enough for his last rites. One last chance for Confession. One last chance to feel the presence. To get it right.
When the second letter arrived, the mother brought it to the dinner table. “We have to tell him something.”
“I said I would call.” The father noticed there wasn’t so much as a personal note from the child psychologist, this man who was not a therapist like they thought, but a researcher. If the father had known that from the beginning, he never would have made the appointment. He would have asked their pediatrician for some sleeping pills, and they could have gone on with their lives.
And anyway, the boy recovered easily from his dreams. He cried them out and went back to singing little songs to himself. And though the mother said he’d been arranging his planes in pyramids and Vs, though he told her about some friend named Jack who said, “Pilot’s wings are just the beginning,” though he’d added details about fumes filling his eyes before the water extinguished everything, he didn’t crash his toy planes in waking life.
When the father came home from work, the boy was watching television, cross-legged on the floor with his mouth open. And he was now sitting at the table while his mother cut up his roast and they prepared for him to push the meat around. The negotiations. At least three bites. She’d indulged him as usual, allowing a cowboy to stand guard over his plate, as long as he promised he wouldn’t play with it until he finished his dinner.
More proof there was nothing to study. This was just a boy with an overactive imagination. This game of make believe would dissipate, just like Gherkin had. One day, his new imaginary friend had to have a seat at the table, and the next, the boy was begging for little tin planes.
“But this feels different,” the mother said. He knew the names of each toy plane, names she’d never heard before like Corsair and F-23, names the father also had to admit he didn’t know. But the boy was highly verbal for his age. The mother would take him to the grocery store to discover he knew Ajax, Nescafe, rutabaga.
“You brag about it all the time,” the father said, pushing the letter aside and spooning mashed potatoes onto his plate.
“But this is different.”
“Different how?”
She said sometimes the boy told stories as if he were the pilot. He’d never confused himself with Gherkin. He seemed, even when lost in his stories, to understand that there were two worlds you lived in at his age, and only one was yours. But this pilot’s world was blending.
“I can’t explain it,” she said.
The boy smiled at his plate like he saw something new there. The father mixed butter into his potatoes.
“Eat up, honey,” she said, and the boy pulled the napkin from his lap and tucked it into his collar. If it were up to the father, he’d make his son eat it cold for breakfast, like he’d been made to do.
The boy rubbed his hands together and grabbed his fork. “It sure feels nice to have a home cooked meal,” he said and ate his entire side of meat.
The father came home to a car in the driveway, to a man with gray sideburns and pressed gray slacks on their couch, one of their good cups and saucers in front of him on the coffee table. Their boy was playing on the floor, luckily with his horse figurines. The toy planes were on the table, and the father wondered who had placed them there.
Their son’s case had promise because there was an identifiable incident, names to trace, death certificates to track.
He shook the child psychologist’s hand, while his wife avoided his eyes. The child psychologist was headed to some institute in Virginia. He said their son’s case had promise because there was an identifiable incident, names to trace, death certificates to track. He said they were lucky. Most children didn’t have enough identifying details to pursue their case.
“Lucky,” the father said.
The mother smoothed her skirt and left the room.
“Yes, well.” The child psychologist gestured toward the boy and sat back down on the couch. The mother returned with another cup and the coffee pot. She poured the father a cup then hovered over the child psychologist’s, stopping because it was almost full. He took a polite sip.
The mother settled into a chair and opened her leather-bound journal, pen poised like a secretary. They all watched the boy prance his horse across the carpet in a very un-cowboy way.
“Do you want to play with your planes?” the mother asked.
The boy shook his head.
“You like those ponies, don’t you?” the child psychologist said.
The boy turned away from him.
Their son was some sideshow freak. They were all waiting for him to perform. He wouldn’t play with his planes. He wouldn’t talk about Jack. Their son turned shy, the way he sometimes did around men. He kept his back to the child psychologist and whispered a neigh to his horse.
The father took a sip and tried to identify what the child psychologist found so distasteful in their coffee. It’s not like it was instant. But he also hoped his wife felt some shame about it because she certainly felt shameless inviting him into their home behind her husband’s back. Did she think she wouldn’t get caught? Or was she hoping to get caught? Because she and the child psychologist nodded at each other as the boy began to draw, like there was some conspiracy between them.
“I’m going to draw too, okay?” the child psychologist said, picking up a brown crayon. His suit jacket pulled taut as he leaned over the coffee table. “What should I draw? A dog? A car? A plane?”
The boy traced blue over and over until it pilled on the page.
“A car then.”
The boy’s eyes moved to the man’s paper. He sketched long lines and curves. The bumpers, the wheels. And after a while, the boy picked up a red crayon and continued.
The father’s stomach growled. What kind of trick would their son have to perform before they could eat dinner? He was sure his wife hadn’t even begun preparations. The boy was making a mockery of his parents, acting like a B movie lunatic one minute and a dumb kid the next. The child psychologist would think they made it all up to get their names in the paper.
And what if they had? What if the conspiracy was between mother and child, cooking up this story not out of fantasy but vanity? Their faces on the covers of biographies, bestsellers he couldn’t hide from the Church. He shook the thought away, reminding himself the boy was only three.
“So, what exactly do you expect of us?” he asked the child psychologist. “To go all the way to Virginia? For our son to be brain scanned and hypnotized?”
“Hardly.” The father could imagine the child psychologist at parties, condescension over canapes. “Before you arrived, I was telling your wife that you simply need to document your son’s account of the pilot.” Not to push. Not to fish for revelations. Simply document. The Institute would do the rest. The mother scribbled in her journal so fast the father couldn’t imagine her neat cursive was legible.
“And don’t worry. We don’t believe in hypnosis.” He said the word like he didn’t like the taste of it. “We’re a legitimate organization. Not one of those LSD quack jobs.”
When the boy finished, his mother and the child psychologist swore he had drawn his death. In the center, a Warhawk was circled in red. A spray of black bullets like gnats came from another plane, complete with crosses on the wings and tail. Red fire, they said, blue ocean.
The father didn’t think it was so clear. A red circle with a green X in the middle, like he’d tried to scratch out a mistake. A child’s abstraction, like when he drew pictures of the family, circles with sprouting legs and arms, indistinguishable from the sun above them. They were seeing what they were seeking. Like people who claimed to see the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. He could forgive his wife this impulse, or at least try. He expected better from the child psychologist, who said he’d be taking these “findings” to Virginia. He said they might have enough information to “identify the life.”
When he left, the mother gathered the half full cup, the untouched sugar and creamer.
“He just showed up,” she said before the father could say anything. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Well, you seemed awfully enthusiastic to host him.” And now, he’d have to eat a cold sandwich for dinner like a bachelor.
“I don’t like that man,” their son said, now flying a toy plane. The father wondered if three-year-olds were capable of spite. Maybe the boy would end up with some sense after all.
The mother pushed the kitchen door open with her hip, the china jangling on the tray. “Well, he never heard back from us.” The door swung open and closed several times in her wake, and the smell of casserole wafted into the living room.
At Mass, Father Mandracina sermonized that heaven and hell were the same place. After you died, there was only you and God for all eternity. And if you truly loved God, what ecstasy that would be. If you didn’t, well.
The father thought, what about my parents? And if heaven and hell were the same place, what did that mean about purgatory? Their pastor was making up rules—he knew this was nowhere in the Bible.
His wife just nodded along. She lived easily in contradiction, God-works-in-mysterious-ways as a coverall. In her mind, God and some many-armed deity could exist side by side, spitting back souls and planting them in little children’s bodies. His wife was less interested in the rules and more in the feeling. She chose the patron saint of alcoholics as her Confirmation name because Monica sounded pretty. She said she knew for certain that God existed when a hummingbird hovered in front of her face on a camping trip. It made eye contact, and she felt like it knew her name. She didn’t think this hummingbird was God but a sign, a messenger. The father had never received a sign. There was only that presence, that feeling of being watched from a corner of the ceiling. He tried not to think about how he would feel alone with this presence. It would be different, he told himself, when it was actually God and not his imagination.
Lately, it wasn’t the boy but his wife who was testing him. The house was quiet. She wasn’t ironing or sweeping with her old Beach Boys records playing. She was studying, chin in hand at the kitchen table as their boy ate breakfast. Just like when he was a baby, and she’d stare at him for hours proclaiming he was a perfect replica of a human, his tiny toes the dollhouse version.
Just yesterday, when he came downstairs, he found her holding a book open like a grade school teacher, pointing to the pictures. But instead of a story of little lost puppy, she was pointing to fighter jets. “Like this?” she said. “Or this?” And the boy twisted his mouth side to side. The plastic cover crinkled along the open spine.
The house was suddenly filled with history books. His wife was now an expert in the library loan system and the two-front war. She’d been in Junior College when they met, hoping to be a librarian or history teacher. But the draft was looming, and they married early in the relationship. It turned out the father had flat feet, but by then he was working, making enough for both of them. And she’d dreamed of being a mother longer than she’d dreamed of librarianship.
At the kitchen table, the boy finally pointed to one of the photos, and his mother wrote it down in her journal.
But things were getting better. The boy’s dreams had ebbed. The father couldn’t recall the last time he’d woken screaming. His vocabulary was changing too, both growing and shrinking depending on the subject. He didn’t know Iwo Jima, but he did know ponderosa. He was more interested in his fourth birthday party than in mastering the defensive split. The mother had purchased the invitations, bordered by a lasso with a sheriff’s star on top, but they were still sitting unaddressed on the coffee table.
They decided they would broach the delicate topic of God after the party. Then he would understand why he went to the nursery and ate small donuts while his parents went to Mass. The boy would be four in a month, and before they knew it, he would be seven and then eight. Still, his First Communion seemed unimaginable. And the father worried the dreams would mushroom into a fatal skepticism later in life, worse than his own. Would he run away to a commune? Would long-haired hippies come banging down their door looking for proof of reincarnation? The father was afraid it was already too late to set the boy on the right path.
He tried to return to the liturgy, the congregation singing “They Will Know We Are Christians,” as the offertory basket made its way down the aisles. He reminded himself that the hippie movement was waning, just like the boy’s dreams.
But even before the pilot, the boy felt like a test. There was a nettling dreaminess about him that said he would grow up to be difficult, lazy and weak. It wasn’t so much the boy now, as much as the threat of what he would become. When the boy started school, he would need more discipline. If he was ever going to make it in this world, the father would have to help him develop a callous to protect and hide the soft body that, hopefully, God could forgive. He put an extra $5 in the offertory basket, wondering if this pilot was what he’d been sensing all along.
His wife sang without looking at the hymnal, glossing over the words she didn’t know with open vowels. She gave his hand a squeeze, which told him he needed to release his shoulders. She was a good wife, a good mother. He told himself to remember this tonight when her easy breathing kept him awake.
Even though it was winter and Tuesday, the mother filled their glasses with Chablis. She said it paired with the chicken and dumplings, his own mother’s recipe. The boy tried to make his cowboy ride his disproportionate pony, the cowboy’s stiff legs touching the table. The mother lit candles.
“Well?” the father said.
“I found it.”
“Found what?”
“The Saratoga.”
She was so excited, she couldn’t hide her teeth.
“It was a real World War II aircraft carrier. And Maggie at the library said it might be hard to find personnel rosters, but they could be in the National Archives. And there’s an entire book about The Saratoga and all its battles. It should be in on Monday.”
The father chewed slowly. The last time his wife made this meal, she’d told him she was pregnant.
“Isn’t that incredible?” she said.
“If you think so.”
“Don’t you think so?”
“Honey, I don’t know what you think this will accomplish.”
The child psychologist wouldn’t disclose whether he believed in reincarnation. It seemed a strange impulse for a man of science. Shouldn’t scientists believe in nothing? That was more logical than some cycle of lives. Just gases and chance. Just you and then the worms and what the father imagined as a never-ending darkness. Though, even darkness was a kind of existence.
His stomach burned, making it hard to drink the wine, to drink the morning coffee he needed more of lately. How long would this test last? He was getting tired of trying.
“Well, I do,” his wife said cutting her chicken smaller and smaller. “I think it’s incredible.”
Then the clang. The boy had dropped his horse into the roux, a beige splatter on his shirt. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said covering his eyes.
The father was already standing. He took the figurines off the table and put them on the high shelf next to his wife’s cookbooks.
“At least wipe them off,” she said before his eyes quieted her.
“This is dinner time,” he said. “Not play time.”
“Why are you always mad at me?” the boy said.
“Listen and I won’t be.”
The father placed his napkin back in his lap and prepared to send the boy to bed without dinner. But the boy blinked at him, cocking his head like a puppy learning the world. He squinted before saying, “You know, you remind me of him.”
When the boy spoke as the pilot, he lowered his voice. Still a child’s voice, but older. An actor embodying a role.
“Who?” the mother said.
“My old man.” He sat with his legs wider apart, a bravado in the way he leaned back against the arm of the chair. An adult in a booster seat, challenging the other man in the room. “Hope you’re not as wicked with the belt.”
Both parents let it sit with them at the table. They did not use the belt. They agreed the hand made a point, no need to leave a mark. Though, as a child, the father had learned quickly from the belt.
His wife said, “Do I remind you of your mother?” Their son looked her up and down with a smile that said, “not at all.”
But then, his blinking sped. He softened, his face and body his own. He jumped off his booster and hugged his mother so hard, her chair tipped back.
He didn’t burst like he did after the nightmares. It was like he was trying to speak but kept running out of breath, a wet growl then gasp. He inhaled his cries and choked on them. His mother stroked his hair, her cheek on his forehead. “Shh,” she said, and he only cried harder.
The father was reminded of that head-spinning girl in The Exorcist, the film they dared to release that dark Christmas during the energy crisis when good citizens across America left their string lights in the attic. A year ago, he would have dismissed exorcisms as superstition.
His wife took the boy by his shoulders. “You’re here now,” she said. “You’re here.”
What was that supposed to mean? But it worked. The boy eased, his little chest rising, his breath catching in hiccups.
“See?” She smiled, a string of saliva connecting her lips. Both she and the boy were shaking. “You’re here.”
The father said nothing. He followed them upstairs as she readied the boy for bed. He didn’t often see the boy undressed, and when he did, he was always surprised by his fragile body, visible ribs, little blue veins snaking up the arms. Even after his wife went downstairs, he watched the boy sleep, like a gazelle he’d seen on a nature program, run ragged escaping a lion. He wished they’d had a girl. His wife would know how to raise a girl properly.
He wished they’d had a girl. His wife would know how to raise a girl properly.
He found her in a living room chair, a glass of wine in one hand and her forehead in the other. Her eyes were closed, and he could hear the breath whistle in her nose.
“We’re done with this,” he said, and she opened her eyes. “You’re making this happen.”
“Me?”
“Your shrink even said it. Don’t push. All you’ve been doing is pushing.”
“But we’re getting close.”
“We?”
She shook her head.
He pointed to the ceiling, their son asleep above them. “Is this what you want?”
She’d complained she was getting older, and this was the first time he saw it in the lines around her set mouth. He walked with hard footsteps he wanted her to hear, china shaking in the cabinet, as he went upstairs. She’d finished the wine by the time he came back down with the cookie tin full of toy planes.
He made her repeat after him. She’d call the Institute and say they would not participate in the study. She’d ask the child psychologist to leave their son alone and if he didn’t, they would sue. She said this all with her thumbs hidden in her palms. She used to be a nail biter but kicked the habit for their wedding. He handed her the tin and watched as she emptied it in the kitchen trash.
The dreams stopped completely. The boy knew plane, but not aircraft carrier, not The Pacific. His parents didn’t ask if he knew crash.And after he’d blown out his candles in his cowboy hat, the memory of the pilot was extinguished too. And after the party, his parents sat him down and explained God. Though his wife was better at this kind of thing, it was important that the father take the lead. He felt the presence in the back of his head as he told the boy that God created the heavens and the earth, that God created him and loved him and only wanted him to be faithful. And if he was, good things would come in the end. The boy paid more attention to the hem of his shorts, but this was a seed. The father would tend it, monitor its slow growth.
On Palm Sunday, already too hot, they stood together in the church parking lot waiting for Father Mandracina to precess through the crowd. To keep the boy behaved, the mother taught him how to fold his palm frond into a cross. The priest passed by, dipping the aspergillum into the holy water and launching it at the parishioners, but the boy did not look up. He picked at the fibrous threads, which pulled away like loose strings on a sweater. The mother knew the father wanted to grab the boy’s wrist, to tell him that the fronds were not playthings. They were blessed and sacred. But he didn’t. He was trying. He watched the boy pull string after string, leaving them in a pile at his feet.
Something in the soil that summer turned the hydrangeas pink. But the white stayed at the edges of the flowers, so it looked like a mistake, petals withering instead of blushing. The father searched the closet for his yard clothes, planning to bury pennies to change the flowers back.
In the far back of the closet, he noticed a moving box that hadn’t been there before, a scarf and two pairs of shoes stacked on top as if to hide it. He removed the clutter and opened the cardboard flaps, but he already knew. It was full of mimeographs and yellow legal pads, his wife’s usually neat handwriting slanted and smeared. She’d starred and circled paragraphs. There were three exclamation points next to the name William O’Connor. She’d found a photo, which was copied to a hazy poor quality. Still, the father could see the corn-fed smile, the big cheeks, the hat cocked just right.
And on letterhead from the Institute, a message from the child psychologist, dated only a month prior. He reported that the details didn’t add up. The Saratoga, yes. William O’Connor, potentially. His body was never recovered. A John, nicknamed Jack, was also on the roster. But no one was flying Corsairs then. But, while they were flying Warhawks, O’Connor was not declared missing at Iwo Jima. So, they could not say this was a match.
In another letter, he wrote that, no, he didn’t believe she or her son were lying. Children were suggestible and imaginative sometimes. Still, he assured her the findings were logged at the Institute and, yes, he would honor her request to remain anonymous. Further study would not be pursued, but this was where many cases ended. She should be grateful they were able to get this far.
A violence crawled up the father’s body. This betrayal felt worse than adultery. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. He balled the letter in his fist, stabbing a corner into his palm.
“What’s wrong?” His wife was standing behind him. He’d forgotten he called her. “You’re burning up.”
She placed a cool hand on his forehead, and he leaned into it. He didn’t know what he felt. This oblivious, soothing comfort. This hailstorm inside him. Who did he marry?
“Honey,” she said. He pushed into her palm, but he’d taken the coolness from it. He loved her and he wanted to hurt her and he was scared. So he just pointed. She opened her mouth to speak and closed it.
“Throw it away,” he said.
He thrust the box into her arms. He knew it was heavy for her. The letter was still balled in his fist, and he brought it outside and threw it into the burn pile.
That night, he turned the pillow over to find the cool spot. O’Connor wouldn’t leave him, his corn-fed smile clearer in the father’s mind. He was so young. Was he digested by fish or entombed in charred metal? How long did it take for salt to wear away bone?
He should have been relieved by the child psychologist’s cold response. Proof this was nothing, his wife trying to force a miracle. There were no other lives. Or visitations from ghosts. Just a boy who couldn’t parse fantasy from reality.
But logic couldn’t satisfy the father tonight. He’d been there. He’d witnessed the boy transform. And now that he’d seen the picture of O’Connor, he knew he’d seen him before, somewhere behind the boy’s eyes. They were finally on a stable path—didn’t his wife see what she had done?
His wife, who was not asleep like he thought, rolled over and put her head on his chest.
“What does it all mean?” he said.
“I don’t know.” But think of how special their son was, she said. He’d drawn them to a man forgotten by history. The father pushed. What did that mean about other lives? About the afterlife? About their son?
The mother didn’t say what she actually thought, that their son was a guide. Father Mandracina often used the word mystery in his homilies, which brought a roller coaster feeling to her chest. Their son was offering them a glimpse at something beyond them, and the best thing to do was pay attention. But she knew this would only frighten her husband. And she wanted to ask for husband’s sympathy, her months of research ignored because the men at the Institute could only see her as a meddling mother. Instead, she yawned and said, “Maybe he just needed remembering,” and they both tried to sleep.
Their son will never know that he could have been a poster child for reincarnation, featured on paranormal TV alongside other small children who remembered the Holocaust and slavery and someone else’s trauma. His mother agreed, a thumbnail in her mouth, never to tell him.
In the decades to come, the boy will rarely have nightmares. In fact, his father will be concerned that he sleeps too much, and most of their fights in his teenage years will be about his laziness. As an adult, the boy will waste his weekends lying in bed, drinking coffee in his pajamas well into the afternoon. He will not spend Sundays at church unless he’s home for the holidays.
The boy will not remember his first Palm Sunday or the day his parents explained God, but he will remember how often his mother told him that his father was trying, that the world was heavier for his father. Whenever the boy disobeys, it won’t be the punishment that sticks, but the way his father looks into him, like he’s searching for some devil there. In high school, when he and his scouting friends are caught passing around a jug of Communion wine behind the rectory, the boy will say, “It’s not like it was consecrated,” and watch the fear take over his father’s body, his shoulders reaching toward his ears as he holds his breath. And the boy will feel this devil too, which drove him to sabotage his scouting career, the only pursuit that had made his father proud.
When the adult son hears a story on morning radio about the revival of reincarnation cases by quantum physicists, he will not connect it to himself. The physicist will describe these cases not as proof of the soul but as proof that consciousness continues after death. The son will barely listen, still in his pajamas, flipping a pancake for his husband, who asks, “Do you think the kids forget because they start to develop their own memories?”
He will sip his coffee and shrug.
The boy and his husband will live in a Northeastern town by the river, far enough from his parents and their disappointment. And when heavy rains flood the river and a man in a canoe ferries them away from their window, the son will not think about his watery death in another life. He will think about climate change and try not to blame the whole thing on people like his father.
And the son will not understand what he finds in his parents’ attic, cleaning out the house after his mother’s death and years after his father’s: a cardboard box full of legal pads and photocopies, messy handwriting he doesn’t recognize, all about some missing pilot, maybe a distant relative. The son will feel guilty throwing it away, along with the leather-bound journal he finds in his mother’s underwear drawer, which he won’t read, too afraid it contains something she wouldn’t want him to know.
The second half of the year always feels like a return: to darker evenings, introspection, and stories that ask bigger questions. It’s also when quieter, stranger novels tend to rise to the surface—books that don’t shout, but quietly haunt. Stories that ask us to reflect. Spanning decades and continents, from postwar Austria to contemporary Haiti and Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, from a haunted research institute in Korea to a Venus statue in Tokyo, each book on this list offers a powerful reframing of what fiction can teach us about the realities that we inhabit.
Sweden
Engagementby Gun-Britt Sundström, translated from Swedish by Kathy Saranpa
Published in Sweden in the 70s and translated into English for the first time this year, Engagement by Gun-Britt Sundström follows Martina, a disenchanted humanities student in her early twenties, living on student aid and frequenting whatever seminar catches her attention. When she meets Gustav, it’s far from a passionate romance; he’s not exactly her type, and she’s not really interested in settling down. Despite this, she finds herself falling into established routines with him, performing the expected rituals of coupledom. Cut from the same cloth but wanting entirely different things out of their relationship, the two endlessly discuss what coupledom actually means, who loves whom more, and what the right way to love really is. In a time of social change and upheaval, Martina endlessly asks herself questions that feel as relevant today as ever.
Austria
Killing Stella by Marlen Haushofer, translated from German by Shaun Whiteside
Told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, Killing Stella—first published in 1958—by Marlen Haushofer (author of newly rediscoveredThe Wall) is a tense domestic horror novella exploring gender roles, repression, and complicity. Set in post-war Austria, we follow a housewife left to her own devices as her unfaithful husband and two children visit her parents-in-laws for the weekend. With time to herself, the narrator reflects back on past events and, in particular, what happened to Stella—the teenage daughter of a family friend who lived with them briefly before meeting a horrific end. Deceptively quiet and tranquil, Killing Stella is written in the form of a confession, gradually building in tension while ruminating on moral responsibility, silence as a form of both protection and violence, and what happens when things are left unsaid.
In a surreal take on love, loneliness, and beauty, Emi Yagi, author ofDiary of a Void, returns with her second book translated into English. When the Museum is Closed follows Rika Horauchi, a part-time worker splitting her weeks between a frozen-food warehouse and a museum, where her job is to make conversation with the statue of Venus after closing hours. Recommended by her old professor for her proficiency in Latin, Rika begins to visit the statue on Monday evenings and, together with the anthropomorphic goddess, explores new ideas and perspectives, soon finding herself in love. But her newfound life is threatened when the museum curator wants to keep Venus all to himself, forcing Rika to decide what she will do about this strange new connection. Leaning into the same quiet surrealism as in Diary of a Void, When the Museum is Closed is a dreamlike take on desire, loneliness, and the transformative power of being perceived by others.
For fans of I Who Have Never Known Men and Tender is the Flesh, Ana Paula Maia’s latest novel translated into English, On Earth As It Is Beneath is a gruesome account of what can happen when violence is allowed to reign supreme. In a country where people have been enslaved and tortured, a penal colony which only incarcerated men is shutting down. But with the loosening of control, a no less brutal system takes over. On every full moon, the inmates are set free, the warden armed with a rifle, and a hunt begins. Planning their escapes but never knowing who is a friend and who is an enemy, the men can’t tell what direction the threat is coming from—or indeed if life beyond the walls will provide them with better prospects. Like in her previous novel, Of Cattle and Men, Maia demands that her readers bear witness to the violence we are capable of when pushed to the extreme, or when power is left unchecked.
South Korea
The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran, translated from Korean by Gene Png
Part crime novel, part queer vampire love story, The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran—author ofA Thousand Blues and winner of the 4th Korea Sci-fi Literature Award—follows detective Su-yeon, who takes it upon herself to investigate a string of deaths at a local hospital. Her colleagues all rule the deaths of the deceased—four elderly patients who seemingly all jumped out of a 6th floor window—as suicides caused by loneliness, but Su-yeon, whose grandmother is also a patient on the same floor, is scared something will happen to her next. As she starts investigating, a mysterious woman named Violet steps forward, claiming to be a vampire hunter. She is searching for her ex-lover, Lily, and insists a vampire is behind the mysterious deaths. Diving into the fantastical, The Midnight Shift is a fast-paced commentary on loneliness, isolation, and grief.
National Book Award finalist and Booker Prize shortlisted author Bora Chung returns with Midnight Timetable: a novel-in-ghost-stories. Set in a mysterious research center which houses cursed objects, where footsteps echo in empty hallways, doorways disappear behind you, and cats can talk, a night shift employee soon discovers why few employees last long at the Institute. Through her trademark bizarre and uncanny motifs, this literary horror novel is an exploration of power, corruption, and late-stage capitalism. From animal testing to conversion therapy and domestic abuse, Midnight Timetable is as steeped in the fantastical and whimsical as it is in the horrors of everyday life.
Mexico
Restoration by Ave Barrera, translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones & Robin Myers
In the vein of Juan Rulfo, Angela Carter, and Mariana Enriquez, Restoration by Ave Barrera is a ghost story of sorts, exploring the male gaze, obsession, and ill-fated love. The novel follows Jasmina, who has been commissioned to restore the dilapidated family home of her current situationship. The house, once the home of famous artists, has become an abandoned time capsule, full of holes and cracks in the foundation. As Jasmina starts her repairs, the house comes alive, telling her its stories of previous residents and the women who walked its halls before her. Soon, these stories begin to overlap with her own, causing her to wonder where the boundary between self and these forgotten women lies, and ultimately asking the reader to consider where the line between novel and reality is drawn.
Portugal
Grace Periodby by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
First published in 1973, Grace Period by Maria Judite de Carvalho is a story about a man at a crossroads and about how to move forward with life when you have one foot stuck in the past. After 25 years away, Matea Silva returns to sell his childhood home in order to send his dying girlfriend on her dream trip to the Acropolis. In a rush to make it happen before she passes, he sells the house to the first bidder: a former friend whose wife, Graça, was Matea’s first love. Struggling to reconcile the woman he sees now with the beauty in his past, and the events that ultimately tore them apart, he feels unable to change direction in a life that seems out of his control. Set on the cusp of the Carnation Revolution that would come to overthrow a four decades’ long dictatorship and told in Maria Judite de Carvalho’s unsentimental and precise prose, Grace Period stands as a parallel to a country on the eve of change.
Argentina
The Eventby Juan José Saer, translated from Spanish by Helen Lane
Winner of the 1987 Nadal Prize and penned by an author lauded as “the most important Argentinian writer since Borges,” The Event by Juan José Saer follows Blanco the Magician. Performing his feats of telepathic marvel and tricks of the mind all across Europe, he is suddenly forced to emigrate to a remote corner of Argentina when he is exposed as a fraud. Together with the enigmatic Gina, he hides away in obscurity and tries to rebuild his sense of self, only to be drawn into a series of events that challenge the laws of logic. Stretching from Europe to Argentina, The Event explores themes of deception, exile, and identity—all while blurring the line between illusion and reality.
Haiti
Cécéby Emmelie Propheté, translated from French by Aidan Rooney
Set in the Cité of Divine Power, a neighborhood in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Cécé by Emmelie Propheté throws the reader into a world marred by gang violence and territorial disputes. After witnessing the deaths of her mother and grandmother, the eponymous Cécé lives with her bedridden uncle Frédo, accompanied by the soundtrack of street vendors, children playing, radios at full blast, and gunfire. In an attempt to make a better life for herself, she buys a smartphone and quickly gains a large online following under the online persona Cécé La Flamme. Documenting her reality while people watch on in horrified rapture from the safety of their own homes, Cécé is an account of a young woman trying to reclaim her own story, asking what it means to bear witness to violence—a violence that is increasingly commodified for entertainment. But, beyond the violence also lies a tender tale about community and survival, and the importance of human connection.
India
Andhar Bilby Kalyani Thakur Charal, translated from Bengali by Asit Biswas
In a newly formed country, around a local body of water known as Andhar Bil, a group of Dalits of the Matua Sect settle to rebuild their lives in the wake of partition. The bil, resembling the one they left behind, acts as a central character in its own right, bearing witness to the community of refugees as they attempt to start fresh while honoring long held traditions. Around its shores, children play, marriages are celebrated, and new generations grow up to leave, like generations before them left to explore new land. Told as an episodic, loosely woven narrative, at its heart is a young woman of the community, Kamalini, who will one day do just that: leave for the city. Written by Dalit feminist poet, critic, publisher and editor Kalyani Thakur Charal, Andhar Bil is an ode to the Dalit community, written with tenderness and a deep understanding of the region.
From novelist, poet, and internationally acclaimed visual artist Şener Ozmen comes a bold English-language debut, set in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan. The Competition of Unfinished Stories centers around Sertec, a vehement atheist and aspiring writer who finds himself teaching theology at an Islamic school while attempting to write stories about the larger-than-life characters that comes to him. But Sertec can’t seem to finish any of them, and soon finds himself spiraling into madness as his marriage falls apart and he loses grip on reality. Through Sertec’s schizophrenic tendencies, the novel asks whether imagination is always harmless, or whether it can sometimes be the very thing that paralyzes us.
Italy
The Burning Originby Daniele Mencarelli, translated from Italian by Octavian MacEwan
After leaving Rome and his working class background behind for a chance to start anew in Milan, Gabriele is now a world-famous designer and someone who has seemingly “made it.” But he hasn’t been home for four years, and when he returns for a family celebration, he finds everything and everyone unchanged. Between the Tuscolano neighborhood of his childhood, his provincial family, and a tight-knit group of former friends, Gabriele can’t help but feel nostalgic yet ashamed of his origins. At the same time, he finds himself deeply unsatisfied with his present and when a rumor threatens to reveal how he really achieved his success, he has to contend with the contradictions between who he was and who he has become. In this fast-paced novel, Mencarelli offers a loving portrait of Rome, exploring the complex emotional consequences of social mobility and self-invention.
Ecuador
Carnaval Fever by Yuliana Ortiz Ruano, translated from Spanish by Madeleine Arenivar
Winner of the 2023 English PEN Translates Award and named one of the 50 best books of 2022 by El País, Carnaval Fever by Yuliana Ortiz Ruano is a celebration of Afro-Ecuadorian identity and female resilience. Ainhoa grows up in her grandmother’s household surrounded by strong women. Between her grandmother’s firm hand and a constellation of aunts, these women teach and protect her, anchoring her through spirituality and a celebration of life—particularly during Carnaval season. But behind this joyful existence lurks poverty, precarity, and male violence. Through it all, it is the power of sisterhood that will ensure the continued existence of the community, as it goes through heartbreaks, migration, and violence.
Nobel Prize winner and internationally renowned author Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel translated into English, House of Day, House of Night, has remained a bestseller in Poland since it was first published in 1998. Set in Nowa Ruda, a small town in the historically contested region of Silesia—an area that has been tugged between Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia—it is a story about how places can form who we are and who we become. When a woman settles in town, knowing no one, she soon meets the village’s few inhabitants, in particular her enigmatic neighbor, Marta. But beyond the living, the village is overflowing with stories of the dead. Tracing the stories back to the founding of the town and even the saints themselves, the novel acts as a testament to the fact that all places, no matter how small and insignificant they may seem, have their own histories and roots, teeming with life.
Snow fell outside the hotel conference room, and my breasts grew heavy with milk. I sat in a cushioned, straight-back chair amongst a dozen other students from my creative writing graduate program. On my lap was a printout with a selection from a Carson McCullers short story called “The Haunted Boy.” When this seminar was over, I would meet my husband and two young children back at our hotel room and nurse my not-quite-one-year-old baby.
The instructor asked someone to read the story excerpt aloud. In it, a teenage boy comes home with a friend from school and finds his mother absent. The scene plays out much like my children’s well-worn copy of Where’s Spot?Is the mother in the garden? No. Is she in the living room? No. Is she in the kitchen? No, there’s only clean pans and a lemon pie on the counter. The signs of this mother’s labor are all around the house, but she is not.
The boy worries, “sickened with a sudden chill remembrance of ‘the other time.’”A man in my class commented, “It sounds like there’s something off with the mother, like maybe she isn’t very involved.” Our instructor nodded thoughtfully. I read again about the “fresh checked towels” and the “wax-floored hall” and the spring flowers in the garden, of which this mother had taught her son the names, and I seethed. Can’t this poor lady get five minutes to herself? I thought.
Perhaps I felt this man was talking about me. Throughout the 10-day graduate residency—intended to be an intensive creative retreat—I had felt both not present enough as a writer and not present enough as a mother. I hurried back from every seminar to nurse the baby, and I missed bedtime stories to attend faculty readings. Of course, no one had forced me to start a masters program at eight months pregnant. I chose to be both a mother and a writer—two identities that come imprinted with inescapable fantasies of what we, as a culture, imagine them to be. There’s the solitary writer, escaping into Thoreau’s wilderness, unburdened by cell phone service and children, responsible to nothing and no one but his own ingenious imagination. Opposite him is the dutiful mother, attached at the hip—and the breast—to her children, as she lovingly prepares a home-cooked meal. These images haunted me at the residency, not only because I feared other people expected me to embody them, but because I myself wanted to.
After I flew home (my children both charming and annoying everyone on the plane), I kept thinking about “The Haunted Boy.” I obtained a copy of the story and read it in full. Upon this reading, I learned that Hugh’s all-consuming worry is due to his mother’s past suicide attempt, when Hugh found her alone in the house, covered in blood. McCullers reveals the mother to us, ghostlike, through her son’s anxieties. When the boy, Hugh, feeds his friend a slice of her homemade pie, he makes excuses for why the crust is store-bought instead of made from scratch: “We think this graham-cracker pastry is just as good. Naturally, my mother can make regular pie dough if she wants to.” Even this mother’s accomplishments are seasoned with her shortcomings.
“My mother is a super cook,” he insists to the friend, who seems to represent some nascent patriarchal power. “She cooks things like meat pie and salmon loaf – as well as steaks and hot dogs.” Reciting this banal menu, he reassures himself.
We never get a full, three-dimensional portrait of the mother. McCullers writes of her room, simply, “The lady things were on the dresser.” To Hugh, the mother is a feature of the house, a light he turns on when he enters, until one day he finds the bulb broken. But while Hugh’s understanding of his mother’s interior life is limited, he is not a stock stand-in for toxic masculinity either. He allows—even invites—his friend to see him at his most vulnerable, begging him not to leave while he looks for his mother. Hugh confides to the friend that she was institutionalized for a time. The friend, in response, “reached out and carefully stroked Hugh’s sweatered arm.”
The story is rich with tension until its final pages, when the mother—to my great relief—returns home safe, wearing a new dress and shoes. She has only been out shopping. At this moment, Hugh’s fear morphs into anger. McCullers writes, “He could not stand his love or his mother’s prettiness.” How dare she make him worry? How dare she not be there when he needed her? I am reminded of my own children, climbing onto my back without asking, or screaming in frustration if I don’t “look!” fast enough at a creation they’ve made. I am also reminded of the Zadie Smith quote: “What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission.” To Hugh, his mother is just that: his mother. His own burgeoning manhood demands her constant presence and the sacrifice of her selfhood. His worry, therefore, is not only personal but existential: If she dies, what happens to him?
McCullers reveals the mother to us, ghostlike, through her son’s anxieties.
Hugh’s father comes home, too, and he comforts the boy privately by commenting on how nice the mother looks in her new clothes. She is neither the first nor the last woman to find solace in shopping.
“The Haunted Boy” first appeared in a 1955 issue of Mademoiselle, a magazine that published “shoe and stocking news” (according to one cover) alongside stories by Truman Capote and Joyce Carol Oates. For middle-class white women like McCullers (and like myself), the 1950s was a time of economic boom and increased consumerism, when teen culture emerged and the nuclear family atomized in the suburbs.
Carson McCullers was my age, late 30s, when she wrote the story. Hailing from the South (also like me), she alternately conformed to and defied her culture’s patriarchal fantasy of what she should be. The author Jenn Shapland captures McCullers’ complexity exquisitely in her memoir-biography, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. She writes of the author’s personal style: “In some photos from her twenties, she wears a white dress, has long, waving hair past her breasts. In others, she wears a suit and a bob.” McCullers loved many women throughout her life, but married (and divorced, and then remarried) a man. It’s hard to understand why she remarried her ex-husband; there seemed to be little reason except that he wanted her to. The year was 1945; as Shapland writes, “More marriages occurred during these years than in any other period of US history, and as men came home from the front the pressure for people to return to heteronormative gender roles mounted from many corners of society.” McCuller’s husband, like her, was queer and closeted, and perhaps for this reason battled debilitating alcoholism. He abused McCullers emotionally and physically until one night in a hotel in Paris, he killed himself with sleeping pills. She didn’t attend his funeral.
Much of McCullers’ work is queer or queer-coded, depicting tomboys, gay characters both open and closeted, and same-sex “friendships” that read like love affairs. The title of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, comes from a poem by William Sharp, who for many years carried on a female alter ego named Fiona Macleod. When I read about Sharp/Macleod’s “ambivalent” relationship with W.B. Yeats, I heard Shapland in my ear, pointing out that many of McCullers’ relationships were also called “ambivalent.”
My copy of “The Haunted Boy” comes from a slim, three-story collection by the same name, published in 2018 as part of a Penguin Modern box set. Each story in the book takes place within the confines of a heterosexual nuclear family’s home. The second story, “The Sojourner,” follows a worldly yet lonesome man who visits his ex-wife and the family she has built with someone else. He seems to long for the woman and, perhaps, for this domestic life he could have had with her. It’s hard not to see a bit of McCullers in the character of the sojourner. Was she thinking of her own decision to reunite with her ex-husband when she wrote this?
Her choice to write from a male perspective is both curious to me and not. When I began writing as a teen, I idolized Fitzgerald, Salinger and Hemingway, identifying with them and their characters without ever thinking of them as “male.” Likewise, I never thought of myself as a “female” writer. McCuller’s choice of point-of-view could be a strategy for avoiding confinement in the women’s fiction shelves, or a craft choice, or another hint at her sexuality and/or gender expression. Perhaps, like me, she simply felt at odds with her culture’s portrait of femininity.
In the story, the sojourner’s ex-wife becomes more appealing to him by the minute when surrounded by her children. He muses that she “was very beautiful, more beautiful perhaps than he had ever realized. … It was a Madonna loveliness, dependent on the family ambience.” We see here the male gaze turned mother-ward. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, co-editor of the anthology, Revolutionary Mothering, writes in her essay “m/other ourselves: a Black queer feminist genealogy for radical mothering” that motherhood is “a status granted by patriarchy to white middle-class women.” Mothering, on the other hand, is an act of care done in community, outside patriarchy, and “is a queer thing,” she writes. “Not just when people who do not identify as heterosexual give birth to or adopt children and parent them, but all day long and everywhere when we acknowledge the creative power of transforming ourselves and the ways we relate to each other.” Gumbs draws particular attention to the word “other” contained in “mother.” She is not arguing that our definition of motherhood should expand to include those traditionally excluded by the term. To stop there would be “assimilating into existing white supremacist norms of family.” What Gumbs and her intellectual ancestors call for instead is to “create something new,” something queer.
McCullers herself never had children, but that’s not to say she didn’t have a family. She spent part of her twenties living in February House, a three-story Brooklyn brownstone that she shared with other queer artists. She lived off and on with her sister and mother, who helped care for her during her frequent bouts of illness. And she maintained a long-term partnership with her former therapist in the latter years of her life. The only person she couldn’t stand to live with, it seems, was her husband.
Queer family shows up not only in McCullers’ life but also in her two most famous novels. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter depicts a poignant relationship between two deaf men who live together and care for each other, until they are forced apart by a blood family member. The Member of the Weddingfollows a twelve-year-old tomboy coming to terms with being an “unjoined person” while longing to join her brother and his fiancée’s bond.
Then there’s the last of the three stories in my collection, “A Domestic Dilemma.” It reveals how motherhood as the patriarchy has defined it—caring for a child in virtual isolation—guarantees not only a mother’s undoing and the death of her true self, as we saw in “The Haunted Boy,” but also the neglect and harm of her children. In the story, a father leaves work early and comes home to his house in the suburbs, where he finds his children unattended in the living room, their mother drunk upstairs. Again, food signals failure: It’s dinnertime, yet the mother, stinking of sherry, has prepared nothing. Like Hugh’s mother discovering the joy of shopping, we witness the spectral modes of self-expression allotted to this woman: “Often at such times she affected a slight English accent, copying perhaps some actress she admired.” Finally, there’s the heavy, uneasy apprehension that all is not right in this household: “If you could only realize how sick I am –,” the father says, “how bad it is for all of us.” By “it,” he means his wife’s alcoholism. But McCullers, I imagine, means much more.
If her performance of gender is exposed, what does that mean for her husband’s?
While this story is clearly about the ills of the patriarchy, the father’s desires, like Hugh’s, are complex. He fears the town’s gossip, feeling his wife’s drunkenness undermines his manhood. But he also enjoys the tenderness of bathing his children. I am reminded of my grandmother’s surprise when, while staying at her house, my husband took the children upstairs to give them a bath. “You mean he bathes them too?” she asked in astonishment and delight. Perhaps it is possible for even those of us in heterosexual nuclear families to queer mothering.
McCullers writes of the suburban husband, “For the first time that evening he looked at his wife.” Looking at her requires him to see who she has become: a depressed drunk who cannot care for her children and hates the life her husband has built for her. She is the tradwife behind closed doors, after the selfie camera has been shut off. If a tradwife’s hyper-feminine, drag-like performance is designed for the eyes of men, not for women—as some have speculated—the tradwife in this story is not worth watching, because her faults belie the artifice of her motherhood. And if her performance of gender is exposed, what does that mean for her husband’s? A whistle of wind, and the house of cards quivers.
I think back to the opening line of “The Haunted Boy:” “Hugh looked for his mother at the corner, but she was not in the yard.” Hugh finds his mother at the end of the story, but does he really? He is haunted by the traumatic memory of her suicide attempt, yes. But he is also haunted by her authentic self, which he will never find—not here in the suburbs, and not in the 1950s American vision of family.
The men and boys in these stories desire mothering, but they look for it in motherhood—the uncanny double that their own sex has invented and imposed. To enjoy true mothering—the tender care and comfort, the love and connection and kindness—would require them to give up the jig: to relinquish their power and dominance. Until they do so, they will never find the mother they long for, but they will never stop seeking her either. She will haunt these boys their whole lives, and longer.
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