In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time we’re featuring Rosebud Ben-Oni, author of If This Is the Age We End Discovery, who is teaching several upcoming workshops and seminars with extremely intriguing names like “Writing the Sex Poem” and “Pump Up the Volume: Poetry & Music Videos.” Ben-Oni talked with us about experimentation, Haribo, and how poetry resists rule-making.
What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
Honestly, in my MFA Program, it was being given the time to write, which was fully funded by a fellowship. Years later, in CantoMundo, a fellowship organization dedicated to Latinx poetry and poetics, it was the generous spirit of community. I completed my fellowship during three retreats when CantoMundo was still at the University of Texas at Austin, and those years really helped me bloom as a poet and write the kind of poems I wanted to write, to take risks, to experiment as much as possible, which I’d been doing on my own, but the encouragement and support I received during those retreats remain invaluable.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
Not understanding the poets’ intention during a workshop or being able to ask what their intention is. The workshop professor downplaying or dismissing students’ feedback counter to their own (yes, this happened to me more than once), and not understanding students might not have the same reading tastes or come from different backgrounds (literary and otherwise.) Or encouraging a one-note atmosphere, by which I mean not being open to trying new things for the sake experimentation and curiosity and stressing only the importance of publication.
What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?
Don’t edit before you write it all out, everything you want to say. I learned this myself by looking at my own writing process. It might not work for everyone, but it helps me immensely. If I have to take out some big ideas during editing, I save them for future poems
Does everyone “have a novel in them”?
Yes, in a sense, but that novel might a long poem. You might think I’m biased, since I’m a poet. I think everyone has stories within them, whether or not they want to tell them, and quite possibly many genres in doing so. Not everything begins and ends with a narrative arc. If that’s the case, might I, again, suggest writing a poem?
Not everything begins and ends with a narrative arc. If that’s the case, might I suggest writing a poem?
Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?
That’s a hard NO. Don’t give up. Why would you? If writing is currently making you unhappy, step away from as long as you need to. Remember you don’t have to publish everything you write, right away, months from finishing a piece or even ever. Sometimes it’s best to take a break, and then come back, but try new things. For example, if you’ve been writing free verse, why not try a sonnet or villanelle? That’s just one example.
What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?
They aren’t on opposite ends, though. Both are valuable, and often interwoven within each other. For instance, you can praise an idea you see emerging in a student’s poem, but perhaps it’s not as fully flushed out as it could be. When I was younger and a student, I remember I was in one workshop where the professor did not allow any praise because he felt it would not help us. Yet half the things he himself ended up saying were often “half-praise,” if you want to call it that, because students had admirable ideas that just needed more work. I believe it’s best to be candid about what’s working for you in a poem, but also realize what’s not working for you might work for others. That’s why it’s important to me to let the student speak during the critique, which I was rarely allowed to do as a student during my own workshop days; it was thought at the time it was better to wait until everyone had their say. But things get lost, questions go unanswered or not addressed at all, especially, as I brought up earlier, the poet’s intentions for the work. It was unfortunate.
Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?
I mentioned this earlier, but I think before you’re writing with publication in mind, write the poem you want to write first. You start putting a lot of pressure on yourself worrying about if it will meet a certain style or tone that you believe to be expected. Drown out the noise and get that poem you need to bring into the world.
In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?
Kill your darlings
Show don’t tell
Write what you know
Character is plot
None of them are maxims in poetry. The best thing about poetry is that once you start trying to define in one definition or give it rules, it will go and do the opposite, and I cannot tell you how happy this makes me.
What’s the best hobby for writers?
Curiosity! For instance, ask how things work, especially those that you are interested in.
What’s the best workshop snack?
Anything Haribo, especially Peaches and Happy Cola. Side note: before the pandemic happened, I featured at this reading with a reception beforehand that had wine, cheese, quiche tarts—things like that—but of course I broke out a packet of Happy Cherries, just as a well-known poet came up to me, introduced herself and said she’d come to see me read. She immediately eyed the candy, and I asked her if she wanted to try some. It brought her such joy I ended up just giving her the bag, as she kept saying “well, maybe just one more,” and then the event began. Afterwards, she congratulated me on a great reading and held up the empty bag! She promised to buy me a new bag. I told her not to worry about it. She insisted. I said, OMG. No. And she said: But I must. This went on for a good while. It was a wonderful night. We were actually supposed to read together a few months later. Then the pandemic happened. So if she’s reading this, I’ll keep some Haribo on hand, for when we can meet again, and share a bag (or two—I’ll be ready).
When Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced it would no longer be publishing six of Dr. Seuss’s books which have aged problematically, the bookstore I work at in Scranton, Pennsylvania had a flurry of very concerned customers.
People were coming up with stacks of his books along with an unsolicited-by-me explanation for why they were buying in bulk. They had to get them before they no longer could. Sure, it might only be three titles today, none of which they would have considered buying otherwise, some of which they’d never heard of. But what about tomorrow? What happens when we cancel Green Eggs and Ham?
I do understand the worry. A friend of a friend on Facebook shared a post that suggested no good ever came from banning books and it gave me pause. Then again, those six Dr. Seuss books are not even technically banned, at least not by any federal mandate. Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided independently to stop publishing—and profiting from—specific titles which included racist caricatures, and they weren’t even pressured to do so. They simply made a judgment call based on the social climate of our time and did the right thing.
My bookstore doesn’t sell those books anymore. But we do sell Mein Kampf.
What would it have meant for someone Jewish to have to carefully cradle four copies of a book that attempted to justify their nonexistence?
I recently had to shelve four copies of Hitler’s semi-autobiographical manifesto during a shift at the store. As I held the stack between my elbow and my ribcage, I thought about the other books I’d held and shelved with care. I’m not Jewish, but plenty of booksellers are. What would it have meant for someone Jewish to have to carefully cradle four copies of a book that attempted to justify their nonexistence and promoted ideas that would eventually lead to the extermination of six million of their forebears?
The question of whether Mein Kampf is still a dangerous book raised its head in 2016, when the 70-year ban imposed on the reprinting and sale of the book in Germany was lifted because the copyright—granted to Bavaria in 1945—ran out. At that point, an annotated edition, including commentary on the lies and errors in Hitler’s writing, was published by the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History. Few imagined it would become a German bestseller the way it had been during World War II when 12 million copies were in print. At the time of the reprint’s launch, there were only a few thousand copies available. One year later, the annotated edition went into its sixth printing and it had already sold over 85,000 copies.
The edition of Mein Kampf I was shelving is published by Mariner Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publisher of Mein Kampf in the United States. HMH has published Mein Kampf since 1933 and only started donating the profits to Jewish charities in 2000. In the two preceding decades, they kept the proceeds for themselves, and while the publisher has not stated how much money the book generates annually, estimates have fallen in the tens of thousands of dollars range, as reported by The Boston Globe’s Malcolm Gay in 2016.
Some believe that banning the sale of books—or arguing to ban them, for that matter—boosts the profile of the book in question. When Amazon tried to stop carrying Mein Kampf last March, and then shortly afterwards buckled under public opinion that it was infringing free speech and re-allowed sales, the book’s sales rank on the site rose from 50,000 to 3,115. In 2016, Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker that the arguments Hitler puts forth in the book are not new, or entirely his, and it remains our struggle to resist them. He did not consider it dangerous enough to be banned. And of course, the publishers of the German annotated edition conjectured that allowing Mein Kampf to be disseminated and read widely should help demystify Nazism and root it out in our society.
If the ubiquity of Mein Kampf in bookstores isn’t deterring anti-Semitic violence, which it certainly isn’t, then why maintain it?
But that’s not what seems to be happening. Increased availability of Mein Kampf correlates with more anti-Semitic activity, not less. German police recorded an increase in anti-Semitic offenses between 2016 and 2019, with just over 2,000 cases reported in 2019—the highest in 18 years. A similar rise was reported in the United States over that span of three years, with the number of anti-Semitic incidents—including physical assault, harassment, and vandalism—hitting a high of 2,107 in 2019, the worst year since the Anti-Defamation League began keeping records in 1979.
Obviously, those numbers aren’t directly caused by the lifting of the ban on reprinting Mein Kampf in Germany, especially not in the U.S. where another megalomaniac leader was elected in the same year. But the data does undermine the intellectual utility of the book as presented by Gopnik and others in 2016. Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, told the Associated Press that the violence seen in 2019 was partly attributable to the “normalization of anti-Semitic tropes.” If the ubiquity of Mein Kampf in bookstores isn’t deterring anti-Semitic violence, which it certainly isn’t, then why maintain it?
My friend (who is Jewish) and I (who am not) often rewatch a scene from the second season of HBO’s Succession to make ourselves laugh. In it, the bumbling character Tom has to vet one of the conservative talking heads that the Roy family employs, as there are rumors that the man is a full-fledged neo-Nazi. Tom asks the guy if he’s read Mein Kampf before, to which the man affirms that he has, “a couple times.”
“A couple times?” Tom asks. “Are there Easter eggs in there you didn’t get the first time?”
That line never fails to send my friend and me into hysterics because it’s making light of an absurd conceit, which is that someone could claim to read Mein Kampf “a couple of times” for the sake of pure knowledge. No one who considers Hitler a monster is reading the whole of Mein Kampf more than once. They don’t need to own it.
I am typically in favor of using careful consideration when taking so-called “dangerous” books out of circulation. I’m well aware, for instance, that one of my favorite books—James Joyce’s Ulysses—was banned or suppressed in many countries for nearly fifteen years after publication, on the grounds of being obscene. Our understanding of what makes a book dangerous, and how that supposed danger weighs against its other merits, may evolve over time, and the decision that a book’s harm eclipses its value should not be made casually. But our views on genocide will not, or should not, change. Furthermore, Mein Kampf is not a literary work; it is a self-defense written by a man who did most of his damage through rhetoric and lies. Those living in Hitler’s time learned the destructive power words can have when passed from the lips of a dangerous, deluded leader to the ears of his dangerous, deluded supporters. Those living in this time have learned that, too.
There is a place you can go to read a book just once. We call it a library.
Today is Yom HaShoah, Israel’s day of commemoration for the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Right now, out of 1,474 global ratings of Mein Kampf on Amazon, 74 percent give the book five stars. Out of the four copies I shelved a month ago, only one remains. My coworker told me she knows who took home one of them: a teacher. He caught her judgmental gaze and quickly explained that he thought he probably should have read it at least once, just to know. Okay. Sure. But there is a place you can go to read a book just once. We call it a library.
I know what can happen if history is erased. I’m not advocating for the annihilation of the copies of Mein Kampf that currently exist. But I do believe they should be pulled from bookshelves and kept in the publisher’s warehouse, only to be distributed to libraries or to writers, historians, and students who request the text on academic grounds.
It’s on the publishers of Mein Kampf to put this plan into action. The fact that they currently donate the profits of the sale of Mein Kampf to organizations promoting Jewish tolerance should bear no weight. It’s telling that when HMH decided to let a range of nonprofits apply for the funds to promote tolerance projects, the Boston Children’s Museum, whose proposal was accepted, backed out of the plan, citing discomfort with “placing the consequences of this book in such close proximity to the Children’s Museum.” The museum is not the first organization to decline the chance to be Mein Kampf profiteers. In 1976, The German Welfare Council made a deal with Random House, the UK publisher of Mein Kampf, to put the book’s royalties towards helping Jewish refugees from Germany; no Jewish charity wanted the money. Twenty-five years later, the council ended the deal, and returned £250,000 worth of royalties back to Random House, because there weren’t many Holocaust survivors left to help. If publishers of Mein Kampf really want to support Jewish causes, they could simply stop publishing Hitler, instead of trying to offset the moral cost with dirty money.
Adam Gopnik is right that it is still our struggle to resist the arguments of hatred. I, too, am interested in understanding what makes a man like Hitler tick. But there are so many other voices writing on the subject—from people who didn’t plan and execute a mass genocide—that I’d much rather read.
A letter arrived for my birthday addressed to another woman. Despite years of marriage, my family forgets I never changed my name. With a consistency that’s a bit baffling, they often address letters to me with my husband’s name. Like many anachronistic episodes that occur between generations, they wrote a check to me once with this other woman’s name. I had to ask them to send it again, reminding them the bank will not recognize the name with my account.
I’ve reminded them and I know they don’t do it maliciously, but it always gives me pause. It’s the knock of presumption, that I am not who I am—or who I should be—that arrives with each envelope. The demands of an imposed tradition, that would have me absent myself from my own identity and take a man’s name—it’s not a minor request. It perpetuates the expectation of silence and erasure that has been imposed upon women for generations—that our identity can only exist if it is contingent upon a man.
Women have had to conceal and contort their identities in order to be visible in public since the advent of printed text.
The expectation that a woman should take her husband’s name—and the startling fact that despite a recent uptick in “maiden” names, the majority of women still take their husband’s name—is a continual negotiation of women’s identity, and of their visibility in public life. Every time I see that other woman’s name in reference to myself I am reminded of all the women whose names are missing or have been erased from history—of what it does to one’s sense of identity when you cannot attach your own name to what you write or create. Women have had to conceal and contort their identities in order to be visible in public since the advent of printed text.
When Mary Wroth (1587-1653), one of the first English women to publish an original work, offered her own name in print—a novel with a plot that appeared to reveal her personal life—she was roundly condemned for it. Edward Denny, an English courtier and member of parliament, accused her of being a “hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster.” Another critic claimed she “thincks she dances in a net” —meaning that a woman should only appear (dance) in public veiled (netted) and unknown. It was far too obvious that Wroth was brazenly making herself visible.
Women have for so long been caught within that net—forced to live in silence and invisibility, actions guarded, knowable only as the property of father or husband. The formal legal framework for marriage—brought by the Normans to England and later carried across oceans to North America—is based on the idea that women are femme covert, literally a “covered woman.” Covered by their bonds to men, a woman was not—and could not be—legally considered a separate entity. The language in Blackstone’sCommentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) is blunt:
By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage…a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence. [Women]…perform everything…under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord.
While marriage unified husband and wife as one, the one was the husband. As a result, women’s identities have been covered and concealed—and in too many cases, written out of existence.
As a married woman did not exist under coverture laws, she could not own property, could not own the wages she might make, obviously could not vote, and could not publicly claim a name of her own (an issue that maddeningly still exists in some countries). As an English court record of 1340 reflects: “when a woman took a husband, she lost every surname except ‘wife of.’”
While marriage unified husband and wife as one, the one was the husband.
Suffragists in the nineteenth century would argue that coverture laws were akin to slavery, relegating women to chattel under the control of a “Head and Master,” who made all decisions over their bodies, their households, their property. Despite movements to change such laws, spearheaded by the advocacy of Lucy Stone in America, coverture laws remained a part of legal structures in the United States into the twentieth century. In 1937, the Alabama Supreme Court held that “the general custom was for a wife to be designated by the surname and first name of her husband, together with the prefix ‘Mrs.,’” noting that this identification of married women was “more perfect and complete” than the use of their own first name (Roberts v. Grayson, 173 So. 38, 39 (Ala. 1937)). It wasn’t until 1966 that a Supreme Court ruling declared coverture laws an “archaic remnant of a primitive caste system,” intent on supporting male privilege and female subjugation. And yet it wasn’t until 1981 that the Supreme Court effectively revoked coverture frameworks, ruling that the practice of male-rule in marriage was unconstitutional (Kirchberg v. Feenstra, 450 US 455).
…God sends us Women— When you—hold—Garnet to Garnet— Gold—to Gold— Born—Bridalled—Shrouded— In a Day— “My Husband”—women say— Stroking the Melody— Is this the way?
As a woman was covered into marriage—veiled, bridalled, shrouded—the erasure of her identity was complete.
A friend of our family died recently—a man who had been like an uncle. At the funeral, we shared stories of his humor and stoicism. Months later our friend’s widow (a term that still implies a woman’s possession by a husband) shared that while she was mourning his absence, she was surprised to find herself feeling a sense of freedom—to be the femme sole—in charge of her own choices, hearing her own voice.
The frank truth of that recognition felt profound. Despite some progress made legally with regard to coverture laws, the legacy of the framework persists. If a woman does not sign her own name throughout life, her identity—what she owns, chooses, creates—becomes obscured.
My husband and I hadn’t really planned to marry. Legalities, rather than fate, intervened when we were in graduate school, when my husband was planning to attend a graduate program in Norway and I was finishing my own degree. We planned to be in Norway together for a year, perhaps two. We had been living together for over five years and had never thought about that changing, believing our commitment to one another each day was enough. But in order for me to join him in Norway under a visa, we would either have had to give years of proof of our partnership to the Norwegian government—rental agreements, financial statements, taxes—or be married. With two months until our travel date, a wedding became the simplest choice. And without a thought, I kept the name I’d had since birth—an identity that has been a companion to me my entire life.
If a woman does not sign her own name throughout life, her identity—what she owns, chooses, creates—becomes obscured.
I had naively expected that most women of my generation would keep their names. I couldn’t really imagine a reason or desire for a woman to take a man’s name in modern times. And yet I’m still surprised that I know of only two close friends who did not take their husband’s name.
What magic does a name have on paper—how can we better reflect the shape of our identities throughout the shifting stages of life, in relationship to the public, to ourselves, to children, to partners, to extended family? The voices and identities of women have for so long been made changeable, covert, silent. Erased.
Names on paper have a varied history when it comes to authorship. Identification of a single author first began as printing presses became widely available. Knowledge was no longer held in the scriptoria of the church, and books grew increasingly accessible to the public. For the early English woman writer, the arrival and circulation of printed texts offered a platform for communication—and, theoretically, the opportunity for a woman’s voice to be heard, to step into the exterior world from which she had for so long been concealed. Yet it was still a prescribed dance—the net of invisibility was still a requirement. There were narrow, constrained channels for how a woman’s name could appear in print and still have respectability—still uphold the virtues of silence and the domestic sphere.
One way women achieved this was through religious writing—demonstrating that while a woman writer may be pushing the boundaries of virtue by printing her name, the subject matter still held to the proper ideals for a virtuous woman. Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645)—one of the first women to publish a volume of poetry in English under her own name—used the boundaries of religious texts as a means to defend women, to craft a counter narrative to the misogyny of biblical texts:
I have written this small volume, or little booke, for the generall use of all virtuous Ladies and Gentlewomen of this kingdom… And this have I done, to make knowne to the world, that all women deserve not to be blamed.
Lanyer used religious frameworks to argue that the sin of woman—Eve’s original offense—pales in comparison to the sin enacted by Christ’s male crucifiers. Men tortured and caused violence; women offered empathy. Lanyer describes the scene of Christ’s crucifixion squarely focused on the women who lamented him, who recognized Christ’s divinity and showed empathy for what the world had done to him. Lanyer argued that women, in contrast to the sins of man, were redeemed because of that empathy. Women attend, they bear witness, they mourn. While women may be (primarily) excluded from the violence of the battlefield, they always attend to the casualties.
Perhaps because of this undeniable and redeeming role as mourner, another route for women to define themselves in print became possible through legacy literature. One in four women died in childbirth in seventeenth century England, a fact reflected in a tract of spiritual counsel from the 1600s that recommends itself specifically to groups of persons at great risk of death: “mariners when [they] goe to sea…Soldiers when [they] go to battell…and women when they travel of child.” Anticipating these odds, a woman’s printed account of her life, written as the child inside her grows, unsure of the frontier that lies ahead for them both, offered a chance for instruction and legacy for her children—the only way that a dead woman could speak to her now motherless child. Through accounts of mourning, women could bring their voice into a more public sphere, while still acceptably remaining in the domestic interiorscape of a virtuous woman.
It was only acceptable for a woman to write a secular text if it was predicated on the woman’s own physical erasure.
Mourning texts were prefaced with assurances from the family of the writer’s virtue—and death. The reading public could rest at ease that decorum was upheld—that they were not in danger of being corrupted by the loose morals of a living woman’s writing. Essentially, it was only acceptable for a woman to write a secular text if it was predicated on the woman’s own physical erasure.
As women had no legacy of property to bequeath, women writers bequeathed what they could—their beliefs, experiences, and thoughts. Such books included guidance for their children, but would often expand to provide comments on public, social, and political subjects as well. Death—or an impending death—gave women permission to speak in public. In the voice of mourning—by husbands and children who would go on to publish their wives and mothers’ works posthumously, or in the voice of a woman confronting her own mortality—a woman could speak in the present tense to a future where she no longer exists. It’s a ghostly voice beyond gender and the physical body—and it depends on the erasure of the woman, at the very moment she is able to assert herself in the public sphere.
As I became a mother, I was surprised to find how quickly my surname became a means of separation for my son and me. My son and husband are linked by the same surname—my surname, however, continues to connect to my father and mother (who took her husband’s name), sister, cousins, etc.—not to the family I live with as an adult, that I have chosen and helped to create.
The problem was acute when I first began traveling with my son internationally. Our different surnames stung. Airline staff, customs agents, and TSA would review our IDs, ask my 6-year old son his name, and have him confirm that I am his mother. Standing in airport security was the first time in my life that I thought about changing my name. I couldn’t stand that my son and I were not overtly recognized as family on paper, in public. There’s always the low-grade caution a parent has in protecting their child while traveling; but if we became separated for some reason, the added concern of not being easily linked to one another became a worry I hadn’t anticipated.
To have your role as a mother questioned is a tremor beneath the surface of your own identity. Even the hint of someone posing a challenge to the relationship to your child—whom you love more than anything you ever thought you could love—is threatening. I dread it each time we travel as a family—of being reminded that my name doesn’t match the name of my husband and son. Often if our seats get assigned, the airlines will find seats together for the two of them, but we have to ask them to connect to mine—and they often don’t bother.
For many early women writers who wished to claim their own name on the printed page, only a posthumous future world offered the hope of visibility.
I tried to imagine going through with changing my name, what it would feel like to become that other woman. I’m struck with the irony that for centuries, a woman’s identity was covered by a man’s name, and that I found myself actively considering if I should use the cover of my husband’s name to validate my relationship to my son—and my identity as a mother—in the eyes of the public.
Women still need to negotiate how their names and identities are used on the printed page. How can a woman’s name remain her own—maintain her own identity—when doing so becomes the very thing that separates herself from her child?
I thought of early women writers, of the love they felt and the conviction they had, to link themselves to their children, whether in death or life. Of the families that had the care to publish their deceased wives and mother’s writing, to claim her space on the page, when she could no longer claim space among the living. And of the women who made their voices heard through religious writing. Women have long had to find ways out of the net in order to claim their identity and space in public.
Writing is a magical act—a way to move between invisible and visible worlds, to travel between past and future. But for many early women writers who wished to claim their own name on the printed page, only a posthumous future world offered the hope of visibility. Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, “As a woman, I have no country.” As women writers found ways into print, perhaps the only country a woman could claim became the future—a future where a motherless child could hear and know a mother’s voice after her death. A future where women’s voices are not behind a net. A future in print. And perhaps a future that no longer would demand a living woman’s silence.
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s book The Disordered Cosmos is a book we’ve been waiting for for a long time: a science book, directed at Black folks, connecting our individual lives to the universe at large. I read it last fall, after the long summer of uprisings and constant change, and it challenged my questions on how we do this movement-building together. It’s all connected, and it begins—maybe, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein and her colleagues are still figuring that part out—with the cosmos.
The Disordered Cosmos engages with some of the most consequential questions we can ask.
The Disordered Cosmos engages with some of the most consequential questions we can ask: what and where do we come from? How do we map our origin story? How can we make a liberation plan for the future? I had the pleasure to engage Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s work and talk to her about her lineage and family, her work as a physicist, and the math that makes Black folks possible. Whether you’re a perpetual student of science or someone who’s been shut out of the broad dialogue, The Disordered Cosmos has a story to tell. And it’s here for all of us, if we want it.
AF: This was such a deeply satisfying book to read. In your chapter “The Biggest Picture” you say “To borrow a word from the Indigenous communities that my Black ancestors likely hailed from, I am a griot of the universe—a storyteller.” There’s a symmetry to how you balance personal narrative and science that help cohere this large complicated origin story of the universe. Yet you start the book with how it maybe began and juxtapose it against the timeline of your intellectual development from childhood to know. How did you decide on that approach and why was it important to include it?
CPW: There are a lot of really talented science journalists out there who specialize in communicating science to the general public. What’s different when a scientist is doing that work is that we are bringing to the table our very personal perspective on the doing of science. It’s impossible to do that dispassionately when it is your life’s work. Because this book is a holistic look at the doing of physics, it is very tied into the evolution of my own understanding of physics and what it means to do physics. Also, I think there’s something valuable in admitting that the book is going to challenge people’s perspectives on science and that I can identify with their sense of shock and maybe disappointment.
AF: When you’re doing the memory-work of writing, sometimes it feels like you have to go back, get that left-behind possibility and travel back to where you need to be. I realize I’m also asking: how does it feel to be a time traveler?
CPW: There are two answers to this question. My scientific work focuses largely on how to understand the first three minutes of spacetime’s history by looking at the last billion years or so. This means trying to draw connections between 13 billion years of history and understanding how the very small gets imprinted on the very large. This kind of time traveling using reasoning based on math and certain types of empirical evidence is super awesome. There is also the kind of time travel that is required constantly of me to look back at the challenges I faced in working toward becoming that kind of time traveler, and that’s more painful. I’m actually working on an essay right now about how my mentoring work—and academia’s refusal to change— means I never get to let the past just stay in the past.
AF: Especially now that it’s the catch-phrase-question of the moment in everyday conversation: what even is time? Like, how are we not, collectively, always asking this question?!
CPW: The funny thing about all of these questions about time is how ill-equipped physicists are to answer them. There is no point in a physics curriculum where physicists are asked to think carefully about the meaning of time. If we ask about it, we’re sent to the philosophy department. Same, generally speaking, with interpretations of quantum mechanics. I think there’s a big disconnect between public perception of the kinds of questions physicists work on and the kinds of questions we’re even allowed to ask in class. That’s a long winded way of saying I haven’t thought too much about time in any fundamental sense. For me it’s a parameter that follows a rule: we can’t reverse it or go backwards. I like following the work of thinkers like Julian Barbour who are trying very hard to better understand it in a physical sense. I encourage people to check out his new book The Janus Point, which looks at time in the context of thermodynamics.
I think there’s a big disconnect between public perception of the kinds of questions physicists work on and the kinds of questions we’re even allowed to ask in class.
AF: Your desire for a holistic approach to cosmology and particle physics in and of itself is a Black Feminist futuring, and adds some elasticity to how we see the world. In “Black Feminist Physics at the End of the World” there’s incredible grief and anxiety alongside imagining into curiosity and play and pleasure. I think of two lines from Lena Blackmon’s epigraph that opens the book “here is what is true:/ a black body radiator be in thermodynamic equilibrium which is to say/ a black body be at rest yes let the black bodies rest”. We have to ask big questions to deal with these very real problems. Do you have big questions for future joy?
CPW: I hope in a future that it is more normal for physicists to think about time and about interpretations of quantum mechanics. The proliferation of questions about these ideas—and the rise of analogies which use them—indicates that this is something that people enjoy thinking with. It’s so unfortunate that physicists aren’t in a better position to provide support on how to think about these things from the perspective of people who work with quantum mechanics and its consequences on a regular basis. I want to add that part of what is so incredible about Lena’s poem is that she wrote it as someone who is thinking through both physics and analogy. She’s a talented materials scientist and a talented poet. The poem works in both ways. I want a Black feminist future where other folks can experience the kind of multilayered joy that I did in being able to understand her work on both levels.
AF: I love that, as a dual seeing! You said the reason why you love your cosmology work is because it feels like being the keeper of a deeply human impulse. I think our impulse is to find those patterns that lead us to something.
CPW: It’s interesting how important patterns are in science and also how Black people’s ability to identify patterns is constantly questioned. I will never get over how brazen this juxtaposition is. We know what it’s like to be Black in a white supremacist world and yet we are constantly gaslit about whether it means anything at all. Holding fast to our storytelling ability is therefore a form of resistance. Particle cosmology has been my North Star. It keeps me focused on what makes me human. To see past the struggle, to the possibility of joy.
Particle cosmology has been my North Star. It keeps me focused on what makes me human. To see past the struggle, to the possibility of joy.
AF: Absolutely, I hear you. Joy is a possibility we work toward. I think of that joy when I think about the way you thread your relationship with your mother. In epigraph, throughout the book and ending with a reverent letter to you mother, I can’t help but go back to your comfortability in juxtaposition (and sometimes your worry of its limitations). But the insistence of tenderness, especially for fiery Black women feels like a way of reclaiming our whole selves, and the grace to do that reclamation. What led you to end on a letter?
CPW: That letter has so many different impulses in it. The first one was that I wanted to thank my mother, and I wanted to do it in a big public way. It’s a long-winded way of saying, “You’re gonna remember her name.” I wanted to be clear that Margaret Prescod who feels that she is an idiot at math has made contributions to science, by being part of the community that shaped me as a scientist. I also wanted to experiment also with writing to her, and this was inspired by Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy, where he writes in the second person. And actually the letter started really differently in early drafts. Then one day I was thinking about how the Lagrangian is this fundamental tool in theoretical physics, and I hadn’t discussed it at all in the book. I wanted to try my hand at explaining it to my mom. And I feel it is very much in the spirit of my mom’s mission in the world, that by sharing it with her, it becomes a sharing to the whole community. We weren’t supposed to learn how to read or do math, and here I am, writing down Lagrangians. We’re allowed to write down big equations and understand them and dream with them. Making sure we actually get to is part of my freedom dream for Black folks—and everyone else too.
Daisy is a show pony and she always has been. She’s got the pompoms, the leotard, the hip-hop dance class at the YWCA, the youth theater auditions, the singing lessons, and the piano recitals. She’s got the special smile she uses when there’s a camera nearby and she says Please and Thank you without ever having to be reminded. She’s only nine now, two years younger than me, but I don’t feel like I’ve got any kind of first-born clout here.
My family lives near the ocean, and the salt air eats away at the foundation of our house each winter, but this is not something Daisy would ever notice. While she’s plié-ing in the kitchen, I’m studying the way everything under us is cracking apart, splintering, and coming undone. There are fractures on the patio, and the walls sometimes seem to swell and sway, barely able to stand the pressure.
Sometimes when Ronny, my stepdad, is out with his friends, and Mom is at work, and Daisy is looking at herself in the mirror or whatever she does, I go down into the cellar. It’s cold down there, so it’s best in the summer. The slugs all move in for the moisture, crawling along the damp floor, leaving trails of silver. The main kind of slugs we have are the shiny black ones called Black Arions. I looked them up, found out they’re hermaphrodites. I wasn’t sure what a hermaphrodite was, so had to look that up too. Sometimes when I look up stuff, I tell Ronny and he’s usually impressed that I know so much, but this isn’t something I want to explain to Ronny.
Earlier this summer there was a day when everyone was out, and I did something I’d been thinking about doing for a long time. I went to the cellar, took off all my clothes, and lay down in the middle of all the slugs. It felt like hours, waiting. A lot of them came close then stopped, curled up or changed directions. But then finally one and then another slowly made their way up my side, crossing the landmass of me. I tried to stay completely still, pretended I was a corpse. I wondered what we looked like as their cold bodies glided over mine, wondered what someone would think if they walked through the door and saw. Then I imagined it was me coming through the door, looking down at my own body. Flat chest, slender hands and feet, and all my pet slugs around me, a whole kingdom. I saw myself and thought, “Here’s someone who is interesting at least.”
But I’m not sure anyone else would agree.
Now, I can’t get the idea of a hermaphrodite out of my head. I feel distracted with it all the time. Wonder if I know any hermaphrodites. Sometimes I think Ronny might be a hermaphrodite. Once I saw him in Mom’s dress and they were laughing in the bedroom and closed the door and kept on laughing, and they never said anything about it later. Mom could be one too. She’s got these thick hairs above her lip that she sometimes forgets to pluck and when they grow out there’s a dark shadow there.
My dad left us when I was one, and I don’t remember him. Mom says I don’t need to worry about him because I got her genes. She said before I was born she thought I might come out black, because he was black, but I’m almost as white as her, prone to sunburns. I did have dark, curly hair like him when I was little but it has lightened—Mom says with the sun—and softened over time. I wish I had something from him, something I could point at and say, “See, this is from my dad.”
Daisy is my half-sister, but I’ve known her almost my whole life. Sometimes I feel bad just calling Ronny my stepdad because he’s been here for so long. Daisy has all the luck. She’s good at everything, has two parents who made her on purpose, and she’s pretty in a way that people recognize, even just on the street. When she was younger, and some stranger would say how cute Daisy was, Mom would always correct them.
“She’s not cute, she’s INTELLIGENT,” Mom would tell them, and give them the eye.
Most people didn’t seem to understand, probably were horrified that this mother was yelling in the grocery store about how her daughter wasn’t cute. People generally haven’t exclaimed about my cuteness, but I do get some attention. Mom says I’m precocious, and when she says it I know I have something Daisy doesn’t have. This past year, right before school let out, I got sent to the office because the teacher told us to make Father’s Day cards, and I told her that her assumptions about the nuclear family were misguided. She just stared back at me with her round mouth open like a cave, and I could see her gold fillings in the back, before her lips got hard and tight and she told me to leave the room. The principal called home, but that night when she got off work, Mom just gave me a big hug.
“The nuclear family is misguided, huh?” she asked me before lights-out. She leaned in my doorway and rolled herself a cigarette.
I told her that a few months back I had heard her talking with her friend Francis—that I’d sat in the hallway and listened as they drank wine and blew cigarette smoke out the window.
“Francis said nuclear families were nothing to strive for and were often pretty dysfunctional,” I reminded her.
Mom smiled and gave me this look she gives me sometimes. “You’ve got a good memory, kiddo. I’m scared to ask what other conversations you’ve eavesdropped on,” she said, laughed a little, turned out my light, and went to go smoke.
But I couldn’t sleep. I wondered what else Mom talked about with Francis when they thought no one was listening. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I think about the Black Arions in the basement, living their hermaphrodite lives. I picture their slick black bodies, their movements so slow and sure. If I visualize them long enough I can usually fall asleep. Sometimes though, I keep worrying about things. My biggest fear is that I’ll grow up to be a regular woman with boobs and kids and stresses. I don’t want that, not at all.
My friend Stacey just got a bra and I can tell she is so proud of it, like she’s getting somewhere, like she’s grown up. I don’t mind that she’s excited, but I don’t have much to say because that’s the last thing I want. I don’t want to explain anything though because I might end up telling her about the slugs and she wouldn’t understand. I can’t think of anyone who would understand. Not Mom, not Ronny, and definitely not Daisy. I wonder if my dad would understand, like maybe he left because he agreed that a nuclear family wasn’t all that great, and maybe he was precocious like me, and wouldn’t think it was weird if he knew about me and the Black Arions.
I thought everyone was out again today when I went to the basement. I took off my clothes and lay down in the spot I liked, near the window that looked out at the yard at eye level, so I could see the overgrown grass and the ocean winds blowing the cedar tree. There was one Black Arion out, and it was curled in a ball of silver it had made. I curled in a ball too. Then it stretched out a little and moved, and I tried to copy what it did exactly. I wasn’t thinking of it as a dance, but for a second I could understand why Daisy liked to practice her assemblés and arabesques over and over. I stayed on the floor for a while, making the same shapes as the slug, but I was getting cold. When I pushed myself over, I saw her feet first, housed in pink ballet shoes, and when I looked up, there was Daisy, staring at me with a look on her face that made my stomach turn icy.
“Mom! Dad!” she screamed, strangely guttural and hoarse, in a terrified voice I’d never heard before. “Help!” Like it was an emergency.
Mom and Ronny came running down the stairs, stopping next to Daisy a few feet away from me. I stood there before them, shivering and naked.
No one said anything at all.
Below us, the Black Arion stretched itself out, gracefully covering everything in silver, looking like it was having the time of its life.
When I Google-searched inspiration for a list of books about codependent relationships, I was sent immediately to the self-help area. There is a whole subgenre of books, it seems, dedicated to teaching people how not to need each other so much. But I’m interested in something else. What I want to read about is how deeply and obsessively characters want each other, how completely their desire transforms them, how two characters together become something other than either character could be alone. I’m interested in characters who create miniature worlds together, with their own rules, and maybe their own language. I’m interested in how these mutually-constitutive relationships free them of some of the world’s interpretations and demands, and even sometimes empower them to imagine and enact new realities.
“Mental health is always so measured by a person’s ability to thrive independently,” says one of the Sarahs in my story collection Sarahland. She’s a Sarah obsessed, a Sarah with the urge to merge, a Sarah who wants to both be and become her lover. While this particular Sarah loves with an intensity that borders on violence, the collection is full of Sarahs who love a little too hard, who desire a closeness a little too extreme, who merge with pop-cultural and literary figures, with fantasies, and with each other, and in this merging, transform.
For those of us who struggle in a world of hierarchical power, and especially for those who are not privileged by the structures in place, sometimes a magical-seeming other shines like a beacon, like a map of possibilities, like a way out, like a potential future. Sometimes it’s only possible to be who we’re meant to be by being it together. Here are 13 books that explore the earth-shattering capacity of the power of two.
Nan, a dorky small town oyster shucker in 19th century England, is obsessed with Kitty, a cross-dressing cabaret performer in a can’t-tell-if-you-wanna-fuck-her-or-be-her way. She spends all her oyster money on seeing Kitty’s show every single night and then, on the road as Kitty’s assistant, she ends up doing both, fucking Kitty and becoming her. Kitty trains Nan as a performer and they’re madly in love and have a successful cabaret show as cross-dressed twins. I love this novel for its portrayal of how recognition of queer desire can blow apart the world, completely reshaping one’s identity and way of moving.
Midcentury American David moves to Paris at least unconsciously so that he can explore his homosexual desire. He drifts his way into a bar of swishy men with their own language of she pronouns and witty repartee and falls for Giovanni. The eponymous room is dark and at the edge of town, and in it, away from the rules and the gaze of the world, David and Giovanni are liquefied by desire. Only, David remains a little solid, eventually leaves the nest of mutual queer reconstitution for a life of bourgeois respectability. Giovanni says he will die without David, and, via a series of devastating events, does.
A rich Brazilian lady enters her maid’s room once her maid has left, sees a cockroach, and falls so in love with it that she does not know how she will ever return to humans and parties and language etc. The cockroach somehow contains the goo that is the meaning of all life, the narrator understands herself as an earth creature, all former meaning is lost to her, and the cockroach sees her and remakes her in its gaze. This is the whole plot of this book. It is one of my favorites.
This is a book about an adolescent misfit named Frankie who becomes codependent with her own fantasy of her brother’s wedding. She is sure that the wedding is “the we of me.” As a girl in love with a wedding, Frankie transforms: she changes her name to Jasmine and moves around her town with a new sense of agency and possibility. I love that Frankie/Jasmine is able to be so transformed by love for an object that only exists in her imagination.
In the world of this novella, adolescent boys and young men are non-consensually impregnated by very nurturing aliens. The aliens seem to truly love the boys, cuddling them from babyhood and feeding them a sweet druggy milk straight from their bodies. But they are also implanting them with little alien eggs that will have to be harvested by slicing the boys open in an extremely violent procedure the boys may or may not survive. This story fucked me up forever around the question of whether violence and possession are ever fully separable from love, and made me wonder if all love stories are horror stories, too.
In this queer reimagination of the vampire novel, the sharing of blood and power are used to fight against forces of oppression. The name Gilda is passed down from vamp to sire blurring the lines between self and other, especially when one Gilda has the other Gilda’s blood coursing though her veins. The Gilda Stories imagines what is possible when multiple marginalized yet powerful outsiders merge and power becomes collective.
Baby from Dirty Dancing has a Catskills tryst with Patrick Swayze in which she imagines herself as a leather hunk named Bruce, such that when she leaves the Catskills, she is no longer Baby at all. Maria from Sound of Music has her affair with Captain von Trapp but then realizes that she actually wants to be Captain von Trapp and leaves for the mountains to figure that out. In this collection of stories, the narrator merges with pop-cultural objects, transforming them into queerer situations even as he comes to understand who he is on their terms. A book about inescapable codependency with the most mainstream cultural narratives, while allowing those narratives to shape-shift in order to become the stories we need.
A postmenopausal woman in a future corporate dystopia eats a forbidden durian and gives birth to a human girl, Miranda, who’s a little stinky and scaly. Miranda is the reincarnation of Nu Wa, a mermaid from 18th-century China who had transformed into a human in love with a girl who sold salt fish in the market. Miranda works in a lab, for a doctor who is secretly running tests on her, when she meets Evie, a mostly human but part freshwater carp clone, part of a cadre of clones created as a labor force for factories. Evie and Miranda escape the world of corporate ownership and human experimentation, find a hot spring in a forest, and grow mermaid tails which merge together so that they become a single two-headed mermaid—unbeknownst to them, possibly a return to Miranda’s original Nu Wa form, and only possible together.
Ames FKA Amy has de-transitioned, gets his girlfriend Katrina pregnant, and decides he needs his ex-girlfriend Reese—who he hasn’t spoken to in five years—to co-parent the baby with him and Katrina. Katrina sees him as a cis man and her gaze, he is sure, will turn him into a cishet father, something he knows he cannot survive. He wants Reese to be there to see and keep seeing the Amy within Ames, who is dormant without her continued vision. It kind of works out for everyone, maybe. I love the possibility this novel suggests of gathering up exes into a family in order to be who you were with all of them at the same time, instead of having to let those selves go.
Dracula is already a book about codependence, maybe all vampire books are. It’s about women who are only rescued from the safe prison of domesticity by merging with the monstrous. In this book, the Dodie character merges with Mina Harker in her own kind of vampirization of literature, merging with the text at the same time that she merges with the Kevin character, falling in messy, needy, sometimes gross love.
It’s weird because I thought we learned that this was a book about feminism and a woman’s right to sleep around among a town of judgy Puritan gossips. But I reread this recently and it’s actually more about the codependent relationship between Reverend Dimmesdale, the father of Hester Prynne’s child, and Roger Chillingsworth, her cuckolded husband. Chillingsworth moves in with Dimmesdale under false pretenses as a supposed healer, in order to gleefully torment him. He drives Dimmesdale to spiritual and psychological illness while he himself becomes a caricature of a raving psychopath. Once Dimmesdale dies of guilt-and-shame-related illness, Chillingsworth dies too. The message of this book might be that codependence between white settler patriarchs can never lead to good.
“Did I love her or want to be her? Is there a difference?”
The narrator’s decades-long friendship with SL is beyond friendship; it is a relationship about which the narrator says, “I don’t want to exist much outside his thinking and regard,” about which he says, “I have felt myself becoming him,” about which he says, “how can he have a thought, a feeling, without me?” An essay about the real life that is brought forth by the birth of a we, and the devastation when those wes are disrupted: by AIDS, by racism, by heterosexual marriage. The essay ends with a suggestion that we are all acting out of desire to mirror the we to which we feel we belong, that even the white girl prosecutors of the Central Park Five were acting “in an effort to prove their twinship with Lady Justice.”
After Manu is sexually assaulted and Nadine witnesses the murder of her friend, the two join forces and become something new and unimaginable together. What they become is serial murderers, on a road trip killing spree. While this book is emotionally difficult to read, it is also thrilling to witness the joining of two separate girls such that they become something wholly other that is only possible together. It’s also hard not to fall in love with the incredible mutual tenderness between them as they destroy the world that has fucked them up.
Fan of the best-selling Humans of New York book series? Then buckle up for the newest spin: HUMANS OF THE APOCALYPSE. Stunning photography is seamlessly paired with words in these intimate portrayals of citizens at the end of days.
“As we went into the fourth year of Zoom, I was pretty much totally checked out. I logged on, sure, but barely made any eye contact or spoke with anyone. But there was something about his box that was different. He never turned his camera on, not once in any of the daily calls for three years, and he only unmuted to say ‘yeah’ or ‘no.’ But oh, those yeahs and nos! Like the music of Apollo. I started to imagine him saying ‘yeah’ to having a private chat, or even… taking things outside the corporate communications structure. The fantasies sustained me for well over a year until one day, he just didn’t log in for the morning huddle. ‘Quit,’ they said. ‘Got another job,’ HR told me. But I say ‘no’ to that. He’ll be back, as long as I keep logging in each day at 9am EST, I’ll see his blank box with his initials again. I have to.”
“I rarely went outside after the moon fell out of orbit, but that day I happened to glance over and see a single moth flying around aimlessly. I opened the window a tiny crack and he darted right in—he clearly needed a friend! I named him Bartholomew the pantry moth, and we’ve been inseparable ever since. When I shower from my bucket, he flaps around keeping an eye out for marauding packs of sentient Airpods. When I eat, I save a few drops of rehydrated potato soup for him. I may have saved him physically from the rapidly deteriorating air quality, but really, Bartholomew saved ME. Emotionally. From loneliness.”
“On paper, we should never have worked. But when a planet no longer has the resources to produce paper goods, you just have to follow your heart. I told everyone who would listen that I wanted to go out in the first wave of the Great Murder-Off of 2034. But she was a prepper. Never left the inhabited zone without her lifestraw. We bumped into each other one day in a picked over Shake Shack, both looking for one last hit of ketchup. It was love at first slurp from the nearly empty industrial vats. Now here we are, side by side in this little bunker partition we’ve made into a home. I’m still an anxious mess when she’s out on a food procurement mission, but every time my little ash-covered angel returns I rush to her, destroyed by another wave… of love.”
“Flee for more space in the sea steading communities? Never! Like an airborne fungus is going to be stopped by your arbitrary maritime boundaries. I’m just as safe here. The 287 square feet you see behind me are the pinnacle of good taste and human ingenuity. A composting toilet, an ultraviolet air sanitation system, and wainscotting. And thanks to Amazon’s new at-home pap smear kit and DIY orthodontia, there’s nothing I need outside of these 4.5 walls. The only way I’m leaving this apartment is as a dehydrated puck within a hermetically sealed jar inside a biowaste bag carried out by a Sanitation Force Drone. What was it my mom used to say? ‘Over my dead body.’ Ha! Adorable. I miss her. Well, I would, if I hadn’t taxidermied her and put her in the corner. There really is an Amazon kit for everything.”
”On the one hand, I’m just so mad at her. She kept insisting we had to use all-natural cures for everything even as it became clear that the Great Sleeping Scourge was becoming more and more of a problem. How many times did she dump my coffee and caffeine pills and Four Loko IV’s down the drain before handing me a vial of her signature essential oil ‘energy’ blends? To this day, I can’t smell clary sage without remembering the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled. Or yawned. And there were so many more yawns than smiles those last few weeks. Before she gave into the hibernation programming.
On the other hand, I just miss her so much. I know she’d want me to keep dropping fennel under her tongue and wait this thing out, Sleeping Beauty-style, but I think it’s time to pull the plug. There has to be a time limit on how long you have to care for your partner as they sleep in a sensory deprivation tank. Especially when that tank is really just a discarded Yeti cooler…and we need that water to make more coffee. Which brings me to the GoFundMe campaign I just launched…”
“My ancestors are what the media used to call ‘conspiracy theorists’—people who were always looking for a covert group or organization to blame for things. It was a pejorative term back then. But being theorists is what allowed my kin to decipher the symbols—and know that trouble was on the way before anyone else. My great-grandparents were the first to head into their custom bunkers, and I was the first of my generation to come out. 90 years the Johnson family spent down there—whew! Now, all the ‘rational,’ ‘educated’ people are gone, and everyone left is a theorist just like me. We can’t agree on much (I don’t think dogs are being abducted to make baseball gloves, but try telling them to my buddy Steve!), but we sure do love to argue. What news source did you say you’re from, again?”
“I was so optimistic then, when we thought the nuclear turtle crisis would blow over in a few months. When we worried about trivial things instead, like where to find yeast. So like Dr. Frankenstein, I created my own monster. All it took was flour, water, time, and hope. But my monster, like that first weaponized turtle, took on a life of his own. He was an enabler, encouraging all my bad habits, whispering in my ear, ‘You know it never tastes as good when it’s cooled. Carpe the carbs, baby.’ Yet he was so capricious—sometimes much too sour, other times barely bothering to give me a yeasty pop of encouragement. No amount of flour or water or salt I gave was ever enough. ‘MORE,’ he would cry even as his rage and corporal form bubbled over into bigger and bigger containers. One day though, something broke—the glass jar I kept him in, specifically. I left the lid on after feeding him. Some might say I did it on purpose. But I have no regrets. I am free. Well, as free as anyone is these days in New Tortuga.”
“She was the last person I would have expected to succumb. While the rest of us were depressed, anxious, complaining about our new Bug overlords (turns out Starship Troopers was pretty right on), Maria never stopped being positive. ‘I think the Bugs have some pretty good ideas on composting,’ she’d say, or ‘The Bugs only took over a year ago, let’s give them a chance to get settled in!’ She wore t-shirts asking ‘Who’s Gonna Planet? The Bugs!’ and voluntarily signed up for the Bug Reeducation program. Whenever I complained about marching in the serpentine lines or wearing the electronic collars, she told me to ‘look on the bright side,’ and ‘I think being negative is a waste of energy.’ After a few more months, I started to notice that her skin was turning red, and starting to peel off. ‘Probably just too much exposure to toxins,’ she said, switching us to all-natural sunscreen. But then her eyes started turning green, and her tongue became black and bubbly. By the time we could get her an appointment with an in-network, non-Bug doctor, it was too late. ‘Toxic positivity’ is what they say killed her. To be fair, I will say that the Bugs allowed me to bury her, rather than eat her corpse like they normally do. So that was nice.”
In addition to all the other crises happening everywhere, we are in the midst of the worst refugee crisis in history. Many refugees have fled countries that, as Americans, we have been in conflict with for entire generations, but they’re fleeing for the same reasons anyone leaves their home—fear and desperation. And while many other countries have stepped up and taken in refugees from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine, our former president implemented a Muslim ban that has only been lifted in the past month of a new administration.
As millions of displaced people search for a safe place to land, I hope they will once again find a haven in our country.
Many Americans have hardened their hearts to this crisis by seeing Arab peoples only through a lens of 9/11, our invasion of Iraq, or their confusion over Syria’s civil war. They forget that Arab culture is and has been a part of American culture (hummus anyone?) and that most Americans probably already have a neighbor or two that can trace their ancestry back to one of the oldest regions in the world. Arab peoples are complex and varied. Even in the category of religion, there are those who define themselves as Palestinian Christians or secular Syrians or Lebanese Muslims or Iraqi Jews. Or there are the Arab people who, like me, have ancestry from several places and see themselves as Palestinian Syrians or Lebanese Egyptians first before any other identifier.
As millions of these displaced people search for a safe place to land, I hope they will once again find a haven in our country. These seven Arab American poets will introduce you to a piece of the Arab diaspora and the Arab American experience. I’m excited to share the Arab American women I regularly share with my daughter. These poets embody the characteristics you want in a new neighbor and friend. They, like me, are strong, committed to their own troubled, but beautiful history, and are ready to roll the welcome mat out to refugee women suffering around the globe, ensuring everyone has a future.
Adnan writes: “writing comes from a dialogue with time.” She should know. Now in her mid-90s, she captivated me first as a painter, then an activist resisting the Vietnam war and the civil war in Lebanon. All her art reflects her sense of displacement and duality and she’s lived a very full life. Her partner, Simone Fattal, published many of her early books. Any book by Adnan is worth it, but I adore Time as a rumination about the ways countries and people break our hearts and put them back together. In her poem, “Friday, March 25th at 4PM,” she says: “there are wounds / that wait for the heart / to dress them.”
Alyan’s wonderful novel Salt Houses, about a multigenerational Palestinian family, won her a Dayton Literary Peace Prize and an Arab American Book Award. But it was her book Hijra, focusing on the stories of Arab women, war, and selfhood, that made me a fan for life. These are not emotionally easy poems. In “Amna” she writes: “Love is filching/ your child’s air from her white throat,/ feeding her to the river before/ the army arrives. Ask any woman.” These poems will break you, then make you sing.
Nathalie Handal considers herself French Palestinian American and has written many books and plays. There is nothing of hers I’ve read that hasn’t made me want to read it aloud. Her latest book is Life in a Country Album and, as with much of Handal’s work, is lush, mind-bending, and multi-lingual. In “Les chemins lumière,” she says: I have to carefully / choose my words, / to keep my wounds / and love apart.”
Rizkallah says all the things I feel as a fellow Lebanese American woman at this moment in America’s history. She won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize for the magic my body becomes. This collection contains one of my favorite poems: “if teta never had to leave lebanon I wonder if she would make preserves,” where she writes: “they tell me to be less Poetry about my rage…sometimes there is only the bubble on the job applications / where you fill in a circle because you’re working hard you’re a good / American today / you get to be white as long as you’re behaving but you’re a liar…” In her interview in 2017 in the LA Times Review of Books she said, “viewing your body however you choose is revolutionary.” Her book is a testament to Arab American women being unapologetic about their stories.
Majaj’s poem “Guidelines” is the kind of poem I wish I’d written about being Arab American and the stereotypes that follow that assertion. “If they wave newspapers in your face and shout, / stay calm. Remember everything they never learned. / Offer to take them to the library…. If they ask you if you’re white, say it depends…. If they ask how long you plan to stay, say forever.” Majaj is a Palestinian American poet and scholar. Though she’s only written one book of poems, Geographies of Light (which won the Del Sol Press Poetry Prize), all the poems satisfy her belief that poetry can “bear the longings of individuals, and of nations…[as well as] give us something to hold onto in the midst of despair.”
Camp’s father escaped Iraq after the Farhud (the genocide of the Jewish population of Baghdad), but he never talked about his life there. Her third book, One Hundred Hungers (winner of Tupelo Press’s Dorset Prize), pieces together her family’s unspoken history. The book is one part ancestry reconstruction, one part searching for self, and many parts homage to those who perished. It is filled with family and shared meals. Camp is a master of the luscious line, as in “Variation: Let’s Pretend”: “Let’s agree that you’ll tell me the details./ Please. You have to remember every flake/ of the air and the furrows of danger.” It is one of the most sensuous books you’ll ever read and characteristic of the gorgeousness of her work.
In every list helping with despair, it helps to have an activist who can still find joy in the world. If you need to laugh through your tears, Syrian American Kahf is your woman. A professor, poet, and member of the Syrian Nonviolence Movement, Kahf’s strength is her ability to be outrageous, satirical, and lyric all at once. I’d recommend her book Hagar Poems because it has one of my favorite sequences and is a good introduction to Kahf’s humor, “Little Mosque Poems:” “My little mosque offers courses on / the Basics of Islamic Cognitive Dissonance. / ‘There is no racism in Islam’ means / we won’t talk about it / ‘Islam is unity means / shuttup.”
My family has established a post-dinner routine ever since I’ve moved home during the pandemic: clear the table, wash the dishes, turn on our latest Korean entertainment binge. One night, we decide to watch Minari, Lee Isaac Chung’s film about a Korean American family that moves to a mostly-white Arkansas town so the father, Jacob, can pursue his dream of starting his own farm. Monica, his wife, is his reluctant counterpart.
The director based the story on his own childhood in 1980s Arkansas. His character, David, is six years old in the movie, around the same age I arrived in America. Anne, the older sister, is his responsible, mature babysitter. As I watch the film with my parents and my little brother, I see myself in both characters—the wide-eyed boy excited about the move, and the sister who tries to keep the family together.
I see myself in both characters—the wide-eyed boy excited about the move, and the sister who tries to keep the family together.
The eccentric maternal grandmother flies in from Korea to live with the family on the farm. Monica is immediately overcome with emotion when she sees the black plastic bags of chili flakes and dried anchovies her mother has packed.
“It’s so hard to get this here,” Monica says, wiping away her tears.
The scene reminds me of my mother’s own tear-stained greetings at the airport whenever my grandmother came to visit us during the holidays. She bore overflowing boxes of kimchi, dried squid, and soybean paste packaged under layers of bubble wrap to entrap the pungent fermented scents.
My grandmother would boast. “Customs? Aigo, not to worry! We just shook our heads and strolled past them—I deserve an acting award.” I always suspected an alternative truth—Customs agents probably sniffed the acridity from a mile away and left my wizened grandmother alone rather than deal with the hassle.
The most heart-wrenching scene of all is one where we glimpse the depth of Monica’s desperation. The family is on the verge of bankruptcy. Monica pulls Jacob away from the children to announce she’s leaving him and taking the kids to California.
“I can’t bear it,” her English subtitles read. “I’ve lost my faith in you.” In reality, the words translate more accurately to something like this: I can’t keep holding on anymore just by looking at you. I’m too tired for this.
The line hits me like deja vu—something I’ve heard my own mother say in the distant past. I steal glances at her out of the corner of my eye. Her laughs are bittersweet and filled with a kind of remorse. I can tell by the way they catch in her throat that she is Monica. I wonder if my parents have ever had conversations like Monica and Jacob’s out of my earshot.
The next evening, when I complain about entering my mid-20s, my mother sighs. “When I was your age, I was getting engaged.”
“When you put it that way, umma… I can’t even imagine.”
Why did they stay? Was it out of love? And will we ever truly know what lies in their hearts?
My mother is a little drunk from the soju we’ve had along with our bossam. “I wasn’t supposed to leave everything behind. I regret it all.” My father winces while avoiding her gaze. I pat her on the back and cluck gently, at a loss for words.
I toss and turn that night haunted by questions about Monica and my mother. Though Minari is centered around Jacob’s quest of staking out his own land, my dreams drift to Monica and her untold motivations.
Why did they stay? Was it out of love? And will we ever truly know what lies in their hearts?
My first memoryin America takes place in a preschool office—my small hand transferred from my mother’s coarse palm to pale smooth skin.
I remember peering up at the teacher’s face. She was young and white—the first white person I had seen so up close. The sunlight reflected off her blonde hair from behind her, creating a dizzying halo. Her sharp features were bizarre to me. How is her nose bridge so high? I wondered.
“Don’t worry,” my mother stated firmly. “You’ll have fun.”
“Where are you going, umma?” I shifted my feet nervously.
My parents grinned at me and retreated from the teacher with slight bows, the Confucian method of greeting instinctual in their stooped bodies. My eyes welled up with tears, realizing that they were leaving me alone with this unfamiliar woman. I watched silently through the window as they left down the exit ramp and climbed into our Toyota minivan.
The teacher led me to the back of the building, where a group of children were shrieking in a tanbark lot. Beaming, she kneeled down to reach me at eye level and said something unintelligible while pointing in their direction. I reluctantly shuffled over to the corner of the playground. No one took notice of me cowering on the swing set.
After school, I ran to my mother, who stood waiting for me by the manicured front lawn. She wore a red wide-brimmed visor to protect her flawless Seoul skin from the harsh California sun. It cast an elongated shadow over her face, obscuring her eyes from my vantage point.
She reached out and stroked my hair. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
I shrugged. “I guess. I didn’t really understand anyone.”
“Let’s go look at some English books,” my mother said, waving goodbye to the teacher.
We walked across the bridge to Cupertino Library, a massive two-story glass structure. Row upon row of arched fountain water scattered through the sluggish afternoon heat as diapered toddlers squealed and splashed around. In the hallway before the children’s section, we stopped before the enormous floor-to-ceiling aquarium. I was awestruck—everything was so big in America. Throngs of children sat cross-legged in front of the blue glass, riveted by the clownfish and blue tangs floating by. Lying beside me on the dusty carpet in the children’s section, my mother traced the large-print words with her forefinger.
“The cow–jumped—over—the—moon,” she slowly sounded out. “Now, you try.”
I chanted back. “The cow jumped over the moon!” Memorizing my mother’s recitations was a thrilling—but feasible—challenge. It was easy enough to recall her strings of nonsense based on the illustration on the page.
“Good girl. Let’s check out the rest of these books.”
We trekked back across the bridge to our new apartment, the newly-acquired picture books stacked into my mother’s backpack. I sing-songed at our second-floor doorstep while swinging my mother’s hand back and forth. “The cow jumped over the moon, the little dog laughed, to see such a sport, and the dish ran away with the spoon…”
She looked crestfallen. ‘I don’t understand anything they’re saying. It’s too fast. How am I going to live here?’
Once inside, my mother set the books aside and turned on the TV. The news blared across the boxy screen. I stared, mesmerized by the fast-paced dictation and the slate of faces that looked so unlike the anchors back in Seoul.
“W-a-r. What does that mean, umma?” I spelled out the shortest word I saw on the fixed caption below. My mother didn’t respond, so I turned to prod her arm.
She looked crestfallen. “I don’t understand anything they’re saying. It’s too fast. How am I going to live here?”
Eventually, my brain soaked up English like a sponge. It was only weeks before I went from the lonely outsider on the playground to giggling during naptime with my new friends and volunteering excitedly to read aloud during storytime. The shock from being dropped into the middle of an English-speaking world is retained only in that single memory from that first day at preschool. I have no other recollections of struggling with the language, only a period when I didn’t know English at all, then suddenly, afterwards, when I did.
My mother, at age 32, began a more painful parallel process. Despite her master’s degree from a prestigious women’s college and her former coveted government position at Korea’s National Forensic Service agency, her credentials were wiped clean in America. She had to re-earn her pharmaceutical license in the States. She studied fervently during those first few years, her slight frame burrowed amongst binders. When I kissed her goodnight, I found her hunched over, furiously marking up stacks of textbooks. The fluorescent kitchen lights glinted off the wet highlighter ink on the page.
My mother passed the technical exams on her first try. She had always been a gifted student and it only took her a few months to refresh her memory. Medical terminology, universally in English, allowed for a smoother transition.
It was the Test of Spoken English that took years to crack. The TSE was an oral test designed to measure the communication ability of non-native speakers. After she learned to drive, our car audio alternated between my library audiobooks and her TSE English tapes. We listened to a chapter of Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary, then a recorded textbook conversation of native English speakers discussing the weather and odd hobbies. At traffic stoplights, we made sure to practice along with the tapes.
“I like to fix cars in my spare time,” the speaker said. “Now, repeat after me.”
My mother and I dutifully obeyed. “I like to fix cars in my spare time.” The instructors spoke in calm, soothing voices. In my head, I envisioned nice white ladies like my preschool teacher strolling around a Sesame Street neighborhood on a lazy afternoon. Their sentences curved upwards into smiles.
The tape fed us prompts—strangely philosophical ones, such as “Do you believe childhood to be the happiest time in life?” or, “What does it mean to acquire knowledge?” then allotted 15 seconds to prepare, 45 seconds to respond. My mother, fumbling her nascent vocabulary, recorded herself haltingly.
“Aish!” she fumed as she replayed her stilted English responses. Oftentimes there were more pauses than words in her practice answers. She rewound the tape and started again.
“Childhood is most happy time because…”
I envisioned nice white ladies like my preschool teacher strolling around a Sesame Street neighborhood on a lazy afternoon. Their sentences curved upwards into smiles.
The day my mother passed the TSE on her third try, I was elected to the 3rd grade student council. We feasted that night, my father bringing home king crabs and a cheesecake from Ranch 99, a treat reserved only for birthdays and special occasions. My parents danced around the living room, tipsy and in love for the night. I imagined there could be no happier family in the world than the three of us together in our small townhouse. I drifted off to sleep dreaming of the second Harry Potter library book my mother had just checked out for me.
The Bay Area eventually welcomed many more of my mother’s classmates from Ewha University—other young Korean mothers who had followed husbands chasing their Silicon Valley dreams. Scores of them attempted the TSE test, and one by one, all of them gave up. There was only one other ahjumma who passed the exam a few years after my mother did. Citing the difficulty of adjusting to an English-speaking role, she quit her job after a few months.
My mother was finally hired at a large pharmacy chain after years of competing against younger applicants. Her joy was a short-lived one, as the reality of the workplace hit.
“They call me, speak so quickly, and then hang up!” she complained. “What am I supposed to do if I can’t catch what they said in time?” The TSE tapes hadn’t prepared her for the rapid English spoken over the phone when doctors and patients called to fill prescriptions.
I was always embarrassed by my mother’s loud announcement of our foreign presence.
In public spaces, seeking refuge from the discriminatory workplace, my mother refused to address me in English. I was always embarrassed by my mother’s loud announcement of our foreign presence. I was painfully aware of the way gazes swiveled and fixated on us at the neighborhood Safeway when she addressed me across the aisle in Korean. It seemed that she always drew unwanted attention to ourselves by bellowing a few decibels louder than necessary.
“Quiet down,” I whined in English, embarrassed that others might be watching.
My mother replied even more loudly in Korean, as if to teach me a lesson. “What, you’re ashamed of me? You mannerless wench. I raised you wrong.”
Sometime during Minari, I break out of a dreamlike trance.
My family is sitting in our darkened living room, the light from the TV screen illuminating my parents’ shiny foreheads. My father and brother are seated on the rug as they crack roasted peanuts onto a snack tray, and my mother sits beside me with a quilt draped upon our laps. We bicker throughout the nightly entertainment as usual—my father taps my brother’s hand to remind him to cluster his spilled shells together, while my mother complains of a chill and tugs our quilt over to her side.
The Minari family, too, is mundanely going about unpacking their moving boxes in their dimly-lit living room. Monica checks David’s heartbeat with a stethoscope. “I want to listen,” he says.
“You do? Put these in your ears,” she instructs.
My mother chuckles and nudges my brother. “You used to ask me that all the time when you were little, too!”
Onscreen, Jacob suggests a move-in celebration. “Let’s all sleep together on the floor since it’s our first night.”
“No, appa! You snore,” Anne retorts.
Jacob lunges for her. “Eesh, when did I ever?” They fall over in a tickling bout.
Watching Jacob’s denial, my brother and I burst into giggles, poking my father’s side. “See, appa? He snores, like you.”
My father snorts and rolls his eyes. “Who, me? I never snore.”
More than our shared Korean resemblance, it’s the way they seamlessly code-switch back and forth between the two languages that directly reflects our own family dynamics.
Why does this all feel so familiar? Though we are both first-generation Korean American families, the similarities end there; in fact, there are some glaring differences. The Minari family is in a Arkansas farm trailer in the 1980s, and my family is in the Bay Area suburbs in 2021. But it still feels like I’m observing an uncanny mirror image on the screen.
With a jolt, I realize—it’s because they’ve been speaking in Konglish, the hybrid language that mixes Korean with English. It beams from their living room to ours, lulling me into a haze of snug intimacy. More than our shared Korean resemblance, it’s the way they seamlessly code-switch back and forth between the two languages that directly reflects our own family dynamics. Their conversation could be our family’s, no matter the time or place—or any Korean American family’s I know.
I am cloaked in the vernacular of my youth. My family’s lingering laughter fades away as I slip back into the calming rhythm of a language that conjures a sense of home.
Now, many years later, my mother has graduated from TSE tapes to religiously following the NPR evening news during her commute home. At the dinner table, I bring up the political headlines of the day, and she waves her chopsticks in my face.
“I know that already. I heard that in the car. How do you spell in-sur-rec-tion? What does that mean?”
“In. Sur. Rec. Tion.” I snap in English, refusing to list out the letters. “You can figure it out.” I’ve been spelling words for her my entire life, and it irritates me to define words for her even at this age. It’s much too easy, in moments like these, to willingly forget that she guided my pointer finger to trace words like l-i-o-n and s-u-n on the Cupertino library floor.
My family’s lingering laughter fades away as I slip back into the calming rhythm of a language that conjures a sense of home.
My mother slaps my hand. “You-this. You-that. English is so disrespectful. Speak in honorifics to us.”
After dinner, we Kakaotalk videochat my grandmother in Korea. My mother has a habit of shifting to Konglish even when we are on KakaoTalk with my grandparents, not realizing her subconscious mistake—my grandmother does not understand any English whatsoever.
“Woorihealth insurance cost wanjun meechutsuh!” Translation: Our health insurance costs are crazy high.
“Stop your Konglish,” my father and I hiss under our breaths. “You know she can’t understand.”
“How is our Yi Youn-ee doing?” my grandmother asks. We discuss recent Korean political scandals, American two-party dysfunction, and the status of my graduate school apps. She gasps incredulously at the news scenes she sees of American carnage. “America is a developing country compared to Korea. Such violence. Also, we have better healthcare here.”
“I know. Halmoni, I miss you. I’ll come and see you soon,” I promise near the end of the call. My voice breaks as she hangs up, knowing that soon could mean anywhere from a few months to years.
My mother starts streaming our nightly Korean drama episode. I struggle with a word I’ve never heard before. “What does boojil-updamean?” I ask her.
“For something to be pointless,” my mother explains patiently. “Meaningless.”
I wonder if this is how my mother feels—constantly frustrated at the defunct machine sitting in her throat, between Korean thoughts and English words.
Moments like these are frequent these days. Am I losing my Korean? I worry. I feel like a child again at times, asking my mother questions about a language I hold onto dearly. What sounds like eloquent English in my mind will often be spat out as garbled elementary Korean instead. My brain wearily protests the effort it takes to juggle two different languages. I wonder if this is how my mother feels—constantly frustrated at the defunct machine sitting in her throat, between Korean thoughts and English words.
I turn my attention back to the screen. Beside me, my mother hums along happily to the OST. She marvels that these days, we have so many K-drama options to choose from even in America.
In Minari’s final scene, Monica and Jacob grasp a squared rock as they trail the water-witcher’s dowsing stick. They have decided to start anew after losing their harvest to an accidental blaze. Monica smiles softly at Jacob. The water-witcher points to the ground, and they set the rock down to mark a spot for their well.
I can’t help but see my mother’s story in Monica’s—that of mothers who sacrifice all that is familiar to become transplants in America. Some chase their careers. Some follow their husbands. Others, like my mother, are not sure looking back why they came at all.
But they are here, whatever the reason may be. They have chosen to stay. With all the strength they can muster, they set their rocks down, and draw what water they can from the foreign soil.
Gabriela Garcia’s debut novel, Of Women and Salt, opens with a heartfelt lament from Carmen to her daughter Jeanette who has long struggled with addiction. “I was afraid to look back because then I would have seen what was coming,” Carmen says. “The before and the after like salt whipping into water until I can’t tell the difference… Every story that knocked into ours.”
It’s these stories that shape the novel, and Jeanette’s life. In one, she must decide what to do when ICE takes her neighbor in a raid, leaving behind the woman’s daughter, Ana. In another, she travels to Cuba to search for clues about her family and the painful history her mother cannot share. Miami is awash with memories of clubbing, department store jobs, her fraught relationship with her mother. But there are also the stories she doesn’t know.
With lyrical prose and haunting storytelling, Garcia explores the lives of five generations of Cuban women and a mother-daughter pair from El Salvador who are all impacted by immigration policies, political violence, and the intersection of class, race, and oppression.
I chatted with Garcia over email about how endemic racism shapes both the carceral and immigration systems, the racial and class divisions of Florida, and why timeliness is a false label for novels about immigration.
Christopher Gonzalez: Sometimes I think that all families really leave us or pass down to us are their stories—the stories we’ve told ourselves based on those stories, and the messy larger narratives patched together from what is lost in between. What were you exploring about the idea of family through the book’s structure?
Gabriela Garcia: You’re right about the way we understand ourselves through story. We are born into a story about ourselves, and mythologies that are passed on to us by our families, by society, by the other stories we consume. And I wondered what it would be like to tell a character’s story through some of the stories she doesn’t see. Jeanette doesn’t know the backstory of her ancestors, doesn’t know all the backstory of the people who come into her life, doesn’t actively think of all the historical and political forces that shape who she is in the world and the actions she ultimately takes. But in many ways, she is more the stories she doesn’t know or understand than her own story about herself. And the novel is full of characters like this, people who don’t see their own privilege or racism or power and dangerously/violently live in their own mythologies instead.
We are born into a story about ourselves, mythologies that are passed on to us by our families, by society, by the other stories we consume.
Also at the center are books and words that are passed down through generations. The idea for the chapter set in the tobacco factory came from encountering those actual letters from Victor Hugo to Cuban independence fighters at a museum in Cuba and researching the books that lectors read to workers. I was fascinated by the way these stories shaped actual political movements—and the connection between story and revolution—but also by what it meant for workers to hear perspectives from only European white men, and whether reclamation of some of those words is possible or will always be shaped by the forces that ensure some stories are told and some are not. I wanted the novel to end on a question about stories.
CG: That idea of dangerously and violently living in one’s own mythology—is it continuing a cycle of violence against others, one’s self, or both? Is there a point at which buying into mythology feels like an act of survival?
GG: I think it can be both. This is certainly true of generational trauma and violence that isn’t spoken about, as happens in the novel. But I think it can also be dangerous not to locate ourselves in historical or political context, when we don’t question the mythologies that serve us. I think those mythologies can be about survival, but they can also be about power. For example, Carmen buying into her own “immigrant success story” and not wanting to engage on what it has meant that Cubans of her generation had an easier path to migration and resources that ensured that success when Jeanette brings this up. And what that results in is taking actions that put lives at risk.
CG: I was fascinated by the parallels between Jeanette and her cousin Maydelis. With Maydelis, we’re given a snapshot of what life might have looked like if Jeanette had grown up in Cuba. That’s a topic often explored by writers across the diaspora, the idea of going back home to a place that isn’t actually home, “a tourist in one’s own land,” etc. I am probably guilty of similar scribblings about Puerto Rico. But we first see Jeanette visiting Cuba through the eyes of Maydelis, on their trip to La Habana, which turns the trope on its head by filtering Jeanette through a local’s eye. Can you speak more about this decision? And about writing about a place that feels like home but maybe isn’t?
The same endemic racism that shapes our carceral system and policing shapes detention and deportation.
GG: That’s true. It’s a common trope, and I examine that often problematic outsider gaze in various forms throughout the novel—there is also the U.S. white woman who lives in Mexico and is welcomed in a lot of spaces in ways other “outsiders” are not, etc. Maydelis’s perspective is really just reflective of many of my conversations with Cubans on the island and observing some of the ways Cuban Americans and other tourists interact with Cuba and Cubans. I’m lucky in that I’ve spent a lot of time in Cuba and traveled there since I was young and talk to my friends and family in Cuba on a daily basis—I never had the friction that someone like Jeanette has with her mother about traveling to Cuba. But having this kind of relationship with Cuba and with Cubans on and off the island, let me see a lot of the ways Cubans and Cuba and the US exist in the imaginary on both sides. I think a lot of people in the diaspora want to imagine we can never be the Ugly U.S. American Tourist or the Naive Outsider because we have a particular connection to the place, but I wanted to gesture toward the ways Jeanette is different and not all that different from the German tourist who behaves in abhorrent ways while with Maydelis.
CG: You are very conscientious about writing against the idea of a Latinx monolith and an immigrant monolith. There’s a brief, pertinent moment in the chapter “An Encyclopedia of Birds” where Gloria, a Salvadoran woman taken by ICE to a detention center in Texas, describes the women she sees: other Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Haitians, and Chinese. In the United States, the mainstream image of an undocumented immigrant is one who is Brown and Mexican, erasing Central Americans, Black, and Asian immigrants from within and outside of Latin America. How did your work in immigrant rights organizing and detention centers influence your writing?
GG: I started writing snippets of what eventually became that chapter while I was working on deportation defense and visiting people in detention centers so it’s definitely colored by the actual reality of what I saw and what, at the time—and still, to a large extent—received so little media attention. Today, the largest group in detention is Black Haitian immigrants and they also face disproportionate rates of asylum denial. The same endemic racism that shapes our carceral system and policing shapes detention and deportation.
And the problem with flattening Latinx or immigrant identity is that we get this really dangerous narrative that there is such a thing as “the immigrant experience” and that it is not shaped by race or class or gender. I am the daughter of Cuban and Mexican immigrants who were treated very differently by this country and had very different paths to immigration. And I wanted characters who reflected that reality—Jeanette’s Cuban mother, for example, had a very privileged and easy path to immigration shaped by class and race and has no qualms about pushing her daughter to turn over a child to the police and does not see any solidarity with other immigrants when Jeanette somewhat pushes her about it. And that lack of solidarity is true to my experience in movement work.
CG: Building off of that, I want to talk a bit about Florida. Your novel has two very iconic scenes—one where a dead woman’s body is washed ashore and one with a panther in a neighbor’s home. These both strike me as Extremely Florida, though I am not a Floridian. They feel like the Florida I’ve read in fiction by Kristen Arnett and Jennine Capó Crucet.
I am curious what you think people get wrong about Florida and if fiction is able to illuminate some truths about the state. To that end, why do you think Florida is the subject of such strong stereotyping and caricature? I also can’t help but think about the recent election and this false idea of “the Latinx vote” and which way it was expected to swing. All of these things seem to be related.
GG: I, for one, wasn’t surprised about voting patterns at all. I think I write Very Florida because it is the place I know best and it’s true—it’s swampy and hot and perhaps an amalgamation of a lot of this whole country’s weirdness. Though I’ve always been less interested in the Florida Man caricature of Florida because it feels like a particularly anglo white imaginary. Like my Florida was far more Puerto Rican and Dominican Orlando, U.S. Black Jacksonville, Latinx Miami with all its fucked up racial and class divisions.
What does whiteness, and aspirational whiteness and proximity to whiteness, do to people?
And it’s true—I grew up in a city where bodies and cocaine bundles washed ashore regularly and where wild-animals-as-pets was probably born. But in many ways, this part of the country is just a reflection of the rest of the country in technicolor. It becomes an easy scapegoat. Malcolm X’s “everything south of Canada is the South.” It becomes easy to say, “I’ll disown these white Latinx voting for Trump” and “there goes Florida being Florida” and harder to say, what does anti-Blackness look like all across Latin America and in a U.S. context? What does whiteness and aspirational whiteness and proximity to whiteness do to people? I’m interested in characters that implicate all of us.
CG: Relatedly, when Yosmany appears in “People Like That,” he’s one of the only prominent Black Cuban characters in the novel. His introduction reveals some of Jeanette’s abuela’s racism and allows Jeanette to reflect on the whiteness of Cubans in Miami and anti-Blackness on and off the island. But then later, when her grandmother accuses Yosmany of stealing her book, Jeanette stays silent about the fact that she is the one who takes it. It’s a moment where Jeanette is shown as not being absolved of her own anti-Blackness just because she can identify it in others. For white and non-Black Latinx readers, we’re definitely implicated, right? But how do you thread the needle in showing examples of anti-Blackness in fiction and not further perpetuating it?
We were working so hard to get attention on the Obama administration’s record deportations and the birth of family detention, but came upon a media landscape that wanted nothing to do with it.
GG: I was thinking a lot about innocence and who it’s conferred upon. In that chapter, Jeanette also reflects on stealing from a Victoria’s Secret as a teenager, and other than her mother being called to the store, she’s let off. Which is in stark contrast to what would’ve happened if her grandmother denounced Yosmany as she threatened to do. In many ways, Jeanette is allowed room to mess up and try to find her way while other characters around her, such as Ana and Gloria, are expected to live these paper-perfect lives to even claim a right to live in peace, and this has everything to do with race and class and status. And as much as Jeanette can identify racist behavior in others and position herself as above it, when that moment arrives with her grandmother and Maydelis, she falls back on that innocence, she instinctively knows–even if it’s not a conscious decision–that she can weaponize that presumed innocence. And I think that relates to the second part of the question, too. I’m always thinking about subject position. If, as an author, I position myself and my readers as inherently innocent and my characters as one-dimensional pawns then that’s when the writing becomes about absolution or saviorism, and ends up perpetuating the very same dynamics it seeks to denounce. I think about James Baldwin’s controversial essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in which he wrote about the “thrill of virtue” of reading literature that does not implicate the reader or the author but rather positions them on a comfortable moral high ground, and how this kind of writing “so far from being disturbing,” offers a kind of bland reassurance that is morally dishonest.
CG: We’re now living at the start of the Biden administration. Gloria’s deportation takes place during the Obama administration when deportations were ramping up [The Obama administration deported more immigrants than any other administration]. I’ve been really sitting with the reality that for many Americans, deportations and anti-immigrant policies might be seen as a lesser sin depending on which party is in the White House. Perhaps hagiography will be the thing that prevents us from true progress.
What kind of influence, if any, did the shift from an Obama to a Trump presidency have on how you approached revisions in the novel? Has your other writing and advocacy work experienced a shift?
GG: I wrote most of the book before I had any inkling that Trump would ever be president. Which is what makes it even weirder when people talk about how those parts of the book feel very “timely” or whatever. And I’m like, to who? Those of us in the movement were working so hard to get any kind of attention on what was happening under the Obama administration with record deportations and the birth of family detention but came upon a media landscape that wanted nothing to do with it. And now we are in a dangerous moment when that could happen again, and, if recent news is any indication, is happening again.
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