Baba Badji’s new poetry collection, Ghost Letters, begins in English, but quickly defies the category of “Western” or “American”: One by one, other languages—French, Arabic, Wolof—join the fold. His technique of mixing languages on the page not only reflects his personal background, but also imbues the poems with a diasporic resonance that complicates the themes of heritage, homeland, race, and trauma.
Badji, a Senegalese American poet, translator, and scholar, beautifully waves images from his childhood together with scenes of contemporary life in America. Many of the poems, written as letters, address various “Ghost Mothers”—women both real and imagined—who haunt Badji’s collection. “I have nothing but Ghost Mothers and a thick accent resembling a baobab trunk,” Badji writes. “I have nothing, but a thick accent. Its western beat. A Rabbi’s Challah bread. The blessing.” Lines from these poems have nestled into my brain and stayed with me long after I finished reading the collection.
These ambitious poems move through the trauma of being an outsider; the beauty, pride, and pain of Blackness; and the unceasing desire to belong with both clarity and compassion. Each piece is a seedbed for different languages, religious experiences, and voices to flourish.
I spoke to Badji—whom I first met when we were translation students at Columbia University—about his collection and how the poems are inspired by his personal history and the current landscape of America.
Shoshana Akabas: I want to start out by talking about language. One of the most remarkable features of your collection is the number of languages intersecting in every poem. And of course, each language plays a different role, which comes out in lines like, “I dream in Wolof and write in English”. Can you talk a little about the different languages in the collection and why you chose to include them?
Baba Badji: I’m originally from Senegal and growing up, I would speak in Wolof and in other African dialects like Manding and Diola. So, you would have your family speaking Wolof, and you have friends who you play soccer with who do not speak Wolof, so you play soccer in a different language. Or you go and play outside in different languages. You learn these languages as a young kid. And they stayed with me. I was really lucky to have not forgotten the Wolof.
In a sense, the Wolof is my way of reaching out to my roots. Without the Wolof in the poem, the poem becomes a European poem or a Western poem. Without the Wolof in a poem that also doesn’t have French, that poem strictly becomes an American poem, whatever that definition is (I’m still trying to figure out what is an “American poem”). But for me, a diasporic poem or a universal poem has to have Wolof, has to have English, and has to have French together. And what happens when all these worlds meet in one text? Does it allow the text to travel across the Atlantic? Does it force the poem to move around the diaspora?
SA: As a fellow translator, I’m curious if your translation background helped you approach this multilingual project?
BB: Oh, absolutely. I feel that I’m always translating, even when I’m reading, when I’m writing, when I’m thinking. And in a sense, this is almost like a confession: when you write in English, you are thinking in French, or you are thinking Wolof. But the style of writing is different. So, this is where translation comes as a space for freedom to allow you to express yourself the way you want to express yourself. But definitely translation is a big part of my work. Translation has been sort of like the backbone. My creative artistic devices are basically sealed in theories and methods of translation. Because every line you read, even when you read newspapers, you read a line you wonder, how do I write this in French, or does this word really exist in French or in Wolof?
SA: You use the word confession — that strikes me, because so many of the poems are in letter form and feel confessional. What drew you to that structure?
The Wolof is my way of reaching out to my roots. Without the Wolof in the poem, the poem becomes a European poem or a Western poem.
BB: I started working on these letters, and then I thought about how letters are really important spaces to express oneself, whether it’s love, whether it’s fixing a relationship, whether it’s forgiveness, whether to discover oneself, right? The only way, I think, to recover the past is to return to the correspondence—in those spaces we find so much. And I flip it, so in these letters, the main figure is the ghost mother. Every letter is written for “ghost mother.” And for me, this is a way to reach out to the motherland. The letters actually are a way of corresponding or linking the Diaspora to a ghost mother figure, and it is me confessing to that powerful figure that I’m still working with, and I think I’ll always be working with. I suppose there’s a sense of freedom, too, in the letters: that only you know what you are telling to that person.
SA: You mentioned that some of these poems were written many years ago in an MFA workshop, but some of the poems reference very recent events. How did you go about interweaving the past and the present in these poems?
BB: We’re always told when a poem is done, that poem is put away, but that’s an idea I’m trying to challenge. You can always return to those lines and change them and speak about today. You can always feel present in a poem, and I wanted to link the past in the present. I always take notes, so a lot of these poems were “done” and then when I went back to my notes.
There’s one poem where I’m reaching out to what is happening today in America, a poem where I mention Abner Louima, “Bush Boy’s Nationalized Hymn.” This poem was written a long, long, long time ago. But then I was just looking through my notes on Arbery, Amari, and Zari. And then Théo Luhaka and Adama, they rhyme in the end, and I thought about how everything that’s happening to the Black body is actually linked. So, we have this really brutalized awful event that’s happening in France, not far from Paris. And then you have another crazy, crazy situation that happened actually in New York, years ago, so I thought Briana, Sandra, and Abner Louima, they actually rhyme too, and I was like, this would be really nice to put together and see: Do we hear these ghosts? And for me, every single person in this book is a ghost. Whether it’s Floyd, whether it’s Sandra Bland, whether it’s Breonna Taylor, whether it’s Abner Louima—and these people don’t know each other, but I’m just trying to tell people: When you read these poems, you can do the work, and you can see why these people are related.
SA: What you mentioned about drawing connections and starting a conversation really goes back to the idea of the correspondence, right? Even the parts of the collection that aren’t in letter form still felt like letters. As you’re quoting Baldwin and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, it feels like you’re writing back to them, in a way.
BB: Absolutely. That is one of the big knots I’m trying to untangle in my personal creative work and in my criticism, because the only way to reach out to those people is to write back to them. When we write to our heroes this way, it’s like reaching out to them, and it’s meaningful when you read a poem and the ending lines are Baldwin’s lines.
SA: The idea of “reaching back” connects to the themes of “return” and “belonging” which seem to echo in your work. I wonder how your experiences have informed how you think of home and belonging?
BB: Those themes are really important for the work, in the sense that I’m still trying to define my home. I am an American citizen, but it is a very complex fate. I think Henry James said that being an American is a very complex fate. So what is home for me? I’m Senegalese, I’m Black. But, my adopted mom is Jewish. We’re not afraid to talk about race at home, but, you know, I’m a Black man, I have hair, I have an MFA from Columbia, I’m getting a dissertation done. But I’m Black, so when I walk into a store right now, or walk on the streets, people don’t see that. All they see is, Oh he’s a Black man. So you become regularized by the gaze. In a place where you’re supposed to call home. The place where you’re supposed to belong. So, to tell you the truth, every time, before I leave my studio or my apartment, I have to calculate everything I have to wear for the gaze not to disturb my day, or my way of thinking—whether I’m going to the park, whether I’m going to a bar, whether I’m going to see a friend. You always feel that you want to belong, but I’m just speaking for myself, there’s always a question.
All they see is, Oh he’s a Black man. So you become regularized by the gaze. In a place where you’re supposed to call home. The place where you’re supposed to belong.
It’s crazy, whenever I return from international travel, when I hand my passport to the security guard, the TSA folks will say “welcome home.” It’s so powerful, but then you question that, too. So home, belonging, exile. For me, those are really important themes in the sense that it allows me to push my artistic creativity. It allows me to push the boundaries and question things, and criticize things. I love America so much. It’s a very complex relationship, too. I always criticize America, or the idea of being American, the idea of being French. So those themes are really gonna be questions for the rest of my life.
SA: I also see the theme of belonging with the religious references in these poems. You’ll mention the Quran and Jesus in the same stanza or line, and the image of the braided challah comes up a few times. How do these different religious traditions coexist or overlap for you?
BB: I just mentioned my adoptive mom is Jewish, and I was beaten to attend the Quranic school in Senegal. I’m not religious, by the way, but I pray to something. I pray to the Rabbi, I pray to Jesus, and I pray to Allah, because I know the Quran. My religion actually is my poetry. I don’t do it because it’s cool, because it’s hip, because it’s smart; I do it because it heals me, as sad as that sounds. I’m exhausted after finishing this book. In this particular space, it leaves you with something—whenever you go back to the poem, you are at peace.
When you think about religion in general terms, it can be violent, it can be scary, it can be sexist, and people have used religion to brutalize other folks. But for me, that sense of not knowing and reaching out to these people, whether it’s a rabbi, whether it’s Jesus, whether it’s the Quran… Pope Francis comes into these poems, he’s a very important figure. And he’s a very important figure in my general work. I think the sense of freedom he portrays heals me. The sense of freedom that Jesus portrays heals, and the sense of freedom the Rabbi gives heals me, as well.
SA: That’s interesting, because you don’t often hear that religions are not mutually exclusive.
BB: Exactly. And this is also my way to start a conversation. It’s beautiful when we allow people to explore religion in this sense. So write a poem and put Jesus in there, put the Rabbi in there, and put the Quran in there. That’s what I’m trying to do with the church and the mosque—those two spaces are symbolic. They portray peace, for me.
SA: That’s beautiful. I guess my last question is: What do you want readers to know about the collection?
BB: They should be patient with the book because it’s dense. And also they should not be afraid to read it however they want to read it. There is no specific way to read this book. You can start with the notes, you can start from the front, you can start from the middle.
There’s nothing like pulling up a chair and settling yourself in for a good gossip with a friend whom you can always rely on to spill the chai. And let’s not forget the pleasure of finding an empty seat at a café, occupying your hands with a beverage, and opening your ears to the full range of tattle that comes your way. In a past life when we could wander freely, you may have experienced the privilege of being in the right place at the right time, of hearing stories about people you didn’t know and would never meet, unadulterated opinions, and confessions that were thrilling even when they were mundane, simply because they were not yours.
My debut novel The City of Good Deathopens with a dead body being pulled out of the Ganges, and the moment gives life to a strand of gossip that weaves itself into the city of Banaras, twisting with threads of other stories and tightening around the city, from the crowded steps of the ghats to the bustling market stalls. And while sometimes the gossip can be amusing and harmless, some of the tales passing from one mouth to another generate a momentum that obliterates the line between truth and fiction.
These days, I wonder if the limitations of texting, video chatting, and phone calls mean we’re also losing out on the joys of gossip in its most unadulterated and spontaneous form. Until it’s safe enough for us to once again become conversation voyeurs, here are nine books to quell your appetite for a good gossip.
A chorus of women narrate the events of Brit Bennett’s debut novel, closely following the lives of three young members of their church’s congregation. Under this collective gaze, Nadia, Luke and Aubrey grow up—each carrying a personal burden that follows them into adulthood as they form attachments with each other, as well as deep secrets that threaten to crack open the carefully structured community that watches them. As the chorus notes,
“All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around in our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.”
In classic Dickens fashion, this sprawling novel introduces us to characters up and down the Thames, from the spoiled Bella Wilfer, betrothed to a man she’s never met, to Bradley Headstone, a doomed schoolmaster who falls in love with Lizzie Hexam, the waterman’s daughter who helps her father troll the river for dead bodies. Throughout, members of the upper echelons—dubbed as the collective Society—compete to be the one to pounce on the juiciest story and be the final word of judgement, as they do with the huckster Veneering:
“…Society will discover that it always did despise Veneering, and distrust Veneering, and that when it went to Veneering’s to dinner it always had misgivings—though very secretly at the time, it would seem, and in a perfectly private and confidential manner.”
After revealing the title’s death scene in the opening pages, Márquez proceeds to tell us each of the events leading up to and after the fateful moment Santiago Nasar is stabbed by the Vicario brothers to avenge their sister’s deflowering. Far from being a secret plot, the murder is openly discussed by the entire town, in a case of gossip taken far less seriously than it needed to be:
“The Vicario brothers had told their plans to more than a dozen people who had gone to buy milk, and these had spread the news everywhere before six o’clock.”
After a storm kills all the men on a Norwegian island in 1617, the women left behind have only themselves to rely on. While they grieve, some get to work manning the fishing boats, others take care of storing winter provisions—and a handful decide to busy their tongues with whispers that quickly ignite into something uglier. Taking inspiration from a real-life storm that preceded the 1620 witch trials, this book is a dark and brooding exploration into how women can shift roles, form bonds, and light the match that sets the whole thing ablaze. Gossip takes a dark and sinister turn, as one character observes:
“But now she knows she was foolish to believe that evil existed only out there. It was here, among them, walking on two legs, passing judgement with a human tongue.”
Whenever I find myself losing enthusiasm for reading or for writing, I pick up Betty Smith’s classic, and it never fails to instantly revive me. Covering Francie Nolan’s life from age 11 to 17, the novel shines when it indulges in its many side-story diversions that keep the neighborhood humming with a constant buzz of chatter—as when Francie’s mother has an encounter with a notorious killer:
“…the neighborhood forgot the murdering pervert. They remembered only that Katie Nolan had shot a man. And in speaking of her, they said she’s not one to get into a fight with. Why she’d shoot a person just as soon as look at them.”
I was on a writing residency when, after a few days of feeling uninspired, I picked up this classic Naipaul novel and instantly fell into the world of Mohun Biswas and his quest for a home and a life of his own in postcolonial Trinidad. This book sparkles with wit and humor and some of the most effervescent gossip I’ve had the pleasure of reading, from neighbors ribbing neighbors, family members side-eying their own, and brothers-in-law warning our title hero against the perils of siding with the wrong crowd:
“‘These Aryans say all sorts of things about women,’ Seth said. ‘And you know why? They want to lift them up to get on top of them. You know Rai was interfering with Nath’s daughter-in-law? So they asked him to leave. But a lot of other things left the house when he left.’”
All my Mary Downing Hahn stans, put your hands up. From Doll in the Garden to Time for Andrew, I spent my grade-school years tearing through Hahn’s oeuvre—yet the one that remains with me years later is December Stillness, a frank exploration of a teen’s coming of age as she tries to befriend a traumatized Vietnam veteran. As Kelly McAllister tries to get inside Mr. Weems’s head, she must contend with an unsympathetic community more intent on labeling the man with increasing paranoia:
“‘He could be a psychopath,’ he said. ‘The kind who pulls out a gun and shoots everybody in sight.’ The woman gasped and clutched her books to her chest. ‘Good lord, I never thought of that.’”
Doug Swieteck has just moved to upstate New York when word gets around that he’s the brother of a likely criminal, and he quickly finds himself trying to forge his own way in a place where everyone around him has already decided his character. Trudging against the tide of gossip isn’t easy—as Doug says,
“That’s how it is in a small town like stupid Marysville. All you have to do is spit on the sidewalk, and the whole town figures you’re the kind of guy who might commit homicide, and everyone in your family is likely just the same.”
But he keeps on, aided by a librarian who ignites an interest in Audubon’s Birds of America,in this wonderful story of growing up during the Vietnam War.
Perhaps you’ve seen the Bollywood sob-fest that is Sarat Chandra’s Devdas, wherein the title hero turns to the bottle after societal pressure separates him from his true love. Similar themes emerge in the lesser known Palli Samaj, the tale of an engineer who returns to his home village hoping to coax it into modernity, only to fall in love with his widowed childhood sweetheart and invite the wrath of the community’s moral police. The book plunges the reader into the unforgiving world of village gossip from its opening pages:
“‘I have forgotten nothing, Benimadhab! Tarini had wanted to get his son married to my Rama…he got Bhairav Acharya to conduct some black magic on this poor girl so that within six months of her marriage she was widowed…. That scoundrel has died in as horrific a manner as he deserved….’”
The clown room was off-limits. It lay behind a narrow door at the bottom of the basement stairs, which I crept down when my mother was otherwise distracted—having tea with a neighbor, or cutting someone’s hair. She had a salon in her parlor and one of those hairdryers that looked like a space helmet. She served all of her guests strawberry wafers in plastic sleeves. Some days I ate only strawberry wafers, washed down with orange juice.
The clown room was a small room with wood-paneled walls. There was a painted chest full of tricks, and clown shoes were lined up against the baseboard. The shoes were too big, clearly fake. They looked less like shoes than sculptures of shoes. The room was a closet for all intents and purposes, but in this closet was another closet, and in that closet were the clown suits and wigs. They smelled like burned things. Marionettes hung from hooks in the ceiling. The wigs hung from hooks in the walls. The wigs were long and curly, either red or every color of the rainbow. I would put them on, and the stringy hairs would fall over my nose and mouth. They tasted how balloons tasted: manufactured, toxic. I never tried the suits. They were too large and floppy. I never had enough time to deal with their limp arms and sticking zippers before my mother came creaking down the steps.
My mother was one of a troupe of party clowns who went by the names of mediocre candies. Tootsie Pop, Sweet Tart. I could never keep them straight. Their faces were impossible to make out beneath all that paint. At family reunions and birthday parties, the clowns juggled, made crystal balls float, pulled handkerchiefs out of thin air. In the summertime, we would attend two parties a day. I would sit at the back of a crowd of cross-legged children, whose frank sense of belonging left me intimidated. I worried constantly that they would tell me I shouldn’t be there, I hadn’t been invited, but no one ever bothered me so I would remain where I was, trying to understand how a birthday cake could blossom out of a top hat.
The answers, I knew, were in the clown room. Each trick was diagrammed in a booklet I’d discovered one day in the bottom drawer of the blue-and-white chest. I had paged through the diagrams and scrutinized the numbered instructions beneath each until my mother flung open the door. I hid the booklet behind my back. She sunk to her knees and asked if I had found her secrets, and I admitted the truth: that I had, but I couldn’t understand them.
She nodded. “That’s the way it is,” she said.
For a long time, my only friend was a neighbor, Imogene. She was a year older than me, a fourth grader at the all-girls school. I could see a sliver of her through the fence separating her yard from mine. One heavily lidded eye, a streak of blonde hair, a soft freckled cheek. “Hello,” we would whisper to one another. I would wiggle a finger through the gap, try to touch her, and Imogene would skip away. Whenever I invited her to my house, she said she couldn’t; her parents wouldn’t let her. I assumed she was trapped and became determined to free her, but I didn’t know how. When I asked my mother for help, she and her troupe teased me. They sang, “Jeans, beans, and Imogenes.”
My father was not a clown. He didn’t have much interest in them, either. He existed primarily in his chair, by the TV, watching The Lone Ranger. The TV troll, my mother called him. Only when I had been caught in the clown room would I stop by his chair, and he would hoist me onto his lap and tell me about Iwo Jima. One day he asked, “Have you seen that picture? The famous one of the Marines raising the flag?” He said that he knew one of those men. Don Maggiano was his name, and my mother leaned against the wall and said, “It’s not him!” So they called him up and Don Maggiano said, “I have to admit, Clive, it isn’t me.” But my father remembered him fondly. “He was a kind person.”
I patted my father’s warm, round belly and asked why he never became a clown.
“Bah,” he said, “that never interested me.”
I asked if he knew how the clowns did their magic, and he said that magic wasn’t real, God was. He informed me that the clowns were tricking me, but that God had created everyone before the foundation of the world, and that was no trick. My father’s fingers were huge. He dipped them into fonts of holy water he’d hung about the house. My mother never did this; she saved all the blessings for him. “He needs as many as he can get,” she said. She wasn’t joking. He had constant chest pain and could often be found with his hands over his heart. “Heal me, Lord,” he would say intermittently, which I fully expected to happen. I was surprised when he died of a heart attack when I was eight years old.
After the funeral, people showed up at our house, no clowns among them. They brought macaroni salad and paper plates, and stabbed at grapes with silver forks. I sensed Imogene before I saw her: beautiful, wan, blonde. She had come out in the open. It was a miracle. Yet, together, her eyes were not what I’d expected; one was slightly higher than the other, and its blue iris seemed to wander—as if being tugged by a gentle distraction over my shoulder.
“What are you staring at?” she asked, nibbling the edge of a cracker.
I had only ever seen her through the fence. “You’re so whole.”
She smiled. “You’re so funny,” she said, and stepped toward me. This close, she smelled soapy. I was dying to show her the clown room.
We wound toward it, through the house, around guests’ black pantlegs and skirts, and arrived at the top of the steep wooden staircase. She followed me down, each step groaning beneath our feet. I pushed open the clown room door, flipped on the light. I tried to see the place through Imogene’s eyes, but her reaction was unreadable. She took in the dark walls, the chest of drawers. She opened one, found plastic candies in it, put one in her mouth.
“Clowns terrify me,” she said, sucking. She spit out the candy, wiped it with her dress, and replaced it in the drawer. “You won’t become a clown, will you?”
Loosening my necktie, I retrieved the diagrams from the bottom drawer. “Can you understand this?”
She studied the papers, tracing each line with her index finger. She was only a few inches taller than me, but I seemed to be staring up at her.
“This is easy,” she said. Then she looked up from the answer sheet, one blue eye aimed straight at me, the other seeming to focus just behind me. “Which trick should we do first?”
I never told my mother that I’d learned her secrets, but after some time I think she knew. She must have noticed I was no longer sneaking downstairs. I had no reason to. She and I began to move about the house independently and oddly at peace. She picked up a job at the Italian diner half a mile away, but on weekends she continued fooling children at their parties. One night, while she was sipping tea in my father’s chair, I asked why she had become a clown in the first place. She pressed the tea bag against the side of her mug and told me that she hadn’t chosen. She said it’s the kind of profession that happens to you.
When she passed away many years later, she left the house to me. I dragged most of the boxes and tricks out to the roadside, but not before trying on the wigs one last time. I couldn’t squeeze into the suits. Now they were too small. But the shoes fit just fine.
The final frontier is an epithet famously attached to outer space. Don’t strap on a spacesuit just yet, though: closer to hand, our home planet remains plush with underexplored terrain (or the aquatic equivalent thereof). The ocean yields newly-discovered species every year, such as 2019’s glow-in-the-dark pocket shark and 2020’s adorable entry to the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, a “gelatinous blob” ctenophore; not to mention new appreciation for creatures like the poor misunderstood blobfish.
Of course, even as we eagerly rifle their pockets for fascinating new species, the world’s waters still maintain plenty of mystery. From the strange sound known as “the Bloop” to phenomena like phantom islands, to disappeared ships and submarines, to the sheer incomprehensible strength of a storm at sea, the ocean can be a strange and dangerous place–the perfect setting for myths and stories across the ages and around the world. Between its beauty and its innate unknowability, the deep waters of home offer fertile ground for many writers to sow the seeds of imagination.
In my book Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters, I sought to riff on the classic notes of The Little Mermaid by giving my genetically engineered “mermaid” a whole new sea to explore: the depths of space. Perhaps by the time humans have colonized worlds like hers, space really will be a true final frontier.
The sea can be beautiful, but it’s dangerous first. In Solomon’s novella, we get the accounting of that power as it is reclaimed by the birthright of the descendants of African women thrown from slave ships to drown. Like Solomon’s other work, this is characteristically intense, a world forcefully drawn in shades of deep blue.
Seonag and the Seawolves by M. Evan MacGriogair
The sea is full of strange creatures. MacGriogair evokes the lovely sparseness of the Hebrides with each carefully chosen word. Seonag and the Seawolves offers a character who, finding little kinship in her home village, seeks what may be found in the strangeness of the sea instead.
“Auger” in Luna Station Quarterly by Sarah Pauling
The sea is a dangerous place, of course, as are many of the things that dwell within it. Sometimes, though, human beings are the ones to be afraid of. In showing the arrival of a visiting mermaid—or what appears to be one—Pauling deftly constructs the sharp, salt-air atmosphere of a seaside town whose men are mostly destined for sailing-ships, and pokes holes in the tender places where the fabric of this life has worn thin.
Short and poignant, this is a selkie story turned inside out in a fairly literal fashion. The language is both beautiful and violent, like a storm seen from a safe distance; this is a story you can’t help but feel in your bones.
What’s a list of sea creatures without a mermaid story? The ending of The Little Mermaid, in both its Disneyfied incarnation and Anderson’s original fairy tale, can ring unsatisfactory, as the titular mermaid racks up sacrifice after sacrifice for her human love. In this story, Chen weds the detail of the mermaid’s every painful step to the practice of footbinding and exacts the denouement’s satisfying price.
Okay, you probably don’t need me to tell you to read Sofia Samatar, but just in case, this is as good a place to start as any. Selkie stories are so often tales of love and loss, and this one is too, but it is a different sort of a love and a different sort of loss; bittersweet and beautiful in Samatar’s characteristic way with words.
“The Fisher Queen” in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction by Alyssa Wong; reprinted in audio in PseudoPod
“My mother was a fish,” this story begins; mermaids are merely fish, not people, so the story avers; mermaids are even sold at the fish market. The narrator of this chilling but gorgeous story confronts the tangled nets of familial relationships and social strictures that has been woven around her for her whole life.
The plink-plink of a tack piano gives way to the voice of Kristin Windbigler, executive director of The Western Folklife Center, asserting “2020 taught us that our perspective on the state of the world looks better when viewed through the ears of a horse.” Kent Rollins stands on a windy Oklahoma plain and describes how to make the low-maintenance sourdough starter we all needed eleven months ago. Legendary cowboy poet Dick Gibford explains the popularity of his genre among ranch hands in the bunkhouse—“good poetry is good poetry no matter what walk of life you’re in”— more recently minted cowboy poet, Jonathon Oderman, jokes with his chicken Penny, and the center’s sponsor Nevada Gold Mines makes a case for an inexorable bond between mineral extraction and Nevadan prosperity.
The 37th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering is underway. And this time, for the first time, the gathering’s gone virtual.
The cowboy poets are not the sort of cowboys who ride the ranges of popular culture’s iconography.
Every year since 1985, the Western Folklife Center has hosted the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a dead-of-winter celebration of Western ranch culture and traditions on the high desert plains of Elko, Nevada. Music, visual arts, dance, cooking, leather crafts, storytelling, rope braiding, and more are all part of the show, but cowboy poetry, the performative folk art practiced primarily in the ranching communities of the West, is the point. The cowboy poets are, almost to a person, real cowboys, defined by what they do (or at least what they write about doing)—physical work in support of cattling operations, ranch work, which can happen, among other places, on the range, in the rodeo ring, on the farm, at the feed store, in the forest, on the mountain, and in the home–and not by race, gender, or a simple-minded and violent reactivity. In other words, the cowboy poets are not the sort of cowboys who ride the ranges of popular culture’s iconography, a historically inaccurate fiction born in the movie studios of 1930s Hollywood.
The gathering normally attracts upwards of 6,000 fans: rodeo riders, ranch hands, cattlemen, folklorists, Western families, and a growing number of literati, media outlets, and cowboy-curious greenhorns. Attendees pay hundreds of dollars each for six days of recitations, poetry discussions, and social events at which the cowboy poets are stalked like Timothée Chalamet at Vanity Fair’s after-Oscars party. Many of the evening poetry performances are standing room only, and most end with boot-stomping ovations that shake the 900-plus-seat Elko Convention Center Auditorium.
Because of the pandemic, this year’s gathering took place online. On a recent Saturday, while the East braced for a significant winter storm and Elko endured one, cowboy poets and their fans put the coffee pot on the stove or cracked open a Sierra Nevada and gathered for a ten-hour video marathon. The streamed version managed to maintain, and sometimes even amplify, much of the charm of a live gathering (though admittedly without the foot-stomping, hat-waving, spur-jangling, whiskey-gulping raucousness of the real thing). Cowboy poets checked in from their ranch properties, atop their horses or aside their dogs or among their grazing cattle, in pre-recorded segments (a necessity because both Elko and most of this year’s performers reside on the far side of America’s urban-rural digital divide, and don’t have a reliable connection for live video). A chat scrolling below the video stream was a steady stampede of shoutouts to old friends and gentle poet-to-poet ribbing as each participant took the virtual stage. During breaks in the readings and music, footage from the first gathering in 1985 ran, and the chat box swelled with the guffaws of those seeing their younger selves perform and the laments of those suddenly looking on the faces of friends long gone.
Much of the success of this year’s video gathering is down to Windbigler, who, despite fierce opposition from the many in the Elko community for whom the gathering represents substantial tourist dollars at an otherwise slow time of year, started in June to make plans to take the event online. And given her involvement, it’s no surprise the virtual version went so well. When it came to lassoing digital technology in aid of corralling a scattered audience, this was in no way Windbigler’s first rodeo. Her previous jobs were working with TED in New York to expand the reach of its talks worldwide, and before that with WIRED magazine in San Francisco.
Bringing on the digital media savvy Windbigler is part of broader effort on the part of the Western Folklife Center to attract a younger, more diverse, more national audience to the gathering (the mandate the center’s board gave her when they hired her in 2017). As part of that, the Western Folklife Center is doubling down on its efforts to redefine (or, as history tells us, correctly define) the “cowboy” in “cowboy poetry,” countering the stereotype of a gun-toting, right-wing white male, slow-witted but quick with the trigger finger anytime he feels a threat to his God-given freedoms. Think John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Cliven Bundy, or Couy Griffen (the founder of Cowboys for Trump, currently locked in a D.C. jail awaiting charges related to his participation in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol).
Rebranding the cowboy poet as something other than white, male, and mean seems essential.
Last year’s 36th Cowboy Poetry Gathering provided a powerful counternarrative by focusing on the Black cowboy. Performances included: Grammy-winning Dom Flemons playing songs from his 2018 album Black Cowboys; urban cowboys from South Central LA discussing the horsemanship, traditions, and art of the historical Black cowboy community there; Black, white, and multiracial members of Oregon’s rodeo-riding McKay family telling stories and talking up their latest film project; and several lectures on the history of Black cowboys, who made up 25 percent of the wranglers working the great U.S. cattle drives that took place from the 1860s through the first decade of the 20th century. The first cowboy poets, and presumably the first cowboy poetry fans, were among the herdsmen who moved 27 million cattle from Texas to Kansas’s rail centers during that era.
Rebranding the cowboy poet as something other than white, male, and mean seems essential if the Western Folklife Center is going to succeed in using the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering to further its stated mission of deploying “story and cultural expression to connect the American West to the world.” After all, Amanda Gorman is the face of poetry in 2021, not the Marlboro Man.
And the Western Folklife Center did certainly counter that image with its 2020 gathering and again this year, as a number of featured artists dialed in from Indigenous American ranching communities. A highlight of the stream was the Martin Sisterz performance of “Piccadilly Billy,” a traditional Diné tune updated with the perhaps equally traditional pop theme of teen crushes. (All ten hours of the 2021 National Cowboy Poetry Gathering will be made available in early March to members of the Western Folklife Center, a membership that also includes early access to tickets for the 2022 gathering). But the truth is the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering has from its inception challenged the popular and historically inaccurate stereotype of the American cowboy. From the first keynote lecture at the first gathering, when Jim Griffith, gathering cofounder and folklorist, outright stated the premise, organizers and supporters of the center and the gathering have made it clear that the cartoon caricature of the cowboy is too simplistic to produce the type of poetry that has always been the focus in Elko. Cowboy poetry is a complex and evolving art, staying true to its roots and relevant to modern Western ranch culture. As English Professor Emeritus at Utah’s Westminster College David Stanley explains in his essay “Form and Tension in Cowboy Poetry,” cowboy poetry is a combination and refinement of a number of styles, traditions, forms, topics, inspirations, and metrics: the Victorian era’s embrace of parlor poetry recitation as prime time entertainment; Homer’s Odyssey to the Bible to Ulysses, both Tennyson and Joyce’s versions; Old English folk poetry, beat poetry, rap, and poetry slams; balladeers like Robert Service and Rudyard Kipling; modern political bards like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.
This is not poetry for incurious meatheads.
Furthermore, again according to Stanley, mastering the performative art of cowboy poetry is the work of a lifetime. It comes not from “…reading essays that dissect and analyze the poetry but from being in the midst of a lively poetic subculture that also values hard, practical knowledge of cattle and horses… The conventional norms of this poetic tradition—how far the poet can depart from standard forms, what the generally accepted limits are, how rules can be altered, and what constitutes a good or successful poem—exist within cowboy poetry and within cattle culture and are learned subconsciously and over time.”
Dr. Limerick ended her lecture with a proposal: that President Biden invite Amanda Gorman and a cowboy poet to some future national unity event to recite poetry that speaks beyond stereotypes to the honest history and real lives of messy, complex, diverse Americans. The cowboy poet doesn’t need a rebranding to earn a place on that stage, something anyone who has followed the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering and the Western Folklife Center already knows. But for those who doubt, perhaps instead a refocus is in order—to look past a distorted image of the American cowboy toward the wider horizon against which today’s cowboy poets honor the traditions, challenges, and work of the American West.
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 month we’re featuring Alex McElroy, author of the forthcoming novel The Atmospherians, who’s teaching a course on how to make the first few pages of your novel really sing. We talked to them about leaning into your flaws, resisting feedback that prevents you from being true to yourself, and why writers should learn to cook.
What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
Can I name two things? For me, the most important part of workshop was making friendships with trusted and brilliant readers. These are spaces to learn who reads and understands your work, and to discover the work and writers that most resonate with you. Also, I left workshops with a pretty thick skin. I learned to value and defend what I loved about my writing.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
Readings of my work that have nothing to do with the work itself. At times, workshop can push writers away from their vision and can lead them to rethink entire projects or revise in directions meant to please other people. This has happened to me a couple times, and it always takes some effort to get back to what I believe in about my writing. Also, I could’ve done with a few less assigned readings of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?
Lean into what might appear, on the surface, to be flaws in your work—there is value in what makes your writing unique. Consider the moments where readers are most engaged by your writing: positively, negatively, loudly. Making a reader feel something is key. And even a reader’s impulse to “change” aspects about your work might be a sign you’re doing something right if the reader found themselves returning to particular passages. In short, cultivate what sets you apart.
Does everyone “have a novel in them”?
I think it’s vital that instructors be transparent about the financial realities of writing professionally.
Does everyone have a story to tell? Yes. I believe this. However, is everyone able to—due to life/family/career circumstances—carve out the space necessary to commit to writing a novel? I don’t think so. Though I wish we lived in a world where people could, but that’s another conversation. This isn’t to say not everyone can do it. But writing is hard, especially writing a novel, and it takes a great deal of confidence, encouragement, luck, sacrifice, and safety to put together an entire book. Writers can gain the first two things from a class or writing community. The others, though, require a lot that is outside of the writer’s control.
Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?
I would never encourage a student to give up writing. However, I think it’s vital that instructors be transparent about the financial realities of writing professionally. This might take the form of encouraging writers to work a day job and write in the spare hours, or to write whenever they have met their immediate needs of safety and survival and community. But I would never advise a student to give up if they are committed to keeping writing a part of their life.
What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?
Praise—by which I mean enthusiasm. Anything that makes the writer want to keep writing. That is my primary goal in the classes I teach. Similarly, I like when authors speak directly about their aims or intentions. This helps the readers in the room consider what the author wanted out of their piece, and it guides readers toward encouraging the writer in that direction, helping them enhance the parts of their work that most interest and excite them.
Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?
Unless you’re on assignment, I don’t think writers should write first drafts toward publication. But it is helpful to revise with publication in mind—you’re revising for an audience, after all, even an audience of peers in a workshop. Personally, I like to get published and share my work with readers. Many authors feel the same way. And, similar to my comments about professionalization above, if a student is looking to make a career out of writing, they should absolutely be considering publication—and thus audience and venue—when they work through their drafts.
In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?
Kill your darlings: Cryogenically freeze your darlings and dethaw them for later drafts, gauge their chance of survival in this modern, unfamiliar landscape.
Show don’t tell: Why not both?
Write what you know: I would revise this to “Write what you care most about.” Knowing about something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re interested in writing about it—and the reader will be able to tell if you aren’t.
Character is plot: Character can help move the plot forward when you’re stuck, but not everything can emerge from character.
What’s the best hobby for writers?
Cooking. It gives you something physical to do with your body, keeps you away from a screen for hours, impresses friends and lovers, and, critically, teaches you good taste.
What’s the best workshop snack?
Tootsie Pop! (ignore what I said about good taste)
I picked up Lydia Davis’s Almost No Memory again recently for the first time in years, and as I flipped through, one line shone out to me like a beacon. In “The Mice,” Davis writes, “our house is much less tidy than the houses of our neighbors. There is more food lying about in our kitchen, more crumbs on the counters, and more filthy scraps of onion kicked against the base of the cabinets.” If I even registered the onion on my first reading, I don’t remember it. But this time around, I’m 37, and because of the coronavirus pandemic, I’m home pretty much all the time, trying to juggle work and housework and childcare. And I know that when you’re a woman with a career and a family and maybe another career—a side hustle, a passion, an aspiration—on top of that, there are probably going to be some onion skins on the kitchen floor.
I turned to Davis’s Collected Storiesin search of more and found domestic failures everywhere. When Davis discusses disorder in the home, she reports on it with a cool remove. Of her children, she writes in a story called “Selfish”: “they have clean clothes most of the time, a fresh haircut fairly often, though not all the supplies they need for school, or not when they need them.” From another story called “Our Kindness”: “Our house is not clean, not completely clean. Our family is not completely clean.” In “The Caterpillar,” Davis writes, “Now the trouble is the stairs are so dirty. I don’t clean them because no one ever sees them here in the dark.” In a story called “Her Damage,” which clocks in at a total of 535 words, Davis recounts, in a single matter-of-fact sentence, an episode that in another author’s hands might serve as an opportunity for self-flagellation: “The baby rolled off the side of their bed and fell onto the floor.” I’ve seen Facebook mom group posts longer than 535 words on far less risky baby situations.
It makes a lot of sense to me that Davis writes so much about the things that go wrong in her home. I suspect most women who work outside the home obsess over the messes, the school supplies that weren’t purchased on time, the little injuries that might not have happened had they been paying more attention. I know that finding the right balance between caring for a family and doing my own work obsesses me, too. Lydia Davis sums up the dilemma in a story called “Mrs. D and Her Maids,” in which a writer works through three drafts in an attempt to create an ad for a maid to help manage the domestic burden:
Writer couple with well-trained schoolgirl daughter and year-old baby
Writer couple who must have harmonious household with wife free for morning work
Woman writer who must be free of household problems every morning requires helper…
By now, we all know the basic facts of life for the modern American woman: Even though women make up more than half of the U.S. workforce, they still do more housework and childcare than men. Married American women who have children spend nearly twice as much time on housework as their male counterparts. In heterosexual couples where both partners work, finding and paying for domestic help like housekeepers and day cares is still often women’s domain. In one 2018 survey, “mothers were 40 percent more likely than fathers to report that they had personally felt the negative impact of child care issues on their careers.” Leaving the workforce for even a few years to care for a child can also have a big impact on a woman’s lifetime earnings–reducing it by as much as 20 percent. The pandemic has only exacerbated the issue. It is women who leave their careers to care for the children and manage online school, even in families where the woman is the breadwinner. More women have left the workforce than men in the pandemic. In September 2020, when virtual school came back in session for many, 865,000 women left the workforce, more than four times the number of men who left in that month. One mom famously shut down her business and laid off 13 employees because her husband (who was unemployed) couldn’t handle twelve-hour days of solo childcare. Their case was extreme, but the story went viral because women find themselves making similar choices all the time.
Women do more housework and childcare because society expects them to and because they’ve internalized those expectations.
Why is it like this? In 2019, the New York Timesreported on a trio of studies that illuminated how Americans think about domestic duties. When shown photos of a messy room in one study, participants judged it as more messy when they believed it was a woman’s room than when they believed it was a man’s. They also thought that this imaginary woman would be less comfortable having guests over and would be less positively viewed by those guests than a man. Women do more housework and childcare because society expects them to and because they’ve internalized those expectations. The messages that women get from society are transmitted in a variety of ways, but even when they’re subtle, women feel them acutely. Women know what we’re supposed to do: cook nourishing meals, make sure our family looks nice, create enriching activities for our children, have a beautiful clean home, and somehow, in addition to all that, have a career.
For me, at least, even before the pandemic I found it impossible to do all the things I thought I was supposed to. And I have to assume it’s the same for other women. We purge belongings with Marie Kondo, we make schedules with the Fly Lady, we watch an army of cleaning influencers clean toilets and countertops and organize toy closets. All of these people offer a false promise: that if you just follow the program, you’ll finally be able to get it all done. But none of it helps, because the problem isn’t in the method. The problem is in our minds.
When I sit down to work with laundry unfolded next to me and dust bunnies collected in the corners of my room, I tell myself that my creative projects are more important than a perfectly clean house and press on, but I still feel guilty. However, I notice that my daughter, nearly three, sees a smudge on the wall or a cobweb in the corner and has no reaction to it. To her, these things are just part of our house, like the front door or the living room rug. She doesn’t yet know to derive any meaning from them. Somewhere between three and 30, women learn to feel guilt. But we can unlearn, too, with enough practice and the proper influence.
Part of the trouble is that there are few places we can turn for an alternative model, one that’s perhaps dirtier and more equitable. Social media is little help. A few months ago there was a trend on TikTok where women showed off their messy houses (a response to all the pristine mansions showcased on the app). These so-called messy houses were a little cluttered, lived-in, played-in. But they weren’t dirty. They were relatable, cute, funny—not anything you’d be embarrassed about if a guest came over. Then there are the Instagram moms with their letterboard signs. One mom vacuuming a white rug in a perfectly clean house had a sign that read “Cleaning with kids in the house is like brushing your teeth with Oreos.” These accounts are supposed to help us feel less alone, but they don’t because they’re trying to have it two ways. They’re not truly messy. They don’t normalize the reality that most of us live in and feel bad about.
I’d like to offer up Lydia Davis as the patron saint of the messy mom.
What’s missing from this landscape is someone to help us accept messiness and find a new way to think about and distribute the burden of housework. I’d like to offer up Lydia Davis as the patron saint of the messy mom. Davis’s stories show us what it really looks like when you’re struggling to be a writer with two children. And she provides a model in which the responsibility for maintaining that life, messy though it may be, is evenly distributed to all the adults involved.
Many of Davis’s stories use a first-person plural narrator—a “we” narrator—which has the effect of forcing shared responsibility of domestic duties on Davis’s characters. The narrator of “St. Maarten,” shares house-caretaking duties with another, unnamed person: “We” is the pronoun used throughout:
We hardly knew what a clean house should look like. We would begin to think we were quite tidy, and then we would see the dust and clutter of the rooms, and the two hearths covered with ash. Sometimes we argued about it, sometimes we cleaned it. The oil stove became badly blocked and we did nothing for days because the telephone was out of order. When we needed help, we went to see the former caretakers…The old man came by sometimes, and when he saw how the grass had grown so tall around the house, he scythed it without comment.
The failure to clean and take care of the house is just a fact. There’s no remorse expressed and no fretting. It’s a collective problem, just like the baby who fell off the bed. No word on who was watching the baby when he fell: their bed, their baby, their responsibility. Shit happens, the baby survived, let’s get back to work.
On a societal level, we tend to give men a pass when it comes to mess—as in that study where a man’s mess seemed less messy than a woman’s. But men are just as capable, and just as culpable. When Davis writes “we” it shifts that culpability to right where it should be: from her shoulders over to theirs. They both carry the yoke and therefore share the load. These problems belong to all of us that live in this house. If a mess doesn’t often distract from a man’s work it cannot be allowed to distract from a woman’s work.
James Wood once wrote about Lydia Davis, “You could say that selfishness, in every sense of the word, is Davis’s real theme: the overbearing presence of the self, the insistent internal volume of the self, the dunning inescapability of being who one is.” I’d argue that the focus on the self is what allows Davis to detach from her messy house and detach from the undue pressure women feel. We think the answer is to give up more of ourselves for our family and our children, but when we allow ourselves to be equally important and our work to be equally important—if not more important—than some of the household tasks, and even the work of our husbands, that’s when we’ll find true gender equality. And that’s when we’ll find the time to get our work done.
What Davis offers is validation that the work is worth it—that the work her female characters are doing is more important than the dust and the onion skins. That a woman’s work is valuable and necessary is never questioned, never called up for reconsideration. And that’s what we most need to be influenced by, for ourselves and our daughters. It doesn’t really matter if my daughter has chicken nuggets for dinner again. It doesn’t really matter if my baseboards are dusty and my bathtub has gray soap scum around the drain. But it will matter, and matter a lot eventually, if my work is not complete. It will matter to me and to my daughter. The example I set for her will guide the way she lives her own life, and perhaps influence the guilt over housework she does or does not carry when she is grown up. I want her to live comfortably with the idea that she can let some of it go, without remorse, in the service of something greater.
Pan entered Gubeikou Station at top speed, hurtling through the crowds, hand on her purse. It was late and her father would be getting restless, prone to wandering; she needed to get home, get on the train. At the end of the line a guard lazily waved his security wand over her duffle coat, both sides, slowing her down. “I’m in a hurry,” she said plaintively.
Down the steps, then, quick-stepping on the too-shallow stairs, dodging the march of people headed in the opposite direction, determinedly clutching their bags as they went. “Let me through!” she cried. But it was 5 p.m. and Gubeikou was crowded. A train had just arrived, disgorging more people now headed to the exits; she was beaten back against the wall by the crowds.
By the time she reached the foot of the stairs the train doors had closed; it had left the station.
That was all right, Pan thought. She’d get the next one. She made her way to a bench, sat down. Haste didn’t pay, she reminded herself. Today she’d miscounted the change at the register and ended up 20 yuan short: she’d had to make up the difference. At home as a child, her family had nicknamed her Ranhou Ne? because she was always asking, “And then?” from the time she was young.
“I got some leeks today,” her mother might say.
“And then?”
“I’ll make some soup.
“And then?”
“And then we’ll eat it.”
“And then?”
“And then you’ll go to sleep and stop asking questions, baby.”
The station filled with people. A middle-aged woman with a perm sat down beside her and took out a tube of crimson lipstick and smeared it on her face. Opposite them was a yellow ad featuring a grinning Jack Russell terrier jumping in the air to catch what looked like the world, a globe. It was too large: Pan doubted the dog would be able to catch it; it would just bounce harmlessly off his nose.
Another ten minutes passed. Then, an announcement: “The next train will be delayed. We thank you for your understanding.”
The train was a marvel, just two years old, state-of-the-art. It had doors that swung open like a singing mouth, emitting a merry chime, and closed after twenty seconds with precision. There were twenty-six lines already built, with another ten under way. No other city in the world had built its subway stations so quickly.
At home as a child, her family had nicknamed her Ranhou Ne? because she was always asking, ‘And then?’
Half an hour passed. The crowd swelled and milled around unhappily, everyone bundled in their coats. Pan was glad she had her seat. Every ten minutes or so, the announcer would return: “The next train will be delayed. We thank you for your understanding.”
A pair of teenage boys took off their coats and laid them on the ground and sat atop them. A handful of others followed suit, and then others.
Pan’s legs were starting to fall asleep, and she twitched her chilly toes inside her pink boots. It had been a while since anyone else had entered the station, she noticed; they must be turning people away.
Down the platform, a man in a bright-blue coat was the first to try leaving. Indignant, he led a group of half a dozen commuters back up the stairs, where they banged on the access gates, which consisted of tall, solid plates of hammered metal.
One guard must have taken out a stepladder, because suddenly his whole face and part of his torso appeared, peering out over the barriers.
“We’ll get the train moving soon,” he said kindly. When shouts rang out, he nodded sympathetically. “I know,” he said. “You’re tired. I’m tired, too. You want to go home and eat a nice meal, rest for a while. I do, too. Please be patient. We’ll get there together.”
Then he did a little shimmy of his hips, at which the crowd laughed. After the subway system had opened, the government had hired teams of beautiful young women to dress in tight-sheathed skirts and blouses with red sashes across their chests that read TRAIN GODDESSES SERVE THE PEOPLE. During rush hour, they stood on the platform and twitched their hips as they sang the same song:
Thank you for your cooperation, please line up, do not push
Be a civilized passenger, for your safety and that of those around you
We’ll get there together.
Pan didn’t laugh. Her father was waiting at home, waiting for her to come back and cook dinner. By now he would be pacing anxiously in the living room, where she had left the television on all afternoon in an effort to amuse him, but his favorite program had ended an hour ago and who knew what he might decide to do next: Light the stove? Bang his head repeatedly against a wall?
She took her subway card and waved it repeatedly over the gates, which flashed a red x. “Let us go!” she shouted, but the guard’s head had already disappeared.
That night they slept on coats at careful distances from one another, on islands spread of newspaper, heads pillowed on bags. The lights never went out. A baby made small keening noises through the night, but did not cry. They were too far down to get any signal, but Pan, who seized a patch of ground near the bathroom at the west end of the tunnel, kept an eye on her phone anyway, watching the time: 11:10, 4:30, 6:32. Her stomach clenched anxiously anytime she thought of her father: perhaps one of the neighbors would have stopped to check on him, she thought to herself. It had happened before.
At 8 a.m. two guards reappeared, this time through a side door marked STAFF ONLY that had been locked overnight. The first came wheeling a cart stacked with boxes of ramen and tall thermoses filled with hot water. Each person got a cup, a toothbrush, and a sliver of soap, which came in pouches that bore the stamped white letters HUMANITARIAN SUPPLIES.
“Repairs still under way,” he said shortly.
A man dressed in an untidy, reflective smock, the kind that street cleaners wore, got up, brushing himself off. “You can’t treat us like this!” he shouted. “We have things to do. Let us go.”
The first guard shook his head regretfully. “Passengers must exit at a different station from where they entered,” he said. “It’s in the rule book.”
The second guard taped a sheet of paper to the wall. Owing to a mechanical breakdown, it ran in printed letters, trains at Gubeikou Station will be delayed. We assure passengers they will get to their destinations. Thank you for your cooperation. A red seal was affixed in one corner.
“Let us out with you,” another man said, pointing at the door through which they’d entered; a third guard was wheeling in another cart.
“Can’t do that,” the first guard said. He tapped the STAFF ONLY sign and began to lay out trays of plastic utensils, washcloths, and napkins. Other passengers gathered, peppering the man with questions: How much longer? What was the problem, exactly? Could their fares be refunded?
“We’ll get you to your destination,” is all they would reply. They would take messages to loved ones, they said. They would ensure work units were notified.
One of the teenage boys darted toward the door. In response, the second guard unsheathed an electric baton and whirled it about his person once, striking the young man, who dropped to the ground and began quietly moaning.
“Look what you made me do,” the guard said angrily.
In a matter of minutes the men had erected a small supply station near one end of the platform, complete with soy milk, crackers, instant noodles, coloring books, pencils, and stacks of coarse yellow blankets. “Thank you for your cooperation,” they said to the crowd, before leaving. “We’ll get you moving soon.”
We’ll get there together.
That day, the two teenage boys tried scaling the subway turnstiles, but were warned back by guards who stood just outside, faintly visible through the cracks, wielding electric batons. “Down!” they cried, gesturing at signs that said NO CLIMBING.
Pan and others tried standing by the entrance, shrieking repetitively, “Let us out!” There was something both liberating and terrifying in all the fuss they were causing; it made Pan think of her grandmother, who, in her final years, had similarly appeared to lose all inhibitions, shedding her pants in a supermarket, calling other neighbors “slovenly” to their faces. It also made Pan’s head hurt, and with the guards unmoved, eventually the group’s efforts subsided.
By the second day, the train still hadn’t come, to everyone’s bewilderment. The announcements kept playing: “The next train will be delayed. We thank you for your understanding.”
“Soon,” the passengers kept telling one another. “It must be soon.” Maybe a new part needed ordering. Someone remembered hearing that the trains had been made in Germany. How long did it take to ship something from Germany?
On the third day, the man in the blue coat set off into the tunnels. “We may as well,” said the man, named Jun. He tied plastic bags around his shoes; the tunnels were damp, and at night they could hear the sound of water dripping.
“Be careful!” Pan shouted as Jun set off. She liked the slender-hipped way he would stand for hours at the platform, listening earnestly for sounds of the train, the way he helped pick up the scattered ramen lids and neatly stack them after meals. He wasn’t from the city; his speech was lilted like that of someone from the country’s west.
He returned when they’d nearly given up expecting him, face and hands dirtied. The tunnels extended for miles in all directions, lit by only ghostly lights, he said. He’d gotten lost. The track layout was bewildering, he said. Some tunnels were partly caved in and appeared to have been abandoned halfway, while others led nowhere at all.
The next day he went back in anyway, this time carrying a bag full of their trash, which he used to mark his way. He began disappearing for hours like that, every day. Occasionally the teenage boys would go with him.
“There must be a way out,” he said.
Sensing discontent among their charges, the guards wheeled in a television set, which carried cartoons in the morning, sports games and dramas in the afternoon, and every night, the evening news. There were winter dust storms sweeping the north. There was a new scourge of telephone scams happening; residents were urged to stay on the alert.
Together they slid, uneasily, into this new life. In the mornings, one woman began leading calisthenics sessions to the sound of a tinny transistor radio from one of the guards. The children spent hours chasing one another around the benches on one end of the platform, and did not appear to weary of their game. In the afternoons, adults chatted, watched television, or slept.
At night Pan heard whispered endearments exchanged between a teenage couple who slept a few feet away. Unlike the others, the two seemed utterly content, staying up for hours to eat ramen and watch the television as it flickered in the dark, schoolbags discarded to one side. At times Pan touched the roof of the small cardboard cove she’d erected above her head, offering a semblance of privacy. On its inside, she had stenciled in a number of stars.
She made one for Jun, too, bending and taping the cardboard with care. “You don’t have to draw on it,” he’d said, and she’d nodded, embarrassed.
One morning, a shout went up in the station: someone had seen a flash of color peeking out from the pile of blankets where one construction worker slept and found that he had been hoarding piles of ramen. When they pulled back his bedding, they found dozens of packets had been stuffed inside.
“Selfish!” shouted the middle-aged woman with a perm. “Don’t you think of the rest of us?”
“Get up! Apologize!”
Eventually the group took a vote, and a retired professor among them was chosen to manage the ramen. A sign was drawn up and pasted to the supply station: NO SEEKING PERSONAL BENEFITS: TAKE ONLY WHAT YOU NEED.Later that afternoon (some had begun to eye the professor with suspicion), a second vote was taken and it was decided that they would instead draw up ramen ration tickets, to be handed out every day, and that system lasted for a few days before the guards brought in additional boxes and there was an excess of ramen anyway and everyone abandoned it.
Pan thought of the first time she’d taken a train, thirteen years ago with her mother, before she’d passed away from stomach cancer. Her father had been there, too; it was before his accident, before his confusion had set in, before his illness had turned him into an invalid. She had been ten, and they had been going to see the famous karst landscapes of the south. The train was a hulking green locomotive that carried them for hours, and when they’d arrived, the air was hot and humid and the hills lush with foliage. Later she would understand her mother was already sick at the time, and this was a final trip for them all to help say goodbye.
Time passed. At night, the baby cried. Jun ventured into the tunnels less frequently, and, like the others, started sleeping for long intervals during the day. “When will the train come?” they asked the guards every morning. “Together we’ll get there,” they replied, like manic pharmacists given only one pill to administer. The calisthenics woman stopped leading group exercises in the morning after she came down with a cold; dampness from the tunnel had caused it, she was sure.
And then in the middle of the afternoon, two weeks on, it happened. The air changed abruptly, a wind blew through the station, and a rushing noise grew louder.
“It’s a train!” yelled one of the children, getting to her feet and dashing near the edge.
“Careful!” her mother warned. “Don’t run!”
Others shouted, too. “A train! A train!” On mattresses around the floor, several who’d been taking a post-lunch nap fumbled for their glasses and quickly rose to their feet.
Jun was already at the end of the platform, waiting, peering into the tunnel. Pan hurried to join him. “Do you see it?”
“I see it.”
The light was getting stronger, streaming through the thick air of the tunnel. The crowd lined up around them, watching. The light grew nearer; there was a honking sound. The train entered the station, moving fast. Inside they could see the train car was empty. There was a moment, too late, when everyone realized that it was not going to slow. It did not stop.
After it departed the station, they sat around dazedly, trying to console one another. “Next time,” they said. “It’s a good sign, anyway.”
A short while later, the sound of the Train Goddesses’ song came on the audio system.
Thank you for your cooperation, please line up, do not push
Be a civilized passenger, for your safety and that of those around you
We’ll get there—
Then it was abruptly cut off, as though an order had been quickly countermanded.
Later, lying in bed, it occurred to Pan that the careful trails of debris that Jun had been leaving had probably been obliterated by the train. It didn’t matter, she told herself. So far his periodic searches hadn’t yielded anything, anyway. She suspected he was keeping them up just as a way to be alone: twice she’d seen him shrug off the teenage boys who tried to join him.
Days drew themselves out, days in which Pan, like the others, spent hours prone in bed. After long days on her feet at work, and long nights caring for her father, for the first time in years, she found she could sleep for twelve, thirteen hours straight: such richness, such intoxication. At times it was an effort to pull herself out of bed, to push herself to think of what was required of her now.
For the first time in years, she found she could sleep for twelve, thirteen hours straight: such richness, such intoxication
“Something’s wrong,” Pan told the group one morning nearly a month after they were stranded, slowly stirring her ramen. “We’re never going to get out. Not unless we do something.”
“It’s a mechanical issue,” said one man who worked in a metallurgical plant and snored loudly through the night. “Have a little patience.”
“Patience?” Jun said. “It’s been weeks.”
“What do you have to do outside that’s so important, anyway?” the woman with the perm said. Her voice sounded coquettish, and Jun’s face flushed. It was true that he didn’t have a wife or children waiting for him, like some of the passengers did. It was true that he would not be missed at the factory, either; they would just move another man up the line.
“Anyway, it’s not so bad in here,” a woman who worked as a schoolteacher said, sensing his discomfort. “They’re taking good care of us.”
Since the first days, the guards had brought in mattresses, folding tables, chairs, and pillows. They’d wheeled in extra television sets and for meals had begun serving simple boxed lunches: steamed buns, sandwiches, fried noodles. There were towels, even a badminton set, lots of paper and markers and pens for the children, a few boxes of books and videos. What else did they need?
“That’s not the point,” Pan said.
“What is the point?” the retired professor said, with what sounded like genuine curiosity, as though she were a student who’d posed an interesting academic question.
Pan stared at him crossly, not knowing what to say.
“I’m getting more rest than I have in years,” said a man to her right, and a few of those assembled laughed, as if he’d been joking.
“So you aren’t upset?” Pan said, appealing to the group.
“Of course we’re upset,” the professor said. “But it doesn’t do any good to be anxious. Just calm down.”
“I am calm!” Pan said. Then she turned away and walked back to her blankets, slowly and deliberately, to show how calm she was, and to camouflage the heat around her eyes.
It took two days to hatch her plan, and then one night after everyone had gone to sleep, she arranged her three other co-conspirators by the staff door. Jun was the one who’d had the good idea to lay additional blankets on the floor and recline on them, as though they’d simply chosen to move their sleeping spots. “There are cameras,”he said. “They could be watching.”
The next morning, the four of them woke early and listened intently for sounds of movement, each holding an extra blanket. When the click of the lock turned and the first guard entered, Jun sprang up and flung a blanket over him. It was harder than they’d expected: one of the teenage boys had to rush to his aid before they managed to pinion the guard’s arms to his side.
By then the second guard had entered, baton aloft, but also disappeared sputtering into a blanket. Farther down the platform, heads were beginning to turn.
“Hurry!” Pan yelled to the others, as she and the teenager fought to keep the blanket pulled tight and the guard’s arms to his side and wrestle him to the ground. “Get the door!”
“Help!” the other boys cried. “Help!”
No one moved. In another moment, roused by the commotion, half a dozen other guards had rushed in, pulling the blankets from their colleagues’ heads and administering shocks to Jun and the two teenage boys. Pan they left alone: she registered the surprise on their faces, seeing she was female. “Wait!” she screamed. “Please!” They ignored her and gave Jun and the other boys a few halfhearted kicks as they left, bloodying Jun’s nose, taking their still-laden cart with them.
After that another vote was taken: Pan and Jun and the teenage boys weren’t allowed anywhere near the staff door in the mornings.
“You’ll get us into trouble,” the woman with the perm scolded them. “Don’t you realize, we depend on them for everything?”
“We could have escaped, if more of you had just helped,” Jun said angrily, rubbing his head, still sore from being struck by the baton.
“Yes, and what would we have done once we got there?” said a man with a small, pointed face and a shadow of a mustache, who monopolized the bathroom in the morning. “Do you think we wouldn’t have been punished?”
“We just wanted to get out,” Pan pleaded. “We have important things to do outside.”
“Are you saying the rest of us don’t have important things to do outside?” the woman with the perm said indignantly.
“It’s not the guards’ fault,” the construction worker said abruptly, and everyone turned to him in surprise. It was rare for him to say anything at all.
That night, without saying anything to anyone, Pan defiantly pulled her mattress across the platform, close to Jun’s. In the middle of the night, after she’d gotten up to use the bathroom, she came back and lay down, tensing, wondering if he was awake. After a few minutes, she stretched out her arm and let her hand rest on top of his blankets, where it stayed for perhaps thirty seconds, until he grabbed it and pulled it inside. She let out a low laugh and rolled toward him.
Two months after they were stranded, the country’s state broadcaster sent a team to do a report on the group, sending reporters to film their badminton games and to interview the passengers. The guards let them respectfully through as the stationmaster, a woman they’d never seen before, wearing a shiny badge and a black tricornered hat, supervised.
The reporters moved through the crowd, picking their subjects. “Sometimes I despair, but I trust in the authorities,” the middle-aged woman with a perm said, lip trembling, in the clip that all the news stations aired that evening. “Together we’ll get this train moving!”
Back in the studio, the broadcaster nodded and intoned to the camera, “The spirit of Gubeikou Station is strong.”
The next day, theirs was a front-page item, under the headline GUBEIKOU SPIRIT. The newspapers carried each of their names, in a double-page spread, along with their photos, opposite an editorial that praised them for their bravery, for “inspiring a nation with their fortitude and optimism.”
The atmosphere in the tunnel changed as they pored over the papers the guards had brought that morning, examining their photos. The woman with the perm asked for, and was promised, extra copies.
The spirit of Gubeikou Station is strong.
After breakfast, the retired professor called a meeting. “It’s time we organized ourselves,” he said. “We have been here two months, and we may be here much longer. The nation is watching us,” he said sententiously. “We need to be role models.”
Pan made a face and turned to Jun, waiting to see his expression, but to her surprise his eyes were trained on the professor’s face, and he was nodding.
“Look at this trash,” the professor said, gesturing at the detritus around the tables where they’d eaten. “The bathrooms are a mess, too. We need to organize cleanup crews. We need discipline. We need a schedule.”
There was a sound of general assent. “We represent the Gubeikou Spirit!” he said. “We need to come together.”
Soon the group had drawn up a list of tasks. Jun volunteered to lead the cleanup crews. The woman with the perm said she’d help run morning calisthenics. The schoolteacher said she’d tutor the children, and asked for volunteers to help. Another woman offered to lead a team to do regular laundry: two items per person per week. They would use the bathroom sinks. The construction worker said he would hang some clotheslines.
A sudden camaraderie seemed to have seized the group. Looking around, Pan felt her skepticism weaken. “I’ll help work with the children on their sums,” she offered, and felt herself embraced by a smile from the teacher.
The woman with the perm began singing a chorus from the Train Goddesses’ song, giggling, shuffling her hips. A little self-consciously, as though they were on camera, the rest of the crowd caught the tune, too:
Thank you for your cooperation, please line up, do not push
Be a civilized passenger, for your safety and that of those around you
We’ll get there together.
After that news broadcast, donations started to flood into the station. First it was pallets of dehydrated beef sticks and tins of cookies. Then a store donated piles of new down jackets. One culinary school down the street offered to have its trainees cook for them, and fresh, hot meals began arriving twice a day. To the group’s delight, someone sent an old karaoke machine as well, and soon the afternoons were punctuated by the sound of people warbling lustily, taking turns at the microphone.
The guards, too, turned unexpectedly solicitous. After seeing TV commercials for a new kind of fried chicken, the guards brought them samples. When the retired professor complained he was chilly, they sent in an electric heater. When the group wearied of their existing stock of videos, more arrived.
“It’s better here than on the outside,” a few of the stranded passengers were heard to joke, and others agreed.
Every now and then, the announcements still sounded—“The next train will be delayed. We thank you for your understanding”—but at longer intervals now, and someone had turned the volume down. It was possible, at times, to forget that they were even in a train station. After the news broadcast, more reporters kept arriving, and with them new comforts, as well. The stationmaster ordered couches and more television sets. There was a new program featuring the palace intrigue and romances of a family with two daughters unlucky in love that the group assembled daily to watch, shouting and jeering at one sister, cheering the other on, Pan’s head curled on Jun’s shoulder.
And meanwhile, the train system kept growing. In the distance, if they craned their necks just right, they could sometimes hear the sound of hammering and drilling. There were twenty-eight lines now open throughout the city, the newscasters said. By the end of the year, there’d be twenty-nine. “With the Gubeikou Spirit,” an anchor said one night, “we will continue to persevere, to build the world’s most advanced train system!”
At that, the crowd on the platform cheered. They were more considerate of one another, stood a little more upright. The mayor had come to see them, had shaken their hands and posed for a photo before a red banner that bore the words GUBEIKOU SPIRIT. In the mornings, after calisthenics, they ran twenty laps around the platform together, laughing as they tried to round the corners without knocking into one another. In the afternoons, they traded off taking care of the baby, who had grown a soft cloud of hair and begun issuing her sunshiny smile to anyone who looked at her.
To her surprise, Pan found she liked working with the children, helping them with their math, joining them as they colored. On large sheets of paper, she encouraged them to create jungle scenes and geometrical patterns, big whorls of colors and diamonds that they taped to the subway walls.
It was only late at night that her thoughts turned, reluctantly, to her father. By now, surely the neighborhood committee had taken charge of his care, she told herself. Perhaps he didn’t miss her, she thought—some days he was so confused. She was a poor caretaker, she thought guiltily, working long hours, always away: he might do better in a real institution.
Still, lying near Jun, she found herself restlessly trying to conjure up new methods of escape anyway. They could revolt en masse and climb over the turnstiles—surely some of them would get away. They could refuse food, refuse water.
The next morning, Jun would gently dissuade her. “At this point, we just need to be patient,” he said. “We’ve done all we can. If you haven’t noticed,” he added, “most people here are actually pretty happy.”
He got up and went to play badminton; in recent weeks he’d begun a heated competition with the construction worker. Disgustedly, Pan ate two extra bowls of ramen for lack of anything else to do, and then stopped. Across the way, the calisthenics woman had started up the karaoke machine and was beginning a bouncy rendition of a folk tune with two other women. Pan lay down, shut her eyes, and again fell into a deep slumber.
One morning, the guards came in and affixed a new circular to the walls. Attention, it ran. Gubeikou Station is currently conducting track work. Passengers are advised to stay off the tracks until further notice.
A ripple of interest ran briefly through the group, then dissipated. The woman with the perm was diligently leading an aerobics session, which was running behind because a few people had slept late, and the group was anxious to finish and have their breakfasts (fried mushrooms and steamed rice porridge with pickled vegetables, which smelled very good indeed). It was an unnecessary notice, anyway: Jun and the teenage boys had long ago given up their quest to find a way out through the tunnels.
Shortly after the notice went up, another train arrived. Everyone paused what they were doing and looked up as a rushing sound grew nearer, and a horn sounded full blast. Some of the children moved toward the platform, but the adults simply froze and watched. The locomotive, when it entered, was full of people, they saw: a pack of dusty-faced commuters looking tired and sallow under the fluorescent lights. It zoomed forward without slackening its speed, and, in another moment, it was gone.
Afterward, the adults went back to quietly chatting, struck by seeing so many strangers after so many months. “That was strange,” the professor said aloud, as though to himself.
“They looked so unhappy,” someone said.
“It’s not easy, being outside,” the calisthenics woman said, nodding.
It’s not easy, being outside.
Someone turned on the television: the evening newscast was starting up again. Jun and two women on duty moved around and began collecting plates and stacking them on platters for the guards to remove the next day.
That night the newscast was about the job losses being suffered at two steel refineries that were shutting down. For several weeks, the news had all been in a similar vein, a steady drumbeat; the economy was slowing. There was a crime spree in certain neighborhoods; news anchors advised viewers to lock their doors. “Sad,” the construction worker said with a sigh, and the others agreed.
After that, trains started coming into the station every day or two. Sometimes they arrived with horns blaring, other times they silently sped through, all their lights off. Twice they saw that the cars had people inside: once, another group of commuters, and another time, a man in an orange repair suit who stood alone, tinkering with a light.
Each time the train never slowed, never stopped. While most of them learned to ignore their appearances, their repeated arrivals seemed to drive one woman, with a spotted face and a badly knitted sweater, over the edge. After each one departed, she would sit in a corner rocking back and forth by herself, muttering. When the next train arrived, she would chase it and pound her arms against the swift-moving body of the locomotive, terrifying those around her, who eventually began forcibly restraining her whenever one arrived. “She could hurt herself like that,” they said to one another. “She could fall onto the tracks.” But the trains came at all hours of day and night, and it wasn’t possible to watch her. Eventually they asked the guards for a short length of chain with which to tether her to a drainpipe by the bathroom.
They moved her mattress and placed a television set in front of her. “It’s for your own good,” they told her. “We don’t want you to get hurt.” The woman howled at first, but eventually quieted.
The woman reminded Pan of her father. In the afternoon, she would sit and draw pictures by her side as the woman watched, fascinated. She began bringing her plates of food during meals, to make sure she ate properly.
“More celery,” she’d say, imitating herself when she was with her father. “Eat some fruit.” The woman would make an assortment of pleased-sounding noises at Pan’s attentions. It could not be determined if she had always been so incoherent, or if it was life at Gubeikou that had made her so.
When the trains came, the woman would rise up and lunge at them, as though the locomotive had wronged her family in a past lifetime, her chain rattling. The other passengers speculated about her quietly: Where had she been going the day they’d been stranded, anyway? What would happen to her when they were freed?
“Poor thing, no work unit would want her. She’s lucky she wound up here.”
The professor had the bright idea of finding the long-ago newspaper article that had listed all those stranded. Together, they located her picture wonderingly: it said she was an accountant.
A chorus of indignation broke out. “Not possible—look at her,” the professor said.
“It must be an error,” the others said.
Then one day, the train snuck up on them. It was late in the evening. The kids were playing down on one end of the platform, by the badminton net. They had just finished eating their dinner, roast pork and steamed rice and braised bamboo shoots, and now that the plates had been stacked and put aside, most of the group was congregated around the television, watching a detective show. Pan was leaning back in her chair, her legs casually slung over Jun’s lap, comfortably encased in one of the newly donated sweatshirts the guards had unpacked the other day, which read GUBEIKOU SPIRIT across their fronts. It was a Friday, but it might as well have been a Tuesday or a Wednesday; it made no difference—all the days ran together. The atmosphere was warm and convivial: the retired professor was already nodding off in his chair, and around the table, some of the others smiled at the sight.
The volume on the television was turned up, and it was only the sound of metal rasping against metal that made them look up. Across the way, a beam of light was streaming through the tunnel: another train was coming through. Down the platform, the woman was on her feet, yanking futilely at her chain and lunging forward, her chain clanging noisily against the pipe. The group frowned. “Calm down!” the middle-aged woman with the perm shouted.
The rushing sound of the train was quieter than usual, though, and in another moment the group realized why. The train wasn’t moving that quickly; in fact, it was slowing down. It had stopped. In another moment the train’s doors had opened with a merry chime. The train car was empty. Its insides had a faintly yellow cast, the carpet dirty and worn.
“It’s stopped!” someone cried. Pan stood and gazed at the open doors, heart pounding, joy and fear coursing through her veins in equal measure.
The group was silent. On the screen, a detective was rushing down a set of stairs in pursuit of a woman in flight. Pan turned toward her sleeping pallet to grab a few possessions. No, there wasn’t time. “Jun!” she called. “It’s here!”
He was still seated, slowly tying his laces. “It might not be safe,” the professor warned. No one moved.
“We should ask first,” one of the others muttered. “Find out what’s going on.”
“This could be our only chance!” cried Pan. A few wary pairs of eyes glanced over from the television. “Come on, get up! What have we been waiting for?”
The train’s warning chime sounded: in another moment, the doors would close. “Hurry!” she yelled, but the others stayed seated. Incredulous, she wrenched her eyes from the group and hurtled toward the train, socked feet flashing white. Farther down the platform, she heard the sound of the woman’s metal chain rasping and felt a twinge of guilt, but kept running. Two of the teenage boys rose and joined her. The doors slid shut. “Pan, wait!” Jun shouted.
She didn’t hear him. She stood panting, exhilarated and afraid. She was already through the door.
I wish I remembered exactly where my dad got the 1992 Royal Rumble tape. I imagine it was from the packaging factory in the Toronto suburbs where he worked for most of his life. We couldn’t afford to order the pay-per-views, so we relied on bootlegged copies from his co-workers for the majority of our wrestling videos. We collected others by recording WWE (then WWF) Saturday Night’s Main Event off the TV each week. Sometimes, we’d rent a show from the local video store, set up two VCRs, and record it onto a blank VHS. I was six or seven years old at the time and my mom worked the afternoon shift as a custodian on an assembly line, so dad and I would watch these recorded tapes each weeknight. Dad, exhausted from his own laborious day shift, would often fall asleep on the couch beside me, while I repeatedly poured over the familiar matches. This was as close as he ever came to reading to me before bed.
Wrestling was always on in our house, but the 1992 Royal Rumble was special. We watched this tape together often, each time pretending to be unaware of the outcome. We feigned surprise every time the villainous Ric Flair weaseled his way to a victory in the 30-man over-the-top battle royal to win the championship belt. Dad cheered for his cheating antics while I faithfully rooted for the wholesome Hulk Hogan to regain the title. Dad played heel to my babyface, illuminating the struggle between good and evil to me through wrestling.
Why—almost 30 years after the 1992 Royal Rumble and sixteen years after my dad’s death—am I still watching professional wrestling?
Every January, during the build up to the annual Royal Rumble, I think about my dad, who, like a wrestler who lived too hard, suddenly passed away in 2005. I also consider Flair, the renowned dirtiest player in the game, and what my dad tried to teach me through the Nature Boy’s elusive ways. Above all else, I contemplate a larger question. Why—almost 30 years after the 1992 Royal Rumble and sixteen years after my dad’s death—am I still watching professional wrestling?
My grandpa was perpetually disappointed when he caught dad and me watching wrestling matches. He ridiculed our passion, referring to it as “a waste of time.” He mocked us for “watching these naked men dancing around” and never missed an opportunity to tell me it was “fake,” no matter my degree of obsessive belief.
Grandpa, a stout three-piece suit-wearing Punjabi Sikh who matched the colors of his tie and turban, recited the daily Sikh prayers loud enough for the entire house to hear every morning. He specifically targeted me before school, encouraging me to repeat the prayers in the shower, while I got dressed, and during breakfast. The religious texts themselves were inaccessible to me, as they were often bound in lavish cloths and kept in the most elevated places, usually the top shelf of a closet in the highest room in the house. Even if I could have reached the scriptures, I wouldn’t have been able to read them, because they were written in Punjabi or another dialect that appeared simultaneously foreign and familiar. As a first-generation South Asian growing up in Canada, I recognized the words but failed to understand the non-Romanized alphabet that formed them. Without complete physical or mental access to the scriptures, my grandpa resorted to dictating and translating them to me. Roughly, these sacred texts described a “formless” yet “all-pervading” God who was equally present and obscure.
Despite Grandpa’s insistence, Dad never adopted religion at his beckoning. He let grandpa force the prayers on me, but I never heard dad repeat them publicly, except for an occasional sarcastic waheguru (oh God). Even at Grandpa’s funeral in 2004, one year before his own death, Dad silently listened to the ceremonial prayers rather than reciting them with everyone else.
During particular bouts of religious fervor, my grandpa would advocate for me to grow my hair and wear a turban like a true Sikh. “Your father didn’t listen to me, but there’s still time for you,” he said. I kept delaying, maintaining that I would consider formalizing my religious devotion next year, and then the year after that.
Unlike the abstract prayers, wrestling had narrative arcs that informed my morality.
My elementary school days consisted of prayers in the morning and wrestling in the evening. Scripture and mythology. Absolute truth and fiction. I always preferred wrestling because I understood it. Unlike the abstract prayers, wrestling had narrative arcs that informed my morality. I learned never to look at another man’s wife from the Hulk Hogan-Miss Elizabeth-Randy Savage love triangle, when Savage infamously accused Hogan of having lust in his eyes and in his black heart. The Hart Foundation taught me how to love my siblings unconditionally, despite the family rivalries, jealousy, and outside interference from those trying to split us apart. I discovered that death is inevitable for everyone—except for the Undertaker, because you can’t kill what’s already dead.
Despite Grandpa’s rumblings, Dad continued to be an advocate and my tag team partner for watching wrestling. The extent of his fascination is confirmed in a collection of family photos that I recently revisited. In one, I’m maybe four years old, resting in my dad’s arms, holding my chubby cheeks to his youthful face in front of a “Rowdy” Roddy Piper poster. In another poster, my dad stands alone with his hands crossed in front of his slender frame, in faded jeans and a blue crewneck sweatshirt, in front of Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase with Virgil and the Honky Tonk Man. The last photo is of my mom and dad sitting together on the bed. Dad has his arm loosely wrapped around Mom, the most affection I ever saw between the two. Their intimacy is awkwardly mirrored by the portrait in the background of Macho Man Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth: wrestling’s royal couple, often called “the match made in heaven.”
What strikes me about the posters in these old family photos is the nuanced choice of performers. These weren’t the titans of wrestling at the time: Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, the Ultimate Warrior. Instead, it was the intercontinental champions, the exaggerated American gimmicks of wealth and music, and a Canadian pretending to be an unhinged kilt-wearing Scottish wrestler. These were immoral anti-heroes that illuminated the goodness of the megastars that I adored. Dad lived the heel gimmick to my babyface as he specifically sought out these posters and then convinced my mom to pose with them.
As an immigrant from a small agricultural village in Punjab, India with minimal English skills, my dad used wrestling to communicate with his co-workers. If wrestling was my first fiction, it was potentially a language for him, a way to assimilate at work and connect with life in a foreign country. Suplexes and submissions replaced reading and writing. Maybe he was indoctrinating me so I too could engage with my peers at school—or perhaps wrestling was his language to connect with me.
Wrestling was our shared education of North American values, our common fiction.
Wrestling was our shared education of North American values, our common fiction. Our fandom and understanding of the world grew together. We never explicitly discussed sex or sexuality, but we watched the raunchy and distasteful segments with Sable and Sunny on Monday Night Raw. That was as close as we got to “the talk.” We never discussed our Indian immigrant identities, but proudly sided with Canadian icon Bret Hart during his heated nationalist feud with Shawn Michaels in the late ‘90s. We were proud Canadians because our own Hart was the best wrestler in the world and morally superior to Michaels. We never talked about depression or death, but we saw Mankind manically pull his hair out in a boiler room while grieving for a lost childhood before burying another man alive. We had all of life’s sensitive conversations in silence, through the fictitious portrayal of morality in the wrestling ring.
This was no different than a father reading to his kids, indoctrinating them into the fandom of his favorite sports team, or encouraging them to follow in his professional footsteps. All those formative moments occurred for me through a single medium. Professional wrestling was my simultaneous introduction to fiction, sports, and the grown-up world. Although Dad never said much, the in-ring lessons were self-explanatory based on what we watched together. Sergeant Slaughter was to blame for America’s war in the Persian Gulf and that was why Hulk Hogan had to defeat him at Wrestlemania VII. Nobody liked paying taxes because Irwin R. Schyster (IRS) was a greedy and corrupt heel just like the internal revenue service. Ravishing Rick Rude—with his mullet, thick mustache, and muscular body —was a real man because the women in the audience gushed over him every week even though he brutally insulted their hometowns.
Dad could never be compared to wrestlers capable of cutting a stirring 10-minute promo that left the audience anxious for their next match. He was quiet and sensitive, which is why I think he was drawn to loudmouth wrestlers like Flair and DiBiase. They were obnoxious and cocky, the opposite of his reserved, unambitious persona. He worked in the same factory for decades, rarely bought new clothes, drove his cars until they halted on the side of the road, and hated any disruption in his routine. He was content with the first variation of immigrant life he found and never felt the need to expand it. He didn’t seek additional knowledge about the world. Instead, he survived in it as he saw it: a confined ring with ropes and turnbuckles. Wrestling, as both a fiction and language, was his simplified introduction to life abroad and so it naturally became mine as well.
I absorbed wrestling before ever reading a book, watching a movie, or adopting a God.
In Grandpa’s absence, Mom has gladly inherited his role when she catches me watching wrestling alone. “This is what your father did his whole life and now you’re going to do it too,” she says, condescendingly. I used to rebel against her resentment, trying to explain the rooted life lessons from the fiction that shaped my childhood. I absorbed wrestling before ever reading a book, watching a movie, or adopting a God. It always made sense to me because it made sense to my dad. But I no longer fight back against Mom’s cynicism. Instead, I too watch quietly now, letting the fictional conflicts in the squared circle restore memory and meaning.
Wrestling occupies the silence around me. Each match mirrors the last one, and the one years and generations before that. Good versus evil. The story never changes. The repetition evokes nostalgia for a time when tapes could be rewound, Dad slept by my side, and praying was a mandate.
No single wrestler, feud, or moment keeps me engaged with wrestling. Rather, it’s the harmonious sequences—the sleeper holds, elbow drops, and leg locks—that form a language to converse with the past, to seek answers to questions that I never asked. Dad’s silence has transformed to absence, yet I still hear echoes of his sentiment each time a body crashes onto the mat and a loudmouth heel mocks his babyface opponent. I don’t need to imagine Dad’s voice, because he wouldn’t have said anything—only fast forwarded to the next match.
In the 2017 film Revenge (directed by Coralie Fargeat), the protagonist Jen is raped by a friend of her lover. Her lover, the rapist, and a third man then chase her to the edge of a cliff and push her off. She falls several stories and is impaled on the spearlike branch of a small, dead tree. Her assailants leave her for dead, and since they are ostensibly on vacation to hunt, they decide to pick up her body and dispose of it later, on their way to go slaughter some animals.
Jen is able to free herself from the tree, but then has to walk around for half of the movie with a penis-like branch protruding from her body. She is eventually able to remove the phallus, take some peyote, and cauterize her wound with a beer can. The label of the can has a phoenix on it, and when Jen saves her own life, she also brands her abdomen with her own large phoenix tattoo.
The movie is heavy-handed, gory, and very Freudian. The symbolism is obvious, and the plot follows closely in the tradition of the rape-revenge genre: girl is wronged, girl survives, girl murders everyone in her wake. Certain scenes are difficult to watch because of the amount of blood and gore. Despite all this, I love this movie with all my heart because when all is said and done, Jen is victorious. She wins.
The entire superhero genre, in a sense, is about good guys avenging wrongdoing.
I’m not the only one who likes to see a hero triumph over someone who has done her wrong. Movies like The Crow, Kill Bill, John Wick, and The Dark Knight are beloved by millions of watchers. The entire superhero genre, in a sense, is about good guys avenging wrongdoing. Three of the top ten grossing movies of all time are Avengers films.
Because of my love for Revenge, and for similar movies like the 2007 Teeth, where a young woman with vagina dentata moves through the world castrating would-be rapists, I was excited to see Promising Young Woman, the Carey Mulligan vehicle directed by Emerald Fennell. I’d been watching the trailersfor months, and was ready for what I thought would be a witty, ruthless revenge movie.
The colors in the trailer are all neon pink and blue (very similar to the marketing and trailers for Revenge) and in it, we watch the protagonist Cassie (played by Carey Mulligan) smash a windshield and draw hash marks in a diary. An instrumental cover of the Britney Spears tune “Toxic” accompanies the images. This version of the song, with its screeching violins, sounds less like a pop hit and more like the soundtrack to a slasher film.
The movie starts out by making fun of the men who approach the protagonist. In one of the opening scenes Cassie goes to a bar and pretends to be blackout drunk. She acts as if she’s having a hard time keeping her head up, and when a “nice guy” played by Adam Brody approaches her she slurringly explains that she can’t find her phone. He offers to take her home, only to “change his mind” at the last second, taking her to his place instead.
He carries her into his bedroom and begins to take off her underwear. Still pretending to be drunk, she asks him what he’s doing. He continues and Cassie asks again. When he does not stop, she sits up straight in bed, revealing she is actually sober, and asks him pointedly, “Hey, what are you doing?”
Over the course of the movie, we learn that Cassie’s best friend Nina was raped in medical school by one of their classmates. Because Nina was drunk, the rape was dismissed by the school. Toward the end of the film, Cassie confronts a female dean who explains to her that the school didn’t want to ruin the young man’s future, that he was a “promising young man.”
I turned to my boyfriend at one point and said, ‘So all she’s going to do is talk to them and make them feel bad?’
We watch as Cassie catches a series of men in attempted rape, and here is where the movie defies expectations. Having watched the trailers, I assumed that at some point Cassie would murder one of these men. Instead she makes them realize that she is not drunk, makes them explain themselves, and leaves. I turned to my boyfriend at one point and said, “So all she’s going to do is talk to them and make them feel bad?” I wanted one of these men to suffer violence for trying to hurt Cassie—a moment of discomfort wasn’t good enough.
Promising Young Woman is clearly situated in the rape-revenge genre, yet most of Cassie’s movement in the story feels less like action and more like sleight of hand. We watch as Cassie loses more and more: her best friend, her career, her boyfriend, and ultimately, her life. All of the men survive, and only one of them suffers any legal consequences. When the credits rolled, I felt depressed, anxious, and disappointed. In contrast, at the end of Revenge I felt happy, even elated.
In many ways Promising Young Woman is a more complex, more feminist movie, despite the fact they are both directed by women who are self-described feminists. The plot of Promising Young Woman is unique, and it refuses to objectify Cassie. Revenge, on the other hand, spends a lot of time in close-ups on Jen’s lips and butt. (I believe Fargeat is making a comment about the male gaze with these shots, but still, they are there, and we get to gawk at actress Matilda Lutz’s rear end just as much as the men in the movie do.) So why did I feel like Promising Young Woman was such a bummer?
One key difference between Promising Young Woman and Revenge is the scope of the story. Jen is isolated in the desert with her three assailants. She must fight and kill to survive the men who are hunting her. Because the movie does not appeal to anyone beyond the four lead characters, it eliminated my need to worry about any legal system or outside community. Within the parameters set up by the story, either Jen will kill, or she will die. As a viewer, I’m let off the hook for enjoying the slaughter.
Similarly, her three assailants are blatantly awful, cold-blooded people. About halfway through the movie, Jen’s rapist (Stan) wakes up in an SUV after waiting in it all night, keeping an eye out for Jen. What Stan doesn’t know is that one of his friends (Dmitri) is floating dead in the lake nearby, having been stabbed to death by Jen.
While Stan pees outside, he spots a spider and urinates on it, chuckling while he does so. We watch as the creature struggles and then dies. Even while taking a pee, this man is mean and callous. He has to dominate everything around him, even the natural world. He is easy to hate, and that’s why, when Dmitri’s bloated corpse floats up to Stan while he’s washing his face in the river, I laughed. The scene is shocking, but it is also funny.
In contrast, Cassie is stuck in the modern world. She has access to anyone in her town who might deign to listen to her. She is a modern-day Cassandra, who pleads with former school mates, the dean, Nina’s mother, and her own parents to take Nina’s plight seriously. (Nina is never seen on screen, and the film implies that she committed suicide because of the pain and humiliation resulting from her rape.)
Promising Young Woman engages with the reality: Help is not coming, and catharsis may not be either.
Cassie is telling the truth, and she wants someone to do something about it. Yet in this version of the story, rather than not believing her, it seems that everyone around her knows she is right and they just don’t care. She is met with responses like “we were just kids,” or “we get accusations like this all the time,” or “you gotta let it go.” As far as support from her community or legal ramifications go, she might as well be in the desert. Revenge offers the fantasy of an isolated moment when anything, even bloody justice, is possible. Promising Young Woman engages with the reality: Help is not coming, and catharsis may not be either.
Director Emerald Fennell imagined a different kind of story, where revenge is taken non-violently—but it’s clear that this is not a choice on Cassie’s part, but a constraint. Cassie is repeatedly put in situations where the other characters believe she has done something awful, killed someone, or put another woman in a position where she could be assaulted. She explains over and over that she can’t do something like that. The men in this story can get away with things. She can’t.
Cassie’s community turns its back on her. No one will help until it’s too late. While Revenge is a fantasy where Jen is allowed to completely transform herself into a blood-soaked, victorious survivor, Cassie refuses to transform, to hold her friend’s tragedy close and live her life by its memory. Because of that, she is completely crushed by the apathy of those around her.
My negative reaction to Promising Young Woman made me realize there is something in the violence of more traditional revenge films that makes me feel better about the world. These movies may be gross and terrifying, but if the story is well-executed, I’m left with the feeling that justice has been done, that the protagonist has received a kind of payment for the trauma they have suffered. Revenge that has to operate within legal and moral constraints doesn’t feel like it matches the power of my anger.
But at the same time, fantasies like Revenge do us a disservice by letting us feel satisfied. I can watch Revenge and then immediately go about my day. I’ve been granted catharsis and can let the experience fade away into the background of my life. I think that is part of the reason why revenge movies are so popular. Promising Young Woman isn’t like that. It won’t let you go. Even now, weeks after watching the movie, I still can’t shake the feeling of despair Cassie’s story brought me. I can’t look away, and I think that was the point. Within the constraints women operate under, catharsis is a lie. The best revenge we can hope for is forcing people, for one moment, to listen.
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