George Orwell’s 1984 is one of those ubiquitous books that you know about just from existing in the world. It’s been referenced in everything from Apple commercials to Bowie albums, and is used across the political spectrum as shorthand for the silencing of free speech and rise of oppression. And no one seems to love referencing the text, published by George Orwell in 1949, more than the conservative far-right in America—which would be ironic if they’d actually read it or understood how close their own beliefs hew to the totalitarianism Orwell warned of.
Following last week’s insurrection at the Capitol, Josh Hawley said it was “Orwellian” for Simon & Schuster to rescind his book deal after he stoked sedition by leading a charge against the election results. Donald Trump, Jr. (who I absolutely promise has not read a book let alone that one), claimed after his father was kicked off Twitter that “We are living in Orwell’s 1984,” then threw in a reference to Chairman Mao for good measure. Far-right voices all over Twitter lamented the “Orwellian” purge of their followers after accounts linked to the violent attack were banned from the platform. It’s enough to make an English teacher’s head spin.
Although we often urge our students to resist easy moralizing, the overt didacticism of 1984 has long been part of its pedagogical appeal.
I understand why Orwell’s dystopian novel is so appealing to people who want to decry authoritarianism without actually understanding what it is. It’s the same reason I relied on the text for years in my own classroom. Although we often urge our students to resist easy moralizing, the overt didacticism of 1984 has long been part of its pedagogical appeal. The good guys are good (even if they do take the last piece of chocolate from their starving sister or consider pushing their wife off a cliff that one time). The bad guys are bad. The story is linear and easy to follow; the characters are singularly-minded and voice their views in straightforward, snappy dialogue; the symbols are obvious, the kind of thing it’s easy to make a chart about or include on a short answer section of a test. (20 Points: What does the paperweight represent to Winston, and what does it mean when, after it is shattered, he thinks, “How small…how small it always was!”) Such simplicity can be helpful when presenting complicated ideas to young people who are still developing analytical and critical thinking skills. And so, like so many other teachers, I clung to Orwell’s cautionary tale for a long time as a pedagogical tool despite its literary shortcomings.
But when Trump began his rise to political power, I started to notice the dangerous inoculating quality that the text had in my own classroom. Because the dystopia of 1984 was such a simplified, exaggerated caricature, it functioned for my students not as a cautionary tale, but as a comforting kind of proof that we could never get “that bad.” I didn’t take the step to remove the text from my curriculum, but more than in previous years, I began to feel the need to charge the students to consider how things like “doublethink” and Newspeak related to our own political moment. But beyond the intellectual pleasure of the exercise itself (they were more than ready to offer examples of these methodologies across the political spectrum), most students could not bring themselves to consider that the United States could actually sink into the kind of totalitarian control that Oceania experienced. They cited our “freedoms”—speech, press, etc.—as mitigating factors. They trusted norms, even as those norms were being continually tested and broken in real time, the goalposts moving ever closer to political collapse.
It functioned for my students not as a cautionary tale, but as a comforting kind of proof that we could never get ‘that bad.’
High school students aren’t always known for being thorough readers, to be sure, but even reading 1984 cover-to-cover doesn’t seem to have prepared Americans for the moment in which we find ourselves. If anything, it’s allowed us to scapegoat other people (the Nazis, Stalin, Big Brother—who is, to be clear, not a real person) other places, other times. A reading of 1984 in an American classroom has almost always brought with it comparisons between our system of government and the “evil” regimes against which we’ve historically placed ourselves in relief; we read it as being about those people, not about us. I’ve watched students who align with right-wing ideologies see the text as a clean-cut repudiation of communism without any sense of self-reflection regarding America’s own tyrannical past or present, and it’s hard to argue against their reading when a large part of Orwell’s critique was directed at Stalinism, one of the great totalitarian regimes of his age.
Because white Americans of all political stripes so instinctively view themselves as living at the epicenter of history, they usually have trouble internalizing the historical context of the book. It’s a misreading Orwell couldn’t possibly have foreseen, of course. But because he set the story in in his own near future, he inadvertently also set it in a very specific political era for America. The year 1984 was, for us, the height of the Cold War, that easy shorthand for cultural oppression, with Russia and China serving as such nearly-unchallengeable scapegoats (hence Jr.’s reference to Mao in his tweet). It’s unfortunate that Orwell’s text gained a second life in this context, but worse, it makes it even harder for us to draw parallels from the text to our own political reality. Orwell wanted us to see the tyranny that rises from within. Instead, his parable only serves to steel our minds against facing the cognitive dissonance of our own capacity for authoritarianism. Doublethink, indeed.
The population of students to whom I was teaching the text were Jewish, predominantly white, mostly sheltered from the worst of America’s evils. If anything, their Jewishness allowed them, perhaps somewhat reasonably, to much more easily view the world of 1984 as a Nazi-adjacent dystopia: something perpetrated upon us, the good guys, rather than a horror of which we ourselves are capable. There is much talk in present-day literature pedagogy about stories being both a “window” and a “mirror.” For most of us, especially when we are young and understandably see our own experience as primary, the mirror comes first. To see the window takes work; some never discover it.
1984 lets them off the hook. It’s a text that allows them to frame themselves as the victim of their own unacknowledged atrocities.
“This is just like 1984!” the right-wing mob cries as it changes the very meaning of words to suit its nefarious aims. “So Orwellian!” its leaders cry as they demand unthinking fealty to an unhinged, unquestioned leader. For those insistent on ignoring the real and present danger that America poses for Black people, immigrants, Native people, the LGBTQ community, and so many other dispossessed people within our own borders, 1984 lets them off the hook. It’s a text that allows them to frame themselves as the victim of their own unacknowledged atrocities. Winston Smith, with his varicose ulcer and thinning hair, seems like an unlikely hero, which is part of Orwell’s rhetorical point. But in the hands of a 21st-century American reader (and I use the term “reader” extremely loosely), Winston is the likeliest victim in the world: a middle-aged, middling white male cog in the machine who just can’t catch a break. What white supremacist insurrectionist wouldn’t see himself in Orwell’s hapless hero of the rebellion?
Perhaps if they’d read to the end and actually seen Winston captured, brainwashed, embracing the figurehead of a totalitarian regime, they might have seen themselves in the text in a way that would have opened their eyes to their own folly. It’s hard to say. Poisonous ideas, like viruses, travel quickly and are not easily eradicated. But even those of us who do not find ourselves in this seditious camp can reflect on our own failures, both in our understanding of America’s legacy and our own participation in its most violent acts. We can seek out texts that are true windows and allow them to move us, to change us, to make us reconsider our place in the world and our role in the march toward justice. We can smash our own paperweight, the one we’ve filled with the myths we’ve told ourselves about America’s greatness, its rightness, its inability to fall prey to humanity’s worst inclinations, and expose those myths as false and insufficient for the task ahead. “How small,” we’ll say as we see their shattered remains strewn about the floor, “how small they always were.”
I don’t need to say that poetry got us through 2020, because poets get us through everything.
I don’t say this to put a burden on all of the beautiful poets out there, of course. But when we’re acutely focused on small joys and precious moments, I can’t help but think that poetry might be the perfect medium for us. This is true now, this is true always.
I can’t help but think that poetry might be the perfect medium for us. This is true now, this is true always.
Things have been distracting; life has changed irrevocably. We feel unsure, adrift, and anxious about so many things. We’re rethinking the media we consume, the ways we communicate, what’s important. If you’re anything like me, you’ve struggled to focus on anything beyond the absolute basics in order to get by. I watched the same shows over and over. While I was reading more often, I was only able to focus on things that felt familiar, where I knew what I was getting into. I’ve been in a bubble. Maybe you have, too.
It is during these times when I feel that I need poetry the most. I think back to all of the times in my life when I’ve felt lost or stuck, and poets have always been able to shake me out of it. Poetry is there for comfort and for radicalization, for pain and joy, for when we’re feeling trapped in our own fleshy meat suits and when we’re feeling like screaming at the stars. Poems give us new ways to look at life, nudge us to feel more and deeper, remind us that there is beauty in the world. Poetry carries us through.
So, here’s to the possibilities of a new year, and the poetry that will take us there.
Drifting in and out of dreamstates, Jackie Wang’s debut collection explores the state of unrest caused by the looming threat of climate change, the economy and, ya know, all the other things that want us dead. Life can feel like a dream when you’re living in the margins and everything seems built to exclude you and people like you, Wang’s collection takes us to all the unfathomable places we sometimes find ourselves in, and reminds us there is also hope and brightness and bravery.
It’s strange to think that this is Cortney Lamar Charleston’s first full-length book since 2017. He’s such a staple in the poetry world, as poetry editor for The Rumpus and all-around wonderful presence in the writing community. Doppelgangbanger is an introspective look at Black masculinity and boyhood, pop culture, and how our upbringings shape us. Charleston takes us from malls to basketball courts as he interrogates the language of growing up.
Natalie Shapero is the poet I’d most like to have at a dinner party, and Popular Longing is a perfect example of why. Her sharp observations of human weirdness are just unparalleled. Popular Longing is cutting, clever, and a criticism of modern culture. Shapero knows no bounds here, and it makes for a remarkable read.
Rosebud Ben-Oni’s unique style blends physics and language, as if she is single handedly trying to break down the STEM/Humanities divide. Ben-Oni’s poems are filled with wonder for the world, causing readers to shift perspective and open up to new possibilities. This collection explores how we seek connection, love, and understanding in a way that is truly otherworldly.
In a superbly inventive collection, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley’s work explores the living under the dominance of whiteness in America and the history of violence, particularly against Native communities. These poems ask: is racial violence in this country’s DNA? How far will it go, how long will this go on? It is a bold inquisition into the damage that has been done, accomplished with creative risk-taking.
Motherhood and family can provide a deep well of inspiration for writers, and Nikki Wallschlaeger’s new collection dives in head-first. Delving into Black womanhood, the postpartum body, and what it means to sustain love and warmth, Wallschlaeger’s work is unflinching in its honesty. It is about darkness and hope, struggle and survival, sinking and floating.
With thoughtful contemplations on home, the body, and adulthood, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s new collection is full of confidence. These poems feel secure in what they are and to whom they are speaking, and are ready to leave the past behind and move forward into their blessings. With tender words to their partner and themself, Candrilli’s new collection speaks not only to the nonbinary/trans experience, but the experience of coming into one’s own self and finding happiness.
Donika Kelly is one of our best and brightest, and this collection is just hit after hit after hit. These poems discuss queerness, legacy, growing beyond our parentage, and finding solace in each other. This collection feels strong and rooted in the earth, and explores how we are connected, and how we can break free.
Andrés Cerpa’s sophomore collection grapples with loss, grief, and the disassociation that can come with being a survivor. Everything normal becomes slightly strange, things feel far away and unsteady. In these poems, Cerpa exhibits restraint and care, each thought purposefully positioned on the page. His work is somber, reflective, and deeply moving.
I get genuine butterflies thinking about the fact that we’re getting a new collection of Kaveh Akbar poems to cherish this year. One of the most thoughtful and dynamic poets working today, Akbar’s work grapples with religion and godliness, addiction and Americanness, language and selfhood. Akbar’s work pulls no punches, and if “The Palace” is anything to go by, we’re about to get shaken to our very cores.
“The world will come between you,” writes Marcos Gonsalez in the prologue of his memoir Pedro’s Theory: Reimagining the Promised Land. The you here refers to both the author and his father, an immigrant from Mexico, captured in a photograph from the author’s childhood. “Hundreds of years of history, conquest, migration, and survival coming together to form a point of convergence in a small town in New Jersey. One photograph can tell so much,” he writes.
Gonsalez is most interested in what we can learn from snapshots, the physical and those of memory, such as the conversations had between classmates or a parent and their child, and when they occur in relation to history. He leads readers into his childhood school, down small-town streets, life in academia, New York City queer clubs, and everywhere in between. Filled with lush prose, the resulting memoir is a layered, scathing excavation of how the seeds of white supremacy have bloomed into damages on the everyday lives of immigrants, queer people of color, and others existing on the margins in the United States.
I spoke with Gonsalez about whiteness in educational spaces, queer clubbing in 2010s New York City, specificity against the flattening effect of Latindad, and holding space for our past and present lives.
Christopher Gonzalez: Your memoir is a thorough indictment of whiteness and white supremacy in small towns, big cities, and academic spaces. What have you learned and observed as a student, as a scholar, as an educator, about how whiteness operates in academic spaces, specifically?
For the first few years in New York, I was trying to totally erase where I come from, who I belong to, because I wanted to be as close to whiteness as I could get.
Marcos Gonsalez: I was trying to work out the ways in which white supremacy in the United States is a means of violence and violation through a kind of nurturing. We’re not meant to question our educational system, beginning from kindergarten on to higher education. These systems are not apolitical, they’re not neutral. The ways in which we learn language, are taught to write, to speak, are deeply political things. I wanted to really change how we think about whiteness, how we think about how it operates in the United States, because I think we’re only taught to understand white supremacy or racism as these open assaults against people, like racial slurs or outward, physical violence. And those are important. Those are things that happen. But I wanted to touch upon the everyday, mundane instances of the ways in which we are taught to believe in white supremacy and hold it to be true, because the educational system upholds it.
CG: Something that I started to think about while reading your book is how whiteness is very situational. It’s always in flux. You write about life in your hometown of New Egypt, New Jersey, and how you chose to identify more with your Puerto Rican heritage, because it afforded you a closer proximity to whiteness. Then, jumping ahead to your time in New York City, your desire is one more focused on upward class mobility and not whiteness alone. That’s the trick of whiteness for people of color, right? It’s always aspirational and never obtainable.
MG: In New Egypt, I couldn’t pass as white. I was still always racialized and marked in that way. But I’d seen a lot of my Puerto Rican family idolize whiteness or try to aspire to it, because of the benefits. Whereas my Mexican family, they couldn’t do that. They were much darker skinned, and that was always an impossible mission. I had seen very early on how physical skin color, how movement could be weaponized or could not be weaponized in different ways for the privileges to be proximate to whiteness. New York was a different game, a different kind of navigating. There was still an ethnic-ness that I had to hold up and couldn’t necessarily get rid of. For the first few years in New York I was trying to totally erase where I come from, who I belong to, because I wanted to be as close to whiteness as I could get. There also was the whiteness that was about queerness. I associated being queer with white. Going to clubs, they were very white spaces. The music was always Britney Spears or other white women artists. This switch happened where, if I wanted to be queer, if I wanted to be a part of this community, I again needed to idealize and idolize the whiteness of culture, of the body, of experience. And so, New York transformed what that was. Even if you were amongst queer people of color, we still always wanted to be proximate to whiteness. And I had to break free from that at some point. I’m glad I did.
CG: Leaving home for college, your acess to a queer community is through these predominately white spaces and white disireability politics. Could you talk more about that? And where did you ultimately find community?
MG: By this point, in the 2010s, in the last ten years, queer clubs for people of color had been shuttered. One of them was Escuelita. Black and Latinx people were welcomed there. There was hip hop and music in Spanish. And so, I’d go there a lot. That was where I realized that it didn’t always have to be these Hell’s Kitchen or Chelsea spaces filled with thin or overly muscular bodies that were overly white, prototypically masculine. There were places where you would see the play that would happen with gender and body size. I would go to places in Washington Heights, in Harlem, where they were only folks of color, queer people of color, too. And you would start to see how these possibilities would happen.
The world is extremely racist, queerphobic, fatphobic, all these kinds of things. And we have to carve out spaces wherever we go, because if not, life becomes unsustainable.
But, I also needed to be able to create space in white-dominated places. It’s about the people you are around, whether they’re white or not white. How do you create a mobile community so that wherever you go, you’re in good company? We have to create these wherever we can. That’s ultimately the lesson I learned with writing this book. No matter where you’re at, whether you are in a small town in New Jersey, or you are in New York City, or you are traveling to Mexico, wherever you’re going, you have to try to create community. You have to try to create a world that can work for you, because otherwise the world will try to take it away from you. The world is extremely racist, extremely queerphobic, fatphobic, all these kinds of things. And we have to carve out spaces wherever we go, because if not, life becomes unsustainable.
CG: I see how that plays into the main conceit of the book, the idea of Pedro’s Theory. The Pedros in your book refer to you as well as other Mexicans and Central Americans, usually field workers and service workers, some of whom may be queer, and some maybe not. I don’t want to say you’re trying to identify exactly with them, but is it accurate to say you’re seeing within this group of people who are so often violently ignored and erased in society a potential for community?
MG: That is what was really important for me to grasp onto—how to be in community with them, with all kinds of different people, who are like me and who are not like me, in a way that isn’t about identifying with them, but to be in communication, to be in solidarity, to be in a politics of care. Some of them probably wish I did not exist for being queer. Or they probably wouldn’t agree with the kind of life I live. But I still want their well being, I still want them to be free of harm and violence. That was the idea behind the theory. How are we in alignment with one another, with our similarities and with our differences? And to be able to hold onto those differences rather than quickly try to erase them or overlook them. Oftentimes we try to overlook differences for the sake of solidarity and, especially, I think, for the sake of Latinidad. For Latinx people, too, there’s this drive to just be the same or critically look for the same. The driving interest for me was how do we mobilize around our differences, how do we work within our differences and value those differences in a way that doesn’t erase or flatten who we are and who we are in relation to one another.
CG: You mentioned Latinidad, which was hanging over my head as I approached this interview. To speak to that flattening that happens, over the last year, and the last two election cycles in particular, we’ve been met with a lot of Hispandering, the idea of a “Latino vote,” or even how much of our identity is linked to Goya beans. On the one hand, Latinx people are not a monolith, but on the other Latinidad is a racist, colonial framework. So I’m curious, what are your thoughts about the potential for Latinidad, if we even need it at all?
MG: That question of Latinidad has to start with what makes us different rather than what unites us. When I was really young and little, particularly from my Puerto Rican family, there was this mentality of “we’re all the same.” We’re all Hispanic, we’re all Latinos. I have two parents who have different skin colors, who have very vastly different histories. One comes from an island, the other comes from across the border. These aren’t the same. I think I had that question in the back of my head for a very long time, but I didn’t have the tools in which to explore it until recently. I came from two different kinds of ethnic cultures and saw how there was always friction, and even when my family tried to collapse those differences, they still manifested. I think any kind of Latinidad has to begin with an acknowledgement of the way race plays out in different places in Latin America, across the literal hemisphere. But I think people don’t necessarily want to engage with that because it’s a lot of work to learn about all of these different contexts and how these different histories have been mapped out. But if we don’t want to learn to do the work, then there can’t be a Latinidad, because it just erases or flattens people’s histories and lived experiences.
CG: To build off that, your book is a shift toward specificity. Specificity within your mother’s Puerto Rican and Caribbean background, within your father’s Mexican Indigenous background, and within yourself. How did you avoid overgeneralizing either of your parent’s backgrounds? Was it something you worried about at all?
MG: It’s so easy to fall into stereotypes. I think publishing, popular publishing, or popular culture in general, wants stereotypes. They demand them. Oftentimes we’re held to that standard and, if we don’t deliver, we won’t get acknowledged for the work that we do. I didn’t want to play into that game. From the beginning, I was trying to think about how I could capture the conditions of our lives, the conditions of my life, the condition of my parents, the condition of those who came before me, in a way that wasn’t about stereotypes or icons. I looked at what structured our lives, the conditions of the Puerto Rican migrations of my family, of my dad’s migration, and thought through what pushed us into this point where the story begins in New Jersey. That was always the guiding concern of mine. Even in random parts of the book that are perhaps not as narrative based, like where I’m talking about this wrestling match between my father and the cousin. It was a moment where I was able to see how masculinity operated in this town with Mexican American people, and how they had to show their masculinity in particular ways or not show it in particular ways. This was about Mexican American experience, but it wasn’t speaking to any kind of stereotype. For me, it was about how to show these scenes and portraits of our lives. No matter how boring, mundane, or everyday they are. These really boring moments of our lives show who we are, how we got here, and what might come next for us.
CG: I want to talk about one of those everyday moments from your book. The first time your father ever writes his own last name is when he has to sign your birth certificate. It results in the Gonsalez spelling of your name, which some might view as incorrect, but you don’t view it as a mistake. And it’s not. It’s so much more than that. You write, “The impossibility of pronouncing our names is our possibility. Call it our American dream.” Can you expand on that?
MG: Like you said, it’s a very everyday thing of just signing a paper, but the signing of the paper wasn’t just the signing of the paper. It was still speaking to this history that has shaped us, that we can’t seem to break free from. And I think often that’s the question for me. I want to break free from these things, but I also want them to be contextualized. So quickly we try to be, like, yeah, that was a mistake, it should be this way. But all of it was a mistake. The colonization of the Americas was the big thing that should not have happened. I was trying to capture in the signing of the name this very long and dense history that still to this day shapes who and what we are and even how we relate to each other. For so many of us who come from colonized locations, who are colonized peoples and colonized histories, so much of our everyday life has a context to it, has a history that is literally about the way we connect to our fathers or the way we connect to our children, the way in which we love partners and our friends. It shapes everything.
The position has to assume you,
like a fever, or a favor, or a black hole
swallowing its own ballistics report.
Like trying to believe you deserved
even a single afternoon
two years ago, with an old friend
ascending the micro-climates
of Pacific Heights eating oysters.
Your jail cell is made of harp strings.
Nothing deserves your skepticism
more than a mirror.
If you start here, in the middle,
then any progress will grant you
both a beginning and an end.
Open and close your eyes
and sweep the front porch of your face.
Standing on the moon, you’d weigh
less than a toddler
where the extended forecast
calls for no weather at all
and the coffee tastes like sand,
so best to admire the majestic from afar.
You don’t have to believe
your own story,
you simply have to believe
you’re the only one who can tell it.
Instead of deleting the digressions,
erase the precedents. Beware of any wolf
who goes still.
Sun Salutation
It’s the needlessness to this mess that makes it feel so endless,
and unlikely
I’ll live long enough to know why.
I love what you didn’t do with the place.
All the regrets
cross-matrixed to failures,
the piano there to hold up the family portraits,
the pink apple blossoms falling to the sidewalk
as if to destroy us,
like a wildfire jumping a break.
The alley to the road to the capitol runs through me,
and the preposterous,
and in the end, I got exactly what I had coming,
there must be some misunderstanding
say it with me, there must be some misunderstanding.
I first read Nadia Owusu’s debut memoir Aftershocks in June, as the United States—led by the white nationalist backed Republican administration—was several months into a still ongoing unchecked global pandemic which was disproportionately killing Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans. Protests for racial justice sparked by the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and so many others were taking place worldwide, even as white women like me were weaponizing the police against people who identified as Black and Brown. As a seventh-generation Mississippian descended from slave owners who now lives in a blue bubble, I was craving a book that would help me make sense of both America and the world right now.
I found it in Aftershocks, which among other topics, explores the impact of colonialism and anti-Blackness worldwide. Owusu had a global upbringing, following her father, a Ghanian civil servant with the United Nations, across Africa and Europe, before settling in the United States for college. In Aftershocks, Owusu explores the mental breakdown she faced in the aftermath of complicated revelations about her father’s death. Along the way she wrestles with her own search for identity, reckoning with her early abandonment by her mother, whose family escaped the Armenian genocide, the problematic legacy of being descended from Ashanti royalty, and exploring what it’s like to live in America’s highly individualistic society when one is rooted in Ghana’s collectivist culture.
Owusu, who is associate director of the economic racial justice organization Living Cities, is a winner of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her lyric essay, So Devilish A Fire, won the Atlas Review’s chapbook contest. Owusu and I spoke in early December and discussed global anti-Blackness, grappling with colonialism’s legacy, and rewriting narratives about mental health.
Deirdre Sugiuchi: I originally read this book this summer at the height of the protests for Black lives. You took part in the protests in New York City. How did you feel marching, knowing you had just finished a book which in part addressed global anti-Blackness?
The reasons that Black people are impacted disproportionately by COVID are very connected to global anti-Blackness and colonialism.
Nadia Owusu: Given how hard this year has been, it made so much sense that this was the moment that the uprising happened, because the reasons that Black people are impacted disproportionately by COVID, dying disproportionately—as are Native American and Brown communities—are very connected to global anti-Blackness and colonialism. These issues on the surface might seem coincidental, living through this moment of global pandemic and uprising, but I think those things can’t be more deeply connected, that in the midst of the global pandemic and the disproportionate impact on communities of color, you have the ongoing violence against Black people. It was not surprising that this was a significant moment in the movement for Black lives which has been ongoing and has been building for many years. At the same time, I think the thing that is significant is that until now white people could choose not to see, and now they could no longer.
I felt a lot of grief in terms of seeing the ongoing violence against Black people with all the loss we are experiencing already. At the same time I found a lot of hope in the radical reimagination that has been part of the movement in terms of calling out what we actually need. What we need is to actively dismantle the existing systems and create new ones. There is nothing individual Black people can do to change the systems, which are built on existing stories about who we are that are not true. It really is going to take large systemic change in order to shift the disproportionate outcomes.
Having spent all these years thinking and writing about these questions, and also in my day job working to close racial income and wealth gaps, it was a moment of deep reflection. How do I continue to interrogate myself? Although I am American, I didn’t grow up here and my Black history is not African American here. What is my role as an artist and an activist and an organizer?
DS: You write about colonial mentality and dealing with anti-Blackness at an early age, and having a father who actively taught you about Ghana and your family, yet also recognizing that colonial mentality was a fault line in the African body. How has this shaped your worldview and your writing?
NO: My life is a result of that legacy of colonialism, even the fact that my father’s siblings went to the U.K. for their education and settled there. It shaped my father’s choices as far as coming to the U.K. and going to university in the States. I literally would not exist had the world not been shaped in a different way, but that’s why that history felt important for me to reckon with.
For Black people across the diaspora, the stories that are told about African histories and about Blackness and what our own Blackness means have been in many ways codified into the way the world is organized. It was literally the law of the land in many places in terms of what opportunities we had and didn’t have, which shaped how our families lived in the world. I think we don’t talk enough about that, which is why this most recent movement—the uprisings for Black lives and the clear pro-Black stance that people are taking—is an act of revision and correction against the stories, which, whether we like it or not, are in the groundwater, and everyone white and Black have been drinking our entire lives.
We live inside these stories. We are not always able to see them and I think at the same time they are doing a lot of destruction in Black people’s lives and in our bodies and in ourselves. I think the undoing of that in myself is going to be a lifelong project.
DS: How does coming from a collectivist culture influence how you operate in America’s highly individualistic culture? I know you studied urban planning. How does this inform your work?
What we need is to actively dismantle the existing systems and create new ones. There is nothing individual Black people can do to change the systems.
NO: I struggle with American rugged individualism. This is probably in part due to my upbringing. Trying to explain to my family in Ghana why Americans won’t wear masks is confusing. “It’s because of their freedoms.” “Freedom to do what? Kill people?” It doesn’t compute. It’s a very different worldview. Whether we like it or not we’re all, and not just human beings, every living being on this planet is linked.
In terms of my work, that is a barrier I am constantly pushing against, because a lot of the solutions that are proposed in terms of policy have individualism baked in them. There are a lot of solutions that are proposed around supporting entrepreneurs of color, and I think those are positive things to do, but they are very focused on the individual, not so much addressing the broader system and the way we all live in community with each other. From an urban planning perspective, the focus on single family homes as opposed to affordable housing that is more communal and the zoning laws that privilege wealthier people who can afford single family homes, all of that is connected to that philosophy of individualism and its really hard because that’s what people aspire to.
If we actually shifted our idea about what’s possible when we care for each other differently and organize ourselves in society to live differently and organize ourselves to live more communally, I think there are different and more beautiful possibilities that can open up, but there is a lot of dissonance.
DS: This book deals with the aftershocks of the death of your father as well revelations in the aftermath of his death. It also deals with maternal abandonment and a family legacy of abandonment. Did writing help resolve conflicting feelings?
NO: I started writing pieces of this book just for myself to work through some of those questions and feelings. I was coming out of a long period of depression and felt like I had avoided looking at those questions too closely most of my life. It was a personal project. Because I have always been a writer, I have always been someone who understands how I think through writing.
Looking at the more personal aspects of my mom leaving and my dad dying and trying to contextualize our lives and their choices led me to do greater research about the history of the places they came from and their families. That also expanded my understanding of how my life was shaped and in ways that were positive and deepened my empathy.
Because I grew up outside of my parents’ cultures, those were histories I was not familiar with. To reconnect with my ancestry and my homelands felt in some ways like writing myself home.
DS: You did an incredible job illustrating how mental health was viewed in your family as well as the culture at large, and also illustrating how in your family it was your job to keep it together. You wrote about a mental breakdown, which is typically taboo, and healing through art. Can you discuss writing about this?
NO: I think in many cultures, many of us grew up hearing this message that you cannot show weakness. There is a narrative that depression, grief, or mental illness is weakness. I think that for Black people and for Black women in particular, you do not show weakness, you have to work twice as hard for half as much.
In my family, I felt a great deal of responsibility for holding the family together. It’s a lot of pressure to carry, particularly when I didn’t have a lot of examples in my life of how to deal with grief, depression, and anxiety that I was facing, so I tried to power through it for a very long time. What I was trying to write against was that message that mental illness was a form of weakness. We hear these stories in the Black community, that mental illness does not exist, that only white people have time to indulge themselves. I think those are really harmful messages and I understand why they came to be, it’s a product of white supremacy.
It felt really important to me to be honest. I wanted to write from inside the breakdown. I wanted to show what it feels like and present what it can feel like if we internalise different stories that are not so fear based, and that are kind and loving to ourselves and allow ourselves the space to breathe, so it doesn’t compound itself the way it did in my experience.
Art might not be sufficient in terms of healing, but I do think that the stories we tell are important in terms of what help we are willing to seek. I wasn’t willing to seek any help because of the stories I had internalized. I think it is important to use art to write ourselves different stories that we believe in, so that we can get ourselves the help and the community that we need in order to heal ourselves.
It’s a truism that historical fiction reveals more about its own age it than the one it portrays. We can’t escape or even perceive our own biases, the reasoning goes, so we end up helplessly projecting them onto a past where they don’t belong. But the past is not a museum, and contemporary perspectives don’t necessarily distort historical subjects.
And to state the obvious, historical fiction isn’t history. Accuracy and authenticity are not the same things, and “distortion” is a loaded term to begin with. In The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead interleaves the archival ephemera of slavery with his own dystopian imaginings. That the two are often indistinguishable shows that narratives need not be strictly historical to be fundamentally truthful. Art is supposed to transfigure human experience, to make it newly meaningful. That’s what it’s always done. That’s what it’s for.
Of course, novelists don’t always begin with such lofty intentions. In writing The House on Vesper Sands, I began with no intentions at all. At the time, though, the U.K.’s Tory government was diligently stripping the vulnerable of what meager protections they depended on. Their souls, I remember thinking to myself. They’re devouring people’s souls. And since I found myself with one foot in Victorian London, where such notions were taken pretty seriously, I began to see new shapes in its familiar gaslit fog.
As important as representation may be, gay characters don’t need to appear in fiction for any particular reason. Waters describes her own sexuality as “incidental,” and in her Victorian England, lesbian women are naturally just present. Like everyone else in Fingersmith, though, they’re also schemers and strivers. Waters renders their erotic encounters with dependable virtuosity, only to use them as a fulcrum for one of the most breathtaking double twists in all of fiction.
In historical fiction, verisimilitude isn’t always your friend. The line between authenticity and pastiche is vanishingly fine, but although Catton assuredly knows the risks, she bets the farm in this novel anyway. The Luminaries might be compared to an immaculately crafted piece of reproduction furniture, but one whose intricately inlaid surfaces conceal all manner of arcane inscriptions and secret compartments.
Faber’s revivification of Victorian London is both exquisitely wrought and magnificently coarse. Although his embrace of all social classes invited comparison with Dickens, he has more in common with Chaucer, whose democratic instincts were much less hampered by paternalistic illusions. The only illusions here—as Faber reminds us in sly metafictional interjections—are our own: “You are an alien from another time and place altogether.”
In Atwood’s best-known fictions, for all their undisputed merits, character is often subservient to some overarching schema of ideas. Based on real events—involving an Irish maid implicated in a brutal double murder—Alias Grace provides a counterpoint in a character study as enthralling as it is forensic. It also demonstrates the necessity of revisiting grim historical realities, like the coercive medicalization of femininity, that have never quite gone away.
Like Eleanor Catton, the Australian novelist Peter Carey shows how Victorian certainties tended to dissolve at the periphery of their empire. When he undertakes to transport Lucinda Leplastrier’s glass church to the remote Outback, inveterate gambler Oscar Hopkins seems to embody Pascal’s conception of religious belief as a momentous wager. The same might be said of this novel’s unlikely but indelible love story, in which everything and nothing may be at stake.
Byatt might be unlikely to use the term herself, but in Possession she proves that you can be formidably erudite and also, well, extremely meta. True to form, she styles it “a romance” in the strict literary sense—that is, a quest narrative in which defining values are tested. But as its fusty Victorian scholars unearth a love affair between Victorian poets, they discover hesitant passions of their own. Think Inception, but with tweedy academics and polite rapture.
Bram Stoker hadn’t written Dracula when he left Ireland for London, but he had begun to feel its dark stirrings. There, he managed the Lyceum Theatre and began a lifelong entanglement with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, giants both of the Victorian stage and of egotistical excess. In O’Connor’s wholly masterful recreation, we also see him wander the Ripper-haunted streets, contemplating an era in decline and the monsters it might harbor and bequeath.
In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time we’re talking to Abeer Hoque, author of the memoir Olive Witch, who’s teaching a two-week seminar on one of the most challenging forms of writing in existence: the artist’s statement. (Please note that there will be one full scholarship for this course awarded to a Black writer—the deadline to apply is Jan. 25.) We talked about how editing relies on empathy.
What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
I am continually amazed and inspired by how some readers can deliver feedback in a way that energizes and excites rather than enervate and depress. I know some of it has to do with that workshop mantra which I recite to my own students: focus on getting the writer to the best version of their piece. But it’s a gift of empathy and compassion and kindness, as well as a skill of reading and analysis and craft. And it comes in handy not just in writing, but in life. I aspire to be better at it as I go, and luckily, teaching is a great way to learn.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
I started my MFA program around the same time my sister was doing her M.Arch and her accounts of their “crits” not only sounded horribly cruel but her fellow students all internalized their “value”—as if it weren’t a good critique unless it made you cry. There’s a lot of that in MFA school, and while my particular program wasn’t that bad, there was still a huge focus on looking for things to fix or expand. I fall into the same track myself sometimes but I want to learn how to teach (and learn) through positivity rather negativity.
I think it covers so much ground if you start from kindness.
What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?
Another Catapult instructor, the brilliant and funny Sofija Stefanovic, asks her students to agree to be extremely kind to each other. I love this so much I adopted it for my own classes. I think it covers so much ground if you start from kindness. The screenwriter Jacob Kreuger is one of my favorite teachers and he warns against prescriptive or negative feedback. He starts workshops by asking people to shout out only what they love and sometimes he stops there too. Because if you know enough about what your readers love, then you might know what to keep and what to change. Either way, only you know how to write your story.
Does everyone “have a novel in them”?
A la Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, I think everyone has a creative drive. How that plays out could be a novel or a poem or a painting or a song or a dance or a garden or some combination or interstice of art forms. I think it’s more important to make time for that creative impulse, to honor its meaning, and capacity for connection and joy, than wonder if you should write a novel.
Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?
No. Choosing writing as an art form is a big deal, especially for BIPOC, immigrant, poor, undocumented, queer, disabled, and other marginalized communities. We need to read these stories as much as we need to write them. I recognize how much of a privilege it is to be an artist when you’re likely to make little money from making art. I’ve always had another job to pay the bills, but I’ve always worked part time so I’d have time to write. Some hardy full-time-job-having friends of mine have written whole novels in 15-minute chunks, or on weekend/summer breaks. In that vein, I love Audre Lorde’s assertion of poetry as the most essential and economical art form because it requires little in the way of materials (unlike visual art) or labor or time (unlike novels).
What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?
You can probably guess by now that I’m gonna go with praise!
I actually had to pretend my first book would never see the light of day to keep going.
Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?
I suppose it depends on what you’re writing. I have a successful YA author friend who once shifted the plot of her novel because the editor thought another ending would sell better. Journalists and essayists might have to conform to a certain style or angle or pitch. That said, my first book project was a memoir, and there was no way I could have started or finished it if I had thought about its publication. It would have been way too stressful imagining what my family might think. I actually had to pretend it would never see the light of day to keep going. I also think it lets me play more with form and meaning, if I don’t have to worry about who will publish it. However, once I have a solid draft done, I’m more than happy to take cues from interested editors or beloved readers or themed lit mag calls in order to revise.
In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?
Kill your darlings: I just save them in another file.
Show don’t tell: I lean towards more show, but love a good tell.
Write what you know: Sure, but if you know why you want to write about what you don’t know, I think it’s a great way to learn about yourself and the world.
Character is plot: It can be! But plot can also just be plot and glorious for it.
What’s the best hobby for writers?
There is no right answer to this question! I have a zillion hobbies (scrapbooking, dancing, hiking, organizing, cooking, gratitude journaling, gossiping with friends) and I can’t separate them from self-care let alone self-actualization.
What’s the best workshop snack?
I’ve sometimes brought in samosas and empanadas (I live in Queens after all) and people have loved it. But frankly, it’s kinda greasy for your papers and keyboard. At home while writing, I love to eat popcorn with chopsticks!
It’s no secret that the tech world has a troubling track record with diversity in the workplace, especially with the dearth of Black and Latinx employees in key roles. Author Mateo Askaripour confronts the lack of diversity within the workplace with satire in his debut novelBlack Buck. Some critics have been describing Black Buck as Sorry to Bother You meets The Wolf of Wall Street, but if you ask Askaripour he doesn’t seehis novel as similar to Sorry to Bother You but has compared some elements of it to Death of a Salesman.
Black Buck follows an almost two-year journey in the life of Darren Vender, a young Black man from Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood. The valedictorian of his high school who is now working at a Park Avenue Starbucks, Darren is smart and full of potential but isn’t realizing it until a life-changing opportunity manifests in the form of a coffee order for Rhett Daniels, the white CEO of Sumwun, a powerful sales start-up. On his way up and after a tragic incident, Darren begins to realize he was simply a pawn in Sumwun’s affirmative action game and sets out to lift up his own people. But of course, challenging the racial politics of Sumwun and bucking against the system leads to consequences.
Askaripour and I, two Black men from different parts of Brooklyn, conversed about what’s really going on with race in the workforce as presented through Black Buck.
Kadeem Lundy: Black Buck follows the idea that in order to succeed in business a Black man must change his identity, in a sense. So can you talk a little bit about why you feel like that might be the case where a Black man has to potentially change his identity in order to succeed in business?
Mateo Askaripour: So I don’t believe that a Black man has to change in order to succeed in business. That’s a personal belief that I don’t hold. However, when it comes to the book, I believe that Darren, that specific Black man, had to change in that specific business, being someone at that startup in order to survive and then thrive there. Darren didn’t have to change if Darren went in there and he was like “yo, I don’t like how this is white guys talking to me. I don’t like how these white people are looking at me. I don’t like them calling me every, you know, popular Black person from MLK to Dave Chappelle.” You know, he could have stuck to his guns. But what would have happened in an environment like Sumwun is Darren would have experienced probably even more hell and then either left or just been fired.
A place, a company or an organization like Sumwun is predicated on a certain amount of assimilation. Not all startups, not all companies, but that’s how many companies thrive. They believe that there is a culture that they need to establish: a culture that binds all of the employees together, typically with a common mission or goal in mind for them to achieve, whether that is going public, getting more funding, beating out the competition, creating something truly innovative. The goal is constantly changing, but within that culture that they established, there are norms. There are even sometimes ways of speaking, dressing, and so forth.
So, Darren, being the only Black person in the entire company, if he went in and said you know what, I’m not going to switch it up—and he wanted to remain as true to at least the beginning iteration of himself when we started in the book—I don’t think it would have worked out. But that doesn’t mean that he could have gone to another business with white people or Black people or non-Black people and remained who he was and thrived. He definitely could have done that.
KL: Yeah, I definitely get that, I understand that. When you think about that and when you talk about his transformation as well, he gets the nickname of Buck. So when you talk about the nickname of Buck itself, it kind of serves as a symbol beyond just the obvious of working at Starbucks. But it seems like it also has a deeper symbolic meaning. And so when you think of the nickname specifically and you think about how maybe the historical connotations of what buck meant for a Black man. Can you speak a little bit about that idea?
MA: I’d say there are three or four meanings to Buck. There’s the fact that right, he’s a dude who gets the name Buck and he’s Black. That he worked at Starbucks is number two. Number three, it’s a representation of Black wealth, Black bucks, you know, obviously talking about cash and bread and the idea that what Darren does and how he changes the game, even if only for a moment in time, will help more Black and Brown people make money and hopefully uplift their families and their communities. And this is obviously bold, but maybe beyond the way to be attaining some real wealth. And then the fourth way is the historical meaning of Black buck, right? What it means to be a Black buck. As you know, they were the unruly, big, wild, enslaved people who these white masters, these enslavers, believed were going to burn down the plantation, steal their wives, kill the animals, kill them.
And when I thought about that and I meditated on it deeply, I said, you know what, that’s the energy that I’m bringing to this book as the writer and the energy that Buck is bringing to the world of Black Buck himself and especially the world of these startups, which are overwhelmingly white now. Buck’s not going in and burning them down, but he’s changing them from the inside out in a very, I’m not going to say aggressive, but in a very intelligent way that these people at the top—I don’t want to call them enslavers. I don’t want to call them masters. That sounds like way, way too dramatic, even though shit, some people would call them that—but even without the people at the top, who are typically white, knowing what was going on right before their eyes. So I’m happy that you asked that question, Kadeem, because it’s at the core of this book. And sorry, the last thing I’ll say is we see that Buck pays for it, for bucking against the system. And we see how that plays out.
KL: But there’s also kind of a situation that arises that where it ends up being, you know, there’s a saying that when you help your own people, sometimes it’s your own people that actually go against you. So if you could talk about how you dealt with that and is it really to be expected that it can always be your own people who will be the ones that can be your downfall?
MA: Wow, this is a type of question that I live for, a question that only the interviewer can ask me, and I haven’t heard this one before from anyone else. So thank you. And you’re asking me about my personal beliefs, so I can’t hide behind the fiction. And I wouldn’t even want to.
Personally, I’m not one of these people that are of the mind that when you give back to your own community, they will end up being your downfall or it’ll be detrimental to you. I don’t believe that. I don’t want to believe that. And I don’t believe it at all, you know, on a molecular level or a spiritual level.
Any Black and Brown people who read this book and have been in these situations will know that they haven’t been alone, will know that they don’t deserve to be made to feel less.
I wrote this book for many reasons, but the second reason specifically was so that any Black and Brown people—and obviously Black people, first and foremost—who read this book and have been in these situations will know that they haven’t been alone, will know that they don’t deserve to be made to feel less. They will know that they have the same rights just as much as anyone else to chase their dreams, that’s what I wanted. And this is to serve people who look like me now.
Right now, I’m wearing a hoodie from The Marathon Clothing (Nipsy Hussle’s brand) and Nipsy could be evidence of what you’re saying. Nipsy stayed basically in his hood. He did a lot for his community. He promoted a lot of Black entrepreneurship. And then he gets shot and killed right outside of his own store by another Black man. Right. And this is conjecture, I didn’t know the man, Nipsy. I know what he means to me, but I feel like if someone were to say a couple of years ago, Nipsy, this is going to be your life and then you’re going to get killed, would you still help out your people? Would you still stay in your neighborhood in terms of giving back and doing all of these things? I feel like he still would have done it. So that’s my personal belief.
KL: A big theme in the book is about sales and the idea of sales. And I noticed in the book, it is noted that sales isn’t about talent, it’s about overcoming obstacles, beginning with yourself. And so to go a little bit further about overcoming obstacles, how can you say a person can work through those obstacles if they can’t seem to fully understand what the internal obstacles actually are?
MA: If someone’s walking through the forest and they have bad eyesight and then all of a sudden they miraculously find a pair of glasses, they will then realize how much they couldn’t see before. It’s the same type of thing. It’s like I’m bringing up a bunch of analogies, just that people who are close to me and who inspire me, right. When Malcolm X was in jail, then he gets put on to the Nation of Islam and he changes course. You oftentimes need help. Almost always. You need help from somewhere, another person, a book, another form of art, just hearing a conversation in order to have your eyes opened or to be “awoken,” which is the term that a lot of people use today. Just years ago, it was conscious. Now it’s woke. So I think that someone is set on the path of liberation from the help of someone else usually. Self-liberation. I don’t know if liberation happens in a vacuum. We all need help. No one just all of a sudden wakes up and says, oh, I need to be free if they don’t know what freedom actually looks like. You need to realize those internal obstacles with the help of something or someone else to then surmount them. I think that so many of us who wake up to certain shackles in our own lives do it with the help of others.
KL: You just mentioned what you were embedded in the world of start-ups. Can you speak a little bit about how your experiences influenced the direction of the book?
It’s easy to post a black square. It’s harder to speak up. It’s harder to actually enact change: the changing of heart, then the changing of law, the changing of systems.
MA: I was able to write the book because of my experience, Darren and I actually had pretty different experiences within the workplace. I noticed things related to race, of course. Did I experience paranoia and anxiety, and sometimes think I may be overly sensitive about things dealing with race? Of course. I know how these startups function from the inside out, extremely intimately, even after I quit my job in 2016. I was traveling and I was writing, but then I began consulting with startups across North America, you know, again, very intimately. So I got to see how many startups work. So I was drawing from everything from personal experience, from the things that I felt. Every single character in the book, I feel as though I’ve felt every emotion that they felt, like I needed to feel these emotions in order to imbue them.
But in terms of the wild racism that Darren experiences within the workplace, I didn’t experience it like that, because I was on a different trajectory than Darren coming in as an entry-level salesperson. I started out in a startup for around four years, I came in as an intern then I did social media community management, then started a sales team, and then very quickly right within like a year or two, I was one of the top leaders within the sales organization. So that power incculated me from a lot of things that I could have experienced because I was one of the people at the top. Now at the same time, a lot of what Darren experiences within the workplace, the wild racism as I called it, I’ve experienced outside of the workplace. I’ve experienced it in high school, I experienced it in middle school, I experienced it on sports teams, I experienced it in social groups. So I translated a lot of those experiences while they’re not one for one and the same things aren’t happening, I translated the severity of those experiences and how I felt about them and how I felt during them into what happens in the workplace with Darren.
KL: And so my last question to you is actually going to be with your experience in sales, where do you see the future of sales going, specifically for people of color and Black people in positions of key roles of executives?
MA: Well, I’m not sure where anything is going, to be honest. I think about this specific moment that we’re living in even though it’s connected to a string of other moments. Related to the past few decades and hundreds of years and not just in America but around the world. And I think that this specific moment, especially after the murder of George Floyd, in the wake of these protests about Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Elijah McClain, that there’s hope that real change is going to happen. I’d like it to happen no matter what but I don’t know if it’s actually going to happen because a lot of people who post these black squares are really fairweather friends. It’s easy to post a black square. It’s harder to speak up. It’s harder to actually enact change, that change I was talking about before the changing of heart and then the changing of law, the changing of systems.
So I don’t know what’s going to happen. And it’s the same in the world of sales. I’d like to say that more Black and Brown people will become sales-people especially in tech startups and that they will rise up and hire more people of color and Black and Brown people, and educate them. But it’s really important to note that—at least in the world of this book—the end goal isn’t just for these Black and Brown people to work for white people. Like that’s not it. I would hope that many of you Black and Brown people who work for these white companies, excuse me, white-owned companies and white majority companies, change them from the inside out, put other people on to get their paper, and then maybe start their own things if they want or find other ways to create spaces by Black and Brown people for Black and Brown people. I think that will be the true definition. At least one definition of freedom and liberation.
Monica Furlong’s Wise Child was the first time I ever saw a mother that I wanted to be. I was ten or eleven the first time I read it, and I didn’t think about mothers much beyond the fact that they were just sort of there—often harried, overworked, and tired, but useful if you needed a meal or a hug. Although I had a vague sense at the time that I wanted to have kids one day, none of my concrete experiences of what motherhood looked like made it seem all that appealing. Even in books, mothers were mostly just background noise; fathers were at least allowed to be funny or have quirky hobbies, but mothers rarely seemed to have inner lives. Furlong’s Juniper, an independent-minded woman with supernatural healing skills living in a dream cottage full of magic, was different.
The term “voracious reader” is clichéd, but it’s the most accurate one to describe what I was like as a kid. I had a bottomless appetite when it came to reading materials, by which I mean that if I didn’t have a book nearby I would resort to the backs of cereal boxes or the weird ads in the yellow pages. I also read literally all the time: at breakfast in the morning, on the school bus, under my desk instead of listening to the math lesson, in the bath. I once got in trouble during gym class for sneaking a book into the outfield during baseball (I’d hidden it under my shirt when we were changing). It wasn’t just that I loved the stories (although I did), but also that my brain craved that specific stimulation, and without its constant input I felt tortuously bored. It was a lonely way to be, not because I was teased for my reading or anything—I had plenty of friends, and I was so cavalier about my obsession that I don’t think it occurred to them to make fun of it—but because I never had anyone to talk to about the fictional worlds that felt at least half real.
I didn’t know anyone who read like I did, least of all my own mother—she had some Danielle Steele books lying around, and at least one installment of the Outlander series, but I’m not sure that I ever actually saw her sit down and crack any of them. Sometimes when she saw me sprawled out on the couch with a book she’d say, “I used to be a reader before I had kids, but now I don’t have the time.” The comment didn’t have any particular layers of meaning to it—other than I should have been helping out more around the house, probably—but I saw dark undercurrents in it: a hint that motherhood thwarted intellectual pursuits, and a threat that if I ever became a mother, I, too, would have to stop reading.
I didn’t have anyone around me to whom I could recommend Wise Childand its prequel Juniper, even though I desperately wanted to talk about them. When my middle sister was old enough to read them, I bought her a copy of each, and she loved them as much as I did. But other than her, I didn’t meet anyone else who had even heard of them until I was an adult, at which point I met a whole bunch of other people—mostly women—who had read and loved those books. They became a sort of password, a shorthand for seeing that someone else had been the kind of kid you’d been: bookish, witchy, often wanting something that you couldn’t quite put into words. I get a quiet thrill every time I meet another Wise Child reader, like I’m meeting members of an extended ersatz family. When I had my own kid, one of the things I wanted most was to shape him into that particular kind of weirdo, too—or, at least, provide the environment in which that kind of weirdo would thrive. I just sort of assumed that any child of mine would inherit this thing that seemed so essentially a part of me that I couldn’t imagine not passing it on.
The hero of Wise Childis a nine year old girl named Margit, although that name is used only once in the book. The rest of the time she’s referred to by her nickname, though as she explains, “Wise Child” is not exactly meant as a compliment—in her language, it’s a term used for children who “used long words, as I often did, or who had big eyes, or who seemed somehow old beyond their years.” Wise Child, who lives on a remote Scottish island in some nebulous Medieval era, finds herself suddenly homeless after the death of her grandmother, with whom she’d been living; both her parents are still alive, but her glamorous mother has run off to live a life of luxury on the mainland, and her father is a sea captain off on some voyage. With nowhere else to go, Wise Child winds up living with Juniper, a mysterious woman who lives in a house on a nearby hill and is widely regarded as a witch. The village priest especially seems to fear and dislike her.
I wanted Wise Child’s life, and by extension the attention and care she received from her guardian and mentor.
As it turns out, Juniper isa witch, although she says that’s a vulgar term—instead, she calls herself a doran (the italics are Furlong’s), which she describes to Wise Child as being someone who has found a way of perceiving “the pattern” and as a consequence “lives in the rhythm.” The rest of the book is more or less Juniper teaching Wise Child how to be a doran, punctuated by run-ins with Wise Child’s mother, who is up to no good, and the village priest, who thinks Juniper is in league with the devil. Although parts of Wise Child’s journey to becoming a doran involve magic and spells and thrilling rituals, most of it is more prosaic: memorizing herblore, learning Latin, trekking through the countryside to gather ingredients for the healing ointments and poultices they make. But somehow the descriptions of those day to day chores interested me just as much as the chapters about flying on a broom. I loved all of it; it was the kind of book that made me want to step into it and live inside its story. I wanted Juniper’s house with its hearth and its garden and its stone dairy. I wanted her life. I also wanted Wise Child’s life, and by extension the attention and care she received from her guardian and mentor.
Reading Wise Childfor the first time made me feel the way I knew I was supposed to feel in church—that sensation of goosebumps mixed with something unlocking inside out and expanding outwards and outwards and outwards. It’s a moment of touching the infinite unknowable, I guess, or a moment when you know that magic or God or whatever is real. Given all of that, maybe it’s not surprising that Monica Furlong devoted most of her life to religious writing, much of it, like Juniper herself, both subversive and progressive. She was particularly interested in the ordination of women in the Church of England, a context in which Wise Childmakes perfect sense, since it’s a fantasy about a quasi-religious order in which women are autonomous and powerful spiritual teachers. It’s also a book about religious men who react violently to women who challenge the status quo, and it’s a book about motherhood, or at the very least a book that’s deeply concerned with mothers, biological and otherwise.
Juniper wasn’t just the kind of mother I aspired to be—she was first the kind of mother I wanted to have.
Juniper was the first mother-figure I saw who genuinely seemed to love every part of parenting, who approached it as an interesting and interactive project, who felt like she got as much out of it as she put into it. She also had a real life outside of taking care of Wise Child, with friends, travel, interests, and, of course, plenty of time for reading. I loved the way she took Wise Child seriously, listening to feedback and admitting when she was wrong; I still remember the sense of injustice I had as a kid about grownups not understanding that I was a fully-formed person with opinions and feelings of my own. But Juniper’s softness didn’t make her a pushover and, even though respectfully listened to Wise Child’s complaints about her chores, she never let her get out of doing them.
Juniper wasn’t just the kind of mother I aspired to be—she was first the kind of mother I wanted to have. Not exactly in a parenting sense—my own mother was and continues to be wonderful—but almost in a religious sense. I longed for someone who could induct me into the great mysteries of life, who could make me feel a sense of sustained awe about the world, who could teach me to “live in the rhythm” the way Juniper did. I suspect that this was what Furlong had wanted throughout her life too: some kind of spiritual foremother who could model the divine feminine for her. (She even called the goddess Juniper worships “the Mother.”) Wise Child was my introduction to the idea that faith doesn’t have to be prescriptive or dry, that it can be full of that dizzy, expansive joy that I sometimes felt flashes of but could never hold onto for very long. That catch-your-breath goosebumps that I would, later, associate with falling in love.
My nine-year-old son and I have been reading Wise Child at bedtime for the past few weeks. We make a whole ritual out of it, putting a log in the fireplace and getting our pajamas on and generally letting Furlong’s words and the flickering snap of the fire transport us back to Medieval Britain. I’ve been wanting to read this book to him for ages now, but I’ve held off, partly out of selfish fear: what if he doesn’t like it? What if he just doesn’t care? It felt oddly vulnerable to offer this piece of myself up for his judgment.
There is a part towards the end of the book when Wise Child tells Juniper that she is done chasing her biological mother’s love, and that she wants Juniper to be her new mother. I was surprised when my son laughed out loud, saying “that’s not how it works, you can’t choose your mother.” We argued back and forth about the idea of chosen family, but I understand to a certain extent what he means: at nine years old, he doesn’t get to choose much about his life.
But while he might not have chosen me, I chose him, or an idea of him, when I decided to have a kid. Because of that, I gamely worry that I am not living up to that choice, that I am not a good enough mother, that I am not Juniper-caliber. Sometimes motherhood seems both too big and too small. I will never be enough to fill this outsized role, but I also feel confined by it, a sensation that’s been exponentially heightened this year when my son and I have literally been confined together for ten months. I have no problem extending grace to other mothers, quick with a glib “they’re only human” and “we’re all just doing our best,” but there are moments when I know I am not doing my best. Some days—more days than I would like to admit—I am just trying to make it until bedtime.
Then again, life is basically a string of bedtimes, some more anxiously anticipated than others. What I mean by that is: you don’t really get to know the overarching narrative until later, if ever. Juniper takes things hour by hour, for the most part, and then season by season. When Wise Child first comes to live at her house, Juniper’s focus is first on caring for her body: feeding her, washing her hair, giving her a warm nest to sleep in and a chair by the fire. It’s not until Wise Child is physically stronger—like The Secret Garden, one of the pleasures of this book is that it equates eating and gaining weight with happiness—that she can be nurtured in other ways
Sometimes motherhood seems both too big and too small. I will never be enough to fill this outsized role, but I also feel confined by it.
And even though my son believes that you only get one mother in life, the reality is that his life is full of mothers who fill in where I fall short—his aunts, his grandmothers, the summer camp director whose every word he hangs on, the handful of teachers who have seen him for the quirky little joy he is, a constellation of mothers of all genders. If motherhood seems too big sometimes, that’s probably because our modern be-all-end-all conception of what a mother should be describes a role that takes multiple people to fill.
My son likes Wise Child well enough, I think; he reacts, he asks questions, he offers analysis. I don’t know if he’ll ever be the bookish weirdo—he likes being read to, but he’s still not too keen on independent reading—but that’s all right. I didn’t turn out to be much like my mother, but the parts of her that I see in myself are gifts that I appreciate very much. What matters most is that she was present, that she made sure I was clean and fed and had a warm place to sleep and outlets for my interests, even if they were not hers. She was the one who took me to the library and helped me check out stacks of books, who paid off the fines I racked up as my Christmas and birthday presents, who scoured my grandparents’ basement to find the paperbacks she’d loved as a kid. And really, if she didn’t have time to read, whose fault was that? It belongs at least partly to the kid who spent so much time sprawled on the couch with a beat-up Judy Blume instead of doing the bare minimum to help out around the house.
My mother gave me the gift of accessing the enchantment of books; I hope that I help my son find a gateway to a similar feeling, through whatever medium. Even if books aren’t what takes him there, the moments when we read together are still a communion of sorts. We come together and share in this moment, and then we separate. It’s a pattern that will only grow broader as he gets older; the separations will be wider, punctuated by, hopefully, moments of the same old wonder of joining. Maybe that’s living the rhythm, or at least a part of it. Maybe it’s as easy as that.
My wife gave birth at exactly 0400 on a Tuesday. She noticed the clock as she pushed our daughter into the world, which should tell you everything you need to know about my wife. She is immaculate. She misses nothing. Our child was issued in confused terror as I began to cry.
“Maybe he wanted a boy,” whispered one of the scrubs.
After stitches, after clean-up, after measurements, the staff gave us one hour alone. We were in awe. Awe felt oddly like incomprehension. Pictures, a lullaby, and phone calls came of their own accord. My wife’s parents insisted via video that our baby was the image of their daughter. The new baby, they squealed, like our old baby. They assumed her, which made me jealous. They were certain of her and themselves and knew the next time they’d sleep. The jealousy increased.
Once our hour was over, the labor nurse told us to pack up, fetched a wheelchair, and escorted us from the scene of contest. The recovery floor was older, dimmer. The paintings in the gray hallways were all the same colors as each other, in the same teakwood frames. Even the faces were softer than labor and delivery, the nurses clustering at their desks socially. Their counterparts upstairs huddled too, but with an air of war.
Every RN shoved a pacifier into our daughter’s mouth with verve—stirred, moved, manipulated. Our daughter’s mouth was often open, was not always crying, was searching with small aperture movements, narrowing, widening. I couldn’t describe her to you. She was eyes and lips and nose all topped with wild, dark-brown hair. A baby. Absolutely individual.
Each recovery room contained two beds, but they tried not to double-book so that Dad could have a place to rest. And everyone said “Dad” just like that. Universal Dad, a Platonic oomph in the phrasing, Dad as a form that Moms might invoke, a wandering accessory all Moms could contain. If she was lucky. One nurse said Partner. There was a TV we didn’t expect and uncomfortable chairs, one of them wide enough we assumed it had something to do with nursing. It was too small for two people, insulting for one large person. We tried to ignore it, but it was always in the way. They’d thought in excess of the things we might need, and it annoyed us. A medium-sized, small-city hospital. What there was of downtown pressed at the drafty window.
The weight of our half-used blankets, the streetlights’ sour glow, even the splay of my wife’s hair, its vitality and near-agency—there was more I remember. But we must get to the story.
I took the baby from my wife, the morning still dark with winter clouds, and walked the cold linoleum in overused socks. Our girl, her cone head, the joints at elbows and knees loose, pliable. I still didn’t recognize her, which surprised and slightly worried me, but I was drawn by her. I could feel myself circling and circling her, our living gravity well. She’d come out crying and staring. When she closed her eyelids something seemed to shut off in the room, and still we orbited. We warped around her mentally and physically and were distended with new paradigms of self and meaning. It was that quick.
One day, I realized, I wouldn’t be here. I would die. The proof was in my arms.
Mammals abounded as comparisons. Her mouse hands. Her marmot tummy.
As I paced, she cried more loudly. I bobbed on the balls of my feet, imitating Dad bounces and Dad noises. She’d eaten, she’d been changed. I focused on her weight in my arms. There was not a next, simply a hope she might respond favorably to my performance. There was step after step after step.
One day, I realized, I wouldn’t be here. I would die. The proof was in my arms. After a time, the proof fell asleep.
My wife jerked awake at the silence. I whispered my epiphany.
“That actually makes a lot of sense.”
“She wasn’t here before.”
“Exactly.”
“People can not be here.”
“Yes, yes. Exactly,” said my wife. We’d never done drugs, but we figured this was about the gist of it. Everything was irradiated and unspeakable. We fell asleep looking at each other across the visage of our invented, incarnate mewling. I was in the second bed parallel to hers, the baby in the rolling carrier between us. A plastic tub on a makeshift dresser, with wheels. Her first home. The sun still wasn’t up but I could see the reassuring lines on my wife’s forehead in the blue light. When the baby didn’t cry out for half an hour, I woke and stared at her chest. It rose. It fell. I drifted uncertainly.
We were roused at eight or nine o’clock in the morning by a new nurse. She was a middle-aged, middle-heavy woman with a reassuring mien. Her hair was nurse-tight, her shoes nurse-practical. She spoke nursely.
She bathed our daughter, talking the whole time. “I always give one piece of advice because parents these days are so focused on experts and opinions and all that. Oops”—to the baby—“did that surprise you? Anyway, I like to remind everyone that there is still such a thing as instinct. I had my dad living with me, and he’s older. A few years ago he gets a fever, he’s got some belly pains. So I call the doctor, right?”
My wife gripped the sheets as the nurse submerged our daughter beneath a faucet.
“We gave my dad some acetaminophen to lower his temperature, and because the temperature comes down, the doctor says give it some time. Well, I know it’s probably nothing, but I have this bad feeling. I lean into this feeling. And I swear, I don’t know what you believe, I don’t know what you think, but I heard a voice. A man’s voice spoke right to me, and said, ‘Go now.’ I got my dad in the car and we raced to the ER. What do you think? Diverticulitis, and it was bad. He probably would have died.”
“What, what did the voice sound like?” I asked.
“It saved my father’s life.”
“‘He,’ you said. ‘A man.’”
“Oh, it certainly was.”
We watched our daughter as she was enfolded by the nurse’s towel, her squirming limbs, her voice cawing with uncertainty. Ten months ago there wasn’t a baby who shared my genes and now there was. Zoom out. There wasn’t, and now there was. The nurse never told me how the voice sounded. The nurse, with one aside, began this whole tale for me. She left, and I took our daughter into my arms.
We didn’t have any family in town, but friends were expected. When they arrived we played hosts for our own comfort. Drinks? You must try the ice. Nothing like hospital ice. I pushed the ice too hard. We kept the door open for some reason. Sarah was my closest friend from college, and she’d come with her husband. As with serial killers, so with baby lovers: Sarah cataloged body parts.
“Look at her toes. Her hands. She grips so well! And those feet. They keep folding in prayer. I want to eat them.”
“And all she needs is breast milk. Can you believe that?” said Micah, her husband, who had no children or even the ability to lactate.
We made small talk and batted about innocuous predictions for our daughter’s life. I can’t remember any of them. I wish I could, but that conversation was built on somnolent good manners, and blurs into what comes next.
This, finally, is the story.
Outside our room, there was a sudden shift in the white noise, as if someone changed the channel. Pressure built in the air from unseen, frantic movements. I was alert to sounds in crescendo, one voice calling to another. An aide rushed past. Then three nurses.
“Oh my God,” said my wife.
Our daughter began to cry in Sarah’s arms. Stunned, we asked each other urgent, obvious questions. “Has something happened?”
Micah assumed the role of common sense. “It’s probably nothing. Something in the nursery maybe. A scared parent.”
“I kept waking up this morning, just to see if she was still breathing,” I said.
“Exactly. The staff is just being safe.”
Doctors appeared as well, jogging the way all doctors jog, hands clapped on their writhing stethoscopes.
Go. Now.
A voice spoke to me. A Voice.
Go. Now. I shivered.
I didn’t, however, listen. I nodded in concert with Micah to calm myself, to ensure proper reaction. “Everything’s fine,” I told my wife. “Don’t they announce a code if something goes wrong?”
“Code Pink, I think,” said Sarah. “Like, if a baby is stolen.” I acted as if, yes, that’s exactly what I meant.
“That’s exactly what I meant,” I said. “If we even get on the wrong elevator and have her with us, they announce Code…Kidnap. They shut the hospital down.”
“And wouldn’t there be more people?” said Micah. “There weren’t that many nurses.”
Our daughter kept crying in Sarah’s arms, but with less vigor.
Someone screamed. An animal noise. Not a child.
The scream sounded a second time and my wife asked to have our daughter back and as Sarah handed her over she said, “We should see what’s going on,” and I said, “We’d get in the way,” and Micah said, “Maybe we should close the door. We don’t want to be insensitive,” and I thought, great, even Micah realizes something awful has taken place. He was balding. The Voice remained silent.
“Go see what it is,” said my wife, and the Voice, it said nothing, but I remembered the tone, it seemed embedded in her words. Careful and practical and insistent, she nodded at me again. “Go see what it is.”
Go. Now. So I went.
Other patients and their families were poking their heads from behind doors, but no one ventured forth. A conspiracy of Dads nodded me along the corridor but stayed in their rooms. I was walking in the correct direction without thinking. There was a small crowd of medical professionals at the end of the hall, instruments lifeless. An otherwise empty desk was crowded by two janitors and their carts. They must have already been on the floor. I could hear sobbing, but no more screams.
A security guard rounded the corner and stopped me before I reached the hidden spectacle. The sobbing grew distinct. The guard put his hand in the air to cease and desist me, and I agreed with him. I wanted to stop.
“Unless there’s a problem, sir, please stay in your room.” He was short and very fat. All the worst of me was bubbling to the surface. I stared past him, down the antiseptic corridor, all the heads of the other Dads behind me, and I knew I shouldn’t go any further.
“What happened?” I said.
More sobbing. The two janitors were pushing their mops back and forth, idle. The wheels on the buckets squeaked.
“Sir, please return to your room.”
There was the sound of feet walking on glass mingled with great blubs of emotion and urgent conversations in the hall. Nurses speaking to nurses speaking to doctors and the doctors shaking their heads, clueless, without any answer. The sobbing continued as I turned back toward my room. My daughter was in this hospital. A Dad.
A man named Greg pulled me to his doorway. We’d met and quickly bonded at the ice machine. He was burdened with multiple kids and wore a face that said as much, a manager at a car dealership who played music in clubs on the weekend. He guided my arm before I understood what was taking place, his six-year-old son hanging on the door beside him.
“Did you see anything?” he whispered.
“No, the guard asked me to turn back.”
“Awful. It’s awful.”
“What happened?”
“No, it’s better not to know. You can’t control these things. Some things are better with blinders, New Dad.”
“Hey,” I told him. He was older, pudgy in a confident way, his knit polo battered but expensive. “What the hell happened?”
Greg bobbed his head, leaned closer. “A baby died.”
I swayed. Sometimes Dads sway. Sometimes they reach for the doorframe and picture their daughter’s silhouette stilled, still.
Greg kept speaking, was electrified to finish what he’d been allowed to start.
“Okay, but that’s not the worst of it.” He shooed his son back from the door. “I mean, I guess the father about bum-rushed the nurses’ desk and said their baby wasn’t breathing, I don’t have a lot of details on that, but then all these people started rushing toward the room. I went there myself. The mom’s crying, okay? The father was holding his head and the mom was crying and the father started banging his head against the wall and wailing and, well, they told him to stop. I was still in the hallway, you know. No one could have guessed what was going to happen. No one. He stopped banging his head and so I turned away.”
“He was just banging his head?”
“Yeah, but as I’m walking away I hear glass break, shatter I mean, and so I hurry back. They have the door open, you know. No HIPPA in an emergency, I guess. Nobody’s thinking. There’s a dead baby, isn’t there? That should be enough, right? But the guy jumped, apparently. I saw a lamp on the floor, that wide-ass chair turned over. I dunno. It was chaos. People were rushing around, others were kind of stunned. No one was ready for that. But yeah, somehow he broke the window and jumped. He killed himself, the coward.”
Oh, I thought. Coward. I was swallowing a lot and not speaking. Greg patted my shoulder and I hurried back to my own wife, my own child, Sarah and Micah waiting for news, police surging out of the elevator, sirens outside, but then this was a hospital, there’d been sirens all night. Coward. Greg was already summarizing, narrating, drawing moral conclusions. I saw nothing, not even the aftermath, and I was blank. I could barely remember the words. He broke the window and jumped.
“Down that way!” someone directed the police, uniforms who jingled deadly metal.
Positions in our room had remained the same. My wife clutched our daughter, Sarah sat on the windowsill, her finger clasped in our newborn’s fist, Micah in the too-wide chair at the base of the bed. I saw his serious face, his slow-blinking eyes.
“It’s not good.” I felt embarrassed but continued. “Very bad. A baby, I guess, I mean, a baby died just down the hall.”
“Holy hell.”
“I knew it,” said my wife, whispering into our daughter’s back. “I knew it. I knew it.”
She moved our daughter from one shoulder to the other. Babies were transferred like that. They were carried through the world and bobbed outlook to outlook, their vantage adjusted, predetermined.
Micah became aggressively reasonable. “So why are there police?”
I didn’t know how to deflect, how to massage the information.
“The, the father jumped,” I sputtered.
“Like, out the window, jumped?” said Sarah.
“Oh my God. I knew it. I knew it.” My wife eyed our window, studied its latch.
Sarah shifted her weight, wanted to reach for my wife, our baby, me, to comfort us, I assume. She grew fidgety. Micah began pacing, filling the room with his purposeful reflection. I tried not to recall the Voice and watched my wife. She wanted to be alone, wanted to turn off the lights, probably, to simulate a cave of primordial solitude where she could hold our child in private. I wanted the same, but neither of us was capable of saying so.
“He must have already been very unstable,” said Micah. “Mentally, I mean.”
“He was banging his head against the wall, I guess, and then, yeah, he jumped.”
“And no one stopped him?”
“They tried, I think. There weren’t enough of them, maybe.”
Micah paused. “Or he just surprised them. Who expects something that bad to get worse?”
I hadn’t, and I told myself I hadn’t, and I repeated such to the doubts in my head that remembered and rehearsed the Voice’s command to Go, now. The doubts were trying to calculate the exact timing of my inaction.
Two police officers escorted a crying nurse past our room. I recognized her. The nurse whose father had almost died from diverticulitis. But he hadn’t. She’d saved him.
Time passed. Probably. Some aide asked if we needed anything. There was the back and forth of many official-looking persons, not only medical or police but business suits, probably the hospital administration, maybe its lawyers. At some point, an officer came by and Micah stepped forward, taking control, the type of civilian who nods at soldiers in uniform and the soldiers nod back. He told the officer we hadn’t seen anything, and the officer wanted me to confirm this, mentioned a security guard who’d made a note of my room number, who’d managed to describe me, as if I’d been in a lineup, as if there was something to accuse me of, and there wasn’t. I concurred with Micah and said I’d done nothing. I said, with anger for some reason, “I didn’t even see the guy jump.” Everything I told him was true and innocuous, but it felt like a lie.
“Your baby is beautiful,” said the officer. Then he left.
Sarah and Micah settled on the other hospital bed, Micah with his hand on his coat, Sarah inching away from it. Our daughter was asleep in my wife’s lap and my wife was staring out the window. She couldn’t take her eyes from the glass, her ghost in its image, her own features of soft, quiet uncertainty. My wife folded the tips of her fingers into our daughter, talon-like, fierce.
“No more police,” said Micah.
“So quiet,” said Sarah.
They’d stayed here much longer than they planned, but they didn’t know how to escape.
I suppose we heard the group before we saw them. An entourage wheeled the bereaved mother through the hallway toward the elevators. She was younger than I wanted to know and slumped in her wheelchair. Someone had to place her arm back in her lap. Drugged, I guessed. The hospital didn’t have a psych ward, but maybe she was being taken to the morgue for the father, or for the baby.
I searched for a small package, for I didn’t know what. A box. A bag. A doll’s form trailing in the grip of some orderly. There was a presence on the mother’s knees, a glimpse, and then they were gone. She, like a negative of ourselves, was also never going to sleep again. I played out strange scenarios where I wrestled the father to the ground, possibly beat him as a way to save him. I hurt him and tied him and consoled him and yelled at him to look at his wife, to witness her, and he lived, he was alive because of me. Go. Now.
Tomorrow, they were sending this baby home with us forever.
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