A Novel About Rebelling Against Toxic Positivity

Posted on by Jo Lou

Janet, the acerbic narrator of Lucie Britsch’s debut novel Sad Janet, is a resister. She’s sad—has been for most of her life—and doesn’t want to take the pills that big pharma, her mother, and the culture at-large is pushing on her to “fix” her. She’s content with sadness, and she’s not into the “h-word”—happy—and taking pills to be that way, a new normal she wants no part of.

Sad Janet by Lucie Britsch

After an intervention orchestrated by Janet’s mother, probably with the support of her boyfriend, Janet breaks up with him, reclaiming her ability to eat pizza and watch bad TV alone. She works at a dog shelter, a job that was supposed to be temporary, but she doesn’t want to leave because of the dogs, who make her the closest to happy she’s ever been, and because of her strong, unsentimental boss, Debs.

The toll of Janet’s sadness shows, despite her sarcasm and humor mixed with a dash of vulgarity and quips like “When life throws you lemons, remember there are dogs.” It’s the Christmas pill that finally gets Janet, a pill specially designed for people like her who can’t stand the hype and family drama of Christmas. Just resolving to take the pill makes her feel lighter.

Sad Janet feels like it could be set anywhere through Britsch’s wry capturing of drug advertisements, the pervasiveness of medicating, and the Christmas-fueled capitalism that feels more draining than depression. Janet’s world rings true for anyone who takes pills, has seen a drug commercial, or been alive during the holidays.

Britsch and I exchanged emails about big pharma, Christmas spirit, kooky families, just being you, and—of course—dogs.

Sarah Appleton Pine: What is it like to release a book so of this moment in the world?

I joke that I wanted the world a bit sad for my book but not this sad.

Lucie Britsch: It’s so long between when you write a book and when it comes out, so I wanted to sneak a few current references in there and hope they were still current. I love it when you read something and there’s actually a reference you get like that, like a song you were actually singing the other day, so it’s more relatable. I didn’t know of course just how of this moment Janet would be. I joke that I wanted the world a bit sad for my book but not this sad.

SAP: Can you say more about this moment and how Janet is a part of it?

LB: She would see all this sadness and anger now and be hopeful for real change. I didn’t know the world would be like this when I wrote it and it would be as apt and we’d all be struggling more than ever to feel happy about anything, but life is hard and being human is hard, being sad is a fundamental part of it. I remember on The Good Place Janet said something about humans are ultimately sad because we know we’re going to die, that about sums it up. 

SAP: For the most part, Janet describes herself as being sad—not depressed, not a goth. It seems like sadness and depression (and being goth) often get conflated. How do you distinguish between them? 

LB: I think it’s just she doesn’t want to be labeled and doesn’t identify with any group, it’s just who she is. Depression is something clinical that can be treated whereas sadness is a feeling, for Janet it’s a natural one we should embrace. There’s this idea of the happy existentialist, someone who sees the void at the heart of existence but accepts it and is free, that’s something I’ve always been interested in and strive for. For Janet goths are part of something and she doesn’t feel part of anything.

SAP: Janet is okay—happy even—with her sadness and doesn’t view it as a problem like just about everyone else does. Does sadness serve a purpose?

Life is hard and being human is hard, being sad is a fundamental part of it

LB: Sadness definitely serves a purpose, it’s a cliché but without it how would we know what’s good. You can’t only feel the things you want to feel, you should feel the whole spectrum of human emotion. I always say if you don’t feel every emotion in one day are you even alive? Everyone knows a good cry is cathartic, we need to feel these things not block them.

SAP: Janet’s sadness has a grunginess to it, which I think contrasts to a glamorized sadness we sometimes see, especially in drug advertisements, like Janet points out. If anything, Janet’s life is the opposite of glamorous.

LB: Yeah I definitely wanted to move away from glamouring depression, I think we’re all bored of these pretty sad people manipulating us to sell stuff.

SAP: And big pharma seems especially eager to sell us stuff. “There’s a pill for that” feels like a mantra throughout the book, like pills are the only answer—some people are pretty quick to take them, then take more of them, which doctors encourage. Janet pushes against the efficacy of that. Fortunately, her dad and a couple of other people in her life embrace Janet’s sadness rather than see it as something that needs fixing, with pills or otherwise. There’s just such a push for one-dimensionality, eradicating sadness and feelings on that end of the spectrum. Is there ever a point where we have an obligation to encourage treatment? I think this sort of comes up at the end of the book, but I don’t want to give that away here.

LB: I think you have to find what works for you, Janet is just trying to find what works for her and stay true to herself, she accepts other people’s choices and just wants people to accept hers the same. She wants people to know you don’t always have to take a pill, there are other options, you can tell your doctor to fuck off, you can work it out yourself, but if you can’t, that’s ok too. It’s this monetising of normal feelings in a sad world Janet is against.

SAP: Besides sadness, I notice other emotions in Sad Janet—the occasional laugh, fury, jealousy, sarcasm (is that an emotion?)—but, of course, sadness is so essential. How would you describe this sadness?

LB: Janet’s can’t believe everyone isn’t sad or mad all the time. I always say that if you’re not a difficult woman, you can’t be living in the same world as me. Life is difficult, especially for women.

SAP: I think about that all the time, like all the little ways and big ways the world is more difficult for women. And Janet deals with some of that, too, like her mom wanting her to be more feminine, or at least brush her hair, and her ex-boyfriend’s expectations.

Her mom is perpetually locked in a mid-life crisis and (mostly successful) attempts to foist her ideas on the people around her, and meanwhile, Janet’s brother seems like an immature 12-year-old boy rather than a grown man with a family. These family dynamics are hilarious.

You can’t only feel the things you want to feel, you should feel the whole spectrum of human emotion.

LB: I love books about dysfunctional families too, I mean for me that’s what family is. It’s messy. We all have our sadness and we all cope with it differently, some can’t cope without medication and some can’t cope with the thought of being medicated, we’re all just muddling through. People have to let people do whatever works for them, in a family, in the world, we all want the same things, to not feel so shitty all the time.

SAP: Janet’s family seems especially messy at Christmas, particularly with her mother’s obsession with it, so Christmas seems like the perfect choice for the pill forced on the Sad Janets of the world. Your description of the Christmas obsession is so vivid. You really capture the capitalist spirit of the early build up with carols and cookies and mall Santas to the insistency on it being this big, dramatic day and how tough that is for some people. 

LB: Yeah, I think we’re not far off this sort of pill to be honest—it’s coming, you wait. People would want it, that’s the problem, there’s already a market.

SAP: Janet’s doctor hones in on the Christmas pill being a perfect pill for Janet, even though he hasn’t succeeded in getting her to take anything in the past. He even tricks her into coming into the office to sell it to her. It’s kind of surprising given all of Janet’s skepticism about doctors and big pharma that she has zero concern about health insurance. A lot of Americans deal with insurance hurdles to see doctors, get medication, etc. Does the difference in British versus American healthcare factor in at all here?

LB: Thankfully here in Britain, we have free healthcare in the NHS, and when it’s working it’s brilliant obviously. And just seeing the amazing efforts through this pandemic has made me very grateful we have it. I know it’s different in America and I hope one day you guys get the health care you deserve, I mean it should be a basic human right. I think if you don’t have a problem with big pharma though, you don’t see what’s going on.

SAP: I think a lot of Americans are envying universal healthcare right now—whether they want to admit it or not.

I also found Janet’s tendency to label herself (and others) interesting. She splits herself up—Sad Janet, New Janet, Old Janet, Bad Janet—and the tension between a unified self and a self with separate parts feels notable.

Fuck being happy, be you.

LB: She can be kinder to herself maybe, like she can be outside herself and see she’s complex, changing, growing; she isn’t this fixed thing she has to hate always. We aren’t just one thing, we have all these versions of ourselves we have to live with.

SAP: Janet classifies dogs, too, so your cover caught my eye—a dog in a “stupid outfit,” as Janet would say. Did you have a hand in the design or any thoughts you’d like to share about it?

LB: The first cover they sent me didn’t feel right at all so I asked them to come up with something else and this one just felt right. I had rescue greyhounds a few years ago myself and they didn’t know this so it just sort of felt like fate. I don’t know anyone that’s immune to a dog in a sweater.

SAP: I still have a burning personal question: do you have a dog?

LB: I don’t have a dog right now, but soon hopefully, and it will be a rescue greyhound for sure. They’re the best.

SAP: Anything else you’d like to add?

LB: I have bi-polar but choose to not be medicated, and it’s fucking hard but it’s just who I am. I’m always open about it and if people can’t handle it, it says more about them. I don’t know who these people are that have good mental health?

Being human is the hardest thing we’ll ever have to do. The more people talk about mental health, the more people realize having mental health problems is the norm, not the other way round. I just hope people read my book and know they can be whoever they are and I’m rooting for them. Fuck being happy, be you.

9 New Translated Books by Women

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

August is Women in Translation month, dedicated to works of literature originally written by women in languages other than English. As we explained in our 2018 version of this list, such works make up a tiny percentage of the books published in the United States each year, though with increased attention and dialogue around them, publishers will have an incentive to put out more. Consider this your excuse to tour the globe, absorbing its richly varied stories through the eyes of women whose first language is Korean or Polish or Arabic or French. Below are nine translated novels that first appeared in English in 2019 or 2020. (If graphic narratives are more your speed, there are also many wonderful women authors on our recent list of translated graphic novels.)

That Hair

That Hair by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, translated by Eric M. B. Becker

Half-Angolan, half-Portuguese Mila moved from Luanda to Lisbon at the age of 3. As an adult, she makes one demoralizing visit after another to Portuguese salons that have no idea what to do with her “rebellious mane,” applying abrasive chemicals and time-consuming weaves that soon fall apart. Mila sees this tale as a geopolitical one that spans continents, and in an associative style, tells it through memories of her parents and grandparents, interrogating even her own compulsions to notice and want to police the behavior of other Black people.

In This Korean Best Seller, a Young Mother Is Driven to Psychosis ...

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang

Millennial Kim Jiyoung experiences rampant patriarchy at every stage of her upbringing in contemporary South Korea. As a young wife and mother, she finally snaps in front of her in-laws and questions the expectation that she must bend over backwards to serve them. Apologizing that she must be ill, her horrified husband ushers her to a male psychiatrist, whose notes constitute the novel. Jiyoung even starts to dissociate, believing that she can seamlessly transform into other women. Though in some ways a relatively straightforward catalog of relentless patriarchal pressure, Jiyoung’s critiques are also anti-capitalist, as she wonders who could possibly be happy even if they were the last person standing in a world with today’s priorities.

Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin

Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

In Argentine author Schweblin’s latest novel, a tech craze for cute, furry robot animals is sweeping the globe, dividing the world into “keepers” and “dwellers.” Keepers purchase a camera-equipped kentuki—which come in a range of species, from crows and dragons to rabbits and moles—while dwellers purchase a remote controller that pairs them with one kentuki elsewhere in the world, allowing them to interact with and peer into a stranger’s life through the robot. The novel runs through many vignettes of such pairings. From displaced maternal feelings to disturbing sexual demands, kentuki prove to be just the latest vehicle for anonymous connection and digital intimacy in our increasingly networked yet still frequently lonely internet age.

Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah, translated by Geoffrey Strachan

Mauritian-French author Appanah tells the story of Moïse, a boy growing up in the postcolonial chaos of Mayotte, an island in the Mozambique channel and neglected department of France. When Marie—the white nurse who adopted him as an abandoned baby—dies suddenly, 14-year-old Moïse falls in with the brutal gang leader whose child soldiers run a nearby slum. Different characters narrate the many short, vivid chapters, some like Marie speaking helplessly from beyond the grave about the devastating yet inevitable events that ensue.

The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous

The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

In recent-day Syria, Suleima and Naseem meet in their therapist’s waiting room, leading to an intense affair that ends abruptly as Naseem flees Assad’s dictatorship for Germany. However, he soon sends Suleima an unfinished manuscript that contains a close fictional double of herself. Suleima, who escapes to Beirut herself, struggles with her mental health as she looks back on her family’s difficult history in Syria, her narration interspersed with chapters narrated by her fictional version in Naseem’s unnamed book.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Nobel laureate Tokarczuk sets this mystical murder mystery in a Polish village near the Czech border that contains a few year-round locals and many second homes for city dwellers. Older English teacher Janina Duszejko is one of the former; she spends her free time translating Blake with former student Dizzy and drawing up horoscopes using elaborate astrological charts she believes in fervently. When local men, many of them hunters who mistreat animals and dismiss the eccentric Janina, start showing up dead and surrounded by animal artifacts, Janina believes said Animals (she, like Blake, prefers to capitalize the word) are finally exacting their revenge and is determined to convince others of the same.

The Girl in the Tree by Şebnem İşigüzel, translated by Mark David Wyers

In the wake of Turkey’s violent 2013 Gezi Park protests, a 17-year-old girl sits in a tree in Istanbul’s Gülhane Park, reading Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees (of which this novel is itself a sort of update). Aware that she might appear like she’s lost her mind, she chats with a bellboy from a nearby hotel who brings her food and water for weeks. She reflects on various heartbreaks, from an aunt who disappears to friends who were killed in a bombing and a teacher who ridiculed a deeply personal story she wrote, until her reasons for the arboreal campout finally emerge.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes

In a provincial Mexican town, boys find the local Witch dead in a canal under a mass of black snakes. She was known for furnishing the women of the town with spells and cures, the men with orgiastic parties. Each of the chapters, which often contain pages-long sentences, provides a window into the consciousness of a different townsperson, showing how the Witch became the scapegoat for all the shames and desires they would have preferred to keep hidden.

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein

Set in a more privileged neighborhood of Naples than the Neapolitan Quartet, Ferrante’s latest novel centers 12-year-old Giovanna, who comes to the story a good student and loyal daughter of progressive, educated parents. When her father makes a mean remark about how she looks like his estranged sister Vittoria, Giovanna sets off through the city to find her troubled aunt, forging a relationship and slowly untangling generations of family history that her parents had covered over with convenient lies, which leads her to new understandings about how she wants to conduct her own budding young adult life.

7 Books About Being Young and Messy in New York

Posted on by Jo Lou

My memoir is not unique. But only in the sense that my story unfolds with New York City as the backdrop, where so many other stories have unfolded and will continue to unfold long after I’m gone. That’s the beauty of this multilayered city: it unravels you, and no one’s unraveling is alike. Yes, there are common denominators: exorbitantly priced breakfast sandwiches, not batting an eyelash when Jessica Lange is dining one table over, crying on the subway—but all of these elements leave a different imprint on a person.

I was lucky enough to experience NYC nightlife in the early 2010s, the tail-end of an era that I was fortunate enough—with the help of a fake ID—to experience. Don Hill’s was still around. You could catch a show at Trash Bar. You could grab a nightcap at St. Jerome, where my nightlife friends-turned-family spent many-a-night. I go-go danced at Nurse Bettie, a burlesque joint a few blocks over on Norfolk Street, for a few months during the spring of 2013. I’ve bumped into Debbie Harry at a party. I’ve spilled a drink on Lady Gaga (sorry, girl!). I could still wander into Trash & Vaudeville and get a hug from Jimmy Webb. 

After graduating from Hofstra—which is only forty minutes east of Manhattan—I made the move to NYC a year later, in 2014. Nightlife faded into the background while I worked on my master’s at The New School, interned at various online and print magazines, and tried to carve a space for myself as a writer. 

Below are seven books that helped me carve that space.

Don't Worry, It Gets Worse by Alida Nugent

Don’t Worry, It Gets Worse by Alida Nugent

My first apartment was in East Harlem. I’d take long walks to the Barnes & Noble on 86th Street and sit my broke ass down to read whole books from the humor section. Don’t Worry, It Gets Worse was one of those books. Like Nugent, I, too, was a 20-something college graduate navigating adulthood with the same finesse I would possess at pole vault. Did the employees at the Upper East Side Barnes & Noble start to recognize me and cast looks of pity in my direction? Yes. But it was worth it, because this book made a confusing time in my life a little less lonely. 

Intimacy Idiot by Isaac Oliver 

My pursuit of love and intimacy in NYC was, more times than not, misguided at best. Crying in a subway stairwell at four in the morning with a sad hashbrown in my hand at worst. I am approaching three years of being in a loving and healthy relationship somehow (witchcraft), but before I met my current partner, every relationship (which, by the way, is a generous term) I was in crashed and burned. No one gets it more than Oliver, who is able to articulate the ups and downs of emotional turbulence in a city notorious for its dating woes with heart and humor. I slept with this book by my side in between each terrible dude I boned.

The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead

The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead

If you could describe a book as a love song to the city that never sleeps/charges no less than $14.99 for a salad bowl the size of your fist, The Colossus of New York is that book. Few are able to capture the frenetic nature of this multifarious city with lyrical mediation and keen observation, forming an impenetrable bond between city natives and longtime dwellers. Every sentence from Whitehead’s fingertips is a full sensory experience. Swoon!

M Train by Patti Smith

M Train by Patti Smith

Just Kids is the Gideon Bible of coming-of-age in NYC memoirs, but M Train, to me, is a beautiful testament to the ordinary, a place we always return to. In Smith’s case, it’s that one tiny corner table in the West Village where she penned most of this book. Even though this book is woven with collections of her travel abroad, it is, at the end of the day, an ode to a first love. 

Out East by John Glynn

This is a question for any writer: do you ever read a sentence that is so good that you want to throw all of your possessions into the sea and start anew somewhere far away? Because that is every third sentence in this book. JOHN GLYNN HOW DARE YOU. Glynn has this uncanny ability to capture that feeling of your heart and mind being trapped in a viscous dipping sauce, unable to strike a balance, while everyone around you seems to have their shit together. It celebrates the complexities of queerness beyond crossing the threshold from private into public, all to the tune of one Montauk summer. This book is my jam.

Face It by Debbie Harry

I mean, is anyone more New York than Deborah THEE Harry? My love for Debbie Harry contains multitudes beyond being a Blondie superfan. Like yours truly, she also grew up in New Jersey, and she tells a lot of stories about getting in her car and driving to the city at night to hang out with her friends in the Lower East Side, which is literally what my life looked like after I graduated from Hofstra and moved back in with my parents for a year. Face It also captures the Golden Age of New York City, when you could stroll into a bar and bump into a Ramone, see bands like Television perform on a random weeknight, and/or share a cigarette with a Warhol superstar. Also, this book is extra special to me because if you had told 18-year-old Greg that he would one day interview Debbie Harry, he would have hurled a box of Clairol frosted tips at you. 

Do You Mind If I Cancel? by Gary Janetti

My heart will always beat for a fellow Hofstra alum. Yes, he’s the writer and producer of some of the most iconic television comedies of our time, but Janetti’s catalog of his twenties in New York—from trying to find a job before the internet to working at a hotel with an ornery bellman to a tale of soap opera addiction, all wrapped in a bow made from the finest observational humor—is a puzzle piece of universal fit. Also, please note that Lisa Rinna’s blurb for this book is just, “Gary.” Engrave that on my tombstone, please. 

The Bourgeois Romance of Pandemic Isolation

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

The lizard that lived around my apartment and popped up every once in a while died today. Found dead, cause unknown—the way they report it on the news. I burst into tears without quite knowing why. Perhaps because it too was a lone traveler within these walls, or because I had been rooting for it, as much as I have for myself, to survive this indefinite lockdown. If I were in the millennial habit of celebrating monthly markers, today would be the four-month-versary of my isolation. Not a particularly cheery thought: a hundred and twenty days since I have seen a familiar face, my nagging memory reminds me (somehow, video calls don’t feel like they count). I try to quell the burgeoning self-pity by skimming through the daily news, a concoction of public despair that leaves a bitter but less personal aftertaste. People would switch places with you in a heartbeat, I chide myself. The thought doesn’t really help. 

When an acquaintance recommended May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude to me, I’d already spent nearly two months at home. The beginning of the lockdown, as far as beginnings go, had been quite comfortable. I procured enough supplies to get by, avoided the toilet roll mania and cooked healthy meals five days a week. I sent out an email newsletter for 40 consecutive days, for friends and acquaintances who were struggling to adapt to the new circumstances. I thought I couldn’t be more pandemic-ready. After all, wasn’t solitude the fuel to creativity?

I’ve lived alone in this apartment for the better part of two years, studying and working from home. Everyone who knows me knows how much I enjoy being on my own. Until recently, my version of solitude was the epitome of a comfortable existence. Much like the life Sarton describes in her journal, my schedule was interspersed with weekend trips and walks around town, weekly teas and lunches with friends, visits to relatives and social obligations twice a month. My meetings with people were intimate enough to refresh the soul and challenge the intellect, yet not so much as to intrude into my space. I relished my independence and indeed, fiercely guarded it. But as Sarton wrote, sitting alone on a freezing February day, “At what price would total independence be bought?” In retrospect, what I was thoroughly unprepared for was the actual solitariness of prolonged solitude, when it becomes imposed instead of chosen. 

In A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf points out, with due apology for her bluntness, that a woman, in order to write or create, must have a certain financial standing. Wordsworth, in Daffodils, reflects a bourgeois sentiment in evoking the pleasures of leisure. Solitude, and the enjoyment of it, comes inherently imbued with a notion of class consciousness. I daresay if I found myself sharing a room with five other people, with interrupted supplies of water and power, struggling to put the next meal on the table, I would have time for neither solitude nor loneliness. There is nothing romantic about poverty, except when the affluent write about it. 

Solitude, and the enjoyment of it, comes inherently imbued with a notion of class consciousness.

Even as I record my own reflections in a journal, I wonder what right I have to write about the nature of solitude. Living in an upscale urban neighborhood that borders India’s capital, equipped with the gift of the internet and a slew of social media apps, I have the ability to pick up my smartphone and see any one of my friends who live thousands of kilometers away. I have been home-bound, but I own the roof above my head, a sophisticated high-rise apartment roof with electricity and water, a well-stocked refrigerator, a weekly walk to the nearest supermarket for groceries. I can open my wallet without worrying, and can afford to casually buy a poor woman (or two) a liter of cooking oil that she will make do with for an entire month. After the third person peers hopefully at me, I can (not so) casually convince myself it’s all I can afford to do. I can come home and write an angry article about the government’s inadequacies and sign a few petitions. I can afford to put my upper-caste, majority-religion last name on them without fearing an arrest (yet). 

But I am also the person who drifts around in an empty house quiet enough that you can hear the air displaced by whirring fan blades. A house that I have deep-cleaned like a crime scene, where dust still accumulates daily on chairs that no one sits on. I exchange pleasantries with a potted areca palm, leave the TV on for no reason, and assign names to stray reptiles that die on me. There are days when I successfully adhere to the “inexorable routines” that Sarton calls a necessity for surviving tempestuous upheavals, and then there are days when I succumb and lie on my bed for hours at a time—I have nearly decoded my crying schedule. I am half-sick of oblique gazes on electronic screens; more and more, I find myself wanting to turn off my phone and write a letter. I am not struggling as much as many others—but it matters that I too am struggling. 

For a while now, I have dreaded reading the newspaper because I feel accountable to innumerable, nameless people for the luxury of my bad days, and even more for my good, peaceful ones. When people were walking hundreds of kilometers to reach their homes and collapsing on the way, I was dancing in my kitchen whilst cooking pasta. Even as  a security guard reached home after a two-day shift, only to leave in a couple of hours again, I woke up fresh from eight hours of sleep, and went about watering my plants. A fire, literal and metaphorical, rippled across the world as I received a much-awaited acceptance letter for a poem I’d submitted. At what point in a dystopian existence do you stop celebrating your own little joys?

At what point in a dystopian existence do you stop celebrating your own little joys?

Growing up, my solitude was a comfortable given. The only child of working parents, I could amuse myself for much of the day with little trouble. As I went out into the world and learned how to share a room, I also discovered how rare my childhood usual was. Sarton describes the responsibility that an independent existence burdens a writer with: a noblesse oblige of sorts, to dive deep into oneself and cast a wider net, to raise a voice for the stories so often  brushed under the carpet.  Despite the difference between my time and hers, I find myself agreeing. My autonomy—financial, sexual and social—is a gift I did little to earn, one that is denied to a majority of my country’s people, and a majority of the world. I owe it to them to be as unpretentious as possible, to at least face, without any hypocrisy, my life’s reality.  

I speak to a friend who has moved back with her family, who tells me about how they frequently interrupt her work. Another’s friend’s anxiety chronically gets triggered in close quarters, as she grapples with the uncertainty of her professional life. Many are suffering toxic domestic situations that they don’t want to stay in, but cannot completely abandon. Months ago, when I decided not to return to the house where my parents live, I agreed to pay a much smaller, albeit significant, price for my independence and solitude: periodic, debilitating loneliness. On my bad days, I try to remind myself of the good ones. 

On my good days, even as I lift my pen to traverse narratives of discrimination, political censorship, sexual violence and feminism with relative ease, I falter, unlike Sarton,  when it comes to a quietly confident exposition of my daily life. In her journal recorded over a year, with great self-assuredness, she touches upon several knotty subjects including racism, homosexuality, and patriarchy, but mostly, she writes at length about herself and her everyday struggles. What is of essence here is not so much what she narrates, but the fact that she chooses to say it at all—a confidence I and most women of my acquaintance sorely lack, a confidence hitherto the monopoly of white male writers. But truly, if alcohol can be the motif of Bukowski or Hemingway, why can’t Sarton’s gardening be hers? 

From time to time, it becomes essential to find something that pulls you out of yourself, and reminds you of your place in the grand scheme.

The extraordinariness in her journal is its attention to the ordinary: the changing flowers, the antics of the parrot Punch, the turn of seasons, the visit of a feral cat or a boisterous raccoon—the kind of minutiae that might be termed mundane, privileged and irrelevant by critics, but that she seldom apologizes for. At one point, she questions herself: “What do you want of your life?” and realizes that all she wants is the same, but “to handle it all better.” From her isolation to mine, perhaps just as she intended, this has been the connection forged: an appreciation of one’s life as it is, without an inner voice intermittently wondering if this is how it ought to be. 

In the interests of efficiency, solitude requires that one assume a certain weight of the world on one’s shoulders—in Sarton’s words, “think like a hero.” But here’s the catch: most heroes that populate history and literature are terribly self-absorbed. From time to time, it becomes essential to find something that pulls you out of yourself, and reminds you of your place in the grand scheme. Over these weeks, I am learning to transition from someone likely to blame herself for the death of a cactus, to someone who spends an hour each day pruning, re-potting, fumbling her way through the language of the soil, accepting alike the delight and disappointment. As I read about a garden in bloom in a patch of countryside half a century and half a world away, gazing out at my own backyard, it becomes increasingly lucid to me why nature is the unifying metaphor for human existence. There is nothing to be done, says Sarton, but to go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour. Today marks four months of my isolation. As I hum to myself while tending to a plant with curling leaves, I have finally stopped counting. 

Stories About the Worst Things Possible

Posted on by Jo Lou

In one of the stories in Shruti Swamy’s debut collection, A House Is a Body, the main character says this about her own state of mind:

“The screen dropped from my self in those moments without me even realizing it; the terror came later, when I noticed it had fallen, when I was trying to gather myself up in raw handfuls, but I was like sand all over.”

The woman is, interestingly, a professional laughter artist for hire. To a large extent, the stories here are about exactly such singular moments in their protagonists’ lives when that inner screen drops and they perceive their own deep vulnerabilities.

Swamy examines these moments and vulnerabilities in her characters with language that is both precise and moving. Whether the character is a mother, a father, a sibling, a lover, a re-imagined mythical demon’s wife, or a contemporary version of a Hindu god, each is trying to occupy the various spaces they’re allowed with a self-awareness that isn’t insular but all-encompassing. Swamy’s narrative style gives their musings a dream-like intimacy so that we, as readers, do more than bear witness; we find ourselves, much like the dog with the cobra in “Night Garden,” in thrall.

Shruti Swamy and I exchanged emails to discuss how motherhood became a dominant theme in A House Is a Body and why space—physical, emotional, intellectual, or liminal—features so frequently, especially for mothers who are also women of color.

Jenny Bhatt: Several of the stories here feature mothers of various stripes trying to balance motherhood with their other relationships and their own physical and/or emotional needs. The struggles create various layered tensions that then play out in myriad ways. You’ve also written briefly elsewhere (a Catapult essay on learning to swim, which was my first introduction to your writing) about your relationship with your mother and your grandmother. To be clear for our readers, I’m not suggesting the entire collection is about motherhood narratives but that it is one of the main themes. What fascinates or draws you to explore the mother-child relationship throughout the collection?

Shruti Swamy: None of these stories are about my own mother, at least not directly, but I remember something that happened first as a young adult, when I looked at a familiar picture of my mother as a young woman and realized with a shock that she had been a person before me, not defined by me at all, with her own moods and thoughts and desires. I was around the age she was when the picture was taken, and I wondered, what was she like? Would we have been friends? The glamour of your mother, as soon as you can see her like this, an adult looking at an adult, and the mystery of her—I find these aspects very compelling. 

On a more simple level, the mothers (and father, in the case of “Didi”) are mostly the parents of young children. During the time I wrote these stories, I was not yet a mother—fiction was a way for me to try that identity on, to play with the what-ifs.

JB: I agree. Whether we’re mothers ourselves or not, the mother-child relationship is a fascinating one to explore in fiction because it’s such an elemental one. We all have mothers, whether we’ve known them or not, loved them or not. That said, less than a decade ago, if there was a short story collection or a novel that honed in on motherhood as one of its major themes, it often did not get its due respect, got shelved under “women’s fiction” (which, as a genre label, is ridiculous, I know), did not receive much airtime from book critics or major literary awards, and more such. There are now, relatively speaking, more works centering on motherhood. Do you believe much has changed in the publishing world and among readers to make this a subject worthy of more respect and attention?

SS: I don’t think I’m qualified to comment on the publishing world! I can say that as a reader, I have always been hungry for stories about motherhood. It does seem like there were a great many books that were published all at once right around the time, coincidentally, I was pregnant with my daughter, and which were overwhelmingly written by white writers. There is room for many, many more stories still.

JB: Yes, I was thinking the same about how there have been a lot of recent books by white women writers exploring motherhood. They’ve been very good. I’m thinking of the most recent Want by Lynn Steger Strong (which, of course, is about more than motherhood but that’s an important aspect of the protagonist’s identity.) And, yes, we need more such from women writers of color.

Coming back to the mothers in these stories. One of the notable struggles they face is how to be a “good” mother. Certainly, it’s a rich vein to be mined because it’s not simply about living up to socio-cultural expectations or conditioning but also about figuring out and coming to terms with how motherhood fits in with a woman’s own sense of her identity and femininity. Could you talk a little about how you’ve worked, through these stories, to examine the ever-evolving alchemy of motherhood, how a mother’s relationship with a child is both draining and fulfilling, and how the intersections of race, culture, and class define “good mother” differently for all of us?

Culturally, we have an idea of who is a mother—whose bodies and bonds should be protected—and who is not.

SS: As a mother, I’m interested in what it means to be “good,” or at least, “good enough”, but in these stories, I was more interested in the opposite. I wanted to loose my characters from those neat scripts of motherhood and let them be human, to really fuck up. There was something exhilarating about letting them be “bad.” In the title story, for example, I was after this terrifying, giddy feeling I got when I read The Days of Abandonment [by Elena Ferrante]—what can go worse, how can things get even smaller and tighter around the neck of my character, what wildness will that provoke? Many of these stories, though, are interested in the worst thing that can happen, in motherhood and otherwise.

JB: Could you elaborate a bit more on the “neat scripts of motherhood” bit, please?

SS: To me, it’s less about the different definitions of “good” mothers across race, class, culture, etc, and more about visibility—who do we see? 

I had this weird experience when I was pregnant: literally into the final week of my pregnancy, most people, like people on the street, or colleagues at work, didn’t notice I was pregnant. I was like all on guard about strangers trying to touch my belly or whatever, but it never happened, the flip side of that, of course, was that people rarely offered me their seat on the bus or even just smiled beatifically at me like I saw them do at other pregnant women. The weirdest part was that, almost down to the one, the people who did notice I was pregnant were people of color. Once, in my 38th week, standing on BART, a Chinese auntie (who, as a senior, should have also been offered a seat) shamed these two white girls into getting up for me. My pregnancy was a strange, temporary condition, so these incidents were disconcerting, but not wrecking. Still, it was a taste of what it feels like to be, I think, so outside of someone’s narrative of what a mother looks like that you become invisible.

It’s not a controversial statement that mothers are treated like shit in this country, some more than others. A couple examples: Black women are dying in or after birth at far higher rates than white women, for example. We are persisting in separating mothers from their children at the border. The people who are contracting COVID on the front lines as essential workers are disproportionately Latinx and Black, many of them mothers. We allow these things to happen, culturally, because we have an idea of who is a mother—whose bodies and bonds should be protected—and who is not. I don’t want to put too much on books; I don’t think a story should have to, or even can, prove someone’s humanity. But I do think that books by and about mothers of color, especially Black women, should be uplifted and read with gratitude and care. Black feminism has so much to teach us all about how to be better citizens and mothers.

JB: The idea of “space” shows up both explicitly and implicitly in several of these stories. Whether it’s “The Neighbors,” where the protagonist, a mother, asks her new neighbor, also a mother, about how she finds the space to do anything else. Or, “The Laughter Artist,” where the protagonist muses on how a woman walking on the street is so self-aware of the physical space she’s occupying. Or, in the title story, where the mother feels as if her parenting takes up all her space and time, where she sees the house as not just a space to occupy but as a body that holds souls. There are more such examples. Why does the idea of space—physical, emotional, intellectual, or liminal—feature so frequently?

SS: Most of my life as a writer has been about trying to strike a balance between the time and space needed to do writing and the time and space to do everything else—to love people, to go grocery shopping, to make money. There was a terrible year when I had a terrible job that made me grind my teeth in my sleep. Which was ironic, because I had taken that job with the idea that the schedule and the relative simplicity of its tasks would allow me to write. I didn’t really write. I read slowly and tried breathing exercises and cried in the park on my lunch breaks and tried not to lose all faith in myself. But I had intense, vivid dreams, some of the most beautiful of my life. That year was very cramped for me, emotionally if not temporally, but even still, my subconscious was reminding me lovingly of the vast terrain always available to me, the richness and wildness of my consciousness. Any explorations of space in my work come from honoring that inner space.

JB: A number of women in your stories are dealing with depression, anxiety, and/or pathological worry. And these stories were written in times different from the one we’re currently living in. Given the global pandemic causing even more life-threatening dangers and fears, how have your thoughts changed on these issues and the ways that mothers, like the ones in these stories, might be coping, choosing, prioritizing?

I don’t think a story should have to, or even can, prove someone’s humanity.

SS: I wrote these stories in slightly less apocalyptic times than the one we’re living in now, but only slightly. In my city, Alex Nieto was killed in 2014. Every year, “wildfire season” stretches longer, and California burns for months and months on end. As a resident of the Tenderloin, and then the Mission, walking down the street is a daily reminder of the human suffering caused by the homelessness crisis and income inequality. We are absolutely at an extreme moment right now, but this crisis has deep roots. That anxiety, the feeling of being on the edge of collapse, thrums beneath the feet of many of my characters. One of the questions I am asking in this collection is about that: how do we live here at the edge? How do we find meaning? Unfortunately, I don’t think that my thoughts have changed, maybe just intensified.

JB: Yes, that sense of living on the edge of collapse came through frequently for me in these stories. It made me appreciate how your language truly immerses us in the interior landscapes of the main characters. They’re very self-aware, these women and men, of what they’re experiencing both emotionally and sensorially. I’ve always thought this kind of deep immersion is good for both the writer and the reader because, if done with due care and attention that’s not merely navel-gazing, we both come out of the writing and reading experiences having learned something about our individual selves, not simply about the characters. That’s my take and you don’t have to agree with it. But I’m curious to know how you think such immersion helps you as a reader, first, and then as a writer.

SS: I love the feeling of swimming in language, the feeling of living through language in someone else’s body and mind: more than plot or even character, it is this quality that offers me the greatest pleasure as a reader. Proust looks at flowers, at the brilliant sheet of sea at Balbec, revels in clothes, and music, and conversation. When you look up, you see it too: how exquisite the flowers are on your own kitchen table! The clarity of your lover’s eyes! The feeling of your hair against your cheek as the breeze blows into it! This is why I come to books, to tune my eye to the writer’s so I can look with it at my own life. And it is my goal as a writer: to offer the best of my vision to my readers.

Grandma’s Bones Live In My Mouth Now

Posted on by Alyssa Songsiridej

Teeth

When my grandma left me her teeth I had no choice but to take them. They were a bad fit, riddled with cavities, and I was sorry to see my own teeth, white, healthy, plucked loose from my mouth and stored in a glass display case until such time as I might bestow them on someone else. Not that I would. It’s some real fucked up nonsense, inheriting someone else’s teeth, carrying their bones in your mouth, sharp little marbles of memory.

Ever since the transplant I’ve gone mute. My grandma Helen was a dancer. The language inside her body was movement, and now the language inside mine is unrecognizable even to me. I was never an athlete. I was never an artist. There is no way for me to externalize these internal currents, so I don’t.

At night, my dreams are filled with Helen’s memories. It’s a second life for her—her memories reincarnate in my body—but it’s me who’s living it. She’s as dead as she was before the surgeon buried the roots of her teeth into the fresh craters in my mouth.

My mom calls to ask how I’m doing even though she knows I can’t answer. She was sad when her mom skipped her and went straight to me, but she was also relieved, and I can tell she feels guilty that I’m the one carrying this ancestral burden instead of her. Nana was never that nice in the first place.

“Is your mouth sore?” she asks me. “Are you eating?”

Inside my body I feel what it felt like to carry her as a fetus. I feel the deadweight of her girlbody asleep on my chest. I feel insurmountable anger when she calls after months of not calling to say she’s pregnant, not because she’s pregnant, but because I’m the one who’ll have to take care of the baby while she finishes school, builds a life, when all I want to do, all I’ve ever wanted to do, is dance, and this is the second time this girlchild has stolen that from me.

“You sound good,” my mom says, even though I haven’t said anything, and my body is all flex and angles, all hard-lined accusation. “Let me know if you need anything,” she says, because she knows I can’t.

I cook Campbell’s tomato soup on the stove, and while it cooks, I choreograph a dance that perfectly expresses all of my fury and sadness. When I try to enact it in the living room, I am a pre-lingual baby, imitating sounds without understanding their meaning, and it makes me feel like tearing the limbs from my body and replacing them with another, more fluent set. I leave the soup on too long and it burns a thick layer of sludge on the bottom of the pan, which I leave in the sink for someone else to clean.

My mom comes by with Tylenol and coffee. Her eyes roam my untidy apartment and land briefly on the display of teeth that have been extracted from my mouth. I have made an altar for them on the coffee table—votive candles, Hershey’s kisses, peppermints. When I eat, I set aside a little food for them. When I drink coffee, I pour them a small cup and sit with them and tell them what I am feeling without using words or movement and it is no small miracle that they understand me. They offer suggestions. They ask for a refill. These enamel rocks that want what they want and aren’t ashamed to ask for it.  

“Are you having second thoughts?” my mom asks me, nodding towards the teeth which are no longer mine.

All of my thoughts are second thoughts, having been thought once, already, by Helen, but how can I say this? There is a body enacting breath, billowing up and down, up and down, repeated ad nauseum, and for once I try my hand at performing this speech-act in front of another human, in front of my mom, but it comes off spasmodic and weird and I want to grind my fists into my eyes until I see stars. I have a feeling that my teeth are laughing at me from their coffee table shrine, and I want to knock their socks off, metaphorically speaking.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” my mom says, as if I had some choice in the matter. “No one would blame you for reversing the procedure.”

The teeth go sharp in my mouth, the roots clinging to my jaw like tentacles. How do I say I’m not alone? How does a body dance haunted? I remember the adrenaline rush of being backstage before a performance, the pulsing dark, the incipient light. I roll my head in a large, slow circle. I hunch my shoulders. My mom backs out of the apartment still holding both coffees, hers and mine.

I dream I’m dancing for an audience of Gaba girls. I dream about sex. The teeth want to keep dreaming, so I stay in bed all day, dozing through the morning, the afternoon, only rising at nightfall to pour some water on my extracted teeth, the poor thirsty darlings, before falling back into my bednest where I’m shaking cocktails for someone named Alfonse. When my mom calls, I send her straight to voicemail. When she calls again, I turn off my phone.

I am lying on a dance floor, watching other women leap over me. I am in a nude leotard on a rooftop slow-stepping in geometric patterns with women whose shoulders I never touch. I am good at this. I am the best.

In the bathroom mirror I meet a stranger with my teeth and someone else’s nose. First there’s fear, then panic, then the numbing sensation of a word repeated too many times, and a face is a face is a face and that’s not what’s important anyway.

In the living room, I move the furniture to the walls to make room for the words my body wants to say, but a full set of teeth, not mine, are shrieking for crusty bread and milk. They are desperate, these teeth, and I don’t truck with desperate. I unwrap a Hershey’s kiss and eat it, watching the teeth vibrate with envy, and then I eat another. When I’m finished with the chocolate, I eat the peppermints, and when I’m finished with the peppermints, I lick my finger and thumb and extinguish the candle’s flame.

I carry the teeth to the window—the night is balmy with spent rain—and I pluck them, one by one, from their setting until all that’s left is thirty-some empty cavities, a glass palate, a speechless tongue.

10 Books About the Importance of the Postal Service

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Given the recent news, we’ve been reminded just how vital the postal service is for our everyday life. With the June 2020 appointment of Louis DeJoy as the new Postmaster General, the USPS has seen a sharp decline into crisis; with the November presidential election rapidly approaching, many are concerned at what this means for mail-in ballots. Furthermore, for many indigenous, rural, and/or low-income communities, as well as incarcerated folks and people who need medication delivery, the USPS is often the only reliable source. 

If this sobering turn of events has got you ruminating on the importance of mail delivery, below are ten books in which letters and the postal service—or lack thereof—play a crucial role. Ranging from academic studies about the diverse history of the USPS to a novel with original postcard artwork, these are books to write home about. (You should write home about them, and don’t forget to mail the letter!)

DeJoy now promises to suspend his mail-delaying shenanigans, but only because there’s been so much hue and cry. If you’d like to get in on that action, there are a number of ways to help support the USPS. Texting “USPS” to 50409 is an easy and time-efficient way to contact your representatives; here is a list of compiled resources of petitions and action items; and, of course, I firmly believe that one can never own too many stamps. 

The Postman by David Brin

In Brin’s dystopian vision for America, the USPS is painted as the only source of hope. In The Postman’s post-apocalyptic world, a man puts on an abandoned USPS uniform and tries to barter mail for food. However, his initial fraud snowballs, as he claims to work for the “Restored United States of America” and civilians cling to the idea of a centralized government’s return. Meanwhile, the U.S. is ravaged by bio-engineered plagues and a group of white supremacist, misogynist, and hypersurvivalist militia. The Postman, AI scientists, and other opposition groups must band together to fight for the future of civilization. Originally published in 1985, Brin’s sci-fi novel resonates uncomfortably true in our current-day society. 

All My Mother’s Lovers by Ilana Masad

In Masad’s debut novel, a woman does her own postal delivery (as we’ll probably also be forced to if things don’t improve). When Maggie’s mother dies abruptly in a car crash and leaves behind five letters, Maggie is determined to hand-deliver the sealed envelopes to each address. Although Maggie always thought her mother, Iris, had the picture-perfect marriage, she realizes there was much more to Iris’s past than she ever dreamed of. All My Mother’s Lovers is a warm-hearted and intriguing exploration of family, the imperfect nature of relationships, the intersections of sexuality, gender, and identity—and how much five letters can change someone’s life. 

There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality by Philip F. Rubio 

The Postal Service was the first public service to hire women and Black workers, and continues to have one of the most diverse workforces today. There’s Always Work at the Post Office highlights the stories of Black postal workers, and the ways in which they fought for a more equal work environment. A history professor and former postal worker, Philip Rubio shows how civil rights movements and Black labor protest traditions combined to help establish postal unions in 1971. For another analytic look that discusses how gender, race, and class play out within the USPS, try Linda B. Benbow’s Sorting Letters, Sorting Lives: Delivering Diversity in the United States Postal Service. 

Possession by A.S. Byatt 

Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning 1990 novel is all about the paper trail we leave behind, and what others may make of it later on. Two scholars’ paths converge through letters, as they uncover a potential love affair between two famous fictional poets. Poring over drafts and getting tangled up with academic power struggles, the scholars make it their quest to find out the truth behind the letters. Byatt highlights our society’s obsession with written “truth” and explores what it means to collect historical artifacts, challenging the reader to ask questions about a text’s authority and the concept of possession itself. 

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett 

Feeling like our news is getting rapidly more absurd every day? Try Pratchett’s satiric take on the mailing system, set in his fantasy city of Ankh-Morpork. Moist von Lipwig, a con man, is forced by the city’s ruler to take over the decrepit Postal Service (for context: his other alternative is death). Faced with piles of undelivered mail, Moist must step up to his position to invent postage stamps, hire golem messengers, and fight off the monsters of communication monopoly. (And if you’re interested in Pratchett’s anti-capitalist take on banking, follow along with Moist’s further adventures in Making Money!) 

Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence by Nick Bantock

If you’re looking for a hands-on, fantastical adventure involving letters, Griffin and Sabine is the perfect interactive read for you: author and illustrator Bantock crafts a book where you can directly take letters out of colorful envelopes. Griffin Moss is a card designer in London living a lonely and bland life, until he receives a congratulatory (albeit mysterious) note about one of his postcards from a stranger in the South Pacific Islands. The stranger, Sabine Strohem, is a postage stamp illustrator. The two start up a correspondence, showcasing their personalities through their heavily-illustrated missives. The lovers’ story is part of a trilogy, continuing on in Sabine’s Notebook and The Golden Mean. 

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff 

Before email and the Internet, the postal service was also the sole means of international communication. This 1970 classic is formed of real-life letters between Helene Hanff, a writer in New York City, and Frank Doel, an antiquarian bookseller at Marks & Co., 84 Charing Cross Road, London. The two bond over obscure British literature and their friendship blossoms into a twenty-year correspondence. Adapted into a popular play and film, Hanff’s collection of letters show both the literary and personal value of having a pen pal. 

How the Post Office Created America: A History by Winifred Gallagher 

Did you know that the Founding Fathers established the postal system before signing the Declaration of Independence? Gallagher tracks why and how the development of the U.S. Post Office was crucial in binding the individual colonies into a centralized United States, and grew to impact every branch of American life as we know it today, such as industrialization, consumerism, migration, and settler colonialism. Public postal services have been a cornerstone of U.S. democracy since the beginning, and will continue to be vital in 2020’s upcoming presidential elections. If you’re interested in further reads that contextualize the historic significance of the USPS, check out: Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service by Devin Leonard.

Post Office by Charles Bukowski

Yes, I know. Bukowski. But listen: Post Office, the autobiographical work that catapulted Bukowski to national fame in the 1970s, is an extremely apt fit for this list. The book describes the day-to-day drudgery and debauchery of Henry Chinaski, who works as a mail carrier and sorter for the USPS. Between escaping guard dogs and dealing with hangovers, Bukowski’s anti-hero provides a biting look at America and the Postal Service. 

The Postal Service Guide to U.S. Stamps, by the United States Postal Service

Lastly, if you want a book by the USPS (who knew they wrote books!) and/or are an avid stamp collector, consider flipping through The Postal Service Guide to U.S. Stamps. Starting from the 1845 Postmasters’ Provisionals to today’s stamps, this vividly-colored guide documents every single kind of U.S. stamp. Perhaps a good addition to your coffee table, while you sit there writing letters?

Robert Deane Pharr Gave Us an Unfiltered View of Black Life on the Margins

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

In recent months, we’ve been overwhelmed with suggestions to read James Baldwin, Ibram X. Kendi, Audre Lorde. But it may be even more illuminating to read more obscure Black authors, who are equally unabashed in their writing but never achieved mainstream acceptance and success. Many of them remain obscure specifically because they opted to write without making the white gaze their primary motivation in writing those unadulterated stories, and that kind of candid storytelling is what all readers, white and Black, need right now. 

One of these authors is Robert Deane Pharr, who chose to write about Black people’s lives in an unfiltered manner, claiming “[only] I would let white people look at the Black man as he lives when the white man is not looking or listening.” With this aim, he’d create worlds with a writing style that was as colorful as it was prescient. And with the recent spark of global protests over systemic racism, set off when police killed George Floyd, Pharr’s writing should have some place in critical discussions of those issues.

This kind of candid storytelling is what all readers, white and Black, need right now.

I discovered Pharr’s writing in high school while working as a page at the Queens Public Library. Being in this job fed my voracious appetite for reading, especially for anything related to Black culture and history beyond the bland texts assigned to me. S.R.O. stood out to me visually first, before I had an idea of its contents: the cover, a desaturated city building with the title in bright red letters, gave it a noirish air. The blurb on the back was the kicker, speaking of Harlem in the 1960’s, which was when my late father used to live there. The novel was part of the “Old School Books” series by Norton featuring Black novelists from the 1960’s and 1970’s. I devoured all 544 pages and to this day, that book remains among my favorites to read.

Pharr’s literary voice centered Black voices, mainly people from the margins of American society, depicting their lives in an unvarnished manner with cynicism and hope. No respectability politics for him. In his few available published interviews, Pharr cites being inspired by the writing approach of Sinclair Lewis, who was known for his poring observational tone. This approach was the basis for his first and most successful novel, The Book of Numbers, published in 1969. Pharr’s candid look at two men who create a numbers racket in the Black community of Richmond, Virginia in the 1930s garnered attention for its look at two waiters, Blueboy Harris and Dave Greene, who briefly achieve success before seeing it all end in tragedy. S.R.O., about a waiter’s life in a single room occupancy hotel in Harlem, and dark comedy Giveadamn Brown followed right after. Each of these novels drew heavily from Pharr’s own life experiences and observations as a longtime waiter after he graduated from Virginia Union in 1937—he was 53 as he was on the job at the Columbia University Faculty Club when he arranged for a professor to read his manuscript.

Pharr’s depiction of policing as an unreformable system built to brutalize and oppress Black bodies and others of color in his work rang true then and truer today. In The Book of Numbers, Blueboy dies in an agonizing way after cops beat him so badly they rupture his intestines. In Giveadamn Brown, the intimidating crime lord Harry Brown is called in to try to rescue a dealer from an abandoned building who’s kidnapped three white NYPD officers for stealing fifteen kilos of drugs from him. This exchange between NYPD senior official and Harry is telling:

“For God’s sake, Harry!! We can’t have no execution of three cops on TV. What the hell you think this is anyhow?”
“I think it’s a damned good show.”

The dealer winds up dying with the officers when the rest of the police on the scene set off an explosion rather than have their misdeeds made public. The police don’t fare any better in S.R.O., where the protagonist Sid Bailey is being questioned as if he’s a criminal by one of two cops called to prevent a woman from stabbing him to death. After the incident, Sid develops a violent hatred of cops. He goes into a psychiatric ward after a nervous breakdown over the near stabbing, gaining insight on that hatred as well as his alcoholism.  Reading this novel again, I find a striking connection in how Sid relates his treatment by the NYPD to the therapists and those conversations I’ve had with friends and relatives online and offline. Our conversations are as tinged with anger and resignation as Pharr’s dialogue was over 40 years ago.

Police brutality against Black people isn’t the only issue where Pharr prefigured our current concerns. He wrote of gentrification as a looming, leering colossus waiting to take Black people’s homes for the aims of white business and pleasure. This is playing out in cities across America at an alarming rate today, yet in Giveadamn Brown and S.R.O. of the ‘60s, Pharr already depicts Columbia University is that villainous colossus—an idea that still has validity as the school expands through West Harlem. This is expressed in a tirade in S.R.O. from Sid’s close friend, Blind Charlie:

Here I am, taking you for the first time to show you where a bastid what’s on Welfare should go to buy his daily bread, and you got the nerve to tell me what Columbia don’t own? Columbia owns every inch of ground you walks on every day. And don’t tell me it don’t! You aint been more’n five, ten blocks away from the Logan in months. And Columbia owns all this land for twenty blocks in any direction!

Pharr also anticipated the growing awareness that Black women, in particular, have been overlooked and undervalued. His Black women characters and other women of color are multifaceted personalities who have been forced to be the bedrocks of communities where the men have been decimated or torn down by hustling, war, alcoholism and prison. Though Pharr doesn’t avoid some outdated tropes, his female characters are more than mere foils. There’s Gloria Bascomb, Sid’s lover from S.R.O. who’s a former heroin addict and call girl who embraces Sid with a  love that supports him through alcoholism and schools him on “the life,” but not without taking him to task for being cynical about Black liberation. There’s Margo Hilliard, the “Foxy Cool Momma” who is Giveadamn Brown’s first lover and hips him to the ways of the streets. Pharr also depicts women who love other women in a range of ways that show deep consideration, seen prominently through S.R.O.’s Joey and Jinny, a lesbian couple composed of an former Irish hijacker and a Black con woman who also become part of Sid’s “family” in the Logan. In Giveadamn Brown Pharr even has an asexual character, Connie Hawkins, which puts him ahead of most modern literature in terms of representing the full range of women’s desires.

Critics loved Pharr’s work, raving about his raw look at Black life. But some felt he was too raw.

Critics loved Pharr’s work, raving about his raw look at Black life in America. This critical acclaim for his viewpoint led to a film adaptation of The Book of Numbers, part of the wave of Blaxploitation movies. But some felt he was too raw, and wanted to focus on writers who offered a more positive outlook on race relations in the U.S. This downturn would soon put him back into obscurity, fueled by his frustration with the publishing industry and his own battles with alcoholism. Pharr would go on to write two more novels—The Soul Murder Case and The Welfare Bitch, both so obscure that copies are a rarity. Pharr would live the rest of his days in upstate New York, passing away in 1989. But Robert Deane Pharr left American literature with some important lessons to be learned concerning Black people of all walks of life—lessons that deserve a second look amidst protesters’ calls for society to confront its dependence on systemic racism. The very things that keep Pharr obscure—his unwillingness to pander to white readers, his focus on writing about Black life at all levels of American society in a plain-spoken way, his anger at the way Black people have been abused and murdered in different ways by this society—are the reasons we need him right now.

“Lolita” Belongs to the Girls Who Lived It

Posted on by Jo Lou

Alisson Wood’s high school English teacher told her that Lolita was a beautiful story about love. She believed him—after all, there were so many similarities between Vladimir Nabokov’s famous novel and the relationship she and the teacher were forming, which she believed was true love. It wasn’t until college that she started to understand that Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator and a sexual predator—and that her teacher was, too.

Wood’s debut memoir, Being Lolita, is a fearless interrogation of her own experience being groomed and manipulated by an older man—and a reclaiming of the narrative of Lolita, reminding readers that the cultural understanding of the novel still tends to favor the predator’s perspective, and that teenage girls need support, not objectification.

I spoke to Alisson Wood about the flawed expectation of catharsis in memoir, being the kind of teacher she wishes she’d had, and not having a neat and tidy ending. 

Lilly Dancyger: In the book, when you describe the first time you told anyone else about your relationship with the teacher, you say it was “to open my hand and let the secret fly away. How free.” That made me wonder whether putting this whole story down in a book and sharing it with the world felt freeing like that, or if it was more re-traumatizing and scary. I expect it’s a combination of those things, but can you talk a little bit about what it’s like to put such a personal story out there? And especially one that was so built on the idea of secrecy?

Alisson Wood: I think that oftentimes with memoir, especially if it’s about something traumatic, people really want to hear authors saying, “it made me feel so much better, it lightened the load, it was cathartic.” But I have not found that to be my experience at all. I’ve published pieces about being raped, being almost killed by a stranger, and now this long-term, really terrible, abusive, awful relationship that made a huge impact on me. And nothing about putting those stories out there—not the writing, not the publishing—made what happened to me better. 

So often women’s stories are put in a corner of being domestic, unimportant, ‘chick lit,’ and treated as if they don’t carry any real weight.

I do believe, however, that there is a lot of power in telling these stories, in particular for women. So often our stories are put in a corner of being domestic, unimportant, “chick lit,” and treated as if they don’t carry any real weight. So I think it is incredibly powerful and incredibly important for women to defy those stereotypes and tell their stories, as complicated and as messy and as imperfect as they are, and I’m very proud to be part of that tradition.

But it can cause a lot of stress, it can cause pain—especially for women and other marginalized folks who are often targeted on the internet. I’m certain that I will get a fair amount of vitriolic hateful emails about this book, because I have with every other piece I’ve written. 

LD: How do you prepare yourself for that? Are you bracing for the hate mail? Or do you let it roll off your back at this point?

AW: Oh, it doesn’t roll off my back. But I have a wonderful therapist and this is something that we talk about a lot, because when you’re putting your trauma out for the world you don’t want it to be re-traumatizing. So you have to prepare and know what you’re getting into as much as you can. Intellectually I know I’m probably going to get some not very nice emails and comments, probably from white men. But understanding that doesn’t mean I’m not going to be hurt. It doesn’t mean it’s not going to upset me. 

LD: I knew you’d have something interesting to say about the idea of catharsis, and that it’s not that simple. It’s actually a fight, it’s emotionally draining and challenging, and you’re met with a lot of resistance when you try to share a story like this. 

AW: Completely. And that was why I chose to write this as a memoir. Throughout the process people were constantly asking, “Why isn’t this a novel? Have you thought about making this a novel?” And the whole time I was, like, “No! No.” The entire point of this book is that it is real. This happens to women. This happens to teenagers. This is not some fictional thing that you see on a page, that you read in Lolita. This really happens constantly—the abuse of young women, and the over-sexualization of teenagers, and manipulation, and domestic violence. 

LD: That’s odd to me that people were pushing you to make it a novel. I found the tension between the fictionalized story of Lolita and the very stark reality of your own story to be a lot of what was so interesting about the book. And I could tell you were playing with that. Like how you used the structure of Lolita as a framework in the first two sections, but then broke away from it in the third section. That felt like such an important point. Like, we’re now departing from fantasy, and this is reality. I’d love to hear about that structural choice.

AW: I wrote the book out of order—it was much more impulsive and driven by urgency than driven by time or narrative plot. But at a certain point, when looking through how much writing I had and trying to piece it together, it just struck me: Oh. This is the same structure as Lolita. Part One is the extended grooming/“seduction.” The break between Part One and Part Two is when they sleep together for the first time/when Dolores Haze is raped in the novel. And then Part Two is their series of extended road trips to try to escape being caught. But the difference is that unlike Dolores, I didn’t die at the end. So I made a Part Three. I got to go on. So I tried to ask the questions, “What would have happened if Lolita had survived? What would her life have been like? How would it have been like mine and also not like mine? And how has this story, this relationship impacted me since then?” Which is, at this point, close to twenty years ago. 

So, yeah, it was definitely a really conscious choice to engage so overtly with the Nabokov. And also it was just right there, I mean, the teacher had given me a copy of Lolita. He literally told me I was his Lolita, that it was a beautiful story about love, a story about us. He gave me Lolita-themed gifts. It wasn’t a stretch. But when I was a teenager I didn’t understand the book. I did not know what an unreliable narrator was. So I took the book at face value because that was what the teacher told me, and I was naive and believed him and thought he was so smart. 

LD: Yeah, you mentioned the unreliable narrator, and seeing you have that realization in the book was such a powerful turning point in the narrative. You talked about realizing that Humbert is an unreliable narrator and how that helped you realize that the teacher was as well, but then you’re also questioning whether you might also be an unreliable narrator in the telling of this story. That made me wonder about memoir in general… do you think any of us are reliable narrators of our own stories? Is that possible?

AW: I definitely believe that nobody knows your story better than you, but I also understand that everyone has a point of view, everyone has a perspective, and memory is deeply, deeply imperfect. So those all complicate things a bit. But I did my best to use all the primary source documents I had, which were a lot. I had a dozen journals that I had filled from that period. I also had maybe two dozen or more of the letters that the teacher had written to me. Letters that I had written to him. Notes. Hall passes. Literal receipts from hotels with his name and address on them. I had so much stuff to work with. And what was really interesting was the times when what I remembered didn’t match what was in these primary source records. That’s the real reason I felt like I wasn’t actually a reliable narrator, because at the time that this was happening to me, when I was 17 and 18, I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. I thought I was so special, I thought I was so powerful. But looking back, it’s very clear that I was being groomed and manipulated and taken advantage of from the get-go. 

LD: A really powerful example that you talk about in the book is the photograph of you backstage at the school play, and how you remembered feeling so sexy and in control, but then looking at the photo years later you saw something very different. 

AW: Finding that photograph was truly heartbreaking, because I remember it being taken, I remember what that felt like to have the teacher looking at me just out of frame of the camera. How I knew he thought I was sexy, and I felt so powerful with him looking at me and me looking back at him, and it’s this moment of what I thought was a beautiful romantic connection. And then I saw the picture—and I just looked so sad, and I looked so young. I did not look sexy or powerful or any of that. I looked like a 17-year-old girl, which is what I was. That was an example where I realized very deeply that what, at the time, I thought was happening to me was not what was happening to me. I was being victimized. 

LD: I think holding that complexity is something that you did really beautifully in this book. You really did justice to adolescent desire, and you described the agency that you felt so sure you had at the time, but you also made it very clear that you didn’t have nearly as much agency as you thought. That’s a complexity that so often gets lost in pop culture and literary depictions of teen girls. What do you think is most often misrepresented there?

Women are still taught from a young age that their power is in their looks and their sexuality. Which connects to women’s role being as wives and mothers.

AW: I think it boils down to the fact that women are still taught from a very young age that their power is in their looks and their sexuality. Which connects to women’s role being as wives and mothers. As much as we would like to say that that’s not how it is anymore, it is. I think it’s getting better, but I don’t think we are beyond this at all. We were definitely not beyond this when I was a teenager 20 years ago. And when you’re taught that that’s where your power is, you wanna grab hold of that as fast as you can. 

It’s incredibly complicated because I also deeply believe in the agency, and the maturity, and the intelligence of young women. But I think the problem is that they often aren’t supported in the way that they need to be, they aren’t encouraged to look at themselves and value themselves beyond their bodies. I think that if I had been supported and encouraged in different ways, it would have been a very different story for me. 

I was very vulnerable. I was sad, I was lonely, I felt like no one understood me and no one cared about me. But in all of that I was asking for attention and for help. I was not asking to be fucked by my teacher. That’s not what I really wanted, but I didn’t know how to articulate anything and didn’t understand my body or my role or what I really wanted in the world because I was a teenager. I mean, a lot of adults are still struggling to understand their roles in the world, and what they want, and agency, and healthy relationships. But especially as a teenager, I was lost, and I got preyed upon. 

I thought I was in love, because he was paying attention to me. I was feeling seen. It’s natural for a young woman or a young man who is feeling lost and vulnerable to feel complicated feelings when they finally get attention. It’s completely developmentally appropriate for a teenager to have a crush on an adult, especially someone in a position of authority like a teacher. It is not appropriate developmentally, morally, intellectually for an adult to not just have a crush but then to take action on that crush for a teenager. That’s not okay. And that’s the difference.

LD: The way you articulate those distinctions in the book, I think is powerful and important for anyone of any age, but I kept imagining a teenage girl reading your story and recognizing something about a relationship in her life, and having that realization that you didn’t have until later about what’s really going on. Which I guess comes back to the idea that there are bigger things than catharsis in telling a story like this.

AW: For me that would be the best outcome, to have an impact on someone and to make someone have a moment of deep understanding about their life. 

I also think something that’s really important is that when we think about Lolita today, the book and as a symbol in pop culture, we think of Lolita as this sexual, powerful, in some ways dangerous young girl. Right? There’s a Kat Von D lipstick called Lolita and it’s this deep, beautiful, sexy red. When we talk about Lolita fashion it’s this super girly—like with lots of ruffles and bows—but also a very sexy way of dressing. And it’s just so fascinating because, really, when we talk about Lolita as a culture, we talk about the hunger of Lolita. This sexy “powerful” girl who’s going to seduce and take advantage of a man. Like Lolita is the predator. When, in actuality, Lolita is not even her name. Her name is Dolores Haze and she is raped and kidnapped. She is a victim.

LD: This book felt like very much like a reclaiming of that narrative. 

AW: Yes, definitely. It was a conscious act to try to do that. And one of the most powerful parts of writing this book was realizing that that’s what I want to do and I can do that. That was very empowering and made me feel really good. But writing the book as a whole did not make anything better. It did, however, give me a better understanding of what had happened and of myself because the project of the book took so much research. Rereading or reading for the first time so much Nabokov. And not just his novels but his work on butterflies, his research. Rereading every single primary source—all of my journals, all of the teachers notes, and letters, and everything multiple times. Which was, again, very painful and I do not recommend anyone do it for fun. But it really made me understand things about what happened in a way that I just simply hadn’t. And at every stage in writing the book I understood more. And I’m still understanding, I’m still unfolding what happened and how it still impacts me. 

So often with women’s memoirs, the end is ‘and then I got married and had a baby and everything’s great.’ That wasn’t my story.

I think something interesting about memoir is that it’s a never-ending process. Just because a book ends doesn’t mean that the story does. It doesn’t mean that the ending is a nice, little bow tied up neatly. The ending was really hard for me because so often with women’s memoirs, especially if there’s trauma involved, the end is, “And then I got married and had a baby and everything’s great.” And that wasn’t my story. I am very happily single and independent, but I found love in teaching and I found love in writing. And I wanted to express that, but it’s very difficult because it’s not the traditional ending that you would expect or maybe want from a book like this. 

LD: Yeah, I  love that though. I think that came across really well. There’s something so vindicating and healing about seeing you become a teacher, and a good teacher. It’s clear that you care a lot about your students, but you also describe the very clear, firm boundaries that you draw of not getting personal with students, making sure to maintain that professional distance. So that correcting of patterns in an interpersonal sense, and also seeing you teach Lolita to students with so much more insight… That felt like a victory in the end, to me.

AW: I teach Lolita the way that I wish it had been taught to me, with context. We read the Rebecca Solnit essay “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” that wonderful McSweeney’s piece, “If Women Wrote Men the Way That Men Write Women,” which I’m in hysterics over every time I read it because it is just too accurate. 

And professionalism is incredibly important to me because I think that’s important to model. I am very clearly in charge of my classroom and as a teacher I know that I have a certain authority, and I want to demonstrate for my students, especially the young women, that you do not have to depend on your body to have power, or to be smart, or to be valued. 

“Bengali Harlem” Shows the Indelible Tie Between South Asians and the Black Community

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

There is a knot at the heart of South Asian America. Racism against Black people runs deep within our communities, some of it carried over from our respective countries, some of it learned here in America, encouraged by the possibility of economic mobility and a myth that tells us that the acceptable South Asian American aligns with white culture and its dominance over Black people. But this was certainly not how the first South Asian Americans did it, as Vivek Bald details in Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, a book that has come to be canon among a generation searching for their histories. Bald digs up stories of what he considers the first significant settlement of South Asians in America, and uncovers how, when met with racist immigration practices in America as they traveled from a homeland colonized by the British, they built communities with Black people in order to survive. 

In 1897, a dozen Bengali men disembarked from the S.S. St. Louis docked at Pier 14 in New York City, a detour from its usual stop at Ellis Island, where the building set up to inspect immigrants had been (accidentally, according to records) burned to the ground overnight. These men had journeyed a long way across British-controlled waterways and debaucherous port cities like Colombo, Karachi, and London. They were armed with delicate, chikan-embroidered fabric that they planned to sell along New Jersey’s beach resorts, on the sunny, teeming boardwalks of Atlantic City to Asbury Park. These were popular goods:  Americans were infatuated with the smells, sounds, and aesthetics of the mystical Orient and would gladly pay a pretty penny for rugs, curios, and silks if it meant that they could seem worldly. 

These passengers were part of the roughly 1,500 Bengali men who came to America between 1880 and 1920, recounts Bald. They hailed from Hooghly, West Bengal, and loosely regarded each other as family. And a small number of them had chosen to make America their home. Before Bald’s research, most records of South Asians in America in the early 20th century indicated a small population of students and other temporary residents, who spent some time in the United States before returning to their homes, with a few outstanding exceptions in the West coast. But the men Bald studied kept coming back. 

They occupied a strange place in the American imagination, which did not know what to do with anyone who fell between acceptable whites and dehumanized Black people. Some immigrants, like the Irish, were gradually shuffled into whiteness, but the Bengalis were hard to characterize. They were seen as “exotic and peculiar, inscrutable and fanatical, ridiculous and treacherous,” writes Bald. Like South Asians today, these men were subject to the whims of an immigration system that could choose to rescind its acceptance at random. As they are today, these men were entering a country that loved their culture, but did not love them.

These men were entering a country that loved their culture, but did not love them.

As they disembarked the ship, the travelers were handled like cattle by medical practitioners, who combed their hair for lice and checked under eyelids for trachoma. Immigration professionals interrogated on jobs, political and religious views, marital statuses. To the last question, some men may have responded that yes, they were married, and that their wives lived in America. Some Bengali merchants had moved inwards to places like Tremé, New Orleans, where they had fallen in love with Black women, had operated their businesses within Black communities, and had become fathers to Black-Bengali children.

But these answers didn’t pass muster: they were seen as little more than economic threats. The immigration official decided that the men of the S.S. St. Louis must be breaking the Contract Labor Law (1885), an extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) that stopped companies from bringing in contracted workers, a law that was supposedly created to protect American jobs. After twelve days in detention, the officer ordered them deported back to their previous London port. 

The deportation didn’t last very long. Within the year, the merchants had found their way back into the U.S., splitting into smaller groups and trying different ports of entry to make their efforts less obvious. There was poetry to their bravery, explains Bald. Despite the odds stacked against them, they may have returned because they had started to feel at home within Black communities in America. With the women they loved and their neighbors, Bengali men would have shared a thread of oppression, one group brutally enslaved, pillaged, and left to live in poor enclaves even after they were freed, the other group invisible in America and under colonial rule in the homes they had left in India. 

Among these men were those like Sofur Ally, who moved to New Orleans in 1895, married America Santa Cruz, a woman of Afro-Cuban and Creole descent in 1900, and by 1910 had three sons. Bald unearths records that indicate a string of difficulties for Ally: in the 1920s, he had naturalized and had become the proprietor of a “dry goods” store. But by 1930, the Depression had set in, and the records no longer showed that Ally owned the store. Most likely, he had gone back to street peddling along with his sons, the very trade that had brought Ally to the town. Eventually, after 35 years in New Orleans, he began to act as a middle-man between New Orleans and arriving Bengali communities, helping with paperwork, signing as witness on immigration documents, setting up welcome events at local churches.

America has been presented as an equal opportunity provider. But the history shows that this is a convenient bending of the past.

South Asian Americans have been molded to show that they have had relative academic and financial success; because this is the dominant representation of us, we have to mimic these qualities in order to be seen. In turn, America has been presented as an equal opportunity provider, one where people from different countries can immigrate to and with a little bit of hard work, be on equal financial footing with white people. But the history of those like Ally shows that this is a convenient bending of the past.

In between color lines, when race was still seen as a binary between black and white, Ally would have faced several challenges and privileges. In these years, South Asians were even more foreign than their Asian counterparts, immigrants from China who had inspired the Chinese Exclusion Act. In the minds of Americans, they came from a nebulous, strange place that spanned the Middle East, North Africa, and large swaths of Asia. This meant that they were not neatly classified into the stark color lines enforced by Jim Crow laws, which had divided nearly every public facility: whites to one side, Black people to the other, the Black side poorer and seen as inferior. Bengali peddlers fanned out to segregated cities like Chattanooga, Charleston, and Dallas and crossed between these lines. 

Journalists scratched their heads trying to define South Asians in reports, with one 1900 story on sailors in New York City stating that the men were “all so dark as to be taken easily for Negroes, but their features are Caucasian, and their hair is straight, stiff, and wiry.” They were still seen as dangerous, however, “peaceable and orderly up to a certain point and then they lose all self-control and generally resort to the knife.”

Some made use of the gray areas that South Asians occupied, like Reverend Jesse Routte, a Black man who wore a velveteen robe and a turban on his head and lived in a white Mobile, Alabama hotel, eating in downtown restaurants and willfully passing the color line. But being a South Asian did not make one safe. They were still considered inferior to white people, like Abdul Fara, who sat in the free white persons section in New Orleans and was eventually attacked by a fellow passenger, who took a heavy wooden sign and smashed it over his head.

No amount of pleading could change the fact that these men were not white. Abba Dolla, an Afghan trader who was part of the Bengali network and moved to Savannah in the 1890s after working the New Jersey summer resorts, offered proof to the courts of his whiteness, touting his skin, transparent enough for his blue veins to show, and his ownership of a piece of land in Savannah’s white-only cemetery. Though Dolla won, Bald describes the case as an anomaly, an argument that the U.S. government soon came to vigorously oppose when other South Asians presented it. Perhaps even more interestingly, Bald’s research shows that Dolla had gotten two Black men to testify for his good character, though he claimed that they were merely people he conducted business with. Most likely, Bald reveals, Dolla lived in a Black neighborhood, and had managed to win citizenship through the use of his silver tongue.

In the minds of Americans, they were not neatly classified into the stark color lines enforced by Jim Crow laws.

With the Great Migration, many Black Bengali families that had settled in the South moved to cities in the North. Nazaf Ali, a Bengali man, and his Black wife Juanita Lambert Ali, moved from New Orleans to Chicago in 1918. In Chicago, Najaf found work alongside Black men in the city’s stockyards, where so much meat was produced that the city became known as the “Hog Butcher to the World.”

Bald makes clear that these men did not come to America with grand ambitions, like our modern myth of the diligent immigrant. They likely came with the aim of disappearing. There was no way that they could be both seen and exist. Yet, if we trace their ancestries, many of their stories lived on.

Margaret and Bahadour, the Black-Bengali children of Moksad and Ella Ali, moved north with four siblings to New York City and registered as “colored.” Bahadour listed himself as an “actor,” and changed his name to Bardu in the 1920s. That was the start of Bardu Ali, a man who would become pivotal in shaping the Black entertainment scene in America.

The Baltimore African-American profiled him as a dancer on the Black vaudeville circuit in 1926, describing him as the son of a “Turkish” father and “Creole” mother. By the 1930s, Bardu had made a name for himself as a popular emcee with a smooth style. Next up was his own nightclub, when Bardu moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s, teaming up with Johnny Otis, a white drummer big on the R&B scene, to open Barrelhouse, a nightclub devoted to R&B. Before he died, he made his foray into television, as the business manager of high-flying standup comedian Redd Foxx in the 1970s, who acted in hit series Sanford and Sons. 

White people would not have accepted these men. Their success and happiness relied on Black people.

Not all were as prolific as Bardu Ali. Countless others disappeared into the ether. But because Bald’s stories are vague, we are free to imagine the lives of these men as rich and as full as we choose to. Last year, I met a Bengali American man who owned a pizza shop outside of Detroit. He told me how he’d heard about Bengali Harlem for the first time last year, and how it had helped him come across what faintly, and for the first time ever, felt like his history. His grandfather had sailed to America for work, disappearing for decades, returning to Bangladesh when the pizza shop owner was just a child. His grandfather was quiet about his experiences, but slowly unveiled stories of a vivid life of love, and friends, and commerce over the years. 

The first significant settlement of South Asians in America was Muslim, not the Hindu, upper caste, highly educated poster children America chooses to celebrate. They were not cherry-picked from their home countries for the purposes of their labor and placed in antagonistic positions in America. Instead, their journeys were much more like the undocumented immigrants who traverse borders today. 

When South Asian Americans celebrate what we consider to be our achievements in America, it’s important that we take the stories of the Bengali sailors as proof that these are due to new privileges granted to a select few. If our success was the result of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, the Bengali sailors might have had an easier time. 

White people would not have accepted these men. Their success and happiness relied on Black people. Years later, South Asians are yet to repay that debt and acknowledge those histories. That’s why it’s imperative that we, all of us South Asians, say that Black lives matter. By saying it, we acknowledge that our own lives matter too.