I am always in awe of people with big imaginations, who are able to really make stuff up. For a writer, I think I have a very terrible one, which is why I am always setting my stories, whenever I can, in my own city, right on my street, in my childhood bedroom.
Place, its vivid particulars, often elude me, I thought—though recently I realized that every one of my stories is set very specifically inside a body, and the world within it, the weathers of consciousness and mood, and the intensity of the senses. The setting of the stories in A House Is a Body, more than any particular city or room, is the body of my character—what happens to and through it. The body in question is most often a woman’s.
The great books from which I learned to write contained many women’s bodies. They were often beautiful bodies, and very captivating, or else they were ugly and therefore uninteresting—they contained flighty and irrational or ardent and empty creatures that held little value beyond their beauty or lack of it. Now the books I read more often, and the books I continue to learn from, and to love, investigate the complexity of the insides. These books take the body—women’s bodies—seriously, allowing it to be an organ of both thought and sense. Here are some of my favorites.
“Her body was the river. It was itself the shore. It was the hunter and the hunted; the path and the goal” I am astonished and moved by the deep wisdom of these stories, the clear-eyed tenderness and humor. Ambai is an explicitly feminist author, concerned with the lives of women, yet her expansive stories never feel didactic, just true.
Like the title suggests, these are wild stories about disobedient bodies, pressing up against the strictures of society and realism. In one of the collection’s most memorable stories, “The Cure,” a girl begins to grow into a giant as she passes through adolescence, keeping measure with her growing sexuality. Many of these stories explore the many aspects of sexuality and desire of their women characters, with an understanding of the strangeness, and even the grotesque nature of having a human body.
In Luster, hunger, longing, desire, pleasure, discomfort, pain and alienation are all brilliantly, physically expressed in the protagonist Edie’s body—literally in her gut. The brilliance of this book (or, one element of it) is the way issues of race and power are felt so physically, and rendered so intimately you feel them in the pit of your own stomach.
“There is only so much of your body you can ruin,” the narrator of “Black Tongue” says, having stuck her tongue in an electrical socket in a demented act of childhood defiance. These stories look keenly at the body’s capacity for ruin, decay, and transformation, often probing a beautiful surface to reveal a dark, complicated interior.
“In that instant I felt myself open wide. My insides cleared out into a rectangle, all clean air and uncluttered space, that began in my forehead and ended in my groin…” The sensual intensity of Vivian Gornick’s memoir is encompassing from the very first page, each scene remembered, it seems, as much through her eyes and ears as through her nerves. But it is the way she recounts the development of her consciousness as a writer and a thinker that I find the most stunning, for she locates this abstraction physically and concretely: inside her own body.
These poems, some a thousand years old and written by several authors, some anonymous, nonetheless carry a vivid sense of aliveness I find very moving. Sex is the primary subject of these poems, treated with seriousness but also with a sense of play; women both desired and desire in these poems, their pleasure at the heart of them.
Adios, Barbie edited by Ophira Edut
In high school, I checked this book out so many times from the library that my mom finally bought it for me. The bodies in Adios, Barbie are brown, queer, differently-abled, fat, and wholly, defiantly themselves. Finding some element of me in each of these bodies profoundly changed the way I saw myself. (And bonus! It includes an indelible early essay from Mira Jacob, the Desi big sister I wish I had.)
I have always found revolution in queerness and Blackness, in people who dare to exist authentically on the margins of a world that prohibits it. As society grapples with its sins, I am reading of heavens and hells constructed by queer voices. Lately, I have been learning how to dream beyond what exists. Ain’t no better teachers on dreaming and living fearlessly than queer and trans BIPOC. Our stories, particularly those included below, tell humanity about ourselves and hold no punches. They dare me to cross lines, destroy boxes, and learn to love myself in the best ways through words. When I want to dream about liberation, my roadmap is always the voices of BIPOC LGBTQ+ writers. Centering their words in my dreaming and activism helps me understand the intricacies, layers, and connections between identities, communities, and resistance movements. Centering BIPOC in my queerness and queerness in my reading of BIPOC narratives allow me to reclaim space for the most important stories—stories that make us question the structures that affect our communities both from without and within.
Like the existence of queer and trans BIPOC bodies in this world, reading for revolution is in itself, a revolutionary act. In it, we honor the complexities and resilience of queer and trans BIPOC who built this movement, those that came before it, and those still to come. Sometimes reading is just as powerful as yelling. As we dream and read for revolution, these seven books honor the fire, joy, truth, queerness, Blackness, and dopeness that is a revolution all on its own.
Instagram is full of quotes from Lorde’s foundational feminist text, but cute captions and hashtags are such a reduction of the beautiful brilliance and wisdom she offers us in this collection. In this text, she is unabashedly queer, black, and woman. These essays and speeches demand we recognize not only the author’s complex wholeness but also our own. Authentic and affirming, Sister Outsider forces us to grapple with ourselves and our communities as an act of radical love.
Antiracism is the new black and these days everyone is reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist. Too often we forget that the folks on the front line are who they’ve always been: Black and Latinx queer and trans women. Charlene A. Carruthers’s 2018 Unapologetic is an essential read for anyone wanting to engage in this rebellion through a queer, feminist lens. Carruthers’s narrative challenges readers’ notions of organizing and community-building within the Black radical tradition. “Are we ready to win?” Carruthers asks us. As a complicated community of readers turned activists, it is a question we must answer as we continue to fight. What does it mean for LGBTQ+ people to win in this movement? Are we ready for it?
In more recent years, civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin has received his due for his monumental role in the civil rights movement, particularly in the execution of the famous March on Washington. Rustin, a gay Black Quaker who “refused to honor the lines that marked and separated individuals and that stratified American ideals” is an OG badass in organizing. D’Emilio’s extensive biography details the intersections of Rustin’s sexuality, Blackness, religious identity, and leadership. Rustin lived righteously as a gay Black leader in the Civil Rights Movement and paid for it in jail time, silencing, and a legacy that is just now being rightfully honored. D’Emilio’s biography does Rustin’s complex legacy justice and provides a blueprint for what it means to be a sex-positive queer organizer in today’s movement.
What does it mean to breathe while your world is on fire? A heartwarming, beautiful coming-out/of-age narrative, Juliet Takes a Breath is a journey of a Boricua teenager unpacking identity in all of the ways possible. Through Juliet’s summer internship under a white feminist author, Harlowe, Rivera explores the complexities of interracial coalition building and love. A manifesto of joy, self-love, and community, Rivera’s vivid and brash realness reminds us to “question everything,” “be proud,” and to “love everything that brushes past [our] skin and lives inside [our] soul.” Reading this book is meeting like joy and truth at a street fair; it is like seeing your best friend for the first time in years; like breathing as the world burns and a great reminder to take care of ourselves and our community as we fight.
Released in 2019 by International World Slam champion Porsha Olayiwola, i shimmer sometimes, too is an ode to the pieces that make her whole—her beautiful Blackness, queerness, Chicago upbringing, family, community, lover, and her whole continuum of being, past, present, and future. A self-proclaimed Afrofuturist, Olaywiola uses language and form to split our hearts and stitch them back together over and over again. Olayiwola’s writing demands our elasticity in emotions—joy meets sorrow, anger meets excellence, optimism smacks readers with exhaustion without warning. More than anything, her poems offer us everything and nothing at all—they leave us yearning for answers, not only for her but also for ourselves.
An exploration of the in-betweenness of queerness and mixed-race identity, Dean Atta’s The Black Flamingo is 400 pages of acceptance and love in verse. Atta’s debut novel follows the journey of Michael, a gay Brit with Jamaican and Greek Cypriot roots. Michael’s journey of self-acceptance and coming-out shines a light on the nuance of gender, sexuality, race, and family dynamics. More than a book, Atta’s book is a reclamation of self, a proclamation of being, and a call to action for our community to honor the beautifully nonlinear journeys of one another in this movement. In a world where outness is privileged, Atta’s “How to Come Out as Gay” leaves us with a reminder to own our stories: “Come out for yourself. / Come out to yourself. / Shout, sing it. / Softly stutter.” In his verse, we are reminded that pride is not limited to the parades and protests and is perhaps best celebrated as our own inner revolution.
In this six-section compilation of essays, conversations, and art, adrienne maree brown explores the act of making social justice the “most pleasurable human experience.” In the book, she tackles self-love, community care, and activism. From her essays like “A Conversation with a Sex Toy” and “A Timeline/Tutorial on Squirting” to conversations with others on sex work, drug use, and the politics of healing, there is no question about where brown stands on embracing the complexities of sex, love, and pleasure as an act of radical revolution. In a time where we are fighting for humanity on so many fronts, brown reminds us that “prioritizing ourselves in love is political strategy; it is survival.” A book about activism with a directive to masturbate as homework in between chapters sounds like a pretty good way to celebrate pride and love yourself all year round.
Akwaeke Emezi’s work continues to get wide acclaim for the fresh perspectives, differentiated structures, and succinct, palpable narratives they bring with every book. Their latest, The Death of Vivek Oji, continues to show Emezi’s dexterity as a writer and their keen focus as an artist. In Vivek Oji we are introduced to a wide community. The saying “it takes a village” is clear here through the relationships Vivek has with his family and friends as well as those he touches throughout his life. While the outcome for Vivek is not a secret—it is in the title and his passing occurs on page one—his death is a driving force for many to face a truth they ignored while Vivek was on this earth. We meet Vivek, his parents, Chita and Kavita, his cousin Osita, the Nigerwives and the extended community in Nigeria where blood family and made family come together to help build a life and provide support in ways others weren’t able to. Emezi’s latest book encourages readers to pay attention to who we focus on as readers and what characters like Vivek are telling us.
I spoke with Emezi about the origins of Vivek Oji’s stories, the importance of the prominence of queer characters, and how confinement versus awareness comes into play for characters within their new novel.
Jennifer Baker: In regards to the title—The Death of Vivek Oji—I thought about the presence of death as an inciting incident in some works. Vivek’s story is not just about his death. We get to hear from so many people in this book including Vivek and those who make Vivek’s life full. Do you feel like death was a necessary signifier in this story or is it really about Vivek’s life? And can we explore one without the other?
Akwaeke Emezi: The reason why the book was structured like that and named that was actually a craft reason. After I had written Freshwater, I had written Vivek in 2016, and I was trying to figure out a way to challenge myself because I’m a Gemini. As a book it has to be interesting, otherwise I will get bored halfway and I just won’t get to the end of writing it.
It was honestly hard to follow up Freshwater. It was like “Okay, well, you’ve already done this thing with form in your first book. What are you going to do in your second book that is going to be more or equally as interesting, or just challenging perhaps as what [you] did with Freshwater?”And I had just dropped out of an MFA program, and in the program we had read Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. And I had done a Toni Morrison seminar in which we read my favorite novel of hers, Love. I loved it because Love as a book is so opaque up until the end. The last maybe 20, 30 pages is when everything suddenly clicks into place. And with Chronicle of a Death Foretold I was fascinated with the fact that Marquez could kill his main character in the beginning of the book and still have an entire book. That seemed really difficult to do. So I was like, “What if I combined these two things?” What if I start with a main character who dies at the beginning, and then I write backwards, and I also keep it opaque until near the end of the book, which is basically being structured like a mystery which is how Morrison structured her book. And that’s actually how I ended up with the book being that way was because I wanted to write something backwards.
Jennifer: I love that form because it makes us do more work as readers.
Akwaeke: I’m always a fan of giving the readers work.
Jennifer: As I was reading I realized I didn’t care if I knew how Vivek died because I cared so much about Vivek. I cared whether or not Vivek found a semblance of self before he left this earth. My question as a reader became: Was Vivek happy?
Akwaeke: I love that so much! That’s actually really reassuring to hear because I worried a lot with the book about essentially killing off a queer character. And I worried about the book coming out and people saying “Oh, well, you’re leaning on this problematic trope or whatever.” But my other queer frineds who read the book were like, “This is not about that at all.” They said “He’s so alive in the book.” There’s so much more there. So that was really assuring to know that he was alive in the book, in the work, and that was the thing that readers would really connect with in that sense.
Death is fine. Death is natural. What most people identify with the trauma of death is really about suffering.
You can’t do anything about death. It’s going to show up when it shows up. I have conversations with my friends often about how I don’t have a problem with death, I have a problem with suffering. Death is fine. Death is natural. What most people identify with the trauma of death is really about suffering. Was this person suffering before they died? The people left behind, are they suffering? It’s really a question of suffering. And I think there was something that is important in Vivek’s life: how suffering is managed. A lot of the early reviews because Vivek is queer it’s like, “Oh, he’s suffering because he’s queer.” No he’s not. He’s got a bunch of spiritual stuff that’s difficult for him, but it’s not about his identity in a sense.
Jennifer: I agree with you, I just never saw it as suffering being queer, I saw it as suffering to perform. I thought about fight or flight and sometimes there’s this kind of “play dead” mentality where someone doesn’t say anything. He’s not lying but he’s going into myself and silent as a form of protection. And Vivek seemed to realize that pretty quickly as a way to manage being around his family.
Akwaeke: And the thing that I just realized as you were talking is that if there’s anyone who is suffering due to their queerness it’s actually [Vivek’s cousin] Osita. And no one ever focuses on that. That just kind of slides under their radar because he presents as “normal.” He doesn’t present as “deviant” in the ways that Vivek does [to others], but Vivek is actually the self-actualized one. And Osita is the one really having a lot of suffering based on not being okay with who he is.
Jennifer: Where do you think that comes from? Vivek and Osita were fairly close as young people, as cousins. I’m curious how two men who grow up together, practically brothers, and one is more assured and the other is hiding?
Akwaeke: I feel like because Vivek is having kind of a different spiritual experience than Osita. The dedication of Freshwater is “to those of us with one foot on the other side.” And Vivek is one of those. Vivek is here but also not here. He has these spiritual episodes. He’s connected to something else. And I think that gives him that sort of a detachment where he thinks this is not real. Or he thinks it doesn’t matter. He’s floating outside of this reality a bit. And Osita is not. Osita is very much in this world with all the limitations, with all the expectations of what he’s supposed to perform and who he’s supposed to be. So he takes that on harder than Vivek does because Vivek is floating. And Vivek has one foot on the other side. And that actually gives him a freedom that Osita doesn’t really have.
Now that I think about it, I’ve been pushing back in the last couple of months ever since review copies have come out, against this narrative that Vivek is living an inauthentic life. Which is bullshit quite honestly. Or that Vivek is not facing his true self. It makes no sense to me because he is actually the only person who is facing his true self and is tapping into that and is exploring that even when people don’t see it. He sees himself. And he can look at himself. That’s a quality that is really important is the ability to look at oneself. I also think I wanted to write them in contrast to each other because seeing how Osita can’t look at himself, in comparison to how easy Vivek looks at himself. I think their presence helps you see them clearly if they’re standing next to each other.
Jennifer: You’re very concise in your work. You let us in and also you don’t over-explain. This allows me to appreciate those small snippets that cater to what you’re talking about. Vivek’s moments are so tightly written and that’s all I needed as a reader because Vivek knows who Vivek is. I know you can’t explain other readers’ reading habits, but I am curious about how you are so succinct in your writing.
Akwaeke: I think of it often as centers. What center are you creating the work from? And Vivek is at the center of writing this story about him. Which, honestly, I think people are not used to. The idea that he can be at the center and not say as much as other people are saying. There’s not a lot of him compared in the ratio of his chapters to other chapters. But, what’s interesting to me, is that it does test the reader because then the question is: Are you listening to Vivek? You listened to him and all you needed is that one thing because he says it very clearly. And he is very clear, he’s just not as verbose in the book.
I don’t know if people are used to actually centering a queer character rather than centering everyone around him.
I don’t know if people are used to actually centering a queer character rather than centering everyone around him. Because you can read the book and you can listen to everyone around Vivek or you can listen to Vivek, and you get two completely different experiences of the work that way. If you’re listening to everyone around Vivek then there’s a lot that isn’t clear because they don’t see him. And there is a lot that’s assumed or guessed. But if you’re listening to Vivek himself and if you focus on him amidst all the noise then everything, to me, is quite clear. And I think that’s in exercise in centering, not just in this work but in the world, in centering queer kids. Are you listening to the person? Not to their parents. Not to other people’s perceptions of them. Can you cut through all of that and actually listen to them? That’s huge in deciding what actual support looks like. It’s huge in just telling these stories because the person’s story is often different from the story that people around them have that’s based in fear.
Jennifer: That feeds into my next question about support systems and who we’re hearing from in this book. Those support systems are so key to Vivek to not only be aware of who he is, but to actually live and express himself to people who recognize it. In building these other characters did you already have a sense of who Vivek’s community would be?
Akwaeke: I think the rest of the community. The Nigerwives, that’s a real organization. My mom was a member, my mom still technically is a member. But that’s the community I grew up with was all these aunties from all these different countries and all these kids. And we lived in a very specific bubble, especially our early years. Our worlds were very different from our mothers and their cultures and the community that they had deliberately built in this country that was foreign to them. So I wanted to put Vivek in that community because I think it’s interesting, it’s not in a big city like Lagos or Abuja. It’s in a small little commercial town in Nigeria, it’s such a little niche subculture. As I was writing the book it made sense that these children would have their own private worlds. And that would actually hold together as they got older. And this idea of a private world that the parents didn’t have access to. I think that pushes back in some ways against this very Western idea that if you’re queer you have to come out and be loud & proud. And that’s the only way your life is deemed authentic and real and all your problems go away because now you’re out & proud. That’s not true. That’s a very specific narrative, and I wanted to write this world that’s more private.
The book asks, what does it look like to not need that outside validation? To find it among your own people?
It’s not that Vivek is hiding out of shame or anything. He just has a private life. And the idea of these queer characters having enough agency to decide that they want to stay in their own world, with their centers and they’re not going to expend the energy to try and get to try and their parents to see them. They’re going to just stay with each other where they’re safe, where they’re loved. I think that’s radical in a sense. So much of how we treat queer people in this world is that “you have to intergrate into the rest of the world,” “you have to explain,” “you have to fight for your place.”
And I think the book asks, what does it look like to not need that? That outside validation. To find it among your own people. And to stay within that support system and to know that is an equally valid form of family. That you’re loved and you’re seen and you’re able to live express yourself. And that shifts centers for readers who are used to the center being in this “mainstream” to reject that belief, and to say, “It doesn’t actually matter if you see me or whether you understand me because I have people who already do. I’m good. I already have my world. I’m steady in this world.” And that is why I pushed so hard for Vivek to stay at the center of readings of this work because it’s not just as innocuous as “You know every reader has their own perspectives…” But those perspectives are informed by something. And often when we’re talking about queer characters and queer people it’s informed by violence, it’s informed by violence that says “If you don’t follow this path of, ‘well come out and be loud & proud, make sense to us, make yourself legible to us’ then you’re not truly a true life.” And you’re pathologized. I push back against this because that’s harmful to real people in real time. The center is the queer people, and we’re in our center, and we’re good. It doesn’t have to be legible to you. Vivek doesn’t have to be legible. But you will respect that center as valid.
I was obsessed, specifically, with becoming one. When my friends and I were younger we would terrorize everyone into leaving us alone; we would growl on the playground, eat tanbark while crawling on the ground on all fours. When I went to sleep I would dream about changing, and I dutifully made sure this dream-change would be reflected somehow the next day: I dressed up in paper fur, I made my own claws. I would get upset, and instead of restraining myself I would immediately let it out on my surroundings — my parents patiently but fruitlessly dealt with broken furniture, with torn up rugs. I was uncontrollable.
When I was eleven my friends began to nervously apply makeup, go to dances, tentatively care about looking pretty. I, on the other hand, began to look monstrous to myself in a way that made me feel ill. I started to stare long and hard in full-length mirrors, my body roiling in a way that felt malicious. I stopped being feared, and instead, I was watched. My peers watched me, my parents watched me, and finally, I watched and watched as my feelings and my body escaped from my control.
I was uncontrollably angry, but not in a way that felt victorious. I got angry in the way that would end with me in tears. When I was eleven, I started to wear bigger shirts. I started to hide. I went from screaming my head off at anything that upset me to intensely quiet. And more importantly, I started to make more frequent trips to the library.
This is where I was, the summer before I would start 7th grade, bored as dirt, mindlessly flipping through the 50 cents bin in the library, when I saw Spring Fire by Vin Packer. The cover had the two female leads, scantily clad and falling demurely into each other’s chests.
I wasn’t clueless about the source of my feelings. I was old enough to understand the very fundamental binary: I wasn’t feeling any attraction towards boys, and I heavily valued my friendships with girls, arguably more than they did. I was an outcast at school. If I wasn’t one I had to be an Other.
The marketing for lesbian pulp fiction like Spring Fire, especially from a modern vantage point, is a horrible kind of funny. Ann Bannon, the author of Odd Girl Out and the Beebo Brinker Chronicles, tells me the covers for lesbian pulp reflect the way gay life was seen at the time: salacious and forbidden.
Pulp fiction revolutionized the publishing industry: printed on cheap “pulp” paper, the genre made an unprecedented amount of creative writing accessible to the public. Under-paying writers and publishing on inexpensive media meant that the genre had a low bar to entry, which allowed writers to be experimental. Science fiction covers, detective series — all had eye-catching subtitles, with portraits of pretty women, crazy monsters, and handsome men to get people to the cash registers.
At the start, the books were mainly targeted towards men. But there are a few reasons to believe that lesbian pulp wasn’t limited to the male gaze. For one, the books had a largely female readership, regardless of orientation. And the writers of lesbian pulp were, in fact, primarily gay women, who were able to use the genre not only to jumpstart their writing careers but to depict authentic lesbian experiences without the constraints of the more “traditional” publishing industry.
While it was fully okay to capitalize on moral outrage, the books inside those salacious covers couldn’t actually validate gay life.
Many of these books were written right during or after the McCarthy Era, so while it was fully okay to capitalize on moral outrage, the books inside those salacious covers couldn’t actually validate gay life. Bannon recounts that for the lesbians in most of these stories, “In order to shut up Senator McCarthy and all of the morality cops, they had to be punished … The Post Office would not deliver the books unless one of the women had committed suicide, gone nuts, or been killed.”
Lesbian pulp thus became a Frankenstein genre: an imperfect, unsure vocalization of identity. Spring Fire, for example, featured two women, Leda and Mitch, who genuinely loved each other, the wakings of gay consciousness. Then, all of a sudden, the story veers off course. They are discovered, Leda goes crazy and is institutionalized, and Mitch changes her name to Susan and goes to a doctor to become heterosexual. The conclusion was very clean: being gay was monstrous, and amoral.
Vin Packer (real name Marijane Meaker, as I later found out) hated the imposed ending so much that she wanted the book all but buried.: “I still cringe when I think about it. I never wanted it republished. It was too embarrassing,” she states in a new 2006 introduction.
Horror and a lot of lesbian pulp bank on the same titillation: the idea of a desire that is fundamentally perverse. Like many gay women, I did not immediately understand my fascination with girls as attraction. And so before I had lesbian pulp fiction, I started to read more and more about male serial killers, and the awful things they would do to the young women they talked to on the street.
My friends started dating. I, on the other hand, became moody and hard to look at. As I directed my anger more pointedly within myself, I forewent loud and unnervingly ugly monsters in favor of the monsters who were observers — monsters that breathe quietly on phone receivers, monsters whose fearsomeness only comes from the fact they are never truly shown.
My obsession with women became just one of the long list of things that confirmed my own ugliness; I would look at girls in the corner of my eye in the locker room, I would avert my eyes too late when my friends would change in front of me; I watched women on the street from coffee shops and car windows. And when I did I would think about Ted Bundy, Andrei Chikatilo, how they hid their monstrosity deep inside.
My obsession with women became just one of the long list of things that confirmed my own ugliness.
Morality, beauty, and evilness were, to me when I was younger, very black and white. I knew that I was evil, and my parents and my friends were not. I fell in love with a girl when I was a teenager; I was watching The Descent with her on the couch, and while I realized I loved her I simultaneously fell in love with the main female antagonist, Juno, played by Natalie Mendoza. And as she was torn to pieces by crawlers, covered in blood, I kept imagining the walls pressing into me until I couldn’t breathe. When I went back home that night, I still heard the crawler’s screams, the scratching of their nails. I could imagine the surety all the girls must’ve felt in their untimely deaths.
It can be easy, now especially, to laugh or to pick at some of the derogatory tropes found in a lot of these books. But so many of these books were these women’s actual lived experiences —Bannon wrote Beebo Brinker Chronicles as a hopeful tribute to her “dream woman,” and
Spring Fire was based on Meaker’s actual life. For Meaker especially I can’t imagine what it is like, having to tack on an ending like that to a book about your life.
Before lesbian pulp, I thought this vulnerable, awkward, transitioning phase where I existed as a girl yet as something much worse was something only unique to me. I don’t know who I thought I was when I watched The Descent. To some degree, I was the girls in the cave, and me being torn apart by something horrible was a rightfully deserved ending for someone like me.
But when I shoved Spring Fire to the bottom of my bag, I felt the same way I felt watching Juno get torn apart — when I stole the book I fully expected to turn into a crawler myself, and ran down the street laughing when I got away with it.
As Bannon said, in the early 1950’s there was this pressure to sell lesbian pulp, but also make it adhere to a well-understood morality. Anyone who’s read Spring Fire can see where the story Meaker wanted to tell ends. The rest is a tacked-on moral, a typical horror shocker, as the two women are torn apart from each other.
But what I think the censors couldn’t really catch was that vulnerability and bravery that achingly real is hard to disguise. Because unlike when I watched horror movies, I was able to understand that Leda and Mitch, the characters I identified with, were not the monsters. The monster was the fear of being discovered.
What shocked me about lesbian pulp was this open celebration of being unsure.
What shocked me about lesbian pulp was this open celebration of being unsure. For many of these authors, these pulps acted as their vehicle for coming out, their tentative, and imperfect coming to terms of a potential autonomy that existed outside of what these authors have been told.
And reading the book, I realized that autonomy only seems monstrous when it is so breathtakingly unfamiliar.
I finished Spring Fire in a park two blocks from my house, with the cover dutifully taped over with red construction paper. And as I read the ending, with Leda being taken away, I felt for the first time that I was being recognized. Not just in the superficial aspects of sexuality, but by this vocalized embracing of ugliness.
Many of these books were treated as perverted. Not only in terms of what their content was actually about but how their expression was literally perverted or manipulated by publishers. Yet, this immediate indictment of morality and monstrosity imposed onto some of these books didn’t dishearten me. Instead, I found that there was something strangely heartwarming at the time about seeing how two characters love despite all narrative attempts to keep them apart.
Because as horrible as the ending may seem, there is nothing more exciting and horribly, horribly scary than finally being able to see yourself yearn in Mitch and Leda’s tender eroticism, in Leda so gently and lovingly embracing Mitch for the first time.
It should be said that not all lesbian pulps ended badly, or were manipulated against their will to change their manuscript; that would do a disservice to the genre. Bannon, Artemis Smith, and Valerie Taylor were prolific authors who published multiple pulp stories in which the two women were able to end up together. Meaker, after Spring Fire, published multiple books of acclaimed lesbian fiction, minus any tropes. The history of lesbian pulp fiction is hard-fought: many saw the books as disposable, so while some of the bigger titles like Women’s Barracks, Spring Fire, Odd Girl Out can be found pretty easily through most online booksellers, I had to find others through torrents or pdfs on a blog of a blog of another blog.
Much of the restoration is also done by the gay women who grew up with these pulp works. Bannon received academic acclaim decades after her career with pulp fiction ended. Forrest’s anthology, and her profuse thanks for the authors that came before her, was the closest thing to LGBT history I had when I was a teenager.
It was two years and thirty pulp books after I read Spring Fire alone in a park. I had just finished Forrest’s anthology, and for the first time, I realized I was scared.
Lesbian pulp is so divisive possibly because it manages to be both brave and embarrassing.
As I read more lesbian pulps, my obsession with horror quieted. I stopped punishing my friends for nervously daydreaming about boys in our class. Instead, I obsessively turned inward, obsessing in the ways I could be seen as sick, contradictory, and more importantly vulnerable in a medium that I always saw as reflective of who I was.
Putting these books in context with Spring Fire, I realized that I deserved to be loved, and that I wanted to be loved in that way. And that if I were to finally accept that love, I would become a monster, in the proudest proclamation possible.
And sitting on my pile of hoarded books, I also realized it would take a very long time for me to finally have the bravery to become one.
When you are a preteen girl about to hit puberty like an SUV charging toward a brick wall at 100 mph, you dream about something either destroying you or destroying the quiet life someone else has built for you. Lesbian pulp is so divisive possibly because it manages to be both brave and embarrassing: for some, the genre may be too harsh of a reflection of shame.
Most of all, like many LGBT works, it thrives in contradiction, in confusion. And going beyond just sexuality, I think reading that confusion for the first time was when I started to forgive myself for a lot of my own failings.
On Thursday morning the hot water isn’t running and there is a new mouse caught in the trap. My roommate and I have been supporting a family of mice for six months. We have gone through a series of traps and yelled at each other in Home Depot about what constitutes a humane death. My roommate wanted to bomb the place, but none of our windows open. So we have these plain glue traps which are engineered to smell like peanut butter. The thing is, to unstick the mouse I have to go outside and pour canola oil on its feet. Yes, there are always tunnels in my bread. Yes my landlord, a twenty-three- year-old, Flat-Tummy-Tea, Instagram shill who inherited the building from her grandfather, is ignoring my emails. But we are all trying to eat. So when I’m outside trying to release this distressed, balding mouse while the fat calico is watching from the deli across the street, it’s like this mouse infestation and I are in it together. When I go back inside, I think about how little the mouse wants. I think about the chicken grease and peanut butter. I think about how before lunchtime, one of the bodega cats will rise from a crate of Irish Spring and welcome the mouse into its jaws.
I go back inside and throw on my least wrinkled dress. I look into the mirror and practice my smile because they moved me to a desk where my manager can see my face, and I have noticed her growing concern. Management claims they moved me so that I am more accessible to staff, but I know it is because of Mark. My first year two years on the job, I sat in the outer limits of the office, where the children’s imprint transitions into epub-only romance. There, I was fortunate enough to face a wall, where I could blow my nose privately. Now I am social. I show my teeth to my coworkers and feign surprise at the dysfunction of the MTA. There is a part of me that is proud to be involved in these small interactions, which confirm that I am here and semi-visible and that New York is squatting over other people’s faces too, but another part of me is sweating through the kabuki, trying to extend my hand and go off script.
I have about ten hours until my date with Eric, which means I have to eat as little as possible. I cannot anticipate the overreactions of my stomach, so if I think there is even the slightest possibility of sex, I have to starve. Sometimes the sex is worth it and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes there is a premature ejaculation and it is eleven pm and I have twenty minutes to make it to the closest McDonald’s with an intact ice cream machine. I pack a can of black olives for lunch. I roll on some lipstick, hoping the maintenance of the color will make me less inclined to eat.
By the time I push my way onto the train, the sun is nuking all the garbage in Manhattan. We stall for traffic at Montrose, Lorimer, and Union Square, and the dark tunnel walls make mirrors of the windows. I turn away from my reflection and a man is masturbating under a dirty velvet throw. I almost lose a seat to a woman who gets on at 23rd, but luckily her pregnancy slows her down. I arrive at work eighteen minutes late, and the editorial assistants are already directing the wave of phone calls to publicity.
I am the Managing Editorial Coordinator for our children’s imprint, meaning I occasionally tell the editorial assistants to fact-check how guppies digest food. I call meetings where we discuss why bears are over, and why children only want to read about fish. The editorial assistants do not invite me to lunch. I try to be approachable. I try to understand my group of pithy, nihilists who all hail from the later end of Gen Z. There is only one EA I try to avoid, and this is the one who comes first thing this Thursday morning to my new, centrally located desk.
“I don’t know how these reporters are getting our direct lines. Have you seen Kevin?” Aria is the most senior editorial assistant. She is also the only other black person in our department, which forces a comparison between us that never favors me. Not only is she always there to supply a factoid that no one knew about Dr. Seuss, she is also lovely. Lovely like only island women are; her skin like some warm, synthetic alloy. So she’s very popular around the office with her reflective Tobagonian eyes and apple cheeks, doing that unthreatening aw shucks schtick for all the professional whites. She plays the game well, I mean. Better than I do. And so when we are alone, even as we look at each other though borrowed faces, we see each other. I see her hunger, and she sees mine.
“I don’t know, maybe Kevin was finally beamed up by the Heritage Foundation,” I say, taking my coffee into my hand.
And as you are wont to do—having always been the single other in the room, having somehow preserved hope that the next room might be different—she looked around, searching for me.
“This isn’t a joke to me,” she says. For the most part I’ve stopped worrying that she is compiling a list of reasons she should have my job, because now it is not a question of whether she will take my job, it is a question of when. The only thing that bothers me is that I still want to be her friend. On her first day, she came into the office meek and gorgeous, primed to be a token. And as you are wont to do—having always been the single other in the room, having somehow preserved hope that the next room might be different—she looked around, searching for me. When she found me, when we looked at each other that first time, finally released from our respective tokenism, I felt incredible relief.
And then I miscalculated. Too much anger shared too soon. Too much can you believe these white people. Too much fuck the police. We both graduated from the school of Twice as Good for Half as Much, but I’m sure she still finds this an acceptable price of admission. She still rearranges herself, waiting to be chosen. And she will be. Because it is an art—to be black and dogged and inoffensive. She is all these things and she is embarrassed that I am not.
I’d like to think the reason I’m not more dogged is because I know better. But sometimes I look at her and wonder if the problem isn’t her, but me. Maybe the problem is that I am weak and overly sensitive. Maybe the problem is that I am an office slut.
“They’re never going to give you the power you want,” I say because I’m jealous, and it is interesting how she wavers between her mask and this offering of conspiracy.
She leans down and there it is, that sweet, copyrighted black girl smell—jojoba oil, pink lotion, blue magic.
“How would you know? You’re still a managing editorial coordinator, and you’ve been here three years,” she says, and I could assert my seniority, but that would be embarrassing. The difference in our entire yearly salaries is one monthly student loan payment.
“We just got a bunch of proofs for that series we’re doing on bath time. Can you take care of those?” I say, turning away from her. I check my phone, hoping there might be a text from Eric. Some reassurance that our first date truly went well, or some indication that he is excited about tonight. I think about sending him a comprehensive list of things he is allowed to do to me, so that we are on the same page, but when I have a draft, it has kind of a boiled rabbit vibe. I try my hand at it a few more times before I give up and go to find Kevin, who has acquired the book at the center of this PR nightmare, an illustrated history for the conservative child, a lyrical meditation on the radicalism of the liberal media and the martyrdom of rural states.
What they say about not shitting where you eat only holds if they pay you enough to eat. For the most part, this has been the best part of the job.
If I have to be objective, the art in this book is something. The moody gouache sunsets over confederate camp. Lincoln’s saggy thought bubble as he looks into the future, disappointed by the state of his party. The photorealistic depictions of urban crime. I find Kevin walking around his office in one sock, talking on the phone as this G-rated agitprop flies off the shelves. And then I see Mark. I’m not proud of what I do then, which is duck into the stairwell and hold my breath. Of all the men I’ve slept with at work, this is the one who cost me the most. What they say about not shitting where you eat only holds if they pay you enough to eat. For the most part, this has been the best part of the job.
Onboarding with Mike, his little fingers and junior human resources lingo as I cajole him out of his pants. Jake from IT coming up the stairs at 6pm with his key fob, breathing on my neck about admin privileges while he addresses the service desk ticket about my broken monitor. Hamish from contracts in the nursing room with that blue streak in his hair and his hairy thighs asking me so sweetly if I could call him Lord. Tyler, Managing editor of Lifestyle and Self Help, his fanned glossies and sock garters, pushing my head down while he’s on the phone with the Dublin office. Vlad from the mailroom with his broken English and all the packing peanuts around us on the floor. Arjun from the British sales group with his slick black hair and cartoon villain forearms, all riled up by Scholastic poaching high performers on his team. Jake from IT, again, because these computers are shit and he has the prettiest dick I’ve ever seen. Tyrell from production with his halfway smile in the bathroom stall at the office Christmas party, string lights a fractal echo in his dark, reflective eyes. Michelle from legal sitting on the copier, nylons slung around her neck as fluorescents flicker overhead. Kieran from bodice rippers taking me from behind and going on and on about severing my body from my limbs and the whole time I’m laughing and I don’t know why. Jerry who is acquiring all the cancer- centric YA, making bank and soft love to me in the conference room with the aerial view of 30 Rock and I’m crying and I don’t know why. Joe from True Crime who doesn’t read at all and who comes loud and quick and calls me nigger and then mommy. Jason from STEM textbooks who wants me to cry just like I did for Kieran, which is an experience I do cry about, at home. Adam from Christian erotica coming on my face and I feel nothing. And then Jake, one more time, because my keyboard is on the fritz, but it isn’t Jake but John from IT who comes, sliding his hand beneath my shirt, telling me that Jake was in a bad car accident and it isn’t looking good.
And somewhere in between, Mark. Mark, head of the art department, where the air smells like warm paper and everyone is happy. Where there are silky sheaves of sixteen by twenty four and the printers are sighing in self-generated heat, churning out deep blacks and high whites like clockwork, panels as clear as water, so saturated that if you touch it fresh you can feel the wet. The people in the art department move around the building in smiling clusters, concept work cradled in their arms. They have passionate debates in the elevator about embossing and verdana and courier new. They have their own hours and their own dress code, each in that chic, dorky limbo that is the domain of the old art school kid. And all I want is to be one of them. I want to order takeout from the dumpling house across the street and stay in the office until ten, revising the vista behind Frank the Fox from ultramarine to cerulean to cyan. I have applied three times. I have interviewed twice. And in both cases they have asked me to do more work on my basic figure drawing skills. Mark told me that they would keep my resume on file, and so I went and flunked some night classes I could not afford, thwarted by the dimples in human muscle and especially by the metatarsal bones in the foot. I stuck to graphite and paper, hoping that unlike paint, the medium would afford me more control, but my figures kept blurring under the heel of my hand.
I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost.
When it comes to this, I cannot help feeling that I am at the end of a fluctuation that originated with a single butterfly. I mean, with one half degree of difference, everything I want could be mine. I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost. The difference between being there when it happens and stepping out just in time to see it on the news. Still, I can’t help feeling that in the closest arm of the multiverse, there is a version of me that is fatter and happier, smiling in my own studio, paint behind my ears. But whenever I have tried to paint in the last two years, I feel paralyzed.
And Mark is not exactly pressed against the chapel ceiling or projecting this bleached, Warholian cool. He is a grown man in a duster who keeps fresh orchids in his office, collects polymer toys, and does Groening-esque renditions of The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. And one day it was raining and 8pm, and he and I shared an elevator. He showed me panel of a cunnilingual octopus and the care he had taken to render this piece knocks me right over and onto his cock. But it isn’t like the others—the ecstatic rutting and cushy ether of the void—it is like I really need him. Because there are men who are an answer to a biological imperative, whom I chew and swallow, and there are men I hold in my mouth until they dissolve. These men are often authority figures. And so Mark was very kind, taking me out and deepening my palate and ordering all the wine. He took me back to his apartment, the sort of New York Real Estate that seems impossible, lousy with light and square footage like some telegenic Hollywood lie.
The sex is okay but sort of beside the point, because in his drawing room there are buckets of prismacolors, copic markers, and oils. Rolls of raw canvas, cans of lumpy gesso and turpentine. Filberts, brights, and flats bound with soft camel hair. And while he has a light taste for libertarianism, he doesn’t ask me to do outdoor activities, so it kind of squares. We spend weekends in bed, moving quickly out of the first nervous touches into the realm where we are undeterred by the odd turns of the id. But of course, my failure is hanging between us. He is infinitely more talented in the thing I most want to do, and he seems to prefer it that way. It is silly how late this occurs to me, the carrots he dangles in his boredom, how casually he reaches for the stick. I see myself in the women who trail him, the moony typographers, the perky-breasted RISD grads. Still, eventually I go over to his house and beg him to look at my work. I get on my knees, offer up my sketchbook, and say goodbye to his apartment and the sinewy watercolors he sometimes shows me at 3 am. There is a painting that I love by Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes. In it, two women are decapitating a man. They hold him down as he struggles to push away the blade. It is a brutal, tenebristic masterpiece, drenched in carotid blood. When Gentileschi painted it, she was seventeen. She painted it after her mentor, Agostino Tassi, was convicted for her rape. As I am working on a piece inspired by this painting, my father dies. I bury him next to my mother, and for weeks I don’t sleep and the mice eat all my fruit. Mark sends his condolences in a card, but then he stops returning my calls. He sends the drawings I left at his house in an envelope simply labelled stuff, and I leave him some voicemails which mostly boil down to him being a hack who only draws four- fingered hands, to how he is an impossible dweeb who needs to be kept away from women and shot into space, and a few times, yes, I stand in front of his house in the middle of the night. I draft some emails I don’t send and wander the halls of the office with all the things I want to say to his face. But when I see him now, when I go back into the stairwell next to Kevin’s office and see how Mark has remained unchanged, how he is flanked by two women and proceeding gaily about his life, I lose my nerve.
It can seem like there’s a checklist of growing pains to be endured as we edge our way towards adulthood; overbearing parents and nuisance siblings, unrequited love and friendship fallouts, and these are often the least of our troubles. It’s a time when we’re wising up to what’s really going on around us, learning that the authoritative figures that surround us are flawed, and even hypocritical. Furthermore, they don’t understand us, want to control us, and they’re doing weird things. If all that wasn’t enough, we’re being increasingly exposed to the world’s slings and arrows, and there’s not a lot we can do about it.
If you think about it, adolescence is a time and a place, and many a beloved bildungsroman features a small town as its backdrop. According to the canon, coming-of-age in a small town is quite the absorbing experience; there’s a ready-made cast of players and the novelty of local color, life lessons aplenty, and unregimented summers spent pondering the big questions (in addition to hanging out with the people our parents warned us about). These safe havens, stagnant backwaters, and one-horse towns can influence our life’s trajectory in ways we may not become cognizant of for many years into the future.
My novel You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here is set in the fictional Irish town of Glenbruff, and tells the tale of two precocious girls, Katie and Evelyn, who have grandiose dreams of becoming filmmakers and artists, but an all-consuming rivalry overshadows their friendship. As with all small towns, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface in Glenbruff, and the people living there embody the spirit of the place. While it’s understandable for a young person to want to move on from their hometown and see what the wider world has to offer, there’s always one last adventure waiting for us before we leave, and inevitably, things are about to get pretty interesting…
Eilis Lacey is a smart young girl working in a grocery store in an insular Irish town. Her sister Rose is her closest confidante, and has higher hopes for her. The influential Father Flood encourages Eilis to travel overseas to Brooklyn where he says she’ll find more satisfying work and a better quality of life.
Eilis emigrates and takes a position in a department store while undertaking bookkeeping classes in the evening. She begins venturing out to dances at night, and that’s where she encounters Tony, an Italian American plumber. She and Tony fall in love and begin making plans for their future, but then the shocking news arrives from Ireland: Eilis’s beloved sister Rose has died from a heart condition. Eilis is forced to come back to Ireland to grieve for Rose and to support her devastated mother. To make matters all the more discombobulating, local publican and eligible bachelor Jim Farrell begins showing a romantic interest in her.
Eilis is consumed by inner conflict, torn between the simple, familiar life she might lead in her hometown, and that which beckons to her from America, full of love and excitement. To whom, and to where, does her heart belong?
15-year-old Davey Wexler loses her father to a shooting death at the scene of the family’s 7-11 convenience store in Atlantic City. Understandably devastated, she begins suffering from panic attacks and disordered eating. Her mother Gwen opts to whisk the family away for a change of scenery, and they go to the small town of Los Alamos, New Mexico for an extended trip.
Davey spends time alone in Los Alamos, exploring the locale on her bicycle, hiking, and hanging out by a canyon where she encounters a boy named Wolf. Wolf passes comment on Davey’s palpable sadness, but she finds herself unable to share the story of her father’s passing with him.
Through becoming a candy striper volunteer at a nearby hospital, and attending counselling sessions with Gwen, Davey gains the strength to face up to her traumatic loss. Her sojourn in the small town will end up creating multiple healing experiences, including the ceremonial burying of the bloodied clothing she was wearing on the night of her father’s murder.
The coming-of-age story genre has introduced us to Anne of Green Gables, Tom Sawyer, and Scout Finch. Have you heard the one about Owen Meany?
A Prayer for Owen Meany is set in Gravesend, New Hampshire, an echo of the author’s own hometown of Exeter, New Hampshire. The fictional Gravesend is representative of small-town America in the 1950s and captures the zeitgeist of the wider social history of the times.
Narrator Johnny Wheelwright comes from a wealthy background, where his eccentric, peculiar friend Owen Meany is the son of a quarry owner and working class. When the boys are aged 11, a Little League baseball game upends their lives when Owen strikes a baseball and hits John’s mother Tabitha in the head, killing her.
This affecting, expansive novel incorporates a wide cast of memorable Gravesend locals, copious reflections on and moments from small town life, and explores friendship, morality, and destiny with great aplomb.
It seems that we’re always waiting for something dramatic to happen when we’re young and living in a small place. Something Wicked This Way Comes is a fantasy novel penned by Ray Bradbury about two 13-year old boys, Jim Nightshade and Will Holloway, and the coming-of-age journey they undergo when a malevolent carnival arrives in their hometown of Green Town, Illinois. The novel’s sense of place lends an evocative backdrop to a chilling, yet charming tale.
The attractions of the carnival have the power to alter a person’s age, changing them both physically and mentally. At first, Jim and Will are intrigued by the carnival’s transformational powers, tempted to ride the carousel and become fast tracked to adulthood. Before too long, their lives and the lives of the townspeople of Green Town will be turned upside down by Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, and the friends will be forced to develop the courage and maturity to go to war against the carnival’s evil forces.
Lives of Girls and Women by Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro was first published in 1971. The novel comprises short stories chronicling the life of Del Jordan, a girl growing up in small-town Jubilee, Ontario in the 1940s. Del learns about womanhood from the women she observes in her surroundings, including her mother Addie (with whom she has a strained relationship), various female relatives, and her mother’s boarder Fern. Several feminist themes are explored, including female self-actualization, the relationships between mothers and daughters, and women’s role in society. Del’s formative love relationships also feature, though male characters are only lightly drawn.
Having always felt like an outsider, dissatisfied with small town life and continually seeking meaning, Del will leave Jubilee behind in order to further her own development. The novel is considered to contain several autobiographical elements from Munro’s own life; at the very least, the author grew up in a small town in Ontario, and became a writer, as her lead character Del intends to.
As in life, coming-of-age is no cakewalk. In Back Roads, Harley Altmyer bears a heavy weight of responsibility on his teenaged shoulders. His mother is in prison for killing his abusive father, and he’s trying and failing to raise his three younger sisters singlehandedly. There are limited prospects for Harley in the isolated coal town of Laurel Falls, Pennsylvania, and life takes a dramatic turn when he encounters an attractive married mother of two, Callie, living close by. Harley’s mental stability is rocked as his affair with Callie turns perilous, and his troubled sister Amber begins acting out in an extreme fashion. This is a coming-of-age story that doesn’t pull any punches, a gritty narrative about a young man feeling hemmed in by his bleak surroundings and circumstances.
Jacqueline Woodson was born in Ohio in 1963, but raised between New York and the small town of Greenville, South Carolina, where her mother’s parents lived. Brown Girl Dreaming is a memoir told in verse, detailing Woodson’s childhood and her growing awareness of adult relationships, racism, and the emerging civil rights movement. The memoir also concerns the effect of our surroundings and community on our lives, and the real-life education it can offer to a young person.
When Woodson’s parents separate, she and her siblings move in with Grandpa Gunnar and Grandma Georgiana in Greenville. Though she feels content and secure with her grandparents, racism is rife in the town, and she observes her grandfather being disrespected by his coworkers, segregation on buses, and sit-ins taking place in the locality.
Having witnessed the suffering of her loved ones as a consequence of prejudice, Woodson develops an interest in the Black Panther movement, and becomes inspired by activist Angela Davis. Brown Girl Dreaming is an emotional and impactful piece of work about the shaping of our drives, and how an individual becomes motivated to be a part of the solution.
About three years ago, Toni Morrison wrote a short and, as is her style, superlative essay in The New Yorker titled “The Work You Do, The Person You Are.” At a young age, Morrison delineated an understanding of the fear of losing the power of a dollar while also recognizing the burdens of employment even with the financial reward. Morrison didn’t reveal the race of the person she worked for, but the power dynamics beyond employee and employer were clear; the status was clear. The piece concludes with her translation of a quick response from her father when she bemoaned how she was treated as an employee. Morrison condensed her father’s response to the following tenets:
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.
When we think about Morrison, we most prominently, and for good reason, dissect the writing she’s gifted us, material we can turn to weeks, months, years after her sunset. TheNew Yorker essay also bestows an understanding of her work ethic—though it’s an ethic we could have intuited from how methodical and responsible she was with the written word. When I read Morrison I don’t only take in the work of a magnanimous writer; I also consider how clearly her editorial framework comes through the control and distinction she pays to text, in pieces and as a whole. The impact she had as an editor further curated her love of books and at the same time distilled how she lived her life, how she represented herself, who she represented. (See Contemporary African Literature, Corregidora, The Black Book, to name a few.)
In the first chapter of Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison conveys her early way of reading, when she presumed that Black people were of no consequence in the white American literary imagination. She digs into how Black people were erased in the white-dominated “canon,” and investigates white Americans’ willful refusal to read books about or by African Americans. And if white Americans weren’t reading those books, how could the white literary establishment publish them? “But then,” Morrison writes, “I stopped reading as a reader and began to read as a writer.” By altering her viewpoint, Morrison better informed her reading and empowered herself to acquire more books by Black writers. From the start of her time in publishing, this perspective allowed her to magnify the gaps in contemporary literature celebrated by white audiences, and to elevate books deserving the same shelf space. (See Tenet 2: “You make the job; it doesn’t make you.”)
Earlier this year I became an employee within a division of the publishing house where Toni Morrison once worked. Her name is inextricably linked with this press, due to her publications and the impact she had as an editor in the scholarly and trade divisions. There are many, though trust me not enough,hard-working and dedicated Black women in publishing. Recently, new names are being added to the roster, which we can hope is a lead-in for many more to come. Pre-quarantine we walked the halls and sat in conference rooms. Nowadays we enter virtual rooms where we are still one of a few if not the only. We speak our truths or hold our tongues, all in the name of a larger strategy to see and make a difference. We stay because we love the work and because we want to showcase the intrinsic dedication and brilliance of those of our ilk. We do the work because the work needs to get done. The navigation of being “the only” or “one of the few” requires a singular focus and a clear strategy to keep going. This is not just about the industry, it’s about our belief and love for what we bring to it.
Morrison more than likely fought in ways subdued, calculated, and blatant when she entered the office environment.
It may not be a surprise that Toni Morrison was one of the first Black women editors at Random House during her 19-year tenure. It may not be a surprise that she was one of the first Black women in this space with acquisitions power. It may not surprise you that she was one of the first Black women in this space to enter a “boys club,” a club I guarantee didn’t know how to recognize her as an equal, even when they shared the same title—though not the same salary. (To this day her adamance of “head of household” in the documentary The Pieces I Amrings true of the battle cry to make a proper and equitable wage to men.) What we can ascertain from this is that Morrison more than likely fought in ways subdued, calculated, and blatant when she entered the office environment as editor and then again outside of it, or adjacently as author when discussing her work again and again and again. Imagine the strength of mind and character it takes to be on both sides of the coin, to uplift Black people in your work each and every day when people don’t always see them the way you do, most notably as equals and most derogatorily as people. Imagine the love for the people one has to pursue this work as adamantly and precisely as she did and bring it in all ways to a deep admiration and honesty day in and day out. (See Tenet 1: “Whatever the work is do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.”)
Black publishing professionals continue to navigate working within the system while also trying to combat an industry that continues to provide roadblocks to access let alone retention, even when it purports to value Black lives. There’s no easy or singular answer to maintaining your own values in a space that does not value you as a person, let alone the work you’re producing or helping to produce. Like Morrison did in these same spaces, we may assert or negotiate or magnify the larger importance of the content and creators we support, not just for the company but for the nation. These may be seen as negotiations and yet they’re also part of the fight. At some point we all come to terms with the fact that negotiation can no longer be about what we will tolerate, but what we will not accept.
We know how much Morrison achieved—it is worth repeating and the right way to speak of someone who achieved so much. But alongside the achievements we know of, there are many that we do not know about. Ones that may seem small but are monumental in getting through each day. Ones in which we defend and deflect, be it ourselves or whatever opposes us. The ways of navigating what may not, outwardly, appear to be a hostile environment, but one that will not acknowledge that you deserve more. Having experienced this in ways both aggressive and passive-aggressive, I continually think of those who are the sole (or rare) entity carving out a way to be seen and, unintentionally and often unwillingly, representing so many others. As Hilton Als noted in his New Yorker profile on Morrison, she “preferred to publish writers who had something to say about Black American life that reflected its rich experience.” This is the way she published, wrote, and read. This is who Morrison was and how she exemplified an eternal love for Black people. This is who she prioritized in the roles she held and I can only imagine the ways she fought for them in these same halls/rooms/spaces.
This is who Morrison was and how she exemplified an eternal love for Black people.
This year, at the height of the George Floyd protests, many businesses designated June 2nd as Blackout Tuesday, a day of (optional or enforced) mourning. My company gave me the option to take that day off. I performed my job functions anyway because my grief didn’t start or end on that Tuesday. In the afternoon, I sat at a desk in the corner of my living room. I spoke calmly into a headset for a video conference in recognition of this moment. I spoke into what has felt like a void in quarantine, even more so due to the intense quiet and periodical appearance of teary-eyed/somber faces on my screen. I had no video, so my Blackness was not on display in the way it would be if we all still shared office space. Pledges to be conscious, to be more aware, to make more efforts in the content published and the people present on the line were made. My headphones pulsed with the repetition of how valued Black people were especially as we kept producing. I talked to other Black writers and publishing professionals and we spoke honestly and with uncertainty. At the end of the day several people said to me, “All we have is us” and “Keep doing what you’re doing because it’s important” and “We see you.” The power of those words from those you know beyond a moment makes us take a breath, and a break, before we resume. (See Tenet 4: “You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.”)
I began with a quote from Morrison, so it makes sense to end with one:“Being a Black woman writer is not a shallow, but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination, it expands it. It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.” To be a Black women editor in a large publishing world, who you are has to be as distinct as how you read and discuss what you read. Morrison has written extensively of that awareness in her reading, and how it led her to prioritize who she was always trying to reach, and allowed her to broker past the issues of “what could sell” to land on what is needed and desired. It may come as no surprise her contextual awareness of being, not just as writer but as a Black woman, also allowed Morrison as editor, as teacher, as speaker, as observer to conquer the world at large and recognize, as well as continually illustrate, that we could too. (See Tenet 3: Your real life is with us, your family.)
Ingrid Persaud made the grandest of debuts in the literary world by winning the BBC Short Story Award in 2018 with “The Sweet Sop,” the first short story she ever wrote. After this extremely auspicious beginning, the Trinidad-born writer, whose resume includes stints in legal academia and art school in the U.K., publishes her novel, Love After Love.
In Love After Love, Betty takes in a lodger after the death of her handsome, brutal husband. Betty and her young son, Solo, grow close to Mr. Chetan, a queer man navigating the homophobic island landscape. One night, Solo overhears Betty confess a secret to Mr. Chetan. The revelation throws Solo into despair and exile to New York where his father’s brother lives. Solo remains in touch with Mr. Chetan but he refuses to speak to Betty until a tragedy strikes and Solo has to come home.
The novel, told entirely in the lyrical dialect of Trinidad, offers a close-focus picture of the island’s Indo-Caribbean community, as well as the diversity of Trinidadian culture, traditions (like Carnival), and life. The unconventional trio, who narrate the novel in turns with their distinctive voices and perspectives, endear absolutely with their desires and flaws. By the novel’s end, I felt so close to them, mostly because their voices shine—and I felt like I could hear them. I spoke to Persaud about her winning debut, multiple diasporic movements, and her favorite Caribbean storytellers.
J.R. Ramakrishnan: I would love to start with your BBC National Short Story Award. You won this in 2018 with your first ever story! How incredible? Can you tell us about this?
Ingrid Persaud: Things were rough. Within twelve months father dead, father-in-law dead and two uncles gone and dead. Grief caused all kinds of things to hold me—love, memory, regret, anger, redemption. How to write about this without depressing people? While I was there scratching my head, I came across a set of stories where people dead from eating chocolate. Yes, one of the essential food groups: chocolate. Next thing I know the son in my story was dealing forbidden chocolates to his estranged father. Look, it takes all kinds. Some deal in crack cocaine and some deal in KitKat. I had plenty fun writing “The Sweet Sop.” Chocolate was the answer to some of life’s harrowing questions. Remember what the Trini people say, laugh and cry does live in the same house.
JRR: When did you begin this novel? Tell us how you imagined this family, who is quite far from the heteronomative model. Also the title, is it a reference to the Derek Walcott poem?
For so long the literary establishment treated our dialect like bad English we were forever apologising, explaining, translating. Them days done.
IP: You know Walcott’s poem, “Love After Love”—but the rest of all you who don’t better hurry up and read it now for now. It’s a masterclass in accepting ourselves as we are: “Sit. Feast on your life.” Betty, a widow, Solo, her son, and Mr. Chetan, their lodger form an unconventional family torn apart by secrets, and we follow them as they trip and stumble towards self-acceptance. See why I had to thief the man’s title?
The book started with a short piece about a young man who deals with his emotional pain by self-harming. In that scene, he visits a sex worker. As she puts down a set of licks in his tail, the physical pain eases up his psychological anguish. Writing that scene was like posing myself a question. The rest of the novel evolved as I kept asking myself how the poor fella reached this circle of hell, and how I was going to free him.
JRR: You write about a very specific Indo-Caribbean community–in dialect. You’ve explained very little to those who might not be familiar with Trinidad or the Indo-Caribbean community.
IP: You’re talking truth. Not many writers use Trini dialect in a sustained way. And because for so long the rest of the literary establishment treated our dialect like bad English we were forever apologizing, explaining, translating. Them days done. Go through hard. Do your thing with confidence. Excellence will shine through no matter what. I bet you five dollars all them fellas from Shakespeare come down didn’t spend a minute worrying if readers would get their use of dialect. Mine is no different. Take an example:
I was liming in a Carnival fete last month and I met a real hot man. Straight away I gone bazodee. I can’t think eat. I can’t sleep. All I thinking about is he.
I’m sure as God make Moses I don’t have to translate “liming” or “bazodee”.
Of course every language has its gatekeepers and Trini dialect is no exception. Next to my laptop are no less than four dictionaries of the English/Creole of Trinidad—just in case a little doubt catch me. It’s worth taking the time to get it right. This is my love song to the place and language of my childhood.
JRR: Your background is of multiple diasporas. You were born in Trinidad, spent a lot of time in the U.K., and had a stint in Boston. I see you live between Barbados and London right now. It made me think of other writers from the Caribbean who’ve made similar journeys (V.S. Naipaul and Sam Selvon, to name just two). In your book, Mr. Chetan and Solo (as well as others like Mr. England) both leave and return to Trinidad. I was wondering if you could talk about this going and coming (back) in general, in your book, and how it has impacted you as a writer?
IP: In Love After Love,Betty cooks a special fish called cascadoux. Once you get past how ugly it is, you’re in for a treat. That fish sweet. And watch me—Trinis believe that if you eat cascadoux, no matter where you go in the world, all England and America, you will always return to Trinidad. No spoilers, but if you’re born on a small island sometimes the only way to flee your demons is to physically ups and leave. The trick is finding your way back and making peace with yourself.
This is my love song to the place and language of my childhood.
I’ve licked down my fair share of cascadoux and hope to end my days right where I was born. But, assuming Covid-19 spare life, for now I remain in self-imposed exile, a perpetual insider/outsider. I don’t know if it’s because I am used to being in this liminal space that I have finally embraced it. I step outside the agonizing questions of identity and nationality to belong to that non-belonging. Maybe this is how we might build a place called home—as something we can carry with us.
JRR: I see that you trained as a visual artist. I wonder if you could meditate on how this visual background has influenced your writing?
IP: I was raised in an ordinary middle-class Trini home where there were three career options: doctor, lawyer, or failure. I read law at LSE and for a good long while I was an academic. But something was missing from my life. I left academia and went off to art school. I had the best time ever and learned to only wear black. Seems I am a visual thinker and although the novel is character-driven, I was always drawn back to working and reworking my descriptions—especially when Mr. Chetan or Betty were cooking.
JRR: The domestic violence that Betty experiences at the hands of her husband, Sunil, results in more violence, and manifests again with Solo’s self-harm. I was wondering if you would discuss this a little?
If you’re born on a small island sometimes the only way to flee your demons is to leave. The trick is finding your way back and making peace with yourself.
IP: You catch me here. See, I thought I expressly didn’t make the violence cyclical. But maybe a different truth comes out in the book. Sunil was a nasty wife-beater who should have made a jail. Rather than dwelling on the violence, his wife Betty moves on. Those who are harmed can break the cycle and lead fulfilled lives. Solo’s self-harming is something different—partly his father’s legacy, but the boy had plenty other things on his mind. I can’t say what or I will give away the whole story.
JRR: I was very struck by the character of Solo and how his innocence is shattered by the overheard revelation. I felt like you rendered his response to this betrayal so acutely. Could you talk about Solo’s creation? I see you have sons. The mother-son relationship in it seems very real.
IP: I ain’t lying. Bringing Solo alive on the page was real pressure. Anxious, teenaged boys don’t like to talk about their feelings and the only tools I have are words. Luckily, I’ve been keeping a close eye on our sons—nineteen-year-old identical twins. They are wonderful and I hope not traumatized like Solo but I’ve learned a lot from being their mama. Family attachments and how we make those systems work when things rough—that is a minefield. I’ve only scratched the surface.
JRR: Who are your favorite Caribbean writers?
IP: What happen, like you want to put me in the bamboo? If I say Naipaul, people go bawl he’s a traitor and a misogynist. If I say Sam Selvon, people will want to know if I don’t read all the new talent around. If I say Claire Adam, people will say the women them sticking together. Mention Marlon James, Kei Miller, and Lorna Goodison and people will say I favoring the Jamaicans them. Nah. You can’t trap me so.
My friends and I discuss the news once a week during our Zoom calls. The conversations are a mix of sympathy, frustration and opinions, but all I can bring myself to say is, “I’m tired.” Apparently, I wasn’t alone. It’s a sentiment reflected by Langston Hughes in a poem that has been posted all over Twitter and Tumblr since late May, in response to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. In simple words that clearly resonates—I found a Tumblr post with 20,000 notes, and a tweet with more than 28,000 likes—Hughes describes our shared exhaustion:
I’m so tired of waiting Aren’t you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind?
In this poem, Hughes reflects our feelings of being buried in injustice. There are moments where we can feel like we have no power over what’s going on. We’re just waiting for something to fall out of the sky and make the world good again. We acutely feel the time pass as we’re waiting. We answer, “Yes, I am tired of waiting.”
It can be exhausting trying to stay optimistic while hearing the news of people dying from disease and murder and countless other atrocities. Between the relentless news cycle, easy access to social media, and rampant burnout, it can feel like the bad news just piles on, leaving no time to process. It can make a person bone-weary. I read a news headline, and I feel like I’m melting into my bed and becoming a puddle. “Tired” encapsulates this puddle feeling.
Between the relentless news cycle, easy access to social media, and rampant burnout, it can feel like the bad news just piles on, leaving no time to process.
Hughes’s career took off during the Harlem Renaissance. A lover of jazz, he used the music’s rhythm and diction to shape his poems, creating a song and word mix. Jazz poetry suited him as he rejected the classical approach to poetry, instead using common words and simple structures that almost anyone could read. That easygoing beat makes it quick to latch on to his words. Sometimes his poems even sound like comforting nursery rhymes.
Hughes’s words are simple—“beautiful,” “kind,” and “good”—but they also convey a romantic air. There’s a soft mood to his words, despite the horrors he alludes to. The reader can imagine looking out at the world’s troubles, huddled inside a bubble, disappointed and wondering when things will look less bleak. Hughes’s words can decorate this little bubble creating a tragic but beautiful scene. After all, we all feel tired once in a while.
There’s a version of this poem for everyone. A serene mountain backdrop to Hughes’s words make a great wallpaper or Facebook post in tough times. You can find beautiful calligraphy of his words on Pinterest to add to an Activism or Altruism inspiration board. There’s always Tumblr accounts filled with black text, white background quotes where “Tired” makes regular appearances.
But the words they’re sharing are only the first half of the poem. The second half is less romantic.
Let us take a knife And cut the world in two— And see what worms are eating At the rind.
Hughes wasn’t exhausted. He was fed up. He implores the reader not to wallow in exhaustion but to take action, and not just a performance of action but something deep. He wants action that cuts the world in half, slicing down to the foundation of our beliefs and institutions, so we can recognize what is souring the world.
With his “Let us,” Hughes invites others to join in improving the world. Though the Harlem Renaissance is marked as a celebration of Black culture, it was also a time of race riots and lynching, and the art of the time often reflected the inequality Black people faced. Themes like institutional racism, Black identity, and the after effects of slavery were extremely common. Amongst these themes, Hughes specifically championed unity among all those of African descent. With this invitation he recognizes that change of any amount does not happen singularly but as a joint effort. This is not only a poem for staying in and peering at the trouble from a safe distance.
We all have times when we feel exhausted, but when a Black man speaks of being tired you cannot ignore his call to action.
When only half the poem is presented, the context of this piece is completely lost. We all have times when we feel exhausted, but when a Black man speaks of being tired you cannot ignore his call to action.
It’s easier and more comforting to focus on the first half of the poem. It’s easier to stay in the comfort of being tired, to use it as an excuse, rather than taking a brief rest before continuing the fight. We may not want to hear that change might require rioting, shouting, violence. At the very least it certainly isn’t comfortable. The knife and the worms are not #aesthetic.
A poet of the people, I suspect Hughes would have loved seeing his poem shared all over social media to thousands. Hughes found great success with the average Black reader. His reach was so great Hughes may have read his poetry to more people than any other American poet, according to scholar Donald Bernard. Those audiences meant Hughes was the first Black American writer to live off his earnings from writing alone. He aimed to reach the masses of the Black community with his work either in his jazz poetry or work for the famous Black newspaper the Chicago Defender. He often celebrated the diversity of Black people, hoping Black artists would find inspiration within the community rather than looking to white creators. Dedicated to democratizing poetry for his people, we can imagine Hughes would be ecstatic to see his work shared to friends and followers online. He wanted his work to be easily consumed and shared, taking art out of the formal classroom and into the lives of people.
Hughes saw the beauty and romance of his people, but his frustration with how Black people were treated is clearly evident in his work. And yet we repay him by taking a knife and cutting “Tired” in two—keeping the romantic portion, but not the poet’s ideas for change. We can swallow the emotion but not the action Hughes calls for, informed by his years living through a time of riots, lynching, and segregation.
We need the second half of the poem to remind us to keep fighting.
Cutting the poem is a disservice to Hughes and the struggles he endured and witnessed. They were struggles not unlike what we deal with now. As history circles back we’re left with people who will step up and work for something better and those who’ll let the world rot. Hughes didn’t want us to drop everything because we felt exhausted. And after picking ourselves up he didn’t want us to stop and stare at the worms ruining the world. Acknowledging the fatigue is only the first step, and seeing the problem is only the second. We need the second half of the poem to remind us to keep fighting.
In cutting the world in half we can see past surface-level actions and demolish the core systems that are built with racism embedded in them.
Loften Mitchel, a mentee of the poet, described Hughes’s legacy of creating a, “standard of brotherhood and friendship and cooperation.” Hughes wanted better for Black people, but we can’t achieve that by looking out at the world, content to feel the exhaustion of the movement but not participate in it. Don’t stay a puddle.
It’s Election Day. It’s the finest day in history. The air
is crisp and the tone is full of hope. My party is weighing in early.
There are victory flags in the sky. And the whole morning I am haunted
by the memory of a lover who at the end of everything
told me I had no ass.
I cleaned the house.
I moved the bookshelf from the radiator. I put my brown things in boxes. I threw away the cardboard. I scrubbed the stove. and dried it with a black towel. There is no more fray coming from under the area rug. Broke a glass while doing it. and swept the glass. and wiped the glass. I wiped the glass. And I looked for glass, stray in the break of the wood flooring. Moved the couch and tried to find the glass heating its way into a wedge. I imagined the foot on glass at some worst time: a phone interview. a lovemaking. a day of the flu. I took a magnifying glass to the glass. I thought there were strands of slivering into a splinter so thin so thin you couldn’t see. I imagined the glass elongating. I imagined the glass cooling too quickly and snap. I threw away the glove I used to look for the glass and wiped my knee with a white towel. I shook the towel over the trash and wiped the floor where I shook the towel and washed the towel and then washed the sink where the towel stank. A woman came home and said she was moving out. I put that dinner on a plate and slid it beneath the glass bowl covering a salad on the second shelf which upon its second onceover with a fork, has lost its verdant leaf. In the bowl, through the glass, it’s all trunk. The beet is sparse, the avocado soggy and browning. Lettuce stalk is bitter and watery and hard. In that distortion, I found a sharp tongue. And I knew I would stab it. And I knew it would be so only delicious, to me.
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