Did the recent Netflix adaptation of the Baby-Sitters Club series leave you feeling nostalgic? Us too. Not just for landline phones or the sleepy town of Stonybrook, but also for the books, with their smart depictions of entrepreneurial pre-teens and their childcare escapades.
From Mary Poppins to Amelia Bedelia, children and their caretakers seem to be a staple in children’s literature. But although we may not read a Baby-Sitters Club book a day like we used to, we don’t necessarily have to outgrow babysitter narratives; the themes of family, childcare, equitable pay, and labor transactions also prove to be rich fodder for literary fiction. (There’s a lot more murder in these than in the original BSC, though.) As a New York Times article notes, “the nanny novel lives on, showcasing complex and imperfect nannies whose personal stories intersect with thorny larger questions about race, class, immigration and parenthood.” Below are nine books that tackle the nanny novel from a variety of angles.
Aren’t kids fun?Emira Tucker is a young Black babysitter working for a rich white family. Alix Chamberlain, her boss, is a white woman who prides herself on self-confidence and doing the “right thing.” When a grocery store security guard accuses Emira of having kidnapped the white girl she is babysitting, the racist incident sets off a whole series of complications for the Chamberlains and Emira. Reid’s acclaimed, page-turning debut explores the intersections of babysitting, class privilege, and race.
Single mother Patsy can only get an American visa if she agrees to leave her 5-year-old daughter Tru behind in Jamaica. Sending Tru to live with her father, Patsy heads to New York, hoping to reunite with her friend and former lover Cicely. But Cicely has married an abusive man and is unwilling to give up the lifestyle his wealth affords her. Meanwhile Patsy can only find work as a bathroom attendant at first, though eventually she secures steady work as a nanny. Caring for someone else’s child leaves her haunted by the absence of her own daughter, who is growing up motherless—struggling with depression and self-harm but also with a burgeoning interest in soccer kindled by her father—back in Jamaica.
In 1936 Singapore, recent mission school graduate Chen Su Lin has aspirations of attending secretarial school, but agrees to fill in as a temporary nanny for Singapore’s acting governor Sir Henry Palin after his family’s previous Irish nanny is killed in a fall from a balcony. Su Lin soon discovers from her charge Dee-Dee, Palin’s adult daughter who never developed mentally past the age of 7 due to a fever, that she suspects someone murdered the previous nanny and intends to murder her as well. Su Lin investigates, navigating the British family’s racism and distrust while gathering evidence for the murder case, at great risk to herself.
Due to an unexpectedly disastrous arrival when her cousin fails to show up at the New York airport, Grace Caton winds up nannying for a rich Jewish family. Grace, a sixteen-year-old from Trinidad, learns the ins and outs of nannying in Manhattan, from gossiping in Union Square to weird employer requests. She also stumbles into a community of friends in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Set against the 1990s backdrop of the Crown Heights race riots, Minding Ben showcases the diverse turbulence of New York and the individual struggles it takes to make a living.
In Moroccan author Slimani’s Goncourt Prize-winning novel, a Parisian lawyer and music producer hire Louise, a middle-aged widow with an estranged adult daughter, to look after their two small children. Louise seems perfect at first, winning the children over with her playfulness and creative games and the parents with her delicious cooking and constant readiness to take on more household work. She soon does prove too good to be true, as the pathologies underlying her perfectionism begin to emerge. The couple prepare to confront Louise but she murders their children first—a fact known from the very beginning of the book—in a crime propelled by extreme loneliness, compulsive behavior, and financial desperation within the secret economy of nannies in Paris’s wealthier professional neighborhoods.
This 1990 coming-of-age novella by Kincaid is now considered a postcolonial feminist classic. Lucy comes to the U.S. from the West Indies to work as an au pair for a wealthy white family. However, she soon starts to notice that neither the U.S. nor the family are as flawless as they initially appeared. She also struggles to communicate with her own mother, who is steeped in traditional values that Lucy is trying to escape.
When she was 7, Jo Holt’s beloved nanny Hannah disappeared, and her distant aristocratic parents seemed unconcerned about this. After the death of her husband, Jo moves back to her family’s English mansion Lake Hall with her own daughter. When the two of them discover a 30-year-old skull near the lake, investigators suspect it might be Hannah. But then an older woman shows up claiming to be Hannah and Jo, desperate to reconnect, believes her and invites her to take care of her own young daughter—a catastrophic mistake.
Who is the perfect family for a babysitter with no childcare experience? The answer: a family who does not yet have a child, but has a turbulent and tragic backstory. Tassie Keltjin is a college student, looking for a side job—instead, she becomes embroiled in a local family’s efforts to adopt a biracial child. With sharp, melancholic insight, Moore has crafted a crash course in grief, loss, and the limits of love.
Simpson’s novel alternates between the perspectives of Claire, a successful composer and less-than-confident new mother, and Lola, a nanny from the Philippines and veteran mother of five children. Claire just wants to make sure she is doing her best for her young son; Lola is earning money to finance her children’s higher education. Set in L.A., Simpson explores how domestic workers are used as power symbols amongst the Hollywood elite, and the familial costs—on both sides of the equation—of the nanny industry.
As Crown Publishing predicted, readers eagerly anticipated Michelle Obama’s Becoming. Autobiography and memoir are best-selling categories because virtually everyone enjoys learning about the private life of public figures. In this case, many were curious about the woman who seemed to rise above peculiar controversies and non-stop criticism. How had Mrs. Obama felt about being portrayed as “some angry Black woman”? A meticulous biographer had engaged these issues, but this was an opportunity to hear from the source. Did it bother her that she was criticized for wearing shorts in warm weather? Did appearing in political cartoons make her lose sleep?
Becoming delivers in that it unfolds powerfully and is a pleasure to read. Beginning with a portrait of her family of origin—including ancestors—the book shows readers how a young Michelle’s confidence was cultivated and then strengthened by challenges to it. The narrative allows readers to understand what empowered Michelle to come into her own and to maintain her sense of self as she, Barack, Sasha and Malia navigated life on the world stage. Nevertheless, the memoir is less revealing than it seems. As a result, one might learn more about Michelle Obama by seeing how little has changed since another exceptionally accomplished Black woman wrote an autobiography informed by her time in the White House.
In 1868, the self-emancipated Elizabeth Keckley published a post-Civil War slave narrative, Behind the Scenes; Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. As Mary Todd Lincoln’s primary dressmaker and confidante, Keckley wrote the book to clear Mrs. Lincoln’s name. Lincoln had sparked an “Old Clothes Scandal” by trying to sell her wardrobe to keep afloat financially because Congress failed to provide for the widow after her husband’s assassination. Keckley’s narrative style is striking for how skillfully she shields personal experiences while telling her life story. She declares, “The veil of mystery must be drawn aside” because “my own character, as well as the character of Mrs. Lincoln, is at stake”—but she places the Lincoln family on display, not her own.
Mrs. Obama has mastered seeming to be available to the American public while fiercely protecting one’s inner life.
Mrs. Obama has mastered the same skill that shapes Keckley’s work, seeming to be available to the American public while fiercely protecting one’s inner life. As Mrs. Obama continues Keckley’s legacy, they both participate in what historian Darlene Clark Hine famously termed “a culture of dissemblance.” African American women create “the appearance of disclosure, or openness about themselves and their feelings, while actually remaining an enigma.”
Hine’s concept is about more than the simple desire for privacy. A “culture of dissemblance” has developed because “the relationship between Black women and the larger society has always been, and continues to be, adversarial.” That is, American culture maligns Black women in every possible way, arguably as a matter of course, beginning with the constant portrayal of them as natural whores who cannot be raped. Insisting that Black women so willingly gave themselves and indeed ensnared white men was the foundation on which the United States literally built its wealth in human property. Not surprisingly, then, Keckley’s life story was shaped by rape. Behind the Scenes recounts: a white man “had base designs upon me. … Suffice it to say, that he persecuted me for four years, and I—I—became a mother.”
Just as Keckley refuses to offer specifics, Michelle Obama need not dwell on details for her experience to spotlight American culture’s adversarial approach to Black women. Becoming mentions the political cartoon in which Mrs. Obama was depicted with a machine gun, fist-bumping her husband, but it omits how predictably she was compared to a man, an ape, and a gorilla. And yet, because American culture is geared toward reminding everyone who isn’t a straight white man of their “proper” place as subordinates, these responses are common. When I tweeted “The Secret to Michelle Obama’s ‘Most Admired’ Status,” my Twitter mentions suddenly contained masculinized images of the former First Lady. A Black woman is succeeding? Time to take her (and those who value her) down a peg.
In a society invested in casting Black women as deviants, withholding one’s full humanity is not simply reactive; it’s proactive.
Super-dignified moments like “When they go low, we go high” should be understood as part of this culture of dissemblance. In a society invested in casting Black women as sexual deviants and unfit mothers as well as financially and morally bankrupt leeches, withholding one’s full (flawed) humanity is not simply reactive; it’s proactive. According to Hine, “achieving a self-imposed invisibility” allows Black women to “collectively create alternative self-images and shield from scrutiny these private, empowering definitions of self.” In other words, when Black women remain enigmas while seeming to share so much, they create proxies at a distance from their psychic and spiritual realities because they are so rarely safe in public. Despite the release of her memoir, audiences will never be privy to who Michelle Obama actually knows herself to be, and that is more than appropriate.
In Keckley, dissemblance shows up most profoundly around sorrow. When the Lincolns lose their son Willie, Keckley offers particulars that highlight the family’s pain. She follows this detailed scene with a single paragraph about the death of her own son. She says, “previous to this I had lost my son,” who had joined the Union army after having attended Wilberforce. Immediately after this paragraph, she exposes the Lincolns’ mourning even more by reproducing a newspaper tribute to Willie that Mrs. Lincoln had saved in a scrapbook. By making brief, passing mention of her son’s death in a story about her own life, Keckley keeps her struggle private. This is remarkable because, as a genre, slave narratives rely on the conflation of Black identity with pain. As literary critic Janet Neary explains, Keckley applies her sewing expertise to writing, by “ripping the slave narrative apart at the seams and refashioning it.” Dissembling is key to this refashioning. Keckley appears to reveal so much while shielding from public view her innermost thoughts and feelings. In a space synonymous with whiteness and power, the White House, Keckley claims privacy for herself and her family. She secures what the nation robbed her of when she lived in a slave cabin… and in the white home she later occupied as housekeeper when she was raped.
Mrs. Obama has been as deliberate as Keckley in constructing her self-image both in how she embodies her role in public and in her memoir. Michelle Obama’s persona as FLOTUS was one of welcoming warmth—an absolute feat in a society determined to see Black women as angry. Mrs. Obama’s comforting aura hinged on her insistence upon performing Mom-in-Chief, complete with an emphasis on gardening. Her Princeton and Harvard degrees faded into the background, along with her executive experience at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Another strategy she consistently used, which didn’t surprise anyone familiar with the nation’s tendencies toward Black people, was to take what seemed to be every opportunity to teach white folk how to dance.
Mrs. Obama’s success as First Lady required helping Americans to forget the fullness of her humanity.
The Michelle Obama who performed in these ways was no less aware of the nation’s racial politics than she had been before becoming First Lady, but she had seen how swift punishment could be for speaking her truth. The Obama campaign had to take her out of the public eye in February 2008 after she admitted, “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” Given the vitriol white Americans felt justified spewing after that remark, Mrs. Obama’s success as First Lady—because of Americans’ shortcomings, not her own—required helping them to forget the fullness of her humanity.
FLOTUS needed to conceal not only her understanding of who she was and who her family was, but also her awareness of who white Americans often proved themselves to be. To appreciate the labor required for, in Hine’s words, “achieving a self-imposed invisibility,” please recall Obama’s February 2007 60 Minutes interview. When asked if she feared for her husband’s life as a Black candidate, Mrs. Obama responded, “I don’t lose sleep over it because the realities are that . . . as a Black man . . . Barack can get shot going to the gas station” (emphasis added). Inevitably, Mrs. Obama’s performance as Mom-in-Chief was inflected by her awareness that racist violence undergirds U.S. culture. To recognize that her husband could be shot going to the gas station was to evoke the realities of the racial profiling that results in Black and Brown men disproportionately dying at the hands of police.
Even if one insists that, given her familiarity with gun violence in Chicago, Michelle Obama had been thinking of Black men dying from other Black men’s gunfire, that would still gesture toward the country’s systematic devaluation of Black life. As cultural critic Ta-Nehisi Coates has explained, the structures that all but ensure African Americans’ civic, social, and economic exclusion also cause their deaths. “Spare us the invocations of ‘black-on-black crime,’” Coates writes, “I will not respect the lie. . . . The most mendacious phrase in the American language is ‘black-on-black crime,’ which is uttered as though the same hands that drew red lines around the ghettos of Chicago are not the same hands that drew red lines around the life of Jordan Davis [and Hadiya Pendleton].” Likewise, Michelle Obama had suggested that, whether political candidates or ordinary citizens, African Americans become targets because the nation consistently casts them as not only unfit for inclusion but downright disposable.
It feels like a stretch to connect a Michelle Obama comment to Coates’s condemnation of the violence woven into purportedly civil discourse, doesn’t it? That’s a testament to the skill with which she participates in the culture of dissemblance, which allows her to enjoy privacy in public. Like Keckley, she recognizes that the mainstream gaze cannot be trusted when it lands on a Black woman’s truth. When Keckley foregrounds the Lincoln family’s grief and glides past her own, she reverses the spectacle expected in a slave narrative. Her story begins with an account of enslavers separating her family of origin, but her memoir later places the spotlight on a white family in distress. The reversal is not about exacting textual vengeance on white people; it’s about highlighting the achievement of having moved from slave cabins to the White House.
Mrs. Obama’s public persona is a success-oriented cultural production—even if, or especially because, most Americans fail to see it as such.
White Americans devastated Black families and swore they never existed, and that is the lens through which to view black cultural production that spotlights African American accomplishment. Mrs. Obama’s public persona is one such success-oriented cultural production—even if, or especially because, most Americans fail to see it as such. Indeed, as Mrs. Obama joins Keckley in cultivating a culture of dissemblance, she takes lessons from her younger friend, Beyoncé, who has mastered privacy in public in the era of not only the 24-hour news cycle but also social media. Besides modeling how to control access to one’s inner life, Beyoncé’s singular status and fashionista tendencies align her with both Obama and Keckley.
Mrs. Obama’s facility with securing privacy in public might be best illustrated in how Becoming engages fashion and beauty. She speaks passionately about wearing Jason Wu’s designer gown on inauguration night, insisting that it captured “the dreaminess of my family’s metamorphosis, … transforming me if not into a full-blown ballroom princess, then at least into a woman capable of climbing onto another stage. I was now FLOTUS….” Embodying that new level of capability proved especially meaningful as she and Barack attended “the Neighborhood Ball, the first inaugural ball ever to be broadly accessible and affordable to the general public and where Beyoncé—real-life Beyoncé—sang….”
Acknowledging the meaning-making power of clothing beyond inauguration night, Obama’s memoir grapples with the dilemma American culture would not let her escape: “As a Black woman, too, I knew I’d be criticized if I was perceived as being showy and high end, and I’d be criticized also if I was too casual.” Meanwhile, the memoir says close to nothing about the tensions that always arise around African American hair.
Obama’s memoir grapples with the dilemma American culture would not let her escape.
Allow me to paint a portrait of a Black woman who is creating privacy in public. She shares her life story with a nation eagerly awaiting it, and a world that will soon make it the bestselling memoir in history, and she has accepted help from a ghostwriter, adding distance between herself and the page. Even more telling, the depth of discussion about her tresses amounts to: “When I decided to get bangs cut into my hair, my staff would feel the need to first run the idea past Barack’s staff, just to make sure there wouldn’t be a problem.”
What could be more relevant than hair, especially Black hair, when engaging the politics and power of fashion and beauty? When Mrs. Obama was interviewed by Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams for their podcast 2 Dope Queens, the hosts gushed about how good she looked. She returned the compliments, saying “you got your hair games on!” and that was just the beginning of the conversation. As I demonstrate in From Slave Cabins to the White House, Mrs. Obama’s hair choices did a lot of (unspoken) work not only in navigating white hostility, including comparisons to men and monkeys, but also in actively affirming Black women. The full meaning and complexity will remain unspoken, but Mrs. Obama offered a hint when interacting with Robinson and Williams: “There’s a whole other life to Black hair, Black wardrobe in the public eye.”
Please notice that hair is on par with wardrobe here. So, minimizing decisions about how to wear her hair had been deliberate, as deliberate as Keckley’s single paragraph about her son’s death. Most people failed to notice, but I could feel the pride emanating from the ancestral realm as Michelle Obama’s forerunner Elizabeth Keckley nodded in approval. And that’s to say nothing of the joy in this realm as Mrs. Obama’s friend Beyoncé did, too.
Student travelers take themselves out of one story and place themselves in another, one in which they have little control. With expectations based on their race, gender, and class replaced, they may find freedom in once-unbroachable relationships, or have to summon up the courage to push back against new strictures.
One of my favorite characters to write in my novel Where the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow was Nash, the kid who returns from study abroad and will not shut up about it. Nash is an Indian student studying abroad in Japan, a position that has several international resonances in the early 1900s when the novel is set. Though Nash is from India, he’s still a British colonial subject. Japan, meanwhile, has recently triumphed over Russia in the Russo-Japanese war, and foreign students in Japan are instrumental in the formation of a new pan-Asian solidarity that will not cohere for decades yet. Leela, the villain-protagonist, faithfully read and responded to his letters while he was in Japan, but after he returns, she wants him to go back to being who he was. Leela wants their anti-colonial agitation to be grounded in Indian—and to her mind, Hindu—symbolism; Nash has her attention, but like many of the student travelers on this list, not quite the wherewithal to articulate what he’s learned from where he’s been until it’s much too late.
With study abroad yet another casualty of 2020, and with all of us perhaps in need of a story in which someone takes on disorientation and survives, these novels offer glimpses into student travelers’ attempts to make sense of where they are, and who they have become.
Paradise of the Blindby Dương Thu Hương, translated by Nina McPherson & Phan Huy Đường
This novel—possibly the most stunningly lyrical I’ve ever read—has been banned in Vietnam for its denouncement of the post-war Vietnamese government, but the story’s present takes place in the USSR. Hang, who’s been forced to leave college and go abroad to make money for her family, struggles to make sense of what she owes her family, who themselves have as many different valuations of what she owes as they do political opinions. Only in her interactions with The Bohemian, a boy she’d had chemistry with back home who’s now a student in Moscow, does she get a respite from responsibility.
Days of Longing by Nirmal Verma, translated by Krishna Baldev Vaid
An Indian student in 1960s Prague, wandering and drinking his way through a Czech winter, serves as a translator for a slightly older Austrian woman and falls in love. He doesn’t think of himself as an immigrant, and so his loneliness, and that of his fellow stranded international student friends, feels both unanchored and quite precisely tethered to being on the edge of adulthood.
The German Room by Carla Maliandi, translated by Frances Riddle
A middle-aged Argentinian woman blows up her life to return to her natal city of Heidelberg, Germany where she pretends to be a student in order to secure cheap housing in the student dorms. Divested of her mobile phone and laptop (which I loved, as someone else who left their laptop at home), she forces herself to drift. Her dormmate’s determination to draw her into friendship via karaoke runs a sly, sad line through her muddled self-sabotage.
Poultry farmer Nonso’s desire to become an international student is real—he wants to achieve a European sheen to make him worthy of his rich beloved, Ndali—but when he finds out he’s been scammed when he leaves Nigeria for university in Northern Cyprus (a country that doesn’t officially exist). A transcreated Odyssey, Nonso strives to get himself home before Ndali stops waiting. Narrated by a guardian spirit, it’s a dense book in the best way, tracing a tale of someone with a great deal of knowledge—not only of poultry but also of Igbo cosmology—immediately rendered useless.
In this novel by Sarah Moss, British literature student Nina joins a group of archeologists on a trip to Greenland. While Nina tries to ascertain whether the dig is haunted or whether she’s simply unable to bear its realities, the group learns that a virus that was just a blip on the news radar when they left has become a global pandemic, and they may be student travelers forever.
Lintang’s father was exiled from Indonesia during Suharto’s reign and he made a comfortable life for himself in France. Leaving the Sorbonne, Lintang returns to Indonesia to understand her roots just in time for the 1998 student protests leading to Suharto’s resignation.
In fellow American-in-Norway Emily Robbins’ debut, Bea is an American studying in Syria just before the unrest. From her outsiders’ perspective, she is perfectly placed to witness the romance between her host family’s migrant worker maid, Nisrine, and a local policeman, Adel. Bea travels the world only to spend most of her time inside the walls of her host family’s home—a rare, realistic depiction that allows the quiet relationships she forges with them to shine.
“I am no Othello. Othello was a lie.” In this postcolonial classic, a man returns to his Sudanese village from his studies in England only to meet Mustafa Sa’eed, who has also studied abroad and can recite English poetry to prove it. Mustafa, however, is overtaken by his bitterness about that time in his life, particularly about his relationships with fetishizing white women. After Mustafa’s death—possibly suicide—the narrator must grapple with his own relationship to his time abroad and his changed identity.
Morgan Jerkins’s debut collection of essays, This Will Be My Undoing, shot directly to the NYT bestseller list, gaining wide acclaim for its visceral and vulnerable personal explorations.
Her second book, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots, includes more and deeper questions about her familial origins. The book follows Jerkins as she travels across the South and to the West Coast, following a migration trail that extends to various generations in her family line. Jerkins’s trek across rural lands, low country, sundown towns, and retained plantations brings readers in close proximity to how generational trauma is never forgotten but often unknown or erased. She witnesses this instantly in tours and seeks to eschew the colonized narrative that reduces Black people to mere snippets of a larger history that built not only residential communities, but a nation. Through the spaces visited or not yet seen, the diaspora’s generational footprint remains as does the evidence, in Jerkins’ words, of much theft.
I had a chance to talk with Jerkins about her new book, reflecting on her pursuits as an author and reporter, as well as the tender and analytical ways she sought to not only reclaim her roots but highlight the omissions of Black history, and the importance to continually reclaim our stories.
Jennifer Baker: It’s an interesting parallel to go from your first book that was kind of isolated in a way at the level of personal introspection. Wandering in Strange Lands is about traveling and unraveling more of your ancestry, learning so much more about roots and trauma. That segue is different in the ways you tackle exploration.
Morgan Jerkins: This one is so granular in terms of my experience. It was at certain times claustrophobic depending on who you ask. And I remember when my [first] book came out my father was hurt because I didn’t talk about him as much as my mother. And I didn’t have the courage to say to him at the time, “I don’t know how.” Because so much of his lineage, his family history was a mystery to me. And I knew that I wasn’t ready yet. I wanted my second book to be an exploration of not just myself, but my family history, and my stake in this country as a Black American connecting to other Black American communities.
When the pandemic was going I was doing everything online to not lose my connection with people of the diaspora. Whether it’s about asking Black people about their cultural traditions, whether asking about their ancestors’ names. I was trying so hard to not forget that, yes, you do have a book coming out, but to also know our people have endured far worse and that we are super connected in spite of time and distance and other types of systemic forces. I think this is coming at a prescient time. Between This Is My Undoing to Wandering in Strange Lands, I’ve grown so much. I’ve matured a lot. Not just as a writer but as a person, and I really wanted that to be reflected in this book.
JB: I want to tap into that because you’re a very generous person as well as a generous writer. And there’s a vulnerability that is required in art that you dug into immediately with your first book and do again in this book. When you say you’ve grown as a writer, is it fair to ask if that fear goes away of what you’re tapping into? Was there a bit more fearlessness?
I realized that if I tried to silence myself after what my ancestors have gone through, what’s the point in me even writing a book in the first place?
MJ: My book went through many different drafts, as most books do. But one of the reasons why Wandering in Strange Lands went through many different drafts is because I felt like psychologically and emotionally I was slapped shut like a Venus fly trap. And the reason was I was so vulnerable from my first book. I saw the praise from it and I saw the backlash from it and a part of me didn’t want to go there again. I thought it was just easier to just go to these communities and travel as a distant observer. And I realized that I couldn’t do that. Zora Neale Hurston already taught us that, but also because I’m a Black American too. How could I write about the movement of African Americans in this country and be distant? My editors were constantly pushing me “you have to put yourself out there.” And I was scared because, as you know, I’m active online just like I am active offline. And I know what happens when you are vulnerable, when you’re not being taken in good faith. When your writing is taken out of context. And I was afraid. But I realized that if I tried to silence myself after what my ancestors have gone through, what’s the point in me even writing a book in the first place? What’s the point? And so, vulnerability was required. It was required for me to say “Guess what? I don’t know everything about my family’s history.” This is why I’m traveling. It was vulnerable for me to say, “Hey, these historical facts about my family kind of makes me feel a type of way” because this is what I thought my Blackness was until I traveled. I just had to do it. And I had to bring the reader in. Because just like the reader I’m traveling to places they’ve never been to and I wanted it to be informative at the same time be intimate. Because there were so many moments, quiet moments.
To answer your second question, the part about the fearlessness, to this day I’m still emotionally processing the places I went to. The rural places I went to. The sundown towns I crossed by myself with no weapon on me, just my recorder, my phone, and my purse. And I think about those moments and I’m like, “How in the hell did I do that?” Because I had a deadline, I had a goal to reach. In many of these places people were risking their lives to show me certain parts of their history, to show me certain lands that were robbed from them. They risked their lives to let an outsider come into their community that way. The least I could do was start typing, start recording, start saving it.
JB: You’re saying you were walking in these similar pathways of our ancestors, you even include the documentation and the photos. I think a lot about the presumption of knowing that struggle even now as observers.
Black people are complicated. We’re human. And we make certain choices because we had to survive.
MJ: Here’s the thing that I want people to understand: When you say Black people are not monolith, do you know what that means? That means the same thing for the living as it does the dead. What I wanted to demonstrate with this book is that we cannot flatten the interiorities of our ancestors even if we knew what they looked like, knew where they were born, knew they were married and had children. We do not know them. And it’s okay to not know them that intimately. It’s okay to be uncomfortable when you find out certain things because guess what? Black people are complicated. We’re human. And we make certain choices based on the time and space that we’re in and because we had to survive. That’s why I sometimes take issue when people say, “I’m not my ancestors.” And they don’t say as a way to be like, “Oh we’re different” obviously we’re different. But your ancestors had to survive for us to be here. And whatever way they had to survive is their business but they did survive. And it needs to be documented and written about in that way of not just complication, but also delicacy at the same time. That’s what I believe. That’s what I always try to carry with me as I’m doing this type of research.
JB: I think about a lot of that because one of the moments that sticks out to me the most is when you were on the tour in Natchitoches in Louisiana, with Tracey. And you’re looking at Tracey to how she is reacting to what’s being said about her ancestors who helped build a community that’s now overrun.
MJ: This book is the first time I’ve been to a plantation before. So prior to me traveling with Tracey in Louisiana I’ve been to rice plantations in the low country. As a writer I can’t even discuss the magnitude of actually being in these places.
JB: That are still left to look as they were.
MJ: Yeah! But I’m so thankful when I went to the low country in Georgia and then I went to Louisiana. I was with two women, they’re descendants of people who worked that plantation and those who owned. And with regards to Tracey it took on a different turn. Imagine you go to a plantation that your family owned and you hear somebody tell the story and your family is just a footnote. What does this do to you? This woman had lived in this community her entire life and she purposely never went there. Her family said don’t go there because it’s not for us. So I went to this tour and there is this rift between official tours/official “narratives” and what Black people say, oral history, there’s this rift there. And it isn’t always because they’re cannibalizing our stories. It’s also because we don’t want to be part of their exoticism. We don’t want to be part of their show. And we don’t want to be part of that whole tourism thing. And so it was intense.
JB: And you don’t necessarily want to give them that intel either?
MJ: Nope. And it felt weird because I’m like this community isn’t that big. Her family has been here for hundreds of years! How does the tour guide not even know who she was? It was surprising to me. And I was balancing it in real time, balancing it in terms of understanding officially what was going on and understanding what I was hearing in her parents’ home and they’re not there. It’s like these different prisms of knowledge when it comes to Black history that don’t always reconcile with each other. As a writer I had to tell myself it’s okay there’s no reconciliation. It’s not your fault. It’s not a flaw of yours. It’s because of the powers that be. It’s because of the theft that has happened before you were even born. And I had to be mindful of what I was showing the readers what was going on, there was this collision course. And that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s going to be peace at the end.
JB: And it all relates to the same thing we continually talk about. In this sense I’ll say “white” and colonial like the occupants who become the owners. And the erasure of Black voices, which is a cycle that continues and continues.
The thing I wanted to convey is that we have been robbed so much.
MJ: Right. And that’s the thing about this book is that, what I like about it and what I hope readers will get from it is we’re in a cycle. It’s continuing to happen because we are not addressing the issues. Any time Black people try to exert their self autonomy, whether it’s self-governed towns, whether it was the histories that they had, whether it was their own identities, whether it was their land, it was taken from them. Any time we exert movement to try to find a different type of freedom there has always been something to try to curtail it. This is why we have these protests. This is why we have this Black rage that keeps happening because our ancestors fought for better, they fled for better. And I think that that is the thing I just wanted to convey is that we have been robbed so much. It wasn’t just because of the transatlantic slave trade with the loss of our names and our tribes and the ways we did our hair on american soil. Even to this day, we are being robbed. And there are still people in those communities they are seeing it in the present. And that’s something I want people to notice. It’s not just continual Black rage, continual racial terrorism. It’s continual robbery and theft. And so much is at stake. Even if we don’t know these Black people. That’s why I trailed them, even if I didn’t know you so much of what I know about Black people is because of that robbery. It is because of that narrative that is not in this community’s hands. So how do we reclaim that?
What I hope this book is, because it can’t be the end all be all, but there’s some kind of documentation there that lets black people that the oral history you heard as a kid, they can’t all be lies. There has to be a root there. And that root connection is to somebody else, some place else.
JB: You just tapped into something else I was thinking about. I believe books are necessary and at the same time I wonder about the damage that books have done. What books like Wandering in Strange Lands are trying to make us do a really firm compare-contrast. Do you think when we read books and absorb their content that there’s a level of discussion that unpacks this in a way that really needs to be unpacked?
MJ: I notice this is kind of tangential with the blackface [discussion] that is going on right now. Everyone wants to get rid of the blackface episodes [in which white actors portray Black characters]. And I think “no, we need to keep them and contextualize them and understand why these decisions were made in the first place.” So when I think of Wandering, I don’t necessarily think of it as an overthrow of the stuff that came before, even if they were erroneous. I want to know why these things were asserted in the first place. Who benefited from them? Who had the short end of the stick, for lack of a better phrase? I think there needs to be an unpacking of the books that have done harm and the books that contextualize and challenge what’s going on. Who gave this person the right to write this book? Who was affected by it? I don’t think we should necessarily discard it because that’s our legacy. They still have to remain. We still have to discuss them.
One Sunday in the spring of 1969, James Forman walked into the sanctuary of Riverside Church in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, barreled his way to the pulpit, commandeered the microphone, and before many wide-eyed and captive congregants, declared:
Underneath all of this exploitation, the racism of this country has produced a psychological effect upon us that we are beginning to shake off. We are no longer afraid to demand our full rights as a people of this decadent society.
Forman chose Riverside Church for the delivery of his address—The Black Manifesto—because of Riverside’s association with the Rockefeller family and for its Morningside Heights location. In his view, the church embodied both types of white American capitalist oppression: generational wealth, in the form of the Rockefellers, and elitist white enclaves within the city.
Columbia University’s transparency project focusing on its ties to American chattel slavery says of Morningside Heights: “[The university’s] move to its current campus at the turn of the 20th Century served to preserve the area’s elite, white, Episcopalian character and keep out people of other ethno-racial or religious backgrounds.”
That morning in his address at the Riverside Church, Forman accused all white Christian churches and synagogues “sustained by the military might of the colonizers” of complicity in establishing and maintaining America’s racist constructs. He demanded $500 million, about $3.6 billion today, “due us as people who have been exploited and degraded, brutalized, killed and persecuted.”
We can imagine the churchgoers in sticker shock, their nervousness and fearful clutching of purses.
In a Sunday service like no other, Forman called for $200 million in land grants, $10 million for technical training, $20 million for black businesses in America and Africa, and funding for a black university in the South. He had counted the cost of America’s comfort, but he made clear “…the demands we make are small.”
He said “an indigenous people violently captured, taken from home, and bound to political servitude by the military machinery and the Christian church working hand in hand … can legitimately demand this from the church power structure…” and even more from the U.S. government. We can imagine the churchgoers in sticker shock, their nervousness and fearful clutching of purses—their urge to stand up and stomp out of the sanctuary, their sheer terror at the idea of making a move, their outrage as he went on, banging through threats and demands.
But The Black Manifesto was about more than money. It also required certain action from white people. A certain posture, too:
We call upon all white Christians and Jews to practice patience, tolerance, understanding, and nonviolence as they have encouraged, advised, and demanded that we as black people should do throughout our entire enforced slavery in the United States. … By taking such actions, white Americans will demonstrate concretely that they are willing to fight the white skin privilege and the white supremacy and racism which has forced us as black people to make these demands.
Forman, a Chicagoan by birth, had always been an impassioned intellectual. He lived with his grandmother in Mississippi as a child. Excelling in school, he matriculated to universities in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York, but along the way, he suffered a brutal and traumatic encounter with police that would see him institutionalized, shaping his remaining years and his life’s work. Of that time, he wrote in his autobiography The Making of Black Revolutionaries: “I will always remember the Los Angeles police […] They are guilty of cruel and inhuman treatment, physical and mental torture.”
As a staff writer for the Chicago Defender, one of the most important black news publications of the day, Forman developed a burgeoning consciousness that fueled an urgency to achieve black civil rights.
In his executive leadership role at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, his aim was to “[work] full-time against the whole value system of this country,” wrote Julian Bond, who co-founded the organization in 1960. Forman’s platform was enlarged and elevated through that commitment, and it was largely by his influence, Bond said, that SNCC had a significant role in the 1963 March on Washington. Forman helped draft the speech delivered at the march by SNCC’s then-chairman, the recently departed Congressman John Lewis. Through his involvement with other black advocacy groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Black Panther Party, Forman was further validated in circles of black civil rights activists and advocates.
But he trained and led black youth in a radical style of protest actions, sometimes denigrating King’s approach as something near toothless by comparison. “People had become too militant for the government’s liking and Dr. King’s image,” he wrote. “The mighty leader had proven to have feet of clay.”
Forman had run out of patience with the way things were. He was full of fire.
To the dismay of affiliated organizations, Forman garnered respect for strong-arm ideas that would become his hallmark. “Accumulating experiences with Southern ‘law and order,’” he wrote, “were turning me into a full-fledged revolutionary.”
Following the assassinations of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, and then Martin Luther King, Jr., who had preached at Riverside on several occasions throughout the ‘60s and with whom Forman had marched, there was a sense among blacks in America that the movement for black civil rights had died with those leaders.
Later that summer, following the Riverside Church takeover, Murray Kempton wrote a piece about the Manifesto for The New York Review of Books, in which he gave voice to a painful truth about the crusade and the crusaders for black civil rights. “The existence of the black revolutionary, of course, is only too often the business of making do between the time he is noticed and the time he is shot,” Kempton wrote.
In spite of this, Forman felt, the time for accommodating open hatred with careful, unoffending words, all to realize no meaningful change—that time was over. He was a student of philosophers and revolutionary theorists like Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, and others whose writings expound on the interdependence of race and class as a tool of the State. “There can be no separation of the problems of racism from the powers of our economic, political, and cultural degradation,” he wrote. “For it is the power of the United States Government, this racist, imperialistic government, that is choking the life of all people around the world.”
Forman had run out of patience with the way things were. He was full of fire and, under a political charge to equip and lead black people through the racial terrorism of the American landscape, he wrote The Black Manifesto.
Forman’s address brought a response from the Episcopal Church, with promises of actions and some funding, but not without cost. Ironically, his comportment in white society stoked fears and dissent among some in black communities.
“Forman’s … function is kicking down doors to empty rooms,” Murray wrote. A curiously reductive assessment when considering Forman’s life of leadership in black civil rights, the self-actualization and empowerment stirred in us through his work; and the timeless philosophical and socioeconomic applications of the Manifesto.
Forman wrote the Manifesto while attending the National Black Economic Development Conference at Wayne State University in Detroit, the month before his address. Detroit is significant as the birthplace of the Manifesto. It was one of the last stops along the Underground Railroad for slaves crossing the Detroit River into Canada. In the antebellum, members of The Order of Emancipation, which included some whites, helped to make the town a hub of abolition.
Then as now, the Manifesto spoke to a social contract that had long been trampled underfoot.
Then as now, the Manifesto spoke to a social contract that had long been trampled underfoot. It challenged systems and constructs designed to make black progress unlikely, to harm black people, and worse. It examined white allyship and looked for evidence of those things white people say they believe about establishing, upholding, protecting, and meeting standards of conduct in the world, and its resources that we all share.“We shall liberate all the people in the United States…” reads the introduction. “All the parties on the left who consider themselves revolutionary will say that blacks are the Vanguard.”
Ironically, it’s by the unchanged nature, incomprehensible greed, and barbarism of whiteness that Forman’s Manifesto remains critically applicable to black life in America, and has even become anthemic. Fundamentally, The Black Manifesto is about democratic socialism. It’s about leading with those principles that are heartfelt, even inherent, to most of us. Boiled down, it’s a promise of accountability to one another, and accountability is retributive, restorative, and reparative.
Today, in one of the most arresting moments of our time, in the pretense of a flat society where white people “don’t see color,” where“we’re better than this,” where “we’re all in this together,” James Forman’s vision cast so long ago still suffers bullets and billy clubs and knees to the neck. Today, every Black person you know is buckling under the crippling weight of yet another hashtag. Today, the unmet demands of The Black Manifesto echo in that mocking, deafening silence of so many yesterdays, and it still reads shamefully fresh.
Forman demanded $10 million to establish a black publishing and printing industry, “an alternative to the white-dominated and controlled printing field.” More than half a century later, American media continues to prove incredibly resistant to black representation. Just last year, The New York Times, widely considered the gold standard in American journalism, showed a blinding 76% white leadership compared to just 6% black, and only 9% of the staff was black according to its inaptly-named Diversity and Inclusion Report.
The Manifesto is symbolic of America’s accruing and compounding indebtedness to black people.
And in his call for $20 million “to establish a National Black Labor Strike and Defense Fund … for the protection of black workers and their families who are fighting racist working conditions in this country,” Forman speaks directly to today’s capitalistic scheme targeting the mostly black and brown, often blue collar, under-insured, and low-wage earning “essential worker.”
The Manifesto is symbolic of America’s accruing and compounding indebtedness to black people, a stolen people, who built the nation and its economy through generations of labor, whose blood is in the soil.
While Forman’s techniques weren’t wholly adopted or even appreciated by the NAACP and other black advocacy organizations, his approach to reparations for African chattel slavery and its many resulting devastations were appropriate for that time and for this one. James Forman, a leader and a comrade in the fight for black humanity, succumbed to cancer in 2005 at the age of 76. But the Manifesto is as vital a roadmap in our marches and protests today as the day it was first delivered. We, black people in America, remain compelled by the power and purpose of The Black Manifesto, and we continue to demand our full rights as a people of this decadent society.
Raven Leilani’s debut novel, Luster confronts what it means to be hungry and desperate as a Black artist. The novel is about Edie, a 20-something Black woman who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Edie struggles with her low-salary publishing job, tries to make art despite it, and ends up getting fired because of her many sexcapades with colleagues. As she tries to continue surviving, she gets involved with a white man in an open marriage, and in turn, builds an allyship with his white wife and adopted Black daughter.
Leilani skillfully explores grief, desire, and anger using both humor and honesty. She touches on how difficult it is to believe in yourself, in your art, in your decisions.
I got to chat with Leilani about the similarities between desperation and desire and how certain systems hinder Black women.
Arriel Vinson: At the beginning of Luster, the protagonist Edie is concerned with being uncomplicated and accepted by the married man, Eric, she’s dating. Tell me more about her urge to be accepted.
Raven Leilani: I think it’s more her resignation to the performance demanded of her even in these personal spheres. Edie is a young Black woman, and she is studious in the way all Black people have to be to survive. So she is often calculating, presenting the face most suited to her environment, and with Eric, it is no different, and perhaps worse, since she is so invested in how he sees her. It makes it so that she is distorted, even to herself, and her dialogue about this, about wanting to be uncomplicated, is rooted partly in the rage she feels about this constraint. She makes a lot of mistakes and she is constantly wrong, but she’s shrewd in the way she understands that this relationship is unbalanced and transactional, operating under the expectation that she be a sexy, unserious detour, which she knows she is not.
AV: Edie is a dead broke, 20-something Black woman in Bushwick, and even more broke compared to Eric. We don’t often see these types of characters. Why was it important to showcase this?
RL: It was important to me to show characters at work, characters needing money. It always feels relevant to see how a character is meeting, or not meeting, those fundamental needs. In my life and the lives of so many people I know, this is often the most relevant question, and writing frankly about Edie’s artistic journey also meant grappling with this economic dimension. There are a number of barriers that hamper her ability to make art—Edie herself is one of them, she self-sabotages frequently—but there are also structural impediments that have great bearing on that access, and I wanted to speak to that, the way the question of survival defers dreams, and even deadens you as you strive to meet those demands.
AV: Throughout the novel, Edie has a way of being both full of desire and desperation, which she even recognizes sometimes. Why is she often oscillating between the two?
I wanted to speak to the way the question of survival defers dreams and even deadens you as you strive to meet those demands.
RL: I think desire and desperation are inextricable. When I started writing this book, I felt moved to depict a woman who yearns deeply and openly. A Black girl who is wanton and moved along by her id, who has the freedom to be that. There is a derangement to desire, a violence, and that animates many of Edie’s choices, which are often responses to the desire she has had to sublimate. That sublimation breeds desperation.
AV: In Luster, she struggles with her art—whether it be avoiding painting, or someone else telling her she’s not good. But she begins to create once she moves in with the married couple, arguably an equally difficult living situation as her last. Tell me more about this.
RL: Edie often looks to men to affirm her artistry and seriousness, and naturally she is disappointed. There is also the fact of her trying to make art while she barely has enough money to eat or pay rent, and it is nearly impossible to produce anything when most of your bandwidth is spent trying to live. A couple things change when she moves in with Eric and Rebecca, one being that she is less dogged by these questions of survival, though she understands the arrangement is temporary. Another thing that changes is she meets two women, Rebecca and Akila, who in different ways relieve her isolation, introduce a different rigor to her work, and allow her to show her true face. It makes it so that she isn’t working less from a place of frenzy and distortion and can be more generative.
AV: Throughout the novel, Edie remembers and grieves her mother, sometimes also reflecting on her relationship with her father. How do her familial relationships relate to her hunger, desperation, and ideals about love?
RL: I wanted to show how Edie was made. She absolutely is a hungry, desperate person, and her choices are informed by the pressure of her environment, but also by her formative years. I didn’t think it would be enough just to present a catalogue of dysfunction. I think that orients the reader to make judgements rather than consider the choices characters make within their context. Or at least it would have felt like I was writing inhumanely, making the dysfunction a punchline rather than a response to a history. Both of her parents have complicated relationships to feeling—her mother is a recovered addict, her father is a veteran who has been deadened by war and by his country. If you understand that, you understand why Edie seeks, and perhaps why she often seeks the wrong things.
AV: As Edie thinks about her mother, she analyzes her body—bringing up the history of her/her mother’s addictions and connections to diets, her mother being “bare and grotesque” in photos (which also seems to be a commentary on herself). Tell me about the decision to weave in these thoughts.
When I wanted to depict a Black girl who is wanton and moved along by her id, who has the freedom to be that.
RL: Within those scenes of her mother is a precedent of a Black woman who is begging to be helped. It is a precedent that is deeply formative and that is replicated in Edie’s own life. On the body, I did want to briefly touch on how those disordered attitudes are developed and perpetuated. All the ways the body is made unruly and subjected to our bids to assert control. Edie and her mother take different routes to this end. Edie also looks this closely at her mother because she is a burgeoning artist, and so her observations are more merciless, in the service of getting it down in paint. But the image of her mother is elusive, because her mother is, like Edie will be one day, not present enough to depict.
AV: Throughout Luster, Edie’s desire for violence—or the thrill violence gives her—is palpable. There are times she wants to be hit, and also identifies love as “a violence” later on. Why is violence significant in this novel?
RL: Edie wants to feel and be witnessed, and she gravitates to the most extreme affirmations of this want. I tried to be careful here as much as I tried to be free. I worried about diminishing the terror and inevitability of violence I and most women I know live with, and of course I worried that this all might be deeply unfeminist, to depict a woman welcoming this kind of violence. But it felt most important that I make room for a Black woman to assert agency without judgement or stigma, to make room for a human portrait, which allows for contradiction. In this respect, she’s not a victim. She is complicit in her own ego death, leaning into it, finding relief in obliteration, and in this small way seizing control. I was less interested in guiding my reader to moral conclusions, and more interested in showing my characters grappling with how to tend to their needs.
AV: The theme of being othered is prominent throughout Luster. Edie is almost an ally to Eric’s wife and Black child but also ignored by him at times. Tell me about how being othered—and dealing with it —is a means for Edie’s survival.
RL: It is both that Edie is subject to and complicit in choosing inadequate witnesses, people who she has to hide from, who cannot see her. This kind of invisibility can be great for an artist, or at least one whose art is predicated on observation, but it is isolating, and detrimental to her survival. It isn’t really until she is forced out of hiding, beginning to articulate to others what we’ve been seeing in her mind, that she begins to flourish.
A beam shoots out of my little sister’s right eye and won’t stop. It’s because during a meteor shower, the two of us wished on a shooting star to be cool. I called an ambulance, but the doctor said nothing could be done. With no other choice, I just hold my hand over her eye. For whatever reason, my hand is the only thing that can block the beam. We can’t be apart. When we got home from the hospital, we practiced walking and other daily-life things.
Unlike me, my sister has a lot of friends. They all come over after work late at night. My sister and I quit our jobs the day after the meteor shower. We went together to each other’s offices. When we said, “I’m her big sister,” or, “I’m her little sister,” our bosses welcomed us, but things soon grew awkward. Why was the other sister at this sister’s work, and why was the older one holding her hand over the younger one’s right eye?
“It shoots a beam.” My sister told the truth. My boss stared blankly at us, while her boss laughed, but both were angry in the end, so we thought that we’d like to burn their lockers with the beam sometime.
My sister’s friends know about the beam, so they’ll be like, “Hey, hey, can you do the thing?” I say, “Okay, okay,” and move my hand slightly away from her eye. Just the tiniest bit. And then a red light extends from my sister’s eye to my palm like rubber. Five centimeters, that’s as far as I can go, the farthest from my sister’s eye I can take my hand. Inside those five centimeters, the red light expands like it’s exploding and makes the whole room glow. “Whoooaa,” say her friends. They pull out their phones and snap a zillion pictures, but the light is too bright for anything to show up.
After her friends go home, my sister shakes. She breathes hard and retches. Even that five centimeters puts a lot of stress on her system. She does her best. She hopes the fact that a beam shoots out of her eye will just be taken as a sort of joke.
“Someday I hope I can just fire this beam,” she says. Someday we want to climb a mountain. My sister will face straight up into the darkness, and I’ll remove my hand completely. The red beam will climb into the sky and gouge through the clouds.
“Is it reaching outer space?”
“Yes, people light years away can see it.”
The light of her eye is so bright, I won’t be able to see her face, but I would hope she’d be smiling. After we’d done that for a little while, I would cover her eye with my palm, but the light wouldn’t disappear. Tens, hundreds, hundreds of millions of light years away, people would be able to see my sister’s light. I hope they’ll smile with us.
When the poet Jorie Graham heard Matthew Aucoin, then her student, intended to adapt James Merrill’s epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover into an opera, she told him that Merrill would haunt him the rest of his life. The 1982 work is Merrill’s unaccountable masterpiece, a 17,000-line poem of the afterlife, purportedly based on 20 years of nights spent transcribing messages from the dead. How Merrill, a poet whose ambitions had seemed to lie in technical mastery of meter and form, produced this bizarre, magnificent, supernatural work is one of American literature’s best mysteries.
Despite the warning, Aucoin mounted From Sandover with a group of fellow undergrads in the Horner Room at Harvard’s Agassiz Theater, a ballroom of dark wood moldings and pilasters, hanging chandeliers, and French doors. In the opera, Jim Merrill and his partner, David Jackson (“JM” and “DJ”) sing seated around the Ouija board; the spirits of their freshly dead friends, the poet W.H. Auden and Greek socialite Maria Mitsotáki, are staged above them, in a clerestory balcony space, and a supertitles screen displays messages that JM and DJ work out on the Ouija board. “It may have been closer to theater of the absurd than I’d intended,” Aucoin admits. “I’m quite sure the audience had no clue what the fuck was going on.”
To be fair, that’s most people’s reaction to the poem. Over the course of Sandover’s three volumes and coda, JM and DJ are visited at the Ouija board by a flamboyant first-century Greek Jew named Ephraim; poets, pharaohs, and opera singers; four zesty archangels; a sweet, armless centaur from Atlantis; and bat-like demons of atomic radiation, one of whom turns into a peacock.
I’m quite sure the audience had no clue what the fuck was going on.
Then there are the gaudy, acrobatic puns, which can require multiple languages and maybe an open Wikipedia tab to untangle. “ST PETER’S QUAIS JINGLE AND BLAZE / WITH HER UNMELTING SNOWFLAKE POLONAISE”—here, the shade of JM’s friend Robert Morse, a composer, is speaking about winter in St. Petersburg’s harbor, but punning on Saint Peter’s keys to Heaven. “Who made that pretty couplet?” JM asks. “SHH IT BWOKE OFF”—Robert has a weird habit of baby speak—“WHEN TINY BOB WEACHED OUT TO TOUCH NABOKOV.”
Aucoin sums up the experience of adapting Sandover: “I learned a lot about what cannot be an opera.”
Since then, Aucoin has learned a thing or two about what does work. His third full opera, Eurydice, premiered at the L.A. Opera this February; it was the last opera I saw before the COVID-19 pandemic suspended live performances. Eurydice is a collaboration between three MacArthur Fellows—Aucoin, playwright Sarah Ruhl, and director Mary Zimmerman—and heads to the Metropolitan Opera in 2021, assuming. The libretto, which Ruhl wrote from her acclaimed play, adapts the same Orpheus myth familiar to the operatic repertory, but focuses on Eurydice in the underworld as she reunites with the shade of her father.
Aucoin and I talk across time zones, I quarantined in San Diego, he in a farmhouse in Vermont. The wireless there is too slow for Zoom; we talk by phone, with a third-party voice-recording app blooping in the background, our own feckless sonic ghost.
Theodore McCombs: Both The Changing Light at Sandover and Eurydice take place not just in the afterlife, but in a kind of transitional afterlife space: not yet in deep eternity, but touching life and death at once. Do you feel an attraction to those spaces, musically?
Matthew Aucoin: I guess it did attract me from the get-go. One thing Sandover has in common with Eurydice is that this liminal space allows people to say things to each other they could never say in “real” life. Merrill said something to this effect in an interview about Sandover, that sometimes, with your parents, say, it’s the easiest thing in the world to pick up the phone, but there can still be so much emotional distance, and baggage, and complexity that comes with the relationships you have while you’re alive. And then somehow, talking to beloved friends through the Ouija board, he felt like he was able to say things he couldn’t have said when they were alive. And the same thing happens in Eurydice. Sarah has said she wrote the play in order to have more conversations with her father, who died when she was in college. And the things Eurydice and the Father are able to say to each other because they are in the underworld are so beautiful.
Because music makes everything sound like dream-speech anyway, why not allow the setting to be a dreamlike one?
Music is a dream language: it follows dream logic. It doesn’t follow the logic of everyday speech, and operas that act as if they were playsrun the risk of being unintentionally funny. Pretending you can do that sort of standard domestic drama and have it feel as if everyone were speaking, it’s not going to happen. So, because music makes everything sound like dream-speech anyway, why not allow the setting to be a dreamlike one? It tends to feel truer to me. It’s a way of saying the things that you can’t say in real life. And that feels like music to me, too.
TM: Where did you first encounter Merrill? What drew you to his work?
MA: I encountered Merrill in Jorie Graham’s poetry workshop—both Merrill and his polar opposite, John Ashbery, and I fell in love with both of them. It struck me as curious that there was this sense that Ashbery was going into uncharted waters and Merrill was working within familiar metrical structures, playing with rhyme, being kind of effete and aesthetically backwards. But both poets were undertaking these extraordinary experiments.
With Merrill, it’s the magical quality that language has of making sense of its own accord. The sound of a word, even the shapes of letters seem to take on these uncanny meanings. As a musician, I love that: for Merrill, language has a kind of inherent meaningfulness, which places it very close to music for me. And also his playfulness and the range of tones and the psychotic ambition of writing Sandover made me think, who is this crazy motherfucker that he would write these cute little gay lyrics, and then all of a sudden he’s writing this cosmic sci-fi poetic drama. It’s the most bonkers—
TM: Which is also somehow cute and gay at the same time.
MA: It is also very cute and extremely gay. Yes. Those contradictions really attracted me.
It is also very cute and extremely gay. Yes.
TM: Do you see something like the opposition of Merrill and Ashbery in contemporary music, between the schools of, say, the process music of Philip Glass and Michael Nyman and the more—I don’t even know what you’d call it, is it an atonal school?
MA: Sure. In the latter half of the 20th century, I can think of three kind of obvious—and in a way, false—categories. One being, as you said, process music or minimalism; another being an atonal high modernism post-Arnold Schoenberg; and a more nostalgic neo-romanticism.
TM: When I listen to your music, it sounds like you’re moving in and out of those schools at will, pretty much.
MA: Pretty much. Yeah, I’m a gatherer. If you’re writing an opera, you realize quickly you need as many tools as possible, because you’re creating a whole world.
TM: And Merrill does that too, doesn’t he? He’s agile in moving in and out of his formal conventions. In Sandover, the meters appear and disappear at seeming random; free verse stumbles into couplets, and then sort of extracts itself; the sections set in Italy are in Dante’s terza rima.
MA: Early on, Merrill is a brilliant student of every verse form in the English language, and he’s very happy to live within these gilded cages of metrical forms. And then slowly but surely, he starts testing things. It’s thrilling, because he has such technical mastery that when he starts to break things down, you trust him.
But in his last collection, A Scattering of Salts—which Merrill wrote when he was dying of AIDS—there’s where you see language disintegrate in a heartbreaking way, because he felt it was happening to him. He felt his body breaking down. And he was also uncannily aware of climate change, in a way that the vast majority of people would not become for another decade. This thing that’s happening to his body, the thing that’s happening to the planet, and the thing that’s happening to the language all cohere, so that the language has this kind of devastating wounded quality.
TM: You set several of those poems for your Carnegie Hall commission, Merrill Songs, for solo voice and piano, and there’s something of the language’s wounded quality in what the piano’s doing. You’ve also adapted—not for voice, but for piano and violin—the poetry of Paul Celan, whose later poems are almost completely opaque, purely sonic experiences. How do you approach that kind of text, that is something more and less than language?
MA: For a long time there’s been an association between “tonal music” as being stable or soothing, and “atonal” music being a kind of sonic manifestation of chaos. And I’m just not interested in tonality as stability, and I’m not interested in mere depiction of chaos and non-connection. I am interested in looking honestly at the structures of meaning that we can build, and also honestly looking at how fragile they are. Having the vulnerability to say: Yes, I care about this meaning something, and I’m going to try and say it to you as directly as possible. And then, following that all the way through and seeing the thing disintegrate.
I am interested in looking honestly at the structures of meaning that we can build, and also honestly looking at how fragile they are.
The last scene in Eurydice is the best example of this in what I’ve done so far, in that we get this solo scene for Eurydice, which is tender and vulnerable and lyrical. And then at the very end of the opera, we get four minutes of essentially, the river of forgetfulness, rushing. Nothing that we can hold on to in the music. It’s all been washed away.
I guess I have come to feel the aesthetic camps that existed in the second half of the 20th century were largely about saying music is this, music is that. And you end up denying so much. Maybe it’s a flaw of mine to want to have it both ways. But I want to be able to create something that’s sweet and lyrical and vulnerable and then a minute later to have it morph into total noise. It doesn’t feel like a contradiction to me.
TM: It feels like the world, right?
MA: It feels like the world.
TM: Do you find yourself returning to that fragility across compositions? Especially given the ongoing pandemic we’re in?
MA: You know, I think for a long time, human beings did not need to be reminded of the fragility of life. If you’ve ever wondered why music and art from certain periods seems fixated on depicting an ideal world, you have to remember that it was in juxtaposition to obvious extreme instability in human life. In the 20th century, that changed, or it did for those in the first world with access to life-saving, life-prolonging medicine. It became possible—and I think America is exhibit A, or at least was before March this year—it’s exhibit A of a culture that really tries to pretend death doesn’t exist and that it’s not among us. I think a lot of artists over the past half-century have felt called to make manifest the fragility or inevitability of loss that is still a part of life, because that loss was no longer super visible.
And it’s funny. I have no desire to make art that responds in a direct way to the pandemic we’re in. When I realized that, I also realized, oh, this is probably why, you know, Haydn didn’t feel the need to put the how terrible the pigsties at Esterházy smelled in the string quartets, because everybody knew you were surrounded by the smell of pig shit all the time. Music was something else. I guess it’s a long way of saying I have felt that giving voice to transience and instability has been important. But at this very moment, I don’t feel the desire to bang anybody over the head with the fragility of life.
At this very moment, I don’t feel the desire to bang anybody over the head with the fragility of life.
TM: I want to go back to what you said earlier about Merrill’s interest in words, as objects as themselves—I think you called it “their inherent meaningfulness”—and how that brings his poetry very close to music. Could you elaborate on that?
MA: I think the best example is Merrill’s poem “b o d y,” where he looks at the word “body” and imagines the “o” of the word passing across a stage: first peeking from stage right (as part of the “b”), then at center, then at stage left (as part of the “d”), where “b” and “d” are, conveniently, birth and death. And that “o,” could be an open mouth, singing on the stage of life. Outside of birth and death is the “y”—the why, “unanswered, knock[ing] at the stage door,” as Merrill puts it. I don’t think the architect of the word “body” way back when put all this in deliberately and said, “I hope someone notices this,” but it’s Merrill staring at a word until it yields up unintended meanings.
TM: Merrill’s puns, too, are all about those structure of words, right? They’re all investigations into connection within these lexicographical accidents. That—that is a pun. And the fact that he focuses so much on them seems such an interesting investment in looking for meaning in that aspect of language.
MA: One way that you could define music is “language without signification.” We would never say it doesn’t have meaning or meanings. It just doesn’t have signification—the notes and chords are not tied to things outside themselves. I mean, unless you’re Wagner, in which case you’re spending all your time building these chains to tie a particular chord to particular things. But that’s not much fun, right?
And that was something I was obsessed with, especially as a student: What is the border? If you start stripping language of signification, at what point does it become music? And is it possible for music to kind of crystallize into language? A composer like Janáček—he makes use of these speech rhythms and musical gestures that are so direct, they risk being crude, but they can be breathtakingly powerful. It feels to me like Janáček’s music is straining towards the condition of language. It’s a porous border.
If you start stripping language of signification, at what point does it become music? And is it possible for music to kind of crystallize into language?
TM: There’s this concept in scholasticism of the flatus vocis, the “vocal wind” which is all that’s left of a concept if you deny it meaning; if it’s just a word, just a sound. All opera is, obviously, vocal wind—
MA:(a swift laugh—barely an exhale—)
TM: —but there are also these 20th-century operas that use untranslated language, like the Sanskrit in Glass’s Satyagraha, where the signification is deliberately withheld from the audience. And it seems Merrill is interested in that remainder too.
MA: I would say that it has to do not just with opera, but with music on the most fundamental level. I think what Merrill does again and again is, he strips language of meaning in order to see what meanings emerge. And that, to me, is—there’s a faith in music there. There is a faith that the music of the words, that the sound of them, the feel of them will yield up something meaningful.
L.A. Opera, Eurydice Musical Sneak Peek: Orpheus Writes to Eurydice
In Eurydice, Aucoin doubles the role of Orpheus, so that his mortal nature is portrayed by a baritone, while his divine nature is sung by a countertenor. The baritone, a low, sturdy voice, is Orpheus’s body, his human significance. The countertenor is, in a way, his music: that something else, that something above, beyond, and after Orpheus. This staging emphasizes what makes Eurydice and Orpheus’s relationship so dissatisfying: there is a part of him Eurydice can never fully access. But when he enters the underworld, where his divine aspect can’t follow, she doesn’t recognize him. “Where’s his music?” Eurydice asks.
Perhaps this is the simplest explanation for Merrill’s transit from the metrical to the mystical in Sandover, from the corpus of letters to the spirits behind them: just a question, “Where is their music?”
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.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
