The Novel That Shows Us How to Face Our Past to Change Our Future

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

After several grueling hours of protesting against systemic injustice (no one can prepare you for long hours on your feet, long hours screaming for recognition of your humanity), we stood with our signs tucked safely under our arms as the organizer introduced some parting words. The speaker was an older Black man, the weariness of the movement evident in his face and in the way he leaned against a streetlamp for support. But his passion was clear in his speech as he declared that we were not the first to fight for our rights, and we will not be the last: he was protesting in the streets back in his early adulthood, the same way we were today. It was then that I looked at the faces of the people around me; some couldn’t be older than sixteen, and some as old as the speaker, or older. It was in the aftermath of being surrounded by these people, all aligned in our goal for the abolishment of the systemic injustices that cause Black oppression, that Nina Revoyr’s literary crime novel Southland came to mind.  

I first encountered this sweeping tale of past and present iterations of Los Angeles, of riots, looting, and the reincarnations of allyship, in my Asian American Literature class, junior year of college. My professor had casually remarked that it was her favorite novel of all the ones we read; I was too awash in pre-finals anxiety to give her remark a second thought. It wasn’t until I came home from the protest that I gave the text the attention it deserves. A story about injustice dressed up as a detective novel, Southland reminds us that activism is both an ongoing project and a deeply personal choice.

The pathway to justice in Southland is a quiet storm, at odds with the loud righteous moment going on today—but the unity in creating genuine change remains the same, predicated on the past. Southland draws on Los Angeles’s history of activism—the Watts riots of 1965 and the Rodney King riots of 1992—but also shows how that hunger for change can manifest in isolated actions, in individual lives. Today, we take to the streets, we sign petitions and start hashtags that address the various inequalities Black people face in the workplace. We are very loudly and openly discussing the systems that have led to decades long, ongoing oppression. These open discussions are no longer isolated to a single March on Washington, or even a city-localized riot: this is a national conversation gone worldwide. Southland reminds us that it must become personal, too.

‘Southland’ shows how the hunger for change can manifest in isolated actions, in individual lives.

The protagonist of Southland, Jackie Ishida, discovers in reading her grandfather’s will that he played a role in a multiple homicide decades earlier, during the Watts riots. Jackie and her acquaintance turned friend, James Lanier, a cousin of one of the victims, look into the murders and fight for a legal investigation. Along the way, Jackie learns more about her grandfather, and about the history of Los Angeles through the eyes of those she encounters along her journey. The journey Jackie Ishida goes through in uncovering her grandfather’s past, and the important weight his corner store holds to the surrounding Crenshaw community, means so much more to me now in the wake of the media’s spin on rioting and the national attention on the police state we live in. 

Jackie Ishida, a second generation Japanese American, is, like so many of us, comfortably enveloped in privilege. Much of the conversation lately has shined on the workings of white privilege and the ways it bleeds into every aspect of our livelihood, but it’s important to speak on the ways we as black and nonblack people of color have privilege, too. In order to truly dismantle systemic injustice, there must be a dedicated effort to address the variant intersections that allow for some of us to be ahead of the curve, while others struggle to even see where the curve is. One of those privileges often, is silence: the ability to not speak up on the sufferings of others worse off than you because you are doing fine. For Jackie Ishida’s family, though, this silence became a double-edged sword. 

In so many ways, Jackie Ishida’s family suffered: internment, forced participation in World War Ⅱ, constant mistreatment from white people due to their being Japanese. But rather than address the systemic injustices they faced, they secured higher positions (and profit), letting their silence wrap around them like a noose. “Her family didn’t talk,” Revoyr writes. “None of them, including her grandfather. No words laced together into a chain of intertwined stories that connected her to anyone’s past. More than gaps in the narrative; there was no narrative. Whole years, like the years of World War Ⅱ, dropped cleanly from their collective history.” This silence eventually disconnects Jackie Ishida so much that she is uncomfortable addressing race or racism in any way, which is its own privilege. If you cannot speak up for others, how can we all dismantle the system?

If you cannot speak up for others, how can we all dismantle the system?

This silence is also the reason why she knows nothing about her grandfather, or the shocking scene that lies at the core of Southland’s intrigue: four Black boys found dead in the freezer of his store in the aftermath of the Watts riots. No one cared enough even to report it. Jackie’s inability to reconcile her grandfather’s past with her concept of him is how the tale begins, but it expands into an investigation of what it means to renounce the privilege of silence and ignorance. The novel is a love letter to Los Angeles, but also a gentle takedown of Jackie’s assumptions and judgmental nature, the legacy of growing up enveloped in privilege and a genuine lack of awareness. 

Discovering the bodies is the catalyst for Jackie to start filling the silence with noise, creating a narrative with pieces of the past: through constant discoveries, old and new, of her grandfather’s role in Crenshaw and the homicides. Jackie’s insistent probing into the multiple homicide becomes her connection to a history of oppression and activism; despite his silence in life, she feels her grandfather “practically willed it.” Like myself when I stared into the eyes of the people protesting with me, Jackie feels the totality of the past, long ignored in her family, and uses her privilege to bring it to light.

The past is always rearing its head and making itself known in the present, in the future.

Perhaps it is Jackie’s recognition of her grandfather’s loneliness, or her desire to piece together the bits of noise amidst the silence, but she does everything in her power to give the murdered Black boys justice — and in doing so, discovers her family’s past. Her family’s past, the history of Frank’s store, is simply the beginning. The past is always rearing its head and making itself known in the present, in the future. Jackie’s reflection on how the Rodney King riots of 1992 were portrayed in the news, as the media described the looters, rings true to today’s 2020 media coverage: “’it’ was coming closer to ‘us’; telling their viewers —as if they couldn’t see and smell for themselves—of the smoke that hovered over the city.” The media has a history of taking whole swaths of people (often people of color) and painting them as the Other, a dangerous conglomerate threatening any source of normalcy. This “it” versus “us” dynamic echoes today as we see people who riot and loot are called “outside agitators,” as people discuss looting with more care than the fact of Black people losing their lives to police every single day.

One of my favorite moments in the text is when Jackie finally steps foot on the ground where Frank’s store used to be, though it suffered damage after the aforementioned Rodney King riots of 1992. 

Her grandfather’s money had been made and lost here. Four teenage boys had died here. It seemed to Jackie that if she could just get inside, beyond the boards, the answers would all be available to her, scattered among the ashes. … Her past was like this neighborhood—still there, intact, but she had never bothered to visit.

Frank’s store’s existence, standing through riots, looting, and death, is what drives Jackie. Frank’s store is a piece of history; a chance for Jackie’s redemption and her ability to restore a narrative otherwise lost to her. Jackie’s past, her grandfather’s past, the history of Crenshaw, is only the beginning. I spent some time protesting in the neighborhood I grew up in—the place I hung out with my friends after school, the place I grew into the steadfast woman I am today. Bringing the fight for our rights to such a local place has changed me forever, in ways I’m incredibly proud of. The same sentiment stands for Jackie, who is driven to change her present after setting foot in her grandfather’s past.

The past is prologue. The Black Lives Matter movement has existed for going on a decade, and yet it is only the beginning, a continuation of the work done by civil rights activists of the ’60s, of the Watts riots of 1965, of the Rodney King riots of 1992. We are standing on the backs of those who have fought long before us, and we all would be better if we remembered that. The news is telling one story of rage, looting, and woe, but as in Southland, we must create our own story.

Poetry Collections About Being a Queer Person of Color

Posted on by Jo Lou

Encountering racism from other gay men when I came out caused me to interrogate my own identity, questioning what I’m able to become if a lot of the world told me “no.” The more I thought on this, over time it eventually sank in that the answer was (and always has been): anything I wanted to be. 

My debut poetry collection Mythical Man is made up of poems spun from my experiences as a gay Asian man in the 21st-century, and it explores this journey of identity-making through love, lust, and heartbreak, while reflecting on my ancestral roots. The collection challenges ideas of male beauty, gay sex, and toxic masculinity in contemporary gay culture.

From writing my book, I’ve come to learn that as a gay man of color, navigating queer spaces is oftentimes a tricky experience to do in order to feel safely seen and confident in who I am as a minority. Below are nine other poetry books that also explore what it’s like being a queer person of color, each looking at the intersections of race, sexuality, and identity-making.

War / Torn by Hasan Namir

The poems in Namir’s War / Torn explore what it truly feels like to belong, and what it means to create an identity. The tenderness in these poems is as poignant as the violence Namir invokes throughout the collection, both working in tandem to interrogate the nuanced identity of existing as an Iraqi-Canadian in queer spaces.

Love Cake by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

In Love Cake, the poems ask, “What happens when we encounter unsafe spaces in queer communities as a person of color?” And they do so with a profound voice that draws you in and doesn’t let go. This collection is a memorable exploration on how queer people of color utilize love and desire to transform violence.

Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral

Corral seamlessly blends English and Spanish together in meticulously crafted poems to convey his experiences as a gay Chicano man. Slow Lightning is a collection that captivates you with unexpected imagery, forms, and phrases that establishes Corral as a masterfully formed poetic voice.

Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed

In Indecency, Reed boldly explores the inequity and injustice in his critique of white supremacy culture. These poems unashamedly push the boundaries of social order while unpacking personal intimacies and exploring topics such as masculinity, skin, culture, and sexuality.

a place called No Homeland by Kai Cheng Thom

When you enter a place called No Homeland, the poems captivate you with a spoken-word quality, echoing Thom’s history as a performance artist. Spinning together folklore, magic, and trans feminism, these poems urgently question how we define inclusiveness. 

This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt

The beautiful poems in Belcourt’s breathtaking collection don’t shy away from sex and love to explore the intersections of being gay and Indigenous, while looking at how Indigenous people stay positive. It’s a powerful debut that is full of hope for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.”

Disintegrate/Dissociate by Arielle Twist

Twist’s debut is a powerhouse of poems exploring complicated human relationships. Written with a tender rage, this collection speaks to what it means to exist as an Indigenous trans woman, carrying a thread of hope throughout for a better, softer future through sparse but poignant poems.

even this page is white

even this page is white by Vivek Shraya

Bold and provocative, Shraya’s poems don’t hold back to tear down understandings of what it means to be a racialized queer person. They are intelligent and beautifully stark in how they illuminate everyday racism.

Slant by Andy Quan

In this compelling collection Quan asks, “How do we belong?” through poems that explore race, gay sexuality, and the Chinese diaspora. It’s a witty book that really gets to the crux of being a gay Asian man.

A Rally for the Right-Wing Cult of Personality

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

An Excerpt from A Burning
by Megha Majumdar

At the end of a school day, when the bottoms of his trousers are soiled, PT Sir holds his bag in his armpit and exits the building. Outside, the narrow lane is crowded with schoolgirls who part for him. Now and then a student calls, “Good afternoon, sir!”

PT Sir nods. But these girls, to whom he taught physical training just hours before, have hiked up their skirts and coiled their hair into topknots. Their fingers are sticky with pickled fruit. They are talking about boys. He can no longer know them, if he ever did.

When the lane opens up onto the main road, PT Sir is startled by a caravan of trucks roaring past. Three and four and five rush by in a scream of wind. Young men sit in the open truck-beds, their faces skinny and mustached, their hands waving the saffron flags of ardent nationalism. One young man tucks his fingers in his mouth and whistles.

At the train station, PT Sir stands at his everyday spot, anticipating roughly where a general compartment door will arrive. He is leaning to look down the tracks when an announcement comes over the speakers. The train will be thirty minutes late.

“Thirty minutes meaning one hour minimum!” complains a fellow passenger. This man sighs, turns around, and walks away. PT Sir takes out his cell phone, a large rectangle manufactured by a Chinese company, and calls his wife.

“Listen,” he says, “the train is going to be late.”

“What?” she shouts.

“Late!” he shouts back. “Train is late! Can you hear?”

After the terrorist attack, just a few days ago, the word “train” frightens her. “What happened now?” she says. “Are things fine?”

“Yes, yes! All fine. They are saying ‘technical difficulty.’”

PT Sir holds the phone at his ear and surveys the scene in front. Passengers arrive, running, then learn about the delay and filter away. To those who spread out the day’s newspaper on the floor and relax on it, a girl sells salted and sliced cucumber. In his ear, PT Sir’s wife says, “Fine then. Can you bring half-kilo of tomatoes? There is that market just outside your station.”

A spouse always has ideas about how you should spend your time. Couldn’t he have enjoyed thirty minutes to himself, to drink a cup of tea and sit on the platform?

PT Sir goes to look for tomatoes. Outside the station, on the road where taxis and buses usually honk and curse, nearly scraping one another’s side mirrors, all traffic has halted. Motorcyclists use their feet to push forward. PT Sir learns, from a man who grinds tobacco in his palm, that there is a Jana Kalyan Party rally, a rally of the Wellbeing for All Party, in the field nearby. It is the biggest opposition party in the state. Film star Katie Banerjee is speaking at the rally.

Katie Banerjee! Now, PT Sir thinks, is it better to spend twenty minutes looking for tomatoes, or catching a glimpse of the famous Katie? Tomatoes can be found anywhere. In fact, tomatoes can be bought ten minutes from his house at the local market—why doesn’t his Mrs. go there?

So he follows the street, which opens up onto a field, trampled free of grass. The crowd, a thousand men or more, waves the familiar saffron flags. They whistle and clap. Some men cluster around an enterprising phuchka walla, a seller of spiced potato stuffed in crisp shells, who has set up his trade. The scent of cilantro and onion carries. On all the men’s foreheads, even the phuchka walla’s, PT Sir sees a smear of red paste, an index of worship—of god, of country. The men, marked by the divine, wear pants whose bottoms roll under their feet, and hop up now and then to see what is happening. The stage is far away.

“Brother,” he says to a young man. He surprises himself with his friendly tone. “Brother, is it really Katie Banerjee up there?”

The young man looks at him, hands PT Sir a small party flag from a grocery store bag full of them, and calls a third man. “Over here, come here!” he yells. Soon that man rushes over, holding a dish of red paste. He dips his thumb in the paste and marks PT Sir’s forehead, drawing a red smear from brow to hairline. All PT Sir can do is accept, a child being blessed by an elder.

Thus marked, party flag in his hand, PT Sir steps forward to hear better. On stage, it is indeed movie star Katie Banerjee, dressed in a starched cotton sari. She, too, is marked by holy red paste on her forehead, PT Sir sees. Her speech drawing to a close, she raises both hands in a namaste. “You all have come from far districts of the state,” she says, “for that you have my thanks. Go home safely, carefully.”

The microphone crackles. The crowd roars.

When the star leaves the stage, her place at the microphone is occupied by the second-in-command of the party. Bimala Pal, no more than five feet two, arrives in a plain white sari, her steel wristwatch flashing in the sun. The crowd quiets for her. PT Sir holds the flag above his head for shade, then tries his small leather bag, which works better.

In the microphone, Bimala Pal cries, her words echoing over the speakers: “We will seek justice (ice)! For the lives lost in this cowardly (ardly) attack (tack) on the train (train)! I promise you (you)!”

After a minute of silence for the lost souls, she continues, pausing for the echoes to fade, “Where the current government (government) is not able to (to) feed our people (people)! Jana Kalyan Party (party)—your idle government’s hard-working opposition!—has provided rice (ice) to fourteen (teen) districts (icts) for Rs. 3 per kilo (kilo)! We are inviting plastics and cars (cars), factories which will bring at least fifteen thousand jobs (jobs)—”

While PT Sir watches, a man wearing a white undershirt pulls himself up, or is pushed up by the crowd, onto the hood of a jeep far ahead of him. PT Sir had not noticed the jeep until now, but there it is, a vehicle in the middle of the field, still a distance from the stage. The man stands on the hood of the car, surveying the raised arms, the open mouths and stained teeth. Then he climbs a step up onto the roof of the car, the car now rocking from the crowd shoving and slamming, their fury and laughter landing on the polished body of the vehicle.

“Fifteen thousand jobs!” they chant. “Fifteen thousand jobs!”

Whether they are excited or merely following instructions from party coordinators is hard to tell. A few TV cameras will pick this up, no doubt.

“We know (know) that you are sacrificing (ficing) every day!” Bimala Pal calls, shouting into the microphone. “And for what? Don’t you deserve (serve) more opportunities (ies)? This party is standing with you to gain those jobs (obs), every rupee of profit (profit) that you are owed, every day of school (ool) for your children!” Bimala Pal pumps a fist in the air.

PT Sir watches, electricity coursing despite himself. Here, in the flesh, are the people of the hinterland about whom he has only seen features on TV. He knows a few things about them: Not only is there no work in their village, there is not even a paved road! Not only is the factory shut down, but the company guard is keeping them from selling the scrap metal!

“Remember that this nation belongs to you, not to the rich few in their highrises or the company bosses in their big cars, but you!” Bimala Pal wraps up. “Vande Mataram!”

Praise to the motherland!

The man at the top of the car repeats, screaming, “Vande Mataram!”

PT Sir might have thought that this man, along with hundreds, has been trucked here from a village, his empty belly lured by a free box of rice and chicken, his fervor purchased for one afternoon. He might have thought that, for these unemployed men, this rally is more or less a day’s job. The party is feeding them when the market is not.

But the man’s cries make the hairs on PT Sir’s arm stand up, and what is false about that?

The man on the car lifts up his shirt and reveals, tucked in the waistband of his trousers, wrapped in a length of cloth, a dagger. He holds the handle and lifts it high in the air, where the blade catches the sun. Below him, surrounding the car, a man dances, then another, and another, a graceless dance of feeling.

The dagger stays up in the air, itself a sun above the field, and PT Sir looks at it, frozen in alarm and excitement. How spirited this man is, with his climb atop a jeep like a movie hero, with his dagger and his dancing. How different from all the schoolteachers PT Sir knows. How free.

When the men begin to tire, a coordinator announces, “Brothers and sisters! There are buses! To take you home! Please do not rush! Do not stampede! Everyone will be taken home free of charge!”

PT Sir returns to the train station. He has missed the delayed train, and when the next one comes, he finds an aisle seat, tucking his behind, the fifth, into a seat meant for three. The soles of his feet itch, reminding him they have been bearing his weight for much of the day. Somebody shoves past, dragging a sack over his toes. The person is gone before PT Sir can say anything. A woman then stands beside him, her belly protruding at his ear, and her purse threatening to strike him in the face at any moment. In this crowd, a muri walla, a puffed rice seller, makes his way. “Muri, muri!” he calls. The coach groans.

“Today out of all days!” comes the woman’s loud voice above his head. “First the delay, now there is no place to stand, and you have to sell muri here?”

“Harassment, that’s what this is,” says a voice from somewhere behind PT Sir. “This commute is nothing less than daily harassment!”

“Here, here, muri walla,” somebody objects. “Give me two.”

“And one here!” someone else calls.

The muri walla mixes mustard oil, chopped tomato and cucumber, spiced lentil sticks and puffed rice in a tin. He shakes a jar of spices upside down. Then he pours the muri into a bowl made of newsprint.

PT Sir’s stomach growls. He lifts his buttocks to try to reach his wallet.

“And one muri this way!” he says. “How much?”

The muri walla makes him a big bowl, heaping at the top.

“Don’t worry,” he says, handing the bowl to PT Sir. “For you, no charge.”

“No charge?” says PT Sir. He laughs, holding the bowl, unsure whether it is truly his to eat. Then he remembers: the red mark on his forehead, the party flag in his lap. PT Sir feels the other passengers staring at him. They must be thinking, who is this VIP?

At home, after dinner, PT Sir sits back in his chair, gravy-wet fingers resting atop his plate, and tells his wife, “Strange thing happened today. Are you listening?”

His wife is thin and short, her hair plaited such that it needs no rubber band at its taper. When she looks at him from her chair, it appears she has forgiven him for the forgotten tomatoes.

Something has happened at the school, she thinks. A man teaching physical training to a group of girls, all of whom are growing breasts, their bellies cramping during menstruation, their skirts stained now and then. A bad situation is bound to arise.

“What happened?” she says fearfully.

“There was a Jana Kalyan rally in the field behind the station,” he begins, “then one man climbed on a car—understand? climbed on top of a car—and took out. Tell me what he took out!”

“How will I know?” she says. When she bites into a milksweet, white crumbs fall on her plate. “Gun, or what?”

“Dagger!” he says, disappointed. The truth is always modest. He goes on, “But Katie Banerjee was there—”

“Katie Banerjee!”

“Then Bimala Pal also was there. Say what you like about her, she is a good orator. And she was saying some correct things, you know. Her speech was good.”

His wife’s face sours. She pushes back her chair and its legs scrape the floor. “Speech sheech,” she says. “She is pandering to all these unemployed men. This is why our country is not going anywhere.”

“They are feeding a lot of people with discounted rice,” he says. “And they are going to connect two hundred villages, two hundred, to the electricity grid in two years—”

“You,” says his wife, “believe everything.”

PT Sir smiles at her. When she disappears into the kitchen, he gets up and washes his hands clean of turmeric sauce on a towel that was once white.

He understands how his wife feels. If you only watch the news on TV, it is easy to be skeptical. But what is so wrong about the common people caring about their jobs, their wages, their land? And what, after all, is so wrong about him doing something different from his schoolteacher’s job? Today he did something patriotic, meaningful, bigger than the disciplining of cavalier schoolgirls—and it was, he knows as he lies in bed, no sleep in his humming mind, exciting.

A Palestinian American Story About Loving Too Much

Posted on by Jo Lou

Zaina Arafat’s debut novel, You Exist Too Much, follows a Palestinian American teenager as she becomes an adult, navigating her queerness and love addiction. It follows her romantic relationship as well as her recklessness on the side, and where that may have come from. Finally, she admits herself to a treatment center that will make her question her need for what she considers to be love.

You Exist Too Much: A Novel by Zaina Arafat

The novel is told in vignettes, moving from the girl’s childhood in the Middle East to her adulthood in various cities. You Exist Too Much asks what the difference is between desire and addiction and obsession, and what it means to question love because of family and religion. 

Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian American writer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, The Washington Post, and others. She holds an MA in international affairs from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Iowa and is a recipient of the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts. She grew up between the United States and the Middle East.

I spoke with Zaina Arafat about how childhood memories affect adulthood, desire and insatiability, and overcoming trauma. 

Arriel Vinson: The protagonist is very consumed, for good reason, with her mother’s opinion of her queerness throughout You Exist Too Much. Her mother is worried about how their culture will judge her, how the Quran will judge her. Tell me more about why her mother’s shame was so prominent in this novel.  

Zaina Arafat: The mother is mostly concerned with how her daughter’s queerness reflects onto her, more than with her religious convictions or cultural expectations. The protagonist’s humiliation and shame are so prominent in the novel because she sees herself through her mother’s eyes; it’s her mother’s approval that defines and drives her behavior.  

AV: Early in You Exist Too Much, we learn about the protagonist’s struggle with anorexia, and later put a name to her love addiction as well as see her in a treatment center for it. Why was it important to explore all of these struggles? 

ZA: The protagonist’s eating disorder and her love addiction are related insofar as they both entail shame when it comes to appetite, along with restricted desire and insatiability. They both stem from a place of great pain, longing, and unfulfilled need, and each exists as a form of control. In the case of her anorexia, food is the central instrument of control, and in love addiction, it’s her romantic obsessions.

AV: Desire and obsession are at the core of You Exist Too Much. We move through each of the protagonist’s affairs and obsessions in the novel, her making the same mistakes and being left in ruins. Why did you choose to display recklessness and lack of self-care in relation to showing desire? 

ZA: I wanted to illustrate how internalized homophobia can lead to destructive behavior and self-sabotage. This protagonist’s desire has been consistently shamed and deemed unacceptable throughout her life, and though she tries to suppress it, it still seeps through and manifests in unhealthy and harmful ways.

AV: You Exist Too Much is written in vignettes—-moving between the protagonist in the U.S. as an adult and in the Middle East (Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine) as a child/adolescent. Tell me more about that decision. 

The protagonist’s eating disorder and love addiction stem from a place of great pain, longing, and unfulfilled need, and each exists as a form of control.

ZA: I wanted to use involuntary associative memory to show how seemingly insignificant moments in one’s past, especially one’s childhood, can have great bearing on one’s adult self, their behavioral patterns, and present-day reality. I leapt between these vignettes to illustrate how the protagonist’s responses and actions in the present are influenced by the past, be it her own personal memories or collective cultural ones.

AV: There’s a moment where the protagonist says she was loved from a distance, and that’s the safest way to be loved. How does grappling with loneliness, even with lovers around, play a part in this novel? 

ZA: The protagonist puts herself in situations where love is “safe,” which means she doesn’t risk being seen too closely and rejected. She pours attention and affection into people who can never really know her, and who she can’t really know, for that same self-preserving reason. Of course, when you’re in a relationship with someone and loving at someone outside of the relationship who doesn’t love you back, it’s very lonely. But she’s willing to trade the risk of being seen and potentially hurt for loneliness.

AV: The protagonist in You Exist Too Much often reflects on her parent’s abusive relationship and realizes that her mother had trauma of her own. It takes the entire novel for her to make sense of that trauma and how it shows up in her life. What about her mother, and how she deals with relationships, does she see in herself?  

The protagonist puts herself in situations where love is “safe,” which means she doesn’t risk being seen too closely and rejected.

ZA: Recognizing her mother’s past traumas allows the protagonist to forge empathy for her. She sees her mother’s wounds as being integral to the way she exists in the world, and recognizes her mother’s patterns in herself. She realizes that she is destined to repeat these patterns if she doesn’t change.

AV: Towards the end of the novel, she realizes she felt fulfilled by dating someone who was just like her—emotionally unavailable, addicted to loving others who weren’t her. Someone encourages her to find healthy love. Why is this an important note to end the novel on?

 ZA: When faced with decisions throughout the novel, it was often painful to watch the protagonist continuously choose such destructive options. I felt it was important that she eventually make progress toward less harmful behavior, even if she slips along the way, especially since we’ve followed her on this path of trying to heal. She may never fully overcome her traumas and her demons, but she can identify that by choosing healthy love, she is also choosing to love herself.

“Wanting a Better Life Is an Act of Resistance”

Posted on by Jo Lou

In November 2012, the founder and figurehead of a regional rightwing party died, and to mark his passing, Bombay city went into a complete, daylong shutdown. Shops, markets and roads were ordered to close without notice, and people largely stayed indoors—a combination of acceptance and fear. In response, a young woman posted a comment on Facebook criticizing the shutdown, and her friend liked the comment. Both were arrested. Later that day, a group of men vandalized a medical clinic belonging to the girl’s uncle. 

I remember sitting in my dad’s Bombay flat, feeling utterly, deeply shocked. She was arrested? For a Facebook post? Eight years later, six of which have been governed by an increasingly genocidal government, what surprises me most when I look back at that incident is my shock. Since the Hindu nationalist BJP came to power in 2014, arrests for “anti-national” speech, actions and protests — both online and off — have practically become par for the course. In 2018, a news report found that of the people arrested for online speech, many were recent smartphone owners, over half were Muslim, and almost all were incredibly poor. 

A Burning by Megha Majumdar

Jivan, the young woman who opens Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning, perfectly fits the bill. She is arrested in the opening pages, swept into a system explicitly stacked against her. Set in the Indian state of West Bengal, Majumdar’s taut, sharp narrative intimately follows three individuals living amidst the rise of fascism—a setting that deeply shapes their lives, and yet is so violent and pervasive that comprehending it is an impossible task.

Instead, the paw paw of autorickshaws and the gheu gheu of street dogs draws us into a sampling of small lives that are made, bolstered, crushed and silenced by a violent state. A Burning has all the page-turning qualities of a thriller, and as I tore through its three central storylines, I found myself echoing Jivan’s question: “If she had received a chance to tell her story, how might her life have been?”

I spoke to Megha Majumdar about shame, freedom, the limits of fiction, and what hope in the face of profound injustice can look like.

Richa Kaul Padte: A Burning begins with Jivan, a young Muslim woman who lives in a slum, watching the aftermath of a terrorist attack play out online:

“I admired these strangers on Facebook who said anything they wanted to…Whether it was about the police or the ministers, they had their fun, and wasn’t that freedom? I hoped that after a few more salary slips…I would be free in this way too.”

Elsewhere in the book, a middle class PE teacher finds himself at a Hindu nationalist rally, witnessing a man standing on a car, thrusting a dagger in the air. He thinks: “How spirited this man is…How different from all the schoolteachers PT Sir knows. How free.” The central characters in your book are all in some way driven by a desire for freedom. So I’m curious to know: what you think it means to be free? 

Megha Majumdar: Hmm, I think freedom has a great deal to do with having the opportunity to pursue a meaningful life. So it’s a profound injustice when that opportunity is denied—when a person like Jivan spends her energies on trying to save her home from being demolished and securing a reliable water supply to her apartment. Or when PT Sir feels that his life as a schoolteacher fails to have the kind of vigorous impact on the nation that he might have dreamed of for himself. Who could they have been? What might they have achieved? That’s where the pain of being denied freedom makes itself felt.

RKP: One of the central threads winding its way through your novel is shame, experienced in different forms. Lovely, a trans woman from the Hijra community, teases a group of boys who are openly staring at her until they begin, instead, to stare at their feet. She tells us: “In this life, everybody is knowing how to give me shame. So I am learning how to reflect shame back on them also.” 

Elsewhere in the book, Jivan narrates: “My head feels drawn to the earth, incapable of raising itself. I listen to [her] scolding in this posture of shame, until the posture is all I am.”

Megha, I think I’ve asked every South Asian woman I’ve interviewed over the years about shame, because it’s a theme that keeps surfacing in their work. Why do our societies steep women in so much shame — and to what effect? 

MM: Your question urges me to think harder about this, and I am grateful to you for that, Richa. Shame operates as an oppressive force, a way to keep certain people from aiming too high or reaching for things that the rest of society doesn’t think they deserve. So it’s rich for storytelling, because right away you have people who push back and resist and assert their right to dream. And perhaps it surfaces in our work because we have grown up, as you say, steeped in forms of it.

An experience that my friends and I shared in our teens was being groped on buses and autos—first there was confusion and shame. Then we began talking about it among ourselves and pushing back. We encouraged each other to loudly protest when it happened; we learned to shout, “Keep your hands to yourself! Don’t you have any shame?” to these grown men on crowded buses. We learned to throw this shame back at them, and it was what they feared. They stopped as soon as you raised your voice and shamed them. It was our triumph. 

RKP: One of my favorite things about A Burning is also the thing I found the hardest: the way you demonstrate the crushing weight of violence borne from inequality and prejudice—a weight that’s so terribly heavy that understanding it seems futile. As Lovely says of police brutality:

“Many years ago I would have been asking why is this happening? But now I am knowing that there is no use asking these questions. You might be begging on the train and getting acid thrown on your face. You might be hiding in the women’s compartment for safety and getting kicked by the ladies…In life, many things are happening for no reason at all.” 

This sentiment is echoed throughout the book, and wherever a character does try to wrest reason from senselessly oppressive circumstances, it only seems to lead to further devastation. I tend to believe that the best way to overthrow a system is to name it, to understand how it works. But does this perhaps have more to do with my own privileges than with the capacity of knowledge itself? 

Wanting a better life is an act of resistance, and an act of hope.

MM: That randomness is so hard to deal with. I wanted to confront it in the book, and explore how even though a novel needs to make a certain kind of sense and follow a narrative logic, life is full of random injustices and instances of violence. Perhaps these characters have lives outside the margins of this book, and perhaps that’s where the imposed logic of fiction fails them. 

RKP: Could we talk about belief, please? You do a wonderful job exploring not just what it means to tell one’s own story (an experience routinely denied to your characters) but also what it means to have that story believed. In your novel, which of course reflects a ground reality, belief is often manufactured as a means to preserve or garner power—whether it is belief in someone’s guilt, the belief that certain “types” of people are a threat to “the nation’s future,” or even the fervent belief in a powerful majority religion. What, according to you, is belief contingent on? 

MM: An author I’ve had the great luck of working with in my role at Catapult is Dina Nayeri, who wrote about this question in her book The Ungrateful Refugee. When refugees and asylum seekers face certain expectations of what their story and suffering are supposed to look like, what do they do when their story deviates from that expectation, when their true story is more complex or surprising? The stakes for them couldn’t be higher. It’s such an intricate, profound question.

In my book, belief in someone is perhaps another way of asserting who has the right to speak, and who doesn’t. All the lines of class, education, privilege, gender, and so on—all of these lines converge upon this question: Who is considered worthy of our trust?

RKP: A Burning is set in a country teetering on the edge of fascism, and yet, by intimately inviting us into the lives of your characters, you make it difficult for the reader to parse out clearly demarcated “sides.” Instead, you present to us a deep fear—of the state, destitution, violence, and rejection—that engulfs people in a society marked by tremendous inequality.

PT Sir’s journey from disgruntled schoolteacher to Hindu nationalist is, for example, driven by the same sort of fear that he eventually inflicts upon others. There’s a moment when he reflects: “The Muslim man’s family perished, nobody is denying that, but he himself will be all right. Maybe that is all that can be salvaged.” I was really scared in this moment, Megha, because I felt myself almost empathize with a person who is bolstering the most vicious government I have ever witnessed. And while you never condone this violence, you do invite us into the interiority of its making. Is there something you wanted readers to take away from this? Something other than fear? 

Shame operates as an oppressive force, a way to keep certain people from aiming too high or reaching for things that the rest of society doesn’t think they deserve.

MM: I wanted to write complex, full people. I tried hard not to write flat characters or simple villains. I wanted to show what an ordinary person—driven by a glimpse of what it means to have a little bit of power in a society with huge power differentials—will do. Will they hold on to their personal ethics? Will they adjust their moral compass? Will they seek security for themselves or justice for another person? And I hope the reader sees themselves in these characters, and feels close enough to them to wonder how they would act.

RKP: There’s a moment towards the close of the book where Jivan thinks, “I don’t know what this means, this matter of hope. Moment by moment, it is difficult to know whether I have it, or not, or how I might tell.” This is often what I felt while reading A Burning: is there hope? is there none? and for these characters, what might it look like? 

This also makes me think of Lovely’s reflection on the ending of a beloved relationship:

“My love for Azad…is existing in some other world, where there is no society, no god. In this life we were never getting to know that other world, but I am sure it is existing. There, our love story is being written.”

Is this, finally, where true hope lies — in a world without society or gods? And if so, how on earth can we get there? 

MM: I think there is great hope in all the different forms of resistance we’re seeing, whether it’s in women-led activism or a character in this book taking matters into their own hands. There is great hope in every act of ambition and dreaming and striving, right from every kid going to school so that they can have a better life than their parents did, to every grown-up who says: you know what, this secret dream of mine might sound wild to you, but I’m going to chase it. Wanting a better life is an act of resistance, and an act of hope. That’s a big part of what I wanted to write about—yes, there are systems and social institutions that challenge you and sometimes defeat you, but you still live with defiance and joy and humor. You never stop working toward the life you want. That’s what it means to live with hope.

10 Books Set in Museums

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Museums are a lot like libraries and bookstores: quiet, contemplative spaces filled with wondrous objects that can light up your imagination and transport you to a different time and place. Now, like so many other cultural institutions amid the COVID-19 pandemic, most are shuttered for the time being. By one estimate, about a third of museums in the United States may never reopen. 

Still, some—like Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles—have taken to social media to creatively engage quarantined audiences with challenges like #BetweenArtAndQuarantine, in which members of the public recreate works of art using whatever they happen to have lying around at home (incorporating toilet paper rolls seems to be especially popular). The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City recently launched the #MetMaskChallenge, encouraging followers to design masks incorporating artwork from the collections to wear once it is safe to reopen, “because why not wear the art while you look at the art?”

If you find yourself longing to escape to the halls of a museum during these days of confinement, consider cracking open one of the following books about real and fictional collections.

Metropolitan Stories by Christine Coulson

Metropolitan Stories by Christine Coulson

First up is New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, housing over 5,000 years worth of global art in its Fifth Avenue building, which spans four city blocks. Of course, the Met features in such classic novels as E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. But here’s one you may not have heard of yet.

In Metropolitan Stories: A Novel, Christine Coulson — who worked at the Met for over 25 years — breathes magical life into the collections, giving voice to the art itself. The Duchess of Parma’s fauteuil chair craves a support group of other chairs with whom she can share stories of the family who once owned her, her lonely times in storage, and how she aches for the long-lost touch of human beings on her fabric and frame. When the museum’s director requires a muse to sit in on his meeting with Karl Lagerfeld, the curatorial departments dispatch headless stone graces and nineteenth century oil portraits to shuffle awkwardly to his office for inspection. The staff think they are protecting and studying the artworks while the artworks think they are protecting and studying the staff.

Coulson takes lovers of the Met — and those who have yet to discover its wonders in person — behind the scenes, diving deep into the special magic of this iconic institution.

Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson

Next up is the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark. In Anne Youngson’s gentle epistolary novel, an English farm wife in her sixties, trapped in a loveless marriage, begins a correspondence with the museum’s curator, himself a lonely widower. Tina Hopgood has long dreamed of visiting the Silkeborg Museum, where Tolland Man — an early Iron Age bog body with an unusually well-preserved face — is displayed. Curator Anders Larsen encourages her to finally make the trip. The two exchange letters and emails, reflecting on whether they have lived the lives they meant to, until surprising revelations leave Tina with big decisions to make.

The Octopus Museum by Brenda Shaughnessy

The Octopus Museum by Brenda Shaughnessy

Our third museum is fictional, though at the rate 2020 is going, is it so outlandish to imagine that the earth might soon be ruled by semi-benevolent octopus overlords with museums dedicated to the study of humanity? Could it hurt to start preparing, just in case? Shaughnessy’s poetry collection takes place in a world of ever-unfolding climate apocalypse caused by humans, with Octopodes reigning over us all. The table of contents is framed as a Visitor’s Guide to the Octopus Museum’s five exhibits about humans: The Gallery of a Dreaming Species; Special Collection: “As They Were”; “To Serve Man”: Rituals of the Late Anthropocene Colony; Found Objects / Lost Subjects: A Retrospective; and Permanent Collection: Archive of Pre-Existing Conditions.

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

Now to Istanbul, where tucked near the main shopping thoroughfare of İstiklal Street is the Museum of Innocence. This real life museum was conceived and developed by the Nobel Prize winning writer Orhan Pamuk as a companion project to his novel by the same name. In the book Kemal, the son of a wealthy Istanbul family, falls for his beautiful but distant cousin Füsun, a poor shop girl. He pursues her even as his engagement to another woman falls apart as a result and the two are briefly lovers, though Füsun remains his unrequited love much longer. After she marries another man, Kemal becomes a frequent visitor at their house, each time stealing an object to add to his collection commemorating their brief affair. Through his “museum” Kemal seeks to regain a closeness that he will never achieve with the actual person. 

The real life museum is filled with objects that the characters in the novel would have interacted with, evoking Istanbul life in the 1970’s. Display cases correspond to chapters in the book and Pamuk himself narrates the audio guide. The museum’s website states: “It is not essential to have read the book in order to enjoy the museum, just as it is not necessary to have visited the museum in order to fully enjoy the book. But those who have read the novel will better grasp the many connotations of the museum, and those who have visited the museum will discover many nuances they had missed when reading the book.”

Still Lives by Maria Hummel

Maggie Richter, the protagonist of this smart literary mystery/thriller, is an in-house editor at the fictional Rocque Museum in Los Angeles, whose boyfriend recently left her for provocative artist Kim Lord. Lord’s upcoming exhibit “Still Lives” features gruesome self-portraits of the artist recreating media images of famous murdered women. Though meant as a commentary on our culture’s fetishization of violence against women (especially beautiful women), some including Maggie see the work as glorifying that same violence and allowing the artist to capitalize off the victimization of others. When Lord goes missing on opening night, Maggie feels compelled to investigate and disprove the police’s theory that her ex is to blame. 

The Barnum Museum by Steven Millhauser

Next up is the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, CT, or at least the highly fictionalized version it inspired. This story collection was originally published in 1990 by Steven Millhauser, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. Millhauser used to visit the Barnum Museum, founded by P. T. Barnum of “The Greatest Show on Earth” 19th-century circus fame, as a child in the 1950’s and clearly it made an impression. He set out to write about an impossibly large museum full of dubious things. The museum in the collection’s title story goes on forever, eventually swallowing Bridgeport and all of its residents. Each story in the collection can also be seen as an “exhibit” featuring a different experimental writing technique.

Rohan at the Louvre by Hirohiko Araki

Now to Paris and the Louvre Museum, by way of Japan. Teenaged Rohan is an aspiring manga artist when a seemingly disturbed tenant at his grandmother’s boarding house tells him of an evil, centuries old painting. She also destroys one of his works that features an image of her. A decade later, Rohan travels to Paris and finds the painting in a closed wing of the Louvre, unprepared for the power of the curse he unleashes by doing so. Rohan is a recurring character in Hirohiko Araki’s Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure series, and stars in this graphic novel, which is itself one of a series by different authors commissioned and published by the Louvre Museum. 

The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art by Matthew Kirkpatrick

Our next museum is another fictional one, haunted this time. Its strange curator is in love with the ghost of an artist, while the daughter of the museum’s founders has disappeared under mysterious circumstances at sea. It is told in part through increasingly long and strange museum tags, in part through the musings of an elderly town resident who finds unexpected connections between the exhibits and her own past, though her thoughts on death and loss are at odds with the curator’s.

The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose

Once more to New York City, this time to the MoMA. Heather Rose’s novel is based on the real life performance of Serbian artist Marina Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Abramović, who gave the author full permission to use her as a character, spent over 700 hours silently gazing into the eyes of any audience members who chose to sit across from her. The novel follows film composer Arky Levin, whose wife suffers from a genetic disease and recently left him, ordering him never to see her again. At the MoMA, Arky meets a grieving widow from Georgia as well as a series of other characters, all transformed by Abramović’s performance as well as their tender, unsteady relationships with one another. This is the first novel by Australian writer Heather Rose to be published in the U.S.

The Art Forger by B. A. Shapiro

Our tour ends at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, infamous as the site of the world’s largest, still unsolved art heist in 1990. In Shapiro’s novel, a struggling artist with a scandalous past must discover the truth about one of the stolen masterpieces she is hired to forge, before she is arrested for her involvement. The mystery features fictionalized 19th-century letters from museum founder Isabella Stewart Gardner herself. If you enjoy the special pleasure of reading about how artists assemble their work in great detail, this book is definitely for you.

All the Best Weird Fiction Comes from Florida

Posted on by Jo Lou

JD Scott’s debut short story collection, Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day, calls on myth and magic, Florida and fabulism to tell stories of queer youth seeking out love and transformation within a world in crisis (and in the case of the collection’s novella, “After the End Came the Mall, and the Mall was Everything,” a world post-crisis).

There is a wry, constant humor and so much poetry that these stories sing as they wind through baroque lives and landscapes: a chinchilla is an amulet that keeps a couple together; a perfume maker poisons his boyfriend, slowly, carefully, beautifully; angels observe a generation of men abandoned by their families, dying alone of AIDS. The world is for the young, Scott tells us, but it is not always a good, kind, or fair world. And yet, somehow, there is laughter and hope. 

The collection weaves between YA, fantasy, science, and literary fiction, and this fluency creates a floating, dream-like quality to the stories, and the spaces between them. Scott’s dreams are beautiful and familiar, even when unpleasant, and they will linger long after you’ve left them.

Nicole Treska: You and I have talked about the poetic quality and potential of writing across literary genres, why is that so interesting to you?

JD Scott: There are these spaces that light my brain on fire, in a way. I grew up reading Diana Wynne Jones and Brian Jacques, stories that were more adventure-focused, or fantasy-oriented, as well as fairy tales. That was my first learning experience with writing. That becomes part of you. My approach to these things isn’t necessarily the approach of what someone who holistically reads fantasy or sci-fi would be, because I think if you’re reading fantasy and sci-fi, you’re looking for this pleasure, right? You’re looking for pleasure in these recognizable genre tropes, but I find a certain amount of displeasure in the fantastic, and that can become quite subversive in a way.

NT: These are coming of age stories, with characters falling in love, becoming disillusioned, searching for meaning in the world, with their “still fat faces,” as you described them. What draws you to these still fat-faced parts of our lives?

I’d become enamored with this idea of the ‘second adolescence,’ which is a queer concept that you might not have always been living your truth.

JS: We all have these obsessions we pursue in our writing. It was something on my mind, the idea of the youth, or the teenager. There’s this space of “anythingness,” of a certain age group that I was excited by. And I think as I got older, especially in my late twenties or early thirties, I’d become enamored with this idea of the “second adolescence,” which is a queer concept that you might not have always been living your truth, because you had to live someone else’s truth, when you were going through your first adolescence. So, you hit this second adolescence, living your truth for the first time. And that’s not necessarily my truth, but it’s something I became interested in. The performance of youth. And this idea of teenagers, this space that has these infinite futures, and space for transformation. I talked about genre tropes, and this idea of displeasure, but there has to be some balance to that displeasure. And maybe the idea of characters or even space or setting being able to be transformed balanced the displeasure. Maybe it’s a little bit cheesy, but maybe I buy into this idea of hope or tenderness. At least in as a book, at least in these stories.

NT: I had a question about “Their Sons Return Home to Die,” a story about gay men coming home to die of AIDS, to families who reject them, even then. It breaks the first-person singular narrative and goes takes a high, parable-like first-person plural, a “we,” that breaks your heart. I was wondering what about that more fabulist, fable-ish mode allowed you to capture that magnitude of loss?

JS: Everyone’s going to have a different entrance point. When I wrote that story, I was living in Alabama. I had returned to the South, after almost a decade in New York. And I had read this article about Ruth Coker Burks. This article called her the “Cemetery Angel,” because she took care of hundreds of gay men who were dying in and around Hot Springs, Arkansas. I believe she had inherited a family cemetery plot. So she had this plot of land, and she buried these dead gay men with her own two hands because, presumably, families had rejected them, and they had no one else to bury them.

Of course, New York certainly had its own relationship with the AIDS crisis. When you’re young enough to only barely remember ACT UP, like I am, you have to seek out these stories because they’re not always being passed on to you. The thing about AIDS and also the thing about gayness is most gay people are born from heterosexual couples. You have no one to teach you your lineage. And a lot of our teachers died in the AIDS crisis. I grew up in what felt like a generational disconnect. I returned to the South, which meant seeking out queer community, and by doing that I inherited this narrative of how Alabama deals with queerness.

When I was in Tuscaloosa, it was one of the first annual Pride events they had. And I remember this one woman, she was old, and she could barely stand and she got up at this gathering. It wasn’t a big, flashy Pride parade, it was like what a small Southern town might have as its first pride. And this woman was bitter. And she was mournful, and she’d got the mic and said, “We are the ones who had to watch our men return home to die.” That was the seed of that story. There was anger and a righteousness in her voice. Her voice blended with my own, and it became that “we” voice. It’s interesting because that first-person plural voice is where the angels are talking. The story is told by the angels. But of course, the angels are representative of these queer men who left to go to the cities, who left to go to New York, and San Francisco, and the new homes they created, where they could love each other and find acceptance. But unfortunately, when the AIDS crisis emerged, some people decided to leave those sort-of-heavens, to return for their families of blood, and families of origin, and places of origin to die.

That’s the fraught space where that story emerged. I’m also continuously dealing with this idea of the parable, or the Judeo-Christian stories that I grew up with, alongside Joseph Campbell and The Hero’s Journey. Those are the Bible stories I grew up with, and internalized, and I found a place for them in my work. But that’s also the transgression, to pit the biblical story and homoeroticize the angels, who are objectively queer and beautiful. And of course Tony Kushner, too. How could I not think of him after connecting the AIDS crisis to angels, and Angels in America?

NT: Do you think fabulist world-building comes more naturally to a Southern writer, who historically observe the bizarre without flinching, too much. Why do you think that Florida is capturing this moment of literary attention?

JS: With the Southern Gothic, there’s always been a sense of the uncanny, the grotesque, the derelict, the violent, the impoverished, the criminal, the alienated, the nightmarish, and the absurdist and fantastic. That’s Faulkner, that’s O’Connor. There’s something happening in Florida… what I call the Subtropic Gothic. If you look at what Joy Williams has done. There’s Kelly Link. Alissa Nutting, Jeff VanderMeer—all these people who have a connection to Florida doing very weird work. I’ve heard the term “The Florida Renaissance,” I don’t know if there’s a whole truth to that… but Florida certainly possesses a sub-genre of the Southern Gothic. 

We’ve honored this type of literary novel about upper-middle-class white people. So, maybe we’re looking for other types of stories.

If we interrogate what has been normative, we’ve centered these metropolitan novels, and now we are moving into the province, to see what’s happening in other places. We’ve honored this type of literary novel about upper-middle-class white people: heterosexual, and maybe they’re getting a divorce. So, maybe we’re looking for other types of stories.

I think the most fascinating book that took off, recently, is Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, from Tin House. She is near me, in Orlando. It deals with taxidermy, and that specific brand of Florida strangeness, and queerness…it’s a Southern Gothic novel in a way. And it’s wonderful, and because Kristen’s book was so well-received, I think it shows there is some lingering interest in Florida as a place.

NT: Yes. It’s a fascination that’s bigger than just literature.

JS: Right. That’s the whole Florida Man thing. I could easily explain that. I mean, I don’t know if that steals the magic. Florida is unique in that it has these unprecedented public record laws. When I was a teenager, 15 or 20 years ago, we used to go on the Hillsborough County arrest inquiry website, and tried to look up people or adults we knew, to see if they had been arrested. With open access, you can find all these records. So, “the news of weird” in Florida can be uncovered a lot quicker. But that’s also, I mean, but I don’t want to fully put that reasoning forward as to why Florida’s strangeness is so ubiquitous. 

NT: A little bit of a Florida defense mechanism.

JS: I definitely have a Florida defense mechanism. And I don’t want to confirm the bias. Florida is weird, but I think the weirdness of Florida doesn’t always align with the idea of what non-Floridians think is weird about Florida. It’s not necessarily something you can put into words, but you see or experience something and it has a “Floridaness” to it. Like the red tide, and that’s a real phenomenon that I include in one of my stories, and is one that I experienced as a child. 

I didn’t leave Florida for the first time until I was seventeen. I think that’s something else about Florida. It’s such a long state. It’s not like New England, where you can quickly move between different areas and regions. We are sequestered and isolated.

For a long time, my parents went to the same motel every summer. That was our one vacation, and we went to the same beach. It was like 90 minutes from where we lived. But I have this one memory of a year we decided to go in the winter, and it was red tide season. So not only was it unseasonably cold, but the red tide had killed all the gulf life. So it was cold and you’re walking on the beach and there were octopuses and…all these fish and aquatic life I had never seen before because they live so far in that deepness, in the depths of the ocean. I remember how wrong it felt seeing them on the shore. It’s a red tide. It’s science, right? Science explains why red tide happens. For me, those are the types of moments that become magically charged, when they’re a wrongness to it. These fish shouldn’t be on the shore, and they’re dead, and they’re perverse. They’re on display for anyone to walk by, or touch, or poke them with a stick. But there are other Floridas. When people are talking about Florida Man, they’re like, “Oh, someone got drunk and threw a baby alligator through Taco Bell drive-thru window.” And that becomes the focus and barometer of Florida’s weirdness.

NT: I know you love to play a crane game app on your phone. I’ve watched and wondered. Tell me about this.  Why was it a JD Scott obsession for a while?

JS: I feel like it ignites the same place in your brain that addiction does, the reward centers. So, even though you’re on your phone, you’re actually playing a real crane game, sometimes called a UFO catcher game or claw-machine game, over webcam—you’re controlling a real one in Japan. And if you win the actual prize, they ship it to you from Japan, much to the chagrin of my USPS person. I think she retired because I was winning so many stuffed animals, but I was always at work, and never here to sign for my international stuffed animal packages. Once, I was at the post office picking up a package I missed, and the worker with like, wow, this big box is so light. It’s almost like it’s full of stuffed animals or something. And I laughed really nervously.

NT: Like, I’ll just take that package—goodbye.

JS: I mean the stuffed animals, I think they’re cute and love having them on display, but I stopped because there is no room for them in my apartment anymore. I have twenty of them. People are going to think I’m a serial killer.

NT: How much money does one have to spend on claw game?

JS: You get daily free tickets usually. That’s the exercise in self-control. There’s some pleasure there too, right? Getting one free ticket, and playing only once a day. There’s something monk-like about it. I have a lot of plants at home, and I have stuffed animals too. They do the same thing to my space, making it feel inhabited and sacred.

9 Books about the World-Changing Power of Protest

Posted on by Jo Lou

The history of progress is a history of protest. We would have few of our modern rights if no one had stood up and demanded them. The books on this list cover some of the largest protests in the last century, protests that reshaped societies and reimagined futures. These books show that small groups of people speaking up for their rights can become powerful movements that change the world.

Page 145 – Electric Literature

1989 Tiananmen Square Protests: Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

This sprawling novel covers generations of Chinese politics and upheaval through the lens of two young women, Marie and Ai-ming, as they try to unravel the mystery of why Marie’s father, Kai, killed himself. The women bond over a series of notebooks written by Ai-ming’s father, Sparrow, that detail Kai and Sparrow’s lives as friends and burgeoning musicians during China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. As the Chinese government cracks down on artists and intellectuals, fear and political loyalties begin to tear the musicians apart.

1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation: When We Rise by Cleve Jones

Growing up in the 1950s, Cleve Jones feared he might be the only gay man in the world. But when he moves to San Francisco in the 1970s, he immediately finds community and purpose. Jones joins the fight for gay rights, and soon he’s thrown to the forefront of the AIDS crisis during its terrifying beginning. This memoir documents Jones’ incredible life, from his time working with Harvey Milk, to his organization of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Egyptian Revolution of 2011: The City Always Wins by Omar Robert Hamilton

Mariam and Khalil are reporters who end up on the front lines of the 2011 Egyptian revolution as they attempt to raise awareness about governmental corruption in Cairo. Thrust into the chaotic, Twitter-fied world of modern revolution, the couple discovers that they’re part of a new kind of battle, one that relies on Facebook posts as much as it relies on physical warfare.

Human Acts by Han Kang

1980 Gwangju Uprising: Human Acts by Han Kang

In Gwanju, South Korea, in 1980, student uprisings are met with brutal police violence. Centered around the tragic murder of a 15-year-old boy, this novel splinters into seven sections that each chart a different character who has a relationship to the murdered boy. In these sections, Kang tells a story of grief, brutality, and suppression that is both painful and painfully human.

Armed Resistance in Chile (1973–1990): Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez

Set in Chile in the 1980s, Fernandez’s novel focuses on a group of young school friends as they become close with a young girl, Estrella, whose father is a government officer. Though the violence of Pinochet’s dictatorship looms beyond school walls, the children are more focused on their favorite video game. But when Estrella suddenly disappears, the remaining children must wrestle with her probable fate, even as she continues visiting them in dreams and letters.

2019 Hong Kong Protests: City on Fire by Antony Dapiran

Anti-government protestors took to the streets of Hong Kong in the summer of 2019 and sparked a pro-democracy movement that took over the city for months. This movement created an entirely new kind of protest, one that had to fight not only police and tear gas, but also advanced surveillance technology. Dapiran offers an intimate look into contemporary Chinese politics, and a protest that has already changed China.

Dakota Access Pipeline Protests at Standing Rock, 2016- 2017: Our History is the Future by Nick Estes

What began as a small group of Indigenous people protecting their land from the Dakota Access Pipeline quickly became an environmental movement. Estes reports on the Water is Life movement at Standing Rock, then moves through time to examine the long history of Native American peoples attempting to protect and preserve their land from white settlers. This book presents the Water Protectors as an essential installment in a long line of Indigenous people protesting unjust seizure of their land by white Americans.

Occupy Wall Street 2011: The Not Wives by Carley Moore

Set against the uncertainty and financial instability of the Occupy Wall Street movement, this novel follows three women as they attempt to reinterpret the roles society has assigned them. Stevie is a professor and struggling single mother, her best friend Mel is a bartender who has become uncertain about her relationship with her wife, and Johanna is a homeless teenage runaway bound to Stevie through a shared tragedy. As the women navigate a city in protest, they must also revolt against their own identities.  

Unapologetic

Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene A. Carruthers

Grassroots activist and one of the Roots’ most influential young African-Americans in 2017, Charlene A. Carruthers offers her extensive knowledge and experience in protesting and activism in this handbook on radicalism. With a focus on empathy and organization, Carruthers builds on the history of Black radicalism and offers new ideas on how to recenter political strategy around those who are the least served.

In Case of Emergency, Have Your Cat Call an Ambulance

Posted on by Halimah Marcus

The True Story

Jessie was eating olives over the kitchen sink when she woke up in the emergency room. She’d almost died, but only almost. “It’s a good thing you called 9-1-1 before you hit the floor,” the doctor told her.

“But I didn’t call.” Jessie had been spitting pits into one hand, brine running down her forearm. She touched her forearm now, remembering. She touched the bruised, bald area of her scalp and the stitches.  

“The EMTs broke down the door.” 

She found her phone on the floor of her apartment. 

“See, you must have called,” her boyfriend said. “You were alone, weren’t you?” 

She nodded. “But my phone was way over there. It wasn’t me.” 

The boyfriend kept pausing the TV show to bring it up. “Then who called? The cat?”

They looked at the cat, who blinked.

Jessie stood watching the cat from different angles, then came up close to inspect the cat’s paws. She thought of the first time she saw the cat as a kitten in a box in a garage—how their eyes met over the cardboard edge. Later, Jessie shook her boyfriend awake in the night, her eyes wet and possessed. She garbled through her dental retainer, “I think you were right.” 

Jessie recreated the night in question, collapsing in front of the cat, waiting for a response. She hired a local pet psychologist to study the cat. She stared at the cat, as though imploring verbal corroboration. She found stories of feline heroism on the internet and read them aloud to the boyfriend while he showered, so he couldn’t escape. “You have to believe me if you want this to work,” she said. 

 “Let’s agree to disagree,” was the last thing he said before she broke up with him. 

Alone, Jessie repaid the cat for saving her life with treats and toys, incessant hugs and kisses. But the attention irritated the cat, who took to sitting in her litterbox and swiping at Jessie with claws. This went on until the cat, old and overweight, grew ill. 

The cat wailed in corners, losing her sight. Vomit dried into her fur. She scrabbled her paws mid-dream as though hurtling to earth from a terrifying height. Jessie hounded her local veterinarians, in search of better news, and her distress opened a portal of need through which the boyfriend returned. 

The volume of Jessie’s sorrow in the vet’s office frightened the boyfriend, and he apologized to the waiting room. “Don’t say sorry for her,” said an old woman with a pink-eyed Pitbull. “It’s her family.” Chastened, he rubbed Jessie’s back. The furry lump in her lap twitched. 

After, Jessie felt lighter, free, now that her duty to the creature was finished. It was like waking from a long, intense dream of having been saved by a cat. She stepped into the sunny parking lot with the cat’s wrapped body in an old backpack and took the boyfriend’s hand. She realized she no longer cared about winning. It was behind them. Wasn’t there more to love than a shared, compatible reality? 

In the car in the parking lot, the boyfriend yanked on his seatbelt and startled. He jerked to look at the backpack in Jessie’s lap. “Did you hear that?” he said. 

“What?” Jessie said. “Hear what?”

The boyfriend gingerly moved the backpack from her arms to the backseat. “Never mind,” he said, and started the car.  

That night, the boyfriend asked Jessie if she’d set her alarm, and she said yes, and they smiled at each other, an old routine revived. She fell asleep quickly, the heavy sleep of the unburdened, but the boyfriend rolled between the sheets. It was after two when he slipped into jeans, out the back door, to the patch of upturned soil, under which they had packed the cat’s lifeless body into the cold dirt. 

The flashlight’s beam cut shadows in the grass as the boyfriend lowered to his knees, sat on his heels. He listened, eager and afraid. The trees creaked in the wind. He slid to his stomach and pressed his ear against the earth, straining to hear it again, the sound of something impossible and his, something he’d be desperate and doomed to share.

24 New and Forthcoming Books That Celebrate Black Lives

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Stories encompassing Black life and individuality do not begin and end with racism. Even when racism is part of the narrative, it is not all there is to our story. To become dedicated to anti-racism is to admit, first and foremost, that Black people are human. That we love, live, thrive, and hurt. That any predetermined “savagery” comes from the assumption that we do not deserve to be seen as people in the first place.

With this understanding, the question becomes: Where do we start? If you hadn’t seen it already, where do we begin to see the vastness, beauty, and complexity of Blackness? It’s not easy to know where to start, but we know where we want to end up: having our lives recognized and treated as equal to those who established social dominance through pillaging, looting, and genocide. Achieving this requires knowing our history. It requires recognizing that at heart we have more similarities than differences—and at the same time those differences should never be erased. It requires an openness to listening and embracing the layers of who people are and what they’ve experienced. 

This year has seen many new books, from middle-grade novels to literary fiction and poetry to memoir, that show the full complexity of Black communities. Like Black people ourselves, these books do not exist because of racism but in spite of it. 

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston 

Hurston continues to be essential for resisting the pressure to write “tragic negro” characters. All the stories in this new collection from Amistad Books center Southern Black characters, some who migrate north. One gets a taste of Hurston’s growth as an artist through her first short story publications to some of her latest from the 1920s to 1930s. Here you’ll find women who fight back, men who recognize their philandering ways (though they may or may not change), and karma for many spreading ill will. 

Homie by Danez Smith

The title page reveals the “real” name of Smith’s latest poetry collection, one that many are not allowed to say. Respect that, because the familiar designation between Black people is not one to be taken out of our mouths nor used against us in a bid for solidarity. From the real title onward, Smith ensures that those they are speaking to are embraced. The collection itself is about relationships, the shame of some and the intense love in many. Friendship in particular is at the forefront of Homie (aka My Nig) because those tethers to others lift and guide us through life, and many times may be the most pure form of love we extend and receive.

The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré

Debut author Abi Daré has called her main character Adunni “a 14-year-old spirited, intelligent dreamer.” Adunni’s pursuit of a “louding voice” through education means her refusal to live by others’ rules for her as a young woman. Through community and her own dedication, as well as the significant words passed down from her mother before she passes, Adunni’s journey for what she deserves means breaking through an already broken system. 

Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box by Evette Dionne 

When the Suffrage Movement is mentioned, often the names touted are white. Too often Black women have been erased or attributed as sidekicks in civil rights stories. In Lifting as We Climb, Dionne makes a point to put these women center stage. Heroines such as Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mary Church Terrell should be in syllabi nationwide, and central to womanist discussion about women’s rights and particularly Black women’s rights. Thanks to Dionne’s new book, we gain even more insight and visibility for these trailblazers. 

That Hair: A Novel by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida

The narrator of That Hair begins at the beginning, or so she says, of a biography of her hair that is so much larger than the follicles on her head. Semi-autobiographical, Almeida’s book takes in racial context, standards of beauty, along with family lore and her own memories. Heartfelt and humorous, the book treats us to a worldview that feels close to home. 

Too Much Midnight by Krista Franklin 

One of a few works of poetry joining imagery and the written word, Franklin’s Midnight spans storytelling modes, subject matter, and the depths and versatility of the Black experience. It’s not an easily categorized book and it shouldn’t be, because Blackness isn’t easily categorized either. 

The Game Is Not a Game: The Power, Protest, and Politics of American Sports by Robert Scoop Jackson 

A huge percentage of American sports players are Black, and the number has grown over time. Jackson’s essay collection tears into the ways sports, for many Americans, is life. He considers the hypocrisy of the game, capitalism, activism (a la Kaepernick), disrespect to female athletes, and who benefits from sports the most. 

The Voting Booth by Brandy Colbert 

The importance of voting and voter registration as a radical act is at the heart of Colbert’s latest young adult novel. Considering the hard-won fight for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it’s refreshing to see a contemporary novel star a teen, Marva, who is dedicated to making sure people in her community have access to vote their conscience and the power to have their voices heard. Marva teams up with Duke to help him gain his right to vote when he’s turned away, and in a side-story they’re also on the hunt to find Marva’s cat. 

Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby 

Irby’s latest collection of essays came right on time (during quarantine) and became an instant bestseller. In Wow, Irby uses the same wry wit as in her previous (also bestselling) collection We Are Never Meeting in Real Life to break down a full day of being Samantha Irby complete with commentary on not being “too hydrated,” the decision making behind a nap or coffee in the late afternoon, and how late is too late when committing to going out. Irby’s frankness, voice, and on-the-nose topics recognizing a larger anxiety of society-at-large are not only relatable, they’re comforting. 

A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow 

Black mermaids! That almost says it all about Morrow’s debut young adult novel, but really there’s more. Besties Tavia and Effie are fighting their own battles—literally, against literal demons—all while having to deal with high school in Portland, Oregon. Morrow’s latest utilizes the fantastical to explore evergreen themes like isolation, modern day witch-hunts, and the violence to Black women’s bodies. A Song Below Water shows the imbalance of power at the same time Tavia and Effie find their own.

Ways to Make Sunshine by Renée Watson 

Sunshine does indeed provide many warm and thoughtful moments, plus Black girl growth in the first of this middle-grade series starring Ryan Hart. Like some of Watson’s work, this one also takes place in Portland, Oregon, where Ryan—whose name means “king”—moves to a new home, gains the courage to speak up for herself, and learns from her mistakes. This book is all about what happens when growing up and also provides endless opportunities for young readers to see themselves as leaders, just like Ryan does. 

You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson 

Former Electric Lit employee Johnson’s debut is full of pop culture quips, awkward moments, and meet-cute romance. Liz Lighty’s biggest worry—well, one of her biggest worries—is how she’s going to pay for college when financial aid becomes nonexistent. She comes up with a plan to make potentially quick money, even though Liz considers it selling her soul, by running to be the next Prom Queen at her school. Through the competition Liz comes to find out what really matters as well as who really matters to her—cue the super cute new girl and prime love interest. 

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender 

A love story in so many ways, Felix follows a young trans man who sees love all around him—from the scribbles of initials on public transit to the couples engaging in serious PDA on the street—but has yet to experience it. Felix is already navigating his intersectionality, and when someone harasses him with transphobic messages his quest for revenge turns into a quest for enlightenment when it comes to love beyond storybook romance.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett 

A book like Vanishing Half takes up where well-known books like Nella Larsen’s Passing left off, but this time with two identical sisters who are not so identical after all. The Vignes sisters, Desiree and Stella, live oppositional lives in their adulthood even identifying as different races—one Black and one white. Covering almost 50 years, Bennett’s sophomore novel jumps through place and time following characters through the trials of a life of secrecy, segregation, and silence. 

Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert

Time for some shenanigans in romance! The second book in Hibbert’s Brown Sisters series follows Danika (aka Dani) on her quest for a friend-with-benefits. Of course this includes the hard-won and often comical pathway to love. Dani is practical, Zafir is a romantic, and the fun is finding out when, or if, these two will meet in the middle. 

The Dragons, The Giant, The Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore 

Moore’s memoir begins with the Rainy Season and a question: “Where is she?” As a young girl in Liberia, Moore yearns for her mother’s companionship while her mother is off studying in New York City. Their reunion is bittersweet when war breaks out in Liberia and Moore and her family manage to escape and join her in the States. This is not where the story ends, it’s just the beginning of a new way of life as a Black woman migrating to a new country. Home is not a singular thing for many and Moore explores this seeking of home while holding close those we love. 

Seeing the Body: Poems by Rachel Eliza Griffith 

The multi-talented Griffith combines haunting photos with eviscerating text while exploring Black womanhood, grief, identity, and self-image. The balance of both the written word and the imagery illuminates Griffth’s many talents as an artist and the many ways to tell one’s story and see oneself in space and time. 

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

Emezi’s writing always packs a punch; their stories are compact and fully alive with characters who jump off the page, even when that jump means their demise. Vivek Oji remains a mystery to those closest to him, and the mystery is unraveled bit by bit as we come to know Vivek in the ways his family may never come to. Taking place in Nigeria with an equally lively cast of characters, Emezi’s latest once again reveals the bonds and complexities of family. 

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson 

Wilkerson’s latest extensive work doesn’t solely center Black lives, yet her exploration of caste systems absolutely includes us and the ways we have been excluded by the system. Wilkerson is known for her in-depth reporting and highly detailed portraits through individuals who help tie together a larger narrative. In Caste, the ranking of people based on worth is dissected from the perspective of both science and propaganda. Going across continents and through America, Wilkerson exposes the continuous divides and their origins. 

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey 

The Pulitzer Prize winner’s latest work puts into nonfiction a topic she’s often explored in her poetry: the unfortunate death of her mother and its lasting impact on her life. Trethewey recreates her mother’s life, not focusing on her as a victim but revealing the crux of her as a person leading up to that fateful evening. This is a dedication and memorial to a Black woman’s survival through racist and misogynist territory to lovingly raise a family. 

Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots by Morgan Jerkins 

Jerkins’s second work of nonfiction is as exploratory as her collection of essays. In Wandering in Strange Lands, Jerkins mixes reportage with personal reflection, taking readers through Southern spaces not often given visibility by those inhabiting or those who built the towns because they’ve since seen another type of colonization. Connecting her present with her past and investigating the ways DNA for Black people is not secular but spans many regions in the United States, Jerkins delves into a family history she didn’t understand but brings herself, and us, closer to. 

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

The lives of several generations of family are woven through the stories in Philyaw’s debut work. Who hasn’t contested with their own wants and expectations from others due to faith or rearing or region? The church, sexuality, and everyday life come alive in each story bringing readers closer to experiences we can, or have, seen ourselves in.

Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine

In Just Us, MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine continues using the multi-genre form in another exploration on white supremacy in America. Rankine keeps copious notes and uses these to delve further into power structures, those who uphold it, and the fear of Black bodies that has nothing to do with Black people. 

Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam 

National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam collaborate on a novel-in-verse that gives readers an inside look at the unforgiving nature of the penal system for Black teens, specifically through the eyes of 16-year-old artist Amal Shahid. This is not a story about Black trauma but about retaining your humanity when society may not recognize it.