Why We Keep Getting New Adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw”

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

There is a word that more than one movie critic has used to describe the novels of Henry James: “unfilmable.” Others prefer “unadaptable”; still others, “untheatrical.” Semantics aside, the underlying diagnosis remains the same: the very traits that make the Master’s oeuvre catnip for literary scholars—labyrinthine sentence structures, deep attention to characters’ inner lives, and subtle commentary on nineteenth-century social structures—have proved serious hindrances to directors looking to bring the likes of The Ambassadors or The Portrait of a Lady to the stage or screen. 

Critics therefore often conclude, as did Lisa Zeidner writing for the New York Times, that “most [adaptations of the novels] lose James in the translation.” Filmmakers usually bungle the Modernist author’s nuance, she continues, either by succumbing to “deadly dull[ness]” or by so ludicrously inflating the drama of a given narrative that the resulting movie bears no resemblance to its delicate source text. (Tellingly, James’s own attempts to write for the theater, the most popular dramatic medium during his lifetime, failed bombastically: Guy Domville, his only play ever to reach the stage, was famously greeted with “tumultuous hooting, groaning, and hissing” on opening night.)

The Turn of the Screw

But against this backdrop of ho-hum James interpretations, one exception emerges, as glaringly out of place as a ghost in the daylight. James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw has been brought to film, TV, and the stage at least 27 times, dwarfing the closest contender for most-adapted James book (The Aspern Papers, with approximately 17 performing arts iterations). Between the first Turn adaptation (a 1950 Broadway play directed by Harold Pinter) and the latest (the second season of the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, which will take place in the Turn universe and is slotted for release sometime this year), the slip of a tale has been transported to a stunning variety of historical contexts. These settings have ranged from the swinging ‘60s (dir. Rusty Lemorande, 1992) to a World War-I era psychiatric asylum (dir. Tim Fywell, 2009) to the melancholic overkill of mid-1990s Maine, replete with a grunge soundtrack and wardrobe (January’s The Turning, dir. Flora Sigismondi).

And it isn’t simply that there are a good number of Turns out in the world; there are a number of good ones, too. Jack Clayton’s 1961 film The Innocents features a screenplay by Truman Capote and routinely ranks on lists of the greatest horror movies of all time; Benjamin Britten’s opera has been deemed a masterpiece by several major critics; a 1959 television production starred Ingrid Bergman in the leading role; Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001, starring Nicole Kidman), which riffs loosely on the original novella, earned wide praise for its brooding atmosphere and psychological thrills.

The very factor that makes most other James narratives so colossally difficult to adapt also makes Turn of the Screw an inviting prospect: its congenital ambiguity.

Why does Turn break the mold? It may be that the very factor that makes most other James narratives so colossally difficult to adapt also makes Turn of the Screw such an inviting prospect: its congenital ambiguity. In other works, James’s characteristic nuance manifests primarily at the levels of sentence and mental event, resulting in entire scenes given over to “people thinking about what others are thinking,” scenes that seem custom-designed to “stymie … directors,” as scholar Lee Clark Mitchell puts it. But in James’s best-known Gothic tale, this nuance largely takes the far more cinematic forms of perceptual and supernatural doubt. 

Or, rather, doubts. The sources of eerie uncertainty in Turn of the Screw are legion, despite—or, in fact, because of—its deceptively simple plot: an unnamed woman of indeterminate background takes a job as a governess to two wealthy orphans at a remote country estate, all too readily accepting the condition that she never contact her employer about any problems that may arise during her stay. The governess is charmed by the lovely Bly Manor and by her two lovely young charges, Miles and Flora—until she becomes convinced that the ghosts of Bly’s disreputable previous employees, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, are bent on physically and/or spiritually destroying the children.

It is because this skeleton of a setup leaves so very many questions hanging that directors, playwrights, and critics have so eagerly flocked to answer them. What exactly in the governess’s mysterious past and personality has compelled her to accept this strange posting? Are the ghosts real, or merely a product of the governess’s unraveling mind? (This particular line of inquiry dominated Turn criticism for a somewhat embarrassingly long time, with Edmund Wilson advancing the most famous “non-apparitionist” reading.) Which acts did Quint and Jessel commit with one another—or with the children—to earn such wicked reputations among the current employees of Bly? Have Miles and Flora been irreversibly corrupted by their malevolent caretakers, or are they truly as innocent as they first appear? 

It is because this skeleton of a setup leaves so very many questions hanging that directors, playwrights, and critics have so eagerly flocked to answer them.

Any one of these questions might provide—and has indeed provided—more than ample temptation for a screenwriter to contribute her own fresh turn of the screw. For instance, even if a filmmaker takes up the seemingly straightforward stance that the governess is mad and the ghosts a product of the poor woman’s fevered imagination, this choice soon proves a garden of forking paths, each route leading to a unique interpretation of the original. 

A number of adapters have suggested, for example, that the lecherous spirits are a sublimation of the governess’s repressed lust for her employer (see, e.g., the films by Jack Clayton [1961], Graeme Clifford [1989], and Rusty Lemorande [1992]). Others have invented a panoply of traumatic backstories to explain the governess’s present-day instability, a multiplicity only possible because her history is so sparsely sketched in the novella. We learn in Presence of Mind (dir. Antoni Aloy, 2000), for instance, that the governess was physically abused in her youth; The Turn of the Screw (dir. Rusty Lemorande, 1992) and In a Dark Place (dir. Donato Rotunno, 2006) posit that this childhood abuse was sexual in nature; in another Turn of the Screw (dir. Dan Curtis, 1974), the governess was orphaned early in life, like Flora and Miles; The Turning (2020) hints that the governess has inherited some form of mental illness from her institutionalized mother. Because each of these alternatives has major repercussions for the movie’s plot and symbolism, a filmmaker can use even the slightest interpretative tweak to justify her desire to create yet another Turn adaptation.

The particular nature of Turn’s gray areas also bears noting. Many of the ambiguities that James sows throughout Turn coyly hover at the edges of our culture’s two most luridly profitable taboos—sex and death—without naming the specific events entailed. Characters merely describe Quint’s and Jessel’s past actions as “horrors,” or “dreadful,” or an instance of people living “much too free[ly].” These winking half-revelations conveniently allow each new generation of creator to provide freshly provocative interpretations as cultural mores change and audiences become harder to shock. 

Many of the ambiguities coyly hover at the edges of our culture’s most luridly profitable taboos—sex and death—without naming the specific events entailed.

Thus the only thing that Jack Clayton’s 1961 film The Innocents had to do to get a rise out of viewers was to obliquely suggest that a cross-class romance had budded between Quint and Jessel. By contrast, Michael Winner’s The Nightcomers (1972) was born in the wilder era of the sexual revolution (and three years after the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code was lifted), and therefore ups the ante with explicit portrayals of BDSM between Quint (played by a rakish Marlon Brando) and Miss Jessel. A 2006 production (Donato Rotunno’s In a Dark Place), surfing the rising tide of lesbian representation in TV and movies of the mid-2000s, adds a frankly baffling erotic subplot between the governess and Mrs. Grose. Perhaps most enduringly of all, incest and child molestation have retained their capacity to disgust across the ages, and several films have exploitatively sought to disturb increasingly jaded audiences by placing Miles and/or Flora in sexual situations (The Nightcomers, Dan Curtis’s Turn of the Screw, Tom McLoughlin’s The Haunting of Helen Walker, Presence of Mind, The Turning). 

Film was still a tenderly young medium when James wrote Turn of the Screw, and it would be preposterous to suggest that he consciously wrote the story with an eye towards motion picture adaptation. (James did happen to see—and fall in love with—his first movie in 1898, the year of the novella’s release, but it wasn’t until later that his fiction  would explicitly reference the cinema.) However, the particular strategy of Gothic suspense that the novella both theorizes and embodies still undergirds our contemporary understanding of what makes a horror film maximally engaging to its audience. Which is to say: the realist virtuoso was one of literature’s earliest advocates of the notion that horror thrives in understatement. 

In this regard, the enigmas baked into the work’s plot and phenomenology are just the beginning; every element of the novella is an intentional exercise in withholding. But it is perhaps James’s own writings about Turn that most explicitly spell out his strategy for generating readerly chills. In a Preface published a decade after the original novella’s release, James bemoaned the way in which “the new type” of ghost story that had come into vogue in the late nineteenth century defanged itself by describing its specters in too much detail. Such tales “washed [their ghosts] clean of all queerness as by exposure to a flowing laboratory tap,” he complained. So, too, did narratives that explicitly described evil human acts succumb to “the comparative vulgarity, inevitably attending […] the offered example, the imputed vice, the cited act,” and in so doing run the risk that “they shouldn’t seem sufficiently bad” to the reader.

If Turn succeeds in its goal, the reader herself effectively serves as an adapter of the text.

It was to avoid these pitfalls, James continued, that he decided to paint Quint and Jessel’s crimes with such vagueness that “the spectator’s, the critic’s, the reader’s […] own experience, his own imagination […] will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.” In this framing, the ideal Gothic narrative makes the reader into an active participant in the narrative, his imagination the silver screen onto which he projects a fuller backstory by “think[ing] the evil […] for himself.” If Turn succeeds in its goal, then, the reader herself effectively serves as an adapter of the text—and conversely, any would-be adapter, be he a filmmaker, librettist, or playwright, must act as a reader, an interpreter making conscious choices about how to tie up James’s many loose ends. Unsurprising, then, that so many directors would eventually take the next step and immortalize in celluloid their respective answers to the novella’s myriad questions. (It is a cruel irony of adapting Turn, however, that as soon as a filmmaker offers up such an answer, even if only at the movie’s end, she chips away at the audience’s experience of the original text’s unremitting ambiguity. Adaptations of the novella wherein the screenwriter and director resist the urge to fill in Turn’s blanks, and instead fully reproduce those blanks for their audience, are rare indeed.)

In case this theoretical blueprint were not sufficient, though, the novella also provides the would-be adapter with a fictional role model as to how to retain an audience’s attention through Gothic delay. Turn of the Screw’s frame narrative opens on a cluster of friends exchanging spooky stories around a fire. A member of the group named Douglas will eventually relate the novella’s central tale of the hauntings at Bly. But Douglas, like a good horror filmmaker, coquettishly builds as much suspense as possible before he’ll give up the ghosts: he waits two whole nights to speak up at all, and even then, it is only to say that he must write into town for a manuscript that contains a tale of “dreadful—dreadfulness.” The document then takes another three days to arrive, and Douglas sits on it for another evening before finally spilling the beans. 

Douglas’s listeners protest each time he postpones and equivocates, yet also grow progressively more excited due to these very same withholdings. “Oh how delicious!” a woman declares after he provides a teaser on the first night. It’s this same reaction that James, like his fellow creator of Gothic narrative, Douglas, undoubtedly hoped to evoke in his own audience. Turn of the Screw was originally published in Collier’s Weekly magazine in serial form, over the course of four months, so its author was banking on readers’ attraction to slow-release scares. (He was right: initial responses to the novella were overwhelmingly positive, with a typical reviewer gushing in October 1898 that the story “rivet[s] the reader’s attention on every sentence.”) 

Even the work’s title evokes the kind of masochistic pleasure that arises from delayed revelation. The medieval practice of thumbscrew torture was typically inflicted with deliberate slowness, each “turn of the screw” very gradually bringing the vice tighter and tighter around a person’s finger. Anticipation was therefore part of the torment, the victim foreseeing greater levels of suffering long before he felt them. So, too, does each chapter of Turn disclose information with such painful slowness that the reader’s imagination runs wild with the “delicious” horrors to come. 

The increasingly unusual experience of deprivation can provide a unique kind of joy.

James’s short tale permanently established suspense, withholding, and ambiguity as major virtues on the rubric by which we still evaluate horror today. Of course, some entries in the genre, such as David Cronenberg’s gore-fests or Eli Roth’s torture porn, intentionally aspire to maximalism. But for the larger portion of horror media, which aims to sustain slow-burn dread over a longer period of time, common wisdom holds that such narratives—be they books, movies, creepypasta, or TV shows—become decidedly less scary as soon as they overshare. This excess might take the form of showing their monster too soon, the insultingly obvious exposition of a character’s traumatic past, or a reliance on visually overwhelming CGI. (The predominantly negative responses that greeted The Turning a few months ago have accused the film of all three of these sins, with one reviewer objecting that “Nothing is subtle here, least of all the scary bits” and another begging director Sigismondi to “show us your ghosts, but please do so sparingly and tastefully,” rather than relying on an “unsubtle overuse of CGI spirits.”) 

Precisely because our age is one that offers instant visual and digital gratification, the increasingly unusual experience of deprivation can provide a unique kind of joy. We experience a rare kind of suspense when we are temporarily blocked from seeing, hearing, or knowing something that, we predict, will thrill us. Halfway through Turn, in a metaphor that uncannily prefigures the cinema, the governess imagines herself as just such a blocking force between the impressionable children and the darkly sensual forces at Bly that seek to corrupt them: “I was a screen—I was to stand before [Miles and Flora]. The more I saw the less they would.” Horror fans still hope that a film or novel’s creator will stand between us and the main terrors for as long as possible—not so that we will be protected from the horrors, oh no, but so that we might stew just a while longer in the “‘delicious’” sauces of our own imagination. It’s these frissons of the invisible and the unsaid that will always be greater than the ones that actually take shape on the screen.

Why Is Everyone Suddenly Obsessed With Sourdough?

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

All of a sudden, everyone is making sourdough. Cooped up and anxious from shelter-in-place orders, we turned to bread-making in such numbers that yeast became impossible to find. Denied commercial yeast, we thundered forward with sourdough, which relies instead on a starter made of flour and water, fermented by wild yeast and lactobacillus bacteria. Quarantine sourdough has gotten so popular that we’re already getting backlash. Is it a forward-looking attempt to develop post-collapse skills? A way of bragging that you got your hands on some flour? The restless desire to make something tangible and useful? Or is it just a function of our collective depression and resulting desire for carbs?

For help interpreting this sourdough fixation, I turned to Robin Sloan, author of Sourdough. Sloan’s book, which came out in 2017, predated our current moment, but also kind of prefigured it; it features an adrift and alienated tech worker who is brought back to herself when she’s given a mysterious, almost otherworldly sourdough starter and begins baking perfect bread. I asked him what sourdough is doing for us right now, and what lessons it can teach us for the future.

Jess Zimmerman: Sourdough came out a few years ago, but it’s newly relevant today because sourdough has become the hot quarantine hobby for people who are lucky enough to be able to think beyond survival. What have you observed about the rise (sorry) in sourdough culture (sorry)? I feel like it goes beyond “I want bread and I don’t have yeast.”

The reality of a sourdough starter is honestly SHOCKING. It’s as much a weird roommate as a kitchen ingredient.

Robin Sloan: Well, this is what happened to me, and I think it’s true for a lot of people, especially people who have lost touch with old foodways: the reality of a sourdough starter is honestly SHOCKING. That it’s as much a weird roommate as a kitchen ingredient, I mean. It’s probably not a very kind commentary on me, or people like me, and the way we live and eat that it should seem so strange at first—but, oh well! You’ve got to learn sometime. And I really do think that, beside being a key part of this iconic (delicious) substance, sourdough starter also offers this broader “ohhh” about cooking and eating and like, the whole natural world.

JZ: What’s the substance of the “ohhh”? If people are making a sourdough starter because they don’t have yeast, or because everyone else is doing it, or whatever, what can they expect to be sort of passively learning from that experience?

RS: I think the big surprise, ESPECIALLY if you get into sourdough baking because it means delicious carbs (rather than because of an interest in fermentation), is just how truly and palpably alive the starter is. I mean it MOVES. It expands and contracts. Sometimes it spills out over the lip of the jar. It has moods and very specific needs, in terms of temperature and humidity. It is really a different (LITERAL) animal than a sack of flour or even its desiccated cousins in the dry yeast packet. And when you reckon with that, I think it opens up a whole bunch of new questions and, maybe, preoccupations.

JZ: Is it possible that the fad for quarantine sourdough is not unrelated to the drive for quarantine pets?

RS: I feel like, for me, that’s more aspirational than actual. This is where the fiction comes into it! I mean, I really DO believe that sourdough starters are strange, powerful, complex communities of life… but I wish they had a little bit more personality. The kind that’s parsable by a human mind, anyway. So… I wrote one! (I think some of the really great sourdough bakers really are in tune with their starters that way. I have to confess I never got there; my fictional singing, burping starter was my “cheat,” in a way.)

I do think that starters, like pets, are VERY happy with the situation we’re in. They’ve never gotten more love and  attention!

JZ: Your protagonist is a tech worker who’s deeply alienated from a lot of aspects of human life, like eating normal food instead of a Soylent analogue. Baking bread and caring for her sourdough starter put her back in touch. We’re experiencing a different kind of alienation now; can we still look to sourdough to ground us, at a time when a lot of us are actually way too connected to our kitchens?

RS: Well, the thing about sourdough that’s extra special—and this is true for anything that calls for some microbial ferment—is that not only CAN you share the starter, doing so is basically required. So it’s inherently social. I think the appeal of something like this [person who was tacking bags of free sourdough starter to telephone poles in the Bay Area] is not only its quirkiness, but the fact of sharing something (weirdly?) personal and incredibly abundant. A starter might be one of the all-time great gifts.

JZ:  Have YOU been baking sourdough in social seclusion?

RS: I confess: I haven’t! Here is the truth: I’m not a very good sourdough baker. I do have a starter, but mostly acts as a little factory producing excess for sourdough pancakes.

JZ: Wait, sourdough pancakes sound amazing though.

RS: Oh there is SO much you can do with all the “extra” material your starter produces after you feed it. Sourdough pancakes, sourdough waffles…

Turns out, just the tiniest bit of hardship unlocks this part of our brains that was always there, always waiting.

JZ: I wonder if this is going to be the next bit of frontiersmanship we all learn—I feel like I’m getting WAY better at figuring out what to do with what would otherwise be food waste. Although I guess one of the beauties of sourdough starter is that the leftovers are never waste, they’re just potential new bread.

RS: Absolutely! Turns out, just the tiniest bit of hardship unlocks this part of our brains that was always there, always waiting. I’m sure you’ve felt the (mild) thrill of coming up with a use for some weird scrap. It’s like a puzzle game. (All humans who lived a hundred years ago and before roll their eyes in sync.)

JZ: Okay, for the first time I understand my unprecedented excitement about making improvised soup the other day! I hate cooking but I love puzzles.

RS: Have you ever heard of the M.F.K. Fisher book How to Cook a Wolf?

JZ: Yes, we ran an essay on it!

RS: Oh that’s terrific. Well, AS YOUR READERS KNOW, it’s great. Her style was a huge (aspirational) influence on Sourdough, and I think this book in particular has fresh resonance.

JZ: The sourdough starter in your book is of Mysterious Origin and has almost fairy-tale powers, but it’s also not that far removed from real-life sourdough starter, which still involves catching invisible creatures and bending them to your will. Does sourdough have an inherently science-fictional aspect? Does that make it feel familiar in an inherently science-fictional time?

RS: One of the things I love about all fermentation is that, for as ancient and established as it is, as crucial as it’s been to the whole human story… we still don’t totally understand how it works? Microbial communities can be, and routinely are, complex beyond comprehension. Like little curled up global macroeconomic models just bubbling quietly in a jar on your countertop. It’s pretty clear to me that the richness of the microbiome—our own and others’—is going to be one of the things about which humans in a century say, totally condescendingly, “I can’t believe they didn’t understand that.” And anytime the world outpaces our understanding of it, yeah, I think it’s ripe for science fiction.

One of the things these microbial communities are amazing at is coordination, and I think there’s something about that worth dwelling on in this moment. Of course, I don’t want to be a lactobacillus, even if it means I can work in perfect harmony with a community of billions; but… I guess I’d be willing to LEARN some things from a lactobacillus?

One of the things these microbial communities are amazing at is coordination, and I think there’s something about that worth dwelling on in this moment.

JZ: What should we learn from a lactobacillus, in these times?

RS: Oh, EVERYTHING. Resilience: you can put a jar of starter into the fridge and forget about it for Y E A R S and then (almost certainly) revive it with no problem. What else? Cooperation! The way these communities of microbes—who are NOT homogenous, by the way—all pedal together to grow and flourish, and respond to hardship, too… it’s amazing. Microbial communities are very VERY good at communication, and we could also use that. THERE’S SO MUCH.

JZ: Do you have any tips for new sourdough bakers, besides “pay close attention to the microbes and apply their lessons in your daily life”?

RS: Yes. It’s the thing I never mastered, even though I always knew about it (and it’s especially tricky here in the Bay Area): the temperature of your starter is really, REALLY important. A few degrees overnight can be the difference between a starter that froths full of life and delicious potential, and one that’s sort of… gloomy.

JZ: So sourdough may get us through the pandemic but it won’t get us through climate change. Sorry! Too dark!

RS: I’ll tell you what… when it’s 2096 and you’re floating the messed-up ocean currents on your solar barge, living off of krill chips, you’ll be glad you have your starter with you.

Mom Is in Love with Randy Travis

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

“Randy Travis”
by Souvankham Thammavongsa

The only thing my mother liked about the new country we were living in was its music. We had been given a small radio as part of the welcome package from the refugee settlement program. There were other items in the box, such as snow pants, mittens, and new underwear, but it was the radio she cherished most. A metal box with a dial that picked up a few channels. The volume button had only three ticks, and then it couldn’t go any farther to the right. She held this little radio up  to her ear like a seashell and listened. The host always spoke briefly between songs and there was the occasional laugh. A laugh, in any language, was a laugh. His laugh was gentle and private and welcoming. You got the sense that he, too, was alone somewhere. Grateful for the sound of a human voice and for the music that kept her company, she listened to the radio constantly while I was at school and my father was at work.

My mother especially loved American country music, because it reminded her of the way the women in her family talked among themselves. It felt familiar. The pleas, the gossip, the dreams of the big city, what it was like to come from a place no one had ever heard of. The songs always told a story you could follow—ones about heartbreak, or about love, how someone can promise to love you forever and ever and ever, Amen. My mother did not know what Amen meant, but she guessed it was something you said at the end of a sentence to let people know the sentence was finished. “Three apples, Amen,” she would say at the corner grocery store. Because of this, our neighbors thought my mother was religious, and even though our family was Buddhist, she caught a ride to church with them every Sunday. She made friends easily, was quick to smile, and was never shy about practicing her English.

My mother did not know what Amen meant, but she guessed it was something you said at the end of a sentence to let people know the sentence was finished. “Three apples, Amen,” she would say at the corner grocery store.

At church, she told us they ate one cracker and took one swallow of red wine and the rest of the time there was a man talking. She did not know exactly what he said, but he said it for a long time. Sometimes, just to give her hands something to do, she would pick up the heavy book in front of her seat and open it. Even though she didn’t understand everything they were singing, she moved her lips anyway. It was just like at the citizenship ceremony. Whether or not you understood the oath you made, you had to move your lips.

After a while, for some reason she seemed to lose interest in going. She didn’t say why.

When my father got his first paycheck, he wanted to buy something that wasn’t a necessity. We were living  in a new country now. We could have grand ideas of owning something luxurious. My mother suggested a car so he wouldn’t have to take a bus to work, but that was out of our price range. They thought of going to a fancy restaurant like the ones their friends took them to, but they did not like the way the steaks were cooked, thick slabs fried in butter. There was no fish sauce with hot spices and herbs at the table. They talked about getting a wooden bed frame to put their mattress on, but beds were for sleeping on, not for show. There were many things my father could have bought with his first paycheck, but in the end he decided on a record player. In Laos, it was something only rich people owned.

My mother loved the control the record player gave her. With the radio, she had to wait for what she wanted to hear. It could be days before she heard her favorite song again. Now she could drop the needle onto the black disc and watch it turn and turn, and listen to her favorite songs whenever she wanted. She never went back to the radio after that.

Later, once we could afford a TV and a VCR, she taped the country music award shows. After the nominations were read, she’d yell out her pick for the winner. If she got any wrong, she would memorize the winners in each category and replay the show and yell out the correct names. Whenever Dolly Parton was nominated, she chose her, and she was right every time. She’d yell, “I won!” I didn’t understand why she did that. What she’d won was nothing but being right.

The songs my mother loved most were by Randy Travis. Whenever we saw a new Randy Travis music video on television, she would quickly hit the Record button, and everything else slipped from her mind. She would kneel with her face close to the screen, then reach over and hit Rewind and Play, watch him sing again and again. After a while, the labels on the buttons began to fade and disappear.

By then, she didn’t care much for the things she usually did around the house. The laundry would be done but the clothes remained unfolded, dishes washed but not dried or put away. Then, she discovered frozen dinners. You could warm them up in minutes. And these dinners were my favorite for a time. It was what all my friends ate at home. I loved having mashed potatoes and corn and steak and roast chicken. My father did not. He wanted papaya salad, padaek, pickled cabbage, blood sausage, and sticky rice. But those dishes took days to prepare and getting the ingredients meant long bus rides to the market in Chinatown. It took time to ferment fish sauce, to pickle, to chop up a whole chicken into its parts, and to soak the rice to soften it. Time that my mother wanted to spend listening to Randy Travis sing.

My father was nothing like Randy Travis. No one noticed who he was or what he did for his living.

My father was nothing like Randy Travis. No one noticed who he was or what he did for his living. He never used the word love or showed much sentiment. For my mother’s birthday, he gave her a few twenty-dollar bills. Not even a birthday card or plans for a night out. He thought that because he was there, that was all that was needed to show his love. He thought his silence was love, his restraint was love. To say it out loud, to display it so openly, was to be shameless. He thought it was ridiculous to be moaning about love so much. What kind of man was Randy Travis, with his health, his looks, his fame, and his money, that he should ever have anything to cry about?

One morning, my mother gave me some money to buy one of those teen Bop magazines so we could find a mailing address for Randy Travis at the back of it. She brought out a card printed with a pink heart on the front, but because she couldn’t read or write English, she told me to write a note to him for her. I did not know what to write. I must have been about seven. What could I know then about the language of adult love? While she curled a few strands of her hair around a finger and broke out in small fits of giggles, I stood there, unable to decide how to even begin a sentence to him. I didn’t like how she was acting, and I was afraid of what would happen to my father if Randy Travis ever wrote back.

So I wrote, I do not like you.

My mother would never know what I had written.

I told her I’d written I love you forever and ever, just like his song.

She smiled, and then signed her name underneath.

We sent these cards to Randy Travis again and again, and though no one ever wrote back, my mother insisted we keep on sending them. I tried to think of what to write and thought of the things people wrote in the bathroom at school or spray-painted on the brick outside our building. You’re ugly. Go back home. Loser. Sometimes I didn’t even get the chance to write anything before she signed her name on the card, sealed it inside an envelope, and pushed it down into the dark slot of the mailbox at the corner of our street. We must have sent out hundreds of these cards, spending money on stamps and envelopes, my mother always hoping to get something back. It wasn’t any different than what she had done to come to this country, she said.

Of course I told my father about what we were doing, thinking he could put a stop to her obsession. It was getting out of hand. By then I’d refused to help her anymore, saying I had homework, thinking this would stop the letters, but she kept mailing them on her own with just her name inside. I showed one of the cards to my father. He pointed to her signature. It looked like pretzels, loopy and knotted, and he laughed and said to my mother, “Randy Travis reads English. He’s gonna look at your name and see a doodle. That address you got, who knows what they really do there. For all we know, the cards probably go straight to the dump.”

Randy Travis reads English. He’s gonna look at your name and see a doodle.

But my mother continued to send those cards with her name written out in Lao. Randy Travis was all she could think of and talk about. When the pipe in the kitchen sink clogged and my father didn’t know how to fix it, my mother said, “Oh, I bet Randy Travis knows how to do that.” And then there was the time she said out loud over dinner, “I bet Randy Travis would like to have dinner with me.” She’d stare outside the window at the sky, the moon, the sun, or a cloud and say, “Randy Travis could be looking at the very same thing I’m looking at right now. Wherever he is.”

It was inevitable that my father got tired of hearing about Randy Travis, and he finally said to her, sadly, that the man was famous and that our lives would never cross his. “He doesn’t even know we exist. We’re not even a single glitter of light to him,” he said. Then he brought his hand to his face, formed a circle around his eye with his fingers, and closed the space inside until there was nothing left except a tight fist. But you could not talk her out of her Randy Travis love. It was a shadow that covered her up, and all you could do was wait for some light to come through. She even started dressing up like Dolly Parton, thinking this was the kind of woman he’d want. She dyed her hair blond, teased its strands, and tied it in an upsweep. She played his music and sat by the window, waiting and gazing out onto the street below, as if he was going to drive up and take her away.

Hoping for some of this Randy Travis love to brush off on him, my father started wearing these cowboy boots my mother got for him at a garage sale. Pretty soon, he was wearing jeans and flannel tops, and standing like Randy Travis. He’d hook a thumb into the belt loop of his jeans and stand there with one leg straight and the other loose at the knee so it jutted forward. It made my mother happy to see him change in this way. But then when my mother asked him to sing, he failed spectacularly.

He did not know how to pronounce the words.

Her broad and hopeful smile vanished from her face, but my father only tried harder, belting out the chorus louder, holding on to the vowels, trying to produce a southern twang. He was no star. He was no  leading man. He packed store furniture into cardboard boxes for a living. No one would pay to see him sing, but he didn’t care. He was only trying to be what my mother wanted.

One day, my father told me we were going to a Randy Travis concert. He said, “It’s what your mother wants. We have to do this for her.” He rented a car and we drove down south. In those days, there was no such thing as buying things online. You had to walk up to a concert venue and buy a ticket right there at the box office.

My mother was so thrilled, she made the kinds of food my father liked to eat. She spent the three days before we set out soaking sticky rice, and when it was done cooking, she put it in a thip khao and bundled that in a blanket so it would keep its warmth. She made papaya salad and crushed tiny dry shrimps into it, and fried up two quails and wrapped them up in aluminum foil. I hadn’t noticed how beautiful Lao food was before. After the bland yellows and browns of those TV dinners, it felt like a homecoming. Arranged together, the colors were so bold and bright, the flavors popped and sharpened. Every meal tasted like a special occasion. It was a reminder of where she came from and her love. I could now see why my father insisted on eating nothing but this.

I do not remember much about the drive there except seeing a blue-and-red sign with the number 75 on it. We followed it for many days. I couldn’t see much out the window. I only saw black wires like underlines in the blue of the sky and then the dark and my own little face staring back at me.

At the concert, we were so high up on the outer ring of the audience I could not tell if it really was Randy Travis onstage. His face was the size of a pin. I closed my left eye and measured him with my thumb and index finger from where we were. He wasn’t more than an inch between my two fingers. And I don’t know why, but I closed that space he took up until I couldn’t see him anymore. It was when he started to sing that I opened my other eye and realized it had to be Randy Travis on that stage. His voice matched exactly the one from our records.

He did not move around much onstage. He mostly just stood there, strumming his guitar. He actually seemed shy, casting his eyes to the ground whenever the crowd rose to their feet with applause. He’d nod to acknowledge their praise, then begin another song. He did not look at anyone in particular. Didn’t single out anyone to sing to. He stared out into the crowd and the spotlight lit him with a glow I hadn’t seen before. He seemed to sparkle. Once in a while, he would wave in our direction and my mother would wave back. But we were just a black dot in the dark to him. I thought of what it must have cost my father to bring us to this concert. The hours he put in lifting and packing all that furniture into homes we could never own ourselves. Homes owned by the kind of people who could afford to sit closer to Randy Travis. From where we were sitting, the stage lights lit up their heads so they gleamed.

After the concert, we waited with all the young teenage girls by the tour bus, but I was too small to see anything besides people’s backsides. I saw my father reach for my mother’s hand, but he missed. So he put both his hands in his pockets and looked to the ground, at his cowboy boots.

When I think of it now, I’m not surprised that, a few years later, my mother would find something else to devote herself to. This time it was slot machines. She sat up close as those machines lit up her face and swallowed her hope coin by coin. I knew my mother was no stranger to hoping; it’s how we all ended up here in this country in the first place. She got in the habit of not coming home, sleeping in the car most nights in the parking lot of some casino, my father waiting up to see if she’d come home. It wasn’t long after that we were told she was found collapsed in the parking lot. People die sometimes, and there doesn’t have to be a reason why. That’s just the way life is.

I saw my father reach for my mother’s hand, but he missed. So he put both his hands in his pockets and looked to the ground, at his cowboy boots.

It seems wrong to say, but I felt relief for her then.

Last month, it was my forty-second birthday. I went to visit my father in that old apartment. Everything was the same, except the view. There was a building now where there had once been a park. It had become a place where the light did not get in. My father took out his wallet, which was made of brown leather and frayed at the edges. It was packed with receipts, coins, and mints. He grabbed a bunch of twenty-dollar bills and held them out for me, but I waved the money away and said I didn’t need it. He asked me if I had eaten and when I said I hadn’t, he fried fish with grated ginger and brought out a plate of papaya salad and sticky rice. We didn’t say much to each other. We were eating. I got choked up at the first taste of the papaya salad. Fermented fish sauce is like a fingerprint—you could trace who it belonged to by how it was made. My father added crabs to his sauce, which was thick and dark, fermenting for years. That wasn’t how my mother made her sauce.

After dinner, my father and I went into the living room to watch television. He came upon the country music channel and there was a Randy Travis special on. We watched a few of his music videos and then my father got up and turned on his karaoke machine. I was nervous for him, cringing at the memory of how he had sung all those years ago, when he didn’t know the lyrics or how to pronounce the words. Now, with the help of that machine, he knew what to do. I was the only one there, and I was sitting up close. The instruments started and a white dot hovered over the words. Then, he opened his mouth, and I was astonished.

A Book About Undocumented Americans That Doesn’t Pander to White Expectations

Posted on by Jo Lou

Now, with COVID-19 spreading at horrifying rates in the United States, and social distancing in effect, we are having to reckon with who is most vulnerable in our country: who gets jobs security, who gets to work from home, who has savings to live on, who has health insurance, who has the protection of intergenerational wealth, who is eligible for the $1,200 stimulus check, who, who, who. A book like The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is so vital right now. It’s an intimate, probing book, it is both documentary and poetry, a punk manifesto.

Cornejo Villavicencio was born in Ecuador and came to the United States when she was five. She started the book the morning after Donald Trump was elected president:

“I wanted to write about our daily lives, how we survive, how we thrive, how we cope. I would not ask undocumented subjects why they came to America, no focus on push/pull factors, because I believe migration is a human right. I would not ask, except in rare cases, how they came to America. No thrilling, explicit, border crossing stories. I would not ask them if they felt American. No apologizing for our illegality. But I would ask them if they had regrets. I would ask them if they had nightmares.

I was the American dream incarnate—one of the first undocumented students to graduate from Harvard, getting a PhD at Yale, pitching TV shows in Hollywood—I knew the American Dream was a pyramid scheme at which at the bottom were immigrants meant to recruit other immigrants. I knew children of immigrants have to carry the carcasses of those dreams from generation to generation. My book tells those stories throughout my visits to various cities, but it also tells the story of a prodigal daughter—me—finding chosen family in the migrants I met, and finding emancipation from the American Dream I had been striving after my whole life.”  

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Throughout the book, Cornejo Villavicencio travels across the U.S. interviewing undocumented people, interspersing her and her family’s experiences: day laborers in Staten Island, New York’s whitest, most conservative borough; women who frequent pharmacies in Miami, where they are able to buy low-cost medicines without prescriptions; residents affected by the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; among other lives. Cornejo Villavicencio participates in a vodou cleansing ritual for protection from ICE, visits children in Ohio whose father has been deported to Mexico, and she removes her outerwear so as not to overtly give away the passing of time, when she visits a man living in a church to resist a deportation order. The effect is that migrant bodies that are used as talking points in political debates are finally rendered fully human. 

I was delighted to speak to Karla Cornejo Villavicencio by email about empathy, humanizing the political, emotional and mental health for migrant bodies, immigrant feminism, and more.  

Alexia Arthurs: I believe that books have lives that go beyond what we can anticipate when we’re dreaming them up and writing them, and later when we publish. Or, that’s been my experience. How do you hope your book, The Undocumented Americans, lives in the world? 

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio: I’d like it to be a red string around the wrists of young migrants, children of immigrants, grandchildren of immigrants who feel the heavy weight of the American dream, who feel an all-encompassing affect towards their parents that we know is love but is also muddled by guilt and obligation and like oil and water is hard to separate. I hope my book emancipates them from that burden, even a little. Or allows them to acknowledge it, to name it, which can put them on a path to that emancipation. To fuck shit up. 

And for non-immigrants, I hope this book moves them towards something other than pity, or inspiration, or charity, or looking at us and then feeling #blessed about their lot in life. I hope it makes them see undocumented people as fully human. 

AA: Reading The Undocumented Americans, I recognized the shame of being undocumented. Growing up, I knew that people like me were referred to as “illegal immigrants” on the news, language that fed my shame, the fact that we were unaccounted for, unwanted, and were doing something bad. You write, “As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram,” and you write about the unidentified undocumented bodies at Ground Zero. I love that your book puts language to lives that have been forced into the shadows of American life. 

In the essay, “A Poetry of Proximity,” Solmaz Sharif writes, “The maiming and obliteration of language preempts and attempts to excuse the maiming and obliteration of bodies.” I wonder, what was the experience of language-making, naming experiences that have been so absent from our social and political lives and literary imaginations? 

KCV: My father works with his hands, my mother works with her hands, and they will die prematurely because of it. Because of their sacrifices, I am able to make a living working with my hands too through the most extravagant career—writing. But as my job was paid in blood, I have the ability to kill who I have to kill and resuscitate who I have to resuscitate and that’s what I did in this book. 

AA:  I’m really interested in hearing your thoughts on this moment of this conversation between poets Natalie Diaz and Leslie Contreras Schwartz in the Kenyon Review. Schwartz asked, “Do you consider yourself a poet of witness? What issues emerge out of bearing witness, so to speak, to a Native experience for an audience that includes non-Native and white readers?” Diaz responds:

“I think witness is sometimes a performance, sometimes a distance, so I am skeptical of what witness has become in poetry. Bearing witness is an interesting term. Most people don’t bear it at all, they just look, they just look with their eyes and write with their eyes, and go to sleep. I don’t believe in empathy. Which might mean I don’t believe in witness right now. Definitely, I don’t believe in empathy. Empathy is selfish. We can’t have empathy for the people we drop bombs on because we aren’t afraid bombs will be dropped on us. Empathy is selfish. If a person can’t imagine (the violence or pain) happening to their body or to a body beloved to them, they can’t possibly understand it.”

I’m interested in how a book like yours humanizes the political—how it can serve as a call to empathize, as a call to action. What do you think? How do you contend with this idea of personalizing the political? Is empathy really selfish? 

My parents work with their hands, and they will die prematurely because of it. Because of their sacrifices, I am able to work with my hands too through the most extravagant career: writing.

KCV: My goal was to address a failure of imagination on the part of people who wrote about immigrants, which was a failure to depict us as something other than long-suffering, laboring marvels with an innate connection to the land. And that was true both for fiction and non-fiction. It was a literary quest. Of course it was political, because those depictions depended on beliefs about our abilities to experience pain, or on colonialism, but as an artist I wanted to really play with genre and use genre to force the reader to experience empathy. 

Empathy can never be selfish. Empathy is godly. Art allows us to feel for the pain of others who have or will experience pain we cannot imagine or cannot ever happen to us. Even if we cannot feel it, or imagine it, that’s just human limitation. A failure of imagination can be compensated by the construction of a sturdy enough bridge of artistic articulation of that pain, and if it’s honest enough, we may not feel it—though in some cases we may— but we will feel for our fellow humans, and that is the job of the artist. If I only cared about the violence I could imagine realistically happening to me or my loved ones, I would be a Trump supporter and that’s selfish.

AA: I really appreciated how The Undocumented Americans explores the psychological lives of undocumented Americans. I probably had an eating disorder in my early twenties—it’s why I first went to therapy when I got graduate school insurance—and I’ve wondered if my disordered eating and my health issues now, in my early thirties, are because of the thirteen years I lived in the U.S. without documentation. I have an easier time aligning my anxiety with my former immigration status because somehow as a culture we forget that trauma lives in the body. Did you set out to write a book so interested in the emotional and mental lives of undocumented immigrants? 

KCV: Yes. My parents’ marriage was falling apart as I was writing this book, and it was causally correlated with my father’s depression and overall decline in health after he turned 50. This happened after his father died and he couldn’t go back to Ecuador to bury him. I had also explored my mental illnesses for about a decade and realized a lot of the symptoms that were co-morbid in my diagnoses were related to my experiences as a migrant. It was a theory I had.

Roberto Gonzales at Harvard told me about the ulcers and headaches and anxiety and actual health problems that he’s seen in younger undocumented populations so I knew that. So when I started asking aging migrants I interviewed whether they had nightmares, for example, or if they drank, or if they experienced anxiety, or if they were lonely and depressed, and the answers started lining up with my hypothesis, I thought about how to depict the reality of our mental and emotional state without depicting us as a sick population, which feeds into the propaganda, but rather a lovely wounded beast, fierce and gentle, fighting till the last breath. We’re really brave.

AA: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what I would describe as immigrant feminism, a particular kind of feminism I don’t hear included in the conversations my queer white women peers are having. You write about your own mother’s feminist awakening, and you interview so many incredible undocumented women, who organize and care for their communities, but whose voices and experiences are left out of mainstream (i.e. white) feminism. I’m angry that mainstream feminism doesn’t center the most marginalized women, women like the ones in my family, who took care of white children and cleaned in white homes.  

I was scared of flying, scared of ICE, and scared of looking into the eyes of other undocumented people and seeing pain I wouldn’t know what to do with.

KCV: The migrant women I met through my research are incredible organizers, activists, and public speakers. They know they’re smart, they know they’re capable. They just don’t have resources and don’t know where to find them unless they’re already connected into activist networks. I think a lot of undocumented women reach this feminist awakening at an older age, once their kids are a bit older, and white, black, queer feminist allies could welcome them by providing them with resources to empower them.

Think, what would a middle-aged undocumented divorced, separated, or single woman need? Well, tools for empowerment include conversations for sure. But also find or translate information in Spanish about domestic violence, divorce, financial independence, financial literacy, getting your GED, taking classes at the local community college, if the woman is a nail tech, teach her how to put up her designs on Instagram! Remember, with undocumented Latinx women, a lot of them married young, and many of them migrated with their husbands or married their husbands as soon as they arrived in America. They don’t know America without their husbands. Encourage them to know America without their husbands! 

AA: Let’s talk writing process. I loved your voice throughout the book—it’s intimate, at times, really funny, and searching. For me, the book reads kind of like a quest—you travel across the U.S. interviewing undocumented Americans, reflecting on your and your family’s experiences in the U.S. How did the nature and intent of the project feed the writing process and the crafting of the book? 

KCV: I’m a very lonely person. I have few friends, and most of the people I am close to are my neighborhood’s dogs. I was scared when I set out to write this book, scared of flying, scared of ICE, and scared of looking into the eyes of other undocumented people and seeing pain I wouldn’t know what to do with. I wondered if I was putting my parents at risk. 

Throughout the journey, I met so many people I grew to love. I wanted them to live, I wanted them to spit in the face of Stephen Miller, all in a row, taking turns. I wanted them to live long lives, eat their favorite childhood foods, never suffer a single day more in their lives, and die peacefully in their sleep in a field of poppies. Obviously I am in therapy. But I now know that there are dozens of homes across the country where there is a couch and a warm meal waiting for me should I need it, and a very long hug, and I’ve never really had that before.

AA: I believe I first heard the term “UndocuJoy” from activist and poet Yosimar Reyes. The movement challenges victimization narratives about undocumented people. I thought about UndocuJoy when I was reading The Undocumented Americans because I was getting to know about undocumented lives beyond the trials of their immigration status. Did you think about joy when you were compiling these interviews? Do you see your book in conversation with the UndocuJoy movement?   

The United States does not want immigration reform. They want our people to work for little pay, break their bodies in half, and die in anonymity.

KCV: My priority was depicting complexity and dignity, and dignity doesn’t always look happy. Sometimes dignity looks hysterical. I will preface this by saying, I’m a bit of a Larry David type, so nobody listen to me. But I don’t really like portmanteaus. Making up words with Undocu- as the prefix is something I’m not into. It’s a type of community building that seems inspired by branding. But I appreciate the sentiment. I mean, I also don’t like imperatives so if you tell me to look joyful and post it on Instagram with a hashtag, I will put a thumbtack through my eyeball and tag Sofia Vergara. 

In this book, as in all my writing, I wrote and write against people depicting undocumented people as crouched over, with calloused hands, and dirty fingernails, I wrote us as heirs to the myths that people love about this country, I wrote us as frontiersmen. But yes, when people try to pitch me to media, they’re like, she was born in a literal ditch and somehow made her way to Harvard which angers me 50% of the time, and makes me laugh 50% of the time. But the imperative to perform joy—for whom? As undocumented people, our joy can be rage. Our joy can look like revenge. Our joy can look like allowing yourself to cut class one day. Our joy can look like finding a wallet with cash in it and keeping the money but returning the wallet. Our joy doesn’t have to be ready for consumption. Joy is fucking joy. We’re just fucking people. They’re just fucking kids.

AA: I loved the probing nature of your book—“I’m looking to interview children of immigrants partly to get a blueprint for myself because I’m lost and I’m scared…”. I was particularly impacted by the questions you asked about caring for aging migrant parents who aren’t eligible for social security benefits and don’t have retirement plans. Personally, I worry about this too—A woman was telling me recently about her parents’ retirement lives in which they catch up on the Academy Award nominations, and it made me sad, as I couldn’t help drawing comparisons to my mother, who will continue to work for a long time. I’ve published what could be described as a well-received book and yet I still feel shitty for not choosing a more lucrative profession.

Researching and writing The Undocumented Americans, what did you learn about yourself—as a person and as a writer? Did you find the blueprint you were seeking? Interviewing undocumented people, did you learn anything you didn’t know before?

KCV: I learned that the United States does not want comprehensive immigration reform. They want our people to work for little pay, break their bodies in half, and die in anonymity. That was the plan. But our African American and Native brothers and sisters could have told us that. I will still keep fighting for all American citizens I know to vote Democrat. A lot of them don’t, because they’re moral purists. My family feels the consequences of that. But they’ll keep on with their lives, writing for Jacobin, gentrifying Brooklyn. 

I have learned that my back is as long as it is wide and I can fit 11 million people on it, and I will feed them all, and clothe them all, and nurse them all back to health, because I am an immigrant’s daughter, and my freedom was paid for in blood, and I have to pay my dues. I’ve learned that I want to stop writing about immigration but I can’t because I can hear all their sighs every time they realize God has let them down but they don’t give up their faith in God yet. I learned that I may have gone insane. And I learned that undocumented immigrants, not Mary, are the people Jesus left to John’s care when he was dying on the cross.

Can Two Chinese American Orphans Find Home in the Wild West?

Posted on by Jo Lou

At the opening of C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold, we meet Lucy and Sam, newly orphaned siblings who must find a way to survive after their father’s death.

How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang

On a stolen horse, and with Ba’s body secured in a chest, the two leave their small mining town for the open, wild, and often brutal landscape of the American West. They’re looking for a proper place to bury Ba. They’re looking for a new place to call home.

What follows is an incredibly moving immigrant epic. At its center is a Chinese American family whose desires, pains, dreams, and joys are so alive on the page that I’ve thought about them again and again after reading (and rereading) this gorgeous book. 

C Pam Zhang and I had the chance to speak over the phone about the novel’s family and much more, from the Western landscape to language’s role in the book to writing from a child’s perspective. 

Alexandra Chang: The setting—the American West—and the time period—Gold Rush era—are so important to the novel. It’s imbued with such a mythic quality, and it’s romanticized in the American imagination as this place of possibility, where anyone could strike it rich. (Which in many ways still exists today.) What drew you to writing about the American West? Were there particular westerns that you were inspired by or riffing off of or writing against? 

C Pam Zhang: I remember moving to this part of the world as a kid. There was something about the sky and the horizon that struck me. I also grew up loving books like East of Eden, Lonesome Dove, and Little House on the Prairie. One thing that all of these books do is cast a small group of people against the epic backdrop of this landscape. In doing so, they make these people seem grander and their aspirations loftier. That’s always been one power of literature that I admire—it reminds us that our lives can be epic. 

But then, of course, I had several moments in which I realized that these books that I loved were all about white people, suggesting that only white families could be epic, which is not true. Especially when I think of the struggles that so many immigrant families go through. The fact that they’re crossing new land, trading one life for a completely different life, gaining new names, even. Those stories should have the right to stand as large as Greek myth.

AC: How would you describe the characters’ relationships to the land around them, especially Lucy, who we get most of the book through? 

Immigrant stories should have the right to stand as large as Greek myth.

CPZ: Conflicted is probably the simplest answer that I can give. They feel very attached to the land because it is where some of them were born. They see it as their own in a way. But they are also being told at every turn that they don’t belong there, that the land isn’t theirs. And finally, there’s the uneasy legacy of knowing that the land was stolen from indigenous tribes. That’s one of the great tensions at the heart of the book—how can you feel so deeply about a place and then be told at every turn that it is not yours to inhabit?

AC: Language also plays a critical role in this family, the family of the novel. They speak to one another in this mixture of English and Mandarin, and we see them depend on code-switching when dealing with people of the town and other people they encounter. Their access and facility with language, though, causes some big misunderstandings between them. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I was wondering if you could talk about how you see language affecting the way these characters perceive one another, as well as the decisions they make throughout the book. 

CPZ: I speak very broken, elementary Mandarin. In Mandarin, I have a completely different personality to when I speak English. I have a different sense of humor. I have a different capacity for depth and nuance. And I actually don’t feel like myself at all. 

You say code-switching, but for the characters in this book, it runs even deeper than that, especially when a character like Ma has come to a language much later, at an inflection point when she’s about to trade one life for another. I think when the family speaks this mixed Mandarin and English, it joins them because it sort of glues those parts of their lives together. But when Ma switches back to Mandarin, she is harkening back to this whole different life she has and this whole different set of secrets. She’s accessing this different part of herself which is one reason that language creates this turning point in the book. 

AC: The two siblings, Lucy and Sam, diverged in their willingness and ability to assimilate into the dominant culture around them. For example, with Lucy, we see from the beginning her wanting to fit in laughing when people are laughing, learning etiquette from her teacher, diminishing herself and those she senses she has the power to diminish. Sam, however, fights against society’s norms and finds ways to exist outside of other people’s expectations. Why was it important to depict these different modes of defense and survival, especially from the perspective of immigrants and outsiders?

CPZ: It was important to me to depict both because I think many immigrants play with different modes of existence on this spectrum. When I was younger, I was probably more in the Lucy vein, where I tried to diminish myself. I directed a mixture of envy and judgment towards people who operated in the more Sam-like, open vein. It can seem obvious from the outside that, Sure, of course, you should stand up for yourself and be exactly who you are and fight against these like tiny boxes that society tries to cram you into. But there’s also an inherent danger in it. 

You can see in the novel that Sam has lived this much more dangerous lifestyle, and part of the great tragedy of Sam’s life is that Sam has given up so much in order to live more honestly. There is no right way to live. Unfortunately, both ways are always going to be fraught. 

AC: I know you started this novel as a short story, and now that story is the opening. I was wondering if you always knew that you were going to expand that story into a novel? Did you have a sense of the novel’s arc after writing the story?

How can you feel so deeply about a place and then be told at every turn that it is not yours to inhabit?

CPZ: No, not at all. I really did not want this to become a novel. And honestly, what person wants to be writing a novel? They are very arduous and soul-crushing projects that take over your life. So when I finished the short story, I thought it was done. For many months afterwards, I tried to do other things, but the characters and their lives would keep popping into my head. When I took a shower, I would have an idea about them, or I’d have a question about what happened next. And I fought this for many months so that the entire arc of the book had crystallized in my head and the characters had taken on a more fully fleshed form by the time I finally gave in and sat down to write the novel draft. 

I keep reminding myself of this now, as I’m working on my next book, that the time spent not writing is just as important as the time spent writing. 

AC: Structurally, with this novel, we begin at the middle. Did you ever consider another opening? How did you land on the structure of the book? 

CPZ: I did not consider another opening. For me, the book always did have to start with this huge emotional question. It starts off as a very traditional quest novel. A terrible event happens and it sets these two characters literally running off to fulfill this quest. 

When I thought about the rest of the structure of the novel, I was pretty inspired by Michael Ondaatje’s novel Divisadero, which in many ways is nothing like this book at all. But what I really admire about that book is it completely puts aside the need for a linear chronological plot, and doesn’t even follow characters in any sort of patterned way. There are characters who you meet in the first pages of Divisadero who are not mentioned at all in the last hundred pages, for example. The extreme structure of that novel is an emotional arc rather than a plot arc. Every subsequent section reaches deeper emotionally. 

One thing I was trying to depict structurally is that the children of immigrants often proceed with their lives completely unaware of these vast foundations that their parents have lived through. It was this tension where I couldn’t have Lucy or Sam notice, because that wouldn’t be realistic or true to them, but I needed some way to go deeper. That was something that the novel on the structural level could provide. 

AC: Yeah, and I totally love that section where we go into the voice of the father who seems to speak from the dead. It’s this critical moment where the reader gets access to the story beyond Lucy or Sam’s perspective. You speak to its purpose in the novel, but how did that section come to be? 

CPZ: The father’s death really haunts the entire book, and Lucy and Sam, from the beginning of this quest narrative. After the first section, they have to push that death aside and get back to the question of survival. But that doesn’t actually mean that they’re done with it. I wanted a way to spend time on and honor that loss. 

History is largely by and about white men.

From a craft perspective, by that point in the book, I was starting to feel constrained by the close perspective on Lucy. I needed a way for the book to open out. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the presence of joy in writing. I just heard Garth Greenwell speak a little bit about that. I do think that I have this tendency to write about topics that are very “serious” or “heavy,”—which is not to say that those aren’t important to write about—but in most people’s lives, there is a whole spectrum of emotion and it felt like Ba’s story was a way to access additional joy and beauty, to give texture to the novel.

AC: There’s a lot of storytelling in this book. I wanted to bring up one instance where Lucy shares one of her father’s stories with her white teacher, who then shows her the “truth” in a history book. In showing her, the teacher takes the life out of Ba’s story and calls it “pure sentiment and just a pretty little folk tale.” Speaking, a bit more on the joy of fiction—do you see fiction as a way also give back life to some of these stories?

CPZ: Yeah, I think there is a lot of joy in that. And specifically in that encounter with the teacher, they’re talking about written, recorded history. History is white. It is largely by and about white men. But beneath that official history is this other history of people deemed unimportant at the time, whether that’s women or people of color or queer folk or domestic help and so on. I think that it is the job of historians, of course, to try to unearth more of those histories that have been lost to time, but some of them are just lost forever. I do think it is the simultaneous job of artists and writers to, through an act of empathy and craft, imagine those stories and to imagine that joy into being. Sometimes fiction can tell an emotional truth that strikes harder than fact. 

AC: Was there anything that you found especially challenging in the writing of this book? 

CPZ: Oh, definitely. I alluded it a little bit earlier when you asked that question about structure. The hard part about writing any novel is that each novel is flawed and comes with its own set of constraints, which are also its strengths. In the case of this novel, it’s told for the most part in this very close third person, in the present tense, of this young and traumatized child. I had to inhabit the mind space of this child who feels everything incredibly deeply, much more deeply than I or most adults, who have learned to compartmentalize or quiet our emotions in some way. After every single draft of this book, I would find myself crying, not necessarily because of the book, but just because I had been flayed open by inhabiting the child.

7 Surreal Books That Suddenly Seem Relatable

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

These are strange times. As lives are disrupted by COVID-19, seemingly impossible things are suddenly coming to be—shortages in the land of plenty, universal payments from the government, nostalgia for packed train cars. Hell, Americans are buying out bidets. At this point, if I saw on CNN that a man named Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect, I might not even choke on my coffee. 

To brave this new world, perhaps it’s time to dive into surreal and absurd stories that don’t seem so outlandish anymore. From rapturous extended memories of a conversation with a friend at a cafe (remember that?) to aliens who you’d want to keep at a six-foot distance to cockroaches waxing poetic about a viral outbreak on a cruise ship, these books suddenly feel more realistic than realism.  

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

In this 1971 tale, George Orr’s dreams have the power to change reality in an instant—albeit not in the way he would have intended in his waking life. For example, anxiety about the overcrowding in the fictional future Portland where he lives becomes a dream about a plague. When he wakes up, 6/7ths of the world’s population is gone. If you are among the perennially guilty, perhaps you’ll see where this is going: at some point, haven’t we all thought that we could complete our own Casaubonian projects if only we had no social commitments for, say, a month or two? 

All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva

The nine stories in this collection follow massive forces—technology, religion, nature, the supernatural—at play in ordinary lives. In “Manus,” the forces are aliens who look like “giant globs of snot.” They have dominated humankind via a fungus transmitted through physical contact, and their main order of action is forcing everyone to get their hands replaced, through a painless procedure, with metal ones, commonly referred to as “forks.” On a basic level, it reads like an eerily prescient allegory from pre-coronavirus days about what happens when you don’t socially distance yourself. But it also offers reprieve in the form of a pervasive humor in the face of oblivion: the interplanetary invaders, for example, have adopted a hilariously human version of English, which means they say things like “buncha loons” when watching revolutionaries die in the streets.

The Conversations by César Aira (translated by Katherine Silver)

This 2007 80-page novella consists entirely of a conversation between two friends whose philosophical meetings of the minds generally have “no place for gossip, soccer, health issues, or food.” The conversation in question, however, arises when an offhand comment about a slip-up in a low-brow movie they had both seen bits of turns into an extended debate about the wavering line between fiction and reality. The absurd conversation awakens nostalgia for times when you could sit with a friend at a bustling cafe. But it also mirrors the obsessive consumption of media that has come to replace many of our social lives. Don’t believe me? Search “Tiger King” on Twitter. 

Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez

The stories in this 1993 collection, which centers on the strangeness and loneliness of cities, are among the less fantastical of García Márquez’s oeuvre—but you will still find the body of a young girl that will not decompose, a crying dog, and a literal river of light. When, after eighteen years, he finally had a full draft, García Márquez revisited the European cities where the book is set, only to find them unrecognizable. “Not one of them had any connection to my memories,” he wrote in the introduction. “True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories were so convincing that they replaced reality. This meant I could not detect the dividing line between disillusionment and nostalgia.” That alienation that seeps through the book reads today like a warning for how we’ll feel when we emerge from isolation.  

Get in Trouble by Kelly Link 

This entire collection, a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist in fiction, is full of delights. But the most salient is the fairytale-esque “The Summer People,” which itself won two literary prizes. In it, a teenager named Fran has a nasty bout of the flu. When her father runs off, she’s forced to take care of the summer people—which means both vacationers and folks of unspecified origins and magical abilities—while nearly catatonic with illness. That horribly realistic point is bound to make you a shudder (and hopefully donate to domestic workers). Flu descriptions aside, the reason to read this story now is the lush Southern scenery. Take poor little Fran’s house: “You could hardly see the house itself, hidden like a bride behind her veil of climbing vines: virgin’s bower and Japanese honeysuckle, masses of William Baffin and Cherokee roses over growing the porch and running up over the sagging roof.” Consider it a mental vacation.

Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (translated by Matvei Yankelevich)

This collection could merit inclusion on the basis of its painfully relatable title alone, but there is also much from this Soviet-era writer that rings true today. His absurd microfictions, mostly unpublished in his lifetime, are told in a breakneck hilarious deadpan. Who among us has not yet tried this method of cheering up, from a little story about the struggles of being a hermit: “There were days when I ate nothing. On those days I would try to manufacture a joyous mood for myself. I would lie down on my bed and smile. I’d smile for twenty minutes at a time, but then the smile would turn into a yawn. That was not at all pleasant.” 

The Wonder That Was Ours by Alice Hatcher

This is a novel narrated by a chorus of cockroaches. There. Now that’s out of the way. The cockroaches live in Wynston Cleave’s taxi on a fictional island in the Caribbean, and one day he picks up two Americans who have been kicked off their cruise ship—just before a deadly viral outbreak overwhelms the remaining passengers. The book is an open-eyed exploration of colonization and a history of political movements, but the basic plot points are too pandemic-related to ignore. Bonus points come from this proto-twist on the xenophobic term “Chinese virus”: the contagion is called “the American disease” by the islanders. 

Why We Turn to Jane Austen in Dark Times

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

The coming year looks like a busy one for Austen fans. In the U.K., at least three novels are scheduled to be published based on her life or inspired by her work. On the big screen, there’s a film adaptation of Emma out and a new television version of Pride and Prejudice coming soon. 

Even for a writer who has barely been out of print in her 200-year career, this is a lot of attention. What’s driving it? Could it be that we turn to her with a special kind of hunger when the world seems particularly grim? 

History suggests that might be so. In the First World War, special cheap editions of Austen’s books were printed for soldiers to read in the trenches, and when the fighting was over, they were prescribed to shell-shocked veterans as a kind of literary therapy. The stable, orderly world in which her characters spar and flirt seemed particularly suited to heal and soothe shattered minds. 

Twenty years later, the comfort she offered was just as appealing. Between 1939 and 1940, as Britain went to war again, sales of Pride and Prejudice tripled. Winston Churchill, snatching a rare moment of downtime from leading the fight against fascism, finished Pride and Prejudice with a wistful envy for the idyllic, untroubled world he found there: “What calm lives they had, those people!”

Virginia Woolf agreed. You would never know from Austen’s writing, Woolf observed in 1940, that for nearly all her life, Britain was engaged in a bitter ideological conflict, fought on a global scale with a huge cost in lives. The Napoleonic Wars, Woolf argued, made little personal impact on those who did not fight in them. Austen did not know what it was like to throw herself to the ground, as Woolf was later obliged to do, in a terrified attempt to take cover from an enemy bomber. Horror happened somewhere else. 

Austen’s insulation from the wars of her own time, it was suggested, made her all the more attractive to beleaguered readers suffering under the inescapable perils of twentieth century conflicts. They could retreat into her books safe in the knowledge that they would find nothing there to remind them of their current fears and anxieties. Her work was a safe space where they could give themselves up to all the pleasures Austen so brilliantly delivers—her wonderful characters, her sly and supple prose, her wit that so unfailingly hits the spot—and of course those gloriously satisfying happy endings. 

There’s no doubt that Austen’s skill in creating a fully-realized world into which it is easy to escape was indeed a powerful part of her appeal—and one that has long outlasted wartime. I’ve often turned to her in times of trouble—and always found her writing to be a very effective way of raising the spirits. I can never read Elizabeth Bennet’s tussle with Lady Catherine de Burgh without feeling exhilarated, and the moment when Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth finally come together always makes me smile with relief that they didn’t mess it all up again.  

Austen described this as her “light, bright, and sparkling” mood—and when you’re looking to escape from a reality that feels oppressive, it’s exactly what you want.    

But I’m not sure it’s the whole story—or that it does justice to the true nature of her appeal. 

I don’t think we continue to turn to Austen because, unlike us, she was protected from the capricious miseries of life. On the contrary, I’d argue that her power to connect with us in hard times arises not because her retired life shielded her from grief, pain, and fear—but because she knew very well what it was like to feel vulnerable, exposed, and anxious about the well-being of those she cared about.  

We wouldn’t return to Austen again and again if all she had to offer us was an agreeable candy-colored fantasy.

I think it’s this experience that gives Austen’s writing its muscularity and strength. We wouldn’t return to her again and again if all she had to offer us was an agreeable candy-colored fantasy. There’s a toughness in Austen that tempers everything she writes, even her lightest and brightest moments. It isn’t always pretty, but it’s an inescapable part of who she is. It offers an altogether more bracing prescription of how to respond to terrible events—and is, I think, a product of her constant exposure to a steady stream of human tragedies.         

Jane Austen didn’t need to experience warfare first-hand to look death in the face. She saw plenty of that at home. Even for middle class families like her own, daily life was an endless war of attrition against illness and annihilation. Everyone was a potential victim—her sister Cassandra’s fiancé died suddenly at 29—but women were especially exposed. Pregnancy placed a woman squarely on the front lines of the struggle for survival, and the casualty rate was high. Three of Austen’s sisters-in-law died in childbirth, two in their eleventh confinements. It’s no surprise that Austen’s books are haunted by dead mothers; Anne Elliot, Emma Wodehouse, and Georgiana Darcy have all experienced this loss. Everyone had a black dress in their wardrobe and all too often was obliged to put it on.  

Austen’s response to this remorseless toll of mortality was uncompromising. She refused to give in to misery or hopelessness, cultivating instead a steely bravado that even now has the power to shock. Her remark on hearing that a neighbor had miscarried—“I suppose she happened, unawares to look at her husband”—still makes you catch your breath. 

It would be easy to dismiss this as heartlessness—and indeed, there is a merciless quality in Austen. Her happy endings are amongst the most compelling in literature, but she has no qualms in dispatching less favored characters to truly terrible fates. Think of Maria Rushworth consigned to a lifetime of exile with the appalling Mrs. Norris. 

Unlike so many of her peers, Austen has no time at all for sentimentality. The world is a cruel place, she implies, but we cannot allow ourselves to be destroyed by it. It may be necessary to ration your sympathies, if you’re not to be engulfed by misery.

What Austen really prizes is resilience. All her favorite characters display it.

In Persuasion, she has no patience with Mrs. Musgrove’s rose-tinted recollections of her dead sailor son, tartly reminding us that the “poor Richard” for whom everyone is now lamenting, was when alive merely “thick-headed, unprofitable Dick Musgrove” whom nobody much cared for. His mother’s “fat sighings” are, she suggests, really nothing more than self-indulgence.

What Austen really prizes is resilience. All her favorite characters display it. Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne comes closest to giving into despair, but even she finds the courage to claw her way back to a chastened resignation of her lot. We cannot afford, Austen suggests, to allow ourselves the bitter pleasure of surrendering to terrible events. We need to find a little iron in our souls if we’re not to be crushed by the horrors the world throws at us.

Austen’s coolly pragmatic attitude to the management of despondency doesn’t make me love her any less. I can rejoice in the escape she offers from the pressures of a hostile world; but I can also be fortified by the self-discipline she insists upon as a means to survive them. The tough love she advocates can be just as consoling in its way as the light, bright and sparkling comfort that’s so easy to enjoy.    

Let Nothing Come Between a Man and His Kite

Posted on by Kelly Luce

The Last Argonaut

On the anointed day at the chosen hour, the wind coming out of the east was calm and incidental. This angered Bob and he lashed out at the woman he had hired to dance for him at the Days Inn. 

“Slower, goddamn you. Sensual. Do you know anything of burlesque, of the great French symposia,” Bob said from the armchair. He caressed his unflown box kite and watched Miss Priscilla dance satirically in slow motion. 

“You know what, fuck you, you demented woman. Just dance normal,” Bob said. 

Miss Priscilla resumed aggressively humping the air and Bob took a pull of 100-proof whiskey. Bob was going to drink and Miss Priscilla would dance until Judgment Day. 

The Nacogdoches Kite Festival had been scheduled for earlier that afternoon. But a near windless pall had settled over the county. The pines stood upright and the water in Lanana Creek sat still and limpid. Bob was inconsolable. Dr. Thibodeaux, the organizer of the event, had not consulted the meteorology. 

“We are lions being led by donkeys!” Bob yelled to his fellow kite flyers. 

“Alright, calm down, Bob,” said Thibodeaux. 

“I will not be calm, sir!” Bob shouted. “I’ve waited all goddamn year for this.”

Bob was so upset he debauched himself with Miss Priscilla and whiskey and Pizza Hut and a rack of Lone Star beer and donuts and the Book of Mormon and its prurient space opera. He woke up the next day to the rustling of the wind. 

 Bob ordered a beer and a shot at the Chili’s where the kite flyers day drank. He downed both.  

“Who will ride with me to Aqaba?” he asked. No one answered. 

“Goddammit,” Bob said, “Is there not a fellow Argonaut among you?”

Dr. Thibodeaux got up from his table and said, “Bob, we don’t want you in the club anymore. Most of us are parents. We don’t want you around our children.” 

Bob took another shot of whiskey. “You’ll apologize for that, and offer your resignation,” Bob said. Bob then turned to the rest of the kite flyers and added, “When I am president of this venerable club, please know that your children will be banned from our events, because they are clumsy and vicious. They have no goddamn business flying kites. They don’t have the artistry or the resolve.” 

The kite flyers responded to Bob’s assertion by physically assaulting him. Dr. Thibodeaux and Martinson, whose son really was an oaf, held Bob back for a few minutes while the others punched him in the kidneys. Finally, the bartender, also a kite flyer, said enough was enough and Bob was allowed to stumble into the parking lot. It was a fair and compassionate beating. 

Bludgeoned, Bob had returned to his motel room, called for Miss Pricilla and Pizza Hut, and drank whiskey, far too much of it. How had kite flying become as booze-fueled as horse racing? When Bob was young he used to fly kites sober and innocent on his father’s land in Nebraska. Between the harvesting of summer corn and planting of winter wheat, Bob would sail his Dopero across the sky, despite this being pheasant hunting season. His father would stave off the roving gunmen. “That is my boy,” Bob’s father would say, “Let him be, for he flies kites thrice as well as the best pheasant gunman shoots.” 

“Thrice!!!” Bob Sr. would shout, rising from his chair on the front porch with fine, terrible anger. 

But when Bob turned twenty-five, his father brandished his own Remington and shot down the Dopero as if it were a migratory bird. “Kite flying is the purview of children. You look insane and unprofitable,” Bob’s father told him. Bob realized his father was right, that an adult kite flyer is a highly unsocial specter but fifty adult kite flyers must be a society unto themselves. So Bob joined a kite flying club in Lincoln. He was quickly dismissed for his exacting standards and contempt for children. Then they kicked him out of Omaha. Then Kansas City and Topeka. He had slowly worked his way south over the years, trying to live on a small allowance provided by his father’s estate. In total, Bob had been expelled from nearly three dozen fraternal organizations devoted to the flying, building, preservation, and repair of kites. 

Bob was soon drunk and he wept openly, sprawled across the bed. 

This alarmed Miss Priscilla. She had never seen Bob cry before, in all the days she had watched him drink and curse the Soviet bureaucracy of kite flying.  So she learned how to dance the burlesque from YouTube. Then she danced for Bob, at the correct pace, with the perfect balance of feigned eroticism and bemusement. And Bob smiled through his tears and applauded. 

“Miss Priscilla, will you come fly kites with me?” Bob asked. 

“No,” Miss Priscilla announced. “You still ain’t right. Not tried to ride me the once.” 

“How can you speak of procreation in my hour of want!” Bob screamed at Miss Priscilla. He threw cash at her and she went. 

Bob drove to the park. Screw them all, Bob thought. He unfurled his line and watched his box kite advance. It was beautiful in the warm green air of Nacogdoches. Bob felt at peace. He owed Miss Priscilla an apology, he thought. He would track her to the bar and buy her a gin martini and a steak. Bob would finally admit to Miss Priscilla that she too was beautiful and kind in her own way. And he would forgive Dr. Thibodeaux and the others. Thibodeaux would embrace Bob at the Chili’s and say to an incensed Martinson, “you are ever with me, and all that I have is yours, but thy Bob was lost and now he is found.” 

Families with small children arrived for a birthday party at the park. A child of perhaps seven walked over to Bob and pointed at his box kite dancing in the wind and then looked up to Bob with tender, expectant eyes. Bob recognized himself in the boy, his eagerness to take up the reel and line and explore the vast and open spaces of this country. Kite flying might even be an Olympic sport one day. This is what Bob had wanted for himself, for life to be easy and gracious. 

But Bob lived out of cheap motels, alone. He watched salacious videos of women dancing, alone. He sold his plasma to afford whiskey, bamboo and silk. Bob had scurvy because he only ate Pizza Hut. Outside Fort Worth, several convenience store robberies were perpetrated by a masked bandit who bound the cashiers’ hands with kite string. The bandit usually wept. When Bob’s father passed away, Bob did not go to the funeral. The winds in Salina were too promising.  

The boy gestured for the reel and line, and Bob ran away from him. The boy laughed and gave chase, thinking Bob was being playful. But Bob fled in moral terror. He would not be responsible for setting this child on the kite flyer’s path of misery and violence. Bob would keep running until he found Miss Priscilla at the bar. She would be drunk on gin and so proud of him. When he looked back he saw that the boy had been joined by the other children, a horde of them laughing and chasing after Bob. Bob ran as fast as he could. He did not see the new sewer ditch on the north side of the park. Bob stumbled and broke his neck. His body lay in the ditch. Wholly innocent of the world, the children noticed only that Bob had relinquished the kite at last, and they cheered wildly.

“Little Fires Everywhere” Asks Whether Art—Or Parenthood—Is Theft

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

If you’re going to adapt a book to the screen, I’m a fan of the limited series. It gives the story room to develop echoes and reflections between characters and events, a luxury that two-hour films often don’t allow. For these reasons, the series approach is a benefit for the Hulu adaptation of Celeste Ng’s New York Times best-selling Little Fires Everywhere, which is very much about those creative reiterations and alterations.

The series reflects on how art (not unlike adaptation) borrows, quotes, references, pays homage to, creates a pastiche of, appropriates, plagiarizes, samples, or steals from others’ work. The story’s central artist, Mia Warren (Kerry Washington), however, critiques art that is too focused on appropriation—the artistic concept of taking from others—without much creativity of its own. Mia states, not surprisingly, by quoting her teacher Pauline (Anika Noni Rose) that “art should either bring something new into the world or something strange and familiar and terrifying. Or at the very least uncomfortable.” She is saying that art should make something new and unsettling while acknowledging what it takes from others.

When does adaptation and intertextuality become stealing? To whom does the art object finally belong?

But when does adaptation and intertextuality become stealing? To whom does the art object finally belong? And to what extent is anything we “make” truly ours? In Little Fires Everywhere, adaptive art can be a means to establish a larger conversation, to see another’s perspective, and to reject the myth of the self-made and self-sufficient person who has earned the right of sole dominion over something or someone else. 

The narrative follows the nomadic artist Mia when she moves with her daughter Pearl into the affluent planned community of Shaker Heights, Ohio in 1997. Their arrival shakes things up for another family, the Richardsons: mother Elena (Reese Witherspoon), father Bill, and their four teenaged children Lexie, Trip, Moody, and Izzy. Broadly, the story considers the power dynamics created by race, class, gender, and sexuality, particularly in the failures of characters to see outside of themselves, resulting in their judging others based solely on their own experiences. The story eventually turns to the issues of a cross-racial adoption case as well as the question of parental “ownership.” But it begins in the art.

Cinephiles will perceive a layered artistic repetition in the first shots of the series. As viewers watch a stately home burn to the ground, we see the echoes of another famous book turned movie—Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, cinematized by Alfred Hitchcock. Viewers may also recall that that narrative, like this one, is told in retrospect. In both cases, the house has burned down and now we must return to it in its prime to see why we have ended where we have. As another female-focused narrative where the growing distrust between women and issues of class consume everything, this reference establishes some of the interpretative context for the narrative. 

After this opening flash-forward, the inciting narrative event—Mia’s arrival in Shaker Heights—constitutes another cinematic repetition. The Stepford Wives, a classic book by Ira Levin turned feminist film directed by Bryan Forbes, also focuses on an artistic photographer who has left the city for rule-bound suburbia where the women embody some “idealized” sense of womanhood and domesticity. While this more reality-based rendering with book clubs and pre-packed lunches does not reveal the women to be controlled by men as directly, we do see how Mia, Elena, and their children continue to feel overwhelmed and conflicted about the patriarchal norms of heteronormative, white-dominant, family-centered life. Therefore, these establishing instances help to develop the overall emotional core of the story and its allusive history.

One area of referentiality that stands out because of this story’s adaptation onto the screen is the use of music from Tina Turner, Silver Convention, and Marvin Gaye to Alanis Morissette, Counting Crows, and Tupac Shakur. Although using popular music isn’t unusual for a soundtrack, some of the numbers are covers of the originals that should make the viewer a bit unsettled. The first episode ends with Union’s remake of Marcy Playground’s “Sex and Candy,” which dominates two crosscut scenes—one where Elena and her husband are having sex and one where Mia, in a nightmare, rides a subway car while being held by a woman who disappears, leaving Mia alone to receive the threatening gaze of a man who turns into Elena. This musical moment lets us see some of the hidden dimensions of our characters.

But while the original version of the song was a timely 1990s piece, this 2016 cover jumps the listener forward in musical time outside of the realism of the story itself. These moments are off-kilter—with Elena momentarily returning to a sexy, laid-back version of herself, and Mia in the terrifying dystopian space of a dream. Additionally, having a woman, Marie Hines, sing this dreamy, slow, and dark version of the song in our contemporary moment not only anachronistically unbinds the timeline, but it also unmoors the heterosexual narrative with one woman singing about another in sexualized ways: “and there she was / Like double cherry pie.” By using a cover, this piece of art is telling us something new about the story as well.

These musical references highlight the commonality of creative borrowing that is made plain in the story’s visual art examples, but it also brings up new questions. Mia makes her daughter a bicycle, which she likely took from the trash of her neighbors, and then covered in the Good Neighbors Guide. Pearl stitches a favorite quotation from Adrienne Rich into a t-shirt she wears. Izzy, the youngest Richardson and a budding artist herself, creates a collage of lesbian imagery that she cuts out from magazines, and she repurposes Cabbage Patch Kid dolls. They all bricolage the objects at hand as part of the regular creative process, making them anew.

These examples show that art regularly makes use of the work that has come before it, but Little Fires Everywhere also reveals the problems of such referencing in the storyline itself. When the story flashes back to Mia in art school, Mia criticizes the historical artist Richard Price’s re-photographing the images of others while talking to her teacher Pauline: “they’re not art. They’re derivative. He’s basically stealing.” Pauline questions her by restating, “You mean appropriating,” and adding, “You take things that don’t technically belong to you and put them in your art.” Although Mia certainly finds many ways to make her art her own, her teacher reminds her of the importance of acknowledging her sources and that no one is fully self-made.

This threat of appropriation that disregards its source crosses into plagiarism—using someone else’s words or ideas without acknowledgement—when Lexie Richardson steals an incident that happened to Pearl for her college application to Yale. In the essay, Lexie rewrites the classism and racism Pearl encountered when trying to be placed in an advanced math class, replacing those issues of race and class with the glass-ceiling of gender, and then claiming the experience as her own. It is one thing to take the objects of others, but it is quite another to appropriate their lived experiences, especially when you are already the one with power on your side. Lexie only sees this moment through her perspective as an opportunity for self-advancement instead of seeing how she has built her success on someone else.

These concerns about appropriation in art culminate in conflicts over the possession of children. Can parents own children like they own art?

These concerns about appropriation in art culminate in conflicts over the possession of children. Can parents own children like they own art? The story suggests that we see the children as a kind of art (kids are referred to as the new objects being brought into the world, just like the definition of art that Mia gives). Replacing objects with bodies, though, brings the benefits of totalizing parental authority into doubt. For instance, in the custody dispute attempts are made to buy the child as though she is a consumer good or an art object—a parallel made apparent by Mia’s sale of a famous photograph to pay for the custody hearings. This symbolic objectification produces a logic that focuses more on parental rights than on the child.

Issues about parental rights extend into all the major relationships. Mia talks about her right to take whatever pictures she likes of Pearl because, as she says, “she’s mine,” but this is part of an all-consuming urge of parenthood. Elena further exposes that dominating desire when she speak of wanting to eat her daughter like an apple, “seeds and all.” As with the relationships between the various mothers and their more mature daughters, attempts at total control only lead to disconnection. If appropriating art without acknowledgement is problematic, appropriating children holds even worse dangers because children are not just reflections of their parental “makers.” Instead, parents should shed their myth of being sole creator and acknowledge that children have multiple influences and should creatively shape themselves.

Although Little Fires Everywhere doesn’t give us all the answers, its layered artistry uses repetition to question our notions of possession. By focusing on women’s issues and community control based on privilege, the show reminds us of the importance of seeing outside the self, confronting the characters and the viewers with some of the dangers of claiming ownership of others’ bodies as if they were art. The show, like the art within it, is a pleasurable experience that also purposely brings discomfort with it. Its high drama doesn’t minimize a style that’s all its own. By incorporating musical covers, cinematic allusions, and highlighting the connection between children and art, the series pays attention to the multiple facets in the book while making something new as a work of art should.

7 Books About Women in the Desert

Posted on by Jo Lou

What is a desert? A desert is a place with little rain, a dry place where plants struggle, where animals struggle, and only those creatures who have adapted themselves to the harsh winds and sun can survive. A desert is extremely hot, but it can also be stunningly cold, like Antarctica—a desert of ice and snow. A desert is expansive and flat with waves of inhospitable sand. A desert is a landscape of corals and reds, with mountains that touch the clouds and air that sings ancient songs. A desert can seem so very old, primordial even, a place before people, designed without people in mind. But many deserts are relatively young and often have been created, unintentionally, by us. A desert is wise. A desert is mute. A desert is the place we’re supposed to go to find our true selves. A desert is not a place at all, but rather a state of mind. It is pure spirit, the soul confronting itself in silence. It is a place to experience the body’s fragility and its dependency on water and food. A place of wandering; a place of finding. A place of strife; a place of peace.

Growing up in Las Vegas, Nevada, a city of sparkles in sand, I was taught to see the desert as barren and useful only as a vessel in which to fulfill the ambitions of men. Contrast that with the following thought by the poet Joy Harjo: “I don’t see the desert as barren at all. I see it as full and ripe… it does with what it has, and creates amazing beauty.” Perhaps how one experiences the desert depends upon whether you see it as empty or full, and how you act in the face of that “presence” or “absence.”

The following books explore aspects of the desert, specifically as experienced by women—women singing the desert, women lost in the desert, women looking, women drowning, women showing. “[He] did not understand,” wrote Mary Austin in the story collection Lost Borders of a minister who has newly arrived to her desert from the East Coast, “that the desert is to be dealt with as a woman and a wanton; he was thinking of it as a place on the map.“  

Secrets from the Center of the World by Joy Harjo, photography by Stephen E. Strom 

In the work of poet Joy Harjo, desert is a verb. It is an act, a ceremony—an ancient mountain lion shifting his bones; an old man who wakes and prays then comes inside to cook his breakfast; the shutting of a car door that echoes into the dark of the mesa west. The desert is a “pure event,” but one “mixed with water, occurring in time and space, as sheep, a few goats, graze, keep watch nearby.”

Written in collaboration with the photographs of astronomer Stephen Strom, Secrets From the Center of the World begins with the words, “All landscapes have a history.” The desert holds something of the pure spirit that so many have written of, but for Harjo—current U.S. Poet Laureate and first Native American to hold the position—this spirit is inextricable from stories. The stories are of the people who live, or have lived, in the desert, but they are also stories of the desert itself. “There are voices inside rocks,” writes Harjo in the preface, “they are not silent.” The desert, which looks so deceptively still, is actually filled with motion and time. It is not the desert, therefore, that brings stillness and silence to us. The desert is an invitation to become silent so that we might hear its tales. For Harjo, the desert is fat and abundant with desert stories, which include stories of trauma and grief. The desert gives as much as it takes, and can teach us how to sing its song, even if it’s a song we don’t know, and maybe, do not want to know. 

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Lost Borders by Mary Hunter Austin

Though she was born in Illinois, and spent a number of her years in New York and Europe, Mary Hunter Austin is a writer of the American West. Moving to California in 1888, Austin’s adult life was largely spent in deep communion with the people and landscapes of the Mojave Desert and New Mexico. A feminist, socialist, mystic and escaped Midwesterner, Austin’s desert could be put in the category of “desert as freedom.” But more than that, I think Austin was seeking something she calls “pure desertness,” a desire to know something essential in the desert, a message, one Austin learned largely through the act of seeing.

In Lost Borders, as in most of her works, Austin’s writing unfolds in snapshots: “a crumbling tunnel, a ruined smelter, and a row of sun-warped cabins under tall, skeleton-white cliffs.” Straight, white, blinding, flat, forsaken. Starved knees of hills and black clots of pines—the way a certain part of the desert looks can teach you its lesson, though that lesson, like the land that tells it, might be one of hazy borders and sandy edges. More than once in Lost Borders, Austin begins a tale that seems to evaporate just before it ends, like an unraveled ball of string that leaves no center. “There was a woman once at Agua Hedionda—but you wouldn’t believe that either.”  This is the desert too, for Austin, a place not just of lost borders but a place that has no end, and thus, fewer limits.

In Lost Borders, Austin also conjures a quality of the desert not often described: the land’s sensuality, and even its femininity. “If the desert were a woman”, she wrote, “I know well what like she would be: deep-breasted, broad in the hips, tawny, with tawny hair, great masses of it lying smooth along her perfect curves…eyes sane and steady as the polished jewel of her skies…such a largeness to her mind as should make their sins of no account, passionate but not necessitous, patient—and you could not move her, no, not if you had all the earth to give…If you cut very deeply into any soul that has the mark of the land upon it, you find such qualities as these—as I shall presently prove to you.”

Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor, illustrated by Peter Parnall

This is a profound book in the guise of a light children’s book. It makes one important point: Everyone needs a rock. The book offers ten helpful rules on just how to obtain your very own special rock including, “Don’t let anyone talk to you while you’re looking for your rock,” “Don’t worry while looking for your rock,” “Don’t get a rock that is too big or too small,” and “You must get truly all the way down on the ground to look at all the rocks in the eye in order to find the one for you.” Baylor’s little book creates a sensory experience of the desert by inverting its landscape and shrinking it into what you might call the micro-sublime. One must not just look at rocks en masse, as many do; you must find your individual rock by smelling it, stroking it, listening to it. Through your rock, you can share an intimacy with the desert landscape and perceive prehistory in your hand. Also, by the end of your search, you will have a rock friend that will last for a million years. Baylor’s desert is a site of curiosity and discovery—a place, even, for play. Why not? Yes, there is the overwhelming spread of the desert with its dizzying lack of corners and shifting landmarks. And also, there is just this rock, your rock, should you choose to find it.

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe

One day, a man on a short holiday goes looking for insects in a remote village in Japan, built among the dunes. The man is a collector and, as all collectors, eventually loses track of time in the dizzying landscape of sand. He asks a local villager if he might stay somewhere for the night, and is led to the home of a woman whose little shack is at the bottom of a deep hole in the dunes. Thinking he is to be there one night, the man soon realizes that he has been tricked into living with the woman in perpetuity and for one purpose: to help her with the daily work of digging sand that constantly threatens to drown the little shack—and in fact the entire village.

As you can imagine, the man thinks only of how he can escape this wretched life of repetitive, pointless, Sisyphean labor. The story is told through the man’s desperate and winding series of thoughts, but it is the woman, I believe, who is the book’s true focus. The Japanese title of this book, Suna no Onna, translates as Sand Woman. The man is dumbfounded by the woman’s seeming passivity and even stupidity, and by her lack of desire to escape what he sees as a life of thankless slavery. Yet the woman, while not exactly happy, seems quite content with her life. 

The Woman in the Dunes is an extended meditation on the elemental power of sand. While the man sees this power as a force to fight against, the woman appears to see the act of clearing sand as simply her life’s work. She approaches this task with a Zen-like concentration. Is the woman just a sacrifice, as the man thinks, an offering to the villagers or even the gods of sand? Or is she free from the bonds of “self?” Just as one’s footsteps are immediately effaced in sand, so can the desert erase one’s individuality. Whether you think of this as liberation or hell is up to you.

Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao

Can you remember a time when “the world” came to us in encyclopedias and books and guides? This is how the writer Sanmao first discovered the Western Sahara, while absentmindedly flipping through the pages of a National Geographic in an apartment in Madrid. Chinese-born and raised in Taiwan before living for a time in Spain and Germany, Sanmao didn’t know where she belonged. But looking at the shiny magazine pictures of the Sahara, she was at once seized with a feeling of homesickness and longing she couldn’t quite understand, and this longing soon became obsession.  

Sanmao did eventually travel to Spanish-colonized Western Sahara; her six years there living on the borderland between expats and Sahwari natives make up the tales in Stories of the Sahara. Residing in a rented house on the edge of town, Sanmao is ever asking the locals how one gets into the desert. But, this is the desert right here, they reply. You are in it. Living on the edge of desert and town, Sanmao’s writings invoke the question: Where does the true desert begin? Is there a real desert that can tell us the secrets of life? Her ideas about the desert—romantic and childish, by her own description—are forever bumping up against its troubles: djinns that howl in the night, goats that fall from the sky, neighbors who steal your shoes. But for Sanmao, a true romantic, even these experiences—by turns annoying and terrifying—are woven into the desert’s magic.

Written in the 1970s, Sanmao’s portrait of the desert is an ancient one; it is a place of “poetic desolation,” the “boundless” place in which to expand one’s personality and move beyond one’s own individual borders. Sanmao is the desert traveler as seeker, the desert a destination for those who don’t quite fit into the life prescribed for them, who feel like strangers on earth.  

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Revolt Against the Sun by Nazik Al-Malaʾika, translated by Emily Drumsta

Born in 1920’s Baghdad, the poet and critic Nazik al-Mala’ika left Iraq in 1970 after the rise of the Ba’ath Party. She lived in self-imposed exile in Kuwait and Egypt until her death in 2007. Al-Mala’ika is known as a pioneer of Arabic free verse (taf‘ila poetry) but her work has been largely untranslated; the soon-to-be-published Revolt Against the Sun: A Bilingual Reader of Nazik al-Mala’ika’s Poetry is the first major edition of her work in English. 

Although al-Mala’ika is considered an innovator of modernist verse, she is also fundamentally a Romantic, and, as her translator Emily Drumsta has written, al-Mala’ika’s poetry articulates deeply felt emotions and sensations through the use of traditionally romantic motifs—primarily the sun. Yet, while for European Romantic poets—living in darker, colder landscapes with seasons that have more obvious contours—the sun is a sign of hope and joy, in al-Mala’ika’s literature of the desert, the sun is portrayed as a judge, an oppressor bearing down on fragile hearts with its heat and blinding rays that leave no room for our innermost concerns. She writes, “I came to pour out my uncertainty / in nature, ‘midst sweet fragrances and shadows, / but you, Sun, mocked my sadness and my tears / and laughed, from up above, at all my sorrows.” In the desert, the sun creates thirst and cruelly rips off the shroud of dreams fashioned in the nighttime. In the desert, it is the light of the stars and not the sun that inspires the “hopeful heart”: 

How often I have watched stars as they pass
letting the twilight shape my incantations,
and watched the moon bidding the night goodbye,
and roamed the valleys of imagination.
The silence sends a shiver through my spine
beneath the evening’s dome, so still and dark,
Light dances, painting on my eyelids with
The dreamy palette of a hopeful heart.
“And as for you, oh sun… what can I say?
What can my passion hope to find in you?

I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan translated by Eliza Griswold, photography by Seamus Murphy

In the winter of 2012, the poet Eliza Griswold, along with photographer Seamus Murphy, began collecting landays after learning the story of a teenage girl living in Afghanistan who was forbidden to write poems by her male family members, and set herself on fire in protest. A landay is an ancient oral poetic form created by (and are primarily for) Pashtun women living between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The two-line poems are anonymous, and as they can be swapped and sampled from each other, are also fundamentally authorless. Contemporary landays reference Google as much as goats, but are most often riffs on themes like love, war, family, and homeland.     

When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.

When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

In the book’s introduction, Griswold writes that she wanted to collect landays before US troops pulled out of Afghanistan. Her fear—and the fear of many with whom she spoke—was that Pashtun women were living in a brief grey area of relative freedom, and that their lives would become smaller and more isolated, as they were during the reign of the Taliban, when American soldiers—who were resented as they were appreciated—left. 

If you hide me from the Taliban,

I’ll become a tassel on your drum.

Once, landays were shared around campfires and sung in fields and at weddings—they were a form of community bonding as well as art. Now, they are just as often shared on Facebook and in text messages, but still battle cries against the social deserts that threaten us all. They are a secret language Pashtun women use to connect with each other in universal rage and grief and fear of violence, as well as humor and longing.

I’m in love! I won’t deny it, even if

you gouge out my green tattoos with a knife.

In my dream, I am the president.

When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.