The brown squirrel, coiled & clinging
to the guardrail of my balcony,
is a wig.
I stepped out of the shower to dry my feet
on a damp wig.
You can fold a wig in a certain way
that it becomes a cup from which you can swig
water or juice or wigskey,
which is whiskey distilled
from fermented wigs.
I met Dolly Parton & she was all wig.
Kristen Wiig is a wig.
So was Ludwig van Beethoven.
In Britain, there used to be two political parties
—the Whigs & the Wigs.
There are wigs that are mops
& wigs that seduce cops.
In some countries, it is illegal for wigs
to marry other wigs.
Have you ever slept in a wig? It’s itchy.
The best wigs in life are free,
but the second-best cost
extraordinary amounts of money.
Somewhere in Detroit, you can trade
20 small wigs for one giant wig
& the award for Best Wig Ever goes to
Medusa. I love how she’d rather lose her head
than part with it
& how, even without a heart,
the head maintains its awful power.
I spent my formative years in London, the intonations of which will probably never fully leave my voice. For me, London is a metropolis of color, of people from all over the former empire who’ve helped to create one of the world’s greatest cities. Official statistics say that people of color make up about 40% of the city’s population. Around the same percentage of Londoners are foreign-born. This is the city of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, both superlative books about different ends of London (and much else) that you should read if you haven’t already. The below list, totally biased to old favorites and sparkling (personal) new discoveries, attempts to see the city on the page in all its transnational, ethnic, and cultural complexities and glories.
The lead character of Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe is Zuleika, the daughter of Sudanese immigrants who’ve made good in London, A.D. 211. After the ingestion of traditional English Literature at school, reading a novel of olden days London not centered on whiteness thrilled me when it was first published in 2001. Yes, there were black people in Roman London—the novel emerged from Evaristo’s residency and research at the Museum of London. This city is an outpost of another empire. The brilliant realignment of historical perception aside, Evaristo tells a gripping and hilarious story of Zuleika’s boredom, which is soon alleviated when Emperor Septimius Severus arrives in town and the two begin an affair—all in verse. I adore how Evaristo imagines the then-and-now topographies of London. She writes of “the humid jungle at Bayswater,” “mud huts by the Serpentine,” and “grasslands” of Mayfair. The contemporary also creeps in with “Wild@Heart, the trendy ‘flower boutique’ / on Cannon Street.” Zuleika and her crew’s partying ways will be familiar to anyone who’s been out on the town in London. Evaristo—whose debut, Lara, also in verse and based on her own British Nigerian family—should have won all the prizes back then. Her latest Girl, Woman, Other shared the 2019 Booker Prize.
Novelist Andrea Levy’s father arrived in the U.K. on the Empire Windrush, the ship which brought the first large group of colonial subjects from the West Indies in 1948. The Windrush generation helped build today’s Britain (and most certainly London, its language, and its culture). In Small Island, Levy tells the stories of Jamaicans, Gilbert and Hortense, as well as those of Queenie and Bernard, a white couple with whom they become entangled. Set in 1948, the novel moves between the characters, back to World War II, and across the world to India, and back to London with a twist at its end. Worth a read in light of the recent Windrush scandal. Another offering of Windrush stories to check out is the nonfiction Windrush: The Irresistible Rise Of Multi-Racial Britain by Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips.
“One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet.” From this start, Sam Selvon’s novel goes on to run riot over standard English with its Calypso-infused rhythm and creolized idioms. Selvon, born to an Indian father and an Anglo-Scottish mother in Trinidad, follows Moses, who acts as a one-man welcome party for Windrush-generation immigrants, and his friends in an often unwelcoming London. The city’s streets are sadly not paved with gold, as per the Dick Whittington lore. The Lonely Londoners is often considered a pioneering novel of Black British literature.
At the beginning of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, protagonist Karim declares: “I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories.” Karim, like Kureishi, is of mixed British Pakistani descent and hails from the south of the river suburbs. He escapes to the wilds of London and its theatre world, and in doing so, braves the frontiers of sex, sexuality, class, and race in London on the eve of Margaret Thatcher’s ascension to power. Meanwhile, his dad becomes a guru to white hippies. The novel’s soundtrack was interpreted by another South London boy, David Bowie for the BBC series of the novel, starring Naveen Andrews. A lyric highlight from the theme: “Screaming along in South London/ Vicious but ready to learn/ Sometimes I fear that the whole world is queer/ Sometimes but always in vain.”
Haroun Khan’s The Study Circle offers a very different 2000s view of British Pakistani youth from a tower block of a South London council estate. The view isn’t for the tourism brochures:
“A sterile panorama of ashen granite that, from most vantage points, dominated the totality of your vision. Blotting out the rest of the world. A demand to be your sole reality. Spawned from the popular post-War Brutalist style, the estate consisted of half a dozen twenty-story towers. Monolithic structures that trust upwards and stood like forbidden sentinels, forever gazing.”
The gaze inwards comes from Ishaq, his friends, and the choices they have as young, urban British Muslim men amid the growing racism and radicalism around them. Khan, who based the book on his own life, writes the hell out of these margins. His characters—particularly Shams, whose early Tube adventures and job search got my heart—will linger, as will the characters’ conversations.
A 25-year-old newspaper journalist, the British Jamaican Queenie breaks up with her white boyfriend and goes on a bender of finding love again. The novel has been called the “Black Bridget Jones”—and there is a Darcy here too—but Queenie has to navigate quite a bit more as a young black woman in the world. To take one example from her quest for love: an encounter with a Neo-Nazi with a fetish. With exuberant prose, Carty-Williams takes us inside millennial Black British life (and joyfully into friendships), and all around (gentrifying) South London.
On Portobello Road, the setting of a million London stories (and plenty of my own), Mary, a white woman slowly being overtaken by dementia, meets Cub, a thirteen-year-old Jamaican boy from Brixton. Their unsettling attraction to each other eventually leads to Cub moving into Mary’s decaying Notting Hill home. Devi’s prose is both exquisite and disturbing; she leads us into the world of a conflicted (though pre-Brexit) London. White supremacy, gentrification, and aging are amongst the book’s meditations. Devi who lived in London in the 1970s as a student offers an astonishing, flaneur’s love letter to the city in 2005.
“It was possible to love this city and die of it.
To love its hidden stars and its cemented sky,
To love its children who laughed in Leicester Square and who experienced life so immediately that nothing of it remained in their memories…
To love the old folks dying in Stockwell, sitting on a bench while the houses they’d bought and lived in for so long became luxury residences for the nouveau riche. No more space; no more space, except for the conquerors.”
Devi, who hails from Mauritius, writes in French. The novel was translated to English by an American, Jeffrey Zuckerman. The novel’s brew of memory (including Mary’s own of WWII), time (Devi talks about the novel’s 40-plus-year gestation here), languages, ethnicities, and nationalities makes it an especially eternal new novel of London.
Writing about oneself is a process of rewriting one’s life. You filter your raw experience to make it funnier, or raunchier, or more melancholy—or, if you’re Pedro Almodóvar, all of the above. The Spanish director has long pilfered his own life for his films, and in his latest one, Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria), he’s crafted an autobiographical portrait that’s particularly entrancing because of its familiarity. Indeed, Pain and Glory easily caps off a trilogy that began with 1987’s Law of Desire (La ley del deseo) and continued with 2004’s Bad Education (La mala educación). All three films center on openly gay filmmakers struggling with creative impasses who find in their male muses new ways of thinking about their past and present desires.
Rather than eliding the way he’s aping himself, he’s made such self-looting all too evident.
But these films, unusual in Almodóvar’s woman-fronted oeuvre because they focus on male characters, don’t just cannibalize the director’s life. They also lift shamelessly from each other. With each successive attempt at telling (a version of) his life story, Almodóvar has found himself revisiting scenes and moments anew. Over three decades he hasn’t just told the same story over and over again. He’s refined and refracted it, making each iteration a self-plagiarism so flagrant that one cannot help but notice just how much he relishes quoting his own work. Here’s a case of a writer looking back at his early career and taking on the challenge of reworking its themes, characters, and storylines. And rather than eliding the way he’s aping himself, he’s made such self-looting all too evident, making those kinds of quotations central to how these recent narratives exist.
Growing up in rural Spain, Almodóvar has said that he always felt wary of the Catholic education imparted on him by the priests at his school. Instead, he found the nourishing lessons he needed in Hollywood. And if his films are any indication, all he’s ever wanted is to give his memories the sheen of the silver screen. In the early ‘80s he began that project with an obvious (despite Almodóvar’s claims to the contrary) alter ego called Patty Diphusa, the star of a newspaper periodical he wrote intermittently for Madrid’s Diario. Patty was a symbol of the underground circles Almodóvar himself belonged to in the 80s (at a time when, as he writes, “We had no memory and we emulated everything we loved, and enjoyed doing so”), and eventually she became a template for many of his characters. When he released Kika in 1993 he actually published a conversation between the film’s titular character and Patty, who was undeniably her predecessor. Outraged over being rewritten for a new decade, Patty wondered what it meant that scenes from her own life had been recreated to give life to Kika: “Could it be that I’m getting older, or could it be that Pedro is repeating himself, as he grows old as well?”
The answer, of course, was that both things were true: she and Pedro were getting older and yes, Pedro would continue to repeat himself. A small scene about organ donation in Flower of my secret turned into the premise of All About My Mother; a movie poster in Bad Education later became a reality when Almodóvar shot I’m So Excited!; Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown served as the real-life inspiration for the film-within-a-film “Chicas y maletas” being shot during Broken Embraces. In every instance, he gave his scenes new depth. And no selection of films shows this more clearly than the journey from Law of Desire to Pain and Glory, which anchored their plots in Almodóvar’s autobiography. The earlier film stars Eusebio Poncela as a filmmaker who creates sexually explicit movies where naked young men moan “Fuck me!” to the camera at the behest of an unseen film director. But Almodóvar filtered his own childhood through another more colorful character: Pablo’s trans sister Tina (Carmen Maura). In one scene set at an otherwise empty church, Tina begins singing along to the song a priest is playing on the piano, prompting him to tell her she reminds him of a young boy soloist from a long time ago. She shocks him by admitting that she and the soloist are one and the same. Relishing the chance of having caught the priest off guard, Tina regales him with the many memories she hasn’t been able to shake off, telling him there had only been two men in her life—the priest and her father—both of whom had abandoned her. Despite the way her dialogue hints at having been the victim of sexual abuse, she’s almost wistful about how she thinks of her childhood, a sentiment that rankles the already uneasy priest. And so when he urges her to find her way back to God (and to banish those memories, like he has), Tina utters a line that may well serve as an Almodovarian thesis: “I don’t want to run away from them. My memories are all I have.”
The Spanish director has long been open about the abuse he witnessed at his Catholic school (“They also tried it with me but I always escaped,” he shared on the eve of Pain and Glory’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. “There was a priest who always put his hand on me in the playground so I would kiss it, I never did it, I always ran away. We were very scared.”) In the hands of Maura’s Tina, this traumatic event is, in true Almodovarian fashion, made all the more outlandish. Maura’s darkly comic and almost flirtatious delivery bluntly gives voice to the abuse Almodóvar witnessed but frame it as far away from him as could be conceivable. For a boy who grew up idolizing strong-willed women in films like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Splendor on the Grass, the choice to map his own experience onto an equally fabulous diva like Tina/Maura wasn’t just obvious but seemingly necessary. Here was Almodóvar realizing the thrill and promise of storytelling, the chance to rewrite one’s own life and using its own discomfiting reality to create a colorful narrative that shed light on the darker corners of his childhood. To do so, though, much as he had done with the character of Patty Diphusa in the early ‘80s, the director chose campy female characters that grounded traumatic encounters in absurdist comedy bits: this was drag as autobiography.
Almodóvar framed Bad Education around the ways we tell stories from our youth so as to rewrite them.
Drag hinges not just on exaggeration and broad humor but on borrowed gestures and quoted lines. It has been through female characters (ones whose very femininity was overly performative) that Almodóvar has explored some of the most recurring themes in his work. With Patty’s stories Almodóvar approached desire through the chaotic energy of a sex addict, one who constantly had to find where her own limits lie. In one story, Patty meets a young man her age called Juan Félix. After he goes down on her, Patty discovers a photo in his jacket that features two young schoolgirls—one of whom is Patty herself. That’s how she learns Juan used to be Adela, her old classmate who had decided to transition just to be able to seduce Patty. Those who have seen Almodóvar’s Bad Education can immediately recognize that the plot for that 2004 film is a combination of that Patty story and Tina’s confrontation with the priest in Law of Desire. Fascinated by these moments which had queered childhood memories colliding with the present, Almodóvar framed Bad Education around the ways we tell stories from our youth so as to rewrite them.
In the early scenes in Bad Education we see a beautiful drag queen called Zahara (Gael García Bernal) picking up a random guy who’s seen her act in a nightclub and taking her back to her motel. When the guy is unable to keep his erection up, Zahara decides to rob him, stopping only when his wallet reveals him to be her old middle school crush, back when Zahara was a young boy called Ignacio. This sparks memories of the Catholic school where Ignacio met Father Manolo, who’d loved his singing and who’d clearly favored him above all his classmates. Zahara decides to confront Father Manolo after all these years in order to face the childhood trauma she’s had to deal with for so long. What in the 1987 film had been a mere monologue is fleshed out in vivid scenes at the Catholic school. And, yet again, we get a moment of righteous confrontation between a grown-up Ignacio/Zahara and Father Manolo. Where Maura’s Tina was content with merely conversing with her former “lover,” Zahara wants revenge: she’s written out a story that lays out all that happened between the two and is all too happy to stay quiet—for a price. That short story, titled “The Visit,” was in itself a piece Almodóvar had written years earlier and which he’d dusted off for Bad Education after first borrowing its plot line for Tina’s brief church scene.
In his most autobiographical film to date, Almodóvar took that short story and gave it yet another twist. By the time Bad Education wraps up, we learn that the scenes at the Catholic school as well as all the scenes featuring García Bernal as Zahara have been not flashbacks, as we’d been led to believe. Instead, they were filmed recreations that make up a film within the film. Enrique (Fele Martinez), the Almodóvar stand-in, has been directing. Ostensibly an adaptation of Zahara’s short story, the movie was also based on Enrique’s own relationship with Ignacio when the two were schoolmates who’d sneak off to the movies. This kind of labyrinthian metafictional aspect merely reinforces the way that, in Almodóvar’s world, memories are always already screened: they are always remakes, retouched and reframed for newer audiences. Even as we believe we’re getting an unvarnished look at Almodóvar’s own childhood in rural Spain, he’s offered only a twice removed recreation of it, a reminder that in his films nothing is ever original.
Pain and Glory hinges on a similar conceit. On its surface the film follows Salvador (Antonio Banderas), an aging Spanish director known for his cheeky 1980s comedies, who finds himself reminiscing about his childhood in rural Spain as he reconnects with not one but two men from his past. Set at a house that’s a near replica of Almodóvar’s own and with Banderas wearing Almodóvar’s own clothing, Pain and Glory doesn’t shy away from the autobiographical trappings of its central character. One of the earliest memories of his we see on screen is a young Salvador being asked to sing for a priest, hearing in voice-over how he soon became the choir’s soloist. Those familiar with Tina and Ignacio/Zahara will see here unmissable parallels. But if Almodóvar has yet again returned to his Catholic school days, it is not to tell a story of abuse.
In Pain and Glory Almodóvar skips through whatever happened between his young protagonist and the priest and lingers instead on a bond the young Salvador shares with Eduardo, a dashing handyman. Expanding on the queered coming-of-age tale he put forth in Bad Education, Almodóvar gives his young fictional self a moment of sexual awakening that’s as bold as anything he first envisioned with Patty or Tina or Zahara. Eduardo (César Vicente) becomes Salvador’s pupil, learning to read and write at the hands of this preternaturally smart eight-year-old. But there’s also something rather lustful about their relationship; young Salvador sneaks wide-eyed glances at Eduardo, transfixed by the young man’s full lips, broad shoulders, and disarming smile. When Eduardo asks him to sit for an impromptu portrait after he’s done painting and tiling their house, Salvador is flush with excitement. Later still, when Eduardo strips down and washes himself with no regard for the young boy staring at him, Salvador faints. Heatstroke, he’s told, though we’ve seen the way he was struck by Eduardo’s naked body, his chaste desire clearly getting the better of him.
To watch his latest film is to see Almodóvar’s career-long leitmotifs outright quoted and recreated.
But, as with his 2004 film, those childhood moments are revealed to be recreations, scenes Banderas’s Salvador is now shooting as part of an autobiographical project that makes Pain and Glory feel like an ouroboros of a film. Not only is he revisiting his memories to turn them into art, but he’s revisiting the theme of turning memories into art. To watch his latest film is to see Almodóvar’s career-long leitmotifs outright quoted and recreated, a reminder that creative self-plagiarizing has long been part of his creative arsenal. Moreover, just as in Bad Education and in Law of Desire, Almodóvar has created a character portrait of a gay filmmaker that depends on borrowed and stolen fictions. In the 1987 neo-noir, Banderas’ Ripley-esque Antonio exchange correspondence with a film director asking to be addressed by a pseudonym (“Laura P.”), a name borrowed from a film script, while in the 2004 film, Ignacio’s brother (played by García Bernal) passes off “The Visit” as his own while impersonating his older brother. In Pain and Glory, an old collaborator of Salvador’s stumbles upon a makeshift monologue/journal entry the film director has written and convinces him to let the piece be adapted for the stage. Salvador’s only request is that his name be stripped from it: the actor passes off Salvador’s writing (and therefore his personal history) as his own. In these films there’s always the fear that the fictions we tell about ourselves will become someone else’s. But there’s also the understanding that sometimes borrowed words are necessary to reveal one’s truth.
Almodóvar’s latest film is a melancholy look backwards, not just at his life but at his career—and, specifically, at the ways such backward glances in his work have always gone hand in hand with self-plagiarizing schemes. There’s a sparseness to Pain and Glory that seems to contrast with his baroque previous efforts, but by the time he shows us that half the film has been a film-within-a-film it’s clear this is a seasoned filmmaker polishing another one of his most famous tricks. The journey from Patty Diphusa and Tina to Zahara and Salvador is, on the one hand, a move away from artifice and towards verisimilitude. On the other, it’s a move towards ever more elaborate storytelling that has slowly shifted the focus from outlandish drag impersonators to sensitive young boys; in Law of desire same-sex attraction was violent and volatile, while in Bad Education it was a weapon to be used. In Pain and Glory, it emerges as a palliative balm that serves both the aging filmmaker and the budding choir soloist well. He may have told a version of this tale before, but with age he’s softened its edges and sanded it down to get at its central truth.
Writing about oneself is a process of rewriting one’s life. But, of course, once the writing is done, it means one’s life is nothing but a story, a narrative told and retold, edited and sculpted for consumption. Almodóvar, like many great artists, is obsessed with a small number of issues (desire, filmmaking, gender, Catholic abuse), and with Pain and Glory he’s returned to the one scene his career has long grappled with: the moment when a filmmaker sits down to witness his own queer childhood on the silver screen. There’s a distance now, which nourishes ideas that have gone from mere sketches to full-fledged films. Almodóvar has been turning these stories and characters over like a kaleidoscope, trying different angles, adorning them with ever more stylistic flourishes until he’s finally found yet another way to depict them on screen. He’s gotten closer to telling his own story while making sure the films that encase it remain jigsaw puzzles, obscuring the thin line that always divides fiction from autobiography.
Before you go: Electric Literature is campaigning to reach 1,000 members by 2020, and you can help us meet that goal. Having 1,000 members would allow Electric Literature to always pay writers on time (without worrying about overdrafting our bank accounts), improve benefits for staff members, pay off credit card debt, and stop relying on Amazon affiliate links. Members also get store discounts and year-round submissions. If we are going to survive long-term, we need to think long-term. Please support the future of Electric Literature by joining as a member today!
The challenge of an absurd reality is producing art that is reflective of that absurdity without giving in to its logics. What I mean is, it’s difficult to make art that captures the heightened sense of precarity and peril we face while maintaining the perspective needed to undermine the forces that have produced such a situation. For author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, recently named to the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35, one answer to this predicament is to dial into the absurdity, turn the volume way up, and allow the harshness to wash over us until it hurts too much not to move. Full immersion.
His debut story collection, Friday Black, is darkly humorous satire of the dystopic results of an American culture conditioned to accept the excesses of capitalism, racism, and structural violence as the norm. The extraordinary becomes quotidian. And somehow Adjei-Brenyah retains a semblance of hope. We aren’t necessarily doomed, but we will be, he warns, if we can’t see how we’ve allowed the absurd to flourish in ways both macro and micro.
I spoke with Adjei-Brenyah over the phone about the big things — violence, racism, capitalism, human nature. But these are only points of entry. He wants, perhaps even more than the end of these forms of oppression, to remind us of our human connection — and responsibility to one another.
Mychal Denzel Smith: These stories are incredible. You’re diving into this satirical dystopian blurring of American life, particularly from a black perspective, with all of the different violences and systems at play that prey on emotions and alter the way in which we interact with one another. I’m curious, as far as your writing process, are there triggers in your everyday life that turn your imagination towards the surreal?
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: I remember a while back I made a video about wearing a hood. I remember Geraldo Rivera said if black kids wore their hoodies — didn’t wear hoodies as much — maybe they’d be safer. To me it’s already so ridiculous and so crazy but he said that in this way that presents it as normal or whatever, and so I try to say what is the real implication of him saying something like that? It’s that if you wear this kind of thing, that is if you present in this sort of way that is associated with black people, then maybe you’re going to get killed. Then maybe it’s okay for you to die, or maybe it’s acceptable. Almost literally even by his own logic that’s sort of what he’s saying. And that was several years before I wrote that book so for me, the surreal is the way of getting to the heart of the ways people try to use language to hide a sinister reality. The racism, or general evil that they’re willing to accept.
The surreal is the way I get to the heart of how people try to use language to hide a sinister reality of racism.
MDS: From the very beginning of the collection, the violence you imagine feels extraordinary. But there’s a coolness to the way that you describe it in which it feels sort of regular or mundane in a way. Is that a deliberate approach to it? Do you find the violence extraordinary, or what is the tension there for you?
NKA: Yeah, I do think there is an extraordinary amount of violence. Part of the reason why the book is playing with that is because we accept a lot of violence in our personal lives and also on a larger more macro scale. I remember the first time, the news was like 47 people were killed today on Black Friday. And it was just like, “yeah”and then “The Ravens Won.” Because of the overwhelming nature of the violence in our society we kind of almost allow a lot of violence. So when I put it in text, you’re kind of forced to pause and think “wait a second.” Because there is a part of us that does resist, but we’ve gotten so used to packaging our violence in these particular ways. “Oh a bomb was dropped in x country that we are trained not to care about. It hit a hospital. 68 people we think were killed.” And that’s — 68 human beings were killed by an accidental whatever, civilians whatever you want to say. And it’s just there in front of you.
I worked in a mall for a time. I was there when someone jumped off the fourth floor of Palisades mall. And I remember they put a yellow tarp on her. They kind of put like an emergency siren or something and the mall just continued. And I guess —
MDS: So that story is real.
NKA: Um, that story — it’s more real than I wish it were. Yeah I definitely worked in a mall for sure. I worked in a mall for too long. And besides actually teaching at school, the only real jobs I’ve had have been in retail. Everywhere I look there is some incredible violence happening and we’re sort of just walking by it. Sometimes in my stories I turned up the volume on that violence a little bit more, or I make it seem like I’ve turned it up a little bit more. Sometimes — now, often I don’t even think I am. But I turn up the volume a little bit more, and I still walk by it. I think that also causes the reader to be like “hey, wait a second,” and I guess what I hope is that we had that “wait a second” a little bit more in our actual lives.
MDS: Yeah, because to me this is like a comment on the ways in which violence, or even the potential for violence, informs our interactions even when the violence or that potential is left unsaid.
NKA: Yep! Yeah it’s kind of like known — and there’s violence like “I’m gonna kill you” and there’s violence like erasure. There’s violence like silencing. And it’s just built into society that you pay.
It feels like if you don’t wear a tie, you’re not acceptable. A tie has nothing to do with your person, it has nothing to do with your ability to handle problems. It’s about your ability to conform to this arbitrary system. I mean not even arbitrary system, it’s often very much explicitly and implicitly right in front of us. It’s kind of just the thing we do. And there’s violence in that, too. There’s all types of violence that we sort of just learn to deal with. And sometimes I try to maybe present them in hyperbole so we could say maybe we shouldn’t just accept these things.
There’s all types of violence that we sort of just learn to deal with. Maybe we shouldn’t just accept these things.
MDS: In the story “Zimmerland” there are a few sentences that felt like they encapsulated the themes that you were trying to address throughout the book. You write: “People say sell your soul like it’s easy, but your soul is yours and it’s not for sale. Even if you try, it’ll still be there, waiting for you to remember it.”
In the context of the story this man is playing out this role at this symbolic theme park and he’s attempting to make a difference here, or believes that he’s doing something more than he’s actually doing, only to see that he’s playing into the racist fantasies of people who come into the park and pay to kill him over and over again. But he thinks that there’s the potential for him to do good. It plays out over and over again — from the first story when these folks are getting retribution for the deaths of these children, the last story with this dystopian future. People’s souls are still intact, no matter what the systems they are subjected to, but feeling like they have little control over them. But it remains with you and eats away at you.
NKA: That’s one of the places in the book where I almost to the point of stepping out of the story — tried to say it a little bit overtly — what my hope is. Sometimes when I’m a little more cynical I don’t know how true that is. But when I’m at the highest up and doing revision, looking at your work hard you kind of get this story to reflect a self higher than your person.
Whenever we allow ourselves to believe in these dehumanizing practices, we try and try and try but it’s an empty promise that will never return what you think it will. The protagonist in that story has realized that — and he’s realized it in a way that maybe makes him do what is wrong for the time being, but he has arrived at something that I think is true, and I think the idea of selling is really important to the book as a whole.
The idea of purchasing, consumerism, this transactional life that we subscribe to or are forced into in capitalism is kind of an illusion. The realest thing is there when you can’t sell anything, and you can try and try and try I think, or hope. But I think there is sort of an innate call to good or at least without any help you know that it’s wrong to hurt somebody else.
MDS: Yeah —
NKA: It’s also sad, you know. It’s kind of like really depressing.
MDS: Well, yes. You do — what’s interesting in the way that you present these stories is that there is the sadness of the violence here but sometimes it’s comical in a way. In that very dark, humorous way. And it hits you in a way that you’re caught off guard by your own laughter. The idea, the absurdity of the level of violence or the way that you’ve described the violence, does hit you. But then you’re remembering that what you’re describing is the destruction of the human being.
NKA: Humor works in several registers for me. I think that’s how I navigate the world, it’s how I cope. But also, one of my favorite types of humor is when the punchline is actually the truth in the joke. It’s ridiculous and it’s terrible, and there is something that makes us laugh about absurdity. There’s absurdity and I actively try, to make things “haha stupid” funny to kind of leaven the intensity, but there are also times when it’s like “Hah — Ohhhh.” And I like that cut “Oooooh” moment, where we’re getting ready to laugh but then you realize no, you said — whatever you’re describing — these are real people’s views, these are real people’s bodies. There’s a real profit in this. And they’re ridiculous.
My favorite types of humor is when the punchline is actually the truth in the joke.
MDS: I’m probably not going to be the last person to bring this up to you, but your stories put me in the frame of mind of when I was watching Sorry to Bother You. The idea of — there’s an absurd level to this, that I’m presenting to you but actually this is not far off from the reality that we’re living through. And similar to Sorry to Bother You I feel like there’s a way in particular your stories about the mall and retail and Black Friday, that you’re presenting the very real evils of capitalism to us, and the consumerist impulse that this breeds within people and the way that can turn violent, but also from the perspective of the narrator of the story, finds a pride in his ability to sell. And there’s a way in which you can recognize the evils of this system and have that still juxtaposed with the fact that someone who’s also victim to the system finds self-worth and purpose within that.
NKA: For me it’s important to recognize that I’m not on some hill talking about these problems. I’ve gone to the store and felt good about myself because I was able to buy this or that. Make art out of pain and I think that’s important and I recognize that I am not outside of that.
So that’s another thing I think for the narrators of my stories. The narrator is not innocent — they’re part of the system, too, and that’s sort of the insidiousness of it for me. Because, even when you think you’re outside of it, even if you’re critical — I know I still, at some level, judge my work by these things I have. And sometimes I have to to survive because the system is set up that you have to participate to an extent, but even outside of that, I want these shoes, I want that thing, and I’ve gotten away from it quite recently, but I think it’s really hard to separate yourself from the system entirely.
MDS: Yeah, I mean I have 100s of pairs of Jordans, so —
NKA: I used to kill myself for Jordans. I remember when I used to follow it, and when the 8s came back out the first time, it was such a huge thing. I mean, I’m not anti-them, I think they’re cool, I just know how I’ve attached my self-worth to them.
MDS: Right, exactly. Is retail a special villain to you within the capitalist economy or is it just because you worked retail?
NKA: Retail is special to me because I know it. And I know it because it’s funny because it’s so — I imagine those old wars, those guys that get shot right in the beginning you know? They shoot them, they shoot them, we’re like one of those people. One of those — brief, inconsequential, foot soldier, pawn, for some guy you’ll never meet. Or when you do meet them it’s such a big deal — they come to the store and you have to bow down at their feet.
For me retail is what I know but also it’s funny because in retail you also connect with the people not in retail. In the same way that corporate suits do not. And in some way that’s a grey area in that story “In Retail.” You get to speak to people. And there is something nice about having an opportunity to help someone. I remember working in a store — I still remember this was several years ago and I was trying to help them. I realized that they were deaf — all three of them were deaf and I remember this moment of — they were trying to get a Northface jacket — and I sold a lot of Northface jackets. They were trying to get the fleece that everybody used to wear. And whatever, I’d sell a bunch of those, and they don’t see the one they need, and they’re trying to talk to me and I remember this moment of one of them takes my hand and they draw it into my hand, I understood them. And I went to the back and got a medium. And they were happy. It was like someone helped them and they were happy.
There were times when people would come to the store looking distraught — back to school, I remember how stressful that was for me and my parents. And I know that this is cheap and I was young enough, I’m young enough to know they’re not going to get clowned at school for it. So let me help them. Several people came in — but usually a woman would come in for a very specific request because in prison you can’t wear a lot of stuff. You can’t wear any of these colors, you can’t wear any insignias, you can’t wear these and that. It’s almost like a section of grey on grey stuff. And it’s a big relief to them to be a small help, so for me the blessing or salvation of retail is that you do get to interact with people on a human level that is sometimes really nice. Often it’s really not nice because customers suck and people are the worst. But — also people are cool. It’s always both. Are people the worst, are people the best? Yes. It’s both.
Retail is a good subject for me because I do like working in that space of intense — terrible, also wow wasn’t that a beautiful thing. And if you ask somebody in retail they have a bunch of horror stories, but also if you push them, they have moments of “actually that was pretty dope when I got to do that for that person.”
We live in a world fueled by capitalism. From the moment we wake up, we’re inundated by a torrent of non-stop advertisements, screaming at us to buy, buy, buy! Upgrade to the newest iPhone that will break down in two years! Sign up for a monthly subscription of bedazzled lambskin notebooks! What I love about shopping is that rush of endorphins and that buzz of optimism that the new purchase will (somehow) make your life better, easier, happier. But you know what’s an even better warm, fuzzy feeling? Donating and knowing that your tax-deductible contribution is going towards a good cause that will make a difference in the world.
We’ve compiled a list of literary non-profits that are doing amazing and necessary work. If you can’t afford to make a monetary offering, consider volunteering and getting involved in your favorite local non-profit instead.
Books Through Bars provides free books and education materials to prisoners across seven states. The United States has the highest mass incarceration rate in the world and most of the incarcerated population are African-Americans and immigrants. This year, prisons in Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland have tried unsuccessfully to ban organizations from sending free books to inmates, making the work of this all-volunteer run non-profit more vital than ever. There are three easy ways you can contribute to Books Through Bars. You can volunteer your time by packing books, donate money, or donate books.
PEN America champions the right for everyone everywhere in the world to have the freedom to write and the freedom to express their views. Support the freedom to write by donating or becoming a member.
Girls Write Now seeks to empower high school girls by connecting them with professional women writers for mentorship. Help empower teenage girls by becoming a mentor, donating, or volunteering as a photographer or videographer.
Electric Literature is a not-for-profit literary publication that champions exciting, relevant, and inclusive work. We’re campaigning to reach 1,000 members by 2020, and you can help us meet that goal. Your support would allow us always pay writers on time (without worrying about overdrafting our bank accounts), improve benefits for staff members, pay off credit card debt, and stop relying on Amazon affiliate links. Members also get cool perks like store discounts and year-round submissions. Please support the future of Electric Literature by joining as a member today!
VIDA is a feminist non-profit organization that committed to creating transparency around in the publishing world and amplifying marginalized voices. The VIDA Count tallies bylines to calculate the gender imbalance in the literary landscape. You can contribute by volunteering with the VIDA count or providing monetary support.
We Need Diverse Books advocates for diversity in publishing industry, aiming to help produce and promote children’s books that reflects and honors all young people. Their vision is a world where all children can see themselves in the pages of a book. Help champion diversity by volunteering or fundraising.
The Lambda Literary Foundation advocates for the LGBTQ literary community through writers’ retreats, scholarships, and more. Donating helps fund their programs and nurture emerging LGBTQ writers.
Is there anything more magical that books lovers gathering to see their favorite authors? I think not. Donate to your local book festival and help free it for everyone.
As we celebrate the most damaging case of gentrification this country has ever seen, perhaps you’d like to spend a little of your time off thinking about the past, present, and future of Native and Indigenous writing. Here are some of EL’s favorite essays and interviews by and about Native writers.
In an essay born from the image of Wednesday Addams burning down Camp Chippewa, Elissa Washuta reflects on how the loneliness of Thanksgiving is an intersection between her disconnection from the holiday as a Native person and her fundamental sense of isolation.
I am neither Wednesday nor Fester. I am not the grim girl with her own guillotine, not the unsmiling camper who would let the blonde girl drown. Neither am I the old ghoul who wants a companion so badly he clings to the woman who tries to electrocute him in the bath. But I am a loner and a weirdo. Even in our kindergarten Thanksgiving celebration, for which I was assigned a construction paper feathered headband that signified my affiliation with the half of the class playing the Indians, I didn’t belong, because I was going to be Native the next day, too, and every one after, while they were going to forget we’d even played this game.
Washuta is also the co-editor of the collection Shapes of Native Nonfiction. Here, EL contributing editor Jenn Baker interviews her and collaborator Theresa Warburton on what it means to create, read, teach, and anthologize Native writing.
Writing by Native authors is foundational to the field of nonfiction period. So, this isn’t an anthology of Native writers per se but actually a collection of nonfiction that is centering the voices of Native writers. The distinction between those two things was really important to both of us.
As a child, Joseph V. Lee spent his summers learning his Wampanoag tribe’s language at a summer camp led by a woman named Jessie Baird. With the release of a documentary about Baird’s efforts to revive the Wampanoag language, Lee wonders: is she right to forbid non-tribal members from attending her classes?
I wonder how much these pushes for secrecy are motivated by a desire to be able to claim absolute ownership of something for once. I can identify with that desire. One year in Turtle Project we were taught the “true” story of the first Thanksgiving. The story we had been taught in school, we were told, was a lie. We were also told not to share this new version with non-Tribal members. I felt a rush of excitement upon learning this new version of the Thanksgiving story. … But if the story I was being told was indeed a more accurate version of an important American story, then why were we being told not to share it?
If you haven’t read There There, you’re missing out on one of the best books of 2018, a beautifully-wrought multi-viewpoint epic that spans Oakland’s Native community. In this interview, Orange discusses the fact that Native Americans can’t be treated as history or legend.
Reservation consciousness is an adaptation after removal, after being pushed there. Being Indian meant something totally different before reservations. So we can’t just refer back to reservations like we’ve been on reservations forever. We have to think of the new thing that we’re going to be.
The oli is a native Hawaiian ritual chant that helps to preserve history, memory, and culture. This essay is an introduction to oli for non-Hawaiians, but it’s also a meditation on Kalama’s relationship to her family and roots.
I remember my grandfather’s funeral as if it were only a few months ago. When he passed away, his four children came together to write a family chant of our own. It was a way to honor him, his memory. To assure him (and ourselves) that the wisdom of our clan would carry on through generations. At his funeral, his children and grandchildren lifted their voices in his honor. Here we are, and we will continue.
When Sherman Alexie was accused of sexual harassment, it struck a huge blow to the presence of Native literature on academic syllabi—but only because white scholars, critics, and commentators had been treating Alexie as the sum total of Native writing. Now, says Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., they have to reckon with this colonial attitude—and think about what comes next.
As an extremely popular writer in the mainstream who has written a number of young adult works, Alexie is often the only Native voice heard in many social studies, language arts, and English curricula. White writers and scholars may find themselves wondering, “who should we get to replace him?” They may not even realize that this question highlights the gates that tend to surround Native lit, their complicity in maintaining them, and the consequences of their actions — actions which are akin to literary colonialism.
Brandon Hobson’s novel, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award, grapples with difficult topics like trauma, anger, and abandonment as well as questions of racial and gender identity. Main character Sequoyah is rattling around in the foster care system, looking for ways to connect with people but also pushing them away.
A lot of people aren’t asking enough about Sequoyah’s identity, exploring his gender issues and trying to decide—you know, I think that’s a big question that teenagers ask, “Who am I? What is my identity?” So while he’s exploring his Native identity, he’s also a little bit androgynous. I just don’t know if that’s being written about very much, the question of androgyny especially in Native youth.
Jawort is the editor of Off the Path, a two-volume anthology of fiction by Native and Indigenous writers. In this essay, he describes the process of finding contributors for volume 2—which also means thinking about the present and future state of Native and Indigenous fiction.
Still, despite collective tribulations and stereotypes we still face even today, we recognize and embrace our tribal differences. Our identities are not of a one-size-fits-all pan-indigenous nature, but ones of diverse cultures, languages, and geographical differences. Through those intricate lines we’re able to write about our experiences today from distinct points of view.
Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir Heart Berries is a model of turning trauma and pain into powerful, lyrical writing. In this interview, she talks about mental illness, children, the failures of “resilience” as a concept, and writing about and to the dominant culture from a Native perspective.
When I was writing the book, I had to place myself at the center of the story. I could not look at being Indian; I had to look through it.
Before you go: Electric Literature is campaigning to reach 1,000 members by 2020, and you can help us meet that goal. Having 1,000 members would allow Electric Literature to always pay writers on time (without worrying about overdrafting our bank accounts), improve benefits for staff members, pay off credit card debt, and stop relying on Amazon affiliate links. Members also get store discounts and year-round submissions. If we are going to survive long-term, we need to think long-term. Please support the future of Electric Literature by joining as a member today!
It’s Thanksgiving, and whether you’re visiting relatives you’d rather forget you had or celebrating alone in your apartment for reasons you just don’t want to get into, stop asking, you’re probably taking this opportunity to eat a lot of food. What could take your mind off of your racist uncle, the problematic history of the holiday, and your nascent indigestion? Reading some of the best articles we’ve published about food and cooking, of course.
This personal essay opens up with a tale as old as, well, the beginning: the one about Eve and the apple. Kristen Zory King delves into her lifelong fascination with this origin story and traces back to the origin of her own eating disorder, along with the conditions that fostered it.
“I would venture to say that the numbers of reported eating disorders are a low estimate, made up of the lucky few who are able to seek help. How could they not be? We are surrounded by conceptions of womanhood directly perpetuated by this story. It’s on the periphery of comical, overt, obvious. But whether we are a product of our culture or our culture is a product of us, it is clear that the question of the female body, of what to do with female desire, is all-consuming.”
Most of us have, at one point or another, eaten alone before. Gina Mei is a master at it but has a lot to learn when it comes to cooking and generally caring for herself. Former Top Chef contestant Anita Lo’s cookbook provides much needed wisdom during a tough year.
“In many ways, I’m Solo’s target audience: I eat most of my meals alone, and I can’t afford to eat out for every meal. Unlike Chopped, Top Chef Masters, and Iron Chef America veteran Anita Lo, however, I hate cooking for myself. So, I often don’t. Instead, I stock up on frozen dinners. I make a second meal out of my work lunch. I order containers of spicy pad Thai, or boxes of thin Neapolitan pizza, and stretch them out over the week. I relish asking for a “table for one” — which has somehow always felt less depressing to me than eating alone at my tiny kitchen table.”
When you’re the only child of a working single mother, you’re left home alone a lot. Learning to cook for yourself becomes a necessity and the first thing you make turns into an integral part of who you are, following you to different kitchens or life stages.
“Mom worked during the day and went to school at night. Having me stay home was a big deal. The first thing I was taught was how to cook for myself…”
If you want to believe in love again then Emily Everett’s short story is sure to convince any doubters. Told in the form of a product review on Amazon, readers watch on as a decades-spanning marriage unfolds. Who knew you could feel so emotional reading about kitchen appliances?
“But we were still young in our own quiet way: we read poetry aloud in the den, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, and sang Beatles covers around an acoustic guitar. Surrounded by friends, everyone swaying into the couch cushions—I always felt so pleased with us in those moments. Later when the house was quiet, arms full of cups and ashtrays, I’d tell my husband what a nice night it had been, and he’d say that every night with me was a nice night.”
There are two things Abby Walthausen is struggling to figure out in this essay: how to effectively use her old gas-guzzling stove and how to “put [herself] in the mindset of a 1942 manual for cooking during wartime.” On her journey to answers, connections between our modern living conditions and the doom of World War 2 come into focus.
“If I feel awkward and small scraping my restaurant leftovers into an old yogurt container, or planning a meal with tofu when the meat looks so good, that is no new phenomenon. The folks we think of as bleeding heart, crunchy granola types now were once the thrifty church ladies who populate Fisher’s book. But as she reminds us on page after page, the tips she writes about in this book, some extreme, others practical, are mostly gleaned from the pages of cookbooks put out by just such dowdy church groups or ladies’ circles.”
What do reality television bakers and writers have in common? While crafting her newest novel, Becky Mandelbaum begins taking nightly writing breaks to watch the hit TV show The Great British Bake Off to de-stress. However, she soon begins to see similarities between her struggle to write and that of the bakers.
“At some point it dawned on me why I felt so connected to the show: it is, emotionally and often structurally, exactly like a writing workshop or, more loosely, like the art of writing as a whole. A cookie in place of a poem, a cake in place of a story. All day, the bakers stand at their little islands, feverishly attempting to create something that is both beautiful and tempting, that others might enjoy.”
So, we’ve established that baking and writing aren’t so different after all. But how does a pastry chef recreating mass-produced snacks on YouTube fit in? The art of failure, of loving the process, reveals itself to be not only the main tenet of the show but of writing in general.
“Many of the foods Claire attempts to remake so obviously require mass-manufacturing tools and ingredients that her attempts are all but designed to fail. The writer in me is particularly tickled by such a proposition. Claire’s goal is to replicate an ideal she knows she can only ever approximate. In this pursuit she’s no different than many of us who write for a living, where every sentence can feel like an approximation of the ideal we aspire to but must understand we’ll never accomplish.”
A funny comic that has compiled, as you can guess from the title, reviews people leave on Yelp about popular fast food chains. As creative as it is side-splitting, from regular customer complaints to conspiracies on where Taco Bell gets ideas for the menu are sure to entertain.
“Tacos are still crunchy and tasty. Diet Sierra Mist too is a plus. I do have a theory though that everything Taco Bell makes is made out of the same thing.”
Before you go: Electric Literature is campaigning to reach 1,000 members by 2020, and you can help us meet that goal. Having 1,000 members would allow Electric Literature to always pay writers on time (without worrying about overdrafting our bank accounts), improve benefits for staff members, pay off credit card debt, and stop relying on Amazon affiliate links. Members also get store discounts and year-round submissions. If we are going to survive long-term, we need to think long-term. Please support the future of Electric Literature by joining as a member today!
Growing up, cousin Phip sold puppies from the alley by the deli there. He leaned out from the alleyway and said, “Doggies have ’em have ’em” quietly as people walked past so it sounded less like someone wanting to sell you something and more like the idea of it came from inside your very own head. This was smart selling. You never knew what sort of puppy you were getting. Sometimes it’s foxes, sometimes it’s dog, sometimes it’s wolfies, sometimes something in between. He got out of poor, did Phip. But then he became not rich, not poor, just nothing, because they sent him to jail. They didn’t like him selling the breeds on the street. Another cousin, Ruby, she had her business. She used the bed in my dad’s room for her business. She went in, came out, and flashed a palmful of cash. “So easy,” she’d say. Lie.
My dad worked dyeing fabric and purple stained his fingertips. The skin on the tips and the skin below his nails. Like all the blood was gone to all his fingertips in the moment when they’re purple before they turn white and fall off. The way cousin Phip did with the dog tails sometimes. Elastic banded them. Red purple white, flimp, off they fell. Tails on the ground. My dad, though, bent over barrels of purple and breathed in the purple particulars—I think that’s what they’re called—all day. He had purple specks around his mouth when he came home, and purple specks on his neck. My dad had purple freckles. He leaned over a barrel all day with cloth in his hands and he leaned over the sink soon as he was home. Some of the purples washed off him down the drain. Some stayed on his skin. Always on his fingertips. And purple in his lungs, inhaling it that way. The particulars float up. Just because you can’t see a thing doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Back bent, fingers stained, lungs stained, and my dad was good at the work and proud of the work and he’d come home and tell me some piece of cloth he’d dyed had sold for a bag full of cash to some rich-bitch princess wanting deep color for a cape—except he never called her a rich-bitch princess, that’s what I’m calling her. He showed nothing but respect, and I always wanted to ask, if they buy it for so much, how come you make so little. But I never asked it.
He brought home scraps and he showed me sewing. He showed me how to weave. He told me, “Not like Phip, not like Ruby. You don’t sell dogs on the street. You don’t wear lipstick if you don’t want. You find your way.” He said those words a lot. You find your way. They’re words that don’t make a lot of sense even if you think hard about them, that only come to make sense out of a long time and thinking about it, but not in a direct way, like letting it sort of linger at the side of your brain instead of it occupying the center of it. You find your way. It was always there in my brain and I didn’t know what it meant, but then I did.
I liked the loom from when I was small. I learned early and it’s most of what I did. I got taught the basics, then I taught myself more and I just kept doing and doing and I impressed my own self. I’d finish up a tapestry and I’d lay it down on the floor. I’d stand above and think, Goddamn. It wasn’t there, now it is. Every time it felt like a miracle. I’d look at the skeins in a heap by the loom, all their separate threads, and I’d think, Goddamn, first strands one by one, then this all together. This thing whole. Something out of something else. I made this transformation. The act of art is metamorphosis. It’s where I found my pride.
I made this transformation. The act of art is metamorphosis.
And it turned out I wasn’t the only one impressed. Neighbors on the block, when they stopped in, maybe to bring a casserole, maybe to bring some pastry, maybe to just see by me to make sure I was okay (no mom, good-but-gone-a-lot dad, people’s concerns), they saw, too. And they said, “Oh oh ooooooh. Look at you. Look at what you’ve done.” And first I thought, this is just nice people being nice. But nice isn’t telling others and having others tell others about how wowed they were. That’s when you can start to believe it might be good.
So people started coming. They came to look and I’d sit there and take their praise. Oh the colors oh the way they bleed one to the next oh the detail oh the scene it’s like a painting it’s like it’s real, you got a gift, you were touched by the gods, you own skills like no one’s ever seen. One thread on top of the next, one hour on top of the next, I just kept bettering. You find your way. This was my way. I was young but my name was known, and not just on my block and not just in my village, but in places miles away. People heard some things about me. They heard I was good.
They heard I was the best.
Rich people, besides money, got options. They’ve got options so much they don’t even realize the options they’ve got. Poor, less options, sometimes none. I think people forget that it’s not just money. So my dad sells a purple robe to some fancy dan, and this fancy dan sees the color’s special and he’s feeling all puffed up for having good taste enough to find my dad. He thinks the difference is that he can afford to buy this robe, and my dad can’t. That’s a difference, but that’s not the difference. Fancy dan has time to figure out what his path is. He has time to wonder: What do I want? How do I get it? Poor, harder to think about what you want. Less time wondering, more time worrying. More time making sure enough purple cloth is made so there’s money enough for food and roof. Plus, you think too much about what you want, you’re swallowed whole. Rich, you’ve got to worry less about having to sell puppies from a box by the alley and whether they’ll take your body into jail for it. Rich, you’ve got to worry less about being bent over a barrel so your back’s curving even when you’re not bent over the barrel. Rich, you’ve got to worry less about questions of roofs, questions of sweaters, questions of bread.
I paid attention, I stayed awake, I knew about options, what it was to have them, what it was to not, and I knew I wanted some. One way to options is being fine at something, being finest best of all. So each day I sat at my loom and sometimes it’s the last place I ever wanted to be, but I sat there for knowing it was the one way to get better, to keep doing and doing.
I watched the people I knew reach the limits of their options. Again and again. It was as though the kids I grew up with, my pals on the block, from the village, it was like all of a sudden there were these walls erected, these tall, smooth white walls, and they’d be walking along, living their lives, and then, slam, straight into this wall. And there was no going over and no going around, just dead-ended a hundred percent. Eagle, BenBen, Paulo, they went to prison. Kevin, he got killed by the police. Spice Rack, Henrietta, they got killed that way, too. Alma went wrong in her head because she kept drinking from this one well we knew had the poisons, but she drank anyway because that’s the way she always did it and there was nothing that would change her mind. Gloria got sick and the doctors said, We’ll cure you, but you need this much. She didn’t have that much. She died. Sylvia talked so much about being tired. “It’s tiring being poor,” she said, and then one day she gave herself permanent rest. Sometimes when things go so bad, when there’s no hope of bettering, that’s where you get led. Maybe where my mom got led. Or where she led herself. To her own end, that is.
I tried to keep that big white wall from arriving in my life. And what I learned is that it’s not just about being finest at something, not just about being the very best. It’s about speaking it that way, too, about knowing it and owning it and saying it. I knew it. I knew I was the finest. And I said it. I had pride.
“This is the most amazing weave work I’ve ever seen,” people said.
“Thank you. I haven’t seen work that’s finer myself,” I’d say. Grateful, yes, and also knowing. Say what you know.
Once a person whispered: “You must have learned from Minerva.”
Wrong. I learned from my dad and I learned from myself. And the fact of it was, I was better than Minerva.
And then I wondered why I wasn’t saying that out loud. You don’t get to be big in this world if you don’t know how to own your skill. You don’t get over that smooth wall if you don’t go after the thing you’re good at with everything you’ve got. And even then, other walls might rise.
So I started saying it out loud. “I taught myself, and I’m better than that weaving goddess. Any single day of the week I could outweave Minerva. She should come and try me.” I liked the way it sounded. “Get yourself down here and we’ll see who’s best,” I dared her. They’ve got a lot of power, but we’ve got power, too. More than they want us to think.
An elder lady with a gray knot of hair and cheeks that dangled off her face like thin-sliced meat had the nerve to tell me to take it easy. “It’s enough to be the best in the world that you know,” she said. “You don’t have to outdo the gods.” She said something against outgrowing my britches, that I should think about taking back what I’d said about outweaving Minerva. That I should think about apologizing.
Old ladies think they know. She comes into my place to watch me weave and look at what I’ve made and thinks she can tell me a thing? No. She’s lucky I didn’t smash her face, because that’s what I wanted to do. All people do is tell you why you can’t or won’t or never will or shouldn’t try. These scared old ladies. “You’re old,” I told her. “You’re old and the years got you dim. I never asked once for your advice. I advise myself. I’m sure of myself, and it’s hard for you to hear. And I’ll keep standing by what I said. Minerva should come and try me.”
Minerva should come and try me.
“So be it,” the old lady said, and she showed herself to be Minerva in disguise. The other folks in the room bowed and gasped and clutched their hearts. Not me. I stood with my shoulders back and my eyes front. I hold my own is why. The blood that rose to my cheeks in blush, it was surprise, and it was pleasure. I was getting what I wanted.
That’s a chance.
I sat at my loom. She had hers. We started. My blood moved faster. I raced the shuttle back and forth across the warp, the strands collecting. It’s what I’d spent most of my eyes-open hours doing. The weight of the shuttle in my hand, the speed of the slip through the wool, the treadles up and down, the squeaking, I knew this all, like it was my own body, as familiar as the inside of my mouth, as familiar as the weight of my leg, the sighs from my belly after a meal. I was motion and color and threads combining and I could tell, in a blurred way, that I was doing the finest I’d ever done. The patterns and shapes kept coming and awareness as to how it happened left me, like I had disintegrated into just the making, gone from myself, and just aiming energy toward the wool. The best of all feelings. And never more so than in this session at the loom.
At some long periphery, like she was in another galaxy, Minerva worked with fury. Now and then I heard her breath and heard her swish the shuttle across the wool. The sweat slid down my back, my shoulders ached. I didn’t care what she was doing. I barely knew what I was doing, only that I was doing it, it was happening, and it was fine.
Minerva finished first. She spread the tapestry and all I saw from the side of my eye was a weave of olive branches around the edges. Peace offering. It made me work harder and faster and bolder. She wanted peace because she knew I was going to win. There’d be no peace.
I near collapsed off my stool when I finished and a woman nearby had to hold me up. I couldn’t believe it when I saw what I’d done. I’d painted with wool. I painted my whole poor world versus all the deathless gods who live guiltless. Who live guiltless and without consequences. All we know is consequences. We’ve got mountains of consequences on top of us that press us and bury us and keep us down.
That’s the bull raping Europa, and the waves looked so real you’d think your hand would come away wet if you touched it.
That’s the eagle before he violates Asterie, carrying her off in his talons.
That’s Leda, getting herself crushed underneath the swan.
That’s Jove disguised as a satyr giving Antiope twins inside her.
That’s Jove turned into gold spray and entering Danae unconsenting.
That’s Jove in the form of fire, tricking Aegina.
That’s Jove playing a shepherd, fucking Mnemosyne nine nights in a row.
And Neptune, as a bull, Neptune as a ram, a stallion, a bird, a dolphin, tricking us on earth. All the lies. All the power over people. Power born of layers and layers of lies. And Phoebus as a hawk, a lion, a shepherd, lying, tricking, fucking. And all those gods, all those deathless ones. They never met regret. They don’t fear mistakes because they don’t know consequences. Never guilty, never punished. I showed you all, showed each crime, showed all you criminals. And yet we’re the ones to pay. How’s it work? You murder. You rape. You violate. And it’s us who fall. Why am I the only one to say it?
I say the names of all the fallen.
Europa, Asterie, Leda, Antiope, Alcmena, Danae, Aegina, Mnemosyne, Proserpina, Bilsaltes’s daughter, Aeolus’s daughter, Medusa, Melantho, Erigone, and so many more. Taken down in innocence. I showed the truth.
And was it an accident that I showed this guardian of virginity as many sexual violations as I could fit on a tapestry? Nope, it sure wasn’t. And of course she didn’t like being bested, and of course she didn’t like the feeling one bit that some poor mortal could outdo her. But I’ll go ahead and bet that her reaction came from this mirror held up to her and her world, seeing the twisted immoral forms “love” could take, knowing she’d done nothing to guard in them what was sacred in her.
And was it an accident that I showed this guardian of virginity as many sexual violations as I could fit on a tapestry? Nope, it sure wasn’t.
So what did she do? She acted like a brat child. She grabbed what I’d just made. And she started tearing. She shredded it. This god, this deathless one. All those scenes. All that color. All those crimes made clear for all eyes to see. Too much. She tore it apart. I stood. I watched. Finest thing I’d ever made, truest tales told, in tatters. Something drained out of me, seeing that work a wreck. Some force I had just seemed to slide right out of me and a tired landed on me like it had never landed before.
But tearing it apart wasn’t enough for her. She needed me to know better what was what so she took my boxwood shuttle in her hand, whose weight I knew like it was my own bones and blood. She grabbed it and she hit me. I have been in fights. I know how it feels to be in danger that way. When there you are maybe yelling some, maybe fighting, and you’re on your two legs and then your arms get grabbed and you get thrown and you fly through the air into a bureau or a wall, tossed like a sack of laundry. It hurts but it doesn’t hurt because you know how to leave yourself. It hurts but it doesn’t hurt because all your thoughts are on exits.
But all the fight was out of me. All the energy was out of me. It had left me when I saw what I’d made in shreds on the floor. Like I could do the very finest thing of all, and still, instead of praise, I get punished. You do wrong. You get punished. You eat Skittles. You get punished. You stand in the wrong place. You get punished. What drained the energies right out of me is that you do right, you do finest, you do the best undeniable, you still get punished. That big white wall I’d been trying to avoid, it rose up in the moment where all the walls should have come right down. I got tired the way Sylvia got tired. Minerva hit me once, twice, three times. I took it. Four, five, six. Across the forehead. I felt the blood slide down and in toward my eye. Seven and that’s when I knew enough. And I took what energies I had and I grabbed a rope and I noosed the loop and quick I strung it over my head to end it. There was no going any further.
Oh, but then Minerva takes pity. She says, “You’re deserving not to die, but you’re still deserving punishment.” You know what’s next? I live, but I live eight-legged. An angry little spider. Weaving webs, and they’re as fine as you’ve seen. I still go. I find my way. She thinks: harmless spider. She thinks: she doesn’t do harm and her webs can be invisible except in the dew, and they’re weak enough to get swatted through with a broom, and people won’t come to look and sigh and wow. And if they do, the next thing they’ll do is wipe the web away because folks don’t want spiders all around. Let her think it. Let her think how harmless. Let her think she did a good job punishing. But I learned about consequences. I learned how certain choices echo back and pin you.
Besides being turned into a spider, I heard Minerva say another thing. So it wasn’t just the finest thing I’d made, and it wasn’t just the beating, and it wasn’t just the being turned into a spider. “This is how you’re going to live. And this is how all who descend from you will live.” If I had babies, they’d be spider babies, is what she was saying. She went on. “Understand what it means? You fear the future.”
Didn’t she know? I guess she didn’t. You live the way I live, you grow up the way I grew up, you watch what happens to the people it happens to, all you do is fear the future. There’s no other choice. You’re rich, you’re guiltless, you’re deathless, the future’s something to fill with boats, ambrosia, giant pets, afternoons that last forever, every sunset seeming like it’s there for you. It just becomes a question of what to do with the fear. Same way I had my dad’s words and I found my way before at the loom, I find my way now. I fear the future, so you know what I do?
I have babies. I have babies and babies and babies. And they live for a bit and then what happens, my babies have babies. Each of my babies has babies. There are already babies beyond you can count. Picture as many of us as you can. And then more because it keeps going. And how many babies will my babies’ babies have, and how many babies will my babies’ babies’ babies have? Oh, more than you can count. We will be so many. And we will keep coming. More and more together. We find our way. We’re doing it right now. Do you know? Who should fear the future? You.
It was a rainy, snuggly night in November 2018, perfect for making mushroom barley soup or stuffed cabbage. I was walking home from the train when I saw it, inexplicably abandoned at the Little Free Library on my block. There, lying on its side as if after a long day of work, was that unmistakable thick white tome with the feisty red lettering on its spine: Joy of Cooking.
I didn’t need it, of course. I’d brought my copy, used so relentlessly the backstrip dangled like a hangnail, when my partner and I moved in together—even though he, no slouch in the kitchen, had his own. No, I didn’t need it. But taking it felt like a moral imperative. It was the same as if I’d seen a stray kitten cowering under a bush. I told my mom,and later my best friend, who was at the time a new mother, about the intense reaction I’d had to the sight of an abandoned Joy. They both said they would have felt exactly the same way.
In November 2019, Scribner brought out the ninth edition of Joy of Cooking, which first appeared in 1931 as the self-published venture of an amateur cook and writer. Other books Americans were buying in 1931 include The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, Dash Hammett’s The Glass Key and Faulkner’s Sanctuary. The memoir of the Russian Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, granddaughter of Tsar Alexander II, was also a bestseller. In other words, books that were popular in 1931 feel very 1931.
Bestselling cookbooks reflect the cultural moment. But what if a cookbook could avoid that fate, by changing with the times?
Indeed, popular books are always a shorthand for an entire era—and this is doubly true of cookbooks. Aesthetically and gastronomically, cookbooks capture the zeitgeist; they both reflect and create the cultural moment. Do you have a bottle of pomegranate molasses in your cupboard, from which is missing a scant quarter-cup? If so, you probably also have a copy of Ottolenghi (2008) on your shelf, now neglected in favor of something simpler, say, Nothing Fancy (2019). Today the marketplace for cookbooks is more robust than ever, catering to every possible palate and diet, but these titles have long been ephemeral. Julia Child published her epochal Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961, and it taught Americans how to cook Dover sole (filleted) and how much butter to use (more). Only ten years later, Frances Moore Lappé ushered in an era of environmentally conscious cooking with her revolutionary vegetarian cookbook-manifesto Diet for a Small Planet. A lot changed in that intervening decade, and yet today, both those books read, and cook, like time machines. Because of changes in taste, technology, nutrition and entertaining, bestselling cookbooks quickly become culinary bugs trapped in amber. But what if a cookbook could avoid that fate, by changing with the times?
The story of Joy of Cooking is every bit as surprising as the recipe for braised bear (p. 530 in the 2019 edition). Irma Rombauer was the sociable St. Louis housewife and mother of two who, following her husband’s death by suicide in 1930, decided to parlay her savings into creating a crowd-sourced cookbook. The project was a bold choice considering the recent stock market crash, and the fact that she was not a particularly gifted cook. But Irma was a hustler. She had her modest volume stocked in gift shops as well as bookstores, and personally delivered copies to local buyers. The first readers responded most of all to her tone, which was casual, playful and above all, encouraging. A trade publication was arranged in 1936 by Bobbs-Merrill, then the largest press in the Midwest. The professionalized text lost none of its personality, as when Irma digresses from the nominal subject of wild duck to reassure her readers:
Since you may be burdened by tradition amounting in some instances to misinformation, and will in addition read and hear many things that are confusing, approach the matter of cooking with an open mind. Draw your conclusions from your experiences and be guided by your tastes and impulses. This book is supposed to be a beacon (I devoutly hope it is!) to light your way. Your path is your own and a healthy curiosity should lead you into many agreeable byways, provided you use your mind.
The full title was The Joy of Cooking: A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat. Uniquely among American cookbooks, it has never been out of print.
Irma pioneered a personal mode of recipe-writing, opening the door for people like Nigella Lawson and Deb Perelman. She’s friend who sits on a stool in your kitchen to gossip and tell you when it’s done. Her recipe for cream puffs begins, “Please cease to think of these as something to try out in your more adventurous moments. Try them at any time. They will soon prove to be stand-bys.” On banana cake, she writes, “I wish I might comment on all the cakes in this book. Please try this one if you like bananas and make the comments yourself.” The fact of Prohibition did not stop my girl from beginning her book with recipes for cocktails.
Irma’s daughter Marion was an artist, organizer, and educator, and she helped develop her mother’s harebrained project into a title with staying power. In its pages, Marion’s enthusiasm for organic gardening translated into a concern with nutrition and food science. In 1940, she moved with her husband, the architect John Becker, to Cincinnati where she became the director of the Modern Art Society (today the Contemporary Arts Center). He designed a Bauhaus-style house for them, a home they dubbed “Cockaigne” after a mythical land of ease and luxury from the French medieval imagination. All the “cockaigne” recipes in the Joy, like the fudgy brownies (pp. 764–765) I grew up eating, were developed in that Cincinnati kitchen. “Not just brownies,” my dad would say, slicing diamonds into the still-warm pan. “Brownies cockaigne.” We all just thought it was French for decadent.
The cover Marion designed for the 1936 edition is a masterpiece of modernist graphic art: a woman in a floor-length royal blue dress with a small cauldron slung over her wrist confidently raises a broom over the head of a threatening teal dragon. She is Saint Martha of Bethany, the patron saint of cooks. The dragon represents the tedium and drudgery of kitchen work, or maybe he’s just hangry. There’s a 1998 facsimile imprint that also contains the Marion’s illustrations from the first commercial editions (1936, 1943, and 1946). They’re playful and whimsical images, produced using the medium preferred by Marion and, contemporaneously, Henri Matisse: paper cut-outs. Puffed heads of dandelions introduce a section on soufflés, and two snails, cautiously touching feelers to get acquainted, crawl above the chapter on hors d’oeuvres.
Of the 1951 edition, for which Marion was named co-author, New York Times food critic Jane Nickerson wrote, “When its enthusiastic users get together, they play an ‘it even has’ game.” We played the same game in my family, and the winning entry was always squirrel, from the section on game. That edition also marked the replacement of Marion’s paper-cuts with diagrammatic illustrations by Ginnie Hofmann, including a now infamous drawing of said squirrel being relieved of its coat, the tail pinned down under the slender boot of an elegant and capable woman wearing thick gardening gloves to protect her hands from rodent entrails. These same long-fingered hands appear throughout the book, confidently shelling clams and weaving the lattice top on a fruit pie. Newer versions still rely on pen-and-ink drawings; the hands, degendered now, demonstrate how to roll sushi and de-rib kale.
Photo by Abigail Weil
Irma died in 1962 and Marion, with significant input from her husband, assumed full control over the project. This was the first time that authorship shifted decisively from one generation to the next. A subtler shift occurred on the title page. The 1964 edition, and all the others after it, is technically called Joy of Cooking. (I like to imagine John Becker gliding through an editorial meeting with the single suggestion, “Drop the ‘the.’ It’s cooler.”) But the Rombauer-Becker family, like my own, continued to call it simply The Joy.
In the 1964 dedication, Marion writes:
In revising and reorganizing “The Joy of Cooking” we have missed the help of my mother, Irma S. Rombauer. […] We look forward to a time when our two boys—and their wives—will continue to keep “The Joy”a family affair, as well as an enterprise in which the authors owe no obligation to anyone but themselves—and you.
The work Marion put into this revision is unfathomable; as the mother’s health declined, it fell to the daughter to add editorial and legal work to her design tasks. This dedication, however, is egoless. It’s about the parent who preceded her in building a tradition, and the children who she trusts will follow. Mutability became crucial to the book’s identity. Marion, more process-oriented and health conscious than Irma, transformed it, and counts on her sons to someday do the same. Moreover, she recognizes that families grow laterally, allowing for the influence of her sons’ future wives, as her husband influenced her. It’s worth noting, too, that although the first transfer of the project was, conventionally enough, mother to daughter, Marion disregards the historically gendered dimension of cooking. The Joy belongs to the family, whatever its future permutations may be, and to the readers.
The Joy belongs to the family, whatever its future permutations may be, and to the readers.
History has borne out Marion’s hopes. The full author list of the 2019 edition is: Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan Becker (Marion’s son), John Becker (Ethan’s son), and Megan Scott (John’s wife). “An index,” Irma wrote in 1936, “isn’t literature, but a careful perusal of it will sometimes produce a poem.” The same can be said of a contributors list.
The Joy has continued to change its shape and meaning right along with American culinary culture. Marion’s triumphant 1975 edition, a full-fledged encyclopedia of cookery, remains the best-selling version in Joy history. It was the version I was raised on, my parents having received it as a wedding present in 1981. Notorious is the 1997 edition, when Ethan Becker, the only culinary school graduate in the family, hired a slate of “experts” to revise appointed chapters. John Becker confesses in the introduction to his new revision that this experiment was widely panned, and it must have come across, to Joy loyalists, as a gimmick in the dawning age of celebrity chefs. But it was good enough for me when I shipped off to college, and it’s the same volume I brought it with me 15 years later when my partner and I established our two-Joy household. You can learn more about the history of The Joy from Anne Mendelson’s Stand Facing the Stove, and the New School panel discussion The Culinary Legacy of Joy of Cooking, featuring Mendelson, culinary historian Laura Shapiro, librarian Rebecca Federman and anthropologist Amy Trubek.
Irma’s plucky voice faded after Marion took over, and Marion’s ideas about nutrition, while still compelling, are not the book’s main draw. Amazingly, neither of these pioneering authors conclusively defined the book. Instead, the infrastructure they both engineered helped it become what it is today: a reliable, updatable reference book. At least since the Enlightenment, reference is a genre not defined by individual authors, but by collective efforts; Diderot didn’t write the Encyclopédie, he edited it. The Joy’s greatest strength, I’m convinced, is the flexibility that has allowed a single title to expand, to express changing priorities and encompass new ideas, to make room for new generations. You can’t tell a Joy dish from the way it tastes as much as from the way you feel while cooking it. If there is a Joy of Cooking style, it’s not culinary but literary, a voice that is clear and reassuring. For a cookbook to speak to you, it has to understand you, not the other way around. It helps if you both come from boisterous omnivorous families, unafraid of change.
In the end, I didn’t take that errant Joy. My dedicated cookbook bookshelf was overflowing, and all my friends who cook already owned a copy. But I like to imagine someone else finding it, recognizing it from a delicious childhood memory, and taking it home to an entirely different life than it would have had in my kitchen. In the preface to the 1943 edition, Irma wrote, “My daughter says that when my book is praised I purr like a cat.” I hope she’s looking down on her great-grandson’s edition, the book’s ninth life, and purring up a storm.
Before you go: Electric Literature is campaigning to reach 1,000 members by 2020, and you can help us meet that goal. Having 1,000 members would allow Electric Literature to always pay writers on time (without worrying about overdrafting our bank accounts), improve benefits for staff members, pay off credit card debt, and stop relying on Amazon affiliate links. Members also get store discounts and year-round submissions. If we are going to survive long-term, we need to think long-term. Please support the future of Electric Literature by joining as a member today!
Say you’re writing a story and the protagonist is a baseball player, or a war veteran, or a typist. Now, since you’re a person in the world, you’ve of course also been conditioned on the media we all are, meaning you’re also familiar with, say, Marathon Man. Amazing William Goldman novel, amazing William Goldman-scripted movie, I don’t mean to take a single thing away from it, would only ever try to heap even more praise on it, and urge us all to ever do even half as good as it does.
For anyone out there who hasn’t read or seen Marathon Man: this one dude’s a runner, maybe not Prefontaine-good, just Dustin Hoffman-good, but still, he’s committed, it’s always on his mind, it’s always getting his feet out there slapping the asphalt day after day. Through a series of Hitchcock-ish shenanigans, this self-styled runner ends up embroiled in a Nazi plot involving stolen Jewish diamonds. Lots of intrigue and close shaves and torture, just as the story doctor always orders, all culminating in this runner, in serious mortal jeopardy, using his… can you already guess?
His running turns out to be his “superpower,” the surprise ability that allows him to escape, survive, win the day.
Nothing at all wrong with that, you’ve seen it before, it tends to work. Writers are magicians, always slipping things into your pocket early on, when you’re not paying attention, then pulling them out precisely when they need you to go ahh.
Trick with Marathon Man, though? This runner, he elected to be a runner. His using that running to save his own life and win the day is an investment finally paying off. No, he didn’t know he was going to need his conditioning and technique to escape some Nazi holdovers, but now that he really-really needs to run, it’s not like he’s not going to use that conditioning and technique, right?
This build is golden, is bulletproof, is hardly the wrong move.
Except when it is.
My characters had always been Blackfeet all along. Just, I wasn’t hanging dreamcatchers and braids all over them.
Back when I was coming up through grad school, I had this kind of a-ha moment in fiction workshop. In my second or third story for the semester, I mentioned that my protagonist was Blackfeet. Nothing momentous, just, somebody in the story happened to ask, the character answered, move along now, it’s still the same story. But the workshop couldn’t quit talking about him being Indian. Which was pretty weird to me, since all of my characters had always been Blackfeet all along. There was never any reason to actually say it, but they always were. Just, I wasn’t hanging dreamcatchers and braids all over them, as that would be a lot like making them wriggle into loincloths so they could fit the limited expectations of . . . everyone, pretty much.
The workshop was now reading my story completely differently, though. They kind of put on tragic glasses, they set their eyebrows in that way that indicates “We’re talking about issues now,” and their voices were all sort of kinder, predisposed to pity and charity instead of carving up my pages as my pages needed carving up.
Like I say, it was weird and kind of off-putting, and was my first time to encounter that. It wasn’t my last. Once I started publishing novels, I quickly found that, at book events, I’d get questions that focused on Indian culture and life and history and “tragedy” (always the tragedy) more than on the story itself. It had stopped being weird by then, just felt wrong, like I was part of some unwholesome transaction—like I was selling my identity or my heritage along with my books. So I ran away, said screw this, I’m going to write about zombies and slashers and werewolves and private detectives and toilets and haunted houses and demons and—and giant invisible time-traveling caterpillars—and they’re going to be so loud and bloody that nobody will be able to ask those Indian questions anymore, and I can start selling books, not myself.
Worked great, and now I’m kind of able to still do the horror I love, but while also writing the people I know.
Still, though?
Every once and again, I’ll give a draft of a story to someone, and they’ll come back with the old saw I’m always hoping isn’t a thing anymore: Okay, so this character is Indian, but… why does that matter to the story? When will this Indian-ness, you know, activate? Or, to say it differently: So, this guy’s a runner, you say? What if his running can be the thing that he uses like a surprise at the end?
Okay, so this character is Indian, but when will this Indian-ness, you know, activate?
Sub in the baseball player using her fast-pitch or the war veteran using his military training or the typist using their speedy fingers to enter a page of dictated code just in time to save the missiles from deploying.
When you sub in other things for “Indian,” that question of “Why is this character Indian?” wants to make perfect story sense: to employ the kind of economy the reader expects, you of course use all the pieces of this puzzle you’ve already laid out.
Except the baseball player wasn’t born with the diamond in her eyes, the soldier didn’t come out knowing the chain of command, the typist doesn’t have QWERTY actually in the tangled letters of their genetic code. All these characters went the direction they went, made the choices they made, and so became a baseball player, a soldier, a typist.
Being Indian, though, that’s not a choice. You’re born Indian, you die Indian, and you’re Indian pretty much the whole way through, except maybe at Halloween, when other people get to buy a costume of you. You may end up also being a baseball playing typist on a submarine, but before and underneath all that, you’re Indian, man. Nothing to do about that.
And we can take that question apart a little, can’t we? Why is this character Indian? The assumption underneath that is that the default setting is “non-Indian,” not Native, un-indigenous. But that’s probably a bit too wide, a touch too charitable of a read.
The real default setting that question assumes isn’t just non-Native, it’s “white.”
So the question is actually “Why is this character not white?” And it’s not meant to be asked (I tell myself) in any violent or damaging way, it’s not intended as colonialism in action, it’s just some close reader’s awareness of fiction’s impulse—obligation, even—to utilize what’s there, and justify its presence.
I submit that a character being Indian doesn’t need justification, though.
I submit that, while I might want being Indian to be a superpower, a special ability, actually, contrary to popular myth, being Indian doesn’t even get you free college, right? It doesn’t jack you into casino money, it doesn’t make you automatically in tune with nature, and it doesn’t make you any sadder than everyone else about unrecycled cans in the creek. It also doesn’t make your cheekbones or your nose like this or like that, your name exotic to American ears, your hair long or short, your religion here, there, or anywhere.
It just means you’re Indian, in a world that’s largely not Indian. It means you probably don’t see yourself in the main role on the television show. It means you’re reduced to being the most insulting mascot as often as not. It means that people will be rocked back on their heels a little bit to learn you’re—gasp—vegetarian? But how can that be?
We don’t use every part of the buffalo anymore, no. Nowadays, we use every part of our self-control just to get through the day.
You don’t even have to be interesting at all. You just have to, you know, keep being.
And, yes, there’s heritage there if you want it, there’s community to plug into, there’s history to engage and resist, there’s fights to fight and stereotypes to undercut. But there’s also just, and simply, being born as you were born. There’s being Indian. At a certain point in your story, you’re not compelled to tie a bandanna around your head, unsheathe a tomahawk, and become the opposite of John Wayne. You’re not only interesting when standing at the barricade of a televised protest. You don’t even have to be interesting at all. You just have to, you know, keep being.
The best way to be the protagonist of your own story—which is also, I submit, the best way to write the protagonist of your story—is just to assume Indian-ness. Say it out loud on the page if you want, or don’t, it doesn’t matter. You’ll know.
But what if being Indian were a superpower, right? Whatever situation I’m in that I don’t want to be in, I just peel my shirt open to reveal my uniform beneath, the one with CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS tooled into the belt, the one with MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COWBOYS beaded on the back, the one with FRYBREAD POWER stretched across the gut, and then a hawk screeches and the sun flashes and like that—
You get the picture. Or I do, each time I’m asked “why does it matter to the story that this character is Indian?”
My answer: it doesn’t.
But it also very much does.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
