How Literary Translation Can Shift the Tides of Power

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Close your eyes. What do you picture when you hear China? How about Japan, or Korea? Did a particular scene, person, or image come to mind? If you’ve never lived in or travelled to one of these countries—and even if you have—those images probably came from something you watched or read. Whether it came from a news report, travel blog, film or work of fiction, our understanding of these far-flung countries is limited by what gets translated into our language. But who and what determines which voices and whose stories we get to hear? Whose voices are we not hearing?

Translation holds a particular and peculiar power. It is how we come to understand the world outside our own; that is, the world that exists outside of our own language. The Latin root word for translation comes from latus, the past participle of ferre or “to carry”; in Teju Cole’s beautiful metaphor, the translator is a ferry operator, carrying words from one shore to the other. To take this metaphor further: if the translator is the ferry operator, language is a current. Ocean currents shift and change speed; some are more dominant than others. In previous centuries the English current was propelled by the British empire, summoning all the boats of the Commonwealth towards it; America is the great ocean current of our time.

Prior to the 19th century, classical Chinese was the dominant ocean current in East and parts of Southeast Asia. Chinese characters (hanzi / hanja / kanji) were the lingua franca of the ruling class and in diplomatic communications; without needing a ferry operator, Confucian values, ideas and knowledge traveled the seas, underpinning societies in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam for centuries. But as Western imperialism swept over much of Asia and the Chinese tide receded, translation took on a new urgency. Translation was the primary means for the subjugated to understand a new, Western-defined and often disturbing modernity: a means for the powerless to understand those in power. 

Translation was the primary means for the powerless to understand those in power. 

The powerless have no choice but to learn about those in power, yet those with power are uninterested in learning the language of the powerless. Western colonizers, apart from practical needs, did not bother learning or uplifting the language of the colonized, whom they saw as inferior. When Colonel William Farquhar, Singapore’s first administrator, learned Malay and picked up Malay customs (also fathering six children with a half-Malay mistress in the process), it was seen as a weakness, not a political strength, and he was targeted by Singapore’s official founder Sir Stamford Raffles for “going native.” 

South Korea, a Japanese colony for almost half a century, has entire bookstores dedicated to books translated from Japanese, with many from the pre-war generation still able to speak the language. Haruki Murakami is particularly popular; it is estimated that at least three times as many Murakami novels are available in Korean compared to English. But until recently, Japanese readers had little interest in Korean literature. During the East Asia Literature Forum in Seoul last October, a gathering of the region’s most well-known writers, Japanese novelist Keiichiro Hirano, expressed that “it is very difficult for me to think of any Japanese writer of the same generation as remarkable as Kim Yeonsu and Eun Heekyung,” and yet very few Japanese writers, let alone readers, have even read their work. Korean culture, thanks to its colony status, was considered inferior to Japanese culture for years, particularly amongst the older generation. Japan’s zainichi or ethnic Korean community have been discriminated against for decades, many stripped of citizenship, as documented in Japanese novels and films like Kazuki Kaneshiro’s Go and Yang Seok-il’s Chi to Hone (“Blood and Bones”), made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Takeshi Kitano. At the same forum, Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima, the child of French literature professors, spoke about only discovering Korean literature in her 40s when she met Korean writers at the University of Iowa. When she discovered the poetry of Yi Sang and Yoon Dongju, both poets who lived in Japan-occupied Korea, and learning they had died of police violence in Japan, she was shocked into silence. 

And yet the currents between Japan and South Korea are shifting, with wave after wave of Korean popular culture (hallyu) washing up on Japanese shores. Korean literature made its biggest splash in Japan yet in 2018, with Cho Nam Joo’s Kim Ji Young, Born 1982, released at the end of the year, selling over 130,000 copies and topping bestseller charts. Bungei, one of Japan’s leading literary magazines, published a special issue titled Korea, Feminism, Japan in July this year, featuring leading Japanese and Korean women writers. It was an unexpected hit, with the magazine running emergency reprints for only the second time in 86 years, selling over 14,000 copies within a few weeks, and a fourth reprint out in September. “The oyajis (older men) are the only ones blind to the popularity of hallyu,” writes cultural critic Minako Saito, also the older sister of Mariko Saito, translator of Kim Ji Young, Born 1982. “It is the Oyajis,” she writes, “in politics and the media who are stirring anti-Korean sentiment.” Japanese women and the young, she says, share the opposite sentiment. Underlying her words is a scathing critique: the arrival and spread of Korean culture in Japan is an affront to Japanese men, upending belief in their own cultural superiority.

At a recent translation conference in Singapore in September, I listened to children’s book translator Helen Wang speak of the high demand for translated children’s books in China. Chinese parents, especially educated professionals, believe imported children’s books, especially those from the West, teach “greater self-confidence and ambition.” Even with children’s literature, translation is a one-way street: in the U.S., translated children’s literature is almost non-existent. Most translated children’s books are works from Western Europe.

Most translated children’s books are works from Western Europe. What does that do to a young child not from the West?

What does that do to a young child not from the West, to read almost exclusively about the exploits of the Hungry Caterpillar, Bear Hunts or Fantastic Mr. Fox? I was that young child growing up in Singapore, devouring Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, and later Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume. These are fine writers who wrote great works of children’s literature. But I also longed to see myself in the books I read: a bookish, curious Singaporean Chinese girl with the habit of putting my foot in my mouth and stepping out of line in a conservative society. In my teenage years I discovered Chinese writers like Eileen Chang and Chiung Yao, but their tragic heroines troubled me: falling in love, in their feudal-era stories, always came with a price. Why did bad things always happen to girls who pursued their own desires? Nothing in the books I read then satisfied me, and as a mother of a little girl (and boy) today, I continue to struggle with the question. 

Soon after I gave birth, my writer friends arrived at my house with piles of classic English picture books. Determined to have my children rooted in their own culture, I set out to find children’s books with characters that not only looked like them, but stories that would help them navigate the complex world they will inherit. Just by the act of searching, I came to read wonderful writers from Japan, South Korea, and China with a completely different sensibility from Western children’s literature. 

Reading children’s literature again as an adult, the difference between Western and East Asian stories was startling: Western children’s books are often centered on the individual’s journey, while stories by Chinese, Japanese and Korean authors emphasize respecting other people’s feelings, patience, and acceptance. As a child, I found many of these old Chinese stories moralistic and preachy. But to my surprise, I also discovered many wonderful children’s books which conveyed these same values without being didactic, and helped me as a mother understand my own feelings and moderate my response towards my child’s behavior. I am just one parent. What if more parents read translated books with their children? Would this be enough to shift the winds in the publishing and bookselling industry? And more importantly, would this help our children build a kinder, nicer world?

How do we get publishers and booksellers to acquire and push more translated books? Prizes, especially major literary prizes, play a big part. Awards like the Man Asian Literary Prize have propelled the careers of writers like Han Kang in the English-speaking world. In fact, Han Kang, like Shin Kyung Sook who won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012, may be said to have paved the way for English-speaking audiences to even consider reading Korean literature, and for publishers to push more writers and translated works from South Korea.

Translation is an act of selection, a personal choice as well as a subjective judgment.

And yet, curiously enough, even as Han Kang has garnered international acclaim, emerging as a representative of Korean literature in the West, back home she remains on the periphery of her home country’s literary scene—just like Haruki Murakami with Japanese literature in the earlier stages of his career. Translators play an enormous, outsized role in interpreting foreign cultures for their home audience. Translation is an act of selection, a personal choice as well as a subjective judgment that something is more worthy of becoming known by one’s home audience than everyone else. To borrow Teju Cole’s metaphor again, how does the ferry operator choose which passenger to ferry across the ocean? The choice we as translators make has far greater impact than we may realize.

At the East Asian Literature Forum last year, I heard one after another beautiful story from writers that almost no one in America would have recognized. Even as a scholar of East Asian languages myself, I was startled by how few writers I had heard of, and how much of what I read in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean was to a large extent pre-defined by what had already been picked up and translated by the West. Reading takes time, and reading beyond the canon takes effort. If I, as a scholar of East Asian languages, found that difficult, what sort of scholar am I? What more of publishers and readers in America and the West, who have scant knowledge of writers from East Asia beyond the few names that have won awards in their home countries? 

These stories had to be heard by a wider international audience. I reached out to one of the Japanese writers I had met at the forum—and received her permission to translate a story she had read out, a powerful story on womanhood that had many in the audience crying. Despite winning multiple domestic awards, she has never been published in English. If we never hear from these writers, how blinkered and piecemeal is our understanding of the world outside the dominant American cultural current? 

As readers and translators, it takes effort to recognize our blinkers and even more effort to look beyond them. We may not be strong enough to shift oceans—but maybe, just maybe, our collective effort will make it easier to swim against the tide.

A Ghost and a Skeleton Meet on a Beach

Posted on by Kelly Luce

The Ghost at the Beach

A ghost rides a longboard to the beach. It’s late summer. The ghost has on a pair of sunglasses and board shorts. Saturdays are the busiest days at the beach, but luckily for the ghost, no one can see him. He likes to surf and bodyboard, but today he’s just going to sit in the sand and take it easy, maybe read a book.

When the ghost arrives on the sand, he spreads out his towel of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The ghost is from Anaheim, CA, but he just likes the pirate imagery. The ghost sits down and stares at the waves. He’s been coming to the beach since young ghosthood. He used to go with his father, a former professional surfer. The ghost was born on Halloween, 1966 at 6PM. The ghost doesn’t believe in superstitious things like astrology or politics, but he does love rock n’ roll music and existential poetry. The ghost’s favorite band is The Cultured Demons. His favorite poet is Marosa di Giorgio.

After reading a book recommended to him by his therapist, El Río Solitario by Francisco “El Monstruo” Vargas, the ghost takes a nap. The ghost dreams of Costa Rica. He’s never been to Costa Rica, but he imagines it the most beautiful place on Earth. The ghost plans to visit one day, perhaps next summer. He dreams of seeing spider monkeys and quetzal birds. Also, surfing and more surfing.

When the ghost wakes up, he notices a skeleton in a fedora playing the guitar next to him. The skeleton smokes a cigarette and plays “La Vida Tombola” by Manu Chao. The ghost stands up and joins him with a cigarette. What luck, he thinks, a cigarette and a serenade at sunset. He takes a photo of the sunset and the skeleton guitarist and puts it on InstaGhost.

The ghost rides his longboard home in the last moments of sunset. He feels free on the board. He knows he’s getting too old for it, but he’s still able to maintain balance, so he doesn’t give it up just yet. On the bottom of the board, there is an illustration of a flame with sunglasses with an ace of spades in its hand.

Eventually, the ghost arrives at his apartment and makes a turkey club sandwich. He goes online until bedtime. He dreams about surfing with his father as a boy. His father no longer exists because he went to the world beyond the stars. Not even ghosts can escape such worlds. In the dream, the ghost is surfing with his dad, and neither of them are ghosts. They are human and alive and they feel the coldness of the water. The ghost loves being alive and human, if only in a dream. When he wakes up he goes to church for the first time in years. He prays he’ll be human again, one day, and reunited with his family. Amen.

The Skeleton at the Beach

A skeleton walked along the Venice Beach Boardwalk. It was just turning into summer. He had on a pair of sunglasses and a camouflaged hat, but he wasn’t a soldier. It was a mild day, high 70’s. The skeleton had just begun his summer vacation. He’s a music teacher at a local high school. He plays the guitar.

There were plenty of seagulls around. A group of skeletons played volleyball on the sand. Beautiful palm trees lined the beach. The skeleton walked without a care in the world. He was going to go on vacation to Vera Cruz, Mexico, later that summer, but for now he was content in just appreciating his local beach.

He walked by some art vendors on the boardwalk. A lady skeleton sold a Cubist drawing of a woman holding a palm tree and sun in her hands. He was impressed. He saw another skeleton selling a black-and-white drawing of a marijuana plant. He chuckled and continued walking. All along the shore, skeletons rode longboards, beach cruisers, and rollerblades. The skeleton felt at home by the beach.

Then he decided to have a slice of pizza. He visited his favorite pizza parlor: Ned’s Pizza. He bought one slice of pepperoni and a Coke. As he ate, he noticed the graffiti murals on the beach. One of the artists, “Rage One,” had painted a radical raptor on a wall. It was painted in red and turquoise fragments; it was juxtaposed with a sheep’s head. The skeleton was very impressed. Predictably, on the main street, was a mural of Jim Morrison in front of a palm tree and the sunset. The skeleton still liked the painting despite its status as a cliché. Next, he saw a mural by a graffiti artist whose name he couldn’t decipher: it looked like “Craft” or “Draft.” The red-orange lettering was jagged and wild. On the left side of the letters was a woman’s head with sunglasses. On the right was the word “California” written in light-blue lettering. That was the skeleton’s favorite piece, hands down.       

Later, when he finished his slice of pizza and Coke, the skeleton took out a cigarette and strolled closer to shore. He loved looking at the waves crash onshore as he smoked. He remembers back when he was in high school, body boarding at the beach frequently with his friends. All of his skeleton friends had since moved on with their lives and now had grown-skeleton responsibilities. Most had families. Some were chefs. Some were clerks. Some were teachers. Some were business-skeletons. A handful were still lost and not looking to be found. Eventually, the skeleton recycled his cigarette and walked to his car. When he got home, he wrote a song about his day at the beach. It was called “The Skeleton at the Beach.”

The Memoir of a Political Prisoner Who Never Stopped Imagining a Better World

Posted on by Jo Lou

Update: Since the publication of this interview, Ahmet Altan was rearrested by the Turkish authorities a week after his initial release.

Virtually none of us will ever know what Ahmet Altan has gone through, and continues to live through. After the 2016 Turkish coup d’etat attempt, the writer was arrested along with his brother on such claims as “sending subliminal messages to coup supporters.” In 2018, they were sentenced to life in prison. On November 4th 2019, Altan was released from prison after three years of incarceration, but his memoir written from prison remains a testament to the cost of oppression and the power of human imagination.

Image result for will never see the world again

I Will Never See the World Again is Ahmet Altan’s remarkable response to what PEN America rightly calls an “unjust sentence.” The book consists of short pieces penned by Altan in prison, many detailing his mental journeys to transcend the dehumanizing environment imposed upon him. As he writes: “I had to blow a whiff of air into this dead life. […] How was I supposed to do this? There was only one way to perform this miracle. To imagine.”

Though the Altan brothers’ life sentences have since been overturned, Ahmet Altan was still incarcerated when I interviewed him. From Silivri Prison, Istanbul, he answered the following questions through his translator Yasemin Çongar, describing his daily conditions, and the novel he recently completed. Prison did not put a stop to his writing life. “Because, like all writers, I have magic. I can pass through your walls with ease.”

YZ Chin: I Will Never See the World Again was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize. And you recently finished a new novel, described by The Guardian as a comedy. Your tenacity is admirable. How do you write each day?

Ahmet Altan: The book I wrote in prison is not a comedy, but it’s a novel with more than a few amusing parts in it.

In the darkness created by oppressive regimes, writers’ words are the light of matches.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of determining the circumstances in which I work. In our cell, there is a small table. Three of us share this table. We eat at this table, we drink coffee at this table, we read the newspapers at this table, we watch our small TV, sitting at this table. My cellmates are too kind to complain about it, but when I sit and write at this table with my papers spread all over it, their daily life becomes a bit harder. I asked the prison administration to let us have a second table in our cell, so that I can work without disturbing my cellmates, but that request was denied. Sometimes, when I lose myself in my writing, my cellmates either go out to the courtyard or retreat to their beds, but I can’t expect them to do this all the time. When the weather is nice, they like spending time in the little courtyard. Then I stay inside and work. When it is cold or rainy outside, they don’t have a choice. They have to sit at the table. So my work hours also depend on meteorology. There isn’t a set time during which I write.

YZC: You wrote beautifully about temporarily losing your capacity to imagine in prison, and then regaining that vast power. Do you think imagination is like a muscle that responds to training?

AA: Ever since my childhood, I’ve been somewhat of a dream addict. Daydreaming is a crucial part of my life. But sometimes my imagination can get overworked and exhausted, and it quietens down. My imagination becomes arid. Those are hard times for me. When my imagination quietens down, especially when it does so here in prison, my inner strength also weakens.

YZC: Why do you think regimes around the world are so afraid of writers? Is it because those in the regimes lack imagination?

AA: You can turn on a projector lamp on a bright day and its light, no matter how strong, will be hard to notice. On a dark night, however, a single candle’s tiny flame can be seen from afar. In the darkness created by oppressive regimes, writers’ words are similar to the light of matches; they are easily noticed and thus have to be snuffed out. Even a tiny matchstick can shed light onto a part of what the oppressors are trying to hide. Even the tiniest piece of truth scares them.

YZC: You have constructed whole worlds out of your imagination in prison. Do you share these worlds with others detained? Are you able to converse with other imprisoned writers?

AA: I can’t converse with other writers. When my brother was also a prisoner here, I wasn’t allowed to see him for an entire year.

My cellmates and I usually talk about the quotidian problems of life in prison. We don’t much talk about ourselves, our personal problems or our dreams. No one invades another’s territory with his own worries and dreams.

YZC: You also wrote movingly about how creating fiction allows you to transcend your circumstances. What about reading fiction—what part has that played? 

AA: A good novel or essay can also change your circumstances at once. You can latch on to another writer’s imagination to escape from prison.

YZC: You said that you “like to read novels in which characters’ emotions and relationships have the upper hand.” What are you reading right now?

AA: I am one of those “classic” readers who likes books that have a solid plot, through which we learn about people’s emotions and relationships.

At the moment, I’m reading Olivier Remaud’s long essay, “Voluntary Solitude.” I must say, being in prison, I find it especially pleasurable to read about how a person relates to solitude and hard conditions.

YZC: Your new novel has been described as a very funny book set against a dystopian background. I’m curious whether you deliberately set out to write a comedy as a way to subvert your surroundings and defy your jailors, given that you’ve said a novel is “something that relies purely on instinct and intuition” to be written.

Being in prison, I find it especially pleasurable to read about how a person relates to solitude and hard conditions.

AA: Yes, I believe instincts and intuitions are more important for a novelist than ideas.

The fact that there are more funny parts in this novel than in my previous work may indeed be an instinctual act of defiance, as you’ve suggested. It may also be the result of a need to entertain myself in a place where there’s absolutely no entertainment. But honestly, I don’t really know why I did what I did.

YZC: Did you make yourself laugh while writing the novel?

AA: When I write, I hear the characters’ dialogues in my head. When they say something funny, I laugh. I’m spared a diagnosis of schizophrenia simply because I write the voices I hear.

YZC: Will your new book be available in Turkey?

AA: My new book will not come out in Turkey for a while yet. I think it will be published in English first.

Please Write More Books About Cryptids

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I am not an expert cryptozoologist and I will not claim to be one. I’m simply a person with a vested, professional interest in mysterious, supernatural creatures that may or may not exist; creatures like Bigfoot, Mothman, the Jersey Devil, etc. These beings are the stuff of legend, but apparently that’s not enough for the literary community. It’s easy to find books about “sexy” supernatural creatures like vampires and witches, but it seems that authors are too good to look down from their ivory towers and into their local woods, where the Flatwoods monster is probably rolling around in its big metal suit, hissing at children and emitting a noxious gas. I’m sick of all the fanfare going to the popular crowd of unexplainable beings; here are some book ideas that would celebrate the outcasts and weirdos who actually deserve celebration.

Mothman: Nightlight

Mothman is a seven-foot-fall humanoid with wings, glowing red eyes, and the ability to fly over 100 mph. I think they deserve some love, so I suggest a graphic novel where a teenaged Mothman lives in the woods next to a skatepark and falls in love with a skater girl named Light who frequents the park at night. When she notices glowing red eyes watching her from the woods, she surprises Mothman by inviting them to skate with her. As Mothman falls harder for Light, they must overcome their fear of her world in order to be with her.

Bigfoot: The Silent Woods

Bigfoot loves hanging out in the woods of the Pacific Northwest and avoiding detection. In Bigfoot’s book, he grew up alone in the woods, never knowing a life outside of isolation. But when he finds a girl wandering in the woods, mute and lost, he tries to take care of her. Over time, Bigfoot discovers that the girl ran into the woods after her father died, her grief so extreme it rendered her speechless. Bigfoot and the girl use an invented sign-language to communicate, and help each other heal from their different types of loneliness.

Jersey Devil: Daughter Devil

The Jersey Devil is generally believed to be a sort of horse-dragon crossover, although accounts vary. It can fly and breathe fire, and its origins date back to the 1700s. The Jersey Devil’s book would be a historical fiction novel beginning with the Jersey Devil’s birth as the cursed thirteenth child of a witch. The book traces the Devil (named 13) as she grows up in with her abusive, magical mother in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. After her mother threatens her life, 13 escapes. She happens upon a tough woman living alone near the edge of the Barrens who gives 13 something she didn’t know existed—unconditional love. 

Flatwoods Monster: The Town

When a family moves to a small town in West Virginia, they immediately notice something strange is happening. There’s no phone service, electronics rarely work, and town-wide blackouts and earthquakes are common. The people of the town say they just live in a technology dead zone, but the family is suspicious. One night, their son Justin stays out late and notices none of the townspeople are in their houses. He smells something odd coming from the church basement, and there he finds the townspeople gathered around a ten-foot-tall robotic monster. Will the family escape this cult, or fall victim to the Flatwoods’ hissing call?

Loch Ness Monster: Eventide

A group of teenagers walking around Loch Ness late one night gets a shock when they notice a beady eye watching them from the water. When the eye becomes a head and long neck, the teenagers realize they’re looking at the famous Loch Ness monster, but before they can react, they hear Nessie’s voice in their heads. She needs their help to solve a mystery, and they have to travel through time with her in order to do it. As the friends begin helping Nessie, they must unravel a mystery that goes back hundreds of years, and hits closer to home than any of them expected. 

Two-Toed Tom: A Fortune-Teller’s Guide to Reptiles 

A lesser-known cryptid hailing from the Florida-Alabama border, Two-Toed Tom is a 30-foot-long demonic alligator known for attacking both animals and people. In southern Alabama, a woman named Bea runs a psychic business out of her trailer. What her clients don’t know, however, is that Bea’s powers are real. While practicing her magic one night, Bea accidentally summons a demon in the form of an alligator who offers to grant her wishes. Bea begins making wishes before realizing the consequences: for each wish made, Tom will devour someone in town. Now, Bea must defeat Tom before he becomes too powerful. 

Teakettler: The Teakettlers

In a small cottage in the middle of the woods, Esther lives unhappily. The cottage felt full when Esther’s wife was alive, but now that she’s gone the garden has wilted, the paint is peeling, and most of the lights are burnt out. Esther is bored, lonely, and considering ending her life—until she hears a funny whistling noise outside her kitchen window. In the wilted garden are three little dogs that look like corgis, but they whistle like tea kettles, walk backwards, and blow steam out of their mouths. While Esther is originally suspicious, she soon comes to love the teakettlers and, over time, the pups help her get her life back.

7 Choose-Your-Own-Escapade Books for Adults

Posted on by Jo Lou

Ask anyone writing a book, and they’ll tell you: writing a book is very hard. (You don’t actually have to ask: we’ll tell you anyway.) Your classic, run-of-the-mill, hard-to-write book contains exactly one ending. One and a half, if you count epilogues (I don’t). But there’s a certain genre of book that dispenses with the conventional wisdom that books should have one to one and a half endings. There’s a certain genre of book that believes that books should in fact have dozens of endings, and — more than that — that the reader should have some control over the plot along the way.

I’m talking about books where the reader chooses his or her own path, the type of books made popular by the Choose Your Own Adventure series of the ‘80s and ‘90s. These books were formatted so that after every couple of pages of reading, a choice would be presented to the reader: you would make your choice, which would lead to other choices, which would lead to any number of endings. In my experience as a young Choose Your Own Adventure reader, those endings usually involved my horrifying and violent death. It robbed me of my remaining nine-year-old innocence, but I still kept coming back for more.

Image result for Build Your Own Christmas Movie Romance: Pick Your Plot, Meet Your Man, and Create the Holiday Love Story of a Lifetime

My own first book, Build Your Own Christmas Movie Romance, is inspired by three things: first, by a deep, abiding belief that Santa is real and walks among us; second, that there is no one on Earth more evil than luxury condo executives descended upon a small town; and third, that there is nothing more fun than the kaleidoscope of plot possibilities that a “choose your own path” book allows. 

Build Your Own Christmas Movie Romance is like a Hallmark Christmas movie pumped full of steroids. A satire of the “made for TV Christmas movie” genre, Build Your Own Christmas Movie Romance follows our heroine, Chrissy, a busy businesswoman from the big city who loves money and hates Christmas. But when her business boyfriend dumps her and her business job fires her, she has no choice: she has to return to her simple small town, Candy Cane Falls, for Christmas. Chrissy has no choice, but you, the reader, do: from small decisions (what Christmas hold music should be playing on the phone when her mom calls?) to big ones (when her terrible business boyfriend comes to her small town to win her back, should she accept his proposal or not?), you, the reader, are the the one in charging of building the most magical, insane holiday romance ever.

When I was writing this book, I went looking for inspiration. I wanted to read books that were similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure series… but written for adults. And I found quite a few. The titles below, in no particular order, are some of my recommendations for any adult looking to recreate the magic, joy, and occasional terror you once experienced while reading Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Choose Your Own Misery: The Holidays by Mike MacDonald and Jilly Gagnon

Mike MacDonald and Jilly Gagnon, alums of The Onion, are the masters of the “what if a choose-your-own-path book tackled the excruciatingly mundane travails of adulthood?” genre. Aptly named, the Choose Your Own Misery series features three books so far, and #2 in the series is The Holidays. The hilarious parody that’s perfect for scrooges of all stripes, Choose Your Own Misery: The Holidays is predicated on the idea that you, the narrator, are desperately trying to skip out on family holidays. But who could know how much disaster and misfortune would await you? There’s only one way to find out (read this book).

Image result for ryan north romeo and or juliet

Romeo and/or Juliet by Ryan North

Choose-your-own-path-books-for-adults master Ryan North believes that when it comes to Shakespeare, “Plays aren’t meant to be read. They were meant … to be played.” Romeo and/or Juliet, North’s hilarious deep dive into all of the possibilities of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, features over one hundred different endings, and explores questions like: what if Romeo and Juliet never met in the first place? What if, instead of moping around the castle, Juliet just got super buff? What if—and who couldn’t have seen this coming—the two star-crossed lovers teamed up and took over Verona while wearing robot suits? If you need the answers to these questions (and trust me, you do), this is the book for you. 

My Lady's Choosing by Kitty Curran and Larissa Zageris

My Lady’s Choosing by Kitty Curran & Larissa Zageris 

In My Lady’s Choosing, you get to play as a plucky but penniless young Regency maiden who works as a bitter dowager’s companion. What’s there to do but … find love? Who will you choose: he “bantering baronet” Sir Benedict Granville? Or the handsome highlander, Captain Angus McTaggart? Or the wild and mad Lord Garraway Craven? (That last name should tip you off.) For lovers of historical romances and Byronic heroes, My Lady’s Choosing offers dozens of hilarious potential paths, misfortunes, adventures, and romances… all that await whatever lords or ladies pick up this book.

Build Your Own Romantic Comedy

Build Your Own Romantic Comedy by Lana Schwartz

Schwartz’s forthcoming book, Build Your Own Romantic Comedy, delivers exactly what the title promises: it lets you, the reader, help piece together your own perfectly stereotypical romantic comedy plot. A loving send-up of all your favorite romantic comedies, Build Your Own Romantic Comedy puts you in charge of all the classic tropes: will the heroine be able to save the struggling bakery? Will the undercover journalist meet her deadline? Will we finally find out what the quirky best friend really thinks? That’s up to you decide.

Choose Your Own Disaster by Dana Schwartz

Choose Your Own Disaster is the only piece of nonfiction on our list. Unlike most of the other “choose your own path” books on our list, Choose Your Own Disaster uses made-up personality quizzes as its way of guiding the reading through its chapters. The reader gets to choose his or her path by taking quizzes such as “Which fake rom-com lady career should you pursue?” or “What sort of writer will you become?” or “Which Lord of the Rings character are you, based on your eating disorder?” Equally hilarious and dark, Choose Your Own Disaster brings the adult “choose your own path” storyline to memoir.

A Series of Choose Your Own Adventure Stories Where No Matter What You Choose You Are Immediately Eaten by a Werewolf by Luke Burns

This brief, hilarious interactive online story, conveniently abbreviated to ASOCYOASWNMWYCYAIEBAW, lets you choose from five different adventures for your starting point. But no matter what you choose, from The Old Mansion to The Pizza Parlor of Peril to The Mystery of Werewolf Forest, be warned now: it is exactly as the title promises. Whatever narrative choices you click on, you are absolutely and immediately going to be eaten by a werewolf. Which is, in its own strange way, somehow kind of comforting.

Lost in Austen by Emma Campbell Webster

Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure by Emma Campbell Webster 

Your name? Elizabeth Bennett. Your mission? To marry prudently (first), and for love (hard second). How are going to do this? It’s up to the reader. Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Austen Adventure is a delightful, hilarious, romantic romp through Austen-land: all of the landmarks, halls, gentlemen callers, and sisters playing wist you could ever imagine populate the pages of Lost in Austen. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of this book.

Can I Write Fictional Stories About Real People?

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

The Blunt Instrument is an advice column for writers, written by Elisa Gabbert (specializing in nonfiction), John Cotter (specializing in fiction), and Ruoxi Chen (specializing in publishing). If you need tough advice for a writing problem, send your question to blunt@electricliterature.com.

Dear Blunt Instrument,

I’m fascinated by a particular cultural event from recent history. (Not a huge one, and not a negative one—think “the first season of Real World” in scope more than, like, #MeToo.) I’ve been wondering lately whether that fascination would lend itself to a novel, but I’m not sure how to walk the line of turning fact into fiction. If we continue with the Real World metaphor, could I write about Kevin, one of the actual contestants, which would mean ascribing thoughts and offscreen experiences to a real person who is presumably still alive? (It’s not actually Real World, so I had to look up the contestants’ names, please don’t anyone get mad if Kevin was boring.) Should I add a little more distance and write about a fictional fan, but still use real events from the show? Or should I write about a very popular and somewhat genre-defining fictional early reality show called, say, True Life? 

I realize some of these are just questions of preference, but I feel like there must be some general rules or at least suggestions. What considerations should I take into account when deciding how much to rewrite history, versus simply being inspired by it?

Sincerely,

I really thought the first season was the Puck one

Dear IRTtFSwtPO,

Blunt Instrument is many things—a critic, a taskmaster, a style icon—but Blunt Instrument is not a licensed lawyer. Before we talk about the ethics and aesthetics of your question, we’ll outline some potential legal issues you may want to discuss with an actual lawyer before you make a final call. 

Defamation is a notoriously weaselly area of the law, a discipline rich in weasels.

Let’s keep using the example you suggested, Kevin from Real World Season One. Just as a TV watcher or reviewer back in 1992 might have found Kevin either heroic or unsavory, and been free to say so, Kevin’s televised personality is fair game for your characters to snark on or stan. If they’re watching him on TV. 

The trickiness appears when you depict not only what TV watchers think about Kevin, but what Kevin thinks about Kevin, or you begin to invent things for him to do behind the scenes. Then you get into the realm of potential defamation. This is a notoriously weaselly area of the law, a discipline rich in weasels. “Perplexed with minute and barren distinctions,” defamation (like its cousin, slander) can be boiled down to three broad-strokes questions: 

  • Is the person you’re writing about dead? If so, knock yourself out. Dead people can’t sue you for what you write about them and neither can their heirs nor fans. Breakfast on their ashes, you monster.
  • Is the person you’re writing about famous enough to qualify as a Public Figure? Are they a big-name actor, musician, politician? If so, good news for you, because public figures have to clear a higher bar in a defamation case: they have to prove you were acting with “actual malice,” about which more below.
  • Is the person you’re writing about an obscure private citizen? If they aren’t in the least bit famous, you may have a problem. Especially if what you write is construed as implying an actual, real-life (insulting) truth about them, rather than pure invention. 

If something is so absurd that no one could possibly believe it—say a story in which Real World Kevin teleports back in time to seduce Marie Antoinette—you’re fine: no reasonable person would think that’s something Kevin might do; no one’s under the suspicion you’re making “actual statements of fact about the plaintiff.”

But let’s say it isn’t Kevin, rather my friend Gil, a non-famous person. If I write Gil into my novel but depict him only as a reasonable and forthright dude … well, I’ll probably be fine. If I tell the reader I don’t like him very much that’s also probably fine; “I don’t like Gil” isn’t actionable. “Gil’s objectively a shit” may be more so. To answer your question above, if I fictionalize Gil but everyone who knows him can tell it’s Gil, then we haven’t solved much. 

Let’s shift away from jurisprudence for a moment and into the realm of aesthetics. The trick with non-famous real people is not just to rename them but actually fictionalize them. Rather than giving real Gil the fictional name Gus and describing him as detestable, I’d do better to use my fiction for something other than settling a score with Gil. Fiction is a poor tool for revenge. In my role as a fiction instructor, I’ve read probably hundreds of stories expressly written for the purpose of revenge and almost all of them were dull, partial, not-quite-credible affairs. 

The trick with non-famous real people is not just to rename them but actually fictionalize them.

The dirty secret of humanity as a species is that people don’t differ from one another as much as we might like to think they do; what differs are their circumstances. Let’s say I’m writing a story about a standup comedian—I’m doing this because standup is an interesting and perennially topical subject. Let’s say I have an idea for a story and need to select my characters. I don’t know any professional standup comedians, so the first question I’ll ask myself is, “Who do I know who could be a standup comedian?” Not just who do I know who’s funny, because I know lots of funny people—who do I know who would actually have the guts to get onstage and be laughed at? 

Got someone: my friend Kirsten, a professional public speaker and also funny. Okay, so the standup comedian in my story—for pure story reasons—needs to be elected to the California State Senate, and then forced to resign. Eventually, for story purposes, I realize they need to be a man. Shoot, Kirsten may not work. But my friend Kenny will. Am I basing the character of the senator on Kenny, such that the senator is, basically, Kenny? Not as such. The Senator is an embezzler (Kenny never stolen a dime) and hotly religious (Kenny agnostic). But Kenny has a teasing way of greeting people he knows well—he squeezes their bicep, pinches their stomach. I’m porting that to the senator. Now I’m figuring out how to depict the Senator’s shamefaced return to standup in the ruin of his Senate career, so I’ll make use of the pursed, frozen frown Kenny greeted us with on his return from Florida after a bad breakup; I’ll keep in mind, too, the way that frown became, in the course of a week, boasts about how things were better without her, about how he’d been scheming to get out of that relationship all along. I’ll use lots of Kenny in the story, whole pages worth, and if I do it right he’ll never recognize himself. No one else will either. 

We think of ourselves as unique, partially because we’re trying to market that uniqueness. But in truth we’re collections of gestures and perceptions and received ideas, united mostly by whatever fiction we’re using to provide ourselves with coherence. (Rimbaud: Je est un autre. I am someone else). Even when we write about the very famous—people so constantly in the public eye the Public Figure defense protects our work—we’re inventing them, supposing, projecting. 

I’m thinking here of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s wicked short story “The Arrangements,” a half-burlesque of Mrs. Dalloway that imagines Melania Trump reviewing the week just past as she prepares for the arrival of her Pilates instructor. What’s so effective about the story is the way Melania remains on the side of satire but resists becoming absurd. There’s a richly imagined world here. Her jealousy of Ivanka, protectiveness of Baron, even her fondness for Donald ring true (“even the way he nursed his grudges, almost lovingly, unleashing in great detail slights from 20 years ago, made her protective of him.”)

Public figures can’t sue The Onion, or Saturday Night Live. Satire is a legal shield.

The Trumps are a litigious family, but if Melania tried to sue Adichie for “The Arrangements” it wouldn’t survive summary judgement. Public figures can’t sue The Onion either, or Saturday Night Live. Satire is a legal shield. Even when Adichie’s Melania rubs caviar cream onto her son’s face, or fantasizes about seducing her instructor, or when “just thinking of Ivanka brought an exquisite, slow-burning irritation,” Adichie’s exercising her rights. 

There’s a deeper truth here too, which is that Adichie’s story isn’t about Melania at all, not the real person Melania may suspect herself to be. It’s about an actor in a Melania mask. Gore Vidal, who knew something about writing history (recent history included) wrote, “Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.” To create a fictional character is to fit somebody for a mask. 

The law is mutable but the law is also for sale. On the one hand, the fiction writer ought to have godlike rein to invent and un-invent what she likes. On the other hand, there are lot of assholes out there. The First Amendment protects most books, but if you want to be on the safe side, denature your characters (or, as a smart editor told me of a too-autobiographical story I showed him: “Next time, chew your meat a little better.”)

I’ll leave you with an interesting coincidence. I know the example you chose in your letter was chosen at random, but Real World’s Kevin was, in fact, sued for slander only last year, thanks to something he’d written and published. The woman who sued him won. 

Writing Is Always a Political Act

Posted on by Jo Lou

In 2013, Helon Habila crossed paths with many migrants and refugees in Germany, some of whom had fled his home country Nigeria to escape the Boko Haram militancy that had displaced millions. Urged by these migrants to record their experiences, Helon Habila began his new novel in search of answers to his long-held questions about the meaning of home, if one could return to the home they’d fled, and the possibility of making a home away from home.

Image result for travelers helon habila

Travelers is a fictional record of the real and harrowing experiences of  migrants fleeing certain death for uncertain survival in Europe. It follows the unnamed narrator, a Nigerian academic in Berlin—an expatriate really but for his skin color—who befriends a group of African refugees and their activist friends fighting for documentation and better life conditions. The slight advantage the narrator has over the African asylum seekers soon disappears when he misplaces his papers and accidentally boards a train heading for the refugee camps. In the camp, he learns how quickly lives can become displaced.

Kenechi Uzor: Your books have always struck me as interventive, political, always responding or reacting to some issue. Would you agree?

Helon Habila: We all write in reaction to something, what we often call the inspiration or the muse that triggers creativity. My muse happens to be more inclined towards social and political concerns, perhaps because of my history and the milieu in which I grew up in. In my country, and I guess in most other places, writing is always a very political act, it cannot afford not to be.

KU: “What is the point of art if it is not to resist?” How would you respond to this question posed by Mark, one of the characters in the Travelers?

In my country, and in most other places, writing is always a very political act, it cannot afford not to be.

HH: I think the best, and the most relevant writing, is always an act of protest. A refusal to keep quiet in the face of whatever seeks to dehumanize us—be it power, or oppression, or even simple lack of taste. Here I am referring especially to a long tradition of protest writing in Africa and other formerly colonized countries, and even in African American literatures—literatures described by Deleuz and Guttari as “minor literatures”—literatures subsisting within or underneath other, more dominant literatures, or within a dominant language. Such literatures, intentionally or otherwise, will always be political through their themes or aesthetics or use of language; such writers will always be seen as spokespersons for their community whether they like it or not. For such writers, to pretend not to be political will be futile.

KU: In the early pages of the book, the unnamed protagonist reflects on the “immigrant’s temperament,” the dilemma of wanting home and permanence in a new world but at the same time being reluctant and fearful of long-term commitments that could provide such permanence. I don’t think there’s been much conversation around this particular experience, at least not as much as the identity crisis that attends immigration.

HH: My image of the migrant is a person living out of a suitcase, with one foot always at the door, no matter how long he or she has lived in their new home. This image I guess is predicated on the trauma and uncertainty that always accompanies migration or exile—as Edward Said said, exile is compelling to think about, but painful to experience. This experience is manifested in many different ways, some over-compensate by embracing their new homes and not wanting to hear about the home they had left, associating it with all that is bad and evil; others can’t seem to feel at home in their new home, pining for their old country and never really making a life in the new place. This is what my character here calls his “immigrant’s temperament”—a permanent inability to fit in.

KU: In book 4, the narrator wonders why people etch their names in walls “only in places of bitterness and suffering and sweat” but never in “fancy hotels or restaurants or churches.” I’ve been thinking a lot about that and I’m wondering if you have some thoughts on this. 

HH: Well, they say that suffering forms character, meaning you benefit more from adversity than you do from a lack of it. To survive adversity is to have proven something, it means to have been tested and to have survived that test. This on the surface of it, like most axioms, makes absolute sense, but in a way, I am also questioning this common assumption that suffering is good for us, while the truth is that we’d rather not suffer at all. Wars teach us to hate violence but think of all the dying and the privation we have to go through just to learn that lesson. That quote from the book links to another section where Gina, the main character’s wife, prefers to paint migrants whose bodies bear visible marks of their suffering. She refuses to paint Mark because his face is too smooth and unmarked by suffering. She thinks these markers of suffering makes them more interesting, and more convincing, but the truth is that these migrants would rather have stayed at home, in their countries, with their loved ones. That is the irony of it.

KU: Your novel made me rethink my idea of nostalgia as a wistful longing of pleasant past. A few of the refugees like Karim seem to reflect with longing for not only their pleasant past but also on the past that held their travails as refugees and asylum seekers. Is it still nostalgia if the reflections are of unpleasant experiences? Is this a phenomenon similar to Stockholm Syndrome? What is it about the human psyche that longs for a past suffering?

HH: I guess for most migrants nostalgia isn’t only for a past, it can also be for the present and for the future. They miss the present that they cannot share with their families and friends back home, they miss the future they will never witness with their childhood friends and their families.

If I were white I guess they’d call me an expatriate.

One of the best books I have read to this subject of nostalgia and migration is Eva Hoffman’s memoir, Lost in Translation. She grew up in Poland post-WWII. It was by no means a paradise, especially for a Jewish family having to deal with the vestiges of the WWII antisemitism and the new resurgence of it—yet, when her family finally leaves Poland and moves to Canada, she is heartbroken. She doesn’t remember all the privations and the antisemitism they faced in Warsaw, she only remembers the good times. Psychologists call this a dissociative mechanism. Because our mind is unable to cope with the pains of losing our home and the challenges of making a new home in an alien and often hostile place, it escapes to the past and paints a pleasant picture of the past, even the unpleasant past, rather than face the present.

KU:  Language is often the first complication of traveling. In the refugee prison, where the segregation is by race and language, Karim’s two boys enjoy some privileges due to their ability to speak multiple languages. Can you speak a bit on the complication language brings to the immigrant experience?

HH: Language is the most common and the most effective tool humans have of expressing themselves, meaning of expressing their intelligence. Imagine if that is taken away from you. The characters in the camp have all been reduced to incoherence and even silence. I have often met adult migrants who—because they are not fluent in the new language, or because they speak with an accent, or because they cannot quickly understand a joke or cannot tell a joke—are looked upon as idiots. Sometimes, they have to depend on their children who are more fluent in the new language, to speak for them. And sometimes even their own children, who didn’t know who their parents were in their former life, begin to look upon their parents as not very smart.

In a way that is what I am playing with here, these adult characters have to rely on these kids to interpret this brave new world for them. For these kids the new world is not as frightening as it is for their parents because for them, it is normal, they have nothing to compare their situation with. They are fluent in the language of the present, whereas their parents are more fluent in the language of the past.

KU: Portia refers to her father, the resistant poet as a “professional exile” who “developed a taste for exile” and preferred to move from one asylum city to another rather than return home to his wife and daughter. Going by what happens to her father when he returns to Zambia, is the novel engaging with this idea that one can prefer and get so used to being in exile that returning home even in peacetime might not be the best for them?

HH: There are two types of exiles, those who never fit in and continuously hold on to the past, and the second are those that don’t want to hear about the past or the home they just left; instead they embrace the new home and overidealize it. Both are extreme cases, and both are dissociative mechanisms, they are not normal. James Kariku, Portia’s father, is on the end of the spectrum where exiles don’t want to hear about their home countries and even the family they left behind. In his case he has some justification, his country jailed him because of his political writing. He becomes a perpetual exile, a professional exile. Note that he is also an artist, a poet. Sometimes writers need that kind of opposition, even an imaginary one, to keep writing. A case in point is James Joyce, who kept alive his argument with Ireland and refused to go back or to hear anything good about Ireland; instead he decided to invent his own ideal city of Dublin, perhaps the way it used to be when he lived there. Clearly James Kariku can’t cope with the realities of the present, he can’t get over the slight done to him by his country and its rulers. He’d rather rot in exile than to go back—for people like him, to return is to die, both literally and figuratively. 

KU: Travelers point to the plight of refugees and the need for activism and resistance to the world status quo, but it also seems to reinforce the hopelessness of the human condition. There is so much futility expressed through the experiences of Mark, Karim, Mousa, Portia, James Kariku,  and the other characters that makes one wonder, like the narrator, if any change is possible, if there’s any point to resistance. Is futility the underlying theme of the novel? 

HH: I must disagree that futility is the ruling sentiment in the book. I think most of the characters would look at themselves as heroes, they refused to lay down and die in their own countries, they refused to give in to tyranny and hopelessness, instead they took the risk to seek a new beginning in a new land. I also try to look at their motives for doing so—for most of them they do it because they love their families, they want their children to have a better future and they are willing to face humiliation and even death to achieve that.

These characters refused to give in to tyranny and hopelessness. Instead they took the risk to seek a new beginning in a new land.

Karim, the Somali character, leaves Mogadishu and enters exile because a warlord wants to marry his ten-year-old daughter. His options are to stay and watch his beloved daughter marry this crazed warlord or to run into an uncertain future, but a future that offers his daughter better odds than the one he is leaving behind. There are no easy choices. In a way I am interrogating a world order that has left some people so far behind, leaving them no option but to escape from their native homes. I don’t call their actions futile, I call it heroic.

KU: Travelers also engages with existentialism. Have you always been interested in existentialist concepts in your writing?

HH: If by existentialism you mean the search for meaning in a meaningless world, and the individual’s drive to survive at all cost, especially in a world that tries to stifle the individual impulse, I will say yes. My characters fight and resist “group-think,” sometimes rebelling against tradition because tradition should be a starting point, not a destination. It is there to guide us, and in the end, we have to find out what works for us and fight for that with all our resources.

KU: How has living and teaching in America influenced your writing? Would you have written a book like Travelers if you weren’t living outside Nigeria?

HH: I doubt I would have, or could have. Living outside one’s country gives one a deeper perspective into the discourse around travel and migration. There’s a sense of recognition I felt while talking to African migrants in Europe for the book—of course there are all sorts of migrants and travelers, my travel is less traumatic in the sense that I didn’t have to escape war or persecution, if I were white I guess they’d call me an expatriate, an expert in his field who is working in another country other than his. Migrant, refugee, émigré, expatriate—sometimes these terms are created to limit and confine. That is why I decided to go with Travelers, because in the end we are all traveling.

KU: Who should tell the immigrant story? Who can tell the immigrant story and tell it, right? Who should tell any story?

HH: Whoever is inspired or compelled by circumstance can tell it. It is not a competition. Migrant narratives are some of the oldest genre in literature. Think of the Odyssey, think of the Iliad, these are among the oldest western texts, and they are on travel. I guess we have come to associate the immigrant story with stories of black or brown people seeking refuge or opportunity in western countries. But the colonialists who went to Africa to conquer and to live there were also migrants, the experience is the same whether you are a soldier or a refugee, you still have to deal with the nostalgia of losing your native home, you all have to deal with the challenges of self-reinvention in a new place. It is the oldest story ever told or written: a man or woman goes on a journey, or a man or a woman comes to town.

KU: Some writers often say they have no readers in mind when they write. Is this the same for you? Who would you consider as the primary audience for Travelers?

HH: I really wasn’t thinking of any particular reader when I wrote it. All I wanted to do was to do justice to the people who entrusted me with their stories and to go beyond the statistics and the headlines and in the process to humanize them as much as possible.

KU: What problems, if any, have you noticed with how African writers have been telling their own stories? If we’ve been doing so, have we really been telling it different, or do we still propagate the same flaws we accuse foreign media and writers of doing?

HH: There isn’t any wrong way or right way of telling a story, as long as one does it with sincerity and humility. Each writer has his or her own approach to telling a story. I know I have in the past been uncomfortable with certain modes of representation of the African experience by African authors, but in the end I think it is a matter of style. Some writers are more subtle, some are more nuanced, some are less so. But if I were to offer an advice, I’d say we need to write more about our heroes and less about our villains and dictators, but the truth is that stories about villains are often more compelling than about good people. So, there you have it.

How Lolly Willowes Smashed the Patriarchy by Selling Her Soul to Satan

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Heinrich Kramer, the author of the Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witches, the 1487 treatise on witchcraft, was not a man who thought highly of women. In the sixth of a series of questions, Kramer asks “Why is it that Women are chiefly addicted to Evil superstitions?” After all, he notes, most witches are women. His answers to his question are predictable and familiar: women are naturally inclined toward wickedness, their intellects are childish and weak, they gossip too much, they are feeble in mind and body, they are lustful, they are deceitful, they have weak memories, they need governance by men but resent and resist it, they tend toward hateful jealousy. Even in the Bible, Kramer reminds us, Potiphar’s wife falsely accused Joseph of rape when he wouldn’t satisfy her sexual demands. Women: you just can’t trust them.

Heinrich Kramer wrote his treatise after he was kicked out of town for his obsessive attentions to the sex lives of the women of Innsbruck, particularly the sex lives of women who refused to attend his sermons. The Malleus Maleficarum is his justification for his behavior, and he advances the claim that witchcraft, once viewed as a minor offense, is actually heresy, a much graver crime. The punishment for heresy was to be burned alive. His treatise, with the help of new technology, spread his ideas far and wide and helped kick off the witch hunts that took place in the early modern period throughout Europe and lands colonized by Europeans. The vast majority of convicted witches burned, hanged, or drowned over this several-hundred-year period were women, often older single women, and they were killed by the tens of thousands.

In her 1926 novel Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner, who did think highly of women, asks much the same question as Heinrich Kramer had asked over four hundred years earlier: why are witches so often women? What about selling your soul to the devil is so much more appealing than living by the standards of goodness and womanhood under patriarchy? Her protagonist, an unmarried middle-aged woman named Laura Willowes, has a different answer than Kramer, and yet they are in agreement on the premise: women are more inclined to sell their souls to the devil than men are, and witchcraft is a largely feminine preoccupation. In Lolly Willowes, that’s just a logical reaction to patriarchy.

The first sentence of Lolly Willowes reads, “When her father died, Laura Willowes went to live in London with her brother and his family.” The second sentence begins, “Of course.”

In Lolly Willowes, patriarchy is assumed as a fact of life. The book takes place among the white middle classes of England: the comfortably landed professionals who benefit from the violence of patriarchal colonization and yet rarely encounter violence themselves. Laura Willowes, the daughter of an English brewer with a small inheritance of her own, is hardly one of the foremost victims of English might. None of the men in her life feel any antipathy toward her, and some even love her. Her material needs are met, and she should be satisfied.

Despite the comfort of the middle classes, however, Laura will, by the book’s end, sell her soul to Satan and become a witch.

Though Lolly Willowes starts in 1902, the question of what to do with the unmarried woman was also relevant to 1926, when it was published. Between the Great War and the pandemic flu of 1918, a whole generation had become sexually lopsided in the course of just a few years. The colonial demands of Empire had also bled the British Isles of young British men, who proliferated in the lands they settled, far from English women and English marriage, ready to reshape and model English patriarchy for a new population—who, though they had never asked for such instruction, were still Englishly judged to need it. Lolly Willowes was a surprise success among people who saw themselves as liberated and modern. It was an international bestseller and the first Book of the Month Club selection. 

Lolly Willowes explores the ways that patriarchy can quietly, gently, lovingly deform a woman’s entire life.

Lolly Willowes explores the ways that patriarchy can quietly, gently, lovingly deform a woman’s entire life. Even the title is molded by outside influences and expectations. “Lolly” is a nickname bestowed upon Laura by the first child to make her an aunt, and it is immediately and irrevocably taken on by Laura’s family, although Laura herself dislikes the name, and the narrator never uses it, except to illustrate the thoughts of Laura’s relatives. Laura sees “Aunt Lolly” as a state into which she enters when she is moved into her brother’s house, and it is, moreover, a state she finds increasingly unbearable, and yet she bears it for years on end without any of her relatives suspecting her inner rebellion against it. It imposes itself on the title of the book, shaping from without. You cannot pick up the book without becoming complicit in making Laura into Lolly.

When I was a young mother, sometimes my duties to my family would become overwhelming, and I would imagine a scenario in which I got sick—not deathly ill, but ill enough to be hospitalized. In that state, people would have to take care of me, and I would have to take care of no one. I’ve talked to other women who had the same fantasy, and I was surprised by how long it took me to realize that if I was imagining it, I could imagine something better. I could imagine winning a paid vacation or being the kind of rich that only exists in fiction, where all is done for you, and you harm no one. I could even arrange something better in real life: ask for help, ease up on some duties, acknowledge that I was struggling. But no. Instead I pictured a hospital stay, which could not be my fault, and therefore could not be, even in my mind, a shirking of my duties.

Heterosexual couples, as a rule, don’t split parenting or housework duties evenly. This is true whether both partners work outside the home or not, whether the couples are old or young, whether they are college educated or not, whether they are on the left or right of the political spectrum. I’m pretty lucky, because my husband and I both despise housework fairly equally, and our expectations of one another are not terribly focused on domestic labor. Still, domestic labor needs doing, and while we split it as evenly as we can, we still live in a society that doesn’t place the burdens of those expectations evenly across genders. Even if we are fairly equitable, the judgment of a messy house is more likely to fall on me. 

Why not sell your soul when it doesn’t belong to you anyway?

In Lolly Willowes, though Laura is unmarried, her move into her brother’s house launches her into this role of domestic expectation. She is needed to help care for the children, needed to assist her sister-in-law in mending and embroidery, needed to take the children to their dance lessons and to do the shopping and to clean the canary’s cage. “Needed” is the word used in the text, but in fact it is work almost anyone could do, and work that presumably got done before she arrived. On Tuesdays she must go to the library to change out their books. Every summer, Laura goes with her brother’s family on holiday. She looks forward to it with anticipation of taking “long walks inland and find[ing] strange herbs, but she [is] too useful to be allowed to stray.” Every summer ends with a list of things she had hoped to do and failed to do. She is too useful to follow her interests and her work too useless to hold her interest. During the war she takes on war work, but this, too, is useful and useless at once. She is put to work wrapping packages, and is so good at it that she is never offered other work. Laura spends the first World War in an office, tying up brown paper parcels, needed by everyone but herself.

Why not sell your soul when it doesn’t belong to you anyway?

Over the years in Lolly Willowes, Laura settles into middle age and a state of Aunt Lolly so grim and permanent that she almost forgets her own name. Autumn unsettles her yearly. When autumn comes, she wants more than anything to be in the country, not for beauty, but for a something she doesn’t understand, “a something that was dark and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels, and by the voices of birds of ill omen.” But it passes yearly, leaving behind the frustration of having missed whatever the point of her “autumnal fever” might be. She buys small indulgences by which to wrap herself in “a sort of mental fur coat.” But the mental fur coat, too, fails. Being Aunt Lolly is stultifying to such a degree that Laura, at the age of 47, can no longer perform the part. Something in her cracks and she finds herself imagining a new life in a place she has never been. 

On a sudden autumn impulse, Laura moves, alone, to a village called Great Mop, where she both finds what she wanted and fails to find it. She wanders the countryside, map in hand, looking for that unknown something she has wanted in the autumns. But all of this comes crashing down when Laura’s nephew Titus shows up. 

Titus, the son of Laura’s brother James, is about to settle down into the family brewing business, but first he wants to stop and visit his Aunt Lolly. As soon as Titus arrives, he starts gently, lovingly pushing Laura back into the state of Aunt Lolly that she fled. Titus falls in love with the Chilterns, the range of hills north of London where Great Mop is located. But his love is oppressive: 

Love it as he might, with all the deep Willowes love for country sights and smells, love he never so intimately and soberly, his love must be a horror to her. It was different in kind from hers. It was comfortable, it was portable, it was a reasonable appreciative appetite, a possessive and masculine love. It almost estranged her from Great Mop that he should be able to love it so well, and express his love so easily. He loved the countryside as though it were a body.

Titus, a kind man, a good nephew, the best and closest of Laura’s family, is still unable to enter her world without loving her into pain and nightmarish alienation from herself and from nature. Walking with Titus in the hills and woods, Laura feels “the spirit of the place withdraw itself further from her.” She feels it as an animate rejection by the land. If she walks it as an aunt with a nephew, soon she will only be able to walk it as an aunt with her nephew.

Worse, because Titus’s oppressive love is true, he quickly decides to move to Great Mop himself. Laura feels the specters of the rest of her family coming alongside Titus, as he, sure of her, sure of himself, sure of the landscape, tells them, “You see, it’s all right. She’s just the same.” She feels it as an attack on her soul, which her family feels certain is already theirs.

When a soul is at stake, there is always a buyer. Laura cries out into the evening sky her determination not to go back, not to be held by those who love her and don’t know her. She begs for help. And in the moments that follow, she feels an animate silence that tells her that “surely a compact had been made, and the pledge irrevocably given.” When she gets back to her room, a kitten is waiting there, and Laura recognizes her familiar.

The middle-class spinster from a respectable family has made a pact with the devil. Laura feels at peace.

The middle-class spinster from a respectable family has made a pact with the devil. Laura feels at peace. She knows that, had she been “called upon to decide in cold blood between being an aunt and being a witch, she might have been overawed by habit and the cowardice of compunction.” But in a state of desperation, afraid of being forced into Aunt Lollyhood once more, Laura chooses unerringly: becoming a witch is the instinctive right choice. Moreover, she has always been a witch in training, she just wasn’t allowed to see it.

Grateful and secure in Satan’s loving hands, Laura knows that between the kitten and the devil, Titus will be gone. And indeed, mysterious bad luck suddenly seems to dog Titus. His milk spoils, even when it is fresh and new. When he replaces the milk with canned condensed milk, he cuts his thumb on the tin lid, and his wound festers. He is unable to write. He is plagued by flies, and then by bats. His lovely hair is chopped close. And finally, he is set upon by wasps and becomes engaged to the first female friend he runs into after the wasp incident. Titus will leave Great Mop. 

Gender under patriarchy can’t help but harm women. It harms men, too, but it offers particular benefits that make that harm worthwhile for a whole lot of men. Gender under capitalist patriarchy is necessarily impossible. It isn’t a coincidence that gendered expectations are contradictory. The contradictions make it impossible to fulfill those expectations, and the impossibility places it always just out of reach, fixable with the right product, new look, new attitude, new behavior. For women under capitalist patriarchy, failing to fulfill gendered expectations is financially punished, but, crucially, so is fulfilling those expectations reasonably well. You might get the job or the marriage by being attractive and tidy and correctly female, but the rise to authority and true ownership of wealth is unlikely to follow. Fulfilling femininity to the satisfaction of men is nearly always an argument against your own potential. 

A system that prevents alliance between women prevents witchcraft as well.

The women in Laura’s life who perform gender better than she does, who read the right books, got the right look, the right husband, the right house in London and the right holiday spots in the country or by the seaside, don’t have lives that look more open or fulfilling than her own. They are mothers, menders, and spoilers of husbands less capable than themselves. Of the sister-in-law with whom she lives for much of the book, Laura thinks, “She was slightly self-righteous, and fairly rightly so, but she yielded to Henry’s judgment in every dispute, she bowed her good sense to his will and blinkered her wider views in obedience to his prejudices.” This constant indulgence by his wife changes Henry’s “natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people’s point of view.” A good wife makes a worse husband. 

Solidarity between women isn’t fully possible in this state. Perhaps Heinrich Kramer, writing his manifesto against female devilry, was right about “the woeful rivalry” between married and unmarried women. Kramer worried that when women talked to one another, they spread witchcraft. Their “slippery tongues” made them “unable to conceal from the fellow-women those things which by evil arts they know.” A system that prevents alliance between women prevents witchcraft as well.

The novel ends on a hillside. Laura finally gets a nice long sit-down talk with Satan. Reminded that Satan seeks out men as well as women, Laura says, “I can’t take warlocks so seriously, not as a class. It is we witches who count. We have more need of you. Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are dependent upon others, and their dependence so soon becomes a nuisance.” She imagines women all over Europe “living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded.” She describes the lives of women, “settling down,” in “a dreadful kind of dreary immorality.” 

Being a witch offers so much more. Laura’s family is so sure of her soul, but they hardly know she has one. The Devil, though, knows women have souls, and he wants those souls, and he knows that they must be pursued and courted. Being a witch offers an escape from good and evil both, from the habits of useless work that Laura learned as a woman and aunt, from the need to always be in service to everyone else, anyone other than yourself. Laura, in giving up her soul, can finally call it her own. After all, Satan only worries at those he does not yet have. Like a hound, he pursues and attacks, but the attacks end when the hunted submits. The book is called Lolly Willowes, but its full title is Lolly Willowes, or, The Loving Huntsman.

Laura sold her soul in 1922. It seemed a strangely old-fashioned thing to do in the age of riotous nihilism and centers that would not hold and the looming shadows of Great Wars leaning in on either side. And yet it was also the most modern solution Laura’s author, a woman living a very modern life, could fashion.

We sit nearly a hundred years out from the events of Lolly Willowes, and it is still true that women’s lives are constrained, often by those who love us most. What Sylvia Townsend Warner saw was that patriarchy is not always a blow from a closed fist, but often the enclosure of an enveloping shawl, wrapped forcibly with love and concern, around someone who doesn’t want it and is already too warm. Throughout Lolly Willowes, characters insist that Laura will be too cold, is too cold, that she must avoid the outdoors where she is most secure and peaceful, that she must protect herself against that which most pleases her. Women are loved, in this world, not as individuals, but as archetypes. What Lolly Willowes imagines, and what Laura Willowes eventually attains, is a world where women can go out in the cold. A soul can be as much an encumbrance as a shawl, but in Lolly Willowes, it turns out to be just as easy to discard.

Married with Kids: One Star, Difficult to Assemble

Posted on by Erin Bartnett

“Patience”
by Courtney Maum

After putting his daughter Roxy on the school bus in a parka he had won a battle over and flip flops he had not, Mark returned to a kitchen bright with detritus from the night before. Crusted cake dishes, garbage bags of torn up wrapping paper, pink sequins here and there. It was a milestone of consequence: Mark had weathered a princess party with something close to grace. 

And then he saw an object on the kitchen table that hadn’t been there earlier: an opened birthday present with a Post-It note attached. It was immediate, the disheartening. His swallowed coffee burned.

This was the gift that had caused problems; the low point of the night. Initially, their four year-old had been thrilled with the LED “Glowbrite” drawing easel whose neon markers made your sketches look all psychedelic, but there was no way for mortal humans to wipe the markers off the screen. After Roxy had presented them with a slate full of “R”s and demanded room to make her “O”s, he and his wife had tried soap and water, even an ancient burp cloth, but the markers were immutable; these efforts only transformed his daughter’s letters into a beaming smear. 

Well after Roxy had been bribed into bed, Laurie had been sore about the botched cleaning, turning the scratched screen over and over with calculated sighs. Because his wife had been out of the room when Roxy had actually opened up the present, Laurie remained convinced that the challenge they were facing was Mark’s fault. That he’d misplaced the instruction manual, even though there hadn’t been one. 

Research? the Post-It on the easel asked, the question mark so coy it made Mark want to go back upstairs and take a sleeping pill. Tomorrow is another day, unfortunately, a college friend wrote recently on Facebook. Mark had pressed the heart button and liked it. And then he unliked it, because he didn’t want anybody to think that he didn’t like his life.

Mark sat down at the kitchen table with the offending item, the room almost indecent with October light. These Post-Its were a sickness. A manifestation, their upscale hippy friends would say. Laurie knew Mark was being visited by existential questions and she used it to her advantage. He’d spent most of last Friday researching toddler size 9 waterproof boots because of a sticky note he’d found on his own shoe.

Mark looked up the Glowbrite drawing easel up on his cell phone. The company didn’t even have a website, just terrible Amazon reviews. Only two of the markers weren’t dried up when we got it, read the first one. Impossible to clean. What a headache. Worthless and scratched. 

Mark scrolled through the various ways that strangers felt cheated by their products. And then he came to this: If the markers don’t work, the toy doesn’t work, and the markers don’t work.

He sat very still. He held his phone and waited. He had a feeling that this consumer review might hold something magical for him. Then his phone pulsed with a phone call. It wasn’t even 8:00 a.m.

“Hello?” he asked, his question mark, hopeful. 

It was his assistant producer. The lead in their new feature film quit. 

It wasn’t that Mark Lambros was an opera buff, exactly, but he was interested in the story of a once-famous opera star who, in the 1860s, refused to sing in public anywhere but her country house in Winsted, Connecticut, a humble river town which, back then, was reached by horse, train, horse. She spent her weekdays refusing different public concerts, and on the weekends, she would cart her favorite friends out for days and nights of opera, her singing it, them enjoying it, all of them discussing how much such singing meant. 

Mark wasn’t entirely sure why he was drawn to the project. The arbitrariness of this woman’s decision, her wish for control, maybe, her wish for something special that took place entirely in private. The director was young and fiery and convincing, and he’d done prize-winning shorts. Plus, he’d thought, how beautiful would it be to hear opera in the woods. 

What r we going 2 do?!! his assistant producer texted, even though they had just spoken. The star’s deflection was urgent; the calls coming were urgent. But Mark did not feel moved. At forty-six, he’d done this twenty times. It was so exciting in the beginning, producing indie films. The undiscovered talent, the electrifying hustle, even the gummy turkey wraps at film festivals and the weird seasonal beers. But now, distribution, the goal you used to aim for, and once in a while, get, had become such a pipe dream, that it didn’t really seem worth it to make movies any more. He could post a video of his daughter singing about poop and have more eyeballs on it than he’d ever have for his three-million-dollar doc/fiction-blend about a niche group of opera fanatics living in the woods. Who cared? No one really did. 

A duck fell out of the sky into the small pond outside his office. The pond was man-made, and had seemed like a charming water element when they’d visited the house. Now Mark spent as much time parenting that pond against infestations of filamentous algae and duckweed as he did his daughter against head colds and Lyme. Shouldn’t there be two of them? Shouldn’t that duck be south?

The director called. Mark let it go to voicemail. When he thought about the size of the thing he needed to accomplish, the cinematographer and the Belgian lighting director and the wistful supporting actress who’d all signed on to the film because of its big star, when he thought of the important people who would also quit when they heard that Mark had lost her, well this was a hurdle he wasn’t ready to run toward at 8:30 a.m.

He put his cellphone in a drawer where he kept the expired family passports and searched until he got back to the review about the toy not working if the markers didn’t either:

My two year-old received this easel as a birthday gift, and we decided to put it away until she was three, because at two years old, she could not properly handle the markers that came with this product.

Waiting for another birthday might account for why some of the markers were so dry by the time we gave it to her. We stored the gift in its original box which took up a lot of room in our house. Maybe it needed a different environment, the basement, for example.

This product is almost impossible to clean and it looks scratched after the first time that you use it. Before this, our daughter was only allowed to draw on paper though so she is very proud of it. Even our six year old plays with it sometimes. 

The reviewer’s dignity was striking. No agenda other than the sharing of a personal opinion, an opinion that didn’t point any fingers at the children who maybe left the caps off of those markers, or the husband (Mark bet it was a husband) who’d bought the wrong thing at the grocery store, again. Together, as a team, these parents had decided to delay the giving of the gift until their child could have a successful experience with it. It was awe-inducing, truly.

Mark looked above the review for the person’s name. Debbie Meyer. Debbie’s community activity board showed a smiling woman wearing a fleece coat. She appeared to be holding something, maybe a falcon. Her reviewer ranking was 2,250,249. She lived in Salt Lake City.

The drawer started rattling from the vibrations of his cellphone. The less quickly Mark responded to the assistant producer, the more frequently he texted. Mark looked at the other products Debbie had reviewed. A baby sun hat. A Nalgene water bottle. Metallic two-tone shoes. A “Better Life” floor cleaner that smelled like citrus mint.

Something in Mark’s heart twinged at this last product. Was he not living his life right? Should he have fragrant floors? There were a lot of people he knew who were having shameful problems in their home lives, but Debbie Meyer maybe wasn’t one of them. This was a woman who had kind and good solutions, who was probably raising a child who faced forward at the dinner table, instead of backward, with her feet up by her ears. Was she a pragmatic wife and mother and a falcon-tamer, as well?

Mark turned back to his computer, his hand shaking a bit. The most recent thing that Debbie had reviewed was a box of “Happy Belly Decaf.” She’d given it four stars. Delicious and FRESHLY ROASTED was the title of her review.

Mark got up and walked around his office. He felt moved—maybe irreversibly—by this woman’s praise. He let himself imagine what it would take for him to be the kind of person who took the time to leave four-star reviews of a bag of decaf coffee. When I got this, Debbie had written, it had only been roasted five days earlier. How awesome is that?

Mark felt sick to his stomach. He turned off his computer. He’d do the breakfast dishes, now. There had been a Post-It note about this, right next to the sink.

“Have you ever reviewed anything on Amazon?” Mark asked his wife that night after they’d reheated the food their daughter had refused to eat and eaten it themselves. 

Laurie was cutting up that day’s school notices into an ever-growing scratch pad. She didn’t like to waste paper, and every time Roxy’s backpack came home stuffed with all these notices, she threatened to say something to someone at the school. From the stack of flyers in front of her, Mark noticed two identical ones about “Socktober.” 

“Books,” she said, cutting both notices in half. “I’ve reviewed books.”

“Never a product?” he asked. 

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said, disappointed that she wasn’t going to surprise him. “What would make you want to leave one?”

“Of, like, what?” she asked, her eyes meeting his.

“I don’t know, a thing. Or a kid’s toy.”

“I guess if it caught on fire or something, I’d want people to know that.” She shrugged. 

“Would you ever review, like, coffee? If it was really, really good?”

“Well, no. I wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

She squinted at him. “Because who has time for that? And also, there’s too many kinds of coffee. People are totally out of control about caffeine.”

“What about a decaf? Like if I found a really good decaf?”

Laurie looked to the lacquer tray they kept above the fridge with the unfinished bags of potato chips and an ancient Fed-Ex envelope of pot edibles that had a Post-It taped to it, DON’T EAT. 

“Are you high?” she asked.

The next morning, after learning of the star’s departure, the film’s supporting actress told her agent that she felt like she was working “in an unstable film environment” and Debbie had a new review up. It was for a “Utah Riffic Snapback Trucker Hat” from a company called, “THATS RAD.” It was fifteen dollars and forty-nine cents, and she’d given it four stars. 

What a fun hat but toooo big for this lady! was what she’d gone with as a title. Except, no, she wouldn’t have “gone with” anything, not Debbie. She didn’t question herself, try to present herself as anything; she cleaned her floors with “Better Life” floor cleaner and did not do coy:

I got this hat to hike in because my toddler pulls on the neck protector of my other hat. I am a woman with an average head size, I would say, but this hat was really big! What a disappointment because the hat was very cute. Unfortunately, this hat only comes in one size. So I had to return it. 

Mark indulged himself in the flood of good feelings that this news brought to him. Debbie had been excited about something, and it hadn’t worked out, but she was going to keep climbing up life’s mountain, regardless. Faced with the revelation that she didn’t have an average head size, Debbie hydrated her children and sunscreened the lot of them and went on without a hat. It occurred to him, as it did sometimes, in a burst of adrenalized clarity, that there was  beauty in his life that a simple change of attitude could help him to admire. Obstacles were challenges. Challenges were opportunities. When life put a big rock in front of Debbie Meyer, she just climbed around it. 

This mindset was challenged when Mark went into the kitchen and found a new Post-It note attached to the coffeemaker. The note read, Beans?☺

The thing was, Laurie hadn’t always been a castrater. (The couple’s therapist asked Mark not to call her that the first-and-only time he’d tried to; she suggested “deflector,” instead.) Laurie was a novelist who worked around the clock when she was inspired, and in the beginning (“their salad days,” as Laurie liked to call it, which wasn’t right, really, because they ate way more salad, now), they’d had a loosey-goosey life. A lot of things—a lot of them—fell through the cracks. They had to pay back taxes one year. The car would sit with the same sludge of unchanged oil for months. Or years, until something cracked. They’d run out of coffee and it would be something they complained about until one of them complained the hardest and finally made the trip out to the store, which was kind of far away, because in their early thirties they’d made the decision to leave the city for the country so they could have more time for art. 

Laurie had weathered that move phenomenally: she produced untold amounts of work in the new peace and silence. In the beginning, Mark had been inspired, too: he’d produced some award-winning shorts, and even written one himself which made it all the way to Tribeca, three hours away, but a big deal in the film world. And then, the projects had stopped appealing to him, or stopped feeling urgent, and he’d started tinkering with the house, learning a little carpentry, which was useful to the both of them because the house was kind of falling apart, and he was no longer doing the two-film a year thing that would keep him in the scene, and his name started to carry less weight, until it didn’t carry any weight at all. And the real problem was that it didn’t really matter because Laurie’s books were selling gloriously, so she told him to take time, take all the time he wanted. When really, if he really looked back on it, what she probably wanted was for him to fix more things around the house.

He had pushed for a child. He wasn’t allowed to forget this, by the way. And it felt awful to admit this about a being who brought him so much simple joy, but their little girl kind of decimated their marriage. Or at least, Roxy changed the way they were married to each other. They were married worse.

To Mark and Laurie’s credit, they’d fought off the operations management roles that parenthood auto-suggests. They tried not to have the mundane “checklist” conversations they’d witnessed other parent-friends tick through with defeated eyes. Do you have a snack, the bottle, do we have diapers, do you have the disheveled T-shirt blanket that probably is riddled with Ebola? They skipped these domestic check-ins because doing so felt like proof that they were still “spontaneous” and maybe even “in love,” but these forced inattentions usually resulted in Roxy pissing in her car seat because each of them thought the other one had put the diaper on.

It had never been a conversation. Something about parenthood had depressed Mark, in the full sense of the word, it had filled him and had slowed him, and it hadn’t done this to Laurie, so she was still working furiously and making money and he wasn’t, or he wasn’t making much, and so without either of them really talking about it, he’d become the eighty-nine percent-of-the-time caretaker of their child, and Laurie was the winner of the whole grain, sprouted bread. And the fact that they had never talked about it, hadn’t used words like “time out” or “depression,” hadn’t used any words at all, really, but just kind of shifted into these new positions that saw Laurie leaving Post-It notes that were punctuated as love letters but were obviously chores, had Mark feeling immobile. He resented his wife, and she resented him, but he needed her, and she needed him, also, but not for the kinds of things that he wanted to be needed for. 

That night, Mark asked Laurie if she had an Amazon wish list. In between trying to find a replacement for his opera star and convincing the panicked cinematographer not to jump ship also, he’d been tracking the things that Debbie wanted. She had a lot of stuff on hers. 

“A what?” Laurie was separating the school notices at the kitchen table, again. There was going to be a field trip to the fire station Friday. Their child was going to have to walk through a “smoke trailer,” and if they didn’t want that to happen, he was going to have to call the school. 

“An Amazon wish list. Where you put the things you want.” 

Laurie squinted. She was always squinting at him. “I just buy the things I want.”

“Exactly,” Mark said, pleased. There was an apple on the table for some reason, and he decided to eat it. 

“Are you accusing me?” she asked.

“Of what?” he crunched.

“Of, I don’t know.” She was holding onto a blue piece of paper. The Socktober notices had changed color. The need was urgent, now. 

“Well, what would you have on your wish list if you had one?” he asked.

“I would have less notices from this stupid school.” 

Debbie Meyer’s wish list had 27 items on it. Mark monitored it daily. She wanted a book of poetry by Mary Oliver, a replacement mop head for her spin mop, and a travel memoir by Bill Bryson. But she also wanted a lot of books about God. How incredible to see someone’s desires listed out so plainly! It made Mark dizzy to imagine a world in which he could see what Laurie wanted. The transparency, the happiness, the access of the thing! To know with a single click that you were living with someone whose heart sung for an expandable pull-out cabinet shelf, waterproof adult sandals, a 6.5 inch cast iron pan for making homemade donuts, and a turquoise shawl. It made him start with longing. It was a freedom—a freedom with a framework that he would never know. 

Mark and Laurie had composed wish lists once, under the supervision of their therapist. They’d had to fill out sheets that read, “What would make me feel loved?” at the top. It was bad, definitely, that Mark couldn’t remember what Laurie had on hers. He’d put “speak to me with the same face she uses for her girlfriends,” on his.

They’d made it three sessions with that therapist. Things improved, so they stopped going. Then things got sad again a year later, so Laurie called for an appointment, but the therapist had moved. To North Carolina, the voicemail said.

Socktober passed; 272 pairs of socks were gathered which didn’t come close to the 383 pairs received the previous year. “Humanity is fucked,” Laurie said when she fished the disappointing news from the “Parent/Teacher Communication Folder” in Roxy’s glitter backpack. 

Well it was true, wasn’t it—there wasn’t much hope left. They’d started 2016 with so much fury, tipsy with the potential of their specific rage. Laurie set up automatic payments from their checking account to ACLU and Planned Parenthood; they attended sign-painting parties with Roxy, and took those signs (and Roxy) to crowded government lawns; they hand-wrote postcards to senators; bought sheets and sheets of stamps.  

But you can’t stay in the fury stage; it’s followed by defeat. If you bang and bang on a door, and nobody opens it, barring the exception of the person who actually knocks the door down, most people walk away from the door with a new hunch in their shoulders, burred shame in their heart.

Mark’s wife was a fighter, but she disliked wasted time. Laurie wanted results for her actions that she could track online. At a dinner party the other night, she announced that the lack of action around gun laws had gotten to a point where she fully expected to be shot. That every time she went to some big chain place like Target or Trader Joes, she wondered: Is this the day it happens? In the patio and garden department, considering a pouf?

It was a lot to reckon with. It was. In so many ways, Mark understood why Laurie left him all these Post-It tasks. They ran out of coffee beans, and he got some. Roxy wanted to be a mermaid for Halloween, so he found her a costume. Laurie was worried she’d trip on her mermaid tail getting into the school bus, so on the 31st, he put it in his Google calendar that he’d drop her off at school. On the micro level, their world was manageable and functioning, they were winning every day. He ordered things from Amazon and like clockwork, they showed up. There was a gaping, spreading hole underneath their driveway, enlarging weekly, widening its gullet to swallow the whole world, but at least Laurie could go down knowing that Mark had stocked the fridge. 

A lot of his friends seemed like they were on the brink of losing it. But nobody did.

That Thursday was date night, every second Thursday was. They’d chosen a new place their friends had raved about that had an eighteen-dollar burger. Was this considered a good deal? The burger came with fries so Mark supposed it was.

The waiter handed them the menus, and they took time looking through them even though they’d probably order burgers. While they were waiting for the waiter to return, Laurie made an announcement. 

“I’ve sent the new manuscript to my agent,” she said.

“That’s great!” he answered.

“She’s going to hate it,” she added, pulling at the menu’s tassel.

Mark didn’t say anything else because this was probably true about the agent, who didn’t like Laurie to take risks of any kind. His wife wrote romantic chic-lit comedies about busy moms who did things like send their kids to school plays in an Uber. She’d put some lesbians in this one. 

“Well,” he said. “What now?”

Laurie actually looked at him. She had put on earrings. The unexpected effort both flattered him and made his stomach clench. Three years ago, she had asked him if they should try an open marriage. While they were folding laundry, he recalled. He said he’d rather not. He really did not want to have this conversation again. 

“What now is…” she faltered. The waiter had come back. But then he left again because he’d forgotten his writing pad. 

They both searched for something to say in the gape of the waiter’s absence. 

“How’s the opera proj—film?” Laurie course corrected. There had been hot water over this at the therapist’s, the fact she never called his films films, she called them “projects.” “That’s because so few of them actually become films,” is how she explained it to the therapist. Right in front of him. 

“I think what we’re going to do,” he said, picking at a tear in the menu’s lamination, “I think what we’re going to do is change the filming dates. To…accommodate her new schedule. So, like, April probably, instead.”

Mark watched Laurie work through the way this information would impact her own schedule. Her lips tightened, brow furrowed, the whole thing. 

“You couldn’t have mentioned this before?”

Mark stopped himself from saying that he was mentioning it now. He stopped himself, but it didn’t feel very good. “If we don’t get her back, the whole film will fall apart.”

His wife was going to say something, but the waiter re-appeared. 

“Are you ready to order?” the waiter asked.

“Um, we’ll have the burgers?” he replied. “Medium, for both?”

Laurie exhaled. She shut her menu. “I’ll have the mussels, actually.”

“Oh,” said Mark, once the waiter had left them. “Wow.”

“I know,” said Laurie. “Wild!”

Her earrings made a swoosh-swoosh sound when she laughed her little laugh.

In November, the cinematographer quit because April didn’t work for him, and Debbie added a new book to her wishlist: The Uncertain Church. She also posted a two-star review of her garlic press. We have now been using it regularly (a couple of times a week) for 8 months and the metal has become bent and rendered itself useless. It is possible, she accommodated, that we pushed too hard.

The fact that Debbie seemed to be flailing in her life and her belief system made Mark want to be strong for her. It made him want to be strong for the entire world. It made him want to be the exceptional person who knocks down the fucking door. 

He called up the cinematographer and used strong words. He ordered a drain cap and installed it in his gutter so that the leaves and chipmunks and whatever wouldn’t keep going down the S drain and clogging everything up. He went to a new Tai Chi class at the town recreation center and let everything flow. And when he found a Tupperware in his fridge with a Post-It note that said Really bony whitefish? Mark stuck another note on it that said, This is NOT my problem.

That night, for the first time in forever, Laurie initiated sex.

By December, Mark had convinced their original star to come back into the fold using the age-old solution of flattery and cash. They’d shoot the film in May, which was a terrible month to shoot in (black flies, persistent mud), but they’d shoot the film with her. Mark celebrated by taking Roxy and Laurie to the local church.

It had been something he’d been thinking about for quite a while now, going to a church. The catalyst had been the underlying piety of Debbie’s careful wishlist (she’d purchased a new copy of He Whispers Your Name, but had bought God Has a Plan for Your Life, used), but also, there was the quagmire of Roxy’s current age: she didn’t take what her parents said as fact any more, for each question, there were more questions—her mind was like an existential set of Russian nesting dolls. 

And then there had been pet week: the disastrousness of that. One day, Roxy came home with a missive in her Communication Folder to bring in a pet photo: this was what the kindergarteners were doing, bringing in photos of their pets. This was going to be difficult for Roxy, because the Lambros’ family pet was dead. Or at least they thought he was dead: Muffins had not come home one night and after three days of steel-hearted optimism, Laurie told Roxy that he’d gone to Coyoteland, which she had meant as a euphemism, obviously, but just made things more complicated. (“When will he be back?”)

So an irate Laurie had sent Roxy off to school with a picture of their dead cat, Muffins, when he’d been alive. (“What kind of public school assumes that everyone has a pet?” she asked.) It did not go well. No it did not go smoothly, and now Roxy was talking about death all the time, and because Mark didn’t have the answers, he had started thinking that they should go to church to find them. They had one right across the town green, a nice place that flew the rainbow flag and offered monthly “maker space” activities where the elderly passed on their knowledge of…well, Mark didn’t know of what, exactly, because they hadn’t been yet, but the young received instruction in something from the old. Aside from gratis activities and the fact that they had something to do on Sundays other than make pancakes (which, honestly, took Mark all day to digest), there was something stronger pulling him—all of them—to the Northwest Congregational. Wasn’t it kind of irresponsible to raise a child without religion? Not that religion was ever something he or Laurie had. Laurie’s parents were admitted atheists, and Mark had grown up thinking he was “epa-skopp-lian.” 

But still. A person should have answers. Especially right now when everything…felt hard. A person should be allowed to indulge in the belief of a master plan holder if it enables them to floss, drive on the right side of the dotted line, not phone all of it in.

To Mark’s astonishment, Laurie was enthusiastic about the church outing when he found the courage to suggest it. She spoke of it like a field trip—like a trip to the museum. At an ice cream social fundraiser for the school’s roof (which needed reinforcement, an assurance of some kind), she regaled their circle with a teaser about “their upcoming trip to church.” What she didn’t tell their friends is that—after that initial visit—the Lambros’ had kept going.

Roxy loved the little “houses” for the Bibles in the backs of all the pews. She liked to follow along in her prayer book like a “real” reader, and sing the grown-up songs. As for Mark, he loved the Pastor. (It was “Pastor,” right? The Fathers were Catholics?) Mark loved Pastor Rick in a way that made him think (worry?) that he was opening to the wonders of the world outside his house. Plus, he was so progressive! PR—as Laurie called him—was tall with boyish skin and a pair of glasses that weren’t interesting at all. He was a new kind of hip—earnest, vitamized. PR incorporated pop culture into his sermons and he ran around the neighborhood in freshly laundered sports gear; if Mark and Roxy made it out of the house five minutes earlier than usual, they could watch Pastor Rick run by in his ironed clothing while they waited for the bus. 

It was becoming very important to Mark, the church-going, but it was a fragile thing. He had no idea why Laurie was encouraging it—participating in it—and he was too afraid to ask. If he asked, he worried that it would wake her from some reverie, cause her to announce that now that they were expected there on Sundays, it was time to stop.

So Mark didn’t prod and Laurie didn’t say anything, and soon enough the holiday gauntlet was upon them, and they powered on. The church-going felt even more restorative and significant during the holidays—plus, it distracted Mark from the guck of daily life. In church, Mark didn’t need to consider whether Roxy was too young for the computer tablet she desperately wanted for Christmas, or ponder where he was going to find three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of lighting equipment with the hundred-thousand dollars he had left to light his film. No. On Sundays, Mark could think about babies in mangers, and what myrrh actually smelled like, and whether there was any way—like, scientifically?—that there actually was a God. Church kept him from, well, grinding, really. It sprung him from the cog. And it got him thinking of the big things—the great big, great beyond.

The best thing was the sermons, though. Thanks to these, Mark was finding answers to questions he didn’t know he’d been holding in the closed-up interrogation room inside him. Last week, Mark had spent hours mulling about the Pastor’s view on credence: “Don’t put a question mark where God has put a period.” But two weeks ago was the really good one; Mark’s favorite so far. Pastor Rick talked about Tom Petty, who had stopped living, recently. He used some of Petty’s lyrics to explain God’s relationship to his flock. 

It’s alright if you love me
 It’s alright if you don’t
 I’m not afraid of you running away, Honey
 I get the feeling you won’t

“God waits,” the Pastor said. “He is patient. He’s the most patient man there is.”

Laurie was changing, too, from church, and definitely for the better. Normally, by this time of year (post Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas—or rather, the “Winter Holidays,” as Mark had recently been corrected by a woke gaffer), Laurie would have had Mark researching different thread counts and scouring holiday listicles for teacher appreciation gifts that made elementary teachers feel “seen,” but this year, she declared an entirely different tack. They were going to focus on giving experiences instead of things; privilege memory making over buying. So far, all of the ideas that Laurie was culling off of lifestyle blogs actually did entail buying things, but Mark was game. They were looking at different camping tents, and Laurie really wanted to find an ice skating rink for a family outing—they could rent the skates and get one of those little hobbly things for Roxy, who had never been on skates before. They were going to bake, also. They were going to bake for other people. Roxy was not going to take the news well that she would be giving, rather than getting this Ch—holiday season. There would be no tablet. But they agreed to present a united front about it. They agreed to stay the course.

Meanwhile, in Utah, things were not so good. The formerly steadfast Debbie Meyer seemed to be experiencing a real form of malaise. She was adding all kinds of funky items to her wishlist, but her actual purchases remained run-of-the-mill, which made Mark think that her soul’s song wasn’t being heard. For example: she wanted a weighted blanket; she purchased a second set of “Tike Right” drink trainers which she only gave three stars. Worse still, she left a one-star review of the choose-a-sheet paper towels she’d switched out for the basic family roll from a “bulk retailer” she’d previously favored. (“This product might be appropriate for a family who can’t easily make it to a supermarket, but I plan to switch back to my old paper towels after this because those towels were cheaper.”)

It was just defeatist, this attitude, defeatist and not like her. The Debbie who had taught Mark something important about faith and its rewards would have credited her children for making fewer spills than they used to, so she was one of the lucky few who didn’t have to be concerned about a superior absorption rate for a higher price. “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” 2 Corinthians 12:9, she might have added, the Debbie he rooted for.

Even though it would break the “memories over materialism” credo that he and Laurie had aligned on, it just didn’t seem right—it didn’t—to let Debbie go ungifted. It was in Mark’s power to buy something off her Amazon wish list—he had looked it up, it was a new service they were offering called “Be an Awesome Neighbor.” And while Mark recognized that it was a little weird to buy something for someone that you had never actually met, the truth was that they had been through something together, he and Debbie, and so it wasn’t invasive, what he was considering doing. It was modern friendliness; a long-distance version of goodwill. 

Mark had been eyeing the Warm Tartan Checked Shawl that Debbie had had on her list forever, but then—two weeks before Christmas— it went out of stock. (This occurred before Debbie checked the item off as “purchased,” which pained him, on her behalf.) Of course there were the Mary Oliver back titles, but even Mark recognized that the sending of poetry was a step over the line. Laurie—if she knew any of this—would consider it all over the line, that you didn’t buy things for strangers that you had effectively been surveilling, but Mark had come far enough along in his intrapersonal efforts to recognize that this would be Laurie’s criticism of the situation, not Mark’s. As for Debbie? Debbie in Salt Lake with the falcon and the spills? Debbie would appreciate having her bird call answered, even if it was by a customer named “Spyro the Dragon” with no customer reviews.

Reminders about the Mitten Tree and the Cookie Drive flooded Roxy’s backpack; Laurie’s purchases of buckwheat flour and silicone oven mitts and Healthy Cookie Cookbooks flooded their mailbox. It became December 18th, 20th, and still Mark hadn’t found the perfect thing for Debbie. In search engines bearing mistletoe logos and chili pepper Christmas lights, Mark browsed gift lists for friends who were “having a hard time.” He found a furry worry monster with a zippered pouch that you could put your scribbled doubts inside of, compression socks with affirmations on them, non-stick egg rings in the shape of hearts. Mark paused —not for the first time—over the weighted blanket that had been on Debbie’s list for months now, his internal sensor zinging because of 1) the price and 2) the fact that Laurie would think it way over the line to give a stranger an item for her bed.

Grey and queen sized, non-toxic and hypoallergenic (which were kind of the same thing?), the blanket that Debbie wish-listed had glass beads inside that aided Deep Pressure Stimulation for an epic sense of calm. One-hundred-and-forty dollars (without shipping!) was way more than Mark should spend on a stranger—honestly, it was approaching the most he’d ever spent on Laurie from his own account—but still, the blanket felt just right. This was his parting gift to Debbie, proof that Mark wished her the very best on her particular path, which couldn’t be his path any longer—Laurie was keen on them doing a digital detox for the new year, so his access to the Internet was going to be severely pinched.

Mark ticked the blanket from her wish list and followed the “Be an Awesome Neighbor” instructions that an Amazon video tutorial had showed him how to do. He manifested the happy life he wished for Debbie inside of her new blanket, along with dreams that smelled of Nalgene bottles and citrus mint-cleaned floors. In his stomach, in the dark part where he kept the things that even PR hadn’t troubled, Mark registered that he was going to miss Debbie’s children and the things they spilled on floors, miss the demanding titles of the books she wanted to read, the real-time tracking of the money that she was saving up to spend. But you had to let go of an apple seed to grow an apple tree. (Pastor Rick that Sunday.) And so, with a sentiment closer to resignation than acceptance, Mark confirmed the buy.

White Supremacy Is America’s Original Pyramid Scheme

Posted on by Jo Lou

Ijeoma Oluo started writing about issues of race out of necessity. “The issues that were impacting me, my family and other Black people in Seattle were really incongruent with Seattle’s political attitude and reputation. It felt like gaslighting, and I was trying to find a way for people to get engaged.” Oluo started by sharing her work on Facebook and on Twitter. “First mostly people of color in the Seattle area started really being drawn to the work and asking if they could repost it.” Soon magazines and editors began contacting her. “Within a matter of years I really had to make a choice if I was going to continue writing or with my day job because I couldn’t do both. when you find a space where you can write openly about things that matter and can make a difference there really isn’t a choice.”

Her New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race guides readers in thinking and discussing race, gender, and sexuality while deconstructing white supremacy. Each chapter focuses on questions such as “What is intersectionality and why do I need it?” or “I just got called a racist. What do I do now?”

Oluo and I spoke by Skype the week that the Chicago teachers went on strike, a few days after Atatiana Jefferson was shot to death by the police, and a week before the 45th president deemed the current impeachment hearings a lynching. As a citizen of a nation founded on the twin evils of enslavement and genocide, I hesitate to say that Oluo’s scholarship is needed now more than ever, but I know that it is needed.

Oluo and I spoke about the model minority myth, how the origins of the police force play into the murders of people of color, and why protecting the childhoods of children of color should be viewed as a national emergency.

Deirdre Sugiuchi: You talk about white supremacy as being this nation’s original pyramid scheme,  one where even those who have lost everything are still waiting to cash out. Do you mind elaborating on this?

Ijeoma Oluo: The system of capitalism is a brutal system that exploits almost everyone. Slavery and the American system of race were created as a function to justify capitalism by getting as much free labor as possible out of Black people to justify the brutality required from it. Also it was to give a space for lower-income whites to play a part in the system to help uphold the system when they were going to get very little payout. The promise was that you were going to get something out of it, that you were going to at least be better off than Black people, that you were going to get your reward, that if you worked hard enough you were going to rise to the top in a way that people of color never would, because it was your birthright, not theirs. 

The system of capitalism is a brutal system that exploits almost everyone.

It helped convince lower and middle-class white Americans to play their part in exploiting Black people and Native people, in order to increase their chances and their payday that was never going to come, because capitalism has always been designed to make sure that a select few get the most profit out of the system. It’s a pyramid scheme. You’ve got middle managers getting lower-class whites to buy in constantly, telling them, “Your paycheck’s coming, your paycheck’s coming” and everyone is stepping on everyone else but all that cash is already spent. It’s already allocated to everyone on top.

People have wasted their entire lives and have participated in really violent systems in the hopes that one day it will pay off for them and all that it’s giving them right now is just a sense of identity and the ability to look in the mirror and go, “At least I’m not Black.” They’re losing so much more potential because there could be using a different system, one that doesn’t restrict 98% of the wealth to the very top. 

DS: Agreed. It’s so disgusting to me that right now the working class is being taxed at a higher rate than the billionaire class. We just had this highly racialized election and people have blatantly got screwed over and they’re still buying in. Speaking of, I love that you cite Ronald Takaki, who wrote about how racism is experienced by different ethnic groups in America and introduced me to that subject from a historical perspective.

IO: I first read Takaki in college. His work is so fundamental to talking about race in America, and the bamboo ceiling, and the model minority myth. I wish he was referenced more in contemporary works on race.

DS: I actually wanted to ask you about the model minority myth, which you say is an act of racism that harms Asian Americans and benefits white supremacy. Can you elaborate?

IO: It’s really important to recognize that the model minority myth was created to first be used against Black Americans and to say, “Look they have nothing to complain about. Look how great Asian Americans are doing.” It harms Asian Americans on so many levels because the story of the success of Asian Americans has to do with patterns of migration, who is allowed in and who isn’t, but also people like to lump all Asian Americans together. Asia is a huge section of the world and has so many countries and so many cultures and circumstances. [Lumping all Asian Americans together] ultimately erases the struggles that many Asian Americans face. It hides extreme wealth and opportunity imbalances within Asian American communities. It makes it much harder for many Asian Americans to effectively advocate for services and to be heard when they do because people go: “what are you talking about? You’re Asian, you should be just fine.”

It’s important to recognize that the model minority myth was created to first be used against Black Americans.

It also hides other issues impacting Asian American communities like the fact that you may well be able to rise up to middle management but your chances of being promoted to upper levels of management if you are Asian American is decreased. Your chances of being elected to government and having that sort of representation are decreased. Your chances of getting help for domestic violence or mental health issues are decreased because these myths are ingrained, that Asian Americans are strong, that they’re stoic, but also that they’re not really leaders. All of these work against Asian Americans and they also work against other people of color because that message is used to silence the issues of other groups of color have as well. It also stops any sort of solidarity between Asian Americans and Black Americans or Latinx Americans or Native people, because people are played against each other in a way that only serves white supremacy.

DS: Right now the nation is reeling from the death of Joshua Brown and Atatiana Jefferson, and before that from the death of Botham Jean. This past weekend here in my community of Athens, Georgia, a 28-year-old man is in serious condition due to excessive use of police force. You say that few subjects shed greater light on the racial divide in the United States than the subject of police brutality. Can you discuss the history of the police forces and how they were born from the Night Patrols, the units who controlled Black and Native populations in New England and assisted the Slave Patrols?

IO: I think it’s really important for people to understand that our police forces are rooted in violent white supremacy and they’ve always had dual purposes. The dual roles of these were to capture escaped slaves and protect white citizens. From the very beginning of the police forces we’ve had two separate mandates—to control Black people and to protect white people. It’s important to know that this is in the DNA. This is how our police forces were started.

The night patrols were precursors to police in America. Many white people who don’t understand the issue of police brutality because they are being served by that other mandate to protect and serve white people and it’s hard to reconcile how one officer you trust to save your life will take the life of a Black person. It’s important to recognize that the entire training, that the entire structure of the police force has been designed to ensure that that is what happens, that they will protect and serve whiteness and that they will control violently if necessary Black Americans. That dual identity has always existed and is part of the bones of American policing.

DS: This morning I was listening to NPR and they were talking about how the warrior mindset played into the death of Atatiana Jefferson. Basically this mindset views people as threats and that’s the way officers are trained. 

IO: That’s the part that always confuses me because the reason why we are supposed to appreciate police forces is because they’re supposed to risk their lives for us, but at the same time it is very clear even by the justifications given for the death of murders of Black Americans is that they are never supposed to risk their lives for us. Even at a hint of possible danger, they are trained to shoot us. So then why do we have police when they are never trained to risk their lives for ours?  Why do they have all of these vests? Why do they get all these accolades if they aren’t supposed to take some risk and that risk is this person may not be armed? 

From the very beginning, the police forces had two separate mandates—to control Black people and to protect white people.

But if that person is Black, that is not how they are trained. They’re trained to shoot to kill. They are not trained to protect us. They are not trained to risk their lives for us and that’s something I think we really need to understand is that all this defense people give for police, what they’re actually saying is when they say that phone could have been a gun, that hand in that pocket could have been a gun, what they’re actually saying is I’m not willing to risk my life. My life is so much more important than yours but even the hypothetical risk that your hand could be a weapon means that you deserve to die because that hypothetical chance is not big enough to take. I’m that much more important than you. It’s really what we’re saying about the value of Blacks and Native Americans in this country, that the hypothetical risk to our police isn’t even worth it and they’re the one people tasked to risk their lives to save people. That hypocrisy always just gets to me.

DS: I taught in public schools for fifteen years and was fascinated by all you had to say about the school-to-prison pipeline. Can you discuss how the high levels of suspensions and expulsions lead to the school-to-prison pipeline?

IO: Any time you have youths out of school, you’re going to increase the chance of crime, so when you have youths of color being released continuously from school you increase the likelihood with all the free time and the bad decisions that students make they’re going to tend towards crime. Also what we see is school resource officers are used to enforce suspensions and expulsions. Often the student is not just suspended and expelled, they are arrested. School resource officers really escalate the situation and not only that, they are predominantly placed in schools with large amounts of African American children. They predominantly target them in a way that doesn’t actually match any increase in violence, drugs, or truancy at school. They target them because they are there. 

Once a child is entered into that system, it’s very hard to get them out. Being removed from their friends or their social support groups and placed in detention centers, it is really hard for them to ever get back on track and it’s very hard for them to be treated like children worth educating by the school system after that, and it’s really the beginning of a lifelong relationship with a criminal justice system that really robs our youth of their whole livelihoods. It’s really important to recognize how heavy use of school resource officers, how unchecked discipline programs of suspensions and expulsions, are forcing our Black children and Hispanic children into the system, especially if they are at a really young age—dooming them to a life in prison before they even know what hit them. 

We have to find a solution to this, we have to start recognizing the right to education, a safe education for all of our children. What is deemed a threat to our children is different from what is deemed a threat to white children. Maybe some families might feel safer sending their white children to a school that has a school resource officer, but it often does not make Black and brown children any safer at all. Just like the rest of our criminal justice system, there is very little accountability for how youth of color are treated by the system. Very few people are looking into these numbers and figuring out nationwide how many of our children are being stolen. Activists are, of course, but I’m talking about the accountability government level. Our youth jails are filled with children of color, no matter how few children a color are within a demographic area. That absolutely needs to stop.

DS: You talk about how we are teaching from textbooks that teach white culture and taking tests designed for white students. A lot of the teachers are majority-white and come from different backgrounds from their students.  All of these things make it harder for children of color to succeed in school. How can we have a diverse and inclusive education for all of our kids in a white supremacist society?

IO: I think it’s important to realize that no matter what the racial makeup of your classroom is, you’re not adequately educating your children if you’re not providing a diverse and inclusive curriculum, if you’re not recognizing that absolutely every subject has contributions from people of color and it’s more than just one month a year for one racial and demographic. Your children aren’t learning anything accurate or adequate about any field—math, science, English, history, social studies—if they aren’t learning it from a diverse perspective. 

You’re not adequately educating your children if you’re not providing a diverse and inclusive curriculum.

Often times when I go into schools and workshop with teachers, we start talking about what sort of opportunities each class has to teach about to increase the diversity and teach through a racial justice lens, it’s often really hard for them to imagine the different ways. But when I do these exercises with students, especially students of color, they have a myriad of experiences. In almost every single class we have billboards of ideas from them that they know that if they had a class that really cared about racial justice, teachers that cared about racial justice, they have so many ideas about what that would look like. Because we are a racialized people, every subject has a racialized lens. Every subject has people of all races that are contributing to it and deserves to be heard and we need to normalize the thought of people of color existing and achieving and interacting in every system and every subject matter that our students learn about, and that’s something that students of color need to see and that’s something that white students need to see.

Oftentimes teachers only tend to see this issue if they have a high minority population in their class, but they’re also cheating their white students out of an adequate education if they don’t do this.

DS: For the most part I’ve only taught predominantly students of color, but thinking of my own education, I agree, it’s imperative for people, for society, to understand. I so appreciate you writing about children and sharing stories about your family and yourself. You say the biggest tragedy of our schools is the loss of childhood joy. Can you elaborate on this?

IO: Our children, I mean children of color, are not able to be rambunctious. They’re not able to make mistakes. They’re not able to be rebellious. They feel the thrill of discovery of seeing someone who looks like them in their textbooks, of getting the praise and attention from their teachers that white children get. All of these things are integral to childhood. They’re part of the whole fairy tale that we tell about childhood and it’s robbing our youth. And of course, in the more extreme, they’re being robbed of their youth when they are kicked out of school, when they are being sent to prison at an early age, when they are being brutalized by school resource officers. They’re being robbed of childhood and we can’t get those years back. 

As adults we can sue, we can do whatever we can to try to rectify the harm done to adults, but we cannot give a childhood back to someone. Those years never come back. Those formative experiences never come back and that absolutely breaks my heart when I see how often being an actual child just costs Black children, Native children, Hispanic children, in particular. They don’t get that back. They don’t get that carefree joy back. It robs you of something for the rest of your life and that absolutely breaks my heart. Too often instead of looking at how can we preserve and protect childhood for children of color, we look at how can we compensate them after it has already been stolen. And you can’t ever. To me, it’s an emergency. Each child that goes through the system without us doing something has lost something that can never be returned and that’s an absolute tragedy and a crime. We have to treat it like every day that we don’t address this, like we have lost another childhood. We have to treat it with that urgency.