Did you know that there’s an entire genre of books dedicated to white people going to Nepal to find themselves? I didn’t either! But it’s not so surprising since the release of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love, and its 2010 film adaptation, which has caused an uptick in tourism to Asia. Here’s the narrative: a wealthy white woman travels to “exotic” (brown) locales in to “slum” it with other expats in ashrams, only to leave with an Instagram post using local people as props without an actual life-changing epiphany (beyond the whole tired “these people are so happy with so little” white guilt mantra).
Instead of reading these cliched (and boring) narratives of poverty tourism, why not pivot to books relaying the experiences of American people of color going abroad? Let’s take the narratives of people of color and see how their experiences—whether it’s discovering their ancestral homelands or starting afresh in a new country—translate into new perspectives.
Eat, Pray, Love had its moment, but it’s time to move onto these captivating novels about Americans of color traveling and living abroad.
This enticing novel about espionage and seduction takes place in 1986 and jumps from New York to Burkina Faso to Martinique. A young black woman who works in the FBI is assigned to a case involving the president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, whose Marxist agenda is seen as threatening to the American government. With her fearless voice, Wilkinson examines patriotism, nationalism and sacrifice on an intimate level.
Caramelo follows the Reyes’ family’s annual summer road trip from Chicago to Mexico City through the perspective of the youngest daughter and only girl, Lala. Lala’s problems range from dealing with six, rambunctious older brothers to living between borders, but those become minuscule when she discovers her misunderstanding of her grandmother’s life. Cisneros dissects storytelling, tradition, and family in her seventh book, published almost twenty years after The House on Mango Street.
A gifted mathematician from the Midwest is scrutinized for her mixed-race background in both her personal and professional lives. She goes on to be one of the few women graduates of MIT in the 1960s and then to complete a fellowship in Bonn, Germany, where she plans on solving the challenging Riemann hypothesis. Math, family, and legacy are beautifully explored in Chung’s most recent novel.
What happens when a Turkish American freshman at Harvard attempts to flirt with her crush over email in 1995? Quite obviously, she follows her unrequited love all the way to Hungary! The Idiot is a funny, poignant novel about a perceptive, yet sometimes clueless, young woman navigating her way in Cambridge and the tiny Hungarian village where she teaches English for a summer.
Also a story about fleeing Chicago, Black Deutschland follows a young Black man recently released from rehab who is heading to Berlin with the hope of starting afresh and staying sober. Lusting over the queer, dreamy life in Berlin he’s been envisioning, Jed is quickly doused with a splash of reality. While he does indulge in nightlife, sex, and love, he also deals with a city wrought with racism.
Darius the Great Is Not Okay is a candid and tender story about a biracial high school student with depression. Feeling isolated from both his family and white classmates in Portland, Darius expects no different when he goes to Iran for the first time. This changes when he meets Sohrab, the boy next door who integrates him into everyday life in Iran by introducing him to local games and customs and helping him understand real friendship.
Three American women living in Hong Kong make up the expat community of wealthy people living in the city-state. One of them, a Korean American who’s recently graduated from Columbia, hopes to start anew after a mysterious tragedy. Her life converges with those of a rich housewife and a woman wishing to conceive a child in this novel about grief, identity, and connection.
Sometimes a story is too large or unwieldy to fit in a single, discrete package. Maybe the narrative at hand is too far-reaching to be crammed into a single book, or even a series of books (or films or graphic novels or insert-medium-here); sometimes a story can only be told by weaving together multiple formats. Such is the case with Dalton Deschain and the Traveling Show.
Dalton Deschain and the Traveling Show is a story universe, a band, a series of novellas, and a narrative that is still unfolding at the time of this writing. The first part of the story to be released was Catherine (a bookand EP), followed by Roberta (a bookand EP), and this month they’re releasing their latest entry, Casey, which will be—surprise!—a joint book and EP.
The titular Dalton Deschain is both a character in the story and a real-life human person, the latter of whom I sat down with to discuss this latest entry in the DDTS universe and the nuts and bolts of writing a cross-platform story.
Calvin Kasulke: I’m going to ask that you account for yourself on the record. Can you explain what Dalton Deschain and the Traveling Show is?
Dalton Deschain: We are a band. I think that’s first and foremost. We call ourselves a “pulp punk” band out of an aversion to genre labels, but also because there’s the allusion to pop punk, which we kind of are, but with pulpy-horror-sci-fi lyrics.
We follow a musician who is possessed by a demon who takes control of a circus and is a real bad guy.
We play regular rock shows but they tend to have a more theatrical bent to them, because all of our songs tell one continuous story about an alternate-universe 1940s United States after we lost World War II. We follow a musician who is possessed by a demon who takes control of a circus and is a real bad guy.
It’s this big, sprawling ensemble piece about circus “freaks” in the freak show and a demon and this girl that he sort of entraps into his orbit and a psychic janitor on the east coast—all these wild sci-fi horror elements just put in a blender, and that story is told through the music. We also release novellas with our albums that give you the entire story from front to back.
CK:How do you decide what part of the story goes into a song versus what goes into a novella?
DD: One of the first things I decided is that the songs needed to be accessible on their own, so if you weren’t interested in the story concept at all, you could still like the music. I don’t want to demand this dedication from every person that listens to the music, so I really wanted to avoid getting too in the weeds with the lore in the lyrics. There are some concept bands out there whose lyrics are just incomprehensible unless you know the whole story, and I definitely didn’t want to do that.
It almost comes down to the difference in opera between an aria and recitative, right? In an aria, it’s more a contemplative piece on the emotion that they’re feeling, while your recitatives are your less melodic, more fit-in-the-plot kind of things. That’s kind of where I draw the line: that these songs should be about primarily whatever emotional experience this character is going through in the scene, and that it should always be grounded in my reality or experiences. So I take whatever is happening to the characters in the story—whatever they’re feeling in that moment—and sort of write a song about both of us.
At the same time, I actually try not to cover the same ground in the story. Like in “Rabid,” which is on the EP, it covers the dog man’s traumatic relationship with a girl when he was in grade school. That’s not in the story. It’s kind of alluded to, but the way I see it, that ground’s already been covered in another section. If you know the music—which you probably do if you’re reading the book—you’re like, “oh, that’s someone in the song,” but otherwise it doesn’t detract anything from the story not to know that. I don’t need to spend five pages telling that story when there’s a song that does it already. I think they can sort of live together while each exploring their own little corners.
CK: Did you come up with the story first, and that then necessitated the band and the novellas? What was the order of operations in terms of creating the story, band and books?
DD: They fed off each other until they grew into an unstoppable nightmare. (Laughs)
Technically the story came first. I was writing music in college. I’d always wanted to write a concept album, but I never thought I would have an idea for one—I was like, “I just don’t have ideas.” And then I had this terrible nightmare this one night when I was a sophomore, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I developed this story around it and I was like, “oh, I can make that a concept album.”
At the time it was way simpler. It was really two characters. It was Dalton and Catherine, and it was: Dalton is a musician. He gets possessed by a demon. He tricks Catherine into falling in love with him. He takes political power and hurts a bunch of people and something bad happens at the end. And that was it and I was like, it’ll be 12 songs and it’ll be done. I had the outline done, but I was in college and I didn’t have a band so I put it on the back burner.
When I came to New York I didn’t want to just drop 12 songs and be like, “oh, well that’s it, I’m done,” but have nobody listen to it because I hadn’t done any groundwork to get people into the story. So I started writing sort of auxiliary songs, and I would write a song and think, well how does this fit into the universe?
So I ended up writing about these characters and then the story got bigger. As I would write songs, new characters would work their way into the story and the story would grow and then they would introduce more new characters. Then they would introduce new songs and it all just kinda grew until I was like, “Oh I think I have like a very complete thing. I’m not adding onto it much anymore.”
The songs don’t actually tell the details of the story. They tell the emotional beats of the story.
As far as the books coming into it, that came in much later. Because the plan was still for it to all happen through music. It would just be a band thing. But as I said before, the songs don’t actually tell the details of the story. They tell the emotional beats of the story. And so people were interested, well, what is the actual story you’re telling?
I started writing these little journal updates I would send out to our email list—it’d be a little diary entry from one of the characters. But as I kept going, they kept getting longer and longer and longer until I was like, oh, this is too long for the mailing list.
But I was also starting to get more confident with every diary entry I wrote, I was like, well, actually this is much better-written than the one before. Maybe I can actually write this story. So that’s the idea for the EP trilogy that we’re concluding now, writing the novella for each of them, each focusing on a character—with the goal not yet to tell the entire story, but to introduce these characters. Once I was writing it, I was like, well this seems like the best vessel for it. We’ll write it like a series of novels.
CK:It sounds like everything you write helps inform the next thing you’re writing, not just in terms of the actual story, chronologically, but in terms of the structure of the next piece.
DD: Yeah, I’ve been figuring out the structure of this kind of as I go and every time I try something and I think it works, I go, “Oh we can keep going further in that direction.” I’ve definitely tried some things that didn’t work. The first email diary thing didn’t really work because it was too vague. People didn’t get a good sense of what it was.
Telling the story on stage has evolved a lot as well. We found a more narrative and engaging way of telling it that took years to find. I kept trying different weird little bits to try to make the storytelling palatable. And I kept trying to find obscure ways of doing it. I think I was afraid of telling it straight on. I thought I needed to find this abstract way of doing it, but it’s not what people wanted. Songs are the abstract way of doing it. People wanted to know, “Now just tell me the story, tell me what’s going on.”
CK: We should probably address that your name is Dalton Deschain, and also the villain of the story is named Dalton. When you had the initial dream in college, were you going by Dalton by then?
DD: No, I never intended to actually go by Dalton permanently. I named the character Dalton Deschain. As I was moving to New York, I was like, well, I should make that my stage name because when I perform, I have this character—not really grasping that when you move to a new city and start playing, there’s no wall between you and the audience. It was much easier for everybody to know me as Dalton, and so that just became the default.
Photo courtesy of Dalton Deschain
CK:Talking about concept albums, are there other bands or artists or other equally confusing nouns that are influences?
DD: I mean, I’m a David Bowie fan till I die. I always wanted to write my Ziggy Stardust. Probably the biggest obvious influence is Coheed and Cambria, who told their story over multiple albums, but also did the supplementary work, like releasing novels of their albums. My idea was to take that Coheed approach and focus it a little bit more. It always felt like they were music first, and tried different approaches to tell their story—a comic book with one album, a novel with another. I wanted to find a way to more consistently tell the story from beginning to end.
I had, it turns out, a story that was being told in two forms simultaneously. And I had one of those forms figured out and I didn’t know what the other one was, but I kept pushing on until it found itself.
CK:And it sounds like part of figuring out how to tell the story was audience feedback?
DD: At the beginning I wanted to be mysterious about it. David Bowie never came out on stage and was like, “This is the story of Ziggy Stardust.” It was all kind of ethereal, and I wanted to do the same thing where I could say, “The story is about these things,” but it’s all in the music.
And people wanted more, they were like, “Well, what is that about? Who is this character? What do they do like, what’s the thing that happened?” I really wanted to be mysterious about it, but what I thought was coming across clearly wasn’t coming across. If what I think I’m conveying is not being accurately conveyed, then I need to find another way for it to be delivered.
CK: I’ve got a nice question and kind of a mean question. Which one do you want first?
DD: The mean one.
CK: Why not just write a musical?
DD: No, this is a good question. This is the question I get most often. Literally everyone’s first reaction when they see the band is “you should write a musical.” And that’s legit. I would love to write a musical. But a musical is a different form, and I don’t think this story fits in that form.
It’s not one-to-one analogous with a rock show that has theatrical elements to it. Some things bridge that gap like “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which is another work we’re very influenced by. But the story’s too long. If I want to tell this the way I want to tell it, hitting all these emotional beats and letting you follow these characters in this ensemble piece from beginning to end, we’re looking at 35 songs and that’s probably too big for a musical.
I want this to tell the story but also be a fun thing you will jam to in your personal life.
The songs have to serve another purpose as well. I want this to tell the story but also be a fun thing you will jam to in your personal life, and be at a rock show and dance to.
I like the idea of this being a surprise to people. I like people not knowing what they’re getting into—maybe they’re going to a show to see a different band, they’re not planning on a night at the theater. They go in and they’re just expecting a rock show and they get us. They get the fun high energy hooks and music and they also get this weird comic book thing going on, and there are props and there’s dialogue and things like that. That may translate to the stage in some version, but that’s not the primary thing we’re going for.
CK: The nice question is: What are the advantages and disadvantages to writing this way, in multiple formats?
DD: The advantage is, just on a superficial level, that it helps us stand out. There’s a lot of music out there right now, and with streaming you have immediate access to any song you’ve ever wanted. You can find a song you like on a playlist and that may be the only song you ever listen to from that band, because there’s no reason to really seek out more unless you’re really in love with it or you want to know more about that person or that band. You need to have something more than just the music now. We’re not just the songs we make, we have an entire universe that if you want, you can get lost in it.
The disadvantages are keeping it clean and organized in a way that’s accessible. I think we’re finally getting to a point where we do just have the music and we have the books, with the mailing list is as a bridge. You started one, you graduate to the other—but I think that can be confusing to people, where maybe they do discover us on just like Spotify and they’re like, what’s going on with this band? There’s a worry of being impenetrable, and finding a way to make it clear to people what it is that we do. You’ve got to find a way to make it cohesive across the board, that’s a disadvantage.
But I get to write anything I want in a bunch of different ways. It’s more freeing as a creative person to not just be like, “I have this next thing I want to tell, I have to make it a song. Let me find a way to make this a song.” Instead, I can make it a song, but maybe the idea doesn’t need a song. Maybe it’s just part of the book. Or maybe I just wrote a part of the book, and I’m really turning the scene over. Maybe then I’ll want to turn that scene into a song.
It’s almost like having a whole creative community in your own brain. You’re feeding off yourself. You’d be like, “Ooh, that thing you did is cool. Let me take a spin on that,” you know? But both people are me. It’s more avenues for creation, which can be overwhelming, but it’s also way more fun.
When Greta Gerwig’s Little Womenhits the screen this Christmas, it will mark the eighth time Louisa May Alcott’s beloved 1869 novel has been adapted for film since 1912. The story about four sisters has also been made into TV shows, plays, operas, and even two animeseries. Widely beloved for its plucky heroine and romantic realism, the tale has such staying power that the book has never been out of print in the 150 years since its original publication. Little Women has proven timeless in its appeal; the story conjures images of New England fall, the scent of gingerbread, and the cozy warmth of a crocheted blanket. But the writer behind the wholesome bestseller and the family she based it on were political radicals. While Alcott’s semi-autobiographical novel is charming, it’s also more revolutionary, and more relevant, than it may seem.
When Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers Publishers first asked Louisa to create a “girls’ story,” she was resistant, writing in her diary, “I don’t enjoy this sort of thing.” After the critical success for her Hospital Sketches, she typically wrote “blood and thunder tales” under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard. Eventually, though, she conceded: “Lively, simple books are needed for girls and perhaps I can supply the need.” And supply she did, by fictionalizing (and in some cases, sanitizing) her family, her town, and the events of her life. Despite Louisa’s initial misgivings, her “girls’ story” about four sisters living in genteel poverty in a small New England town became one of the most widely-read novels in the American literary canon. Little Women’s illustration of “the domestic sphere” has resonated with readers across centuries, inspiring authors from Cynthia Ozick to Ursula Le Guin. Today, literary scholars, fans of her oeuvre, and viewers of the screen adaptations recognize that this “girls’ story,” a complex portrayal of domestic mundanity and women’s interiority, is subversive in its own right. But the Marches were not nearly as subversive as the family they were based on.
We don’t tend to remember how much trouble the Alcotts were making in 19th-century Massachusetts.
“We don’t tend to remember how much trouble the Alcotts were making” in 19th-century Massachusetts, notes Pulitzer Prize winning Alcott biographer John Matteson in the Emmy-award-winning documentary, Orchard House: Home of Little Women. But Louisa’s parents, Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail “Marmee” Alcott, were political outliers even in liberal Concord and constantly challenged the status quo. Bronson was a teacher, philosopher, educational reformer, and failed-utopian-commune founder; he was the first educator in Boston to admit a Black student into his class, and we have him to thank for inventing recess. Abigail was one of the first paid social workers in Massachusetts, as well as a passionate suffragist. Both were Christians, transcendentalists, abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and vegetarians; it was with these beliefs that Bronson and Abigail raised their four daughters, affording them much more freedom and agency than young women at the time were generally given. As Matteson asserts, the Alcotts “were rocking the boat in a society that was, for the most part, really very comfortable with the idea of women being subordinate in the home, with the [idea] of slavery.”
Nowhere are the family’s radical politics better showcased than in Orchard House, their home from 1858 to 1877 located in Concord, Massachusetts; screenwriter Olivia Milch calls it “the epicenter of a great American intellectual tradition.” And, indeed, philosophers, intellectuals, and writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Ward Howe, and Margaret Fuller were frequent visitors at the renovated farmhouse. Jan Turnquist, creator of the aforementioned documentary and longtime Executive Director of the house museum, is eager to chat with me about the Alcotts, their beliefs, and Orchard House when we speak on the phone. “It is still just the way it was when they lived in it,” she says, mentioning that it is one of the first house museums in the country and one of the first dedicated to a woman. The Alcotts “moved around a great deal before they lived in Orchard House, but it’s where they lived the longest. They had already lived there ten years when Louisa wrote Little Women, so for her it was natural to use that house as the setting.” Turnquist points out that “visiting Orchard House is a little bit like walking through the book.”
The Alcotts acted as station masters on the Underground Railroad.
But in Orchard House, unlike in Little Women, there are indicators of the family’s radical beliefs everywhere. The walls of Bronson Alcott’s study, for example, are decorated with images of his intellectual contemporaries and friends: Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Franklin Sanborn, one of the “Secret Six” who funded militant abolitionist John Brown. In fact, a portrait of Brown himself hangs in the same room, evincing the Alcotts’ anti-slavery beliefs, which even in the North, were considered “extremist” in antebellum America. The Alcotts acted as station masters on the Underground Railroad and hosted fugitive slaves; Bronson started an anti-slavery society with famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; and Louisa volunteered as a seamstress and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War. Turnquist informs me that when John Brown was eventually hanged for treason and murder, Louisa published a poem in Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, memorializing the man whom she called “Saint John the Just.”
Throughout Orchard House, visitors will also find subtle reminders of the Alcotts’ commitment to women’s rights and their belief in equality. Louisa’s sister May’s original pencil drawings still adorn the walls (yes, she drew on the walls), and Louisa’s writing desk, crafted by her father, still stands in her room. Today, Little Women fans view the white, half-moon table where Louisa wrote her most famous novel as a kind of shrine—the place where the magic happened. But Louisa’s desk and May’s preserved sketches are more than just displays of the Alcott girls’ hobbies and talents; they’re evidence of parents who not only allowed, but also actively encouraged their daughters to draw, to write, and to think at a time when women weren’t encouraged to do much of anything.
Empowered by their parents and a community of literary and social revolutionaries, Louisa and her sisters broke down barriers.
Empowered by their parents and a community of literary and social revolutionaries, Louisa and her sisters broke down barriers and earned the respect of their male contemporaries. May, for instance, became a talented artist herself, and many of her most famous paintings can be seen hanging in Orchard House. She also tutored Daniel Chester French, who pursued art because of her teachings and went on to sculpt the Lincoln Memorial.
Bronson and Abigail didn’t just apply their beliefs about women’s liberation to their own family, and the proof of their impact extends beyond their daughters’ accomplishments. Both parents were advocates of college education for girls, women’s right to vote, and even equal pay, principles they passed on to their children; Abigail once said, “I mean to vote before I die, even if my daughters have to carry me!” She never made it to the polls, but Louisa became the first woman registered to vote in Concord in 1879 and regularly rallied other women in town to cast their ballots with her. In regard to the Alcott’s progressive views on gender equality, Turnquist offhandedly mentions that the family not only sheltered escaped slaves, but also abused women who had no legal recourse against their husbands. “Louisa doesn’t put any of that in Little Women,” she quips.
There was a good reason for that, Turnquist adds: “She wanted her books to sell.” Bronson’s controversial schools, which prioritized a conversational style of teaching and avoided physical punishment (the inspiration for Little Women’ssequel Little Men), were often shut down when parents discovered his “controversial” methods and labeled him a “fanatic,” forcing the family to relocate. As a result, the Alcotts were poor—it was the need for money that motivated Louisa’s writing career. Thanks to the Alcott daughters, who were willing to work outside the home, Bronson was able to pursue idealistic projects and rarely compromise his values.
Perhaps the best example of this is Fruitlands, Bronson’s short-lived transcendentalist commune. Co-founded by Louisa’s father in 1843, the utopian community was rooted in the ideals of environmentalist, morality, and selflessness. According to Turnquist, in order to avoid exploiting other living beings, the residents of Fruitlands abstained from nearly all “luxuries” of the time: They didn’t wear wool or cotton (in solidarity with slaves), or use soap, animal labor, or artificial light. Residents adhered to a nearly vegan diet. Needless to say, after seven months, the socialist commune shuttered and the family moved again. In Louisa’s Transcendental Wild Oats, a satire based on her experience living at Fruitlands, she critiques ventures fueled by male arrogance and (ironically) enabled by women’s exploitation. The old saying goes, “Behind every great man, there’s a great woman.” But in mid-19th century Concord, it would have been more apt to say “Behind every great man, there’s an Alcott woman.”
The Alcotts’ unwavering sense of morality propelled them to champion progressive causes.
Although the Alcotts’ views are well documented, it’s impossible to know exactly what they would think about contemporary politics, and Turnquist doesn’t want to speculate. But she notes that the family’s “radical” belief system really “boils down to kindness.” The Alcotts’ unwavering sense of morality, grounded in faith, propelled them to champion progressive causes and, in some cases, break laws that they deemed discriminatory. If the Alcotts have something to teach us today—maybe even obliquely through Gerwig’s movie—this is probably it: The importance of kindness not just as a personal value, but also as a political framework.
During this conversation, Turnquist remembers a quote by Bronson’s friend, William Lloyd Garrison. When once asked to be more “moderate” in his abolitionist beliefs, he exclaimed: “No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm.” “That level of immediacy and urgency is how the Alcotts felt” about all forms of injustice, Turnquist asserts.
In An Old Fashioned Girl, published a year after the second half of Little Women (Good Wives) hit shelves, Alcott wrote “Women have been called queens for a long time, but the kingdom given them isn’t worth ruling.” Louisa and her family strove to change this, to create a kingdom that was worth ruling, and not just by women, but by everyone. When Gerwig’s Little Women arrives in theaters this winter, let us not forget that the creator of this gentle story was a progressive firebrand, a suffragist, a proud spinster, and a passionate abolitionist. May the film provide us a much-needed escape from devastating news cycles, and the memory of Louisa May Alcott and her radical family inspire us to action.
On 15 July 2016, 26-year-old Qandeel Baloch was murdered by her brother in Multan, Pakistan.
In the years leading up to her death, Qandeel posted an array of videos on social media. In one, she playfully asked her friend in broken English: “How I’m looking?” (it became a meme). In another, she promised to strip on camera if Pakistan won their cricket match (they lost). In several, she declared her love for the cricketer (now Prime Minister) Imran Khan. In most, she dressed exactly as she pleased: skirts, swimsuits, shoulders on display.
Thanks to these videos, Qandeel acquired innumerable fans and haters across Pakistan, and rose to unprecedented online fame. Unprecedented, that is, for a teenager who escaped a violent marriage. Unprecedented for a girl who came from one of the least developed areas of Pakistan. Unprecedented, in other words, for a woman like her.
Sanam Maher’s debut book A Woman Like Her: The Story Behind the Honor Killing of a Social Media Staris a compelling work of sharp, empathetic reportage. In order to tellQandeel’s story, Maher deep dives into the lives of dozens of Pakistani men and women. From the investigator in charge of the case (one of the first women in her hometown to join the police force) to the preacher implicated in Qandeel’s murder (known as a “true preacher of liberal Islam”), A Woman Like Her is a portrait of Pakistan as much as it is a portrait of one Pakistani woman who refused the life set before her.
Here’s a moment that stayed with me.The area where Qandeel came from is one where women are visibly missing from the landscape; where, in fact, they are often not given any shoes. When Maher asks a local journalist why this is the case, he impatiently explains: “If you’re not wearing shoes and you walk outside, where will your eyes remain?”
A Woman Like Her is the story of women who look straight up.
Richa Kaul Padte: At age 17, Qandeel is in a violent marriage. After the birth of their child, her husband snaps at her: “You have a son, what more do you want?” You write of this incident: “Even six months later…the answers to her husband’s question beat within her like the maddening tick-tocking of a clock’s hand frozen on a minute in time. What more do you want?” In A Woman Like Her, you make so much space for women who are taught to want nothing. Or at least nothing more than a male heir. Was this your intention at the outset?
Sanam Maher: It’s such a powerful question, isn’t it: what more do you want? What space do we have for this wanting? Even if all you want is to be someone, to have people know your name—can we allow it?
We didn’t have the ‘perfect victim’ in a woman like Qandeel– she was ‘the national slut of Pakistan.’
When Qandeel was killed, something you would hear a lot of was, “What else did she expect?” After all, she put photos and videos of herself online, angering her brother and [community], so wasn’t she asking for it? I started out wanting to interrogate this response, but I didn’t anticipate that I would want answers to other questions too. For instance, when I met Qandeel’s mother, I was struck by her behavior and how she spoke about her dead daughter. I was using my own frame of reference. I thought: Wouldn’t a mother be totally bereft? Wouldn’t she be beside herself with grief? I expected her to behave in a way that made sense to me when we were dealing with a totally senseless situation.
But I realized that she was surrounded by people who were saying, “Your daughter was shameless, so if you mourn her, you’re equally shameless.” She was in a position where she was being judged for her grief. So then I had new questions for myself: how we even begin to understand this? Everything I’d seen about Qandeel in the media tried to present a straightforward story about who she was and what had happened. But you cannot tell a neat story about this kind of killing, when a family colludes against or tries to save one of its own for doing something so terrible.
RKP: Please can we talk about the phrase: “You’re like a daughter to me”? Every time I encounter it, my whole body cringes, because it’s a sentence that many brown women know intimately. For me, it calls to mind older men who put their hands on your back, on your thigh, on various parts of your body. Older men, like the Islamic preacher implicated in Qandeel’s murder, who later deny allegations under its comfortable guise: “She was like a daughter to me.” What, according to you, does this phrase hide? What does it reveal?
SM: I encountered that phrase differently. All my life, my mother struggled with her mental health, and any time I would hear someone—women, usually—say that I was like a daughter to them, it carried a whiff of judgment about my mother: of how she had raised me, of how they were now trying to “better” me. That phrase gave them an excuse for their judgment. But then I suppose that’s what it is in other contexts too—a free pass.
RKP: Sanam, you and I follow each other on Instagram, where you do an amazing job of chronicling print media censorship in Pakistan. A bunch of your posts and stories contain pictures of, say, the New York Times, a paper whose Pakistani edition is punctuated with blank white spaces, where images that were deemed unsuitable once lived. I thought of this a lot while reading your book, which explores myriad efforts to erase women’s stories and lives.
In turn, I feel like A Woman Like Her does the work of refusing this erasure, of filling in the blank spaces by allowing women like Qandeel to tell their own stories, in their own voices. Could you tell me more about your decision to intersperse the narrative with Qandeel’s unedited words, to allow her to “talk back” (another thing we brown girls are so often discouraged from doing)?
SM: When it became public knowledge that I was working on this book, there was already a lot of information out there on Qandeel, but none of it seemed to satisfy people’s curiosity. So I’d find myself at dinners and someone would ask, “So, was she really a prostitute?” “How exactly did she make her money?” But it isn’t my job to provide you with those details. It’s my job to ask why you need them.
When Qandeel was killed, something you would hear a lot of was, ‘What else did she expect?’
I started to become wary of journalists or sources who promised me “the real story of Qandeel Baloch.” Qandeel was a chameleon, and she presented different parts of herself to different people—as we all do. We’re different with our family, friends, partners or colleagues, and we’re different creatures on social media where we get to curate our images. Who has the right to say who the “real” you is? Even after all this time, Qandeel is still a cipher to me. With every new piece of information, every new interview, I would feel, “Yes, this is it, I understand her now,” only to learn something else and be utterly confounded again.
I felt uncomfortable having the platform to tell her story when she was never given that opportunity herself. When news broke that Qandeel wasn’t her real name, or that she had a child, those were “real stories” that had been brought to light by force. I asked myself if I wanted to contribute to the sickening way a person can be robbed of their agency. I never wanted to speak on Qandeel’s behalf, and I pushed to have her words appear verbatim throughout the book. In fact, there are many sentences where you might not be aware that you’re reading Qandeel’s words, not mine. I tried to keep intact the ways she spoke, and how she described herself or seemed to think of herself. It was a very small way for me to keep her voice in her story, to allow her to talk back to whoever is reading it.
RKP: A Woman Like Her is so minutely observed, and yet it is tremendously expansive, with a narrative that twists and turns in different directions. And one of my favorite places it arrives at is the question of digital rights. An administrator of a women’s university says of the challenge of keeping its girls safe: “I can tell them when to leave and when to come back, and I can tell them when to be in their rooms, but once they turn on their phones, they could be anywhere.” What a thought: online, girls can be anywhere! Why does the same idea that lifts my spirits frighten those in power?
SM: I think it has started to frighten me too, albeit for different reasons. We’re seeing that these spaces are being policed and monitored and we’re more aware of their limits now. It’s becoming harder to find safe spaces online and to make sure that the conditions that women and minorities are trying to escape in the “real world” aren’t spilling over into their online worlds. Just last week, I received a text message from the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority urging citizens to “report” anything they deem to be “blasphemy, pornography, terrorism and other unlawful content on social media.” I’ve noticed that I’ve started to become very cautious about what I choose to voice online— it’s one thing for me to get angry or abusive messages, but it’s quite another to have a totally subjective system in place that allows you to do more than DM me.
RKP: There are over 44 million social media users in Pakistan, but, as many of the people you interview believe, “they must [all] remember one thing: they are still rooted here in the land of the pure.” I’m interested in how this dance between purity and freedom plays out in women’s lives: both online and offline. Can a “pure” woman ever be free?
SM: Well firstly, what is “free”? You and I might have the same answer to that question, but I’m thinking of something the lead investigator on Qandeel’s case, a female police officer, said to me: “Of course women have the right to employment, the right to education, the right to good living standards. You can say you want to be totally unfettered, to have freedom, but is becoming Qandeel Baloch freedom?”
How should a Pakistani Muslim woman look, behave and think?
A question that Qandeel would get asked many times in interviews about her social media activities was, “What kind of woman would do something like this?” That demonstrates an anxiety—how should a Pakistani Muslim woman look, behave and think? There’s a fear around what could happen if a woman decides to answer that question for herself. The only kind of “free” I understand is the freedom from any consequences of not looking, behaving or thinking the way that a “good” or acceptable woman would.
RKP: Qandeel’s murder was claimed by her brother as an “honor killing”—a murder enacted to avenge shame brought upon a family, community or tribe. Qandeel died halfway through 2016, and in those six months, there were approximately 326 reported honor killings in Pakistan. 312 of the victims were women. The linking of women’s actions and bodies to a family or community’s honor follows brown women across the world: for example, between 2010 and 2014, there were 11,000 honor crimes recorded in the United Kingdom, including abduction, female genital mutilation and murder.
Qandeel says in despair, “No one tells me, ‘Qandeel, you have gone to war against a society, against a kind of place where men think women are as lowly as their shoe. The kind of place where it’s so common for a man to hit a woman, that if some man doesn’t hit his wife, people call him dishonorable.’ Why don’t people see that?”
From London to Karachi, from New York to New Delhi: why don’t they?
SM: We’re dealing with an interesting case here in Pakistan right now, where an actor’s wife has accused him of beating her. The wife, Fatima, shared photographs of her bruises on Facebook last week and since then, many have spoken up in support of her and condemned her husband’s behavior. He was largely ridiculed for holding a press conference where he called his wife “troubled”, saying she was “playing the woman card” to vilify him. A protest against domestic abusers has been called in Lahore, and a senator tweeted her support and promised to help Fatima.
This is all really great to see, but it makes me wonder how conditional this sympathy is. Fatima shared photographs of her bruised face and body, she has a small child, her family agrees that she should divorce her husband, and many neighbors and friends say they were witness to beatings over the years. I think about the reaction Qandeel got when she spoke about her abusive marriage, of her husband putting out cigarettes on her body, of her desire to leave him so she could continue her education and make something of herself. We ridiculed her for saying she wanted support herself after she left her husband. We didn’t have the “perfect victim” in a woman like her – she was trashy, fame-hungry, a drama queen, a woman who had left her husband and abandoned her child so she could become “the national slut of Pakistan.” So I think that we do offer support, but only when we’re comfortable with the kind of woman asking for it.
RKP: A BBC journalist once memorably called Qandeel “Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian” — a comparison that made Qandeel legible to global audiences (even though Qandeel, who came from one of Pakistan’s poorest areas, was unable to access the privileges and safety nets that Kim’s fame allowed her). You write in the book’s epilogue: “Qandeel is no longer ‘Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian’ — if anything, the women who follow in her steps, who aspire to the kind of fame she found…want to be ‘Pakistan’s next Qandeel Baloch’.”
This sentence gives me so much hope. Does it give you some, too?
SM: It does, and I hope that whenever we find our new Qandeel, we do a better job of celebrating her. Okay, perhaps that’s a tall order — I’ll amend that. I hope we’re better at tolerating her.
I’ve been hooked on tales about things that go bump in the night since I was in third grade. I cut my teeth on Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammel’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I was shepherded across the untidy years of puberty by Stephen King’s Loser’s Club and Anne Rice’s pansexual vampires, and I spent many a happy summer vacation working my way through Blockbuster Video’s horror section. It should come as no surprise, then, that I eventually decided to write a scary story of my own.
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That story, A Cosmology of Monsters, seemed like a simple enough proposition at the outset: a multi-generational saga about a Texas family running a haunted house and struggling with monsters both literal and symbolic. But as I began to write the novel and became acquainted with my characters, I realized that my story was in deep conversation with the tropes and history of horror. Since I’d always been more of a dilettante than die-hard horror geek, I knew needed to research my subject further. All this homework gave me (and by extension, my characters) a strong awareness of the horror tradition, and made Cosmology into a book that knowingly subverts and celebrates its antecedents.
During my research, I kept my eye out for new horror fiction at the libraries and bookstores I frequented, but I rarely saw much I hadn’t already heard of. There were the big names, like Lauren Beukes and Joe Hill, and a couple of anthologies in the sci-fi section, but I wanted more. Lord knew there were no shortages of mystery and sci-fi/fantasy paperbacks, so where was all the horror? Was it gone?
In late 2016, I stumbled across a list of the 2016 Bram Stoker Awards winners, the annual awards given out by the Horror Writers’ Association. I started looking up the titles and authors listed, and discovered, to my delight, that the horror world was alive and well, but coming mostly from smaller independent presses. It had left the chain bookstores and moved underground. I bought some books from the list, and, to my delight, found exactly what I had been missing in my reading diet.
Since we’re nearing Halloween, I thought it would be fun to share some of my favorite horror releases of the last several years. These books run the gamut from relatively well-known to downright obscure; their contents similarly range from heartwarming to moody to terrifying. No matter where your tastes fall, I hope there’s something here for you to read while you enjoy that pumpkin spice latte or bag of candy corn.
This short horror novel tells the story of the ghost of a failed writer trying to solve her own murder in grunge-era Seattle. I defy anyone not to fall in love with Greta, a narrator who is bracingly honest, wryly funny, and deeply sad.
Like Miskowski’s book, The Fisherman is also short, and helped along by an engaging narrator—an elderly widower on a fishing trip who is granted an unsettling peek behind the veil of our everyday existence. To say more would ruin the fun. This novel won the 2016 Bram Stoker prize for best novel, and it’s easy to see why.
Some cosmic horror writers set up camp in H.P. Lovecraft’s sandbox and play there for the rest of their careers. Laird Barron went a step further and created a cosmos of his own, hardboiled, mean-spirited, and deeply disturbing. All his books are worth reading, but this first collection of short stories is an excellent place to start your acquaintance.
If Marisha Pessl’s Night Film was your kind of book, you’ll love this found footage tale about a down-on-her-luck documentarian investigating the unsolved disappearance of Canada’s first female filmmaker. It combines great character work with an unsettling central mystery to create a compelling read.
This is more of a horror-adjacent coming-of-age story about a group of believers and skeptics who spend the summer of 1980 investigating their town’s local ghost stories and urban legends. For those who like their horror gentler (although still present) and with a lot of heart.
If you’ve heard of any title on this list, it’s probably this National Book Award-nominated (and Shirley Jackson Award winning!) short story collection, but I don’t think it’s possible to over-praise (or signal boost) this book. The opening story, “The Husband Stitch,” is a brilliant feminist take on a classic spooky folktale, and “The Resident,” is as good a modern example of the modern weird tale as I have ever read. If you haven’t read this book, read it. If you have read it, read it again. Also preorder the author’s forthcoming memoir, In the Dream House.
Ellen Datlow is the hardest-working person in the horror genre. She seems to edit multiple anthologies a year, and, in her lengthy introduction to each annual Best Horror volume, she also reviews every horror novel, collection, anthology, film, magazine, tv show, and work of visual art released that calendar year. In other words, she knows horror like nobody else, and always selects a terrific bevy of tales for her Best Of books. This year’s volume provides a great sampling of voices working in the genre right now.
I have a confession to make: I never listened to Tegan and Sara. This is strange because in the late ‘90s/early 2000s, when they first rose to queer icon fame, I was—from the top of my frosted tips to the soles of my Doc Marten boots—their exact target demographic. While every other queer teen was encountering the Quin sisters’ indie pop ballads on mix CDs from their crushes, I was still listening to Pearl Jam. Instead, I first heard of Tegan and Sara thanks to a stranger who thinks all queer women look alike.
I was at a thrift store—Beacon’s Closet in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—sometime around 2008, waiting to try on some clothes when another girl in line approached me and said, “You know who you look like?”
I had a few guesses. If my head was shaved I’d often get Dolores O’Riordan from the Cranberries. If I was wearing leather pants, it would be Joan Jett. If I’d let my hair grow in and was sporting a blazer I’d magically become the spitting image of Ellen DeGeneres. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone somewhere told me I looked like Sara Quin.
“Who?”
“From Tegan and Sara. The band.”
Every time I was told I resembled some gay celebrity I had the same reaction—an angry, painful, almost sickening visceral reaction.
When I got home I looked up a photo and rolled my eyes. Twin lesbian sisters playing guitars? Which one of them was even Sara? It didn’t matter because I looked nothing like either of them! Every time I was told I resembled some gay celebrity I had the same reaction—an angry, painful, almost sickening visceral reaction. This was somewhat hypocritical considering how gay I did in fact look, and in no way by accident. (How else was I supposed to get laid?) But I had been raised to believe lesbians were ugly. Ugly to look at, ugly to think about, ugly to be—even as I was clearly growing into one. That sickening feeling, that knee-jerk reaction of, “I look nothing like [your lesbian of choice here!],” came from a complicated self-hate that didn’t go away, no matter how alternative I got with my appearance choices.
So I didn’t start listening to Tegan and Sara’s music right then. I didn’t even give it a try.
Fifteen years later, this past May, I still hadn’t listened to their music. My friend and fellow book-person Megan was in town for an annual book industry expo. Megan asked if I was going to the event at Housing Works Bookstore Café & Bar celebrating Tegan and Sara’s forthcoming memoir High School. I may not have been a Tegan and Sara fan, but I had fifteen years of queer community and pride parades and ex-girlfriends under my belt, so I knew enough of their legacy to know that getting my hands on a book they’d written months before it reached the general public would be a coup. Yes, I wanted to go! But no, I had not been invited.
“Come anyway,” Megan said. “At the door just say you’re the third twin.” Thankfully it did not come to that. One polite email and a gracious reply later, I was on the list.
The event began with both sisters on stage, seated side by side. Each of them would read a section of the book, followed by a Q&A. In the years since that Beacon’s Closet incident I, too, have been on a few stages with a microphone in my face and a book in my hand. In fact, I’ve been on that exact same stage at Housing Works. When I achieved my life goal of becoming a published novelist I’d overlooked the amount of public speaking involved. My introvert’s approach to such extroversion has been to go into a fugue state while on stage and remember nothing afterward, so I’m never sure how I’ve performed or what I even look like up there under the lights. Now I realized: I probably looked like Sara Quin.
From my front-row seat in the audience at Housing Works, I could finally see the resemblance. We’re about the same size; we’re about the same age. Yes, she’s obviously way cooler than me but in our offstage lives we could, at least in theory, share T-shirts. As a five-foot-three, masculine-of-center female I can’t share T-shirts with many people who aren’t pre-pubescent boys—so I don’t take that lightly.
The experience of reading High School was just as surprising and comforting in its familiarity. Like the Quin sisters, I also cut my teeth on Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins. I even used to play guitar, back when I still had long hair. More significantly though, no other book I’ve ever read so perfectly captured what it felt like—what it really felt like—to come of age as queer in the late ‘90s, years before positive representations of nonconventional sexualities and genders could be found in mainstream newspapers or on broadcast television.
No other book so perfectly captured what it really felt like to come of age as queer in the late ‘90s.
The scenes in the book of Tegan and Sara fighting tooth and nail over their single landline telephone brought a knowing smile to my face, but also a lump to my throat. Tell a young queer person today, “We didn’t have cell phones,” or “This was pre-internet,” and you may as well be saying, “This was before we had electricity.” And it should strike them that way, because we were all in the frigging dark, straining to see who we were and who we wanted to be with so few visible models, while those that were visible were hassled, harassed, and made fun of.
High School’s cover is reflective like a hazy locker mirror, apt given how much reading it felt to me like catching sight of my past self. I was surprised at the pleasure it gave me to recognize my own experience in theirs, as I’ve only recently had any interest in seeing my past self. I was not an uncomplicatedly happy or proud teenager or traveler through my early twenties. I was anxious and depressed, and while I had a lot of fun and a lot of queer sex and many loving queer friends, I was still the product of my childhood home and ‘80s America. So I didn’t like myself very much. I definitely didn’t love or accept myself. I think people assumed, or maybe I just assumed, that if I knew I was gay and looked gay, I must also like being gay—or at least not hate myself. This wasn’t how it went for me. I didn’t want to relate to Sara Quin in my younger days, whether we looked alike, dressed alike, or were alike or not. Potential for connection doesn’t always create the desire to connect, nor does it necessarily lead to acceptance of oneself or the other.
What I understand now, but didn’t that day when I was thrift-store-shopping, is that you can build self-acceptance from recognition and identification. You can stare at an aspect of yourself that you are ashamed of in the mirror and seek out that component of yourself in others. The exposure can help ease your discomfort, amend your sense of commonality, and you can reconceive your identity through all that bouncing light.
You can stare at an aspect of yourself that you are ashamed of in the mirror and seek out that component of yourself in others.
Presently, Tegan and Sara and I are, all three, aging into elder-status lesbians who suffered through the ‘90s, drank through the early aughts, and today get to sit on stage at Housing Works and tell people in their twenties what it used to be like to be gay. This feels like something of a miracle. And it’s been a surprising joy to not just see myself in their present, but to see my past self in their past selves as well. “Recognition” means the act of knowing and remembering upon seeing, but it also means an acceptance that something is true or important—that it exists.
They have a new album coming out. It’s called Hey, I’m Just Like You. Ha, I thought. Funny. You are just like me, aren’t you? Or, I am just like you. I’ve already pre-ordered it, and before it arrives, I’ve been listening to some of their older stuff too, to get caught up on all those years of music I missed—and to remember with new affection things about myself I used to want to forget.
One last thing: After that Housing Works event in May I posted a photo to social media of Tegan and Sara on stage and half my relatives commented with Congratulations! and Good job! Did they think I was Sara and Tegan was the moderator? I have no clue. I simply said thank you.
“…With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.”
—Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, “Methods for Studying Coincidences”
Earth is so heavy with people, my love,
We’ve doubled our numbers since my arrival.
You can still fit twenty humans into a Volkswagen Beetle,
but I worry, will there be enough seatbelts
for our four children? What if civilization
bottoms out backing down our driveway?
Or you can populate two New York Cities
with people that share your birthday.
Isn’t that, and that, and that a coincidence?
A miracle might strike at any moment.
Everything rare is well done. Everyone compares
their lottery winnings. So long, religion.
down the road, rabbit’s foot. But even
in a world of colossal, humongous, truly superb,
blimp-sized numbers, my love, we’re
exactly two people. And when we sleep,
despite what my snoring might suggest,
I am only one man. And of that night
I proposed with Chablis and pawn shop diamond
beneath the walnut tree, and you said yes,
I’ll say this: quantity only betters the structure
of affection, the architecture of surprise.
As when you step from the shower
and search for your towel even though
I’ve hidden it for the millionth time
so that I might behold you searching
for your towel until you finally ask, “Hey, have you
seen my towel?” At which point
I jump to the rescue with dry, fluffy,
wondrous towels worthy of Nefertiti,
and the whole morning smells like sweet pea
and violet body wash, lavender and citrus
anti-frizz conditioner, and this is only
the first hour of the day. I’m one
timeline away from figuring out
when the odds kicked in, how I found you.
It’s so crowded, my love, and we’ve all
been mistaken for someone else
with the same first name and a one-digit difference
in our social security numbers. If only
we could hold a truly large mirror
up to Earth, we could at least gain the illusion
of spaciousness. This would also solve
the problem of surveillance. Everybody
making love outside, looking up
at themselves making love in the sky.
Hey Dwayne
--Reunion, Class of ’85
Didn’t you shoot the water tower with a dart gun?
Didn’t you join the Masons? Didn’t we walk down
the swamp road and spew pot smoke into each other’s faces
concurrent with hyper-ventilation? Didn’t I fall down
for a minute, then wake in awe of Def Leppard,
loblolly pines like compass needles fucked with
by the wind-magnet? Didn’t we go to three funerals
that Saturday? Didn’t we sit in the abandoned
tractor trailer shifting the dead gears? Didn’t they
sound like a hailstorm of horse teeth? Didn’t the well water
taste like matchheads? Wasn’t our team sponsored
by the sawed-off light of the turpentine factory?
Didn’t our coach point to the example with a busted
car antennae? Didn’t we ride your Kawasaki in the rain
all the way to Turkey Fork in December? Didn’t the gray sky
leave a skid mark on the ridgeline? Wasn’t there
supposed to be a bonfire at the bridge, but the boat-
ramp gate was welded shut, and the weedy beach
was empty, but for an x of smoldering driftwood?
I still remember the feeling I had the first time I finished one of Edwidge Danticat’s stories. I’d been assigned to read her short story collection Krik? Krak!, published in 1996,in one of my undergraduate classes at Barnard College (where Edwidge was an alumna) and I had approached the book the way I often did with assigned readings—a mindset of, Okay, I just have to get through this. But by the first page, I was immersed. “Children of the Sea,” the first story in the book, riveted me with its lush language and epistolary form; it was also the first story I had ever read about Haiti, a place whose violent history I’d known very little about. By the end, I was breathless, moved, and never more aware of the power of a well-written story.
I’m not the only person in the world to notice Danticat’s talent, of course (despite what my colleagues in my MFA program might have thought)—Danticat’s stories and books have garnered her many awards and nominations, including the American Book Award for her novel The Farming of Bones (one of my favorites), National Book Award nominations for Krik? Krak! and her nonfiction book Brother, I’m Dying, and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Brother, I’m Dying. Danticat herself received a coveted MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Even without all of this institutional recognition, I know from speaking to friends that she is beloved among writers and readers, particularly among women of color.
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Her new book, Everything Inside, is Danticat’s first collection of short stories to be published since Krik? Krak! over twenty years ago. The stories, which center on people of the Haitian diaspora and the various traumas they seek to make sense of, feel particularly timely at this moment as America debates over the value of and moral responsibility we have towards immigrants and their children. The stories are elegant and empathetic, still bearing the hallmark tension between beauty and violence that marked her first collection. And yet they’re less sentimental, more mature, quiet, and steady—the work of someone who has lived through more and has evolved in what she has wanted to say.
I was privileged enough to speak to Edwidge Danticat over the phone, where we discussed the evolution of her short fiction, the relationships between the characters of Everything Inside and the characters in Krik? Krak! and the difficult and differing ways in which immigrants and their children deal with lingering generational effects of painful pasts and the burden of representation.
Karissa Chen: I think this is your first collection of short stories since Krik? Krak!, which you published over two decades ago. I know in between you’ve written a lot of other things—novels, novels-in-stories, a lot of nonfiction. You’ve even written a bunch of children’s books and YA books. I’m curious how it’s changed for you to go back to this form after these years. I mean, I’m sure for some of these stories you’ve probably been working on them for a while behind the scenes. But I’m wondering why you decided to return to this form and if you approach writing short stories in a different way now than you did back then.
Edwidge Danticat: I love short stories. I love to read them and I love to write them. I like the bursts of narrative. I like the economy. When I was writing the stories in Krik? Krak! I was still in college and later working a full time job. I wrote those stories during stolen moments, often before exams, and after hours in the office where I worked. There was an urgency for me about getting those stories down because I was new at writing stories and each story felt like a stroke of lighting, something that might never happen again. I was always afraid that if I didn’t stop whatever I was doing and write those stories down, I would lose them forever. I think that sense of urgency shows in the stories in Krik? Krak! They’re very direct, declarative even, like the kind of stories they’re modeled after, the oral stories that are part of the call and response of Haitian storytelling, which we introduce by saying Krik? (or asking the audience if they’re ready to listen) and having them answer Krak! (or replying yes, they’re ready to listen.)
The stories in Everything Inside, though, are stories that I have been writing for over thirteen years. I have written and rewritten them many times, even after they were published in journals or magazines. These stories have benefited from the patience I now have with both myself and with narrative, the trust I have that some resolution to the problems in the story might lie somewhere ahead, in the future. I am now more willing to wait for my stories to resolve themselves. So it was great to re-enter stories with that kind of patience, to let the stories pause and breathe, and allow the characters to keep revealing themselves to me over the years. I enjoyed going back to the form and writing stories in this unhurried way. The stories in Everything Inside are not just longer but more nuanced because of this, and you feel, I think, that you are also reading about people with a lot more time on their hands, a situation which parallels the case of some first-generation Americans who have a lot more time and leisure to linger on some things and address certain issues than their parents did.
KC: You said some of these pieces you’ve been working on for a long time. What’s the one that you’ve been working on the longest and how long did that take you?
ED: The first story in the book, “Dosas,” is the one I’ve been working on the longest. I added the most recent elements to it last year. It’s based on something that actually happened to a few people I know, where someone they loved and trusted pretended to be kidnapped to get money from them.
I also wanted to write about Certified Nurses Assistants in Miami and later added an element of something my mother said to me while she was in the hospital with terminal cancer. Everyone who was taking care of her was Haitian and she found a lot of comfort in this. So one day she said to me, It’s wonderful that so many of us are here to take care of each other. Behind these words, I was hearing her say, Who would take care of us, if we didn’t have each other? So the combination of these two things—people we love betraying us and potential strangers taking care of us—came together in the many layers of this story.
Different elements kept popping up with this story over the span of thirteen years. A possible new romance for Elsie, the Certified Nurses’ Assistant. Her thoughts on marriage. Then I saw a sign in my gentrifying neighborhood in Miami’s Little Haiti that said “Nothing Inside Is Worth Dying for” and I put that on Elsie’s door and switched it to “Everything Inside Is Worth Dying For”, which gave us the title of the book.
KC: In both your collections, all the stories seem to be in conversation with the others in the book. Krik? Krak! was very much focused on a historical Haiti, with almost a sort of magical realism and focused on the violent past of the island. Whereas I think this collection felt a lot quieter, but still very much focused on the Haitian diaspora in our current times and how they wrestle with their different traumas. There’s echoes between the stories, even though all their situations are different.
I’m wondering—and I hate to do this, because I know it’s probably very annoying for you to have the two collections compared to each other—but because so much time has gone by, do you think that your own interests as a writer have shifted since these two collections?. I’m wondering where you are as a writer now that led you to write these particular stories.
ED: I don’t mind the two books being compared because the characters in Everything Inside could be the children or the grandchildren of the ones in Krik? Krak!. Krik? Krak! is about several generations of one family. The characters in Everything Inside are not related to each other or to them, and they are certainly of another generation, but they feel connected in my mind.
If we want to be really meta, we might say that some of the characters in Everything Inside may have read Krik? Krak! and said “This reminds me of my mother or grandmother.” I meet a lot of young Haitian-Americans who say that to me about Krik? Krak!, by the way. So there’s definitely a strong connection between the two books, the most important being the ancestral town in Haiti from which both groups originate: Ville Rose.
This is what’s wonderful about having a collection. When you’re writing individual stories, they feel singular. When you put them together, a thread emerges not only between the stories, but also between your past and possibly future work. But, as I mentioned earlier, I don’t think I would have been able to write the stories in Everything Inside twenty-five years ago. Watching the shift in focus and perspective between the different generations of my family has helped a lot in shaping these stories. Watching my parents die and the next generation grow up and become adults—American adults—has really guided these stories.
KC: I think that’s really apparent in the way you frame a lot of these stories. “Sunrise, Sunset” literally had that shift in perspective going back and forth between the two generations, showing the contrast in how they’ve had to deal with motherhood. But so many of the stories are recursive—where something happens and the characters go back to see how they got to this point in time. They’re revisiting their own histories, but vis-a-vis their family, etc.
ED: “Sunrise, Sunset” is a good example of that gap between generations where there’s this missing link of knowledge on both sides. The mother believes that her daughter should be grateful for all the sacrifices that have been made so that the daughter can have the life she now has, and the daughter thinks the mother is unable to understand all that she’s going through because her mother’s experiences are from a time and place that is unfamiliar to the daughter. If only they could talk, they would realize just how similar their experiences are. Yet, there’s something heavy about trauma-related migration that makes silence comforting for both of them until the silence becomes so stifling it’s dangerous. The friction comes to a boiling point when a new generation comes into the picture, the grandson. The story fills in that gap and you realize that if one could hear what the other was thinking, things would be a lot better.
KC: One of the other things I noticed about the stories in this collection is that the “big thing” that happens almost always happens off stage. So, in “In the Old Days,” the father has already died, in “Seven Stories,” Callie’s father has already been killed, and the earthquake happened off stage in “The Gift,” even though we get to see it a little bit. Even in “Without Inspection,” although we are in the moment of his death, like with the other stories, it feels like the traumatic thing isn’t the point of drama. Maybe this is because it’s something that’s out of the characters’ control. So instead, what you end up focusing on is how they make sense of this thing that has happened and their personal histories and the memories that lead up to it and what happens beyond that moment. It’s interesting because I feel like this is not how people often think about writing. People think, Oh, we got to lead up to the point of drama. So I’m curious what it is about this aftermath that interests you, because I think there actually is a lot of tension in the aftermath.
I was always afraid that if I didn’t stop whatever I was doing and write those stories down, I would lose them forever.
ED: For the stories in Everything Inside, the aftermath feels much bigger than any singular event because the “big thing” is one in a series of events—historical, cultural, familial, personal—that are affecting these characters. What concerned me most was not just one triggering event but how the characters were trying to regroup after a series of events, some of which go back several generations. If you were to meet any of the characters in this book on the street and you said, tell me something about yourself, this is what these particular people would say. That’s how I see the contents of the stories. Plus there’s always in immigration and migration this feeling where obviously you’ve come to a new place to have a different future, but you have no choice but to keep looking back because you’ve left everything you’ve ever known behind. So you’re moving forward, but always looking back at the same time.
KC: That’s something that personally interests me as well—when you are someone who is a migrant, someone who is either refugee or an immigrant, and the different ways of dealing with things. Some people just forge forward and they’re like, This is all I can do is, all I can do is move forward. And some people are like, I have to keep making sense of what has happened to me. Obviously many people do both. I think that tension is something that is really palpable through these pieces even with the children. In “Hot Air Balloons,” Lucy has this roommate who goes to Haiti and does all this relief work, and Lucy is like, I can’t, that’s not a thing that I’m trying to, and she’s sort of inherited this conflict.
ED: Whenever I asked my parents about their lives in Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship and what it was like to live in Haiti in the ‘50s and ‘60s, for example, all they would say is some version of “We’re here now.” This was meant to explain everything. Like if things weren’t difficult then we wouldn’t be here now, so let’s move on. I think having to leave was painful for them in a way that they never wanted to detail or even describe. They had also grown up being discreet. Living under a dictatorship you couldn’t say too much because you didn’t know what people were going to do with that information, how it might be used against you. You didn’t know who to trust. So my parents were very tight-lipped about what their lives had been like. They’d moved on in some ways but were still tied to the past, as are some of the characters in the book.
Many younger people, like Lucy in “Hot Air Balloons,” are very protective of the image of Haiti, even if they’ve never been there. So many awful things have been said about Haiti that we want to highlight its beauty. So Lucy wants to go to Haiti but not with a relief or aid group. She wants to go on vacation there. She also wants to protect this image that her parents have created for her of the beautiful beaches and cool mountains which paradoxically co-exists with her parents’ conflicting desire for her not to go there so she doesn’t come face to face with some of the things that drove them away.
KC: I think when you’re the descendent of immigrants in America, there’s that burden, right? You feel that burden to be like, I want to be able to personally acknowledge the failings of wherever my parents came from; obviously they came here for a reason. But I also want everyone here who doesn’t understand that place that I’m from to not have a negative image of it. I want them to think this place I’m from is a great place.
The more stories we have, the more storytellers we highlight, the more nuance and complex our views of a place and its people can be.
ED: Exactly. I think fiction can get at some of that nuance. There has to be some balance. It’s not all terrible and it’s not all pretty either. There’s no place or person like that. We deserve to have our full humanity and the complexity of our lives fully explored. This is why it’s important to have more Haitian novels translated and have more Haitian diaspora voices out there. The more stories we have, the more storytellers we highlight, the more nuance and complex our views of a place and its people can be.
KC: It actually makes me wonder about another one of your stories, “Seven Stories,” because that one is about an unnamed island. It’s interesting because you write from the point of view of this woman, Kim, who’s Haitian, but she is an outsider to this island and she first hears about this island through her friend Callie. And what she knows is how Callie’s father was killed, but at the same time, Callie is telling her, My island is great in all these ways. Then Kim gets there and it has turmoil, it has its own xenophobia, but it’s also beautiful and has a very well maintained facade. It actually feels very familiar despite being an unnamed island. Why did you set this story in this unnamed place and then have this woman who’s on the outside be the one to take us into it and into Callie’s story?
ED: That story was originally a novella, which would mimic one of those narratives where people go to a place for a few days and feel they understand it and write a long expert type article about it, something which happens a lot with Haiti. I decided to make the person who does this kind of writing Haitian-American because I could easily be asked to write a story like that about another Caribbean island and find myself facing the same issues Kim Boyer does. Writing as an insider/outsider feels very familiar to me as someone who writes about Haiti while living outside of Haiti so I wanted to complicate that whole thing in some way. I also had this experience when I was in my teens of having some famous Haitian exiles move across the hall from me in Brooklyn in the 1980s and later seeing them in Haiti after they’d become politicians. It just so happens though that on this particular island in “Seven Stories” they don’t like Haitians at all, but would make an exception for Kim because she’s Haitian-American. Among many other things, Kim realizes, while trying to write about the complexity of the place, that she travels differently through the world and gets a very different reaction than other Haitians who are coming to that very same place for a better life.
KC: I’m going to ask you one more question. Is there a story in this collection that either was the most difficult or one that you’re proudest of? And would you be willing to share which one that is and why?
We deserve to have our full humanity and the complexity of our lives fully explored.
ED The story I’m proudest of is “Without Inspection.” It’s the most recent of the stories and it’s a story that I’ve been trying to write for a really long time. When I first moved from New York to Miami about seventeen years ago a lot of people were coming to Miami by boat from Haiti, the Bahamas, and Cuba. I wanted to write about someone who’d made this journey but ended up falling in a construction accident, something which was also sadly happening a lot a that time. And still happens now and then these days. Last year I went to an immigration forum and I learned the term “Entry Without Inspection”, which means entering this country without seeing an immigration official, which means, on paper, you’re not technically here at all. I wanted to integrate all of those elements into one story and it took a while to figure out how to do it. I wanted to incorporate a historical and mythological element about flight as well. I also wanted to include something of the quick moment after a person dies where some loved ones who are nowhere near them experience this feeling that you can’t quite explain, whether it’s a flash of something, a shiver, a flutter, or something else. Balancing all of that with the reality of Arnold, the main character’s fall, meant a lot of research, down to how many seconds it would take to fall from a certain height. So I’m really proud of how that came out, and that’s probably why I close the book with that story.
The hardest story to write though was “Seven Stories.” I was really enjoying the company of these characters and I didn’t want the story to end. Cutting it down to a third of its original length was hard for me. I killed a lot of my darlings, but I really wanted to keep that sense of the beauty, as well as the complexity of the place.
KC: Yeah. It’s really beautiful. The island feels really real—it was so real that I actually thought, Did I miss the name? I actually flipped back several pages to double check. It seemed so real I was sure you’d been there before.
ED: I borrowed different aspects of many islands, including Haiti, to make up that place. One thing I’ve found just in talking to people about the book is that if you want to be asked about something a lot, just don’t give it a name. [laughs] People really want to know if the place is real or not. All I can say is that it’s very real to me.
KC: And I liked the song that Arnold mentions, [“Latibonit O”]! I appreciated that in the final note, you give the whole translation. Because you have it without the translation in the story and the reader still gets the effect. And then, when the reader moves to the end note and reads the lyrics, it adds something extra.
ED: You should go and listen to it online. A wonderful singer and family friend named Leyla McCalla sings a very beautiful version of it. This book ended up having a lot of singing. That’s one of the things I realized after the stories came together. It had a lot of music, from Nina Simone’s rendition of “Take Me to The Water’, to Charles Mingus’ “Haitian Fight Song” to “Latibonit O” then the hymn “Shall We Gather at the River?”
So you got your early bird tickets for Electric Lit’s Masquerade of the Red Death ($35 until October 1, going up to $50 thereafter, act now!), and now you’re stuck on what to wear. Anything red, black, or red and black will do, but you obviously want to bring your A game. Well, look no further: we’ve compiled some classic, eye-catching looks from film and TV for sartorial inspiration.
Buttercup and Westley’s Fire Swamp outfits, The Princess Bride
Sure, they look sulky here, but in a minute they’ll be declaring undying love and lightfooting it around flame spurts, which sounds like a party to us. If you’re bringing a date to the Masquerade, having one of you in full red and the other in stark black is a great idea.
Dana’s “Gatekeeper” getup, Ghostbusters
Honestly, this might be orange, but we think it’s red with gold threads and anyway we want you to bring this entire energy to the party—the hair, the coquettish bared shoulder, the channeling old gods, the sleeping four feet above your covers, etc.
Mrs. White’s party dress, Clue
The simple black sheath dress and pearls combo taken to the next level. Accessorize with flames on the sides of your face.
Blade’s whole thing, Blade
A black leather duster and weird little shades truly elevate any party outfit, even a bulletproof vest. Before there was Neo, Blade did it first and best.
Lydia Deetz’s wedding dress, Beetlejuice
The wedding had some problems (groom a malign ghost, bride there against her will) but that frothy red confection of a dress and veil, plus Siouxsie hair? Perfection. If anyone shows up in a mouldering burgundy tuxedo we will also be into that.
Babs’s execution outfit, Pink Flamingos
She may be the filthiest person alive, but Divine looks like a million bucks in this truly iconic mermaid gown.
Dora Milaje uniforms, Black Panther
Outside Wakanda, most military getups don’t have the requisite pizzazz for a party, and Okoye does change into an also incredible red outfit in order to blend in at a casino. But the standard-issue Dora Milaje uniforms, with their leather and metallic accents, are plenty fancy for us.
Willow’s vampire alter ego, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Before she went evil IRL, Buffy’s geeky friend had an alternate-universe vampire version whose RenFaire-meets-dominatrix outfit sent every 1990s baby goth into orbit.
Maleficent’s horn and cloak situation, Maleficent
Listen, it’s been a hard year. You deserve to go to a party, but maybe you don’t want to change your clothes or do your hair. We have the perfect solution.
Practically anything from the Hunger Games movies
From the black-and-red training sweats to the “girl on fire” gown, from the black leather armor on the Mockingjay Part 1 poster to the… identical red leather armor on the Mockingjay Part 2 poster, the Hunger Games movies are full of fashion ideas.
The Little Man from Another Place’s suit, Twin Peaks
Cooper’s dream trip into the Black Lodge is an iconic moment in the show (consider the fact that it was parodied in both The Simpsons and a Harlem Shake video). But the dancing, backward-talking Little Man from Another Place is also important for a different reason: he’s a testament to the power of a custom-fit red-on-red suit.
Despite the sweltering heat beating down on New York City, this week officially marks the start of fall! The leaves are turning citrus-shaded hues, Halloween merchandise is taking over the aisles of every big box store, and overly-eager city dwellers are decked out in their cashmere sweaters and knit scarves. To celebrate this cozy season, we’re challenging you to put your autumn wardrobes to work. Dress up to match the cover of a book, and you could win a Writing Well Is The Best Revenge tote bag!
To enter, post a photo of you dressed to match a book cover on Instagram, and use #DressLikeABook. Remember to follow Electric Literature and tag us. The best photos will be featured in a post on the site. For some inspiration, here is the EL team channeling our inner fashionistas.
Associate Editor of Recommended Reading Erin Bartnett is a tinfoil butterfly at heart.
Former intern Ruth Minah Buchwald moonlights as a P.I. investigating literary scams.
Editor-in-Chief Jess Zimmerman is a literary gatekeeper, hence the dress with the keys.
Editor-at-Large Michael J. Seidlinger thinking about what’s he going to eat for lunch. \m/ \m/ \m/ \m/
Dog-in-Resident Billy and his personal assistant are so ready for their tropical vacation. Why be an office dog when you can be a beach dog?
Contributing editor Jennifer Baker dazzles as the 2019 PW Star Watch Superstar! #ShineBrightLikeADiamond
Jess’s sister Sam coincidentally happened to text her this picture while we were writing this. Everyone should always color-coordinate their outfit to match the book they’re carrying!
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