An alternate tale of Cinderella has haunted me since childhood. A picture book in rich pastels, it told the story of a poor servant girl with a nasty step-family, named Yeh-Shen, who lived “In the dim past, even before the Ch’in and the Han dynasties” in China. This folklore can be traced back in writing to the T’ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), and shares remarkable similarities with that of Cinderella—she goes to a ball, loses a slipper, and is found by a prince by virtue of her small feet. But the oldest European version of Cinderella dates back only to 1634. “Cinderella seems to have made her way to Europe from Asia,” reads a note on the dedication page to Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story From China. The book was written by Ai-Ling Louie and illustrated by Ed Young, and it was first published by Philomel Books, a division of Putnam, in 1982.
Like the legend of Yeh-Shen, Ai-Ling Louie’s career has lived in the shadows of children’s book publishing. As an Asian American author who came of age during the ‘60s, her trials and tribulations are a sharp contrast to the creative careers of many Asian American artists working today. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College (where she and Vera Wang were the only Chinese Americans in their class of ’71), and Wheelock College, Louie aimed to write children’s books about successful, modern-day Asian Americans, but no publishers were interested. Louie switched gears to publish the legend of Yeh-Shen, but remained determined to see her passion project through. Between 2012 and 2018, she ultimately self-published the series under her own Dragoneagle Press. It includes biographies on Vera Wang, Yo-Yo Ma and his sister Yeoh-Cheng Ma, astronaut Kalpana Chawla, and most recently, U.S. Congresswoman Patsy Mink.
When Electric Literature asked Twitter followers to share the first book they’d read by an Asian American author during APA heritage month, I realized my answer was Louie’s Yeh-Shen. I then was thrilled to discover her more recent biographies for children—books I wish I’d had growing up. I talked to Louie about her struggle to put the series into the world, why she felt it was valuable, and what it was like to be an Asian American author during her time.
Cathy Erway: Were there many other Asian Americans in your school environment? And did this have an effect on you or your work?
Ai-Ling Louie: I’d like to start a little farther back than college and show how immigration laws affect the lives of real people. I was one of the few Chinese American children born in the U.S. in the 1940’s. Immigration laws discriminated against us, keeping immigration from China to 150 persons a year, while those from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany numbered over 104,000.
In 1954 when I was a kindergartener in a public school on Long Island in New York, I, alone, integrated my school as the only non-white in the entire building. The name-calling and insulting gestures and shunning I received were a shock to me. It was a good thing I came from a strong family, who told me I was to hold my head up and to use my wits to find a way around any obstacle.
Even if we celebrate the few who make it, we must not forget the many whose lives are stunted or whose minds are embittered by their treatment.
When discriminatory immigration laws are written and prejudice against one race or another is acceptable, I find there are many who suffer and only a few lucky ones who find a way to thrive. Even if we celebrate the few who make it, we must not forget the many whose lives are stunted or whose minds are embittered by their treatment.
I saw all around me the perception that Chinese girls are pretty and docile and Chinese boys are weak and unassertive. It warped my generation, and I still see these stereotypes around me. My family and I talk about them all the time. We see how it has negatively affected many of our Chinese American cousins, nieces and nephews. I set out to try to change these perceptions.
CE: What made you decide to share the story of Yeh-Shen as an illustrated book for children?
ALL: I wanted to write stories about Asians in America, but the ones I submitted to publishers were not being accepted. I decided to try to break in to publishing with a folk tale that my grandmother knew, Yeh-Shen. Sure enough, it was quickly accepted. I thought I could write my Asian-American stories after “Yeh-Shen” was published.
CE: How did you publish your series of Asian American biographies for children?
ALL: I spent many frustrating years trying to get a second book published. Finally, I realized I was going to have to find a way around this obstacle. I started my own publishing company, Dragoneagle Press, in 2007. My brother, Jonathan Louie, a graphic designer, is my partner. Children and teachers were clamoring for biographies of Asian Americans. May was designated as Asian American History Month. Libraries needed attractive books for their May displays. I decided to write a series, “Amazing Asian Americans.” It was my hope that someday the big publishers would pick up my series and distribute it across America.
CE: How do you decide on the subjects for these biographies? And are you working on any new additions to the series now?
ALL: When I got to Sarah Lawrence College, Vera Wang and I were the only Chinese-Americans in our class. She was the best-dressed, affluent daughter from one of the top private schools. I was the girl on scholarship, who had needed tutoring in French class. After graduation, I watched her career rise and rise and rise.
I spent many frustrating years trying to get a second book published. Finally, I realized I was going to have to find a way around this obstacle.
When I was a librarian in New Jersey in the 2000’s, I saw that the state had a large population of South Asian Americans, mostly from India. I learned that South Asian Americans were the U.S.’s latest and largest Asian immigrant group come to the United States. There wasn’t a single biography of a South Asian American on the children’s bookshelf. I knew there was a U.S. astronaut, who was originally from India, Kalpana Chawla. So, I set out to write a book about her.
Patsy Mink was the first congresswoman of color and the co-author of an important law, Title IX, which changed education and women’s lives in a big way. Yet Americans didn’t seem to know who she was, or why she was important. I found out her papers, 2,000 boxes of them, were stored at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and open to the public. I spent three summers at the Library, doing research, a job I find exciting.
I am not working on any new books for the series. I am happy that I accomplished what I set out to do.
CE: Why did you feel that this series was an important addition to children’s books?
ALL: After 1965, I saw the next generation of Chinese Americans come to the U.S. The new Hart-Cellar Law let more Asian Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, come to this country and to bring in their families, their sisters and brothers, to reunite families. There were more young students of color in public school classes. As an elementary school teacher and then a children’s librarian, I was getting to see children from China, India, Brazil and Egypt, all in the same school. There were many students who looked like me but came from Vietnam, Korea or the Philippines. And so, I began to see myself as an Asian American rather than just a Chinese American. These Asian American children needed books in their libraries that showed children like them. They needed to see a future for themselves as American citizens, capable of contributing to the country. Indeed, all Americans needed to see Asian Americans and other non-whites as full Americans. American publishers were slow to see this and change. The few books they were publishing were full of stereotypes. I knew I could do better.
There are more than 25 million refugees in the world—people who have fled their countries to escape religious persecution, war, violence, and other dangers so intense it’s worth giving up your home and often your family to get away. While there are a number of ways for people in stable countries to support the displaced—donating to refugee organizations, supporting politicians who welcome asylum-seekers—it’s also vital to develop understanding of and empathy towards people who are in an impossibly dire situation. For World Refugee Day, here are ten books that delve into the experiences of people displaced from home countries across the world.
In Crossing, Bujar and his friend-cum-lover Agim flee Communist Albania in a small boat across the Adriatic Sea to Italy in hopes of a better life. Finding xenophobia and hostility in Europe, Bujar hides his Albanian origins and invents a new self in every city he moves to. Author Pajtim Statovci fled Kosovo for Finland at 2-years-old during the Yugoslav Wars.
Dina Nayeri was 9-years-old when her family have to leave Iran because of religious persecution, eventually settling in Oklahoma after a couple of years in Dubai and Rome. In her memoir, Nayeri draws from her childhood and from the accounts of asylum seekers she meets in Greek refugee camps to explore what it means to be a refugee.
The Far Away Brothers recounts the true story of a pair of identical twins, Ernesto and Raúl Flores (as they’re known in the book). Facing violent threats from the MS-13 gang, the siblings flee El Salvador and cross the US-Mexico border with coyotes before finally reuniting with their brother in the Bay Area. Markham met the Flores brothers while working as a program coordinator at Oakland International High School and spent 11 years following them.
A little known fact is that Dadaab in Kenya was the world’s largest refugee camp for decades until 2017 when violence and ethnic cleansing forced almost 625,000 Rohingya refugees to flee Myanmar for neighboring Bangladesh. City of Thorns follows the lives of nine displaced people (and their families) in Dadaab refugee camp located near the Somalian border. The refugees live in FEMA-style tents and are not allowed to work or leave the camp (unless they voluntarily return to their home country). They spend their time (months, years, decades) waiting and fantasizing for resettlement when their “real lives” will finally start. There’s a word the residents of Dadaab invented for that longing for resettlement: buufis. City of Thorns is a heartbreaking glimpse into the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the refugees that the world has forgotten about.
In 2013, Iranian-Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani fled Iran after the office of Werya, the Kurdish magazine he worked for, was raided by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He made his way to Indonesia and attempted to reach Australia by sea. His boat was intercepted by the Australian Navy and he (and the other 60 asylum seekers) were detained on Christmas Island before being moved to a detention centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. The Australian government had implemented a zero tolerance policy against “illegal boat arrivals” and forced refugees into mandatory detention in offshore detention facilities. As of 2019, he is still detained on Manus Island. Written entirely on Whatsapp, Boochani’s memoir is a searing and heartbreaking account of Australia’s cruel and inhumane immigration policies.
Lauren Hilgers met Zhuang Liehong, an activist leader in Guangdong province, while she was a political reporter stationed in Shanghai. Several years later, they reconnected when Zhuang and his wife sought asylum in the U.S. Hilgers chronicled both Zhuang’s experience as a political dissident and the couple’s attempts to establish themselves in Flushing, Queens—navigating language barriers, supporting themselves, applying for asylum, and attempting to reunite with the child they left behind. The result is a deeply-reported portrait of a man, a family, a neighborhood, and America’s byzantine asylum-seeking process.
In the aftermath of the Sri Lankan Civil War, the cargo ship MV Sun Sea was intercepted by the Canadian navy near Vancouver. Onboard were about 500 Tamil asylum-seekers fleeing Sri Lanka–two of them a father, Mahindan, and his six-year-old son. Their hope for starting a new life is questioned when they, along with the other Sri Lankans, are thrown into a detention center for suspicion of involvement with the Tamil Tigers. In Sharon Bala’s debut novel, the Canadian government’s equivocations on refugees are exposed through the accounts of Mahindan, his lawyer, and an adjudicator with a substantial amount of power over Mahindan’s fate.
The past and future clash for one family after the fall of Saigon in Thi Bui’s debut graphic memoir. With striking visuals, Bui recounts her family’s journey from South Vietnam to a Malaysian refugee camp and finally the Bay Area. The sacrifices she must make as an immigrant and new mother are uncovered in this family tale that questions what makes a family, especially in times of crisis.
Edited by Pulitzer Prize–winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Displaced features essays about exile and dislocation by 17 refugee writers from around the world. 10% of the book’s cover price is donated to the International Rescue Committee.
In 1994, 6-year-old Clemantine Wamariya and her older sister Claire fled Rwanda and made their way through 7 countries, hoping to find refuge and reunite with their family. The Girl Who Smiled Beads isa powerful memoir about surviving the Rwandan genocide.
Dear Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Media Disruption,
On the first day of our concern, I was in Principal Shurmur’s office. My twin sister, Annette, who is disabled, was in her wheelchair beside my regular chair. Principal Shurmur was across from us, at his desk.
Principal Shurmur: “I want to know what, exactly, you meant to express with your little stunt.”
Me (technically Charlene Babineaux, but please refer to me as Charlie): “We.”
At that, Annette gave me a look. It was one of her bad days, where she couldn’t quite turn her head, so I had to feel the look telepathically. And I did.
“We?” he asked, his eyebrow arching.
“We did it together,” I said. I am not a good liar, which may be useful for your admissions committee to know, though I will do it in the service of societal progress. So I looked at the other office chair, instead of Principal Shurmur’s face. He had clumsily dragged it out of the way, apologizing a lot, when Annette didn’t have the space to roll inside. “Annette and I.”
I could feel him looking at me. “The security footage clearly shows one person on the roof and—” here he paused, blushed. “The person climbed. Up the fire ladder.”
In moments like this, I wished Annette would be angrier. But she was not. She never is. I feel, sometimes, that I have to be double-angry, angry for both of us. This was one of those times.
“So?” I said.
He seemed to decide to abandon this point—the climbing point. Instead he picked up my write-up slip, and read: “‘Student poured a tub of blood into the air conditioning duct.’”
This was your applicant’s first attempt at Media Disruption for this essay. I told Shurmur I obtained a tub of porcine blood via the dumpster behind the Whole Foods, but the truth was that I had only made imitation blood: corn syrup and food coloring. I subsequently decanted the blood in the duct above the AV room while Kyle Lafferty and Marissa McBride—who had failed to stifle a laugh the week prior while reading my suggestion for the Winter Formal theme (Climate Apocalypse)—were filming the morning announcements, therefore disrupting media.
“Well,” I said. “If it was one of us, how do you know it was me? Not her?”
Principal Shurmur looked at me queerly.
“We’re twins,” I said, pointing to Annette. “Identical.”
Consequently, I became suspended. Annette, who does not like the identicaljoke, didn’t speak to me when she got home from school, unsuspended, or later that night.
You are probably thinking, Wow. That is a bit extreme, Charlie. But please let me explain some things about my actions and my suitability for your program.
First: Westlake High School serves approximately thirty-five dismembered bovines and porcines per day for lunch (according to calculations made by Annette and C. Babineaux), despite the pamphlet sent to the PTA by your applicant’s mother about the contribution of meat-eating to global warming;
Second: Westlake, Ohio is, in my opinion, the most boring and least disruptive place in America;
Third: Media Disruption occurs only when “people of vision deliberately break, pervert, and offend the content consumers and barriers to entry” (Bezos, Jeff; TED Talk). The barriers to entry, in this case, being literal, since the AV room is not wheelchair accessible.
Media Disruption occurs only when ‘people of vision deliberately break, pervert, and offend the content consumers and barriers to entry.‘
Thus, I accepted Annette’s anger and my punishment. I accepted my mom crying in the van on the way home, even though it made me feel bad, because I saw the greater goal (more on this later).
Even as this episode concluded—Mom ceasing crying, the school paper writing a small article about what happened (attached here for your reference)—I knew it was not disruptive enough to gain admission into such a prestigious and discriminating program.
That night I went into Annette’s room and tried to induce her forgiveness.
She was painting. She is right-handed, but in recent years her right hand has become somewhat claw-like, as it suffers from intention tremor.But the left one is okay. She paints with this hand, her non-dominant hand, for hours at a time, longer than I do anything, even though it hurts her arms and spine and neck, even though she is often soaked with sweat when she’s done. I used to watch her, but recently I have stopped. When I used to watch, every time she dropped a brush I would rush to pick it up, resulting in me feeling sorry for her (which she hates) and her yelling at me to just leave them on the ground! So now she has like a hundred brushes in a jar on the easel, and the carpet in that corner of her room is covered in a floral sheet, spotted all over by triangular brush printings.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Move,” Annette said, because I was standing in front of the window. Her painting was of the van. Mom’s pea-soup-colored Dodge Caravan. Souped-up, Mom says, cringily, of her van. Both because of the color and because of the stuff she has added, like Annette’s wheelchair ramp and hand controls on the steering wheel so she can drive on days when I am morally objecting to the consumption of fossil fuels. For three months Annette had been doing paintings of the van. They were stacked in a corner of her room like old pizza boxes. Every time she painted the van it looked exactly the same, and every time she insisted it was different.
Annette peered out the window at the green-black Westlake nighttime. She then turned back to the painting, her hand rocking back and forth like a wooden chair with rounded feet, and finally poked the canvas with her brush.
I squinted at her painting. If the brush-poke had changed it at all, I couldn’t tell. But Annette fell back in her chair, her body relaxing, and looked satisfied.
I took her posture as an invitation to speak.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, a little less nicely. I added: “It would have been really cool if it worked.”
(The fake-pig-blood disruption hadn’t quite gone according to plan. I’d figured that the blood would flow through the duct like a downhill mountain stream, thereby spilling out of the vent and onto the desk/heads of the morning announcement anchors, Kyle Lafferty and Marissa McBride (see above). However, when I had last been in the AV Room—delivering my wheelchair ramp schematics—I had failed to see that the vent was relatively non-sloped, so the blood just sort of pooled, for several hours, and then stank, plus bugs.)
“Cool,” Annette said. “Cool how?”
I ignored this. As the Latin proverb says (translation via Magistra Hughes), There’s no accounting for taste.
“Do you hearme?” I, now irritated, said somewhat snippily. “I’m trying to apologize.”
She snorted. “This is you apologizing? Like everything else you do, Charlie, you certainly make it complicated.”
“I know you don’t like the identical joke. I shouldn’t have said that. And I know you have this weird friendship with Principal Shurmur—”
“Just write a normal college essay, Charlie. Christ.” She aimed one more stab at the painting, but, perhaps because I was still there, thought better of it, and put the brush down. “Everybody else writes essays without getting expelled. There must be some other way to tell MIT that you must be the center of attention at all times. Think of something else to write. Or there’s always self-immolation.”
I didn’t (yet) know what self-immolation was, but I’d understood her tone. That had been enough to let it slip out.
“Easy for you to say.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Coward,” she said. “You were going to say—what? If only you had a disability to write about? If only you had a hardship? Was that it?”
I know how bad this exchange must look. However, I hope that the committee would understand, as briefly referenced above, that certain actions have been taken by your applicant which may appear selfish or cruel but actually are in service of the greater good. In Mrs. Mullaney’s class we learned about utilitarian ethics, which is when right and wrong are determined by outcomes. If a seemingly bad small action causes a bigger good result, it is ethical. Like: if the guy who invented Ziplocs had a dungeon torture chamber that was very expensive to run, and you mobilized your followers to destroy the Ziploc factory, so the CEO of Ziploc no longer had any money to torture, that’s an ethically right action. Even with the breaking-in and burning. This is just one example.
What I’m trying to say is: yes, that was what I was going to say. I had nearly blurted out the cruelest thing I could have said; and yes, Annette saw straight through me.
I kicked over her painting of the van. It fell with a flat thump to the carpet. Mom has made me scrub the stain in Annette’s carpet three times hence, but there is still a ghost of the van.
“What about me?” she yelled, as I stormed out. “Aren’t I your great big hardship?”
You should know that Annette has been in her chair her whole life. She can stand, sometimes, if she has something to brace herself against; she can walk, too, with a walker, though she hardly ever does anymore. All of it—the chair, the physical therapy, the day-separated plastic containers of pills—it is something she is used to. She is used to old ladies practically bursting into tears when she rolls by. She is used to the way people at movie theaters or hotel desks or Mom’s Christmas party lean in and speak at her in slow, loud, enunciating voices, smiling so hard that their faces are painful to look at. She is used to people saying she is brave, when they really mean that they are sorry that this happened to her, which really means they are glad it didn’t happen to them.
She is used to all of it. She has jokes.
THEM: You are so brave!
ANNETTE: Brave?! I peed my pants when I saw The Shining! Matter of fact— *here she makes expression of concentration*—I’m peeing my pants right now!
THEM: My cousin/aunt/neighbor’s stepson has cerebral palsy, too.
ANNETTE: Of course! I saw him at last year’s convention!
THEM: You are truly an inspiration, young lady.
ANNETTE: *twists face and makes Chewbacca sound*
The jokes are a “defense mechanism,” (Mom—Nicole Babineaux, 41; nurse; nice, tired) but that phrase, in my opinion, is sort of misleading. It makes me think of animals, how small things evolve to survive. Annette’s jokes aren’t like that, like a porcupine’s spines or a skunk’s excretions, because the jokes aren’t natural, and they aren’t easy for her to make. I know this not because I am her twin, but because our bedrooms share a wall, and for years I could hear her practicing the jokes as she got dressed. Over and over, for hours, until she got the tone just right.
Annette’s jokes aren’t like that, like a porcupine’s spines or a skunk’s excretions, because the jokes aren’t natural, and they aren’t easy for her to make.
Not applying to college: that is a defense mechanism, too. Of course she would get in. She would get in to places whose SAT ranges are so high they’d give me nosebleeds.
But how could she go? Would Mom quit her job, get some crappy wall-to-wall carpeted apartment nearby, in case Annette’s health suddenly went bad? Would she get a service dog again, like she had for ages 8-11, constant sneezing and runny noses of her allergies be damned? Could she be the girl in the wheelchair without us? Without me?
There was community college, of course, or Shawnee State. If she went there she could live at home. But the only time I saw Dad mention either of these options Annette closed her face up like a fist and left the room. I understand it, even if Mom and Dad don’t: those places, they are consolation prizes. They are so much less than she deserves, so far below what she has earned. She’d rather just blow the whole thing up.
So she didn’t apply at all. All those years of Student Government. All that SAT tutoring—all for nothing. The applications Mom had printed went from a pile on the kitchen table to a pile in Mom’s office to, presumably, the recycling bin.
And then, like everything else, she made it a joke. Annette University. When Mom pointed out her grades are slipping, she said, they don’t mind over at Annette University! When Mom was frowning her way through my philosophy capstone (Diamond Handcuffs: The Delusion of Monogamy by Charlie Babineaux), Annette, grinning, said, dumb and slutty—perfect for AU! Free morning after pills at the student union!
Because that is how she deals with things: she laughs, and then later she goes quietly into her room alone and forces herself to get over them. I will be honest and say that although sometimes I wish I was in her room with her, most times I am glad I am not. Either way the sight of her closed door makes me feel lonely, in a way that is hard to explain. It’s like: I feel lonely for Annette, that she needs to close everyone off, but I also feel lonely for me.
I know that is selfish to admit. She is the one with the disability—I am able-bodied and healthy. But there was a time that I can almost remember, when we were babies, before we were old enough to understand why her little baby-fists didn’t unfurl like mine, or why the left side of her face looked sort of blurry, or why she couldn’t wink—when we were still the same. Still twins, still connected.
Ergo: the reason I am explaining all of this is that several weeks after my suspension, something happened that Annette couldn’t get over, couldn’t laugh off.
Here’s what I know. She had a meeting scheduled with Principal Shurmur. In the meeting, they were going to talk about the Winter Formal. (Annette is student body Vice President. The current student body President, Heinrich Beasmore, is in Colombia on a very snooty service trip. Thus, Annette is in charge of Winter Formal planning.) She went to said meeting after school on Thursday, and then proceeded to fail to pick me up from Ultimate practice at Barrett Field. I stood at the gazebo getting chomped by mosquitoes until it got dark. I had to walk home. My phone told me the walk was 3.4 miles. By the time I got home, to use a Dad phrase (Peter Babineaux, 42; husky but not fat; funny; away on business), I was royally pissed.
But when I got there, I saw the van in the driveway. The ramp door was open, so all the lights in the van were on, but no one was inside.
I hurried into the house. It was dark. I walked through the kitchen (empty) and the mudroom (no sign of Annette’s coat), and went upstairs, turning lights on as I went. I had that scary-movie sensation, when your guts feel like they’ve been double-knotted.
Annette’s bedroom door was open. I flicked on the lights. The window was open: the breeze and the night-sound of traffic on I-83 pushed inside. And there was Annette’s chair, empty, between the window and the stack of old paintings.
I went to the window and carefully climbed out. There is a narrow stretch of shingles outside the sill, a foot, maybe, wedged there between the sill and the gutter. When we were younger, and we fought less, we would come out here at night; I’d help Annette onto the ledge, and then she’d press forward onto her hands and knees and sort of army crawl up the slope of the roof, into a sitting position. We’d sit and smoke the cigarettes that Mom hides in her sock drawer, talking about nothing, only crawling back inside when dawn started showing, working on the black line of the horizon like an eraser. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been out on the roof. And even then, with my help, it had been dangerous trying to get Annette out there. Thinking about how hard it must have been for her to climb out on her own, how close she might have come to tumbling over the edge—all of a sudden I felt seventeen years’ worth of guilt for every time I hadn’t been there, every time I’d acted like I had the night before.
She was there, halfway up the roof, where the incline of the roof-shingles makes an armpit with the window-shingles. She saw me coming and wiped her face. Her cheeks were shining in the dim orange of the streetlight. She’d been crying.
You have to understand something. Annette and I have different fingerprints. I bet you’re surprised. Our whole lives, in a way, are about division. Divergence is maybe an even better word. We were one egg in the womb, and then, poof, there were two eggs, two of us. From that moment we were on separate paths. The different parts of Mom’s womb that we touched changed our fingerprints. I came out first, eleven minutes before Annette, and by the time she did, the air in the room was different. The temperature, the smell. The chemicals in my mother’s body, after delivering a baby. Only eleven minutes later, but everything was different. And so it has been, on and on and on.
Annette’s life, the doctors explained to Mom, who later explained to us—it would be hard to predict. They told Mom that Annette might die before she ever left the hospital, but she didn’t. That she might die before she turned five, but she didn’t.
One doctor, I remember, used the phrase 50-50 shot. I never got it out of my mind. Fifty-fifty. What he’d meant was that it was a coin flip, whether Annette would survive another year—but what I heard was: Two equal parts. Two halves of a whole. Me and Annette. She could have been me. I could have been her.
And always, every year, when we sit there blowing out two cakes, Mom doing a bad job hiding her crying, I have this tiny, awful thought: what if we weren’t meant to be two people at all, but one? We were once a single zygote. What if the split wasn’t 50/50 at all? What if things haven’t been equal from the very beginning?
Two equal parts. Two halves of a whole. Me and Annette. She could have been me. I could have been her.
That’s what I think, in that moment while the candles are flickering, everybody is holding their breath so they don’t accidentally snuff them out. And some part of me knows: it isn’t equal . It never has been. Of course not.
She was up on the roof, and she wiped roughly at her face where the tears had left streaks. All around us, peepers and crickets yammering. Me half-hanging out the window, feeling like, utilitarianism aside, I would have dumped myself straight out onto the front lawn if it would have gotten her to stop crying. But I didn’t say that. We don’t say things like that to each other. Not anymore.
Instead, Annette sniffed. She nodded, as if answering something I’d forgotten I’d asked. And she said, “You figure out a new plan for your essay yet?”
We climbed back into her room (Annette allowing me to help her) and started brainstorming.
Something had changed after her meeting with Principal Shurmur. She wasn’t pushing me away, or hurrying me out of her room. Now she wanted to help.
With no explanation, she started telling me what Shurmur had discussed with her, the plans for the Winter Formal. She unrolled, on her desk, a big blueprint-y drawing of the layout of the dance. I am sure I don’t need to tell you this was top secret stuff.
The Winter Formal, she explained, was to be Winter Wonderland themed. (Please see earlier, where I explained Westlake’s staggering boringness.) There would be little glittery snowflakes dangling from the gymatorium ceiling on glittery strings; there would be several frosted plastic Christmas trees on the stage; there would be papier-mâché penguins as centerpieces on all the white-table clothed tables. And so on and so forth.
She also explained that there would be a big presentation at the beginning of the dance. Shurmur was going to make remarks, sort of a toast, give an award—Annette seemed vague on the details. But—“that,” she said, “that’s where you come in. When everyone is stopped. Watching and listening. That’s your moment.”
Instantly, disruption ideas appeared in my mind: We hire a locksmith and lock everybody inside the gym. We drive a car to the gym and park it on stage. We rearrange the marquee letters above the stage—WESTLAKE HIGH SCHOOL into: WE HATE SCHOOL. WEAK HIGH SCHOOL. Or STALE TALK SHOW. COOL LAKE WHIGS. We fill the penguin centerpieces with blood—
“Jesus, Charlie,” Annette said. “Why is it always blood! No blood!”
It wasn’t all blood, I told her. But she was right. I had done the blood thing before, and I don’t need to explain that to you, admissions committee, about the daunt of your 11% acceptance rate. I felt itchy and frustrated, sitting on the floor of Annette’s room, worrying that I had a great opportunity but not the creativity to seize it. I thought of self-immolation again—but, no. No use getting in to MIT if I was dead.
Something else was bugging me, too. Annette.
“Was it this meeting?” I asked. I tried to stare at the floor, but I had to look at her. “What was it? That made you so upset?”
But she just looked away.
“Anal fissures,” she said. “Now go. Go plan your stupid thing.”
Here I will fast-forward past a few weeks that are not super-relevant to our story. Things that happened:
Dad came home and the three of us went to a Browns game. On way home after game:
Dad: “There is no better argument for nihilism than the Cleveland Browns.”
Annette: *laughed*
Me: Looked up nihilism on my phone.
At Thanksgiving, relatively good time had by all, except when Mom overcooked turkey, proclaimed it petrified. Hard to disagree. Dad went back on road next day.
Crazy Jeff Garbo at school was rumored to have shoved sharpened pencil into eye of Trevin Lutz. Lutz indeed seen with eyepatch. Garbo, however, was neither expelled nor in jail; day after rumor, he was spotted at school; it was soon revealed that Lutz had a contact-lens related infection. Disappointment.
I finished four college applications: DePaul, Ohio State, University of Pittsburgh, Loyola Chicago. (Since these were listed on p. 4, I assume it will not hurt my admissions chances to mention them. They are just safeties.)
Me and Mom at dinner table one night working on Common App essay.
Annette (at open door of pantry): “We’re out of Puffins.”
Mom (not looking up from essay draft): “Well. The keys are right there and there’s gas in the van.”
Annette: “I don’t want to go to the store.”
Mom: “Annette, shh. We’re trying to work here.”
Annette: “I just don’t understand why we don’t have them if I put them on the grocery list.”
Mom: (put down red pen, crossed arms)
Annette: “I’m just saying.”
Mom: “Annette Marie. You are an adult woman, perfectly capable of buying groceries for yourself. And I am not your maid. You better fix your attitude—“
Annette: (slammed pantry door) “Fuck this.”
Mom: (stood up so fast her chair tipped over) “Go to your room! Right now!”
Annette: (did not go to room; picked up keys) (*in fake-nice singy voice*): “Anybody need anything from the store? I need to go so I don’t disturb Charlie’s college applications! Because I’m an adult woman who better learn self-sufficiency! But Charlie needs Mommy to check all her commas and periods! Oh well! Once Charlie is off getting a 1.5 GPA in her American Studies degree at Buttfuck State College at least I’ll have had lots of practice going to the HyVee!”
Annette: (went out kitchen door, slammed it, started van, drove away)
Mom: (crying, stood up, went upstairs, closed bedroom door quietly)
With two days left before the Winter Formal, I was starting to freak out. The bolt of inspiration I awaited had not yet electrified. Every night after school I scoured the blueprint Annette had given me, and I googled best senior pranks and media disruption and cool ways to make anarchist statement + high school + not technically illegal, but I kept finding the same stuff. Toilet-paperings, car/parking lot stuff, prank phone calls to the principal. Etc. I knew I would come up with something better eventually, but I was running out of time.
I hope that the committee will consider this next part with the following qualifications in mind:
I did not actually 100% go through with it (more on this below).
I conducted plenteous internet research and two controlled backyard experiments.
I am willing to bet no one else in your application pile showed this kind of commitment.
If you recall, earlier in this story Annette made a snarky half-joke about “self-immolation,” which means to “set fire to oneself, especially as a form of protest or sacrifice” (Google). After I looked it up that night, the idea kept bugging me, poking at my mind for weeks like a stone in my shoe.
Although I couldn’t really watch the videos of the Buddhist monks self-immolating in the 1960s without crying, I thought that was also a pretty strong indicator of how powerful the spectacle was. I did not want to actually burn myself—I hope that is obvious—nor did I want to be seen as “culturally appropriating” something so serious, so I found what I thought was a good middle-ground:
I would steal the Westlake High School mascot suit (the Proud Bear);
I would set up a Kiddie Pool full of water on the wings of the Winter Formal Stage;
I would douse the mascot suit—with myself inside it, carefully ensconced in Dad’s flame-retardant onesie (from his yearly trip with “college buddies” to “NASCAR camp”)—in lighter fluid;
I would set the suit on fire, run across the stage blazing and screaming something impactful (Impactful Statement TBD) and dive into the Kiddie Pool.
Westlake High School’s janitor, a 74-year-old man named Dexter Higgins, has been an unwitting accomplice to all my disruptions. Dexter is very nice. He has one eye that long-ago detached from its roots and thus points down and to the right, at nothing. He is good at his job in the sense that the school is pretty clean and the trash cans are usually emptied on time, but he is bad at his job in the sense that he has not remembered to lock the big industrial delivery door for—this is a guess—twenty years.
I couldn’t take the van—the Souped-Up Van is well known around Westlake—so I started the long walk to the school at midnight and got there at quarter to one. I went in through the auto shop door, ignoring the cameras (which are all fake/turned off), and made my preparations. I stole the mascot suit from Coach Gerrity’s office. I went into the gymatorium and inflated the Kiddie Pool, dragged it to the wings of the stage, filled it with water and covered it with a sheet from the school’s production of Sweeney Todd. I had also brought a small bath of my fake blood, just in case, so I tucked my industrial bucket beneath the tablecloth skirt of table number six.
But then I heard something behind me. I stood up too quickly, cracked my head on the table, and whirled around.
It was Annette. She was between tables seven and eight. On her lap, the bear’s head, which I had apparently dropped while dizzily pumping up the Kiddie Pool with my breath. The bear’s head looked spooky, there in her hands, its big meshy eyes black and empty.
“You followed me?” I said.
She didn’t answer. She scratched the bear’s fluffy ear.
“The pig blood thing,” she said. “You stole that from Carrie.”
I thought about this. It occurred to me that it was possible that Carrie, a Stephen King book-cum-movie which, without spoiling too much, involves a girl having pig’s blood dumped on her at a dance, had subconsciously influenced some aspects of my disruption.
“You shouldn’t do this,” Annette said. “You don’t even have a reason.”
This annoyed me. “You’re the one who suddenly wanted to help me.” Except, there, in that moment, I couldn’t remember exactly how she’d helped at all. What inside information had she even given me? Who cared that the theme was Winter Wonderland. But she had encouraged me, hadn’t she? She wanted me to do something.
But before I could ask, she said, “I know. I know that I told you about it. I know that I helped. I just wanted… I can’t explain it now. But I changed my mind. You can’t do it. You might get expelled.”
I snorted. The sound echoed weirdly in the empty gym. “I won’t get expelled.”
“You really might,” she said. “You’ve already been suspended three times.” (NB: the other two are addressed in Supplemental Essay #1: Miscellaneous Disciplinary Concerns.)
“What do you care?” I said. “You probably want me to get expelled. That way I can’t go to college. So I have stay home with you.”
Annette looked at me for a long time. Like I said, I was upset. I was confused. I felt guilty. I had accidentally scorched a toenail during a controlled backyard experiment that afternoon and my foot was throbbing so bad it was like it was trying to tell me something. I was surprised Annette had followed me there—she doesn’t like to do rule-breaking things. And as I looked at her, looking at me, feeling the whole swirl of confusing feelings… for one of the first times in our life I had no idea what she was thinking. We share 99.6% of the exact same genetic material and yet we are very different people.
“You can be a real idiot sometimes, Charlie,” she said. She put the bear’s head on the ground. And then she rolled out of the gym, and I heard the van start up, and for the second time in a month, I walked home in the dark.
Winter Formal day. I got up and felt pukey. Mom had already taken Annette to school for the Student Government meeting at six, so when she came back to give me the van and then carpool with Bev to the hospital, she was too tired and too focused on work to notice I was acting strange. She just gave me the keys and kissed me on the head and left.
I drove to school in silence. No Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, nothing. In the back seat, I had my black duffel, stuffed with the necessary implements for all my potential disruptions: Dad’s jug of Kingsford Lighter Fluid; Dad’s floppy flame-suit; three Bic lighters; band-aids and Neosporin and aspirin; and the tattered friendship bracelet Annette had made me during our first year at sleepaway camp.
The school day passed without incident. No one was talking about pranks, or if they were, no one suspected me. Is it silly to say I was a bit disappointed? I do not, as Annette has sometimes suggested, do everything for the attention—I do things for the societal benefit. But the attention is a not-bad byproduct.
In sixth period, I asked Mr. Holster for a pass and he signed one, yawning. I went to my locker and got the duffel (my locker reeking like a grill). I went to the girl’s locker room, waited for Sadie Jorgenson and Ashley Wu to finish re-straightening their hair, and then changed into the mascot suit. I slipped into the gymatorium—decorated and dark—and ducked underneath table six, where I found my blood bucket, undisturbed from the night before.
The dark, quiet space underneath the table felt like the inside of the igloos I would make for Annette and I when we were kids. I had five hours until the dance started, and for the first four, nothing happened.
I played games on my phone ‘til it died.
I looked at the gym floor and tried to guess where I was on the basketball court by the weird hieroglyphs of tape on the ground.
I laid on my back and stared at the green and pink landforms of gum adhered to the bottom of the table, wondering who had chewed them, thinking about how teeth are almost bones and our whole bodies are just bags of bones and cables and goop.
I don’t usually genuflect so deeply, to tell the truth. But I was nervous. Actually, I was, to use a Dad phrase, “pants-messing scared.” The self-immolation suddenly seemed offensive and misguided. Even if it wasn’t, it was not impossible I would get expelled. It was not impossible I would die, or at least burn my arms/face/scalp irreparably. And for what? These disruptions were not MIT-worthy. They were just stupid pranks. The Charlene Babineaux show, as Annette would say. I could practically hear her voice in my ears. Why did I do any of the stuff that I did? Did I even believe in any of it? Anything I did? The veganism? The demonstrations? The sit-in at the Rowley IndiePlex? Everything I did suddenly seemed empty. It was all spectacle.
I was crying again, quietly. I decided to leave. To pull the plug on the whole thing. I would go home and take the MIT bookmark off my browser and finally let Dad teach me how to be a fucking accountant.
But just as I went to climb out from under the table, the double-doors opened, and I heard Principal Shurmur and Vice Principal Mack, and then a cacophony of voices, and the whole class of 2019’s shoes squeaking on the gymatorium floor.
I was trapped.
Within minutes, it got hot under the table. All those bodies, throbbing with hormones, excreting their weird heat in the air. I was sweating in the mascot suit. I had to take the bear head off, which was bad, because if anybody peeked under the table, or if I went for it and fled, I would not have a disguise on.
And then, after who-knew-how-long, I heard the music fade out, and the sound of somebody tapping on a microphone.
“Hey, all right,” Principal Shurmur said, with maximum lameness. “How we doin’ tonight, Seniors?”
A few mild woops.
“I just want to say thank you to our teacher chaperones—Ms. Bachelder, Mr. Link, you guys are looking very spiffy this evening.”
Some clapping.
“And to all our student government representatives, let’s get a round of applause.” Genuine clapping. “Yeah, right? What a great night. Everyone being safe, enjoying themselves. You guys did a great job planning this.”
For some reason, my stomach clenched. Strangely, I was feeling that tingly twin feeling. The onset of telepathy. But then again, maybe I didn’t realize that then. Maybe I only see it now, looking back.
Shurmur cleared his throat.
“I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight one particular member of our Class of ’19 student government. This student has been an elected rep for four years. She has done it all—planned events, mediated student disputes, fund-raised.”
I belly-crawled to the front of the table and lifted the tablecloth. It took my eyes a moment to adjust, but when they did, I could see Shurmur on stage, and behind him, an easel, with a big rectangle perched on it, covered by a black cloth.
“This student,” he said. “Is someone I really admire. Not just as her principal. But person to person. She is—oh man, she’s going to kill me. She really didn’t want to do this! But I have to embarrass her, I’m sorry. Listen, I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say her bravery, her energy, her spirit… she is an inspiration. An inspiration to our whole community.”
The crowd clapped, murmured. I heard people muttering, whispering. Somebody sneezed.
“We want to dedicate a scholarship to this person. This pillar of our community. So that we can all remember her impact on this place.”
And he reached over and pulled the curtain off the easel. Underneath was one of those huge novelty checks.
ANNETTE BABINEAUX MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP, the check read.
And right then it all clicked.
Her meeting with Shurmur. Why she’d been so upset. The vague stuff she’d said about a presentation, an award.
He was doing the two things she hated most. One: all those barfy words about her bravery, her integrity, what she meant to the community. And two: pretending she was already dead.
He turned to back to the microphone, and he was about to say her name—and all of a sudden I had my reason.
Admissions Committee Reader, the reason is not always one thing. This is what I learned in my disruption—this is what I will know for the rest of my life. When I graduate from your program. When I get my first job. When I get old and have kids. When Annette’s 50/50 finally comes up the wrong way. When I have to pull over on the way to work to write down her old jokes to make sure I still remember them. When I visit Mom alone. When June 11th is no longer our birthday, it is only my birthday.
I was under the tablecloth, sweating through my bear costume and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. But then I saw Annette on the side of the stage, the left wheel of her chair and the scuffed-white toe of her left Converse, and the twin-telepathy feeling was crashing like cymbals in my ears—and I lifted the tablecloth, and I went.
Please find the attached pictures of my disruption. There are three.
In the first, you will see Principal Shurmur pulling back the black cloth on the novelty check that is propped on an easel. If you squint, you can see the end of the To: line of the check —BABINEAUX MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP. If you squint, you can see Shurmur glancing to his left, his eyebrows knitted in surprise or confusion at what he is seeing. Also there, at the side of the stage, you can see Annette, just starting to roll out from the wings. Her back is to the camera. She is still partly obscured by the curtain. And yet—though I am biased, though I know her better than anybody—I bet you can tell how horrified she is. You can feel it, just looking at the photo. The tension in her neck, the way she grips the wheels of her chair: her titanic embarrassment. Her panic. The SOS signal she was sending, that only I could hear.
In the second photograph, Annette has emerged from the curtain. She is making her way across the stage. She is craning her neck, turning back to look at something, something behind her. She still has not made it to the edge of the spotlight that is illuminating Shurmur and the mic stand and the check, so even though she’s out on the stage, she is still semi-shrouded in darkness.
Behind her, a headless Westlake Proud Bear has clambered onto the stage. In the bear’s arms is a bucket. The bucket is swinging; a wave of extremely believable fake blood is cresting. The bucket is tilting; the corn syrup is reaching the lip of the bucket, just about to fly. Because of the angle of the camera, you cannot see the bear-person’s face—only her sweaty pony-tail, the Utah-shaped birthmark on the back of her left ear. You can only see, in other words, the moment before the real moment.
But before that—before the blood hits, before Principal Shurmur is covered, his suit sticky, his toupee gloopy and lollipop-red, his doofy novelty check ruined—before the eyes widen in the faces in the crowd, before the chaperones rush to the stage—you can see it. Frozen in a photograph, Attached here as proof.
Look at Annette. She is pretending to be shocked. She is pretending to be oblivious. But look at the corners of her mouth, her cheeks, her eyes. Something is changing. An expression is forming. It is like: pre-delight.
The space of the graphic novel allows a “coming out” process that is uncompromising and by definition “alternative” (like a great underground ‘zine). This glorious, sometimes eerie space is where characters curse, fuck, gesticulate, poop, live. Right in your face, showing you fear, desire, often humor. This diverse list of 10 queer graphic novels features characters who challenge sex roles, gender identities, class hierarchies, capitalism and other systems, corruption and exploitation of various kinds.
Book 1 of the Locas series (part of the indelible comics classic Love & Rockets) was the first time I ever saw brown women, Latinx women of L.A., at the center of a “comic book” (my term for it then!). Maggie (Margarita) and Hopey are friends, rivals, lovers, confidantes, political sisters. They observe the world and each other with major “side eye.” In this start to a still-ongoing series by the graphic novel pioneers Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Maggie’s adventures around a crashed spaceship in the jungle intersperse with romantic and lustful letters back home.
Lisa Maas’ debut graphic novel was recently named a Stonewall Honor Book for the Barbara Gittings Literature Award by the American Library Association. The book delves into the specificity of “white lesbian cultures,” specifically in Victoria, Canada (Pacific Northwest), weaving the details of this world (mullets! Indigo Girls! Cats!) with a traditional “rom-com” scenario of a two people who “gave up on love” finding each other with an awkward, authentic excitement.
The winner of the 2018 LA Times Book Prize for best graphic novel, this book makes an inevitable appearance on every “queer comics” list for the sheer haunting beauty of its images. Walden, a manga-influenced comic artist who was also a former figure skater (and who has written a graphic memoir, Spinning, about this experience) makes use of a lyrical, understated style to tell a story about rebuilding the world on a new planet. Mia, a crewmember, once fell in love with a girl named Grace, and wants to help the rebuilding crew in part to recover this lost love.
This sweet, sexy graphic novel, by queer black woman artist and disability rights activist Tee Franklin, deserves to be turned into a star-ensemble movie. A decades-long love story between two women who meet as young adolescents at a bingo parlor, fall apart when their families demand “straightness” from them, then come back together in a relationship that lasts, Bingo Love is one of the few graphic novels that offers bold queerness without “youth” as a prerequisite.
Ignatz-winning illustrator Tamaki’s episodic story set in a school for superteens can be read as a cross-over YA graphic novel, sort of like an edgier, multicultural, existentially-themed Twilight, or maybe more like the sensibility of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (2019 extremely gripping, risqué, scary version, not the benign sitcom schtick of Melissa Joan Hart, whose character would’ve been killed off in the forest in the first episode of the all-new Sabrina). At SuperMutant Academy, problems involving witches and monsters are juxtaposed with anguishing but universal problems—like unrequited love.
When I first encountered Kari, by Indian graphic novelist Amruta Patil, I thought it might be too grim for me—the stark black and white images were so unsettling, and echoing some of the most disturbing images in religious comic books I had grown up with. But in the end, the book leaves you breathless, and extremely glad to be alive. Kari explores the aftermath of an attempted double suicide by two women lovers, herself and her lover Ruth, and the titular character’s subsequent survival (and rebirth) in the shadow community of the gutters of Mumbai and against the challenges of the 2008 recession as it affected the city, including during terror attacks in fall of that year.
Wet Moon portrays a compelling goth scene, in some ways following the tradition of the Hernandez brothers’ Love & Rockets (which introduced the idea of the punk rock scene as multiracial and as available to Latinx women as it was to white women). Body positivity of very diverse shapes is celebrated in the book. The story starts in the town of Wet Moon, focusing on Cleo Lovedrop and friends Trilby Bernarde, Audrey Richter, and Mara Zuzanny, all art students. There is courage in the portrayal here of sexual violence and its survivorship.
Co authored by two American Library Association Stonewall Honorees, Luisa: Now and Thenis a particularly delightful and precisely-drawn graphic novel about a 32 year old artist/ photographer being brought in dialogue with her teenage self on the streets of 1990s Paris. What more could you need?
Starting with the elaborate, gilded cover art: the work is gorgeous and intricate, fashioning a kick-ass marginalized rebel heroine, Maika Halfwolf, who could eat Katniss Everdeen for breakfast (literally). Nudity, fury, revenge—what women are finally able to be like, when free of the confines of “the likeable woman” expectation guiding much of commercial literature.
Winner of an 2018 LGBTQ Lambda Literary Award in the Graphic Novel award, this story centers on a 10-year-old queer girl, Karen Reyes, as she investigates the death of her Holocaust-survivor neighbor against a backdrop of the monsters she imagines herself as being, like the drawing she makes of herself as a werewolf chasing a village of women. This book, because of its juxtaposition of a “comic” story arc with reproductions of works from the Art Institute of Chicago and elsewhere in the city, is considered to have elevated the graphic novel genre, but come at a great physical cost to the artist, who labored over the book for years while recovering from hand and arm paralysis from West Nile virus. Ferris is also an inspiration in that she began this debut work only after the age of 40.
Tyrese L. Coleman’s How to Sit: A Memoir in Stories and Essays, follows a young Black woman’s coming of age in America. A finalist for the 2019 Pen Open Book Award, How To Sit blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction. In some sections, it is clear one is reading about the author Tyrese as she analyzes her DNA results, navigates a predominantly white institution, and endures a high risk pregnancy. In other selections, the protagonist is nebulous. Throughout Coleman’s voice is raw and real and powerful.
In addition to being an author, contributing writer at Electric Literature and the reviews editor of Smokelong Quarterly, Tyrese L. Coleman is also a wife, mother, and attorney. We spoke about writing as escapism, the benefits of acknowledging shame, and the perks of publishing on small presses like Mason Jar.
Deirdre Sugiuchi: In the author’s note, you write that How to Sit “plays with the line between fiction and nonfiction as it explores adolescence, identity, and grief, and the transition between girlhood and womanhood for a young black woman seeking to ground herself when all she wants is to pretend her world is fantasy.”
In some ways How To Sit reminds me of bell hooks’ Wounds of Passion. Can you discuss the decision to play with this line? Did you have any models?
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Tyrese Coleman: I don’t know if it was a conscious thing, a switch where I decided at some point that this was what I was going to do. I was just starting to write professionally, or rather, more than just for myself and my own self-enjoyment, and what came out were these pieces of auto-fiction or essays that related to these topics of identity and maturing and childhood. When the first couple of iterations of this book wasn’t going anywhere, two things happened: one, I discovered that there had been collections from famous writers that included fiction and nonfiction in the same space. And second, I was reading The Things They Carried for the millionth time and realizing that what I was creating was similar.
Ultimately, though, I really wanted to create a version of Jean Toomer’s Cane, which has always been my favorite book because of the risks Toomer took in writing something seemingly inaccessible, dense, and genre-bending. A modern version of that, for me, was Citizen by Claudia Rankine. When I realized that, yes, I do want to play with what the word “memoir” means and what is fiction and what is non-fiction, those were the two books that I carried around with me everywhere—the things I carried (sorry, couldn’t resist). Those were my models.
DS: Can you talk about the need the narrator has to pretend that the world is a fantasy in order to survive?
TC: Other than the obvious feeling of wanting to be someone other than yourself, the escapism from books, television, movies, art comes in the brief exodus from whatever is happening in the outside world. The escape is where the pleasure lies, at least for me, and it’s a world that I often think is better than reality, even if I’m reading a dystopia. There is the reassurance that you can get up and walk away from your consequences. If you are in the hands of a capable story-teller, then it’s almost as if you are being cradled, like a child secure in their parent’s embrace, there are no worries, and in this space, you don’t look like you, you aren’t poor, you aren’t traumatized, and at any moment, when those things start to happen and the tension becomes too much, you can close the book until you are ready to deal with it. What a wonderful life that must be! I want that. I want to be a part of a story. Or rather, I want to be the character in the story that is being read. Because there is the option to dip in and out of the stakes. Real life is continuous stakes. There are no page breaks, no white space, no chapter endings and a brand new scene on the next page. You must deal. Sometimes you have to go through life pretending that, in the morning, there will be another scene.
DS: You write about the sexual abuse of young girls, particularly young black girls, and the continuing impact of abuse on a woman’s life. It’s something I think about a lot, the impact of trauma, both as a survivor and as a public school educator. You created art out of horrific situations. Can you talk about the importance of breaking this silence and your process?
TC: I don’t know, I don’t want to talk for everyone, but for me, my trauma is a part of who I am. I carry it around in my body because it happened to this body and this is the only body I have. It was never about breaking a silence, because everyone who knows me understands this about me. My friends have known this since we first met. I’ve been talking about it for years. It’s one of the first things I told my husband when we started telling secrets. I am not ashamed of what happened to me because I understand it is not my fault, though, that revelation took time and years of me punishing myself in various ways.
I am not ashamed of this body and everything it has suffered.
But, yes, I am not ashamed of this body and everything it has suffered so what is it but a thing for me to speak about it or write about it. This is fact. I was molested. For other women who do feel shame, though, that is what I would challenge them to confront first, rather than the idea of breaking the silence. Because if you aren’t addressing the shame, then speaking on it isn’t going to be from an authentic source or frame of mind. And then, in essence, you’re going to perpetuate the same trauma on to yourself. You have to be able to confront the bold-faced truth of what happened to you in the most frank terms. And then understand, that you did not do this to yourself. Someone did this to you. Then maybe, you can talk about it.
DS: At your AWP panel, “My Memoir’s First Year,” you mentioned that one of your goals in writing was to create art. Can you expound on this?
TC: Like I mentioned briefly, Cane is my favorite book. It’s hard to read, at least it was for me. I didn’t understand it, really, until I’d read it many many times. It was one of the first books that required that much work from me. And I immediately recognized that it wasn’t for every one. I always wanted to create something that felt special in that way. It is my own skewed interpretation of what art is. A beautiful piece that gives you something new with each enjoyment of it, though it may not be to everyone’s taste.
Small presses are putting out the work that the big publishers were afraid to back.
Art, though, is not commercially viable because it is not universally palatable. I knew that this book was going to be that, especially since I never told people whether they were reading fiction or nonfiction. I knew that people would be like, “what the hell is a memoir in stories and essays?” or “no, honey, that’s just a collection of stories and essays, it is not a memoir.” This was the goal for this book, but it may not be the goal for another project.
And, I hope I haven’t walked myself into a corner with this, because I don’t think that just because a lot of people like something it cannot be art or artistic. I just think I want to write something that withstands universal taste, that can be read at any time and any place and be relatable in some respect. I hope that is what I did.
DS: At that same panel, you said that “Small presses are really doing the hard work of diversifying literature.” Can you discuss this?
TC: When I first had the concept for this book, an agent asked me “but, what shelf would that go on?” and I knew that attempting to publish through the traditional route would be a waste of time. One, this is a book that discusses sex, masturbation, health, bodies, grief, and reads very very Black. Two, it is lyrical. I’ve never seen a book like mine ever commercially available and the closest I’d seen to it was published by an indie press.
When I took a survey of who was publishing what, I saw my friend Donald Quist publishing with a small press. I saw Feminist Presspublishing our voices. I knew Roxane Gay’s and Alexander Chee’s first books were with small presses. And I realized that small presses were putting out the work that the big publishers were afraid to back because there is no guarantee that the risk would be worth it. Most of us publishing with small presses are used to rejection. I’ve learned that a lot of times when things are rejected, it’s not based on quality, but rather the “I don’t get it.” To me, when those are the words they use when rejecting you, it means you are doing something innovative and special. Those folks rejected with the “I don’t get it,” are the ones small presses embrace. They get it.
Now, I will say that there are risks. We all know what just came out about Curbside Splendor not paying royalties. And that is not the first instance of a small press being called out for not paying their writers, so we do have to be cognizant of who we give our art to. And, because small presses are publishing writers who are from the most vulnerable groups, it is even more important to be diligent when it comes to these matters. Join a local union, hire an attorney if you don’t have an agent, question the contract, damn it, READ the contract and know what is up and what is owed to you. Don’t just be grateful that someone is publishing you. Expect to be published. Look, the white lady being served poorly is going to call the manager. Damnit, we got to learn not to just be happy we’re getting service. We need to learn how to ask for the manager too!
DS: Social class is often ignored in America, but you do an incredible job of highlighting social class differences throughout How to Sit. Can you discuss writing about social class?
TC: I grew up on a dirt road in a house that was smaller than my first apartment out of college with three generations of my family. I found a mouse in my shoe once, a snake in my drawer, and many a bird would fly into our home. There were times we had to boil water for washing and for a long time, my mother made below the poverty line though she had and still works for the same company for many decades. You know, when you live in this world, you don’t know how bad it is until you experience something else. So, does that mean it was bad at all? I didn’t have a whole lot, but at the time, it wasn’t as big of a deal, so was it actually a problem? Yes and no, I guess is the answer to that. Yes when I need to go to the doctor and almost fall out from walking pneumonia because we couldn’t afford a doctor bill. No when I had a roof over my head, food to eat, and water to drink.
Real life is continuous stakes. There are no page breaks, no white space, no chapter endings and a brand new scene on the next page. You must deal.
When I left the country, went to college and saw the world I grew up in with fresh eyes, that is when I saw what others must’ve seen. This is when I saw what I saw…what I was starting to think about that world and the people I left back home. At some point, I had to admit to myself that I became judgemental, became “cute” and “bougie” and all the things other people had called me in the past when I did things they deemed stuck up. I gave into those class distinctions. It allowed me to write from both perspectives after the fact. I am ashamed of the college version of me who felt shame over where she came from and thought she had lived enough to judge anybody. But, because I thought those things, I was able to translate them into my stories. And I think it takes removal from the situation in order to write about it honestly.
DS: V-Day was such a powerful essay! I wanted to hug you and tell you “It’s not your fault!” I’m a mother too. I constantly feel guilty. Can you discuss writing about mother guilt?
TC: Parenting is just an exercise in overcoming daily guilt. As long as I’m a parent, I will always have a well of guilt to pull sustenance from. I’m the type of person who would rather confront these things than let them linger. Every parent feels guilty about one thing or another. Might as well talk about it.
DS: Who are your favorite authors? What writing excites you?
This is a book that discusses sex, masturbation, health, bodies, grief, and reads very very Black.
TC: I have like 8 million favorites, but I am partial to Southern writers like Kiese Laymon and Jesmyn Ward. Heavy and Sing Unburied Sing were two books that made me feel simultaneously overwhelmed by jealousy and so inspired that I needed to write something immediately. I’m excited by voice and my ability to relate to the text in some ways. I am also really into Romance these days. I highly recommend pretty much every book written by Alyssa Cole.
DS: Can you talk about your next project and your shift to fiction?
TC: I don’t know if its a shift to fiction. I’ve always written fiction. Maybe a shift to less autobiographical fiction, though, I’m sure when my book comes out people will find a way to ask me whether or not its based on my life because, well I’m a woman and that’s what they do to us. But, I am working on what I like to call a “literary romance novel.” My goal is to write a book that makes you happy at the end of it, but isn’t dictated by genre. As you can tell about me, I hate rules.
I want to write a book about love, about race, about grief, about family, about the South and about good sex (because goddamn, why is sex so damn awful in literature outside of romance novels…?). So, that is what I’m going to do.
I like to think that I’ve become more whole having written my first novel If I Had Two Lives. After moving to the United States at twelve years old, I’ve not lived anywhere for longer than five years, moving from one state to another. My connection to place is tenuous, my relationship to people transitory due to geographical circumstance; my ability to hold together the various fragments of my identities loosens with time. I am perhaps lucky to have lived more than one life, yet as my life experiences gain in layers and textures, my sense of self grows all the more opaque.
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If I Had Two Lives is a work of the imagination that has autobiographical consequences. I wrote it in bursts and out of order. When I had all the crucial moments, I began stitching them together, writing into the empty spaces, between voids, assembling coherence. Meaning is the magic potion that unites seemingly random series of events. Narrative gives meaning. I’ve not suddenly become surer of myself, but I’m more comfortable living with stitches, breathing in the seams.
Below are seven works of art that investigate powerful psychic ruptures. Often it is the protagonists themselves who undergo this split. They are not easy books and they shouldn’t be. Like most great works of literature, they ask difficult questions⎯How does a psychic split happen? Can a person survive it? How many masks can one wear before getting crushed beneath their weight? Is coherency an illusion?
An accident burns off the face of a scientist. Disfigured, he loses his connection to his wife and the world. To find his way back into society and win back his wife’s love, he creates a mask⎯a dangerously convincing mask that manifests its own destiny. An intellectual exploration of what it means to lose one’s identity and the perils of living with a crafted identity.
Nadia and her husband Ange are bewildered to find that they are loathed by everyone, their neighbors, their friends and family. Their world begins to deteriorates physically and mentally. The more they seek the reason for their ostracism, the more punishing their reality gets. As Nadia retraces her steps into the past, it becomes apparent that she has been keeping ugly secrets⎯lies that are soul-severing.
The trilogy follows twin brothers Claus and Lucas who were torn apart in World War II as were Western and Eastern Europe. The brothers abuse as much as they are abused by others. Cruelty is weaponized as a survival necessity. This postmodern saga dives into the ruthless products of psychic fracture and the consequence of political division in private lives.
Missing Person by Patrick Modiano, translated by Daniel Weissbort
A psychological detective novel. Guy Roland, a detective who has no memories of his own past, is on a search for a man named Hutte. Guy follows directories, yearbooks, photographs, clues that lead to other clues, birthing more mysteries than conclusions. As Guy chases the trail of another man’s life, he meanders deeper into the mazes of his own repressed memories.
In this dystopian world, there is a cure for those who have lost the will to live. Like children, suicidal patients will be born again without past pain and disappointment. A voluntary amnesia⎯their memories are erased so that they have another chance at a life they might actually want to live. The novel asks potent questions about the nature of memories, and the cost of forgetting as well as remembering.
Dandelions by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Michael Emmerich
Ineko suffers from somagnosia, a condition that makes her unable to see the bodies of others. Her mother and her boyfriend commit Ineko to a mental hospital. This final and unfinished work by Kawabata who himself committed suicide is a philosophical contemplation on the nature of madness and the disappearing self.
Oba Yozo always wears the pasted smile of a clown. He has learned this trick early on in his childhood and realizes its power to fool those around him. Yozo’s inner life is starkly different from the face he shows everyone⎯anguished, resentful, alienated from others and from himself. Yozo’s mask serves as powerful reminder of a person’s inner and outer self, which when lacking congruency could prove deadly.
The road to hell is a lengthy passage in Hadestown, but the journey of Anais’ Mitchell’s re-envisioning of ancient Greek myths to Tony-winning victory on Broadway seems even longer and more transformative. Somehow when diving into the two of the most well-known tales from the ancient Greek canon, the singer-songwriter discovered new truthsin the timeless dramas. Stories of doomed love at first sight became sprightly duets of flirtatious teasing, while Hades himself was transformed into an imposing politician and businessman in Mitchell’s self-proclaimed “folk opera,” one of the most inventive scores to play on Broadway in years.
It’s hard to describe exactly what Hadestown is. It’s two Greek myths—Hades and Persephone and Orpheus and Eurydice—adapted into a musical.It’s a classic story with startlingly modern themes. It’s an ancient tale told in one of the most inventive new musicals Broadway has seen in years. It is also the only musical of the 2018–19 Broadway season directed by a woman and written by a woman—one of the few women ever to have written the entirety of a new musical, both book and score, on her own.
The best Broadway musical of the year had humble, DIY beginnings. It began performances in 2006 at acommunity theater in Vermont, with Mitchell herself playing Eurydice. In 2010 she released a concept album, featuring Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon as Orpheus and singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco as Persephone. (The album was released by DiFranco’s label Righteous Babe Records.)
Hermes presides over the meeting of Orpheus and Eurydice. Photo by Matthew Murphy
When Mitchell and Chavkin first met in 2012, Chavkin had heard Mitchell’s concept album, and Mitchell had admired Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, the wildly imaginative and unconventional musical Chavkin was directing Off-Broadway. They started collaborating soon after, combining their respective talents for songwriting and musical direction to develop Hadestown as a musical. Their work was first seen Off-Broadway in 2016 when Hadestown opened at New York Theatre Workshop. It then played Canada in 2017 and London’s Royal National Theatre in 2018, undergoing significant revisions along the way. The sets changed, as did the staging—from theater in the round to proscenium style—and Chavkin and Mitchell stroveto strengthen the story’s connective tissue—a challenging attemptfor Mitchell, who was encouraged by Chavkin to encourage the audience’s comprehension of the story by writing it into the text. It was tough, Mitchell admitted, to communicate in a “practical storytelling level”while still striving for the “mystical poetic level” of the story.
“[Rachel] often felt that if I truly wanted the audience to grasp something in the storytelling, I should put it in the text, which is all musicalized / underscored anyway,” Mitchell said. “That is, I shouldn’t assume that it could be represented or grasped visually. It really pushed me to go further as a writer than I ever thought possible.”
Hadestown, according to Mitchell, is set in a “set in a darkly political, Americana dreamscape.” Onstage, the story takes place in two distinct settings: aboveground and underground. Above, the characters converge in a New Orleans-style café inspired in part by the famous jazz venue Preservation Hall, whose aesthetics also inspired the costume designs, Chavkin said. Underground, Hadestown is dark, dreary and mechanical—a factory from which there is no escape.
Patrick Page as Hades and Amber Gray as Persephone. Photo by Matthew Murphy
Eurydice soon finds herself trapped in the wasteland underground. Finding herself lonely and hungry after falling in love with Orpheus, as her poetic husband strives to compose his perfect song, she is tempted by Hades with ideas of security and prosperity and travels to the titular factory underworld where she is locked in never-ending toil to build a wall surrounding the town.
The workers march in an endless circle, muscles strained and sweating, and their ruler delivers a speech on “Why We Build the Wall,” which Mitchell wrote long before Donald Trump had declared his campaign promise of a border wall.Thoughts of modern-day America are inevitable;Hadestown represents industrialization, climate change, and, obviously, a wall to shut out the impoverished.
The first audiences loved the music, Mitchell said, but they had trouble following the plot. To those unfamiliar with the ancient tales, it wasn’t clear what was happening and why.
“We were sort of assuming a lot of knowledge about Greek mythology on the part of the audience,” Mitchell said of the early stagings. “The idea that Persephone lives above ground for half the year and below ground the other half—there was nothing in the show to explain or indicate that to folks. They just had to come into the theater knowing it.”
To those unfamiliar with the ancient tales, it wasn’t clear what was happening and why.
So during workshops they introduced the character of Hermes, played in the current show by Broadway veteran André De Shields.Dapper in a shining silver suit, the god of oration welcomes the audience and remains onstage for much of the musical, a jaunty and impish emcee and narrator. Essentially, Chavkin and Mitchell solved the problem of audiences being unfamiliar with ancient Greek mythology by turning to ancient Greek drama: Hermes and The Fates—Jewelle Blackman, Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer, and Kay Trinidad, three sister deities—serve as a musical Greek chorus, keeping the audience aware of both the details and the stakes.
Jewelle Blackman, Kay Trinidad, and Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer as the Fates. Photo by Matthew Murphy
Even with Hermes available to explain the basics of the myth, though, there remained the challenge of bringing ancient characters into a modern context and giving them plausible emotional motivations. Early audiences didn’t understand why Eurydice, played on Broadway by Eva Noblezada, would fall in love with Orpheus, currently played by Reeve Carney. He’s an idealistic aspiring songwriter, and she’s a vagabond, a solo survivor wandering the Earth—what draws them together? What makes her love him, what takes her away from him, and what sends him to find her? In the myth, the answer is basically “that’s just how the story goes,” but audiences wanted more. Both characters underwent significant development as the show progressed, Mitchell said, especially when developing the motivation of the soulful, artistic Orpheus: “There has been a lot of digging in over the years to who this character of Orpheus is. What motivates him, besides his love for Eurydice? Finally it felt like it satisfied at both a story and a poetic level that he believed he could ‘bring the world back into tune’ with his music.”
Orpheus travels though that darkness to find Eurydice and bring her home, inspiring Hades with hissong to offer the young lovers a chance to escape andsetting in motion the inevitable tragedy.But their story isn’t over:The musical travels full-circle. After Eurydice is forced to return to Hades, the show immediately returns to its opening number, with Orpheus and Eurydice meeting each other again as if anew. “It’s an old song,” Hermes sings in the show’s opening moments, and again at the end. “And we’re gonna sing it again . . . Maybe it will turn out this time.”
‘It’s an old song,’ Hermes sings in the show’s opening moments, and again at the end. ‘And we’re gonna sing it again.’
Bringing the story full circle to its beginning first took root at New York Theatre Workshop but didn’t come to life, with the characters returning to the stage in their Act One costumes, until the London production—a technique that Mitchell said “really tugs [her] heart.”
This moment, moving from tragic loss to a glimmer of hope, inspired some gasps from audience members as the two characters doomed to spend eternity apart reappear and begin the story again. The promise of another chance also offers some insightinto the two lovers’ instant, otherworldly connection. Such immediate, intense love inspired skepticism to audiences watching the dreamer Orpheus romance the pragmatic Eurydice singing, “I knew you before we met/I don’t even know you yet… All I know is you’re someone I have always known.” Even less plausible is his decision, after learning she left him for Hadestown, to travel the road to hell to save her. But upon witnessing them meet again for the first time, a bittersweet truth is infused into their melody.
“That was an interesting evolution,” Mitchell says. “It felt like a very full-circle moment for the narrator to reflect on the meaning of having told the story and the sort of passing of the torch of hope from the artist Orpheus to the storyteller, who’s going to tell it again.”
The plot of Pajtim Statovci’s latest novel Crossing is set in motion when a young man and his friend (and sort of lover) flee war-torn Albania by sea for refuge in Italy. There the two explore what it means to live in a place that doesn’t want them.
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The choice of following in the expected footsteps of those who came before them, or creating a new path comes up frequently on the pages as the Albanians adjust to their new lives as refugees. His characters yearn for belonging; both in their new countries and within their own bodies.
Born in Kosovo in 1990 to a Kosovar Albanian family, Pajtim Statovci and his family fled to Finland two years later during the outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars. His first novel, My Cat Yugoslavia (featuring a self-hating talking cat) was first published in 2014 in Finnish then translated into English in 2017 to wide acclaim. The novel won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for best debut novel written in Finnish. His second English-translated book, Crossing won the country’s Toisinkoinen Literature Prize, which is given out to an author’s second book.
I talked to Pajtim Statovci via email about writing about people who refuse to be defined by others.
Adam Vitcacavage: I have been talking to writers a lot about place recently. Some say their history with cities play a major role in how they think about setting in their works. Others have a more nonchalant relationship with how their hometown or current city plays a role in their literature. How has your history from Kosovo to Finland played a role in your writing?
Pajtim Statovci: My background has affected my writing immensely—because where I come from, where I’ve lived and what I’ve experienced in the past has everything to do with who I am and what I do now. I write about dislocation, loneliness, racism, people that are in between places and beliefs. Like one of my protagonists, I, too, fled Kosovo and moved to Finland with my family at a very young age. The writing about these topics stems from my own life and my personal history–as well as from the lives of people around me.
In Crossing, the protagonist is a pathological liar, and ends up living in many different cities – Tirana, Rome, Berlin, Madrid, New York and Helsinki–experimenting with life as someone new in each of them. He does this because, ultimately, he’s ashamed of who he is and where he’s from, wishing to escape the stereotypes people have about his background. Although I have not lived in all of these cities myself, to my protagonist they represent and present a possibility to start again, from a clean slate.
AV: Your characters in this novel are seeking a sense of home and belonging. My Cat Yugoslavia also dealt in some ways with similar topics. Why do you find yourself returning to these themes?
PS: I respond and relate to stories that explore questions of identity, belonging and home, perhaps this is because to me there is no clear concept of home nor an explicit idea of a national identity. I wanted to express this with both of my books (among other things).
I relate to stories that explore belonging because to me there is no clear concept of home nor national identity.
I deliberately write about people who refuse to be defined by others. People whose actions and words are not always filtered through their backgrounds. People who don’t want their backgrounds to matter. Because do we actually think about where we come from that much? I certainly don’t go to sleep at night thinking about my relationship to the country I was born, or thinking about my relationship to Finland or the languages I know how to speak. I never explain my behavior with any nationality in mind.
Still, I frequently get asked whether I feel I’m more Albanian or Finnish. If I am being completely honest, I really don’t care whether I am considered Finnish or Albanian because my relationship to Finland and to Kosovo is like no other person’s relationship to their home country or home countries. I want my protagonists to find themselves in the same freedom of self-definition.
AV: What was your relationship like with your translator David Hackston for this book and My Cat? How involved are you in that process?
PS: I am very lucky to have a translator like David Hackston, and I admire his work most profoundly. He has translated both of my novels with uncompromising diligence and grace. I have a really good relationship with David. Until fairly recently, we both lived in Helsinki, so it was easy for us to meet, discuss and change ideas. I try to be as involved as possible, help in any way that I can because David puts a lot of time and effort into translating my work. Simultaneously, however, I have to keep in mind that David is an English native, and I am not.
David is also an artistic soul, so I want him to be able to have the freedom to create art based on my art in his own way. Because a translator is never just repeating the words that I have written in another language. He’s conveying symbols and allegories, creating interpretations. David is also very interested in and knows a lot about the history of the Balkans, and speaks some Albanian, too, which only emphasizes the fact that we’re a match.
AV: An example of what I mean is that (according to my use of Google Translate) your novel’s original title translated to either “The Heart of Tirana” or “Hearts of Tirana.” (Tirana is the capital of Albania.) The English title is Crossing. What do the different titles allude to about the work?
Where I come from, where I’ve lived and what I’ve experienced in the past has everything to do with who I am and what I do now.
PS: The decision to change the title of the book was a sum of many things. We all – I, David, my agents, English publishers–agreed that the original title (Tiranan sydän, “Heart of Tirana”) didn’t express enough ambiguity in English, although the word “heart” has many meanings in both languages. Since this book is about constant change and shifting borders, we felt like the title should be as representative of that as possible. For a long time, we called it “Heartlines”, but then one day my US editor at Pantheon Books, Tim O’Connell, called and told me that he has a title in mind. “Crossing”, he said, and I said yes–because I truly think that this word in all its meanings truly captures what this book is about.
AV: Crossing was originally published in Finland in 2016. What is it like revisiting a work again three years later as a new audience discovers the book?
PS: I have to admit that revisiting my past work is not my favorite thing in the world. Because when I’ve finished a novel, I like to set it aside as much as possible and let it live in the minds of others. This being said, I do give interviews and will gladly speak publicly about my work because feel like I owe it to my readers. I want to acknowledge and respect my audience by answering any questions they may have for me and or about my work. Because I wouldn’t be here without my readers, and I am very grateful for each and every one of them.
Finnish is a small language, so to have my work translated into English and published worldwide means everything to me. The occasional discomfort that I may feel about going back to something I might not write or say the same way today, is completely pushed aside by the joy of my work being available in other languages.
AV: Looking forward, what are your next plans? What do you want your writing to explore next?
PS: I am actually finishing up my third novel, and it’s being published in Finland in August 2019. I’m also in a Ph.D. program at the University of Helsinki, and working on my dissertation on non-human representations in selected works of Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway and Franz Kafka. I’m very interested in teaching, too, so hopefully, in the near future, I get to do both.
In the beginning, there were volcanoes. Ruthless, sulfurous vents that blew rock and ash sky high and that oozed magma into the sand that was once the floor of an ancient ocean.
Thousands of years later, I walked into Big Bend National Park and found a paradise of sorts. Cradled in the bowl of the Chisos Mountains lies a deciduous forest, encircled by scrub desert mountainsides. At the top of these giants are grassy plains, an Eden-like harbor of life in the West Texas desert. I hiked to the top and watched the sunset over the mountains of Mexico on the other side of the Rio Grande.
Hundreds and hundreds of miles north and west, along the shores of the Columbia River that divides Oregon from Washington, and all throughout the long mass of California, forests and tree-lined ridges are blackened and scarred from months of fires. Fires caused by years of drought, caused by changes in the climate. And all over the country, the world, there are few natural refuges or idylls that are unscarred. There are a thousand little ways that we’ve made this world worse.
It’s all around us, the splendor of nature and the evidence of the harm we’ve done. And the more I see, the more I think about Adam Young.
Over this last year, I’ve been all over the U.S., driving from national park to national park. I’ve seen subterranean caves, primordial cypress swamps, canyons cut by the Rio Grande, the breathtaking grandeur that is the Redwood tree. But I’ve also seen skylines of belching smokestacks, pesticides rained down upon fields, more street corner litter than you could fill a small rare books shop with. It’s all around us, the splendor of nature and the evidence of the harm we’ve done. And the more I see, the more I think about Adam Young, the boy protagonist of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s 1990 comic novel Good Omens, and also the Antichrist.
Adam Young has been on my mind because of his anger about the environment. My anger has been a slow, boiling thing, while Adam’s ignites quickly and burns bright. Before he turned 11, “no one had even used the word environment in Adam’s hearing before.” And then he meets occultist Anathema Device, who opens his eyes to the world outside of himself in a single conversation. She tells him all about the hole in the ozone layer and dying whales, gives him some New Agemagazines to read, and she’s unwittingly made an antinuclear environmentalist. He wants a better world to grow up in.
Good Omens hasn’t just been in the back of my mind, but in the forefront of a lot of other people’s too. The long-awaited miniseries, written and produced by Neil Gaiman, was released on Amazon Prime at the end of May. The show’s popularity has also put the book on the New York Times best sellers list for the first time.
To be alive in 2019 means having the world’s end, or at least its destruction, on your brain’s back burner. It’s difficult to read Good Omens and not see our contemporary world. In an interview with The Guardianabout the Good Omens miniseries, Neil Gaiman noted that “the weirdest thing is how a novel that was written literally 30 years ago feels really a lot more apt now than it did then … I mean, if I could trade, I would have a much duller world in which we had to try and convince people that an apocalypse was likely, instead of having the world that we’re in, where the nuclear clock is ticking closer and closer.” The jokes and tactics that Pratchett and Gaiman used to convince their readers that the end of the world could be nigh hit much harder as the world around us is starting to look even worse than an imagined, if comical, Armageddon.
Good Omens is not about the world ending through man-made climate change, though environmental concerns are always present in the book. It is more directly focused on the angel Aziraphale, the demon Crowley, and the final battle between Heaven and Hell—which is to be brought about by Adam Young, the Antichrist. Through a series of errors (Crowley lost him), Adam has grown up without any influence from his Satanic parentage. Aziraphale and Crowley, who like the world very much and don’t want it to end, race to find the misplaced Antichrist and head off the end, while the infernal and ethereal legions gather, and the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse ride to ground zero. The clock ticks down. The threads of plot and prophecy and people are woven together and pulled tight as all converge at a military base in Tadfield where the apocalypse is supposed to happen.
Still, part of the genius of Good Omens is that it never portrays humanity as the helpless victim. Even with literal angels and demons abroad, it’s humans who have to save themselves—and humans who are responsible for most of what’s gone wrong, at least everything that’s not being directly driven by an occult hand. Early in the book, it is observed through Crowley’s perspective that people “were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.” Crowley is often at a loss for how tempt humans to do evil because “but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.”
We may not have meant to destroy our planet, but we’re doing it anyway.
This is because humans are good, bad, and everything in between. And, of course, human morality is never just that black-and-white binary. Unspeakable things (like the Spanish Inquisition) have been done in the name of ostensibly benevolent religion. Industrialization that made goods cheaper and more available started the descent into global warming. Experiments done in the name of scientific progress gave us nuclear weapons. In Good Omens, humanity made these things and now they are available for Heaven and Hell to use for world’s destruction. We don’t really know how the world will end, and neither do Crowley and Aziraphale—though Aziraphale does note that “thermonuclear extinction has always been very popular.” The scary part is that the pieces are in order and, whether with good intentions or not, we put them there. We may not have meant to destroy our planet, but we’re doing it anyway. Good Omens points this out with particular clarity.
In a 2006 interview with Locus Magazine, Gaiman commented that “you can actually tell [readers] things, give them messages, get terribly, terribly serious and terribly, terribly dark, and because there are jokes in there, they’ll go along with you, and they’ll travel a lot further along with you than they would otherwise.” I can’t think of a better book to comment on the direness of our environmental situation than Good Omens.
Pollution waits by the riverside. He is the youngest harbinger of the apocalypse, born from humanity’s ability to advance in medicine and their inability to clean up their plastic or stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere. The banks of the sluggish, fetid river are barren, except for the pale, languid figure. This river was a popular spot for fishers and lovers, but that was before Pollution lent an artistic hand: “Now white and brown sculptures of foam and sludge drifted serenely down the river, often covering it for yards at a stretch. And where the surface of the water was visible, it was covered with a molecules-thin petrochemical sheen.” Only the sunrise is beautiful.
Pollution is the culmination of humanity’s efforts to, as Crowley might say, make the earth worse. Climate change has been part of the human story since we started cutting down forests for fuel and fields and redirecting rivers for irrigation. A side character, Jaime, observes that, “the shame of it … was that his children were growing up thinking of trees as firewood and his grandchildren would think of trees as history.” Environmental destruction is something that we’ve passed down from generation to generation, but that is coming to a head. The responsibility to stop this destructive ecological inheritance rests on the shoulders of today’s youth, just like the responsibility to start Armageddon rests on the shoulders of Adam Young.
He may be the Antichrist, but Adam is the book’s most committed voice on the environment.
Or the responsibility to stop it. He may be the Antichrist, but Adam is the book’s most committed voice on the environment. His powers, unimpeded by the directives of Heaven or Hell, instead latch onto concerns he encounters in New Age magazines: the rainforests, the whales, nuclear power. (A nostalgic, late-’80s set of worries—were we ever so innocent?) In the run-up to Armageddon, we see Adam remove the nuclear material from a power plant, which keeps pumping out clean energy. He destroys whaling ships by raising the Kraken. He causes the South American rainforest to grow back at time-lapse speed. (Not all of these scenes make it into the TV series, in which Adam’s role is reduced to give more space to the relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale—a curious choice, given how much more crucial these worries are to an 11-year-old today.)
At the point where the wheels of the Apocalypse are in full motion and Adam understands his place in it, his eyes have just been opened to how big and grand the world is, but also to all the people and powers at work destroying it. “It’s all very well for them,” Adam says. “Everyone’s goin’ around usin’ up all the whales and coal and oil and ozone and rainforests and that, and there’ll be none left for us.” He understands—both because he’s a precocious child and has the knowledge and power of the son of Satan—the need and the urgency to do something to stop the end. He hears the ominous ticking.
The apocalypse in Good Omens is not our apocalypse, but Adam holds up a metaphorical mirror to show readers the state of the real world—or, at least, to understand the gravity of their actions. He does not stop the apocalypse using environmental means, but he is motivated by the environment. He admonishes Heaven and Hell (and religion) for “tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead.” If people stopped worrying so much about the afterlife, Adams says, “they might start thinkin’ about the sort of things they’re doing to all the environment and ecology, because they’ll still be around in a hundred years’ time.” Religion aside, the tactics for which Adam criticizes the bureaucracies of Heaven and Hell are remarkably similar to those of modern politicians—particularly in the United States—who create so much noise through argument and what-abouting to distract us from the reality of climate change and muddy that reality with cherry-picked or false science.
In the pages of Good Omens, Adam Young speaks for the generation of children and young people that will have to heft the consequences of the abuse that their elders heaped upon the planet. In many ways, he echoes contemporary teen activists like Greta Thunberg. Adam tells his friends that “It makes me angry, seeing the way those old loonies are messing [the world] up.” “People’ve been tryin’ to sort it out for thousands of years,” he says, “but we’ve got to sort it out now.”
In many ways, Adam echoes contemporary teen activists like Greta Thunberg.
In a recent speech before U.K. Parliament, Thunberg tore into her elders, saying, “You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to … You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before.” Or the teenage climate-change activists called to testify before U.S. Congress, among whom was 18-year-old Aji Piper, one of the plaintiffs suing the government for using a “national energy system that emits prodigious amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and ultimately threatening their right to a prosperous future.” All of these children, fictional and otherwise, demand to be listened to. (But only Adam can fix it by himself, effectively by magic. Other child activists have a more difficult road.)
Adam is an effective mouthpiece because he was written with the wisdom of men who have seen the world’s evils, but his voice is still innocent (well, as innocent as the spawn of Satan can be) and apolitical. Wisdom and innocence together are potent.
In the end, he subverts his destiny and saves Earth—from the imminent danger, but not from everything that’s wrong with the planet or humanity. The cosmic powers decamp to regroup— they will still have their war, at some point. And the humans are left with all the harm they’ve wrought, and the self-destructive impulse that makes them keep doing it. There is so much more to be done in the real world, if we’re going to make things better. The weight of this knowledge can feel like too much. So what do we do? Go to the coast and admire it while it’s still there?
For 35 days across December 2018 and January 2019, the U.S. government was shuttered in a record-breaking shutdown. During that period, national parks were left open, but were largely unmanned while workers were furloughed. Chaos held sway at Joshua Tree National Park, where visitors off-roaded across the delicate expanses of desert, knocked over signs and gates, and even cut down some of the precious Joshua trees. Three weeks after the government returned to work, I visited Joshua Tree. I witnessed the desert park that is a forest of Gaudi-esque gneiss rock palisades peppered with cholla and prickly pear and, of course, groves of Joshua trees. I even got to see the desert landscape washed clean under a blanket of snow. National park officials announced that the damage done at the park would take 300 years to heal. Knowing this gave me a deeper appreciation of the finiteness of life around me. As Adam Young says, the only thing that might help is for people to know that “if they kill a whale, they’ve got a dead whale.” The chopped down Joshua trees won’t come back; if we kill the Earth, it won’t come back.
But while the trees continue to grow and the snow to fall, there’s some hope, isn’t there?
Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work is a searingly intelligent novel told from the perspective of the adult children of Abdel Latif as they transport their father’s corpse from Damascus to his ancestral village of Anabiya in the midst of the Syrian war.
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Like the best absurd or picaresque novels in the Arab literary tradition, Death is Hard Work is a tragic-comic exploration of the arbitrary logic of tyranny and its effects on memory, landscape and identity across generations.
I got to speak with Khaled Khalifa via email about the aesthetics of absurd literature, the role of the writer during times of geopolitical crisis, the brutality of the ongoing Syrian war, and his day-to-day life as a writer in Damascus. Death is Hard Work is a novel worth paying close attention to, a book we will likely be talking about for years to come.
Khaled Khalifa’s response has been translated from Arabic to English by Bennett Capozzi.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi: Though Death Is Hard Work is written in a realist mode, it is also a life-threatening epic quest rendered absurd due to the ongoing civil war, a war that is operating with an arbitrary logic. What can we learn from this method of telling stories about historical and present tragedies?
I wrote Death is Hard Work because I felt that I did not have a lot of time, or a surplus of life.
Khaled Khalifa: In war things take on a new meaning. The meaning of everything changes: life, hope, frustration, despair. Things lose their value, humans become killers and the killed, and time becomes ongoing, tied to a mysterious chord called the hope of survival. Thus the writer’s narrative or way of seeing stories is subject to unintended intensification because of what was happening at that time. Because it might be the last time that you are able to write, you do ordinary and regular things for the last time. You drink your coffee, hold your lover, go to work, and write for the last time.
I wrote Death is Hard Work because I felt that I did not have a lot of time, or a surplus of life, therefore I was tied to the table thinking that I must do what I can do to write something different from my other works as well as other stories about war, and I didn’t know if I would be successful in writing this unique story.
AVdVO: One of the qualities of Death Is Hard Work that I immediately recognized as part of the Arabic narrative tradition is that the story’s plot—its propulsive energy—comes from an examination of the characters’ memories of place. In your novel, there is a total superimposition of the body and the landscape. Abdel Latif ’s corpse is decaying as his adult children transport his dead body from Damascus to his ancestral village of Anabiya; the country itself has been gutted by war and is in the process of collapse. The body and the land are atrophying simultaneously. How did writing the body help you to navigate the process of writing about an ongoing war?
KK: Syria became a corpse not only during the war, but it was also becoming that corpse slowly and day by day during fifty years of dictatorship. The idea came to me through personal experience, and from repetition of the daily contemplation of death and the way Syrians buried their loved ones. Throughout 2012 and afterwards endless stories spread through social media about the need for Syrians to bury their loved ones in the garden, in the house, and in the streets because of the difficulty to get to the cemetery, or because the amount of death does not give you the opportunity to respect rituals or the meaning of death and the body. The body of a loved one becomes a project and certainly an epidemic.
The personal experience that is the most telling for me was in 2013 when I had a stroke and spent three nights in the hospital, and while I was there I thought about how to respond to the question: if I die right now and give up, how will they come to transport my body? These moments were comedic, tragic, touching, and funny. Truly facing death turns you into an absurd being.
AVdVO: Do you think the novel as an art form can serve to reveal structures of tyranny?
Syria became a corpse not only during the war, but slowly and day by day during 50 years of dictatorship.
KK: I consider the novel to be the most effective art form for dismantling the narrative of tyranny and dictatorship, as the novel informs a wide space. Within it is a large capacity for flexibility and renewal and concealment at the same time, and the novel can become a history that is not the history tyrants always contrive in their books, an often falsified history. We watched in history the success of many attempts of these falsified narratives by tyrants and dictators, but in the modern era these projects by dictators have become more difficult.
AVdVO: Bolbol, one of the novel’s main characters, often imagines “whole communities committing suicide in protest against a life so soiled.” In contradistinction, his father’s mantra is “the children of the revolution are everywhere.” Did writing Death Is Hard Work help you to interrogate what it means to live with death so near at hand?
KK: It is necessary to remind yourself that this was not a civil war, this revolution turned the world into war and then a war of settling scores on Syrian land. The amount of lack of understanding does not indicate its complexity, but a lack of desire to acknowledge that the whole world was contributing in defending this revolution, and stopping the regime.
AVdVO: Like Abdel Latif, Bolbol spends his life yearning for his first love. And yet father and son never discuss their common nostalgia for a life and a love that could-have-been. Instead, the novel foregrounds their differences when it comes to politics. In what ways did this choice serve the novel? What did it allow you to reveal and/or conceal?
KK: While writing I was trying to find any points of similarity between Bolbol and Abdel Latif but I could not. Abdel Latif represents the generation of the ‘50s in Syria, the jumping-off point for national ideas that infiltrated within them the military into the government under the pretext of the liberation of Palestine, and they remained for half a century ruining everything in there. But Abdel Latif was part of a big group that represents this romanticization of revolution in that generation. Of course it could be a coincidence that the remaining members of this generation are everywhere, living in desperation and despondency from the coup of their comrades and they turned from activists to thieves.
I had to hide the draft of my book because each computer was being inspected and if they read even one sentence, it would have been a huge problem for me.
Meanwhile Bolbol is considered to represent a model of humanity more broadly: the man that is afraid of everything. Today we can find Bolbol walking on the streets of New York, an urban person, modern. Deep down he is afraid of losing his job and privileged existence, and also he is afraid of marriage and love. Life is complicated in this era as we see in it the savage features of capitalism ruling the world and wanting to turn humans into robots. I certainly failed in the attempt to find points of similarity between the two characters but I was happy with this failure because I wrote Bolbol completely and I thought about him for more than a quarter of a century.
AVdVO: There are hints of the comic in the novel that help to make the darkness darker. Early on, at one of the check-points, Abdel Latif’s dead body is arrested. The officer explains that according to their records “Bolbol’s father was still alive and still wanted. It didn’t matter if he had in the meantime turned into a cadaver.” A few passages later, Bolbol reflects on his fear which “increased every time he thought of the possibility that a person might be nothing more than a collection of papers.” As a writer, what is your relationship to this type of official papers? I ask this as someone who has spent the majority of her life chasing identity papers, deeds, death certificates and who has, along with my family members, been sent on endless errands to have this or that paper stamped only to have to do it all over again. What do you think about the fact that every war elicits an obsession with ink and paper?
KK: My relationship with official papers is funny. I will tell you something, I have two surnames, Khalifa and Abdel Razak, and the official one on the papers is Abdel Razak, and I have kept the name Khaled Khalifa all my life.
When it was necessary to choose a name when signing my book, I chose the unofficial name, the name not registered on paper, as a result of my laziness, and because it is not likely in the records of the bureaucratic Syrian state that is always trying to find people that writes these kinds of works.
For the past eight years, it has not been possible for anybody to go into the street without their personal identification, so my ID is stuck in my pocket, and I feel its weight constantly, naturally afraid of losing it because I will have a big problem at the checkpoints and everywhere else. Today in Syria there are hundreds of thousands of cases in the courts regarding people’s papers, there are people missing and their families want certificates of their deaths to continue on with their lives. And there are dead people and the system has notified their families, but will not hand over the body until they sign a paper that this person has died as a result of illness and not under torture. Yes, papers are heavy and we do not think about them except when we encounter them.
AVdVO: Where do you write in Damascus?
KK: I write in my cafe, and I cannot write in the house or the office, despite having a nice furnished office. In Damascus I had kept my table reserved for thirteen years in the cafe The Journalists Club. It was a wonderful place that I was linked to by a close friendship with the employees there, but I lost this place as the unfortunate result of the strict security constraints during the beginning of the revolution, when the place turned into a crowded gathering point for intelligence officers. And afterwards it was given to a tacky manager close to the regime who turned it into a tacky cabaret that was unfit for its long history.
I was writing secretly, often forced to erase it from my laptop and put it on a flash drive that made it easier to hide it.
I continue to remember those years fondly, it was the employees and staff there who brought me the best coffee, and my table was exceptionally meaningful to me. My mail was brought there and they worked for my comfort, and I know a lot about their lives, we talked about everything, they share with me their fears and joys, most of the employees were Kurds without paperwork, surrounding me with every care. I still remember their nobility and generosity with me.
Five years ago I traveled between a lot of cafes until I settled down again in a cafe Connected Coffee that is in the center of the city and is owned by one of my close friends, and often I write in a very small cafe in the area of Al Qasa’.
AVdVO: And what is the process of getting from your home to your preferred writing spots?
KK: After 2012 the journey from my house to the cafe became hard work, ten minutes by car became an hour or two hours. On the route, I passed two or three checkpoints, and usually these checkpoints were crowded, and often I would get there exhausted and I would not have the energy to write, especially in the hot summer.
In the city throughout the past eight years, the terror has not stopped, everything is scary. There’s no electricity, no heat, and the threat of abduction and disappearance at every moment. Everything bad happens to us in the war, and everything unexpected can happen in the war, thus I was stealing time to write. Even if you stayed in the house, it didn’t do you any good. In the winter there was no heat, and most of the time no electricity, the whole process was stressful for the nerves.
I feel the terror strongly, but I did not feel afraid. When I was writing Death is Hard Work I was putting the novel [in a folder] on my laptop [with] a dramatic television series about love, because each computer was being inspected and if they opened the folder and even read one sentence, it would have been a huge problem for me. To an extent I felt like I was writing secretly, and often I was forced to erase it from my laptop and put it on a flash drive that made it easier to hide it. But in every circumstance, despite the difficulty, I felt that I was being defiant.
AVdVO: How do you stay grounded given the day-to-day situation in Syria? How do you hold on to hope?
KK: I learn perseverance and hope every day. I do not think about fear. For five years the shelling did not stop at all, from the window of my house I saw where the missiles left from and where they landed.
For me, departing Syria was equal to death. It is not possible to bear it.
I gave up all of the forms of life that were there before. Now there is no electricity, no friends because most of them emigrated, the streets of the city are dark. Every morning I was checking my house and my body, checking on my friends who stayed, and not thinking about going out. Thinking here is my fate and it is necessary to belong to my new tragic world. Basically I became a different person living in a different place, I can live for days on a loaf of bread. And I have a new memory. But in every circumstance I did not lose hope for one moment despite what I have suffered, and I was measuring it against people around me who had much more severe loss, who lost their children, their house, their husband, their limb. I was always thinking that it is necessary to think that departing [Syria] is difficult to the extent that it is not possible to bear it, that departure was equal to death. I can write pages, but always it was hope that was my angel, that I watered each moment so that it did not wither away.
AVdVO: Do you feel optimistic about the Arab Spring’s aspirations of reformation, its desire for an Arab Renaissance?
KK: Yes, I remain optimistic despite the ferocity of the counter-revolution, and the prevalence of new regimes that possess the approval of the Western world, and do nothing to hold them accountable. For example, until now there has not been a conversation about an independent international tribunal for the fiercest dictators that the world has ever seen. This reinforcement of dictatorships and nepotistic forms of governance does not mean that revolutions from the eruption will be renewed. The ancient world in Arab countries has collapsed, but the new world that defends Arabs (and Syrians especially) has not formed, all of these are the costs for it.
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