A Queer Albanian Refugee Creates a New Self in Every City

Posted on by Jo Lou

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.

Crossing by Pajtim Statovci
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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.

Reading “Good Omens” at the End of the World

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

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 Age magazines 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.

Image result for good omens book cover

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 Guardian about 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?

Why Khaled Khalifa Chose to Stay in Syria

Posted on by Jo Lou

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.

Death Is Hard Work
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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.

A Mother With Grown Children Is a Controlled Experiment

Posted on by Kelly Luce 
 Night of the Living 

 If the constellation of stars 
 above your house looks like
 a woman skating across a lake 
  
 you could name it that. If someone
 long before you called it warrior with a sword
 or dragon at the gate, it doesn’t matter, 
  
 it’s your sky now. If you’re lost in the evening 
 fog all your former selves line up by the side 
 of the road to show you the way home. 
  
 If you want to pry open the moon
 and crawl inside, remember the sky 
 waits like a clock for you to unwind. 
  
 The planets contain the fur of wooly  
 mammoths and fossilized ferns
 that never got to be trees. Your position 
  
 relative to them is what you think about 
 when night is a rabbit hole and sleep
 is a coin toss. A hand moves across your face 
  
 in a dream you are having about being alive. 
 When you wake up the hand disappears 
 along with the way it felt to be dreaming, 
  
 on the edge of some great adventure. 
 The shadows of owls against the trees 
 are not owls but you can pretend 
  
 the sound of branches against the window 
 is someone trying to get in. You can breathe 
 and imagine the night breathes with you.  
 
 Taxonomy
  
 A group of mathematicians is an equation.  
 Unless they are at a party and then they are 
 a problem. Two or three architects is a situation. 
 More than that and the building collapses.  
 A subdivision snakes through property 
 that used to be farmland. Part of the field 
 remains and a few rusted tractors linger like men 
 at a grange hall gathering who would rather mumble 
 to each other than dance. My son worries about gentrification  
 in the old neighborhood. He thinks no one will have 
 a place to live.  Neighborhood meetings with city planners 
 are not funerals. No one sings and prayers are offered silently. 
 Pray for the view of the mountain that will soon be obstructed 
 by condominiums. Unless you find tall buildings beautiful. 
 Then rejoice at the way concrete obliterates the field.  
 A group of condo dwellers is the answer to a question 
 posed by developers everywhere, but no one knows the question 
 or how to measure its importance. When I was seven I lived 
 across the street from a horse and fed it apples from a tree nearby. 
 Its mouth scared me. I thought it  might devour my hand 
 if it had the chance, thinking my hand was part of the apple. 
 A horse behind a fence is progress, but only if you’re not the horse.  
 The first time I let my kids walk to school by themselves 
 I went with them to the end of the street and watched 
 until they arrived at the top. They turned and waved at me, 
 standing  at the bottom of the hill. Did I tell them I would 
 stand and wait? Or did they just know. Then they turned 
 the corner, out of my sight, to walk the few remaining blocks  
 to school alone. Now my children are adults. A mother 
 with grown children is a controlled experiment. How long 
 can she go without thinking of them and how she used 
 to hold their entire bodies in the width of her arms. 

What to Read After Watching “Fleabag”

Posted on by Jo Lou

From the moment that Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s gaze first penetrates the camera, it’s evident that Fleabag will be one emotional gut-punch after another. The series follows the unnamed titular character as she copes with the death of her mother and the unexpected loss of her closest friend, poking fun at the bleakness of her situation, and the destructive coping mechanisms it has drawn her to along the way.

The appeal of Fleabag comes from the tension between the audience’s external perspective on Fleabag and her behavior (frequently awful!) and the vulnerable glimpses we’re afforded into her internal world when she breaks the fourth wall and addresses the viewer. Whether she’s falling in love with a (hot celibate) priest, trading passive-aggressive barbs with her former godmother (now stepmother-to-be), or punching her brother-in-law in the face (he deserved it), Waller-Bridge balances keenly-observed interpersonal dynamics with an almost unparalleled intimacy between the audience and the main character.

If you’re looking for something to do in between rewatches of Fleabag, these books will fulfill your desire for narratives exploring complex relationships, self-awareness, and grief.  

Image result for things to make and break by may lan tan

Things To Make and Break by May-Lan Tan

May-Lan Tan’s short stories are about the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. A couple stays the night in a hotel together as something of an endurance exercise, recommended by a therapist after one partner discovers that the other sees a professional domme. Twin brothers who are sleeping with the same girl attempt to navigate her memory loss after a car accident. A woman seems to finds her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriends the most interesting thing about him, reveling in the fact that she’ll one day be among them. Tan’s writing style enlivens even the most mundane of observations and makes the most bizarre of premises seem quotidian.

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Tonight I’m Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson

Throughout her first collection of essays, Hodson interrogates the relationship she has to beauty, money, lust, and the intersection of the three. “A theory my friend has: sleepovers are where girls learn to wake up in love. Remember when we knew our friends’ bodies as well as our own?” writes Hodson, articulating the unique discomforts of womanhood, without ignoring the rewarding moments, too.  

The Guardians by Sarah Manguso

“What do I regret—that in the end he didn’t need me, and now I can’t need him?” Sarah Manguso asks, succinctly articulating the grief she feels after the death of a friend that is the root of the book. Through the course of The Guardian’s 122 pages, Manguso tosses and turns over this loss, questioning whether or not the death really was a suicide or the result of a faulty medication’s side effects. Much like Fleabag, or any good eulogy, this grief isn’t grounded only in ruminations on the death and its aftereffects, but through vignettes of what made their friendship so strong. These memories are just as humorous as her recollection of his struggle with mental health is harrowing—at one point she recalls his infamously large dick, which she’ll never have the chance to glimpse now.

Image result for mean myriam gurba

Mean by Myriam Gurba

Crafted with a specificity of language that only a poet could muster, Mean is a reckoning with racism, misogyny, and homophobia by way of a coming of age tale. Though these are heavy subjects, Gurba approaches them with her striking dark sense of humor, as when she describes her period as “birthing blood clots”and worries that she’ll burn in hell for finding Anne Frank’s Diary boring. Just as Waller-Bridge’s accomplishes with Fleabag, Gurba’s sharp wit draws you in, giving her room to candidly consider the way her identity as a queer, mixed-race Chicana has shaped her life.

The Pisces by Melissa Broder

The Pisces by Melissa Broder

When I first picked up The Pisces, a novel about a depressed woman who falls in love with a merman, I was expecting to be dropped in the story of a life unimaginably different from mine. Yet even by the first page, it was clear that this wasn’t the story that Broder had written. I wound up underlining half of the book, so stricken by Broder’s ability to so skillfully nest the universal experience of loving what’s wrong for you within such an outlandish outer shell. The pull of Broder’s merman is not so much a result of his supernatural form but of his undeniable unavailability. Sound like a hot priest we know?

You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld

You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfield

In her story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It, Curtis Sittenfield adeptly explores power dynamics and the minute indignities that result of them. A Regular Couple, one of the shining stars of the collection, zeroes in on an adult woman’s chance run in with a high school bully as she attempts to enjoy her honeymoon at a resort. As you wait for the expected explosion between them, Sittenfield heightens the tension between the protagonist and her husband. While she’s a morally corrupt money-making lawyer who made the news for representing a rapist, he works as a nonprofit immigration lawyer. The story hits its crescendo as the two relationships crumble, if only momentarily. Sittenfield presents such nuanced characters that you leave a story not sure who exactly you were rooting for, if only because you were made to root for every character.

Image result for Alexandra Kleeman

You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman

The main characters of Kleeman’s debut novel are named A, B, and C—the protagonist, her best friend, and her boyfriend, respectively—because of this, there’s no choice but to immediately acclimate within their peculiar, expertly crafted world. Everything in the book seems as though it’s taking place in an alternate dimension, a just slightly heightened version of our own reality. In reading the book, one becomes addicted to Kleeman’s style, just as the characters are addicted to ideal beauty standards and being an active member of consumerism (if those two aren’t one in the same). We follow A, B, and C as they gravitate closer to porn obsessions, a corporate cult, and reality TV, among the myriad other distractions that populate our everyday lives.

A Gay High School “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” Featuring Kurt Cobain

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Among the myriad charms of Aaron Hamburger’s second novel, Nirvana is Here, is his protagonist, Ari Silverman, a medieval historian trying to reconnect with his high school crush, Justin. Ari’s search leads him to recall the events that led them to become friends—and more. By turns, Hamburger is tender and provocative in his examinations of sexual abuse, racial strife in ’90s Detroit, and the way that discovering Nirvana changes everything about Ari’s world. The complexities of this novel are deftly handled by Hamburger, whose sensitive and observant prose is a pure joy to read on every page. He’s the winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letter’s Rome Prize and a nominee for the Lambda Literary Award, and he and I spoke about his novel last week over email.

Kristopher Jansma: Aaron, your novel Nirvana is Here is in some ways a timeless story of coming-of-age. Young Ari struggles to find safety and love as a queer Jewish boy in ’90s suburban Detroit. And yet it also feels quite timely because you also delve into Ari’s life in middle-age, still processing his abuse, in the #metoo present day. To start, I wondered, is this a story you’ve wanted to write for a long time, or was it perhaps inspired by these conversations around rape and abuse that have begun happening more recently?

Aaron Hamburger:  This is in many ways a story I’ve been attempting to write my entire life but it took me a while to find the right frame. My initial motivation was to write something that would force me to delve into the emotional realm, so I began doing various disconnected and fairly autobiographical pieces on the same theme, attempting to find my way into a story. And then I was talking to a fellow writer, Elizabeth Searle, with whom I teach at the Stonecoast MFA Program, about all these “reboot” type stories, like the novel Emma becoming the movie Clueless, and I was saying how I wanted to write a gay high school version of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and she said, “Do it!” And that gave me the permission I needed to really launch into a larger plot line and take real events but transform them to make a more satisfying and more richly textured story. It took me a good six years to write it, and it’s striking that when I was finished, so much of what’s in the novel has now become so timely. Maybe the world is catching up to me? Or, in all seriousness, a lot of the issues the book raises, like the #metoo movement or race, are ones that have always been present in American life, and now for a whole host of reasons we’re having what feels like a very different national conversation about them than what’s gone on in the past.

KJ: Yes, absolutely, and can I add that “Gay high school Tess of the D’Urbervilles” is surely exactly what we all need right now? So there’s some classic Hardy in there and also, as the title suggests, some classic Nirvana. I’m curious why you centered Ari’s development around that band in particular?

AH: I recently wrote a piece in The Washington Post about Kurt Cobain’s support of gay rights, which is more substantive than I think is generally known. In the book, Ari is not completely aware of all the things Cobain did and said regarding gay rights, yet he does feel a spirit of acceptance coming through the sound, the lyrics, and the image of Nirvana. Cobain and Nirvana positioned themselves as advocating for people to be different and find their own voices. While Cobain may have been an imperfect messenger in some ways, he had the right message for the right time, coming as he did at the end of the 1980s, when so much of the music that had their sound was associated with hetero-forward hair metal bands singing about bagging babes, “cherry pie.”

I was inspired by Kurt Cobain because he made it seem okay, cool, and defiant not to conform.

I too was inspired by Kurt Cobain because he made it seem okay, cool, and defiant not to conform, which maybe is not so original to him, but at the time it was original to me. Until Nirvana became popular, which was actually during my college life, not high school, I was unaware of what became known as “alternative” music and culture. As I explored that aspect of pop culture, I found a lot of personal liberation there, and I wanted to delve into that in this story. 

Another reason I chose the Cobain story as a backdrop was that I liked the narrative frame that it provided: the book takes place during the three years between the unexpected success of Nirvana’s Nevermind and their quick rise in 1991 to Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, which coincide neatly with Ari’s three years at Dalton and his three-year relationship with Justin.

I’ve noticed that in some reactions to the book, people note the title refers to the band, not the spiritual state of Nirvana, but I think they’re wrong. It’s both! The idea of the title is that we can find “nirvana,” aka what we need, right here, right now, in every moment. Even in moments that are painful, because they have the potential to teach so much. Or even if they don’t, we are lucky because they always end. If someone punches me in the face, as soon as that happens, it’s over. Isn’t that wonderful? Now I don’t have to be punched again unless I do it to myself in my own mind by reliving that moment and dwelling in it. Which is not to say I want to deny that it happened, but rather, to acknowledge the painful episode without having to feel the pain of it the way I did the first time.

KJ: Yes, and you connect those two nirvanas in the novel really well, which impressed me because I recall that Cobain, even, had only a pretty loose understanding of what “nirvana” meant in the Buddhist sense when he chose it as the band’s new name. But there’s a meaning there that listeners can find on their own–certainly much more than if they’d stuck with Fecal Matter or The Stiff Woodies or something like that. It speaks to what you bring up in the Post article, about how vocally political he was, that his anti-establishment raging was sort of wedded to a love for those that society was forcing to the margins, like Ari.

There’s a scene early in the novel I loved, where Ari finally gets the actual Nevermind album so he can study the words better than on the mix tape Justin’s played for him–only to find that there aren’t any liner notes, so he’s still left to just interpret the bursts of words he can make out. You call it a “sound collage of resentment”: “Pick me, please pick me. I’m ugly, but that’s okay. No, stay away. A little group of self-assured pricks. A dream, a horny dream. I know it’s wrong, but there’s nothing I can do. Just stay away. Something’s in the way.”

You mix actual bits of lyrics together with Ari’s own thoughts, and it emphasized nicely how the incoherence oddly makes the music more relatable. I remember hearing the Tori Amos cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the first time in college and realizing I had sung along to that song in my car probably a thousand times and never once gotten 3/4 of the words correct! But it doesn’t really matter because there’s something in the tone that carries it all. You describe his “quivering voice a hair above a whisper, as if it were too painful to speak. As if he’d survived something worse than I had. As if he needed my sympathy, not the other way around.” 

That line made me wonder—Ari has, actually, a surprising amount of sympathy in his childhood. His parents seem supportive, they put him in therapy after his assault, and send him to a private school away from his tormentor. Ari’s brother tells him about his gay roommate and suggests that things might get better when he gets to college. And then there’s Justin, who at times goes out of his way to be kind to Ari. Of course Ari faces a lot of cruelty, but there’s still a lot of genuine love in Ari’s life, which made this feel very different from other stories of queer youth I’ve read, where protagonists are surrounded with bigotry and hatred from all quarters… was it your intention here to tell a different kind of story?

I think at base, all of us want to be liked and want to like each other. It’s our true nature.

AH: That’s a really interesting question. My primary motivation in embarking on this book initially was to make use of emotion in my work, to practice what the writer Breena Clarke calls “radical empathy.” Or as George Saunders says, “Revision means asking myself, what could I know about these characters that would enable me to love them more.” Notice he does not say “like” them more, which is a very different thing. I don’t need to like someone like, oh, I don’t know, Donald Trump to recognize that he is a fellow human being just as I am. I think at base, all of us want to be liked and want to like each other. It’s our true nature, and when we go away from that, it causes us pain. And I don’t know if this is true or not, I’m just theorizing here, but maybe literature that doesn’t recognize this, that writes off its characters as being less than fully human, just isn’t deep or interesting enough. I’m sure I’ve done that in my work, but it’s an impulse that I want to get away from. Think of how Anne Frank famously wrote that deep down she believed all human beings were basically good. If she could write that from such a deeply dark place, then who are we to say we can’t find the humanity in those around us now?

Thinking about the plot of this book, I think you’re right that Ari gets a lot of sympathy. But I also think there’s quite a bit of misunderstanding of Ari’s situation, or well-intentioned moves that don’t work, and those have the potential to cause pain. Sometimes our best intentions aren’t enough when we want to help someone in pain. Sometimes that person has to do some work on his own, as Ari does. I think that’s what makes his relationship with Justin so special. Justin doesn’t necessarily treat him with sympathy or not with sympathy. He just takes him at face value, meets Ari where he is, without a story or judgment, which is incredibly attractive. Who wouldn’t want that?

KJ: Justin was such a fascinating character. He and Ari are from different worlds and yet Justin’s sincere curiosity allows them to connect. The way he praises Ari’s Israeli candies and tries to learn Hebrew words and Jewish holidays. And Ari, in turn, learns something about Justin’s community in Detroit. They, and you, are really working against a lot of long-standing racial divisions—was that a challenge?

AH: As I wrote about this subject, I knew it was something requiring work and thought. I wanted to address race in this story because to write about Detroit and not address race would be to write science fiction, and maybe that’s true of America as well. So I did my homework as much as I could. Research was invaluable, and I learned quite a bit about the complicated legacy of race in the history of Detroit. For example, I was reading interviews with African Americans living in Detroit describing the largely white suburbs surrounding the city as “the white noose.” That tells you something.

The advantage of writing about younger people is that they will do and say things that adults have learned not to do and say openly.

The advantage of writing about younger people in this context is that they will do and say things that adults have learned not to do and say openly when addressing issues of identity. I remember several frank discussions that took place in my high school about these issues, including a non-Jew who told me that we Jews should consider spreading ourselves around more instead of isolating ourselves in certain pockets of the Detroit suburbs, to show we were human beings just like everyone else, and that I had no idea the terrible things people said about us. Or I recall another conversation in which another student said, “I have no problem with homosexuality. It’s bisexuality that weirds me out. It’s like, make a choice one way or the other!” Those kinds of conversations always stuck with me, and that came through in the book.

KJ: Another very lively character is Ari’s present-day ex-husband, another professor who goes by “M”—”Not an initial, just the letter, to express solidarity with the transgendered.” He comes off as a comic character at first, teasing Ari to go online to reconnect with Justin. Meanwhile, Ari has been put on a committee at the college to review M’s potentially inappropriate interactions with a student at a party. At first this struck me as kind of comedic—and yet, as the book progresses it becomes a bigger question for Ari and for us. He’s gradually reflecting on his own rape, and suddenly he seems to be looking at his own former husband’s actions in a more serious light. “Who the hell is this treacherous predator?” Ari asks himself at one point—but then when he suggests that the committee should actually speak to M and the boy to get their versions of the event before drawing any conclusions, some of his colleagues get upset with him, as if he’s looking to excuse or defend M’s problematic behavior. Were you hoping to draw parallels between those parts of the story? Is there a sense of how those situations are, or aren’t different from one another, and how they should be addressed?

AH: The “#metoo” themes of this book may seem timely but in fact are an age-old question: How do we draw firm lines around the business of desire which is by nature slippery, formless, and shape-shifting? I think it was the Roman poet Catallus who compared love to a piece of ice held tight in your fist. You see this too in Ari’s specialty, the rules of courtly love, which were an attempt to get medieval knights to behave by a code that would constrain their awful behavior around women. The two situations in the book—Ari’s assault and M’s behavior—are linked by their sexual nature as well as issues of power and consent, but they are not the same. In our contemporary life we too often gloss over nuanced distinctions. These problems need to be addressed with thoughtfulness and care, not social media status updates, slogans, or quick fixes. And I will also say I do not believe universities should be in the business of judging crimes. Crimes should be handled by the judicial system.

KJ: As you mentioned earlier, the end of the novel comes to deal with the suicide of Kurt Cobain. Without giving too much away, we get to see what that meant to Ari at the time, and how he thinks about it all these years later. To wrap things up here, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about what Cobain means to you, as a fellow artist and writer. Is there something you’d want someone—perhaps a younger person like Noah at the end—to know about his music or his life?

AH: Kurt Cobain was an extremely talented and troubled man, one of those people who appear to the outside world to be bent on self-sabotage but during his short time on earth created great beauty. What struck me as I researched his life for this book is how controversial and outrageous many of the things he said and did at the time were and how routine they are now becoming. For example, there’s a picture of Kurt Cobain on the cover of a magazine in a dress and with painted fingernails—a gender-fuck pose that in the early ’90s was a good way to get yourself beaten up badly. Recently while on book tour, I met up with two friends of mine from those days each of whom lives in different cities and each has an adolescent boy who paints his nails, and it’s just the way it is. And their dads, if they have a problem with it, it’s their problem, not the kid’s. In my day, it would have been the other way around. That shift didn’t just happen out of nowhere. It took bold and brash people like Kurt Cobain who when thrust unexpectedly and uncomfortably into the limelight took the opportunity to rudely shove the rest of us into a better and more accepting future.

The New Generation of Latinx Literature Will Have Room for Everyone

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

I grew up with a vigorous love for reading and storytelling. There was (and still is) a sense of ethereal magic that occurs when reading about other people, real or fiction, other worlds, other perspectives. At the time, I wasn’t looking to books for people who looked like me; I was looking for something outside myself. Eventually, though, I wanted to see myself reflected in the works I read—or at least know that it was possible, that other people reading fiction for other perspectives might find a perspective that looked a little like mine. What I found was that it was possible, but very rare. The great Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez were some of the very few Latina authors that had pivotal works with Latinx characters heavily represented.

Over the last few years, Latinx representation in literature has slowly but surely increased. Among these new voices is Kali Fajardo-Anstine, whose debut short story collection Sabrina & Corina was published this year. Centered around multiple Latinas with indigenous ancestry and the trials they face, while also having their lives interwoven through their shared home of Denver Colorado, Sabrina & Corina features complex Latina characters that fall outside of the stereotypes that are normally attached to this community in various media. This has been something that felt so out of reach for a long time in my eyes, but reading the stories of these women, women whose cultures and struggles are similar to mine, has given me a feeling of fullness I longed for since realizing the need for representation of the community I’m a part of in the stories I read. Latinx representation in literature has been increasing, but now it’s time for us to ask for something more than representation. It’s not enough for Latinx characters to exist, instead of not existing; we’re ready for a range of Latinx characters as varied and vital as the white characters we’ve been reading for so long. With its cast of challenging and admirable Latinas, Sabrina & Corina has the potential to be the start of a new generation of Latinx literature.

This is not to diminish the work of iconic Latina authors like Cisneros and Alvarez. In previous decades, transcendent and remarkable works, including In the Time of the Butterflies, The House on Mango Street, Esperanza Rising, and Like Water for Chocolate, gave us deep insight into Latina characters from various generations. The problem has always been one of numbers. There have always been very few Latina authors with work in mainstream literature, compared to the number of white authors who have their narratives widely and continuously available.

I don’t want to have to only expect these stories one in a while.

The women in Sabrina & Corina are complex and imperfect, three-dimensional in a way Latina characters don’t always get to be (especially when written by white authors). In a recent interview, Fajardo-Anstine stated that she “was trying to portray a community that, often times, is invisible in the greater Latinx narrative. Southern Colorado, Northern New Mexico, mixed Latinx communities here in Denver—I was trying to create characters that were very individualistic, very human, in a way that I haven’t seen rendered before.” Her characters deal with traumas and intense situations, some of which are unique to the community and indigenous ancestry they come from, but many more of which face not only the broader Latinx community but humans everywhere: racism, classism, general and intergenerational trauma, and gentrification, among others. Fajardo-Anstine goes past the surface of her characters and digs deeper, pulling all the complexities, aches, doubts, and struggles, both internal and external, to the forefront. There’s no sense of hindrance in the way that Fajardo-Anstine writes so relentlessly raw, especially through the voices of the Latinas she’s manifested. These were stories that I had to sit with after finishing each one, ruminating on each of their unique and detailed environments and narratives.

Even though I was absolutely overjoyed that Sabrina & Corina exists just as it is, I couldn’t help but wonder how the literary world could better itself if Latinx narratives like Fajardo-Anstine’s became commonplace. In glimpsing into these lives, I gained a sense of comfort, a camaraderie between myself and the women of many generations in the book, especially knowing that we share similar experiences with many of the hardships faced by our community. To feel these things, especially in a time where we are seen as less than, is phenomenal, but I don’t want to have to only expect these stories one in a while.

In literature that I’ve read prior, there weren’t many characters like me that I could relate to and identify with in regards to their described viewpoint as a Latina. The Latinas in Sabrina & Corina display the layers of experience, both good and bad, that come with being a Latina in an ever-changing society. Social pressures, machismo, colorism within our own community; there was a sense of comfort in knowing that I was reading about Latinas that I could connect with if they existed in real life, that I could share an unspoken mutual understanding with them. This is a feeling that white readers get all the time, so often that they probably don’t even notice. I, and undoubtedly many other Latinas, deserve to experience it more often. Our voices are often silenced and disregarded as unimportant in mainstream literature. When we do get narratives in literature and in U.S. media, especially, they end up warped into unrealistic, exaggerated versions of us. Having our narratives be written by us and for us allows us to reclaim and strengthen our voices, while also emphasizing to the public that we aren’t the sidekicks, the gang bangers, or the maids.

In the next generation of Latinx literature, Latinas won’t need to search for the stories we can connect with.

Other Latina authors have preceded Fajardo-Anstine into the mainstream, including Elizabeth Acevedo (The Poet X), Lilliam Rivera (The Education of Margot Sanchez), Erika L. Sanchez (I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter), and Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Fruit of the Drunken Tree). It’s apparent that what’s been happening in Latinx literature lately can easily be called a cultural renaissance. I can already tell, or at least truly hope, that this next generation of Latinx literature will be vast, full of a wide variety of voices within our community. There will be a multitude of voices from so many diasporas, a constant stream of thoughts, discoveries and rediscoveries of the depths of our cultures, contemplations on what it means to be Latina and what those who came before us suffered through in order to have us exist today. In the next generation of Latinx literature, Latinas won’t need to search for the stories we can, as a community, connect with.

Signs of a new era have been showing through, filled with narratives that allow Latinas to be even more proud of our cultures and roots, where we came from and what lies ahead. Fajardo-Anstine has created multidimensional Latinas who have shared paths with those who came before, who have shared griefs and devastating cycles of abuse, who haven’t had the ability to voice their stories. She and other new Latina authors are reclaiming these real narratives we’ve been used to going without during our experiences reading mainstream literature. I only hope that other Latinas who are yearning to have their writing out in the world see that there is still a demand for the stories they are holding on to, their potential contribution to this exciting moment and movement that’s happening. I hope for this influx of literature written by us to inspire more undiscovered and upcoming Latina authors to grow and join this reclamation of our narratives and true depiction of ourselves, imperfections and all. It is more than possible to have our narratives be easily and readily accessible in mainstream literature, and this renaissance we’re in the middle of is only the beginning of what’s to come. Let it continue to thrive further, for the sake of the generations currently here and the ones yet to arrive.

How Stonewall Liberated Young Adult Literature

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

Two weeks before the Stonewall Riots, the first major young adult book to explicitly feature homosexuality hit the shelves. At the time, a book for teens that included a queer plot was so radical that, when John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip debuted in June 1969, the publisher appended a blurb from a psychiatrist. “A moment of sex discovery is told simply but poignantly in the life of a thirteen-year-old boy through his relationship with a friend of his own age and sex. It is how he absorbs this experience that becomes the key to what will happen next,” Dr. Frances L. Ilg of Yale wrote. Ilg went on to assure potential readers that “Davy is able to face his experience.” Not exactly glowing praise, but an official sanction that seemed necessary at a time when homosexuality was still considered a psychological problem.

The book, like Ilg’s blurb, aspired to both assuage parental fears and carve out space for same-gender attraction. In it, thirteen-year-old Davy Ross develops a close relationship with his classmate Douglas Altschuler after he moves to a new school. At one point, Davy kisses Altschuler, and they spend the night together, where they have a sexual experience that in the following days Davy can only refer to as “it.” After, he struggles to make sense of what he’s done. Although his thought process reflects the prejudice of the era, the fact that he contemplates the legitimacy of his feelings at all was exceptional: “There’s nothing wrong with Altschuler and me, is there? I know it’s not like making out with a girl,” Davy asks himself. “It’s just something that happened. It’s not dirty, or anything like that. It’s all right, isn’t it?”

But the publication of Donovan’s book, along with its wide library and bookstore distribution, was not a success of Donovan’s alone. I’ll Get There got its life thanks to a series of literary activists, who, taking cues from the gay liberation movement that followed the Stonewall Riots, went to great lengths to push LGB literature for young people into the mainstream.

I’ll Get There, like most early works of queer literature for children, can trace its genesis to an early trailblazing editor: Ursula Nordstrom. Nordstrom is widely credited with pushing the burgeoning category of YA literature, which dates to the 1942 publication of Seventeenth Summer, out of its moralistic foundations. Whereas the earliest spate of YA books centered on books that taught kids how to act their best, Nordstrom championed books that dealt with “taboo”: drugs, sex, and family drama. She once wrote that she wanted the category to move out of “bad books for good children” and toward “good books for bad children.”

Ursula Nordstrom wanted young adult literature to move out of ‘bad books for good children’ and toward ‘good books for bad children.’

Herself a lesbian, Nordstrom had a penchant for hiring queer writers like Donovan, even when they weren’t open about their sexualities. In addition to Donovan, who lived with a man for fourteen years, Nordstrom sought out writers like Where the Wild Things Are’s Maurice Sendak and Harriet the Spy’s Louise Fitzhugh, who quietly shaped the burgeoning world of books for young adults while hiding or downplaying their sexualities.

After years of acclimating the category of children’s literature to heavy but true-to-life themes, Nordstrom dreamed of publishing a book like I’ll Get There. When in 1968 John Donovan wrote to her with his idea, Nordstrom responded that she had “been waiting a long time for a manuscript that includes ‘buddy-love problems’ and it will be fine if you are the one to do it successfully.”

For a major editor to lend her support to a book about gay teens was no small feat. In 1969, the American Psychiatric Association still classified homosexuality as a mental disorder, and because strict decency laws meant that books with homosexual themes could be confiscated, no writer dared broach the subject for young audiences. (“Gender identity disorder” was also a diagnosable illness, which wouldn’t be revised until 2013.) In fact, Nordstrom’s version of “good books for bad children” YA literature drew from the same well as lesbian pulp fiction, which offered literary representation outside the bounds of official book distribution networks in the 1950s and ’60s. Pulp writers like Marijane Meaker, whose 1952 lesbian romance/tragedy Spring Fire sold over 1.5 million copies during its lifespan, also wrote some of the first queer books for teens.

Even Nordstrom, despite her tireless support of books that dealt with the complexities of childhood and adolescence, knew that putting this novel out into the world was going to be a challenge. In a letter to Donovan in advance of I’ll Get There’s publication, Nordstrom wrote, “We’re going to meet a lot of resistance to this book and we will be eager to fight that resistance as intelligently and gracefully as possible. … I think it is going to mean a lot to a lot of young readers, if we can just get it past the adults who buy their books!”

Yet publishing the book was only half the battle. The work of getting I’ll Get There into the hands of kids fell not on Nordstrom but on a group of librarians who, in 1970, formed the Task Force on Gay Liberation during the American Library Association conference that year—the first LGBT caucus in any U.S. profession.

Israel Fishman, one of the creators of the Task Force, later credited the Stonewall Riots—which were celebrating their first anniversary on the day of the ALA conference—with providing the impetus for the organization. “I was inspired and truly touched by what was happening in New York hundreds of miles away,” Fishman told the crowd. “I want to emphasize that it was that shift in my consciousness—that I would no longer be afraid—that led me to bring about the birth of this Task Force, this miracle, this incredible tool/weapon for social change and liberation.”

The Task Force set about disseminating books about LGB people as widely as possible. Soon after its founding, lesbian activist Barbara Gittings compiled a list of positive books about queer people in the first ever Gay Bibliography, which launched in 1971. At the ALA conference that year, the Task Force set up a kissing booth to protest the lack of inclusion of queer books and queer librarians, launched a Gay Book Award (now called the Stonewall Book Award), organized a panel entitled “Sex and the Single Cataloger: New Thoughts on Some Unthinkable Subjects,” and passed a resolution to protect the library rights of homosexuals. The impact it had on a literary world that continued to skirt the issue of LGB identity was seismic. Still, its activism had its limits: although trans women like Sylvia Rivera played key roles in the contemporaneous gay liberation movement, the Task Force did not give much thought to trans narratives in literature. Only in 2004, with the publication of Luna by Julie Anne Peters, did a book for teens center an openly trans character.

Many of these books, while offering newfound visibility for queer teens, were riddled with tropes about homosexuality and suffering.

Around the time the Task Force took off, queer YA literature was exploding. John Donovan’s book seemed to have broken a dam. In the eighteen years after I’ll Get There, thirteen books for teens touched on same-sex attraction, including Rosa Guy’s Ruby (1976), the first to feature a queer Black girl. But many of these books, while offering newfound visibility for queer teens, were riddled with tropes about homosexuality and suffering. Even I’ll Get There ends on an ambivalent note: although Altschuler tells Davy that he doesn’t regret what they did together, prompting some critics to see a hopeful message in the book, Davy ends up blaming his escapades for a car accident that kills his beloved dog. “It certainly isn’t in my nature to queer around,” he says, fearing that his dog’s death is punishment.

As researcher Scott John Arbery put it in 2000, I’ll Get There, “while praised for being the first young adult text to ‘openly’ approach the topic of adolescent homosexuality, also provided the blue-print for subsequent texts dealing with the subject.” The spate of books that followed latched on to many of the same motifs that Donovan’s book did. Car crashes, gay shame, same-gender kissing relegated to scene transitions—many of these same patterns materialized in the spate of books that followed I’ll Get There, including The Man Without a Face by Isabelle Holland (1972), Sticks and Stones by Lynn Hall (1972), Trying Hard to Hear You by Sandra Scoppettone (1974), and What’s This About Pete? by Mary W. Sullivan  (1976).

The new crop of queer literature advocates did not overlook these problems. Groups like the Gay Task Force made a point of calling out problematic tropes, foreshadowing the legacy of activism in YA literature that lives on today. For instance, in Lynn Hall’s Sticks and Stones (1972), Tom struggles with his feelings for his best friend just as a rumor spreads through his school that he’s a homosexual. Tom’s best friend later comes out as gay, and Tom learns to ignore the opinions of his classmates. But by the end of the book, the two boys end up as friends, not lovers, despite confessing their affection for each other.

The Task Force reached out to Hall to ask why the optimistic ending had not made space for the possibility that the two could be lovers as well as friends. Hall responded that although her original ending had included a romantic subplot, it evaporated during the editing process. “The publishers would not let me do it,” Hall wrote to the Task Force. “In their words, this was showing a homosexual relationship as a possible happy ending, and this might be dangerous to young people teetering on the brink. One editor wanted me to kill Tom in a car accident.”

Many authors internalized activist pushback to their books. After the Task Force criticized Trying Hard To Hear You (1974), Sandra Scoppettone noted that her book’s ending—in which a gay side character is hit by a car after he asks a girl on a date—“was misconstrued by many people. Perhaps this was my fault; I should have made the reason for this clearer. My intention was to show that he died trying to be something (heterosexual) he wasn’t and not because he was a homosexual.”

By 1976, the Task Force codified its aims into an official document entitled “What to Do Until the Utopia Arrives,” which directed librarians on how to approach books with queer themes. Decades later, the guidelines still mirror some of today’s discourse on representation. “Young gay women and men can and should be portrayed as heroes as simply as their nongay counterparts,” the Task Force wrote. “The positive acceptance of a parent, teacher, or best friend should be shown happening without destructive repercussions.”

The radical energy behind Stonewall spawned a parallel movement in the children’s literature world.

With the number of LGBT books for teens stretching into the hundreds in 2019, the lengths required to bring a book featuring same-gender teen kissing to the public fifty years ago feel increasingly hard to imagine. That isn’t an accident. Bookish activists organized for decades around the belief that queerness can and should thrive in children’s literature. The same radical energy behind Stonewall spawned a parallel movement in the children’s literature world—and that spirit of envisioning a richer, queerer, more complicated literature lives on today in the books of authors like Anna-Marie Mclemore, Mason Deaver, and Shaun David Hutchinson, who are pushing the genre to new heights.

The Gay Task Force, too, has become a mainstay of YA. Now the the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table, it oversees the annual commemoration of the Stonewall Book Award, and its work of critiquing books that engage in harmful tropes has shifted to individual bloggers, writers, and booksellers who remain vigilant on Twitter and Goodreads. Yet while YA books framed around “punishing” queerness still exist, the landscape of positive LGBTQ novels for teens is growing so rapidly that some literary activists have the luxury of adopting a new approach. Rather than challenge the hurtful queer YA, as the Task Force had to, the unspoken mission of blogs like LGBTQ Reads is to drown out the bad books for children with the good.

Maria Kuznetsova Thinks You Should Go Ahead and Be Weird

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

In our monthly series Can Writing Be Taught? we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time, we’re talking to Maria Kuznetsova, author of Oksana, Behave!, who’s teaching an upcoming six-week workshop about writing young narrators. If you’re interested in creating a teen viewpoint protagonist who’s relatable, entertaining, and not too precious for adult audiences, this class will help you analyze works that get it right and break down how you can use those techniques in your own writing.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

My teacher Ethan Canin often talks about how every story should have only one “emotional question.” It can have as many characters, settings, plots, and subplots as you want, but the story should only be actively investigating one thing, which can be as direct as “Why do people die?,” to hang together. My stories tend to be pretty packed with characters and subplots, and having this in the back of my head has helped me see how everything hangs together—and to be able to tell more easily when something is distracting or out of place. 

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

The worst thing I’ve gotten out of a writing class is seeing an instructor or a group of students trying to make a story into something that is more easy to digest .

The worst thing I’ve gotten out of a writing class is seeing an instructor or a group of students trying to make a story into something it didn’t want to be—something that is more easy to digest or discuss as opposed to thinking of the goals of the writer. In other words, I’ve seen writers be discouraged for being “weird,” and encouraged the get rid of the strange parts of their writing because they didn’t quite feel plausible in the real world. 

What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?

Treat writing like a job. Though waiting for the muse to visit or the conditions to be sufficiently inspiring may make writing seem more exciting, treating my writing like a job I have to show up to no matter how sad, overwhelmed, distracted, or uninspired I’ve felt has helped me stick to my work, no matter what was going on. Sure, I was lucky to have many moments of inspiration in there, but that didn’t mean I didn’t get plenty of work done when I wasn’t feeling particularly excited to write. 

Does everyone “have a novel in them”?

Yes, and as the old saying goes, “…and that’s where it should stay!” Just kidding—I actually don’t think that every writer has a novel in them, and that’s okay. Some writers are wildly talented short story writers and feel pressure to work on a novel for sales reasons, which is really a shame. And I think many novelists can’t write a story for their lives, and that’s okay too!  

Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?

I can’t imagine I would ever do this—unless writing is so very painful for the student that it was ruining their life in some major way. 

What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?

I think that praise is more important, especially for writers who are starting out, and I’m not just saying that for touchy-feely reasons, but because I really believe writers need to know where the heat of their writing is before they can get better. In workshop, there can be a tendency to focus on character and plot and on cutting out the weird parts that don’t quite fit in the story yet, so I like to point out the moments where the writing really came alive for me, even if that particular bit didn’t quite make sense in the current iteration of the story, so the writer can either expand that part, or take note and use it for something else. I think most writers can improve the scenes, characters, and plots of their writing, but it’s much harder to create electric moments, and nearly impossible to hit pure gold, so it’s important to know when you do. 

Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?

I like to say, ‘Write about what you don’t know about what you know.’

No! Not at first, at least. I think you should write for several years, or for as long as it takes, to really find your voice and material—and only then should you worry about whether your material is “saleable” (one of my least favorite words on earth). Once you do find your footing as a writer, then of course it’s important to write, or at least to revise, with publication in mind, if you have the goal of finding an agent and selling your work to a publisher. But ideally, you should work on making your writing the best it can be on its own terms, instead of, say, throwing in a love affair or cutting back on the lyrical passages you love only because you think it’ll make your work more marketable. If you’re lucky—and this part does require a ton of luck—you’ll find someone who likes the best version of your work. 

In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?

  • Kill your darlings—Do it when you need to, but you can always use your darlings in another story! 
  • Show don’t tell—Telling can be important, especially when your readers are lost.
  • Write what you know—This can often get you started, but I like to say, “Write about what you don’t know about what you know” or “Write what you’re curious about.”
  • Character is plot—I thought character was…character? Though characters have to be interesting enough to make you follow them, which I suppose relates to plot. 

What’s the best hobby for writers?

Anything that lets them turn off their brains! I recommend running or watching The Bachelorette. 

What’s the best workshop snack?

Does white wine count as a snack? 

Anne Shirley Was the Best Friend a Queer Brown Boy Could Have

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

The following essay is adapted from C.E. Gatchalian’s memoir Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man.

It was one noon hour in the school library, where I usually hid during my lunch breaks, that I—a little brown Filipinx boy who had just started feeling the first vague stirrings of queer desire—discovered L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. The library’s books, I remember, were alphabetized by title, so Anne was probably one of the first three or four books in the fiction section.

I connected instantly with the cover art for Anne: it was the famous 1942 edition with the young protagonist propped atop a heap of wood, enclosed in an oblong iris, which was in turn enclosed by rows of green and white abstractions that ably and efficiently suggested gables. I was drawn to Anne’s plaintive looks—all old-soul melancholy eyes. Her aching solitariness—underpinned by a bursting, indescribable sweetness—moved me, I remember, utterly.

That I was a boy reading a “book for girls” was not something that overly concerned me—at least, not enough to dissuade me from borrowing it. I probably did have a vague notion linking the liking of “girl” things with being a “sissy”: I remember being careful to read Anne only at home, and to never be seen reading or carrying it in school. But I also had enough chutzpah to be true to myself—I had no interest in G.I. Joe, or even boy-focused classic literature like Huckleberry Finn.

There are obvious reasons why a little brown queer boy would fall in love with Anne Shirley. Anne is an orphan and, consequently, like virtually every queer child, an outsider in every family she ends up with. With her red hair and freckles, she is, in her own way, racialized, given the still-present stigma against redheads in white society. She is a girl in a world that vastly prefers boys, shipped by mistake to a family expecting and wanting a boy. In the face of these challenges she strives, Herculean, towards unadulterated poetry, beauty, transcendence. This she achieves with her most unassailable attribute, her imagination, constructing a divine counterworld to the colonial conservatism of early-20th-century Prince Edward Island.

In the face of these challenges Anne strives, Herculean, towards unadulterated poetry, beauty, transcendence.

But even in the actual world, Anne—as her guardian Marilla would drily say—does well for herself. She transforms her fury at the world into a ferocious work ethic, leading to impressive academic and artistic achievements. She stands up to bullies who belittle her orphan status and red hair—can anyone resist cheering her epic takedown of the town busybody, Rachel Lynde? She’s a feminist who stands up to and runs with the boys; her response to Gilbert Blythe is particularly admirable. Rather than crumble like Spanish shortbread before his good looks, she refuses to forgive him for the wrong he does her—he calls her “Carrots”—fiercely repudiating his advances for most of the book. Above all, she magically transforms her weaknesses into strengths, appropriating the stigmatized categories of “orphan girl” and “redhead” for her own triumphant individuation.

And, of course, there are the queer-tinged characters and relationships in the book. Anne’s guardians, the elderly, unmarried brother-and-sister duumvirate of Matthew and Marilla, are qualified early in the book by Rachel Lynde as “a little odd.” Gruff, angular, no-nonsense Marilla is emotionally guarded and uncomfortable with physical affection (she is “disturbed” by the “unaccustomedness and sweetness” of Anne’s spontaneous caresses). Timid, taciturn Matthew is debilitatingly shy, especially around women, whom he dreads because of “an uncomfortable feeling that the mysterious creatures were secretly laughing at him.” And Anne’s “bosom” friendship with Diana is described in terms that are unambiguous and absolute in their devotion and passion. When Anne accidentally gets Diana drunk, and the latter’s mother forbids their friendship to continue, Anne resorts to language worthy of Tennyson: “Fare thee well, my beloved friend. Henceforth we must be as strangers though we are living side by side. But my heart will ever be faithful to thee.”

Anne Shirley is one maniacally determined individual. She fights for her rights with a ferocity that verges on the transgressive. She stridently strives to be “the best,” and eventually becomes it. Finally, after much struggle, she gains acceptance from the dominant culture, to the point where, as we progress through the six Anne books, we barely remember she’s a red-headed orphan. The jewel in her crown: eventual marriage, sexual fulfillment and child-breeding with hunky Gilbert, the imagined Prince Charming of adolescent females the world over.

Why is it surprising, then, that a little brown Filipinx boy with burgeoning queer desires and a profound wish to be white should find inspiration in Anne’s triumphal narrative?

Growing up in Vancouver, Canada, as the child of immigrant parents from the Philippines, I was abnormally introverted, obsessive compulsive and anxious. Artsy and bookish, I had no interest in sports. I was scared of the outside world and spent most of my time in my room, consuming every artwork—high and low—I could get my hands on: books, music, films, TV shows; desperate, I now realize, for some reflection of myself, of concrete, tangible proof that I exist; that I matter. But, of course, there were no representations to be found of queer brown Filipinx boys, so I could only consume what was most accessible: artworks by, about and for white, mostly straight people. The implicit message transmitted to me by the easy accessibility and complete domination of white stories is that only white stories matter, and, by extension, only white lives matter. That, despite being a professional writer for over two decades, it’s been only the last few years that I’ve written explicitly about being brown and Filipinx, is evidence of how long I held on to the belief that the stories and lives of brown and Filipinx folks don’t matter. How could I have believed otherwise? Our lives had never, in my years growing up, been given the validation afforded by cultural representation.

But I needed something to empower me, something to help me survive; and Anne Shirley came along at just the right time. She offered solace and hope; she showed a way out. Perhaps, through smarts and hard work, I, too, could carve out space for myself in the world. And perhaps, I, too, despite my coarse black hair and brown skin, could make some (white) Prince Charming fall in love with me.

Perhaps, through smarts and hard work, I, too, could carve out space for myself in the world.

There was likely another, more basic reason behind my love for this book, although at the time I don’t think I was conscious of it. My body, I believe, carried trauma. Both the inherited trauma of being Filipinx—a population that has been systemically humiliated, subjugated and brutalized for centuries—and the trauma I’d just started experiencing as a queer boy, in the form of shunning, name-calling, bullying. Quite simply, Anne of Green Gables—with its feel-good narrative and its florid, purple prose—was a balm on my hypervigilant, traumatized being.

The famous 1985 CBC television adaptation of Anne premiered shortly after I finished reading the book. I was unhappy with the way the miniseries reordered a number of the novel’s scenes, and was disappointed that none of the actors spoke in British, or at least mid-Atlantic, accents (weren’t all Canadians supposed to sound sort of British in those days?). Overall, though, I was captivated. We recorded the film the two nights it aired, which allowed me to watch it virtually every day for the next year. I would talk about it incessantly to the few friends I had at school, and find ways to mention it in every writing assignment I could. (Whatever stigma was attached to a boy openly liking this movie my obsession for it easily overrode.) And I loudly proclaimed my crush on Megan Follows, who played Anne—not exactly a lie (less about wanting her than wanting to be her) but more a pushback against the accusations being leveled against me than an honest declaration of lust.

For there was another aspect of the film whose peculiar energies were most preoccupying me. The moment Jonathan Crombie as Gilbert first appeared on the screen, the tenor of the film changed. Until that point, the world of Anne was cozily familiar, full of women and all the colors, textures, and modes associated with matriarchy. The sudden inflow of young male energy—so foreign and exotic to my eleven-year-old self—made for something darker, more menacing, more exciting—so exciting that, sometimes, unbeknownst to my working mother (but known to my non-working Lola, who didn’t care, didn’t tell, and would write me sick notes to take to school the next morning), I’d cut class and stay home, just to watch the movie, again and again.

Once, around this time, my father took my mother and me out for lunch. In his car afterwards, my mother, sitting in the passenger seat while I was in the back, told him that she’d heard me yelling the name “Gilbert” in my sleep in a manner not generally considered normative for a prepubescent boy. My father screeched the car to a halt, swung abruptly around, and smacked me hard in the face.

My father took my mother and me out for lunch. In his car afterwards, my mother told him that she’d heard me yelling the name ‘Gilbert’ in my sleep.

I blocked this incident out of my mind as soon as it happened and never dwelled on it again.

I’ve never asked my mother why she chose to divulge this information. I know it was out of genuine, if misguided, concern. As for my father’s violence—even that I justified for the longest time: he’s a product of his times, a macho, conservative Filipinx. Who could blame him for genuinely thinking he could beat the queer out of his son? Most fathers then thought that. Many still do.

For all my faults, holding grudges isn’t one of them. My friends tell me repeatedly that I’m extremely forgiving.

Anne saved my life. She entered my life exactly when I needed her. Her strength lit a fire under the part of me that remained intact, even as obsessiveness and anxiety started colonizing my young being. In her determination and triumph, I found hope.

Three decades later, shortly after his premature death of a brain hemorrhage, I read that Jonathan Crombie was queer, and that he didn’t come out until his forties. At that moment, as I recalled the huge crush I had on him when I was a boy, an epiphanic shiver rushed up my spine. For how could Anne’s influence extend even here, the most private thoughts and fantasies of a queer brown boy born exactly 100 years after her creator was?

But perhaps this is the upside, the magic of melancholy. Melancholics, alienated from their own immediate milieux, can connect, comfort and speak to one another across vast expanses of space and time, in the most loving and revelatory of ways.