Why Can’t We Make Up Our Minds About Sally Rooney?

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

A few weeks ago Interview Magazine asked five New York City booksellers for their thoughts on Irish literary phenomenon Sally Rooney. Aside from establishing which New Yorkers are buying her books (“regular upper-middle class Manhattanite people,” “young literary hipsters” and, overwhelmingly, women, “specifically younger white women”), they gave a few anecdotes, like this one:

This one woman came in, dressed kind of cool, and she was like, “Okay, my therapist told me I have to read something that makes me look dumb when I pull it out.” ….And I was just immediately like, “Well, you have to read this.”

“This” was Rooney’s first novel, Conversations With Friends, which makes sense if you’ve seen the cover: two cartoony white women’s faces, one in oversized black sunglasses, pop against a juicy tangerine backdrop. It screams chick lit.

Except Rooney was longlisted for the Booker Prize, nominated for the Dylan Thomas and Rathbones Folio Prizes, and won the Costa Award, Irish Book Award, and British Book Awards, in addition to being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. Critics have praised Rooney’s intelligence and her ability to capture the zeitgeist of her generation. You’d be pretty surprised if someone asked for a book that made them “look dumb” and a bookseller pulled out fellow Costa Prize winners The Satanic Verses or An Artist of the Floating World.

The fact is that by virtue of her accolades, reading Rooney’s work can’t make you look stupid. By virtue of her book covers, however, it will make you look like you’re reading women’s fiction. And to many people, including that (female) bookseller, “dumb-looking” and “women’s fiction” are the same thing.

This particular tension—has Sally Rooney written smart, literary books, or stupid female ones?—underscores the coverage of her work. Conversations with Friends is either “a smart, sexy, realistic portrayal of a woman finding herself” (Book List) or a novel about “the invisible bars imprisoning the apparently free” (The Guardian) written by someone with a “natural power as a psychological portraitist” (The New Yorker). Complicating matters is that Rooney writes straightforward sentences and easy-to-read books. Or maybe Rooney writes taut, precise sentences and poised books; there is an odd bifurcation in her coverage, as if the media is describing two different authors depending on the publication. Sometimes she is a serious literary talent and at others she is the author of Instagrammable beach reads, the voice, and purview, of millennial women.

There’s nothing wrong with debating the quality of a book—literature is meant to be discussed—but it’s easy to fall into the is-she-or-isn’t-she-literary rhetoric and harder to step back and ask what we’re really talking about. If you look closely, many conversations about the literary caliber of Rooney’s books are actually coded discussions about how specific the books are to women. I’ll take myself as an example: I’ve spent much of my recent professional life looking at gender bias in publishing and still I found myself wondering at Sally Rooney’s critical success. Marianne in Normal People and Frances in Conversations with Friends are similar characters: they’re intelligent young women whose unusual status as likeable outsiders allows them to observe and comment on the millennial social scene at Trinity, a prestigious Irish university. It also propels their romantic story lines, which deal with burgeoning sexuality, self-esteem, and the intense, often overwhelming emotions that come with being in love for the first time. (Yes, there are male characters in her books, but Rooney’s clear talent and passion is to showcase the interiority of young women. Her female characters have a complexity that her leading men, who tend to be quiet and a little confused, don’t.) References to issues such as class or sexual orientation feel secondary to young women’s immediate emotional experience, and overall I found the novels to be enjoyable “quick reads” that lacked the resonance I associate with great literature.

Many conversations about the literary caliber of Rooney’s books are actually coded discussions about how specific the books are to women.

But how much of that reaction comes from my cultural predisposition to dismiss works about twenty-something women’s interior lives? While reasonable people can disagree on Rooney’s style or pacing, dismissing her books because of their content is giving in to the underlying belief that a young woman’s life doesn’t teach us anything beyond its own existence. It’s falling into the trap of expectation: we expect young women to be emotional, so those emotions become less interesting or worthy of examination. Comparing Rooney to say, John Banville, a writer who also won the Irish Book Award for a novel about a young romance and coming-of-age, Rooney’s characters strike me as less profound. Why? How much is it because Rooney writes about the lives of white, educated Millennial women, whereas Banville portrays white, educated Baby Boomer men, long considered a fitting subject for great books?

I’m sure I’m hardly alone as a woman whose automatic process is to equate literature with male voices and perspectives. It’s what we’ve been taught. There isn’t “men’s fiction,” after all; for men, there’s just “fiction.” Stories about men are universal stories about the human condition. Women are expected to be able to sympathize with male characters while men can find women impenetrable or uninteresting. No woman would skip a book that centers on a boy’s coming of age or marriage from a man’s point of view, yet stories about a young woman’s first romance or a struggling mother become women’s fiction, a thing apart. Worse, these stories are marketed with cheesy book covers and grouped with mass market thrillers as something you should read when you’re half-fried on the beach, which makes them unappealing to readers of any gender who want more serious fiction. It’s frustrating that women who want to read literary fiction end up ignoring many of the stories that reflect and explore their own experience just because they’ve been shelved in a different section of the bookstore, but it’s hard not to internalize the implication that women’s fiction isn’t very good or else it would be called literary fiction. And it’s not all in our heads; studies show female authors are treated as less literary by the press and books about female protagonists don’t win major awards.

Maybe this is what breaking out of the ‘women’s fiction’ ghetto looks like: a book that is praised by Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend, and also by Anne Enright.

But Rooney’s did. So maybe this is what breaking out of the “women’s fiction” ghetto looks like: a commercially successful book that is praised by Camila Morrone, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Instagram model girlfriend, and also by Anne Enright, winner of the Booker Prize. A book that focuses on the experience of a young woman and doesn’t need to be about anything else to win major awards. A book that has a cheesy cover but isn’t regulated to the genre shelf. Even if it’s still easy to roll our eyes at all the hype, Sally Rooney’s success is an important step towards legitimizing female stories, which is crucial at a time when we want, and need, men to see women’s issues as universal issues, that reproductive rights are human rights, and improving women’s health and childcare policies will positively affect us all. There are going to be some growing pains, for this reader included, but if we pay attention to how we talk about female writers and their work, we can let go of the idea that “stupid” wears lipstick and “smart” has a beard.

Finally, a “Road Trip Across India” Novel That’s Not About White Men

Posted on by Jennifer Baker

Set mostly in India, Balli Kaur Jaswal’s fourth novel, The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters, and her second published in the United States is both a rolicking and suspenseful trip. In it, three sisters come together to fulfill their mother’s dying wish: that they journey to visit a set list of places (Delhi, Amritsar) and perform a series of ritual tasks, from performing seva, or selfless service in the Sikh faith, to scattering her ashes in a particular place.

Rajni, Jazmeen, and Shirina are separated by personality, distance, or both. Rajni, the eldest Shergill sister by more than a decade, is a stickler for order and is thrown into a tizzy when her 18-year-old son announces that he is engaged to a woman twice his age who is pregnant with their child. Her relationship to her sisters is far more maternal than sibling-esque. Jazmeen is an aspiring actress enmeshed in a bizarre viral video scandal. She both embodies the wild, middle child trope, and subverts it. Shirina is the peacemaking baby of the family: she has moved to Melbourne to marry a wealthy man, and lives with him and his controlling mother. Her geographic distance from her sisters has made it easy to remain neutral in family conflicts, and also mum about her own trials.

Each sister also harbors secrets, which are cleverly revealed, often in flashback, as the novel unfolds. Setting aside their long-standing and deep-seated differences, Rajni, Jazmeen and Shirina confront the past and bear towards the future.

I have followed Jaswal’s career since we met in Singapore in 2014 where we quickly became friends and colleagues. I was blown away by her first novel, Inheritance.. It is a graceful and moving book about a family navigating loss and mental illness, as well as a haunting portrait of Singapore post-decolonization. I blurbed her second book, Sugarbread, a young adult novel about food, faith, and family. In other words, I am a fan.

Jaswal is based in Singapore and is currently a doctoral candidate at Nanyang Technological University. We have been in conversation twice before for the publication of her previous novels; I spoke to her this time about writing about women, genre conventions, and the diaspora.

Pooja Makhijani: Your novels concern Punjabi women and their relationships with one another and, more generally, how their lives and bodies are constrained by the patriarchy. Why do you continue to obsess about these themes in your fiction?

Every time I look at the relationships between South Asian women from a different angle, a wealth of issues and potential themes emerge.

Balli Kaur Jaswal: There’s just so much to explore! With Shergill Sisters, I was really interested in the dynamics between the three sisters, each straddling the tension between tradition and modernity in their own ways. They are so different as individuals, and I wanted to see where their paths and values would intersect. I suppose I was also interested in the relationship between birth and death, and the way each of them comes to terms with the idea of mortality.

It feels like every time I look at the relationships between South Asian women from just a slightly different angle, or place them in a new context, a wealth of issues and potential themes emerge. I think it points to the fact that intersectional identities are complex and our stories are well worth exploring.

PM: This novel is three sisters on an epic road trip, not only exploring the tensions among themselves, but also between polarities — tradition and modernity, diaspora and the home country, male and female. How did you come up with its central storyline and characters?

BKJ: I tend to write about the familial relationships between women, and I found sister relationships most intriguing because of how much history and vulnerability they can share. Sisters can be brutally honest with each other — in a way that friends cannot be — with an understanding that the core relationship will stay intact.

I was also inspired by the idea of writing an “in-between” journey story: as in the sisters are traveling to India but it’s not exactly new to them, because they grew up with some aspects of Indian culture, but it’s also not quite home.

I noticed that most road trip narratives in India tend to be from the perspective of men, or white British or American people. So many people from the diaspora “return” all the time, and the experience is quite unique. And the experience of traveling in India as a woman is quite different from the relative freedom that men have.

PM: This is a road trip novel — the road provides both geographical and narrative structure — and the road is often a symbol of freedom in such works. I found Unlikely Adventures to be a clever take of that genre, almost an inversion. Can you speak to this a bit more?

Men travel through India and have this life-changing experience, but it’s often because India is completely new to them.

BKJ: Something I noticed every time I thought about narratives I had come across about traveling in India —The Darjeeling Limited comes to mind, as does an episode of An Idiot Abroad — men travel through India and have this life-changing experience, but it’s often because India is completely new to them, so it’s a fish out of water story, or they have freedom to move, discover and explore without the same repercussions that women and girls face when traveling in India.

I was really curious about the restrictiveness of traveling as women in a country where catcalling and other forms of disrespect are commonplace. There are all these logistics to consider when you travel as a woman in India, like which forms of transport will be safest. We don’t really hear much about the way travel expands or broadens women’s definition of themselves, and we definitely don’t see enough stories about women from the South Asian diaspora traveling to India.

PM: What sort of research did writing this novel entail?

BKJ: I went on a very similar trip — with my parents though — to Delhi, Amritsar, and Chandigarh. We also went to Anandpur Sahib but that didn’t make it into the novel. Besides that, I read a lot of accounts from Indian women on social media and in the press about the daily challenges of asserting their independence in India, from things like so-called “eve teasing” to being called names by neighbors for wanting to live alone, to family pressures to get married so they could “be taken care of.” All of these attempts at owning women and suppressing their autonomy went into the context of this novel.

PM: In a previous conversation, you said, “Diaspora fiction is my favorite genre. It speaks to my experience and helps me understand ways of communicating that experience to a wider audience. To write that sort of fiction is such a privilege.” In Unlikely Adventures, too, you explore diaspora and migration and dislocation with complexity and verve. How do varying diasporic geographies, histories and identities inform your work?

BKJ: I’m interested in the idea that our cultural identities can be fairly fluid if we’ve lived in more than one place. When I was growing up, the common representations of diaspora women always pitted traditional women against modern ones, and created this dichotomy that alienated anybody who identified as both.

I’m interested in exploring the question of what it means to be a South Asian diaspora woman. Does it mean abandoning one set of values and jumping ship to another? Does it mean following traditional values that are passed down by previous generations, and then rebelling? Can it possibly be that women don’t know the answer to this and are allowed to be inconsistent?

PM: Do you think that has changed in popular or literary narratives, or are we still seeing more of the same dichotomies represented?

BKJ: I think it’s changing as we’re seeing more diverse representation, so characters and stories don’t focus entirely on Indian-ness, but other things as well — which end up providing more nuance to the questions of identity, while also telling a good story about characters doing things like traveling, or working on their failing acting careers.

PM: I love the humor in this book (as I did in Erotic Stories). In one particularly memorable scene, Jazmeen becomes involved in an altercation with her dining partner at a high-end Chinese restaurant in South London and causes a rare fish to become so distressed that it leaps out of its tank and onto the floor, where Jazmeen kicks it repeatedly. The scene, although absurd, reveals much about Jazmeen’s backstory and also forwards the narrative. Why is humor so important in your work? How to you balance humor and heaviness (given the book’s darker themes)?

There’s a lot of dark and heavy stuff in our world, but you get through each day by finding the things you can laugh about.

BKJ: I found it easier to balance the humor with heavy themes if I told the story in a fairly lighthearted tone. It’s generally how I look at life too: there’s a lot of dark and heavy stuff in our world, but you get through each day by finding the things you can laugh about. I think the only way to really discuss uncomfortable themes, and to give them a chance to sink in and resonate with people, is to provide a bit of relief with humor.

It was the same with Erotic Stories— I knew I couldn’t talk about women owning their sexuality without some heavier issues surfacing, like honor killings and domestic violence. I made sure that these themes were addressed and considered, but I balanced it out with moments of comedy so it wasn’t all doom and gloom

I think that’s the reality of being from the diaspora though — there’s some hard stuff, and some really funny stuff. They coexist.

The Last Man I Loved Was a Woman

Posted on by Kelly Luce 
 Green Hills
  
 You asked if the last man
 I loved was a woman.
 She was a brush
 of lipstick
 where the red sun 
 fell into our laps, an aircraft I shot
 into history. Everything felt warm like waiting, 
 alight with cobwebs, unseen and alive 
 in their absence. In the countryside,
 absence filled entire houses, cut families out
 of construction paper, stick figures went missing
 on the way to a plate of dinner.
 Our house swam up
 like a goldfish, asking. 
 Now, my mother asked 
 if my father loved men.
 Did he love them more than this,
 was that it.
 He must have loved 
 a question mark so much 
 it was no longer allowed by the heart. 
 Whatever I am allowed makes a memory.
 You visit the green hills. They are new every year
 like an annual sale, half-off and free. Here 
 is everything untouched, 
 please touch 
 and break and bring
 the stranger of your body back home. 
 You long to look at distance, sometimes beyond.
 Sometimes the car fades away. But the road remains.
 You know there are other homes in the wideness of the low world.
  
 The Unbelievable
  
 O beautiful for unbelievable bodies
 how they swam beside each other
 on the beds of America.
 In snatches of incandescence, 
 could you sense that this was not 
 a single longing but lifetimes
 of caterpillars, how 
 families of goldfish
 came alive in our fast motions.
 How far we both have traveled
 to unite here in dappled heat,
 slowed at the foot of the bed 
 where our sweaters lay piled
 a touch of rainwater seeping in,
 all the coolness that seems now worth
 reaching for the pipe drip 
 under which we met, over what seemed 
 to be hours and years at once.
 Today was stolen and rented
 among clangs of radiators, 
 orchestral squares of urban light
 revealing flowered and fruited gestures 
 of impassioned trespasses, 
 two citizens, being held
 by only one another’s borders. 
 In the water of our languages
 how this country grew suddenly unfurled
 and conceivable, and the morning glories 
 became ours in our arms.

A History of the Wench

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

In 2010, Dolen Perkins-Valdez published the best-selling historical fiction novel Wench. According to the back cover, the novel’s setting is “an idyllic retreat for Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their enslaved black mistresses.” The book’s front matter includes a quotation from 1836 about a slave owner who “especially prided himself upon owning the swiftest horse, the handsomest wench, and the finest pack of hounds in all Virginia.”

This title caught my eye for a few reasons. First, the story has particular personal resonance for me: My great-great-great grandmother was an enslaved cook on a plantation in east Texas. Her master, who owned the plantation, raped her. She gave birth to my great-great grandmother as a result. I do not know my great-great-great-grandmother’s name, but I think about her, sometimes, when I’m making dinner.

What was this Middle English term doing in a novel about the sexual exploitation of enslaved black women?

But second, I am a medieval scholar who was, at the time, in the midst of researching the term wench’s sexualized associations in the Middle Ages. What was this Middle English term, “wench,” doing in a novel about the widespread sexual exploitation of enslaved black women in the United States?

As it turns out, the term’s medieval history paved the way for its later use as a gendered racial slur, evolving from a relatively neutral term designating youth or servitude to one signifying femininity, then transgressive feminine sexuality, and finally black feminine sexuality. This long history enabled “wench” to become a tool for dehumanizing black women, insisting on their sexual availability to white men, and facilitating their exploitation.

“Wench” has its earliest roots in the Old and early Middle English “wenc(h)el,” which designated a servant or slave of any gender, or a child. (A text from around 1200 refers to “An wennchell thatt iss iesu crist,” a child that is Jesus Christ.) In 890, the Old English noun “wencel” translates the Latin “mancipium,” which means “possession, property, servant, slave.” Wencel is a term designating subordinate status and a lack of power, but during this time period, that disempowered status was tied to youth and servitude rather than femininity or sexuality.

This changed in the later Middle Ages as “wench” became both gendered and sexualized. It signified (per the Middle English Dictionary), “a girl” or “young woman;–occasionally with disparaging overtones,” “a serving maid, bondwoman,” and “a concubine, paramour, mistress; a strumpet, harlot.” This multivalence, with its underlying connotations of youth, femininity, lower social status, servitude, and sexual transgression, invokes multiple grounds of disadvantage. The “wenche” is subservient to higher-ranked women—“ladies”—as well as to all men, and she is marked by the stain of illicit sexuality. The Book of Vices and Virtues, a comprehensive guide to recognizing the seven deadly sins, forbids complaining by “wenches ayens here ladies” [wenches against their ladies], setting up a relationship of inequality and subservience between “wenches” and “ladies.” When her jealous husband suspects her of adultery, the character May in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale insists, “I am a gentil womman and no wenche.” She sets up a stark class differential between the “gentil womman” on one hand and the “wenche” on the other, portraying the latter term as derogatory and linking it to sexual transgression. According to May, only “wenches” cheat on their husbands. William Langland’s Piers Plowman mentions “wenches of the stewes” [whores from the brothels] at multiple points. Bible translator John Wyclif uses “wenche” derisively six times, in addition to “strumpet” and “yong strumpet,” to name the dancing Salome in a sermon about the beheading of John the Baptist, setting up “wenche” and “strumpet” as synonyms. The female speaker of an erotic song recalls her early sexual experiences “when I was a wanton wench / Of twelve yere of age,” underscoring the term’s popular links to wantonness. Finally, in King Ponthus and the Fair Sidone, Guenelet uses the term after becoming angry when Sidone rejects his advances: “he thretened her sore and swore that he sholde take her by force and make her his wenche yf she wolde not be his wyfe.” Here, “wenche” functions in opposition to “wyfe” and is part of Guenelot’s threat to overpower and rape Sidone “by force.”

The implications of “wench” are most chilling in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, which tells the story of two Cambridge students who spend the night at a miller’s house after the miller steals some of their grain. The miller has a 20-year-old daughter named Malyne. The tale introduces Malyne as a “wenche,” following the term with a sexualized description of her body: “This wenche thikke and wel ygrowen was…With buttokes brode and brestes rounde and hye” [This wench was thick and well-developed…With broad buttocks and round, high breasts]. Here the term “wenche” invites us to leer at Malyne, focusing on the shape of her buttocks and breasts. It guides audiences to view her as a gendered, lower-status, dehumanized body created as an object for others’ gratification. That night, the miller’s family and the two students enjoy a boozy dinner. The miller, his wife, and Malyne pass out afterward, and their drunken snoring keeps the students awake. “The wenche rowteth eek” [The wench snores too], we are told, the term here serving to emphasize Malyne’s unladylike snoring as well as the intoxication that causes it. As the two students lie awake in bed fuming over the miller’s theft of their grain, Aleyn crudely declares to John, “yon wenche wil I swyve” [I will fuck that wench]. Here, the term works to dehumanize Malyne and to position her as an acceptable target for assault. Finally, “wenche” is used two times in two lines to name Malyne just before Aleyn rapes her: “And up he rist, and by the wenche he crepte. / This wenche lay uprighte and faste slepte” [And up he rose, and by the wench he crept. / This wench lay flat on her back and fast slept.] By naming Malyne as “wenche” in these moments just before her rape, the text discourages empathy for her plight and sets her up as both naturally subordinate and as sexually available, the term working both to mark her as exploitable and to downplay her rape. In the Reeve’s Tale, the term “wenche” illustrates how Malyne is vulnerable to the students’ predatory actions due to her social status, gender, and age, while its sexual associations are insidiously marshaled to make her seem as though she is “asking for it,” to allow her rape to be read as not-rape.

The fact that the term already designated age, gender, subordinate social status, and sexual availability meant that it was ready-made for race to be mapped onto those other inequalities.

Three centuries later, the term “wench” proliferated in newspapers on the other side of the Atlantic. By now, in addition to connoting gender, social status, sexual availability, and age, it had become racialized to designate an enslaved black woman. In 1828, Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language defined “wench” as “In America, a black or colored female servant; a negress.”  John Russell Bartlett’s 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms contains the entry, “WENCH. In the United States, this word is only applied to black females.” The fact that the term already designated age, gender, subordinate social status, and sexual availability meant that it was ready-made for race to be mapped onto those other inequalities so that it could function as a pejorative term for black women that disparaged them and advertised their sexual availability to white men. Once again, the term’s derogatory connotations work to overshadow the very real and constant violence that black women suffered as a result of their intersecting disadvantages. When a woman is called a wench, we are prepped by centuries of connotation to see her as something intended for sexual use.

The phrase “Negro wench” appears repeatedly in slave advertisements and runaway slave reward posters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A 1735 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette advertised “A likely young Negro Wench, who is a good Cook and can wash well, to be disposed of,” while a 1749 issue proclaimed, “To be SOLD, TO be sold cheap, a very likely young Negro wench, about 18 years of age: Also fine Palm oyl, by the half dozen pound, or lesser quantity.” This linking of the “cheap…Negro wench” with the “fine Palm oyl” emphasizes her status as a commodity to be sold. In these advertisements, the adjective “likely” means “good-looking” or “attractive” as well as “capable, vigorous, strong,” and almost always appears alongside “wench” as a rhetorical convention. In 1766, Pennsylvania botanist and explorer John Bartram wrote in a letter, “I have sent thee six likely young negroes amongst which is two young breeding wenches.” Bartram emphasizes the enslaved women’s age, race, gender, and sexuality, using the term “wench” to dehumanize them as reproductive commodities. In an interview about Wench, Dolen Perkins-Valdez discussed her choice to use the term as her novel’s title: “I felt that given the sexual servitude of my female characters, this word would most accurately evoke the set of cultural expectations they were tangled within,” she said. The novel features a reward poster for a runaway enslaved woman stating, “$100 REWARD for NI**ER WENCH.” This echoes historical posters such as the 1810 one proclaiming, “Runaway Wench. Absconded from Georgetown, Columbia…a mulatto wench named Lottie.”

In 1913, Julian Shakespeare Carr—a wealthy North Carolina white supremacist, Confederate war veteran, and outspoken Ku Klux Klan supporter who once referred to a massacre of 60 black citizens in Wilmington as “a grand and glorious event”—dedicated the Confederate soldier monument statue known as “Silent Sam” on the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s campus. In his dedication speech, Carr shared a personal anecdote. He said,

One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison…

Carr brags of brutally whipping a black woman seeking protection, calling his violent act a “pleasing duty” that he performs publicly for a group of one hundred men. Here, as in medieval texts, the “negro wench” is deliberately contrasted with the “Southern lady,” setting up a stark status differential. He uses the term “wench” to racialize and dehumanize the woman whom he attacks and to downplay his violence against her, illuminating the term’s cultural currency.

On February 12 of this year, antiracist activists in Chapel Hill erected a plaque dedicated to the woman. It read, “In honor of the Negro Wench. She ran to this University for safety and, for the color of her skin, was beaten at its gates. We fight in her name.” Three days later, the plaque was stolen. A video celebrating the theft was posted to Confederate 901’s Facebook page, titled “Antifa lost their first monument at Chapel Hill.” The plaque was reinstated on February 20, then broken and partially stolen before its pedestal and remaining portion were removed by town officials two days later due to “public safety concerns.”

When I did a Google image search looking for newspaper advertisements featuring the phrase “Negro wench,” something else came up as well. It was a still from a porn video someone had posted to YouTube, titled “Negro bed wench.” In the still, a naked white man is positioned behind a young black woman on a bed. With one hand, he holds her hair tightly. With the other, he digs his fingers into her mouth and pulls out her lips and cheeks. Her eyes are wide, her mouth yanked into a painful-looking grimace. Like Malyne’s rape in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, this scene of racialized sexual violence illuminates how “wench” can operate: by bundling together different kinds of disempowerment and rendering its object always already sexually available, the term simultaneously makes “wenches” more vulnerable to violence and glosses over that violence by portraying them as “asking for it.”

The video’s title is also the name of a popular pornographic trope in which sexual violence by white men against black women is racialized and eroticized. It is meant to arouse desire, to get people off. In her study of black women in pornography, Mirielle Miller-Young analyzes how black women performers in early pornographic stag films from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s “often played sexually passive domestic servants in interracial encounters with white men.” She notes that “coercive sex, and the woman’s performed resistance, is part of the fantasy” that this trope entails.

The medieval paved the way for the later dehumanization and exploitation of black women.

It is imperative to understand this term’s medieval English and American racialized histories in order to grasp how the medieval, in this case, paved the way for the later dehumanization and exploitation of black women. The term initially designated age and social status in the early Middle Ages, then became gendered and sexualized in the later Middle Ages, functioning as a term of intersectional disadvantage. Once the Atlantic slave trade commenced, race was able to be seamlessly mapped onto “wench”’s web of preexisting associations with inequalities—gender, class, age, sexual availability—so that it came to signify a young enslaved black woman, its medieval pejorative sexual connotations enabling the “wench” to be viewed as hypersexualized and accessible to white men.

This is one of the many reasons why the medieval matters. It is the Middle Age’s derogatory linguistic freight that allowed this term to become a tool of misogynoir, a term coined by Moya Bailey and Trudy to name “the ways that anti-Blackness and misogyny combine to malign Black women in our world.” We are still reckoning with these attitudes today, as illustrated by the 6-part Lifetime documentary Surviving R. Kelly, which aired in January and detailed R&B singer R. Kelly’s decades-long sexual exploitation of black girls. This documentary starkly illustrated how our culture’s long history of viewing young, economically disadvantaged women as sexually available—specifically narrowing to black women in the eighteenth century—has devastating effects on those women. It just as clearly illuminated how our culture’s linking of these qualities together allows violence and abuse to go unrecognized and unaddressed. As writer Mikki Kendall states near the end of the documentary, “We still, socially, don’t perceive black women as innocent.” The history of the term “wench” can show us how those attitudes developed. And it is my hope that, armed with the knowledge of how those attitudes accrued and calcified until we took them for granted, we can begin to chisel away at them.

The Battle of the Book Cover: U.K. versus U.S.

Posted on by Jo Lou

Jacket covers are essential—the first line of attack to visually persuade you into purchasing a book, whether through a vibrant, pop-out typeface or a artfully draw illustration you can’t help but notice. Don’t think designing a cover is an easy decision, though. There are a lot of components that affect the process, and the considerations differ country by country. One thing to agree on: these choices make for beautiful books. (Well, when done right.)

We put together a poll on our Instagram of U.K. versus U.S. book covers and here are the results. (We’ve offered justifications, but the votes were all yours!) The left are book covers from our over-the-pond friends, while book covers from the good ol’ U.S. of A are situated on the right. This is a battle where there are no losers: only resigned, yet happy, people with another 20 books to add to the pile.

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami

With a bird’s-eye view of almost identical houses in the suburbs, this U.K. cover alludes to the story of The Other Americans: people brought together through the death of a Moroccan immigrant killed at an intersection. The billowing gold strands of the U.S. version may be beautiful, but ultimately it’s too abstract and doesn’t tell us anything about the book.

WINNER:

Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt

This novel is a work of autofiction about a Midwestern woman obsessed with her New York neighbor. The cover on the right might have more detail and flare (loving the feathered head-dress!), but this is a novel about the self, and I think the self is honest and bare. Let the body fly free, y’all. #FreeTheNipple (and the pubes).

WINNER:

Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

The cover on the left is beautiful, bold, and unapologetically colorful for this short story collection about blackness and middle-class America. This is not to say the right-side simplicity isn’t wonderful in its own way, but the U.K. has knocked it out of the park. (Pardon the American expression.)

WINNER:

Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi’s modern-day fairytale retelling of Hansel and Gretel is evocative and strange. While I love the emblematic lost-in-the-misted-woods illustration, I’ve seen it before. The American cover wins with its bright yellow font and a striking illustration of a raven holding a branch of orange and in our book, millennial pink always wins.

WINNER:

House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

This debut about a teenage boy’s disappearance in Zimbabwe is so stunning that I would be happy with any cover. If I had to choose, though? There is no question. The U.K. cover on the left looks like a photo hanging in an art gallery and the bright multi-colored typography has my complete attention.

WINNER:

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot

Terese Mailhot’s memoir speaks poetic on growing up on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation and being diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Bipolar II Disorder. While both images are stunning, there is something vulnerable about the hand-drawn quality of strawberries found in the dark.

WINNER:

The River by Peter Heller

Bold typography weaved with a psychedelic blue, red and white print? The U.S. version is as striking as the story it contains, about two college students who canoe down the Maskwa River before meeting a man in the midst of a wildfire. The British cover, on the other hand, looks like a cheap thriller sold in airports (right down to the cheesy tagline).

WINNER:

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, this novel brings us Yale Tishman, a gay man in Chicago during the AIDS epidemic, and his friend’s sister Fiona, who is looking for her daughter in Paris 30 years later. If you’ve bought the U.S. copy already, you chose correctly. The pink and yellow looks stellar on the bookshelf. (I can attest.) The British cover conveys a lot of emotion with the image of two men embracing, but looks too much like a magazine cover.

WINNER:

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

Beginning with Bertha Truitt, a mysterious woman found in a cemetery, Bowlaway features three generations of a family that owns a New England bowling alley. For a novel as curious as this, the U.S. cover is a touch too cute. The U.K. wins with its nostalgic neon signboard.

WINNER:

The Overstory by Richard Powers

A Pulitzer prize winner, this novel is a must-read, especially with such a rich, concentric cover from the U.S. that centers us deeper into the forest. This book interconnects the lives of people brought together by communicating trees to save one last, untouched landscape. The British cover, with the rainbow tree layers all screaming for your attention, gave us less of a sense of the book—and more of a headache.

WINNER:

The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins

The embroidery on the left image is incredibly appealing. Its gilded thread and menacing imagery have my vote for this book about a former slave accused of murdering her employer. For a novel where Frannie Langton voices truth and condemns English society, do we need another picture of a headless woman?

WINNER:

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

An American Marriage portrays newlyweds Celestial and Roy after Roy is arrested on a fraudulent charge. Their relationship is shaken further when Celestial takes solace in their friend, but when Roy’s conviction is overturned, what will happen? The U.K. cover is as gripping as the novel, revealing both sides of a shaken marriage through the letters they write to each other.

WINNER:

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

Lost Children Archive winds down the Southwest as a family drives to Apacheria, the homeland of the Apaches, while hearing about the immigration crisis on the radio. Each cover filter glimpses of this compelling story, windowing an old photo of two children through orange and grey hues. The solution: buy both.

WINNER: Tie

We, the Survivors by Tash Aw

These covers may be tonally different, but the U.K. version is just too remarkable to ignore, especially for a book like this. We, the Survivors opens to a Malaysian fishing town, where Ah Hock, an ordinary man in an unforgiving world, is lead to murder a Bangladeshi migrant worker. The choice is hard, but whichever jacket you like more, I’m the last to judge.

WINNER:

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

The green skull looks like a mouthless imprint that receives the reader in a story where Silvie and her family live like ancient Britons. After they join an anthropology course, Silvie confronts what life could be, while the class builds a ghost wall, a barricade with skulls to ward against enemies. It’s a haunting tale, and it needs an image to match. The winner is clear.

WINNER:

Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley

It was no surprise to us that the U.S. version was the winner. The cover is arresting with the Renaissance painting of an angel cleverly hidden in typography. This novel, about two couples whose relationships devolve when someone dies among them, deserves a cover as vivid as its story.

WINNER:

The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo

The Night Tiger is about a young boy’s mission to find his dying master’s finger, a woman’s secret world as a dancehall girl, and men who transform as tigers in 1930s British Malaya. The British cover is playful and whimsical with its abstract cutouts. The American version, on the other hand, looks like a very stereotypical cover of books written by Asian women with the back of a (yet another faceless) woman dressed in what looks like a cheongsam with her hair in a bun.

WINNER:

The Parisian by Isabella Hammad

Though the U.S. cover is eye-catching with its sharp lines, bright yellow background, and period figure of man in a suite and cane, the British cover, with its stamps pinned into a floral wallpaper, evokes this novel’s long journey. From France during WWI through British-occupied Palestine, a young man discovers what it means to fight for independence.

Winner:

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

While the right side has the lovely dark teal background and flittering pink, the left side is playful and seductive with the line drawing of a woman, her face coyly hidden. This 1940s NYC love story is about nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris and the Lily Playhouse theater, where she finds freedom in her female self. What better way to show that than come-hither eyes shrouded in a feather boa?

Winner:

Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis

Sea Monsters tells the story of two teenagers in Mexico City who don’t know each other but run away together to look for escaped circus dwarfs along a beach town. These covers are oceanic treasures—as captivating as the story they encase.

WINNER: Tie

Kathleen Alcott on the Lie of American Meritocracy

Posted on by Jo Lou

Kathleen Alcott’s third novel America Was Hard to Find is a multi-decade, multigenerational, national epic about arguably the three most definitive events of the second half of the 20th century—the moon landing, the Vietnam war, and the AIDS crisis. It is as broad in scope as it is limited by its small cast of characters, as lofty philosophically as it is intimate emotionally.

Buy the book

Alcott is a virtuoso of the significant detail. In her treatment we are not told that a rocket is faulty; we are shown the brilliant yellow lemon that one of the astronaut’s “lilac-jawed colleagues” placed upon the command module simulator, as a clever signal to his colleagues. Nor are we told that a woman is trampled by her horse; instead we are shown him galloping back toward “the line of chaparral [that] obscured the flat place where he’d lost her.” The effect is slow, elegant, cinematic, and absorbing.

Reading this novel was, for me, like panning for gold on the lip of a goldmine. Every paragraph or two I’d feel the need to stop, bend down, and examine a sentence more closely. I’d touch it. I’d weigh it in my hand. Only on standing up again, and taking in a broad view of the whole landscape, would it occur to me—first teasingly, and then in earnest—what Kathleen Alcott’s project might have been.

Rachel Lyon: Your other books are less ambitious in scope than this one (though the characters are just as deeply rendered, the stories as finely wrought). Did you know how ambitious this project would be when you started it? Was that part of the plan, from the beginning? Or did it grow larger—geographically, temporally—over the course of the writing process?

Kathleen Alcott: The concerns of the novel are always the concerns of the life, and the best answer to this question is probably more attuned to how my life changed, during the long time I spent on this book, or what understanding of that life—previously barred from my awareness—I began admitting, namely my identification with certain underclasses: that of the raised poor, that of the raised female.

In terms of the first, and not to be too heavy-handed and with the caveat that I don’t think the poverty of my childhood is at all akin to ancient Roman slavery, something that comes to mind is this half-remembered history lesson about slaves in Rome, who were not dressed by masters in clothing that set them apart (in the way that, for instance, royalty was set apart), so that they could not, in public, identify each other, and in so doing gain any kind of power through any kind of exchange. That is money in this country! By which I mean the barriers are invisible or deceptive to a certain point, and we all do such a good job pretending about being “equal,” furthering that illusion by painful and private debt.

It took me a very long time to realize how very few people I knew in the New York intellectual circles where I spent my twenties could at all relate to certain very charged and frightening memories I had, the year my father was living out of his car, the time as a flirty toddler in a free clinic I ran toward a person nodding off mid-heroin nap in a waiting room and my mother panicked and barked at me not to bother him. That’s a particularly American conception of inequality, its late arrival I mean—it’s such a nice lie, the American one, the staircase of merit to which everybody thinks she has access. My sense of being held back as a woman came similarly late, as I think it does for many women the moment we turn about 25 (I was 24-29 as I wrote this novel), coming off the false equalization of the liberal arts classroom, realizing how much of our power is soft.

RL: I’m always curious about how novels begin. Some start with an image, some with a dynamic between two or more characters, some with an anecdote the writer heard at a party, some with her curiosity about a certain concept, etcetera. I read that one particular piece of information caught your eye, during the research phase for America Was Hard to Find: that many Americans were deeply critical of our government for redirecting public attention from the atrocities of the Vietnam war to the “bread and circus” of space travel. Was that discovery, for you, the beginning of the book? Or was there some other guiding question or story, say, that set it in motion? Did you always know you wanted to write about the moon landing, for instance?

It’s such a nice lie, the American one, the staircase of merit to which everybody thinks she has access.

KA: Well, it was fucking crazy to write about the moon landing, and I expect to be sued. It’s true that when I began on my research about the Apollo program (which I just thought was just reading!) I kept tagging sections where an astronaut would be pelted by tomatoes, or otherwise met with vitriol, on a goodwill tour or some such. These sections were always very brief, a passing mention of a “smaller” strain of hatred or passion than many other protest movements. So I began with an image of two people not watching the moon landing, which felt like the way to begin answering the questions I had about the worth and virtue and public opinion of the Apollo program.

RL: There is an almost myopic quality to the descriptions in this book, as if all your characters’ sensations are experienced very close to the body, and very intensely. Sifting through the book for examples of what I mean, for the sake of this interview, is overwhelming; there are half a dozen examples of stunning, closely observed descriptions on every page. I wonder if you chose a kind of sensory, claustrophobic prose style in part to counterbalance the global expanse of the novel, or if that just happened naturally?

KA: I think and teach often about John Gardner’s idea of psychic distance, how closely/fully we are brought to any given character’s thinking but also sensoria. It’s an idea I’ve enjoyed expanding upon, and in the classroom I will sometimes put these (six sense distinctions, actually, to my mind) on a left to right scale that describes increasing intimacy, starting with the sonic, ending with the “organic”—literally the experience of the organs, the shivering of intestines, etc—and ask which seem crucial/justified in our look at any character, and identify any kind of sensorial bias. In [my novel], Wright and Fay are more often granted more sensorial “space” given the less institutionally protected—but also sexually liberated—natures of their lives. I wanted the Vincent sections a bit more flattened, at least in the long nadir of his life after the program.

I do think it should be said I live more in my body than some people might, people who are very lucky to be just in their minds—exercise, sex, the tactile experience of clothing and pillows, the way my home and car smell, are a semi-impractically crucial part of my happiness. It feels ridiculous to complain in the space one interview about class inequality and then hint at your fine feeling for linen and palo santo, but there you questionably have it.

RL: The limits of any historical novel—and of any novel at all, really—have to be delineated against the backdrop of reality. Your astronaut Vincent Kahn is a fictional character. Your fictional radical leftist domestic terrorist group Shelter is loosely based on the Weather Underground—but you say in your acknowledgements that “it feels important to clarify mimesis of their actions was not my intention.” What sorts of decisions did you make, in the process of adapting certain people, places, and facts into fiction, and why was it important to fictionalize to the extent that you did?

The rule I set was that all the white men at the very top of American power were the same, but those under them could be counterfacts.

KA: The rule I set for myself was that all the white men at the very top of American power were the same, but those under them (as well as the women who raged against both sets) could be counterfacts—when I started, some of the novelists in my life were very dubious about this choice, but my hope is it became a message of its own: that when masculinity is conceived of as it is, that when imperialism destroys as it does, etc, etc, etc, it is never the specifics of the individual that are valued. Anybody could have walked on the moon, almost anybody could have died building a bomb in Greenwich Village, and very little would have changed, because, in the first case, it was an order that came from a rarely unchecked top.

In the second, the message sent was that certain young Americans, in the face of what this country did to less powerful countries, no longer valued their own lives, and so to depart from the individual, to create a fictional sort of metonym of a character—Fay is not really only Fay, to me—felt right. The choice is an arc, and the choice is about what is ineluctable under hierarchy and American greed and American fear.

18 Inclusive Anthologies That Highlight Underrepresented Voices

Posted on by Jennifer Baker

When I think of anthologies I always consider how The Black Poets, edited by Dudley Randall, is one of the first of its kind. This is a book that helped define and assemble generations. While The Black Poets doesn’t encompass every Black poet known today, it serves as a steady guide of those who came before us, the poetic devices they utilized, and the ways that rhyme and language were molded to describe life at the time. Anthologies have often been a reference tool (see Norton’s Best or the Best American series), yet often their core pages have not been inclusive or reflective for many of us in marginalized communities.

Collections compiled by and for marginalized identities have been a source for writers and artists to find space for their work, whether in creative writing, visual arts, or personal stories about their backgrounds. When I edited Everyday People: The Color of Life—A Short Story Anthology, I thought a lot about the role of an anthology and the way that an editor’s vision plays into how the work unfolds for readers. I didn’t want to think of this collection as an “issue book,” but more so a text that took into account the different methods of storytelling. I thought of, and referenced, a few all-Black anthologies that had spoken to and given Black artists a place to be themselves, to experiment, to have fun. I used that as my guide along with my own preferences for full-fledged stories where characters of color didn’t suffer and had agency. For many of us the search continues to find stories, whether they’re organized around theme or identity, illustrating our existence, an existence that is multifaceted.

As I see more anthologies publishing, I wanted to compile a list of those out both traditionally published and crowd-funded, that have made space for inclusive stories in all their glory and range. Here are 18 titles to get you started.

Habibi: A Muslim Love Story Anthology, edited by Hadeel al-Massari

This project got up and running on Kickstarter with full funding and beyond in 2017. The short fiction in Habibi range from the erotic to romantic comedy and LGBTQ couples putting Muslim characters center stage in their own love stories.

The BreakBeat Poets Volume 3: Halal If You Hear Me, edited by Fatimah Ashgar and Safia Elhillo

The Breakbeat Poets series from Haymarket Books has included work focusing on themes of identity (Black Girl Magic edited by Mahogany L. Browne, Idrissa Simmonds, and Jamila Woods) as well as musical influences (New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall). This edition celebrates the multiplicity of Muslim identities through poetry.

Daughters of Africa and New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing By Women of African Descent, edited by Margaret Busby

New Daughters of Africa was recently published in America by Amistad and in the U.K. earlier and features over 200 artists ranging from those born 200 years ago to those born in the 1990s. This is an updated edition to Busby’s hefty Daughters of Africa originally published in 1992 with snippets of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. The new edition includes more contemporary voices such as Nana Brew-Hammond, Jesmyn Ward, and Namwali Serpell to name a few. Both editions include excerpts from icons such as Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, and Audre Lorde.

Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food and Love, edited by Elsie Chapman and Caroline Tung Richmond

As the title proclaims, this new young adult anthology combines food and love, in some instances through romance and others through an actual love of food that brings characters together or to a firmer understanding of their background. An array of POC authors contribute their fiction to an anthology which may also boast an appetite.

New Poets of Native Nations, edited by Heid E. Erdrich

Twenty-one Indigenous poets of varying styles and tribal affiliations are showcased in Erdrich’s anthology from Graywolf Press. From National Book Award finalist Layli Long Soldier to MacArthur Fellow Natalie Diaz, readers are treated to thought-provoking and experimental work of some of the most captivating poets of our time.

Can We All Be Feminists? Writing from Brit Bennet, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and 15 Others on Intersectionality, Identity, and a Way Forward for Feminism, edited by June Eric-Udorie

I loved the scope of Eric-Udorie’s anthology on feminism with essays touching on topics like the exclusion of trans identity and sex workers in feminism, the struggle for same-sex female couples seeking immigration, and the misogynistic judgment on women’s bodies. Where Can We All Be Feminists? title asks the question, the contributions provide positions many should think about when it comes to intersectional feminism.

In Other Words: Literature By Latinas of the United States, edited by Roberta Fernández

With work segmented by genre in drama, essay, fiction, and poetry, Fernández compiles a fairly hefty and focused text of work by Latinx women in varying styles. Writers engage on topics from feminism, culture, assimilation, and class among other themes.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, edited by Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett

Meanwhile, Elsewhere spans many areas of sci/fi fantasy from high fantasy, post-apocalyptic, and more with new work from writers Ryka Aoki, Jeanne Thornton, and Dane Figueroa Edidi. If you go to the Topside Press landing page for this title you can even buy themed post-reality swag along with the text itself.

Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction From the Margins of History, edited by Rose Fox and Daniel José Older

With contributions from established names in speculative fiction  (Victor LaValle, Nnedi Okorafor) and rising voices at the time (Rion Amilcar Scott, Sofia Samatar), Long Hidden allowed oral tradition to play a key role in the presentation of marginalized voices from history and beyond. The follow-up anthology Hidden Youth, edited by Mikki Kendall and Chesya Burke, features teen characters.

What God Is Honored Here? Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native and Women of Color, edited by Shannon Gibney and Kao Kalia Yang

Combining poetry and prose, the pieces within What God Is Honored Here? discuss the pain of loss while also the perseverance of those who have experienced it either by choice or not. At a time when the regulation of bodies resurfaces throughout the country, this collection showcases how BIWOC are affected in personal and profound ways.

Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives, interviews by Nia King, co-edited by Jessica Glennon-Zukoff and Terra Mikalson

Don’t stop at volume one King’s QTAOC series. These compilations feature candid conversations with POCs in the LGBTQ+ community. King’s books have received great visibility due to her passion and influence and for prioritizing the stories of trans and queer people directly from trans and queer people.

This Place: 150 Years Retold from High Water Press, foreword by Alicia Elliott

A graphic novel anthology published in Canada, This Place features the work of Indigenous creators like Brandon Mitchell, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Katherena Vermette, Tara Audibert, Kyle Charles, Natasha Donovan. The stories encompass depictions taking place from the late 1800s to an anticipated future with vibrant illustrations and candid storytelling.

Go Home! by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

A collaboration between Feminist Press and the Asian American Writers Workshop, the work featured in Go Home dispels a singular idea of home whether as a person of color or an immigrant/refugee. The Asian writers who contributed provide context and contrast in pieces spanning many explorations of place.

Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology, edited by Hope Nicholson

This anthology merges genre with heartfelt romance. Stories range across the Indigenous LGBT community and those focusing on two-spirit characters included tales that are intergalactic or include technology as a way to find love.

The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America, edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman

Personal stories have often been at the forefront of what makes an anthology unique and The Good Immigrant adds to that roster. With stories of cultural appropriation, revisiting homelands, and seeking connection through food and fashion, the contributions in this collection go from country to country leaving readers with more to consider and a wider viewpoint on “belonging.”

How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance, edited by Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin

Contributions run the gamut in How We Fight White Supremacy, with words from freedom fighters and celebrities like Harry Belafonte to Insecure’s Amanda Seales as well as Kiese Laymon, Imani Perry, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Dr. Yaba Blay. Much of those featured have deep reflections on pushing against oppressive forces and joining together in a fight for a more inclusive and loving nation.

Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing, edited by Stephanie Stokes Oliver

Stokes Oliver compiles work as early as the writings of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington to Roxane Gay and Edwidge Danticat on the work of writing as a Black person. Looking at the range of pursuits as well as the personalization of craft this anthology speaks to the positions Black writers have been in to speak a form of their truth for decades.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton

Terese Marie Mailhot and Kim Tallbear are a couple of the contributors to Washuta and Warburton’s anthology. Shapes of Native Nonfiction takes lyric essays into account with the complexity of looking at how to literally weave and coil them together through the idea of basket weaving. This anthology publishes in July, so get your preorders in now.

“Ramy” Reflects Muslim Millennial Anxiety Like Nothing Else on TV

Posted on by Jess Zimmerman

The new Hulu series Ramy explores the complexities of life for an Egyptian, Muslim millennial born and raised in America. The show, a fictionalized version of creator Ramy Youssef’s life, follows his character, Ramy Hassan, as he navigates the everyday world with his immigrant parents, his sister, and his Muslim and non-Muslim friends. In many ways, the show is revolutionary; it’s the first sitcom focused on a modern Arab Muslim family, and it’s part of a rare breed of shows that present Muslims in a way that doesn’t blatantly offend or resort to stereotypes. For me, a millennial Egyptian-American raised Muslim just like Ramy, to see a family like my own on screen for the very first time was incredible—and vastly important for other first and second generation Arabs and Muslims, no doubt. But even more than Ramy’s family, the presentation of Ramy himself felt revolutionary: a young man who has not rejected the religion or culture of his family, who respects them, but who struggles to figure out what they mean in his generally secular, American life. While the show does not claim to speak for all Muslims or Arabs, it depicts a very common tension felt among first and second generation millennial Arab Muslims—the tension between the values and demands of our parents versus those of our peers, and the ways in which we remain in conflict between the two.

One common experience—both for myself and others I’ve encountered with a similar background—is the cognitive dissonance between the values we’re raised with and our actions.  Millennials who were raised Muslim and still identify as Muslim nevertheless often defy the rules of Islam, blatantly and habitually. We’re taught not to drink, smoke, have sex before marriage. We’re told to fast during the month of Ramadan. Our families are sometimes more strict, with more conservative values than the families of our American friends, and when we choose between their values and our peers’ behaviors we aren’t always following rules to the letter. This is not to generalize, but the experience does seem common—in my own family and others as well.

Ramy embodies the tension between behavior and belief.

Ramy embodies that tension between behavior and belief. While he does “sin”—having sex before marriage, taking an edible, sleeping with a married woman—one common thread throughout is his seemingly earnest desire to be religious. He says at one point, “I wish I never had sex,” recalling what he now thinks of as a happier past. It’s not that he feels guilty, exactly, for breaking a religious rule, but he misses a more innocent time in his life when choices were less complicated and he believed in a more rigid idea of right and wrong—an idea that his parents passed down. This nostalgia for simple childhood is common among millennials, but Ramy is the first time I’ve seen that struggle explicitly framed within the narrative of Islamic culture.

Similarly, when Ramy takes a weed gummy, he soon finds himself in a mosque looking for redemption and forgiveness. Even as he defies the rules his parents have taught him, a part of him still clings on to the culture and religion they hold dear: his transgressions are American and millennial, but the way he seeks to soothe his complex feelings about them is specifically Muslim. Ramy arrives at the mosque and sees a man—a white, Muslim convert—vacuuming the rugs. The two sit and speak, and Ramy says he feels less like himself and more like “another dude who does weed.” The man sitting next to him responds, “It’s not about adding up every good deed versus bad deed. ‘Cause if it was, none of us would have a chance. It’s about your heart.” The scene ends with Ramy cleaning the mosque in an attempt to clean the “black spots” on his heart.

Scenes like this encapsulate the tensions faced by first and second generation Arab Muslim millennials, and show that there’s more to Islam than following the rigid rules taught by our parents. As late as my early twenties, I felt that same pull on my conscience each time I broke a rule that my parents held sacred. I never wound up in a mosque, speaking to a wise convert before I cleaned the place as a metaphor for cleansing my soul, but I felt guilt nonetheless and sometimes found myself apologizing to God or perhaps no one at all for being a “bad” Muslim who defied my family’s values. Much like Ramy, I struggled with the tensions of breaking those rules and breaking away from the beliefs my parents instilled in me.

In an episode centered around Ramadan, Ramy fasts for the month and vows to give up sex and porn, as though that alone will make him wholesome and good. His friend accuses him of being a “Ramadan Muslim,” or a Muslim who is only devout during the month of Ramadan and hypocritically defies the religion for the rest of the year. But Ramy’s inconsistent observance is less an act of fundamental hypocrisy and more a kind of arrested development; he’s unable to break away from the structures his parents taught him, even as his life changes. He views Ramadan as a chance to start fresh and live a life free from sin and temptation. While the show itself complicates the idea of what it means to be Muslim, Ramy remains glued to the surface-level rules, something I very much relate to in my own upbringing. Like Ramy, I was taught to follow these rules without any real room for error, and the show does a good job of exemplifying that almost simplistic mode of thought many first and second generation Arab millennials are stuck in.

The show complicates this pull between the devout past and the Americanized present when Ramy goes to Egypt. His goal is to take time away from the temptations afforded to him in the U.S.—sex, drugs, parties—and he assumes Egypt will lend him the space to move closer to Islam and follow a more righteous path. Because his moral framework comes from his parents, Ramy assumes that a move towards his ancestral homeland will mean less temptation and more effortless morality. However, as soon as he arrives in Egypt, his cousin Shadi takes him to a party where people are drinking and snorting coke, and Ramy is plunged into a world with even more temptations than before. Shadi, though, is more complex than we’re first led to believe, as his partying is a result of the trauma he experienced seeing friends die during the protests in Tahrir Square. Through Shadi, the series debunks the myth that Muslims abroad are any more wholesome than Americans, but it also complicates the notion of Islam as a whole. Shadi is Muslim, but has found that in his struggle to get over his trauma, the rules of his religion don’t bring as much relief as the diversions of his peers.

Ramy, like myself and other Muslim millennials, has to figure out what Islam means to him beyond the rules he learned from his parents.

In speaking to his other cousin, Shadi’s sister Amani, Ramy says, “I feel like the problem’s really that I just don’t know what kind of Muslim I am.” “There’s Friday prayers, and then there’s Friday night,” he tells her, and he’s at both. He adds, “I’m breaking some rules, I’m following others, and I thought coming here would give me some clarity.” Ramy comes to the realization, though, that coming to Egypt to escape American temptation and American life is not the answer; he has to reconcile his beliefs on his own. Amani takes Ramy to a prayer group that consists of singing, chanting, drumming, and swaying, and in that moment, we see Ramy more moved than he’s been throughout the entire series. That scene seems to tell the viewers that his concerns—his preoccupation with rules—don’t matter. Nowhere is free from temptation, and the cognitive dissonance of living two lives with two different value systems almost seems to fade away as Ramy gets lost in the prayers and music. Ramy, like myself and other Muslim millennials, has to figure out what Islam means to him beyond the rules he learned from his parents—what Islam means in the context of a changed world.

Of course, the millennial Muslim experience varies greatly across cultures and families, and Ramy doesn’t aim to represent every Muslim American. In fact, in a Reddit thread about the show, many viewers find themselves unable to relate, while others call it “honest” and “unfiltered.” But the series hit home for me, exemplifying the often complicated experience of growing up Muslim in an American, non-Muslim society. Ramy, like myself and other Arab, Muslim millennials, is stuck between two worlds, belonging to neither.

13 Books by Pacific Islanders

Posted on by Jo Lou

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Month, supposedly a time to celebrate Americans with roots in Asia or the Pacific Islands. But functionally, it winds up being Asian American Month, with people of Pacific Islander heritage shoved to the side or not recognized at all. There are articles and literature about Asian Americans aplenty, but no sign of Pacific Islanders—the other group that is allegedly meant to be celebrated. Sure, Hawaii and other Pacific islands like Samoa, Micronesia, Fiji, and the Marshall Islands have relatively small populations compared to the continent of Asia—but there are still over a million people with native Pacific Islander heritage in the U.S. alone!

By grouping these two very different communities together, we are inadvertently erasing Pacific Islanders from our collective consciousness and working against the very significance of the month itself. Despite the absence of Pacific Islanders from publications celebrating AAPI month, they are present in the creative world and we need to remember them. There are incredible artists, writers, and creators of Pacific Islander descent, with stories rich with history and mythology that deserve the spotlight.

To close Asian American and Pacific Islander Month, let’s begin the celebration that is due to these Pacific Islander authors. And then let’s continue to read them throughout the rest of the year.

Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner  

As a poet and performer, Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner uses art and activism as a means to enlighten her readers and followers about her home, the Marshall Islands. In 2012, she co-founded Jo-Jikum, a nonprofit organization committed to helping the next generation of Marshallese to preserve their islands in the face of rising sea levels. Her book, Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter, pulls from personal and familial stories to create an illuminating collection of poetry about Marshallese politics, heritage, and climate change.

The Girl in the Moon Circle by Sia Figiel

The Girl in the Moon Circle takes a look at Samoan culture and society through the perspective of a ten-year-old girl. Figiel draws from her own experience with Samoan language and art to produce lyrical prose that immerses the reader in this young girl’s childhood, from crushes on boys at school to family violence at home.

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Afakasi Woman by Lani Wendt Young

Lani Wendt Young, known for her young adult novels set in Samoa, takes on the heavier facets of life as an afakasi woman in this collection of short stories. With prose that have cemented her place as a prominent South Pacific writer, Young puts forth 24 short stories that weave elegantly between the lighthearted, the humorous, and the arduous experiences of a “Real Samoan Woman.”

Black Ice Matter by Gina Cole

Fijian writer Gina Cole explores a theme of heat and coldness in this collection of short stories that follow an eclectic array of characters in the South Pacific; from a glaciology expert stuck in the crevasse of his research to a child working in a Barbie Doll sweatshop.  

Tales of the Tikongs by Epeli Hau’ofa

In this collection of stories, Hau’ofa explores the importance of ancestors in the South Pacific, and the danger that colonialism poses to ancestral traditions. Hau’ofa sets the stories on a fictional island in Oceania called Tiko, where the culture, society, and politics can be likened to his home country, Tonga. Along with his contributions to the South Pacific literary canon, Hau’ofa made a large impact in the art scene in Oceania as the founder of Oceania Centre for Arts at the University of the South Pacific.

Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings by Tina Makereti

Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings by Tina Makereti

Tina Makereti, of Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Rangatahi, Pākehā, and Moriori descent, has garnered national and international awards for her novels and stories. Dedicated to promoting and maintaining representation of Maori and Pasifika authors in New Zealand, she convened the first Maori and Pasifika Writing Workshop in 2014 at Victoria University. The questions of identity and heritage that Makereti explores in her own life are posed in Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings, a novel set in New Zealand that follows several generations of characters with complex ancestries.

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Shark Dialogues by Kiana Davenport

In Shark Dialogues, the matriarch of a native Hawaiian family recounts the complex history of her kin to her four granddaughters, beginning with a 19th-century romance between an American sailor and the daughter of a Tahitian chief and ending in present-day Hawaii. Like Davenport, who was born and raised in Hawaii by a native Hawaiian mother and a white father, the characters in her novel are all products of numerous love stories that cross oceans and generations.

Leaves of the Banyan Tree by Albert Wendt

A major literary figure in the South Pacific, Albert Wendt has gained national and international recognition for his work as a poet, novelist, editor, and anthologist. In 2018, Wendt was a recipient of the Icon Award, The Arts Foundation’s highest honor, given to New Zealand artists for their achievements in—as well as their impact on—the arts in New Zealand. His writing and his work as an educator has influenced the presence and study of Pacific indigenous cultures, particularly in Samoa, New Zealand, and Hawaii. Leaves of the Banyan Tree tells the story of three generations of a Western Samoan family as they struggle with the effects of colonialism in their home.  

This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila

This is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila

In her debut collection, native Hawaiian author Kristiana Kahakauwila intimately captures the reality of life in the Hawaiian islands in six related stories. Kahakauwila’s vivid characters navigate through stories about family, culture, tradition, and home. This is Paradise takes a searing look into modern island life, exploring the aspects that are not in harmony with the widely-held view of Hawaii as a paradise.

Black Marks on the White Page edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti

Ihimaera and Makereti curated stories from the Maori and Pasifika canon to create an anthology that stretches the boundaries of the short story genre. Each indigenous Oceanic author selected for Black Marks on the White Page brings innovation to the way we view the art of storytelling, whether it comes in the form of verse or prose or even visual representations.

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Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden

Madden’s memoir is a raw and honest portrayal of her childhood in Florida. Of Chinese, Native Hawaiian and Jewish descent, her physical features set her apart from her peers and received ridicule. She forgoes the conventional story of redemption and recovery for an honest look into the mess and madness that surrounded her youth, the death of her father, and the absence of her mother.

My Urohs by Emelihter Kihleng

With My Urohs, Kihleng was the first Pohnpeian poet to publish a book. The title, which is the word for the traditional dress of Pohnpeian women, alludes to the themes of colonization, indigenous culture, beauty, and tragedy that populate the poems in the collection. In her poems, Kihleng liricizes about everything from intimate moments, like snacking on Micronesian food, to contemporary issues in her community.

Island of Shattered Dreams by Chantal T. Spitz, translated by Jena Anderson

Island of Shattered Dreams, the first novel published by an indigenous Tahitian, is set in French Polynesia in the mid-1900s. In customary Polynesian style, the prose are interspersed with poetry and Tahitian vocabulary. As much a romance story as it is a political statement, this novel brings the reader along the journey of a Tahitian family as they live through the second world war and the disturbance of colonization in their peaceful homeland.

The Doomed Friendship That Helped Define African American Literature

Posted on by Jennifer Baker

The subtitle of Yuval Taylor’s latest work of nonfiction, Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal, may imply more dramatics than actually occurred. Nonetheless, it proves to be an engaging work that depicts the evolving friendship of two literary luminaries and, sadly, the demise of this friendship. Zora and Langston reflects the individual lives of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes as budding artists, including the road trip that solidified their friendship and the issues they both faced in sharing their art and viewpoints with the world. Well-known voices from this time period like Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wallace Thurman, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Hurston and Hughes all had differing opinions on the role of art as a platform for one’s political or personal leanings. Hurston and Hughes’ similar thoughts on the role of their art, their respect for one another’s work, and their relationship with a shared White benefactor (Charlotte Osgood Mason), brought them together. The fall of Hurston and Hughes’ friendship over a theatrical collaboration of the play Mule Bone was rife with misunderstandings, egotism, and internal frustrations. The break is the driving force of Zora and Langston, but this moment speaks to the individuals involved as much as references the pressures of conformity and staying true to one’s developing voice and viewpoints.

Taylor’s previous books have also focused on American history including the slavery anthology series I Was Born a Slave, Dark America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop, and Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity In Popular Music. He and I discussed our mutual admiration of Zora Neale Hurston, what drew Taylor to this particular story, and how much tensions arose within the literary world at the time.

Jennifer Baker: I’m familiar with many of your books, several of which have been about Black history in America. But how did you gravitate to Zora and Langston?

Yuval Taylor: In Darkest America, which is about Black minstrelsy, I have a chapter devoted to Zora. Some magazine asked me if I might be interested in writing a short piece for them that tells a story that’s not in the book. And I thought the Langston and Zora story was a good one. So I suggested that but they didn’t follow up. Then I thought that would be a good book. I wanted to write a book that told a story, that told a good story about real people, and as I was writing it I had this idea that a good biography, or a good book about an event or a particular group of people, can be just as rewarding and rich as a really good book of fiction.

I had always loved Zora’s writing. Especially Their Eyes Were Watching God—it’s one of my favorite novels. And I find her such an interesting character. I wasn’t really so sure about Langston at first. The more I got into him and the more I explored his writing, the more I really appreciated what he was doing and saw him as a real American original and someone who really changed the way people wrote.

JB: Is there something that drives you to focus on African American history considering your work about Zora and the slave anthologies you edited and your book on minstrelsy?

YT: It may have been when I was in my teens and I discovered Ray Charles. I read his autobiography and I started reading more and more books by African American musicians, listening to their music. That’s how it all got started.

JB: Is it fair to say it seems as though those books really fed your interests?

Zora was very focused on not playing the victim but playing the hero instead.

YT: Yeah, yeah it did. I think part of it was I’ve always had a bit of a passion for justice and for fairness. And looking at the ways that Whites have mistreated Blacks and have patronized them or worshipped them like Charlotte Mason did while demeaning them at the same time. That’s also a theme in my book Faking It, which has a lot about White people trying to praise African Americans for how primitive they think they are. That’s always been something that’s angered me and frustrated me. And one of the things about the slave narratives that was so interesting to me was how African Americans did not play the victim. And that’s something that Zora was very focused on: not playing the victim but playing the hero instead and actually doing something [in her stories]. And writing is a way of doing that. And so all that kind of coheres.

JB: Speaking of Charlotte Osgood Mason, I don’t want to call her a character, but she is someone who really did have her tentacles in art and art being made. She can really be a puppeteer of sorts. There is the power dynamic but there’s also the need for Zora and Langston to have their own autonomy as artists. So how did you go about discussing the ways her influence implements people’s work?

YT: Yeah, there’s this weird power dynamic there. She was a difficult person to write about with sympathy because she just had such a terrible effect on both of their lives and their work. Although she did sustain them and she enabled Zora to do great folklore research and she ended up making Langston’s novel Not Without Laughter a better book. But who knows if he would have attempted a novel without Mason. I don’t know. It was difficult balancing my distaste for her with the fact that I really needed to tell her story. And there were a few good things that she did. My distaste also presented a difficulty because Zora and Langston loved her so much. And that love is so real in their letters to her. She had engendered that love in so many of the people that she met. It’s hard at this distance of 90 years to really make that charisma, that attraction that she had, real.

JB: How do you suggest creators go about utilizing research to actually build a character study?

YT: I guess I would advise one to try as hard as they can to put in details that establish scenes. Writers who think in scenes and can make a real particular event, a particular conversation, a particular place and time, I think is what makes for really good nonfiction. If you try to tell a story in broad terms and leave out those telling details it’s not going to be as rich. What I try to do in this book, as you saw in the chapter subtitles, is focus on those moments [Zora and Langston] were together. If I have to also cover some stuff before and after those moments that’s fine in passing, but I wanted to keep the focus on their friendship and the time they shared together. And that enabled my focus on these meetings with Charlotte Mason in her Park Avenue apartment, the Niggerati getting together in Harlem, or the Fifth Avenue restaurant that opens the book with the big Opportunity magazine dinner. I just wanted to make those moments come alive.

JB: The chapter that strikes me the most is Chapter 3, the summer of 1926. Very clear divisions are drawn within the Harlem Renaissance camps between the Black Bourgeoisie and the “Niggerati,” as Zora had termed her group. How did you go about that particular chapter to show these divisions without really picking a side?

YT: I think I did in a way take Zora and Langston’s side. They were really out to outrage people and they were trying to do something new and very different from what W. E. B. Du Bois and Countee Cullen were doing at the same time. The way I wrote the book was kind of a different approach than most authors take. I wrote a kind of skeleton, a 75-page outline, and then I would just keep adding to it as I did more reading. The structure was all there and I would just put more and more flesh on it as I did more reading and exploration. One of the things that was really fun about it was exploring Langston and Zora’s ideas in this chapter because they expressed them very clearly in their essays.

Langston’s essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and several essays by Zora deal with ideas of what African art is and who the African American people are. Reading other writers on these ideas—I mean David Levering Lewis has written very well on this—it made me think about what was new here and what they were trying to change and what they were reacting against. It was interesting for me to then look at how Langston’s and Zora’s ideas diverged as well as where they converged. And I felt like I was departing from the narrative at moments in that chapter when I was really talking much more about ideas than about the story that I was telling. But I wanted to do that. I think it made the book go deep into questions of race, literature, writing, and class.

JB: I feel a bit more sympathy for Zora because she’s an idol of mine, not to say Langston is not someone I highly admire. But there’s something about Zora, her zeal, her voice, her work that is so pervasive. It seems that there was a careful and protective element there because you mentioned earlier on that you’re such a fan of Zora.

YT: I felt keenly the hurt that she felt when all these people attacked her work, mostly African American men. And it comes across in her later work. She gets so angry at Alain Locke after he gives Their Eyes Were Watching God a bad review. The hurt there seemed palpable to me too. There were so many other things in her life that hurt, and it was mostly men who were treating her like a child.

JB: So did you know the history of minstrelsy when you read Zora? Or was it a snowball effect?

YT: I think I knew enough about minstrelsy to find it distasteful when I started reading Zora. But then years later I discovered there was this whole rich history of Blacks doing minstrelsy that was different from Whites doing minstrelsy. But in the beginning, I think with most people you encounter this dialect, and you associate it with Uncle Remus and you associate it with minstrel shows. You associate it with older ways in Hollywood or Stepin Fetchit. There’s a kind of language that was used by African American characters in movies in the 1930s and ‘40s. And you think this is all just so demeaning, but when you get past the use of dialect you see how Zora was using it in an entirely different way. You see how rich it was and how rich it made her storytelling. If you read her essays, she talks about how she’s using it totally differently from the way minstrel shows did.

At the end when I was writing Zora and Langston, I was reading Langston’s play Mulatto, which he wrote right after he helped write Mulebone. Mulatto uses dialect in a way that Zora would never use it. He says things like “I’s a gwine,” which is totally from the minstrel show. Langston was not as familiar with the way southern African Americans really speak as Zora was, so he just fell back on the way he thought they spoke, which he got from Broadway plays. I would never have known that if I hadn’t read Zora pointing out all the differences between dialect as she wrote it and how dialect had been done in minstrelsy.

JB: This is opinion, but do you think had the play and this potential collaboration not happened between Zora and Langston they would’ve potentially stayed friends considering their bond? It was more than just the collaboration, it’s what’s transpired from this collaboration: the misunderstanding, the miscommunication.

It seems almost inevitable that they would have to collaborate and then they would have to break up after that collaboration.

YT: They wanted to collaborate. And the theater was the thing that made the most sense. If Charlotte Mason hadn’t put them together in Westfield, New Jersey, they probably would have collaborated six months later on something, you know? It was all building toward that. Maybe once Zora had gotten her book of folklore together and Langston at that point had been rejected by Charlotte Mason maybe they would have come together and written something else. They wanted to collaborate together so much and that is because of the great respect they had for each other. I mean they loved each other’s writing. And I can’t imagine them souring on that writing. I suppose the only other thing I can think of is after Langston had become super Communist, if they hadn’t collaborated by then they wouldn’t have collaborated after that. But at the same time Zora would not have been able to put up with that very much. Her idea of what good art is excluded the kind of Communist writings Langston started doing in 1931. It seems almost inevitable that they would have to collaborate and then they would have to break up after that collaboration. Almost like a doomed friendship from the start. That’s with the benefit of hindsight.

JB: It seems so salvageable, I think. Of us being where we are looking back. The way communication works.

YT: But the history of [African American] literature is a history of quarrels. There’s so many great African American writers who quarreled with other great African American writers. Langston quarreling with Zora but Langston also quarreling with Alain Locke. Or Richard Wright quarreling with Zora Neale Hurston. Or James Baldwin quarreling with Richard Wright. It just goes on and on. It’s tough to find a friendship that really lasts.