If you love both fashion and literature, many books are outfitted with special delights. The vivid description of a dress, a shoe, or even a shade of lipstick can thrill. Yet there’s always a subtext to an emphasis on sartorial style in creative narratives. A T-strap heel in an author’s hands can be political or sexual, foreshadowing or world-building, a commentary on class or a synecdoche for the indulgences of an era.
Here are nine of my favorite fashionable fictions, listed in the order they were published, from earliest to most recent.
The originator of the novel is also the doyenne of stylish lit. If you’ve ever wondered how to coordinate twelve layers of robes in impeccable but original color combinations, then this doorstopper is for you. Written by a Japanese woman of the Heian court around a thousand years ago, The Tale of Genji is, in the minds of many scholars, both the world’s first novel and its first psychological novel. The story of an aristocratic playboy is lacquered with descriptions like these: “Six young page girls sat next to the stands, each wearing a ceremonial outer robe of white with red lining and layered robes of scarlet and wisteria underneath” and “This girl, who was tall and statuesque, wore a woven, patterned robe of pale violet lined with blue over a short, dark purple singlet and a diaphanous outer robe of pale russet.” But Genji’s influence goes beyond fashion: one of its biggest achievements was making the Japanese language itself fashionable, at a time when male writers were still clinging to classical Chinese.
One of the four (or six, depending on the list) classic Chinese novels, Dream of the Red Chamber is another encyclopedia of vestiary delights from long ago.As its English title suggests, it’s drenched in reds of all hues, blushing crimson and flushing scarlet. When the reader first encounters the male protagonist, he is “wearing a narrow-sleeved, full-skirted robe of dark red material with a pattern of flowers and butterflies in two shades of gold . . .Over the upper part of his robe he wore a jacket of slate-blue Japanese silk damask with a raised pattern of eight large medallions on the front and with tasseled borders.” The jewelry, décor, and architecture are described just as meticulously. You can see why this book, an epic family saga written and set in the eighteenth-century, runs long—2500 pages in the English translation. It is a world unto itself, with even a name for its devotees: “redologists.” Yet its vivid colors in the early pages also remind the reader that the brightest lives and families eventually fade, hinting at the decline in fortunes to follow.
Until the syphilitic corpse of the eponymous character putrefies the final scene, Zola’s novel is a feast of Second Empire chic. For instance, when Nana makes her entrance at the Grand Prix, she steps forth “in a remarkable outfit. This consisted of a little blue silk bodice and tunic, which fitted closely to her body and bulged out enormously over the small of her back, outlining her thighs in a very bold fashion for this period of ballooning skirts. Then there was a white satin dress with white satin sleeves, and a white satin sash worn crosswise, the whole decorated with silver point-lace which shone in the sun. In addition to this, in order to be still more like a jockey, she had jauntily stuck a blue toque with a white feather on her chignon.” Zola’s fashion details are part of his overall indictment; fripperies and frills symbolize the society’s decadence and excessive corruption.
A satire of English literary history and biological determinism, as well as a love letter to her beloved Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s novel asks serious questions about gender and sexual orientation. Naturally, fashion plays a key role as the heroine metamorphoses from male to female and adventures through the centuries. We’re told several times at the start of the novel that the fashions of the time—the opening chapters take place in the Elizabethan era—tended to disguise one’s sex, which will prove thematically important. Once her transformation is achieved, Orlando cannily adopts the dress of a noblewoman, if not quite her mores. In one extraordinary scene, she lights the silver sconces around her mirror and regards her new self: “Then since pearls do not show to advantage against a morning gown of sprigged cotton, she changed to a dove grey taffeta; thence to one of peach bloom; thence to a wine coloured brocade . . .she was like a fire, a burning bush, and the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was green water, and she a mermaid.” In Orlando, dress dissembles.
This 1936 novel—one of the first to openly celebrate lesbian love—is simultaneously modernist, gothic, and a nod to the Decadent movement. Fitting, then, that its female protagonist’s signature style is off-key, with one slipper in the mode of another time: “Her clothes were of a period that he could not quite place. She wore feathers of the kind his mother had worn, flattened sharply to the face. Her skirts were moulded to her hips and fell downward and out, wider and longer than those of other women, heavy silks that made her seem newly ancient.” That final oxymoron encapsulates the book, which is perfumed with the same thing as a great runway show: the feral scent of the past reinvented.
Written in prison, Genet’s first novel immortalizes the drag queens and other denizens of the Parisian underworld, consecrating their every costume and gesture in voluptuous prose. Introducing the pimp Darling Daintyfoot, Genet writes, “I shall say that he had lace fingers, that, each time he awoke, his outstretched arms, open to receive the World, made him look like the Christ Child in his manger—with the heel of one foot on the instep of the other—that his eager face offered itself, as it bent backward facing heaven, that, when standing, he would tend to make the basket movement we see Nijinsky making in the old photos where he is dressed in shredded roses. His wrist, fluid as a violinist’s, hangs down, graceful and loose-jointed.” By insisting that the body’s poses may constitute their own high style, this novel anticipates the voguing that would be immortalized forty-seven years later in Paris is Burning.
With her tartan skirt and slate-blue eyes, fifteen-year-old Gilberte (Gigi) is Lolita’s older sister. In Colette’s novella, as in all her writing, wit, wisdom, and warmth gambol with each other. For example, Gigi proudly models her grown-up dress in one scene: “The full sleeves and wide flounced skirt of blue and white striped silk rustled deliciously, and Gilberte delighted at picking at the sleeves, to puff them out just below the shoulders.” But her primping is swiftly undercut when future husband Gaston remarks, “You remind me of a performing monkey . . .I liked you much better in your old tartan dress.” Throughout the story, Colette reminds the reader that as much as a rite of passage and a tool of seduction, clothes are traps for women.
In My Brilliant Friend, the first of the four novels, irascible Lila Cerullo channels her prodigious creative gifts, which have been frustrated by her having to quit school at a young age, into designing men’s shoes in the back of her father’s store. Durable, original, and beautiful to look at, the shoes are what Lila grows up to be. They go on to function as the purloined letter of this long story, changing hands, breaking hearts, and signifying the power dynamics of an entire Neapolitan neighborhood, symbolizing both her boundless potential and the crushing limitations of her social milieu.
Fashion is all about a harmony of sense and surprise, and few things could have been more surprising than the colorful splashes of designer clothes amidst Wang’s stark, searing essay collection about living with schizophrenia. Her musings on Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and high fashion as camouflage for the mentally ill are striking but make sense. Weaponized glamour, as she calls it, is all about subverting expectations and seizing respect.
In novels that have a passion for fashion, too, the glamour is always weaponized, deployed to dress up characters, settings, and themes. Textual couture is, like its wearable counterpart, painstakingly assembled and dazzling to behold.
In The Weight of Our Sky, Malaysian author Hanna Alkaf places her protagonist Melati, a Beatles-loving teenager afflicted with obsessive compulsive disorder, alone and directly in the line of the country’s 1969 race riots. In May of that year, Chinese-led opposition parties made electoral gains in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital. The gains unnerved the dominant Malay Muslim community, who feared losing political power to the Malaysian Chinese community. These tensions simmering since the country’s colonial period, when the British pursued the colonial ethnic management policy of divide-and-rule, exploded on May 13 after two political rallies by competing groups. Amid this extremely volatile setting, Hanna writes to the humane by having the Malay Muslim Melati’s life saved by a Christian Chinese family, who are in themselves divided in how they view the riots.
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In Malaysia, the incident has historically been only minimally discussed, usually as a cautionary tale and an excuse for silencing dissent over preferential economic policies to favor Malay Muslims over others put in place in its aftermath. In 2019, the shadow cast by May 13 and its legacy remains over the country.
For Malaysian readers, many of whom have family memories of the riots, the novel offers a dramatization of that moment in ways never seen before on the page. As a minority with generations-deep roots in the capital, I found Hanna’s depiction to be respectfully complex and deeply emotional. The close rendering of Melati’s OCD episodes aided by a djinn figure further escalates the book’s turmoil and realism. For readers unfamiliar with the complexities of The Weight of Our Sky’s historical landscape, the novel is a rollicking, imaginative ride.
I spoke to Hanna Alkaf over email about digging up and honoring the past, mental wrestling with djinns, and being seen.
J.R. Ramakrishnan: Your disclaimer at the start of the novel is pretty intense. You tell readers that if they are not ready for the violence, OCD, racism, and other triggers, to not proceed. Melati’s story was pretty harrowing for me—even as (or maybe because of it) an adult aware of the history. How did this story begin for you?
Hanna Alkaf: I had been thinking about writing the May 13th riots into a story for a long time; it had sort of sat in the recesses of my mind waiting for me to decide what form it wanted to take. Part of that comes from how little we’re actually taught about the incident in school, and how rarely people are willing to even talk about it. It’s held over our heads as a specter, a threat to make us fall in line—“Don’t do this, or there might be another May 13th” our politicians warn us—but so much of the narrative is obscured or missing, and I always wanted to know why. What was it that we weren’t being told?
As for the OCD component, I’d just finished working on a nonfiction book that explores the landscape of mental illness in Malaysia, and was still very much in that headspace—so when I decided I wanted to begin working on my first novel, it became a way of marrying two topics very close to my heart.
JRR: When you started writing, who was the reader you had in mind? Did you consider writing an adult novel at all?
Our young people deserved a story about their own history, a story that explains the collective scars we carry.
HA: I wrote this story for young Malaysians. I never considered making it an adult novel. People—adults, mostly—ask me this question of “Why YA?” a fair bit, and my response is always: Why not? The implication seems to be that heavy, complex stories are beyond the scope of YA literature, and honestly, that just isn’t true. Teens and young adults want all sorts of stories, and they deserve stories that challenge them, make them think, reflect their experiences, stories that are written for them and not just about them, stories that speak to them and not at them. Our young people deserved a story about their own history, a story that explains the collective scars we carry. And they deserved to see themselves reflected in the pages of a book.
JRR: Outside of a brief introductory note, you don’t explain too much to readers unfamiliar with the May 13 riots, one of the defining events of modern Malaysia. You also leave a lot untranslated—to cite just two examples, cibai and kapcai (a slang curse word and the nickname for a commonly used motorbike, which are derived from Hokkien and Cantonese respectively but widely used by all in Malaysia). While writing (or in the editing process), were you concerned about readers “getting it”?
HA: Not particularly. Like many of us outside of the Western world who read in English growing up, I very quickly grew comfortable and familiar with entire worlds and vocabularies that weren’t mine. I could read tales of tea and crumpets, bluebells and midnight feasts, brownies and pixies, fairy circles and trolls under bridges, and bat not one eye. Is it too much to ask that non-Malaysian readers do the same? If you can read books that tell you to accept Elvish as a language, then surely a sprinkling of Malay is doable?
JRR: Tell us about your title and why you decided to use it. You have the words (in Malay) come out of the mouths of the non-Malay characters of the book–Auntie Bee and later, Vincent.
If you can read books that tell you to accept Elvish as a language, then surely a sprinkling of Malay is doable?
HA: I am always hugely gratified when people tell me they love the title of the book, because I am quite honestly terrible at titles, usually. TERRIBLE. But I was writing a particular scene, and trying to think of a peribahasa (a saying) that would fit the situation best, and when I settled on “di mana bumi dipijak, di situ langit dijunjung” (where you plant your feet is where you must hold up the sky, meaning that you have to follow the rules and customs of wherever you decide to put down roots), I knew it was perfect. And after that scene was written, I knew that I wanted the title to call back to it somehow. It’s such an intimate, quiet scene in the middle of all this chaos, but it means so much.
JRR: You don’t avert our eyes from the racism of that moment, and you depict racial slurs towards all parties. You also remind us of Malaysia’s deep Hindu and Chinese roots. Did you have concerns about taking on this “sensitive” (in the context of politics in Malaysia) era as a subject matter?
HA: I wasn’t concerned that I was going to get into trouble—which is not to say I won’t, I just wasn’t particularly concerned about it. What I was concerned about was getting it right. I was, and I still am, if I’m completely honest, extremely anxious about letting down my fellow Malaysians, about telling our story in a way that’s harmful or disrespectful or lacking in nuance. I know what it means to see yourself on the page; I would hate to do it in a way that is hurtful.
JRR: I attempted to read your novel as if I didn’t know the historical background or the geography of the city. Obviously, it was impossible. I feel like May 13 was mostly an episode, at least on personal level, that was not meant to be discussed—or there was no way of discussing it without being inflammatory.
In your research, you interviewed many people who lived through these times. How did the interviews go? How did you get them to tell their stories?
HA: I tried to seek out as many people as I could to interview, and from as diverse a range of ethnicities, backgrounds, and ages that I could. Some were willing to talk to me almost immediately; some needed some coaxing; all preferred not to be explicitly named in my acknowledgements. Their reasons were varied: Some were worried that the things they were talking about might hurt friends or family; some were worried that their stories portrayed them in a bad light; many were worried about the repercussions of speaking about “sensitive” topics.
I can’t say with any certainty why they were willing to talk to me. I was frank and honest about my intentions and the story I wanted to write, and I did not push them for details they might not have wanted to talk about. Mining those memories was painful for many, and I was acutely aware of the need to be as sensitive and respectful as possible, and to show that I had a genuine interest in them and their stories—not just as fodder for fiction. They put so much faith and trust in me, and I took that trust very, very seriously.
JRR: How have young Malaysian readers responded to the book’s history especially since the present seems to be increasingly contentious? What have been the conversations you’ve been having with young people at your readings and events?
HA: There are a few different layers to the reactions that I get. The first is usually from people who are incredibly excited at just seeing themselves, their families, their communities, their culture, in a mainstream, traditionally-published, internationally-available book. For some, it goes even deeper. They get to see a protagonist who looks like them wrestling with mental illness, as so many of us do. Then they hit the history aspect, and for many, this is where things get emotional. I get disbelief at first; people asking me if I made up incidents, especially some of the more violent ones. Nobody wants to believe those parts are true, even though they are. There is a lot of sadness, and a lot of anger. But there is also a strong undercurrent of hope.
I get asked a lot if I learned anything that surprised me in the course of writing this book, and I always say that I was surprised by both the violent, crazed inhumanity of it—and the humanity that shone through as well. There were so many acts of heroism, big and small, that carried people through those dark times, and I love that this is what people cling to when reading this.
JRR: There is still so much stigma around mental illness. The last time I was discussing a work position in Kuala Lumpur, I was asked to sign a declaration to affirm that I hadn’t suffered any mental illness ever. It was for a media company—I am sure you know from your experience of the industry, everyone is 100% sane all time!
In the book, you don’t shy away from the anguish Melati suffers. This line especially affected me: “It feels as if the Djinn’s sharp teeth are gnawing away at my frayed nerves.” I was wondering if you could talk about your past writing on mental illness, how it came to influence Melati’s creation, and maybe a little bit about the Djinn’s role in it.
I wanted to create a story where both religion and mental illness were part of the hero’s identity, but neither of them defined her.
HA: As I said earlier, before I started writing The Weight of Our Sky, I’d just completed a nonfiction book, published locally, that explores the landscape of mental illness in Malaysia, and I really wanted to work with this intersection of mental illness and faith that seemed to come up in every conversation, because it seemed to me to be such a uniquely Malaysian condition.
In Malaysia, you can’t escape faith; you’re constantly surrounded by it even if you don’t practice it yourself. The streets are lined with places of worship; chances are your own family has at least one religious person in it—and every person I spoke to in the course of writing that nonfiction book operated within this very specific context. They turned to faith to find solace and relief; they visited spiritual healers, whether willingly or unwillingly; one was made to go through an exorcism.
For my Malay Muslim character, it made sense to blame a condition she didn’t understand on djinn possession. As Muslims, we believe in the existence of djinn, and even today, it’s not unheard of to blame what some may recognize as symptoms of mental illness on spiritual weakness. The bottom line is that I wanted to create a story where both religion and mental illness were part of the hero’s identity, but neither of them defined her.
JRR: How have Malaysian audiences responded to your depiction of Melati’s OCD struggles?
HA: I’ve seen some people confused as to whether the djinn in the story was actually real, as the term “OCD” is never specifically used within the text, it being a term Melati wouldn’t have been familiar with at all. I’ve seen people talk about how repetitive and tedious and painful it can be to read as Melati goes through her OCD flare-ups, and I do have to say that yes, that’s the point, that’s what OCD is: It is all of those things. But the reactions that mean the most to me are from people—teen readers especially—who send me heartfelt emails and messages to tell me how Melati made them feel seen. This writing business can feel long and lonely and exhausting, but if I can make even one person feel that way, it’s all worth it.
Much like writing itself, the planning of a literary festival may start with a question. At least this is what the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) founder, Jael Richardson, says about her conference each year. Before planning truly begins, Richardson and the organizers of FOLD ask themselves: Who have we not seen or heard from? She says, “That’s where we start our programming.”
This question—what viewpoints and voices are absent from the larger celebrations of literature?—is inspiring a new batch of literary festivals, focused on increasing and highlighting inclusion as well as expanding the conversation on how to see change. Alongside FOLD, this spring will see the inaugural Antiracist Book Festival, the first of its kind in the United States, founded by National Book Award winner Dr. Ibram Kendi and managing director Dr. Christine Platt. The Antiracist Research & Policy Center (ARPC) Kendi heads was launched in 2017 and earlier this year Kendi co-edited an Antiracism and America series for The Guardian. During this timea book festival was a kernel of an idea that grew into a reality. Per Kendi, this gathering was meant to be “a celebratory and thought-provoking and inspiring space for writers and readers of books on racism, books that are striving for racial justice.”
With this dedicated focus on both ends, the organizers of the Antiracist Book Festival—taking place in Washington, D.C. on April 27th—and FOLD—happening on May 2nd in the city of Brampton, Ontario, Canada—have created their own paths. These events establish an imperative space, not only to showcase books by marginalized people, but to center marginalized people in the literary discourse.
Organizers ask themselves, ‘Who have we not seen or heard from?’
This year marks the fourth annual FOLD, which Richardson initially called a “social experiment.” Having already established herself as an author and an advocate for diversity and inclusion in Canada’s literary scene, she created an event that has grown and been absorbed by the larger community because it allows them to see the range of underrepresented authors and illustrators within Canada and beyond. Providing a stage to creators publishing representative and respectful stories isn’t simply a goal, it is a clearly written mission on the FOLD’s website. FOLD doesn’t solely feature underrepresented artists, the day-long event highlights artists whose work “inspires acceptance, empathy, and equality.” In other words, it’s not enough to simply have the representation; inclusion needs to be evident in the ways characters and spaces are depicted.
The Antiracist Book Festival’s mission is also clear in its programming, which is split into author panels and editorial workshops. With discussions on topics like using lyricism to explore time, religion and sexuality and race, democracy in public record, writing a book proposal, and Race 101, the focus on and around racial justice is never lost. How racism is discussed, dissected, and described is not separate from the craft of writing. As Kendi says, “what makes this group of authors unique, and uniquely antiracist, is their books chart paths forward to healing ourselves and our country of racism.”
How racism is discussed, dissected, and described is not separate from the craft of writing.
Aspects and participants of the Antiracist Book Festival were introduced through the Antiracist Research & Policy Center’s FD200, which honored 200 Americans whom the Center felt best represented the legacy of a leader in the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass. This celebration took place in Washington, D.C. earlier this year, and several honorees, like Jason Reynolds, Carol Anderson, and Jacqueline Woodson, will be in attendance at this year’s festival.
Kendi emphasized the importance of the community built as part of this festival and what the festival offers attendees in scope and dialogue as well as inspiration. “We are bringing together some of the most important authors of our time, who are literally writing for racial justice, for a world where the bodies of people can be as free and lively as their pens.”
For Richardson the breadth of community in not only the attendees but the speakers and organizers is what makes FOLD unique because it shows what people have been missing due to lack of awareness or even lack of support by publishers and other entities. An issue that arises with festivals and book-related events, Richardson says, is complicity. Exclusion occurs because many groups were never considered in the first place and so the same narrow ways of thinking and planning continue. Richardson mentioned one white attendant who was excited about the new authors she was introduced to thanks to FOLD, but also upset: as a regular patron of bookstores and libraries, she didn’t understand why she hadn’t been aware of the authors she’d just encountered at the festival in Brampton. Richardson hopes attendees will carry that new awareness with them after the festival. “I want people to feel a difference at the FOLD that makes them long for more diversity in the reading they do beyond FOLD,” she says. And she’s leading by example, expanding planning to be more inclusive of disabled guests in order to broaden access to FOLD.
Who isn’t represented here? What isn’t being spoken about but should? These are the questions that FOLD and the Antiracist Book Festival seek to answer through literature and fellowship. These should be the questions all literary festivals should be asking themselves every year.
Tickets can be purchased for the Antiracist Book Festival at American University’s Washington College of Law on eventbrite. You can register to attend the upcoming FOLD in Brampton via their website.
In honor of National Poetry Month, I’m watching a lot of TV. Classic ‘90s teen TV, to be precise. Felicity, starring Keri Russell,is not just an ode to bookish girls with curly Marie Howe hair. It’s not just a love letter to college life in NYC, and of course, the tangly love triangle. It’s not just the show that single-handedly convinced me to consider enveloping myself in a wardrobe composed solely of sweaters. Felicity is also, though I didn’t realize it at the time, the show that made me a poet.
Well, maybe. I don’t remember Felicity turning me towards poetry, but here are the facts: Felicity is one of my favorite TV shows of all time, and when I started recently re-watching it, I was shocked to discover that the first season prominently features classic poetry. It’s remarkable (and a little heartbreaking) that I forgot, because—and here’s the final piece of evidence—I ended up becoming a poet, who wrote a heartbroken book.
For those of you who missed Felicity, here’s the gist: on the day of her graduation, our Stanford-bound protagonist musters up the courage to ask her high school crush to sign her yearbook. Here’s what he writes: “I’ve watched you for four years. Always wondered what you were like. What was going on in your mind…I should’ve just asked you, but I never asked you. So now, four years later, I don’t even know you, but I admire you.”
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After reading this bombshell, the stuff of every invisible girl’s fantasies, Felicity makes the first impulsive decision of her completely mapped-out life. She drops out of Stanford, and follows the boy of her dreams to college in the Big Apple. So in the spirit of our heroine’s semi-delusional attempt to stalk her high school crush, who is essentially a stranger, from coast to coast—and in defense of the retrospective ways that unliterary endeavors, like TV-watching, can unknowingly influence your future—I’ve obsessively combed through all 22 episodes of season one to pick out the six most poetry-heavy scenes and pair them with these iconic college moments.
For those reading along, the poetry textbook used by Felicity, Ben, and Julie, as seen in several episodes throughout season one, is the first edition of Poetry in English: An Anthologyby M. L. Rosenthal.
When You’re Fully Crying in Your First Class of College…Read Emerson.
Smack in the middle of getting that awkward photo taken for her freshman ID card, Felicity runs into Ben (played perfectly by Scott Speedman) for the first time. Not only is he with another girl, whom he smooches right on the spot, Ben doesn’t really remember Felicity. The flash of the camera snaps. Cue the realization that you just moved across the country and shifted your entire life’s trajectory for a boy who doesn’t even know your dangname. Felicity mulls over this humiliation while she sits in her first class of her university career—fittingly, an introduction to poetry class. Her professor, Mr. Rogalsky, is bespeckled, bowtied, and sporting a checkered three-piece suit. He opens the class with the best reference to an 18th century Neoclassical poet that you will ever come across in the history of teen television: “When we get through with him, Alexander Pope will have become your favorite diminutive, Catholic, English hunchback poet in the entire world.” Tears pool in Felicity’s eyes as she mulls over the recklessness of her questionable life choices, and the camera pans across Emerson’s “Experience,” a poem that precedes the essay with the same title. This work grapples with the state of confusion that we often live in, and how to gain perspective and comfort in these moments. The poem is written in all caps in chalk on an old-school blackboard:
“Experience” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The lords of life, the lords of life,— I saw them pass, In their own guise, Like and unlike
When the Hot Boy Who Never Noticed You in High School Needs You to Help Him with Homework (and His Chin Dimple Is Inescapable)…Read Dickinson.
Ben and Felicity end up in the same poetry class, and shocker—he needs help with his assignments. It’s every wordy girl’s nerdiest dream: reciting poetry with your burning crush on the floor of your cozy dorm. Is there a more romantically literary way to bust out of the friend zone than explicating Emily Dickinson? As Ben reads the first line of the poem out loud to Felicity, and earnestly tries to decipher its meaning with an adorable amount of misguided effort, he suddenly looks down and asks: “How come you never went to any parties in high school?” It’s that quintessential adolescent moment, when the popular guy unknowingly admits that he has been quietly cataloguing the quiet girl all along. Who better than Emily Dickinson, the Queen of Unrequitedness and Longing, to capture the intimate-sweetness of this scene, with a poem on the impossibility of love.
“I cannot live with You” by Emily Dickinson
I cannot live with You— It would be Life— And Life is over there— Behind the Shelf
When You’ve Royally Effed Up Your Love Life & Have Become the Unreliable Narrator of Your Own Story…Read Browning.
As Ben and Felicity grow closer, and a sliver of hope appears like a delusive moon that this shipping might come to fruition, Felicity blows it—big time. While working on their respective poetry papers on Robert Browning, Felicity offers to run Ben’s essay through her spell-checker (using a floppy disk! I heart the ‘90s!). Instead of simply correcting Ben’s there, they’re, and theirs, Felicity can’t help herself. In one of the most dramatic plot points of the season, she rewrites Ben’s paper, without telling him. When Professor Rogalsky accuses Ben of plagiarizing, Ben is furious with Felicity, but stubbornly refuses to let her confess to her crime. Instead, Ben must come before a makeshift English Department tribunal to get grilled on his paper. He almost pulls it off, surprisingly triumphing over interrogations on dramatic irony and a quote on William Bosworth. But when asked to compare and contrast Browning’s “My Last Duchess” with “Count Gismond,” Ben finally faces his literary limitations, and admits he didn’t write the paper. Felicity is standing outside the classroom the entire time, until she bursts through the door to admit her guilt, in order to save the innocent boy, who is too prideful to be saved. “My Last Duchess” is Browning’s most anthologized poem, and like “Count Gismond,” employs unreliable narrators. Art imitates art imitating life, as “Count Gismond” can also be read as vindication of innocence.
“My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
After You’ve Broken Your Dream Boy’s Trust, Ruined Any Romantic Chances With Him, and Oh Yeah, Almost Got Him Expelled…Read Auden.
After the fallout of the cheating scandal, Ben is, rightfully, Icy AF with Felicity and will hardly speak to her. So she ambushes him as he emerges from the subway and tries to apologize to him for the umpteenth time. It’s a heartbreaking scene, and a tribute to Keri Russell’s incredible acting, as her voice breaks to hold back from crying, when she says: “The last thing I ever wanted to do was to make you feel less than amazing.” Felicity is absolutely dejected, and as one of the main storytelling devices used in the series, she records audio-letters (on a cassette tape recorder!) that she sends to her former French tutor, Sally (fun factoid: if the voice sounds familiar, it’s Janeane Garofalo). These voice-overs are prominently featured with Sarah McLachlan-eque musical accompaniment at the end of many episodes to hype up the emotional crescendos. When Sally “writes” back, she tells Felicity that her situation reminds her of a poem with this central question: “Is it harder to count on someone, or to know you’re the one being counted on?” Sally quotes the famous line of one of the most famous Auden poems: “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” It’s the perfectly prescribed poem for anyone in need of consolation from the desperation of one-way love.
“The More Loving One” by W.H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.
(Or, listen to astrophysicist Janna Levin read it here.)
When It’s Finals Time and You Can’t Help But Succumb to the Sexy Magic of Library Vibes….Read Keats.
It’s exam week at the fictional University of NY (fun factoid: NYU denied the WB-turned-CW permission to use its name) and this episode is very heavy on Keats, with shoutouts to “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to Psyche,” and “The Eve of St. Agnes.” At this point in the season, Ben has warmed back up to Felicity, partially because he needs her help to pass the class. It’s exactly 12:28:53 pm in the Library Lounge, and there are 31 hours and 32 minutes until finals. “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:— Do I wake or sleep?” Felicity reads the last couplet out loud, and explains to Ben that the poem is about contradictions; how fantasy and dreams can distract you from painful realities. “And you get all this from just reading it, you don’t even have to figure it out?” Ben smiles his Ben-smile. Then, he and Felicity engage in an epic intellectual debate of what constitutes greatness:
“Poetry is the greatest,” says Felicity.
“Well…pizza is the greatest,” counters Ben, without skipping a beat.
Touché, Ben. Touché.
Hours later, in the Silent Reading Room, it’s 3:17:48 AM. This time, it’s Ben, whispering Keats out loud to Felicity, the poem blooms in closed-caption on the screen: “The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, / The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. / Darkling I listen; and, for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death…” As Keats becomes intoxicated by summer flowers in the dark, Felicity is also catching The Feels for Ben again. He is so close to her, she can practically count his eyelashes.
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk
When Your Best Friend Nabs the Boy of Your Dream…Read Whitman.
Plot twist: just as Ben and Felicity’s love prospects are looking up again, Ben gets with Felicity’s best friend, Julie. Avalanching more salt into Felicity’s heart, Julie also becomes Ben’s go-to Poetry Study Buddy. “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” Ben is uncharacteristically animated, reciting this line to Julie in her dorm room, “Walt Whitman rocks,” he says. “I thought you hated poetry?” Julie asks. “Yeah, that’s because I never understand it, but Walt here, actually wrote some stuff that I get. Listen.” At this point, he is on the bed with Julie, reading the opening stanza out loud, with one desk light glowing in the background.Julieis rendered totally helpless under Ben’s spell—as are the viewers, though we’re not always sure why. My favorite TV critic, The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum, said it best in a tweet: “I’m not even into guys like Ben. Except for Ben.” So what is it about him? Besides the annoying-yet-effective combo of good looks and unavailability, why is Ben Covington so compelling? Here’s a theory: it’s not just the chin dimple or squinty eyes or even his mumbly-magnetism. Maybe it’s the poetry? There’s a hidden literary storyline here as Ben undergoes his own arc, not just as a love interest—but a smitten reader. He’s a bona fide lover of poetry in his own right. All it took was a little Whitman.
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
O n April 20, 1999, a failed bombing planned by two high school seniors at Columbine High School and turned into a shooting with assault rifles changed the way we talked about school safety and guns in America. Dave Cullen was a journalist who was one of the first to arrive at the tragedy that took the lives of 13 individuals and injured 24 more.
Cullen dove into the minds of the killers and followed the survivors’ stories beyond that day to write Columbine over the next decade. During that time, Cullen became the mass shooting expert that media called after every tragedy.
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On Valentine’s Day 2018, another school shooting happened in Parkland, Florida at Stoneman Douglas High School where 17 were murdered and another 17 were injured by a former student armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle.
Once again, Cullen was called by media outlets to be a talking head on television or an expert quoted in newspapers. What happened in the days and weeks after lit a spark in him. The students who were bravely standing up the Congress had an important story America needed to hear. Over the course of the year that followed, Cullen wrote Parkland. This time, the book wouldn’t be about the shooting itself, but about the gun reform movement the survivors inspired.
I had two phone calls with Dave Cullen over the course of two days less than a week prior to the anniversary of the tragic shooting in Parkland. During those calls, he opened up about his post-traumatic stress disorder and how following the students from Stoneman Douglas High School as they became advocates for gun safety helped heal him after two decades of covering school shootings.
Adam Vitcavage: How has the Columbine shooting on April 20, 1999 reshaped your life?
Dave Cullen: It basically rerouted my life. I remember driving out to a school I had never heard of. I didn’t know I would become “the mass murder guy” who [the media would] call after these tragedies.
I do feel a responsibility when these tragedies happen to go on television. Or sometimes editors would call me asking for advice. It feels good to be able to contribute with help. I do feel that obligation because I’ve become an expert on it after spending twenty years writing about it.
AV: When you got down to Florida for this book and met the Parkland survivors, what was your initial reaction? I know you said they were pissed off and ready to make a change, but what else about them stood out?
DC: I first got down there during the organizational meeting for their trip to the state capitol in Tallahassee. [Laughs] I’m laughing because they told me I wouldn’t want to come because it was going to be boring. They said it was going to be signing permission slips and what sort of clothes to wear and basic things like where they were going to be sleeping. That was exactly what I wanted to see. I wanted to see them being kids. I didn’t want to be the reporter who shows up where they were just giving speeches and meeting the governor. I wanted to see how it happened. I wanted to see moms and dads signing the permission slips.
A lot of them were very dressed up when I met them. I asked why and they told me they had just come from a funeral of one of their classmates. I was amazed by the fact they were just doing it. They didn’t look like shellshocked kids. They were very matter-of-fact about everything. It was five days after the shooting, but they didn’t look like five-day-old victims and survivors. They had a purpose.
AV: I feel a lot of America has become numb to these tragedies and the public moves on. We forget about the victims and survivors, but we also forget about those secondary to the event. We forget about the first responders, the journalists on the scene watching it unfold. You spent a decade staying immersed in the Columbine tragedy. What was that like for you?
What the hell do we need assault weapons for?
DV: It was terrible. The Dave Sanders bleeding to death sequence was the hardest for me to write. I wrote the after story of Columbine in order and I watched out for the events I knew would be hard. Dave Sanders was hard to revisit. I didn’t foresee the second hardest part to write and took me completely by surprise was Dylan Klebold’s funeral. It completely undid me. I wrote that a week or two after Dave Sanders.
While writing that there was another situation at a school in Colorado at Platte Canyon High School. I watched it unfold for three hours. When I told my shrink that, she offered that maybe three hours was a bit excessive. I told her it was my job and she just looked directly at me and asked if it had to be. If every bit had to be my job.
There was another event that didn’t have to do with a school shooting. There was a disgusting video of men who filmed homeless men fighting for money and they uploaded it. Thinking there was a market for that shattered me. It shattered my faith in humanity. I could no longer believe the good outweighed the bad in the world. For about a month I would get out of bed at three in the afternoon and not get any work done. It took about a month for me to realize what was wrong and I got serious help.
AV: But you still kept working on Columbine.
DC: During year eight or nine of writing it, I was driving to my therapy appointment and I was late. I was crying uncontrollably and couldn’t calm down. She asked me how long it happened. I told her three or four times a week and she gasped. It was the first time she reacted like that. Normally she hid her reactions. I knew it was a lot then. It became so much of my normal life that I forgot that wasn’t normal.
I was fine once I finished though. Once I turned in and signed the letter to my editor that I had no more changes to make, I felt a huge sense of relief. I didn’t realize how much it was affecting me. Later, I realized I wasn’t crying uncontrollably anymore.
I hadn’t cried three times a week since. What I didn’t realize was there was some vestigial part of me that was down in me until I didn’t really get until this past Thanksgiving when I was interviewing Alfonso [Calderon]. We talked about his situation and how he was doing. He realized he wasn’t doing as well as he thought he was and I talked about my situation. As I was telling him, I realized it was these kids that really healed me.
Going into writing Parkland, I knew it could wreck me. It was quite the opposite. I am happier now than I was last Valentine’s day. It almost sounds sick to say, but ten months with them really healed me.
I think that happened to a lot of people in America. There are so many people still afraid and I think the Parkland kids helped heal all of us. They gave us all hope again. They gave me hope in humanity again.
AV: The future does seem full of hope but right now I feel like buying and selling a car is more difficult than doing the same for a gun, which is absurd. Whenever I talk about guns, people will say I can’t take their guns. I don’t want to take guns, I want to make sure we know who has a gun, where it is, and what it’s being used for.
The Parkland kids helped heal all of us. They gave me hope in humanity again.
DC: I think it was The Daily Show that pointed out that Switzerland is just as big of gun fanatics as we are and that their model of gun control is way better. We’re not the only country on the planet who likes guns. We should take a look at a few other countries.
AV: What do you hope is in store for gun legislation in the future?
DC: We have active judges who are lobbied to look at the Second Amendment in a way it was never intended. We need to realize we are a different country now. The Second Amendment was for a well-regulated militia. That’s the National Guard now and not an individual person. I don’t know all of the particulars, but we need to do what Australia did and do a gun buy back. It’s not okay for everyone to have one all of the time. Especially anyone who wants one. That may make me an enemy of some people, but we need to look at what we are doing.
Assault weapons: what the hell do we need those for? I was an infantry soldier. I had one. I used it to kill people and to attack objectives. That’s what assault weapons were made for. No one uses them for hunting. Maybe it’s for collecting and having them to show off. There were signs out there at events during the past year that said it much better than I will, but they said that your hobby does not supersede my right to live.
AV: 20 years ago, I’m not sure anyone, let alone the survivors at Columbine, knew how to react to the massacre. Now, these students have led a political movement. What other ways has America shifted in the two decades since Columbine?
We as a country have failed to solve this gun problem. America is letting its kids die.
DC: You nailed it. With Columbine, the massacre was out of left field. It was out of their frame of reference. It was like a kid realizing there really are monsters hiding under their bed. The community was just shocked. The students really had PTSD.
I mean, look at lockdown drills. Every kid in high school now has fire drills and lockdown drills. Both of these are expected things. If a fire ever happened, it would be frightening and any deaths would leave people distraught. It wouldn’t be surprising because we know fires happen. There are fire departments and fire trucks. Now we react the same with school shootings. We expect them now.
The Parkland kids were horrified, but they have mentioned they knew a shooting could happen at their school. With the Columbine kids, it was almost like as if they didn’t know fires existed.
I think maybe your generation that sort of grew up with lockdown drills, but you didn’t start kindergarten with them. You were probably in junior high school when lockdown drills started nationwide and had a frame of reference why they started. Now you talk to kids and they don’t even know a life without lockdown drills.
When I go to schools to do talks, kids are shocked when I tell them lockdown drills, wearing IDs, and check-in places for visitors started after April 20, 1999. Students look at me like they don’t believe me. Now it’s just normal life.
Now there is an undercurrent of anger. Kids are angry for having to grow up this way. They don’t get why grown-ups are letting kids die. I don’t know if your generation felt like that.
AV: I remember being in high school having to wear my student ID and being annoyed. It wasn’t until I was about to graduate high school when the shooting at Virginia Tech happened that I was angry mass shootings were still happening. And they’re still happening!
DC: We as a country have failed to solve this gun problem. We tried after Columbine and failed. We tried after Virginia Tech and failed. We failed again and again. It’s been two goddamn decades and sometimes it feels like we went backward. It is a disgrace. I feel like when David Hogg stood up on CNN and he basically told America they were letting their kids down. That America was letting its kids die. That struck a chord because the truth hurts. I feel like even gun owners and Second Amendment warriors even heard that and realized that we are letting our kids die.
Carmilla, by the Irish Gothic writer J. Sheridan LeFanu, first appeared serialized in the London magazine The Dark Blue over 1871–72, a quarter-century before Dracula. In willowy, lucid chapters, the narrator, Laura, recounts how the mysterious, alluring Carmilla came to stay at her father’s estate, and how their extreme affective bond coincided with an onset of illness, dreams, and terrifying apparitions. In short order, Carmilla is exposed as a vampire, captured, and executed gruesomely. Typical of Gothic stories, the novella is presented as a “found text”: an account by Laura, told to LeFanu’s recurring occult detective character, Dr. Hesselius.
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The newest reprint of Carmilla,by Lanternfish Press, is edited and introduced by Carmen Maria Machado, whose 2017 collection, Her Body and Other Parties, has quickly established her as one of the freshest voices in dark fantasy and horror. The New York Times named the collection part of “the New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”
Consistent with that fearless literary persona, Machado’s introduction tackles a controversy around Carmilla so fraught, it’s hardly discussed aloud among LeFanu scholars: a modern literary mystery, centered on the real-life seduction trial of Marcia Marén, and Marén’s subsequent execution for “morbid harlotry.” The claim, first put forward by Professor Leight in 1973, is that Marén and her lover, the English-Hungarian Veronika Hausle, are the originals of Carmilla and Laura, and much of LeFanu’s text is drawn exactly from letters from Hausle to a Dr. Peter (Pierre) Fontenot describing the affair. Yet before Machado’s introduction, not one Carmilla edition has explicitly addressed Prof. Leight’s work, or dropped even a footnote on the Marén-Hausle affair.
Carmen Maria Machado
Machado and I find ourselves, appropriately enough, in a refitted Victorian in Cheyenne, Wyoming. First built as a cattle baron’s folly, then converted to a boarding house for unmarried women, it’s now run as an opulent but gloomy bed and breakfast. We’re in a sitting room in a princess tower overlooking the thick, obliterating snow; this tower room, Machado tells me, is where the women boarders were able to lounge uncorseted in each other’s company, outside the scrutiny of men. I make a joke about intruding on their ghosts déshabillé; this earns me an abrupt, chilly laugh, which could be described only generously as half-hearted. Machado is bundled in a heavy wrap that furs everything but her face and makes her look like a black cat sitting on top of her paws. In the following conversation, which has been edited for clarity, we discuss Carmilla’s place in queer literature, the controversy over its origins, and Gothic fiction’s power to make the voiceless irresistibly heard.
Theodore McCombs: What about Carmilla first attracted you to this project? What do you hope 2019’s readers will find in this 1872 vampire tale?
Carmen Maria Machado: The connection between narratives of vampires and narratives of women—especially queer women—are almost laughably obvious. Even without Carmilla, they would be linked. The hunger for blood, the presence of monthly blood, the influence and effects of the moon, the moon as a feminine celestial body, the moon as a source of madness, the mad woman, the mad lesbian—it goes on and on. It is somewhat surprising to me that we have ever imagined male vampires at all. But of course, that’s because we think of Dracula as the ur-text, the progenitor of the vampire in literature. Carmilla simply isn’t as well-known; I was as surprised as anyone to learn about it. But despite the fact that it’s a somewhat obscure text, its influence can be keenly felt. So I wanted modern readers to understand both Carmilla and Carmilla’s importance.
TM: Carmilla is also a seminal text in queer literature, and from a modern vantage it’s hard not to read Laura and Carmilla’s intense mutual attraction as erotic interest. It brings to mind Joanna Russ’s professor who dismissed Jane Eyreas “just a lot of female erotic fantasies.” Do you think there’s something about the Gothic genre that makes room for women-centered eroticism, even in a period that treats the subject as taboo?
CMM: Well, the Gothic can be conducive to suppressed voices emerging, like in a haunted house. At its core, the Gothic drama is fundamentally about voiceless things—the dead, the past, the marginalized—gaining voices that cannot be ignored.
TM: Queer readings of Carmilla often zero in on speeches by the vampire that read, today, almost as vindication of lesbian desire: “Do not think me cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness,” or “All things proceed from Nature—don’t they? All things in the heaven, in the earth, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains?” What is going on here? How do we separate any vindication from Carmilla’s predatory behavior? Can we?
CMM: For a long time, there was something of an obsession with the idea of queerness as an inherent trait, one based in genetics. This was quite tightly bound up in the fight for queer rights: “I was born this way, I deserve the same treatment as you. It’s not a choice.” In her essay “On Liking Women,” trans lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu completely dismembers this idea, and asks: what if it doesn’t matter? What if queerness or transness is about moving towards desire, and not affirming some inherent trait? Why is the lack-of-choice narrative necessary? This is obviously a very controversial idea, but I find it bracing, exciting, even moving: the idea that one might choose what gives them pleasure no matter their instincts or body or social constructs, and no one should have anything to say about that. I’m not saying all queerness is chosen, but rather that we should be open to that possibility.
Anyway, this complicates the queer reading of your quotes. Because instead of affirming the “born this way” narrative—of Carmilla’s sexuality and her predation as her Nature, and thus inextricably linked together—isn’t it better, more interesting, if we think of them as some combination of nature and choice? Or as choice entirely?
TM: Your introduction to Carmilla builds off studies positing the Veronika Hausle–Marcia Marén affair as not just inspiration for LeFanu’s novella, but as its original text. According to this theory, LeFanu distorted Veronika’s letters about Marcia into a story of supernatural monsters preying on a pure-hearted victim. Why do you suppose LeFanu would work this kind of transformation? Is there a sense in which LeFanu needs a monster to tell a story about sexual desire between women?
LeFanu needed a monster; he could not imagine lesbian desire otherwise.
CMM: Sorry, Leight’s work is hardly a theory. I think it’s kind of fucked-up to call it that? It’s scholarly research. She isn’t positing a possible reading, she’s restoring previously concealed primary documents. It is an act of wholeness, of repair. She is making things right. And certainly LeFanu needed a monster; he could not imagine lesbian desire otherwise. What are invert women if not monsters, shunning the attention of men?
TM: Do you see this as wholly an act of bad faith? Is there any way in which LeFanu is using the outright lie of fiction to tell another sort of truth?
CMM: Look, LeFanu made his choice. He is long dead—impossible to “cancel,” to use the parlance—but his decision had untold ramifications. The concealment of queer sex, desire, and relationships has rippled outward with disastrous results. For my memoir, In the Dream House, which is coming out this fall, I wrote about how this cultural and conversational dampening has aided, among other things, queer domestic abuse, much in the same way that it’s hindered people’s ability to understand themselves.
I’m not saying that LeFanu committed a particularly heinous act of narrative violence, but of course, he didn’t have to. You don’t have to be a flash flood to wipe an entire identity’s sense of self away; you only need to be a drop of water, a hardened fleck of earth. To quote Joanna Russ, “At the level of high culture… active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral.”
TM: Why do you think no other Carmilla editions but yours touch on this research? Do you see that as a critical failure or as a scholarly consensus?
CMM: I’ve sent several sharply-worded letters to various writers, editors, and publishers asking this very same question, but I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer. I think people are made uncomfortable by the complexity of Veronika and Marcia’srelationship—it was difficult and complicated and quite fucked-up—and they are afraid to ding a male writer’s reputation “without proof,” even a writer as long-dead as LeFanu. And certainly, the rumors about Dr. Leight didn’t help matters.
In any case, even after the hidden letters surfaced, the academic community made sure to come to a consensus about the Leight research. And once consensus was reached, the cultural gaslighting commenced. And it continues, unabated.
TM: In 1974, many LeFanu scholars dismissed Dr. Leight’s find as suspect; others accused her of overreading Veronika and Marcia’s relationship—especially later, when her own affairs with women became known—
CMM: Scholars say a lot of things.
TM: Hold on, I didn’t finish my question. Are queer readings of texts like Carmilla or Veronika’s letters necessary? Are they in any way wishful thinking, in one sense or another?
CMM: A graduate school classmate of mine once repeated something a teacher of great repute told him, which is that she loathed when people read into texts in this particular way, impressing queerness where (she believed) there was none. This admission was so shocking, and repeated so effortlessly, it diminished me slightly, and I have never recovered.
TM: Do you have Veronika’s letters still with you? What else do they tell us about the enigmatic Marcia?
CMM: Do your own research.
TM: She looks a bit like you, doesn’t she? Marcia Marén, I mean, in the one photo we have of her. There’s a likeness.
CMM: I hadn’t noticed.
TM: Due to the significantly longer exposure times of that era, the authorities had to hold her head in place during the photograph. Still, you see how the eyes have blurred away where she fluttered her lids. You see how her black hair has fallen over their fingertips in one angry cloud. If you lean close— Do you mind if I come over there?
CMM: I’d rather you not.
TM: No, no, it’s OK, I’ll crouch here, right here. You see it? Am I too close? You see the likeness? You’re not even looking, Carmen Maria Machado.
CMM: I do not care to.
TM: Do you need water? I don’t have any water.
CMM: I need no water.
TM: You chose not to publish Veronika’s original letters alongside LeFanu’s novella; you explain in your introduction, “I wish the reader to come to the text with a complete understanding of its inadequacy.” How do paratexts like an introduction, or LeFanu’s prologue for that matter, function to broaden or narrow the main text?
CMM: They create space where there was none, like a tick burrowing into skin. They create space where there was none, like a tick burrowing into skin.
TM: Did you bring Veronika Hausle’s letters with you? Are they downstairs in your room? Are they in your suitcase, for example? Are they in the front flap of your red, rolling suitcase, for example?
CMM: I have not seen the original letters with my own eyes. How do you know the color of my suitcase?
TM: The last time we spoke, you mentioned how queer readings of classic texts, even Gothic texts like Carmilla, meet resistance in part because they destabilize not just conventions of sex and sexuality in eras like the Victorian, but even conventions of reading. Do you want to elaborate?
CMM: That’s not what I said. I didn’t say that.
TM: You did say that, though. I remember it clearly.
I looked at my hands, and they were not my hands; they were someone else’s hands.
CMM: I did not, but I did have a dream last night: I was outside this very door, listening at the gap in the lock to voices from inside this room, including mine. I could see our shadows beneath the crack in the door, puddles of darkness in the flickering firelight. And then I looked at my hands, and they were not my hands; they were someone else’s hands. And then I looked up and saw you. But you were not you. You were a middle-aged Irishman with mutton chops and eyes like the northern lights. And I was myself and a nameless woman both.
TM: Who were you talking with on the other side of the door? I had the same dream of the door to this room and us both straining to hear through it. I heard your voice inside, talking about Carmilla, but I couldn’t hear the other voice, not the other voice, no matter how closely I pressed to the door. There was another woman’s voice inside, deep, haughty; and it seemed to come from this very spot in the room. I thought it was you also, but it wasn’t, was it? That would be too many doubles. You have to tell me.
CMM: No. Not in the least.
TM: [unable to vocalize]
CMM: Much better.
TM: [unable to vocalize]
CMM: Fine. Speak.
TM: Certain vague and strange sensations visited me in my sleep. The prevailing one was of that pleasant, peculiar cold thrill we feel while bathing, when we move against the current of a river. This was soon accompanied by dreams that seemed interminable and were so vague that I could never recollect their scenery and persons. But they left an awful impression and a sense of exhaustion, as if I had passed through a long period of great mental exertion and danger.
CMM: When I was a girl, I had a vision that beneath my bed existed a set of stairs. In my imagination, if I descended the stairs, I might be able to see everything I had ever wanted to see: every fantasy, every truth. But I knew—I understood, as clearly as you understand what is happening, now—that were I to descend those stairs, and then look up, I would see what was above me as divers do: through a medium dense and rippling, but transparent. I would be under, and lost.
TM: After all these dreams, there remained on waking a remembrance of having been in a place very nearly dark, and of having spoken to people whom I could not see. And, especially, of one clear voice, a woman’s, very deep, that spoke as if at a distance, producing always the same sensation of indescribable solemnity and fear. Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, and there the caress fixed itself.
A woman barricades the entrance of her house with a rope. Fierce-looking women draped in blood-red garments attempt to come into the compound, but the woman will not allow them to take away the children under her care: girls who have run to her for protection from having their genitals mutilated. After a moment of both parties staring at each other, sometimes without uttering a word, the red-clad women turn back, disappointed.
Considered the father of post-colonial cinema in Africa, Ousmane Sembène’s work as a writer and filmmaker highlighted the shortcomings of religion, impact of colonialism, perpetuation of classism, and the plights of the victims of a rigid societal construct. Already an acclaimed novelist, at 43, he made his first feature film Black Girl (1966), which is centered on Diouana, a young Senegalese woman working as a maid for a white couple in France. As his career progressed, Sembène’s feminist sentiments became more prominent.
His last film, Moolaadé, which premiered in 2004 when the filmmaker was 81, serves as a critical commentary on female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa. Sembène’s decision to shoot the film in Burkina Faso, one of the countries with the highest rate of FGM in the world, was deliberate. The film portrays the quotidian life of a people in a small community, the role religion plays in reinforcing patriarchy, the atrocities committed against women and their bodies, and the lifelong impact a marginalized group could make for generations to come when they finally find their voice.
The film shows the lifelong impact a marginalized group could make for generations when they finally find their voice.
It’s natural to root for Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), this pipe-smoking, no-nonsense woman who is doing something no one has ever done in the community. “Purification is an important part of our custom,” a man tells Ciré, Collé’s husband. “Who is she to challenge it? You have to do something about this situation. You must tame your wife.”
Female circumcision is the norm in this remote village. Mothers take their prepubescent girls to the Salindana women whose primary duty is to ensure all the girls in the village are circumcised. Someone holds the girl down, another pulls her legs apart, another takes a knife and tears her open. In one scene, some of the girls are seen, perhaps days or weeks after the procedure, with black loincloths tied around their waists. One is crying and cannot stand, while others are called upon to come out of the shed. “Spread your legs apart and jump,” a Salindana woman instructs them, perhaps to examine them before discharge. Some jump, gingerly, and clap to the rhythm of their song; some are unable to respond, bending and writhing in pain.
But as a round of mutilations is about to begin, six girls flee the scene. Four make it to Collé; the other two are missing. Collé ties the rope at the entrance and invokes the Moolaadé—the magical protection of the first king of the village which should not be tampered with—thereby transforming the sun-baked huts into a sanctuary. The girls are safe as long as they remain inside the compound. Protecting them has become an issue of life and death.
“Why won’t you let us have the girls even though you were purified as a child?” the Salindana women ask Collé the first time they come for the kids. They are standing in front of her rope barricade but will not dare cross it. Their leader holds a metallic staff, an authority in her own right, as though with every step she is saying “All ye women, bring your girls unto me.” The women in the village obey without questions; after all, the custom was established long before they were born.
The girls run to Collé because she refused to have her daughter circumcised despite strong oppositions. Having lost two children to this monstrous act, and with a belly that bears the scar acquired from birthing her now only daughter through C-section, as a result of implications from mutilation, she vows never to let her be subjected to such treatment. Now 15, Collé’s daughter is perhaps the only girl walking around the village uncircumcised. Because of her, these four girls realize an escape is feasible, that they need not accept violence against their bodies because it’s the societal norm. “You are our only lifeline,” they tell Collé.
“I don’t want to be cut,” says one of the girls when a Salindana woman signals at them to cross the rope. “Me neither, me neither. I don’t want it—” they all say in turns, affirming one another. To not be circumcised is to be looked down upon and banished to a life of chronic singleness.
The girls’ solidarity in their shared struggles calls to mind a scene in Sex Education, the Netflix series about how teenagers navigate their sexuality and experiences. Following some threats by a fellow student, a picture of a high school girl’s vulva is shared among other students. As the principal sermonizes about the negative impact of distributing pornographic images and the importance of being courteous, a male student names the girl to whom the genitals belong, and the assembly roars in laughter. However, a female student rises and proclaims that it’s her vagina in the photograph. Another one stands and says it’s in fact hers. Followed by another, on and on; even a male student declares that it’s his vagina. The viewer swells with pride at how the power of solidarity holds people together and makes them transcend shame—this patriarchal tool that has been exploited for centuries to silence women.
To term female genital mutilation, an extremely brutal procedure, “purification” in the community, is a testament to how women are expected to respond to patriarchal violence: we are supposed to be grateful for whatever is handed down to us, to regard it a blessing. Any form of resistance is perceived as being unnecessarily difficult, self-absorbed, or ungrateful. Nasty, unsolicited comments masquerading as compliments should not only be received by women with a smile, they should be appreciated.
Another norm in this community is that it’s not only acceptable for men to flog their wives in order to subdue them—it’s encouraged. “Tame your wife,” Ciré’s brother tells him.
“You’re my favorite,” Ciré says to Collé. “You refused to have our daughter purified, I said nothing. You climbed on top my head, I did nothing, now you want to shit on it.” I find his choice of words, “shit on my head” interesting. At what point does existing, the simple act of Collé living on her own terms and protecting the girls from a lifetime of horror, become in his mind a tremendous insult?
“Tame her! Harder! Tame her!” Male spectators and some of the women prod Ciré on, as he flogs Collé to concede: say the redemptive word to ward off the Moolaadé power so the girls can be taken away. Other women standing at a corner encourage her to resist and not say the word.
How can we nurture one another out of violence?
The women in the former group are an insightful portrayal of how internalized oppression makes the work of solidarity difficult. One wonders: How can we make such women in our midst see that they themselves are thoroughly being screwed? When do we look inward, individually and collectively, and point to that which holds us back? How committed are we to unlearn internalized misogyny? How can we nurture one another out of violence?
Sembène’s films do an excellent job in portraying the inner lives of people who, despite being on the receiving end of a horrendous system, learn to stand firm on their feet. They serve as a reconfiguring tool such that the viewers are forced to take a look into their own lives.
Sembène referred to Moolaadé, which was announced best film at Cannes 2004, as his “most African film,” in relation to its narrative structure and aesthetics. “We have a majority of individuals, both men and women, who are struggling on a daily basis in a heroic way,” he said in a 2005 interview with the Guardian, “and the outcome of whose struggle leaves no doubt.” Mercenaire a merchant in the village, is a rich, complex character whose role is pivotal in Collé’s fight for freedom. This womanizing war veteran who was unjustly discharged from the army following an accusation, is the other person, besides Collé, who does the unthinkable in the village.
Though the film portrays repression of a group in a rural society over a decade ago, its themes are still a reflection of our daily lives today. They subtly show in some conversations that ensue, for instance, on social media: what women should do, what we should have access to, who we should be, what should bother us, what we should say, how much we should achieve. One easy example: I have seen the word “allow” being used on Twitter countless times, in relation to romantic relations between heterosexual men and women. Guys, can you allow your wife make this hairstyle? Can you allow your girlfriend wear this dress? Will you allow your partner eat that?
In the community, the women’s only contact with the world outside their immediate environment is the radio. Following Collé’s revolt, the men go from house to house, taking women’s radios. Once, three women are seen walking with bundles of firewood on their head. They stop beside a pile of radios, all confiscated from the women in the village.
“Do you know why they are confiscating our radios?” one asks. “Our men want to lock up our minds,” another replies;
“But how do you lock up something invisible?”
The World Health Organization says more than 200 million girls and women alive today in 30 countries in Africa have been cut. The primary purpose of the procedure is to take away women’s sexual pleasure. Millions more have been subjected to other barbaric, deep-rooted cruelty. In northern Nigeria, not only is FGM common, so is under-aged marriage. Foot binding was a major custom in China until the early twentieth century. It was believed that small feet made women more desirable to men.
Although foot binding is longer in practice, some other horrific customs still are. Breast ironing, for instance, is done in Cameroon and some other parts of Africa. Stones are used to press down girls’ breasts so they don’t mature fast; hence preventing them from being viewed sexually by men. Like breast ironing and foot binding, genital mutilation is an extremely painful, sometimes fatal procedure which is also done to control women and make them appeal to men’s gaze.
In Moolaadé, the Salindana wear red garments and walk around the village with a fierce resolve to do their duty. Once, after returning from Collé’s house without success, they sit in a semi-circle in an open space to discuss their next step. This scene harks back to images of witches as portrayed in Yorùbá films of my childhood. A group of women with red or black wrappers tied around their breasts are oftentimes plotting how to destroy someone’s life from their dreams or waking consciousness. They make incantations and invoke spells such that the victim sometimes wakes up unable to articulate what has befallen them or strips naked and runs onto the street. An intervention from a spiritual authority is often required to save them.
For women and girls, horror continues to manifest daily, dressed in different outfits.
Still, for women and girls, horror continues to manifest daily, dressed in different outfits. Once, as the Salindana women approach, through the point of view of the kids, the viewers see the women wearing dark masks with smoke rising around them, even though there are really no masks or smoke.
Apart from the fine blend of humour and charm, Moolaadé is set in a community; there is room for the women to amplify one another’s voices, for one to pull the other up. Black Girl’s Diouana, isolated and detached in a strange land, does not share a similar ending as in Moolaadé.
Moolaadé touches on the importance of having a support system, of connectivity and collectivity. The first time the Salindana women come, Ciré’s first wife Hadjatou gives Collé a cutlass. She stands facing the women on the other end of the rope while Hadjatou observes some feet away. The next time the women come, Collé is not alone. Hadjatou and the youngest wife stand behind her. Her rebellion has rubbed off on them.
But Moolaadé doesn’t only provide a model for how women’s solidarity can help resist patriarchal brutality. It also provides a road map for how men can be a part of that solidarity. From Mercenaire’s viscerally impactful role, we see what it means to be an ally. While most men will not take drastic steps as Mercenaire does, damning all consequences and interjecting Ciré when he publicly flogs his wife, they can at least take up simpler roles by simply listening to women. Only through dedication to unlearning toxicity will men become true allies.
Ciré’s life serves as a reminder that we women must first hold our hands and march forward, together. He loves Collé; however, it’s only after the women save themselves that he is able to stand up to his menfolk. I imagine he is, thereafter, able to lend his voice in dismantling other aspects of the society that hold them—both men and women—from living freely.
What comes to mind when someone is described as “all-American”? They’re probably physically healthy, maybe blonde, and definitely white. This image isn’t neutral: By associating the American identity with whiteness, we allow whiteness to dictate our definition of “normal,” of “us” versus “other.” This is dangerous to people who don’t have that “all-American” look.
In our interview with Mitchell S. Jackson, the author of Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family said: “if you don’t fit into the dominant group, you often get hyphenated: Asian-American, Hispanic-American, African-American. Those hyphenates seem a part of the great project of othering. A part of me calling them all American is challenging the idea of who is American. In ‘American blood’ I claim that the people who are subjugated, oppressed, disenfranchised — and despite those harms, maintain some sense of national pride — might be the most American.”
In conjunction with hyphenated identity, “All-American” becomes a tool to dictate the narrative. It sanitizes the realities of minority communities and fictionalizes what “American” means. Equality, liberty, independence, the American Dream—these ideas don’t exist for all people, but the term “All-American” affirms the myth that it does, that everyone is included.
But what if our idea of “all-American” was actually . . . all-American? Identity is a multitude; reading more broadly into the American experience can help us create a truer, less oppressive image of who is considered American. The following list collects a few of the infinite narratives that complicate our understanding of the “all-American” identity. They encapsulate what I hope is a wide berth of experiences, genres, and intersections—written from people who identify as American or have experienced the reality of living in the U.S.
This list is never finished, but here are 30 incredible writers who deserve more attention and a lot more care. Consider it a first step in rupturing our conceptions of the American narrative.
Cornelius Eady’s extraordinary collection was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry. The collection examines what it means to be black in white imagination. The book reckons with the falsified report of Susan Smith, after she blames the murder of her two children on a nonexistent African American man.
The novel follows the interconnected stories of the Rivera and Toro families, who struggle to find themselves in a new country. Ruth Ozeki says that Cristina Henríquez “gives us unforgettable characters . . . whose resilience yields a most profound and unexpected kind of beauty.”
This essay collection contains the reflections of 26 immigrants and the children of immigrants, from writers like Teju Cole and Jenny Zhang, about their experiences in the U.S.
In this coming-of-age, a young woman attempts to bridge being black, white, American and not, in the grief of seeing her mother succumb to cancer. What We Lose is a stunning portrayal of living after loss and finding oneself in the disconnect.
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, this debut explores the relationship between mother and son and the forms of love that emerge in the identity of being Asian American and queer.
This short story collection travels through history, reality, and fable as it presents Muslim women and men with boundless care and imagination. Laila Lalami says Jarrar’s “voice is assured, fiercely independent, laced with humor and irony—and always, always, honest.”
Esmeralda Santiago recounts her journey from rural Puerto Rico to receiving high honors at Harvard, after her mother decides to move to New York with her eleven children.
Kiese Laymon confronts the spoken lies between him and his mother, reckoning with the complex relationships he has with his family, sexual violence, anorexia, race, and gambling. Heavy takes on the weight of where someone has been and where someone has come.
This exquisite poetry collection, written in part as a response to the Congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans, examines the coercive language of the U.S. government toward indigenous communities.
Elaine Castillo’s debut novel America Is Not the Heart follows three generations of women who reconcile with leaving behind the Philippines and confront what it means to live in America while the inescapable past follows.
Survival Math is a stunning nonfiction book that delves into race, class, masculinity, near-death experiences, and how Mitchell S. Jackson and his family were made to survive in the whiteness of Portland, Oregon. Terrance Hayes says “Mitchell S. Jackson’s insights into how black men survive become insights of everyone’s survival.”
Lysley Tenorio moves us through the Filipinx American community in California and the Philippines with his heartrending short story collection, exploring family, isolation, and the distorted glitz of Hollywood.
This work of nonfiction is fearless as it tackles racism, misogyny, sexual violence, and homophobia. As stated in this coming-of-age about being a queer, mixed-race Chicana: “being mean isn’t for everybody. Being mean is best practiced by those who understand it as an art form.”
Winner of the 2017 Alice James Award, Isako Isako is a book of poetry that follows four generations of Japanese American women and the generational trauma of surviving internment during WWII. Brynn Saito says “Isako Isako is a powerful testament to poetry’s capacity for alchemizing history, memoir, and the lyric.”
Heads of the Colored People maneuvers between sharp, poignant, and darkly humorous as the collection explores being black and middle-class in America. Kiese Laymon says “the super thin lines between terror, intimacy, humor and hubris are masterfully toed, jumped and ultimately redrawn in the most exciting and soulful fiction I’ve read this century.”
Moustafa Bayoumi asks the same question W.E.B. Du Bois asked in The Souls of Black Folk: how does it feel to be a problem? In this book, Bayoumi delves into the profile of a community through the lives of seven young Arab Americans living in Brooklyn.
Written in conversation with James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, this collection of essays and poems brings together 18 brilliant writers of this generation, such as Jericho Brown, Kevin Young, and Claudia Rankine, to reflect on race in America–past, present, and future.
There, There presents a portrait of urban Native Americans through the lives of 12 people attending the Big Oakland Powwow. Marlon James says the novel “drops on us like a thunderclap; the big, booming, explosive sound of twenty-first century literature finally announcing itself.”
Friday Black is a dark short story collection that reckons with racism, oppression, and capitalism in America. Tommy Orange says this book is an “unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary American voice.”
In this graphic memoir, Mira Jacob recreates past conversations about race, color, sexuality, and love as she attempts to answer her young mixed-race son’s life questions. Kiese Laymon says “Mira Jacob just made me toss everything I thought was possible in a book-as-art-object into the garbage.”
Written in the first 200 days of Trump’s presidency, this poetry collection features 70 poems haunted by America’s past and future. Terrance Hayes explores what it means to be American in the sonnet form.
Native Speaker follows a Korean man, Henry Park, as he tries to become a “true American” while fixing a straining marriage and spying on an up and coming politician.
Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, Olio delves into the lives of African American performers from the Civil War to WWI by weaving sonnet and story together.
Don’t Call Us Dead imagines an afterlife for the black men shot by police in the U.S. This poetry collection is an evocative commentary about life in America as someone who is queer and black and living in danger.
Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer prize winner, journalist, and undocumented American. He says that his memoir is about “homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in.”
Nepantla is an anthology formed with the help of the Lambda Literary Foundation to celebrate and preserve the experiences of queer poets of color in America. The book showcases writers like Audre Lorde, Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong, and Tommy Pico.
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears follows the journey of Sepha Stephanos as he flees the Ethiopian Revolution and ends up in Washington, D.C., running a struggling convenience store.
This novel follows a girl and her family as they withstand a second-class existence as migrant workers along the California landscape. Julia Alvarez says Under the Feet of Jesus is “a moving, heartbreaking tale of loss and survival.”
Everyday People: The Color of Life anthologizes short fiction from established and emerging writers of color, such as Yiyun Li, Alexander Chee, and Brandon Taylor.
A dermatologist with a can of liquid nitrogen can remove a wart in four to five seconds. I can remove one overnight with a clove of garlic and a Band-Aid. Your fingers will stink for days, but the wart will never come back. You won’t have to bite or scratch at it until blood rushes over the spongy lining. You can hold someone’s hand without shame or embarrassment.
I learned how to do this from my great-grandmother Estrella. She taught me all the remedies she learned from her own grandma on their pueblo in northern New Mexico. If you have a stomachache, drink chamomile tea with honey at the hottest temperature possible without scalding your tongue. If you have a headache, put slices of potato at your temples and let them draw out the pain. If you have a cold or a broken heart, drink a warm cup of atole made
only with blue corn.
Our lice came from Harrison, though Mama didn’t realize it was him the first time. She just tried washing my hair with mayonnaise. She heard about this trick from another hygienist at the dentist’s office and came home with a big jar of Kraft, the good stuff. She held my head over the kitchen sink, took a serving spoon, and plopped hunks of mayo across my scalp. With a Marlboro Light bumping up and down on her lip, she swirled the mess into my long brown hair until my entire head was soppy and warm. As she puffed smoke in and out of her lipstick mouth, I could see the missing tooth on her right side, the spot she always hid from everyone, including me. After she finished, she put a plastic bag over my hair, tying it at the middle of my neck with a rubber band.
“Here,” she said, pointing with her red nails to a chair at the kitchen table. “Sit for fifteen minutes, jita.”
She dashed out her cigarette on a saucer and parted her own
dark hair, leaning over the countertop and examining her pale scalp with a teal Cover Girl compact mirror. Her gaze went up and down and back again. Mama then snapped shut the compact and looked at me.
“All right, baby girl. Put your head over the sink.”
With my face dropped into the sink’s chrome basin, Mama rinsed my hair as her large breasts pressed into my back. Hot water spilled over the front of my Tweety Bird T-shirt, soaking my neck and chest. I whined, fighting back nausea from the egg-smell of my own head.
“Mama,” I said. “Why can’t we just ask Grandma Estrella about lice?”
“Look at me.” She turned my body around and dried the water from my face with the bottom of her T-shirt. “You can never tell your grandma Estrella you have lice.”
I tried to ask her why, but Mama shoved my head back under
the faucet and kneaded my hair with her strong hands the way I had seen Grandma Estrella knead masa on Christmas Eve. As my brown hair wetly twisted, water rushed into my eyes, blurring my vision, but I swore I saw white lice eggs against the drain’s black pit.
It was snowing the first time we picked up Harrison. Mama drove us to an apartment on Grant Street in downtown Denver and we huddled in our scarves and secondhand Sorels beneath the red-tarp awning at the front entrance.
Mama pushed a button on the intercom and a sleepy voice answered, “Who is it?”
“It’s us,” she said. “Millie and Clarisa.”
A quick buzz vibrated the brass speaker box and Mama pulled on the lobby’s door handle. Before we stepped inside, she hesitated, looking down at me.
“Now, this is your brother,” Mama said quietly. “I know you haven’t met him and I know that we never see Daddy anymore, but Harrison isn’t as fortunate as you are, so be kind to him.”
After I promised to be nice, we went inside, where the carpets were puke green and the ceiling was made of tin. We walked up a flight of creaking stairs while competing smells of garlic and mildew followed us. At the end of the second-floor hallway, Mama knocked hard on 13B.
Harrison’s mom answered the door. She wore an enormous pink sweatshirt with the neck cut away, showing a star tattoo on her upper left shoulder. Her thin blond hair was pulled high on her head in a sloppy bun, and when she smiled, her teeth were very crooked.
“Oh, hi,” she said. “Harrison, come here, Son.”
He appeared next to her, hunched over and skinny, looking downward at the floorboards.
“Have fun with your sister,” his mom said in her drowsy voice before handing him a backpack. She leaned over and kissed Harrison on the forehead. Behind her, I could see some of their apartment, a dusty living room with a sagging brown couch covered in laundry. There were pairs of crinkled and silky underpants beneath a grimy glass coffee table.
Harrison’s mom rubbed her eyes with both hands, smearing her makeup until a speck of mascara floated inside her left eye.
“He never said you were such a nice lady.” She then blew a kiss to her son before closing the apartment door.
Mama flashed a warm smile. “Do you remember me? I met you when I came over to talk to your mom. You’re going to stay with us for a couple days.”
Harrison nodded and scratched his head. “You brought Tootsie Rolls.”
“Gross.That candy sucks,” I whispered.
Mama jabbed the back of my neck with her long red nails. “This is Clarisa. She’s your half-sister. You guys are almost the same age.”
“You’re ten?” Harrison asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m eleven. I’m short for my age.”
“I’m not,” he said. “My mom says I get that from my dad.” The three of us started down the hallway, and I was surprised when we walked past a bathroom built into the wall, like a lime-green coat closet. I peered inside at an old porcelain bathtub with claws at the bottom. Grandma Estrella had a tub like that in her upstairs bathroom. I asked Mama about it and she told me that in the old days people shared bathtubs. They shared everything, she explained. But later when I asked Grandma Estrella, she told me those hallway bathrooms were only in buildings where dirty people lived, people who did awful things for a living, people she prayed for each night before she rubbed cold cream on her face in slow upward strokes, because downward caused wrinkles.
Grandma Estrella lived in a red-brick Victorian house on the edge of a park named Benedict. She was a short, wide woman who
wore long colorful skirts and carried on her skin the scent of rose oil and Airspun face powder. She lived alone, since my great-grandpa passed away before I was born and their only daughter died in a car crash when Mama was just four years old. Mama and I lived with Grandma Estrella after Daddy left, and even after we got our own townhouse in Northglenn, we visited her every weekend—except when Harrison came over. Mama said it was because we were busy, but I knew the truth. While Grandma Estrella hated all of Harrison, she only felt that way about half of me, my father’s half, the white half.
One weekend, while I was staying over Grandma Estrella’s, we baked cookies she called biscochitos. We were in her big kitchen with all the windows open, the yellow curtains rising and falling with a breeze. We watched Bewitchedon the countertop TV, and when the episode ended, Jerry Springer came on. “Ah, mija, I hate watching these hillbilly white people,” Grandma Estrella said. “Look at this man.” She was using a large wooden roller to point at the TV. “He was given every chance to make it in this world and what did he do? Threw it away on booze and drugs and can’t take care of his family. Just like your father.”
“I guess,” I said, licking my spoonful of raw cookie dough.
“Him leaving your life was the best thing that ever happened to you and your mother. If he wouldn’t have left on his own, I would have chased him off myself.”
I laughed. “You’d chase him, Grandma Estrella? With what?”
“A broom, or maybe a coat hanger. There are many tools. Now, my baby, switch the station. I want to watch my stories.” I wiped my flour-covered hands on the white-lace apron she had made especially for me and clicked the dial to channel seven. The picture was soft on purpose, part of the show. White people with diamonds and pretty eyelashes kissed or lied and cheated on each other. That’s how Grandma Estrella liked her people on TV—rich and scandalous.
Grandma Estrella said, “Doesn’t Tiffany look gorgeous this week? Why don’t you grow your hair like that, mija? A girl’s hair should always be long.”
I looked at the ends of my brown hair. “It quits growing after my shoulders.”
“Nonsense. I know some herbs you can make into a tea.”
Grandma Estrella closed her tiny eyes behind her large glasses and silently moved her lips as if she were reading different scraps of paper in her mind. After some time, she opened her mouth, the ridges in her face spreading wide and smoothing over, making her appear young again, if only for a second.
“I’ll tell you the recipe for long hair, mija, but you must be cautious with this tea.”
“Cautious?” I asked.
“Vanity is risky, my baby. Let me tell you, you had a great-great-aunt, Milagros, the same Milagros your mother is named after, and she used the herbs too often and her black hair grew so long and so beautiful that all the men in our pueblo and even from far away wanted to marry her, but she would not choose one because she believed the longer and more beautiful her hair grew, the better her choices of husbands would be until one night, when the
rest of the children were sleeping soundly in the same bedroom, her hair coiled around her neck like a snake, squeezing all the life from her throat.”
“That really happened?”
“Of course! You’re calling me a liar?”
I pushed my dough scraps into the wastebasket and wondered what my own hair was capable of.
Whenever Harrison stayed over, Mama pulled out the extra comforter, the one with holes and all the cotton bunched together
in the corners. She’d spread it over the couch, making up a little bedroom for him, where they’d sit for hours, watching movies and laughing. Mama often asked Harrison questions, and they were usually about our dad.
“Does Daddy ever send you presents?”
“One time he did. A Hot Wheels set.”
“Oh, wow,” Mama said, reaching out and stroking his neck. “What about your mama? Does he send her money to help out?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I hope so. He can afford it. You know, Harrison,” she added with a sincere smile, “you look so much like Daddy. It’s like you’re him but as a little boy.”
Each time I walked into the living room, I looked at Harrison’s slumped-over body on the couch and felt something like hot
blacktop tar in my guts. I hated to be around him. I didn’t care that Mama said I should feel sorry for him because our dad was long gone and his mom had problems with drinking and taking pills. Imagine if I slept all day, Mama told me. You’d never get a warm meal.
With Harrison in our living room, the whole townhouse smelled as bad as his apartment building. He had dark bags under his eyes, like someone hit him real hard and never let him heal. His T-shirts had holes in the sleeves and his jeans were worn thin, covered in a fine layer of dirt at the butt and knees. The worst part, he smelled like pee.
“Hey, Harrison, why don’t you use that bathtub in the hallway at your crappy apartment?”
“No one uses that, Clarisa. It’s busted and old.”
“You probably should. You smell like a litter box.”
“No, I don’t. I took a shower today!”
“Why does my mom have to take care of you, anyway? What’s wrong with your own mom?”
“Nothing. She’s just my mom.”
Harrison never had a comeback and he never told on me for being mean. Instead, he acted crazy. In the middle of the afternoon, he’d open my dresser drawers, stick his face against my T-shirts and jeans, turn on and off our microwave, and ask annoying questions that made me wonder what his life was like at home.
“Do you get recess even when it snows real bad?”
“No, we have an inside day.”
“How about your teacher—is she nice? What color is her hair?”
“For your information, my teacher is a guy.”
“A guy, really?”
“Leave me alone. Don’t you go to school, too?”
“What about our dad? Why doesn’t he want to see any of us?”
“Maybe he doesn’t want lice.”
He was only a year younger, but even then I knew we were worlds apart. What I hated most about Harrison—besides that each time he came over, the lice came back—was that my mother was right. He looked like my dad. Even as a little boy, he looked like Daddy.
I was nine years old the last time we spent Christmas with Daddy. He was up unusually early, no black bags under his eyes or sour breath reeking of beer and cigarettes. He was happy, smiling and kissing Mama on the mouth. We played airplane and he whirled me around his one-bedroom apartment, giggling and cheering, my arms open like little wings. Mama cooked all day—ham, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, cornbread. No Christmas tamales like at Grandma Estrella’s, though. He never liked that.
We were together, sitting at his fold-out card table in the corner of the living room, when Daddy started the prayer. I gazed at the creases around his dark eyes, wondering if I would get those someday. I loved being near him when I could—loved it when he cupped his hand on the back of my neck and I could feel his calluses coarse against my skin. He reminded me of work, of cars, that special orange soap he used to wash away grease.
“Millie,” he said. “You forgot the butter, honey.”
Mama glanced at me and asked if I would be nice enough to get Daddy some butter. I hopped out of my chair and headed for the tiny kitchen. I walked by the overflowing garbage, where a sparkling green Christmas card was shoved beneath empty green bean cans and cracked eggshells. I don’t know why I did it, but I stuck my hand inside the trash, pulling out the mushy card. When I opened it, a picture fell out of a little boy with dark eyes and light brown hair swinging a baseball bat. I stared into his face for a long time.
“Clarisa,” Mama yelled from the table. “Did you find it?”
I shoved the Christmas card as far as I could back into the garbage. I grabbed the butter for the table and told my parents that I would be right back—that I needed to wash my hands before dinner.
In Social Studies, I scratched and scratched until a louse slid down the back of my neck and onto Chantel Sanchez’s desk. She screamed so loud that the principal heard it from his office, or that’s what the other kids claimed. It was the fourth time in a year that I had gotten lice from Harrison. I was sent home from school, indefinitely, until the issue was resolved. “Expelled due to health hazards” is what the official pink slip read. Mama was more upset than usual about the lice. She tried mayonnaise, then olive oil, then rubbing alcohol, then over-the-counter shampoos. By the time she had finished, I thought I would never go back to school.
The next Saturday, Mama took Harrison and me to a hair salon in a part of town called Wash Park. The salon was painted blue and white with mirrors in every direction. Techno music came out of the ceiling speakers and the floor was lightly scented with ammonia. The hairdressers were vibrant with colorful hair and face piercings. They had names like Celeste, Luna, and Sky. I flipped through a booklet with different hairstyles, showing Mama cuts I thought she might like.
“Look at her bangs,” I said, folding the page over for Mama
to see.
“Those are nice, jita. You guys are also getting haircuts.”
“Here?” Harrison looked up from his seat, a surprised expression on his face.
“Yup. Don’t need to worry about picking out anything new. I told the ladies what to do.”
My hair had recently grown extra-long with the help of Grandma Estrella’s tea. Mama normally took me to Cost Cutters for a trim, but last time, we were refused service. No one gave a reason why, but I knew it must have been lice.
When a woman called my name, I jumped out of my seat and
I stuck out my tongue to Harrison. He ignored me, scratching his head. Then another lady called his name. They brought us
to a row of black spinning chairs, seating us side by side. My hairdresser snapped peppermint gum in her mouth. She had glitter across her eyelids and her teeth were the whitest and biggest I had ever seen, like those white ladies in Grandma Estrella’s stories. After she parted my hair with a black comb, she pointed beside me to Harrison, draped in a purple cape.
“Are you guys twins?” she asked. “What do they call that, paternal?”
“No,” said the lady cutting Harrison’s hair. “It’s fraternal.”
“That’s it,” my hairdresser said. “You sure do look about the same age.”
Harrison giggled. “I wish we were twins. That’d be cool.”
“He’s just my half-brother,” I said.
The hairdressers shared a knowing look and I glanced away, toward the front windows.
Outside, seagulls dived between street lamps. The sun was going down and the whole neighborhood was a shadowy pink. A family carrying pizza boxes walked together through the parking lot. It was a mom, a dad, and three little boys. The mom was laughing, pointing at her husband, who had grabbed a shopping cart and was riding the back like a scooter. His sons tried copying him. They wobbled everywhere, and the mom seemed worried. For just a second, I felt jealous of that family, their happiness and togetherness. Maybe if I had always known Harrison, we could have been friends.
But instead, he reminded me of Daddy, the only person who had ever left me. The family then walked out of sight and I looked back at the mirror.
That’s when I burst into tears.
My long hair was gone, gathered across the floor like piles of dust. The hairdresser kept asking what was wrong, but all I could do was clutch my short hair, wetter in the front from all my tears.
“Don’t cry, Clarisa,” I heard Harrison say. He was whimpering quietly. His head had been shaved completely bald.
I stood up then and looked for Mama. She was behind us at another station, her expression downturned and sorrowful. Her long black hair had been trimmed into a spiky undercut with short bangs. When her eyes met mine, she mouthed something, maybe sorry.
On our way out, Mama handed the receptionist a check and one
of the women tried selling her an antidandruff shampoo.
“You know, the kids both have it pretty bad,” the woman insisted. “This will help for sure.”
Mama shook her head, her short hair stationary against her scalp. “Thanks, but we’ll try some home remedies first.”
Mama was crying. Harrison and I heard her when we were fighting over whose turn it was for the only working Nintendo controller. At first it sounded like the neighbor’s dog yipping, but it grew louder and steadier. I threw down the controller and Harrison followed me. Sitting on the toilet with the lid closed, her head in her hands, Mama was itching and pulling at her short hair, red bumps all over her scalp and neck. Snot and tears dripped down her face, over her lips, and onto the front of her white shirt. I stood in the doorframe, afraid to go near her. I had only seen her like this one other time—when Daddy left for good.
“They won’t go away.” She sobbed into her hands, gargling a bit.
“What, Mama?”
“They just won’t go away.”
Harrison stood behind me, his dark eyes filling with tears that lingered above his bottom lashes. I could see the bathroom
reflected in his eyes—Mama, alone, on the toilet with hair in her lap and across the floor. I wanted to scream at him to leave,
to walk home, take a bus, find some way to get out of our lives, but instead I just told him to watch Mama while I ran to the kitchen and did what I was never supposed to do—I called Grandma Estrella.
I told her what happened, and had been happening for months. She screamed so loud that when she finished, I heard true silence in our townhouse kitchen. Dust sifted through shoots of sunlight. Water dripped from the chrome faucet. The phone’s cord slowly rolled. Everything was calm until Mama’s sobs bumped throughout the hallway, interrupting the dead air. She didn’t hit me or scream at me when I told her Grandma Estrella was expecting us. Mama got up from the toilet lid, silent and red-faced, and walked to the car, as if she had been expecting this day from the beginning.
When we arrived, Grandma Estrella stood on her porch, one
hand over her eyes, scanning the yard with a watchful, hawk-like gaze. She wore a wavering purple skirt, the brick house like a castle behind her. Mama parked and got out of her car, flicking a cigarette into the road as she walked us to the porch.
“Look at your hair,” Grandma Estrella said. “Every one of you.”
“It’ll grow back,” Mama said, quickly wiping tears from her face.
Grandma Estrella grunted some. She stepped aside and motioned with both hands for us to follow her. Before she opened the front door, she reached out to Harrison’s small hand and introduced herself as Mrs. Lopez. Harrison’s dark eyes grew wide and seemed to fill with wonder. It was like he didn’t have grandparents of his own, and I realized he probably didn’t.
“All of you, upstairs.”
We climbed the cherry-oak staircase to the upstairs bathroom. The long white porcelain basin of the claw-foot tub rested in the otherwise dark room. It was cold, though the windows were cloaked in fog from a steaming metal pot on the floor, the pot Grandma Estrella normally used for menudo. She told all of us to get on our knees and drape our heads, facedown, over the bathtub. The porcelain was chilly against my neck and arms. Grandma Estrella used to bathe me there when I was younger, working my knees and elbows with a washcloth and Ivory soap. Once, I asked her why she needed to scrub so hard it hurt. “Because we are not dirty people,” she had said. Later, when I asked Mama about it, she told me when Grandma Estrella was a little girl, her own teachers called her a dirty Mexican and it never left her, the shame of
dirt.
Slowly, from behind me, I felt Grandma Estrella pour bitter water over my head, a liquid made from something called neem that had a thick rootlike stench. Grandma then combed my short hair, harsh and fast, pressing into my scalp. When she finished, she told me to stand up.
“Mija, take this. Make sure to get the backside of their necks to the front side above their foreheads.”
She placed the heavy pot in my hands. “But I don’t think I can lift it.”
“Don’t be such a malcriada.”
I braced myself, steadied my knees, and lifted the pot. My arms trembled as I poured the liquid over Harrison’s small neck, seeing for the first time how incredibly scabbed and bitten he was.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“No, Clarisa,” he said, muffled and soft. “I’m sorry they don’t go away.”
“Don’t worry. This time it’ll work.”
As I finished pouring the water over Harrison’s head, Grandma Estrella got on her knees and began rubbing his scalp with a white towel.
“Don’t get it down my back,” Mama said. She was tense against the tub, gripping the rim with white-knuckled hands. She kept looking back at me, squinting. That’s when I noticed she was shaking, her legs and wrists trembling. Grandma Estrella had put down her white towel and was leaned over Mama. She reached out, letting her hands lightly rest on Mama’s head, as if she was protecting her from the cold.
Grandma Estrella whispered, “That man and his choices are behind you now.”
Mama said, “I just wanted him to know he has a sister.”
“And now he does, my baby, but none of this is your place.”
She then danced her fingers over Mama’s neck, motioning for me to begin pouring, wetting her skin along with Mama’s.
The next day, Mama put on a full face of makeup, ran mousse through her lice-free hair, and dropped Harrison off at his apartment on Grant Street. I waited outside in the car, looking up at the window I knew was his. I wanted to catch a glimpse of him, my only brother in the world. I watched until he finally appeared. With his skinny arms, he reached up, and closed the blinds. It was the last time we dropped him off anywhere.
Before Grandma Estrella died, she gave me a booklet of all her remedies. Inside, with an unsteady hand she had drawn pictures of plants and, beneath them, their Spanish names, their scientific names, and just for me, their English names. I can cure head lice, stomach cramps, and bad breath with the right herbs. For the most part, I stick to over-the-counter remedies. They are cleaner and work faster and come in packages with childproof lids. But every once in a while, when I get a real bad headache and the aspirin isn’t cutting it, I take slices of potatoes and hold them to my temples, hoping the bad will seep out of me.
I see Harrison every now and then in the city at parties or shows. He’s a bass player in a punk band called the Roaches. He’s tall now with a serious yet hopeful face. Sometimes I wonder if my dad looked like him as a young man when both our mothers fell for his shit. Other times, I wonder if he’s still giving everyone lice. But I doubt it.
A couple months back, I was outside Lancer Lounge and through the windows I saw Harrison inside on the platform stage, bent over a microphone, a black cord rolled around his arm. When he stood up, we shared a look for a long time before I smiled, pointing to his blue Mohawk.
“Nice hair,” I mouthed, and Harrison smiled back, as if he could hear me through the glass.
About the Recommender
Mat Johnson is the author of the novels Pym, Drop, and Hunting in Harlem, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the comic books Incognegro and Dark Rain. He is a recipient of the United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. He is a faculty member at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
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