When I was a child, the only way I could identify pre-sexual queer characters in fiction—such as in works by Harper Lee, Dorothy Allison, and Carson McCullers—was by their feral nature. I saw myself in these kids’ dirty clothes and boyish swagger, the way they made startling comments that no one else appreciated. I longed for more characters like these, both more children and also adult characters who showed me a future, who did whatever they wanted, who messed up again and again, who did shitty things, who acted in ugly ways, who were fierce and aggressive and sexy and bold and even sometimes mean. I love difficult people, on the page and off, and I get grief for it all the time. But part of why I love fiction is because I can challenge myself to feel sympathy for people who act wildly and badly.
My first novel, Songs of No Provenance, was initially inspired by my fascination with the idea of a protagonist, Joan Vole, an art monster who says difficult things and disappears into her crappy Coney Island apartment for weeks on end on a songwriting tear. Joan doesn’t bother with meals, pees in public, picks up random strangers from bars, and throws her whole body into music. I was curious about what would happen if such a character tipped into toxicity and went too far, harming people and causing real damage. The book opens with a horrible act that Joan commits on stage, which she’s pushed to by her jealousy of her mentee and best friend. Joan must then face the unrolling consequences of her actions, while sifting through her past in a seedy underground music scene for where her life went wrong.
Queerness goes hand in hand with wildness. Growing up queer and trans in a time when it was not okay to be out, I was so outside the norm that I had a certain freedom. I could wear shirts with giant owls on them and have messy hair and ask probing questions and say shocking things, and people would expect it. That’s why I love the 11 novels below, each of which feature protagonists who are allowed to stretch themselves into their wild nature.
This compelling, propulsive novel tells the story of one of the most feral breeds of queer: the sportsbian. Mack is a high school basketball star who develops feelings for the only other Division 1 hopeful on her team, Liv. Mack and Liv touch all the time on the court and have beautiful communication, moving like one organism, creatures ruled by instinct. But when they are alone, they are awkward and unsure, can only access intimacy by role playing or joking around. The book moves toward breathless sex scenes, where the bodies of the characters take over with a different flavor of wildness. This book is aching and gorgeous, the fast-paced lists and moments of reverie mimicking the energy of the game, and the writing about basketball is full of speed alongside these two young people who have wild hearts and a fierce nature both on the court and off.
The story of a young queer Cherokee girl who is bound and determined to become an astronaut, Steph is one of the most compelling characters in recent memory. She is completely bold and badass, single-minded in her ambition, unafraid to snap back at her mother and betray her sister. She barfs when her mother and sister share a sentimental moment and goes so far as to frame and prominently display the acceptance letter to a school her mother wouldn’t let her attend. The book covers three decades and multiple continents, detailing Steph’s ambition, her romantic relationships and journey of sexuality, and her family dynamics. Steph is so loveable in her wildness that I rooted for her to get whatever she wanted.
This graphic novel tells the story of a transgirl named Felina who navigates Seattle as a sex worker. Every character in the book is depicted as a human/animal hybrid and everyone acts freely, a little outside the norms of “conventional” humanity. Felina is not afraid to say what she feels like saying, poised to react with violence when she needs to. She has sex with her friends and it doesn’t have to mean anything. She works hard at the factory and cleans deer and wanders where she wants at night. She’s a badass up against a shitty transphobic world. The art is beautiful and expressive and the story is moving and deeply real.
A voicey novel about a trans woman who does what everyone has wanted to do at some point: escapes her life. Maria draws in the reader with a conversational, intimate voice that’s absorbing and authentic, like a friend confiding in you on the couch. She sweet talks you through her adventures taking drugs, letting a relationship die, stealing her ex-girlfriend’s car, and making friends with strangers as she dashes across the country. A testament to the freedom that can come beyond romantic love, and because of it, if you just let yourself do what you want.
This is the only book on the list where the protagonist is literally feral, because they are a mountain lion. This book follows a queer mountain lion as they struggle to survive in an LA landscape destroyed by humanity, surrounded by drought and wildfires and tepid attempts at talk therapy. Hoke’s lion is loveable even when they are apparently menacing children or considering eating a human. They bring home the very personal consequences of the climate crisis more than any book I’ve ever read.
This manga memoir tells the story of a twenty-eight-year-old woman who has never had a sexual experience and sleeps with a female escort. When the story opens, Nagata is living a life outside the norm: doesn’t want kids, never washes her clothes, has no friends, no romance, her hair is always messy. She blurts out her feelings to strangers and tears out her hair. In my favorite moment, she eats unboiled cakes of ramen that are so hard they speckle with her blood. Her encounter with the sex worker is utterly honest and moving, and brought to mind for me the experience of squaring your neurodivergence with the way you are “supposed to” act in situations that it seems everyone else can master.
This book is full of a smorgasbord of feral queer protagonists, from a hulking lumberjack boldly exploring gender identity in a hostile clique of other lumberjacks to a boarding school boy driven to commit horrific violence because of his unsorted desire for his ex-roommate. This book is full of wild desire, high-concept trans storytelling, and characters who are unafraid to follow their instincts.
The protagonist of Arnett’s hilarious and absorbing new book is a MILF-obsessed, financially irresponsible, lesbian clown. The book opens with Cherry jumping out a window after sleeping with a married woman at the woman’s child’s birthday party. Cherry attends punk shows in backroads, DIY queer venues, steals, runs her bank account down to nothing on impulse, and is so guileless and open and full of id that you have to love her.
This story of a bisexual Palestinian American woman living in Brooklyn and dealing with sex and love addiction bounces between her various relationships and her travels to Kentucky, the Midwest, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine as she follows her desires, seeking answers through love, sex, recovery, and writing. The protagonist is not afraid to follow any lead for pleasure, entanglement, or enlightenment that presents itself, and it’s refreshing to watch a character say whatever comes to mind.
In this auto-fiction novel, Michelle runs wild in the queer subculture of San Francisco, jumping between liaisons with various feral lesbians, a knife-wielder and a boyish runaway, and more, delighting in an urgent realm of imaginative sex. Michelle is a delightful, loveable scamp, free and easy in a city that used to be a queer paradise.
This immersive novel is feral in tone as well as in the behavior of the characters. Cass, a young playwright, flees New York after having been cancelled for a strange and brutal act of violence. Cass is a whirlwind spiraling out of one of the more famously staid art forms, and it’s inspiring and thrilling to witness her unbound nature among quiet audiences of old-heads. In Los Angeles Cass ends up meeting a pack of reckless teenage girls who rival her own feral self.
In 2011, Heather Christle was about to release her second poetry book, The Trees The Trees. I saw online that she was doing a “Dial-A-Poem” promotion where people could call a Google voice number and Heather would answer and read to them.
This coincided, conveniently, with a period where I was waiting tables at a now-folded posh brunch spot in central Indianapolis. We had dinner service a few nights a week and as I helped set up the front of the house before open, I called Heather’s Dial-A-Poem number and, as it rang, plugged my phone into the restaurant’s speakers. My fellow waiters smirked at me. Mostly they weren’t regular readers of poetry, but I think my excitement charmed—or at least amused—them.
Heather answered. I told her my name, that I loved her work, and that she was talking to seven or eight of us in a restaurant as we polished silverware and made table settings. Would she please read some poems for fifteen minutes while we worked? She laughed and happily obliged. I was 23. I loved poetry with a monomaniacal fervor that sometimes literally made me dizzy, made me forget to breathe. One of my favorite poets was reading to me and my friends! I spent my whole shift hovering an inch off the ground.
Since then, Christle has remained among the small handful of authors whose books I reflexively, half-consciously reach toward whenever I need inspiration, consolation, delight. Nobody thinks like her, nobody sees the tiny hooks that attach words to words as clearly, or as imaginatively. Her new book, In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf, is as elegant, searching a book of prose as I’ve read in years. I still don’t really know how to describe it: an ecstatic whirl around a central radical axis of motherhood (or perhaps memory? obsession? grace?). Like other titans of the ferociously granular observation— Nicholson Baker, Terrance Hayes, Anne Carson leap to mind—Christle has the chops to render flinting eccentric curiosity in delicious, propulsive prose. There’s almost no praise I wouldn’t extend to In the Rhododendrons. It was my luck to talk to her about it for Electric Lit.
Kaveh Akbar:There’s a moment in the book’s epilogue when you’re speaking to the nurse who is helping you undress after a surgery and you’re trying to explain to her that you’re working on this book and what it’s about, and you’re like, I have trouble talking about that even without even a single IV in my arm. So how do you describe the book now that you’ve had a few more tries?
Heather Christle: The easiest way to talk about it is how I did when I first spoke to my editor about it long, long ago. She asked, so what do you think this book is really about? And I lied and said, well, I think it’s really about three women. It’s about Virginia Woolf, my mother, and me. It looks at our relationships as well as our relationships with England: the land, the nation, its histories. I pretty quickly realized that that wasn’t me just making something up for the sake of making the book make sense to her. It was actually true. Although, because I can’t help but take my mind and body in eighteen different directions as I move through life, the book covers a lot of other material as well. But on the whole, everything is coming back to those people and relationships.
Some things I’ve learned about the book only very recently, only since publishing it, despite having worked on it since 2018. So for instance, in much of the third part of the book, I’m longing to move outside of language, feeling that somehow if I could get outside language into a wordless place, I would be able to resolve these experiences and memories, I would be able to experience a kind of cathartic release and forgiveness. And then getting towards the very end of the book, the character of me starts to realize that language is what I’ve got, and that whatever change is going to happen in me is going to begin in language. That’s just the nature of the work. Were I working in some other medium, it would be different, but I’m a writer. It’s all words all the way down.
Whatever change is going to happen in me is going to begin in language.
KA: You just referred to “the character of myself,” which is a way of saying, here are the dolls that I’m making talk. Even though it is you, right?
HC: It is, but/and my imagination is also an enormous part of me, so that’s on the page too. I have been thinking about this in relationship to narrative demands that are placed on people who have experienced sexual assault. There’s this relentless push to tell the precise truth, the factual truth, and if you deviate from that in any degree, it calls your whole story into question, your whole idea of yourself into question. And I think that it was really important for me in writing In the Rhododendrons to make the book be a real place where things could happen that maybe would not be able to be directly reported by other people inhabiting the physical world. Imagination matters, and everyone deserves space for imagination regardless of what demands the world might want to place on them around how they tell their story.
KA: And we see you, the character, struggling with that in the book too, trying to reconcile your own memories with other people’s recollections as they perhaps diverge. There’s the beat in the end where you’re talking about Scott, the character Scott and whether or not your mom told him of the specific need to take care of you when she sent you to stay with him. And Scott said, I would’ve remembered her saying that. And you’re like, I bet I could imagine a way where they’re both telling the truth, where the language was soft enough that they’re both telling the truth. That kind of impulse towards allowing all characters grace is deeply compelling to me. A different kind of writer who had created a different kind of environment might’ve said they both failed me. You’re documenting not the arrival at a point where you have decided that they were both telling the truth, but documenting your consideration of the possibility.
HC: Yes, and it is an environment that I’m trying to build in the book, but also I think in the world. I don’t want to inhabit a world where to tell a story like this is to mean that I’m seeking some kind of punishment or carceral solution to violence against young women. That’s just not the world that I want. But I do want a world where we can tell our stories and be heard. Where maybe the story gets to change. I would love, oh God, I would so love to be part of making a world where these stories change.
I do want a world where we can tell our stories and be heard. Where maybe the story gets to change.
KA: This book is going to find its way into the hands of people who you’ll never meet and you’ll never hear from who recognize the possibility that it affords in stepping towards the horizon of such a world. They might not even clock it as possibility-expanding until a decade later or more or whatever. But that kind of quiet, slow, horizon-clarifying work of literature feels like a profound privilege to get to be a part of.
HC: Oh, completely. There were so many moments in researching this book where I was finding these little examples of something like that occurring. I’m thinking back to learning about these seeds that were extracted from China during an 18th century diplomatic expedition. They were put into an envelope and brought to George III, and he stuffed them in a book in his library, and then his collection formed the base of the British Museum’s library. And then 150 years went by and the museum was bombed by the Nazis, and firefighters put out the flames. When people went back to find what could be saved from the wreckage, they saw that these seeds—who had spent over a century in the dark—had responded to the devastation of the fire and the rescue of the water with germination. They decided, Hey, now we’re going to grow.
KA: The thrill of reading the book is feeling the centripetal momentum, the angular velocity of these kinds of sparking, effervescent curiosities to which you attend. It’s like those rides at the carnival where you’re fastened into the wall and you’re spinning around and then the floor drops out and you’re held up only by the force of your own spinning.
HC: I completely loved that ride. I have such a strong memory of that ride and just being like, I can’t believe this is really happening and possible, which is a feeling that I had very frequently when writing as well.
KA: You’re also curating those stories…a favorite is Dante Gabriel Rosetti changing his mind about the poems that he had buried with Elizabeth Siddal, and deciding to exhume her so that he could retrieve his poems, which is simultaneously horrifying and just the most relatable poet gesture. Unfortunately, I find myself relating to that impulse, exhuming your love to get back some old drafts you buried with her, in a way that is utterly unconscionable.
HC: No, I love that. I also had so much fun writing that part because I got to talk about this legend of Elizabeth Siddal’s hair continuing to grow, as if she understood how important her hair was to Rosetti. And so when he dug her up to retrieve the poems, he was also like, oh, thank you so much for continuing to grow your hair. Good job. Your hair was important to me.
KA: And these sort of magpie bits of curious history or consciousness or experience are a way of calibrating the angular velocity in the book so as to keep a reader in it. But you also speak about watching an eclipse through a pinhole viewer so the sun doesn’t burn your eyes. And in your Lit Hub essay [“The Body Made Metaphoric”] you quote a sentence from a poem by Tony Tost: “I don’t know how to talk about my biological father, so I’m going to describe the lake.”
HC: Yes, I quoted that in The Crying Book too. It’s a line that I find incredibly useful.
KA: And that’s how this book often feels, here’s a glance of that, and now I’m going to catch my breath. It’s an advance / retreat, which feels like real intimacy. That’s how intimacy, when you’re sitting across from a person at a funeral, a beloved of the deceased, they’re not like, here’re all my big feelings about the deceased, presented for inspection in a tidy array. It’s an advance in intimacy, vulnerability, then a retreat, this whole choreography.
HC: Oh, I’m so glad that it has that effect. I want In the Rhododendrons to feel quite intimate. There’s some things that I write and think this wants to meet a crowd—and of course I would love for this book to meet a whole bunch of people—I just think that it probably wants to meet them one at a time. But to come back to what you were saying, the trick of writing when you are employing both disclosure and avoidance is to ensure that the avoidance is not only a looking away from the sun that could burn your eyes, but it also toward some other dimension with the work of the book. It matters which pinhole you choose.
KA: Well, and that’s the endless calibration of metaphor too, you want to get the tenor and vehicle as far apart as possible without it becoming utter non sequitur. Right? We’ve spoken about the Kuleshov Effect before. Lev Kuleshov made all these studies about how the first image that you see influences the way that you read the next image.
I think in both poetry and in a book like this, each image that you show us, like of Rosetti digging up Elizabeth Siddal, forms a sort of aura around that image as it moves into the next thing. And now the next thing, the images are sort of superimposed on each other in your superimposition way. And so we suddenly have, I don’t know, a blue and a yellow making a green sound instead of just the constituent components of blue and yellow. Does this make sense?
HC: Yes, and the book is super interested in, well, in superimposition, like you said. I’m fascinated by how placing a yellow image and a blue image next to one another in this case might not make green. It might make some green, but then it also might instigate that phenomenon of binocular rivalry where the left eye is looking at yellow, the right eye is looking at blue. And what happens in your consciousness is not that you see green, but that you see a kind of patchwork image that is yellow in some places and blue in others. When you’re actually looking through a stereoscope (which is something that I do a lot in the book) at two different images, it’s not just a static patchwork of yellow and blue. It’s dynamic. And so as you look, a patch that once was yellow will become blue and a patch that once was blue will become yellow, and then perhaps there is some green in there.
That’s another way that I want to think about looking at history. This book is very interested in looking at history in a way that allows it to continue to be dynamic. It is our job to continue to look to it and see what emerges, what surfaces that we might desperately need.
This book is very interested in looking at history in a way that allows it to continue to be dynamic.
KA: What do you want to say about the life of the book in the world, both in your micro world, in the family members who have encountered it? Because in The Crying Book, you were writing predominantly about yourself with little appearances of [your husband and child] Chris and Hattie, whereas this one is much more peopled with real people with real names.
HC: So specifically, In the Rhododendrons covers the difficulties of my early adolescence, which involved intense psychological distress, suicidal ideation, and sexual assault. Those stories are from my own life, but they are also social. In order to tell them, it requires bringing in these other people. You can’t write about them in a vacuum, even though that would be easier to manage in one’s present life. The pages that tell those stories are probably the hardest I’ve ever written.
But I was talking with my dad yesterday about the recognition of my parents’ mortality. I am really thankful to have had the incredibly difficult conversations that this book required before my parents died. I don’t know what it will be like to lose my mom. I think it’s going to hurt a lot. And I know that it hurt also to have these conversations. But I hope that the overall hurt of everything is lessened by the fact that we’ve talked these things through together. I think that we understand each other more truly and deeply than we did before. And I’m just incredibly grateful for her courage in that.
KA: How do you conceive of this book living, or how do you hope for this book to live?
HC: It always brings me great joy when another writer reads something that I’ve written and says, well, I had to put it down. I wanted to go write. I love it when that happens, but I think that it just so happens that I talk with a lot of writers, and so that’s the response that I hear. My actual hope for it is not that it necessarily causes people to go write, but that when they put the book down they might have an impulse towards perception and imagination and regard for the past that makes space for seeing something new, and to allow that to shape the present and perhaps future differently, whether personally or collectively. And that could be through art, that could be through friendship and or a difficult conversation. That could be through direct action, that could be through…it could be through so many modes! I hope that they’re all available.
KA: It models a posture of grace towards oneself and the people for whom grace might be required to continue to be in relation with.
HC: Including oneself.
KA: Including oneself. Yeah, absolutely. And when I say grace, I mean something that can’t be earned and something that isn’t beholden to ideas of commerce or deserve or owe. I mean grace that is contingent only on recognition of another person’s vital and complex interiority.
HC: There’s so many forces that are working right now to prevent us from seeing that in one another or within certain groups of people. I know that so much more is required, but I believe that recognition is required too.
KA: Absolutely. Just the irrevocability of the condition of humanity from anyone, you know what I mean? The idea that there is nothing that a person can be, say, or do that will forfeit their claim to humanity.
HC: I’m always so thankful for you Kaveh, to know that you are there on the other side of the page sometimes. It really is a joy.
The whole mess started when Owen was fired at the end of summer term. Estie had been right at thirty-six weeks and two days when he came home and announced that his position as an English professor at Norton College had been terminated. “Financial exigency,” he said, his eyes puffy. It was a good hour-and-fifteen-minute drive from Norton to Briarwood, where he and Estie lived, and Estie guessed he’d cried all the way home.
He spent the next thirty minutes hauling in boxes of books from his car and stacking them neatly in the closet of what was going to be the baby’s room, and the ten minutes after that cleaning up cat vomit. The cat, Herbert, disapproved of strong emotions.
“So what happens now?” Estie asked. “Do you look for another position?”
“I don’t know,” Owen said. “No. Not yet. They don’t post English jobs until October.”
Estie felt her stomach clench, or maybe that was just Braxton Hicks. It was the end of July, and the baby was due in late August. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Owen said again. “It just happened. I need time to think.”
Estie nodded, ignoring the baby’s kicks of protest against her ribs. The truth was, she’d been waiting for something like this to happen ever since she’d gotten pregnant, possibly even before. Estie knew she’d been lucky so far: the major disasters of her life up to this point—her parents’ divorce, the not-quite-breakup with her college boyfriend, Dan—had been relatively minor. But if reports of tornadoes and school shootings had taught her anything, it was that luck was fleeting and complacency dangerous: the other shoe was out there, dangling, ready to drop, and it was important not to be caught off guard. Except that Estie had been caught off guard. Owen losing his job felt like a failure of imagination on her part: it had never occurred to her that a tenured professor could be laid off. How had she not considered this possibility? Why had she not made any backup plans?
Then again, it wasn’t as if much had been going according to plan lately. Take, for instance, the pregnancy itself. Yes, Estie was glad she was pregnant—she was; she was really—but she’d always imagined that she would be the one setting the schedule, the one who would some day find herself weeping in the diaper aisle at Target, triggered by a passing stroller or the photo of some celebrity’s sleeping baby, and then rush home and declare it was time. Instead, it was Owen who had made the decision back in January, after they’d gone to one of Estie’s coworkers’ baby shower. The coworker, Jillian, was the receptionist at Big Earth, the artisan tile factory where Estie worked as a glazer, and she was the kind of person who emailed everyone photos of her positive pregnancy test, then separately cornered each of her coworkers and forced them to place a hand on her small mound of belly while, flushed with pride, she asked, “Can you feel the peanut kick? Now? And now?” When it had been Estie’s turn to feel the baby move, Jillian had guided her hand so far down along her abdomen that Estie’s fingers had brushed against the waistband of Jillian’s underwear. “Okay, I feel it, I feel it,” she’d said, even though the only thing she’d felt was Jillian’s hot skin. “She could’ve at least bought me dinner first,” Estie complained to her best friend, Alice, and Alice, who worked at a start-up in Chicago that was developing a tartar-detecting smart toothbrush, had laughed: “At least there’s only one of her,” she’d said. There were four pregnant women in Alice’s unit alone.
Jillian’s shower had been held at Precious Insights, a converted movie theater that specialized in big-screen 4D gender-determination ultrasounds that you watched from “luxurious stadium seating” while sipping mocktails from a sippy cup. According to Jillian, vanity ultrasounds were all the rage and women-only baby showers were passé, but then again, Jillian also liked wearing maternity tees that said things like “Don’t eat watermelon seeds” and “You’re kicking me, smalls.” Still, there were going to be cupcakes, so Estie had figured that she and Owen would spend a pleasant afternoon rolling their eyes at each other and feeling superior. And the afternoon had certainly started out that way, with Owen grimacing at the Precious Insights slogan, which was painted on the wall in a precious, impossible-to-miss script: “The Largest of Blessing’s Are Those That Are Small.” Nothing set Owen off like apostrophe errors in corporate logos. “See,” he said, pointing to the same error in the program the hostess handed them. “If you’re not careful, these mistakes just perpetuate themselves.”
They’d found seats in the right corner of the theater, near the emergency exit because you never knew, and looked on as Jillian hoisted herself up on the cot in the center of the room and hitched up her maternity blouse without hesitation. The ultrasound tech, a woman in blue scrubs and lots of blue eye shadow, smeared jelly on Jillian’s abdomen, which, unsheathed, looked plastic and fake, crisscrossed by pale stretch marks and so taut with baby that her belly button appeared to be turned inside out, like one of those pop-up timers people used to cook turkeys. Then the lights dimmed, Jillian and her husband clasped hands, and the Dolby Surround Sound speakers began blasting the whooshing of the baby’s heart into the observation area. A few seconds later, the large screen behind Jillian flickered to life and there was the baby in all its yellow three-dimensional glory. Next to Estie, Owen exhaled loudly, as if he were the one who was nervous.
“Here is Baby’s foot,” the ultrasound tech said, pointing. “Here are Baby’s little toes.” She moved the wand a little, then announced, voice bursting with pride, “And here’s Baby’s little boy part,” as if she’d just attached the penis to the baby herself.
Estie had expected Owen to make some sort of crack about the solemnity of it all, but all he did was lean closer and squeeze her knee. The tech slid the wand over a little more, and on the monitor, the baby’s blurry yellow face filled the screen, shifting in and out of focus as if he were pressing himself against a fleshy yellow wall, a tiny Han Solo trapped in carbonite. You’d make out the orbs of his eyes and his flat little baby nose, and then they would recede and melt into the background, or worse, transform into dark hollows as if the baby were all skull, as if he’d forgotten to grow muscle and skin. “It looks like an alien,” Estie started to say, but just then the baby yawned and rubbed his eyes with a small fist, looking as aggrieved as any human interrupted in the middle of a deep sleep.
“Wow,” Owen had whispered, his voice reverent. “I mean, wow.” And just like that, getting pregnant became yet another milestone in a long list of milestones that refused to unfold as seen on TV—a first kiss full of spit and onion rings, a first high school party without beer or weed, first-time sex without soft lighting or simultaneous orgasms. Instead of swelling violin music and a gentle baby wakeup call, what Estie had gotten was Owen shuffling her off to the bedroom the moment they got home, then undressing her from top to bottom, all business, no kissing. “Sheesh,” Estie had said, “what’s your hurry?” Her fingers were still sticky from the cupcakes, and there was a smudge of blue frosting at one corner of Owen’s mouth, but his urgency had made her feel irresistible—he was usually so calm, so measured in everything he did—and so she’d helped him with the clasp of her bra, with her zipper, with her socks, with his, and tried not to feel self-conscious and fat when he lifted her onto the bed and climbed on top of her.
“Feel my heart,” Owen had said once he was inside her, and Estie could feel it, beating rapidly against her own chest. She waited for Owen to pull out and put on a condom, and when he didn’t, she’d said, “Wait.” Owen paused, resting his full weight against her so that she was pinned. “I really really love you,” he told her. “We’re adults. It’s time.”
She didn’t know what she wanted, just what she ought to want.
“Be serious,” Estie said, squirming.
“Come on,” Owen whispered, still on top of her, his lips against her ear. “I want you. I want you and me and a baby of our own.”
Estie swallowed hard, suddenly aware of Owen’s bony ribs against her chest, his jutting hips against her inner thighs. She could have told him to stop, but doing so felt pointless—she didn’t know what she wanted, just what she ought to want. She was thirty-two. She was married and gainfully employed. She’d always figured she’d have a baby someday. She closed her eyes and tried to relax. Of course she wanted a baby. Of course she did. “Okay,” she told Owen. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
Even though only high school girls got pregnant the first time they had unprotected sex, Estie had gotten pregnant right away. “That’s some good sperm,” Owen said proudly when she showed him the first positive pregnancy test, and then the second and the third, because what if the first and second tests were defective? They waited until they had the doctor’s confirmation before telling Estie’s mother, who for months had been campaigning vigorously for Estie to have a baby before her eggs shriveled up and her uterus rotted, never mind that Estie’s brother, Sammy, had already provided her mother with two perfectly good grandchildren. “Nobody wants a perimenopausal mom,” Estie’s mother had pointed out helpfully time and again, although now that Estie was finally pregnant, instead of shrieking in delight or bursting into tears of joy, her mother contented herself with eyeing Estie’s waistline and saying, “I thought as much.” Then, after some further consideration, she added, “You’ll have to get rid of the cat. Cats suck the breath out of babies.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Estie said, or maybe even snapped, although later that evening, while Herbert was using the litter box, she surreptitiously asked Google, “Do cats suffocate babies?” and Google answered ominously, “Not purposely,” which wasn’t as comforting as it could have been.
But even though her mother’s reaction to the pregnancy had been disappointing, it had still been far better than Alice’s response, which had been a pause so pregnant it put Estie’s actual pregnancy to shame. Estie knew what the pause meant: Alice was trying to think of something nice to say. She’d done something similar back when Estie told her she was marrying Owen, but that had been because Alice had impossibly high standards for marriage, and so that silence had been easy to dismiss. Alice’s hesitation about the pregnancy, though, rattled Estie. She cleared her throat. “You’re not happy about the baby?”
“That isn’t it,” Alice said. “I just didn’t know you were trying.”
“We weren’t,” Estie said, “and then we were.”
“Huh,” Alice said. “That’s the biological imperative to reproduce for you. You couldn’t help it.”
“No, I could have,” Estie said. “It’s not like that.” She put a hand on her belly, which felt, at four weeks, no different than it ever had—soft and paunchy—and for a moment she wondered if maybe she was mistaken and she wasn’t pregnant after all. Please, she caught herself thinking, please. She didn’t let herself finish the thought, but after she hung up, she found herself taking the final pregnancy test in the four-pack she’d purchased, blushing in embarrassment when the second blue line showed almost immediately. She was still pregnant. There was no reason to think otherwise. The whole thing, she reminded herself, was going exactly according to plan.
After he finished stacking the boxes of books from his office in the nursery closet, an exhausted Owen told Estie, “I don’t think I can go to childbirth class. Not tonight. Tell them I’m sick?” Then he lay down on the couch, head down, arms and legs drawn inward, and fell asleep almost immediately, Herbert curled up behind his knees.
“Okay,” Estie said, mainly to herself. She considered staying home too, but that night’s topic was diaper changes, and those seemed important. Plus, she needed time to think, or to not think, or to do or not do something that would soothe the panic rising in her throat. Maybe a class full of pregnant women led by an instructor who kept reminding them to trust their Inner Wisdom was exactly what she needed.
Except that it apparently wasn’t. Class was held in a yoga studio with mirrors on two walls, which meant that the instructor, Rita, with her flowing skirts and jangly bracelets, spent most of class addressing her own reflection while the parents-to-be sat in a semicircle in front of her, bobbing up and down on giant inflatable balls. While Rita lectured about the evils of absorbent gel beads—“I’m not against Pampers or Huggies per se,” she explained—Estie tried to convince herself that Owen getting laid off was a good thing, a kind of parental leave that would enable him to be fully present for the birth and the first couple months of the baby’s life. This was not, she told herself, the beginning of a downward spiral that would have them living out of their car by Christmas. Her mom still lived in town. Her brother worked for Google. Nobody would let them starve. She forced herself to focus on Rita, who was passing out baby dolls to everyone. The doll she handed Estie was naked except for a diaper and made of yellowing plastic that made her appear jaundiced. Her hair was blond and matted, and her eyes didn’t shut properly, as if she instinctively understood that Estie wasn’t to be trusted.
Rita returned to the front of the classroom and clapped her hands sharply, then announced, “Rule number one: If there’s no changing table, place your baby on the floor. Babies can’t roll off the floor.”
Obediently, Estie heaved herself off her yoga ball and began the arduous process of getting down on her knees.
“Now remember—” Rita began, and that was when it happened: Estie, still making her way down to the floor, lost her balance and tipped forward—stupid shifting center of gravity—her knee landing squarely on the doll baby’s sternum. The doll baby crumpled with a high-pitched squeak, and the pressure of the escaping air launched her head across the room. The other parents-to-be gasped, then watched in horror as the head rolled to a stop at Rita’s feet. Estie watched in horror too, too mortified to laugh when Rita picked up the head and quipped, “Okay, start over. The actual first rule of parenting is: do not crush your baby.” She walked over to Estie and pried her trembling fingers off the doll’s torso so she could shove the baby’s head back onto her little stump of a neck. Then she straightened up and checked her reflection in one of the mirrors. “Reattaching limbs,” she cautioned, tucking a wayward curl behind her ear, “isn’t nearly this easy in real life.”
Estie knew that, and she also knew that a head wasn’t a limb, but she was too busy blushing and sweating to say anything. And that was pretty much how she spent the remainder of class: cringing and sweating and using a wet wipe to clean up the yellow mustard Rita had thoughtfully squeezed into each doll’s diaper in what she called “a touch of realism,” then cringing and sweating some more. When class finally—at long last—ended, Estie was the first one out the door, the first one screeching out of the yoga studio’s parking lot: she was going to have to find another childbirth class in another town.
Apparently having your husband get laid off and accidentally crushing a doll baby wasn’t portentous enough for one day.
AC blasting, she drove around in circles until she felt calm enough to go home, or at least calm enough to stop at the Creamery for some ice cream—two scoops of chocolate chip for her, a mint Oreo shake for Owen. She parked, then hoisted herself out of her car, and, because apparently having your husband get laid off and accidentally crushing a doll baby wasn’t portentous enough for one day, she spotted Penny Smilovitz standing three people ahead of her in line. Estie hadn’t seen Penny since their freshman year in college, but she still recognized her immediately in much the same way that she recognized her own foreshortened reflection in the funhouse at the annual Kiwanis Fair. The acne was gone, thank goodness, but Penny still had those liquid brown eyes and the nose that, during puberty, had broadened and lengthened at an alarming rate but had now finally settled into the right size for her face.
“Oh my God,” Estie said. “Penny.” Almost immediately, she wished she’d kept quiet. She wasn’t proud of the way she’d handled her friendship with Penny, a friendship she’d resisted for the first two months of ninth grade, put off by Penny’s frizzy hair, her braces, her giant grown-woman boobs. You had to dress for the job you wanted, not the job you had, and the job teenage Estie had wanted—being popular—didn’t allow for (and here the grown-up Estie had to wince, because there was no good way to put it) ugly friends. Then again, at fourteen Estie had been no prize herself—sallow and plain, with greasy bangs and cold sores that showed up like clockwork two days before her period—and it didn’t take her long to understand that high school was much easier to navigate with a partner at the ready for science lab, for gym class, for group projects, a partner who didn’t reek of sweat and cigarettes or spend most of class drawing lightning bolts on the soles of their shoes. And so she and Penny had settled into a friendship of sorts, an arrangement of convenience, maybe, which was fine. More than fine, actually, because going over to Penny’s to do things like bake cookies or thumb through the dirty parts of Penny’s mom’s romance novels turned out to be kind of fun, even if it hadn’t been the right kind of fun. And even that didn’t matter because, as Estie kept reminding herself, nobody actually wanted high school to be the best years of their life, not when there were a good sixty years to get through afterward. And so her arrangement with Penny had lasted right up until they’d graduated and gone to different colleges and “drifted apart”—which was how Estie liked to think of it—and the last Estie had heard, Penny had moved to California.
Except now Penny was back and standing in line for ice cream. “Oh my God, Estie,” she said, dropping back to stand beside her. “Look at you!” She gestured at Estie’s ginormous belly. “Do you know what you’re having?”
Estie did know. “A boy, thank God.”
Penny patted her own flat stomach. “I just hit twelve weeks, so we don’t know yet.”
“I swear,” said the ponytailed man who was eavesdropping behind them, “you pregnant women are everywhere.” He winked at Penny. “If only there were some kind of pill . . .”
“Har har,” Estie said, and Penny gave him a withering look, and apparently the shared bond of being pregnant among idiots trumped twelve years of silence. “It’s so weird to see you,” Penny said after the server handed them their ice cream, “and also not weird at all. We only moved back, like, two weeks ago.”
“That’s so great!” Estie said, although she wasn’t sure if it really was all that great. Standing next to Penny after all these years was making her feel dowdy and fat. Had she always been shorter than Penny? Had Penny always looked better in jeans? And then there was the matter of the square-jawed and massively-forearmed man who was saving Penny a seat at one of the few shady tables outside.
“Wow,” Estie said when Penny introduced the man as her husband, Jack, “you’re huge.”
“I know,” Penny said. “I thought it was cute, but now I’m going to have to push out his giant baby.” She pretended to shudder, and Jack rolled his eyes.
They spent the next few minutes exchanging headlines—Jack was an accountant, Penny worked at Briarwood Speech and Language out by the mall, and they’d just bought a house on the Old West Side, a neighborhood full of stately Victorians with gingerbread trim. “I’m at Big Earth,” Estie said when it was her turn. “And Owen is a professor at Norton. Or he was. He just got laid off.” She thought it was a good sign that she managed to say this last part without her voice cracking, although she did have to blink a few times when Penny said, “Oh no. Poor him. And poor you.”
“Oh, we’re fine,” Estie said, careful to keep her voice light. “He’ll find something else—there are, like, a million colleges between here and Detroit.” Then, as if suddenly remembering, she added, “Speaking of Owen, his ice cream is melting. So great to run into you. I’ll see you around?”
Penny nodded, and that would have been the end of it, but Jack had apparently never heard of Michigan invites and how everyone knew they were only for show, and so, just as Estie turned to leave, he pulled a pen and a crumpled receipt out of his pants pocket. “Wait a second,” he said, tearing the receipt in half. “You two should exchange phone numbers.”
Back in the duplex, Owen was still asleep, so Estie slid his shake into the freezer, then worked herself up into a state of righteous indignation on his behalf—because anger had to be better than panic—before calling Alice to fill her in. “All those weekends of grading,” she said, “and for what?”
“But I thought he had tenure,” Alice said.
“I know!” Estie said. “Can you believe it?”
She waited for Alice to say something else, something equivalent to Penny’s “Poor you,” or “I’m sorry,” or “Those assholes.” But instead, what Alice said was, “I didn’t think colleges worked like that.”
“Well, they do,” Estie told her. “They can lay you off if they run out of money.” She felt incandescent with rage, so much so that even the warm purring weight of Herbert on her chest was doing nothing to settle her down.
“Did they have to lay off a lot of people?” Alice asked.
“I don’t know. Probably? I didn’t think to ask.” Even Estie could hear the whine in her own voice. She loved Alice, her logic, her ability to advise Estie through flight delays and corrupted Word documents, but this—Owen losing his job—was different. There was no logic to it, at least no logic that didn’t involve moving numbers from one budget line to another. “I mean, we just found out.”
Alice was quiet for a few seconds. “I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
By then, it was too little, too late—everyone knew that a sorry you had to solicit didn’t really count—so Estie just said, “Thank you. I don’t think so.” And then, because she didn’t want Alice to hang up mad, she said, “At least Herbert is having a good day.” Alice was the one who had given her Herbert, the one who had driven all the way from Chicago to Briarwood with kitten Herbert in a soft-sided carrier after Dan, Estie’s college boyfriend, had ghosted Estie. Up until then, Estie hadn’t even known she’d wanted a cat, but after that first night of Herbert sleeping between her knees like a small, thrumming hot-water bottle, there had been no question she was keeping him. “How’d you know?” she’d asked Alice over breakfast, and Alice had shrugged: “I just did.”
Now, Estie held the phone to Herbert’s neck so that Alice could hear him purr, and maybe that in itself was enough, because by the time they’d hung up, Estie felt calmer. It wasn’t as if the world was ending. Somehow, she and Owen would be fine.
I’ve been a film buff since before I could read or write. One of my earliest memories is, at age five, sleeping in the back of our station wagon while my mother took in a midnight showing of Michael Cimino’s epic western (and epic flop) Heaven’s Gate at our local drive-in. Restless and uncomfortable, I’d emerge every so often to climb into the front seat and catch a few minutes of Kris Kristofferson, my first and longest celebrity crush. My early film buff status was baptized in the fire of that sprawling attempted masterpiece, which is most famous for the myths and yarns about how wrong everything went behind the scenes.
The novelist in me has always loved reading about the drama behind the films as much as I like watching the films themselves: directors with eccentric or risky practices, actors prone to diva fits and temper tantrums, method actors refusing to break character, ambitious locations where the terrain or the weather ultimately proved impossible to navigate—these just make for great stories and entertaining characters. Was everything permissible behind the scenes as long as it yielded magic on the screen? Like in love or war, it seems all was fair on the set, and whatever it took to get a great emotional performance or capture a perfect shot, the means justified the ends. With time and a slightly more evolved understanding of the actual damage this left on the humans involved, many of our beloved masterpieces remain in a bittersweet cloud, marked by excess, cruelty, or even abuse.
This is precisely the kind of behind-the-scenes drama I wanted to investigate when I began working on my novel Porthole, about a film maker who has come to a tipping point in her career because of her working methods and her complicated and messy relationships with actors and her crews. Her unyielding but often myopic artistic vision has led her to some considerable success, and some colossal failures as well—she can no longer run from the damage. I was interested in exploring this fine line between the eccentric and the extreme when it came to methods behind the camera. At what point does this kind of exacting vision tip over into failure: a project that can’t ever be completed, or which outstrips any ability to recoup its costs—either monetarily or metaphorically? What leads to a situation where the ambition of the vision ultimately destroys the possibility of it ever succeeding?
There is probably a reason that I stuck to writing on the page, rather than for the screen—there’s safety to the anonymity of the author versus the fame of the film auteur. But this list has a few books that capture the best of both those worlds. Several are beloved favorites mostly by women with women protagonists, though some came to me through recommendations from other enthusiasts. All of these books offer some compelling explorations of the drama and intrigue of filmmaking.
This magnificent story of a woman in search of her dead or presumed dead or walking-dead husband is set to the backdrop of a horror film festival in Cuba and is reminiscent of Brian De Palma at his high point. As the protagonist of The Third Hotel follows a ghost through the streets of Havana in her own kind of horror story, Van Den Berg investigates the horrors behind horror film history, the cultural inheritance of gendered violence in the genre, and the mixed bag of seduction and dread inherent in the form.
Focused more on the relationship between book publishing and television development, the protagonist of Colored Television is a novelist trying to ditch the hungry artist lifestyle and narrowminded gate-keeping of publishing in favor of a nearly-utopian hope of the streamable serial: the new television. Hoping to reach an audience beyond the white, liberal paradigm of publishing and finally make an income, she quickly learns Hollywood always has a few tricks up the sleeve. With Senna’s signature turn of phrase, and scathing cultural coinages, Colored Television exposes the latest version of artistic exploitation: corporate studios and streaming platforms, art made by and for the market-economy, and a wild west attitude to intellectual property.
Set in a near-future Los Angeles, an era of late-stage climate disintegration featuring synthetic water, perpetual wildfires, and sinister wellness cults doesn’t prevent Hollywood film-making from lurching forward like an undead beast as the rest of the world burns. Something New Under the Sun follows a novelist working on the adaptation of one of his books for a film. Relegated to gopher, he is forced to watch every aspect of the work he created disappear in production. In flight from wildfires, he finds himself on a road trip with a messy starlet, whose prepper paranoia pans out amid Twelve Monkeys-esque anarchist plot twists in a mycelial web of global greed, artistic vacancy, and dystopian collapse.
The protagonist of Muriel Spark’s The Public Image is a mousy actress called Annabel who, despite a lack of talent, has managed to carve out a successful career on the strength of a public image (an infantilizing but hyper-sexualized typecasting) imposed on her by studio executives. Annabel is essentially a walking void, but things get complicated when her husband, a failed actor-turned-pretentious auteur, filled with resentment, casts her in his own film with a long game of ruining her public image. As with any Muriel Spark novel, just when you think things are dark, they go much darker, but you can never underestimate a dippy underdog surrounded by petty would-be patriarchs, and Annabel does not disappoint.
Dana Spiotta’s Innocents and Others centers a pair of female filmmakers, Meadow and Carrie, whose long-standing friendship must endure the pressure-cooker of corporatized filmmaking as they grow into their very different film careers. Peppered with film history and the anxiety of influence—Orson Welles looms large—the book uses formal experimentation in the flavor of cinematic montage to mimic the technological immersion of modern filmmaking, and the fragmented modes of composition and communication it demands. Spiotta challenges any simple, singular category of woman-as-artist and maker, highlighting nuanced differences in aesthetic, ideology, and methodology for the two friends, and a difference in their feminisms, and strategies for navigating the male-dominated industry.
Acclaimed French writer Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden—the first in a trilogy of books focused on women in art and performance—is partly an auto-fiction focused on her obsession with the American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden, whose career and interpersonal dramas could easily have been a model for Muriel Spark’s The Public Image. Loden began as a bombshell-ingenue, whose glamorous Hollywood marriage to Elia Kazan was underpinned with insecurities and resentments. Léger focuses on Loden’s pivot from a trade in her sexuality toward a career behind the scenes. We see the ambiguities and unexpected moments that led to the making of her cinema verité cult classic Wanda. Weaving biography, film criticism and imaginative flights of fancy that take readers not just into the mind of Loden but into the mind of her character Wanda, Léger creates an intimate but Cubist portrait of an often overlooked artist.
Quebecois artist and filmmaker Valérie Bah brings the funny and fierce with their award-winning first novel Subterrane, set in fanciful New Stockholm, a Janus-faced city of bourgeois delights and post-industrial low-income wastes. It is these zones of exclusionary inclusion where protagonist Zeynab attempts to shoot their state-funded but relentlessly avant-garde documentary. In the margins, Zeynab finds a vibrant collective of artists, activists, philosophers, and holistic separatists centering Black and Queer voices. Bah uses her filmmaker’s eye to spotlight precisely those communities who get bracketed, but nonetheless resiliently maintain their esoteric and learnéd revolutionary scheming despite a dystopian squeeze, and the soul-killing drudgery of urban Renaissance for the few, rather than the many. A must read for the hunger artists looking for a witty and brilliant fix that doesn’t skimp on cultural critique.
What could I say about Chris Kraus’s classic Aliens and Anorexia that hasn’t already been said by Chris Kraus in Aliens and Anorexia? In her renowned third book, Kraus adds film-maker/film-theorist to the list of her other genre colliding monikers as she recounts an attempt to get her experimental film “Gravity & Grace” distributed and shown at the Berlin Film Festival. Self-centering (and self-decentering), this exploration of alienation in artistic ambition, in all possible connotations of “alien,” also manages to uplift “anorexia” to the conceptual and psychological stature of Deleuzean “schizophrenia,” for one of the earliest efforts to complicate the stigmatized (with just a hint of misogyny) condition.
For these women, the personal and political are intertwined.
Almost a decade ago, I fell in love with reading memoirs at a Life Writing class in college. We spent a semester around a circular desk discussing memoirs that I enthusiastically devoured. Since then, I’ve continued to reach toward memoirs to read about different perspectives and lived experiences, especially those written by women. The searing honesty and vulnerability with which women chronicle a specific period of their lives captivate and even nourish me.
The global rise of authoritarianism and Trump administration’s crackdown on free speech and immigration in the US made me reach for memoirs by women that grapple with political upheavals around the globe. In these books, I sought knowledge and solace from women who have lived through and assessed the male-dominated business of authoritarianism, war, occupation, and other forms of political violence.
The authors in this list have experienced or witnessed myriad hardships created by those in power, including state-sanctioned censorship, discrimination, and violence. Notably, these memoirists, in one way or another, are considered the “other” due to not only their gender but also ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality, offering unique perspectives that are often excluded in the Western canon.
Weaving political events and personal histories, these women bear witness to the political unrest that upended their lives and advocate for the disenfranchised in their families, communities, and countries. They offer an invaluable lens through which we can examine our current political turmoil.
Nobel laureate, lawyer, writer, and former judge Shirin Ebadi writes of her unconventional upbringing, marriage and family life, faith, and experiences as one of the first female judges in Iran. With vivid details, she describes the circumstances and ideals that led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979. A former supporter of the Revolution, she quickly became disenchanted with the new authoritarian regime that replaced the Shah, crushing dissidents through wrongful detentions and executions without any due process. Stripped of her role as a judge due to the new government’s gender-based discrimination, Ebadi became a staunch advocate for the oppressed, and in the face of political persecution, remained steadfast in her commitment to justice.
Ebadi fought a lengthy legal battle to have this memoir published in the US since American trade laws restrict writers from embargoed countries from publishing their works. Since 2009, she has been living in exile in London.
Zara Chowdhary takes the reader to the Ahmedabad of her girlhood in early 2002, when a train fire killed Hindu right-wing passengers in India. The chief minister of Gujarat at the time, Narendra Modi, and his political party rushed to describe it as an “act of terror,” instigating the massacre of over a thousand Muslims across the state. Many scholars would later describe this as a pogrom, state terrorism, and genocide. Like other Muslims in the state, Chowdhary and her family found themselves under a three-month siege as their Hindu neighbors turned into angry mobs, hunting, looting, raping, and massacring the country’s Muslim citizens.
In The Lucky Ones, Chowdharyexplores how the foundations of an authoritarian nation-state are laid down and furthered through its failure to protect its minorities. She offers essential context for understanding the contemporary political upheavals in India as well as the global rise of fascism.
In Baghdad Diaries, Nuha Al-Radi describes the horrors of living through the first Gulf War and its aftermath. Pieced together entirely through Al-Radi’s diary entries, this memoir creates an immediacy that transports the reader to Iraq as it was being bombed by a 42-country coalition led by the US following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Al-Radi documents the extreme poverty, shortages of medical supplies, and diseases that plagued the Iraqi civilians due to the UN embargo on their country, frequently questioning how the world could look away from their pain.
Filled with witty and unfiltered observations, her diary entries coalesce into a searing testimony of the high human costs of war. As a famed painter, sculptor, and ceramist, she channeled her trauma into her art. Shortly after her memoir was published, Al-Radi passed away from leukemia that she believed was caused by the depleted uranium left over from the war.
In this raw memoir, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio recounts not only her own experiences as a DACA recipient and daughter of undocumented parents, but also stories of other undocumented immigrants in various parts of the US, including Staten Island, New York, and Miami, Florida. Her stories shed light on the various abuses undocumented people face on a daily basis, thereby humanizing and highlighting the resilience of an extremely vulnerable group that is otherwise lumped together by all sides in the political sphere.
The author, who spent most of her childhood in the US, depicts how she and her family dealt with the changing political landscape in the country, spanning from the post-9/11 War on Terror era to the first Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Born in exile to a South African guerrilla father, Sisonke Msimang chronicles a life spent constantly on the move, traveling from Zambia to Kenya to Canada and then to the United States before she finally finds her way back home to the new post-apartheid South Africa. She writes of her personal struggles that are strongly linked to the wider political landscape she finds herself in around the globe.
Her unique family background ensures that she is never too far away from politics, but she has her political awakening in the US, where she learns firsthand the country’s unique form of racism. This sociopolitical consciousness follows her to South Africa where racism and xenophobia still find a home post-apartheid, as she gradually becomes disillusioned with the political party she once championed. Msimang’s ability to self-reflect about her privileges stands out the most.
In this lyrical and genre-bending memoir, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Palestinian refugees, explores her family history that is inextricably linked with the occupation of her ancestral homeland. Painful memories resurface when she is hospitalized due to an eating disorder, driving her to unearth and piece together her lineage fractured by multigenerational displacement.
With the rhythm of a poet and meticulousness of a journalist, Aziza weaves her struggles with anorexia together with the statelessness that still haunts her and her family. She peppers her narrative with citations from the works of poets and scholars, adding layers and giving texture to this portrait of a people displaced by a political movement that hinges on their erasure.
Leila Ahmed begins her memoir with an overview of the historical events that shaped the Egypt of her childhood. She writes of the ideals that led to the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 and what it was like to live through the aftermath of it. Gamal Abdel Nasser, a revolutionary turned president of Egypt, normalized political repression that directly affected Ahmed and her family. She describes a specific period of her life as “crucible years” filled with political upheavals that heavily influenced her life.
A Border Passage is less confessional, more academic (yet engrossing), perhaps owing to Ahmed’s background in academia: She is a scholar who became the first professor of women’s studies in religion at Harvard Divinity School, where she still teaches.
Social activist and writer Gita Ramaswamy writes a compelling account of how, despite belonging to an upper-caste, privileged family in India, she was drawn to the ideals of the Naxalite movement. She joined the Communist Party of India and was forced to go underground when the country’s then-Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency, resulting in widespread surveillance, imprisonment, torture, and even extra-judicial killings of Naxalites.
Ramaswamy also reveals how she later became disillusioned with the party as its leaders became dogmatic, hypocritical, and power-hungry. After leaving the party, she became an activist for Dalit rights, supporting them in their struggle to reclaim land, secure fair wages, and gain freedom from bonded labor.
Aptly titled, Linda Sarsour’s We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders is a memoir that is also a call to action. A Brooklyn native of Palestinian descent, Sarsour depicts the trauma that stems from a family’s displacement by colonialism. As a Muslim, she recounts the early days of the War on Terror and its effects on the Muslim community in the US.
Sarsour’s detailed account of her evolution as a community organizer and political activist who helped Arab and Muslim men facing detentions, deportations, and disappearances across the country in the early days after 9/11 makes for a riveting read. Years later, she rose to prominence as one of the organizers and National Co-Chairs of the Women’s March held the day after Donald Trump’s first inauguration in 2017.
Yeonmi Park, one of North Korea’s most famous defectors, details a harrowing account of her life in her native land, where the vast majority live in poverty, starvation, and constant surveillance. The author describes how the smallest infraction could land one in labor camps by an authoritarian regime that categorizes people by a caste system based on their family’s loyalty to the “Great Leader.”
With immense bravery, Park recounts how she and her mother fled this brutal regime only to be trafficked and sold into sexual slavery in China before eventually finding their challenging way to freedom in South Korea. Park, who has found her home in the US, is a renowned activist today.
Jennifer is a storyteller with a gift for making associative connections between time, place, memory, and land. In Nightshining—the second in her diptych of memoirs that began with The Eighth Moon—she weaves personal and generational grief, mid-century weather experiments, community resilience, and many other threads into a multi-layered tapestry of a place and the histories that have shaped it.
After her basement in Margaretville, New York, fills with water from a burst creek and her town is deemed a federal disaster area, Jennifer discovers a bizarre connection between the catastrophic 1950 “Rainmaker’s Flood” and geoengineering experiments conducted in her town by Kurt Vonnegut’s scientist brother, Bernard, and the chemist and meteorologist, Vince Schaefer—two men determined to control the weather.
Jennifer also examines the loss of her father—a man dedicated to a utopian vision of cooperative society—the climate crisis, the question of who is asked to sacrifice what to whom, and finding community with human and other-than-human beings.
In reading it, I was struck by the timeliness (and timelessness) of Nightshining, much of which is set during the first term of President Trump. Jennifer contends with legacies of genocide and environmental manipulation as political polarization, global warming, and the COVID-19 pandemic rewrite the landscape. She writes, “all the smoke and war here. It feels like a portent, or a palimpsest whose traces you can read into this place.”
This interview is a composite of two conversations, the first over Zoom and the second at a book tour event at Split Rock Books in my hometown of Cold Spring, NY.
A Jack-in-the-pulpit is an elusive pitcher-shaped spring ephemeral wildflower.
Summer J. Hart:You open Nightshining with this paragraph: “You and I are with Iris and her baby on a cliff edge in the Catskills as I tell this story. Farm fields quilt the valley below. Looking down on it, other bluffs like this, long and flat, frame the view. I imagine the mountains all filled in and the land a thousand feet higher in the air, as if we are all floating, levitating together.”
I’m struck most by your use of collective pronouns.
Jennifer Kabat: The collective pronouns are intentional. I wrote that scene hoping it would feel cinematic because it’s on high. The opening of The Eighth Moon has a similarly zoomed-out-from-on-high sense to watch this shootout in a corral in drag. Here, I wanted this idea of us all being together in nature. That was also a pandemic experience. What I loved about the pandemic was that nature was no longer a white place. It wasn’t about one’s private experience; everybody was in nature together. I’m opposed to the white guy and his shining, romantic experience of nature—like the Emerson and Thoreau or Casper David Friedrich kind of experience—that is bullshit. I wanted a feeling of “us” and for it to be weird and strange. I use inclusive pronouns throughout the book to build that sense of collectivity. Writing almost feels like the fine point of neoliberal activity because you do it by yourself. But what I yearn for is collectivity—the shared and the social—the social part of socialism.
SJH: Much of this book is about absence. You describe your father not only as a powerful advocate for cooperative energy, but also as vapor, smoke, a trick of light, a ghost, snow, and blue butterflies. He is a man who spends his daughter’s childhood writing letters from the sky.
Do you see your father’s work as an act of love? If so, for whom?
JK: That is an amazing question and a beautiful reading of my dad.
I’m opposed to the white guy and his shining, romantic experience of nature. I wanted a feeling of ‘us.’
For me, he was this person who became a kind of ghost, who was with me after he died. We had this beautiful in-death relationship. I was lucky I didn’t fight it. I was lucky that he stayed with me. It’s one of those experiences where I have a hard time putting it into language because it sounds crazy. The rationalist language of my upbringing doesn’t have a voice for those experiences. I do think my dad’s work was about love. It was also problematic. He was a person of a certain era, you know, and throughout U.S. history, all the utopian dreams have had dark sides.
Capitalism also failed my father in every way it could. As a child, he lost everything. He suffered from antisemitism. A cross was burned on his lawn. His family lost their home, and he moved into his grandparents’ unheated attic when he was eight. His mother was institutionalized. He never talked about his childhood with me. He went to school on a scholarship and dedicated his life to cooperatives, which was both an evasion of family life, because he wasn’t there, and a deep belief that the world could be a better place with workarounds to capitalism. I found in his papers a speech that he gave in the eighties against individualism and the growing yuppie era. At the end, he quotes a letter I wrote him from summer camp. It was amazing to find myself in a speech he gave about the idea of us being better together. So, I do think it was love.
SJH:Jonathan Lethem writes, “Nightshining sifts a riveting exposé of the Cold War technocratic fantasy-state through lyrical family memoir …”
Do you think of this book as an exposé? If so, what did you expose?
JK: You know, I never thought of it as an exposé, partly because to me it feels like an essay. I go to an archive, then I respond to the archive. When the word exposé was used, I was like, wow, is it an exposé? We live in this moment where Marjorie Taylor Greene can tweet about how Democrats can control the weather. She’s not right, but she’s also not wrong. She’s batshit crazy, but the government can in some ways control the weather. Not how she thinks—it can’t prevent a hurricane. In my town, the government took what had been developed as a Cold War weapon by General Electric and used it at the wrong moment, which caused a devastating flood.
I was also grappling with the language of modernism and rationalism, and this world of pure science where Bernard Vonnegut and Vince Schaefer existed. Their work had no ramifications other than the pleasure of exploration, which is so colonial.
SJH: At first, I thought, these are brilliant guys. They’re conducting experiments to stop a drought. They’ll save people from dying in wars. They, too, are working for the greater good. Then, it became a sort of villainy. I was like, are they villains?
JK: Bernard is my bad guy. Vince is heroic. The only sympathy I have for Bernard comes from his brother and the deep love that Kurt had for him. Their mother committed suicide. Everyone thought Kurt was dead in Dresden. I can kind of understand, given that background, how he might have thought using weather to stop war was logical.
Vince loved being outside. To have spent enough time observing hemlocks and pine trees to realize that they exhale and that transpiration is a way to test for ozone is amazing.
To realize the same logic behind seeding clouds with silver iodide was poisoning the world through leaded car exhaust, and to dedicate his life to campaigning against leaded fuel, was beautiful. Then something dark happens. The Defense Department learns about this technology and takes it.
We’re a country that has used weather for war. We’re also a country that developed nuclear weapons, which create their own clouds. So, you know, basically the things that I expose are the ways research, defense spending, and dreams of a better world are tied together. There’s no way to get through this moment, through climate change, without sacrifices. The U.S. and many European countries have benefited from the extractive industries that created the crisis. We’re not talking about who is sacrificing. I live in a community that was sacrificed for the greater good.
SJH:People in your community watched as their homes were bulldozed because New York City needed water.
JK: “We have it. We give it to them,” one person who lost his home said about the water. “You can’t stand in the way of progress,” someone said in news footage just before his home was torn down for the reservoir. It’s profound living in a place where the trauma of being separated from the land that you identify with is carried and held alive. It’s not something that most people in this country have. Europeans came here with the idea that land is ahistorical. When it’s ahistorical, there’s no connection to place and no connection to that place’s meaning. It’s moving to live in a place that holds its histories tightly.
SJH:A palimpsest of memory, place, trauma, sacrifice, resilience, and …
JK: Love.
SJH:“I think about how the Rainmaker’s Flood happens in November 1950, when all time becomes present tense.”
Can you talk about this sentence?
JK: My husband, David, and I were hiking in winter, and it’d been raining. It’s warm. Winter isn’t winter anymore because we’re so far into climate change. So, the present is already crazily altered.
He tells me about this moment in 1950, where all time is declared the present. It has something to do with radiation and atomic testing. History ends because we can destroy the world, and time ends in terms of being able to carbon date things. Then there is this flood in my town.
That moment is also about arriving at a tipping point. At the same time, I’m thinking about club moss, which I love. They look like little fir trees. They aren’t mosses at all but are related to some of the very first plants on Earth. They have a very complex sex life, taking years to reproduce, and because their sex life is so tricky, they can replicate themselves by throwing out an arm.
SJH: You write beautifully about the flora and fauna of the Catskills. You describe the people in Margaretville with equal affection. While writing Nightshining, did your idea of community evolve?
JK: Yes. The backstory is, I wrote a novel that failed, and I turned it into two memoirs. My parents were dying and I wanted to write about the meaning in that loss. They were deeply committed to the public good and modernism.
Europeans came here with the idea that land is ahistorical. When it’s ahistorical, there’s no connection to place.
This book is also a way for me to write about the climate crisis because the geoengineering experiments conducted in my community are like what is being done to mitigate the climate crisis. There’s very little difference between cloud brightening schemes—where you put iodide in the clouds to make more clouds—and the kinds of floods geoengineering—rainmaking—causes. It’s the same technology. As I was writing, my sense of the community that I’m committed to expanded.
SJH:The river is alive. Everything’s connected. Everything’s meandering.
JK: It’s all hydrology. Hydrology and club moss.
I think also when you live in a place, you develop relationships with things in your environment. This feels true for me with the plants that I encounter. There’s this kind of magic hemlock forest that I live on the edge of. When you observe another creature intimately, it becomes a familiar. Like the phoebe nesting under my deck. Because I have a Nest Cam, I’ve formed a deep intimacy with her. She sleeps in her nest overnight. She settles in at 7:45 pm and leaves at 5:40 am.
SJH:I think we are all so isolated these days. There’s sort of a plague of loneliness—at least in my family—and especially during the pandemic. But not me, I think, because I have horses and art and walks in the woods, and you know, I’m talking to my ghosts, and I feel like I have this weird …
JK: Community.
SJH:I tracked 77 instances of the word “blue” in Nightshining. My favorites are: “a blue I learn that if not for vapor, for aerosols, would be black;” “Impossible blue;” “Blue of disaster;” “Blue of distance—of breathing trees;” “Even the blue, blue sky this day foreshadows darkness;” and “Karner blue.”
Can we talk about color as a throughline?
JK: Blue is an atmospheric color. Blue is often a figment of our imagination, too, when you think about it. Bluebirds are actually black. It’s just a trick of the light that we see them as blue. I was using this vaporous sky as a theme. And there’s also the endangered Karner blue butterfly. You probably have little blue butterflies around. To me, they’re indistinguishable from the Karner blue. I don’t know how Nabokov recognized that Karner blues are a different species, but he did, and they inhabit the same landscape where cloudseeding was developed.
I wanted to capture color as a way of being evocative. In The Eighth Moon, everything begins brown. There’s a drought—all is amber and earth. For Nightshining, I used blue because it feels like air and the atmosphere, and how we see distance. Blue is created either by absence or by various vapors in the air that reflect light back. Smoke will appear blue.
Of course, I was writing this during the pandemic, so we were all thinking about aerosols—these microns. I started thinking about them in terms of smoke and all these other things, and it became very rich for me. It was like this moment kind of doubled with our historic moment.
We are also in the Pyrocene, so we live with smoke all the time.
SJH:Blue has a quality of childhood nostalgia. Like the idea of the color of water.
JK: Or even the sky. Do you remember drawing the sky with Crayola crayons? I always used teal.
SJH: I read this poem called “Greensickness” by Laurel Chen, and it has almost the same sort of saturation of green as your blues, some of which are filled with loss, like the blue window that your father looks out of while flying somewhere. In this poem, the green of grief is agonizingly green.
JK:Nightshining is also a book of grief. I don’t like to ascribe emotions to colors because I think our perceptions of color are culturally bound. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how blue exists on screens and how neoliberal that is.
SJH: In The Eighth Moon, you described time held in lichen and in the bodies of efts. In Nightshining, you write about “Biblical time,” “redwood time,” and “glacial time.” But modernity and progress are thought to follow linear time.
Can you talk about the relationship between our varied experiences of time and historical progress?
JK: Well, linear time is a construction. The lived experience of time is cyclical. Linear time is based on this idea of the enlightenment and modernism that believes in progress, and progress believes we’re on a line, always improving. Like calendar time, our way of thinking is tied to that notion of chronology, but it’s a fiction, and it comes bound with violence. When you believe in that kind of progress, you believe the world is ordained. Once you have that kind of logic, you can believe that Indigenous Americans or Black Americans are less entitled to full and meaningful lives than white Americans, because they deserve to be where they are. That’s progress. There are all sorts of myths of power and about the way the world should be. I wanted to write against that.
I used blue because it feels like air and the atmosphere, and how we see distance.
When you live somewhere for a while, you experience different scales of time held in that place. When your street changes, you hold the old memory. I love the idea of time held in space becoming expansive. Like, oh, I live in this place where there was a climate collapse 380 million years ago.
SJH:And that collapse was, in a way, progress. These ferns fixed the oxygen, and it caused this massive extinction event.
JK: Which made a world in which we could exist.
SJH:Your father was a member of many political organizations—some seemingly contradictory.
What has this taught you about patriotism? Especially now?
JK: It’s an interesting moment—when things seem so dire—to ask what patriotism can look like. And, to think about my dad, who wasn’t perfect, but I share many of his values. It’s like, in looking at my parents’ lives and their choices, I’m seeking a model for how to be a citizen now. What would it mean to say I’m patriotic? In my volunteer fire department, I have to say the Pledge of Allegiance, which I find strange, but less so now than I used to. A pledge doesn’t mean it’s true. A pledge means it’s something you would like to be true. I would like this country to be full of equality. It’s not true, but I want it to be.
I realized in writing The Eighth Moon that my rage about America and my neighbors’ rage are the same rage, expressed in different ways. Now I just wonder if somebody is going to come for me. It’s kind of this weird fear I have. I don’t know if you have this kind of epigenetic trauma, but I think I do. You know, my dad’s family escaped pogroms. There’s a part of me where somehow that fear is baked in. People react to trauma. React around it. Our wiring changes.
SJH:Bodies remember. I think of generational or inherited trauma as sort of like how the offspring of crows recognize their parents’ enemies.
JK: I would like to be a crow.
SJH:I would like you to be a crow.
JK: Can I just ask you, what bird would you be?
SJH:I think I am also a crow.
JK: As a writer right now, I feel scared. I’m political and open about being a socialist, and I live in a small community. I’ve been thinking a lot about things like freedom of speech, which I took for granted, but feels tenuous right now. I think it’s important to be patriotic. There was a beautiful moment last summer when I was at a fire call. A milk truck had crashed. If a milk truck crashes on a two-lane state highway, you’re going to be there for six hours. While I was directing traffic, a guy who’d been in the fire department for 50 years was like, “I read your book.” I asked, “What do you think?” He said, “Well, I finished it. That bit where you wrote about the pledge … I’ve been thinking that for years.” I was like, “Okay, my work here is done.”
SJH:And so, our work here is also done. Thank you so much for talking with me.
JK: I feel so lucky. The only thing that would make me feel luckier is if we were looking at Jack-in-the-pulpits together.
The summer we move into the crumbling mother-in-law suite, my daughter becomes fascinated with origami. It starts with a boat, then she graduates to other critters, and soon dozens and dozens of fortune tellers are strewn about the suite we rent for the summer. She writes esoteric phrases in place of the fortunes I remember from my childhood which focused on the possible attractiveness—or not—of a future husband or the size and quality of one’s house, hut, or mansion. One of her fortune panels reads plainly, “Let it go,” in curly, girlish script. This might be a Frozen reference but it’s also uncannily sage advice.
A year before our summer of fortune tellers, Amy tells me she will be on the school news with her guidance counselor. On the news, she will teach the other students how to make a paper fortune that contains different strategies to help them feel better when they are anxious or upset. But this time, her fortune-making is not as structured. This summer, her fortune-telling starts as a simple game to pass the time. We fold and fold as the clock ticks us deeper into summer, deeper into our unknown.
We rent the mother-in-law suite after secretly selling our blue house, and predictably, it is often stuffy due to the sweltering Florida heat. The place is just about to turn one-hundred and you can smell the years of cigarette tar encrusted onto the walls. So much tar in so much heat that eventually it drips down the walls, like blood from an old wound. A shared chlorinated pool sits between the French doors of the suite and the main house. The big rental house is rarely occupied, and when it is, the occupants don’t hang out by the pool much. At least one of the rotating cast of families seems unpleasantly surprised that there are people living in the backyard, though we try our best to be inconspicuous. One family piles black trash bags by the pool in a futile attempt to eradicate the bedbugs their daughter brought from her college dorm room. Between our two families, just that patch of stagnant water. A floatie continues its slow spin, an aimless raft waiting for someone to climb aboard.
To kill time, Amy and I head to the nearest air-conditioned book store. There, we come across a book with origami tutorials. The origami book is what ignites her renewed desire to create a near infinite array of folded creatures and fortune tellers. Like any story, a fortune begins as a blank page. Once crafted, written, and read, it becomes infused with meaning.
Back in the suite where tar and sweat still permeate the room, we hear the drone of my husband on the telephone working at the six-foot folding table in the lofted bedroom. He sits crooked, using the spring-mattressed bed as his chair, a posture that will later cause him pain. I cut up pieces of construction paper into squares so we can begin folding the origami. We make beavers and otters and roses. The instructions for the folds prove to be daunting. One otter looks more froggish than otter-like, one rose has a squashed side. Amy becomes frustrated at the imperfections, her fingers creasing the paper with a tense determination. Time and time again she goes back to the flower-like fortune tellers until she can nearly make one with her eyes closed. I ask her to teach me how to make one and she does so with surprising patience. “First like this. Then fold here,” she grabs my work-in-progress and flips it right-side-up as I fumble through memories of my own childhood creases. By the evening, a dozen of them are lined up on her digital piano’s matte black top. Finally there are so many we run out of room on the piano, so she makes an origami cup in which to put all of her origami fortunes. Folds within folds.
By mid-July, time in the mother-in-law suite slows to a stop. It has been a few weeks since I shoved the last of our belongings—high-heeled work shoes, clothes that didn’t fit in our suitcases, and unwanted dolls—into the trash bins outside the blue house. We’d been running out of time—the new owners would need the keys and we were due at the brokerage office. We’d been running—an ultra-marathon of police reports, hearings, visa paperwork, getting the family dog certified to travel, booking rental houses, and finally downsizing and selling the last of our things. When selling was too slow, we started giving. Then time ran out and everything became trash. There was a mandatory sequence of steps that followed a familiar logic: getting things done. But in the mother-in-law suite, all that is certain is the precariousness of forward motion: that a decision has been made and a swift cut followed. We are living in the interim—a lull between synapse firing, resulting thought, and action. The suite itself is a type of liminal space where all that exists is a summer, hot and tedious and barren. A summer like an enormous, pendulous mass. Like something about to burst. A cut before the blood comes.
I cut up pieces of construction paper into squares so we can begin folding the origami.
We make do with whatever entertainment we can find in between my hushed phone calls to airlines, my spreadsheet budgeting, all of which color the days before our final leap from one continent to the next. Between bouts of origami-making and sitting poolside by hordes of mosquitoes that skitter across the surface of the water, we take walks around a block of suburbia in a neighborhood so affluent we only ever see professional dog-walkers. Even the origami starts to grow tiresome, but Amy keeps folding, perfecting the petals of the roses and folding two papers at once so that each flower shows two colors. When the tedium hits a fever pitch, I grab one of her blank fortunes and sit down at the round kitchen table that doubles as a desk.
“I bet we can turn this into a story machine,” I say conspiratorially. “We can turn this one fortune into one hundred stories!”
She stifles a laugh and looks at me skeptically. That okay-mom-sure-you-can look.
Unfurled, a fortune is just a piece of paper with compartments for words and numbers. It is an innocuous object—a type of mirror onto which we project ourselves, with all of our expectations and aspirations, fears and apprehensions. Our visions of our future selves appear there, unscathed, heroic even. All of our complex problems are distilled into manageable archetypes. We twist and reframe the narrative shown by the fortunes, whether they are tarot cards, tea leaves, or folded paper, to mirror our hopes and neuroses, wishes and doubts.
On the outermost petals of the paper, I write the beginnings of sentences: “the dog,” “many pigs,” “two sad people,” and lastly, “one sad pony.” Inside these petals, the panel is split in two, totaling eight options for the next segment of sentence. Onto these I wrote verbs like “skateboarded,” “snored loudly,” “cooked,” or “skipped happily.” Then we open up the flower-shaped fortune and write along the triangular, splayed open petals, eight more phrases, each containing an adverb, so that we can situate our characters. Behind, inside, on top of. Underwater. In the center of the flower, I write eight more numbered phrases, this time focusing on a sense of place, whether abstract or palpable. A scary ice cream shop, a pink sky, a cold house.
I explain to her that from these petals we can make up silly sentences. “All you have to do is pick four numbers,” I explain.
“Four,” she says.
“Ok, ‘The sad pony…’”
“Four!”
“’The sad pony plopped…”
“Six!”
“’The sad pony plopped inside of …”
“Seven!”
“’The sad pony plopped inside of the dinosaur’s mouth!”
We twist and reframe the narrative shown by the fortunes.
Amy giggles. We tell each other lots of stories this way. We dub these fortune tellers story machines. Then we make another machine with as many variables as the first one. She asks me how many stories we can tell altogether. I pull up the calculator on my phone and dig into my foggy middle school memory of factorials. Using the current story machines we could make millions of stories.
I write it on the notebook paper’s header. A million stories.
As a joke I add, “By Mom.”
But the stories were there all along, ours for the taking.
Years before we sold the blue house, my husband and I found ourselves sitting across from our friends at a new year’s eve party where a hush had fallen over us. They brought each of us into their game room, away from the noise of the party, their faces almost comically intense. Carlos shuffled the cards. Heather peered curiously from under her waterfall of strawberry-blonde hair. Our host shuffled a deck of tarot cards for what, in my tipsy state, seemed like five whole minutes. Then he asked us to cut the deck. I cut once, then my husband. He laid out three cards with his long finger-nailed hands and sighed. I’m not sure if the sigh was an expression of his own anxiety—(should I tell them what they want to hear? the sigh seemed to say)—or what he saw in the cards splayed before him. He’d pulled the Nine of Wands, with an image of a worried male figure holding on to a staff, eight more staves visible in the background. He explained simply that, the problems we’d faced before, we’d have to face again—but we’d be better equipped this time.
We left and rejoined the rest of our friends, brushing off the cards as just another party game, the momentary quiet vanishing behind us. But I knew the problem represented by all those staves. It never seemed to go away no matter how much I prayed for it to be neatly stored away and forgotten, like a small, inconspicuous deck of cards. A sort of anxiety settled over everything like fine dust. Sundays were the worst. Each Sunday in the blue house, Amy awoke early. I made her breakfast and packed a bag with everything she would need for the day. We waited, both of us tense—I stood at the kitchen sink, nervously scrubbing a dish. She sat across from me, eating a piece of toast or drinking a glass of orange juice. Every few minutes, I glanced out of the bay window that framed our living room. Her father would finally arrive in a white sedan or a gray SUV, or some rental—whichever car hadn’t yet met its violent end—and I would strap on her court-mandated GPS watch and perform a silent, inward prayer. When she left, the prayer turned into paralysis. I often sat at the kitchen counter, wild-eyed, for the twelve hours he had her.
Those were our staves. But the symbolism of the Nine of Wands doesn’t just reveal strife. It’s also about grit and willpower. The ability to keep going even when the load weighs heavy on your shoulders, even when there is a feeling of running in place, of trying hard and getting nowhere. The futility of filling out another form, retelling the same, years-old story again, of spending another paycheck on yet another legal retainer. Many years passed in courtrooms, pleading with a rotating cast of judges to grant her protection, as they had granted me, from the man who harmed her. For many years, these requests for safety were made in vain despite investigations, an arrest, a conviction.
The card my friend pressed down onto the small table between us showed me our hurt, the worst of it happening again—but also our persistence, how close we were to peace, that yet unimagined promised land.
Carlos and Heather’s reading wasn’t my first encounter with the tarot. As much as I tried to stay away from any sort of mysticism, I kept running into it over and over, like a bird flying into unseen glass. A decade earlier, I had loitered around a tarot shop with two girls from school. We were in Cassadaga, a town in the heart of Florida known to some as the psychic capital of the world. Vicky and I were waiting for our turn to have our cards read. Blake, the girl who drove us and whose idea it was to skip school and drive to Cassadaga, was sitting outside drinking a tallboy and muttering under her breath about how ridiculous this whole town was. We tried to shush her disbelief before she disturbed the townspeople and we were forever cursed. An oddly cool wind seemed to blow.
I often sat at the kitchen counter, wild-eyed, for the twelve hours he had her.
We’d been trying to figure out something to do on a cloudy day in a strange Florida winter, a January in which I had seen tiny, incongruous snowflakes fall onto my grandparent’s back porch and into their pool. The rarity of the snow made us reckless. Our misadventures took on a new poignancy—as if we were trying to outshine the bad omen of the southern snow by smearing our bad decisions all over it.
The woman in Cassadaga read my cards first. My memory of her card spread is a blur, but I remember that she predicted my relationship with Vicky would change dramatically in the years to come. That we would no longer see each other like sisters. We’d grow apart, eclipse each other. For some reason this shocked me into silence—I never told her what the woman said. Or maybe I willed that narrative into existence, reflecting back on the meaning of the cards, and realizing our friendship was deeply flawed and unbalanced. Maybe the cards confirmed a feeling that already existed in me that our friendship was something outgrown and better left alone, like a stubborn weed.
After high school, when her father passed away, we lived together for a short, turbulent period. Then, I focused on college and she moved up north. Our paths diverged. I heard from her in passing, but never saw her again.
Mysticism marked the edges of my childhood from the start. Early on, my mother traded Sunday mass for afternoons reading Allan Kardec in her best friend’s incense-laced apartment, while toddler-me pretended to take showers beneath an enormous hanging pothos. She had converted to Spiritism. She believed in past lives and soul mates and serendipity and fate. And she liked to have her cards read.
Once, on a foggy Rio afternoon, I was a four-year-old in a fortune teller’s tent, smelling the salt air and trash heaps—that rancidness that sometimes still reminds me of Rio—through the rips in the plastic. The woman drew cards in a cross pattern. Then, she gave my mother the grave warning that would haunt her for the rest of her life: that she would never marry happily. My mother took this as her life’s greatest challenge—one she pursued with incredible zeal. By the time her fortieth birthday rolled around, she had married and divorced four times. The first marriage was to my father, a man who sent her love letters from the bad side of town. The second was to a sweet Argentinian man with a pill problem and a safe full of secrets. The third was to my brother’s father whose blow with a two-by-four left a permanent, lightning-shaped scar through her left eyebrow. Lastly and most briefly, she married a man who claimed to be a dentist and donned tattoos written in Hebrew he never wanted to discuss. Within a month of their split he was married again. In trying to prove one woman’s prediction wrong, she only proved it right, time and time again. The pivotal moment of her life could be traced back to a single narrative she fought relentlessly against—a destiny predetermined in a spread of illustrated cards.
My mother traded Sunday mass for afternoons reading Allan Kardec in her best friend’s incense-laced apartment.
Despite my slow orbit around the world of tarot, I never had my own deck until after my thirtieth birthday. Perhaps because of the memory of my mother’s ominous reading, I was superstitious, thinking that someone would imbue the cards with bad luck, or even that asking a question myself was too selfish of a reason to have a deck of my own. I considered tarot a gift that had to be offered. Then, a literary magazine I read released a twentieth anniversary commemorative deck. Each card included an artwork or poem written by a contributor specifically for that symbol. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to begin a collection.
Still, I kept the cards close to my chest. I drew cards in the shapes of crosses in the walk-in closet while I pretended to get dressed for work or in the upstairs office, when no one else was home.
When we are finally ready to say goodbye to the cramped mother-in-law suite and move across the ocean, my daughter packs her fortunes, the story machines we’d made during the long summer, and the blank ones, too. I tell her we won’t be able to take all of them, so she places the ones she wants flattened into their green origami cup and packs them up in her rainbow backpack so that they almost take up no room. That she wants to bring the fortunes with her is a reminder that she, too, loves stories and all of their infinite possibilities. If, after everything, she can still hold onto the vastness of her own narrative, then she—and by extension we—would be OK. Our stories are still ours to write.
It was night, one of the last we spent in the blue house. My husband and I sat in the office room with its twinned desks amid the half-taped boxes with our years’ worth of stuff spilling out. Only a single lamp was lit. It smelled pitiful like cardboard and dust—the familiar scent of leaving. The giant oak in our backyard was being rocked by another summer storm, a summer that still housed within it the potential of forward motion.
“Ask it,” my husband said with an uncharacteristic tinge of nervousness.
I shifted uncomfortably on the comically small turquoise futon we had bought on our limited budget for houseguests.
“Then we can’t take it back,” I said.
“Just ask.”
I whispered a tentative, “Okay,” drawing in a slow breath. Then I cut the deck.
I drew a card. Then another. And then a third. I had always been skeptical of any sort of divination, but superstitious enough to get nervous, believing once we see a story in the cards, it is hard to turn away from the throughline. We will it into existence, good or bad. Suggestible as humanity is, we are liable to place everything on the line, the entirety of our faith, on a single, however implausible, story. I tried to concentrate on the issue at hand, the questions we couldn’t say out loud to each other but felt just fine asking an inanimate stack of cards: Will we be safe during our escape? Will this crazy thing we’re doing work?
The deck felt heavy in my hands. I cut and shuffled it over and over delaying the inevitable answer. Then I grit my teeth and cut it one last time, exhaled a final breath that hung in the air like a question. If we leave will we be safe? Will he reach us, somehow, from across the Atlantic? I let the thought fill my mind while I placed the cards down on the desk’s wood-like veneer. Five cards in a neat row. The past and the present, then the challenge. Advice. Lastly, there was the card of outcome. As I placed the cards, our eyes latched onto them as if they had a gravitational pull.
I had always been skeptical of any sort of divination, but superstitious enough to get nervous.
As soon as I pulled the outcome card, I felt the familiar sting of tears. The Six of Swords card of this particular deck has no image. It lay on the wood-veneered desk, a temporarily impenetrable object. In the place of an image was a sliver of prose by the novelist Rick Moody. In it, he described a surreal, shifting scene with a dreamlike narrative. It is hard to grasp the facts of the story. The reader knows there is a mother and a daughter. There is an investigation. There is a departure. We’re not sure who leaves or who stays, but there is the sense that, in the end, there was a messy break toward a new beginning. “Liza cleaved desperately to her mother, and they clambered aboard the skiff, backs to us, onto a river of forgetting,” wrote Rick Moody in his interpretation of the Six of Swords. I couldn’t explain all this to my husband, who sat anxious and silent, while I processed the card’s meaning. The weight of the six of swords appearing in the position of outcome was equivalent to the weight of the story of safety and freedom we were telling ourselves. It is always the story that happens first—that allows us to believe that anything is possible. Before any pivotal event there is a precursor, a primordial narrative that hovers above us, shimmering. We only have to reach for it, to hold it close enough to see ourselves in this mirror of possibility.
In the traditional Rider-Waite deck, the six of swords depicts a hooded woman and a child huddled onto a raft being directed by a man, who the viewer assumes is helping them to escape. There are six swords in the water, representing hardship, but depending on the deck, the swords are split between the space in front of the boat and behind it, suggesting there is more suffering to be had, but some of it has already passed. One can separate oneself from the unimaginable danger that is never depicted on this card, the secret part of the story only the querent knows. To see our story reflected back to us in the symbolism of this card gave me the sudden feeling of freefall. It gave credence to the story we had already begun to rewrite. What we wanted—what we already knew—was that our pain didn’t have to be the ending.
Later, when we make it across the ocean—all three of us and even the colossal white dog—I see the swords clearly, those we’ve escaped and those still ahead. No longer are we passive observers to our own calamities. No longer waiting. We are afloat now, basking in the warm certainty of the sun. From my place on the raft, I reach into the water and grasp the hilt of a heavy sword.
I realize a book that circles a woman’s desperate attempt to gain power, only for her dreams to be mortally dashed, feels a little on-the-nose, especially after the recent US election. But, reader, what if I told you I began working on this book long before the 47th President even became the 45th? In fact, I’ve been writing the story of this woman for a decade. She lived two-thousand years ago. Her name was Agrippina the Younger—she was a noblewoman cum empress who used men as puppets to run the Roman Empire with notable success, yet received no recognition. I found out about Agrippina through the peculiar circumstances of her death—her own son ordered her assassination. This fact hounded me, nipping at my heels. Agrippina was caught in a world of political intrigue, longing for what she was legally denied as a woman: power.
My poetry collection, Agrippina the Younger, is as much about the eponymous historical figure as my own fixation. I chase her through books and museums, scouring for every descriptive clause or partial portrait of the largely overlooked empress. I wrote lineated poetry to imagine moments of her life left out of the archive: her childhood on campaign with her Roman general father, the periods of her exile as an adult. Between these pieces are prose poems about my travels to Rome to learn more about Agrippina. Through these, I try to cast a sharp eye on our world shaped by regimes and social systems over thousands of years. If the victor writes history, it is particularly telling how few words from ancient women have endured. Agrippina wrote three memoirs before she died, but none were ever copied, leaving them among the heap of women’s lost words through the ages. The impossibility of knowing the pulsing details of Agrippina’s life showed me time and again how written history is hardly a dependable resource. Considering this reality, history—the stories we tell about events—can feel like a farce. Little of ancient history, especially, is certain. It provokes the sensation of grasping at something simultaneously enormous and slippery.
Each of the books featured here provide a mesmerizing focus on the past. The authors’s points of interest are often radical and subversive: a “feminist” epic; a poem protesting an ancient murder. These volumes grapple with the infinite legacies we have inherited. Histories, epics, wars, desires, myths, and colonial violence act as conduits for these authors to fathom humanity and, often, themselves. In one way or another, each book turned something I thought I knew upside down. I struggled to select only a few, as (perhaps unsurprisingly) literary books on history populate much of my library. Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War, Anthony Cody’sBorderland Apocrypha, Linnea Axelsson’s Aednan: An Epic(tr. Saskia Vogel), Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, Claire Hong’s Upend, Myriam Moscona’s Tela de sevoya/Onioncloth (tr. Antena), Alison C. Rollins’ Black Bell, Kevin Young’s Ardency—each could stand among these thrilling titles. The books below attend to the lacunae in the archive, reorienting the way we perceive the historical, and ultimately reconstructing the way we understand ourselves today.
This “novel in verse” is about the titular Billy the Kid—a man who, despite seeming like someone out of a dime novel, was real. As a 19th century gunslinging outlaw, Billy is forever braided with ideas and American history. Ondaatje, inspired to push back against the glorification of the Wild West he encountered as a child reading comic books in Sri Lanka, wrote The Collected Works. He includes photographs, newspaper clippings, and interviews, as well as pages from those dime novels of his youth. Ondaatje’s poems are compressed, even restrained, against the expansiveness of his archival material. It is a stunning attempt to suss out who, exactly, was this living legend and how, as Ondaatje writes in his afterword, he was “turned into a cartoon.” Obdaatje explains, “I had to invent Billy from the ground up.” So Ondaatje gives us a man who catches a fly and holds the terrified buzz to his ear. “These are the killed,” Ondaatje’s Billy says before he lists those he murdered. “Blood a necklace on me all my life.”
This memoir is an extended meditation on Ní Ghríofa’s relationship with a keen poem from the late 1700s written in Irish alongside her modern experiences of love and motherhood. The keen is by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill in response to the heinous murder of her beloved husband, whom she realizes is dead whenhis horsewalks to their home with his “heart’s blood smeared from cheek to saddle.” The horse carries her to her husband’s corpse. “In anguish and in grief,” writes Ní Ghríofa, “she fell upon him, keening and drinking mouthfuls of his blood.” Ní Chonaill’s husband was shot at the order of a magistrate, illustrative of the oppression of the Catholic majority in Ireland. Though Ní Chonaill’s voice burns through the centuries, we know little else of her life beyond her entrancing descriptions of love and abject grief. In A Ghost in the Throat, Ní Ghríofa’s life whizzes around us as she raises four small children, her ratty copy of Ní Chonaill’s keen in her hands during late-night breastfeeds. Through the book, Ní Ghríofa never stops probing—the archive, the poem’s lines.
It pains me to say this book is no longer in print (though a large portion is in The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Elizabeth Alexander). Brooks’s poems are the type that stop you dead in your tracks, realizing you’re at the feet of a formidable teacher. Few things illustrate the remarkable chasm between where I am and where I hope to be more than reading even one of her couplets. Annie Allen traces the life of a young Black girl growing up poor in Chicago. Despite her situation, which most would consider circumscribed, Annie dreams of a life when she will have “melted opals for my milk. Pearl-leaf for my cracker.” Annie falls in love and her beloved goes off to war, described in a heroic, long poem entitled “The Anniad”—combining The Aeneidand our protagonist’s name. Ultimately, Annie finds herself alone, wrung out, “tweaked and twenty-four.” Annie Allen may be one of Brooks’s most formal collections, but its content and overarching themes regarding the dehumanizing realities of racism and poverty are radical. She illustrates how a girl who is caught in the thresher of these bigotries is a worthy protagonist of an epic poem, heroic if only for her survival.
An Indian missionary stalks into tribal Bengal to spread Christianity when he hears of demons living nearby. In reality, they are two girls adopted by a pack of wolves. The missionary “saves” the girls by killing the wolf mother, and attempts to reshape them into “civilized” humans. They both die young, buried in the graveyard of his orphanage. Incredibly, this story is true. In less capable hands, Humanimal would have been a book that “freaks” the girls further, dehumanizing them in ways the missionary did. Instead, Kapil delves into the brutal realities of the man’s attempts to domesticate girls whose survival was realized by their wildness. She travels to the orphanage and visits their graves, welcomes space for ghostly encounters. Their power overwhelms her. “I wanted to write until they were real,” Kapil explains. “When they began to breathe…I stopped writing.” In this spellbinding, hybrid collection, Kapil scrutinizes the ways in which children are simultaneously vulnerable and potent—and how adults misuse them. The latter tells us more about human behavior than almost anything else.
Shimoda’s memoir traces the life of his grandfather Midori with a dogged curiosity and profound tenderness. “He was born three years in a row,” Shimoda writes early on, “depending on whose memory is being consulted.” Midori was born in Japan, immigrating to the U.S., alone, as a nine-year-old boy. As an adult, he was an able photographer, making ends meet through portraiture. Yet it is Midori’s camera that makes him vulnerable, suspicious, an “enemy alien” during WWII. He is eventually incarcerated in Montana. Shimoda knows these few facts, which are his lodestars as he travels to Midori’s childhood hometown in Japan, the places Midori lived in the US and was imprisoned after Executive Order 9066. Official documents, photographs, and other ephemera push us along on Shimoda’s relentless but gripping journey to understand a man who, by the time Shimoda was a child, already suffered from Alzheimer’s. The blurry uncertainty about finer details defines the book, while Shimoda’s searing insights into American imperialism, how war serves as permission for brutality in domestic as well as foreign arenas, is undeniable. “White settlers were the original aliens,” he writes while at the Montana fort-turned-prison.
Alice Notley’s brother returned from the American-Vietnam War severely traumatized, ultimately dying from a drug overdose. The Descent of Alette is Notley’s salvo toward the oppressive military system that wrecked her sibling and killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese people. The protagonist, Alette, lives in a grim dystopia in which people are forced to endlessly ride the subway by a tyrant overlord (indeed, many poems start with “On the subway…”). Each page gives a vignette of the trippy world she inhabits where Alette might experience a bleak and fleeting camaraderie before moving to another train. Quotations are used in order to slow the reader’s eye and point to a kind of chorus of voices reciting the events (but makes it difficult to quote). Powerfully incantatory, Alette drags you into its spell. One day, someone tells Alette she must kill the tyrant—the man who keeps everyone in the closed circuit of this world. She goes through a cave network, encountering more figures and scenes as she attempts to locate a means to successfully destroy someone so powerful. Notley maps Alette’s trajectory based on those of myth, epic, and the hero’s journey as she makes her way.
Jess runs laps around turn-of-the-century America, giving us portraits of the period’s brilliant Black artists and performers through persona poems and archival material. This is alongside the undeniable violences white America has cultivated and maintained surrounding the Black performing body, particularly in minstrelsy (one definition of “olio” is the second act of a minstrel show). In a poem from the perspective of the pianist and composer Blind Tom, he says of music, “It howls out / my fingers when I reach into God’s mouth / of piano.” Olio is also about the need for song among a community brutally denied literacy for centuries, the crucial moment between the American Civil War and the Great War. Yet Jess’s focus returns most often to Scott Joplin (“The King of Ragtime”). Jess’s invented avatar Julius Monroe Trotter conducts interviews with Joplin’s contemporaries, which Jess bases off of the wealth of literature he read. Jess says of Trotter in an interview, “he’s trying to find himself by tracing the history of Scott.” (I have also written about Olio here.)
Laura Da’’s poetry collection gives electric attention to the violent displacement and cultural genocide of the Shawnee people through following two of Da’’s ancestors: Lazarus (Shawnee) and Crescent (Anglo), both of the early 19th century. Lazarus is a victim of forced migration from ancestral lands as a child. His people attempt to forage for greens and herbs, groping through the foreign landscape “like a tongue / poking around // in the shrill vacancy / of a shattered tooth.” In Instruments, Da’ gives the textures of such life, the wildness of the landscape. (“Blood fused rain-soak / runs down in rivulets / to the grey mare’s / muddy fetlocks.”) She sets these tight, muscular poems beside prose pieces about herself and the historical events that lead to our modern moment. Throughout, Da’ illustrates the violences that curbed access to the landscape and its embodied realities, reducing them to measurements, numbers—surveryed and ready for the taking. As she writes, “Any treaty is an artifact of unimaginable suffering.”
For centuries, casta paintings were “New Spain’s” ornate, portrait-studded family trees. The purpose of these beautifully detailed paintings was repulsive—to determine if one was “white enough” to have civil rights. (“Casta” and “caste” rhyme in more ways than one.) The white need for the casta, according to Martinez, was “to visually represent ancestors…for public consumption and legal proof.” With castas as a point of departure in this blistering poetry collection, Martinez traces the ways in which white colonizers have brutalized mestizo and Indigenous Latinx people and put them on display. There are lynching postcards, the tour of Joaquin Murrieta’s “pickled head.” Poignantly, among this sharp scrutiny, Martinez includes photographs and descriptions of his family. Martinez’s father was exposed to Agent Orange during the American-Vietnam War and where the terrible chemical touched his skin, it “lost tint in patterned locations across his body, leaving him chalk-white markings—skin a war map of erasure.” This impacted his offspring, including Martinez. The ways Martinez’s body is racialized by trawling white eyes is the legacy of casta paintings of centuries ago.
I’m rounding out this batch of books with Griffith’s electric historical novel. Hild is set in seventh-century Britain during a period defined by change: battles are coalescing, political seats of power are up for the taking, the new Christian religion is gaining a foothold. The unlikely center of this story is Hild—a young girl who, through her capacity to read the wilderness and give advice based on what she divines, finds herself at her king uncle’s side as his seer. Hild was a real person. Through her royal role, Hild’s powers of sight made her a force in a time defined by desperate brutality. (One wrong divination, and the cost is her head.) Though Griffith is not an academic historian, she immersed herself in Hild’s life. A single document serves as the basis for the entirety of the first two books in this series—Menewoodis the second, and equally gripping—which is already longer than the entirety of Lord of the Rings. Griffith describes flora and fauna, mead and meals, battles and sex with such zeal I found myself lost in the events of 1400 years ago.
My mother lost her baby and my father lost his leg. So I tried to be her baby and I tried to be his leg. On both counts, I failed.
“You’re not a very good baby,” my mother said suspiciously. “You’re practically dead, you’re so old.”
“You’re not a very good leg either,” my father said. “On account of the fact that you’re an entire person, and not a leg.”
Still I tried. I let my mother spoon-feed me. I let her buy me Bibles and nightgowns. But I could not make the whole “baby” thing work. Babies are little dummies, and I am no dummy. I could not be a little dummy if I tried, and I did try. My mother would tell me where babies came from and I said “I know better than that.” She told me what would happen after I close my eyes for the final time, which I couldn’t disprove, but didn’t wholly believe and couldn’t fake it. She told me what sort of man to trust and which ones not to—“Never trust a man with dark hair and light eyes,” she said. I said OK, but she could tell I already had had some experience with men. She tried to tell me who to vote for, and that’s where I lost it. “Babies don’t vote,” I said. “Don’t try to make your baby vote. It’s not allowed.” “Why,” she said, “oh, why do you fight with your poor mother? Why can’t you be a real baby who never ever fights?”
I decided to put all my energies into being the leg, then. I held my father up while he pointed his gun at things. But I was too tall, much taller than a leg had any right to be. And, once again, I was no dummy. “Don’t point your gun at that,” I said. “You’re not the boss of me, Leg,” my father said. “Crouch a little so you’re level with the other leg.” I crouched and tucked my head. Now I couldn’t see what he pointed his gun at. But I heard someone crying. “Are you pointing your gun at a baby?” I said, not looking. “Not a real one,” he said. “Not real as in an animal or not real as in me pretending?” I said. “Not real as in, don’t look up, and you’ll never see it.” There was a blast, but the blast could have been the gun, or it could have been anything else that might make a blast sound. It could have been a typewriter. Or a firework. Or the beginning of the end of something.
There are writers one reads and then, rather disturbingly, there are those by whom one finds oneself read. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, it seems to me now, belonged from the outset to the latter category, though I only came to that recognition through prolonged resistance. It was in the summer of 2011, a liminal period for me and for South Sudan—a season of provisional awakenings, when our nation had only just been born and we had not yet learned how to be postcolonial—that I first encountered his work.
I was a university student then, home from America for the summer, shaped intellectually by the contradictions of my condition: a colonial subject belatedly emancipated, but educated in the refinements of Western literary sensibility; a reader steeped in Nabokov’s fastidious irony and Baldwin’s tragic humanism, tutored in the belief that the literary ought to elude, or at least subvert, political prescription.
By these standards, Ngũgĩ’s novels—Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross—seemed aggressive, almost propagandistic. Their characters declaimed rather than spoke, their plots surged forward not with psychological inevitability but ideological purpose, and their metaphors functioned less as vessels of mystery than as delivery systems for slogans. What I took then to be their greatest fault was their lack of ambivalence. He wrote, it seemed, not to flirt with complexity but to expose betrayal.
He wrote, it seemed, not to flirt with complexity but to expose betrayal.
And yet I could not put him aside. Even then, I suspected that what vexed me was not the unbridled earnestness but clarity—an implacable vision that refused to make the compromises to which we, in our seminar rooms and literary circles, had grown accustomed. It was only in 2012, as South Sudan began its descent into internecine strife, that Ngũgĩ’s work began to acquire a different weight. The revolutionary rhetoric that had animated our early independence soured into the tribal arithmetic of appointments and resource capture. It was amid these disillusions, by candlelight during the city’s now-frequent blackouts, that I returned—almost reflexively—to Decolonising the Mind. What had once seemed dogmatic now appeared diagnostic.
Ngũgĩ’s central claim—that language is not merely a medium of communication but the architecture of consciousness, and hence of domination—no longer struck me as theoretical extravagance. It was, I saw then, the description of an epistemic violence I had witnessed daily in the schools of our nascent republic. Children, taught to think in tongues foreign to their inheritance, fell silent—not from ignorance but from dispossession. The pedagogy of the empire had not ended; it had merely changed its flag.
And I thought again of The River Between. This powerful novel is not merely a parable of colonial disruption; it is a formal autopsy of the ways in which empire fractures thought. Set among the Gikuyu, the novel stages a crisis not merely between cultures but within syntax itself—the codes by which meaning, legitimacy, and power are constructed and enforced. Waiyaki, the ostensible unifier, is educated by missionaries under the premise that knowledge is a path to empowerment. Yet what he acquires is less a tool than a schism. “Learn all the wisdom of the white man,” he is told—an injunction that renders him inarticulate in his own tongue. His education produces alienation, not agency. His schools, conceived as instruments of liberation, become colonial simulacra—mechanisms of stratification disguised as enlightenment.
The novel’s central symbol, the Honia River, is both dual in meaning and duplicitous in structure. It is called the river that “never dries,” a source of life, and yet it becomes a fault line. It offers no resolution, only reflection: what flows through it is not reconciliation but recursive opposition. When Waiyaki falls in love with Nyambura, Ngũgĩ dramatizes a failure of translation—not between English and Gikuyu, but between ideological regimes. Their intimacy cannot be sustained because it is grammatically impossible within the colonial lexicon. Joshua, Nyambura’s father, speaks the King James idiom with evangelical violence. Circumcision is framed as sin, not because of inherent moral weight, but because the colonial church has rendered Kikuyu rites linguistically criminal. The tragic synthesis of Muthoni, a young girl who insists on remaining Christian while undergoing initiation, is not an act of rebellion but of fidelity to both her worlds. It is the system that cannot bear her, and so she dies. By the novel’s end, the Kiama—a body meant to preserve Gikuyu tradition—mirrors the authoritarianism of the very missionaries they resent. Waiyaki is condemned not for apostasy but for ambiguity. In Ngũgĩ’s vision, justice is impossible in a world where even the means of expression—schools, rituals, rivers—have been co-opted by imperial design. Language itself becomes betrayal. There is no revolution, only recursion.
Ngũgĩ was not attempting to redeem history through art, but to insist upon literature as the recordof history’s cost.
Where once I had accused Ngũgĩ of ideological overreach, I now began to perceive instead a kind of consistency, the rigor of a writer who refused the division, beloved by privileged literati, between aesthetic subtlety and moral clarity. Ngũgĩ’s fiction did not flatter the reader’s intelligence with ambiguity for its own sake. It confronted one with the burden of truth-telling in contexts where equivocation had long passed for sophistication. Ngũgĩ was not attempting to redeem history through art, as so many of our idols had attempted, but to insist upon literature as the record of history’s cost. Not the decorous gesture of memory, but its reckoning. Not sentiment, but responsibility.
Even his later works—Wizard of the Crow, for example. It is often mistaken for whimsical allegory, but its exaggerations reveal, with clinical precision, the deformities of postcolonial power. Set in Aburĩria—a caricature only in name—the novel dissects tyranny through grotesque realism rather than conventional psychological nuance. Kamĩtĩ, an accidental mystic, and Nyawĩra, a quiet revolutionary, resist a regime so bloated it plans to “march to heaven” via a skyscraper. The Ruler, afflicted with literal inflation and diagnosed as “pregnant,” embodies the self-consuming absurdity of autocracy. These are not flourishes but diagnoses—power portrayed not as ideology, but as disease.
Ngũgĩ’s satire is not escapist; it records the surreal logic of dictatorship, where buttocks become protest and court flatterers chant nonsense with liturgical zeal. In such a world, absurdity becomes the most faithful mode of realism. That the novel remains free of bitterness is its most withering critique. It laughs not to soothe, but to expose. In its grotesque clarity, Wizard of the Crow speaks more truthfully of African postcolonial life than realism bound to interior psychology ever could.
To write in the language of one’s colonizer, he argued, was to dream with someone else’s symbols.
Ngũgĩ wrote in Kikuyu, a choice I had once thought to be a kind of atavistic purism. What good, I had asked, is a literature unreadable to the very youth it seeks to awaken? But that too was a misreading. It is no more strange to write in Kikuyu than in Irish or Hebrew. Ngũgĩ was not attempting to isolate himself from his readership; he was attempting to re-found the very conditions of readership. To write in the language of one’s colonizer, he argued, was to dream with someone else’s symbols. To write in Kikuyu was not a rejection of others but an insistence on starting from home. And what, after all, could be more generative?
There are, to be sure, places where Ngũgĩ’s political judgments seem too categorical, too bound to the certainties of Marxist analysis. He can, at times, appear to reduce the infinite intricacies of African existence to the binaries of class struggle. But to dwell on this is to miss the essential generosity of his work. Ngũgĩ did not write to be agreed with. He wrote to equip. His books are not blueprints but permissions— permissions to think in the idiom of our own experience, to treat the oral as philosophical, the local as literary, the African as a subject of history, not merely its object.
To read him seriously is to be reminded that literature, particularly in postcolonial societies, is not an indulgence but a duty. Ngũgĩ gives us no refuge in cleverness. He demands, rather, that we remember. That we mourn. That we articulate our condition not to explain it away but to expose it to light.
He is, I now see, not a writer one outgrows, but a writer to whom one returns—chastened, wiser, more exposed. The kind of figure who, like an elder too easily dismissed in youth, proves with time to have been speaking the truest language all along.
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