Why Aren’t Women Allowed to be Angry?

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The moment I became a true New Yorker was when I let my tears flow freely on the subway during rush hour. It was after 7 pm and I was commuting home to Brooklyn from my teaching job in the South Bronx over 14 hours after I left stepped foot out of my apartment that day. I was 23 years old and even though I was supposed to help kids and families involved in the foster care system process and overcome their trauma, I had few people to help me process my own trauma. I can’t remember what caused me to cry, but I remember taking off my glasses and pretending to rub sleep out of my eyes. I remember praying to the universe that I wouldn’t start crying and thinking about how much I hated to cry. And finally, I remember how the tears seemed like hot acid eating away at my face and how most people didn’t notice my tears or decided not to acknowledge me. One person handed me a pack of tissues.

From that moment forward, I was more open to the idea of crying in public and have done so more often than I can count. It wasn’t until I turned 30 and started writing poetry, that I started to think about these tears in a different way. Before, if you were to ask me why I was crying, I would probably tell you that I was sad or tired. It turns out, more often than not, I was tired and angry and specifically, tired of being angry. If I cry, people are more likely to respond to me with kindness, or at least, to respond at all. They are less likely to fire me, deny me a raise, ignore my police report, forget to write down my illness symptoms, or threaten me with physical violence. Even if I say “I am angry at you” in my calmest and softest voice, I am still likely to be met with fear, anger, and resentment. I am in the process of opening up to my own anger instead of going to extreme lengths to avoid or hold the anger of others. This work carries a lot of social and financial risks that have thankfully been outweighed by my ability to heal physical and emotional wounds.

 

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In Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly distills years of award-winning work in writing and activism into a single profound volume on women’s rage and the complex systems of social control that silence the rage of women and weaponize the rage of men. She is the Director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project and organizer of the Safety and Free Speech Coalition, both of which aim to curb online abuse, increase media and tech diversity, and expand women’s freedom of expression. Chemaly is a prolific writer whose articles can be found in TIME, the Guardian, the Nation, Huffington Post and the Atlantic.

During a quick break from watching Aretha Franklin’s Homegoing service, Soraya and I chatted via phone about the erasure of our rage, building school communities that raise anger competent kids, and surviving online and offline systems that profit from our abuse.

Candace Williams: You’re very prolific now, and it seems like you might have had to go through a process to realize that you should be writing in this way. How did that process go and kind of how did you come to writing as your method of strategizing anger?

Soraya Chemaly: It wasn’t self-conscious at all. It was really in retrospect, that I realized I was sublimating. I think a lot of sublimation actually happens that way. For example, I made a Spotify playlist. I chose music that I was listening to and I was really conscious of picking music where women artists were focused on this idea of rage. It struck me that in the creation of music, which is one of the most expressive forms of women’s rage, the rage of women is unacknowledged. You can have a guy like Bono talk about how, kind of hilariously, there’s no place for young white boys’ rage in rock anymore. Nobody really thinks, “Oh my God, we haven’t really explored what it means for women to be expressing this feeling so powerfully and consistently in their music,” right? I’ll bet you a lot of those women didn’t set out to say, “I’m gonna do this.” They probably just started writing a song.

That’s more or less how I started writing. I had very strong feelings and thoughts, and was also working, and I had three children, and a family, and a husband, and I thought, “What can I do?” Mainly, my thought was, “Why aren’t people responding to these injustices?” We’re all busy. We’re all tired. We’re all, for the most part, regardless of what people may say or think, people trying to feed their families, or get to work, or do whatever it is we have to accomplish in a day with constrained circumstances. I thought, “Well, I can’t quit my job. So, what can I do? I can write. If I can write, then maybe that will help other people think about these problems in a different way.” That’s how I started. Pretty soon afterwards, I realized what was really resonating with people in my writing, was my unabashed anger. Many people said that to me. I wasn’t necessarily thinking my writing as really angry writing, it’s just that so much writing is still, I think, denuded of emotion, because you’re supposed to be objective, and you’re not supposed to have a perspective, which is bullshit of course, right?

CW: Totally. I’m thinking about your whole playlist idea and how that sparked your writing. The first time I saw a black woman in the arts get angry in public was when I saw Morgan Parker perform the poem “99 Problems” at a bookstore in my mid-20s. I didn’t start writing poetry and expressing anger that way until I turned 30. Her reading was the first time I had ever heard a black woman who also had to contend with suburban white culture growing up, really express a anger in her writing. I think that was a big turning point for me. I’d like to know, who are the artists on this Spotify playlist, and are there other artists, poets, fiction writers, and non-fiction writers that you turn to, when you want to hear more anger from this perspective.

SC: The music that I ended up compiling was mostly seeking for sense of joy. That’s what I was looking for because the acknowledgement of the anger that I felt, was incredibly validating and it allowed me to stop dissociating myself from myself and myself from problems in the world. The acknowledgment of my own anger and other women’s anger was a joyous thing.

You know, there’s this incredible freedom in saying certain things out loud, and then to say them out loud with the assertion that other people should listen and also do something about it, is remarkable for some of us. I mean, I don’t know about you, I grew up with none of this freedom, right? Like, none of it. It was mainly, “You’d be prettier if you smiled.” Right?

There’s this incredible freedom in saying certain things out loud, and then to say them out loud with the assertion that other people should listen and also do something about it, is remarkable.

CW: It’s interesting to think about. I think my mother is ahead of her time. She was born in Philly and she has always told me to speak my mind. When I was a child, she talked very openly with me about racism in the workplace. I do feel like how I expressed my anger was more muted than the men in my life because they are allowed to express their anger.

I really appreciated the idea that we should be looking to music, writing, and art to help us sort through issues of anger. I really appreciated the quotations that start each chapter of your book.

SC: Have you ever heard Martha Wainwright’s song to and about her father called “Bloody Motherfucking Asshole”?

CW: Wow. No. I’m adding it to a playlist now.

SC: The first time I heard it, I just sat here and laughed like that’s just not the kind of song they play in school.

CW: Yeah, I would get in trouble for playing that at school.

SC: Right? But, it’s interesting to think about because it’s not really considered a protest song, even though it’s squarely in the era of all of these male poet protest songs. From an analytical perspective, all those dudes were writing their protest poetry, and strumming their protest guitars, and here’s this woman, who said these things, and no one knows this song, or why she wrote it, or anything about it.

CW: Yeah, this reminds me of Janelle Monae, who you mentioned a few times in the book. I really feel like you were right when you said people are just starting to realize her brilliance, even though she’s been brilliant for about, you know, almost 10 years now.

SC: It took so long.

CW: She’s not a cis white man so people dismissed her message. People will listen to lesser songs and lesser artists, who are very misogynistic, and maybe confirm more of their ideas about the world.

SC: Right. Do you remember her first videos?

CW: Yes, I totally do.

SC: And, I totally do, right? And, I just remember loving ArchAndroid so much. At that point, my daughters were really young. I have three daughters who are 18, 18, and 21 now. I remember being so grateful, that they could see that.

CW: It’s interesting how, even if you express rage, as an artist, depending on your identity, and who is listening to you, it’s actually maybe seen and talked about in much different ways.

SC: You know, it’s interesting that you say that, because I cut 40,000 words out of this book. I wrote a lot about music and art and that all sort of came out of the final version. So, what was interesting to me about what you just said, was that at the same time, there was this whole genre of sad white girl music that became extremely popular like Lana Del Rey. I just can’t get past the fact that we’re not really talking about the anger, we’re talking about the sadness, which is often the way anger gets described and attributed to women, particularly white women.

It would be interesting to go back and look at that particular intersection of gender and race and why it is so important that these white women are called “sad,” and not “angry.” It plays into that vulnerability, and the need to be protected, and all of that dynamic gets fed into the, “Oh, she’s just sad.”

Literature Needs Angry Female Heroes

CW: Yeah. And, I’m thinking about Lemonade. You quote some of the poetry spoken in the video. It was interesting to hear how people processed Lemonade online. In real time we all watched it, and people were just shocked at the levels rage. Yes, there’s a baseball bat, but a lot of it is actually asking questions of power like “Do you see the same thing I’m seeing?” and “Why are you acting this way?” And, then, “How do I let you back into my life?”

That was just really amazing for me to see, and to realize that yes, even Beyoncé has rage. When I saw her rage, it made me think about the rest of her career a lot differently. It made me start to wonder about power, and how power operates in her life, even though she is the total queen right now, you know?

SC: Right, because it is operating in her life. Do you know of the artist Pipilotti Rist? Pipilotti Rist was one of the first video artists in the late 80s, early 90s. In the song, “Hold Up,” where Beyonce is swinging the bat, I think everybody is interpreting it as her personal anger. She’s breaking these cars. The “Hold Up” video is squarely in the legacy of a particular video that Pipilotti Rist did, in which she’s walking down the street with a beautiful, flowy dress, and she’s holding a giant flower. Then, she starts destroying the cars. It’s a really amazing video. When you see it in a museum, it’s two videos that wrap around a corner. So, it feels, literally, like she’s walking around the building and breaking cars. The interesting thing to me about Beyonce’s anger, and the way it’s interpreted in that video, is that it’s intensely personal and intimate feeling, because of all the speculation about her rage. Yet, Pipilotti Rist is seen differently. We have different assumptions about flowers, and then here are these cars, the prototypical masculine machine. She uses this feminine thing to destroy this industry.

SC: How old are your students?

CW: I teach 6th graders, so they are 11, turning 12 in middle school. Before, I taught Kindergarten — 5th grade at a school for kids in foster care. We had an approach that centered social-emotional learning and there was a lot of anger and trauma in that space. We talked a lot about race, trauma, and poverty. As I read your book and thought back to those days, I realized we also talked to the kids about gender quite a bit. The kids always asked me my gender, because I’m genderqueer and wore ties back then, and I was just like “ Well, what do you think my gender is and why do you think that?” and we would chat with the idea that the kids and adults had make space for everybody and their gender. All of this was going on but I never really addressed the gender dimensions of anger. Those dimensions were operating all the time.

I really liked the moments in your book where you talking about schooling. You talk about your daughter’s preschool. When you imagine a school or a classroom community that is actually doing the work of building anger competence, what do you imagine happening?

SC: This may sound backwards but I actually imagine a space where boys could be encouraged to be emotive. Before we engage girls in talking about a single negative emotion, or the shame that comes with it when they’re older, we absolutely have to focus on allowing boys more freedom and flexibility. Ideally, I think that would all come together, and I think that good teachers that are trying hard at that very young age if they’re aware of these things at the same time. Good teachers are allowing boys to talk about feeling sad, for example, or express their love in a way that respects other people’s boundaries.

I genuinely think that even the simple things with little children, like saying “use your words”, has a lot of power and I just think that it requires training to dismantle stereotypes and bias and to really understand it. We are a deeply religious country, and that kind of infuses our ideas about gender, but also it’s hard to look at someone who’s saying “Well, I just try to teach little kids how to be real ladies and gentleman“, because they don’t necessarily understand what’s wrong with that framework. How would they? No one’s taught or talked to them about that. They don’t understand how racialized that idea is and a lot of adults have no experience with inclusion or diversity in their personal lives. They walk into a classroom, look at a room full of kids, and say “Well, I don’t see race, I’m gonna be the same with everyone.” Which of course is bullshit.

When I talk to high schoolers, I’m like “listen, all these adults around are going to talk about mentoring and having to find someone but you have have to do the work of mentoring backwards. You are having experiences and you are having much more difficult conversation than a lot of your parents or the adults who coach you have.” Don’t you think so?

CW: Oh, I agree with that. I teach at a school that has Kindergarten — 12th grade. When I go the high school, and I see what the feminism and toxic masculinity clubs have done, or even in the middle school, what our Gender-Sexuality Alliance, our Black Student Union, and our Asian-Pacific Islander group have done, it’s groundbreaking. If these kids were to do the same assemblies and conversations at a college or a grad school it would still be groundbreaking, even though this is kid-directed stuff.

K-12 students are innovative and interesting. They are still young and willing to have feelings about things. They aren’t so much about their ego all the time. When I bring them poems that are written by people who are alive right now and even poems from the middle ages, we have the best conversations about poems. It’s so much better than talking to adults.

They’re integrating and processing all of this information and what parents might say to me, at all schools I taught, a parent might say “Oh, Candace you can’t talk about XYZ, they don’t even think about that yet, or they don’t even worry about that yet. ” And I say, “Well, if you pull out the last five things they watched on Netflix, or the video games that they play, those pieces of media are actually addressing these issues already, so they’re already thinking about it.”

SC: Yes. They’re sophisticated in their thinking. One of the only things that makes me hopeful, is seeing some of these kids who are willing to engage in very difficult conversations and to do it in such a conscious manner, not to let the conversation just happen to them.

There are so many schools that are unlike the one you just described. It’s just painful. I speak at schools. Generally speaking, a high school that asks me to speak is doing it because they’re already in a place where they’re like “Yeah, this person would resonate with our students.” I think it’s a lot harder to do that in a place where they’re worried about boards or parents that are just too deeply entrenched in conservative thinking. It’s very hard for these kids.

I’ve been working with two different school networks to create symposia. What we’ve done now is have one day or two day sessions where you invite neighboring schools to send an administrator, a coach, a counselor, and three students. And then you spend the whole day talking about issues like these. Many schools are interested in talking about race, or maybe gender, but they are not ready to put the two together yet but the students are. The students are like, “No, we have to do this. We have to talk about it this way.” And so that’s also pretty helpful. But what we were trying to do, we were trying to create a replicable model, so that schools like the one just described would kinda have a viral effect in the broader community, because you can say “We want to invite these ten schools within the 20 mile radius, we want to show them what we’re doing, and we want to be about to talk to them about what they might be able to do”. But after three years, what we’ve kinda concluded is that we need to do the exact same thing, and invite parents, because the parents are the ones who end up being the biggest obstacles.

The acknowledgement of the anger that I felt was incredibly validating and it allowed me to stop dissociating myself from myself and myself from problems in the world.

CW: That’s just really tough. You definitely have to have a community of people, which actually it makes me think about, I think I read all throughout, especially the last chapter or so, we have to trust other women, especially our mothers and our sisters and aunts. After reading this in your book, I’ve thinking about how I can trust more women in my life. I think the hardest thing for me is actually that I experience a lot of racism at the hands of white women white women in many areas of my life. Also, I have privilege in a lot of areas. So, there might be times where I engage in behavior that actually hurts women with less privilege than I have. With this complicated layering of intersectional identities and privileges, what are the steps that you recommend to building communities with other women? Have you seen cases where women with different levels of privilege have been able to heal and work together?

SC: So, they’re are a couple of things that really come to mind. I know some women who are in their 80’s and 90’s now, and they have been doing this work, like when I feel tired, I stop and I think about the women that are literally twice my age and how they continue. I watch a lot of the criticism of the racial justice and social justice in feminist movements of the 60‘s and 70’s, because it’s easy to criticize. There were many flaws and horrible white supremacist tendencies in feminism for sure. There are women in that cohort that have been life long friends and allies. They quietly get the work done and they are tied at the hip. They are best friends for life. I think about how we don’t ever hear about this.

I’m brown. My family is Arab and Bahamian. Sometimes I look South American because who’s gonna say I look like a “Haitian Bahamian American Lebanese gal”? Nobody. People with good intentions (I guess), ask me “Are you a woman of color?”, and I’m like well, “Do you need me to be a woman of color today? Can we talk about why that’s important to you today?” I am the shade I am, and that confuses people sometimes but let’s talk about why that’s confusing. Typically, it is because white people need me on their panels. That’s the conversation. I guess I’m not really answering your question. I think I have seen some fantastic examples of women who have managed to have incredibly difficult conversations and continue working together with real awareness of what that means. I will say, unfortunately, I still feel that that’s an exception rather than the rule.

CW: I’m thinking about Combahee River Collective, and people like Pat Parker and Audre Lorde. In examples I can think of, they tend to share some core identities. Pat Parker and Audre Lorde were both black queer socialists trying to survive cancer. They actually mention white women in their letters to each other. The women white women they mention are often queer and not talking about microaggressions or structural problems. For me, I think about my rage, and trying to figure out who I want to work with and who I wanna rebuild trust with, privilege is so tricky. I wish I could trust more people but then I think about the history and the present and it definitely becomes a very tricky question.

SC: I think it’s really tricky. I have hesitated to collaborate. I think it’s just in my own nature. I don’t like institutions. I just don’t. I’m probably too impatient. But I have in the last six years, understood that to accomplish a particular goal, I need to engage with institutions and I need to work with people in institutions. And in doing that, I’ve encountered exactly what you just said. It’s difficult to feel that you can trust people and if you take the risk there is a pretty good chance that you will get hurt taking that risk.

CW: Or fired. Or not promoted.

SC: Right. And so, I think that, maybe it’s menopause and I’m just really gleefully liberated by whatever happens, but I feel pretty strongly that one of the things that people who work with me appreciate is that I can be brutally honest without being hurtful. I think that being able to talk to people about really difficult subjects takes a lot of energy and time that we don’t necessarily have.

Before, you asked about women and artists I admire. I keep going back to Adrienne Rich. It gives me a particular joy to think of people who managed to transcend the ugliness and be creative and powerful with their words. And she to me is one of those people, as well as Claudia Rankine. She’s Jamaican and I am always looking for people with ties to the islands.

I think I probably spent a good 15 years just studying, socially paying attention to what was happening because it was very different from where I grew up. It was sharply different in terms of race. I come from a black majority country where independence had just happened. My classrooms were incredibly diverse places. When I came to the United States, I just couldn’t get over how segregated people were. If you live on an island it’s all just right here in your face. There’s a horrible racism, there’s terrible colonial hierarchy, but no one’s pretending that it’s not there. You have to deal with it in a different way. The number one thing people do, is to acknowledge it. And here, I got here and no one’s acknowledging any of it. No one talks about any of it.

So that’s totally thrown me for a loop. People are really segregated and it’s as though we’re just supposed to pretend that that’s not happening.

CW: I think the silence lends itself to more rage. There’s doublespeak. You can talk to girls about how they’re in these oppressive environments all the time, but if they say anything about it, they get in trouble and are subjected to violence. I think that’s why it’s infuriating to live here and have to deal with things. Most of the conversations are just about even acknowledging that we have race. Saying “I am black, and somebody else is white, and that that actually influences how people experience the world” is controversial and groundbreaking. We have far to go.

SC: There is far to go. I met someone recently who has just read the book and they were really so focused on what I think of as the “lean in model” which is saying “If I can just be better. If I can change, things will get better.” It’s neoliberal clap chat. She was really tied to this idea that it was all on her. It was almost as though acknowledging that the social construction of emotion was as important or more important than her behavior was overwhelming to her. So when I said to her, “Well, you and your brother, for example, might have the exact same response to a problem and if you display the exact same anger, the people in the room are highly unlikely to respond to you in the same way. If everyone’s more or less of the same ethnicity in your family, then maybe that reaction can be distilled to gender. The minute you go into school, or the minute you go into work, or the minute you go into a political environment, that becomes immensely complex. You just have to be able to acknowledge the double standard and the degree to which the double standard is a mechanism for public control. People cling to the idea of meritocracy and people have got to get over it.

CW: Yes, that’s a dangerous idea. I’m wondering how this applies to online spaces. I’d love to hear your perspective on this. Since tech companies are monetizing behaviors that are actually are dangerous for a lot of women, how do you think tech companies can move forward, and do you think they actually will change their models at all?

SC: I’m kind of disgusted. I had 18 months of being harassed and then talking to other women and writers and then really understanding what was going on. I openly confronted these companies in a series of campaigns over the course of four years. I have worked closely with Facebook, Google, Twitter, and various think tank groups about this issue. I think there are two things they need to do structurally. One, is they need to stop with the pipeline argument because it’s bullshit. They need to diversify at every stage and every point of the chain of decision making, product development, and support. They need to be overt about their decisions and they also need to dissect the industry. Right now, the model is that a bunch of guys build products with poor risk assessment, bad stuff happens, and then there’s all of the clean up and care work that has to happen in the security, privacy, legal, community management, customer support realms. The model itself is seriously gendered. You have all the hyper-masculine engineering and STEM spaces and then you have all the care, clean up, emotional labor spaces. That that super-structure is deeply damaging our ability to change the way products are built and used. This is the only institutional response that is going to make sense.

It’s really that the entire business model is fueled by the capitalization of this abuse. The extremist content. The hateful content. Twitter makes money either way. They’re content neutral. It doesn’t matter. I remember when Ghostbusters came out and Leslie Jones was being harassed. I remember thinking about how they’ve got high levels of engagement around this incredibly abusive hashtag. It would have been really easy for them to turn her harassment into a moment and for that moment might be called ‘Twitter responds to racist harassment” but all of a sudden the harassment becomes a product that can be sponsored.

CW: Definitely. It’s hard because you also talk about how women, especially young girls, need to use social media to find other feminists who they would have no way of seeing or even knowing they exist.

SC: Yeah. I think, what I keep telling young girls who ask me “Should I just not do this?” I say, “No. You’re doing this already offline.” It’s just become second nature if you are a girl aware of the world around you, that you learn to assess your environment, and you do that no matter what. If you understand the environment, then you can cultivate your own resilience. Resilience doesn’t just happen. People actually need to develop it through their upbringing or work on themselves. Like your mom, it sounds like your mom enabled you to develop resilience, right?

CW: Yes.

SC: My mom enabled me to develop resilience. That’s a gift, honestly. A lot of people don’t have it. But it is possible to develop it. So if I talk to girls, I talk to them about that because the most important thing you can do is understand how to use network effects in your favor. Network effects are potentially going to be used against women and you need to understand that. But you do have the ability to think about how they work in your favor.

The World Needs More Single Mom Poems

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PUZZLE

We’re looking for the cloud
with a little bit of town on it,

Vera and I, with three hundred pieces
spread out on the table before us.

Last night we connected the edges,
then fell asleep like we used to —

when my youngest was a baby —
curled up, side by side, on the bed.

The slot beneath my neck and chin fit
perfect above the tab of her silky brown head,

as though we’d been contour cut,
then put back together by God.

It’s morning and our Cheerios
go soggy in the bowl we share,

Vera and I, in our task of attaching
fantastic fuchsia blooms above

a white unicorn that gallops through
the foreground. Soon, her dad

will pick her up and I’ll keep
sorting out the pieces

of this puzzle, not quite done.

SITCOM THERAPY

An entire season in the single episode
of my latest depression — I’m trying, once
again to escape my non-stop crying.
Trade in tears for a pint of frozen
custard. Well, two. But
I paced myself: each spoonful
deliberate, each bite of butter pecan
inserted like a jagged rock
then pulled out — sculpted down

to half its size, rounded smooth
by the roof of my mouth and the spoon’s
slick path, sliding across the hill
of my tongue. If I may eat ice cream
this slowly, surely I can halt my thoughts

of him, and where we went
wrong. The worst is recalling
how, even after the sex
went sour and my lips ached from missing
the kisses he dodged, his mouth
had not yet gone completely silent.

He still made me laugh. Sublime,
that laughter, like water
after one of our four-mile runs
with baby joggers, up and down
Tally Trail. I kept hoping we’d make it,

make life fit the big picture
we spoke of when we first got to town.
Even after his tenure and lectures
on art history consumed all desire
to speak at home, to me, he still mustered
punchlines that made my guts ache

from feeling how funny he was,
that guy I married, the father of my kids.
Now my stomach grips a chilly, churning
knot of milk, thick with sugar and things
on the label I have trouble
pronouncing, without
my middle-aged glasses.

In my teens, the calories made me
stick my finger down my throat so fast,
after a binge like this, my purge
tasted just like it did going down.
Now, thoughts of puking

make me wish I were a big, fat
mama bird in a nest, feeding
her young — like the ones I hear
beyond the window, above
the sitcom’s canned applause.
Credits fade to a glowing
bruise, close to dawn.

“Puzzle” and “Sitcom Therapy” are published here by permission of the author, Ramona McCallum. Copyright © Ramona McCallum 2018. All rights reserved.

‘Black Liberation Means the Freedom to Figure Things Out For Ourselves’

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The title of Wayétu Moore’s debut She Would Be King (Graywolf Press) alone incites some expectations. Expectations Moore delivers in this fantastical, historical tale weaving in the realities, both then and now, and the power dynamics of how societies are salvaged and how they fall. What struck me about She Would Be King, from the cover to the premise and ultimately the execution, is that it’s a novel that provokes a necessary conversation while at the same time being relatable to me as a Black woman invested in our history as well as our failings.

Moore and I had a lively conversation on so many of the parallels lushly illustrated and carefully balanced in her debut novel—from the moment we are introduced to Gbessa’s ability after a perilous snakebite to the battles in Monrovia. Even within a historical context of this world, be it in Liberia or Virginia in the 1800s, everything affecting us today is as a result of and indicative of what has transpired as nations were colonized, communities were brutalized, and women, repeatedly, upheld roles as life givers and caregivers. The inclusion of these ties may not have been intentional in She Would Be King, yet there’s no way it could be overlooked.

Jennifer Baker: Because yours is a historical novel there are certain rules to it. So, how do you create characters in this world while balancing a fantastical premise and at the same balancing the rules?

Wayétu Moore: Liberian history is so closely linked to American history and it’s something I knew I wanted to explore. I think being a Black woman in America and having emigrated as a young girl there are some things that have happened to me over the course of my life and things that are said to me even now — things that are done that do sometimes feel surreal — and I feel like some other marginalized groups could possibly relate to that. But I know that for me my experience here, navigating the world in my body, there is a recognition that “Hey, this isn’t how things are supposed to be.” It almost feels as though I live in another reality. At times Black womanhood feels fantastic. [It] feels like you’re living this other world that isn’t based in reality because you are having to juggle so much. You are having to negotiate so much just to survive.

And so, I think that then when I choose to navigate and negotiate that reality on the page then sure it’s going to have fantastic elements. In addition to that I would say being from a West African background, specifically Vai, it was very rare that I heard a story that didn’t include someone flying or shapeshifting or disappearing. That was just a part of what I understood as the architecture of the story. So when I decided that I wanted to become a writer, magical realism or fantasy was something I naturally was drawn to because that was my introduction to storytelling.

Being from a West African background, it was very rare that I heard a story that didn’t include someone flying or shapeshifting or disappearing. That was just a part of what I understood as the architecture of the story.

JB: You bring a character like Gbessa onto the scene and she is one of several, but she really is that tether from beginning to end. And the book is called She Would Be King, so I was thinking “Gbessa’s gonna be running stuff by the end of this.” But that’s not necessarily what takes place.

WM: The title serves as commentary of that strange relationship to a woman’s power and how it functions in male dominated/male-centric context. She wrestles with her power throughout the book. And that’s not so different from a woman now. Even in the most progressive societies women who are considered all-powerful are still wrestling with their power in a patriarchal, male-dominated context. So yes, it would be wonderful where a woman is omnipotent and she is the one who is sort of dominating throughout the book, but the reality of the world we live and certainly the reality of the world that Gbessa lived in was she would have to navigate in the context she was born in and the circumstances that she was born in. So she wrestles with this throughout the book and she always has what it takes to save herself. But she’s in constant negotiation with her power because of the presence and the absence of the men around her.

JB: Mothers are so key in this book. That’s something I think about a lot of in my own work: the influence of Black women, of mothers. Women’s roles and strength and agency and the power dynamics are given prominence in She Would Be King. Let’s discuss how that’s utilized even through the relationships with men and a world dictated by men. Those bonds are so important.

WM: I wanted to be true to the theme of Black womanhood. So I knew I wanted each of the gifts to be intentionally in conversation with motherhood. I wanted the characters, specifically the male characters, to always be in conversation with Black womanhood as a source for their gift. With June Dey, for instance, his birth mother ends up playing the role as the Mother for the entire story. She’s really all of their mothers. Charlotte, her ubiquity pays homage to Black female identity: she’s both everywhere and nowhere at all. I wanted the story to be told through the voice of an ancestor and I knew that I wanted that ancestor to be a woman that I could relate to, and someone who Gbessa could relate to. And someone who could show that there is empathy in the coupled asymmetry and splendor that is being a Black woman in today’s world. I feel like the “She” [in the title] is not exclusively Gbessa it is more the women who forged the women who are telling the story that is very much a story about Black womanhood. So that’s why even for the male characters I wanted their source to be Black women, a mother, and I wanted those mothers to somehow live on throughout the story.

I wanted the characters, specifically the male characters, to always be in conversation with Black womanhood as a source for their gift.

JB: Which is also at the helm of the patriarchy.

WM: Yes, so the “She” is technically Gbessa, but one of the reasons I said, “Oh, you’re my reader” in talking about mothers and Black womanhood is that it’s exactly right. This is what this book is about.

JB: Yes, because I was thinking, “Wow, [the women] are doing all the work here.” This was the ongoing sacrifice that these characters make. And when they are absent it is felt quite heavily, but most especially by Norman and June Dey. This is not to say female relationships aren’t important to Gbessa as well because they are so key in her being acclimated in the new society.

WM: That’s exactly right.

JB: Do you think that this was naturally inherent in the work?

(Liberia highlighted on a map at the edge of Western Africa)

WM: Honestly I can’t say that those parallels were intentional. I knew I wanted to write about Liberian history and I think what it became as I wrote is a story that explored the breakthrough of Black womanhood. It was a story that was very much about the role women play in the salvation of their people. Norman Aragon and June Dey were vehicles for that. But I can’t say that I sat down had an internal dialogue “Oh I definitely want this person’s power to be this and that person’s power to be that.”

JB: I’ve been talking to a lot of people about masks. What we present versus who we are. Or what we present versus what we think we’re supposed to be doing. And each of them — Gbessa, Norman, June Dey — are trying to weave their way within their society. Norman’s trying to be accepted but he is very light-skinned, so he represents the oppressor. June Dey doesn’t even know the truth of his upbringing, he comes from an othered parenting. And then Gbessa, from the get-go she’s dubbed a “witch.” Each of them does not only have abilities, it’s the circumstances of their having to negotiate being in a society where they don’t really belong even when they technically do.

WM: I think that was more of a decision that speaks to my understanding the psychology of who I would consider “good superheroes.” It has to be married to some idea of isolation or early trauma in order for them to be incentivized to use their powers to help. Because I feel like if they didn’t have early traumas or issues with isolation then they very well could have used their powers for other means. And that’s more or less a choice I made based on my understanding of how human beings work and how the human spirit works sometimes. You generally find people who went through more when they were younger end up looking at the world from a more gracious, more compassionate lens. Some of the traumas that you read for each of the characters were intentional in building their characters for what they became later on in the book, and building their desires for their country. To want to build a country and protect people because they themselves had not really experienced this. So wanting to belong was something all of them shared.

JB: And maybe they would’ve lacked some empathy as well.

WM: Yeah.

Austin Channing Brown Wants to Save Black Women Some Emotional Labor

JB: Maybe. I don’t know. It makes me think, again, there are so many layers to this book, which is why I enjoyed reading it and I sped through it, which I think writers hate hearing.

WM: I read that as perhaps you enjoyed what you were reading and I do like the fact that the book is accessible in that way. There are obviously many characters and many storylines, but the goal was not to write something that was hard to read. I might’ve felt some kind of way if [people said] “Oh my gosh, this is kind of hard.” I say that to say I don’t take that personally at all.

JB: So, when submitting a book like this where people not of this background will read it, how has reception been? You know how some don’t want to talk about what goes on “in the house” with other people. They may feel like “I don’t want anyone to know that there’s intraracial strife, we don’t want people to know that there are intraracial dynamics like this.” And I think, well we need to talk about it.

WM: There’s this trope of marketing anything that’s Liberian that is focused on the question of how former slaves and free blacks from America could then become to the ones who were in Africa treating the blacks there poorly. I had some back and forth after initially writing the book, and I was like “No, this is not what the story is about.” It’s sort of like that’s where people want to go and, unfortunately, I think it alleviates some guilt. “Well okay they went back to the continent and they did the same thing then we’re not that bad.” But when they went back they obviously weren’t doing the same thing. In one of the historical texts that I read, for instance, say one person is Americo-Liberian and another is Indigenous. The Americo-Liberian was paid 50 cents a day and the indigenous was being paid 25. There was a system of social stratification that was established, but I think the dynamic between local groups and Americo-Liberian settlers is greatly exaggerated. To even to compare the two is an indignity and it’s really gross. I was very adamant about staying away from that storyline as a selling point. And in this case it wasn’t about keeping things “in the house.” It’s about making sure that a place with so little representation in literature isn’t misrepresented.

I think that when people of color, distinctly Black people, come together and there is an identifiable enemy that’s encroaching upon their freedom they will unify.

I think that when people of color, distinctly Black people, come together and there is an identifiable enemy that’s encroaching upon their freedom they will unify. And that was I think the larger story that I am trying to tell. Yes, we’re still trying to make sense of the dynamics of this new republic, but right now we know that our freedom to make sense of it is being encroached upon. We want to have the freedom to figure out our history for ourselves. That’s what Black liberation is: not Black perfection, but we want the freedom to figure stuff out for ourselves. And when that was threatened we see that the characters in the story from these different cultures do eventually come together. It is a pan-Africanist manifesto. I haven’t told the whole story. I think I’m just beginning to unpack the nuances of intraracial dynamics. And I’m excited about where this is going to go.

Why Every Writer Should Have a Dog

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The writerly affinity for cats is well-documented. Hemingway was a famous collector of cats, as was Mark Twain. Raymond Chandler, Yeats, Dickens, Burroughs — the list of cat lovers goes on and on. I suppose this is because we writers see something of ourselves in cats. The cat is introverted, solitary, intelligent, carefully withholding, as any good writer should be. Dogs, on the other hand, are unwriterly. They are neither clever nor sly. They are rough and dirty. They withhold nothing. As Karl Ove Knausgaard wondered recently in The New Yorker, “Has a single good writer ever owned a dog?” He goes on to describe his own failed attempt at dog ownership, saying that his own mutt was “infinitely kind but infinitely stupid,” needy, solipsistic, and that he didn’t write a single line of literary prose in the time the dog was in his possession.

In other words, it seems to Knausgaard that dogs are simply too intrusive for writers who need solitude and quiet. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine, say, Virginia Woolf allowing a big whiny drooler to bark and scratch at the door of that room of her own. Knausgaard’s distaste for dogs is part and parcel of a literary assumption that has prevailed ever since Cicero posited in the first century BC that all one needed to write was a library and a garden: writers must avoid the distractions of public life to write good literature. And what are dogs, if not distraction?

Writers must avoid the distractions of public life to write good literature. And what are dogs, if not distraction?

But perhaps dogs are just the thing we writers need, at least those of us who complain that we struggle with plot. I live with an English bulldog and a pit bull, both of whom are walking, drooling plot machines. They shit on the floor, they bark at the mailman, they fight each other for food and toys, they run into the street — it’s a miracle they even survive, given their proclivity to put themselves in danger at the slightest provocation. But they don’t just survive, for they are intensely desirous. They are hungry for touch, for freedom, for squeaky balls, for meat. They want so much. And with all that wanting, it’s no surprise that these barking, slobbering, desperate creatures produce conflict at least as well as they produce shit.

So how can dogs help us produce conflict? How can we writers think like dogs? At the heart of this inquiry is the question I’ve been trying to answer for as long as I’ve been trying to be a writer, and it has to do with plot. How does one stop writing descriptions or journal entries and start writing narrative, a bonafide story, with real people doing real things? Put simply: How can I make shit happen on the page?

Right now, in the coffee shop where I am writing, there is a flyer for a lost dog:

I’M LOST !!! HAVE YOU SEEN ME? I’M TUCKER.

I didn’t want a bath, so I ran away without my collar near 26th and Grant. I’m all white, fluffy, and about 20 lbs. My daddy is very worried about me. Please call him. Steve at 541–216–0917

This flyer, which I chanced upon while walking to the bathroom, contains one of the most evocative sentences I’ve read all year. “I didn’t want a bath, so I ran away without my collar near 26th and Grant.” I’m transported to a backyard, because where else could this intended bath take place that would allow the rascal Tucker to escape? In my head, it’s one of those strangely charged moments, a Friday afternoon perhaps, getting ready for a dinner party, squeezing in a last minute chore while the wife hollers her impatience out the window. You’re due at 6:30 and it’s already nearly six. We’re going to be late, she says, and you still have to shave. These are new friends you’re seeing tonight, evidently, because she is worried enough about impressing them that you must present a clean face. You sense the ridiculousness in this, this need to make people like her. It’s one of the things you’ve always resented about your wife, but you’ve somehow never told her this. Through four and a half years of marriage, you’ve kept quiet, let her go about this business of acting out her insecurities in public, never once broaching the subject of this enormous flaw in her personality. You suppose you want to support her gregariousness, but the truth is that sometimes she belittles you in front of these new friends. You’re mulling all this over when you see Tucker going over the fence. You weren’t aware that Tucker could leap like this, over an eight-foot fence. In fact, his leaping seems supernatural. There’s no possible way that Tucker can make that jump. However, the first thought that goes through your head is not whether you are hallucinating, or that you should go after Tucker, but rather how you will explain this supernatural phenomenon to your wife, who will surely not believe you. She has, of course, intuited that you have no desire to go to this dinner party at 6:30, and she will only see Tucker’s disappearance as a product of your unwillingness to help her present her best self to her new friends. This prompts you to wonder: What exactly is her “best self”? And why do these other people get it instead of you?

Or perhaps that’s not what happens at all. Maybe you’re giving Tucker the bath inside, in the tub. Maybe you’re not Steve, the beleaguered husband with the superhero dog, but Stevie, a newly single woman, new to this town. Tucker jumps out of the bathwater and runs out of the house through the front door. You’ve left the front door open for some reason. But what reason could that be? Why the hell would anyone leave the front door open? You close and lock the door and make to call the one neighbor you’ve met since you’ve been living here, an old woman named Grace who lives next door, whose begonias were the subject of your only conversation earlier that week. You found her polite, if a little uninviting. No, that’s just how people talk, isn’t it? You were probably just being sensitive. You’re going for the phone, going to ask Grace to help you look for Tucker. And that’s when you hear a strange noise in the kitchen, followed by a familiar voice behind you, and the chilling effect this voice produces in you precedes your cognition that he has followed you here, has found you all the way out here in this little town. You regret locking that door.

Here I’ve tried to reproduce the way I think when my writing is working best. There’s an inciting moment (seeing a flyer for a lost dog), a question (how did Tucker escape?) and finally an image created to fill the hole in my knowledge. But that new image produces another question. This time the question has nothing to do with the missing dog; rather, it’s about something I myself have created (in this case, the marriage between the imagined Steve and his supposed wife). So then I answer that question. This answer poses another question, and the process repeats itself.

At each step, there’s a question with infinite possible answers, but I have to commit to only one of the myriad possibilities and follow it with the dogged certainty that the outcome will be a good one. As I answer each new question, I commit to a new reality. This commitment is essential. Without this commitment, nothing happens. Without a commitment, I will weigh potential courses of action, dabbling with each, never making a real choice. I mean a real choice. There is no going back from a real choice, there is only forward, and the way forward is instinctual.

Books Where the Dog Dies, Rewritten So the Dog Doesn’t Die

But don’t forget how this all started: I was in a coffee shop, trying to live seriously — with goals and plans and a sense of importance, trying to live my life in the image of what I consider good and cool and honest and aesthetically appealing — when a flyer caught my eye and my mind wandered far away from all that. The loose dog was a distraction that got the better of me.

If you’re like me, then you think you should resist loose dogs. You are a busy person. You have too much on your plate already. The truth is that I am afraid of loose dogs. I don’t trust myself to follow them because I’m afraid of straying from the path I’ve already decided to take. I’m already bad at accomplishing goals, so why should I follow any thought that takes me further away from what I think I should be doing?

The truth is that I am afraid of loose dogs. I don’t trust myself to follow them because I’m afraid of straying from the path I’ve already decided to take.

There’s a pattern to this fear. This pattern manifests in my thinking, in my daily life, in my dreams, the ones in which I am trying desperately to get somewhere and obstacles keep appearing — the driver of the car keeps making stops, the party is not at the address I was given, the sex keeps getting interrupted by someone knocking at the door. The pattern is one of being infinitely waylaid. And it is this pattern — the total derailment of a set course — that characterizes real life as I know it.

Even in this essay, it has happened. I started out talking about cats, and now here I am confessing my fears and discussing my dreams. On the way from there to here, I have made hundreds of choices, choosing one route from an infinite set of possibilities. I regret this as much as I celebrate it. It seems unfair that we only get to live one path, to write one narrative, out of all the millions that could have been. Even worse, it seems irresponsible to make so many choices in such a short amount of time without considering carefully the weight of each one.

This is the wonderful irony of the loose dog. When you follow the dog, when you don’t resist it, when you embrace it, the loose dog becomes the thing that makes you lose grip on everything else. It forces you to throw away everything you’ve set your mind on and welcome the ambiguous, the absurd, the inane, the unknown. This is exactly what a writer needs. We need to explore the unknown if we are to justify this act of scribbling. We need to have journeys on the page. We need to put ourselves in danger. We need to run into the street, risking death in pursuit of the loose dog, becoming a loose dog ourselves in the process. The loose dog is the thing that shakes you out of your somnolence and forces you to reckon with your true self. It makes you question everything that you take to be real in this world by sending you to another world entirely.

We need to put ourselves in danger. We need to run into the street, risking death in pursuit of the loose dog, becoming a loose dog ourselves in the process.

The loose dog doesn’t have to be an actual dog, of course. (In fact, it probably shouldn’t be. The annals of storytelling are already littered with great dogs.) Instead, Tucker who runs away from the bath can in fact be a llama, a painting, an island of sirens, a stolen car, an iPhone, a rake, an old friend — no, a brother — who shows up at your front door asking for money. The dog is only a metaphor, though you could also call it a white rabbit or a wild goose: annoyances that appear unwanted in your life without your choosing, forcing you to make decisions.

Loose dogs come in all shapes and feelings, but one thing that all loose dogs have in common is that you must follow them. You can’t banish them from the room like Knausgaard or my imagined Virginia Woolf—who, as it turns out, did have a dog, a cocker spaniel named Pinka. In fact, Woolf was an adamant defender of dogs and even wrote an entire biography of the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s beloved dog, Flush. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. What matters is following the dog. That’s what I have to remind myself. When I find myself thinking that life is boring, that there is nothing worth producing on the page, that I cannot tell a story, I have to remember that there’s a loose dog somewhere nearby and an adventure awaiting me, if only I let myself follow it.

How Joseph Fink Uses Comedy to Make Serious Writing Hit Home

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Writer and podcaster Joseph Fink’s universe is a bustling one. Like the characters and themes in the beloved Welcome to Night Vale podcast, Fink’s many creative endeavors swirl about him like so many planets with complementary orbits. Along with Jeffrey Cranor, Fink co-created the eerie, playful sci-fi narrative Night Vale as well as novels that expand on its mythos (Welcome to Night Vale, It Devours!); he produced a meditative nonfiction podcast with musician John Darnielle (I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats); and he wrote the gothic mystery Alice Isn’t Dead, a podcast whose associated novel will be released in October.

Regardless of his medium or underlying message, however, Fink always endows his work with an easy, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. We asked Fink about the nature of comedy in his fiction in advance of his appearance at the new hybrid literature and improv series LitProv at Symphony Space.

Joseph Fink appears at the launch of LitProv alongside Melissa Broder and comedians Dave Hill and Dulcé Sloan at Symphony Space in Manhattan on September 13.

Matthew Love: In the broadest terms, when you’re reading a piece of fiction, what is the value of humor for you?

Joseph Fink: Humor is an integral part of human life, so a work that is entirely humorless often feels inhuman. Even in our darkest moments, there is humor, and to represent it otherwise makes the story ring false. There are always exceptions to every rule, of course.

ML: Humor is certainly a component of Night Vale, as well as your novels, but how essential do you find it?

JF: In my own work? I suppose it’s part of my voice, and I don’t spend a lot of time anymore thinking about my voice. There was a time in which I was actively trying to find it and build it, but now I just sit down and write, and trust that what comes out sounds like me. That usually includes some jokes.

Radio Dramas Aren’t Just for the 1930s Anymore

ML: How different should comedy feel in a script versus in prose, as when you’re working on the Alice Isn’t Dead podcast and then the book? How much do you think about the difference between the two when you write?

JF: I approach all writing based on what medium I am writing toward. A script for a podcast and a novel are written entirely differently. A podcast is written to be listened to, obviously, and so the sound of the words is much more important. It’s also being written for a performer, and so as a writer you think about giving the performer gifts, little moments they can work with and make their own. With a novel, you are thinking about a visual rhythm and have a much more direct connection with the reader, but this connection is also quiet and inward-looking. It’s more difficult to make someone laugh in print.

Even in our darkest moments, there is humor, and to represent it otherwise makes the story ring false.

ML: How possible is it to be simultaneously humorless and artful? Any favorite work that eschews laughter and still achieves greatness?

JF: Well, as I said above, it creates a feeling of artificiality when humans are entirely humorless. However, artificiality is not necessarily bad. There can be a solemnity to humorlessness, a feeling of a kind of religious ceremony. One work that I can think of that has little to no humor is It Follows, one of my favorite movies. It uses the quiet and the lack of humor to build a feeling of marching towards an ending that is horrible and unavoidable. The lack of human warmth is used to the advantage of the mood it is creating.

ML: There are recurring characters or conceits in comic storytelling, such as the hyper-articulate, precocious child or the personification of deities or animals. Are there any comic ideas that will always be funny to you?

JF: A cat attempting to jump somewhere and instead falling to the ground clumsily will always be funny.

In 100 Years, This Forest Will Be Turned Into Secret Books By Your Favorite Writers

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Once upon a time in 2014, the Scottish artist Katie Paterson started the Future Library, a 100-year-long art installation that requires two things: a brand new forest and 100 writers. Paterson cleared a plot of forestland outside of Oslo and planted some trees which will grow over the next 100 years. Every year until then, the Future Library invites one author to write a wholly original manuscript to submit for the Future Library, which the library will hold in trust, unpublished, until 2114. In 2114 the trees will be cut down to print the pages of the collected manuscripts. By that time, Paterson imagines the trees will be infused with “all of the ideas of the writers growing through the roots over the years” (although not literally), and the rings of the trees will be like chapters of the books.

The site of the Future Library

Most recently, as reported by The Guardian, the Future Library has selected South Korean author and Man Booker winner Han Kang to submit her work to the project. The other writers chosen for the real-life fairytale adventure so far include Margaret Atwood (manuscript titled “Scribbler’s Moon”), David Mitchell (manuscript titled “From Me Flows What You Call Time”), Sjón (manuscript titled “As My Brow Brushes on the Tunic of Angels or The Drop Tower, The Roller Coaster, the Whirling Cups and other Instruments of Worship from the Post-Industrial Age”) and Elif Shafak (manuscript titled “The Last Taboo”). The writers are chosen by “a panel of experts” and can write fiction, poetry, nonfiction — really, whatever they want their audience to read in 100 years. Who will be chosen in the next ten years? Twenty-five years? Seventy-five years? Could the Future Library become a future Canon of Master Works of Literature?

Katie Paterson, Future Library

Only time will tell. Until 2114, the manuscripts will be held in the “Silent Room” — a room designed by polyglot Paterson herself in the new Oslo Library, which will open in 2019. The Silent Room will be open to the public (though the manuscripts obviously won’t be), and will only be big enough for two or three people at a time. It will also face the Future Library forest. In an extra flourish of eco-consciousness, Patterson and her team will be using the wood from the trees they cleared for planting the Future Library forest to construct the Silent Room. <cue “Circle of Life”>

The project relies on at least two generations of readers, writers, and artists. On Paterson’s website, there’s a very Kinfolk-friendly video detailing the project. One contributor says the project has a lot in common with forestry and city planning: “We are making decisions today that are extremely important for generations to come. Not for us only, but the next generations.” In the video, there are are beautiful pans to the fog-saturated evergreen landscape, shots of men and women with mud-caked shovels cradling tiny, skeletal trees that make their shaky descent into the ground. It’s an art installation that brims with hope for the earth that will survive us, and the publishing industry we can pass down, to carry on without us.

Katie Paterson, still from video on the Future Library

The writers are invited to come to the Future Library Forest to muse on the hallowed ground that will feed their unpublished work. Margaret Atwood mused, “How strange it is to think of my own voice — silent by then for a long time — suddenly being awakened, after a hundred years,” and David Mitchell called the project a “vote of confidence” that “the future will still be a brightish place willing and able to complete an artistic endeavor begun by long-dead people a century ago.”

It’s nice to imagine an anti-Fahrenheit 451 future: a future that actually exists, a future that includes people, trees, and dare I say, books. Han Kang, as the newest contributor, has issued a kind of blessing on the project: “I would like to pray for the fates of humans and books. May they survive and embrace each other, in and after 100 years, even though they couldn’t reach eternity.” Is ever-after close to eternity? I’m going to say yes, let’s shoot for ever-after, and imagine a world 100 years from now where we’ve collected a diverse cohort of authors that will inflect the next 100 years of art, literature, and ecological preservation with hope, wisdom, and wit.

Imprisoned in Egypt for His Writing, Ahmed Naji is Finally Free

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No one foresaw that Ahmed Naji would be imprisoned for his novel. After all, no author had ever been subjected to arrest for morality reasons in modern Egypt, and as Naji himself says in this interview: “My writings are not political.”

The novel in question, Using Life (illustrated by Ayman Al Zorkany and translated from Arabic by Benjamin Koerber), reads like a colorful account of someone having a lovers’ spat with the city in which he’s lived all his life. That is to say, the book is full of intimate familiarity, occasional tender scorn, and a fervent curiosity toward city and man’s entwined fates that is also somehow coolly detached.

Opening in near-future, post-apocalyptic Cairo, Using Life combines graphic novel elements and quirky characters to produce a portrait of a man making the best of life in a city on the verge of disaster. It is a rollicking read, at times zooming into dizzying detail (for example, a section illustrating Cairo’s various inhabitants), other times hurtling into madcap, breakneck action (secret societies! Ninja assassins!). Above all, the book is a bold depiction of a person pushing against the boundaries of their given life.

The novel passed the inspection of Egypt’s censorship board and was lauded by critics in Egypt and the wider Arab world. Then the unexpected began. In 2015, a private citizen lodged a complaint against Naji after an excerpt from Using Life was printed in Egyptian magazine Akhbar al-Adab. The private citizen, a lawyer, claimed that he suffered heart palpitations and a drop in blood pressure after reading passages from the excerpt describing cunnilingus. State prosecutors then took these claims seriously, and as a result Naji was sentenced to jail on charges that he “violated public modesty”.

As mentioned, his ordeal is extraordinary, marking the first time in modern Egypt that a writer has been incarcerated for their fiction. Zadie Smith puts it this way: “Naji’s prose explicitly confronts what happens when one’s fundamentally unserious, oversexed youth dovetails with an authoritarian regime that is in the process of tearing itself apart.” While imprisoned, Naji was granted the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write award, which was accepted on his behalf by his brother.

In 2016, Naji was released from jail but subjected to a travel ban. In May of this year the ban was finally lifted, and Naji was able to leave Egypt. I caught up with him and translator Benjamin Koerber over email shortly after Ahmed Naji’s arrival in America.

YZ Chin: Glad to hear about the travel ban being lifted! How does that change things for you as a writer, if it does change anything?

Ahmed Naji: I’ve finally been able to travel and leave Egypt. I’ve now moved to the United States, where my wife lives, after we’d spent a full year separated from each other by the ocean and passport inspection officers.

I spent the two years after my release from prison in Cairo, and they were some of the most difficult years for me as a writer. First of all, I was under strict surveillance, and I was not allowed to organize any events or cultural activities. We failed to get official approval for the book launch event for my short story collection, which was published after I got out of prison. Only the Goethe-Institut, which is connected to the German Embassy in Cairo, offered to host the event.

Following the advice of my lawyers, I decided to keep away from publishing until the case was over. For the first time in my life, I felt the real weight of censorship. Even worse, I didn’t know what the red lines were. One time, I published an article on the band Mashrou’ Leila. Lo and behold I get a call from a friend who’s close to the security services, chastising me for the article and telling me they considered it a provocation since Mashrou’ Leila supports the Arab queer community, and that this sort of behavior could negatively impact my case and travel ban. Leaving Egypt now allows me to finally breathe and think freely, to test out my ideas, and reexamine everything that’s happened. I’ll finally be able to enjoy the company of my wife and the friends I have here.

But it also raises complicated questions for me: Is this to be a temporary, or permanent, departure? Am I to become a writer in exile? What does exile mean, now? If I stay here for a longer period, what will I do? What will I write about? Will I keep writing for an Egyptian audience, while living in America? Or will I assimilate to the new society and culture, change to writing in English, find a new ethnic or religious identity to subscribe to, and thus turn into one of those writers that talks about “Islam”, “the oppression of women in the Orient”, “the Arabs”, “terrorism”, and other such topics that captivate American audiences? For now, I’m trying not to think about all that, but I know I’ll have to face those questions soon.

For the artist to protect himself from confrontation with the institutions of power and all their violence, he has the three options that James Joyce prescribed for the writer: “lying, exile, silence.”

YZC: I’m very happy to hear that you are reunited with your wife. Sounds like you’re understandably at a difficult crossroads writing-wise. I get the reluctance to become a mouthpiece that caters to American appetite or biases. Are you concerned America will change you or pressure you in ways beyond that pigeonholing?

AN: I’m always ready for change. So far, I’m optimistic and open-minded about this American journey. My first concern is to learn — to understand this country, to take it all in and figure out its rhythm — and through this I’m sure I’ll find the right place for me. I’m lucky because I have a large number of friends here who are writers or work in the cultural or political fields. They’re providing me with support, and the keys to understand the nature of the scene here.

YZC: Do you think there’s also a risk of being pigeonholed as “the writer who went to prison?” As opposed to, say, “the writer who writes about finding joy in a depressing city and the fearsomeness of killer ninjas.” What would you like to be known for as a writer?

AN: I hope to be known as the writer with a thousand faces. I’d be very receptive to any of these labels or classifications. The writer’s challenge, in my opinion, is his ability to open up to the world, to change, to embark on new adventures, and to create new works. The writer that went to prison, the writer who writes about a depressing city called Cairo, is the same writer that might tomorrow write about intrigue and power play in Washington, D.C. Or he might write about a girl’s education in America. Anything is possible. My appetite’s ready for all trials and experiences.

Two days ago, I was talking to Yasmine [Naji’s wife] about something, and said, “As exiles, we don’t have the luxury of holding on to a lot of memories.” The thought terrified her. It hadn’t really set in yet. “Oh my god, we really are exiles,” she said. I tried to lighten the both of us up by focusing on the few real benefits of exile, like the unbearable lightness of being, and the freedom to remake one’s self and one’s image. Exile provides the opportunity for a new beginning, and there’s nothing more thrilling for me than new beginnings.

Exile provides the opportunity for a new beginning, and there’s nothing more thrilling for me than new beginnings.

YZC: As a writer who grew up in an atmosphere of state censorship, I struggled for a long time with self-censorship. Have you had any previous run-ins with the Egyptian censorship board? How do you grapple with the possibility of censorship when you write?

AN: I think a big part of writing is struggling with, and figuring one’s way around, the many forms of censorship that exist. The political censorship exerted by the state is a concern of course, but I never confronted it before the trial. My writings are not political and I was not interested in clashing directly with the state; I hadn’t thought that sex worried them very much. The greater pressure, the form of censorship that I feel impacts the writer more, is the censorship of society and the family. This form of censorship burrows under your skin, without you ever feeling it. It sometimes becomes impossible to confront or to expose, like the censorship that imposes itself under the name of political correctness.

YZC: That rings true for me, the existence of censorship that never gets registered. So you’re saying there needs to be constant self-exploration to understand the pressures that are placed on us. In that case, I’m curious if you think it’s possible to deliberately cultivate our influences as a countermeasure, like garlic against vampires? If so, what is or would be your garlic?

AN: In such circumstances, the garlic can be prepared a number of different ways.

1 — Listening closely to one’s own personal desires and pleasures, however forbidden or prohibited they might be, however useless they might be to society or the “wheel of production”. No impulse should be suppressed, nor should you run after it like a teenager. You just need to listen to it, then take your time polishing it, until the desire turns into a will.

2 — Don’t put too much trust in psychology or self-help doctrines. Do you really think all these books, programs, and talk shows want you to succeed? Do you really think that the secret of happiness can be sold with a holiday discount? Believe me: except for your mother, no one’s really concerned about your happiness and self-interest.

3 — Whatever you do, don’t let them catch you. In Egypt we have a nice little proverb that says, “Fuck the government but don’t show them your dick”.

4 — Always practice in front of the mirror first. A few days ago in D.C., there was a small demonstration of Neo-Nazis and white people. It was really quite small. Facing them was a counter-demonstration of mostly African Americans and anti-Nazis, which was huge. The Nazis, surrounded by police, were waving flags; they were vastly outnumbered by the counter-demonstrators. In spite of this fact, they were marching with full faith in the protection offered by the police. Their demonstration ended before it began, and they quietly left amidst the shouts of the counter-demonstration. The question I kept asking myself was, “What were they [the Nazis] thinking? Did they consider what happened a victory for them?”

YZC: There’s an interesting passage in Using Life where the character Ihab thinks about art: ‘Might not the “truth” of art conflict with its duty? That is to say, the duty art has to be functional?’ It certainly seems that to censors and some readers, art has a duty to uphold morals. What are your thoughts on the duty of art?

AN: Morality is not constant, it’s constantly changing. Otherwise, we’d still have the morality of the nineteenth century that held African Americans in the cotton fields and women in the kitchen. Permanence and stability are illusions. The world and human consciousness are in permanent motion, and the writer is part of this motion. The power of art lies in its ability to strip off the moral veil that society’s institutions impose under the pretext of stability or observing morality. When that happens, art performs its role vis-à-vis the individual by upsetting the ideas and convictions that one has been raised with. Art also performs its role vis-à-vis society in helping to change the prevailing morality.

Of course change doesn’t happen easily. The art that performs these roles puts itself in open confrontation with the institutions of power and all their violence. For the artist to protect himself, he has the three options that James Joyce prescribed for the writer: “lying, exile, silence”.

The power of art lies in its ability to strip off the moral veil that society’s institutions impose under the pretext of stability or observing morality.

YZC: When I saw David Bowie listed in your novel’s Acknowledgements page, I immediately thought it was very apt because Using Life is such a rollicking and at times surreal read. Best Bowie song?

AN: [I’m Deranged]

YZC: Using Life flirts with fantasy and magical realism, and of course graphic novels. Do you see more possibilities and avenues for expression in blending genres? Will you continue working across genres?

AN: I hope so. One of the faces I’d like to be known by is that of fantasy writer. Comics for me are my eternal dream. I’m a big fan of comics. None of my current projects involve comics, but I have a file full of dozens of stories and ideas that are just waiting for the right artist to execute them. I have the ambition to write a massive graphic novel, which I hope to realize some day.

A Reading List of Queer Romances in Historical Fiction

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There has been a ton of fiction (and highly-readable nonfiction) coming out recently about the secret — or not-so-secret — romances of people in earlier eras. I’m not talking about illicit affairs and cheating spouses; these are stories of buried love that surpass even the clandestine meetings of Romeo and Juliet. Men in love, women in love, transgender people in love: all stories that are becoming more visible these days, but in their time would have been met with social shunning or worse.

It’s more than just the drama of the love stories that has led to the upswing in period LGBT+ romances. There is an element of historical reclaiming in these novels. Authors don’t need to make up brave, convention-shattering characters when so many incredible examples already exist scattered through the past. From the Elizabethan era to the Cold War, famous (and less-famous) figures who would have otherwise been erased are retroactively coming out of their closets for the sake of representation, present and past.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Achilles was a leader, a berserker, a mercurial idiot, and an enemy the Trojans were terrified of facing, but he was also a young man in love. Contrary to the title, The Song of Achilles is less a glorification of Achilles than it is a myth of the lesser known Patroclus — his best friend and lover — and the relationship between the two in the midst of a gruesome war. Miller traces from their childhood to the battlefield, and although we all know how that story ends, the romance shines the spotlight on the true tragedy of the Iliad.

The Whale: A Love Story by Mark Beauregard

Historians have long wondered whether there was more than just friendship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Though their correspondences did not last long, the letters that have been unearthed point to an intensity of feelings that culminate in the creation of Moby Dick. Though largely speculation, The Whale spins a novel out of the repeated and highly suggestive interactions between Melville and the older man who soon inspired him to write one of literature’s great classics.

Eleanor and Hick by Susan Quinn

We are all sick of hearing about scandals in the White House by now, but this unexpected romance focuses on the First Lady for once, and her decades-long affair with reporter Lorena Hickok. Quinn wrote this nonfiction account with extensive research. Eleanor looked upon her position as First Lady with distaste, but it was that newfound role as a public figure that brought her into contact with Hickock. Both highly influential and powerhouses in 1930s activism, Eleanor and Hickock’s relationship was not one merely of love but of mutual ideology and political drive as well.

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

Confessions of the Fox is a fictional novel framed as an 18th-century manuscript. Dr. Voth comes upon a piece of writing from an infamous (real) 18th-century thief by the name of Jack Sheppard. The more Dr. Voth looks into the history of the thief’s exploits, the more queer subcultures of Victorian London rise to the surface. Jack Sheppard, in Rosenberg’s imagining, was not always “Jack.” Assigned female at birth, he first worked as the indentured servant to a carpenter, but with that life behind him and his partner in crime Bess by his side, he leaves behind a legend Dr. Voth can only hope to follow.

Jordy Rosenberg on Writing a Queer 18th-Century Love Story

A Thin Bright Line by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

In this Cold War era novel, Bledsoe fictionalizes her aunt’s experiences as a scientist, writer, and lesbian in 1950s America. Recruited by the government for secretive research venture in the Arctic, Lucybelle hides behind a guise of widowhood. Revealing too much of herself and her preferences could prove disastrous, but isolation is a poor alternative. New love and hard earned reputation conflict as Lucybelle helps lay the groundwork for modern climate research throughout the novel. Bledsoe writes with more conjecture than fact, but her work pulls from the faint traces of her relative’s life to reconstruct an image of early LGBT+ America.

The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell by William Klaber

Lucy Ann/Joseph Lobdell is a figure familiar to academics interested in gender and queer studies. As a prominent writer assigned female at birth but living as a man with a wife in 19th-century New York, Lobdell tangled with issues of gender and identity before those concepts existed in common vocabulary. The novel starts at the beginning of Lobdell’s journey and continues on through her determination to attain the freedom men enjoy, her adoption of men’s garb, and her decisions that transformed Lucy into Joseph.

All Out by Saundra Mitchell

The collection of seventeen short stories by different authors gives a full range of perspectives on fairy tales. Finally breaking away from the strong man rescuing the damsel tropes we grew up hearing, these stories play around with familiar tales, dropping them in new times and places and defying expectations to make the dusty happily ever after endings fresh again. Not all of the shorts pull from well-known tales. Some try their hand at original historical fiction threaded through with the same smooth, lyrical quality that made childhood bedtime stories memorable.

The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov by Paul Russell

Vladimir Nabokov had a brother eleven months his junior who, in the years leading up to WWII, also left Russia in exile, but Sergey left for a very different reason. Trapped in the shadow of a genius brother and enamored with the arts, Sergey Nabokov made his way to Paris, the popular hotspot for artists and sexual diversity in the 1920s. There a parade of big names came and went leaving their cultural marks on the city and on Sergey himself. While he was never destined for the fame his brother enjoyed, Sergey represented a different Nabokov, unacknowledged but present all the same.

The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst

The Stranger’s Child addresses the reflective nature of history. It begins in 1913 when a charming house guest by the name of Cecil Valance romantically ensnares both his host George and his host’s sister. He then writes a thinly-veiled poem about his time at the estate. The novel jumps through time following this poem, which has become a national classic. Scholars squabble to reinvent Cecil and his poem in accordance with their views: gay, straight, a genius, or a hack. As the decades change, so too does the interpretation of history until the distorted past more or less resembles the present.

What’s a Book That Almost Killed You?

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M y mother likes to point out every year that the reason autumn leaves smell so sweet is that they’re dying. In their final, florid throes, after they lose their chlorophyll but before they start to decay, leaves release chemicals that cause the warm and comforting scent of fall. I have not been able to verify this, but it seems correct for the season: we’re surrounded by death, marinating in it, breathing it in, but we like it. (Incidentally, when you try to check this factoid online you instead find many Quora and Reddit posts asking if there’s a single word for the smell of autumn leaves, and someone always suggests “petrichor,” a word that exists purely for nerds to say it’s a word they know. It does not mean the smell of autumn leaves, at all; the question just gives the type of people who like to say they know the word “petrichor” an excuse to say they know the word “petrichor.” What I’m saying is that there’s a gap in the “word that exists purely for nerds to say it’s a word they know” market. Get on it, linguists.)

It’s easy to feel surrounded by death lately, although it doesn’t smell so sweet. The specter of death from climate change or illegal abortion or medical debt or gun violence is never that far from our minds. So in a way it’s a relief to be coming into fall, a season of death but a colorful death, a fragrant one. It’s a good time to celebrate closeness to death, and to celebrate narrow escapes—not to forget the real dangers, but to maybe find some peace. (It’s also, not for nothing, the season of our Masquerade of the Red Death!)

For the new Novel Gazing, Electric Lit’s personal essay series about the way stories shape our lives, we’re asking: What’s a book that almost killed you? This could mean the book whose ideas landed you in physical danger, or the book that fell on your head and gave you a concussion (assuming that you can tell the latter story in a fully-realized way). If you had a run-in with the Necronomicon, if you risked your life mimicking the exploits of your favorite heroine, if you misunderstood a mycology manual, if you once vowed to eat every page of Moby-Dick and almost choked, now’s the time to tell your story. It’s okay if the “book” in question isn’t strictly a book—movies, TV, and other narrative media will do.

You may want to read some earlier Novel Gazing essays to get a feel for the series. Some recent favorites include essays about learning the wrong lessons from 200-year-old erotica, about falling in love with language through the work of Francesca Lia Block, and about reading the Song of the Lioness series as a closeted young gay man.

Essays should not be longer than 4,000 words or shorter than 800, and payment is $60 per piece. Submissions will remain open through September 21.

The Not-So-Hidden Racism of Nancy Drew

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I named my first car, a mint green Toyota Prius, after my first role model, Nancy Drew. To me, it was the perfect homage: like Nancy, my car was pretty, capable, and ready for adventure.

Women of many generations could claim a similar love of the girl detective. Before Buffy slayed her first vampire, before Wonder Woman lassoed the truth out of bad guys, before Leia led the Rebel Alliance, sixteen-year-old Nancy Drew sped her blue roadster all over River Heights catching criminals, getting dirty, and inspiring young girls to step outside of gender expectations.

When the first books were released in 1930, Nancy was an instant hit; to date, more than 80 million copies of her adventures have sold. However, the Nancy we know today is not the same Nancy readers first fell in love with. Thirty years after Nancy solved her first mystery, the original books were revised and shortened. Nancy aged to 18, drove a blue convertible, gained a surrogate mother in the form of her housekeeper, Hannah, and became, arguably, more docile. River Heights became less overtly racist but also more white. Since that first transformation the books have gone through a dozen iterations. These revisions offer one possible answer to the question of how to tackle outdated and harmful aspects of literature: try, try again. The recent controversy around the renaming of the American Library Association’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Award has propelled this question to the forefront of literary conversations in recent months. While the ALA has firmly stated the name change is about the award and is not a statement or recommendation regarding reading the classic Little House on the Prairie series, librarians, parents, and teachers have unsurprisingly found themselves asking: What do we do with these beloved books now?

The revisions to the original Nancy Drew books came in 1959 under the order of publisher Grosset & Dunlap for a variety of reasons — to modernize the series, to diminish publishing costs by shortening the books, and to rid the books of racist stereotypes.

Librarians, parents, and teachers have found themselves asking: What do we do with these beloved books now?

In the original 1930 version of The Secret of the Old Clock, the first book of the series, Nancy chases a clue to a lake bungalow. There, she interrupts a burglary in progress and is thrown into a closet and left to starve by one of the thieves. Eventually, she is freed by the bungalow’s caretaker, Jeff Tucker. Jeff Tucker is an African-American man who is portrayed as a child-like, speaking in dialect and easily fooled into intoxication by the robbers. Nancy scolds him for abandoning his post at the bungalow and grows frustrated when he slows her down by hosing himself off to sober up before they go to the police. At the station, Nancy marches to the front desk and demands to report a robbery, resulting in the marshal and several officers immediately emerging to hear her tale. Even when Jeff Tucker corroborates her story, they pile questions upon Nancy to clarify what he says. Tucker is “gently” pushed back from the car and left behind at the station while the rest, including Nancy, go after the thieves.

The contrast between Nancy and Jeff’s treatment at the police station is particularly disconcerting to me today. It brings to mind Emmett Till and the many instances of white women accusing Black men of various slights with deadly consequences. While Nancy only reports the robbery, her privilege as a wealthy white woman, demonstrated again and again in the book, is never as clear as this moment in the police station.

In the revised 1959 version of The Secret of the Old Clock, Jeff Tucker is white, and he hasn’t been tricked into drinking by the thieves, but is instead locked up in a shed. Nancy comforts him when he frets over losing his job rather than scolding him. At the police station, Jeff Tucker shares his version of the story with no trouble and is advised to call his son for a ride back home. This revision is emblematic of how Grosset & Dunlap chose to deal with the racism in the original texts — simple erasure. River Heights became mono-color.

This revision is emblematic of how Grosset & Dunlap chose to deal with the racism in the original texts — simple erasure. River Heights became mono-color.

While there are many who would say good riddance and allow the original Nancy Drew books to fade into obscurity, Phil Zuckerman, founder of Applewood Books saw value in them despite problematic scenes. In 1991, Applewood Books reissued the first three books in their original forms as an attempt to cash in on the nostalgia of baby boomers who knew and loved the first Nancy best. Zuckerman believed that the quality of writing of the original books outweighed the racism.

The publisher’s note at the beginning of each reprint acknowledges the “racial and social stereotyping” in the books as something the modern reader may be “extremely uncomfortable with” and that the stereotypes may provoke a “response in the modern reader that was not felt by the reader of the times.” Both phrases invoke a white modern reader as well as a white reader of the times. What they fail to consider is what the modern reader of color might feel — and what readers of color felt back then. It is likely a feeling significantly more damaging and painful than extreme discomfort. As a Korean American child, the stereotypes I encountered about Asians in popular media not only provoked anger, sadness, and pain, but were also internalized by me and other consumers — Asian or not. By ignoring the deliberate harm stereotypes were created to inflict, the publisher’s note fails to provide crucial context as well as fully acknowledge the damage of scenes like the one with Jeff Tucker for readers at the time and today.

The reprints went on to sell well enough that Applewood re-released seven additional Nancy Drew originals. I remember reading the reprinted original of The Secret of the Old Clock as a teenager, after having grown up with the revised versions. I recall enjoying the other historical aspects of the book: Nancy’s old roadster, the formalities in conversation, how Nancy ordered dresses to be tailored and shipped home. I remember thinking the Jeff Tucker scene was certainly racist, but did not interrogate it further. Without a full understanding of the history of the stereotyping, I knew it was bad and left it at that. Like Applewood banked on, I was caught up in the nostalgia of Nancy’s adventures. At that age, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that while Nancy was at the center of the novel, her story wasn’t the only one to pay attention to. In a classroom with a great teacher, or with a discussion guide of pointed questions, perhaps I could have gotten more out of it. Perhaps with more acknowledgement, an African American teen would have felt visible in their reaction to that scene. Perhaps guided reading is an answer to the big question posed above. But that may not be enough to warrant keeping these books on the shelves.

The publisher’s note on reprints invokes a white modern reader as well as a white reader of the times. What it fails to consider is what the modern reader of color might feel — and what readers of color felt back then.

Just like in the case of Wilder’s Little House series, there are no easy answers on how to approach its long history and racist past. To leave those texts in the past may feel right for some, and like erasure for others. The ugliness of America’s racism is something that cannot be swept under the rug, yet without the proper context and guidance, particularly for children, the revival of these stories continues a cycle of pain and re-traumatization. What’s certain is that more perspectives besides the default white one need to be considered when leading readers to these texts and determining which to celebrate as “Classics.”

Nancy has lived on with wavering success. New off-shoot series have included The Nancy Drew Files and Girl Detective, both met with criticism for portraying a Nancy with more romantic subplots and less of her earlier brilliance. By disposing of what appealed readers to Nancy in the first place — her grit, intelligence, and bravery — publishers homed in on what they thought teen girls cared about: boys and shopping. A scantily clad Nancy on covers, who spends time thinking about the men in her life instead of mysteries seems to reflect a straight male’s idea of an appealing young woman rather than the perspective of the intended audience. The 2007 movie starring Emma Roberts was met with lukewarm reviews, ultimately failing to breathe new life into the character as well.

Perhaps one of the biggest shake-ups to the series occurred last month with the release of the New Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, an intersectional graphic novel adaptation. In this iteration of River Heights, which takes place in the present, Nancy’s two best friends and sometimes co-detectives, Bess and George, are a woman of color and queer teen, respectively. Moreover, George’s girlfriend is Black. While some backlash is to be expected for any rebooted series, Nancy is, once again, meeting the expectations of the times. Demand for representation is at an all-time high in media, and publishers whether nobly for monetary reasons or other are taking note.

Even with this movement in the right direction, away from the stereotypical Jeff Tuckers and towards a colorful, LGBTQ-friendly River Heights, the question I’m left with is when — if ever — will we see a Black Nancy? An Asian Nancy? A queer Nancy? When color only appears at the edges, marginalized groups remain marginalized. Imagine that scene of Nancy at the police station demanding to report a robbery. Now imagine she is Black. Even today, a Nancy Drew of color would not wield the same privilege a white Nancy has. Changing our titular character in this way would be an opportunity to explore the complexities of the feminism of Nancy Drew, and put a young, capable woman of color front and center, drawing an even larger audience in to this well-loved, long-lasting series.

In 2016, we saw a glimmer of this possibility. CBS developed a pilot of a Nancy Drew TV show, with an older Nancy serving as an NYPD police officer. While the premise left much to be desired in comparison to the books, the casting of Iranian and Spanish actress Sarah Shahi was exciting. Unfortunately, the pilot was not picked up and, while the show is being shopped around to other networks, even if it is picked up the entire cast will be replaced.

For nearly 90 years, Nancy Drew has managed to stay relevant through reinvention and reboots, thanks to her adaptability as a character. Ultimately, Nancy Drew is all things — Midwestern and polite while also cultured and quick-witted; feminine and pretty, yet athletic and tough; popular and wealthy while simultaneously humble and generous. Her near perfection makes her inhuman which in turn makes her easily adaptable to the standards of perfection as they shift over time. The truth is, it’s not Nancy readers fall in love with, but the idea of her and the ideals she represents — bravery, justice, independence. In the real world, her name carries the same credibility it does within the fictional world of River Heights. For this reason, this world needs a Nancy Drew who steps out of the white, middle-upper class mold, who can not only counterbalance the racism that led to the original Jeff Tucker, but grapple with it. She can examine with her magnifying glass the ideals of diversity. Inclusivity. Equity. That’s the Nancy Drew all girls deserve.