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Leucothoe is only one of the many raped women of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, though she is not as famous as Daphne, Io, Persephone, or Philomela. She is collateral damage in Venus’s revenge against the Sun, who exposed the goddess’s affair with the war-god Mars. To torment the Sun, Venus enflames him with desire for Leucothoe, a mere mortal, and each day he prolongs his light by watching her — until watching her is not enough. We’re told versions of this tale time and again in the epic: a beautiful girl, caught in the gaze of a powerful male, violated, and forever transformed. Translations of Ovid often pass lightly over these violations, describing women as being “ravished” or “enjoyed.” But in Leucothoe’s case in particular, translators have so obscured and mitigated Ovid’s language that it seems almost no rape at all but a consensual sexual liaison, a woman won over by the brilliant beauty of a god.
Since translation is an art centered upon small details, I must consider what may seem minutiae in order to glean exactly what happens to her. But, as any rape victim whose every action has been parsed knows, defining rape has far too often been a matter of minutiae. Translation all too often replicates contemporary social attitudes regarding what constitutes seduction, rape, and consent — and the often problematically hazy lines we have drawn between them.
The Sun comes to Leucothoe disguised as her mother. Dismissing her slave girls, he discloses his identity:
She was frightened, Let fall the spindle and distaff, but even her fright Was most becoming. He delayed no longer, Turned to his true appearance, the bright splendor, And she, still fearful of the sudden vision, Won over by that shining, took his passion With no complaint.
This is Rolfe Humphries’ now classic mid-century translation. It is hard to understand here precisely what happens in Leucothoe’s bedchamber. It’s clear that the Sun will take her whether or not she is willing — but she seems almost to consent. She is “won over.” Is this, in the memorably horrific words of an erstwhile U.S. congressman, “legitimate rape?”
There is less ambiguity in the Latin. Here are Ovid’s words followed by my own translation in iambic pentameter, the meter preferred by many translators of the epic:
pavet illa, metuque et colus et fusus digitis cecidere remissis. ipse timor decuit. nec longius ille moratus in veram rediit speciem solitumque nitorem; at virgo quamvis inopino territa visu victa nitore dei posita vim passa querella est.
She quakes, and in her fright distaff and spindle fell from fingers slackened. Dread made her lovely. He delayed no more, returned to his true form and normal brightness. But though the virgin feared the sudden vision, defeated by the brightness of the god, she quit her protest and endured his force.
Vim passa est (“endured his force”) is as clear a description of rape as one can find in Latin. Passa est, from the Latin word pati, has one connotation of being the recipient of sexual penetration. Seneca the Younger, for instance, describes someone penetrated by a man as “enduring (pateretur) the man.” This aspect of Ovid’s Latin is untranslatable without destroying its terse subtlety. But passa est more explicitly suggests suffering something deeply unpleasant, which makes Humphries’ “took” feel off the mark. This is, after all, the word that gives us “passion,” not only the erotic passion of lovers but the bodily passion, the suffering, of Christ or his martyrs.
The word that gives us ‘passion,’ not only the erotic passion of lovers but the bodily suffering of Christ or his martyrs.
Where “passion” appears in Humphries’ rendering, it’s not a translation of passa est, from which it’s derived, but of vim, “force,” a word that communicates aggression, not ardor. In sexual contexts this is frequently the Latin equivalent for the English “rape.” Later in the epic, Ovid tells how Vertumnus nearly rapes Pomona but wins her instead through mutual desire. In my translation:
He readies force but needs no force — the nymph, seized by the god’s good looks, felt equal wounds.
There are parallels here to the rape of Leucothoe. Pomona is “seized” and Leucothoe “defeated.” Ovid even likens Vertumnus to the bright sun just before these lines. But whereas Ovid explicitly states that “force” is unnecessary for Vertumnus (though he was quite willing to use it), “force” is exactly what Leucothoe endures. The similarities between the two stories make the differences starker.
The same nexus of language is seen in Valerius Maximus’s description of prince Sextus Tarquinius’ rape of Lucretia, perhaps the most notorious incident of sexual violence from Rome. Here the famously chaste Roman matron is “forced to suffer (pati) sexual intercourse through violence (vim).” This rape, according to the legend, so enraged the Romans that they overthrew the kings and instituted the republican system of government.
Where is such anger on Leucothoe’s behalf? Why would Humphries downplay her brutal rape?
Two aspects of the text overly influence translators. The first is the god’s nitor, which has not only the primary meaning of “brightness” but also the secondary meaning of “beauty.” This suggests, just maybe, that Leucothoe is actually seduced by the god’s handsomeness. This detail combines with Leucothoe’s failure to complain. In this view, she consents — he is just too dreamy to resist.
There is a better explanation. Leucothoe does not protest because sexual violence silences her, as it does many rape victims both in Ovid’s epic and today. The Sun’s awesome beauty and blinding illumination combine to be undeniable proof that her assailant is a god, against whom she is simply powerless. What good would protest do? Failure to complain is hardly equivalent to verbal consent, no matter how handsome the rapist. And can she even see his gleaming nitor? Can any mere mortal look directly upon the sun? In just the previous book of the epic, another mortal, Semele, beholds the true form of a god, her lover Jupiter — and is incinerated.
Leucothoe does not protest because sexual violence silences her, as it does many rape victims both in Ovid’s epic and today.
When Leucothoe’s father discovers her loss of virginity, he flies into a rage — not at the Sun, but at her. Pointing to the Sun, she insists he raped her in what is her only direct speech: “He inflicted force on me, unwilling.” Her words vim ferre echo other rape accounts. Seneca the Elder uses precisely these words when speaking of a young woman who killed the man raping her (vim inferentem). Humphries’ “He made me do it!” fails to fully render Leucothoe’s unambiguous statement. Leucothoe’s father does not believe her and buries her alive, killing her. The Sun, in a bizarre act of pity applied too late, transforms her into frankincense.
Why do we too not take her at her word? Why do we refuse to believe Leucothoe when she insists she was raped?
I choose Humphries’ translation as my prime example because it’s widely taught and read, not because it is the most egregious in stretching Ovid’s Latin. In fact, it’s quite typical. Some translators veer from Ovid’s original language in only a few details — but details are crucial. Vim becomes “advances” (Stanley Lombardo) or even “ardent wooing” (Frank Justus Miller). It is distressing how breezily violent rape becomes insistent courting.
Some elide the key word “force,” vim, entirely. For instance, Charles Martin:
This unexpected apparition frightens the virgin, but its radiance overwhelms her, and she gives in to him without complaint.
Or Allen Mandelbaum:
That sudden vision finds her still afraid, but godly radiance is just too great. And she — unable to protest — submits.
There is no “rape” in these rapes. Others euphemize Leucothoe’s direct statement accusing the Sun of rape. A.D. Melville gives, “He ravished me against my will!” Martin, “He plundered me! I did not pleasure him!” Mandelbaum maintains the rape accusation but changes it to indirect speech: “even as she claims…that she was raped against her will.”
Some versions play up Leucothoe’s consent far beyond what the Latin could ever justify. David Raeburn, for instance:
Shocked as she was by this sudden appearance, the girl was utterly dazzled. Protest was vain and the Sun was allowed to possess her.
Or Horace Gregory:
The god, revealed, Showed her his sudden heat, his manliness, At which she trembled, yet could not resist it; She welcomed the invasion of the Sun.
Gregory later has Leucothoe accuse the Sun not of raping but of “dazzling” her, with no suggestion of her unwillingness.
David Slavitt, who admits to taking “all kinds of liberties” in his translation, gets far too carried away imagining the details of Leucothoe’s desire:
The distaff falls from her numb fingers and onto the floor, making the only noise in a long and dreamy silence. She stares in disbelief as his features blur and change from those of her mother to new and grander proportions — it is indeed Apollo who stands there, splendid and awesome! The girl, meek, is in shock as he comes to enfold her in his strong arms.
These additions seem almost meant to make us feel a frisson of erotic titillation. Have we been made complicit in a rape that has been glossed over and concealed from us?
The thing is, even with these distortions, omissions, and mistranslations, the Sun still rapes Leucothoe. No other word suffices for when a man (a god!) comes to a woman (a mortal!) when she’s alone, terrifies her, asserts his power over her, then sexually penetrates her. It is indeed doubtful that clear consent can even be offered in such a situation. And what if Leucothoe had offered a vocal sign of compliance? As Monica Lewinsky points out in a recent article for Vanity Fair, such highly disparate power dynamics create “a circumstance [where] the idea of consent might well be rendered moot.”
Is such nitpicking, in the end, really valid? Isn’t this a small moment in a grand, sweeping epic? Aren’t translators meant to take liberties to make something new that stands independent of the original text? To a degree, yes. Yet the translator does a disservice by eliding or diminishing the disturbing aspects of the original, particularly when these involve sexual violence or abuse of power.
It is irresponsible, especially in our present moment, to overlook rather than interrogate the epic’s sexual violence.
To quote a comment by Emily Wilson on the Odyssey that equally pertains to Ovid’s Leucothoe, “Rape culture is deeply intertwined with how this scene is read, and how it’s taught to impressionable teenagers.” It was indeed the Metamorphoses that gave rise to the trigger warning debate on college campuses when a Columbia student complained about a professor’s failure to acknowledge the ubiquitous presence of rape in the poem, instead “focus[ing] on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery.” Educators and translators alike have a responsibility to do better. Rape in Ovid’s poem has indeed received renewed scrutiny in the wake of the #MeToo movement, as has rape in Greco-Roman myth and Classical antiquity more generally. It is irresponsible, especially in our present moment, to overlook rather than interrogate the epic’s sexual violence.
We must think carefully about why translators have mitigated, even erased Leucothoe’s rape. Their hedging in many ways reflects our own contemporary lack of adequate vocabulary for capturing sexual violence and our tendency to gloss over rape with language that mitigates and obscures it. We still lack clarity about what exactly constitutes consent — is it communicated with words or with the body alone? Rape remains a topic around which more questions swirl than clear, definitive answers. Even now, some think it is rape only if a woman screams. These translations echo our failure to trust women who say they have been raped, and they reenact how we downplay female victimization while exonerating male perpetrators, biases recently outlined by Kate Manne.
These mishandlings of Ovid’s tale illustrates how gender biases are reproduced in the art of translation.
These mishandlings of Ovid’s Leucothoe tale illustrate well how gender biases in society at large are reproduced in the art of translation, a phenomenon Emily Wilson has eloquently illuminated. As she has pointed out, such “biases can lead to some seriously problematic and questionable choices (such as…translating rape as if it were the same as consensual sex).” It matters that the person shedding light on such biases is the first woman to publish a translation of Homer’s Odyssey into English.
It is fitting to conclude by observing that only one woman, Mary M. Innes, has published a complete translation of the Metamorphoses into English, more than 60 years ago — Jane Alison’s 2014 Change Me comprises decontextualized selections, not including the story of Leucothoe. Here is Innes’ prose version of Leucothoe’s rape: “Leucothoe, though frightened by the unexpected sight, was overcome by his magnificence, and accepted the god’s embraces without a murmur.”
Perhaps it’s the right time for another woman to be given a try.
O n my podcast Rahul Mehta—whose second book, No Other World, is recently out in paperback—spoke with me at length about the hardships of writing his next book, the reality of writer’s block (it’s really real), and how pain can be harvested from our lives and the writing process, then planted on the page. Ours was one of those conversations where our fears and struggles were laid bare in a way that didn’t seek a solution, but allowed us to recognize the inherent issues facing all creators. I was reinvigorated after speaking with Rahul about his debut novel, his pathway to writing as well as coming to terms with what it means, to him, to be a Southern writer of color from West Virginia. The full episode can be heard on the Minorities in Publishing podcast.
Jennifer Baker: It sounds like we both had some expectations thrust upon us from adults about what we should do as adults. My mother didn’t want me to become a writer either, she wanted me to go into business initially.
Rahul Mehta: Oh, yeah, absolutely, and my brother did become a doctor.
JB: Get out!
RM: I think it was very much expected. I mean, I think that’s pretty common of, sort of my parents’ generation. I think most of the Indians of my generation a lot of them ended up becoming doctors or engineers or scientists or bankers. I think that I’m still a bit of an anomaly, especially among my generation. The younger generation’s a little bit different. But my generation is really the first generation of Indians to grow up in America. I don’t know if you know about the history of immigration, but basically Indians were not allowed to immigrate to the United States until, I don’t know if it was 1957. I’m not sure, I forget the date now, but there a specific law. There had been an exclusion act — no, was it 1965? I don’t know, I’m getting the dates wrong. I’ll have to look this up. But basically there was a very strict quota system before that. The United States had very strict quotas about immigration. They basically wanted to keep the racial makeup of America the same. So the quotas were all based on who was already here.
So very, very, very few Indians were allowed to immigrate before that time. And then when it finally did open up to Indians, and again I think I’m now forgetting the year, but I think it might have been 1965 or something like that, the people who were allowed to immigrate, when they finally opened it up for immigration, the only people who are allowed to immigrate were people who were trained in math and science for the most part. They were the only ones who could get visas. And that’s sort of part of what we think of as the “brain drain,” right? The United States wanted to bring in people who were trained in these areas, and so they were the only people who were allowed to emigrate. So my parents’ generation is really the first generation of Indian immigrants. There were some before that, but they’re really the first big wave, and they were almost all doctors and scientists because those were the only people who could get visas.
JB: Wow. That’s a mindfuck, too, right? Of: this is what’s acceptable.
RM: Yeah, so, I was an anomaly as an artist among the people I knew my age who are Indian-American. And I remember this, I remember — when I grew up in West Virginia there were very few South Asians, or there was no South Asian community really. So I didn’t really have an opportunity to get to know very many South Asians, but when I went to college and went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, there’s a very big South Asian population there. But whenever I go to any of the South Asian events, I just felt like there wasn’t room for me there. I felt like that first of all as an artist, but also someone who was gay. I just, I really didn’t feel like there was any room for me there. I felt, I don’t know, I just didn’t feel at all comfortable in those kinds of spaces. It wasn’t really until I moved to New York that I discovered any South Asians who were queer or artists.
It wasn’t really until I moved to New York that I discovered any other South Asians who were queer or artists.
JB: So you were an outlier amongst outliers, so to speak.
RM: That’s how I felt. I shouldn’t say that was the case across the board, because now when I think I did know a couple people in college. For the most part I felt very sort of marginalized by what I would think of as my own community the South Asians.
JB: Do you know if there’s more of an artist community, especially like South Asian or POC community in West Virginia now that’s been building over time?
RM: Yeah. Now in my parents’ town in West Virginia there’s a nice little South Asian community. I mean, I think there are probably like [inaudible] or so, so it’s a nice little, you know, it’s a nice little group. But yeah, West Virginia, at least the part that part I’m from, is still very, very White. That’s a real challenge. I mean, I should say that I also have tremendous love for West Virginia and I think I started off by think I think of myself as a West Virginia writer. I think of West Virginia as a place that made me as a writer.
JB: It also provides the material, right? I mean, this relationship with place and identity?
RM: I studied with some really great people in grad school. I was lucky. Mary Karr was one of my teachers, and George Saunders was my thesis advisor. I was at Syracuse for my MFA. It was a great program. Anyway, Mary Karr would ask us — or, she asked us this question in this memoir class I took, and it is — I think it’s actually an adaptation of a line from a famous W. H. Auden poem, the poem that he has about Yeats. She asks this question that comes from that poem. The question is: What hurt you into writing? It’s one of those questions where I remember what I felt in my body when she asked that question in class. And she didn’t make us answer the question out loud or anything, but she just posed it. What hurt you into writing? And I felt that question on a cellular level in my body. And it’s really interesting because I had not thought of my trajectory as a writer in that way until she said that. And when she asked that question, I was like, yeah. Yeah.
She didn’t make us answer the question out loud or anything, but she just posed it. What hurt you into writing? And I felt that question on a cellular level in my body.
JB: That’s a really deep question.
RM: And I don’t think that that’s to suggest that we all write from a place of pain because I don’t think that that’s fair. But I think, for me what that question means is that, are you sort of in touch with that pain? Because we all feel pain, right? I mean, we all have that kind of pain. And, sort of like, are you in touch with that as a writer? Which is not necessarily the same as, like, that’s where you write from. But are you in touch with that as a writer? Is that something you can access as a writer? Is that something that you have allowed to shape who you become as a writer? And emotions that you plumb as a writer. I mean, that’s how I viewed it.
JB: Speaking of, in your sophomore book No Other World there are these themes of shame and choices. Everyone in this family has a choice. (And I want to also emphasize this is a multiple perspective book, as well.) It’s not just a linear tale for one person, like the son Kiran seems to be the most paramount in terms of where the story is flowing from beginning to end. But we follow members of his family. I’m wondering if those themes are something you constantly seek to explore in your work and in terms of the fluctuation of viewpoints?
RM: I think it’s not just the case in that relationship. I think it’s actually the case in many relationships from this book where people find themselves in situations where they have to hide who they are, or be diminished versions of themselves. Ways in which they’re just not fully seen by others or fully allowed to be who they are.
And I think that often leads them to behave in ways that hurt other people. So, yeah, I guess that is something that I wanted to explore. I really work from instinct as a writer. I don’t think that I’m not super analytical about what I am doing when I’m doing it, even often afterwards.
JB: I think about Kiran and Shanti’s decisions the most, because they’re kind of zeroed in on so much.
RM: I think it really was this idea of what the immigrant experience is like for people who grew up who live in rural America. I think that it’s something that actually hasn’t been written about quite as much, and I especially say that about the Indian-American experience. We have some really great writers who’ve written about — Jhumpa Lahiri, who’s amazing. I love her work. But, it’s also set in Boston or New England, and I think the experience of, the rural experience of being sort of brown, an immigrant in a rural area is really different. And that was something that was really important for me to represent. Initially, I think the first version of this book, or at least when I was initially thinking about it is, it was in West Virginia. I mean, that’s where I grew up, in West Virginia. Eventually I changed the setting to western New York State, but it was very much influenced by some of the things I felt and my family felt, you know, being brown in West Virginia at that time. And so I really wanted to sort of explore that feeling and I wanted to explore it for various members of the family, what it was like for them, so what it’s like for Nishit, who’s coming and working as a doctor in this town. But then Shanti, who’s coming over as part of an arranged marriage, she hasn’t necessarily chosen to live here, to live this life. And yet it’s sort of the life she’s ended up with. And then for the kids growing up there. I think the siblings end up taking very different routes in their lives in terms of how they deal with that early experience of being outsiders. I think Preeti does everything that she can to try to become an insider and sort of assimilate into White culture in ways that are sometimes kind of disturbing. With Kiran I think that he wanted to try to assimilate and he couldn’t. So their lives take these really different routes.
JB: I’d be interested to hear what more people think as they read No Other World. The Indian-American, the rural America, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone’s like, [Rahul] do you have a sister named Preeti? Is she Christian? When I read it I was thinking: The author is a person who knows this experience and is close to it in a way that they wouldn’t be able to falsify in terms of the emotional toll it takes on a person. Whatever events occur are fictionally based, but that emotional understanding was something I felt: This is not something this author is making up.
RM: Thanks for saying that. I do have to say that I think, just on a process level, whenever I’m feeling something — whether it’s anxiety or pain or joy or whatever, whatever it is that I’m feeling — I’m very conscious about trying to channel that into whatever work I’m doing. And I think that often is especially true of whatever negative things I might be expressing. So, you know, for instance as I said, I went through some pretty dark times writing of this book. There were times when I was feeling, for instance, quite a bit of pain about something, and I would just say, okay, well let me give that pain to one of these characters and explore that. And the circumstances may have been very different. It may have been the thing that led them to their pain might have been very different than what led me to mine. But, the pain itself was, “okay, let me give it to them.” Let me explore it. Let me explore my own pain, but let me do it through this other their character and it may be this very different situation.
JB: Is that therapeutic at all? Does that work? Because I might do it right after this interview.
RM: I’d really hesitate to call this kind of writing therapy. I mean, there is writing that is therapy and I think that’s a specific thing, a specific subset. Yet, I don’t know, I do think that it’s — I definitely work through some stuff when I’m writing for sure. I mean, if nothing else, it gives me a place to put that energy. Whatever I’m sort of feeling it gives me a place to express that and put it, and I do find that really useful.
I’d really hesitate to call this kind of writing therapy. But I definitely work through some stuff when I’m writing for sure.
JB: Cool. This is becoming a very therapeutic conversation for me in all honesty.
RM: And especially if it’s the kind of emotion that is just, you know, it’s like especially with something like anxiety, for instance, which is something I feel a lot. You can either let the anxiety stop you or ruin your day or whatever. Or you’re going to have it anyway, why not use it? Find a way to use it. Just use it.
Whether we care to admit it or not, literature is full of embittered, aggressive, reclusive patriarchs. It’s easy to accuse writers of having daddy issues, but it’s far less easy to admit that because of toxic masculinity, emotionally available fatherhood is a rare practice. My own kind and self-reflective father, a few partners, and many good friends and colleagues are proven exceptions to the bandied-about rule that cishet men are a sad and dangerous bunch.
My novel, The Comedown, lampoons toxic masculinity by showing it in extreme forms. Leland Bloom-Mittwoch Sr. inhales cocaine, berates his wife, and suffers delusions of grandeur. Aaron Marshall worships his drug-dealing father and gets rich working for a development company that could have rendered his family homeless. Lee disdains every woman he sleeps with except Maria Timpano, whom he places on a desperate pedestal, and for whom he drives into a ravine. Being a man in the world of The Comedown is like being on a particularly critical episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, except it’s your patriarchy-warped character being examined instead of your schlubby clothes.
A good dad treats his family like fellow human beings deserving of compassion and respect. A bad dad can act out in as many ways as there are vices and structures of oppression. All well-adjusted dads are alike, but these six patriarchs prove that each dysfunctional dad is dysfunctional in his own way.
Founder of Macondo and head of a family of similarly-named Buendías, José Arcadio is easily one of the worst patriarchs in literary history. Holed away in his study while his wife and children break their backs in the garden and around the house, José Arcadio is disinterested in all that doesn’t revolve around him and his scientific curiosity, a bad father by way of neglect. (When your child becomes the fascist mayor of the town you founded and you don’t intervene, you know you’ve probably failed as a father.) He spends his old age confused and tied to a tree, a fate befitting a would-be master of the universe inquisitive beyond his abilities.
Simon Dedalus starts out as the bumbling, loveable-and-down-on-his-luck father from an after school special. But as young Stephen Dedalus matures, Simon becomes increasingly drunk and monstrous until he’s shouting about Stephen being a “lazy bitch.” (“He has a curious idea of genders if he thinks a bitch is masculine,” Stephen quips afterward.) Propelled by Simon’s ineptitude, Stephen goes on to seek fatherhood elsewhere: in the mythical Daedalus and later in the arms of Leopold Bloom.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is a heart-rending read precisely because of Cholly Breedlove’s actions. Saying that Cholly “behaves badly” is like saying that “being a woman under patriarchy is hard.” Both are gross understatements. Cholly sets his own house on fire and rapes his daughter. His drunken rages transport him to planes of grandiose incoherence. He has been failed by a racist social system and his manic awfulness serves to both reveal and conceal his wounds. If only Pecola could have escaped him sooner.
If anything, Lear’s story is a lesson in not picking favorites, or at least not picking the wrong favorites. Ideally, children wouldn’t have to make formal appeals for their father’s love, but this is not how things worked in pre-Roman Britain. Lear spends more quality time with the Fool in an apocalyptic storm than he does with any of his daughters. Regan and Goneril are regarded as evil without question and Cordelia is practically ignored until the end of the play, when a piteously mad Lear finally gives her the time of day. Good parenting this is not.
Hazel escapes her sterile marriage to the tech tyrant Byron Gogol by moving in with her father. He’s living in a trailer with a sex doll named Diane and putzing around on a Rascal scooter, his every action seemingly designed to maximize Hazel’s discomfort. When he’s not berating Hazel about her past, he’s canoodling with Diane in a way that is truly a bummer. He’s distinct among the rest of these patriarchs in his willingness to meet the lowest possible threshold of decency: he doesn’t actively inflict any harm on his child. Way to go, Hazel’s dad.
Dr. James Orin Incandenza, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Like José Arcadio, Dr. James Orin Incandenza (a.k.a Himself a.k.a The Mad/Sad Stork), completely neglects his children for his filmmaking career. While older brothers Hal and Orin are resigned to being ignored, Mario lusts after his father’s attention, acting as key grip and best boy in Dr. James’ benighted productions. Eventually, Dr. James ends his life by putting his head in a microwave, leaving his children to wonder what they meant to him, if anything.
In 1986 my cousin had a Commodore 64, a TV with a split antenna that pulled Saturday Night Live from the electromagnetic field over the Vermont mountain (Eddie Murphy as Buckwheat, a cone-headed Bill Murray), and a turntable propped on a stack of records. When I’d arrive at his house in the woods, he’d put on Purple Rain while I peeled off my wool coat, its tobacco smell like the backseat of our old Toyota, my stomach upside down from the coiling drive. If you loved Prince, you can see it: flower-edged record sleeve banged up at the corners and slashed with neon purple letters, his iconic white ruffled shirt, his dark eyes staring out from the seat of a smoke-engulfed motorcycle.
The image is indelible, flawlessly constructed. Prince was acutely conscious of his visual identity and relished the provocative complexity of it — anything to make us blush or breathe a little harder. He was also a master of the disappearing act, the epitome of reinvention, receding and returning from rock god to mystic to sex kitten in the blink of a gold-shadowed eye. At some point, I saw Prince and I saw my cousin, not a physical likeness so much as a shared absence — a part in each of them that had existed and been taken away.
Prince was a master of the disappearing act, the epitome of reinvention.
My cousin was my favorite person in our family of writers and painters, all of whom were, on any given day, either in a bloody civil war or as close as the McGarrigle sisters in ecstatic ensemble. He was ten years older than me, good looking, restless. He played piano at night with his eyes closed like a shadow. I felt abundantly attended to, in his presence. Adored. He imbued in me concepts that would stay for good: sugar molecules eat your teeth in the dark; one cell carries our entire human genome; our ears still listen when we’re asleep. But there was a hard sadness in him, too, that I’d sometimes glimpse as if through a prismed periscope when he stacked the wood, heaving pieces across the yard like a javelin throw, or when he shoveled the billions of shattered ice crystals of our endless snow.
I didn’t understand the potent sexuality of the lyrics on Purple Rain yet but I loved the music and everything it made me feel. The minute the needle hit the record and the worn vibrato of the organ began like a church sermon I’d feel the imminent excitement — the “Let’s Go Crazy” moment of conception, the pulse that you couldn’t hear and not jump up and dance.
Some kids at school weren’t allowed to listen to Prince because of his suggestive lyrics, but we were artists. Grandma wrote indecent poems about oblong vegetables; I learned about self-love from Anne Sexton and Woody Allen. No one censored our music or our books, least of all my distracted mother who was raising three of us alone, whose piles of short stories and envelopes of correspondence filled our apartment’s only available counter space. She’d type and package up her 300-page novels and lug them down to the mailbox while we bickered in frayed superhero costumes and ate bowls of government-funded Kix.
From the bottom bunk of my cousin’s bed where I stayed sometimes on sleepovers across town, warm from the sit-down dinner that was always served around his family’s stove — my aunt’s basmati rice cooked over sliced potatoes and eaten with a raw egg as she’d learned in her years living in Iran — I would answer his usual questions: What was I doing in school? Who were my friends? Did I have a boyfriend? When I dreamed about Prince one night he laughed and said it was my repressed desire for the singer that made the dream.
My cousin didn’t seem to care that I was younger than him. He found my endless stream of readings and social sufferings interesting, and revealed to me a world of popular culture that was evidently everywhere except my house. We had no TV, no “Cosby Show,” no Atari projecting bright, pixelated mazes we could spend hours traveling through. Entertainment was our upright Hamlin sloping with the floor, a cassette player, books under and over everything. My old violin. What leaked in came by way of WX104, our state’s hit radio station that launched nightly through my alarm clock radio. At 8 pm the DJ would start taking calls from the sad and the love-struck, playing corny songs for their wounds. Sometimes he’d let a caller go on for a very long time and a whole story would emerge. I’d sit balanced in the kitchen on our church pew — one of the many pieces of furniture my mother found rummaging antique barns — waiting for the end: the woman walking out the door forever, the father succumbing to his disease. I’ve got just the song for you, Sheila, and for all of you out there…
“Out there” was a town over, a state away, it was stories of people and their hopes and injuries, it was the sky and the planets that my grandmother read about in her astronomy journals, and then it was inside, too, a dimension I couldn’t escape walking each day into 8th grade biology dizzy with images of blood and circulatory systems, glands, muscles, tissue. I nearly fainted when our teacher showed up with fifteen tiny scissors and a bucket of frogs. One night, studying cells on the floor of my cousin’s kitchen, he explained the lowest level of biological organization as a house with many hollow and orderly rooms. Put your hands on the walls, he said. Nothing can get through.
What does it take to close yourself up, to disappear? To really disappear, there are online guides with pictures like “How to Cultivate New Habits” (start wearing a hat indoors) and essential rules (you must go alone). WikiHow can have you gone in 10 steps. SkilledSurvival.com says your entire life will become a lie.
The experience of childhood is not unlike the experience of art, as the Russian writer Viktor Shklovsky describes it: “the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” Which is to say, the story of my cousin was forming in me a long time, reconciling with things I could only feel as a kid and not quite grasp. I loved him. I would have chosen him over anyone. But one summer he learned a family secret that had been kept from him for years, and that was that. When he turned to me it was as though he’d never seen me before.
Prince had only recently renounced his name, deciding to become a symbol instead, simply The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, without a record label, without designation. I dreamed my cousin went to the top of a building and bent his body over the roof’s edge, a gesture toward his ending, or all of ours. When I woke up, he was gone.
I dreamed my cousin went to the top of a building and bent his body over the roof’s edge, a gesture toward his ending, or all of ours.
No song quite unspooled me like “Purple Rain.” Walking home from school I’d leap from one sidewalk crack to the next, conjuring up provocations, if a red car drives by now it means — , wanting something to happen to me though I didn’t know what. I’d turn my Walkman up until my eardrums hurt. Our town was gutless, uniform, filled with families in clean Subarus who had orderly domestic systems like chore charts and Macaroni Mondays, people my mother would call ordinary under her breath at the co-op where they were always glaring. I wanted to break into the next kingdom. I wanted to hear Prince relish the inharmonious, the oblique. His shimmery guitar with its tiny striking pangs comes at the close of “Purple Rain” like a late-night whisper that makes you fall in love. His chaos was chemical, the unstoppable force of something urgent coming. When the camera turns out to the audience in a live video of the song from a club in Minneapolis in 1993 — the whole thing bathed in a purple, sweaty glow — my heart beats with an almost agonizing envy of everyone standing in front of that moment, that minute when Prince was so sensual and alive. His face strains with the high, startling “heeee-heee hoo hoo” — a wail that is utterly animal, that ascends to the edge of the atmosphere. Even in the blur of old footage it makes my entire nervous system ignite and dissolve like a star.
Which is what makes the symbol he became when his name disappeared so figuratively right. A curious shape, part ancient Egypt, part biology, something like Ida’s Wunderhorn stabbed through by an iron-tipped spear. He was too large for language, or he was outside of it. Subverting the convention of naming itself made sense, especially when one could not pronounce it or type it into anything.
And what was left in its place? An incredible loneliness pervades many of his songs, an almost unfillable desolation. Which might be at the heart of why we make art at all. How do any of us stand quiet in the middle of a life that’s moving steadily toward its end, that has, up ahead, a total and inexorable vanishing?
He was too large for language, or he was outside of it. Subverting the convention of naming itself made sense.
When I listen to Prince now I’m back in my cousin’s bedroom, on the bottom bunk, looking up at the wood slats that hold the outline of his body suspended above me. Wool blankets piled on our feet, the damp of the forest everywhere, the dirt road running like a ribbon over the mountain. The click-click of his TV antennae trying to catch a signal in the night.
Prince died as Prince, the unsayable symbol relinquished, or he died as Prince Rogers Nelson, the name his parents gave him in 1958. I don’t know what my cousin’s name is now. He never spoke to his mother again, or his aunts, or me. I heard he had moved out of the country, then back again, that he was using a middle name instead of his first. But then the story of him ends.
And I grow more fascinated by erasure, the destruction and the freedom of it. I think about secrets and then exile of the sort we enact on ourselves. It’s a new world now where I walk, decades later, far from that town, far from the sweet anonymity of the ’80s; it’s all technology and surveillance, the whole planet on an intricate grid that can largely be viewed from any given point. I hate the dot on my cell phone map that shows me “me” while I’m running the circumference of my city park or walking to the grocery. I resent the app that lets my daughter or my husband know where I am at any moment so they can ping out their requests for ice cream, milk, postage stamps. Sometimes I want to get very lost. It soothes me to imagine flight, to conjure an escape from my life, even when it’s impractical, impossible. Is there any crack in the framework to slip through anymore?
I have never tried to find my cousin. Surely he is in plain sight of someone, somewhere. But who is he to them? A body defamiliarized, renamed? Who are any of us but an amalgam of cells, our faces like shifting genetic composites, our structures unduplicatable, a whole system of chemicals and thermodynamic reactions that rely on a painstakingly precise balance? A billion cells inside us and each one perpetually gearing up to create, to divide. “It’s the cell’s main drive,” he’d said. Now I think of the mystery of what happens — how a nucleus disassembles and re-forms. It breaks down and is reborn, over and over and over.
Distance yourself from others — WikiHow’s rule #3. Do everything slowly. Erase all documents with your name (#6), lay false leads, wear unusual clothes to a distant border where no one expects you to be. You might once again have a chance at brand-newness, then. Tabula rasa. The mind, as Aristotle said, that is nothing until it has thought.
Erase all documents with your name, wear unusual clothes to a distant border. You might once again have a chance at brand-newness, then.
One night — Dream if you can a courtyard / an ocean of violets in bloom — my cousin fell asleep first. Curious if he could hear me in his sleep as he claimed, I whispered up to the top bunk, Your orange tree is blooming! He didn’t respond, nothing twitched, no firing neuron announced itself, and eventually I fell asleep, too. But in the morning he sat up and said, “I had the most amazing dream. It was summer and my orange tree was covered in mandarins!”
I was amazed. I had broken through the gates of his sleep and spoken to him on the other side! There, where he floated like a raft on the waves of a slowing consciousness, the stony paralysis of his unfastening body going from this world to that. I had found a way in. And what he’d told me had been right: even far away, in that deep, unresponsive place where he had gone, he could hear me.
Dispose of your old personality, bit by bit. If going rogue, find a wild area where no one lives. And if the chance arises, leave behind a token for someone you loved. You won’t be seeing her again.
I was introduced to Brendan Kiely when he collaborated with Jason Reynolds on what would become the New York Times bestselling and award-winning book All American Boys. I was shocked, utterly shocked, to meet a cishet White man determined to speak out about the issues of White supremacy directly, and not guise it under a fairytale premise. At a time when many may want to write away from the issues, this was someone writing towards it, who presented an honest take on responsibility not often seen or read. (Kiely and outspoken advocates in marginalized communities served as examples on how I should reckon more with my own privilege.)
Kiely’s adamance to consistently reflect and speak out on the roles of those with power is also evident in his recent essay in The Good Men Project and several of his books. From owning White privilege to recognizing toxic masculinity, Kiely targets awareness and acceptance of accountability for progress to those of privilege about their privilege. And this isn’t relegated solely to his writing. It’s also evident from his work as a public speaker and advocate working with literary activist groups such as PEN America. With his latest book, Tradition, Kiely zooms in on rape culture and toxic masculinity within an elite boarding school.
I spoke to Kiely about his role as a White man in an obviously broken system, and how acknowledging and pushing against power can give voice to, not so much the voiceless, but the silenced. In the end, we both wanted to know: Within a society of toxic masculinity, when can we expect men at any age to take responsibility?
Jennifer Baker: Much of your new bookseems to be about awareness by those with privilege. Or at least the path to awareness. How do you as author pursue writing a book like this at all?
Brendan Kiely: Action without more time spent building awareness can be dangerous, so I do try to spend a lot of time on awareness, and I think that’s part of how I approach writing a book like this. I spent a lot of time listening to women. And I spent a lot of time reflecting on my own experiences growing up, the ways in which boys encouraged in each other pretty toxic behavior. Also the moments when some boys had the courage to stand up and let the rest of us know we were being idiots. In the same way I wanted to talk about racism in America when writing All American Boys, I had to look at Whiteness and ask how White people can do a better job engaging in self-examination and critique. In Tradition I want to look at misogyny and rape culture and ask men to engage in deeper conversations of self-critique. That seems like the only honest way in for me.
I had to look at Whiteness and ask how White people can do a better job engaging in self-examination and critique.
Jenn: Makes sense. With the rise of #MeToo we hear more from victims, and in your essay (in The Good Men Project) as well as your book, you speak to the need to not only listen to women, but believe them.
Brendan: Absolutely.
Jenn: Where do you think that lack of belief comes from in the male psyche? Understandably, you can’t speak for all men. But there’s a lack of assessment in terms of boys recognizing their behavior, though they’re being supported or protected.
Brendan: On an individual level, I think there are many people (men in this case) who say to themselves, “Well, I’m not that” (then point to an extreme example) “I’m not Harvey Weinstein.” And by distancing themselves in that way they don’t take accountability for all the ways they enable people like him. In Tradition, it isn’t only that some of the boys think they personally aren’t doing anything wrong; the school wants to protect them because the boys are assets. They are sports stars, they bring prestige to the school. They are the sons of Board members, trustees who pay a lot of money to have buildings built at the school. What this all says to other people, anyone without as much institutional power, is that the institution doesn’t care about them as much. For instance, [the character] Jules feels unheard. In fact, it’s even worse — boys, teachers, school officials, even some of the other girls, hear her and want to silence her. That’s why I begin the book with the quote from Arundhati Roy: There is no such thing as the voiceless, only the silenced or the preferably unheard.
The issue with boys too is that they don’t recognize their own power. They’re taught to think, “Hey, look what you’ve accomplished,” instead of, “Hey, look what other people have accomplished for you.” That kind of false sense of self-worth, as a student, a man, whatever, I think is dangerous. And that is the kind of stuff I want to unpack and reveal in real time.
The issue with boys too is that they don’t recognize their own power. They’re taught to think, “Hey, look what you’ve accomplished,” instead of, “Hey, look what other people have accomplished for you.”
Jenn: Oh, and that’s a sour spot too? That moment of recognition of how one gets “saved” when you have privilege. How much money and Whiteness and maleness can “save” you from having to face yourself. And, sadly, we see this in our government today.
Brendan: Exactly. It’s terrifying! White men have the most fragility, it turns out.
Jenn: And this isn’t just reserved for spaces like the Fullbrook school, where your book takes place.
Brendan: Not at all. Fullbrook is representative of our whole society. The other epigraph is from Paradise Lost because I wanted to talk about how these problems of abuse of power, and the construction of a “paradise” are suspect. A paradise for whom and at what cost to anyone else? The very notion of a “paradise” feels built on a kind of false innocence.
Jenn: Do you think false innocence is tantamount to protecting what’s perceived as “the upper class”?
Brendan: In Tradition, I think it is about protecting men — something Jules calls out while they are studying Paradise Lost. There’s a narrative that goes back way too far that seeks to protect men — back to what you were saying earlier. And likewise, when we build places and say “this is an ideal school, a very good school” and hold it in such high esteem, and yet, under the surface, it’s riddled with dangerous misogyny and classism, it isn’t a paradise at all. In fact it makes the notion of any paradise where everyone doesn’t have full agency very suspect in my mind. That’s why I wanted this book to lead towards rebellion.
Jenn: It also sounds like, from a personal perspective, this investigation (of privilege and power) started at a young age for you.
Brendan: Yes. It did. And I was fortunate that women and people of color in my life asked me to interrogate my male and white privileges and power. When I was growing up, most men and white people weren’t asking me to do that interrogation. I also heard it in a lot of the art and music I was checking out. I just downloaded a bunch of music I used to listen to in the early 90s, because I wanted to remember the stuff that inspired me to think more about who I was and how much privilege I’d been afforded through no effort of my own.
It’s important to remind myself that there is no end to this learning and interrogation. While I started thinking about it when I was young, I have to remain committed to thinking about it for the rest of my life. My ignorance will always be greater than my understanding, so I always have to remain committed to understanding more.
My ignorance will always be greater than my understanding, so I always have to remain committed to understanding more.
Jenn: Not to say this is a “platform,” but how often do you think these kinds of things — particularly the patriarchy and male role in rape culture from an acknowledgment of being part of the problem — happens in general, let alone in art?
Brendan: I don’t think all work necessarily needs to be about identity, though at this point in our lives, I’m not sure how it can really escape the work we make either. And therefore, particularly as someone who has been bestowed a vast amount of social power through my whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality, I think the space for me to work in are stories that reflect on those privileges, why they are so insidious and destructive. I think there is a lot of room for more of this kind of work.
But it is important to say that there have been so many people without those privileges and power who have been talking about all of this forever. So it’s essential that as I do my work, I look back, listen, and learn from the masters who have been unpacking this work for so long. I love going back and reading (James) Baldwin and (Toni) Morrison and hooks. I loved re-reading The Handmaid’s Tale and Speak and What Girls Are Made Of. These are authors and books I keep close by me as I work because whatever I’m doing, I’m doing it because I learned from them. I was on a podcast the other day and I was talking about how much I love Renée Watson’s Piecing Me Together. Some people call that a “quiet” book. But to me, if you sit and listen, it’s a book about myriad aspects of identity up against and thriving in the face of all those forms of oppression, like the patriarchy. If you listen, every turn of the page is a heartbeat.
Jenn: Do you think people are ready for these conversations in general? I’ve heard a lot of the time it seems adults aren’t ready for this type of dissection, but that younger readers tend to be more open to it?
Brendan: Actually, I think people of all ages are ready for it because I do believe people have been talking about it all for a long time. The problem is that maybe people (and some people in particular — looking at you, Brendans like me of the world) haven’t taken the time to internalize what that means.
But also, I absolutely agree that as I travel the country and speak with young folks, they are eager to have these conversations. They are eager to see it, feel it, and experience it through art. I’ve learned so much from young people as they’ve told me about the books they like and why, as they’ve told me about why they’d hope more adults would see the emperor’s nudity (or his privilege and power) in the same way they do and stop pretending he’s wearing clothes.
Jenn: There is one more thing I wanted to talk about: the scene where Jules puts a tampon on her desk.
Brendan: Sure.
Jenn: It made me think about how, as women, our bodies make men uncomfortable because certain aspects not under their control, nor is this something of interest. So it makes men uncomfortable.
Brendan: Yes. I think that is very true, and I wanted to bring that to life in the scene where Jules puts her tampon on her desk.It bothers me that I didn’t know anything about that when I was a teen boy.That’s on me, for sure, but it’s also the way we men in general often dismiss women and their bodies. Oh, she’s on the rag, or other offensive phrases like that.
Jenn: What do you mean when you say it bothers you?
Brendan: It bothers me because I think it is essential for us all to know about bodily health, and that doesn’t mean I should just ignore women’s health because I’m a man. It bothers me because it feels like I can draw a direct line from my teen boy’s ignorance to the kind of systematic denial of appropriate healthcare for women in our country, and women of color in particular. That just feels so patriarchal and racist and disgusting.
This is exactly what I’m hoping to do in Tradition. Draw a line from the corrosive behavior in the school, and especially among the boys, to the kind of systems we have in place in the workplace, in government, in our community. The patriarchy doesn’t come from nowhere — it comes from young men nurturing an inherent misogyny in each other, letting it fester, and it impacting the decisions they make every day, as boys and later as adults. That’s why the book leads toward rebellion.
The patriarchy doesn’t come from nowhere — it comes from young men nurturing an inherent misogyny in each other, letting it fester.
Jenn: Tradition leads to stagnant thinking, as you mention, and this protection. You say it’s the old boys club, but it’s also the status quo of keeping things in line as one sees fit. But change is a pretty big shift and it has to come from acceptance of privilege, though that word is scary to many.
Brendan: Absolutely. I agree. Change comes from an acceptance of privilege and a shift in the way those of us who have it act. I can’t walk into a room and say, hey, it’s only me! My Whiteness, my maleness, precedes me into the room. So given that reality — I have to change the way I was taught to act.
I n this cultural moment where prestige dramas are dominating the airwaves and generating endless thought pieces, the idea of the bingeable teledrama as the new novel is already a cliché. More and more great prose writers are realizing that they can make a lot of money writing shows without sacrificing their literary cred. But television’s ascent into high culture hasn’t included reality TV, and I think that’s a huge untapped opportunity for book writers.
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After all, if people uniformly claim now that unscripted reality shows are, in fact, quite scripted, why can’t we give our best writers the job of writing these scripts? I’m not expecting this idea to take off instantly, though I do think I deserve a reasonable finder’s fee if it does and I eagerly await the appreciative emails from these writers. Here are eight pairings of some of our greatest prose stylists with the reality TV shows they were always meant to write:
“Keeping Up With The Kardashians” by Hanya Yanagihara
KUWTK is the benchmark of the modern reality genre: immensely, almost confusingly watchable; seemingly unending; crammed with every possible emotion, as we trace what may end up being the entire lives of its characters. In this way, it’s closer to the shape of the classic Russian novels than most modern novelists dare to get. But not Yanagihara. With A Little Life, she proved willing and able to plumb the kind of ongoing depths provided in the Tolstoy/Kardashian experience. Also, Yanagihara has the remarkable ability to make an audience sustain care for the grossly and unapologetically wealthy, which is the job requirement of KUWTK.
“Naked and Afraid” by Chris Kraus
It’s a tragedy that Amazon canceled the TV adaptation of Kraus’s incredible I Love Dick, but fuck it — who needs Jeff Bezos? Let’s move on. I would welcome a Chris Kraus treatment of every reality show ever made, but I’ll start here, with Naked and Afraid. There’s a line in I Love Dick, when Kraus’s autobiographical protagonist describes being a lover of a certain kind of bad art, which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Who better to provide the lines that telegraph the murky motivations of these strangers who sign up to be dropped into the woods together, ass naked, demanding to be seen?
“Sister Wives” by Alice Munro
First of all, polygamy seems like the perfect match for any short story writer who can give quick, quiet, and devastating insights into the perspective of each wife and child. But a polygamist family famous for its veneer of suburban normalcy? If there was ever a reason for Munro to leave retirement, it is this.
“The Challenge” by Junot Diaz
What novelist better expresses the toxic absurdity of modern masculinity than Diaz? And what figures have more clearly embodied it for the past decade than the stalwarts of The Challenge — men like CT and Johnny Bananas? They keep getting older and thicker; they return to the same situations with the same women, fuck up again. Swaggering, angry, horny, and ultimately sad, these men were born for Junot Diaz to shed light on their souls.
“Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” by Han Kang
If I know anything about Han Kang, it’s that she can write a haunting dream involving meat. If I assume anything about Guy Fieri, it’s that he has many haunting dreams involving meat.
“The Bachelor” by Mary Gaitskill
Mary Gaitskill’s characters often lead double lives: a dark, vulnerable, and often brutal side hiding behind their public facades. Contestants on The Bachelor start off with perfect blow-outs and earnest proclamations of “being here for right reasons”, but they eventually crumble into a teary-eyed mess at just the right made-for-tv moments. Just close your eyes and think about the biting portraits Gaitskill, an astute observer of human behavior, would come up with.
“Vanderpump Rules” by Bret Easton Ellis
Not surprisingly, Bret Easton Ellis is the rare contrarian novelist who is out in the open with his reality TV love, once proclaiming that the Real Housewives shows were more interesting than most modern novels. If he loves all the nastiness of human nature that the RealHousewives explore, I say let him loose on the world of Vanderpump Rules, a Real Housewives spinoff that is, in my humble opinion, the ideal docu-soap. Like Ellis’s best work, the characters of Vanderpump exist in the dark spaces between seductive excess and simmering rage. Plus, like any great Ellis novel, drugs of the snorting variety are a huge catalyst in Vanderpump (legal disclaimer: that’s speculation, but come on).
“Million Dollar Listing: New York” by Jay McInerney
I mean, isn’t every New York novel just a story about assholes and expensive real estate?
Lucas Mann was born in New York City and received his MFA from the University of Iowa. He is the author of Lord Fear: A Memoir and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere. His latest book, Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV, will be published in the US by Vintage on May 1st, 2018. He teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife.
For the longest time, literary recognition of Latin American writers in the U.S. seemed to be limited to a handful of men: Borges, Márquez, Bolaño. But now that the literary world is gradually becoming more inclusive, we have seen a slow but much-needed burst of young Latinx voices in the landscape. Writers like Lilliam Rivera, Erika Sánchez, and Yesika Salgado have created works that tell the stories of Latinx experiences in the United States. Established writers from Latin America are also seeing a resurgence of interest, as independent publishing houses like New Directions and Coffee House Press publish new translations of well-loved authors like Clarice Lispector and Julio Cortázar.
A wonderful thing about contemporary South American authors is that their writing becomes a window into the idiosyncrasies of their countries while remaining honest about what the influence of globalism has meant for each region. As a Colombian and multicultural writer living in the U.S., I love finding writing that illustrates the many nuances of the South American experience of writing. I profoundly enjoy how these Colombian and Dominican authors recognize that their most authentic language is now forever laced with American expressions and references, and I admire the Cuban and Peruvian writers who portray the nuances of being from a country they love but that also makes them uncomfortable. These writers bring fresh language, queer perspectives, and inquisitive writing to people in and outside of South America who were looking for an accurate representation of their experiences without necessarily coming through the lens of living in the United States.
Even as more diverse voices get their due, there is still space to bring recognition to some South American women authors who not only write new perspectives into a rather ossified cannon, but do so with humor and a spectacular grasp of language. Below are some South American female authors, all available in English translation, that the U.S. readers have been sleeping on.
In her first book, set to come out in English in the United States next year, we are treated to the charming, kind, and funny voice of this Colombian author that very often feels like that one friend who will sit with you in times of trouble and crack jokes in between the gentlest of slaps in the hand for once again emotionally auto sabotaging yourself. It came out in Colombia in 2015 and became a runaway success with multiple translations and several reprintings in a country where it is notoriously hard to get people to buy and read books. Arango combines illustrations, activities, pop culture and micro essays to deal with very complex issues like love and how the earth seems to rupture beneath your feet when heartbreak happens—and what to do with these feelings.
Like many gonzo journalists before her, Wiener has taken a profound interest in writing about sexuality and the people who thrive in the corners and side alleys of it. Unlike many gonzo journalists, she keeps her wits and honesty about her at all times, making her an imperturbable observer and a hilarious witness of human interaction. Wiener is a Peruvian journalist whose unflinching honesty and generosity in writing have made her one of the most loved and respected writers of her generation. Her nonfiction writing about her polyamorous relationship of many years is still one of the few accounts of polyamory that feels honest to me.
This Cuban poet, author, and playwright´s writing is some of the most refreshing and insightful that I have encountered in a long time. Her book is composed of collected poems, as is usual for her. Each poem links with the next one in unexpected ways that envelop the reader in their rhythm like garland of deliciously crafted language. An extremely valuable aspect of her writing is the sensibility she has towards the experience of being a person who writes and lives in different cultures. That confusing melancholy of being foreign finds its shape in the poetry and prose of this writer who finds the connection in all things commonplace.
Like Junot Díaz’s work, Indiana’s writing broke open my world by showing me a place where all the pop culture and all the English and all the Spanish and Caribbean expressions that would get me side-eye from family and friends not only existed but flourished. In Papi, translated by the extremely talented Achy Obejas, we see a young girl´s life in the Dominican Republic as she navigates all the discoveries of growing up. Rita Indiana’s writing is fun, but more than that is textured and almost tasty in a way that only Caribbean writing could be.
In this diary novel, also translated by Obejas, narrator Nieve remembers crucial year of Cuba’s political turmoil through the life of a family whose coming and goings are as uncertain as those of the country they live in. Guerra was initially a poet, a fact that seeps into her writing, making it vivid and lyrical. Wendy Guerra is a multidisciplinary Cuban author, actor and director. The sources of inspiration for her writing are varied: from her experiences as a child actor in Cuba to a profound investigation on the life of Anais Nin.
This, of course, is far from an exhaustive list of female authors from South America, but it can serve as a starting point. These writers excel at talking about the contemporary Latin American experience while embedding their language with such force, personality, and care that it is impossible to not feel attached to the their countries and regions just by virtue of having read them. This sort of perspective is the perfect companion to Latinx writing that comes from within the United States. No one author will ever set on the page a universal Latin and Hispanic experience, but reading from the many different angles that compose it will help create the more accurate picture.
My first encounter with the how to essay was in the fifth grade. It was one of a series of essays we had to demonstrate we could write. January was the persuasive essay, February was the descriptive essay, March was the reported essay, and April was the how to. We were taught that a how to was a list of instructions. It was chronological. It was directed at a singular reader, the magical “you.”
At a young age I wanted to poke at that thin membrane between the you of the self and the you of the reader. I wrote to an audience that didn’t exist yet, that was part of the fantasy of being my young self. In writing a how to, I had authority. I had the reader’s attention. I was in charge of the chronology and thus in charge of the outcome.
In writing a how to, I had authority. I had the reader’s attention. I was in charge of the chronology and thus in charge of the outcome.
For our how to essay, we each had to demonstrate our instructions to the class. This way, the how to was written in our wide pencil handwriting on sheets of looseleaf, erasers slashing dirty holes through the paper if we made a mistake. Then, we had to be the expert at the front of the room. Because it was 1994, and video cameras were in fashion, my mother borrowed my uncle’s camcorder and set it up in the small kitchen of our row home to record my how to. I stood behind the counter with my stringy hair and oversized glasses, wearing a sweatshirt with a puffy painted mountain on it with snow and skiers. I had never been videotaped before. I beamed into the camera, my ingredients set up in front of me, and said, “Hi. Today I’m going to show you how to make chocolate covered peanut butter balls.”
You can imagine how that clunky embarrassment went over with my peers.
A tool of the self-improvement genre — how to meditate, how to knit, how to use Excel, how to play guitar — the how to holds power as an invitation. It’s a reading experience that promises a result or, if not a result, an intimacy. You want to know how to do this thing? I am going to tell you how. That very promise has captivated the hopes and curiosity of so many readers and writers alike.
It’s a reading experience that promises a result or, if not a result, an intimacy. You want to know how to do this thing? I am going to tell you how.
And then there’s the literary how to: the piece of fiction or nonfiction that will use the how to to subvert a story, share experience, flaunt expertise, advertise failure. When my creative writing professor put a photocopy of Lorrie Moore’s “How To Be a Writer” on my desk my heart leapt. “How To Be A Writer” was going to answer all of my questions. It was going to be my shortcut to everything I wanted to know. Of course, the essay did not provide the easy map I thought it could. But it did employ the intimacy of the how to to create dark humor and self-deprecation. Still, for someone who had only read a how to in the form of an instruction manual, it was a revelation. A how to is a promise. A how to is an offer. Let me show you. The literary how to slips in this house of chronology and expertise and then shows the reader that it is not a house, it is not a manual. It’s a story. It’s a tightrope walk.
My life is made of learning how to do things. How to do things I didn’t know how to do yesterday, how to do things I didn’t think I’d ever want to know (how to get sober, how to listen without interrupting, how to ask for more money when you don’t believe you deserve it, how to shave your mother’s head two weeks into chemo). And then there’s sharing what I know with others — you want to get sober, you want to listen, you want to ask for more money, you want to honor your mother — let me show you. Open palm. Open story. Here’s how. How is a transitional word, a bridge between wanting and having. It’s a connection. If writing is being of service, I couldn’t adore a service more than the service of learning how.
As I was taught in the fifth grade, a how to is made possible by the second person. We eschew the boundaries of the third person (a safe distance) or the first person (a presumptuous intimacy) for the delicate second. Second person can quickly sour (think valentines, bad poetry, religious tracts). It’s a thin blade on which the writer walks. In a how to, the you has the potency to be the reader, to be the narrator, to be the subject. Pair this with the gasoline of the present tense and you’ve got a potential disaster. There’s so much at risk in the literary how to, this cocktail of intimacy and expertise, second person, present tense. You’re leading the reader along, but you’re also carving your own narrative. You’re performing a magic trick and praying the rabbit will come out of its hat.
There’s so much at risk in the literary how to, this cocktail of intimacy and expertise, second person, present tense. You’re performing a magic trick and praying the rabbit will come out of its hat.
I’m one of those writers who has definitely abused the second person, especially when I was in college, especially when I thought it was a sexy vehicle for writing about ex-girlfriends (sorry). I spent years pulling the second person apart, looking under its hood, and I always came back to the literary how to because it was such a perfect setting for the second person. The second person isn’t just hanging out there, begging for attention. It’s serving a purpose. It’s providing instructions.
For many years I tried to write the story of a girl we’re going to call Angela Giaccini, who was important because she was the only other queer girl at my high school. Angela Giaccini had a shaved head, a leather jacket, a quiet intensity, and a sense of self that I longed for. We would kiss for the first time on her parent’s driveway, in the cold of March, just a few months before I broke her heart. Over the years I tried to write our story over and over again. I tried it as a short story, I tried it as a letter (terrible!), I tried it as a young adult novel, I tried it as an earnest essay about crushes. Nothing worked. It wasn’t until I wrote a how to for my younger queer self, “How To Like Girls,” that I found the right place for Angela Giaccini. In a how to I could walk through every one of my insecurities, my high-octane love, the story of what was said an when it was said and how it was said, all under the guise of writing an instructional pamphlet for other women who found themselves crushing on women and unsure of where to go from there. There’s the punctuation of the certainty of instructing someone on how to do something. Warm your hands in your pockets. Look at the asphalt. Hold your breath. Catch her eye. Kiss Her Now. A literary how to has the potential to cast a spell.
In 2016, BuzzFeed published a version of the title essay of Alexander Chee’s collection, How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. There’s a playful layering within the title. Even the promise of what’s in this how to — the reveal, the secret, the auto in the autobiographical — is evoked. What could get bogged down in a reality-based set of instructions is actually a series of ephemeral observations. The first line — “You are like someone left in the woods with only an axe and a clear memory of houses deciding to build a house” — sets the scene. The writer and the idea of what they want to write are at odds: “A novel, or is it, you aren’t sure yet. But it is as suddenly real as an unexpected visitor. Someone you both know and do not know. You watch each other, carefully, perhaps for years.” This phrase — suddenly real — is the same effect that a how to has the potential to create: instant, tangible. The motif throughout the essay is an axe, a weapon and a tool, a symbol of hard work and violence, something you use outside, alone, with no one else around you. In my spiritual practice there’s a woman who often says, “Chop wood, carry water,” as a mantra, as a simple description of what we do every day, as what the path to what we want looks like. What I love so much about Chee’s how to is the balanced authority it has.
This isn’t the only how to on writing an autobiographical novel. You could argue that every autobiographical novel is its own how-to, for any reader who has ever read a novel and flipped from the chapters to the biography, from the epilogue to the author photo, from the acknowledgements to the side characters, hunting for clues. I read for intimacy and I read for instructions. I read with a hunger that someone show me how to write, that I constantly reinvent what I know about writing, that I search for what I don’t know so that I can add it to my repertoire.
Yesterday, police in California announced that they finally have a suspect for the Golden State Killer, responsible for at least 12 deaths and 45 rapes in California in the ‘70s and ’80s. (He was also known as the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker, among other vaguely literary sobriquets.) Former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, who has been living in the Sacramento area, is now in custody. This is obviously a (belated) success for law enforcement and a relief for the families of the Golden State Killer’s victims, but it’s also an exciting vindication for lovers of mystery novels and true crime. Because in this case, justice was served, in part, by a book.
Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, published in February of this year, is an accumulation of the author’s exhaustive research and work with investigators on the case. McNamara, who became obsessed with the case and spent years gathering research and other investigative materials, died suddenly at the age of 46 before the book was finished. Her husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt, worked with the investigative journalist Paul Haynes to take the 3,500 files left on McNamara’s computer and deliver them for publication. As reported in The New York Times, Oswalt was determined to make sure the book was published: “Knowing how horrible this guy was, there was this feeling of, you’re not going to silence another victim. Michelle died, but her testimony is going to get out there.”
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark didn’t catch the Golden State Killer; DeAngelo wasn’t even on the radar of McNamara or the myriad other armchair sleuths fascinated with the decades-old crimes. McNamara’s lead researcher Paul Haynes told Slate that he frankly had no idea what evidence law enforcement used to crack the case, although he said it was “the No. 1 thing I want to know.” But publicity surrounding the book may have rekindled both public and police interest in the unsolved crimes, and helped light a fire under a string of murders that had long gone cold.
Oswalt tweeted on Wednesday morning that he hoped to visit the suspect, if only to ask the unanswered questions McNamara left behind at the time of her death. McNamara posed some of those questions herself in her direct address to the serial killer, which appears at the end of the book. While there were many things McNamara didn’t know, she was firm on the fact that the Golden State Killer would be found, and the police would show up at his door. “This is how it ends for you,” she wrote.
MichelleMcNamara's haunting words for the #GoldenStateKiller my God she's amazing #IllBeGoneInTheDark
And thanks in part to McNamara and her posthumous collaborators, that’s just how it did end. Not with a bang, but with a book.
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