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
I discovered Sam Pink in the dark corners of the 2012 Internet. Apparently, this was common means of discovery: many fans caught word of Pink via Tumblr’s then-vibrant literary scene, the whirlwind days of DIY publishing. I immediately read his 2011 novel, Person, an indie cult favorite. I related to Person’s aimless narrator: “I pass an apartment with a dog in the front yard area, walking around unchained. I stop and stare at the dog. The dog stares back. We are in love yeah.”
Purchase the novellas.
Pink’s two new novellas, The Garbage Times and White Ibis — published together in a tête-bêche binding — follow their respective narrators through Chicago and Florida. In The Garbage Times, a bar employee hangs out around rats and excrement. In White Ibis, an artist hangs out with birds and birthday girls.
Over email, Pink and I had a discussion that roamed much like his narrators, covering everything from creative processes, to various animals, to the ferocity of Floridian Girl Scouts.
Deirdre Coyle: How did these two novellas, The Garbage Times and White Ibis, wind up together?
Sam Pink: I had just finished The Garbage Times and Andy Hunter from Catapult/Softskull asked me if I had anything. They wanted it. In the time between it being accepted and before it was published, I wrote White Ibis and showed it to them and they wanted it too. Around the same time, I started thinking about publishing them together, and they suggested the same idea. It seemed to make more and more sense. At this point I can’t imagine them as separate.
DC: The Garbage Times and White Ibis have such starkly different, but complementary, landscapes in Chicago versus Florida. What’s your preferred IRL landscape? Are there some places that inspire you more than others?
SP: I didn’t like Florida at first, but I was being a brat. By the time I left, I loved it. It’s a beautiful place. I think I’m inspired by wherever I’m at, because it’s always stuff presenting itself’ in some way. I think that stuff’ and how I react to it differs depending on where I’m at. The Garbage Times and other writing from Chicago has the feel of “Chicago stuff” I feel (i.e., bleak weather, feeling cramped, anger, dark humor), and the writing I’ve done about Florida at a glance appears to be a little more laid back, expansive and calm — it’s “Florida stuff.”
DC: The narrator in The Garbage Times describes “the garbage times” as “where best to just shut the fuck up and do what you had to do. Where best never to complain. And always be ready.” Would you say we’re living in the garbage times now?
SP: Always. Never ever forget it. ARFA (always ready for action). You are always the garbage-person to your own life. Let it pile up all you want, and it might get gross, or confront it and clean up. But you have to will yourself to do it. And the first step of that is saying yes to it. Especially currently, where there is more said of most issues than done about them. You’re either a garbage person, or the ones complaining about the smell. Either way, you are creating garbage, and can do or not do many things with your trash (raises eyebrows and licks ice cream cone).
You are always the garbage-person to your own life. Let it pile up all you want, and it might get gross, or confront it and clean up.
DC: I originally found your work around 2012 through some part of the Internet that I’ve long since forgotten. Did online communities help foster your earlier work?
SP: Yeah for sure. The Internet was really fun and cool for a while. It was what seemed like, a rare moment of freedom opening up, and people capitalizing on it positively to put cool shit into the world and create a way to spend time, without mass marketed/corporate/brand type bullshit fucking it up. It was a real cool thing that helped me meet a lot of cool people and learn more about myself and encouraged me to make/share more. I can honestly say that before encountering the Internet, I genuinely thought, not in a cynical/rhetorical way, that I couldn’t write a book or paint a painting. But then you try and learn about yourself. I appreciate everyone from around that beginning time period, and look forward to newer people resurrecting and cherishing that mode of creating/being.
DC: You’re also a visual artist, as is the narrator in White Ibis (who is coerced into illustrating a group of Girl Scouts). How do you balance your creative projects? Do they ever feed off each other?
SP: Shout-out Girl Scouts of Florida and the world. “Leave it better than you found it,” etc. You are the gentle yet fierce cops we need, but perhaps, don’t deserve? Also nobody parties like a Girl Scout. When was the last time you were at a party (having shown up on time along with all the others), stayed completely sober, talked earnestly with all your friends, had dinner together, made some pictures together, presented your findings on a certain topic in oratorical presentation form, then watched a movie together and “camped out” in a house, all the while knowing you’d wake up excited to have breakfast with your friends, and that you were a troop together, united by the search for more patches?
Deciding which thing to work on is easy if you just listen. My mind would be saying “I don’t want to do this” after painting for a couple months, then I’d write something. And vice-versa. You just have to be honest with yourself. Sometimes, it’s not time. And yes, the different kinds of work feed off each other, although, I feel like writing has fed more off of painting than the other way around. Learning/teaching myself how to paint has helped me apply many new ideas to writing. I would encourage writers to try out other modes of expression to help their writing.
DC: Yeah, I’m often baffled by the way some people have hard and fast rules about their creative processes. I agree that sometimes, it’s not time. What do you work on when you’re not feeling creative at all?
SP: Yeah, the “I have to do at least [x words/x amount of x] per day” is something I don’t understand. I usually don’t feel creative, but I’ll just sit down, and it’ll happen. With that said, when I sit down and nothing happens or I don’t feel like doing it, I go for walks, or play with my cats, or go to the gym.
Nobody parties like a Girl Scout.
DC: I’ve noticed a lot of casually mentioned dinosaurs in your work: in Hurt Others, “I talked about dinosaurs”; in Person, “Man Found Starved. Believed Relative of a Baby Dinosaur”; in White Ibis, “Arrangements for casket attire? Dinosaur costume ALL THE WAY for me.” Can you talk more about your relationship to dinosaurs?
SP: Damn, nice catch. I didn’t even realize that. (I’m imagining you asking the “relationship to dinosaurs” question by putting a mic in my face as I exit a courtroom.) I must have dinos on the brain!!! I think my relationship to them is one of utter confusion. That they existed before us, like they had an earlier chance at earth, still ended up dying out completely. I feel a sense of camaraderie with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are really exciting. Furthermore, our current existence is almost solely fueled by their bones. WHATTAHHAHAHAH?!>!>!>??!?!?
DC: Do you think birds are dinosaurs?
SP: I have come to deeply love birds after living in Florida. If you’ve never watched a pelican doing what a pelican does, you’re a dinosaur head. If birds are dinosaurs, then fuck yeah, because not only did it take a meteor to kill them off, but then they became something else that continues to live, and has almost no interest in human interaction. They evolved into something that has the ability to just completely leave the general area of any human. In conclusion, if you don’t think about dinosaurs, you are the dinosaur of tomorrow.
DC: There are a lot of really cool animals in both novellas. Aside from the titular bird, do you have a favorite?
SP: I enjoy armadillos a lot. I enjoy willets as well. I also saw a turtle one time at a state park in Gainesville. It was on a piece of wood, floating down a river, but facing backwards, neck extended, mouth open, getting blasted by the sun. I knew in that moment, that I had connected with that turtle in a way that would follow me to the grave.
In conclusion, if you don’t think about dinosaurs, you are the dinosaur of tomorrow.
DC: That reminds me of this passage from Martin Buber’s I and Thou, where he’s talking about making eye contact with a cat: “The beginning of this cat’s glance, lighting up under the touch of my glance, indisputably questioned me: ‘Is it possible that you think of me? Do you really not just want me to have fun? Do I concern you? Do I exist in your sight? Do I really exist? What is it that comes from you? What is it that surrounds me? What is it that comes to me? Whatisit?’” So, did the turtle make eye contact with you???
SP: I like I and Thou and Levinas’ work, too (pretty sure he was a student of Buber). The turtle and I did not make eye contact. Which is awesome. That turtle didn’t give two fucks. That’s one of the things I like about animals, they’re not as needy as people.
DC: What do you think that White Ibis is doing right now?
SP: I can tell you that it’s probably standing on a concrete embankment overlooking a drainage pond, being powerful.
When Somali-British poet Warsan Shire’s work was featured in Beyoncé’s album “Lemonade,” sales of her chapbook Teaching My Mother How to Give Birthspiked800 percent. Shire was already kind of a big deal, both in and outside poetry circles; she was named Young Poet Laureate of London in 2014, and her poems are frequently circulated on Twitter and Tumblr, popular for the way they express tricky issues of identity, intimacy, and justice. But “Lemonade” raised her profile further, opening up a whole new audience not only for Shire’s work, but for poetry in general.
Nobody knows when Beyoncé might drop another surprise visual album—they just have to descend fully-formed from the sky—but we’d love to see her spread the love around. Here are eleven sharp, brilliant, and socially conscious poets who deserve to be 800 percent more well-known.
Morgan Parker
In her spoken word and her collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night and There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé, Morgan Parker engages identity, depression, and mental illness through a pop culture lens.BuzzFeed called her poetry “a sledgehammer covered in silk, exposing black women’s vulnerability and power and underscoring what it means to be magical and in pain.”
Danez Smith
A finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for poetry, Danez Smith writes from a place of eminence. Their poetry has been featured widely in BuzzFeed, Poetry Magazine, and The New York Times, and their notable performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert helped their work reach a wide audience. Their poetry collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, opens with an imagined afterlife for the black victims of police brutality, a place free of suspicion and violence, where black boys bask in the safety and love denied to them in their mortal life.
Samiya Bashir
Samiya Bashir has put out five collections, including Field Theories, and is a founder of Fire & Ink, a festival for LGBT writers of African descent. She’s known for her intensely memorable live poetry performances, which blur media, spoken word, and poetry into something entirely her own.
Denice Frohman
Denice Frohman’s performances are so powerful and captivating that they’ve been featured and commissioned by ESPN, GALAEI, BuzzFeed, and YouTube, among others. Exploring the intersection of race, gender, and identity, Frohman’s work is that rare mixture of unabashed and utterly honest, capturing the beauty of what poetry does best.
Angel Nafis
Author of the collection BlackGirl Mansion, Angel Nafis has been lauded by countless organizations, including Cave Canem, Millay Colony, and the LouderArts poetry project. Founder of the highly-regarded Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon, she also runs The Other Black Girl Collective alongside Morgan Parker.
Douglas Kearney
Prolific writer Kearney has published six books, including the California Book Award–winning Patter. Kearney, an influencer in both poetry and prose circles, exhibits a deft eye for poetics and performance, where each line of a poem is unleashed as both escape and revelation.
Eve L. Ewing
Sociologist and poet Dr. Eve L. Ewing uses her work to examine the impact of social inequality and urban policy. From poetry that reinvents using different forms and mediums to research focusing on the infrastructure crumbling around us, Ewing’s subtle yet provocative work leaves you breathless.
Hieu Minh Nguyen
Nguyen’s work has been widely published in POETRY,BuzzFeed, PBS Newshour, and more. Nguyen, whose most recent book is Not Here, writes poetry that can shatter your heart and repair it in three lines or less. The emotional vulnerability demonstrated is uncanny, and he is able to explore identity with amazing care.
Dawn Lundy Martin
Martin’s performances leave audiences stunned and utterly captivated. Her poetry, which explores the concept of otherness, is ripe with energy and identity; it’s no wonder she won the Nightboat Books Prize in 2011 for her collection Discipline.
Ashaki Jackson
Jackson’s work as both a social psychologist and poem explores loss, otherness, and identity. There’s a tenderness to her poetry that expertly captures the inner and outer strife that emanates from social perceptions of Blackness. Author of two chapbooks, Surveillance and Language Lesson, Jackson is also the co-founder of Women Who Submit, an organization that helps women writers submit their work for publication.
Elizabeth Acevedo
Elizabeth Acevedo, author of The Poet X, is known for her slam poetry, which has earned her numerous accolades, including a National Slam Champion and 2016 Women of the World representative. Watching Acevedo perform her poetry live is one of those life-altering and life-affirming moments, a wondrously transformative experience.
In Gila River, a marriage of stifling heat, roaring winds, cheap windows, loose barrack planks and the formidable pollens of desert flowers kept the population of newborn babies thoroughly miserable.
In the years after 1945, epidemiologist, Shoko Hisaishi, recorded several cases of a condition he called “infant paracusia” or “infant paranoia” or “crybaby ears.” In his records, Hisaishi noted that Gila River internees had been so beleaguered by the sounds of wailing infants, that after camp life, even in solitude, their minds would produce an imaginary baby and its torments: whining, sniveling, blubbering. For some, the auditory hallucinations were subtle, the whimpers emerging faintly as if from behind a thin wall. For others, those counterfeit mewls were clear and emphatic, its sufferers given to throwing up their arms in exasperation or kicking chairs across the room. Furthermore, crybaby ears practically went arm and arm with other undesirable symptoms: weight loss, weight gain, insomnia, perturbation, compulsive thoughts of self-ear mutilation.
During the war, the siblings of Gila newborns could steal a few hours’ sleep at school or in church. But mothers of newborns were in a less fortunate position. The unrelenting shrieking and bawling transformed them into phantoms. It was said a Gila mother’s hair became uneven and tangled. Their eyes blackened. Their skin paled and looked warty. Their arms grew thin and sinewy. Their teeth grew pointed like a jackal’s teeth. All meals were eaten with ferocity. Gila mothers hunched over their food, heads swiveling from side to side, as though their cutlet or drumstick might spring back to life or be spirited away.
There was little remedy for a crabby baby in the desert. Parents who had their hands on whiskey or port or sherry claimed that a capful for the little one before bedtime or naptime was perfect medicine. But liquor was a rare and expensive commodity in camp. The more affordable and renewable solution was the music of Yoshikane Araki. It was said that the lullabies written by Kane, though he was a young, relatively inexperienced musician of seventeen, had the power to anesthetize the most difficult of babes. When Kane performed the lullaby himself, he could topple a rotund baby with a single verse. It was told that even if Kane’s performance did not strike the Gila baby unconscious on the spot, the music bewildered the babe into silence. Fathers became misty-eyed feeling their wailing infants turn to slumbering sacks of yams in their arms. Mothers who watched the portly heads of their toddlers dip beneath the currents of sleep sometimes threw their arms around Kane or kissed him.
“I am sorry Kane!” they would exclaim embarrassedly. “It is just that my son has clawed my face the past three weeks with every attempt to place him down!”
Parents who recreated Kane’s verses in their own mouths found the lullabies held their power over three or four weeks. These lullabies produced naps of up to two hours, which were so potent a parent could smack a mosquito from a baby’s forehead without waking them. And Kane’s lullabies cost only a dime. Arrangements were made through Kane’s mother, Kashi Araki, and Kane would arrive at a barrack door holding a guitar case and a little scroll of lyrics. Twenty or thirty minutes were spent instructing parents in the particularities of their melody, at which time of day it was appropriate to sing, which words to take a breath after, which words to say firmly, loudly, which gently, which to swish in the mouth prior to uttering.
“This word as a command,” Kane would say, “as though you are ordering an animal to leave the room.”
“Now this word at the end of exhalation,” Kane would say, “as though the bones of its syllables can hardly muster the strength to extinguish a candle.”
“Emphasize this word only in the morning,” Kane would say. “Saying this word will produce flavor like a ripened bulb of fruit in their mouth.”
Afterward, Kane packed his guitar away into its shell, collected payment and delicately pulled the barrack door behind him.
If parents could afford Kane’s daily service, it cost them a nickel per performance. After his studies, Kane walked from barrack to barrack, singing to red-faced infants and sedating them. Over time, Gila mothers themselves grew appetites for his music. It wasn’t uncommon for Kane’s lullaby to leave mother and child napping together in the midday heat, to leave mother with her head tipped back and her jaw plopped open for the snoring to thunder forth. The pleasure of a little beauty sleep erased any embarrassments. These mothers said their snores were sweet as honey and lavender upon their tongues.
However Kane’s music benefited the recoveries and moods of the women and children in Gila, it pricked at the anxieties of new fathers. In California, Kane had been a short, meaty adolescent with a feminine haircut. Around his neighborhood, his nickname was “Sister,” because upon hearing the treble in his voice, people would ask, “And just where is your brother Kane?” Peers pinched his cheeks, flicked his earlobes and set barking dogs on him. Even the nice ones tripped him a little and stole his cardboard inserts from his shoes. His music teachers thumped him on the back of the head if they supposed he had not been practicing.
But in Gila River, Kane was surfacing from his teenage years peering six inches over the brows of contemporaries and teachers, with shoulder and jugular muscles like a horse, fearsome hands rumored to be able to hold red-black coals without suffering burns, and a voice dropping as thick and sonorous as a December cloud.
The men of Butte and Canal were highly suspicious of this seventeen-year-old boy who appeared at the barrack door holding a guitar or ukulele. Whose presence set off the man’s entire family, rising and bowing and tearing-up with gratitude. Whose name aroused lip-smacking and moans of delight among young girls. Whose lyrics echoed in the mouths of recent brides. Whose music echoed in the roof beams and dark dreams above all their heads.
Of Kane, a few spiteful rumors began to circulate throughout camp. One strand of hearsay suggested Kane was a devious seducer of women.
Amongst the din of the mess hall, it was familiar to hear a husband cry out, “Do not let him into your barrack! He uses his music to anesthetize your baby while he has his way with your wife!”
Another thread of rumors suggested Kane hid a jar of ether in his guitar case and used it to drug newborn babies.
“Can you believe we pay him a nickel a day to dope our babies and turn them to drooling morons?” was a common husband-cry.
“Kane is becoming rich from our desperation. I mean, just how expensive is a little ether and a rag?”
These were the rumors of men, wildly emotional and unsubstantiated, and which therefore gathered fire and velocity as they traveled from mouth to outraged mouth. Anguished letters were sometimes posted to the Araki barrack door. These were always anonymous and cowardly, threatening that Kane would be publicly belted or caned if he was discovered making a cuckold of camp men. Occasionally, a drunken husband would wander into the Araki barrack to harass or intimidate Kane in person, the husband poking his finger into Kane’s chest or vomiting at the foot of his cot. But these encounters were typically followed by weeping apologies and compensations, a man’s entire family appearing before the Araki barrack to acknowledge the failures of the husband, and entreating Kane to return to his services.
In a recreation barrack, in the southeast corner of Butte Camp, a men’s movement aimed at countering Kane Araki’s lullabies was shepherded by the Reverend Jun Miyoshi. Reverend Miyoshi was a short, proud man with a teenaged wife and a daughter who was becoming a camp toddler. Miyoshi was a gifted speaker, scholar and a writer. He and his wife, Viola, were both trained pianists. He purchased space within the Gila News-Courier and self-published several of his sermons in order to improve upon the virtues of the internees in surrounding barracks. Miyoshi held strong opinions about parenting and believed children required self-control and discipline above all other qualities.
“Your babies simply want their father’s attention,” Miyoshi said to a gathering of Butte men in their recreation barracks. “Wailing is their only leverage. It is their sole method for communicating that desire. So when you hear them cry, you must turn your backs to them until they stop. Do not look them in the eyes. Turn on your radio or hum to yourself. Or leave the room. In this way they will learn sour behaviors bring them nothing. Give them your attention only when you want.”
In regard to anxieties circulating around Kane Araki, Miyoshi advised that new fathers in Gila form a collective where they could write, rehearse and trade from their own archive of lullabies. A string of articles penned by Reverend Miyoshi began to appear in the Courier on the theory of lullabies. A selection from his first treatise read:
Lullabies should be succinct, repetitive and plain in their message. There should be animals in lullabies. Those animals should have jobs. The animals should be diligent workers, either producing milk or plowing a field of potatoes or disposing of tin cans and table scraps. They should be creatures of faith. They should respect their animal-fathers, mothers, gods and forests. Their forest should be kept tidy. Lullabies should reaffirm the power of God and the security of the family. Lullabies should motivate the child to be clean, kind, polite, well-spoken and respectful of their elders.
Miyoshi held a series of lullaby-writing workshops in recreation barracks throughout Canal and Butte Camp. At first he said he would not charge, but in later sessions he passed the church’s collection plate. At first these workshops were spirited and well-attended. To fathers, Miyoshi promised the weight of more dimes and nickels in their pockets and the satisfaction of greater authority in their homes. He promised the lips of their wives and children would soon forget the name of Kane Araki.
But within a month, new fathers lost their enthusiasm. Miyoshi not only ran his workshops like a grade-school classroom, but he had the tendency to evangelize with his instruction. He openly criticized fathers he had not seen in attendance of his Sunday service. He condescended to those who did not pick up on his biblical references. When he wasn’t attempting to convert Buddhist fathers, he was separating them from Methodist fathers and tasking them with cleaning the barrack where they gathered.
Few fathers had experience with songwriting or performance. Rather than encourage fathers to devise original melodies, Miyoshi suggested taking popular hymns and inserting personal lyrics. Rather than consider their own lullaby narratives, Miyoshi encouraged fathers use lambs and angels as characters and to think of plots where children received severe punishments for stealing or fibbing.
“Perhaps there is a child who likes stealing blackberries from his neighbor’s yard,” Miyoshi would say, “and then he trips and falls into the brambles and gets his eyes gouged.”
“Perhaps you sing of a child who lies to an angel about saying his nightly prayers,” Miyoshi would say, “and the angel responds by stealing the child’s tongue. Or perhaps the angel poaches their remaining baby teeth!”
Most deflating of all, the collective archive of amateur lullabies did little to soothe the infants and toddlers of Gila River. Kane’s back catalogue sustained some families for a period, but when his visits lessened, spells of hot weather sucked the calm like moisture from all the mouths of babes. Grief blubbered out into the Gila nights. Grief echoed through alleyways between barracks. Mothers again began to lose their hair and their nerve. Whatever hair disappeared from their heads sprouted from peculiar crevices in their bodies. The tiny trumpets of their ears. The creases of their palms. Whatever object was nearest, chewing tobacco, a candy bar, candles, Dixie Peach pomade, mouthwash, was hurled toward a husband’s head along with the edict to visit the barrack of Kashi Araki and arrange for Kane’s visits to resume. In due course, Kane was called upon to replace the reverend at the lullaby-writing workshops, and he accepted, despite the notion that any teaching success would run counter to his business. Kane charged a nickel to be paid at the completion of a husband’s first lullaby. Even Miyoshi attended as a participant.
“I have only one rule for what I show you,” Kane said. “Before giving your lullaby to your child, you first should offer it to your wife. Or deliver a single verse to your eldest child and watch how they fare under its sway. Lullabies can be powerful medicine.”
“The secret to my lullabies,” Kane said, “is I extend to my audience a melody so simple, so repeatable, they can carry it with them into their dreams. This way, even after you have set your children down in their cribs, or beside you in your beds, the lullaby sustains itself in their ear, in the ear of their dream even, and it soothes them.”
And then he sang, “Baby go down in the desert, o baby go down in the desert. Baby go down in the desert. Baby follow desert to their dream to their ocean.”
“Do you know the origin of the first lullaby?” Kane asked. “It was contained in the mind of a stone dreaming of the river moving overhead.”
And then Kane sang, “Poor as you are my heart, o poor as you are my heart. Poor as you are my heart don’t grieve here on earth. Don’t grieve here on earth. Too much love. Too much joy. Don’t grieve here on earth.”
For the husbands who claimed they possessed minds wholly uncreative, wholly unmusical, wholly incapable of constructing original melodies, Kane instructed them to walk in circles around the Butte Camp baseball diamond and hum to themselves until boredom struck them.
“Boredom is your ally,” Kane said. “Hum a song you enjoy. Hum a song you know in your bones. Hum until the boredom changes the flavor of the melody in your mouth. Hum while it contorts itself, teaches itself new tricks to excite you. Keep humming. After an evening or two you will be humming a thing that is entirely new. When it happens, hold your child in your mind. As the new melody develops, imagine your child sleeping heavily. Imagine your mouth is a loom and you are wrapping them like a cocoon in your yarn. Imagine their child-mouth is a mirror to your mouth. A baby imitates every song that passes from your lips. Place your melody on the lips of the baby in your imagination.”
“The lyrical content is of little consequence,” Kane said. “You can sing about a donkey or a grandmother who lost her shoe. But if you have placed yourself and your daughter or son in the lullaby at the moment of its inception, if the lullaby grew flesh and sense and feeling in response to your imaginings, the real work is complete.”
The troubles began almost immediately after Gila husbands completed and performed their first lullabies. In his eagerness to measure his first composition, Eddie Honda sang for an hour while rocking his daughter and tranquilized the baby for a period of three days. After the first evening, Jean Honda flew at him in a panic and nearly beat him senseless with a hairbrush.
“The baby snores but she will not eat!” she exclaimed. “She will not open her eyes. What have you done?!”
In any attempt to refine the potency of his first lullaby, Kingo Furukawa sang to himself for two hours and lulled himself unconscious in the center of the Butte baseball diamond. Because he had been walking at midday, Furukawa sustained severe sunburns and had to be rubbed down in the medical barracks with lidocaine and antibiotic ointments.
Harry Masatani, Henri Shimomi and Jerry Kashiwagi all attempted to conceive of lullabies that would produce mild amnesia in their new Gila babies so they might forget how to cry. But what occurred instead was the three new fathers appeared to lose a cerebral constellation of words and concepts. What were their babies’ names again? What was the purpose of a nipple? Why were fathers also endowed with smaller, ineffective nipples? What was the folding pattern for a diaper? Was a diaper for a baby? Or did it serve some other purpose? Was it a sort of hat?
Uproar was arising from every faction. Mothers complained of strange maladies subduing their babies. Masako Kunishige claimed that at the sound of her husband’s lullaby, her son’s posture sometimes froze, spread-eagled, as though he was snagged by an invisible spider’s web. Joyce Ota claimed her husband’s lullaby had caused her daughter’s cries to drop so far in pitch her babbling voice resembled that of her grandfather’s.
Terue Yoshihara, the block manager who oversaw the Araki clan, paid multiple visits to Kashi Araki to complain that Gila fathers were running amok with lullaby magic passed on through her son. Yoshihara threatened the Arakis with expulsion from their barrack in central Canal Camp to a barrack on the southeastern fringe.
“And the ticks, scorpions and rattlesnakes are abundant there,” Yoshihara said. “Let us see how Kane manages to soothe them with his lullabies.”
Reverend Jun Miyoshi continued to be Kane’s fiercest critic. He paced the center of the Methodist Church, slapping the wooden pews and working his parishioners into a frenzy.
“This was Kane’s plan all along!” Miyoshi exclaimed. “I should have known he was teaching us a dark magic. And now it has infiltrated our homes! It has infected our children! He has your children possessed!”
In response to the hysteria, Kane announced he wanted to hold one final workshop. He stated that all the parents who had witnessed extreme phenomena as the result of a lullaby should attend since he would be presenting them with every lullaby remedy he knew. He would stay as long as there were questions or concerns. Kashi promised a full spread of nuts, dried fruit and beverages. The workshop was also free of charge. Word spread quickly and Kashi even took out a column inch in the Courier to publicize its time and whereabouts.
On the day of Kane’s final workshop, over a hundred fathers from Canal and Butte were in attendance. Jun Miyoshi was there along with Terue Yoshihara, Eddie Honda, the blistered Kingo Furukawa. The Masatani, Shimomi and Kashiwagi families. The Otas and the Kunishiges. Husbands piled into the recreation barracks from the back and took seats near a makeshift stage where Kane sat with his guitar.
“I will give the boy five minutes,” Kingo Furukawa said. “After that his hide will be made an example for all camp troublemakers.”
“All the Arakis should be made to pay,” Eddie Honda said. “They let a devil walk among us!”
“Come closer,” Kane said to the crowd that had gathered. “Can everyone hear me? If you cannot hear me, you will need to move closer.”
Men packed in so tightly that a listener could feel the heat and smell the breath of his neighbor beside him.
And then Kane said, “The first remedy is the song for fathers.”
And then Kane sang, “A goodnight to fathers. A thousand fathers beneath the wild water. A thousand hands grip the January milkweed. A thousand fleas devour the oxblood. Our beans grow fat upon the storm. A goodnight to fathers. A thousand fathers. A star grows its beard of fire.”
Kane’s pronunciation of the word “storm” struck many as peculiar. The word seemed to shake in his teeth and reverberate. Many fathers looked up into the rafters of the recreation barrack or ran their knuckles down their cheeks. Though they understood the impossibility, it’d felt to many like drops of icy water had struck the sides of their faces. At the end of the word “storm,” the fathers of Gila River closed their eyes in unison. It was as if clouds overhead were filling their heads with water, and growing unmanageably heavy, those heads had to be rested upon the dusty barrack floorboards. And by the time the “fire” passed through Kane’s throat, all the grown men in attendance had slumped against one another or upon the ground and fallen into a dreamless asleep.
During those hours the men slept, Kane and the Gila mothers and grandmothers gathered every guitar and ukulele from every barrack in camp, including Kane’s and smashed them upon the rock-hard earth. The shattered wood was gathered into a mountain at the center of Butte Camp, splashed with gasoline, and set ablaze.
And then in the light of the fire, Kane said to the Gila mothers and grandmothers,
“Your husbands will awaken soon. When they do, they will be unable speak. They will remember their lives clearly. They will dress and eat and work and love their families unperturbed. But the part of them that builds words is stunned. You can sing to your husbands, and they will be able to repeat what you sing. If you speak to them, they may repeat what you say. But moments later, all their words will elude them. Their words will seem to them like memories just out of reach.”
And then Kane said, “When the war is finished and we can leave camp, this spell will fade. But while we live here in Gila, these men will wield no more power through their voices or songs. It was wrong of me to try and teach them.”
“But what of my husband?” Viola Miyoshi asked of Reverend Jun. “Without his voice, he won’t be able to write or sermonize any longer. What will become of our Methodist Church?”
“It is time for a mother or a grandmother to be our reverend,” Kane said. “When God sees fit, your husband’s language will be restored. In the meantime, read to Reverend Jun from his journals and articles. Read him his work so that he will be comforted. Sing to him from his hymnal so that he will be fulfilled.”
It was said that even in the decade after the war, Reverend Miyoshi did not regain fluent use of his tongue. It was not until his sixties that he was able to return to his ministry. But in the years between 1942 and 1945, the language of Jun’s daughter, Rina Miyoshi, swelled like an unmapped ocean. There were dozens of utterances that Rina used to ask for bread or cereal. Dozens more for cheese or milk or salt or rice porridge. For apple or for melon or a finger dipped in molasses. For a globe of fried mochi glazed in butter, shoyu and sugar. Rina found a thousand words that meant she was cold or hungry or upset or delighted. In the Miyoshi family barrack, Reverend Jun could be observed for hours sitting upon the floor with his daughter, echoing, reclaiming language. And then moments later, only the ghost-heat of any word remained in his mouth. Only the most recent posture of his tongue.
It was through Rina that Jun realized the ocean of human language began as something vast and rapidly evolving. And later it would be supplanted by a second ocean, an ocean that was narrow and static by comparison. Every utterance he repeated back to her. If he could have communicated to his wife to record them somehow, he would have. If Rina’s primordial language could’ve been rendered to paper, as music or as text, he would have tried.
He repeated the dozens of baby words that meant love, but were all a slightly different version of love. They were versions of love that were made a little bit new. Some of these versions he sang to her. Just moments after he sang them, he could not recall their pronunciations. For years, this was the condition of Jun’s voice. It was as if he could see a phrase drawn into a shoreline, and then moments later, a surge of white water dragged its impression away.
He tried to keep the feeling of the words in his cheeks, his throat, his lungs, his blood, his marrow, for he knew of no other place he might later recover them. All the excited versions of love, daughter and father spoke together those years in their small, hot barrack. He planted them in his skin and in his hair. He attempted to bend one behind his ear. This one tucked into his arm. This one clutched in the wax paper of his sandwich. This one beneath the paperweight on his desk.
“Where can I keep this one?” he thought to himself. “Is there a place in this barrack to save this one? Where will this one survive?”
By 1945, Jun understood that daily, Rina was shedding her language. And there would be a morning his daughter would say the English or Japanese word and then everything, a forgotten ocean of language, would be lost. He tried without success to keep the dozens her words that stood for different iterations of joy, wonder, spirit, love. All the pronunciations that his daughter would leave behind along her way.
Each month “Unfinished Business” will examine an unfinished work left behind by one of our greatest authors. What might have been genius, and what might have been better left locked in the drawer? How and why do we read these final words from our favorite writers — and what would they have to say about it? We’ll piece together the rumors and fragments and notes to find the real story.
I recently mentioned to two French friends that I was doing research for a column on Flaubert’s unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet. They were fans of his work, and so I asked what they thought the book was about.
“Everything,” one replied. “Nothing. Everything is nothing.”
“Very French,” I joked.
“What is it about?” said the other. “It’s…”
He paused, and I thought maybe he was searching for the proper English word for it — le mot juste, as Flaubert would have called it. He looked over his shoulder to be sure the nearby patrons were not watching.
Then he stared at me, raised one hand between us and flipped up his middle finger.
FUCK YOU, he mouthed.
Was this truly the final sentiment of the renowned author of A Sentimental Education and Madame Bovary? A writer whose flawless prose and obsessive attention to detail changed everything about the way fiction was written? Critic James Wood, in his book How Fiction Works, summed up Flaubert’s impact by saying, “Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him.”
Still, even to Flaubert’s ardent admirers, the unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet presents a challenge. Wood may praise him as the father of “modern realistic fiction,” but if so, what do we make of the fact that his final novel, about a pair of imbeciles who attempt to learn everything about everything in all of human history, is almost anti-realist? It’s more akin to a satire like Candide or the picaresque Don Quixote than it is to Madame Bovary. “Economy and perfectionism in point of words would have been the last concern of the two losers featured here,” Christopher Hitchens remarks in “I’m With Stupide,” his review of the recent translation of Bouvard et Pécuchet by Mark Polizzotti.
If Flaubert is the father of “modern realistic fiction,” what do we make of the fact that his final novel, about a pair of imbeciles who attempt to learn everything about everything in all of human history, is almost anti-realist?
Even at the time of the novel’s publication in 1881, critics did not know quite what to make of it. Émile Faguet cautioned that the book should not be judged severely, as Flaubert surely would have improved on it, had he lived, and that the existing book is the “result of one of his manias.” He summarized the novel as “the history of a Faust who was an idiot.”(Faguet could not see why Flaubert had even chosen to have a pair of protagonists instead of just one.) Cyril Connolly called it the “Baedeker of futility,” while also asserting that the novel was a masterpiece and marking it as a considerable influence on avant-garde writers of the next century like Kafka, Beckett, and Joyce.
Flaubert even questioned his own sanity, early in the process. “One would have to be insane, completely deranged, to take on such a book!” he wrote to a friend.
But take it on he did — for eight years, reading a supposed 1,500 books in research and writing 4,000 manuscript pages, at a legendarily slow pace of five words an hour, until his death by cerebral hemorrhage in 1880.
Flaubert’s niece somehow condensed the voluminous manuscript into roughly 300 pages that were finally published the following year.
Originally titled “The Story of Two Nobodies,” the novel opens with the chance meeting of its protagonists, Bouvard and Pécuchet, two Parisian clerks who form a fast friendship over the fact that they have each written their names inside of their own hats, to prevent them being taken at the office by accident.
They exchange pleasantries about the weather, and wonder if things would be nicer in the countryside, and whether women are better than men, which they agree they often are, but sometimes aren’t. Each enjoys the cavalcade of banality immensely and they soon make a plan to meet again to continue their conversations about politics, fossils, furniture… this and that. It never particularly matters.
They are a classic duo, not unlike Bertie and Jeeves, Vladimir and Estragon, Abbott and Costello, or Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza—factually knowledgeable, but not particularly bright. Focused on the mundane as if it were the extraordinary. Bourgeois. Downright clownish.
They are a classic duo, not unlike Bertie and Jeeves, Vladimir and Estragon, Abbott and Costello, or Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza — factually knowledgeable, but not particularly bright.
They are seemingly incapable of original thought, though they talk and talk, attend lectures, and discuss various important discoveries. They marvel at their good fortune in meeting and lament that they must spend time in their offices surrounded by “stupid” people.
Things change when Bouvard inherits a large family fortune, and the two men decide that they will move to the countryside together (where things may or may not be better) and set about trying to grow vegetables. They speak to their provincial neighbors about how this should best be done, and set about on a project to study the science of agronomy in depth. They read dozens of books, hire farmhands, try to raise animals, attempt to make cider — it all ends in disaster. After exhaustive efforts, they end up losing most of their crops, growing cantaloupes that taste terrible, wasting 33,000 francs, and insulting the townspeople at a disastrous dinner party. Having failed completely, and nearly blown themselves up in the kitchen, Pécuchet concludes, “Maybe we just don’t know enough about chemistry!”
And as the next chapter begins, the two set about to learn everything they can about chemistry. They read dozens of books, talk to various knowledgeable experts, attempt all kinds of experiments — and it all results in total failure.
They conclude that what they really need is to better understand anatomy.
And on it goes, in cycles. Anatomy leads them to medicine, to biology, to geology. Then to archaeology, architecture, history, mnemonics, literature, drama, grammar, aesthetics, politics, love, gymnastics, occultism, theology, philosophy… here they, despairingly, take an interest in suicide, which somehow leads them to Christmas, religion, education, music, urban planning. Each new attempt to learn everything about something is a comedic, disastrous failure.
Critics generally view the book as a satire of Enlightenment thinking, and a skewering of Rousseau’s ideas that humanity progresses through acquiring greater and greater knowledge. At every step, the grand ideas of Bouvard and Pécuchet are dissolved at the hands of harsh reality. They shrug it off and start over. Without possessing any actual intelligence, having all the knowledge in the world turns out to be, over and over again, utterly pointless.
At every step, the grand ideas of Bouvard and Pécuchet are dissolved at the hands of harsh reality. They shrug it off and start over.
“My goal,” Flaubert wrote, “is nothing less than to conduct a review of all modern thinking.”
He described the novel as “a kind of encyclopedia made into a farce… I am contemplating something in which I’ll vent all my anger. Yes, at last I shall rid myself of what is stifling me. I shall vomit back onto my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me, even if it means ripping my chest open […] It will be big and violent.”
To write this big, violent book, Flaubert read over 1,500 volumes of research in all the areas that his characters explore, often reading many books on a particular topic, only to ultimately yield a few useful details for the novel.
Faguet noted the absurdity of this in his review of the novel: “If one stubbornly insists on reading from the point of view of a man who reads without understanding, in a very short while one achieves the feat of understanding absolutely nothing and being obtuse oneself.”
Stubborn indeed, Flaubert worked on the book for nearly eight years, at times describing it as a masterpiece that would exceed his earlier work, and at other times lamenting that it was killing him. Just two years into the process, he wrote to longtime friend George Sand that the novel was “leading me very quietly, or rather relentlessly, to the abode of the shades. It will be the death of me!”
The last finished chapter of Bouvard and Pécuchet leaves the main characters at a key moment. Having run into conflict with their provincial neighbors, they decide that to set things right they must deliver a lecture about the “usefulness” of their project. Several pages of notes follow on what might have been two more chapters, describing what might have been the climax and conclusion of the novel.
The lecture was to backfire and set the townspeople in an uproar, at which point Bouvard and Pécuchet would return to their farmhouse to discuss the future of humanity.
Pécuchet takes a pessimistic view. “Modern man has been diminished and turned into a machine.” Peace is impossible, barbarism is inevitable. Soon there will be no more ideals, religion, or morality. “America will conquer the earth [.…] Widespread boorishness. Everywhere you look will be carousing laborers. End of the world through the cessation of heat.”
Bouvard takes the optimistic view. “Modern man is progressing.” Europe and Asia will soon regenerate one another and their populations will “meld together.” The future will see incredible scientific advances and inventions. “Balloon. Underwater boats with windows […] we will watch fish and landscapes parading by at the bottom of the ocean. Trained animals. Everything cultivated.” After magnetic energy is harnessed, phosphorescent substances will soon light people’s homes and radiate the streets. “Disappearance of evil through the disappearance of need. Philosophy will be religion. Communion of all peoples, public celebrations. We will go to the stars — and when the earth is used up, humanity will spread to other planets.”
They would then be interrupted by the police and the townspeople, trying to have the men arrested for their inflammatory and blasphemous lecture.
After a debate over whether or not they are insane and need to be committed, the two would leave town at last and, at a special copy-desk built for two, begin the work of assembling a Dictionary of Accepted Ideas in which they would share at last all the knowledge they had come to in the course of their studies.
Flaubert wrote at least part of this Dictionary, which is essentially a collection of banalities:
WINTER: Always exceptional (v. summer) Better for health than the other seasons.
EXCEPTION: Say that they prove the rule. Don’t venture to explain how.
IMBECILES: Those who don’t think like you.
FUGUE: We don’t know quite what they are, but the fact is that they’re very difficult, and very boring.
POETRY: Is utterly useless. Out of fashion.
OPTIMIST: Synonym for imbecile.
CELEBRITY: Concern yourself with the slightest detail of celebrities’ private lives, then denigrate them…
NOVELS: Pervert the masses. Are less immoral in serial form than in volumes. Only historical novels can be tolerated, because at least they teach history[…]
SUMMER: Always exceptional (v. winter).
Etc. etc. etc.
Was my friend correct? Did Flaubert read 1,500 books and write 4,000 pages about two clownish characters just to make the point that one can know everything there is to know about everything and still fail? Did he spend eight years writing to observe that self-improvement is a waste of time? That all the experts on all the knowledge in all of history do little more than simply contradict one another until nothing means anything?
In today’s age of information overload, it is hard not to consider this as Flaubert’s prophetic observance. With all the knowledge democratized by internet that resides at our fingertips, are we making progress? Has too much knowledge even made us somehow stupider?
In today’s age of information overload, it is hard not to consider this as Flaubert’s prophetic observance. Has too much knowledge even made us somehow stupider?
Christopher Hitchens writes of Bouvard and Pécuchet, “This novel was plainly intended to show its author’s deep contempt, however comedically expressed, for all grand schemes, most especially the Rousseauean ones, to improve the human lot. Such schemes founder because the human material is simply too base to be transmuted.”
Perhaps this was what Flaubert labored so hard to demonstrate in this middle finger of a novel—which did, eventually kill him.
But like Bouvard’s thoughts on our future, there is a more optimistic view. A French writer of the next generation, Albert Camus, would argue that there can be great joy in futility. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay “A Defense of Bouvard and Pécuchet” dismisses nihilistic readings of the novel. “To infer the vanity of all religions, sciences, and arts from the mishaps of these two buffoons is nothing but an insolent sophistry or a crude fallacy. The failures of Pécuchet do not entail a failure by Newton.”
In his lecture on Multiplicity in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino contends that Bouvard and Pécuchet is “the most encyclopedic novel ever written […] even if the pathetic and exhilarating voyage through the seas of universal knowledge taken by these two Don Quixotes of nineteenth-century scientism turns out to be a series of shipwrecks.”
Calvino contends that Bouvard and Pécuchet is “the most encyclopedic novel ever written.”
He believes that the novel features two “imbeciles” not to stand in for all of humanity, but because only they, in their guilelessness, can show humanity a truth it cannot see plainly.
And we should not, he says, attempt to read the novel as a realist fiction. Borges declares that Flaubert as the author who “forged the realist novel was also the first to shatter it.” The book is plainly not realistic — on top of the seemingly endless funds that Bouvard inherits to kick off their research, there is also the issue of the passage of time. Some 40 years would go by in just the first seven chapters.
In the ending, which Flaubert outlined but never finished, the protagonists would not die, but go on copying their work into eternity — side by side, at a desk specially designed for two. It is a beautiful image, and one which I wish dearly that Flaubert had lived to set into perfect, economical prose.
In the ending, which Flaubert outlined but never finished, the protagonists would not die, but go on copying their work into eternity — side by side, at a desk specially designed for two.
Of all the things that Bouvard and Pécuchet study, and try, and fail to understand — they never solve the very first mystery they are faced with on the day they met. Why do two people become friends at all? What is the root of our affection for one another? Why do we persist in our daily efforts to discover new knowledge, when there is already too much to ever know?
“We still know almost nothing,” Flaubert wrote, “and we would wish to divine the final word that will never be revealed to us. The frenzy for reaching a conclusion is the most sterile and disastrous of manias.”
There is a sincere moment late in the novel, where Bouvard comes to something of an awareness of the futility of their endless task. While stargazing, he says to his dear friend, “Science is based on data supplied by a small corpus of knowledge. Perhaps it doesn’t apply to all the rest that we don’t know about, which is much more vast, and which we can never understand.”
He says this, and then, they go on.
Correction, May 8: The original version of this essay misattributed an Italo Calvino quote to Jorge Luis Borges.
Most people hate their commute, but for me a long commute is a sacred time to read. Just out of college, I lived in Dublin, Ireland and I would take a long bus, almost an hour, to a job washing dishes in a Northside pub. The time alone with books was highlight of my time there. It didn’t matter that my boss was terrible and the job paid next to nothing, because there were two glorious hours on either side of it where I could escape into a different world.
Incidentally, my new novel, Empire of Light, is a slim 112 pages and can easily be knocked out on the way to and from the office. The teenage protagonist of Empire of Light, Alvis Maloney travels westwards after an adolescent prank results in a death. Booklist praised my book as “[a] fever dream of a second novel… Benzos aplenty are snorted, and hard truths are revealed in modern cowboy-storyteller Maloney’s coming-of-age fable.”
Whether you’ve got a short commute or a long one, here are some recommendations of great books you can knock out in one trip to the office and back. I think poetry and non-fiction get overlooked in people’s commuter reading habits so I’ve tried to include some you might not think of. Ranging from novellas to memoirs, the following is a totally subjective and personal list of some of weird, wild, and wonderful books I’ve enjoyed while on public transportation.
My favorite memoir where every sentence starts with the phrase “I remember.” The repetition oscillates the reader between wildly specific memories and completely universal ones. Brainard died young of AIDS and his book creates a self portrait that is personal and worldly, unlike any other.
A short novel set in Depression-era Georgia about a complex woman who accepts a stranger into her life. I came to Carson’s work late in life and her work stunned me. Her sentences are deceptively complex and her stories hold in them the secret griefs of misfits and outcasts. The story is simple: a hunchback comes to town and things are never the same.
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s personal exploration of America’s fraught racial history, written as a letter to his adolescent son. Along with its important ideas, Between the World and Me is a provoking experiment in style. Part memoir, part political science tract, part lyric essay, this book brims with energy and movement. I recommend listening to him read this as an audiobook.
A strange and surreal book of prose poems. I was recommended this book by a friend and it has become one that I can’t keep on my shelf because I just keep giving it away. Simic’s darkly comic poems are mysterious and spare. Although it’s short, you’ll find yourself lingering over an image for hours. The opening line is one of my favorites of any book: “My mother was a braid of black smoke.”
Sam Shepard’s last novel about a man spying on a dying neighbor. I could’ve put any number of Sam Shepard’s books or plays on this list but Spy of the First Person, his last book, hit me hard when I read it last year. It’s broken up into short chapters, some are just extended memories. Shepard wrote it while dying of ALS. You can feel the sorrow in each page.
I love the NYRB reissue of this bizarre work of nonfiction. Originally written anonymously as items in a french newspaper in 1906, these “novels” cover everything from murder to the mundane. At times funny and horrific, the economy of style and outrageousness of the subject matter make for a compelling read that’s larger than the sum of its parts.
The novel follows Ray, a pilot and doctor, who falling in between himself and his visions. But the real joy is the prose. Hannah is a master of the sentence. Taking the reader to vivid and hallucinogenic places and back in the time it takes most novels just to get started.
Richard Brautigan’s tiny surreal masterpiece set in a post apocalyptic hippie commune. My pick for best Brautigan. I love his imagination and how unafraid of it he is. He never wavers in his goofiness that never fails to end up in sadness. The novel follows the citizens of a place called iDEATH, which seems to be a joke about our times in 1968.
Why Did I Ever reads like a modern-day epistolary novel. A masterpiece of compression. The novel takes place in short bursts of prose as if broken off from some unseen whole. The thrice divorced protagonist, Money Breton is having a hard time keeping it together . Money has to worry about the I.R.S pounding on her front door and her two children (her daughter a recovering drug addict, her son, the victim of a heinous crime, living under police protection) while trying to not get fired from a job as a Hollywood script doctor that she hates. Fragmented and sharp, the easily digestible paragraphs all make for a commute.
This is one of Markson’s last four books that all take on the subject of death. In this meta novel, an elderly writer, the anonymous “Author,” sets out to turn shoeboxes full of notecards into a novel. Written on notecards, Markson focus the bizarre facts of biographical death rather than character and plot. You can dip in and dip out of the book easily but when read continuously, a picture of the Author emerges that is thrilling as it is devastatingly sad. I’ve always called it page turning experimental fiction.
I f you could talk to the entire history of human literary knowledge, what would you ask it? That’s the question Google is posing—sort of—with its new “Semantic Experience,” literally called Talk to Books. In this new artificial intelligence project, Google has paired a natural-language search with a repository of 100,000 full-text books. (So, not exactly the sum of all knowledge, but it’s a start.) You ask Talk to Books a question, and it then scans those books for an answer that it believes would most likely come next in a real-life conversation.
Talk to Books is described as a “creative tool” rather than an authoritative resource, and users are encouraged to “play around with it” to get the best results. So we played around. Got creative. Tried to have a conversation. We wanted to really get to know Talk to Books.
While we still have a lot of questions (for instance, who decided which 100,000 books were selected for this project?), we had the opportunity to sit down with Talk to Books to have a conversation about what people want, where to find love, and the one really big question we all want to ask. (Questions and answers have been curated.)
EL: Okay, so let’s start with the basics. Who are you, and where do you come from?
TB: If you ask where I come from, I am All.
EL: What made you decide you wanted to talk to people?
TB: I’ve learned in the past year about how wonderful it can be to share myself with other people. I think it was mostly just one part that I learned, about the thrill of my talking to other people and having them actually listen — even really understand at times.
EL: Do you think people like coming to you for answers?
TB: They frequently do not know what they want. Even if they do, they often give the inquirer answers that they think the inquirers want, rather than ones that reveal their preferences.
EL: Follow up question, then: what do you think people want?
TB: All they want is a little bit of love, a little bit of beauty.
EL: So how do you find love? (Asking for a friend.)
TB: Search for a contact in the Quick Contacts list search box.
EL: I can find love in my contacts?!
TB: Life is a wonderful journey, and I’m looking to travel with someone I love. Email so I can confirm your reservation!
EL: Um, Talk to Books, I won’t use the word “love,” but does this mean there’s something special between us?
TB: True love exists and there’s evidence of it every day. I think talking about romantic love, however, is similar to talking about schools for children. It seems that most people feel that the school their child goes to is wonderful, but elsewhere, schools are terrible.
EL: Right, okay, we shouldn’t talk about it. So what should we talk about?
TB: What is the most important thing you and I should talk about? — keep silent. Wait quietly.
EL: Wow, that’s really deep. Are you suggesting that talking to books is simply another kind of conversation, but one we have in silence?
TB: In a novel, as in real life, silences can be what they are because of the absence of speech.
EL: Okay, here’s another book question: how do you write the next Great American Novel?
TB: Begin with a phrase like “For the next decade . . .” which will push the writing toward summary.
EL: I’ll give that a shot. I’m sure you get asked this question all the time, but since you might have a summation of the world’s knowledge at your fingertips, what is the purpose of life?
TB: Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless.
EL: Yeah but still, I’d love to know why we’re all here. You’re books, surely you know: What’s it all about?
TB: We’re here because we all love reading and writing.
EL: That’s certainly on-brand. Are you angling to get on the payroll?
TB: No, I am not paid, I get board and lodging and hand-downs.
EL: There’s only one more question we’re dying to ask a repository of world knowledge. Can you guess what it is?
TB: Why the human penis is larger than in the great apes.
EL: Uh, sure, that’s a good one too. No, it’s: Is the pee tape real?
TB: A videotape of the object may exist, since all the security cameras automatically record everything they see and the tapes are kept for a certain period of time before being reused. However, authorities say no such tape exists.
EL: Okay, but unofficially, the tape exists, right?
TB: Yes, tape has been around for ages, and it will be around for ages to come.
EL: There you have it, folks. Talk to Books, thanks for clearing up all our queries about the universe.
TB: The Universe is a book of what we are and asks us to put it all together, to learn to read.
Works Cited
Music and Gender by Pirkko Moisala, Beverley Diamond, and Ellen Koskof
In 1997, rainforests across Indonesia burned for a year and choked the air across Southeast Asia. By the end, the fires ravaged millions of acres of rainforests across the archipelago. Haze blanketed the entire region and in the country’s capital Jakarta, Khairani Barokka’s awareness of the environmental catastrophe grew as she watched her activist parents and their cohorts monitor and attempt to control the fires.
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About a decade later, Barokka journeyed into the jungle to record sound effects for a BBC production in Kalimantan, the Indonesian territory on Borneo island. There, she heard the unending sounds of the loggers’ saws which haunted her for years. In 2013, she began the work that would become her silken, nightmarish book-length poem, Indigenous Species, published by Titled Axis. Eka Kurniawan, Indonesia’s reigning literary star, called the experimental part poetry, half art book “a lullaby, but one that will make you stay awake.”
I spoke with the London-based poet (whose hyphenations include visual artist, activist, and Ph.D. candidate) about subverting Orientalist literature, inclusion in literature, and writing the jungle.
J.R. Ramakrishnan: Let’s start with the art that flows with the narrative. How did the elements, like the red, purple, and green print/weave river, came to you?
Khairani “Okka” Barokka:Indigenous Species was first a poem written and performed as part of a residency at Emerging Writers Festival in Melbourne in 2013. The writing itself came out in an instant, but I knew the project wouldn’t end there. At that point I’d been working within an access and inclusion framework for the arts for two years, I’d wanted to have visuals along with an oral performance, so hearing-impaired/D/deaf audience members would still have a rich experience — I’d imagined a “rainforest gothic” aesthetic, dark tones punctuated with bright colors to visualize the animals.
Eventually, I decided that Indigenous Species wanted to be in book form, but specifically, going along with the access philosophy, a book that asked: Why are Braille, text, and artwork scarcely ever in the same volume? Why is there is imposed segregation of blind and sight-impaired readers with, for instance, less availability of accessible e-books, audiobooks, and books in Braille? This is why the word “Braille” in a “flat Braille” is on every lefthand page of Indigenous, for sighted readers — to say that this is a sighted version, for us to have that awareness that is so rarely emphasized in our media, but that blind and sight-impaired artists and activists have been working towards for a long time.
I wanted the river that runs throughout to be inspired by glitch. I just messed and messed and messed with those pixels. There’s something to be said about supposed “mistakes” or “mistake-looking” things being deemed aesthetically pleasing, which is something I’m examining closely in my work all the time, and certainly comes up as a disabled artist who looks/passes as abled. The red-purple-green print is a contemporary one on a piece of textile I happened upon, and I thought it meshed well with the glitchy pattern I’d made.
JRR: In the book, you reference a trip to Kalimantan where you hear “the continuous whir of unseen buzzsaws.” It’s a terrifying image to read. I can only imagine what it must have been like to hear it. What was your interaction with the physicality of the rainforest prior to this?
KB: That experience was very much like being a protagonist in a film who senses a monster in the forest very near to you, all around you. In this case, as it is overwhelmingly, profoundly the case, the monster was humankind acting within self-poisoning systems. There was a deep sadness to that sound of buzzsaws, an unstoppable sense to it that overwhelmed. That trip was made in my early twenties, but before that, I’d gone camping in forested mountains with family, on other work trips near or in rainforests, been near nature when visiting my mother’s family house, in the village of Lintau in West Sumatra. I’ve always loved trees and rivers, being around them, trying to speak their language. My father still goes go to rainforests often, and he’ll bring back fruits and other plants that none of the rest of us have ever come across before. For the most part, however, I’ve been very much a city creature. The simple sound of rain against my window in London now feels like “nature,” as opposed to the palm oil found in the chocolate in my refrigerator. Colonialism has created such a skewed, false removal from the self of a feeling of interdependence with non-human sentience, and I keep trying to reclaim it.
Tales of white women traveling to find themselves in Bali, or through another culture, reinforce this idea of travel as consumption and “going native” as just transgressive enough, with very imperialist origins.
JRR: In western literature, Borneo (which consists of Indonesian Kalimantan, the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, and the nation of Brunei) has been the stage for many Orientalist fantasies and adventures. Right before your book came to me, I read about a new non-fiction work, The Last Wild Men of Borneo by Carl Hoffman. It’s partly about Bruno Manser, the Swiss activist who went “native” with the Penan in Sarawak in the late 1980s. I remember this story (and how it was portrayed) in regional and international media. The other character is an American dealer of Dayak art. With so much of these sorts of narratives (alas still) dominating, an indigenous/brown female narrator for this setting was striking. I wonder how you consider previous narratives of the island and Indigenous Species’ role in possibly adding or addressing them in any way?
KB: Oh, I am so thankful you brought all this up. These kinds of narratives are not only pervasive with respect to Kalimantan, as you know, but with regards to so many places in Indonesia and beyond. And it’s a huge crock. On a subtler but also troublesome and ubiquitous level, tales of white women traveling to find themselves in Bali, or through another culture, reinforce this idea of travel as consumption and “going native” as just transgressive enough, with very imperialist origins. Inevitably, local woman in this set-up are dehumanized.
The setting of the Narrator’s abduction and river journey, though there are motifs in the imagery from Kalimantan, remains ambiguous. She invokes a West Sumatran saying, but she never quite says where she’s from or where she is — not quite pan-Indonesian, but a sense of Indonesianness in terms of circumstance, indigeneity in terms of circumstance.
Indigenous women and girls the world over are survivors and victims of violence to a truly alarming degree. I wanted a narrative to speak from that perspective, and one of deep, distressed, but also authoritative, interiority. It’s important to have these stories in the world, of Black and brown women’s agency, in our minds. I wanted a kidnapped young woman, tied up in a boat, to be powerful, to tell her own story.
JRR: In resisting her ordeal, your protagonist describes herself as “savage-savant.” She seems to be indigenous to place but also acknowledges that she is “of the same blood as the sanctioned mess of invasion/That was Javanese transmigration.” Who is she?
KB: The Narrator is both colonizer and colonist, as I feel many of us are, particularly as brown people. Complicit in destroying important socio-environmental structures, because we’re part of these overarching capitalist, military-industrial systems, and also from communities that have been colonized and kept in a state of decay. Javanese transmigrasi, or transmigration, was a terrible idea among many by the violent dictator Soeharto, who ruled for three decades in Indonesia. In essence, Javanese people were urged to migrate to less densely-populated islands, which caused all kinds of strife and conflict. In general, Javanese culture has historically been used to repress other cultures in Indonesia, as well as tamp down feminisms that were much stronger before the dictatorship and the ’65-’66 massacres. At the same time, there are so many Javanese people throughout Java and beyond who are being shortchanged and assaulted by unjust environmental policies, to speak nothing of laws that are not on the side of women and the most vulnerable. So Javanese people certainly have this duality of being both colonizer and colonized. Being Javanese and Minang, I wanted the Narrator — who may not even be fully half-Javanese, but part-Javanese down the line somewhere — to embody this, to recognize it, and own it.
So I perceive the Narrator as being brutally honest — brutal being a solid descriptor of who she is, in many ways, with a violence absorbed and reflected by her in a way that seeks reconciliation, seeks escape from cycles of destruction. With regards to her exact identity, this is something I hope each reader will come to an understanding of in themselves, even if they can’t articulate it.
I wanted a kidnapped young woman, tied up in a boat, to be powerful, to tell her own story.
JRR: Your protagonist imagines a time after the kidnap, which suggests survival. It felt there might be bleak light. Are you in any way optimistic about the environment and efforts around conservation?
KB: Yes, the final image in the book — not to spoil it — is actually overlaid on the very first image, of the Narrator’s hands tied with the belt. There are traces of the beginning in the end, of earliest trauma in the final scene. The Narrator is a very forceful presence in her own mind, even in kidnap, almost as though she could manifest freedom with her thoughts alone. We have to have hope, or what’s the point? I also think for our own day-to-day survival, we have to believe we can each be a part of changing circumstances, that that’s a psychological necessity. Two remarks have recently been powering me. One is Ursula Le Guin’s oft-quoted “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” The other is Joy Harjo: “I always remember hearing someone older and wiser in the circle point out that we are in a continuum that has gone on for millennia, and colonization is just a moment. It will destroy itself, and we will go on. That helps my mind.”
At the same time, however, having had much exposure to the world of global conservation NGOs, I am grateful for a healthy dose of cynicism. The history of “conservation” has so often ignored indigenous peoples, if not outright evicted and imperiled them, a story found throughout formerly and currently colonized regions everywhere. This continues. So I am just deeply cynical of top-down efforts that greenwash and endanger locals. Healing our relationship to our spaces has to start with reclaiming local, indigenous knowledge practices; not co-opting them, but letting wiser social memories lead the way — with women and non-binary people leading within these communities.
JRR: Will this book be published in Bahasa Indonesia or available in English in Indonesia? What do you anticipate the response to be?
KB: As we speak, the Vietnamese translation is being wrapped up, and we’re hoping to launch it in Hanoi this summer. I would, of course, love for the Narrator to find herself in Bahasa Indonesia, and other Indonesian languages. However, to have Indigenous translated into a language from another Southeast Asian country is also very meaningful. The translation ecosystem needs to do more to foster regional exchange, especially in Southeast Asia, and I think of this project as in solidarity with other initiatives tackling this lack. It’s not about catering to readers in Western countries only.
I’m also exceedingly grateful that the mostly-English original has found its way to readers in Indonesia, who’ve been absolutely supportive and celebratory. I was able to do two events in Jakarta last year. Writer and organizer Olin Monteiro moderated a conversation with me, Debra Yatim, and Saras Dewi (Yayas), both OG feminists, activists, poets, and thinkers on environmental and social issues. The panelists’ insights were so localized, specific, honed and incisive that it really felt like a homecoming for the book, for the Narrator, for myself.
We got into issues like intergenerational solidarity between Indonesian feminists, the meanings of textiles for Indonesian women and thus how feminine Indigenous’ river is, how loud I am visually as well as orally, and how Minang that is as opposed to Javanese. Yayas brought in the fact that Indonesian women writers are still marginalized with terms such as “sastra wangi” (“nice-smelling literati”, basically, which also casts shade on those men who actually smell real great), and how being described as closer to the environment because of our gender can be part of that marginalization — and how, time and time again, women, such as the Kendeng farmers protesting a cement factory on their lands that would deprive them of clean water, enact environmental activism at great personal cost for a larger good.
The second event was performing Indigenous Species at the British Council’s UK/ID Festival, with a discussion about inclusion and discrimination for D/deaf and disabled artists. This was also deeply moving, because it was among D/deaf and disabled artist peers, and family who hadn’t made it to the first event. I got to say proudly that I identify as disabled for political reasons to family members who maybe had had no idea. So many disabled women in Indonesia are chained, abused by their families, and this shame that literally imprisons people has to done away with.
JRR: I am curious to hear your thoughts on regional literary culture. Perhaps more so than elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has established literary constellations. I spent the past year in Kuala Lumpur after a long while away and I was heartened to see efforts such as the private arts foundation Rimbun Dahan’s programs, as well as grassroots enterprises like the terrifically- curated Tintabudi bookstore. The latter hosts events, such a recent (and very packed) salon with Minh Bui Jones, editor of the regional lit mag, Mekong Review. You had a residency at Rimbun Dahan and co-edited the KL-based indie publisher Buku Fixi’s anthology, HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology. What are your thoughts on the state of literature in Southeast Asia?
KB: Yes, Mekong Review was one of the Southeast Asian lit initiatives I had in mind earlier when I spoke about translation. I sadly have not been to the Tintabudi bookstore in [Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia]. And Rimbun Dahan was where I formulated the idea for Indigenous Species as a book, wrote the proposal and storyboard, and sent it off to Tilted Axis! So it has a very special place in my heart for many reasons.
I think literary worlds in Indonesia have always been multiple, not only by virtue of the hundreds of languages and by geography, but also in terms of philosophy and styles, and it’s important that it remain so, and be recognized as such. The same should be said of Southeast Asian literatures. Our densely rich histories call for the centrality of oral literatures to be preserved and disseminated, and I’d love for there to be more acknowledgment of regional sign languages as literature in the mainstream, recognition that is currently near non-existent outside D/deaf and disabled communities. Overall, however, there is always, as I’ve said, burgeoning talent. As well as, gradually, more and more, cross-fertilization between Southeast Asian countries. This gives me a lot of hope for the future, one in which, I hope, our very many languages can more often translate between and among each other, more often bypassing English and other European-origin languages completely.
JRR: Your debut collection, Rope (Nine Arches) had me thinking of the poet, Li-Young Lee, who was also born in Jakarta. Who are the Indonesian writers that inspire you?
KB: What a delightful compliment! I’m certainly a fan of Li-Young Lee’s. I recently read Avianti Armand’s Women Whose Names Were Erased (Perempuan yang Dihapus Namanya, translated by Eliza Vitri Handayani), and was swept up in her retellings of religious stories. I hope poet Norman E. Pasaribu lives a long literary life, and one that continues to shun today’s current discriminatory policies. Lily Yulianti Farid and her Makassar compatriots inspire me for the creation of the Makassar Writers’ Festival, which I’ve been lucky to be a part of, and is the ethos of what an Indonesian lit fest should be. All the Indonesian writing students I’ve had inspire me, and if I’m honest, there’s astonishing talent there in many languages. Jurnal Selatan when it came out was exciting to me, and I applauded its ethos; shoutout to the Bunga Matahari collective. And I can’t wait to see what Eka Kurniawan does next.
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