The cat says, “I’m only here on sufferance.” The dog doesn’t understand, so the cat defines the word “sufferance.” It has to do with a kind of tolerance. It has to do with permission that is indirect, permission through failure to prohibit. She uses the word “tacit.” The dog doesn’t understand “tacit.” The cat gives up. She thinks he probably got the idea anyway.
The cat knows they love the dog and merely tolerate her. There is enthusiasm when they greet the dog at the front door. She sits off in the background, watching. They see her and say, “Hello, kitty!” but without much warmth. The dog is more demonstrative than she is. He wouldn’t understand the word “demonstrative,” though he enacts it. He wouldn’t understand the word “enact.”
Later, the cat says to the dog, who stands below her, in the kitchen, sniffing the air, “Now she has left the room. I’m sitting within an inch of her sandwich. That puts a strain on me.” She reaches a forepaw toward the sandwich, but she is not comfortable.
The dog likes her and is interested in her. He would not find it a strain to be near the sandwich.
Later the cat is chewing on the broom again.
The dog does not understand why she would do that.
The cat says, “She scolds me because I’ve been chewing on the broom. She leaves it out and I see it. Then she sees me and puts it away between the refrigerator and the wall where I can’t get at it, though I try. I try when it seems to be where I can reach it.”
The dog listens to her explain all this. At least it is a change from going back to sleep, yet again, in that pool of sunlight.
“Dogs in Love”
by Ali Shapiro
I.
The dog who reminds us of you is easily wounded: every loud noise lands like a blow. She never barks but occasionally moans. The dog who reminds us of me has only two modes: all-out and asleep. She eats dinner out of a maze, has to be saved, every night, from her own appetite. She loves, in this order: food, tennis balls, you. Both dogs love squirrels, but once we saw the dog who reminds us of you leave an almost-dead one at the feet of the dog who reminds us of me, then slink carefully away. The dog who reminds us of me ate it.
II.
We break up, but our dogs don’t. We pass them back and forth through various impromptu airlocks. I let them into your yard and they disappear through the back door, admitted by your invisible hand. You transfer them from your car to mine, then drive away before I get behind the wheel. Because the dogs have always been each of ours (your dog; my dog), and because they are each a part of us (daemons; animal familiars), the pass-through becomes a space where we are somehow still together, a world of what-ifs embodied and lovingly, grudgingly maintained.
III.
Our reunion comes with animal inevitability: a few drinks, flush of skin, clash of teeth. Then we’re back where we started: cooking, vacuuming. Walking the dogs. The one who reminds us of me now insists on sleeping not just next to but on top of the dog who reminds us of you, who accepts the warm weight with a heavy sigh. Maybe it’s true: opposites attract. Or maybe love is just knowing, no particular alignment of selves or stars but a groove one animal wears into another, slowly, surely, until the warmth becomes particular, the weight light.
I am the uncle who gives books to my nephews and one niece. I do this out of love for them and the books, but also out of the need to recover things I may have lost. Most often, the books I give are those iconic lodestones masquerading under simple turns-of-phrase: The Giving Tree, The Little Engine That Could, etc. Each one I love in the way we love the books we are supposed to love; and I love to pass them on to the next generation, like bestowing a stash of especially effective pathfinding breadcrumbs upon worthy heirs. I liked to believe that these books will help them find their way, but a few Decembers ago while shopping for my niece’s birthday gift, among others, I struggled to keep this faith. I’d been trying to give my niece and nephews books that would be maps to show them the way—but I hadn’t yet found my own way, and it suddenly seemed disingenuous to give yet another map that had thus far proven itself unreliable.
So, that December evening in the bookstore, I decided it would be better to give my niece a compass rather than a map. The one book that came to mind was “Mrs. Rumphius” — a book that I had told myself was “my favorite,” the one that “really influenced” me. Both of those things were true, and I did truly cherish the book’s influence on me. But seeing the title on the cover of the new copy I held in my hands, I realized that I had for years been woefully calling it by something that was not its name.
Miss Rumphius — not Mrs. — is perhaps Barbara Cooney’s most beloved work, and certainly her most well known. The 1982 book tells the life story of Alice Rumphius, an equestrian-elegant, red-haired girl born sometime before the ascendancy of the steamship, somewhere in northeastern America. Something of the young nation’s aloof confidence, charged with untested potential, energizes Alice’s tale of self-reliance — a quality she exhibits from the very beginning. As a child, she adores her immigrant grandfather’s wide-ranging stories of “faraway places,” shared with her in the firelight of his home “in a city by the sea.” She promises that she will travel the world too, one day, and that when she’s finished, she will come home to a house beside the sea. Her grandfather blesses her intentions, but on the condition that she fulfill one request: “You must do something to make the world more beautiful.”
She accomplishes all three in the course of long, enviable life of global adventure that comes to its end on the rocky Maine coast. Here, she fulfills her final promise to make the world more beautiful by scattering lupine seeds “along highways and down the country lanes….around the schoolhouse and the back of the church.” Year after year, the lupines multiply thanks to wind and birds and curious children, imperially redecorating the rugged Maine landscape. All said, Alice succeeded in making the world more beautiful, but what is important to remember, and what seemed unimportant to me until recently, is that she planted the flowers herself. There was never any great love for Alice, nor was she ever a “Mrs.”
I had forgotten that part, perhaps because for a very long time I considered it the fulfillment of every person’s destiny to find true love in this life, and to fuse with that person until the very end. In doing so, I had also forgotten the unspoken message of Miss Rumphius: true love is not the only wonder in the world, and not necessarily the greatest.
To a certain extent, Alice’s entire life is a kind of anti-Odyssey — a journey not toward closure, not toward home and birthright, but to ever-wider openings. Three years ago when I found the copy of this book that I would purchase for my niece, I was doing the exact opposite. I was headed toward closure, to an end to the precarity that had dominated my life since I graduated high school. Strange, then, that this book spoke to me. If there was anything I wanted not to be, it was the free, solitary, singularly time-agnostic Alice Rumphius.
The message was vaguely optimistic, yet clearly actionable; open to interpretation, yet specific.
Our differences aside, I found Alice’s charge “to make the world more beautiful” a useful directive for myself and others, even so many years after reading it for the first time. The message was vaguely optimistic, yet clearly actionable; open to interpretation, yet specific. And Alice’s declaration that she did not know what she could do to make the world more beautiful seemed to me important to share with children. After my own adolescence of calculated careerism, a clear reminder to the next generation that life’s mysteries need not be solved by age 18 was a necessary and vital one.
But beyond my appreciation for its developmental nuance, I felt deeply connected to Miss Rumphius, and it wasn’t clear to me why this should be the case. The book wasn’t emblematic of my childhood. I was a kid who loved magic and wanted my own, and while there is a witchy haze about red-haired and strong-willed Alice, there is no sorcery in this book. There was, however, some power at work in those pages that I had not realized until that night in the bookshop, thumbing through the copy I would give my niece. Perhaps I had forgotten it, or perhaps I had just to wait until that moment to remember, but I saw as if for the first time something wonderful on the book’s dedication page.
“This book is dedicated to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children, sailors, and maidens,” reads the text beneath a very specific and very familiar rendering of my namesake saint. This was an eikona, a sacred image; and this Saint Nicholas was properly OAgios Nikolaos: his hand contorted into the blessing cipher IC XC, his body adorned in the full regalia of a Roman bishop, and his face haloed with to aktiston phos, the “uncreated light.” Here, on the first page of the book that I called my childhood favorite, was a message to me that I never knew was there: my name, my faith, my own moment of “wonder” — a concept with which St. Nicholas is richly interconnected.
In Greek Orthodox tradition, one of the beloved saint’s many honorifics is O Thaumatourgos, literally, “wonderworker.” Although imprecisely appropriated into English as “thaumaturge,” the Greek word’s etymology stretches from remote Hellenic antiquity up into the occult origins of modernity, science, and empirical knowledge. Touched thus by almost all of Western written history, the whole lineage of wonder is archived in the root word, thauma (pronounced in Modern Greek as “THAV-ma.”)
“In Archaic [Greek] and early Classical [Greek] literature, the characteristic reaction to a well-crafted image is thauma,” writes Richard T. Neer, an art historian and classicist at the University of Chicago, in his monograph theorizing the cultural genesis of Classical sculpture. Applied variously to crafts, feats, and, famously, to the dangerously deceptive allure of the first woman, Pandora, thauma describes any “figure of dazzling alterity” or “a moment of limitless present” in the finite world. Across all these instances, “wonder derives from the fact that a single thing can somehow be two things all at once.”
Originally an aesthetic term, thauma acquired new figurative meanings through its frequent use in Plato and Aristotle, the latter of whom contended, “[P]hilosophy begins in wonder.” For Aristotle, thauma inhered in the “apparent conjoining of chance and necessity” in otherwise unrelated events that “occur contrary to expectation yet on account of one another” so perfectly as to seem divinely designed. In the interstices, then, thauma sparks and illuminates, situating wonder itself between any “this” and any “that” fortuitously and randomly in communion.
Which is to say, for wonder to truly dazzle, the needful thing is always some kind of disparity, incompleteness, or capacity — a truth intuitively acknowledged in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase “capacity for wonder.” It’s the filling of that capacity that one could say eventually eliminates the last bit of enchantment from the world. For Alice Rumphius, the great work is to rage against the enervation of that enchantment, to re-excavate the capacity for wonder, to beat back against the currents that enclose the imagination. In this sense, above all else, hers is a story about wonder, about thauma. In Miss Rumphius, the portent of thauma for life today glimmers for any who have eyes to see — and whose hearts put their faith in the promise of another half.
Alice’s heart plays a strangely minor role in this story of a life well lived, offering comfort to anyone unrepresented in the glut of stories that culminate in happily ever afters. She does not follow her “heart’s desire,” and her journey around the world seems less of a passion project and much more of a baseline function. To be Alice is to be in motion, to approach every almost and then instantaneously tangent out to uncharted places with unknown people. For that reason, although she finds early on in the book a home that fulfills her requirements — far away from where she grew up, near the sea — Alice leaves. What’s more, she leaves behind the only man in whom she’d felt romantic interest, according to Barbara Cooney in a 1999 interview with The Los Angeles Times:
When I asked her why Miss Rumphius…never married, Cooney said, “She didn’t feel the need to. It was simpler just to go knocking around by herself.”
Didn’t she ever meet anyone who interested her? I prodded. There was a long pause.
“Well,” the author finally said with a little lilt in her voice, “she met Bapa Raja, but he was married.”
Here was a home, a point of closure; yet her journey had never pointed toward the polestar of a yearned-for homeland. Instead, it webbed out into sparkling dizziness, unceasingly in pursuit of the next vacuum. She knew wonder must of necessity be incomplete, and hearts are too easily convinced that they are sufficiently filled.
I learned that the hard way, almost two years after I rediscovered Miss Rumphius on that evening in the bookstore. I had either forgotten or never remembered Alice’s lesson that a full life is not necessarily predicated on occupying one’s heart with love for another person. If wonder emerges “between any ‘this’ and any ‘that’ fortuitously and randomly in communion,” then I thought wonder’s true form must be the rarely successful alchemy between two people in love.
And if not, it was still the case that every book and film and song I ever absorbed affirmed that love outranked any other wonder in the world. Without love, what should be wonderful would be one-dimensional, bereft of the combustible internal tension that generated thauma. I knew better than this, once, but had forgotten by the time it was too late. Perhaps this was why, for years, I referred to this book as “Mrs. Rumphius,” rather than by its proper name, appending a phantom husband to a woman who never needed one.
For many of us, love is the last real sacrament in a secular world that is nevertheless glutted with approximations of transcendence. We are encouraged — demanded, even — to find the sacred at yoga, in the “spiritual but not religious,” in various wellness practices, in cloudy crystals charged at midnight on roofs far away from the ground the made them; I’ve done similar things. Where the divine has been scaled into a compulsory (and, often, capitalistic) component of wellness, love is the last untamed and utterly incandescent wonder; it’s the cherub with its flaming sword.
For many of us, love is the last real sacrament in a secular world that is nevertheless glutted with approximations of transcendence.
And in such a world, the route of Alice Rumphius, which seeks out wonder instead of love, seems pointless. Why work so hard to find wonder outside of love, when wonder is so readily available within it? To be in love is to return to paradise, to enter into the last temple, to do in earnest the things you could previously only do ironically. In this sense, love in its form as the ultimate wonder is perhaps the one baptism we still universally acknowledge for the remission of sins. “Well, I met a boy…” does certainly have something of the sparkle of a preemptive exoneration.
But in exalting love as the epitome of all wonder, we transform it into its antithesis. This kind of romantic love tends toward closure, to completion; it tries to compact the poles that produce thauma into one solid whole. It tells us love can only be true if it lasts through successive rounds of hookups, through trauma, through fights — through a battery of tests, like a laboratory subject. It produces hookup culture as an erotic manifestation of empiricism — a series of adaptive assessments to optimize us, and others for us. This kind of love proceeds, unconsciously, with the intent to decommission the imagination, to fence it in, to atrophy it. Its aim is to avert that other kind of love, the kind that is not wonderful, but full of wondering. I’m sick of wondering. I’m sick of wondering if you really love me, I’m sick of wondering if you will be here.
We want a love so wonderful we need never wonder again.
The problem with such a love is that it is dead on arrival if it is to be the final and ultimate wonder in one’s life. The lesson of Miss Rumphius that I’ve encountered all these years later is that our capacity for wonder is not a cavity that can only be filled, or even best be filled, with love. Love need not be the sum of all wonders, and it is to our own disadvantage to consider a life lived without a great love, a soul mate, or a partner to be a regrettably unactualized one.
Similarly, it dishonors one’s own potential by pinning the hope of happiness on the life-long requited love of another person. Such hope is ultimately invested in certainty, in closure, in the quick algorithmic accomplishment of promises such as those Alice made to her grandfather and whose slow fulfillment spanned her whole life. It caulks the interstices of life — the uncertainties, the voids, the discontinuities across which only imagination can carry us, ultimately impoverishing the world now and in the future.
If love had been Alice’s only objective, her only form of wonder (and for many of us, I think that is the case; it was for me), it’s unlikely she would have ever left Bapa Raja, or that she would have ever climbed mountains or trekked through jungles. In the forfeiture of these experiences, it’s unlikely she would have ever imagined a way to make the world more beautiful.
If love had been Alice’s only objective, it’s unlikely she would have ever climbed mountains or trekked through jungles.
By leaning into the ever opening horizon, she saw more than most will ever see, such that by the time she settled into her new home by the shore, at the margins of the world, she could look into the sunset and say, in earnest, that the world was “already pretty nice.” To fulfill her final promise to make the world more beautiful, she had to imagine a world that did not yet exist. Even after she had presumably seen the whole world and acquired the certainty of experience, she entered the chasm between what is known and not known, and imagined a more beautiful future. Her eyes were quite useless to help her see what had not yet been seen.
Accustomed to the nexus of “chance and necessity,” Alice answers the charge to make the world more beautiful by planting flowers in the stony ground around her home — far from optimal conditions for new growth. To her wonder, at least some of the seeds bloomed in the spring — only the lupines, the flower she “always loved best,” and that are also, incidentally, considered a symbol of imagination. When she finds a patch of lupines far away from her garden, she makes it clear: “I don’t believe my eyes!” To make the world more beautiful is to bring something into it that did not exist before, a task which demands a indefatigable return to the dark interstices where wonder wakes up.
In such places, the lupines grow year in and year out, “in between the rocks around her house,” as her great-niece tells us. The same little girl concludes the book, not with closure, but with new uncertainty, in an embrace of wonder that it’s this book’s prime directive to encourage. It’s in this wonder, of which love is only one of many optional, moving parts, that one approaches the thauma at the heart of life and becomes, in time, thauma idesthai: “a wonder to behold for itself and oneself.”
To make the world a more beautiful place, then — to make anyone else’s world a more beautiful place through love and partnership — Miss Rumphius teaches by example to first become a wonder to behold for yourself. The flowers will then find their own way to bloom.
The reputation of the Bronx, New York’s northernmost borough, is often eclipsed by a narrative that includes violence, drugs, and a wave of arson and riots that occurred in the 1970s. But the Bronx is unique. It’s artistic. It’s a place that lifted up some of the best musical artists of our time as well as literary artists: Don DeLillo was a Bronxite. Newly published writers like Lilliam Rivera and Jamel Brinkley have also called the Bronx home. The Bronx is also one of the most diverse areas in the nation.
The Bronx is no longer engulfed in flames—it’s thriving, especially in the literary world thanks to the artist communities showcasing the richness of the area’s heritage and evolution. We cannot and should not ignore the contributions being made to the larger literary canon from this borough. That’s why I wanted to spotlight several people who have been working to increase Bronx representation and offer the communities, most notably communities of color, the opportunity to access work about their hometown but also contribute to the arts.
How Charlie engages the Bronx literary community: Charlie is the Deputy Director at Bronx Council on the Arts (BCA), which has supported the development of artists and art organizations in the borough since 1962. He directs the Bronx Writers Center program there, which has served local writers since being formed in 1996. Events are free and open to the public!
When you think of the Bronx what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
How rich our culture is! The Bronx is the birthplace of hip-hop as well as home to many arts and culture institutions such as our Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos Community College, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, BronxArtSpace, the Andrew Freedman Home, Bronx Music Heritage Center, Poe Park Visitor Center (adjacent to the legendary writer’s final residence), BAAD! (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance), and Pregones Theater — are just a few. The Bronx’s creative legacy has been informed and deepened by the diverse groups of immigrants who’ve settled here as well as through the efforts of cultural leaders serving some of the nation’s poorest districts. The Bronx is a people-of-color/immigrant-majority county.
The Bronx’s creative legacy has been informed and deepened by the diverse groups of immigrants who’ve settled here as well as through the efforts of cultural leaders serving some of the nation’s poorest districts.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve noticed people don’t realize about the Bronx?
How green it is. I was born and raised here in the 1970s and 1980s, during the burning buildings era people still think of. And although I didn’t grow up in the South Bronx, where the majority of the devastation occurred, I witnessed the heroin, AIDS, and crack epidemics firsthand. Bronxites are survivors who’ve contended with negative stigmas for most of our lives. The Bronx is also the greenest of New York City’s boroughs despite this. Van Cortlandt Park, Mosholu Parkway, the NY Botanical Garden, the Bronx Zoo combined with the Pelham Parkway Greenway that runs all the way to Pelham Bay Park, has sustained urban wildlife in the borough since its very beginnings.
What can the literary community do to support you and the Bronx?
The best way for anyone to support arts and culture activities in the Bronx is to make a donation to Bronx Council on the Arts. No gift is too small and will go directly toward the various artist services and public programs we provide year-round to under-resourced communities being targeted for development. This puts countless artists at risk! Our programs include art exhibits at our Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos, Bronx Writers Center events, and various project funding grants we award yearly to an average of 75 community-based arts initiatives, bringing the arts to the people. You can help out here or sign up for our newsletter to learn more about our amazing exhibits, workshops, and offerings here.
What’s next for you and Bronx Council on the Arts?
BCA has an amazing new executive director, Viviana Bianchi, as well as a headquarters under renovation in Westchester Square, which we hope to move into later in 2018 — so lots of change to come. As an author I’m wrapping up a new supernatural mystery novel and short story collection set in Puerto Rico.
How Saraciea engages the Bronx literary community: Saraciea is bringing a book festival to the Bronx on Saturday, May 19. Her dream is for Bronxites to discover a love for reading and to engage with authors, illustrators, and creatives. The Bronx isn’t burning anymore, the Bronx is reading! It’s never too late to cultivate a culture of reading. The festival will also host school visits on Friday, May 18 via The Bronx is Reading literacy program. Select authors from the festival will visit Title I schools and the festival will provide free copies of their books to students.
When you think of the Bronx what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
When I think of the Bronx, Fordham Road comes to mind. It might seem odd, but walking up and down that area is where I purchased a ton of urban fiction books from street vendors. It’s where I went to pick up books from The Bronx Library Center because my local library had been shutdown.
Poe Center & Poe Cottage — Named after Edgar Allan Poe, the cottage is a literary landmark. You can’t possibly be a writer living in NYC and not have visited the center and the cottage at least once.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve noticed people don’t realize about the Bronx?
According to the New York Times, “The Bronx remains the poorest county in the state, and one of the poorest in the United States.” And it really is poor. It’s also no coincidence that the borough’s demographic is largely Latinx and Black. There are over 600,000 children and teens living in the Bronx and many don’t read, can’t read, and/or can’t afford books. I’m hoping to change that with the festival and with The Bronx is Reading program.
What can the literary community do to support you and the Bronx?
The literary community can support the Bronx Book Festival by donating to our Kickstarter campaign (launching in mid-February), donating books, following us on social media and spreading the word about the festival.
What’s next for the Bronx Book Festival?
We’re gearing up to launch the Kickstarter campaign. Shortly after that we will release the exciting author line-up!
How Ron is engaging the Bronx literary community: From its Bronx lair, the Literary Freedom Project (founded in 2004) publishes Mosaic Literary Magazine, one of a handful of Black literary print magazines; creates social engagement lesson plans for high school educators; and presents the Mosaic Literary Conference, an annual event that places literature as the nexus for discussing social and cultural issues that inform and influence its South Bronx community. He is also on the planning committee of the annual Bronx Book Fair (lead by Lorraine Currelley).
Recently, Ron launched a new initiative, One Book One Bronx, as a way to create book clubs throughout the borough. Each would select a book that reflects the culture of its specific community. The goal is to get more families and friends focused on reading together.
He also is the social media manager at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
When you think of the Bronx what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
Of course Yankee Stadium is the iconic landmark that everyone thinks of but I see new art spaces as being the next big draw. There’s Hell Gate Arts gallery, BronxArtSpace, Andrew Freedman Home, 6Base, Bronx Documentary Center, Wallworks, Longwood Art Gallery—the list continues to grow. And within walking distance of most of these new spaces are restaurants with eclectic menus: sushi, Italian, Latin, Nigerian, American, and plenty of breweries. The challenge is that there isn’t a critical mass of institutions in close proximity to each other so visits require pre-planning or finding a Bronxite that can help navigate the borough.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve noticed people don’t realize about the Bronx?
Its diversity. We have vibrant Pakistani, Ghanaian, Albanian, Mexican, Dominican, Garifuna, Nigerian, and Puerto Rican. And each community has wonderful international restaurants. There’s an “I like to eat” theme here.
What can the literary community do to support you and the Bronx?
Everyone professes to love paper—subscribe to Mosaic (subscribe to any print literary magazine). Mosaic is full of curated literary content. New York artists such as Nicole Dennis-Benn, Javaka Steptoe, William Melvin Kelley, Jamel Shabazz, Lucille Clifton, and Saeed Jones have all been featured in the magazine. Each issue is also supplemented with a lesson plan focused on cultural and social engagement.
Mosaic, which was founded in 1998, and turns 20 this year. It’s amazing that when you consider all the lit mags that have come and gone Mosaic is still publishing. As readers gravitate to digital and apps, each year becomes more of a challenge. We’re online and have vibrant social platforms but I still believe in print and still see some upside potential—yes, I’m in denial and may need therapy. That said, I think this is the year that I will have to decide to stop printing or find new markets for the print mag. Otherwise it has to be full-on digital, and something will be lost.
Also, folks should get on the train and attend an event in the Bronx. Stop claiming you’re a New Yorker if you never go above 14th St.
Folks should get on the train and attend an event in the Bronx. Stop claiming you’re a New Yorker if you never go above 14th St.
What’s next for you?
Continue to grind. Go to readings, listen for new voices to document. Read more—would love to read more books. Too busy being an admin to just slow down and read consistently. Twenty years in, I’m finally getting close to shaping this organization in a way that’s sustainable. There’s a core of four programs: Mosaic magazine, Mosaic Literary Conference, lesson plans, and One Book One Bronx, that I feel have a comfortable synergy to build on.
How Noëlle is engaging the Bronx Literary Community: After the sole bookstore remaining in the Bronx closed in 2016, Bronxite Noëlle started a Indiegogo campaign to open what will be the only independent bookstore in the Bronx. She not only met her goal but surpassed it by 25% last March. The bookstore will officially open in Mott Haven this spring. She’s been honored by the New York Yankees Hispanic Heritage Month Community Achievement Award and been a keynote speaker at various business events on crowdfunding. She also hosts a monthly Movers & Shakers book club in the Bronx bringing together readers of books by underrepresented authors.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve noticed people don’t realize about the Bronx?
That we’re home to 10 colleges and thousands of intellectuals. The Bronx is still stigmatized by the fires and urban blight of the 70s, and while we’re still affected by that history, the Bronx is not to be slept on. We have beautiful communities, disproportionately produce talent, and yes, we read.
What can the literary community do to support you and the Bronx?
Pull up for events and support with your dollars to help me show the world what many fail to see/that the Bronx is no longer burning… except with a desire to read.
The Bronx is no longer burning… except with a desire to read.
Project X, a Bronx based arts organization dedicated to elevating and re-centering the Bronx as an artistic hub.
How is Project X engaging the Bronx literary community?
Project X connects Bronx communities to each other through art and collaborative programming. During our October to May Season, we work with and feature artists of all disciplines in a community effort to highlight and safeguard Bronx and Latinx artists. Our monthly slams bring out some of the borough’s best poets and features a Latinx poet in the writing/performance community. Through monthly artistic partnerships as well as our Poetry Slam Series, held every last Thursday, we are producing the first ever certified Bronx reppin’ Slam Team headed to Nationals, 2018.
In addition, Project X partners with Bronx community organizations, venues, and artist collectives to produce community engagement events throughout the year. So far we have hosted a healing workshop/open mic for our communities affected by DACA with Bronx Native, a local clothing company, a health and wellness workshop led by Chef Gabriela Álvarez of Liberation Cuisine, a DJ Party featuring four Bronx-based DJs at Port Morris Distillery, and #PoetsforPuertoRico: The Bronx, a fundraiser for Puerto Rico Hurricane Relief at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Each collaboration not only connects creative and passionate Bronx natives to each other but also invites those outside of the Bronx to witness our community as crucial and sustainable.
When you think of the Bronx what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
How the Bronx uses its spaces to the fullest potential. Across the borough we have all these amazing parks with nonstop art events happening! From Lucy Aponte at Poe Park Visitor Center curating art and writing events throughout the year to Friends of Soundview Park coordinating their annual music festival, Bronx parks are unforgettably unique and artistic and always a community to explore.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve noticed people don’t realize about the Bronx?
People who still believe the Bronx is as devastated as it was in the 1970s, that we are a failed borough and always will be. Even more, people equate the disenfranchisement of the borough to everyone in it, surprised to find out many of us are successful, creative, and educated. The Bronx is nowhere near where it needs to be in 2018, but we are also nowhere near where we were. The essence of the borough is and always will be grit, passion, hustle, and survival. So we won’t ever stop building a better future for ourselves.
The essence of the borough is and always will be grit, passion, hustle, and survival. So we won’t ever stop building a better future for ourselves.
What can the literary community do to support you and the Bronx?
Project X is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit arts service organization. Donations for the purposes of Project X are tax deductible by law and can be made online here. Specifically we hope to find monthly donors to support our regular programming efforts. As gentrification begins infecting our community, we need the financial backing of our people to keep the Bronx in the hands of Bronx natives.
We want to continue to branch out. We have some strong partnerships already, from ID Studio Theater to the Bronx Museum of the Arts to the Bronx Music Heritage Center but we know there are so many other organizations we haven’t connected to, both in the Bronx and beyond. We need to bring the art to the people, that means partnering and collaborating with similar groups doing important work across the entire city. This also means exploring a diversity of art forms, from film festivals to art galleries we are trying to do it all. We want to support our gente who haven’t been able to access these artistic platforms before and prove that the Bronx has and always will be a hub of artistic creation.
“I’m a minimalist, so I only have two forks,” you said as you tended to an egg with one of them. It sizzled in olive oil. For our date, you told me it would be easier if we met at your place so you could do the cooking. Your diet condemned most foods. Our future seemed finite, but I had spent years with a man who in the middle of May loved to roast whole turkeys and mash piles of potatoes. You made me feel light.
Over the next few months, I watched as you pruned your life. First your table’s chairs disappeared, and then your pillow. Soon there was a single lonely towel in your bathroom. Your bed went next. You slept on the floor with your arms stiff at your sides, like a vampire that had forsaken its coffin.
But you kept your houseplants. You kissed me among the ferns and I felt like we were camping in a tiny, wild piece of Brooklyn. I could smell the fresh earth.
On the day you got rid of your table, I dropped my tote bag onto your lacquered wood floor. It was heavy with the shampoo I carried back and forth so I wouldn’t burden your bathroom. I got it from a $25 donation to WNYC. I shared that out loud to crack the silence. “You shouldn’t get a thing for giving,” you said without looking at me. “That ruins it.”
When you minimized to one fork soon after, I knew what came next. “Minimalism is about freedom,” you began.
“Save your words,” I said. Well, I’m sure you threw them away.
There was nothing to gather. I picked up my tote and opened the door. You sat on the floor surrounded by greenery and said goodbye just once.
Two nondescript people of the traditional number of toes and fingers, noses, ears, hearts, and lungs, sat in a parked car in front of the apartment they shared.
A group of boys, young enough still to feel like the world bent itself to them, walked by the car. Death, addiction, illness, failure, war, murder, car crashes, sexually transmitted diseases, heartbreak — those were all things that happened to other people. They felt too big in this world for any of that to happen to them. One of them pointed at the car, another made a pussy joke, and the four of them walked by the car laughing. None of them lowered their voices as they passed a mother and her young son. The mother, with eyes that weren’t really paying attention, watched her son bend down to pick up a rock. The boy was learning about dinosaurs in school and was hoping to find a fossil. The mailman in his truck, passed the mother and her son and moved around the parked car. Seeing the mother, the mailman couldn’t help but think of his youngest daughter and how she was getting married next month. Of all the things in the world to be and feel — the mailman continued down the street feeling like the most inconsequential man in the world.
The sun shone. The planets moved. The moon orbited the Earth. The tree exhaled oxygen. A man in power called another country a dirty word. And these two people inside the parked car said goodbye to the other. Said goodbye to the life they had hoped to have together, to the love they had fostered between them, to the midnight back scratches, the soft hand that draped itself over her waist as she slept, and her snores that kept him awake.
Akwaeke Emezi’s debut novel Freshwater is an arresting psychological portrait that re-centers African realities overwritten by colonization. To read the novel is to enter, and become immersed in, its vivid metaphysics. Grounded in Igbo ontology and drawing on Emezi’s own life, Freshwater tells the story of Ada, a young Nigerian woman who is born “with one foot on the other side.”
Ada is an ogbanje, an embodied Igbo spirit, and she begins to develop separate selves as a child, replete with their own desires and urges.When Ada moves to the U.S. for college and experiences an act of sexual violence, these selves assume greater power and agency in her consciousness.
Told from multiple perspectives, the novel braids together the voices of Ada, the self she calls Asughara, and a collective voice of her plural spirit, referred to as “We.” In our conversation, Emezi and I discussed the politics of naming, and the reclamation of marginalized realities.
Tajja Isen: I wanted to start with something you say in the acknowledgments. You write that your sister advised you to treat the writing process “like [you were] a method actor, to surrender.” What does it mean for you to approach your work as a method actor?
Akwaeke Emezi: So,Freshwater is based in a very specific reality, Igbo, and it wasn’t one that I had much experience in before writing it. I was raised Catholic, and we’re not really taught much about our traditional religions growing up in Nigeria. The book is set firmly within Igbo ontology, though, so it was impossible to write it without completely surrendering to it, which meant immersing myself in these beliefs. My concern when I started was that I would enter this other reality and not be able to get out of it. I took my sister’s advice and it worked out, but interestingly, I was also right: stepping into Igbo wasn’t really a reversible process, but it turned out for the better. Once the book was done, I had a lot more clarity about myself than I did in the beginning, and using that specific reality as a lens was the only thing that made that possible.
My concern when I started was that I would enter this other reality and not be able to get out of it.
I also realized I wasn’t the only person who was trying to figure these things out — specifically, trying to figure them out when it comes to these indigenous realities that we lost access to through colonialism, replaced by very Western norms of Christianity and science. What you end up with is a bunch of people who are living in ways that they can’t talk about, because if they do, they’re either going to be labeled as “crazy” or “possessed by a demon.” Freshwater, in a sense, is a story that’s also a reconstruction of my life through a completely different lens. It’s like trying on a pair of glasses and realizing, “Oh, these should have been your eyes all along.”
TI: I see that in the novel as well; there’s such a strong sense that the act of naming gives something its power.
AE: Yes, very much.
TI: Do you describe these Igbo narratives using the word “mythology”? I hesitated to use that word.
AE: The word “mythology” implies that it’s not real, that it’s make believe. I had to do a lot of re-centering where I was raised with it being, “this is mythology, this is folklore, this is superstition.” Then you ask a couple of questions and you realize the only reason it’s considered make-believe is because a bunch of white people showed up and told everyone there that the reality they’d been living in was fake, and they’d been believing things that weren’t real. And then that really jolts your understanding of what is real. Which is why a lot of the work I do with Freshwater, and with other work, is about allowing for multiple realities to exist at the same time, versus the concept that there has to be a singular, dominant one and everything else gets defined according to that. So I hope that Freshwater shifts away from that a little bit and allows for multiple ways of being.
The only reason [Igbo folklore] is considered make-believe is because a bunch of white people showed up and told everyone there that the reality they’d been living in was fake.
I use the word “ontology” and at first I thought it was a bit pretentious, but then I realized it was actually very useful. When we were trying to figure out the copy around the book, I said that, because I’m Nigerian, if we used the word “identity” people would assume that it’s about national identity, or racial identity—but no, it’s about metaphysical identity. It’s not about all these human categories that we place bodies in, it’s about the step before that, of being placed into a body in the first place. There are a lot of things that happen to the flesh [in the novel] that are considered brutal, but for me the main brutality in the book is the existence as flesh in the first place. All the other stuff, as bad as it is, isn’t as bad as that.
TI: For me, the moment when I recognized the violence of embodiment was the accident early on with Ada’s sister Añuli, when she’s crossing the road.
AE: I really like that insight, because it’s not actually centered on the Ada. In a way I think seeing the pain or the fragility of a body has more impact when you’re watching it happen to someone you care about versus it actually happening to yourself.
TI: And that’s also what instigates the desire for blood in the selves.
AE: The thing I like about realities, specifically those that are indigenous to Africa— and sometimes move to the diaspora — is that there are certain things that are always true. One of them is about the role of blood. There’s a quote from Zora Neale Hurston which says, “All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason […] Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.” And that last sentence is a fact that is acknowledged across all kinds of realities. Even in Christianity.
That’s one of the things that was interesting about writing Freshwater: these realizations of how much of personal experience can tie into a larger lived experience that involves a lot more people. I think that’s the experience some readers have had — they’ve been having an experience within their heads and they read the book and they get that validation that I got when I was doing my research — “I’m not crazy, this is true in someone else’s reality, which means that I have a community in a sense.”
TI: Do you think there’s something in these ontologies that also helps make sense of desire — both sexual desire and human urges?
AE: I thought about that and it’s hard for me to think about desire in the context of the book because so much of the desire there is different from, as you put it, “human urges.” So even for Asughara, for instance, her quote-unquote “sexual desires” are not really about sex at all.
TI: Right, it’s about protection of the Ada.
AE: It’s about protection. It’s about attack. It’s a weapon, it’s about trying to feel alive or not feel dead, it’s about trying to feel more embodied. So it’s all these things that are, again, not really centered on being human, but inhabiting that paradox of not being human and still having human form. And Asughara is the self who has a lot of desires. They’re not necessarily human urges — for her specifically it’s like the pain of embodiment, or how to stop that dissonance. A desire for death; a desire to go home. If you’re inhabiting human form, then it makes sense that your urges would overlap with human urges—and that on the surface, they would look the same. The urge to go home is such a human thing, but in the case of the book, to go home means to die. So there are layers to it, where the top layer is shared across humans and non-humans alike.
It’s about trying to feel alive or not feel dead, it’s about trying to feel more embodied.
I tried to have the reader feel what that dissonance is like, where you have the layer of flesh but you also have this other layer. And you can’t really separate one from the other. And Ada tries to split them apart and get rid of the selves and she’s making all these little boxes, which is a very human thing to do, to make boxes and try and make everything fit neatly, and it’s still all just a jumbled, overlapping mess.
TI: I definitely felt in myself the impulse to spatialize and separate and figure out where the borders between the selves were, but as I was reading, the novel taught me to resist that logic.
AE: I mean, it’s a very natural impulse to try and start that way. I was having a conversation with someone about the book being kind of autobiographical. We were talking about the selves, and they were asking how they work with me now, outside the book. It wasn’t until after writing the book that I realized that even the demarcations that [Ada] creates are kind of arbitrary and false, and as easily as she can create those selves, they can collapse. So when I was answering my friend’s question — “how do your selves work, which one am I talking to” — I said, “I have no idea!”
The image I use for it is like a boiling cloud, and it’s just a lot of [selves] boiling in there, and sometimes one or two will precipitate out, the way they did in the book, and be around for a while, and then they’ll disappear and it’ll all be mixed up. But part of what I learned from writing the book is to accept that even though I made these different, bordered selves to write the book, they’re constructs. They’re things that Ada created to make what was happening in her head make more sense, because at the time, she/I didn’t have the understanding that all of it could exist at once. It was too complicated a concept. It’s simpler when you divide it and when you make the little boxes. Now I’m better at not dividing it and just accepting the mishmash and layers.
TI: How do you think that will inform your work going forward?
Once you let go of a singular reality, you also have to let go of a couple of other things, like time functioning the way that it would normally.
AE: I think it helps because one of the things about shifting through selves and realities frequently is that it makes it very easy to write fiction — it’s easy to embody other people. I’ve tried writing with one central character, and it’s very challenging for me, because to restrict it to one person is hard. And so my second novel manuscript is also written from multiple points of view and that’s more natural for me, to slip between people. I need a lot of people — I think that’s how it shows up in my work. At least when it’s a book-length work, I need a lot of people because I can’t really stay in one reality for that long.
TI: How does that process of moving between perspectives inform the work of writing?
AE: It’s usually not very linear. There’s a thing about linearity, and binaries, and these very structured things are supposed to move in one direction, and I think there’s something linked about all of that. Once you let go of a singular reality, you also have to let go of a couple of other things, like time functioning the way that it would normally.
I think it’s about a learned flexibility. Once you learn to be flexible with realities, you become flexible about borders, you become flexible about time, you become flexible about a lot of other things, which I think is a really good quality to have just because it makes you a lot more tolerant of other people. If you’re too rigid, you won’t have room for other people’s realities, which is the root of a lot of problems in society. People are so against accepting alternate existences, that they will kill to make sure that a different reality doesn’t threaten theirs.
The subject of almost all of my fiction so far has been the love lives of young women. For a long time, I found this to be both extraordinarily embarrassing and also something I couldn’t help. Throughout my twenties, sex and relationships were what I thought about most, what seemed most mysterious and urgent. If I could have chosen my subject — if I could have written about any subject equally well — I would have chosen something “serious,” the sort of fiction that would inspire people to ask not “Did this really happen?” but “So what are your thoughts on [X]?” Although I have always written about young women’s relationships, I have also always secretly believed that this subject was less important than other, stereotypically male, subjects.
If I could have chosen my subject, I would have chosen something “serious,” the sort of fiction that would inspire people to ask not “Did this really happen?” but “So, what are your thoughts?”
It is not difficult to understand where this idea came from. I began writing in the early 2000s. In many of my early fiction workshops, professors and fellow students derided stories involving girls’ periods/bodies/love lives, books with shoes and lipstick on the cover, and YA literature. At the same time, they praised fiction about the erections and affairs of John Updike and Philip Roth’s protagonists and considered books about adolescent boys — Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — to be adult literature. (With a handful of exceptions, fiction by men and women of color was simply not mentioned). When fiction by women was taken seriously it was typically 1) about a middle-aged man (Bel Canto, The Shipping News) 2) an exception to be apologized for (“I certainly didn’t expect to like a book called Housekeeping”) or 3) fiction that asserted the author’s credibility through intertextuality, extensive research, or historical commentary (The Great Fire, Beloved, A Thousand Acres). In the rare instances in which authors who wrote about women’s love lives were recommended by male classmates and teachers (Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill), their stories were almost always told in a distanced third person that indicated that the author was not simply more intelligent than the characters, but also making fun of them. Zoe Hendricks, for instance, the protagonist of Moore’s famous “You’re Ugly, Too,” is introduced like this: “She was almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite.” You could take a story about a woman’s love life seriously as long as the story itself appeared not to.
You could take a story about a woman’s love life seriously as long as the story itself appeared not to.
Some of this attitude was the simple narcissism of patriarchy — “stories about young women aren’t interesting to me and therefore they aren’t interesting” — but some of this was a more complicated blindness. If you have never been a young woman or tried to understand the experience of being a young woman, the drama of young women’s loves lives is illegible to you in the same way that walking through the United States as a person of color can seem uncomplicated to a white person. But falling in love as a young woman, especially perhaps, as a young woman seeking out men, often requires complex negotiations with power and a long period of learning and unlearning lessons about how to find intimacy without erasing yourself. How can you allow yourself to enjoy sex on your own terms without being punished for it? How can you find power and autonomy in a relationship without taking other people for granted? And how can you date/fall in love/exist as a young woman in America without encountering violence?
When I was first learning to write, I also had trouble accurately telling stories about young women’s love lives while also following the “rules of fiction.” Good stories showed instead of telling; interesting characters acted instead of reacting. But how did you show something that not everyone could see? And why was passivity such an unworthy subject for literature when, in my own life and in the lives of my friends, it so often undergirded nearly every dramatic encounter — not an avoidance of story, but the thing at the center of every story that had to be negotiated. Sure, a story about a person sitting alone in a room thinking was unlikely to be particularly engaging, but what about the story of a person in danger who feels too immobilized by fear to do anything?
Why was passivity such an unworthy subject for literature when, in my own life and in the lives of my friends, it so often undergirded nearly every dramatic encounter ?
Take, for instance, this story from my life in Tempe, Arizona, circa 2005. Late spring. A Sunday. I am walking through my neighborhood when a car slows beside me and the men inside begin catcalling me. I ignore them and keep walking. They follow me. At the next red light, I cross the street so that I am going in a different direction. They keep following me but now their flirting has been replaced by anger. I have ignored them. They call me names and continue to follow me. I eventually make my way to a gas station where I approach a parked taxi and ask the driver to get out of his car. The men idle beside me until the taxi driver, a heavy sweaty man who appears to be in a bad mood reluctantly steps out of his car and then they leave. The men are active characters and, therefore, by the workshop rules I have learned, interesting, but what about me? When I chose not to speak to them was this passive or active? How about when I asked a male stranger to intercede? As a general rule, passivity is boring because it avoids conflict, and yet, in this particular instance, true passivity — i.e. getting in the car with these male strangers, going wherever it was that they wanted to go, doing whatever they wanted to do — is the precise thing that would have introduced more tension into the story.
In a New York Times editorial published this past spring, Viet Than Nguyen argued that the “rules of fiction” that writing workshops teach are rules that favor the stories of white men. “As an institution,” he wrote, “the workshop reproduces its ideology, which pretends that ‘Show, don’t tell’ is universal when it is, in fact, the expression of a particular population, the white majority, typically at least middle-class and often, but not exclusively, male.” The edict against passive protagonists, I would argue, is also a rule that discriminates. To see action as the beginning of tension and to see passivity as the end of the story is a privilege. This view imagines the protagonist always as the actor, never the one being acted upon, and this, as the #metoo movement has shown, is still simply often not the reality for many women — especially young women seeking sex and intimacy with men.
The edict against passive protagonists is also a rule that discriminates. To see action as the beginning of tension and to see passivity as the end of the story is a privilege.
This dynamic is most noticeable in the wide collection of movies, books, television shows, and short stories about young women whose plots hinge upon the possibility of violence. In Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where are you going? Where have you been?” for instance, the real threat is introduced not because Connie is active but because she is paralyzed by fear and transformed from a self-confident, if somewhat narcissistic, teenager into someone no longer capable of protecting herself. But female passivity is also the engine of the drama in many stories by and about women that do not involve male violence. There are, for example, the stories of Alice Munro such as “Post and Beam” that are engaging because of a rich inner life and process of discovery that ultimately goes unspoken, and there are the countless female villains throughout life and literature whose crimes are ones not of action but of maternal neglect. The stories of female protagonists operate differently than male protagonists because the rules by which we live our lives are different.
Are things changing? The celebration of books like Emma Cline’s The Girls or Britt Bennett’s The Mothers and this year’s all-female 5-under-35 National Book Award list make me feel optimistic that they are, that people are not only more willing to read books by and about woman but are increasingly aware that a person’s story and the way she can tell that story largely depends upon her place in society. Even so, it’s hard for me to quiet that voice that tells me that while stories about the love lives of men have always been at the center of “serious literature,” the stories about the love lives of women are something else.
The feeling was embarrassment — not so much at being a woman but in writing and reading in a way that made my womanliness conspicuous to other people.
Recently, I visited a class of college students who had just read my story collection and a young woman tentatively raised her hand. The book had resonated with her and her female friends, she said, but she wondered if I had written a book only for young women and if this bothered me. “I mean, just look at the cover,” she said and pointed to the photograph of a young woman and the curling script’s pink letters. “I probably wouldn’t give this to one of my guy friends.”
I stumbled through an answer to the student. I think I said something about valuing female readers, particularly those readers who saw themselves in the stories, and then something about how it is a problem when men only read books by and about men and white people only read books by and about white people. I don’t remember exactly what I said — just that I wasn’t brave enough to admit that, yes, it bothered me if young men didn’t want to read my book about young women with pink letters on its cover, that I hoped she was wrong, that I hoped she was underestimating her guy friends, and that surely, some of the guys she knew who dated and slept with and befriended young women also believed that their inner lives were complicated and worth imagining.
I thought about this moment again and again. The student had seemed certain that, simply based on its subject matter, young men wouldn’t be interested in the book, and this made her feel sorry for me, as if something that was appreciated only by other young women like her couldn’t possibly be important. This sentiment was deeply familiar. It was the same feeling that had once driven me value the praise of male writers over female writers or to pretend to appreciate famous books by famous male writers more than I did. It was the feeling that still sometimes made me secretly long to write a wordy novel about war or to question my own experiences when they were unrecognizable or uninteresting to men. The feeling was embarrassment — not so much at being a woman but in writing and reading in a way that made my womanliness conspicuous to other people. Tackling sexism in the writing and publishing world is a big job with multiple and varied solutions, but one piece of the puzzle is as simple as confronting this impulse to embrace books we perceive as masculine and to distance ourselves from those we perceive as feminine.
this jealousy of yours is a problem you need to love yourself more you need to have more self-confidence I’m super attracted to confident women I have a lot of women friends she wrote to me really upset and I helped her out don’t you want me to be the kind of man who helps women out okay so I’m the bad guy here and you’re perfect right I love you but you’re not being reasonable you’re being a little crazy are you on your period what did your friends say about me do you believe your friends over me I’m being 100% honest with you here you went online to find bad things about me I just like to join websites under assumed names and follow women around I’m kind and interested in their lives does that make me a predator now I admit I used to ask women for pictures oh that email with my photo that I accidentally forwarded to you was an old email address I don’t know what happened technology am I right well it was just the kind of dumb thing drunk people do wait now you’re bringing up that woman again the one who claimed she and I were involved she’s crazy it was one long email exchange late at night talking about boring stuff life kids dogs we talked for three hours and she sent me pictures but I certainly didn’t ask for them and suddenly she thinks we’re involved jesus christ she’s crazy she took it wrong you shouldn’t believe her that’s always happening to me I guess I need to be more careful I wish you weren’t so insecure I wish you could be more forgiving I’ve forgiven you many times for your jealousy which is still a problem
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Tralfalmadorians do it in four dimensions. The aliens of the Kurt Vonnegut universe, most notably appearing in Slaughterhouse-Five, find it quaint that humans can only see what’s happening to them right now. Tralfalmadorians, instead, “can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti.” Humans are doomed to merely imagine the future, and to remember the past with increasing dimness and imprecision. For Tralfalmadorians, everything and everyone is doing everything they always will all at once.
But knowledge is useless without the ability to act. When Billy Pilgrim asks why they don’t prevent the end of the world, caused by a test pilot pressing a button, they say they simply cannot. “He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.”
On Earth, I am always quoting an article about health care in America.
I am always calling someone “retarded” as a term of endearment.
I am always telling people that I am safe and nowhere near Mumbai.
I am always defending the concept of “Steak and Blowjob” day.
I am always hugging a friend I see every day and never see anymore, bragging about stealing rum from a frat house, performatively announcing that I will be using Twitter to amplify other voices, telling someone I’ve cut out of my life that I love them.
Social media has not gotten us to the point where we can experience something like the future. But our pasts are always happening in real time, turning us into half-Tralfalmadorians. Anyone scrolling through my Facebook feed, which has existed since 2004, or who Googles enough to unearth my awful old blog, can see everything I’ve posted — every misguided opinion, every drunk photo and inside joke — with the clarity and presence of the moment I posted it. I am 17 and 24 and 31, forever.
Social media has not gotten us to the point where we can experience something like the future. But our pasts are always happening in real time.
For Tralfalmadorians, the solution was to approach this information with a shrug: “So it goes.” If everyone is always doing everything they always have, then there is no point in frustration. No one can change, because there is no such thing as change. And if everyone’s pasts are always there to see, then it’s not like anyone can lie. For humans it’s not so simple. We are expected to grow and change, but we also remain bound to our online pasts. (We can edit our public records, sometimes — I can’t delete my old blog no matter how many times I email Blogger — but other people can keep receipts.) Growth is hard when anyone we meet can see all the horrible things we’ve ever said. It’s especially hard when those horrible things might ambush us at any moment, attached to the message “We care about the memories you share.”
Our perceptions of each other are already warped by memory. Our parents cannot stop seeing us as children who need their help, even if we’ve grown. My ex-boyfriend will never stop being the guy who called me a slut for having had sex once before I met him, even if (I hope) he treats his wife better than that. I’m sure a friend has a postcard I sent her somewhere where I make jokes I’d never make now.
Still, it was easier to move from one moment to the next when time appeared linear, and the past could become past. The sting of most actions fade with time, especially when coupled with different, newer ones. But the internet amplifies our memories, and makes them something more than memories — something closer to the Tralfamadorian experience of all the past existing all the time. Instead of a distant recollection, we have proof — our radiant young faces smiling back at us, reminding us exactly where we are, where we were, what we did. Anyone can visit any version of ourselves whenever they want, a permanent slideshow of how we haven’t always been the person we’ve tried to become.
Editing only makes it worse. Prospective employers get creeped out if there’s nothing about you online, and for a prospective date, this might make you seem like a serial killer. What’s more, learning about someone’s online past can be a form of affection. “Failure to look someone up online seemed almost rude, a sign of disinterest,” wrote Maureen O’Connor for The Cut, after a date said he wasn’t going to Google her until he got to know her in person. If there are things about each other for us to know, why wouldn’t we want to know them?
It would be easier to reckon with our pasts if everyone else did too. But all our posts and pictures don’t come with addendums, letting anyone looking know what our current selves regret. While Tralfalmadorians see the actions and movements between each version of ourselves, we get only a scatter graph. I am not the spaghetti of choices I’ve made between 2009 and 2018. I am only both then and now, no matter how conflicting they are. It doesn’t matter if I would never again say what I said. I said it. I’m always saying it.
It doesn’t matter if I would never again say what I said. I said it. I’m always saying it.
The problem is we’re too Tralfalmadorian and not Tralfalmadorian enough. We do not have a grasp of the future enough to throw up our green hand with an eye in its palm and say “So it goes,” nor can we be blissfully unaware of anything happening outside our own present. And even when looking into the past, we see our shifts and changes in ungraceful chunks instead of the luminous spaghetti of the stars.
When Billy Pilgrim asks how Tralfalmadorians handle seeing every bad thing anyone has ever done, every war, every selfish decision, all the time, they say they just try to focus on the good things: cherry pick what they want to see and ignore what they don’t, since it’s all happening anyway. It feels irresponsible to do that as a human — akin to the “but he’s always been nice to me” method of excusing an abuser. We’re not fantastical aliens out of books. We need to find a way to reckon with everything about who we are.
But if we’re going to learn something about memory and time and history from these fantastical aliens out of books, maybe we can learn it from the way Tralfamadorians read. “There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages” in a book, one of them tells Billy, “except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” When Tralfamadorians read, they don’t see the plot or even the characters. What they see is the curation, the human touch. It’s the very humanity of this craft, the way a story reflects its author and her choices, that makes a book beautiful.
If Tralfalmadorians can ignore the long noodle of time to focus on a collection of marvelous moments, then maybe we can do the opposite. We can remember that between one post a decade ago and now, there were endless versions of ourselves and others, changing and choosing. And that we will continue to do so in ways we can’t see until we look back. We can look at the Facebook scatter graph and calculate our full trajectory, so that those different points become one experience. I am always who I’ve always been, different and the same every second. Luminous spaghetti streaking across your timeline.
You may already know Morgan Jerkins’ name, especially now that her debut, This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersections of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America, has made the New York Times bestseller list in its first week. Morgan writes about issues affecting her personally, but also issues that affect Black woman as a demographic, and it’s encouraging to see her tenacity lauded when our voices have been, and still are, traditionally beckoned to be quiet. Morgan isn’t one to be quiet or deterred. From interviewing literary icons such as Claudia Rankine and starmakers like Issa Rae to researching lost legends of the Harlem Renaissance to exploring her own bouts with privilege and her experiences as a Black woman, Morgan’s portfolio has grown to show her versatility as well as her interests. These are often are tied to explorations of identity, history, and breaking down assumptions, while also showing vulnerability when reflecting on herself. I was happy to speak with Morgan prior to the publication of This Will Be My Undoing. The rest of this interview can be heard on the Minorities in Publishing podcast, where transcription of the full episode is also available.
Jennifer Baker: You’ve talked a lot about the barriers of entry into publishing — also touched upon in your book — especially being someone who went to an Ivy League.
Morgan Jerkins: I started commuting to New York multiple times throughout my senior year to interview for positions, entry-level positions. Mind you, when I would go on websites, it would say, “Ideally someone with a literature background, a four year college degree, list your favorite books.” Very standard. I thought to myself, I must have it in the bag, because I have an Ivy League college degree, I’ve had three unpaid literary internships — a couple of them. I spoke five foreign languages in addition to English, and I had a comparative literature background. I went to these meetings expecting something, and I got nothing. I went to New York for these day-long trips for 15-minute interviews and I wouldn’t even get a call back. It devastated me emotionally. I remember even getting rejected from a job on the day of my baccalaureate because the editor told me that my literary interests didn’t match hers, and this was after I was supposed to critique a manuscript, and they gave it me a day late.
JB: I’ve been there. I remember those.
MJ: I was working on it in the midst of graduation practices, and I still got rejected, and so I went back home to my mother’s house in New Jersey. And on top of that, I thought I was falling in love with this guy. I talk about it in my book. That went to crap as well, in a horrendous way. The only thing that was keeping me sane in a sense, that made me realize that I still had some talent, was that I was accepted into an MFA program at Bennington, and that’s what helped me.
I saw so much content being exchanged, and I thought, “Oh, people can write online, or people can get paid online. I think I want to do this!” Now mind you, about a couple of weeks before I graduated, I did write a piece for Ebony about privilege at Princeton and all that. It was a response to a white student there that talked about privilege and whatnot. So, I thought, maybe I should just do this more. I should flex this muscle. So I just jumped into the deep end, so to speak. I didn’t have any mentors at the time who said, “Here are your contacts and here’s how to write a pitch.” I learned through rejection.
I had a mantra in my head. I said, I may not be the best writer out there, but I’m going to work harder than the best writer. I’m going to be the writer who editors know can produce a 1000-word essay in under 45 minutes. I’m going to be the one who’s reliable, who can turn in quick copy, and be that person that they can rely on. That’s what I did. I wanted my name to be any and everywhere. So that’s what happened. In the beginning it was like, okay, if I can publish one piece a month, I’ll be great. Then it started becoming two pieces a month, or maybe two pieces one month, one piece the next one, then three pieces the month after that. Then editors started to contact me.
I had a mantra in my head. I said, I may not be the best writer out there, but I’m going to work harder than the best writer.
JB: And then there’s the whole “you’re overqualified,” right? So the assumption for some jobs is, well, you have so much experience, you’ll get bored, so therefore you won’t want this job. They’re making this decision for you, rather than accepting that you’re there for a reason.
MJ: At that time I never thought I was overqualified. I thought I had to be the best. I had to be over and above because I was Black. I never shook hands with another editorial assistant who was not a white woman. So I knew that I had to have an Ivy League degree. I had to be multilingual, because what Black people, I think, will consider “over,” I thought that was just the minimum for the white publishing world. My sense of measurement was completely skewed. Or completely right on the ball, depending on who you ask.
JB: That’s true. Because it’s not shocking, but it’s mind-boggling in the sense that even when you excel, you cannot get that job.
MJ: I think it’s a lesson that every person of color and Black woman learns sooner or later in her life. That you could be above and beyond, and you could know you could do the job well, but sometimes you’re just not what they’re looking for, for certain reasons that are not necessarily tied to your experience. It might be tied to your race or aesthetic or whatever have you. And so, that was just a lesson I learned early on. Granted — I guess I can say this now with an optimistic viewpoint because I am where I am — I know that in retrospect those jobs weren’t for me. Maybe I would not have flourished.
JB: Getting to your book. I feel like it’s a very specific rendition of a Black woman’s life, and an analysis of that life, especially being very, very aware of being in a Black body, and being in a Black woman’s body. It’s necessary to recognize that you don’t necessarily want to pull these things apart when you’re talking about labiaplasty, when you’re talking about relationships, and sex, and going to Russia, going overseas, being in an Ivy League, what Michelle Obama means to us as a representative, as a human being, wanting to be white and reconciling with that too.
MJ: I wanted to make it specifically clear in the book — I cannot speak for every Black woman’s experience, so I had to make that clear. I’m speaking from one experience. It’s one. I hope that it will illuminate certain things, but it cannot illuminate all things. I don’t know everybody’s experience. Yeah. I think it was just a matter of, what are the key moments of my life when I knew I was a Black girl, or Black woman? Just talk about it and try to not make it so much in a bubble, because we don’t live in a bubble, and to try to tie it back to something bigger.
I wanted to make it specifically clear in the book — I cannot speak for every Black woman’s experience, so I had to make that clear.
JB: There’s also an intuitiveness to these essays, I think. You made yourself the focus, but people can make themselves the focus of the wrong things.
MJ: Absolutely. So, I think it’s just…when I was writing about dating… I never really really worried “what if” because I didn’t want to guess myself. When I was writing these experiences, it was so vivid in my mind. Almost like I was reliving it all over again. That’s how I realized how much it affected me.
JB: And how is that to write, when you’re reliving it?
MJ: It was hard. I remember when I finished the last draft, final draft, I cried. Not because I regretting anything, but I remember when I was talking to my friend about it, she told me, she said, “It’s because you’re mourning your former selves. You’re mourning your former selves.” When she said that, I said to myself, “You’re right.” I’m mourning those women, those multiple girls and women that I used to be.
JB: I was talking to Vashti Harrison about her book Little Leaders. And how it’s a book about women, Bold Women in Black History, that’s the subtitle. People are like, “This is a great book for girls! This is a great book for girls!” Because it is, it’s for the girls, to encourage the girls, but also, these are good books for men. It is good for men to read feminist work.
MJ: Absolutely.
JB: Maybe it’s not for them, in the vein of “Lemonade” is not for white people…
MJ: Because something is not for you doesn’t mean that you can’t watch it. I feel like people of color have watched things that were not intended for them since the beginning of time. So that’s why when I think about…this book is written by a Black woman, it’s for Black women, I don’t know if it’s for me. No, you still need to read it. Because, guaranteed that people of your same identity have done something to affect the way that we as Black women perceive ourselves in the world. So, yes, you do need to read it, just like I read Joan Didion. There’s so many others.
JB: I do encourage men to read this because maybe it’ll gain some empathy. Maybe it’ll just piss you off because you’re all in your feelings. I don’t know.
MJ: Whenever you’re in your feelings about something that is not directed to you specifically, that is a great place to investigate why. That is a place to investigate. Because why? Because I’m talking about misogyny? Or misogynoir? Or sexism? That you’re not on the short end of? Why does that bother you? I was going to say that a hit dog will holler, but no, I won’t go there, because I don’t know y’all like that. I don’t know y’all, but I will just say that if you feel hurt by a man by reading what I say, that’s a good way to investigate that, that’s a good way to discuss that, rather than, “Oh, she’s bitter.” Something dismissive. Because I’m not dismissing you all.
Whenever you’re in your feelings about something that is not directed to you specifically, that is a great place to investigate why.
JB: I wanted to ask, do you think bitter is also on par with the word “sensitive”? When people say, “You’re being too sensitive.”
MJ: No. I don’t. I think “bitter,” from my experience — let me make sure I just say that — “bitter” is so tied to bitter Black women, strong Black women, bitter Black women. When it’s, “You’re so sensitive,” I feel like, for me, the way I interpret it, and I could be wrong, it’s rather tied to women, period. Not Black women. But being bitter is so loaded towards Black women. It is loaded. It’s just like, strong. It’s so loaded when you’re talking about Black women. “Sensitive,” it’s more for…it feels like it just collapses under women in general. But that’s just the way I interpret it.
JB: I hear you. Because I look at those words and how much we experience them, and sometimes it feels as though anger is always valid, and then I wonder, well, we have a right to be upset or angry, and maybe that is bitter, or maybe it’s not bitter. Maybe that’s just anger and frustration.
MJ: And why not?
JB: It’s synonymous, and that’s totally valid. That’s a totally valid feeling, and I wonder why that word is the one that is always used, just like the word “sensitive,” because they’re both used to brush us off in a way.
MJ: Because I think it’s a discursive tactic in order to alleviate the responsibilities of other people, because if you start asking, “Why is this woman feeling this way? Where did she learn that? Who did this?” Then it takes less of the burden off her and puts more of the responsibly on other people to do better. But we don’t ask other people to do better. It’s always the Black woman’s burden to look after herself and other Black women. But who looks out for us if we don’t look out for us?
From office drones occupying bland white cubicles of repressed misery in Corporate America to unwanted but necessary guest workers toiling in the hot sands of Abu Dhabi, these 12 contemporary books skewer corporate culture and reveal the inevitable result of a capitalistic society that views workers as anonymous, replaceable cogs in a never-ending pursuit of profit.
This Could Hurt opens with a series of employee terminations (if the cover or title isn’t telling enough) in the wake of the economic recession. HR executive Rosa Guerrero is tasked with the paradoxical job of guiding her employees while firing more and more people to maintain profitability. Her department has shrank from twenty-two to sixteen to thirteen and now, eleven with “despair (setting) in.” Each chapter features the viewpoint of different characters, retelling the same meetings and conversations from their perspective. The motley crew of middle managers are self-absorbed, manipulative, and dysfunctional but their all-too-human flaws are redeemed by their fierce loyalty to Rosa and the lengths they go to to protect her when she experiences a stroke that leads to her memory and behavior deteriorating.
‘Temporary People is a work of fiction set in the UAE, where I was raised and where foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. It is a nation built by people who are eventually required to leave,” prefaces the author. In these 28 interlinked stories and poems, Unnikrishnan combines Malayalam, Arabic, and English to encapsulate the dissonance of these displaced guest workers straddled between two countries and breaking their backs for a country that they can never call home. The displacement and dehumanization of these perpetual foreigners manifests as metamorphoses: a migrant moonlights as a mid-sized hotel, a runaway shape-shifts into a suitcase and a sultan grow “ideal” workers with a twelve-year shelf life from pods. One chapters contains only a list of occupations “Tailor. Hooker. Horse Looker. Maid.” and ends with “Cog. Cog? Cog.” With anti-migrant sentiment at an all time high, Temporary People is a timely and necessary exploration of how “temporary status affects psyches, families, memories, fables, and language(s).”
Young married couple Josephine and Joseph are fresh arrivals to the city bouncing from one grimy sublet to the next, hoping to finding work and better their lives. Josephine’s life take a turn for the bizarre after she is hired by a faceless, androgynous person. She spends her work days in a tiny windowless office enclosed by revoltingly pink walls, entering a never-ending series of incomprehensible numbers into “The Database.” Her only encounters in the company are with her nameless boss, “The Person with Bad Breath,” and a Barbie doll-like bureaucrat named Trishiffany (“My parents couldn’t pick between Trisha and Tiffany”). The files starts piling up, but no one will explain to Josephine what the company does or what the numbers mean. Josephine’s misgivings turn into dread when her husband disappears more and more frequently with no explanation of his whereabouts and “delivery failed” notices affixed with her name start appearing on her apartment door even though no one has her new address. Author Elliot Holt wrote: “The Beautiful Bureaucrat demands that you keep turning its pages to find out what happens.”
Iris Finch is an unassuming receptionist working at a nondescript company. She isn’t sure what the company does or why her colleagues suddenly disappear, leaving abandoned offices filled with junk in their wake. Her boss, already a rare presence, starts vanishing for long stretches of time only to turn up at the office briefly to hide envelopes under floorboards. The company phone eventually stops ringing, leaving her with nothing to do but she finds comfort in the routine of work. Her life has some illusion of purpose “as long as she had a place to go every morning.” In the suite next door, a mysterious man starts living in the office space and showering in the men’s bathroom. With little going on in her personal life, Iris arrives for work earlier and earlier each day to spy on the strange tenant using a hole she has drilled into the adjacent wall. She writes to him with a plaintive vulnerability: “Please don’t go yet. My name is Iris. I want to talk to you.” Radio Iris is a story of a lonely young woman, emotionally numb in a meaningless job, yearning for connection.
Cate Dicharry writes that Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday is a “ruthless, hilarious critique of corporate decision-making, and nonsensical professional language and culture — all punctuated with desktop defecation, a defunct band named the “Butt Gerbils,” and trenchant, playful humor.” The short story collection features a con-artist who ruins his own company (simply because he can), an abandoned car found in the employee parking lot with a detached ponytail on the hood and a company-wide newsletter affirming the sci-fi like mass disappearance of staffers. Graber artfully mines the mundanity of corporate culture into bizarre and hilarious tales of the 9 to 5 purgatory we call work.
“SECRETS ARE LIES. CARING IS SHARING. PRIVACY IS THEFT.” These are the mantras of The Circle, the world’s most powerful internet conglomerate that aggregates the digital footprints (social media, banking, emails etc) of its users into a unified online identity. The novel follows Mae, an idealistic and enthusiastic new employee as she rises in the cult-like company and goes “transparent,” broadcasting her life live to her “watchers” 24/7 with tragic consequences. “A fascinating Orwellian riff on Silicon Valley,” as Manuel Betancourt wrote in his review, The Circle imagines a sinister world where social media has killed privacy and users are coerced into constant surveillance for the sake of “transparency.”
Eileen is a bitter, self-loathing young woman working as a secretary for minimum wage at a grim correctional facility for delinquent boys in a cold, bleak New England town. She spends her nights supplying booze to her alcoholic, dementia-ridden father while her work days consist of filing away reports of horrific crimes committed by the adolescent convicts, secretly nursing sympathy for them. Her grim existence is made bearable with lustful fantasies of Randy, the prison guard, and daydreams of escaping to a new life in New York City. When the Rebecca Saint John, the new counselor, shows up at the juvenile center, Eileen falls into a friendship that takes a dark, lurid turn and changes her life forever.
Joe is a failed door-to-door salesman of encyclopedias and vacuum cleaners. who spends his days fantasizing about disembodied sex. One day, he has a Eureka moment: “Women were being molested in the workplace solely because their colleagues did not have a legitimate outlet for urges they could not control.” Joe commodifies his perverse fantasies into a successful corporate service: “lightning rods” — female office workers whose lower halves provide anonymous bathroom sex — that alleviate male desires, eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace and cut the expense of lawsuits. After all, a happy office is a productive office and productivity means more money (real words I once heard at a presentation hawking employee monitoring toolkits). Dewitt satires the robotic corporate culture that treats their employees as replaceable, anonymous drones in the obsessive pursuit for efficiency.
David Foster Wallace’s fictionalized memoir literalizes the deadly monotony of pushing paper and crunching numbers from 9–5 in an I.R.S office in the Midwest. A whole chapter is devoted to accountants silently flipping page after page of tax returns. Filled with esoteric financial jargon and tax codes, the most excitement to be found is the clash between the older generation of I.R.S employees, motivated by sanctimonious civic duty versus their more modern colleagues who see their bottom line as maximizing profits. The workers slog away at their mindless and unfulfilling work to “cover the monthly nut,” “thrashing in the nets” of societal expectations while the ever-present threat of being replaced by computers becomes increasingly real. Published posthumously, this metafictional novel questions the meaning of life in a corporate America populated by countless identical workers rigidly adhering to pointless bureaucracy.
“Most of us spend our days at a desk in one of the two archipelagoes of cubicle clusters. The desks have not been at capacity for over a year now,” begins Park’s novel about a company in the process of downsizing. With little to do, the unnamed narrator and his colleagues spend their days theorizing over who will be the next victim of “the Firings”—after the termination of employees with J names, the Ls in the office agonize over their impending doom. Broken up into three Microsoft Word-themed chapters titled “Can’t Undo,” “Replace All” and “Revert to Saved,” Personal Days features characters immediately recognizable by anyone who has spent time in a cubicle: Pru, a fresh-out-of-grad-school spreadsheet drone, Laars, a wall-punching neurotic teetering on the verge on a breakdown and Jack II, administrator of unwelcomed backrubs known in the office as jackrubs. Rife with office lingo and corporate speak, Personal Days serves as a darkly comic guidebook for navigating the cloud of uncertainty that accompanies the looming demise of a company.
“The fact that we spend most of our lives at work, that interests me,” says Hank Neary, a copywriter in a white-collar ad agency. Ferris’s satire of the American workplace takes place at the end of the 1990s dotcom boom when work is scarce, redundancies are imminent, and tensions are rising. In the middle of this downturn, the struggling agency accepts a mysterious client’s request to create an ad that will “make cancer patients laugh”—an assignment made doubly cruel as rumors spread that Lynn Mason, the supervisor, has breast cancer. This darkly comic portrayal of office culture is populated by eccentric characters (there’s a single, pregnant, and devoutly Catholic woman and a stubborn copywriter who keeps showing up for work despite being fired) and chronicles their increasingly desperate attempts to survive the axe.
Jen is a thirty-something former painter struggling with unemployment during the economic downturn. She finds a job at the Leora Infinitis Foundation, a charitable foundation/vanity project founded by a Gwyneth Paltrow-esque celebrity philanthropist who purrs meaningless platitudes (“You are beautiful inside and out. That is the message of LIFt”) and answers her own self-affirming contradictions ( “How do I put my children first and put the children of the developing world first, too. My answer is yes.”). The foundation purports to empower women yet its employees passive-aggressively sabotage one another, waste time devising acronyms for unrealized programs, and ingratiate themselves to their egoistical boss. Trapped in a meaningless job writing memos no one ever reads and struggling to conceive a “hypothetical tiny future boarder,” Jen is crippled by self doubt and constantly compares herself to her two closest friends — Meg, an affluent attorney with a beautiful family, and Pam, a committed artist. When her personal life and professional career converge violently at an art exhibition, Jen is left reckoning with some hard truths that eventually gives her life meaning.
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