8 Books on the Evils of Unchecked State Power

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

You don’t write books for a single reason, or out of any one feeling. I wrote a novel because I wanted to record images and experiences of a brown man’s American life. I wanted to reflect, in my own version of the language, on love, fatherhood, sex, music, money, fate. But I also wanted to write about how ambition could lead a twenty-first century quiet American to do great evil. This last impulse came out of my anger at a specific period of American lawlessness: the imperial wars and covert operations that George W. Bush launched in the wake of Al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States, and that Barack Obama, to the sorrow of many of his onetime admirers, continued or, in some aspects, expanded.

The book I wrote, The Snares, has a spy as its protagonist. Though he’s a D.C. bureaucrat, rather than a clandestine officer, he nonetheless wields life-and-death power. He passes his days and nights reading reports at his desk and searching insanely detailed databases in service of his function: to select suspected terrorists for extrajudicial assassination.

My choice of protagonist raised an immediate problem. I’ve never worked in the intelligence services, held a security clearance, or tried to convince a president to conduct a drone strike. So how could I imagine myself into the mind of an executioner (even one who kills at a distance, in an off-the-rack suit, with government pay and a retirement plan)? And what of his victims, along with their families and neighbors (the “collateral damage” that surrounds them), who have no opportunity to challenge a bureaucrat’s decision to place them on a kill list? They, like the real-life casualties of American campaigns in South and Central Asia and across the greater Middle East, are subject to arbitrary and absolute power—missile strikes, arrest, torture, and detention without end.

I looked within, of course, but I also turned to other writers. Below are eight books, some of which I read before or while I wrote my novel, and some after, that address the depredations of the state. While their subject matter can be grim, these books—to me at least—offer consolation. They show that the bad times aren’t ours alone. Bullies, in uniform and out, have always been with us, as have the sycophants who argue that torture has its uses, that governments can conduct wars without also committing crimes, and that brutality preserves public order. The writer who bears witness to these evils demands a reader who will reject them. On the other side lies solidarity, art, laughter, freedom—the splendors, in short, of ordinary human life. At the onset of what looks to be a new and distinct age of official thuggery, these books might help us remember that the opposite of force isn’t weakness, but beauty.

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 U.S.-backed coup d’état cost Bolaño his Chilean homeland, and almost his life. Bolaño’s vast corpus of novels, stories, essays, and poems is, among many other things, a response to that catastrophe—and never more directly than in the novellas Distant Star and By Night in Chile. The latter is the deathbed confession of a reactionary priest and conservative literary critic with close ties to the dictatorship. The priest gives private lectures on political theory to Pinochet and his generals. He attends a literary salon at the mansion of an elegant Chilean writer. Meanwhile, in the mansion’s basement, the writer’s American husband tortures left-wing dissidents. The priest enjoys poetry, wine, and good food. But when he looks back at the end of his life he sees only a nightmare. Complicity has poisoned his soul.  

A final note: though Bolaño writes, as he often reminds us, from the edge of the abyss, he’s never ponderous or self-serious. Even at its bleakest moments, this is a very funny book.

Sand by Wolfgang Herrndorf

Herrndorf’s novel captures the murderousness of Cold War-era decolonization. It’s set in 1972 in an unnamed North African country, where four Westerners (post-hippies, back-to-the-landers) have been killed in their agrarian commune. The local police are hapless and corrupt. Meanwhile, foreign intelligence officers (from the CIA, KGB, Stasi, and Mossad, along with various Arab factions) swarm the land, kidnapping and torturing at will. They leave a trail of corpses; the police hold no one to account. Bigger things than commonplace life or death—like nuclear secrets, state security, and international spheres of influence—are at stake. The protagonist, when he arrives several chapters in, is an amnesiac whose blankness resists his most gleefully sadistic interrogators. Sand is a big novel, with a brutal and maddeningly complex plot, but it’s never forbidding. Herrndorf, like Bolaño, loves to make us laugh.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

A free retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone, Home Fire is the rare mainstream literary novel to treat the Muslim victims of the West’s “War on Terror” as fully human. Parvaiz Pasha, a young British man of Pakistani descent, leaves for Syria. He hopes to meet the militants who fought alongside his father, a jihadi who died after American interrogators tortured him at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan. Parvaiz never finds his father’s compatriots. Instead, ISIS operatives coerce Parvaiz into working for that organization’s propaganda arm. When he tries to flee, they kill him. The novel’s central drama turns on the attempt by Parvaiz’s twin sister, Aneeka, to return his body to England for burial. But the Home Secretary, Karramat Lone, another British man of Pakistani origin, publicly revoked Parvaiz’s citizenship when he joined ISIS. Out of political expediency and his own monstrous ambition, Lone refuses Aneeka’s request. Lone’s pitilessness will have devastating consequences, for his own family and for the Pashas. I read the final fifty pages of this novel with an exquisite sense of dread. Shamsie’s narrative design is impeccable.

Sound Museum by poupeh missaghi

A woman rises through the ranks of an important government bureaucracy. She lives in a theocratic state that resists powerful adversaries near and far. Though she is conservative in temperament, she fashions for herself a feminist narrative of success in a system designed to thwart ambitious women—she sounds, at times, like Hilary Clinton or Sheryl Sandberg. But here the country is the Islamic State of Iran, and the protagonist has found her calling in its internal security apparatus.

The novella takes the form of a speech the protagonist delivers at the apex of her career: the opening of a monument to state torture, a museum that exhibits sound recordings of anguished prisoners in their isolation cells and the interrogation chair. missaghi calls her book a “theory fiction,” perhaps on account of the breadth of writing on torture and complicity (by Darius Rejali, Hannah Arendt, and many others) with which her narrator engages. But the novella is also a dramatic monologue, steeped in irony, in the tradition of Browning’s “My Last Duchess” or Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” The narrator is both subject and vessel of the ideology of a totalitarian state. For all the pride she takes in her grotesque achievement, she is forever blind to its human implications. I hope missaghi writes a song of the drone pilot next.

The Little Book of Terror by Daisy Rockwell

Rockwell’s brief and beautiful exploration of the limits of empathy juxtaposes her paintings of subjects from the first decade of the War on Terror with essays and personal reminiscences. Rockwell is a renowned translator from the Hindi (including of Gitanjali Shree’s International Booker Prize-winning novel Tomb of Sand), as well as an accomplished visual artist. Though she is Norman Rockwell’s granddaughter, she seems to paint, as Amitava Kumar notes in his introduction, more in the tradition of lurid, decades-old Bollywood film posters. Here she depicts a stylized, pink-skinned Osama bin Laden in his death mask, blood or flame obscuring his face; Saddam Hussein after his capture, enfeebled and wrapped in a shroud; and many lesser villains (and innocent victims) of that era. But she also paints the Abu Ghraib torturers Charles Granier and Lynndie England in a smiling, tender moment, as well as her own friends and colleagues, and images of the little green men her father became obsessed with in his old age. Throughout she challenges us to recognize the humanity of the other—including the most alien or despised among those Dick Cheney called “the worst of the worst.” She offers an alternative to the totalizing narrative of the state at war, and warns us to resist its colonization of the self. “Why do they hate us, indeed,” she writes. “And who are they? And who are we?”

Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo by Murat Kurnaz, translated by Jefferson Chase

In the winter of 2001, at the age of nineteen, Kurnaz traveled to Peshawar, Pakistan, to study the Koran and prepare himself for marriage. Local police arrested him on the day he was to return home to Germany, though he’d done nothing wrong, and sold him to American operatives for a bounty. Five Years of My Life is Kurnaz’s memoir of his imprisonment in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. His American captors subjected him to beatings, electrocution, and waterboarding. For hours on end, they hung him by his handcuffs from a hook in the ceiling. Within a few months, the U.S. government had determined that Kurnaz was innocent. Yet guards and interrogators continued to abuse him for years. Eventually, the government repatriated Kurnaz to Germany, never having charged him with a crime. Kurnaz’s memoir is a testament to this nation’s moral collapse under conditions of mass hysteria. It records a young man’s dignified resistance to a machine designed to break his body and mind.

Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes by Trevor Paglen

What is the secret state? Where are the spies, drone bases, satellites, weapons labs, and surveillance sites? Paglen ventures into the blank spaces on the map, trawls archives and databases, and searches the night sky for traces of that enormous apparatus from which the hundreds of millions of Americans without a security clearance are forever barred. He hikes through public land in Nevada to the boundary of an air force base that occupies—as Rebecca Solnit notes in her introductory essay—an area the size of Belgium. He repurposes astrophotography equipment to capture images of mysterious aircraft, hangers, towers, and chemical and biological weapons “proving grounds” at enormous distances—on occasion, from more than forty miles away. He records the passage of spy satellites in high-earth orbit, photographs government officers and contractors boarding planes linked to the CIA’s “rendition” (i.e., kidnapping and disappearance) of suspected terrorists, and discovers the location of a black site—a secret prison—in Afghanistan. He reproduces the blurred images of CIA officers wanted for crimes in foreign countries.

Many of Paglen’s photographs, particularly of government installations in remote regions of Utah and Nevada, are stunningly composed, even sublime. You feel, as you turn the pages, that Paglen has glimpsed an alien civilization—until you remember that he’s instead had the courage to show us hidden aspects of our own. This is art as witness, and resistance to unimaginable power.

Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, translated by Anne Carson

The books I’ve listed above all appeared in recent years. But writers have grappled with the problem of power from the beginning. For as long as there have been states, there have been outsiders to whom the state declines to offer justice, protection, or basic dignity. While dictators and technocrats darken our own era, the ancients feared gods and kings. But the human dilemma hasn’t changed. Grief Lessons is a collection of four of Euripides’ minor tragedies, in haunting translations by Anne Carson. A goddess tricks a hero into slaughtering his own family; a king condemns his wife to death to propitiate a god; a queen descends to savagery to fulfill a vendetta; a father banishes his son out of sexual jealousy. The plays are brief, each fewer than 1500 lines, but they encompass the fates of families and nations. Grief begets retribution begets more grief; the pages are drenched in blood. You emerge from the book with a renewed horror of arbitrary authority, beneath which every human life hangs by a thread.

 In “The Seers,” Sex Is Liberation

Posted on by EL Assistant2

For Sulaiman Addonia’s characters, sex is often a site of self discovery, of liberation, and homecoming. 

His books center the experiences of refugees, exploring their joy alongside their rage at colonial systems. His frank writing about sex creates space for the importance of intimacy and desire in his characters’ lives, even as they encounter hate and violence. 

 The Consequences of Love, his debut novel, is a Romeo and Juliet story set in Saudi Arabia. Naser, an immigrant from Eritrea, living with his uncle, trades illicit letters with a girl he knows only by her pink shoes. In his second book, Silence Is My Mother Tongue, the siblings Saba and Hagos fight against traditional expectations of gender and sexuality while living in a refugee camp in Sudan. 

His latest book, The Seers, follows Hannah, a refugee from Eritrea, as she wrestles with the endless bureaucracy of London’s immigration system. The novel unfolds in a single paragraph, moving from Hannah’s present through her past. As she waits in a foster home in Kilburn, unable to work or study until the Home Office approves her application, she turns to sex and reading her mother’s diary as necessary forms of self-expression and self discovery. 

I corresponded with Addonia, who is based in Brussels, via email and he recorded answers to these questions using voice notes. We discussed following characters through the writing process, sex as a form of liberation in The Seers, and how he lets the subconscious lead his writing practice. 

Courtney DuChene: The novel has an interesting container. It begins with a sexual encounter between Hannah and the character Bina-Balozi and then moves backward in time to tell Hannah’s story as an asylum seeker, while returning to the opening scene at times. How did you come to this nonlinear structure for the story?

Sulaiman Addonia: I can’t answer this question because I wrote this book from my subconscious. The power of subconscious writing lies in not fully understanding the motivations behind your characters’ actions as you are performing on automatism. Unlike some authors who can explain the reasons behind their characters, scenes and motivations, I cannot. So, I often reflect on this book not as its writer, but as a reader who has written it.

During the first lockdown in 2020, I was working on a book of essays. One afternoon, I went for a walk and found myself standing in front of the pond of Ixelles in Brussels, where I am currently based. Suddenly, the name “Hannah” came to me. I took out my iPhone and started writing the first sentence. Three weeks later, I had a complete first draft. Maybe the fact that I wrote it all on my phone while sitting or standing by the water gave it a sense of fluidity and great energy. I don’t know. 

The art of writing lies in not knowing why things happen.

For me, though, the art of writing lies in not knowing why things happen. I’m in pursuit of pure art. So in that sense, I did not consciously work on Hannah’s background, history, friendships, and the way she told her story. She came to me fully formed. I was just the vessel for her story, a conduit for her voice. The nonlinearity was something only I noticed after I had finished the book. By the way, although I was unaware of the story structure, I felt it in my body as Hannah zigzagged with me across the pages, moving from one aspect of her story to another, at times in circles, to the point that I felt ill and completely fragmented after finishing the first draft of the book.

CD: This temporality is really interesting and in some ways reflects the liminality Hannah faces as an asylum seeker. How did you approach that both from a narrative and a structural perspective?

SA: The interesting thing was that once the name Hannah came to me and I started writing, I simply followed her and went wherever she took me. The structure and narrative, along with everything else in the book, came with her. 

But I suppose, in most cases, the family we are born into is meant to provide us with a structure, something that roots us to a household, a city, a religion, a land, a nation. But when that foundation is constantly bombarded and destroyed, as is the case with Hannah, who is born into a war zone, a state of adaptability becomes the new norm. And so, that fluidity—something innate to her that she discovered quite instinctively—becomes a profound aid in navigating a world that continually challenges her and presents obstacles along her path, even more so after she migrates to the UK.

A book reflects memory, and when that memory is fractured, fragmentation becomes a form of structure.

Everything in London is temporal and shapeshifts, yet Hannah’s adaptable inner structure becomes essential for her. Not because it provides her stability but because, in her new life as a refugee in London, she discovers that she needs to roll with it. When I reflect on the idea of deconstruction and reconstruction at the heart of Hannah’s existence, which is arduous by the way and leaves traces, I feel that her imagination, memories, and adaptability enable her to flow through life. That’s why I believe the book’s structure shapes itself around her story rather than the other way around. A book reflects memory, and when that memory is fractured, fragmentation becomes a form of structure.

CD: Throughout the novel, Hannah repeats the refrain “everything passes, love remains.” The repetition feels almost poetic. What kept you, and Hannah, returning to this phrase? How do you feel like it connects to the novel’s cyclicality? 

SA: Loss is what keeps Hannah returning to this. She first heard that refrain from her father, who said it to her while giving her the diary of her mother, who was killed in the war when Hannah was a child. Hannah learns that love lingers long after those she cherishes depart from her life. However, while in exile in London, her life is yet again marked by loss, this phrase continues to recur, undergoing both augmentation and diminution. As Hannah loves individuals differently, or as different parts of her fall in love with people with varied desires and sexualities, she discovers the various facets of love and the nuances of loss associated with each. The grief encapsulated in love allows her to bear the weight of loss. In other words, love resembles a web enveloping Hannah’s memory, which she clings to when recalling her story, moving this way and that, sometimes back and forth, and in circles.

CD: The novel is a single paragraph. How did you feel that form complimented Hannah’s story? 

SA: I often think about this single paragraph, this one burst of breath, an outburst of words, one long telling of a story on the same spot over three weeks. So, why did Hannah choose this form of narrating? Was she in a hurry to tell her story? And if so, why? I have no answers, and so, I don’t know if the single paragraph complements her story. Maybe it does, and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe Hannah was playful with me. She wanted to challenge me by telling a dizzying tale. I value that interplay with her as I do with all my characters. I am at their mercy because I choose to surrender to them, hungry for them to tell me their stories in the way that feels right to them rather than any logical reasoning on my behalf.

CD: In The Seers, sex becomes a form of rebirth and liberation for a number of characters and writing frankly about sex stretches across your novels. What role do you think the erotic plays in Hannah’s story? 

SA: Instead of being quietly hidden, almost buried by exile, the war, and violence in Hannah’s life, sex serves as a driving force in her life. Sex is how Hannah and her fellow African immigrants in The Seers assert their existence in this world, a world that is full of violence and prejudice. It gives them agency and control even as their application for asylum in the UK and the decision on whether their cases are dependent on the Home Office staff. Sex becomes a profound method that brings tenderness, kindness, visibility, and power during their daily struggles as both immigrants and Black people in the UK. As Hannah says while trying to persuade her male lover, BB, also known as Bina-Balozi, to let her top him on the bench of Fitzroy Square: “BB, I said, we’re black. We earn visibility when we’re on the verge of breaking the law. This is our moment to shine.”

What I found interesting about the long wait for a publisher for The Seers—around three years—is that, as storytellers, when we write about Black people, we are often expected to portray these characters, who are Black and refugees, as diminished by the racism and struggles they face. I agree that it’s essential to tell such stories. Yet, these characters are not allowed to speak in an equally loud, assertive, and frank manner about the things that bring them joy and happiness. That’s why I appreciate Hannah’s candidness in boldly discussing the role of desire in her life even as she encounters racism and prejudice.

CD: What relationship do you see between sex and the idea of home, two prominent themes of the novel?

SA: This is an interesting question that I am often asked. I remember some readers of my second novel, set in a refugee camp, expressing disbelief that people in a camp could be so playful with themselves. But strangely enough, intimacy is at the heart of all three novels I have written so far. It has always made sense to me that for people who flee with few belongings and find themselves living a life of scarcity, the body becomes the central focus in their lives. 

For people who flee with few belongings and find themselves living a life of scarcity, the body becomes the central focus in their lives.

For example, when Hannah is locked inside that room in Kilburn awaiting a decision on her asylum application, she is not allowed to work or study to improve her English, and is instead expected to live a quiet life, neglected, forgotten, and cast aside as if she were irrelevant. Yet in that room, Hannah’s desire takes over, becoming a torch that guides her body from head to toe, illuminating the tiniest aspects of her yearning. Hannah carves out dignity along with her ability to stand firm. She learns the language of her body before she perfects her English. She discovers the beauty of her Eros before she explores London. The erotic becomes a land into which Hannah strolls to breathe, to feel alive, to be whole, human, and vibrant with the sensuality and wilderness that echo within her. 

CD: Within the narrative, Hannah reads her mother’s diary, where she writes honestly about her sexuality. Where do you see the connections between the stories of the mother and the daughter’s sexual awakenings?

SA: An awakening of any kind is perhaps precipitated by factors that require us to delve deep inside ourselves, reflecting and pondering over situations that have occurred. So the question that comes to mind as I reread The Seers is: Is this sexual awakening for Hannah and her mother quite similar? Both find themselves in a war zone, and both are incredibly well-read and versed in their cultural identity and history, speaking several languages comfortably. But do both react to the circumstances similarly? I’m not sure they do. 

I would say the mother’s sexual awakening has taken place outside our gaze as readers, and she is incredibly comfortable with her sexuality, being a dominant, assertive woman who is confident in her powers. However, I would say the situation is quite different for Hannah, who, as she tells us, might have attributes of her father, who happily surrendered to her mother, as well as characteristics of her mother, which are the total opposite of her father. But perhaps the mother’s diary serves as a reminder for Hannah to embark on a journey and seek the kind of life she craves for herself, just as her parents did even during times of war.

CD: Sections of the novel move into third-person toward the end and observe Hannah’s movements. They all begin EYES, why did you want to show the readers these moments where it feels like she’s being observed? 

SA: It’s not what I wanted to show. Once again, let me reiterate that when you write a story from the subconscious, you are truly surrendering control to your character. So, I don’t know why the EYES section came about, but if I were to take a punt, I’d say it makes perfect sense from Hannah’s point of view. When you are a refugee in an unfamiliar place, people ultimately will not see you, perhaps the way you are, and you will feel alone and neglected. In that moment, you have to find someone or something to whom you become visible. Hannah, who reads extensively while living in Tavistock Park, connects with characters, writers, ideas, themes, and dead poets. In that sense, she might enjoy being probed, seen, provoked, and felt by the words, characters and ideas from books such as The Eyes by Samuel Beckett.

In Palestine, Searching for the Remains of My Grandmother’s Village

Posted on by EL Assistant2

An excerpt from The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza

Author’s note: This excerpt includes references to my grandmother’s village of ‘Ibdis, which was ethnically cleansed by Zionist armies in the Nakba of 1948. My father glimpsed the rubble of ʿIbdis once before, when he was able to cross over from the Gaza Strip with his mother in the 1970s. However, ongoing erasure threatens even these remains.

In 2012, I spent the summer of my sophomore year volunteering at a Palestinian charity in the West Bank city of Nablus. My previous visits to Palestine had been heady, headlong and painfully brief—but this time, I would be settled in one place for several spacious months. The long, almost mundane hours were a revelation. Palestine emerging, returning from the obscurity of symbols, entering my body as routine.

The organization provided lodging in a villa at the top of one of Nablus’s many hills, which I shared with a rotating cast of foreign volunteers. The house was grand and crumbling beautifully, full of evening wind. I slept on the second floor, in a room with wide stone tiles and an unscreened window that opened to a quiet street. Across from me slept a French Egyptian woman who made long bilingual phone calls. In the morning, I boiled Turkish coffee in the tiny second kitchen down the hall. Waiting for the steam, I pulled aside a fraying curtain to watch the slopes and buildings blooming pink.

My mornings brimmed, rich in children. I arrived early each day to greet dozens, ages three through eight. For the next several hours, I helped local teachers orchestrate art projects and games. Once shy around children, in Nablus I learned to kneel to their level, look them in the eyes. There, I glimpsed multitudes wide as any adult’s, each one a shifting pattern of desires, questions, and moods. Emerging miracles, each one with their own terms.

My Arabic tongue loosened, my throat filling with remembered, or inherited, words.

This job was the first time since my own childhood that I moved fully in Arabic. While I had returned to the language years before, this had come in the form of classes or sporadic conversations. Those Nablus mornings, there was no classroom formality, no sense of scrutiny. Any stumbles in grammar or conjugation dissolved into the bright chaos, and the children’s replies did not miss a beat. Khaltu! they called to me. Auntie, look! They waved fingerpainted pages, glitter on their elbows, in their hair. My Arabic tongue loosened, my throat filling with remembered, or inherited, words. I smiled for hours straight.

On my way home, I crossed the city center, past the fruit market, bakeries, and knafeh shops. I made the rounds often, filling bags with tomatoes, mint, pomegranates, and a few pieces of pita, their bellies still full of steam. I stopped for the thick, syrupy cheese pastry last. Knafeh was an indulgence I’d eat only partially, tucking the rest away in its wax for a later that might never come. Each bite was a delight so rich I’d wonder how it made me feel so innocent. I slipped my slice inside a pita, East Nabulsi style, laughing back at the shopkeepers who delighted at my taste. Nabulsiya! Many became friends, introducing me to their children and wives, hosting me for Friday meals. They claimed me, calling me bint Ziyad, though they’d never met my father. A signal of my honor, their respect.

Evenings, I sat with fellow volunteers on the stone balcony that wrapped around the second floor. As the hot air cooled to a marble breeze, I watched the hills drop into darkness. A moment later, they blinked back to life with the lights of nearby towns and refugee camps. In some, I could track headlights, their glow sliding along roads and slopes. Framed by the still dusk, it all felt close enough to hear the hum of these engines, the murmur of those neighborhoods.

But in the night, there was no way to know what web of obstacles lay between me and each glittering hill. Flying checkpoints, or the gun of a vengeful soldier, or an armed settler with bloodthirst. 

I spent several afternoons each week outside the city teaching in Balata, the largest refugee camp in the West Bank. There, I saw the evidence of Balata’s famed fierce resistance—posters of martyrs, faded and new, layered on bullet-ridden walls. The streets were narrow, poor, and overcast with its heavy history—decades of battle with Zionist forces, whose state-of-the-art weaponry has only intensified the rebellion in hearts and limbs.1

Back in Nablus, my Palestinian friends warned me to stay near home after dark. Raids were common in Balata, but Israeli soldiers might also enter Nablus by night, bursting into family homes. Boys and men often disappeared in this way, detained for months or years without recourse or charge. Nicknamed Jabal an-Nar2 for its own ardent history of insurgency, Nablus could at times feel autonomous, but as all Palestinian cities, it remained circumscribed. Above us, the sky sometimes ripped with Israeli F-16s. They dove low enough to chatter our teeth, fast enough to break the sound barrier, just to thunder a reminder of their lurking might.

On the outskirts of the city, new settlement outposts were appearing atop hills, driving Palestinian families off their farms. Each encroachment created new frontiers for violence. Palestinians enroute to school or work risked the dogs and bullets of settlers, and the soldiers who amassed to defend the illegal seizure of land. The safety I felt in Nablus was only as large as the space between human hearts.

Late that summer, I took a car west. After a few winding, road-choked hours, I approached the boundary between the West Bank and ’483. I felt my body rolling up like a scroll. A thousand microclenches, the press of my back against the seat. My inner music, which had grown so free, dropped to static. I pushed my thoughts inside this silence, ejecting Nablus and Balata, erasing friends’ faces, burying my family name. As if thoughts alone might reveal me, the truth wafting off me like a scent.4

The checkpoint came into sight. My veins burned like ice. As an American citizen, my presence in the West Bank was not illegal, but it would raise suspicion. Israeli forces often targeted foreigners suspected of solidarity with Palestinians. Just a few weeks before, one of my fellow volunteers, an Australian, had been detained, interrogated, and deported with a lifetime ban.

Some debasement seemed unavoidable, compromise built into the mechanisms that allowed me to be in Palestine at all.

Still, it was my Americanness that I would rely on when I reached the soldiers. Here, for once, I was grateful for my blond hair, the native English on my tongue. It was not uncommon for an IDF soldier to flirt with me, and if I managed a smile, I was occasionally waved through. Such interactions made me sick, as did every mercy my passport afforded me. Yet some debasement seemed unavoidable, compromise built into the mechanisms that allowed me to be in Palestine at all.5

This time, I was lucky. Nearing sunset, the soldiers looked drowsy, bored as they stood around the small station where I submitted my bag to be searched. I waited somewhere outside my body as they scanned my documents. I tried to look un-Palestinian, to mimic their slack, entitled stance as I leaned on one leg, hip cocked. I passed through. On the other side, I sank into a soup of adrenaline. As I felt the prickling wash of relief, I spoke to my driver—we’d both been mostly silent, as if afraid to disturb the gods before rolling our dice.

I was so nervous . . .

I know. But don’t be afraid.

But what if they kick me out, ban me?

Yes, they can do anything they want. But one has to try one’s best. This is your وطن. Don’t be afraid.


My father and brother greeted me in Jerusalem. We hugged, the grit of worry slowly shedding from our foreheads. It had been an anxious day, the three of us facing the Israeli border separately—they’d come through the Jordanian crossing shortly before I entered from the north. My brother, two years younger than me, now taller, sat beside me on the bed. This felt like a miracle, as it did whenever one of us made it across a border created, first and foremost, to exclude us. We went to bed early. The next morning, we would search for ʿIbdis.

The trip had been my father’s idea. It was rare for him to peer so intently toward the past—even in our first visit to Palestine together, it was the present he pointed to. But with his son interning with him in Saudi Arabia and his eldest daughter stationed, however briefly, in the West Bank, his imagination began to turn. That summer, we practiced a different life, glimpsed a hologram world. One in which we had not bound ourselves to Amreeka. One in which our bodies slept on this land.

I agreed to this search, but ʿIbdis was a word so unknown to me, even my curiosity was vague. On the two-hour drive south from Jerusalem, I watched the landscape shift from rich green to arid plains. Off and on, our route skimmed along the hulking separation wall that cleaved through the West Bank. Beyond, Jewish settlements, whole towns and cities of them, perched on Palestinian hills. My father sighed periodically, shaking his head and muttering angry appeals to Allah. Astaghfur . . . I felt the mixture of fury and impotence that had become familiar. Beside me, my brother said nothing.

I was dozing when our car moved off the highway and onto a rattling dirt road. I sat up to see a parched brown field. In the distance, a line of electrical towers partitioned the sky. Emerging from the parked car, my father squinted, scraping the landscape for clues. A few printed pages of directions, gathered from a crowdsourced Palestinian database, fluttered in his hand. It’s changed . . . he murmured. Brittle, bleached grass clutched the razed earth. Pale watermelons dotted the dirt.6 Silence blistered our skin. 

My father fixed his sights on a massive, shimmering sycamore tree in the middle distance. He began to walk, my brother and I following, watching as he bent to pick up a stick. He flicked it left and right, the low wind carrying his murmured memories: My mother would have walked this way, back and forth to the field . . . My father’s words summoned crops, ripples of green and gold from the cracked earth. We were sweating as we reached the tree. This was our jamayza . . . Unripe figs lay scattered at our feet. We bit into them and puckered at the starchy sour. I swallowed anyway, suddenly desperate to put this place inside me.

Most of the shattered houses my father had seen in the 1970s had disappeared—but only his eyes could measure this loss.

Most of the shattered houses my father had seen in the 1970s had disappeared—but only his eyes could measure this loss. We found a few overgrown, ruined walls. My brother climbed onto a scattering of stone slabs, his face quiet, studying. Understanding accreted, pearling into view. Our grandmother was young once. Hers, ours, was an origin of fullness, from which we might have grown. We stood next to an intact stone well, its throat dark and dry. My father repeated the story his mother had told him while standing at its edge: They bought this pipe from their Jewish neighbors—see the Hebrew on the side? The village had a party when the well was finished. The Nakba came the next day.

And then my understanding began to stagger, disintegrate. It was not tears but tremble that filled me. Too much, too much to be ghosts this way, haunting what we will never see. My grandmother, by then, was dead, buried over a year. When she died, after a bitter bout with cancer, my father had to fight to obtain a grave. The cemetery where her husband was buried had since been declared Saudi Only. Palestinian bodies, stateless even in death, were to be sent to a separate site. Ziyad spent the first hours of his bereavement calling in favors from every influential Saudi he knew. As an exception, she was permitted to lie beside Musa, in a graveyard named after Eve.

In ʿIbdis, we searched for the shattered cemetery my father had seen on his last visit, but no trace now remained. Perhaps bulldozers had returned to finish what earlier invaders had begun. Perhaps the graves had been swallowed under new layers of soil. I stepped as lightly as I could. Somewhere, near or beneath my feet, my great-grandfather slept. Alongside him, generations, their bones stacking deep into the past. Family lines cut to sudden, ragged edges after 1948. Already, members of ʿIbdis had been buried in Deir al-Balah, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia; the living were even farther flung. I looked at my brother—where would our bodies rest?

We spent hours in the baking heat, though it felt like far less. We scattered, tracing separate aimless shapes inside the village grounds. There was nothing to do. There was nothing to say. And yet we lingered, knowing this moment was a glitch in empire that might not repeat.

The sun was retreating as we found each other back at the well. Bending over its stone edge, I felt the air shuffle, shift. Floating toward us, a white, round face. A pair of bottomless black eyes. I turned to stone. Its wings appeared, pumping once, twice, and the owl was over us. For an instant, her pale body was larger than the sun.


From The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza. Copyright Sarah Aziza, 2025.  Reprinted by permission of Catapult.

  1. The event of return does not take place after the fact, in a “post”-temporality where the Occupation no longer exists. Instead, the act springs from within the time of its reign, cracking its walls and fracturing its frame.
    —Adam Hajyahia, “The Principle of Return”
    ↩︎
  2. Mount of Fire ↩︎
  3.  1948, a common term to refer to the land inside the borders of the state of Israel. ↩︎
  4.  I don’t know what they thought I was capable of;
    I wish I was more capable of it.
    —Zaina Alsous, “Violence”
    ↩︎
  5.  Saving the argumentI am let in
    I am let in until
    —Solmaz Sharif, “He, Too”
    ↩︎
  6. My grandfather died with his gaze fixed on a land imprisoned behind a fence. A land whose skin they have changed from wheat, sesame, maize, watermelons, and honeydews to tough apples.
    —Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness ↩︎

8 Funny Novels That Make Light of the Writer’s Plight

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Nothing is easier to poke fun at than the life of a writer, with our overly lofty ambitions, fragile egos, and navel-gazing ways. For this reason, there is no shortage of comedic novels that pull back the curtain on this humiliating struggle, following writer main characters as they attempt to produce “important” works of literature in the face of their all too human shortcomings—fear of failure and of criticism, addictions of all kinds, jealousy of other writers, and of course, a debilitating sense of inadequacy paired with a desperate longing for external validation. 

My debut novel, Bitter Texas Honey, follows Joan West, a privileged, pill-popping, Texan degenerate who yearns above all else to be seen and acknowledged as a writer. To that end, she is desperate to finish her long-abandoned coming-of-age novel, or at least get a short story published somewhere respectable. While the novel is about much more than writing, Joan dedicates much of her mental energy toward this pursuit. She carries a notebook everywhere, mining her life (and the lives of those around her) for compelling material. However, like many young writers, Joan is sorely misguided. While she dreams of book signings and prestigious awards, she lacks the discipline to actually sit still with the blank screen and face herself, to be present long enough with her thoughts to write anything approaching truth. 

The following eight novels also satirize their main characters’ literary ambitions. Each of these books features a writer main character at varying career stages, battling against their own ego. What I enjoy most about books like this is their humor, stemming from the refusal to take themselves too seriously as authors. While not all these novels are autobiographical, one can’t help but pick up on a hint of self-deprecation in these stories. It feels that these authors are inviting readers to laugh at themselves alongside their main characters. 

Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn 

In Dorn’s sharp, hilarious, and compulsively readable tale of lesbian chaos, 35-year-old novelist Astrid Dahl is struggling to write her fourth book. She longs for the naïve confidence she possessed in her twenties, and finds herself crippled in the wake of the criticism she’s received after being politically incorrect at a Barnes and Noble event. Dorn’s handling of Astrid’s authorly ego is delightfully ironic and embarrassingly relatable. People with healthy egos don’t become writers, Astrid muses early on. They become engineers.

Old School by Tobias Wolff 

Short story great Tobias Wolff’s semi-autobiographical novel follows a young, bookish scholarship student at a prestigious boarding school in the 1960’s. Spanning one academic year, the novel’s structure is built around 3 successive writing competitions held by the school to win an hourlong audience with incredibly famous visiting authors (Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and finally, Ernest Hemingway). Wolff’s protagonist—ambitious, competitive, and insecure—is desperate to win, and you can’t help but root for him, even as he makes questionable decisions to achieve his goal. Come for Wolff’s masterful storytelling and moral acuity; stay for the funniest takedown of Ayn Rand in contemporary fiction. 

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Fantasy writer R.F. Kuang brings her genre chops to this satirical literary thriller. She takes aim at the entire publishing industry while skewering her protagonist, white novelist June Hayward, whose desperation for outward success leads her to steal and publish her late friend’s manuscript under a vaguely Chinese-sounding surname. Every page of Yellowface is dripping with June’s jealousy, greed, and unhealthy ego. The result is a gripping page-turner that is by turns funny and terrifying. 

Less by Andrew Sean Greer 

In Greer’s charming novel, 49-year-old “minor” author Arthur Less accepts a stack of invitations he would usually decline. He jaunts around the globe, to New York, Mexico, Italy, Germany, Japan, and India, to avoid attending, or even being in the same time zone as, the wedding of his longtime ex-lover. Throughout his journey, we are reminded of poor Arthur’s career insecurities. His narrator describes Less early on as “an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered, one who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books.” Despite his perceived worldly failures, it is hard not to fall in love with Arthur Less by the end of this tenderhearted novel.

My Struggle: Book 5 by Karl Ove Knausgaard 

In the fifth installment of his poignant autobiographical epic, Knausgaard breathlessly catalogs in unbelievable detail the humiliations and humanity of an ambitious aspiring writer. The novel spans the decade leading up to his first book deal at age 28. Throughout, we watch young Karl Ove oscillate between overconfidence and crippling self-doubt. The result is both hilarious and poignant. You don’t have to read the preceding four My Struggle tomes to enjoy this engrossing and honest portrait of a budding novelist. 

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies 

In Peter Ho Davies’ clever, at times heart-wrenching novel, a professor and writer confronts deep moral questions about marriage and fatherhood while grappling with the painful aftermath of an abortion, as well as his young son’s potential autism diagnosis. Despite the heavy subject matter, Davies brings his signature wit to the story, especially when poking fun at his protagonist’s descent into careerism in the face of his somber reality: 

He takes her advice of so long ago, writes about their loss…. Maybe it’ll be his big break, his New Yorker moment. He still feels owed something. 

A Novel Obsession by Caitlin Barasch

Caitlin Barasch’s addictive, thrilleresque debut follows New York City bookseller Naomi, a wannabe writer who goes to absolutely unhinged lengths to gather material for her first novel. Namely, by stalking her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. The story is painful, but propulsive. You might cringe the whole time, but I found it impossible to look away from the mess Naomi makes in her determination to prove herself as a novelist. 

Death Valley by Melissa Broder 

Melissa Broder’s latest follows a novelist as she ventures into the California desert to escape her “anticipatory grief” and gather material for the “desert section” of her novel-in-progress. Here, she intends for her main character to have a pivotal epiphany. However, Broder’s funny and self-aware hero lets her flaws lead her astray, and she find herself into serious danger. This slim novel represents Broder at her best. This survival tale is surreal, meta, and poignant. 

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Little Movements” by Lauren Morrow

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Little Movements by Lauren Morrow, which will be published by Random House on September 9, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.

Thirty-something Layla Smart was raised by her mother to dream medium. But all Layla’s ever wanted was a career in dance, which requires dreaming big. So when she receives an offer to be the choreographer-in-residence at Briar House in rural Vermont, she temporarily leaves behind Brooklyn, her job, her friends, and her husband to pursue it.

Layla has nine months to navigate a complex institution and teach a career-defining dance to a group of Black dancers in a very small, very white town. She has help from a handsome composer, a neurotic costume designer, a witty communications director, and the austere program director who can only compare Layla to Black choreographers. It’s an enormous feat, and that’s before Layla’s marriage buckles under the strain of distance, before Briar House’s problematic past comes to light, and before Layla finds out she’s pregnant.

Little Movements is a poignant and insightful story that explores issues of race, class, art, and ambition. It is a novel about self-discovery, the pressures placed on certain bodies, and never giving up on your dream.

Here is the cover, designed by Cassie Vu.

Lauren Morrow: One of the first things people wanted to know when I told them about my book–that it had sold, it was real, it was happening!–was what I imagined for the cover design. I was at a loss. After all these years, I’d never truly considered the cover, despite knowing how important it is. The cover is often the first encounter someone has with a book. Perhaps that was why I couldn’t think about it. My job, for so long, had been to focus on the words inside. Shifting my focus to the outside, the visual presentation of it all, felt overwhelming.

Eventually, of course, I had to think about the cover. I sent my editor a concept document that included many of the gorgeous covers I’ve admired in recent years along with some early ideas. I knew I liked clean text and bold colors. And I was certain I wanted a figure of some sort, at least in part. The book is largely about dance, after all.

Soon after sharing my thoughts, my editor sent back some early design concepts, and while I liked some of them, nothing felt quite right. I offered feedback and sent images of different dancers doing different things than what they’d been doing in the design I’d like the most of the few offered. More complex positions and energy. The designer incorporated those ideas in a way that was nearly exactly what I’d asked for, and yet still, something was amiss. Everything shared was beautiful, but none of the dancers felt quite right. The image needed to be complicated a bit. It needed texture, layering, something unexpected. My agent even found dancer wallpaper that offered a more abstract feel, which I liked quite a lot (I still may buy the wallpaper for my apartment; watch this space).

The next round offered four very different concepts, all of which were lovely, but the one that caught my attention–and that of everyone I showed–was the one without a figure. There is so much movement in the image, even the suggestion of a body wrapped in the gorgeous flowing fabric. It makes you look twice, think twice. It makes you wonder.

I love that there’s no visible figure on the cover. No projection of who we’re meant to imagine on the pages. There is a quality of falling, of isolation–crucial to the book. It’s fluid, and sexy, and full of life, all without a body.

Another reason I was drawn to this particular design is that it feels like a nod to so much beautiful dance imagery, most notably the fabric that swims across the stage in the “Wade in the Water” section of Alvin Ailey’s Revelations. Ailey and his work loom large in the book, and it felt really powerful to see this deepened, inverted nod to that work here. I don’t believe it was intentional on the part of the designer, but for me, it’s impossible not to see that imagery on the cover. I spent many years working for Ailey and still see the company–and inevitably Revelations–at least twice a year. When I first scrolled through the final round of options and landed on this one, the fabric floating down, I got a bit teary. That was when the decision was made, I suppose. It felt fated in a way.

For so long I’ve kept things close to the vest with this book. It’s my way with most things, and a debut novel is a vulnerable thing. A person cracked open. But now, I’m eager to share it. To show it. There is proof that it exists. That it’s a thing people will be able to have and hold. And she’s a beauty.

Cassie Vu: We knew that we wanted to represent movement in some way on this cover, so first we went down the path of having a dancer in a spotlight on the cover, and different versions of cropped, dancing bodies. Ultimately we decided against that, because even though the book is set in the dance world, the main character is a choreographer, not a dancer. The author liked the deep purples and pinks of the color palette I had been working in, so we used that and leaned into a more abstract approach. The final image is meant to evoke movement, dance, perhaps the shape of a body, a little bit of tension… but nothing too obvious!

9 Books of Long Poems You Should be Reading

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

My favorite way to experience a long poem is to listen to it. Because while your body is busy walking or using the elliptical machine or folding piles of blue jeans and t-shirts and pajamas, a voice is laying, like garlands, rings of thoughts and images around your mind, layering a place for you to wander. 

It’s the digressions in a long poem that I love—the apertures, structural fractures, pockets, and tunnels. The trap door dropping you down into a dungeon; the stairs leading you out. Poe—whom I adore— argues in The Poetic Principle that poetry should have unity and this unity is impossible in a long poem; but it’s the disunity that attracts me. 

I once knew a man who worked in Mission Control at NASA, and he explained to me that his job was to do the math calculations required to keep the International Space Station in orbit. He used the metaphor of balancing a broom vertically in the palm of your hand: his work was like the infinitesimal or large movements to keep the broom aloft. I love that tension in a long poem, the way it’s always threatening to crash down, peter out, rupture, or break; I love the ways the author then invents shapes to keep the thing aloft, to account for shifts and junctures, the unity in the disunity. 

My new book, Rich Wife, is composed of long poems because the form is capacious. Registers shift; perspectives shift; the form can undulate from a list to a quote to a description of a memory or a painting. Montage, collage, dialogue, slang, poems within poems. The long poem allowed me to consider a knot of topics—money, beauty, art—with the fullness that the subjects demand.

And on to my recommendations.

Poemland by Chelsey Minnis

A book-length musing about poetry and its glittering potentials and failures, this poem consists, almost exclusively, of aphorisms, metaphors, absurd jokes, and idiomatic turns of phrase… Reading Poemland is like walking around the set of a film you love, sitting in actual chairs which are also pretend chairs, being in a place that exists but does not exist, tawdry but imbued with shared feelings of longing. Her writing is like fake fur, the color chartreuse, a miniature weapon hidden in a vintage snap-clasp purse. Charming and pouty, it reminds me of the feeling of reading a glossy fashion magazine while lying on your stomach in your childhood bed. It reminds me of those girlish leather diaries that have DIARY written across the front in script, and come with a tiny padlock and a tiny set of keys.

The book opens:

This is a cut-down chandelier…

And it is like coughing at the piano before you start playing a terrible waltz…

The past should go away but it never does…

And it is like a swimming pool at the foot of the stairs…

Nature Poem by Tommy Pico

The second book-length poem in a series of four book-length poems, Nature Poem is an argument, a conversation, a soundtrack, an endless scroll. Taking up the problem of both wanting to write a nature poem and not wanting to embody stereotypes about American Indians, Pico ends up writing a book that circles and weaves a complex response, encompassing feelings and ideas as large as the poem itself, impossible to distill. Reading this poem is like watching a virtuosic dance performance, as Pico shifts tones, employing lists, refrains, anaphora, epistrophe, jokes, puns, personification. Like Minnis’s poem, this poem too is about poetry itself, its limitations and magic. Nature Poem delves into romance, identity, pop culture, city life, and death, returning again and again to the premature deaths of cousins back home. Pico creates a place where meaning and emotion can stream back and forth intelligibly among this chaotic, fragmented world we share.

the fabric of our lives #death

some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this  #death

reach out and touch someone #death

he kindly stopped for me #death

kid-tested, mother approved #death

oops, I did it again #death

it keeps going, and going, and going #death

Tender Data by Monica McClure

The center of Tender Data contains a group of longish poems that were originally published as the chapbook Mala. These slender montages bring together the feelings of being a girl — being looked at, looking at yourself as an object, longing, desire, innocence and its loss, the narrow roles family and society present for you. Childhood scenes are spliced with older perspectives, with metatextual analysis of the poem as poem, critical analysis of how she’s positioning herself, resisting received categories. These poems juxtapose small town aspirations and gossip and poverty and glamour and grocery store aisles and slips of admonishments and slang. Climb inside these poems to become a girl in the early 2000s, in body and spirit, to experience the liquid confusing swirl.

Let’s talk about angels

I saw one just returned from jail with his gentleness

flung over the couch next to his money stack

We didn’t know each other anymore

and never had

We were standing beside our youths like babysitters

But the truth is I was the only one who’d ever had one

Bloom & Other Poems by Xi Chuan, translated by Lucas Klein

In his longish, essayistic poems in this book, Xi Chuan takes up a subject — the mandate to bloom, beautiful fakes and decrepit antiques of the Panjiayuan Antiques Market, an early morning, Manhattan — and he approaches it from in front, beside, below, near, far, with humor, with humility, with cynicism, with history, with literary forefathers, with grandiosity, turning and turning until the subject is exhausted thoroughly, until we, having journeyed and arrived together, land at the poem’s feet. Xi Chuan takes up what could seem the least promising of subjects—just walking around, looking around—and with the force of his intelligence and the shape of his thoughts wrings from them meditations which are surreal, self-deprecating, self-aware, often recalling, too, the long history of poetry, art, and politics of China, people from the past peering across time into the present, and he peering back at them.

People half real half fake pursue a happiness half real half fake,

fall in love half real half fake, and fall into a daze looking at half real half fake antiques; their demands for justice are also half real half fake.

On a world half real half fake they gain a sense of unreal reality we might call transcendent!

Collected Poems by James Schuyler

The long poem “Hymn to Life” appears at the end of Schuyler’s 1974 book of the same name, which is now out of print — but contained within his Collected. Hymn to Life is a churning meditation on mortality and the essential beauty, horror, and meaninglessness of life. The poem is structured around the passage of spring in D.C. — a city whose blankness and stony facades the poem abhors — and in it Schuyler cycles between personifying nature and time, dipping into memories, and describing the life unfurling in the new season, its blue jays and daffodils and pear trees, not idealized but as they are, wavering in and out of existence as time tumbles forward, and also as real things framed by the modern world — sometimes diseased, existing among ugly monuments, glum weather, the sounds of chainsaws, noticed, forgotten about, wild, planted in corporate planters, with tourists milling about. Meanwhile, through it all, life, which is passing, picturesque, not picturesque, slips by and we remain unknown to ourselves, by turns grumpy and depressed, by turns astonished by its wonder.

Attune yourself to what is happening   

Now, the little wet things, like washing up the lunch dishes. Bubbles   

Rise, rinse and it is done. Let the dishes air dry, the way

You let your hair after a shampoo. All evaporates, water, time, the   

Happy moment and—harder to believe—the unhappy. Time on a bus,

That passes, and the night with its burthen and gift of dreams. That   

Other life we live and need, filled with joys and terrors, threaded   

By dailiness: where the wished for sometimes happens, or, just   

Before waking tremulous hands undo buttons. 

Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad by Alice Oswald

Memorial is a fragmented, pared-down, interpretive translation of The Iliad that removes everything but the graphic deaths, elegiac laments, and similes. So what’s left is this timeless imprint of war, its waste and finality, interspersed with brief, impressionistic portraits of familiar kinds of men, their cowardice, arrogance, callousness, regret, terror, mixed with the eternal natural world and rhythms of life — an old woman’s spidery hands measuring wool, the weak petals of a poppy battered by rain, rocks battered by ocean water in an explosion of spray, a toddler raising its arms to be lifted by its mother. The portrait of a soldier who loved to sit on his front porch and make his friends laugh is an ancient portrait of a living face, the boys who died then, the boys who die today. The wastefulness of ancient war, of modern war; life as a sieve the world passes through, or the world as a sieve that life passes through.

Like when a mother is rushing

And a little girl clings to her clothes

Wants help wants arms

Won’t let her walk

Like staring up at that tower of adulthood

Wanting to be light again

Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted 

And carried on a hip

Pedro Pietri: Selected Poetry by Pedro Pietri

Pedro Pietri’s poems vibrate with indignation, revolving around those usually ignored — alcoholics, immigrants, the men who clean windshields at intersections, people living in government housing that’s overrun with cockroaches, people who play the lottery and have a collection of dreams. The most famous poem in this book, “Puerto Rican Obituary,” rotates around the refrain of a handful of names — Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, Manuel — their hopes, exploitation, sacrifice, work, waste — the grayed-out half-life of people separated from their people, of people working now for a promised future that hovers forever just out of reach. Pietri’s poetry appeals to me in its stylistic irritability — the refusal to conform to prevailing conventions, veering into his own voice, manic all-caps, repetitions, patterns, deviations, dialect, surreal detours, a rhythm of his own.

All died

dreaming about america 

waking them up in the middle of the night screaming: Mira Mira

your name is on the winning lottery ticket for one hundred thousand dollars

All died

hating the grocery stores 

that sold them make-believe steak

and bullet-proof rice and beans

All died waiting dreaming and hating

Returning the Sword to the Stone by Mark Leidner

If Jack Handey wrote a book of poems, it might be a book like this one. Fond of aphorisms, surreal premises, outlandish but oddly familiar similes, and silly diction (on humility: “it feels awesome”), Leidner’s longish poems are absurd jokes taken so seriously they become unbearably sad and unbearably sweet. Beneath the jokes, the subjects are love, mortality, ego, and the mystifying beauty and pain of life. Reading these poems feels like playing NES with your friends for hours and hours, drinking 7-Up through Sour Punch straws, staying up so late that a feeling of wrongness seats itself in your chest — piercing pleasure, nostalgia, teetering between wells of joy and doom. 

I hate it when I’m in geometry class

intent on disrupting the lesson 

with inane and off-topic contributions

only to be moved to silence 

by the beauty of the Pythagorean theorem

Air Ball by Molly Ledbetter

The long poems in this book are composed of lines of single sentences leisurely doled out with the pacing, structure, and confidence of a stand-up routine, in which set-ups are paid off in ways you didn’t anticipate. These are poems concerned with taste, status, posturing, heartbreak, small observations, grief, and the difference between art-world art and the actual experience of art, which is private, occurs in slivers, and is never as perfectly encapsulated as a prestigious gallery show written up in a brochure. Ledbetter bestows meaning on what would otherwise be detritus or ephemeral — your Uber ride history, children shouting “air ball!” from a nearby school, a handmade plate that reads “This too shall pass.” These poems make me feel as though I’ve spent an afternoon with a new friend, and have left with fresh observations uncoiling within me, which have unspooled dozens of new thoughts.

I never thought about where the train that cuts through the center of town was going.

Whatever I hear now in its whistle is like those bells in The Polar Express.

Like believing in believing in Santa, which I do.

Like bunk beds that squeak like an old wooden boat.

Like how good those nuts on the sidewalk smell at Christmas.

Like a mediocre cookie plate.

Back then, I could really have been someone.

In “Mỹ Documents” Silicon Valley Surveillance Is a Family Problem

Posted on by EL Assistant2

There are certain novels you really hate to see in the company of words like timely, prescient, or prophetic—The Handmaid’s Tale, say, or Parable of the Sower. Yet Kevin Nguyen’s latest novel unfortunately seems to have been beaned with the dodgeball of Apollo; Mỹ Documents chronicles a family and a country fractured by the mass internment of Vietnamese-American citizens after a nationwide series of terror attacks, reprising a dark chapter of American history (and truly American history’s favorite thing to do is reprise its dark chapters).

Nguyen’s Internment 2.0 has its own distinct flavor, defined centrally by the presence of technology—at the same time that contraband laptops and USB drives become lifelines to the outside world within the camps, Silicon Valley enthusiastically supplies the surveillance and signal-jamming technologies keeping the imprisoned in line. The world’s reaction outside of the camps, too, is frighteningly plausible—with Vietnamese-Americans making up less than .7% of the population, and exceptions carved out for the well-heeled professional class, it becomes easy for those on the outside to act like 2 million people didn’t just vanish; or worse, to pretend there’s a justifiable reason they did.

In fact, the only stark divergence from our reality in the world of Mỹ Documents is that its journalists seem a lot more principled, courageous, and effective than the ones currently standing by and shrugging as the breathing tube gets yanked out of democracy. Let’s just hope we don’t end up calling this book optimistic.

Tony Tulathimutte: The book takes a pretty satirical view of journalism and in interesting ways, a lot of the characters end up being journalists in one form or another, whether it’s the reporters at Top Story who are covering the internment of Vietnamese Americans. Or on the inside, the Camp Tacoma’s rival papers, Nhật Báo and Korematsu. I was interested in what the book had to say about the role of journalism vis-a-vis atrocities like this.

Ursula’s story reads almost like an allegory of opportunism, using other people’s stories for personal enrichment. The book begins with her getting praised and rewarded for telling her grandmother’s immigrant sob story, which ends up being partially untrue. And on the other hand, Korematsu seems to bring genuine aid and comfort to the interned people. Do you think that there’s something unavoidably exploitative about reporting on atrocities like this? Or is it more of a matter of how it’s practiced and incentivized?

Kevin Nguyen: I don’t even think it’s necessarily reporting on atrocities, specifically. I think the construct of journalism — and I say this as someone who works in it and admires the field and believes in the importance of a free press — that when a source talks to a journalist, the person that benefits the most in that interaction is always the journalist. The journalist is the person in a position of power.

And that ranges everything from people within the current federal government leaking stories about what’s going on with Elon Musk, all the way to people just telling their stories about the diaspora. I want those stories to be out there. But at the same time, the power dynamic of journalism always benefits the writer.

TT: Could you say it benefits the journalists even more so than the people who are reading the journalism? Because in a way, journalism does save the day in this book. It’s implied toward the end that it plays a part in rolling back some of the atrocity, right?

KN: Yeah, it does. I tried to thread the needle on that in the book. Journalism as a practice is very powerful. But there are still ways it is exploitative and there are still ways that the people who practice it can be selfish and can be power seeking while still doing the good work.

TT: Yeah. And I mean, I think it’s especially underscored in this book because Ursula’s getting all of her reporting, at least at first, from her own cousin who’s interned and actually doing all of the sort of legwork and sticking her neck out, and not really getting the credit for it. It’s like, “Oh, I just had somebody talk to me, but my own family member sort of risked life and limb to get the information to me and I’m reaping the rewards for that.”

KN: The construction of the book heightens that dilemma. I constructed a scenario in the fiction of the novel that kind of makes it the most extreme. So usually when a source talks to a journalist, they’re able to see the product quite immediately and the effect of it. And because of the setup of Mỹ Documents, the characters in camp don’t see the effect of the journalism until much later.

TT: The first thing I wondered even before I read the book was, why would Vietnamese people be singled out to be put in internment camps? There isn’t an immediate paranoia or legacy of Vietnamese guys specifically being domestic terrorists on U.S. soil. What I found interesting was that the book doesn’t actually really answer that. It lays out what they did and how they did it, but stays pointedly ambiguous about why they did it, Though there are some gestures at online radicalization and misinformation. But I’m curious about the choice to leave it ambiguous.

KN: In talking about this book, a lot of people have called it speculative fiction or dystopian, which I don’t think are inaccurate genres or frameworks. But the reality is, the scenario that happens in the book is one of policy. And whether you believe that thing would be enacted today, that’s up to you. But it was enacted during World War II, right?

TT: All it took was something like Pearl Harbor to make it happen.

KN: And it singled out Japanese Americans who had nothing to do with the attack on Pearl Harbor, right?

TT: Right.

KN: And so, in a way, it’s actually quite random who was affected. And it’s also interesting that it actually fell along basically ethnic and national lines. So in a strange way, the book kind of plays a little bit with the idea of Asian American solidarity. The universe of the book believes that Asian American solidarity and identity can be a real and useful thing. It’s also a construct. And that’s sort of the weird dilemma of solidarity in general.

TT: It was a construct devised explicitly for the aims of political solidarity, right? In the ‘60s by some Berkeley kids.

KN: And the usefulness of it just depends on the situation. In some ways, you and I have a lot in common because we’re both Southeast Asian Americans from Massachusetts, but in other ways it’s also kind of bullshit. What does Vietnamese culture actually have that much to do with Thai culture? And these are already, in a lot of people’s minds, two cultures that are conflated. There are just other ways to divide these experiences, along the waves of immigration, and we almost never do that. Instead, we just think about these former national or ethnic lines.

TT: Yeah. I mean, there’s a nasty historical irony in the conflation of the two, since Thailand was pretty much a de facto air force base for the US during the Vietnam War.

Now let’s consider the other side of the internment act. I thought it was very funny that you expect to see these evil mustache-twirling villains who’ve authored the policy, but they’re largely absent. Except for John McCain, or a kind of alt-historical version of him.

He’s only referred to as the War Hero. He’s one of the big proponents of the AAPI bill that institutes internment. So I guess it’s a two-part question. One, can you talk about the choice to generally leave the villains in the story faceless? And two, does the choice of John McCain as one of those few faces constitute a sort of payback? I mean the guy would not stop calling Vietnamese people quote-unquote gooks until his dying day. Is this a reckoning with that fact that never seemed to drum up that much outrage?

KN: “Payback” is maybe strong, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate. I think especially when I was writing this over the past five years, there was an emergence of this kind of “good” conservative Republican war hero type, and John McCain has come to represent that thing. Yeah, I obviously think that thing is bullshit.

TT: It’s almost not even fair to just single out Republicans. There’s also John Kerry, you know?

KN: Yeah. But I think to your earlier point too, I did want to balance some things where certain touch points would feel specific enough to make the world in the book feel grounded. But I also didn’t really want it to be about how Republicans are terrible and they’re the war hawks or whatever. More than that, I wanted this to be a family story more than it is about what caused instigating conflicts in the book. This is a story about the tensions between the characters rather than about how—or if—they get out of camp.

TT: A different angle on the notion of facelessness comes in the form of Big Tech’s role in the internment. In the middle of the camp there’s this giant obelisk called the Tower that blocks all sorts of incoming and outbound Wi-Fi and cell signals. The company who runs it is pretty much a fictionalized version of Palantir from what I could understand. But Google gets involved too, and they’re named outright in the book. So can you talk about how—especially vis-a-vis the recent tech oligopoly in government—tech becomes the executor of these government policies?

KN: The masks came off so fast and so hard this year that I think that things I was trying to get at are just… they’re really out there in the world in a way they weren’t a year ago. But a lot of the book too is a send up of very stereotypical Asian American ambition and assimilation. So I think a lot of Asian Zoomers, they really want to work at these big tech companies, right?

Because these are lucrative jobs, they’re prestigious and people don’t often think about the implications of what these companies are doing, hidden behind these guises of progressive values. As we’ve seen certainly in 2025, all those values went immediately out the window as soon as President Trump threatened tariffs. So that was a little bit about naming Google specifically. I mean, I also briefly worked at Google and it was really interesting being there, mostly because so many people in my family were like, “You made it. This is the job.”

It pays well. I wasn’t really that high up, so it just paid fine. But it was kind of the new Goldman Sachs in that way. Actually being there, it was a tremendously dim and boring place to work. So I think part of it was sort of reckoning with that gap. So I put a little bit of my personal life in there in that sense.

TT: It’s useful in thinking about that fissure in Asian American solidarity that you were talking about before. There’s no starker divide than, Are you one of the ones who has to go to the camp or not? And the ones who are spared are the ones who have jobs that are considered useful for the prevailing order, like how Ursula and Alvin work for journalism and Big Tech. Is this a comment on conditional privilege or how privilege for Asians is conditioned on work?

KN: Yeah, it’s conditional privilege. It has a lot to do with work. It’s also, I think Asian Americans do it to themselves as well, right? I think there’s a strong belief among Asian Americans that they can transcend identity or the way they are perceived by almost fulfilling the stereotype of what Asian Americans are supposed to be.

TT: I would not even necessarily restrict it to Asians in that I think that a lot of America or what we call the American Dream is premised on the idea that working really hard will make you the exception, will make you successful. You should not resent the ultra wealthy because you could be one of them as long as you grind. But it’s just that here, it’s focalized through whatever stigmas may exist, being an immigrant or looking different and so on.

KN: I think there’s just a very specific Asian American flavor of it that pervades the book.

TT: It’s this weird combination of doing an exceptional job, but not being seen doing it or expecting any commensurate reward, just stability. That seems to be the bargain.

KN: A lot of those jobs tend to be engineering jobs, which have been celebrated because they are so lucrative, but they’re actually quite vocational. Especially when you work in a place like Google, they tend to be very uncreative as well. And they don’t involve a lot of leadership or other things that tend to actually be evaluated in the workplace. It’s like engineers just tend to be very well paid worker bees by definition.

TT: To speak a little more on this idea of solidarity, there’s also the rivalry between Jen and Dennis or between the two sort of rival papers they run within the camp, Korematsu and Nhật Báo. One way to read it would be sort of a historical rhyme of the Vietnam War where you see this factionalism between people of the same culture, although obviously, it’s along different ideological lines. It’s not all that easy to interpret, though, because Dennis is so mysterious. We don’t know what’s in the paper. And he does seem to come as close as it gets in the book to a villain walking around that people have to deal with. 

KN: I read a lot about Japanese incarceration. And you can kind of tell part of the imagination of the book is evoking what that would look like today. The book is an echo of Japanese incarceration, right? And a lot of the book is also these Zoomer characters trying to live without the internet. But what actually ends up happening in some ways is they create a lot of the dynamics of the internet within camp. And I don’t even mean that in a negative way. I think human beings, they just like to make things, whether that is art or stories or garbage, it’s just kind of a necessity of being a person.

And so even when they’re constrained in these detention camps, they’re still doing that thing. And then from within that, especially when you tell stories, Jen ends up recreating the same power dynamics of journalism and what she does, and then in ways, what she’s creating is maybe valuable from one perspective. But then Dennis comes along with Nhật Báo and he believes what he’s creating is powerful too. And I think the lines are a little tricky or they’re just not that clear about when you create something that you feel like is doing good for a community of people or readers — at what point does the doing good justify selfish and power-seeking behavior?

TT: It’s not all that different from the zeal people get for nation-building projects or the idea of capitalism triumphing over communism. And by that token too, I guess a good note to close on is that the book seems to suggest that a lot of good that is done in the world and a lot of the life worth living occurs either in the cracks of institutions, or entirely outside of them. Some trace of this notion is in every plotline. Alvin is able to smuggle an important document out of Google through this kind of unethical move of taking the computer of the woman he’s been hooking up with. In the camp, a kid makes movies on his phone, and people watch K-dramas and Superbad on contraband USB drives. Korematsu gathers in the unused swimming pool to smoke these tiny, miserable little joints that are probably all seeds and stems. And then there’s El Paquete, which is an impressive organization that’s trafficking things in and out of the camp, but is by the standards of industrial commerce, probably pretty small and purpose-driven. The last example would be Jen and Dan, who drop off the grid altogether at different points. So is there an ethical way to exist in an institution, especially a really big one, like Big Tech or the government or media? Or is it the kind of thing where at best, you just sort of malinger and drag your heels?

KN: Yeah. I was reading a piece today that I would say quite ungenerously described all of Sally Rooney’s work as trying to be good under late capitalism. It’s not incorrect. I think her books do a little more than that. But yeah, I think this is a book that starts in a place where right and wrong seem fairly clear cut, and then quickly it’s clear that oftentimes doing the right thing is actually quite harmful to a lot of people. And then sometimes being selfish is actually an action that ends up helping a lot of people or doing a lot of good.

Everything in the book plot-wise is muddy in that way. The book is very un-prescriptive about moralizing these kinds of things. It’s more like wrestling with a heightened reality of what we’re living.

TT: It did seem to me, in different ways, that for Jen and Dan, it was what they needed, not what would be categorically good for everyone to do. Although, who knows? Things are getting very shitty.

KN: I’m kind of in that phase of pre-publication where I’m getting text messages and emails, and I think now they’re some strangers who are sending me DMs and everyone keeps talking about how “timely” the book is. They mean it kind of in a complimentary way. I definitely don’t write fiction to meet a specific moment and certainly not to predict this one.

TT: Yeah, I mean, it’s not really possible to be timely on the same reaction cycle as any other medium. If you sold a book today, it wouldn’t be out for two years.

KN: Right. Someone said the book was prescient, and I know again, it’s supposed to be complimentary, but this kind of thing has happened before. And just imagining it happening again is actually not a great stretch of imagination. A lot of the book is about these kids learning about Japanese incarceration for the first time by experiencing it. And I think if there’s actually a lesson here: it’s how that history has somehow been swept under the rug, even though it’s in plain sight.

Why Does Cinema Love Making Asians Become American?

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

For all of its small miracles—big laughs and bigger gasps, brilliant performances by Joan Chen and Izaac Wang, sharp dialogue that evokes almost too well the brash posturing of ’00s suburban adolescence—Sean Wang’s 2024 coming-of-age comedy-drama Dìdi left me with the feeling that I had seen this one before. The strong-willed child, the disapproving mother, the half-comic-half-tyrannical grandmother, the tense family dinners, the heated arguments conducted between English and Chinese. It gives one, I thought as I walked out of the theater, the unmistakable impression of being an Asian American Film.

In the last decade or so, and especially since the huge box office success of 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians, films and television shows by Asian American directors and with majority-Asian American casts have debuted at what seems an ever-accelerating pace. Part of a general enthusiasm for “diverse” popular media, the mushrooming production of Asian American media by major entertainment companies has given us a dizzying list of titles, from prestige dramas like The Farewell to YA dramedies like Never Have I Ever, blockbusters like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to indie darlings like Everything Everywhere All At Once. If we take the marketing, box office figures, and effusive reviewers at their word, there has never been a better (or more entertaining) time to be Asian American.

Yet I wince a little to identify myself as such. I am a third-generation Japanese American, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area amidst perhaps the most vibrant and diverse Asian diasporic community in the U.S., but if I am an Asian American, I am a somewhat reluctant one. Films like Dìdi are regularly praised for being “good representation,” and though the upward turn in both quantity and quality of depictions of Asian Americans in media is undeniable, I can’t help but feel that this representation has failed to deliver on its lofty promises of empowering Asian Americans and fostering racial harmony. It is not precisely that I, personally, don’t feel “represented,” or that I think these representations are inaccurate or inauthentic. It is rather that I am disillusioned with the project of representation itself, at least as it has been articulated in the popular discourse of Asian American media.

Where more and better representation would seem to invite an expansion of Asian American creative and political possibility, the Asian America that has emerged onscreen feels like the opposite. It is not a broadening but a narrowing of Asian American experience, a congealing of infinite variation into a single narrative core which then appears as the “authentic” essence of Asian America. 

This Asian America, the backdrop and the product of what I call the Asian American Film, is an example of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the “hyperreal”: a sign that has come unmoored from its referent, a mere image which has acquired the gravity of the real. In its repetition and consistency, the hyperreal is something like the “cliche,” but the power of the hyperreal lies in its ability to appear not cliche. Cliches bother us because they remind us of the contrivance, the artificiality of the representation; the hyperreal makes us believe that we are not dealing with representations at all.

Representation has failed to deliver on its lofty promises of empowering Asian Americans and fostering racial harmony.

The logic of representation and authenticity insists that what marginalized minorities need is to see more people like us on the TV. But in doing so it assumes that there is a clear and self-evident object to be represented in the first place (“people like us”) and obfuscates the active, creative nature of representation itself. Representation never simply mirrors an already-existing reality. It pares and polishes experience in order to create a finite object which resembles a world. In naive calls for better representation, the idea seems to be that any representation, so long as it is produced by a member of the ingroup, expresses some kind of essential, unified, and politically potent “truth” about a group’s lived experience. But, as recent years of Asian American filmmaking have demonstrated, this line of thinking lends itself easily to the production of hyperrealities, which obscure, rather than reveal, real people’s lives.

What exactly does this hyperreal Asian America look like? You probably already have some idea, but let me sketch, briefly, the characteristics of the Asian American Film. In the first place, it takes little more than a glance at the posters for the above-named films to see that mainstream Asian American media is dominated by East Asian—primarily Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean American—stories, with the occasional Indian entry, while the Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, and countless other diasporic Asian American filmic imaginaries remain virtually nonexistent. The Asian American Film clings to a tenuous ethno-racial metonymy: the leap that we make when we refer to this mostly East Asian American body of film, or any individual film, as “Asian American.” 

Within this restricted ethnic scope there is, too, a certain curious homogeneity. From New York to LA, sci-fi to sentimental drama, there are some things you can almost always expect to see in the Asian American Film: nagging mothers, enforced extracurriculars, gaggles of judgmental aunties, cluttered homes hung with calligraphic scrolls, problematic non-Asian partners, parents convening to compare their children’s extracurricular accomplishments. These tropes appeal to an overdetermined idea of the Asian American life which we are supposed to recognize as our own, and end up producing the very world that they claim merely to represent. 

The calling card of the Asian American Film—what accounts for much of its chronic sense of déjà vu—is not a single scene or character type but a formal tendency: a narrative structure premised on the tension between Asian immigrant parent and their American child, a fundamental opposition which generates the narrative energy of the film and constitutes its emotional core. The parent is old-fashioned, conservative, and demanding, possessed of an “Oriental” backwardness and incapable of comprehending the child’s wild American ways. A relatively straightforward—and especially common—version of this narrative is the trope of the Asian immigrant parent who struggles to accept their gay American child. In Dìdi, it is teenage protagonist Chris’ passion for skateboarding videos and other early Internet-era amusements that signifies his endearingly free American spirit, while his mother Chungsing’s kitschy oil paintings indicate her old-fashioned, culturally conservative outlook; their clashes, less a matter of personal disagreement than mutual unintelligibility, form the film’s affective backbone.

For onscreen Asian Americans, teenage rebellion is never only generational.

The feeling of narrative satisfaction is achieved when the child has either overcome the parent’s authoritarian power, brought them around to a more progressive way of thinking, or a combination of both. It is through this narrative crucible that our hero(ine) emerges as a proper Asian American; “Asian” being only a modifier, though a significant one. For it is not only the immigrant parent that must be rejected or overcome in the Asian American Film, but Asia itself which hangs over this hyperreal Asian America like a threat, Asia which must be pushed aside, excised like a tumor or put to rest like an angry ghost. “You’re so Asian,” Chris hisses at his mother in a moment of exasperation. When he makes friends with a group of non-Asian, slightly older teenage skaters, he lies and tells them that he is only half. 

Plenty of white kids fight with their parents, too, but for onscreen Asian Americans, teenage rebellion is never only generational. It comes superimposed with a layer of cultural meaning, the (more or less) tacit assumption that what is at issue is not mere familial discord but an East-West culture clash. Even when the child comes to accept the well-meaning of their parents, there is always a figure just behind them (usually, as in Dìdi, a grandparent) in which the backwardness and despotism of Asia persists. Behind each of these figures, too, we could imagine an endless line of scowling parents, but the source of the discontent is always, ultimately, the dark, distant phantasm of Asia itself. It is no wonder then that the coming-of-age is such a popular genre in Asian American fiction: in addition to the child becoming an adult, the coming-of-age narrative stages the process of the Asian becoming an American.

It will probably be objected that the aforementioned films cannot have been performing the covert ideological work I have suggested, because they are reflections of reality and therefore innocent of such schemes—in fact, many of the works I have referenced are semi-autobiographical, a privileged form in Asian American storytelling at least since Maxine Hong Kingston’s landmark memoir The Woman Warrior. I am not suggesting, following Frank Chin’s notorious attacks on such writers as Kingston and Amy Tan, that these films are fraudulent, their directors race traitors and fake Asian Americans; unlike Chin, I have little faith in the existence of “real” Asian Americans. 

The Asian America I know, comprising experiences as vast and varied as can be expected from a population of over 20 million people, has hardly appeared onscreen in its fullness. This Asian America includes, of course, a great number of repressive immigrant parents and rebellious American children. But it also includes families like mine, who have been in the United States for over a century; mothers like mine, born in Long Island and speaking only English. It includes parents, immigrant or not, who don’t care if their child is gay or wants to go to art school; it includes parents who themselves are gay and went to art school. It includes Asian Americans who never knew their parents, who never start their own families, who give up on America and go back to Asia or someplace else altogether.

It is a cruel irony that this real heterogeneity disappears under the guise of representation and authenticity. It is not only excluded from but distorted to fit a predetermined image of what constitutes “authentic” Asian Americanness. My problem with the Asian American Film, which recounts again and again the same story of immigration and adjustment, is not so much its lack of verisimilitude as its myopia, its privileged status as the only Asian American story we seem to be able to tell. 

It is not only Asian America’s contemporary expanse that disappears under the uniform gloss of the Asian American Film, but its rich history. Almost twenty five years on from the release of his book The Deathly Embrace, Asian diaspora scholar Sheng-Mei Ma’s observation that “[the fact that] Asian America is more than 150 years old but rebels like a misguided fifteen-year-old attests to its stunted growth” still rings true. My great-great-grandparents came to this country more than a century ago to build the railroad that united these states, and since those first waves of mass immigration, Asian Americans have have been excluded, incarcerated, and segregated, have worked the land and built cities within cities, have organized and resisted, assimilated and transformed. And yet all of this heavy and wonderful history is virtually inconceivable in the eternal present of the Asian American Film, where history is something that happens elsewhere, in a vague Old World of war and deprivation. 

Asian America is, in its totality, unrepresentable.

The narrowness of the Asian American Film corresponds to the disappointment of Asian America as a political project, a feeling captured well by Steven Duong’s short story “Dorchester.” A disillusioned Asian American writer is invited to read a poem at a protest against the killing of an elderly Asian woman. “They had painted their signs with slogans like Stop Asian Hate and Protect Our Elders,” Duong writes, “things we all believed in, because what else could we believe?” Though it does not refer explicitly to film, “Dorchester” dramatizes the awful gravity that the hyperreal Asian America exerts on those who cannot but call themselves Asian Americans. The narrator runs away from the reading with a sick feeling in his stomach, recalling the deceptions of his mother, who had lied about being a beleaguered refugee when in fact she arrived in America on a plane, “nine years after the fall of Saigon, nine years after [she] had supposedly boarded the fishing boat at dawn.” In Duong’s story the mythology of Asian America has the coercive power to compel certain types of narrative production and exclude others. The sprawl of our lives shrivels into an “authenticity” where Asians can only ever arrive in America in their huddled masses, seeking a better life for their ungrateful offspring.

I am aware, of course, of the irony of my referring to “Asian America” and “Asian Americans” throughout this essay despite my professed skepticism about the coherence and usefulness of these categories. Like the protagonist of “Dorchester,” I feel an obligation to these terms in spite of their limitations, or maybe just a kind of Stockholm Syndrome – what else can we believe?

Asian American Studies scholar Susan Koshy suggests that “‘Asian American’ offers us a rubric that we cannot not use.” But in using it we must acknowledge its perpetual partialness, its failure to bear the burden it takes upon itself. 

In pointing out the failure of the Asian American Film to represent the wholeness of Asian American experience, I am not suggesting that we redouble our attempts to represent, that there exists somewhere a more perfect authenticity if only we can find it. Imagine, for a moment, that we were to represent Asian America in its infinite variety: every ethnic group, every region, every family configuration, every possible relation of the Asian to the American and the immigrant to the native-born. What then would we have achieved but Jorge Luis Borges’ proverbial map the size of the empire itself, coterminous with the land it attempts to reproduce and thereby useless? 

Asian America is, in its totality, unrepresentable. Perhaps there is some comfort in imagining otherwise, in being handed a ready-made narrative and aesthetic package and being told: this is your world, this is your story. Undoubtedly there is comfort in the production and re-production of Asian America as the triumphant result of individualized struggle between Eastern repression and Western social freedoms. But there is greater courage and honesty in shedding the straightjacket of realism and sentimentality, breaking out of the home and into the streets, building something bigger and stranger and more ambitious. 

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed Dìdi. But I’m sick of the autobiographies, sick of the family dramas, sick of Asians becoming American. If there is to be an Asian American filmography — which seems inevitable and is not necessarily undesirable — I want one always new and never authentic, collective but not self-contained. I am not entirely pessimistic about the possibility of an Asian American cultural and political identity of the type imagined by the Asian American dreamers of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but any such project must move past the shortsighted aim of producing authentic representations and towards a collective imaginary that embraces, rather than elides, multiplicity. One that does the difficult work of building shared goals through difference, not just within Asian America but between, across, and throughout Asia and America. 

7 Campus Novels That Break the Mold

Posted on by Jo Lou

Your standard fish-out-of-water campus novel goes like this: Scholarship kid finds themself surrounded by absurdly  wealthy children only to get caught up in their wicked ways. The “hayseed goes to the big city” premise always delivers—especially the makeover phase when the interloper MC learns the ropes (too well) and gets semi-corrupted before righting themself. 

But I’ve read this story many times over so I certainly wasn’t going to write a campus novel following this arc. My boarding school book, To Have and Have More, is about the rich kids who belong—the ones who never question whether they deserve their legacy spots or special treatment. They possess every privilege imaginable but, in their teens, already feel trapped and sense that their lives are preordained. I get why it’s narratively convenient to tell the story from the perspective of the new kid but supporting characters like Daisy Buchanan and Mathilde de la Mole are the miserable rich girls who captured my attention, and that’s just the type of anti-heroine I’ve centered in To Have and Have More. 

This list consists of campus novels that diverge from the standard arc and provide more in the way of professors and politics of academia while remaining in that most beloved of settings: the private school campus.

Japanese by Spring by Ishmael Reed

It so happened that I was reading Reed’s 1993 university culture wars satire while Claudine Gay and Liz Magill were inescapable headlines. Japanese by Spring is so entertaining that it (slightly) lessened the disheartening truth that all of Reed’s critiques still stand—little progress has been made in taking DEI out of bureaucrats and opportunists’ hands. Our world still puts POC professors like Reed’s Prof. Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt in the impossible position of either being considered 1) a Social Justice Warrior (pejorative) by the university administration or 2) a race traitor by his community. Reed gets infinite mileage out of petty politics and small-minded backstabbing. 

Abigail by Magda Szabó, translated by Len Rix

Campus novels sometimes catch flack for not having “stakes”—this book cannot be accused of such. Set in Hungary against the backdrop of WWII, Szabó demonstrates how war touches every corner of life and even if you ensconce your daughter at a boarding school for safekeeping, there are limits to a father’s protection in wartime. The wonder of this book is how Szabó conveys the small moments of adolescence—pettiness, inside jokes, crushes—do not cease to exist even under the most dire circumstances. There is still joy and beauty and mischief when the world is falling apart around you. 

Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly

This is my most unconventional pick because I’m recommending one specific third of this criticism-cum-memoir. Part 3, “A Georgian Boyhood,” is Connolly’s autobiography of his time at Eton, where he was friends with George Orwell. The title of this book is drawn from the idea that many of the “most promising” students are the ones who end up as disappointments: “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.” Thus, to be an “enemy of promise” is to gird yourself against a jinx of sorts. I find it presciently self-aware that Connolly completes his literary criticism (parts 1 and 2) with a description of his schooldays to provide context for how and why he thinks about books. His Eton education informed his perspective (and prejudices) on literature and it illuminates his critical writing to understand how he came to think the way he does. 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Imagine your teacher is a fascist who puts up pictures of Mussolini in your sixth grade classroom—and she’s incredibly charismatic. The campus in question is the Marcia Blaine School for Girls and the ineffable Miss Brodie sticks with her students from age 10 through 17. This book is a hilarious examination of the teacher-student dynamic and how potentially dangerous the combination of impressionable kids and an agenda-having instructor can be. Since it’s Muriel Spark, she keeps it light and errs on the side of comedy but the sinister implications land. (When friends ask for a short book recommendation, this is the 150-page novel I point them to.)

Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy 

Don’t read this if you need someone to “root for”. Almost every character is unlikeable, irredeemable, and/or selfish—and I only wish this book were longer. The fact that McCarthy draws on her experiences as a professor at Bard and Sarah Lawrence makes me deeply curious about how the book was received by her ex-colleagues (who are represented as the absolute last people you would ever want to work beside.) I love a well-drawn hypocrite and Henry Mulcahy (who casts himself as the victim of a witch hunt) is painfully believable in his intellectual posturing and campaign to get other faculty members on his side. 

The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss

When you look back on your schooldays, there is probably at least one authority figure who still feels larger than life. Auchincloss captures the fascinating phenomenon of an institution being carried on the back of one such person. Headmaster Prescott is beloved by (almost) all who pass through the prep school’s halls and the prospect of his retirement is a death knell for the school. The hero worship Prescott receives and the weight of his failures counterbalance each other to create a character who also manages to carry this entire book. The Rector of Justin is both a paean to wonderful schools and also a cautionary tale about believing in your own mythos.

Come and Get It by Kiley Reid 

College campuses are ripe for discussions about class—where else do legacy nepo-babies and first-gen scholarship students cross paths constantly? It’s an extreme melting pot that forces awkward questions out into the open at every turn. Reid’s Such a Fun Age probed into class-race-power dynamics of a Black babysitter and white mom. And this follow-up similarly examines grey zones between an RA, a visiting professor/journalist, and a transfer student who fled her previous school. There’s nothing more entertaining than asking young adults what they think is “tacky” and “classy”—and that’s exactly how Come and Get It opens. When you grow up, you learn not to answer the tacky/classy question because it is only ever asked to cast you as a mouthpiece for a certain milieu.