REVIEW: Letter to Jimmy by Alain Mabanckou

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Seven years ago, on the twentieth anniversary of James Baldwin’s death, African author and scholar Alain Mabanckou composed a book-length missive to the great American writer, delivering bitter news from the new millennium: “If you return to this world, Jimmy, you will judge your homeland even more severely than you did when you were alive.”

In the seven years between the first publication of Mabanckou’s Letter To Jimmy and the book’s new translation from the original French, Baldwin’s homeland has made no more progress toward racial understanding — toward becoming an undivided nation — than it did in the twenty years after Baldwin’s death or in the two decades prior, following the period during which Baldwin bore witness as the leading minds of black resistance were successively murdered. Medgar Evers. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King, Jr. Fred Hampton.

“I couldn’t stay in America,” Baldwin said of his despair in the aftermath to those killings. “I had to leave.”

With the passage of time, hopes once stalled under the gun have stagnated, surfacing time and again in the horrific reek of black men being shot in the street, shot under the color of real or assumed authority, shot dead in the bloody mess of a racist paradigm that makes a brutal lie of the most basic lesson mothers and fathers teach their children: Human life is precious, a sacred gift to be preserved at all costs. This rule can tolerate no exceptions and throughout his life and writing Baldwin summoned all of his profound wit, erudition, and fury to force his countrymen to wake up to the fundamental paradox of American life, the incompatible primordiality that our founding rights and freedoms were built upon a calculated decision to view black lives as a disposable commodity. The profit-point of that commodity may shift from one generation to the next, but as the trade evolves into new and unforeseen industries, the essential disposability remains, passed down in the seamless ease with which white men continue to pull the trigger on black targets.

James Baldwin loved America because he loved himself and he recognized himself as truly American — he could have come from no place else — and Mabanckou’s conclusion is all the more sobering in light of the fact that Baldwin judged his birth country with the searing betrayal that only boils forth when a loved-one disappoints us so thoroughly. Mabanckou centers Baldwin’s work as an act of “understanding the collective through the individual,” and through the personal Baldwin persistently challenged the national conscience, whether expanding from the tenant-landlord disputes of his own upbringing in order to implicate taxi-drivers, teachers, social workers, cops, Con Ed, the army, Albany, Wall Street, Washington, and an entire exploitative system in “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White” or addressing a grim and compassionate correspondence to his own nephew on the 100th anniversary of The Emancipation, writing in The Fire Next Time:

“I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.”

***

Unexpected connections are a generative source of literature and Mabanckou’s Letter To Jimmy is sparked by the bond between seekers who’ve traveled common paths but never met: where Baldwin left his home in New York and found his authorial voice as an ex-pat in Paris, the Congo-Brazzaville-born Mabanckou left his home continent for France before arriving in Southern California. While earning numerous French literary prizes for bawdy novels equally-inspired by the oral tradition and Céline, Mabanckou has also spent the better part of a decade teaching at UCLA, and this role as an educator informs the tone of Letter To Jimmy.

Though Baldwin’s legacy has undergone a recent revival, in the early aughts his writing was in danger of slipping from view and Letter To Jimmy unfolds less as a correspondence between literary lions and more as an introduction to Jimmy. Mabanckou devotes the opening third of the short text to a linear chronology of Baldwin’s childhood, an upbringing in Harlem marked by the cold preacher’s gaze of his adopted father and Baldwin’s own youthful dalliance with the pulpit. Depending on the reader’s angle of entry, this biographical material will provide either a clear-eyed view of crucial backstory, or — for those who’ve read Go Tell It On The Mountain and Baldwin’s autobiographical non-fiction — a passage over well-trod ground.

While narrating the circumstances of Baldwin’s life back to him, Mabanckou maintains the direct address of the epistolary form. Though not a failure of Sara Medi Ansari’s translation, in this mode of address the English language fails Mabanckou: the affectionate rise of the French tu es falls flat in the declarative second-person you are, while the unchanging state of English possessives turns the ta, tes, and ton in a graceful sentence like “Elle m’apparaît ajourd’hui comme le prolongement de tes personnages qui ont ta voix, tes gestes, ton rire, ta colère, ton exaspération” into a rigid repetition of your, your, your, your, your, your.

Translation aside, correspondence is, at heart, an act of give-and-take and throughout the book there is room for far more “I” from Mabanckou. Deferring to the greater reputation of his counterpart — and an aim to educate rather than disclose — Mabanckou quotes extensively from both Baldwin and his biographers while also engaging influential post-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Albert Memmi. This august company may not be the place for the tipsy digressions and reeling gleeful profanity of Mabanckou’s fiction, but it is still notable how little of himself the author reveals over the course of his “letter,” countering both his choice of form and his own reading of Baldwin, through which the collective can be powerfully addressed via the personal.

***

If I were to write my own letter to Jimmy it would begin with an apology; not on behalf of my race — for I’m certain Baldwin would’ve raised an eye and scoffed at my lack of authority to make such an offer — but rather for my initial failure to read him on the pure terms to which he aspired: those of “an honest man and a good writer.”

Growing up, raised in the damp whitescapes of Oregon, I found myself drawn to the hardened edges of punk, noir, and the steelier strains of black protest. Breathlessly reading Soul On Ice and Stokely Carmichael, bumping Public Enemy and the X-Clan; when Ice Cube gave up Olde English 40’s and began endorsing St. Ides, I too switched my preferred brand of malt liquor.

Yes, let’s pause a moment and allow that image to sink in.

Baldwin would label this liberal phenomena “a bizarre species of guilty eroticism,” though in my teenage case the erotics were seeded less in guilt than in desire, consuming black rage to compensate for the many lacks of adolescence: worldliness, physical maturity, purpose, depth, and so on. Grounded in the mythos of the Black Panthers, I ranged back to The Black Jacobins and then dove deep into Harold Cruse’s seminal 1967 text, The Crisis Of The Negro Intellectual.

Exhibit A of that “crisis”: Baldwin, James.

Damn but Cruse laid into Jimmy. For Baldwin’s crime of failing to endorse a political-economic model of black nationalism, Cruse blasted the author for being out of touch, deluded, and belonging to a complacent class of “writers (who) have therefore achieved nothing more in print than an agitated beating of their literary breasts. They are lost sheep bleating to the God of Freedom for their deliverance.”

In Letter To Jimmy, as an example of the divisive response to Baldwin’s work among the American black community, Mabanckou references Eldridge Cleaver’s even more caustic view of the author, quoting a passage from Soul On Ice that I’d since forgotten but certainly once internalized: “There is in the work of James Baldwin the most agonizing, complete hatred for Blacks, in particular for himself, and the most shameful, ardent and servile attraction to Whites than can be found in the work of any other black American writer of our day.”

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Only at one time I bought every explosive word — Cleaver and Cruse were selling an agenda and I had endless needs to fill. In my imagined open-mindedness I was in practice subscribing to the flip-side of the very same paradigm that views black defiance as a threatening — and thus justifiably disposable — form of savagery. No less one-dimensional, my idolization and commodification of black protest left me among those who did not know; worse, it could accurately be said that I did not want to know. Cleaver and Cruse labeled Baldwin “soft” — anathema to my narrow uses — and that Tom-smear was sufficient cause for me to bypass Baldwin’s work for the entirety of my teens and twenties.

In my letter to Jimmy I would first apologize for this failure of character; then I would share the tail-chasing irony that if I’d read his work sooner I would’ve been much quicker to understand why I hadn’t read his work sooner; and finally I would offer quiet thanks for The Fire Next Time, Giovanni’s Room, No Name In The Street, and an entire body of work that sits not as a hollow artifact of its time but rises flush with brilliant turns of phrase that singe and thrill and challenge, words that remain vital to the living body of world literature.

***

On the heels of The Crisis Of The Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse spent nearly two decades teaching in the African-American Studies department at the University of Michigan: the book’s 1984 reprint includes a forward by a pair of scholars from the university. Perhaps it’s pure coincidence, perhaps it’s one of those generative sparks of connection, but before heading out west to Los Angeles Alain Mabanckou spent several years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan — though he never alludes to Cruse in the text, it’s easy to imagine Mabanckou drafting Letter To Jimmy as a gentle corrective to a roomful of misled Ann Arbor undergrads.

It’s certainly no coincidence that Letter To Jimmy comes into its own during a section titled “The Destruction Of Idols.” Freed from secondhand biography and on secure footing with a move to the common ground of France, Mabanckou delves into Baldwin’s rift with fellow ex-pat Richard Wright, an apprentice-mentor feud enflamed by the publication of Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which first appeared in the French literary journal Zero.

Every novel is surrounded by the infinite of what it’s not, and Baldwin’s “gotcha” point in the essay is a dubious one: he criticizes Native Son for Wright’s failure to accurately portray the nuances and cares of black family life, the flip-side of the exact argument made by Baldwin’s detractors. The protest novel lacks the depth of character to endure across generations; the personal novel lacks the political import to matter to a broad contemporary audience: the vertical versus the horizontal, a debate spinning endlessly.

Building from Baldwin’s critique of Native Son, Mabanckou lays out the basic framework of his own wide-ranging literary approach, one that seeks to avoid the natural limits of the protest novel. Citing the prevalence of African genres he refers to as “child soldier literature” and “Rwandan genocide literature,” Mabanckou writes: “If we are not careful, an African author will be able to do nothing but wait for the next disaster on his continent before starting a book in which he will spend more time denouncing than writing.”

Instead, Mabanckou has spent more time writing than denouncing. Sandwiched between a first-person screed from an incompetent, would-be spree killer (African Psycho, 2003) and the loquacious recollections of a quilled-rodent who doubles as a mass murderer (Memoirs Of A Porcupine, 2012), Mabanckou’s barfly saga Broken Glass (2010) stands as an exceptional tribute to free-roaming expression. Streaming in pages of wined-up, comma-strung clauses, Broken Glass trips back and forth between the dignity and indignities of palm-wine drunks and social outcasts, at times recalling Ben Okri’s towering short story “In The City Of Red Dust” as it traces the intimate rhythms of the barroom to indicate something greater about the forces that produce such overwhelming desperation.

***

“Is there a disproportionate amount of outrage sparked by an event, a disproportion linked to a kind of hierarchy of communities?”

Mabanckou poses this rhetorical question in the latter part of Letter To Jimmy, leading in to an examination of the differing responses to a brutal, anti-Semitic murder in the suburbs of Paris. In France, Mabanckou considers the notion of a black community something of “an illusion,” with potential members drawn from too many disparate cultures and colonial histories to cohere around a collective awareness.

This “collective awareness” distinguishes the American black community, and time and again a disproportion of outrage exposes the fault lines of our divided nation. If white youths were routinely being executed by the authorities — if their lives were being viewed as disposable either by cruel error or during the apprehension for minor offenses — members of the white community would summon every power at their disposal in pursuit of personal justice and institutional change. They would, to put it bluntly, freak the fuck out. Yet many of those same white citizens expect the black community to quietly take it on the chin and absorb corpse upon corpse, regarding these deaths as nothing more than an unfortunate function of the system which gives us our necessary freedoms.

Dead over twenty-five years, Baldwin had already seen Ferguson. He’d seen homicidal police justice perpetrated by “some blank American boy who is responsible only to some equally blank elder patriot.” He’d seen cases in which “the Grand Jury had judged their shooting of an unarmed, black adolescent as ‘justifiable homicide.’” He would’ve known there would be no fair trails in St. Louis and Staten Island, for there can be no trial when the prosecution and defense are already in agreement.

Baldwin cited this insidious, epidemic version of white supremacy as the organizing principle of the western world, and as the bodies continued to pile inexorably higher he viewed “outrage” as perhaps the only path to creating a new American morality:

“When power translates itself into tyranny, it means that the principles on which that power depended, and which were its justification, are bankrupt. When this happens, and it is happening now, power can only be defended by thugs and mediocrities — and seas of blood. The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, and dread looking into the eyes of their young; while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything.”

Baldwin published these words over 40 years ago, and in endurance and the word he saw those glimmers of hope that critics like Cruse considered delusional and divorced from true political reality. But hope is the only passage out of despair and Baldwin continually put words on the page in that most powerful act of hope, the belief that the collective could be reached through the personal.

From this hope we have Alain Mabanckou, addressing his Letter To Jimmy to a global audience. From this hope we have Claudia Rankine, riffing on Baldwin’s words and potently exposing how slight upon slight builds to a solid crushing mass in Citizen. From this hope we have Michelle Alexander, changing the national discourse with The New Jim Crow and concluding her bestseller with the “The Fire This Time.” From this hope we have Killer Mike, in the immediate helplessness and despair of the Ferguson decision — despite his unbearable fear for the safety of his children and his rage against the American war machine — from this hope he found words that may have been more profane but which would have suited Baldwin perfectly, words which held the power to reach millions:

“These motherfuckers got me today. But with that said… you motherfuckers will not own tomorrow.”

Letter to Jimmy: On the Twentieth Anniversary of Your Death

by Alain Mabanckou

Powells.com

Tiphanie Yanique on Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera

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Colin Winnette admires the writer Tiphanie Yanique, so he asked her to suggest a book. She suggested Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. Colin read it, then they talked about it.

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Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the short story collection, How to Escape from a Leper Colony (Graywolf Press in 2010), the picture book I Am the Virgin Islands (Little Bell Caribbean in 2012), and the novel Land of Love and Drowning, (Riverhead/Penguin 2014). She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for and by the National Book Foundation as one of the 5 Under 35. Her writing has been published in Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction and other places.

She is now an assistant professor in the MFA and Riggio Honors programs at the New School in New York City. She lives with her husband, son and daughter. They split their time between Brooklyn and St. Thomas.

Colin Winnette: When did you first read this book? Do you remember the exact circumstances that led to your picking it up?

Tiphanie Yanique: I remember hearing about the work of Gabriel García Márquez. I cannot remember ever reading this Love in the Time of Cholera in a particular class…but I know I discovered his work sometime in undergrad. I first read 100 Years of Solitude. I had the sense, while reading that, that I was engaging with something large and shattering. The kind of literature that knows it is attempting to address big things like nationhood and family. But I didn’t know shit about those things, so I read it mostly feeling these things going over my head. But I knew I WANTED to grasp these things. So I turned to Love in the Time of Cholera. It had the word love in it and this was something I’d been thinking very deeply about for a long time. I’d grown up on the love story of how my grandparents met. I’d already had a profound romantic love in my own life. So it seemed like a good entry point to this master’s work. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. This was also a novel about nationhood and family…but the entry point was romantic love.

CW: How did your grandparents meet?

TY: They met at a party. They danced to the Irving Berlin song, “They Say It’s Wonderful.” They were in love by the end of the night. These are the only facts they both admit to!

CW: When I first read this book, it struck me as incredibly romantic. This time around, I started to think it was…pragmatic, in a lot of ways.

TY: Oh, it’s both for sure. Both Fermina and Florentino are young when they first fall in love. They are trapped by circumstance. Their love is a rebellion. Their love defines them. Their love thrusts them into adulthood. Florentino stays there. He continues to create himself with Fermina’s gaze in mind. But Fermina, as a woman of her time and social status, has a sudden realization that she must be less rash in her choice of a life mate. Her adulthood means making a more deliberate choice. She chooses against passion, but in doing this she doesn’t choose against herself. It’s a different way to choose herself. And she doesn’t regret this choice…not for many years anyway. It does seem, though, that if we choose against romance, against passion and for stability, for safety, that we might sometimes end up happier, more successful…but that eventually we will have deep regret. We always want true love. Eventually, that’s what we want. Because, of course, it’s always what we want. Even if it’s the wrong choice.

CW: That’s a great way to put it, it was “a different way to choose herself.” So what is the foundation of her regret? There is love between Fermina and Dr. Urbino — a kind of love that I, if I’m being honest, found very moving in certain moments. So if she feels regret, longing for “true love,” how would you define or describe what true love means in the book? What sets these two relationships apart?

TY: The love between Fermina and Dr. Juvenal Urbino is no less true than the love between Fermina and Florentino. In fact, it might be more true. After all, Fermina and Juvenal raise a family together, share a household…mold their lives to fit the demands of their marriage. Many forms of love can’t sustain all that work. But there is no emotional beginning to Fermina and Dr. Urbino’s love. It grows from her practicality, not from her passion. A passionate love can mature to develop it’s own practical aspects, but it does seem much harder to kindle a passion that never arose organically to begin with. That doesn’t make one more true than the other, but it does seem to me that a love that begins with romance and intensity has a greater potential to be a fuller love, and therefore perhaps more fulfilling.

CW: GGM’s trademark “magical realism” is very tamed, very isolated and controlled in LITTOC. In my reading, the fantastic elements don’t alter the course of the story much, though they add texture and style to its telling. Is this a fable? An alternate world? A magical realm? Or does the book feel grounded in our everyday world. Your book felt much more fantastic and imaginative than this particular Marquez. And that’s not a dig at Marquez, I’m just saying this book has a fairly narrow focus, in some ways, or a smaller aperture than some of his other novels.

TY: How fascinating. I’ve never read Love in the Time of Cholera with the understanding that you’ve illuminated. I suppose this is because I see the love of Fermina and Florentino to be intensely magical. It is the main magical real element in the book. It’s incredibly pervasive, impacting the entire life of one character in even the most minute ways. I suppose I think this because of the way I think of magical realism, which is that it’s real. It’s life as we know it — you, too. Writers who choose to highlight the magical real, versus, say the psychological or social real, are just accessing a different level of human being and human interaction. The only way I can believe in a love that lasts a lifetime is via the lens of magical realism. That shit just does not make sense psychologically or socially.

CW: The story in LITTOC is an interesting blend of loose, unpredictable, and tidy. On a sentence level, there’s no telling where we’ll go next. But on a larger, narrative scale, we know exactly where the story is headed. I got the impression that he started with an ending in mind but let himself go wherever he felt like going as he worked his way toward it.

TY: Garcia Marquez was writing the story of how his parents met and married…so he says anyway. Of course, he adds his own embellishments, as any fiction writer would do. My guess is that he took what he knew of the story and then wrote it as beautifully as he could. I bet he hunted down the beauty…let it take him away and back towards the “”true” story. That beauty allows, perhaps even requires, a meandering journey.

CW: Oh, I had no idea. How interesting. I’m guessing Florentino and Fermina are standing in for his parents? Both relationships have their admirable qualities and their downsides. The “practical” side vs. the crazy in love side. The book makes a case for both, though it does seem ultimately to side with crazy in love.

TY: Yeah, well, Gabo always seemed to suggest that his parents were crazy in love. They made huge sacrifices to be with each other and to stay with each other. That didn’t stop his father from having children outside the marriage who his mom often took in as her own — so, not practical. Nope.

CW: Your new novel, Land of Love and Drowning, invites comparisons to LITTOC, and Marquez’s work in general. Did you think about your work in relation to Marquez’s when you were writing?

TY:I always think about Gabo. He’s the paternal deity that rules my writerly head. My title, in its subject and even it’s grammatical structure, is a tip to him. My novel also has a long “introduction” where characters who are historical to the rest of the novel take center stage and then disappear. LITTOC gave me permission to do this. Besides, structural elements however, there’s not much I’ve intentionally culled from LITTOC. Most of the magic in Land of Love and Drowning is intensely organic to the space I am writing about. The cowfoot woman, obeah women, the Anancy…these beings walk around the Virgin Islands. Eat in our restaurants. Sure, tourists don’t see them. And even people who have lived in in the VI for a few years might completely miss them. Islands keep their secrets. In some ways, because of Americanization and because of tourism, the Virgin Islands has done a fantastic job of hiding our more mysterious elements. It’s getting to the point now that we’re even hiding them from ourselves. I’m hoping literature might be a good place to put those mysteries…a place where we can remember them, but also still keep them close if needed.

CW: Do you have any personal stories like young Jacob’s?

TY: Oh, of course! But like I said…some secrets must be kept. So often these magical stories in our personal histories implicate someone we love…as Jacob’s story does. My family is relieved that I’m a fiction writer, not an essayist.

CW: That idea of “permission” is important, I think. Great books often offer a sense of freedom, I think. As a writer reading, I’m always waiting for that moment when the doors in my head start to open and all the blinds lift. What else did you learn from this book?

TY: One of the things this book teaches is that romantic love is still an important things to talk about in stories. Not just because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy, but because it’s IMPORTANT. It’s political, it’s social, it’s personal. But also it’s love. Come on. Nothing is more important.

CW: It’s also very difficult to write about. Or write about well, because on the other hand, it’s a very easy tool to use, narratively. (Why did she do it? Because she loved him/her.) In your opinion, what other books get it right?

TY: All the big things are hard to write about. Death, sex, war, love. They’re so achingly familiar — how to make them particular? How to make them reveal something about the human condition that they haven’t revealed in literature before? There’s a great book of literary criticism called The End of the Novel of Love. It’s by Vivian Gornick. She does a quick and sharp job of explaining why “she did it because she loved him” doesn’t much work in literature anymore. I’m with her. Writing about love these days is hard, hard work…but love, even romantic love, still remains vital to all the questions of why and how. So we’ve still got to write about it. I can think of quite a few books that are still trying to be about love. The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter, Jazz by Toni Morrison, All I Love and Know by Judith Frank, and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout come most urgently to my mind.

CW: Would you share a passage from the book, or a few sentences, something that you think is either representative or just exceptional on its own?

TY: Oh this is easy. Garcia Marquez’s opening lines are simply undeniable:

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almost always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Armour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escape the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.

New Charlie Hebdo Cover: “All Is Forgiven”

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After a brutal attack on the French weekly Charlie Hebdo left a dozen dead, the magazine vowed to continue publishing. Today, Liberation — who is helping finance the new issue — released this week’s cover:

Charlie Hebdo

The cover depicts the prophet Mohammad holding the Je Suis Charlie solidarity sign and a phrase that translates to “All Is Forgiven.” The issue will appear on Wednesday.

FICTION: Bisbee by Chris Offutt

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Lucy had been raised to hold grudges forever, but long ago realized it required more effort than she cared to exert. She remembered the very moment when she’d suddenly understood that forgiveness had nothing to do with an adversary, but would benefit solely herself. Her entire world-view had shifted, like discovering her house contained a new room full of light, a chamber she wanted to occupy forever.

Ten months before, Lucy had moved to Bisbee and found work in a breakfast café, having become the very person she feared most — a woman in a shapeless uniform serving eggs to working men, the oldest waitress in the place, alone and not wanting to be, living in a dump and drinking herself to sleep. She was not yet forty. She thought she should know better and felt worse for it.

An eighteen-year-old girl, Sheena Houston, joined the breakfast crew. Lucy envied her youth and vitality, the cheery optimism, her slim hips twitching among the tables. Lucy had been the same as Sheena twenty years ago in another town and had progressed nowhere. Worse, Sheena actively sought Lucy’s attention, craving approval, trailing behind her like a pup who’d been kicked but never with sufficient severity.

During the mid-morning lull before lunch, their side-work included marrying half-empty ketchup bottles, refilling salt and pepper shakers, topping off the sugar containers. Sheena chattered about inconsequential subjects, a running narrative of what lay immediately before her, a commentary on the obvious. Occasionally she tested safe opinions. She laughed readily. The boss liked her and the cooks strove to conceal her errors. In another context, Lucy might have found her adorable — slight and needy in old loafers — but Lucy was reminded of all that she herself had lost: everyone she’d ever loved, a familiar landscape, the security of deep belonging, but most of all the naiveté of seeing life as fraught with promise.

For two weeks the girl had gotten on Lucy’s nerves. Fed up, her voice hard, Lucy finally said, “Get away from me. I’m your co-worker not your friend.” Sheena’s face turned red as if she’d been slapped. Her eyes, formerly as brimful of hope as an egg is of yolk, filled with tears. She hurried to the kitchen and Lucy ignored her during the rest of the shift, grateful for the greater efficiency of working alone. She counted her tips at the formica breakfast bar, cashed her change into folding money, and left.

The incessant sunlight pressed against Lucy as if she’d stepped into the sea. Though mid-September, there was little autumn to behold. In the parking lot Sheena was leaning against Lucy’s car, her face downcast.

“Why do you hate me?” Sheena said. “I only want to be like you.”

Lucy’s knees seemed to give, as if the struts that held her upright had become elastic. Her polyester uniform clung to her skin, smelling of bacon, stained along the perimeter of her apron. She was tired. Perspiration sheened her face. This was the girl’s hometown. She no doubt wanted out, same as Lucy wanted out of her own. It had never occurred to Lucy that seeing her young self in Sheena was a two-way enterprise. Sheena’s life must feel drastic for Lucy’s to appear worthy of emulation.

The unforeseen arrival of forgiveness relieved Lucy of a burden she didn’t know she carried, an invisible shawl of stone, grudges she’d always held against herself. She had no enemies, carried no buried slights. Not that she hadn’t felt the burning iron of betrayal many times — lied to, taken advantage of, abandoned — left alone awash in the numb opacity of loss. But she had done her share of hurting people, too. It all worked out in the end. The balance of life was achieved by weighted extremes. She had no appetite for moderation, no patience for people who did.

With the stunning clarity of sunup after a fierce storm, Lucy realized that her life wasn’t a case of failing to learn from her mistakes, but preferring to repeat the patterns again and again. Waitress shoes, a narrow bed, a damaged man. A cheap suitcase and a new town. She wanted to warn the girl, to give advice Lucy had never received: don’t let them hit you, don’t drink on an empty stomach, don’t cry alone. But Lucy knew it wouldn’t have done her any good to hear it, any more than it would for Sheena.

Only two things ever helped in life. Any love Lucy could muster was reserved for the next reckless man, not this waif weeping in the harsh light. She offered the day’s tip money.

“You’re wrong,” Lucy said. “I don’t hate you.”

Sheena started to speak then didn’t. She took the money.

“You hate this town,” Lucy said. “Get out before you hate yourself.”

She got in her car and drove past a fancy community of large bland buildings and raised expanses of grass, irrigated at night. The grass didn’t actually grow, but had been unfurled from trucks and pressed into place. Few people trod upon the slim shards of yard. A mile farther she entered her own neighborhood of strip malls and pawnshops, cement and asphalt, used car lots and yards of dirt. The bus stops lacked shade.

Lucy parked and climbed an exterior staircase composed of pre-made concrete to her one-room apartment. She removed her greasy waitress smock and cursed herself for the day’s work with nothing to show. What kind of life was she leading? What kind of name was Sheena?

The last time she lived in a house, she’d gotten mixed up with a man who’d spent three years hand-building a stone enclosure of water for Koi fish. Swelled as a pup with pride, he’d shown her his project, which Lucy considered a lot of work simply to maintain overgrown carp. In the afternoons they drank beside the pool. He liked to talk and she didn’t like to be alone. He fired a BB pistol at neighborhood cats attempting to prey on his fish. Lucy asked him to stop and he set booby traps instead. One trap caught a gopher, which in turn drew a coyote that ate all his precious Koi. He blamed Lucy. She quit living in houses. Now she was alone after all.

She poured vodka and drank it in her underwear, facing a fan. The AC was a window unit that didn’t actually cool the air, just barely cut the heat and blew desert dust that made her sneeze. After two drinks she laughed at herself — she’d moved from saving cats to giving her money away. She closed her eyes. A while later she awoke disoriented from a dream she’d had consistently since childhood — lost in a vast house, wandering long halls, opening doors and encountering people she’d met in different places. Now they were quite friendly with each other, never acknowledging her as she sought an exit, ignored her as if she was a ghost. She began running a long hall, trying to ward away the awareness that something serious was amiss.

Lucy sat in the chair, blinking herself fully awake until the imagery faded. Each time she had the dream, the house was bigger, as if her continued existence furthered its renovation. After a shower she ate leftover food from the refrigerator. She packed her clothes, loaded the car, and left. She’d try California next. Each time she began a new life she momentarily wished she had a pistol, a small one. She didn’t know why. She supposed it was about confidence and fear. If she’d bought one, she’d have pawned it by now. Someone else would own it, and no telling what they’d do with it, who they’d shoot, maybe Sheena. Lucy hoped she got out before someone did. It could happen easily. Anything could.

“Bisbee” originally appeared in Okey-Panky, a weekly magazine of Electric Literature. 

Writing An Obituary Over Lunch

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The Rib Room

Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet towards which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all of our possible selves that will never be.
 — Rene Dubos

We were at the Rib Room, table five, drinking with my father’s fresh ghost, when a reporter from the New Orleans’ Times-Picayune called my older brother, who’d made it from Pittsburgh to the deathbed just in time. The paper was doing one of those article-length obituaries they publish for people of some civic prominence and wanted to ask a few questions about our father’s life. The two oldest siblings passed the phone back and forth, answering the reporter’s questions with a fuzzy magnification brought on by lunch-time martinis, the rest of us holding in our laughter. I sat across from them in the padded booth, the mortified middle child, mouthing “stop it” over my Beefeaters.

Dad had held court at table five for over twenty-five years, since we were teenagers. The place had hardly changed. Waiters in maroon jackets eternally placed hot French bread in paper wrappers onto white tablecloths. Church-high ceilings with faux Tudor rafters, walls veneered with veiny green and black marble meeting a polished flagstone floor. The usual architectural suggestion — affluence as some sort of ancient privilege, anchored by the prizes of geology. The balcony-sheltered windows kept the noon sunlight indirect and golden, the bare bulbs of sconces and chandeliers merely embellishing the light.

I never quite understood Dad’s attachment to the place. I could only figure his weekly ritual of Friday lunch at the Rib Room was his reward as a self-made man, a rust-belt refugee from a working poor family who got his first job, at a grocery, at ten, worked as a grinder in a foundry at nineteen, and was the youngest strike force chief against organized crime for the Department of Justice by twenty-seven. Not just a reward, but also a perverse “fuck you” to the establishment, as he rebelled against any and all establishments, especially ones he was associated with. His white-shoe law firm, the government, the Catholic Church.

Also: Dad nurtured a grudge like a bonsai tree, tending and shaping, maintaining its diminutive, eternal perfection. Back in the 70’s as a young federal prosecutor, he’d wanted to pick up the check at the Rib Room to celebrate a department victory. But, he was a struggling government employee with eight children and his credit card was declined. The humiliation lodged and stuck. Eventually, he gave up a job he loved and turned to the private sector — corporate defense. Maybe it was a consolation prize, becoming a regular at the Rib Room. Pouring his Beefeater’s from a martini pitcher with Gisleson etched in the glass, picking up checks at table five for the next couple decades.

The Times-Picayune article that came out a few days before the funeral was fine. Biographical details, highlights of the more prominent cases he tried, even ones he would’ve considered disappointments. Padded here and there with a little bullshit from our luncheon. It listed the children who survived him but not those who did not, a sad sort of erasure for his youngest daughters, twins who’d committed suicide several years before. Especially sad since it’s likely the twins were the last ones on his mind as he slipped away from us, dying a patriarch’s death with all of his remaining children crowding his bedside, attending the running down of his animal machine, anticlimactic, exhausting.

Running exactly parallel on the newspaper page a mere centimeter to the left of Dad’s obituary was a story that kept distracting me. “Injuries cited in death at old hotel.” A decomposing body had been found at the bottom of an elevator shaft in an abandoned Howard Johnson’s hotel out in the Katrina-ravaged-but-slowly-recovering New Orleans East. The coroner’s office said that he’d been dead about four to seven days and that he’d died from internal bleeding from pelvic fractures. They had released a description to help ID him. “The man is white, between 20 and 30 years old, 5 feet 7 inches, 148 pounds, and has light brown hair, a full beard and a mustache… The man also has a twisted right incisor in the right side of his mouth. He had several tattoos on his body, including ‘Sublime’ on his right inner forearm, a Cancer zodiac symbol on his left inner forearm and a cross on his right lower thigh with the letters ‘AT’ on one side and ‘RM’ on the other…He wore a white shell necklace, a brown shirt and a brown pants and brown boots.” They were awaiting toxicology reports.

Apparently, it doesn’t matter who speaks for you after you’re gone, your tattoos or your tipsy children, nor whether you died alone at the bottom of an elevator shaft, anonymous in tunneling darkness, or surrounded by your family Uptown at Touro Infirmary under excellent care, you both end up side by side on page B-4 of the Metro section of the Times-Picayune on January 19, 2012.

But something about the man in the elevator shaft resonated with my dad. He often dressed monochromatically, too — in all black, part of his general rebelliousness, a shadow thrown from a tough youth marked by police trouble and car crashes. The intensity of “Sublime” and the quirky ornament of the shell necklace. Dad was loner who loved cheesy holiday decorations and throwing big parties. Self-isolating, drawn to the dark margins. A few times he’d arrive home late in his three-piece suit with a black eye or bloody lip and improbable excuses. Dad’s last act in this world, after week of chemo treatments, was to visit his death row client in Angola Prison, to whom he was deeply attached.

In the last real conversation I had with him, at the Rib Room a couple weeks before he died, he said no one really knew him, not even my mom. Burying an enigma seemed even more crushing. Dad’s ambitions and weaknesses could have led him anywhere. That man in brown at the bottom of the elevator shaft could’ve been one of Dad’s possible selves, murdered and abandoned long ago, finally catching up to him in the stream.

POETRY: Sinkhole & The Drowning by Heather Altfeld

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Sinkhole
First the man’s aftershave, then his remote control,
the half-finished coffee curdling in the Pyrex mug,
the whole bureau everything was perched on,
with the photograph of the girlfriend he’d missed

for ten years wrapped in tinfoil and stuck with gum
to its underside, and then the hat at the tiptop
of his coatrack, its feather sailing in the air to land
on a bit of tile that would still be left in this world,

the Charmin roll from the bathroom,
bobbling happily into neverness,
the tube socks one at a time
to be joined together in the watery hereafter,

and finally the man himself, charmed for a millisecond
to be chosen like this, then quickened and rigid
with Vesuvian terror, inhaled and deposited
in the terrible quarry beneath us. Let’s face it,

the earth has propped all of us so long, and so miserably,
on her table, teetering under our weight,
the familiar mother, five-thirty on a weeknight,
trapped three carts in on the worst grocery line in America,

her arms finally giving way to spill the crying child
beneath her legs, his rejected hair streaming out
against our shoes while her half gallon of milk
streams down the sticky black runway and they have to call

for an extra checker on five. It can no longer
simply eject us, this bright place, with its limestone
sagging and its shale hungry and our boats so delicious,

it can no longer just strike itself against itself
in the great earthquakes of yesteryear,
laundering our cobbles and our shingles,
rubbling our libraries into one great papery heap,

leaving one small hand visible and reaching from the ruins
to remind us what gravity really looks like;

now she is forced to swallow us whole.
This is how it feels so often to love and be loved
these days; volleying about in the arms of the trying,
flailing and defenseless like impotent squid

who will be sucked forever into the bucket of the heart,
chopped and ringed and peppered with sadness
and flash-fried exactly as we were. Now, we’ll have to strap tanks
to our backs to tunnel and learn this cave beneath us,

the dimensions of her cavities, the precise location
of these new graves. Who knows
what forgotten automat we might find
still spinning in its hollows, its mute sandwiches

blinking at the ugly sturgeons? Who knows what kind of music
we might learn down there, or how we will even know
how to hear it, as it laps its thick green sound against our foggy masks?

The Drowning

A plump duck dips the mallet of his head
into the ooze of a black swamp.
North the inky geese
ski with forked feet on frozen lakes,
burst beaky holes for the drugged
and sleeping minnows. In the great bowl

of the ocean, fishermen taped
to the hull of their boats by prayer
hoist heavy wet nets back onto the planks.
Laundry spanks the creek rocks
and women sip from cupped hands,
pat bare clavicles with dripping palms.
Cowlicked boys arc their pee upstream,
laughing at the tandem of splashing yellow crescents.
At the holy edge of the river,

the newborn’s body still glazed with heaven is held
high up to the light, leaking the last helium of the stars
as his tiny forehead catches the first pane of sun.
They plink a drop of water between his eyes
where it beads and rolls like god’s marble,
shimmies down his temples like the tears
that will fall on the floating pyre of his withered body

in years to come. Agua fresco, agua frio,
aqua, l’eau, l’eau du vie vive le mayim.
And then two hours after the co-ed girl

tailgated three Blue Ribbons
and a pink winecooler, she stripped
down to her shoestring bikini, plugged her nose,
and cannonballed straight into the chutes
at the south fork of the Yuba
where the drill bit of her body
twirled and bored
and stopped
between two slabs of granite.
Freezing and stuck
beneath the bright current of water,
she began to die. Downstream

we swam and blinked in the belly of water.
They landed two medevac helicopters
twenty feet from us
and began to be the men
who moved the rocks. Boulders

shifting at the speed of boulders shifting,
river cops ordering the audience of bathers
to stay put for safety’s sake. We watched them

watch her feet hardening,
watched them try to lift her cold heart
out from the bruised socket of her body,
watched the stones’ turn
pillow the wet feather of her form
into their hands. Then we became

the first people swimming in the river
where she had died, pooled
in the length of her last breath,
her long hair netted in the same water
where our hair still dripped against our shoulders,

all of our shivers
carried away from us in the hurried tumble,
pressing us back into the dark cygnets of ourselves
as we watched them carry the table of her blue form
back from the bottom of the stars.

“Sinkhole” and “The Drowning” originally appeared in Okey-Panky, a weekly magazine of Electric Literature.

Sunday Sundries: Literary Links from Around the Web (January 11th)

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Looking for some Sunday reading? Here are some literary links from around the web that you might have missed:

Karen Swallow Prior says T. S. Eliot invented the hipsters… before it was cool

The Millions rounds-up the best advice writers have ever received

Writers on Twitter, be careful! Retweeting your own praise might make you a monster!

Pankaj Mishra and Benjamin Moser debate if writers can still “make it new”

Mark Zuckerberg is creating the world’s largest book club

Ben Lerner: ‘People say, “Oh, here’s another Brooklyn novel by a guy with glasses”’

Get distracted while listening to audiobooks? Here’s why

Got a question about cats, jazz, or ghosts? Haruki Murakami is starting an advice column for fans

8 authors who became successes after 50

Celeste Ng helps us get over our Asian-American women writers blindspot

Lastly, if you haven’t read The Millions first-half book preview, you really should

L.A. Traffic Sign Hacked to Say “Read a Fucking Book”

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Here’s a traffic sign we can all agree to follow. Thursday a Los Angeles traffic sign was hacked to suggest everyone “read a fucking book.” The picture was taken by journalist Daina Beth Solomon.

LA Weekly reports:

The TMI spokeswoman said whomever did this would have had to physically break into the trailer-based sign. But she did acknowledge the possibility that it’s wi-fi enabled.

“It looks like it was hacked,” agreed Tina Backstrom of the L.A. Department of Transportation.

Electric Literature Seeks an Editorial Intern for the Winter/Spring Semester

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Electric Literature internships provide an in-depth introduction to digital publishing and the New York literary scene. Because we are a small, not-for-profit publisher, we provide unique opportunities for professional development and resume-building.

As an Electric Literature intern, you are encouraged to become involved in any aspect of our work that interests you. Sure, you’ll go to the post-office, but you’ll also do things like contribute to editorial decisions, interview authors, and attend cool literary events.

Responsibilities:

  • Read submissions and participate in editorial discussions
  • Comb the web and social media for breaking literary news
  • Copy edit
  • Migrate the Recommended Reading archives
  • Contribute content to electricliterature.com
  • Staff events
  • Select images to pair with articles
  • Update contact databases

Skills:

  • Knowledge of WordPress, Tumblr, and social media platforms
  • Familiarity with HTML
  • Basic understanding of Photoshop and inDesign
  • Firm grasp of grammar and spelling, with a hawkish attention to detail

The ideal candidate:

  • Has an educational background in literature or creative writing
  • Participates in the contemporary literary scene
  • Regularly reads literary magazines and literary websites (including but not limited to Recommended Reading and electricliterature.com)
  • Believes strongly in the Electric Literature mission: To amplify the power of storytelling with digital innovation
  • Is hard working, pays great attention to detail, and can work independently
  • Writes clearly and with personality
  • Has an eye for design and knows what images will grab reader’s attention

This is an unpaid, part time internship (10–20 hours/week), with opportunities for hire. Candidates must be able to come to our downtown Brooklyn office at least 3 days/week. We are happy to work with universities and MFA programs to provide course credit. This 5 month internship runs from the end of January through May (exact dates are flexible). To apply, please send a cover letter and resume to halimah@electricliterature.com by January 23, 2015.

You do not have to be a student to apply.