Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s The Road to the Salt Sea is a novel that examines trans-Saharan migration. The Nigerian author does not shy away from depicting violence and suffering on the page, but his account is one of empathy, tenderness, and humanity.
The novel opens with Able God attempting to escape from his country because of his involvement in a murder. Able God and Akudo, a sex worker and victim of abuse, murdered Dr. Badero in an act of self-defense at Hotel Atrium where Able God works an underpaid job despite being a university graduate. In desperation, Able God has no choice but to submit himself to Ben Ten, a swindler and human trafficker, whose ploy he had earlier rebuffed. Alongside Able God are Mofuru and Ghaddafi who, frustrated by the poverty and emptiness of their lives, are placing their hopes on being ferried to Italy where they could begin life again, begin living for the first time. But that promised life, through the desert and the sea, becomes a gift of death and dying, as the immigrants end up in Libya as prisoners of hope. The Road to the Salt Sea reveals what happens to people, a people, when they leave home in search of a future.
Darlington Chibueze Anuonye: Reading The Road to the Salt Sea made me think of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s remark that his novel Afterlives evolved from his deep interest in “the manner in which people retrieve their lives after trauma.” This is why Afterlives, indeed Gurnah’s works, embodies emotions that enable readers to empathize with even cruel characters. That sense of humane handling of violence manifests in your novel. I really want to know how you came to the decision to write this book.
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé: Before I get into my reasons for writing the novel, I’d like to address your insightful comment on the theme of violence in my novel. The discussion surrounding trauma and violence in African literature has always fascinated me. While I agree that there should be different representations of what is happening on the continent, as well as a diverse range of stories and voices, given the continent’s numerous difficulties, I find it disingenuous when critics attack a writer for simply serving as a mirror for society. That’s why terms like “poverty porn” or “trauma porn” bother me. Art does not exist in a vacuum, and artists live in a real world where people are confronted daily with violence and its consequences. Since violence is part of our collective experience and consciousness, shouldn’t it also be part of our art? I believe the legitimacy of writing about violence will not change, even if some people choose to disregard it, be unconcerned about it, or find it unpleasant. I also think it is an elitist element to the trauma porn school of thought. I love that you described my depiction of violence in my novel as “humane,” because there is a way to do it well. Violence should not be used simply for the sake of violence.
Many years ago, on a road trip through four nations, I came across a group of migrants who had made the arduous journey over the Sahara and had been deported. They told me stories that had stayed with me for years until I did something about them. I am glad this novel exists because the trans-Saharan migration crisis is not only underreported in the media, but more so in literature. The Road to the Salt Sea is a story of hope and resilience. I like that Gurnah is interested in “the manner in which people retrieve their lives after trauma.” I am also interested in moving on, even when people are not sure how to.
DCA: Thinking about Able God who survived the violence of that movement, but whose survival is marked by a disfigured sense of the world, I wonder: how is it possible to live again after so much loss of friends, family and the self?
Since violence is part of our collective experience and consciousness, shouldn’t it also be part of our art?
SK: I am interested in journeys, movements and crossroads and the toll traveling the road takes on travelers. Aside from the physical exhaustion commonly connected with traveling, there is the psychological one. So, this novel is my attempt to map out the “psychological wear and tear” of my characters as they proceed along the journey, some more noticeable than others. However, there is a sense that each of them is relying on something to keep them going and to alleviate the unpleasant impacts of the journey. For Ghadaffi, it’s his family, while for Morufu, it’s his aspirations to play football. At first, Able God is driven by fear and guilt, but his motivation gradually evolves into something more. He does things that he doesn’t even believe he is capable of. In the end, he bears the scars of a survivor which makes him even more determined, I think. The Road to the Salt Sea shows us that redemption is always possible. For Able, God the novel ends with the possibility of a new life, perhaps even a new family.
DCA: How come people like Ben Ten and Serge get away with the crimes they commit? We could say there was war in Libya at the time and that the country was stateless, but what of Nigeria, what kind of government remains ignorant of, or concerned about, such level of human abuse?
SK: The world, like in the novel, is full of villains like Ben Ten and Serge. They were called “vendors of misery” by one reviewer. They prey on unsuspecting victims, and in many ways, both big and small. Serge suffers the consequences of his crime in the story as some bad people do in real life. Ben Ten, however, fades from the story. We don’t know what happened to him, but it’s safe to presume that his criminal activities will continue unabated. This illustrates the other side of the coin as well: some people can get away with doing terrible things.
The Road to the Salt Sea is set some years after U.S./NATO’s violent intervention in Libya and the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi. Libya has become ungovernable and fractured since Gaddafi’s ouster, now ruled by warring factions and regional militia groups. Remember that Libya is the most perilous nation on the route to Europe. Nigeria and Libya are two nations plagued by political crises. The Nigerian government cares nothing about its citizens, except for the elites, and fosters ineptitude and corruption. Conditions are sometimes so dire for people that they believe their only alternative is to escape.
DCA: What has Nigeria done to make its citizens so desirous of escaping the nation so much that Mofuru and Ghaddafi saw a messiah in Ben Ten? Even in the Sahara, the immigrants chanced upon a decaying corpse beside whom a Nigerian passport was buried. Yet, the journey continued. But this is even beyond Nigeria. The number of passengers from other African countries that joined the trip on the way is heartbreaking. Your narrator offers some hints on why these characters were determined to escape their homes. War, economic hardship and political crises recurred frequently and loudly. But there’s even the strange example of Billy who believed he was “born in a body with the wrong nationality—he was born Senegalese, but he had always known he was French.” Isn’t it terrifyingly sad how the failure of a continent leaves its people vulnerable in the world?
Can our decisions influence our outcomes in life, or is there nothing an individual can do throughout their mortal life to change their fate?
SK: Absolutely. The continent’s numerous problems often inspire a certain kind of desperation among individuals, particularly the youth. There is also the idea that anything Western is better because of a deeply embedded colonial mindset. Since the 1990s, military dictatorships, interventionist policies by foreign governments, poverty, corruption, famine, and violence have pushed many sub-Saharan Africans to search for a better life in Europe and North America, continents widely perceived to be safe and prosperous. Yes, we have bad leaders and need attitudinal changes in Africa, but the global migrant issue is a crisis of inequality. Europe underdeveloped Africa and continues to do so in many respects today. Ama Atta Aido once said that Africa gave the west five hundred years and received nothing in return. In recent years, there has been a surge of military coups on the continent, toppling regimes governed by Western-backed politicians. These nations are now turning to countries such as Russia and China. I can see the motivation behind it, even if I think it’s a bad idea and they are trading one slave-master for another.
DCA: Do you think the artist has any responsibility in fixing a failed system of justice or to a failed nation?
SK: Making art is what we do as artists. In addition, we are members of society and citizens. We have societal responsibilities. Occasionally, the things we create serve as a mirror for society. It’s okay for artists to get involved in making change. Activism and the arts can be excellent allies, but not always. I think there is an unfair burden on African writers and Black writers in general to be political activist, to fix things. Artists should be free to do whatever they like. There is also an idea that art is inherently political.
DCA: Back to Able God, I almost wanted to say: what really is the onomastic impact of his name, since he had to suffer so much even though his god is able. Then, I thought about his life again: he survived. That matters, too. But I want to know your thought on this: how able is Able God’s god, that god his mother so melodramatically depended on?
Activism and the arts can be excellent allies, but not always.
SK: This is a book of paradoxes, one of which is the religious symbolism in his name and how it contrasts with his life events. I like characters with distinctive names, so the name Able God sprang to mind while I was considering renaming my protagonist—he had a different name in an earlier version of the work. I also realized that the name I chose resonated with one of the novel’s primary themes. The novel grapples with the idea of choices and predestination. Can our decisions influence our outcomes in life, or is there nothing an individual can do throughout their mortal life to change their fate? Able God battles with many forces in this novel including his own demons.
DCA: The silence that shrouds Dr. Badero’s abuse of Akudo is ominous. It was only from Able God’s sensitive observation of the sexual partners that we suspect, like Able God himself, that something was wrong in their relationship. I like how you rendered the passage: “A light-skinned woman was hunched up in the corner of the bed, sheet drawn to her chin… The corners of her lips were bloodied, and a long welt ran across her shoulder. She glanced up at Able God. As their eyes met, she quickly pulled the sheet over her shoulders and then resumed her gentle rocking. His mind strolled through many questions. From what he could see, there was no latext bodysuit, no manacles or whips. This was something else—something reprehensible had just happened.” What really happened?
SK: Badero is not only a sadomasochist but an abuser. He can get away with his crimes because of his societal status. This highlights the pervasive sexist culture of our clime, as well as the role of money and power in enabling abusers. There is a passage in the book that describes what I am talking about: “In a way, Able God felt wronged. He had known men like Dr. Badero all his life, men who dominated women—and who hurt them—men who thought sexual conquest was a God-given right.” I also wanted to explore the connection between sex trafficking and trans-Saharan migration. I attempted to explore how the circumstances are set up for sex trafficking to occur because my research found it to be a significant component of the global migration crisis. Nonetheless, Akudo has some autonomy in this novel which every character going through a bad situation should have.
The day the circus came to town, I was on duty mopping up blood so warm that steam wafted through the vast and windowless space. It puddled by the drains like spilt cranberry juice, but there was no deceiving myself about what it was, not with the feathers, the viscera. After two months working the abattoir, watching the chrome machine slit the juddering necks of turkeys was no worse than the violence of, say, a video game. The stench that once made me retch—blood, iron tang, bleach—even that I got used to. It was grim relief focusing outwards onto the birds funneling in single file, shuffling and squawking, knocking free clods of muck stuck to their lizard feet. At least I wasn’t one of them.
I was full of pep because I had a ticket to Miss Butler’s Big Folly. Once a year, it meandered to our shit town and tonight I was going. As a kid, Pa had dragged me along—flimsy attempt at bonding—but laughing at circus tricks was my one half-decent memory of him.
This was the year they found my father in bits by the sea. By that, I mean dead. I’d come home from studying at Oxford to play dutiful son and keep Ma company, who was going to bits herself. I didn’t blame her for clinging to the bottle but I’d been telling her a long time already to relinquish the feckless man, my father.
Our griefs were incompatible—I see that now: angsty teen, sloppy widow. Our pettiness piled up like the unwashed dishes moldering in the sink. She’d toss cans of beans, aiming to bruise my skull. I never retaliated like she wanted me to, like Pa used to. It was the only way she knew how to be.
I started keeping out, staying busy. There weren’t many jobs in town for a teen, but they did exist: pub work, that sort of thing. Truth told, I wanted the abattoir, some perversion about keeping death close, understanding it with what my hubris once considered my big intellect. I was eighteen and a fool. And death was just death, a brute fact, raw and unintelligible.
From a gangway across the abattoir, Skinner’s voice, “My office, chap! Now!” Joe Skinner, the bossman, was a kind of friend. I scrubbed my overalls and hands with soap that sputtered from a bucket with a nozzle. Skinner didn’t like me to show up a mess and come in reeking. Though he would never admit it, I think he was squeamish about blood.
There were rumors about Skinner. That the slaughterhouse was a front for laundering dirty money was more or less an open secret; he ran in half of southwest England’s junk from boats off the grubby pier. He’d come from dirt, same as me, but ever since he’d grafted his way into money, he fancied he was highborn gentry, always swaggering about and calling people chap and blowing his nose into silk handkerchiefs. He wore, invariably, three-piece tweeds, matching hunting cap to boot.
Trudging up the metal staircase, I heard wolf whistles from the men behind me. Each morning they drew straws for the worst job of all. I didn’t. Turkeys are chaotic elements. And while the chrome machine was very efficient, it wasn’t perfect. Rare times it missed, someone had to follow up with a stubby knife. Imagine standing there eight hours, slitting, becoming part-machine yourself. Skinner’s special dispensation had spared me the horror. And I was grateful. Still, whenever I met him, I always carried one of those stubby knives in my pocket. I can’t say why I felt the need. It wasn’t fear exactly, but the boss had secrets more than I was comfortable with.
In his office, Skinner sat cradled in an ergonomic throne, custom padding for his bad back. He sometimes made me rub his shoulders ‘til my thumbs hurt. His hulking desk had taken our biggest lads a full hour to lug up and jimmy in. A candle was burning that smelled tacky like holiday spice, cheap and sweet. The radio was tuned to something classical, but as usual he wasn’t really listening. Though Skinner was only in his forties, his face was already a fist of craggy lines, mouth always slightly gaped like he was about to pose a question. It made me jumpy. But he never asked me much of anything. We just played chess.
The first time we played I thrashed him, which pissed him off. But when I lost on purpose, he slammed the desk so hard the pieces jumped. Since then, he’d given himself permission to look up moves in Advanced Chess Strategy. Fair’s fair, he insisted. And he wasn’t a man to argue with.
Presently he was bragging about his antique board, all ivory, hand carved. Some tripe about it being a steal at auction.
“Isn’t ivory illegal?” I asked.
“Don’t talk about things you know nothing about, chap. How about some shut up.”
As usual, I was winning. He narrowed his eyes and poured two rums. “Try this,” he said, “Cask strength.”
“Rank.” I coughed. “Tastes like fucking glue, that does.”
“Wasted on you, chap.” He tutted. “Doesn’t know a nice thing.” Next came some crap about becoming a man, the old cliché about putting hair on my chest.
“I’m Cantonese. Chest hair is not my DNA.”
“Oh, he thinks he’s clever.” Skinner often spoke this way, as if to an imaginary audience, before backhanding me playfully on the arm. He paused. He had a bad habit of looming too close when he spoke. “Are you showering? You smell ghastly. I know what you need.” He peered through the blinds, then snapped them shut and swiveled the back of my chair around. I heard the desk drawer slide, then catch. Rummaging. My hand was in my pocket, fiddling with the handle of the stubby knife.
In the mornings, Skinner’s Benz crept in, then out again at night, like an amber-eyed cat, always surveilling. A private man he was. No one knew if there was a wife or kids or even friends.
Skinner never took an interest in his workers, so that first time he called me up from the killing floor all the men fell silent at their stations and tried not to stare.
“You’re all bone,” he said, “nothing to look at.” He pinched my shoulders, my wrists. “So ratty.”
He held his chin. He got a chicken tikka masala ready meal out the mini fridge and put it in the microwave. He watched me scarf it down with a sly smile, asked if I’d like another. I did. I ate slower. Then Skinner began to speak.
“We’re different, you and I,” he said, pacing like a general, “Not like the rest of them.” He swept his arm over his kingdom below. Muttered vagaries about my potential and taking me under his wing.
“That a pun?” I said.
“What?”
“Because wings round here get clipped and butchered?”
“Clever, clever,” he said. Then, slowly, mouth slightly hung, “You wouldn’t be taking the piss, now?”
I shut up. I ate curry.
Just that morning I’d seen Skinner make a grown man cry. Poor sod had drawn short straw. It wasn’t a race thing—he was Cantonese, too. Just bad luck. Skinner was the sort to tell you he didn’t see race then immediately proffer his disquisition on which immigrants from where worked the hardest, before calling himself gypsy scum, and with a grin. But it wasn’t the killing that broke the man. It was Skinner’s words—I saw it—and he didn’t get you by shouting, either. He had quiet ways of making you feel worthless, so that you’d work doggedly to get back his good graces.
I had no time for questions like was Skinner good or bad. He was good enough—kind enough, to me. When you pass your evenings with someone, even the oddest duck like Skinner, it is hard not to develop certain . . . attachments; I pitied him his loneliness and felt sometimes I even cared for him—though not once did I forget his power over me. How a single sharp word from that slurred mouth could make me quake.
“Why me?” I finally asked.
Skinner stopped pacing and turned with a bashful smile, like a toddler offering up his crayon drawing. He’d heard I was at Oxford; he’d studied there himself—so he said—but got kicked out for. . . . He trailed off, then, “what does it matter, chap. It’s been decades.”
So Skinner was lumping us together in his weird genteel fantasy. He’d plucked me out. Me. I was worthy—but of what I couldn’t surmise.
He started pacing again, rattling on. A crying injustice he’d never graduated, etc. He pinched his eyes before chucking a pistol onto the table. I just looked at the thing. And Skinner, doubled over, cackled. “Fancy a hunt?”
Round back of the abattoir were a few acres of woodland where Skinner loosed some lucky turkeys. His prize pheasants. What “hunting” meant for Skinner was running up behind the clueless birds and firing the gun at an angle, like in a gangster movie. I carried his ammo in a drawstring bag, chasing after the good Sir like some kind of golf caddy.
I carried his ammo in a drawstring bag, chasing after the good Sir like some kind of golf caddy.
The wind that morning was biting, I remember, and I breathed frost, covering my pink ears with pink hands to escape the bang of the pistol. He saw me shivering and offered his Italian leather gloves. They’re somewhere in a drawer—I still have them—though the brown dye has bled off and worn in places to suede.
I never saw him land a shot, not one. He would slap his thighs and say things like, “bloody close that time, no? Not a bad bit of sport this.” Understand turkeys are essentially idiot animals—standing targets there. He missed on purpose. There was a mellowness I sometimes caught in his eyes, the same absent look I’d glimpse in my reflection at the end of a day, wiping down the chrome surfaces. He didn’t have it in him to kill—I knew because I had no bloodlust either, not even for a turkey.
Back in Skinner’s office, rum still fizzing on my lips, I heard the drawer click shut again. I nosed my pits, my hair. Back then I had the long, unkempt mane of the death metal vocalists I idolized. Something tickled my scalp then—a barber’s comb and drops of some perfumed oil. Whenever the comb snagged I prepared to wince but instead of tugging it through the snarl, he was gentle.
“Your hair’s a knotted mess,” Skinner sneered. “I couldn’t stand the sight of it anymore. Doesn’t wee baby know how to groom?” For the five minutes he spent combing my hair—I was facing his office clock and counting every tick—he emasculated me. “No one will take you seriously in this life, little brat, if you don’t look sharp. Consider this a lesson.”
A lesson in what? I wondered.
Then he threw me with a casual question, a personal question. What were my plans for the weekend? I wanted to lie, but when someone is doing me a kindness, even one not asked for, lying makes me feel small.
“The circus, they still have those knocking about?” Then, comb hovering, he said, “I’ll tag along, chap, if you don’t mind.”
I was silent. I knew he wasn’t asking. The bastard had a comb in my hair and his thin digits on my scalp.
When he was done, Skinner slipped me a fifty-pound note as usual; he knew about Pa, Ma’s furies, too. That I was saving up to move out. He’d even trusted me with a set of keys to the abattoir so that, when things got bad at home, I could crash on the staff room sofa.
I watched him leave. The way he ambled to his Benz—those casually swinging arms, his lazy, reedy whistling—it was like he was leaving a kindergarten instead of a slaughterhouse.
The striped circus tent was atop a hill. Skinner and I peered at the laughing families filing towards us like ants. The tent’s mouth was a bright portal, out of which came cheesy pop tunes Ma and Pa used to dance to in the kitchen, tunes I was old enough to recognize but not name. I kicked at grass and inhaled. Salt smell, rock smell, brisk and metallic, hit me. And the waves walloped into the bluff. Not a kilometer away was the beach where they found Pa with junk in his veins—bad junk, Ma said—his legs all a tatter, calf bones where his shoulders should’ve been. Forensics knew him by his teeth. He’d either stumbled or flung himself off in a mad stupor. What did it matter. He’d not been home more than a handful of months in the past five years. And I’d not come near the sea since he’d died.
Skinner tossed my cheap ticket away and bought us front row. The circus used to be rammed; now it was at best half full. As a kid, the tent’s ceiling, suspended from thick cables, steel poles, had seemed impossibly tall, but now if I closed one eye, I could measure it in a few palm lengths. Pa used to clap like mad when the trapeze artists flipped, tapping his feet incessantly. Back then my toes didn’t reach the ground, so I fixated on his scruffy trainers, the hole in the mesh where his big toe danced out, his odd socks—one striped, one polka dot. Now I tapped my feet too, attempting to catch Pa’s rhythm, and told Skinner I half fancied a milkshake.
“Still a bloody kid at heart,” he roared. “I know, we’ll spike it with whisky.”
People stole glances at us—small-town celebrity like Skinner, here doing God knows with this Asian kid. I worried about the optics of the situation.
We sat silent, drinking spiked milkshakes through fat straws, slurping horribly, now and then throwing fistfuls of popcorn at our gobs. Eventually I said, “This milkshake is pretty grim.”
“It’s pigswill.” Skinner winked. “I put doubles in them.”
“I don’t want it,” I said.
The pit was edged in dark velvet curtains that swallowed the floodlights. Briefly, I saw them parted by a white-gloved stagehand. Behind the velvet was a flash of falling red as the mouth of a caged tiger yawned to catch some scrap of flesh.
Skinner was saying, “No, no. We finish what we start, chap. We don’t waste money. That’s another lesson free if you like—the milkshake was, what, three-eighty bob plus the shots plus tip and because I’m generous, as you well know, as everyone here knows, that makes twenty. A twenty, chap, a twenty, when I was your age what for a twenty I couldn’t buy” . . . etc. Christ how he maundered on, his wrists flapping magisterially.
I was saved from his diatribe by the lights dimming. A spotlight tickled the far edge of the pit. A brass band started wheezing false notes, and sleeveless men beat out a drumroll. The ringmaster in a top hat snuck his chubby face out from behind the curtain. He grinned with his mouth full of cigar, big as a gorilla’s finger. Skinner pointed and said, helpfully, “Show’s about to start.”
The things we saw that night were as follows: four riders on tiny motorcycles going 360 round a globe-shaped cage, no helmets; two contortionists pretzeled in glass boxes; a thickset man firing himself out of a cannon, pink helmet this time; a jilted woman in a pinstripe suit throwing knives at an alleged former lover crucified on plywood and spinning; a magician who, when the spotlight fell on me and Skinner, embarrassed us by manifesting a king of hearts into my pocket. It was entertaining, sure, but the tent had lost its childlike mystery. Such a ludicrous place. But what profundity did I expect to find? I was at the fucking circus.
When the tigers strutted out, I felt Skinner grip the bench. Three tigers. They didn’t seem real, motionless on plinths, waiting for the beastmaster to issue a command. When he finally blew his whistle, they strutted on hind legs, jumped through rings of fire. That heat was real, no mistake. But the tigers you could have convinced me were animatronic, their eyes so cold, like cogs were clinking behind their skulls.
Skinner snapped his fingers and pointed. “That’s fucked, chap. Who said anything about animals.”
“It was on the flyer.” I blinked at him, then added, “It’s a circus.”
“What’s next, a giraffe?”
“Sure, or an elephant.”
People stared. He was nearly shouting, “Consider an elephant, on the road and in a tiny box.”
“Skinner, you own an abattoir.”
“Thanks,” he sneered. “I nearly forgot. Thing is, some animals belong in cages, others don’t.”
“It’s what, fifty turkeys to a tiger, sixty? Relax.”
“Higher-order animals. Try a million turkeys.” Then, “What’s that look? I’m a hypocrite, is it?” He leaned close his ugly mug. I saw every black pore.
I wished I’d come alone. Not because of the lecture, but for the realization that I already knew him, this ridiculous man, better than Pa.
Pa’s favorite act was up, one of the only times I’d seen my old man ecstatic. I held Skinner down by the wrist. Lunchbox the black German Shepherd come to save the day. So beautiful she looked like a toy. But the way she moped on stage, lethargic and disaffected, her black ears down-hung, made people tense all the way to the back benches. Feisty the clown was laughing raucously to compensate, making crazy eyes at the ringmaster. Lunchbox was supposed to steal Feisty’s wig and give him the run around in a slapstick farce. The ringmaster puffed a fat cloud and boomed, “Not to worry, ladies and gentlemen. Lunchbox is having a minor strop. She hasn’t had her treat.”
Feisty led Lunchbox reluctantly behind the curtain.
People muttered.
Skinner sighed and stood, picking lint from his trousers. “That’s it, chap. I’m done.”
“Don’t ruin this for me,” I hissed. “This is a well-run establishment.” I pointed vaguely at the dented steel poles, the bit of roof patched with tape.
“That dog,” said Skinner, “is for sure getting abused, whipped, boxed behind both ears. What else.”
I yanked him down. “You’re a nutcase if you think that. Sit, you nutter. Sit.”
He shook me off.
“Leave then. Abandon me too.”
He glanced at me pityingly. It was unbearable. I shoved him. “Why’s a grown man like you always hanging around a ratty kid for anyway?”
“Leave off it, chap.”
“You’re lonely.” I stared Skinner down. “They whisper about you. Your men do. How you’re too pussy to kill. They say you’re a nonce. I’d wager you’re a nonce, too—so why haven’t you wandered your fat hands over me? That’s all this is to you, isn’t it? Buttering me up.” I shouldn’t have said it: he had nice, slim hands actually.
“I’ve been fair to you.”
“You want your own little doll to comb, is that it? Well, comb me. Comb away. I’ll be your little whatever if you teach me to be like you, to make so much fucking money that people hush and stare at their shoes when I enter a room.” I was slurring my words, tapping my feet.
He set his milkshake down and turned to go.
“No, stay. Skinner, stay, it’s alright. I get lonely too.” I hated to be begging. “The dog’ll be alright, you’ll see. If you just stay to the end, you’ll see.” I grabbed at his belt, his belt loops.
He slapped my hand away and paused. “I’m sorry about your Pa, really I am.”
Feelings barged through me then, nameless and dirty. I wanted to hit him. But he was gone already, a tweed silhouette shuffling through the benches. “You think we’re alike,” I shouted after him, “but I’ll never end up like you. As if you went to Oxford, such obvious shit.”
Every eye was on Skinner.
Briefly, he turned, his expression too dark to make out, but the pressure of that look was like hands on my neck. I sipped my milkshake. Coughed. It was atrocious.
My skin pricked when Lunchbox returned. Skinner had planted black ideas, and I couldn’t repress his intuition that some cruelty had passed behind the velvet threshold—hard to say what I noticed, some ruffling in her fur maybe, indications of hard-handling. I winced. It might sound strange but working at the abattoir had given me a sixth sense. Maybe anyone who works closely with animals, whether on the side of angels or devils, becomes attuned to their suffering. In any case, Lunchbox was performing now—if you could call it that. Something about her movements was off, the way she darted around somehow both sluggish and manic; tugging at Feisty’s size-twenty shoe, it came off begrudgingly, and she panted with such miserable effort afterwards, the shoe dangling from her mouth by the laces as she more limped than loped away, dropping it in to the side with evident uninterest.
Easy as that, it was gone. My one good memory of Pa. Now it was just Lunchbox whimpering at the edges of this dirty ring. And for the final trick, a disappearing act.
After the show I loitered out front, rocking on my toes, not wanting to go home and risk one of Ma’s sullen spells. Skinner’s Benz was gone, and the prospect of trekking back made me queasy. Coastline all the way, liquor hot in my belly, nothing but dark and dizzying thoughts to occupy me. I slumped. Slowly roused myself to leave. Couldn’t. I needed to see it for myself.
Seizing my spell of bravery—or madness—I darted behind the tent, looked skittishly over my shoulders. It was dark but for the neon sign above: Miss Butler’s Big Folly. Most of the letters were flickering or busted. I slipped beneath the barricade.
Voices bantered over a campfire, the insistent hum of generators. I crept forward. It had rained the night before and mud squelched into my trainers as every flickering shadow cranked my heart another notch. I trudged on. When I tripped over the guy lines of a tent I turned on my phone light—to hell with stealth. I heard panting in one direction and went. A large cage covered in tarp. The fabric squeaked when I parted it a few inches. My light fell on three sets of eyes, stripes and mottled patterns shifting in the dark. I shut my eyes and inhaled, bit my lip to stop from screaming. When I opened them again, the tigers had backed away, lowered their heads. Slowly, I moved off again into the labyrinth of caravans and cages.
“Lunchbox. Eat!” a voice hissed.
I edged closer. Feisty, wigless, shaved head, was leaning against a trailer in his civvies—an Adidas shell suit—martini in hand and face paint intact, though smeared red around the mouth as though he’d been backhanded. Lunchbox was clipped to a tire hub, shoulders pinched, nosing her dish. It seems odd to say but it was only then that I realized Lunchbox was an animal. Before she’d been as unreal as a celebrity. How much bigger she was up close, all bulk and rippling muscle.
“Is she hurt?” I said.
Feisty stared at me. “You. You were in that crowd tonight.” If he was surprised, he didn’t let it show. He sipped martini.
“I asked what’s wrong.” At least she wasn’t caged.
“She’s getting old is what,” said Feisty, “I can’t hardly get her to eat nothing.”
“What’ll happen to her?”
“You slow? Use your imagination.”
“You’re hurting her, admit it.”
Feisty laughed. “What are you, an activist? Fuck off. I love this dog.”
Lunchbox whined as if in agreement and coiled herself protectively around his leg. He leant down and booped her nose. That should’ve been the end of it. But seeing them like that was somehow worse.
Come, lad. Come have a drink with Feisty. You’re shaking.
I slipped the stubby knife from my pocket and heard my ragged breathing. “Give her up. Give me Lunchbox.” Even as I said it, I saw the terrible path I was on. I saw it and could not stop. It was their intimacy I couldn’t stand. I wanted to trample it.
Feisty eyed me, then pressed himself into the knife and tutted. “I see some nonsense on the road, real nonsense and real violence too. But this—you won’t shank me. Not with this bitty knife.” He knocked it to the grass, gave two quick slaps to my face. “Come, lad. Come have a drink with Feisty. You’re shaking.”
When I was ten, the first time Pa left us, before he became a wavering voice on the phone begging for money, he stole our dog. A sleepy little Maltese mutt with puffy red eyes whose white hair Ma had cut into curtains around its face, its furry mouth always wet with slobber, redolent of something half-drowned. Cute thing. He’d objected to getting a dog in the first place—Pa that is—for the expense, and particularly for a dog like that. Girlish, he called it. He would’ve had a Great Dane. But Ma was defiant.
Pa was the one who named him Dumbo, for those big, stupid impossibly soft ears. And among our miserable histories, these days with Dumbo were our finest. For a time he brought real gladness to our bungalow, despite his pee all over, his white fur dusting our only nice woollens. He yapped shamelessly for love in a way that embarrassed me. Pa had been clean a full year and things were going a little too well. The dog became his new fixation. He taught him tricks, walked him to exhaustion so Ma and him didn’t have to work things through. And when one day he—surprise, surprise—relapsed and took Dumbo with him, so too went the happy days, or what passed for them. I blamed that dog for years.
When Feisty returned with my martini I blurted, “I’ll buy her. I’ve money.”
Feisty held his eyes like he was putting the balls back into their sockets. “That’s more mental than you pulling a knife.” He fidgeted for his olive with white-painted fingers.
The clown wanted eight-hundred pounds. I haggled him to four-fifty. He looked inconsolable when we shook on it. But it could have been the makeup.
“Shall I teach you her attack command?” he said.
“Christ,” I said, “is it a dog or a sleeper agent?”
“It’s a joke. I’m a clown. Clowns tell jokes.” The makeup again impeded interpretation.
“The point is to put this life behind her.” I spat for added drama. “No commands.”
“Hail to the new saint,” he said glumly. “I’m not saying you’ll need it, but if she does misbehave, what you say is . . . .” He whispered in my ear, “red.”
I left through the empty circus tent, Lunchbox padding beside. It was a dream of mine, once, to stand there in the ring. I smelt the trickle of leftover gunpowder. No floodlights hot on my face, everything was dark and still. I saw the circus for what it was: a dying sideshow. When I exited, Lunchbox started barking something awful. The shock knocked me to my bony arse. She tugged backwards. I crawled to her and let her lick at my palms and gnaw my fingers, managed to coax her outside.
To the left were waves, the beach, stars barely lighting the way—the place where those sorry newlyweds out for a morning stroll had found my father’s bloated body. Lunchbox, frightened and obstinate, was trailing dead weight. I felt like a slaver yanking her leash, people shooting us dirty looks.
At the twenty-four-hour petrol station, I clipped Lunchbox to a bike stand. Under the sickly bright halogens, debating between dry and wet kibble, adrenaline weaning, I had a passing hope that someone might steal her. She’d cost most all the money Skinner had given me. But fuck the money. Fuck the dog, too. Because where the hell would I take her? Ma would throttle me if I brought Lunchbox home; she’d swear I was spiting her, reminding her of Pa like that. I should have done it anyway, held fast to my decision, grown a spine. I was soaked and I was filthy.
Outside, I tore open four kinds of dog food but couldn’t get Lunchbox to swallow more than a nibble. If a dog could express hauteur, she was doing so. She flicked her nose up, growled and bared her teeth when I nudged her with my shoe. Her canines were huge and cartoonish and frightening.
At the far end of the parking lot, the abattoir’s roof glowed a rusted orange. I worked the padlock, shouldered the gate and hummed going in so I wouldn’t feel so lonesome. When empty, like the circus, the place became more grotesque, the implication of death thick around us.
I unleashed Lunchbox in the staff room; she stalked around, sniffing at furniture. But when I tried to corral her into the corner shower, she went berserk, sprinting in circles, twisting away from my hands. She bit me. Without thinking, I shouted, “red.” Lunchbox froze. I picked her up like a garden gnome and put her in the shower. The way she sat on her heels was uncanny, letting the water hit her, ears fallen, unmoving. I promised never to utter the command again. Naked together in the shower, I squeezed her against my chest, felt her trembling skin and tufts of wet fur against my slowly warming hands. Her heartbeat, finding it, made me feel somehow sorry for myself. We fell asleep curled together on the sofa. It was unhappily cold when turkeys weren’t bleeding heat.
Bleak morning light through the windows, my headache crunchy like boots compacting snow. I rolled over expecting Lunchbox, but the sofa was empty, door ajar. I swore.
Out in the brisk air, I yawned and windmilled my arms, did jumping jacks to get going the blood. The sickly-looking sun rose pale over the trees. What an ugly morning to make plans.
Everything was oddly quiet. Turning the corner toward the turkey pen, I saw, spattered on the gravel, a trail of familiar cranberry. A leaden feeling stole through me. Then panic. I was not a body but a heart, going, going. Feathers, squiggles of snot-like viscera, turkeys dead by the dozens, part-eaten, parts missing, mauled. The dog, the brute of a fucking dog, lay snoozing in the midst of its carnage.
Then I heard, quiet at first, an unmistakable whistling. It grew louder, stopped. “Hang about, chap, I’m a trifle bit confused.”
I turned. Skinner was holding his chin. He did a pirouette of disbelief that would have been funny if it wasn’t monstrous. “Why the fuck,” he said, “is there a dog in my abattoir?”
We’d woken Lunchbox up. She yawned and began rifling through a turkey.
“Hang about. Hang about. Is that the—no, it isn’t—the mutt from the circus?”
“I can explain. There’s a meat and potatoes explanation.”
“No thanks.”
“Sorry?”
“Just don’t care to hear you out is all.” He scratched at his beard, then clapped his hands. He said, “You’ll kill it for me, thanks.”
“You’re kidding.” I tried lightening my voice. “Where’s the moralist from last night?”
“Oh, that. Tigers are apex predators see, but dogs—dogs are hardly better than turkeys, chap.” He paused, considered. “Not that they deserve to be abused. No animal does. But your hound seems to have done some abusing itself, seems to have played with its food here. Let’s see. . . .” He started snapping his fingers slowly, rhythmically, calculating something. “Well if we’re using your logic from last night. A dozen turkeys to a dog seems the right . . .”—he kept snapping his fingers—“yes, about the right price.”
“You can afford the turkeys.”
“I can afford all the turkeys in the world. But it’s not about the money, is it. There’s a principle here. A lesson.”
“You can’t take revenge on a fucking dog, Skinner. Fuck off with your lessons.” My voice croaked. “It doesn’t know better.”
“If it doesn’t know better, well then it won’t mind dying.” Skinner spoke liltingly. “Hmm, chap, should I revenge myself on you instead?”
“If I embarrassed you or said the wrong thing last night, I’m sorry. I’d been drinking many drinks. I didn’t—”
Skinner hushed my lips with a finger, rested it there. “This is a time for listening. You listening?”
Slowly, I nodded.
“Good. Everything you said last night doesn’t matter. The dog, actually, doesn’t matter. All that matters now is what you’re going to do for me. And you’ll do this little errand because it’s something I want to have happen. It’s simple as.” Skinner’s thin, fidgety digits crept into my hair, and he pulled himself close. “You’ll pump it with this until that dumb animal falls like an oak. Understand?”
I blinked.
His stubbly chin was on my shoulder, our chests pressed together. His soft voice worked my ear. “I’m somebody who if I want to see something happen in the world, it happens. That was true yesterday and it’ll be true today, too. Wouldn’t you agree?”
When had his pistol slithered into my palm? It looked unreal, the steel gleam and utter heft of it.
I could have walked away, taken Lunchbox with me. There were many things I might have done. But I couldn’t disappoint Skinner. Rather, it didn’t occur to me as possible. And I was thinking of myself too, of the practicalities. My bursary at Oxford provided accommodation, but not with a dog. And I could never afford independent housing, not to mention all the doggy accoutrements, the constant feeding. This was what I told myself. Slough it all off then. The turkeys. The dog. Skinner. Ma. Pa. I wanted rid of all these rotten creatures. Clean sheets, a fresh year.
I never did use the stubby knife. But that day I took up Skinner’s gun.
My malevolence was palpable to Lunchbox, who strained at her lead and wailed. No help was coming, poor girl. It was woods for twenty minutes in any direction. In my hand was a shovel, in my pocket the pistol. Silver birches, caught in light, flanked us either side; a gust swayed their branches. I was looking for a pretty spot to bury her, going in circles, anything to put off my cruel labor. Lunchbox collapsed on her front and chundered garbled turkey bits. I crouched, had my hand deep in the ruff of her collar, smelt her musk and waited patiently until she seemed well enough to go on.
Skinner didn’t want to watch the dog die, no. He just needed to know I’d kill for him. So he’d stayed behind, suddenly not in the mood to play hunting.
I leashed her to a tree, a nice tree, big and solid and bare. She writhed when I held the pistol to her temple. The last thing I wanted was to shoot more than once, to witness Lunchbox prone and wheezing. So I broke my word and said “red,” my teeth chattering something horrid. And then she was statue again. Her muscles tense with readiness, fighting not to sprint. My knees buckled, the wet earth on my palms. A dog trying not to whine sounds nearly human.
I unleashed her. She didn’t run. I didn’t deserve such loyalty. She didn’t move until I fired into the head of a nearby turkey, which, dazed, spun comically on its legs, then slumped. The bang resounded and the birds skittered from their branches. Finally, she ran. A second shot did the turkey in. I imagined Skinner hearing the pistol’s report, nodding, then whistling with his lips pursed over a cool glass of rum.
What did it mean for a thing to die? I understood it intellectually but until I dug that hole and held that turkey to my chest, steam rising into frosted air, I did not truly know. I thought of Pa, of the funeral I’d missed. My shoulders soon felt stabbed from digging, and I’d yet to shovel dirt back over the bird. The sordid affair took over an hour. An hour of avoiding the animal’s stupid, stupid eyes. By the end, my shirt and arms and face were grimed with blood. The sight of me would nauseate Skinner—I looked a horror—but he would know my loyalty and my atrocity. Then all was quiet walking back without Lunchbox, as though the wood itself, all the roots and insects, were diverting around me for shame of what I’d done.
I quit the abattoir and found work as a dishwasher. And things with Ma improved. I was patient and vulnerable and we cried.
Skinner would text from time to time, but I never replied.
Drop in for a quick game, chap.
Was it not enough money?
It’s boring when you’re not here.
You’re making a big mistake, chap.
We’re partners, aren’t we?
I miss you. I’m sorry.
Please.
I returned to Oxford nearly a year later to begin again. Eight dazzling weeks streamed by and, briefly, life was a candy apple, glazed bright gold.
Then, after term ended, I came home. I had to. Ma begged me, and I’d no money to stay on. Besides, there was someone I had finally resolved to see.
I donned my cheap suit and bought supermarket flowers wrapped in tacky film. It was brisk but sunny; lovely as a day can be for peeping your old man’s grave. I passed my primary school and, taking the long way to avoid the abattoir, passed the animal shelter. Not a hundred meters gone, I doubled back.
The shelter was a squat, rundown place, really a converted house. Inside was painted like a nursery—baby blue, smiling animal murals. I kept my head down and mumbled hello to the girl at the front desk.
Out back was a drab garden, weeds coming through the cracked pavestones. Everywhere, animal smell. Cages lined the back wall, filled with pets in various states of daze and abandonment.
There she was. Much thinner, all rib. Her ears twitched and she pressed her muzzle so hard to the wire, I thought she might get at me. She wouldn’t quit barking.
“She likes you.” The girl from the front desk was behind me. She had large, fanatical eyes. I felt ambushed.
“She hates my guts, you mean.”
“She has a great personality, can do all kinds of tricks.” The girl sounded desperate.
I let the silence hang.
“I’ll let her out so you can meet her.”
“Don’t.” I stepped back. “I’m not a dog person—really, I’m not. I was just passing.”
“What’s with the flowers?” she said.
I looked at them. They crinkled. Drooping carnations, frilly edges browning. “I’m late,” I said, patting my tie stupidly. “What happens to the dog?”
The girl smiled, but it only resembled a smile.
“What happens?” I said. I could guess, but I wanted her to say it. I deserved every detail.
About the Artist: Faye Wei Wei’s ethereal, poetic paintings feature symbolic reveries and mythical iconography. On her large-scale canvases, the artist combines pastel hues with muted earth tones to render a unique feminine symbology she derives from folklore and art history. The results are dreamlike, exploring psychological terrain as well as broader social concerns: Wei Wei is interested in the performances of gender and love. She received her BA from the Slade School of Fine Art and has exhibited in London, New York, Los Angeles, Athens, Vienna, Shanghai, and Antwerp, among other cities. In 2019, Wei Wei was awarded a commission by the British Council in Hong Kong, in collaboration with the auction house Phillips. Her work has been purchased for collections in London. She is currently at the Yale School of Art for an MFA in Painting.
Between 1976 and 1983, tens of thousands of people “disappeared” in Argentina. Their absences were designed to create a state of terror that few were strong enough to defy. But who were “the disappeared” and what did they endure?
The majority of the “disappeared” were in their twenties and early thirties, captured and often subject to torture in clandestine detention centers before being killed. Many were members of leftist political organizations—militants and activists—while others were trade unionists, journalists, students, artists, and teachers.
Some were young parents, including pregnant women. Approximately 500 babies were born in captivity, stolen from their imprisoned mothers by the military government and given to adoptive families who raised the children with no knowledge of their biological identity.
The mothers of the “disappeared”—the babies’ grandmothers, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo—donned white head scarves and circled the Plaza de Mayo, defying the regime and demanding the truth. Nearly fifty years later, the search for their adult grandchildren continues.
This generational wound is explored through the lens of a grieving grandmother and a North American adoptee in my historical fiction novel, The Disappeared.
Here are seven books that center the lives, experiences, and long wakes of grief left behind by those taken during Argentina’s so-called “dirty war.”
Argentine poet, author, human rights activist, translator, and professor Alicia Partnoy was one of the estimated thirty thousand people captured during Argentina’s dictatorship. In 1977, she was torn from her home and her 18-month-old daughter, who was left behind with relatives. Her memoir, translated from Spanish, is a literary account of the months she spent blindfolded in a clandestine prison called La Escuelita (The Little School) in Bahia Blanca, where she was tortured and abused, bearing witness to both death and birth. The Little School is a survivor’s memoir of unfathomable strength and human spirit.
“I may only be seven years old but they have explained everything to me. I won’t say a word.”
From the perspective of a little girl whose parents’ ideologies have made them a target of the dictatorship, Laura Alcoba recounts her childhood memories of hiding out in the small house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires where a resistance movement was setting up operations for a secret printing press behind the façade of a rabbit farm. In The Rabbit House, Laura’s world is full of forbidden conversations, secret rules, and—despite all odds—unabated wonder.
Analía grew up in the middle-class outskirts of Buenos Aires, but her strong political convictions and ideals were always in direct opposition to those of her parents, making her the black sheep of her family. Then she discovered the truth of her origins: she was a child of “disappeared” parents and her military uncle played a devastating role in their death and her adoption. In My Name is Victoria, Victoria Donda reclaims both her name and her identity, thriving in truth and establishing a successful leadership position as the youngest member of Argentina’s national congress.
Under a darkening cloud of the dictatorship, Kaddish Poznan tends the Jewish cemetery with great care, despite having been cast out by the Jewish community for his past of ill repute. Kaddish’s son, Pato, wants equally little to do with his father. When the junta’s reach extends to the Poznan family, Kaddish and his wife Lillian struggle whether to acquiesce or circumvent an impossible bureaucracy to find Pato. An endearing story about the complicated love of a father for his son and the grief of both a family and a nation.
In this classic story of magical realism narrated by a family friend, Cecilia Rueda is captured after writing an article about the dictatorship. Her husband, Carlos, begins having premonitions and waking dreams revealing the fate of his wife and others who have gone missing. Carlos begins hosting garden sessions to answer the question he shares with so many – what has happened to their “disappeared” loved ones? —but his visions subject him to a betrayal that leads to the disappearance of his teenage daughter, Teresa. Carlos is left wrestling with his own lucidity as he clings to the hope of reuniting with his family.
As a medical student in 1976, Tomás Oriilla would do anything for his childhood crush, Isabel—even if her ideological fervor puts them both at risk. Ten years later, Tomás is in exile, living in New York as Thomas Shore. He is called back to Buenos Aires, where ghosts of the disappeared force him to confront the choices he once made in the name of love. A haunting journey into the past, Hades explores love and complicity through the distorted and surreal lens of individual and collective memory.
With Jorge Videla poised to take the helm of Argentina’s military dictatorship, Berta witnesses her lover being savagely thrown to his death by junta soldiers. Convinced she will be targeted by the government, Berta flees first to her aunt’s, then escapes deeper into the countryside to hide out with family members at a remote farm. There, amongst eclectic and poetically depicted characters, Berta must subsist and keep from becoming ‘disappeared.’
Riveting and unpredictable, the 2024 presidential campaign trail reads like a novel. You literally can’t make this shit up—but if someone could, it might be Charles Dickens. Here’s a six-week slice of election summer as written by 10 writers of classic fiction.
The Candidate by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy’s novel moves slowly, like Biden. The gray narrative follows his struggle to determine if stepping down from his candidacy is the right decision. Short sentences help the 81-year-old President get through his thoughts.
Trump I, Part III by William Shakespeare
Donald Trump’s overconfidence and recklessness make him a truly Shakespearean protagonist. Heightened language suits his strange soliloquies, and iambic pentameter makes his words surprisingly comprehensible. Despite the inaccurate plot, audiences are captivated by the drama.
The Laughing Warrior by Margaret Atwood
Kamala Harris aims to save a dystopian nation where women don’t have the right to bodily autonomy. Her opponent claims that if he wins the presidency, citizens will never vote again. Clearly, Atwood has a wild imagination.
Material Truth: Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
In each short story, a different voter faces a shocking reality, including a Project 2025 supporter who learns that the agenda would ban pornography, a liberal arts college student who purchases a camouflage hat, and a couch salesperson who confronts customer JD Vance.
Say It to My Face by James Baldwin
A woman navigates racism at her “Black job” and homophobia in her family. She’s excited to vote for Kamala, who knows what it’s like to be marginalized. When “DEI candidate” becomes a euphemism for the N-word, she supports her candidate by doing a silk press with a round brush.
Courtesy and Civility by Jane Austen
Affluent white women gingerly discuss politics, attend a whites-only Zoom call, and raise millions of dollars for Harris. Free indirect discourse reveals that many of them are anxious about their vote until they hear Vance disparage “childless cat ladies.”
Independence by Toni Morrison
An unaffiliated moderate remains undecided between candidates. She first considers trivial factors—like Trump’s raised-fist photo and Megan Thee Stallion’s performance—but ghosts, memories, and identity turmoil urge her to contemplate her values and determine her beliefs.
To Be Young and Free by Zora Neale Hurston
As the nation crumbles, Gen Z voters enjoy dancing to “never-Trump guy” remixes on TikTok and posting images of Tim Walz on tampons. The authentic dialogue includes phrases like “Kamala is brat.” Critics call the book “unserious” until realizing its impact much later.
To The White House by Virginia Woolf
Through stream-of-consciousness narration, Trump grapples with the concept of mixed-race identity, while Kamala daydreams about inauguration. In epistolary sections, fundraising emails claim Walz will “unleash HELL ON EARTH” and press releases ask, “is Donald Trump ok?”
A Story of a Strained Country by Charles Dickens
Dickens needs more than 1,000 dense pages to recount the summer. He focuses on political issues—a fresh angle—instead of coconut emojis. Still, the novel amuses readers with vivid character descriptions, masterfully portraying Trump and Vance as “just plain weird.”
As a writer of both prose and poetry, I love to read work that falls between genres. Whether it’s fiction that leans into lyricism so unabashedly it should be called a poem, or a poem so loaded with narrative that it is, in effect, a lyrical essay, I celebrate the merging of poetry and plot to get at some otherwise inexpressible truth. I admire anyone who can write so transcendently that the lines between genres break down so it’s impossible to know what genre you’re reading in and, more importantly, it no longer matters.
While my debut poetry collection, Inconsolable Objects, falls squarely onto the poetry side of the line, everything I write is informed by a desire to tell a story, and every poem in my collection began with a narrative impulse honed into poetry. And yet, if I’d given the narrative a little bit more headroom, those poems could easily have crossed the line into prose.
Here, I present to you a highly incomplete list of books I love that live in the liminal space between genres and could be shelved in poetry, fiction, or creative non-fiction.
In his epilogue to this story, Henry Miller writes: “a clown is a poet in action. He is the story which he enacts.” Miller further states, “it is the strangest story I have yet written.” I initially encountered this little book in my father’s library when I was twelve. I was mesmerized by the language but didn’t know what to make of it. Was it a story or poem? While I couldn’t reconcile the intergeneric language, I was entranced by Miller’s tragic fable about Augustine, a clown who attempts “to depict the miracle of ascension.” Each night before an adoring crowd, Augustine falls into a trance. He is a man driven to impart not just laughter, but everlasting joy, and the ending, as with many poems, is both mysterious and devastating.
Poetry Foundation describes Lydia Davis as a short story writer, novelist, and a translator. That feels to me a bit like describing Mondrian as someone who paints lines, boxes, and squares. Lydia Davis’s writing cannot be defined by the traditional forms because her writing isn’t constrained by the typical dance moves of fiction. While she thinks of herself as a writer of fiction, it’s easy to see why she might be mistaken for a poet. Some of her stories are only one or two lines long and she freely uses enjambment and broken lines. In her essay collection Essays One, she says of her work: “…if, eventually, some of my work comes right up to the line (if there is one) that separates a piece of prose from a poem, and even crosses it, the approach to that line is through the realm of fiction.”
Yes, I know that Tinkers is squarely considered to be a novel and Paul Harding a novelist. Yes, the book won the Pulitzer for Fiction. And yet, I defy anyone who reads it to say it isn’t pure, incandescent poetry. The story, which weaves the tale of a tinker who “imagined himself somewhat of a poet” with the hallucinatory flashbacks of a dying man (his estranged son), is so lyrical you might fill a notebook with all the memorable sentences you’ll want to keep in your treasure box of beautiful writing.
Another indescribable genre-defying work crafted out of 240 numbered paragraphs (or prose poems) that navigate loss and love and profound grief through the lens of someone obsessed with the color blue. Nelson builds her book from borrowed sources: philosophy, psychology, art and music are mixed in with deeply personal observations often framed as questions. Like the elements of a great list poem, each paragraph not only functions as a whole unto itself but simultaneously as a part of the larger whole of the entire book. While the book isn’t an easy read, it offers up immense rewards.
The House on Mango Street is a series of linked poetic vignettes, a story told in the voice and language of poetry by the twelve-year-old Chicana protagonist, Esperanza as she comes of age in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago.
In one eloquent passage, Cisneros writes: “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing. It was my great-grandmother’s name and now it is mine.”
Citizen is the first book on this list typically shelved in with the poetry. Because it is poetry, and Claudia Rankine is one of our finest poets. But Citizen is more than just a book-length poem. It is often called a hybrid work of prose-poetry. And yes, it is that. But Claudia Rankine wrangles language into an entirely new form that doesn’t fit into any clear-cut notions of what we consider poetry or prose. She writes into that liminal space between genres to get at the lived experience of enduring daily microaggressions and being othered in America. An epic tale, a tragic, and profound work of art that bends language to the task of making the indescribable toll of being a marginalized citizen visible.
Before Denis Johnson wrote his epic Pulitzer Prize winning novels, he studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In Train Dreams, he finally merges the two genres into a lyrical tale that moves and breathes and thinks like a poem while capturing the hardscrabble lives and struggle of the men who built the old West in a time of rapid transformation.
On reading the first few pages of Offill’s exquisite story of a relationship as told by an unnamed narrator, one might be confused. Wait, this isn’t a novel, this is something else entirely. Offill shrugs off the expected trappings of a novel in prose and writes in short bursts of imagistic word-crafting that might have you convinced you are reading a poem. It’s like taking a bite of something expecting to taste one thing and discovering it is something else. And yet, this is a deft and compellingly told narrative that tracks a marriage from early courtship to heartbreak and back again.
Set primarily in Antigua, this book explores mother-daughter relationships, colonialism, gender, and coming of age. This slight collection of stories is more poem-like than many poems that call themselves poems. Yes, they are stories too, but they are clearly, unequivocally poems. The first story, “Girl,” is a poem of advice to a girl from some anonymous narrator, presumably her mother. It is a short punchy list of anaphoric declarations and guidance that accumulate and leave the reader breathless.
In all of Martha Baillie’s books you can feel her sister. Her words offer a portal to the multiplistic experiences of existence—to understand better how cut off we can be from each other and where true connection flickers too.
Baillie’s memoir There is No Bluewas published by Coach House Books in 2023. This year, a screen adaptation of her novel,The Incident Report, launched at the Tribeca Film Festival. The filmic incarnation is called Darkest Miriam; it was executive produced by Charlie Kaufman and stars Britt Lower of Severance fame.
Both Darkest Miriam and There is No Blue consider how mental illnesses impact the people who walk around in the world with them and the folks who are consistent in their daily lives.
Darkest Miriam features a librarian moving through enormous grief while navigating public facing work. She records the unusual occurrences of the library in a log of incident reports. As she receives notes from a stalker, she starts to knit details of her own life into these accounts and a longform narrative is born within the institutional record. In There is No Blue, Martha details the deaths of all three members of her original family (her mother, father, and sister). She turns over her incomplete understanding of them and the grief of losing them individually. The stories intertwine in the disorientation of their disagreeing conceptions of each other. Baillie spends the largest portion of the memoir with her sister, Christina. She and Martha co-authored the Trillium Award nominated Sister Language. Christina was diagnosed with schizophrenia and died by suicide about a month before that book’s publication in 2019.
I spoke with Baillie in my studio space, a refurbished industrial building in the west end of Toronto. We discussed the ethics of sharing stories that characterize mental health, her attempts at capturing pieces of her relationship with her sister in different texts throughout the years, and how Christina lives on in Darkest Miriam.
Sarah Feldbloom: So Martha, you’ve written eight books, if I’m counting correctly. Six novels and two works of nonfiction. Characters experiencing mental health challenges appear across your work. Can you tell me about what’s guided your choices in illustrating them?
Martha Baillie: I’ll start with The Incident report, as that’s a book that ethical and aesthetic concerns held me back from writing for a long time.
When you work in a public library, as I have for decades, you witness strange events. You’re assisting people of all ages, from all walks of life. For those living unhoused, some with mental health issues including addiction, the library offers a crucial refuge. De-escalating conflict between library users and handling aggression aimed at staff are key components of a public library worker’s day. One way of dealing with residual tension is to tell stories. For years I’d tell library stories at home, out loud, emphasizing parts that felt absurd. I knew that if I were to put those oral stories down on paper, I would have to address what’s behind them, including a great deal of pain and isolation, and so for a long time I resisted using the material. And then my sister gave me a novel by Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian writer, called The Voice Imitator. It’s a tiny collection of supposed court reports that are all absurdist. In one, the mayor of Venice and the Mayor of Pisa get in an argument, and end up switching the Leaning Tower for the Bridge of Sighs, then get arrested. In every report there is this delicious tension between the style of the prose and the content. Everything about this little collection set bells ringing in my head and I suddenly thought, ohh, if I were to write a novel made of a series of tiny reports, I could be true to the fragmentation at the heart of the stories I wanted to tell. I had been worried that if I wrote a traditional novel, the people I wanted to include might feel like decorative elements, which didn’t sit right at all. At the same time I didn’t want to take any one of their stories and make it the focus. I didn’t feel I had the right to try and elaborate. All I could do was report the fragments that I’d received. So once that structure came to me, I felt as though I’d found a way to honour how fragmentation is central to many conditions of mental instability, and to living unhoused. I’d found a structure that worked both aesthetically and answered some ethical questions for me. I ended with a novel consisting of an arrangement of 144 incidents.
SF: In other novels you’ve focused on a single character living with a mental health issue who you develop fully. Tell me about your process with that.
MB: You’re right. In If Clara, the protagonist is living with schizophrenia, and in The Search for Heinrich Schlögelthe protagonist’s sister makes a suicide attempt. Both those characters are based on my sister, Christina. I felt I knew those characters as well as I knew my sister, by which I mean both very well and not at all. My sister knew I was writing those books. I gave her both manuscripts early on. After reading my description of Heinrich’s sister recovering in a hospital bed following a suicide attempt, Christina said the scene was “a very good aestheticization” of her own experience.
When you work in a public library, as I have for decades, you witness strange events.
My sister was afraid to bathe. Her hydrophobia meant that she washed herself minimally. I asked her if she would mind me including this detail in If Clara. She said no, no, that’s totally fine. I want people to understand what I’m up against—they so rarely do. Then she added that what she did find painful in my book was that Clara succeeds in writing a novel, something Christina felt she couldn’t do. I had thought that I was giving my sister a gift by having her character write a novel; I’d imagined her vicarious pleasure. But instead my “gift” felt like a dagger. I so easily got things wrong when trying to guess what would upset her or please her. Slowly, the importance of asking became clear.
When it came to those I portrayed in the Incident Report, many I’d not seen in years, so I couldn’t ask; I could only draw on memory. I altered details and further fictionalized to make people less recognizable. I wasn’t making exact portraits but creating something new, building meaning from what I’d observed.
SF: I wonder if this may be a good time to talk about your approach to writing Sister Language.
MB: Sure. It was a work of call and response. Certainly, part of the impetus was that I’d used Christina, who was a writer herself, as a character in my books. I’d done so several times, and so I wanted to create a bridge for her to put her voice out into the world more directly, if she wanted that. When I’d approached her in the past, she’d expressed a deep ambivalence about publication, but this time she responded eagerly, asking me to provide a prose framework for her poems, a framework that explained the Formal Thought Disorder that caused words to shatter inside her head. If you said to her “appear,” it would break into “app” and “ear” or “app” and “pear,” and this constant crumbling of language made conversation difficult for her. On the other hand, she was the queen of neologisms. She played with language stunningly. James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Beckett were her heroes. She couldn’t write coherent prose, she claimed. But later, as Sister Language evolved, she composed beautiful letters to me that she made part of the book. In actuality, it wasn’t that she couldn’t produce prose, but she regarded doing so as a betrayal of her inner fragmentation. Her selves were numerous; one would take over from another; each had its own function, she said.
SF: So, when she wrote in a linear way, did you feel that she did that to be of service to you – that she was trying to provide you with ease, give you a gift?
MB: It was, yes, definitely a gift to me, but to her also. She told me that it brought her relief to discover she could do it. Maybe writing letters addressed to me felt so familiar that it was acceptable to her? With any new person she had to develop a whole new language, she said, which felt like “climbing a razor blade.” But between us a language already existed.
SF: How did you begin drafting the book together?
MB: I interviewed her about Formal Thought Disorder then took my notes home and typed up what I thought would be a little introduction to one of her pieces or a beginning of a prose framework, and brought it to her. Immediately she said: you know what? Maybe we could put my writing on one page and yours on the opposite page. That way our languages won’t contaminate each other.
I had thought that I was giving my sister a gift by having her character write a novel. But instead my ‘gift’ felt like a dagger.
She led the process of creating the book. Since she used a manual typewriter, she put pages of her poetry into an old school binder. My role was to respond on the opposite pages. Every few days the binder changed hands. A little way into this, after I’d included a question in one of my responses, she typed an answer on my page. That she’d broken her rule and snuck onto my page, I saw as an expression of trust. Not long after, she began composing the letters within the text, and from then on the whole thing kept evolving organically. She asked that we put in some of my work as well, and said that what it turned out we were looking at was our two different ways of dealing with language.
We included intricate word collages she’d made, and some of her found photographs. When our publisher accepted the manuscript Christina said: if we’re going to do any editing, I don’t want to be involved because I’ll just want to destroy the whole thing. That’s a process I could care less about. I want to create environments, verbal environments, language environments, that people can enter from any direction. Do what you have to so humans will read it, but any of my pages that go in have to remain untouched.
So we scanned her pages.
SF: That’s such a smart method for ensuring that purpose wasn’t lost. It’s a fascinating way for me to think about what’s possible with language, too.
MB: Christina once taped a piece of paper to her fridge door that declared: “language believes in the patient’s existence.” Often, she had difficulty believing that she existed, but she told me that when she read those words she felt witnessed by language. She explained that those words were more alive than she was, that the border between animate and inanimate no longer existed for her.
SF: Martha, what do you think about the danger that people often attribute to artists seeing themselves as being the things they create?
MB: Well, Christina ended her life several weeks before our book came off the press. Friends of mine have suggested that completing what she’d so wanted to write freed her to leave. They may be right. She may have also not wanted to face being read by strangers. There were many reasons she took her life.
In a speech she composed, to be read at the book launch she stated that “To reach someone who is schizophrenic and creative can only be done, in my experience, by connecting with the person through the person’s creative endeavour… The Sister Language experience has worked, it has reached me and strengthened me…[it has] achieved what ten years of dedicated psychiatric treatment failed to achieve.” Yet sister language failed to save her from suicide.
SF: I also have a sister, and maybe because of how dear that relationship is to me, I experience this incredible comfort while reading your books. I think that’s because, for me, your sister feels ever-present in your writing.
MB: That makes me laugh. Early in Sister Language I admit to Christina that I keep referring to her as “my sister,” because of having a hard time writing her name. I explain that writing “Christina,” starts me longing for our old intimacy. Christina’s response was: I can see how you might think that there’s warmth in this exchange, but just let me tell you, schizophrenia is a cold condition: though I can feel genuine excitement about what we’re doing, all emotion feels to me like a form of rape.
Often, she had difficulty believing that she existed, but she told me that when she read those words she felt witnessed by language.
In one of the journals she left, she wrote: my sister’s all about bringing people together, and I’m about the opposite.
But we both needed to make art, and were excited by each other’s art. That was the connection she could allow.
SF: That makes me think about how people classify love in traditional ways, but there are profound examples of how much bigger a concept like love can be. Maybe that’s the same with any concept of connection?
MB: In There is No Blue, there’s a lot of discussion of love and the nature of what love is in the opening piece. My 99-year-old mother is dying and I’m washing her body and making a death mask. And at a certain point, I say that I’ve replaced the word “love” with “attention.” I’m thinking, now, that “attention,” was what could be shared by my sister and me—a shared attention to language.
SF: A question I want to ask about There is No Blue, which was the book you published next after Sister Language, is that in that story you’re sharing with the reader the characters of your sister and your mother and your father, who have all passed now – and I don’t know if it was my reading of it – but it felt like you were with Christina for the longest, and that her spirit and essence were dominant.
MB: Mm-hmm.
SF: And I was curious about that choice – whether I was reading it as you were meaning for the text to feel. If so, why did you make the decision to structure the piece that way?
MB: Well, I started writing There Is No Blue within a year of Christina’s suicide. She’d inscribed her final message on her bedroom wall, and I took that to be her final poem. That I could read her farewell as a work of art, allowed me to continue a conversation with her, artist to artist. It gave me a structure to hold on to. The book tells the story of my family, but it is dominated by my response to Christina’s last words.
SF: I see the book as a family portrait. And maybe Christina is standing a little closer to the front of the photo.
I had to ask myself: am I doing this from a place of love? Am I doing this out of respect for this person?
MB: Yeah, when you have someone within a family who is struggling with a mental health issue, that can take up a lot of space. For us, it was what everybody was responding to—this situation of trying to figure out how to navigate, how to assist, or how not to fail to assist, how to address the struggling. But interestingly, while others feel that a person’s taking up a lot of room, that they are right at the front of the photograph, that all the attention is there—from what I understand based on what Christina told me —inside that person can feel as though they’re not seen at all, because they’re so misunderstood that they’re actually invisible, and that all this attention is coming towards somebody else, a false version of themself. If she read the book, she might say: I’m not here.
Who knows? I hope that she would recognize herself in the portrait, but would she feel that she was present in the book in the way that I feel she’s present in it, or that you, as a reader, feel she’s present? Hard to say.
SF: Yeah.
MB: And that brings us back to ethics. Publishing this book after my sister had passed away, she couldn’t give me her answer anymore about what was okay with her to include. In the end, I had to ask myself: am I doing this from a place of love? Am I doing this out of respect for this person? Am I trying to encourage understanding of schizophrenia? And if I am, then I have to hope that it’s worth going ahead. But it’s very important to me to make as clear as possible that I’m not an authority on anybody else’s experience. Any memoir is an act of imagination.
SF: The film Darkest Miriam, which is based on your book The Incident Report,recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Where do you feel Christina in it, and where do you think the audience will feel her in it?
MB: For me the film is saturated with her. A young version of me is very present, too. Writing that book, I was not thinking of the character of Miriam as being my sister, but Britt Lower brings a vulnerability and extreme sensitivity to the role that reminds me of Christina. Maybe I’m just more comfortable seeing Christina rather than me in Miriam. Tom Mercier, who plays Janko, the young Slovenian taxi driver and painter – I can see my sister in his character too. He brings a mesmerising intensity to his performance and his love of language is palpable. One day on set, I asked him to recommend a book, one he really loves, and he said, ohh, The Diary of Vaslov Nijinsky. So, I borrowed it from the Toronto Public Library. In it, Nijinsky is going mad, and his family is about to place him in an asylum. He writes letters to fellow artist, Jean Cocteau, in a language more similar to my sister’s than I’ve ever encountered. Perhaps it was Tom’s interest in Nijinsky’s madness that attracted him to the role of Janko? I didn’t ask. I see Christina to a more limited extent in the library users who behave in strange ways, because my sister was very careful not to draw attention to herself in public. Alone in her room she might have resembled one of those characters. The time she made photocopies of a squashed dead rat (in a plastic bag) at the Toronto Reference library, she made sure her artistic experiment went undetected.
The director, Naomi Jaye, is brilliant and she’s created a film that is haunting, at least for me. Now you have me wondering if readers who have encountered my sister as you have, in numerous works, will feel her in the film, too.
If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. —Anne Sexton
The first time I heard a voice speak words unspoken in my soul, I was 45 years old and at an American Adoption Congress conference with a new friend who had also been given the name ‘Christine,’ as a baby on her adoption day.
We sat side-by-side listening as another adoptee, a surfer-pretty woman in her forties (who discovered her original name was “Summer”), describe her life as mime and mimic, always studying the landscape and figuring out how to fit in. “Sure, I can make myself seem like their biological child, or like my in-law’s family, or like I belong in this group or that. I know how to do that.” She let out a long exhale. “What I didn’t know how to do, never thought I could or should do, was ask myself, What fits me?”
I squeezed my friend’s arm. As the woman continued, actor Michael Caine’s voice in The Cider House Rules rang in my head. He played Dr. Larch, a World War II-era obstetrician and abortionist who ran an orphanage in John Irving’s book-turned-movie. In the opening scene, baby Homer’s first adoptive parents return him saying there’s something wrong with him, that he doesn’t make a sound. Dr. Larch says, “He didn’t cry. Orphan babies learn there’s no point in it.” Caring as the doctor and the nurses were, they couldn’t respond to all of them.
“You were a perfect baby,” my mother said the middle-school-summer-day that I learned I was adopted. “You hardly ever cried.”
What if I had?
I spent my first three months in an infant home. Three months is enough time for a baby, for a newborn nervous system, to learn that when it cries, when it needs someone—no one comes.
That Cider House scene had felt like an anvil on my heart since I saw it debut in 1999. I was the mother of a young son then. In his first year, when I was 30, I quit a full-time job I’d loved but required quite a bit of travel, to find a part-time one so I could have more time with him. And I signed up for a college music class in voice. Just for something outside the house, I told myself. There was something about music that I’d been drawn to like an elixir since elementary school chorus.
“You know what yourproblem is?” My voice teacher said after my third attempt to sing “Moon River.” She took her fingers off the piano.
There was something about music that I’d been drawn to like an elixir.
My classmates studied the tall pines through the window. I waited for Ms. Turner to tell me the answer, tell me in her matter-of-fact teaching voice, a voice that transformed to a gorgeous soprano when she broke into song. I stood taller, let my shoulders sink, and drew a long, slow breath into my stomach—the place of strength and sustainability she coached us to sing from.
She stepped away from the piano. “You’ve got a three-octave range for God’s sake.”
“Is that bad?” By that point in the semester, I’d learned I could sing alto and mezzo soprano, that a voice is a mix of many elements—some God-given, some nurtured—and that my younger classmates were far better versed in music.
“No, that’s good, quite good. Your problem is you never let your darn voice out.”
“I thought ‘Moon River’ was supposed to be sung quietly.” In all honesty, that’s why I picked it. Audrey Hepburn had sung it so in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and once told an interviewer that it was one of her most challenging roles because she was an introvert playing the extroverted “Holly Golightly.” I related to that.
The song was also far more appropriate for a voice recital than the 90s rock anthems I belted out in my car on the way to class, including INXS’s “The Stairs”—
The nature of your tragedy is chained around your neck.
Do you lead? Or are you lead? Are you sure that you don’t care?
Those lyrics felt a challenge, a challenge I didn’t want to face.
Ms. Turner planted herself in front of me and smiled. “There’s a difference between quiet and weak, and quiet and strong.” She poked her abdomen with two fingers. “You are not managing your breath well. And you’re holding back. You’ve got to sell it! Put more emotion in it— moresomethingof yourself.”
Something of myself is the problem, I thought. While Hepburn sold a persona unlike herself in a movie, I’d been selling one since I was a child.
One summer day in 1980, when I was almost 13, I played the board game Sorry with a girl down the street. I won a few games. She hated losing.
“I don’t even care. You know why?” She stood and kicked the board. “You’re adopted.”
The moment those words escaped her, I knew in my body it was true—and I understood she wielded that word ‘adopted’ like a sword meant to cut.
I ran home to our babysitter. She dialed my mother at work with her long, burgundy fingernails while I cried at the kitchen table. I knew my parents had struggled through miscarriages and the death of a baby, but they never told me I was adopted. I was overwhelmed to think my mother might not fully belong to me. She rushed home, sent the babysitter to the backyard with my siblings and hugged me as we climbed the stairs to her room.
While she rummaged through her closet, I sat on her waterbed’s edge across from a photo of my little sister, brother and me dressed in matching green-and-beige plaid. As a brown-eyed, brown-haired girl in a family of blue-eyed blonds, I looked darker than ever.
I’d spent many elementary school nights making projects about our French Canadian and Dutch ancestors, writing about kin who sang Sinterklaas songs and ate pepernoot, a biscuit made with cinnamon and spices. I drew pictures of girls in clogs. Those projects were meant for my classmates and me to connect with one another through our ancestors’ music and food and stories. I didn’t know I was writing fiction as my sister and brother wrote fact.
I didn’t know I was writing fiction as my sister and brother wrote fact.
My mother emerged, her hair a little askew, with a letter from Catholic Family Services and sat beside me. I was breathless as I read that my unnamed birth parents were Irish, Welsh and German; and that my birth mother was 5’5, intelligent and sensitive, and had taken piano lessons since she was a child. She’d hoped to major in music. She was 17 when I was born. My birth father was 17, too, “athletic and enjoyed the drums.”
The father I’d known had left our family shortly after my brother was born. My mom apologized for not telling me about my adoption and said they hadn’t wanted me to feel any less their daughter. She pulled me close and pointed to a photo of her round-eyed, round-cheeked grandparents. “See how they grew to look like one another—It’s like that for us.”
I wasn’t mad at her for keeping my origins secret, only viscerally aware of my parental math. I had four parents. Only one remained. I couldn’t risk losing her, too.
“Do Suzie and David know?” I asked, trying to digest a new reality that felt unreal.
My mother said they didn’t and that she loved me and nothing had to change. And I could choose whether or not to tell them. I didn’t want them to think I was any less their sister, so I marched out of that room and kept my origins to myself.
A few years before voice class, I discovered I was one of more than two-million babies adopted in America in the decades before Roe v. Wade—a time when surrendered babies like me came with a brand new birth certificate that implied our adoptive parents were our birth ones. It’sas if you gave birth to her yourself, they were told.
Our original birth certificates were sealed in 48 states and just like that—like a shake of an Etch-a-Sketch—your original name, identity, ancestry and medical history disappeared and you were grafted onto another.
Nearly half those states still hold sealed records today. That secrecy was intended to protect us from shame, from feeling worth ‘less,’ but it did just the opposite.
Trading in my nature for all things nurture, for a family, felt like a good trade after I learned I was adopted. For years I watched grown adoptees on 1980s’ talk shows squirm in their seats when they were asked if it might be “a little ungrateful,” or even “disloyal,” to want to know about the people they came from. “After everything your parents have done for you,” was a frequent refrain, along with—“You’re lucky. They saved you. They gave you a life.”
While my parents had not given me my existence, ethnicities, or whatever may have come pre-loaded in my DNA, they had given me a home and love, especially my mom. The Hallmark stores had rows of cards to thank them for that, but I never saw cards for birth parents, which I took to mean I wasn’t supposed to know them and felt ashamed of my desire to include my roots in my identity. What was never said, but I absorbed by osmosis: if you can just be who you’re told you are and ignore any inner voice to the contrary, then you can belong and be loved.
I spoke none of this to Ms. Turner. I only swept my arm toward her piano. “I’ll try again,” I said, hoping more dramatics might suffice.
She led me along the fundamentals instead—singing up the scale ah – ah – ah – ah – ah – ah – ah. . . . and down, Wa-ffles are won-der-ful they wi-den your waist.
“That’s it,” she said. “Just. Keep. Trying.”
Ms. Turner’s words of wisdom came rushing back twelve years later when I began a Master’s program in creative writing. My chest tightened as I listened to feedback on my first semester’s work:
“The voice is passive.”
“Give this character more agency, more ability to take action.”
“Your narrator needs to be really interesting as a person, more idiosyncratic, quirky, individual—give her a voice that conveys her personality.”
I was wrestling with voice again, only this time on the page. The voice I hoped to ‘let out’ was my birthmother’s, and in turn, my own. A lack of agency was central to her story—a story inspired by her time away at a home for unwed mothers.
I was wrestling with voice again, only this time on the page.
The first time I heard of such a place was the day a letter arrived folded around photographs of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman with freckled forearms like my own. I was a college junior and had recently transferred to a school near my mom. A chill raced up my arms as the photos spilled out—a little girl with painted fingernails, that girl now grown, standing beside an older lady who looked just like her, both smartly dressed in crisp black-and-white suits.
“Dear Christine,” she wrote. “. . . I remember holding you on my lap; your eyes seemed to look right into my soul. I knew I couldn’t keep you and my heart was broken and still is. Words cannot express how I have felt not knowing anything about you. I visited you at the infant home but I couldn’t hold you or kiss you because you were behind a glass window. You are a five to ten minute drive from my house. I named you Ann Marie. We are good people, nothing to be afraid of.”
My stomach was in knots when I shared the letter with my mother. She’d suffered so much in her life, and I never felt she loved me less than my siblings. Her eyebrows knit together as she read, ranting that she couldn’t believe this woman hadn’t contacted her first, and what if I hadn’t known I was adopted, and was she even thinking about what’s best for me. My mother handed back the letter and returned to the stove with a huff that I assumed meant she’d had enough.
“It’s a shock to me, too,” I said.
My mother didn’t bring up the letter in the days that followed. I tried to focus on my psychology final, which, ironically, included the study of what it meant to have a healthy sense of self—to feel known and know one’s self—know myself in ways those not adopted could take for granted.
A week later, I stared across a restaurant table at a stranger named Ann. “Oh, honey,” she said in a warm alto voice as she covered my hand with hers. I’m unsure what she saw in my face. I felt struck dumb. She seemed to recognize me in a way I didn’t recognize myself.
“I’ve thought about how strange this might be for you—to see someone who looks like you for the first time. You have the same roundness in your face as my sister, Lisa.” She took a deep breath and shared that she’d recently had a tubular pregnancy and lost the baby, but was still hopeful she and her husband could have children. “Tell me about you and your family.”
The waitress delivered two chicken parmesans as Ann and I attempted to fill each other in on twenty years of personal history. I told her how hard my mom worked to support us after our dad left and admitted I didn’t know I was adopted until middle school. “My brother learned a few years after I did,” I said, likely smiling as I pictured him. “He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I don’t care. She’s still my sister.’”
Ann took a long breath as if she was digesting it all.
I cleared my throat and asked, “How did I come to—be?” She described her relationship with my father in short phrases: “teenage puppy love,” “we met at a dance, we both loved Bob Dylan and poetry,” “we were so young, and times were very different.”
She moved on to music saying she was a piano teacher and that she had passed the time at the unwed mothers’ home practicing Chopin and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” for the senior recital she’d have after she returned. “You were getting big,” she laughed. “I had to figure out how to tuck you near the keys so I could play—do you play?” She looked hopeful.
“Not really. My grandmother taught me a bit on the organ when I was a kid and singing in my school’s chorus. We’ve always been close.”
“I always pictured you playing.” She looked down.
I felt a wave of loss. Her loss. My mother’s loss. And mine, too.
Thankfully, the waitress stopped to ask if we wanted dessert. As we shared a slice of chocolate cake, Ann shared that the home had forbidden salt and sweets with the exception of Halloween night. She over-indulged and mistook her stomach cramps for indigestion.
I was born the next day.
“You were a bundle of pink chub,” she smiled.
It was the first time I heard a true story about the night I was born.
The more she shared—about her family, about what life was like in the 60s—there was no sex ed, no legal birth control, and no credit cards for women without a father’s or husband’s permission—the more I realized I was missing the first chapter, the context, of my life. She said she found me with the help of people she met at an Adoptees Liberty Movement Association meeting, an activist group that was in its infancy stages in the late eighties.
“Your father Gregg is a high school English teacher,” she said as we finished. “He lives nearby, if you’d like to meet him.”
I realized I was missing the first chapter, the context, of my life.
A couple weeks later, I met Gregg. In the months and years that followed, he never talked about my adoption. He sent poetry he wrote that eluded to it and mixtapes of his favorite music—Bruce Springsteen, The Waterboys, U2 and threw in a Whitney Houston song here and there because he knew I liked her. On a road trip to a U2 concert shortly after we met, I learned that he, too, was an introvert who loved to run, travel and write.
Throughout my twenties, I met Ann and Gregg separately in coffee shops and restaurants. It was easy to talk to them from a part of me that felt like me. While my mother knew I’d met them, she didn’t ask much about it afterwards, or suggest how I might share the news, or them, with our family, so I kept my get-togethers on the down low. I didn’t want to hurt my mom, and I didn’t want to lose her. Acknowledging the connection I felt to my birth parents felt like an enormous risk to my relationship with the family that raised me.
If “Voice” is the full embrace, expression—and ownership—of allthat one is, I was on a long and winding road to finding one..
Which parts of my past could I own? Which parts of myself were acceptable to share with whom? That conundrum often left me speechless. And sometimes startled awake in the middle of the night feeling like I’d fallen down a deep well where no one could hear me, questions running through my mind on a loop. How do I say this just right? What if I hurt someone’s feelings? What if I’d said to my mother or family, “I appreciate everything you’ve done, but it didn’t—it doesn’t—take away the immense grief of losing my first family.” Would they love me less? Would they leave me in big ways or small?
Over the years, I’ve pictured finding a voice akin to opening a set of Russian matryoshka dolls. With each one opened through singing and writing, therapy and reading, I got closer. Closer to understanding that curiosity about my origins wasn’t a maladjustment, but a primal desire to answer a question that’s central to our human experience: Who am I?
A couple years before graduate school, I had the beginning of an answer. From my mother, I learned how to be resilient and strong, and to make time to start a day peacefully with good coffee. From Ann, I’d inherited a love of music and art and a deep curiosity about what it means to be human. And from Gregg, a steadfast tendency to use writing as a means to clear a path in which to live.
It was in those same years that Ann lost her life to breast cancer, at age 59. Losing her was the loneliest of griefs. I’d lost a mother I loved. I’d lost the person who wanted to know about all my families, and all the parts of me, and who loved me for them, too.
“Out of nowhere, a wave comes and I’m overcome,” I said months later to a holistic physical therapist who had become a friend. “It’s in the past. I know I need to move on.”
I’d lost the person who wanted to know about all my families, and all the parts of me.
Wen-Li worked the side of my body that moved freely first, then moved to the locked-up scapula behind my left lung, her way of bypassing my brain to show my body what was still working well and possible. Finally, the knot released and I took a full breath.
“Sometimes it is good to spend time in the past when it shines a light in a dark place.” Her hand rested atop my head.
In the decade before Ann’s death, she returned to college to study painting. The painting that graced her first gallery show’s postcard—an ethereal figure with a cascade of white-blue hair offering a trinity of tulips to a child—now hangs above my desk. In her artist’s statement she wrote:
“Being a musician all my life, I always had a silly notion that people are one thing. I never thought I could be an artist. Over the years, I vacationed out on the Cape. I loved the beach but I couldn’t wait to wander into all my favorite galleries in Wellfleet and Provincetown . . . but most importantly I have many works by my friend John Grillo . . . He once said, ‘My work is about color and love, and a little bit about art.’
I have found a voice as a painter, a painterly voice . . .When I am painting, I am in a different space, tapping into some other dimension of self, both intuitive and healing.
In describing these paintings, I think of music. The lyrics are the curved lines. The rhythm is in the texture. The harmony is within the color.”
The money Ann left me paid for my MFA, and a dog my family and I named Rookie. I, too, longed to tap into something intuitive and healing.
I attended that American Adoption Conference shortly after I graduated. It was there that I learned the costs of secrets and shame on many parents, and on their children now grown. Those discoveries came with me to a writing residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, in the Blue Ridge Mountains a few months later.
It took a full day to get used to the quiet, such quiet I heard the chestnut-brown horses chewing grass, and gravel crunch beneath my feet on the path to the barns-turned-studios. As I tacked family photos and a postcard of one of Ann’s paintings to the bulletin board above my desk, I felt guilty for being away from my roles back home; guilty because while my novel-in-progress had earned me the residency, it had no reliable monetary value and, worse, it was composed of words meant to go unspoken. And maybe a little guilt, too, because I was excited for a week in that sunlit studio with a pen, paper and pared-down life.
One night, a painter named Janet Gorzegno tapped her glass after dessert and invited us to her studio. Each of her gouache-on-paper paintings was of a different man in profile. They looked like time travelers from past centuries.
I fell in love with the painting she’d titled Between Land and Sea. He had a scruff of a beard, slight curl in his hair and soulful eyes cast skyward. One of the poets asked, “What inspired them?”
Janet tapped the side of her head. “Painting them is like meditation for me.”
I took a postcard from the table’s stack. Her upcoming exhibition was titled The Old Souls.‘Old soul’ was a term Ann had used often to describe people she loved. “What made you pick him for the postcard?” I pointed to her painting of a man with a stubbly beard and a Nike goddess-wing tattooed behind his left ear.
Janet pointed to another who was clean-shaven, with full lips and a strong jaw. “I thought it would be him,” she said. “But he’s too shy. He didn’t want it.” She touched the postcard. “He kept saying he would be the one, so I let him.”
“Wow,” was all I managed to say.
Voices. She not only heard their voices, she trusted them, too—trusted her inner compass and intuition to lead her in ways I wish I knew.
She not only heard their voices, she trusted them, too.
I sprinted back to my studio and thumbed through a binder of Ann’s letters. A few years before she died, she sent me three-pages titled “Remembrances” that included the day she and her family met with their priest to discuss the best plan for ‘the baby.’ She asked if the infant home could care for me until she finished high school. “A baby needs to be baptized by a married couple,” the priest had said. “If not, its soul will go to purgatory when it dies.”
What does a teenage girl do with the weight of those words?
After Ann died, I found a vine-patterned journal in her bookshelves. In the 22 years we knew each other, she shared poems she wrote while pregnant, a driving tour of the places she haunted as a teen, her music, her friends and dogs, a few piano lessons for me, and painting dates with my sons.
It wasn’t until her last years that she filled in the more horrifying details of unwed motherhood, though she’d never spoken these words that I found scrawled across a page:
Pregnant at 16.
Life of guilt and shame.
Now I have cancer.
Twelve words. What do I do with the story she told herself about herself, her haiku of how her body kept the score? And how do I honor—not shun—the reality of a bond that arcs backward through our roots and forward through my sons?
When I arrived at VCCA, I thought being around other writers would guide me, but it was the painters who left me up late imagining what it would be like for a high school girl to endure what Ann had endured, and get caught in the quicksand of loss that followed. I couldn’t write fast enough to capture what felt like her voice—her desires, her anger, the way she spoke about sexuality through the art she collected, and the peace she found through painting.
The next night, another painter, Jane Lincoln, clinked her glass in invitation. I was in.
The images that filled Jane’s studio were deceptive—composed of nothing more than colored stripes. “Each painting’s red is the same height and width,” she said as we entered.
Wandering the room, the red looked bold with yellow. With mossy green it seemed less vibrant. And paired with fuchsia, I swore there was more red in that painting than there was.
I stared at her wall of colors until my eyes blurred, broken-hearted by all the times I’d let my fear of loss drive the things I said and did.
Those moments felt like a bardo.
What if a voice is something you can never find, or get?
What if it’s something you must put your ear down close to your soul and listen for from the elements it springs from—a mix of nature and nurture, and the rest open to whatever you can open-heartedly create—and then live from.
Later that night, I walked the faintly-lit path from the studios to the residence building and saw a group sitting around the community room, a few bottles of wine on the table. I entered the foyer as I did every night, with a choice: left to the bedrooms, right to the community room.
Night after night I chose left, mostly for sleep so I could get an early start. But that night I heard music. A familiar voice in my head said: They’ve been here longer. They know each other well, and they’re singing. It’ll be awkward. Then, For the love of God, you like singing—and wine.Open the door.
It’s been ten years since that night. I can see more clearly now the ways I lived my way into answering the challenge embedded in that long ago INXS song, and how this thing called ‘voice’ is a matter of choice, of choosing, as the lyrics go on to say, how to climb as we fall and catch ourselves with quiet grace.
In those years, I’ve helped other adoptees share their stories and spoken at adoption conferences on the physical (I’m screened regularly for breast cancer) and mental health benefits of knowing the truth about your full identity (even if you can’t, or choose not, to know the people involved). The hard truth is that adoption is rooted in loss, and I share how powerfully healing it has been to share those losses with other adoptees, and over time, my family.
In the words of renowned researcher Brené Brown, in her book Atlas of the Heart, “our ability to connect with others is directly proportional to our ability to connect with ourselves.”
It haunts me to know that adopted adolescents have a four-times-higher incident of suicide attempts than the general population, to hear Supreme Court justices advocating the use of anonymous baby drop boxes, and to witness the ways recent legislation turns us back to practices so focused on birth that we miss the bigger question—what does it mean to nurture a life?
The hard truth is that adoption is rooted in loss.
I don’t have all the answers, but I share some insights I’ve learned whenever an adoptive parent approaches me after a conference panel for advice, including what a child psychologist said when I interviewed her for a writing assignment. My sons were very young at the time and it became my parenting north star: “If a child has one person in his or her life—ideally a parent, but it could be an aunt, uncle, grandparent—someone who tries to see that child for all of who they are and thinks they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread, that child will be okay.”
I returned to voice lessons recently. As I sang ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah up and down the scale again for the first time in years, I reflexively dropped a note when the sound got loud.
My new teacher, Catherine, made a motion with one of her arms. “Do this while you sing.”
I’d witnessed that motion a thousand times, only in basketball as a free throw. “You’ve got to follow through,” my sons’ coaches often said, their arm rising, hand pressing forward through their fingertips.
I made the motion, over and over, as I practiced with other sounds and words, and heard my voice rise from my core, on up through my throat, and arc out of my mouth toward the trees outside her window—it was sound in all its sonic fullness.
“Did you hear the difference?” Catherine laughed.
“I did!”
A few minutes later, as I continued, she said, “Could you feel what went wrong there?”
“I let it drop again, and a couple other times I think I tried too hard. But when it worked well it felt less like trying and more like allowing the sound to come out.”
“Yes! You made a transition rather than trying to jam the note someplace that it doesn’t want to go—which is a sign of both support and freedom.”
She asked if I had a song in mind to practice. I sent the video link to “A Beautiful Noise,” a ballad sung and played by Brandi Carlile and Alicia Keys. Its’ evocative lyrics speak to the choice we have to use a voice to heal.
I play it in my car sometimes, and sing myself home.
Wolfgang Mozart was remarkable. But then, so was his sister Nannerl. We’ve heard a lot about George Orwell, less about his fascinating wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy. How familiar are you with Dame Alice Kyteler, the first woman in Ireland to be condemned as a witch? Or Marie de France, a 12th century poet? Or Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the finest painters of the 17th century? Talented, smart, ambitious women came before us, as well as talented, smart, ambitious men. And yet, too much of women’s history has been erased or forgotten. It is through literature that we’re finally beginning to understand where we really come from.
I’m fascinated by the history of music. It’s by exploring this that I first discovered a collection of female orphans from 18th century Venice were fundamental to the birth of the concerto, and to their teacher— Antonio Vivaldi’s—compositions. Without these women and girls we wouldn’t have the most famous piece of music in the world, “The Four Seasons.” My novel, The Instrumentalist, imagines the life of one of these orphans: Anna Maria della Pietà. She was Vivaldi’s star pupil.
Picture a world without the Beatles, or Taylor Swift, without Claude Monet’s art or Maria Callas’ voice. Anna Maria della Pietà was the pop star of her day, a world-famous violinist that even kings and queens admired, and yet almost no one has heard of her. I decided I would do everything I could to tell her story.
Researching The Instrumentalist, I could feel the weight of all that we have lost. This enormous cavity where the stories that ignite our imaginations and the works that sing very our souls should be. Literature has the power to breathe light into the shadows. I decided that by combining fact and fiction I could try to do justice to the beauty of Anna Maria’s mind. A novel could demonstrate her determination and resilience, and how it might feel to be as talented as her and yet, still, capped by being a woman in the 18th century. We should never have forgotten Anna Maria della Pietà. And so, in The Instrumentalist, her key aim is to be remembered.
I’m not alone in my mission to bring back the women who came before us. There is a growing army of books exploring history from the female perspective, reimagining what has been lost. The following list celebrates just seven of my favorites. But this is only the beginning—a starting point to whet your literary appetite. History continues to be written. Bolder, more colorful, more nuanced and inspiring than ever. It continues to be imagined.
Cecily by Annie Garthwaite
Annie Garthwaite’s exquisitely researched novel is set in 15th century England. It imagines the life of Cecily, Duchess of York, who was mother to two kings—both Edward IV and Richard III. But in the novel Cecily is much more than a wife and mother—she is a genius political player, maneuvering the puppet strings during the Wars of the Roses.
In 12th century England there lived an extraordinary woman named Marie de France. While much of her history has been lost, in Matrix, Lauren Groff paints her as an assertive, visionary leader and queer woman. She marshals her convent of nuns into bloody battle and actively shapes the world she wants to see.
Being a woman with power was a dangerous thing in the 13th century. Molly Aitkinson’s Bright I Burn explores the life of Alice Kyteler, the first woman in Ireland to be condemned as a witch. Determined not to suffer the same constraints as her own mother, it’s a passionate reimaging of what women have suffered simply for wanting freedom.
Too many historians have painted Agnes Shakespeare as a calculating cradle-snatcher for marrying the younger William Shakespeare. In Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell challenges this interpretation and paints Agnes as a thoughtful, sensitive woman with a deep love of her husband and children. O’Farrell’s Agnes is someone with a remarkable ability to understand others and, more than anything, a desperate mother grieving the loss of her son.
The Book of Margery Kempe is believed by many to be the first autobiography in the English language, and Juliana of Norwich’s writings are the earliest surviving English-language works by a woman. In For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain, Victoria McKensie brings these two extraordinary women back with flare, celebrating both characters as courageous, visionary, and impossible, because of McKensie’s writing, to forget.
Nell Stephen’s debut Briefly, A Delicious Life explores the life of writer George Sand through the eyes of a long-dead ghost who is in love with her. It’s a joyfully original story which does justice to Sand’s strong personality and remarkable relationship to composer Frédéric Chopin. Both plot, and prose, are delicious.
Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the finest painters of the 17th century, and yet many people have never heard of her. She remains lost no longer thanks to Disobedient, Elizabeth Freemantle’s gripping novel, which chronicles Artemisia’s struggle to achieve all she was capable of within the constraints of her time.
IfDon’t Call Us Dead and Homie weren’t enough proof, Danez Smith’s Bluff confirms their importance in the poetic firmament through a magnificent array of form and content.
Smith’s singular voice dazzles, with subject matter that is both immediate and timeless. The poems are often a linguistic simitar about the world’s many injustices—whether it’s the systemic murder of Black people historically and today, or the devastations of climate change—and are equally wholehearted about love, and hope.
I had the pleasure of a generous and wide-ranging epistolary interview with Smith as they prepared for the publication of Bluff.
Mandana Chaffa: Prior to the epigraphs are the poems “anti-poetica” and “ars america (in the hold)” setting both the canvas and the stakes of what follows. In the former poem, despite the enumeration of what poetry can’t tangibly do—fix injustice, matter more than kindness, deliver freedom—what follows in the next 135 pages, proves why poetry is so valuable, even as the second poem is a kind of rooting, providing origin and geography. At what point in the process of creating this collection did these two poems arise, and did you always intend for them to be the preface?
Danez Smith: Leave it to a poet to start a long-ass book with a poem harping on the limitations of the form, right? I don’t remember exactly when I wrote those poems. I know “anti-poetica” came around when I was writing a bunch of ars poetica that were truly negative, maybe in a positive way, in their engagement with poetry. Near the revelation that these poems might be a book, my friend Angel Nafis gave it a read and gave me a good heart to heart about the inward critique and pessimism, the great weight of guilt in that early draft. When Angel says something, you listen. SoI looked at what was the negative force in the poems and leaned into that negativity so I could clock it, control it, play with it, balance it out, and not submit to it all the same. I have a note in my phone that says “turn all the ars poeticas to anti-poeticas” and I think that accurate adjustment allowed me to seek poetry’s use solely in its failures. So, it made space for hope, for light, for a way forward.
I leaned into negativity so I could clock it, control it, play with it, balance it out, and not submit to it.
“ars america” was an older poem that had a different title, maybe it was even untitled, that gained its title once I knew what I was writing into: language, genre, art, land, history, truth. I wanted to think about the art of America with the poems under that title. How and what does America make? What is an ars america? It could only be violence. I didn’t intend for them both to be the preface while writing them, but they felt like they set a certain set of conditions and understandings from jump. I put “anti-poetica” up top, and I think it was my editor Jeff Shotts who suggested putting the other poem up top, too. I think they make a nice two-step before the rest of the book unfolds.
MC: Speaking of epigraphs, the selections by Amiri Baraka, June Jordan and Franny Choi, refer in part to a new life coming from destruction, which feels especially appropriate in our world on fire. Yet the mythology of the phoenix is complex: though the phoenix rises from the ashes of its immolation, it will never be the same being that it once was. Each of your collections has a distinct, wonderful Danez-ness to them, yet there’s also a kind of regeneration that consistently makes it new; is this kind of motion and conversation something you contemplate or is it only present after the fact?
DS: I don’t think it’s intentional. I think I’m just writing each poem or collection as they come, but after a collection is wrapped and in the world, it is fun to think on which poems feel like they have instructions to keep writing, dreaming, and asking into the work. From Homie I think the poems that most influenced Bluff are “waiting on you to die so I can be myself” and “my poems.” Those poems I can see myself already beginning to struggle with the themes and exfoliating self-investigation that Bluff handles, and I think “waiting on you to die…” opened up a door into new lyric possibilities for me. I’m grateful there might be some kind of signature that I’m subconsciously imbuing the poems with, but my only task and mission is to write new poems and hopefully not just re-writing old ones, though that does happen too and I am in love with the fact that sometimes the soul just needs to say something again and again until it is satisfied or transformed.
MC: Though all the poems are visual in varying ways, the progression of forms in your collections, and especially in Bluff, are purposefully acrobatic and often upend the experience of reading in a meaningful way. In a few places, the placement of text necessitated either turning the book, or my head (I chose the latter), and that shifting—one’s body, one’s eyes—was invigorating, as well as a QR code, cascading text, background color shifts. Or in the magnificent “rondo,” which offers a multitude of literary forms: an homage, an elegy, weaving history, and a kind of urban street plan of poetic phrases. Let alone the shattering footnotes, delegated to the bottom of the page, echoing the line in “anti poetica:” that “poems only live south of something / meaning beneath & darkened & hot”
How did you determine the architecture for these poems? Did any of the pieces begin in one structure, and move to a different poetic neighborhood?
DS: It’s all play, trial and error, what ifs, and a little bit of useful boredom, too. All of these poems start with the word first… is that true? Well, no. There are poems like “end of guns” that were just a regular-degular poem in stanzas before the collage came into its body, but there are poems like “rondo” where I knew for a long time what I wanted the shape to be, but I had to wait for years for the language to come. I love the visual fields that poetry holds so well, but nothing can start without the word for me. However, language sometimes does not satisfy, and when that’s the case I can ask “Is this just not the write words or is there something about the shape that I can manipulate to better get to the poem’s intended heart?” I try not to play for the sake of making a poem “different” for variety, but to really listen to the poem and ask how it wants to be embodied outside the confines of my mind.
MC: Your poems are some of my favorites to read aloud—sonic, exuberant, complex—and I was excited about the variety of oratorical possibilities, especially for the visually-forward pieces. They feel like the opposite of erasures, if that makes sense: the voices, the phrases, the unexpected frictions overflow onto the page, a chorus rather than a solo. What’s been your experience of reciting these poems?
Sometimes the soul just needs to say something again and again until it is satisfied or transformed.
DS: I love thinking about something as the opposite of erasure! Maybe that’s why this book ended up so goddamn long. I am excited to meet these poems in the air, but I haven’t had a lot of experience reading them aloud. I go to fewer open mics than I have in the past, I don’t slam anymore (for now), so I’m looking forward to reading these with audiences soon. I am, however, pulled toward what possibilities there are in video. There is a Keith Haring exhibition at a museum in town right now and one of the things I was most attracted to were his “tapes.” I think some of these poems might be better audiotized as tapes so that way the visual elements are not flattened by reading. I hope to get to play around with some ideas along those lines soon.
MC: English, unlike many languages, elects to center the “I” on a pedestal away from the collective; you, we, them, other pronouns aren’t capitalized. You nearly always employ a lower case “i” in your poetry and there’s intimacy and democracy in doing so (autocorrect keeps demanding I turn this into a capital “I”, as I assertively attempt to wrest control), an “us-ness” to it, that feels like the doorway to the kind of eden you’re depicting. How does your work navigate the distance—or intersection—between I-dentity and identity?
DS: Hmmmm…I am not sure! I think i-dentity, for me, stands in as a little plausible deniability in the lowercase i. There are aesthetic reasons I prefer the lowercase i and lowercase letters in general, but it also feels more playful, open, and moveable than the big I. You’re right on the money with that us-ness too. It feels, for me, like I have an easier time folding a “we” behind the little i. The ability to tie the personal to the communicable helps me decenter myself and keep the poetics open, breathing, influenced to the urgencies and pleasures of others around me. I do trust and know that there are moments to be self-absorbed, selfish, utterly and unapologetically internal, but I wanna also find bridges between that deep interiority and the ecosystems I am a part of. I-dentity then is necessary tool to seek out the self, before then turning towards i-dentity which lowers the guard rails and lets the world in. Something like that.
From “Last Black American Poem”:
“Forgive me, I wrote odes to presidents.”
MC: The interrelations of your poems—and collections—provides an unexpected reflection on what you’ve written in the past. I loved “my president” from Homie, but “Last Black American Poem,” and others in Bluff, offer a glimpse of something I rarely see elsewhere: your collections—and the past Danez and current Danez—interacting with each other, as well as how thoughtful you are about the passage of time, and all that it highlights or erodes. Or as you wrote in “on knowledge:” “i wanted freedom & they gave me / a name, it’s distracted me for long enough” // i had to move my mind outside my body / move my body like my mind / move my mind / deeper into the dark / question of its use”
Do you revisit your other poems, and do they inspire or determine what you write about currently?
Sometimes the idea of audience scares me; sometimes it hands me a righteous responsibility and purpose.
DS: I do! I love to sit down with my old work every now-and-then, be it book or draft, and see what I was up to, how I’ve changed, to see how I’m still the same or what I’m still chewing on. Sometimes there is a kindness and self-appreciation in that reading, sometimes an embarrassment and drive to correct something I thought or did comes about. Bluff wouldn’t have happened without those visits into my writing past, be it via the reflective self-critique vein of the book or because there are poems that were written alongside or in-between poems from my previous two collections. Hell, I almost put a poem from 2012, before my first collection, in the book with an addendum written in 2022. I feel inspired by my former selves. I love their stupid, messy asses. I am community with them, still learning their lessons and nursing their wounds. I am grateful to be able to witness myself from a different point in time and put new pieces to the puzzle.
MC: “My Beautiful End of the World” is a remarkable poetic essay about the disastrous state of the physical world, interspersed with beautiful imagery of Minneapolis where you are “returned into the delicious flaunt of nature” even as you reflect upon the planet’s barreling demise. I hope not to be one of your “hesitant cousins” or worse, but even though I have a MetroCard rather than a car, I too am complicit, as we all are. After I first read this poem, I turned 40 pages back to “Minneapolis, Saint Paul” which focuses on a more devastating destruction, the murder of George Floyd, that unimaginable nine and ½ minutes, and all that ensued. Can we talk about the long-form poems that spire through this collection like Redwoods and what they allow you to examine?
DS: We sure can! I love a long poem. The best poem I’ve written so far is the long poem “summer somewhere” that opens Don’t Call Us Dead (don’t tell my other poems I said that). For me there is a lot of excitement in the long poem, having to extend past the brief utterance into volta after volta, door after door journeying deeper into the poem and further away from what language or thought sparked the poems inception. No poems surprise me like what I find deep into those long poems. In the long poem, the unknown, the formerly unutterable must surface, the incantation of length summons it up if you are submitting to it right. I go to the long poem/the essay when I know what I want to say is only the surface, when the questions I have feel like they can’t just sit there and linger, like they must be embraced and dived into right then and there. Sometimes what happens is a much shorter piece is retrieved from that deep investigation, but in Bluff I chose for a great many to stay long. I had a lot to say and unfortunately for the version of myself that said before drafting this “I want a really short book this time,” I liked what I was writing and wanted to share as much as possible.
MC: I can’t stop thinking about a happy poem that exists joyfully before the entrance of the audience. Is it the same for happy poets? I realize there’s no singular answer, and it could change day by day, but what is the “heaven” of writing for you, and how much does the audience—beyond your circle of loved ones for whom, with whom, you create—weigh on you or the process.
I believe in the powers of declaration, manifestation, chant, song, repetition, devotion, and all the things that make prayer happen.
DS: Correct! There are Fiftyleven answers to that question. Here’s today’s: My writing heaven is being able to write honestly and imaginatively about my life, my world, my dreams, my hopes, angers, griefs, disappointments, and pleasures. It is a gift to be able to share that with anyone. Sometimes I keep things for myself. I’ve been journaling again for the last few years and having a private practice has made it easier to maintain a good relationship with my public one. Sometimes the “white gaze” is something I think about. Sometimes it’s too boring and unuseful to consider. Sometimes I want to write poems and get them quickly into the hands of beloved community members known and unknown. Sometimes the idea of audience scares me; sometimes it hands me a righteous responsibility and purpose. When I’m making a book, I must think about the audience, what the effect of writing these pulled together pieces is gonna have on someone and because of that I always try to imagine how reading one of my books might be of use to someone else’s living and working.
MC: I’m interested both in your perspective of the power of words, of repetitions, as well as what I’d call your innate hopefulness, which I feel threaded through the collection, regardless or perhaps because of the undiluted truths also embedded within.
DS: Beginning with hope, I think there are few greater gifts to offer someone. Grief, witness, shelter, solidarity, resources, so many great gifts, but hope offers us possibility, proposes transformation, and believes in the future. There’s a lot of feelings in my work, but I think if you look at the architecture of all my collections you’ll find that I am always trying to orient us towards hope, towards a great “someday” where we are all loved.
I love an “i want” in a poem. I think of my poem “Dinosaurs in the Hood” which is also made of those “wants.” You know, Mandana, maybe it comes back to prayer. I believe in its power. I believe in the powers of declaration, manifestation, chant, song, repetition, devotion, and all the things that make prayer happen. Maybe I believe the purest poem is a prayer, and all prayers are poem, and they have real, big, spiritually tangible consequences and…hopes! I think words have more powers than I can list or even think of, but I think part of the reason I was put on this earth and tasked to make use of language is to provide hope in the midst of darkness, to be one of a great many torches as we light our way through.
There, on Redfin, is Grover Cleveland’s childhood home. Price: $295,000.
Despite my undergraduate degree in history, my knowledge of Grover Cleveland is scant. I can only pick him out of a presidential lineup is if he’s included twice for those nonconsecutive terms. A Google search reveals a mustache and a vague Theodore Roosevelt vibe, though I might be romanticizing since I now want to live in his childhood home.
The house, somewhat over our budget, otherwise checks the boxes: 1500 square feet, two stories, hardwood floors. “Probably original,” says my husband, and not in a complimentary way. After seeing Grover Cleveland’s childhood kitchen, Bryan is voting No.
Our daughter is voting No to the entire move to upstate New York. She wants to live in her childhood home, a teal house in California with orange trees in the backyard and lizards sunning on the wall.
Grover Cleveland’s childhood home sits upon a grassy lot where he once played boyish pranks on the neighbors. Inside is the only shiplap tub I’ve seen on Redfin. The rooms are dim and the wallpaper runs floral, but the built-ins and staircase banister are as charming as time. The house has white siding, welcoming front steps, and a placard announcing that this building is historically important and the people living inside are remarkable.
In Grover Cleveland’s childhood home, I’ll be so busy baking sourdough bread and reading poetry that I’ll rarely scroll the internet. I’ll play Barbies with my daughter without finding it excruciating. And we’ll host dinner parties. Historical, of course. I’ll be me, but more fascinating.
What actually happens is this: On the exact day someone else buys Grover Cleveland’s childhood home, we move into an adjacent neighborhood in upstate New York, a place where folks walk their dogs twice a day and children roam between houses. Because we don’t live in Grover Cleveland’s childhood home, I never join the women’s rugby team or take up knitting. I host exactly zero historical dinner parties. I remain ordinary—by which I mean myself—in every way, even as I paint walls and settle into new routines. We watch nuthatches out the kitchen window, play Wordle, walk our dogs by the Erie Canal.
And after school, my daughter shouts a new friend’s name and where they’re going, and she runs out into the day, the way children used to, the way I suppose Grover Cleveland once did when he lived in his childhood home.
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