We Are Who We Want

This month, Guernica looks at what we want — who we want — and how on earth, or anywhere else, we can possibly survive our own wanting.

We lead our June issue with a diptych on desire and the divine. MM Gindi and Enzo Escober, coming of age as queer young men at different times, in different parts of the world, in homes with different Christianities, forge their queerness with and against the expressions of God that surround them.

Enzo Escober grew up in the Philippines; though his family was not Catholic, he was enamored of the Catholic martyrs and the redemption they offered. “When I was seven, with my book of saints, I wished to be broken like a spotless thing, to be granted God for it,” he writes. But when Escober encounters the story of Matthew Shepard, two decades after the young man’s murder, he uncovers the limits of martyrdom. “[N]obody valued his murder more than liberal groups, whose fixation on his identity was symptomatic of a transformative politics dependent on death . . . a ritual purging of homosexuality’s moral stain,” Escober writes. But where is the room in the myth for a queer man to live, spotless or otherwise?

“I’m scared to write about the devil because writing is a form of incantation, because naming a thing is the first step in manifesting. I’m forty-five years old now and thought that time had diluted the fear, but writing about him exhumes it,” MM Gindi writes. “But I keep returning to this essay, or it returns to me. It haunts me, and I haunt it back.” The devil, in his case, is queer desire. Or rather, the devil exploits that desire, tunneling through otherworlds to reach for Gindi’s soul. Gindi knows what this looks like, how it works, because he watched The Exorcist as a young boy, and because a generation before, his father witnessed exorcisms as a young man. “From a young age, I am taught that the devil is always chasing me and that my job is to keep running,” he writes. “Because I’m gay, I have to run the fastest.”

In Meredith Talusan’s short story, “Sexual Tension,” the protagonist glories in desire, even in spite of themself. Surprised by a desire so strong it trumps career ambitions — desire by another name — they succumb to fantasy, and then flirt with its reality, each threatening an identity constructed, lately, to work as commodity. And in fiction from Spotlights, our series highlighting work from independent literary magazines around the world, a Nigerian woman who desires nothing more than to have a child must reckon, instead, with helping her niece end an unwanted pregnancy. After a lifetime of mothering without the identity or status of mother, she must perform an act that undoes the very thing she most wants in the world — because “this girl I had raised, my child even though she hadn’t come from my body, was despairing.”

In our latest Back Draft interview, Brandon Taylor gives up writing, returning only when he understands that he must want something more for his protagonist. In Wish You’d Been Here, our series documenting the disappearing rituals of a rapidly warming world, one man in the Himalayas finds himself alone in wanting nothing more than a timely spring bloom. In “Administrator,” by Sam Munson, a man who reluctantly becomes the keeper of his neighbors’ keys discovers the pleasure and pain of wanting in isolation.

Omotara James’s poem “Closure” bears witness to the end of desire, while Dmitry Blizniuk crafts poetry around its absence. And Victoria Chang’s ekphrastic poem “Untitled IX, 1982” twists through desires light and dark to understand the expressive limitations of wanting: “What we say, here, now, is only the / part of flesh that is known.”

Thank you for being here.

— Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica

In Search of Radical Care

This month was, I confess, an accident — the kind that our turn this year to digital monthly issues is designed to invite. As we reviewed the pieces in conversation with each other, we found a lot of mothers. More than that, we found so many examples of what culture calls mothering: acts of care, gestures of comfort, so many kinds of commitment to help bodies come into being — or, to borrow poet Phoebe Giannisi’s invocation of Empedocles, to help “a soul dressed in a body” become. Simply that, wherever the verb leads.

It’s perhaps a bit too on the nose (it’s nearly Mother’s Day in the US), but conversations emerge in their own time. Our job at Guernica, we think, is to listen a little more acutely than we might elsewhere in our busy, cacophonous lives and nudge ourselves onward toward the collective vision, that political imagination, that holds so much more for all of us than the world we live in. This month, we heard a search for radical acts of care.

Rafael Frumkin journeys toward trans joys. Sara Petersen critiques motherhood as a gendered and performative act. Sena Moon writes from the intimacy of worlds mothers create for daughters. And, in a sudden turn, Chris Santiago’s poem articulates the existential force, in language as in life, of “mother.” In Apostrophe, our column for book reviews that celebrate the subjective, Aida A. Hozić writes in dialogue with Aleksander Hermon’s work on family — that collective of care (and, often, its opposite) — and in Monika Woods’s “Reading,” a committed mother’s home unspools, even as she helps her son thrive. Yoko Uema longs for safety for the puddle-splashing children of Okinawa, where the consequences of US military presence still put body and soul at risk.

Also this month, we have an extra helping of poetry for you — at Guernica, poetry is very much an offering of spiritual care — from Wayne Koestenbaum, Tuệ Sỹ, and Jesús Cos Causse. And we’re grateful for the translators featured in this issue — Lisa Hoffman-Kuroda, Kristin Dykstra, Martha Collins, Nguyen Ba Chung, and Brian Sneeden — whose commitment to helping new work reach Anglophone readers is equally a creative and political becoming.

Thank you for being here.

— Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica

The April Issue

Guernica, I often tell people, grew up with the Internet. We’ve been an online magazine since 2004, and we’ve seen online conversation grow and change a lot in those nineteen years. We’ve changed too — adding, some years back, a daily blog, then moving to daily publishing entirely.

These days, the daily Internet feels like a conveyor belt of the disposable; hot takes, provocations, and easy outrage roll over us faster than we can consume them. Thought is the commodity; words are merely the packaging.

Obviously, that’s not how we work. Guernica publishes writers who resist the reactive, who shake the very foundations of conventional thinking, who provoke new ways of seeing. In short, we do a different thing — and it needs to be done differently.

Starting this month, we’re publishing a digital monthly — just as much fiction, nonfiction, and poetry every month, but “bound” by our redesigned homepage. We hope this sharpens your view of our editorial vision, the curative work of our stellar team of editors, and the political imagination that brings our community together.

We lead with “The Invisible War,” a genre-pushing piece of nonfiction from Iranian writer Nargol Aran. Aran, who lives in Tehran, immerses in the lives of health workers and interrogates the economic effects of sanctions, in a piece that builds from the intimate details of individual lives into emphatic resistance to the hypothesis that sanctions are a peaceful form of politics. Thanks to the prodigious talents of Farnaz Haeri, who translated from Aran’s original English, we also offer the piece in Persian.

Kashmiri writer Gowhar Yaqoob calls us to attend to another endless, undeclared war in “The Final Landscape,” this month’s fiction selection for our Guernica Global Spotlights series. On the eve of setting out to look deeply at a war seemingly no one but its survivors had noticed, journalist Anjan Sundaram writes a letter to his newborn daughter — a letter he earlier envisioned as the first chapter of his latest book, and which we publish in The Cutting Room, our department for work that writers loved but had to cut from their new books.

And this month, we inaugurate “Wish You’d Been Here,” a series of postcards from the climate apocalypse. Every month, we’ll bring you original photography and meditative writing that captures the disappearing rituals of our rapidly warming world. From festivals to sacred rites to types of labor and forms of leisure, we appreciate and mourn what we’re losing. Michigan photographer Amy Sacka leads the series with a reflection on the shrinking ice of her homeland.

In conjunction with our new climate series, Emma Hardy talks to Amali Tower, a leading voice in the fight for rights of people displaced by climate change, about recent progress, and ongoing struggles, in the quest for climate justice. In Back Draft, Ben Purkert talks with Javier Zamora about revising points of view in trauma writing.

And you’ll find more stellar fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from Kwame Dawes, Jemimah Wei, Daniela Catrileo, Rumena Bužarovska, Bre’Anna Bivens, Myronn Hardy, and Vandana Khanna.

We’re so grateful you’re here.