The World is a Shitting Bird: A Conversation with Emilie Moorhouse

During her MFA, Francophone writer Emilie Moorhouse serendipitously discovered the works of a little-known Surrealist poet, Syrian-Egyptian-English Joyce Mansour, who chose to write exclusively in French. Mansour, a glamourous, married woman who came of age as an artist in 1950s Paris under the wing of André Breton, existed as a kind of glitch in the French literary scene—an upper-class, Arab, apolitical woman who refused to become a sex object while making unapologetically sexual work. Emerald Wounds (City Lights Books) is the result of Moorhouse’s deep dive into the fringes of Francophone literature, translating Mansour’s wide-ranging poetry and asserting her right to be known. In this career-spanning edition, Mansour exists as a writer’s writer, a reluctant feminist, an Arab Jew, and most blatantly as a kind of queer “uber-wife,” pissing in her husband’s drink while flying on the freeway between sex and death.

I recently spoke to Moorhouse on Zoom about the life and work of Joyce Mansour as her Wi-Fi was being changed—the warbling sound of a hole being drilled somewhere above.

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The Rumpus: How, technically, did you find Joyce Mansour?

Emilie Moorhouse: I was taking a translation course—this was in 2017, and the #metoo movement had just exploded and I thought, “I need to translate a woman who is controversial, someone who the literary establishment doesn’t approve of” which, okay, many women have not had the approval of the literary establishment. But I think I was looking for raw emotion, for a woman who could express her sexuality and who could speak her truth whether it fit in with the times or not. So that was kind of the criteria that I set for myself. And I did find quite a few women like this in Francophone literature, but in the Surrealist tradition or practice, a lot of it is stream-of-consciousness writing. And so, what Mansour was writing was naturally uncensored.

Rumpus: Reading Mansour’s origin story as a writer, I found it obviously compelling but also kind of curious, because there’s this story of her being in a state of grief, both from her mother dying when she was fifteen and from her first husband dying when she was eighteen, and the story is that her grief forced her to write. It was either the madhouse or poetry. That’s obviously a very compelling story behind a first book, right? Especially with the title of Screams from a beautiful, foreign, young woman in 1953 arriving on the Parisian literary and art scene. I wonder if there’s anything problematic in this origin story in your opinion. Is it constructed? Or do you think, in an alternate timeline, Mansour could’ve just been a happy housewife with her rich, much older, French-speaking second husband?

Moorhouse: Well, I think she would have been involved in the arts. There is this really strong personality in Mansour. And as much as she was shaped by the events of her youth, she does have such a rich background as well. She was bilingual before she met her second husband, speaking fluent English and Arabic. So, she obviously had this very rich and interesting life, you know, in tandem with these early events. But at the same time, and I’ve never heard it mentioned in any of the interviews, or, in any research that I did, that she was writing poetry, prior to these events. I guess life is life.

Rumpus: So, in sticking a little bit with her biography before getting to the work, when reading about Mansour’s second husband—which sounded like a problematic relationship in that he had lots of affairs—I feel like in a way that Mansour had this despairing, mourning and grieving personality versus a kind of desiring personality, especially desiring of men who she couldn’t really possess. Do you feel that her second husband supported her, especially the notion of the confessional in her work? I wonder if he even read her work?

Moorhouse: Yeah, I also wondered about that. I know that her son read her work and he actually helped correct her grammar, her French mistakes. And I do know that she never discussed her first husband with her second husband but that her second husband sort of swept her off her feet. He kind of gave her life again after the death of her first husband. But her second husband was not someone who was initially very involved in the arts. Apparently, André Breton hated him! Breton did not consent to Mansour’s husband, basically. He came from a very different world than Breton.

Rumpus: I have a lot of questions about the relationship between Mansour and Breton. In Mansour’s poetry, there’s a lot of female rage against the husband or the lover, even as she is taking pleasure in them. It reminds me of the line in one of her poems: “Don’t tell your dreams to the one who doesn’t love you.” I wonder if there’s this irreconcilable split in Mansour’s life between her domestic life and her artistic life. I was thinking a lot about Breton and his mentorship of her in this way. I think it’s interesting in your intro that you state that they were definitely not lovers.

Moorhouse: I was never able to explicitly find any information that Mansour and Breton were sexually involved, and one of her biographies explicitly states they were never lovers. I think Mansour’s artistic side was really nourished through Breton. They went to the flea markets of Paris every afternoon together in search of artwork. And I do think that Mansour’s second husband, through Mansour, started to develop a greater appreciation of artwork. But it wasn’t something that he was involved in initially and so I really don’t know how present he was in her artistic practice.

Rumpus: You label Mansour’s poetry as erotic macabre. Can you break that term open a bit? I am thinking of her work’s relationship to 60s and 70s French feminism (like écriture feminine) but I’m also thinking of the somewhat contrasting pornographic strain in her work, akin to Georges Bataille.

Moorhouse: I do see it as both. I think she gets inspiration from both. Bataille was very erotic macabre, or maybe he’s a little bit more twisted than that even, but this whole idea of la petite morte (death is orgasm), I do see influences from that in her work. But I don’t think Mansour was loyal to any kind of movement. I mean, she was obviously very loyal to the Surrealists, but when she was asked to write for a feminist magazine, she bristled and said, “Feminism, what do you mean?” I think Mansour liked to remain independent and have her creativity be independent from these different movements. She was apolitical. And I think some of that comes from Mansour’s experience in Egypt, being exiled because she was part of this upper-class Egyptian society, her father was imprisoned and most of his property and assets were seized by the government and apparently, he refused to ever own a house again and lived the rest of his life in a hotel. Then you have the Surrealist movement, which Joyce Mansour was a part of, which was more aligned with anarchism. She was kind of caught between two worlds.

Rumpus: It’s interesting, this idea of Mansour being apolitical and having a sort of disconnect from feminism, because it seems to bring up things around the Surrealists having issues with women, with women being objectified or fetishized in their work, this idea of “mad love” trumping all, even abuse. And so, if we just, say, insert Mansour into our present-day politics—and this is a totally speculative question—how do you feel she would fit into our polarizing and gender-fluid times?

Moorhouse: Well, my impression of her work is that it is very gender-fluid, she plays around with gender in her writing quite a bit, so I feel like she absolutely would, in a way, fit into our now. In terms of the political, that’s a good question because, yeah, everything is very polarized and politicized today.  Also, I don’t know that she wasn’t necessarily political. I think she obviously sympathized with many progressive movements and that’s clear in her writing. That includes feminism. She was openly mocking articles that appeared in women’s magazines imposing unrealistic housewife-style standards. She mocked beauty standards and even the condescending tone they had when advising women on how to behave “nicely.” So she obviously did have certain strong leanings. But I think outside of her art, Mansour wasn’t necessarily willing to pronounce them. It was more like my art speaks for itself.

Rumpus: I think that’s probably still the best way of being an artist. And also, it’s not really a speculative question, because we will soon see how Mansour’s work is received with a younger, contemporary, potentially genderqueer readership, right?

Moorhouse: Yeah. I’m excited to see how her work will be received. I do feel that much of her writing is, in fact, very contemporary around gender. But she wasn’t intellectualizing it. It came out in her voice, which rejected any gender confines without having to announce that she was doing so.

Rumpus: Did you find as a translator that you had to make some harder choices around some of the more dated language, especially in terms of race? Terms that people don’t use anymore?

Moorhouse: There were certainly some words that gave me pause. The word oriental comes up a few times, and this is obviously a word that is dated, perhaps more so in English than in French. What is interesting for me though, is that when I read it in context, I think she is using that word in a way that acknowledges the history behind it, the colonialism, the fetishizing, the exoticizing. For example, Mansour speaks of “oriental suffering,” or of a “narrative with an Oriental woman.” I don’t think, even though she was writing in the 60s at this point, that she uses this word lightly. The way I read it, she uses it to evoke her own nostalgia, or longing for her life in Egypt. And to clarify, when Mansour uses oriental in French, it refers to the Near East. It refers to her own Syrian and Egyptian roots. She never returned to Egypt, so even though she did experience a lot of suffering there, she is still a woman living in exile. This is definitely a challenge of translating older work, especially with an artist who, I think, does not use these words lightly.

Rumpus: Interesting. Because what’s making headlines right now is this political urge to kind of clean up certain language that was used in literature in the past that is hurtful or flat out racist today. So, I still do wonder if there was this urge at all for you to clean up the language?

Moorhouse: I didn’t want the language to be offensive. I would hope that I’ve succeeded with that. I don’t want any dated language to draw attention to itself because that’s not what the poem is meant to do.

Rumpus: But the French is the same. You never changed anything in the French.

Moorhouse: No, I never changed anything in the French. I don’t think I’m allowed to do that. The French is word-for-word.

Rumpus: I think this speaks to its time. And it also—yet again!—points back to the Surrealist problems with women. I mean, sometimes Mansour’s work is so radical and standout, and there are also moments in it when it does feel a bit retrograde. I’m inserting her relationship with Breton in here again because I wonder if she was one of those women who lived as an artist aligning herself with powerful men?

Moorhouse: Well, I think that she would have definitely been outnumbered in those groups, right? I mean, women to men. I don’t know if she was loud, and what her personality was like surrounded by all those men. It’s hard to know. But she did smoke cigars!

Rumpus: Right. That is a very alluring look. Also, she was a mother. I think that’s kind of a big deal in a very male-centric artist’s space.

Moorhouse: Yes, and she was a very doting and overprotective mother. But, you know, even though Mansour may have aligned herself with Breton and other men, I don’t feel like she would have been one to just do things to appease them. And you can see that in her poetry, how she rejects the male gaze that objectifies her. So we can’t just put her in a box or in a category of militant feminist or someone who just goes with the old boys’ club, right?

Rumpus: Yeah, you’re right. She’s both an individual and of her time. In terms of her being a woman, what do you make of her disappearance in the canon? You talk about this in your introduction, her work being perceived as “too much.” Do you think this quality relates to the forgetting of Joyce Mansour?

Moorhouse: Being very familiar with the French culture, I would say yes. I use the word chauvinistic because I think that certain French literary elite have this very precise idea of what “French” literature is, and what “great” literature is. And mostly, it’s been men, White men, who write “great literature” and historically women were allowed to write for children. I think it’s a shame because there are so many Francophone voices that are just so rich, so different. And I think that some in the literary elite just don’t know what to make of these so-called different voices, so they kind of dismiss them. And it’s too bad, because these voices enrich the literary landscape. French literature has been very France-centric, right? Which, obviously, has its roots in colonialism. So even though Mansour was somewhat respected as a Surrealist, the wider French literary establishment very easily could have dismissed her. When I was working on getting some of the rights from one of her publishers—and it’s really hard to get through to them—when I finally had a conversation with them, even they dismissed her! This man said to me, “You know, Joyce Mansour would be nothing without Breton. Without André Breton, there would be no Joyce Mansour.” So even one of her publishers in this day and age still doesn’t take her seriously.

Rumpus: There is this suspicion that Breton created her?

Moorhouse: Yes, and that she’s only recognized to the limited degree that she is because of her affiliation with him.

Rumpus: It feels that this relationship with Breton is really at the crux of a lot for Mansour. I mean, he clearly was incredibly important to her, he was her mentor and she loved him, and I don’t know—these very close artistic relationships they can be difficult for others in the world to understand. Maybe it’s why #metoo resonates differently in France, to be honest. And now I’m thinking of Maïwenn and Luc Besson, which is totally different, but still. . . . When did André Breton die? Was it 1968?

Moorhouse: I think it was 1966. I’m not sure.

Rumpus: Because it’s interesting, I was thinking of Mansour’s 1960s publication White Squares and her last work from the 1980s, Black Holes. Her later work is really kind of dark. My favorite line from one of her late poems is: “The world is a shitting bird.” I mean, I don’t want to say that Breton had an unnatural or too strong of a hold on her or a shitty hold on her, but maybe he did. Maybe her work matured after Breton’s death. Maybe it got even wilder.

Moorhouse: Yeah, I mean, I definitely do see that difference between her earlier work and her later work. It’s not just that the poems in her earlier works are shorter. The later ones are more macabre and her identity is more explicit—both her Jewish identity and her Egyptian identity. Also, Mansour evokes disease and aging and the history of cancer in her family. She died of cancer, like her mother did, and I don’t know if her battle was a short one or drawn out. There is another collection of her poems—prose poems that we couldn’t publish because of copyright—but there’s one about the hospital, and it sounds like it’s her visiting someone in a hospital and it’s very much about the human body falling apart and this industrialized hospital where all bodies are falling apart together.

Rumpus: Her mixing of the sexual body and the dying body is so powerful. I love Mansour’s use of urine, actually. Sometimes, it is this incredibly liberatory thing, like, pissing in the street. And then it’s poisonous, or it’s hedonistic, she’s drinking it like honey. Piss is this ubiquitous substance and act in her work. I love that.

Moorhouse: It’s almost like the soul, your soul comes out in your urine. What else can I say about that?

Rumpus: Nothing. That’s perfect. Your soul is in your urine.

 

 

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Author photo by Selena Phillips Boyle

The Presence in Absences: A Conversation with Gina Chung

I first met Gina Chung at a going-away party for a mutual writer friend. In a warm back room, during the final days of summer, I wedged myself into a small circle and caught the final bits of something Chung said. She paused to clue me into their conversation. I was struck by her kindness and easy generosity, the way she openly shared her writing routine and practices with a group of old friends and new acquaintances. Months later, I heard about her debut novel, Sea Change (Vintage). The book sucked me into its effervescent, marbled world and ultimately buoyed my spirit, just like its author had at that summer party.

Sea Change follows Ro, an Asian American woman who is floating into her thirties on her own. Partly struggling, partly aimless, Ro is estranged from her mother, and grieving her father, who disappeared on a sea exhibition a decade earlier. Ro’s only companion is a Giant Pacific octopus, Dolores, the last remaining link to her father. As Dolores is about to be sold to a private investor, Ro has to reframe her understanding of past and present to make sense of her new world. Chung’s prose bubbles with delectable humor and metaphors, burrows into hard truths, and sets out to explore uncharted emotional ranges.

Chung is the recipient of the 2021 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship and a number of literary awards, including a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and the Rumpus, among others. She has a forthcoming short story collection, Green Frog (Vintage, 2024).

I spoke with Chung about Sea Change over Zoom a few weeks before her book launch. We talked about the role of silence and the unsaid in Asian American families, humor’s proximity to grief, subverting conventionality in character tropes, and how to take care of oneself in service of one’s art.

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The Rumpus: I noticed that a lot of your work, Sea Change and a number of your short stories, often features the natural world. What drew you to ocean life and sea creatures as subjects and counterpoints to the characters in your novel?

Gina Chung: I’ve always loved writing about the natural world and thinking about animals that live in different ecosystems than us because it reminds me that we as human beings are also animals. I think we often forget that about ourselves; it’s really easy for us to see ourselves as being somehow apart from or above nature when in actuality we are very much a part of it. Whereas humans can and often do lie about what we need, animals can’t hide or be dishonest about their needs. Thinking about animals and what they need to survive and thrive inspires me as a writer to also try to be more honest on the page.

Rumpus: Within the characters’ environment, money is an oceanic force, capitalism as much a precondition to existence in the novel as it is in current modern life. With our protagonist, Ro, it seems there are few things that she can do in opposition to these forces, but she actively defies, withdraws from, and avoids this system in her own ways. Can withdrawal and avoidance be a form of agency?

Chung: In a lot of ways, withdrawing from or avoiding a decision can seem like a way to surrender one’s agency in a situation, but at the same time—my therapist and I always talk about this—not making a choice is still kind of making a choice as well. For Ro, avoidance is a huge part of how she navigates her day-to-day life because she’s been hurt and carries a lot of pain. That makes her feel afraid to engage directly with things that might hurt her or that she might be in disagreement with. When it comes to the impending sale of Dolores, it is one area where, even if she’s not consciously doing anything to fight back against the sale, she feels a direct kind of no in response. I wanted that to be an inciting incident for the book, too, because it gets her to understand how much this octopus means to her and how much she stands to lose if she were to lose this one point of connection.

Rumpus: This inciting incident also pits her against her best friend, Yoonhee. I was fascinated by their relationship. They grew up together with similar backgrounds but end up in very different positions at the aquarium and have different levels of motivation to rise the ranks. Why was it important for you to juxtapose their ambition and upward mobility?

Chung: I loved the idea of, as you said, pitting them a little bit against each other with this development that happens in their workplace. I wanted Yoonhee to feel like a character who has genuinely been a part of Ro’s life for a long time. They’ve seen each other through different ups and downs and phases of life since childhood. I’m always fascinated by the topic of friendship, in particular, old friendship. What does it mean to have old friends who have been with you for many years and who have been witness to all the different past selves that you’ve inhabited? It’s such a gift, but it can also be such a challenge because when you are friends with someone for that long, you both start to feel a little bit of ownership over past versions of one another. People change and grow over time. Friends can grow apart. They can also come back together.

I wanted Yoonhee to feel a bit like a foil to Ro but be a real person herself, too, as someone who has such a completely different outlook in life. She’s someone who is pretty straightforward, knows what she wants, and doesn’t hesitate to go after it. Just because she tends to be more conventional doesn’t mean that she’s a flat or two-dimensional character. I also wanted to examine what happens in a person’s life when they get to a certain age and feel like, “Oh, my gosh! Everyone is leaving me behind.” Because they’re so close, Ro can’t help but look at Yoonhee and feel, even if she doesn’t necessarily want the same things that Yoonhee wants, that she should want them and that she’s nowhere near getting them.

Rumpus: Craft-wise, how do you write someone who might fall into some of these tropes but also honor their individuality?

Chung: One thing I wanted was to have them interacting and bickering over small things—the way you do with siblings, old friends, or anyone you’ve known for years—and just see the ways in which they are both able to call each other out. That’s what really felt like the core of Yoonhee to me, this person who deeply cares about her friend. Sometimes there’s no other way of expressing it than, “Why are you this way?” in this exasperated but also deeply loving way. I also wanted to show, with the flashback sections of earlier versions of themselves, how vulnerable Yoonhee is. Just because she seems to have her life together doesn’t mean she doesn’t experience pain or doubt or fear.

Rumpus: Through flashbacks, the book alternates a lot between the past and present. How did you kind of conceive of this structure? I felt very taken care of as a reader to get into the story in this way.

Chung: I’m so glad to hear that. I love an alternating structure in a book, and there are so many books that do this amazingly well. One that was particularly close to my heart at the time of writing was Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, which is also a later-in-life coming-of-age story, against a backdrop of family dysfunction that shows how she’s gotten to this point in her life. In that book, those scenes from the main character’s childhood and upbringing really helped me as a reader anchor the choices she was making in the present day. I wanted to do something similar with Ro: give the reader a vivid picture of not only who this person is today and how she is navigating the world but also what has led her to this point, including her parents’ choices. In those past sections, I especially wanted to excavate who Ro’s father was, since he’s not around in the present day of the novel. I wanted to give the reader a chance to get to know who he was and what he meant to Ro.

Rumpus: As you mentioned, the men in Ro’s life, her father and also her ex-boyfriend, are a bit more phantom than flesh. They are bigger figures in her head through her memories than they are in the present. They exist through their absences. What did you want to portray about absences and the stories we conjure about the people who are no longer in our lives?

Chung: You’re so right in saying that a person’s absence, once they’re no longer in our lives, can almost become stronger than their presence was back when they were around. There’s a kind of danger in that, since the person who is mourning might get caught up in imagining that things were better than they actually were with that person. Maybe they think that in losing that person, they’ve lost some irretrievable part of themselves too. With Ro, the book starts off with her having gone through this breakup with her boyfriend, who is leaving her for a privately funded mission to colonize Mars. As anyone who has ever been through a breakup knows, the things that you didn’t quite appreciate about that person when you were together seem to come back in full relief when they’re no longer in your life. That’s what she’s going through, in the process of mourning that relationship, and also the loss of her father, who was hugely influential in how she sees the world. Her father introduced her to this love for animals that they both share, and he encouraged her to be curious about the world. His absence is so clearly felt throughout her later adulthood. I wanted to show just how searing that kind of loss can be and how in the process of mourning someone, whether it’s because you broke up with them or because they’re literally gone and you will never be able to connect with them again, the mourning is never linear. Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t remember or grieve the ones we’ve lost, but I wanted to explore what can happen if you get too caught up in that mourning.

Rumpus: I feel like silence, too, is more of a presence than an absence, in the way it pervades relationships between family, friends, and romantic partners in the novel. Silence feels particularly pertinent in my own Asian American community, especially in how it persists in the first generation and is continuing to manifest in other ways in future generations. What roles did you hope for silence to inhabit for the characters in the book?

Chung: I feel that so deeply. The silences of ancestors, the silences of our parents and grandparents, as well as the silences that we inherit as children of immigrants. It’s hard to ask folks about the past because there’s a lot of pain within those memories. It’s definitely something that I’ve noticed a lot in my own family. In many Asian and Asian American families, there’s an acute awareness of what it would cost for the other person to relive their story just by telling it. That’s something I’m always thinking about and living with. I don’t want to perpetuate the trope of the silent, sad Asian American family either, but I do think that silence exists for a good reason, and a lot of those reasons are bound up in pain and trauma. With Ro, I think we see it most with her mother because she and her mother have never been able to talk about things like her father’s disappearance. They’ve never really been able to process what they’ve both experienced and been through. In writing Ro, I wanted to investigate what it would be like to grow up with that silence and not even know how to broach it with your mom, your friends, or even yourself. Ro doesn’t have the language to name any of the feelings that she’s grown up experiencing.

Rumpus: One of my favorite passages in the novel is: “I used to wonder if we would take better care of our bodies if our skin was transparent, if every little thing we did and said and ate was observable. If every hurtful or careless thing we ever said to one another manifested itself visually in the body.” It’s interesting how everyone has their own version or perception of self-care, especially when we consider the juxtaposition between what we think we need and what others think we need. Could we talk about your intention with writing about self-care?

Chung: Ro is not very good at taking care of herself throughout most of the book. I think taking care of yourself—and I mean real care, not just the commodified ideas of self-care that we’re all sold nowadays—is actually very difficult, and it’s a practice. As someone who also struggles at times to take care of myself, I wanted to explore a character who has never really learned how to do this, and this is something I feel like I haven’t really seen much of in contemporary literature when it comes to portrayals of Asian American women and women of color. There is a sort of larger cultural moment right now around what I’ve seen some people refer to as “the disaster woman trope,” but I feel like those characters are almost always white women, and their meltdowns are still usually played for laughs. But I wanted to show what it would look like to have a character who is so afraid of everyone leaving her behind that she can’t help but leave herself in all these ways, whether it’s by drinking way too much and driving home afterward or avoiding important conversations with the people in her life that she loves. I wanted to show all the small and big ways that we as humans abandon ourselves when we’ve been abandoned many times before.

At the same time, I did notice throughout the course of writing the novel that whenever I put Ro in the position of having to take care of someone else, she was actually not bad at it, much to her surprise. It’s sometimes hard and uncomfortable for her, but she’s able to stay present in those moments in ways that she can’t always be for herself. I wanted to show how she is able to learn how to do those things and, in time, show up for herself too.

Rumpus: As someone who balances full-time employment with writing, do you have self-care practices that help you continue creating art?

Chung: I’m very used to thinking of myself as a brain in a jar. I don’t always remember to consider my bodily needs, especially when things get really busy or when I’m in the middle of an engrossing project. I’ve had to remind myself over the years to slow down when I need to and to take care of the container through which I experience the world.

My main tip is to listen to your body as much as you can. Take breaks and sleep when you need to. I’m someone who can easily ignore all my body’s warning signs and just keep going until the point of exhaustion. It’s just not worth it most of the time. There’s no need to flagellate yourself in the name of your art, and the wellspring of your creativity can’t be replenished if you don’t rest, no matter how guilty you might feel for not getting down a certain number of words per day. I’m still learning how to be gentle with myself in doing this. Now, whenever I feel like all the creativity is gone and I’ve lost it for good, I’ve at least learned to believe that’s not true. It’s my lizard brain panicking. I know it will come back. The only way you can care for your art is to care for yourself.

Rumpus: I laughed throughout the book, sometimes out loud, but it surprised me because some of my laughter was near moments of strife or grief. To what extent does humor and absurdity color your understanding of grief? How can humor be a tool in explaining grief, if at all?

Chung: Humor is so important to me, both as a writer and as a human being. Humor oftentimes hinges around this element of surprise. There’s this idea that writing about grief or difficult experiences can’t be funny or that it’s one note. So much of life isn’t like that, though. There have been times in my life where I’m going through heavy situations, but that doesn’t mean I don’t laugh if I see something surprising or ridiculous. Even in moments of my own despondency, I sometimes laugh at myself because of how dramatic I know I’m being. I think it’s important to be able to do that because otherwise life can be overwhelmingly difficult, and having those moments where you’re either laughing at yourself or at the situation is healthy and also lifesaving in a way. In terms of writing, I think funny scenes can sharpen the emotional quality of the sad ones, and vice versa. It’s like in cooking, where you have complementary but contrasting flavors, they heighten each other.

 

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Author photo by S.M. Sukardi

Killing One to Save Many: Javier Marías’s Tomás Nevinson

Would it be morally justifiable to murder Hitler before he became the Fuhrer? In Diary of a Man in Despair, the author Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen recounts the time he chanced upon Hitler dining alone in 1936 and his regret at not having murdered the man although he had a loaded gun. In his defense, Reck-Malleczewen acknowledges that he could not have known the monster Hitler would become. Had he known, he surely would have pulled the trigger.

Another could-have-been is portrayed, this time in fiction, in Fritz Lang’s movie Man Hunt. It is 1939, and British Hunter Captain Alan Thorndike, hiding behind a bush with a rifle, entertains the idea of assassinating Hitler, but just as his determination sets in, he is captured by a guard. Without that moment of hesitation, the captain would have saved millions of lives.

These two instances are repeatedly mentioned by the narrator in Javier Marías’s new and final novel Tomás Nevinson (Knopf), who often reminds himself that “nothing is certain until it happens.

Nevinson has reason to repeat the truism. A retired British secret service agent in his forties, he has been living quiet and uneventful days when his past superior Betram Tupra reconnects with him. One last job, Tupra says, trying to recruit him for a new mission: assassinate a suspected terrorist before she plots an attack with mass casualties. The scene depicting the initial conversation between Tupra’s methodical speech to lure Nevinson out of retirement, and Nevinson’s deliberation on whether or not to accept, consumes the first hundred pages of the novel. Nevinson succumbs because he can no longer bear the purgatorial state of his life in retirement; he would rather choose hell where the action is than the safe haven where it is not.

Once on the job, he finds himself in his old world of “assumptions and permanent suspicion, distrust and callousness, of pretense and deliberate betrayals.” Supposedly, his target is an IRA-trained terrorist who masterminded the Hipercor bombing in Barcelona by the Basque Separatist Group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna: “Basque Homeland and Liberty”) that killed 22 innocent civilians in 1987. But there is one caveat: While there is only one terrorist, there are three female suspects—an unmarried restaurateur, a schoolteacher married to a criminal, and the socialite wife of an aristocrat.

Transferred to the small town where the three women live, he pretends to be a novelist writing about the town, befriending a local journalist, a drug dealer, and a politician, all to winnow down the suspects. Nevinson acquaints himself with the women, cautiously at first, although the restauranter soon becomes his lover. But the hiatus during retirement has impaired his acumen. While meeting these suspects is easy enough, he finds it more difficult to lure them into his vicinity, become a trustworthy companion, and bait the true terrorist into revealing herself.

When Tupra threatens to kill all three women to prevent a bigger catastrophe, Nevinson uses deduction to select a target, a conclusion with a large margin of error, an educated guess at best. The rising suspense culminates in his attempt to assassinate the supposed terrorist, though he worries that none of these women may be the criminal he is led to believe. Nevinson becomes equivocal: if he had been sure of the suspect’s culpability, would he have murdered her with no sense of guilt? Should he believe, as he did so during his active years, that by killing this woman, he is saving many lives? Nevinson comes to fear the consequences of his decision, quoting Macbeth, “‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy, than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.” The novel puts into question Kant’s idea of categorical imperative when the standard of ethics in our world cannot divorce itself from consequences.

Javier Marías passed away last year, and Tomás Nevinson—his last and longest novel at 650 pages—was translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa, who had worked with him for the last 30 years. Tomás Nevinson is a companion piece to Marías’s previous novel, Berta Isla, Nevinson’s wife and protagonist of that novel. Tomás Nevinson continues where Berta Isla leaves off, but from a different perspective. A prior reading of Berta Isla is not necessary, although the emotional impact may be heightened by knowing the couple’s past, which is briefly sketched in the new novel. If Berta Isla probed the limits of knowing in human relationships, Tomás Nevinson explores the limitations of moral certainty. If Berta Isla toyed with the idea of the espionage novel, Tomás Nevinson consummates the genre.

Indeed, it is an espionage novel, which employs Marías’s signature style: digressive reflections, allusion to diverse literary works, and philosophical musings. Once again, his sentences rove with a compass rather than with a map, exploring uncharted psychological and philosophical territories of human affairs. His narrative enters a maze in which every possible route is inspected. Elliptical turns and backtracking are frequent, yet rather than being exhausting, they offer nuances and emphases.

In one sentence, Nevinson contemplates his illogical decision to accept the mission: “[T]he only way not to question the usefulness of what you have done in the past is to keep doing the same thing; the only justification for a murky, muddy existence is to continue to muddy it; the only justification for a long-suffering life is to perpetuate that suffering, to tend it and nourish it and complain about it, just as a life of crime is only sustainable if you persevere as a criminal, if villains persist in their villainy and do harm right left and center, first to some and then to others until no one is left untouched.”

Such sentences progress like blood flowing into all the channels of a vein, supplying the narrative with life and zeal. Marías is one of those gifted writers whose style sets him apart from other writers, whose authorship is apparent on every page he writes.

The plot of Tomás Nevinson includes a few real-life events that transpired during the long political conflict between Spain and the Basque Country, including the kidnapping and the subsequent murder of the Spanish politician Miguel Ángel Blanco by the ETA. Nevinson joins his neighbors marching to the town square in demonstration, perhaps to earn their trust, taking advantage of solidarity forged by the maddening atrocities incurred by the Basque nationalists. To Marías’s credit, a sense of urgency pervades the novel despite his introspective prose.

Endearing scenes between Nevinson and his wife Berta Isla, who have two children together, provide comforting reprieve from Nevinson’s stumbling undercover work. They care for each other, but long years of absence from the household during his active service rendered their marriage void. They no longer live under the same roof; Tomás is more like an avuncular figure to his children. Although they sometimes share Berta’s bed, Tomás does not probe into Berta’s private life, believing that he has no right. But the novel ends with promising notes as he recites Yeats’s “When You Are Old” to Berta:

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

With Marías’s untimely passing, we will never find out whether Berta and Tomás will rekindle their love, and yet as his final work, Tomás Nevinson, with his perennial theme of secrecy and betrayal, Marías has left us a towering works, a rightful culmination testifying to his genius.

 

 

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“Actually, I’m Not Grateful”: A Conversation with Stephanie Foo

After graduating from college, Stephanie Foo created a podcast called Get Me On This American Life. In an effort to make this dream come true, she borrowed radio equipment and hitchhiked to the world’s largest pornography conference in Texas to find stories. She interned, then became a producer of the radio show Snap Judgement. In 2014, Foo landed her dream job at This American Life—where she remained as a producer for five years and, in the process, won an Emmy. She was a 2019–2020 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism and has published essays in the New York Times and New York Magazine.

In February 2022, Foo released her memoir, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (Ballantine Books). It’s the story of her real self, a woman functioning with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), a condition that can develop over the years following prolonged abuse. Foo’s memoir told the story of childhood trauma, parental abandonment, and the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. Finding limited resources to help her, Foo set out to heal herself and map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.

We met via Zoom, where we spoke about the paperback release of her book (now a New York Times bestseller), how writing for the page is different from writing for the ear, why childhood trauma is often excused by traditionalists, and what she would tell her younger self if she had the chance.

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The Rumpus: What about journalism appealed to you?

Stephanie Foo: Journalism brought me out of my box, forced me to talk to others. I could have these social interactions that are scripted in a safe way. Everybody knew what their role was. I appreciate it made me a more curious, open person. Brought logic to the chaos. I could bring order to other people’s stories even if I couldn’t bring order to my own. It was satisfying and fun and made it easy to completely throw myself into it and dissociate from other things like trauma.
Rumpus: So after years of telling other people’s stories on This American Life and elsewhere, why did you decide to tell your own?

Foo: Every time I was able to showcase somebody’s story, one that represented a larger group of people, there was always a great response from our audience. I found myself as a potential representative of a larger group, which had no representative. There wasn’t a first-person story about Complex Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, so I thought, “I know how to do this.”

Rumpus: Writing is different from radio, of course, but exactly how different?

Foo: Writing a book is so much more relaxed than making a podcast or a radio show. There’s so much more time to consider the topic, do research, and go over many drafts to shape it into what I think is ultimately my voice rather than chaotically panic and put something out every week.

Rumpus: I read your powerful New York Times Mother’s Day piece. How have you evolved as a writer?

Foo: I think I was always a writer. However, I just didn’t let myself think of myself as one because I hadn’t published much since college. Even though radio producing is just writing—it’s the exact same thing except you read it out loud—I shouldn’t have needed the validation of the book or the New York Times article. It certainly helped, since I don’t have an MFA or anything. I didn’t know if my writing, after so many years of being written for the ear, translated to the page anymore.
When I was writing for radio, especially at This American Life, it wasn’t really my voice. It was my voice through the lens of an entire room of between three and ten people shaping my voice into the ideal of what it could be. But this book was mine, which was both intimidating and fun and freeing.

Rumpus: What kind of book did you set out to write?

Foo: I read a lot of memoirs and science-y books written by clinicians and experts, which I found to be lacking because they didn’t show the healing process. Meanwhile, a lot of trauma memoirs are just descriptions of all the horrible experiences that have happened for like 290 pages, and then in the last thirty, the person gets better. Everything is okay. I thought, “No, I’m sure that journey was a lot more arduous.” I wanted to learn from their journey. It was the same in the clinician books, as well, a long exploration of all the negative effects of C-PTSD on people’s brains and then a very small section in the back about what would actually heal.

My goal was to write a book that would be a resource, to show you’re not alone in what you’re going through, to normalize a lot of the feelings. I provided the basic science and psychology behind complex PTSD, so people can know what they’re up against. I hoped to educate them and provide a lot of the resources I found helpful. I aspired to show it is very much possible to get better. This book would be a roadmap for other people who didn’t know where they might go. I wanted the book to provide hope because I didn’t have it when I was diagnosed. Sometimes trauma memoirs can be so difficult to read, and if there is hope, it’s just a little at the end.

My desire was for the book to come from an optimistic place because having C-PTSD is painful enough. I didn’t want to make the process of reading the book agonizing throughout the whole thing. It was very important to me that only the first fifty pages detailed my abuse.

I wanted it to be the book I wished I’d had when I was first diagnosed, which I feel would have made my healing journey so much shorter.

Rumpus: Why do you think your healing would have been briefer if you had a book like yours when you were diagnosed with C-PTSD?

Foo: I would have felt so much less shame and despair. Mental illness is so pathologized. It’s so isolating. C-PTSD is not in the DSM, and it’s a relatively new diagnosis. I think there is societal prejudice around PTSD. The history of PTSD has been focused on soldiers, men at war. I think there’s a lot of sexism, a sort of racism within. That, and an underappreciation for childhood trauma and its lifelong effects. It’s been normalized. Judith Herman writes a lot about the lasting trauma in people who have experienced sexual assault. This is not to shit on survivors of war, which is very real and terrible, but trauma is much wider. I feel like it’s taken society a long time to catch up to that understanding.

Rumpus: Was it healing to write the book, and was it difficult to write the traumatic scenes?

Foo: Different authors have different processes. For some, writing heals. It was important for me to have the healing come before the writing in order to locate that optimism. There was a lot of casual writing that happened during the healing process, but I didn’t take the organization and the real writing seriously until I felt like I had gone through a year and a half of a very intensive healing journey. And I felt like I was in a really good place, so this made the writing easier. I was able to have a lot of empathy and generosity toward myself at those times instead of feeling the self-loathing I’d felt earlier.

The first fifty pages were the most difficult to write, and I wrote those many, many times. I just had to practice a lot of self-care. Those were tough to relive. I think my dissociation protected me. Dissociation helped me to force out what I could, then go play video games for the rest of the afternoon.

Rumpus: Did your feelings about your parents change over the course of writing the book?

Foo: I don’t know. It hasn’t brought forgiveness, if that’s what you’re wondering. It hasn’t made me less disappointed or angry. I think the healing process, if anything, made me angrier at them because it made me realize what I deserved as a child. Learning to treat myself with kindness has taught me that what I received was criminal and unacceptable. So yeah, I don’t think it’s made me forgive them. I hold them accountable for what they have done.

However, their cultural context was important—they had a lot of their own unresolved and untreated trauma—but instead of making me less angry at them, writing the book made me angrier at some of the societal forces that contributed to my parents’ situation. I’m just sharing and spreading that rage around.

It’s also made me angrier at our health care system in the United States and how it really doesn’t serve. It’s made for white, privileged, educated people. There is just such a distinct lack of culturally responsive care. People like my parents could have gotten the help that they needed if that care was more accessible.

Rumpus: What has been the response from people who have read this book?

Foo: It’s overwhelmingly positive. The book has received over 11,000 five-star Goodreads reviews. I receive a dozen messages a day, for the past year, from people saying, “You’ve changed my life, you saved my life, you’re giving me hope, you make me feel less alone. . . .” It’s exactly what I set out to do with the memoir. The fact that it worked is a great relief and a great honor. I feel very proud, and I hope this opens the door for more narratives like mine. A lot of people have told me my book has inspired them to write. I hope to see those books joining mine out in the world.

Rumpus: How does it feel that therapists and educators have started using your book as a tool?

Foo: It’s so affirming! It’s wonderful to know I’ve had this impact because I have so many complaints against therapists, not therapists in general, but against some of the ways therapists practice and the mental health care system. I just want it to be easier for those who come after me.

Rumpus: Did you feel pressure about representing the Asian American community?

Foo: Yes. I was charting new territory by writing about domestic violence and child abuse in the Asian American community. It’s sort of hinted at but excused in The Joy Luck Club, but the story is always Asian American parents can be difficult, but you must be grateful to them because they have provided so much. I was writing something edgy and dangerous, saying, “Actually, I’m not grateful. This wasn’t unacceptable. This was abuse.” We need to talk about abuse.

Rumpus: Is it strange that trauma has also driven you to become the writer you are?

Foo: Sometimes I feel I have this success because of my PTSD. It informed my drive. Literally, I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t have PTSD. I would trade not having so much success for being happier. I would rather have been loved than not have had to write this book.

Rumpus: About healing, how would you describe your current state?

Foo: I am healing. I have done a lot of healing. I wouldn’t say I’m done, but it’s much better than it was before.

Rumpus: What would you recommend to someone who is in a survival mode or being abused?

Foo: I think what I would tell my younger self is this: “You need to know you deserve love. You deserve better. And go chase that love. Run as fast as you can away from those who aren’t going to give it to you. Run as fast as you can toward anyone who knows you deserve love, even though it’s scary and you’re going to be skeptical of them. Run toward the love.”

 

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Author photo by Bryan Derballa

The Spiritual Fact of Our Oneness: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan’s second poetry collection, Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023) is a stunning tryptic that powerfully explores themes of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, and queer love. At the center of the collection is the poem, “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a meditation on the meaning of belonging, home, and the mysteries of fate. Shanahan wrote it after sustaining serious injuries in a bus accident in Morocco, while he was a Fulbright Scholar researching his mother’s homeland. Shanahan’s poems ask difficult questions for which he provides no easy answers. He encourages us to engage with complexities, nuances, and narratives that may differ from our own. There is pain in these poems, but also joy and hope. At the heart of Shanahan’s work is love and the belief we are all interconnected, changed by every encounter we experience. One cannot read Shanahan’s words without being changed.

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco. Originally from the Bronx, he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

I had the great pleasure of speaking with Charif Shanahan over Zoom about identity constructs, the complexity and nuance found in life, and the “spiritual fact” of our oneness.

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The Rumpus: Congratulations on this truly amazing collection. Can you share how it came about?

Charif Shanahan: In 2015, I left my job and my apartment in New York and went to Morocco for what I thought would be a year on the Fulbright to research my family genealogy and representations of Blackness in the Maghreb. About two months into my time there, I was on an overnight bus that crashed. I was badly hurt and medevaced to Zurich, where I was in the hospital for two months. I had three surgeries. After I left the hospital, I ended up back in the Bronx, where I was born and raised, for a long convalescence—in my childhood bedroom.

That experience is the genesis of the book, and its center. The other two sections of the book, which is a tryptic, take up themes of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, queer love and sexuality.

The beating heart of the whole thing, of my first book also, and probably of my vision as an artist, is love, in all its expressions, what denies it and what makes it possible. The grief that accompanies that love has to do with the separateness of our species, how we have divided ourselves, sometimes in ways that feel positive, sometimes in ways that are apparently neutral, and sometimes in obviously corrosive and violent ways. I believe that a unified sense of “us” is our initial state of being in the world– before we are named, gendered, raced, and cultivated into a self, a person. In my poems, I am trying to return us there, to bring the singing voice of the poem and the reader back to that space.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about the poem that centers the collection: “On the Overnight from Agadir.”

There’s tension, deciding whether to make the trip to your mother’s homeland, the tension between the desire to discover and the desire to disappear—or maybe to just get a dog. The search for place, for home, for meaning, your thoughts about time, about the meaning of your work. The poem is so huge in its reach and heart. While you were recuperating, in a forced stillness physically, did you do a lot of writing? Even if it were just in your head?

Shanahan: Poetry was nowhere near my consciousness in the acute moments after the accident, or in the months after. There was supposed to be only one surgery, then there was a second, then a third. With complication after complication, I just wanted to get the fuck out, to get to the other side of it.

I began to explore the experience in poems when I arrived in California, the September after the accident, and it’s amazing how fate carried me into that process. My first book was picked up shortly after I had arrived in Morocco, so my intention that fall had been to apply for fellowships and university teaching positions around the country, to see where I would end up after Morocco.

The accident happened at the time when I would’ve started doing that. While I was in the hospital one morning, between surgeries two and three, I thought to myself, If you get out of this, you’re going to need something to do! It was December 2. I remembered that the deadline for the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford was December 1, so it had passed that midnight. I was disappointed. Then it occurred to me that because Zurich was nine hours ahead of California, the deadline hadn’t yet passed in local time! I had thirty-five minutes to throw together the application, which I managed to do, using pre-existing application materials. Months later, recovering in the Bronx, I was lamenting my circumstances, wondering what was next, when ding! an email came in from Eavan Boland. I arrived in California that September, and it was there that I began to metabolize the experience creatively. 

Rumpus: It feels like this was a poem you had to write.

Shanahan: The experience was so complex and layered that I needed to process what had happened to me, and language is one of the tools I use to contemplate, to process experience. The poem was the eventual byproduct of that process, which, at its start, was about something else, about integrating experience. Somewhere along the way, the processing had occurred and I began thinking aesthetically.

Rumpus: How did you decide to put that poem in the middle of the book?

Shanahan: The first question I had was whether it could be a book-length poem. I generated many, many, many, many pages. In my discussions with Louise Glück at Stanford, from whom I had the privilege of learning, and in my own thinking about the poem, it became clear that it could be a book-length poem, but didn’t need to be. I whittled down the pages and distilled the poem into its current form. In its shortened version, it would exist alongside other work, and centering it then felt intuitive to me.

Rumpus: You write a lot about social identity and physical positioning. All of this is done to find the place of belonging we call “home.” Has the accident, the aftermath, and the process of metabolizing the experience into poems changed your concept of what constitutes home?

Shanahan: It returned me to an understanding, a wisdom, that had always been inside of me that I had lost touch with somehow. There is a truth, I believe, inside each of us, whether we are connected to it or not, that we are at home wherever we are. We are at home in the body. Sure, certain spaces might comfort or energize us more than others. There are places where we feel a sense of kinship to the physical earth, the people, the culture that’s expressed there. But we are diminished, I think, when we begin to depend on something outside of ourselves for a sense of safety, or self-possession.

I have an older poet friend who, in a long spiritual conversation we once had, said, completely earnestly, “Home is a sentimental fantasy!” I understand now more clearly what she meant.

Rumpus: “‘Mulatto’ :: ‘Quadroon,’” a brilliant poem that appears early in the collection, begins with what seems like a universal need to express one’s self: “I want to tell you what for me it has been like.”

The barriers you experience to that expression are not universal, however: “To speak at all / I must occupy a position / in a system whose positions / I appear not to occupy.” You are both, as you say, “A part and apart.”

This feels like a really impossible situation. Can you speak to how that position/non-position and language are connected and how existing in that liminal space adds both an urgency to the need to be heard and, at the same time, a questioning of whether that’s possible?

Shanahan: The poem meditates on that very question and, importantly, I think, doesn’t reach a conclusion. I’m not really interested in posturing at irrefutable conclusions, or easy answers; I want instead to put a spotlight on complexity, on nuance. I believe that racial discourse in this country is often flattened into one of a few mainstream narratives, probably in part because many people are resistant to even the clearest and most urgent issues—police brutality, for example. I don’t mean to say those narratives, or the portions of the conversation, that are most central today should not be as central as they are. I’m saying that there are many narratives. If you are in a body, you are racialized. You are having a racialized experience. What if integrating an experience, like my own, seemingly adjacent to larger mainstream narratives, or other narratives that are less familiar, into the larger racial discourse, can actually help us advance that discourse? I believe it can and does.

As for the poem, one cause of the limits on expression is the tendency to conceive of race, myopically, in terms of a static presence or absence of privilege, when privilege is dynamic. I have privilege in one room, then I absolutely do not in the next. And the reason I lack privilege in the second room is the reason I have it in the first. How do you “position” (name) that? So yes, let’s keep talking, let’s put everything, and everyone’s experience, on the table.

Rumpus: The way you write about your mom is so beautiful. I’m thinking of “Not the Whole Thing, but a Large Part of the Story,” of “Trace Evidence,” and of “Two Rooms Down the Hall,” in which you write “When she tells me not to put forward that I am Black, she is saying I love you. / She’s saying I want you to live. I see now. When she told my brother she wished / He’d just find a nice blonde girl and settle down, I took her by the face / And, staring into her even-keeled nonchalance/ told her I love you, and you are crazy.”

Your mom taught you a lot about identity, and while her own view of herself seems solid, it didn’t match the spaces in which people saw her.

Shanahan: That dissonance has been a primary question of my own identity and has required me to examine the instability of identity constructs, and in particular racial constructs, over time and space. My mother is from the Maghreb, born and raised in Morocco, identifies as Arab, as Muslim, as Moroccan, as woman. These were the identity markers germane to her experience.

It wasn’t that the color of her skin did not have meaning in Morocco. It of course did. But when my mother arrived here, to a new cultural and national context, with its terms of identity, its pathologies, her Blackness took on new meaning, new significance—and often contentiously. Now, it’s not that I think a person in her circumstances would need to revise their self-concept, but I think it becomes especially important to consider those circumstances when children are involved, when a first-generation Black American experience is happening outside of an African American lineage. I’m writing into that generational dissonance. As I ask in a poem that didn’t make it into the collection, “Why are the parts of her that she cannot see / the only parts of me that I can?”

Rumpus: This title made me laugh: “While I Wash My Face, I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me,” because, Charif, you ask impossible questions all the time!

Shanahan: Guilty.

Rumpus: What I found interesting in this poem and several others is that you address yourself in the second person. You directly ask yourself questions. How did that choice come about?

Shanahan: The first piece is the distancing effect of using the “you as I,” the permission it grants you to inhabit a different mind space around your subjects, to separate from them in a way. The self that I’m addressing is part of me, is inside me, but I’m able to inhabit or situate myself in a different internal position vis-a-vis the material at hand.

The gesture is also necessitated by something I believe and that I think a fair amount of people I know would find difficult to trust: the self speaking to you right now, is not the self I inhabited (or that inhabited me) at the beginning of this conversation. We have changed one another in this dialogue of thirty or forty-five minutes. It doesn’t mean that this change needs to be profound, or on a constitutive level. It means a shifting occurs, by virtue of our “contact.” There is information about living, art, human connection, language, race—about everything that is alive inside this interaction—that you have integrated, or that at least is inside you waiting to be integrated. The same is true for me.

Rumpus: We talked about interpretations, and the way people bring with them their views of others when they meet them. Is it scary to put yourself on the page this way, while knowing people are going to hear what they hear and see what they see through their own lens?

Shanahan: I love what you’re saying because it’s an element of my work that can be easily misunderstood. A reader might say these are “confessional” poems or poems that seem generated by a psychological or emotional compulsion to reveal, to be seen. I wouldn’t agree with that at all. I think honesty, or transparency, is an aesthetic choice.

We shouldn’t assume anything that happens within the body of any poem is an event that has actually been lived. In the moments when I am most apparently honest about experiences that one might be expected to hide or keep to themselves, I am more than sharing myself or reflecting myself to an individual, I am reflecting the reader back to the reader. I am reflecting you back to you. One of the lines in “Fig Tree” is, in a similar vein: “Do I apologize? I am of this same world.” I didn’t ask for any of this, and I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I genuinely believe that I am you. It’s a notion that, again, many find hard to accept, or trust. I don’t mean to flatten our differences or to suggest that we’re having the same experience. The constructed world, though constructed, is real. In a way, it’s the first level of experience. My story has to be your story on some level, and yours, mine. We are beholden to one another. We are here at the same time.

Rumpus: What would you like people to get from this book?

Shanahan: I would like them to recognize themselves in a life that isn’t theirs, or maybe even like any they’ve known. I’d like them to be reminded of, again, the spiritual fact of our oneness—in a way that doesn’t feel irrelevant to how we live but can actually animate how we live, that can shape how we move through these lives and these bodies, at this time. I hope there are people who inhabit identity positions very different from my own, who can nonetheless see themselves in this book. I hope the book will awaken some people to the complexities of racial identity, especially today in an increasingly globalized world. I hope that the book can reach people’s hearts and souls and generate new conversation around the subjects I’m exploring.

Rumpus: Do you find that message, this book is especially necessary today?

Shanahan: I often ask my students, “The world is literally and figuratively on fire. Of all the things we could do with our lives, why write poems?” There are many answers to that question, of course, but chiefly, for me, it’s about the elevation of consciousness, the understanding of portions of human experience, even when that experience is far from our own, that poetry enables.

As a species, we can’t even agree, for example, that the climate crisis is real, or, as I put it in a poem in the book, that “we are all the same animal.” We can’t get on the same page about scientific fact, even when it requires our urgent, collective attention if we’re going to make it. And that must be rooted in the competing priorities generated by our separateness.

So yes, I think now is as good a time as any to spread a message of oneness.

Rumpus: What’s next for you?

Shanahan: I am working on a memoir that treats, in prose, the same subjects as the books of poetry, and I’ve also started my third book of poetry—a book-length epistolary poem to Whiteness. The poem is poly-vocal, written by many “authors,” and moves across time and space. There’s a section that comes out of the seventh century Arab slave trade, for example, preceding a section that comes out of the contemporary Bronx. It’s very global in orientation, as I am as a person and a poet, and I’m excited to keep ‘finding’ it.

 

 

 

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Author photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

 

A story is like a nomad: An Interview with Geetanjali Shree

In the past forty years, South Asian writers writing in English have made a significant showing at the Booker Prizes, the literary awards for the best book published in the UK and Ireland. Previous winners include Salman Rushdie (who has been nominated seven times, and whose novel Midnight’s Children won in 1981, introducing South Asian literature in English to the world with a bang), Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga—and even in 2022, Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka won for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

 

But the big news was sixty-five-year-old Indian writer Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand—translated by Daisy Rockwell—bringing home the Booker International Prize, the first time a book translated from Hindi had won in the prize’s nearly twenty-year history. Shree’s experimental and playful novel tells the story of Ma—an eighty-year-old bedridden woman who gets a new lease on life and goes on a journey back across a border that she thought she would never cross again. The English translation was originally published by Tilted Axis Press in the UK, and is now available from HarperCollins in the United States.

 

“Behind me and this book lies a rich and flourishing literary tradition in Hindi and in other South Asian languages,” Shree said in her acceptance speech. “World literature will be richer for knowing some of the finest writers in these languages, the vocabulary of life will increase from such an interaction.”

 

I spoke to Shree on Zoom one late night in California / mid-day in Delhi in between a flurry of events and appearances that have flooded her calendar since the prize was announced in October of 2022. The author of four other novels, Shree’s melodic voice and serene and vibrant demeanor made me wish I could teleport to her city and hear her speak in one of the many storied literary spaces there.

 

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The Rumpus: Why do you write in Hindi?

Geetanjali Shree: The question itself says so much! That a person should be asked why she writes in her mother tongue, when it should be an absolutely natural thing. What else should I be writing in except in my mother tongue? It’s the first and most natural choice for a writer to be writing in her mother tongue. I think the question to be asked, normally, should be why you’re not writing in the mother tongue. But this says so much about our history, about our colonial past, about the place of English amongst the educated in [India], that it becomes almost unnatural that anyone who is educated to be writing not in English, but in another Indian language.

So yes, I write in Hindi because it’s my mother tongue. And I think, like a lot of us middle class Indians, I’ve also grown up with an English medium education. But when it comes to something like the arts and literature, it’s somehow so close to your bones that almost automatically you go into your mother tongue rather than in the language you have learned formally in school. I must add, because too easily it becomes a story about English versus other languages, that there is no such prejudice in my head or heart about it. Those who find for whatever reasons that English is the language they’ve expressed themselves in—they’re most welcome to do it.

Rumpus: Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi) was such a pleasure to read! The playfulness of the language really comes across, and the humor—also the deep themes of women and families and mothers and children and borders. You write: “Women are stories in themselves, full of stirrings and whisperings that float on the wind, that bend with each blade of grass.” Do these themes come up in all your books, and what was the inspiration for this one?

 

Shree: I haven’t sat down and studied what all themes I have written about before, since I don’t think of my books that way; but yes, all the themes you name and a few more as well. It is very pluralistic and very polyphonic and variegated. But yes, women easily and family, these are themes that I am interested in, but the trigger each time would be different.

 

In terms of inspiration, what has more and more become my way and more and more something that I have understood is that you don’t have to go for anything dramatic and big. The daily and the mundane are imbued with the big and the momentous. Every small and completely inane looking thing is also strangely connected to much bigger things, and each thing can have so many reverberations and echoes. What’s important is to find those layers, you know, as you go along. In almost all of my other works, I let small curiosities take me along.

 

The great poet and translator A.K. Ramanujan, in one of his diaries, he’d written that you don’t have to go looking for the poem, you just have to put yourself in a place where the poem will come to you. I really feel at one with that. You are carrying all your stories in you, from your surroundings, from your imagination, from your reality, from your observation, from your history, from your tradition—you’re carrying them all with you all the time. They’re building up. You just want to find the place where the story, for that moment, is going to emerge and begin to take shape and you can go with it. I just tried to put myself in a kind of mode of retreat and empty myself out and let the layers and whispers and the murmurs from within me become more audible and visible. And then I go along with that.

 

In this case, I think what set me off was just an image of an old person, an elderly person, lying with her back turned to the family, which is a very, very ordinary image, which is there in every family or everywhere, you know, elderly people who look like they have nothing more to do with this world. That image somehow formed inside me. Maybe it was there, maybe I picked it up from somewhere. And it stayed with me. And then that image stirred up my curiosity. What is it that this back is doing? Is it turning away from the world and from life, or is it turning away from the immediate family behind her? I followed that curiosity and that character, and that character started to do various things, which began to amaze me and amuse me and then a whole novel was on the way to being created.

 

Rumpus: Your book is dedicated to the Indian writer Krishna Sobti, another Hindi writer. Can you tell us about your relationship with her, and about the Hindi literary community in Delhi. It feels like a real community, as opposed to the United States where it is very institutionalized in terms of MFA programs.

 

Shree: The literary community in Delhi, well, it’s a very informal community at one level—and there’s everything that goes on within a community—there’s intrigue and politics and pettiness and support. In terms of Krishna Sobti, I consider her my guru and a great writer. She’s someone who people refer to as a “difficult writer,” which I find very unnecessary. I mean, why shouldn’t writing be difficult? The more important thing is whether it is good; difficult and good. Krishna Sobti was not an easy writer. You couldn’t just pick her up and read her in one second. But she was a writer of tremendous variety, and strength, and she was a person of great strength and forthrightness, and a person who you could absolutely iconify. She died a few years ago at the ripe old age of ninety-four, and right to the end she was very alert and aware about everything that was going on, very disturbed with the politics that were shaping up—and very upfront about whatever she had to say.

 

She was always very senior to me, and when we met, I was very much a new writer, but she was always very encouraging, not just to me but to others also, and she took all of us very seriously. She remembered what we were doing, and she would question us when we met. So right from the start, whenever I had the time, I would go and see her, which was actually not that often, but we just developed this relationship of great respect and affection. She was very, very kind and generous. We would sit down with a small brandy in the evening, which she would almost never finish, and she would ask about my work, and we would have that little evening together. It was lovely.

 

Rumpus: Your mentorship and community with Sobti makes me think of the many lines in your book about storytelling, and all the references you make to other writers. “Here’s the thing: A story can fly, stop, go, turn, be whatever it wants to be. That’s why our wise author Intizar Hussain once remarked that a story is like a nomad.” Is this an important part of your storytelling?

 

Shree: It is a line of thought which has probably been growing in me, perhaps something that I’ve been thinking more and more about. Perhaps it also comes from the fact that I am born into a literature which is in its modern form. Hindi literature very much belongs to the period just before [Indian] independence, and then concerns what went on after independence. And I think it was a period when social realism had a huge meaning and purpose for everyone who was writing because it was a new society, and everyone wanted to steer it towards a better future. So, this express purpose became the overriding concern for all the writers. Now that makes complete sense and I’m not deriding them at all, but I think it did become the sort of tacit rule and guideline that when you were writing, that you had to write about society for the betterment of society, and you had to do it in a way which is very easily communicable. You had to follow a certain sort of way which can be comprehended, the proper sort of story that a reader can immediately connect with.

 

I think somewhere I—when I say ‘I,’ I am not only talking about myself but a whole community of writers and artists—began to push back against social realism. Society comes into your work in so many different ways—it doesn’t have to be a verifiable, empirical, descriptive way. I think that spurred a lot of us on, and freed a lot of us. It’s like that Ramanujan quote again. I would say that we don’t have to go looking for the society, because almost whatever we do, society will come to it. So, just let yourself free in the field of literature and creativity. And, if you’re letting yourself free, then also realize that stories will not just go straight. Stories will go this way and that! There’ll be non sequiturs! There’ll be all kinds of breaks and incompleteness, and it’s okay to celebrate all that and see what happens.

 

Rumpus: Along with the meta-fictional elements in the book, there is also so much playfulness with the POV and characters and the way the story is being told. Do you feel like there is a lot of experimentation happening amongst modern Indian writers and artists today?

 

Shree: I don’t know if writers are thinking about that word “experimentation,” but it is happening in the course of searching out ways of saying what we are trying to say. Is there a lot of that kind of writing happening? Yes, the literature is very, very vibrant and many different things are happening. But I’ll also say that it’s not as if this is happening for the first time. I mean, if you go back to ancient literature, perhaps anywhere, and certainly in [India], you see it—look at our epics, take the Mahabharata. And what you’re calling experimentation I mean, come on, it’s full of every way of storytelling. It’s doing everything! It’s almost like there’s nothing new for you to do. In a way, I’m only copying. We carry on from things which have already been done, and we keep renewing them with our zeal and reinventing them and we keep trying to do something new. And sometimes, we manage with the same ingredients. And sometimes perhaps, we discover that we thought we were doing it for the first time, but it’s been done thousands of times before.

 

Rumpus: You speak so highly of your translators, not only mentioning your English translator Daisy Rockwell in your Booker acceptance speech, but also mentioning your French translator Annie Montaut. Tell me about what your relationship is like with your translators, and what the process of translating Tomb of Sand was like.

 

Shree: I’m so lucky to have these two translators for this book of mine. With both, actually, I’ve had a very, very rich relationship. I knew Annie, but I only met Daisy in person a few days before the Booker Awards Ceremony. It started with Daisy sending me a sample of the translation. When I saw those few pages, I felt that here’s somebody who really got the sense of things and is clearly enjoying the way I’m using language a bit crookedly—here’s somebody who seems to be in tune with it immediately.

 

After that, Daisy was sending me long questionnaires about lots of things that she needed clarified, which included messages where she said: “You know, it’s not really needed for the translation, but I need for myself, to have the context in my head when I’m translating.” So it was very fascinating, but quite excruciating sometimes for me because my work is not research based. I had to go back to my work and start sort of researching where I got certain metaphors from, what was the story behind my use of language, because when I am writing it’s just coming out. So, it became a conscious exercise of going back and researching and sometimes just guessing at what made me come to certain points in certain words and so on.

 

What’s important between the translator and the author is to share a rapport about the way of looking at things, you know, and feeling intensely about those things. So, I think the fact that Daisy felt as much love for language or playing with language made for a very strong foundation, and I think the outcome has been wonderful.

 

Rumpus: There has been a great deal of attention paid to the fact that Tomb of Sand was the first Indian language book to win the Booker International Prize. Why do you think Indian literature is not being recognized and translated as much as other languages and recognized on a world stage?

 

Shree: We must return again and again to the whole issue of hegemony of the English language. I think it’s unfortunate that English should become the pool where all literature is to be viewed. There should be more translations across languages; in fact, even across Indian languages. Why should Indians from different parts of the country have to read each other only in English? There’s a lot of things which are skewed in this whole translation story. In fact, in recent years, the quality of translations has really, really improved, so that’s a very hopeful sign. In fact, most of [the literature] that’s going out of South Asia is only literature written in English by South Asians.

 

Also, I don’t think there’s such a lot of translation being done of Indian languages. So, I think it’s a matter of accessibility—that it’s not been worked on and created. I think the world is really opening up, but it’s also made people quite insular. I hope something like the Booker win might do that. I was told that at the Frankfurt Book Fair, publishers were really interested in tapping translated works from Indian languages, rather than just going for the English. So, I think that’s a change one can immediately see, but it would only mean something if it becomes a sustained act.

 

Rumpus: How does it feel to be an artist in India, at this moment—or really in the world—with such a prevalence of right-wing and Nationalist leaders?

 

Shree: I’m really, really glad that you added in “the world.” I think that’s important because too often people talk about some places, like that’s where something is happening only. And there are other places where things are really, you know, hunky dory and you can do anything and get away with anything. That’s just not true. There are some trends in the world today, which are disturbing. There’s a tidal wave, you know. The world has opened up, but it’s also become more constricted. Vigilance has increased. Vigilance has become much easier than before, so everyone’s being watched. So, I’m glad you’re not making it India versus the world.

 

What’s happening in India… look, I mean, we respond to things at various levels. And let me tell you this: In some sense, the word has been endangered for a very long time, perhaps from the beginning. If the word is going to threaten the social order, it has to be stopped. Anything which is going to threaten the social and political order has to be stopped. And this has been going on perhaps forever. But I think writers cannot stop because writing for us is like breathing. We cannot stop. We have to carry on. By and large, I think that is what the situation is in India. So many people are writing and, indeed, I think there is a whole community which is carrying on saying what they want—even in this atmosphere of fear.

 

 

Language as Possibility: Renee Gladman’s Plans for Sentences

If you look at any scripted sentence, especially written in cursive, without any concern for reading or meaning, what do you see? Something like looping lines scrawled on the page, strange glyphs making little drawings and patterns. There is a kind of open mindedness involved in this activity, a willingness to try to see what you normally read. Also a willingness to not know the difference. When I adopt this approach it’s hard to describe the kind of enjoyment I get out of Renee Gladman’s poem drawings or prose architectures.

I first encountered Renee Gladman’s work when she came to speak at my university. It was a strange meeting for a couple reasons. My professor John Beer, a great poet in his own right, relayed to me that he first met Gladman at St. Bonaventure University in New York where he worked with Robert Lax. My uncle Bill taught chemistry there for several years before retiring to my home state of North Carolina. It was an innocuous synchronicity, but enough for me to take as a sign that I needed to attend Gladman’s reading. When Gladman zoomed into the reading, I was struck by the combination of wonder and humility in her voice. She spoke slowly, with a sense that she wasn’t exactly sure where the words were coming from but that they were very real, felt, immanent—the same impression I get when I behold her work. She began reading from her novel Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge. Admittedly, being uninitiated to her style, I had no idea what was going on, which is the best place to be for a poet.

For those unfamiliar, it helps to think of Gladman’s work as engaging the imagination the way an architect approaches three-dimensional space with a two-dimensional blueprint. Her art is all about blurring or renegotiating where we draw the line—between writing and drawing, seeing and reading, between knowing and not-knowing, and, by extension, between social constructs. Through the poem-drawings in her newest collection from Wave Books, Plans for Sentences, this latest installment follows up the 2016 book of drawn-writings Prose Architectures as Gladman continues “using the space and time of drawing to explore more deeply the impact of blackness, futurity, and moving/erupting architectures on topographies of the sentence.”

These will set something at the back of something and make it larger; what is smallest

will be at the forefront but also below. These will bend, will contort. They will grain

 

These sentences will dome the thought; they will make complex gestures and grain on a

curve. They will set memories in overlapping modes of slope and cover, making hollows. (FIG 12. p. 25)

Intricate, yet understated, the poems embody a kind of opacity between specific and vague— buildings, “domes of thought,” “propositions of houses,” compositions that “scaffold the unwritten.” However, the supposed impasse between ‘the specific’ and ‘the vague’ becomes overgrown by all ‘their’ (the sentences) self-allusion. In this way, the book is, referentially, a closed loop, as it recursively gestures to its own structure. Yet, despite the recursive (pun intended) looping, these sentences also endlessly open and bloom and “dream themselves into figuration[s] of planets and satellites.” The very core of language as structural possibility, lends animacy to the things being enacted, so that

one thing leaning and the other sloping will divide the plain just below the densest language and will launch the language of the grain.

The topography of the terrain insinuated through the poem-drawings use this “dense language of the grain” to build and rebuild what might be called various ‘architextual’ structures. “Silos” and “spires” lean and loom. “Sanctuaries” “seamed” in clausal “corridors,” by and for “blackened gatherings.”  Take the poem accompanying Figure 23:

They will out quietly in a thin single line of fanning, they will turn, they will counter; they will turn and land and lift off and turn within the meditation, and will blacken gasps into the page

These places will inscribe their own topography: make their shape with their shape. And

will sonar inside the void

These sentences will wind tightly around who we are and how we live and will grow habitations as they wonder; they will cleave from the ground in enclosures of grief and will knoll

Thus, “they” (the sentences) will “blacken gasps onto the page” as the page becomes a space and a surface for “tiny communities,” a multifaceted “substrate” (a word seemingly standing in for “page” used several times throughout Plans for Sentences). A substrate is a surface material for electronic circuitry, or in biochemical terms, a material for enzymes in cell-matrices. In scientific terms, substrates are highly “context-dependent” (Wikipedia), much like the poems’ relation to the drawings. In terms of blackness and futurity, context remains contingent, fluctuating between “a blackening of the figure and a blackening of the ground.”

Legibility is equally context-dependent to the manner of inscription and transcription. Reading these poems is one way to approach the book of drawings. Each stanza lends myriad connotative shades to each meaning, structure, or action described (or inscribed) in the book. For instance, various “castellations” crop up throughout the book, a word defined by Merriam-Webster as “defensive or decorative parapets; battlements.” While ‘the thing being defended’ remains unspecified, the reader can insinuate socioeconomic inferences, where black gathering can stand for the marks on the page and the marked bodies subject to political structures throughout recent space and time.

Gladman’s work literally makes space for blackened gatherings through “geometr[ies] of support.” The significance of the future-subjunctive mood in these sentences not only makes space, but also plans for future spaces—hence the lack of periods at the end of each stanza and proliferation of semicolons, which signifies both separation and continuance, a closing-and-opening. Thus, for all these structures, there are no monoliths. There are plenty of places where ‘they’ “fail” or “void” or “buckle” or “ache;” they even become, colorfully, “a figuration of birds flying above a ground on fire, under fire.”

Readers familiar with Gladman’s work may find a pleasurable surprise in Plans—the increased incorporation of watercolor in several of the drawings. In Fig. 36, the drawings have crooked strokes of ochre and tiny dabs of turquoise. The poem tells us that the sentences “will name little waters that comma” and contain places that “let evening glow through them.” It seems the color gestures or loosely corresponds to certain elements conjured in the poem-drawings. Figures 47 through the end (60) all feature gray (fog), greens (moss, grass), ochre (evening glow). However, these gestures also, in no way, should be reduced to mere symbolism or illustration—a point of contingency Gladman notes in her Acknowledgements. Rather, the color seems to be strictly gestural, they are part of the sentence’s future-plans in the same way the directions, walls, shapes, and other architectural objects are integral to the plans.

Sometimes, looking at the drawings feels like looking at a scape (whether land or city). Then one reads something like: “these places will operate inside a thinning…they will up and over and grain.” We are left, however, only able to guess at the scale of the scape.

(Fig 33. Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/157379/plans-for-sentences-33)

 

Are we looking at miniscule close-ups, magnified to scale, or are these structures massive and faraway? Where are we? Who constitutes ‘we’? Are we spectators, tourists? One gets the sense of being a visitor and the visitation is facilitated by Gladman, but she isn’t so much a guide or host as a kind of purveyor. The visitation purveyed by the writing which is also the drawing, that we are somehow looking at and looking on and looking (with)in(side).

Oftentimes, prepositions are treated as verbal, so that “out” and “over” enact movement that simultaneously gestures and figures. Or prepositional phrases function nominally “these sentences will narrow in an out-and-through (Fig 43).” Plans for Sentences draws out and through and all throughout various plans and planes, sometimes plainly sometimes diaphanously. This method of re-tooling or re-building prepositions, situates the reader in a place where ‘figuring out’ what the poems mean, is really an activity of ‘figuring up’, literally drawing a conclusion based on how you use the sentences to configure or shape the meaning. I find my imagination acting like a cursor drawing in a computer program as I follow the ‘lines’ of words:

These sentences will funnel the plain in a bout of weather between the boundary and the

front; they will rotate above and grain below. They will over and back above, will grain and

blacken below. They will make an underground for your breathing, a repeating of devoted

enclosure (Fig. 29)

The sparseness of the “plain” language throughout ex-plains itself in the recursive looping-around and laying-out of words and drawing. Script is conscripted by drawing and re-scripted in each sentence so that the “poetry” occurs in the interstitial spaces between seeing and reading, visualizing and imagining. The writing/drawing involves planar existences and planning becomes a form of forming.

All this is to say, one of the beauties and joys of engaging this book is that there are multiple ways to engage. There is even a section at the end titled “Descriptions of Future Sentences, An Index,” if a reader wants to just browse intriguing and awe-some sentences. The index is broken into something like ‘stanzas’ based on typified beginning phrases throughout the book. For instance, “these places…”, “these sentences…”, “this chapter…” etc. The effect of this realignment of sentences is even more structural variation and possible figurative building.

Gladman’s art is literally figural and figuratively literal. Her renderings turn abstraction substantive as substance becomes abstract. In order to ‘follow’ the lines she’s following, it’s as if the reader must completely invert their own sense of how to make (create) sense. I cannot help but try to ‘read’ the drawings and ‘visualize’ the writing, rather than the other way around. However, the other way around can be just as compelling and constructive in creating an understanding of the ‘architextuality’ of the poems.

An incompleteness, or voided substance, fills and frames each drawing-poem. Each one feels both fixed and in-progress, simultaneously—much like black futurity, within which Renee Gladman’s vision is a beautiful part. Through a particular strain of defamiliarization, Gladman’s book reminds us that we don’t know, maybe can’t ever really know, what we are looking at. We can, however, adjust accordingly—either with or against the curve or the grain or the gathering, but there will always be escapement, void, the unfinished becoming of those sentences that will be.

 

 

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Learning from Grief: Claudia Putnam’s Double Negative

Among the meanings of Claudia Putnam’s cryptic title is a mathematical one, based on the lower left quadrant of graphs; it is a meaning that she chooses, explicates, and explores from many angles. But negative infinity is much harder to get your mind around than the grammatical concept of the double negative, so a reader may well fear that this idea is too cerebral for a memoir about the loss of an infant son, on the fourth day after his birth, to a dire heart defect known as HLHS (hypoplastic left heart syndrome). The worry would be misplaced. 

Putnam has been thinking about (as well, of course, as enduring) this experience for more than thirty years, and her conclusions about it are bravely earned and are by no means mainly cerebral. But the brain and mind are parts of the self, even the feeling self, and her thinking does matter. So her memoir necessarily includes both many emotions and many kinds of information and analysis. Its genre is memoir, all right, but it incorporates ethics, epistemology, clinical history, philosophy, language, historiography. She speaks as a bereaved parent but also as a friend, a thinker, a mother, a skier, a writer (she has published extensively in poetry and short fiction).  

There are two braided narrative threads in this essay of less than fifty pages. One is a recollection of a mostly joyous pregnancy, followed by the traumatic day of Jacob’s birth and the grief-laden, complicated decision that his parents suddenly faced upon learning from their physician that their newborn son “will not be able to live.” (In 1989, “high-resolution ultrasounds at eighteen or twenty weeks were not routinely performed.”)  

Even today, when the evolving clinical probabilities have opened more space for hope, the decision to seek a transplant or to commit to a different surgery—one that would reconfigure the infant’s heart so that it can sustain life with only two chambers—even today such a decision is problematical and fraught. Putnam’s discussion of how the context has and has not changed is thoughtful, specific, and compassionate as she considers the choices available to parents now. In 1989, when a recent transplant case had involved the use of a heart removed from a baboon, the dizzying odds informed the language (quoted above) of the Putnams’ physician. In recounting her and her husband’s agonized decision—”an awful choice between a worst thing and another worst thing”—Putnam includes a lucid description of her son’s fatal heart defect itself. Occasionally she attaches a footnote that qualifies a claim about probabilities; this practice is one of many signs of her good faith. 

The second thread is the narrative of Putnam’s mourning and thinking, some of it colored by her raising of her (healthy) second son, Julian, born two years after Jacob’s life and death. Putnam recalls her experience of Jacob in her womb and in his few days of post-natal life, which gave her a sense of him as a distinct self, one with a robustness of spirit, a readiness to take things on; she sensed that he was “a difficult person, perhaps, someone with a hard energy, driven.” An early intimation was also true of her second son, Julian, who then seemed “sensitive, artistic, musical, resistant to enclosure.”  

One set of Putnam’s observations has to do with how our first selves fare over time—how they may change even as in other respects they remain the same. “I only had enough to go on to be able to say for sure that a distinct person appeared inside me one day and was born to the world. Beyond that, I have no idea who he [Jacob] would have become.” She also thinks about how adults may change. One of her themes is how unprepared she and her husband were for Jacob’s terrible diagnosis, how young they were, how confident they were until Jacob’s birth that all would be well. 

Putnam’s thinking about parenting does not lead her to criticism of her husband, even though the marriage eventually ends. Throughout her account of the couple’s decision not to pursue surgery, she uses the first person plural; in this period the marriage is a living partnership, and the decisions about care and surgery are made jointly. 

Putnam understands and sometimes shares the reader’s likely skepticism about one’s ability to think clearly in bereavement. And she is wary of religious consolation because she fears it would be a form of self-deception, something that might well serve her but would in some way be disloyal to Jacob by embracing a made-up version of his experience. But she also doesn’t see death as absolute, especially because her maternal experience of intuitive connection makes her wary of empiricism as well. This is where an Emerson poem becomes helpful.   

“Threnody” was begun shortly after the death of Emerson’s young son but completed several years later. The poem sees death as not just a deep price we pay for life but as itself a form of participation in the larger design. Putnam welcomes this idea. Parents sign an implicit contract when they conceive a child. Eventual death is of course among the contract’s major terms, but the fine print includes a very small chance of death almost at the moment of birth—a very small chance that this will happen to your child, and in that sense to you. What Emerson arrives at is a reaffirmation of the contract even when he discovers that the small print applies to him. In Putnam’s eyes Emerson has standing in this context not only because he too is a bereaved parent but because he has language for spirit, for soul: 

Death, with solving rite, 

 Pours finite into infinite. 

Wilt thou freeze love’s tidal flow 

Whose streams through nature circling go? 

Putnam’s own evolving understanding is both intellectual and spiritual. She has read and drawn on (or respectfully declined to follow) other parental histories. Ultimately she chooses “a version of Pascal’s wager”—the conviction that Jacob’s spirit, his soul, “never was not.” She does so in the manner of many more orthodox religious believers, i.e., with tolerance for her own imperfect certainty:

Which kind of jerk would you rather be? The kind who doesn’t want to be made to feel foolish, suckered out of extreme need into having a little faith, or the kind that might dismiss as superstition an attempted communication from your own dead child? Which mistake is more awful?

Her questions are not defensive aggressions aimed at the reader but rather a recollection of Putnam’s own decision-making. The book’s style and tone vary with the nature of the topic at hand—its presentation of clinical information is precise, even professional, while its reflections are unpretentious but searching. What unifies these elements, besides the subject, is a strong personal voice, somber and determined. 

Perhaps what Putnam fears most are the seductions of rationalization, which would feel to her like an abandonment or at least a subtle betrayal of the actual Jacob. The book is in a way an elegy, a gesture of loyalty and respect. “Perhaps”—and its less formal equivalent “maybe”—is a keynote of this bold book. It confronts very difficult questions, questions not just about what we fear but about what is real, some of which is radically contrary to what we wish. Putnam shares not just her pain and her qualified consolations but her methodologies, whose harvests are not guaranteed to align. She is trying to be true both to her son—her sons—and to herself. 

Double Negative transcends its own title, at least for the reader. In a world so full of self-justification and blaming, Putnam’s eloquent and unflinching definition of her own tested truths—clinical, psychological, philosophical, relational—is itself a challenging inspiration.

When The Pipes Inspired the Poets: A conversation with the Boiler House Poets Collective

In November of 2015, a dynamic group of poets convened in MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) studios, some of which overlooked the old boiler house building, for a week-long intensive. The eponymous boiler house is left over from Sprague Electric Company, the former factory campus the museum now inhabits.

The bonds the poets forged during that week were so strong that they’ve returned each year (except for the first pandemic year of 2020) to continue writing, working, and growing together. Some poets left the group; others since joined. But as the collective itself evolves, the focus is always on the work. I was lucky enough to attend the reading they did of their work at MASSMoCA during their 2022 session, which was the inspiration for requesting this interview. Poets Joanne Corey, Ann Dernier, Merrill Douglas, Jessica Dubey, Hope Jordan, Marilyn McCabe, and Kay Morgan answered interview questions about their unique collective.

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The Rumpus: Can you tell me a little about that first session?

 

Ann Dernier: That first year we organized an “unsanctioned” reading in the Boiler House, and videotaped it. That day, in what had been the former boiler room of the Sprague Electric Company, our voices, mixed with the recording component of Stephen Vitiello’s “All Those Vanished Engines” merged us with MASS MoCA and we became The Boiler House Poets.

 

Marilyn McCabe: The Boiler House held a magic, as it turned out, for all of us, with its sound installation clanging and pinging in the background, sun slanting through the pipes, pigeon feathers drifting, an occasional passerby pausing to listen.

 

Kay Morgan: That [reading] was the moment that the Boiler House Poets became a reality.

 

Dernier: The museum itself is partly why I returned year after year. The ever-changing installations helped to electrify the very thing we writers were endeavoring: to channel our own voices.

 

Many of the original poets created ekphrastic poems born from the galleries; responses to Louise Bourgeois, Titus Kaphar, Anselm Kiefer, Sol LeWitt. There is an atmospheric charge in that place, like a live wire. I wanted to be a part of it again and again.

 

Morgan: I shared a big studio with Gail DiMaggio and I can’t write this without mentioning the fantastic view of the Airstream Trailer installation which really became a touchstone for me in writing and thinking about the American dream. It is titled “All Utopias Fell,” by Michael Oatman.

 

Joanne Corey: Because most of our evenings were unstructured [that first year], we took to reading a selection of our poems for each other after dinner. It was the first time I had ever read more than three poems of mine at a time. It was so much fun! We learned a lot about each other’s lives through the poems and our conversations over those evenings. There was a lot of laughter, too.

 

Rumpus: How is a day working at the retreat different than a typical day set aside to focus on your work?

 

McCabe: It is incredibly inspiring to know that everyone around me is (theoretically) hard at work on their ambitions for the week, so out of that creative milieu I’m generally far more productive and focused there than a typical day. Also, it became my practice after that first retreat to do a group project, so I also think hard to come up with something I can engage everyone in. I made a video of each poet reading next to a piece in the museum that had inspired a poem that week, a soundscape using everyone’s voice speaking and singing a word that had significance for them, a videopoem based on an exquisite corpse we generated over the week. Those projects really pushed me out of my comfort zone and into some creative tinkering.

 

Hope Jordan: There’s really no such thing as a typical day set aside for my writing. I have a full-time job and a family, and I spend a great deal of my energy on those. In a typical week I can steal an hour or two for my writing. At the retreat, I could spend all day every day writing and it was absolutely glorious. I never had to think about making dinner or doing my job. I could focus just on what I wanted to write.

 

Jessica Dubey: Home is a cacophony of distractions. The beauty of having several continuous days dedicated to the art of writing is that the only distractions are ones that feed my writer’s soul. The first half of the day is what I make of it. I can plant myself in my studio and devote time to writing or editing. I can spend it at the MASS MoCA galleries, taking in new art or reexploring long-term exhibits. I have the town of North Adams to inspire and the Clark Museum as well. It’s up to me how I utilize this time. The rest of the day I’m with the group, critiquing poems, talking shop, or catching up on the lives of these amazing women who I’ve gotten to know over the last several years. Every minute is stimulating and inspiring.

 

Dernier: The excited pressure of having work upcoming in the afternoon workshop is the best difference.

 

Rumpus: How has being a member of the collective changed your process?

 

Corey: While I had written a few ekphrastic poems prior to our first residency, my interest and involvement with ekphrastic work has multiplied because of the BHPC. Several of our members, including Kyle Laws and Gail DiMaggio, have been an inspiration to me to pursue more ekphrastic work. With Kyle’s example and encouragement, I’ve taken part in The Ekphrastic Review Challenge series and had some poems chosen for publication. Also, I’ve recently assembled a chapbook manuscript of MASS MoCA ekphrastic poems and there are a number of ekphrastic poems in my full-length manuscript that centers on the North Adams area, its history, and my personal and family ties there.

 

My use of space in my work has been enhanced by being a BHPC member. In our initial year as a workshop-in-residence, convened as a collaboration between The Studios at MASS MoCA and Jeffrey Levine of Tupelo Press, we had an illuminating session led by Cassandra Cleghorn on the use of space in poems. Inspired by that and the example of BHPC poets Ann Denier and Jessica Dubey, I have continued to develop my skills in using spacing as an expressive technique in my work.

 

One of the things I love about the Boiler House Poets Collective is the opportunity to create collaborative works, such as “Avalon,” the videopoem Marilyn mentioned. It was accepted by the REELpoetry/Houston TX 2023 festival.

 

Merrill Douglas: The luxury of spending many hours alone at a desk while on retreat reminded me how important it is to be able to experiment, write badly, make false starts, take risks, etc. When writing time is limited, I feel pressure to produce something that seems “finished.” That’s not a good way to go at things! I think one needs (or at least I need) room to stretch out and mess around when working on poems. I get that on a retreat.

Dubey: Being part of the BHPC has made me accountable to work hard throughout the year and show up ready to contribute. Every poet who I’ve had the pleasure of sharing this time with is a poet worthy of respect and admiration. There is a tremendous level of creativity and talent amongst its ranks. From day one I’ve wanted to prove to myself that I deserved to be there.

 

Morgan: The intensity of Boiler House has taught me to listen more carefully to feedback and to appreciate revision instead of resisting it. It has also forced me to clarify my intention in my poems.

 

Dernier: I am able to confront issues faster. When I’m working alone at my desk and write a line that is too romantic or too remote, I can hear all the probable comments of those fellow poets.

 

One year we each had the opportunity to workshop an entire collection or chapbook of in-progress poems with the group. I recorded the group’s responses to my collection on my iPhone, knowing I would not be able to digest it all at once. I have listened to that recording many times. Those generous, hard-core responses help me back into the work.

 

The continuity of our years together has made the difference too. I know if I can just get myself and my jotted-down poems to North Adams, there is hope. Time folds. We get right back to work. We know how to help each other. We dive in. If something is thorny, confusing or worse, I hear about it. I could not ask for better readers.

 

Rumpus: Is there a specific line or set of lines that changed through discussion and feedback at one of the sessions that you would be willing to share?

 

Jordan: I had drafted a poem called “Song for My Grandchildren” and it ended with “Bloom, bloom, bloom.” The members of the group suggested I end it with “Sing, sing, sing,” to make it resonate more with the title and subject of the poem. That made a lot of sense to me. I ended up with “Sing, bloom, sing,” which felt just right to me.

 

Morgan: In just about every poem I’ve ever written, I have needed to “to cut the connective tissue,” and “get rid of the last two lines.” I am finally internalizing that as I revise!

 

Inevitably in a workshop session, someone voices an opinion about a line or a phrase, or the structure of the poem and someone else will immediately contradict and say they like it the way it is. That is the nature of the workshop beast, and in the final analysis, it’s up to the writer to decide what to do.

 

Rumpus: Has being a part of the collective helped you take more risks in your work? Would you be willing to share a specific example?

 

McCabe: I would never have done those group projects without a group of people I trusted to go on the adventure with me. I was always just kind of feeling my way along, so I would propose an outline of a plan, and the group would just say, “Okay, we’re in!” What a gift.

 

Corey: Definitely! I grew up near North Adams and attended high school there, so I thought I’d try to write a chapbook about the area and my relationship with it. The chapbook grew into a full-length collection, which I showed to BHPC. They thought I could do better, so I re-conceptualized it and presented it again to the group in a year in which we decided to workshop manuscripts instead of individual poems. Because of those discussions, I tore apart the manuscript, re-imagined, and assembled a third major revision, which I am currently submitting to publishers. It is definitely stronger than anything I would have been able to assemble without their counsel and encouragement. They helped me to take the risk of major revision rather than abandoning the project.

 

Morgan: For me, it’s just been an inspiration to send out my work more and to see myself as a “real” poet. In the last couple of years, I have taken more risks in terms of writing about some of the more painful parts of my past. I was married for ten years to an abusive husband. Below is a poem I wrote in a class I took with Tracy Brimhall in 2020, focused on The Body.

 

After Seeing Titian

 

I thought of you as a bison of a man

and I your blow-up plastic doll

used and squashed flat.

The obligatory you called it

Sunday mornings

after breakfast in bed.

I had no Titian to paint me

with a circlet of flowers in my hair

a long white dress, stark contrast

to your furred body. As hooves

dug into my shins and you bucked

and galloped across the bed,

lightning bolts flashed, thunder

boomed all around the field of sheets.

I never saw cupids fly across the ceiling

bows and arrows at the ready

only the digital clock

red numbers changing

with every minute that passed.

Like Europa,

I grabbed your horn,

then closed my eyes.

 

after Titian, The Rape of Europa

 

Dernier: [For me] it all began with Sol LeWitt. I can only describe it as an epiphany in the multi-floor gallery of LeWitt’s “Wall Drawing Retrospective.”

 

I knew LeWitt wrote “how-to” instructions, and an artist collective created and installed the actual work, but I didn’t know his instructions read like this one:

Within a circle, draw 10,000 black straight lines and 10,000 black not straight lines. All lines are randomly spaced and equally distributed.

LeWitt embraced intentional vagueness. He provided space for interpretation. He set an expiration date, requiring that the walls be painted over at the end of an exhibition. Impermanence was a part of the art. (Returning to the museum year after year and being confronted by massive, elaborate installations; well, honestly, taking a risk in a poem didn’t seem like a very big challenge.) That day, in that space I wanted to embrace vagueness, to allow for varying interpretations and to anticipate impermanence. I was in the presence of those enormous tents of Francesco Clemente’s “Encampment,” Marco Ramirez Erre’s orange jumpsuits in “Them & Us,” and Jenny Holzer’s over-sized redacted detainee documents in “Deeper Look.”

At the center of this residency is the shared experience of the museum and its ever-changing contents. We were ready for anything any one of us tried. We were already on that same page.

 

What we share at MASS MoCA involves so much more than poems and art and conversation. It is the confluence of inclusive, expressive, impermanent, visionary, passionate yawps. Shout it over the rooftops. It is thrilling!

 

 

***

Installation photo supplied and used with permission from MASSMoCA

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Left to right: Kay Morgan, Wendy Stewart, Joanne Corey, Jessica Dubey, Kyle Laws, Marilyn McCabe, Merrill Douglas, Hope Jordan (kneeling)
Photo supplied by Marilyn McCabe

Men Haunting Men: A conversation with Richard Mirabella

As a gay reader (and gay writer, myself), I take special notice when I come across a deal announcement for a queer novel written by an openly queer person. There are few enough of these books that I often find myself reading books destinated to disappoint me—young adult coming out stories, romantic comedies, women in their twenties and thirties having their first queer experience while already married to a man. These books are all valuable, and are often quite good, but I’m not their best reader. I want the uncomfortable nuances of queer life we don’t often find in queer media—even media created by queer people—thanks at least in part to the parameters set by cisgender, heterosexual people. I want, as I eventually realized, exactly what Richard Mirabella delivers in his stunning debut, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest.

Mirabella, a civil servant in his forties who lives in upstate New York, is a brave writer. Adult literary debuts are no stranger to the “ambitious” descriptor, but Mirabella’s novel is quiet. His prose—which could be described as plain or simple by someone who doesn’t understand its power—is controlled. Mirabella’s sentences ache in their simplicity.

Why does this stylistic choice work so well? Mirabella’s novel could easily be high drama. We have a dual timeline story of siblings—Justin and Willa—whose adolescence in a quiet, wintery town is permanently marred by violence committed by Nick, Justin’s older boyfriend. Readers watch this origin story unfold juxtaposed against the siblings decades later as they try to navigate their relationship as well as new ones. Willa, a nurse, creates dioramas. Justin lives with addiction as best he can. Does the violence that haunts this family change it forever?

That’s not the question this text answers. It’s too simple. Mirabella delicately portrays the after effects of trauma, and one of those traumas is a disturbing act of violence that defines the plot. But Mirabella also goes to that brave place: He shows readers the trauma of a mother who is quiet, even patient, in her homophobia. Of classroom bullies who are still around today. Of building a chosen family that disappoints. Of remembering—and not.

I was lucky enough to chat on the phone with Mirabella about these themes and his craft. We spent a good hour talking about depictions of dating violence in queer media (and how our community responds to it), healing from homophobia experienced both inside and outside of the home, and how it feels to wrestle with these hurts while Republicans wage war against queer people from a new angle—one where the sort of relationship Mirabella writes could be misconstrued as evidence that all queer people are predatory monsters.

***

The Rumpus: Would you like to start us off by sharing what you think your book is about?

Richard Mirabella: I would say my novel is about siblings; in this case, Willa and Justin, and their relationship in youth and adulthood. That relationship has been affected by violence that the brother, Justin, experienced as a teenager. I also think it’s about the failure of a family to care for their queer child whose pain is inconvenient to them.

Rumpus: We have chosen families in this book who both heal and disappoint us.

Mirabella: Yeah, I’m actually glad you said disappointing. Nothing in life is perfect and Justin has found kind of a lovely little family but . . .

Rumpus: But?

Mirabella: I’m gonna slow down a little bit and just say: I wanted to give them to him. It’s kind of a gift. [But] they’re not magical. They’re just people. There are lovely moments between all of them where they’re trying but failing.

Rumpus: Do you think straight people and queer people will have different reactions to these failures?

Mirabella: It really depends on the person. Justin’s gonna sink all of them—he’s taking them all down with him. Justin is a victim of heterosexist, homophobic abuse. The violence that happens to him is a direct reaction to that. He is failed by his chosen family too. I don’t know if straight people will get that. I want people to read it and get whatever they get from it, but I think queer people will immediately see and understand it.

Rumpus: Why do you think it works so well to have Nick [Justin’s older boyfriend] missing in the adult narrative?

Mirabella: I started writing this book and I thought, I’m gonna write like a Shirley Jackson novel. You know, the sort of literary novel that is haunted or has something unreal or supernatural about it. There were elements that I cut from it. But I think Nick is still a ghost and haunts the novel in a lot of ways. Maybe being haunted is just feeling something crooked nearby. In this book, that’s Nick. Justin doesn’t know what happened or where he is. To me, that’s so interesting, to have this spirit hovering over you.

Rumpus: Can you say more about your idea of it being a haunted literary novel?

Mirabella: I’m really fascinated by strange fiction, weird fiction. This novel was inspired by a Grimm’s fairytale, called “Brother and Sister” or “Little Brother and Little Sister,” where the brother is transformed into a fawn. And the sister vows to care for him.

It made me think a little bit about being transformed by something that happens to you, something that changes you in a way that is disruptive to you. Perhaps destructive even to other people in your life.

I think there are a few hauntings in this book. Nick is haunting Justin. Justin’s experiences of violence are haunting him. The feelings of fear. I think Willa is haunted by Justin in different ways—not knowing what to do or how to care for him. I think Justin is haunted by men in general. At one of my favorite moments in the book, Justin has this sort of surreal encounter in the middle of the night. That was a surprise when I wrote it, and it made me realize how haunted Justin is just by manhood.

Rumpus: Do you feel like men in this book are haunted by toxic masculinity?

Mirabella: I have to say yes because, I mean, we all are. We’re swimming in the ocean of patriarchy at all times. So yeah, absolutely.

Rumpus: Can you talk to me a little bit about your process of deciding to have dual timelines for adolescence and adulthood? Were you always hoping to use this method to show the aftermath of trauma?

Mirabella: That’s always what I wanted this book to be about, but I just didn’t know how it would play out. At first it was linear and then it sort of shattered and broke apart a little bit more. I wanted to write about a brother and sister, and so I started writing about them dealing with something in adulthood, but I wasn’t sure of what.

I’m really interested in what happens after something bad. So yeah, it was important for me to show the far reaching effects of trauma and of violence in people’s lives. I think it’s less interesting to me to just focus on one person. So I started writing about Willa and Justin coming back into her life. It kind of grew out of going back to their childhood to work towards whatever it was that happened to them.

Rumpus: What went into your decision to have this specific age gap in this book? Did their ages or the degree of the age gap ever change while writing?

Mirabella: My drafts are all hugely different from each other. So in earlier drafts, Nick was a side character associated with an older person that both Nick and Justin were sort of in a relationship with—like a friendship and a sexual relationship. And I just realized the other person wasn’t very interesting.

I liked Nick more. I thought Nick was more interesting, and I also thought he was frightening, a little bit. In then the next draft he became the focus rather than this other character, who eventually just went away.

Rumpus: Why do you think it’s valuable or interesting to write a character that’s a little scary to the writer?

Mirabella: It’s more interesting to write about that. Nick represents something that I’ve always struggled with, which is masculinity. You know, he’s toxic. And you know, he’s a gay person. He won’t accept that about himself. When I think about him I think of somebody who cannot accept himself. He also criticizes what he sees as signals of Justin’s queerness; the way he holds himself, the music he chooses when they go to the CD store. He’s always telling Justin: The world’s gonna eat you up, basically.

I’ve tried writing Nick for a long time. The muscle dude I would have avoided in my youth, who may have approached me in my youth, and who I was attracted to, but terrified of. I think my early fear of men comes out in writing Nick.

Rumpus: When I think about Justin’s teenage years, I think about him being bullied by his peers, and I think about him on the internet. A lot of readers today will relate to both the bullying and going online—including meeting people online—as the escape. What made you include the internet in this way? Do you feel the presence of the internet establishes readers in a very contemporary sort of narrative?

Mirabella: You know, the internet was pretty new when I when I was a teenager. But at this point, in the book? It’s not much later on. And I was thinking about how even if at that point I knew someone else was gay in my high school, we couldn’t speak to each other about it. That would have been dangerous.

I haven’t been in high school in an extremely long time, so I don’t know what it’s like now. I feel it’s probably a lot more open. But I wanted to include a situation where Justin had seen Nick in school, knew who he was, but they never spoke to each other. What created the opportunity for them to speak to each other was the internet. Here was this website where Justin could see: Oh, this person is gay. I didn’t know that! And could reach out to him.

Rumpus: That’s so interesting. It feels notable to me that while there isn’t a significant age difference between Justin and Nick, their lives feel so different because Nick is out of high school.

Mirabella: Nick has the freedom that Justin doesn’t yet possess. Nick sort of gives Justin a hard time about that too: Oh, why do you have to listen to your mother? They’re only a couple of years apart in age and I like the idea that Nick has a freedom that Justin doesn’t.

Rumpus: Do you feel the story would be very different if Justin and Nick had met when they were the same age? Or if their age difference was larger, as tends to be how age gap couples are portrayed in media?

Mirabella: In an earlier draft, Nick was older. What worried me was that the book would become about that topic; a young queer person being [in a relationship with] an older queer person. But the book is not really about that.

I have to say, I struggled with that for a little while. Honestly, when I started writing more about Nick, I liked his sort of youthful toughness. Justin is kind of a punk kid, but he’s also very soft.

Rumpus: Justin faces violence and harm from a number of people in this book, including, eventually, Nick. What went into the decision to have Justin’s partner be the one to ultimately hurt him, versus, say, a stranger or even a hate crime?

Mirabella: It’s very bleak, isn’t it? I think because it broke my heart, I had to write it. It wasn’t an intellectual choice. It was more about somebody feeling like they could trust a person and then slowly realizing they actually don’t have what they thought they had. They don’t have protection.

Maybe it’s trying to say we have ourselves and we have to find strength in ourselves. We have to do the best we can to love ourselves. I think, in youth, especially at Justin’s age—sixteen, seventeen—it’s very hard to feel that self-love. I think especially as a queer teen, it was hard for me to find that love inside for myself. I absolutely was looking for it outside.

Rumpus: Did you ever have concerns that queer people would read the depictions of same-sex abuse and violence in this book and see it as hurting the “cause” or ruin some sanitized version of queer people?

Mirabella: I lost sleep over that honestly. I think what’s important to me as a writer is to tell the truth about the world as best as I can. And that includes allowing queer people to be imperfect, like all other human beings. You know, writing shining examples of queerness is not gonna change the minds of people who already hate us. I think the realities of our lives don’t matter at all to those people who want to erase and criminalize us.

As far as other queer people, I understand that some queer people may be angry if they read something like this, about a queer person enacting violence on another queer person. But that just goes back to what I said. It’s a reality of our world. And I think there are other more nurturing relationships in the novel. So I think it shows a spectrum, but it is a worry of mine, of course.

Rumpus: Justin and Willa’s mother Grace embodies a sort of quiet homophobia we don’t often see portrayed in media. Do you think some readers, who might see themselves as accepting or even as allies, might recognize themselves in Grace? Like “Oh, I’m not actually as supportive or understanding as I thought I was?”

Mirabella: You know, I didn’t set out to write this novel with that in mind, but while I was writing the novel, I read the book Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and its Consequences by Sarah Schulman. It affected me so deeply (as does most of her work) and it really helped me shape the novel in a lot of ways.

In retrospect, I would hope somebody who perhaps has a queer child and doesn’t necessarily know how to handle that would read this and see the character of Grace—who I think is just unsure about Justin, she doesn’t understand him, doesn’t know what to do with him—and understand that perhaps if she showed some understanding, things would have gone differently for him.

Grace feels she has to do something, where [instead] she could just love and accept him. His troubles in his teen years were brought on by a society that doesn’t accept who Justin is, even though he accepts himself.

Rumpus: Grace fails Justin (and Willa) both when they’re adolescents and when they’re adults, though in different ways. Do you feel that if she was a more accepting or more nurturing parent, the whole plot of the book would be different?

Mirabella: To be honest, no, because it’s not just Grace. It’s the world. I hate to be so black and white about it, but . . . Obviously Grace is homophobic. But I don’t think she is nakedly homophobic. I think it’s a matter of ignorance on her part. What Justin faces in life, and even in school is a lot more intense and naked on the surface. And I think that is a catalyst for what happens later in the novel. I think even aside from Grace, he would be on that path.

Rumpus: We know book bans and censorship are bad. Why do you think it’s important that all young people have access to books by and about queer people?

Mirabella: We’re part of humanity, number one. I think it’s important, not just for queer children to read about themselves, but for other children to read about the spectrum of experience. It’s a part of life. And we want children to understand the world. That’s why they’re in school.

Rumpus: What do you think about the ongoing Republican rallying cries trying to paint queer people as predatory, manipulative, or somehow inherently obscene or inappropriate?

Mirabella: Republicans are always talking about personal freedom. And yet. You know, if they really believed in that freedom, they would allow people’s families to make these decisions. If a family is like, No, I don’t want you to read this, you’re too young, then that’s that family. They can do that (and I believe they’re stifling their children).

I grew up in a house where [the thinking was], You want to read this? Okay, go ahead, read it and we’ll talk about it. Parents don’t want to talk to their children, they’re uncomfortable talking to their children about the realities of the world. They wanna ban books so that other people can’t read them. It’s infuriating. I think a lot of it is that they have a particular vision of the world—which I think is largely white cis and hetero—and so anything that doesn’t fit into that mold is dangerous. Period.

 

 

 

 

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Author photo by Danielle Stephens

Leave what you can, take the rest: An Interview with Idra Novey

 

 

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Author photo by Jesse Ditmar

Migration and return: De’Shawn Charles Winslow on going back to West Mills

Narratives that feature the history and intrigue of Black Southern culture draw me in. De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s 2019 debut novel In West Mills featured characters mining the untold to understand their place in their small town and the world. The book gave a multigenerational look at secrets and revelations, and his second novel, Decent People, adds the urgent draw of an unsolved crime with a sleuth driven by love and a sense of justice.

A character in his first novel refers to another character as “blood but not family,” a clear insight that echoes through both books. Winslow likewise builds the bonds that are family but not blood, showing how people find and create kinship and support.

Decent People begins with Jo Wright, set to retire in West Mills after decades in New York. She is on the verge of completing the dream, finally sharing a home with her long-distance love, Olympus Seymore. That plan is upended when Lymp is accused of the murder of his three half-siblings. Their estrangement seems reason enough for the sheriff to assume Lymp’s guilt and stop investigating. This is where Jo begins the challenging task of finding the truth.

Winslow sets the story in the 1970s. The official markers of Jim Crow are gone, but the West Mills canal remains the divider between the Black and white communities, a parallel to so many remaining divisions. The town is a junction point that features Black characters seeking exodus, those returning, and many making do where they are. Queer characters search for community amid judgment. The reckoning between unacknowledged children and their parents becomes central. Adult friendships and intimacies are solidified. The family tensions coexist with the solace of chosen kin and unlikely allies.

We spoke via telephone and email about distance, unknowing, and returning to a complicated home.

***

The Rumpus: While reading Decent People, I thought about the literary and mystery bones of novels by Walter Mosley and Attica Locke. In addition to Black Southern settings and migration, they show characters finding answers that can be hard to reconcile. In In West Mills, a central character wants to “unknow” what she has just heard. How does the desire to “unknow” work as an idea in Decent People?

De’Shawn Charles Winslow: Once the person learns something about their history or a close friend or family member’s history, they have to change the way they view themselves and their personal situations. Sometimes that knowing can become work, an opportunity, or a burden to face a bunch of realities they’ve been ignoring. Well, it forces you to face the fact that they are imperfect.

Rumpus: You set this story in the 1970s, so you had characters with a backstory during Jim Crow, and they’re dealing with the aftermath of major legal changes in America. The book is in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Loving decision, but you show clearly that changes are slow and challenging in West Mills.  How did you balance that will to change versus the more general idea of progress?

Winslow: There was a continuity that I didn’t realize was happening. The town and the people weren’t changing. The town was changing physically with new businesses popping up, but the people’s mindsets were very much the same. Black people stay out of white folks’ way and largely vice versa, and you have the respectability politics of it all.

My mother is the second oldest of nine children, and she and the first three or four of them went to segregated schools. When her younger siblings graduated high school, it was integrated, but I also know that my aunts and uncles, the younger ones, didn’t have close white friends. Even though they were in an integrated school, things were still highly segregated. That speaks to what you just said about the will to change being there.

Rumpus: One way to find some change was through migration, and In West Mills centered characters who migrated. You feature characters leaving for educational opportunities. Queer characters leave to find community. The reasons for leaving were always central to character development. How did that movement away from West Mills become important as you shaped identity?

Winslow: Some characters from In West Mills definitely moved away to find more people, more community, and feel less like pariahs. I know education was available, and I won’t say a lot, but I know a fair amount was available to Black people in parts of the South. But so many people went north because they felt there would be less resistance and maybe access to more types of education instead of just becoming a schoolteacher, a nurse, or a nurse’s assistant. Leaving was about trying to protect themselves and succeed in a way they felt the South wouldn’t allow.

Rumpus: On the other side of that, Decent People shows the hopes and the challenges of returning. What factors shaped this reverse migration that’s central in the novel?

Winslow: The returning is about rest in a way.  I would imagine that it was also work for them, leaving to go and pursue safety, community, and higher education, moving to these very fast-paced places with a lot of competition and a higher cost of living. By coming back home with some money and some education, they felt they could rest a little bit easier.

Rumpus: The mystery in Decent People is compelling, and I don’t want to ask anything that might disrupt that reading experience, but I want to ask about the sense of truth-telling that the characters manage.  Someone in Decent People says, “There was no way out, so lies would have to suffice.” Let’s talk about lies and secrets as different literary elements. I’m interested in how you used the unspoken, unsaid, or untrue and how those are so necessary to the storytelling, especially when the lies and secrets are protective.

Winslow: As a writing technique, I think having secrets gives the reader a question that’s dangling out there. If they remember that, most readers grasp that question and carry it with them. Propels them through the book. It creates that suspense, but it also creates the opportunity for more bad behavior because people are trying to hold on to these secrets or these lies. They just keep committing these acts, whether big or small, to protect the lie or protect the secret. That creates suspense and a propulsive experience for the reader.

Rumpus: Jo returns to West Mills, but her closest ally and sounding board is her brother Herschel, who supports her from New York. How did that relationship become central to the storytelling?

Winslow: I wanted Herschel to be a little bit like a therapist to Jo. I kept him in New York the whole time because he was old enough when they left to know so much, and I didn’t want him to end up becoming Jo’s co-sleuth. I wanted him to be like, “Listen, I worked hard for this life, and I have safety here in New York as a queer man. This is your battle because you want this man, and you figure it out. Here is a little bit of advice I can offer you as someone who lived there and is older.” I wanted them to have a close relationship.

Rumpus: Herschel is a gay man who found some distance from judgment and hate, and we see that harm threatening the next generation of queer children in West Mills who are too young to seek the safety of exodus. How did you define that harm in both novels?

Winslow: I was showing a combination of patriarchy and religious beliefs—and then some people would say that’s the same thing depending on the religion. In small towns that are largely Christian, people uphold these teachings, these beliefs that a man should be supreme in the home or that he should procreate so that the family name can carry on. People who aren’t even necessarily religious can uphold these ideals of hypermasculinity, and sometimes I don’t even know if they realize it. Some will try to uphold those beliefs so much that they will put their children through different types of torture, whether it’s physical or emotional, to uphold an ideal.

Rumpus: The book gives us a sense of migration and return, and I’m also interested in how those journeys work in your life as a writer.  Ernest. J. Gaines spoke about living in California while writing about Louisiana. Jesmyn Ward has touched on her return to Mississippi. What was your experience writing about the South from a distance?

Winslow: I was in New York, and then I went to Iowa. That’s where I started In West Mills. I was able to visualize my hometown so much more keenly, having not lived there in fifteen years. I believe it allowed me to write about the place with a little bit more compassion than if I had tried to write these books living there. I really do. It amazes me how vividly I was able to see the town of South Mills, North Carolina, and a lot of little details just came flooding in. I would write the name of the road down, and I’d say, “Let me change that. Let me make a name up for that because it was getting too real.” The distance allowed me to be able to write about the place with a little bit more compassion and with less tsk-tsk.  

Rumpus: I’m thinking about the idea that writing and publishing mainly default to heterosexual relationships. Have you seen that at work in your experience?

Winslow: A little bit. Because heterosexuality is what’s given to us in the mainstream, sometimes I fear that if I wrote an all-out queer book, I would have a lower readership. That is a real fear that I have and something publishing needs to work on. There’s a lot of queer representation out there, but I have seen articles about how queer books by and about queer people are published at a much lower rate than books that center completely around straight people. I definitely want to acknowledge writers like Robert Jones, Jr. and his novel, The Prophets, because he took a really big leap to write about two enslaved gay men. I think that book is going to open doors for a lot of young queer writers, especially Black male queer writers.

Rumpus: The Prophets was groundbreaking work. Any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

Winslow: Maurice Carlos Ruffin has a forthcoming book, The American Daughters, that is historical and centered around Black women in New Orleans. So, I’m excited about that. Regina Porter is working on her second book, which might be linked to The Travelers.

Rumpus: You’ve shown the importance of a deep connection between place and identity, especially when we consider the historical period. In your teaching life, how do you encourage students and other writers to develop those links between setting and character?

Winslow: I advise my students who write realism to try to know a great deal about the place they are writing about. I believe that if a writer knows a place well, the characters will, too. That familiarity with place tends to guide characters’ decisions and/or the plot.

Rumpus: Do you care to share any news on the next project? 

Winslow: All I’ll say for now is that I’m stepping away from the fictional town of West Mills for my next project. I’m going to use a real North Carolina town, and it’ll be set in the ‘80s. No murders this time, but there will be deaths.

Rumpus: What lessons from In West Mills were most helpful as you completed Decent People?

Winslow: Writing Decent People felt like the first time all over again, so I honestly don’t know, haha.

 

 

 

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Author photo by Julie R Keresztes

A Worn Violence: On Gabrielle Bates’ Judas Goat

I take as fact that the boundaries between art and the emotional-spiritual interior are entirely permeable. That is, I believe the same motifs that engine the most fundamental human queries—of love and death, moral orientation, the individual’s place and role in the world—also manifest themselves in the human creative endeavor. Gabrielle Bates’ debut collection, Judas Goat, through its title, situates itself firmly within this tradition, and does so in reference to the specific allegory of Judas Goat, the eponymous animal used to lead sheep to slaughter, but whose own life, in the process, is spared. The one animal that survives:

To the goat, / the shackling pen is no more than another human / room.

There is a brand of guilt particular to this paradigm, and without reading a single poem the reader is confronted with, and carries with them through the collection, an underlying feeling of survivor’s guilt.

I am too dying of what / I do not know.

No doubt, the stakes along the speaker’s road through and away from the American South—to one of those liberal cities on the coast—are of life and death. Bates’ work acknowledges the survivor’s guilt inherent in this departure, this leaving-behind of the born home and its definitional danger—that is, the distinctly Southern prejudices based, for example, on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—in favor of a community, a haven, in which to live and practice her art:

What the self forms around / cannot be undone.

And one way this collection makes felt the danger of its speaker’s journey is through the poems’ unflinching depictions of violence against humans as well as raw portrayals of animals being wounded and killed by humans. Sheep, of course, but also dogs, pigs, rabbits, cats, and cows are involved in scenes and images that neither comfort nor turn away, most often destabilizing or unsettling the speaker’s movement through a given poem:

My plan was to come back
and pet its pinky nose
but the dogs got to it that afternoon
and there was no stopping.

You know, you know,
but what, you say,
is knowing to a mind
like mine, formed
around the sight
of a blood-drain in the floor?

These sequences, metrically attuned and understated, come off less as moral commentary (“hurting or killing animals is bad”) than as a vehicle for exploration into the speaker’s own violent experiences, particularly with men:

I think of the sentence
the boy (man?) said to me
while I lowered myself
to a frameless, twin size mattress:

“your neck looks so breakable.”

And what of the God that allows such violence against women, against animals? Rooted as this collection is in scripture, one cannot experience these poems without eventually wondering about that same God who is stitched, however subtly or indirectly, into the seams of every piece in the collection:

God bless her, / look at her go, / God bless her

God bless the IUD, that little white anchor

Irish theologian and philosopher John Scotus Erigena said of the via negativa (the negative way) mode of reasoning, “We do not know what God is. God does not know what God is because God is not any created thing. Literally God is not, because God transcends being.” Imagine a painted portrait in which everything but the figure is painted, a figure defined by everything it is not. If we apply this framework to Bates’ collection, if the work is indeed a book-length via negativa (and I offer this as one of many possibilities)—who or what, can we say, is God? How do we define her?

Without violence, how do I understand my life as meaningful?
I knew God listened. And I knew where to aim.
All the time, every second. I lacked
but with aim.

These lines are poised somewhere between longing and futility, hope and disheartenment; the effort to locate God is, perhaps, the effort to locate a future in which our speaker, in which all women, can live without the worn and specific fear of violence by men. A future carved from whatever remains of compassion, of love.

When I stopped begging to be believed / and started telling the truth, no man was there.

This collection is haunted by that future, by its possibility, by the chance it may never come.

Bates, with this debut, continues an aesthetic conversation populated by the work of such luminaries as Sylvia Plath (Ariel), Louise Glück (Wild Iris), and Mary Szybist (Incarnadine): American women poets writing towards an autonomy, a personal and artistic and sexual freedom long constrained by, among other patriarchal forces, the taboo of sentimentalism unevenly and unfairly scrutinized in the poetry of women.

One might, for example, hear in Bates’ speaker’s fraught but steady relationship with God the subversive and relentless interrogation of faith in Szybist’s Incarnadine (The holy will overshadow you / therefore be nothing) and in Glück’s Wild Iris (Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree . . . It was a test: if the tree lived, / it would mean you existed). In Bates’s refusal to turn from the daily violences that characterize heteronormative relationality one might recognize Plath, or perhaps an evolution from Plath, who tended toward allusion as opposed to direct reportage (Viciousness in the kitchen! / The potatoes hiss. / It is all Hollywood, windowless, / the fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine). Love and intimacy are handled in this collection neither by shirking sentimentalism nor by embracing it, but rather, it seems, by ignoring the historicized conversation around sentimentalism altogether. Romantic love is spoken of right next to platonic love, and these are written as inextricably connected to pain and suffering and violence—a tapestry, ultimately, of the human condition.

The voice in Bates’ poems, ever measured and inquisitive, steadfast and somber, lends ballast to her aforementioned poetic lineage, a sense that beneath the longing and the hurt and the search for answers, there is a speaker who will simply persevere, who will, like “the heart trying to leave the chest,” keep going, and by keeping going, will tend always, though it’s sometimes hard, toward human connection. Toward love.

Gabrielle Bates is a poet we’ll be reading for a very long time. Eyes forward, one hand always behind, bringing history in from the shadows, Bates offers in her poems lessons on how to move forward toward health and safety, and a thriving creative and emotional-spiritual interior, without letting go of who we are and where we came from, painful though it can be to bring ourselves, fully, into the light.

 

 

 

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The View from the Backstretch: Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch

Kathryn Scanlan is a master of distilling found truths into compelling fictions. In her first novel, Aug 9 – Fog, she artfully conjures a singular portrait of life-sized ordinariness by rearranging fragments from a diary, once belonging to an eighty-six-year-old woman, that she found in an estate sale in rural Illinois. In The Dominant Animal, a collection of forty haunting pieces of flash fiction, she strips our experience of being human down to its essential eeriness and basest cruelties. Now, with Kick the Latch—her second novel and likely most propulsive work to date—Scanlan once again brings to light the touching strangeness of everyday mundanity, offering herself up as the medium for a midwestern woman named Sonia whose real-life experiences as a horse trainer are here presented as a fictionalized account of brutality, camaraderie, toil, and trouble on the racetracks.

Written in short, vignette-length chapters, Kick the Latch follows Sonia from the setback of her birth in 1962, when she came into the world with a dislocated hip and a doctor’s prescription for a lifelong impairment—”turned out I could walk”—into the contentment of a middle age that follows only a fulfilled, well-loved youth. In the course of just over a hundred and sixty pages, it bites clean through the flesh of her experience and into the rind, journeying across the development of her passion for horses and the adolescent years of mucking at local stables; through training, hungrily, at the provincial tracks leading to the wealthy realms of the Florida racing circuit; and into the quieter years of a present spent as a correctional officer and flea market vendor.

Though this account is full of wounds, losses, and hardships, the Sonia who emerges herein speaks of them with the kind of sinewy, bracing directness you would expect of a complete stranger sitting across from you at the bar. Describing an episode where a jockey breaks into her trailer and rapes her—a seventeen-year-old and an apprentice—at gunpoint, she presents, bluntly and stoically, her decision to keep her silence and her job. “I knew exactly who it was, it was bad, but anyway I survived. I cut my hair real short after that.”

Later, when speaking of a friend who broke her neck while galloping a young pony, or another who jokingly told her of his plans to kill himself before doing exactly that, or even the accident that sent her own body “bottom of the pile” on the racetrack and into a long coma, she foregoes all shows of sentimentality to paint a picture of just what life was. Her matter-of-factness belies any notes of repression, coming off instead as expressive of a particular way of life where pain is commonplace and not allowed to gain authority. It happens to the horses and it happens to the people around them, “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hot walkers, everybody”—all part of the business.

Such consideration of trauma—as mere happenstance rather than a defining feature of life—may be used to obscure a character’s emotional landscape elsewhere in literature. However, in Kick the Latch, it bolsters our reading of Sonia as an individual, and of the things she holds dear. Though she speaks with brevity her eye is unsparing. Her words, too, flow as if in an intimate conversation she is having with us, so that from amidst her recollections of the violence of the jockeys and the punishing hours of work, the dilapidated trailers and threatening motels, the injured animals taken out back, and the names and faces who disappear forever emerges a sprightly image of tenderness: of the community that formed around her “racetrack family,” all eating together, and frequenting the same stores, laundromats, pubs, and bars—they even had a band—and of the horses who, according to her own claims, were the ones that “raised her.” Pain may be everywhere in the rugged landscape she inhabits, but so is compassion—and we, as readers, do not ever have to go looking for it.

Indeed, it is because of Sonia’s spareness and not despite it that her story appears to unspool itself with such honesty and intricacy in the readers’ consciousness. She emerges through these pages as a sort of figurehead for authenticity, both sober and compassionate, and her economy allows Scanlan—whose authorial hand is entirely invisible throughout the book and casts not a single shadow of invention on the narrator—to pursue through her an appreciation for the extraordinariness of the ordinary, something that sits at the foundation of her craft along with an exemplary skill for compression.

In one of the shortest chapters in the book, comprising only fifteen words, Sonia declares of the racetrack: “You’re around some really prominent people and some are just as common as old shoes.” It is clearly these old shoes that fascinate her and the author; it is their stories, however fleeting, that offer themselves up to our attention and empathy. Characters like Bicycle Jenny, a kooky neighbor from Sonia’s childhood; Thorby, a fellow trainer who “was gentle but when he got drunk he’d pick a fight with a cigarette machine or a jukebox”; and Dark Side, the one-eyed horse whom she obtains for “kill-price” and rehabilitates to victory, are the ones who take up most space in Sonia’s compressed narrative, even when they may exist closer to the periphery and disappear completely the moment after they are first introduced. The idea of what matters in a story is here distorted to accommodate chance and banality at the front and center, which is often where they sit in real life. So much happens, and yet nothing does—everything passes by in a matter of seconds, in a matter of sentences, and leaves in our hands the imprint of a life. In the end, it is as if we’ve taken the stranger from the bar home and made friends with her, as if we have spent all our years together.

In fact, the narrative that is Kick the Latch is gleaned from a series of interviews that Scanlan conducted with Sonia over a course of three years. Part of what makes this book such a brilliant read is how the former disappears from it altogether, expertly concealing her own voice and labor of transcription and creative reconstruction, so that it is only at the end—in an afterword that feels like a revelation—that we are reminded of her presence as the author and intermediary. And though Scanlan here takes her cue from experimental writers such as fellow Americans Lydia Davis, George Saunders, and Willy Vlautin, as well as the Chilean poet Alejandro Zambra, Kick the Latch is a novel like none other—if you would even call it a novel, or a work of fiction. It feels more like a card trick—one where the magician disappears completely and allows the cards to dance for themselves—or better, an act of literary ventriloquism: the work may be hers, but the words come directly from the horse(trainer)’s mouth. And dance they do, each move performed with stunning, reverberating, unforgettable precision.

 

 

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The Freedom of Form & Re-Entering Myths: An interview with A.E. Stallings

When teaching formal forms to my poetry students, at some point I inevitably turn their attention to A.E. Stallings’ poems that never fail to delight, challenge, and surprise with their dexterity of craft and unexpected, revelatory results. “The ancients taught me how to sound modern” says Stallings, a feat so paradoxical, yet one she continues, unequivocally, to accomplish. The poet and scholar of mythological and classical studies draws us into the intimate and grandly epic, and with a taut, formalist hand and gifted musical ear, converges sound and meaning in lines that maintain a lustrous tension in addressing the everyday, the mythic, marriage, mothering, and the urgently political. Her re-examinations of iconic female figures from antiquity, coupled with often witty, complex explorations of domestic life are testament to her impressive imagination and facility with language—all earning her, to my mind, a rightful place in the feminist authorial pantheon.

Stallings lives in Athens, Greece, and has been a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, a winner of the Poets’ Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Benjamin H. Danks Award, and Richard Wilbur Award. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, United States Artist Fellow, and MacArthur Fellow, and has translated Lucretius’s The Nature of Things and Hesiod’s Works and Days.

I jumped at the opportunity to spend time with her recently published collection, This Afterlife: Selected Poems that reflects her prolific career. At the start of 2023 I emailed her questions about life and work.

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The Rumpus: In the past you’ve stated, “I like rhyme partly for the way it draws me through a poem, often towards something surprising,” and also that “form is not the enemy of urgency, but its instrument.” I could not agree more. And yet, while formal constraints amp up pressure on the confines of the page and in the poet’s mind, and that pressure can force language and imagery in marvelous, mysterious ways, it can, potentially, feel limiting. Any thoughts on that?

A.E. Stallings: I need limits. Limiting for me is a positive thing. Unlimited freedom for me would lead to creative paralysis. I don’t feel hemmed in by rhyme as a rule, maybe because I am just very practiced and adept in it. But if I have painted myself into a corner, or into too much tidiness or patness, with a rhyme scheme or with a particular pair (or trio) of rhymes, I am willing to toss them out and start afresh. (When having trouble with a rhyme, it is always important to look at the rhymes as a unit and both under consideration: Think of them as entangled particles, a kind of unit.) If any part of a poem is becoming a problem rather than an aid—number of lines (sonnet), syllable count, meter, rhyme—and I am still interested in what I am tackling, I’m willing to tear it down and start from scratch. Sometimes this happens over months or years. But the “scratch” will most of the time be a different recipe of constraints, perhaps with more free or random elements. That said, I do dabble in free verse and even the odd prose poem.

Rumpus: I’ve noticed that even when you don’t employ an elaborate, recognizable form such as the sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, ghazal etc., you often keep to a five-beat line. So, I wondered about that as a cadence you naturally lean into. Also, is there a form you love best? I know that may be an unfair question, and one that changes over time and may be dependent upon subject matter at hand.

Stallings: Yes, I suppose blank verse is also one of my default modes, and a loose iambic pentameter line. It is such a good unit for the breath, and for parsing out sentences of thought, and often has a feeling of “rightness” if it comes at the conclusion of a piece. I am really fond of shorter and hymn meters, which are more songlike, but they aren’t as good for pieces that are meant to sound like utterances instead of songs, and also tend to want to rhyme more. I find syllabics really exciting to work with, and when I can get a syllabic poem off the ground, I am always a little giddy about it. It’s a different way of thinking about rhythm—the contrast not between syntax and meter or how a word falls into a foot or across a foot, but how to fill up the syllable real estate—will this be (in a five-syllable line) five chunky monosyllables that stomp along, or one sweeping five-syllable word? And, so on.

Rumpus: In your earlier poems—in Archaic Smile, for instance, you conjure such striking “re-tellings” or “re-voicings” of female archetypes—Persephone, Medea, Penelope, Daphne, Eurydice—among others. In entering their personas, donning their skins, so to speak, the resulting narrative feels importantly feminist. In later works, the speaker’s current concerns and reality feel front and center with the ancient veils, and threads echoing through in less obvious, overt ways, as if the mythic personas and sensibilities subtly resonate up from underneath into the poet’s present after all those years of marinating in them.

Stallings: At a certain point a poet becomes one of their own influences to confront. One feels one cannot keep doing the same thing in the same way. But I still remain fascinated with these myths. I suppose my engagement with them now is more mitigated, and often also more inter-textual. Possibly the first method is more powerful, but I do find myself coming at the myths from different angles now. Perhaps living in Greece has been a factor, and being older, more of a mother than a daughter. (One thinks of Eavan Boland’s being able to enter the myth of Demeter/Persephone “anywhere.”) I do continue to write the odd persona poem, though, as for instance a couple of recent (still uncollected) poems from the vantage point of the fiftieth Danaid, and I’m always grateful for these convenient masks. (“Mask,” after all, is the meaning of “persona.”)

Rumpus: In relation to the above question, has your decades-long dwelling in Greece affected how the myth tropes enter or are entered into?

Stallings: Ah! I see I leaped ahead. Yes, living in Greece affects my reading of myth. You know people named Daphne, and Antigone, and Eurydice for one. And there is a different understanding of the layers of history and the diachronic life of places. I certainly read The Iliad and The Odyssey and the plays differently, with an awareness of geography, for instance, and how more current events overlay ancient and legendary ones, refugees, for instance, crossing the same stretch of water from the mainland to Lesbos that features in Achilles’ raids in The Iliad. And then there is living in Greek, a language I am both at home and at sea in.

Rumpus: Your poems that address the quotidian, the domestic, and what might seem, at first, to be trifling abstractions, have a way of expanding into unexpectedly grand and revelatory terrain. There are plenty of plays on words and turns of phrase to delight the reader’s mind, but this elevation of everyday matters concerning the raising of children, the maintenance of marriage, and embrace of the mundane is laudable and ultimately, feminist and humanitarian in my estimation. Nothing’s to be taken for granted. Thoughts?

Stallings: That’s very good to hear! The Greek poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke used to talk about poetry being for her, a state of mind, a sort of altered state of consciousness, one you are either in at the time or not. At any given moment everything is poetic or nothing is, and I somewhat buy into that. That is to say, there are times when even—or especially—everyday objects or events vibrate with meaning. Our lives may seem to be lived on the small scale of the everyday but, because we are mortal, because ultimately everything is at stake, also play out against something universal and important. Words themselves are part of that, and wordplay, even or again especially the humble pun, sometimes seem to me a kind of sympathetic magic. To me, Greek myths themselves are often domestic (so often about families, for instance, and romantic relationships), and for me intersect in the mytho-domestic sphere. But mostly I am pleased to hear that this embrace of the mundane strikes you as laudable, feminist, and humanitarian!

Rumpus: So much has transpired politically, economically, culturally across the globe, and certainly there in your part of the world and surrounding countries. The crisis in Syria; the displacement of whole populations of people. This becomes more evident in your later poems, specifically selections from Like. How have the events around you and here in the United States affected the direction of your work?

Stallings: From the moment we moved to Greece, we have been living in interesting times here. Being on the front line of several global crises has meant, I think, wanting to be more of a witness in my writing. I wanted the tear gas to be able to roll into the poems, and to address things that were of current concern in my life. I started thinking of some of the refugee populations entering Greece—from the Levant, from Afghanistan even—as belonging in some ways to Cavafy’s world, and historically connected to Greece since ancient times. A lot of what has happened in the US, especially since 2016, I have found distressing, but I am not sure much of that gets into the poems. I still lead a weekly poetry workshop, which started in 2015, with refugee women, from Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. One perspective this has given me is the importance of poetry and the arts to our collective humanity, how it isn’t luxury but necessity. The cultures these women come from invariably prize poetry—and poets—higher than we do in Western Anglophone cultures. So, it is always inspiring, humbling, and grounding, to work with them.

Rumpus: As your children grow up and your life changes, do you see your concerns and modes as an artist shifting?

Stallings: My son is off at college now, and my daughter is a teenager, so, yes, I would say that affects my concerns. Childhood—my own and theirs—is a poetic source for me, a time when the world again vibrates with mysterious meaning, and when language acquisition strips even cliched expressions back to their original force. One thing, since 2017 when I suddenly understood better what we are facing, I worry about the world they will face with the climate catastrophe that we seem to be unwilling to address or even attempt to avoid. That frankly can make it hard to write at all, when your concern is about the end of the world as you know it, species vanishing etc. But I also think it is important for the poets to keep doing what they do, however futile it might seem. It is a way of preserving a sort of biodiversity—verbo-diversity—of experience and language. It is important to wonder at and appreciate what we have now.

Rumpus: Thank you for the tasty lagniappe (and uncollected translations!) included at the end of This Afterlife. I wonder how those didn’t show up in previous collections?

Stallings: We decided not to do a “new and selected,” but I did want people to have some things that weren’t available in the other books, to have some added value to this. There were always a handful of poems I rather regretted not including—just as one sometimes regrets including the odd poem!—and this was a chance to put them back into context. In some cases, they didn’t fit well with the themes of a book, or there were already too many sonnets or poems about Halloween or what have you. In a couple of cases an uncollected poem was super popular at readings (the Edna St. Vincent Millay one, for instance) and people kept asking where to find it. So, I thought it might be fun to give these poems another chance at an audience.

Rumpus: Might there be a favorite place in Greece you find particularly sublime or a little sacred? That inspires you? And if you could go there and relish a certain food you deem divine, what would that be?

Stallings: The ancients were very good at selecting real estate for temples. Greece is full of sublime, sacred spots. A favorite place not far from Athens is the temple to Artemis at Brauron. It was the place for Athenian girls to put away their childish things—a favorite doll, for instance—as they commenced womanhood. It also served as a sort of convent school for some well-born Athenian girls. The girls on the cusp of womanhood were known as “Little Bears.” The temple is nestled among some hills near a river and amidst wetlands. Perfect for a temple to Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt and wild animals. I love the combination of ancient ruins and wildlife—belching frogs, and water snakes, sparrows nesting in gaps in the column capitals, and bright red dragonflies hovering over the ancient spring where women dropped gold jewelry to make their prayers and wishes to the goddess for all kinds of women’s complaints—miscarriages or infertility—or in thanks for successful childbirth. The place definitely has a mystical energy to it.

 

 

 

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Author photo courtesy of author

What to Read When Celebrating Black History

A list of books we love by Black authors. All are absolutely worth your time, regardless of the month, some which have appeared on this list in previous years because we are still shouting their praises.

— The Eds.

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Against Heaven by Kemi Alabi
Kemi Alabi’s transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country’s central and ordained fictions–those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest.

 

Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we can expand it. In an era when divisive voices take up so much airspace, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: What might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together, to what we love? Taking a clear-eyed look at injustice, political polarization, and the destruction of the natural world, Gay shows us how we might resist, how the study of joy might lead us to a wild, unpredictable, transgressive, and unboundaried solidarity. In fact, it just might help us survive.

 

The Islands by Dionne Irving
The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women–immigrants or the descendants of immigrants–who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism on what they call the Island. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to unearth the cracks in their marriage. In another, the only Jamaican mother–who is also a touring comedienne–at a prep school feels pressure to volunteer in the school’s International Day. Meanwhile, in a third story, a travel writer finally connects with the mother who once abandoned her. Set in locations and times ranging from 1950s London to 1960s Panama to modern-day New Jersey, Dionne Irving reveals the intricacies of immigration and assimilation in this debut, establishing a new and unforgettable voice in Caribbean-American literature. Restless, displaced, and disconnected, these characters try to ground themselves–to grow where they find themselves planted–in a world in which the tension between what’s said and unsaid can bend the soul.

 

Inheritance by Taylor Johnson
Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self’s struggle with definition and assumption.

 

The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb
The In-Betweens tells the story of a biracial boy becoming a man, all the while trying to find himself, trying to come to terms with his white family, and trying to find his place in American society.  The son of a Black mother with deep family roots in Alabama and a white Jewish man from Long Island, Loeb grows up in a Black family in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey as one of the few nonwhite children in their suburban neighborhood. Despite his many and ongoing efforts to fit in, Loeb acutely feels his difference—he is singled out in class during Black History Month; his hair doesn’t conform to the latest fad; coaches and peers assume he is a talented athlete and dancer; and on the field trip to the Holocaust Museum, he is the Black Jew. But all is not struggle. In lyrical vignettes, Loeb vibrantly depicts the freedom, joys, and wonder of childhood; the awkwardness of teen years, first jobs, first passions.

 

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste
Set during Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, The Shadow King takes us back to the first real conflict of World War II, casting light on the women soldiers who were left out of the historical record. At its heart is orphaned maid Hirut, who finds herself tumbling into a new world of thefts and violations, of betrayals and overwhelming rage. What follows is a heartrending and unputdownable exploration of what it means to be a woman at war.

 

Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks
It’s 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into all-Black New Jessup, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.” In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion–or worse–from the home they both hold dear. As they marry and raise children together, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town. Based on the history of the many Black towns and settlements established across the country, Jamila Minnicks’s heartfelt and riveting debut is both a celebration of Black joy and a timely examination of the opposing viewpoints that attended desegregation in America.

 

Please Make Me Pretty, I Don’t Want to Die by Tawanda Mulalu
Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. The speaker probes romantic and interracial intimacy, the strangeness and difficulty of his experiences as a diasporic Black African in White America, his time working as a teacher’s assistant in a third-grade classroom, and his ambivalent admiration for canonical poets who have influenced him, especially Sylvia Plath. Juxtaposing traditional forms such as sonnets and elegies with less orthodox interjections, such as prose-poem “prayers” and other meditations, the collection presents a poetic world both familiar and jarring-one in which history, the body, and poetry can collide in a single surprising turn of image.

 

Night Wherever We Go by Tracey Rose Peyton
On a struggling Texas plantation, six enslaved women slip from their sleeping quarters and gather in the woods under the cover of night. The Lucys–as they call the plantation owners, after Lucifer himself–have decided to turn around the farm’s bleak financial prospects by making the women bear children. They have hired a “stockman” to impregnate them. But the women are determined to protect themselves. Now each of the six faces a choice. Nan, the doctoring woman, has brought a sack of cotton root clippings that can stave off children when chewed daily. If they all take part, the Lucys may give up and send the stockman away. But a pregnancy for any of them will only encourage the Lucys further. And should their plan be discovered, the consequences will be severe. Visceral and arresting, Night Wherever We Go illuminates each woman’s individual trials and desires while painting a subversive portrait of collective defiance. Unflinching in her portrayal of America’s gravest injustices, while also deeply attentive to the transcendence, love, and solidarity of women whose interior lives have been underexplored, Tracey Rose Peyton creates a story of unforgettable power.

 

Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor
In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins—a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins’s murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor’s poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against—and between—women of color.

 

Composition by Junious Ward
In his debut full length collection, Junious ‘Jay’ Ward dives deep into the formation of self. Composition interrogates the historical perceptions of Blackness and biracial identity as documented through a Southern Lens. Utilizing a variety of poetic forms, Ward showcases to his readers an innovative approach as he unflinchingly explores the way language, generational trauma, loss, and resilience shape us into who we are, the stories we carry, and what we will inevitably pass on.

 

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Seas of Discourse: Zülfü Livaneli’s The Fisherman and His Son

Seamen believe in luck, because they never know what the vast sea has in store for them, what blessings or disasters wait for them.

Few entities in the world’s literature are as written about as the sea. From the works of Homer to Robert Louis Stevenson to Annie Proulx, the mystery and might of the sea invites narratives about people with salt-hardened palms and the strange, iridescent beauty that lurks just beyond the depths of human senses. The obscurity of the sea’s downward expanse reflects the murky nature of human complexity, draws questions about what lies beneath, and pushes human beings to their physical and mental limits. Like life itself, the sea is a turbulent, fickle mistress that rewards those who learn to swim between its unstable waves. It is in these liminal crashes of seawater that Zülfü Livaneli’s novel The Fisherman and His Son homes in on the measured devastations and triumphs that come with sea life on the Aegean, bringing to earth the romanticism of Western writers who tend to forget that the sea, while a stunning component of natural aestheticism, is also a border—a border with all the complications of contemporary sociopolitical tensions.

The Fisherman and the Sea begins by inviting comparison to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, from the title to its opening with a short memoir detailing Livaneli’s intimate relationship with that novel. It was through reading Hemingway’s Nobel Prize-winning book that Livaneli learned about how to push the limits of human endurance on the page, and through reading the novel for a radio adaptation that he learned to write dialogue. It was Hemingway whose work Livaneli read as a child, hiding under his bed with a flashlight to escape the punishing eye of his father. But this is where Hemingway ends and Livaneli begins.

In the opening moments of the novel, when a tourist relates the plot of The Old Man and the Sea, the narrator reminds us that the fisherman of Livaneli’s novel is young and that the titular old man of Hemingway’s novel was stupid for holding onto the fish. The fisherman remarks to the tourist that he believes the massive marlin of Hemingway’s novel should have been granted the opportunity to remain free:

If that fish was so wonderful, if it struggled for its life for days, he should have cut the line and said, Go, my lion, you deserve to live, may the sea bless you. Sometimes you catch a huge fish, sir, you come eye to eye with it as you pull it into the boat, and it looks at you so pitifully you can’t bear to kill it, so you throw it back into the sea.

Creatures who fight so hard for their freedom should be permitted to remain free. The novel then proceeds to place distance between itself and Hemingway’s work in order to present a story bathed in Aegean saltwater and soaked in Aegean concerns.

The novel centers around a couple living on a Turkish coastal village in the Aegean Sea. The wife, Mesude, of Cretan descent, and the husband Mustafa, a Turkish fisherman, represent both sides of a porous border. They lose their only son, Deniz, to the sea when the boy is only seven, and their relationship has soured as a result. When Mustafa finds a baby, pushed to him by a dolphin, amongst the floating bodies of refugees who had been on a capsized boat during their flight to Greece, he seizes on the opportunity to fill in the space of his marriage that had been lost upon Deniz’s death. The sea had taken his son from him, but now it supplies him with a new child. The rest of the novel follows the relationship between Mesude and Mustafa as authorities grow suspicious about a child reported missing from the boat’s wreckage. The child’s mother, it seems, has survived. In order to retain possession of the child they have nursed back to health, they hatch a plan to fool the authorities, one that involves Mustafa’s pregnant sister.

The backdrop of this narrative is one of modernization, gentrification, and international political upheaval. Of industrialism disrupting an agrarian working class. Of nature corrupted by an intrusive capitalism. Mining and fish farms have changed the landscape quite literally, resorts have brought in the bustle of tourists who fetishize local fishermen, and poisonous, invasive fish species eat through fishing nets and devour the local fish populations. The government sends a university scholar to explain how to combat these invasive species, but his advice only serves to contextualize a destruction that seems inevitable. Further, a refugee crisis has arisen, and more than sixteen thousand refugees—from Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, and other places—have drowned during transport across the Aegean. International governments and corporations, just as invasive as the fish species, have poisoned Mustafa’s coastal village and its people by rejecting human decency in favor of bureaucratic brutality and corporate profit.

This is a novel in conversation with Hemingway, one that grounds Hemingway’s seagoing theme of resilience with threads of pragmatism and an understanding of the larger consequences of conflict on individuals. Mustafa and Mesude represent both sides of a maritime border that blends with multicultural concerns instead of dividing along constructed definitions of national identity. The surge in refugees fleeing across the Aegean from Turkey to Greece has only grown since the 2016 deployment of a NATO fleet to the region to address the crisis and has led to the building of fences across the land border between the two nations, and even threats of war. Livaneli touches on this tension and the bureaucratic tension created by water crossings throughout the novel.

Livaneli’s inclusion of the true story of a British-built Greek destroyer, the Adrias, arriving half-obliterated in the harbor during World War II highlights the bureaucratic failures of Western administration in the Aegean. The British military returns the mauled destroyer to Greece, leaving behind one very distraught Greek sailor. While the Turkish residents of the World War II-era port community took in the Greek sailor as one of their own, the contemporary Turkish population feels this same mercy is not given to refugees attempting to enter Europe through Crete and the Aegean. Instead of caring for refugees whose boats are disintegrating in the high waves, Turkey and Greece have decided to return these refugees to countries where they face penalties for attempting to flee. The flashback acts as a historical referent to demonstrate the kindness inherent in a Turkish culture that embraces hospitality, even when acting as a neutral power uninvolved in the conflicts of other countries. The refugees of the contemporary Aegean Sea are people fleeing conflicts in countries such Syria and Afghanistan, yet they are not often afforded the same sort of asylum that even Western belligerents were given during World War II.

When Mesude meets the baby’s mother, she is forced into a dilemma echoing that of the port community and the Greek ship during World War II—should she provide a safe home for the baby or will the baby be left wailing in a cemetery (like the Greek sailor after the ship leaves) when the mother is punished for the abandonment of their Afghan home? Mustafa and Mesude must make a choice to carry on in the ill-fated pursuit of replacing their drowned son with the baby gifted them by the ocean—a pursuit that will surely land them in prison—or hand the baby over in an act that will likely result in the baby’s demise. In the process of making this choice, they realize people do not fight their battles in isolation between mountains of seawater or in a vacuum of hypermasculine idealism; they suffer together and sometimes apart with a thin connective tissue strung between them.

At his core, Livaneli is an activist. Through a career that spans twenty books, several literary awards, forty music albums, and a term in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, he has elevated issues that impact the Turkish people. This novel carries on that trend by focusing on the deaths of refugees crossing into Greece from Turkey through the Aegean, refugees who have come from Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It seeks to explore and amplify the impact on the border that is the Aegean Sea as it struggles with a refugee crisis, one brought on by international conflict and not by anything the local population has done. As the narrator points out, “the villagers could nothing but watch their sea die a slow death.”

The translator is Brendan Freely, a Turkish resident who previously translated Two Girls by Perihan Mağden, The Gaze by Elif Şafak, and Like a Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan. Here, he has translated the spirit of Livaneli’s activism into a smooth prose unafraid of the complicated metaphors contained within the novel. In reference to the rumors surrounding the temporary separation of Mustafa and Mesude, the village is compared to “the sponges that divers brought up from the depths. It absorbed and digested pain, sorrow, delight, and disaster,” giving readers a gateway into the culture of small-town Turkish maritime communities. When Mustafa enters into a deep depression and considers fleeing his home, the narrator asks, “Could someone who knew how to swim succeed at drowning himself? Even if he made the decision, would his body obey?” In Mustafa’s pain and brief desire to share in his birth son’s death, Freely translates the emotional response present in the prose that reminds us that Mustafa has the resilience and competence to move beyond his agony. While at times these metaphors become a touch heavy-handed, I believe such metaphors help to direct readers to the urgency of the matters touched on in the work.

As a whole, The Fisherman and His Son tackles a big subject—the braiding of international conflict with familial desire—and lands in a moment of optimism for Mustafa and his wife, despite larger systemic pressures that threaten their livelihood. This is a novel in line with the sort of compassionate revolution that Livaneli himself espouses: one in which love and solidarity lays the groundwork for survival in the tumult of modern life. The focus on working-class characters caught in a larger sea of international discord juxtaposed with a backdrop of the corporate consolidation of local life helps highlight why human compassion is so revolutionary in the contemporary world. In the face of an encroaching capitalism that threatens the livelihoods of fisherman navigating the Aegean in small boats, even as his friends look to sabotage the corporate fish farms taking on what was once their economic contribution, Mustafa remembers that human life is what remains most sacred to him and to his culture. It is in the sea-soaked bundle of a child’s life that the sustainability of his village truly lies, where the refusal to succumb to autocratic dictates of who lives and who dies generates resistance. When Mustafa is told that the future of the village is “something that concerns us all,” and chooses to care for the child he has found, we, as readers, are reminded of our own individual calls to compassion and activism. This novel further proves Livaneli is an artist, one who understands how a single compassionate act by one or two people can resist the grinding wheels of international politics and invasive capitalism. And it is in this resistance, in this struggle, that Livaneli’s fisherman finds a way to help a child lost among the waves become free.

 

 

 

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The page is the stage: An interview with Junious Ward

Junious “Jay” Ward’s first full collection of poems, Composition, published by Button Poetry brings high expectations from the reader. This isn’t a book that spoon feeds. He plays with form—which one is right for the poem—and in our interview revealed he would try on a form and embrace the freedom of trying another one and starting over if it didn’t work.

That panoply of forms in the book grapple with one of the collection’s recurring themes: what it is like to live as a person of mixed race. Ward’s poetic forms are, in their way, saying I don’t want to be boxed in. I’m going to tell you my truth and my truth is going to look so many different ways. Early on in our friendship, I recall him telling me about Dr. Maria Root’s “A Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage” (reprinted in the appendix of Composition) and in which one of the declarations says, “I have the right not to keep the races within me separate…I have the right to identify myself differently in different situations.” There are so many ways to parse Black and white, but also a tension of giant brackets holding it all together.

In spoken word circles he’s known as Jay. It’s where Ward has his roots as National Slam champion in 2018 and Individual World Poetry Slam champion in 2019. Most recently he’s served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Charlotte, NC. We recently spoke over Zoom.

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The Rumpus: With your background in spoken word poetry, how do you write differently for slam than for the page? How do you think about the rhythm and the music that are so much a part of spoken word?

Junious Ward: I write differently for stage versus “the page.” But I recognize there’s a lot of poets right now from a spoken word background who do both at the same time. And they don’t necessarily write differently and their work stands up amazingly in both platforms. I write differently because I have to. Like when I’m writing for an audience, I feel like there are liberties I can take. If it’s performance poetry, it’s part writing, but also the nuance of being there and hearing the intonation of the inflections and seeing the choreography and just the overall energy—the page can’t necessarily do that. The page is the same way—there are things that don’t transcribe over to the stage. For example, enjambments and line breaks. Those things create their own cadence, their own rhythm, visuals, and in many cases, second meanings.

Rumpus: Several of your poems include blank spaces or brackets, such an interesting tactic for involving the reader. Is there a wrong or right answer for each of those blank spaces?

Ward: No, not necessarily. I’m thinking of the ones that are my take on zuihitsu. The way I set up the first paragraph, those brackets indicate race and you can go either way with it, but also, I’m a big fan of the reader’s imagination. If the reader’s imagination goes somewhere else, I think that’s very telling. Poems can be introspective, but inviting the reader to make their own conclusions allows them to be introspective with themselves as opposed to interrogating my work. It becomes an interrogation of themselves. So, I have guidelines of what those things are, but I’m very willing to leave that open to the reader because that allows them to experience it in a different way.

Rumpus: So much of the book contends with mixed racial identity, and I’m thinking specifically of your poem, “blessings” with its shape of two columns—left and right that meet in the middle. These separate columns with their poems and perspectives culminate in the middle and the whole is so much richer than the parts. Can you deconstruct how you came to this form?

Ward: I tend to read the parts before I read the whole, so that’s how I read it. The left column, which is my Black family reunion; the right column, which is my white family reunion. And then, the middle column. Then, I’ll read the whole thing together. It was fun and challenging to write. I had a consultation with Tyehimba Jess in a manuscript coaching class and his comment on several of the poems was the same: “This is good, but you need to push it. If you’re gonna push form, then you need to push it.” On that particular poem, his comment was I needed to torque it up a little bit.

Rumpus: Let’s hang with that for a second: “If you’re gonna push form, you’ve got to really push it.” Did he mean as a way of bringing Jay Ward to the page?

Ward: The original version of what would become this manuscript was probably written six or seven years ago. It was the finalist for two competitions: Write Bloody and Button. It didn’t make it to publication through either, so I let it sit for a while and then I went to Bread Loaf—it was actually conversations at Bread Loaf and conversations with Ross White of Bull City Press where I was saying I want to revisit this manuscript.

And I started thinking if, in some poems, I’m breaking form, and in some poems, I’m combining form, and in some poems, I’m trying to create a new form—then each poem becomes a metaphor for the whole work.

This idea of being mixed race, but also the idea of Blackness or the idea of dominant race, when you are multiracial or biracial. I spent about six months after Bread Loaf digging into forms more, trying to find out what each form does well—how would my poems benefit from a particular form—and then starting in that form and saying, “Ah, that doesn’t work.” Starting over, in a different form, and then combining them, and just seeing what happens—I probably spent six months doing that. Then, once I revised them that time, that’s when I had the manuscript class with Tyehimba.

So, I work with a lot of documents here. Originally, it was just erasures and blackouts, and Tyehimba said, “You know everybody does erasures, so if you’re gonna do erasures—if you’re gonna do a blackout—instead of always seeing to create subtext, what about super-text?” Like how can you use these documents in new ways to have this conversation? Because in my mind, I’m having a conversation with all the things that were in conversation with my parents when they got together—Senate Bill 219, an anti-miscegenation law, some of the snippets from the newspaper from a nearby city from where we grew up, all these things—I want to find a way to have a conversation with them. So, in some ways, I can kind of parse, not only my own existence, but sitting in my parents’ seat—how it was for them.

Then, to your point about sneaking some Jay Ward in there—prior to Bread Loaf and Callaloo, I was strictly a spoken word artist. So, it wasn’t until after Callaloo that I really started getting into publishing work. I am very meticulous about how I put together a performance, and I wanted to figure out what that looked like on the page. I wanted the page to be the stage and what does that mean—what does that look like? I’m not catering to an oral style in the work, but visually—the way you read it—is this going to jump off the page? Is it going to feel like a performance that I’m reading? So, I was interested in figuring that out.

Rumpus: Do blackouts and erasure poems show underrepresented voices in public works? Did you approach these pieces like you might ekphrasis?

Ward: Absolutely. I was very conscious of what black space and white space would do in the manuscript. I think it was Solmaz Sharif, in an essay about erasure, who made me think about blackouts and the satisfying nature of performing a violence to a document that performs a violence.

There’s at least one poem that has the erasure and blackout happening at the same time that creates this whole column of white space and column of black space that are doing similar things but to a different effect. Even in poems that weren’t blackouts, I was very conscious of the use of black space and white space.

Rumpus: How do footnotes work with blackouts as you have them in “Concerning a Problem”? [“Concerning a Problem” is a blackout of the letter Mildred Loving wrote to the attorney general following the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act.]

 Ward: I wanted to create super-text—I wanted there to be more to the conversation, so I wanted you to be able to read the poem, but also know some information behind it that would either give a different thought or context.

In “Concerning a Problem”—one of the footnotes can be read as part of the poem depending on how you read it. So it’s “Dear sir, I am.” One of the annotations coming off of “I am” is “not Black. I told the people so when they came to arrest me,” which is a quotation from Mildred Loving. And if you drop to the footnote then it gives you more about that—where Mildred was raised, there was an ingrained history of choosing to identify as anything other than Black. So now, from the beginning of the poem it becomes really complicated, right? I would probably read the blackout on its own first and then circle back and get this other complicated part of the history, which is how Mildred chose to identify. But that choice, as the second footnote brings out, was based on ease of living and what everybody in that town also did.

So, everything is nuanced. Everything is complicated. I wanted the poem to be there but I wanted all these other annotations and footnotes to be there to guide the reader through the complications. So, it’s not just Black and white, but I wanted a way to interact where all the complications could live, where you could still enjoy the poem, but also a new way to introduce the complications.

Rumpus: Writing yourself and your story into the gaps of legislation brings a hyper-personal lens of who is impacted by laws and governance. How did the poem “Within the Prohibited Degree” come to be?

Ward: That poem started as notes and other documents and snippets from documents I didn’t use for an entire poem, but they stuck with me for various reasons. So, it was after “Concerning a Problem” when I noted, “Oh, yeah, annotation is a kind of neat way to interact with some of this information.”

So, for “Within the Prohibited Degree,” I took some of those snippets and other documents and found a new way to interact with them, and then intentionally changed the order of a couple things so that you have to interact with the poem differently—almost like a flow chart, but you are being redirected. These are obstructive thoughts, many of them, and they’re obstructive ideals and I wanted to obstruct the reader’s experience in reading it and redirect them and make them feel a little uncomfortable as they go back and forth.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about ekphrasis for a second. How does ekphrasis create connection between us and them? Something in you sees a work and needs to respond to it—it becomes part of you. 

Ward: It causes me to think more deeply about what the work sparks in me. So, some of that ekphrasis is responding to pictures of my parents. Some of it is responding to Romare Bearden’s work and thinking about the great migration and how this has affected Blackness and Black thought. It does create a connection because I have to meditate and put myself in a new perspective in order to really write about the work and what the work causes in me.

Rumpus: I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up “Mural of This Country” with its mirroring poem of seven tercets and two quatrains in conversation with the word map on the opposite page, jumbling the same words and re-orienting them into a map of the United States. Can you walk me through your process of bringing together that poem of two pages speaking to each other?

Ward: I got into research mode on Romare Bearden. I was going to pitch to one of our organizations in Charlotte a booklet that went along with the exhibit for his work. In the process of pitching that, I wrote out all these words and I wrote short poems for every one. The pitch didn’t happen. But as I started sitting with the poems, I thought, “I’m going to create a poem that’s collaged from all these individual poems that are homages to these individual works of Romare.”

As I looked at it, I thought, “Oh, man, I think I could cull this so it works backwards, which I did as commission work for Blumenthal Performing Arts a few years ago. Once that existed, I probably re-edited that and it was after the conversation with Tyehimba where he said push everything, I said, “I wonder if this could be done.” Because the way I had it before, it would just reverse itself like a palindrome. I had to play with it and cut the word count so I could get it onto one page so that it could mirror the other page. And then I worked with a graphic artist to make it fit into the shape of the United States. So, that was a pretty satisfying moment when it actually worked.

 

 

 

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Author photo courtesy of author

Science and Symbols: An Interview with Kevin Jared Hosein

Learning about my own family’s history in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora has been a slow process, excavating one piece at a time. Author Kevin Jared Hosein’s latest book, Hungry Ghosts, is dedicated to “the ancestors and everything they grew.” The novel, set in Trinidad in the 1940’s, centers on the kinds of people in history whose stories only remain in fragments.

The novel begins with four boys sealing their bond in blood and milk, adopting the corbeau, or black vulture, as their mascot. The reader adopts this form in turn, bearing witness to the joys and misfortunes of the characters. The novel is a mystery that features a quasi-haunted house atop a hill full of eclectic oddities, prose to be savored, and deeply human characters.

Hosein has authored two other books that were published in the Caribbean. The Beast of Kukuyo is a young adult mystery, and The Repenters received the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. In addition to his work as a writer, Hosein is a science teacher living in Trinidad.

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to speak with Hosein over Zoom about his forthcoming novel, his research process, and how the people, flora, and fauna of Trinidad are part of its landscape.

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The Rumpus: Within the first few pages of the novel the ghosts of indentured workers are mentioned, almost as if they’re part of the landscape. Do you differentiate between ghost stories and mysteries as a writer or a reader? How do you think about both of those modes of storytelling?

Kevin Jared Hosein: I spent the first few years of my life in a small rural village in central Trinidad, a very Hindu village. It’s where my grandparents live. We moved to another area when I was four or five, but every weekend we used to go visit there. So every time there’s an event, there would be this oral storytelling tradition. A lot of it would focus around what we in Trinidad would call jumbies, that’s kind of like ghosts and demons and so on. It would be spoken of as fact.

As you grow up it’d be like well, the lights came on for themselves, it’d have to be something. I don’t want to use the word superstition, but I would say a lot of it was born from where we had electricity fail in the village. Darkness breeds a kind of mystery.

Ghost stories would become mysteries. We thought of it as actual ghost stories, but we would treat it as, how could this have happened? So we would have to filter the words through that kind of lens, especially me coming from a more scientific background. That is not specific to the village that I grew up in, it’s actually culturally widespread in Trinidad. It’s endemic in many areas today. Even my own parents would say you need to do this because this goddess will visit, or if you go to a graveyard you have to walk back backwards to make sure that no ghosts follow you. It’s probably good that no robbers follow you in! But it would be treated as such.

The mystery [is] to decipher where those originated, where they would have passed down from. Because it might not have started in Trinidad, it might have started in part of Eastern Africa, or parts of Southern India where the ancestors would have come from. I would say that is the link between ghost stories and mysteries. It’s inherently linked to our history and culture.

Rumpus: You mentioned your scientific background. Do you feel like your experience in science and as a science teacher impacts the way you write?

Hosein: It does in a way. I didn’t have the opportunity to study literature, so when I came into secondary school, I went to an all-boy’s Catholic school. It has changed since then, but at the time, literature wasn’t a subject that would be offered to boys. They wanted them to do science or business. That opinion has changed, thankfully, since then. (I do think though if I did do it in that academic setting I probably would’ve decided against it so it’s probably for the best.)

In terms of the scientific background, I might go off on a little bit of a tangent here. That’s ok?

Rumpus: Yeah, go for it! Absolutely.

Hosein: Ok! So in the book all of the characters, almost all of them, speak in what we call Trinidadian Creole English, or at least what I would say is my written version of it. There wouldn’t be any two Caribbean or Trinidadian books that use Creole English the same way because we never learn how to write it. We would put it in text messages and, you know, maybe in emails or Facebook posts, or WhatsApp or whatever, right? But everyone kind of has their own version of it—how to spell it, how to word it—but all of us speak it almost the same way. I mean, you have different levels of it, but you would know a Trinidadian or a Guyanese if you were to meet them.

In school, especially primary school, it was kind of shunned to write like that, to speak like that. You had to speak the Queen’s English, or the King’s English I guess, now. So when it came to me actually writing in a Trinidadian Creole English, I did it very late in life. When I first started to write, when I was a teenager, I wrote [stories set] in America. I had only been to America two times, but I would set my stuff in America and England. Basically, what I saw in the media and on TV. I would write the Hollywood versions of those things. To write in Trinidadian Creole English, to write a story set in Trinidad, I felt like I had to explain everything. To explain our words, and birds, and plants and so on.

Coming back to my scientific background now, I’ve done some scientific writing throughout university. Scientific writing is very specific, and it’s often very descriptive, especially if you’re dealing with zoology and biology—what I study—or ecology. When I was researching and writing Hungry Ghosts, what I wanted to do was to show that everything that we in Trinidad consider educated language, like scientific writing or stuff that I might find in a psychological journal, or very literary poetic prose, I wanted to blend that with our Trinidadian Creole English to show that one is not less than the other. It has a place amongst all these other things; it can be studied and can be academic. I know some people read the book and felt like, oh there’s a lot of big words in here, there’s some scientific kind of esoteric language, but I did have a purpose for that. I wanted our words mixed with all that other type of language. I would say that is maybe how my scientific background helped.

Rumpus: That’s so interesting, because I noticed when I was reading that all of the Creole words—a lot of which I recognized, though some of them are slightly different than the words used in Guyana—are not italicized. Usually in English, copyeditors will encourage you to italicize any words that are non-standard English, and that can be a fluid list of words. It depends on who you’re talking to, and if the audience is expected to recognize those words. If I were to go to a bookstore and pick up a novel, I guarantee if the word croissant is in the book, it wouldn’t be italicized. I love that it’s just included, like “baigan” is written like any other word.

Hosein: No glossary or anything like that. [With] a lot of older Caribbean books, the publishers wanted them to have a glossary. But nobody brought up the possibility of it here.

Rumpus: We’ve talked a little bit about science, and you mentioned your education and oral storytelling. Are there other forms of storytelling outside of literature and science that had an impact on the way you think about story and about writing? Like moves, TV, music, video games, anything like that?

Hosein: Oh, yeah. I love movies. I’m not sure if this is true, but some people tell me I write cinematically. I just write it as I imagine it playing out in a scene, how scenes are set, and kind of paint an image in my head.

I like to listen to music when I write—typically video game soundtracks because they’re so atmospheric. I’ll just give an example: the Elder Scrolls Skyrim soundtrack, because a lot of the time you’re just wandering around in this big open world, so the music is not really specific to any setting, but it has this kind of long, ethereal, wandering kind of feel. So for this book, that was probably on constantly to kind of get those ideas flowing.

A movie I had in my head when I was writing it was Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, which is a poetic, esoteric kind of movie, but still about imagery. I was thinking about how he used the images to tell an otherwise basic story, but gave it extra dimensions.

Rumpus: In terms of history, what is it about this particular period in the 1940’s in Trinidad and Tobago’s history that felt like a really rich place to set a novel?

Hosein: That specific time was when we had two superpowers on the island. We had the British and we had the Americans. The Americans were there throughout World War II and they would’ve vacated I believe sometime in the late sixties or early seventies. It was interesting at a time when both of them were there, because how the locals would’ve seen the British were like these authority figures who were almost infallible. They were very stern, strict, and appeared to be well-dressed, respected officials. To make it in Trinidad you had to emulate that behavior and style of dress and so on.

When the Americans were here, it would’ve been the navy and this was because they thought Nazi boats were in the area so they set up a base there around the capital. They built a road that kind of cut across the country and the navy was allowed to use that road, so it wasn’t a civilian road. We could kind of say it divided a certain part of the country because you had a part that was around the Americans and the more urban areas, and they were a little more developed. And there are the more rural parts like where the barracks would have been. I did find that was an interesting setting, like an actual road dividing the two.

So when both of them were there, the Americans were actually very brash and loud, and kind of the opposite of what the British were. The locals used to see that, and some of them would start emulating that because it would be like, oh the British are not infallible because now we have some Americans bossing them around. It’s almost a kind of feel-good schadenfreude kind of feeling I think some of them had. The Americans also, I think, brought with them the notion of the dream, the American Dream. You could come here and you could build yourself up, you could do what you want. They were very carefree kind of people, they had radios with loud music and they used to play with the locals. You of course had, you know, the very bad ones, but overall they were kind of the opposite of the British because they were very jovial.

What I sought to do was to put characters between, to give them that notion of a dream. I like to say this is a novel about split-second decisions, because either you go for it or you sink into the water and be forgotten.

Rumpus: I wanted to talk a little bit about your research process for this book, especially in terms of researching history.

Hosein: I think in 2016 or 2017 or so, I used to do some work for the Commonwealth Foundation. They run the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. They have an online magazine called adda, they were just starting it, and they were commissioning pieces from former entrants, and they asked me to write something about Trinidad. There’s so much to write, but at the same time I didn’t know what to write.

I had a childhood memory of dressing up—we used to put on these monster masks and go around, kind of like Halloween, what we call J’ouvert. We would take these broomsticks and make noise, and then the neighborhood people would pay us to go away. Last time I played that I would have been eleven years old. Later on, I noticed that nobody used to do it again. The practice has altogether stopped, and it’s almost as if everybody forgot it, and I was like, is this like a Mandela effect? Am I misremembering this thing I did for like eight years? Now it’s as if people vaguely remember it, so I wanted to write about that, or at least start with that.

So I said I would ask my grandparents, or my grandfather—he’s the talkative one. He was like, well things start and then stop. That was his explanation. I wanted to seek into why it ended, and one of my aunts said, well, people just got too ashamed of sending their children out to collect a few cents. It was almost like begging in a way. I don’t know if that’s the reason, but the conversation actually led to something deeper where my grandfather was talking about his childhood, and I was kind of relating it to my own. Over a period of ten to fifteen years, some things change and some does remain in a time capsule.

That first interview with him, I just gathered a lot of information. There was a story that he told me that I found completely unbelievable. In the villages there used to be a lot of floods, so people would actually carry boats in the roads and carry children to school and so on. Of course, when you have a lot of floods, you would get a lot of potholes in the road. There was this British official’s wife, and she was walking through the village, and he said that she tripped and fell, and she landed face down in a puddle of mud. She had this white dress on, so it smeared. Everybody was just kind of silent, and nobody was sure whether to help or not, so then he said this little boy started to laugh. [The official’s wife] got furious and apparently said she would order that the village be torn down because of that.

Apparently it didn’t happen, but I thought something about it was unbelievable. At the time I had a friend who was a historian, and he had a couple of books in Trinidad. His name is Angelo Bissessarsingh, but he passed away a few years ago. He never heard anything like that before, but he was aware that there was an order that was declined by some high official to raze that village, but there was no reason why, really. There was a made-up reason where it was encroaching upon something. It didn’t go through in the end.

So, what I thought was interesting was that, of course, not everything would be archived, that the story actually happened. It was as if, that [story] would’ve been lost in time if my grandfather hadn’t told it. I didn’t actually write that in the article for Commonwealth, but it remained in my head. I thought that maybe one day I could write a book with that character in it, and the book actually started with that character. Just the notion of it, someone having that high amount of privilege and power back then—it’s not like it was the 1700’s or 1800’s. This was 1940-something.

In terms of the research, a lot of it was mainly talking to people, elders, trying to extract information from them. Just me with a notepad and pen, talking for hours. A lot of people don’t like to talk about it, and I was very fortunate to find a few villagers who were quite surprised that it actually turned into a book. I don’t know what they actually thought it was going to be.

Rumpus: While I was reading, animals felt ever-present in the story. They’re pets, they’re symbols of the natural world, sometimes they’re omens of danger or disaster. How did you think about their role in the world of the story as you were writing?

Hosein: In the unedited version, there was actually a part with a cat at the barrack. The cat got edited out, and only the dog remained. It became a bit redundant, so the cat had to go. In terms of the animals and the landscape and so on, a part of me wanted to be like, well, us Trinidadians are part of the landscape too. We are kind of animals brawling and conflicting with each other all the time.

The last chapter of the book is mainly focused around the plants and animals. The book starts off with it as well, and I wanted it to seem like the land is an absolute, it is an ultimate. It’s almost as if to give a broad feeling of the island where—how can I say this—the dream of the island, the life of the island will continue. There will be others to continue the process. It’s almost as if, life will carry on, it will get better, there will be hardships. And the animals are there as a sign of that in a way, that the natural state, despite all the turmoil and hardships the characters endure, will move on.

I do see animals personifying certain emotions or ideals. The key one being what we call the corbeau, which is a black vulture. Corbeau is a French word for raven, but we call it that. It’s not our real national bird, but in a way, it is the most talked about bird in Trinidad. There’s a lot of idioms surrounding the bird, and I guess there’s one I was thinking about. It’s kind of an elitist saying, that corbeau don’t eat sponge cake, which means that you could throw out maggots and rotting food, but if you throw cake for it, it might just leave it alone. It’s as if to say that it doesn’t know what luxury is. That was something I kept in mind because we have a lot of animal idioms here. But I was thinking of it like that, as if these characters were part of the natural landscape, just like any other animal or plant.

 

 

 

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Author photo by Mark Lyndersay

It’s Not Cancel Culture, It’s Scam Culture: Jinwoo Chong’s Flux

“Can we separate the art from the artist?”

If you’re like me, you’ve been in more than a few versions of this particular conversation. You could even, at this point in the post-MeToo era, write a MadLib of this conversation. It starts out in the abstract. Within the first thirty words, the term “canceled” will be invoked. Then it will be interrogated. Now you’re having a conversation about “whether cancellation even exists.” Someone has unironically referred to “Zoomers.” We’re now talking about Michael Jackson (or Kevin Spacey, or Louis CK, or, or, or). Out comes the expression “it’s not apples to apples.” Positions entrench. It usually doesn’t end well.

About 100 pages into his novel Flux, Jinwoo Chong stages a version of that conversation. It’s a version we recognize, only his is ridden with irony. That’s because his protagonist Brandon, who’s rehearsing these tired arguments while on a date—“the idea that we should just dissociate from something that big, like a show, with so many moving parts and other actors and writers and producers…”—isn’t being entirely forthcoming about why he’s defending this particular work of art, this particular problematic artist.

He’s defending a fictional ’80s TV series called Raider, a cop show starring Antonin Haubert. (“The Chinatown detective one?” Brandon’s date Min asks.) Haubert had been the first Asian American lead in the genre, embodying a gritty, hardened detective facing criminal masterminds. (“I’ve read a lot of good stuff… Asian representation, and all that,” Min comments.) Raider was canceled—literally, by the network—before it got the chance to tie up the loose ends of its high-stakes season two cliffhanger, and Haubert’s character, the show’s hero Thomas Raider, never has his big moment of redemption. The actor, on the other hand, moves on to splashy, award-winning projects, leaving Raider to become a footnote in a future Wikipedia entry. It’s an early role, one he’s barely remembered for anymore — a Johnny Depp to the real-life ’80s series 21 Jump Street, perhaps.

Now, at the start of the novel, which appears to be set in the 2020s, women are coming forward to accuse Haubert of abuse. Maybe you won’t be surprised to hear that, unlike Johnny Depp, allegations of misconduct for this man of color lead to a swift and unequivocal public condemnation. Haubert has his Oscars rescinded. His son releases a statement on social media disavowing him.

But Brandon, our narrator, is what we call a stan. For reasons the novel will dole out in due time, Brandon is not letting go. It was my first clue that this was a MeToo book with something new to say: despite Brandon’s vociferous defense of his beloved TV show, I still liked him. I felt a sort of pathos for Haubert, privately, inside this novel, and yet was also disgusted by my own apologism. I began to wonder if the closest analog for Haubert were not in fact Johnny Depp but Bill Cosby. The capital-P Progress his show represented somehow made it harder for fans to see his harm, at least at first. Was I feeling for Haubert as so many have felt for their symbolic and politically meaningful fallen stars?

After actress Constance Wu came forward this fall alleging sexual harassment by an unnamed Asian American producer of the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, Wu gave an interview on Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Red Table Talk on Facebook. “The thing that was most painful,” she said, “was he was so derogatory and harassing towards me, but because this show was sort of a beacon of representation for Asian Americans, and I sort of became a symbol of representation, I didn’t want to sully the one show with sexual harassment claims against the one Asian American man who is doing all this better work for the community.” The one show. The only one. Part of Chong’s method may be to show us how structural tokenism makes for especially fragile idols. It hurts differently. It might be a whole different category of betrayal. Of course now I’m turning fans, and not survivors, into the victims.

Brandon doesn’t see himself as a victim—definitely not. But he’s also no hero. He would rather not choose, would rather not face reality: not with Raider, and not with much of anything in Brandon’s life, which seems to be unfolding before his eyes like a droll rerun. His personal life consists of a standing sleepover date with his boss Gil. “When I liked Gil too much,” Brandon narrates to an imagined Raider, “I thought about your jacket, the kind of no-shit, icy guy I’d be if I could wear something like that every day.” His professional life is a joke he seems as amused about as I was: “You know those little pieces of cardstock that fall out of the magazine when you’re flipping through them at the airport?…That was me.” Life happens to Brandon: When Gil fires him and the rest of his marketing department, Brandon takes his severance check to the mall and buys himself not the coveted Raider jacket, but a leather fanny pack. (“Belt bag,” the shop clerk clarifies.)

Then, as if out of thin air, a new job materializes at Flux. Flux is a multibillion-dollar startup that might be an energy company or might be something else entirely. Its CEO, Io Emsworth, is a kind of sexy punk-nerd version of Elizabeth Holmes, a chance for Chong to masterfully satirize, and maybe complicate, another recognizable 2020s archetype: the charismatic scammer.

Because despite the fact that Flux’s offices, a kind of army base encased in bulletproof glass, cost a fortune and were designed by the Porsche people, somehow, Brandon notices, nobody is ever around and nothing ever seems to be happening. Can he listen to his gut and bail? Or will he continue to take the bribe and go through the motions, hopping in the company car each morning, breakfasting on company-sponsored cinnamon cereal at the same time each day, putting up with his boss calling him “big boy”? What would Raider do?

Flux is not just a story of a young man in, well, flux. It’s also a daringly constructed thriller, a mystery that propels you through it with burning questions, magnetic characters, and gasp-worthy twists. Perhaps because the novel opens with a quote from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, it isn’t a spoiler to say that it’s a time travel book. Time travel stories often rely on a certain kind of narrative déjà vu: You’re stuck in a loop, returning to the same moment again and again, hoping to be able to change the narrative, to do something different this time around. What any time traveler is looking for, in other words, is redemption. Like Raider, the novel uses an episodic structure and a VHS-tape rewind effect to slowly bring into focus its true subject: Brandon’s childhood trauma, and the grief that is deeply lodged inside him.

Because what’s often behind our intellectualizing about separating art from artists is a profoundly personal grief. A character, a story, an idol we once entrusted with our devotion is now tainted, shot through with the horror and disgust of whatever allegation has surfaced. We feel betrayed, even duped, as if some silent deal we’d made with the art has been broken. Pure fandom can feel inviolable like that: unconditional as the love between child and parent. It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge how much of our identities live in the architecture of other people’s stories. When those structures start to crumble, we can either evacuate or stand our ground. But rarely does either option feel entirely right.

Haubert’s work on Raider doesn’t even seem to be all that widely beloved; Brandon seems to be among a small cadre of diehards, certainly in his generation. Is that why I liked Brandon—because he exhibits that quirky mix of courage and sentimentality which characterizes pure, devoted fandom? “The dumbest part about the way they’ve been tearing you down lately is that they’re forgetting the fact that Raider defined an entire genre of television,” Brandon narrates. “Three years after Hill Street Blues, two after Cagney & Lacey, this was a show that played in the dark. … You dealt a rawness that couldn’t be glossed, the hard edges of those alleyways, your filthy clothes, that fucking jacket. You know, I’d kill for that leather jacket.”

This “you.” This strategy—to narrate in an intimate second-person, with Brandon directly addressing Raider the character—is the key to understanding Chong’s sensibility, and to understanding his novel’s critical reframing of the “cancel culture” conversation. “I’m pretty sure Antonin Haubert didn’t even think about the show anymore. There was so much else on his resumé. Which shouldn’t hurt your feelings. You still made a killing in syndication.”

With this point of view, Chong literalizes the separation of the art from the artist: Brandon addresses Raider, but not Haubert the actor, the man accused. For Brandon, Haubert’s real-life violent behavior is not related to Raider’s often violent detective work—work that, at the end of each episode, would lead to justice. Raider is totemic for him, frozen in time. The artist, for all intents and purposes, is dead.

But of course he’s not, and his victims are real. And so Brandon becomes, ever so subtly, an unreliable narrator, his authority undermined by this willful oversight, this wishful separation. It’s the seed of the entire novel: the danger, and the delusion, of the cathected cultural figure. Who is Raider to Brandon, exactly? A proxy? A parent? An object of desire? “I remembered the first time I watched all of Raider through and realized there would be no more episodes,” Brandon narrates. “I wouldn’t be able to watch you quite the same way. I’d never wonder about you again. I’d never be surprised. There you were: Raider, for all you are, and there would be no more.”

It’s almost a eulogy. But even if the art may be separable from the artist for Brandon, his own life and identity are clearly inextricable from Raider. “Sometimes I forgot the way I did things just because I saw you do them,” Brandon confides. “I wanted to smoke so badly, like you did, but my dad would’ve killed me.” Chong gives us glimpses of the child inside the man, whose idolatry blurs lines.

The problem with trying to separate art from artist, of course, is that it becomes too easy to lose track of the truth. But sometimes a work of art lives inside of you. Its hero’s perspective becomes yours. These are the ones it is hardest to let go of: not because we “should,” or because “they’re canceled”; but because we have to, in order to grow.

Scholar and New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom has called ours a scam culture. “Sociologically, scams are about norms and not about legality,” she explains. “A scam culture is one in which scamming has not only lost its stigma but is also valorized.” Flux is a book about what happens when we forget how to tell art and life apart—and about what’s at stake, and who benefits, when we choose the official narrative over the truth. Or do we have a choice? It’s hard to determine the real scam sometimes, hard to know with whom accountability lies. In the introduction to their book She Said, which chronicles the painstakingly rigorous journalism that eventually brought down Harvey Weinstein, Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey explain that their reporting “took place at a time of accusations of ‘fake news,’ as the very notion of a national consensus on truth seemed to be fracturing.” Abuse is like any other scam in that way: It manipulates, misleads, forces its version of reality. It grasps for control over the narrative.

That’s what makes Flux a book for our time. In the flux of the post-MeToo era, whose backlash manifests in bad-faith conflation of censorship and censure, Jinwoo Chong has charted us a way forward that doesn’t throw away the past, but travels back to it with purpose. (I told you it was a time travel book!) With this story, he reframes the question at the heart of social movements like MeToo: not “am I allowed to like this?”, but rather, “what does my loyalty to this work of art prevent me from seeing?”

Or maybe, since we’re dealing with time travel: “What future is my past preventing me from living?”