Khaled, the narrator, is a young Libyan who moves to the U.K. to attend college, but taking part in anti-Qaddafi protests in London dramatically alters the course of his life. Fellow student Mustafa and older writer Hosam, both also Libyans, become companions in his forced exile. The narrative covers years and geographies, leaping back in time and into the future, hinting at what’s to come and what could have been avoided, taking the friends all the way through to a midlife built on a string of personal choices, in the shadow of real-life events—an embassy shooting, crackdown on dissidents, Libya’s revolution, and the killing of Qaddafi. 

As the political tide turns each man must choose for himself what allegiance to their country means. “A revolution requires a great deal of imagination,” Hosam tells Khaled. But so does the life of an émigré who has had to situate himself vis-a-vis his native country and his adoptive one and learn to make a home in the in-between. For Khaled then, a return to his hometown would mean a re-envisioning of the painstakingly built sense of self. “Bengahzi was the one place I longed for the most, it was also the place I most feared to return to,” he says. 

This novel is an ambulatory meditation on the passing of lives, on being far from the homeland, and on the complexity of friendships. Here friends are receptacles of trust, dispensers of pleasure, interpreters of the world. They are mirror images, reflecting the person one fails to become just as they are custodians of the memory of our past selves. Matar’s novel is also a moving portrait of family. His characters have the sagaciousness of inhabitants of old lands, knowing what words to choose to fend off lurking danger, what words to soothe the sorrow of separation. Do you recall the old fig tree in the courtyard? Khaled’s father asks his son rather than pressing him to come back to Libya. “It’s suddenly blooming.” My Friends, at once gentle and ravaging, is a work of great beauty, and an infinitely wise book. 

I spoke with Hisham Matar on the eve of the publication of his book. We discussed male friendships, assessing history, time and temperament, the distance between one’s chest and the world, and exile as a form of death.

Ladane Nasseri: I’ve heard you say you initially thought the idea for this book came in 2012 but going through your archive you found a few lines you had written about it in 2003 already. What was the known element about this story in the midst of all the unknowns of starting a novel? 

Hisham Matar: The first idea was to write a book about friendship, particularly male friendship, and I wanted the human events to be central, but I wanted them to be subjected to history, to politics, to different desires of intimacy, the tension between feeling at home in a friendship but at the same time trust being contingent because of the situation. And also questions of competitiveness. I think on some level my work is fascinated by masculinity. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a man for a long time. These are some of the things that have been accompanying me. 

LN: It seems this book has been in you for quite some time. Why is that? 

HM: the books I write I feel that in some way I am written by them. It feels that the book arrives or suggests itself, very faintly. And it seems that it has its own way with things, its own attitude, also its own appetites, the things that it wants to think about, so it really does feel like an independent agent and that I have to lend myself to its will. The options seem limited, I either do that, or I just don’t write it. So, in the beginning it’s almost like a half-remembered dream and I’m trying to make myself available to it. It then starts to dictate its own pace and with this one it arrived very, very, slowly.

There were other reasons for the delay that had to do with history. I knew my characters had something to do with the events of the Arab Spring, and what followed and I couldn’t write in the ways that I wanted to write about them so close to the event. I’d written journalism around that time, it’s a very different register, but to write a novel time needed to pass to build a certain degree of passionate ambivalence towards these events. It’s an oxymoron—I feel you need to write about things you are passionate about, but you need a certain kind of ambivalent distance to it so as to pull in all the contradictions. The scene of the killing of Muammar Gaddafi… I would have never been able to write that closer to the event. I was bewildered. So, this book took a long time because I needed to find a way to it, but also because of history. 

LN: The events were happening as you were writing…

HM: Yes, and you would know this, if you know people really well, people you grew up with, close friends, members of your family, and you watch them as they’re subjected to these very extreme historical upheavals, you notice how differently they respond. They can start at the same place politically or ideologically or even ethically and end up in different places largely influenced by questions of personal temperament. I thought the novel is really the place for temperament. It’s very hard to talk about temperament on the political stage but it seems to me that temperament is something that’s really at play here. 

LN: This novel is an exploration of friendship, and an ode to friendship. You mentioned temperament, but I wonder whether the three main characters, or four if we want to count Rana, are not different facets of Khalid himself—all the people he could have been or that he holds within him. Did you also aim to portray the different facets of an exile? 

HM: Not consciously. I didn’t mean for it to be sort of a survey of archetypes of exile. The novel is motivated as you say, by a meditation on what friendship is because it is to me an open question and a fascinating one, and I can’t help but for the book to be on some level in critical praise of friendship. But I had so many intentions, they are hard to account for. I had an intention of writing a novel that was epic in scale, but really about the most intimate things. So, not about revolutionary political drama, but actually about the drama of the heart. I also wanted to write a novel that reciprocated some of the reading pleasure that I get from books, when you’re on the edge of your seat, you can’t stop, you want to know what’s going to happen, at the same time, for it not to do that at the expense of a meditative or a philosophical register. I wanted all those registers. I tried it in different ways, but I found that the restrictions of Khaled’s gaze, the things that he knows and doesn’t know, became incredibly fascinating to me. So, we never really meet Mustafa, Hosam, Rana. We are meeting them through Khaled, through how he sees them. The book is thinking about the distance between what’s in your chest and the world. That’s why it starts with a preoccupation, and it’s motivated by that throughout the book. The desire to know and the impossibility to know, that you can be sitting next to somebody you know very well, looking at the same view or painting and you have no clue what is happening inside their chest. That to me is such a simple, commonplace, everyday occurrence but it’s so phenomenal and bewildering. 

LN: You talked about the companionship of books. Books and writers form a thread throughout this novel. Books are physically present, like Khaled’s library or the books Hosam takes with him everywhere he goes. The characters also have a lot of conversations about authors. So, there’s the friendships of Hosam and Mustafa but also the companionship of all these dead authors and their work. Does the title My Friends also refer to these books? 

HM: Yes, very much. It’s a very good question and a good point. I agree. For Khaled the companionship has been obviously those friends, but also very much those books. One of the most moving parts when I was writing was when he discovers that he can walk into a public library without being asked anything and he then uses it as a space for experimentation. Reading has on some level always been that for me. Khaled is a curious character because he is at once very free, he feels that all culture belongs to him, at the same time, he’s very much trapped or stuck. I couldn’t quite figure out as I was writing whether this was the portrait of someone who is truly courageous or the opposite. I still don’t know for sure. I do think it’s quite amazing what he does. 

LN: How so? 

HM: I think there’s a lot of temptation in a situation like that to go into the past, or to run into the future and both seem to be incredibly legitimate things to do. It’s very difficult to remain with the present specially such an austere present. I don’t even know if that’s a good thing, but I know it’s not easy. Before I wrote books, I thought authors write books when their knowledge about the subject has fully matured, that they write out of a sense of mastery. But from my experience you write a novel exactly at the point when you don’t have words for the thing you’re feeling or thinking about. The novel is a space where all the doubts and the contradictions can be articulated.

LN: One of the main themes in your novel is exile. Some artists grapple with a serious dilemma: having the inspiration that comes from being in one’s own land or prioritizing freedom by leaving. I’ve had many conversations throughout the years about this with Iranian artists, especially filmmakers. Some tell me the day they leave Iran is the day the well dries up, and others say they must leave to be able to pursue their art. In My Friends, the main characters talk about the need to remain connected to the motherland or “the source” as they call it. What has been the role of exile in your development as a writer? 

HM: It’s a very good question, a very hard question to answer. The overwhelming majority of my life I’ve lived outside of my country. I was a young child when we left so I came of age, and I became a man abroad. And right now, I feel we need another word maybe because technically I’m not an exile if exile means that you want to return and cannot return. That’s not my situation right now. I have this bifurcated sense of identity or an accumulation of different things. I used to worry ‘am I less because of this?’ or ‘am I more because of that?’ I used to think in those terms. I don’t anymore. It is what it is and I’m certainly much more at ease in it than before. But if you’ve come of age in your home country, and your work is fed and nourished by it such as some of the filmmakers I admire, all this becomes very complicated. Anyone who judges someone for not leaving has no idea how difficult it is. It can be a form of death. But for me it’s not like that because I’ve been away since I was very young, and this book is also about my love affair with London. Although Khaled and I are very different we share the fact that London has been nourishing and hospitable. 

LN: The narrative device in this novel is Khaled’s walking itinerary in London. He steps into the past by revisiting defining places and scenes and as a reader it made me very much aware of the slipperiness of time—Time passed and time passing. This book has such an elaborate, intricate structure and because it starts with the end as soon as I finished reading, I wanted to return to the beginning and start again with this new perspective. You have said that the structure of your memoir, The Return, hardly changed compared to how you wrote it. Did you have a similar experience with My Friends? 

HM: Structure to me is integral not only to how the book is read, but to how it’s written. It’s written from its structure rather than, say, writing it linearly and then mixing it up. Obviously, there are many drafts and things move around and get cut, and other things are added. But the mode it is in right now is the mode in which it was written. In fact, the first thing I wrote was the first page and I wrote it years ago. It’s been with me for over a decade, not knowing who’s speaking, why this tone, why is this farewell so significant. But it was structurally written in that shape, and it adheres to some of the things I always think about with time. A protagonist in this book that is even more important than London is time. How it’s managed, how it exists as he is walking. 

LN: So, you were clear on Khaled’s walking meditation from the start?

HM: Yes, I knew that it’s told on a walk. I just wasn’t sure what will happen in the walk, where he will go or whether he’ll meet anyone. I was in it. I was moving with the characters. In some ways, writing is easy because all you have to do is be aware of the false notes. When you hit a false note, you take it out and try to find the right note. But there were times when I thought this is not a book or I’m not listening properly. There was a moment, about a year into the book, when I put the 150 or 200 pages I had across my studio—quite a long way into the book for you not to know whether it’s working!—I put them across the whole wall, down the corridor. I needed to see them visually, I needed to know what is happening here. So, I don’t want to give you the impression that it was just an easy…

LN: Walk in the park!

HM: Walk in the park! Exactly! But it worked as long as I stayed in that space. Not trying to see beyond what I know. It’s a bit like in any relationship. If you’re with someone and you’re constantly thinking, about whatever end target you have decided, friendship, or marriage or business partnership… it spoils it because it pre-determines what’s going to happen. 

The post Hisham Matar on Writing Male Friendships appeared first on Electric Literature.

The novel follows Coral, a lonely author of a dystopian novel who discovers her brother’s body after he dies by suicide. Aside from the EMTs who clear Jay’s body, Coral is the only person who knows of his death. She takes his unlocked cell phone and begins responding to his texts as if she is Jay, as if he’s still alive. None of these correspondences carry as much weight as the ones to his daughter, Coral’s niece. Told in first-person plural and set over the course of a grief-stricken week as Coral attends a comic convention and attempts to date, the novel has an eerie, otherworldly quality from the very first sentence: “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.” 

As Coral slips from reality, her dystopian novel, “Wildfire,” swirls to life, amid her attempts to keep Jay alive to those who don’t yet know he’s dead. Dead in Long Beach, California examines trauma, desire, grief, hunger, loss, and our society at large in an inventive, form-shifting novel that truly no one but the singular Venita Blackburn could’ve written. 

I had the pleasure of talking to Venita Blackburn about voice, hunger, humor, and more.  

Rachel León: The premise of this novel is compelling, and like all your work, the voice is distinct and strong. This particular voice has an enigmatic quality. I don’t want to discuss who exactly is narrating because not knowing right away makes for an alluring reading experience, but I’m curious which came first—the premise or the voice? 

Venita Blackburn: Definitely the voice came first. I usually don’t write anything without having the sound of the narrator established. The most interesting parts of stories for me aren’t necessarily plot oriented. I’m most moved by characters and relationships. No character is real enough to me to put in motion until they sound real. They have to have a speech pattern, a rhythm that matches their personality and psychoses perhaps. It’s fun.

RL: You’re such a master of voice that I suppose that first question was too obvious. It’s one of the things I love about your work. Plus you often play with form, which you do here with “Wildfire.” But I’d argue it’s used differently than most novels within novels… At what point did “Wildfire” come in? 

VB: I had the essence of the main story ready, but I did find it difficult to write much of it, so I spent a lot of the early drafting period working on the story within the story. I also wrote a lot of it during the pandemic in long stretches of isolation where I wanted to be far away from the realities of that time, so writing the “Wildfire” sections gave me that escape. I also rewatched a lot of Star Trek during that period for the same reason. Going into distant speculative sci-fi fantasy worlds offers the illusion of safety from modern troubles and makes every trauma a little more manageable because the future promises reprieve, right? Of course good sci-fi acts as a reflection of humanity and parallels most modern concerns and bad habits at the core. Eventually, I had to cut a lot of the material I wrote for the “Wildfire” sections because they were not what the real story and situation were about. I don’t have a hard time cutting, but those sections were comforting to me for a while, dreaming in a land via a lesbian assassin with a solid fashion sensibility. I couldn’t fantasize forever and had to face the hard part of the book.

RL: That blending of fantasy and facing hard reality hits at the core of the novel. I think most of us can slip into fantasy pretty easily, but Coral is the perfect character for this story. 

VB: Coral does not handle the situation well at all. What would the ideal reaction to that kind of horror be? I don’t know. I do know that every reaction is legitimate, and eventually we have to be accountable for those actions. The story though is not about healing or excellent coping skills at all. The story happens in the space between the event and acceptance, that point where our emotions, our sense of reality loses all clarity. I wanted to put images and meaning to that space of grief.

RL: I think the way the novel also explores hunger and desire somehow makes that space of grief more profound. Do you think the two are related—hunger and grief? 

VB: Absolutely. On a literal level there are probably psychological studies to confirm this link, but it is definitely something I’ve observed and experienced. Hunger is something I wanted to put language around. Coral has a real struggle to feed herself sometimes in hilarious ways, but that is a reality of grief that we’ve understood forever; it is an ancient reality that the body will not always take care of itself well under the pressure of catastrophic loss. The need to be fed will be there though, and manifests in awkward ways for Coral from standing in an alley eating cheap tacos or failing to order pizza in an almost cruel but funny way.

RL: And that brings us to the humor. While the novel does deal with catastrophic loss, that’s balanced nicely with humorous moments like what you mentioned, as well as funny insights. Was the humor always there or did it come in later? 

VB: The humor was probably always there because of my natural instincts. So much of life is absurd but we take it seriously, and that is the ultimate formula for ridiculousness. During the early drafts though I wasn’t always laughing. When writing some of the harder scenes and material where I really had to remember what it was like in my own body when experiencing the shock of grief I had no awareness of the humor taking place. During the later reads and assessment stages did I see some really wild things happening. I thought I must be insane or this is just hilarious or both. I’m fine with that too. I’ve also read some pieces to different audiences at this point and found that the audience laughs at times I didn’t think were funny, but my delivery is also part of the experience. It has been a ride going from a private idea of the story to its public presentation. 

RL: Can you tell me more about that ride?

VB: Well, this book is the first one I’ve ever written on contract where I sold it as an idea instead of a completed project, which I did for the first two story collections. So, I had expectations I’ve never had before and a commitment to a single story that I’ve never had to have before. I usually write whatever is troubling me and I either finish it or I don’t and I publish it or I don’t. This time I had to follow through with the concept and I had a lot of eyes and minds waiting on the other side. The editing process was great and super easy. I’ve been lucky to have such a solid relationship with my editor Jackson Howard. He’s young and brilliant. A lot of the emotional “ride” has been with myself in the process, self-imposed pressure. I don’t know if I’ll ever do another book under these circumstances where the manuscript doesn’t exist before I sell it. Who knows.

RL: So did this novel originate with something troubling you?

VB: Every story I write originates with something troubling me, and I encourage everyone short on content to do the same. I won’t attempt to put anything on a page unless it is material that is sacred to me, nags at my heart and brain for any number of reasons. I like to say that all stories are grief stories these days. They’re also love stories too. Having experienced significant personal loss at various states of my life, I was able to tap into those experiences to understand the emotional core of the novel, that nameless shaking place of trauma, the sudden emptying out of expectations and possibilities. The novel started with the sense of grief and loss of possibilities that I’ve had with family and circumstances then cascaded out into wider observations of our civilization.

RL: I loved those wider observations of our civilization. Like the part about human evolution and the commodification of Later, and how that both came from More and had to be filled by it. This kind of commentary adds a fascinating layer to the exploration of loss. Grief can make our world feel so small, but these wider observations offer a backdrop, or context, to the physical space we’re in as we’re grieving. Was that your intent as the novel cascaded out? Or was it one of those happy accidents that come from following the novel where it wants to go?

VB: I didn’t always know what kinds of concepts I would use from moment to moment while writing, but I knew the voice and the psyche of the novel needed to look far away from the current moment of crisis. That was in a way an act of self-preservation for the character because the crisis was unbearable if it existed alone in a bubble of time, but as one bead on a long chain of events no given tragedy seems so daunting. That’s how my mind works at least. That sense of organization is anxiety reducing though I can imagine for some it could be overwhelming and have the opposite effect. It was important for me to allow the voice, which was acting as a filter for Coral’s own mind, to travel to places where we have everything figured out, where we can quantify our madness, greed, vanity, curiosity, devotion and all the rest then neatly put them away into files. That way the worst sudden explosion of horror seems like less of a catastrophe. Even though we have to get close and feel our pain eventually, I wanted to acknowledge how for a moment that we can lean back, way back. From far away our nightmares can be funny or pretty or almost nothing at all.  

The post Venita Blackburn Thinks You Should Turn Your Troubles Into Stories appeared first on Electric Literature.

After Shiva enrolls in a graduate degree in Jewish folklore, she uses her research to go to Ropshitz, a village in Poland where her family came from. There, she hopes to learn more about the generations of women before her and uncover secrets about who her mysterious and enigmatic grandmother really was. City of Laughter investigates the constellations of family and folklore, and pushes the boundary on the form of storytelling itself.

I spoke with Temim in person about all the elements of her sprawling multigenerational debut novel.

Olivia Cheng: So much of this novel is about mothers and daughters, Mira and Hannah and Shiva, and female desire. Where did this story originate from and were these always the themes you were interested in?

Temim Fruchter: I played in a band for a number of years, and we went on tour and we went to Warsaw, which I immediately fell in love with. I knew that my great grandmother was from this place called Ropshitz and that it was not too far from Warsaw. We had a van so we drove there. And I stood there and it was like the trope is you go to the place your ancestors are from and you’re supposed to feel something. And so on one hand, I really did. There’s no more town there in the same way there’s no more Jewish village there, but I definitely felt this very charged presence. Or am I just projecting that and making that up, and I’m just standing on some ground? And I was like, maybe it’s sort of both. Maybe it’s like if I insist there’s something here then there’s something here. And so I just started to really think about that. What does it mean to go back to a place that you’re sort of from? And what does it mean when what you find there is kind of inconclusive? So that was one thing.

The other thing is that my grandmother on my mother’s side was a very private, interesting, curious woman. I loved her, I was close with her, but I didn’t always know her very well. And there are these pictures of her from when she was young, and she looked just stunning. She looked like this starlet with these beautiful lips and a leopard-print shrug or something. It wasn’t until later in my life when I was out as queer and often presenting and expressing as a femme gender identity that I started to be like, wow, she kind of reminds me of myself. Or like this sort of aesthetic and way of moving through the world. This femme mischief that I aspire to. Which isn’t to say that I suddenly decided my grandmother is queer. That’s not the point at all. But what I started thinking about was even if she had been or even if any of my ancestors had been, it’s very likely I would never know. Because so many queer ancestries are kept secret and are erased, and we don’t necessarily know of them. And so I think that this book was my way into reaching back into that unknowability of my queer ancestry and my own Jewish ancestry and just experimenting and playing.

OC: Let’s talk about the messenger because they’re basically an omniscient POV. Can you tell me more about your choice to include them in certain critical sections, like when Shiva is about to go to Poland?

TF: When I started getting deeper into writing this book that was about Jewish folklore, I started to think of the novel itself as a folktale. Like a sort of massive, sprawling folktale. Often in a folktale, there’s a storyteller. There’s someone who carries the story and I already mentioned that I was thinking about this imaginary box of letters, so everything kept coming back to this idea of a courier, a messenger. Funnily enough, and I don’t know why, but I’ve had a lifelong fixation with the archangel Gabriel who is also known as the messenger. And also for no reason I can explain, I’ve always thought of the angel Gabriel as nonbinary. I don’t know why. This is why I’m a fiction writer, because maybe I’m making it up.

So I started to play with this idea of a nonbinary messenger whose role is to carry the story, but also kind of make some mischief, but also make meaningful interventions, and carry something from generation to generation that refuses to be tamped down. And so I began to include that character and realized that I want to tell this story almost as though there’s this omniscience that you don’t see, but periodically, I wanted to bring the messenger into view. And especially when I got interested in The Dybbuk and the writer of the play The Dybbuk, S Ansky, who also appears in the book. I didn’t even know that there was a character in that story called the messenger, who also signals that there is something otherworldly going on. It felt really fitting that this messenger character really signaled that even though a lot of what happens in this book is really grounded in “reality,” I wanted to signal the books’ insistence that there is something a little outside of the world we know, especially in a folktale and especially in this story.

OC: With this omniscient POV, there’s this ever-present sense of destiny. How much did your personal worldview about coincidences and destiny come into the major themes of this book?

TF: One way I’ve been thinking about coincidence in this book is that I wanted this story to be a space where if you think it might mean something, it probably means something. Where theorems of wonder get proven true. Where synchronicities are real. I remember reading an interview between Alexander Chee and Jordy Rosenberg, and it was about queer fiction. I remember Alexander Chee talking about coincidence and how sometimes things seem too wild to be true and that coincidence in fiction is often considered to be in poor taste. But queerness is also considered sometimes to be in poor taste. I don’t want to misrepresent it, but I remember reading this piece and thinking “This is it, exactly.” It’s sort of gauche to write things that work out just so perfectly and are synchronous.

But I love both a queer and a folkloric space where it’s not necessarily that everything is predetermined, but it’s that there are all of these opportunities to connect to a story that brings a lot of things together. And I think that’s what is so rich about so much of contemporary storytelling and folklore that things come together in these beautiful and surprising ways and that’s what’s so moving about so many of the books I love. It’s not like a gotcha, everything’s connected. But it’s like everything is pretty connected and so I wanted to lean into that feeling. And I believe that some things are messy and don’t align and don’t work out and aren’t meant to be and don’t happen for a reason. But I also believe that synchronicities are everywhere and echoes are everywhere and that for me at least, a worldview that encompasses queer possibility or the sort of Jewish mystic outlook I was raised with. Those things feel more possible to play with especially in fiction.

OC: How much do you think this sense of destiny is associated with Jewish folklore?

TF: A lot! The short answer is a lot. I think the thing about folklore is that like fairytales, things are flatter in a folktale. There are archetypes and journeys that end in certain places and things that you know happen from the start. But the story is so engaging that you’re thinking how is this going to happen or one of two things is going to happen: the bad thing or the good thing. But I grew up quite religious in an Orthodox Jewish household. I still consider myself a religious person. I think a lot of the magic in this book and from this worldview comes from that. Just the sense that there’s plenty out there that humans either can’t see or just kind of can’t fully see and there are bigger forces at work. In that sense, I think both the storytelling tradition of Jewish folklore and also the Torah, the sort of stories I grew up hearing, where a literal God would move things around and say, “This is what’s going to happen.” That’s not what’s happening in this book, but it gave me permission to be a little over-the-top with that stuff. I’m going to arrange things so that even though these characters are trying to run from something, they’re going to ultimately going to be drawn back to it. What happens when you have agency, but you’re still drawn to something so strongly? I wanted both of those things in there.

OC: The prologue read like a folktale.

TF: One of my favorite parts of the book. It was really fun to write in the messenger’s voice and write in this archaic, wise, slightly wily character who’s carrying cargo across time and space. It really was enjoyable to use a prologue and epilogue, which is archaic, or maybe not archaic, maybe older-fashioned elements of telling a story. I was playing with that tradition or not even playing with it, leaning into it. If this novel is a folktale, we need the storyteller to come on stage and introduce themselves and exit. We need the contemporary story to be held in the much broader, expansive frame of this generational story that’s being told. And if there’s a prologue, I have to have an epilogue.

OC: Given that there are so many different elements of this book, what did research for this look like? How did you get started?

TF: I am a really bad and disorganized researcher, so I will start by saying that. I always knew this book was going to be rooted in Jewish folklore, but S Ansky actually didn’t come up until much later as I was working with the character of Shiva. And she was so curious about where she came from and why she felt the way she did. And it was really kind of meta, because I knew about The Dybbuk and I even know a little about S Ansky’s ethnographic study, but most of what I knew was this thing I had been fixated on a long time, which was that he wrote all of these questions that were very leading and that he never got to actually administer the questionnaire, because of World War I. So all these questions just tell a story. They exist out there. I have the translated version of them and they’re just questions. And then I started reading more about him and he was this really interesting, restless, shapeshifting, political person. Some people even posited that he might have been queer. I got really excited by him, so I was like, I’m going to follow this guy and my character is going to follow this guy.

Research-wise, it was in some ways not a deeply researched book, honestly. For example, the Jewish shtetl of Ropshitz, there’s really not very much that I can find about it. So a lot of the stories that I’m writing about Ropshitz while they’re rooted in some oral accounts I’ve read about and from people who lived there in translation, a lot of it is imaginary. I wanted to be very careful, because when you’re making things up about a place that your ancestors are from and that has been destroyed, you don’t want to be callous about that, but I also wanted to lean into this tradition of laughter that I felt came from there and bring it to life in my own imagination. That part comes less from research and more from just trying to sit with what I felt like I had learned about that place from stories and from just knowing my great grandmother for the time that I did.

Definitely did a good bit of research about Warsaw. I spent time in Warsaw, but not very much. A total of a month and a half there, so I did some research about being in Warsaw, you know, using Google Earth to walk the streets there and talk to people I know who lived there. And of course S Ansky was a big point of research for me. Other than that, I think part of why I call this book a speculative queer history of my family is a lot of these questions that I was asking couldn’t be answered by research. And the questions were more interested in what story I could tell from the bare facts that I knew and what leaps I could take from there.

OC: Who were you rebelling against?

TF: One of the fundamental parts of this book is that I wanted to play with the idea of queer determinism, or not quite determinism, but there is something that refuses to die. Squish it down or tamp it down, but this queer impulse keeps coming up generation after generation. And it’s not that I believe there should be some type of queer determinism, but we live in a world where there is heteronormative determinism of a kind. Generation from generation and we make babies and things go a certain way. I wanted this to be a certain overcorrection to that. Try as you may to escape it, we’re all queer.

OC: What are you excited for in Jewish and/or queer media?

TF: There’s so much already. It’s a golden era of queer television and queer storytelling and I’m extremely excited by that. Not to sound like a weird old person. It’s like we’ve seen the final invasion, but then we see something new and exciting. I’m moved by the growing movement of anti-Zionist Jews and I’m moved by Jewish art that is diasporic in nature. I think we will see more and more Jewish art that emphasizes diasporic community and solidarity with Palestine and just mutual aid.

The post Temim Fruchter on Writing a Queer Jewish Novel Based on Folklore appeared first on Electric Literature.

One-part memoir, one-part narrative nonfiction, one-part historical investigation, The Fruit Cure takes readers on a journey through the sometimes-sinister past—and controversial present—of extreme wellness communities on the Internet. With the deft of an investigative journalist, the nuance of a historical and cultural critic, and the craft of a memoirist, Alnes subjects herself to the same rigor of inquiry as the wellness gurus and devout followers she researches, asking difficult questions about responsibility, narrative, and power. Resisting a convenient slide into the very dichotomies of good and bad, ill and healed, that she unearths in these spaces, the result is a read that is empathic and tender, at times darkly humorous, and ultimately deeply inhabitable for anyone who has lived in a body and grappled with the impossibility of its control.

Jacqueline Alnes, an assistant professor of English at West Chester University, whose work has been published in The New York Times and Guernica, joined me on Zoom to discuss the moralization of food, parasocial relationships, ableism, running, and the challenge—and freedom—of writing an illness narrative that rejects inherited myths about healing and cures.

Alexandra Middleton: You write openly in The Fruit Cure about the challenge of reliving memories of your neurological illness when memory itself was elusive. What was it like for you to revisit these memories through writing this book? 

Jacqueline Alnes: Feeling like I could write about this was an interesting conversation I had with myself. I don’t have a memory of it like you would traditionally a memory. For the sake of my own self-preservation, I tried to pretend a lot of it didn’t happen. Which is part of the crux of the book: if you do that, you harm yourself because you haven’t addressed the thing that actually hurts you. Writing was a step of owning the story, saying, “Yes, this did happen to me,” then asking “What does that mean about how I feel about myself? About my body? About the way I feel I can let other people care or not care for me?” The book is an act of vulnerability, saying, “Here’s the story I haven’t told to myself for so many years.” It’s been sometimes difficult, sometimes joyful, sometimes terrifying. 

AM: A chapter in the book shares the same title as your Ph.D. dissertation, which engaged literature on illness narratives, disability studies, and women in pain: Well Developed Female in No Acute Distress. How did your PhD research inform what ultimately became The Fruit Cure?

JA: Part of it was a resistance to illness narratives. Not all of them; I don’t want to say something click-baity like “she hates illness narratives!” But many felt like the person was okay on the other side. I remember reading and feeling, “Wait. Am I not okay then? Have I just not been able to get over it?” Because it had been ten years since I was seriously ill and I still hadn’t fully left the ghost of that illness behind. The publishing industry, historically or culturally, has valued narratives where the person is an inspiration at the end. I resisted that and thought, how could I write a narrative about not being fully healed or on the other side with your feet firmly planted in able-bodiedness again? Can you still find joy and meaning, and acknowledge a sadness or grief or a ghost in your life? That was a narrative I wanted to read, and that I hope I wrote. Some of the scholarship I read during my PhD made it in because I couldn’t have written The Fruit Cure without thinking about the way we all are harmed by narratives given to us about what it means to have disability and what it means to be able-bodied. 

AM: Definitely. I think many people will identify with your story about the frustrations and grief of falling through diagnostic cracks in a healthcare system that’s not always equipped to address complex illness, not always patient-centered, not always oriented to lived experience. You deliver a critique of vigilante self-care and unregulated alternative treatments under the banner of wellness that step in to fill these gaps. And yet there’s also a sense of meaning, validation, and agency people seem to locate in these alternative spaces that’s not entirely recuperable in the traditional medical system. Can you elaborate on the rift between wider systemic issues in U.S. healthcare and the allure of wellness culture?

JA: You hit on what honestly was one of the hardest things to write about in the book. I in no way want to say either is good or bad. Thinking about how many people are failed on a regular basis by U.S. health care systems, it feels totally valid that someone would click on a link to fast for 30 days to cure their diabetes, which I react viscerally to on surface level. But on a human desperation, I want to feel well and these systems are failing me, charging me thousands of dollars a month for very little care, level? 100% get it.

Writing into it, I was trying to advocate for people to know their bodies best. Alternative healing sometimes offers that sense of agency where if you know your body well and someone else is saying, “Yes, I believe you,” there’s real power to that. There is power in the narratives you have about your own body and the narratives someone else can give you about your body. If you’re being told you’re a puzzle or a mystery, or that your pain is not real or valid, that affects you. My main critique is of people who don’t realize their own influence and power in those spaces. And when people are being harmed and speaking up, there is an alarming lack of self-reflection in some people, when you have the well-being of another person in your hands. 

AM: Yeah, absolutely. And it happens in both those worlds, too. 

JA: Right. That’s what’s hard. I totally get why people wouldn’t believe in Big Pharma. I mean, it’s, horrendous. “We’re making profit from your illness.” I also see the lack of trust of, “take this weird powder and you’ll heal everything.” Both ends are so fraught with potential missteps or ways you could be influenced in a harmful direction that doesn’t help you heal yourself. 

AM: And perhaps accumulates other things to heal along the way. In the absence of a clear path of medical treatment, you took your healing into your own hands through two means primarily: food and running. I want to focus first on food. The connections you drew between the high-carb raw vegan movement and religious ideologies fascinated me. What makes food such a compelling battleground for moral reckoning, personally and collectively?

JA: On a personal level, it came from a desire to want to be good. I no longer had external measures of grades, miles splits. I felt like if I ate these foods, I would be like they told me on the internet: a clean, bike-riding, beautiful acne-free person. In some ways they just condensed all the world’s rhetoric and gave it to me. We hear it all the time: this yogurt is “not sinful” or this is a “guilt-free” snack, or in a workout class someone’s telling you summer is coming. We’ve moved a bit past that, but I think it’s just coded differently so we don’t hear things we know were problematic in the early 2000s. My focus is on women, because a lot of the people I interviewed and who participated in the fruit diet were younger women searching for the “perfect body” and I think there’s something in that in terms of what spaces people feel like they can control. Food is available to all of us as a form of exercising control and partitioning what we do or don’t do, sometimes in harmful ways. 

AM: The historical dimensions of your research really contextualized “how did we get here?” especially as you address the whiteness of the vegan influencing world and the racist, white supremacist origins of thinness, implicitly embedded in ideals of able-bodiedness. Did anything surprise you when you delved into this history? 

JA: So much surprised me and wasn’t all so surprising at the same time. Sabrina String’s book, Fearing the Black Body, really helped me in thinking about racism and whiteness. She wrote about Lady Mary Wortley, and the idea that white women wanted to be thin to separate themselves from black women at the time. It was horrifying to read and to see the ways that framing was echoed in the following texts. I remember reading the Arnold Ehret section about how women could be more Madonna-like if they lost their periods just eating fruit. That was something he celebrated. Now we would frame that as disordered eating, amenorrhea, we need to get you restored and back to health. And he viewed it as being even more pure and holy. Those didn’t just become abstract moral concepts; they had direct impacts, again, mostly on women’s bodies. He’s not talking about men abstaining to the point of gauntness; he’s saying this is what women should do. That became fascinating in a really horrifying way, thinking about how long women especially had been hearing these messages about keeping yourself pure, not only sexually, but also religiously, morally. 

AM: I want to talk to you about influencers. I’m thinking about the double entendre of the word “follower,” in context of the relationship you point out between religiosity, morality, and extreme online food communities. Can you say more about the intersection of parasocial relationships, authority, and health in an age where so many of us are seeking answers online?

JA: There are beautiful things about social media. We get insights into each other’s lives; it’s a form of intimacy and comes from a place of curiosity. But there’s a dark side to it too. Once there’s a setup of “this is what I do, and you should also do it,” that person has a responsibility to know their rhetoric has a direct impact on another’s health, physical or mental, or perceived relationship with food. When does that responsibility begin and when does it end? Is there a way to be an influencer responsibly online, around food? As the dieticians I interviewed said, it’s not very sexy or clickbait to say “Everybody’s different, we have to figure it out with you.” It’s way more fun and engaging to say, “I have the answer. Come on, let’s go.” Our social media platforms privilege our attention to wanting easy answers rather than puzzling out all the different factors that make us who we are and make us eat as we do.

AM: You reached out to Freelee and Durianrider, the influencers behind the fruitarian community you followed, for an interview, which never materialized. So you drew upon their public profiles and content in the book, making clear you weren’t mistaking these mediations for intimacy or interiority. If you could ask them one question, what would it be?

JA: I want to know how they really feel about fruit. I have this hunch that they really, truly, did believe in fruit when they first started this diet. Are they still seeking these ideals of purity, even though they’ve changed the name of the game? Do they feel like social media has kept them beholden to these figures they’ve created for themselves online? Does it matter in the end that I don’t know who you are? In our age of social media, who you are online is a part of you. And that persona is what you’re choosing to give to me as a viewer. What am I to do with that? I guess that was ten questions for them. I hope I treated them with empathy and care because as people, I do care about them and want their perspectives and nuance to be heard. 

AM: You write about the seduction—but ultimate emptiness and sometimes danger—of dichotomies such as “good and bad” and “sick and well.” Do you think of healing and cure as existing in dichotomies of any sort? What does living outside those dichotomies look like for you today? 

JA: Some of the stuntedness of my healing came from the perception that you were either sick or you were well. I did not believe there was a gray area. Culturally, ideas of cures as a quick fix can be so harmful for that reason. It’s why we reach for them. Someone asked me recently, what ended up being the cure for you? And I said, mess, the greatest mess. Therapy and nutrition and seeing doctors who started listening to me and sitting with my own discomfort and thinking about the narratives about disability I had believed and undoing them and figuring out what stories about my body were mine, and which had come from other people, and what that meant. I love now thinking about healing and cures as nuanced, as spectrums, as being in the gray. That’s been the most honest way to find hope in my body again. 

AM: That feels so real, hopeful, palpable. Expecting ourselves to remain in one state feels so overwhelming to uphold. But if healing can be a state of flux, a state that includes what maybe we wouldn’t consider “fully healed”? That sounds so much more possible. 

JA: That’s so true.

AM: I’m curious how running figures into the matrix of healing in The Fruit Cure. There’s clearly so much passion and self-expression; running is this life force channeling through you, a reason to heal. And yet I noticed parallels with how you wrote about fruit: devotion, salvation, hunger, obsession, self-discipline. Many of us who run have some relationship with that paradox, I certainly do. Can you discuss this paradox and the evolution of your relationship with running? 

JA: A lot of messaging I received as a young runner, and I blame the system all my coaches came up in rather than any one coach, was “the less you acknowledge your body, the better.” From a formative age, I tied this dismissal of body with accomplishment in sport. When I got sick, my first instinct was to ignore my symptoms and try to keep running because that’s what my coach told me to do. My second impulse after I quit the team was to be angry at my body that I could run, which turned to: how can I punish myself through this thing I used to love? 

I didn’t reckon with the ways I was using running as a weapon and as a salve until my PhD years, almost a decade after I’d first been sick. I was chasing this version of myself I thought existed: the girl who was the inspirational end to an illness narrative. She was the fastest, strongest, never had a symptom, ignored pain. I wanted to be her so badly because I thought she did exist out there. It took finally realizing I was chasing this illusion of myself to realize I could give her up and just live in my own body and explore what that meant. I’m not going to say it was easy, but I have come to a place where if I’m not having fun, I don’t do it. I still compete, I have fun chasing goals because that’s an impulse we all share as distance runners: to keep testing your own limits. But I do it now from a safe loved place rather than from a place of fear or shame or wanting something I don’t have. 

AM: I love how the resolution of the illness narrative melds with this archetype of the invincible runner, to link back to how we began. You’ve defined your own, Jacqueline-runner now, that is a rejection of that narrative, and maybe because of that finds joy in the sport. That’s powerful for runners to read, because for many of us, if you’re in this sport long enough, it either will consume you at some point or you’ll have to reckon with these parts of yourself that are searching for something. 

JA: Right? That joy allowed me to be in community again. I run with people four times a week now. I care about them and they care about me. That has been really healing in terms of my experiences on the team, this heartbreak I hadn’t been able to address. 

AM: Reading The Fruit Cure I thought how much of a resource this book would have been for a college age Jacqueline, but also college age Allie. And for anyone living with complex illness or without a diagnosis, in the throes of complicated relationship with food, disordered eating, exercise, control, and/or under the influence of the Internet. To any of these readers: what do you hope this book will offer? 

JA: I used to feel so lonely with those feelings. But looking at history made me realize, no. There was a woman in South Africa in the 1960s, Essie Honiball, feeling the same way, due to similar cultural forces I am facing that are now just on Instagram, rather than in some pamphlet or from some pseudoscience doctor in a back room of a house. It made me feel if I understand narratives perpetuated for centuries, from biblical times, about epilepsy or neurological issues or bodies being out of control, then I can start to ask, which ones do I want to accept and which ones do I want to reject? That is true form of power. Rather than reaching for illusions of power through: “How thin can I be? How fast can I run? What kind of foods am I eating?” My hope is that people realize they’re genuinely not alone. All of us in some way are impacted by these things, even if we’re not chronically ill, even if we don’t have disordered relationships with food. We’re all shaped by the stories told to us. 

The post Writing an Illness Story that Rejects the Inspirational Healing Narrative appeared first on Electric Literature.

In this book version, she includes her words, the “letters” from other well-known writers, as well as occasional “notes” that include suggestions displayed on an image of a spiral notebook page. There is a progression based on seasons, but the anthology is also what I think of as a writing table book, something to leave on your desk so that you can flip it open to find a burst of inspiration. 

Because 1000 Words includes Attenberg’s thoughts as well as the words of other successful authors from Alexander Chee to Mira Jacob and Elizabeth McCracken, it creates a sense of community—we’re all in this together trying to figure it out. Attenberg’s approach isn’t focused on prompts but instead employs a much more conversational style, discussing issues that her readers will confront as writers. Not only does she provide helpful insights, but she herself is a model to follow. Attenberg is a highly productive writer who has published six novels, a short story collection, essays, as well as a memoir, so who better to motivate other writers? In addition to the release of this book, her next novel, A Reason to See You Again, will be published later in the year.

Jami Attenberg and I recently spoke on Zoom about writing motivation, social media, and bringing people together.

Abby Manzella: I’ve been watching #1000wordsofsummer grow since I signed up in 2019, and I’m continually impressed with what you’ve been able to build both through social media and now with this book. For me, it was fun to read the book from start to finish to see the connections you were making between ideas, but there were points where I had to stop reading to write because what you were sharing was getting me to jot down ideas that wouldn’t wait. I know that the project began as some self-motivation and accountability, but what kept you going after it served that initial purpose for you?

Jami Attenberg: The first year everybody got so excited by it and really responded to it. Sometimes we just create jobs for ourselves. Sometimes we’re like, that is a thing that I could do—not a paid job, because that’s not what this is about—but it’s something where we can contribute and communicate and connect with people. It called on all the skills that I had, which is to reach out to people, be positive online, and access other people’s skills, too.

AM: Do you think that skill comes more from your article writing?

JA: I’m thinking more about the community aspect of it. I have this background where I worked as a producer for online projects. When I started out, it was like everyone else was the creative person and I managed them, managed their schedule, until I realized that I wanted to be my own creative person. I think there is something about me that has that capability of helping people make their art. That’s part of it, and I’ve been online; I’ve had a blog off and on, since the late ’90s, so talking to people online is something I feel comfortable with. 

AM: Since we’re living through an upheaval with social media, are you now thinking about engaging in those spaces differently?

JA: I’m finding that newsletters are actually an ok place to be. It was funny because it really started on Twitter—and a little bit on Instagram—but mainly on Twitter where the hashtag started. It was easier to find each other [then]. Everybody was still on it. Now people have gone to different places, but in terms of the literary world, it was a place. You’d have your morning coffee, get together, and chitchat, and then people would go about their day. Maybe they’d check in here or there. So, for me tweeting in the morning one day it sounded like a good idea, everyone chimed in. Now I feel like you can’t find people anymore. 

When I send out the newsletter people read it. It used to be that I had to post it on Twitter and then people would know about it and things could go viral in that way. I don’t want to say I don’t need other forms of social media because I’ll take whatever I can get; I have a book coming out. [Still, the newsletter] is pretty consistently read. I mean it’s not 100% read, but it’s like 50% or 60%. That’s a lot for almost 35,000 people signed up for it—consistently every week. Is that a brag? 

AM: No, it’s great. It makes me smile.

JA: It’s really nice.

AM: I was wondering at what point you figured out that 1000 Words was a book project? When did you decide you had to take it beyond the social media space and put it all together?

JA: It was a year ago summer, after I finished that round of #1000wordsofsummer, which would have been year five, and it felt big. We raised all this money for charity, and you could see the people on the Slack were doing it all times of day, meaning all over the world there was somebody who was writing and posting their word count. You could see people showing up, which was really cool, and I was like, is it a book? And then I thought, if it is a book, I need to figure it out now rather than later because if I write this book, I know I will have to keep doing #1000wordsofsummer for a while, so I was like, well let me think about it.

What happened was that I took all of the letters that had ever been written, I put them in by contributing authors, and I put them in a document. I needed to just read them all to see if something came out of this. I felt this surge of energy from it—not to be hippy dippy about it—but for real. Oh shit, there’s a lot going on here. All of these people have written books. All of these people have been through it, and they’re all telling me I can do it, and also they’re telling me that sometimes it’s hard to do it, and also that sometimes they feel like they can’t do it, but they have faith. There’s this incredible wave of energy that came off it, and I was like, man, I need to put these all in one place because it’s different reading them online than it would be reading it from cover to cover. But I thought, still, is it a book? I don’t want this to just be an anthology of these letters because I don’t think that’s enough. I felt like my voice needed to be a part of it, too. 

Those letters told me how to write the book because they weren’t all about the season of summer being wildly generative, because I could see all the struggles they had or different parts of their processes, and I knew what my different parts were too. Then I just thought it’s like all the seasons, and once that framework came into play, I was like, I think this would be a book. This would be worth my time; it would be worth the time of the people who would read it. You don’t want to just write something because you can. You want to write something because it really serves a purpose; it’s going to help people. 

AM: I think it’s interesting that you started with other people’s words instead of starting with the stuff that you had written first—that their words were the thing that made the project make sense to you. 

JA: Because I know how repetitive I am. I know what these letters are. Some weeks I’m like this feels fresh and brand new. Sometimes I’m hitting the same note again. I’m writing about revision again. I’m writing about how do you find the strength to finish a book again. But people reading it give it a different context. I could write about how to fine-tune and edit something and you could read it right now, but you’re just at the beginning of your project and it means absolutely nothing to you. Then, a year later, you’re revising and I write the same kind of thing and you’re like, it means something to me now. Anyway, I realized I had more to say about those other [aspects of the writing process].

AM: The blending of your thoughts with the other writers works well. The one letter that’s in my head right now is the piece by Kiese Laymon where he really took that call of the letter approach very seriously, so you feel both the publicness but also the intimacy that’s in that space. 

The other thing that piece reminded me of was the strange question of when to acknowledge COVID on the page. What are your thoughts on this issue because, while so much of the initial writing overlapped with COVID, it will now be in an anthology that will hopefully last long after this moment?

JA: I think we want to honor that because it’s like a time capsule. There were plenty that I didn’t include, but the ones that I did were really potent and still really make me think about it. The real point is that this dynamic of something bad happening in the world isn’t going away. There are always these dramatic dynamics that are impacting our attention spans, our souls, our lives, and our schedules. Figuring out where to put all that and manage all of that and still have the time and headspace for writing is why I thought it was important to include that part of the conversation. There’s always a reason not to write, unfortunately.

AM: As someone who happily has spent time in New York and now in Missouri, I was wondering about your transplanting to New Orleans from New York and how that has related to your creativity. How has that changed you?

JA: I’m glad I had my time in New York, too. I’m probably going to write about it. I don’t think I’ve talked about it in an interview yet. I don’t think I would have started this [project] in New York. I think I had to move to New Orleans to start something like this. I think that my relationship with the idea of community intensified when I moved to New Orleans, and I had a little bit more time on my hands, and life is easier here than it is in a big city like that, and so I kind of evolved into the person who could create this thing.  There’s something about this city being so much about community that opened me more up to it, but that said, I used to have a reading series in New York on the roof of my house. As Emily Flake said to me, that was the beginning of #1000wordsofsummer, you just didn’t really know it yet. 

I’ve always enjoyed bringing people together and watching what will happen. I really enjoy that dynamic. Writing is so cool, and writers are weirdos; they’re wonderful and they’re my people. It’s just very fun to make things happen. I talked to someone today who started a book during #1000wordsofsummer, and he just sold it. It was really validating for me. People who I don’t even know thank me in the acknowledgements of their books, which is totally wild. It’s so cool. 

AM: To conclude, what is the future of 1000 Words? One of the things I’m seeing from your tour schedule is your plan for write-alongs. Do you have anything to say about what that’s going to look like for the future? 

JA: One of the reasons why I started doing the newsletter year-round was because I felt like I had all this information that I wanted to share, and I’d seen so much good stuff come out of #1000wordsofsummer that I felt like I wanted to give it to people for free. Because I don’t have an MFA, there was a time when I felt like [the literary world] was only accessible to those people. The goal is to create events that are accessible to people where they can feel comfortable. 

I think the write-alongs are going to be me talking really briefly about the project, a writing prompt, and then maybe us all hanging out together. I don’t know, but I feel really positive about it. It can be whatever makes sense. It can helpful. It has to be accessible. I want to create something that invites people in as opposed to keeping people out. 

AM: Whatever it becomes, I look forward to see it, and I know that such interactive space is what people are certainly craving.

JA: My greatest wish for this book is that it will sell for a long time, and it will be meaningful for people. It doesn’t have to be a bestseller; I just want people to love it and get something out of it. That’s the most you can hope for. 

I’m excited for people to read it. It’s a simple motivational book. It has a lot of smart people and that’s what’s exciting for me.

The post Building a Writing Community On and Off the Internet appeared first on Electric Literature.

They are potent calls both inward and outward, weaving between the many textures of pleasure and rage. Brookins cruises through a range of registers, speaking directly and lyrically about harm and resistance. Everything is fair game: Will Smith’s slapping of Chris Rock, revelations about being read as male, an imagined Black future with comfort, care, and ease. 

This book is a container for the multitudinous sides of a complex voice, bringing the reader into a home where a Black trans poet’s self, along with their legacies and visions of the future, is able to unfurl. 

Joss Lake: What are the essential components of building a “freedom house” in your work and in the world?

 KB Brookins: A lot of the poems are about my personal journeys with things like masculinity. And transitioning is really important to me to be like an invisible trans person right now, because nationwide we’re a lot of places. 44 out of 50 states have at least one piece of legislation that they’re totally advanced this year that is anti-trans in nature. So it’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of people being fearful of what they don’t actually understand. I talk a lot about my personal experience as a Black trans person living in Texas, living in the United States, North America in general, and being trans, and what that feels like right now and how because we live in such a place that really discourages people from being who they are.

So it starts personal: Who are you and how much of you is influenced by what you’ve been told versus who you actually are? And then I think it’s interpersonal, like how we treat each other. You have to [think about that] before you can say “abolish the police”, for example. You actually have to be practicing that principle in your everyday life, like how you treat yourself and also how you treat others. And how do you get through things like conflict; how do you show up in romantic or physical encounters. Those are questions that I was thinking through and writing through in the book. 

And then, of course, there are the circumstances in which we live in on a national and global scale that are unnatural. It is unnatural for the climate to be changing at the rate that it is changing. And whether you live or die every day comes down to your race. It’s very unnatural for people to be so invested in things that at the end of the day don’t bother anybody, like someone being trans, like someone being queer. And it’s also just unnatural to have police and militant people who carry guns around. And it’s unnatural to have the law dictate things like putting the Ten Commandments up on every school in a state, which is an actual piece of legislation that’s trying to be passed in my state. I want to talk about these things very clearly, and I find poetry to be the best medium in which I can talk about them. Because poetry makes space for audaciousness and makes space for exploring things, maybe, in a way like you and me are talking right now. So I’m using things like metaphor, I’m using things like simile, I’m using things like repetition in rhyme and even form, ripping off the form of the curriculum vitae or ripping off the form of a legal document in order to have a conversation with a reader.

JL: A really beautiful aspect of this book is that we can move through these different layers and it doesn’t feel like anything is left out. I’m curious about how you went about organizing this vast container. How did you decide on the architecture?

KB: Let’s say, a bedroom space in which you’re having more sensitive things that you may not have in an open space, like a kitchen. You walk into someone’s house and then they’ll say like, oh, you got to take your shoes off. Or like, here’s the chandelier and here’s how the kitchen is. I was using that section as an orienting space, introducing some of the themes that will be constant throughout the book. I was thinking of bedroom spaces not necessarily where the more internal dialogue poems happen, but maybe more of those [dialogues] are in the kitchen. A lot of intense intergenerational conversations happen at the kitchen table in my family. So I was really thinking: how do those rooms function in a house and how can I display that through the poems that are in those sections?

JL: I was struck how, in another interview, you were naming the trees in your neighborhood and talking about how you commune with them. How did you come to sort of know the names of the trees and plants around you? I’ve been thinking about how we’ve lost touch with our surroundings.  

KB: If I was to make my KB school, it would definitely be a class there in which you just learn about your local environment. People think that being vegan will save the world, right? But I think actually eating local, would eliminate a lot of the carbon footprint. And most people live in a place in which they can forage in their local area. It’s really important to be in tune with what is happening around you naturewise. We owe it to the things that live that are not just human, to care for and be in communion with those things. Growing up there’s an element of nature where I think a lot about: time and who has the actual time to be outside versus who doesn’t. When I was growing up, when people would be so “pro-nature,” they would always be white, right? So I would just be like, “That’s some white shit.” And then I realize—as I grow up and learn more about the environment and about the history of environmental racism—this is very ingrained in non-white folks, that nature is not for us. 

There never was a time when I was growing up where at a certain time in the year my family didn’t go and take pecans from a pecan tree. And we always had these big bags of pecans that we picked from a specific area. And also my family went to this big family reunion every year in Waco, Texas, and I saw all these different kinds of trees and the elders that lived in that area knew what those trees were.I was always given little bits of nature. 

Then I got older and people have their section of gays, right? The “artsy gays”, the “theatre gays,” and when I moved to Austin, somehow, I got enveloped into the “nature gays.” My fiancé used to be an environmental educator and one way I got oriented here was walking around the neighborhood and her being able to name every tree. I learned a lot about my local landscape from her and other people who are invested in keeping that knowledge alive. 

JL: Are there ways that you help yourself refocus on your intended audience and away from an oppressive white gaze, or is that naturally happening for you?

 KB: In the late 2010s, all of a sudden, people were paying attention to writers of color. And the things that people were gravitating towards were always about Black abjection or like some person of color talking about their trauma and the trauma of their experience of being whatever race it was that they were. And it was just interesting because the assumed audience would always be white people that didn’t understand where they were coming from. And I wonder where that impulse came from. I found myself, once I started taking myself more seriously as a writer, when I started getting critiques, it’d be like, “I don’t understand it. So you should change it.” What is this assumption that like I could be reading Walt Whitman and you love him and you don’t want him to explain things, but you want me to explain things. We’re reading Robert Frost and John Ashbery, which are not easy reads. Robert Frost is like “Great monolithic knees.” And you’re like, “I can work with that.” That doesn’t make sense. You’re cool with that and you’re cool with figuring that out in class, but you’re not cool with me, making a reference to my hometown that people who I’m actually writing this for will understand? And people don’t have to be from my hometown to understand some of these things because Google is free, right? If you really want to know, you could just Google it. And that’s what I do when I come across texts that I don’t understand,  I just Google it, right? So or use context, close textual contextual observations. We learn that in close reading, right? But there’s an expectation in which writers of color just hand-hold and write for people that are not themselves and that aren’t in their communities.

JL: Can you talk more about this impulse to include so many different textures and layers of existence. We experience this  sense of self in such a vast and almost  encyclopedic way. Can you talk about the impulse to pull everything into your work?

KB: If I’m going to address a subject matter so large and also so mulled over as freedom, I have to bring in everything, right? And if I’m going to take it from a three-pronged lens of personal, interpersonal, systemic, I have to bring in all of the things that that might include. I’m talking about race. I’m also talking about gender and sexuality, because that’s my existence, right? We can’t really escape our context. Even if I was to write like a sci-fi book, those things would still come in. And then also talking about disability and trying to develop a speaker, I’m like, okay, is it autobiographical? Is it not? That’s kind of up to you to decide, right? It had to be like a book with a very large view. And then also, that’s just how my mind works and how these large concepts like racism work—it’s permeated within the books we pick up and don’t pick up. They get made and don’t get made. And in the environment that we see or don’t see and the interactions that we can and can’t have.

It made sense to riff off of forms. When approaching things like a CV, I’m like, “Well, what if we were really honest about what that experience at that one random nonprofit that we worked at was. What if we were more serious about and honest about what it means to be  a worker or a laborer in today’s late stage capitalism and also, what are those hidden labors?” At the end of the day, our work is emotional labor and the labor of “I just found out that someone that looks exactly like me, died in another place due to police violence. And I’m still clocked in and I still have to be clocked in.” Those large things that feel small in the moment that we have to put up with in order to continue on. Because we live in such a place where you have to prove your housing or you have to earn things like water and all of the things that we actually need to live, we have to work for and like. If I want to talk about that, why wouldn’t I literally just put it in a CV, right? Mission accomplished. 

JL: You write in “T Shot # 4,” “I want the black boy in need to be a river you can’t name even if you send sounds underwater.” Can you talk about the freedom that that can be found in illegibility or if you have a different way of relating to that particular line? 

 KB: I didn’t feel tapped into what a Black boy or Black man’s experience might be until I started transitioning. For Black men and for people who are perceived as Black men like me, there is this hyper visibility. There is a large history of a weird relationship with wanting to emulate whatever that we’ve learned through colonialism. And then there’s also this hyper visibility of everyone [outside of your community] seeing you either as a fetish or a threat. 

This is the conversation on TikTok and Twitter where people are stealing from Black culture and not citing Black people, but making money based off of things like AAVE,  Black food that started in African and Black American traditions and, slang. It’s “Twitter” slang now or “Internet” slang. But no, it’s specifically AAVE and you just took it, right? And then when it really comes down to it, you know, that white rapper or that white lady singing like Drake rap lyrics doesn’t actually want the experience of Blackness. Because the experience of Blackness comes with a lot of negativity due to other people’s perceptions due to hyper visibility. I find freedom in the idea of not feeling like you’ve got to be hyperexposed all the time and having a sense of self for Black men and Black people, which is not so corroded with other people’s ideas of who you are and not so accessible for other people to steal and pathologize. That’s happened a lot. 

Science has a very fraught relationship with Black people and we see that still negatively impacting the way Black people maneuver the health care system and other spaces. At the end of the day, Black men die at very early ages compared to pretty much every other demographic in the U.S. I was thinking about how the perception of me changing has led to some very interesting scenarios, mostly where I think that me not being completely happy, completely chipper is seen as me being aggressive. And I want to aspire in this poem to feel like you can be something that you don’t have to explain or display. 

The post The Fight for Freedom Starts With How We Treat Ourselves and Others appeared first on Electric Literature.

Though named after Liontas’ widely praised essay of the same name, the memoir never falls into the easy groove of being a book centered around a single successful idea, and resists plot summary. Using interviews with their wife, an innovative collaboration with a previously incarcerated writer, research, reportage, erasure/redaction, and song lyrics, it’s the kind of book that, when one is done, you turn over in your hands asking, how did they do that? 

Though Liontas and I are friends and neighbors in West Philadelphia, we crafted this interview together in a digital format, which allowed for a pleasant and plaintive evolution of ideas, for me to respond to Liontas’ periodic parenthetical apologies—“brain a little slow”—with explanation points and my own updates that I, in a place of grief after just losing my father, was inspired to listen—playing it loud in my office as we typed back and forth to each other—to the absolute banger that is Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”  

Emma Copley Eisenberg: Annie, you are a novelist and now you are an essayist too. What is an essay to you?

Annie Liontas: I’m thinking about Alexander Chee’s quote, “A story is something you want to run away with, an essay is something you can’t run away from.” I love your question, because we don’t really know what an essay is—is it an argument, is it about perspective, is it about making meaning through reflection—but Chee’s assertion really gets at something for me. I wasn’t consciously building a collection or memoir-in-essays when I first started, but I pretty quickly realized that this work had to be nonfiction. All of the stories we have of head injury are fiction (even when they’re not), because we don’t have the cultural framework to talk about them the way we do addiction or smoking. 

We’ve known since the Egyptians and Greeks what head injury does to the body and person, but we forget what we’ve learned, or we suppress the knowledge through powerful entities like the NFL—and that means the culture hasn’t yet had the chance to masticate and process the knowledge, or change public policy. I felt that I needed to keep asking these questions, and turning the thing on all of its faces to do it any justice. I also hold onto what Annie Dillard says about how an essay is a moral exercise that involves engagement in the unknown, that it can be about civilization but at the end of the day, what matters in this is you.  

ECE: I am always telling my students the formal choices you make in an essay will inevitably be connected to what the essay is about. I also went to a talk where Rebecca Makkai said that in every project she’s done, she’s never solved a major problem by writing around it, only by bringing it to the center. How did you think about the problem of writing about head injury/TBI in the ways it “makes things fiction” or destabilizes things? 

AL: I would have done the book—and, by extension, the millions of “walking wounded,” as survivors of TBI are called—a great disservice if I had not confronted the bodily experience of injury. The condition is really one of erasure, because it’s not a visible condition, and therefore often dismissed or disbelieved by our highest medical and legal institutions. Paul Lisicky calls it getting blood onto the page, and each time I sat down to a new chapter, I asked myself: what is happening to a body in pain? How can I more precisely capture the physical? How can I, even when I’m writing about anger and Henry VIII or Abraham Lincoln and depression or Lady Gaga, or whatever, honor what people are going through and have been going through invisibly, and sometimes for years. So I think it was mostly a gut check about being honest, and direct, and grounding the abstract and the intellectual in the felt experience.

ECE: That makes a deep kind of sense that you were trying (and succeeding) to render the bodily and physical experience because there is something absent or erased at the very core of what you’re trying to say. That does make me think of the erasure essays—there’s three I believe—in which you interview your wife, as well as some of the other craft risks you take in the book—post it chapters, super short chapters, a co-written essay, research and reporting. Were these craft choices a part of your vision or responses to problems/impasses you hit with more traditional forms of narrative? Were there other craft things you tried that you ultimately discarded?

AL: Those erasure essays were a huge risk! I had to be like: “Babe, can I interview you about the worst period of our lives and then let strangers read it?” Lol. In actuality, S and I had a series of recorded conversations, and then I gave her the transcript and a sharpie and said, cross out what you don’t want published. It was an opportunity to extend conversations we were having in our private life and marriage, but also a way to honor and recognize that, while the multiple concussions was an experience I was isolated inside of, I wasn’t the only one being impacted. She was—is—too.  I thought of all the partners and family members and best friends out there similarly suffering silently, and knew that I had to get outside of my own voice and experience. And traditional form didn’t allow for that. I had to invite other voices in. So, yes, while it wasn’t my initial vision, these craft choices are seeking to offer dynamic responses to a set of fairly unanswerable questions. As you note, I do have a collaborative essay in here, one that started as a profile, and I include other testimonies as well–people I’ve met with head injuries, for instance. The work had to expand to ensure they were all heard.

ECE: I loved “Professor X,” the collaborative essay about head injury and legal reform and the implications head injuries have as predictors for future incarceration. You said this began as a profile, can you tell us more about how this essay came to be and what it was like to write collaboratively?

AL: Thanks for asking—this piece is perhaps the most important to me because of the stakes and what it’s trying to do, and the impact it seeks to make in the world. When I was researching discrepancies in the criminal justice system and our treatment of incarcerated people with TBI, I was stunned to learn that people who are in prison are seven times more likely to get a head injury before they ever step inside a cell. You imagine that number will be high, but seven times? It’s a reminder that we incarcerate sickness, as my co-author Marchell Taylor often says. I reached out to Dr. Kim Gorgens, who is doing incredible research about TBI and the prison system—her current staggering data suggests that 97% of repeat female offenders had a head injury in the last year—and Kim connected me to Marchell, a Denver businessman and former inmate-turned-advocate. I thought I was going to write this very distanced, researched profile on Marchell, but we very quickly got close. We became friends, and the process became far more organic than simple interview. We spent hours on Zoom, during which he shared his story through oration, and then I’d work the thing into written text, and we’d go back and forth. It took many months, lots of chats and texts, and eventually some kind of barrier between us fell and we were seeing each other in our suffering. Marchell’s gift is empathy, and connecting with people, and so even though I really wanted this to be about him, he pushed me to engage more deeply, and we decided this had to be a collaboration.  

ECE: That’s so beautiful and speaks to your skill as an interviewer, a curious person excited to look outwards and render what’s going on in the wider landscape of TBI as well as look inward and interrogate what’s going on in on the level of the interior, the personal. One of the essays that especially stayed with me was “Dancing in the Dark,” about your mother and her queerness and her addiction. On the surface this one isn’t as explicitly connected to the theme of TBI and invisible injury, how do you see this one fitting within the broader things you care about in this book?

AL: “Dancing in the Dark,” at its heart, is about me grappling after forty years with my mother’s addiction and queerness. She was an immigrant who was conscripted into an arranged marriage, and while I always had sympathy for her, I think I reacted the way that many children of addicts do, which is to resist the experience and even the narrative—to say, That’s not me.  What I understood—as a queer person dealing with a chronic condition and post-concussive syndrome—was how invisible her suffering had been. I had to reckon with that, and admit my own culpability in being willfully blind. Then I learned that scientists are discovering addiction and head trauma look similar in the brain. That is, damage is damage. I was floored by this. Suddenly, my mother’s experience and my own were not very far apart, and I had to ask myself what it must have been like for her to suffer unseen.  

ECE: You write, “Never marry a writer, they live two truths at once, both the story they tell and its revision.” There’s a lot in this book about lies, doubt, duplicity, and storytelling. I was lucky enough to be on a panel with you last year at AWP called “Hide and Seek.” There is a sense of duplicity and hiding and seeking in this book in the best way. Why was it so important to you to write explicitly about lies and doubt?

AL: A couple of the pieces interrogate the relationship between our public and private selves, and how we must navigate those selves in a capitalist country that demands our full and complete participation: that is, we must at all times create an illusion of wellness and vigor, even when we aren’t well, even when it’s impossible to get out of bed. I had been taught those values, too, as an immigrant from Greece. My father was a welder, my parents were illiterate grape farmers, and no matter what was going on at home—the family, the body—you had to get up and work and produce. I think this was also the kind of erasure I was resisting with essays like “Doubt, My Love,” the fiction of the perceived self that is in service of others even when it comes at great cost. We occupy those false selves even in our most intimate relationships—marriage, for instance—because the borders bleed, and after years of training it can become almost impossible to locate the authentic self. Then one day you wake up and think, Why doesn’t anybody see me?

Most people going through TBI, especially women and people of color, are not believed. Outside of the NFL and sports, we have a very limited lexicon and almost no mental image of what “concussion” means. For instance, girls who play soccer are twice as likely as boys to get head injuries, yet we rarely discuss that. The female body is more vulnerable to concussion, and to post-concussive disorder, but we don’t talk about that, either. Instead, the medical profession and culture seem to trace this back to hysteria, calling it psychosomatic, and dismissing peoples’ actual experiences.

ECE: There’s also a great deal about other kinds of art and creativity other than writing in this collection. We get Bruce Springsteen, we get dancing (a lot of dancing!!), we get your wife the architect, we get riding a bike and a list of song titles. Is there a way in which this book is about art as an enterprise or about how brain injury impacts being a maker and receiver of good art?

AL: Yes a lot of dancing!  Where I’m from, we call it “Church”! I’m drawn to all kinds of art, as I think most artists are, so even if this weren’t about brain injury, it would have been hard to keep art out of these pages, and how it gives us our humanity.  But perhaps the inclusion of the Springsteen lyrics and these other artifacts serves as a tool to further capture the experience of injury and dislocation. On my worst days, I couldn’t listen to music, or exercise, or watch TV, or read. But on the ok days, even when I knew tomorrow was probably going to suck, I could listen to “Dancing in the Dark” and take a walk and feel like some part of me was still alive. Art, even when you’re broken, can make you feel whole.

The post Annie Liontas on “Sex With a Brain Injury” appeared first on Electric Literature.

The novel opens with Marley, the wife every man wants, coaching her son’s little league team, while her husband, Waylon, hides beneath the bleachers for reasons yet unknown. The story then thrusts readers back in time, to the fateful day when Marley and her mother, Ruth, rode into town one summer afternoon and changed everything.

While the jagged edges of Marley initially seem like they might not fit into the small town of Mercury, the orbit of the Joseph family is strong enough to pull her in anyway. It soon becomes clear just how much the family was needing her when nearly every Joseph member is impacted by Marley’s sudden arrival. Spanning nine equally heart-warming and heart-breaking years, Marley and the family endure love and loss, desire and betrayal, secrets and celebrations as they try to navigate the unique demands of a family business and a working-class life.

While the story revolves around a murder mystery, after a shocking discovery is made in a local church attic, the pulse of the novel stays with the Joseph family itself. The town of Mercury, based on a real town by the same name, also acts as its own character throughout the novel. Having grown up in a similar once-industrial town in western Pennslyvania, like Burns herself, I was excited to connect and discuss her latest work.

I spoke with Amy Jo Burns over Zoom to discuss working-class family dynamics, the real cost of a family business, what legacy means for women, being the author of your own story, making peace with the past, and much more.

Sam Dilling: Mercury takes place in a small working-class industrial town in Pennsylvania and centers a dynamic family of roofers—the Joseph family. Where did the idea for this book come from and what was the experience of writing it like?

Amy Jo Burns: I come from a roofing family—my dad, my brother, my uncles, my dad’s best friend, my grandfather. I learned how to tell stories from them. They are fantastic storytellers. They’re so funny. They have a real sense of timing and surprise and how to land a punch line.

In terms of what inspired me, I had been working on a separate project for a long, long time and I had to put it aside. I really love to write about my hometown. I don’t know if you feel that way. I find it endlessly inspiring, beautiful, problematic, romantic, and haunting. All of it. So I sat down and I did a writing exercise. It was from this memory I had of being nine years old at the Little League baseball field. There was a man smoking a cigarette behind the bleachers. He said to my mom, “Please don’t tell my wife.” I always remember that. I thought it would be fun to freewrite who that person might be and what led them back there. It was interesting because as soon as I started writing, it all just tumbled out. I said he’s a roofer. He’s got this wife he really loves, but he’s not sure she loves him back anymore. Why would that be?

SD: The family orbits around the business—like it has its own center of gravity. And at times, the lines between the family and the business blur. The business acts as a proxy for the love the family shows each other. And that might sound bad—but that’s just the way of life. When you’re from a working-class family, the dynamics of work or the family business are going to influence the family itself.

AJB: It’s one of those things where I’ve left, but I don’t think that part left me. It’s a double-edged sword for me. When I think about my family, or my dad in particular, running the business like he did—never really taking vacations or days off. I see somebody who is so passionate about what he does. And so artistic, and so dedicated. I find that to be extremely beautiful that he put his unique mark on everything he did. I think that’s something my brother, my sister, and I all do in our own ways. I’m really thankful for that. I feel like that’s become an important part of who I am. But the other side of it is I don’t really know how to take breaks. I’m not very good at that at all. I hope that’s changing. When you own your own business—it’s not a job, it’s who you are. It’s kind of how I feel about being a writer. It’s why I always feel weird when I tell people it’s my job. It feels like it’s more than that and also less than that.

SD: One thing I appreciate, having also come from a working-class family and background, is the spotlight you put on the women in the story. What was important for you to showcase about these women?

AJB: Before I started writing the book, I was thinking a lot about blue-collar women. In my experience, many women who might be considered “blue collar” are women who are entrepreneurs just like their husbands. The difference is they don’t get titles, they don’t get paychecks. That’s the mindset of these women that I grew up with. They don’t even realize how hard it is because they don’t have an expectation that there could be another reality. They are the bookkeeper and they are watching the children and they’re cleaning the house and they’re cooking. These women really make the impossible possible. At least that’s what I witnessed growing up in my mom and my aunts. They don’t complain.

I wanted to show what it looks like when a woman jumps into that with two feet. I also wanted to show what it might be like when a woman says no to that, which is what Elise did. She said no to the business side, but was very entrenched in the family. These women— Ruth, Marley, Elise, Jade—they’re all in a situation where they don’t have that many choices. They’re each taking a different path. It’s not that one is better than the other, but everybody is trying to make their way. I wanted them to still have a real journey and have real pride in what they do. I wanted to talk about the women I know. Women really make it happen.

SD: When talking about family and business, the idea of legacy comes to mind. The Joseph family business very much becomes the legacy for the men in the story, and we get to see how each son feels about this being their legacy, but what about for the women? How do we define a woman’s legacy?

AJB: I think it comes through the paths they are creating for their own children. That was big for Ruth, who is the single mother. She wanted to create a world for her daughter that didn’t have so many stop signs wherever she went. I think for Marley, when she becomes a mother, she wants to teach her son how to be a good life partner. She wants to teach her daughter that she can take chances. I think that’s one piece of what legacy means is they try to give their kids some options they didn’t have.

I also think there’s something about having a legacy of when you say enough is enough. Sometimes that might end up meaning something becomes invisible. For a lot of these women, much of what they do is invisible anyway. All of these women get to a point where they say no. There’s something really powerful about a woman who says yes, and yes, and yes, and then says, “Enough is enough.” Those are quiet moments that don’t get told at Thanksgiving or Christmas. I honestly think family survival depends on that—when [women] say enough is enough. It’s kind of the opposite of the way we think of legacy, but I think it’s very powerful.

SD: Seeing that on the page is almost revolutionary considering the roles women have had to take on, and fit themselves into, for the sake of family.

AJB: One thing that was important to me was I didn’t want to make these women into cautionary tales because I feel like so often, when we are looking for a lesson, the woman becomes collateral damage. I think there is some balance between saying the right “no” at the right time and finding a voice. There’s a cascading cost that comes through generations when a woman doesn’t have a choice. It’s not just the women that it punishes. It punishes the men, too. There’s real value in a woman being able to tell her story—especially to her life partner, her spouse, her kids, and to herself. I think that’s something Marley is trying to do. She’s trying to be the author of her own story in a way that allows other people in, but she’s still the head of it. That’s something I think Elise was never able to allow herself to do. The more a woman is able to share what her life has been is a very powerful thing for the rest of the family to grapple with.

SD: Putting that into practice is a whole different beast. There is a reason so many women aren’t afforded that freedom to carve out their own place or their own story. There are so many systems in place that keep a woman stuck right where she is—that make it difficult for her to rise above her situation. Like in Mercury, when we see a young woman get pregnant and suddenly have fewer options for her own life and future.

AJB: There’s a cost that comes with leaning in. If you’re going to be an entrepreneur, and you’re going to have a career, you either gotta have a best friend or mother-in-law to help you. Or you’re gonna have to pay somebody because time and energy are finite. As much as we want to say [women] are superhuman, they’re not. We’re human. And that’s a good thing.

I am somebody that tries to do it all and then I fail at it. Anytime somebody asks me what it’s like to have this life, the first thing I say is, “Let me tell you everything that I’m not doing.” I am not cooking super creative meals, I am not scrubbing the baseboards of my house, I am not signing up to be a classroom mom. Even as I’m saying this to you, that guilt is streaking down my face. There’s something that’s ingrained in us that says we should be able to do it all. I really don’t think anyone can. I think there’s always something that pays a price. Sometimes it’s our bodies, our relationships. Maybe it is the state of my bathroom right now.

I think, at least for writers, we have to hold and guard that humanity with everything we have. And sometimes that means saying, “I’m really tired, and there’s Paw Patrol, kids.” I do think there’s something about the women that I watched growing up that didn’t expect any different because they had just never seen it. I grew up thinking, “Oh my goodness, these people are superhuman.” What you see and what the reality is are two different things.

SD: It’s interesting because men never seem to feel the need to qualify the things they’re not doing, or the things they’re not doing well. But for women, it’s like we owe the world an explanation for why we can’t magically do it all.

AJB: I would hate to have an interaction with somebody and have them leave feeling they’re missing something important because I just don’t think that’s true. You know, I’m an Enneagram Four. I don’t know if you’re into that. Fours feel like they’ve been born missing some key part of what it means to be okay in life. You’re kind of walking around looking for it. So it’s important to me, if somebody’s like, “Well, how do you do it?” I like to qualify and say, “Whatever you think I’m doing, I’m probably not.” But you’re right, men don’t do that. Men say, “Oh, yeah, I did it.”

SD: It brings me back to that idea of legacy, and even more than that, strength. How does strength look different for men and women?

AJB: When I was writing, I did think about that concept a lot. Especially since roofing is such a stereotypically macho thing to do. You have to be physically strong to be able to do this job. It’s very demanding, it’s dangerous. I think the flip side is that a lot of these characters who are very physically strong are emotionally fragile. I think that is a very authentic and very interesting paradox that exists in a lot of places.

One of the reasons I wrote the youngest brother, Shay, the way I did is that, to me, he is the picture of strength. He is somebody who doesn’t want to fit in this mold and he’s trying to be honest about it. He offers up a perspective that says, “If you do not have a sense of integrity in yourself, then what are we even doing?” He’s really wrestling with: what does it mean to be somebody who is strong? I think where he lands is it means that sometimes you’re weak. And that’s important. It’s important to let people know that you’re not perfect. He represents somebody who doesn’t fit all of these preconceived notions of what it might mean to be a roofer’s son. And yet, he is the beating heart of the book.

SD: We get a glimpse of Marley’s life two years into the future. But let’s say Marley looks back at her life 20 years from now. What does she think?

AJB: I think she is going to be glad she fought the battles that she fought. I think she’s going to look back and see that all those times where she said “no,” or she drew a line in the sand, or she left, she will see all the fruit that came from that hard choice.

Again, it’s not perfect. She apologizes for the mistakes and the things that she maybe got wrong, but there was something really healthy and life-giving in making those hard calls. I hope she feels proud of what she’s built in her business and her expertise.

There’s something really nice about being older and looking back. You can have compassion on your younger self that you didn’t have for yourself at the time.

SD: Do you look back on your own life and feel the same?

AJB: I do. I think sometimes when you’re in it, you can’t see all the pressure that you’re under. You only feel it. Then when you get older, and you look back, you think, “Oh my goodness, look at everything that young person was dealing with.” And they’re doing it. So, absolutely. You give up expecting yourself to be perfect which is a real gift.

The post The Real Cost of a Family Business appeared first on Electric Literature.

That is part of why journalist Nathan Thrall, whose earlier work with the International Crisis Group led him to write deeply researched articles on Israel-Palestine, zoomed in not just on a few characters, but one particular man: Abed Salama. In Thrall’s new book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, he paints a picture of the modern West Bank, divided by both political and concrete walls. Salama’s son was the victim of a catastrophic 2012 school bus crash that left some fifty kindergartners engulfed in flames as desperate onlookers pleaded for Israeli emergency services to rescue the children. 

Thrall weaves together the story of several lives, each broken up by physical and social lines, and living in the shadow of tragedy and Israel’s military occupation. Thrall also faced his own challenges as he began his book tour, where he faced event cancellations, as many voices critical of Israel experienced as the war began.

I talked with Thrall about life on the other side of the wall, what this tragedy represents for Palestinians, and how this book’s story illuminates larger themes of Palestinian displacement, fragmentation, and mourning.

Shane Burley: Tell me who Abed Salma is, where you encountered this story, and why you wanted to write this book?

Nathan Thrall: Before there was the story of Abed Salama, there was the story of this accident. I live two miles from the walled enclave where the students who were on the school bus lived. In my daily life, I would pass by this walled ghetto without paying it any mind. After the accident, though, I couldn’t stop thinking of the parents and children and teachers involved. Most of them are residents of Jerusalem, people who share this same city with me but live a radically different existence. A separate and unequal existence. They live on the other side of a 26-foot-tall concrete wall and face the worst consequences of an Israeli policy of deliberate neglect. The Palestinian Authority is not allowed to come into the area in which they live, and Israel basically doesn’t go in except as a policing force. The accident was the embodiment of this policy of utter neglect of more than one hundred thousand people. 

I tried to find anyone I could who was connected to the accident. Emergency service providers, doctors, social workers, parents, teachers. A family friend told me that she was distantly related to one of the parents of the kids on the bus, and that turned out to be Abed. I drove through the checkpoint, passed to the other side of the wall, and found myself in Abed’s home. He told me his story, not just about the twenty-four hours of his life where he was searching for his son, but also his personal and family history, the story of his activism in the First Intifada, of his first love, of his arrest and torture. And I realized that, through Abed, I could tell the story of Israel-Palestine.

SB: When I was reading the book, I kept thinking about this 1952 book about the Warsaw Ghetto called The Wall. That book describes the escalating trauma of living in the ghetto, but amongst the dozens of intimate character portraits there is one character the narrative all centers on: the wall that surrounds the ghetto. And I felt like in A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, the partition wall that separates the occupied West Bank from Israel is a sort of character in this story. What role does this wall play in people’s lives in the West Bank, and how is it a part of this particular story?

NT: I’m really glad to hear you say that because the wall is its own section of the book. It’s really the only section of the book that’s not centered on a particular person affected by the tragedy. That section goes into the story of an IDF Colonel, Dany Tirza, who was the wall’s chief architect. The wall had to be a central character in this story because it dictated so much of what happened on that day. It determines so much of these people’s lives. They’re surrounded entirely by walls. They have, on three sides, a 26 foot tall, concrete wall and on a fourth side a different kind of wall that runs through a segregated road, Route 4370, famously known as the “apartheid road.” 

The enclosure of what is today around 130,000 people in the town of Anata and the Shu’afat refugee camp is the central element in their lives, separating them from their schools and health care providers and higher paying jobs in Jerusalem. The wall meant that parents who wanted to send their kids to the Jerusalem schools on the other side of it had to weigh whether it was worth the risk of their children passing through a checkpoint every morning and afternoon and being confronted by Israeli security forces. Many parents didn’t want to take that risk and chose instead to put their children in a West Bank school, a private school, to avoid Israeli soldiers.  

So the wall was important to me, not only in describing how these people live, but also why they’re circumscribed and why the wall was routed in the way that it was. The architect of the wall describes exactly the logic of how he routed it in Jerusalem and around Anata, explaining why he chose not to follow the Jerusalem municipal boundary and instead created an enclave that straddles the Jerusalem municipality. The overriding principle was to remove as many Palestinians as possible from the heart of the city, while relinquishing as little land as possible. That has driven so much of the policy of the state of Israel for decades.

SB: As you write in the Epilogue, part of how this became a story in Israel was a reporter covering the really callous social media comments that some Israeli kids made about the attack. Their ambivalence, while certainly shocking, also seems to have some relationship to the infrastructural unwillingness by Israel to provide any substantial support to Palestinians in the territories. How do those cultural attitudes relate to the structural decisions Israel is making with regard to Palestinians in the West Bank?

NT: The main relationship between the hatred and racism shown by those Israeli youth and the structural barriers that led to tragedy unfolding in the way that it did is that it is a lot easier to dehumanize people with whom you don’t interact. The reality of Israel-Palestine, of Jerusalem, of the settlements abutting Palestinian towns in the West Bank, is one of segregation. That geographic, political, and social reality of segregation is what all the characters in the book had to navigate on the day of this awful tragedy. 

One of the central elements of the book is that it’s not as though any of these Israelis as individuals actually desired that a bus full of kindergarteners continue to burn while Israeli fire trucks took more than thirty minutes to arrive. Some of the teens who wrote jubilant posts on Facebook did desire that, but the emergency service responders did not. Yet the entire system in which they operate is designed in such a way that the very, very late and inadequate response to this crash was entirely predictable.

SB: Mourning is an important part of the book, and so central to both Palestinian and Israeli lives that this may be one of the elements most shared by all the characters in the book. So, for example, we focus heavily on the way that mourning mobilized the Palestinian communities after the crash, but also meet a Haredi organization dedicated to ensuring mourning rituals are able to be observed. What role does mourning play in Palestine, and what political role does it play?

NT: The act of mourning is different depending on whether you consider the deceased to have been a victim of occupation. If there is a victim of occupation who is killed you are not supposed to, for example, do the traditional ritual of cleaning the body and other standard burial rights; instead you bury them in their clothes. So the whole act of mourning, just from the very first step of determining whether this person is a martyr, a victim of occupation or not, is of course, very political. 

The father in the book, Abed Salama, when his son died, one of the things he deeply regretted was not being able to hold his son and say goodbye to him. If they had gone by the declaration of the Palestinian Authority that all of the kids who were killed were martyrs, then Abed and the other parents shouldn’t have done any of the traditional rituals even if they could. In this particular case, Abed couldn’t have because his son was too badly burned.

SB: Your book was released just days before the Hamas attack and subsequently experienced the cancellation of many of your book events and talks, with one particularly notable example when the London police preemptively shut down a planned talk hosted by the How To Academy over alleged “security concerns.” You are obviously not the only one, there has been a massive wave of repression of critical voices in the weeks after the Hamas attack. How did the cancellations affect your promotional efforts for the book, and what has the tenor been like for critical voices since the war began? Do you think it’s becoming increasingly difficult to voice perspectives like yours? And do you think there has been a difference between how critical Jewish and Palestinian voices have been treated in this regard?

NT: The October 7th attacks and the Gaza war had a polarizing effect: on one hand, in mainstream spaces it became much more difficult to have discussions about Palestinian life under occupation; on the other, among younger people and the left more generally there has never been greater support for Palestinian rights. Gatekeepers at some large, mainstream institutions have succeeded in quashing pro-Palestinian speech. At universities, Palestinian freedom of expression has been greatly curtailed and Palestine student groups have even been banned. 

In the cultural sphere, book talks, film screenings, award ceremonies, and musical performances relating to Palestine have been canceled, including about a fourth of the events I had planned in the U.S. (and the main event I had in London, which was shut down by the U.K. police). This has affected Palestinians most severely, but the target is broader—speech that is sympathetic to Palestinians, no matter the identity of the speaker. As a prerequisite to giving a book talk at the University of Arkansas, I was told that I had to sign a pledge that I would not boycott Israel or the settlements. One could boycott virtually anything in the world—the fossil fuel industry or China or Saudi Arabia or the Republican Party—but not Israel or the settlements. I refused to sign, and the talk hasn’t happened. What many people don’t realize is that these sorts of infringements on freedom of expression were in place long before October 7th. It’s just that they have gained steam since.

SB: You and I are talking at a time when no ceasefire is in place, nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, the Israeli right is entrenched and a voluntary end to the Occupation feels as far as ever. As someone who lives there and is deeply invested in the future for the people of the region, are you optimistic about that future? And what kinds of actions for those in the U.S. are most helpful?

NT: As shocking as it may be to hear this, I believe that there is a better chance of ending this system of oppression today than there was on October 6th. The reason for that is very simple. This is a contest between two grossly unequal parties. One is Israel, a nuclear armed regional power with the backing of the strongest state in the world. And the other is a party that is politically divided, militarily weak, barely holds any territory, and even what it ostensibly holds is still controlled by Israel. It really has no ability to impose the kinds of costs that would be necessary to overturn the system. The problem has been that the stronger party has not had a strong enough incentive to change the system. 

For the first time in many years, ordinary Israelis find themselves with a strong incentive to change the system that was in place prior to October 7. Change could come if the Israeli public is convinced that the price that they are paying for endless occupation is too high and that something else ought to replace it. Whether there will be a realistic or credible or decent proposal for changing it, we have to wait and see. But there definitely is a desire to change the system that seemed impermeable to change just two and a half months ago.

It will also be up to people around the world, and particularly in the U.S., to make clear to their governments that they do not support the continuation of more than half a century of ethnonational domination, that they do not support the collective punishment of two million people in Gaza. Ordinary Americans can increase the pressure on the Biden administration to demand a ceasefire right now. If Biden feels he is paying too high a price domestically and internationally for his support of Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, he can be convinced to demand a ceasefire. The difference between a ceasefire today and a ceasefire several weeks from now could be the saving of thousands of innocent lives. 

The post The Physical and Invisible Walls that Determine the Lives of Palestinians appeared first on Electric Literature.

Young, upbeat Happy—an ebullient admirer of new wave French cinema from rural Punjab—goes to Europe in pursuit of riches that are artistic as well as material: he hopes to become an actor in European cinema (he is compared in looks to Sami Frey, the actor in Bande à part, Jean Luc-Godard’s 1964 film, who makes constant reappearances in the novel). Accordingly, Happy saves his wages as an amusement park worker, and pays mysterious “coordinators” to travel to Europe. Once in Europe, however, he is placed in a series of menial, low-paying jobs, in the futile attempt to repay immense debts to the “coordinators”—initially as a restaurant worker in Rome, and then as a laborer on a radish farm—even as his cinematic dream recedes out of reach.

Throughout the novel, Happy’s life attests to the sundering and coming together of nations—from the Partition of India in 1947 (during which his parents had to flee from newly created Pakistan to India) to the current migration crisis and the far-right reactions across Europe and the U.S. Yet the novel’s ambitious form—fragmented into many voices, which nevertheless knit together into a kaleidoscopic view of consciousness—at once records and seeks to mend the sundering it describes.

Celina Basra brings to the novel the intense care and attention to arrangement that has characterised her work as an art curator. Based in Berlin, she has worked with Berlin Biennale, Academy of the Arts Berlin, Arts Night London, and Nature Morte Delhi, among other institutions, and is a co-founder of the curatorial collective The Department of Love, which explores love as a mode of resistance and collaboration, and which has held exhibitions in China and the U.K.

I spoke with Celina Basra on Zoom about fragmented forms and narratives, the complicated and ambiguous trajectories of 21st-century immigration and labor, and recognizing the inner lives of marginalized characters as well as inanimate objects. 

Pritika Pradhan: Happy, the name of the novel’s titular protagonist, is loaded with significance—at once indicative of his upbeat nature and at the core of the novel’s tragic irony, where he struggles to maintain his cheerful narration amid terrible events. Could you tell us what inspired you to choose this name, and how did it influence your envisioning of the novel’s narrative and protagonist?

Celina Baljeet Basra: There is this dissonance and this allusion to humankind’s eternal search for happiness and Paradise, which becomes more pronounced if it involves emigrating. But at the same time, it is not an uncommon nickname and abbreviation for Harpreet, in my extended family, or at least in Punjab. So Happy is a name I was familiar with, and I realized that there’s something there to work with. This is how the character came to me. While the character is entirely fictional, the underlying facts and experiences are very real. And it evolved organically from there: the name played a role in building the character in his world.

PP: The form of the novel is fascinating, consisting of segments narrated from different points of view. Could you please tell us more about your choice of this specific, fragmented form for this novel?

CBB: The basic story had been percolating for a long time before I could finally sit down and move beyond, as Happy called them, the hopeful beginnings that I had stored away in my old hard drive over many years. When I found the voice of Happy, it was through the prologue—the cover letter, or letter of application—which he writes to an employee in Italy, while working on a farm. From then on, the structure of the novel, with its many different fragments, its short chapters, its different voices, and its polyphonic nature, sort of came together and it really then poured and was written fast and furious. It was the only way I knew how to write the novel. 

After struggling for some time to find this voice, I also grappled with the question of how to write this story, which is not my own. There are touching points in my family history maybe, and of course a lot of research and interest over many years. But still, this was the way I knew how to write it, because I feel some stories—especially those of flight or migration—can best be told in a scattered way. To me, at least,  the idea of a novel that is written in one sitting, with a big chunk of time, and in a linear way—that’s not how I feel about the novel. When you have to take care of people—your kid or your family—or when you have to work other jobs, life is not linear. It is a bit like opening Happy’s bag of documents and stories, half-written and unfinished, and of objects that were close to him, the objects he touched that formed his life and that he used to build his world.

PP: In the segment “The Accidental Library,” Happy describes a miscellaneous and indiscriminate collection of objects: “The Library doesn’t hierarchize, nor does it discriminate.” While reading this novel, I felt this anti-hierarchical vision is realized in the proliferation of voices in the novel, which ranges from the titular protagonist to a necklace from Mohenjo-daro, or a pigment from a Pietà. What is the significance of giving voice to persons, animals as well as inanimate objects?

CBB: What I found interesting in relation to Happy’s obsession with the films of Jean-Luc Godard, or the stuff he finds in The Accidental Library, is how accidental these obsessions are when you were a teenager. The time when I first sort of thought of this novel [was in terms of] books falling in your lap. For me, it was like the process of going to my German grandmother’s attic, where there was a big box of Françoise Sagan’s work. So I read all of Sagan—Bonjour Tristesse and so on, but without really a deep understanding. I was only thinking, Oh, this is a cool character. I want to be like her. But Happy couldn’t have been more different from this cool French girl. So I went back to that time of building imaginaries or ideas of what is desirable, and how accidental these influences can be if you don’t have everything at your fingertips—all the museums and the libraries. 

I am an art historian, and I did work, and still do work in the art world. Right now [in the Talking Objects Lab] I am part of a team that works on the idea of the retribution of colonial objects from former colonial contexts, and with African philosophy and artistic interventions that engage with the idea of what to do with these objects that should be given back, [and] how and when and why––the decolonization of memory and knowledge. As a curator, I work with objects and space, amongst others, and this also played into the novel.

PP: So much of Happy’s world is composed of imaginary voices only he can hear: the seductive, and slippery voice of “Europe,” the outsiders of Bande à Part whom he hopes to follow. What role does the imagination play in his story? How does Happy’s imagination inspire him to identify with Europe initially, and support him through his ordeals there?

CBB: The border or the difference between imaginary and real becomes increasingly blurred as the novel continues. And definitely it is always a question with Happy, whether what he hears is reliable, or does he occasionally tell himself those stories and lies in order to cope? I think that’s definitely a thing for him. 

Being born and raised in Europe, living in Europe, I often thought about the idea of Europe and what is it really? Following events like Brexit, we have the idea of Europe as something that wants to close off against whatever comes from outside, as is happening in the Mediterranean Sea. And I also read about Europe in literature and plays, as well as mythological paintings, such as of the abduction of Europe. A lot of the Europe chapters had to be cut in the end, because it was too much. And Europe is important in the novel, and I envisioned her as an HR manager for Europe in a way. I was playing around with a bureaucracy, and how opaque and discriminatory it can be when you want to move, but do not have a passport that  enables you to do so. The experience of trying to get a visa differs wildly, depending on your passport, and is impossible in some cases—which is why other paths are being taken. So there is this humorous aspect, and a dark aspect to Europe.

At the same time, Europe has aspects that are quite human. Sometimes you can feel that Europe is quite insecure—she isn’t really sure of what her image is, or what her role is anymore. She can’t really change the rules like Happy expects her to and is really quite powerless in the end. She is, as you say, this slippery, seductive voice of Europe, who urges Happy to sign the agreement. For me, Europe in the novel is an imaginary character, who is quite vivid, although she might not really exist. However, I would also encourage other readings, if the readers are pleased to do so, such as reading Europe as a real character.

PP: Happy’s only romantic relationships are also lived in the imagination – an unexpressed desire for his male friend and nemesis, Kiran, and later for his fellow farm worker, Zhivago. Could you comment more on this unspoken yet haunting same-sex desire?

CBB: It was clear to me from the beginning that Happy’s feeling of being different might be rooted in his sexuality, which needs to be repressed for obvious personal and political reasons related to the context he grows up in at that time. And that [repression] becomes so automatic that he doesn’t even question it anymore. He outsources it into his imagination, instead of sort of thinking of it as something that can be acted upon, that could be real, that could be fulfilled. And we all know that some ideas, desires, and romances that are entirely imaginary can be so intense—sometimes even more intense than the real ones, especially when you’re young or someone who is very lonely or does not have a lot of touching points with the real world, where he can do real things and act in a way that other people find impressive. Instead, he has to be impressive in his own little world. And so [the imagined relationship with] Kiran, is this classic case of wanting to be with someone with certain aspects that you find dangerous or you are the total opposite of, and someone you want to be like but could never be. 

 With Zhivago, I think that idea is much more real and actually beautiful, but it’s still not reciprocated. Happy is also at that point setting out to realize his dream [of being an actor in European cinema], only to be increasingly disappointed on encountering this big reality check, where things are very different from what he imagined them to be. He doesn’t even open that door [with Zhivago]. However, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot [happening]. There is this eroticism or desire that is expressed through other routes he finds, such as through voices from objects like the bag of flour. And not everything is spoken about; there might be even things that I’m not aware of. Even in a diary, there are things you won’t write down. As a child and a teenager, I tried to tell a good story, but I couldn’t even write about it because there were things happening that were very dark. So you try to tell a story to yourself in a way that you can process. And I think that’s what Happy does a lot of the time. At the same time, there is an increasing divide between reality and imagination, as the novel proceeds.

PP: Once in Italy, Happy is mysteriously but irrevocably affected by powerful, unnamed forces: moved from one job to another, and put down when he tries to agitate for better conditions. What is the reason for keeping these forces unnamed? What do they reveal about the world Happy inhabits?

CBB: When Happy enters Italy, he is moved around like an object and he doesn’t know the faces of the people who are moving him around. And that’s what it is. If you are in that situation, where you are migrating to Europe—not by the books, but without the documents, then you use travel agents who then are linked to other travel agents who then are linked to agents or smugglers, whatever you might call it, because they have many different names. If you research this, you will find a million different ways to do this [migrate], and a million different stories. Some may be half-legal, others entirely illegal, so a lot of power structures come in. If you look into the food industry, or the vegetable farming industry in Italy, or southern Europe,  a lot of these migration trajectories end up pointing to the mafia. When I was researching [the novel], talking to activists and researchers, particularly in Italy, I realized that they had to be very careful due to personal security reasons. 

That’s why it’s so hard to really uncover all the threads. And it’s impossible if you are Happy, if you don’t have a lot of resources and power on your side. If you are in that situation, this is how it feels—you really don’t know [who is moving you around]. There is this entity, this big, unnamed global corportation. I played around with the idea of bureaucracy and HR, so the [movers] are called the “coordinators.” For me, this was a kind of twist because in addition to being a curator, I often worked in situations where I was a project coordinator for cultural events—project coordinators can be many things in many different contexts. So I applied that idea to this context [of migration], because in the end it’s coordination. There is this basic bureaucracy involved, no matter how violent the external context might be.

PP: Some of the novel’s most heartening (and ultimately heartbreaking) scenes ensure from Happy’s relationships with fellow workers and migrants from different countries – the servers at the restaurant where he works, and his fellow radish pickers at the farm. Could you tell us more about the solidarity and togetherness among the migrant workers in the novel across national and ethnic lines, which co-exists with their intense loneliness and enforced isolation due to their immigration and class status?

CBB: I had this question in my mind [about] how certain areas and lines of work are entirely in some nationalities’ hands, and others not at all. In the U.K., who picks your strawberries? Who picks the asparagus in Germany? And then there are Malinese orange pickers in the south of Italy. So you look into it, and then you find that you have these communities that are also sometimes quite apart from each other. At the radish farm, it becomes apparent that the Sikh workers do some work and the Eastern European workers do other work, and then there’s talk of what happens with the Malinese in the south. Zhivago links these worlds because he is moving around, or has moved around quite a bit, but none of the others do or can.

So for me, the novel was always about imagining what if? Because of course these relationships do exist, but they’re so private and so unique to each context that I just wanted to imagine: what would it feel like if Happy strikes up a friendship with a Polish and a Tibetan dishwasher in the Roman restaurant? The back of a restaurant kitchen is stressful, of course, as a working environment, and can be so ultimately unfriendly and hard to endure for any workforce, which is portrayed in popular series like The Bear. But for Happy it’s a little utopia. He will get this moment where he has friends, and becomes popular and strikes up relationships. And we know he practices his Italian because once you work with other workers from other nationalities, you will practice their language, which is quite fun to do. This is just to imagine what are the relationships like, what is the talk at the back of the back door, who shares a cigarette with whom? 

I have traveled to Italy often, and have been interested in places affected by tourism and migration. I’ve always been interested in people who work in providing other people’s pleasure. Once you have worked in a service position or industry yourself, you realize that you could just as well be an umbrella—some guests or customers don’t really see you. So it’s more important what your colleagues mean to you, and how that can empower you. Happy always tries to strike up relationships, always tries to connect to people, to please people and entertain them. And that to me was a way to make the picture of the world richer.

PP: It is significant that the voices of Happy’s family in India (in particular his mother Gul and sister Ambika) continue even after Happy has left for Italy. How does the inclusion of the homeland and family change the depiction of immigration in the novel? 

CBB: To me, this continuity was quite important, to let them speak and let us hear their voices making his absence felt. The family unit is scattered now. But it is also important to show that life at home goes on—it’s not an unmoving ideal. First we idealize the place we want to move to, even if it’s just moving to another town to study or find a new job. But then sometimes it doesn’t turn out as great, so you idealize the place you’ve left, and say, wow, that’s actually how we need to return. And then it becomes this idea where, okay, I will go abroad and I’ll make my luck and find prosperity, and then I’ll return. But then it’s not the same place that I left. You might not be able to return in that way because you’re not the same, the people you’ve left are not the same. And you can never recreate the past, because you might then in retrospect realize, oh, that was happiness. You might think, I will go back to that tree, that house, that meal, and then happiness will come. And it might, but it will always be fleeting because things are moving. To me, that was important in the depiction of places like India, which to so many people growing up here in Germany is this far off place of another imagination. A lot of people will just tell you their India story when you meet them and always the same clichés, you know? So it was important to just and try and attempt to make it complex. It is a place Happy has to leave, in order to try to realize himself. But it isn’t a place that’s entirely bleak. Though there are no prospects for him to evolve in that place in that village, there’s love.

This idea of a mother—Gul, and also [Happy’s sister] Ambika, who is also a mother—is very close to my heart. Shortly after the novel found a publisher, I gave birth to my first daughter. Then in the editing process, which was wonderful and intense and necessary for this very scattered book, a lot of these ideas [about motherhood] found their way in, and made the novel richer. We have the voices of Ambika and Gul in particular, but also the father, Babu, and Fatehpal [Happy’s elder brother] who emigrated as well, but is living his own life and is not very close to Happy, because he left when Happy was still young. They’re all scattered around now, and that’s something that I felt I could identify with. In my own family, everyone is never in one place, but there are always many. So I’m fond of these voices and how they evolve, allowing a space for absences and grief, but also hope and love.

The post An Undocumented Farmworker’s Quest for Happiness in Europe  appeared first on Electric Literature.