Literature

Rachel Trousdale in conversation with Mahek Uttamchandani

Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Several of her poems have appeared in The Nation and The Yale Review. She is also the author of Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination as well as Humor, Empathy, and Communication in Twentieth-Century American Poetry. More recently, she is the winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize, awarded by Wesleyan University Press, for her collection Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body, which released on March 25, 2025. 

MU: Mary Oliver once said, “This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.” Looking at the word “attention” in the etymological dictionary, it can be understood that to attend can mean “to direct one’s mind or energies,” “to stretch toward,” to “take care of” and to “accompany or follow.”¹ Given that many of the poems within Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem have been written across years, if not decades, I would be interested to know how your attentions have shifted, or stayed the same, across time. Similarly, how did you decide which poems to include in this collection? 

RT: I have two parallel answers to this, and one is that my attention has really changed over the last, 15 years, which is the period during which most of these poems were written. I have two children; one is ten and one is seven. So obviously, I was not “paying attention” to the children during the first five years of that fifteen-year span. But if you look at the poems, the children absorb a lot of “attention” once they’re there. So from a subject matter point of view, that’s been a change of attention that’s taking place over the course of the composition of the manuscript, from looking at all sorts of things to looking at my kids. 

But that makes it sound like an either-or or a choice, and I can’t think of a worse way to raise children than by just looking at the children—that’s not good for them or for the parent. So I hope there’s been a constant curiosity about the world. I like finding new things and correspondences between unexpected items and examining them. How is a marriage like a coral reef? It mostly isn’t. So finding that metaphor was a real pleasure for me. That attempt to find correlations between, apparently, quite unlike things is, I think, a constant across the book.

MU: I think you do that wonderfully, and part of this might be attributed to the way the collection seems to be divided by theme, specifically love and family dynamics, science and the environment, and politics (both private and public). Yet, the collection also explores the intersections between these elements. For instance, “First Body Paragraph” primarily features love poems, but science subtly weaves throughout them, particularly in “Units of Measure.” Given your description of science poems as “love poems to the natural world,” how do you see the relationship between love and science shaping the thematic divisions of your work?

RT: Once again, I have two parallel answers, and one is personal. I learned to love poetry from my dad. My dad would come into my room when I was eight and tell me to put down the fantasy novel I was reading so that he could read me whatever poem he was reading. I distinctly remember him reading T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” while I was in the middle of a climactic battle of a really terrible trilogy. I did get to finish the trilogy later, and my dad was a scientist. My dad taught physics at Wesleyan for decades. So actually, the poem “Optics Lab,” which is also in the book, is set in the basement of the Wesleyan science tower. My dad ran that lab, probably in the 1980s…

…My initial exposure to poetry came from the same source as my initial exposure to real scientific thinking. Of course, we all get science in school, but it’s different when you’re getting it from a parent directly, not just as a form of instruction, but as a way of looking at the world—a kind of close attention to detail. For me, science and poetry, like many other forms of meaningful inquiry, are very much about looking very carefully at selected objects and then trying to learn larger lessons from them. So I see those two things as going together very tidily in certain ways. 

But you didn’t ask about science and poetry.  You asked about science and love, and there, too, I think that the attention to detail and the learning from that detail can be generalized beyond just the field of science…. I had this hypothesis, but now that I’ve run the experiment, I’ve determined that my hypothesis needs adjustment. This also applies to meaningful relationships. Really close, passionate attention to what’s happening and wanting deeply to understand it is as much a gesture of love as it is a gesture of scientific inquiry. I’m not a scientist. My PhD is in English, but whatever field we’re in, we can learn these methods from other fields.

MU: That’s amazing. Yes, I think it’s so interesting to implement scientific ways of looking at things into not just your romantic relationships, but into platonic and other types of relationships as well.

RT: Yeah, it works with relationships, but also thinking about love in terms of science. We think humanities people will often think of science as clinical and abstract. But the scientists that I know are motivated by love for their subject matter, and thinking about the love we feel for the objects of our attention can also help us understand how best to pay attention to them, whether that’s climate science, physics, biology, raising a kid, etc.

MU: Changing gears a little bit, the form of poetry in the “Third Body Paragraph” takes an interesting turn. You become more experimental with the use of the page, playing around with white space and the sectioning of the words visually, forming shapes, walls, and more. However, with this freedom, the poems also become more political. This section opens boldly with the poem “A Long List of Small Mercies”, which begins by saying, “1. But we have deferred our son’s first active shooter drill.” It’s an incredibly poignant poem. “Night Shift, Summer, 1994” takes on an entirely different form. The poem consists of 3 parts, each exploring power dynamics imposed on working-class women who experience economic necessity and vulnerability. I would be interested to learn more about the role of politics in your work. It’s obvious that politics are intertwined in your poetics, but how do you work to manifest them in your craft? Does working in a more experimental form allow you greater freedom in expressing your opinions? How do you decide what form the poem should take?

RT: Oh, that’s another interesting question. Thank you. Honestly, I hadn’t noticed that many of my more experimental poems are also some of my more political ones, and those were written. Some of the ones that you’re mentioning are written over quite a span of time. Obviously, “A Long List of Small Mercies” is a pandemic poem. 

MU: Oh, I hadn’t noticed that! 

RT: Well, it’s a pandemic poem, because that’s what deferred my kid going to school. My older child would have entered kindergarten in the fall of 2020, and he didn’t. So, on the bright side, he didn’t have to learn how to hide in a closet for an extra year. But you know, we didn’t enjoy the reason, whereas “Night Shift” is one of the older poems in the book, and itself, of course, harkens back to a much older experience– working at the McDonald’s on Washington Street in Middletown when I was in college. 

So, I think that there’s a sense in which I would argue that any poem is political. But sometimes, the political nature of the poem is the belief expressed by the poem, that it can live in an apolitical world. And it is my belief that considering oneself to be somehow apolitical is itself a political gesture, which is, of course, a terrible argument to make because, much as Freud will say, the fact that you think I’m wrong in my analysis merely proves that I’m right in my analysis. Similarly, there’s no way out of it if I say, “Well, you can’t be apolitical. There’s no such thing as apolitical.” 

But I would argue that a love poem written in the privacy of the lovers’ home…is conditioned by the circumstances of the love so if I, as a cisgender heterosexual woman, write a love poem to my male spouse, I’m doing that in the context of a world that enables me to do that… Love poetry written by women often takes a slightly different tack than love poetry written by men, even if it’s within a traditional heterosexual relationship. Raunchy love poetry by women, for example, is totally absent from my book because it’s not something I want to write. But maybe the reason I don’t want to write it is in part due to some of the subliminal discouragement I’ve received… So writing a poem is political, even when the politics doesn’t show.

MU: I’m also interested in how the “Third Body Paragraph” navigates the idea of “home” and how it is constantly changing—be it a person who is growing older, a living rock that is suddenly decaying, or a landscape that was stripped of its resources one time too many and is now unexpectedly resisting its exploit. No matter the shape “home” takes, there is some level of impermanence to it. Yet, in the collection’s final poem, “Packing List,” there is a strong sense of trying to hold on to the home through seemingly trivial memories. Do you think of “home” as something we can claim as ours and shape according to our will, or is home inherently in flux, always shifting beyond our control?

RT: You’re asking really good questions! In my other life as a literary critic, my first big project was a book on Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie, both of whom I look at as similar despite their very different backgrounds. Salman Rushdie [was] born in India. Nabokov [was] born in Russia. Nabokov live[d] in Germany, France, America, and then finally Switzerland. Rushdie move[d] to England… They have very different biographies, but they take a similar approach to thinking about what you can bring with you when you cross very literal geographical borders. 

And I mentioned my dad is a physicist. My mom, until a couple of years ago, taught in Wesleyan’s Russian department. So I grew up surrounded by Russian emigres. And although I myself was born in Connecticut and now live in distant Massachusetts, I have always thought about home in ways that were conditioned by other people’s experience of exile, of immigration, of voluntary and involuntary change of place. I’ve always had in my head the idea of there being the things you can bring with you and the things that you can’t. 

But what you can bring with you is your memories. And, if you’re lucky, your people. You get in the car with the members of your family and drive off. And so home is, by its definition, impermanent; even if you never go anywhere, even if you die in the house that you’re born in, things are going to change. The trees will grow. Some of the trees will fall over. The mice are going to get into the cellar. Maybe you decide to raise the roof, put in a bed or windows. 

Because life is a condition of mutability. The alternative is stasis, which is basically a form of death. So home has to change. You don’t have a choice. So in “Packing List,” I was thinking, “Okay, well, what can you bring with you when you cross whatever the barrier is, whether it’s a border with a passport, or when you die, what goes with you?” And I think that those are deeply connected for me and probably for a lot of other people, too.

MU: I think reading this, especially after everything that’s happened with the California wildfires, this poem stood out to me even more. Home has never seemed so impermanent. It’s in the every day, especially as college students, each year we pack up our dorms and then unpack them again. And, even within that one year, you choose what to give away, what to take with you…

RT: Yeah, and some of those objects that you want to bring are really important— I mean, obviously you need your computer—but you probably also need that journal you’ve been scribbling in and that little candy heart your best friend gave you on Valentine’s Day when you went out together. 

MU: Yeah, I actually do have a little memento like that, the cork from the champagne bottle my friends got me for my 21^st birthday! 

RT: And sometimes you actually do pack up the old champagne cork. Sometimes, that’s the thing that’s worth bringing with you. But since you’ve only got so much room in your bags, how do you pick? And of course, we have to do that with our memories too, because, if we’re lucky, we live a long enough time that we’re going to forget a lot of things. So how do you pick which memories you want to make sure you hold on to? 

MU: And then, sometimes, you don’t even get a choice with that either. 

RT: Well, and there, too, right? You don’t get a choice with some of the physical objects, the house burns down. Sometimes somebody spills a coffee mug on whatever it was you were going to be carrying with you. So the process of selection is partially randomized, no matter how careful you are. 

MU: But at least it’s not stasis! 

RT: Exactly—that would be worse! 

MU: Well, speaking of the last poem in the book, “Packing List”, brings me right back around to the title: Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem. Thinking about that and the collection’s structure itself, which takes the form of five sections– an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion– the book comes across as quite academic, calling to mind the format of a persuasive essay. What made you decide to format the book in this manner? And given the collection’s essay format, what do you suppose is its thesis? 

RT: I think the thesis is that there are a lot of ways, physical and intellectual, of finding joy and pleasure in the world, and that we have to do it even in the face of the various things that interfere. I mean, I was just getting all serious about mortality, and you still need to go eat chocolate cake at some point, and that is almost a moral imperative. 

The title is partly a joke. I, as a teacher of writing at the college level, read a lot of five-paragraph essays. And I live in a permanent state of warfare with the five-paragraph essay because I consider it a very limiting and prescriptive and ultimately quite boring form. I keep mentioning my children. My older child just came home from school with his first ever five-paragraph essay, and I looked at it in just hilarity and despair, because he’s doing exactly what he was told, which is the three sentences in the opening paragraph, laying out what each paragraph will be about, and then repeat the sentences at the start of each paragraph, and then repeat them again at the conclusion. It’s a format that’s really designed to be boring and not to give you any room for discovery. 

So I object to five-paragraph essays on principle, and in my writing classes, I’m always urging students to move past them, to use what they’ve learned in high school about five-paragraph essays as a form of structure, as like the diving board that they’re going to do their triple jackknife off of and discover something better now that they understand how to do structure. 

My collection takes its title from a poem that has the same title. I wrote it after a long night of grading as an act of rebellion against the prescriptiveness of the five-paragraph essay, which interferes with discovery. And I found myself thinking about the way the five-paragraph essay structure limits what you can discover is like an analogue to how, when our bodies go wrong, when something happens that makes you ill, it limits your activities, both mental and physical. So in that poem, the speaker is based in part on a character in an Oliver Sacks book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, who is suffering from cerebral syphilis, somebody who has been literally driven mad by a venereal disease…The body is sort of interfering with what had hitherto been the self. And as I was trying to structure the collection, I discovered that that interference between your body and your sense of self was a through-line for a lot of the poems. 

The structure that you’re inhabiting, whether it’s “Is this thing a sestina?” or, “Hey, look, I’m going to steal a bunch of end-rhymes from a Yates sonnet,” (those are both formal bodies), or, “Okay, I’m working at McDonald’s because I’ve got to pay the rent. That’s a constraint on my life,” what does that do for what I can accomplish outside of my working hours, or just the very simple fact of physical illness or one’s human physicality? How do those condition our emotional experiences? How do they condition what discoveries we can make, and where can we push back on it? Where can the mind find those limits and work around them or escape them in one way or another? I think that’s the question you asked. 

MU: It went a lot of places, but if it’s a rejection of the five-paragraph essay, then it should go a lot of places. In this case, would you say the five-paragraph essay is anti-intellectual?

RT: I suppose I would argue that the five-paragraph essay can be quite anti-intellectual because the foreclosure of discovery sets too much of a limit on itself. To be called an intellectual by Robert Pinsky was definitely a career highlight for me, but I hope that he understands the term in the same way that I do—not of just having a credential or knowing some things, but of viewing curiosity and learning as central to how we understand the world. I would argue that an intellectual is someone who may have developed an expertise in one or more topics but is aware that there’s always more to be curious about in the world and aspires to put those pieces together. So, from that point of view, I yearn to be an intellectual! 

MU: This is my last question for you. I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight your achievement in winning the Cardinal Poetry Prize, which is given to a poet aged 40 or older who has not been previously published. Your reception of this honour (which is where Robert Pinsky called you an intellectual!)  was incredibly well deserved, and in reading your work, it’s clear that writing is a natural state for you. Now that this collection, comprised of your writing through the years, is out in the world, where do you see your poetry heading next? What new ideas are occupying your attention?

RT: That’s fun to think about. Some years ago, I had the good luck to be in a Bread Loaf [Writer’s Conference] seminar taught by the amazing poet Terrance Hayes. And a term that he used a lot in his feedback, not just to me, but to all of us in the seminar, was “wildness,” and I particularly remember him saying of one of my poems, “I’d like to see more wildness here.” And

I thought he was absolutely right.

A thing that I have been working on is trying to let the poems go to places that surprise me. As I mentioned, sometimes I’ll get an idea for a poem that is “Okay, I’ve got to get it to this last line.” A challenge I’ve been giving myself lately is, once I’ve gotten to that last line, checking to see if it really is the last line. Maybe there’s somewhere else, [somewhere] stranger and more productive that the poem can go after it’s reached its preliminary destination.

You mentioned politics earlier. I’ve been thinking a lot about what poetry can do that interacts usefully with politics. W.H. Auden says that poetry makes nothing happen. He says that in his elegy for William Butler Yeats. On the other hand, Percy Bysshe Shelley says poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. These are two sorts of opposed statements by poets who have a dog in the fight about poetry. I presume, since almost everybody’s wrong all the time, that both of them are wrong one way or another. So if poetry can make something happen, but we’re not legislators, what can it make happen?

MU: That’s a very big question. A wide berth to occupy your attention!

RTL We’ll see where it gets me, if anywhere. I may just spin in circles. Let me know if you come up with an answer. 

MU: I mean, that could be a really nice thing to do with your poetry, though. And, for what it’s worth, I was in a poetry class last week, and one of my classmates referred to the poem as the needle through which you thread the two parallel planes of language and soul. And, although poetry doesn’t necessarily give you legislative power, it might allow you, as the poet, to give the power of language to someone who is in that seat. Even if you’re not the one in the position to change the law, maybe your words can touch the people who are and kind of bring them to a new place of thinking. And I don’t know, maybe that could be one of the powers of poetry. 

RT: I hope so, I think that’s a beautiful idea. 

On Andre Carrington’s “The Black Fantastic” and Building Canons

“Antares,” by Chesley Bonestell, restored and adapted by Laura Lindgren. Reproduced courtesy Bonestell LLC. Adapted into the cover art of Sun Ra’s “Exotica” album.

By Nic Galleno

Canon-making has always been an exclusionary process. Any number of examples would elucidate this point: take Zora Neale Hurston’s long stint outside of the canon for her “lyricism” or, alternatively, how Charlotte Bronte published Jane Eyre under the pseudonym Currer Bell to avoid the backlash female authors received. In the African American literary tradition, the debate on the canon formation must be traced back to W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright’s essays “Criterion for Negro Art,” and “A Blueprint for Negro Writing,” respectively. In nineteen twenty-six, Du Bois argues for the political capacity of African American art–broadly encompassing painting, performance, and literature–toward achieving “assimilation” as “fully-fledged Americans.” Alternatively, Wright would argue the political, by which he means the effort to demonstrate humanness and to plead “with white America for justice,” dampens the creative potential of the tradition. Wright instead posits that the African American author must look within for inspiration in an argument that centers on a vague but inherent African American culture and Marxist theorizations of class consciousness. 

A problem with both Wright and Du Bois’ arguments can be located in the essentialization of a singular, collective authenticity inherent to African American culture that their proposed author might channel toward political liberation or utilize toward literary production. Canon-making projects must not fall back onto the essentialization of race in designating literary categories–this lazy assumption inherently others minority authors as oppositional to the white (male) author and, circularly, limits the scope of their work to topics on racial identity. Additionally, it assumes a homogeneous component of identity in minority groups that, beyond simply not existing, implies that the work somehow speaks to them.

This problem may be more easily understood by the designation of Toni Morrison’s work: is she the great American novelist or the great African American novelist? Hopefully, it is also through this question that the stakes of canon-making might become clear. Morrison, a black author writing about African American characters, certainly has been claimed in the African American literary tradition. However, if Morrison is to be located in an African American literary canon, there must be an essential aspect of her work that differentiates it from the broader category of the American literary tradition. Kenneth Warren polemically argues that African American literature could only be written during Jim Crow in his essay “Does African American Literature Exist?” as the condition of systematic oppression served to form a collective political goal in the literary tradition. Beyond debates on the lasting effects of Jim Crow, or the antebellum South for that matter, Warren’s jab could be understood as a call for the demystification of what forms, politics, or aesthetics might be essential in forming any literary canon. Beyond academic and bookworm (a loving designation) circles, the importance of canons must be apparent as Morrison herself has novels banned in seven states. It is of utmost importance how readers–from casual to intensive–perceive literature and the traditions it forms.

Turning toward more recent work, Andre Carrington published The Black Fantastic, an anthology of twenty recent Afrofuturist stories. In the introduction, Carrington states that “the main value of Black speculative fiction today isn’t that it brings Blackness to places that are especially antiblack. Rather[…] it demonstrates and exemplifies yet another flourishing of Black creativity, extending our thinking, feeling, ‘otherwise’ presence into the world.” The anthology begins as an elephant bursts into the living room of a fifteenth-floor apartment, eats a houseplant, generally makes a ruckus, and then floats off the balcony while performing a backflip. The brevity of Nalo Hopkinson’s “Herbal” creates a wonderfully concise story in less than four pages. The piece calls toward Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis–the short novel about a man who is suddenly transformed into a beetle–in its straightforward narration, short-form style, and matter-of-fact descriptions of the character’s emotions. The elephant’s backflip might be read as parallel to the beetle, Gregor Samsa, who becomes stuck on his backside and struggles to flip over. 

The final piece in The Black Fantastic, however, takes on a different form. Maurice Broaddus’ “The Rear Guard” describes Sylvonne Butcher’s journey to Ghana from the United States in search of her own place in the diaspora. In moments of prominent nostalgia, Sylvonne remembers the stories her mother told her of her own childhood in Ghana and the smells of food in an open-air market. However, she is also confronted with the complete impossibility of diaspora when she is embattled in conversations with her hosts who question her place in Ghana. While Sylvonne feels an identification with the Ghanaian culture, the conflict arises as her hosts view her as a foreigner. Sylvonne eventually meets Ban mu Kyidomhene–a matriarchal figure in an organization fighting for liberation whose name translates to “leader of the rear guard.” The piece ends as Ban mu Kyidomhene accepts Sylvonne into the organization after she shares “a deeper truth” in response to the question of why she is in Ghana: “I need here. And here needs me.” Beyond a reading of lineage and inheritance that this specific story lends itself toward, it is worth juxtaposing alongside “Herbal” as the bookends to Carrington’s anthology of Afrofuturism. While “The Rear Guard” considers themes related to the Africana diaspora, there is nothing in “Herbal” that immediately signifies one of the essential elements of an African American literary tradition as demarcated by Du Bois or Wright. In reverse formulation, then, Broaddus’ concluding story must be interrogated as a text within the African American literary tradition for reasons other than an essentialization of racial politics or discourse in the text. Rather than attempting to present a reformulation of the entire African American literary canon, this essay will continue forward with Carrington’s designation of Afrofuturism. 

In his scholarly monograph Speculative Blackness, Carrington describes the four tropes that define “the speculative fiction of Blackness: Afrofuturism, surrealism, Otherhood, and haunting.” Since the publication of the manuscript in twenty-sixteen, Carrington has shifted the term Afrofuturism into the position held by the term “speculative fiction of blackness,” now acting as an umbrella category for three other listed tropes. The shift in terminology suggests that a certain combination of surrealism, Otherhood, and haunting are essential aspects of the aesthetic or form of Afrofuturism. While even Carrington himself may argue for the value in locating the black authors from the anthology in a longer literary tradition of speculative stories–as opposed to being placed as an isolated, minority group of writers in the broader speculative fiction genre–this conclusion must not be entirely satisfying. Suturing this counterargument to Carrington’s earlier definition of Afrofuturism, then, begins to form the canon that Carrington presents in The Black Fantastic. 

Jennifer Marie Brissset’s “A Song for You” puts this definition of Afrofuturism into play, particularly at the register of surrealism. The piece begins with an inversion of the Orpheus myth. Certain renditions of the myth conclude with Orpheus’s head left floating down infinite rivers while singing mournful songs after he was killed by the Maenads. In Brissett’s version, the story begins as the protagonist discovers a robotic head near a river by her house after hearing it sing. The robot explains that he was a part of a ship crew with, among others, a woman named Eura. This character may be read as the Euridyce equivalent with whom the robot falls in love. She was particularly taken by his music, of which the robot describes that he: 

“played a series of acoustic waves from my subprocessor for them. [He] designed a composition by sampling some harmonics to mimic rain patterns, the drips of falling water. The crew remained remarkably still after [he] completed my piece. [He] didn’t know what to make of it. Then [he] saw that one or two of them were weeping. They clapped their hands to [his] relief and many of them told [him] that what [he] had played was good.”

A reading of the “acoustic waves” and the “harmonics” that the robot emits can be found by taking on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s reading of the deterritorialization of language. The two French academics present the theory in their book, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, as one of the three constituent elements of a minor literature. Their work suggests that a minor literature, in opposition to a major literature (which might be read as the Western literary canon), “permits a reversal… it will henceforth serve as a rallying point or model for certain texts and “bi-lingual” writing practices that, until now, had to pass through a long purgatory before even being read, much less recognized.” The method of a minor literature is the deterritorialization of language, specifically the process of disarticulating language to create the potential for new expression. 

Deleuze and Guattari present that Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is transformative in that Gregor Samsa’s speech is an example of disarticulated language. They take particular interest in the function of Kakfa’s German language who, having grown up in Prague during the Austro-Hungarian empire, wrote in a variant dialect. Beyond the formal linguistic difference, Kafka’s protagonist in The Metamorphosis has a particular effect on language. This transformation, or disarticulation, is represented by how “the [beetle] does not speak ‘like’ a man but pulls from the language tonalities lacking in signification[…] To make the sequences vibrate, to open the word onto unexpected internal intensities in short, an asignifying intensive utilization of language.” The “tonalities” refer to broken down language, which becomes deterritorialized once the sequence represents something new–in this case, the words vibrate. In this utilization of language, it “stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits.” More simply, the language does not simply mimic human speech in animals but rather represents animals themselves speaking. Carrington’s definition of the constituent tropes of Afrofuturism, then, may be read as having the same effect on the literature as Gregor Samsa’s “tonalities.”  

Returning to Brissett’s piece, the robot’s song can be read as deterritorialized language. Like Gregor Samsa’s language, his formulation of song does not simply mimic the human form, but rather the “acoustic waves” of the song sampled from “harmonics to mimic rain patterns, the drips of falling water,” ensure the lyrics take on a new form. This underlines the allegorical function of the story as a whole–in taking on the classical Greek Orpheus myth, Brissett doesn’t simply reproduce the myth but instead deterritorializes the language toward the function of a minor literature. In Carrington’s language, Afrofuturism might express a “thinking [or] feeling otherwise presence” in the world which, in this case,  becomes increasingly legible with a continued reading of “A Song for You.” 

When Eura disappears after an attack on the ship, the robot searches for her and descends below the rubble of the battle to the enemy base–just like Oprheus’ journey into the underworld. After finding her in a trance-like state and attempting to lead her back to the surface, the robot looks behind him at the last moment to find that Eura disappeared. In conclusion of the formal narrative arc of the classical myth, the robot is eventually captured by the enemy and decapitated after a spree of violence, his head left to float down the rivers indefinitely into the future. However, by taking on Carrington’s trope of haunting, the story continues many years later when Maya returns due to the death of her mother. While Maya “wondered how real the memory was or if it was only the imagination of a child,” she is drawn toward the woods where she played growing up and re-discovered the head. Despite her attempts to erase the memory, the head reappears in the narrative in conjunction with the passing of her own mother’s death–an ephemeral moment of haunting after years of repressing the childhood memory.

 After the robot restates his long-held desire for Maya to help him end his life, the story is completed as Maya is finally ready to aid the robot. However, before the conclusion of the story, three crucial moments underline the deterritorialization toward an Afrofuturist literary canon. First, Maya experiences a moment of both catharsis and grief upon re-discovering the head, and “then she cried. She cried for her mother. She cried for the head. And she cried for her own guilt.” Next, the head sings a song composed specifically for Maya–a final rendition of deterritorialized language. The song prompts Maya to suggest an alternative ending for Eura’s story based on her own mother’s passing: 

“‘My mother will soon be making her journey to the ancestor lair. It’s how we bury our dead and dying.’ Then she looked up and said, ‘I’m sure they meant no disrespect to your friend.’”

The Orpheus myth, then, takes on a different conclusion based on Maya’s revision, ending in the enumeration of grief rather than the infinite reproduction of pain as the head endlessly floats away in Greek mythology. As Maya completes the narrative by helping the robot end his life, “the head screamed in beautiful harmonic agony” which is left untranslated for the reader. This ultimate harmony represents the creation of a new form of expression possible in the Afrofuturist genre, deterritorialized from the classic Greek myth. While incomprehensible to the reader–there are no lyrics or syllables–the evidence of utterance is visible on the page. 

The conclusion of “A Song for You” exhibits the full definition of the Afrofuturist canon as a minor literature–the production of an “otherwise” being in the world where grief and catharsis are reconciled in the face of haunting within the bounds of a surrealist text. By way of conclusion, it is worth turning to Morrison in words worth quoting at length: 

“Above all I am interested in how agendas in criticism have disguised themselves and, in so doing, impoverished the literature it studies. Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape. It is important to see how inextricable Africanism is or ought to be from the deliberations of literary criticism and the wanton, elaborate strategies undertaken to erase its presence from view.”

Crucially, Carrington’s anthology has projected these twenty stories in a form that celebrates the “arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape.” African American literature, whether in its totality or via smaller categories, has too often been left subaltern, abject, and–in a non-Deleuzian formulation–minor to the Western literary tradition. Whether by taking on a reading of the anthology through Deleuze’s formulation or by simply engaging closely with the stories, The Black Fantastic provides a space for something else to be said. 

On Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection

Hopper, Edward. Excursion into Philosophy, 1959. Private Collection

by Finn Flackett-Levin

It is abundantly evident that we live in an age of unprecedented social division. Mainstream media on both sides of the aisle has belabored this point so thoroughly that it feels almost needless to say. Division as a sociological phenomenon is certainly not unique to our epoch; it is one of those perennial aspects of human experience that cannot help but continuously rear its ugly head. However, no one would contest that this eternal affliction has now become, in America especially, a terminal threat to civic life. The New York Times, possibly the most notable arbiter of ‘the way we live now,’ devoted 5000 words to the American “loneliness epidemic.” Lauren Greenfield’s recent documentary series Social Studies delineates in unsparing fashion the vice grip of technology on members of Generation Z and how the supplanting of real-world experience with digital interactions has eroded their ability to find common ground with their peers. The technological advancement of the internet has defined the advent of the 21st century for good and, increasingly, for ill. 

Perhaps, given all of these troublesome factors, it makes sense why artists feel such a reticence to engage with the contemporary at this juncture. One look at the upper echelon of the cinema landscape, the art form that most accurately reflects the desires of the public at large, and it is clear that the reigning auteurs have no interest in depicting the present. August directors such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson have not made a movie set in a contemporary milieu in more than a decade. While this could be chalked up to the fact that cell phones and electric cars aren’t particularly suited to visual representation, we must also consider the possibility that even for the brightest artistic minds working today, modernity and its discontents are simply too much to bear. 

In this context of the media’s stultifying avoidance of confronting the damage wrought by social media and the internet’s all-pervasive influence, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte feels like a breath of fresh air. Tulathimutte, prior to Rejection’s publication, was an undoubtedly admired but obscure writer who wielded influence in the hermetic Brooklyn literary scene via his position as the founder of CRIT, a writer’s workshop that has gained considerable prestige in the eight years since its inception. Of course, the irony of  Tulathimutte writing the book that may be considered the last word on the fraught subject of rejection is that he has become a de facto gatekeeper of a niche subsection of the New York publishing world, regularly doling out rejection letters himself. Consider this a form of prolonged research: Tulathimutte knows his subject like the back of his hand, not only in his administrative capacity at CRIT but also in his own self-publicized struggles to get his books published. By Tulathimutte’s own account, his debut novel Private Citizens was rejected nineteen times before finally getting published in 2016 by William Morrow. The accumulation of rejections that Tulathimutte has suffered seems not just to have unfazed him but emboldened him. 

The same cannot be said for the characters in Rejection itself, a misanthropic collection of millennial neurotics who, over the course of the book’s seven distinct yet interrelated chapters, implode in a breathtaking variety of self-inflicted ways. The unnamed narrator of the opening section ‘The Feminist’ (in a later story we discover his identity) adopts the lingua franca of male feminist allyship in a gradually more desperate attempt not just to find a girlfriend but also to achieve some measure of social cohesion with a generation he feels alienated from. In ‘Pics,’ a one-night stand leads Alison down the rabbit hole of psychosexual obsession toward a friend who feels markedly indifferent toward her. In what is perhaps the most revelatory yet delightfully sickening story in the collection entitled ‘Ahegao, or, The  Ballad of Sexual Repression,’ a withdrawn young Thai American man named Kant (subtlety isn’t Tulathimutte’s main objective here) struggles to lose his virginity given his outré taste in pornography, a taste that has made it so intercourse is nearly impossible given the astonishing complexity and barbarity of his sexual desires.  

These unnerving tales play out not solely in the physical plane but also in the digital realm, a world all the characters feel more comfortable in given their bone-deep sense of estrangement from the world around them. One of the most notable examples of Tulathimutte interspersing his prose with a simulacrum of unedited electronic discourse is the snippets of group chat conversations among Alison and her coterie of girlfriends in ‘Pics.’ Tulathimutte has an incredible ear for how those who outwardly espouse progressive viewpoints show a far less empathetic disposition behind closed doors. Look, for instance, at a text about the man Alison recently hooked up with sent by one of her supposed friends: 

Anjali 

okay yes now that it is safe to say so . . . . I kinda thought that  guy seemed sus lmao 

didn’t you say he works with pedos? literally who signs up to do that 

middling ass softboi 

While it is easy to lampoon a man who derives a sense of moral superiority from working in a halfway house for recently castrated pedophiles, Tulathimutte is an equal opportunity offender committed to skewering both those who deliberately live their lives in such a way as to net the maximum amount of social justice clout and the people who deride them out of insecurity that they are not living their lives in accordance with their much-touted principles. The fact that Anjali ends her missive by taking a swipe at the man’s masculinity further reifies how the lexicon of the internet enables such people to deride those they seek to invalidate in a fashion seemingly incompatible with their beliefs. On top of that, the friend group repeatedly disregards Alison’s viewpoint in the ensuing pile-on that takes place, refusing to acknowledge the fact that this apparent commitment to selflessness and charity attracted Alison to him in the first place. Online discourse, be it in a text chain or a chat room, inevitably leads to people seeking confirmation of their own biases as opposed to engaging in the fruitful yet more challenging endeavor of genuine conversation.

For all of this harping on Tulathimutte’s facility, there are times when his prodigious reach exceeds its grasp. The shocking denouement of ‘The Feminist,’ where the narrator’s growing disaffection metastasizes into violent rage, takes what had been a nuanced portrayal of how lonely men can easily get swept up in the tide of masculine resentment found on Reddit forums and turns it into a piece engineered to be a flashpoint in the culture wars (it’s not for nothing that ‘The Feminist’ was the most read story in n+1’s history at the time of publication).  The section of the book entitled ‘Main Character’ starts as a promising window into the psyche of Bee, a person who refuses to have any label ascribed to them, be it race or gender or even to some extent the label of personhood, and ends up outstaying its welcome by laboriously underlining its central points many times over and getting caught up in a breakdown of a convoluted online trolling scheme. The penultimate chapter ‘Sixteen Metaphors’ is exactly that, a series of one-line metaphors about rejection that registers as a mildly amusing curio and nothing more. The final section ‘Re: Rejection’ is a fictional letter from a publisher outlining all the reasons they have decided to pass on the manuscript of  Rejection while also giving insipid notes as to how to increase the likability of the characters and how to inject more pathos into the overall narrative. This postscript somewhat works metatextually but feels more than anything like an awkward victory lap on Tulathimutte’s part,  celebrating his own iconoclasm in the face of corporatized mediocrity. 

The section that best exemplifies how Tulathimutte’s social commentary exists on a razor’s edge between profundity and pretension is ‘Our Dope Future,’ the monologue of a man who speaks only in the affected patois of bogus self-improvement. As he tells the reader about why his last relationship (with Alison from ‘Pics’) fell apart, it becomes clear that he uses the superficial desire to better the lives of those around him as a cover for his manipulative tendencies. When he starts to suspect that Alison’s depressive lethargy stems from a potential chemical imbalance, he swabs her cheek without her consent to attain further information and then uses a program called WristSlapp to monitor her online communications. At the end of  the story, all of his close relationships have dissipated as a result of his insatiable need for control, and he asks the following question: “Tell me, after all the value I’ve created, and the  best-in-class innovations I have successfully brought to market, and the inspiration I have  brought up by my example—if everything I did was so evil, how is it that up until now not a  single person has told me No?” 

This question simultaneously confronts the reader and acts as a kind of thematic lodestar for Rejection as a whole. The fragmented nature of contemporary discourse drives social division but also renders everyone an accommodationist, too concerned with their own myopic conceptions of virtue to recognize injustices perpetrated just under their noses. In the end, the net result of having access to all information all of the time is the understandable impulse to burrow inward and use the internet, or any other tool that aids in fostering alienation, to create a protective shell which even the most salient of points can’t break through. That is why, even when it occasionally falls short of its aims, Rejection cannot be ignored. It shows us, up to the minute, who we are, how we’ve failed, and what we can do to change — if anyone is still listening.

Shon Faye’s Love in Exile in Conversation with bell hooks’ all about love

By Maisie Wrubel

Love. Elusive, yet desired by all. A transformative force central to life, possibly even the reason for living, and the epitome of what it means to be human. For years, the challenge of capturing love has shaped philosophy, art, social theory, music, and literature. Yet despite the millennia spent in pursuit of this practically celestial four-letter word, our world today seems farther than ever from embodying whatever it is that “love” means. At least, that is the sense one gets from Shon Faye’s new memoir Love in Exile.

“Memoir” isn’t really the right word, though. Love in Exile is more, as evidenced by its extensive bibliography and critical engagement with the idea of love. Faye does more than simply recount her experiences with love; she uses them as entry points into a greater exploration of how love is mediated by hegemonic systems of oppression and how certain people are “exiled” from love because of these systems. Extending beyond the confines of a memoir and plunging into the expanse of feminist theory, Shon Faye reveals how the personal is political.

—

However, Faye is far from the first person to embark on this kind of project. Auto-theory is a growing practice, particularly within feminist writing, and feminist thinkers have been discussing love for years. Probably the most well-known work of this kind – one that Faye repeatedly draws from – is bell hooks’ 1999 book All About Love: New Visions. Though over 20 years old, All About Love has retained a place of honor on bookstore display tables and bibliophile blog posts. Readers extol its persisting relevance, and bell hooks continues to be a household name in feminist writing largely because of it.

Like Faye, hooks sees love as the beating heart of being human – the reason why we live. She also believes that love is something our world has turned away from yet desperately needs. hooks diagnoses our struggle with loving as the result of confusion as to what “love” really means. Love is mysterious exactly because there is no common definition of it. It is misidentified as an individual feeling when it is so much more than that: to love is “an act of will,” specifically “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Under this definition, agency and thus the possibility for politicization appear within the realm of loving.

This is the definition that Shon Faye leans into. But, unlike hooks, she does not begin her treatise with a definition of love – she allows for more fluidity in the term while still contesting the more common conception of (typically heterosexual) romantic love as love’s platonic form. In fact, Faye notes that “Plato would have been horrified” at the common belief that romantic love is “the pinnacle of human attachment and communion.” Rather than rejecting this supposed ideal of love specifically on the grounds of its lack of agency, as hooks would, Faye exposes love’s embeddedness within systems of capitalism and heteronormativity and how that embeddedness limits our understanding of it.

It would be a mistake to label All About Love as apolitical. Yet under the light of Love in Exile, it is hard not to see a thinness in hooks’ indictments of patriarchy and capitalism. While hooks spends a chapter on the latter (“Greed: Simply Love”) Faye lets her critiques permeate the text. They bubbling up to the surface in discussions of community (“friendship… is of very little benefit to capital”) and heterosexuality (“iterations of the ideal heteronormative relationship materially disadvantage women and… were, feminists have long argued, created to subordinate women to the interests of capital”) and frequent citations of Marx and Engels. There’s a charge to Faye’s observations and criticism, which at times verge on preachy, but which All About Love lacks.

Part of the weakness of hooks’ insights stems from her stricter adherence to the central theme of love. For example, in “Greed: Simply Love,” hooks argues that “to maintain and satisfy greed, one must support domination. And the world of domination is always a world without love.” However, her efforts to interrogate the roots of greed and the systems that support it feel under-researched and highly individualistic. hooks may call for a more communal approach to life, “living simply,” but her equating this with “showing respect for love” distracts from the true political implications of her call. Essentially, hooks’ commitment to tying everything to love dilutes her arguments, as they disappear into each other in their repetitive nature. 

Faye, on the other hand, allows for more tenuous connections between her topics of discussion and love, which give her room to explore sex, addiction, and motherhood in ways that are far more in-depth and incisive than hooks. These themes are discussed in relation to her own experiences and how these experiences are the product of social systems. In Chapter Four, “Mother,” Faye not only discusses her lack of a desire to be a mother and how that has impacted her romantic relationships, but also the “mother” as a political entity in relation to the patriarchal Christian idea that “motherhood and true womanhood are indivisible,” racial disparities in pregnancy, the cost of childcare, and alternate, non-biological forms of mother-like care.

Yet Faye would be nowhere without hooks. Even in moments where All About Love is not explicitly cited, ideas in Love in Exile (such as men’s lack of emotionally fulfilling relationships and addiction being a false form of love) are traceable to the former text. If I ever questioned bell hooks’ influence or the deservedness of her acclaim (which, admittedly, I did after first reading All About Love), Love in Exile put those doubts out of my mind. Love in Exile may cut deeper than All About Love, but All About Love sharpened that blade. 

—

When it comes to love, Faye covers all her bases. Heartbreak? Check. Self-love? Check. Friendship? Check. For every one of love’s key subsets, Faye has a story to tell, and Love in Exile has a chapter that tells it. It is hard not to notice the underlying formula of the book. However, it is equally hard to remember that formula once you are immersed in Faye’s funny, poignant storytelling and cultural analysis. 

Faye’s tendency towards the formulaic is evident in her chapter titles. The single relevant term that could have been used for each instead seems to have been fed into a “make it more intriguing” generator: “The Broken Heart” (Heartbreak), “System Failure” (Heterosexuality), “The Pantomime” (Sex), “Mother” (Motherhood), “Blackout” (Alcoholism), “In Community” (Friendship), “Self” (Self-love), “Agape” (Religion). Additionally, there is something a bit disarming about the start of each chapter. Consider for example the movement from the prologue to Chapter 1, “The Broken Heart.” Faye ends the prologue by earnestly expressing her hopes that her book will illuminate the beauty and necessity of the struggle to know love, but then quickly shifts tone at the opening of the first chapter, which she begins with the cheesy, self-indulgent, and overdramatic: “It was, without question, the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” “it” being a breakup. Faye makes no effort to bleed chapters into each other, instead beginning each with a pithy, culturally relevant, and perhaps cliché hook— In Chapter Two she writes, “Until the months following my breakup with B, I never really believed it when people said that their favorite singer had ‘saved my life’ or ‘brought me back to life.’ Then I began to listen to Norman Fucking Rockwell! on repeat.” She doubles down on cliché in Chapter Five’s “he came and went so quickly I still wonder if I made him up.” 

Because of this formula, Love in Exile reads more like a collection of essays than a continuous narrative, the thread of Faye’s struggles with love tying it all together. There are other ways to approach auto-theoretical writing – take, for example, the free-flowing continuity of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts – but despite the formulaic feel, the format of critical vignettes aligns with Faye’s piercing voice. This format allows her to explore diverse topics all under the umbrella of love, a theme she deftly keeps afloat throughout.

Furthermore, the central themes of the chapters follow a progression, even if the movement between them lacks a feeling of fluidity and their titles feel a bit contrived. We begin in heartbreak, explore both false and atypical forms of love, and finally end up in religion and spirituality. Faye ends her final chapter, “Agape,” describing waking up on the coast of Ireland, looking out to the sea, being moved to fall to her knees and pray, feeling “as though I had found what I had always been looking for.” After 150 pages and thirty-something years of searching for love, Faye finds it in spirituality.

All About Love has a similar conclusion. hooks begins her final chapter, “Destiny: When Angels Speak of Love,” saying how, as a child, “the solace of knowing I could speak my heart to God and the angels made me feel less alone.” This sentiment of spirituality as a way to find love appears throughout All About Love. hooks argues that “all awakening to love is spiritual awakening.” For her, the two are inextricable, and it seems to be so for Faye as well.

It is significant that these two auto-theoretical treatises on love, despite their differences, both end up with their authors discussing their finding of love in spirituality. The kind of generous ethic of love that underlies the beliefs both Faye and hooks express in their respective books is reflective of an ethos that appears in the teachings of a number of religions. Spirituality of almost any kind entails an understanding of the interconnectedness of all beings, and when one sees everyone as connected, it is hard to not feel the necessity of love. These books suggest that when it comes to the search for love, there is something of a natural conclusion, a natural destination in the spiritual.

—

Love in Exile is evidence of the power of personal experience in autotheory. In terms of her theory itself, Faye is not breaking ground, but she proves that the abstract is relevant to how one approaches life. And even though her ideas are not new, she makes them feel fresh with her unique perspective as a transgender woman and recovering alcoholic whose palpable dry humor winningly emerges throughout. Faye is honest – with her personal history, her politics, her tone – and thus moving. She is a gifted storyteller and astute reader who situates her life experiences within years of history and philosophy while referencing modern-day forms of media to be all the more culturally relevant.
This is the freshness, the brightness, that All About Love lacks. While indebted to hooks’ work, Shon Faye’s Love in Exile outshines it. Faye brings hooks’ ideas into the present in a way that hooks’ lasting acclaim cannot. And this is exactly what bell hooks would want, anyway. Her famously uncapitalized name was a choice made to center her ideas, rather than her person, in her written works. Yet, despite her best wishes, her name and person have become divorced from her thoughts, and the idea of “bell hooks” has come to maybe mean more than her writings, themselves. But Love in Exile honors bell hooks by taking her ideas and placing them within a new context, allowing them to grow with time and become more than what they originally were. Love in Exile is an act of love – to bell hooks, to the many other writers who have come before, to the reader, and to Faye herself.

The Art of Truth-seeking in Han Kang’s We Do Not Part

By Arla Hoxha

A newborn’s white gown—never worn. Melting ice. A miniature forest of dark wood. Flashes of violence of Korean dictatorships. Two women holding tight to a white cloth sheet as they walk into the sea, like a funeral rite. How to account for loss—the kind that leaves a hole, somewhere you can’t place, for someone you only ever knew in stories? How can one carry their grief through life? Han Kang’s collaboration with her friend and filmmaker IM Heung-soon at the 57th Carnegie International (2018) was a construction of mixed-media installations, performances, and films providing room for this reflection. Housing work from 32 artists and art collectives The Carnegie International, held annually at The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, invites visitors “to explore what it means to be ‘international’ at this moment in time.” Kang’s 2021 I Do Not Bid Farewell rendered in English as We Do Not Part is a thematic continuation of the abstract short film with the same name, portraying two women carrying a white sheet. We Do Not Part is brought in English as a joint effort between e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Kang’s first book to be translated into English after she was awarded the Nobel in Literature in 2024, it is perhaps her darkest work to date.

Kang’s dreamlike novel centers around the friendship between Kyungha and Inseon in an intense period of their lives, as they try to uncover personal histories and their connection to what is now remembered as the “Jeju 4.3 Incident.” 45 years after, anyone who would speak of the massacre “was liable to arrest by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) or its successors, followed by beatings, torture, and a long prison sentence administered under the terms of the National Security Law, enacted in December 1948 and still on the books in 1998.” For the author, the inspiration behind the novel comes from her experience living in Jeju villageand interacting with those who witnessed its aftermath. Kang describes in an interview for The Korea Herald how she received a detailed account of the events from her elderly landlady as she was helping the woman carry out a task in town. Similarly, Inseon is told about the massacre by an elder in her community before she starts her research. Much like her characters, Kang’s art is not just a form of self-expression—it is a way to get a better hold of the truth. She does not shy away from detail in her descriptions of the massacre.

“The soldiers were hurling bodies into the ocean, and people lay bloodied, their faces in the sand. At first, I thought they were clothes floating on the water, but it turned out they were all people, dead people.”

She uses her usual harrowing prose to recall events and give voice to people who still haven’t received apologies over 75 years later.

We Do Not Part is the story of two friends, both haunted by ghosts of their nation’s past, intertwined with their own. They seek to escape them through their art but get enveloped deeper into these histories, histories that the Korean government sought to hide. These stories are violent; they bare their teeth and demand attention. First, they rupture the protagonist’s sleep—they come to her in dreams of ice and blood, as rows of dark flooded logs of trees. The dreams follow her in her wake, in the dead of winter and in the midst of summer, suffocating her and inducing migraines, tracking her steps from Seoul to Jeju. To untangle these threads between dream and reality, to expel these hauntings from her body, they find their way to the page, as Kyungha writes about the massacres that torment her. Later they reveal themselves as memoriesof the protagonist’s best friend, Inseon, who has sought to wrestle with the past through another form of narrative—film.

The book starts with Kyungha’s distress and dreams of snow and her attempts to write a book. The image of black trees chopped down, graves covered by water, and the snow— snow that lasts for centuries—are remains of a half-forgotten memory pushing the protagonist to her limits, as it tries to float to the front of her mind. Much like the ‘I Do Not Bid Farewell’ film, the simple images reflect something deeper, a feeling of pain or loss that one can’t quite define. It is unclear where these shifting, uncertain images are coming from, whether they pertain to events witnessed or passed down. They lead Kyungha to spend her days at the library researching the massacre in the town of G—, trying to produce the novel as fast as she can in hopes that once it is on the page, it will cease to haunt her:

“The book came out almost to the day in mid May. The nightmares, unsurprisingly, continued regardless. In retrospect it baffles me. Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively— brazenly— hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?”

For a while, Kyungha considers ending her life, leading her to write a short story about a melting woman made of snow entitled ‘Farewell’. She later deems this an unfit ending. Instead, she contacts her filmmaker friend Inseon—in art, to give these images life.

Inseon herself becomes obsessed with this project. Kyungha’s visions remind her of family history, which Inseon starts to unravel slowly. The novel transforms into an odyssey in candlelight—the pair goes through Inseon’s family history while uncovering what happened inthe Jeju uprising. They piece together the stories but are still unable to identify the bodies of Inseon’s relatives among the 30,000 other deaths. Art becomes the way personal and national consciousness merge, slowly coming to light. Images that start in real life, in memories of others, infiltrate the art and reappear as dreams. Kang’s troubled characters voice phantasms that do not only plague their consciousness. Kyungha tries to limit her writing to her office, to a specific location for a few minutes a day, to isolate it—to keep it from infecting other parts of her life. Yet, she remembers a sensation that was only experienced in nightmares of extreme violence, as a uniformed man pushes a bayonet into her chest. As Inseon recounts her mother’s stories and goes through her family’s archives, she brings to the forefront forgotten memories and rewrites her understanding of them. Simultaneously, through these characters and novels, Han Kang is rewriting collective memory for Korea and the readers who see these events through the eyes of her characters.

More than just speaking up about these taboo events by providing a personal connection between the characters and the massacres, Kang engages with the role of art in truth-seeking. The images and memories are not the only ones that torment—the character’s work torments them too, gnawing until it is pursued. The need to let the truth out, the need to understand, can haunt one just as much as the truth. And once the truth is out—once the pursuit takes place, once Kyungha starts writing, once the film starts rolling—the wound still bleeds. The processes of filmmaking and writing, encompassing the research that the readers witness in the novel, feel like an unfolding of truth. Truth seems to be at the core of what preoccupies both Kang and her artists. Kyungha describes “Inseon’s face as she slowly pieced together her words, like someone doomed to only ever speak the truth” —like an oracle or a prophet.

“In that moment, as though someone has flicked a switch, my dream roars back, so vivid and tangible I stop breathing for a second. The squishing of my trainers, the sponginess of the ground underfoot, the water seeping up from beneath the snow. The tide rising up to my knees in the time it would take to blink, engulfing the black tree torsos, the burial mounds.”

It is impossible to part with these images, the shared memory, the truths these characters are given. Inseon cannot cease researching and filming, even after Kyungha repeatedly asks her to stop. Art can heal as much as it breaks. These artists dig up pieces of themselves and stitch them together again into their work.

Art serves as an attempt to grasp something ungraspable. A shifting thing like truth canonly be approached through a medium that can move with it. Kang’s approach to art confirms this idea—retaking and remaking themes and images until the meaning is unveiled, even between different forms. Remaking and perfecting—not until art can fully resemble life, but until a crux is reached, a feeling has crystallized. Through this lens, the piece of art does not need to be perfect, if anything could even be defined by such a term. In fact, Kang’s flowery prose can at times obscure meaning, rather than enhance it. The piece should be viewed as part of the body of work, like Kang’s installations and collections of novels—together, an inquiry directed to revealing certain truths, in this case, about Korean history.

“Life is exceedingly vulnerable,” Kyungha acknowledges at the beginning of the novel. What will matter when we are gone is the images we leave behind. Kang’s storytelling is truth-seeking as much as history-making. She weaves a string of images through her words, lining them up in the form of a novel. These images will not leave us, they will be remembered.We Do Not Part reminds us why it matters to speak up and try to stick together, even when it snows.

 

The iconography and interiority of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz through the lens of Lili Anolik’s new biography

by Mia Foster

One naked, playing chess with Duchamp, the other, cigarette in hand in front of a white Corvette: Eve and Joan. Their iconic images preceded them, intertwined in our minds as “Daughters of the Wasteland,” L.A. ladies. In her new book, Lili Anolik argues that these women were counterpoints to one another, creating a kind of cosmic balance.

Anolik originally met Babitz in her one-bedroom in West Hollywood, where a ‘black, foul, choking’ scent lingered, and the blinds were closed against the California sun. At the time, she was writing a Vanity Fair article on Babitz. For months, she had been searching for archival material from Eve’s life but, after seeing the state of the apartment, assumed she had hit a dead end. Eve’s archives were probably lost – thrown out somewhere, misplaced in a move, or just victims to Eve disregarding the sanctity of her files. But Anolik couldn’t get Babitz out of her mind. For the next two years, even after the article was published in Vanity Fair, she kept reading about Babitz, thinking about her, falling in love with her. She was obsessed. 

Ever since New York Review Books—famous for their colorful spines and republished forgotten classics—reissued Eve’s Hollywood (2015) and Slow Days (2016), there’s been a revival of interest in Babitz. As Anolik uncovered Eve and her forgotten works of L.A. genius, the world too began to remember her: Jim Morrison’s lover, a Didion protégé, the double Ds in the Duchamp photo, “A Hedonist With A Notebook.” The world would never again forget Eve, with her “movie-star profile” and “cleavage deeper than the San Fernando Valley.” 

All the while, in the depths of a closet, untouched for years, remained a stack of cardboard boxes: the archives. After her death in 2021, that crucial piece of the puzzle was discovered. At the top of one of the boxes was a letter asking “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?” The boxes uncovered a “lost world:” the uneasy and unlikely friendship between Eve Babitz and Joan Didion. 

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7406 Franklin Avenue, a white two-story house with a Greek-columned facade, was Joan’s L.A. home. And it was a scene. Imagine the outsized figures of Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Eve Babitz, Michelle Phillips, Ron Cooper, Harrison Ford, and Tom Wolfe together in the living room. It was the LA of the late sixties. Artists and writers and musicians like Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper, Annie Leibovitz, Jackson Browne, Don Henley, Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Duchamp all spent time in Hollywood. And so did Didion and Babitz: one listening and jotting down notes on a legal pad, the other with a drink in hand, flirting with her subject.

When we think of Didion, we picture the following: “hair parted down the middle and flowing past her shoulders, in a long jersey dress, loose yet clinging. Her expression is defiant, dreamy, maybe a little bored.” There is a severity here, but also an effortless sense of cool. Who you believe Joan Didion to be is Eve Babitz; “Eve is Joan’s ideal self.” The cultural imagination surrounding Didion is wrong. The introduction closes with the realization that “I knew only the Joan that Joan wanted me to know. I’d always taken Joan at her persona, which I’d never, until this moment, noticed was one.” 

In a letter, Eve wrote: “It embarrasses me that you don’t read Virginia Woolf. I feel as though you think she’s a ‘woman’s novelist’ and that only foggy brains could like her.” She goes on to say that Didion distances herself from “Art. Vulgar, ill-bred, drooling, uninvited Art.” For Joan, art is a ladder to be climbed, success intertwined with each rung she ascended. For Eve, art is life, it is “salvation.” It’s everywhere—a field from which she could pick whatever memory and make it into something brilliant. Joan, the ever “sharp, accurate journalist,” couldn’t help but be at odds with Eve, “artist as pinup.”

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While wistful about Babitz, Anolik is realistic about Didion: “She did anything and everything necessary to go all the way. And if she wasn’t squeamish about it, what excuse have we?” We can picture Didion on her Trancas balcony, overlooking the ocean after two bestsellers. In Malibu, she was distant from the world of bohemian chic that made her famous. Now, she was attending parties and hanging out with Spielberg, Keitel, Scorsese, De Niro, and De Palma, eating burgers on the beach. Didion, already a star then, would sit among these little-known Hollywood personalities, always on the outside, always a “distant observer.” That distant observer would write many scripts after her strategic move to Malibu. All her moves were calculated.

Buttoned up and more concerned with keeping her image intact than getting her hands dirty in her art, she was a writer before she was anything else. Anolik paints an unfavorable portrait of Didion throughout the book: Didion, the mother of Quinatana Roo, hosting her daughter’s friends in her apartment, handing guests a drink, silent, and always staring. As she sipped her large glass of vodka (no ice), guests later described the experience as “no picnic.” Anolik describes her as a presence that makes you tense. This vision shows what she was “willing to do for the sake of her writing (anything) and what it cost her in a human sense (everything).” 

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From the start, Anolik admits her bias: “I’ve picked my side: Eve’s. A no-brainer since I’m crazy for Eve, love her with a fan’s unreasoning abandon.” Even so, it is not Eve’s story alone; the book attempts to elucidate Didion but struggles to claw past her cool facade, ultimately accessing only a glimmer of her reality as provided by Eve’s voice.

Anolik’s book is a biography of Didion, Babitz, and their intertwined lives. Only it’s not really a biography. It’s a labyrinthine approach to Joan Didion’s career and Eve Babitz’s life. This split mode of storytelling reflects Anolik’s analysis: Didion’s curation of her persona and writing as her life and Babitz’s life as her art. The book balances Babitzian excess with Didion-esque seriousness. In the first half, Anolik establishes Didion’s influence on Babitz (Didion got Eve’s first story in print and edited her first book), analyzes their images (Norman Mailer described Didion as “a perfect advertisement for herself;” Babitz is painted as “a totemic figure, particularly to young women in the arts”), and illustrates their respective L.A.s (Malibu, bourgeois idyll versus Hollywood, the place of art and weirdness and bohemia). Didion & Babitz does not entertain the previous romanticization of these writers – effortlessly cool, careless, and free. Instead, it addresses the aspirations of these women, the constraints of their friendship, and their contrasting approaches to life, love, and writing. 

The book can feel slanted in its analysis, but what begins as a critique of Didion becomes a balanced approach to the subjects. While Anolik admits that “Joan is somebody I naturally root against,” she also praises her as “sentence for sentence, among the best [writers] this country’s ever produced.” Similarly, she acknowledges Babitz’s shortcomings; when Eve’s drug problems got worse, so did her writing, and without Slow Days, Fast Company “she’d be relegated to literary history’s honorable mentions.” She is not condemning Didion’s ambition and cold-bloodedness, nor praising Eve’s tendency towards excess, but rather attempts to show how these qualities defined their respective careers and lives. In the end, Anolik argues that Didion and Babitz cannot exist without one another; together, they form the “two halves of American womanhood.” In their careers, they feared and longed to be who the other was: an inspired amateur, a true professional. The dichotomy between them lay in their approach to their scenes: “Joan, an observer; Eve, a participant.”

For Anolik, Didion, in all of her chainsmoking splendor, was an image that functioned as an extension of her work. Her “cool customer” aura was carefully constructed, “a contrived act… requiring calculation.” Leaving a funeral to talk with her editor, asking if her grief memoir would be a bestseller, Didion put her writing before anything else. Didion was a stoic: untouchable, rational, and strategically lacking emotion. Conversely, Babitz’s image inhibited her literary success. Her refusal of East Coast seriousness defined her writing but rendered her “Eve Babitz, 23, a strawberry blonde” forever. Unlike Didion, whose legacy was created by viewing art as her career “with rules to follow, a ladder to climb,” Eve made art through the passions of life. The book seeks justice for Eve, unveiling the life that gave Babitz’s readers the sumptuous pleasures of her L.A. of “blue skies and pink sunsets, of rampant bougainvilleas, of beautiful girls and the cruel fates closing in on them.” She shows us Babitz’s life as her art in all of her naked chess-playing, boa-wearing, Dionysian glory; and conversely all of the severity, seriousness, and cigarettes needed to make Joan into Joan Didion.  

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In many ways, Didion & Babitz provides some much-needed perspective to our images of the writers. It is easy to be charmed by the initial likeness and to ignore the people behind them. I used to feel very defensive about Didion, ignored many conservative essays in favor of the photo I had of her in my mind. Anolik isn’t dismissive of Didion as much as she is honest.  

It is easy to pass their writing off as mere extensions of those images, when, really, their writings complicate our visions of them. Didion in all her gravity is diffused by standing in front of the white Corvette, and Eve is easily dismissed as she poses in intimates on the balcony while her writing makes it clear she was an avid reader of Proust.

Beneath my senior yearbook photo reads “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget,” a quote from Joan Didion’s On Keeping a Notebook. At eighteen, I found this to be the best senior quote imaginable. Didion was my Bible. I grew up in Los Angeles and Joan was the only writer I knew who wrote about it with the same opaqueness through which I saw my strange hometown. But as I grew up, Babitz sang a different tune, one that loved LA with a reverence I was jealous of instead of dismissing the strange city as a sign of the apocalypse. Babitz taught me LA was fun, not a symbol of catastrophe, and for that, I’m forever grateful. Anolik’s book serves as a reminder of perspective; one can choose to look at and move through the world in the way Babitz did, and one can conversely choose to strive for success like Didion.  

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Didion & Babitz succeeds in creating vivid, and more realistic portraits of these writers and rejecting the bios that have come before. However, Anolik fails to make these images as vivid and sumptuous as they could be. Their lives, their world, the gossip of it all feels too lush to not be played with more. Joan and Eve are humanized though the text, yet ultimately, Anolik draws them out still as two sides of American womanhood, rendering them symbols instead of people. Still, she has fun with it, bringing the reader into her corner (“Don’t worry, Reader,” “Bear with me, Reader,” “In case you haven’t noticed, Reader”) and gossiping extensively while balancing this with scholarly discourse. I only wish that she had played with their scene and its visceral imagery more, and kept them people instead of making them into contrasting likenesses – I wished it had had a little more of a Babitzian flare, not taken itself too seriously.

Like the epigraph for Eve’s Hollywood thanking Joan “for having to be who I’m not,” the book concludes with the balance they created, impossible for each one to be the writer she was without the other. As Anolik tears down the Duchamp photo and the Stingray negatives, she reveals a more honest image of Eve and Joan. She concludes that “each was the closest the other had to a secret twin or sharer. To a soul mate.” While I don’t know if I completely agree, the two certainly understood each other in ways we as readers never will (but perhaps will always wish to). For me, Didion and Babitz will always embody two visions of what it means to live in LA and what it means to be a writer. As a love letter to its subjects, Didion & Babitz leaves Eve and Joan to stand in all their glory and flaws, forever foils to one another. In the end, Anolik’s biography suggests that once one is rendered an icon, it is impossible to escape becoming a symbol.