A Portfolio (Or something Similar)

Words From the Author

[writtenbylois]

While Sitting at an IHOP

I realized I loved him staring at a stack of overpriced pancakes. And I was only staring at those overpriced pancakes to keep from drowning in his eyes. They weren’t blue, his eyes—you can’t drown in blue eyes. You can dip your feet in, swirl your toes a bit, but you can’t drown in blue or green or hazel. You can only slip, trip, fall into and drown in brown. And I knew this sitting across from him in the tiny breakfast booth of the diner.

           When I caught him looking at me for just a second longer than I was prepared for, I sought refuge in my pancakes. Watched butter spill over the sides as I pushed my fork softly through the top of the mound. Maybe the coast is clear, I thought, taking a breath. But when I looked up, his eyes met mine for just a second before falling to his own food. And I made that split second a memory; sewed his eyes and the warmth of their brown in that moment into my palm to hold against my heart whenever I wanted.

[writtenbylois]

Phoenix Heart

She fell in love with

The echo of you. 

When she saw your skin 

Shining in the light

She loved that, too. 

Boy, she burned herself 

Loving you

[writtenbylois]

The Transfer of Power in Castillo’s Mixquiahuala Letters

Ana Castillo’s novel The Mixquiahuala Letters serves as a staple in Chicana feminist art, exemplifying the intersectional and multifaceted nature of the Chicana feminist movement. The novel is made up of letters written from one Chicana woman, the darker skinned Theresa, to her friend and travelling companion, the white passing Alicia, over the course of nearly twenty years. Much else can’t be said about the plot of the novel, for there are multiple ways of reading it, which Castillo highlights before the novel even begins in a note to the reader. Through Castillo’s choices regarding the epistolary form, perspective, and anti-essentialist undercurrent weaved into the novel, she presents Chicana feminism as a relational movement in which power is relinquished to the Chicana woman.

           The novel opens with an epigraph that is directly followed by Castillo’s letter to the reader, representative of the first transfer of power between not only Castillo and her reader, but white men to a presumed Chicana or woman of color. The quote, taken from Anais Nin’s Under a Glass Bell, reads “I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern” (Castillo, 6). This excerpt foreshadows the themes of sexism and complicated male-female relationships ingrained in the content of the novel, but also the way in which Castillo will push back against those ideas. While Castillo challenges heteronormative, sexist practices and norms by placing her protagonist, Theresa, in precarious situations throughout the novel, her strongest point of attack is found before we learn anything about the characters in her story—right after that epigraph. In a note to the reader and her earliest stroke of anti-essentialism, Castillo offers five ways of understanding The Mixquiahuala Letters based on different modes of thinking.  Castillo tells the reader that her book is not one to be read in “the usual sequence”(9) from first page to last with no ability to deviate from the strict linear way of processing a novel widely accepted and perpetuated by white male creators. The different modes of reading presented—for the Conformist, the Cynic, the Quixotic, and those who want to read each letter as a short story—take large chunks of the forty letters and rearrange them, creating drastically different interpretations of the book. Though it isn’t explicitly stated, there is one more way to read the book; from “Letter One” to “Letter Forty” in chronological order, with no regard to Castillo’s letter. While this act could indicate a reader’s objection to subscribing to a conformist or quixotic worldview, or view of themselves, the reader is taking control of how they ingest the book reflecting an implication of the Chicana feminist movement.

In being anti-essentialist, Castillo allows her reader to direct their own journey through her novel as feminists, specifically Chicana Feminists. Ana Castillo’s anti-essentialism comes in the form of rejecting the notion that any specific group of people, Chicanas in this instance, or things follow the same formula of living. The first way Castillo breaks a common convention of Chicana literature is using fiction rather than memoir or autobiography as a mode of expressing her ideas. By separating herself from the expected, Castillo has the ability to integrate ideas she deems valuable into her piece without having to be dishonest or rely solely on personal experience. None of the experiences of Theresa and Alicia can be devalued as bad luck or pure chance—they were purposefully included by a writer who was cognizant of everything she added to her novel. Castillo wanted us, the readers, to be aware of the intersectionality of Chicana feminism, the ways her protagonist exemplified that feminism, and they ways she fell into the cycle of patriarchal sexism into which she was born. One of the many beautiful aspects of The Mixquiahuala Letters is Theresa’s unreliable narration and the purpose it serves.

Castillo’s use of first person narration in the epistolary form gives the reader an opportunity to see the nuances of Chicana feminism through Theresa’s voice and experiences. Framing the novel in the form of letters establishes inherent intimacy between the narrator, Theresa, and the reader. As far as Theresa knows, Alicia alone has access to the letters, and Castillo uses that privacy to be blunt and vulnerable in her discourse. In “Letter Thirteen,” one of the angriest of the novel, the reader learns of Theresa’s conflicting feelings about Alicia and her multiple identities. The letter opens with the line “Alicia, why i hated white women and sometimes didn’t like you” (49) informing the reader of Theresa’s strong feelings, a divide between her and white women, and Alicia’s position as both an insider and outsider in relation to Theresa’s life as a woman of color. By having Theresa say that she “hated white women,” Castillo allows her protagonist to experience a full catalog of emotions. Theresa is given an opportunity to be angry, to be hateful, and to be imperfect in a way that women of color aren’t often afforded. She isn’t demonized for her feelings, and isn’t static or blind in her rage. Having Theresa express her frustration with the way white, and white-passing, women are valorized by men in the epistolary form gives her the freedom to jump around from idea to idea without censoring her stream of consciousness. The following sentence blames society for the hierarchy Theresa hates, which gives our narrator a full figured understanding of institutional and social factors that have established and continue to perpetuate the norms she suffers as a result of. The full sentence reads: “society had made them above all possessions    the most desired” (49) and not only highlights society rather than individuals as the source of Theresa’s issues, but the reference to white women as “possessions” acknowledges the suffering of the same group Theresa suffers more than.  

The language of “Letter Thirteen,” in all its anger and frustration, intimates a deep understanding of how gender and race work together and apart in systems of power and oppression. This is especially evident in the fourth sentence of the chapter, when Theresa writes that her “husband admitted feeling inferior to them.” This inclusion of the emotions men of color feel in relation to white women and women of color adds another level to exploration of oppression packed into the letter. Castillo illustrates white women in interracial relationships as “dough colored” (49) to shift Theresa’s thoughts and the reader’s attention from the actions and thoughts of men back to those of women, keeping with the feminist lens of the novel. Theresa goes on to discuss how white women fetishize men of color using words like “black pimps,” “savage,” and “bestial members” (49) to magnify the objectification white women can inflict. The duality of Theresa, Alicia, and their lovers—men of color, for the most part—is another important idea Castillo uses the epistolary form to write. Towards the end of “Letter Thirteen,” Castillo has Theresa write about the ways in which she is, or is seen as being, superior to Alicia. She writes, after expressing her frustration concerning the supposed superiority of white women, that Alicia is “not especially pretty and [bares] no resemblance to the ideal of any man [she] encountered” (50) as both a personal attack on Alicia and an acknowledgment of her own privilege. Theresa, the curvy, more beautiful of the two within the context of Mexican culture, implies that Alicia’s whiteness is the only praiseworthy thing about her, discounting their shared Chicana heritage. Despite the malicious intent of the comment, Theresa is taking control of the narrative and how we view Alicia.

    The portrayal of Theresa as a complicated, multifaceted woman of contradictions is another function of Castillo’s anti-essentialism that gives power to the Chicana woman. Castillo proves that there isn’t a single way to tell the Chicana story in the same way that other activist artists do. One such artist is Suzan-Lori Parks, an African-American playwright and essayist who constantly pushes boundaries and challenges widely accepted ideas about how black people should be portrayed in art. In her essay “An Equation for Black People Onstage,” Parks discusses her thoughts on writing for black people and illustrating black experiences in a traditionally white space. Parks writes that “there is no single ‘Black Experience,’ there is no ‘Black Aesthetic’ and there is no one way to write or think or feel or dream or interpret or be interpreted” (Parks, 21) and this assertion holds true in both her plays and Castillo’s works about Chicana experiences. The Mixquiahuala Letters is a mostly English-language novel, living in a space created by white men whose successors would decide that the works of Edgar Allen Poe and Ernest Hemingway are classics, but those of Richard Wright and Sandra Cisneros are great pieces of “ethnic literature.” Castillo’s novel takes agency within a space it normally wouldn’t be invited to by rejecting the rigid tropes presented as markers of Chicana literature. She abandons autobiography for fiction, traditional novel structure for the epistolary, and focuses on dynamic characters rather than representative placeholders whose sole purpose is to explain their struggle to a white audience. Suzan-Lori Parks is a black woman writing for black people, Ana Castillo is a Chicana feminist writing for Chicana feminists, and they both skillfully use language and literature to convey nuances about their communities.

Ana Castillo stitches arguments about intersectionality and systems of oppression into Theresa’s angry “Letter Thirteen” before using a drastically softer tone in “Letter Fourteen” to add even more complexity to her characters and shed light on the love and sisterhood of Chicana feminism. Theresa begins “Letter Fourteen” by addressing Alicia, whom she had deliberately hurt in the previous letter, as “hermana,” (Castillo, 51) the Spanish word for sister, immediately expressing deep intimacy and tenderness. The fourteenth section of the novel is a love letter. Castillo never makes clear distinctions between platonic and romantic love in Theresa and Alicia’s relationship, which only adds to the control Theresa has over her narrative. She is not explaining herself to an “other” but to someone she loves and cares for, which is explicit when she writes “i wish i could have convinced you how beautiful you are” (51). In “Letter Fourteen,” Theresa apologizes for each of the insults she threw at Alicia in the other letter, instead choosing to empower her friend. To combat the comment she made about Alicia’s lack of beauty in the thirteenth letter, Theresa describes the construct that would deem her more desirable than Alicia as “antiquated values regarding feminine beauty” (51) and writing about Alicia’s body outside of the context of the male gaze. Theresa spends time describing Alicia’s beauty in physical terms—her hair, her legs, her fingers—but doesn’t objectify or sexualize her. Theresa does these things to relate to Alicia, who is a painter, in the way a visual artist would view the body with “angular lines,” “narrow ripples of [the] vertebrae,” and “graceful curves of the slender neck” (51). “Why don’t you see that?” Theresa asks, elevating Alicia’s view of herself as the most important perspective to consider. Chicana feminism, as expressed in “Letter Fourteen,” not only calls out oppression, but builds up those who suffer—and sometimes benefit, as white-passing women like Alicia do—form the systems of oppression in which they are immersed.

Another aspect of The Mixquiahuala Letters that works so well to express Chicana feminism is Theresa’s continued use of the lowercase “i” in reference to herself. The same societal constructs that say there is only one way to write novels and to portray woman of color also says that there is only one way to write a strong woman. Strong women often subscribe to characteristics of male dominance. Think of Katniss Everdeen’s blank stoicism in The Hunger Games and how her physical strength and lack of emotion is valorized, especially when she is compared to characters like Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby who are often characterized as weak for their femininity. Ana Castillo fights these traditional ideas about female strength by having her protagonist, the woman who controls all the readers have access to, use the lower, inferior “i” to tell her story. Maybe Theresa doesn’t see herself as strong. Maybe she does, but wants her letters to be more about Alicia and the other characters she describes than herself. Maybe the use of the “i” is a residual effect of growing up in a system that was created to demoralize and undervalue her. Maybe it’s a reminder of how she has overcome that system. Either way, Theresa’s “i” is powerful and important. Theresa isn’t presented as a strong Chicana woman, despite the fact that she is one.

Theresa’s just a woman speaking to her friend about their experiences, and Castillo uses the simplicity and intimacy of those interactions to illustrating an anti-essentialist Chicana story. In Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Equation for Black People,” she writes that essentialism is “a fucked-up trap to reduce us to only one way of being” (Parks, 22), the “us” in the essay being not only black people, but members of all marginalized groups. Parks continues to say that “we should endeavor to show the world and ourselves our beautiful and powerfully infinite variety” (22) which is the goal of Chicana feminism, at least in the way Ana Castillo expresses it. All of Castillo’s decisions, from choosing the epistolary form for her novel to giving her readers options in the way they read the novel, give power to the readers in the same way Chicana feminism relinquishes power to the Chicana woman.

[writtenbylois]

And His Name was Goode

My grandfather died on a Monday night

He was in a hospital, sedated to ease the pain

 My family had already said our goodbyes—the kind that paint nicely on primetime TV

Crisp, rhythmic beeps on a monitor served as the soundtrack to our late night special

None of us cried.

 I had begun to steel myself weeks earlier when we visited him for Christmas

Saw the echo of a soul left in his small, big body. Said all the things I was supposed to,

Staring at a silent telenovela as I held his hand

 I was hosting a sleepover when my phone buzzed

And it was over.

 Just like that

Decades and decades of dirty jokes and dizzy laughter

Gone

 Just like that

“Keep up the faith,” melted into

“Oh one day, you’ll see him again”  

Until we get to forever, I won’t

 And instead of thinking of times he

Lifted me

Bothered me

Ate my sister’s leftovers and blamed it on me

 I’ll see his glossy eyes

Withered and beautiful like the blue veins

His rice paper skin

[writtenbylois]

Goldilocks and the Three Beyers (a modern rendition on the traditional Goldilocks tale)

You remember what happened on Wilson Place that one time, right? Somewhere down the block, around the corner from the Miracle House—the one that was built in a day—a little girl with blonde pigtails learned a very important lesson, kid.

Do you want to learn her lesson? It’s a lesson I learned when I was young, and one your parents learned, too. My older sister told me on a cold morning like this one, when I wanted hot soup and a cookie. You can have one later if you want, but you have to hear the story of Goldilocks and the Three Beyers first.

 A long time ago, before iPhones, Doc McStuffins, and Netflix and Chill, kids like you used to play outside for fun. They’d ride their bikes around the block, or play neighborhood games of hide-and-seek until the street lights came on. Moms and Dads didn’t have to worry about the bad strangers approaching their children, and everybody kept their doors unlocked. It was a wonderful time, or, at least, it’s remembered as such.

 The pretty little house on Wilson Place, the one with a big blue door and white shutters, around the corner from the Miracle House—the one that was built in a day—used to be owned by the Beyer family. There were three of them: John, Emily, and their little girl, Minnie. John Beyer was a tall man with broad shoulders and smiling eyes who always helped shovel the snow or pick up groceries. Emily Beyer was woman with a sunshine face and a heart warm as hot chocolate who made chamomile tea if she heard you had a stomachache. Minnie was simply cute as a button. The Beyers were known by everyone in the neighborhood, everyone in the town, as kind people who would never do anything to anyone. Every Sunday, around two o’clock, the three Beyers made the best chili ever. As they waited for the chili to cool, they’d make their beds, tidy the house, and go for a drive around town, greeting all their neighbors and friends along the way.  

 One day, a new family moved to Wilson place, and with them came a little girl with blonde pigtails. Nobody knows what the little girl’s name was, but everyone came to call her Goldilocks because of that hair. Goldilocks didn’t have many friends when her family first moved to Wilson Place; she missed the kids she used to ride around with from her old home. She would play outside with them the whole year—snowball fights in the winter, races in the spring, pool parties in the summer, and bike-riding in the fall—but she stayed inside most of the first year on Wilson Place. What Goldilocks didn’t take into account was her less than stellar personality. She was the kind of kid your mom told you not to jump rope with, the kid who’d grow up to be the roommate who ate your homemade lasagna without asking. Goldilocks liked to take things first and ask permission later, something you should never do.

 One day, Little Goldilocks and her blonde pigtails put on her coat, wrapped a watch around her wrist, tied her shoes, and grabbed her helmet. Her daddy was outside raking leaves when she stepped outside the house and asked him to bring out her bike.

 “Have fun, my little Goldilocks,” Daddy said, tying his bag of leaves, “but don’t talk to strangers.”

 “I won’t, Daddy.” Goldilocks nodded, placing her helmet on top of her head.

 “Have fun, my little Goldilocks,” Daddy said, throwing the bag in the garbage, “but don’t go where you don’t belong.”

 “I won’t, Daddy.” Goldilocks nodded, climbing onto her pretty pink bike.

 “Have fun, my little Goldilocks,” Daddy said, walking back into the house, “but be back before the street lights turn on.”

“I will, Daddy.” Goldilocks nodded, riding away.

 Goldilocks rode around the block one time, two times, three times, four times before she started to get cold. Her cheeks were rosy as ever, little finger chilled to the bone, and her legs felt like lead as they pushed the pretty pink pedals of her pretty pink bike. She gave up riding and settled in front of a house with a big blue door and white shutters that was around the corner from the Miracle House—the one that was built in a day. The smell of warm chili tiptoed into little Goldilocks’ nose, and she knew that she wanted some.

 What was the first thing Goldilocks’ daddy told her not to do? Yes, not to talk to strangers. And the second thing? Not to go where you don’t belong. You all know you don’t belong anywhere your mom or dad can’t see you, and Goldilocks did too, but she was disobedient.  

 Goldilocks walked up to the big blue door and knocked one time, two times, three times, but there was no answer. Little Goldilocks knew she had no business going into that house, but the smell of chili pulled her in, and she pushed the door. When it opened, she told herself she’d take just a little taste of the chili, and then go straight home. She walked into the house, and followed her nose to the kitchen. Three pots of chili stood on the table. Goldilocks leaned onto the table, took the ladle out of the first pot—Papa Beyer’s pot—and tasted.

 “This chili is much too hot!” she screamed. Maybe the next—Mama Beyer’s—would taste better, it smelled very good.

 “This chili is much too cold!” she spat.

 You’d think that at this point, Goldilocks would have taken the hot and cold chili as a sign that she should just go home, but she was headstrong. She saw one last pot on the table—Minnie Beyer’s—and had to taste it.

 “Ahh,” she sighed, “this chili is just right.” As Goldilocks tasted more and more of the chili, she grew more and more tired. “I’ll just sit down for a minute and then go straight home.”

 Goldilocks walked into the living room, looked at the three chairs and decided to jump into Papa Beyer’s, the biggest one.

 “Ouch!” she screamed, “This chair is much too hard!”

 Sign number one, kids.

 Maybe the next chair—Mama Beyer’s—would feel better.

 “Oh no!” she frowned, sinking into the seat cushion, “This chair is much too soft!” Sign number two, but we all know Goldilocks doesn’t care about signs.

 Goldilocks hoped that the smallest chair—Minnie Beyer’s—would feel good and, of course, it did.    

 “Ahh,” she sighed, “this chair is just right.” Before long, Goldilocks grew even more tired than she was before, and wondered if lying in a bed would make her feel a little better. “Just for a few minutes, and then I’ll go straight home.” she said.

 Goldilocks walked into the first bedroom she saw. One side of the bed was very neatly folded and had one big pillow that looked so comfortable, Goldilocks jumped right in.

 “Ouch!”she screamed, “This side is much harder than the chair!” Maybe the other side—Mama Beyer’s side—would feel better; it had lots of little pillows on it, she thought.

 This little girl is just not taking any hints, is she? At this point, what would you think? You’re already in a stranger’s house. Maybe it’s time to go home?  

 “Not again!” she frowned, “This side is much softer than the other chair!” Goldilocks walked out of the bedroom, disappointed. Only when she noticed one last room did she allow herself to hope that maybe, just maybe, there was one more bed. Goldilocks opened the door and saw a bed she knew would be perfect. She jumped in and smiled.

 “This bed is just right.” And before she knew it, Goldilocks was fast asleep.

 Soon, the three Beyers returned from their drive around town. Mama Beyer wondered who had tasted her and Papa Beyer’s chili. Minnie Beyer wondered why her chili was all gone. Papa Beyer wondered who had been in his and Mama Beyer’s chairs. Minnie Beyer wondered why her chair had a dent in the cushion. Papa Beyer and Mama Beyer wondered who had been in their bed . . . and Minnie Beyer screamed when she saw a little girl with blonde pigtails in hers.

 Goldilocks woke up from the scream and yelled herself, jumping out of the bed and running out of the house before anyone could say anything to her. Goldilocks put on her helmet, climbed onto her pretty pink bike, and rode all the way home. By the time she got back, her daddy was sitting on the porch waiting for her, looking at the street lights flicker. Little Goldilocks was in a lot of trouble, and that was before the Beyers went to her house and told her parents what happened.  That little girl was grounded for a long, long time, and had to work twice as hard as before to earn the trust of the whole neighborhood. That’s the end of the story, kids. What do you think the lesson of this was? Yes, you shouldn’t break into someone’s house. Yes, you shouldn’t eat someone else’s food and sleep in someone else’s bed. But you have to listen to your moms and dads. If Goldilocks had just followed her daddy’s rules, she would have never gotten in trouble.

[writtenbylois]

That One Time I Was A Child Criminal Mastermind

Sometimes I wonder how I didn’t grow up to be a serial killer. There’s a cute picture of me on my family’s barely touched piano. I’m smiling and I’ve lost my two front teeth. I often look at that photo and think “there’s so much evil in those eyes.” I’ve come to a point in my life when I can laugh at the crap I used to pull as a kid, even the most diabolical evils committed against my siblings. One really bad story concerns my earliest memory of my little brother getting spanked.

           I have one of those HGTV-obsessed, do-it-yourself, fancy-couch-buying moms. She takes every piece of furniture in our house very seriously, and has for as long as I can remember. Around the time I was six years-old, my mom bought me a really cute set of lightly distressed wooden dresser drawers for my bedroom. She lined the insides with teddy bear wrapping paper to keep my clothes from catching splinters, and I think she loved those drawers as much as she loved me. My younger brother/partner-in-crime, who was four, shared the bedroom with me. He was a cute little thing with big eyes who, until he started first grade, wrote his name on our dad’s notepads in crayon with the y’s facing the wrong direction. Ryan and I had a hot and cold relationship back in those days. He’d follow me around, take the clothes off my Barbie dolls, and pee on the carpet in our room from time to time. I had a bad, slow-burning temper that included outbursts leading to my older sister’s favorite doll mysteriously losing all its hair and other slightly disturbing things. I can’t remember exactly what my brother did to provoke me, but one day I was really upset with him. I wanted him to receive the worst punishment my mom could give, so I took an orange crayon from my pencil box, walked over to my brand new dresser, and wrote my brother’s name on the side facing the door. The forged signature was perfect, down to the backwards “y.” I can vaguely remember hearing “Mommy, I didn’t do it” trip out his mouth in between tears as he was disciplined for my action.

           I know it’s terrible, but I laughed writing this whole thing, and I started crying from the giggles when I finally confessed to my crime nearly a decade after it was committed. My mom cried when I told her too, out of guilt rather than glory. She hugged the life out of my brother, apologizing to him as I sat in my room, punished, still laughing, and felt equal sensations of remorse and amusement. I’ll never forget my mother turning to me and asking how I could do such a thing to my little brother and laugh. I don’t know the exact reason for my laughter, but I can certainly try to figure it out.  

           In the essay “Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears,” Georges Bataille discusses the reasons for and implications of laughter in relation to human awareness, and the depth of other physical responses such as tears. Bataille writes using his theory of nonknowledge, the idea that we will never truly understand why we find something funny, we must “envision a possibility” (350) of discovering more about the unknowable through investigation. His most basic meaning of laughter is described as “something that reveals that knowledge was not given to us, and that situates itself uniquely as being unable to be attained by knowledge” (135). We laugh in response to change as we move into a state he compares to that of a religious experience after writing that “in every case when we laugh, we pass from the sphere of the known, from the anticipated sphere, to the sphere of the unknown and unforeseeable” (135).

           I wouldn’t say my fit of laughter after revealing myself as an evil mastermind was anything near a spiritual moment of transcendence, but I do agree that my laughter was a result of a rapid change occurring in my life. A secret I’d been sitting with for years, one I had forgotten, had been unraveled by my own hands. I could have screamed, cried, apologized profusely—in theory, any response is a valid response if a change occurs—but my natural reaction was an awkward half-nervous, half-entertained laugh. Laughing in the face of awkward situations is something I’ve done since childhood. Perhaps my laughter doesn’t matter as much as my ability to respond to the change at all. My mom cried when I told her what I had done, and shortly after was more pissed at me for framing my brother than ruining my dresser drawers. Both of us reacted in ways Bataille wouldn’t consider much different. My mother’s tears and anger were not only directed at me, but at herself. Before she knew I’d framed my brother, my mom was completely justified in disciplining him. I imagine she was disappointed in herself for ignoring Ryan’s cries of innocence, assuming he was just another little kid who wanted to talk his way out of a spanking, and inflicting unnecessary pain on her youngest child. My mom was angry with me for being vindictive, finding what had broken her heart funny, and, though I doubt she’d admit it, making her feel like a bad mother. In another section of Nonknowledge, Bataille discusses his issues with the fisherman in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. According to Bataille, the fisherman—the old man—is a static character who constantly fails in his attempts to capture s swordfish, but evolves in no way throughout the story. Bataille writes that “there is something bothersome” (149) about the lack of reaction in Hemingway’s characters. Bataille feels that people can’t help but to convey some sort of physical and emotional reaction to life’s circumstances, whether good or bad, and sees the fisherman as unrealistic. I think, however, people have the profound ability to be more nuanced in many cases. I remember my brother, who was 14 years-old when my secret came out, reacting in a very subtle way. He was sitting next to me on our parents’ bed when I blurted everything out, and his eyes widened as his memories of the event flooded his mind. “I remember that!” he yelled, smiling, before he nudged me and said something to the effect of “that was really messed up.” Ryan, the victim in this situation, laughed as our mom scolded me for my actions, relishing in the sweet revenge karma had given him. I don’t know exactly what was going through his mind, but I’m sure he wasn’t just laughing at my getting caught. Who’s to say he wasn’t trying not to relive the pain of being falsely accused and punished, because he had certainly suppressed the memory of that spanking for a decade. For to return to his mind meant that the emotions associated with it must have come back, too.  

           While I laughed in response to a change when I told my mother about what I had done to my brother, the type of laughter I experienced recalling the event as I wrote it earlier was very different. It didn’t come from a place of guilt or discomfort. I was laughing, and am laughing, as an older, slightly more mature human being thinking of an extremely childish moment. I suppose I could interpret that laughter as a response, in part, to the emotional and physical changes I’ve experienced in over a decade. I’ve grown from a six to eighteen years-old, and my sense of humor has evolved during that twelve year gap. I know that what I did was wrong, but laugh despite that revelation at the gall I had to go as far as forging my brother’s signature to get revenge. I think I’m more inclined to take a walk when I get as angry as I must’ve been in that moment now, not that I don’t think of shaving off eyebrows or snapping skateboards in half from time to time. If I do snap and do either of those things one day, I’m sure I’d feel pretty guilty about it first, and then find myself laughing about it in another ten years.  

[writtenbylois]

Honey Badger Don’t Care...Should We?

Exactly five years ago today, I shared a video titled “The Crazy NastyAss Honey Badger” on Facebook. Five years ago, I was in the eighth grade, and I probably only watched the video because my friends had referenced it in school and I felt left out. All I remember about my first experience logging onto YouTube, typing in “honey badger” and watching the parody is that I laughed, and slowly but surely made my entire family watch the video. My dad made honey badger jokes for the rest of that year. When I was thirteen, the honey badger went from being an animal featured in one of the children’s books my mom used to read me before bed to a hilarious badass mammal I had a newfound, albeit humorous, respect for. As an eighteen-year old, my perspective on the video has changed. I still see the honey badger as the biggest badass of the animal kingdom, and I laugh every time I hear about the honey badger not giving a shit, but my current curiosities force me to examine other aspects of the YouTube production—the environment and characterization of the animal.

           The video opens with the honey badger, a small creature that looks mostly like a skunk, running through the desert in slow motion. A stereotypical cello concerto documentary plays in the background, a loud, heavily New York-accented voice interrupts the montage to say “This is the honey badger! Watch it run in slow motion.” At this moment, six seconds into the video, Randall, the narrator, makes it crystal clear that this is not a nature show that will fit the status quo. There will be no old, British man talking the audience through the mating rituals of the honey badger, discussing the size of its feces as countless children doze off against the shoulders of their grandparents.

The video continues with choppy clips, no transitions or pieces of information more factual than a Guinness Book of World Records reference to the honey badger being “the most fearless animal in all the animal kingdoms.” The honey badger runs through the desert—the slow motion clips have ended at this point—eats a bird, and Randall exclaims “Ew! What’s that in its mouth?” The most famous lines of the parody are first uttered when the honey badger climbs a tree to capture a snake. Randall grabs the viewers’ attention, instructing them to “watch this” before he says, “Honey badger don’t care! Honey badger don’t give a shit!”  The rest of the video consists of Randall’s colorful commentary of the honey badger’s adventures eating larvae and sleeping after a hunt while the cello concerto continues. The parody concludes with a clip of the honey badger eating a cobra as Randall simply states “the Honey Badger.”

What was once a forty-seven minute National Geographic documentary titled “Snake Killers (Honey Badgers of the Kalahari)” became one of the most viral videos in YouTube history as “The Crazy NastyAss Honey Badger.” The qualities that made Randall’s video viral are easy to identify—the surprising juxtaposition between the idea of a dignified documentary and a flamboyant man’s amateur commentary, paired with his strong accent, and the urban sensibility applied to the honey badger as it dodges death and kills animals deemed deadly by humans. Randall adds personality to honey badger by coloring activity that would normally be seen as mundane (running through the desert, hunting, and so on…) with profanity, sarcasm, and vibrant commentary.

One especially memorable moment of the parody is towards the end of the video. The honey badger has successfully captured a cobra, and decides to rip its head off before eating the snake, and Randall, shocked at the amount of blood leaving the cobra, exclaims “ew, that’s disgusting” in the middle of a completely unrelated sentence. Moments like that one highlight the thoughtlessness that also contributed to the video’s success, but I’m more interested in what Randall subtracts from the original video than his additions. There’s also what could be interpreted as an exotic quality to the honey badger’s habitat. Randall never explicitly expresses this, but the honey badger, and the birds and cobras and jackals featured with it in the video, are African animals—specifically from the Kalahari Desert region.

Randall makes no mention of the honey badger’s surroundings; the Kalahari Desert, or South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia (the different countries that desert covers) are either overlooked or ignored in the parody. While this neither adds nor detracts from the comedic aspects of the video, the way it illustrates, or fails to illustrate, the Kalahari may give insight into the deeper implications of the video—especially one so widely circulated. How do viral videos, specifically those originally published on YouTube like “The Crazy NastyAss Honey Badger” craft our ideas about foreign places and peoples? Why, globally, do these videos carry so much weight regarding the way countries like Namibia is viewed by the “west”?

In “Africa on YouTube: Musicians, Tourists, Missionaries and Aid Workers,” a paper featured in The International Communication Gazette, Melissa Wall describes the representation of Ghana and Kenya through YouTube videos, mostly made by Europeans and Americans. Based on calculations taking into consideration the country of the people uploading videos filmed in Kenya or Ghana, the total number of views each video receives, and the focus of the videos (ranging from news to religion) Wall determined that the most popular YouTube videos set in those respective countries were created or released by Westerners.  Wall writes that “YouTube enables the average westerner in particular to become a chronicler of other peoples in faraway lands just as travelers and missionaries ‘discovered’ Africa in previous centuries” (405) suggesting that the imperialist histories of western nations like the United States and Great Britain still impact how Africa is viewed in contemporary media today. Wall writes that while Kenyan and Ghanaian people do film a large number of the videos set in their countries, the majority are made to entertain Western audiences.

This is certainly the case with both the original and parodied honey badger videos. The National Geographic documentary was filmed by David Hughes, a biologist and natural history photographer, three years before the parody was created, presumably, for western consumption. Randall narrates the “Crazy NastyAss Honey Badger” video in English, and uses American sarcasm and profanity to amuse his viewers. The Kalahari region, the area where the famous honey badger resides and the people in that region don’t seem to be at all taken into consideration.

According to Wall, “age-old inequities still exist and still allow westerners to dominate” (405) the narrative of African countries. In both the National Geographic documentary and the YouTube parody, Western men are speaking about an animal native to an African region for the entertainment or education of a Western audience. The way Randall’s video is spliced, edited, and narrated takes away what could have been African qualities from the honey badger and attaches American values to the animal. Randall’s honey badger is characterized with an American grit, a spunk often attached to stereotypically rude New Yorkers. Because they don’t give a shit, neither does the honey badger, according to Randall.

The original honey badger documentary has a completely different tone. The first thing mentioned is the Kalahari Desert and how it is home to “the great predators of Africa” as a lioness is shown dragging a dead wildebeest through the dirt. A montage of the other usual predators quickly follows—two cheetahs help each other carry carnage back to their camp, a hyena trots along with the head of a gazelle firmly grasped with its teeth—until the honey badger is introduced as “the one unlikely creature that may be the most fearless of them all”. The title, “Snake Killers: Honey Badgers of the Kalahari,” appears above footage of a honey badger carrying a cub by the nape of its neck. Granted, the National Geographic video depicts an African area through a western lens, it seems to paint a more complex picture of the honey badger. It’s shown as a fierce hunter, relentless fighter, and caring, protective mother to its young. The honey badger parodied in Randall’s YouTube video is a female, a fact the National Geographic documentary makes clear within the first five minutes of its program. The personification of the honey badger in the original documentary seems more fleshed out, as complex as an animal can be depicted through a human lens.

This isn’t to say that the National Geographic documentary is better than Randall’s parody in portraying an African area. The Nat Geo video features the researchers tracking the honey badger with their guide, Klaus, an African man born and raised in a tribe native to the Kalahari. In the documentary, Klaus is described as “one of the last Bushmen […] who can still read the language of the sands” before one of the researchers says how intimidated she and her partner were by the land until “Klaus came into [their] lives.” While it’s fair to assume that Klaus is, in fact, one of the last Kalahari-born people able to track animals in the desert, the tone of wonder the narrator employs to relay this information to the audience exoticizes both the Bushman and his environment. The researcher’s quote that immediately follows Klaus’ description also makes him seem like a wild, wise foreign man who saves well-meaning white people from the terrors of the desert. Klaus is no different than any mountain man they could have enlisted the help of if they had been trying to observe bobcats along the Mississippi. While the Nat Geo narrator discusses the Kalahari more often than Randall, his discussion of the desert is more about the landscape as a massive, living organism rather than a place where people with unique cultures live.

The common rumor spread describing Randall’s motivation for creating his honey badger video states that he felt the honey badger deserved a more compelling commentary—something that could keep its audience engaged and aware of the honey badger’s greatness. The National Geographic video is much less exciting than the YouTube video, erasing the lighter humanistic qualities being attached to the honey badger. Randall makes the honey badger human in the American sense of the word, witty and crass, without any respect for its African roots, which begs the question—how does one respect African culture? How do we keep from making a continent a country with no respect for the various nations, cultures, and peoples within it?

The original documentary puts the honey badger in a box crafted by countless nature programs before it, viewing the animal as something only useful for observation and analysis, but considers its environment in that analysis. Both depict an African animal through a western lens, giving different qualities to the animal, which indirectly characterize Africa.

Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan author, gives satirical instructions on how to write about African countries in an essay, aptly titled, “How to Write about Africa.” In the third paragraph of the essay, Wainaina tells the reader to “treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals […] or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates,” (92) highlighting the ways in which Africa is discussed as a single place rather than a home to diverse nations, people, and animals. The “Crazy NastyAss Honey Badger” follows this piece of sarcastic advice perfectly, even if it doesn’t directly address the Kalahari during its entire run. Africa is so homogenous that the viewer is left to assume that the setting of the honey badger’s adventures is irrelevant. The clips of African researchers the National Geographic documentary features are left out the comedic video, suggesting the presence of actual Africans in Africa would detract from the humor of a video about an African animal. In another section of the Wainaina piece, he writes that “animals […] must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak […] and have names, ambitions and desires” (94) to push the idea that African animals are generally valued more than African people to westerners. This is exactly what happens in the “Crazy NastyAss Honey Badger.”

Africans are erased from the narrative for the viewing pleasure of a western audience who cares more about a cute animal turning out to be a badass than actually badass people who live in Zimbabwe, Namibia, or South Africa. After all, the video went viral. It has over seventy-eight million views on YouTube as of today, and doesn’t seem to be losing any traction. To be fair, Randall hasn’t ever said that the video was supposed to represent the Kalahari in any way, and the purpose of the “Crazy NastyAss Honey Badger” is to be entertaining, not culturally enriched or informational. The problem isn’t that an American decided to parody a National Geographic documentary set in Africa. The problem is that, once again, a westerner is profiting from what could have been a successful, entirely African piece.

It is possible for westerners to include people from African nations in media in a way that helps or empowers themselves. Louis Cole, a British white dude with dreadlocks and nearly two million subscribers on YouTube, is paid to travel the world. His videos often include cool time-lapses, his quirky friends, and different humanitarian efforts with which he is involved. Last year, Louis and one of those friends, Dave Erasmus, decided to launch The Solvey Project, which sets out to find people interested in a solving major problems in their communities and provide either monetary resources or connections for those people to enact change. Cole and Erasmus released a YouTube video explaining Solvey in detail before going on a world tour to meet people interested in working with their organization, going to countries with little YouTube representation. The first country on their tour in a video titled “Will Anyone Turn Up?” was Ethiopia.

On the rooftop terrace of a hotel, Cole and Erasmus set up a table, two benches, and waited for people to arrive at the meetup they organized. Slowly, as the time to meet came and went, people trickled to the table, mostly in couples, and the group of them began to discuss different issues people in Ethiopia experienced, from colorism to mass power outages. While the meetup was created by Cole and Erasmus, the six Ethiopians, mainly college students, who spoke with them drove the conversation. Afterwards, the students and YouTubers exchanged contact information and created an international network for all members of the Solvey Project through which to communicate before heading over to a local restaurant for dinner. The Ethiopians and Europeans collaborated, and began a dialogue that included the people of an underprivileged area being their own heroes.    

If this could be done for a humanitarian cause, what’s keeping the same collaboration out of the world of comedy? Randall’s ignorance about the portrayal of African countries in the global media has probably contributed to the lack of thought he put into creating his honey badger video, and the parody’s current status as a “one-hit wonder” of the YouTube video is a testament to the effects of that ignorance. Perhaps Randall would have experienced continued success in his animal videos if he had taken time to collaborate with people, as Cole has with Solvey, without losing his voice as a creator, and making a lasting work of comedic art from both a Western and African point of view.

[writtenbylois]

Woman, King

Why does a listening ear, a silk tongue, a sweet smile impress you?

Why do you bow down to him like he is a god?

Don’t you know the difference between mere man and the divine?

 Gold flows through your veins

Your skin sparkles in the sun  

Under the moon it shines so bright

Can you not see your own magic?

 The spirit that hovers over

And out

And in you

Does not need to be understood

 Stop looking

Listening

Yearning for his understanding

Do not ask to be understood

 You are not a girl, not an instrument to be played

When symphonies were meant to leave your mouth

You do not use training wheels to ride around

You fly, woman

 Animals without wings can only comprehend footprints

And you cannot leave them behind

 When his arms come open for you,

Take them

But do not forget

Do not forget the living water native to your bones

 Your body, that body

Broken and healed and strong and spitfire

Your body

Woman

Is your body

Woman

 When he folds himself into your beauty

Do not forget who it belongs to, woman

Do not forget the ruler of your fingers

And your eyes

And your heart

[writtenbylois]

The Power of Language in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World

Suzan-Lori Parks’ play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (“The Death”), elevates a story that could easily wallow in the suffering of black people to a cultural narrative written by and for African-Americans. Using symbolic characters, playing with time, and experimenting with language, Parks flips traditional practices in playwriting and direction upside down. The Death focuses on the space around a black man’s death—the figures who come before and after him, the female figure who cares for him and helps him as he is hunted and slaughtered, and his life after death. Through these events and the two main figures, Black Man with Watermelon and Black Woman with Fried Drumstick, Parks situates multiple black experiences in a way that challenges old tropes, stereotypes, and storytelling traditions. The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, taken at its bare bones, is both an attack on and revival of American theater. Parks’ disruption of theater through her use of language, characters, time, and history heighten the stakes of her work for all who consume it, as well as those who are represented by it. Parks, primarily employing language and sound, challenges the notion that only theater falling into norms determined by white society are inherently more meaningful and beautiful than plays that follow other cultural patterns.

            Parks’ use of sound, specifically in lieu of obvious stage notes, disrupts the traditional theater technique of explicitly written stage direction, reinforcing the importance of spoken language and the audible in her play. By omitting notes pertaining to the appearance, emotions, or inner thoughts of her featured figures, Parks forces everyone viewing and putting on her play to take cues from her dialogue more than anything else, using her power as the playwright encode direction in language and noise.  The only parenthetical notes Parks leaves throughout the script pertain to sound, specifically the ringing of bells to indicate when scenes start and end. “(A bell sounds twice)” is the first note of sound in the play, coming immediately after Black Man with Watermelon, the focal figure of the play, recites his first line “The black man moves his hands” (101). While there is no emotional inflection given to Black Man with Watermelon as far as the literal script goes, the ringing of the bell clues the reader and viewing audience member of the significance of a scene. The bell sounding, whether it be once or twice of three times depending on the scene, adds a layer of continuity to the play that isn’t especially apparent in the beginning as the figures are introducing themselves to the audience and each other. With no explicit directions revealing how, for instance, Black Woman with Fried Drumstick looks at, touches, or speaks to Black Man with Watermelon, the reader and viewer must rely entirely on the dialogue Parks constructs for the play.

           Suzan-Lori Parks’ use of language as both a spell and physical act illuminates the thoughts of her figures and establishes clear differences between the world of her play and the world of its audience to mirror the differences felt by marginalized communities (especially African-Americans) under the white patriarchy. Parks often replaces words like “the,” “to,” “away,” and “of” with “thuh,” “tuh,” “uhway,” creating a vernacular among her figures that sits in a space equally as sophisticated as Shakespearean English and as colloquial as the realistic English of contemporary plays. She also abstains from traditional grammatical structures and completely ignores the apostrophe, which, more for the reader than viewer, creates a stark divide between The Death and the life the reader lives. Parks discusses her writing process and, to an extent, world-building in “Elements of Style,” stating that “words are spells in our mouths” (11), spells that created the world of The Death. Black Man with Watermelon and the figure And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger often repeat the phrase “I would like tuh move my hands,” in the same way someone would desperately pray or recite an incantation until magic is activated. The distinction between the ways the two figures say the phrase is made by Parks’ use of capitalization. The figure And Bigger and Bigger screams the phrase “I WOULD LIKE TUH MOVE MY HANDS” (110), after asking for someone to free him from the electric chair to which he is bound, expressing fear, anger, and desperation. Black Man with Watermelon, conversely, recites his spell with no changes in intonation, indicating resignation and distance. Black Man and And Bigger and Bigger represent different iterations of the same person, not uncommon among characters in traditional theater, groups of people experiencing the same struggle of being black men in American society. The spell they share bears the weight of continued restrictions, pain, and slavery they have been unable to overcome.

The significance of language is explored further when Parks writes that “language is a physical act” and that “each word is configured to give the actor a clue to their physical life” (12) in “Elements of Style.” Parks’ interesting employment of words, punctuation, and language structure serves the actors more than explicit stage direction could. Parks continues to say that “the action goes in the line of dialogue instead of always in a pissy set of parenthesis. How the line should be delivered is contained in the line itself […] The Greeks did it…” (16) explicitly stating her reasoning for the absence of direction. Her reference to the Greeks highlights the revival of classic techniques through her destruction of widely accepted theatrical norms.

Instead of subscribing to the expected idea of theatrical beauty being found in written direction or exposition concerning characters, Parks embraces a writing style that could be seen as confusing to a reader of the play. She relies on movement and sound, signaled by the encoded dialogue she writes, to direct the actors portraying her figures. These figures physically mirror each other, most notably in the second panel, when And Bigger says “Would somebody takes the straps off uh me please? I would like tuh move my hands.” (113), to which Black Man replies “Now kin kin I move my hands?” The function of unique language in The Death acts as a double-edged sword in this instance, with the word “kin” being used as a phonetic substitute for “can” as well as carrying the weight of its actual meaning—family. Parks’ seemingly simple modification of traditional language adds thick layers to the interaction between And Bigger and Black Man, as well as their functions throughout the play. Along with the rest of the figures of the play, And Bigger and Black Man are not characters, but beings meant to flow in and out of time, creating a complicated relationship of influence and familiarity between them.  Black Man’s reference to And Bigger as kin establishes intimacy between the figures as well as the mutual destiny and destruction of black men of old and black men of the present day, while also suggesting that the spell Black Man utters morph into a curse that follow And Bigger and Bigger.  With absolutely no stage direction or parenthetical citation, Parks’ language stands on its own.

The figures Black Man with Watermelon and And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger of all the figures live in the gray area of being representatives and characters with stakes that extend beyond the circular timeline of the play. They almost serve as foils for each other—both are confined, by either chains or objects in their hands, for nearly the entire play, and both figures die. A lot of And Bigger and Bigger’s lines echo or foreshadow Black Man with Watermelon’s: “Would somebody take these straps offuh me? I would like tuh move my hands!” he screams (116) not unlike Black Man’s continued cry “I would like tuh move my hands.” (109). Both express similar sentiments of discomfort within their worlds and represent oppression over time in ours. In the production of the play, the direction and costuming of the figures—Black Man in traditional, slave garb and And Bigger in modern, urban dress—alert the viewer of the differences of their situations without taking away from the continuity of their lines. In relation to one another, they represent the transition of the black man from slave to prisoner, trying to make sense of their immoral deaths in the figures they leave behind. As figures, they’re allowed to move in and out of linear time, to exist outside the lines of life and death traditional characters usually cannot.

Parks continues to abandon popular theatrical conventions through her use of “non-traditional” language in a speech recited by the figure called Queen-then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut, a representation of African peoples before white obstruction, during the second panel of the play. “Before Columbus thuh worl usta be roun” (115) is the opening line, perfectly setting up the themes of the speech. “Before,” “Columbus,” and “be” are the only traditionally spelled words in this line, and the placement of “Before Columbus” and “thuh worl” illustrates the wall Parks creates between her figures and the audience. Queen-then-Pharaoh, as portrayed in the Signature theater production of the play, quickly changes tone after saying “Columbus,” verbally indicating the change in the spelling differences convey on the page. She continues to speak, saying “They put uh /d/ on thuh end of roun makin round. […] Without that /d/ we could uh gone on spinnin forever” not only giving a name to the white people who came with Columbus, but also the destruction their colonialization initiated.

The choice to reference white people as an unspecified, general “they” opposed to “Caucasians” or “Europeans” others them in a way that gives power to the figures of the play, as well as the group of people who inspired their creation. This way, the black community remains the focal point of the story rather than a weak group overtaken by mighty, awe-inducing, and all-consuming white supremacy. It is also worth mentioning that traditional spelling is only used in discussion of the actions of white people and the negative repercussions of those actions. “End,” “gone,” and “forever” stand out as words of negativity or permanence in Queen-then-Pharaoh’s speech, contrasting with “worl,” “roun,” and “spinnin” which are viewed in a positive light by the speaker. The world of the figures was spinning without an end before the arrival of the “they,” before Columbus sailed the ocean blue and momentarily halted their progress, culture, and lives. One of the major effects of Columbus and the infamous “they” is magnified upon examining the only figure who breaks from the pattern of unorthodox language: Prunes and Prisms. Prunes and Prisms uses “proper English” as taught and forced onto other groups of people by white supremacy, a form of English the presumed white or white influenced audience of The Death would be accustomed to hearing and understanding. The white patriarchy, as a result of white male scholars and educators making the distinction between “the King’s English” and all other forms of the living language, suggests that anyone who deviates from that form of English is inferior and subservient. Dialects spoken by people of color, from Ebonics to Chicano English, are often targeted as indicators of a lack of education or intelligence. Parks pushes against this notion of white supremacy by using vernacular speech patterns and spellings in her play with each of her figures except Prunes and Prisms.

           Through the figure Prunes and Prisms, Parks further “others” an audience used to white patriarchal traditions, presenting the traditions of their form of English as disgusting and abnormal, while normalizing the black world of the bodies in The Death. Prunes and Prisms, played by a young woman with straightened hair who wore prim, proper white knee-high socks. Her lacy white gloves dripped with respectability politics as she delivered a jarring line in the second panel after another one of Queen-then-Pharaoh’s speeches. Enunciating every word, the figure tells the others to “Say ‘prunes and prisms’ 40 times each day and you’ll cure your big lips. Prunes and prims prunes and prisms: 19” (113) magnifying the figure’s consciousness of herself as being separate from the white standard of beauty. Prunes and Prisms represents black assimilation to white standards, rejecting any semblance of her “blackness.” Her “big lips” must be “cured,” because, along with her dark skin, it is seen as a curse or disease. The audience learns of Prunes and Prisms’ internalized racism most overtly in the line above, but throughout the play, her affectation of eloquence gives subtle clues that stage direction stating her self-hatred could not. Suzan-Lori Parks’ destruction of beauty is similar to that of Laura Mulvey,’s as theorized in Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” All the things Mulvey suggests should be done to take away from the patriarchal beauty of cinema is done in The Death. Laura Mulvey writes “it is said that analyzing pleasure or beauty destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (2) before leading her reader on a journey that situates film and its consumption within the framework of phallocentrism and sexism. Mulvey implies throughout the article that progressive film should actively work against the assumed male gaze, which Parks does by othering white people and ignoring the assumed white gaze of audiences consuming the work of people of color. Speaking in the form of English one can assume the reader or viewer has been taught to deem the most acceptable, and therefore the most beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, makes her an outsider in the world of The Death, very much like the audience. Creating discomfort for the audience forces them to be empathetic with the figures of The Death, and their painful, confusing experiences.

           All these disruptions to the classical theater form strengthen the message of The Death, and take away the beauty of a creative outlet that had previously been dominated by the oppressor. Movements like #OscarsSoWhite have inspired a flurry of films made in both mainstream and independent film and television spaces to improve how people of color are represented. Most notably, the FXNetwork series Atlanta uses classic tropes of black representation in television in its depiction of a rising rapper and his friends to give a social commentary on racism, sexism, homophobia, and other issues through a black lens. Parks does something similar in The Death, deciding to reframe the narrative with her language rather than using expected methods of gaining attention for black figures or characters in theater. She doesn’t highlight whiteness or white objects of desire as ultimate aspirations as many plays written about the black experience have in the past. Both Shakespeare’s Othello and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, follow orthodox methods of portraying black people and culture in different ways. While Othello is novel in featuring a black man in the 16th Century as the protagonist, he falls into the stereotype of the violent black man killing the sacred white woman whose love for him is suggested to only be a result of bewitching. A Raisin in the Sun centers on a Black American family whose ultimate goal is to move into a home in a white suburban area—whiteness is the ultimate in this circumstance, and the struggles of the Younger family is palatable to a white audience. Suzan-Lori Parks neither falls into stereotypes nor writes to keep a white audience free of guilt.  In twisting the beauty of theater—the original camera lens—through her rejection of stage direction, traditional language, formal character, Parks cements The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World as an experimental classic that opens the door for discussion about black culture and representation in traditional art forms.

  Works Cited

Parks, Suzan-Lori. "The Death of the Last Man in the Whole Entire World." The America Play: And Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999. 99-131. Print.

Parks, Suzan-Lori. "Possession." The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. 3-6. Print.

Parks, Suzan-Lori. "Elements of Style." The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. 6-19. Print.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. 1999. Print.

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[writtenbylois]

I Wrote This Crying Over a Mukbang Video

It hurts. 

This hurts. 

I’m hurting. And disappointed. 

That you’re always on my mind when I know you don’t belong there.

That I feel your eyes in my silence. 

These are bitter words for bitter tears

And you don’t deserve them

So I’ll swallow them. Wash my face. 

And you’ll never know. 

[writtenbylois]

The Second Draft of a First Chapter

Moon River rippled through their home the night Hepburn Wallace was conceived. It’d been an otherwise uneventful day. Rosie spent the afternoon flipping through pages of her high school yearbook. Mr. Wallace went to work, ate leftover spaghetti for lunch. Little Fred and the other boys were with their grandmother.

           The summer sun bronzed Rosie’s skin to an even darker brown than normal while she walked their Yorkie around the block. Its name was Puppy—Little Fred’s idea. Puppy wheezed every two blocks, hiked his little legs at all the oak trees in the neighborhood. Rosie sneezed at this, cursed the dog, and dragged him along, trying and failing to remember why Mr. Wallace got the damn thing in the first place.

           All she could think of was the way his collar hung around his neck that morning. Like an origami noose. He kissed her on the forehead before driving off into the sunrise. There goes Frederick Wallace Sr., bringing home the bacon for Rosie and the boys. How wonderful.

           Thinking of his starched, white collar wilted her. She leaned against the front door, twisted it open, and blew in. Puppy rubbed up against her legs, still wheezing. Rosie pet him, very briefly, before deciding they both needed water.

Ice clunked into Puppy’s silver bowl slowly, licking Rosie’s fingers on their way down. Puppy’s nub of a tail wagged, shaking his whole body like a plucked string the moment his tongue kissed the water. Rosie swallowed a whole cube of ice, stood up straight.

           For the first time in a long time, she had the house to herself. No little boys running or jumping or shitting on her hardwood floors. No one smudging her books with blood red Toaster Strudel gunk or begging for Daddy to come home. No one screaming “Mama!” a name that, after so many years, still felt like someone else’s. Rosie settled into her solitude with the shadow of a smile on her face. She kicked off her shoes, tip-toed to the bedroom, and didn’t close the door on Puppy when he followed. She traced her yearbook photo, cringed at the bangs and acne—the droopy eyes she wished had been the product of inebriation and other things of high school lore. She’d been reading late the night before. The last time she stayed up late reading was when she found out she was having Little Fred.

           Big Fred walked with her to the library, they didn’t have a car back then, and looked up the price of diapers as she picked up every pregnancy book she laid eyes on. The pee hadn’t dried on the stick when they left their shoebox of an apartment. Rosie felt a quickening in her womb the moment Frederick pulled the test out its brown paper bag. She read about gestation and whooping cough and every kind of deformity she could find as Fred pretended to sleep. He tried to remember if he saw any high paying job openings in the paper that morning, thought about the blue house he’d driven past a few days back. Was it still for sale? Maybe he could build a nice picket fence around the thing, paint it white?

           Little Fred and his brothers had defiled that fence with melted Popsicle fingers and crayons a week earlier. Mr. Wallace brought out paint to correct the blemishes, but Rosie stopped him. Later. Do it later.

           She remembered the art her little boys had ruined her fence with, noted the complementary blues and oranges they used. Little Fred’s finger painting was the largest of them all, a smiling figure seeming to wave at the Sun. It wore sunglasses, naturally. Linus’ piece was a gray blob of mixed crayon wax, melted into the fence from the heat of the afternoon. Henry had made something with some artistic promise, used his Popsicle stick to make a solar system of polka dots. Rosie took a Polaroid of it, hid it in her journal, and made a note to look into child art classes. Maybe she and Fred would have the money to pay for it once his deal went through. Maybe she’d have time to get a job—the bookstore would be nice—or go back to school.  

           Puppy’s squeaky yelps yanked Rosie out of a slumber she didn’t realize she’d fallen into. The excited pat-a-tat of his paws on the floor dragged her out of bed.

           Mr. Wallace pushed his shoulder into the side door, checked twice to make sure it was locked before taking off his jacket, dropping his bags. He squatted down, cupping big brown hands around Puppy’s face, just long enough for the dog to reverently press its wet nose against his cheeks.  

           “Hello, Mr. Wallace. How was your day?” Rosie rubbed the sleep out her eyes with her ring finger. She pulled a biscuit from the top of the fridge to give to Puppy once he was done with his master.  

           “Long, long, long. Not too bad, though.” he said, giving Puppy one last pat on the head as he stood. “The-microwave-broke-Jim-took-that-big-meeting-with-the-couple-I-was-telling-you-about-the-spaghetti-was-delicious-even-cold.”

           “Jim met with the McCoy couple? The couple you spent damn near three weeks taking shit from?” She wrapped and unwrapped her fingers around the biscuit one by one. “Jim Moore? The guy who’s only at the firm because he’s Mr. Perry’s nephew, Jim Moore? Didn’t he fuck up the last three accounts he was given? You’re the top earner in your department.”    

           “It wasn’t his fault, really.” Fred said, shrugging off his wife’s outrage. “Boss switched our accounts.”

           “Wha. . . did he give you a reason, Wallace?” Her nails dug into the biscuit. Puppy licked up the crumbs that fell to the ground, tail wagging. “He had to have told you why, right?”

           “Mr. and Mrs. McCoy asked for another salesman.”

           “Bullshit. You had lunch with them a few days ago. It went well—you said so yourself.”

           “I thought so, Rosie.” Mr. Wallace stuck his finger into the space between his neck and noose, scratching his Adam’s apple. “Apparently, they felt I was intimidating. Something to do with my stature.”

            “Wallace, you said Mr. McCoy was at least 6’4”. That makes no. . . ”

           Mr. Wallace closed his eyes at the sound of her voice trail off, blinked for what felt like a long time. When he opened them, Rosie was staring at him, face splotched with dull pinks and reds. Puppy hopped on his hind legs, reaching for the biscuit, a low whine rolling out his mouth. Mr. Wallace shrugged. Rosie felt her bottom lip tremble. Puppy’s whine evolved into a yip, quick and pointed—the kind Little Fred would giggle at with his brothers.

           Puppy’s doggy biscuit exploded against the door, right next to where Mr. Wallace’s jacket was hung, smack dab in the middle of the window. Rosie was a great shot; walked into the living room without checking to see if she made her mark. Puppy quickly gobbled up the broken pieces and removed himself from the kitchen.

           Mr. Wallace pulled two bags of popcorn out the weathered kitchen cabinets, whistled a song his mother liked to play through the house. He couldn’t remember the name of it. A Billie Holiday tune about fruit or something.

“Rosie!” He tilted his head towards the living room. “Wanna watch a movie tonight?”

           Silence.

           “Watch a movie with me, Rosie.”

           Sniffling.

           He slid one popcorn bag into the microwave, pushed his index finger into the start button.

           “Rose, I’ll even sit through one of those old ones you like. What’s that one you really like? It’s based on a book? Breakfast at where? Persnickety’s?”

           “Tiffany’s.”

           His ears perked. Puppy trotted over to the door into the kitchen, looked up at Mr. Wallace. Mr. Wallace looked down at Puppy.

           “What was that?”

           “Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Wallace, with Audrey Hepburn. It was a novella, not a book.”

           “Oh, yeah, of course! How could I forget?”

           The microwave timer radiated through the kitchen, kernels still popped as Mr. Wallace pulled the bag out. The smell of butter and salt and familiarity tickled his nose, warming him like two hands on the face. He poured the popcorn into an old mixing bowl, threw a piece into his mouth, and popped the second bag into the microwave.

           “Fred!” Rosie’s voice, clear and peppered with enough annoyance for her husband to relax, travelled to the room. “You didn’t rewind the movie!”

           Mr. Wallace poured the other bag of popcorn into the mixing bowl and walked into the living room with Puppy behind him. Without missing a beat, he placed the bowl into a nook in the couch, and tinkered with the VHS player. Rosie sank into the fuzzy cushion, trying her best to ignore the spit stain on the spot right next to the popcorn. Fred settled next to her as the movie’s opening harmonica rendition of Moon River began, kicking off his shoes and placing an arm around her shoulders. Ten minutes in, Mr. Wallace pulled off his tie, rolled up his sleeves, and actually relaxed.

           “Can you do anything about the account?”

           He tensed.

           “Well, I can’t get it back, if that’s what you mean, Rose.”

           Click. Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard froze on the screen in Technicolor. Rose Wallace rubbed her nail into the spit stain, punctured the rough fabric of the couch.

           “Do you have any idea what this thing meant for our family? What it meant for me?”

           “Do you have any idea what this meant for me?” he asked very quietly, slowly sliding his arms from her shoulders.

           She pushed herself to the furthest corner of the couch, biting down on her lip. For the first time in a long time, she had no idea what to say to her husband. He was staring at his hands, hands weathered by sweat and blood and low-paying part-time jobs to keep the lights on. Fred never complained, though, not about a single thing he had to do. Such a saint, but so damn resigned to slavery. Too resigned, Rosie thought to herself, crossing her arms over her chest. She married a man she knew would love her, a man who had loved her and their children without hesitation. That’s all she wanted when she was young, scared, and alone in the world.

           Fred felt the weight of Rosie’s eyes on his face, crumpled under the pressure of her gaze, but said nothing. She would speak eventually, he was sure. If he knew no one else, he knew his wife. She would come back, she would get over it, and maybe he would be able to do the same. He folded his hands together, squeezed them until his palms were white, and counted the seconds it took for the color to creep back into them. Sometimes, when no one was around, he would see if he could do the same to his arms, his face. Over and over again he squeezed, that Billie Holliday song echoing through his mind. “Strange Fruit”, it was called. And he was swinging.

Puppy wiggled over to Rosie’s feet, climbed over her toes and nuzzled her ankles. He whined when she ignored him, hopping on his hind legs relentlessly.  

“Remind me why you got this damn dog.”

Fred patted his knee, beckoning Puppy over to his master.

“The twins wanted one. They asked nicely,” he murmured.

“It wasn’t Little Fred?” she moved closer to him on the couch, eyes on the dog. “The twins could barely speak the year we got Wheezy.”

“Well, they made their wishes very clear. Their brother wanted to side with you, as always.”

“But he named Puppy.” Finally, she dropped her hand to Puppy’s head, scratching behind his ears and up and down his scalp.

“That was after he met him.” Mr. Wallace loosened his tie. “The twins wanted Puppy before they knew how to say so properly. I could see it in their eyes.”

Rosie moved away from her husband, pushed the side of her face into her hand.

“Fools.”

“Linus and Henry?”

“No, no, no.” Black curls bounced as she shook her head. “Your boss and that couple. Damn fools for not seeing you.”

And they were, really. At least as far as Mrs. Wallace was concerned. He stared at her, big brown, almost black, eyes daring not to move from her face. The light from the television reflected off his skin, which shined as weathered, polished leather in moonlight. In that moment, they both believed the lie that everything would be okay. Her hands found his face on instinct, he leaned into them on principle.

“Intimidating . . . what bullshit.” He was the softest person she’d ever felt. The warmest. “I just wish you got what you deserved. I wish you knew what you deserved.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her fingers fumbled with the buttons on his shirt collar until he was free.  

“Don’t be sorry, Freddy. You’ve done nothing but exist.”

She smelled flowers when he kissed her, enveloped her in his arms, and forgot about the things they couldn’t control. Puppy crawled into the kitchen to look for more biscuit crumbs as the kisses deepened. Nobody bothered to stop the movie when the credits began to roll. Rosie decided that the child they made that night would be their last—it’d have to be. If born a girl, her named would be Audrey.  

[writtenbylois]

I Promise this is not Moana Fan Fiction--a prologue

You were the best thing that happened to me. I remember the night he was born, as young as I was, like it was yesterday. That’s not entirely true, but nothing will erase the sight of warm, golden candles pulsing in darkness from my mind. I remember the taps of rain hitting the old green rooftop of our house, which I used to think was so big. I remember looking out the window, and watching black waves crash against the sand as Papa held me against his chest. I remember crying, hearing Mother cry out in pain. The sound of her shrieks was a claw ripping down my back. I remember focusing on the waves, wondering why nobody else seemed worried. Papa pressed his lips against my forehead. He smelled of salt water and sweat. Over and over again, he told me “It’ll be over soon, my girl. You’ll be a big sister.”

For some reason, I can’t remember much after that. Papa told me I should try to sleep, sang an old tune in a language I can no longer understand as he rocked me back and forth, aligning with the rhythm of the waves. “Wake me up, Papa” I remember saying against his shoulder “Wake me up when the baby is here.” He promised he would.

I must have fallen asleep soon after. Papa shook me awake. I heard the door swing open, slid off his lap when a faceless woman cried “A boy!” Papa patted me on the head and ran into the birthing room. The entire compound had run over, too. I heard a knife being sharpened, for your cord, I think. A friend gave it to Papa to cut for you. Gosh, Papa was so excited as the nurses cleaned you up. Uncle grabbed me, placed me on his shoulders so I could see Papa hold you. This I will never forget.

Papa held you in his arms, smiling wider than I’d ever seen before. His smile faded, like someone snatched it off his face. The room got very quiet. The nurses stopped singing their old songs. And when Papa put you down, little brother, he slit his own throat.  

[writtenbylois]

Something Resembling a First Chapter

Four letters, three meanings, two syllables—one name. I wear it like a crown and a curse. My mother saw the name in an old book when she was pregnant with me, probably went through every encyclopedia in Papa’s store until she found its definitions. Hope, aspiration, expectation. As a child, I assumed my parents named me Amal with hope in mind. My name always rolled off their tongues with an upward intonation, I closed my eyes and thought they were smiling when they said it. Even when I was being scolded, a part of me loved hearing it and knowing what it represented.

“Amal, my girl,” my father told me, “When you were born, I looked up at the sky, and it was blue again.”

I never failed to laugh when he said that. I would be doing something mundane—organizing a bookshelf in the store, completing a math problem for school—and he’d pat my shoulder and talk to me about blue. I never paid much attention to his words, though, not at first. He said them so often that their weight began to fade. I was my father’s blue sky girl. I didn’t have a problem with my title for a long time.

My mother cried when I showed her the grade on my first exam. It was a spelling test, and I received a perfect score. “Look, Tarek!” she screamed, holding the flimsy piece of paper high in the air. “One hundred percent! Our daughter, our Amal, so smart!”

Papa put the down paper he was reading and ran to my mother, pulled the test from her hands gingerly, and held it over the flickering candlelight on the table. He didn’t say a word, traced the scarlet “A” written next to my name, and pressed his thumb to his lips. Mama gave me a cookie, one with raisins and chocolate and caramel bites, which I devoured with a smile, watching my father stare at that exam. I was licking melted chocolate off my fingers when his eyes finally found me. His hands were rose petals against my cheeks, his kiss a plant blooming on my forehead.  

** *

My mother was angry with me the last time I saw her. She was screaming out words I’d never heard her use in my direction as I sat with my knees to my chest, curling into myself. Her voice broke as tears welled in her eyes, the same I eyes I have. She screamed even after her voice was gone. Papa wasn’t around to calm her down.  

I had come to know my mother as a woman of beauty and grace, shoulders back, head held high. She wore rosy lipstick that brought out the pink in her butterscotch skin. She always had little flowers in her hair, usually white ones that shined against her thick black coils. I picked them for her as a little girl.

“Thank you, baby,” she said, even when I gave weeds as an offering. She somehow managed to make them look wonderful before my eyes. I was in awe of her, always fantasized about how my brown kinks would hold roses and lilies. When I got older, she taught me how to braid them into my hair before telling bedtime stories. I heard so many stories about princesses and towers—Mama sort of sang them to me. Sandwiched between the tales of princes and white horses were also stories of justice, of struggle. And she sang those stories just as loud.

“Never forget who you are, where you come from.” Her soft fingers massaged my curls. All the princesses in my bedtime stories had thick hair like mine, brown skin like mine. “The best princesses are strong and smart. They know how to stand up for themselves and others. They become queens when they grow up.”

I saw my mother as a queen. I imagined her walking through our village with a golden crown and scepter, teaching me to one day do the same. With age, that illusion deteriorated.

She said that she could no longer recognize me. Her eyes bore into me.

“Who are you?” she asked for the first of many times.  I held myself closer, stared at the letters in her old, worn hands. She had spent hours reading them aloud, shocked at their content, but composed. Words I silently ingested like sweets before supper spoiled against my ears. I groaned watching her drop each note on the floor, one after the other, until only one remained. I heard her read the first two words, and then nothing at all. Her mouth snapped shut. I remember the feeling of her silence, the weight of it on my chest. The envelopes, all signed E. Clough, mocked me from the ground. Mama probably read over that last letter three times before rolling her eyes to mine. She asked me all her peaceful questions—those of confirmation, certainty, and decision—without saying a word. My answers came the same way. I saw the steam come out her ears, braced myself for the burns I’d surely get from her boiling overflow. Then the screaming started. And ended.  

“He will ruin you.” She said very quietly, palms placed lightly on her forehead.

My body shook at the sound of her leaving, a shiver ran down my spine when the door clicked softly. I wanted it to slam. I wanted to feel anger, bitterness, but I sobbed. I sobbed that whole night.

***

I was afraid the thick layer of blood on his face belonged to him, and my heart dropped when I realized it didn’t. It was like he was wearing a mask, the only patches of visible skin being the pink under his eyes, as he slumped, hands shaking, in the old chair my father built one summer long ago. I remember trying, and failing, to weave daisies into a flower crown as Papa sanded the wood, sang songs he promised to teach me when he finished. I was humming one of those songs to distract myself from the violence I heard outside my home that night. There was screaming, yes, but the faint sounds of last prayers and calls for loved ones that crept in from the outside world were more terrifying.

And then the door knob slowly, painfully, twisted. The door whined against the weight of Eoin’s entrance, moaned as he stumbled in, mumbling something incoherent. I helped him into a chair with trembling arms, tried to ignore the sick smell of burnt skin I knew would be stuck in his hair.

I felt him look up at me with black eyes under the flickering light candles in the room’s corner. My fingers were stained red, wet from the worn rag I pressed against the rough skin above his eyebrow. Somehow, blood was stuck there, too. I avoided his gaze, using what was left of my energy to keep from vomiting. The pieces of grime I scrubbed off him settled under my fingernails. They had grown too long. I was proud of myself for resisting the urge to bite them for months, but in that moment, with blood and dirt and sweat caked under, I knew I’d have to cut them down to the quick. All that work, for nothing. . .

After wringing the rag over what was quickly becoming a bucket of murky water, I began to address the other half of Eoin’s face, paying careful attention to the little cuts that must have come from debris. I rested my free hand on his cheek for balance and, without thinking, didn’t remove it when he leaned in, lips brushing the center of my palm. I could’ve moved away when his trembling hands made their way to my waist, planting themselves on my dress finger by finger, waiting for my rejection. I heard his breath catch, allowed myself to look him in the eyes. My name tumbled out his mouth in a soft mumble, a tone that rang comfortable to my ears, much different than it had a week earlier.

***

We met on a Friday afternoon—the day before my eighteenth birthday. The sun was setting and I was walking back from school alone for the first time in months, neatly labelled textbooks pressed to my chest as I passed through Main Street. I kept my eyes down, just as my mother had told me, ignored the jeering of the imperial officers leaning against bar entrances. The sickly, beer-flavored promises of pleasure they threw at me stuck to my body, irreverent tattoos I’d received time and time again. I was disgusted, but too scared and too smart to say anything back. I felt my parents push me along in those moments, thought of seeing them at home and pretending the regular danger I faced didn’t actually exist. Catcalling, I would soon learn, was the least of my worries with these soldiers.

My eyes were pulled up by the murmurs of a gathering crowd two blocks from my home. A girl in my class, Zahra, had been found in the river. Her name meant radiant, full of life, and she was. She whistled on her way to school, leant me her notes when I was sick. Her body was soulless, naked, and bruised when they pulled her out. We all knew what happened. We all knew who did it. We all knew that there was nothing we could do.

They had the guns and the food and the power to make any one of us disappear. At least, that’s what I’d heard my father say at the meetings he held in our basement. That’s what he said that Friday night. Our history was dying, being stolen away by the thief in the night.

“We cannot even teach our children to tell our stories, to speak our language, to read our sacred texts.” Papa held an old book up in the air, waved it like a flag as the other people at the meeting cheered him in hushed praises. “These invaders, bringers of enlightenment and death, tell us that our ways are not good enough, our words are not good enough. But our resources are theirs for the taking. Our women are theirs for the raping. We mean nothing to any of them.”

I clapped at that meeting, ignoring the distant expression on my mother’s face as she did the same. I wondered how an entire group of people could be so despicable.

And my mind floated back to Zahra; the image of her brown skin sucked dry by the river. Gray and cold as the undertaker whispered our rites of the dead over her body. A priest came shortly after, cutting through the crowd of villagers surrounding her as they repeated the chants of the undertaker. He threw a sheet over her corpse, cursed our gods and prayed to his as she was lifted by soldiers with expressions I thought were too calm, and taken away. They hadn’t even waited for her mother to come, to say goodbye. She’d be buried away in their way, blessed for their gods, and distant from us for the rest of time. Her mother should have been able to say goodbye.  

When Zahra’s mother finally arrived at the riverbank, I ran. Didn’t want to hear her wail as so many mothers before her had. I ran, pounding my loafers on the ground, ignoring the sweat that seeped through my uniform. I threw the door open, fell into my home, and unraveled. My eyes squeezed shut, mouth became a tightly covered jar of cries as my hands tried to stifle them. Papa was probably in the basement preparing for the meeting. Mama had no doubt gotten word of Zahra and was either praying about it, or finding a way to blame her for her own death. I could hear Mama asking if I’d seen her talking privately with any soldiers, putting herself in harm’s way. It made me sick.

Kicking off my shoes in between bouts of crying, I wondered when either of my parents would emerge from wherever they were. I’d have to be clean and calm by the time they did—a prim and proper representation of our family; my parents’ hopes and dreams finding solace weighing down on my shoulders. On days like that one, it was especially hard. It could have easily been me in that river, and all those expectations stuck in the depths of the water. . .

A brisk knock upon the door snatched me out of my thoughts. And there he was, maybe two years older than I, standing with three textbooks tucked under his arm. Pale pink skin, jaw clean shaven, kind eyes I didn’t expect from someone in a military uniform. But he was all business, perfectly erect in posture and straight faced. I froze, suddenly feeling so small.

“Good afternoon, would these happen to belong to you?” He tilted his head towards the books, brought his eyes to mine.            “Yes,” I said in a more hoarse voice than intended, opening my arms to receive. It must have taken him by surprise, quickly followed by a wave of realization that rippled through his face, kind eyes.

“You knew the girl in the river, didn’t you?” He placed the books in my hands gingerly, cupping his palms under mine for just a beat longer than necessary.

“She was a friend . . . but that doesn’t matter.” I whispered. “It’s not safe for any of us anymore.”

“I’m sorry. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.” He paused. “I. . .I don’t like the way things are being handled, the way my brothers are acting. It isn’t right. I’m very sorry.”  

I took a step back, rested my hand on the doorknob, and settled into the silence between us. I knew he meant well, but his uniform meant more to me than his condolences.

“My name is, uh, Eoin Clough.” He pointed to the pin above his front pocket. “If you need anything or feel scared, you can come to me. I promise. And I’m a man of my word.”  

I nodded, slowly closing the door with no intention taking him up on the offer.

***

He was pacing, arms tightly crossed above his chest, hands firm and steady. I watched him from my bed, perched on the edge.

“You have to leave.” He said with a firmness I’d never before heard. “It’s the best bet, the safest bet.”

I blinked, I think, digging my fingers into the flat mattress I tricked myself into believing wasn’t completely devoid of anything close to comfort. Safety was the last thing on my mind, especially in that moment. The sweet smell of burning coal and beeswax had been moving through my village for days; blacksmiths were busier than they had been in years. The spot where my father’s old gun stood was suddenly vacant. My mother started fasting, tuning out the sound of her rumbling stomach with high praises and worship songs. Villagers I’d barely seen crowded outside my house late at night to talk to Papa in low whispers about how to make provisions for their children. I lay in bed listening to them, tasting iron and bile as my thoughts betrayed me, brought me to him.

“I’m staying. I’m staying right here for whatever happens.”

“I won’t let you.”

Heat crept up my ears. I didn’t try to keep myself calm.

“My mother warned me about this. You’re all the same. Weak and strong and pathetic. God, I chose you. Over everyone. I have chosen you time and time again despite everything and I am stuck with you.”

“Fuck you.”  

The words dripped out his mouth smooth as honey, sticking to my skin like thick molasses. We stared at each other.

“Everyone is dying and you’re upset with me for being honest with you? Unbelievable. People are dying—my people are dying because of you. Because you and your brothers stomp on our land and sling your guns in our faces and say that everything that is ours suddenly belongs to you.” I felt my voice cracking, took a breath.

“You won’t let me stay with those who are still alive? . . . I suppose you can force me to evacuate. That wouldn’t be uncommon for people in our situation, would it?”

He stalked away, twisting my door open, and closing it immediately after. A sharp pain split my head when I stood up. I clutched my torso, held back a gag.

He turned back, sighed against the wall.

“This is as easy for me as it is for you, Amal.” he tapped on the dusty green shell of his helmet absentmindedly. “I don’t want to put you in a bad position.”

“You might not have wanted to, but you did from the very beginning.” I dropped down onto my bed, spent, trying to remember where I’d put the bucket I’d been throwing up in all day.

“Eoin, I have never truly been safe with you. And that’s a fact we have both failed to acknowledge.”