How many householders meet in
a whorehouse?
How many mujras dwell in a kotha?
How many neonates hew to a bordello?
Like her admirers
the god is silent.
In her sinews
hides a hint of soil
from the yard of courtesans.
Category: Aquifer
Cosmos Obscura
Warning: This video contains flashing images.
Score by Irina Escalante-Chernova
In Cosmos Obscura, the universe is at once known and unknowable. New patterns, rhythms and metaphors are born from old ones, and familiar celestial bodies are refracted into strange and unusual forms. The visuals were created from photographs taken from the Voyager II spacecraft. Photographs of the planets and their moons were abstracted and animated in order to create various patterns, rhythms and images.
The musical work was originally created for 8 channels and subsequently adapted to the stereo version. The music focuses on the work from different backgrounds with the noises of nature and those which have an electronic source.
Monads and the Cosmic Jigsaw Factory
My scientist friend—his name’s Adam but he spells it “Atom”— calls me about the latest breakthrough. He says physicists have discovered a new subatomic particle. His voice is urgent, almost cracking.
I say, “I’m tired of spheres. Tell me this new particle is noodle-shaped.”
He says, “Monads, they’re called monads. They don’t have a shape, but they might have a soul.”
I’m no conspiracy theorist. Still, sometimes I get the suspicion that the scientific community is really a secret society of comedians who get a kick—a 2,500 year-old kick—out of human credulity.
Atom is out of breath. He says he has to go, but he’ll keep me updated. He makes it sound like he’s right there, in the midst of the action, his hands touching the lever of a particle accelerator, his eyes obscured by fancy goggles. I use the word “scientist” somewhat liberally. Atom teaches AP Physics at a charter school.
*
When my wife and I were still doing marriage counseling (a year before our divorce), Atom was full of suggestions. He kept championing the need for proximity. He’d call me up and say, “Are you close? I mean, you know, close?” He’d suggest that my wife and I take a sample of each other’s blood and put the samples under a compound microscope, and then—as husband and wife—spend time marveling at the shifting landscape within, how each drop of our blood was a unique eruption of lentil-shaped lava.
On some level, I think he was right. My wife and I were failing because we had run out of topography.
*
The next day, Atom calls up again. This time, I stop him mid-sentence and say, “Soul? I think I misheard you yesterday—did you say monads have souls?”
He says, “It’s complicated. At the very least, monads have perception. Not to mention appetite—”
“Jesus, they get hungry?”
“More like inclination. Or desire. They long.”
There’s a lull on the phone. On Atom’s end of the receiver, I can hear clinking glasses and a droning electronic voice, as if Atom’s at happy hour with Stephen Hawking.
I say, “Look, it just doesn’t sound very, uh, scientific—”
“What?”
“All these metaphors.”
“Actually, at the subatomic level, nonidentity is the norm. Nothing is what it seems, and thus metaphors are the most accurate form of language we physicists have at our disposal—”
Atom’s voice is drowned out by cheering, even wild abandon. Wherever he is, it sounds like a team has just scored.
I say, “So, uh, what do they want?”
Atom says, “Who?”
“Monads.”
“Omniscience.”
*
To be fair, it’s not just Atom who’s monad-struck. All the media outlets—NPR, CNN, FOX, even ESPN—can’t get enough. Monads this, monads that. Despite being infinitesimal, monads are bigger than sliced bread. The title of one article reads, “Sentient Particle Added to Our Subatomic Zoo!” Oddly, it’s not the first time I’ve heard the whole zoo analogy. After my wife and I split, Atom wouldn’t shut up about quarks and leptons and gluons and all those other subatomic “animals” that escaped from the primordial zoo.
Atom said, “The Big Bang was the first prison break.”
I said, “You’re mixing your metaphors.”
He said, “Imagine how many inmates we’ve yet to tag.”
It dawned on me later that Atom was talking about women. Other women. Soul-bonding with particles that were not my wife.
*
Atom keeps calling. Sometimes I wonder if I’m Atom’s only friend. He strikes me as the kind of person who believes friendship is monogamous.
He says, “The perception of monads is directed inward, not outward.”
I say, “Omniscience—I don’t understand—how does a particle seek omniscience?”
“Monads are navel-gazers. Each monad is like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle: its own existence belies the contours of its neighbors. Thus in studying its own being, each monad is in fact intuiting its cosmic neighborhood.”
Atom goes on to describe how monads understand the world concentrically. Monads reason from self to neighborhood to neighborhood’s neighborhood, etcetera.
It all sounds a bit alarming. Like an invasion. Minus the green humanoids with laser beams.
*
I rub my eyes into the wee hours of the night. Everything is out of focus except negative space. A hat suggests a head. An outlet, a plug. Contours become clues. I imagine my body as one gangly, oversized monad: it too is a jigsaw piece with a shape that suggests a connection. What connection? I only know the answers that are incorrect. All the hands I thought my hands fit into.
You get this sinking feeling when you turn forty—alone forty, divorced forty, table-for-one forty—you get this sinking feeling that the cosmic jigsaw factory made a mistake. A manufacturing error. Honestly, I think Atom knows this feeling all too well. I think it’s why he won’t stop calling. The cosmic jigsaw factory expresses its deepest apologies. No one’s perfect, it says. But the truth is, well, how to put it? Your piece was shrink-wrapped in the wrong box.
The Collector
Broken Models
Rachel Poliquin, in her 2012 book The Breathless Zoo, writes that “Taxidermy is deeply marked by human longing,” revealing our hopes and dreams about our place in the natural world. Natural history dioramas present a carefully constructed, perfectly encapsulated and controlled experience of nature, revealing as much about humanity as the nature depicted. In Broken Models, Steensma Hoag negotiates access to dioramas in various stages of being decommissioned and uses these fictional spaces to create imaginary scenes. By introducing a worker wearing a white Hazmat suit, which evokes images of advanced technology labs in which the environment needs to be protected from the worker, the series suggests a scientific method of understanding and quantifying our experience of nature and comments on our failed construction of the environment as an inexhaustible resource.
What’s It Like to Be a Feminist?
Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2017
Paperback, 299 pages, $26.95
Start with the assumption that feminists are angry, pushy, unhappy, irritating, willful, stubborn, insistent, loud, shrill, disruptive, hypersensitive, and humorless spoilsports, policing others’ words and making unreasonable demands.
It isn’t a pretty picture.
Go one step further and call feminists ugly. Pretty women are cheerful not angry, agreeable not pushy, happy not unhappy, accommodating not willful, acquiescent not stubborn, deferential not insistent, modulated not loud, soft not shrill, socially inconspicuous not disruptive, sensitive but not hypersensitive, good-natured not humorless—they are cheerleaders who go along and get along.
Accept these assumptions.
Notice that resistance will simply reinforce them. Say, “No, I’m not,” and you are, once again, being willful, shrill. Calmly and patiently explain what’s not funny about a sexist joke, and you are, once again, an irritation. Demonstrate that your feminist demands are not unreasonable, and you are manifestly pushy. Modulate your voice and try to be socially inconspicuous; when your ideas are ignored and your work overlooked, you will speak a little louder, draw a bit more attention, and confirm that you are, as everyone already knew you to be, stubborn, a disruptive presence. Assert yourself, proudly rebuking prettiness as a bland and artificial mixture of complacency and conformity, and you will appear all the more garish and difficult to countenance. The more forcefully you resist, the more alienated and alienating you become.
Feminists live trapped by these perceptions—that we are angry, unreasonable, ugly.
In her new book Living a Feminist Life (2017), Sarah Ahmed offers a compelling view of what it is like to live inside this trap. By looking from within the subject position of the feminist (who may be known as the nasty woman, the uppity bitch, the difficult colleague, the crazy aunt, the unruly girl, the mad woman), she reveals why it is so hard to be a feminist. That is, she reveals why the interpersonal, emotional, and epistemic position of the feminist is so challenging to occupy. Ahmed’s phenomenological exploration of the life of the feminist will undoubtedly offer solidarity to feminist readers, who will nod, wince, and exclaim in full recognition of the situations Ahmed describes.
The title might suggest that the book is a primer for feminist ideas, history, or analysis; it is not. If anything, the book takes for granted a reader who is already educated or experienced in feminism. But it is also not a book whose goal is to redirect feminist attention to particular cultural and political ills in need of feminist analysis or activism. Neither an introduction to feminist thought, nor a contribution to more traditional feminist scholarship, the book is, by design, difficult to characterize. Stylistically, Ahmed combines academic reference and literary analysis with personal anecdote in prose that wanders and loops, sometimes repetitively, over concepts and associations. The effect is that of having caught the author in the act of creation, of watching how she unwinds an idea or observation. The text is interrupted at intervals with bold-faced fragments; not sub-headings or section markers, these bits of language appear like echoes of speech (e.g., “poor him”), physical gestures (e.g., “rolling eyes”), or affective signposts (e.g., “flinch”). Their presence signifies a poetic impulse to imbue the text with a lived and living presence, not standard in academic writing. Reading this book is more like tracing a butterfly’s meandering course through the air than like watching a jet plane’s trajectory. But this is one fierce, unflinching butterfly.
In a sense, the book is an intellectual autobiography: It explores how Ahmed, an influential and highly successful author who has published nine books, navigated her way through a career in academia and developed theoretical tools out of her own experiences as a woman of color, a feminist, and a lesbian. The book showcases several ideas Ahmed first presented in other texts, including the “feminist killjoy,” “sweaty concepts,” the “willful subject,” and “stranger danger.” Revisiting them here, in the context of sharing her personal experience, she demonstrates that “the personal is theoretical.”
By parallel to the more familiar slogan, “the personal is political,” Ahmed suggests that personal experiences are felt in the particular ways that they are because of the theoretical frameworks that give them shape and that theory is constructed in the way that it is because of the personal experience of the theoretician.
Consider first an example that is not directly feminist. If you live in a capitalist society, you may experience shopping at a mall as pleasurable. You may look forward to it, enjoy perusing the fashions, looking for deals on sale racks, or splurging on an item that beckons with its sparkly new-ness and promises to define or improve your image. Your experience includes positive feelings of anticipation, reward, and affirmation. Your excitement about purchasing is a function of several key concepts—money, disposable income, competitive pricing, bargain-hunting, credit, debt, and worth—which arise from an economic system shaped by capitalist economic theory. If your credit is bad and you have no disposable income, you may have negative feelings associated with shopping at the mall—disappointment, embarrassment, envy, stress—which, of themselves, can be understood as reinforcing the positive shopping experience as the normative ideal to which you aspire. Theory shapes experience.
But experience also shapes theory. And it is from this angle that Ahmed’s book offers its most arresting and crisply articulated insights. She describes how being perceived as stubborn and difficult in conversations at the family dinner table enabled her to develop the idea of the feminist killjoy, the person whose feelings and aspirations are out of line with patriarchal norms and expectations. The feminist killjoy doesn’t laugh at sexist jokes and doesn’t want to partake in patriarchal rituals, heteronormative practices, or norms of femininity. She doesn’t have the same affective inclinations as those who are not feminists, and her difference is experienced by others as disruptive, sour, disagreeable. (To return to the earlier example: It’s like being the person who complains bitterly about the vulgar greed, banal aesthetics, shallow consumerism, unthinking conformity, and sweatshop labor that are represented at the shopping mall. . . capitalist killjoy!) By giving name to the figure of the feminist killjoy and articulating the dynamic in which she becomes trapped, Ahmed constructs a theoretically useful tool.
Similarly, by considering her experience as a brown woman stopped by the police while she was walking in a white neighborhood, Ahmed exposes how the cautionary tale of “stranger danger” relies upon assumptions about race and color that have nothing to do with being a stranger or an outsider, let alone an actual danger. If she is perceived as a sun-tanned white woman, she is not deemed a stranger, not a potential danger; whereas, if she were deemed non-white, a person of color, her presence would signal caution, fear, anxiety, interrogation. The link between “stranger” and “danger” is a construct that disguises forms of racism, colorism, and xenophobia. From personal experience, she seizes an insight that has theoretical utility.
It must be remarked here that the kind of theory Ahmed has in mind is that which appears in certain styles of academic discourse. It is the sense of “theory” that may guide work in English literature and cultural studies, philosophy, sociology, humanities, history, classics, and other areas where academic writers develop sophisticated means of describing and making meaning out of human life. Acknowledging the way in which personal experience may become a resource for the construction of such theoretical work defies the purported objectivity and neutrality of such discourses.
This defiance shows up in Ahmed’s book in two further, significant ways. One concerns her use of pronouns. She employs the first-personal “I,” indicating the subjective perspective of the author. If there are truths to be communicated by the author (and there are), they will be presented without the protective cover of typical academic style, which minimizes the first-person. For example, the preceding paragraph began with the phrase “it must be remarked,” which obscures my presence as the writer, replacing “I must remark” with a phrase that makes it seem as if the decision to remark comes from the ether and is beyond accountability, rather than coming from me. (Here I am, for the first time in this essay. Did you notice my absence?)
But Ahmed also alternates with the second-person “you,” where the “you” affords her the “distance” to discuss certain personal experiences, for example of sexual violence. The effect of this “you” is not only to shield the author in some of the most vulnerable passages, but to invite the reader to recognize her own similar situatedness, her own experience of being doubted or distrusted or of being, as a feminist, trapped in an interpersonally and rhetorically pressurized position. You know the feeling of the quicksand: The more you struggle to free yourself, the more forcefully it threatens to pull you under. (You.)
If the theoretical and the personal are interlocked, and if the personal is political, then the practice of academic citation—which authors and texts are adduced as supporting evidence, as worthy of dispute, or as valuable predecessors and truth-bearers—is itself implicated in the construction of our worlds: a world of personal experience, a world of theoretical interest and influence, a world of political action. Ahmed is explicit: “In this book, I adopt a strict citation policy: I do not cite any white men. By white men I am referring to an institution [. . .] Instead, I cite those who have contributed to the intellectual genealogy of feminism and antiracism.” It is a good thing Ahmed is not up for tenure! Here, her defiance of academic tradition and institutional authority, and their claims to objectivity, is plain. As so many women academics know, failure to engage with “seminal” and canonical (white male) literature is indeed deemed failure; to succeed is to follow in the path of those who have gone before you, and those who have gone before were, by and large, not feminists or anti-racists. (We might even go further to say that insofar as those who went before were feminists or anti-racists, they thereby disqualified themselves from participation in the institution of white men; that’s just what it means to say that “white men” can be understood as an institution, rather than a set of persons who were, merely incidentally, white and male.)
I would like to think that we can strike a middle-ground, that we can continue to engage with the writings of white men, who are among our literary and academic forebears, even if the aim is to critique their work, while at the same time learning to read, discuss, take seriously, and cite works by women, people of color, and others who have been excluded or marginalized. (Did you notice? Now that I am here, in my own essay, I am not going away.) But at the same time, I laud Ahmed’s decision about whom to cite in Living a Feminist Life: Her decision enacts a possibility; it performs the title’s task and the book’s subject in a way that may not be imitable for many women in academia today but sets an important precedent. Brava!
Yet for something to count as a precedent, there must be subsequent instances, which raises the problem of how to alter not just academic citational practices but the larger arenas in which “white men” is the name of hegemonic cultural and political power. In this book, Ahmed returns to a discussion of “diversity work” begun in her 2012 book, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press). Diversity work, for Ahmed, has two, related meanings. In one sense, diversity work is “the work we do when we do not quite inhabit the norms of an institution.” The work involves, for women, people of color, and the disabled, negotiating expectations and “passing” as “something you are assumed not to be,” such as knowledgeable, competent, informed, reliable, intelligent, authoritative, or scholarly. Once again, Ahmed articulates the difficulty of “being” for those whose “legitimacy is in question” in the context of an institution, like a university, where women or people of color are not only minorities, but bring life experiences, interests, and literatures that have not been built into institutional practice. Like being trapped as a feminist, the diversity worker is trapped by the fact of her being anomalous, by the simultaneous demand that she assimilate to institutional culture and that she be the public face of diversity, and hence of divergence from institutional culture. Ahmed brilliantly describes the experience of being worn down by the effort (emotional, interpersonal, epistemic) required simply to exist when you are not, by virtue of your embodiment or identity, proximate to the norms of white male culture.
The second meaning of “diversity work” is the work that institutions hire people to do (usually women and persons of color) to try to transform the institution, to make it more diverse, and to redress problems of sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism. In a book replete with incisive observations, it is Ahmed’s discussion of diversity work in this second sense that I found most necessary. I have encountered no other text that illuminates so well the fact of institutional resistance to the diversity work that institutions themselves initiate.
Ahmed details how decisions are made via committees, but never meaningfully implemented; how recommendations for policy are made, then ignored; how the actions taken to measure the extent of the problems (how many faculty of color? how many allegations of campus sexual assault? how many grievances filed?) are perversely repurposed as evidence that the institution is resolving the problems. The diversity work that is done, in good faith and with great effort, by designated diversity workers is co-opted to represent the institution in a good light: Look at all we are doing! The mechanisms and procedures used for assessing the diversity problem seem to replace confrontation with the root causes of the diversity problem. The rubber never hits the road. Ahmed calls the phenomenon “non-performativity: when naming something does not bring something into effect or (more strongly) when something is named in order not to bring it into effect.” For those of us that have done diversity work, cynicism is an occupational hazard, not a temperamental proclivity. Notably, Ahmed resigned from her faculty position at the University of London in 2016 to protest the university’s failure to respond adequately to the problem of sexual harassment on campus.
Is it any wonder, then, that feminists are unhappy? If being subject to gender oppression didn’t make us unhappy to start with, being perceived as unreasonable, humorless, and unattractive when we speak up against gender-based injustice will almost certainly make us unhappy. Finding that our sustained efforts to transform institutions are futile (even institutions that have hired or appointed us to do this very work) will make us unhappy.
As Ahmed argued in her 2010 book The Promise of Happiness, we are guided by social norms toward activities, practices, and relationships that do not necessarily yield happiness, but offer a socially agreed-upon vision of where you are supposed to find it. The important thing is not that you achieve happiness, but that you feel that you are approaching it by following the proper route. For example: college, job, marriage, kids, retirement, grandkids, travel. Deviate and you will be unhappy.
Even if, by some marvel of personal fortitude, meditative achievement, or luck, a feminist manages to live happily—brimming with cheer and optimism, surrounded by warm friends and loving family, peaceful in the pursuit of meaningful projects—she will nonetheless be cast as unhappy, for she will fail to inhabit at least some of the cultural locations in which happiness is believed to reside: She may be unmarried (unhappy in love!), childless (the sorrowful deprivation barely requires comment), showing her age (if only she would keep herself up, sigh), working in a male-dominated profession (why does she want to do that?) or otherwise living outside of the mainstream norms of femininity that offer the promise of female happiness.
The feminist will be moving through institutional spaces and organizations that do not welcome her or share her values. And if she manages to do this affably and with equanimity, she will nonetheless be cast as an unhappy figure insofar as she asserts her feminist ideas and ideals; she will be pitied, excoriated, or ostracized on account of having willfully ceded her own best chance at success. If happiness is promised to reside in participation in these institutions, it will be said, the feminist has only herself to blame if she obstructs her own chance at fitting in by criticizing or seeking to reform the institution. Cast by others as an unhappy person, the feminist becomes a source of unhappiness for others; her presence is felt as negative charge.
Smile.
Many feminists have explained the sources of their anger and unhappiness: We are agitated about being underpaid, undervalued, disrespected, ignored, politically disenfranchised and under-represented, economically exploited, culturally oppressed, sexually assaulted and harassed, sidelined, disbelieved, silenced, demeaned, abused, and, so often, slain.
Read through that line-up again, slowly. Let the last word fall into place as the logical conclusion of all that precede it.
Much feminist work has been done, by activists, journalists, writers, and academic scholars, to expose the patriarchal institutions, sexist culture, and misogynistic social norms that pervade society. Feminists have documented the situation of women through historical study, literary analysis, anthropological research, economic data, empirical psychology, biological and neurobiological scrutiny, review of legal systems, even philosophical argument. Armed with expertise and facts, feminists assert their claims and suffer the backlash. Ahmed’s thoughtful and bold book explains what it is like to live as a feminist, what it is like to occupy a position that is, in a patriarchal world, intrinsically oppositional. As a feminist, one is always out of tune with mainstream society, always coming up against walls.
In what strikes me as a sad irony, the book could serve as an explanation for why so many women are not feminists and don’t want to be called feminists. Acknowledging feminist claims is by itself an emotionally harrowing experience. Remember the line-up: underpaid, undervalued, disrespected, ignored, politically disenfranchised and under-represented, economically exploited, culturally oppressed, sexually assaulted and harassed, sidelined, disbelieved, silenced, demeaned, abused, slain. Once those claims are acknowledged, the work of living a feminist life adds more emotional and interpersonal demands. Every day. All the time.
Breathe.
Ahmed closes Living a Feminist Life with two sections titled “Conclusion 1” and “Conclusion 2,” no doubt to avoid the potential trivializing that would come from calling them Appendices. Conclusion 1 comprises a “Killjoy Survival Kit,” offering comments on how feminists can find strength and comfort in feminist community, feminist books, feminist humor, and more. This “kit,” more an invitation than a conclusion, is a good resource, especially for young feminists.
Conclusion 2 is a “Killjoy Manifesto,” another great resource for young feminists or feminists feeling isolated, lost, or ambivalent as they deviate from the path of femininity and heteronormativity, and its false promise of happiness. Here, Ahmed enunciates a number of “principles,” each of which begins with either I am willing or I am not willing. For example, principle five is, “I am not willing to get over histories that are not over.” I especially appreciate the brevity and distillation of this Manifesto, and the way these principles are not presented as unyielding rules. Ahmed’s focus on willingness, the ability to recognize the existence of one’s own will and to assert it in resistance to whatever is antifeminist, leaves wide latitude with respect to exactly what, how, and when a feminist summons her will. Principles of willingness afford the flexibility that allows individual women and men to enact their feminist commitment in their own ways. Yet the Manifesto provides a common language for conceptualizing and justifying one’s feminist acts and bolsters feminist courage.
The Killjoy Manifesto may be just what the contemporary moment needs. The #MeToo movement, which was galvanized following Trump’s election, inspired women to give personal testament to their experiences of sexual harassment and assault. This uprising of women’s voices incited thousands of uncomfortable conversations—for the women who spoke up, for their husbands and friends, for their employers and co-workers. The willingness to be the cause of social discomfort is no small achievement for so many women who have been socialized to smooth things over, to deny their own pain, and to sacrifice their own well-being in order to keep the peace at home or at work.
Among the charges that women face when they bring forward allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of classmates, colleagues, employers or others is that they are being selfish, careless, or malicious. They are asked, Why do you want to destroy his life? Set aside the fact that for some women (not all), their experience of sexual harassment or assault has effectively destroyed their lives, causing lasting damage to their emotional well-being, professional reputation, career prospects, vocational or educational opportunities, or family relationships. Set that aside. The question gets its unnerving force largely because women are not supposed to be agents of destruction. To destroy is to exert power and influence, a masculine prerogative. Women are supposed to create and nurture, not destroy. Ahmed’s Killjoy Manifesto encourages women to be willing to destroy systems of white male privilege and the violence they produce. No, feminists are not encouraged to engage in literal, physical violence or killing. But they are encouraged to kill the patriarchal practices and institutions that have been held up as the route to happiness; when this route protects men who assault and harass women, it must be denounced. If taking down a powerful man on account of his sexual misconduct (crime, violence, cruelty, misogyny) makes people unhappy, so be it. Better to kill that foul joy, founded on corrupt behavior, deception, and systems of dominance, than to sustain the silence that perpetuates the misery of women, individually and collectively.
Ahmed sees more clearly than most, I think, that feminism is essentially radical. Her writing offers creative and incisive tools by which to understand and respond to the demands of feminist living. To free ourselves from the trap, we must be willing to. Feminists have explained why they persist, why they insist: We won’t accept anything short of full and equal regard for our fundamental humanity. Almost is not good enough. Better than it used to be is not as good as it should be.
Raise your arm, raise your voice.
Rich Gold
Aquifer shares this story in conjunction with
Anna Levi’s visit to UCF on February 4, 2019, 7:30 p.m.,
Foxtail Coffee at the UCF Bookstore.
Please also see our interview with Levi.
This evening when I woke up, Chino was gone. Not a sight of him selling crack on Cow Head Road. There was something different about that morning. The rain came with rage in a vengeful way for the first time in two months. Force-ripe baby breadfruits dropped into the canals whenever the wind struck. Bedsheets slid off the lines straight into the muddy gutter. Some girls were woken up by the growls of the thunder and, one by one, they ran out the rooms with their half-naked selves to save their towels, panties, and bras off the clothing lines.
There were fifteen wooden and rusting galvanized-roof shacks in the yard of the brothel. Each room had a thick mattress on the checkered black-and-white linoleum floor; a small speaker box; a small lattice window; a small round mirrored ceramic face sink; a suitcase; a brass vase of dying red hibiscus flowers in the right corner of the floor; an aerosol spray of floral air-freshener; a roll of toilet paper on a shelf; and burgundy lace curtains all balled up in a knot to allow air to freshen up the rooms. Rainwater leaked through some of the roofs straight onto the mattresses.
Chino’s mother, Sita, property owner of the brothel, who lived in the same yard with us, came over, dragging a large blue tarpaulin, gasping for breath and occasionally spitting on the floor. Chickens ran towards her gluey mucus and they picked at it like grains. She dropped the tarpaulin in front of my bare feet, scratched her grey coolie hair, flickered thick white dandruff from her fingernails into the air, then she placed her left hand on her hip and pointed her right index finger in my face and said, “Look here gyal, just cover de place until this rain dry up and come see me after. Ah tired. Ah gone.”
Already soaked in the rain, I stared at her skinny madras bosie back slowly walking back to her jhoparee. I stared at her jutti pitching mud at the bottom of her yellow saree and I remembered Tasha, my childhood friend from Tacarigua who drowned in a well a day after she turned eight. I could see her in my mind running after a cow straight up to Kandahar Village on a rainy crusade day in August. I could never forget that day Tasha slipped on a blue tarpaulin in Tanty Lalee’s yard and buss her head. I couldn’t bear the memory of the tarpaulin that caused Tasha months of healing, so I took one hard look at it, then I walked away from it.
I grabbed a white pigtail bucket to catch the plopping rainwater that leaked from the edge of the galvanized roof. Water from the pipe was scarce. It came once or twice a week. Sometimes for days, not a drop of water in Chase Village. Chino, our pimp, often told us that the water company deliberately locked off our water supply to put pressure on him to shut down his business.
There were twenty-five of us living in the backyard shacks of the brothel. Three locals including me, and the rest were from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Martinique. Two girls had babies including me, and three other women had children. The babies and children all lived with Sita. My baby, Maria, was only nine months old and I didn’t know exactly who was her father. My baby didn’t look anything like me. She was a light-skinned, chubby-legged, Chinese-face, dougla-hair baby, and I was a mocha-skin, skinny girl with Afro hair. I remembered fucking a few men from an offshore company, but I just didn’t know which one was Maria’s father. I didn’t really care about her and sometimes I didn’t believe I had actually kept her. I left it up to Sita to look after her. Sita got money from the child welfare services for all the children she looked after, including mine. She knew how to scam the system.
Every day, some of the girls were transported to other brothels far away in the countryside, depending on their legal status. Most of them either left their babies behind with Sita or found a way to take their children for their family or friends in their home country to look after.
My best friend, Bella, a thirty-two-year-old Dominicana, had been living in the brothel since she was twenty-seven. Bella and I shared a small room at the back of the brothel. During the daytime, we were allowed to go out and make our own money. Bella and I worked two days a week peeling vegetables in a Chinese restaurant in San Fernando. One day a week Bella learnt English, and I had recently started taking maths lessons. The other days Bella, I, and some of the girls hustled on the marina in Chaguaramas, selling our cunts for pounds, US dollars, yen; any money that pass, we didn’t miss. Some of the girls took English lessons some days in the week to keep their legal status, while others took the risk to work in Chinese-owned variety stores. Chino often warned the girls about jobs that put them at risk of deportation. I was lucky because I was a local and could lie to save myself.
From 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m., Chino owned us. Every man we fucked, he took and controlled our money. He fed everyone, sent us shopping whenever he felt like, paid for the girls’ legal status, tickets back and forth to their home country to drop off their babies, court charges. He was our fairy godfather. He had many friends in high places, but he wasn’t an easy man to deal with. He often gave us crack to kick off our night’s work and sometimes he’d beat us like he did the pit-bulls he trained. This is why for a long time, I have been considering running away from this place with or without my baby.
“Sonya, Sonya, where is Chino? Me no see Chino,” Bella inquired. She covered my head with her towel and dried my arms with her top.
“Ah doh care. Ask Sita, she know everything about she son,” I replied.
“You no care? Chino have me passport. If me no have passport, me no go no way?” said Bella, pointing at her chest and shaking her head with concern.
“Whey yuh going, Bella? There is no way tuh go right now. The police busted Copa Cabana, Miramar, and Ocean Spray last week. Yuh want tuh go tuh jail or get deported? Dem women in de jail will fuck yuh harder than ah man and yuh know what? Chino’s friends, dem is prison officers too. They go fuck yuh even harder if they know Chino owns you. Especially how yuh have sunflower eyes and yuh skin so soft and pink and yuh lips so thin and yuh hips so wide, and yuh hair so blonde, straight and long,” I warned her.
“Me no understand you. Chino what? What is da problem? Can you talk slow? You confuse me with Trini talk. You sound like you from Africa. You English is very, very bad!”
“Sita want tuh see meh fuh something Ah doh know yet. Come with meh nah? Maybe she know whey she son gone too,” I said slowly and I grabbed Bella’s hand to take her to Sita.
A long trail of violet periwinkle flowers separated Sita’s house from the brothel. Children who lived in the sawmill next door were sliding their asses in the mud, and some were racing after a bicycle tire around Sita’s jhoparee. Sita’s pothounds never liked me. They rushed me in the rain.
“Los perros think in he mind that you are ah fantasma,” said Bella and she picked up a few pebbles to pelt the dogs.
“Fantasma?” I asked twisting my confused face.
“Yea, it is something like ah dead person you cannot see. Ah! Like ah spirit,” she replied, clicking her fingers.
“Hahahah, that is ah scary way tuh see people,” I said.
“Me abuela would say that you are maldicion. Ah don’t know the word for it in English. But you need ah rosario then go to confesiones. You need to put on white clothing. You spirit, you life will be better. In me country, muchas people Catolicas. Is ah tradition. We love it,” she said waving her hand and smiling with happiness.
“I understand you. But I am not Catholic. The woman who Ah live with was ah Hindu like Sita. We have puja fuh bad spirit. Sita knows,” I replied.
Under the coconut tree in Sita’s yard, an open mandir with a statute of lord Shiva sat with folded legs on a cushioned fake lion. He was adorned as a lady with long golden mala earrings, a golden trishul firm in his left hand, green beaded bracelets around his wrist, a white lingam drawn on his forehead, a charming snake posed off on his bun-styled hair, and another vicious-looking snake around his blue neck. His lips were raspberry red and his fat cheeks were blushed up with rose. He held his right hand against his chest as if he was giving a pledge. I picked up a yellow buttercup flower on the slippery muddy floor, lit a coconut-soaked wick in a deya, and performed aarti, singing a bhajan:
Om Namah Shivaya, Har Har Bhole Namah Shivay,
Rameshwara Shiva Rameshwara, Hara Hara Bole Namah Shivay,
Ganga Dhara Shiva Ganga Dhara, Hara Hara Bole Namah Shivaya
Bella held onto the colored bamboo flags and waited for me in the rain. After I sang the mantra, she hurried me by my arm.
“Listen to me, Sonya,” she said. “Sita is ah bad woman.”
We walked through the rain and then up the few stairs of Sita’s jhoparee.
“No, she ain’t. Yuh should pray. I go teach yuh. He is Lord Shiva, he killing all evil,” I said.
“No! Me is Catolica. Me confess to San Basilio only! You like ah madness. Only think I like is that you God is ah man and he look like ah woman. She pretty lips, rojo. She man and she woman. Me like that. Eso es poder e igualdad para cada género. But snake on she body? Maligna! Sita esta loca! If me hungry? I will never eat from that crazy Sita. Loca. And you Sonya, you crazy too!”
Sita was sitting on a rocking chair feeding Maria sugar-water from a plastic baby bottle. Four children were sitting on the floor eating macaroni and ketchup and licking their fingers. Two boys were jumping from a table to the mattress. Bella took off her white cotton frilled top and beat the flies that buzzed around the children’s meal. Salina the red-eyed cat jumped on me, and I flung her on the balata window frame of the tapia house.
“Meow, meow, meow” Salina cried.
“You see, I know what I talk about. You need change you God,” Bella remonstrated.
Sita handed me Maria in a hurry, and I threw her into the air and kissed her all over her belly. Baby Maria’s skin was smooth like the milk Sita offered Lord Ganesh.
“She has a bad cold,” I said, listening to Maria’s rattling cough as she giggled “Ma ma, ma ma.”
“Ah just squeeze ah lime in she tea,” replied Sita.
“No! give she honey and vaporizer, no lime!” Bella persisted.
One of the children who were eating on the floor, a small boy with a swollen, malnourished belly, stood up to stare at us, chewing his thumb. Sita’s jhoparee contained three small bedrooms with seashell-printed shower curtains as doors, an open kitchen, and a littered living room. The dried grass from the clay-filled walls flew in the air whenever the fan breezed the wall. Lizards ran in and out of holes in the walls to catch spiders. There were a few plastic bottles of water under the kitchen sink. Baby cockroaches clambered out of a Styrofoam box, which contained Sita’s cold-storage food on a table in the center of the living room. Dried corn husks and strips of orange peel hung from the low palm grass ceiling of the jhoparee. The smell of soaked dhal filtered the air as if a sewer had been leaking underneath the house. Black and white photos of old folks and a colored baby photo of Chino licking ice cream on the beach were glued to the wall. A tall brown cardboard barrel with an address in Germany was used as a space saver. An electric kettle, coffee mugs, and Lipton teabags sat on a red-crocheted tablecloth on the top of the barrel. People’s names and addresses and phone numbers were scribbled all over the barrel.
Bella examined the colorful picture of Mother Lakshmi that sat on a pitch-oiled lamp near Sita’s rocking chair. When Sita lit a cigarette, Bella took it from her to finish it.
“Sita, me no see Chino all day. Where is Chino? We no have enough beers in de bar,” said Bella.
“Well this is why Ah wanted tuh see Sonya,” replied Sita and she got out of her rocking chair to make black coffee.
“What is da problem for Chino? This morning me have premonition for Chino. I see in me sonar, ah woman with ah gun. Me no understand that woman. Me never see she in me life. She look like ah Trini. Maybe it is you sister, Sonya. She look just like Sonya. Negra and tall and bonita. Big Afro hair! She and Chino have ah gun. Then me see ah white bird come and Chino go with de bird and I no sleep good after that,” continued Bella propping her head with her hand on Sita’s table.
“Ah doh have any sister, Bella! You make me so angry when yuh talk about family. I’m ah Nowherian. Sita should take you tuh she pundit to unfold yuh dream,” I replied, standing up to rock Maria to sleep.
“Well Ah get ah call from de police station and they say they have Chino in Remand Yard at de jail. They say they find Chino in Carlsen Field with a kilo of cocaine. And he have ah hearing next week Monday in Chaguanas Magistrate Court. And Ah doh have no money. I eh even get meh pension and de children welfare yet,” Sita paused with a worried look and she continued to weep, saying, “Before Chino father dead, he wanted tuh sell de bar inno. Ah shoulda sell de damn bar. But Ah feel sorry for de girls Chino trying tuh help. Yuh know? Chino doh sell coke! Somebody must be jealous of meh son because he used tuh make money from de bar. And these children Ah minding here, Ah get good people to take them, but Chino doh listen tuh nobody. Ah tired tell he tuh stop helping allyuh. Doh take in no more girls! Leh dem go back home tuh Venezuela and Santo Domingo or wherever he pick them up, on de street, Ah doh know! Ah just want back meh son and fuh he tuh change he life. Now he in jail and me eh have no money. Not ah cent. Ah cyah even buy tablet fuh meh diabetic foot. Oh God, they set up meh son. Chino doh trouble nobody.”
“I no understand,” said Bella and she raised her skirt to dry Sita’s tears.
“Chino is in carcel.” I explained to Bella.
“Chino what? I need me passport. I want get ah man to take me away from Rich Gold and he will help me go back to me country,” Bella boasted.
Maria held my neck tight. I felt her little heart pumping on my chest. I looked at myself in a mirror that was nailed to the balata wall frame, and I imaged what my birth mother looked like with me when I was her baby. I have never seen any pictures of myself as a child nor of my mother. I vaguely remember where I got that long deep scar over my eyebrows. It must have been my foster mother. She often beat the shit out of me and that is why I came to Chino.
Nobody told me I was pretty except for Bella. And that is why she is the only girl at the brothel my blood took. A woman who knew my real mother told me I smiled just like her. She also told me that my mother had a deep dimple in her cheek just like me. Some people from Kandahar Village told me that my mother died of pneumonia when I was six months old. Other people told me that my mother gave me away because she was on drugs. I never wanted a baby so young in my life, and I didn’t know if I really loved or wanted Maria. Sometimes I did. But I hated my mother for leaving me in the world like this. And I hated Chino for lying to us about our future. He didn’t care. Maybe my father was like Chino. I would do anything to leave this place.
“So this is what yuh want tuh tell me Sita? How can I help Chino? I can’t!” I replied and I shoved Maria into her hands.
“Ah woman from Rio Claro want tuh buy yuh baby from you. She can’t make babies,” said Sita, putting Maria down on a mattress on the living room floor.
“She buying meh baby? How much money she want tuh give meh?” I asked eagerly.
“How much yuh want?” Sita asked seriously.
Mosquitoes gathered around Maria’s head. Sita placed a net over her body and fanned her with a newspaper. I wondered what my daughter would become if I sold her or if she would be better off living with Sita. I didn’t know what to do with her.
“What yuh think, Bella? Ah doh know if de police go find meh. People everywhere already know ah make baby,” I worriedly asked.
“Just tell them de baby die,” replied Sita, shoving her saree between her legs and fanning Maria faster.
“Sonya, let me make ah confesion. Five years ago, me make baby. You know how I get to know Sita? Somebody bring me here, and Sita sell me baby to ah Trinidad woman who now live in Canada. She say she make baby at home in Trinidad and she get ah passport for de baby. Ah get some money and me baby go Canada with de woman to live. No problem! Baby will have ah better life. Baby will not forget you smell, you eyes, you skin. One day, baby will come back to you. I cry for my baby every day but I happy she is in a better life. Así es la vida. Da police no understand nothing in this country. Only for marijuana and cocaine. That is not police business. Okay? So take de money and give de baby away. You start ah new life. You are ah free woman!”
“Is she going to miss me?” I turned to Sita.
“No! she is going tuh miss me. Not you!” Sita pointed at herself.
“Okay, take my baby! Give de woman ah reasonable price. No!” I quickly changed my mind and declared, “Ah want ten thousand dollars. It’s enough fuh a visa and a ticket tuh start a new life in America.” I fantasized about shopping in America with a rich white man.
“If de woman come fuh Maria tonight, can I borrow de money tuh bail out Chino and he go give it back tuh you?” Sita was serious.
“Tonight? So soon?” I asked.
“Well, after midnight. It better Maria goes while she is asleep. When she get up, she won’t see me and she won’t know how she got there. She won’t remember anything,” Sita replied.
“Ah don’t trust Chino inno. That money is my only dream,” I replied.
“Our dream,” Bella insisted.
“Do you trust me? I’m not Chino!” Sita demanded. Her raccoon eyes looked dangerous, reminding me of the snake around Lord Shiva’s neck. The moles on her face made it look like a sour rough lemon. Her fat nose looked inflamed, red and swollen like Krusty the Clown.
“Take de baby, Sita! Call me when yuh have meh money,” I said and walked out the jhoparee in haste, leaving Bella with Sita.
“Do you want tuh go tuh America? Meh sister living in America inno. She is ah citizen. I can help yuh go tuh America.” Sita’s voice echoed behind me.
Later that night, Gloria and nine of us were sniffing hail, dancing to Yoskar Sarante’s La Noche, and dressing up for our night’s work in the garage.
“Where is Chino?” Gloria enquired, then she offered me a line of candy coca. After sniffing, I wanted to slap Paola for stealing my client when he came looking for me last Friday and she didn’t call me for him. I saw neon green lines walking past the room. I hugged my tattooed chest tightly and dropped my head on Gloria’s shoulder to gasp quietly for breath. My body went numb and for a few minutes I stood silently, thinking of Maria. The smell of Johnson’s baby powder and clean cotton diapers overwhelmed me. I realized that Sita was right. Maria would be better off sold or given away, and I could be a free woman in America.
“Chino always go to jail. He come back out and he gone again,” replied one of the girls as she rolled her fishnet stockings up her burnt legs.
“Me need me passport,” Bella said as she entered the garage.
“We don’t need passport. Me don’t want to go back home. There is nothing for me in Bogota. No more!” shouted Sandra.
“I want go back home. Mi mama sick and me miss me boyfriend. De men here not nice. De culture is loca. Me need freedom. No like work behind de kitchen, no like hide from police. Life no good here. Is ah racist country. Imigracion like money. No money, no extension. In me country we eat carne frita and chicharrones de pollo every day. I eat mucho curry and bbq in Trinidad. Curry everywhere! I need food from my country. From my mother!” said Bella, and she bent down to draw a line of candy coca for her stuffy nose.
The garage was a large secured space, situated beneath the brothel. We kept our personal belongings there. It was also our secret hiding place whenever the police came to raid. It had a gravel-camouflaged electric gate that locked us inside until we were dressed and ready for work at night. Wardrobes, cardboard boxes, plastic containers, and large blue rubbish bags were labeled with our nicknames.
After Betina painted my lips with her dark purple lipstick, she pulled out a pink bralette from her drawer and measured my tits.
“My god, you arm smell like ah ram goat,” she said, to the amusement of the other girls.
Sometimes we shared each other’s clothing, wigs, lace stockings, weaves, high heels, lipsticks, jewelry, and perfumes.
“Give it to me,” shouted Isabella, and she grabbed the bralette from Betina.
“No, yuh greedy bitch,” I replied, and I punched Isabella in the face.
When Isabella scraped my dark smooth face, I wanted to murder her. I pulled off her wig and choked her. Some of the girls screamed when Bella jumped in to help me punch Isabella some more.
Some of Isabella’s friends pulled me off her.
“You nothing but ugly n—! Nobody wants you!” Isabella cursed me.
When Sita heard the smashing sounds of beer bottles on the wall, she ran into the garage with two children holding on tight to the end of her saree.
“Yuh see wha happening here already? Ah fed up. Ah trying meh best tuh raise allyuh children and put dem in good homes and look how allyuh mashing up meh place,” quarreled Sita.
Hidden in the center of some of the mattresses that were spread on the floor, were unused condoms, packets of heroin, cocaine powder, and kush, rubber gloves, needles and syringes, packets of extra strength Panadol, bottles of sleeping pills, antibiotic pills, and an untouched diamond-black 9mm, seventeen-round pistol. Colombian, Venezuelan, and Dominican Republic flags fluttered from the ceiling as the fan recycled the dark eau de toilette air. Artificial silk flowered headwear wreaths, straw hats, and sunglasses adorned the white bald heads of Pinocchio-nose mannequins. Metal filigree masquerade masks, purple carnival beads, and a rosary hung around the neck and on top of the ivory white-veiled head of a statue of the praying Mother Mary standing in a corner. Half-burnt white candles lay at her feet. The small toilet and bathroom near the entrance were barely visible behind a montage of world maps and geometric-patterned Chinese fans.
Not all the girls came out that night. Some stayed in the garage either jacking up heroin or sick, rotting away in a locked, abandoned room Chino kept for the sick. Those who were working wore white mini-skirts cut right under our bottom, carnivalesque bras, thick high heels, and dark and bright-colored lipsticks, wigs. We often shared each other’s perfume—as long as it was cheap. We walked into the bar together, and the men, already drunk, were waiting for us. My handbag was packed with a bag of Xanax to put bad guys to sleep, a penknife, condoms, cigarettes, a lighter, and lubricating gel. Most of the guys liked fucking me in my ass, which I didn’t mind. In fact, I preferred it because they came faster and it paid more than a blowjob or anything else.
Chino’s right-hand man, Hawkeye, had been checking in a few part-time night workers, bartenders, and off-duty policemen. When the jukebox played bachata, a few of the girls did the mariposa dance on the rainbow-colored poles, which were surrounded by pool tables, slot machines, and chairs. Their legs opened wide as an ostrich opening its mouth. You could see their silk v-string thongs stuck tight in their vaginas and their hips grinding up and down the poles as men gaped hungrily, squeezing their balls and trying to figure out which one they wanted.
Bella came out of her room to tease the drinking men.
“Aye papi no lo hagas asi,” she shouted with a sign language to inform another girl to avoid a certain client because he was a cheap motherfucker.
In each bar room, there were mugshot photos of bandits who had robbed brothels in the village. We often looked at the photos to see if they matched our clients before negotiating price with them. I sat in room number three and recognized a regular client of mine. He wanted me again and knew how to follow me to my room in the back of Rich Gold.
My client preferred a dark room, and he didn’t like me looking at him. I knew he was a wealthy married, Muslim business owner from Point Fortin. Bella used to work for him. She used to babysit his children. Bella once told me he had fucked her, too. Each time he fucked me, I learnt something new about him. But this time he he had nothing to say to me. His long beard was shorter than usual, and his cold face looked like frozen salted prunes. When I undressed myself, he gently turned my face away from him and positioned my body in a back-shot posture. My head and the shape of my wig resembled Cleopatra in the shadow of the lattice window. The night pumped to the lyrics of La Noche:
En vano aliento mi rencor
Y espero el dia para odiar
La noche me hace recordar
Que no soy nada sin tu amor.
La noche
Me hace volver,
enloquecer.Enloquecer.
My client’s enlarged cock stuck firm into my vagina, and, as he pounded to the music, I thought about how much I missed Chino that night. My client fucked me nonstop until his sweat rinsed my spine. I looked back at him, and he warned me, “Don’t look at me!”
“It hurts!” I replied.
When I looked away again, through the window, I saw a strange woman walking out of the backyard carrying my baby and Sita behind her with a large cardboard box in her hands. There was nothing I could have done to stop Sita. Watching the woman and my baby leave, I wept in silence.
Glossary
Aarti: a Hindu religious ritual of workship.
Abuela: grandmother
Aye papi no lo hagas asi: daddy don’t do it that way
Bachata: popular music from the Dominican Republic, often associated with brothels
Bhajan: a devotional song in Hindi.
Bonita: pretty (female)
Candy Coca: a grade of cocaine/street name for cocaine
Carcel: jail
Carne frita: fried meat
Chicharrones de pollo: chicken cracklings
Deya: an oil lamp originating in India, usually made from clay, with a cotton wick dipped in ghee or coconut oil.
Dougla: a Caribbean Hindustani word for a person of mixed races (Afro-Indian descent)/illegitimate or bastard
Fantasma: ghost
Hail: a grade of cocaine/street name for cocaine
Jhoparee: a tapia house constructed from indigenous materials which include a mixture of forest lumber, leaves from palms/grasses and clay.
Jutti: Indian footwear (associated with royalty) made of leather and embroidery.
Kush: a high grade of marijuana.
Los perros: the dogs
Mala: prayer beads
Maldicion: blight
Malinga: bad/Evil
Mandir: Hindu temple
Mariposa: butterfly
Negra: a black woman of African descent
Nowherian: a person of no fixed place of abode
Puja: the act of worship in Hinduism
Jhandi: a common sight inside or outside the Hindu home situated next to a temple. It is usually made of bamboo poles and coloured flags. Each coloured flag represents a deity.
San Basilio: Saint Basil of Caesarea (Bishop, Confessor and Doctor of the Catholic/Anglican/Orthodox church)
Saree: a garment consisting of a length of cotton or silk elaborately draped around the body, traditionally worn by Indian and Asian women.
Sonar: dream
Trishul: a three-pronged weapon of Lord Shiva (Hindu mythology)
Interview: Anna Levi
Anna Levi is a writer of dual Grenadian and Trinidadian citizenship, born August 29, 1984, and now living in Tacarigua and Trincity, Trinidad. Her first novel, Madinah Girl (Karnak House, 2016), won Special Mention in the 2016 Bocas Literary Awards competition. Levi’s narrative style is both lyrical and rude, combining a Caribbean realist literary tradition with the creole nation language spoken in the streets and rumshops of Trinidad. Levi has been hailed by literary icon Earl Lovelace for taking readers into the “bruising, multi-religious, multi-ethnic churnings in the underbelly of Trinidad.” Her second novel, “Nowherians,” continues to develop Levi’s vision of life among young people on the margins of contemporary Trinidad. Please see the excerpted chapter, “Rich Gold,” in Aquifer as well.
Kevin Meehan for The Florida Review:
Madinah Girl is a very strong and uniquely voiced debut novel. How did you come to be a writer, and what motivates you to write?
Anna Levi:
My life! It has been a flamboyant, emotional, and a kind of surrealistic adventure—from selling avocados and empty Carib beer bottles in rumshops, begging for food and money in Mosques for Juma, running around half-naked and bare-feet on the hot-pitched streets of Tacarigua, selling my mother’s aloo pie in primary school in order to buy red mango and tamarind balls, pitching marbles with orphans, roasting pigeons, doves, and cashew nuts on the fireside for lunch, listening to Lord Kitchener from a jukebox, liming with cows in the cemetery, attending funerals of children who died from drowning in the river, catching butterflies, flying kite, playing cricket, frightening children with Lagahoo stories, bursting bamboo and lighting deyas for divali, eating orisha food my mother always warned me about, and so many other tragic-buoyant, memorable things I have done in my life. The world of children—their voices/language, their livelihood, their social and emotional status, their environment and the underworld culture—is the biggest motivation for me to write. From childhood I was always telling and writing stories. When, much later, I began to study literature formally for a degree and reading people like Selvon, Naipaul, Michael Anthony’s Green Days by the River, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, I realized I had the material to develop this interest. Acting as Atticus Finch in a high school production of Mockingbird gave me a breakthrough—when I realized that as a writer one could assume any identity.
TFR:
Other critics have compared your work to the social realism of Harold Sonny Ladoo, you yourself have spoken to me many times about the importance of Jean Rhys as an inspiration, and I myself was frequently reminded of Merle Hodge and especially her short story, “Inez,” that appeared in Callaloo some years back. What do you make of these sorts of comparisons?
Levi:
I began Madinah Girl before I’d read any Ladoo and I haven’t yet read Merle Hodge’s “Inez.” If you’re looking for comparisons, I think someone like Reinaldo Arenas, in terms of childhood, poverty, and abuse as content, subject matter, and also his self-declared peasant identity, might be more productive. Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night would be another comparable text, in its treatment of sexual abuse and trauma. While I can now see similarities between Ladoo’s irreverent attitude, his settings and language, he wrote almost exclusively about the rural Indo-Trini community, whereas my focus is on all the indigenous and immigrant communities in Trinidad and then beyond in the intra-Caribbean diaspora (Guyana, Grenada, etc). Jean Rhys—whose narrative I identified with and who first showed me that life experience can be structured in literary form—is definitely a major literary inspiration—but mostly because of Voyage in the Dark. Although I’ve studied Caribbean literature, because of my rootsy upbringing which brought me into direct contact with the range of Trini cultural and religious practices, I tend to treat my texts as extensions of these practices, rather than neatly formulated linear narratives. Creole language, dance, and song are integral to my writing. I write from a Creole position with no apologies.
TFR:
What are some other inspirations—and not necessarily literary icons—people, places, or things that had an impact on the writing of Madinah Girl that we might not expect?
Levi:
When I was fifteen years old, I went to Grenada. I was on my uncle’s estate, and I was wandering the estate because I was trying to see how big it was. And I saw an orisha woman living in a shack, very poor, she was squatting on my uncle’s property. Very very very very VERY poor place, I’m telling you, I took pictures, and she had a blind son, a very big boy he looked like about twenty-something and he was a blind boy, and he was walking around and looking for his brother and sister. They were small. And so I’m hearing the man—the boy—calling out for his brother and sister, and he’s blind. I saw him with a stick, so I said, “Who’re you looking for?” and he said, he’s looking for his sister. So, I went off to look for his sister, and his eleven-year-old sister was being raped by her twelve-year-old brother. And I stopped him. And the girl was crying, tears, and that really woke me up to literature to want to write about it. So after that every year I went to Grenada, and I used to check on the girl and see if she was fine and okay. I think her brother died, but that girl being sexually abused by the brother really was painful for me, and I had to write about it. And in the same village when I walk down the road, I’m seeing men drinking alcohol, drinking rum in rumshops, and they’re really having a good time, I’m talking about father’s drinking rum in rumshops, like heavy rum, and getting drunk, a pig roasting in the back, they’re eating pork. And the girl’s being raped in the bush there, and the father is drinking alcohol in the front here, so it’s the whole landscape and the village life that really woke me up to write about it.
I grew up in a poor (but not depressing) and racially divided environment. My parents are an interracial couple with a big age difference. My siblings and I were often rejected by primary schools because of our father’s skin color, religion, social/economic, and marital status. For seven years, I attended a primary school which included orphans. The orphanage was across the road from the school, also close to where I live, and we shared the same church. The school and the orphanage were one. Children confided in me. From secrets about sexual, physical, and verbal abuse to their lives of their incurably insane and alcoholic birth parents to the luck of being saved by the bell. I was also a victim of child sexual abuse. At the age of eight, I felt psychologically homeless and emotionally parentless. So there was a special kind of bond with these friends of mine. We created our own kinship… many of these kids have been demonized by their own society. These children are my biggest inspiration and you’ll come across it in “Nowherians,” the novel I’m currently working on.
TFR:
What’s at stake in the title, Madinah Girl?
Levi:
Madinah means city in Arabic, “city girl.” It’s a young girl who’s looking to be enlightened. She has been suffering for so long, and she leaves home to find enlightenment, love, everything. Madinah is also the holy city of spiritual enlightenment. It’s a multicultural place where people interact and fuse. I love Arabic language… especially through music. I’ve learnt a lot about the culture through the music, like “Mastool” or “High” in English, by the Egyptian singer Hamada Helal.
TFR:
So, carrying on with the topic of children and your interest in children and children’s stories, the coming-of-age novel is arguably a primary genre in Caribbean literature. I wanted to ask you how you see Madinah Girl as either fitting into that slot or what makes it unique as a Caribbean bildungsroman?
Levi:
Well, it’s the language that makes it unique. I write about the language of the people, it’s a nation language, so you look at other novels, and it’s really bourgeois and you can laugh it off, and then you move on with life. But when you look at Madinah Girl, you can’t laugh that off. It’s realer. So when you get someone in their own language who reads Madinah Girl, they recognize one time what is right and what is wrong, what’s going on in a village, you know, people are sick, people are dying, all the issues. They are conscious, it makes them conscious. And, you know, I did an experiment. I gave a few people, a few uneducated people, Madinah Girl to read and after they read it they were like, “Oh, my God, I know someone who did this.” They were conscious of other stories and stories in their own life.
TFR:
Typically in the bildungsroman, the character finds a place in society at the end, but I don’t know that Maria, the protagonist in Madinah Girl, finds that place in society at the end. It seems as if it’s open-ended at the end, if not fragmented and shattered.
Levi:
Yeah, because we are a fragmented people. Caribbean people, we are fragmented and we are made of all different kinds of things. I wanted to leave it open because it continues, it’s like a discourse, something that’s going on still. I didn’t want to put an end to it, it’s still going on.
TFR:
Does her story continue in “Nowherians”?
Levi:
Yeah, it continues in “Nowherians,” but it goes back to children. It goes back to their lives at a tender age, much younger than Maria in Madinah Girl. I think in both books, “Nowherians” and Madinah Girl, it’s a nation of language, people, and culture. It’s that nation that people do not want to know about, especially the bourgeoisie.
TFR:
And what about “Nowherians”? How did you come up with that title?
Levi:
That is a working title, but I really love it. “Nowherians” means “children of Nowhere” and most of the things I’m writing about in the book concern children who feel abandoned or not loved or they feel bad because of their treatment. So, children of Nowhere, they’re lost, they are lost.
TFR:
When I read Madinah Girl, I found the issues of chronology, time, and development of the protagonist to be extremely interesting, difficult, and bordering on chaos even. What are your thoughts about chronology?
Levi:
Well, I want to jump. I believe in the gap. You know, I did a workshop with Marlon James, and he said that gap is important. Sometimes when you write a story line and it’s too consecutive it’s sometime boring and sometimes you’re stuck. I just wanted to jump, because I just wanted to show the importance of the lives of Maria and even her brother Pablo, I wanted to show the important parts of their lives, and the effects and all the chaos in their lives. I didn’t want to have to jaunt through a chapter that’s settled. I wanted to pinpoint the chaos, like “This is it, I’m nailing it. I’m not hiding it at all, I’m nailing it, and this is the fucking chaos.”
TFR:
What’s up with the shift from the first person to the third person in one of the chapters, I think it’s titled “Walima”?
Levi:
I sometimes want to be like God in the book. I want to use my skill, to tell it in the first person, but then I want to step aside and look at a character. I change to third person when I don’t feel comfortable in the character’s shoe, when I don’t feel comfortable with the character. So in “Nowherians,” I am in most of the characters’ shoes. So I’m changing and each character is different. We have three characters—Donna, Bruno, and Keisha—and I am Donna in one chapter, Keisha in another chapter, and Bruno in yet another. I feel so comfortable it’s like I’m writing a story I can experience and I can tell. But third person is when I don’t feel comfortable enough to be in the first person, so I kind of step aside. Writing in the third person allowed me to be omniscient. I wanted to show and tell with many eyes and with an unobstructed view by switching the point of view. It’s like sitting on top of the world with a microscope!
TFR:
Can you say something about your writing process?
Levi:
Writing “Nowherians” depresses me. I went to two interviews yesterday—child brides—then before I write I get so depressed. All morning I am in tears, then I go into exile and write for days. I interviewed a woman who was a child bride, and it made me realize something. When I was eleven, a Muslim woman brought me to my “future husband”… it was the same man I ended up with after leaving the woman I lived with. In Hindu and Muslim culture, men are given their brides as young as nine. This woman I interviewed was married at age eleven, she met her husband at age five. Her mother chose her husband. Her mother was Indian and her father was African, but her family didn’t accept the mixing of the races so she was considered a bastard child and her mother married her off to get rid of her and the “shame” she (the mother) brought into the family. She is in her forties and has fourteen kids. Some died. Her husband beat the shit out of her. He is dead now, but she lives alone because all her kids were taken in by people. If you see the poverty the woman lives in… I can write about it without taking any pics, because I grew up with women like that—women who marry young. These same women who marry young, often do the same… they bring husbands for young girls… a fucking cycle. And I remembered, the same Muslim woman who gave me my first lover, she was in an arranged marriage at age eleven.
TFR:
How would you characterize the Trinidad that you write about in Madinah Girl, the world of Orange Grove, Trin City, Dinsley Village, Calcutta Village, rumshops, masjids, and brothels in St. James? This is not the sort of place you typically see depicted in literature, so how do you talk about this Trinidad?
Levi:
Through experiences, one, and then when I’m writing a chapter I revisit the place and look at it then and now. I look at images, I talk to people. I look for the filthy stuff, the dirty stuff, the things that people do not want to talk about or do not want to write about or hear about. You know, you come to Trinidad, you eat bake and shark, you drink coconut water, or you go to the beach and you don’t know how many kids are in the orphan home, are abandoned by their drug addicted parents, you don’t know about children being sold off into shops to work for people. So I wanted to look at that, at the bitterness behind all of this sweetness. It’s very bitter, and when you come out of the beautiful zone of Trinidad and you go into the ghetto, and you see a young boy with a gun, and you see a young girl being a prostitute, and you see an old-old woman who is digging in a dustbin and smoking crack cocaine, you wonder where this began. You know, it just didn’t happen now.
TFR:
I would say the flora and the fauna and the food, the things that people drink and the clothes that they wear, and the landscapes around them, all of that is brilliant and sharply drawn in the book—
Levi:
—and the vagrants!
TFR:
I want to ask about the range of languages in the novel. In particular, how would you talk about the language of your protagonist, Maria, when she is functioning as a frame narrator versus the vernacular spoken language of both Maria herself and the other characters? How do you handle the issue of narration versus spoken language as a writer?
Levi:
It’s kind of difficult sometimes because when I’m writing the dialogue and I go into the narrator, I kind of fall back and I wanna stick to the damn Creole English, right, I wanna stick to the language? But it’s challenging so that’s why I have an editor who edits for me, to keep me on track, but it’s sometimes difficult to maneuver both. Maria, like most Trinis, works the linguistic continuum from Creole to Trini Standard English, sometimes all the way to Standard English. When she’s framing narrative she’ll tend towards the more “proper” register, whereas when she’s speaking like some of the other characters, she’s more comfortable with Creole, although even then, because we’re dealing with a traumatized character, she may almost subconsciously slide between registers. One very important point has to be kept in mind when engaging with Madinah Girl. This is a series of events/episodes recalled through the consciousness of a character who is not stable, which is why it veers between the sublime and ridiculous, the horror and the beauty. This fluidity is also reflected in the language, which refuses like Maria’s fragmented consciousness to be standardized or regulated. Some publishers and critics fail to grasp this basic dynamic and have attempted to get me to tidy it up, to make it logical, which would entirely defeat its essence. My editor even tried to retain some of the incongruities of Maria’s thought processes, which are expressed in a strange combination of a creolized literary Standard English, resulting in the unique voice. Once you start standardizing and attempting to force this text into conventional forms, you kill the voice. The voice, the language, reflect the damaged consciousness not only of Maria and other characters but indeed of postmodern neo-colonial T&T. The text, the narratives it carries are a cry against denial (of the realities presented) and a Creole assertion and subversion of the impositions of a postcolonial society unable to free itself from the jumbies of colonialism, respectability, and bourgeois/globalized values. If readers and critics find this confusing, so much the better, because the reality is itself highly confused and conflicted.
TFR:
So what’s at stake there? Why not just use nation language to voice the narrator?
Levi:
For the narrator? Well, I want to do that in the future. It’s a good experiment!
TFR:
Your experience suggests that, if you write in nation language, a local audience is there to receive it.
Levi:
Yeah, mostly the poor people. I have great feedback from my supporters, so, I just write, you know, in my language, so that my people could understand, and other people who aren’t my people are welcome to understand the culture.
TFR:
I want to ask you another question about the style or technique of your writing. Because it does have a social realism aspect to it, which is both extremely beautiful and extremely harsh from paragraph to paragraph or even sentence to sentence. But, against the social reality, you have these utopian desires of the protagonist. This opposition or tension is also a formal/stylistic issue in which harsh and obscene language is pitted against unexpected lyricism, and adjectives or adverbs often work to modify objects and actions in surprising ways. So, what about those oppositions in your writing?
Levi:
Maria doesn’t get to be a child when she is around her family. With her father, she doesn’t get to be a child. So she has to fake things in order to get out of things and not go to the church. So I wanted the style to reflect that and change when she’s around different kinds of people.
The opposition (brutality vs. beauty, innocence) reflects Maria’s struggle with the harshness of her position and her innocence, her longing to belong, when her family fail to protect and nurture her. To transform/transcend the specific adverse social conditions of T&T we must first acknowledge rather than deny the plantation’s legacy of brutality, which persists in the sometimes very cruel way people deal which each other. Under the veneer of modernity and globalization this brutality continues unchallenged –children are still viewed as potential labor and objects not as vulnerable emerging people thus, robbing them of their childhood and the emotional development necessary for them to become complete caring adults.
Various global and local influences have accelerated the meltdown of postmodern Trini society, and I believe that we can transcend/transform our condition by revisiting/revisioning some of our Creole cultural expressions and rituals, many of which focus on healing and community. This is the way forward for us in our unique historically framed reality. We can’t solve our very basic problems by distracting ourselves with the trinkets of globalization –social media, global mass culture, pretending once again that what happened over the last 300 years in T&T didn’t happen. Recognizing the oppression and suffering we’ve inflicted by following the plantation model is a vital first step, and Madinah Girl recognizes all this and throws it in your face. It demands that readers, especially here in T&T and the Caribbean, take responsibility for their humanity, or lack of it and by confronting our daily horrors we can then move forward.
TFR:
And what does it take for the human spirit to transform/transcend adverse social conditions?
Levi:
I think again it’s freedom, you know?
TFR:
What does that line mean: “Men like to use women and treat them like metal”?
Levi:
You know metal is something that is very hard. It’s a saying in the Caribbean. Metal is something you can hit on the ground many times. It can bend but it can’t hurt like a human body, it’s an object. So it means that men like to use Drupatee like an object. Something that can’t feel. So women aren’t supposed to feel anything when they’re abused.
TFR:
Madinah Girl seems at once intensely autobiographical—sometimes excruciatingly so—and yet utterly NOT an autobiography of the author, Anna Levi. How do you talk about that issue of muddling the line between autobiography and autobiographical writing?
Levi:
Art comes from life, is a part of life, can inform life but shouldn’t be confused with life. Madinah Girl began from a store of life stories I kept telling my husband. When he got fed up with hearing them for the nth time, he suggested I start writing them, in the same voice as I told them. Obviously much of the raw material is autobiographical, but my intention never was to write an autobiography but by presenting a series of fragments to make some sense of my own fragmented childhood and adolescence and a period of recent Trini socio-cultural history which hasn’t really been written about from the bottom up.
TFR:
What are you working on now, and what can you tell us about the scope, the focus, the stylistic issues?
Levi:
I’m reading for a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of the West Indies. I’m working on my second novel, “Nowherians”. It’s about the life, living condition, and treatment of children who were raised with informal fostercare parents/families and even orphans in Trinidad and Tobago. Most of my materials are from experience… but to give me a boost, I talk to vagrants, drug addicts, ex-convicts, incurably insane people, happy children, sad children, elderly impoverished people, criminals, sex workers, immigrants, and even religious spiritual leaders/healers. In writing, I love, respect and appreciate the dialect Trinidadian English creole and all other dialects from the Caribbean …. in fact the world. I like to write with visibility. The first chapter of “Nowherians” was adapted into film by film students at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, under the supervision of their directing lecturer, Yao Ramesar.
TFR:
Before we wrap up, can you talk about your interaction with the filmmakers? What did you see? How was that set up? What kind of versions of your writing did they produce?
Levi:
So, there’s the film department at UWI, and my work was selected, so they took a chapter from “Nowherians”, and the students had to read and take any part and adapt it. Some students liked the landscape, right, so they did a silent film on the landscape. Some of them loved the dialogue and did the dialogue. Some of them liked different parts of the book. They changed it up and adapted it, but it’s very connected to the book itself. I spoke to them before they made their films and they told me what were their plans. It was a great attempt because some of them didn’t even have dialogue in their film, they had just a landscape, just a young boy who grew up. He was an orphan and he grew up, and he’s walking through the place that he knew when he was young, like an old broken wooden house where it had fallen, with his pets and just some music in the background showing his emotion. I’m really loyal to “Nowhereians” and really dedicated to finishing it.
Remnants
This series features small, improvisational, origami-like collage forms created from manipulated pieces of encaustic-infused rice and tissue papers. The series began with the otherwise practical intention of reusing scrap materials but has evolved into something more meaningful and representative of an interest in science, nature, memory, and narratives of ecosystems in flux. These abstract compositions are the result of an exploration of how encaustic-infused paper can be manipulated through layering, cutting, folding and the use of heated tools. My goal is for these non-representational compositions to reflect a suspended state of evolution as one form shifts to become another.
Opening the Door
At the Great Door of Morning: Selected Poems and Translations by Robert Hedlin
Copper Canyon, 2017
Paperback, 220 pages, $18.00
Of all the books of poetry I’ve read this year—and I’ve read quite a large number—Robert Hedin’s At The Great Door of Morning: Selected Poems and Translations has pulled me most deeply into the depths of feeling, seeing, and being that I hope to discover in poetry. Each poem is a genuine experience, a small moment of grace, and the book as a whole is a series of revelations. Once I started reading At the Great Door, I couldn’t put the book down—and yet it is a book to savor. Its pleasures have renewed and reinvigorated my own faith in the power of poetry to matter deeply to us, to help us live by restoring us to wonder in this clamorous, narcissistic, cliché-ridden time. It is a book to be kept on that short shelf of favorites.
At the Great Door of Morning is divided into six sections, the first and last two comprised of Hedin’s own poems and the middle three of his translations of the Norwegian poets Rolf Jacobsen, Olav Hauge, and Dag Straumsvag. As masterful as the translations are, it is Hedin’s own poems that really sing. He is a master of clarity and of the kind of image that revitalizes the actual world—makes us look at an ordinary object or action with fresh eyes—as when, in a poem about teaching his sons to row, he shows the act of rowing as “keeping/the river moving,” making suddenly vivid what would otherwise be a common action barely worthy of our attention. In another poem he shows us owls that “glide off the thin/Wrists of the night.” These perfectly-observed/masterfully created moments of imagistic transformation achieve Pound’s goal of “making it new,” but they don’t just revitalize the art of poetry; in fact, they make new the actual world, showing us ordinary things in authentically fresh ways. And this is what Hedin does over and over here: makes the mundane miraculous again, refreshing our perceptions and thus our lives. We might even say that Hedin is a visionary poet, though a quiet and personally modest one. Reading these poems, we respond not to the poet’s brilliance (which is manifest) but to the world he shows us: This book shows little of Hedin’s autobiography or personal life. What it does show, in deep and trembling ways, is a vision and an immersion in the world of things and mind, the world of being and contemplation. One leaves Hedin’s poems with reinvigorated eyes. I was reminded of the experience of leaving an art museum after a particularly strong show of paintings—of walking around seeing the world through the lens of those paintings for a while. Hedin’s best poems have that effect on my sensibility: they refresh and reawaken my everyday world.
There is an ancient quality of folk-tale magic in many of Hedin’s best poems, a charmed and dreamlike quality of “seeing into the life of things,” which results from careful, lifelong craft and attention to clarity of detail. These poems remind us of how ancient the art of poetry is, how deeply a good poem can plumb:
This must be where the ravens turn to geese,
The weasels to wolves, where the rabbits turn to owls…
Where hunters have forgotten their trails and sunk out of sight…
Glistening with the bones of animals and trappers,
Eggs that are cold and turning to stones…
(“The Snow Country”)
It seems to me that the great majority of contemporary poems, even the best of them, are filled with clamor and self-regard. These qualities may be reflective of our time and thus fitting attitudes for our poetry. Sometimes it seems though that idiosyncrasy is a stand-in for originality, mere oddness a stand-in for genuine freshness. This observation is not meant to bemoan the state of our poetry, which is vibrant and challenging and forging new ground. But it is to point out one of Robert Hedin’s greatest strengths, and perhaps what moves and refreshes me most deeply in his work: the modesty that infuses every aspect of his art, a modesty informed of deep craft, genuine feeling, and transformative seeing. This is a modesty born of respect for the millennia-long art of poetry and the poets who have practiced before him. It is equally a modesty born of respect for the world of living creatures and energies with whom we live our lives, and a respect for the clarity of language. It is the grounded and self-assured modesty of a master:
Goddard Hot Springs
When you lie in these sweating streams
You are lying in the breath of your ancestors,
The old pioneers who sat here in these pools
Mapping trails to the mother lode.
You feel a fog drift through your body,
A voice that is strangely familiar
And still has stories to tell.
A poem like this, with its understated, carefully-modulated revelations, reminds us again that poetry, true poetry, needs to be savored—read slowly, listened to—then read again. Without such reading, the depths this poem plumbs might be missed or skated over. Hedin trusts his reader to breathe with his poem, to listen carefully for its news and subtle revelation.
Hedin’s best poems remind us that to read a poem, we must breathe with the breath of the poet who made it, thus reanimating it with our own breath-stuff.
Hedin’s book ends with a final “chapter” he calls “Field Notes,” a compendium of insights and assertions about the art of poetry, all of them wise, useful, and memorably written. Among them, this statement, which might stand as a kind of motto for all of Hedin’s work:
A good poem breaks through the numbing, stultifying voice of our mass
culture to successfully articulate, in all its breadth and meaning, a land-
scape of conviction, a deeper circuitry that helps give life its necessary
shape and substance.
and another:
Poetry is, in many ways, a sustained longing for home and reconciliation,
the inseparability of self and object, self and other.
Or, better yet, turning again to one of Hedin’s poems:
The Tlingit on this island tell a story about fog.
They say in its belly
The spirits of the drowned are turned into otters,
That on cold nights when the lowlands
Smolder with steam
The loon builds its nest in their voices.
(“Ancestors”)
As deeply as I admire this book, I do wish that Hedin’s modesty had not prevented him from including a greater number of his own poems and (perhaps) fewer of his translations. As strong as they are, the translations do not strike me as quite as linguistically or imigistically fresh as Hedin’s own work. Though the three poets translated here are themselves masters of imagery and concision, and though it is clear that they all have influenced him, still I yearned for Hedin’s own language, his singular vision. Perhaps I am merely quibbling. Perhaps it is simply that I would have liked a longer book. What’s here is a treasure, a genuine contribution to American poetry and a gift to all who read it.