Forthward: Guy Psycho and the Contemporary Epic

Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame by John King

Beating Windward Press, 2019

Paperback, 206 pages, $17

Epic heroes are traditionally paragons of the societies that invent them, extolling the virtues that those societies find most desirable. Guy Psycho, aging rock star and titular hero of John King’s debut novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame, is no exception in that regard. He’s a hero for the postmodern era, and so he’s somewhat different from his classical counterparts: He’s tall and thin, in black lipstick and eye makeup. He wears Wayfarers and wingtips (size 14). He has a surgically implanted voicebox that occasionally goes on the fritz, causing him to blat certain syllables with a tinny, synthesized version of his otherwise golden pipes. And, far from being the sole agent of fulfilling his quest, he gets through most of his adventure due to the unfailing support of his band mates: from the musicians, to the discretely differentiated backup-dancing Postmodernaires, to the band’s new manager and accountant. Their adventure, like their professional lives, is something that they all do together.

The book doesn’t only evoke epic literature stylistically and thematically, but literally. The story itself is a wild romp through the tablets described in The Epic of Gilgamesh, as Guy and the crew are plunged into a dreamlike prehistory in search of the lost thirteenth tablet, which they have to find before an angry Ishtar and the other Sumerian gods destroy the world. King lovingly deconstructs the larger-than-life deeds of the original Gilgamesh and gives us a different, almost surreal reinterpretation—or, really, a reiteration—of them.

Along the way, he relies on several distinct elements of each character that quickly become their own sort of nods to traditional heroic epithets: Guy Psycho of the size-14 wingtips and Gaultier gauze, Lulu of the auburn hair and motorcycle boots, Trudy of the black ringlets and silver-ruffled party dress. This also helps further differentiate the various characters (there are eighteen) in a relatively short amount of time, as all of them are far more complex and interesting than they initially appear—the musicians are more than the instruments they play, and every single one of the Postmodernaires has something more than mere dance steps that informs their voices and characterization.

Despite the book’s clear love for the classics, the rest of its presentation is a playful, joyful rejection of convention, as King enjoins the text itself to participate in the narrative. Pages go black as characters are plunged into darkness, punctuated on the next page by cones of onomatopoeic flashlight. Lines of narration from characters lost in a maze spiral around the page in neat right angles, helping drive home the sense of uncanny disorientation. Far from seeming distracting or gimmicky, this quintessentially postmodern acknowledgement of the text as an ontologically distinct artifact reminds the reader to enjoy not just the book, but the experience of reading the book. King includes small moments of explicit and implicit intertextuality, as well, that drive home the point that the book doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the astute reader is rewarded for Googling the serial number on the otherwise nondescript crate in Mr. Youngerman’s curio collection, for example, or for noting the title of the book one of the guests at the Bull of Heaven’s party is reading (which, with any luck, is the tacit promise of a sequel).

The language, too, at the sentence level, is a melodic free-form jazz of excellent description, fluid and rich in metaphor, that whisks the reader effortlessly along through the book’s two-hundred-or-so pages. For example, during a reminiscence, Lulu, a Postmodernaire with a background in archaeology who helps guide the crew through ancient Mesopotamia, reflects on when she hit rock bottom:

Lulu remembered, in a single flash, a time when her face was mashing her nose down against a tabletop, her sweaty, auburn hair crawling with sticky airs, in some murmuring necropolis of a bar in the underside of Tangiers. . . [H]ere she was, across the globe, a cipher in a ledger that no one would ever read, an empty egg cracking in the back of the fridge.

The visceral detail, the vibrant verbs, the fresh and interesting figurative language—all are typical of King’s prose throughout the novel.

In addition to the quality of the language, the passage above also illustrates one of the things that makes the novel work so well: while it never loses its spirit of fun and adventure, King isn’t afraid to treat his characters seriously, to let the reader in on their doubts and vulnerabilities. The nagging problem with many of the ancient epic heroes is that they were portrayed with precious few real faults, few true weaknesses, save a near-ubiquitous hubris. This worked for the societies who birthed them, who seemed to desire these larger-than-life supermen. Guy Psycho and his coterie, however, are products of the contemporary (or postmodern) age, so a big part of their heroic nature comes from their courage in the face of their own faults and personal tragedies. The result is a story that not only has a harmonic resonance with the ancient adventure tales—in a way, the forebears of the craft of fiction itself—but a story that still has a melody all its own, that doesn’t hesitate to march “Forthward!” in an attempt to excavate a new niche in the bedrock of myth—and turn it into a rock-and-roll stage.

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Before & After the Pinnacle of Happiness

The Truce: The Diary of Martín Santomé by Mario Benedetti
Translated by Harry Morales
Paperback, Penguin UK, 2015

“In only six months and twenty-eight days I’ll be in a position to retire.” So begins Mario Benedetti’s The Truce—a novel that takes the form of the brief and intimate diary of the forty-nine-year-old Martín Santomé, a Uruguayan widower living in Montevideo in the 1960s. Martín’s attention to life’s mundane details, like the shapes of strangers’ legs and his coworkers’ nervous sneezes, combined with his frequent accounts of exhaustion, are what make him feel real and familiar right away. Although his world is small and provincial, his reflections are universal.

The novel was originally published in Spanish (Editorial Nueva Imagen, Montevideo, Uruguay ,1960) and was published in English by Penguin UK Modern Classics in Harry Morales’s English translation in 2015. Readers should be grateful to Morales for not only capturing the contradictory nuances of Benedetti’s resigned-yet-open voice so perfectly in English—but also for inviting a wider audience to enjoy this timeless story of love and sorrow. The translation in today’s context gives the novel a fresh, new meaning. The novel is about learning to appreciate the present, but the way in which it approaches the present is charmingly old-fashioned.

Early on in the novel the protagonist’s daughter, Blanca, laments to her father, “Sometimes I feel sad, over nothing more than not knowing what I’m missing.” The girl’s sentiment is one that hardly exists today. On the contrary, modern readers tend to be acutely aware of what we are missing; we are inundated with online images and texts that remind us of what-could-be on a daily basis. It’s amusing to think that the very reality we have now is what Blanca might have been yearning for. Yet it’s precisely this feeling of Blanca’s desire—a desire her father also shares—that serves as the emotional premise for the entire novel.

The novel embodies the thrill one feels when finding something he never even knew could happen. It’s about the retrospective discovery of a hole—a discovery made only after that hole has been unexpectedly filled. In the case of our protagonist, this hole is romance. Romantic love is the last thing Martín Santomé expects or even wants to find. He is tired. He seeks only leisure and some rest, yet at the same time is depressed by the prospect of a blank agenda. The love affair he begins with his twenty-three-year-old assistant, Laura Avellaneda, just before he enters his retirement, is hardly original. But it’s the way in which this experience moves and reinvigorates him, that is so potent and inexplicably memorable.

Martín’s celebration of his own surprising happiness is made all the more intense by his keen acknowledgement and understanding of the fragility of life and its transcendence. In a small moment midway through the novel he narrates:

She had got out of bed, just like that, wrapped in a blanket, and was standing near the window watching the rain. I approached, also looking at the rain, and we didn’t say anything for a while. All of a sudden, I realized that that moment, that slice of everyday life, was the highest degree of well-being, it was Happiness. Never before had I been so completely happy than at that moment, but still I had the cutting sensation that I would never feel that way again, at least at that level, with that intensity. The pinnacle of happiness is like that, surely it’s like that.

Martín Santomé’s unexpected bliss is poignantly balanced with an underlying fear of loss: “Are we burning?” he asks his lover. The novel beautifully explores the frightening contradictions that are inherent in love, and it’s easy to see why the book still stands as such a revered classic in Latin America, and why it deserves to be read everywhere else. Harry Morales’s translation of La Tregua is a novel you will read without stopping and will never forget. It will be a physical experience that marks you, twists you, and pulls something out of you. It will make you weep and narrow your eyes at details you’d never before noticed: the wood of a table, a dog outside a window. It will make you think about your own emotional life like a chart on paper: where do the peaks and the valleys lie? And, most importantly, what happens in between them?

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Melting Among Echoes: The Elusive Narrative Voice of Z213: Exit

Z213: Exit (Poena Damni trilogy) by Dimitris Lyacos
Translated by Shorsha Sullivan
Shoestring Press, 2017
Paperback, 152 pages, $12.00
Please note: the entire trilogy has been re-released by Shoestring Press as a boxed set as of October 2018.

Z213: Exit—the first installment of Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy—eludes a straightforward interpretation and defies easy genre categorization. One of the most striking features of the text, which offers an admixture of poetry, prose, and fractured discourse, is the varied, evanescent nature of the work’s narrative voice. It is at once discretely anonymous and richly polyphonous—a voice that is both an echo of a dying oral tradition and a singular windswept report from future underworlds, or perhaps contemporary nightmares. A voice that wanders a crumbling cerebral maze of déjà vu as it grapples with bouts of pre-cognitive amnesia. This narrative ambiguity, elliptical and serpentine, allows for a wealth of themes and mytho-religious motifs to surface in the text, such as the mercurial relationship between memory and nominal identity and the symbolic resonance between Greek myth, Christianity, and European folklore.

The fragmented, wandering narrator of Z213: Exit and the dislocated world (suffused with a sense of impending dread) in which they exist is prominent in the work’s first line: “these names and that’s how they found me.” Immediately, we get the sense that either a bureaucratic body, or perhaps an entity, is cataloguing and in pursuit of some targeted group of people. But the list of names—the “they” —and the “me” never come into focus, and so the narrative trope that we are teased with in the first line—one of straightforward persecution and pursuit—never quite coalesces into a recognizable shape. Instead, over the course of 152 pages, the narrator—the at-first unidentifiable “me”—slides between sensation and memory as it struggles to individuate from the host of shadowy presences that surround it and to identify the pain, suffering, and mystery that the environment itself seems to breathe forth. For example, later in the text, as the narrator (who at this point we can deem an anatomical male) engages in a fleeting sexual encounter, which seems to be more discomfiting than pleasurable, he muses, “Where did I come from? My name? Where was I heading?” Here, the somatic pressure of an erotic experience in a darkened world evokes sharp questions of origin, identity, and purpose. However, as we move toward the conclusion, the narrator seems to find a paradoxical certainty in letting all his questions dissolve into the prevailing sense of ambiguity and in doing so, he offers a contradictory assessment of the circumstances implied in Z213: Exit’s first line: “Nobody is coming after me. Surely they have forgotten about me. Nobody will ever come here to find me. Nobody ever.”

As the fragmented narrator of Z213: Exit quests through his broken world in something of an atemporal haze, echoes of Dante, Beckett, and even Proust can be detected in Lyacos’ careful and subtly erudite writing. But we also find rich allusions to ancient Greek myth and Christian ritual, which primarily enter the text through a Bible that the narrator finds in the pocket of a jacket, which he has taken from a partially conscious solider. The Bible proves to be a palimpsest containing erasure marks, blank space among biblical verses, “the words of a stranger,” and the writing of the narrator (perhaps they are all actually the words of the same person), who states “I walk through other names” before he briefly describes the Bible’s contents. In this book within a book, truncated excerpts from the Old and New Testaments float next to fragments from ancient Greek sources and original, darkly lyrical imagery. It is within this intertextual Bible that we encounter Z213: Exit’s most phantasmagoric layer, which Lyacos weaves in a rhythmic, episodic manner through the body of the text. Here we find scenes where Christ’s harrowing of Hell merges with Odysseus’ suffering-rich nostos; the mortification of Christ’s body upon the cross fades into the image of Dionysian sparagmos (or ritual tearing asunder); and the ritual of the mass and the ritual animal slaughter central to the ancient Greek sacrificial rite carry the same numinous weight.

A central motif of With the People from the Bridge, the second installment of the Poena Damni trilogy, is the revenant of European folklore. The revenant, which is somewhat akin to the zombie and the vampire, is a reanimated corpse or a revivified spirit who stalks in terror the living. The shadowed presence of a revenant also appears to be active in the text of Z:213 Exit. There are moments when the narrative seems to emanate from the twilit consciousness of a revenant, such as when the multi-voiced wanderer and narrator declares, “You are somebody else, but you are the same, you are him. This is continuity, you travel…” This lends a profound sense of liminality to the text. The reader is not only betwixt and between the pursuer and the pursued, but also the material and the immaterial, the pulse of life and the cold of death. There are also times when the narrator seems to be haunted by a revenant for dimly perceived reasons with the pursuit itself following a non-linear dream-logic. This is most vividly seen on the text’s final page, which we are led to believe is a page from the multi-voiced Bible that the narrator carries with him: “get away always, but feel he is coming, as time goes by he is approaching, and still now that the distance increases, and now that you draw away still the distance decreases.”

In noting the spectral influence of the revenant, we are brought back to the polyphonous narrative voice of Z213: Exit. As mentioned above, the page that ends the text is taken from the Bible that the narrator carries, but we are not told if the writing is that of the narrator, the words of a stranger, or even of someone else. Any hope for a unified voice or an integrated protagonist dissolves into uncertainty. What Z213: Exit leaves us with is something of a snapshot from the collective unconscious. An unmoored myth of wandering and suffering as likely to be plucked from the pages of the Western canon as from the dreams and nightmares of strangers in the contemporary world.

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The Funhouse Mirror of Humanity

The Internet Is for Real

Chris Campanioni

C&R Press, 2019

534 pages, Paper, $25.90

Imagine the internet told your life story and fucked it up. That is the unspoken thesis behind Chris Campanioni’s The Internet Is for Real. Although it becomes clear early on that, while Chris will spend time discussing his family history and other autobiographical details, the life story he is really telling is that of the modern world, as filtered via internet culture. His work views the internet as humanity’s id: sometimes charming, sometimes profound, but mostly idiotic, vain, and vapid. While large portions of the book are dedicated to celebrity worship and the distracted nature of internet communication, he also turns his attention to the way our political past and present has been affected by this new technology. A winding discussion with his father about his relationship to his native Cuba after fifty years melds into a meditation on dreams versus reality versus nostalgia, the distance between his father’s recollection of his youth becoming a cipher for Campanioni’s own distance from his father’s homeland.

My father dreams in Spanish. I am writing this down in English.

Where are the gaps and slips, I wonder, as I hold the tape recorder with

my left hand, and with my right, scrawl the notes that will eventually

re-constitute this story.

Where are the gaps and how can I make them wider, instead of trying to

fill them; how can I make them wider so I can breathe within them, in

and out, out and in, and make song from all those unknowable breaths?

He recognizes that the memories and dreams he uses to feel a connection to his ethnic heritage are for a place that no longer exists, that may have never existed, but one which he cannot escape. This could very well describe social media, where we hold on to, document, and obsess over memories and the image of ourselves those memories conjure. The way people communicate with us on social media is through a manipulated, nostalgic view of ourselves that polishes the rough edges of our personalities. In turn, complete strangers come to relate to us in the same way the child of an immigrant relates to the memories of their parents’ homeland—we know it is a myth, but we can’t bring ourselves to ask the tougher questions that arise from that myth.

Another instance where Campanioni uses the internet to make larger statements about world affairs is his chapter on ISIS as an online creation. The piece is a tour de force that demonstrates the way that terrorist groups can promote themselves using the same sort of branding and merchandising as a clothing line or television show. A new video of a beheading, for instance, is treated the way the new trailer for a Marvel movie might be. The violence is a show, and, for people seeking meaning, a global conflict is incredibly appealing, as is the hierarchical society offered by ISIS. This impulse for meaning and fighting for a cause is as old as humanity itself, but because of the internet a cause can reach an unprecedented scale by utilizing the tools of consumerism.

YOU

Senior media operatives are treated as if they’re emirs.

Emirs?

YOU

(sharply)

More important than soldiers. Their monthly income is higher. They have better cars. They preside over hundreds of videographers, producers, and editors … they form a privileged, professional class with salaries and living arrangements that are the envy of every soldier.

Isn’t ISIS concerned about the fall-out? A drop in the soldiers actually willing to fight its war?

YOU

(shakes head)

The overriding goal of the Islamic State is not only to inflict terror on an adversary.

(beat)

Now it wants to command a global audience.

The ISIS section may seem like Campanioni’s most damning statement about the world, but it is really just the most explicit and sensational example of a theme that runs throughout the book—the internet is, above all else, a tool that compounds loneliness and despair by promising to eradicate those very things. The desire to connect with a celebrity, with one’s father, with a cause, all arise from a sense of missing something in one’s life (again, this is not new behavior, but the reach and scope is). Making friends with stranger’s online image instead of in person is a symptom of a greater disease—humanity is retreating into its id, disconnecting from interaction and empathy with others, creating entire lives in a fictional platform—and we are miserable. That misery manifests in a number of ways, from extremism across the political spectrum, to blocking people and ideas we don’t agree with, to outrage culture, to an increasing lack of complexity in the way we approach problems, ideas, and policies. The internet is the most powerful technology in history, and it is winning by holding up an ever-uglier mirror at humanity.

If the internet is the antagonist of Campanioni’s book, it is still a charming one. One with endless diversions, humor, and charm. It is the abusive boyfriend made digital, and our world has yet to find a way to either take the relationship to therapy or cut all ties. Campanioni’s book is wise enough to not try to answer those questions, and is instead interested in asking questions that grow increasingly profound. The book offers a visceral thrill that feels more like a great song or movie than a written text. It is a bold statement in the age of Tweets to release an almost 600-page novel that is in large part about Twitter and the culture it has cultivated, and Campanioni uses every page to excite the mind, cleanse the palate, and ignite your imagination. The next time you find yourself wanting a break from the internet, I highly recommend you pick up The Internet Is for Real. You get the same addictive experience, minus the dirty aftertaste, and you’ll feel better about yourself in the morning.

Editor’s note: We have slightly altered the formatting of the second quoted passage due to readability of the web page on the internet. A little irony there.

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Griefs Spun to Gold

Venus in Retrograde by Susan Lilley

Burrow Press, 2019

Hardcover, 123 pages, $20.00

In his essay “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” Tony Hoagland asserts that many contemporary poets are leery of the narrative mode because such poems require commitment to development and continuity. Those holding that view, he says, are drawn to the poem that is “skittery,” that “would prefer to remain skeptical,” and that “prefers knowing to feeling.”

Susan Lilley’s collection Venus in Retrograde is an elegant example of the reasons narrative poems still deserve a place in our contemporary poetic cosmos. Her poems diligently interrogate the past while avoiding the excesses of sentimentality and self-indulgence that are often associated with narrative (“confessional”) poetry. Lilley’s poems also demonstrate that “knowing” and “feeling” are not mutually exclusive methods or goals.

In “Champagne Road,” the second poem in the book, is this couplet: “There must be an easier way to quit a house / than to touch everything in it.” Those lines encapsulate both the primary thematic concerns of the book—love, loss (and its corollary, new beginnings)—and the ways in which Lilley’s poems reach out to touch (and to clarify and animate) the “kitchen laughter, / hallway recriminations, [and] shower singing” that are the accompaniment of a life richly lived.

The book is arranged along more or less chronological lines, and some of the most endearing poems are those addressing the foibles and joys of puberty and sexual awakening. Lilley’s sure eye for the telling detail is evident in “Experienced: Jacksonville, 1967,” in which the speaker and her cousin attend a rock concert as an adjunct to church camp. In the bus on the way, a boy “stood up and burped the alphabet;” when a “boy way too old” showed an interest in the speaker at the concert, her cousin “grabbed my arm and close-mouth screamed,” and when he asked how old the speaker was, “I said, I don’t know.” And the result of these transgressions? “We had to write extra Ten Commandments / for not staying with the group.” Lilley maintains an affectionate distance from the stories the poems relate, relying on a wry tone to provide the commentary.

In a similar, if more reflective vein, is “Song for a Lost Cousin,” which nicely illustrates the ways in which these poems strike lyric notes as a complement to their narrative intent. The middle of the poem finds the girls “powdering our faces / geisha white, love potions / in the blender with nectarines / and stolen Cointreau.” And later,

Even the peacocks I love

are shadows of my first, a bird

now dead for decades, once

opulent and princely on a dirt road,

calling for love against black

storybook trees and a moon cut

from tracing paper.

The rich imagery makes implicit the importance of the experience and its indelible place in the speaker’s memory.

Lilley is a mature enough poet to have lived through the deaths of parents, and several poems focus on the circumstances of those losses. “A Man in a Hurry” chronicles the sudden death of her father, how “On the Sunday we now know was his last” “he fell / into a long moment and stayed there, / stayed no matter how we called him back.”

“Palm Court,” one of the strongest poems in the book, begins as an elegy for the speaker’s mother but expands to become a meditation on memory itself. Standing with her own daughter near her mother’s childhood home, the speaker wants “to ransack the air itself / for evidence of afternoon / piano lessons, dark braids / flying behind a rope swing, / hopscotch songs in the street.” But then comes the honest and moving truth:

But our faces are not

yet dreamed of,

here at the very place

her girl laughter might still

be trapped in the trees.

That lovely and unexpected juxtaposition of past, present, and future exemplifies just one way in which these poems often push beyond mere narrative to reach for the transcendent.

Anyone who is a Florida native, as is Lilley, or who has lived long in the state, will appreciate the elegiac allusions to mid-century Florida that appear throughout the book, the “burnt cake / perfume that citrus refineries blew,” the beach houses “at the end of two-track driveways / soft with sand and flanked by / crowds of hissing palmettos / and sea grape.” Nostalgia is an inevitable adjunct to such imagery but also there is the stamp of authenticity in it, that the reader is taken by the hand and led by a credible guide through a rich landscape that has vanished or is disappearing.

One of the greatest strengths of Susan Lilley’s poems is that they present the reader with a bifurcated subject. As the poems recall the physical and emotional landscapes through which they pass, what is also being discovered and described are the paths the self must navigate toward awareness. It is not enough for Lilley to remember and describe what happened. It is also important to discover the courage and the means to let things go. Venus in Retrograde succeeds at both tasks.

Please make sure to see Susan Lilley’s poem “Wedding Season,” included in Venus in Retrograde and previously published here in Aquifer.

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Stories Inspired by Midnight at the Havana Zoo

A Kind of Solitude by Dariel Suarez
Winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction
Willow Springs Book, 170 pages, paperback, $19.95

Elena, the keeper of the address registry in her neighborhood in Havana, is an outstanding citizen and an exemplary neighbor. But all that comes undone when the police come knocking at her door, find out about the contraband cheese in her fridge, and demand the name of the supplier, her old friend Emilio.

Isidro hauls his eighty-year-old father, a Santería practitioner who is writhing in pain, in a wheelbarrow through the storm-lashed, flooded streets of Havana to the hospital. As Isidro struggles getting the proper treatment for his father in a hospital with limited resources, he finds himself reconciling his family’s beliefs and his own lack of faith.

In both these stories, “The Inquest” and “Possessed,” Elena and Isidro find their solitary lives disrupted; there’s palpable angst and longing, and that sensibility forms the heart of Dariel Suarez’s debut story collection, A Kind of Solitude. The mélange of eleven stories, set in Cuba and largely after the fall of the Soviet Union, offers an intimate, penetrating, and nuanced sociopolitical commentary of living in a communist country facing severe economic crisis. There’s critique, criticism, flavors of patriarchy, but also a portrayal of the infallible beauty of hope, yearning, and ambition. Suarez’s characters are neither heroes nor victims. They are, in turn, bold, shrewd, cruel, corrupt, melancholic, contemplative, kind, dignified, and—as portrayed in the story “Primal Voice”—actual rock stars.

The opening story, “The Man from the Zoo,” is at once magnificent and heartbreaking, and appropriately sets the tone for the rest of the collection. Two men, Arquímedes and Orlando, steal a giraffe from the Havana Zoo in the middle of the night for an American trophy-hunter family. The story is fast-paced, yet periodically slows down to let you catch your breath and to reveal the history of the men and their motivations.

Born and raised in Havana, Cuba, Suarez moved to the United States as a young teenager in 1997 during the island’s economic crisis known as The Special Period. His writing is reflective and critical of his country of birth; his prose is lyrical yet incisive, but not pedagogical. His Cuba is not a private or enigmatic Cuba, where revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries are smoking cigars and plotting government takeover (though some of his characters have fought alongside Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and marched in service and in protest of the country), but a Cuba that is deconstructed via the power of fiction and rendered approachable and open.

The title story, “A Kind of Solitude” [originally published in The Florida Review 40.1, Spring 2016] takes us deep into Cuban countryside, where sixty-year-old Eladio, a man who prefers the company of his farm animals over humans, prepares to leave for the city after he realizes that at his age he needs the protection of companionship. Haunted by the suicide of his wife, he nonetheless looks forward to uniting with his long-term mistress, Griselda. He ruminates about his love and devotion to both women, but as the evening progresses the focus changes—there’s an intruder on his property, and Eladio must act, for better or worse. The story showcases powerfully the way that fleeting choices can change our paths.

In “Mudface” we come to terms with the games and cruelty of young boys. In “The Comforter,” corruption and a young man’s integrity come head to head. And here we see Suarez’s brilliance in how he portrays the ugly interiority of complex, flawed characters, shaped by the sociopolitical landscape but shown without unnecessary judgments or justifications. The Special Period in Cuba was a time of great economic crisis with overwhelming shortages in food, medicine, energy, healthcare, and opportunities. Through the eleven stories in this collection, Suarez offers a multitude of perspectives and plot lines that wade through these difficulties and showcase human desire and ambition. In the story “Hope” we follow the motions of Vladimir who is yearning for a better life, a life his mother doesn’t want. We find a similar yearning in the story “Daredevils” where Suarez explores the friendship and love between two young men, Yaisandar and Miguel.

It was the story “Marching Men,” however, that affected me the most. There’s a moment toward the end of the story when the protagonist, Eloy Manduley, participates in the parade at La Plaza and brings to fore the triumph and tragedy of the Common Man:

. . . and the steady chant of “Fidel, Fidel, Fidel!” resounded within different pockets of the crowd. Eloy held his umbrella against his chest—the handle down at his right hip, the metal tip at his left shoulder—and raised his chin like a proud soldier. He was in sync with the throng. He knew the majority of people had been forced to participate, yet the men marched on with determined steps, stout voices, and celebratory gestures … for the first time in his life, Eloy was physically part of el pueblo, a nation brought together despite all odds. If only Gladys could see him. Maybe he could surprise her at the airport. Maybe he could take her dancing at the carnival at El Malecón.

At a recent reading from A Kind of Solitude at Boston’s Brookline Booksmith, Suarez also spoke about the process of writing his book. He spoke of the research involved, the craft and linguistic choices he made, and the challenges of choosing to write about a Spanish-speaking world in English—a language not his first but preferred because, he said, even though he loves speaking Spanish he didn’t think he could do justice to the Spanish language by writing in or translating his stories to it. He further talked about how writing about Cuba through his stories helped recalibrate his world view. For me, both the talk and the book reinforce the importance of reading international (and multilingual) authors. Dariel Suarez’s story collection contributes further to the American publishing landscape what Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, Yiyun Li, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and others like them have helped evolve and enrich—the scope and possibilities of what constitutes the universal experience in literary fiction.

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A Balm to Soothe the Fevers

Bluer and More Vast by Michael Hettich
Hysterical Books, 2018
Paperback, 82 pages, $15.00

In Michael Hettich’s Bluer and More Vast, the reader bears witness to a man who is barely and beautifully tethered to the world around us. These small prose poems are evocative, tender stories of companionship, confusion, home life, memories of fathers, and dreams of wives and husbands dreaming together. In “The Double Dream of Sleeping,” we are invited inside:

One night, my wife and I dreamed the same dream: we had carried our mattress to the ocean, thrown it into water and climbed on. We lay together in that bed as we drifted out into the deep water, in a night that was teeming with stars and silence.

What happens next, as throughout the collection, asks more questions of us than provides answers: What is memory? A dream? Family? Can small things save us?

The man and his family here reside in tandem with opossum families and insect worlds and the forest dwellers and everywhere the presence of birds, the birds, the wild Florida birds. Their homes are in the water and in the branches and the moss and the boat. We are all in it with him and looking around and wondering. Hettich brings a David Byrne-like beautiful befuddlement to it all: Is this my beautiful wife? Who am I? How did I get here?

Reading a new collection by a white male poet isn’t usually first on my poetry list these days. I have spent too many years on assigned books written by white men, and I need to catch up on years and years of missed and silenced voices from my queer, brown, trans, young, female, Asian, and other and other and other poetry family. I approached Bluer and More Vast with my armor up. I was curious. What does a seasoned white male poet have to say to me, a woman, right now? Right now?

In the end, I am grateful for the read and review. Taken as a whole, the collection feels like a balm to soothe the fevers whipped up in my body—and so many othered bodies—these days. Oh, these days. Even my teenage daughter has been taught dozens of dark, dystopian YA books in recent years—a response, they say, to our untethered, anxious world. Hettich’s prose is like a pill one can take to quiet some of the angry male voices on the air, across the bumper stickers that berate us, the defiant, spewing Supreme Court nominees.

The speaker of these poems is a man at once fully grounded and light as air—someone who puts a soup in the crock pot and carries injured long-necked herons to bed (“The Guest”) and who loves his wife. Really loves her. So many love poems here. Did Hettich know we needed this? In “Sunday Morning” a man recalls a long list of the books he and his wife are reading, and the passing of the days together:

We were putting our reading aside and going out to putter in our garden, to listen to the cardinals and mockingbirds and mourning doves, to smell the spearmint we’d planted by the henna tree. It was raining then, softly, and we let ourselves get wet, soaked through to the skin, which belonged to us now.

The beautiful, dreamy poem “To Sing The World” almost asks what is love? And it is not too sentimental; rather, in Hettich’s hands, it becomes serious meta-commentary in a world battered by a lack of gentleness.

Magical realism works well for these poems, especially because they occupy that murky, liminal place: the prose poem. Hettich’s emphasis is on story and mood more than traditional poetic elements like sound or metaphor. What is happening to these people, these fish, the deer with bird nests nestled in racks on their heads at the beach (“Solitude”)? Strange and confusing things, sure, but the reader is not scared. The language is evocative and beautiful, so the brevity of each piece lends an urgency to the collection that is hopeful instead of harried.

Hettich’s words play with idea and imagery, giving us just enough weirdness to want more. Does he want us to know he is dreaming or does he want us to just not care for once, to get in the poem and go? “The Ordinary Wonders” encapsulates much of the trip we are taken on, via spider web and the neighbor’s lusty libretto. These poems and this speaker are something to sing about. And so, in turn, are the little and big lives always happening around us. Like Mary Oliver, Hettich skillfully slows us down, and we look together on the wading birds in ways more studied than sappy, more insightful than ordinary in spite of the quiet subject matter.

And we wonder, too, as we sink in steel lawn chairs with Hettich and our ancestors all around us smoking pipes and bringing wayward turtles to our laps. All along the birds and the neighbors and the mothers keep singing and the opossums lumber. It is the big world in our small yards. It is knowing:

Everywhere we look there are reasons to go home

I felt like the poet carried me through this book because I needed to rest. It felt good to know, just a few poems in, that I could be taken well care of with words. The poems were the lullabies, the myths made by us, and maybe they were breadcrumbs, too. Maybe Hettich is a kind of prose poem Pied Piper, but he is not leading me far from home. He is trying to tell me, trying to tell us, that home is the safe place and the vast, relentless water rising all around at once. It is loving the person beside us as much as the people still in our dreams. It is standing in the shallows every chance we get. It is our feet finding sand dollars in the water while we still can.

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The Shrapnel of Being

Reading Life by Chris Arthur
Negative Capability Press, 2017
Paperback, 202 pages, $15.95

Chris Arthur, a native of Ulster, Ireland and a long-time resident of Wales and Scotland, happens to be one of the prominent authors of long-form, meditative essays published in America. All but one of his books have appeared with a US publisher, and he makes frequent appearances in Best American Essays as well as a variety of US literary journals. Reading Life, his sixth collection, declares again a kind of trans-border citizenship through his lifelong residence in texts and the literary imagination. It offers his most direct commentary on the form of the essay itself.

“Perhaps no essayist,” he muses, “is worthy of that name unless he or she succeeds in creating objects which do not resemble their usual descriptors but are instead depicted in that elemental rawness which shows how little, in the ordinary run of things, we allow them to resemble what they in fact appear to be.” The sequence of negatives and reversals in the sentence indicate the complexity of the task: truth is, of course, elusive; evidence is illusive; the essay, with its epigrammatic etymology of provisionality and its seventeenth-century pedigree, must somehow get beyond these matters and uncover the bones.

Writing instructors often coach students in the practices that lead to a “writing life,” and Arthur’s title hints at a kind of companion practice, how to establish a life as a reader. In this vein, he re-examines texts acquired in his youth, such as novelist Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, “a piece of literary flotsam picked up on one of the many occasions when I was beachcombing in bookshops in my late teens.” On the occasion of his ten-year-old daughter being assigned to read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, he wonders whether the novel’s gruesomeness might be at best a “curious choice” or “unsuitable” for children that age and decides to re-read the novel alongside her to consider the question carefully.

But these sorts of reflections—living with and re-living familiar texts—are just one of Arthur’s intentions in Reading Life. In “reading” the objects of the world around us, Arthur offers a kind of enactment and commentary regarding the essayist’s purpose. “Essays deal in the shrapnel of being,” he writes, “turning over now one piece, now another, carefully running the fingers of their prose along the edges, testing for sharpness, looking for hints of connection, feeling for the cut-off remnants of joins, trying to reconstruct a sense of setting, context, contiguity, extrapolating from the minuscule moments and objects that create a life reminders of the massive milieu in which they and it are embedded.” The extended metaphor—stunning in its disruptive mashup of violence and contemplation—exemplifies Arthur’s method. He favors complex and suspended syntax; he crafts intricate details that subtly interconnect.

Arthur’s essays have always worked by way of fragments, assembling mosaics or braiding multiple narratives. His style lies in the scope of these assemblages and the patient, measured pacing with which he brings the pieces together and an unseen pattern emerges. Sometimes those fragments are literally objects—a whale’s tooth, for example, that Arthur subjects to close examination and free association, linking the memory of his childhood visits to the dentist who gave him the small artifact to consideration of the unbroken texts of DNA, “a paired line of antecedents going back some 60 million years to the land animals whales once were … [leading] finally to the same destination: that moment of naked singularity, the great beginning, the point at which there was something rather than nothing.” (This was one of my favorites in the book, recalling in some ways “Miracles” from his 2005 Irish Haiku, in which the fossilized bone from a whale’s ear resonates with connection to cosmic unity and the disunity of religiopolitical violence in Northern Ireland.)

Arthur’s omnivorous attention “reads” moments from literary history—a passage in the Goncourt brothers’ Journal containing an image of child prostitution in nineteenth-century France; a few degrees of separation regarding Seamus Heaney and his famous Bog Bodies poems—and from personal experience—leading a group of writing students out into the snow on a quest for found objects as writing prompts; “listening” to the histories associated with three walking sticks Arthur inherited. Through these readings, the richness he gleans includes delight in language itself (acquiring new words like “sett” and “clough”), companionship in shared meaning (“one of the things I’ve always liked about second-hand books is the way they hold the spoor of other readers and how, following their tracks, a sense of almost tribal complicity can be kindled”), the sudden shock or surprise of entering an alternate point of view (“why did this glimpse of child prostitution in nineteenth-century France strike me so forcefully that it felt—still feels—as if it left a splinter?”). Such “splinters” stay a long while with the reader, too—that’s part of Arthur’s power as prose writer, to deliver images, or facts, or anecdotes that work their barbed way more deeply in.

Reading Life is distinguished from his previous books in its deliberate commentary on form and theory. Essayists often like to comment on the meandering, fragmentary, organic approach that seems fundamental to the form, and Arthur has done so before. But here he devotes more direct consideration to such matters. Instead of losing himself in the unfolding energy of the essays, more often Arthur remains a self-conscious, authoritative as well as authorial presence. It’s sometimes as if he’s holding a subject before his own and the reader’s gaze, while simultaneously commenting upon what gazing feels like and explaining how sight casts an upside-down image of the world on an imaginary screen on the back of the eye.

And so “Sonatina for Oboe and Bayonet (Reading All Quiet on the Western Front),” the piece in which Arthur and his daughter read two distinct editions (his a 1963 edition with a cover depicting the dead and dying, hers with “only…an artful image of a poppy”), the story of their reading widens to recount their discussion of what a bayonet actually is (a knife the size of an oboe, he explains at first) and to examine one from the World War I theater purchased long ago from a junk shop. Soon the essay also provides a close reading of its own movement, Arthur explicating for the reader the image he’s just drawn, laying out the layers of symbolism he perceives there, making what moments before were implicit, explicit. The prospect of his own daughter on the floor between the musical instrument she plays at school and the authentic German bayonet her father has brought for her to look at “makes a powerful cameo … freezing into a kind of icon of incongruity that’s at once symbolic and interrogative,” Arthur muses. “It symbolizes vividly the way in which our world is riven by the coexistence of opposites: gentleness and brutality; compassion and cruelty; beauty and ugliness; creativity and destruction; peace and war. These polarities can pull apart any equilibrium of meaning we try to lay between them. Their sudden alternations act like military rounds, pounding the semblance of order on which we build our lives.”

This, too, is vintage Chris Arthur. Calm and articulate, while pointing to the firing guns.

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Ghosts in the Trees

Day of All Saints by Patricia Grace King
Miami University Press, 2017
Paperback, 96 pages, $15.00

Winner of the 2017 Miami University Novella Prize

Patricia Grace King begins her novella Day of All Saints with an image of ghosts: “Ghosts in the trees. Martín wants to rip them all down. If he could, he’d bury them deep in the flowerbed that he’s uprooting, or stomp them into the grass.” These ghosts, Halloween decorations that adorn a yard in Chicago’s affluent north side, are anything but playful; rather, they represent the suppressed memory of trauma, specifically the horrors of the Guatemalan Civil War, which haunts Martín Silva de Choc, and, indeed, the pages of this stunning short novel. It follows King’s two previous fiction chapbooks, The Death of Carrie Bradshaw (Kore Press, 2011), and Rubia (winner of our very first Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Prize here at The Florida Review, 2012). Her work is growing in power, and here she draws on her three years spent in Guatemala working with refugees of that country’s civil war.

Although the primary narrative, set in Chicago in the 1990s, unfolds over the course of a single day, King skillfully weaves in flashbacks that take place in Guatemala City. There, Martín, a young language instructor, lives with his grandmother, Doña Ana, and his aunt, Rosa, in the El Incienso barrio, to which he moved when he was four, as “civil war ripped through the rest of the country.” In the first of these flashbacks, Martín falls in love with a US foreign exchange student, Abby, even as her social, economic, and national privilege cause her to fetishize, to romanticize through a Eurocentric lens, the very neighborhood in which Martín lives. “This feels Mediterranean, somehow,” says Abby, “‘If you just nearly shut your eyes … If you look through your lashes.’” Indeed, the crux of the work hinges on how Martín and Abby, though in love with one another, cannot communicate in a meaningful way due to their different cultural identities and experiences. Doña Ana, in telling of her former life in the Ixcán in the 1970s, echoes this difference when she juxtaposes Guatemalan culture with US culture. Of her own culture, she says,

And I had my own small diversions: nights I sang with the neighbors, down at the Pérezes’ house—the Pérezes had a marimba—and the priests’ visits on weekends. They came regularly then, to say Mass on Saturday and to hold Spanish classes for us women, since back in the highlands we’d mainly spoken K’iché.

She follows this observation with one of US culture during the same era: “In America, what were they doing—roller-skating? Donna Summer? Don’t look so surprised; I know who she is. Electing Señor Ronald Reagan, too, weren’t they? Who sent our Army so many guns.” This cultural difference, and its underlying significance, permeates the work and is ever-present in Martín and Abby’s relationship. When they move to Chicago, their bond becomes tenuous, and their different social positions and histories more starkly defined. As Abby attends art classes at a university, Martín works as a day laborer. And while Abby has her own past trauma related to her mother, she ultimately has the privilege of security. When she leaves Martín, haunted as he is by the brutal deaths of his parents and extended family members, she finds safe haven in the home of her mother on the north side. Martín, however, bewildered and alone in a new country, finds himself without such material and emotional sanctuary.

King writes a story within a story within a story, and she does so in lyrical language with details so vivid that the reader cannot help but enter the picture she paints. In the primary narrative, Martín searches for and then finds Abby at her mother’s home, and in the secondary narrative, Martín and Abby fall in love in Guatemala. In the tertiary narrative, Doña Ana, over a dinner prepared for Abby at home in El Incienso, begins the story that is the heart of the text—the traumatic events that occurred in the Ixcán and that haunt Martín and his remaining family members.

This narrative, begun in a flashback sequence, ultimately enters the primary narrative as Martín faces the ghosts of his past, who appear before him in a memory long suppressed. He can no longer banish these ghosts, nor can the reader, who encounters them, and the world they inhabit, at every turn. They are “[t]he heat [of the Ixcán, which] was this thing that sat down on your skin and would never let you up. And the mud—you would sink in it up to your knees. You could lose your own shoes in that mud.” They are “‘[t]he fog on those mountains … something you miss when you’ve left them—how it flies from the peaks like white laundry.’” These ghosts drift through the text, hovering on the periphery of the psyche in both Martín and the reader.

In Day of All Saints, King makes a thoughtful social statement about cultural difference and First World privilege: as Martín observes, “Halloween: a day of no real significance in Guatemala. What matters, instead, is El Dia de Todos los Santos, Day of All Saints, one day afterward.” However, she does so without ever allowing that statement to overwhelm the true focus of the story: Martín’s strength and fortitude, indeed the strength and fortitude of his family, the other residents of El Incienso, and the citizens of Guatemala, which shine throughout the course of the text. King’s characterization of Doña Ana; Aunt Rosa; Don Gustavo, Aunt Rosa’s romantic companion; and Ernestina, the young woman of Ixcán who chooses to leave behind her village and her birth name in order to fight for the resistance, is honest, nuanced, and deeply affecting, largely because of how King understates their sacrifices.

Ultimately, though, Martín is the character who most affects the reader, not, solely, because the narrative is focused through him, but because of the complexity of his character. He is a man in love with a foreign woman, a woman who wishes to heal the wounds of his past in the same way that she wishes to heal a wound on his hand, but he is also a man deeply connected to his place of origin, his remaining family members, and his fragmented history. He haunts us, as does the ending in which, hunched against the trunk of a tree in the Palm Room of the Lincoln Park Conservatory, he confronts the ghosts of his past that have now entered his present. It is closing time at the conservatory, but this room is the ever-present Ixcán, where the guerillas, dressed in “camo-green,” await to aid survivors of the army’s ruthless actions, and he is trapped there “[a]mong the wet trees.” He knows that “soon the people in green will come for him too,” with a green-aproned conservatory attendant poised to tell him, “‘Sir, it’s time to go now.’” Where will he go when he leaves the Palm Room? One hopes to a sanctuary of his own creation.

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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.

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Category: Book Review