Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswa

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows / Balli Kaur Jaswa / Morrow/HarperCollins / 2017

I picked up Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows per the recommendation of a Chicana gender studies professor I met in passing. I am immensely grateful for her recommendation. Like “Jane, the Virgin,” the novel toys with genre in genius and hilarious ways. Whereas “Jane, the Virgin” plays with the tropes of romantic comedies, romance novels, and telenovela, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows plays with tropes of romance novels and—you guessed it—erotica. In doing so, it elevates erotica as a genre and engages in some good old-fashioned postmodern meta-analysis of erotica as a genre.

Before I go further, let me give a plot teaser. Nikki, a feminist law school dropout and British Indian, applies for a job teaching a woman’s writing workshop in Southall, UK’s little Punjab. She is bummed to find out rather than teaching creative writing, she was bait-and-switched into teaching a literacy class for a group made up largely of middle-aged widows. In one of the first few classes, Nikki accidentally leaves behind an erotica novel meant as a gag gift to one of her friends. When she returns to class, she discovers one of the widows reading the stories aloud for the rest of the group. Hilarity and drama ensue.

The workshop format allows for some great commentary on the tropes of erotica. There are hilarious sections where Nikki complains about the widows tendency to compare every phallus to a vegetable. It is fascinating to read the differences between the smutty, tawdry erotica, as created and narrated by the widows, and the steamier bits of the novel written in the elevated and more subtle tone of Jaswa’s narrator. The erotic provides powerful avenues into discussions of intergenerational trauma, gendered violence, femicide, gender relations, and modern vs tradtional lifestyles. It is awe-inspiring to watch Jaswa use erotica of all things to open up these conversations so naturally. There is a great amount of healing had, as Nikki’s writing workshop becomes a space for these women to process their grief and the injustices widows and women sometimes face in traditional Punjabi communities. The women value this opportunity to take pleasure in their stories and articulate their desires so much they are willing to risk the disapproval of powerful members and organizations of their community.

There is a very cinematic quality to the writing. This is at once one of the most fun aspects of the novel and perhaps also its greatest weakness. The dialogue is so witty and on cue, the scenes so snappy and brilliant, you may be too swept up to be annoyed by what may perhaps be a lack of realism. The transformation of Kulwinder, the novel’s antagonist, may happen a little too smoothly, so much so that it feels a bit like a movie. That said, I am immensely surprised this novel hasn’t been turned into a sitcom yet. It’s a goldmine! Someone needs to get on that.

What I might appreciate most about the novel, however, is that while it may draw readers in with a steamy promise of sexual content, a solid chunk of the narrative focuses on violence against women and a femicide in the Southall community. The novel shows a community grappling with the femicide, the power relations between the families involved, and prompts the reader to think of the not-so-uncommon femicides in our lives. If the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement and the #sayhername movement has taught us anything is how widespread and interwoven into the fabric of modernity gendered violence is. The erotica workshops end up empowering the women to use their voices in a way that directly challenges the authority of the patriarchal men in the community and those complicit in the femicide.

I loved this book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in gender and sexuality studies, feminism, postcolonialism, diaspora, narrative pacing, and postmodernism.

The Poet and The Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery

The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery / Simon Worrall / 2002

Sometime in fall of 2019, I became fascinated with the story of Mark Hofmann, a Mormon forger and murderer whose work blurred the line between truth and fiction, between history and fantasy. The story of Mark Hofmann should be a key part of any Mormon or historian’s education. Briefly, the story goes like this: a young bibliophile and rare books dealer forges dozens of historical documents, fooling both historians and the leadership of the LDS church. In his forgeries, he provided “evidence” that Joseph Smith dabbled in folk magic (which is ultimately true) and necromancy (which is true if you consider baptisms for the dead necromancy, but not true any other way). His strategy was to sell these embarrassing “historical” documents to the church for large sums of money (tens of thousands of dollars) so they may suppress them, then leak their contents to the press to embarrass the church. Hofmann ultimately forged the handwriting of 129 different historical characters, including Martin Harris, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and others!

Hofmann, however, bit off more than he could chew. He churned out so many rare, impossible documents he was bound to get caught eventually. His problem is that he kept going for more and more ambitious forgeries. As the scrutinizing eyes of his debt collectors and manuscript dealers began to close in on him, he went on a bombing spree that resulted in the deaths of two people. He eventually confessed to his forgeries, although scholars and the public alike are suspicious. Can we trust a pathological liar to tell us about all his forgeries? What if he’s lying about how much he forged to brag and bolster his legend? Hofmann sold both legitimate and illegitimate documents, so just because Hofmann touched an artifact doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a counterfeit. My heart breaks for all the poor historians whose work got mangled by his crimes.

For those interested in learning more about Hofmann and his crimes, The Poet and the Murderer by Simon Worrall might be a good place to start.

Be warned, Worrall is not an excellent writer. Sometimes, he mangles his sentences. Other times, he revels in inappropriate allusions and similes, both of which are connected to other blind spots in his work. Check out this bizarre comparison, for example: “Among some African tribes boys are separated from their mothers at the age of fourteen and sent into the bush, where they learn to become warriors. Similarly, young Mormon men are taken from their families and sent out into the world to become warriors for God”. Not only are these two rites of passage extremely dissimilar, Worrall’s depiction of a generic African tribal society reduces a culturally specific practice to a stereotype.

Worrall’s treatment of Mormon history is thorough, but dismally biased. This particular comparison Worrall utilized will show you what I mean: “These local community organizations are the eyes and ears of the Church, funneling reports of disobedience and dissent up through the system in much the same way that local party officials in Communist China keep tabs on local neighborhoods.” This claim is made too flippantly and does little to reveal the true nature of church organization. Instead, it relies on the reader’s xenophobia and fear of communism to villainize the church. At another point, Worrall writes, “Mormons also learns from a young age to recognize each other by means of a series of signs and symbols known only to them.” This line made me laugh out loud. As someone raised Mormon, I was surprised to hear so.

Unfortunately, like many books in the true crime genre, Worrall also ultimately romanticizes Hofmann, and once again, Worrall’s similes provide a few clear examples. When describing Hofmann’s forays into hypnosis, Worrall writes, “like a Zen master, Hofmann would eventually gain almost total control of his mind and emotions. It was these extraordinary psychic powers that enabled him to control and manipulate others.” Comparing a sociopath to a Zen master is simply inappropriate. Moves like this happen throughout the text.

Where the book succeeds and what makes it worthwhile is its contextualizing of Hofmann’s work within a tradition of Mormon forgery. Once I learned of Hofmann’s story, I was struck with its parallels to Joseph Smith’s life. Early church leaders, including Joseph Smith, forged money or worked closely with Mormon forgers like David McKenzie and Peter Haws. Worrall succeeds in showing how Hofmann is a particularly Mormon villain who in some ways is just like Joseph Smith—that is, a brilliant, charismatic con man who knew how to make people believe what he was saying. Ultimately, I found The Poet and the Murderer satisfying because it did a great job highlighting this tradition and Hofmann’s parallels with Joseph.

Worrall also provides snappy narration about aspects of Emily Dickinson’s life, the story of the poor librarian who fundraised 24k to unwittingly purchase Hofmann’s forgery of a Dickinson poem, and the larger history of forgery in general. The text is sprawling and a reader will definitely feel bumps in the road between chapters, as Worrall awkwardly dances between Hofmann’s story and Dickinson’s. That said, it was an enjoyable enough read.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in forgery or Mormon history.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and Before Us Like a Land of Dreams by Karin Anderson

As someone whose ancestors survived the middle passage and the genocides of smallpox and European imperialism, as someone whose living ancestors survived warfare and migration, I sometimes pray to my ancestors for strength and wisdom. This is a common practice for many people of color I know. We pray to those who sacrificed everything so that one day their descendants could know something more than mere survival. If we romanticize our ancestors, it is only to balance the grotesque stereotypes of them popular in American culture. In writing prompts, it is common to ask young writers of color to reflect on their lineages and share their histories of survival.

That same writing prompt lands differently when given to a white person.

When white people romanticize their histories and feel proud about their ancestors, it’s complicated. American bootstraps narratives and manifest destiny abound, frequently blithely turning the eye away from the masses of enslaved Black bodies, massacred Indigenous bodies, and silenced Queer bodies left in their wake.

When people of color turn to their ancestors for strength, there is something holy, even if simplistic. When white people turn to their ancestors, there is sometimes a reckoning, the dance of positionality has more chances for missteps.

As a teacher, I have wrestled with how to best teach my students how to reckon with their heritages. For my students of color, there is often the need to validate, to empower, to bring to light; for students of color farther along their identity development, I challenge them to complicate their histories, to stop performing their histories cleanly for white people. There are plenty of models I can point my students towards to develop their writing in this way. In the past, however, I have been somewhat at a loss for how to best direct my white students when wrestling with their cultural legacies. Books by white people that reckon with the weight of the legacies of racism and imperialism in ethically satisfying ways are harder to come by perhaps or they have somehow escaped my attention. Too often, the conversation ends with How to Kill a Mockingbird.

I was excited to read Before Us Like a Land of Dreams by Karin Anderson, because it seems like one of the few books by white people that strives to find a way to ethically narrate and thereby define a spiritual relationship with white history. By chance, I read Anderson alongside William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Reviewers of Before Us Like a Land of Dreams are fond of comparing Anderson’s novel to As I Lay Dying. The obvious connection is the shifting first-person perspectives in which the novels are narrated, as well as the authors’ shared ambition in encapsulating a region’s history and culture. The obvious connections end there. While Faulkner’s novel is driven by a clear conflict—the Bundren family’s desire to bury their mother in a faraway town—the conflict in Anderson’s novel is less clear. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams covers five different sets of characters from distinct generations, whose conflicts don’t necessarily interact with one another. In this sense, Before Us Like a Land of Dreams more closely approximates The Glory Field by Walter Dean Myers than As I Lay Dying. The impetus for Anderson’s novel seems to be derived from the author’s mid-life crisis after a divorce—from a husband and a religious history. Like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, the novel starts with non-fiction and ends in the imagination: Anderson moves from narrating a mid-life crisis to voicing the stories of her ancestors as a way of finding herself anew in the world. While Anderson compassionately retraces the family histories of several branches of her family tree, Faulkner exposes his characters for the amusement and derision of his readers. Reading As I Lay Dying is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. With this in mind, both novels perhaps offer two contrasting ways of engaging the legacy of whiteness: by Anderson’s approach, compassionately humanize the ancestor in all their flaws and shortcomings, tracing the limits of their strength and desire; Or by Faulkner’s approach, expose the callousness and depravity of your kin without erasing the ache that makes them human. I don’t think it’s fair to call Anderson’s approach redemptive. Rather, much like the Matthew Arnold poem from which the novel takes its name, Anderson seems to nod to the fact that much of the love and light in the romanticized narratives of Mormon history are an illusion.

In Faulkner, we find a fiercely poetic prose with descriptions and moments that will steal your breath. The slim narrative hits you like a bunch of knife jabs. Anderson’s novel is much more sprawling and unfocused. Each voice in Faulkner’s novel clearly pushes along the narrative arc. Each voice in Anderson feels like the beginning of a new novel. Both novels beg for rereading in order to fully appreciate the rich switches in voice. Reading these novels side-by-side is miserably dizzying, although rewarding.

I first engaged with Anderson’s novel in a panel at Southern Utah University. What captivated me the most then was the novel’s attempt to compassionately narrate unspoken parts of Mormon history, such as the forced removal of indigenous peoples from Mountain West, queer figures like Julian Eltinge, and so forth. I am deeply grateful this novel exists, because it narrates the stories of a Utah concealed from the public. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams is a solid counterpoint to all the romanticized stories about pioneers young Mormons are fed in church and public school. A large part of our conversation in that panel was a discussion about how to best represent marginalized stories in Mormon history without losing the ears of our devout community members. I have mixed feelings about how successful Anderson was in that count. There are moments where the autobiographical narrator’s callousness towards the religion makes her seem a tad biased and I can imagine that offending the devout. When the same callousness comes in the voices of the ancestors, it feels more acceptable to me. It’s harder to lay blame on the dead.

On a formal level, Anderson’s novel is worth reading for the explosions of brilliance scattered throughout the novel. There is an absolutely fantastic four-or-so page scene where circus elephants leap off a cliff and into a river—and survive! Equally impressive is the story of a drag performance in rural Idaho that wins the hearts of the conservative community. Then, there’s the story of the white boy who helped Natives steal a herd of farm animals. Time and time again, Anderson narrates these unlikely stories in a way that makes them utterly believable.

I recommend Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to anyone interested in studying perspective in fiction. I recommend Anderson’s Before Us Like a Land of Dreams to anyone interested in Mormon Studies, history of the American West, perspective in fiction.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

‘I started graduate school when I was twenty-two. According to some of my professors and peers, this meant I was yet incapable of depth and genius, at least in comparison to my peers older than twenty-five: the age when humans begin to think with their prefrontal cortex (the rational part of their brain) more than their amygdala (the emotional part of their brain). Never mind the fact I felt less insecure and published more than some of my older peers, the fact of my biological development meant more to them than the muscle of my work. Not surprisingly, my twenty-fifth year came without any out-of-the-ordinary growth or major epiphanies, despite the developmental milestone.

While I do not want to dismiss the importance of the prefrontal cortex’s maturation and its significance in changing human behavior, one of the more fascinating insights of Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teach Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence” was it argued that the rigidity of the mature, older brain could, in fact, stifle genius and creativity necessary for innovation. Our minds, according to modern neuroscience, functions a bit like artificial intelligence, taking in information from our senses, then making educated guesses to fill in the blanks or shape the material in the window of our mind. Our senses are not transparent windows to an outer world, it seems; everything we experience is an interpretation of our minds. As we age, our interpretations may become less and less flexible, making us unable to see problems or experiences from new angles. Psychedelics, Pollan argues, can disrupt the rote patterns of an experienced mind, opening people to new insights into problems and perspectives on the world.

“How to Change Your Mind” is a fascinating piece of non-fiction. Part historical overview of psychedelics, part memoir, part lay-person literature review of contemporary psychedelic research, Pollan manages to provide a captivating and coolly narrated introduction to almost anything a neophyte would want to know about psychedelics. Eschewing the evangelistic and impassioned, or even feverish, tone popular in familiar iterations of psychedelic writing, Pollan’s narration is dominated by a sober, rational tone and a clear line of argument. This tone is definitely necessary in order to make Pollan’s writing credible and more persuasive for anyone suspicious of psychedelic exuberance. At times, however, it does seem to make Pollan’s interior life as somewhat devoid of the spiritual. As someone familiar with the emotional explosions of spiritual revelation and poetry, he can seem a bit stiff at times.

In particular, I wish Pollan would have shaken off the observational tone in places where race was central to his narration. Take Pollan’s narration of white people’s discovery of the “magic” mushrooms of the natives of the Sierra Mazteca. Maria Sabina, an indigenous Maztecan, provided the mushrooms to two Americans for the first time, so the story goes, and inadvertently ended up triggering a cultural revolution, as these two went on to spread the word, eventually leading to the famous feature in Life Magazine “Seeking the Magic Mushroom”. The magazine feature led thousands of tourists to swarm the once remote indigenous village, drawing the unwanted attention of law enforcement. The mushrooms became scarce. Sabina was ostracized from her community. The violation of an indigenous community’s environment and way of life is an crucial, unavoidable part of the history of psychedelics. And while Pollan competently narrates the history, there were times I just wish he would bare his teeth a little more and strike at some of the toxicities part and parcel of Western culture.

Perhaps the only major shortcoming of the work is Pollan’s treatment on race. I left the book being able to tell someone much more about American and European research on psychedelics, rather than the millenia-spanning history of indigenous practices. For a book concerned with the therapeutic uses of psychedelics, “How to Change Your Mind” glossed over the curandera uses of the velada and other indigenous practices, which probably merit chapter of their own. I imagine some of this information must be difficult to access, but if Pollan can go through the trouble of finding the underground community of psychonauts and therapists illegally using psychedelics, of pummeling his way through contemporary neuroscience, and of imbibing psychedelics himself, surely he could go through the trouble of familiarizing himself with the indigenous communities who preserved this practice despite extreme repression from Christian authorities.

Another sticky and tricky unexplored racial tension in the work is some researchers and enthusiasts tendency to use psychedelics as a way of “eating the other,” in the bell hooks’ sense of the phrase. Why do these psychedelic trips seem to encourage the orientalism of some of the researchers and enthusiasts? In moments like these, an observational side-eye is warranted, if not a more direct criticism.

Pollan does an amazing and thorough job of reporting the advancements made via psychedelics, although not all the advancements are as new as the title of the book implies. As Pollan himself acknowledges, much of the new research is retracing the ground researchers trekked in the 50s and 60s before psychedelic research became taboo. While the book didn’t necessarily change my mind about psychedelics—I was already inclined to believe they could be useful in psychotherapy—it did provide me with a robust set of arguments to advocate for their use in treatments for depression, addiction, and the existential dread of dying common in terminally ill patients. It has also guided me into an understanding about the safest way to use these drugs. Prior to reading the book, I assumed my C-PTSD would make any trip especially unpleasant for me, if not dangerous. Although its not legal yet, a trip guided by a shaman or psychotherapist could actually prove to be a transcendental experience, even for the severely traumatized.

My reading of “How to Change Your Mind” is informed by my own research into C-PTSD and Internal Family Systems Therapy, as well as by my EMDR and Brainspotting therapy sessions. Internal Family Systems Therapy “is an approach to psychotherapy that identifies and addresses multiple sub-personalities or families within each person’s mental system.” According to my therapist, this form of therapy is inherently spiritual. EMDR and Brainspotting, on the other hand, both use free association to heal unconscious, somatic wounds. Suffice to say, I have had plenty of material to evolve my understanding of the self, the limits of human perception, and how to heal my mind. One of the most energizing aspects of scientific research into psychedelics is that many users experience something inherently spiritual, forcing science to wrestle in unfamiliar territory. Pollan does an especially great job asking the right questions when it comes to expanding the bounds of science.

One of my favorite aspects of “How to Change Your Mind” is the expansive ways it asks you to consider perception. I have spent a lot more time engaging in the humbling experience of pondering other forms of consciousness, such as that of plants and animals, in an attempt to better understand my own limits and strengths. The book allows you to vicariously experience psychedelic trips, in a sense, and even that experience is rife with power.

“How to Change Your Mind” is a thoroughly enjoyable read, intelligent without being opaque or jargon-laden, personal without being indulgent. I recommend this book to anyone studying neuroscience, religion, Buddhism, the war on drugs, philosophy of the mind and self, psychology, mental illness, and mental wellness.

We Hold Your Name: Mormon Women Bless Mormons Facing Exile

We Hold Your Name: Mormon Women Bless Mormons Facing Exile / Edited by Kalani Tonga and Joanna Brooks / Feminist Mormon Housewives / 2019

In a recent interview with RadioActive on KRCL, I was asked the gigantic question: how do you define poetry? After a few minutes of scribbling, I came up with this: prayer and blessing through story and song. Prayer I believe points to desire and to an attempt to access greatness. Blessing is product of my own goodwill, as a poem can certainly be a curse. In either case, it is a wish to transform the other. Story points to the need for meaning. Song points to the need for meaning beyond the literal words.

We Hold Your Name is an open mic, a hearth of women gathered in vigil, a collection of poetry written largely by unpublished and non-professional poets. If what you’re looking for is mind-blowing imagery or deft line breaks, this collection is not for you. What you may find, instead, is a home, a community to weather with you your doubt and exile.

Gina Colvin

The collection was written and gathered in preparation for Gina Colvin’s December 2018 excommunication court. For months, it looked like Colvin, a prominent and fierce Mormon feminist personality, was going to go down the same route as other Mormon intellectual icons and critics of the past decades and be excommunicated. Colvin’s community, the international coalition of women she helped organize, nurture, and connect to Heavenly Mother, came through for her with letters of support to Colvin’s bishop and poems to help strengthen Colvin during her difficult trial. The poems they sent were collected and presented in We Hold Your Name. For those unfamiliar with Colvin’s work, this interview is pretty good.

The poems range widely in tone and purpose, a reflection of the breadth of Colvin’s Mormon community, even a reflection of how wide and varied the Mormon experience is in the 21st century. There are sharp little barbs, like Kate Kelly’s poem, “Fuck the Patriarchy, A Poem”:

F

u

c

k

t

h

e

p

a

t

r

i

a

r

c

h

y.

Amen.

There are priesthood blessings like Kathryn Elizabeth Shields, which opens with the snarky and touching lines mimicking and inverting LDS priesthood blessings: “O Woman, / having been given no authority, / Neither from on high or by man, / I give you a name and a blessing.” There are also simple offerings of peace, such as Jami Kimball Baayd’s poem, which describes a sacred space Baayd has visited, one where Colvin would never be excommunicated from for speaking her truth.

The power of We Hold Your Name is its ability to represent, and thereby create, alternative ways of being Mormon with different relationships to the institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There’s a chance that if I had known of the Mormon Feminist Housewives and the intellectual class of Mormon thinkers in my teenage years, I would have found a path for staying inside the church. Because leaving the church did require letting a believing part of myself shrivel up, these poems offered a profound relief for that choked limb, allowing it to feel the blood of love and the possibility of belonging again. I found myself so moved in my first sitting with the collection that I read through more than half in one sitting. The poems read easily and won’t belabor you in search of their meaning. That’s not the intention of this collection. Rather, it’s to create a community in the absence of approval and acceptance from those with the so-called authority. As Sara Hughes-Zabawa put it in her poem, “…it is in our un-belonging we found you, and that has been the greatest gift. Following your insight, it was the map to belonging to ourselves for the very first time.”

The act of empowering and comforting a silenced community is poetry at its finest.

A close friend asked me today, “Do you think you’ll keep up this relationship with Mormonism your whole life?”—this relationship where I keep returning to its literatures, histories, and scriptures, wrestling with their meaning. The truth is, I don’t know. But I do know I believe in the literary power of Mormonism, in the ability of its metaphors, imagery, and histories to reveal profound truths about human nature and the divine. That is enough for me for now.

I recommend this collection for anyone interested in feminism, religion, and Mormon studies.

Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib

Go Ahead in the Rain / Hanif Abdurraqib / University of Texas Press / 2019

When We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service dropped in November 11, 2016, all I could hear was my own wounds. At the time, the people around me hadn’t even found the courage to name Donald Trump, instead referring to him as 45 or awkwardly stumbling around his name in conversation. I had lost a relationship to a romantic interest and mentor in what was easily the worst heartbreak of my life. I was building a community for undocumented students in a hostile conservative environment. In my headphones, I had Emilio Rojas (especially I hate Donald Trump), Residente, Jamila Woods, and J. Cole. As an ardent hip-hop head literally co-teaching a Poetics of Rap class with Adrian Matejka, I knew I was supposed to listen to and love the new Tribe album. I simply couldn’t find it in me to digest it.

In need of a soulful and relaxing read, I turned to Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib a couple of weeks ago. I wanted an audiobook fluid and clear enough to listen to while I played video games, but still meaningful and important enough that I wouldn’t be better served by listening to music. I have been a long-time fan of Abdurraqib’s work. In 2013, I had the blessing of competing against him at the National Poetry Slam in Boston, before the Button Poetry deal, before the best-selling essay collections. There is a small place in my heart where a poet like Hanif will always exist in the crowded dimly lit slam venues, where he, she, or they will grace the stage and then disappear, forever out of your reach, only emblazoned on your memory. I come from communities historically excluded from publishing houses and official literary spaces. So, perhaps you can understand my joy as I began to see Abdurraqib’s star ascend. I eagerly purchased his first poetry collection and wrote this novice book review of his work. Now I turn to Abdurraqib’s work whenever I need a long and passionate eye, a stout and sturdy shoulder to turn to.

For newcomers to Abdurraqib’s essays, Go Ahead In The Rain steers far from the objective journalistic and academic style you might expect from a history book. This isn’t to say the book isn’t well-researched. Rather, Abdurraqib’s work is known—and loved—for his deeply personal forays into the contexts surrounding his subjects, including the material of his own life. Go Ahead In The Rain, for example, also narrates a portion of Abdurraqib’s middle school years and the definition of “cool” he had to navigate. A move like this would likely come across as navel-gazing or self-indulgent done by other writers. In Abdurraqib’s essays, such forays always imbue his subject with new and often surprising meaning. Understanding the definition of “cool” operative in Abdurraqib’s middle school in Columbus, Ohio proves enlightening to understanding the cultural niche the Native Tongues carved out for themselves.

Whether you’re watching The Get Down or Hip-Hop Evolution, or whether you’re reading The Rap Yearbook or Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, you will inevitably notice the repetition of some of hip-hop’s most dramatic moments. Whether we are talking about hip-hop’s birth in the condemned streets of the Bronx or the beef between Biggie and Pac, there are stories hip-hop heads know and hold dearly. One of the sticks Tribe fans will measure this book by is how well Abdurraqib narrates these stories. For me, I love it when an artist can tell me a story I’ve heard a thousand times and still manage to teach me something new or keep me invested in the emotional narrative when I already know the ending of the story. I was excited by the narrative fluidity Abdurraqib brought to these stories, weaving personal narrative and hip-hop/political trivia into Tribe’s story without boring me or making me feel as if I am simply too old to appreciate what this story has to offer.

I especially dug Abdurraqib’s tender approach when narrating the tensions between Tip and Phife, his honest and critical appraisal of The Love Movement and its lukewarm reception, and his refusal to omit his own admittedly immature anger at Tip when Tribe broke up. No one could narrate the disappointments of Phife’s solo career with as gentle and loving of a hand as Abdurraqib. It was Abdurraqib who I turned to when Phife died, and he wrote this gorgeous elegy for him. One of the most heartbreaking and moving segments of the book is when Abdurraqib writes a letter to Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Phife Dawg’s surviving mother who also happens to be a remarkable poet in her own right. The letter gives the reader a chance to glimpse at an intimacy and engagement with grief and death that only those whose shouldered its burden would know.

I wrote this book review re-listening to We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service, and entering more fully into its experience, grateful Abdurraqib gave me the push to explore not just Tribe, but a handful of classic hip-hop acts I have yet to get around to. For me, that is the true success of this book. I only interrupted listening sessions of the audiobook to return to the music, both familiar and new-to-me, Abdurraqib was engaging.  

I recommend this book to anyone interested in Hip-hop, Music, Black Studies, Biography, and creative non-fiction.

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem / Natalie Diaz / Graywolf Press / 2020

One of my favorite things about Natalie Diaz’s poetry and celebrity is how much it seems to rub some of the older poets I know wrong. One older Native poet, for example, believes When My Brother Was An Aztec was published too soon. According to them, the manuscript felt too much like an MFA thesis—with its trumpeting play and virtuoso with forms, which to them felt like mere exercises. Another older queer poet went out of their way to comment, “[Diaz] isn’t that great” in a way to suggest not that Diaz isn’t good, just that she’s not as amazing as her celebrity would make it seem.

Maybe these poets are right, but I think the things they would fault about Diaz are the precise reasons why I love her work. I love that When My Brother Was An Aztec stunts on em with ghazals, pantoums, and the like. I love that Postcolonial Love Poem feels overwritten, that it makes me reach for the dictionary time and time again for words as thicc as atman, cabochon, lapidary, alarum, mullion, and transom. Perhaps these are things that would make me side-eye other poets, but in Diaz, there is something so deliberate and authoritative about her voice, her political framing of her own work, that makes me fall for her. While it isn’t the primary or sole reason I love Diaz’s work, I confess, part of the reason I like the high-diction of her work is because it probably makes old white people reach for the dictionary.

If you have yet to fall for Natalie Diaz, try Postcolonial Love Poem. As unabashedly erotic and deftly political as its title would imply, the collection includes intensely sexual poems, flooding over with ecstasy (“Like Church,” “Ink-Light”, and “Ode to the Beloved’s Hips” being my favorite), poems about grief, race, her brother’s drug addiction, basketball, and the environment. These poems are all densely related to the body, which—per the seven-page prose poem “The First Water Is the Body”—extends beyond Western notions of arm, leg, leg, arm, head to also conceive of the land and water as equally, if not more important parts of the body.

My favorite line is from the last poem “Grief Work”: “Achilles chased Hektor around the walls / of Ilium three times--: how long must I circle / the high gate / between her hip and knee / to sold the red-gold geometry / of her thigh?” Ugh.

Poems like “Grief Work,” like “Like Church,” like “Postcolonial Love Poem” are as full of grief as they are with love. I don’t feel like I have anything profound to say about them, just that as a grief-bound queer person of color, I am grateful for these love poems that hold the weight of history as tenderly as they do a lover’s waist. I am grateful that these poems can allude to wars lost and never-ending in the same swooping stanza where “we pleasure to hurt, leave marks / the size of stones—each cabochon polished / by our mouths.” (If you’re slow on the uptake there, she’s talking about leaving hickies.)

Postcolonial Love Poem is a must-read on your syllabus about feminism, ethnic studies, and environmentalism. Or if you’re simply looking for a hot piece of erotica to get you through the quarantine.  

There's Gunpowder in the Air

There’s Gunpowder in the Air / Manoranjan Byapari / trans. Arunava Sinha / Eka / 2018

The first time I went to El Salvador I was 18. I tasted my first anona. Met tios y primas I never knew existed. Milked a cow. Got stung by zancudos. Rode a horse. One of the most beautiful and jarring aspects of El Salvador, however, was my mother.

Montefresco, Summer 2011

 At 18, little about my mother made much sense to me. I still didn’t have a good understanding of the history of El Salvador and while I admired her strength, faith, and charity, there was a lot about my mother that I thought I understood, but didn’t. One of the reasons that first trip to El Salvador was so remarkable is I saw my mother in a context where it felt she belonged. I had only really seen my mom as a foreigner. In the US, it would not be out of the ordinary for me to help my mom navigate somewhere, reading signs and such. In El Salvador, our dynamic switched. I was the outsider, reliant on her to understand how I should behave in spaces. It’s as if I had never seen a fish in water before. Suddenly, aspects of my mother’s personality made much more sense to me.

I am starting to more intentionally read Indian literature, partly because my partner is Bengali. While we have shared an extraordinary four years together—watching one another grow and stagger, fall and blossom—part of me is anxious because I have yet to see her in her home country. I know how much I don’t know yet. On top of that, my knowledge of Indian history is dismal. I’ve picked up a generous bit from my conversations with her, her roommate, and from my university studies. But my knowledge is clumsy at best.

It’s with this shaky footing I stepped into Manoranjan Byapari’s There’s Gunpowder in the Air. A slick and energetic novel, translated magnificently by Arunava Sinha, TGITA captures an attempt prison break by five Naxals. Naxals are members of the Naxalbari Movement, a violent revolutionary group in India that rattled the country’s core for brief but fiery years in the late sixties and early seventies. (Want to read more, look here). My brief excursions into Indian literature and history has taught me that the Naxalbari Movement is complicated historical wound that many sectors of the country are still very much processing. The Naxalbari movement was viciously repressed with as much, if not more violence than they wreaked—which is really saying something, because they were a militant bunch. The movement had sharp ideals, but often evokes complicated feelings from the Indians I know, as feels appropriate for the amount of murder involved.

The novel is told in shifting perspectives, a move that really helps bring the bustling, overcrowded prison to life. We get the perspective of jailers, guards, Naxals, and moles alike, all with inebriating range and depth. One of my favorite novelistic techniques is a writer’s ability to dive in and out of side plots and characters to really breathe life into a community. Here, Byapari does so with the ease and muscle of someone who shared jailtime with the Naxals he narrates in this novel. Fair warning, the novel is chockful of heartbreaking, traumatizing subplots, grisly if casual descriptions of state brutality and degradation, and equally grisly if casual descriptions of poverty. The heaviness of it might crush you for a bit, and I definitely had to put down the book several times, because the lengths at which human beings will go to humiliate and harm one another is dizzying even to someone as disillusioned and cynical as I am. The shifting perspectives, however, does make this book easy to pick up again after putting it down for a few weeks, as I had.

One thing I appreciate about literature revolving the Naxalbari movement is its ethical wrestling. Social justice movements have a tendency to idealize themselves, to sometimes pit themselves unequivocally as victims. It is near impossible to view the Naxalbari movement through the rainbow-colored glasses of a social justice warrior. This book thrusts you into the moral wrestle of the jailers, deputies, Naxals, and prisoners, faced with a failing system.  There are many disappointments throughout, but also moments that will make your cheeks buckle with hope.

I recommend this book for anyone studying social justice, postcolonial literature, or prison studies. I also recommend it for creative writers studying perspective.

Kickdown

Kickdown / Rebecca Clarren / Arcade Publishing / 2018

As shameful as it is to confess, the first time I listened to Tracy Chapman I couldn’t relate. I may have been in high school or in the sophomoric years of undergrad, where part of me knew I had suffered more than most of my peers and believed it made me special. I definitely suffered more than some, but I had suffered nowhere near as much as I thought I had and it certainly did not make me special. My young self only wanted kicks and snares to treat my eardrums like punching bags. I wanted punchlines to uppercut my guts. There was so much I couldn’t hear in the nuance of a voice, in the careful fingering of a guitar, in the silence. Thankfully, I would later return to Tracy Chapman’s work with a clearer, if wetter, eye.

Once, Tracy Chapman’s music played on shuffle during a card ride, and the poet Leticia Hernandez Linares told me to change the track. She wasn’t up for the brewing of that set of emotions. The more I have sat with my own crushed hopes, my own tender and powerless love, the more Tracy Chapman’s music has made sense to me. The more its strings and hums have cut and calmed my wounds.

I feel the same way about Tracy Chapman’s music that I feel about rural America. Once I hated its silence, its slowness, its empty space, its darkness. I wanted to run back to my train-chugging city, its bright lights and slick rhythm. By extension, Kickdown is a novel I’m not sure I would have appreciated when I was young—but I should have. Written by Rebecca Clarren, a prize-winning journalist who reported on environmental issues in the rural West, Kickdown not only provides good material for discussing the politics of oil, water, and rural life, it also provides a penetrating look into the lives of three characters shaped by the classic rural values of self-sufficiency and hard work.

One of the questions Kickdown asks is how do these values fail and reward its main characters. Kickdown follows a pair of sisters, Susan and Jackie Dunbar, and Ray, an Iraq war veteran and police officer, and begins by capturing what certainly can count as some of their bleakest moments. Susan and Jackie have just lost their father and find themselves in the predicament of failing to adequately take care of his enormous ranch and livestock. Early on, Jackie gets ran over by a cow and Susan goes close to losing her mind. Ray, on the other hand, feels stuck in his marriage and drinks to avoid PTSD flashbacks of Iraq. If the book can feel a tiny bit slow at times, that’s because Kickdown is a book about setbacks.

The novel opens with an impressively detailed description of a cow giving birth, a thrilling scene that shows Clarren did her homework and has earned her rural chops. There are similar moments scattered through the novel that I suspect will make ranchers and rural folk grin with recognition. One of my favorite aspects of the novel includes itsl turns of phrase, such as this nice zinger on page 40: “Shorty Lee has always been a real bee in cheesecake.” All my minor annoyances are now officially bees in cheesecake.

The novel offers this rather jargony definition of kickdown as an epigraph: “a well will kick or kick down when the pressure of natural gas overcomes the pressure exerted by the mud column.” This makes sense as the novel rotates around the rippling effect a kickdown can have on a rural community. The result is much more dramatic than the scientific definition implies. A more casual reading of the title, on the other hand, can refer to the state of the main characters—these folks have definitely been kicked down.

What I love most about Kickdown is its tender portrayal of the messiness involved in getting your life back together after a major catastrophe. Each of the three main character have lost their dreams and face the challenge of rekindling their hope against tremendous power and odds, be it the promises they made to their father, the boundaries of a marriage, or the financial and legal strength of the oil industry. Clarren narrates all the action with the clean, cutting eye of a well-seasoned journalist mixed with the flare of a (good) buzzed poet.

I would strongly recommend teaching this book in a class about the rural West, environmental literature, in a creative writing class focusing on perspective or just writing some plain ole strong prose. If you are looking for a book to help you survive a moment that feels like it just upended your life, this book may be for you. 

When the Living Sing / Don't Call Us Dead: Surviving Black Death in the Poetry of Danez Smith and Yalie Kamara

When The Living Sing, Don’t Call Us Dead: Surviving Black Death in the Poetry of Danez Smith and Yalie Kamara

“how long

does it take

a story

to become

a legend?

how long before

a legend

becomes

a god or

forgotten?”

Danez Smith poses us these difficult questions in “not an elegy,” a blistering meditation on survival that confronts the murders and suicides of different Black people. These lines are a direct call-and-response to the epigraph of their sophomore collection of poetry Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017). Smith introduces the collection with Drake’s hook on “Legend,” the opening track of his 2015 mixtape “If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late,” where the Cash Money rapper brags, “Oh my god, oh my god, if I die, I’m a legend.” Smith’s questions pull an awestruck Drake by the collar to interrogate what it actually means to become a legend when you die. ¿What does it mean be at risk of becoming Biggie Smalls or Mike Brown? For Drake, this realization is one of his greatest accomplishments. There’s the pride of knowing you’re a living legend—like Drake, like Danez—dominating the game and knowing your death would be a tragedy; then, there’s the dumbfounded pride and despair of knowing you’re a living legend, dominating the game and knowing your death will be a tragedy and because of the color of your skin, even that won’t save you; those who share your hue will never be afforded that privilege. They will never have their death properly mourned and have that mourning legitimized by the so-called justice system. “what legend did we deny their legend?” Smith asks. ¿What happens when that same legend is mythologized or forgotten? ¿How does it change the way we envision ourselves and, thereby, envision the world?

It is into this screaming assault on the sanctity of Black life that both Danez Smith and Yalie Kamara publish their new collections of poetry. Both collections find complementary, at times opposing, ways to transcend the grief of Black life in the United States. Danez Smith’s collection confronts the consequences of two fatal epidemics, white supremacy and HIV/AIDS, and wrings from their suffering the magnanimity to face the brutal realities of these diseases, as well as the unconquerable ability to imagine and enact a wondrous life within and without them. Yalie Kamara’s debut chapbook When the Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017), on the other hand, unpacks the rupture she experienced as a first-generation Sierra Leonean-American and finds in song the grace to transform the anguish of Black death and dislocation into the triumphant joy of survival. When I read Don’t Call Us Dead, I long for the bonebreaking joy of Kamara. When I read When the Living Sing, I long for the unflinching frankness of Smith’s eyes surveying his America. I am writing about both these collections together because I cannot read one without hearing the voice of the other harmonize and counterpoint. 

A look at their cover images highlight the resonances in their collections. When the Living Sing is inaugurated by a photograph Kamara took during her time living abroad in France. In it, a graffitied pair of scissors are about to cut free a heart-shaped balloon from its earthly tethers. The pairing of the image with the title implies that when the living sing, we unbind our hearts. By “couper ici” or “cutting here,” we can transcend beyond our worldly worries and limitations. Kamara’s songs are at times cutting and painful, but always, they are life-saving.

The cover image of Don’t Call Us Dead includes a similar image of balloons and flight: “the moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it,” a visceral image by visual artist Shikeith Cathey. Cathey’s work mines the too-often unacknowledged depths of Black masculinity, depicting Black men at their most vulnerable, at times naked, selves. In the cover image, two nude young black men ascend into an off-white sky. The first looks down in the precarious space between fear, reflection, and doubt, holding the delicate string of a black balloon in his left hand and the hand of another young black man in his right. The second looks up (¿hopefully?) to the slightly larger, slightly higher young man. The vulnerability here—the bravery and fear as they dare to do the unthinkable and take flight—is captured by the stark contrast between black and white and the expressive language of their profiles. The title of the image undergirds the entire piece with fear. ¿Will they stay faithful to the possibility of their flight? The title of the image implies that their ability to transcend hinges on something more precarious than “couper ici,” namely the fortitude of their faith to persist in the face of unspeakable odds.  

The title of Smith’s collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, stretches the reach of the symbolic lexicon of the cover even further, opening up a slick allusion to the story of the Flying Africans. I first heard about the Flying Africans in conversation with Ross Gay, where he questioned me about the ways myth and metaphor illuminate and/or obscure violence. Igbo people, the mythology goes, survived the Middle Passage and upon reaching the shores of Savannah, Georgia, collectively decided to escape, to fly back home. According to wyt folks, in this case slave owner Roswell King, the group collectively walked into the ocean and drowned themselves to escape the horrors of slavery. According to over 200 years of African American folklore and literary tradition, however, the Igbo peoples flew back to Africa, sometimes as buzzards, sometimes joining hands and spinning in a circle until they rose into the sky and flew away. Like the story of the Flying Africans, the black boys and men that populate Smith’s heavens and earth have their lives denied, defined by their proximity to death; Smith creates in their poems a world where Black folk are given relief from violent death—with or without magic. Like the story of the Flying Africans, the Black folk who populate Kamara’s world find themselves “too beautiful not to be in hiding”; Kamara enacts through her poems a world where song can save us. 

I began this conversation with Smith’s “not an elegy” because it drives at the heart of Ross Gay’s question—¿what is the role of myth and metaphor in illuminating and/or obscuring violence?—and illuminates Kamara and Smith’s differences in responding to other important questions, namely ¿how does one overcome the grief in Black life in the United States? ¿what are the powers of prayer and song? ¿what are the limits? The second section of “not an elegy,” which is a remix of “not an elegy for Mike Brown,” a poem that went viral during the Ferguson riots and resistance in 2014, begins “i am sick of writing this poem,” a line that captured the pain and despair of so many Black writers speaking against police brutality that it has since become a cliché in the Black literary community. We enter this section of the poem with an immediate dismissal and frustration with the limits and redundancy of poetry, which like the courts, are useless in providing violated communities reprieve and justice. Smith rightly escalates the fight by the end of the third stanza, demanding “a war to bring the dead child back. / i at least demand a song. a head.” Here, the surprise is after the nausea felt of yet another Black life lost, of again needing to write the poem, the song, Smith reasserts the value of song and song’s important role in healing, despite the obvious need to ascertain justice for the victims of police brutality from the perpetrators. In the last section of “not an elegy,” Smith laments “i have no words to bring him back, i am / not magic enough.” If this sentiment is expressed with despair, it is not expressed with fatalism. What is so powerful about Smith’s work is that they does not fail to see and recount the devastation before them; they may flail, they may bite and kick and cry, but Smith never surrenders.

On the back cover, poet laureate Tracy K. Smith notes, “Don’t Call Us Dead gives me a dose of hope at a time when such a thing feels hard to come by.”  I’m not sure if hope is the right word. As Danez Smith suggests in a recent Mic50 interview, “to be real, the future sorta sucks. At least the one our collective imagining is leading to. It’s dry, like no water dry, and sad.” Hope is a precious comfort no one wants to abandon. I know because I’ve shouted my grief in the streets as one of the leaders of the sanctuary campus movement in my college town, and I’m now invited to speak at panels on activism and immigration. One of the questions our brilliant, beautiful, and exhausted young never fail to ask is “¿how do you stay hopeful?” We don’t know what we’d do without hope. When I look around my Americas, families torn apart by deportation, all the #metoo statuses by friends, family members, and lovers I have had, the endless list of grievances we share, hope is not what keeps me going. Hope is a poor solution for injustice.

I tell the young students that slavery took hundreds of years to “end” and those who lived under its yoke still fought and dreamed and gave their all to their loved ones. I hustle with no real expectations for change.  I don’t have another word for what propels me personally, but this “little prayer” by Danez Smith feels close:

let ruin end here

let him find honey

where there was once a slaughter

let him enter the lion’s cage

& find a field of lilacs

let this be the healing

& if not   let it be

The final stanza of this poem is the most important in the entire collection for me. What Smith offers us may not be healing, but it is the might and love to bear what we must.

While Smith’s work wrestles against the limitation of word, the limitation of song, Kamara’s entire collection is premised on capturing what does happen when the living sing. The chapbook opens with the Sierra Leonean proverb, “The song is done, the words remain,” a koan that dares me to believe we can live in song, in the healing and the emotional purity and beauty of it, that the words remain with us for a reason. Words are not just the dead bones of a song, the same way the bones of our loved ones are not just bones. In “Aubade For Every Room In Which My Mother Resides,” the first poem of the collection, Kamara listens to her mother’s singing, perhaps similar to Smith and definitely similar to myself, as a skeptic:

Before I knew her wail was a blues ballad,

I called her croon crazy. Thought this

a song I could do nothing with.

The youth in Kamara speaks with an arrogance the rest of the poem humbles and unravels. This is a powerful choice because the rest of the poem enacts for us the process of observing her mother pray and sing and then, Kamara praying and singing herself. “I am ready,” Kamara tells us halfway through the poem, and by the end, she is spelling her name in her throat, which is to find your identity, your inner strength. For Kamara, this is done by entering pain and expelling not the pain itself, but the root:

This is how she beckons me to hold this life,

with both hands, even when it aches like a

word shunted in bone.

I walk toward the sound of splinter exiting kin.

Dawn is peeling from dusk. And my mama

is teaching me how to depart from that

which does not love us.

Note: I always read this first poem backwards because I am not brave enough to read it forward. In reverse, each of the sections build to tell a story of betrayal of the mother’s heritage and a lack of access to prayer. Read forward, the right way, the reader is brought to their knees in prayer by the first poem of the collection. Kamara blesses you with “lungs that eat crystal”. The power to “make rubble sing”.  

While Smith cries “i have no words to bring him back, i am / not magic enough,” in “Resurrection,” prayerful words of the Kamara clan perform a miracle. The poem chronicles the grief of Kamara’s family as they mourn the loss of the writer’s grandmother. Kamara bears witness to a visitation by the grandmother who visited them by night and partook of a dinner offering left to her by her children. “The dead only die when the living refuse to sing for them,” Kamara teaches us and thus, presses into our hand the delicate balloon string of miracle, the power to keep our loved ones close to us, almost as if they were alive.

And therein lies the tension that makes me hug both of these collections tight, the racquetball in my brain as I struggle to find my way out of my particular despairs and grief. My hand is clenched tight as a vice around the string of a balloon, and I’m not sure whether it’s confidence or fear, faith or doubt.

The power of Kamara’s work is that she knows how to read the darkness, and in it, find beauty, resilience and light. In “Oakland as Home. Home as Myth,” Kamara combats negative rhetoric that attempts to reduce Oakland to a bullet-ridden “killing field,” flattening the lives of those who live and love and find joy in the city. She tells us,  

            We are the bucktoothed city that made you wish you

            never wore braces…

We fall and get back up again and tell you that we didn’t mean to make our

          mistakes look like a dance. All that big booty attitude in those small Bay

                        Area jeans…

To claim this is a city of endless nightfall is easy. If they knew how to read darkness

they would have figured it out by now:

the object that casts the biggest shadow is the one closest to the light.

Compare this with Smith’s beautiful poem “tonight, in Oakland,” where he fantasizes that “tonight / guns don’t exist. tonight, the police / have turned to their God for forgiveness… tonight, prisons turn to tulips / & prisoner means one who dances in yellow field.” Here, Smith’s spirit must transform reality to achieve freedom and reclaim Oakland, while Kamara manages to root this joy in Oakland’s reality. Whereas in Smith’s world Black men and boys must die to call snow black, whereas in Smith’s reality even the Black guy’s profile reads sorry, no black guys, in “Sweet Baby Fabulist,” Kamara shares the story of how her three-year-old nephew calls everything he loves, everything that is beautiful Black.

It’s not that Smith’s reality doesn’t have its share of celebration, joy, and reclamation; it’s more that Don’t Call Us Dead provides a map for those who don’t always have access to spiritual communities and supportive kinship that Kamara may. In “a note on the body,” Smith guides the forsaken and godless with the words,

when prayer doesn’t work:                 dance, fly, fire

this is your hardest scen

when you think the whole sad thing might end

but you live                 oh, you live

everyday you wake you raise the dead

            everything you do is a miracle

Smith has survived by finding the miracle in the Black boy with his unfloating feet, planted firmly on ground, holding a balloon. The same way James Baldwin reverses the N-word and spins it onto wyt people, throughout Don’t Call Us Dead, Smith fights to undo the stigma and portrayals on queer bodies, on Black bodies, on HIV+ bodies as dying, as dead and spins it on the United States. “You’re Dead, America,” declares Smith in his post-election poem. “Those brown folks who make / up the nation of my heart” are “realer than any god.”

While Smith may indulge in fantasy and myth—even dreaming of becoming a Flying African themself, as in “Dear White America”—their survival relies on building a soul tenacious enough to withstand the heat and explosiveness of White America. If that doesn’t work for you,  follow Kamara’s song and prayer and help her build her New America. Reader, take from both these collections what you need to keep pushing. Take this string. Fly.

Corazones Peludas: Two Dope Collections by Latina poets

Corazón / Yesika Salgado / Not a Cult Press / October 2017  

Peluda / Melissa Lozada-Oliva / Button Poetry / September 2017

Corazones Peludas: Two Gorgeous Poetry Collections by Centroamericanas

Imagine you are at a slumber party with all of your homegirls, complete with nail polish and cheap booze. Your homegirls give you two options: Would you rather be 1) “completely covered in fur, like, head-to-toe, monster type of shit,” or 2) “perfectly smoothie-smooth in all of the right places: thighs, crotch, armpits, upper lip, neck? But here is the caveat, alright: all of the hair that would have grown in those places takes the form of a tail.”

Melissa Lozada-Oliva poses the reader this question and many more in her debut collection of poetry, Peluda (Button Poetry, 2017). On the front cover, the nightmarish image of Lozada-Oliva’s slumber party monster repeats on a daffodil-yellow background. If this hairy monster is comical or absurd, it is also an accurate portrayal of the monstrous ways American culture distorts the bodies of women who fail to uphold its rigid guidelines. The hairy monster is an externalization that perfectly symbolizes the anxieties many Latinas face. At the end of the slumber party poem, the speaker’s woke friends dismiss her party question, focusing instead on self-love and acceptance of their body hair; meanwhile, the speaker confesses, “I always choose the tail,” a heartbreaking, if silly conclusion to the game. Lozada-Oliva’s ability to balance whimsical humor with breathtaking disclosure is what makes her poems so magical. Lozada-Oliva deftly navigates Latina identity with a brutal playfulness, an undeniably addictive rhythm and punctuation that squeals and screams, giggles and sobs off the page.

As if in call-and-response to Peluda, Yesika Salgado published Corazón (Not A Cult, 2017), her debut collection of poetry. Corazón chronicles the poet’s journey through heartbreak and romance to self-love. Whereas Lozada-Oliva’s voice is unapologetically girly and visceral, Salgado strikes the page with a gut-dropping honesty and introspection. I am not sure how exactly Salgado would respond to Lozada-Oliva’s slumber party question, but in Salgado’s poem, aptly titled “Peluda,” she reveals the way our culture’s policing of hair has infected her relationships:

I used to leave your house before we fell asleep / tell you I had to get home before work the next morning…

The night sprawled out before me as I made my way home / to the razor blade in my shower / the hair on my chin growing / a hundred little fingers ready to give me away / ready to show you I am not the woman you think I am / that sometimes I am grizzly / manic / human

one day / I didn’t leave / you said love / I believed it / the sun found me and my bearded chin in your kitchen / stirring oatmeal / your hands on my waist / a soft song saying / so this is what it means to stay

Salgado’s poems have the preternatural ability of capturing the smallest domestic moments and excavating their emotional core. Her poems demonstrate the power of vulnerability, its ability to make love possible and heal wounds.

Peluda and Corazón are both poetry collections by Latinas whose bodies are under intense scrutiny—for their color, for their hair, for their size. They plunge their reader through the conundrums of contemporary Latina identity, a maze of mirrors where the authors’ immigrant heritage and self-perception are disfigured by the male gaze and xenophobia in America. A side-by-side reading of these collections reveals not only the common struggles shared by these two young Latina writers, but also the complimentary, if at times opposing, strategies for coping with the pressures of America’s beauty standards. In a culture that attempts to reduce Latinas to housekeepers and sexual objects, Melissa Lozada-Oliva and Yesika Salgado write poetry that demonstrates the complexity and range of Latina identity in the 21st century. Far from the flat portrayals of pan-Latino characters common in the mainstream, Lozada-Oliva (a Guatemalan-Columbian American) and Salgado (a Salvadoran American) unflinchingly unpack their fraught relationships to their Latinx backgrounds, to their bodies, and to men.

Both poets pay special attention to the ways destructive behaviors are passed down one generation to the next. In these moments, they reveal intergenerational trauma and reveal the work it takes to heal. In “Traditions,” Yesika Salgado parallels her mother’s response to her father’s misdeeds to her own response to her partner’s misbehaviors. When their men ask questions stemming from insecurity and guilt—such as “we are happy, aren’t we?” or “you’ve forgiven me, right?”—both Salgado and her mother fail to rebuke them or respond frankly. Rather than tell the men “the everything of everything,” Salgado responds with a tearful nod. The love and commitment Salgado and her mother have for their men overpowers their need to hold them accountable in this moment. The moment is filled with risk: Do I suffer in silence or do I upset this gentle moment? Can I let go of my hurt and resentment? Will things work out? Fear of the unknown, of loneliness, of being unloved, of fighting again and worse charges these pages with an explosive energy. In “Traditions,” Salgado chooses the path of her mother and refuses to spark the fuse—for now. The poem raises questions about the soundness of this choice, foreshadowing the rise of a speaker who will soon find her strength to demand more from her partners.  

In “I Shave My Sister’s Back Before Prom,” on the other hand, Lozada-Oliva describes how her sisters inherited hair from their father and fear from their mother. Here, the father not only works with the mother to police their appearance and behavior, he also gives them the physical trait that prevents them from fitting in. “maybe this has always been about our parents & all the things we never told them & all the ways they made us different,” Lozada-Oliva laments before shaving her sister’s back. Shaving, in the poem, becomes a celebrated act of rebellion, paralleled with their sneaky choice to stay up past their curfew.

Beauty routines accrue meaning throughout Peluda until they ultimately become redefined as acts of resistance. This move is crystallized in the last poem “Yosra Strings Off My Mustache Two Days After the Election in a Harvard Square Bathroom,” where the speaker declares, 

this isn’t oppression. this is, i got you.

i believe you. it hurts but what else are we going to do

it aches but we have no other choice do we

Beauty routines become rituals of love and self-love, where community and support are found. Lozada-Oliva knows she cannot escape oppression. She cannot heal all the wounds. The years of shame cannot be undone, but throughout Peluda, Lozada-Oliva overcomes shame by outperforming it, by beating it at its own game. 

If Lozada-Oliva and Salgado appear to be obsessed with hair, this compulsion is the result of living in communities so ready to attack them for any stray strand. In Salgado’s “Hair,” for example, the poet remembers, “you’d complain / about my hair. / how you always / found it in my sheets / after I’d gone home.” Stray hairs are often viewed as disgusting or annoying, but in the post-break-up phase of “Hair,” where the poet is suspicious of their ex’s infidelity, hair also becomes evidence of their relationship, and in turn, possible evidence of an affair to another woman. This realization raises suspicions about the motive behind the ex’s complaint, compounding the emotional weight granted to stray hairs.

Similarly, in “My Hair Stays on Your Pillow Like a Question Mark,” a white girl (Lozada-Oliva’s phrase, not mine) criticizes the speaker for leaving behind hair at her apartment. Almost the entire poem is end-stopped with double question marks, signaling the insecurity sparked by the white girl’s criticism and littering the poem all over with hair. Hair, as we know from “I Shave My Sister’s Back Before Prom,” becomes a symbol of Lozada-Oliva’s heritage, so in the poem, the white girl’s disgusts makes Lozada-Oliva insecure not just about her appearance, but her heritage:

imagine your hairs as daddy longlegs

crawling up the shower curtain??

daddy’s long legs??

daddy’s dark legs??

daddy’s hairy dark legs??

imagine you are what makes the white girls in a brooklyn

apartment scream??

except deep down?? you want to be a white girl

in a brooklyn apartment??

In these poems, hair has the power to define and literally create its bearers. Here, it transforms Lozada-Oliva into a spider, then her father, both of whom are terrifying and inhuman to the white girl in Brooklyn.

Like their relationships to their hair, their relationships with their homelands are equally fraught. In “Jenny and I” and “My Salvadoran Heart,” Salgado pushes past the clichés of homeland nostalgia to create a striking parallel between her longing for a homeland and her longing for a lover. As the first two poems of the collection, these poems become a sort of ars poetica, a map with which to read the poet’s journey through love and heartbreak. In “Jenny and I,” the mango is established as a place marker for El Salvador, and El Salvador is described romantically as “that country we considered wild / all that green / all those animals.” Salgado’s front cover, designed by Cassidy Tier, shows a heart growing beside a mango on the same branch. For Salgado, “love” is “a dangling fruit I ached to eat.” Similarly, in “My Salvadoran Heart,” Salgado tells us,

I am asked if I want a husband / asked if I will return to my country / they are the same question / I do not want to answer.

The conglomeration of romantic and diasporic longing makes each of Salgado’s love poems about more than heartbreak and love; they also become about having a difficult relationship with home and homeland. This understanding reveals deeper layers to poems like “Motherhood,” where the poet asks her lovers “aren’t I a home, baby?”—another question that rarely has an easy answer. Salgado’s question is not only about romance.

The way Salgado’s Salvadoran background becomes inseparable from her love life becomes inseparable from her own body image becomes inseparable from her parent’s relationship is mirrored in Lozada-Oliva’s “You Know How to Say Arroz con Pollo but Not What You Are.” In this poem, Lozada-Oliva unpacks her relationship to Spanish, and in the process, winds up narrating her parent’s romantic relationship and divorce. Lozada-Oliva ends the poem on lines about longing and distance:

i will tell you my Spanish is understanding that there are stories / that will always be out of my reach / there are people / who will never fit together the way that i wanted them to / there are letters / that will always stay / silent / there are some words that will always escape / me.

Lozada-Oliva’s Spanish is like Salgado’s mango—out of reach, escaping her. The last line break, however, implies a reversal in this relationship. My Spanish is me, the last line implies, suggesting this tangled relationship with love, language, and family history is, in fact, inescapable. Likewise, the break at “stay” implies there are words that always stay and also words that are always silent. 

Don’t let these troubled relationships make you believe everything these women receive from their heritage are stumbling blocks, however. Poems like “Los Corvos” and “The Women in My Family are Bitches” showcase the strength and wisdom these poets draw from the women in their families. In “Los Corvos,” Salgado’s machete-wielding matriarchs not only become role models of physical strength, but also the emotional strength it takes to draw boundaries and let go of toxic people. “I come from women who know how to fend for themselves,” Salgado tells us. “the blade is our friend. / and you? / you are a weed. / I know how to slice you out of me.” In “The Women in My Family are Bitches,” Lozada-Oliva proudly portrays the women in her family as “cranky” and “stuck up,” but if anything, Lozada-Oliva’s reclaiming of “bitch” reconstitutes the word to make it encapsulate the women in her family in all their complexity. If the women in Lozada-Oliva’s family are bitches, they’re the bitches who ask you to “give abuelita bendiciones!” They’re the bitches who worry about you enough to ask you to pray before the plane takes off and text them before you get home. Most importantly though, both Lozada-Oliva and Salgado’s women kin believe in a self-autonomy that will cut off those who betray them.

Peluda and Corazón both show us different ways of grappling with the pressures of Latina identity. While Lozada-Oliva finds power in converting beauty regimens into rituals of resistance, Corazón traces the arc of heartbreak and demonstrates the ways vulnerability makes love possible, even after heartbreak. “all of my poems are collection plates,” Salgado declares. “I fill / and fill / and fill / and fill / and / fill / I have yet to come up empty.” If you explore these collections, reader, neither will you

Teaching Statement

My experiences in academic and community workshops have taught me that the best creative writing classes use literature as a trigger for writing. As such, in my classes, I use a number of short stories, essays, and poetry to serve as models of good (and bad) writing and as launching pads for student writing. I pull from a diverse range of texts: everything from Julian of Norwich to Martin Espada to Li Po.  The point is to expose all students to new writing and to make them a part of the conversation of literature. To support these goals, I prefer to have an online discussion board for students to post questions to readings and respond to one another before class. This ensures that students critically read texts before they arrive, spurring deeper conversations in the classroom.

To explore form, I draw on my experiences in translation. Some of the readings I include are competing translations ranging from Dante to Pablo Neruda to Rumi. These ensure that students get much needed exposure to international writing and that they see how small shifts in language and form change meaning and effect. Moreover, these texts will inevitably bring up questions of power, interpretation, and representation in translation and make students more aware of biases they have when they interpret—and write—texts. In one translation-inspired writing prompt, I ask students to bring in an unpolished piece to translate into three different forms. This can be as simple as translating a poem written in couplets into a poem written in tercets or as drastic as translating a short story into a Wikipedia article or a hip-hop song. Students learn how to approach subject matter from different angles and realize that even minor changes in form can change meaning and effect.

To maintain a respectful workshop environment, I assign “(Wo)manifesto – Talking to a Victim/Survivor, Dismantling Rape Culture, Apology Etiquette and More!” by Megan Falley, a poet and survivor of relationship abuse. As the best workshops often push writers to take risks and be vulnerable, I find that leading with a text that discusses abuse and oppression early-on prevents awkward and triggering interactions later and prompts discussions that make students more sensitive to one another’s experiences. I ask students to apply what they learn in these discussions to their writing. In one assignment, I ask students to change the gender or the race of a character in a short story, prompting students to ask questions like “how would this impact the story, if at all?” or “How do I represent this character without resorting to stereotype?”  

Lastly, I require at least two one-on-one conferences with me throughout the semester. I’m trained as a writing center consultant and have whetted my skills with one-on-one poetry consultations with fledgling poets in the Westminster Slam Poetry Club. I have an easier time breaking through people’s shields and having supportive conversations one-on-one. These conferences help me know a writer’s goals, processes, and personality, and I then tailor my feedback.

Statement of Purpose

I first met poetry listening to Nas’ Stillmatic as a ten-year-old. Though tracks like “You’re da man” and “Smokin’” scared me, I understood that the words he said were dreadfully necessary. Hip-hop became the primary way my brother and I communicated, and it provided us with a language to combat disturbing aspects of Utah’s suburban culture. Combined with the symbolism and angst I inherited as a Mormon of color, it makes sense that I found magic in language, that metaphors worked on me like keys to a lock. I pursued poetry because the slam community in Salt Lake City provided the support I craved. My involvement in slam quickly turned poetry into a lifestyle. I embraced both spoken and written word and have always enjoyed testing the limits of form. My roots in hip-hop instilled in me the conviction that I should not dumb myself down for performance and neither should I stifle the orality of my work for the page.

I want to pursue an MFA at Indiana University because I am searching for a community of writers whose work is urgent and challenging. The program’s emphasis on teaching and its studio/academic track align with my goals of teaching at a university. The program’s internship opportunities align with my goals of editing and publishing. As editor-in-chief for ellipsis… literature and art, I read a wide array of contemporary literature. ellipsis is an undergraduate-edited magazine that annually receives over 1,500 international submissions and publishes about 3% of submitted work. In class and editors’ meetings, we learned methods of evaluating literature and discussed the merit of submissions under the guidance of Natasha Sajé. My involvement in ellipsis has helped me identify my literary tastes and introduced me to top-notch journals, such as Crazyhorse and The Kenyon Review.

In my research with the McNair Scholars, Kalina Press, and Kihada Kreative, I studied and sometimes translated Latin American and Latino/a authors, such as Alfonso Kijadurías, Miguel Piñero, and Javier Zamora. I want give back to the legacy these writers have left me by focusing more on my Salvadoran heritage and family history in my writings. Raised in Harrison, New Jersey and South Jordan, Utah, I’ve lived both sides of class and cultural conflict. My family is an example of how environment affects the choices we can make. I want to write poems that reflect people like them: my primos living in Compton, CA and Jiquilisco, El Salvador. My family is full of stories that are hardly spoken about, history that threatens to disappear as my parents’ generation begins to fade. I am threatened with the possibility that if I don’t share these stories, no one will. I hope to continue this work under the mentorship of Indiana University’s faculty, especially Adrian Matejka. Matejka’s ability to penetrate themes as diverse as hip-hop and more excite me as mentors can rarely engage with those aspects of my writing. I look forward to pursuing an MFA at Indiana University. Thank you for considering me.