Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Bestiary (2020)

  It parted the fog, flapping like a sail in trouble, no destination visible, and through the curdled milk of the air I could only see Ben bending down to save it. GRANDMOTHER Letter V: In which I name you Dear final daughter, You married a man the opposite of your father but I need to say all men are synonyms none the word you’re looking for when your husband went to the mainland you asked if you should have followed him I followed your father to this country & now I wear a diaper once I brought a piglet into my wedding bed tucked it between my legs & let your Ba fuck that instead I wanted to be the only one inside my body the piglet gave birth later to a litter of grenades each with a girl face I pulled their pins threw them into the river one by one rending the water into rain I see the zhongyi once a month & I pay him in memories my only currency once when you were little I said you could love your father or your mother but you had to pick one the one you love is your leash the other is a house you burn down you never told me what you chose but I know myself to fend off ash I tied the river in my hair like a ribbon I told you a lie there is no choice you have no father but me *1 the one you call Ba is not yours I conceived you with the river *2 I mothered & fathered you both the Ba you love better than me never sired you I milked you from the mountain Papakwaka I never named you answered to a whistle the same sound summoning dogs every neighborhood bitch born stray when you were born I was dry nursed you on a bitch’s teat you slept knotting your arms so tight they never learned how to be straight. I stood you against a wall for posture but you can’t train a spine to disobey itself I am sending all these letters separately but know I wrote this one first. To my last my not-son my knot daughter.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie and I bring jam jars to pee in. Ba fills them all, and we stop once a day to leave the jars by the side of the road like lanterns. Our piss is a gradient, darkening from clear to amber as we run out of water. At night, we pull over and sleep with the seats reclined, one back window open, headlights on in case of nocturnal animals. In case Ba wanders off, we paint his name with engine grease on the back of his windbreaker, along with these words written by Jie: DO NOT APPROACH. To keep him from sleepwalking, we knot three seatbelts around his limbs at night. Ba’s breath humidifies the whole car, and in the morning we wake with our windows steamed, our bodies hammocked in heat. Jie drives in a spine shape, swerving between lanes, uncontained. We pass Texas and unzip its border with New Mexico, which looks like the same state but thirstier, the cacti more nipplelike, asking for our mouths around them. The desert floor breeds rows of button cacti, and I’m tempted to wander out one night and undress them of their spines. Jie leans her head while she drives, half of her face frying against the window, the left half browning more than the right. I tell her she looks like two women splitting one mouth. Go deep-throat a cactus, she says. Go back to sleep. I dream it: my throat perforated with needle-holes, my throat turning into a sprinkler every time I try to drink. Jie and I buy corn dogs and packaged pies at convenience stores, where the clerks look at us like we’re a species of upright armadillo, yellow and armored. They watch through the window as Jie pumps gas, sometimes asking where we’re going, sometimes asking where we’re from. We say Taiwan even though we’ve never called it that, and the cashier grins big as a window: We see his missing teeth, we smell what he eats. He says he bombed Taiwan back during the war. Says it looked pretty from the air, a severed green finger floating in the sea. Jie tells him that Taiwan’s silhouette looks more like a finger flipping you off, then runs out of the store with a stolen lighter up her sleeve. The packaged fruit pies dye our spit different colors, and when Ba sleeps at night with his mouth ajar, I can see his tongue glowing blue-raspberry. We stop at a seafood restaurant somewhere left of Texas, though the closest sea is the one we dream. There’s a live fish tank two feet from our table, and when the waiter hears us speak his dialect he bags us a fish for the road even though we’ve got no fire to cook it. Finally, we fry it on the hood of our car, the sun seething through flesh. The fish tastes metallic, too much memory of the sea in its bones.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The Mahabharata is not an antiwar epic: innumerable passages glorify warfare and describe battles enthusiastically and in gory detail. Even though it is set in an earlier time, the epic probably reflects the period after Ashoka’s death in 232 BCE, when the Mauryan Empire began its decline and India entered a dark age of political instability that lasted until the rise of the Gupta dynasty in 320 CE.105 There is, therefore, an implicit assumption that empire—or in the poem’s terms, “world rule”—is essential to peace. And while the poem is unsparing about the ferocity of empire, it poignantly recognizes that nonviolence in a violent world is not only impossible but can actually cause himsa (“harm”). Brahmin law insisted that the king’s chief duty was to prevent the fearful chaos that would ensue if monarchical authority failed, and for this, military coercion (danda) was indispensable.106 Yet while Yudishthira is divinely destined to be king, he hates war. He explains to Krishna that even though he knows that it is his duty to regain the throne, warfare brings only misery. True, the Kauravas usurped his kingdom, but to kill his cousins and friends—many of them good and noble men—would be “a most evil thing.”107 He knows that every Vedic class has its particular duty—“The shudra obeys, the vaishya lives by trade.… The Brahmin prefers the begging bowl”—but the Kshatriyas “live off killing,” and “any other way of life is forbidden to us.” The Kshatriya is therefore doomed to misery. If defeated, he will be reviled, but if he achieves victory by ruthless methods, he incurs the taint of the warrior, is “deprived of glory and reaps eternal infamy.” “For heroism is a powerful disease that eats up the heart, and peace is found only by giving it up or by serenity of mind,” Yudishthira tells Krishna. “On the other hand if final tranquillity were ignited by the total eradication of the enemy that would be even crueler.”108

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I grew hot and faint beneath the layers of wool. My swollen head was knocked, and began to pulse and ache. Someone placed her thumb — I remember this very clearly — at the top of my thigh, in the slippery hollow of my groin. It might have been Maria. It might have been Mrs Hooper, the housekeeper.At last I lay panting upon the bed, the dress about me. The shoes were placed upon my feet, and laced. ‘Stand up!’ said Diana; and when I had done so she caught me by the shoulder and propelled me from her bedroom, through the parlour, and out into the darkened hall beyond. Behind me, the ladies followed, Mrs Hooper and Maria with Zena gripped between them. When I hesitated, Diana prodded me forwards, so that I almost stumbled and fell.Now, at last, I began to weep. I said, ‘Diana, you cannot mean this -!’ But her gaze was cold. She seized me, and pinched me, and made me walk faster. Down we went - all flushed and panting and fantastically costumed as we were - down through the centre of that tall house, in a great jagged spiral, like a tableau of the damned heading for hell. We passed the drawing-room: there were some ladies there still, lolling upon the cushions, and when they saw us they called, What were we doing? And a lady in our party answered, that Diana had caught her boy and her maid in her own bed, and was throwing them out - they must be sure to come and watch it.And so, the lower we went, the greater came the press of ladies at my back, and the louder the laughter and the ribald cries. We reached the basement, and it grew colder; when Diana opened the door that led from the kitchen to the garden at the rear of the house, the wind blew hard upon my weeping eyes, and made them sting. I said, ‘You cannot, you cannot!’ The cold was sobering me. I had had a vision, of my chamber, my closet, my dressing-table, my linen; my cigarette case, my cuff-links, my walking-cane with the silver tip; my suit of bone-coloured linen; my shoes, with the leather so handsome and fine I had once put out my tongue and licked it. My watch, with the strap that secured it to my wrist.Diana pushed me forward, and I turned and grabbed her arm. ‘Don’t cast me from you, Diana!’ I said. ‘Let me stay! I’ll be good! Let me stay, and I’ll pleasure you!’ But as I begged, she kept me marching, backwards; until at last we reached the high wooden gate, beside the carriage-house, at the far end of the garden. There was a smaller door set into the gate, and now Diana stepped to pull it open; beyond seemed perfect blackness.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She took Zena from Mrs Hooper, and held her by the neck. ‘Show your face in Felicity Place again,’ she said, ‘or remind me of your creeping, miserable little existence by any word or deed, and I shall keep my promise, and return you to that gaol, and make sure you stay there, till you rot. Do you understand?’ Zena nodded. She was thrust into the square of darkness, and swallowed by it. Then Diana turned for me.She said: ‘The same applies to you, you trollop.’ She pushed me to the doorway, but here I held fast to the gate, and begged her. ‘Please, Diana! Let me only collect my things!’ I looked past her, to Dickie, and Maria: the gazes they turned upon me were livid and blurred, with the wine and with the chase, and held not one soft spark of sympathy. I looked at all the ogling ladies in their fluttering costumes. ‘Help me, can’t you?’ I cried to them. ‘Help me, for God’s sake! How many times have you not gazed at me and wanted me! How many times have you not come to say how handsome I am, how much you envy Diana the owning of me. Any one of you might have me now! Any one of you! Only, don’t let her put me into the street, into the dark, without a coin on me! Oh! Dam’ you all for a set of bitches, if you let her do such a thing, to me!’So I cried out, weeping all the time I spoke, then turning to wipe my running nose on the sleeve of my cheap frock. My cheek felt twice its ordinary size, and my hair was matted where I had lain upon it; and at last, the ladies turned their eyes from me in a kind of boredom - and I knew myself done for. My hands slid from the gate, Diana pushed me, and I stumbled into the alleyway beyond. Behind me came my sailor’s bag, to land with a smack on the cobbles at my feet.I raised my eyes from it to look once more upon Diana’s house. The windows of the drawing-room were rosy with light, and ladies were already picking their way across the grass towards them. I caught a glimpse of Mrs Hooper; of Dickie, fixing her monocle to her watery eye; of Maria; and of Diana. A few strands of her dark hair had come loose from their pins, and the wind was whipping them about her cheeks. Her housekeeper said something to her, and she laughed.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  The death of Sitting Bull, shot under mysterious circumstances, had left a shroud over the Lakota’s hopes. In turn, the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry were anxious to avenge their historic defeat at the hands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota alliance that had beaten them before. What happened at a place called Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890 was their chance. Col. Forsyth ordered his men to disarm the few Lakota men who were part of Big Foot’s band; most were elders, women, and children. Without their rifles these men could not even hope to hunt for rabbits to feed their families, so they resisted the order. The 7th Cavalry opened fire. In the words of the man sent out by the Smithsonian to survey the “battlefield” and interview the few Native survivors: At the first volley the Hotchkiss guns trained on the camp opened fire and sent a storm of shells and bullets among the women and children … The guns poured in 2-pound explosive shells at the rate of nearly fifty per minute, mowing down everything alive … the surviving handful of Indians were flying in wild panic to the shelter of the ravine, pursued by hundreds of maddened soldiers and followed up by a raking fire from the Hotchkiss guns, which had been moved into position to sweep the ravine.4 The corpses of some two hundred Lakota people were piled up and then placed into a mass grave; photographs were taken to commemorate the “victory.” To add insult to injury for this massacre, and perhaps to send a clear message to any other Native people who dared to disobey an order from the white authority, around twenty soldiers who participated in the slaughter were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest medal for bravery given by the United States.5 At Wounded Knee in 1890 a military force gunned down innocent civilians in a massacre. They killed the dancers, but they could not kill the Dance. The spirit of the Ghost Dance survived because the people’s longing for redemption survived. Their envisioning of a day of justice and their faith in God survived. The dance moved into the hearts of the people. Even though they were penned up in cages called reservations and denied the dignity of their own culture, they did not submit. They continued the vision quest, only this time, not just individually, but collectively, as Wovoka had showed them. They kept the vision of nationhood alive. They maintained their belief in their traditions. They spoke their language in secret, but they spoke it. What we learn from Wovoka’s vision is that the same impulse that brought early Jewish converts to Christianity brought Native Americans to the Ghost Dance. It also kept them faithful to that vision, even when the price for doing so became a matter of life and death.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Coming upon the disconsolate shade of Achilles, he tries to console him: Was he not honored like a god before he died, and does he not now rule the dead? But Achilles will have none of it. “Don’t gloss over death to me in order to console me,” he replies. “I would rather be above the ground still and labouring for some poor peasant man than be the lord over the lifeless dead.” 71 We have no firm evidence, but it was probably pastoralists living in the mountainous regions surrounding the Fertile Crescent who introduced warfare to Sumer. 72 The herdsmen would have found the cities’ wealth irresistible, and they had perfected the art of the surprise attack, their speed and mobility terrifying the city dwellers, who had not yet mastered the art of horsemanship. After a few such lightning raids, the Sumerians would have taken steps to protect their people and storehouses. But these assaults probably gave them the idea of using similar techniques to seize loot and arable land from a neighboring Sumerian city. 73 By the middle of the third millennium BCE, the Sumerian plain was mobilized for warfare: archaeologists have discovered a marked increase in walled fortifications and bronze weaponry in this stratum. This had not been unavoidable; there was no such escalation of armed conflict in Egypt, which had also developed a sophisticated civilization but was a far more peaceful agrarian state. 74 The Nile flooded the fields with almost unfailing regularity, and Egypt was not exposed to the tumultuous climate of Mesopotamia; nor was it encircled by mountains full of predatory herdsmen. 75 The Egyptian kingdoms probably had an ad hoc militia to repel an occasional nomadic attack from the desert, but the weapons unearthed by archaeologists are crude and rudimentary. Most ancient Egyptian art celebrates the joy and elegance of civilian life, and there is little glorification of warfare in early Egyptian literature. 76 We can only piece together the progress of Sumerian militarization from fragmentary archaeological evidence. Between 2340 and 2284 BCE, the Sumerian king lists record thirty-four intercity wars. 77 The first kings of Sumer had been priestly specialists in astronomy and ritual; now increasingly they were warriors like Gilgamesh. They discovered that warfare was an invaluable source of revenue that brought them booty and prisoners who could be put to work in the fields. Instead of waiting for the next breakthrough in productivity, war yielded quicker and more ample returns. The Stele of Vultures (c. 2500 BCE), now in the Louvre, depicts Eannatum, king of Lagash, leading a tightly knit and heavily armed phalanx of troops into battle against the city of Umma; this was clearly a society equipped and trained for warfare. The stele records that even though they begged for mercy, three thousand Ummaite soldiers were killed that day. 78 Once the plain had become militarized, each king had to be prepared to defend and if possible extend his territory, the source of his wealth.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ama’s mother was birthed from the belly of a crab. Her head rolled out in a helmet of orange shellac and her hands were toothed pinchers, capable of splitting rocks to sand. Her father—Old Guang the pirate—sucked her out of the crab’s disked stomach and spat her across the table, where she landed on clawed feet. Named Nawi, she walked sideways like a crab and ate shelled meat: beetles sucked clean, shrimp from the sea. When she turned fourteen, Nawi married a boy who had been born a beaver—he had four teeth like hinged doors—and bore thirteen children. The last one was born with a snake for a penis. Nawi stroked it, letting it learn the diameter of her wrist. Its voice filled her skull with its silk: I am your daughter and born to break you. I am your son and spine. Nawi believed the snake would eventually loosen like milk teeth or grow into another limb, vestigial and shriveled. The snake threaded its head into the baby’s diaper, forked tongue slurring the same song, like steam escaping, like a rock striking a river and then sinking. Whenever Nawi tried to nurse the baby, the snake nibbled her breasts and nipples, seeding her skin with poison. Her milk came out burnt and bitter silver. The snake stretched out, whipping the air with its tongue. Nawi decided to slaughter it. The snake was a bloodless white, rooted to the baby’s crotch like a radish. She brought the knife down and it cut as if through light. The snake never woke. In place of blood, smoke spiraled out of its body. It looked smaller not attached to anything, blue head tucked, tongue flickering, hungering. No scarring, no evidence of severance. The baby’s crotch was smooth as a tree stump. She tossed the snake’s body into the fire, slept with the milk-bulged baby in her arms. The next morning, the baby was awake and batting at Nawi’s braids, yanking her scalp awake. Where the stump had been, there was now a clutch of eggs, clinging clear as rain. She tried to dab them away. By evening, a dozen more were dewed to the baby’s crotch. Only three eggs bore snakes, braiding and unbraiding. They spoke at once, a knot of song, a tangle of telling. We are your daughters. We are your sons. Stroke us and we will save you. Feed us and we will not forget you. The snakes’ mouths outnumbered her own, so she obeyed them. She fed the snakes better than any of her children, even slaughtered the pigs and split the meat among the three heads, the hooves too. The snakes’ jaws opened wide as doorways. Hunger amplified them, sweeping up their songs like seeds, planting each note deep in her ears. She woke sobbing some nights, praying to be swallowed soon.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  He tells us “those who passed by hurled insults at him,” telling him to “come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God.”8 Matthew goes on to tell us “in the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him,” saying, “He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him.” To complete the abuse poured on Jesus, Matthew includes the thieves in his story telling us “in the same way the robbers who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him.”9 It may be that this series of public humiliations adds to the pathos of the crucifixion story from the vantage point of European styles of theology. If the purpose of the crucifixion is understood as Jesus dying for our sins, then these incidents underscore the sinful nature of humanity in being cruel to Jesus and rejecting him. From the perspective of Native American theology, however, the insults take on a more central and nuanced place in the fourth vision quest narrative. First, they indicate that as the Native Messiah, Jesus is suffering a fate worse than death. Dying is not the pivotal point for the Native Covenant. Exile is the issue. When Matthew tells us that the “chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him,” he is telling us in Native terms that the whole community has turned against Jesus. In Native American community, if the elders reject you, then you are truly banished from the tribe of the human beings. The great suffering Jesus endures is this sense of exile, one that he feels so deeply in the lament of his last vision quest that he even cries out to God, “Why have you forsaken me?”10 This cry of the Native Messiah is the most chilling moment of the crucifixion. In the heart of his vision, Jesus faces the ultimate exile. He must go to the very limits of endurance that any human being can suffer. In order to fulfill this quest, in order to transcend individuality to embody Native community, in order to literally “become” all members of the tribe of the human beings, Jesus must experience the depth of the lament of any person who has ever felt rejected by their community. Unlike the interpretation of the crucifixion in Christian theologies that believe Jesus had to die as a blood sacrifice of atonement, the Native American Christian view is that he had to live in a new way in order to heal the whole circle of humanity. He had to become the “we” to the farthest limit of that definition. In order to call back every person from exile, he had to go where they are, on the very margins of society, cut off and alone, rejected and abused.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  But Achilles will have none of it. “Don’t gloss over death to me in order to console me,” he replies. “I would rather be above the ground still and labouring for some poor peasant man than be the lord over the lifeless dead.” 71 We have no firm evidence, but it was probably pastoralists living in the mountainous regions surrounding the Fertile Crescent who introduced warfare to Sumer. 72 The herdsmen would have found the cities’ wealth irresistible, and they had perfected the art of the surprise attack, their speed and mobility terrifying the city dwellers, who had not yet mastered the art of horsemanship. After a few such lightning raids, the Sumerians would have taken steps to protect their people and storehouses. But these assaults probably gave them the idea of using similar techniques to seize loot and arable land from a neighboring Sumerian city. 73 By the middle of the third millennium BCE, the Sumerian plain was mobilized for warfare: archaeologists have discovered a marked increase in walled fortifications and bronze weaponry in this stratum. This had not been unavoidable; there was no such escalation of armed conflict in Egypt, which had also developed a sophisticated civilization but was a far more peaceful agrarian state. 74 The Nile flooded the fields with almost unfailing regularity, and Egypt was not exposed to the tumultuous climate of Mesopotamia; nor was it encircled by mountains full of predatory herdsmen. 75 The Egyptian kingdoms probably had an ad hoc militia to repel an occasional nomadic attack from the desert, but the weapons unearthed by archaeologists are crude and rudimentary. Most ancient Egyptian art celebrates the joy and elegance of civilian life, and there is little glorification of warfare in early Egyptian literature. 76 We can only piece together the progress of Sumerian militarization from fragmentary archaeological evidence. Between 2340 and 2284 BCE, the Sumerian king lists record thirty-four intercity wars. 77 The first kings of Sumer had been priestly specialists in astronomy and ritual; now increasingly they were warriors like Gilgamesh. They discovered that warfare was an invaluable source of revenue that brought them booty and prisoners who could be put to work in the fields. Instead of waiting for the next breakthrough in productivity, war yielded quicker and more ample returns. The Stele of Vultures (c. 2500 BCE), now in the Louvre, depicts Eannatum, king of Lagash, leading a tightly knit and heavily armed phalanx of troops into battle against the city of Umma; this was clearly a society equipped and trained for warfare. The stele records that even though they begged for mercy, three thousand Ummaite soldiers were killed that day. 78 Once the plain had become militarized, each king had to be prepared to defend and if possible extend his territory, the source of his wealth. Most of these Sumerian conflicts were tit-for-tat campaigns for booty and territory.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Especially besetting were the temptations of sensuality, and irresistible without the utmost exertion and constant watchfulness. The same saints, who could not conceive of true chastity without celibacy, were disturbed, according to their own confession, by unchaste dreams, which at least defiled the imagination.298 Excessive asceticism sometimes turned into unnatural vice; sometimes ended in madness, despair, and suicide. Pachomius tells us, so early as his day, that many monks cast themselves down precipices, others ripped themselves up, and others put themselves to death in other ways.299 A characteristic trait of monasticism in all its forms is a morbid aversion to female society and a rude contempt of married life. No wonder, then, that in Egypt and the whole East, the land of monasticism, women and domestic life never attained their proper dignity, and to this day remain at a very low stage of culture. Among the rules of Basil is a prohibition of speaking with a woman, touching one, or even looking on one, except in unavoidable cases. Monasticism not seldom sundered the sacred bond between husband and wife, commonly with mutual consent, as in the cases of Ammon and Nilus, but often even without it. Indeed, a law of Justinian seems to give either party an unconditional right of desertion, while yet the word of God declares the marriage bond indissoluble. The Council of Gangra found it necessary to oppose the notion that marriage is inconsistent with salvation, and to exhort wives to remain with their husbands. In the same way monasticism came into conflict with love of kindred, and with the relation of parents to children; misinterpreting the Lord’s command to leave all for His sake. Nilus demanded of the monks the entire suppression of the sense of blood relationship. St. Anthony forsook his younger sister, and saw her only once after the separation. His disciple, Prior, when he became a monk, vowed never to see his kindred again, and would not even speak with his sister without closing his eyes. Something of the same sort is recorded of Pachomius. Ambrose and Jerome, in full earnest, enjoined upon virgins the cloister life, even against the will of their parents. When Hilary of Poictiers heard that his daughter wished to marry, he is said to have prayed God to take her to himself by death. One Mucius, without any provocation, caused his own son to be cruelly abused, and at last, at the command of the abbot himself, cast him into the water, whence he was rescued by a brother of the cloister.300

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Today the crotch of my underwear is a landscape painting. The landscape is mud for miles cleft-ass mountains cloudturds. The zhongyi says loose anal sphincter says it’s age but I suspect it’s because your father liked to do dirty things to me. He must have knocked loose a beam in my bowels I let him put it in wherever I couldn’t grow another daughter the zhongyi says I’m beginning to lose motor skills I say I never knew how to drive anyway. He laughs says the body is the motor in this situation says I am the driver in this situation I remember how you learned to drive from that ghostboy whose balls you licked you think I didn’t know heard you joking to your sister about planting his balls in the yard to grow us a son but could you find someone to teach me how to drive? I may shit the seat but I won’t hit anything living Remember the time you threw a knife to me no at me it perched on your sister let that be a lesson about intention. I eavesdropped on all your bones laboring to make blood your throat diameter of a fishbone nothing could fit down it I injected water into your belly needle stolen from the morphine-addicted widow the one whose doctor husband disappeared with the rest of the men when the rain was raided the police told her to listen to General [ ] [ ]-[ ] on the radio transcribing the night into names of the missing because they owned guns fists she didn’t tell them she was illiterate I transcribed General [ ] [ ]-[ ] ’s speeches for her when the soldiers came again they told her eat what you’ve written they said a woman is only loyal with a man’s words inside her I watched from the door you were strapped to me batting milk from my breasts the woman knelt in the road the roosters round her preening gungloss round her mouth O O O she swallowed each sheet of my handwriting

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ba says he’ll find the gold soon. Ma beats him again, this time with a pair of high heels (also a gift from the church wives). Ba says the birds will tell him where he buried it all. Ma throws a flowerpot at his head (seeds via the church wives). Ba dances the shovel too deep and hits water. Except it isn’t water, it’s a sewage line, and the landlord tells us to pay for the damage. The rest of the month, we wade the river of everyone’s shit, still convinced Ba can remember, still convinced memory is contagious. If we stand close enough to him, we’ll catch what he lost. The gold was what Ba brought from the mainland to the island. That’s how soldiers bribed the sea that wanted to steal their bodies. He paid his passage with one gold bar the width of his pinky and swallowed the rest, the gold bleached silver by the acidity of his belly. In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That’s why she thinks we’re compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust. After twenty years of gambling on the island, Ba lost all the gold and tried to win it back and back and back again. When they met, Ma already had three children and one dead husband who returned weekly in the form of milk-bright rain. The local men said she was ruined from the waist down but still eligible from the waist up. She wore a heavy skirt that tarped her like a nun. Ma donated her three daughters to her parents and birthed two new ones with Ba. I’m the second of the new ones. We’re the two she kept, brought here, and beat.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  What feeds on your body without permission is a parasite children are no exception. The only cure is to survive what lives off you The river steals the sky a color suggestive of birds where the river hinges like my elbow it floods when I say the snakes rise to the surface of the river like scars the snakes have always obeyed my veins the evening before you turned four the rain came red my tongue rumoring snake. I was nineteen five babies my breasts stones that skipped out of your mouth. You practiced latching on my finger firecrackering my husband the second one hard against me prick parting my ass I told myself be stone moan an animal awake somewhere is smoke I pour rainwater into rice for porridge four of your sisters strapped to me. Two across my chest, two on my back. I walk sandwiched by their hunger rain ranting down our street you asked to put on your boots new ones I cut from my own you said you’d never seen a puddle before a sea you could span with your mouth mirror the size of whatever I show it. Lake the width of your face you have mine nothing of your father don’t ask me why I hated you then your hair grown up black. You said you’d been watering it long you stood in the rain waited for your spine to sky. I held you by the hair stepped outside you dangling boneless from my hand my babies I wear asleep beaded to me. You kicking your feet as if dreaming this I walked to the nearest bridge eight houses away I counted in twos swinging you a sack of salt I threw you down my tongue in my mouth a salted slug dissolving your name the river outraged by last night’s rain ate you your white-bellied feet flippering so fluent on land wordless in water in in in in in river whipping itself this raw word I I threw the babies in too. What alive can tell me why. I & unstrapped the cloth all four of my babies spearing in after you I I I I even then they chose you over me water trotted over their backs .

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Mac has really made it a point to keep reminding me to find things I delight in. I’m lucky to be with someone who really prioritizes making room for me to live my best life. When I start to get overwhelmed by my circumstances, Mac is really good at making a surprise karaoke party happen. I get a lot of pleasure from karaoke. When I was on my first chemo cocktail, I fell into a deep depression, and pleasure was not accessible to me. That was hard. I didn’t see the point of living. I was on chemo to extend my life, yet my life was the worst it had ever been. My whole personality was changed. At some point, my oncology team realized that my anti-nausea medication was actually causing the personality change. I stopped taking it, and the very next day I started feeling human again. amb. What is cancer teaching you about pleasure? Alana. My body has always been a great source of pleasure for me—whether it was sex or exercise or an amazing meal, I’ve always been a very embodied person. Cancer is the first time where I’ve really had a hard time being in my body. It’s the first time I’ve been deeply uncomfortable—or even paralyzed—for long stretches of time. Two things strike me: When I was in the hospital for a month as a result of my brain hemorrhage, I stayed having fun. I was in really good spirits almost the whole time. It was like a crazy adventure, and I was up for it. Mac and I celebrated our second anniversary in a hospital room in Oahu, when I couldn’t move the left side of my body. It was like nothing I had experienced before. But Mac was there, and the nurses loved us. One of the nurses brought us a cake for our anniversary, and she covered my hospital bed with rose petals. Part of me wants to attribute all of that to this amazing nurse, but she also must have really resonated with something in us. However, I often feel very betrayed by my body now. It can make it very hard to experience bodily pleasure. For a while, sex was simply off the table because it was too hard for me to manage feeling into my body on top of everything else going on. But recently, I decided to just give it a try, and I was like, “oh right, I love sex!” So it can be a little reach and some extra effort to be open to pleasure—that applies to any kind of pleasure—but when I make that leap, it’s so amazing. amb. I know you love brunch, ice cream, internet animals, and sharp humor. What are some of your other pleasures, and why?

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Then he remembered and grabbed the next pen and tried it, and it was dead, and he dropped it into the trash can, where it landed too loudly. The next two were dry, the next clotted, the next fine. He went through all the pens. Twelve good ones. Two with Northwestern logos, a few plain Bics, a couple of fancy erasable ones, a few cheap ones advertising insurance companies. At least Yale guessed that was the writing on the sides; he couldn’t focus his eyes. When Bill walked in ten minutes later, Yale already knew from his face—the pained, hesitant look that didn’t quite cover his relief—that it had worked. “I think it’s going to pan out,” he said. “I mean your—your idea. What I said to him. It’s all about ego for him.” “I know.” “You’re a genius, Yale. You realize that? And now the problem is I’ve lost my genius. That’s a fine kettle of fish, isn’t it. He said he felt listened to, and then he started going on about something with the music school. We’ll see how things play out. Maybe we can—maybe he’ll move on to other things, and we can reverse this all.” “No.” Yale could hear his own flat voice with remarkable clarity, as if on tape, some message he’d recorded years ago. “If it works, let’s not mess with it.” “I want you to finish your projects first. We can’t have the office empty. Yale, I want to say that—” Yale said, “If you can spare me next week, I’ll go to Wisconsin.” “Yes! Fantastic! And take Roman!” Bill said it as if Roman were a consolation prize. When he left, he made a great show of closing the door quietly. Yale considered both his stapler and his Rolodex, and decided on the latter. He picked it up and hurled it, with all his strength, at the wall. — That next Tuesday, Yale rented the most expensive car he could, a red Saab 900, and he charged the snacks he bought to his university credit card as well. He picked up Roman outside his apartment on Hinman—he’d made sure to give Roman an out, but Roman had wanted to go—and they drove down Lake Shore Drive to scoop up Fiona. Fiona was along to appease Debra. They weren’t close, but Fiona was the one who’d called up there, told Debra how Yale had been fired, made her feel as guilty about it as she could. She’d told Debra that Yale wanted to say goodbye to Nora and that she wanted to see Nora, too, and Debra could call her father or even the police for all she cared, but they’d be there. “The last part probably wasn’t necessary,” Fiona said, “but I’d practiced it, so I said it.”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  He wanted to go outside and catch ash in his mouth, but we said the ash was made of corpses, the air carrying bones on its tongue. Inside the house, he watched TV with the sound off, substituting the dialogue with his own memories: Once, I fished with my father. He taught me which ones to throw back: He said if it’s bigger than your dick, butcher it. If it’s not, give it back to the river. But when the week ended and looped back, Agong repeated the stories with words in a dialect I’d never heard before. I tried to rearrange his words back into a narrative, but Agong spoke in a rhythm like swimming, dipping down and out of his own stories until I understood nothing. Once in a river I fished my father raw. He taught me butcher me. He tried to bite off his tongue until my mother held his jaw open and told him to stop, reciting a list of everything inside his body that was still his. Tongue. Bones. Blood. Throat. Mouth. Eyes. Ears. Anus. Neck. Intestines. When we ran out of things inside him, we repeated them all again in different dialects: This is your tongue. These are your teeth. They are not enemies. Agong untied all the leaves from our white birch tree and ate them, copying the squirrels. He didn’t know his own species. I’d read online that memories can be startled back into a person, then pulled out of the mouth like a magician’s scarf. My brother and I tried to scare Agong into remembering us by mimicking the sounds of war. We filled pots with pebbles, popped balloons to impersonate gunfire. Sometimes it worked, and he leapt from the bed as if boiled, fondling the imaginary gun in his waistband, calling us guizi, guizi, guizi. My mother told us to stop—she thought we could trigger another heart attack, which in Agong’s dialect sounded like heart war. Back then I thought a heart attack was when your heart grew legs like a soldier, walked out of your chest, and invaded the nearest body. I thought bowels were a breed of bird, and bowel movements were how they migrated. Agong claimed he once ate sparrows for an entire year, back when fullness was foreign to his body, and some of the sparrows were all bone. We took him to a monk in the neighborhood to be blessed, a former soldier who told us that the only cure for forgetting was to approach your own future like a fort. Say: Surrender. That night, I walked to the kitchen and touched the cleaver hanging above the sink, my face foreign in its reflection. My mother said gegu hadn’t worked for Agong because the toes she’d fed him were only marrow: The meat had quit their bones long ago, and only meat could cure a father of his forgetfulness.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “Nothing was ever good enough for him,” he told me as the busboy took our plates away. “He was smart, and he couldn’t ever let you forget. If you came home with the second best grades in the class, he would ask why you weren’t first. ‘You are an Obama,’ he would say. ‘You should be the best.’ He would really believe this. And then I would see him drunk, with no money, living like a beggar. I would ask myself, How can someone so smart fall so badly? It made no sense to me. No sense. “Even after I was living on my own, even after his death, I would try to figure out this puzzle. It was as if I couldn’t escape him. I remember we had to take his body to Alego for the funeral, and as the eldest son, I was responsible for making the arrangements. The government wanted a Christian burial. The family wanted a Muslim burial. People came to Home Square from everywhere, and we had to mourn him according to Luo tradition, burning a log for three days, listening to people cry and moan. Half these people, I didn’t even know who they were. They wanted food. They wanted beer. Some people whispered that the Old Man had been poisoned, that I must take revenge. Some people stole things from the house. Then our relatives began to fight about the Old Man’s inheritance. The Old Man’s last girlfriend, the mother of our baby brother, George—she wanted everything. Some people, like our Aunt Sarah, sided with her. Others lined up with my mum’s side of the family. I’m telling you, it was crazy! Everything seemed to be going wrong. “After the funeral was over, I didn’t want to be with anyone. The only person I trusted was David, our younger brother. That guy, let me tell you, he was okay. He looked like you a little bit, only younger … fifteen, sixteen. His mother, Ruth, had tried to raise him like an American. But David, he rebelled. He loved everybody, you see. He ran away from home and came to live with me. I told him he should go home, but he refused. He didn’t want to be an American, he said. He was an African. He was an Obama. “When David died, that was it for me. I was sure our whole family was cursed. I started drinking, fighting—I didn’t care. I figured if the Old Man could die, if David could die, that I would have to die, too. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had stayed in Kenya. As it was, there was Nancy, this American girl I had been seeing. She’d returned to the States, so one day I just called her and said I wanted to come. When she said yes, I bought a ticket and caught the next plane out. I didn’t pack, or tell my office, or say goodbye to anyone, or anything.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself; it was that loss of order that had made both Rafiq and Mr. Foster, in their own ways, so bitter. For how could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars? Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that’s been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And the others, the millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into a deeper despair. We drove in silence to our final meeting, with the administrator of a local branch of the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training, or MET, which helped refer the unemployed to training programs throughout the city. We had trouble finding the place—it turned out to be a forty-five-minute drive from Altgeld, on a back street in Vrdolyak’s ward—and by the time we arrived the administrator was gone. Her assistant didn’t know when she would be back but handed us a pile of glossy brochures. “This ain’t no help at all,” Shirley said as she started for the door. “We might as well have stayed home.” Mona noticed I was lingering in the office. “What’s he looking at?” she asked Angela. I showed them the back of one of the brochures. It contained a list of all the MET programs in the city. None of them were south of Ninety-fifth. “This is it,” I said. “What?” “We just found ourselves an issue.”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  In the morning, we took a taxi to the brim of the city, where my father and his two cousins managed the slot-machine factory. Clouds mopping up the sky’s spilled light. We drove down a half-paved street with apartment buildings so tall I thought they’d been built from the sky down. My father was the rain that day. We watched from the taxi as my mother entered each apartment building on the street, repeating my father’s name until someone told us he had left. The slot-machine manufacturer had halted production months ago, and most of the workers had been deported from the city at night, carrying nothing but their teeth. They guessed my father had gone home to the city where he was born, a city west of every named body of water. We took the overnight train to Anhui. My brother and I wanted to go home, our boogers black after two hours of walking outside and breathing. We asked why the boys who begged outside the hotels all had the same parts of their bodies missing: a left hand or both feet or tongues. I mistook this for kinship, believing that somehow all the boys without feet found one another by holding up their hurts and pairing their pains. But my mother told me it was because gangs would buy children and injure them the same way, assembling them in teams to go out and earn pity with their new bodies. They knocked on the windows of taxis until the drivers cursed them away. My mother gave them nothing. She shut the door on one of the boys’ fingers, his hand purpling in the hinge. His fingernail fell off and landed in her lap and my mother flicked it away. I plucked it from the seat crack and tossed it out the window like a coin I could wish with. My mother slapped my hand and said not to touch those boys’ fingernails because they were dirty and we didn’t know what they’d been touching. I reminded her that she touched feet for a living; toenails were her terrain. She gripped my pinky and yanked the nail clean off its bed of skin, so fast I didn’t bleed, the pain a bright bead, rolling back and forth on my tongue until I couldn’t taste anything else. Don’t compare us to them, she said. When another of the boys wedged his wrist through the window slit and offered his palm, my mother spat in it. _ We found my father in a top-floor apartment, where my mother knocked on the door so long her knuckles split one by one. He answered. It was blue-hot in the apartment, and my father was bare-legged: I’d never before seen his kneecaps, the hair on his thighs.