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)

  You born with your legs tied together trussed like a pig in the tissue of me birds circled your cry your namelessness: there are certain gods nameless true I didn’t name you isn’t that a form of divinity? To be known to the world by body alone? Wake your father sleeping beside me you may think you’ll steal him someday but I let him be taken from his body I lent him this life & now he owes me a country where I’m alive today I wanted to sever his tongue skin it for the fish inside in this country you always spoke for me when the cashiers told me how much was owed you counted the money over I want to know how much you will forgive me for if I sewed his tongue to the back of his skull if I told you the truth about who fathered you when I say come take him I mean take me out of this sentence I’m running out of hands to hurt with words to make you return to me I mean I mean the river today on the Taiwanese radio channel reports of two murders in one day big news for a shit-small island one happened on the train older woman stabbing a stranger’s child no motive second about a mother sneaking onto the elevator of a hotel throwing her baby off the rooftop garden dozens of witnesses stuck evening traffic straddling electric scooters smoking out taxi windows that’s when they saw the falling thing a blue hospital blanket same sky shade some described it a stunned bird a baguette a piece of meteor a plastic bag even after the clean-up interviews arrest on-scene vigils candles no one would name what it was the hotel renamed itself & the mother later a prisoner in Taoyuan sentenced to labor in a candy factory photo in the papers wearing a striped uniform hairnet I turned off the broadcast before her live interview before she could say why she did it I have always known your favorite story: Hu Gu Po you drew stripes on your skin with ink you the tiger-woman never the child commissioned to kill it pouring oil into its mouth until boiled from the inside-out some of us born to play predator I know you sometimes move your sleeping daughter from her mattress to yours replacing your husband’s heat with hers you put her back before morning. You just like to hear her breathing at night a daughter is a source of light among others: fireflies you used to catch in your teeth bite open drink their assfuel beast undressed of its stripes the river licking its stones like teeth in my dreams my shits are soldiers I bury them in my yard my bed I mourn my bones that believe they’re home the moon a sound & your sisters the stripes I wear.

• From Cultish (2021)

  With no tangible organizational structure, no single leader, no cohesive doctrine, and no concrete exit costs, QAnon is not exactly in the same cultish category as, say, Heaven’s Gate or Jonestown. But a fully immersed QAnon follower couldn’t just go cold turkey. For those fully submerged in the world of “the awakening” and “the research,” climbing out of the rabbit hole could mean a profound psychological loss: a loss of “something to occupy one’s time, of feeling connected to something important, of finally feeling a sense of self-worth and control during uncertain times,” elucidates Pierre. Even if former believers come out to denounce QAnon, the existential consequences are enough to keep true die-hards under. Not everyone finds their way into a QAnon-level internet cult, but platforms from Facebook to Tumblr are what help life feel important and connected for so many of us. The way I see it, while celebrities and conspiritualists create their own cult followings online, the ultimate pseudo-church to which billions of us belong—even (and especially) figures like Dr. Joe Dispenza and Donald Trump—is social media itself. In a sense, we can’t even claim to be growing “less religious” when social media’s job is explicitly to generate ideological sects, to pack people’s feeds with suggested content that only exaggerates what they already believe. As each of us posts, curating our individual online identities, the apps capture those personas via metadata and reinforce them through irresistible targeted ads and custom feeds. No “cult leader” takes advantage of our psychological drives quite like The Algorithm, which thrives on sending us down rabbit holes, so we never even come across rhetoric we don’t agree with unless we actively search for it. The way we make choices—from our clothes all the way to our spiritual and political beliefs—is a direct consequence of these uncanny digital versions of ourselves. In her book Strange Rites , Tara Isabella Burton wrote, “America is not secular but simply spiritually self-focused.” In a social media–centered society, we’ve all been rendered at once cult leader and follower. iii.It would be easy enough for me to write off all these groups, from SoulCycle to Instagram, as cultish and thus evil. But in the end, I don’t think the world would benefit from us all refusing to believe or participate in things. Too much wariness spoils the most enchanting parts of being human. I don’t want to live in a world where we can’t let our guards down for a few moments to engage in a group chant or mantra. If everyone feared the alternative to the point that they never took even small leaps of faith for the sake of connection and meaning, how lonely would that be? Studies of famous scientists’ personalities and their receptivity to offbeat beliefs show that excessive cynicism actually stymies discovery.

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

  I see my grandfather, standing before his father’s hut, a wiry, grim-faced boy, almost ridiculous in his oversized trousers and his buttonless shirt. I watch his father turn away from him and hear his brothers laugh. I feel the heat pour down his brow, the knots forming in his limbs, the sudden jump in his heart. And as his figure turns and starts back down the road of red earth, I know that for him the path of his life is now altered irreversibly, completely. He will have to reinvent himself in this arid, solitary place. Through force of will, he will create a life out of the scraps of an unknown world, and the memories of a world rendered obsolete. And yet, as he sits alone in a freshly scrubbed hut, an old man now with milky eyes, I know that he still hears his father and brothers laughing behind him. He still hears the clipped voice of a British captain, explaining for the third and last time the correct proportion of tonic to gin. The nerves in the old man’s neck tighten, the rage builds—he grabs his stick to hit at something, anything. Until finally his grip weakens with the realization that for all the power in his hands and the force of his will, the laughter, the rebukes, will outlast him. His body goes slack in the chair. He knows that he will not outlive a mocking fate. He waits to die, alone. The picture fades, replaced by the image of a nine-year-old boy—my father. He’s hungry, tired, clinging to his sister’s hand, searching for the mother he’s lost. The hunger is too much for him, the exhaustion too great; until finally the slender line that holds him to his mother snaps, sending her image to float down, down into the emptiness. The boy starts to cry; he shakes off his sister’s hand. He wants to go home, he shouts, back to his father’s house. He will find a new mother. He will lose himself in games and learn the power of his mind. But he won’t forget the desperation of that day. Twelve years later, at his narrow desk, he will glance up from a stack of forms toward the restless sky and feel that same panic return. He, too, will have to invent himself. His boss is out of the office; he sets the forms aside and from an old file cabinet pulls out a list of addresses. He yanks the typewriter toward him and begins to type, letter after letter after letter, typing the envelopes, sealing the letters like messages in bottles that will drop through a post office slot into a vast ocean and perhaps allow him to escape the island of his father’s shame.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Running around the city to search for her was out of the question. She should go get a sweater, but she didn’t want to move. There was nothing to do but keep calm. Cecily was in the air, and hopefully they’d let her plane land. What were the odds that Claire would show up for work tomorrow morning? What were the odds that the city would be thrown into such chaos that Fiona would never find her again? She was surprised by her numbness, at least regarding the televised carnage, the bloodied, sobbing people on the streets. Was it because it wasn’t her city, or because the rituals of outrage and grief and fear felt so familiar now, so practiced? Or maybe it was the pain pills she’d popped after dinner for her hand. She was struck by the selfish thought that this was not fair to her. That she’d been in the middle of a different story, one that had nothing to do with this. She was a person who was finding her daughter, making things right with her daughter, and there was no room in that story for the idiocy of extreme religion, the violence of men she’d never met. Just as she’d been in the middle of a story about divorce when the towers fell in New York City, throwing everyone’s careful plans to shit. Just as she’d once been in a story about raising her own brother, growing up with her brother in the city on their own, making it in the world, when the virus and the indifference of greedy men had steamrolled through. She thought of Nora, whose art and love were interrupted by assassination and war. Stupid men and their stupid violence, tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn’t you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot’s dick? Richard’s show: No one knew if the preview could happen on Monday as planned. His publicist called, and his manager. “They need to calm down,” Richard said. “You’d think they’d have better things to worry about.” Serge said, “We’re screwed. The whole world is screwed.” He hadn’t stopped moving for the last hour and a half. “I don’t mean to sound callous,” Fiona said, “but we’ve been through this in the States. And it’s not—” “No,” Serge said, “whatever, a hundred dead people, I don’t care. That could have been a bus crash. What I care is, now they elect right wing across Europe. And then, yes: You, me, all of us, we’re screwed. Everyone acts from fear, the next year, two years. What happens, you think, to people like us?” Fiona felt herself sinking. She said, “Things might seem different in the morning.” Serge wheeled on her. “When people are afraid, we get the Christian Taliban. We get it here, you get it there, and we’re all in jail.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  The risk is that we’re going to stress your heart out, more than it’s already stressed.” The almost inevitable result, in short, would be congestive heart failure—the same thing Nora had died of. How had she seemed so serene through all of it? — In the morning, everything was much worse. Debbie was gone and Bernard had taken her place. Bernard changed the catheter bag, and Yale tried to ask about Fiona, but all he got out was her name. “She’s calling the nurse’s station every ten minutes, I swear to God,” Bernard said. “She wanted to know when you woke up. No baby yet.” Dr. Cheng came by. He said, “You’re gaining weight, which is, for once, not a great thing. We’ve got some fluid collecting in your abdomen now. Which means the kidneys and liver aren’t doing too well.” Yale’s fingers tingled from low blood-oxygen, and he wasn’t sure he could feel his toes. His heart was climbing a mountain with every beat. In second grade, Mrs. Henry had been hospitalized with pneumonia and the substitute, a man who mostly told them stories about his time in the Peace Corps, had attempted to explain what was wrong with Mrs. Henry. “Take the deepest breath you can,” he said, “and don’t let it out.” They did, and then he said, “Now take another breath on top of that. Don’t let that one out either.” They tried. Some of the kids gave up and let it all go with a wet raspberry noise, fell off their chairs laughing, but Yale, who always did as he was told, managed to keep going. “Now take another breath on top of that one. That third breath is what pneumonia feels like.” There was something comforting in the midst of all this about knowing he’d been warned so early. That sitting there with his healthy, strong little body, he’d felt, for one second of his seven-year-old life, how things would end. Dr. Cheng said, “I want you to just nod or shake your head. If I can’t understand you, we’ll go to Fiona, alright? I want to know if I have your okay to take you off the pentam and the amphoterrible. That means we’d be officially starting hospice. And I want you on morphine.” It was one of the things Yale appreciated about Dr. Cheng, that he just went ahead and called it amphoterrible. Yale used all the strength he could to make it as clear as possible when he nodded yes. — He woke up after God knew how long to see a very tall young man hovering over the bed.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  But at least I knew what was going on there.” “No, you didn’t.” Fiona wasn’t sure which fact Claire was refuting. Three adults and a child looked down at them from the porch of the big house, waiting. Fiona knew better than to force the issue, to elbow her way in the door. She said, “I’ll come back in the morning. I’ll bring doughnuts.” “Please don’t.” When Fiona returned the next day, a wooden barricade blocked the end of the long driveway. A man with a waist-length ponytail leaned against it, and as Fiona drove up, he made a “turn around” sign with one finger in the air. And she did, because Damian was already on a plane, and it was better to come back here with him, anyway. Over the next insomniac week, asking around Boulder and scouring the Internet, the two of them discovered the things Fiona was now telling Arnaud: The Hosanna Collective was the small and restrictive offshoot of an already restrictive parent cult from Denver. It was ostensibly Judeo-Christian, but also astrological, vegetarian, antitechnology, male-dominated. They believed that the church needed to return to a pure state described in certain chapters of the book of Acts, that everything since Paul had been corruption. They called Jesus “Yeshua” and celebrated no holidays but Easter. No money of their own, the communal life made possible by the near-constant labor of the women and children. The men sold honey and salad dressing at farmers’ markets, and did occasional construction work in town, contributing all their wages to the group. Fiona and Damian went to the police, but there was nothing illegal going on. Damian reminded her of what she already knew: The more they chased Claire, the more she would shut them out. They tried once more in person, this time approaching the compound in the squad car of a sympathetic police officer— Fiona was so sure that Damian, too, was remembering their desperate ride around Chicago nine years back that she didn’t need to mention it—but the same man who’d been at the barricade came out and unleashed an impressive string of legal language at the cop. And no, there was no warrant. Fiona and Damian sat at a bar in the Denver airport with bags under their eyes, both of them crying, then stopping, then crying. They must have looked, to other travelers, like lovers parting for the last time. He with a wedding ring, she without. Fiona said, “We should stay.” But there were more productive ways to spend their time and money. Damian would talk to lawyers. Fiona would contact Claire’s high school and college friends, even offer to fly them out. She’d track down Cecily Pearce and see if she might talk some sense into her son. Arnaud nodded along to all this but didn’t write it down.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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 . Snakes arriving to scalp you I watch you open your mouth in the water brief flower the snakes answering from inside you Years ago a storm chaperoned your birth the soil gave up its trees for adoption the snakes singing now rhyming that year & this morning my babies buoying river lifting like a tongue to lick my back turn me around I do I needle my body through the water stitch you this new ending I fish you out one by one last of all you my eldest I went in belting the river around my waist on land I lay you safe water flocking from your mouth the river revised you a new body ribs ridging into scales your skull a snakehead legs arrowed into a tail hands honed into fins

• From Bestiary (2020)

  GRANDMOTHERLetter V: In which I name you [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] 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. You born with your legs tied together trussed like a pig in the tissue of me birds circled your cry your namelessness: there are certain gods nameless true I didn’t name you isn’t that a form of divinity? To be known to the world by body alone? Wake

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I chose you, my mother said, but it was like a channel had changed too quickly, one image unable to fade while the other overlapped it, contaminating all the colors, one story told as two. I was still thinking of the women who harnessed gravity with their hair, braids knotted to branches. The braids must still be there, still growing after the bodies were cut down. Braids vining down to the ground, growing so long they became some species of snake that strangles its prey. When I asked what she meant by choosing, my mother said, This family. I started it to save me. I asked her why she couldn’t go back for Agong. Just for him, I said. No one else. She still called daily to ask if Agong was wearing pants, even when Ama didn’t pick up. I knew she wanted to dress him herself, to fill her clothes with his body. I got out, my mother said, as if a family were a fire. I chose your father over my father. My father, who was not here. My father, who once bought me a popsicle at a zoo while I watched a monkey try to eat a broken bottle someone had hurtled into the enclosure. I wanted to say she’d made the wrong choice, but that would mean reversing my own body, returning to water inside her. My mother opened the window above the sink. She was trying not to look at me, but her shadow acted as her opposite, circling me on the floor. Do you know what it means to leave something? she said. The air outside was too bright to breathe, dyed by with moon. To give birth to yourself again and again? To lock yourself out of your life? I said we could knock. We could knock on Ama’s door, and ask her to give up Agong. I’d keep my hand over my tail as we walked in, ready to draw it like a hilt. Reaching up, I touched my fingers to her cheek, but she shook them off like flies. I walked around her and shut the window above the sink, relieving the window of its duty to breathe. Ma, I said, and she shook her head, said that was what she called her mother and I should never let that sound out of my mouth. Let’s go now, I said, whispering as if Ama could hear us from another city. Let’s bring him home and you’ll be happy again. You’ll be a daughter again.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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 I used to think the neighborwoman weak her needles sinning through skin now I pray to replace my blood something sweet & buzzed honey or bees my bones a hive of memory make me foamfooted porridge-headed as your father never thought I’d marry another soldier his sack of government rice pregnant with rats your father with his gold bars love for American rock I watched him hawk his Japanese watch sell his own shoes outside the bars in Taipei eavesdropping on jukeboxes he never knew the lyrics made them up in dialect the province he was born in north of a river cleaving mountains like an ass-cleft when he sang so off-pitch even birds offended shat all over his shoulders now his voice is a gnat I slap off my cheek you always thought I hated him saddling me with shit-stains the river I inherited like debt following me to bed bowl of water where I swim his dentures at night I wrap him in lamp-skin search for a bulb small enough to fit his mouth beneath his eyelids clots of flies I have always wanted to be that empty no need to be anything but living maybe god a hole we keep filling with our dead I envy the way he watches me TV the way he believes blinking his eyes changes the channel. Sometimes he thinks shutting off the TV means the weather is off the war has switched countries time to halve his skull into bowls pour out the oil of last week he thought the TV a window tried opening the country climb in this week gardening I dug a hole in the ground beneath my chili bush a rehearsal the hole sized for his skull my chili bush will keep the dogs away from his body I’ll home him better than any country the army claiming they’d pay him enough to keep hunger at home every hole is a crown the dead wear save me from what my hands plot * when I let them off the leash of my arms I mine for gods all of them hiding here I’ll dig him here he’ll share a grave with his gold They always say: cold feet in bed means a man will leave you I have had cold feet my whole life & still no luck _ My tail ticked side to side while I read the fourth letter, beating out of sync with each syllable.

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

  “Finally, he had to accept a small job with the Water Department. Even this was possible only because one of his friends pitied him. The job kept food on the table, but it was a big fall for him. The Old Man began to drink heavily, and many of the people he knew stopped coming to visit because now it was dangerous to be seen with him. They told him that maybe if he apologized, changed his attitude, he would be all right. But he refused and continued to say whatever was on his mind. “I understood most of this only when I was older. At the time, I just saw that life at home became very difficult. The Old Man never spoke to Roy or myself except to scold us. He would come home very late, drunk, and I could hear him shouting at Ruth, telling her to cook him food. Ruth became very bitter at how the Old Man had changed. Sometimes, when he wasn’t home, she would tell Roy and myself that our father was crazy and that she pitied us for having such a father. I didn’t blame her for this—I probably agreed. But I noticed that, even more than before, she treated us differently from her own two sons. She would say that we were not her children and there was only so much she could do to help us. Roy and I began to feel like we had no one. And when Ruth left the Old Man, that feeling was not so far from the truth. “She left when I was twelve or thirteen, after the Old Man had had a serious car accident. He had been drinking, I think, and the driver of the other car, a white farmer, was killed. For a long time the Old Man was in the hospital, almost a year, and Roy and I lived basically on our own. When the Old Man finally got out of the hospital, that’s when he went to visit you and your mum in Hawaii. He told us that the two of you would be coming back with him and that then we would have a proper family. But you weren’t with him when he returned, and Roy and I were left to deal with him by ourselves.

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

  The Pelagian controversy turns upon the mighty antithesis of sin and grace. It embraces the whole cycle of doctrine respecting the ethical and religious relation of man to God, and includes, therefore, the doctrines of human freedom, of the primitive state, of the fall, of regeneration and conversion, of the eternal purpose of redemption, and of the nature and operation of the grace of God. It comes at last to the question, whether redemption is chiefly a work of God or of man; whether man needs to be born anew, or merely improved. The soul of the Pelagian system is human freedom; the soul of the Augustinian is divine grace. Pelagius starts from the natural man, and works up, by his own exertions, to righteousness and holiness. Augustine despairs of the moral sufficiency of man, and derives the now life and all power for good from the creative grace of God. The one system proceeds from the liberty of choice to legalistic piety; the other from the bondage of sin to the evangelical liberty of the children of God. To the former Christ is merely a teacher and example, and grace an external auxiliary to the development of the native powers of man; to the latter he is also Priest and King, and grace a creative principle, which begets, nourishes, and consummates a new life. The former makes regeneration and conversion a gradual process of the strengthening and perfecting of human virtue; the latter makes it a complete transformation, in which the old disappears and all becomes new. The one loves to admire the dignity and strength of man; the other loses itself in adoration of the glory and omnipotence of God. The one flatters natural pride, the other is a gospel for penitent publicans and sinners. Pelagianism begins with self-exaltation and ends with the sense of self-deception and impotency. Augustinianism casts man first into the dust of humiliation and despair, in order to lift him on the wings of grace to supernatural strength, and leads him through the hell of self-knowledge up to the heaven of the knowledge of God. The Pelagian system is clear, sober, and intelligible, but superficial; the Augustinian sounds the depths of knowledge and experience, and renders reverential homage to mystery. The former is grounded upon the philosophy of common sense, which is indispensable for ordinary life, but has no perception of divine things; the latter is grounded upon the philosophy of the regenerate reason, which breaks through the limits of nature, and penetrates the depths of divine revelation. The former starts with the proposition: Intellectus praecedit fidem; the latter with the opposite maxim: Fides praecedit intellectum. Both make use of the Scriptures; the one, however, conforming them to reason, the other subjecting reason to them. Pelagianism has an unmistakable affinity with rationalism, and supplies its practical side. To the natural will of the former system corresponds the natural reason of the latter; and as the natural will, according to Pelagianism, is competent to good, so is the natural reason, according to rationalism, competent to the knowledge of the truth. All rationalists are Pelagian in their anthropology; but Pelagius and Coelestius were not consistent, and declared their agreement with the traditional orthodoxy in all other doctrines, though without entering into their deeper meaning and connection. Even divine mysteries may be believed in a purely external, mechanical way, by inheritance from the past, as the history of theology, especially in the East, abundantly proves.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Prayer to Disappear a Tail: To Be Repeated Twice Nightly and Once in the Morning (Prior to Counting Every Toe in the Household)dear shangdi dear papakwaka please let my skin rescind all scars all tails let my teeth be benign as butterflies let my tail be a fuse if I light it the fire deletes me dear papakwaka if you are the mountain that mothered us all like my ama says please let me not become her hu gu po please let the world be extinct of children so I will have nothing to eat but myself dear papakwaka dear ancestors who took up spears toothpicked the dutch like fancy finger food who bombed back the qing dynasty with bags of farts who turned all japanese soldiers into beads with holes in their bellies please open my tail like an umbrella build me for protection not for prey keep buffering from girl from girl from girl from girl to please stop stalling if I have to transform let my new species be a window a bar of herbal soap my mother’s thumb in my ear dear papakwaka I know this story is outside your language but is hu gu po born one limb at a time or all at once which part of her am I already o papakwaka mountain teat mouth of us all please don’t strand my body outside its myth _ Before he left, we ate at the largest of Duck Uncle’s restaurants, an hour away in a mall that sold fake phones and sour plums. Duck Uncle told us the rules before we went in through the glazed double doors: No spitting anything out, even if you’re choking on it. No swallowing your noodles whole and then pulling them back out through your nose. No removing any item of your clothing at the table. No disturbances. The red carpet made my eyes runny and the plastic chandelier hung so low we ducked for it. Dozens of dim sum carts spun in a carousel around the room. My brother and I pointed at everything that swept by, the table so crowded we ate fast to keep it from collapsing. I filled my cheeks with boiled peanuts, then spat them at my brother’s head. You broke the rules, my mother said, while pinching my lips shut with her fingers. Duck Uncle said he’d feed us so well that we’d beg for bigger mouths. I tasted blood but didn’t know what dish it was coming from.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Her fields regrew as fingers and made a fist around the U.S. military base. The American soldiers taught her how to hunt communists, how to shoot a winter melon the size of a commie skull. The [ ], led by General [ ] [ ]-[ ], banned all languages but [ ]. This alphabet was banned too, meaning that this text does not exist in history. The soldiers broke glass bottles on the beach, cementing the shards along the shore to gouge the feet of invading commies. The radio said to prepare for an invasion at night, prepare for soldiers who come to eat your feet, and Ama said: What about the soldiers already here? What about the ones in my bed, the ones who fuck me into five daughters, the first one who sees only shadows, the second one I beat into bone, into something that floats? Myth: If you said anything about General [ ] [ ]-[ ], the river tattled on you. The river was made of ears and started a rumor of snakes. The snakes slithered into the bodies of dumped prisoners, feasting on the brains and swallowing their memories. Now the snakes are the only ones who tell stories. DAUGHTER Birdbirth When we arrived home, my mother unfolded Agong on the sofa while I visited my yard-holes and made sure Ama hadn’t emerged from one of them, hadn’t followed us back by swimming beneath the highway, bobbing her head out of the 口 to breathe. I walked through the yard, parting the darkness of the night like a pair of thighs. From the 口, something white poked out of the soil, bone-bright. When I plucked it out and held it up to the window, it was blank. It was the sheet of paper Ama had buried for me, saying I’d write back someday. I considered folding the sheet into a minnow and feeding it back to the 口, but instead I kept it, sliding it into my waistband. The paper molded to my belly, metal-hot. I had no words to write yet, but it didn’t feel right to bury something blank. Inside the house, my mother tucked Agong into our sofa, its cushions still smelling of Dayi’s sweat. She’d tried embroidering Bible verses onto them with silver thread but gave up halfway, each sentence left open like a body midsurgery. The word righteous was unraveling to its root. My mother and I kneeled together beside Agong, turning his head to the side and opening his mouth to irrigate his drool, redirecting it into an ashtray. I wanted to say I never meant to hurt him.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I’m here shitting my pants. The zhongyi says sphincter loose as a sleeve says it’s because of my age I suspect it’s your father the first man I married for his soldier’s pension for a future the color of tendon one night I woke to him between my legs tongue out weeding my pubic hair with his teeth balding me said he could see the lice on me the size of pearls stuffed me with what he plucked I birthed hairballs the size of your head rehearsed birth until you born drilling my body into wind You my littleplum I raised you braised in my blood let me begin the river is noodled with snakes the river is not to blame I once saw soldiers throw prisoners into the river the fish for weeks were shaped like boys they say the babies here born gilled bladed or hammerheaded evolution is the body becoming its best weapon. 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.

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

  We all wrestle—in secular or religious ways—with “nothingness,” the void at the heart of modern culture. Ever since Zoroaster, religious movements that tried to address the violence of their time have absorbed some of its aggression. Protestant fundamentalism came into being in the United States when evangelical Christians pondered the unprecedented slaughter of the First World War. Their apocalyptic vision was simply a religious version of the secular “future war” genre that had developed in Europe. Religious fundamentalists and extremists have used the language of faith to express fears that also afflict secularists. We have seen that some of the cruelest and most self-destructive of these movements have been in part a response to the Holocaust or the nuclear threat. Groups such as Shukri Mustafa’s Society in Sadat’s Egypt can hold up a distorted mirror image of the structural violence of contemporary culture. Secularists as well as religious people have resorted to the suicide attack, which in some ways reflects the death wish in modern culture. Religious and secularists have shared the same enthusiasms. Kookism was clearly a religious form of secular nationalism and was able to work closely with the Israeli secular right. The Muslims who flocked to join the jihad against the Soviet Union were certainly reviving the classical Islamic practice of “volunteering,” but they also experienced the impulse that prompted hundreds of Europeans to leave the safety of home and fight in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and Jews to hasten from the diaspora to support Israel on the eve of the Six-Day War. When we confront the violence of our time, it is natural to harden our hearts to the global pain and deprivation that makes us feel uncomfortable, depressed, and frustrated. Yet we must find ways of contemplating these distressing facts of modern life, or we will lose the best part of our humanity. Somehow we have to find ways of doing what religion—at its best—has done for centuries: build a sense of global community, cultivate a sense of reverence and “equanimity” for all, and take responsibility for the suffering we see in the world. We are all, religious and secularist alike, responsible for the current predicament of the world. There is no state, however idealistic and however great its achievements, that has not incurred the taint of the warrior. It is a stain on the international community that Mamana Bibi’s son can say: “Quite simply, nobody seems to care.” The scapegoat ritual was an attempt to sever the community’s relationship with its misdeeds; it cannot be a solution for us today. AcknowledgmentsThis book is dedicated to Jane Garrett, my friend as well as my editor at Knopf for twenty years. From the very beginning, your encouragement and enthusiasm gave me the strength to persevere with the daily jihad of writing; it was a privilege and a joy to work with you.

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

  The night wore on; I tried to regain my balance, sensing that there was little satisfaction to be had from my newfound liberation. What stood in the way of my succumbing to the same defeat that had brought down the Old Man? Who might protect me from doubt or warn me against all the traps that seem laid in a black man’s soul? The fantasy of my father had at least kept me from despair. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live. All he could tell me, perhaps, was what had happened to him. It occurred to me that for all the new information, I still didn’t know the man my father had been. What had happened to all his vigor, his promise? What had shaped his ambitions? I imagined once again the first and only time we’d met, the man I now knew must have been as apprehensive as I was, the man who had returned to Hawaii to sift through his past and perhaps try and reclaim that best part of him, the part that had been misplaced. He hadn’t been able to tell me his true feelings then, any more than I had been able to express my ten-year-old desires. We had been frozen by the sight of the other, unable to escape the suspicion that under examination our true selves would be found wanting. Now, fifteen years later, I looked into Auma’s sleeping face and saw the price we had paid for that silence. Ten days later, Auma and I sat in the hard plastic seats of an airport terminal, looking out at the planes through the high wall of glass. I asked her what she was thinking about, and she smiled softly. “I was thinking about Alego,” she said. “Home Square—our grandfather’s land, where Granny still lives. It’s the most beautiful place, Barack. When I’m in Germany, and it’s cold outside, and I’m feeling lonely, sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I’m there. Sitting in the compound, surrounded by big trees that our grandfather planted. Granny is talking, telling me something funny, and I can hear the cow swishing its tail behind us, and the chickens pecking at the edges of the field, and the smell of the fire from the cooking hut. And under the mango tree, near the cornfields, is the place where the Old Man is buried ….” Her flight was starting to board. We remained seated, and Auma closed her eyes, squeezing my hand. “We need to go home,” she said. “We need to go home, Barack, and see him there.” CHAPTER TWELVE

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

  Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule; issues of power. It was this unyielding reality—that whites were not simply phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives—that finally explained how nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program. So long as nationalism remained a cathartic curse on the white race, it could win the applause of the jobless teenager listening on the radio or the businessman watching late-night TV. But the descent from such unifying fervor to the practical choices blacks confronted every day was steep. Compromises were everywhere. The black accountant asked: How am I going to open an account at the black-owned bank if it charges me extra for checking and won’t even give me a business loan because it says it can’t afford the risk? The black nurse said: White folks I work with ain’t so bad, and even if they were, I can’t be quitting my job—who’s gonna pay my rent tomorrow, or feed my children today? Rafiq had no ready answers to such questions; he was less interested in changing the rules of power than in the color of those who had it and who therefore enjoyed its spoils. There was never much room at the top of the pyramid, though; in a contest framed in such terms, the wait for black deliverance would be long indeed. During that wait, funny things happened. What in the hands of Malcolm had once seemed a call to arms, a declaration that we would no longer tolerate the intolerable, came to be the very thing Malcolm had sought to root out: one more feeder of fantasy, one more mask for hypocrisy, one more excuse for inaction. Black politicians less gifted than Harold discovered what white politicians had known for a very long time: that race-baiting could make up for a host of limitations. Younger leaders, eager to make a name for themselves, upped the ante, peddling conspiracy theories all over town—the Koreans were funding the Klan, Jewish doctors were injecting black babies with the AIDS virus. It was a shortcut to fame, if not always fortune; like sex or violence on TV, black rage always found a ready market. Nobody I spoke with in the neighborhood seemed to take such talk very seriously. As it was, many had already given up the hope that politics could actually improve their lives, much less make demands on them; to them, a ballot, if cast at all, was simply a ticket to a good show. Blacks had no real power to act on the occasional slips into anti-Semitism or Asian-bashing, people would tell me; and anyway, black folks needed a chance to let off a little steam every once in a while—man, what do you think those folks say about us behind our backs?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I sat on a bench, and smoked till my fingers scorched; and then I considered my plight.My situation, after all, was a ridiculously familiar one: I had been as cold and as ill and as wretched as this four years before, after my flight from Stamford Hill. Then, however, I had at least had money, and handsome clothes; I had had food, and cigarettes - had all I required to keep me, not happy, but certainly quick. Now, I had nothing. I was nauseous with hunger and with the after-effects of wine; and to get so much as a penny for a cone of eels, I should have to beg for it - or do what Zena recommended, and try my luck as a tart, up against some dripping wall. The idea of begging was hateful to me - I could not bear the thought of trying to extract pity and coins from the kind of gentlemen who, a fortnight before, had admired the cut of my suit or the flash of my cuff-links as I passed amongst them at Diana’s side. The thought of being fucked by one of them, as a girl, was even worse.I got up: it was too cold to sit upon the bench all day. I remembered what Zena had said the night before - that I must go to my folks, that my folks would take me. I had said that I had no one; but now I thought that there might, after all, be one place I could try. I did not think of my real family, in Whitstable: I had finished with them, it seemed to me then, for ever. I thought instead of a lady who had been like a mother to me, once; and of her daughter, who had been a kind of sister. I thought of Mrs Milne, and Gracie. I had had no contact with them in a year and a half. I had promised to visit them, but had never been at liberty to do so. I had promised to send them my address: I had never sent them so much as a note to say I missed them, or a card on Gracie’s birthday. The truth was that, after my first few, strange days at Felicity Place, I had not missed them at all. But now I remembered their kindness, and wanted to weep.

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

  Religious mythology may have endorsed their structural and martial violence, but it also regularly called it into question. There was a strong vein of skepticism in Mesopotamian literature. One aristocrat complains that he has always been righteous, joyfully followed the gods’ processions, taught all the people on his estate to worship the Mother Goddess, and instructed his soldiers to revere the king as the gods’ representative. Yet he has been afflicted with disease, insomnia, and terror, and “no god came to my aid or grasped my hand.” 103 Gilgamesh too gets no help from the gods as he struggles to accept Enkidu’s death. When he meets Ishtar, the Mother Goddess, he denounces her savagely for her inability to protect men from the grim realities of life: she is like a water-skin that soaks its carrier, a shoe that pinches its wearer, and a door that fails to keep out the wind. In the end, as we have seen, Gilgamesh finds resignation, but the Epic as a whole suggests that mortals have no choice but to rely on themselves rather than the gods. Urban living was beginning to change the way people thought about the divine, but one of the most momentous religious developments of the period occurred at about the same time as Sin-leqi wrote his version of Gilgamesh’s life. It did not happen in a sophisticated city, however, but was a response to the escalation of violence in an Aryan pastoral community. Early one morning in about 1200 BCE, an Avestan-speaking priest in the Caucasian steppes went to the river to collect water for the morning sacrifice. There he had a vision of Ahura Mazda, “Lord Wisdom,” one of the greatest gods in the Aryan pantheon. Zoroaster had been horrified by the cruelty of the Sanskrit-speaking cattle raiders, who had vandalized one Avestan community after another. As he meditated on this crisis, the logic of the perennial philosophy led him to conclude that these earthly battles must have a heavenly counterpart. The most important daevas—Varuna, Mithra, and Mazda, who had the honorary title ahura (“Lord”)—were guardians of cosmic order and stood for truth, justice, and respect for life and property. But the cattle raiders’ hero was the war-god Indra, a second-ranking daeva. Perhaps, Zoroaster reflected, the peace-loving ahuras were being attacked in the heavenly world by the wicked daevas.