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 The Art of Memoir

  Dedication To Sarah Harwell & Brooks Haxton for decades of showing me how Epigraph Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself with glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed, I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me I am my own mistake. Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore Contents Dedication Epigraph Caveat Emptor Preface: Welcome to My Chew Toy 1 | The Past’s Vigor 2 | The Truth Contract Twixt Writer and Reader 3 | Why Not to Write a Memoir: Plus a Pop Quiz to Protect the Bleeding & Box Out the Rigid 4 | A Voice Conjures the Human Who Utters It 5 | Don’t Try This at Home: The Seductive, Narcissistic Count 6 | Sacred Carnality 7 | How to Choose a Detail 8 | Hucksters, the Deluded, and Big Fat Liars 9 | Interiority and Inner Enemy—Private Agonies Read Deeper Than External Whammies 10 | On Finding the Nature of Your Talent 11 | The Visionary Maxine Hong Kingston 12 | Dealing with Beloveds (On and Off the Page) 13 | On Information, Facts, and Data 14 | Personal Run-Ins with Fake Voices 15 | On Book Structure and the Order of Information 16 | The Road to Hell Is Paved with Exaggeration 17 | Blind Spots and False Selves 18 | Truth Hunger: The Public and Private Burning of Kathryn Harrison 19 | Old-School Technologies for the Stalled Novice 20 | Major Reversals in Cherry and Lit 21 | Why Memoirs Fail 22 | An Incomplete Checklist to Stave Off Dread 23 | Michael Herr: Start in Kansas, End in Oz 24 | Against Vanity: In Praise of Revision Acknowledgments Appendix | Required Reading—Mostly Memoirs and Some Hybrids Permissions About the Author Also by Mary Karr Credits Copyright About the Publisher

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

  132 And when it was all over, Southerners would see their defeat as divine retribution, while Northern preachers would celebrate their victory as God’s endorsement of their political arrangements. “Republican institutions have been vindicated in this experience as they never were before,” Beecher exulted; “God, I think, has said, by the voice of this event to all the nations of the earth: ‘Republican liberty, based upon true Christianity, is firm as the foundation of the globe.’ ” 133 “The Union will no more be thought of as a mere human compact,” exclaimed Howard Bushnell at the Yale Commencement of 1865. “The sense of nationality becomes even a kind of religion.” 134 In fact, however, the outcome had been decided not by God but by modern weaponry. Both sides were armed with Minié rifles, which made it impossible for either to charge—the traditional mode of engagement—without being vulnerable to the gun’s substantial range and suffering horrific casualties. 135 Despite the appalling loss of life—two thousand men could be lost in a single charge—generals continued to order their men to take the offensive. 136 As a result, in eight of the first twelve battles of the war, the Southern Confederacy lost 97,000 men, and in 1864 the Northern general Ulysses Grant lost 64,000 men in the first six months of his campaign against Robert E. Lee in the Wilderness. 137 The infantrymen caught on to this problem before the political or military leaders. Because one had to fire the Minié standing up, foot soldiers on both sides started to dig the trenches that would become the hallmark of early industrialized warfare with its protracted stalemates. 138 With both sides “dug in,” unable to advance decisively, modern wars would drag on battle after battle. After the war, the more reflective leaders—such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Andrew Dixon White, and John Dewey—retreated from the certainties of Enlightenment Protestantism. 139 In Europe too, Enlightenment confidence had been undermined. In Germany during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scholars had applied to scripture the modern historical-critical methodology used to study classical texts.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The mother said she’d tried walking onto a highway that morning, but god would not let her die, god chose her to outlive grief. Ma said the woman wasn’t chosen, just stupid as a melon: She should have just tried in the evening, when there was more traffic and less visibility. Jie turned off the TV. Ba was asleep on the sofa in his cook uniform, a hairnet that’s mostly holes, bare feet obscene with blue veins. One time when Ma needed antidiarrheal medicine, Ba spent the money on a beach umbrella he said was wide enough to eat the wind and digest it into flight. He said if we waited for a storm and got under the umbrella and held the handle together, our feet would quit the floor. Ma said she’d beat his ass like a tambourine, but when she saw he’d fallen asleep on the toilet again, she spread a quilt over his body, covering his face like a corpse’s. _ After two hours of the TV broadcast, Jie said she’d started seeing severed heads everywhere. In the bathroom mirror, she thought her head was attached to nothing, rising off her shoulders like steam. When she saw a birthday balloon in the sky, she assumed someone had let go of their head. Ma said, Enough about heads. We ate leftovers from Ba’s restaurant, lemon chicken that tasted like soap, broccoli with sauce-sagged heads. Ba dragged his sleeves through the oyster sauce, a slug-slick trail from plate to lap. Ma pinched him hard on the wrists until he noticed. At the dinner table, Ma asked Ba if he’d remembered to put on his underwear. Ba’s hands shook too much, so Jie and I sat on either side of him and took turns feeding him. Ma asked again if he’d remembered to wear underwear. Ba looked up, eyes unfixed, teeth typing on his lower lip. Jie blew on the spoon. She lifted it to Ba’s lips. Make a mouth, she said. But his tongue was smoke and didn’t know shape. Did you remember to put on your underwear, Ma said again. Ba looked. He’d put his hands down but couldn’t remember where. He stood up from the table and unbuttoned his pants, penis lolling out. It looked like a plucked neck, a bird stunned for slaughter. Ma set down her bowl. She reached across the table and clamped Ba’s penis between her chopsticks, squeezed. Don’t check when you’re at the table, she said. I will cut you off and boil the bone out. Ba trembled, his pants thin from years of scrubbing the stains from his lap, the fabric almost see-through at his crotch. We watched Ma choke his penis with her chopsticks until its tip purpled. Ba’s eyes like the fish’s, lidless. That’s when Jie went into the kitchen for the knife. The wooden handle was sweat-softened, fingerprinted. Ma used it to sliver guavas in the summer, telling us not to swallow the seeds when we’re fertile.

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

  The author of the Fourth Gospel, however, depicted Jesus as a cosmic being, God’s eternal “Word” (logos) who had existed with God before the beginning of time. 89 This high Christology seems to have separated this group from other Jewish-Christian communities. Their writings were composed for an “in-group” with a private symbolism that was incomprehensible to outsiders. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus frequently baffles his audience by his enigmatic remarks. For these so-called Johannine Christians, having the correct view of Jesus seemed more important than working for the coming of the kingdom. They too had an ethic of love, but it was reserved only for loyal members of the group; they turned their backs on “the world,” 90 condemning defectors as “anti-Christs” and “children of the devil.” 91 Spurned and misunderstood, they had developed a dualistic vision of a world polarized into light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. Their most extreme scripture was the book of Revelation, probably written while the Jews of Palestine were fighting a desperate war against the Roman Empire. 92 The author, John of Patmos, was convinced that the days of the Beast, the evil empire, were numbered. Jesus was about to return, ride into battle, slay the Beast, fling him into a pit of fire, and establish his kingdom for a thousand years. Paul had taught his converts that Jesus, the victim of imperial violence, had achieved a spiritual and cosmic victory over sin and death. John, however, depicted Jesus, who had taught his followers not to retaliate violently, as a ruthless warrior who would defeat Rome with massive slaughter and bloodshed. Revelation was admitted to the Christian canon only with great difficulty, but it would be scanned eagerly in times of social unrest when people were yearning for a more just and equitable world. The Jewish revolt had broken out in Jerusalem in 66 after the Roman governor had commandeered money from the temple treasury. Not everybody supported it. The Pharisees in particular feared that it would make trouble for diaspora Jews, but the new party of Zealots (kanaim) thought that they had a good chance of success because the empire was currently split by internal dissension. They managed to drive out the Roman garrison and set up a provisional government, but the emperor Nero responded by dispatching a massive army to Judea led by Vespasian, his most gifted general. Hostilities were suspended during the disturbances that followed Nero’s death in 68, but after Vespasian became emperor, his son Titus took over the siege of Jerusalem, forced the Zealots to capitulate, and on August 28, 70, burned city and temple to the ground. In the Middle East, a temple carried such symbolic weight that an ethnic tradition could barely sustain its loss. 93 Judaism owed its survival to a group of scholars led by Yohanan ben Zakkai, leader of the Pharisees, who transformed a faith based on temple worship into a religion of the book.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The snake-child grew up to be my Ama. Her snakes vined up the length of her legs and whisked around her waist when she walked. Ama and her snakes were saints: Shamans and priests asked to see what they’d grown from, flipping up Ama’s skirt, but the snakes bit their wrists blue. She whistled to wake them. Ama tapped each one on the head, their eyes milk-lit. She fed them mice from the fields and rats from the gutters on both sides of the road and turtles swept out of the river by typhoons and minnows the size of her pinkies. The farmers who once wanted to dam the river, the ones who never dared to visit the indigenous township for anything other than cheap millet wine, now came in pairs to pet the snakes under her skirts. The year Ama turned fourteen, the river railed against the fields. Typhoons tore up the fences and the hens that weren’t tied down in baskets were swallowed into the sky. Ama straddled the narrowest part of the river to piss into it. When she pissed, the snakes lunged open their mouths. The farmers said she was the one poisoning the water, turning it rancid, handcuffing the crops to the soil so they wouldn’t grow. But they wouldn’t hurt the girl who hissed piss out of a snake’s mouth. When the river stood up again in the banks, Ama ran outside. Ama’s snakes were bobbing out the bottom of her skirt, leashing her to the river. She walked toward the water that begged to be beaten, its surface a skin, and waded in to her knees. Her leftmost snake extended itself like an arm and then doubled back, its head pointing between her legs. It entered her body and nosed its way up her asshole. The right snake looped around itself too, turning toward her body and hooking its head into her vagina. The middle snake, the one thick as her wrist, lifted itself to Ama’s lips. Opened its eyes in the dark of her mouth. Her teeth were pried apart. The snake shimmied down her throat and she couldn’t breathe until it entered her belly. All three snakes snapped off at the crotch-root, two convening in her stomach, one in her womb. Ama pissed and shat and birthed at the same time, baby snakes streaming out of her. The river hooded over her head and she opened her mouth underwater, exhaling snakes. They poured out from her mouth and anus and vagina by the dozens, writhing away from the radius of her belly. It was a new breed no one had seen before, rain-red. When the rain ended, the river returned to its socket, the shape of a spine misaligned. The mud returned to its color, but the snakes inside remained red. They browsed the water for meat. The army * discarded its prisoners here, holing the boys’ wrists to thread a wire through.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I liked your honesty. I humored your helplessness, your misplaced faith in my body I lifted you from the river a fish in my fist loosed you into the rainbarrel with your sisters you were the last to girl back snakes chewed the mud spat it back out venom in the soil spreading to the sugarcane sour this year trees retracting their roots we begin to eat the cotton roll them into balls our bellies full of our fists the neighbors go to hunt the snakes but they rescind into the water sink to the bottom pretending to be stone Sometimes I dream raking the river with my teeth staring every fish in the fin none are you. You saltiest of my fishdaughters I steered you by the tail in my rainbarrel what substitutes touch: water hunger I dreamed the clouds were calves I killed to feed you in the morning only cotton swabbing my belly I envy the river its boneless I After weeks your sisters turned back to daughterbodies not you yearly a fish you photosynthesize light into bone I feed all my daughters full of cotton my daughters so empty they shit streams of fog one day I’m home I see your sisters standing around the barrel where you glowbone your sisters so thin cotton infants in their bellies doorknob knees ghostfins I see my eldest with her fist around you your bone in her mouth your sisters hunched together taking turns biting into you scales sequinning their tongues I beat them till they let go too late I forgot what you looked like as a girl I saved what they didn’t swallow some bone an eye-pit when your sisters shat out your ribs I returned them to the river beat its surface blue with my hands the neighbors told me water can’t bruise said I will never be forgiven they saw me drop my children into the river did I really think they would be returned to me the same species it’s true there was a whale in the river one summer before you were born you head-butted my belly blue wanting to get out of me to see it no one knew how the whale squeezed itself in but it was there I swear it was a whale I pet its jellyhead it mooed at me you laughed from inside me too tickling me on the day your sisters ate you I asked the river to give me back a girl again instead it spat out a fish-hook at my feet said go hook yourself another daughter * * THIS IS HARDCORE. IS IT CANNIBALISM IF YOU EAT YOUR SISTER WHO’S ANOTHER SPECIES?

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  78 See Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” this volume, p. 27.79 micha cárdenas, ed. Trans Desires/Affective Cyborgs (New York: Atropos Press, 2010), esp. “Trans Desire” and “Affective Cyborgs.”80 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1990), 192.81 See Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” this volume, p. 28–29.Pleasure After Childhood Sexual AbuseAmita Swadhin Amita Swadhin is gentle and uncompromising. It's a rare combo. She puts her finger directly on a wound, but only to say—this is not right. This cannot continue. Her work with Mirror Memoirs to support healing from childhood sexual abuse is massive and deeply necessary. Here is part of her story. “Did you like it? Did it feel good?” My father’s words, directed at me. We were sitting on the floor in the bedroom I shared with my sister, fully clothed after he had raped me again. I don’t remember his face or the sound of his voice in that moment, but I remember his words. I remember the feel of the ugly dark brown slightly shaggy wall-to-wall carpet that he’d bought with his employee discount against my fingers as I ran my hands back and forth, back and forth. I remember staring at his face, trying to assess what he hoped—no, expected—to hear. I remember knowing the violent encounter would only be prolonged if I said the wrong answer. “Yes,” I said. “What did it feel like?” “Like … shooting over the moon and through the stars.” He smiled. My face remained blank, per usual, but my gaze was glued to his body, watching, waiting, eyes following his back as he walked out of the room. Something in me relaxed slightly: I had passed the test. The ordeal was over. For now. I was six years old. I already had a penchant for lying with panache. It was a survival skill. My father raped me at least once a week—and often more—for eight years of my childhood, beginning when I was four. Whenever my body would show my true feelings through tears, I got hit in the face until I stopped crying. And then the rape would continue. Whenever my body would show my true feelings through resistance, like hitting or kicking, I got pinned down and raped more violently. My father’s abuse including forcing me to watch porn with him regularly. Most of the scenes he forced me to watch were in the “incest porn” genre—VHS tapes depicting “daughters enjoying sex with their fathers.” I never knew whether the people in the videos were actors or whether they were actually fathers and daughters. I never knew where he acquired these tapes. But I knew with certainty: I hated those videos. And I hated my father.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  It flew low, tailing light. It’s on fire, I said, and thought of Duck Uncle inside it. If we slit open the plane’s belly like a fish, he would spill out all shiny and scarfed in guts. I thought it was unfair that she was the only one being the bait, so I stuck my tongue out at the sky and wriggled it like a worm, luring all the lost. DAUGHTER Hu Gu Po (IV) The cost of being fatherless: Shut off notices from the water company (hang up, bathe with baking soda). Shut off notices from the electricity company (ignore: the house will starve itself dark). No exterminator (kill the ants with duct tape, termites with vinegar, rats with our hands). No calls from my father for two weeks, then months, then the trees started growing new beards. The fall my father stopped sending money or answering calls, my mother bought us plane tickets to the mainland, said she’d either bring him home or kill him there: She hadn’t decided which would punish him more. We got our passport photos taken in the living room of a Shanghainese man my father once bribed for a faster visa. The man told me to show my ears in the photo, tucking my hair back with one broad thumb. His hands were like my father’s: bruised nailbeds, knuckles loose as screws. I felt guilty for summoning my father through some other man’s body. We packed in the dark, my mother cursing my father’s cousins, their factory, my father, who must be dead, my father, who must have forgotten us, my father, who hadn’t called back, my father, who must have fished himself another family, another woman whose knees he prayed between. My brother begged her to turn on the lights, but she didn’t want us to see her face, its increasing resemblance to fear. I pretended we lived underground and had lightbulb-heads and were packing for our first trip to the surface. On the plane, I slept with my head leaning against my mother’s and woke with the sun running like a yolk across the window. Buildings toothpicked the sky. It was so humid I could gargle the air and spit it. In our hotel room, my brother and I slept on the floor, my mother on the skin-colored bed. The sheets were so thin they let light into our dreams. Our shadows sharked across the floor. The first night in Jiangsu, I dreamed my mother was kneeling over me, one of her hands balled inside my mouth and the other pressed over my nose, caging my breath in my chest. I woke believing that my tongue had dried into a cricket and leapt out of my mouth, and I crawled to every dust-clotted corner of the room searching for it.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Mrs Best’s son found a sweetheart, and brought her to the house: she was given tea and sandwiches in the downstairs parlour; she sang songs, while someone played on the piano. Mary broke a window with a broom, and shrieked - then shrieked again when Mrs Best rolled up her sleeve and slapped her. Such were the sounds I caught, in my grim chamber. They might have solaced me, except that I was beyond solace. They only kept me mindful of the things - all the ordinary things! the smack of a kiss, the lilt of a voice lifted in pleasure or anger - that I had left behind me. When I gazed at the world from my dusty window, I might as well have been gazing at a colony of ants, or a swarming bee-hive: I could recognise nothing in it that had once been mine. It was only by the lightening and the warming of the days, and the thickening of the reek of blood from Smithfield, that I began to realise that the year was edging slowly into spring.I might have faded into nothingness, I think, along with the carpet and the wallpaper. I might have died, and my grave gone unvisited and unmarked. I might have remained in my stupor till doomsday - I think I would have - if something hadn’t happened, at last, to rouse me from it.I had been at Mrs Best’s for about seven or eight weeks, and had not once stepped beyond her door. I still ate only what Mary brought me; and though I only ever sent her off, as I have said, for bread and tea and milk, she sometimes came with more substantial foods, to try and tempt me into eating them. ‘You’ll perish, miss,’ she would say, ‘if you don’t get your wittles’; and she’d hand me baked potatoes, and pies, and eels in jelly, which she bought hot from the stalls and pie-shops on the Farringdon Road, and had bound with layers of newsprint into tight little parcels, steaming and damp. I took them - I might have taken arsenic, if she had offered me a packet of that - and it became my habit, as I ate my potato or my pie, to flatten the wrappings across my lap and study the columns of print - the tales of thefts and murders and prize-fights, ten days old. I would do this in the same dull spirit in which I gazed from my window at the streets of East London; but one evening, as I smoothed a piece of newspaper over my knee and brushed the crumbs of pastry from its creases, I saw a name I knew.The page had been torn from one of the cheap theatrical papers, and bore a feature entitled Music-Hall Romances.

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

  54 A new class of “untouchables” (chandalas), who had been thrown off their land by the incoming Aryans, now took the place of these aspiring workers at the bottom of the social hierarchy. 55 City life was exciting. The streets were crowded with brightly painted carriages and huge elephants carrying merchandise from distant lands. People of all classes and ethnicities mingled freely in the marketplace, and new ideas began to challenge the traditional Vedic system. The Brahmins, therefore, whose roots were in the countryside, began to seem irrelevant. 56 As often in times of flux, a new spirituality emerged, and it had three interrelated themes: dukkha, moksha, and karma. Surprisingly, despite this prosperity and progress, pessimism was deep and widespread. People were experiencing life as dukkha—“unsatisfactory,” “flawed,” and “awry.” From the trauma of birth to the agony of death, human existence seemed fraught with suffering, and even death brought no relief because everything and everybody was caught up in an inescapable cycle (samsara) of rebirth, so the whole distressing scenario had to be endured again and again. The great eastward migration had been fueled by the Aryans’ experience of claustrophobic confinement in the Punjab; now they felt imprisoned in their overcrowded cities. It was not just a feeling: rapid urbanization typically leads to epidemics, particularly when the population rises above 300,000, a sort of tipping point for contagion. 57 No wonder the Aryans were obsessed by sickness, suffering, and death and longed to find a way out. Rapid change of circumstance also made people more conscious of cause and effect. They could now see how the actions of one generation affected the next, and they began to believe that their deeds (karma) would also determine their next existence: if they were guilty of bad karma in this life, they would be reborn as slaves or animals, but with good karma, they might become kings or even gods next time. Merit was something that could be earned, accumulated, and finally “realized” in the same way as mercantile wealth. 58 But even if you were reborn as a god, there was no real escape from life’s dukkha, because even gods had to die and would be reborn to lower status. In an attempt to shore up the now-vulnerable class system, perhaps, the Brahmins tried to reconfigure the concepts of karma and samsara: you could enjoy a good rebirth only if you strictly observed the dharma of your class. 59 Others would draw upon these new ideas to challenge the social system. In the Punjab, the Aryans had tried to fight their way to “liberation” (moksha); now some, building on the internalized spirituality of the Brahmanas, were looking for a more spiritual freedom and would investigate their inner world as vigorously as the Aryan warriors had once explored the untamed forests. The new wealth gave the nobility the time and leisure that was essential for such introspective contemplation.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  He ran for the door, through the hallway, then up the stairs to the roof. I’d later ask why he ran up instead of down, but he told me nothing. It was dark in the stairway, like turning the night back on, but we all followed after him. We scattered on the square rooftop, big as a parking lot, where wet lines of laundry hung heavy and dank as meat. Someone had burned something recently and the air was full of gossiping smoke. There was a chicken coop in the center of the roof, made of plywood and plastic wrap, and the two hens inside looked dead. My brother was standing at the edge, where the rooftop ended. Where the railing buckled its shadow around his waist. I was the one who got the closest. My thumb snagged the belt loop at the back of my brother’s jeans, but he had already climbed over the railing, the rust sloughing off on his hands. I came close enough to see that. He didn’t jump so much as sprint past the sky. He didn’t fall through the air so much as become it. Then my father was behind me, lifting me by my hair, saying Come back from there, come back. I didn’t know if he was talking to my brother or me. My mother had not moved since we got to the roof. She was a statue of salt, solidified by my eyes, but I saw she was speaking something, willing his wings. The building was at least a hundred stories, and when we first saw it from the window of the taxi, my brother said, It’s like a big boner. A big boner in the sky. I told him to shut up, it was not, it was beautiful, with rows and rows of windows opening like eyes. Wouldn’t you want to live somewhere like that, I asked him. The whole world in your window. My brother said, No, I’ll never live where he lives. Now the building was not tall enough. I needed it to never end, for the ground to be as far back as history. My mother, the one who watched, would tell the story better: She would say my father loved kites so much he became one, that my brother borrowed new bones. We both watched my father follow my brother as if tethered, yanked along, tied ankle-to-ankle by a kite-string. I grabbed at his ankle, but the weight of his want was too much for me.

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

  Bin Laden’s “Crusader-Zionist Alliance” model exploited the conspiracy fears that are widespread in Muslim countries where lack of government transparency makes accurate information hard to come by.44 It provides an explanation for an otherwise inexplicable concatenation of disasters. Islamists often quote a hadith that was rarely cited in the classical period but became very popular during the Crusades and the Mongol invasions:45 “The nations are about to flock against you from every horizon,” the Prophet had told his companions, and Muslims would be helpless because “weakness [wahn] will be placed in your hearts.” What did wahn mean? “Love of this world and fear of death,” Muhammad replied.46 Muslims had become soft and had abandoned jihad because they were afraid of dying. Their only hope was to summon again the courage at the heart of Islam. Hence the importance of the huge martyrdom operation that would show the world that Muslims were no longer fearful. Their plight was so desperate that they must either fight or be killed. Radicals also love the Quranic story of David and Goliath that concludes: “How often a small force has defeated a large army!”47 The more powerful the enemy, therefore, the more heroic the struggle. Killing civilians is regrettable but, fighters argue, the Crusader-Zionists have also shed innocent blood, and the Quran commands retaliation.48 So the martyr must soldier on bravely, stoically repressing pity or moral revulsion for the terrible acts that he is tragically obliged to commit.49 The al-Qaeda leadership had been planning the “spectacular” attack of September 11, 2001, for some time but could not proceed until they found the right recruits. They needed men who were technologically competent, were at home in Western society, and had the ability to work independently.50 In November 1999 Muhammad Ata, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah, on their way (or so they thought) to Chechnya, were diverted to an al-Qaeda safe house in Kandahar. They came from privileged backgrounds, had studied engineering and technology in Europe—Jarrah and al-Shehhi were engineers, and Ata was an architect—and would blend easily into American society while they trained as pilots. They were members of a group now known as the Hamburg Cell. Of the four, only Bin al-Shibh had a deep knowledge of the Quran. None had the madrassa training that is often blamed for Muslim terrorism but had attended secular schools; until he met the group, Jarrah was not even observant.51 Unused to allegoric and symbolic thought, their scientific education inclined them not to skepticism but toward a literalist reading of the Quran that diverged radically from traditional Muslim exegesis. They also had no training in the traditional fiqh, so their knowledge of mainstream Muslim law was at best superficial.

• 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. The next month, the river receded like a hairline. At night the stars flaked off the sky as dandruff, salting the soil white.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  This light I lair. Now my holes are many . Gods blame me though memory. I taste torn , . brine I. I have many names hiring a home from water, . A history of the hole still family. Forgive me because & I watched you with my mouth. threw you I loved drown you to life. _ I read the last letter aloud in my yard. Ben sat in front of me with her legs forked open in the soil, her hand petting the 口. Reading aloud to the holes, I mispronounced all the silences, rewrote them with my own prayer. She’s getting ready to bury him, Ben said. She’s baiting us. My tail curled in on itself, fit in my hand like a stone. I wanted a window. I wanted to see something shatter because of me. I said I wasn’t going to let her bury anything. The bone in my tail was wincing down to a wick, preparing for me to light it. Its marrow was memory. When my mother came home from the foot spa that night, I said I was volunteering to be her weapon. She softened the knots of her hands in a bowl of hot water, said she was tired. But I said it anyway: Ama is going to hurt Agong. She turned away from the window, her face wiped of light. The sink behind her was full, the water silver with knives. You think I don’t know? she said, and I knew she was mocking me, her voice stretched out of shape over the words. Everything in my mouth sounded already wrong, gone sour. I looked down at the bruised tile floor, at her shadow grazing on mine, eating it whole. I know about the river, I said, looking up. I think it’s time to dam her. My mother’s knees must have come unscrewed: She knelt down, her back against the wall, her hands snagging in her hair when she tried to shift it out of her face. I moved forward through the dim of the kitchen, tugged down on her left ear like she always did for me when I was having a bad dream. When she jerked her head away from me, I told her she didn’t have to be afraid of Ama. While I untangled the hair from around her fingers, I imagined loosing my tail like an arrow, shortcutting it through Ama’s body, her ribs making a fist around her heart. Do you remember that story I told you? my mother said. I asked her which one, and she told me about the women who hanged themselves with their own hair when the mountains were mowed over. Once, we lived inside the ground. The sun swung like a bucket of our blood. When I asked her why they hanged themselves, she said the only way to own your body is to die inside it.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Alone on my mattress for the first time, I told the ceiling I’d leave Ma soon, find a man I can steer out of this city, a man who can snuff the sun out with his thumb. In the kitchen, I can hear Ma struggling to tug the thread of her breath up her throat. After breathing all the cleaning chemicals and the factory air, Ma’s lungs cringed to fists and beat at her ribs. When she needs someone to unsnag her breath, I fill a bowl with hot water and push her head an inch from the surface. The steam speaks for us. Her head bucks against my palm, but I press harder. Sometimes I want to sink her head into the water, remind her of the river, but I’m too afraid she’ll become a fish and wriggle out of my fingers. It’s more a punishment to keep her in this body, ache-lunged and coughing, skin worn thin as a lampshade. It’s not night yet, but Ma prefers the kitchen dark, says her eyes have never been native to light. When she wakes, her mouth opens before her eyes. She says, Jie, and I don’t correct her. She gets up from the stool and finishes the dishes. I do the drying. Ba’s not home yet, but he’s already on the bus, counting the stops with his shirt buttons. At every stop, he unbuttons one. When the shirt’s all the way open, the sweat of his chest beaconing through, he knows it’s time to get off. When Ma plunges her hand into the sink, groping for the bowl, she grabs the blade-end of a knife instead, releasing her blood into the water. Taking her hands out of the sink, I dry them on my shirt. I don’t know why I’m rescuing her hands from the water when they once tried to d____ me in the r___. In a year I’ll leave. I’ll marry your father, any man I can ride away from here. The irony: We’re the same as Ma. That’s what Ma did, marry out of her country, marry out of her body. _ You only know her as disappeared, but your fourth aunt was the first one to hold me when I was born: I practiced latching on her thumb, crying when I couldn’t suck anything out but blood. Her absence now is the size of the sky. The only thing that fills it is night. At night, I watch your yard-holes gaping for the moon to descend into their mouths like a nipple, fill them with milklight. Two nights after her wedding, she came back to pack the last of her things. Jie said they were driving to Reno for the honeymoon soon, and I told her not to gamble anything she wasn’t willing to lose.

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

  The Quran had given Muslims an historical mission: to create a just community in which all members, even the weakest and most vulnerable, would be treated with absolute respect. This would demand a constant struggle (jihad) with the egotism and self-interest that holds us back from the divine. Politics was therefore not a distraction from spirituality but what Christians would call a sacrament, the arena in which Muslims experienced God and that enabled the divine to function effectively in our world. Hence if state institutions did not measure up to the Quranic ideal, if their political leaders were cruel or exploitative and their community humiliated by foreign enemies, a Muslim could feel that his or her faith in life’s ultimate purpose was imperiled. For Muslims, the suffering, oppression, and exploitation that arose from the systemic violence of the state were moral issues of sacred import and could not be relegated to the profane realm. After Ali’s death, Muawiyyah moved his capital from Medina to Damascus and founded a hereditary dynasty. The Umayyads would create a regular agrarian empire, with a privileged aristocracy and an unequal distribution of wealth. Herein lay the Muslim dilemma. There was now general agreement that an absolute monarchy was far more satisfactory than a military oligarchy, where commanders inevitably competed aggressively for power—as Ali and Muawiyyah had done. The Umayyads’ Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian subjects agreed. They were weary of the chaos inflicted by the Roman-Persian wars and longed for the peace that only an autocratic empire seemed able to provide. Umayyads permitted some of the old Arab informality, but they understood the importance of the monarch’s state of exception. They modeled their court ceremonial on Persian practice, shrouded the caliph from public view in the mosque, and achieved a monopoly of state violence by ruling that only the caliph could summon Muslims to war.69 But this adoption of the systemic violence condemned by the Quran was very disturbing to the more devout Muslims, and nearly all the institutions now regarded as critical to Islam emerged from anguished discussions that took place after the civil war. One was the Sunni/Shiah divide. Another was the discipline of jurisprudence (fiqh): jurists wanted to establish precise legal norms that would make the Quranic command to build a just society a real possibility rather than a pious dream. These debates also produced Islamic historiography: in order to find solutions in the present, Muslims looked back to the time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs (rashidun). Moreover, Muslim asceticism developed as a reaction against the growing luxury and worldliness of the aristocracy. Ascetics often wore the coarse woollen garments (tasawwuf) standard among the poor, as the Prophet had done, so would become known as Sufis. While the caliph and his administration struggled with the problems that beset any agrarian empire and tried to develop a powerful monarchy, these pious Muslims were adamantly opposed to any compromise with its structural inequity and oppression.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I wanted Ba to live with me, in a new city with my new husband. Ma said: Either leave him or take us both. I said I’d take them both: I’d let Ma beat your brother out of me if it meant Ba would get to witness the birth, bring the baby its first breath. That’s what I said, but I should have known that when I speak something, it’s no longer mine. It’s the air now, breathed in by everybody, exhaled as nothing. The week I moved out, Ma was in the kitchen rinsing Ba’s pants in the sink. She said if he shit himself again she’d feed him his own stain. I toweled between his butt cheeks. He hadn’t showered in months since Ma stopped helping him. I stood him over the sink, washed him everywhere below the waist. His penis looked like a boiled prawn. Ma took my hands off him. She said, If he can’t do it himself, he doesn’t deserve to be clean, and then she scrubbed my hands so raw they hurt to hold air and your brother inside me asked to leave. Your brother was the one who kicked my skin into a sky, a constellation of bruises on my belly; you were the one who didn’t move, who wanted to stay inside me, who kept your eyes closed for days, not yet committed to your body or this world, still waiting to see if you could be returned. And look now: You want me to go back. Ma said, Take us both or no one, and I chose no one, which means I chose myself. Daily, I see myself like I’m on TV: I leave LA in your father’s car. A rabbit jumps into the starving man’s fire and saves him and becomes the moon. But everyone always forgets the rabbit’s sacrifice means nothing. The starving man was not starving at all: He was not even a man. He was a god. Hunger was the weather he invented. The rabbit died for a fraudulent want. When I left, Ba was still standing over the sink. So still he might have been praying. Or waiting. In another life, another story, a daughter who is not me says: Both. I’ll take you both. She takes her Ma and Ba, replants them in another city, becomes a truce between trees. Memories ago, when you and your brother were asleep and your father was newly home from the mainland, I took the car and drove halfway down to LA before pulling into a motel. I thought I’d finally take Ba home, but then I remembered that my house is not mine, that your father’s money paid the bills and I didn’t even know what my ba could eat anymore, if I still knew how to make sugar-hearted dates the way he liked them, with so much syrup it sealed his jaw. The sign outside the motel said NO VACANCIES, but I asked for a room anyway.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  If I keep my eyes unfixed and look through my eyelashes I discover I can turn the whole night into something I drew with crayon. The trees around us have bubble-shaped heads. The dresses flying into the fire are cut out of a paper-doll book. The fire is burnt orange and sunflower yellow and fire-engine red, with bold black spikes around it. The refinery towers in the distance are long skinny lines I drew with the silver crayon, using my ruler to keep them so straight. Their fires remind me of birthday candles fixing to get puffed out. I don’t know when all the fight drains out of me, but it does. You could lead me by the hand straight into that fire, and I doubt a squawk would come out. I can’t protest anymore, and I can see that Lecia has been scooped pretty empty too. We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm has settled over me from the inside out. What is about to happen to us has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one and by one. I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp’s Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up supporting you after a while. People can get behind pain that way, if they think it derives from powers larger than themselves. So in the middle of some miserable plague where everybody’s got buboes in their groins and armpits swelling and bursting with pus, people can walk around calm. So I know with calm how cut off we are from any help. No fire truck will arrive. None of the neighbors will phone Daddy or the sheriff. I picture old Mrs. Heinz standing next door at her sink behind the window she cleaned down to the squeak every Saturday with a bucket of ammonia water into which she squeezed a lemon. She can see us out there. I feel her eyes on me. She’s wiping off the last plate from the drainboard and watching us and wondering should she come out. But she thinks better of it. Mother’s flinging things into the fire like one of those witches out of the Shakespeare play, and old Mrs. Heinz probably peers out from behind the ruffled Priscilla curtains that she copied herself on her sewing machine using dimestore gingham to look like the ones in the Sears catalogue. She probably takes one long gander at that hill of flaming toys and furniture and the picture frames of living fire and Mother stirring it all with a long pole and thinks to herself, Ain’t a bit of my business. Then she lets the pink-checked curtain go so it fell across us. The other neighbors have done the same.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The woman at the counter thought I was a whore and I let her think it. Inside, the TV’s already on: war, war, weather, news at eleven. Outside, the sun pregnant with the moon. When my mother gave birth to me, she barely had to squat. I stole myself out. The year I married and left Ma, I scoured my room clean. I took my toothbrush out of the bathroom, the one I’d used for so many years that the bristles were balding. Most nights I scrubbed my teeth with a finger: I like to feel what’s sharp in myself. I threw the toothbrush away, and that’s when I saw it in the trash, half-wrapped in toilet paper: a hair dye box with an Asian model on it, the darkest shade available. Ba’s hair had been white since I was born, and Ma said it meant his brains were made of cloud. I thought of Ma dying her hair in secret, tarring each strand until it was her shadow, refusing the softness of silver. I sat on the bathroom floor. I walked into the kitchen where Ma was rinsing bone-colored gaolicai. Her hair in pink curlers, pinned up and tumorous. She said, Eat this cabbage on your wedding night. It will fill your belly with water and leave no room for a baby. Her hands shucked the leaves, cracked the cabbage-heads like skulls. She’d saved me all the fresh leaves. The leaves that surrendered at the edges were the ones she’d feed Ba. What if I want a baby? I said, not knowing your brother was the size of a bird. She slit a leaf along its veins. Every year your child grows is another that’s subtracted from you, she said. The older your children grow, she said, the more jealous a god will become. The god will look for reasons to steal the child back: a name that’s too long, skin with no moles or scars. Maybe that’s why Ma threw me into that river: to save me from being stolen. My last night living in that house, I took the bag of cabbage out of the refrigerator and slept with my body cleaved to it, cradling its cold. I slipped it under the belly of my nightgown and kissed it, imagined it was growing inside me into you, my not-yet daughter, my slaughter. _ This isn’t the story I promised you. I know. My toes were a toll I paid for this body. You think they were thieved by Hu Gu Po, the tiger who inhabits us like our own bones. Sometimes I want to pluck the rest of my toes like grapes, suck the sweet from their skins.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Only staring steady at something could chase off those whirlies, or at least soften the incline that I felt myself sliding up and down in the waves I was dreaming under myself. I fixed on a small portrait on the far wall. It was Mother’s last painting, a guy she called “Mack the Knife.” She’d toted it all the way from Texas. That puzzled me, since it wasn’t even of somebody we knew, being a black-haired Frenchman with almond-shaped eyes. Actually, maybe he wasn’t French. But to me, he was the spitting image of the nauseated fellow on the Sartre book jacket, the one Mother had told me wanted to puke just from being alive. Mack the Knife wasn’t exactly handsome in the technical sense, being sallow-complected and puny. But it was a good painting. His eyes rested on me easy, and the light coming in sideways from the street gave him a sad, knowing look. Plus, he took the whirlies away, merely by being constant in the great roiling of that room. When I said my prayers that night, which I did only after I was sure Mother was back in the parlor out of hearing range, I directed them as much to that sorry-looking fellow with his sallow cheeks and black turtleneck suspended in a sea of red and black swirls as to any father who might have been installed in heaven. Dear Mack, please keep me from horking on these covers. And keep Mother from finding her car keys in the ivy pot. Amen. Other nights were occupied with Mother and Hector fighting. The litany of his innate low-lifedness got seared into my skull during this time. Hector was a pussy, was her main gripe. Also, he lacked gainful employment, which meant Mother accused him of sponging off her all the time. But if, of a hung-over morning, he lamely started scanning the want ads for bartending jobs, she’d coo up next to him don’t bother, because if he was working they couldn’t make love in the afternoons. Hector was also the planet’s sloppiest drunk. He staggered and slurred and forgot stuff. He fell down and threw up. One morning, I overheard her screaming that for Christ’s sake, he’d wet the bed again. Another time with Gordon and Joey standing in the kitchen, she’d hollered that Hector couldn’t even “get it up right.” She rapped the wooden countertop with her knuckles. “Pete’s dick was always as hard as this. Always.” I didn’t know how to take this news, but watched Hector sink down under the weight of it, staring the whole time at the bottom of his lowball glass like it was a crystal ball. For some reason, Mother was just springloaded on pissed-off, which made her want to harm herself. Once, for instance, when our car was winding home from a particularly nasty dinner in town, Mother just threw open the car door and pitched herself out on the road.