Grief

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 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  “I used to put a flower in my hair and walk in the sun. After big rain, I walk in the sun. The flower I put on my ear. So wet, so cool.” Her eyes drifted from me. “It’s a stupid thing.” She shook her head. “Stupid thing. To be a girl.” After a while, she turned back to me as if remembering I was there. “You eat yet?” — We try to preserve life—even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind. I’m thinking now of Duchamp, his infamous “sculpture.” How by turning a urinal, an object of stable and permanent utility, upside down, he radicalized its reception. By further naming it Fountain, he divested the object of its intended identity, rendering it with an unrecognizable new form. I hate him for this. I hate how he proved that the entire existence of a thing could be changed simply by flipping it over, revealing a new angle to its name, an act completed by nothing else but gravity, the very force that traps us on this earth. Mostly, I hate him because he was right. Because that’s what was happening to Lan. The cancer had refigured not only her features, but the trajectory of her being. Lan, turned over, would be dust the way even the word dying is nothing like the word dead. Before Lan’s illness, I found this act of malleability to be beautiful, that an object or person, once upturned, becomes more than its once-singular self. This agency for evolution, which once made me proud to be the queer yellow faggot that I was and am, now betrays me. — Sitting with Lan, my mind slides, unexpectedly, to Trevor. Trevor who by then had been dead just seven months. I think of the first time we had sex, not with his cock in my palm like we usually did, but for real. It was the September after my second season on the farm.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  63 The Tale of Genji Lecture 15 The subject of this lecture is The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, about whom we know a lot less than we would like. We know that she came from a remote branch of the [ruling] Fujiwara family, which ruled Japan through successive emperors through most of the Heian period. M urasaki Shikibu, the author of The Tale of Genji , served as lady- in-waiting at the Heian court from about 1005 to about 1011. All we know of her childhood is that she was so intelligent that her father wished she had been born a son, and that she learned Chinese—an achievement she later suppressed. She married in 998 or 999, bore one daughter, was widowed in 1001, and perhaps died about 1015 or 1016, her novel being written between her husband’s death and her own. The novel’s central character is a Genji—a son of an emperor reduced to the status of commoner, mostly to cut down on the expenses required by the big retinues that had to be kept for the many crowned princes that the emperor sired. Most emperors had many wives and lovers, and so they also had several sons, and if some of those sons became commoners and thus ineligible to succeed to the throne, then costs would be lower. In the novel, in Genji’s case, he is also made a commoner so that he will be protected from court intrigues—since his mother, although a great favorite of the emperor, has no strong family backing to protect her and her son. Genji needs protection, especially from the emperor’s ¿ rst wife, the Lady Kokiden, a Fujiwara from the main branch of the family. He grows up splendidly and wins the hearts of everyone at court not already predisposed against him by the conditions of his birth. When he is 12, he is married to Aoi, daughter of a powerful court minister. It is not a happy marriage, he spends little time with her, and she does not bear a son until some years later, after which she dies. Genji is always ready to love someone who reminds him of his mother, including the Lady Fujitsubo, the wife the emperor took to replace Genji’s mother, and a nine-year-old girl named

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I turned quickly into the space between two buildings, an alleyway lined with trash bags and refuse, among which I bent over or crouched, unable to stand. But it wasn’t with bile or sickness that I heaved but with tears, which came unexpected and fluent and hot, consuming in a way I hadn’t known for a very long time, that maybe I had never known. I raised my hands, wanting to cover my face, though there was no one to see I was still ashamed of my tears, and I saw that my right hand was covered with blood. In the light from the street I could see where my wrist was torn, a small deep wound where it had caught on the glass. Stupid, I thought again, stupid, at the wound or my weeping, I’m not sure which. Why should I weep, I thought, at what, when I had brought it all upon myself, and I took one of my socks from my pocket and pressed it to the wound, wrapping it around my wrist and folding the cuff of my sleeve over it, not knowing what else to do. It was a fit of weeping violent and brief, and as my breath steadied I felt a sense of resolution, that I had been lucky and must learn from that luck; I wouldn’t go back to such a place, I thought, this would be the end of it. But how many times had I felt that I could change, I had felt it through all the long months with R., months that I had spent, for all my happiness, in a state of perpetual hunger; and so at the same time I felt it I felt too that my resolution was a lie, that it had always been a lie, that my real life was here, and I thought this even as I struggled to climb from the new depth I had been shown. And even as I climbed or sought to climb I knew that having been shown it I would come back to it, when the pain had faded and the fear, maybe not to this man but to others like him; I would desire it, though I didn’t desire it now, and for a time I would resist my desire but only for a time. There was no lowest place, I thought, I would strike ground only to feel it give way gaping beneath me, and I felt with a new fear how little sense of myself I have, how there was no end to what I could want or to the punishment I would seek. For some moments I wrestled with these thoughts, and then I stood and turned back to the boulevard, composing as best I could my human face. CLEANNESS I was at our usual table, next to the window that made up most of the restaurant’s east-facing wall.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Minutes later they rushed to the scaffold to dip their hands in Louis’s blood and buy locks of his hair. — As the leader of the French Revolution, Danton now faced two rather daunting forces: the invading armies that kept pressing closer to Paris and the restiveness of the French citizens, many of whom clamored for revenge on the aristocracy and all counterrevolutionaries. To meet the enemy armies, Danton unleashed an enormous citizen army of millions that he had created, and in the first few months of battle these new French forces turned the tide of the war. To channel the people’s taste for revenge, he set up a revolutionary tribunal to bring quick justice to those suspected of trying to restore the monarchy. The tribunal initiated what would become known as the Terror, as it sent thousands of suspects to the guillotine, often on the flimsiest of charges. Shortly after the execution of the king, Danton traveled to Belgium to help oversee the war effort on that front. While there, he received the news that his beloved wife, Gabrielle, had died in premature childbirth. He felt horribly guilty for not being by her side in that moment, and the thought that he had no chance to say good-bye to her and that he would never see her face again was unbearable. Without thinking of the consequences, he abandoned his mission in Belgium and hurried back to France. By the time he arrived, his wife had been dead for a week and buried in the public cemetery. Overwhelmed with grief and the desire to see her one more time, he hurried to the cemetery, bringing along with him a friend and some shovels. On a moonless, rainy night, they managed to find the grave. He dug and he dug, and with his friend’s help, he lifted the casket out of the ground and, with much effort, finally pried the lid off. He gasped at the sight of her bloodless face. He pulled her out, hugging her tightly to his body, begging her to forgive him. He kissed her again and again on her cold lips. After several hours, he finally returned her to the ground. In the months to come, something seemed to have changed in Danton. Had it been the loss of his wife, or was it the guilt he now felt for having unleashed the Terror within France? He had ridden the wave of the revolution to the pinnacle of power, but now he wanted it to go in another direction. He became less engaged in affairs of state and was no longer in favor of the Terror.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  In the Hartford I grew up in and the one you grow old in, we greet one another not with “Hello” or “How are you?” but by asking, our chins jabbing the air, “What’s good?” I’ve heard this said in other parts of the country, but in Hartford, it was pervasive. Among those hollowed-out, boarded buildings, playgrounds with barbed-wire fences so rusted and twisted out of shape they were like something made out of nature, organic as vines, we made a lexicon for ourselves. A phrase used by the economic losers, it can also be heard in East Hartford and New Britain, where entire white families, the ones some call trailer trash, crammed themselves on half-broken porches in mobile parks and HUD housing, their faces OxyContin-gaunt under cigarette smoke, illuminated by flashlights hung by fishing lines in lieu of porch lights, howling, “What’s good?” as you walked by. In my Hartford, where fathers were phantoms, dipping in and out of their children’s lives, like my own father. Where grandmothers, abuelas, abas, nanas, babas, and bà ngoạis were kings, crowned with nothing but salvaged and improvised pride and the stubborn testament of their tongues as they waited on creaking knees and bloated feet outside Social Services for heat and oil assistance smelling of drugstore perfume and peppermint hard candies, their brown oversized Goodwill coats dusted with fresh snow as they huddled, steaming down the winter block—their sons and daughters at work or in jail or overdosed or just gone, hitching cross-country on Greyhounds with dreams of kicking the habit, starting anew, but then ghosting into family legends. In my Hartford, where the insurance companies that made us the big city had all moved out once the Internet arrived, and our best minds were sucked up by New York or Boston. Where everybody’s second cousin was in the Latin Kings. Where we still sell Whalers jerseys at the bus station twenty years after the Whalers ditched this place to became the Carolina Hurricanes. Hartford of Mark Twain, Wallace Stevens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, writers whose vast imaginations failed to hold, in either flesh or ink, bodies like ours. Where the Bushnell theatre, the Wadsworth Atheneum (which held the first retrospective on Picasso in America), were visited mostly by outsiders from the suburbs, who park their cars valet and hurry into the warm auditorium halogens before driving home to sleepy towns flushed with Pier 1 Imports and Whole Foods. Hartford, where we stayed when other Vietnamese immigrants fled to California or Houston. Where we made a kind of life digging in and out of one brutal winter after another, where nor’easters swallowed our cars overnight. The two a.m. gunshots, the two p.m. gunshots, the wives and girlfriends at the C-Town checkout with black eyes and cut lips, who return your gaze with lifted chins, as if to say, Mind your business.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Then Angela began at the very beginning. She described a Colonial home in Virginia. A grave, grey house, with a columned entrance, and a garden that looked down on deep, running water, and that water had rather a beautiful name — it was called the Potomac River. Up the side of the house grew magnolia blossoms, and many old trees gave their shade to its garden. In summer the fireflies lit lamps on those trees, shifting lamps that moved swiftly among the branches. And the hot summer darkness was splashed with lightning, and the hot summer air was heavy with sweetness. She described her mother who had died when Angela was twelve — a pathetic, inadequate creature; the descendant of women 202 THE WELL OF LONELINESS who had owned many slaves to minister to their most trivial re- quirements: ‘She could hardly put on her own stockings and shoes,’ smiled Angela, as she pictured that mother. She described her father, George Benjamin Maxwell — a charming, but quite incorrigible spendthrift. She said: ‘ He lived in past glories, Stephen. Because he was a Maxwell —a Maxwell of Virginia — he wouldn’t admit that the Civil War had deprived us all of the right to spend money. God knows, there was little enough of it left — the War practically ruined the old Southern gentry! My grandma could remember those days quite well; she scraped lint from her sheets for our wounded soldiers. If Grandma had lived, my life might have been different — but she died a couple of months after Mother.’ She described the eventual cataclysm, when the home had been sold up with everything in it, and she and her father had set out for New York —she just seventeen and he broken and ailing — to rebuild his dissipated fortune. And because she was now painting a picture of real life, untinged by imagination, her words lived, and her voice grew intensely bitter. ‘ Hell — it was hell! We went under so quickly. There were days when I hadn’t enough to eat. Oh, Stephen, the filth, the un- speakable squalor — the heat and the cold and the hunger and the squalor. God, how I hate that great hideous city! It’s a monster, it crushes you down, it devours — even now I couldn’t go back to New York without feeling a kind of unreasoning terror. Stephen, that damnable city broke my nerve. Father got calmly out of it all by dying one day — and that was so like him! He’d had about enough, so he just lay down and died; but I couldn’t do that because 1 was young — and I didn’t want to die, either. I hadn’t the least idea what I could do, but I knew that I was supposed to be pretty and that good-looking girls had a chance on the stage, so I started out to look for a job. My God! Shall I ever forget it!’

• From Fragments (7)

  As long as the time you were absent before. A REBUKE (6) To show me gratitude thou e'er ref usest ; From beauteous words with seven-stringed lyres allied. From noble words to keep thy friends thou choosest. And me reproachfully to aggrieve and chide. Well, be it so! With insolence be sated. Thou mayest allow with rage to swell thy heart. 20 Sappho But my contempt can never be abated To fear the wrath of such as thou now art. CHARAXUS AND DORICHA (7) Cypris! he found thee all too bitter, And many a noisy taunt he earned : " Him Doricha once more doth fetter, And hath his love, for which she yearned." PRAYER FOR THE RETURN OF CHARAXUS (8) Ye Nereids, nymphs revered, my brother, I pray you, safely let return. Grant also any wishes other, All that for which his heart may yearn. May all his old shortcomings leave him. A joy unto his friends be he, A terror unto those who grieve him. No more a saddening care to me. To honor his sister be he willing, That she with grief be not imbued, E'en now my shameful sorrows stilling, With which my heart he had subdued. 21 Lyric Songs of the Greeks For his disgrace had penetrated Far into me, my soul to blight : To see my townsmen so elated At intermittent gossip's spite. But, if my song delighted ever Thy heart, O goddess, hear my prayer: From griefs, from evils us deliver; Give them to Night away to bear. SAPPHO'S DAUGHTER CLEIS (9) For me a pretty child I claim, With form like flowers of gold. Beloved Cleis is her name. Admired by young and old. Were lovely Lydia all my own, It could not for her loss atone. THE FAIREST THING IN ALL CREATION (lO) Some think the fairest thing in all creation To be of horse or foot an armed host; For battle-ships some have most admiration, But I my heart's beloved do cherish most. And 'tis not hard to follow me for any ; For queenly Helen, fairest of the fair, 22 Sappho Although surveying mortal beauties many, Did most of all for her famed lover care. Forgetting her dear parents and her daughter, She follow^ed him w^ho glorious Troy destroyed. Far from her friends and native land he brought her, By. vanity and passionate love decoyed. For easily is woman tempted ever When lightly she considers what is near. E'en so, my Anactoria, you never Remember her who still today is here. But I her lovely foot-fall hear more gladly. Prefer the brightness of her gleaming eye To all the din of chariots rushing madly, To Lydian armoured foot-men's battle-cry. I know to men the best cannot be granted: 'Tis better far to ask a share of that Which once was shared, to be with this contented, Than, vainly reaching higher, to forget. PARTING FROM A GIRL FRIEND i (II)

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I remembered the confidence I had had, hours before, in my own competence, the pleasure I had taken in the solace I could give, and I wished I could have some of it back, that it would ease the sense I had now of helplessness and loss, though loss of what I wasn’t precisely sure, an idea of myself, I suppose, which shouldn’t have been so precious to me but was. Other people have gone through this, I began, finding it difficult to speak. Other people have felt it, they bear it and they get through it, they aren’t trapped in it forever. These feelings, I said lamely, all of them, they will get easier, they’ll stop being the only thing you feel, they’ll fade and make room for other feelings. And then, in time, you’ll look at them from far away, almost entirely without pain, as if they were felt by somebody else, or felt in a dream. That’s what it’s like, I said, thinking I had struck on something, it’s precisely like waking from a dream, and like a self in a dream the self that feels this will be incomprehensible to you, and the intensity you feel now will be like a puzzle you can’t solve, a puzzle it finally isn’t worth your while to solve. I was speaking of myself, of course, of my own experience with love, with overwhelming love that had made me at times such a stranger to myself. But I could see this failing even as I spoke, I could see him recoiling from me, looking at me with an expression first of surprise and then of dismay, and then of something like revulsion. I don’t want to feel it less, he said, I don’t want it to stop, I don’t want it to seem like it wasn’t real. It would all be for nothing if that happened, he said, I don’t want it to be a dream, I want it to be real, all of it. And who else could I love, he asked, his voice softening, we grew up together, in the same country, with the same language, we became adults together; who could I meet wherever I go next who could know me like that, who could love me as much as he could love me, who could I love as much? What life could I want except for that life, he said, reminding me of the question I had asked so long before, he hadn’t forgotten it, his whole recitation had been an answer, what other life than that could I bear?

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  108The History of Christianity II CRISIS AND PERSECUTION õOne pattern from throughout history is that when leaders feel insecure, they often look for a religious minority to blame. From the late 18 th century onward, the Ottomans found themselves on the defensive against European Christian armies. õFirst, Russian soldiers marched into Crimea and the Caucasus. Then in 1798, Napoleon’s armies demolished Muslim forces in Egypt. As the 19 th century rolled on, the British joined the French and other European powers in nibbling away the edges of Ottoman territory and even threatening Istanbul itself. 109Lecture 11—Christians under Muslim Rule õChristians living in the empire watched these developments with increasing excitement. They became more assertive, sometimes rebelling against Turkish control in the hopes that they could take advantage of the empire’s weakened state to seize their independence. õWhen the Greeks revolted in 1821, the Turks struck back with a vengeance. They massacred Greek-speaking laypeople and clergy across the empire. They even hanged the patriarch of Constantinople himself outside his own cathedral, on Easter morning. õThese were the desperate, violent reactions of a crumbling empire. The Ottomans were hemorrhaging territory—and then they sided with Germany in World War I. That spelled the end. õIt’s in these last years that the Ottomans committed their most horrendous atrocities. Beginning in 1915, they began rounding up and massacring Armenian Christians and other Christian ethnic groups. At least 500,000 Armenians died. õMany scholars call their deaths one of the first cases of systematic genocide in the modern era. The Turkish government denies the scholarly consensus on this, insisting that historians have inf lated the numbers and that both sides did a lot of killing. õBy the end of the period this lecture covered, the dividing line was no longer theology—it was political power. Namely, Christians in the West had it, and Christians living under Muslim rule went for centuries without it. Their experience was a lot more like that of the very first Christians in ancient Rome, who sometimes got lucky under the rule of a tolerant or indifferent emperor and sometimes had to die for their faith. 110The History of Christianity II õToday, small communities of Christians still live in Turkey and the Middle East, although political and religious strife makes the continued existence of these communities very tenuous. The Coptic Christians in Egypt have fared better in the 21 st century, but they too are embattled. It’s impossible to understand their situation, or the broader dynamics between Muslims and Christians today, without considering the long history of that relationship—with its complicated mix of politics, ideology, and the timeless facts of human nature. SUGGESTED READING Finkel, Osman’s Dream. Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity. Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äHow did the Ottomans view their Christian subjects? äWhy did so many Christians stop practicing their faith under Muslim rule? äHow do today’s politics inf luence our attempts to understand the history of Christian experience in Muslim lands?

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Jesus is black because blackness has historically been the color of oppression in this country; thus Christ's blackness is his ultimate expression of solidarity with marginality. For all readers, the Scriptures are normally interpreted on the basis of the social location of the interpreter, in light of the interpreter's privilege or lack thereof. African Americans, more so than the dominant culture, identify with Jesus’ humanity, specifically the communal aspects of the suffering Messiah, who suffered like so many African Americans did and do today. Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection become salvific motifs for the black experience. Yet this same Jesus, who willingly shares in the death-causing plight of the marginalized, also rose from the ultimate conclusion of oppression, death. This same Jesus is present in the lives of today's sufferers and will return to judge those who benefit from the unjust social structures that cause suffering. A black Christ thus stands in contrast to a white Christ and to a focus on the resurrection as “the beginning of a triumphalist church tradition that protects the status quo.”17 A FEMALE CHRIST In the previous chapter we reviewed how women in the Hebrew Bible were perceived as possessions who existed to meet the physical, emotional, economic, and sexual needs of men. They could be readily sacrificed for the sake of men's survival. Their ultimate function was to become vessels that carried the seeds of men. Hence the greatest shame a woman could ever bear was barrenness. This is evident in the story of Hannah as recorded in 1 Samuel 1. Because Hannah was barren, she was taunted by her husband's other wife. Bitter in her soul, she wept and refused to eat. She entered the Temple to ask for the only thing that would make her humanity whole, a man-child. Women find their fulfillment in life by the process of birthing great holy men (not women). If not, the shame of barrenness becomes so great that it leads women like Rachel, Jacob's wife, to exclaim in Genesis, “Give me sons, and if there are none, I shall die!” (30:2). Good women are blessed with fertility. The so-called bad girls of the Bible are those who lacked the seriousness to be used by God to birth great men, heirs of God's promise. Even when women chose to break out of the restricted social space designated for them, as in the case of Mary of Magdala, we question their reputation. For example, what was Mary of Magdala's prior profession? Did you say she was a prostitute? If you did, you are not alone. Yet nowhere in the Bible does it say Mary of Magdala was a prostitute. Where then did we get this idea? According to all three Synoptic Gospels (Matt. 27:55–56; Mark 15:40–41; Luke 24:10), Mary of Magdala is mentioned first among Jesus’ female disciples. Her role (along with other women) must have been important enough to be included as equal to the twelve male apostles.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  153 Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past Lecture 36 In this lecture, we’re going to take a look at a novel which helped to abandon Realism, to reject the rubrics of Realism and in the process, set a brand new course for the novel for the 20 th century. We’re talking about Marcel Proust’s the Remembrance of Things Past. T he ¿ rst word in the novel is longtemps (“for a long time”) and the last is temps (“time”), so the novel is in many ways about time: about the time in which Proust lived, the time in which he wrote the novel, the effects of the passage of time, and the enemy the protagonist hopes to defeat by ¿ nishing the book. Time and the havoc it wreaks on everything is a standard theme in literature. Here, as in most cases in literature, this kind of voice is a lament. Remembrance of Things Past is a heroic battle fought againt time. It has an elegiac tone, because the battle against time is always doomed. The novel is a search for some absolute that can oppose the À ow of time. The protagonist will try many things—friendship, romantic love, ideas—all of which turn out to be subject to time themselves. Even the self, which we think of as enduring across time, changes from day to day. This is an idea which may derive from Henri Bergson’s concept of time as duration, and we will encounter it again in Pirandello; here, it is the theme. For Proust, our old selves live on in the subconscious, returning in dreams, so that waking up each morning, having spent the night with other selves, we need to recover our current identities. While we are asleep we have access to levels of memory usually blocked by our conscious mind, and we can be any self we have ever been. Waking, we have to reorient ourselves to this room and this self. Inside each of us is something permanent and unchangeable that cannot be destroyed by time; hence the title of the book, which in French means In Search of Lost Time. In the novel Proust distinguishes between two kinds of memory: voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary memory is that of the conscious mind, the memory of the intellect, which is what we use when we are awake, and which the

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  Although it’s only three in the morning, the lampshade makes the room feel like the last moments of a sinister sunset. Under the bulb’s electric hum, Paul and I spot each other through the doorway. He wipes his eyes with the palm of one hand and waves me over with the other. He slips the photo into his chest pocket and puts on his glasses, blinking hard. I sit on the cherrywood armchair beside him. “You okay, Grandpa?” I say, still foggy from sleep. His smile has a grimace underneath it. I suggest that I go back to bed, that it’s still early anyway, but he shakes his head. “It’s alright.” He sniffles and straightens up in the chair, serious. “It’s just—well, I just keep thinking about that song you sang earlier, the uh . . .” He squints at the floor. “Ca trù,” I offer, “the folk songs—the ones Grandma used to sing.” “That’s right.” He nods vigorously. “Ca trù. I was lying there in the damn dark and I swear I kept hearing it. It’s been so long since I heard that sound.” He glances at me, searching, then back at the floor. “I must be going crazy.” Earlier that night, after dinner, I had sung a few folk songs for Paul. He had inquired about what I had learned during the school year and, already steeped in summer and drawing a blank, I offered a few songs I had memorized from Lan. I sang, in my best effort, a classic lullaby Lan used to sing. The song, originally performed by the famous Khánh Ly, describes a woman singing among corpses strewn across sloping leafy hills. Searching the faces of the dead, the singer asks in the song’s refrain, And which of you, which of you are my sister? Do you remember it, Ma, how Lan would sing it out of nowhere? How once, she sang it at my friend Junior’s birthday party, her face the shade of raw ground beef from a single Heineken? You shook her shoulder, telling her to stop, but she kept going, eyes closed, swaying side to side as she sang. Junior and his family didn’t understand Vietnamese—thank god. To them it was just my crazy grandma mumbling away again. But you and I could hear it. Eventually you put down your slice of pineapple cake—untouched, the glasses clinking as the corpses, fleshed from Lan’s mouth, piled up around us. Among the empty plates stained from the baked ziti, I sang that same song as Paul listened. After, he simply clapped, then we washed up. I had forgotten that Paul, too, understands Vietnamese, having picked it up during the war. “I’m sorry,” I say now, watching the red light pool under his eyes. “It’s a stupid song anyway.” Outside, the wind is driving through the maples, their rinsed leaves slap against the clapboard siding. “Let’s just make some coffee or something, Grandpa.”

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  199 The ending of the novel illustrates Yeats’s thesis. The forces that loose anarchy into the Igbo village come from the Evil Forest, the place where excluded values have been gathering strength. The missionaries emphasize personal relations versus the communal ones of the culture, and those are the values that break down the walls of the Igbo construct and bring about “the second coming.” When one of the elders lashes out at the English commissioner at the novel’s end, he laments not just the death of Okonkwo, one of their best, but of an entire culture. There is an irony in the book’s ending—an irony of which Achebe is himself very much aware. Achebe himself is a post-colonial writer writing in English, which makes him a descendent not so much of Okonkwo as of Nwoye, since Nwoye is the one who takes the ¿ rst step that will allow an Igbo writer to record his people’s history in English. Nwoye’s movement away from tribal values is the ¿ rst step in the journey of the Western-educated Nigerians of Achebe’s generation, making Achebe the inheritor of Nwoye’s revolt. He can celebrate the Igbo culture, but he does so through tools gained by its destruction. Ŷ Achebe, Things Fall Apart. Innes and Lindfors, eds. Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. Killam, The Novels of Chinua Achebe. Ironically, Okonkwo’s success in embodying the virtues of his culture leads to his destruction, while Nwoye’s failures … ensure his survival in a changed world. Essential Reading Supplementary Reading 200 Lecture 45: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart 1. Why are the masculine virtues so important in traditional Igbo society? Why is it said that “yams are a man’s crop”? Why is the man taking care of a child who opens the gate allowing a cow into the yam ¿ eld given a stiff ¿ ne by the elders? Why is calling someone an agbala an insult? 2. Can you identify the stages of Nwoye’s realization that his people’s ideals are not his own? What might have become of him had the missionaries not shown up when they did? To what extent is his father responsible for Nwoye’s unhappiness and sense of alienation? To what extent do you share Nwoye’s emerging values as opposed to those of his people? Questions to Consider

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  They say everything happens for a reason—but I can’t tell you why the dead always outnumber the living. I can’t tell you why some monarchs, on their way south, simply stop flying, their wings all of a sudden too heavy, not entirely their own—and fall away, deleting themselves from the story. I can’t tell you why, on that street in Saigon, as the corpse lay under the sheet, I kept hearing, not the song in the drag singer’s throat, but the one inside my own. “Many men, many, many, many, many men. Wish death ’pon me.” The street throbbed and spun its shredded colors around me. In the commotion, I noticed the body had shifted. The head fell to one side, pulling the sheet with it and revealing the nape of a neck—already pale. And there, just under the ear, no larger than a fingernail, a jade earring dangled, then stopped. “Lord I don’t cry no more, don’t look to the sky no more. Have mercy on me. Blood in my eye dawg and I can’t see.” — I remember you grabbing my shoulders. How it was pouring rain or it was snowing or the streets were flooded or the sky was the color of bruises. And you were kneeling on the sidewalk tying my powder-blue shoes, saying, “Remember. Remember. You’re already Vietnamese.” You’re already. You’re all ready. Already gone. I remember the sidewalk, how we pushed the rusty cart to the church and soup kitchen on New Britain Ave. I remember the sidewalk. How it started to bleed: little drops of rouge appearing beneath the cart. How there was a trail of blood ahead of us. And behind us. Someone must have been shot or stabbed the night before. How we kept going. You said, “Don’t look down, baby. Don’t look down.” The church so far away. The steeple a stitch in the sky. “Don’t look down. Don’t look down.” I remember Red. Red. Red. Red. Your hands wet over mine. Red. Red. Red. Red. Your hand so hot. Your hand my own. I remember you saying, “Little Dog, look up. Look up. See? Do you see the birds in the trees?” I remember it was February. The trees were black and bare against an overcast sky. But you kept talking: “Look! The birds. So many colors. Blue birds. Red birds. Magenta birds. Glittered birds.” Your finger pointed to the twisted branches. “Don’t you see the nest of yellow chicks, the green mother feeding them worms?” I remember how your eyes widened. I remember staring and staring at the end of your finger until, at last, an emerald blur ripened into realness. And I saw them. The birds. All of them. How they flourished like fruit as your mouth opened and closed and the words wouldn’t stop coloring the trees. I remember forgetting the blood. I remember never looking down.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  The time we went to Goodwill and piled the cart with items that had a yellow tag, because on that day a yellow tag meant an additional fifty percent off. I pushed the cart and leaped on the back bar, gliding, feeling rich with our bounty of discarded treasures. It was your birthday. We were splurging. “Do I look like a real American?” you said, pressing a white dress to your length. It was slightly too formal for you to have any occasion to wear, yet casual enough to hold a possibility of use. A chance. I nodded, grinning. The cart was so full by then I no longer saw what was ahead of me. The time with the kitchen knife—the one you picked up, then put down, shaking, saying quietly, “Get out. Get out.” And I ran out the door, down the black summer streets. I ran until I forgot I was ten, until my heartbeat was all I could hear of myself. — The time, in New York City, a week after cousin Phuong died in the car wreck, I stepped onto the uptown 2 train and saw his face, clear and round as the doors opened, looking right at me, alive. I gasped—but knew better, that it was only a man who resembled him. Still, it upended me to see what I thought I’d never see again—the features so exact, heavy jaw, open brow. His name lunged to the fore of my mouth before I caught it. Aboveground, I sat on a hydrant and called you. “Ma, I saw him,” I breathed. “Ma, I swear I saw him. I know it’s stupid but I saw Phuong on the train.” I was having a panic attack. And you knew it. For a while you said nothing, then started to hum the melody to “Happy Birthday.” It was not my birthday but it was the only song you knew in English, and you kept going. And I listened, the phone pressed so hard to my ear that, hours later, a pink rectangle was still imprinted on my cheek. — I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else. I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son. If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast. — The time, at the nail salon, I overheard you consoling a customer over her recent loss. While you painted her nails, she spoke, between tears. “I lost my baby, my little girl, Julie. I can’t believe it, she was my strongest, my oldest.”

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I stand, the laptop held out in front of me, and point Paul’s face to Lan’s grave, which is embossed with a photo of her when she was twenty-eight, roughly the age when they first met. I wait from behind the screen as this American veteran Skypes with his estranged Vietnamese ex-wife, just buried. At one point, I think the signal had cut out, but then I hear Paul blowing his nose, his sentences amputated, struggling through his goodbyes. He’s sorry, he says to the smiling face on the grave. Sorry that he went back to Virginia in ’71 after he received notice that his mother was ill. How it was all a ploy to get him home, how his mother faked her tuberculosis until weeks turned to months, until the war began to close and Nixon stopped deploying troops and Americans started pulling out. How all the letters Lan sent were intercepted by Paul’s brother. How it wasn’t until one day, months before Saigon fell, a soldier, just home, knocked on his door and handed him a note from Lan. How Lan and their daughters had to leave the capital after the fall. How they’ll write again. He said sorry that it took so long. That by the time the Salvation Army called him to let him know there was a woman with a marriage certificate with his name on it looking for him in a Philippine refugee camp, it was already 1990. He had, by then, been married to another woman for over eight years. He says all this in a flood of stuttered Vietnamese—which he picked up during his tour and kept at through their marriage—until his words are barely coherent under his heaving. A few children from the village had gathered at the edge of the graves, their curious and perplexed stares hover on the periphery. I must look strange to them, holding the pixelated head of a white man in front of a row of tombs. As I look at Paul’s face on the screen, this soft-spoken man, this stranger turned grandfather turned family, I realize how little I know of us, of my country, any country. Standing by the dirt road, not unlike the road Lan had once stood on nearly forty years earlier, an M-16 pointed at her nose as she held you, I wait until my grandpa’s voice, this retired tutor, vegan, and marijuana grower, this lover of maps and Camus, finishes his last words to his first love, then close the laptop. —

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  You sit beside your mother, your hands, finally empty, lie in your lap. Mai points to Lan’s toes. “They’re turning purple,” she says with eerie calm. “The feet, they go first—and they’re purple. Only a half hour now, at most.” I watch Lan’s life begin to recede from itself. Purple, Mai had said, but Lan’s feet don’t look purple to me. They’re black, burnished brown at the tips of the toes, stone-dark everywhere else, save for the toenails, which had an opaque yellowish tint—like bone itself. But it’s the word purple, and with it that lush deep hue, that floods me. That’s what I see as I watch the blood pull out of Lan’s black feet, the green surrounded by clusters of violet in my mind, and realize the word is dragging me into a memory. Years ago, when I was six or seven, while walking with Lan along a dirt path that hugged the highway off Church St., she abruptly stopped and shouted. I couldn’t hear her over the traffic. She pointed out the chain-link fence that divided the interstate from the sidewalk, eyes pupil-wide. “Look, Little Dog!” I stooped down, examined the fence. “I don’t get it, Grandma. What’s wrong?” “No,” she said, annoyed, “get up. Look past the fence—there—those purple flowers.” Just beyond the fence, on the highway side, lay a spill of violet wildflowers, each blossom no larger than a thumbnail with a tiny yellow-white center. Lan crouched, held my shoulders, leveling her eyes with mine, serious. “Will you climb it, Little Dog?” Her gaze narrowed in mock skepticism, waiting. Of course, I nodded eagerly. And she knew that I would. “I’ll boost you up and you just grab them quick, alright?” I latched on to the fence as she lifted my hips. After wavering a bit, I made it to the top, straddled it. I looked down and immediately felt sick, the flowers somehow tiny, faint brushstrokes on a whir of green. The wind from the cars blasted my hair. “I don’t know if I can!” I shouted, near tears. Lan grabbed my calf. “I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen to you,” she said over the traffic. “If you fall, I cut open the fence with my teeth and save you.” I believed her and jumped, landed in a roll, got up, and brushed myself off. “Get them by the roots with both hands.” She grimaced as she clung to the fence. “You have to be quick or we’ll get in trouble.” I pulled one bush up after the other, the roots bursting from the dirt in ashy clouds. I tossed them over the fence, each passing car made a gust so strong I almost fell over. I pulled and pulled and Lan stuffed them all in a plastic 7-Eleven bag.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I remember the walls curling like a canvas as the fire blazed. The ceiling a rush of black smoke. I remember crawling to the table, how it was now a pile of soot, then dipping my fingers into it. My nails blackening with my country. My country dissolving on my tongue. I remember cupping the ash and writing the words live live live on the foreheads of the three women sitting in the room. How the ash eventually hardened into ink on a blank page. How there’s ash on this very page. How there’s enough for everyone. You straighten up, dust off your pants. Night drains all colors from the garden. We walk, shadowless, toward the house. Inside, in the glow of shaded lamps, we roll up our sleeves, wash our hands. We speak, careful not to look too long at one another—then, with no words left between us, we set the table. I hear it in my dream. Then, eyes open, I hear it again—the low wail swooping across the razed fields. An animal. Always it is an animal whose pain is this articulate, this clear. I’m lying on the barn’s cool dirt floor. Above me, rows of tobacco hang, their limbs brushing against one another in a lone draft—which means it’s the third week of August. Through the slats, a new day, already thick with summer’s heat. The sound comes back and this time I sit up. It’s not until I see him that I know I’m fifteen again. Trevor’s asleep beside me. On his side, his arm a pillow, he looks more lost in thought than in sleep. His breath slow and eased, cut with hints of the Pabst we drank a few hours ago; the empties lined along on the bench above his head. A few feet away lies the metal army helmet, tipped back, the morning light, powder blue, collected in the bowl. Still in my boxers, I walk out into the vast haze. The howl returns, the sound deep and vacuous, as if it had walls, something you could hide in. It must be wounded. Only something in pain could make a sound you could enter. I search the flattened fields; mist wafts across the brown and tarnished soil. Nothing. It must be coming from the next farm. I walk, the humidity rises, my temples itch with new sweat. In the next field, the last of the tobacco, fat and dark green, a week away from harvest, rises on all sides—somehow higher than usual, their tips just above my head. There’s the oak where we’ll total the Chevy in two weeks. The crickets have yet to unhinge their legs and now serrate the dense air as I go deeper, stopping each time the bellow shoots up, louder, closer. Last night, under the rafters, our lips raw and spent from use, we lay, breathing. The dark quiet between us, I asked Trevor what Lan had asked me the week before.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I reach back, clutching two of your fingers, and press my face into the dark slot under the bed. On the far end, near the wall, too far for anyone to reach, beside an empty water bottle, a single sock crumpled and filmed with dust. Hello. Dear Ma— Let me begin again. I am writing because it’s late. Because it’s 9:52 p.m. on a Tuesday and you must be walking home after the closing shift. I’m not with you ’cause I’m at war. Which is one way of saying it’s already February and the president wants to deport my friends. It’s hard to explain. For the first time in a long time, I’m trying to believe in heaven, in a place we can be together after all this blows over up. They say every snowflake is different—but the blizzard, it covers us all the same. A friend in Norway told me a story about a painter who went out during a storm, searching for the right shade of green, and never returned. I’m writing you because I’m not the one leaving, but the one coming back, empty-handed. — You once asked me what it means to be a writer. So here goes. Seven of my friends are dead. Four from overdoses. Five, if you count Xavier who flipped his Nissan doing ninety on a bad batch of fentanyl. I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore. Take the long way home with me. Take the left on Walnut, where you’ll see the Boston Market where I worked for a year when I was seventeen (after the tobacco farm). Where the Evangelical boss—the one with nose pores so large, biscuit crumbs from his lunch would get lodged in them—never gave us any breaks. Hungry on a seven-hour shift, I’d lock myself in the broom closet and stuff my mouth with cornbread I snuck in my black, standard-issue apron. Trevor was put on OxyContin after breaking his ankle doing dirt bike jumps in the woods a year before I met him. He was fifteen. OxyContin, first mass-produced by Purdue Pharma in 1996, is an opioid, essentially making it heroin in pill form. I never wanted to build a “body of work,” but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work. Take it or leave it. The body, I mean. Take a left on Harris St., where all that’s left of the house that burned down that summer during a thunderstorm is a chain-linked dirt lot. The truest ruins are not written down. The girl Grandma knew back in Go Cong, the one whose sandals were cut from the tires of a burned-out army jeep, who was erased by an air strike three weeks before the war ended—she’s a ruin no one can point to. A ruin without location, like a language. After a month on the Oxy, Trevor’s ankle healed, but he was a full-blown addict. —

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  an engineer and I liked the sound of the word. I got out as much of the mustard as I could. It made a brown and yellow smudge where I’d scraped it off on the edge of my plate. “All right,” Dwight said. “Now—was it empty?” “Yes,” I said. He leaned across the table and slapped my face. He didn’t swing hard but the slap was loud. Pearl started yelling at him, and while he was yelling back I got up and left the house. I wandered around feeling sorry for myself. Then I decided to buy a Coke from the machine on the loading ramp of the main warehouse. There was also a phone booth on the ramp, and as I drank the Coke I formed the idea of calling my brother. I didn’t know how to do it, but the operator was amused by my helplessness and steered me through. She got Geoffrey’s number from Princeton information, then calmed me when I panicked at her request for money. “We’ll just make it collect,” she said. I listened to the muffled signal ring through the static. I was quaking. And then I heard his voice. I had not heard it for six years, but I knew it right away. He accepted the call and said, “Hello, Toby.” I tried to say hello back but the word got stuck in my throat. Every time I tried to speak I seized up again. It wasn’t self-pity; it was hearing my brother’s voice and, for the first time in all these years, the sound of my own name. But I couldn’t explain any of this. Geoffrey kept asking me what was wrong, and when I found my voice I told him the first thing that came to mind—that Dwight had hit me. “He hit you! What do you mean, he hit you?” It took me a while to get the story out. The word mustard resists serious treatment, and as I described what had happened I began to fear that Geoffrey would find the episode ridiculous, so I made it sound worse than it had been. Geoffrey listened without interrupting me. Once I was finished he said, “Let me get this straight. He hit you because of a little mustard?” I said that he had. “Where was Mom?” “Working.” Geoffrey was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again he sounded