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 The Art of Memoir

  and gin mean nothing—they’re a gesture. About what? Who knows? How postpubescent and hard-drinking and world-weary I was? Mother did way more interesting stuff. When she adjudged the small-town supermarket’s Parmesan unworthy, she upended the whole cheese display. She wagged a shotgun at the ice cream truck when its bells woke her from a nap. She owned a couture suit from Paris and gave me Sartre’s Nausea to read when I was in sixth grade. But I was somehow stifled from speaking directly about the far- more-interesting facts, much less the events that ran through my nightmares and kept me dragging to a shrink’s office. If I wrote vaguely enough, I risked nothing. No one could understand what was going on. I once heard a quote by Marvin Bell on his early work: “I knew I was an experimental poet. My poems didn’t make sense.” In a private workshop with Etheridge Knight—an ex-con from Mississippi and elsewhere, ashy of knee and with hands rusty enough to strike a match on—he scolded me about the pretentious pages I turned in. Way before poetry slams, he used to take us into bars or onto crowded buses to read out loud. Facing a listing drunk or a footsore commuter, you figure out pretty quick how irrelevant much of your drivel is. During this time, my much-loved old man was killing himself with drink. And the one poem Etheridge kinda liked of mine was about a suicidal dog. (The first line was “Don’t do it, Dog.”) That jokey riff was as close as I could come to the deep mourning that corroded my insides like battery acid as I drove Etheridge crazy with my evasions, spiraling around the home-based subjects haunting me. In a poem called “Invisible Man,” I actually faked both being black and knowing about scientific notions of entropy. In another called “The Double Helix,” I quacked on about genetics, a subject that I only knew existed through the similarly titled memoir by Francis Crick and James D. Watson. Then I had a lightning stroke of luck. I blindly bumbled into one of the planet’s best conversations about memoir. Age twenty-three,

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie once said I’d better keep my toes and be buried whole or I won’t be allowed into the afterlife, but I don’t believe bodies are born as wholes. We aren’t born anything but holes, throats and anuses and pores: ways of being entered and left. Here’s a lesson about light. In your language, they say life is extinguished. But that assumes our bodies are made of light, and light is always limited. We are sacks of dark, and the dark resists direction, resists capture: When I open the tin where I keep my toes, the dark doesn’t leave in a beam. Light can be measured and spent, a number printed on the backs of lightbulb boxes, but the dark has no quantity. I measure it in memories, in myths. You and I beneath the sheets, your feet feathering in my mouth, flocking out by morning. _ I’m fifteen, a daughter, all knees. First summer in Arkansas and a storm steals leaves off the trees. Arkansas looks like our island, same rain, air so thick we can spoon it into our mouths. We need names here. We try to find them in other things, in the trees, in electric fences, in cow patties coined by our feet. The summer we arrive to the farms, the chickens lay eggs the size of pearls. Everyone needs something new to blame: The rain like diarrhea, brown and sizzling. The unspiced sky, the river too arthritic to bend, the paved roads cracking like lips. The new chinks in town with their bowlegged daughters. What you know: We work first at the chicken farm, scraping shit off the walls with a pallet knife, beheading snakes with rakes. The soil’s made of snakes, so many snakes we eat snake meat for months before the church folk find out and bring us cans of luncheon loaf, boneless bricks of pink. Ma doesn’t trust meat without bones, without organs. All meat in America comes from some species of animal that doesn’t shit or speak or eat. Must be people-meat, Jie says. The snakes are smart: They wake up before the sky and tunnel down through the soil and into the coops. We spend mornings wading through shit-crusted hens, whacking off snake heads with rakes. When they strike at us, we shove the rake-pole down their throats. Their mouths are our windows and we look inside for the weather: wet. Ma says that snakes become women at night, especially if they’re white, so I fling the white ones into the trees, where they dangle like nooses. We pray to all the names multiplying inside the trees like rings, the names of everyone hanged here, everyone who paid their lives to this land so that we never have to.

• From My People (2022)

  Now, decades later, South Africa’s black president is under increasing pressure from his own people due to mounting accusations of cor ruption and failure to address the ongoing needs of the black majority, freed from apartheid but still not free from poverty. During the memorial service, former colleague and longtime friend Robert Borosage had this to say about Roger: “Few have provided greater insight into how racism has scarred this nation. Few have wrestled so fiercely with the contradiction between the nation’s ideals and its flawed reality. Few have struggled directly with that contradiction at the highest levels of government, philanthropy, and journalism.” A contradiction, hiding in plain sight until now, and coming around again. My husband, Ron, worked with Roger at the Justice Department, where Roger was the first black deputy attorney general. Ron remembered his stewardship of a case involving the police in a D.C. shooting of an unarmed black man thirty-two times. The case ended with an acquittal, citing justifiable homicide. Not long after that, a deranged black man shot and killed a policeman, and black activist Stokely Carmichael, in a pre–Black Lives Matter moment, called it “justifiable homicide.” That was all in 1969—and here we are faced with far too many of the same kind of scenarios. Moreover, even as I recalled Roger joining a lawsuit against the New York Times for discrimination against its black employees back in the 1970s, the Times is once again in the news due to a discrimination suit filed by its black employees. And now other media organizations seem to have forgotten the blame the Kerner Commission placed on mainstream media in 1968, following the explosions that lit up inner cities around the country. To wit: The riots came as a surprise because there was no one in the newsrooms of America from those communities who could have written about the simmering rage there due to lack of attention to their basic needs. Media organizations like the Times responded for a while, but now there is the rapidly changing, constricting media landscape and African American journalists are being forced to get their hats, with almost no one seeming to remember the much-heralded truisms of the almost fifty-year-old Kerner Commission report. Still another case of coming around again. Also, not long after Roger’s memorial, a few days later and thousands of miles away, in Florence, Italy, I turned on the television to see the despicable carnage in Manchester, England, and to hear commentators decry not only terrorist attacks against innocent victims in general, but something indescribably worse given that the targets were deliberately children.

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

  90 Even though nobody at this date, Khomeini included, believed that it was possible to topple the shah, events were moving faster than he had anticipated. In November 1977, his son Mustafa was assassinated in Iraq, again almost certainly by SAVAK agents, 91 and the shah forbade mourning ceremonies to be held. This only identified Khomeini even more closely with the Shii Imams, since like Husain, his son had been murdered by an unjust ruler, casting the shah yet again as Yazid. And at this critical juncture, U.S. president Jimmy Carter cast himself as the “Great Satan.” In November 1977, while Iran was mourning Mustafa Khomeini, the shah visited Washington, and Carter spoke with great emotion of the United States’ “special relationship” with Iran, “an island of stability in a turbulent corner of the world.” 92 He thus entered the unfolding Karbala drama as the shaytan, the “tempter,” who lured the shah to follow the United States to the detriment of his own people. The revolution began on January 8, 1978, when the semiofficial newspaper Ettelaat published a preposterous attack on Khomeini. 93 The next day four thousand unarmed students in Qum demanded a revival of the 1906 constitution, freedom of speech, the release of political prisoners, and the return of Khomeini. Throughout, Iranians showed that they had fully absorbed the modern ethos, demanding the independence, liberty, and constitutional rule that they had been consistently denied by the shah’s secular government and the international community. Seventy of these students were killed. With this massacre, the regime crossed a line. A pattern now emerged. Forty days after the Qum massacre, crowds gathered for the traditional mourning ceremonies for the dead, and more people were shot down. Forty days later there were more ritualized rallies in honor of the new martyrs. Marxists, secularists, and liberals who opposed the shah but knew that they had no grassroots appeal joined forces with the religiously minded revolutionaries. This was not a violent uprising, however. Cinemas, banks, and liquor stores—symbols of the “great shaytan”—were attacked, but not people. 94 By now the jails were full of political prisoners, and the mounting death toll showed the world that the shah’s secular regime, lauded in the West as progressive and peaceful, was slaughtering its own people. The revolution was experienced as a religious as well as a political event. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Everywhere is Karbala, and every day is Ashura,” convinced that they were following Husain in their struggle against oppression.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie once said I’d better keep my toes and be buried whole or I won’t be allowed into the afterlife, but I don’t believe bodies are born as wholes. We aren’t born anything but holes, throats and anuses and pores: ways of being entered and left. Here’s a lesson about light. In your language, they say life is extinguished. But that assumes our bodies are made of light, and light is always limited. We are sacks of dark, and the dark resists direction, resists capture: When I open the tin where I keep my toes, the dark doesn’t leave in a beam. Light can be measured and spent, a number printed on the backs of lightbulb boxes, but the dark has no quantity. I measure it in memories, in myths. You and I beneath the sheets, your feet feathering in my mouth, flocking out by morning. _ I’m fifteen, a daughter, all knees. First summer in Arkansas and a storm steals leaves off the trees. Arkansas looks like our island, same rain, air so thick we can spoon it into our mouths. We need names here. We try to find them in other things, in the trees, in electric fences, in cow patties coined by our feet. The summer we arrive to the farms, the chickens lay eggs the size of pearls. Everyone needs something new to blame: The rain like diarrhea, brown and sizzling. The unspiced sky, the river too arthritic to bend, the paved roads cracking like lips. The new chinks in town with their bowlegged daughters. What you know: We work first at the chicken farm, scraping shit off the walls with a pallet knife, beheading snakes with rakes. The soil’s made of snakes, so many snakes we eat snake meat for months before the church folk find out and bring us cans of luncheon loaf, boneless bricks of pink. Ma doesn’t trust meat without bones, without organs. All meat in America comes from some species of animal that doesn’t shit or speak or eat. Must be people-meat, Jie says. The snakes are smart: They wake up before the sky and tunnel down through the soil and into the coops. We spend mornings wading through shit-crusted hens, whacking off snake heads with rakes. When they strike at us, we shove the rake-pole down their throats. Their mouths are our windows and we look inside for the weather: wet. Ma says that snakes become women at night, especially if they’re white, so I fling the white ones into the trees, where they dangle like nooses. We pray to all the names multiplying inside the trees like rings, the names of everyone hanged here, everyone who paid their lives to this land so that we never have to.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I said. When you want most to be touched, Ma said. We never saw her touch Ba unless she was knocking on his head with a spoon or dressing him in the morning, calling him a ______ who couldn’t even thread his neck through a hole. I was standing on Ma’s side of the table, opposite of Ba, twisting the skin of her wrist so she’d let go of the chopsticks. Then there was a knife in the soft hinge of my elbow. Coins of blood on the table, the same color as the tablecloth, so at least I wasn’t staining anything. Ma dropped Ba’s penis, let it bounce off the lip of the table. Jie stared at my elbow, then at her own palms, not knowing which to apologize for. I felt no ache, just a presence beneath the skin like a splinter. I reached down to withdraw the knife, but Ma said: Don’t. Ma tied her quilting squares into a tourniquet, yanked it out an hour later. By then, I’d gotten used to its permanence inside me, a new bone. When she drew it out, I felt the absence more than anything, a hole where something once homed. Ma left the morning after. She’d said nothing about the penis, my sister, my arm. Dinner still on the table from the night before, flies redacting the fish from its bones. She’s gone three days before Ba notices, and even then he only asks why we’ve been eating porridge for every meal. Jie and I walk him to the bus, adjusting his hairnet before he boards, telling him to get off the bus when the road runs out of trees. On the fourth day, Jie and I forget to wash the spoons and bowls. Collars of mold strangle everything. Ba and Jie and I eat in front of the TV, scooping cold rice porridge with our hands. We look like a litter of pigs, suckling on our fingers like this. We watch Monkey King cartoons on the Chinese channel, translating the Mandarin into Ba’s first dialect, watching his mouth mime ours. Ba laughs at the sound effects, what we don’t have to translate: In this episode, the Monkey King gets buried alive under a landslide, and the little rocks rivering down the mountain sound like gunfire. Pa pa pa pa pa pa, Ba says. Then the Monkey King gets rescued by a monk who asks for a debt paid in bones, so the Monkey King castrates himself and hands the monk his penis and says, Enough? Ha ha ha ha ha ha, Ba says. When Ba is asleep, there’s only the news. That’s when we see Ma’s factory on fire. We recognize the blacked-out windows. The whole factory haloed in flame, smoke we can’t smell. There’s a close-up of ten hoses spraying the flame at different angles, each one leashed to a different little man.

• From My People (2022)

  With this history in my head and heart, my path forward includes working to ensure that the doors of my alma mater are open even wider to Black students who, along with their classmates of all colors, will embrace this stated UGA goal: “to foster the understanding of and respect for cultural differences necessary for an enlightened and educated citizenry.” We have many challenges ahead. There are times when, watching the news, I am brought to tears, not least when I see some of those I still think of as my fellow citizens, nevertheless exhibit awful behavior toward others who don’t look like them—the latest in the despicable behavior at the Capitol. It is in these moments that I wonder: Why have they not learned from history? Is it because not all of our history is being taught in many schools around the country? And why is there no embrace of respecting differences of opinion? As we make sense of these questions, history will continue to echo itself. As Georgia elected its first Black senator, Raphael Warnock, I thought back to Henry McNeal Turner, my high school’s namesake, and other Black officials freely elected to office during the brief period of Reconstruction over 150 years ago. And so as I reflect on the sixtieth anniversary of my university’s desegregation—as a Black person and a woman, as a wife and mother, as a sister, aunt, and citizen—remaining true to my calling as a journalist, I leave you with the question: what can we all do to keep working toward a more perfect union? Go Dogs! Part VIHonoring the AncestorsI was brought up to respect my elders, never for a moment thinking that one day I would be one . . . until now. And one of the inevitabilities of aging is losing friends. But I was brought up in a religious household, and while tears were often shed when a loved one or close friend passed on, I was taught not to let sorrow linger, and among the consolations were songs sung at funerals. Songs like “In the Sweet By and By,” which from an early age I learned, to wit: There’s a land that is fairer than day, And by faith we can see it afar; For the Father waits over the way To prepare us a dwelling place there. In the sweet by and by, We shall meet on that beautiful shore; In the sweet by and by, We shall meet on that beautiful shore. Later, when I moved to and began reporting from South Africa, among the many things I learned from its people early on in my seventeen years there was how they approached loss, including never using the word death . Instead, one who has passed on is referred to as having transitioned.

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

  1605–27) had to put down one rebellion after another, and Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) seems to have believed that political unity could be restored only by greater discipline within the Muslim ruling class. He therefore outlawed laxities such as wine drinking, made Muslim cooperation with their hindu subjects impossible, and engaged in the widespread destruction of their temples. These violent policies, the result of political insecurity as much as religious zeal, were reversed immediately after Aurangzeb’s death but were never forgotten. Sikhs had suffered from this imperial violence. By this time Sikhs, who had once eschewed all external symbols, had developed some of their own. The fifth guru, Arjan Dev, had made the Golden Temple at Amritsar in the Punjab a place of pilgrimage and had enshrined the Sikh scriptures there in 1604. Sikhism had always abstained from violence. Guru Nanak had said: “Take up arms that hurt no one; let your coat of mail be understanding; convert your enemies to friends.” 99 The first four gurus had had no need to bear arms. But Jahangir had tortured the fifth guru to death in 1606, and in 1675 Aurangzeb beheaded Tegh Bahadur, the ninth guru. His successor, Gobind Singh, therefore faced an entirely different world. Henceforth, the tenth guru declared, there would be no more human leaders: in the future the Sikhs’ only guru would be their scripture. In 1699 he instituted the Sikh Order of Khalsa (the “purified” or “chosen”). Like Kshatriya warriors, its members would call themselves Singh (“Lion”), carry swords, and distinguish themselves from the rest of the population by wearing soldiers’ garb and keeping their hair unshorn. Yet again, imperial violence had radicalized an originally irenic tradition and had also introduced a particularism that was entirely alien to the original Sikh vision. Gobind is believed to have written to Aurangzeb that when all else failed, it was only right to lift the sword and fight. Militancy might be necessary to defend the community—but only as a last resort. 100 The Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim communities were now in competition for British favor, resources, and political influence. Their leaders discovered that the British were more receptive to their ideas if they believed that they represented a larger group and realized that in order to prosper under colonial rule, they would have to adapt to the Western understanding of religion. So new reform movements tended to adopt contemporaneous Protestant norms in a way that distorted these traditions. Luther had tried to return to the practice of the early church, so the Arya Samaj (“Society of Aryans”), which was founded in the Punjab in 1875 by Swami Dayananda, attempted a return to Vedic orthodoxy. He also tried to create an authoritative scriptural canon, which had no precedent in India. The Arya was, therefore, an extremely reductive form of “Hinduism,” since the Vedic tradition had long been the faith of only a small elite, and very few people were able to understand ancient Sanskrit.

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

  As it was, the people were so bewildered by the secular legal system that Egypt was effectively becoming a country without law. 48 Lord Cromer, however, who regarded the social system of Islam as “politically and socially moribund,” would have none of it. 49 In the same vein, Rashid Rida (1865–1935), Abdu’s biographer, wanted to establish a college where students would be introduced to modern jurisprudence, sociology, and science at the same time as they studied Islamic law, so that it might be possible one day to modernize the Shariah without diluting it and to formulate laws based on authentic Muslim tradition instead of a foreign ideology. 50 But these reformers failed to inspire disciples who could carry their ideas forward. Far more successful was Hassan al-Banna (1906–49), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the more positive “free lances” who would step into the spiritual leadership vacuum created by the modernizers. 51 A schoolteacher who had studied modern science, Banna knew that modernization was essential but believed that because Egyptians were deeply religious, it could succeed only if accompanied by a spiritual reformation. Their own cultural traditions would serve them better than alien ideologies that they could never make fully their own. Banna and his friends had been shocked and saddened by the political and social confusion in Egypt and by the stark contrast between the luxurious homes of the British and the hovels of the Egyptian workers in the Canal Zone. One night in March 1928, six of his students begged Banna to take action, eloquently articulating the inchoate distress experienced by so many: We know not the practical way to reach the glory of Islam and to serve the welfare of the Muslims. We are weary of this life of humiliation and restriction. So we see that the Arabs and the Muslims have no status and no dignity. They are no more than mere hirelings belonging to foreigners.... We are unable to perceive the road to action as you perceive it, or to know the path to the service of the fatherland, the religion and the ummah. 52 That very night Banna created the Society of Muslim Brothers, which inaugurated a grassroots reformation of Egyptian society. The Society clearly answered an urgent need because it would become one of the most powerful players in Egyptian politics. By the time of Banna’s assassination in 1949, it had two thousand branches throughout Egypt, and the Brotherhood was the only Egyptian organization that represented every social group—civil servants, students, urban workers, and peasants.

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

  After the conquest of 1492, the monarchs inherited Granada’s large Jewish community. The fervid patriotism unleashed by the Christian triumph led to more hysterical conspiracy fears.24 Some remembered old tales of Jews helping the Muslim armies when they had arrived in Spain eight hundred years earlier and pressured the monarchs to deport all practicing Jews from Spain. After initial hesitation, on March 31, 1492, the monarchs signed the edict of expulsion, which gave Jews the choice of baptism or deportation. Most chose baptism and, as conversos, were now harassed by the Inquisition, but about eighty thousand crossed the border into Portugal, and fifty thousand took refuge in the Ottoman Empire.25 Under papal pressure. Ferdinand and Isabella now turned their attention to Spain’s Muslims. In 1499 Granada was split into Christian and Muslim zones, Muslims were required to convert, and by 1501 Granada was officially a kingdom of “New Christians.” But the Muslim converts (Moriscos) were given no instruction in their new faith, and everybody knew that they continued to live, pray, and fast according to the laws of Islam. Indeed, a mufti in Oran in North Africa issued a fatwa permitting Spanish Muslims to conform outwardly to Christianity, and most Spaniards turned a blind eye to Muslim observance. A practical convivencia had been restored. The first twenty years of the Spanish Inquisition were undoubtedly the most violent in its long history. There is no reliable documentation of the actual numbers of people killed. Historians once believed that about thirteen thousand conversos were burned during this early period.26 More recent estimates suggest, however, that most of those who came forward were never brought to trial; that in most cases the death penalty was pronounced in absentia over conversos who had fled and were symbolically burned in effigy; and that from 1480 to 1530 only between 1,500 and 2,000 people were actually executed.27 Nevertheless, this was a tragic and shocking development that broke with centuries of peaceful coexistence. The experience was devastating for the conversos and proved lamentably counterproductive. Many conversos who had been faithful Catholics when they were detained were so disgusted by their treatment that they reverted to Judaism and became the “secret Jews” that the Inquisition had set out to eliminate.28 Spain was not a modern centralized state, but in the late fifteenth century it was the most powerful kingdom in the world. Besides its colonial possessions in the Americas, Spain had holdings in the Netherlands, and the monarchs had married their children to the heirs of Portugal, England, and the Austrian Habsburg dynasty. To counter the ambitions of its archrival France, Ferdinand had campaigned in Italy against France and Venice and seized control of Upper Navarre and Naples. Spain was, therefore, feared and resented, and exaggerated tales of the Inquisition spread through the rest of Europe, which was itself in the violent throes of a major transformation.

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

  The Saudis’ experience of modernity had been very different from that of the Egyptians, Pakistanis, or Palestinians. The Arabian Peninsula had not been colonized; it was rich and had never been forced to secularize. Instead of fighting tyranny and corruption at home, therefore, Saudi Islamists focused on the suffering of Muslims worldwide, their pan-Islamism close in spirit to Azzam’s global jihad. The Quran told Muslims that they must take responsibility for one another; King Feisal had always framed his support for the Palestinians in these terms, and the Saudi-based Muslim World League and the Organization of Islamic Conferences had regularly expressed solidarity with member states in conflict with non-Muslim regimes. Now television brought images of Muslim suffering in Palestine and Lebanon into comfortable Saudi homes. They saw pictures of Israelis bulldozing Palestinian houses and in September 1982 witnessed the Christian Maronites’ massacre, with the tacit approval of the IDF, of two thousand Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila. With so much suffering of this kind in the Muslim world, pan-Islamist sentiment increased during the 1980s, and the government exploited it as a way of distracting their subjects from the kingdom’s internal problems.18 It was for this reason too that the Saudis encouraged the young to go to the Afghan jihad, offering airfare discounts, while the state press celebrated their feats on the frontier. The Wahhabi clerical establishment, however, disapproved of the Afghans’ Sufi practices and insisted that jihad was not an individual duty for civilians but was still the ruler’s responsibility. Yet the Saudi king’s civil government supported Azzam’s teaching for its own temporal reasons. A study of Saudis who volunteered for Afghanistan and later fought in Bosnia and Chechnya shows that most were chiefly motivated by the desire to help their Muslim brothers and sisters.19 Nasir al-Bahri, who would become Bin Laden’s bodyguard, gave the fullest and most perceptive explanation of this concern: We were greatly affected by the tragedies we were witnessing and the events we were seeing: children crying, women widowed, and the high number of incidents of rape. When we went forward for jihad, we experienced a bitter reality. We saw things that were more awful than anything we had expected or had heard or seen in the media. It was as though we were like “a cat with closed eyes” that opened its eyes at these woes.20

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Detroiter Ingrid LaFleur is the founder of Maison LaFleur and Afrotopia. Fashionista, artist, and most likely to make bank on bitcoin, she ran for mayor of Detroit in 2017 as an Afrofuturist candidate. amb. What do you like people to know about your pleasure activism? Ingrid. Fashion has definitely helped to define my pleasure activism. When my father passed away over a year ago I felt a grief I’ve never had before. After two months of being in a catatonic state, I began craving laughter and joy. I decided to wear the one thing that gives visual pleasure instantly no matter who is wearing it, sequins. I wore sequins every single day for about a month. Although my energy was low, my sequin jackets would make someone giggle, and then they would send me that good energy, which would soothe my wounds. It was, and still is, the best healing therapy I’ve experimented with. I continue to wear sequined jackets, now paired with heart-shaped red glasses, in hopes to generate more love and joy in my life and others. amb. What is your pleasure philosophy? Ingrid. I believe every moment of every day should be a pleasurable experience. If it is not, then it is time to question what is happening and why you decided to endure it. I also believe pleasure generated through our own power should resonate as far into the future as possible. If I eat something that tastes super-delicious but makes me sluggish and tired and sends me into a spiral of body shaming, then that was not a pleasurable experience, no matter how juicy and delicious it was. However, if I eat something fresh, clean, and healthy for my body then I will feel empowered and energetic simply because I have exhibited my love for self. Ultimately, love for the self is the deepest pleasure we deny ourselves. I work daily to be courageous enough to indulge in the purest pleasure of self-love. amb. How does Detroit inform and benefit from your approach to pleasure? Ingrid. Detroit taught me about pleasures derived from participating in and supporting innovative ancestrally rooted loving communities. This is a soul-satisfying pleasure that is aligned with my values without compromise. The more compromise, the less soul-satisfying. It’s tricky because addictions can blind us to this truth. amb. What are your actual daily practices of pleasure? Ingrid. I would love to create more rituals of pleasure. At the moment, because of my nomadic life, I have pleasure goals I try to maintain to help me keep clarity and that are necessary no matter where I am living—daily meditation for twenty minutes, keeping a clean kitchen (food is medicine), making the bed, and drinking a fresh green juice at the beginning of each day. Also, accomplishing work goals set for the day brings pure joy and gives me permission to play. amb. Time-travel for me: what is the most pleasurable possible future you can imagine?

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Aishah Simmons is a warrior saving her own life and bringing us all along. Aishah shares her story to break silences and make pathways to healing for multitudes. The living and the not-yet-living. The already gone ancestors who are still healing through us. And what gives Aishah’s survival story so much power, or what gives Aishah so much power in relationship to her story, is that she takes the rigorous time to take a step back from her story, months of silence in order to distinguish between chosen and imposed silences, between defensive and strategic storytelling. For Toni Cade Bambara, Aishah Shahidah Simmons is a devoted initiate. A practitioner of the intervening life-saving practice of storytelling in film and journalism that Bambara taught with her life and courses at the Scribe Video Center in Aishah’s Philadelphia home. Aishah’s consistent acts of radical storytelling in multiple mediums not only honor Bambara’s truthteller legacy, they also honor the communities Bambara loved and the characters in her own stories. For Aishah, Toni Cade Bambara was and is infinite possibility. She was the teacher that gave Aishah permission to explore the depth of herself in her early short films (including Breaking Silence, an engagement with Audre Lorde’s work that was also an important part of Aishah’s coming out process as a person and an artist). She was the mentor that allowed Aishah to learn to mother herself. For me, Aishah is a cherished sister-comrade. But before that, she had already saved my life. When Aishah brought her film-in-process NO! The Rape Documentary to my school in 2002, I was working at the rape-crisis center and also working very hard to survive my own silence about being sexually assaulted at my school. Aishah’s film, and the voices of the women organizers, scholars, poets, artists, and dancers who spoke through the film, allowed me to hear what I was not yet ready to say to myself. That I had survived. That the violence I experienced was real. That the silence I was experiencing even at that moment was a silence that other people had moved through. That though I was there at the intersection of multiple harms, shocked and bruised, I was not alone. When Aishah decided to lend her finished world-renowned film NO! as a primary awareness-raising tool to UBUNTU, a women of color/survivor-led coalition to end sexual violence that I co-founded in Durham, North Carolina, in the wake of the Duke lacrosse rape scandal, authorizing multiple targeted screenings in our community, she became a sister. (In fact, I remember that one of our first one-on-one conversations in the back of someone’s car on the way to an event was about how brilliant Farah Griffin is.) And it was Aishah who taught me what Toni Cade Bambara taught her: that “sister” is a verb.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  And as Farah Griffin reads and rereads, teaches and writes about and is taught by Toni Cade Bambara’s work and her focus, in her short fiction on the perspective of Black girl-children, she also protects and celebrates her girl-child self. The self that state violence failed to take away. The person she was when she could still ask her father for a simple gift, a beautiful book. When she could still give her father a poem recitation and watch him smile and know he was proud, in a different way than she still now knows he is proud. Farah, through her following of Toni Cade Bambara, through her Instagram postings of dancing children and laughing babies, through her conferences that feature Black girls jumping double-dutch at art openings in Harlem, offers a model of protecting the Black girls that are ourselves, at any age. After everything that would attempt to take the joy and possibility we represent away from us. And I think about this now, after the loss of my own father, who was a casualty of state policy in a different way. My father too could still be alive if not for the predictable racism of the medical-industrial complex and the systems that have left so many people without access to health insurance for decades. At this moment when my spirit feels fractured. When I am quiet I can hear myself at different ages calling out to my father, demanding his presence, refusing his absence. And I think about all the mortal knowing, the defining “afters” that shape the lives of Black girls and women. I think of the divided histories in my body. The increased difficulty of my idealism and pluck after abuse, after sexual assault, after witnessing the preventable deaths of Black people over and over again. After my father. And I think about Farah and how she smiles, not a forced smile of polite survival but a sincere smile of joy in the moment. How she listens to jazz music in a way that allows her to find new parts of herself to grow into. How she keeps an image of a Black girl above her desk. How as a teacher, and therefore perpetual student, she honors the part of each of us that is learning, that is young and possible, that is braver than it makes sense to be, incongruently joyful in a world that targets us. The part of each of us that could embody a poem, draw out a smile, be held. You know. The gift. Sister Is a Verb for Aishah Shahidah Simmons

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ama’s tongue was its own language, a language that didn’t need to be taught to it. When the riverwoman came in her mouth, Ama didn’t rinse it for days, kept tonguing the salt between her teeth. The riverwoman flipped onto her stomach and the mud opened around her, her limbs waning back into her body. Red scales rushed up her belly like a flame and she slid forward through silt, belly-flopping back into the river. Back home, Ama undressed and scrubbed the mud from her dress, but it had ground itself too deep into the weave and become inseparable from the fabric. She shook it out, went outside to dry it anyway, and saw something clinging to its hem. A scale the size of her toenail. Ama placed the scale on her tongue and sucked on it all day until it blurred away. When her belly rose as rapidly as bread, she knew this would be her last daughter. Ama thought of the riverwoman whose belly never left the ground, the way her hips gave into honey. The scale Ama swallowed: It must have doubled itself inside her, daughtering. This daughter was only hers. Hers and the river’s. Hers and the dead’s. This daughter—my mother—was the one Ama would see as her second body, a liability. Months later, when Ama tossed all her daughters off the bridge and into the river red, she would watch the snakes warring over their meat. She was waiting for the riverwoman to bring her daughters out of the water, her tongue hooking their mouths, dragging them back to the surface. While Ama was dropping her daughters into the river, trying to skip the last baby like a stone, she thought of water as the best of all mothers. Water had none of its own wants: It served only the thirst of others. Ama knew being needed was a kind of divinity, and she was tired of being that good, that god. When she dropped my mother into the river last, Ama thought: I am returning her to the river that will raise her better, raise her like a flood I will run from. _ In her house there was only her. When we’d pulled away, I’d looked through the back windshield, holding Agong’s head in my lap like a fruit I couldn’t figure out how to fit in my mouth. Ama watched me from the dark of her doorway, her knees blurring into each other. Her mouth was pitted from her face, a hole where she once had a name.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ba says the birds will tell him where he buried it all. Ma throws a flowerpot at his head (seeds via the church wives). Ba dances the shovel too deep and hits water. Except it isn’t water, it’s a sewage line, and the landlord tells us to pay for the damage. The rest of the month, we wade the river of everyone’s shit, still convinced Ba can remember, still convinced memory is contagious. If we stand close enough to him, we’ll catch what he lost. The gold was what Ba brought from the mainland to the island. That’s how soldiers bribed the sea that wanted to steal their bodies. He paid his passage with one gold bar the width of his pinky and swallowed the rest, the gold bleached silver by the acidity of his belly. In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST . That’s why she thinks we’re compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust. After twenty years of gambling on the island, Ba lost all the gold and tried to win it back and back and back again. When they met, Ma already had three children and one dead husband who returned weekly in the form of milk-bright rain. The local men said she was ruined from the waist down but still eligible from the waist up. She wore a heavy skirt that tarped her like a nun. Ma donated her three daughters to her parents and birthed two new ones with Ba. I’m the second of the new ones. We’re the two she kept, brought here, and beat. When Ma married him, he was twenty years older. Take the number of years you’ve lived outside of my body and plant them like seeds, growing twice as many: that’s the thicket of years between your grandmother and grandfather. Except Ma doesn’t measure her life in years but in languages: Tayal and Yilan Creole in the indigo fields where she was born blue-assed and fish-eyed, Japanese during the war, Mandarin in the Nationalist-eaten city. Each language was worn outside her body, clasped around her throat like a collar. Once, Ba asked her to teach him to write the Tayal alphabet she learned from the missionaries. But she said his hands were not meant to write: They were welded for war, good only for gripping guns and his own dick. Jie thought this was funny, but I didn’t laugh. I have those hands. When you were born, I saw too much of your grandfather in you: rhyming hairlines and fish-hook fingers, the kind that snag on my hair, my shadow, the sky.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I said that wasn’t true anymore. She stood up and tugged her own ear, checking to see if we were dream-speaking. Steaming her hands over the bowl of water, she said, You’re not listening. The steam opened her fists like flowers. The story about the women, she said, was a story about choice. How we had one. How we chose to be dead in our own bodies than alive without our language. I chose you, my mother said, but it was like a channel had changed too quickly, one image unable to fade while the other overlapped it, contaminating all the colors, one story told as two. I was still thinking of the women who harnessed gravity with their hair, braids knotted to branches. The braids must still be there, still growing after the bodies were cut down. Braids vining down to the ground, growing so long they became some species of snake that strangles its prey. When I asked what she meant by choosing, my mother said, This family. I started it to save me. I asked her why she couldn’t go back for Agong. Just for him, I said. No one else. She still called daily to ask if Agong was wearing pants, even when Ama didn’t pick up. I knew she wanted to dress him herself, to fill her clothes with his body. I got out, my mother said, as if a family were a fire. I chose your father over my father. My father, who was not here. My father, who once bought me a popsicle at a zoo while I watched a monkey try to eat a broken bottle someone had hurtled into the enclosure. I wanted to say she’d made the wrong choice, but that would mean reversing my own body, returning to water inside her. My mother opened the window above the sink. She was trying not to look at me, but her shadow acted as her opposite, circling me on the floor. Do you know what it means to leave something? she said. The air outside was too bright to breathe, dyed by with moon. To give birth to yourself again and again? To lock yourself out of your life? I said we could knock. We could knock on Ama’s door, and ask her to give up Agong. I’d keep my hand over my tail as we walked in, ready to draw it like a hilt. Reaching up, I touched my fingers to her cheek, but she shook them off like flies. I walked around her and shut the window above the sink, relieving the window of its duty to breathe. Ma, I said, and she shook her head, said that was what she called her mother and I should never let that sound out of my mouth. Let’s go now, I said, whispering as if Ama could hear us from another city.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  We wanted one more day of missing her. We wanted it back, our grief—we wanted it real—but grief was just another thing we lost, another thing she took from us. _ Sometimes I thank shangdi you won’t ever leave home for a man. You can leave me for anyone but a man. Jie gets married two weeks after her graduation. The boy is nineteen and Cantonese and works as an auto mechanic at his father’s garage, which is where they first meet. Jie is a serial roadkiller, collecting smashed pigeons on her windshield, daily scraping the dogs and raccoons and squirrels off the fender. When I’m riding with her, that’s how I calculate our speed: in miles per dead thing. Jie finally decides that something must be wrong with the car. Maybe it’s some kind of animal magnet. Maybe she needs new brakes. So she drives it down to the garage, and the boy is there with a wrench, looking at her in the reflection of his greased hands. Jie gets married on a Saturday. She stole a bolt of sateen from her second factory job and I sewed her dress from it: It was sheer as rain, the kind of blue that looked green in indoor light, a border color. The morning of her wedding, Ma and Ba and I walk to the Baptist church and sit on the ass-dented pews and wait for the priest to speak. It’s morning and the boy’s family is also there, his three little sisters identically dressed in red sweaters and jean skirts. The sisters all stole a different part of their mother’s face: The youngest one took the flat eyebrows, the middle one got the mouth, the third one’s hair is already silver. The father is there too, in his mechanic uniform with a wrench in one hand, like he’s waiting for something to use it on. Ma refuses to meet them, so we sit on opposite sides of the church and don’t look for too long. Ma says, Don’t marry a man with more oil in his hands than blood. Ba’s hands are so greasy from the restaurant, he can’t work open our doorknob. Jie says that engine oil is different from food oil, and it doesn’t matter anyway because the boy is smart and going to college, and his oldest brother is a surgeon who once saved a girl with a hook-shaped heart. Jie gets married in a month without rain. From the kitchen, Ma says it’s an omen, says something about no children, but Jie says she doesn’t want kids anyway. At night, kneeling in the bathroom, she once tried to insert rat poison into herself, but she got it up the wrong hole.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Smoke ghouling up from the ground. Finally, my mother reached forward and took the match from Ama’s hand, striking it alive on her own callused palm. She lit the rabbit’s newspaper-shroud and I lowered its body into the sink, basketing the light in my hands. Even after we were gone, the rabbit-fetus burned. We searched for its bones in the sky, mourning that our agong was now moonless. _ In the car, I asked my mother if Agong was really her father. In Ama’s last letter, she’d written that my mother was conceived with the river, and Agong didn’t look like a river to me, except when he wet himself, his piss souring the seat, dribbling out of his bladder like the juice of a squeezed fruit. Instead of answering, my mother lowered the window and tossed out her cigarette butts. They dotted the street like acne. She laughed and asked me to define a father. I said it was someone who didn’t have the strength to carry his own name and had to employ others to do it. She laughed again, but this laughter sounded like a recording of the last, too repetitive to be real. I wedged Agong’s head between my knees, stroked the blank spot on his forehead where his eyebrows drifted in opposite directions, where he most resembled my mother: When she slept, the skin between her eyes pleated in two places, and she always told me to stay up by her bedside and iron it down with my fingers so she wouldn’t wake in the morning with wrinkles. But I always fell asleep beside her, and in the morning she asked if she’d aged. Yes, I said, you’re as wrinkled-up as an asshole, and then she’d laugh and roll me off the bed, saying that one day I’d have this face too. When my mother asked if I was begging for another story, I breathed steam onto the backseat window, wrote the word yes on the forehead of night. Turning onto the highway, steering with one hand only, she said the problem with memory was that I turned all of hers into currency, bought my future with forgetting. Keep your memories, then, I said. Give me someone else’s. _ An Abbreviated History of the River and Her Lesbian Lover (My Great-Grandmother Nawi) A NOTE OF CAUTION: All references to water may be slightly exaggerated, but when your agong is pissing all over the backseat, every river feels literal. A SECOND, AND MUCH BROADER, NOTE OF CAUTION: My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you’re in. What you believe will depend on the color of your hair, your word for god, how many times you’ve been born, your zip code, whether you have health insurance, what your first language is, and how many snakes you have known personally.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Before Dayi left, my mother said she was glad: Dayi’s useless. She’s practically a piece of furniture. Furniture is extremely useful, I said. Still, I wondered if one day Dayi’s legs would seam together, her skin leathering, her spine reclined like the sofa. Dayi always joked that she was becoming a goose herself, nested on our cushions, crumb-fed. When I asked if feeding her like a goose meant she’d never fly home again, she said this was already home. Here, where my mother replaced all the salt in her dishes with sugar, cooking everything so sweet we spat it back into our bowls when she wasn’t looking. Ants infested the kitchen. Dayi and I loved when the ants came. We used pieces of Scotch tape to pick them up in clots. We perforated their lines and counted the seconds it took for more ants to pour into the gaps we’d made. We liked to kill them one at a time, watching an entire lineage of ants walk over their dead, no one bothering to pick up the body or bring it home. We kept waiting for the queen to show, but we knew it was winged, somewhere above our heads and unkillable, her appetite an entire army. _ For a month after she left, my mother wouldn’t throw out the uneaten jars of baby food we had bought her, all the red flavors: beet and apple, mixed berry, rhubarb. When she died, we sent paper lotuses to be incinerated along with her body: My mother folded each palm-sized petal at the dinner table. At Dayi’s cremation on the island, my aunts lifted bone fragments from a tray with chopsticks and touched them to the light, discovering that Dayi’s bones were filled with red crystal. They broke all her bones open like geodes. Even her heart was candied bright as an apple. They sent my mother a bone splinter in the mail. It shot out of the padded envelope and bounced twice on our dining table, brazen as a blade. It was the length of my forefinger, blunt on one end and forked on the other. In my fist, the bone harmonized with my heat. Sang me to my knees. My mother said we should sheathe it in a sandwich bag and pulverize it, but in the end she kept it, filling a vase with beef blood and planting the bone upright, watering it every day to grow back Dayi. GRANDMOTHER Letter II: In which the clouds are eaten Dear second daughter, When you were born you laughed instead of crying.