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

  In human society too, the emperor Justinian (r. 527–65) believed, there should be a symphonia of church and state, a harmony and concord based on the incarnation of the Logos in the man Jesus. 105 Just as the two natures—human and divine—were found in a single person, there could be no separation of church and empire; together they formed the Kingdom of God, which would soon spread to the entire world. But there was, of course, a massive difference between Jesus’s kingdom and the Byzantine state. As the barbarians crept ever closer to the walls of Constantinople, Justinian became even more zealous to restore the divine unity by vigorously enforcing the supremacy of “the emperor’s church.” His attempts to suppress the Monophysite party permanently alienated the people of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. He declared that Judaism was no longer religio licita: Jews were now debarred from public office, and the use of Hebrew was prohibited in the synagogue. In 528 Justinian gave all pagans three months to be baptized, and the following year he closed the Academy in Athens that had been founded by Plato. In every province from Morocco to the Euphrates, he commissioned churches, built after the style of Constantinople, to symbolize the unity of the empire. Instead of providing a challenging alternative to imperial violence, the tradition that had begun in part as a protest against the systemic oppression of empire had become the tool of Rome’s aggressive coercion. In 540 Khosrow I of Persia began to transform his ailing kingdom into the economic giant of the region in a reform based on a classic definition of the agrarian state: The monarchy depends on the army, the army on money; money comes from the land tax; the land tax comes from agriculture. Agriculture depends on justice; justice on the integrity of officials, and integrity and reliability on the ever-watchfulness of the king. 106 Khosrow devised a more efficient method of tax collection and invested heavily in the irrigation of Mesopotamia, which previous Persian kings had neglected. With the proceeds he was able to create a professional army to replace the traditional aristocratic levies. War with Christian Rome was now inevitable, since both powers aspired to dominate the region. Khosrow employed Arab tribesmen to police his southern border, and the Byzantines reciprocated by hiring the Banu Ghassan, even though they had converted to Monophysite Christianity, to patrol the frontier from their winter camp near Damascus.

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

  "When I first received the intelligence of the death of Claude and of your son Louis, I was so utterly overpowered (tout esperdu et confus en mon esprit) that for many days I was fit for nothing but to weep; and although I was somehow upheld before the Lord by those aids wherewith He sustains our souls in affliction, yet among men I was almost a nonentity; so far at least as regards my discharge of duty, I appeared to myself quite as unfit for it as if I had been half dead (un homme demi-mort). On the one hand, I was sadly grieved that a most excellent and faithful friend [Claude Féray] had been snatched away from me—a friend with whom I was so familiar, that none could be more closely united than we were; on the other hand, there arose another cause of grief, when I saw the young man, your son, taken away in the very flower of his age, a youth of most excellent promise, whom I loved as a son, because, on his part, he showed that respectful affection toward me as he would to another father. "To this grievous sorrow was still added the heavy and distressing anxiety we experienced about those whom the Lord had spared to us. I heard that the whole household were scattered here and there. The danger of Malherbe601 caused me very great misery, as well as the cause of it, and warned me also as to the rest. I considered that it could not be otherwise but that my wife must be very much dismayed. Your Charles,602 I assure you, was continually recurring to my thoughts; for in proportion as he was endowed with that goodness of disposition which had always appeared in him towards his brother as well as his preceptor, it never occurred to me to doubt but that he would be steeped in sorrow and soaked in tears. One single consideration somewhat relieved me, that he had my brother along with him, who, I hoped, would prove no small comfort in this calamity; even that, however, I could not reckon upon, when at the same time I recollected that both were in jeopardy, and neither of them were yet beyond the reach of danger. Thus, until the letter arrived which informed me that Malherbe was out of danger, and that Charles and my brother, together with my wife and the others, were safe,603 I would have been all but utterly cast down, unless, as I have already mentioned, my heart was refreshed in prayer and private meditations, which are suggested by His Word ....

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  We returned to the change-room for our coats: its jets were all flaring now, and there were white-faced women in it with handkerchiefs before their eyes. Then we stepped to the stage door, and waited while the doorman found a cab for us. This seemed to take an age. It was two o‘clock or later before we started on our journey home; and then we sat, on different seats, in silence - Kitty repeating only, now and then: ‘Poor Gully! What a thing to do!’, and I still drunk, still dazed, still desperately stirred, but still uncertain.It was a bitterly cold and beautiful night - perfectly quiet, once we had left the clamour of the party behind us, and still. The roads were foggy, and thick with ice: every so often I felt the wheels of our carriage slide a little, and caught the sound of the horse’s slithering, uncertain step, and the driver’s gentle curses. Beside us the pavements glittered with frost, and each street-lamp glowed, in the fog, from the centre of its own yellow nimbus. For long stretches, ours was the only vehicle on the streets at all; the horse, the driver, Kitty and I might have been the only wakeful creatures in a city of stone and ice and slumber.At length we reached Lambeth Bridge, where Kitty and I had stood only a few weeks before and gazed at the pleasure-boats below. Now, with our faces pressed to the carriage window, we saw it all transformed - saw the lights of the Embankment, a belt of amber beads dissolving into the night; and the great dark jagged bulk of the Houses of Parliament looming over the river; and the Thames itself, its boats all moored and silent, its water grey and sluggish and thick, and rather strange.It was this last which made Kitty pull the window down, and call to the driver, in a high, excited voice, to stop. Then she pushed the carriage door open, pulled me to the iron parapet of the bridge, and seized my hand.‘Look,’ she said. Her grief seemed all forgotten. Below us, in the water, there were great slivers of ice six feet across, drifting and gently turning in the winding currents, like basking seals.The Thames was freezing over.I looked from the river to Kitty, and from Kitty to the bridge on which we stood.

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

  A month. That’s how long we would have together, the five of us in my grandparents’ living room most evenings, during the day on drives around the island or on short walks past the private landmarks of a family: the lot where my father’s apartment had once stood; the remodeled hospital where I had been born; my grandparents’ first house in Hawaii, before the one on University Avenue, a house I had never known. There was so much to tell in that single month, so much explaining to do; and yet when I reach back into my memory for the words of my father, the small interactions or conversations we might have had, they seem irretrievably lost. Perhaps they’re imprinted too deeply, his voice the seed of all sorts of tangled arguments that I carry on with myself, as impenetrable now as the pattern of my genes, so that all I can perceive is the worn-out shell. My wife offers a simpler explanation—that boys and their fathers don’t always have much to say to each other unless and until they trust—and this may come closer to the mark, for I often felt mute before him, and he never pushed me to speak. I’m left with mostly images that appear and die off in my mind like distant sounds: his head thrown back in laughter at one of Gramps’s jokes as my mother and I hang Christmas ornaments; his grip on my shoulder as he introduces me to one of his old friends from college; the narrowing of his eyes, the stroking of his sparse goatee, as he reads his important books. Images, and his effect on other people. For whenever he spoke—his one leg draped over the other, his large hands outstretched to direct or deflect attention, his voice deep and sure, cajoling and laughing—I would see a sudden change take place in the family. Gramps became more vigorous and thoughtful, my mother more bashful; even Toot, smoked out of the foxhole of her bedroom, would start sparring with him about politics or finance, stabbing the air with her blue-veined hands to make a point. It was as if his presence had summoned the spirit of earlier times and allowed each of them to reprise his or her old role; as if Dr. King had never been shot, and the Kennedys continued to beckon the nation, and war and riot and famine were nothing more than temporary setbacks, and there was nothing to fear but fear itself.

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

  He wasn’t sure, he said, how much longer his church would continue to serve that function. Most of his better-off members had moved away to tidier neighborhoods, suburban life. They still drove back every Sunday, out of loyalty or habit. But the nature of their involvement had changed. They hesitated to volunteer for anything—a tutoring program, a home visitation—that might keep them in the city after dark. They wanted more security around the church, a fenced-in parking lot to protect their cars. Reverend Philips expected that once he passed on, many of those members would stop coming back. They would start new churches, tidy like their new streets. He feared that the link to the past would be finally broken, that the children would no longer retain the memory of that first circle, around a fire …. His voice began to trail off; I felt he was getting tired. I asked him for introductions to other pastors who might be interested in organizing, and he mentioned a few names—there was a dynamic young pastor, he said, a Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, who might be worth talking to; his message seemed to appeal to young people like me. Reverend Philips gave me his number, and as I got up to leave, I said, “If we could bring just fifty churches together, we might be able to reverse some of the trends you’ve been talking about.” Reverend Philips nodded and said, “You may be right, Mr. Obama. You have some interesting ideas. But you see, the churches around here are used to doing things their own way. Sometimes, the congregations even more than the pastors.” He opened the door for me, then paused. “By the way, what church do you belong to?” “I … I attend different services.” “But you’re not a member anywhere?” “Still searching, I guess.” “Well, I can understand that. It might help your mission if you had a church home, though. It doesn’t matter where, really. What you’re asking from pastors requires us to set aside some of our more priestly concerns in favor of prophecy. That requires a good deal of faith on our part. It makes us want to know just where you’re getting yours from. Faith, that is.”

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  Even though I keep the memories that happened there, it’s haunting to know that the place where they all took place is no longer here. So, when Sam told me this news about their home, I had a sickening sense of how shocked they felt. It was a death of its own kind. Whenever a tragedy like this occurs is usually when people come in with some toxic positivity phrases. “At least no one died,” or “They’re just things— things can be replaced.” Sure, that’s all true. But it’s traumatic to have your home, your potential safe haven that you’ve known and loved for years, torn away in a matter of hours. It’s a pretty awful feeling to drive through your neighborhood and not know whether your house will still be standing. I certainly wasn’t going to minimize Sam’s pain. It was an irreplaceable landmark of their life that disintegrated all in one night. When tragedies like this happen, I have a name for it: evil popcorn. It’s when, for no rhyme or reason, some are saved and some are not. It’s this evil popcorn that keeps us up at night—we never know when that kernel might pop. It’s enough to send us into a panic if we let ourselves. Sam got hit with evil popcorn when their home burned down. Maybe you’ve been hit with it yourself. Sometimes it’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time and our worst-case scenario happens. Other times, we know that the pain will be inevitable. Sometimes you see the pop coming and sometimes you don’t. It burns your tongue all the same. The pain can be inevitable; it can be unpredictable. What do we do with that? This book has so far been about learning to ride through the toughest of waves, but, hell, sometimes the wave is just too big for us. Sometimes it breaks us. That’s what this chapter is for—when life feels snapped in half. When we’ve been bitten by the shark and it feels like we’ve lost our leg (or maybe we actually have), how do we heal? Here’s where to start: get out of your water. Stop forcing yourself to swim. I love Dory from Finding Nemo, but she was wrong this time around. Don’t “just keep swimming.” No—you need to take a break. I’m amazed at how many clients (and non-clients who feel like they don’t need therapy) force themselves to keep working into oblivion so that they don’t have to sit with the reality of their pain. When anxiety is in the mix, it can feel practically impossible to slow down and make room for our sadness. We’ll do anything to avoid looking at our grief. But surprise: no matter how fast or long you try to swim away from your heartache, it’s still there, waiting for you. You may as well acknowledge its presence before it makes you. So give yourself grace and step out.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  You define a daughter as something done to you at night without your permission I dream Agong in the window a face I forage for resemblance the only thing we share is sorry you say there’s no such thing as death only debt only deferring the next life I once thought you’d given birth to me directly skipped my mother entirely you conceived me by screaming into a peach eating around its seed planting it inside your shit watering it into me a story like all stories treeing out of you all stories are about ownership I’m mistaken: you aren’t the tiger spirit you’re the woman it wears you tell me choices are made by men militaries language is not what’s said but what’s silenced Agong told me today I could become anything by mimicking it he lay down in the middle of every road said now I’m every way home I pen his mouth here by punching the page Agong kneels in the yard digs a birdbath where I rinse my hands you say a mouth is all I wanted for you my name goes nude maiden name meaning what survives is what I choose to remember _ After I feed the letters back, Ben and I stand over the holes as they breathe. The moon a bared tooth. We ask our mothers if we can sleep out in the yard tonight, and when they both say no, we do it anyway, build a tent out of blankets and brooms. My mother watches us out the window for an hour, then comes out with a quilt to use as our roof, the one with Ama’s denim river sutured down its center. She brings the border to her nose and breathes all the blue out of the fabric. Then she hooks the blanket over our broomsticks, hanging it above us, and the river is resurrected as our sky. Ben and I fall asleep paired like quotation marks, my mother between us, my mother the thing we speak. I couch my head on my mother’s belly and listen to her bowels fill with wing-beats. She perches her fingers in my hair and names each strand with her hands, singing a song that Agong learned from the crows, a song about camphor trees that grow to be girls.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  It was dark in the stairway, like turning the night back on, but we all followed after him. We scattered on the square rooftop, big as a parking lot, where wet lines of laundry hung heavy and dank as meat. Someone had burned something recently and the air was full of gossiping smoke. There was a chicken coop in the center of the roof, made of plywood and plastic wrap, and the two hens inside looked dead. My brother was standing at the edge, where the rooftop ended. Where the railing buckled its shadow around his waist. I was the one who got the closest. My thumb snagged the belt loop at the back of my brother’s jeans, but he had already climbed over the railing, the rust sloughing off on his hands. I came close enough to see that. He didn’t jump so much as sprint past the sky. He didn’t fall through the air so much as become it. Then my father was behind me, lifting me by my hair, saying Come back from there, come back. I didn’t know if he was talking to my brother or me. My mother had not moved since we got to the roof. She was a statue of salt, solidified by my eyes, but I saw she was speaking something, willing his wings. The building was at least a hundred stories, and when we first saw it from the window of the taxi, my brother said, It’s like a big boner. A big boner in the sky. I told him to shut up, it was not, it was beautiful, with rows and rows of windows opening like eyes. Wouldn’t you want to live somewhere like that, I asked him. The whole world in your window. My brother said, No, I’ll never live where he lives. Now the building was not tall enough. I needed it to never end, for the ground to be as far back as history. My mother, the one who watched, would tell the story better: She would say my father loved kites so much he became one, that my brother borrowed new bones. We both watched my father follow my brother as if tethered, yanked along, tied ankle-to-ankle by a kite-string. I grabbed at his ankle, but the weight of his want was too much for me. When my brother was halfway down and my father a breath above him, their bodies began to rise. They plateaued in the air, horizontal like kites, and flapped in the wind before riding it upward and out, blade-arcing through the air. My brother breached a cloud, rising up past the roof where my mother and I stood, our hands on the railing, our mouths round as sirens.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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. Jie says the hoses look like alien penises. While she laughs, I watch the stretchers, scuttling in and out of the building like beetles. I wait for Jie to tell me. To tell me Ma must be inside there. To say Ma is ash. Or she can’t be, she is in our old house stroking a picture of our three sisters, she is on her knees in the next room praying, she is in the kitchen scraping away the mold that is our fault, she is undressing Ba in the bath and oiling his back. The reporter on-scene speaks too fast to understand. We scan the screen for a body count, but there is only the day’s temperature in the left corner. Jie shuts off the TV and we watch the last ghost-strand of static wriggle in the center of the black screen, then flatline.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  And to Maxine Hong Kingston, Jessica Hagedorn, Toni Morrison, Dorothy Allison, Larissa Lai, Helen Oyeyemi, and so many more. Thank you to my Agong. You deserve everything. Thank you for your smile and the way you held your hands behind your back. I miss the paper pinwheels and the garden with the tree and the chili bushes. Wherever you are, I hope your pigeons are with you and that they’ve finally made it home. ABOUT THE AUTHOR K-MING CHANG was born in the Year of the Tiger. She is a Kundiman Fellow. Her poems have been anthologized in Ink Knows No Borders, Best New Poets 2018, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, the 2019 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. Raised in California, she now lives in New York. Bestiary is her first novel. kmingchang.com Twitter: @k_mingchang What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had cast off all my friends and joys, and embraced misery as my career. For a week - and then another - and another, and another - I did nothing but slumber, and weep, and pace my chamber; or else I would stand with my brow pressed to the dirty window, gazing at the Market, watching as the carcases were brought and piled, and heaved about, and sold, and taken away. The only faces I saw were those of Mrs Best, and Mary - the little skivvy who had opened the door to me, who changed my pot and brought me coal and water, and who I sometimes sent on errands to buy me cigarettes and food. Her expression as she handed me my packages showed me how strange I had become; but to her fear and her wonder alike, I was indifferent. I was indifferent to everything except my own grief - and this I indulged with a strange and horrible passion.I believe I barely washed in all those weeks - and certainly I did not change my dress, for I had no other. Very early on I gave off wearing my false chignon, too, and let my hair straggle greasily about my ears. I smoked, endlessly - my fingers grew brown, from the nail to the knuckle; but I ate hardly at all. For all that I liked to watch the carcases being towed about at Smithfield, the thought of meat upon my tongue made me nauseous, and I had stomach for none but the blandest of foods. Like a woman quickening with child I developed a curious appetite: I longed only for sweet, white bread. I gave Mary shilling after shilling, and sent her to Camden Town and Whitechapel, Limehouse and Soho, for bagels, brioches and flat Greek loaves, and buns from the Chinese bakeries. These I would eat dipped in mugs of tea, which I brewed, ferociously strong, in a pot on the hearth, and sweetened with condensed milk. It was the drink I had used to make for Kitty, in our first days together at the Canterbury Palace. The taste of it was like the taste of her; and a comfort, and a frightful torment, all at once. The weeks, for all my carelessness to their passing, passed by anyway. There is little to say about them, except that they were dreadful. The tenant in the room above my own moved out, and was replaced by a poor couple with a baby: the baby was colicky, and cried in the night.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie tells me to go to bed. She thumbs the broken seam in our sofa, tugs at the thread. Go to bed, she says. I ask if Ma is inside there. She says, Sleep. I ask if she’s sure it’s the right factory. I mean the wrong factory. Jie shuts off the light, and we sleep together on the sofa, her chest pressed so deep into my back I feel her heart punching my shoulder blades, harder than anything I’ve ever been hit with, louder than what we know how to say. Have you ever wished me dead? I forgive you for that, just as I want you to forgive me for what’s next. Ma comes home after six days, two days after the fire is put out. She hadn’t been at work. She hadn’t even left our block. She slept in the bathroom of the dollar store, locking it from the inside. All day she walked up and down the aisles, fingering pots of plastic putty and flipping the glazed pages of magazines, pretending she could read them. Finally, the employee told her to purchase or leave. Ma says yuanfen kept the fire caged from her, kept her corralled in the dollar store until the fire was done. When Jie and I first hear Ma knocking, we think it’s a debt collector and hide behind the couch. We know it isn’t the police: Ma has no ID that can confirm her identity. She has no face in this country, only a fire’s record of her body. Then we hear Ma calling our names, Ba’s. Her fist flying into the door like a dumb bird. We let her shout. We let her keep knocking with no one answering. It’s an entire minute before Jie climbs up from behind the couch, unlatches the door, presses her lips to our mother’s knees. It was easier to want her living when she was dead. 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.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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. Sometimes I believe the snakes and I share a breed, feeding off foreign sources of heat. At night I park my stomach against Ma’s spine. Without her, my blood depletes its own heat. I whisper against her shoulders, speak mouth to marrow: I killed three snakes today. I opened their dead mouths and touched their fangs. My hands are numb up to the wrists. I’m telling no one but you. You’re the only one who knows I’ve been dying all day. I like slaughtering snakes. They die clean. We fling them into piles. No need to grieve what doesn’t bleed. My only competitors are the red-tailed hawks that snip the hens’ heads off their necks. There’s a gun leaning against the long wall of the coop for the purpose of shooting them down. In the heat, the barrel goes limp as silk, roves the house on its snakebelly. _ Ba beheaded a snake in the city where I was born. By then, he’d changed his name to a tree’s. In another country, he’d strung his mother in a tree by her thumbs. The soldiers asked him to do it. He double-tied the knot, tested the branch with his own weight. He beat her and tried to imagine the rain removing her face. Tried to imagine the body as water, able to take any shape and survive it. But all he saw was the time his mother told him to close his eyes as she walked him around the fields and placed his hands on everything he’d someday need the name of, a goat’s beard, a well, a tree with leaves like keys, the sky a door that swung open to the sun. Years later, when he was beating a woman in the street for having broken curfew, and the woman asked him why he was doing this, why there were so many men in her city, why they had shot her dog and leashed her father, Ba had said nothing. There were nights he misplaced his hands, couldn’t tell what he was beating, if it was a dog or a woman or a sack of flour mixed with sand to make it last, if what buttered the road was blood or the pulp of fruit orphaned by a tree.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Here was his own Michigan sweatshirt, smelling like a crypt. He wondered if Charlie had kept it on purpose, or if it had just stayed buried somewhere, unnoticed. Here was the map of Chicago that Nico had drawn on top of, illustrating the places they’d all been together—a tiny Richard with his camera on the Belmont Rocks, a tiny Julian holding a tray of food by the sandwich shop where he used to work, Yale wearing a beret at the Art Institute. This, he would keep. When he reached for it, Teresa said, “Don’t keep moving all over. If you don’t take full breaths, you’ll wind up with pneumonia.” It felt good to be mothered. And with Charlie gone, he didn’t feel guilty taking up what little mothering energy Teresa had left. So he stayed on the couch that still, after all these years, softened itself naturally to the shape of his body, and he let her bring him tea with honey, and he let her fill two big boxes with things he knew he might never unpack. The apartment was bizarrely the same. Charlie hadn’t redecorated even a little, hadn’t added anything to the walls. The same refrigerator magnets, same sad plant on the windowsill. Yale was glad. It would have felt bad, in some inexplicable, unjustifiable way, to see physical evidence of the ways Charlie’s world had moved on. Or maybe it was just that he wanted to believe in a world where this apartment still existed, where it was forever 1985, where the door might open at any moment and there would be Julian with a party invitation, Terrence with beer, Nico with a new comic for Charlie. Teresa said, “You’re not going back to work, are you? Don’t even pop in. You know how people are, you check in and next thing they’ll hand you a mountain of papers. Tell me you’ll lounge at home and do nothing else.” He assured her he’d take as much time as he needed. One of the great things about DePaul was how little emotional investment he had in his work. They were currently raising funds for a new parking garage. Yale wouldn’t be able to carry these boxes home, even in a cab, so he promised he’d return next week when Teresa was here again from California. She’d been back and forth since Charlie died in December, though Yale wished she’d just go sun herself in the Caribbean for a month and sleep. “The fact that this plant is alive,” he said, “means you’ve been doing too much.”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  There was a cartoon bear indented into the lid of the tin, and the blue paint had been battered off. Inside it were hardened rings of ash and in the center, brown stones. At first we thought they were chrysalises of some kind, bark- covered tubes rattling as if something inside were trying to hatch. But there were nails still growing from them, caramelizing in the tin’s body heat. We had found her toes. They hummed as if they owned our hearts, and we thought there was still a chance they could be sewn back on. When we showed her, she said, I don’t want them back. My brother and I held a ceremony to bury the toes, even writing a eulogy: Here lie the toes of our mother. May the soil eat them and shit them out as beautiful trees that smell like our feet. When our mother found out, she whipped us with a wet sock and asked us to show her the spot, watching us dig them back up. Untrimmed for a week, the toenails had grown six inches long, enamel swords with worms pierced alive on them. She returned the toes to the cookie tin, neutered their nails with a file, and taped the tin shut, saying she would need them later. When I asked her what she needed them for, she said all losses have lifetimes, always longer than we think, and her toes would someday find another source of blood, a new mouth to metabolize them. DAUGHTER Girl in Gourd California, still I was born with a gourd-shaped head: My mother kneaded it back into a sphere while my bones were still milk. The left side of my head still wears her handprint. My mother joked that if she’d ever dropped me, I would have split open into symmetrical bowls, spilling a head full of black seeds. Every night, I sat cross-legged on the floor while she sat in a chair above me, holding my head between her knees and squeezing my skull into a shape that could sit in her palm. Her fingers fattened the strands of my hair with horse-oil cream. When her knee-bones ground against my temples and milked tears from me, she lapped them off my face like a cat and said she was almost done. She had to make sure my head was round enough to remember who loved me, sturdy enough to carry the stories she was going to crown me with.

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

  Neither he nor I knew of Akumu’s last visit to Sarah. But Sarah had remembered her mother’s instructions, and only a few weeks passed before she woke up Barack in the middle of the night, just as her mother had done to her. She told Barack to be quiet, helped him get dressed, and together they began to walk down the road to Kendu. I still wonder that they both survived. They were gone for almost two weeks, walking many miles each day, hiding from those who passed them on the road, sleeping in fields and begging for food. Not far from Kendu, they became lost, and a woman finally saw them and took pity on them, for they were filthy and almost starved. The woman took them in and fed them, and asked them their names; and when she realized who they were she sent for your grandfather. And when Onyango came to get them, and saw how badly they looked, this is the only time that anyone ever saw him cry. The children never tried to run away again. But I don’t think they ever forgot this journey they made. Sarah kept a careful distance from Onyango, and in her heart remained loyal to Akumu, for she was older, and perhaps had seen how the old man had treated her mother. I believe she also resented me for taking her mother’s place. Barack reacted differently. He could not forgive his abandonment, and acted as if Akumu didn’t exist. He told everyone that I was his mother, and although he would send Akumu money when he became a man, to the end of his life he would always act coldly towards her. The strange thing was that in many ways Sarah was most like her father in personality. Strict, hardworking, easy to anger. Whereas Barack was wild and stubborn like Akumu. But of course such things one does not see in one’s self. As you might expect, Onyango was very strict with his children. He worked them hard, and would not allow them to play outside the compound, because he said other children were filthy and ill-mannered. Whenever Onyango went away, I would ignore these instructions, because children must play with other children, just as they must eat and sleep. But I would never tell your grandfather what I did, and I would have to scrub the children clean before your grandfather came home.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Yale was tired after he left, but he’d been afraid, for the last couple of days, of falling asleep. He didn’t fear dying in his sleep—he’d take it, at this point— but waking up under water again. He wasn’t afraid to close his eyes to his last day but to close them to his last good day. And so for now he kept them open, kept Fiona talking. He asked her to sing him “Moon River,” and she said, “I still don’t know the words!” but she managed anyway, laughed her way through it. She said, “Nico would have loved it here. The art room! Can you imagine? I guess I’m picturing a version of him that would live a little longer. Like, if he got sick now and had good meds and everything. I mean, his nurses wouldn’t touch him. And here you get massages.” “Well, I used to. Before I had tubes everywhere. But yeah. He would have liked it.” She looked so tired. Her hair was limp and greasy, her face swollen. She should have been home taking care of herself, resting up before the baby came— not sleeping on her side on a cot in his room. Most people’s own families didn’t do that for them. He asked if she was okay. “My back just hurts,” she said. “You don’t have to sleep here.” “I want to.” He said, “Fiona, I hate that I’m putting you through this again. I’m worried what this is doing to you.” She rubbed her eyes, made a feeble effort to smile. “I mean, it’s bringing back memories. And it’s killing me that it’s you. You’re my favorite person. But I’m pretty tough.” “That’s what I mean, though. I keep thinking of Nora’s stories about the guys who just shut down after the war. This is a war, it is. It’s like you’ve been in the trenches for seven years. And no one’s gonna understand that. No one’s gonna give you a Purple Heart.” “You think I’m shell-shocked?” “Just promise me you’ll take care of yourself.” “I’ll find a shrink in Madison. I will.” Then she said, “Is there anyone—is there anyone you wish would come here that hasn’t? I could call your dad, if you want. If you have any relatives, any old friends—even if it were awkward. If I had a magic wand. Is there anyone?” “I don’t feel like making small talk with my cousins.” She looked upset. “If there’s anyone in the world that you’d want to see, even if you didn’t think they wanted to see you. Is there anyone at all?” “Christ, Fiona, you’re making me feel really friendless right now. Unless your magic wand can bring back the dead, no.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ma stands at the not-altar, holding the handkerchief in her left fist and the jade in her right. There is no god we know better than her fist. Ma never looks at the photo. She turns to the kitchen window and watches the mosquitos fatten into moons, light salting all the lines on her face. She prays to the sisters whose names I don’t know. Her prayers robbed of a god. Jie and I were born thieves. Born to orphan our sisters by birthing our mother into this country. You don’t know about gold, about grieving what you could have owned. Your grandmother’s grief has grown its own body. She raises it like another child, one she loves better than me and my sister, one that can never leave her. Today she complains she’s married to a manhole, a shaft for memories to fall down, a man who can see only the sky above him. But Ba’s smarter than she knows. The one time we got robbed, the thieves didn’t know to dig. Couldn’t find anything worth taking. Only our door was missing. We were sure they took something else from the house, but we didn’t know what to look for. How to search for an absence. When Ma stews the apricots we steal, she never asks where we get them. She knows nothing belongs to us, and that’s why she won’t let us sit on chairs until she wraps them in cheesecloth or scrubs off our skin. We can’t put pictures on the walls, if we had any, or fully unpack—she still thinks we’ll have to give everything back. Jie’s mouth is still magnetized to the word sister, but outside of her dreams she’s stopped asking for names. Jie goes to church and her English has gotten so good she’s started reading aloud the billboards outside our house. One of them is the phone number of a divorce lawyer. One is for bail bonds. One is for a casino, which tempts Ba until Ma throws her quilt basket at him, tells him to sit down or she’ll snip his balls off and sew them to his earlobes. Jie and I can’t stop imagining Ba wearing his balls like earrings, and we laugh until we piss, the stains in our laps symmetrical. _ We dig beneath so many trees we’ve given them nicknames: The one with the bent knees. The one that sways like a drunk. The one with a woman’s hips. The gold is under none of them. It’s the earthquake that finally wounds a way to the gold: I sleep through it, but Jie claims it felt like the whole earth was operating on itself, scraping back its own skin, rearranging its organs.

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

  I remember a conversation I had once in Chicago when I was still organizing. It was with a woman who’d grown up in a big family in rural Georgia. Five brothers and three sisters, she had told me, all crowded under a single roof. She told me about her father’s ultimately futile efforts to farm his small plot of land, her mother’s vegetable garden, the two pigs they kept penned out in the yard, and the trips with her siblings to fish the murky waters of a river nearby. Listening to her speak, I began to realize that two of the three sisters she’d mentioned had actually died at birth, but that in this woman’s mind they had remained with her always, spirits with names and ages and characters, two sisters who accompanied her while she walked to school or did chores, who soothed her cries and calmed her fears. For this woman, family had never been a vessel just for the living. The dead, too, had their claims, their voices shaping the course of her dreams. So now it was for me. I remember how, a few days after my visit to Sarah’s, Auma and I happened to run into an acquaintance of the Old Man’s outside Barclay’s Bank. I could tell that Auma didn’t remember his name, so I held out my hand and introduced myself. The man smiled and said, “My, my—you have grown so tall. How’s your mother? And your brother Mark—has he graduated from university yet?” At first I was confused. Did I know this person? And then Auma explained in a low voice that no, I was a different brother, Barack, who grew up in America, the child of a different mother. David had passed away. And then the awkwardness on all sides—the man nodding his head (“I’m sorry, I didn’t know”) but taking another look at me, as if to make sure what he’d heard was true; Auma trying to appear as if the situation, while sad, was somehow the normal stuff of tragedy; me standing to the side, wondering how to feel after having been mistaken for a ghost. Later, back in her apartment, I asked Auma when she had last seen Mark and Ruth. She leaned her head against my shoulder and looked up at the ceiling. “David’s funeral,” she said. “Although by then they had stopped speaking to us for a long time.” “Why?” “I told you that Ruth’s divorce from the Old Man was very bitter. After they separated, she married a Tanzanian and had Mark and David take his name. She sent them to an international school, and they were raised like foreigners. She told them that they should have nothing to do with our side of the family.”

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

  But as we have seen, in war the state also targets such victims; during the twentieth century, the rate of civilian deaths rose sharply and now stands at 90 percent. 102 In the West we solemnize the deaths of our regular troops carefully and recurrently honor the memory of the soldier who dies for his country. Yet the civilian deaths we cause are rarely mentioned, and there has been no sustained outcry in the West against them. Suicide bombing shocks us to the core; but should it be more shocking than the deaths of thousands of children in their homelands every year because of land mines? Or collateral damage in a drone strike? “Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western people at least, to be morally superior,” says British psychologist Jacqueline Rose. “Why dying with your victim should be seen as a greater sin than saving yourself is unclear.” 103 The colonial West had created a two-tier hierarchy that privileged itself at the expense of “the Rest.” The Enlightenment had preached the equality of all human beings, yet Western policy in the developing world had often adopted a double standard so that we failed to treat others as we would wish to be treated. Our focus on the nation seems to have made it hard for us to cultivate the global outlook that we need in our increasingly interrelated world. We must deplore any action that spills innocent blood or sows terror for its own sake. But we must also acknowledge and sincerely mourn the blood that we have shed in the pursuit of our national interests. Otherwise we can hardly defend ourselves against the accusation of maintaining an “arrogant silence” in the face of others’ pain and of creating a world order in which some people’s lives are deemed more valuable than others. 13 Global Jihad In the early 1980s a steady stream of young men from the Arab world made their way to northwestern Pakistan, near the Afghan border, to join the jihad against the Soviet Union. The charismatic Jordanian-Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam had summoned Muslims to fight alongside their Afghan brothers. 1 Like the “fighting scholars” who flocked to the frontiers during the classical period, Azzam was convinced that repelling the Soviet occupation was a duty for every able-bodied Muslim. “I believe that the Muslim ummah is responsible for the honor of every Muslim woman that is being violated in Afghanistan and is responsible for every drop of Muslim blood that is being shed unjustly,” he declared. 2 Azzam’s sermons and lectures electrified a generation distressed by the suffering of their fellow Muslims, frustrated by an inability to help, and youthfully eager to do something about it. By 1984 recruits were arriving in ever-larger numbers from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Iraq.