Longing

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 Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "The image of Teleny haunted me, the name of Réné was ever on my lips. I kept repeating it over and over for dozens of times. What a sweet name it was! At its sound my heart was beating faster. My blood seemed to have become warmer and thicker. I got up slowly. I loitered over my dress. I stared at myself within the looking-glass, and I saw Teleny in it instead of myself; and behind him arose our blended shadows, as I had seen them on the pavement the evening before. "Presently the servant tapped at the door; this recalled me to self-consciousness. I saw myself in the glass, and found myself hideous, and for the first time in my life I wished myself good-looking—nay, entrancingly handsome. "The servant who had knocked at the door informed me that my mother was in the breakfastroom, and had sent to see if I were unwell. The name of my mother recalled my dream to my mind, and for the first time I almost preferred not meeting her." "Still, you were then on good terms with your mother, were you not?" "Certainly. Whatever faults she might have had, no one could have been more affectionate; and though she was said to be somewhat light and fond of pleasure, she had never neglected me." "She struck me, indeed, as a talented person, when I knew her." "Quite so; in other circumstances she might have proved even a superior woman. Very orderly and practical in all her household arrangements, she always found plenty of time for everything. If her life was not according to what we generally call 'the principles of morality,' or rather, Christian hypocrisy, the fault was my father's, not hers, as I shall perhaps tell you some other time. "As I entered the breakfast-room, my mother was struck with the change in my appearance, and she asked me if I was feeling unwell. "'I must have a little fever,' I replied; 'besides, the weather is so sultry and oppressive.' "'Oppressive?' quoth she, smiling. "'Is it not?' "'No; on the contrary, it is quite bracing. See, the barometer has risen considerably.' "'Well, then, it must have been your concert that upset my nerves.' "'My concert!' said my mother, smiling, and handing me some coffee. "It was useless for me to try to taste it, the very sight of it turned me sick. "My mother looked at me rather anxiously. "'It is nothing, only for some time back I have been getting sick of coffee.' "'Sick of coffee? you never said so before.' "'Did I not?' said I, absently. "'Will you have some chocolate, or some tea?' "'Can I not fast for once?' "'Yes, if you are ill—or if you have some great sin to atone for.' "I looked at her and shuddered. Could she be reading my thoughts better than myself? "'A sin?' quoth I, with an astonished look. "'Well, you know even the righteous——'

• From The Art of Memoir

  reader’s awareness. Nabokov makes you drool like one of Pavlov’s dogs for these moments when he takes one scene in time and stitches it to another. And finding lost connections in these “clicking” or twinning moments becomes what you shop for as you read, thus providing momentum. From early on, each flight from time implies longing and a desperate scramble to reenter the past. So when he sails from one era to start what would (in another writer’s book) be digressive, we gladly fly into another age with Nabokov—it becomes a forward movement, not a sideways detour. I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness . . . is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. “Oneness with sun and stone” sounds not unlike being God. And from his state of timelessness, he is a god at resurrecting the lost. Another twinning example. At one point, he describes a boyhood encounter with General Kuropatkin, head of the Russian Army in the east, who lines up on a divan ten matches for young Vladimir to make a smooth ocean surface. When the general tips the matches up in pairs to look like sharp waves, that pattern represents a stormy sea. Fifteen years later, as Papa Nabokov flees the Bolsheviks across southern Russia, he meets what he presumes is a peasant in a sheepskin coat who asks for a light. Of course it’s the old general, seeking a match. The twin moments are jammed together to reveal a great truth—how the powerful fall, the matches are burnt out and lost. But as for the general himself, he’s a pawn in the pattern, not a character we’ve been made to care about. “I hope that old Kuropatkin, in his rustic disguise, managed to evade Soviet imprisonment, but that is not the point” (emphasis mine).

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I opened my eyes and looked at Alice - and knew at once that I shouldn’t have spoken; that I should have been as dumb and as cunning with her as with the rest of them. There was a look on her face - it was not ambiguous at all now - a look of mingled shock, and nervousness, and embarrassment or shame. I had said too much. I felt as if my admiration for Kitty Butler had lit a beacon inside me, and opening my unguarded mouth had sent a shaft of light into the darkened room, illuminating all.I had said too much - but it was that, or say nothing.Alice’s eyes held my own for a moment longer, then her lashes fluttered and fell. She didn’t speak; she only rolled away from me, and faced the wall. The weather continued very fierce that week. The sun brought trippers to Whitstable and to our Parlour, but the heat jaded their appetites. They called as often, now, for tea and lemonade, as for plaice and mackerel, and for hours at a time I would leave Mother and Alice to work the shop, and run down to the beach to ladle out cockles and crab-meat and whelks, and bread-and-butter, at Father’s stall. It was a novelty, serving teas upon the shingle; but it was also hard to stand in the sun, with the vinegar running from your wrists to your elbows, and your eyes smarting from the fumes of it. Father gave me an extra half-crown for every afternoon I worked there. I bought a hat, and a length of lavender ribbon with which to trim it, but the rest of the money I put aside: I would use it, when I had enough, to buy a season ticket for the Canterbury train.For I made my nightly trips all through that week, and sat - as Tony put it - with the Plushes, and gazed at Kitty Butler as she sang; and I never once grew tired of her. It was only, always, marvellous to step again into my little scarlet box; to gaze at the bank of faces, and the golden arch above the stage, and the velvet drapes and tassels, and the stretch of dusty floorboard with its row of lights - like open cockle shells, I always thought them - before which I would soon see Kitty stride and swagger and wave her hat ...

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ama’s first language was not found in books, only in bodies. Tayal was written in the English alphabet, each word a phonetic translation written by missionaries, translated through their hands. The same hands that had beaten children into belief. Those hands were fluent only in punishment. I imagined a missionary transcribing Ama’s body, tracing her tongue on paper and burning it so that she spoke smoke. I read in the kitchen, transcribing into English as much as I could read. When I showed Ben in the morning, she said I should squat over the hole again, but this time it didn’t open its mouth for me. It only works once, I said. What kind of key only works once? Ben said. We tried to feed the holes again, this time with water from our palms. We tried prying them open with sticks. We fed them strips of pork jerky. But they chose silence. At school, I gave Ben my transcriptions on notebook paper. We’d midwifed a language together, delivered it from the dark. When she folded the sheets into her pocket, I told her to be careful, to treat the letter like a daughter. Ben asked me what my ama looked like, and I said I knew her mostly by voice. I reported one of my mother’s memories: Once, Ama striped her face with mud and told them about Hu Gu Po, weighing down her daughters’ bellies with a swallowed story so that they wouldn’t be whipped away by typhoon wind, by wind that flexed the trees like bowstrings. My mother liked to say she and I were born at the same time, into the same story, and that we were just growing at different rates: I grew like a tree and she grew like a riverfish. She said she’d died and been reborn many times in the span of my life. Someday, she said, you’ll go back to the river and give birth to me there, spitting out a jet stream of eggs, all of them me. I’ll dew the skin of your fists. I’ll hatch when you open your hands. GRANDMOTHER Letter I: In which the river is not responsible Dear eldest, Now that you are dead you can see why I never wanted you to live. See how much lighter you are now? barren of a body mother to nothing? You darkest of my daughters in skin in smoke. I burned you this ash is yours rebuild it into anything you want me to be. This letter is not apology . I am not writing for a response a bullet doesn’t ask to be given back. My second husband the soldier lives by the law of loss kill what you cannot carry marry what you cannot bury writing will wring lies from the white open a gate to our griefs. I have no need to grieve what I named .

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I told my brother to be careful beside me: I’d hunt him in his sleep. Protect your feet by duct-taping them to the mattress, I said. Count your toes in the morning. I counted them aloud before he woke, not allowing myself to breathe or look for light in the room until there were ten. Every morning I said my hungers aloud, rehearsing for my future body: Today I want to eat my mother. I will eat as much of her as fits in my belly, and then I will rebirth her. I will eat her into a new future. Duck Uncle packed three Tupperware containers of dim sum, shiu mai with peas crowning the meat, har gow straining out of their skins. We ate it all with our hands, sitting at a picnic table we’d elbowed a white family for, licking our fingers till they glowed. There was a feeding scheduled for the tiger exhibit, so we went back to watch the zookeeper attach the frozen steak to a thirty-foot pole. He extended the pole through the bars, past the empty moat beyond, and out toward the brown field and faux-stone cave. The tiger, napping on its side, didn’t even look at the steak-pole waving its meat flag ten feet away. My brother kicked the bars. The tiger slept. We kept watching even after everyone left to watch the seal feeding at three. We were the last ones to leave the tiger that day, the steak defrosted and growing a rind of rot. It stank, slotting its scent through the bars. We watched anyway, convinced that as long as we stayed, the tiger would wake the full width of its hunger, show us what was done in the wild. The steak would reverse into a cow and walk into the tiger’s mouth. Instead, we drove home as evening opened its purple cape. Duck Uncle said, In China, the tigers are real, not far away like that. You can pay a man to throw in a roped-up goat, and they’ll let you watch up close from a bus. The words in China stilled my mother’s hands on the wheel, and she sped until the road beneath us was rain. In China, tigers were already extinct. There are no more breeding pairs in the wild. Duck Uncle’s restaurants closed during the recession. On TV, when I heard the word recession, I thought it meant the same thing as recess, when you were free of teachers who slid their rulers into your mouth and told you your accent was an inch off. But this recession did not mean free, unless free meant that no one could afford to pay.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  She welded her left hand to the doorframe, held the dark open for us to exit through. The night was the same throat-dark as the inside of her house, and leaving felt like being swallowed, like symmetry: The farther we drove, the lower down we lived in her throat. We didn’t know if she was waiting for us to leave or to come back, only that she stood there longer than I looked, that the road startled like skin when we backed onto it. Even after we left, I found her face in a palm tree, a run-over dog, cows scabbing over a field, the dark bracketing our car, my mother in the rearview mirror, teething on her tongue to keep herself awake, one hand hooking out the window. Her fingers undoing the button of the moon. With my sleeve, I dabbed at the window like a wound, tried to wipe away Ama’s resemblance to the night. She let us go because years ago she’d tried to sever herself from her daughters, and not even the river could cut through them. She let us go, knowing she was with us in the car and in our yard, a fishline threaded through our spines. When I was home, I walked between my yard-holes, knowing Ama was on the other end of them. I fed my hands to the 口, imagined that Ama was doing the same on her end, our hands touching halfway between her city and mine, knotting at the wrist-root. This was the only way we could see each other, with our hands alone: without our full bodies to hurt each other, without words to want from each other. In the holes, a reforested dark. In a month, a tree would grow from the 口, a subterranean sapling just beginning to breach ground, touch night. The tree would have bark thick as buckles, a hollow trunk. It would grow to her height, dress in her shadow, a tree narrating her absence. In a month, when the tree braided out of the hole, born from no seed but my hands, I would water it. * Fact: The Nationalists confiscated my grandmother’s land a second time. Watakushi, she said again and again. It is mine. It is mine. She claims her land in a language that’s not hers. She lines up her Is like a fence: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. The I doesn’t indicate a presence but an absence, the place where a body has been redacted from the sentence. Story: Ama married a soldier, the only type of man who keeps his job forever. In return, she received a daily ration of rice.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Kitty’s the Prince, and I’m Dandini. I have to speak, sing, dance, slap my thigh, the works, in velvet breeches. And the crowd go mad for it!’ He smiled at my pleasure - it was lovely to be allowed to be pleased with myself, at last! - then shook his head. ‘Your folks, from what I’ve heard them say, don’t know the half of it. Why don’t you have them up to see you on the stage? Why the big secret?’ I shrugged, then hesitated; then, ‘Alice doesn’t care for Kitty ...’ I said. ‘And you and Kitty: you’re still in her pocket? You’re still struck with her like you always was?’ I nodded. He sniffed. ‘Then, she’s a lucky girl ...’ He seemed only to be flirting again; but I had the queerest impression, too, that he knew more than he was letting on - and didn’t care a fig about it. I answered, ‘I’m the lucky one,’ and held his gaze. He tapped with his pen again upon his blotter. ‘Maybe.’ Then he winked. I stayed at the Palace until it became rather obvious that Tony had other business to get on with, then took my leave of him. Once outside, I stood again before the foyer doors, reluctant to resign the reek of beer and grease-paint and confront the altogether different scents of Whitstable, our Parlour and our home. It had been good to talk of Kitty - so good that, seated at the supper-table later, between silent Alice and nasty Rhoda with her tiny, flashing sapphire, I missed her all the more. I was due to spend another day with them, but now I thought I could not face it. I said, as we started on our puddings, that I had changed my mind and would take the morning, rather than the evening train tomorrow - that I had remembered things that I must do at the theatre, that I shouldn’t put off till Thursday. They didn’t seem surprised, though Father said it was a shame. Later, as I kissed them good-night, he cleared his throat. ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘back up to London in the morning, and I’ve barely had time for a proper look at you.’ I smiled. ‘Have you had a nice time with us, Nance?’ ‘Oh yes.’ ‘And you will take care of yourself, in London?’ asked Mother. ‘It seems very far away.’ I laughed. ‘It’s not so far.’ ‘Far enough,’ she said, ‘to keep you from us for a year and a half.’ ‘I’ve been busy,’ I said. ‘We have been terribly busy, both of us.’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  What I say is, if you’re not going to make an uncle of her, then, really, consider your friends, and pass her on to somebody who will.’ ‘You ain’t having her!’ ‘I don’t want anyone, now I’ve found Sue Bridehead. But there, you see, you do care for her!’ ‘Of course I care for her,’ said Florence quietly. Now I was listening so hard I felt I could hear her blinking, pursing her lips. ‘Well then! Bring her to the boy tomorrow night’ - I was sure that’s what she said. ‘Bring her to the boy. You can meet my Miss Raymond...’ ‘I don’t know,’ answered Florence. The words were followed by a silence. And when Annie spoke next, it was in a slightly different tone. ‘You cannot grieve for her for ever,’ she said. ‘She would never have wanted that...’ Florence tutted. ‘Being in love, you know,’ she said, ‘it’s not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can’t just go out and get another to replace her.’ ‘I thought that’s exactly what you were supposed to do!’ ‘That’s what you do, Annie.’ ‘But Florence - you might just let the cage door open, just a little ... There is a new canary in your own front room, banging its handsome head against the bars.’ ‘Suppose I let the new one in,’ said Flo then, ‘then find I don’t care for it, as much as I did the old one? Suppose - Oh!’ I heard a thump. ‘I can’t believe that you have got me here, comparing her to a budgie!’ I knew she meant Lilian, not me; and I turned my head away, and wished I hadn’t listened after all. The parlour remained quiet for a second or two, and I heard Florence dip her spoon into her cup, and stir it. Then, before I had quite tiptoed back into the kitchen, her voice came again, but rather quietly. ‘Do you think it’s true, though, what you said, about the new canary and the bars ... ?’ My foot caught a broom, then, and sent it falling; and I had to give a shout and slap my hands, as if I had just that moment come home. Annie called me in and said that tea was brewed. Florence seemed to raise her eyes to mine, a little thoughtfully. Annie left soon after, and Florence busied herself, all night, with paper-work: she had lately got herself a pair of spectacles, and with them flashing firelight all night, I could not even see which way her glances tended - to me, or to her books. We said good-night in our usual way, but then we both lay wakeful.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  She welded her left hand to the doorframe, held the dark open for us to exit through. The night was the same throat-dark as the inside of her house, and leaving felt like being swallowed, like symmetry: The farther we drove, the lower down we lived in her throat. We didn’t know if she was waiting for us to leave or to come back, only that she stood there longer than I looked, that the road startled like skin when we backed onto it. Even after we left, I found her face in a palm tree, a run-over dog, cows scabbing over a field, the dark bracketing our car, my mother in the rearview mirror, teething on her tongue to keep herself awake, one hand hooking out the window. Her fingers undoing the button of the moon. With my sleeve, I dabbed at the window like a wound, tried to wipe away Ama’s resemblance to the night. She let us go because years ago she’d tried to sever herself from her daughters, and not even the river could cut through them. She let us go, knowing she was with us in the car and in our yard, a fishline threaded through our spines. When I was home, I walked between my yard-holes, knowing Ama was on the other end of them. I fed my hands to the 口 , imagined that Ama was doing the same on her end, our hands touching halfway between her city and mine, knotting at the wrist-root. This was the only way we could see each other, with our hands alone: without our full bodies to hurt each other, without words to want from each other. In the holes, a reforested dark. In a month, a tree would grow from the 口 , a subterranean sapling just beginning to breach ground, touch night. The tree would have bark thick as buckles, a hollow trunk. It would grow to her height, dress in her shadow, a tree narrating her absence. In a month, when the tree braided out of the hole, born from no seed but my hands, I would water it. * Fact: The Nationalists confiscated my grandmother’s land a second time. Watakushi, she said again and again. It is mine. It is mine. She claims her land in a language that’s not hers. She lines up her I s like a fence: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. The I doesn’t indicate a presence but an absence, the place where a body has been redacted from the sentence. Story: Ama married a soldier, the only type of man who keeps his job forever. In return, she received a daily ration of rice.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Now your ass is rat-free, I said, and she laughed. Another time she drank insecticide and got diarrhea for so many days that our sewage must have dyed the sea brown and bloody. For years I thought babies began as insects, and that’s why you drank insecticide to get rid of them. They began as gnats flying in your belly, and then they matured into flies and then into moths, flying out of the dark of your body and into the light that would incinerate its wings. Jie gets married and the boy hasn’t hit her yet. He’ll do it only once, when he’s home from work and doesn’t like the way she’s asleep on their couch, curled like some kind of animal in his house. She wakes but hasn’t recognized him yet. There’s a palm print on her cheek that will turn autumnal and then shed. When the priest asks if there are any objections to the marriage, I stand up. Ma reaches up for my skirt, tugs me down to the pew. I don’t know why I’m standing, only that I’ve spoken something. It sounds like no or go . Before her wedding, we sit together on the mattress we share for the last time and I ask her why she has to get married so soon, why can’t she wait till I make some money and we can live together, find a place with a room for Ba. We can take him, I say. We can take care of him all day and work at night in a cemetery or something. We’ll buy bars of gold and bury them together. I tell her this with my hands in her hair, braiding it so it’ll wave on its own tomorrow. If I do it wrong it’ll frizz like bad wiring, but I always do it right, oiling my hands beforehand. Jie says, I don’t want him. I don’t want either of them, and she turns around so fast I pull a handful of her hair out. I’m braiding it to the air. That’s how I know she really wants to leave, when she turns around to me: her eyes bright from the pain of my braiding. She smells like my hands. She smells like the vinegar we use to clean Ba’s piss from the floor. — At the front of the church, Jie kisses the boy and I make a fist around Ma’s hands.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Before moving on, I want to say that when I have gone back and reread her books, I see that she is often very complex, not presenting these ideas as purely sensual or easy. I have to say that because a lot of it still lodged in my mind as sensual, as a longing, as a turn on. I wanted to move in the body of a dolphin and feel the tentacular love of the Ooloi. I wanted to find a vampire who would make me feel good and be super healthy in exchange for a little taste of me. And I think so many of us would be nourished by the sort of symbiotic communities that Octavia envisioned, where connection wasn’t necessarily based on visual attraction but other kinds of longing and need. Where being attracted to someone wasn’t the first step of a path toward a singular ownership but could be a move into community and a future. Where interdependence was a given and there was no shame in seeking to learn the right ways to enter and stay in community. And where the truth could be perceived by the physical or telepathic connection, so instead of wasting time on projecting and lying to each other, we would spend our time lifting each other up, generating futures based on our truest selves, truest needs. Octavia Butler will always be my lover outside of time, a sensual mind of my mind. I am grateful for all the seeds she cast into my young erotic mind and will explore what has burst forth from them with rigor and curiosity in these pages. 45 Octavia Butler, Wild Seed (New York: Warner Books, 2001).46 Octavia Butler, Bloodchild (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996).47 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 1993).48 Octavia Butler, Fledgling (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).49 Butler, Fledgling.50 Butler, Parable of the Sower.51 Octavia Butler, Clay’s Ark (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984).Love as Political ResistanceAudre Lorde taught us that caring for ourselves is “not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”52 And although we know how to meme and tweet those words, living into them is harder. We have a deeper socialization to overcome, one that tells us that most of us don’t matter—our health, our votes, our work, our safety, our families, our lives don’t matter—not as much as those of white men. We need to learn how to practice love such that care—for ourselves and others—is understood as political resistance and cultivating resilience. We don’t learn to love in a linear path, from self to family to friends to spouse, as we might have been taught. We learn to love by loving. We practice with each other, on ourselves, in all kinds of relationships. And right now we need to be in rigorous practice, because we can no longer afford to love people the way we’ve been loving them. Who have we been loving?

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

  That was the Confucian dilemma—similar to the impasse that Ashoka had encountered on the Indian subcontinent. Empire depended on force and intimidation, because the aristocrats and the masses had to be held in check. Even if he had wanted to, Emperor Wu could not afford to rule entirely by ren. The Chinese Empire had been achieved by warfare, wholesale slaughter, and the annihilation of one state after another; it retained its power by military expansion and internal oppression and developed religious mythologies and rituals to sacralize these arrangements. Was there a realistic alternative? The Warring States period had shown what happened when ambitious rulers with new weapons and large armies competed against one another pitilessly for dominance, devastating the countryside and terrorizing the population in the process. Contemplating this chronic warfare, Mencius had longed for a king who would rule “all under Heaven” and bring peace to the great plain of China. The ruler who had been powerful enough to achieve this was the First Emperor. a In this chapter, I have used the Pinyin method of Romanizing the Chinese script; I have given the Wade-Giles version as an alternative in cases when this form may be more familiar to a Western audience.b Tao Te Ching in the Wade-Giles system.4 [image file=image_rsrcDZB.jpg] The Hebrew DilemmaWhen Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they probably did not fall into a state of original sin, as Saint Augustine believed, but into an agrarian economy.1 Man (adam) had been created from the soil (adamah), which in the Garden of Eden was watered by a simple spring. Adam and his wife were free agents, living a life of idyllic liberty, cultivating the garden at their leisure, and enjoying the companionship of their god, Yahweh. But because of a single act of disobedience, Yahweh condemned them both to a life sentence of hard agricultural labor: Accursed be the soil because of you! With suffering shall you get your food from it every day of your life. It shall yield you brambles and thistles, and you shall eat wild plants. With sweat on your brow shall you eat your bread, until you return to the soil as you were taken from it. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.2 Instead of peacefully nurturing the soil as its master, Adam had become its slave. From the very beginning, the Hebrew Bible strikes a different note from most of the texts we have considered so far. Its heroes were not members of an aristocratic elite; Adam and Eve had been relegated to mere field hands, scratching a miserable subsistence from the blighted land.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  A lace of holes where I’ve written the words and then erased them, inventing a language from friction: Dear Ama, 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. My mother rolls my head off her belly, reaches down for my feet and says they’re ripe enough to eat. Imagine this: I eat your foot like a fruit. I shit out its seed in some city far from here. The seed grows into a tree. You walk by the tree and know I’ve been there. You cut down the tree, count its rings, add it to how old I am. Wherever you’re going, I’m already there, a tree waiting.

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

  Highly stylized videos notwithstanding, one can never know what goes through the mind of suicide bombers at the moment when they drive trucks into a building or detonate bombs in a crowded marketplace. To imagine they do this entirely for God or that they are impelled solely by Islamic teaching is to ignore the natural complexity of all human motivation. Forensic psychiatrists who have interviewed survivors found that the desire to become a hero and achieve posthumous immortality was also a strong factor. Other would-be martyrs cited the ekstasis of battle that gives life meaning and purpose, a feeling that is close to religious exaltation, as we have seen. In fact, it is said, the Hamas rank-and-file lived not for “politics, nor ideology, nor religion … but rather an ecstatic camaraderie in the face of death ‘on the path of Allah.’ ”94 Life under occupation held little attraction for many of the volunteers; their bleak life in Gaza’s refugee camps made the possibility of a blissful hereafter and a glorious reputation here on earth powerfully alluring. But then all communities throughout history have praised the warrior who gives his life for his people. Palestinians also honor those who are killed involuntarily in the conflict with Israel; they too are shahid, because as the ahadith made clear, any untimely death was a “witness” to both human finitude and the nation’s plight.95 It further complicates the question of faith and terrorism that the suicide killer has been revered as a hero in other religious traditions as well. In the story of Samson, the judge who died pulling the Temple of Dagon down upon the Philistine chieftains, the biblical author does not agonize over his motives but simply celebrates his courage.96 Samson “heroically hath finished a life heroic,” the devout Puritan John Milton likewise concluded in Samson Agonistes:97 Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble.98 Far from inspiring horror, Samson’s end left those who witnessed it with a sense of “peace and consolation … and calm of mind, all passion spent.”99 Not coincidentally, Israel calls its nuclear capacity “the Samson Option,” regarding a strike that would inevitably result in the destruction of the nation to be an honorable duty and a possibility that the Jewish state has freely chosen.100 The anthropologist Talal Asad has suggested that the suicide bomber is simply acting out this same appalling scenario on a smaller scale and can therefore “be seen to belong to the modern Western tradition of armed conflict for the defense of the free political community. To save the tradition (or to found its state) in confronting a dangerous enemy, it may be necessary to act without being bound by ordinary moral constraints.”101

• From Bestiary (2020)

  He snuck out every day of bedrest lugged his dead foot he found a cave on the fourth day the clouds shaped like colons inside the dark a girl & her shadow eight-limbed . He assumed she came to meet a man or a moon she taught him how to make shadow puppets on the wall of the cave filtering light through fingers pasting the dark over the night in the morning he crawled home spent days practicing silhouettes nightly he climbed to the cave his shadow-tutor casting stories onto stone. Most about revenge: stories the boy who grows his foot back twice as large & clawed & your father never made love to the shadow-girl tried once but the girl was cave rock it hurt to enter her one week a rockslide down the mountain he crawled toward the cave saw its mouth gated by boulders he tackled each stone by the time light broke in morning & no one inside when he spoke her name what he thought was her name: his echo never noticed that before. He danced his shadows along the walls she never answered his hands with her own: When your father told me this story I revised the ending one day the shadow-girl waiting with an oil lamp. She threw it at the entrance to enter the cave he must walk through burn the body that brought him to me when your father met me he shadowed me for days heeled like a bitch broke an umbrella in my fist I said make me a new one he folded it from newspaper oiled so the water leapt off it handle carved from the body of his warpistol he kissed me beneath my skin wasn’t even raining the sun a bullet through us both * WHAT IF YOUR TAIL IS SOME KIND OF REGROWN UMBILICAL CORD? WHAT IF YOU’RE BEING FED THROUGH IT? I KNOW CORDS DON’T USUALLY GROW OUT OF THE ASS, BUT IF I WERE AN UMBILICAL CORD, I’D WANT TO COME BACK AND AVENGE BEING CUT. WHAT ARE UMBILICAL CORDS FOR, ANYWAY? THEY HYPHENATE TWO BODIES. DO YOU SPEAK THROUGH IT LIKE A TELEPHONE CORD? DOES IT CARRY MEMORY FROM THE MOTHER TO THE BABY? —BEN GRANDMOTHER Letter [ ]: In which I am the driver Dear [ ] daughter, Jiejie, girl I gave to this country, Today the crotch of my underwear is a landscape painting. The landscape is mud for miles cleft-ass mountains cloudturds.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I remembered all the times that I had lain here and pictured similar things, before Kitty and I had ever even kissed. I remembered when I had first slept beside her at Ginevra Road, when I was used only to sharing with my sister. Now Alice’s body felt strange to me; it seemed queer and wrong, somehow, to lie so close to someone and not kiss and stroke them ...I thought suddenly, Suppose I fall asleep, forget that she isn’t Kitty, and put a hand upon her, or a leg -?I got up, put my coat over my shoulders, and smoked another cigarette. Alice did not stir.I squinted at my watch: half-past eleven. I wondered, again, what Kitty was doing; and sent a mental message through the night, to Stamford Hill, to make her pause - whatever her business was just then - and remember to think of me, in Whitstable. [image "010" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_010_r1.jpg] My visit, after that poor start, was not brilliant. I had arrived on a Sunday, and the following days, of course, were working ones. I didn’t fall asleep, that first night, until very late, but the next morning I woke when Alice woke, at half-past six, and forced myself to rise and eat my breakfast with the others, at the parlour-table. Then, however, I didn’t know whether to offer to take up my old duties in the kitchen, with the oyster-knife - I couldn’t tell whether they would like it or expect it, or even whether I could bear to try it. In the end I drifted down with them and found I wasn’t needed anyway; for they had a girl, now, to sever and beard the natives, and she was just as quick, it seemed, as I had been. I stood beside her - she was rather pretty - and made some half-hearted passes with my knife at a dozen or so shells ... But the water chilled and stung me, and soon I preferred to sit and watch - then I closed my eyes and placed my head upon my arms, and listened to the hum of gossip from the restaurant, and the bubble of the pans ...In short, I fell asleep; and only woke when Father, hurrying by me, stumbled over my skirts and spilled a pot of liquor. Then it was suggested that I go upstairs - out of their way, they meant.

• From My People (2022)

  The South was still segregated and Bobby’s father, a doctor, used to drive many hours, through several states where Blacks were not allowed on the various beaches along the way to get to a place where Black people could enjoy everything the place had to offer. That included all of its beaches, and especially the one most frequented by Blacks, known as the Inkwell. The origin of the name is disputed, but as one legend has it, the Inkwell was so named due to the color of the people most in evidence. Another, and the one I prefer, is that it was called the Inkwell because of all the famous Black literary figures who sunbathed and swam there, including Dorothy West, the author of short stories and novels and a member of the Harlem Renaissance. But I never got to go in those days. Many years later, my husband, Ronald, and I were invited to the Vineyard by one of his colleagues at the Ford Foundation who had a place on the twenty-six-mile island. That part was widely referred to as “Up Island,” where people like Jacqueline Kennedy and other white celebrities vacationed. While we had a wonderful time Up Island, I had heard so much about Oak Bluffs from Bobby Jackson that at the end of our visit, we headed down to OB, as it is known. Once there, I realized I needed to tell the world about this wonderful Black oasis and update where it now fell in the ongoing racial history of the country. So I called Arthur Gelb, the New York Times metropolitan editor, and persuaded him to give me a few more vacation days to chronicle my “discovery.” The article appeared in what in those days was the crème de la crème of the paper’s sections—the Second Front, with a great picture of one of the dark-skinned Inkwell regulars. Years later, I would come to make OB my home away from home, for, like the woman in my Times story who originally came from one of the Cape Verde Islands, OB was a melting pot and a window into that and other cultures. This cultural diversity was often on display at various events that, thankfully, included food, especially at the end of the summer, up and down the long sidewalk above the Inkwell. Among those who saw to it that I was properly taught at an early age was my grandmother, Frances Wilson Layson Brown Jones. I developed my first appreciation for Harlem when she took me from our small-town home in Covington, Georgia, to Atlanta, where we boarded a train to New York City and headed straight to my great-uncle Henry’s apartment in Harlem. Even at the young age of five, I was captivated by how the address was lyrically given as 115th-Street-Between-Lenox-and-Fifth. Not only were the streets identified differently from what I was used to back home, but there were both similarities and differences in the people I saw around me.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Yes, very; and so was I of her. Moreover—had I not been given to those propensities which I dared not avow to her, and which only tribades can understand; had I, like other men of my age, been living a merry life of fornication with whores, mistresses, and lively grisettes—I should often have made her the confidante of my erotic exploits, for in the moment of bliss our prodigal feelings are often blunted by the too great excess, whilst the remembrance doled out at our will is a real twofold pleasure of the senses and of the mind. "Teleny, however, had of late become a kind of bar between us, and I think she had got to be rather jealous of him, for his name seemed to have become as objectionable to her as it formerly had been to me." "Did she begin to suspect your liaison?" "I did not know whether she suspected it, or if she was beginning to be jealous of the affection I bore him. "Matters, however, were coming to a crisis, and were shaping towards the dreadful way in which they ended. "One day a grand concert was to be given at——, and L—— who was to play having been taken ill, Teleny was asked to take his place. It was an honour he could not refuse. "'I am loath to leave you,' said he, 'even for a day or two, for I know that just now you are so busy that you cannot possibly get away, especially as your manager is ill.' "'Yes,' said I, 'it is rather awkward, still I might——' "'No, no, it would be foolish; I'll not allow you.' "'But you know it is so long since you played at a concert where I was not present.' "You'll be present in mind if not in body. I shall see you sitting in your usual place, and I shall play for you and you alone. Besides, we have never been parted for any length of time—no, not for a single day since Briancourt's letter. Let us try and see if we can live apart for two days. Who knows? Perhaps, some time or other——' "'What do you mean?' "'Nothing, only you might get tired of this life. You might, like other men, marry just to have a family.' "'A family!' I burst out laughing. 'Is that encumbrance so very necessary to a man's happiness?' "'My love might surfeit you.' "'Réné, don't speak in that way! Could I live without you?' "He smiled incredulously. "'What! do you doubt my love?' "'Can I doubt that the stars are fire? but,' continued he, slowly, and looking at me, 'do you doubt mine?' "It seemed to me as if he had grown pale when he put that question to me. "'No. Have you ever given me the slightest cause to doubt it?' "'And if I were unfaithful?'

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Folding the denim skirts she’d sewn on Ma’s Singer, Jie kept her eyes down on the seams and said she never intended to lose anything. I told her she could leave most of her things here—her fake jade bangles that were just glass painted with green nail polish, the mannequin hand she stole from the factory and French-manicured, and that Ma almost threw away because she thought we were using it to masturbate. The soda can tabs she liked to pick up off the sidewalk and pocket, the coins she stole from public fountains and didn’t spend out of respect for what had been wished on them, the shards of a tortoiseshell headband she once broke during a fistfight with another factory girl, though she couldn’t remember what they were fighting over, only that she tore out the girl’s ponytail, flapping open her scalp to the bone. A sun-scoured book stolen from the Montebello Library, a book she couldn’t even read but that had a cover she liked: two blonde girls painted from behind, almost identical except for the angle of their heads, standing in a field full of some ugly species of flesh-colored flower with petals that looked like foreskin. One of the girl’s heads was half-turned, painted in profile, as if she was going to say something, something to make the other girl stay and watch morning make it here alive. Jie never said why she stole it, except once when she said the field reminded her of the island, reminded her of the time we thought we were being chased by a feral mountain dog but it had only been our own two-headed shadow, and when we finally stopped, we were in some other city where we had no Ma or Ba, where we were only sisters. When she asked if the cover reminded me of the island too, I knew she was asking me something else. But I only answered that there hadn’t been any blonde people on the island. Jie packed everything, which meant she wasn’t coming back from the honeymoon, and that night we slept facing each other like we used to, the dark a third body between us, our daughter. From the window came the moon, a buoy we both held on to. I could smell the horse- oil in her hair, the boy on her breath: Her husband was picking her up in the morning, and then they would be in Nevada, the state we had crossed to get here, where the sun looked like a half-peeled orange and the dry air knifed out your lungs. While she slept that night, I stole something from her suitcase, which was just the same twined-up shepi bag she’d brought from the island. I took the book. I told myself it wasn’t stealing if the thing had already been stolen once. Two acts of thievery canceled out, became something more like salvaging. I still have it, that book.

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

  Behind him, the bottles staggered up on their little choir risers—amber and green and clear bottles, and one bottle of luminous yellow chartreuse shining out of the back line like some brand of rocket fuel. I looked across the bar and caught in the mirror on the back wall a long view of my pudgy eye, misshapen and caked with powder. Daddy would have been proud of that eye , I thought, and slid off the stool. In the unheated bathroom, you could actually see your breath. I wiped Mother’s makeup off with a glob of toilet paper I’d wetted down using tap water. Then I used the hand drier fixed to the wall to blow my face dry, as much to warm up as anything. Standing there by myself, with my eyes closed and that hot wind huffing down on my features so I could feel my hair stream behind me and some blood start seeping back to my bunged-up eye, I had a sudden flood of homesickness. Once I’d ridden in the back of Daddy’s truck all the way from the beach. The sun that day had made even the nailheads on the floor of his truck bed hot enough to scald your bare foot if you set it down on one. The back of Daddy’s head in his red Lone Star cap had been fixed like an icon in the rear window. I’d turned from him to lean my face up to the sun. The wind itself was hot but somehow kept me from sweating awful much. Still, that night I had a blistering sunburn on my face, which Daddy patted cool with Noxzema. The memory clicked off with the drier, as if the power on it got cut too. I hoisted myself up the sink’s edge to check out that bruise again, using the rectangular mirror on the towel dispenser. The eye had swollen back up glossy blue-black, with a streak of green at the edge. Daddy would have called it a kick-ass shiner. Later when I lay half dozing on the banquette in the bar’s darkest corner, I could almost see Daddy taking form from the vast ether of alcohol fumes and smoke. Finally, he sat next to me. Or a ghost of him sat, for I wasn’t crazy enough to have believed that the Daddy-shape I’d conjured was actual. I knew full well he wasn’t. Still, it comforted me to see him assemble through the veil of my own lashes. He sat gangly inside his creased khakis. “You gotta keep your guard up,” he finally said. He drew a smoke from the tight line of Camels lined up like organ pipes. The glass on the black tabletop was only a little more transparent than he was. I told him I was missing him awful, but he just shrugged that off. “And lead with your left. Then she can’t reach that eye.