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.

Page 165 of 170 · 20 per page

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When we drove him to the airport, I counted the hours his flight would take, calculated that he would land the hour I woke. I didn’t sleep that night, telling myself that as long as I never woke, he would never land: our father forever midflight. That night, flying my kite in the rain, I saw the paper shrivel into a fist before falling. From the sky, my father said we’d make a new one, a kite so large we could strap it to our backs and leave the country. I lost the kite that night, stayed out till morning to watch it reappear, as if light could undo any loss. It was years before I realized that kites were only puppetry and could only fake their flight. Real flight involved no leashes or strings. Birds did not come with girls tied to them, girls reeling them down, girls the opposite of the sky. My father called from the mainland every week with nothing to say. When we picked up, he was twelve hours ahead in the day, answering from our future. We pulled the phone toward our mother, yanking the spiral cord straight. My father’s roommate—another cousin whose name we didn’t know—sometimes talked to us instead. He complained that my father never spoke, that silence had shrunk his throat to the width of a string. This worried my mother, but comforted me: It meant I could reel him back to me. I knotted the phone cord around my wrist, tugged his voice taut like a kite-string, but I couldn’t pull him back into the sky I could see. _ Meng Jiang Nu grew at the rate of a tree and could be fed only soil, silt, water, insecticide in the form of vinegar. The two families took turns watering her, but she never grew more than an inch per year. By the time she was a girl, her mothers and fathers were dead. She outlived the second generation of the family, then the third, each generation leaving a written set of instructions for the care of the gourd girl: Keep her buried waist-deep in soil at all times. Turn her face to the sun. Stimulate her roots by stroking them. Water her. Prune her hair twice a week. If you see moss on her skin, beat it off with a broom. Meng Jiang Nu was planted in a trench dug between the Meng and Jiang courtyards. Her body was hollow, and the neighborhood boys liked to sneak onto the estate. They carved her a pair of earholes and shouted into them, heard their own names echo back. They dared one another to cut her down, bring her home, plant themselves in her body. In Jiangsu, my mother said, where my ba was born, there were daughtertrees.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There was clapping; Tricky rose to say - what he said every night, so that half the audience smiled and said it with him - that You couldn’t get many of those to the pound! Then - as if it were part of the overture to her routine and she could not work without it - I gripped my seat and held my breath, while he raised his gavel to beat out Kitty Butler’s name. She sang that night like - I cannot say like an angel, for her songs were all of champagne suppers and strolling in the Burlington Arcade; perhaps, then, like a fallen angel - or yet again like a falling one: she sang like a falling angel might sing with the bounds of heaven fresh burst behind him, and hell still distant and unguessed. And as she did so, I sang with her - not loudly and carelessly like the rest of the crowd, but softly, almost secretly, as if she might hear me the better if I whispered rather than bawled. And perhaps, after all, she did. I had thought that, when she walked on to the stage, she had glanced my way - as much as to say, the box is filled again. Now, as she wheeled before the footlights, I thought I saw her look at me again. The idea was a fantastic one - and yet every time her gaze swept the crowded hall it seemed to brush my own, and dally with it a little longer than it should. I ceased my whispered singing and merely stared, and swallowed. I saw her leave the stage - again, her gaze met mine - and then return for her encore. She sang her ballad and plucked the flower from her lapel, and held it to her cheek, as we all expected. But when her song was finished she did not peer into the stalls for the handsomest girl, as she usually did. Instead, she took a step to her left, towards the box in which I sat. And then she took another. In a moment she had reached the corner of the stage, and stood facing me; she was so close I could see the glint of her collar-stud, the beat of the pulse in her throat, the pink at the corner of her eye. She stood there for what seemed to be a small eternity ; then her arm came up, the flower flashed for a second in the beam of the lime - and my own hand, trembling, rose to catch it. The crowd gave a broad, indulgent cheer of pleasure, and a laugh. She held my flustered gaze with her own more certain one, and made me a little bow. Then she stepped backwards suddenly, waved to the hall, and left us. I sat for a moment as if stunned, my eyes upon the flower in my hand, which had been so near, so recently, to Kitty Butler’s cheek.

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

  Jihadis did not need the state’s permission but could volunteer whether the authorities and professional soldiers liked it or not. However, these pious volunteers could not solve the empire’s manpower problem, so eventually Caliph al-Mutasim (r. 833–42) would create a personal army of Turkish slaves from the steppes, who placed the formidable fighting skills of the herdsmen at the service of Islam. Each mamluk (“slave”) was converted to Islam, but because the Quran forbade the enslaving of Muslims, their sons were born free. This policy was fraught with contradictions, but the Mamluks became a privileged caste, and in the not-too-distant future, these Turks would rule the empire. The volunteers had created another variant of Islam and could claim that their way of life came closest to that of the Prophet who had spent years defending the ummah against its enemies. Yet their militant jihad never appealed to the wider ummah. In Mecca and Medina, where the frontier was a distant reality, almsgiving and solicitude for the poor were still seen as the most important form of jihad. Some ulema vigorously opposed the beliefs of the “fighting scholars,” arguing that a man who devoted his life to scholarship and prayed every day in the mosque was just as good a Muslim as a warrior. 75 A new hadith reported that on his way home from the Battle of Badr, Muhammad had said to his companions: “We are returning from the Lesser Jihad [the battle] and returning to the Greater Jihad”—the more exacting and important effort to fight the baser passions and reform one’s own society. 76 During the Conquest Era, the ulema had begun to develop a distinctive body of Muslim law in the garrison towns. At that time the ummah had been a tiny minority; by the tenth century, 50 percent of the empire’s population was Muslim, and the code of the garrisons was no longer appropriate. 77 The Abbasid aristocracy had its own Persian code known as the adab (“culture”), which was based on the literate artistry and courtly manners expected of the nobility and was obviously unsuitable for the masses. 78 The caliphs therefore asked the ulema to develop the standardized system of Islamic law that would become the Shariah. Four schools of law ( maddhab ) emerged, all regarded as equally valid. Each school had its distinctive outlook but was based on the practice ( sunnah ) of the Prophet and the early ummah. Like the Talmud, which was a strong influence on these developments, the new jurisprudence ( fiqh ) aimed to bring the whole of life under the canopy of the sacred. There was therefore no attempt to impose a single “rule of faith.” Individuals were free to select their own maddhab and, as in Judaism, follow the rulings of the scholar of their choice. Shariah law provided a principled alternative to the aristocratic rule of agrarian society, since it refused to accept a hereditary class system.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Her absence now is the size of the sky. The only thing that fills it is night. At night, I watch your yard-holes gaping for the moon to descend into their mouths like a nipple, fill them with milklight. Two nights after her wedding, she came back to pack the last of her things. Jie said they were driving to Reno for the honeymoon soon, and I told her not to gamble anything she wasn’t willing to lose. 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.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She was as haughty and as handsome as ever. I gazed at her and had a very vivid memory - of myself, sprawled beside her with pearls about my hips; of the bed seeming to tilt; of the chafing of the leather as she straddled me and rocked ...‘What do you think she would do,’ I said to Zena, ‘if I went over?’‘You ain’t going to try it!’‘Why not? I’m quite, you know, out of her power now.’ But even as I said it, I looked at her and felt that doggishness come over me again — or doggishness, perhaps, is not the term for it. It was like she was some music-hall mesmerist, and I a blinking girl, all ready to make a mockery of myself, before the crowd, at her request ...Zena said, ‘Well I ain’t going nowhere near her ...’; but I didn’t listen. I glanced quickly again at the speakers’ tent, then I stepped out from behind the bush and made my way towards the stall - straightening the knot in my necktie, as I did so. I was within about twenty yards of her, and had lifted a hand to remove my hat, when she turned, and seemed to raise her eyes to mine. Her gaze grew hard, sardonic and lustful all at once, just as I remembered it; and my heart twitched in my breast - in fright, I think! - as if a hook had caught it.But then she opened her mouth to speak; and what she said was: ‘Reggie! Reggie, here!’That made me stumble. From somewhere close behind me came a gruffer answering cry — ‘All right’ - and I turned, and saw a boy picking his way across the grass, his eyes in a scowl and fixed on Diana’s, his hand bearing a sugared ice, which he held before him and sucked at very gingerly, for fear it would drip and spoil his trousers. The trousers were handsome, and bulged at the fork. The boy himself was tall and slight; his hair was dark, and cut very short. His face was a pretty one, his lips pink as a girl’s ...When he reached Diana she leaned and drew the handkerchief from his pocket, and began to dap with it at his thigh - it seemed, he had spilt his ice-cream after all. The other lady at the stall looked on, and smiled; then murmured something that made the pretty boy blush.I had stood and watched all this, in a kind of astonishment; but now I took a slow step backwards, and then another. Diana may have raised her face again, I cannot say: I didn’t stop to see it. Reggie had lifted his hand to lick at his ice, his cuff had moved back, and I had caught the flash of a wrist-watch beneath it ...

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I took my bags up to my old room, and washed my face; when I came down a little later, the presents I had brought had all been tidied out of sight, and Rhoda was helping Mother peel and boil potatoes in the kitchen. They shooed me away when I offered to join them, and said I was a guest; and so I sat with Father and Davy - who seemed to think that keeping to their usual habits, and hiding themselves behind the Sunday papers, would put me at my ease. We had our dinner, then took a walk to Tankerton and sat pitching stones into the water. The sea was grey as lead; far out upon it there were a couple of yawls and barges - bound for London, where Kitty was. What was she doing now, I wondered, apart from missing me? Later there was tea, after which more cousins appeared, to thank me for their presents and to beg for a look at my handsome new clothes. We sat upstairs and I showed them my frocks, my hat with the veil upon it, and my painted stockings. There was more talk about young men. Alice, I learned - they were surprised she hadn’t told me this - had finished with Tony Reeves from the Palace, and had started stepping out with a boy who worked at the shipyard; he was much taller, they said, than Tony, but not as funny. Freddy, my old beau, was also seeing a new girl, and seemed likely to marry her ... When they asked me, again, if I was courting, I said I wasn’t; but I hesitated over it, and they smiled. There was someone, they pressed - and just to keep them quiet, I nodded. ‘There was a boy. He played the cornet in an orchestra ...’ I looked away, as if it made me sad to think of him, and felt them exchange significant glances. And what about Miss Butler? Surely she had a young man? ‘Yes, a man named Walter ...’ I hated myself for saying it - but thought, too, How Kitty will laugh at this, when I tell her! I had forgotten what early hours they all kept. The cousins left at ten; at half-past everybody else started yawning. Davy saw Rhoda home, and Alice bade the rest of us good-night. Father rose and stretched, then came to me and put his arm about my neck. ‘It’s been a treat for us, Nance, to have you home again - and you grown into such a beauty!’ Then Mother smiled at me - the first real smile that I had seen upon her face that day; and I knew then how really glad I was to be at home, amongst them all. But the gladness didn’t last long. In a few minutes more I said my own good-nights, and found myself alone, at last, with Alice, in our - her - room.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  And can I let people into where my visioning happens? Can we be intimate at the level of our longings? What as a society can we truly long for? Can I truly say out loud? So yes, all of that. Cara. And before we close, I do want to say that my work with Southerners on New Ground really was transformative in how we moved work.44 I’m talking like ten years ago or eight years ago. I was living in the South for seventeen years. Our organizing was moved by the questions: How do we move toward liberation with our longing and desire? And what do we long for? And these questions were a beautiful realization that “what do we long for?” to me holds “what do we remember? What can we imagine? What do we desire?” And that’s a very different language from “protect and defend,” which is critical too, but we’re on a spectrum of understanding, our heart must be in this. Our spirit must be in this. Our memory is in this. Our collective bodies and desires must be in this. And all of that is integral to our transformation. amb. Fuck yes. Thank you for taking this time. Cara. Thank you so much. Keep doing what you do. Peace. 31 This conversation took place on April 13, 2017, transcription by ill Weaver.32 Cara was the executive director of the Audre Lorde Project for five years.33 There will be an audiobook! I hope it will include Cara’s voice.34 See Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” this volume, p. 27.35 Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (New York: Penguin Random House, 1980); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1984).36 See Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” this volume, p. 27.37 Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Consider Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (New York: Scribner Poetry, 1997).38 See Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” this volume, p. 27.39 amb note to self: Make sure you hound Cara until you actually get to see this cool young ripe performance!40 James Baldwin, The Amen Corner: A Drama in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1961).41 Here, Cara is referencing my work as a healer, somatic teacher, and bodyworker.42 Adaku Utah is the founder and a collective member of Harriet’s Apothecary.43 When Cara said this, I snapped and heard the snaps of a million ancestors, who also at that moment said, “Oh, snap!”44 Southerners on New Ground (SONG) is a regional queer liberation organization made up of people of color, immigrants, undocumented people, people with disabilities, working-class and rural and small town LGBTQ people in the South.A Spoilerific Gush on How Octavia Butler Turns Me OnI once sat on Octavia Butler’s face. It was stitched onto a pillow in a tent in Dubai, and we were in public, but I still flush at the sheer longing I felt in that moment.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  If you find yourself naked with someone who doesn’t look at you with the love, care, and worship with which you see yourself, reclaim your skin—there are always more lovers in the sea or the app. Someone wants your body whole. Wait for that. Get Consent While it’s amazing that this needs to be said, don’t get naked in front of others without consent. Don’t show up and just whip off your raincoat or expose yourself on someone’s lawn as a romantic gesture. You don’t know how your nakedness will impact another. Permission and boundaries—those powerful acts of saying maybe or no—allow for real freedom within a connection. Get Naked Your miraculous body is a gift to you and a gift to those who get to see it and be with it. Undress in that manner, as if you are untying a bow around a precious and well thought-out gift. Make eye contact and see your power and desirability in your lover’s eyes. This is your living body; this is what aliveness feels like. Hot and Heavy Homework Assess your comfort in your nakedness: If you don’t feel fully comfortable dancing (it can just be a head bop) naked in your bathroom mirror, begin a practice of looking and finding your sexy, whole, and sacred self. One of my practices this past year has been to take pictures of my whole body and post them with the hashtag #sexyfat—to will myself and others to understand that the thickness truly is a delight. I feel like it has been a reprogramming that has made my nakedness, my movement, my sex, and my life feel much more powerful. It’s also been helpful to engage others. At first people would say “that’s sexy, not fat,” like they thought I didn’t know how to choose words to describe myself. Slowly, though, I think folks have caught on to the intention. Perhaps even been a bit reprogrammed themselves. 55 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “It’s Time to Reclaim Our Skin: How Getting Naked Restores Our Dignity,” January 10, 2018, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/its-time-reclaim-our-skin/how-getting-naked-restores-our-dignity.I Want You, but I’m TriggeredWe don’t see it coming.56 We are having a moment of intimacy: a moment we’ve been desiring and have been moving toward. And here it is, clothing is coming off, and the connection is good and new and hot, and then boom—a flashback comes at the tip of a lover’s fingers, the thrust of a tongue, a hand at the throat—suddenly we are pulled back to a moment of terror, violation, or confusion. Our bodies feel caught up in that memory state and cannot register the present moment, can’t tell if we are, in fact, safe here. Our hearts pound, sweat comes to the palms and upper lip, and perhaps we gasp for air, pull into balls of ourselves, lose our ability to explain coherently what is happening. We break the connection with our lover.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I met her once and saw her smile. Sometimes I think about how tall she was, her broad shoulders, that jaw, the way her cheeks folded into her smile, those focused skeptical eyes. The lack of social niceties, that laugh. Octavia Butler was crushable. I truly think that we could have had a very dynamic sexual connection if I had been bold enough to flirt with her when I met her. I don’t know her sexuality (although there are others who have argued every position vehemently with me), but I know that Octavia Butler had a beautifully freaky mind and that she, like me, used masturbation to move through her creative blocks. Age, race, gender, species, time—nothing familiar could limit or otherwise dictate the kind of intimacy in which her characters could engage. Reading her work, which was offered up to me as dystopian writing, absolutely terrified me. But it also opened my young mind to a realm of aliveness and sexual adventure that I am still pursuing. I have a hypothesis that Octavia believed pleasure to be one of the most important strategies and activities for long-term survival. And that she knew how complicated it was to let pleasure be, to let it lead us. I even think she understood that the moral essence of the species was unveiled in these complications around what we desire and how we follow it or deny it. There are two levels at which I would like to examine the sensual realm of Octavia Butler. First, I want to examine the actual sexy encounters she wrote, to examine them with focus and rigid … rigor. Second, I examine the role that sex, pleasure, and relationship play in each of her projections of human systems in the future. First, let me list a few things that we encounter in Octavia’s work: Interspecies sex. Some might call it bestiality, but that’s only if you assume aliens are beasts. Octavia had Wild Seed’s shapeshifting Anyanwu in a full-out love affair with a dolphin, as a dolphin! Anyanwu also spent time as a shark, eagle, leopard, and wolf.45 And then when we meet the Oankali in Butler’s Xenogenesis series, all mating has to happen through their third gender ooloi, who have big elephant-trunk-like “sensory tentacles.” In the Patternist series, the Clayarks are a hybrid species with animalistic qualities that some humans still desire and mate with. Threesomes. The only way to get down with the aforementioned Oankali! It’s gonna be you, me, and our ooloi friend here. Shapeshifting/Body Snatching/Gender Switching Sex. Yeah, so Octavia taught me that if you can shapeshift into any form, including other sexes, and your boo-nemy can snatch whatever bodies are out there, then y’all can experience some gender-switching sex.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The child spoke it herself, a sound halfway between swallow and song. Be careful what you ejaculate into the sea. A crab could crawl onto your ship and grow your child inside it. *21 My grandfather, having successfully sired children with his wife and a pirate, retired back to his fishing boat. My grandmother didn’t mind having one less person to feed, so he spent the rest of his life scouring the sea, holding the fishing pole between his knees as he doodled maps with both his hands. They were nonsensical maps, maps that were all ocean or all land, that had rivers ending in volcanoes or mountains that punctured the sky and let out all its color. They were maps with no directions, no orientation, no decipherable key. Sometimes the maps were just arterial collections of lines, rivers balled up like thread, roads without beginning or end. They were maps to get lost with, and when passing boats advised him to turn back, head toward safer waters—when dockhands tried to sell him real maps with real trade routes and real countries—he refused. He was trying to be lost, and he was professionally good at it. As long as he was lost, my grandfather believed that Ah Zheng would have to find him, recapture him from home, place him in the bondage of belonging again with someone. I choose to believe that Ah Zheng found my grandfather again, delirious with thirst and far from any coast; I still dream about it; I still see him in a fishing boat, small as a hat; then he’s suddenly overshadowed by a frigate; Ah Zheng on the deck, waving his shirt like a flag, bare-skinned and salt-striped; the logo of Ah Zheng’s new pirate fleet painted in his own blood; a scab-colored crab with a hundred legs; a hundred-legged crab with wings; Ah Zheng scolding Old Guang for leaving their daughter on land, letting her be corrupted by land-hemmed people; but at least there is time enough for a million more children, a million-gendered child; between them, there is an entire century to father; an entire sea to sire. *22 I’m not going to change the sheets for you, not even if you wet yourself. Why do you think you’re sweating so much? Because you’re sick? It’s the sea in you. That stretch of sheet where you’ve pissed the mattress: a shoreline. The heart’s a fish. If you open your mouth, it’ll swim out *23 of you, touch air, die. When I say shut your mouth, I mean survive. _ When I retold my mother the story, a week after I got better, she said all of Ama’s stories were figments of my fever and the only piracy in our family is the bootleg-DVD kind. Our cousins on the island used to send us shrink-wrapped packages full of pirated movies from Hong Kong, and we’d watch them while my mother massaged horse-oil cream into my scalp. She said it’d make me smart.

• 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.