Search Results for: Tin House

The Olympian Who Believes He’s Always On TV

Mary PilonThe Kevin Show: An Olympic Athlete’s Battle with Mental Illness | Bloomsbury | March 2018 | 14 minutes (3,775 words)

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you.” –The Velveteen Rabbit

As Kevin Hall stood onboard the Artemis, a 72-foot catamaran, trying to help his teammates dredge Andrew Simpson’s body out of the water, he wasn’t entirely sure if the scene unfolding before him was really happening or not.

Andrew “Bart” Simpson, whose body might or might not have been in the water, was a stocky British Olympic gold medalist with short, spiky chestnut hair and a wide smile. One of the world’s best sailors, Simpson knew what to do in emergencies, which made his being trapped underwater for ten minutes all the more incomprehensible. The $140-million Artemis was supposed to be a technological wonder, so it made no sense to anyone onboard that it had crumpled so quickly into a taco shell, trapping Simpson in its fold.

Finally, Kevin and his teammates were able to pull Simpson’s soggy two hundred pounds out of the water and onto a floating backboard.

The emergency responders began to perform CPR, one officer cutting open Simpson’s wetsuit so he could apply a defibrillator to his chest. They pushed, the sailors waiting for Simpson to breathe, to show some sign of life. But Simpson was dead. He was 36 years old.

Months of preparation and millions of dollars had gone into the design of the Artemis, a vessel that had stunned other sailors with its foils and gadgets and that had seemed almost to fly over the water. Kevin suddenly felt lost. What had happened? Who, if anyone, was to blame? And why had Simpson, of all the sailors on the boat, been the one to die? Kevin had known Simpson for years, their sailing careers often overlapping, intersecting, and running in parallel. Simpson had something that Kevin and some of the other men on board the Artemis did not — an Olympic gold medal — and he represented something that all of the men on board aspired to be: a champion athlete and family man with a kind heart and generous spirit, seemingly unfazed by the success that he had attained.

Kevin thought about all this and more as the emergency workers took Simpson’s body away and everyone went home. In the days that followed, part of him wanted to talk to his teammates about what had happened, but part of him dared not. Because, if he was honest, he still wasn’t entirely sure that the crash and Simpson’s death had really happened. It seemed too horrifying to be real. And for a few moments, there had been that flash.

The Director. Cameras. Actors. Scripts.

Kevin wondered: Had it all just been part of The Show?
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Doomed in Nashville

Scott Boehm via AP

Monica Drake | Longreads | March 2018 | 19 minutes (4,778 words)

 

When my second novel came out, Chuck Palahniuk invited me, along with best-selling thriller writer and friend Chelsea Cain, to share his book tour. We’d make a joint venture of it.

Chuck is established, the author of the novel Fight Club, of course … “and 15 other books,” as he says. We’ve workshopped together for decades. A tour with Chuck would be a roving literary rave! My only hesitation? At 8 years old, my daughter was still young. She wasn’t a baby; still, I was her daily support.

Her father spent long days earning an hourly wage, leaving our house mid-morning and coming back too late to manage her life. A 40-minute commute on public transit added to his workday. He regularly stopped off at a bar before he made it all the way to the house.

When my first novel, Clown Girl, came out, she was a toddler. I’d brought her along on a homespun, couch-surfing road trip of a tour. She and I darted every which way in an old Nissan sedan, sharing bags of chips and sleeves of Oreos, driving between small towns. We met fabulous people. In other words, I juggled indie lit and parenting, and managed without childcare because as a family, we ran on a very slim budget.

Consequently? She attended 43 readings in 52 weeks, pre-kindergarten. It was boot camp; she learned to sit quietly and color while grown-ups did their thing. She learned patience.

This round, my daughter would stay with her grandmother — and she’d be fine — but still I had a clutch of apprehension. If anything were to go wrong, I’d be across the country, reading stories, tipping up a drink, laughing with strangers. The mother-guilt was thick and ready.

Hesitantly, I released myself, temporarily, from the obligations of daily parenting, and went, joining the team.
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It Depends on What the Meaning of ‘Consent’ Is

It’s amazing how the #MeToo movement has so quickly reframed our understanding of so many old things — books, movies, culture, news stories, scandals. I’ve been waiting for an updated interpretation of what was once problematically known as “the Lewinsky affair,” and I was so thrilled this week to see it coming to us from Monica Lewinsky herself.

In a personal essay for Vanity Fair, on the 20th anniversary of Ken Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton, Lewinsky reconsiders her relationship with Clinton — 27 years her senior — through the lens of 2018, and realizes that given their power differential, the word “consensual” might not have perfectly applied.

Given my PTSD and my understanding of trauma, it’s very likely that my thinking would not necessarily be changing at this time had it not been for the #MeToo movement—not only because of the new lens it has provided but also because of how it has offered new avenues toward the safety that comes from solidarity. Just four years ago, in an essay for this magazine, I wrote the following: “Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.” I now see how problematic it was that the two of us even got to a place where there was a question of consent. Instead, the road that led there was littered with inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege. (Full stop.)

Now, at 44, I’m beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern. I’m beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot. (Although power imbalances—and the ability to abuse them—do exist even when the sex has been consensual.)

But it’s also complicated. Very, very complicated. The dictionary definition of “consent”? “To give permission for something to happen.” And yet what did the “something” mean in this instance, given the power dynamics, his position, and my age? Was the “something” just about crossing a line of sexual (and later emotional) intimacy? (An intimacy I wanted—with a 22-year-old’s limited understanding of the consequences.) He was my boss. He was the most powerful man on the planet. He was 27 years my senior, with enough life experience to know better. He was, at the time, at the pinnacle of his career, while I was in my first job out of college. (Note to the trolls, both Democratic and Republican: none of the above excuses me for my responsibility for what happened. I meet Regret every day.)

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Jason Fagone, Joe Zadeh, Victoria Myers, Andrew Dickson, and Steve Almond.

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Grown-Woman Theology

Brittney Cooper | Eloquent Rage | St. Martin’s Press | February 2018 | 15 minutes (3,982 words)

The summer before I left home for graduate school, I drove down to the rural Louisiana countryside to sit on the porch with my grandma. As I took the four steps up to the house, face scowling at the hot Louisiana sun beating down on my brow, my Gram squinted at me, called me by my nickname, and declared, “It’s time for you to start having sex!”

I’m sure my eyes bugged out of my head, as the horror dawned on me that this wasn’t going to be any old regular visit to the country. There was an accusation in her words, as though this was something my 22-year-old self should have been doing forever. For the record, I had, in fact, had a bit of sex by age 22. For my 22nd birthday, my homegirl, horrified at my post-college near-virginal status, took me to a sex shop and purchased a vibrator for me. There was a classic Black woman read in my grandmother’s words, an unspoken “If that’s true, I can’t tell.” Of course she couldn’t! I was steeped in all kinds of Christian guilt about the little bit of sex that I had had and the copious amounts of vibrating I had done. That, coupled with the asshole I chose for a first partner, meant that I wasn’t having particularly joyful or enthusiastic sex, and most times I was in sanctified denial about my desire to be sexual in the first place.

I made it onto the porch and sat down to listen to my good Christian 75-year-old grandmother, a lady given to elaborate hats and bejeweled suits on the Sundays she didn’t usher at church, extol the virtues of sex to unmarried me. “Back in my day, we did it,” she said. I squirmed. Whoever wants to know this about their grandma? “Don’t ever let anybody tell you we didn’t. We went up in the woods and did it, but we did it.” By the time I was born, Grandmama had been a widow for 10 years. She and my grandfather got married and then had their children. In the way that none of us is ever inclined to think about the sex lives of our grandparents, it never even occurred to me to ask about whether my grandmother had waited until marriage to have sex, or to consider the sexual practices of young Black folks in the 1940s.

For my Gram, access to birth control mattered greatly. She told me that she would have opted for only two children rather than the six she’d had (and raised and loved) if birth control had been widely available to Black women in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Louisiana. “But we couldn’t get the stuff,” she told me. In her own way, I think my grandmama let me know that the women’s movement was a win for Black women, too, because in the 21st century, it meant her granddaughter could have a wonderful sex life without bearing children until she chose to.

My grandmother had already developed a pragmatic blend of both feminism and Christianity that worked in the context of her life as a rural poor Southern Black woman born two years before the Great Depression. I was still far too much of a Christian zealot to be either pragmatic or feminist. My grandmother didn’t have all the language for these differing ideological positions, but she had good sense. She looked at me with those laser eyes that Black mamas use to see right through you, and commanded me to “Start having sex.” She meant real good sex. Sex that left you with telltale signs that you had been touched right and handled with care. I didn’t exude sexuality. I didn’t exude grown womanhood. I did not look like a Black girl comfortable in my own skin. Because I wasn’t.

I was trapped in a raging battle between my spirit and my flesh. The evangelical teachings of the Baptist churches in which I grew up insisted that our flesh — our bodies and their longings and impulses — were sinful, dangerous, and unhealthy. We were admonished each week to bring our unruly flesh in submission to our “spirit man.” Having heard this every Sunday of my life I did not understand how my grandmother, our beloved family matriarch, could dare advocate that I let my flesh win. Clearly, I wasn’t ready for the grown woman theology that this holy woman offered to me that day. Frankly, I thought she had gotten ahold of some terrible theology, and I was determined to live my life as a good evangelical should. I had life goals and desires for success that my provincial grandmother, who once told me to go to the local college and then “get a good clerical job,” clearly did not understand. Sex messed with your head, boys were fun, but trouble, and a baby before you wanted one, could ruin your life. This was my credo in triplicate.

Dismissing grandmother’s words was easy. I felt that my theology, informed indirectly by the advent of the “True Love Waits” purity campaigns of the 1990s, and my ability to recite by rote all the Bible verses condemning sex before marriage made my spiritual perspective more sophisticated, more informed, more correct. I had imbibed a set of social ideas about Black girlhood and womanhood rooted in the fear of being a failure and the social shame of becoming a statistic. I nearly worshipped my mother, but I didn’t want to be a teen mother as she had been. I wanted to finish college, something my birth had prevented her from doing. By the time grandmother sat me down for the talk, I was twenty-two, had completed two college degrees, and was on my way to a Ph.D. program. By local standards, I had already made it.

White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color hypervisible.

There were no mission trips or classes devoted to sex ed. What my community also had was a teen pregnancy problem — it was not uncommon for Black girls to get pregnant in my middle school or my high school. I can remember only one white teen mom in high school (although I am sure there were a few others), and absolutely none in middle school. For me, the equation was simple. In communities where they talked about sexual abstinence and “waiting,” they didn’t have a teen pregnancy problem. In my community, where no such conversations were had, teen pregnancy was rampant.

These messages about success, whiteness, abstinence, and Christianity converged for me. Black kids accused me of acting white, but the white kids I knew loved Jesus (like I did), did well in school (like me), and got to have interesting discussions and experiences at church (which I didn’t). I have already mentioned the particular challenges of growing up a nerdy Black girl in a predominantly white school system. One way that I internalized white supremacy in my honors classes, which were 95 percent white and in which the kids were overwhelmingly Christian, was to associate the success I sought with the kind of whiteness and morality that shaped my classmates’ lives. White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color hypervisible. For instance, on the surface, it simply looks like white people have better access to education, jobs, and housing because they make better choices or because they work harder. And, conversely, it looks like Black people have less access to these same things because they are lazy. In fact, in most opinion polls, white people believe that Black people don’t work as hard as they do. And what is perhaps most interesting is that white people believe this myth as much today as they believed it in the racially volatile 1960s.

Held up as an exceptional Black student, I was conditioned to believe in the myth of my own exceptionalism, to see other Black students’ struggles to succeed as a result of their own terrible choices. But white children in my school district weren’t inherently smarter. They were reared in homes where their parents had been college educated and where they had access to enrichment programs and private tutors. My close proximity to middle-class white youth put me in a position to culturally eavesdrop on my white friends, even though I didn’t have the experiences they had. I knew the possibilities of those experiences existed. What I learned from watching white kids who were set up to succeed while Black kids were set up to fail, even in matters of intimacy, was that sexual self-regulation was critical to my success. It took me being a grown woman to recognize all the ways that systems of white supremacy regulate our intimate lives, too.

Black girls and Black women, particularly those who have had any sustained encounter with Christianity, are often immobilized by the hyperregulation of their sexuality from both the church and the state. These messages about excessive and unregulated Black flesh that converge from both the nation-state and the church, form a double helix of sexual ideas that form the core of cultural ideas about Black sexuality. These messages constitute a critical strand in a sticky social web that immobilizes Black women caught at the intersections of race, class, gender, and lack of access to normative modes of sexual behavior. Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins refers to this sticky web as a matrix of domination, a sociological term for the way social systems of power converge to impede Black women’s agency and structural well-being. Far too often the result of trying to extract ourselves from these webs, which immobilize us until all of the life is drained from us, is that we leave critical pieces of ourselves behind. Black women are often robbed of our agency to build healthy intimate lives. These systems don’t crush every Black woman, but they do retain pieces of flesh, bone, and spirit.

When you are free enough to run away, you run. It makes no earthly sense to go back and do battle with the system for the fragments of yourself that remain. We are taught to be grateful that we “made it,” no matter what we had to leave behind.

This is why Black women’s self-help literature is obsessed with the question of “how to be whole again.”

For my grandmother, my very successful regulation of my sexual desires read like a wholly unhealthy inhabitation of my own Black woman body. I was a fully grown woman, but my theology and thought process around sex was adolescent and retrograde. Grandmama pushed me to articulate a version of my selfhood that would force me to bring my whole self to the table and prioritize my pleasure.

“Girl,” Grandmother said while gesturing mischievously toward her nether regions, “I had good stuff.” (I repeat: No one ever wants to know this about their grandmother.) She wanted me to own the fact that my “stuff” was “good stuff,” too. Grandmother’s indecent proposal constituted a critical and intimate dissent from the wholesale American demonization of Black women’s sexuality. To justify enslaving, raping, and breeding Black women and girls, white Americans created a mythos around Black women’s sexuality. They cast us as sexually insatiable, unrapeable, licentious, and dirty. Today, Black women still experience much handwringing around owning our sexuality. Calling her sexuality and her sexual body parts good in the face of these unrelenting social messages suggests that my grandmother had wrested her own sexual subjectivity from the fearsome clutches of Christianity and white supremacy. Or maybe she simply didn’t buy in all the way.

The problem is that I still inherently saw my “stuff” as bad, as the source of a temptation so mighty that it could derail my relationship with God and my life goals all at the same time. This is no way to teach sex education to teens, and it is a completely absurd way for grown-ass women to think about sex.

The politics of fear and endless rules that we use to (try to) control teenagers is unhealthy but understandable. For teens, advocating that they delay sex is ultimately about maximizing their life chances by helping them make choices that will benefit them and the future families they hope to build. We could, of course, do a better job of telling teens to do something other than wait. It turns out that my “simple equation” that abstinence would solve teen pregnancy was totally wrong. In places where abstinence is the only form of sex education, teen pregnancy rates are alarming. In places where access to contraception and proper information about birth control is available, teen pregnancy rates have decreased astronomically. What the poor Black girls in my school needed was not the True Love Waits campaign, but rather good information about sex, emotional maturity, and birth control.

Telling grown-ass women that all sex outside of marriage is an affront to God is absolutely ludicrous. Healthy consensual touch is nothing short of holy. But the indoctrination is real, especially if you are invested in being a “good girl,” especially if your goal in life is to not “repeat the cycle,” to not “become a statistic.” These are the kinds of social messages that Black women and girls get about their bodies and the potentially enormous public and personal costs of their sexuality. My mother once mentioned that when she found herself pregnant with me at age 18, at her grandmother’s insistence she had to go up in front of the church and ask for the congregation’s forgiveness for getting pregnant out of wedlock.

My grandmother had wrested her own sexual subjectivity from the fearsome clutches of Christianity and white supremacy.

Widowed at the age of 42, my grandmother chose to never remarry. She told me that same day, “I would never want to marry again, because I don’t ever want some man telling me what groceries I can and can’t buy.” That was all she said about marriage — that she understood it as men being able to dictate to women how to spend money and how to run a household. Living her own life and being able to raise at least some of her children independent of my grandfather’s influence had shown my grandmother that having a male head of household was not, in fact, desirable. In her forthright rejection of conservative evangelicalism on the matter of sex, she modeled for me that Black women had the right to dissent from theologies that didn’t serve them well. Black women had the right to a say about their finances, their bodies, the number of children they bore, and the kind of sex they wanted to have. What she offered to me that day was permission to choose for myself.

I wish I could say that I stepped off my grandmother’s porch a new woman, ready to own and explore her sexuality. But all her fussing about what I needed to be doing proved no match for the years of shaming and moral panic about sex that I experienced both inside and outside of my community. Four years after that conversation, I came home from church after a particularly guilt-compelling sermon, bagged up all my romance novels, astrology books and manuals, and my vibrator, and threw them in the dumpster. The presence of these items in my apartment were tacit licenses for me to engage and indulge in sinful living, and surely God was not pleased with that. These days, I’m sure that between peels of laughter, God is sitting somewhere, saying, “Girl, bye. I didn’t tell you to throw away all those books and that perfectly good vibrator.” Live. Learn.

What does it mean when our spiritual and theological systems impede healthy living? This is a question that Black women should begin to ask forthrightly. They should insist fervently on answers among themselves and from their spiritual leaders. We do a kind of violence to ourselves when we shut down our sexuality. It’s not so much that I should have had more sex, although I wish I had in my twenties. It’s that there are things we come to know about our bodies, our impulses, our likes, our dislikes and desires, when we fully engage the sexual part of ourselves. We go around missing critical knowledge about who we are, or might be, when we act as though sex isn’t foundational to who we are.

Also, what does it mean when our theological systems impede our access to a healthy and robust set of spiritual and political practices — practices that should give us life?

My grandmother tried to empower me to fight for my happiness by helping me to not be limited by script and convention. She modeled the ways that Black women can build a life for themselves. And sometimes that comes with a willingness to cast aside fear and say no to what others think is best for you so you can find the courage to say yes to yourself.

There are so many ways that Black women need to free themselves from the strictures of conservative Christian theology. Notice that I didn’t say to abandon Jesus and the Church if it’s important to you. I haven’t. But I’m no longer checking my thinking cap at the door.

Many Black Christian girls are seduced by white evangelicalism, because, hell, it seems to be working out so well for white people. I mean, white Jesus helps white people to win a lot. But when my grandmother showed me that I could take a different approach to my theology, that it could be a push and pull, a debate, and even an ongoing set of arguments with God, she freed me up from my investment in being a Christian Goody Two-shoes. I don’t even believe God wants that. The God of Christianity seems to love people who are engaged in all manner of scandals, affairs, and murders. But I digress. We also have an absurd theology of discrimination against LGBTQ people. And far too many churches still believe that women can’t be preachers or pastors. The thing we would all do well to remember is that conservative Christian theology was used to enslave Black people. We can use our theology to oppress people or to liberate them. That’s our choice.

We can use our theology to oppress people or to liberate them. That’s our choice.

Sometimes this means that we have to reject the kind of Christian teaching that sets up a false binary between flesh and spirit, mind and body, and sacred and secular. To be Black in the United States is to be taught our flesh is dirty and evil. A liberatory theology for us cannot set us at war with our very bodies. A liberatory theology for women cannot set us at war with the desires for touch, companionship, and connection that well up like deep springs in our spirits. When we hear about how the “heart is deceitful above all things,” which is an actual verse, it teaches us to suppress our deepest longings, to not trust our own thoughts and our own counsel. For people who have been enslaved and oppressed because of their race, or gender, or sexuality, such interpretations are dangerous.

The Bible isn’t any old regular text. It is a text endued with thousands of years of political, social, and cultural power. That means that to wrest a theology for my grown Black woman life from it, I had to bring my fully embodied, unapologetic self to it. My grandmother didn’t teach me anything about how to understand the biblical text more critically. She offered to me a fully embodied theology of grown Black womanhood that day, one with its compass set toward freedom. One in which I should embrace the fundamental goodness of all my stuff, both sexual and otherwise. I had to become a fully grown Black woman to receive it though. In my holy hubris, I had dismissed her as provincial and out-of-pocket. How did she know, in her sanctified country-ness, that sexual pleasure and the freedom to pursue it would be critical to a healthy sense of self? She modeled for me one of the core things Black church girls would do well to remember about Jesus: He fully embodies both the divine and the human. If we spent as much time thinking about how he lived as we do worshipping how he died, our faith would demand that we prioritize a better integration of flesh and spirit, of humanity and divinity, than we do.

The second thing we need to remember is this: The primarily white male theologians who created the systematic theology of evangelical Christianity were trying to make sense of a theology that fit their own lives and their own worldview. This is why so many white Christians can read the Bible and still vote Republican. Because for them, nothing about the Bible challenges the fundamental principles of white supremacy or male domination.

Interpreting the biblical text conservatively has a political function. This political function differs depending on if you’re white or Black. Conservative biblical interpretation became the hallmark of the rise of the religious right, a political force that rose in response to desegregation in the South, and Lyndon Johnson’s perceived betrayal of Southern Democrats. Conservative biblical interpretation in Black churches has conversely risen in response to the political evils engineered by the white religious right. White male Christian conservatives used conservative biblical interpretation to pioneer a religious right wing to shore up the machinations of white supremacy in government policy. Black religious conservatives adopted conservative biblical interpretation to inoculate themselves against the massive devastation of these same social policies. Although the social desires (or political goals) of these religious communities are wholly oppositional, the biblical interpretation methods are the same. Obviously, that can’t work. If Black women are honest, it hasn’t been working for us for a long time.

Perhaps it’s time for us to read some other sacred texts alongside the Bible. My grandmother’s words are a sacred text to me — a sacred text of country Black girlhood. My mother’s words are a sacred text to me — a sacred text of grown Black womanhood. The words of Sojourner Truth, and Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston, and Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill Collins, and Anna Julia Cooper, and Beyoncé and my homegirls are all sacred texts to me. Black feminism has been a liberatory theology for me in its own right. It has made space for me to bring my spiritual self into the academy and my academic, intellectual self into the spiritual parts of my life. What Black feminism and my Grandmother have taught me is that Black women are experts on their own lives and their own well-being. Grandmama taught me that all the sacrifices I was making for middle-class aspirations weren’t entirely worth it. That if I made it but I was lonely and miserable, then that was a failure, not a win.

What I call Black feminist theology is something that can help sisters who are damn near ready to leave the church just so they can act like grown women with full sex lives in peace. My Black feminist theology is not just focused on what happens in the church, but rather is a call to those of us who are Black feminists to remember that lots of Black women are still quite religious. We need a way to reconcile our feminist politics and our spiritual lives, not only at church or mosque, but at the office, too. Even when Black people were enslaved and it was illegal for them to “read the word for themselves,” (as Black Christians love to say), they knew that God was nothing if not freedom. I believe that because of all the oppressions that we’ve experienced, Black girls have unique visions of freedom. I believe those visions are God-given, however you understand God, even if you simply worship, to paraphrase Alice Walker, the “God you found in yourself.” Freedom is my theological compass, and it never steers me wrong.

* * *

From Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper. Copyright 2018 by the author. Reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press.

How to Write a Memoir While Grieving

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Nicole Chung | Longreads | March 2018 | 11 minutes (2,845 words)

I am writing a book my father will never see. Not in its entirety, not out in the world. He got through about half of my first draft, my mother said, or maybe a little bit more, sometimes using a magnifying glass to read the manuscript I’d sent in 12-point double-spaced Times. When I heard this, I berated myself — I should have thought of that; I should have sent a larger-print version. “Honey, it wouldn’t have mattered,” Mom said. “He had to use the magnifying glass for all his reading, even the bigger type.”

Why didn’t I know that? Because I was far away, across the country. Because he didn’t read books on the too-rare occasions when we were together; he was focused on spending time with me. Because, while I asked about his health all the time, I never asked, specifically, how does he read these days? One more thing I hadn’t known about my father. One more thing to reproach myself for.

He did read part of my book. I think about that every day. He and my mom would sometimes read it aloud, together, chapter by chapter, working their way through it in the evenings after she got home from work. When my dad died suddenly, six days into the new year, they were still several chapters from the end.

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Guantánamo, Forever

Guantanamo guards keep watch over detainees inside a common area at Camp 6 high-security detention facility at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

Amos Barshad | The Marshall Project & Longreads | February 2018 | 16 minutes (4,100 words)

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

The message came in on a spring day via the undisclosed U.S. government facility that approves all correspondence out of the military prison in Guantánamo Bay. It was a request for representation from Haroon Gul, a detainee, to Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, an attorney. Gul had never had a lawyer. He was one of the last men in Guantánamo without one.

Now, in 2016, his request was urgent. After nearly a decade of nothing, he was being given the chance to explain himself. It would happen through the Periodic Review Board, an administrative body that considers whether Guantánamo prisoners who have not been charged should be transferred home or to another country. A board representative wrote Sullivan-Bennis an email explaining that Gul, also identified as detainee number ISN 3148, “has requested in writing that you assist him with … proceedings before the PRB, at no cost to the Government.” When the email arrived, Gul’s first hearing was weeks away.

Guantánamo lawyers are famously overworked. At the time, Sullivan-Bennis was juggling five other clients. She and her coworkers at the human rights organization Reprieve asked themselves: How can we possibly handle another one? “And then everyone was like, ‘Let’s just try,’” Sullivan-Bennis recalled. “Because otherwise he’ll be alone.’”

She typed Gul a brief note saying that she’d take his case and that she’d come see him soon. She asked if he wanted anything from Guantánamo’s all-purpose department store, the Navy Exchange.

“Dear Honorable Miss Shelby Sullivan Bennis,” he wrote back in sloping, cursive handwriting, “I have no words to express my feeling of gratitude, appreciation and Thanks for your timly legal and moral help in my PRB hearing. I was in a helpless and hopeless state of my mind in my legal affairs you gave me emotional psycholgcal help.”

A few weeks later, they met for the first time in a windowless cement cellblock on prison grounds. Gul sat across a plastic-top table from Sullivan-Bennis in a loose-fitting, tan-colored T-shirt, with his ankle shackled to a metal ring secured to the floor. He’d been detained in Guantánamo since 2007, shortly after Afghan National Directorate of Security forces burst with guns into the rural guesthouse where he was staying outside Jalalabad and threw a bag over his head.

For the first time, he told his story to a lawyer. He was in his early 30s, like her. He had a wife, Halimah, and a 10-year-old daughter, Maryam, living in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Gul himself grew up in a Pakistani camp after violence forced his family to flee his home in Afghanistan. Despite harsh camp conditions, he’d earned an economics degree at Hayatabad Science University. He spoke four languages, including Pashto and Dari. While at Guantánamo he’d learned a fifth, English.

And like nearly every other detainee held at Guantánamo since 9/11, Gul had never been charged with a crime. The U.S. government was justifying his detainment under the law of war. In a secret government dossier on Gul released by Wikileaks, Gul (also known as Haroon al-Afghani) is described as “high risk” and of “high intelligence value.” The dossier alleges that he was an explosives expert and a high-ranking military strategist who had executed attacks on the Northern Alliance on behalf of Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin, or HIG, a party affiliated with al Qaeda in the 2000s. U.S. intel also indicates that, in 2001, Gul attempted to help Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora.

Gul was too polite to put it this way, but he was effectively saying that it was all, all of it, bullshit. His affiliation with HIG was the same as that of millions of other Afghans: The group ran the refugee camps he needed to survive. He said he supported his family by selling small goods, like used books and jars of honey. He said the reason he was in that guesthouse that night was because he was on the road, selling, trying to scrape together some money. He said the Afghans had grabbed the wrong person.

The government’s allegations were built on secret interrogations and unidentified sources named things like IZ-10026. Sullivan-Bennis came to believe that Gul was innocent. It had happened before: An alleged al Qaeda agent named Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri was detained for 13 years before his release; during his PRB hearing, the government admitted it may have had the wrong man. Read more…

Trying to Understand YouTube Success

Ramil Sitdikov/Sputnik via AP

Rather than dreaming of being a film star, kids now dream of being a YouTuber, but what does that entail? Video producers and viewers wage wars on channels many people have never heard of. At Vice, Joe Zadeh spends time in Will Lenney’s London flat to understand the life of a YouTube celebrity. That life involves money, yes, fans and self-employment. It also involves days glued to various screens, responding to followers, a fragile sense of self-worth, sleepless nights producing content and anxiety about career longevity. England has an especially robust YouTube culture, with more than 250 channels that have one million subscribers each. That’s a lot of traffic, and it generates a lot of revenue for their creators. For many of us, the idea of self-employment implies freedom, but very little about Lenney’s YouTube career seems liberating.

“I’ve never loved anything as much as I love YouTube,” says Will. “But I have started to realise how it affects me. When one of my videos has a good first hour, I get so happy and sometimes I step back and think: ‘Hang on, these numbers on a screen are controlling my entire emotional state. Fuck, that’s dangerous.’ I feel good, but shit. It’s like my generation’s crack cocaine.”

“Could you go a day without looking at your YouTube analytics?”

“I’d rather go without sleep,” says Will, smiling, but in a “no, honestly” kind of way. “It’s an obsession.”

And yet, despite all the hard work they put in, YouTubers are constantly being reminded of how precarious their form of labor is. Will seems resigned to the fact that, at any point, this might all just go away. “We all have a sell-by date on this,” he says. “There will come a time when people don’t give a toss about my videos anymore. I’m just working on growing my skills in such a way that I can prolong that date.”

Read the story

Kara Walker’s Subtlety

(Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Natalie Hopkinson | A Mouth Is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five Continents, and the Art of Resistance | The New Press | February 2016 | 14 minutes (3,721 words)

* * *

Like a web
is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed!
Martin Carter

Inside the abandoned Domino Sugar Refinery in New York, the first thing that hits you is the smell: over a century’s worth of industrial grime, clinging to black, molasses-coated walls. At first whiff, it is kind of sweet, like stale cake. As you go deeper into the cavernous brick building, it gives way to a sour curdling. As my ten-year-old daughter, Maven, describes it: “It’s like how my cat smells when he throws up.”

Maven, my friend Izetta, and I are among more than a hundred thousand people who make a pilgrimage in the summer of 2014 to pay homage to the “Sugar Sphinx,” the seventy-five-foot-long, forty-foot-high creation of Kara Walker, one of the most important and provocative artists working in the United States. The sculpture is forty tons of sugar molded into a ghostly white apparition, part mammy, part sphinx. The line to see her takes more than an hour to travel and stretches out for four long Brooklyn blocks. I spot the writer Gaiutra Bahadur, whose recent book, Coolie Woman, explores the history of indentured sugar workers in Guyana. Bahadur’s research on sugar plantation life and its bitter aftertaste among Guyanese women speaks forcefully to the exhibit we came to see. I wave Bahadur over to join us in line.

The installation’s title, displayed in bold black type painted along the Domino Sugar factory’s brick façade:

A Subtlety

or the Marvelous Sugar Baby

an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who
have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to
the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the
demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant

The original Domino factory—first built in 1850s Williamsburg— was being torn down, along with the stories of generations of lives that it touched around the world. The factory was just one stop in the sugar industry’s “triangular trade” that created the blueprint for the globalized economy. Investors came from Europe; labor came from Africa; the cane fields were located in points across the Global South. The Domino refinery was the final step before the sugar reached consumers. Raw sugar would arrive at Domino’s forty-thousand-square-foot facility. Through the magic of refinery, pristine white sugar would come out. The profits that followed made sugar a key fuel of Empire.

The title, A Subtlety, is taken straight from history. Centuries ago, “subtleties” referred to elaborate, edible toys made of sugar. These exotic treats and status symbols were first made in the Middle East and popularized among the seventeenth-century European aristocracy. These “subtleties” could be trees, architectural models, or depictions of peasants holding baskets of fruit. There was nothing subtle about them, given what a rare and expensive luxury sugar was at the time. Unveiled at dinner parties, these were ostentatious displays of the host’s clout. The sugar sculptures could also be used to send more subversive messages. “Sly rebukes to heretics and politicians were conveyed in these sugared emblems,” writes Sidney Mintz in Sweetness and Power. Read more…

Asking For It

Andrew Matthews/PA Wire

Piper J. Daniels | Hotel Amerika | Winter 2017 | 12 minutes (3,365 words)

When I was a girl, the thing I loved most was the game Light as a Feather. Back then, I felt weightless when any girl had her hands on me, so lying there with six girls’ fingers tucked beneath my body, I’d float to the ceiling, flushed and breathless. The touching was permissioned, so I could just enjoy it, though there was, of course, that fear of the occult. In the days that followed the game, I’d worry about the evil spirits that might’ve entered me. I would lie awake feeling something of the devil a-flicker inside.

Light As A Feather was a ritual performed in murmuring secrecy. It was sexy and witchy, but did not require me to invite anyone or anything inside. Ouija, on the other hand, was a kind of penetration I was not yet prepared for, a game my mother called the occult version of asking for it. 

There are many reasons why in girlhood, we become necessarily preoccupied with possession. It makes sense—the fascination, as you are trying so desperately to grow into your body, with the dark thing that would drag you away. For girls are taught that the zenith of our lives occurs when we are most deeply inhabited by another. It is no coincidence in The Exorcist that the devil selects Regan for writhing. She is a pre-teen, which means most poised to be entered.

Once upon a time, everything carnal or feral in me was made, by faith, moribund.  For fourteen years, my body remained this way — untouchable, untouched.

Once upon a time, I had no idea what I felt like inside. I’d lie in bed at night, fingers pinned beneath the small of my back so that God would not mistake a single movement for a sin.

It was only a matter of time before I was broken open.

***

He was, at the time, my best friend. When I wouldn’t let him kiss me, he shoved his fingers in my mouth. They were cold and smelled sharply of clementines.

And then it happened that he wormed my clothes away, and made me try things on, made me spin in a circle, motioning with his finger, a 360-degree humiliation.

He choked me out on the heart-shaped canopy bed my father built for me when I was a little girl. There was a Maglite under the mattress I used to read past my bedtime, and he fished it out and beat me with it until I agreed to lie still.

“I love you,” he said, like I was an idiot not to know it. “I love you.”

As he entered me, the room went black and filled with tiny stars. I had no idea I was so connected inside.

It was over for maybe minutes, and then it was never over. [1]

For months afterward, I avoided the eyes of my mother, father, and sister. I was worried they could tell by my face that I was changed. And then there was the feeling that everyone could see and smell my hymen ripped open, that the bruised triangle between my legs would point now only to what was missing.

I kept thinking, this creature, this monster, that my friend whom I loved turned out to be — was it there all along? Or was it culled from his body by my body, twirling as his finger guided me, tracing slow circles in the air?

***

In the game Bloody Mary, where girls summon a murderous spirit in the mirror, the point is not to invite evil, to stir the supernatural pot. To summon evil is to acknowledge its inevitability, to address that each moment spent in safety feels like holding your breath. If being a girl means leaving this world in little pieces, let’s get it over with. In chanting, let us exact some small control, let it be clear when and how we are asking for it.

It was over for maybe minutes, and then it was never over.

Sleep was something to be avoided then. Within sleep, all the hidden things choiring like starlings.

The dream in which the graveyard slides into the sea, and I drink the water clogged by corpses’ long, still-growing hair.

The dream where I feel safe from harm in a field of sunflowers until one by one, they give me up like a name they swore they’d take to the grave.

So much of my life was spent in that blue hour of morning, too early for waking and much too late to fall asleep. I’d put myself in a kind of trance watching bloody true crime television. Like melancholic music when your heart is broken, sometimes the only thing you can do with a feeling is lean into it.

Fictional shows in which rapists were captured and punished enraged me. I preferred survivors of torture talking straight to the camera. Stalked, abducted, raped, shot at point-blank range. Then burned, tossed in a trunk, tied with rebar to a desert stone. The actresses reenacting the story crawling so convincingly across lush lawns in blood-soaked nightgowns or running through a dark wood with only half of their heads attached.

A documentary about Seattle singer Mia Zapata, who wrote a song about being murdered and spread in pieces all over town just before being killed by a stranger who strangled her with her own sweatshirt.

A documentary about the Tate murders, in which the crime scene photo of Abigail Folgers shows her less heiress, more lawn stain. Her last words to the man stabbing her, “You’ve got me.  I’m already dead.”

Maybe I was morbid to find comfort or, at the very least, distraction in these stories which were gruesome beyond my imagination. But I needed a break from the narrative I was living. The one where girls in my town were fish that fill a manmade lake, or fair chase pheasants set loose in the forest. The narrative where being hunted was the only thing they ever had in mind for us.

On a popular daytime talk show, footage of a body being exhumed. There are machines to help with the unearthing of the burial vault and tools to break its seal, revealing a cherry colored casket still draped in withered white roses. The shock of these bright colors coming out of the dirt makes it seem as though the casket too could be pried open to reveal a girl who is more like a Russian doll than a decomposing body or even a girl who would open her eyes, like the murder never happened, and say: I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.[2]

When as children, my sister and I named Ken dolls after our enemies and buried them alive beneath the evergreens, and when we dug up dead frogs from the glittery coffins we made for them, praying over their tiny souls in tongues of necromancy, these were not merely games to us, though that is what we said. We knew survival would depend increasingly upon our relationship to resurrection.

***

And so, just as the corn was silking, all I could think about was driving till I hit the Pacific, becoming for all intents and purposes a ghost.

You see, I come from a town where no one leaves and there’s only one way a girl goes missing. Every few years, weighted to the bottom of a golf course pond or stuffed in a storm drain she will be discovered, made Legend.

You see, I come from a town where there’s only one way a girl is made Legend.

And in that town, that the air does not ring with them, that the new crocuses do not chatter with what has become of them, that the hushed ground is filled with them where they will remain forever, it is that more than anything that gave me the courage to leave.

Give me a world, I said aloud to no one.  You have taken the world I was.[3]

And a new world opened for me, by and by.

Each night in that blue light, they flickered across the ceiling. Pretty girls turned hungry ghosts who wanted to leave with me. I could see each of their lives like little boats upon the water, bright first, then burning, then snuffed out by the breakers of the sea.

I come from a town where no one leaves and there’s only one way a girl goes missing. Every few years, weighted to the bottom of a golf course pond or stuffed in a storm drain she will be discovered.

I will not say to you that the Legends as I experienced them were real, that I can prove how the room filled with strange heat, buoyed by their breath.

What I’m saying is whether they were real or mere projections of the mind seen with intense clarity, we belonged to one another. And knowing them, what was done to them, gave me one hundred new reasons to survive.

***

I began at dawn through the green maze of corn, an achingly familiar crop that dizzied suddenly with its vastness, its flickering infinity. I drove all day long, straight through Des Moines’ end-of-the-world darkness, where I made believe the few flickering lights were lanterns of the last survivors. Throughout Nebraska, day and night, earth and sky fused together, falling like a white sheet over me. That such monotony gave way to mountains was its own little miracle, though I couldn’t decide at first whether they made me feel sheltered or loomed over. By the time I got to Oregon, the clouds seemed close enough that you could reach your hand through the sunroof and come back with a fistful of nimbostratus.  And when at last I reached Seattle, lush and so fervently green it bordered upon narcotic, I knew for certain I would find heaven there.

The first thing I did was drive to the corner of 24th Avenue and South Washington Street, the place where Mia Zapata was made Legend. It felt like the only right place to start.  Twenty years had passed since her death, something like 5,520 days of rain, and it seemed to me she still smudged the earth, though there was nothing of her spirit there, which I knew would move through darkened rooms bright as aurora borealis.

I could see each of their lives like little boats upon the water, bright first, then burning, then snuffed out by the breakers of the sea

It was like stepping inside a house where you intuit immediately that something horrible has happened, except that there were no walls around it, making it that much harder to escape.

Aside from my books, I didn’t want anything that home had threaded through. Everything else I burned or left on the side of the road. What I needed, more than anything, was a perfect loneliness, pure and cold and bright. I found a studio two streets east of where Mia had lived when she’d been alive. With the apartment empty but for a mattress, windows clean, ceilings high, walls freshly white, I loved Seattle, which was more a city in the evening when its greenery folded into darkness. That first night, there was whiskey, and the Legends partnered and danced sweetly across the ceiling, and Nina Simone sang to a lover I hadn’t met yet: You’re spring to me / all things to me / don’t you know you’re life itself?

Back in high school, there were girls I loved for their beauty, and for their ability to receive pleasure without needing to return it. I would learn little things about them—a favorite song, a moon sign so I could joke that we were star-crossed or destined depending—but I did not use or remember their names. I wanted them for the way they kissed, the way they moved and sounded in the dark, that they smelled of rosehip and jasmine or Parliaments and Jameson, that beneath my tongue, they’d rise to the ceiling like steam. The only girls I named were the girls with whom things went terribly wrong.

For instance, there was I Should’ve Loved A Thunderbird Instead, who threw a brick through the window of my car, filled the driver’s seat with mayonnaise, and lit all of my shoes on fire before trying to fuck me in the driveway of my parents’ home.

There was What Spring Does To The Cherry Trees, who had feverish dreams I was the devil and tried, on more than one occasion, to spoon holy water into my hair before accosting me one day when I was at the dentist, marching right up to the chair to hit me in the face with the zippered end of her leather jacket.

In both instances, the authorities had to be called, and I authored wild explanations that absolved me entirely. I did not learn, in either instance, that for all the charm in the world, I would always be out of my depth until I could become a woman who could set her heart on something.

***

My favorite book as a girl was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. I found myself in the farewell letter Willie-Jay addresses to Perry, one the novel’s killers:

You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction.

The juxtaposition of individuality and conformity could be true of anyone, as could the notion of existing in a half-world. What frightened me then was the misplaced hunger, the way that Perry, pulled by confusion and desire, became a killer, a grown man who had yet to understand his appetite.

The trouble with being a girl is that you are expected to trade craving for hunger, hunger the specter that looms over you even as you sleep. And this makes you feel like a predator, a prowler in the lambs’ midst.

Being both evangelical and gay from birth, I worried at purity balls that my sinner’s skin would singe my satin gown. I was made to wear a purity ring that only a wedding ring could remove—this, an offering of love from my earthly and heavenly fathers.

What I knew that they did not: If God made me, he made me an aberration of nature.  Try as I might to people the wedding chapels of my imagination, there were other things consuming me, other fires, which burned the bridegrooms, and leveled the altars to ash.

It was with this same burning that I left my hometown, determined to find what I wanted and, for the first time in my life, to ask for it.

***

I learned Seattle by watching it like a television. Learned, for example, that I would need to trade my thick Midwestern skin for indifference. Learned that a morning’s bleariness was known to burn away like a marine layer, at which point the branches, hanging lush and wet and low, flickered for a bit in the wide pinking light. And on those days, people would stand in the street with reverence, or perhaps I imagined it that way. In any case, it made me feel that I was less alone.

I met her at a bar called Flowers, quiet and dark, three whiskies in.

From the start it was almost too much to look at her, so I stared instead out the windows, balmy with breath, tracing my fingers through their slow sweat.

The trouble with being a girl is that you are expected to trade craving for hunger, hunger the specter that looms over you even as you sleep.

When I worked up the nerve to be near her I was hooked right away by the friction between the few cautious words she afforded me and the way she knew, like no one had ever known, how to own me with her hot, hungry look. Those eyes that reduced continents to kindling, crisping planets of the Milky Way until the known universe scattered like ash from a cigarette’s sleeve and in that bar, it was only the two of us. And in that moment, I was the first woman ever made or the last one alive at the end of the world.

We compared scrapes born of war stories, and secretly, I named hers after summer constellations.

Southern Crown.
Northern Crown.
Arrow.
Archer.
Shield.

When I touched myself and was close to coming, I whispered her name, evoking her: a séance.

In the nights that followed, she was the specter. Bright, inscrutable orb darting the darkened room.

Every day the Legends got hungrier. I could hear the grinding of each twinkling maw. We were all starving in our own way, them because they’d been denied their rightful lives as women, me as a woman with the world before her too frightened and scarred to do a damn thing about it.

My days with them were lucid dreams. Their stories swirled around me, and if I wanted, I could pluck one from the air and ask her.

Legend who spoke of her body discovered in the dumpster behind Dot Liquor.

Legend who was murdered while playing Bloody Mary in the mirror.

Legends whose sweet mouths appeared still singing in the water, multiples of Millais’ Ophelia.

Legend three days shy of her sweet sixteen birthday party, who received instead the party where everyone searches and searches, finding nothing in the end but a crawl space filled with bone.

I say that I asked them for their stories, but over time, the room became cacophonous. It was sometimes hard to remember I wasn’t one of them. I was beginning to feel like my body was an Ouija board full of vague answers: yes, no, goodbye. Forever anticipating that moment where the wind shifts and the room moves from carefree to electric and malevolent.

The ghost I knew by heart was Mia. She was the only one who moved through the world with me. It was, after all, her neighborhood, and she was nice enough to show me around. We spoke through a kind of telekinesis, girl to ghost, and although it is strange to say so, Mia was my first Seattle friend. I would learn I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, that many girls in Seattle were descendants of Mia, beautiful and strange but because of her story, less innocent, walking home from the Comet Tavern, their keys tiny knives between their fingers, their eyes two fierce dogs gone hunting in the night.

In Buddhism, there is a creature known as the Hungry Ghost, a spirit characterized by great craving and eternal starvation. Small of mouth, narrow of throat, Hungry Ghosts are all desire, with no way to satiate. Sometimes they’ll receive a drop of water which evaporates upon the lips, or food, which bursts into flames before they can swallow. Each iota of desire comes with the consequence of pain, and being a woman had me like a Hungry Ghost. I am no longer willing to forfeit the wild and beautiful things I thirst for all for some craving gone quiet.

What I want now is a balance between woman and ghost.

A courage that has nothing to do with survival.

I want to eat a Clementine without thinking of his cold fingers.

I want Mia to eat my heart from cupped hands as Beatrice did Dante’s, and for everyone to vow on her behalf: I will not let him make of me a craven thing when bravery is so much sweeter.

I want to never forget the Legends, but to set them free, or to trap them in a lucid dream from which I will myself awake, so that I may finally see past them, see instead the first sailboats of morning upon the water, salty and cerulean, and wonder how I got so lucky. And wonder I am alive to know it at all.

“I want to be with someone who knows secret things,” Rilke said, “or else alone.” And I would like that to be my love letter to her.

I want her to see in perfect detail the things that might have destroyed me, and how I chose beauty instead. I want her to know so she never doubts it again, that she is commensurate of that beauty.

I want to move into the terror and the awe of this rare and beautiful thing between us, and hold there until we forget who we are, or how we might ruin one another, for as close and as long as she’ll let me.

And if ever she asks, without a word, I will gently
let her go.


[1] Heather McHugh
[2] William Faulkner
[3] Anne Carson

* * *

The essay first appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of Hotel Amerika, a biannual print literary journal based in Chicago, and is forthcoming in Daniels’ debut essay collection, Ladies Lazarus, from Tarpaulin Sky Press.