Sara Fredman | Longreads | October 2018 | 11 minutes (2,913 words)
In the second season of Stranger Things a tentacled smoke monster forces its way into poor Will Byers’ mouth, taking up residence inside his body. When his mother draws him a warm bath, he refuses. “He likes it cold,” Will intones creepily. The demon inside is invisible to others but exerts its will on Will, who is himself but also something else. As I watch the story unfold, the human being growing inside my body moves frenetically, as if it is popping and locking to a beat I cannot hear. This flurry of activity makes my stomach look like a potato sack with several distressed squirrels stuck inside; this is likely due to the cookie-dough ice cream I have recently eaten. I, too, have something inside of me; it also likes it cold.
“Pregnancy has every element of an alien invasion,” I read on the NPR website. “The human placenta is one of the most invasive placentas.”
We often turn to the extraterrestrial when we describe the phenomenon of growing a new person inside of an existing one. Early ultrasound images recall the classic imagining of alien form: a giant head attached to a smaller, translucent body set against a black abyss. It’s not just the optics. As pop icon and formerly-pregnant person JLo once remarked, “Pregnancy and giving birth are weird, strange. The growing life inside you — it’s like an invasion of the body snatchers.” I assume this creepy description reflects the way in which the growing fetus influences, commandeers even, so many of the bodily processes of its host. Google “alien” and “pregnancy,” and the least-frightening video that comes up will confirm: “Clearly, the fetus has no qualms about doing whatever it needs to do to get things for itself.”
For most of his life, John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction, had trouble remembering his childhood. He had filled his stories with extravagant images, but he had no visual memory, to the point that he was unable to picture the faces of his own wife and children. When L. Ron Hubbard, one of his most prolific writers, approached him with the promise of a new science of the mind, he was understandably intrigued. And he was especially attracted by the possibility that it would allow him to recall events that he had forgotten or repressed.
In the summer of 1949, Campbell was thirty-nine years old and living in New Jersey. For over a decade, he had been the single most influential figure in what would later be known as the golden age of science fiction, and he had worked extensively with Hubbard, who was popular with fans. The two men were personally close, and when Hubbard, who was a year younger, suffered from depression after World War II, Campbell became concerned for his friend’s mental state: “He was a quivering psychoneurotic wreck, practically ready to break down completely.”
Carolita Johnson | Longreads | October 2018 | 8 minutes (1,969 words)
On October 5th, 2018, the Nobel peace prize went to activists Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege, for their work to end rape and sexual violence as weapons of war.
Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege
On October 6th, Brett Kavanaugh was named to the Supreme Court, in spite of multiple allegations of sexual assault against him and his shameful response to them, goaded on by a man who promotes the violation of women’s bodies as one of the wages of financial and political power, and ridicules women who speak out against and report sexual assault; I’m talking about the 45th president of the United States.
The bodies of women have historically been used to unite men in drunken fun of the type that remains, as Christine Blasey-Ford memorably said, “indelible in the hippocampus” at traditional frat parties that purportedly upstanding citizens like Brett Kavanaugh attended and organized and which continue to take place. These same men are often united in their outrage over the questioning of their right to be excused for such “youthful indiscretions” or collegiate, “boys will be boys” fun.
Natalie Lima | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,165 words)
Yesterday I woke up and looked at my body in the mirror. My nightgown was tighter on my stomach, the folds in my skin forming a silhouette of my shape on the fabric. I’d put on more weight over the summer. Panicked, I gathered all the visible clothes in my bedroom, pulled them off hangers and out of drawers, and threw them into a hamper. I carried the hamper outside. The sun was out and directly overhead, but the desert-winter air was cold, and I could see each puff of my breath in front of me. I tossed the hamper onto the driveway and some panties spilled from the top. A white cat sitting across the street, licking itself, scurried off. An elderly man with a Fitbit on his wrist speed-walked directly in front of me, past my house, but didn’t acknowledge me, which was perfect, as I was still in my very snug nightgown, braless, and standing over a laundry basket with panties spilling out onto my driveway.
I looked up at the bright sun (only briefly because it hurt my eyes) and I lit a cigarette and burst into tears, chunky black eyeliner from the day before streaking my face and running down my chest like wet soil. After a few puffs, I dug out the nail polish remover that I’d thrown into the basket during my frenzy, and I emptied the liquid onto the mound of clothing. Then, without a moment of reassessment, I flicked the remainder of my burning cigarette onto the hamper and watched one of my favorite maxi dresses slowly ignite. And everything else in the basket followed. Before long my driveway was a summer bonfire against a Tucson mountain range. A car alarm went off close by, but I didn’t know whose it was; I didn’t care either. My knees buckled and I fell back against the garage door and slid to the ground. Sobbing, I watched my now too small clothes burn into ashes right in front of my house. I eventually lifted the collar of my nightgown and hid my face underneath. “Oh my god, when did I get so fat?!” I cried and cried into my chest. After who knows how long, I leaned over and blacked out.
* * *
Everything you just read was a lie. But as I was writing that opening scene, I did imagine the deep satisfaction of being able to take all the crap in your life that upsets you and burn it up. However, despite my fondness for melodrama, there’s no way that story could have actually been fact because I’m a broke grad student and I have neither a house nor a garage, and I don’t really know anyone else my age (31) who does. My mom owned a house at my age, on a housekeeper’s salary, which I see as a testament to the present economic state in this country, but hey, that’s another essay.
So let’s start with the truth now.
Yesterday I woke up to the song of a lesser goldfinch outside my window (I think that’s what it was, but I’m not one of the Irwins). I announced to my sleeping dog, “Today is going to be a good and productive day!” then leaped out of bed and started a pot of coffee. Eventually I walked into the bathroom and looked in the full-length mirror and I saw myself — my chin was sagging a little lower, my nightgown with a cartoon bunny and the word “friends” printed across the front was snug on my body. It was clear that I’d put on a significant amount of weight in recent months (that part was true).
This happens sometimes, that we actually take a sincere look at ourselves in a mirror and maybe spend a few minutes — probably because of untreated anxiety — picking at some old blackheads populating our nose. But if you’re like me, after excavating some of the grime, you continue on to examine all of the changes in your appearance, notice how you’ve aged, think about your mortality, and remember the cross-country drive with your mom the summer your dad left and you turned 15, and how she made you leave your dog behind with a stranger, and how you didn’t see the point in existing anymore — not without your sweet pitbull who used to lick your eyeball without warning. And in the middle of this musing, you finally pause and tell yourself: Stop thinking about your childhood traumas before 8 a.m. Then you lean further into the mirror, as much as your back will allow, your nose almost touching it, and you think: Every day I wake up I’m another day closer to my imminent death.
This is when you know it’s time to turn away from the mirror.
Any sort of unwanted bodily change can make me want to sink into myself; it can prompt me to want to cancel all of my commitments for the day so I can brood over a salad and question my current self-care practices (or lack thereof). But usually this is not the case. In reality, things are busy and there is a hot cup of coffee that needs to be drunk, emails that need to be sent, a dog running in circles around my living room who needs to go out (and poop, or things will get ugly and I have carpet). In those first moments of the day, I am quickly reminded that life is in session and the weight is there, whether I like it or not. I know that the fat on my body is part of me, and I can choose to carry it like a backpack weighing me down, bruising my shoulders by the end of the day. Or I can carry it like a fashion accessory that is a key part of the outfit I slipped on that morning. Most days, I make an effort to carry mine like an artsy tote bag that bears an edgy photo of Joan Didion or Frida Kahlo smoking a cigarette.
* * *
How should we actually carry ourselves anyway? I don’t know the right answer to this, but I think about it often, especially since adopting a dog a few months ago. The skin on her belly hangs low, due to overbreeding, due to nature and circumstance. When I walk her, strangers point out how much her stomach sags, how it makes her look much heavier. Sometimes, they even point out the largeness of her uneven nipples. My dog doesn’t care, of course. I watch her move the tiny limbs attached to her sausage-shaped body fearlessly, in a way that I wish we all moved about in the world. I also think about our place as humans in the animal kingdom: our supposed superior intelligence, with our big Homo sapiens brains (though the brain of the sperm whale wins for biggest). Yet we worry about the aesthetics of extra flesh. We worry about how we carry everything around.
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When I was growing up, my mom used to tell people that my excess weight was baby fat. I’d run into the kitchen after dinner, during Fresh Prince commercial breaks, and ask her for a second slice of flan. She’d groan, then cut me a slightly smaller slice, with less syrup drizzled on the plate, and hand it to me. I’d smile and leave the kitchen. She’d instantly turn to her friend Kristina, the wife of my father’s best friend and an aerobics instructor. “It’s just baby fat,” my mom would say, sincerely, as she placed the remaining flan in Tupperware. “Hopefully she loses some of it when she goes through puberty. You know, your body changes then.” Kristina would smile and nod. It was evident that neither of them believed the baby fat theory. I didn’t believe it either (I could hear the whole conversation from the next room; our house was, um, compact). After a silent moment, my mom would finally change the topic to the less stressful O.J. Simpson trial.
Presently, I’m the heaviest I’ve been in years. My mom lives across the country now, and I call often to check in and ask about my nephew and sometimes about my brother. My weight occasionally creeps into conversation. It’s never to shame me, not anymore at least. Often it’s me complaining about how I need to get active again, and she listens and agrees. She reassures me that I’ll lose the weight again. Sometimes I’m tempted to say, “Mom, what’s the problem? It’s just baby fat.” But I don’t want to make her upset.
* * *
I’ve spent my entire life in a large body. I have chosen “large” as the most accurate adjective to describe my body because the word is vague, and my weight fluctuates from year to year — 100 pounds lighter one year, 50 pounds heavier the next, 115 down the year after that. Sometimes my body is on the smaller side of large, more Queen Latifah in The Last Holiday, that movie where she’s told she only has three weeks to live so she jets off to Europe, eats caviar, and falls in love with LL Cool J. And sometimes my body is closer to Chrissy Metz in This Is Us, and I eat comfort food late at night, shove the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos wrappers immediately into the trash can, and ask myself, Why is this my life? — all while dressed in fashionable prints and versatile shrugs.
Because of the current body I occupy, I have to acclimate to everything that comes along with it — larger clothes, tighter chairs, and by far the most unpredictable component: people’s reaction to it. Last fall, I ran into one of my former professors who I hadn’t seen in more than a year. We were at a reading, listening to a well-known poet discuss palm leaves and the rhythm in his lines. My professor did a double take when he spotted me across the conference room, his eyes wide open but blank as he sized me up, unsure if it was me or a stalker who was staring too hard at him. Ultimately he turned away, deciding it wasn’t me. I called his name twice, “Charlie! Charlie!” and his eyes finally widened in recognition.
“I knew that was you!”
“Of course you did!” I said but didn’t actually mean it. I gave him a hug and almost added: Maybe I should become a spy since I’m virtually unrecognizable now. In the moment, I thought this joke was funny, but I figured it would have embarrassed him so I refrained.
* * *
My current bodily state is, of course, mostly of my own doing. Bad habits, things I’ve been trying to kick my whole adult life. Then, last spring, I fractured my ankle. I was walking across the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa one day, watching the squirrels run about and bury nuts. I had just finished my tutoring shift in the Writing Center, where I’d spent the past hour copyediting a male student’s paper, an argumentative essay for why abortion is murder and should be made illegal again. To decompress, I stopped in front of the campus library and watched the squirrels for a while. One squirrel sprinted across the grass into a little hole it had dug itself and popped back out with a nut in its hands like a magician. Two other squirrels wrestled near a large tree (at least I think this is what they were doing; I don’t know a ton about nature without Google). After a stressful afternoon, watching these animals do their thing — watching life in motion — soothed me immensely.
A few minutes later, I continued my walk back to the parking lot to play the “Where did I park my car this morning?” game, and I looked up at the cloudless blue sky. Every existential thought I’ve ever had filled my head: Wow, life is so beautiful/Why don’t we all take time to slow down more often?/We’re all glued to our smartphones/We don’t appreciate the simple things anymore/I remember a time when I used to pick up the phone and call all my friends/Maybe this is why our society is sick and full of broken people, because we don’t take time to pause/I wish I could play the cello/I think I’m lonely/What is connection in this world anyway?/Nobody connects anymore, except to send nude photos/I can’t believe Snapchat moved past the era of sending temporary nude photos to strangers/When all my religious friends started using Snapchat to send photos of their weddings and babies, I knew I was getting behind the times —
Then I tripped. Not on something blocking my path that shouldn’t have been there — like a rock or a fallen tree branch after a springtime windstorm. I simply fell over nothing. Which has become the most unimpressive ankle fracture story anyone has ever heard. Sometimes I have to share how I fractured it; I actually have to say it aloud. “Can you slow down?” I plead with a friend as we walk to a class together. “I messed up my ankle a few months of ago.” They always reply with a sympathetic “of course” and proceed to slow down because my friends are decent people. But, invariably, the follow-up question is: How did you mess it up?
“I tripped. That’s it.”
“Over something? Was it during sex?” they joke.
“No,” I chuckle. “I tripped, just walking. There was no sex. Well, there were squirrels. What I’m saying is: My life is horrible.”
My friend laughs and pats my shoulder in consolation.
* * *
Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t live in a body? Or if we all lived in ones that looked exactly the same? I imagine us like Flubber, a green goo-like substance bouncing around a lab and happily jiggling all day. All of us green and unwieldy and free. However, I have considered how this sameness could eventually get boring. Sometimes we might have the desire to pair up with someone less green and more blue, or someone less gooey. Sometimes we might not appreciate the ordinariness of our own gooeyness and sink into a depression and chronic self-loathing. But this concept — of what life would be like untethered to a body — never leaves me.
* * *
A few weeks after tripping over air, after some squirrel-watching and ankle-fracturing in Tuscaloosa, I left my program and moved home to South Florida. It was for the summer only, before driving out to Tucson to try out a new grad school and a new, larger, more progressive city that seemed like a better fit. The move back home made for a good kick to my ego. Not only was I less mobile and speedily putting on weight, but I was also in my thirties and moving into my mother’s three-bedroom apartment — an apartment she shares with her husband, my younger brother, his girlfriend, and my 3-year-old nephew, Mugen.
I spent those weeks hobbling around, and because there wasn’t much space, I slept on a small daybed in the living room. Each morning I awoke to the song of a screaming toddler who, for some reason, was always fed in a high chair placed two feet from my head. At night I often cried into my pillow, distressed about the current shape of my life, regretting that I quit my full-time job and gave up my crappy-but-cozy apartment in Los Angeles to attend graduate school — for the financially lucrative dream of writing short stories. Though I slept in the middle of the living room, and though I was the largest person living in my mom’s apartment, I remained essentially unseen. No one knew of my daily weep-fests. Everyone else’s life, too, was in session.
The night before my cross-country drive to Tucson, my mom returned home from work and cooked my favorite meal — garlic chicken, red beans and rice, and avocado salad. She was calm as she stirred the beans, and it calmed me to watch her. My mami, nine inches shorter than me and less than half my size, mothered me that night. I decided to ignore the past few weeks so I could enjoy this last meal with her. I forgot about my screaming nephew and the tiny daybed. I forgot about my body and my messed up ankle, and decided — for just that evening — I didn’t have a body because bodies didn’t exist anymore. That night I was a glob of green goo.
My mom handed me the avocado salad and sat down. “Mi’ja,” she said. “Wasn’t it nice to get to spend these last few weeks with little Mugen?”
Before I could answer, my brother stepped into the kitchen. He rested his hand on my shoulder.
“What are you two talking about?” He asked.
“Natalie was just saying how much she’s gonna miss Mugie.”
“Aww,” my brother said. “Isn’t he the sweetest?”
“I think I’m getting a dog,” I said, then shoved some rice into my mouth.
* * *
What’s great about relocation is that everyone in the new place is unfamiliar with your body. They’ve never known its shape any bigger or smaller; there are no emotional attachments to the way they assume its size should be, like the disappointment when you see the plate with your favorite recipe come out of the kitchen with too much cilantro on top. People fasten themselves to what they’re used to, including bodies they don’t live in. A perplexed glance from a friend or loved one at a party, and you’re instantly reminded that you showed up covered in too much cilantro.
* * *
Once I had driven past miles of endless cacti, after listening to all the available X Factor auditions on YouTube and every mediocre cover of Whitney Houston in existence, I eventually reached Tucson, Arizona. I quickly moved into a modest apartment (and by “modest” I mean it had roaches). When I noticed the the bugs zigzagging across the bathroom floor one night, I called the apartment manager to complain. “We don’t have roaches here,” she said. For me, this translated to: Natalie, move out before you wake up with roach eggs lodged in your ear canal.
By this point I had acquired some furniture — a new bed, some tables, a reading chair — and I needed a truck to transport everything to the new pest-free apartment I’d found. However, I was nearly broke from traveling, and my parents failed me by never teaching me any practical moneymaking skills, like carpentry or identity theft. This left me having to brainstorm creative ways to secure a truck without landing myself in jail — in a city where I had no one to bail me out. I could:
(a) spend the last bit of my travel money and commit to never eating ever again;
(b) sell my voice to Ursula the Sea Witch in exchange for Prince Erik to come help me move my stuff with his royal carriage; or
(c) sell my kidney.
I settled on the only realistic option — (c).
Okay, I’m kidding. I decided that before making any hasty decisions, I’d sleep on it.
A couple of days before I was scheduled to move out, I found myself at Circle K, wearing a raggedy dress that should have been relegated to pajama status, pumping gas and buying a Chaco Taco to help me cool down from the Arizona heat (but who doesn’t love a Chaco Taco in the winter, too?). On my walk back to my car — ice cream–filled taco in hand — a tall, lumberjack-looking dude stepped out of his truck to pump gas. He sized me up with the eagerness of a dog who has spotted the can of wet food instead of the kibble.
“I like your dress,” he said.
I offered a half-hearted “thanks” and quickly licked up the vanilla ice cream running down my hand. He walked into the store, and I looked over at his truck. I stared it down just as he had done to me. It was a giant, white Ford F-150, definitely big enough to transport all my furniture in a single trip. It was perfect. When he came walking back to his truck, I appraised him. I quickly decided that I wasn’t picking up on any serial killer energy, based on nothing except that he was smaller than me and I felt I could take him in a fight, if it came to that.
“Hey! Sir.” (Don’t ask me why I called him sir, I already hate myself.)
He turned to face me, with the jolly, wide-mouthed smile of a 13-year-old who just met his favorite Laker — which just so happens to be the same exact smile of a man who thinks he might be able to stick his dick in you.
“Any chance I could borrow your truck to move some furniture?” I asked, eyes twinkling. “I’m new here.”
My lumberjack’s smile wilted. “My truck?” What?” The confusion on his face was unexpected. Wasn’t he used to people in his life asking to borrow his big-ass truck? Isn’t that what trucks are for?
“No,” he huffed. “What I’m looking for is a date. With a big, sexy lady like you.”
If this had been the first time I’d been told something like that, had it been the first time a man I’d never met announced how much he likes big women — like it was suddenly my lucky day — I might have clenched my pearls. But this wasn’t the first time, because I’ve been in this body for more than three decades — and all of those decades fat. After a big sigh, I looked over at his truck again and, in my mind, kissed it goodbye. “I understand,” I said, nodding. “But I can’t go on any dates right now. I need a truck to move my crap.”
I jumped into my car and sped off.
* * *
There’s a scene in the series finale of Sex and the City where Carrie walks around Paris, sad music playing in the background, wallowing in her sorrow. She has recently abandoned her life in New York to be with her artist lover in France. However, upon her arrival, her lover is busy preparing for his upcoming show at some fancy art gallery and has no time for her. This leaves Carrie exploring the City of Love alone. During one of her solitary, daily walks she passes by a busy cafe and, through the window, notices a group of women sitting at a table, laughing hysterically together. The women remind her of her own best friends, back in New York, and suddenly her face falls and she sinks into a deeper state of melancholy.
Anyone who has moved to a new city can, to some extent, relate to Carrie’s loneliness (though we haven’t all been invited to Paris by Baryshnikov). Now take that loneliness and compound it with the inherent loneliness of living in a large body, of having to navigate the world in a body that is often stigmatized, made invisible or hyper-visible at any moment. A multilayered loneliness.
* * *
The next day I rented a U-Haul and moved into the new apartment without trouble, just an achy lower back and some sweat stains on my shirt. I slunk down onto the carpet, then lay flat on my back and attempted some stretches I saw on YouTube. Mid-stretch, my phone buzzed. It was a text from a good friend, a meme:
Dear Big Girls:
Don’t be afraid to get on top
If he dies, he dies
I cackled. Which hurt my back a little, but the laugh helped me relax. I let my body unfurl on the floor right then, let it just be for a while. I rubbed the (supposedly new) carpet with my fingers and thought about every awkward romantic encounter I’ve ever had (which I blame on porn and the patriarchy but that, too, is another essay). The text from my friend was a magical moment of big girl solidarity, where I was reminded that I am never alone in this complex existence inside of a body. Everyone has to deal with living in a body and, some of them, bigger bodies like mine. So the next time I find myself climbing on top of a man, laughing because of the meme, I know he likely won’t die. But if he does, there are certainly worse ways to turn up one’s toes.
* * *
Natalie Lima, a 2016 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and VONA/Voices alum, is an MFA candidate in creative non-fiction at the University of Arizona. She is currently working on a collection of essays about the absurdities of living in a body.
In ancient Rome, there were certain fabrics so delicate and finely stitched they were called subtilis, literally “underwoven.” The word—from which came the Old French soutil and the English subtle—often described the gossamer-like material that was used to make veils. I think of organza or the finest blends of silk chiffon, material that is opaque when gathered but sheer when stretched and translucent when held up to the light. Most wedding veils sold today use a special kind of tulle called “bridal illusion,” a term I’ve always loved, as it calls attention to the odd abracadabra of the veil, an accoutrement that is designed to simultaneously reveal and conceal.
II.
Doris Lessing once complained that her novel The Golden Notebook was widely misinterpreted. For her, the story was about the theme of “breakdown,” and how madness was a process of healing the self’s divisions. She placed this theme in the center of the novel, in a section that shares the title of the book, which she assumed would lead readers to understand that it was the cipher. Rather than making the theme explicit, she wanted to hint at it through the form of the novel itself, “to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.” But in the end, her efforts did not translate. “Nobody so much as noticed this central theme,” she complains in the introduction to the 1973 edition. “Handing the manuscript to publisher and friends, I learned that I had written a tract about the sex war, and fast discovered that nothing I said then could change that diagnosis.”
There are people, of course, who will argue that divergent readings are a sign of a work’s complexity. But whenever I return to Lessing’s account of her novel’s reception, I can’t help but hear a note of loneliness, one that echoes all those artists who have been woefully misunderstood: Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a protest against abstract math. Georgia O’Keeffe insisted that her paintings of poppies and irises were not meant to evoke female genitalia (flowers, her defenders keep pointing out, fruitlessly, are androgynous). Ray Bradbury once claimed at a UCLA lecture that his novel Fahrenheit 451 was not about censorship, but the dangers of television. He was shouted out of the lecture hall. Nietzsche abhorred anti-Semitism, but when Hitler came across a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he interpreted the image of the “splendid blond beast” as a symbol of the Aryan race. One wonders what might have happened had Nietzsche simply written: “lion.” Read more…
The attention paid to the U.S.-Mexico border seems to ebb and flow like the tide. News coverage spikes and then recedes, giving the impression that migration itself must be doing the same, when in fact the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has been stable for the last 10 years. In summer 2014, it was the wave of unaccompanied minors arriving from Central America drew our scrutiny. The year 2018, as in so many arenas, brought new horrors, with young children forcibly separated from their parents and the ensuing debacle of reunification.
I spent the first few months of 2014 as a volunteer at a migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. On the side, I was dipping my toes into journalism, pitching to small non-profit websites. On a typically sticky afternoon in Ixtepec, I asked the priest who runs the shelter, Alejandro Solalinde, what changes he had seen so far that year. More children than ever, he said. And more of them coming alone. I wrote about the rising number of unaccompanied minors for the Americas Program that April.
Just a few months later, I watched with a mix of relief and bewilderment as international media flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border to cover the full-blown controversy. Few outlets had bothered to look at what had been apparent in refugee shelters in Southern Mexico for months: minors travelling solo. Only when these adolescents and children arrived on the doorstep of the United States did their situation become a “crisis” meriting media attention and presidential action. But then as now, Central American migrants were compartmentalized, and their stories simplified for easy consumption.
I stayed in touch with some of the young men and women I met in Ixtepec, meeting up in person when possible. In strip malls in Northern Virginia and Van Nuys, California, I have caught up over pupusas with young Salvadorans who made it across the border after passing through Ixtepec. Instead of writing about just a snapshot of individual border crossings, I wanted to fit together the disparate pieces of their shared stories into the bigger picture; leaving home, the dangerous journey through Mexico, and now, adjusting to the United States.
When I needed more substance, and a respite from flash-point news coverage of the border this summer, two books satisfied my desire for depth, context and nuanced empathetic storytelling: Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatownby Lauren Hilgers and The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Lifeby Lauren Markham. Both trace the stories of families migrating to the United States and explore the gap between the myths the immigrants had heard before arriving and the reality of the life they experienced in America. Hilgers and Markham unravel the complicated circumstances that led their subjects to come to the United States, and the unexpected barriers they faced once arriving in their respective destinations. Read more…
How many times can you start your life all over again from zero? If there’s anyone who knows the answer to that question, it’s Claudia Amaro. She had to do it for the first time when her father was murdered, when she was ten years old. She started over again for a second time when she was thirteen and her mother decided to move the whole family, including Claudia and her three sisters, to the United States, fleeing violence. She had to hit the reset button again when she was thirty and a deportation order for her husband destroyed her family and the life she had built over the past two decades, sending him, Claudia, and their US-citizen son back to Mexico, a place she no longer felt was home.
And with nothing left to lose, in the hope of getting back a little of the life that had been hers, in 2013, at thirty-seven, Claudia started over for the fourth time. She was prepared to spend as much time as necessary in a detention center in the US. She crossed the border north and at the entry gate said she wished to apply for political asylum. A few months later, her husband, Yamil, did the same. Claudia spent three weeks in detention. Yamil was locked up for two years and three months.
Back in Kansas, a place they both consider their home, Claudia and Yamil live under the ever-present shadow of possible deportation. Neither of them knows if they would be able to start over from nothing for a fifth time.Read more…
Hanna Neuschwander | Longreads | September 2018 | 18 minutes (4587 words)
A week before my daughter was born, I typed up her birth plan. Reading it now, it sounds strange and stilted. “If the baby is born alive, we would like both a birth and death certificate. … I have fears that laboring will be painful without the joy of knowing we will be giving birth to a healthy baby who will come home with us. I have fears that I will be deeply sad during labor/at birth instead of happy to meet our daughter.”
How do you organize anguish? How do you bureaucratize grief and fear into bullet points?
River’s birth was scheduled for September 26. She would be born in the same hospital where I had given birth to our daughter, whom I’ll call M, two years before. The staff were ready for us. A kind nurse checked us in at noon and led us to a delivery room with a small sign on the door — a leaf with droplets of water that looked like tears. It’s a secret code. It alerts everyone who comes in the room that your baby is going to die, so people don’t accidentally congratulate you for being there.
It’s hard to know how to give birth under these circumstances. While you wait for the Pitocin to kick in and get labor started, do you read? Do you make small talk with your husband? Can you will yourself to disappear? I had trouble sitting still. I went out into the bright afternoon sun and walked a paved labyrinth in the courtyard. As I circled toward the center of the labyrinth I imagined I was coming to meet her. As I unwound, I prepared to say goodbye.
Once the Pitocin-induced contractions got going, they were intense bursts of knotty pain with just 20 or 30 seconds rest in between, very different from the long, rolling waves I recalled from my first delivery. It was tiring. I paced around the room, tried to lie down, paced again. As the sun was setting, we went for another walk. Twilight had painted a dark rainbow at the edge of the sky, and Mars or Jupiter or some planet was twinkling just above it. It would have been beautiful except for the ugly parking lot we were walking through. I remember being confused and then excited about the large silhouette I took to be a horse statue at the end of the sidewalk — what is that amazing statue doing in this ugly parking lot, I wondered — arriving at it only to realize it was a Dumpster.
In the early 1980s, probably the summer of 1982, a teenage girl was at a party in a Maryland suburb near D.C. It was a memorable night, one which she could recall in detail almost forty years later. Two boys pushed her into a bedroom. One pinned her to the bed and groped her, his body writhing on top of hers, clumsily attempting to pull off her clothes and the one-piece bathing suit underneath them. When she tried to scream, he put his hand over her mouth. The boys were laughing. The girl was afraid the boy on top of her might accidentally kill her. His friend watched, then tried to join in, jumping on top of them. All three went tumbling to the ground and the girl fled, locking herself in a bathroom until she heard the boys stumbling away.
The girl — around 15 at the time — did what many girls who find themselves in this situation do: She told no one. In the next few years,she struggled academically and socially, unable to form romantic relationships.
It’s possible she watched on television almost ten years later when Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about being sexually harassed by her former boss, Clarence Thomas, then a Supreme Court nominee. It’s possible she saw Hillaccused of being delusional, or a vengeful woman scorned. “She wanted it” is likely something she heard said of this poised and polished scholarly woman. It’s possible that two years after that, in 1993, she watched as David Brock gained plaudits and wealth for a character-assassinating book claiming to show “the Real Anita Hill,” watched when GOP operatives referred to his mansion as“the house that Anita built.” It’s possible she again noticed a decade later, in 2001, when Brock quietlydisavowed his entire book and said his writing on Hill was gleaned not from reporting, but from rumors intended to destroy her reputation. He faced exactly zero repercussions. It’s possible she watched Hill, an accomplished legal scholar and lawyer, get reduced forever in history to a woman in the shadow of a man for whom consequences proved to be purely theoretical.
A year later, in 2002, the formerly teenaged girl, now a successful professor herself,married. Early in their relationship, she told her husband she’d been physically abused, but it took ten years of struggling in their marriage beforethe details came out in couples counseling.
It’s unclear whether she noticed that the boy who watched in that room on the night in question publisheda book, chronicling his history of alcoholism, and including anecdotes about a friend named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who partied at the beach with him as a teen. According to her husband, she did remember the last name of the boy who held her down: Kavanaugh. In the 2012 therapy session when she revealed the details of the night that traumatized her as a teen,she told her husband that the boy who attacked her was now a federal judge, and she feared he might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.
That day came earlier this year. Hesitantly, the woman contacted the Washington Post’s tipline and her congresswoman. Through her congresswoman,she sent a letter describing the incident, and requesting confidentiality, to the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Frightened of the repercussions of going public with her story, she ignored efforts from the Post and others to speak with her. She hired a lawyer who specializes in sexual harassment cases, andtook a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent. The test concluded she was telling the truth.
It’s unlikely that gave her much comfort, if she remembered Anita Hill’s experience. After all,Hill took and passed a polygraph test. The man she accused, Clarence Thomas,refused to, was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, and remains on the court to this day.
Those are the details ofthe story provided by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser thus far, and some of the historical context surrounding them. There are other cultural realities to consider, of course: the current #MeToo movement, which has some women feeling slightly less afraid to speak up about experiences of abuse, and many powerful figures on the defensive, accusing supporters of the movement of going too far. We are in “the year of the woman,” some say. Will that help Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor accusing Kavanaugh? Consider this:1992 was also “the year of the woman.” It wasa year after Anita Hill testified, the same year as the Supreme Court decision inPlanned Parenthood v. Casey, allowing states to regulate abortion as early as the first trimester, a ruling that reaffirmed central tenets of Roe v. Wade while beginning the gradual process of eroding the rights granted to women in the 1973 landmark decision.
Ford initiallyagreed to testify before Congress, just as Anita Hill did after statementsshe gave to FBI agents doing background checks on Thomas were leaked to the press. Women from her high school have circulated aletter of support. Of the 65 high school acquaintances of Kavanaugh’s who signed a letter of support for him last week,only four have stood by their signatures since Ford came forward. (Many of those 65, though, did not respond when POLITICO contacted them.) Mark Judge, the friend who Ford says was with Kavanaugh when he attacked her, has since writtenthat he never saw Kavanaugh behave as Ford described and he would prefer not to testify. The Senate Judiciary Committee has subpoena power to compel him to do so, but it’s unclear whether the committee will pursue that route. Meanwhile, a woman who says she went to school with Ford tweeted that she knew about the incident when it happened, though she has since deleted the tweet and declined to discuss it further.
Hill had support back in 1991 too. She hadfour women waiting to support her credibility, but they were not allowed to speak — because Joe Biden, a Democrat, madea deal with his Republican colleagues. Biden has of late taken up the cause ofaffirmative consent andcampus sexual assault, and has twice come close to apologizing to Hill — though not for suppressing her supporters, or for his own role in the attacks she received (he claims he wishes he’d done more to tone down his colleagues’ attacks on her). As Hill herselfsaid: “He said, ‘I am sorry if she felt she didn’t get a fair hearing.’ That’s sort of an ‘I’m sorry if you were offended.’”
Biden has pointed out he voted against Thomas’ confirmation, but if he suppressed her witnesses, how much does that single vote really matter?
Biden has long been praised for his ability to “reach across the aisle” and work amicably with his Republican colleagues. Many of today’s top Democrats have the same reputation. Does that mean Ford can expect to be undermined in back-door dealings the way Hill was? The vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation was scheduled for this Thursday, but after three Republican senators said they thought it should be postponed, Sen. Chuck Grassley canceled the vote. A new date has not yet been set.
At first, Ford’s lawyer said on television that Ford would testify before the committee. But after receiving death threats, having her email hacked and identity impersonated online, Ford said an FBI investigation should occur before she is forced to go “on national television to relive this traumatic and harrowing incident.” While Ford and her family had to relocate from their home for safety reasons, Kavanaugh’s wife was handing out cupcakes to the reporters outside their house. (Hill’s experience predated the internet age, but she too received harassing phone calls from strangers.)
Sen. Orrin Hatch has claimed the FBI doesn’t conduct such investigations, even though they did investigate Hill’s statements about Thomas. Hatch should know this: During Thomas’ hearing, he praised Biden and Strom Thurmond for ordering an FBI investigation “which was the very right thing to do, and they did what every other chairman and ranking member have done.” (The Justice Department has said the allegation against Kavanaugh “does not involve any potential federal crime” for the FBI to investigate, and that the FBI’s role during background investigations is specifically to look for natural security risks.) The Utah senator even doubled down in recent days: When Sen. Schumer criticized the White House for not ordering an FBI investigation, Hatch said his complaint “does not hold water” because Senate Democrats had withheld Ford’s letter from Republicans and the FBI for two months. Hatch’s accusation comes off a little hypocritical, however, considering the White House and Republicans have withheld the majority of Kavanaugh’s record, only releasing about 7 percent of it and blocking subpoenas seeking answers to a variety of questions. (For comparison, when Justice Elena Kagan was nominated, the Obama White House released about 99 percent of her record.)
Why do these details about Hatch matter? He sits on the committee that will question Ford — and was on it back in 1991 when they questioned Hill. He was one of her most aggressive interrogators, and accused her of plagiarizing her statements about Thomas from “The Exorcist” and an obscure decision by a federal appeals court in Tulsa, Okla. He doesn’t seem to have changed much since then: Ford hasn’t even testified yet and he and Grassley (also on the committee when it questioned Hill) have already said she is “mistaken” and “mixed up.” As Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has sat on the committee for at least a decade, told The Washington Post, “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close,” which hardly suggests any plan to actually consider any testimony from Ford.
It’s odd that Hatch’s blatant, seemingly blind support for Kavanaugh doesn’t disqualify him from being on the committee considering his appointment. It’s especially worrisome in light of a David Brock tweet claiming that it was Hatch’s staff who selectively leaked part of the FBI investigation into Hill’s claims about Thomas to him. It would not be surprising to hear that Brock is experiencing deja vu these days, harkening back to the days when he was determined to help make Hill appear “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” by printing “virtually every derogatory and often contradictory allegation” he heard about her. Contradictory claims are making a comeback, it seems: Kavanaugh’s defenders have mounted a wild array of excuses for the man. Sometimes it’s that he wasn’t at the party; other times that there never was a party. Or he was at the party but the incident didn’t happen; or it happened but it doesn’t matter because it was a long time ago and apparently teenage boys categorically sexually assault their female peers and that’s acceptable. Or something happened but it was “rough horse play.”
Hill herself penned an op-ed in the New York Times this week, writing that “the public expects better from our government than we got in 1991.” But will we get it? She doesn’t sound so sure: “That the Senate Judiciary Committee still lacks a protocol for vetting sexual harassment and assault claims that surface during a confirmation hearing suggests that the committee has learned little from the Thomas hearing, much less the more recent #MeToo movement.”
It’s fair to wonder why Republicans wouldn’t want to just pick a new nominee. Ford’s accusation is, after all, not the only problem that has come up during the judge’s hearings. He is accused oflying under oath not onlythis year, but also in 2004 and 2006. The thing he was allegedly lied about:allegedly stolen documents. (A former staffer for Sen. Hatch now claims that Kavanaugh “knew nothing of the source” of the documents he was provided.) It’s also unclear whether he was truthful about his involvement in the vetting of a judicial nomineewhom he recommended for the seat. He may have also lied about his involvement with the appeals court nomination ofa lawyer who helped develop the Bush-era interrogation torture policies, andanother judge who suggested a reduction of the sentence of a man who helped to burn a cross in front of a mixed-race couple’s home. He may have evenlied about his knowledge of the interrogation torture policies themselves (according to Sen. Richard Durbin, to whom Kavanaugh professed his ignorance of the Bush administration’s detention and torture policies during his nomination to the D.C. Circuit court, “…[Kavanaugh] had to know he was misleading me and the committee and the people who were following this controversial nomination”).
Whilelegal scholars say Kavanaugh’s actions likely don’t meet the very high bar for perjury, it’s hardly commendable to give someone who apparently struggles to tell the truth under oath — or fully understand the documents he is given or the actions of people he promotes — a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court. There are more than 3,000 federal judges in this country. Is it really not possible for Republicans to find one who has not, willfully or otherwise, said untrue things under oath? The Supreme Court is, after all, the highest court in the land. Wouldn’t it be reasonable, then, to hold the people we put on it to the highest standards?
Moreover, is being the party who insisted on putting not just one, but two men accused of sexual misconduct on the Supreme Court really how the GOP wants to define itself?
Apparently, it is. POLITICO quoted a lawyer “close to the White House” insisting Kavanaugh’s nomination would never be withdrawn. “No way,” the lawyer reportedly said. “If anything, it’s the opposite.” Apparently, the White House is concerned that “if somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.”
This is perhaps not a surprising view from a White House that stands behind a president caught bragging on tape that he doesn’t wait before forcing himself on women because “when you’re a star, they let you do it… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” A president accused of sexual assault byat least 22 women. A president whodefended his White House staff secretary after claims of the man’s history of intimate partner violence — which the White House knew about for months — was exposed. Or who said, of child predation allegations against Republican senate candidate Roy Moore, “forty years is a long time.” Or who defended Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Corey Lewandowski and so on. In effect, an endorsement from the Trump White House doesn’t do much to dispel the idea that his chosen nominee may have committed sexual predation.
As a non-fiction writer, Olivia Laing has made a name for herself by writing deeply empathic explorations of creativity and the human condition. Her 2011 debut, To The River, situates the River Ouse, in North Yorkshire, within history and culture, from its role in 13th century battles to the death of Virginia Woolf. Her follow-up, 2013’s The Trip to Echo Spring, focused on American writers and alcoholism. Her 2015 book, The Lonely City, interrogated loneliness as a state of being and as a catalyst for art. But with her fiction debut, Laing has pulled back from the closely researched subjects that have been her wheelhouse; instead, she broadly documents a seven-week span of time. And yet her penchant for research still peaks through — the narrative is written from the perspective of a fictionalized Kathy Acker-esque avatar, whose books Laing kept piled around her for inspiration while she wrote.
Crudo opens with the resignation of Steve Bannon, which Kathy, a soon-to-be newlywed, follows on social media from a Tuscan resort. Her attention ricochets between the rapidly unfolding news cycle playing out online and her private world of friends, her upcoming wedding, and, eventually, adjusting to life with her new husband. As she writes and prepares for her first trip overseas without her husband, Kathy charts the frenetic energy of the summer of 2017, unsure of whether the end of the world is truly approaching.
That sense of confusion was what Laing sought to capture. She wrote the book in real-time, with carefully outlined rules that were designed to ensure she didn’t deviate from the emotional responses to a specific whirlwind moment. Kathy, who is based in part on Kathy Acker, is also based on Laing, who turned forty and got married within the time frame of the novel. Crudo was conceived of as a means of understanding the impossible speed at which the news seemed to move, while also preserving the feeling of instability and uncertainty she saw in herself and those around her. Read more…
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