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Under the Influence: Watch(wo)men

Jacques Benazra

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | October 2019 |  7 minutes (1,716 words)

Part three in a three-part series on the influencer economy. Read part one, “White Lies,” and part two, “Deeper than Beauty.”

* * *

“I haven’t believed the purity of my own intentions ever since I became my own salesperson.” Imagine PewDiePie — the Swedish influencer who at one point was the most-subscribed user on YouTube for literally just playing video games while spewing alt-right fodder, the guy name-checked by a mass shooter yet little scrutinized by anyone, let alone himself — saying that. “I saw the gap widening between the story we told and the situation on the ground.” Imagine Logan Paul , another YouTuber whose popularity is barely examined perhaps because his Jackass-lite routine suggests there is nothing to him beyond the denigration of all living things from rats to suicide victims, saying that. Those quotes, both published in The Cut, come from women, both of them influencers: the first is Tavi Gevinson, whose success as the founder of the teen magazine Rookie has been parlayed into an acting career fueled by Instagram; the second is Caroline Calloway’s ghostwriter Natalie Beach, who exposed her employer as a largely empty vessel filled by Beach’s own talents. Theirs came in a long line of critiques recently piled onto the influencing industry (and those within it), critiques that seemed to be overwhelmingly delivered by women like Gevinson, like Beach, even like me.

I notice male influencers interrogating video games, superhero movies … even women. What I don’t notice is male influencers interrogating this interrogation. But is it really only women who are contemplating this industry and their roles within it? Who are capable of thinking a little, instead of constantly doing? According to Crystal Abidin, who has been studying influencers for more than a decade, the lack of clarity starts at the source, with the word itself. “I think the politics of naming and self-branding contributes to the perception that there are more women scholars or more women influencers looking at these things,” says the author of Internet Celebrity (2018), “when I don’t actually feel that this is the case.” The case is what it always has been: We watch women as they watch themselves, a Matryoshka doll of reflection and self-reflection, and we watch men as they watch themselves, with little more than a passing glance.

* * *

On its face, influencing is visibly feminine, which tracks if you think about what an influencer actually does. “You are basically in the business of persuading people to like you,” says Abidin. While women may not be considered authorities on much, they are certainly expected to have a handle on likability. Some women in the influencing industry even feel they have an advantage over men, since the job lends itself particularly well to the emotional-labor savvy. That the most successful influencers tend to project the most empathy explains in part why queer male influencers do so well in the lifestyle niche (one of the industry’s most lucrative) — their emotional acuity tends to exceed that of many straight men, who have never been forced into introspection by oppression.  

But being introspective can also be a liability — it’s harder to function online when you’re reflecting on how every decision might impact you. At the BBC, #vanlife-r Brianna Madia presented the calculus this way: “How vulnerable can you be? What piece of information can I expose about myself? How wide can I rip my chest open for all of these people?” Any potential balance is something of a myth since the “authenticity bind,” identified by media and communication professor Jefferson Pooley in an essay in the 2010 book Blowing up the Brand, ensures that female influencers lose out either way: They are shameless if they share and a sham if they don’t. Gevinson’s essay described internalizing just this dilemma, dividing her life into “the part of myself that had learned to register experience as only fully realized once primed for public consumption, but that was monitored by the other part of myself, the part that knew the actual sharing of these specific moments would appear inauthentic.”

Women subject themselves online to a sort of identity fracturing on two levels, internal and external. Not only do they actively present themselves through a medium designed for the male gaze, but we actively receive and process them from this same vantage point, one that views them fundamentally as sex objects. Female influencers are siphoned into more visual platforms (Instagram, Facebook) where they deal in subjects requiring more visual expertise (beauty, fashion), while the text-based spaces (Reddit, Digg) that emphasize more expansive subject matter (politics, tech) are more hospitable to men. Ultimately, authenticity is not the only bind women find themselves in — they are also primarily valued as a gender by the qualities we devalue as a society. They are pressured not to perform “real work,” but instead to do emotional labor, to be more personal and intimate. It’s virtually the only arena in which they can succeed, for which they are simultaneously undervalued and overvalued. 

Even women’s content is secondary to their physical appearance, however, since this all falls under the male gaze, remember, and the male gaze objectifies first. “Your body is your calling card” is how Abidin explains it. Regardless of your skills, if you gain weight, like queer beauty influencer Mina Gerges did, you lose value. If you are expected to be single and you are suddenly coupled, once again, your value drops. The constant scrutiny of women’s personal lives impels them to do the same, deconstructing themselves in a way they might not were they left to simply live without constantly being dissected. But any woman in a world that surveils women is familiar with this everyday tyranny, so it follows that female academics would recognize it. As women experiencing the same repression offline, they gravitate toward studying it in a way that men, who are free of this quotidian analysis and self-analysis, don’t. “There’s a lived experience there,” explains Abidin. “We are trained to specifically look out for these things.”

Men are trained not to look at anything but the work, whether it’s offline or online. “There’s this tremendous culture of toxicity around being vulnerable,” says Gerges, “and around sharing real things and talking about our emotions and about talking about our struggles.” The same way female academics may have more of a personal interest in fashion and beauty, male scholars are likely inclined toward male-coded subjects like gaming and tech. Regardless of the actual gender breakdown in these two arenas, women are perpetually believed to be a subculture within them the way men are believed to be in lifestyle, despite the number of male makeup artists and stylists who dominate the sphere. So while it’s been reported that women make up 75 percent of the influencing industry, Abidin is skeptical: “We have to consider the politics of vocabulary.” Since the standard beauty influencer is female, both because beauty is associated with women and influencing is too, any males within this sector are identified by their gender. Gamers, however, shed the influencing moniker entirely and are popularly referred to as e-sports players or online streamers — no gender marker required, because the standard is male — while scholars (as well as the industry) classify them as content creators in the online creative industry rather than influencers in the influencing industry. “They’re conceptually a bit more distinct for academics who are giant nerds,” quips Abidin, “but in essence you are looking at the same thing.”

Despite the increasing number of women leaders in the influencing industry, particularly in Asia, men overwhelmingly hold the highest paid positions on the business side of things — they run media conglomerates, platforms, and even agencies scouting for talent. “So much of the money, so much of the power is still traditionally modeled after the tech industry,” says Abidin. “It’s men-heavy. You still get the same old boys clubs, you get the same gated networks.” These men make as many if not more decisions about what you see on their platforms as the women making the content, which is to say they are shaping the conversations around influencers, they’re just doing it a lot less visibly. The real question is whether they are at least hazarding some answers to the concerns — from pay gaps to opportunity hierarchies around race and gender — that appear to be predominantly surfaced by women. Abidin thinks they’re aware of the quest for equality, but if it affects their bottom line, in an industry that is particularly transient, they are less likely to react. From her work on the ground, Abidin senses that the women in charge “are the ones pushing for the change,” because they see their treatment in influencing as a symptom of their treatment in workplaces as a whole. Perhaps predictably, in Abidin’s experience, environments where there is more gender equity offline — Nordic countries, for instance — see men on the business side more open to reflecting this balance online.

* * *

“Amid all the self-worth-measuring that has made up my experience of the internet,” wrote Gevinson, “I believe there was also self-actualizing, and that there still can be.” This self-actualization has been the arena of the women who are exposing the sexism and racism inherent in the influencing industry, increasing its transparency and uncovering the need for parity at the top. Women of color seem to be particularly enlightened, with Valerie Eguavoen launching the Instagram page You Belong Now to promote overlooked influencers, and Shannae Ingleton-Smith and Tania Cascilla founding Facebook group The Glow Up to support black influencers.  This seems to have had a sort of trickle-up effect in which women in charge have realized that the inequities faced by these influencers are just another example of discriminatory labor practices. Outside of that, female academics are parsing the effects of this dynamic on the industry. “I think the beautiful thing is that a lot of women have pushed against that unrealistic standard that has been sold to women for so long,” says Gerges. “Unfortunately for men, there’s still so much shame about talking about these things.” But the same way female influencers have established agency within the industry — for instance, making a living wage while rearing kids — similarly non-stereotypical male influencers like Gerges are introducing an alternative. Perhaps he too will inspire those within and around the industry to do better. He is an influencer after all.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

My Brown Dad Voted for Trump

Longreads Pick
Author: Anjoli Roy
Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 20, 2019
Length: 27 minutes (6,945 words)

Tar Bubbles

Melissa Matthewson | Longreads | November 2019 | 9 minutes (2,451 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

I used to play with tar bubbles on the pavement in the Missouri suburbs when I was just 5 while my mother watched, or didn’t, from our two-story home. I spent a wealth of time alone as I recall. I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing, except that now, as an adult, I love to be solitary in abundance — walking through tall reeds on a lake shore and reading the sky for colors of rose and peach at the edge of night, crouching on one knee, measuring the pronounced shifts of the purpling dark, or surveying the birdhouses for bluebirds, perhaps a few feathers as testimony. In memory, as a child, my mother couldn’t be bothered with me, and so the hours turned. My mother must have thought, Give her a soda and the Beach Boys, her dolls, the second-story window, tar bubbles, she’ll be okay. Now, my daughter asks me when I depart for work or play, “Why do you always leave?” My mother never went away, but she was always absent. 

I was consumed with the bubbles — my favorite thing was to pop them, one by one, just off the sidewalk. There were differences between the beads of tar. Some were more satisfying to burst than others: those that had sufficient air rose firm unlike the already diminished bubbles that had no depth. The heat gave rise to the tar and on the hottest days, the tar bubbles multiplied to my thrill and captivation. Imagine the precision in directing fingers toward the condition of collapse. Such particular attendance to one thing. I’d lay there for hours hoping to find the one that would make me feel less deflated. Less alone. I think I might have gleaned a film of toxic glue in the creases of my skin, but you can’t have back those hours as a child when all that circled in your imagination were the stories of princesses perhaps and orphans and seahorses and Persephone and the quiet boredom of popping, over and over until the afternoon went.  

 It’s quite technical the variety of cracks that break on pavement, and necessary then to fill them with tar, at least it was in 1980: fatigue cracking, reflection cracking, edge cracking too. These terms have definitions, but I’d like to name my own — what is a crack but a split between two things, a fracture, a rupture? Gaps as in the seed head, the space between kernels, the pores of grain and chink of light underneath the doorframe, the interlude of two bodies making love, the burrows in dirt where vermin go, in a field mowed for a path, the separation of wake and dream, the break of keys on a piano. We always want to fill the cracks, seal them with something, anything, to perhaps ease the discomfort and the realization that we are always alone. Maybe to hide the loss that ascends from melody or sad stories. There’s always something that wants to grow in the gaps left behind. A filler: conversation, a weed, music. A way to save ourselves perhaps, but what if we left the gaps open, ajar? What would happen then? 

What is a crack but a split between two things, a fracture, a rupture?

Our Missouri home had Midwestern appeal, the American Dream, on the edge of a wood that to me, at the time, was enormous and churned forth with witches and ugly things, but also beautiful with ochre hickory and ground litter I liked to crunch over with my boots. I liked our deck, with the barbecue and hamburgers and the orioles with a patois of chatter. The long avenue of our staircase ascended to my bedroom where I hid in imagination and play, or where I’d sit at the top of the landing and listen to the adults in the kitchen laughing, whispering, smoking, maybe dancing. We sold the house after a few years — my father wanted the West where he had been born and grown into a man, so that home with its slanted roof and tar bubbles is now nothing but a distance. A longing.  

* * *

I have a daughter of my own, Ava, 8, who is delightfully imaginative and kind, and we spend time together often, so she asks me what happens after you die. Ava, for bird. For life. In Persian, Ava means voice, sound. As sky, heaven, opening. “Do you dream,” she wonders. “I think you return to the earth,” I reply. “Like what? Like a tree? I want to be a tree that doesn’t get cut down,” she answers, not waiting for me to respond. Later, we sit at a pond waiting for her brother and she takes a stick to a dead fish, bloated from the top of the head to neck (say, if a fish had a neck), overwhelmed with water. “Strange,” I say. “I’ve never seen that.” Blue dashers skitter across the pond, dizzying asymmetry and I can’t keep up. It’s hot here. She becomes frightened soon when the fish splashes and jumps suddenly in the pond as she pierces it — and in this unexpected action, she deteriorates, becomes all raw. I’m alone with her, and the breeze is so sudden and lovely on the hot afternoon, that I shush her. “Ava, the wind. Feel it.” Why should she cry — it’s just a fish, but she goes on. “I don’t want nightmares,” she says, and I become galled by her whimpers. I do not soothe her.  


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There are other such times that my daughter enchants me (or impels me into tangents) with her wisdom, and I pay attention, cultivate an awareness and try my damnedest to listen and at least share in her spellbound fascination with the universe. I try hard not to be my own mother (not to be bothered, but oh, how I do it, and oh, how I hate myself for it). My daughter tells me she wants to live in Alaska during the summer. She was born on a night of heavy rain and loves storms and cold and bitter wind, watching out the window as the deluge saturates our farm, the world, covers all the oaks and orchard grass. She says to no one in particular, but maybe me, “The rain shines like diamonds.” 

She spends hours on the sidewalk one afternoon spreading petals from the cherry tree, making up titles for her installation: The Path That Never Ends, but Fades, or A Heart Exploding. When we live together in our small living room set up against the mountain, she listens to the stories on the radio and I ask her questions, but she’s distracted and not attending to me. She says, “I get lost in my land of over and over again.” 

* * *

When I’m away on one of my trips, the trips Ava complains about, the trips I tell her are important to me, something she’ll understand as she grows older (though, will she resent me for my absence? Even as she stretches her heart thrum through the phone on evenings when I call and we talk and she recites spells and rhymes she’s composed about words and the lines of their path), I watch two girls play by a fountain. 

I try hard not to be my own mother (not to be bothered, but oh, how I do it, and oh, how I hate myself for it).

They are without their mother, or father, or any guardian at all, which is unique and interesting, and they are eating cherries, discussing Montreal and underwear and miniature figurines. The precocious girl explains divorce to her friend in the unicorn helmet, “They are together, but not anymore. It’s like they had me and then —” she breaks and it makes me think of the way we talk to one another in threaded spontaneous associations and how one person will occupy the space more than another, and how we feel inadequate in our own selves because of this. The sky widens into purple as I observe the girls (they could tell I was snooping, but I pretended to look at my book every now and again) and I wonder how a small child understands separation. She is smart, this girl, already beautiful, with dark skin and big eyes, facial gestures that will change every man, every woman’s notion of attraction. Here now at this fountain, can she ever know the other girl in a way that isn’t contrived somehow? How can she reach across the grass and meet her friend? The sky becomes a strange color then, of shadows and gray, and I wonder how to escape the divide between us? Not so these little girls. They seem close enough tonight. As I watch the girls take off across the grass toward home, cherry juice on their lips and cheeks and hands, the fireflies arrive, popping incandescent in the night air. 

I think, I’m everything to my little daughter. The day before I leave for another trip, she follows me around the entire stretch of day and asks that we play her favorite game, the one where she lays on top of me in the side yard on my reclining chair and we listen to the sounds and count all the things we hear. We do this for several minutes until she speaks up and tells me what she has gathered: a scrub jay rustling above in the plum tree, the wind like a tender breath, a car racing by, the boys talking down in the field where they pick greens for salad. “What do I hear?” she wonders. I say, “The same.” Later, she asks that I take her for a walk to the mailboxes and talk, not about anything she says. Just talk. She clutches my hand and tells me about Paris and asks me, “What do you love?” I tell her, “This. I love this.” Upon return, she constructs fairy houses in the garden I tend out front with the sage and rudbeckia, oregano, bee balm and lavender. Little ladders and barns and Playmobil figures. I liken the fairly dwellings to the tar bubbles. I think it is the same attention for those gaps of time when time is everything and nothing at all. I leave them where they are when I sprinkle the garden with water and watch, as over time, they fall apart and she builds new ones. I don’t think my mother was everything to me. It was a consistent wandering away from home that I recall: into the woods, up the drive to the scary homes big with ghosts, places of mystery and riddle, through the Greenbriar to Bethie’s house. Away. Even now, a range I don’t want to cross. 

It’s then I have a terrible dream that wakes me at 3 a.m. I’m at a gathering in a barn loft with lengths of wood as the floor with spaces in between, many large openings revealing the floor beneath. The barn roof slants sharply to the ground. I’m drinking wine and my children are with me, playing, though I don’t seem to have any concern for their safety as they leap around the barn, peeking through the slats into the interstices and cracks. There are women at the party, dressed in elegant garments, but they are unaware of me as they speak to one another. I say, “I’m here, What now?” As I turn my back on the children, the night collapsing into indefinite contours, and raise my glass to the air, there ruptures a shriek, a few I think, eclipsing the tenor of celebration. I turn to see a child, I don’t know who, reach forward to grab my daughter as she slips and falls to the ground and is gone. 

It isn’t long after the dream that Ava discovers I’ll die and there is nothing to stop the tears. She’s young — this will all change — so I hold her, say, “We all die, but not too soon. Not too soon.” We continue to collect our time together in the expression of this new awareness — she sings to me lullabies, tells me stories, and dresses me up in tutus and glittery vests. I go with her when she asks, and if there were tar bubbles on the gravel road, I’d pop them with her. I let the things I don’t know about her stay fastened inside her until she will let me into her secrets, if ever a chance for this. 

On a warm day, I sit with her at the table out back and watch the new season come in like a deep breath: the grass laid out upon the earth, the geese streaming across the sky, the blue heron erupting from the pastures. We lay out a picnic in the yard with a quilt patched in pumpkins and goldenrod and sip lemonade together. I tell her of a time I took her shoes with me on a trip, by coincidence, a pair of pink Mary Janes. I found them stuffed into the pocket of my tote bag, having somehow missed them through packing, airport security. They were small. Shoes for a 3-year-old. I remember I was leaving for two weeks and when I arrived at my destination, I put them on the shelf near my books in my temporary home and consulted them every day as a reminder of who she was and who I was, should that ever disappear. While studying the shoes, I remembered a distant morning when I had come upon a cattle drive in the early reaches of winter near the township of Wisdom, Montana. Men on cow ponies drove the herd over the two-lane road covered in Angus muscle and sweat, the cattle’s highway to winter range and fresh grass, the sounds of thuds and hooves on pavement, the low moos of livestock and an occasional “Haw! Haw!” from the lead. A woman followed behind them all and with her, a bundled baby on the saddle, a pink face poised against the 30-degree wind. Tough and weathered, the woman and baby drew close, calm behind the herd, like a dream. I wanted to ride with them toward the Anaconda-Pintlers across the great plains of Montana and never look back. With them, I wanted to rinse my hands in the Big Hole River and kick my boots against the chutes and fences of the grazing pasture. I wanted to hold onto them forever, reins and sweat and grit and all. I wanted to preserve their fortitude, their fragility. I wanted to preserve their extinction.

I turn to Ava where we mingle in the grass and tell her all this and see the gaps in her teeth as she smiles, like open invitations, and think, maybe there’s something here that tells of our future circumstance, a distance we can’t know until tomorrow.  

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes

* * *

Melissa Matthewson’s essays have appeared in Guernica, DIAGRAM, American Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Bellingham Review, River Teeth, and The Rumpus among other publications. Her first book of nonfiction, Tracing the Desire Line, is out now from Split Lip Press. She teaches at Southern Oregon University.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Cross Talk

Photo Collage by Homestead Studio

Jacqueline Alnes | Longreads | November, 2019 | 34 minutes (9,431 words)

To get to Kamp in rural Missouri every year, I flew from Jakarta to Singapore to Tokyo to Minneapolis to Springfield. There, my mom rented a car, picked our trunks up from storage, and drove my brother and me up winding roads to drop us off first, always first. The welcome party was a horde of college-age blond-haired, summer-tanned counselors jumping around in costumes: ballerina skirts over basketball shorts; children’s floaties tight around biceps; the beleaguered orange hair of a synthetic lion mane worn too many times. Without other kids there yet, a product of our early arrival, the party seemed surreal. I slouched in the back seat of the car. Maybe I could disappear.

“I can’t do this,” I moaned, though I knew deep down that I would. After all, I was the one who had discovered Kamp. A popular older boy on my swim team in Indonesia, one with crew-cut brown hair and a glistening set of abs, had bragged to the other kids about how much fun it was. I begged my parents to let me and Erik attend, so they logged on to our family’s dial-up internet. Years later, a search for Kanakuk Kamps would render a list of news articles rife with reports of sexual abuse and molestation, but back then it led you to its website, which only featured pictures of clean-cut kids splashing in the pool or standing on a kelly-green soccer field, their arms around one another. My parents signed us up.

“You say that every year,” my mom said. She turned from the driver’s seat to look at me, her green-blue eyes unblinking. “Come on, get out.”

“But this year I’m serious,” I whined. Though I liked Kamp for the lake swimming and kickball tournaments, it felt like a test of identity, one I never passed: to prove I was a good, Christian, American girl.

“Come on, Jaggin’,” my brother said. The counselors rushed toward the car, the chant of howdy y’all, get rowdy y’all growing louder as my brother opened his door. We said a quick goodbye to my mom, and Erik and I followed our counselors into the cavernous dodgeball gym.

“You gonna be OK?” Erik asked. Though I was 12 and he 11, he often took on the role of an older sibling in how he cared for me. Lecrae’s Who u with? Are you in it to win man? Are you livin’ in sin reverberated from stacked speakers. LED lights flickered a kaleidoscope of colors over the walls. Without Kampers, the scene felt depressing, like a birthday party no one had bothered to attend.

Mungkin,” I whispered. I shrugged. My use of Bahasa Indonesian was a ploy to make him feel tethered to me, though he was confident enough not to need me at Kamp. When we were in America, the language felt like a set of tin cans and string no one else could touch.

“Please try to have fun,” he said, and walked to the boys’ side of the gym, where he pantomimed skateboard moves with his counselors. I wrung my hands and waited.

One by one, the other Kampers came in. They separated by gender, the way we would remain throughout Kamp. Boys’ and girls’ cabins were on separate sides of the property, our dining hall tables were on opposite ends of one long room, and parties were divided by an unmarked line on the gym floor. The only way I would see my brother throughout the week was if he passed my cabin on the way to somewhere else.

Girls began to populate my side of the gym. To me, all of them looked like my American Girl dolls at home, their noses perfectly freckled, skin like shimmering bowls of cream, hair wild and undone. They danced politely around me in their oversize basketball shorts and baggy T-shirts, all modest enough to meet the Kamp dress code. They talked about soccer tournaments and complimented hair braids.

‘Mungkin,’ I whispered. I shrugged. My use of Bahasa Indonesian was a ploy to make him feel tethered to me, though he was confident enough not to need me at Kamp. When we were in America, the language felt like a set of tin cans and string no one else could touch.

“You’re from Kansas City, too? No way!” Two girls hugged, as if the proximity of their neighborhoods was a sign from God. I knew it was just coincidence. Girls came from the same hometowns every year: Knoxville, Naperville, Dallas, Fayetteville, Wichita, St. Louis, Tulsa. The city names sounded so American, especially prefaced by a suburb of. I often wondered what it would be like to say I had been raised in a three-bedroom, two-bathroom single-family home on Ashley Spring Court or Savannah Hills Drive. During summers in America, I had seen the miracle of glittering, planned streets, and I wanted them as my own. Instead, my family moved frequently. Before Jakarta, we’d lived for four years in Balikpapan, Indonesia, in a home we deemed the Vitamin House because B-12, our address, was sprayed yellow on our driveway.

I stayed away from the other girls, hoping they wouldn’t ask me any questions, especially about where I was from. I knew that my body — a gangly array of tanned limbs and blond hair cut to my chin — looked like the Kamp girls, but I felt split in half, like I didn’t belong. My vision of America came from the filtered peek I received each summer on our two-month trek through grandparents’ living rooms, the Mall of America, and cousins’ lush backyards. I fell in love with the silky green grass I was allowed to touch with bare feet. But I didn’t know the country well, not at all. I felt like a tourist in a land that everyone else said was mine, and though I’d been coming to Kamp for three years, the initial night always felt shocking, like a full-body plunge into ice-cold water.


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Smile, I reminded myself. Kamu orang Amerika.

Eventually, in the gym swollen with the noise and heat of nearly 300 campers and counselors, the Kamp leader who went by the initials of something like JP shushed us all over the microphone.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he crooned, like a poorly paid late-night radio host. “How are we all doing tonight?”

The Kampers cheered. I raised my voice in a half-hearted yay while scanning the boys’ side of the room for any sign of my brother’s freckled cheeks or the white-blond spot on the back of his head that marked him like a fawn. My counselor shot me a glare.

“Let’s play Who Traveled Farthest to Kamp!” he yelled. I twisted the edge of my T-shirt in my hand. “Stand up now, and when I name a state, you’ll sit down if you get eliminated.”

We all stood up. I tried finding Erik again. Most of the counselors were new each year, so maybe we could lie about where we were from. The bobbing sea of boy-hair left him camouflaged.

Half the crowd sat down at “anywhere outside Missouri.”

Another chunk crumpled to Kansas.

Texas.

Oklahoma.

Soon, I could see my brother, one of only five or so of us left standing.

JP, wearing a bandana around his balding head in an attempt to look hip, dragged the cord of his microphone behind him into the crowd.

“Which one of you thinks you have it?” he asked. I shot my brother a glance, hoping my eyes would say we could pretend to be from Illinois? He gave me a thumbs-up, not understanding. He didn’t mind the attention; somehow his status as the Boy From Indonesia earned him extra credibility.

A boy with scruffy brown hair raised his hand. “Virginia,” he yelped into the microphone.

“Ooh,” JP sang. “Virginia. How long did it take for you to get here?”

“A day,” the kid said. I looked around. The girls in my cabin flitted their eyes at one another, impressed. Two of the other kids sat down. My palms began to sweat, and I rubbed them on the tie-dye I LOVE TABLEROCK LAKE tourist T-shirt my mom had purchased for me at the local Walmart.

“Anyone from further than that?” JP murmured. He swaggered toward me, and I again eyed at my brother: help. I was the one who struggled with words under pressure. On a family vacation to a different island, a man had approached me asking, “Where’s the slide” in a British accent. I’d responded “Disana, disana,” before he backed away, saying “SORRY” slowly and loudly. Sometimes even my tongue got tangled between lives.

“Where are you from?”

I wasn’t from anywhere, I wanted to say. I wasn’t allowed to be from Indonesia; no matter the fact that I had lived there for five years — longer than anywhere else in my life — no matter that I spoke the language, no matter that I no longer remembered what America was like, I could never be from Indonesia. I’d always be a white foreigner, the daughter of parents wealthy enough to live on the compound, holder of a passport from the USA.

“Jakarta, Indonesia,” I whispered.

The crowd went silent.

Is that in California? someone behind me whispered.

Probably, a different voice whispered back.

“That’s near Bali, right?” JP responded. I nodded yes, though I wanted to him to know the difference between the tourist resort town and where I lived. People went to Bali for a pristine beach, trinkets, and the idea that they were somewhere foreign, without ever actually experiencing the realities of the country. I wanted to believe that my years in Indonesia had been different. I learned to squat rather than sit while waiting for the bus, watched the snake man wrangle a spitting cobra into a cage, and woke each morning to the wail of a mosque, the prayers a soothing cadence. I wanted to tell him that I came alive in the rhythm of a place where I could never belong — but I didn’t.

I wanted to tell him that I came alive in the rhythm of a place where I could never belong — but I didn’t.

He adjusted his bandana before making the hang-loose sign with his free hand. “Rad.”

***

The first days of Kamp passed in a haze of chlorine and a crackle of bonfire. One afternoon our cabin trekked from the soccer field to the volleyball court, where we had been told we’d get to play against a boys’ cabin. One of the girls walked next to Melissa, who was secretly my favorite counselor. Melissa was blond, tan, and wore a small purple sport watch on the inside of her wrist. Kampers and counselors alike were drawn to her intensely caring and exuberant spirit. Melissa was who I dreamed I might turn out like someday, when my braces and glasses would finally come off, when my hair would grow past my chin and cascade down my back, when I would move to America and change not only my appearance but also the part of me that grew anxious whenever I was around too many other people. I wanted to give tight-squeeze side-hugs like Melissa instead of turning away. I wanted to be able to love others without abandon, without worrying that who or what I was would never be enough.

I wanted to be able to love others without abandon, without worrying that who or what I was would never be enough.

Boys waited at the volleyball court. The other girls, out of earshot of our counselors, had whispered throughout the week about biceps and dimples and hunky hair. I wanted to participate, but even speaking about the boys seemed like a sin. As girls, we were supposed to view the opposite sex as brothers, protecting them from our preadolescent forms by wearing one-pieces at the pool, long shorts, and baggy T-shirts everywhere else. Plus, when I scanned the lineup, my actual brother was there. Only 13 months younger than me, he’d been assigned to my partner cabin. I raised my hand in acknowledgment. Without him around, I’d been able to pretend my life in Indonesia was a distant dream and that my small attempts at being social were equivalent to a queen bee rallying a hive.

“Melissa, you know we’ve got a star on our team?” the boys’ counselor teased. He and Melissa had been flirting all week in the way that only Kamp counselors could. They’d pass notes filled with scripture and make fun of each other’s college mascots. Sometimes Melissa left her long hair down after illegally drying it in our cabin, and she’d flip it over her shoulder.

“Is that right? I’ve got some stars, too,” Melissa said, her voice light.

“This kid,” the counselor said. He grabbed my brother by the shoulders. Erik raised his hand in a fist pump. I could tell he’d spiked his hair with water from the bathroom sink, and he was wearing the same shirt he had on two days before when I’d spotted him at the dining hall. “He’s a two-time I’m Third Award winner.”

“Wow,” Melissa said, her voice suddenly sober. The I’m Third Award was the highest at Kamp. As we were told at every meal, chapel session, Bible study, and worship time throughout the week, the award was named after the life motto of Captain Johnny Ferrier, a man who drove his fighter jet to the ground — and certain death — rather than risk killing others by attempting a safe landing. I’m Third meant God first, others second, and yourself third. By winning twice, my brother had earned a spot as a near-saint. “Well I’ve got his sister,” she added.

I’m Third meant God first, others second, and yourself third. By winning twice, my brother had earned a spot as a near-saint.

Melissa came toward me and I flinched; I hated to be touched by anyone. My face grew hot. In previous years, for my immobilizing anxiety, I’d won the Meek and Humble Certificate, an award allocated only to girls, because I had managed to spend a full week speaking only a few words.

“You must be pretty awesome if you’re this legend’s sister,” the boy counselor said to me. “And you guys are from Indonesia? Pretty cool.” I stared down at my white tennis shoes, the curly pink elastic laces erupting from them like confetti. I kept my head down, not wanting my cabin to suddenly gain interest in where I was from. They’d left me alone after the opening ceremony, and my international residence had evaporated overnight, the immediacy of what flavor Kool-Aid was available with lunch and who launched furthest from the blob in the pool reigning supreme as conversation topics.

But now, if the girls in my cabin realized, the questions would start: What is it like there? Do you live in a hut? What do the people look like? Whenever I was asked about Indonesia, I stuttered at the impossibility of what felt like describing another life. I didn’t know how to compare countries. As I’d left Alaska after kindergarten, my memory there was a blur of moose roaming the backyard and fields of fireweed coloring the mountains hot pink. Indonesia was complicated. I could describe my life as a child: To get to school, I scootered past monitor lizards poking their prehistoric heads from the drains; at recess I whacked my wrist against a taut tetherball, a crowd of caged gibbons behind the school chirruping me on; and in my backyard, I pulled ribbons of gray fading skin from the base of a eucalyptus tree to reveal streaks of pastel oranges, purples, and greens. But to describe who I was there and what that meant — a white American girl on a compound in Balikpapan, and now a girl in a gated, walled-off home with rotating security guards in Jakarta — seemed too big of a task. Usually I stopped at It’s different. In the rare times I did explain, people responded with remarks like, “They really live like that?” or “Whoa,” which made my stomach feel like it was ballooning toward my throat, all of me taut with failure.

Looking back, I realize now that at the age of 12 , it was difficult for me to navigate the glaring privilege of the life I led. Even now I feel reticent about my time in Indonesia, as I still feel like an outsider, someone whose words fall short again and again and again. Though I want to consider myself different from the tourists who collected trinkets and memories of time spent on beaches, was I? Am I? I spoke the language, yes, learned the customs, respected cultural norms, consumed local food, was invited into the homes and weddings of Indonesian friends, and tried to remain aware –– as much as was possible for someone in second to eighth grade –– about the privileges I was afforded. But I was also someone who attended exorbitantly priced international schools with other expatriates; lived in homes with marble floors and gated walls; flew to Singapore every other month to get my braces tightened; and, with my passport and family’s financial resources, could leave at any time. My memories of Indonesia are dual in nature. Sometimes I remember myself with compassion: I was a child who remained sensitive to the workings of the world, who tried her best to let love and respect lead her through the thorniness of privilege, place, and power. But other times, I remember myself with disdain: I did not deserve –– and still do not deserve –– the privileges I had and have access to; I am saddened that I, with my presence in Indonesia, contributed to a legacy of colonialism. But there is also this: I was a child. What agency did I have during those early years of my life, when I didn’t have the chance to choose where or how I lived? What grace can I give myself and my family, all of us wanting to respect the communities we landed in during our many moves, all of us seeking to nurture those around us in different ways? Now, it seems possible to hold an array of truths in my mind –– I was a source of harm and also did my best to make a home –– but at Kamp, I only felt a complicated tangle of emotions, with no way to parse them out.

Looking back, I realize now that at the age of 12 , it was difficult for me to navigate the glaring privilege of the life I led. Even now I feel reticent about my time in Indonesia, as I still feel like an outsider, someone whose words fall short again and again and again.

At the volleyball court, the game started with the crack of a first serve. I positioned myself in the back corner, half-heartedly lunging for the ball when it soared my way. After the boys scored a point, I watched as my brother clapped backs and received noogies; he could speak the language of physical affection. The longer I watched him, the further away I felt. Was I the strange one for not belonging to both worlds? Here, he was revered for his awards, his ability to stir a crowd into laughter with his movie impersonations, his athleticism. And in Indonesia, he was a laki-laki, nomor one, praised because he was male, because he was blond, because his skin was porcelain. The men in our lives would ask Erik to help drive the car, give him candy, ride their motorcycles. I, on the other hand, was pinched and prodded at the market for showing my bony legs and tan arms, an anomaly in a predominately Muslim country. I was only a perempuan or gadis, a girl or virgin. My only wish was to belong somewhere, fully and completely, as I could in my bedroom: hair down and bobbing, my voice singing a made-up song in whatever language emerged, my legs and arms swinging with a rhythm I composed.

Comp-e-tition! Woop! Jesus is number one! a girl with French braids and freckles in my cabin began chanting. The thwack of the volleyball from the boys’ side only made her louder, and a few of the other girls chimed in.

Awesome! Awesome! Hit ’em in the head with a big ole possum! the boys cheered back. Sweat trickled down my brow, and I whispered Jesus is number one just in case He was listening, realizing, even while I said it, that the reassurance was just as much for me as it was for God; in Kamp, surrounded by reminders that I should be proclaiming my faith, I felt even more compelled than usual to try believing. Both cabins grew louder, but when someone served the volleyball into a thicket of nearby woods, we all moved to sit on the wooden barrier separating the edge of the court from grass, tired. The chants quieted down. Some of the boys moved close to the girls in my cabin, a proximity Melissa didn’t notice because she’d run to help the boys’ counselor find the ball.

One of the boys, a mop of brown hair framing green eyes, turned to a girl in my cabin. “Ba-gus … sek …” My body froze. “Hey, Indonesia, how do you say it again?”

Erik leaned over from his spot on the barrier. “Say what?”

“You know, what you taught us.”

Bagus sekali!” Erik said, and gave the boy a thumbs-up. I glared at them both, especially when the girl in my cabin giggled back.

“What’s that mean? You speak another language?”

“Kind of,” the boy said. He shook his hair so his bangs swayed to one side. “Erik has been teaching us Indonesian.”

I felt like taunting the boy, asking anda bisa berbahasa Indonesia? You think you can speak my language? The way he spoke the words made me angry, using them only to impress a girl. He didn’t know the cacophony of cicadas screaming high in the rainforest trees, the clucks of a dusty rooster, the high whine of motorcycles straining uphill that turned the language to music. And toward my brother, I felt something I hadn’t before. In my eyes, he had everything: the right clothes, Kamp awards, friends, and the ability to belong anywhere. Why had he given away a language that felt like ours in a country that didn’t?

When Melissa called us to go, I left without saying sampai jumpa to Erik. I was angry without fully understanding why. Usually my brother felt like a kind of home, somewhere I didn’t have to explain my past or present, but watching him give away part of what had tethered us together, our words made me feel further unmoored, as if I didn’t belong even with him. I felt like the long snakes that sometimes hid on the concrete wall near our home, only their flickering tongues peeking out from behind lush leaves of ivy.

***

A few afternoons later, during Flat-On-Back hour, Melissa called my name.

“Wanna join me outside?” she asked. I sat up in my bed, sentence half-finished in my diary, and nodded yes.

From attending Kamp so many years in a row, I knew that I’d been summoned for my Porch Talk. These special sessions spent one-on-one with counselors were designed for Kampers to share their testimonies or deepest struggles. In the past, I’d been so tight-lipped that my sessions had lasted only 10 minutes at most. A couple of the counselors had drawn me a picture of a cliff — me on one side, God on the other — and then filled the gap in with the arms of the cross, telling me that if only I accepted Jesus Christ as my One True Lord and Savior I’d be saved forever, lifted up to Heaven, forgiven for the sins I hadn’t been brave enough to confess to them. Usually, I took whatever paper they gave me, let them place their hands on the back of my head or shoulders as they prayed for me, then shrugged off their touch as soon as I could, returning to my bunk to write in my diary or read the Bible.

This year would be different. I had never told a testimony before, but I had heard enough at church services and Kamp to know the general outline of the narrative — doubtful sinner experiences a dramatic event, feels God’s presence, lays down life for Christ — and so I’d begun to devise one during the hours spent on the soccer field or swimming. If I could tell a good enough story, maybe I’d belong here as much as my brother did. Maybe Melissa would think I was special.

“How are you?” she asked as soon as we were outside. Another counselor and Kamper sat at the other end of the porch, their heads bowed together in tears or prayer.

“Good,” I said shyly. The wood slats of the porch beneath me whorled in what looked like fingerprints. I traced the grain with my pointer finger before realizing that I was supposed to be a girl brave enough to tell a testimony. A good American girl. I looked up and offered Melissa a smile.

“Do you want to tell me a little bit about your faith journey?” She sat cross-legged and leaned forward.

“I don’t really know where to start,” I said cautiously, which was true. I was supposed to be a Christian. I had been baptized in the Catholic church and served as an altar girl at mass for four years in Balikpapan, our parents watching us from the pews. The priest, an elderly Indonesian man, mumbled at the podium, so mostly my religious experience was knowing when to ring the bell, recite my prayers, and try my best not to laugh at Erik when he pretended to swig the chalice if no one was looking in our direction. My parents took my brother and me to church on the compound sometimes too. Church there, some sort of unitarian service, was more fun than the rigid kneel-sit-stand-pray solemnity of the Catholic mass, but I didn’t learn to distinguish between Catholicism and other types of Christianity until I was in my early 20s. To me, God was God. And as a child who took comfort in following rules, in knowing the “right” way to live and love, God was not only God, but also community. Believing in God — and adhering perfectly to every rule set before me — meant in my mind that I would finally find solid footing in terms of identity. The part of me that felt unmoored by moving so often during childhood took solace in the idea that I could be a Christian: something definable, something unchanging.

When we moved to Jakarta, we didn’t attend church because of a series of bombings that had happened a couple years before, but I tried my best to believe on my own, to quiet the voice in my head that said, How can you know for sure that there’s a God out there? In many ways, on the outside, I seemed like a Christian. One of my favorite books was Rachel’s Tears: The Spiritual Journey of Columbine Martyr Rachel Scott. After my fifth or sixth time through the book, I stood in front of the mirror in my bedroom and tried to convince myself that I too would stand steadfast in my love for Christ if ever a school shooting happened, that I would die for Jesus. I wore a cross necklace to school, chastised a popular girl when she told me my T-shirt had a “condom pocket,” and wrote worship songs of my own: You surround me, but with clarity or love? Do your arms wrap around me like the wings of a dove?

But my diary from the time wasn’t one of a steadfast believer. I flip-flopped enough between belief and disbelief that I had a codeword, “tnm,” that I would use to differentiate between my entries written by my sinner-self and “the new me.” Looking back, I realize that I learned the language of “new” versus “old” from Kamp, where they preached a fundamentalist version of being saved. While as a baptized Catholic I had technically been freed from original sin, the allure of Kamp was that I could choose to commit myself to Christ. In my mind, in the black-and-white thinking I often reverted to, committing myself to Christ meant not only that I’d be a Christian, but also that I would be “pure,” and that, if I prayed hard enough, I might eventually shed the shell of fear that kept me from wanting to be close to other people. I also believed that if I was Christian, my family would better be able to love me because I was “good,” not trusting fully at the time that they would –– and do –– love me unconditionally; I think I didn’t love myself enough at the time to be able to recognize that. If I believed in God and tried hard enough, as I was taught at Kamp and in sermons, I might be comfortable with greater levels of emotional intimacy, be able to articulate the complex struggles I experienced with identity, or be happier. When I look back at myself from where I am now, I see my fears –– my fear of emotional intimacy, physical touch, my desire to have someone at Kamp tell me I was “good” –– sprang from a lack of self love. I internalized so much guilt about who I was as a foreigner living in Indonesia, about not being able to believe without doubt, and about my shortcomings as a person, that I was afraid to be close to anyone for fear they would see too much of me and dislike me as much as I did myself. I thought religion could save me, give me worth.

For these reasons, I tried my hardest to believe. But “the new me” entries in my diary only lasted a few days, sometimes a week after Kamp, and then I would unravel and make a mess of my newly-saved self. I would still follow the rules of Christianity I’d been taught like modesty and no physical intimacy with boys, but the pulse of true belief often faded away, leaving me feeling muddled. I began to hate myself for not being able to believe like everyone else at Kamp and church seemed to, as if my lack of faith was just another personal failure. During one of these confusing periods, I wrote: I guess you could call me Christian, although if writing solely for myself, I only read the Bible in hopes of making a connection in my life, trying to see the way out of my lonely Friday nights, trying to let my parents love me. Right now I’m stuck, like when you’re driving in a car through a long tunnel and you can’t see the light on either side. It’s the place in tunnels where most cars crash, I think.

“That’s OK,” Melissa said. Her pen hovered over the blank page of her notebook. “What do you struggle with most in your faith?”

“Doubt,” I responded honestly. Whereas I aligned myself with Thomas of the Bible, needing to see something before believing it, my brother believed in the unseen. He’d once claimed to see the cherry red of Santa Claus’s suit disappearing into our bathroom in Alaska, and he would keep his belief until he was 12, my mom breaking the news to him in tears. I, on the other hand, had questioned Santa’s existence at the ripe age of 5. On a piece of computer paper, I had calculated the route for my mathematician dad, telling him that it was physically impossible for a Santa to fly around the world, especially if he stopped to eat cookies.

“Why do you doubt?” Melissa asked. Part of me withdrew, not wanting to give any more about myself away; I had not told any other counselor that I doubted, because I wanted to be a good Kamper. But something about Melissa made me want to talk. If she kept my secrets in her notebook, maybe I would mean something to her. Though I shied away from physical affection, my story in her notebook would seem like a kind of closeness, an emotional intimacy I could handle.

“It’s complicated,” I said, and I twisted a chunk of my shirt between my fingers. How could I explain something that I hadn’t been able to put words to in my own diary? The doubt itself was complicated, a gnarly-rooted plant taking hold somewhere deep within me: How could there be a One True Christian God if outside my home every other person believed just as fervently in Allah? How could Christianity be the only thing that was right and real if another set of people sang their own beautiful prayers? I felt like Thomas; I couldn’t believe without seeing a scarred palm. During those years, I often begged God to show me a miracle, a form of proof that He existed, something like a meteor flaring across the night sky. I had heard testimonies from visiting pastors about dramatic moments in their lives –– God showing Himself by saving them from drowning after a fishing boat capsized or sending them a friend when they were at rock bottom in their life or putting their cancer in remission after doctors said it was incurable. I wanted a sign like that, but I’d been met with silence, which I interpreted as a message from God that I needed to trust Him, even in the absence of a miracle. I tried my best to dampen my own misgivings, for my faith wasn’t just a means of community or identity; it was also a form of absolution. During a time when I felt perpetual guilt –– over my inability to believe fully in God, my presence in Indonesia as a foreigner, the sadness I saw in my mom’s eyes when I winced during our rare hugs, and my inability to understand why physical touch was so impossible for me though I’d only ever been treated with love –– Christianity offered a salve. I could be pure, no matter how often I stumbled through the complexities of life. I could be good, no matter how often I internally berated myself for not being good enough. This is why I kept trying to believe: I wanted the feeling of salvation to wash over me again and again. I wanted to be clean.

A few months before Kamp started, I woke on our usually quiet street to the sound of motorcycles chuffing down the road, voices shouting, and the familiar crackle of a morning prayer vibrating over a loudspeaker. I left my bed and padded over to my brother’s room across the hall.

“You want to see what’s going on?” I asked, shoving him awake. He opened his eyes and looked up at the broken ceiling panel above him, one that had collapsed in the middle of the night weeks before from the weight of a dead rat and thousands of maggots, all of them raining onto his bed.

“Mom said to stay inside,” he mumbled. Usually he was braver than I was, not afraid to break the rules if he was sure he wouldn’t get caught. He drank Coca-Cola from the fridge while Mom was gone and threw the empty cans into a construction zone next door.

“Come on,” I said. “I wanna see.”

He slouched out of bed and the two of us made our way to the front room of the house, where a balcony on the second floor overlooked the neighborhood park. The park was nothing more than a dusty patch where no house had been built, but that day it was to be transformed into the local site of slaughter for Idul Adha, a holiday celebrating Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his own son and Allah’s subsequent grace in killing a sheep instead. Already, this early in the morning, throngs of people milled about, and goats brayed loudly. Some of the animals had plastic bags tied over their heads. I pinched my wrist to keep my eyes from welling up.

“Whoa, they’re gonna do it,” my brother said, nudging me to look toward the edge of the park, where a long knife glinted in the sun. A group of people flipped a goat onto its side and it wriggled in the dirt. They chanted a familiar prayer while they tugged limbs into place and steadied the head. The man with the knife aimed toward the throat, and soon bright red blood seeped from the goat’s neck and into the ground, the crowd voicing praise. I watched as the goat was hung with a rope from one of the park’s feeble trees, blood dripping down.

I watched as the goat was hung with a rope from one of the park’s feeble trees, blood dripping down.

Later that day, our doorbell rang. One of our security guards, a man with a face that looked not much older than mine, was waiting outside. Usually he joked around with Erik, the two of them throwing wiffle balls at each other over our tall gate, but that day he was somber. In each hand he held a steaming bowl of meat, rice underneath.

“I share goat with you,” he said slowly in English. “As Allah waters ground, may he bless you.”

My mom took the bowls in her hands. We thanked Effrianto and told him to have a happy holiday. When he’d gone, we put the meat on our dining room table. My mom and I, largely vegetarian at the time, didn’t care to eat it, and it went untouched by my brother and dad as well. We left it out on our dining room table the rest of the day, I think as a sign that even though we didn’t partake in the meal, we respected it, communed with it at our table. We all seemed to recognize that it was far more than just food. In a sense, it seemed like a moment representative of inequity that roiled under the surface of our lives. There was something I couldn’t name, at 12 years old, about the stark differences in not only religion, but also in class and race that unsettled me while living in Indonesia: a child roaming the streets barefoot while the heels of my feet kissed cool marble; the stooped older women hawking meager vegetables across the street from machine gun guards who stood stiff outside the gates of my school. My whiteness and wealth perturbed me the older I grew, and I begged always to move back to America, as if that would erase the world’s disparities, as if that would absolve me of my guilt.

On Idul Adha, with the goat on my family’s table, I felt stronger than ever the notion that Christianity couldn’t be the only acceptable religion. According to my Bible, Effrianto would perish in flames because he didn’t believe in Jesus Christ, but how could that be when his act was more generous than any act I’d seen in my own religion? In that moment, I felt torn between believing in a Christian God and admitting to myself that I was stuck in some kind of limbo. But with Melissa in front of me, two hair ties around her wrist, a pearly white smile, blue eyes that looked at me searchingly, I wanted to be a Christian, to forget about all the confusion and adopt what I thought might be a normal, easy identity: a girl who believed in God, a girl who might one day live on Enchanted Crossing Lane in a suburb of some American town.

“Have you accepted Christ as your savior?” Melissa prompted. I was aware that long minutes of silence had passed between us, but I never knew how to articulate the storm of identity that raged in me whenever I left Indonesia behind.

“Actually, I have,” I lied. Though I’d tried over and over to commit myself to Christ, using the language I’d heard others use, writing a contract in my diary and signing my name, I didn’t actually believe.

“I’d love to hear your story, if you’re willing to share,” Melissa said. She flicked her pen between her fingers.

“On Christmas Eve we were on a flight from Jakarta to Thailand. When we landed, everyone in the streets were gathered around television sets in the windows of shops. There was footage playing that looked like a horror movie — waves taller than buildings smashing into land, houses crumbling, streets turned into brown rivers, people screaming. We watched with everyone else, but we couldn’t understand Thai so we walked to our hotel, not knowing what had happened or where, not knowing if the scenes were a movie or real life,” I said, all of the information true. We had been flying that night, we had landed and seen footage from the tsunami, we had received dozens and dozens of phone calls from family members calling my dad’s work cell phone to see if we were alive.

“Wow,” Melissa said softly.

“We had planned to go to Phuket for Christmas, a town that got hit hard, but my dad had picked Chang Mai at the last second,” I said, as my last truthful statement. “For months before the tsunami, I had prayed and prayed for a sign that God was real. Show me, I begged. I wanted to know that He was real. In that moment, in the hotel room, with my dad receiving phone calls from people wondering whether we were alive or not, I began to realize that God must have saved me and my family for a reason.”

I began to cry in front of Melissa, though I hadn’t planned on it. Part of my sadness probably did come from the experience of the tsunami, an event I hadn’t really processed. To hear my grandmother’s voice warble into tears over the long-distance line when she heard my voice, alive, was unsettling. Later, to write letters in school to survivors in Aceh felt like a cruel trick, something to remind me of how useless I was in helping anyone actually heal. What could the words of an American girl with a life, a school, a home, and a family do when so many tangible walls and meals were needed? I felt terrible that I, of such little faith, had survived a storm for no clear reason. And the idea that I’d just used such a devastating event as a lie made my shoulders shake harder with grief.

Melissa, of course, took my tears as relief that I’d finally told someone my testimony. She rubbed my back with her palm and scooted closer to me. I didn’t move away.

“God kept you alive for a reason,” she said. “You’ve been blessed with a servant’s heart and an opportunity — there’s an entire country of nonbelievers around you. You are a light.”

I nodded and tried to smile through my tears. Wasn’t this what I had dreamt of when I read Rachel’s story? That I would save others from damnation and defend my faith? In that moment, I wanted so desperately to feel as though my life had changed, as though I could be absolved of my guilt and my failings. I wanted some sign that I was moving through the world in the right way, as Christianity seemed to promise would happen if I believed fervently enough. Instead, my stomach churned with the ghost of greasy meat gone sour.

At Kamp’s last supper, the entire dining room was silent. No kitchies stood on the counter to stir batter and belt Disney songs, no one squabbled over the last hot limb of fried chicken in our basket, no one broke into the familiar cheer don’t gimme no pop no pop don’t gimme no tea no tea, just gimme that milk moo moo moo, just gimme that milk moo moo moo. The only sounds in the room were the crinkle of oily parchment paper in the chicken basket, the squish of jelly as I swirled my knife to make a sandwich, and the tap of an anxious Kamper’s foot against the floor. We were all supposed to be quiet in order to prepare our minds and hearts for what was coming next, an event called Cross Talk. I nervously glanced at the boys’ side in an attempt to find Erik, who I hadn’t seen since the volleyball game, but his small frame remained hidden.

JP entered the room, unadorned. He looked smaller or wearier somehow without a bandana on his head or microphone in hand. “Let us bow our heads. Lord, we call upon you to descend upon this place, to enter the hearts of each and every one of these Kampers,” he said. I wasn’t used to an earnest, sober JP. Usually he spoke in his own form of Christian slang. He referred to his wife as “Wifey” rather than by her name, which all of us girls found titillating, and called new believers “baby C’s.”

“Tonight, Lord, we have the opportunity to come to you, to lay down our sins and failings and ask you into our hearts. I pray that each Kamper here receives you,” he said. I clenched my eyes shut tight, feeling that he was speaking only to me. “I know there is doubt in this room, Lord. I know there are souls heavy with wrongdoing. This is the night to give those burdens up to You, because You alone Lord can save, and You alone Lord can heal.”

He closed his prayer. As we did every year on this night of Kamp, we followed JP down the main road, stopping every so often to watch different scenes from Jesus’ last days on earth. In one, two female counselors had wrapped sheets around their bodies as dresses. One woman, playing Martha, busied herself by clanging pans and pots from the kitchen. Mary sat by Jesus’ feet, listening to his every word. Do not be distracted by many things, Martha, Jesus said. There is only one important thing, and Mary has chosen it. Mary began to wash Jesus’ feet and I was struck by the intimacy; I hadn’t seen anyone give affection at Kamp besides same-sex side-hugs, and the moment between Mary and Jesus felt tender. What if there had been an actual Jesus? What if I had been denying his dusty feet? His stories? I was surely Martha, worrying about whether or not I’d get to shop at Limited Too or not during prayers, comparing the lush blond and silky brown hair of my middle school crushes during worship. As we walked along the road to watch the Last Supper, I realized I was probably Judas, too. I had betrayed Indonesia to get a foothold at Kamp, and I had betrayed my supposedly Christian faith by lying to my counselor. I had been jealous of my brother, coveted the clothes of my cabin mates, and harbored a false belief in Jesus. As Judas turned away from the table, clink of heavy coins in his cloak, I began to cry, suddenly overwhelmed by my transgressions.

Dusk settled in over the tallest limbs of trees as we made our way to the kickball field. The night was quiet aside from siren songs of cicadas and the low rumble of a generator. A spotlight illuminated a wooden cross that nearly reached the height of the tall backstop fence. We filed in and took our seats on the dewy grass of the outfield. No one spoke.

From somewhere in the dark, I heard the sound of skin being slapped. Thwack. Thwack. Crucify him, a man yelled, and a chorus of voices joined in.

Away with him. King of the Jews? Thwack.

Messiah? Thwack. Save yourself.

I crumpled my shirt in my hand. From somewhere near the front, I heard soft, low sobs.

Jesus, surrounded by a pack of angry, shirtless men, was brought to the front of the kickball field. His chest was ribboned with red welts that looked too realistic from where I sat. As Jesus was kicked and beaten by the other men, I cried.

Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing, Jesus said. His head slumped to one side as the other men lifted him to the cross.

If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself, the men yelled, slapping him once more. I heard myself in their jeers and began to shake with grief. Here, now, after telling a testimony, sitting in front of a life-like Jesus, shouldn’t I finally feel as though I could accept Christ in my heart?

Jesus’ body crumpled on the cross, his arms extended. Father, into your hands I commit my spirit, he whispered, and the spotlight was shut off, leaving us all in the dark. I heard the murmurs of sadness around me: sniffle of a nose, choked gasp of a sob. The counselors weren’t supposed to comfort us during the ceremony, so we all curled into ourselves, hugging our knees and wiping our tears with the backs of our hands.

A few minutes of silence passed, and the spotlight kicked back on. Jesus, wearing fresh white robes, stood blood-free and smiling on the cross. “Tonight you have the opportunity to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior,” Jesus said.

JP rolled a whiteboard onto the field and left it by the cross. On the other side of Jesus, a few counselors gently set a towering bell on the ground. “Confess your sins. Lay down your life for Christ. Ring the bell of salvation,” JP said. Soft worship music began to play — guitar chords, humming, and the song of Jesus we need you — and Kampers began a mass migration to the front of the field.

I could guess what each of the girls in my cabin was writing. A few evenings before, at Campfire Night, we had been encouraged to voice our sins. Some girls wept when they confessed what they perceived to be wrongdoings: having a crush on a boy who wasn’t Christian, posting pictures to MySpace that weren’t Kamp-approved, wearing immoral clothes to school, or dancing to “Genie in a Bottle.” One girl’s story has stayed with me through all these years. The whole week, I thought she had everything. She was beautiful, had a steady Christian boyfriend, and lived in Kansas City. On Campfire Night though, she wept as she told us about how her boyfriend had sprinkled rose petals on her bed for their first anniversary and begged to touch her. He had pawed at the button of her jeans until she complied, telling her they’d break up if she didn’t submit to him. Our counselors responded by asking if she was wearing makeup, or if she’d thought about her clothing choices, and the girl sobbed even harder as she described her short jean shorts.

All of us were harmed in some way by that circle. I realize now that the identity I so longed for — that of a simple American girl — was only a mirage. The actual lives of my fellow cabinmates, if only I had stopped to listen, were filled with grief and complication. I wish now that I could return to that place. I would tell each girl that their worth came not from men or God or what they kept hidden, but from the innate and fierce beauty of their independent hearts and minds.

The night of Cross Talk though, they penned their wrongdoings on the whiteboard. They knelt by Jesus’ feet and raised their hands to the heavens.

I sat frozen on the grass. I felt like I would burst with the impossible decision in front of me. To stay seated in my spot would mean that I wasn’t a true believer; I might go to hell, and Melissa might sense that my testimony had been a lie. Jesus’ bodily sacrifice on the cross — a violence that had just played out in front of me — would be wasted. But to walk to the front of the field, to list my sins and ring the bell of salvation felt fraudulent. To do so would be to claim a Christian God as being the only one true God, renounce other people’s beliefs as false, and reduce an entire country to the category of “nonbelievers,” elevating myself in not only race and class but religion as well. I did not believe in Islam, but I did believe in the earnestness of the daily calls to prayer, the immense, undeserved generosity shown to me, and the footage of hands raised to sky or heads bowed toward the ground after the tsunami.

I sat and wept into my knees. Years later, I would want to reach out in time to hold that young girl’s hand in mine, lead her away from the dramatic, manipulative ploy unfurling on the kickball field, and tell her that her worth as a person — as a girl, a daughter, a citizen of any country— did not depend on whether or not she rang the bell that night, on whether she believed at all. I would let her know that Indonesia — all of its immense beauty, its complications — would remain with her, blooming in strange turns of guilt and desire. Some mornings, before dawn, she would ache for the melody of a long-gone adhan, and her tongue would speak the language of a place she never belonged. She would grow up to assert herself in the world as a woman. She would become someone who made her own thoughtful decisions about who to love and how, someone who settled for nothing less than equality and respect in relationships. She would find her own church, one where the footfalls of a long run became prayer, birds chittering in the trees a sermon, the dappled sunrise above a form of miracle. But there, in that moment, my only options were to ring the bell or not.

She would find her own church, one where the footfalls of a long run became prayer, birds chittering in the trees a sermon, the dappled sunrise above a form of miracle. But there, in that moment, my only options were to ring the bell or not.

A figure stepped gingerly across the dark grass toward me. Erik squatted next to me on the grass.

“Can I give you a hug?” he asked. His cheeks were shiny with the residue of tears. I nodded yes. When he wrapped his arms around me, I was reminded of how small he was, how young still. Despite his ability to make friends, despite the show of bravery he put on to prove to me that everything would be OK wherever we went, I realized he must feel some of the anxieties related to identity that I did. Though he was pak and nomor one and a boy at Kamp, those labels came with their own outrageous expectations of what it meant to be a man. None of them involved crying on his sister’s shoulder when he was supposed to be accepting Christ into his heart.

Apa kabar?” I asked.

“Sad,” he whispered. He looked around furtively for a counselor. “I don’t know what to do.”

Saya juga,” I said in agreement. “I’ll go up there with you if you want.”

He nodded, and we made our way to the whiteboard. I couldn’t think of any sins that I wanted to confess to all of Kamp. Was confusion a sin? Doubt? Mistrust of this choreographed night? Because I couldn’t see any options other than believing in Kamp’s version of God or eternal damnation, I hated myself for not being able to believe. The bell began to ring, cheers rising up after. Another one saved! Hallelujah! My stomach turned.

Erik wrote on the board and asked me to come with him to the bell. We stood in a line as Kampers, one by one, often guided by their counselors, pulled the worn rope. Too many people were around for me to ask Erik if he actually wanted to, but years later, far enough away for us both to probe the past, he would tell me that he thought if he rang the bell, it would mean he belonged to something. It was only then that I remembered his struggles with friendships in Indonesia; he had one good friend at school, but other boys made fun of him because he was not aggressive enough, didn’t wear Quicksilver shirts, and cried too easily. At Kamp, he was a hero, his sensitive heart elevated by counselors who saw how he took the trays of other boys after dinner or the way he ran across a soccer field just to make sure I was doing OK.

When my brother made it to the front of the line, his counselors appeared and prayed over him. I slunk back into the shadows, where I held my arms around myself and looked up at the night sky. Constellations usually covered by Indonesia’s smog began to emerge from memory: Orion’s belt blazing bright, Lyra’s lines transforming into imagined chords. I tried to lose myself in the rigid boundaries of ages-old light. Around me, Kampers hugged one another, inconsolable. Even after being saved they wept, and I couldn’t tell if their tears were those of relief or anxiety. I listened as Erik rang the bell, one note within the music of other repentant hearts, a song of salvation that I couldn’t bring myself to sing.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Tin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Every One of Us Is Other: Looking Back on Representation in “Heavenly Creatures” 25 Years Later

WingNut Films

Alex DiFrancesco | Longreads | November 15, 2019 | 9 minutes (2,578 words)

In 1994, years before showing us the wonders and terrors of Middle Earth, Peter Jackson released a film that some still consider his finest work to date. The film was Heavenly Creatures, the real-life story of the 1954 Parker-Hulme murders in Christchurch, New Zealand. It won awards all over the festival circuit before receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

To provide a brief background to the history of the case and the film: Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme met as teeangers and went on to form a loving and obsessive friendship built around a mythical world that they created and escaped to frequently when the real world proved too much for them. When the girls’ parents began to fear they were developing an “unnatural,” queer bond, they decided to separate the young women. The girls, in retaliation and hopes they would be together forever, decided to murder Parker’s mother. They committed the act on June 22, 1954, bludgeoning the mother to death with a brick in a stocking.

Peter Jackson’s fourth film (after low-budget splatter-fests Bad Taste and Dead Alive and a Muppet-Show-gone-perverse venture called Meet the Feebles) was a departure for him. Jackson’s partner Fran Walsh had been passionate about the real-life Parker-Hulme murders for many years, and Jackson joined in the obsession. The film would take Jackson out of the realm of camp and cult, and catapult him into the playing field that made all of his later blockbusters possible. Attempts had been made to tell the salacious murder story before, including Michelanne Forster’s play Daughters of Heaven, but one reason that those attempts may have fallen flat was that no one before Jackson had had quite his empathy and dedication to the girls portrayed in the film. New Zealand filmmaker Costa Botes, a friend and one-time collaborator of Jackson’s, in a lengthy 2002 piece for NZ Edge, told a story that he believed exemplifies Jackson’s dedication:

He had already found black and white photographs of the Hulme family’s Port Levy summer house, but had no idea what colour it was painted in the 1950s. Anyone else would have built a recreation and settled for a best guess.

Jackson flew to Christchurch, drove two hours to the site, and then proceeded to dig in a grown over rubbish pile he found in the back. He emerged with a wooden shingle. Comparing it to his photographs, he realised he was holding a name plate that used to be screwed above the front door at the time of the Hulmes occupancy. Traces of original green paint still clung to the plate.

Thus, the colour the Port Levy house ended up being painted in the film was … exactly the right colour.

This dedication would be admirable for any director to undertake, but why exactly Jackson was so dedicated to this story is another matter.

In a 1994 Los Angeles Times article, Jackson himself said that the story had been around for decades. “But in all this time … the story has never been told sympathetically.”

Though he grew up in another era, though he was a white cisgender heterosexual man, Jackson, along with Walsh, was the first to reach through time with sympathy for Parker and Hulme. Or, perhaps, it could be something closer to empathy. Surely, Jackson’s early feature films, the splatter-fests like Bad Taste, which was made on weekends, (movies that were made around life events like a cast member marrying a devout Christian, being unable to work on the Sundays the films were shot (in the case of Bad Taste), being written out of the script, then written back in after his divorce), were not far off from the fantasy world that Parker and Hulme created to escape to, portrayed with gruesome life-sized plasticine figures in the film. Both were obsessive and thought out to the smallest detail. Both were ongoing projects that Jackson and the girls spent years on, relentlessly refusing to give them up despite any attempts by nature or man to interrupt them. And though the film doesn’t skirt the issue of the girls’ connection verging into homosexuality, Jackson doesn’t flinch away from it or sensationalize it, either. The sex scenes in the film juxtapose a disintersted, disconnected Parker having sex with a male boarder in her parents’ guest room against a scene in which Parker and Hulme experiment sexually with each other, acting out the roles of matinée stars to gently disguise their fascination with and passion for each other.


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While I wouldn’t suggest that Jackson or Walsh could intimately know any of what these girls went through in their repressed time, when they were further repressed by their gender and their obsessive love for each other, the pair seem to have been able to take their own experiences and morphed them into care and even understanding for these murderous young women. Particularly, Jackson seems to view the girls’ make-believe world as a creative outlet not dissimilar from his own acts of creativity — a world both the filmmaker and the girls went to great pains to portray in full and vibrant reality. While the girls made painstaking figurines of the characters who inhabited “the fourth world,” as they called it, Jackson’s work in recreating it went above and beyond much of the CGI work of the time, including claymation battle scenes and orgies, in what would later become the studios that made orcs and elves for Lord of the Rings. This empathy with these girls so unlike himself, created through the bridges he was able to build to them in the understanding of their lives and fantasies, becomes particularly relevant in our time, which no longer allows many examples of sloppy representation by those outside a demographic being represented to slide by unnoticed. Jackson’s approach and careful attention to detail in his portrayal becomes important because it’s a prototypical example of how we can use our own inner worlds and emotions to create, lovingly and with care, the world of someone who is nothing like us.

Though he grew up in another era, though he was a white cisgender heterosexual man, Jackson, along with Walsh, was the first to reach through time with sympathy for Parker and Hulme.

I am not playing devil’s advocate here. I firmly agree that some representation of marginalized people in art is better left undone. For example, Ariel Schrag’s Adam, a book in which a young cisgender man is mistaken for a trans man and becomes part of the queer community so he can make friends and find dates, was written by a cisgender lesbian and used transgender people as a foil for the lives of cis people. The television show Transparent notoriously chose a cisgender actor, Jeffrey Tambor, to play a transgender lead.

Though the topic is thornier in the example above, poor or sloppy representation typically happens when we view those outside our purview as “other.” There have been countless classes and panel discussions in the arts about “writing the other.” But the fact is, each of us is “other” to everyone else, and it is the job of art to lessen the distance of that othering. Essayist and editor Janice Lee, in a presentation at the Thinking Its Presence conference in 2017, likened the distance between any two humans as the same between a human and a badger.

What I’m going to propose though is that the impossible distance between a human and a badger, that daunting and difficult and impossible divide, all of the differences between a human and a badger, is the same impossible distance between any two humans. But that the similarities between two humans, that which makes us alive and living, that closeness that can be intimated, is the same possible closeness between a human and a badger.

I’m also going to propose that attempting to occupy the point of view of a badger is just as important as the attempt and willingness to occupy the point of view of a different human being other than yourself. If we can consider the similarities between humans and badgers in a way that unites us, both as creatures of this planet, both as creatures that want to live and find intimacy differently but similarly, then we might be able to understand the differences and similarities between humans too.

It would be presumptuous to assume Jackson felt the same way when portraying these girls so outside his own purview. But Jackson took several steps toward making sure the girls themselves were represented in ways that humanized them. For one, he poured obsessively over the diaries left behind by Pauline Parker, making the voiceover of the film the girls’ own words. He dug through court records and diaries to find and interview living friends and family, including former classmates of the girls, to round out his understanding of the girls, their love for each other, and their final, horrific act. The film, through camerawork and the voiceover of words directly from Parker’s diary, stays remarkably close to the girls, their sensitiblities, and their actions, until the very end, when the murder is committed, and the camera and the viewer are made to pull away. Up until this point, Jackson sticks to the facts of the girls’ lives and friendship as the girls would have told them themselves. The murder itself, while factual, reels away and lacks the steady gaze that Jackson has cast on these facts throughout. (“I can understand everything but their motivation for the murder, everything until the leap they made from the fantasy of killing to its reality,” Jackson said in the Los Angeles Times interview.) And perhaps, in a world where we are so removed from one another that it is suggested most of us could never understand one another, this documentary-ish approach is a necessary one. Perhaps it is not just good filmmaking to dig through the rubble of a demolished house to find the color scheme, to obsess over the history left behind by people themselves in their first-person accounts, but perhaps it is a living example of the empathy necessary to cross the divide between any one human and another.

But the fact is, each of us is “other” to everyone else, and it is the job of art to lessen the distance of that othering.

Whether or not the girls were actually homosexual is still a piece of conjecture. While Jackson’s film portrays the girls engaging in sexual acts with each other and shows a scene in which a psychologist labels the girls “depraved homosexuals” (it was the ’50s when homosexuality was still firmly in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an unquestionable mental illness), it’s never been “proven,” if such a thing can be “proven.” What seems important is that Jackson never used the piece of potential information to sensationalize the way others had in the past, nor the way that someone who is decidedly not homosexual might be tempted to. Accounts from newspapers and tabloids of the time the murder was committed were relentless in their othering of the lesbian schoolgirl murderers. In the digital newspaper collection of the Christchurch city libraries, one article recounts a psychiatrist’s view of the girls as homosexual and insane. “Their association, I consider, proved tragic for them. There is evidence that their friendship became a homosexual one. There is no proof there was a physical relationship, although there is a lot of suggestive evidence from the diary that this occurred. There is evidence that they had baths together and had frequent talks on sexual matters. That is not a healthy relationship in itself, but more important, it prevents the development of adult sexual relationships. I don’t mean by that physical relationships, but attachment to people of the opposite sex. Homosexuality is frequently related to paranoia.” Jackson, according to the interview in the Los Angeles Times, found little use in these accounts.

A Film Quarterly review of Heavenly Creatures suggests that Jackson veered away from the connection between homosexuality and insanity that even the girls hid behind in their trial by considering it a “red herring” in light of the rest of their powerful, intimate feminine relationship. Simply put, Jackson didn’t seem to care whether the girls were in love with each other because he knew they were in love with each other, and that bond of love and obsession carried enough weight to transcend categories of easy and dismissive identification. While their potential homosexuality wasn’t irrelevant (it was portrayed in a scene as inventive and intimate as the rest of their relationship, mentioned earlier, in which the girls’ sexual ecounters were informed partly by their fantasy world and partly by their love for each other), it also wasn’t an easy out, a way of othering that allowed Jackson the explanation for the unthinkable that so many sought in the story.

Jackson’s approach and careful attention to detail in his portrayal becomes important because it’s a prototypical example of how we can use our own inner worlds and emotions to create, lovingly and with care, the world of someone who is nothing like us.

I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s. There was little self-representation in those times. Visibility in the realm of popular culture was almost nonexistent for queer and trans people, not as anything other than a punchline or a sideshow dweller, a flippant one-liner on The Simpsons about Homer’s mistreated uncle Frank who transitioned because of childhood trauma, or a “bearded lady” in the circus. When I first came across Heavenly Creatures in the early 2000s, years after its release, I would find something like understanding there. I was a nascent queer, just beginning to identify as bisexual, living briefly back in my small hometown, working at a video store, and understanding the repression that Parker and Hulme may have felt in ways that I wouldn’t have expected someone like Jackson to. In those days, we took what we could get, and when what we got was something as shining as this film, it didn’t really matter as much where it had come from, just that someone had appropriately seen. Years later, after I had cut off ties with my own family (its own sort of murder, I suppose) in order to live my life as an out trans person, I rewatched the film and marveled again at how little judgement Jackson lorded over these girls, and how much care and sympathy he afforded them. How dedicated he was to telling their story in their words, how his sympathies, throughout the film, are firmly with the girls — not with the parents terrorized by a diagnosis of homosexuality, or a world outside Parker and Hulme’s deeply imagined one. I wonder about the generation of ’90s queers who felt the same, in some little way. Being seen is a powerful thing — sometimes being seen by someone nothing like you is powerful in ways that can’t be replicated by someone who hasn’t had to make the leap between potential consciousnesses.

We live in a time when “own voices” is becoming the norm — rightfully and happily so in most cases. It seems that many, to paraphrase Janice Lee, are not ready to do the work of leaping over the divide that is between one living being and another in a sensitive and caring way, not, in many cases, in a way that we might consider artful. Yet those of us who see ourselves portrayed poorly or with little sensitivity in the media are also, often, aware that this trend will never stop. And, in some ways, it should not. We should never stop trying to bridge the space between us, doing the work that art insists we do to understand one another. However, there are prototypes for understanding and sensitivity all around us. I believe Heavenly Creatures is one of the finest examples of an artist finding one of the multitudes of self and using it to show the lives of people who, for all reasonable purposes, are utterly unlike him.

***

Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism who has published work in Tin House, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and more. Their first novel, an acid western, was published in 2015, and their essay collection Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and their second novel All City (Seven Stories Press), in 2019. Their storytelling has been featured at The Fringe Festival, Life of the Law, The Queens Book Festival, and The Heart podcast. DiFrancesco is currently an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University. They can be found @DiFantastico on Twitter.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Jason Stavers
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

How to Stay Out of Your Editor’s ‘Jerks’ File

Blue retro typewriter with screwed up paper balls

As an editor receiving 50 to 100 essay submissions per week for roughly 125 slots per year, I pass on exponentially more pieces than I accept. This unfortunate math makes me anxious, not only because I’m an incorrigible people-pleaser who hates having so many humans unhappy with me, but also because I’m a writer myself, and I know how frustrating and heartbreaking it can be not to land your work where you want to see it published.

Most of the time writers are understanding and gracious, not only about my passing, but also about my only responding if I’m interested in their piece, as I explain in my submissions guidelines. But now and then, someone will fire off a mean email. Obviously (well, to me, anyway) this is not a good strategy for anyone who wants to eventually have their work accepted!

Mcsweeny’s Internet Tendency editor Chris Monks feels my pain. In an essay for Vulture, he writes about some of the jerky replies he receives when he passes on humor submissions, and provides screenshots as well (with names and other identifying details redacted).

I empathize with the frustration of not getting your work published, but it still sucks to receive these sorts of emails because, you know, I have feelings. By nature, I flee from any signs of interpersonal conflict, so I rarely engage and fire back an equally snarky response. Instead, I place these mean messages in a folder I’ve titled “Jerks” and occasionally share screenshots of them (with the names of the jerks redacted) to my followers on Twitter.

I know all about rejection. Sure, I dole it out frequently, but I’ve been on the other end a lot, too. I, too, am a veteran struggling humor writer. I know what it’s like to work forever on a piece, meticulously crafting a joke, until it feels just right and worthy of submitting. I am familiar with the adrenaline rush of clicking “send,” and the overwhelming wave of dread and second-guessing that follows. And I am no stranger to the interminable waiting for an answer back, a yes or no, please not a no, but, yes, it will probably be a no. It always feels like it’s going to be a no.

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The Spiritual Path at Fat Camp

George Peters / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Mona Kirschner | Longreads | November 2019 | 20 minutes (5,102 words)

Day One

I look around the pool as I kick my legs backwards. I wonder how I found myself in a swim cap and a full-piece bathing suit doing water aerobics with eight ladies over 60 at a health retreat that turned out to be an upscale fat camp.

Why is it that we never tire of talking about love? Of analyzing all angles of heartbreak?

No Uber driver’s English is bad enough to deter us, no stranger on an airplane too disengaged for it to all come spilling out, the same story, again and again.

Filling the void, my therapist had said. I always hoped that when I inevitably fell apart, at least I’d be original about it.

The previous day I had rushed down to the waiting taxi, stalling outside the high gates of my apartment building in São Paulo.

I was late, throwing clothes onto the bed and settling for stretchy workout pants and an old blue sweater that was too tight on the arms. The flight was smooth, the two hours going by quickly as I stared out the window in dark sunglasses that covered most of my face.

On the other end, I shuffled through the airport with my head down and bought sweet and salty peanuts after I couldn’t talk myself out of it. I walked outside; the muggy heat relentless, but I kept my sweater on, joining a group of elderly women next to a van stamped with a logo I recognized from the website. This should be good, I thought, making eye contact with no one and finding a seat.

A friend had recommended this place, deep in the countryside of southern Brazil, a short flight from my place of birth and my home for the last 10 years, having moved back after falling in love and dropping out of school in Canada, where I had grown up with my immigrant parents and privileged life.

I was always looking for something. For love, for adventure, for a story worth telling. I shifted happily from a good kid with a scholarship to a bartender in shorts and knee-high boots with no plan, chasing the drama.

And then I fell in love with a man in that way you do when you throw yourself into something so hard, you don’t even recognize yourself when you take a step back. Fully, entirely consumed.

He had green eyes and skin that actually glowed. I saw him for the first time from the side, across a cheesy wedding dance floor. I remember feeling short of breath. I hardly saw his face. Yet I recognized him as if I had known he was coming.

The van bumped along. I watched a series on Netflix on the drive out about an artist from Brooklyn and her many affairs. I noticed how all the actors on it were thin. Something I would have never realized a few months before.

We drove onto the property, a long, winding driveway with cornfields on either side. The sky was a rich shade of blue and the sun peeked out from the clouds, hot and unforgiving.

A purple and yellow butterfly flew next to my window as we drove up. I hated butterflies, always thought of them as the mean girls of insects. All colorful, flashy wings on the same old insect body.

We arrived to a welcome drink of green juice, the glass only filled halfway, hinting at the moderation that was to come. I noticed I was the youngest person there by at least 15 years. They showed me to my room and instructed me to turn up for my doctor’s appointment at 3:15. I let my bag drop off of my shoulder.

Everyone was in their provided white robes, the blue logo embroidered on the left side. I put mine on, noticing gratefully that it hid everything that needed hiding. My thighs chafed in the heat.

The nurse was gentle, especially when asking me to step on a large, rectangular scale.

“That’s a good girl.” She said, making a note on her clipboard. The doctor put me on a diet of 850 calories a day, which sounded absurd. “What caused the weight gain?” he asked.

“Heartbreak.” I shrugged. “Wish it was a more original reason.”

What is it about comfort from strangers that is so soothing? That makes us feel as if our uncertain futures are less terrifying if someone promises they won’t be? Someone who couldn’t possibly know? And yet.

“Do you think I’m going to be okay?” I would ask anyone who would listen.

I missed him. I could feel his hands, the callouses on his palms. The softness of the finer hair on the nape of his neck. The smell of his shirts. I could see the wrinkles on the side of his eyes when he laughed. I could hear his voice. My chest on his. Could feel him pinching my side when he thought something was funny. I’d say his name aloud.

They say our brains label pain, give it a face. He had a beautiful face.

How do you determine the difference between love and fear? Should it feel so similar?

The love had been there, at some point. Perhaps it was passion. It faded. The fear was constant. I was afraid of the fights, I was afraid of staying, I was afraid of leaving. I was afraid of being alone, of regretting it, of missing him, of realizing there’d be nothing better.

We introduced ourselves at the welcome address, our names, where we’re from, why we were there. I sat in the back. They assigned each one of us a table that we’d sit at for the week. Mealtimes clearly required military-level control. I looked down at the sad six grapes in front of me and tried to concentrate on chewing whatever absurd amount of times was recommended by one of the many (thin) doctors who gave a painfully slow speech before we could eat. Was it 40 times?

My ex and I used to get kicked out of bars for our screaming matches. He was jealous, I was hysterical. I thought it was romantic. I ended it after almost 10 years. He was my first love, all I knew. It was my decision. Courage and strength showed up suddenly, like unannounced dinner guests to an otherwise lonely affair.

He loved me. But he was terrible to me. We were terrible to each other. I plotted and hoped for my freedom for years. Yet the loss, the gaping hole felt like it was only getting bigger.

Love or fear?

They gave a tour of the grounds, the clinic, the vegetable garden, the main house.

I set my stack of books on the bedside table. I looked at the clean, neatly made single bed and sighed. I listened to Miles Davis.

Dinner was pea soup.
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‘I Was Trapped Forever In This Present Tense’: Carmen Maria Machado on Surviving Abuse

“At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her.” Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, color lithograph by Arthur Rackham, 1907. (Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Hope Reese | Longreads | November 2019 | 8 minutes (2,125 words)

“The nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history,” Carmen Maria Machado writes in her memoir In the Dream House. “We see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention.” In this new book, which draws attention to the rarely-written issue of abuse in queer relationships, she hopes to provide an antidote to the problem.

In her elegant and piercing story, Machado, whose 2017 collection Her Body And Other Parties was a finalist for the National Book Award, fits fragmented memories together to tell her own story of abuse (chapters appear as vignettes, with titles such as “The Dream House as Utopia,” or “The Dream House as Diagnosis”).

“The Dream House” — although entirely real — is a bit fantastical, and Machado writes in the second person to turn the lens around. Her partner is, simply, “the woman in the dream house.” And Machado’s use of footnotes from the Motif Index of Folk Literature is uniquely striking. Read more…

The Beauty of “Bl-Bl-Bl-Blue Moon”

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Barry Yeoman, a man with a lifelong stutter, suggests that while society mostly views a stutter as a disability, stammering really isn’t the problem at all. At the Baffler, he argues that the real problem to cure is the assumption that those who stutter are somehow deficient.

Like virtually all disabilities, stuttering has long been viewed through a medical lens—as a pathology in search of neutralization, an obstacle to a successful life. That lens is embedded in the language of speech impediments and speech pathologists. At best, stuttering has been framed as a “despite” condition: we can be happy and productive despite how we talk.

Some of us, though, have been trying to flip the paradigm, to reframe stuttering as a trait that confers transformative powers. We wear our vulnerability on the outside, and that invites emotional intimacy with others. We slow down conversations, fostering patience. We give texture to language. We gauge character by our listeners’ reactions. We are good listeners ourselves.

“There’s something interesting about stuttering in a world that moves at increasingly breakneck speed,” says St. Pierre, the Alberta professor. For most of human history, we measured time in lunar cycles, menstrual cycles, agricultural cycles. Today we rely on “clock time,” standardized and designed for industrial production. Clock time values efficiency; it has no patience for silences and repeated syllables. “Stuttering highlights that fact: that clock time runs roughshod over all these other ways of creating time, but that they still persist and are still important,” he says. “Stuttering interrupts this hegemonic order of time.”

Alpern wrote an essay for Stammering Pride and Prejudice, an anthology published this year in the United Kingdom. (The British use “stammering” as a synonym for “stuttering.”) St. Pierre has a chapter; so does Constantino, who is one of the book’s editors. In hers, Alpern tells the story of ordering a “Bl-Bl-Bl-Blue Moon” at a bar and finding unexpected pleasure in the extra syllables. Part of the delight is in using a voice that is uniquely hers; part is the hard-earned absence of shame.

Part is physical: “that little loss of control that resolves itself so beautifully sometimes,” she writes. “I am falling through the air for an instant, then catching the ground again, like Fred Astaire pretending to trip when he dances.”

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The Art of Losing Friends and Alienating People

Illustration by Giselle Potter

Laura Lippman | Longreads | November 2019 | 17 minutes (4,147 words)

1.

I am firmly in the camp that believes we need new interests and new goals as we age. At 60, I have taken up tennis and am dutifully working my way through Duolingo’s basic Italian lessons. Recently, a friend and I decided to pursue Stephen Sondheim completist status, attending productions of every musical for which he has written music and/or lyrics. Alas, our crowded calendars keep us from being as nimble as we need to be. Passion in the Philippines would have been amazing, but we couldn’t even make it to The Frogs in suburban Detroit. Clearly, we’re going to be at this for a while.

But this past spring, we managed to bag a New York production of Merrily We Roll Along, a Sondheim work that has been vexing dramaturges since its original 1981 Broadway run of only 16 performances. Based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, it moves backward in time, centering on a three-way friendship that has fractured beyond repair. Mary, who always had a thing for Frank, has become a bitter alcoholic. Frank has ignored the work he does best, composing, in order to become a mogul, at which he is mediocre. Frank and Charley no longer speak at all. Because the story moves from their crabby old age (40-something!) to their more hopeful 20s, we see the fallout before we hear the bomb. The suspense is not fueled by whether Frank and Charley will patch things up, but the origin of the feud. Who did what to whom?

That reveal comes quickly, one advantage of a backwards-moving story. The fifth or sixth song, depending on the production you see — people are forever tinkering with Merrily — is a bravura rant. Charley breaks down on a live television show while discussing his writing partnership with Frank. Which comes first, Charley is asked, the words or the music. The contract, he replies, then launches into “Franklin Shepard Inc.,” a laundry list of his friend’s shortcomings.

The song builds, his rage builds. But just as Charley appears on the verge of one of those musical theater transitions that was mocked in Spamalot’s “The Song that Goes Like This,” he stops himself and begins to speak-sing softly. He misses Frank. He wants him back.

His argument is contradictory. He compares friendship to a garden that has to be tended, then, shades of Elizabeth Bishop, says “Friendship’s something you don’t really lose.” The tempo begins to build. He’s out of control and he knows it. Very sneaky how it happens . . . Oh my god, I think it’s happened. Stop me quick before I sink. He ends with a few vicious, well-chosen words about Frank’s obsession with money. The friendship is irrevocably broken. It’s unclear what can’t be forgiven — the stinging words or the public airing of the grievance.

Absent this kind of betrayal or falling-out, most friendships don’t end so definitively. These no-ending endings can be hard to process. Our culture long ago made peace with the fragility of matrimony, but we still have high expectations for friendships. If you really care about someone, you should be able to pick up where you left off, no matter how long it’s been. Friendship’s something you don’t really lose, right?

Hold my beer, Charley. It’s Frank’s turn to sing.
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