Search Results for: marriage

Bending the Straight Line of Queer History

 

Manuel Betancourt | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (2,170 words)

 

Confronted by a historical record that mostly excludes and often disparages them, queer communities have long been forced to write their own histories — or, more often, to scrub them clean. After all, such histories can be dangerous to write, and the act of memorializing can sometimes feel like just another burden to bear.

In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love warns against this, writing that “given the new opportunities available to some gays and lesbians, the temptation to forget — to forget the outrages and humiliations of gay and lesbian history and to ignore the ongoing suffering of those not borne up by the rising tide of gay normalization — is stronger than ever.”

Three recent novels, all of them decades-spanning narratives centered on LGBTQ characters, are attempts to connect recent queer history with contemporary gay life. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair, John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and Tim Murphy’s Christodora are each expansive visions of post-war queer life. Set in London, Dublin, and New York City respectively, they tell stories about men and women living in the decades before and after gay liberation, through the AIDS crisis, and into the present. They depict everything from restroom cruising encounters and gay conversion therapy appointments to ACT UP meetings and late-night Grindr hookups. And they ask us to consider how past traumas haunt the 21st century.
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Seeking a Roadmap for the New American Middle Class

The next American middle class
Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Livia Gershon | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (1,950 words)

Over the past few months, Starbucks, CVS, and Walmart announced higher wages and a range of other benefits like paid parental leave and stock options. Despite what the brands say in their press releases, the changes probably had little to do with the Republican corporate tax cuts, but they do reflect a broader economic prosperity, complete with a tightening a labor market. In the past couple of years, real wages hit their highest levels ever, and even the lowest-paid workers started getting raises. As Matt Yglesias wrote at Vox, “for the first time in a long time, the underlying labor market is really healthy.”

But it doesn’t feel that way, does it? From the new college graduate facing an unstable contract job and mounds of debt to the 30-year-old in Detroit picking up an extra shift delivering pizzas this weekend, it just seems like we’re missing something we used to have.

In a 2016 Conference Board survey, only 50.8 percent of U.S. workers said they were satisfied with their jobs, compared with 61 percent in 1987 when the survey was first done. In fact, job satisfaction hasn’t come close to that first reading in this century. We’re also more anxious and depressed today than we’ve been since the depths of the recession, and we’re dying younger — particularly if we’re poor.

So maybe this is a good moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers. Imagine for a moment that everything goes right. The long, slow recovery from the Great Recession continues, rather than reversing itself and plunging us back into high unemployment. Increased automation doesn’t displace a million truck drivers but creates new, more skilled driving jobs. The retirement of the Baby Boomers reduces labor supply, driving up wages at nursing homes, call centers, and the rest of the gigantic portion of the economy where pay is low.

Would this restore dignity to work and a sense of optimism to the nation? Would it bring back the kind of pride we associate with the 1950s GM line worker?

I don’t think it would. I think it would take far more fundamental changes to win justice for American workers. But I also think it’s possible to strive for something way better than the postwar era we often remember as a Golden Age for workers.

Let’s start by dispelling the idea that postwar advances for American workers were some kind of natural inevitability that could never be replicated today. Yes, in the 1940s, the United States was in a commanding position of economic dominance over potential rivals decimated by war. And yes, companies were able to translate the manufacturing capacity and technological know-how built up through the military into astounding new bounty for consumers. But, when it comes to profitability, business has also had plenty of boom times in recent decades, with no parallel advances for workers.

This is the moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country. Page through Working, Studs Terkel’s classic 1972 book of interviews with a broad range of workers, and factories come across as a kind of hellscape. A spot welder at a Ford plant in Chicago describes standing in one place all day, with constant noise too loud to yell over, suffering frequent burns and blood poisoning from a broken drill, at risk of being fired if he leaves the line to use the bathroom. “Repetition is such that, if you were to think about the job itself, you’d slowly go out of your mind,” he told Terkel.

The stable, routine corporate office work that also thrived in the postwar era certainly wasn’t as unpleasant as that, but there’s a whole world of cultural figures, from Willy Loman to Michael Scott, that suggest it was never an inherent font of meaning.

The fact that the Golden Age brought greater wealth, pride, and status to American workers, both blue- and white-collar, wasn’t really about the booming economy or the nature of the work. It was a result of power politics and deliberate decisions. In the 1930s and ‘40s, unionized workers, having spent decades battling for power on the job, at severe risk to life and livelihood, were a powerful force. And CEOs of massive corporations like General Motors were scared enough of radical workers, and hopeful enough about the prospects of shared prosperity, to strike some deals.

A consensus about how jobs ought to work emerged from these years. Employers would provide decent pay, health insurance, and pensions for large swaths of the country’s workers. The federal government would build a legal framework to address labor disputes and keep corporate monopolies from getting out of control. Politicians from both parties would march in the Labor Day parade every year, and workers would get their fair share of the new American prosperity.

Today, of course, the postwar consensus has broken down. Even if average workers are making more money than we used to, the gap between average and super-rich makes us feel like we’re getting nowhere. We may be able to afford iPhones and big-screen TVs, but we’ve got minimal chances of getting our kids into the elite colleges that define the narrow road to success.

And elite shows of respect for workers ring more and more hollow. Unions, having drastically declined in membership, no longer have a seat at some of the tables they used to. Politicians celebrate businesses’ creation of jobs, not workers’ accomplishment of necessary and useful labor. A lot of today’s masters of industry clearly believe that workers are an afterthought, since robots will soon be able to do anyone’s jobs except theirs.

But let’s not get too nostalgic about the Golden Age. As many readers who are not white men may be shouting at me by this point, there was another side to these mid-century ideas about work. The entire ideological framework defining a job with dignity was inextricably tied up with race and gender.

From the start of the industrial revolution, employers used racism to divide workers. And union calls for respect and higher wages were often inseparable from demands that companies hire only white men. The Golden Age didn’t just provide white, male workers with higher wages than everyone else but also what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “public and psychological wage” of a sense of racial superiority.

Just as importantly, white men in the boom years also won stay-at-home wives. With rising male wages, many white women — and a much smaller number of women of other races — could now focus all their energy on caring for home and family. For the women, that meant escape from working at a mill or cooking meals and doing laundry for strangers. But it also meant greater economic dependence on their husbands. For the men, it was another boost to their living standard and status.

Golden Age corporate policies, union priorities, and laws didn’t create the ideal of the white, breadwinner-headed family, but they did reinforce it. Social Security offered benefits to workers and their dependents rather than to all citizens, and excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who were disproportionately black. The GI Bill helped black men far less than white ones and left out most women except to the extent that their husbands’ benefits trickled down to them.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country.

Today, aside from growing income inequality, unstable jobs, and the ever-skyward climb of housing and education costs, a part of the pain white, male workers are feeling is the loss of their unquestioned sense of superiority.

So, can we imagine a future Golden Age? Is there a way to make working for Starbucks fulfill all of us the way we remember line work at GM fulfilling white men? Maybe. With an incredible force of political will, it might be possible to rejigger the economy so that modern jobs keep getting better. It would start with attacking income inequality head-on. The government could bust up monopolistic tech giants, encourage profit-sharing, and maybe even take a step toward redistributing inherited wealth. We’d also need massive social change to ensure people of color and women equal access to the good new jobs, and men and white people would need to learn to live with a loss of the particular psychological wages of masculinity and whiteness.

But even all that would still fail to address one thing that made work in the Golden Age fulfilling for men: the wives. Stay-at-home moms of the mid-twentieth century weren’t just a handy status symbol for their men. They were household managers and caregivers, shouldering the vast majority of child-raising labor and creating a space where male workers could rest and be served. And supporting a family was a key ingredient that made otherwise draining, demeaning jobs into a source of meaning.

Few men or women see a return to that ideal as a good idea today. But try imagining what good, full-time work for everyone looks like without it. Feminist scholar Nancy Fraser describes that vision as the Universal Breadwinner model — well-paid jobs, with all the pride and status that come with them, for all men and women. She notes that it would take massive spending to outsource childcare and other traditionally unpaid “female” work — particularly since those jobs would need to be good jobs too. It would also leave out people with personal responsibilities that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hand over to strangers, as well as many with serious disabilities. And it certainly wouldn’t solve the problem many mothers and fathers report today of having too little time to spend with family.

A really universal solution to the problem of bad jobs would have to go beyond “good jobs” in the Golden Age model. It would be a world where we can take pride in our well-paid jobs at Starbucks without making them the center of our identities. That could mean many more part-time jobs with flexible hours, good pay, and room for advancement. It could mean decoupling benefits like health care and retirement earnings from employment and providing a hefty child allowance. Certainly, it would mean a social and psychological transformation that lets both men and women see caring work, and other things outside paid employment, as fully as valuable and meaningful as a job.

As a bonus, this kind of solution would also make sense when we do fall back into recession, or if the robots do finally come for a big chunk of our jobs.

All this might sound absurdly utopian. We are, after all, living in a world where celebrity business leaders claim to work 80-plus hour weeks while politicians enthusiastically deny health care to people who can’t work.

But the postwar economy didn’t happen on its own. It was the product of a brutal, decades-long fight led by workers with an inspiring, flawed vision. And today, despite everything, new possibilities are emerging. Single-payer health care is a popular idea, and “socialism” has rapidly swung from a slur to a legitimate part of the political spectrum. Self-help books like The 4-Hour Work Week — which posit the possibility of a radically different work-life balance, albeit based on individual moxie rather than social change — have become a popular genre. Young, black organizers in cities across the country are developing their own cooperative economic models. And if there’s any positive lesson we can take from the current political moment, it’s that you never know what could happen in America. Maybe a new Golden Age is possible. It’s at least worth taking some time to think about how we would want it to look.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other places.

 

“Hey, Can I Sleep In Your Room?”: Studying Love with Elizabeth Flock

AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh

Jonny Auping | Longreads | March 2018 | 16 minutes (4,156 words)

 

In her recently published book, The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, Elizabeth Flock aims to tell authentic stories of love in the city of Mumbai. But in a place where the notion of flashy Bollywood romance is ubiquitous, Flock went about her mission as a diligent reporter, spending close to a decade observing the daily lives of married couples in the eighth largest city in the world — interviewing them, living with them — even sleeping on their bedroom floors.

Flock, who spent two years in Mumbai in her early twenties, returned in 2014 to embed with her book’s subjects — three couples she had previously met. “I liked them because they were romantics and rule breakers,” Flock writes. “They dreamed of being married for seven lifetimes, but they didn’t follow convention.”

The deeply reported chronicles of these middle-class Mumbai couples depict the sometimes painful push and pull between love, breaking convention, and the ingrained duty to generations of tradition.

True to the diversity of the city, the book follows three couples from different religious and cultural backgrounds: Maya and Veer are Marwari Hindus, Shahzad and Sabeena are Sunni Muslims, and Ashok and Parvati are Tamil Brahmin Hindus.

But as Flock’s writing illustrates, these backgrounds were contextual and monumentally significant to their circumstances, but not even close to wholly representative of their identities.

Although Flock removes herself from these narratives, the stories feel complete and candid in a way that seems remarkable considering they are told by an outsider. The years worth of trust she built with her subjects — at times even babysitting their children — led to revealed secrets and emotions that take the accounts from ordinary to captivating.

Some of the obstacles these six people face — religious restrictions, gender expectations, antiquated laws and practices — are unique to their cultural environment. But what all of them are after — a successful marriage — is universally relatable.

Flock took the time to speak with Longreads about her reporting process, the state of marriage in India, and how love does or does not transcend culture and region.

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“Hey, Can I Sleep In Your Room?”: Studying Love with Elizabeth Flock

Longreads Pick

An interview with Elizabeth Flock, author of The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, on the years she spent studying other people’s marriages in Mumbai.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 8, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,156 words)

Looking Back On the Last Housing Bubble From the Precipice of the Next One

(Getty)

I could have used a trigger warning for Ryan Dezember’s recent Wall Street Journal essay commemorating the 10th anniversary of the bursting of the housing bubble.

Dezember writes about getting stuck for more than a decade with a deeply devalued house he’d bought on the Alabama Gulf Coast at a speculator’s price during the market’s peak in 2005.

My husband and I had a similar experience. Around the same time, we paid asking price for a house in Rosendale, New York, a depressed town in the Hudson Valley, after our lower offer was rejected. “Rosendale is really coming up now,” the owner argued. Two years later, the bubble burst, and Chase cut off the home equity line of credit we’d been using to renovate, saying we were now under water. In their opinion, our house was worth about 30 percent less than what we owed on it.

Due to the recession, we had less work, our incomes dropped, and the price of oil soared, making it hard for us to heat the house and pay the mortgage. We tried taking in a tenant, but for a variety of reasons, that was only workable for a month. We looked into ways to convert the house into a two-family so it would bring in income, but that would have meant borrowing money on credit cards to hopefully, maybe make some money. Eventually, we rented the whole place out and moved to an apartment in nearby Kingston.

Dezember’s experience was much more dramatic and painful than ours: His marriage fell apart, ours is intact; his renters used the place as a drug depot, while ours are actually about to buy our house (we close next Thursday!). And our home’s value has healthily rebounded to the point that we’re not losing too much of what we put into the place.

Now we find ourselves looking for a new home to buy in suddenly-chic Kingston, where we’ve been renting for four years, and where prices have quickly come to feel artificially inflated. We worry we’re about to buy into yet another housing bubble. How long before this one bursts? Dezember writes:

At a staff meeting last summer, my editors at the Journal put out a call for stories to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the housing crash. One colleague pitched a story about young Wall Street types who viewed the crisis as a historical event. Such a story would have never occurred to me. As far as I was concerned, the housing crisis had ended just a few weeks earlier.

About 2.5 million American homes are still worth less than their mortgage debt, according to estimates by CoreLogic . That is about double what it should be in an otherwise healthy market, said Frank Nothaft, CoreLogic’s chief economist.

Those of us who have emerged from underwater missed the chance to buy low. Home prices in many markets now exceed their 2006 peaks.

Investors such as Mr. Schwarzman who amassed thousands of houses to rent have bet more than $40 billion wagering that the crisis was so traumatic for people like me, and so destructive to our finances, that we’ll be renters forever. They may be right.

At a wedding I attended recently, I met a real-estate broker who touted the riches to be made by buying units in the glassy residential towers popping up along the waterfront in Brooklyn, where I live. No matter how slapdash the construction, she said, prices have only one direction to go.

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A Storyteller, Unbecoming

Painted houses in Shekhawati region, Rajasthan, India. Photo by Ahron de Leeuw (CC BY 2.0).

Namrata Poddar | Longreads | March 2018 | 14 minutes (3,636 words)

 

I remember writing workshops and story gods — firm believers in the real, in an alabaster universal and unhappy endings.

I remember hearing for the nth time from story gods: do not write about writing. I would nod. Of course. Last thing the world needed was another writer staring deep into their navel.

I remember visiting a Thai restaurant with my cousins once. They ordered jasmine rice with red, green, or Panang curry. I ordered coconut rice, as usual. A cousin snapped shut the menu and said, “You had to be different again?”

I remember writing workshops and lessons from story gods — no adjectives, no adverbs, no prepositions, no over-thinking, no over-remembering, no over-feeling, less interiority, more action, the usual elements of white male style.

I remember looking for a story goddess in workshops, one with chai skin and a foreign accent.

I remember Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, and Ernest Hemingway.

I remember Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Raymond Carver, John Updike, and John Cheever. When it was time to be diverse, there was Grace Paley and James Baldwin. When it was time to be radical, there was Bob Dylan.

I remember growing up in a city once called Bombay and the carrot halva cake Ma had made in the shape of a human heart for my fifth birthday. I was wearing an overused Jinny & Johnny dress discarded by one of my rich cousins. I bent over the candle, squinched my eyes, and made a wish: please please please Krishna, let Mumma and Papa be here for my next birthday too.

I remember Bombay years and Papa singing, always singing aloud with whoever was playing on our red National cassette player. Unlike Ma or Didi, my older sister, I was the one to hover around him. As he ironed his cotton shirts for hours, I would sit cross-legged on the floor next to him, pored over my drawing book with Camel crayons. Once done ironing, he would introduce me to classical North Indian, to devotional and ghazal singers, to Bollywood stars. I must have been 6 or 7 then and my parents had yet to call it quits. I don’t recall every name, but I remember Ravi Shankar, Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Mohammed Rafi, Kishori Amonkar, Nargis, Meena Kumari. I told Papa I liked Madhubala the most — she had a Colgate smile. Nargis and Meena Kumari cried too much.

When Ma and Papa called it quits, I remember looking for another model of that red National cassette player in electronic stores for years. I never found it.

I remember looking for a story goddess in workshops, one with chai skin and a foreign accent.
 
I remember Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, and Ernest Hemingway.

I remember summer vacations when my parents hadn’t exactly called it quits. Papa was no longer living with us in Bombay and had moved back with my grandparents in Calcutta. For several summers, we visited Papa, Dadu, and Dadi at the Poddar house in Bara Bazar. A typical May afternoon in Calcutta, thunderstorms and pounding rain, followed days of homicidal heat. Didi was busy playing Ludo with my older cousins in our room upstairs, but I wanted to watch rain fall on Bara Bazar streets. I hopped down to the gaddi on the first floor where Dadu was chitchatting with the neighbors passing by. He was perched on his rocking chair in his usual outfit — a silk beige kurta and a white muslin dhoti — with one of his English dictionaries in hand. Chambers Dictionary of Etymology was his favorite, but I don’t remember the edition he was reading that day. I pulled his kurta and dragged him to the main door so we could watch the rain. “What nice smell, Dadu!” I clutched his walking stick, as tall as me, and watched the parched street exhale fumes as if Aladdin’s lamp had been rubbed and a genie might appear any moment. Dadu removed his Gandhian glasses and inhaled theatrically. “Petrichor,” he said. When I asked him to repeat the word, he opened his dictionary and raised my index finger to a page starting with P. I stood on tiptoes to see the word clearly and nodded each time I repeated, pet-ree-chaur.

I remember standing on tiptoes to touch Papa’s sitar, enthroned above a bookshelf with locked glass doors. I’d started reciting The Daffodils from my English textbook; reading poetry in Hindi, Marathi, French, Spanish, or Creole would come later in life. Reading in my mother tongue may never happen; Marwari is a space of my heart, of family, music, dance, and a part of me wants to protect us from texts. That day, though, as I tried to reach Papa’s sitar, I remember squashing the tip of my nose against the glass door and staring at the hieroglyphics on Papa’s hardcovers — voluptuous curves in black ink extending in all directions and connected by a horizontal line.

I remember recounting the story of Romeo and Juliet to Dadi when she visited us from Calcutta to help Ma who’d taken a third job since we didn’t have Papa or his income around anymore. I must have been 8 or 9 and I parroted every word Betsy Miss taught me at school that day. “Shayspeare wrote the world’s most famous love story. The world remembers it even after 500 years.” I stood against the lime-washed wall of our one-bedroom flat in Bombay, locked my palms, and brought them closer to my chest, as we did in the elocution period at school. When I was done, Dadi continued shelling peas and discarding the pods into a circular cane basket. “Dying because you can’t live without your beloved?” She lowered her glasses and gave me the grandma look. “But that’s desperation, beta. Not love.”

I locked my palms tighter into each other. “Betsy Miss said Shayspeare wrote the most famous love story!”

I remember Bombay years and singing with my teenage sister who’d started learning French: Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous? I didn’t understand the language but I loved feeling my tongue around those foreign words; I enjoyed their familiar tune, too. I knew then I would learn French on growing up. What I didn’t know was how hard I’d fall in my love of the different.

I remember undergraduate years of Business School in Bombay and repeating to my uncles and aunties for the nth time that I did not want to get married to their Marwari friend’s brother’s cousin-in-law’s nephew whom they were proposing as the brightest possible future for me, a divorcee’s daughter. I did not care to pursue an MBA, IAS, IFS, CFA, or software engineering after marriage should my future husband allow me either. Instead, I wanted to pursue my love for French and an education in the Arts — now.

“MA in French literature?” one of my uncles said. “What next, M.A.D. in Swedish cake baking? Soon, you’ll go mad, child. Mad!”

“Oho, whose salvation vill your degrees achieve anyvay?” my aunt added, sipping the last of her chai.

I remember undergrad years in Bombay and my first class of Yoga — a casual curiosity, a cheap opportunity. After practicing asanas for an hour, we moved on to a lesson in meditation. I remember the boredom I felt after the first few minutes of staring into the candle’s flame, a way to steer the mind into stillness. What I didn’t know then was how hard I’d fall in my love for Yoga, a worldview rooted in union, and at the other end of my love of the different, a worldview rooted in separation.

I remember begging Brahmin professors at a university in Mumbai to let me in their Masters program in comparative literature. I remember being told that they couldn’t lower the program standards by enrolling baniya Business Majors.

“I mean, Marwaris are good at making money, but culture?” a professor said with her oxbridge drawl, stressing the “w” and “r” instead of the local pronunciation, Marvaadee.

I remember daydreaming day after day about my escape to America, the most hospitable land for immigrants (I believed media stories at that age), the best way I knew to escape a life that would be imposed on me in the name of family and love. I worked hard with my books and won a fellowship for a PhD in French in one of those private American schools that paid a stipend for summer months too.

I remember grad school years in the U.S. and white colleagues suggesting I take lessons in American English, more than once. When my brown colleague — we’ll call her Oshun — found out about this, she put her foot down for us foreign students. Over the years, Oshun taught me how books could save — and kill — but that day, she simply told our white colleague, “Will you cut the racist crap? Indian English is English.”

I remember story gods on a very long reading list whose mastery would allow me to continue a PhD in French literature — Montaigne, Racine, Rousseau, Balzac, Zola, Stendhal, Hugo, Baudelaire, Michaux, Perec, the usual suspects. I remember pleading with the one in charge to replace a few on the list with gods and goddesses closer to my home by the Arabian Sea — once an archipelago of seven islands, my home. I wanted to add black and brown writers who wrote in French. “From the Indian Ocean? Like, who?” the one in charge asked.

I remember visiting Montreal from Philadelphia over Christmas because winter break was too short and the fare to Mumbai five times higher. At the Trudeau International Airport immigration desk, the red-haired officer asked me about my student status in the U.S., then continued his interrogation in French. As he opened a fresh page to stamp my passport, he said, “You speak very good French.”

“Thanks, you too,” I replied.

He stamped my passport over a lingering silence and raised his hand to summon the next traveler.

Uprootedness felt strongest in those early immigrant years when I knew so little about walking the xenophobic labyrinths of a liberal First World.

I remember census survey forms. One day, when applying for a job, I was filling out a form online. My buddy Elijah was visiting me in Philly from London and watching a Woody Allen movie on TV. He sat on the couch beside my desk with a bag of pretzels.

“What would you pick for me, bud? Asian, Indian, Pakistani, Black, Other?” I read aloud the relevant options and didn’t need to explain how ridiculous they read.

“Caucasian,” Eli said, eyes fixed on the screen, as he popped another pretzel into his mouth. “Aren’t you guys the real Aryan deal?”

I remember the 20s and their ceaseless game of hellos and goodbyes, a game of switching homes across the planet. Dadu passed away and Papa’s singing was becoming a distant memory since I migrated to the U.S. Uprootedness felt strongest in those early immigrant years when I knew so little about walking the xenophobic labyrinths of a liberal First World. I remember a constant longing for home and seeking it in the bodies of men, hoping that lust would lead me to love and love would lead me home.

I remember landing at LAX with Philly years packed in two suitcases. I was excited about a job that would bring free weekends, warmer weather, and new people into my life. I’d said goodbye to my Philly boyfriend, and realized, as one often does after grieving via denial, that I needed to fill my weekends with something other than men. I’d been amassing volumes of personal diaries — another attempt at finding home — but I hadn’t taken my desire for creative writing seriously. Wasn’t that kind of literary life a gora luxury for those who eat, pray, love, and indulge their muse? It never occurred to me that an artist’s life could be in harmony with my life.

The new job offered me enrollment discounts so I signed up eventually for a creative writing workshop. One day, when reworking a story draft at Peet’s, I remember my fingertips tingle and a bubble of silence expand around me as it drowned rush-hour traffic outside and the barista’s calling out the names of clients awaiting their cappuccinos, Americanos, peppermint white mochas, and holiday spice lattes.

I remember a blond friend from Connecticut (or was she from New Jersey? Or Pennsylvania?) pulling me aside at a writing conference in Vermont once. “Now I know how much you love your In-dia, but can you teach me how to pronounce Amy-Tuh-Vaah Gosh? He’s my favorite writer,” she said. Her gray-eyed biracial bestie from Connecticut (or was she from New Jersey? Or Pennsylvania?) faked a cough.

I remember meeting the friends of a new date at a bar in Beverly Hills. Halloween was approaching and ideas on potential costumes for the next party were being exchanged over dirty martinis. One couple settled on Red Riding Hood and the wolf, another couple settled on cop and prisoner, and yet another, on doctor and nurse. When my date and I were quiet, the desi American lawyer, most talkative of them all, suggested we dress as Cowboy and Indian. I wanted to be liked by my date’s buddies so I decided to play sport, almost. When my date and I went to the party, the lawyer complemented the feathers on my outfit and asked me, what kind of Indian wears bindis on her forehead?

“The thoroughly confused kind.” I winked.

I remember the first visit to my ancestral house in Shekhawati region of India’s Thar desert. The blooming cacti of Southern Californian streets and those first road trips across Death Valley made me miss my grandparents and the stories of their desert past I’d grown up hearing. I remembered family lore and endless variations on how our town was founded by one ancient Poddar family, how Marwari merchants once commissioned artists to paint their homes with the latest trends in the visual arts, how Shekhawati is the world’s biggest open-air gallery.

I called my sister in Mumbai one day, booked our flights, and made my first visit to the ancestors in Ramgarh, one of the richest towns of 19th-century India, a ghost town now that trade routes had moved from the Thar desert to the Indian Ocean ports. Rumor spread fast in the small Rajasthani town that Poddar girls from Mumbai and LA were visiting.

For years, I’d not spoken to Papa. For years, I’d kept deliberate distance from Papa’s family — Dadi, Dadu, cousins, uncles, aunts — as if they were not my own. For years, I’d declared myself a nomad, uninspired by bourgeois, nationalist ideals like roots. For years, I pretended I’d no memory of the letters I wrote to Papa as a child, week after week after week: Papa please come back, Papa I miss you, Papa you promised last summer, Papa I’m still waiting, Mumma doesn’t tell me why you left, Dadi doesn’t tell me why you left too, yesterday I heard that Kishori Amonkar song on TV, today I saw Guru Dutt’s poster in a store, do you know Tina’s papa plays the sitar too?, why you left us Papa?

For years, I believed my father had read my letters, because at 7, you believe what the elders in your family tell you, and because at 7, you just goddamn believe.

Walking around Ramgarh, our tour guide showed us Poddar houses, Poddar temples, Poddar cenotaphs, all covered in some of the region’s best preserved frescoes, what pride in roots! The guide took us next to our ancestral house, the Poddar house where Dadu and Dadi regularly spent their winters. He gave us a tour: here, a flour mill made of stone in the former kitchen, there, the outer courtyard where our forefathers traded in spices, wool, and cotton with the passing caravans of the Silk Road, and out there, in the alcove, the bookkeeper’s cabin, across from the main door, so he could check out the visitors before letting them in. I was playing the fresh-off-American-Airlines tourist, taking pictures faster than I could breathe, when Didi sauntered to the gaddi’s corner and picked up a scroll with a thick bed of dust on it.

“What language is this?” my sister asked the guide as she opened the pages with a script that resembled long lists, each line ending with numbers in parentheses. I lowered my camera and walked toward the scroll. The script resembled Urdu as each line started from the right side of the page. Or did it? Neither of us could tell. Like other Bombay Marwaris from Shekhawati region, Didi and I were fluent in Hindi, Marathi, and English. We spoke Marwari with our grandparents, a pure version of Hindi, English, or Hinglish with our parents, and a creolized Bombay Hinglish between the two of us. We used to speak Bengali during our Calcutta summers in childhood too; Didi is more fluent in Indian languages as she lives in the motherland. Yet we felt no shame in not reading our mother tongue. Marwaris I know are seldom nationalistic in the same way as Europeans, Bengalis, or Marathis. As migrant desert folk, we believe in adapting wherever we are — a survival mechanism born from harsh weather and scarce resources.

“Must be Marwari, no?” I said, my desert pride shaky then.

“They call it Moody tongue,” the tour guide said. “A cryptic language written in lists. Men used them to conduct business.” When we asked questions on Moody language, the tour guide said he didn’t know the answers; his ancestors weren’t traders. On returning to America, I googled Marwari merchants from Shekhawati and Moody tongue, and didn’t find much. After a while, I willfully quit; there’s only so much I desired in my indulgence of roots.

Yet I remember that mysterious ancestral script written in lists. And upon my return to LA, I remember calling Dadi in Kolkata after over a decade. We talked nonstop for two hours.

I remember November 2016 and a sudden awakening to resistance, to the personal as political among pale American liberal artists.

I remember telling stories to my niece before she went to bed every night I saw her when I visited my family in Mumbai from California. This was my way of making up for becoming her American Masi, making up for the childhood I had missed witnessing: her first birthday, her first walk, her first haircut, her first day of school, her first prize in dance. This was my way of making up to her for the childhood I’d always wanted, one with stories told to me in bed by my parents. I would read to my niece the stories of Shiva, Uma, Laxmi, Ganesha, Arjuna, Aladdin, Ali Baba, stopping often to embellish the story with imagined details, and when my niece would fall asleep, I would whisper in her ear my favorite line from the world of stories: “Tomorrow little one, I’ll tell you a more entertaining story if the King lets me live.”

I remember November 2016 and a sudden awakening to resistance, to the personal as political among pale American liberal artists. The liberals organized conferences, workshops, retreats, seminars, symposia, colloquia, caucuses, tea clubs, Boba clubs, chai hours, coffee hours, happy hours, unhappy hours, and advertised these on social media with the image of a raised alabaster fist. The liberals loved to talk. They talked about Art, they talked about Culture, they talked about History, they talked about Science, they talked about Climate Change Capitalism Democracy Refugees Border-crossing Social Justice Gender Justice Reproductive Justice Environmental Justice, and raised their alabaster fists in the air. The liberals were angry, the liberals were earnest, the liberals were determined to make America great again through Art. Above all, the liberals were funny, always funny. And slow on irony.

I remember Bombay years, the April heat, and the anticipation of story books after final-exam days at elementary school. Ma would take me to the raddi wallah, Ramu Uncle, whose “store” across from our residential building was tucked between Good Luck, the stationery store, and Amul, the dairy store. Ma would buy fruits and vegetables from the street vendors nearby while I would sit, yoga style — as I learned to call it in America — on a heap of old newspapers, sifting my favorites from piles of used books and magazines: copies of Suppandi, Chacha Chaudhary, Tin Tin, Malory Towers, St. Clare’s. Issues of Amar Chitra Katha were always my favorite find — or did narrative drive create this memory in its need to inject order and meaning into a fragmented past?

I remember the parcel my grandma sent me from Kolkata as a housewarming gift when I moved from Los Angeles to Huntington Beach with a boyfriend I’d eventually marry — a resplendent lehenga from her wedding trousseau, covered with handmade zardosi embroidery in real silver threads that had survived decades of coastal Indian humidity; not one thread has turned dark. Gopis in different Kathak positions stand on each of the 39 pleats that frame the lehenga’s central-front pleat, where a pale-skinned Krishna stands on one knee, plays the flute, and looks deferentially at a blue-skinned Radha, his Shakti, who dances in joyous oblivion. Hindu mythology is complex and I’m learning to decode the deeper layers of meaning to this androgynous union, portrayed through a reversal of the couple’s skin color.

Each time I open the saree cover that encloses Dadi’s lehenga, the first thing I do is bury my head in it. I inhale slowly the combination of rose, naphthalene balls, and a musty, woody smell I associate with almirahs of Calcutta summers, and I hear Papa playing his sitar, I hear Calcutta rains with Dadu, I hear my Dadi’s laughter as she pickles dates after soaking them in lemon juice for days, and I remember the letter she sent with her parcel: “This one tells a love story too, beta. A story of union and non-possession that goras don’t get. But first, you learn to read.”

* * *

Namrata Poddar writes fiction and non-fiction, and serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli, where she curates a series on Race, Power, and Storytelling. Her work has appeared in The Margins, Transition, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, among others. She holds a Ph.D. in French Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars. She has lived in different parts of the world and currently calls Huntington Beach home.

Editor: Ben Huberman

Grown-Woman Theology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

How to Write a Memoir While Grieving

Illustration by Katie Kosma

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

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

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

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

Read more…

Little Führers Everywhere

Matthew Heimbach in front of court in Charlottesville, VA. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Vegas TenoldEverything You Love Will Burn | Nation Books | February 2018 | 20 minutes (5,442 words)

The first time I met Matthew Heimbach was in 2011, shortly after my trip to New Jersey with the National Socialist Moment. Our meeting was completely coincidental, and we would both forget about it for several years until we met again. That summer I found myself in the woods of northern North Carolina at the invitation of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. My experience with the NSM had resulted in more questions than answers, and I figured that if I wanted to understand the white supremacist movement in America, I might as well start with the “Original Boys in the Hood,” as one of their more popular t-shirts stated.

It took some driving around to find the location of the Loyal White Knights rally. This was another thing that had changed over the years. There was a time, only a few decades ago, when Klan rallies were, if not announced and attended by the public, certainly tolerated enough to be held in the open. In 2011, even in North Carolina, they had been relegated to the backwoods, as far from people as they were from relevance. At the turn-off to a narrow dirt road stood a decrepit old tractor that someone had taken the time to drape in a Confederate flag. It seemed like a clue, so I took a chance and turned left into the woods. Read more…

A Tale of Two Vegases

View of the strip in Las Vegas. (Kobby Dagan/VWPics via AP Images)

Gayle Brandeis | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (3,027 words)

 

The Best of Times — March, 2007

The night before I was slated to fly to Atlanta to attend the biggest writing conference of the year, I was sideswiped by one of my vomiting episodes. These hit every few months — hours of intense abdominal pain that came and went like labor, followed by hours of vomiting that often led to a trip to the emergency room; this had been going on for the past 12 years, with no diagnosis. I didn’t want to miss the trip, but I was writhing around on the floor, and heaving into a large mixing bowl, and attempting to keep the anti-nausea suppositories up my ass long enough for them to kick in. I was chanting, “Help me, help me, help me” — words that always burbled from my mouth during these episodes. I wasn’t sure who this chant was aimed at — not my husband, who tended to shy away whenever the vomiting began — but my mom seemed to hear me in Oceanside, 100 miles from my home in Riverside, California. She called and was alarmed when I told her I still hoped to get on the plane the next morning.

“I’m coming with you,” she announced. Before I had the sense to stop her, she purchased a last-minute ticket for my flight. She picked me up in her red Intrepid shortly after sunrise, and I wondered what in the world I had gotten myself into. I pretended to sleep most of the flight.

My mom and I ended up having a surprisingly good time in Atlanta — we danced together, attended illuminating panels, had a blast with her cousin who lived in the area, ate copious amounts of boiled peanuts; she even made meaningful eye contact with Walter Mosley, who she was certain would one day become my stepfather. When our flight was delayed, she was miraculously relaxed and chatty, and I didn’t feel the need to pretend to sleep on the plane to avoid her. I was plenty sleepy by the time we arrived at the Las Vegas airport, though — it was 1 a.m., and we had missed our connecting flight. The airline gave us the option of staying in the airport and flying home in a few hours, or taking a hotel room and flying home late the next day.

I was so tired, I needed to rest my head on the ticket counter, but I looked up at her and said “Why don’t we stay? Maybe we could see a show or something.” It was the first time I could remember voluntarily extending a visit with her. Our relationship had always been complicated, but when she started to show signs of a delusional disorder 14 years earlier, our connection became all the more fraught.

“Let’s do it,” she said, and soon we were giggling in a free cab on our way to a free hotel room just off the strip. Our luggage was still on the plane, so we slipped into the plush white robes hanging in the closet and crashed for a few hours. We put our rumpled travel clothes back on after our showers, then ordered egg white and asparagus omelets with our free breakfast vouchers and set out to see how much Vegas we could pack into a day.

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