“Fear has descended,” says James Schamus, the screenwriter-producer who also heads the profitable indie company Focus Features, “and nobody in Hollywood wants to be the person who green-lit a movie that not only crashes but about which you can’t protect yourself by saying, ‘But at least it was based on a comic book!’ “
It had been so long since I had walked down those steps into a poorly lit foyer with low-hanging ceiling tiles, where the scent of buttery popcorn filled the stagnant air, and posters hung limply off the walls. That’s right, I went to my local cinema: I actually saw a film with other people, on a big screen, and wore proper outdoor clothes. After nearly two years of viewings from my sofa, largely in pajamas, this felt unnerving — and exciting. Granted, the seats were still uncomfortable, the chocolate was still overpriced, and a large family walked in late, discussed loudly where to sit, and then chose the seats right in front of me. But there was also surround sound, laughter, and Daniel Craig.
COVID-19 had kept No Time To Die, the latest James Bond film, out of the cinemas for as long as it had me; it was supposed to be released in April 2020, but when cinemas shut down around the world, 007 (or at least Universal Pictures) refused to stoop so low as a streaming platform. And so we waited. It was worth it, it’s a good film, and improbable car chases across dramatic snowy landscapes do lose something outside of the big screen. (I found myself wondering what brand of winter tire he uses, very grippy.)
Although I don’t proclaim to be a particularly ardent James Bond fan, watching an aging Daniel Craig strut his stuff did make me start to ponder the incredible longevity of this franchise. We had waited a year and a half for this film, but that’s nothing to a spy who has been in the field since 1952.
***
James Bond has always been in my subconscious. Growing up in the UK, there were four TV channels, and I remember the films on all of them around Christmas — the broadcasters having decided we deserved a treat at that time of year. First, it was Roger Moore, arching his eyebrow at me, then he gave way to a smooth Pierce Brosnan, who my mum excitedly ordained “rather dishy.” Moore and Brosnan were my Bonds. I had missed the very start, the era of Sean Connery — and so, my curiosity piqued after my cinema trip, I decided to dig deep into my streaming platforms and watch a Sean Connery classic: Goldfinger.
It’s from 1964, so I was not expecting the production values to be particularly high, and I was duly rewarded in the first scene when Connery appeared with a bedraggled stuffed seagull on his head as a disguise. We quickly move on to him kissing a woman (sans seagull), when he sees someone with a hammer sneaking up on them reflected in her eye — impressive at such close range — and in an incredibly unchivalrous move, he swings the woman round so that the man whacks her on the head rather than him. And this was all before the opening credits.
It gets worse. In one scene 007 is getting a massage by the pool, and, just as he creepily asks the masseuse to “go a bit lower,” a guy comes up to speak to him. Connery, I kid you not, tells the masseuse to shove off, it’s “man talk,” and proceeds to slap her bottom as she exits. He then pulls on a hot pants onesie apparently made out of a used towel — a look he deserves at this point. It gets more troubling later when he pushes Pussy Galore into a hay pile and forcibly kisses her as she tries to fight him off. By the time Goldfinger has him tied to a table with a laser beam tracking toward his penis, I’m rooting for the laser beam.
In contrast, No Time To Die does not even open with Bond, but with a little girl who, when chased by a villain, pulls a gun out and shoots right back. A retired James has also been replaced by a new 007 — a Black woman. While it is impossible to apply today’s values to a film from the early ’60s, I am pretty happy that being dismissed with a quick bum slap is no longer acceptable, and the stark differences between the two films made me again appreciate just how long Bond has been around. When he first pulled out his gun on-screen it was a very different world, and that license to kill still hasn’t expired. How has someone who is a borderline rapist, a murderer, and a potential sociopath endured through all these decades?
We could consider the fact that all the films share the same enjoyable elements — it’s always fun to hang out in an exotic beach location, drive beautiful mountain roads, and then pop home to share some quips in a British government office. Villains with metal teeth, white cats, or dubious accents have a certain timeless appeal; and submarine cars, magnetic watches, or X-ray sunglasses are always cool. And then there is the music — the iconic theme songs have an attraction all of their own. I particularly remember Madonna’s Die Another Day, due mostly to my younger self crashing my dad’s car while trying to dance along to the bizarre techno part. (Do not dance and drive, however fun the song may be.) There are many other classics: One of the few times in Goldfinger where a woman is actually allowed to shine is Shirley Bassey singing the theme song. It’s magnificent. However, the locations, the gadgets, and even the songs cannot be enough to keep this unwieldy franchise going.
So let’s look at how it started — with a rather posh English chap called Ian Fleming. He penned the first 007 novel, Casino Royale, in 1952, and proceeded to write another 11 Bond novels and two short story collections. The timeline in these books is rather vague, but Bond’s penchant for cars, drinking, and women remains consistent. It was a successful formula, and Fleming sold 30 million books in his lifetime — although it wasn’t until after his death that Bond entered a whole new medium, with an American film producer named Albert “Cubby” Broccoli first bringing the character to screen in 1962, under his production company Eon Productions. Unbelievably, Bond never left the tight grip of the Broccoli clan: 58 years after Bond’s first outing the producers of No Time To Die are Albert’s daughter Barbara Broccoli and stepson, Michael G. Wilson. Albert having handed the Aston Martin keys over to them back in 1995. This is a family dynasty that likes control — No Time to Die was originally supposed to be directed by Danny Boyle, who brought along his regular writer, John Hodge. This didn’t work out so well. Hodge’s script was rejected, and Boyle quit, stating “The producers wanted to go in a different direction.” The Broccolis weren’t happy, there was no way he could stay.
I think it is this iron control that is the key to Bond’s success. The Broccolis know what they are doing — after all, the family has been doing it for nearly 60 years. They have been the ones to choose the lead, the director, the locations, and now they have finished Ian Fleming’s material, the stories. A 2015New York Times interview revealed that the creative process begins with Barbara and Michael trying to decide on a premise and a villain that can embody some topical issue or prevalent fear. This is critical: Their Bond films change to reflect the world they are going to be viewed in. It was a strategy first started by Albert Broccoli: When Star Wars turned space into a trend, 007 also reached for the stars in 1979’s Moonraker. And as Dr. Jaap Verheul, editor of The Cultural Life of James Bond, has said, “Each time a new actor becomes Bond, the series takes the opportunity to recalibrate itself to the ideology of the audience it’s trying to talk to.”
Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli did just that after brutally dismissing my mum’s crush, Pierce Brosnan. In 1997, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery rather wonderfully satirized the movies, making things groovier, but much harder for Brosnan’s rather tongue-in-cheek style to continue working. Then 9/11 happened, and the Broccolis felt the world needed a rougher, darker, Bond: A thug with hidden complexities. Brosnan had to go. They wanted Daniel Craig. With this reinvention, some of the more unpalatable elements of Bond were also tackled — for example, in Casino Royale, Bond’s drinking is portrayed for the first time as a coping mechanism for his internalized guilt.
During this dive into the world of 007, I discovered that one of my favorite writers, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the star of Fleabag, had worked on the script of No Time to Die. She hassaid of Craig’s portrayal of Bond that he “let us in a bit, which makes the moments he shuts us out even more arresting … Overall he grounded a fantasy character in real emotion, which is what I think we hadn’t realized we’d missed amongst the action and the bravado.” So basically, with Daniel Craig, Bond isn’t all about the arse-slapping. In fact, this Bond actually falls in love, actually cries. What I didn’t realize at first, as I sat in the cinema somewhat confused having missed the preceding film, Spectre, is that the Craig films also follow on from each other in a series — so for the first time Bond even ages as well. But even as James Bond gets older, he is still never diluted — the Broccolis don’t allow any spin-off shows where M is venturing out to run a start-up spy business. It’s always all about 007.
These producers are smart. They know how to handle their baby. No Time To Die is Craig’s last film as 007, and the rumor mill of who will be next has started, with some speculation that it could even be a woman next time round. I don’t think it will be. The Broccolis have a good thing going. Bond is invariably going to be a white guy — there was enough backlash when he went blonde — but they will make sure to always keep shifting him just enough to make sure he is palatable to the audience, whatever decade we are in. And with the next generation of Broccolis already in the business, I suspect there will be many more.
***
Further Reading
During my research for this post, I came across three particular long-form articles that I enjoyed — so if you feel you would like to dwell a little longer in 007’s company, keep on reading.
*Haben Araya was working in the local hospital when a farmer came in, bleeding from his gums. He was suffering from a snakebite — a case she’d seen many times.
*At the request of the doctors involved, some names have been changed.
Before Araya sought asylum in the United States, before she helplessly watched the COVID-19 pandemic tear across the country, and before she learned about what doctors must go through to relicense in America, she worked as one of a handful of physicians on staff at a local hospital in her home country of Eritrea. She was a general practitioner, responsible for everything from pediatric preventative medicine to minor surgeries and gynecology. She served as the regional appointed physician for malaria case management and the hospital’s Director for Tuberculosis Control. If a patient needed to be transferred to another hospital, she had to write the referral. Call the ambulance. Make sure the ambulance has enough gas. Find someone to fill up the tank.
Snakebite cases were heartbreaking for Araya because she knew the medication was prohibitively expensive: 840 Eritrean Nakfa for a single vial (about 56 USD). Sometimes four or five vials were required, costing more than many farmers would earn in a year.
The hospital insisted on taking some sort of collateral until the bill was paid, but Araya knew the farmers were good for the money. She also knew that they would likely sell their goats or sheep — whatever animals they relied on for their livelihoods — to pay for the treatment. And then, she knew, they and their children would return in a few months’ time with severe cases of malnutrition and a host of consequent health issues.
A nearby military clinic, where there was no on-site physician, had a stock of antivenom. In exchange for a free supply for her patients, Araya told the administrator of the unit that she would provide medical consultation and training. It was not a perfect solution, Araya admits, but her job was to do anything she could for her patients. “We have to do our best with what we know,” she says. “Every day we had to be more than a doctor.”
***
Doctors trained in resource-limited environments possess a unique skill set. They’re adaptable, creative, and work well under pressure. Yet, upon arriving in the U.S., internationally trained physicians like Araya must go through a licensing process so arduous it can take nearly ten years to complete. There are currently an estimated 165,000 internationally trained medical professionals living in the United States and underutilizing their skills. Many, like Araya, are sitting on crisis management experience the United States never thought they would need — until the pandemic hit.
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Eritrea has a single medical school: the Orotta College of Medicine and Health Sciences, offering a six-year medical program. With only 30 to 40 spots in each graduating class, the nationwide competition was fierce. “When I applied to medical school, my dad always tried to impress on me that I need to have Plan B and Plan C,” says Lily Yemane, an expat Eritrean physician like Araya. But she couldn’t think of any other job she wanted to do.
In the United States, the pandemic forced many doctors who had never experienced shortages to make life-or-death choices about who would be given oxygen, but for Araya and Yemane, that kind of challenge was part of their regular work as physicians. “You have an idea of how a certain patient can be helped, but you don’t have the resources,” explains Yemane. “Two or three patients need a medication, and you have to decide who to give it to.” With only one or two ambulances per hospital, she often fought to convince the administration to deploy their ambulance for her patients.
Resource scarcity wasn’t the only issue. Living under the oppressive regime in Eritrea bled into every aspect of their personal and professional lives. “We don’t choose where we work, we don’t negotiate our salaries,” says Araya. “The government, basically they put our names in a fishbowl.”
Since President Isais Afwerki came to power following the country’s independence in 1993, freedom has been stifled. Afwerki’s extrajudicial executions, imprisonment of journalists and religious minorities, indefinite forced labor sentences, and other human rights violations have been documented by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Reporters Without Borders, on its World Press Freedom Index this year, ranked Eritrea last, below North Korea. There have been no presidential elections held in the country’s 28-year history. “ … You don’t get any say, you don’t vote. We’ve never voted in our entire life,” says Yemane.
When political prisoners were brought to the hospital for care — often for tuberculosis or scabies, the result of years in captivity — doctors were forced to defer to a system they vehemently opposed. Some prisoners were journalists; others had been caught at the border, trying to flee the country. “You almost never ask why,” says Yemane. “You don’t want to know.”
Each time a prisoner was brought for treatment, Yemane had to convince the guards to admit the patient to the hospital for necessary care, raising suspicions that she was on the prisoner’s side. Except once: Yemane supervised the care of a prisoner with kidney failure. When she went to check on him in the recovery facility, she was surprised to find the patient with his family, and the guards nowhere to be found. “He was free,” she says, “but they only let him go because they thought he was dying.”
There was no single moment that pushed Yemane or Araya to leave and follow their family and friends who had already fled to the US. Instead, the burden of oppression and persecution simply grew until they felt they had no choice. “My rights as a human being were being violated,” says Araya. “I did not have the freedom — that basic, basic freedom … we all deserve as human beings.”
***
Yemane did not arrive in the United States naive to American culture or to the challenge ahead. She’d read plenty of English literature and loved watching Oscar-nominated movies, from My Fair Lady to La La Land. But still, the culture shock was real. While waiting the nine months for her work permit to be approved, she lived with a family member and took an anatomy course at the local public college, working towards a physician assistant’s degree in case she couldn’t relicense. Eager to resume medical practice, she also began volunteering at a free clinic, which helped her to feel more at home as she gradually met more like-minded people.
Reporters Without Borders, on its World Press Freedom Index this year, ranked Eritrea last, below North Korea. There have been no presidential elections held in the country’s 28-year history.
When Araya reached the United States the following year, more than a dozen Eritrean doctors like Yemane — who’d fled in the months before her — warned her of the difficult road ahead. She’d have to have her credentials verified before she could sit for the three intensive U.S. medical licensing exams (USMLE) and apply for a residency program to repeat her training — the last step before finally being able to practice on her own.
For most refugees arriving with few resources, the financial cost — of translating educational records into English, covering the exam fees (nearly $1,000 each), and working a clinical internship (often unpaid) to help get a residency — is prohibitive. And the Eritrean doctors were struggling to get past the very first step in the process. For their primary source verification, authorized representatives from the Eritrean medical school would need to confirm that their documents, including their diploma and transcript, were authentic.
They’d contacted the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG), a non-governmental, non-profit agency, responsible for primary source verification. Of roughly 3,500 operational institutions in the World Directory of Medical Schools, ECFMG accepts credentials from approximately three-quarters — including the medical school in Eritrea. But when Araya and Yemane’s colleagues applied for verification, the Eritrean administrators wouldn’t respond to ECFMG’s inquiries.
The medical school and placement system in Eritrea, like many countries, is controlled by the government, which has the power to withhold the records of anyone they don’t want to assist. “In the eyes of the government,” says Yemane, “we are traitors — which is not true. We served our country when we were there. I worked with very little pay, like everybody else in the country, for four years, outside of my hometown. And we did serve the people. We did our best. But the government was not understanding of that. So when we left, we were considered traitors.”
Kara Oleyn, Vice President for Programs and Services at ECFMG, was assigned to their case. ECFMG sees 20,000 applications each year, and Oleyn was no stranger to verification challenges. When ISIS infiltrated Iraq and medical school officials fled to the south, Oleyn’s team worked with the Iraqi Ministry of Health to track them down, so they could provide verification for their former students. In Crimea, where both the Russian and Ukrainian governments claimed the medical university, they had to determine who was actually authorized to verify credentials. “We do need to assure the public that the individuals who are going to be laying hands on them have the appropriate credentials,” says Oleyn, “and primary source verification is a big part of that.”
But Araya’s and Yemane’s cases — and the cases of their Eritrean colleagues — stumped Oleyn. “There was absolutely no information coming out of Eritrea,” she says.
Araya and her peers were devastated. “The fact that the government I left was able to affect me here — it was just heartbreaking,” says Araya. “America, they gave me protection to stay here, but the [Eritrean] government was able to retaliate and hold me hostage, even when I’m here.”
In rare cases where verification couldn’t be obtained — often for political asylees — the ECFMG used an alternate process: having three U.S.-licensed physicians who attended the same international school swear on their medical license that they have personal knowledge that the individual graduated from medical school. Unfortunately, the Eritrean medical school, founded less than 20 years ago, had no prior graduates working in the United States to provide testimony.
Oleyn’s three-person team relentlessly contacted any sources they thought might be able to share information. “We were trying to triangulate exams that we knew they took in Sudan with Sudanese officials, and we couldn’t get anywhere,” she says. Even the US Department of State couldn’t offer any contacts in Eritrea besides those already refusing to cooperate. Instead, the State Department confirmed what she recalled the Eritrean applicants had already told her: “They’re not going to reply to you, because they don’t want their physicians … their young, bright, educated people to leave their country.”
Yemane and Araya’s feeling of helplessness intensified as the pandemic rolled through their new homeland, and they watched as the news quickly became saturated with reports of hospitals running out of beds and doctors to care for COVID patients. When Eritrea went into lockdown, they feared for their friends and family left behind. Yemane would close her eyes and remember the limited number of beds in the hospital’s ICU, imagining them all filled. The staff was already underpaid and overworked before the pandemic.
“In a perfect world, when this happens, what do you do? You just go home and you help, and then you come back,” says Yemane. “We could not go back home, even to help, even to contribute.” And in America, she couldn’t help either. “… Imagine sitting with the capacity to do something but not being able to do anything … What was the whole point of your training if you cannot do something, even in a pandemic?”
Many internationally trained doctors have valuable experience working in the thick of SARS and Ebola epidemics, conflict zones, and other limited-resource conditions — not unlike the conditions faced by hospitals across the United States, as doctors scrambled for personal protective equipment. “When you have a shortage in supplies all the time, you get creative,” Yemane explains. “When we didn’t have ventilators, we could make CPAPs out of things that you can access at the hospital. So we have that kind of mindset.”
Jina Krause-Vilmar, the president and CEO of Upwardly Global, a nonprofit organization that provides career services to immigrants and refugees (including several interviewed for this story), says that, despite knowing the risks of COVID-19, their clients were anxious to help and “in tears about the idea that they were standing on the sidelines at a time when their communities were suffering.”
Unable to assist medical efforts directly, Yemane volunteered for a mutual aid society to help with cooking and delivering food to a local homeless encampment, but she wished she could do more. At the height of the pandemic, “that’s when it was most painful,” she says. “You see the hospitals running low on supplies, on skill[ed workers], and you’re sitting at home doing nothing when you could have been out there helping people.”
Yemane would close her eyes and remember the limited number of beds in the hospital’s ICU, imagining them all filled.
In a few select states, desperation finally bred change, and internationally trained physicians were given the opportunity to contribute. New York (home to roughly 13,000 foreign-trained medical professionals not able to make full use of their skills) joined New Jersey, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Colorado in adapting licensing guidelines to allow foreign-trained physicians to help with COVID efforts at various levels — but with limited success.
For some, the application was too difficult. Upwardly Global heard that in one state Russian applicants were deterred because the drop-down menu on the online application accidentally omitted “Russia” as an option for country of origin. Some, like Yemane, applied to the NJ licensing program but never heard back.
“These were emergency policies that were designed and implemented at a time of unprecedented need and at a time when states were trying to mount a response to a public health crisis like no other,” says Jacki Esposito, director of U.S. Policy and Advocacy for World Education Services Global Talent Bridge, a non-profit dedicated to helping international students, immigrants, and refugees achieve their educational and career goals. “So just by virtue of the fact that they were designed and implemented very quickly, there wasn’t the time and the space to consult all of the various stakeholders that would be consulted in a permanent reform process.”
For example, according to Esposito, some states require applicants to have active, valid licenses in another country, but many people — refugees especially — let their licenses lapse to avoid yearly fees and continuing education requirements. Esposito says the application could have required that a foreign license was in good standing when it was last active to accomplish the same goal — of weeding out those applicants with disciplinary actions on their record. “It really was a mix of getting the eligibility requirements right so that they maintain health and safety standards, but at the same time are accessible for applicants,” says Esposito. “Eligibility requirements must be workable for these policies to be effective.”
Without the time to be more intentional about the design of the application process, inform employers about the policy, or conduct outreach to applicants, the opportunity went underutilized. By the end of 2020, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners, which operated the most robust program for applicants without residency experience, had received approximately 1,100 applications for temporary medical licenses, but, according to a spokesperson at the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, they issued emergency licenses to only 35 individuals. And according to Gothamist, not all who received emergency licenses were able to secure positions. Many applicants who were eligible for similar programs across the country didn’t know where to look for jobs, and hospitals weren’t sure they were allowed to accept internationally trained applicants — or just thought it was easier to not employ them.
“When push came to shove, the hospitals would rather repurpose a plastic surgeon,” says Tamar Frolichstein-Appel, a senior employment services associate at Upwardly Global, who believes better outcomes could be achieved if healthcare employers, legislators, and NGOs work in partnership. Without buy-in from employers who are willing to hire from this talent pool, a license doesn’t make much of a difference. “It’s a missed opportunity that we have not, as a country, leveraged the immense talent that immigrant and refugee doctors and other healthcare workers offer,” says Esposito.
Amid the crisis, a door was cracked open for a select few. But, by and large, doctors like Araya and Yemane watched the pandemic unfold, stuck outside of a system they desperately wanted to be part of. “We got so antsy to do something,” Yemane says. “It’s a privilege to be able to help in that time, and we didn’t have that.”
***
As more time passed without any news of progress from ECFMG, the persistent uncertainty began to take a toll on the Eritrean doctors stuck in limbo. “A few of us went back to medical school again. But to go to medical school twice in one lifetime — it’s a lot to ask,” says Yemane.
After fleeing Eritrea, another doctor, Abraham Solomon, chose this option to avoid being at the mercy of a stalled bureaucratic process. But he couldn’t simply repeat medical school; he had to go back even further and complete up to 90 credits of undergraduate pre-med requirements before even taking the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT). As he sat through freshman seminars for the second time in his life, he had a strong sense that this situation wasn’t fair, but he had to make peace with it. “What [I] had to do was more important than getting lost in the emotions,” says Solomon, who worked in customer service to pay for school. “At that point, you understand this is something you can’t control.”
Mohamed Khalif, who left Somalia as a refugee when he was two years old, moved around the world with his family before graduating medical school in China. While studying for the USMLE in Washington State, he worked as a security guard and then took night shifts at a pie factory so he could volunteer at a medical clinic. Khalif has valuable skills and is fluent in five languages, including Urdu and Mandarin, but even after he passed the USMLE he failed to match with a residency program. The screening for residency programs filters out candidates without “hands-on” clinical experience in the United States: few applicants can afford unpaid internships, and few institutions are willing to take them on over U.S. medical students. The applications cost Khalif more than $6,000 each year, in addition to flights and hotels for interviews. After four years, he decided he had to go in another direction.
As the founder of the nonprofit Washington Academy for International Medical Graduates (WAIMG), he now advocates for those who face the same challenges and offers professional development opportunities through his organization. Through this work, he met folks with similar stories, like a Japanese neurosurgeon who married an American and moved to the U.S., but, even after passing the USMLE, was still working at Starbucks because she couldn’t match into a residency program. Khalif’s organization hired her for a job that would count as “hands-on” clinical experience to improve her prospects.
“Once she found this job,” says Khalif, “she actually cried. And I felt that. Because that’s what I’ve been through — those kinds of odd jobs — and I cried with her.” These stories keep him hopeful, even though he’s not able to practice: the fact that he’s making it possible for so many others.
***
The matching process is a major concern for Araya, Yemane, and their peers — not having their official transcripts or diplomas will likely pose problems during the difficult process of applying to residencies — once they even reach that stage. This year, only 55 percent of immigrant international medical graduates who applied for residency were matched to first-year positions, compared to 93 percent of U.S. graduates.
And every year Araya and Yemane have spent fighting for the right to even sit the exams has cost them: The more time that passes after a candidate’s graduation year, the harder it can be to secure a residency match.
“When you only consider somebody’s graduating year as a criteria and not know the story behind that, it hurts a lot of people. It hurts a lot of people who are really passionate,” says Araya. “To come here to fight for all these years to go back into your profession — that tells a lot about the persistence and the passion that person has for medicine.”
Amid the crisis, a door was cracked open for a select few. But, by and large, doctors like Araya and Yemane watched the pandemic unfold, stuck outside of a system they desperately wanted to be part of.
Khalif began to look for a solution that wouldn’t require physicians to repeat their entire residency. “Legislators did not know about this match process and this residency process,” says Khalif. “They thought people could apply for residency through Indeed Job Search or something.”
Members from Khalif’s non-profit met with legislators and eventually started gaining traction. “COVID really changed people’s minds,” says Khalif, and in May 2021, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed into law SHB 1129, which allows limited licenses to be granted to internationally trained doctors in Washington who have completed their USMLE, without requiring residency to be repeated in the U.S. “Once you pass all your exams now, you don’t have to settle for an odd job, or leave the profession like I did,” says Khalif. “You can qualify for a license and work under the supervision of a physician, and you can take care of patients.”
The bill was overwhelmingly supported on both sides. Republican representative Mary Dye says that her small county of Garfield, with only a handful of doctors, has benefited from internationally trained physicians from Bangladesh and South Korea, who can work without the equipment, facilities, and large medical teams that most U.S. doctors rely on. “In rural America, we need people that have different experiences,” Dye explained. “We’re grateful to have … people that are capable of serving in these remote locations, under challenging conditions, with lots of limitations, and still provide wonderful medical care for our community.”
From the rural healthcare crisis to expanding medical access for at-risk populations, advocates believe internationally trained physicians could be part of the solution if given the opportunity. “I think they have a huge role to play in terms of health equity access, because of that cultural language fluency,” says Krause-Vilmar.
“We need to re-envision what the process is for licensure for doctors in the United States,” says Esposito, “so that we are not leaving out people who have 20 years of experience in a field where we know that we need more doctors.”
Without any change in legislation in California, the current residency hurdles are still daunting for Araya and Yemane, who hope that, when the time comes, institutions will consider their circumstances and give them a chance to prove themselves. “We are all a loss for our country,” Araya says. “I hope we’re not a loss here.”
***
One night, more than a year into the investigation process, Oleyn was working late in her Philadelphia office when she received a call from one of the Eritrean applicants. She detailed everything her team had tried — most recently, reaching out to the medical school in Cuba that had a partnership with the Eritrean medical school. But it was another dead end.
“Anything you can think of,” she asked on the phone that night. Anything at all.
In an attempt to leave no stone unturned, the applicants submitted lists of people they’d come into contact with during medical school — in the hope of providing a useful connection. As Oleyn’s team searched for leads through the lists of names, they found that one was a dean at a U.S. medical school. It turned out that a small number of U.S. physicians — faculty members of American medical schools like George Washington University — helped establish the school in Eritrea. The connection provided a glimmer of hope after months of coming up empty-handed.
A caseworker from Oleyn’s team contacted the dean; he didn’t remember the specific students but put them in touch with other American faculty members who had taught or helped design the post-graduate training curriculum in Eritrea. Oleyn’s team asked those physicians to verify the information about the applicants: the courses they took, which textbooks were used, and their graduation dates. They responded enthusiastically about the qualifications of each applicant and eagerly asked how they could help.
The alternate form of verification — with all the supporting evidence they had amassed — was presented to the ECFMG’s board of trustees, which finally granted approval in summer 2020. Araya and Yemane could move forward to the exam stage. When Yemane heard the news, she felt like she’d finally gotten her life back. “There was a time when I was too scared to be hopeful about that because I didn’t want to be disappointed,” she says.
Solomon had just finished a year of intro courses — Biology, Chemistry, and Physics — when the decision was released. He no longer had to repeat the rest of the prerequisite courses and medical school, and he was thankful to finally have some control over the next steps. “This is a challenge I can overcome,” he says. “An exam is just an exam. You study. You prepare.”
“It’s a good thing that we’re doing this exam,” Yemane says. “It’s a good way to revisit the basic sciences and to familiarize ourselves with what’s most important and most common in this country.”
The Eritrean physicians continue to stay in touch through their Whatsapp group, meeting occasionally, sharing job opportunities, and cheering each other on. Araya says she won’t stop rooting for their success. “Passing the exam, getting matched [with a residency program] has become more than even being a doctor: Just proving that the government back home, the school — whoever could not give us our certificates, credentials — that actually, there is justice in the world, and they could not dictate our professional pathways.”
This year, only 55 percent of immigrant international medical graduates who applied for residency were matched to first-year positions, compared to 93 percent of U.S. graduates.
In a thank you note Oleyn received an Eritrean physician wrote: “This shall also afford every graduate the privilege to revisit his/her oath to humanity, to summon his/her medical expertise, and to engage hereafter in the honored service of the people of the United States of America.”
It remains the most gratifying case Oleyn has seen in her 22 years at ECFMG.
***
On a warm Thursday in June 2021, Yemane traveled to San Jose to take her first exam. She hadn’t slept well the night before. Kept awake by nerves, she’d scrolled through Reddit, where other nervous exam-takers shared their anxieties. But in the morning, she pretended she’d had the best sleep of her life. “I think that worked,” she laughs. “I think I fooled my brain.”
The test center was familiar because she’d paid $75 to take a practice exam there earlier that week, but it was nerve-wracking all the same. “There was a lot of pressure on me, because I’m one of the first people taking the exam from my country,” she says. “And we begged for three years for this opportunity.”
She reminded herself that she was prepared. She’d done over 7,000 practice questions. She thought about a text her friend sent, telling her that the test outcome would not change her identity. She imagined her father and mother telling her, “You were created for this.”
When she finished the eight-hour exam, a sense of relief washed over her. This was the hardest test for her; the next one focuses on clinical skills, and she hopes to sit for it in spring 2022. After that, she will take the third and final test. The next challenge — applying for residencies — will be the final step in the long and expensive licensing process.
For now, though, she’s taking one step at a time. As she anxiously awaits the results, she knows that even if she doesn’t get the score she’s hoping for, she was brave just to take the exam after everything she’s been through. “That’s what I’m doing right now,” she says. “I’m celebrating the bravery.”
Shoshana Akabas is a writer and teacher based in New York. She primarily writes fiction and reports on refugee policy and issues of forced migration.
On a summer day in 1931, a man was found wandering South State Street in Jackson, Mississippi. He appeared to be lost. He was white, with gray hair and a thin, angular face. His clothes were worn and rumpled, but on his feet were a pair of tan Borden low-quarter dress shoes, the kind that sold for more than ten dollars at S. P. McRae’s department store on West Capitol Street. He had shell-rimmed eyeglasses and a belt buckle with the letter L on it. In his pocket was a cheap watch and a single penny.
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When police questioned him, the man seemed dazed. He was unable to supply his name, his address, or an explanation for why he was in Jackson. He was arrested for vagrancy. After a few days, he was placed in the custody of Dr. C. D. Mitchell, superintendent of the Mississippi State Hospital. Upon his arrival at the facility, the man, who was estimated to be about sixty, was entered into the patient ledger as “Mr. X.”
Who was he? Where had he come from? How did he wind up alone on a street in the Deep South, at the beginning of the Great Depression, without his memory? Months passed, then years. Mr. X remained at the hospital, and the mystery of his identity lingered. For reasons no one could discern, his past was beyond his reach.
Formerly known as the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, in 1931 the hospital was a warren of overcrowded barracks so decrepit that patients kept getting injured by pieces of plaster that fell from crumbling ceilings. Worse yet, the hospital was a firetrap—its buildings were full of mattresses, linens, and other combustible material. One blaze after another destroyed parts of the facility, necessitating reconstruction.
In 1935, four years after Mr. X’s arrival, the institution moved to a brand-new campus about 15 miles outside Jackson. It was built on the site of a former penal farm and dubbed Whitfield, in honor of the governor—Henry L. Whitfield—who approved the construction. Over the course of several days, patients in Jackson were loaded onto buses in groups. They traveled along Highway 80 before turning onto a long gravel drive lined with young trees and freshly planted flower beds. Some 70 redbrick buildings with white columns were nestled on Whitfield’s green lawns and connected by paved walking paths. A visitor, taking in the manmade lake and the wide porches on the buildings, might have thought the place a summer camp or a university.
Over the previous century, patients in mental hospitals were often written off as subhuman and kept in barbaric conditions; by the 1940s, mental health care began shifting toward new treatment models, some with real potential to help people (psychiatric pharmacology), and some that could only do harm (lobotomy). Mr. X’s time in state care fell between these two eras, at an institution flush with the spirit in which it was built. Whitfield’s superintendent, Dr. Mitchell, designed the campus in line with the latest scientific understanding of psychiatry. The physical environs were intended to be peaceful and pleasing to the eye. Patients attended weekly dances and movie nights. On Sundays, patients and staff alike worshipped in the campus chapel. Orchards, fields, and a dairy farm provided Whitfield’s food. Able-bodied patients sewed overalls in the occupational therapy workshop; others milked cows or repaired fences. Mitchell believed in giving residents the opportunity to contribute to their community, because the dignity of honest work could be a salve to a troubled spirit. It also helped stretch the institution’s meager budget.
For some patients weathering a temporary crisis, the restful environment was all the treatment they needed, and they left after a short stay. For those suffering from more severe or chronic disorders, the hospital offered comfort and stability. The focus of treatment was on easing symptoms and providing structures that kept patients safe.
By all accounts, Mr. X thrived at Whitfield. He worked in the hospital’s greenhouse, tending to plants and flowers, and he revealed a surprising store of botanical knowledge. In his downtime he played cards with other patients and with staff. He had a knack for complicated games like bridge.
Knowing the names of things is semantic knowledge; knowing how to do things is procedural knowledge. These parts of Mr. X’s mental functioning were intact. What was missing were his autobiographical memories. And without them, who was he? A skilled bridge player who couldn’t remember how or when he’d learned the game; a gardener with no recollection of who’d taught him the names of flowers or which varieties grew in his mother’s yard.
Mr. X spent hours in the hospital’s library, reading every newspaper and magazine he could get his hands on. He told his doctors that he was looking for something that might jog his memory, something that felt familiar. Nothing ever did. He spoke with a genteel Southern accent, which suggested that he’d had some education in his life, or at least had grown up among educated people. Those people—his people—could tell Mr. X who he was. But no one came to Whitfield to claim him.
We’re not the only ones who carry our memories. The people around us, who share in our experiences, have their own version of events saved away. And when we tell a story to a loved one, we’re giving them a piece of our lives. We scatter memories like seeds, letting them take root in the people who care enough to listen.
One day in the late 1990s, I sat cross-legged on the cool tile floor of my grandmother’s sunroom in Florida, listening. I had a cheap spiral notebook in my lap where I scribbled down the scraps of memory she shared. My grandmother had always been reticent to talk about her upbringing in Mississippi, but as she spoke, her initial hesitance burned away like a fog dissolving in sunshine.
As she described her childhood, she dwelled for a while on a woman named Ligon Smith Forbes, her aunt on her mother’s side. Ligon—pronounced with a short i and a hard g—died well before I was born, but as my grandmother spoke, a lively, unconventional woman took shape in my mind. “She was a feminist divorcée suffragette journalist alcoholic lesbian rabble-rouser,” my grandmother said, tapping a manicured finger against her ultra-slim cigarette. “You would have loved her!”
Ligon was a tall, striking woman, and by the time she was in her fifties, her lined face had a rosy glow—the complexion of a heavy drinker. She was married briefly, retaining nothing from the union but the title “Mrs.” and a new last name. Ligon worked all her life, and she held a wide variety of jobs. She tried teaching, then managed a stationery and newspaper shop. She dabbled in real estate and in the insurance business. She got into journalism and road-tripped with Eleanor Roosevelt to report on conditions in the rural South for the Emergency Relief Administration. She also started the first advertising agency in Mississippi. Her cofounder was her longtime “companion,” a woman named Earlene White.
“When I was turning 13, Mama let me take the train to visit Aunt Ligon in the city, to celebrate my birthday,” my grandmother told me, her eyes shining at the glamour of it all. The year was 1931, and the city was Jackson—for a girl from a small, dusty town, the state capital was the height of sophistication. She stayed with Ligon and Earlene in their suite at the Robert E. Lee Hotel.
“Of course, they were lovers,” my grandmother said in a casual aside, “but we didn’t talk about things like that back then.”
Her mother—my great-grandmother, Ligon’s sister—had given her five dollars to buy a dress. “Five dollars was a lot of money,” my grandmother said solemnly, as if she could still feel the weight of it in her patent-leather purse. “Ligon took me shopping, and well….” My grandmother shrugged. “Instead of a dress, I came home with my first pair of high heels.” She grinned with the mischief of a rebellious teenager.
“She worked for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans for a while,” my grandmother said of Ligon, narrowing her eyes in concentration. “Wrote for a bunch of newspapers. Sometimes she sent me cuttings, but I don’t think I saved them. Maybe you could look”—at this my grandmother gestured vaguely toward the sky, indicating technology and its mysteries—“find out something about her work.”
I tried, but searching through old newspapers on library microfiche was a formidable task, and the earliest databases for genealogy research, such as Ancestry.com, were just coming online. The notebook where I’d scribbled my grandmother’s memories soon slid to the bottom of a box. It sat there, unopened, and moved as I did, to new homes, half a dozen times over the years.
When I discovered the notebook again, my grandmother had been dead for a decade. But there were her words on the page, transcribed in my ballpoint-scrawled hand. Outlandish stories of feuds with her older brothers, of the small-town telephone operator who eavesdropped on everyone’s conversations, of the house her lumberman father built, hand-picking every board. And memories of her beloved Aunt Ligon.
I took the fragments my grandmother had given me—the Robert E. Lee Hotel, the Times-Picayune, Earlene—and fed them into search engines. There she was: Ligon Smith Forbes. I discovered facts about my aunt’s life that my grandmother hadn’t shared, perhaps hadn’t even known. Ligon filed a patent in 1920. She worked with Near East Relief, famously the first charity to let donors “adopt” a child by supporting them financially from afar. And at the time of the 1940 census, her residence was listed as the Mississippi State Hospital in Whitfield.
At first I thought Ligon had been a patient. Perhaps she was being treated for alcoholism. But no—I soon learned that Whitfield was another career shift. Ligon was hired in July 1938 as the institution’s public relations director. Previously, administrators or the occasional contractor had handled publicity. But someone convinced the hospital that it could use a dedicated staff member to liaise with the press. In all likelihood that someone was Ligon herself. Creating jobs out of whole cloth was one of her specialties.
Ligon moved into the female staff dorm at Whitfield. Her commute to work was a stroll down landscaped paths, first to the dining hall for breakfast at communal tables, then to the cupola-topped administration building. She had a Rolodex full of contacts at regional newspapers and magazines. She had experience writing copy she knew papers would run. Now all she had to do was scour the hospital for story ideas.
Ligon reached out to the Commercial Appeal, a newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, that had wide circulation in the South. It was always seeking content for its weekly photo supplement, referred to in the newspaper business as rotogravure. Ligon suggested that the paper do a two-page spread on the state-of-the-art mental hospital where she’d recently started working. She said she would travel to Memphis herself and hand-deliver the photographs. The newspaper, presumably eager for an easy way to fill a couple of pages, agreed.
On the day she would board the train for Memphis, Ligon came across a patient file that roused her journalistic instincts. As topics went, it was far meatier than images of Whitfield, however lovely the campus was. It was the sort of thing the public was hungry for. The stuff of radio melodrama and matinee movies. The kind of story a writer stumbles upon only a handful of times, if ever.
Adrian Daub | Longreads | September 2021 | 21 minutes (5,894 words)
When a new trailer for the Marvel film Black Widow dropped in April of this year — after the movie had been repeatedly moved back due to the pandemic — the producers seemed intent on reminding people about why they’d been excited about the movie before the lockdowns started. They did so by closing the promo with a new version of the theme from The Avengers, probably to call back viewers to a different, less socially distanced time. How could you know this was a new version of the motif? It was choral, but that was a well Marvel had gone to before. This time it had lyrics. As best I can tell, for the first time.
As fans welcomed the callback in online comments, I was brought back to a question that I’d had when Game of Thrones did something similar at the end of its fourth season and again at the very end of the show. It’s something of a trend these days to take a highly recognizable instrumental theme and make it choral. And I get why: The gesture is big and bold and epic. But my question concerned something comparatively pedestrian: Who decides what the lyrics are? What language are they even in? And who writes them? I decided to find out.
Those of us who listen to soundtracks obsessively do so knowing that that’s not how soundtracks are intended to work on us. Whoever mixed in a chorus for a few seconds of the Black Widow trailer was going for an emotional reaction, not some new layer of meaning to be disentangled. “When I do a film score,” the late James Horner said in a TED talk in 2005, “I am nothing more than a fancy pencil” executing the vision of a filmmaker. You’re not meant to listen to a soundtrack in isolation from the image. It is music in service of the moment.
You’re not meant to listen to a soundtrack in isolation from the image. It is music in service of the moment.
But one place where this fancy pencil has more autonomy is when it comes to the text that a chorus sings. Perhaps it’s better to say that the pencil is condemned to freedom. When the composer John Ottman was hired to score the 2008 Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, he realized that he needed a break in the texture of the soundtrack at the very end of the film. That’s because in the final scenes of the movie basically all of the even remotely redeemable characters get executed. After they had all died and the credits rolled, Ottman decided he wanted a “sense of release, because there had to be a different feeling as the audience walks out of the theater.” So he hit upon the idea of a self-contained choral piece. “The problem was though, what on earth would they be saying?”
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What on earth indeed? It’s a moment where blockbuster filmmaking — always so anxiously in control of its meanings — seems to be at a bit of a loss. And it’s a moment where we as an audience suddenly get a sense for how films make meaning, and how it isn’t always the meaning they intend to make.
So who decided what the lyrics to the theme from The Avengers were? The short answer is that I still don’t know. But the long answer to my pedestrian question leads into the high-pressure, highly collaborative world of film scoring. A world in which composers often have just a few weeks to write music that pleases the studio and the director, and potentially even test audiences. And in which they toil with assistants, orchestrators, sound editors, and many, many session musicians to find a sound for a film that is still in the process of evolving. I wanted to find out who among this massive group would be the one to say “hey, let’s add a chorus and have it sung in Sanskrit” or something along those lines.
The answer turns out to be: Pretty much any of them can and sometimes do. What film choruses offer us is a perfect synecdoche for the collective, frenzied, and deeply mercenary magic that creates movies in the first place. It’s as likely that a director had the screenwriter invent specific lyrics early in post-production as that a subcontractor, assistant composer, or orchestrator jotted down some words or went on a Wikipedia deep-dive eight weeks out from release in a desperate late-night quest for a non-copyrighted text to use with a cue that might please a bunch of suits half a world away.
What film choruses offer us is a perfect synecdoche for the collective, frenzied, and deeply mercenary magic that creates movies in the first place.
***
Choruses have been part of film scoring for over a century. People have been singing on screen since the earliest silent reels, and with increasing technical wizardry we could even hear them doing it. But something like the Black Widow trailer is what we call an non-diegetic chorus: These are voices that viewers aren’t supposed to somehow locate within the screen action. In early cinema you had to have musicians physically present, first in the cinema with a viewer, eventually in the scene with the actors. Both of which pretty much ruled out the use of a choir. And, as film music historian Mervyn Cooke points out, once technologies existed that allowed films to have at least a partial soundtrack, filmmakers initially avoided non-diegetic music — precisely because they needed to sell the illusion that the sound was coming “from” the scene.
Non-diegetic music started to become the norm only in the early ’30s. And even then the limitations of recording technology meant that non-diegetic voices were not usually worth the trouble. By the late ’30s this had changed. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) had its choir chime in even when it wasn’t for the explicit musical numbers. (Snow White was also the first soundtrack issued as an album, so choruses were part of how film soundtracks traveled semi-independently from their films from the very beginning.)
Alfred Newman had begun relying on wordless “heavenly choirs” going ooo and aaa in the background, in films like Wuthering Heights (1939), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Song of Bernadette (1943). As the music historian Donald Greig, who is also an active session singer on many modern scores, has pointed out, in the beginning choruses had to be at least somewhat motivated by theme or screen action — they were there to speak for ghosts, to intimate religious dimensions to the screen action.
And then there was Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937). The film concerns the discovery of Shangri-La in the Himalayas, and when we finally get to the fabled land the soundtrack accompanies the matte-painted wonderland with a chorus singing in … well, in a language that isn’t English and doesn’t seem to be Tibetan either. And thus another Hollywood tradition was born: film choruses belting out perfectly nonsensical prose with utter conviction.
And thus another Hollywood tradition was born: film choruses belting out perfectly nonsensical prose with utter conviction.
Both types of choral performance have never left the Hollywood lexicon. In thinking through how film choruses make meaning, I became obsessed with what the process of recording a soundtrack looks like today and at what point in that process someone actually writes lyrics in fake Tibetan. In the Golden Age, studios kept their own choirs — professional singers would show up at the lot and ooo and aaa for a Miklós Rósza score today and belt out a ferocious battle hymn for Erich Wolfgang Korngold the next. Studios also had their house orchestrators (usually several), and while laypeople remember the composers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, there are other figures that probably shaped the way films sound just as much if not more, all the while just quietly collecting their paychecks.
Speaking with modern singers about their experiences, I was struck by how little their day-to-day job description had changed since Tiomkin’s day. But the world in which they are performing is altogether different. As part of my research for this article I made a massive choir belt out the most menacing rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” ever, and all it cost me was $199 plus tax. The EastWest Symphonic Choirs software allows you to make a virtual choir sing in just about any style imaginable. Want your ooos and aaas to sound like a whisper? More Broadway or more classical? All of that’s in the package.
But there’s more: Due to a system called WordBuilder, you can have this choir sing pretty much anything — you can type in text in English, in phonetics, or a proprietary alphabet called Votox, and the software will assemble it out of a massive databank of vowels and consonants. This is a commercially available product, but there are even bigger sample libraries kept by individual composers: If you’re wondering who’s dropping by to supply a quick “agnus dei” for a Hans Zimmer score, well that’s almost certainly a proprietary sample owned by Zimmer’s film score workshop, Remote Control.
All the professional singers I spoke to were keenly aware of products like EastWest Symphonic Choirs and the sample libraries — because more likely than not they’re in them. If you’re in the business of singing on film, these days you won’t always be asked to sing for an actual score, but instead you might get booked to record samples. There’s a scary possibility that these artists are slowly eroding the industry’s need for their labor — that the fruits of their one day of paid work will perform for the studios in perpetuity and with no extra residuals. Their disembodied vowels are putting their vocal chords out of business. But that possibility hasn’t been fully realized: Often enough when they arrive in the recording studio, singers will find that there is a vocal track already, but it’s done by computer. And yet, the composer wants a live version. Almost all the singers I spoke to expressed some surprise that Hollywood still bothered.
Their disembodied vowels are putting their vocal chords out of business.
One possibility why they do: Composers simply like working with live humans and consider it part of their job to do so. As Jonathan Beard, who has been composing and orchestrating in Hollywood for over a decade, put it to me, choirs are an easy, effective way to give dimension to a scene — “because you have a human body as one of the instruments, and there’s a power the human voice [has] over us in general.”
Composers are highly trained musicians, and a lot of their training has involved singing. The composer brothers Harry and Rupert Gregson-Williams (Harry composed for films like Kingdom of Heaven, the Narnia-films, and most of Denzel Washington’s films of the last 15 years, while Rupert is best known for DC Universe films like Wonder Woman and Aquaman) were both choirboys at St. John’s College in Cambridge — it makes biographical sense that choral textures and their creation would be important to them. And that they might like to think through music with a live chorus rather than a computer. Another surprising preference that speaks to a kind of sweet traditionalism: While sometimes vocal tracks get doubled in recording (meaning what sounds like 16 singers is just eight overlaid onto each other), this seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Clearly someone in the process enjoys working with large groups of people and thinks they give you an aesthetic payoff that engineering wizardry would not.
But there’s a more cynical reason as well, and it’s the reason why automation hasn’t displaced human labor in other fields: The process of booking some freelancers through a fixer, having them record for a day, and then paying them no residuals isn’t actually much of an expense. That’s how London became a preferred place for Hollywood to record: a large population of well-trained musicians, whose union doesn’t insist on residuals. Several London-based singers I spoke with suggested that the reason Hollywood doesn’t record in, say, Germany as often is that singers in continental Europe have steadier income and are less dependent on session work. And once a producer decides that even London-based musicians are too demanding — well, then there’s always Prague or Budapest. The gorgeous voices you heard in a John Ford Western were the sound of unions and full-time employment; in a Hollywood score today they are monuments to the globalizing power of the gig economy.
***
So that is the world from which these vocals emerge. Imagine you are a classically trained singer in, say, London who has done some previous work on soundtracks. You get a call from a fixer, who is assembling a chorus, or soloists, for a production company. You book the gig, and you show up for the recording session knowing which film you’re singing for, probably knowing the composer you’re recording for, but nothing else. Most recording sessions take place in the famous Abbey Road Studios, which are expensive, so you’re usually booked for no more than a certain number of union-approved hours.
Importantly, by the time you show up for the recording session, the film is pretty much “in post post production,” as one session singer put it to me. The film is basically finished, the wrangling over what the score is supposed to sound like is over. By the time you record, whatever orchestral parts you are supposed to accompany are fully assembled — you usually have them in your headphones as you sing. When you get there, you are handed a large stack of notes to sing and, according to all the singers I spoke with, you get through some portion of them in the next few hours — never through all of them. Some cues you sing will never be in the finished film, some cues you might do 10 versions of. And then the studio time the composer booked is over, you hand over your stack of notes, sign statements agreeing not to divulge anything about what you just sang, and you are on your way.
As the soprano Catherine Bott said: “You enter a studio and you open the score and off you go. You sing what you’re told, and it’s all about versatility, just being able to adapt to the right approach, whatever that may be for that conductor or that composer.” And part of that, singers told me, was singing the words — whatever they may be. As Donald Greig pointed out to me, a lot of these singers have training in classics; they certainly know their way around a Requiem or a Stabat Mater. And yet often enough when they step into Abbey Road they’re being asked to sing perfectly nonsensical phrases in pseudo-Latin — but the studio is booked, the clock is ticking, and as Bott put it, “that’s not the time to put up your hand and, you know, correct the Latin.”
Or the English: Bott sang on the soundtrack for the 1986 animated feature An American Tail. For a cue where the little immigrant mouse Fievel first lays eyes on New York harbor, composer James Horner had the choir intone the famous Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. As she was singing through the cue — “Give me your tired, your poor” — Bott realized that whoever had put together the score had written down “your huddled masses yearning to be free” rather than “breathe free.” She was pretty sure she knew better, as did some colleagues, but out of English reserve, deference to the Americans, or professionalism, no one felt it was their place to say anything. The misquote stayed in the picture and you can buy it on CD today.
Perhaps part of what made me look for the meaning behind the lyrics on some of my favorite soundtracks was exactly this professionalism. A good singer sells the emotion and the conviction, to the point that a listener sort of has to believe that it all means something. Interestingly enough, early in this long tradition of made-up languages, Hollywood felt the need to pretend that it did mean something. When Lost Horizon was released in 1937, Columbia Pictures claimed in its publicity material that Dimitri Tiomkin’s score “includes authentic folk songs of Tibet.” The same press sheet noted that the Hall Johnson Choir, a popular gospel choir, “will sing the folk song arrangements in the native Tibetan language.”
Film music historians agree that this is hogwash. There is no evidence Tiomkin researched Tibetan folk songs for his score — what the ad men were selling as “authentic folk songs” were almost certainly newly written pieces in a made-up language. Tiomkin had started out as a concert pianist and relied on a small army of orchestrators to turn his melodies into actual playable scores. Someone in that group put a pen to paper and wrote these pieces, and either that same person or someone else seems to have made up some fake Tibetan text to distribute to the singers.
But for whatever reason Columbia Pictures’ publicity department didn’t want to frame the vocals in this manner. Perhaps extradiegetic voices were still sufficiently new that they wanted to tell an audience what these voices were doing on the soundtrack. Or it had nothing to do with the soundtrack itself, and was just another way of selling the broader spectacle of filmmaking: Look at the lengths we went to.
At the same time, lyrics have a pesky way of clarifying the intended audience. After all, it is not altogether difficult to imagine why Tiomkin and company wouldn’t have bothered with actual folk songs and actual language. Lost Horizon is one of those movies that stars noted non-Asian persons H.B. Warner as “Chang” and Sam Jaffe as “the High Lama of Shangri-La.” The broad and bogus claims to authenticity are also making a point of who the movie is for. The fact that the Hall Johnson Choir was an African American group best known for singing spirituals, amplifies the sense that Lost Horizon turns non-white people’s authenticity into charming window-dressing for white audiences. Like Shangri-La for its white visitors, even when its lyrics were incomprehensible film music was still “for” white English speakers.
At other times when Hollywood filmmaking relied on choruses, the point was the opposite of exoticism: hyper-comprehensibility. Decades later Tiomkin wrote a rousing score for John Wayne’s jingoistic epic The Alamo (1960). At the end of the movie, with the siege over and one lone survivor and her little daughter leaving the ruined fort, a chorus drifts faintly onto the soundtrack, almost as though the singers were standing somewhere far away in the field of battle. Over the movie’s final shots, the choir takes over the soundtrack, singing a version of what would eventually spend some weeks on the pop charts as “The Ballad of the Alamo.” The first lines a viewer is able to clearly hear are: “Let the old men tell the story / let the legend grow and grow. / Of the thirteen days of glory / at the siege of Alamo.”
This music explicitly tells us why it needs to turn human voices singing in a language the viewer is supposed to understand. The “Ballad” tells us what to do with the story we have just heard: Pass it on, let the legend “grow and grow.” Also — since this was made by John Wayne in the ’60s — the message is probably also don’t be a communist. But note how the movie has to treat three things as essentially the same: the singing has to be audible for the casual moviegoer, over people getting out of their seats early or finishing off their popcorn; the words have to be comprehensible on a purely linguistic level to an audience that has been taught to tune out the music on some level for the last two hours; and the reason why these words were included in the movie has to be clear.
Also — since this was made by John Wayne in the ’60s — the message is probably also don’t be a communist.
The fact that these three factors are separate can be easy to forget for an English-speaking audience reared on American pop culture. I grew up on Hollywood films in dubbed versions — though those didn’t typically dub the music. Meaning, as a kid who didn’t speak English, I became pretty used to following a plot in German, then the music would swell and I’d sort of tune out for a few minutes as the soundtrack, and the English language, washed over me. I’d get the basic idea of course — the characters were happy, or sad, or patriotic — but I had no idea what they were saying, and I was okay with that.
That’s sort of how most of us feel when we listen to the theme to the 21st-century version of Battlestar Galactica — unless we happen to be familiar with the mantras of the Rig Veda. Still, it’s a culturally specific experience. These days we can’t watch fantasy or science fiction without being sung at in Sanskrit, Old Norse, Dwarvish, Elvish, Uruk-hai, Klingon, and so on. When composer John Williams returned to the Star Wars universe for 1999’s The Phantom Menace, he composed an amped-up piece for the final duel — and over its churning ostinatos he overlaid a chorus belting out a … Sanskrit translation of a Welsh poem.And apparently the syllables of the Sanskrit text were rearranged to the point of incomprehensibility. Clearly, these shows and movies are not addressing us as potential speakers of Klingon or Sanskrit or even Welsh — they’re interested in the feel and a sound of a language rather than its meaning. At one recording session, Donald Greig told me, “they spent ages telling us how to pronounce the Russian and then we realized, ‘well this doesn’t actually mean anything.’” This turns out to be both a pretty new and pretty old way of listening to music.
When composer John Williams returned to the Star Wars-universe for 1999’s The Phantom Menace, he composed an amped-up piece for the final duel — and over its churning ostinatos he overlaid a chorus belting out a … Sanskrit translation of a Welsh poem.
***
Hollywood scores come in waves. The film industry isn’t known for being particularly fond of risk taking, and film scores in particular often build on previous scores. The director will often cut the film to a temp track consisting of existing pieces, and it’s easy to imagine that the filmmakers would eventually want something that sounds like their temp track to accompany the finished film. Choirs have never really left Hollywood, but there are certainly moments when producers and directors seem to have almost reflexively sought them out and others when they have avoided them. The Omen (1976) with its massive latinate choral opener, “Ave Satani,” kicked off one such wave. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy kicked off another.
This new chapter in the way films sounded started in the Town Hall, a storied concert venue in Wellington, New Zealand. That’s where composer Howard Shore recorded the earliest parts of his soundtrack for The Fellowship of the Ring (the rest would be recorded in London). The recording involved a full orchestra on ground level and rotating choirs in the balcony. It wasn’t lost on the composer that the scene was weirdly traditional: “The orchestra,” Shore explained, “was set up very much the way a pit orchestra was set up in an opera.” The collaborative process around the composition, too, felt like something Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte might have recognized. The screenwriters wrote the text the choir would be expected to sing, an on-site translator would translate them into Tolkien’s languages, and Shore would then set the Dwarven or Elvish text.
Somewhat counterintuitively it’s not actually choral music with incomprehensible lyrics that is novel and needs explaining, it is choral music with comprehensible ones. For a long time, and for far longer than instrumental music, choral music in the West belonged to the church, to the mass, and that meant to Latin. A language as native to Christian religious life as it was foreign to most Christians. The Lutheran Reformation did a lot to hand church services over to language the congregants could actually understand, but throughout Europe the experience of being talked, and in particular sung, at in Latin persisted. That’s of course not to say that people didn’t sing in their vernacular languages — just that the experience of singing words you don’t, or don’t fully, understand would have been very normal to these people.
For a long time, and for far longer than instrumental music, choral music in the West belonged to the church, to the mass, and that meant to Latin. A language as native to Christian religious life as it was foreign to most Christians.
For the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer choral music was meaningful only insofar as the words were not the point. In his The World as Will and Representation, which appeared first in 1819, was republished in 1844, and strongly influenced composers like Richard Wagner, Schopenhauer claimed that music was the purest expression of reality because it didn’t linger with “representations” — words and the things they represent — but tapped automatically into something deeper. Choral music would seem to fall short of that standard — being pretty centrally concerned with words and the things they denote — but Schopenhauer didn’t think so. After all, you shouldn’t listen to sung music primarily for the words, and often you may not even know the words. And Schopenhauer thought this was for the better.
Latin still works that way for most modern audiences: You might argue that there isn’t much of an expectation on the part of an American film composer circa 1989 (or on the part of the filmmakers who hired him) that the audience should be able to follow along with the Latin lyrics — in fact, it might well be distracting if they did. What text is included, both singers and composers confirmed to me, has far more to do with the flow of phonemes and how it interacts with the raw sound of the vocals. The words are simply yet another instrument in the repertoire the composer has at their disposal. But it’s an instrument that comes freighted with all the complications that inevitably arise when our loquacious species uses language.
The words are simply yet another instrument in the repertoire the composer has at their disposal. But it’s an instrument that comes freighted with all the complications that inevitably arise when our loquacious species uses language.
After all, unlike a humming chorus, a Latin chorus does create extra levels of meaning for those who want to listen more carefully. Composer Jerry Goldsmith wrote “Ave Satani” for The Omen as a deliberate transposition of various Catholic masses. While the individual Latin may have been hard to pick up on (and wasn’t entirely correct to boot), listeners who were Catholic likely would have recognized what was being inverted here, given that they’d spent most Sundays around the actual Latin texts. It’s not clear how seriously Goldsmith (or the choirmaster who jotted down the Latin lyrics for the composer) grappled with that dimension of the score — for one thing, the very title of the piece messes up the declension of Satan. But that dimension was there nonetheless —The Omen was part of a kind of religious revival in Hollywood, and though it plays as camp today it was taken far more seriously then.
James Horner’s score for the 1989 film Glory relies heavily on a Latin chorus, and in the film’s climactic moment that chorus sings recognizably in Latin. Glory tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment, an all-Black unit during the American Civil War, and the film ends with most of the unit being mowed down by Confederate soldiers while assaulting Fort Wagner in South Carolina. The piece in question relies on a text drawn from a Latin mass, frequently incorporated into the classical canon in various requiems from Mozart to Verdi. But, as so often, Horner (or his orchestrator) doesn’t stick to the actual text, but rather seems to create a mashup of snippets from the traditional requiem mass.
So is Horner just using the text of the requiem mass the way layout professionals use the phrase “Lorem ipsum?” Hard to imagine. After all, it makes a lot of sense to have a requiem text being sung as your characters are dying one by one. But more importantly, precisely because the text is so garbled, certain words stick out all the more: “Recordare,” Latin for “recall,” “stricte” (severely), and “judex” (judge). These pieces are largely taken from the Dies Irae, the part of the requiem mass that tells of the end of the world and God’s judgment, albeit with admixtures from just about every other part. The text, though hard to parse, is remarkably consonant-heavy for a Hollywood soundtrack, and a lot of it seems to be due (and I hope I’m hearing that right, as no actual text exists for this piece that I was able to track down) to the text’s overreliance of the future active participle, which ends in “-urus”: just in terms of pure grammar, the threatening hissing in the text is literally about what is to come.
So is Horner just using the text of the requiem mass the way layout professionals use the phrase “Lorem ipsum?” Hard to imagine.
So maybe the text, and the fact that it’s in Latin, isn’t about pretentiousness on the part of the filmmakers at all. It’s a mass for the dead and a tale of divine wrath, and it seems to make — over the heads of most of the film’s audience, admittedly — a point about retribution. It is remarkable how sophistic (white) Americans, who are frequently so proud to deal in moral absolutes, get when it comes to their Civil War. Horner’s grammatically challenged remix of the “Dies Irae,” I think, makes a point that is stark and simple and remarkably rare in American depictions of the country’s most bloody conflict: The Confederacy is evil, those who kill on its behalf are committing a sin, and they are bringing God’s wrath (and future judgment) upon themselves. There is, then, in this particular instance something to be gleaned from a text that otherwise we’re not meant to pick up on.
Which gets at an interesting disconnect — namely, that different constituencies will experience the same song differently. The choir members know what they’re saying, even if they have no clue as to what any of it means. And the composer, director, sound designer, etc., although they live with a soundtrack far longer than either the performers or even the most devoted audience, don’t tend to get to the words that go with the music until fairly late in the game. They often have to rely on orchestrators and assistants, or a helpful choirmaster who claims he really knows Latin. Their budget, and thus their time, is not tailored to their needs, but to the dictates of the director and the studio. The prose simply appears, like a ghost in this immense machine. And — in spite of the fact that most parties involved seem to be content to have it not mean very much — it winds up signifying something.
One example: An “exotic” text can only be understood by very specific listeners. But, very much to the point, they are not therefore the intended listeners. Lost Horizon wasn’t banking on a particular reception in the Tibetan community — rather the opposite: Dimitri Tiomkin and his collaborators seem to have counted on not having any actual speakers of Tibetan in the audience.
This gets a lot more troubling in the case of the phrase “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba,” likely one of the most repeated, parodied, and bowdlerized lines of text in any soundtrack. It’s clear that it isn’t addressing the average viewer with the intention of being understood. The very fact that it is in Zulu, but the story of The Lion King appears to take place in the Serengeti, thousands of miles to the north, suggests that the language is here to signal one thing and one thing only: African-ness.
For contrast, look at the way composer Michael Abels’ score for Jordan Peele’s Get Out features Swahili voices: Outside of the considerable number of Swahili speakers in the world, most people watching Get Out won’t know what the singers are saying. But what they’re saying does matter, in a way: Literally “listen to your ancestors,” but as a saying meaning something kind of like “you’re about to be in danger.” The viewer who doesn’t understand this line is missing an important warning about what is to come in the film. As is, of course, the film’s African American protagonist who cannot listen (or at least understand) his ancestors. Peele and Abels manage to wring from this small decision a whole range of subtle points.
***
But as with all exoticism, there’s a strange tug of war between condescension and appreciation in these kinds of borrowings. When Ottman decided to use a choral piece at the end of the 2008 film Valkyrie, he clearly needed a German text, and I suspect any German text would have sufficed. But he didn’t pick any German text. The film stars Tom Cruise as Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, a historic figure who led the only attempt by members of the Nazi state to get rid of Adolf Hitler. The text is “Wandrers Nachtlied,” one of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s most memorable, well-known texts, and if it’s a little bit treacly by the great poet’s standards, it’s hard to deny it’s a deeply appropriate choice for this moment. Not overtly about politics, it is nevertheless about history, about reflection, about resignation. And about a different use of the German language than one is used to in Hollywood films.
For any German person it’s weird to hear bad guys so consistently speak (and butcher) your language. I’m not complaining, mind you, it makes perfect sense. But what’s remarkable about Valkyrie is that it seems unusually careful for a Hollywood-film in how it deals with the German language. Earlier in the film, Cruise’s character says that “people need to know we were not all like him,” and this final poem seems to do something similar for the German language — the filmmakers close their movie by pointing out that this language is capable of beauty and deep humanity. The poet Paul Celan — himself a Holocaust-survivor — pointed to the strangeness of writing in a language that was both “my mother’s tongue” (Muttersprache) and “the murderer’s tongue” (Mördersprache). Ottman seems to want to recover the former after showing plenty of the murderers.
The strange thing is: I am pretty sure Goethe’s “Nachtlied” is the first utterance in actual German in this film about Germany. Cruise sort of tries a German accent every other scene, the largely British supporting cast doesn’t even bother. And no one speaks any German, the way Sean Connery does with Russian at certain moments in The Hunt for Red October, or Alan Rickman in Die Hard. The film’s supporting cast is stacked with Germans who belt out accented English throughout. It almost feels like the film wants to bend over backwards a little too much: remind us what beauty and thoughtfulness this language is capable of — even though it never shows us the barbarity, which the film renders in English.
I suppose it’s moments like that one that made me obsess over what choirs sing in movies, and who decides what they sing. Because it’s a moment when blockbuster film or TV, which increasingly is created for the greatest possible global audience, which has been focus-grouped and test-audienced within an inch of its life, manages to speak far more directly, more improvisationally to a much smaller audience. All of us are sometimes in that smaller audience, sometimes not. But we’re aware it’s there. When cinema is literally speaking in tongues, how could we not? And to be the person who hears a call the object of fascination never knew it was putting out there — what better definition could there be of what a fan really is?
* * *
Adrian Daub is professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of four books on German thought and culture in the nineteenth century, as well as (with Charles Kronengold) “The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism” (related story here). He tweets @adriandaub.
Photos and artwork throughout courtesy of Wafa Almaktari. Background image of Sana'a by Santiago Urquijo/Getty Images. Illustration by Cheri Lucas Rowlands.
She is in a Toyota RAV4, somewhere in the mountains of south-central Yemen. It is hot, desert hot, and the AC doesn’t work. There is no road. The driver maneuvers the car through dry riverbeds, which show the cracks of prior floods.
In the back seat, Wafa Almaktari tries not to throw up. She tries not to think about the men with guns who will stop them, demand money, and search their baggage over 50 times in the next 16 hours. If they don’t like her, or she cannot pay, she may disappear in these hills. She tries not to think about the fact that the driver, hired privately for $300, does not have a map.
How the hell does he know where he is, in the middle of the mountains? she wonders. But the alternative — a bus that blunders at even slower speeds, and attracts even more attention at armed checkpoints — was unthinkable. She has to get through the mountains as quickly as possible, because Moutaz is waiting for her.
It is June 2019. Moutaz Al-Qershi, her fiancé, lives in the northern Yemeni capital city of Sana’a. He was going to meet her when she landed in the port city of Aden. But she knows she can’t trust herself not to fling her arms around him and kiss him. In the U.S., where Wafa has lived for the last four years, public affection is normal for young couples, but in Yemen, unmarried couples can’t publicly embrace. She told him to wait at her family’s home.
Not that Wafa cares about what other people think. She’s waited too long. She has a lady in Sana’a baking her wedding cake (she found her on Facebook). There is a butter shortage, but she’s got connections. She’s even got a female DJ lined up.
“If Moutaz was not in Yemen, I would not go. I would not even visit,” she says. But he is here, and so she has returned — enduring the heat, the nausea, the armed checkpoints — to a country in the midst of violent civil war. She does not know if she will be allowed to return to the U.S. after her wedding.
“Home is where Moutaz is,” she reminds herself. She twists the ring on her finger. She hopes — no, she knows — coming back was the right choice.
* * *
In 2021, the small Middle Eastern nation of Yemen ranks as the world’s largest humanitarian disaster. Civil strife has mired the country in famine, cholera outbreaks, and violence. Since 2015, a complex set of combatants has battled for control: armed rebels in the north, known as the Houthis, who rule the capital; Saudi Arabian forces, who are determined to stop the Houthis; Al-Qaeda in the Arabic Peninsula, who rose up briefly to fill a power vacuum; and southern separatists in the port city of Aden.
Wafa and Moutaz met before the war. Although a poor country, Yemen had been a democratic one. During the Arab Spring, protesters had demanded reforms, leading to a transitional government. In 2014, the transitional president was struggling to stabilize the country. Soon, international embassies would begin to close, and the militant group Ansar Allah, often referred to as the Houthis, would take the capital. Saudi Arabia would step in to oppose the Houthis, whom they saw as Iranian proxies. By 2015, ports would be blockaded, airports closed, and cities bombed.
But politics mattered very little to two young people who, despite societal restrictions and the potential scandal, were falling in love.
Wafa and Moutaz exemplify the long-haul love story of many immigrants, whose children, parents, and spouses remain on the other side of geopolitical barriers.
At the time, she was in high school and he studied electrical engineering at Sana’a University. Wafa had a huge, trusting smile, expressive eyes, and a laugh that rose up out of her chest. Moutaz was a serious, slender introvert, prone to long conversations on mathematical concepts. He was detail-oriented; she was all big ideas. She recalls how taken aback he was during their first interaction: “All the ideas that I tell him, and my hijab is not very on point. … I don’t have makeup on my face. So he’s like, you’re not normal.”
Despite the differences in their education, Moutaz didn’t intimidate her.
“It was this very weird chemistry that was between us,” she says.
They kept their relationship secret. Young Yemenis couldn’t date without being engaged or married, but the two of them did “all the crazy things in a very conservative society,” Wafa says. On one of their dates, Moutaz thought it would be romantic to ride Arabian stallions. The huge horses terrified Wafa. They were out in a sunlit field, beyond the city limits, far from prying eyes. She remembers watching him feed the animals, showing gentle care. “Although I was scared, around him I was very safe,” she recalls.
At the time, she had been suffering from tonsillitis and had been told not to eat any ice cream to avoid a possible surgery. On the way home, Moutaz stopped for a treat.
“I was like, oh, this is love. You’re giving me ice cream that I’m not supposed to eat, so I know you love me,” Wafa recalls with a smile.
That subtle spirit of rebellion would permeate their relationship for the next seven years. Soon what divided them would not be family objections, but the policies and decisions of world nations: who allied with whom in the war, who offered visas for Yemeni citizens, who blocked the airports. Surrounded by immigration restrictions and bound by national policies they cannot control, Wafa and Moutaz have refused to give up on each other. For them, love has become a kind of defiance of boundaries, borders, and rules. Separated for years, they search for ways back to each other.
* * *
In the movies, love resolves itself quickly: Two chemicals combine, and either reject each other or dissolve into a single solution. It’s more difficult to convey the reality on screen. Love hits, and we wait, watching the colors creep up the pH strip, waiting for the hiss of reaction. Sometimes we know what the result will be, but still must wait for proof.
Most people wouldn’t watch a film of all those empty hours. We like the catharsis, the moment of triumph, the release of tension: a climactic kiss in the rain. But for many people whose loved ones live across borders, separated by visas, wars, or financial circumstances, there is no such easy resolution. Patience becomes the story.
Sometimes — as in Wafa’s case — waiting feels unendurable, and migrants buck against the helpless hours, months, and years. They might act to gain a sense of advocacy or autonomy, but rarely do the massive national circumstances that surround their situation shift.
Wafa and Moutaz exemplify the long-haul love story of many immigrants, whose children, parents, and spouses remain on the other side of geopolitical barriers. They want to be together. They long for the normalcy of family dinners, daily commutes, and coffee dates. And so they wait.
* * *
Wafa arrived in the U.S. in 2015, joining her mother, Susan Kassim, and leaving her secret boyfriend behind. The two had been separated for a year, first by visa processing and then by war.
Kassim hoped her spirited, outgoing daughter would acclimate well. Three weeks after arriving in Oregon, Wafa started college, taking ESOL and math classes at community college. She then transferred to Portland State University to study business.
But Kassim soon noticed that Wafa locked herself in her room for hours a day, talking on the phone to a “friend” back in Yemen. Like many moms of teens, she became suspicious. It wasn’t that a romantic connection back home was bad; in fact, if the phone kept Wafa from staying out late and going on unsupervised dates, Kassim was all for it. But she didn’t want secrets.
So she watched. She saw that Wafa didn’t clean her room or make her face up for video dates. She noticed that they laughed a lot. She liked that Moutaz had a calming influence. Afraid he would get frustrated with Wafa’s sass, Kassim urged her to be more demure.
Wafa didn’t agree: “This is me. If I change then I’m not going to be me. It’s like fooling somebody.”
Satisfied, Kassim gave her blessing — but required that Wafa finish college before any marriage could take place.
So they waited. Donald Trump became president. Anti-immigrant rhetoric in the U.S. rose. And in January 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13769, which banned U.S. entry for several Muslim-majority countries, including Yemen. Before the ban, the wait time for a family visa to the U.S. could range from months to several years — and Moutaz hadn’t even proposed yet. After the ban, they were faced with an indefinite wait.
Wafa knew she had only one choice: “I’m going to fight.”
Trump’s travel ban worked the way it was intended; it forced immigrants to choose between their families and their visas. It deterred. It broke hearts, if not spirits.
Her defiance shifted to her new country, which seemed to be rejecting her love and her future. She became more outspoken about immigrant rights. At her job, she began questioning a manager about microaggressions. She joined her school’s Muslim Student Association and developed her campus activism, starting her own student coalition in 2017.
A few years before, Saudi Arabia had begun an aerial bombing campaign called Operation Decisive Storm. Originally planned to last only a few weeks and drive the Houthis from the Yemeni capital, it instead became a prolonged aerial bombardment of the city. Sections of old Sana’a, built before the 11th century, were destroyed. Thousands of civilians died in those and subsequent airstrikes. The Houthis remained in control of the city.
Moutaz was working on an MBA when Operation Decisive Storm began. Bombs fell while he commuted to and from classes.
“At first it was intimidating and scary, but with time I got used to it so quick because the airstrikes would last for long hours and would occur daily,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message. “It took me two weeks to get used to the fear, the loud bombing, and accept the reality that I was living in.”
He adopted an attitude many Yemenis would come to embrace: If he was going to die from a bomb, so be it. If it wasn’t a bomb, it would be something else. Life had to go on.
“Although it was hard to be lonely during that time, when Wafaa left the country I felt much better. I worry about her more than myself,” he wrote.
They spoke every day on WhatsApp, sometimes trying seven or eight times before they could get a connection. When she heard about a new bombing, she would often call, panicked, to make sure he was all right. Video dates helped Moutaz get through the stress of school, separation, and airstrikes.
While Wafa grew more outspoken, Moutaz developed a stoic endurance. “I never saw our separation as a goodbye; rather I saw it as ‘see you soon in better circumstances,’” he explained.
In late 2017, Moutaz sent her a ring — ostensibly to ward off interested men from whom Wafa got a lot of attention. But along with the ring came 365 handwritten reasons why he loved her. A proposal came the following year.
“Hell yes, I want to marry you,” Wafa recalls thinking. They both knew what that meant: He was banned from coming to the U.S., so she would go to him, perhaps putting her green card in jeopardy. On the day that she submitted her last final exam to graduate, against the best advice of nearly everyone, she flew back to Yemen.
* * *
Americans often think of immigration policy as a grand national project. Politicians wax hopeful or fearmonger, drawing broad statements about the way we view ourselves as a nation, or the way we think of the Other. Such thematic strokes capture the immensity of the issue, but they fail in the details.
Details like these: One day, Wafa walked into a grocery store in Beaverton, Oregon. There were tulips in pots, cheap sweatpants on racks, and sale bins of candy. Behind the standard smells of rotisserie chicken and plastic was another scent: Moutaz’s cologne. Someone in the store was wearing it. The smell overwhelmed her, and she collapsed on the floor in grief.
Starting in 2017, Donald Trump’s immigration policies explicitly used family separation as a means to discourage migration to the United States. This was a new twist: not just to separate families currently in violation of immigration law, but to use separation as a deterrent against future migration.
Soon what divided them would not be family objections, but the policies and decisions of world nations: who allied with whom in the war, who offered visas for Yemeni citizens, who blocked the airports.
But for many years prior to Trump’s administration, U.S. immigration policies had been de facto separation policies. Undocumented parents could be deported, while their U.S.-born kids remained in the country. The parents often had little legal recourse. Long processing times, high fees, and complicated paperwork have meant that husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, kids and parents, are often separated for months or years while they wait. In Moutaz’s case, and the case of thousands of other applicants sidelined by the travel ban, the separation became indefinite.
“I talk to a lot of people every day [about] how hard it is,” Wafa says. “It’s just emotionally draining. It is expensive, it is risky.”
Wafa has filed an I-130, Petition for Alien Relative, for Moutaz. It costs over $500. Add an international flight: When his case finally comes up for processing, he will need to fly to Malaysia, Algeria, or another transit country; the U.S. embassy in Yemen has been closed since 2015. Add $300 to hire a private driver for the 16-hour trip through mountains to Aden, which has the country’s only functioning airport.
“The Yemenis who have fled the country are very often from the middle and wealthy classes. For the most vulnerable, there are very few opportunities to leave the country,” write Solenn Al Majali via email. Based in Jordan, Al Majali studies Yemeni emigration at Aix-Marseille University and the French Institute of the Near East, and is a non-resident fellow at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies.
Wafa knows she is lucky. Her dad studied abroad in the 1980s, and her eldest brother was born in the U.S. He was able to sponsor some of his family members and help them escape the worst of the war. As a U.S. permanent resident, she has some leverage.
“If I didn’t have the resources or the money, I would not be able to apply for him. If he didn’t know how to speak English, he’s not going to come. If they see him at the embassy and he is not dressed well or he doesn’t speak well or he doesn’t have a career, you know, anything, they can just reject it,” Wafa says.
Since 1965, the U.S. has been relatively open to family immigration, mostly as a result of the Immigration and Naturalization Act. That legislation got rid of quota systems based on current U.S. census data. It opened the country up to immigrant families from more diverse countries. Thought about generously, the 1965 act was “driven by recognizing that family units are critically important for happiness, well-being, economic prosperity,” says Duncan Lawrence, the executive director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University. (Full disclosure: Lawrence is a friend of mine.)
Support for families — from permission to find work to early access to ESOL programs — are the backbone of healthy immigration policy, according to Lawrence. But there’s one overwhelming factor in the health and well-being of families: keeping them together.
“If you had this magic wand of tools that you could use to positively impact families, I think that is probably one of the most powerful things you could do,” Lawrence says. Kids are especially vulnerable to separation from their parents, but all families suffer from the threat and reality of being apart.
No matter where we live, we take refuge in those we love.
There is a kind of helplessness to this process that overwhelms Wafa. Despite her defiance of the travel ban, which was lifted by President Biden in January 2021, she remains at the mercy of international law. She cannot speed Moutaz’s visa interview or guarantee that he will not be rejected. Will U.S. Customs and Immigration Services see their relationship as one of convenience? How does she prove that she truly loves this man who she has seen only twice in five years?
There have been times when she felt like giving up and going back to Yemen. At least they could be together. In that sense, Trump’s travel ban worked the way it was intended; it forced immigrants to choose between their families and their visas. It deterred. It broke hearts, if not spirits.
That kind of heartbreak leads a young woman to collapse in a grocery store. It sends her, desperate, back to a war zone.
* * *
Wafa arrived at her family home in Sana’a at night, after a harrowing 16-hour drive through the mountains. She still had the taste of vomit in her mouth. The smell of sweat clung to her. She dropped her bags off inside, briefly greeting her father before running out the back door.
Moutaz was waiting. Completely forgetting where she was, she burst out into the street and hugged and kissed him, not caring they were in public.
“I kept telling him, ‘This is a dream. This is not real,’” she says. “I think that night was the best night of my life.”
Planning a wedding in a war zone posed challenges. In 2019, four years of fighting had cost many Yemenis their businesses. Moutaz told Wafa that Houthis demanded a cut of private sales; the extortion, combined with the high price of goods, forced many people to move their businesses online. A 2015 Saudi-led blockade of the port of Hodeidah, where most Yemeni food had been imported, created massive shortages. Women especially had become Facebook entrepreneurs, making sweets and doing makeup from home.
If he was going to die from a bomb, so be it. If it wasn’t a bomb, it would be something else. Life had to go on.
Wafa recalls the mixed emotions of that moment: “You feel guilty because you’re celebrating and you’re doing all these plans, and people are dying. People are dying out of hunger. People are dying in the airstrikes. Even the availability of things like who’s going to do the wedding cake. … I was telling him, should we downsize it? And he was like, ‘I loved you for five years. I’m not going to downsize my wedding and the celebration of love that we have.’”
Wafa also struggled to adjust to her Yemeni relatives. Her naturally ebullient personality, combined with years of living in American society, made her relatively intolerant of strict traditions. She invited Moutaz to tea at their family home, only to have her father kick him out. When an aunt complained that Wafa shouldn’t see her fiancé before the wedding, Wafa bristled: “I don’t really care what you think.”
Despite the tensions, a week later an imam proclaimed them married.
After the religious ceremony, she hugged Moutaz freely in front of others for the first time. It no longer felt wrong. “It just felt like, here we are. We worked hard. We waited. It was beautiful. And then we just danced the night out.”
More celebrations followed: a spa day for the women, donations of food to the poor. Wafa and Moutaz were still required to keep their distance from each other, a tradition they mostly ignored. They weren’t trying to anger their relatives; this formal celebration period just felt like another barrier to being together.
Finally, they had a party with hundreds of guests. Wafa wore a white, sparkling off-shoulder dress with a sheer cape. Moutaz wore a black tuxedo, his beard shaved close, and a dapper chain clipped to the vest. Their initials hung on the wall in huge gold letters, the W and M intertwined. They went back to a hotel afterward, without secrecy or shame.
They had agreed to write their own vows, but to read them privately. In the hotel, Moutaz pulled out a sheet of paper. To her horror, Wafa realized she had forgotten to write hers.
“He was like, ‘babe, you crossed the ocean for me,’” she recalls, smiling. “‘That’s your vow.”’
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As Solenn Al Majali points out, Wafa and those like her, whose families have emigrated to escape violence, make up a small and privileged minority of Yemeni citizens. Most remain stuck in Yemen.
Bordered by only two countries, neither of which is accepting refugees, Yemen remains geographically isolated. Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s neighbor, has been a main player in the conflict. The United States and other Western countries have supplied Saudi Arabia with weapons, tactical assistance, and training. The bombs that fall on Yemen are American-made. In turn, Iran has given some tactical and financial support to the Houthi rebels.
For those who remain, safety has shattered. The United Nations has found that all parties in Yemen share responsibility for war crimes, including “arbitrary deprivation of life, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, gender-based violence, including sexual violence, torture,” and more. Children are greatly at risk for death in airstrikes, but also from common childhood diseases and hunger, for which there is limited medical assistance. Saudi and United Arab Emirates blockades of the ports where Yemenis import food have created famine conditions. According to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “More than 16 million people are expected to go hungry [in 2021]. Nearly 50,000 Yemenis are already starving to death in famine-like conditions.”
Back in Yemen, she faced physical risks unimaginable in Oregon — but she also had a sense of worth and belonging. She wondered if the two of them could make a life in Sana’a. Could survive, with just each other.
Before leaving office, the Trump administration designated the Houthis as terrorists, making international aid delivery trickier. While the Biden administration has reversed this decision and pledged to end support for the conflict, it remains to be seen how much they can disentangle themselves from Saudi allies.
For many Yemenis, the conflict no longer seems to have a foreseeable end. The civil society they knew is gone. There is only endurance and the slender hope of escape. For Moutaz, that hope is Wafa: “She always find[s] a way out,” he told me.
* * *
In the past, Yemen had coffee shops where people could gather and chat. There were seaside towns with beaches along the Indian Ocean. Men chewed qat at house parties, sharing the news. Ancient rammed-earth buildings were beautifully inlaid; brick minarets and winding stone streets were part of a long, proud history of Arab culture, from the Queen of Sheba to rare Islamic manuscripts.
“I keep that beautiful image for my country inside me,” Susan Kassim says.
When she flew back for her daughter’s wedding, the first time she’d been home in five years, her beloved Yemen had been transformed by war. The seaside towns where she had vacationed were destroyed. Community institutions struggled to operate. Buildings had been destroyed in aerial bombing campaigns, leaving swaths of ancient cities in ruins. The highway between Sana’a and Aden, formerly a brisk six-hour drive, was blockaded, forcing her to endure the same harrowing mountain journey her daughter had taken. More than anything, the guns scared her. Armed men patrolled the streets and stopped cars. There was no government, only martial law.
“But people there, they accept the reality. They are not afraid,” says Kassim. Her local relatives teased her that living in the U.S. had made her soft. “And I say no, it’s normal to be afraid. This is horrible.”
To her newlywed daughter and son-in-law, however, the summer of 2019 was bliss. They seemed so elated, Susan asked if they had been taking drugs.
“I’m like, ‘everything is perfect,’” Wafa says. Airstrikes hit a building nearby, and the couple slept through it.
Being together had made them immune to fear — or perhaps it was a deliberate blindness. If they paid attention to the reality of their situation, they could see the precarity of it all. Wafa only had six months of travel allowance before she had to go back to the U.S. Despite court battles, Trump’s travel ban still stood in modified form, and visa processing for Yemeni citizens had ground to a near-halt.
For many Yemenis, the conflict no longer seems to have a foreseeable end. The civil society they knew is gone. There is only endurance and the slender hope of escape.
Ten days after the wedding, Moutaz got called back to work. Every six months to a year, he was given a new project-based contract by an NGO. He traveled outside the city to small villages, interviewed tribal communities about their needs, and attempted to provide infrastructure: bathrooms, running water, menstruation products, housing. The work fulfilled him, but it was dangerous. Soldiers often stopped his car, demanding to see travel authorization and receive bribes. He would make a few phone calls, and he could keep driving. But Wafa worried about a time when his answers didn’t satisfy them, when his bribe was insufficient, when he didn’t come home.
“It’s living without a government. It’s crazy I would say, because nobody is held accountable at all,” she says.
Moutaz didn’t have much choice. Humanitarian work, paid for by foreign NGOs, was basically the only viable income in Yemen in 2019. Government officials were paid sporadically; teachers had worked for years without pay; private businesses had suffered from ongoing power outages, infrastructure damage, and a shrinking economy.
He knew the risks. This is war, he figured; to survive, Yemenis have to support each other. Against those who threatened his safety, he bowed his head, then persisted. Mostly, he refused to be afraid — a form of defiance that Wafa tried to imitate, especially when her mother begged her to return to Oregon.
“It broke my heart to leave her in that situation that I saw with my own eyes,” says Kassim. Other than official wedding events, Kassim had refused to go out of the house for most of her visit, refused to acknowledge the changed city. She flew home, hopeful that she would reunite with Wafa at the end of the allotted six months.
Wafa wasn’t sure. She felt like she was living in an alternate reality: “We don’t have gas. So what? We walk. We don’t have electricity, so what? We have candles.”
As the day of her U.S. flight approached, Moutaz refused to say whether he thought she should go. He wanted the decision to be hers. Once, when she woke in the middle of the night, he was sitting up in bed, tearing up. He would miss her, he said, but he felt relief knowing she would be somewhere safe. “So I’ll just trust you,” he told her.
She considered staying. Like so many emigrants, her heart was torn between her old home and her future in the U.S. In the end, she left Moutaz and was allowed back into the United States.
* * *
Love can blind us to reality, binding us only to our beloved — a person, a nation, a memory. We might refuse to see danger, or turn away from transformation, because to acknowledge the horrors of the world would be to betray a beloved relationship. We want to ignore everything except that sweetness.
No matter where we live, we take refuge in those we love. They shelter us, protect us, comfort us. When those people live far away, the best we can do is pretend. We wrap their late-night texts and dropped phone calls around us like a blanket, and rapt in a combination of memory and expectation, we close our eyes.
But love can also clarify. For many families separated by national borders, there are hopes of happy endings, but no illusions. Brokenheartedness can become a kind of resting state, which isn’t to say it hurts less — simply that it becomes a kind of ever-present harm. And as anyone who has ever hurt before knows, pain wakes us up. It focuses us, fixes us to the present moment. For some, the pain becomes a kind of a beloved, a stand-in for the real thing. For others, like Wafa, it becomes an itch you can’t stop scratching.
* * *
Wafa struggled to readjust to the U.S. A six-month newlywed, she felt more like a widow. Reckless, angry, she started graduate school and also a full-time job. She was trying, she thinks, to numb herself with endless work.
It wasn’t just missing Moutaz. Going home also meant resuming a role as an immigrant, rather than a citizen. It meant accepting a status shift that she hadn’t realized she resented so much.
“Back in my country, I live in a villa. I have a driver. I have people that do shit for me. Yet when we move here, people don’t know that. We start from zero,” she says. “It hurts … I’m this established person back home, yet here I’m irrelevant.”
That pain had started early. During her own emigration process in 2015, she had flown to Algeria for an interview at the U.S. Embassy. As the passengers disembarked, an officer in the airport asked who was a Yemeni citizen. Without further questions, he told them to get back on the plane and fly home.
“Just having the idea that an officer has the power to kind of humiliate me, target me, and say, ‘just go back to your country,’ I can’t go through that again,” she says. “If I ever have a child, I never want them to get the feeling that [they] are nothing.”
Wafa wanted to give Moutaz the safety and freedom of the United States, but she increasingly wondered if the process was worth it. Back in Yemen, she faced physical risks unimaginable in Oregon — but she also had a sense of worth and belonging. She wondered if the two of them could make a life in Sana’a. Could survive, with just each other.
* * *
She had four brand-new iPhones in her bag, including two for the man with the ghost ticket. She dialed him when she landed in Cairo, but he didn’t respond. Airport security took her passport, and she had no ticket forward.
It was July 2020. COVID-19 had transformed the world, including immigration routes. Countries tightened their borders, citing health and safety concerns. One of two routes to Yemen, through Amman, Jordan, closed down. Traveling through Egypt remained the only way back.
Wafa had a ticket to Cairo, and no farther. And now she was stuck in the Cairo airport with no passport.
After eight months of separation, she was trying to get back to Moutaz. She had quit graduate school, thrown herself into work at a bank, and saved her money. She applied for U.S. citizenship. Trump was still president, the travel ban was still in place, COVID had changed the rules, but she had to see her husband again.
If you could die from an airstrike, there was no time for distress about a virus. It raged, invisible, behind the more immediate dangers of war.
Following a nebulous web of diasporic Yemeni connections, she contacted a man named Khalid in Egypt. He strung her along for a week, promising a ticket in exchange for large amounts of money. Reckless and desperate, she agreed: “This is my last paycheck. I’ll just spend it all and go to zero balance.” She sent him $750 to buy her a Cairo-Aden ticket.
The limited flights from Cairo to Aden were coveted by Yemeni migrants living in Egypt. Over 500,000 Yemenis live in Egypt, according to the Yemeni Embassy in Cairo, more than a 700% increase from before the war. They often come to Egypt or Jordan on two-month visas for medical necessity and remain, applying for refugee status. Many see Egypt as a temporary refuge. They are often stranded in legal limbo, hoping for resettlement, but not recognized as refugees by the United Nations for geopolitical reasons, says Solenn Al Majali. As such, they have little access to resources like jobs, schools, or humanitarian assistance.
Wafa’s class and nationality privilege did not endear her to those she contacted: “I am a lady living in the U.S. trying to go to Yemen, when they [Yemeni refugees] are freaked out.” The people she spoke with had more pressing issues than leisure travel. They were worried about paying rent, buying food, and finding employment. Wafa understood their bitterness.
A few days later, Khalid created a ghost ticket: It looked like a real flight but did not guarantee her a seat on the plane. She would have to trust that someone would cancel so she could fly standby. In exchange for the ghost ticket, he asked her to bring two iPhones to his relatives in Sana’a.
If her first time going back to Yemen had been inadvisable, this time was worse. COVID-19 had killed several members of Wafa’s Yemeni family, including three relatives in a month. People had worn masks for perhaps the first month of the pandemic; after that, a mindset of numbness took over. If you could die from an airstrike, there was no time for distress about a virus. It raged, invisible, behind the more immediate dangers of war.
Wafa flew to Cairo in July, having spent the last of her money, clutching the ghost ticket like a talisman. After a few terrifying hours, airport security returned her passport, and Khalid texted her a link — for a real ticket to Aden.
* * *
Wafa had been in Sana’a for four months when it came time for Mawlid, the birthday of the Prophet. A traditional Islamic holiday, the 2020 Mawlid celebrations took a different turn. The city was bright with lights (Where did this money come from? Wafa wondered). The Houthis paraded tanks through the streets, and soldiers stood on every corner.
“I felt like they came out of a grave. They had guns and they had paint of green all over them,” she says. The soldiers frightened Wafa; to her, it wasn’t a celebration, but a show of military force. She was beginning to see how deeply the war had infiltrated everyday Yemeni life. Last summer’s newlywed blinders were finally off.
Airstrikes hit a building nearby, and the couple slept through it.
There were other signs of change, too. In 2019, Moutaz and Wafa had gone out to coffee shops and enjoyed their favorite snacks in the markets. Now, even married women and men could not associate on the street. Nonprofit work had become more difficult, as the Houthis refused NGO authorizations; Moutaz found himself unemployed for long periods. Due to a Saudi embargo, there was no fuel except at exorbitant black market rates, so they couldn’t drive anywhere. They stayed in their apartment and watched TV.
After the wedding, they had considered staying together in Yemen. A year later, that life seemed impossible. Wafa told Moutaz, “I can’t have a family here where education is corrupted. They teach kids what they want them to know, and it’s all about sacrifice, sacrificing themselves, and it’s just toxic. People don’t have dreams.”
Moutaz knew his wife would not survive long in Yemen. She had always been too big, too bold, too unwilling to follow the rules. Even if she ducked political trouble, her spirit would wither from the restrictions on daily life. He saw it happening already, in the shrinking of their ambitions: Find food. Find a good movie to watch, and an internet connection to watch it.
She told him, “I wanted to go into politics. I wanted to go into law school. I had dreams. But I don’t have dreams here because there’s not even space for dreams.”
* * *
As of winter 2021, Wafa is back in Oregon. Rain falls softly and constantly on the pavement outside. Home is no longer where Moutaz is, as she once thought. Home is the state of waiting, of not acting on her worst impulses to scream in frustration and cause a huge fuss and fly back to him.
The easy route would be to give up on the U.S. Move to Egypt together, or Jordan. Make a new life. The harder, lengthier, more painful route is continued separation. Despite her desire to be with Moutaz, she has chosen not to give up, because his future is more important than her own immediate happiness.
“I want him to have an opportunity to get out and see the world, or just have the power to choose,” she says.
She wants to give one thing to him and their future children: a U.S. passport. She never wants them to be humiliated, or trapped, or in danger because of their papers. She wants to give them the space to dream.
For them, love has become a kind of defiance of boundaries, borders, and rules. Separated for years, they search for ways back to each other.
He, too, wants more. He doesn’t want to apply every three months for a new NGO job and then face another bout of unemployment. He doesn’t want to take another application test on his Excel skills, or endure invasive background checks, or bribe armed militants on his way to get villagers clean water. He wants to work in engineering, but more importantly, he wants to be his own boss, set his own hours, have power over his future. He wants to see Wafa smile.
“Your smile is the best thing [to] happen in the universe,” he wrote her in a message.
Does love always resolve? Perhaps a cross-border relationship is less about cathartic reunion than the slow, patient intention to help someone else find joy. Like Wafa, Moutaz says migration is about the fight for his partner’s dreams. National policies may require a shift in how we imagine our futures, but they cannot negate the audacity of wanting a loved one to be safe and happy.
Perhaps love means deferment. Or the refusal to defer. Or the unshakable belief that someday, you’ll walk together to get coffee, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
* * *
Caitlin Dwyer is a writer from Oregon. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, Narratively, Creative Nonfiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Quartz, and Oregon Humanities, among others. She holds an MA in journalism from the University of Hong Kong and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She also hosts the podcast Many Roads to Here and teaches at Portland Community College.
I blame Drew Barrymore for two things: the amount of money I have spent on celebrity memoirs and an unfortunate attempt to dye my hair platinum blonde in 1993, inspired by Drew’s locks in a Seventeen magazine Guess Jeans ad.
Little Girl Lost, Barrymore’s 1990 account of growing up as a child star in Hollywood, was my first celebrity autobiography. It ignited my love of celebrity memoirs, especially those by women. My dog-eared copy has survived numerous book purges and cross-country moves. I am not alone in my appreciation for it. The coming-of-age tale was a New York Times bestseller and although the book is now out of print, it has achieved cult-like status. It was even the subject of a 2018 New York Times Magazine Letter of Recommendation.
Barrymore was just 11 months old when she got her start in a television commercial for Puppy Chow. At 7 she starred as Gertie in Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1982 film E.T. and that same year became the youngest person ever to host Saturday Night Live. Barrymore’s drug and alcohol use began shortly after E.T. phoned home. The first time she got drunk she was 9. Barrymore started smoking weed at 10 and by 12 had moved on to cocaine. The actress entered rehab at 13; during her second stint in rehab she completed Little Girl Lost, which was published when she was just 16.
Barrymore’s drug and alcohol use began shortly after E.T. phoned home.
Gossip and juicy stories about nightclubbing with Jack Nicholson definitely make for a good read, but what initially drew me to the book was that Barrymore wrote it to counter stories about herself in the National Enquirer. “[I]magining the godawful headlines — ‘Drew Barrymore Cocaine Addict at Twelve Years Old’ or ‘Barrymore Burns Out in Teens’ — and the impression people would get of me was all my worst possible fears come true. I would’ve been the last person on Earth to deny my problems, but I wanted to have the option of confessing them,” Barrymore writes in Little Girl Lost. She wanted to come clean on her own terms. Barrymore’s desire to control her own life story compelled me to read the book and has made me return to it over the years.
Barrymore wanted to redirect her life’s narrative and that’s a popular reason why celebrities embrace the genre, but it is not the only reason. Some stars write their book to revive a stalled career and return to the limelight. For others, memoirs extend their 15 minutes of fame. This is a popular motivation for reality show stars. (Will you accept this rose and this six-figure book deal?) Memoirs also settle old scores. In André Leon Talley’s The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir, the fashion journalist and former Vogue creative director works through his issues with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Memoirs can also promote the brand a star has built around their celebrity. Reese Witherspoon’s Whiskey in a Teacup, which markets the star’s Southern Lifestyle to y’all, or any book from one of Queer Eye’s Fab Five are great examples.
For readers, celebrity memoir appeal lies in the juicy gossip and name dropping, and the chance to peek inside and live, if only for 500 pages, the glamorous lifestyles of the rich and famous. Social media, reality television, celebrity gossip blogs, and the popularity of TMZ-style tabloid journalism have created an insatiable desire to know more about our favorite celebrities. Celebrity memoirs help fulfill this desire. Sometimes, unfortunately, we learn a little too much about our favorite stars. After reading Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist, her third memoir, I am unable to watch Star Wars without thinking about all the coke Fisher said was consumed on set. I imagine the film’s stars hollowing out lightsabers to use like giant straws to blow rails with. (That’s not how the force works!)
While it’s easy to dismiss celebrity memoirs as guilty pleasure reads or unworthy of serious literary consideration, you cannot deny the genre’s popularity. One of the bestselling celebrity memoirs of all time, former first lady Michelle Obama’s 2018 release, Becoming, is still on the The New York Times bestsellers list and has sold more than 10 million copies. Recent months have seen new books from everyone from singer Mariah Carey to actor Matthew McConaughey to soccer star Megan Rapinoe. Celebrity memoirs are big business and we have Rolling Stones co-founder and guitarist Keith Richards to thank for that. His bestselling memoir Life was published in October 2010 and more celebrity autobiographies were published in the four years that followed than had been in the previous 15.
Life, for which Richards received a $7 million dollar advance, sold over one million copies in its first year. Following the success of Life, memoirs by male musicians from Duff McKagan to Steven Tyler were all bestsellers and it is not just men penning the hits. Remember when we all got together and decided women were funny after Bossypants came out? Tina Fey’s 2011 bestselling memoir preceded an onslaught of popular memoirs by funny ladies, including Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?(And Other Concerns) and Amy Poehler’s Yes Please.
***
Since first reading Little Girl Lost at 20, I have devoured memoirs by female celebrities from punk singer Alice Bag’s Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story to Jersey Shore star Snooki’s Confessions of a Guidette. I’m interested in how women write their stories, what they leave out, what they focus on, and how much of what they reveal is a reaction to the image of them we have from watching their movies or listening to their music or seeing them stumbling out of nightclubs in Us Weekly.
“How do we edit our life into a decent story? That’s the rub with an autobiography or memoir. What to reveal, what to keep hidden, what to embellish, what to downplay, and what to ignore? How much of the inner and how much of the outer?” says punk icon and Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry in her 2019 memoir, Face It, of a process that is scrutinized and critiqued much more if, like Harry, you’re a woman.
I’m interested in how women write their stories, what they leave out, what they focus on, and how much of what they reveal is a reaction to the image of them we have from watching their movies or listening to their music or seeing them stumbling out of nightclubs in “Us Weekly.”
And while there is no shortage of male celebrities spilling their guts all over my poorly constructed Ikea bookshelf, the fact that they share shelf space with celebrity memoirs written by women is about all they have in common. When it comes to celebrity memoirs there’s a distinct gender bias in everything from how the books are marketed to the type of topics female celebrities are expected to write about and the amount of themselves they are expected to expose to sell books.
The gender divide bias becomes even more problematic, and downright depressing, when you read the reviews and see how critics and the press receive female celebrity memoirs. Rather than celebrate women and their amazing stories, reviewers revert to stereotypes and tired clichés and, in the process, miss the actual story. Women can spend chapters talking about their accomplishments, their awards, and their accolades and reviewers will still only focus on the sex, the scandal, and the bombshell reveals that are expected from female-penned celebrity memoirs if they want to actually sell books. From memoir titles to book blurbs, when it comes to celebrity memoirs by women, sadly, we haven’t come a long way baby.
***
Debbie Harry’s Face It was one of the most anticipated celebrity memoirs of the recent past. In the book, Harry chronicles everything from her adoption at only 3 months old, to her days in the hippie band Wind in the Willows and all-girl group the Stillettos, to forming both Blondie the band and Blondie the persona. For Harry, Blondie was very much a character she played, one inspired by the “Hey, Blondie!” catcalls she received from construction workers after bleaching her hair, as well as the 1930s Blondie comic strip character who was a “dumb blonde who turns out to be smarter than the rest of them.” Marilyn Monroe was also an inspiration; Harry describes Monroe as “the proverbial dumb blonde with the little-girl voice and big-girl body,” who despite her appearance has “a lot of smarts behind the act.”
Face It also covers Harry’s acting in films like Videodrome and Hairspray, her time training as a professional wrestler for a role in the Broadway play Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap, as well as her activism and philanthropy work. (Fun fact: She was almost Pris in Blade Runner, but her record company made her turn it down.) There is certainly no shortage of great material for reviewers to discuss. Unfortunately, they responded with the same tired sexist tropes that greet memoirs written by women.
“In her memoir, Debbie Harry proves she’s more than just a pretty blonde in tight pants,” read the headline on The Washington Post’s review of Face It. The headline was later changed to, “In her memoir, Debbie Harry gives an unvarnished look at her life in the punk scene” after social media responded less than kindly to the sexist headline choice. The Washington Post admitted they botched the headline and appreciated the feedback, but the headline was not the review’s only problem.
The review opens with: “Even if Debbie Harry, of the band Blondie, isn’t to your taste—her voice too smooth, her sexiness too blatant, her music too smooth—you can’t dismiss certain truths about her.” While this sentence is a great example of disdain, it is not a great review opening. I read Bruce Springsteen’s 2016 memoir Born to Run at the same time as Harry’s and tried to imagine the Post opening a review of Springsteen’s book in the same way. To be fair I do find his sexiness far, far too blatant.
So how does the Post open Springsteen’s memoir review? “Why, one might ask, would Bruce Springsteen need to write an autobiography? Haven’t we been listening to it for the past half century? Hasn’t he been telling us his story all along?” says Joe Heim in the review’s first paragraph. Springsteen, a talented songwriter, has already shared so much through his music, what more could he be required to give us? It is okay if you want to sit this one out Bruce, I have heard Atlantic City, and do not require any further emoting from you at this time.
The Post’s review of Face It just goes from bad to worse, with criticism that Harry “sometimes comes across as self-interested” to a focus on the more sensationalist aspects of her story like sex and drugs. (This is an autobiography, right? I didn’t see them complaining about the 79 chapters in Springsteen’s book.) “She had a hookup with an Andy Warhol protégé in a phone booth in Max’s Kansas City and began what she blithely calls ‘chipping and dipping’ in heroin,” reads the review. The Post points out that “Harry is quite explicit in her descriptions of her drug use and sex life,” which they seem to interpret as permission to exploit the more sensationalistic aspects of her life and use them as a focal point in their review.
The review also offers a great example of how media likes to promote and celebrate the idea of women as trailblazers, praising Harry for being candid about the realities of being a female musician (an “unvarnished look”), while also painfully reinforcing the realities of being a female musician by using a sexist, stereotypical headline that focuses only on Harry’s appearance and sex appeal.
Control is a central theme of Harry’s book, whether it be of her image, her band, or her art. Early in the book Harry recounts a record company promoting Blondie’s first album using posters with an image of her in a see-through blouse, despite early reassurances that the posters would only feature headshots and would include all band members. She was not happy with the marketing decision, saying, “Sex sells, that’s what they say, and I’m not stupid, I know that. But on my terms, not some executive’s.” And while doing things on her own terms is a source of pride for Harry, reviewers have a serious problem with it.
For Harry control empowers, for memoir reviewers it threatens. “You can’t control other people’s fantasies or the illusion they’re buying or selling,” says Harry early in Face It when talking about people having posters of her on their bedroom walls. While Harry resigns herself to her lack of control, reviews of her work never want to relinquish theirs. Harry’s insistence on doing things on her own terms is panned by reviewers who call her guarded and closed off.
Reviewers want to read a book by a female celebrity and have her completely figured out by the last page. “[W]hat’s a memoir for, if not to pull back the curtain and check out the lady who is pushing the buttons?” asks Harry in Face It. But when the curtain doesn’t pull back as much as reviewers want, they become resentful, sullen, and offended, reacting with “how dare you?” to any resistance on the part of the woman to give them everything they want, every piece of her. The Atlantic’s review reads almost like it’s giving Harry permission to tell her story on her own terms, saying “holding back is an understandable maneuver for someone who’s been stared at so much.”
One way or another, the reviewers keep the sexist treatment coming when discussing Face It. The Guardian was also annoyed that Harry did not give enough of herself in the book. “It’s a shame that Harry passes up the chance to dig deeper into her experiences of objectification and the nature of fame, but more disappointing is that we learn so little about her interior life, and how she really thinks and feels.” I guess talking about being raped at knifepoint by a stranger is not enough for the reviewer. What’s with the heart of glass Debbie? Give us more of your pain! And on page five, not 105!
I guess talking about being raped at knifepoint by a stranger is not enough for the reviewer. What’s with the heart of glass Debbie? Give us more of your pain! And on page five, not 105!
The headline of Rolling Stone’s piece on Face It highlights how Harry’s book “looks back on what she learned from Andy Warhol and David Bowie.” The media loves to position women in relation to the men in their lives as if the only way we can understand work by women is in the context of the men who orbit them. Despite writing 368 pages about herself, according to Rolling Stone, the only interesting thing about Harry is the famous male company she kept.
The New York Times continues the tired pop culture gender bias with a review that manages to make it all the way to the fourth paragraph before it mentions her age. It also talks about the number of memoirs by female rockers being released at the same time as Harry’s book. (“[T]here’s a bit of a pileup of female rockers getting reflective this season.”) I smell a trend. Ladies, they be writing! The review mentions the fact that Harry’s “face is unlined” and talks about her “crisp red collared blouse with white polka dots and red leggings.” I think Bruce was wearing the exact same thing when they wrote their piece about him and Born to Run. How embarrassing.
Two weeks after Face It came out another musical icon released a memoir. Me by Elton John covers the singer’s childhood in the London suburb of Pinner, his early musical days in Los Angeles, his songwriting partnership with Bernie Taupin, successful solo career, and marriage and family with husband David Furnish. Keen celebrity memoir readers might also be quick to point out that the title of John’s memoir is the same as that of actress Katharine Hepburn’s. Is there anything men will not just unapologetically lay claim to?
The review mentions the fact that Harry’s “face is unlined” and talks about her “crisp red collared blouse with white polka dots and red leggings.” I think Bruce was wearing the exact same thing when they wrote their piece about him and “Born to Run.” How embarrassing.
While Rolling Stone’s book review name-checked Harry’s famous male friends in the headline, not surprisingly, John’s does not. “Elton John’s Me Is A Uniquely Revealing Pop Star Autobiography. The long-awaited book covers his hard childhood, struggles with addiction and road to recovery.” It ends with “Elton has never been one to hold back difficult truths, and Me — while a little skimpy on revelations about his brilliant, ground breaking music — is essential reading for anyone who wants to know the difficult road that he walked while creating it.”
Entertainment Weekly’s description of Me is also glowing: “While Me is as colorful as you’d expect from an artist famous for his outlandish stage costumes and outsize temper tantrums, it is also so much more than simply a dishy sex, drugs and, rock ‘n roll tell-all.” The Entertainment Weekly review shows that when it comes to male celebrity memoirs there may be sex and drugs, but no review should reduce their work to just these scandalous and juicy elements.
Can you feel the love tonight? Not yet? Never fear, here comes The Guardian to continue the praise. Their review opens with, “Choosing one’s favourite Elton John story – like choosing one’s favourite Elton song – can feel like limiting oneself to a mere single grape from the horn of plenty.” Reading reviews of the book you have to wonder if John is still standing because he is unable to sit down from all the ass kissing. The Daily Mail calls it “the rock memoir of the decade” while for The Washington Post it is an “unsparing, extravagantly funny new memoir” and “bracingly honest.” It’s hard to find criticism and scrutiny in the reviews of John’s work because there is not much negativity. John’s book is not better than Harry’s; in fact, I think Harry’s is much stronger. She’s more self-aware and can deconstruct the misconceptions and preconceptions that fans, the media, and other musicians have of her.
Can you feel the love tonight? Not yet? Never fear, here comes “The Guardian” to continue the praise.
“You think you’re being difficult, my little sausage? Have I ever told you about the time I drank eight vodka martinis, took all my clothes off in front of a film crew, and then broke my manager’s nose?” he writes of being a father reacting to his son’s temper tantrums. There are plenty of stories about famous friends like Stevie Wonder, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Andy Warhol, and Neil Young. The anecdotes leave readers feeling like they never get to peek behind the shiny veneer of the celebrity that is Elton John. At times it’s all surface and that’s fine, but reviewers do not criticize him for it in the same way they would if he were a woman.
John’s book reviews do talk of his well-documented addiction to cocaine (“If you fancy living in a despondent world of unending, delusional bullshit, I really can’t recommend cocaine highly enough,” he writes), but they are quick to follow it up with redemption stories, which is a standard formula in memoirs written both by and about men.
“Now that he’s sober, there’s the more conservatively dressed, happily married elder statesman of British pop, a proper establishment figure,” writes The Guardian. Not only do they give him a redemption arc and treat his addiction very much like a phase, but they also give his addiction issues a free pass, writing “while his extraordinary talent justified his personal excesses, it is his self-awareness that has counterbalanced the narcissism and made him such a likable figure.”
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Redemption comes up often in male celebrity memoir coverage, but examine the media’s reaction to another celebrity memoir and it becomes painfully clear that this narrative is strictly for the boys.
Actress, producer, and director Demi Moore’s memoir Inside Out was released a few weeks before John’s. Moore and her book were soon all over the media and it was not for her redemption story. Like John, Moore struggled with addiction, but unlike John the media never lets her forget it, along with other parts of her story.
“Demi Moore drops shocking revelations about Ashton Kutcher, sexual assault and sobriety,” reads the headline of an L.A. Times piece about the memoir. The story proceeds to break down Moore’s childhood pain, her miscarriage, Ashton Kutcher cheating on her, and her struggles with alcohol and drugs.
Unlike In Touch Weekly, they skipped the “Ashton and Bruce Are in Good Places Too” sidebar because like with Debbie Harry, we cannot talk about Moore without mentioning the famous men in her life. More than one review talks about how Willis and Kutcher must feel about Demi airing their dirty laundry. Was Bruce mad? What does Ashton really think? Dude, where’s my sound bite?
Entertainment Weekly’s piece ran with the headline, “Celebrities react to Demi Moore’s revealing memoir Inside Out. From Jon Cryer’s affectionate follow-up to Ashton Kutcher’s cryptic non-response.” They forgot to add “male” in front of “celebrities” though as all the celebrities quoted in the piece were men. Also, if one more reviewer mentions how great Moore looks for her age, I will make them watchthat awful scene in St. Elmo’s Fire where Rob Lowe’s character passionately details the origin story of St. Elmo’s Fire while performing pyrotechnics with a can of aerosol hairspray and a lighter on repeat until they beg me for mercy.
Also, if one more reviewer mentions how great Moore looks for her age, I will make them watch that awful scene in “St. Elmo’s Fire” where Rob Lowe’s character passionately details the origin story of St. Elmo’s Fire while performing pyrotechnics with a can of aerosol hairspray and a lighter on repeat until they beg me for mercy.
Most of Moore’s memoir coverage focused on the tabloid aspects of it. Read the headlines to see if you can spot a trend and how many you can read before you want to just set shit on fire (you can borrow Rob’s aerosol can).
“7 Biggest Bombshells From Demi Moore’s Explosive Memoir” (accessonline.com)
“Demi Moore: 8 Biggest Bombshells From Her Memoir Inside Out” (popculture.com, also, take that accessonline.com)
“Demi Moore’s raw Inside Out reveals rape, why marriage to Ashton Kutcher crumbled” (USA Today)
“Demi Moore Gets Real About Her Painful Childhood, Drugs, Ashton Kutcher and Other Exes in New Book ‘Inside Out‘” (Stay classy, Us Weekly)
“Why Demi Moore Fulfilled Ashton Kutcher’s Threesome Fantasies” (E! Online)
The unfortunate thing about these headlines, which would be vastly different if they were referencing a man’s memoir, is that, like Harry, they reduce Moore’s story to only its most scandalous and juicy elements. Moore got her acting start in 1981 as Jackie Templeton on General Hospital (Luke and Laura forever!), the number one show on daytime television at the time. She followed that up with roles in films like the Brat Pack bonanzas St. Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night.
Then she got what many, including Moore, consider to be a turning point in her career. “This could be either an absolute disaster, or it could be amazing,” she writes of reading the script for Ghost,which ended up being a big hit in 1990, grossing over $500 million. It was nominated for five Oscars and four Golden Globes, including a Golden Globes best actress nomination for Moore.
Moore followed the success of Ghost with A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal, and Striptease, a film for which she was offered over $12 million, an amount no other woman in Hollywood had ever received. Moore became the highest paid actress in Hollywood. “But instead of people seeing my big payday as a step in the right direction for women or calling me an inspiration, they came up with something else to call me: Gimmie Moore.” It is worth noting that at the time her husband Bruce Willis had just been paid $20 million for the third Die Hard movie. (Yippee ki yay indeed!)
“She became a movie star in this time where women didn’t naturally fit into the system,” said Gwyneth Paltrow, a friend of Moore’s, in the The New York Times piece on Inside Out. “She was really the first person who fought for pay equality and got it, and really suffered a backlash from it. We all certainly benefited from her,” says Paltrow.
And while it pains me greatly to side with someone who talks a lot about vagina steaming, Paltrow’s right. Moore is an inspiration and fighting for equal pay in Hollywood should be one of the things the media focuses on when they talk about Inside Out, but, sadly, it is not. It is unfortunate that when Moore is discussed it is in the context of Ashton Kutcher and threesomes, at the expense of the many other empowering and interesting parts of her life.
And while it pains me greatly to side with someone who talks a lot about vagina steaming, Paltrow’s right. Moore is an inspiration and fighting for equal pay in Hollywood should be one of the things the media focuses on when they talk about “Inside Out,” but, sadly, it is not.
Remember her iconic Vanity Fair cover? Shot in 1991 by Annie Leibovitz when Moore was seven months pregnant with her second daughter Scout, it’s considered one of the most influential magazine covers of all time. Legendary Esquire art director George Lois describes it as, “A brave image on the cover of a great magazine — a stunning work of art that conveyed a potent message that challenged a repressed society.” Let’s talk about that!
Or her intense training for her role in G.I. Jane, a 1997 film Moore both starred in and produced. “I was emotionally invested in the story, the message and the provocative questions it raised,” she says of the film. The film was panned by critics and Moore talks at length in Inside Out about her disappointment at the reception to a project that meant so much to her.
The parts of the book where Moore talks about Hollywood’s double standard, whether it be the pay gap or reactions to the age difference between her and Kutcher, are some of the best parts of the book. Unfortunately, they are the parts covered least.
The last line of Inside Out is, “we all suffer, and we all triumph, and we all get to choose how we hold both.” It is a great line for a memoir to end on, but in Moore’s case, while she may get to choose how she holds both, the media will only ever focus on the suffer part.
There is the emphasis on opening up, on fighting, on bravery, on revealing — “Demi Moore Lets Her Guard Down,” reads The New York Times headline. This is the way memoirs by women are positioned and even if it isn’t explicitly spelled out, it has become the expectation so much so that when female celebrities don’t expose themselves completely they are resented for it. The reception to Harry’ book Face It offers proof.
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Jessica Simpson released her memoir Open Book in February 2020. It reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list, but like Moore’s, Simpson’s book soon became tabloid fodder. “Jessica’s Shocking Confessions,” reads the headline on Star’s piece on the book, which focuses on Simpson’s struggles with drug and alcohol abuse and her famous exes from Nick Lachey to John Mayer. Like Moore, Simpson is now sober.
Simpson was signed to Columbia Records in 1997 at 17 as the label’s answer to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and went on to release six bestselling records. She also starred in the MTV reality show Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, which featured Simpson and then husband and 98 Degrees singer Nick Lachey, who at the time was the more successful of the two. If you don’t remember Lachey from MTV you might know him from his recent gig hosting Netflix’s Love is Blind where he greets contestants with “Obviously, I’m Nick Lachey,” which seems to overestimate his place in both pop culture’s canon and our general consciousness.
Newlyweds, a ratings success, aired for two years and while it made the couple a household name, it was Simpson who stole the show with her ditzy, dumb blonde antics. Her confusion over whether Chicken of the Sea was chicken or tuna earned her a place in both reality television and pop culture history. The most interesting parts of Open Book are when Simpson talks about her reality television persona and the identity crisis it led to. “How was I supposed to live a real healthy life filtered through the lens of a reality show? If my personal life was my work, and my work required me to play a certain role, who even was I anymore?” she writes.
Open Book is Simpson’s attempt to distance herself from her Newlyweds role and change perceptions of her, a common reason people write memoirs. Some get it —“You Remember Jessica Simpson, Right? Wrong,” reads the headline on The New York Times piece about her memoir — but, unfortunately, most of the reviewers discussing her book don’t. Simpson has moved beyond her Newlyweds character. She’s built a billion-dollar fashion and licensing business and is a mom to three kids, but the media seem uncomfortable embracing Simpson in her new roles, preferring to keep her forever stuck in 2003, in her UGG boots and pink Juicy Couture tracksuit, confused about tuna.
Simpson has moved beyond her “Newlyweds” character. She’s built a billion-dollar fashion and licensing business and is a mom to three kids, but the media seem uncomfortable embracing Simpson in her new roles, preferring to keep her forever stuck in 2003, in her UGG Boots and pink Juicy Couture tracksuit, confused about tuna.
Simpson talks about the effect this identity crisis had on her and her struggles with her weight and body image, as well as her sexual abuse at age 6, and her addiction to alcohol and pills. She started to increasingly rely on alcohol during her relationship with Mayer in 2006, insecure that she wasn’t smart enough to date Mayer. My heart breaks when I think of Simpson wasting time worried about being the intellectual equal of the man who gave us the musical depth that is “Your Body is a Wonderland” and later referred to sex with Simpson as “sexual napalm.”
It is also troubling that after talking about how Mayer brought out her insecurities, the media thinks it is a good idea to focus on Mayer’s reaction to Open Book. I know you thought you were never good enough for this guy and that he was always judging you, so let’s get him to judge you some more by asking what he thought of your book!
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Simpson’s attempts to challenge the dumb blonde perception of her are not the only example of a female celebrity going off script or off brand in their memoir and failing to give the media, and readers, what they want or expect. Singer and songwriter Liz Phair’s Horror Stories says “a memoir” on the front cover, but the book is more a collection of essays and stories by Phair than a straightforward linear memoir. Reviewers did not respond well to Phair’s artistic license with the storytelling form.
“It’s hard to tell the truth about ourselves. It opens us up to being judged and rejected,” Phair writes in Horror Stories and that may be one reason she chose to tell her story the way she did. Through stories about blizzards, blackouts (from lack of electricity, not drinking), marital infidelity, giving birth to her son, and getting dressed up to go to Trader Joe’s, Phair reveals a lot about herself and about identity, insecurity, fame, and regret. “In the stories that make up this book, I am trusting you with my deepest self,” she writes in the book’s prologue. Her deepest self just might be a bit harder to find for those fuck and run readers who are too busy complaining about the book’s nontraditional memoir style to actually read it.
Horror Stories does not talk a lot about her music, including Phair’s critically acclaimed, influential 1993 album Exile in Guyville. A song-by-song reply to the 1972 Rolling Stones album Exile on Main St., it was the number one album in year-end lists from Spin and The Village Voice and was rated the fifth best album of the 1990s by Pitchfork. “At the time, it was a landmark of foul-mouthed, comprised intimacy, a tortured confessional, a workout in female braggadocio, and a wellspring of penetrating self-analysis and audacity,” reads The New Yorker’s piece on the 20th anniversary of Exile in Guyville’s release.
“Frankness is Liz Phair’s brand. Her 1993 breakthrough album, the brilliant and profane Exile inGuyville, chronicled her post-college experiences in Chicago’s male-dominated music scene. Phair’s new memoir Horror Stories makes little mention of the album or her artistic life,” reads The Washington Post’s review. Remember how the Post thought that Bruce Springsteen did not need to write Born to Run because he had already revealed so much in his songs already? Why doesn’t Phair get the same consideration?
“Though there are anecdotes about flopping on live television and scrapping a record after learning of a collaborator’s abuse, the absence of concrete stories about Exile in Guyville is palpable,” writes Pitchfork. Just give us the hits, Liz! “Her relationship to music seems to have been the longest and maybe the most demanding love of her life, the one for which she has been willing to get lost, to fail, and to try again over and over for decades. Call me a selfish fan, but I have to say that is one story in all its horror and passion I would love to hear,” reads the review in The New York Times.
Reviewers spend so much time focused on what’s missing from Horror Stories that they miss what’s there. Well, maybe not all of what’s there. In chapter 14 of Horror Stories, called “Hashtag,” Phair writes about waking up one morning to headlines about the rock star who was supposed to produce her next album. Multiple women had come forward to accuse him of sexual harassment and emotional abuse. The FBI was also investigating him for exchanging sexually explicit communications with an underage fan.
Phair never specifically names Ryan Adams, but, in February 2019, seven months before Horror Stories was released, The New York Times broke the story about multiple women, including his ex-wife Mandy Moore, coming forward to accuse Adams of manipulative behavior, sexual misconduct, emotional and verbal abuse, and harassment.
In the chapter, Phair talks about her own experiences with sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalkers, and the sexism she experienced in the music industry. She writes about being instructed by a record label president to let radio programmers “feel her up a little” because it would help boost her career or about being told that she would never work again if she didn’t go along with sexy photo shoots. But her personal stories are not what the press focused on when she was promoting Horror Stories.
Phair was frequently asked about Adams and her experience working with him. “I don’t want every headline about this book that is so important to me to be about Ryan Adams,” she tells Entertainment Weekly. She becomes understandably annoyed with a male reporter from New York Magazine who asks her several questions about Adams, including one about his process as a producer. (I know when I hear about a man accused of sexual misconduct the first thing I wonder about is his artistic process.) “Out of everything in the book, why is the Ryan Adams thing such an interesting topic?” Phair asks him. “You’re not the only one singling out Ryan Adams as a hot talking point, and it’s sad. It does need to be talked about, but so do the larger issues.”
It’s unfortunate that Phair shares intimate details about herself, and her own experiences with sexual harassment and assault, and the media takeaway from that is that they don’t like the format of her book and would rather talk about the famous man in her life. Congrats on your book Liz, did Ryan ever send you inappropriate texts?
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While Phair is criticized for not talking about what is expected of her in her memoir, men who follow the same course do not hear “how dare you?” The reaction to Acid for the Children, the 2019 memoir by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea (aka Michael Balzary), proves that.
Acid for the Children details Flea’s childhood growing up in Australia, his relationship with his older sister Karyn, his family’s move to the U.S. when he was 4, his first crush, how Kurt Vonnegut Jr. changed his life, and his love of basketball and the Sony Walkman. He talks about meeting Red Hot Chili Peppers lead singer Anthony Kiedis in 1976 at Fairfax High School, about learning to play bass, about his first band Anthym, about shooting coke and taking speed, his time in the California punk band FEAR, and about acting in the 1983 movie Suburbia. There are also lists of the concerts that changed his life, books that blew his mind, and movies that grew him. Lots of great material, right? You know what’s missing? Anything about the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the bestselling, Grammy-winning, Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Fame-inducted band he founded, plays bass in, and is most strongly associated with.
Flea’s book ends just as Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem, what would later become the Red Hot Chili Peppers, play their first show at the Grandia Room in Los Angeles to 27 people in February 1983. This performance comes up on page 375 of the 385-page book. There’s no mention of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, his movie roles beyond Suburbia (My OwnPrivate Idaho being one of his most famous), his role as a father of two girls, how he founded the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, or his work with other musicians from Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace to Alanis Morissette. (Flea played bass on “You Oughta Know,” her hit single from 1995’s Jagged Little Pill.)
The book is about Flea’s journey to the band, rather than with it. Surely, reviewers were as outraged by this omission, as they were when Phair failed to talk about Exile in Guyville in Horror Stories. It will not surprise you to know they were not bothered at all. Rather than focus on what was missing from Acid for the Children, the coverage focuses on what’s there and praise for it. Reviews focus on Flea’s gift and skill as a writer and fail to mention that if you want to dream of Californication, you will have to do that somewhere else. Reviewers can see, and appreciate, Flea as something other than just the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There is a very distinct set of rules female celebrities writing their memoirs must follow. The more tell all, the more trauma and the more tabloid, the better. They are not free to write about what they want. They must bare it all, page after page. Men like Flea have the freedom to operate by a very different set of rules. He can leave his scar tissue out and reviewers have no problem with it. Book coverage focuses on Flea the writer, rather than Flea the bassist. This same courtesy, and basic level of respect, is never extended to women telling their stories. Female celebrities like Debbie and Demi are never just human beings writing about their lives. Reviewers are unable to abandon their preconceived notions, their ideas of who these women are, their celebrity personas and just see them as people who should be allowed to tell their stories their way.
“[H]e’s actually a lovely writer, with a particular gift for the free-floating and reverberant. He writes in Beat Generation bursts and epiphanies, lifting toward the kind of virtuosic vulnerability and self-exposure associated with the great jazz players,” reads the review in The Atlantic.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly Flea said that his goal with Acid for the Children was that “it could be a book that could live beyond being a celebrity book or a rock star book and just stand on its own as a piece of literature.” I can only imagine the outrage if Debbie Harry wrote Face It and the book ended with, “And then I started this band Blondie. See you later!” Or if Demi Moore ended Inside Out with, “Then I got the part in this movie St. Elmo’s Fire. The end.” Or if Courtney Love wrote her memoir (please do this, Courtney) and the last page read, “And then I met this guy Kurt, but I have to go be the girl with the most cake now. Peace out.” The fact that Love and her accomplishments are forever tied to her husband is a whole other gender bias problem all together.
The book is about Flea’s journey to the band, rather than with it. Surely, reviewers were as outraged by this omission, as they were when Phair failed to talk about “Exile in Guyville” in “Horror Stories.” It will not surprise you to know they were not bothered at all.
Of course, Flea is not the first Red Hot Chili Pepper to give it away in a celebrity memoir. In 2004, lead singer Anthony Kiedis wrote Scar Tissue, a New York Times bestseller about his life, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and his time in and out of rehab, as well as in and out of various women. If you have ever thought, “I bet Anthony Kiedis does well with the ladies but would really like to get a better sense of his success rate,” then this is the book for you. In his memoir Kiedis gets away with writing about debauchery, depravity, and drug abuse in a way that reads like a Behind the Music episode on steroids. (See any book by a current or past member of Mötley Crüe or Guns N’ Roses for a further look at this style.) A woman would never get away with writing about drugs like Kiedis does.
When women write about their addiction there’s an apologetic, self-aware tone male memoirs don’t have: “I know I am a drug addict, and I keep messing up, but I’m really sorry, and please stick with me cause I am gonna sort this out.” (See How To Murder Your Life by fashion and beauty journalist Cat Marnell and More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction from Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, who passed away in 2020, for great examples of this.) Also, I would like to point out the blurbs on the backs of Scar Tissue by Kiedis and How To Murder Your Life by Marnell in case you still doubt there’s a gender bias when it comes to how celebrity memoirs are received.
“Hot Bukowski” —Rolling Stone on Marnell
“A frank, unsparing, meticulous account of a life lived entirely on impulse, for pleasure, and for kicks” —Time on Kiedis
Oh, and, if you’re reading this and in charge of greenlighting Red Hot Chili Pepper memoirs can you please get John Frusciante working on his? Frusciante is known for talking at length about both his connection to spirits (he might already have a ghostwriter!) and different dimensions and worlds. If there’s a book by a band member to be written this is the one.
It is also impossible to talk about Flea’s book without mentioning the title, which comes from the song by a band called Too Free Stooges. A man can get away with calling his memoir Acid for the Children, while a woman certainly cannot. I would like to see Demi Moore title her memoir Whippets for the Wee Ones and see how far she gets. If I look at memoir titles by women on my bookshelves there is Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, The Girl in the Back by 1970s drummer Laura Davis-Chanin, Girlin a Band by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, and Not That Kind of Girl by actress and Girls creator Lena Dunham.
A man can get away with calling his memoir “Acid for the Children,” while a woman certainly cannot. I would like to see Demi Moore title her memoir “Whippets for the Wee Ones” and see how far she gets.
All the titles mention “girl” as if there is a need to announce that early on and get it out of the way, before the book has even been opened. Let us compare these with titles of the celebrity memoirs by dudes that I own. There’s Life by Keith Richards, Slash by Slash, The Heroin Diaries by Nikki Sixx, and In the Pleasure Groove by John Taylor. I do not know what the pleasure groove is, but I do hope it is also the name of the kick-ass yacht in Duran Duran’s “Rio” video.
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Acid for the Children is not the only recent celebrity memoir by a man to resist the traditional memoir style and not receive criticism for it, although in the case of singer and songwriter Prince’s The Beautiful Ones, named for the song from Purple Rain,it’s understandable why it lacks the typical style of a life story given that its subject died just one month after the book’s publication was announced.
“He wanted to write the biggest music book in the world, one that would serve as a how-to-guide for creatives, a primer on African American entrepreneurship and a ‘handbook for the brilliant community,’” he told Dan Piepenbring, an editor at The Paris Review, who was writing the book with Prince. Notoriously private, to the point that reporters were not allowed to record their interviews, many were surprised Prince would want to write his life story at all. He wanted his book contract to state he could pull it from shelves if he felt the work no longer reflected him, which just seems like a very Prince thing to do.
Prince had completed just 30 handwritten pages before he died of an accidental fentanyl overdose on April 21, 2016. The pages detailed his childhood and his early days as a musician. Piepenbring returned to Prince’s Paisley Park compound months after the singer’s death to find additional material that could be used in the book. This material includes personal photos, drawings, song lyrics, and a handwritten synopsis of Purple Rain, Prince’s 1984 film that marked his acting debut. The addition of personal artifacts to round out the story means The Beautiful Ones is more scrapbook than memoir. “The Beautiful Ones does not offer a clear-eyed view of who Prince really was — he would have hated that, but it illuminates more than it conceals,” reads The Washington Post’s piece on the memoir.
Reading reviews of The Beautiful Ones, I wondered if the book would have even been finished and released if Prince were a woman or would it have been indefinitely shelved because of the death of its star. Maybe it would have focused on the singer’s drug use, final days, death, and the reaction to his death. The media has a way of making a female celebrity’s story about her death, not her life, which was noticeably lacking when the media talked about Prince and The Beautiful Ones.“It’s up to us to take what’s there and make something out of it for ourselves, creating, just as Prince wanted,” said NPR in their piece on the memoir. Prince’s life ended with respect and a beautiful tribute in book form, and glowing reviews for it. This respect is definitely missing when we pay tribute to female celebrities who have died. Their deaths provide another opportunity for the media to pick them apart and let their scandals overshadow their contributions. Following Prince’s death there were no pieces like the gossip-heavy Vanity Fair piece from 2012 on the late singer and actress Whitney Houston, “The Devils in the Diva,” which “investigates Houston’s final days: the prayers and the parties, the Hollywood con artist on the scene, and the message she left behind.” Or the, at times, less-than-respectful movies made about female celebrities after their deaths that focus more on their personal lives and troubles than they do on their art. Even in death, women like Houston and Amy Winehouse are still expected to bare all even though they are no longer with us.
This year will give us new memoirs from actresses Sharon Stone, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Julianna Margulies, as well as singers Brandi Carlile and Billie Eilish. We are also getting a Stanley Tucci memoir and I think we can all agree he is the sexiest bald man (sorry, Prince William). Women are not just turning to books to tell their truths, with recent documentaries from the likes of Paris Hilton and Demi Lovato giving female celebrities the opportunity to tell their truths, clear up misconceptions, and control the narratives around their lives. We can only hope the way these stories are received starts to change, and that women can be free to tell their stories the way they want to (embrace your inner Flea, ladies!) without fear of negative reviews, sexist reviews, or questions about Ryan Adams’ artistic process. And please, no one ask John Mayer for his opinion.
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Lisa Whittington-Hill is the publisher of This Magazine. Her writing about arts, pop culture, feminism, mental health, and why we should all be nicer to Lindsay Lohan has appeared in a variety of magazines.
Seventeen years ago, I receive the call most immigrants dread. It is inevitable, and yet. The call announces that my Baba, my indefatigable, extroverted, positively enthusiastic father, was felled by a massive cardiac arrest. On a heart that was the most giving one among all the people I’ve known. Life in America at that second continues without a ripple. Only, my life changes, divided into before-the-call and after-the-call.
I ask my now-ex. “Will you come with me?” — like a child.
Awkwardly, he says, “Do you want me to?” — like he has an option and he could escape this uncomfortable moment. I call him my now-ex for a reason.
“My Baba is dead,” I say mournfully. As if saying it over and over would make it real. It wasn’t real. It still isn’t.
Journalist Aman Sethi talks about the burning funeral pyres that light up India’s cremation grounds in the New York Times. With over 300,000 new daily infections and over 21,000 dead in the last week in April, the pyres are lit in the parking lots of crematoriums. Author Rani Neutill writes about the pyres and her own journey back to cremate her mother five years ago. We both acknowledge these images transport us back to our own trauma of losing our parents, our loved ones. PTSD all over again.
***
On an August evening last year, now Vice President Harris tells the world, “Family is my uncles, my aunts and my chittis.” — as she accepts the Democratic nomination. I — and I am sure, millions of Indians, Indian Americans like me — weep with unbridled joy. To me, this kvelling was surprising, because I didn’t realize the depth of unbelonging I had felt. I have lived in America longer than in India, my birth country. I’m not even Tamil, and yet, that word, “chitti” — younger sister of an aunt, mausi, mashi, moushi in other Desi languages — reverberates in bursts of validation all through our immigrant communities. Two months later, author, host, and activist Padma Lakshmi notes what that ripple effect would be when a woman of color is vice president. Padma articulates what we all felt — we may not agree with everything Vice President Harris said/did, but we do like what she represents. We are hopeful.
As Indian Americans who have lived most of our lives outside our birth country, we abide by unwritten rules. We work hard, we internalize racism by being “model” immigrants. We follow American rules and norms, in effect, we try to create very large waves of “good immigrants.” We sympathize with other people of color but try not to draw too much attention to ourselves, except when we are excelling at academics, Spelling Bees, or inventions. To say we have internalized our colorism and racism is minimizing what we feel — we try so hard to “fit in.”
***
For Hindus, death is the final stage of life, the next journey where the soul travels different levels of earth, the nether lands, and on to heaven. The concept of reincarnation is an idea one grows up on, even if we have moved far away from it.
It takes me almost 36 hours to get to my Baba. A layover in Kuala Lumpur watching a somewhat famous Bollywood star hamming it up for his fans in the lounge, waiting for Didi, my sister to join at the airport connection area, both of us now fatherless, rudderless. I do not remember those 36 hours. I remember every moment of those 36 hours.
In the lounge, waiting for Didi, my sister to join at the airport connection area, both of us now fatherless, rudderless. I do not remember those 36 hours. I remember every moment of those 36 hours.
When we reach Chittaranjan Park, the Bengali neighborhood of middle-class former refugees of the 1947 Partition of India, my Ma is already waiting, eyes swimming in tears, but a hopeful smile on her tired lips. Her daughters are home. She isn’t alone in her grief anymore.
The house is filled with neighbors and strangers. Everyone looks at Didi and me, expecting us to collapse, weep, wail, because only a frantic acknowledgment of loss matters to the neighbors. Didi and I don’t cry, though we hug our Ma despite us not being a hugging family.
The neighbors want to know, “Who will give mukhagni?” — only menfolk are allowed to go with the dead to the cremation grounds. Only sons or designated male family members are allowed to light the pyre, mukhagni (adding fire to the mouth of the dead). Women are second-class, not permitted. Women are to bear children — souls may get attached to them when they return from the cremation grounds — not allowed, not allowed.
Didi tells the crowd and to no one in particular, “Ma will give mukhagni. We will be there with her.”
I hear the collective soft gasp of horror. But no one says anything. The Ghosh daughters are foreign-returned, with Western ideas. They don’t see how wrong this is. How men and women aren’t equal.
We have my father to cremate. We have no time to worry about what the neighbors think.
We have my father to cremate. We have no time to worry about what the neighbors think.
***
In a country that brought in immigrants and slaves for centuries, Indians are the “good” ones, who are still shocked in the ‘80s when the Dotbusters attack them in Jersey City. “We are Americans too,” we say, the hatred is incomprehensible.
Post-9/11, the first immigrant to be gunned down in Mesa, Arizona, isn’t a Muslim but a Sikh. Balbir Singh Sodhi is killed at the gas station he managed by a man who didn’t want “towel heads” in his country. As Indians who give up their birth country’s citizenship when we become U.S. citizens, we gulp down that discrimination, that unnamed fear, to pay taxes, buy property, wave the U.S. flag, vote in elections, because we have earned it. We are model citizens, even when we remain entwined with what our birth country does. What we become is casual observers of what’s happening in “desh,” but very involved in the American way of life. We choose, because we are made to.
***
As the years go by in a country not our own, we spend time teaching non-Indians what India represents. Soon it is descriptions of the festivals, the cuisines, the food, our saris, politics, and minimizing how much cricket is a religion. We minimize because it’s easier to do that than push Americans to explore cultures other than American. We minimize sports, religion, food, life.
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But then, when we interact with Indians in India, our attitudes are of condescension toward those we left behind, mixed with cultural respect for elders as we were taught. We roll our eyes at WhatsApp Good Mornings and rose gifs from family and classmates pinging at midnight. We send back things like Costco cashews, or thick socks for the family, and college advice for future generations. We are stuck in the decade we left desh — for me it’s the ‘90s, the advent of Madhuri, Rani, Shahrukh, and revenge movies.
We still hate the social media forwards, but surreptitiously sign up for Signal because the WhatsApp gang told us to. However, we dare not leave the high school group of middle-aged classmates because they connect us to our long lost childhood. We post pictures of dishes we’ve created during the pandemic, but secretly, we crave the spicy paapri-chaat mix of crunchy goodness from the stall next to the bus stop at Delhi University. We scroll online sites for the Desi dhurrie, spices, fabrics. We’re more up to date with the politics from desh than ever.
After a few decades in America, we miss the things we consider ours. We may return “home,” armed with U.S. citizenship because we have the freedom to do so. But lately, we go home, not because we can afford to but because we’ve reached a stage in life where our people are getting older, sick, or dying. Guilt that we abandoned our parents, our extended family, our home for better lives in America, is what usually guides us back. But even then, we visit for two weeks at most, because work in America beckons like an angry, righteous, and indignant spouse.
But lately, we go home, not because we can afford to but because we’ve reached a stage in life where our people are getting older, sick, or dying. Guilt that we abandoned our parents, our extended family, our home for better lives in America, is what usually guides us back.
***
In 2004 when Didi and I get to the Lodhi cremation grounds, we are part of a handful waiting. The priest and the “body handlers” ask for cash to expedite the services. They speak only with the menfolk who accompany us. When we go in, with Baba — his body clad in a new dhoti and kurta hurriedly bought to make him look good on his last journey on a flat wooden bed covered with marigolds and rajnigandha — Baba looks like he’s sleeping. We sprinkle him with his favorite aftershave, as if we want him to arrive at the heavenly gates like it’s his first day at his new job.
We sprinkle him with his favorite aftershave, as if we want him to arrive at the heavenly gates like it’s his first day at his new job.
The priest says the prayers that guide the soul on its journey. They ask us to throw flowers at the body. They sprinkle ghee all the while chanting shlokas that mean nothing to us. Then they ask Ma to hold a bunch of incense, and place them on Baba. She does, howling, because among the Ghosh survivors, she knows what comes next. They light camphor and place it near Baba’s head. Handing a small fragrant sandalwood piece, they tell Ma, “Isko yahaan lagaaiyeh.” — put this here, pointing at Baba’s chest. I know they mean his mouth. Mukhagni. Fire to the mouth.
Handing a small fragrant sandalwood piece, they tell Ma, “Isko yahaan lagaaiyeh.” — put this here, pointing at Baba’s chest. I know they mean his mouth. Mukhagni. Fire to the mouth.
Ma does that. Didi and I hold her between us. Those cries haunt me. They will haunt me till I die. The wood bier trundles away from us as if he’s on a makeshift train ride. I did not realize that would be the last time I’ll see Baba. The crematorium fire roars like a hungry dragon at the far end. Baba enters the flames, the orange fire taking over our world.
That is the last time my family is together.
***
The Great Pause has thrown that nostalgia out like trash. The vaccines cannot be developed fast enough. Being part of the scientific community gives me the privilege of receiving the Moderna vaccine within the first month of 2021. I haven’t seen my extended family and friends in India for over three years — life, then work, and then the pandemic happened. Staying alive in a pandemic has been the reason to stay put.
My life, as it is for many of us immigrants, revolves around phone calls to India early on weekend mornings. India, roughly half a day ahead of us, is also used to those calls. There were times when those calls were short, maybe 10 minutes, our eyes on the clock indicating the $2/minute price on a calling card. Not anymore. Our privilege is calling our cousin for a masur dal vada recipe. Our privilege is us tweeting anti-Indian government comments without concern for whether our families will be harassed by Modi-bhakts. Our privilege is that we are Americans and our bravado too, is American.
***
India watches us in 2020 grappling with the virus racing through New York, L.A., Texas, and Florida like the California fires usually ravage our canyons, jumping highways, towns, and roads resembling acrobatic dragons.
“Ah, we can’t afford shutdowns. We had the BCG vaccine, we’re immune,” my former classmates say, noting why the TB vaccine may lead to a lower coronavirus infection rate.
The first wave doesn’t phase India. It’s Modi’s India — brash, young, arrogant, and complacent. In May 2021, the Lancet notes the government’s response of “[f]ully opening society with unrestrained crowding, mass gatherings, large scale travel, and lack of personal protective measures such as masks” gave the public a false sense of healthcare and vaccine security — that the pandemic had passed India by, much like the first wave.
Madhushree Ghosh’s high school classmates.
During the first and many waves in America meanwhile, we stay home. “Hunkering down” is a phrase I never want to hear again. Then religious places, movie theaters, stores, and restaurants shut down. The owners and workers protest.
Our Indian families and friends find the outrage amusing, “Ah, you’re all such rule-followers!” The condescension we had shown Indians as green card holders, as Indians who’d escaped to a better life, returns against us with a vengeance. The public, our extended families, and friends laugh at our caution.
“Yes, but this will contain the virus,” I counter.
“Sure, but in India, we’re so many people, nothing will work. We’re done with the pandemic here, Madhu,” my WhatsApp classmates opine.
***
During the first wave, in 2020 at the end of March, a 21-day lockdown is established by the Modi government to curb the virus. Over 120 million migrant workers left stranded, walk back to their villages and homes, making it a migration ten times larger than when Hindus and Muslims moved between British-divided India and Pakistan during the 1947 Partition. The Desis who can stay home are the privileged ones.
Indian-Americans have our own lockdown issues to handle. Beside a few articles, tweets, prayers, and thoughts, we don’t worry about the migrants. A very well-known American activist tells me that Americans get “crisis-fatigued” quickly, and not to expect them to think much about issues outside of America.
During a WhatsApp call, architect and high-school friend Anuj Arya says, “Migrants who I’ve worked with as daily wage construction workers, can’t survive without their wages. If they live in a 20X20 foot space with 10 more people, one of them getting COVID means the rest of them do too.”
He adds, “A COVID QPCR test is 1500 rupees (about $20). It’s beyond their reach.”
***
When the second wave hits India in April 2021, no one is prepared. Not the government. Not the healthcare system. Not the people.
When the second wave hits India in April 2021, no one is prepared. Not the government. Not the healthcare system. Not the people.
A country of 1.3 billion is now gasping for air. By April 21st, 2021, the oxygen requirement is over 8000 metric tons per day. India, as per the government, produces 7127 tons daily. People aren’t dying because of the virus. The COVID-compromised patients are dying of suffocation.
***
We sit outside the crematorium in October, watching Baba’s remains burn at high heat. The chimney above the oven spews out hot carbon air.
“That’s my Baba in the air,” I think, feeling nothing.
A few hours later they call us.
They tell us, “Hold your palms to receive the ashes.”
Didi and I hold the clay matka with the ashes and bones. It is harsh, real, immediate. There aren’t pretty urns priced according to your financial ability. It’s a reddish clay pot, with gray ashes. A priest-helper adds, “Yeh dekhiya, your babuji’s nerves are connected at the nabhi.”
Baba’s nerves are knotted near the navel — which never burns completely. This is why Hindu philosophy says we are connected to our ancestors through our nabhi, navel. This is added to a separate dish, covered with another clay plate. We are to take it to the Ganges, the holy river that will connect my father’s soul to the gods. Much as we don’t believe any of it, we do what we are told to.
Didi and I head to the Yamuna river in her best friend’s car. My father’s ashes rest on my lap. The clay pot is still hot from the crematorium. It is surreal and yet, here we are. Here we are.
We get out of the car close to the Yamuna, a tributary that connects to the Ganges. The river is thick with grease, decaying animal corpses, feces, and industrial effluents. The smell is nauseating and yet, Hindu religion tells us this river will connect Baba to the gods. And who are we to deny that?
The river is thick with grease, decaying animal corpses, feces, and industrial effluents. The smell is nauseating and yet, Hindu religion tells us this river will connect Baba to the gods. And who are we to deny that?
Ma gets out of the other car, her arthritis makes her older than she is. She waits silently for us as Didi and I climb over rocks slick with dirt, shit, and dead animals. Didi looks ahead, one step at a time, no words. I follow. This isn’t what Baba would have wanted. This is all we can give him.
The priest stands next to us, chanting hymns. “Put the ashes here,” he points.
Didi lets the pot float. We have the nabhi in its clay dish. He points at it and tells me to throw it inside the turgid river. I do.
“Walk, walk! Don’t look back,” the priest says like we are suddenly in an adventure movie.
It must have something to do with the soul latching onto live people. I don’t know. I don’t care. I want to look back, but I don’t.
At the car, my now-ex says, “Uff, that river sucks, doesn’t it?” — like a naïve American would.
I ignore him. My Baba is dead.
***
Twelve months after the first wave, before the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela encourages millions to congregate at Haridwar, near the Ganges river bank, the B.1.617 double mutant is already circulating among the people. The Mela is held every 12 years, but the Hindutva nationalist government appeases Hindu astrologers to allow a super spreader event to happen a year earlier. On April 1st, millions descended. The Mela was stopped two weeks later. A double mutant with an exponentially increased infectivity rate has now taken over the entire country — larger metropolitan cities like Delhi reached a COVID positivity rate of 30% in 12 days. Only 9% of the total population has been vaccinated.
On WhatsApp group messages, I now see posts about where one can buy more oxygen, or how to kill the virus by drinking water. Vaccine hesitancy, and misinformation circulates as rampantly as the virus through uneducated guesses, pro-government media rumor mills, and government silence on the total failure of the hospital and healthcare system. There’s a vaccine shortage which was expected to abate by May 1. It hasn’t.
A month ago, citizens and the Indian government were complacent enough to not mandate masks, nor ban large gatherings. The political rallies to pander to the public and gain votes took place like 2021 was a normal year.
***
On my high-school and middle-school WhatsApp groups, there are no rose gifs anymore, nor are there midnight pings of “Good morning!” The threads are somber, humming with stress, slow panic, and calls for help. The only requests are pleas for oxygen cylinders and hospital beds in Delhi suburbs. We hear of patients gasping for breath in hospital hallways and parking lots, dying in ambulances. Neighbors help neighbors cremate their loved ones.
A relative dies in Hyderabad and his family waits for hours to get the paperwork completed before he is hurriedly cremated. Crematoriums and cemeteries operate beyond capacity. Families wait for hours at cremation grounds in lines snaking through Noida and Ghaziabad to cremate their own. The Noida Hindon crematorium sets 14 funeral pyre platforms on the sidewalk for the COVID-19 dead to perform the last rites there instead. Dead and dying line hospital pathways. There is no respite.
***
Meanwhile in America, for us, India feels like what New York did in 2020. But Modi continues to punt to states to determine healthcare logistics, while he and his administration have created one of the largest humanitarian crises in this pandemic. On Twitter, we watch an interesting trend of the entire world going about their lives as Indians gasp for breath. It’s as if India isn’t a country that needs to be helped. We hear that the U.S. government didn’t allow for vaccine raw materials to reach India but the blame lies with the internal decisions made at the Indian government level.
We see “trauma porn” photos of funeral pyres burning through the night skies in India. The Western world watches those images over and over, and the Western people react to it. This is showing TV ads of malnourished African babies for us to donate instantly. This is Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” playing for animal shelters and pulling at our heartstrings.
But where does one donate? Does it go to the PM Cares Fund, run by the nationalist Prime Minister with no way of knowing how your money was used? Where there is no guarantee that the money reaches the migrants dying hungry, or the patients waiting for oxygen or Remdesivir?
I wonder if daughters were able to accompany their dead father’s body to the pyre. The cremations are taking place morning through sundown. Overworked priests are charging more. The lower-class Dalit funeral grounds helpers work round the clock, as do the hospital ward workers, the caregivers. Are the family members able to pay their last respects like I was able to? Do they know if the dignity expected of the dead was given to theirs?
***
Hospitals shouldn’t be overburdened. Oxygen supplies should have been available. Vaccines in the world’s largest manufacturing country, should be, well, available. And yet, the latest news cycle asks not to blame but to unite, to blame America for holding the raw materials for vaccine production instead. It’s easier to hate the Western country, hand-wave over the flouting of social distancing rules, because religion and elections are more important than gasping-for-breath Indians.
***
As an Indian who is a U.S. citizen, the guilt I feel is one that paralyzes me. I have abandoned my country of birth to choose the country of citizenship for personal material gain. Of that I am sure. How am I to assuage this guilt? The American way is to donate. But where do I donate? Not to the government that has systematically pushed against unity, religious, and caste freedom creating a Hindutva country. What do I do? How do I amplify this without tokenizing Indian grief?
We hold onto phone calls, reach out to friends, family members, find out ways, or “jugaad” as we call it in India, to make sure our people are safe. Others want to donate, but don’t know how. They See Blue GA circulates a Google doc of places that’ll accept our dollars. We want to do anything, something, something to help. Because if we can’t help, and if we can’t be there, and if we can’t do anything, the guilt we’ve always felt as Indians who became Americans will be fueled enough to rage on further.
As immigrants who love this country, we are grateful for the privilege and we also love our birth country that’s in such hell. Behind the scenes, my group of Desi authors text each other bemoaning the state we are in, neither in desh/home, nor in heaven. COVID is definitely a stark reminder of the choices we made. Feeling guilty is our state of being, besides a state of exhaustion and fear.
It’ll take India decades to recover from this and I am but a bystander, whether I like it or not.
Twitter asks about the use of funeral pyres and how disrespectful it is — do you not rage when they do this to your people, Twitter asks. No, I say, no — because what is disrespectful is how and why Indians are dying.
It takes President Biden two weeks before he does a U-turn and announces millions of AstraZeneca vaccine doses to be routed to India. Two weeks, with thousands dying daily. America and American leaders are silent. Only with social media outrage, behind-the-scenes negotiations lead to Biden behaving like the leader he says he is. Those pyres speak much more than the world’s largest humanitarian country. Are those photos disrespectful? Not if they coaxed my country of choice to act like the leader it says it is.
***
I hope Vice President Harris comments, perhaps shows solidarity with the country her mother comes from. It isn’t her job, but I’d like to think her chittis would be doubly proud of her if she did.
Right now, as an Indian American, the guilt propels me to doomscroll like I did with other Americans last year. Now I call my friends, and I tell them, “Stay safe,” like it’s a mantra that’ll save them all when their government has failed them.
My Baba’s cremation has stayed with me for decades since he left. The families losing their loved ones can’t even touch their dead as they’re whisked to the cremation grounds. COVID-19 has destroyed life in ways unimaginable.
The guilt I feel, buzzes like a loud bee.
***
Madhushree Ghosh‘s work has received an Honorable Mention in Best American Essays in Food Writing. Her work is Pushcart-nominated, and has been published in the Washington Post, The New York Times, Longreads, the Rumpus, Catapult, Hippocampus, Atlas Obscura, Unearth Women, Panorama, Garnet News, DAME, and others. As a woman in science, an immigrant, and daughter of refugees, her work reflects her roots and her activism. Her food narrative, “Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey” is forthcoming Spring 2022 from University of Iowa Press. She can be reached @writemadhushree.
“Master criminal Rédoine Faïd loved the movies, and his greatest crimes were laced with tributes: to Point Break, Heat, and Reservoir Dogs. When he landed in a maximum-security prison, cinema provided inspiration once again.”
Prologue This diary chronicles the turning of my world, from spring to winter, at home, in the wild, in my head. It travels from the west of Northern Ireland in County Fermanagh to the east in County Down. It records the uprooting of a home, a change of county and landscape, and at times the de-rooting of my senses and my mind. I’m Dara, a boy, an acorn. Mum used to call me lon dubh (which is Irish for blackbird) when I was baby, and sometimes she still does. I have the heart of a naturalist, the head of a would-be scientist, and bones of someone who is already wearied by the apathy and destruction wielded against the natural world. The outpourings on these pages express my connection to wildlife, try to explain the way I see the world, and describe how we weather the storms as a family.
***
Tuesday, 5 June
The garden has blossomed in the warmth of these late spring days. So much light and sunshine, compensating for the heaving tiredness and exasperation that comes, for me, at the end of the school year. Friendship has always eluded me – what is it anyway? A collection of actions and words between two people or more, people who grow and change anyway. It’s a good thing, apparently. That’s what some people say. I don’t have any experience, though. I mean, I play board games with a group at my school. We play, we deconstruct the game. We don’t ‘talk’. What is there to say? Sometimes, I feel that if I start, I might not shut up. That has happened, lots of times. It doesn’t end well. Kids in my class, they walk around town together, they might play football together or whatever other sport takes their fancy. They don’t talk, though. They smirk and snigger at anyone who is different. Unfortunately, for me, I’m different. Different from everyone in my class. Different from most people in my school. But at breaktime today I watched the pied wagtails fly in and out of the nest. How could I feel lonely when there are such things? Wildlife is my refuge. When I’m sitting and watching, grown-ups usually ask if I’m okay. Like it’s not okay just to sit and process the world, to figure things out and watch other species go about their day. Wildlife never disappoints like people can. Nature has a purity to me, unaffected. I watch the wagtail fly out and in again, then step a little closer. Peering in, I see that last week’s eggs are now chicks. Tiny bright-yellow beaks, mouths opening and closing silently. This is the magic. This bird, which dances and hops at everyone’s feet in the playground, unnoticed by most. Its liveliness and clockwork tail, ticking constantly, never touching the ground. It appears again, and the squawking starts in earnest. I giggle inside, in case someone sees. I have to hold so much in, phase so much out. It’s exhausting.
At home, I mooch around the garden and notice the first herb robert flowers, pink wild bloom amongst the verdant. I note it down on my list of firsts in the garden and feel good. I hear Dad come back from work, and with him an injured bat. She’s the first of the year and we tend to it – females only have one pup a year, such precious cargo. We feed it mealworms and put water in a milk-bottle lid. The bat’s mouth is so small I use one of Bláthnaid’s paintbrushes to put droplets on its tongue, hoping it will be something like lapping dewdrops from a leaf or puddle. Dehydration is the main killer of an injured bat, so it’s important to get it to drink. But as they’re getting better they’ll chew up a mealworm like a piece of spaghetti.
They’re such innocuous and timid creatures, not worthy of the silly hype that surrounds the movies and Hallowe’en. They’re insect-controllers: a single pipistrelle eats 3,000 midges a night. Can you imagine the swarms really ruining your camping holiday if we didn’t have healthy numbers of bat populations? It’s unimaginable.
The bat sleeps in my room. They always do because it’s quiet away from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the McAnulty family. I always sleep so soundly when I have a bat staying in my room. I hear it scratching about in the night and am never afraid, I am comforted.
Friday, 8 June
I trudge to school with a leaden heart: the bat didn’t make it through the night, and we didn’t lose just one bat, we’ve lost every generation that could have followed. Her injuries, caused by a cat, were too much and she died, Dad thinks, from infection. I feel so heartbroken. I’ve finished all my exams but that isn’t enough to lighten my spirits.
After school, Lorcan and I arrive home to squeals of delight from Mum and Bláthnaid. ‘The fledglings are out! The fledglings are out!’ Mum roars with all the childish delight that many of the kids I know have lost before they’re eight or nine. The excitement is intoxicating, and it spreads into me and I feel a little airy. We watch through the window as a just-emerged coal tit, blue tit and sparrow rest on the branches of the pine trees, open-mouthed, noisy and boisterous and splendiferous.
Watching the discordant gang, I realise that I won’t see them when they’re fully grown. Not if we move house. I’ve been in complete denial about moving house. Tomorrow, though, we’re going house-hunting in County Down, in Castlewellan – a small town six miles from our new school in Newcastle (which Mum and Dad say is too expensive for us to live in). I’m not sure if I feel really annoyed about the whole thing, or whether that tickle I sometimes get thinking about it is a sign of the excitement there might be in starting over again. The opportunity to reinvent myself.
Mum notices my mood shifting. I give her my best broad grin and a hug. It’s not easy for any of us, but she and Dad will do most of the work – and the worrying.
Every day, ever since I can remember, Mum has sat me down, sat us all down, and explained every situation we’ve ever had to deal with. Whether it was going to the park, to the cinema, to someone’s house, to a café. Every time, all manner of things were delicately instructed. Social cues, meanings of gestures, some handy answers if we didn’t know what to say. Pictures, social stories, diagrams, cartoons. Many people accuse me of ‘not looking autistic’. I have no idea what that means. I know lots of ‘autistics’ and we all look different. We’re not some recognisable breed. We are human beings. If we’re not out of the ordinary, it’s because we’re fighting to mask our real selves. We’re holding back and holding in. It’s a lot of effort. What’s a lot more effort, though, is the work Mum did and does still, so light-heartedly. She tells us it’s because she knows. She knows the confusion. That’s why she and Dad will be doing the worrying about moving, and why Mum will be doing all the planning and mind- mapping, and will somehow know how everything fits together. I’m lucky, very lucky.
Many people accuse me of ‘not looking autistic’. I have no idea what that means. I know lots of ‘autistics’ and we all look different. We’re not some recognisable breed. We are human beings.
Saturday, 9 June
The day is glorious. It’s summer weather, I have a new Undertones T-shirt (the ‘My Perfect Cousin’ one) and I feel good wearing it. I don’t know why I love T-shirts with some part of me brandished on them. Maybe it’s because it will either scare people away or start a conversation without me having to do anything. Well, either way, that hasn’t happened yet!
We arrive at the first house for viewing and Mum hates it, I can tell. I don’t like it either. Everything about it is squashed, though we can see the Mourne Mountains from upstairs. The second house is much better but needs a lot of work – the views are extraordinary. Neither of them lights a fire in anyone’s belly, though, so that’s it for today, thankfully. And because it’s still morning we’re going to explore the Castlewellan Forest Park, a government-owned forest with native woods, conifer plantation and red kites. It even has a lake and a mountain path. Lorcan and Bláthnaid have already been but it’s a first for me. It’s so beautiful. I feel a swell of anticipation – if we move here we could live beside a forest. We could be near trees! We might not be crammed in by suburbia anymore. I could ride my bike without worrying about cars.
You see, this is a big deal for us kids. We can’t access nature the way my parents’ generation could. Our exposure to wildlife and wild places has been robbed by modernity and ‘progress’. Our pathways for exploration have been severed by development and roads and pollution. Seriously, you take your life into your own hands if you choose to cycle anywhere in Enniskillen. The roads are congested, busy and unfriendly, especially if, like me, you want to stop and stare. We always have to travel to forest parks or nature reserves for our dose, returning to the starkness of concrete and manicured lawns. To think we could live beside a forest!
The thought keeps echoing and I feel euphoric, almost delirious. We all feel it in the glow of the sun with swallows, house martins and swifts above us, dancing everywhere. So many. I’ve never seen so many all at once. Not all three together. It’s heady and intense. We’re all springing, bouncing off one another with sideway glances and controlled smiles. Hoping and holding it all in.
We find a peace maze in the park, created after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. It has 6,000 yew trees and was planted by 5,000 school children and others from the nearby community. We rage through it until we come to a rope bridge. I stop and get out my binoculars: red kites, three of them, wheeling and soaring, ascending, dropping right over our heads. It’s staggering. We gawp at the sky and you can feel our family agreement travelling through us, silently: this might be a good place to live.
Exhausted after the long drive and the day’s events, we head back to Granny’s house in Warrenpoint, where we’re staying tonight. My Granny Elsie has amazing views from her back garden. We can see Carlingford Lough and the Mournes and the Cooley Mountains. Every day looks different there, with subtle changes of colour or the way the clouds sit then disperse on the mountains. Today, the sparrows are chattering and the sun is still high. We decide we need another walk along the beach before we get dinner.
We do a beach clean as we go, but not too much today, which gives us plenty of time for exploring. Lorcan has the best find of the day: a cuttlefish bone smoothed by the sea, silk-soft. The bones, which are not really bones at all but a shell, are usually from the females who die a few weeks after breeding, and the dead cephalopods’ skeletons are later washed up on the beach. Lorcan’s find has the kind of piddock holes that we normally see in soft rocks and clays, and there still seems to be life inside them so we carry it back to the sea before it dries out. We find another, bone-dry, which we bring back to Granny Elsie’s.
Later that night, in the darkness, sharing a room with Lorcan, we talk about the move in hushed tones and excitement, until we both sink like stones into sleep.
Dara McAnulty is the author Diary of a Young Naturalist, forthcoming in Spring 2021. He is the recipient of the Wainwright Prize for nature writing. Dara lives with his mum, dad, brother Lorcan, sister Bláthnaid and rescue greyhound Rosie in County Down, Northern Ireland. Dara’s love for nature, his activism and his honesty about autism, has earned him a huge social media following from across the world and many accolades: in 2017 he was awarded BBC Springwatch ‘Unsprung Hero’ Award and Birdwatch magazine ‘Local Hero’; in 2018 he was awarded ‘Animal Hero’ of the year by the Daily Mirror and became ambassador for RSPCA and the iWill campaign; in 2019 he became a Young Ambassador for the Jane Goodall Institute and became the youngest ever recipient of the RSPB Medal for conservation.
Carolyn Wells 
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