Search Results for: writing

Deconstructing Disney: The Princess Problem of ‘Frozen II’

Elsa with blue flag behind her

Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | December 2019 | 10 minutes (3,028 words)

Frozen came out the year I came out. The film was released in November 2013, one month after I’d sat in a courtroom, a newly out, 25-year-old lesbian finalizing my divorce from my fundamentalist Christian ex-husband. I went to see Frozen its opening weekend and listened to a newly crowned Disney queen with hidden magical powers accidentally out herself after a lifetime of repression (“Couldn’t keep it in, Heaven knows I’ve tried”). Elsa sang “Let It Go” on an icy mountaintop, and my baby gay self sobbed my heart out, sitting alone in a dark theater, at what was obviously a coming-out anthem. I had let go of so many things: my marriage, my faith, a complicated friendship with the woman I was in love with. “Here I stand, in the light of day — let the storm rage on” was a prayer and a promise to myself, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to commit to my own healing no matter what anyone in my life thought. 

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If My Scars Could Talk

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Tega Oghenechovwen | Longreads | January 2020 | 15 minutes (3,777 words)

Content warning: This piece contains mentions of child abuse and childhood sexual abuse.

* * *

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise — Maya Angelou

* * *

1. Why is the World Silent?

I am 7. B is 8. We are on the balcony of this monstrous brick house, naked. Our small bodies are soaking in gasoline. Our shirts, shorts, and shoes are on the concrete balustrade with our bags. A Good Samaritan who found us at the bus park trying to run for our lives just dragged us back. B’s teeth are inside his tongue. His eyes are liquid red. Tears and gasoline have washed away my sense of smell.

We face aunty Em. Her eyes pierce us to the marrow. She has a matchbox. She draws out a matchstick. She threatens to strike it. We shout as if shouting was what we were born to do. Our bodies creak and crack with fear. After a short while, Aunty Em fishes a waist-high koboko from the pantry.

“If you ever —” Lash. “If you ever try—” Lash. Lash. “If you ever try to run again —” Lash. Lash. Lash. She lashes us with the koboko until we become like raw beef; until we promise we will stomach her wickedness; that we will forget we are people’s children, and become her footstools.

Uncle Dee is in his study crafting a model boat for a client. He could be building a bomb to finish us. I wonder why he doesn’t hear us weeping. I wonder where the world is.

We hate here. The food we eat here tastes like burnt soil. Even at that, it’s never enough. Why did our parents dump us here? What did we do to deserve this? What?

I draw two eagles with enormous wings on the yellow walls of my room — one for me, the other for B. Aunty Em sees the eagles. She pops my head with the heel of her ko-ko shoe and locks me in a room without any light or window.

Silence speaks in the dark room. I hear the blood flushing my veins, and the worms eating my belly. I cry. I cry until I faint. Why is the world silent? Where is God? Why does He or She do nothing?

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Jersey Girl

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Mako Yoshikawa Story | Summer 2019 | 23 minutes (4,676 words)

 

When my mother first came to America, she wore a pink coat with a rounded collar and four beveled black buttons. A farewell present from her parents and by far the most expensive garment she’d ever owned, the coat was wool, custom-made, and heavy enough to withstand the winters of Boston. It was March 1959; she was 22 and had never been outside of Japan or on a plane, and she’d not seen my father, Shoichi, for a year, but she wasn’t nervous, at least not much, or at least less nervous than excited. In her carry-on was a copy of A Little Princess, a pocket Japanese-English dictionary, and a daikon, a Japanese turnip, that she planned to grate, douse with soy sauce, and share with Shoichi for their first meal together in America.

The story of the eighteen months that followed, when my mother lived with my father in Boston, also sounded like a fairy tale.

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Witness Mami Roar

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez | Longreads | December 2019 | 13 minutes (3,486 words)

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

* * *

My mother feared removal and separation from her children long before Trump became president. I crossed the Mexico-U.S. border with her and my younger sister in 1992. We walked from Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas, and boarded a plane to Chicago where my father, already a permanent resident, met us. We were stopped at the airport in El Paso. Officers handcuffed my mother and separated her from my sister and me. At 5 years old, I sat in a black plastic chair, with my 4-year-old sister crying on my lap, waiting for my mother to return. The men interrogating her harassed her with questions about her family and made comments about her appearance. 

Years later, as we sat around my mother’s kitchen table in Cicero, Illinois, she remembered that the officers tried to convince her to go back. “Me decian que que bonita soy,” they told her. A woman as beautiful as her should have no problem making a better life for herself in Mexico. At 23 years old, my mother had already heard her share of promises from no-good men — including from my father, who was the reason for the journey in the first place. If I had been thinking only of myself, my mother said to me, I would’ve stayed in Mexico.

“Tengo que pensar en el futuro de mis hijas,” she responded when the men asked why she was willing to risk it all. Her daughters’ future is why she left her mother and siblings in Mexico and why she believes she endured many years of mistreatment from my father. 

* * *

The climate around immigration in the United States today is not the same as it was when my family immigrated in the 1990s. And yet the violence and the terror feel familiar. Even though my mother made it past the border and was eventually reunited with her husband, she lived in constant fear that any wrong move could lead to deportation. Raids were a real possibility for her every day and would become a real terror for my sister and me as we got older. Today, many immigrants and asylum seekers have been apprehended and are now detained in detention centers and for-profit jails across the country. Images of overcrowded cages with brown children wrapped in Mylar blankets abound the news. The current condition of the U.S.-Mexico border is infuriating not because I’m formerly undocumented, but because the injustice against immigrants and asylum seekers suggests that neither the U.S. nor Mexico see Mexicans and Central Americans as fully human. My immediate family didn’t have such atrocious experiences with the immigration system. Instead, our trauma was crafted inside the privacy of our own home, where we believed we were one step closer to the American Dream.

Growing up, I often asked my mother to tell us the story of how we got to Chicago. My curiosity was grounded in a desire to learn where I belonged and a frustration because  our lives were filled with violence and pain. Even though I grew up in a predominantly Mexican and Mexican American community, where mixed status households were common, keeping our undocumented status to ourselves was paramount. Protecting the secrecy of our status meant we also needed to be silent about the trauma occurring in our home. Letting friends, teachers, or cops know about the violence always meant risking family separation. 


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In The Nation, Isabela Dias recounts a story of an undocumented woman, Nancy, who was deported back to Mexico after helping to convict her rapist. After many years of physical and emotional abuse, Nancy reported her boyfriend for sexually attacking her in their home and applied for a U visa, the resident authorization for undocumented people who witness or are victims of a crime. Because of an enormous backlog, Nancy was deported before she could receive the visa, and her U.S.-born children had to follow after her. Dias reports that since President Trump took office, the backlog for U visa applications “is now more than 134,000 pending cases” — only 10,000 visas are granted each year. While they struggle to survive in Mexico, Nancy and her children wait for her U visa application to be processed. Throughout the narrative, most of Nancy’s concern is the future of her children: ‘“I dream that they will have a career one day,’ Nancy says. ‘I want them to think big. Then, it will have been worth going through all of this suffering.”’ Nancy’s words remind me of my mother, who never pressed charges against my father for beating her. She never applied for a U visa; she probably never knew it was an option. 

* * *

In 2011, before my 24th birthday, I received a master’s degree in English literature. By then, I had been living in Southern California, away from any family, for about two years. I had also started what would turn into a five-year-long emotionally abusive situation with a man also enrolled in a graduate program, and I was living my best life as a high-functioning alcoholic with high-functioning depression. When I passed my exams, I called my mother from Riverside, California, to share the good news.

“No he de hablar ingles pero ahora mi hija es maestra de la lengua,” she said, laughing  at not being able to speak English while I was about to receive a master’s degree in it. I sat on a concrete bench outside the humanities building, holding the phone with one hand and plugging my ear with the other. The day was bright and hot. Students walked around me. The chatter of the campus made it difficult to hear my mother speak from some 2,000 miles away in Cicero, Illinois. My friends, also in graduate programs at the campus, stood a few feet away, waiting to celebrate me.

The current condition of the U.S.-Mexico border is infuriating not because I’m formerly undocumented, but because the injustice against immigrants and asylum seekers suggests that neither the U.S. nor Mexico see Mexicans and Central Americans as fully human.

“Todos mis sacrificios y todo este dolor ha valido la pena,” she said. All of her sacrifice and pain, she told me, had been worth it. My lungs burned from holding my breath too long at hearing my mother’s voice filled with pride. Guilt crawled from my gut and wrapped around my heart — because I didn’t have a summer job, which meant I couldn’t send money home and wouldn’t be able to pay my own rent; because I resented her so much; because I hated myself and didn’t want to be alive; because I believed I wasn’t worth it. But I couldn’t share any of this with her; instead, I thanked her and we got off the phone. My friends stood around me and we shared celebratory tequila shots.

* * *

When my mother moved to this country at 23 years old, her new support system consisted of her children, her husband, and her husband’s family. She didn’t know the language, she didn’t know how to drive, and she only had the equivalent of a sixth-grade education. My mother tethered her life and her children’s future to her husband, a man who had been sent to the U.S. by his mother in hopes that the change of scenery would force him to mature. Over the years, I’ve tried to imagine what it’d be like for a young married couple, 23 and 24 years old, with two daughters, 5 and 4 years old, to be in a new, strange country unable to return home. In my investigations, I’ve gathered that the root of their rocky marriage was my father’s desire for independence and my mother’s insistence on codependency. He probably didn’t want to be married and have children, while her Mexican upbringing taught her that husbands are the only way to a better life. These conflicting desires culminated in a tumultuous, violent, and traumatizing union in the U.S. — wherein my father, a permanent resident, had the upper hand over his wife and children, all of whom were undocumented. 

In their text on immigration and domestic violence, Edna Erez and Shannon Harper suggest that battered immigrant women are “forced to make an inordinately difficult choice between remaining in an abusive relationship or leaving. If they leave, they may risk their legal status, facing deportation, and losing custody of and contact with their children.” As a child, I saw this up close with my mother. I don’t know if she believed everything my father said because she had limited access to information or because she loved him. When my sister and I would plead with her to leave him, she’d look into our round baby faces and ask, “¿Y adonde vamos a ir?” Where could a mother of two, then three, then four children go without money, without a car, without papers? My mother feared shelters. She thought worse things would happen to us there. She tried leaving a few times. Often, it didn’t matter where we’d run off to, because my father always found us and brought us home — without a fight from my mother because she believed it would be different this time and she wanted a home for my siblings and me. Hope was all my mother had to her name. I don’t doubt my father used his power to manipulate my mother. I don’t doubt he lied to get her to stay or to keep her quiet. I have an easier time understanding my father as the villain of the story than I do understanding why my mother stayed. 

* * *

My memories of the beatings come in snippets. They were so frequent, I can’t keep them in order in my mind. I can’t remember if my mother sneaking us out of our apartment in the middle of the night came before or after he punched her so hard we had to take her to the hospital. Or if it was before or after he tried to make it all up by taking her on a date, then slapped her and kicked her out of the car. Or if it came before or after his near fatal drug overdose, which they told us kids was heat exhaustion. Maybe it was after she ran and hid under our kitchen table begging for her life, or before he dragged her by the hair across the living room. It could have been after that time he almost choked her to death, or when he beat her while she was pregnant with my brother, or when she got so drunk at my aunt’s house she walked outside barefoot and I gave her my shoes. Maybe we left after I caught her in the hall with a razor blade to her wrists. I still have night terrors of the beatings and I don’t know if they’re memories or if they’re just dreams.

When I was a teenager, what terrified me more about the beatings was the idea of becoming solely responsible for my three younger siblings if one day my mother decided to leave. By the time I was the oldest of four I was 13 years old, which meant whenever my parents fought, I had to give my 12-year-old sister instructions on where to hide, when to call 911, and how to keep the babies quiet. When their fighting was too much for my sister and me, we’d each carry a baby and go outside. I, like my mother, needed a way out. I planned for college to be my exit strategy. I’ve never had the courage to admit it but I believed that if my mother left us, if she saved herself, I wouldn’t be able to leave for college. I believed I needed her to stay with her children so I could make it out. 

The violence and the reasons for the violence evolved as I got older. My father started beating my mother shortly after they got married at 17 and 18 years old. Both sets of their parents were violent with each other and both sets also struggled with alcoholism. At first, other relatives would intervene. “No, ya, asi no. Cálmate, hermano,” I’d hear my father’s sisters say. My instinct was always to cover my sister’s eyes. Eventually, there was less and less adult intervention, which meant I had to step in if I wanted my mother alive. I regret never being courageous or strong enough to kick my father’s ass. “Please, please, please, please, dejéla,” I pleaded, hating myself for having to be the one to beg for her life. I started calling the police even though we weren’t supposed to. The cops would show up, I’d translate, and depending on the cop they’d either take my father away or tell him to take a walk — it didn’t matter that my mother’s face was always bloodied. My mother never pressed charges, and she never let him spend more than a night in jail or at his sister’s house. “Pero dejélo,” I’d plead — begging her to save her own life and mine. “¿Y quien paga la renta?” Making rent was always, and continues to be, her burden. Even when her literal life was on the line, my mother knew that without money there was nowhere for her and her children to turn. 

* * *

Recently, a female student in her 20s came up to me after class and asked me to approve a video for her essay assignment on advertisements. The assignment was for my Introduction to Composition and Research course, where I ask students to choose an advertisement and do a close reading of the narrative choices the company uses to sell the product. Students usually choose typical ads from major companies like Nike, Coca-cola, Dove, etc. One student chose a commercial screened during Super Bowl 49 about domestic violence. The ad, titled “Listen,” features a voiceover using dialogue pulled from a real 911 call of a woman insisting on placing an order for a pizza until the operator understands that the woman can’t ask for help. While the phone call is happening, the camera pans throughout a large house showing a punched hole in one of the walls, broken class on the floor, dirty dishes, and household items thrown about. The ad ends with the NO MORE Project’s slogan, “When it’s hard to talk, it’s up to us to listen.”

My immediate family didn’t have such atrocious experiences with the immigration system. Instead, our trauma was crafted inside the privacy of our own home, where we believed we were one step closer to the American Dream.

My heart raced, my breaths shortened, and my hands shook as I watched the video. I widened my eyes, willing them to swallow the tears threatening to burst out of me. “Yes, this will give you lots to write about,” was all I could manage to tell my student as I  hurried to collect my belongings and rush to my office. When I made it there, I cried real, ugly, large tears. I covered my face to muffle my cries in case any of my colleagues were nearby — because, even though it’s been 10 years since the last time I witnessed my parents physically abuse one another, when I’m triggered, I’m a child again, calling 911, yelling for help while my father beats my mother, and no one comes to save us.  

* * *

In a photo taken one month before we left Juarez for Chicago. My mother sits on a blue bench in front of a house with a barred window. Her hair is dark and permed. Her smile is wide as she looks at my sister and me. Her hands clasp a soda or beer can. My aunt, in a red dress, with similarly permed hair, sits next to her, looking at her. My sister, my cousin, and I are at the center of the photograph. We wear matching outfits, my sister and I — brown shorts, white tops with brown stripes, white long socks and black Mary Janes. A month later, we’d arrive to Midway Airport in Chicago wearing those same outfits. In the photo, my sister holds both her hands to her mouth — biting the nails of one hand, using the other as support. She looks at something or someone outside the frame. My cousin looks in the same direction. I stand tall with my arms behind my back and smile directly into the camera. Whenever I ask my mother about her decision to immigrate to the United States she says she saw me and my sister the day the photo was taken and knew we had to leave. It wasn’t because she trusted my father was what was best for her; she left because she wanted my sister and me to have careers. “Tienen que mirar a lo alto,” she says to me. You have to aim higher. 

Women like my mother traverse worlds looking for a better life and what they find instead are entire countries telling them their lives aren’t worth protecting. Statistics vary, but generally one in four women and one in nine men experience physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime. One in four children witness intimate partner violence in their homes, according to cases filed in state courts. National statistics don’t break down into more complex pieces where I can find my mother, where I can find myself. There are four women and two men in my family. Four of six were undocumented at some point in our lives. Two of six have experienced physical abuse in our lifetime. Six of six of us have dealt with emotional abuse. Three of six struggle with alcoholism. Six of six live with a mental illness. One in six has diagnosed depression and PTSD. Six in six are still forcing the pieces of ourselves together.

“We must acknowledge the lack of mental health resources [immigrant mothers] faced [in the U.S.] and in their native land. They were never provided effective ways to deal with their pain,” Nia Ita writes in the magazine Fierce. “As a result, our moms are burdened with their mothers’ traumas while holding onto their own lost childhood and relinquished dreams.” My mother made herself into a vessel to hold her own and other peoples’ traumas — her husband’s, her mother’s, her children’s. I often ask her to seek out a therapist and she says she has God. I tell her I’ll pay for it because I don’t know the kind of health insurance her factory job provides and she says, “No, mija. Ya te he quitado suficiente.” My own therapist often has to remind me I can’t unburden my mother of her trauma. Today, it very much feels like my healing is in conflict with hers — as if only one of us can make out of the pain we’ve experienced. Like when I was a teenager and needed her to stay so I could leave.  

* * *

The beatings didn’t immediately stop, but my mother wielded pots and pans to protect herself until they did. I don’t know what changed in her that made her fight back and speak up. Because I witnessed it all, it felt like she changed overnight. “No grito, asi hablo ya” is my mother’s favorite retort when my now grown siblings and I tell her that she’s yelling at us when she speaks. “It’s not yelling, it’s my new voice,” she says. When you’ve been forced into silence, physically beaten into submission, there isn’t a gradual progression to a louder, unbroken voice. As soon as my mother learned to love the power of her own voice, she roared through her apartment demanding we hear her. 

Guilt crawled from my gut and wrapped around my heart.

My mother, my sister, and I received our permanent residency in 2004, after 12 years of waiting and thousands of dollars spent hoping our applications would be processed. Having her permanent residency has certainly helped my mother find her voice. After 31 years of marriage, she hasn’t left my father and I choose to read that survival strategy as the way the lives of many immigrant women are complicated by a long life of poverty, cultural marginalization, and language barriers. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I understood my mother’s act of staying as a terrible choice. As an adult, I understand how she, and many immigrant women in those situations, didn’t have a menu of healthy options to choose from. I comprehend the complexities involved now, but the little girl inside of me still feels like she chose him and not me. 

When I see my mother now, I don’t always know how to approach her. I still desire a relationship that isn’t ours — one that isn’t riddled with trauma, one where she can protect me. In all of my feelings of abandonment, I’m also still grateful for my mother and her sacrifices. Lately, I witness my mother’s persistence, vulnerability, flaws, and love from afar. I don’t need to understand her choices, but I also don’t need to be a part of them. Growing up, her greatest fear was forced separation — either by deportation because of our citizenship status, or by the state’s child protective services because of domestic violence. Our distance now is our best attempt at surviving all of that. 

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
To Be Well: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir

* * *

Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez is an Associate Professor in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College in NYC. She is an immigrant of Juarez, Mexico and raised in Cicero, IL. Her work has been published in Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Hispanecdotes, Everyday Fiction, Acentos Review, Newtown Literary, and So to Speak A Feminist Journal of Language and Art.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross
Fact checker: Matt Giles

Renovating a Family

Illustration by Missy Chimovitz

Christine Kalafus | Longreads | December 2019 | 14 minutes (3,666 words)

 

1.

There’s an art to giving bad news well. Think it out carefully. Choose the appropriate moment. Most of all: Don’t screw it up and make things worse.

I sat on our kitchen counter while my son stood sipping his coffee and I told him his father had an affair. The news of the affair was old — 17 years, four houses, and one renewal of wedding vows old. But telling my son about his father’s affair was urgent, the way testing our house’s main beam for termites before moving in had been urgent.

My husband’s affair had been the first in a series of betrayals. As we began to rebuild our marriage, I became pregnant with twins. The betrayal by my usually healthy body wasn’t the pregnancy — it was the aggressive breast cancer I developed. Cancer in my right breast growing with the babies, undetected until three weeks before they were due. One day of operations: A C-section, a lumpectomy, and a tubal ligation were like a series of crashing waves. But only until the real water came, a long winter of steady downpours on top of snow, on top of everything. Our basement repeatedly flooded, as if the house wanted us out.
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The Christmas Tape

SKIF Production / Getty, and Homestead Studio

Wendy McClure | Longreads | December 2019 | 18 minutes (4,618 words)

The Christmas Tape has always existed.

The Christmas Tape was recorded around 1973 or 1974. My dad thinks we were in our second Oak Park house, the one on Elmwood. I would have been 2 or 3. I don’t remember.

The Christmas Tape was our family tape, a seven-inch reel of holiday music played on an open-reel deck. The first four songs were taped from a folk-music show called The Midnight Special, which aired Saturday evenings in Chicago. I don’t know which one of my parents recorded the Christmas Tape, but I think it was my mother.

The Christmas Tape meant Christmas, which meant that everything was going to be all right.

Because the songs came off the radio — because whoever taped them had only a moment to toggle the RECORD switch — they all have their first few seconds clipped off at the beginning. Each one ends with a few soft thuds of fumbled edits before stumbling into the next song.

Nobody knows these songs; nobody outside our family at least. My brother and I never heard them anywhere else, except on The Tape, and we assumed they came from some alternate Christmas universe.

They are, in playing order:

“The Little Drummer Boy,” by Marlene Dietrich, who sings it torpidly in German while a children’s choir mewls rampa pam pam! in accompaniment. (It sounds, really, like a mash-up between the pageant scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas and a smoky Berlin cabaret.)

“Mystery Song Number One,” one of two folk tunes on The Tape so woebegone and obscure that not even my parents could remember what they were called or who the hell performed them. We thought of this one as “Three Drummers from Africa,” since that was the refrain: Three drummers from Africa/ leading the way/ to play for the baby on Christ-a-mas Day.

“Mystery Song Number Two,” featuring a single guitar and the vocals of a slightly dour-sounding trio or quartet. Maybe called “Come Let Us Sing.” Maybe not even a Christmas song.

“Go Where I Send Thee,” by Odetta: For years my brother and I had no idea who the folk singer Odetta was, so for a long time this song was just a voice, neither a he nor a she, racing through the lyrics of raggedly and breathlessly and ferociously in a tempo so frantic and ecstatic that it matched our own Christmas! Christmas! excitement.

Last year I emailed my dad to ask who recorded The Christmas Tape, since he is the only parent I can ask now. He wrote back saying that he and my mom used to love The Midnight Special. “It featured all the folk songs that killed the 60s,” he wrote. It is the sort of funny thing my father likes to say these days, funny but slightly evasive. Does he not remember whether he or my mother recorded the songs? Does he mean he wanted the 60s dead? (Probably.) When I try to nail down family history details I get genial not-quite-answers like this that I have to work around. This is how I came to think it was my mom who recorded The Christmas Tape.

There used to be more to The Christmas Tape. After those first four songs, my mother recorded two popular holiday LPs, collections of carols and traditional songs by the Harry Simeon Chorale and the Robert Shaw Chorale, so that The Tape drifted off into the more conventional realms of “Silent Night” and “Angels We Have Heard on High” for the next two hours or so. Then it sounded more like any other family’s Christmas tape, if other families had Christmas tapes.

I don’t know why my mother decided to tape albums that we already owned and could easily play on the turntable; maybe she grew impatient with recording songs off the radio. Or maybe she wanted to create an expanse of unbroken time, free from the interruption of radio commercials or the need to turn a record album over. Time that she could live inside, with us, seamless as a snow globe.

It’s true the air seemed to change when the tape deck was switched on: a thick pop from the speakers and then an expectant hum, the world enhanced.
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Still Waters

Participant, Killer Films

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2019 |  9 minutes (2,330 words)

About halfway through Dark Waters, after corporate lawyer Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) has agreed to hear out farmer Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), after he has seen that hundreds of cows on the Tennant farm have died, after he has connected this to their town’s water system, after he has linked that to the chemical company DuPont, after he has tied that to PFOAs (perfluorooctanoic acid), after he has found that PFOAs are a man-made forever chemical that can cause tumours and that the company that runs the town is effectively destroying everything within it, after all of that he’s about to sit down his pregnant wife (Anne Hathaway) to explain it to her when she looks at him square in the face and says, “I’m not listening to this.”                          

That should have been the tagline for the movie. It should be the tagline for the world. Dark Waters’ largely ignored release mirrors the larger apathetic response to the climate crisis as a whole. And yet a number of critics who saw it threw away their nonstick pans (PFOA is used to create Teflon), proving the film had the power to spur people on to some kind of action. But if it’s that effective and that timely — show me a global corporation that isn’t hoarding power and destroying the planet — why is no one talking about it? Why did only two movies seem to grab all the column inches over the past few weeks: Marriage Story, a movie about Noah Baumbach’s (sorry, “a couple’s”) divorce, and The Irishman, a movie about an aging mobster? Surely the planet has greater reach being, you know, where we actually live? 

That seems to be the problem. Dark Waters is not just about one plutonium plant (Silkwood), a single nuclear power plant (The China Syndrome), or even a Catholic church abuse conspiracy (Spotlight), it’s a story about systemic corruption that courses through the entire world. As the film’s director, Todd Haynes, told the New Yorker, “There’s no silver bullet, no magic solutions.” No one wants to listen to that.

* * *

Environmental films have been around almost as long as films themselves, and our responses to them have varied as much as our responses to the natural world. Pare Lorentz’s 1936 short The Plow That Broke the Plains, about how aggressive farming created the Dust Bowl, was actually sponsored by the U.S. government. But then World War II ended and America got richer, which meant a lusher population if not a more fruitful landscape. Lorentz wanted to keep making political movies (and what are environmental films if not political), but no one was funding them — one of the most popular films of the 1940s was called The Best Year of Our Lives. Then, in 1958, a woman named Olga Owens Huckins noticed that ten of her favorite birds had died after a DDT mixture was sprayed around her home and alerted her biologist friend Rachel Carson — she responded by writing Silent Spring.

With the 1962 arrival of Carson’s opus on pesticides — the DDT mosquito spray turned out to be killing Huckins’s birds, poisoning marine life, and was possibly also carcinogenic to humans — Americans awoke to the world around them and its abuse by corporate America. The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 (not to mention Earth Day) to sate their concerns, while activist groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth sprouted up, outcrops from the era’s wider counterculture movement. This was an epoch in which regular people speaking truth to power could actually be heard. In 1976, All the President’s Men was one of the top five highest grossing films of the year and it remains the high-water mark of whistleblowing movies, while 1979 remains one of the best years ever for overtly political filmmaking in Hollywood. That year both Norma Rae, the Sally Field starrer about union activist Crystal Lee Sutton, and The China Syndrome, about the safety coverup at a fictional nuclear plant, competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. For the latter, Jack Lemmon won Cannes’ best actor for his role as the plant’s shift supervisor, and for the former, Field won the best actress Oscar. Both films were critical and commercial successes. It didn’t hurt that the nuclear power industry accused China Syndrome of mendacity, only to be hoisted on its own petard less than two weeks after the film’s premiere by the Three Mile Island nuclear partial meltdown and radiation leak in Pennsylvania.

But the 1980s came along and activism turned into consumerism. The average American now wanted reassurance, not revolution. So they reverted to conservatism, they pushed the government to deregulate, and instead of paying taxes, they watched their money pile up around them as they stayed indoors watching MTV, only trekking to the movies for escapist blockbusters. They were encouraged to buy and buy and buy, spending rather than questioning. If there was disaffection, it wasn’t with the corruption of higher powers so much as the corruption of their own psyches. In the midst of all this, Silkwood was released in 1983, with Meryl Streep playing another whistleblower. Despite its star power — Streep being Streep, Cher getting serious, Kurt Russell going dramatic — the film didn’t have the same success as its predecessors. Audiences now preferred ghostbusters and gremlins and Indiana Jones, an archeologist who unearths fortune rather than failure.

In the following decade, going to see a movie about the planet usually meant going to see an action movie with an non-man-made threat — asteroids were a favorite. From Deep Impact to Armageddon to Dante’s Peak to Volcano, these were movies about nature attacking us rather than the other way around. It speaks to how out of touch they were that Disney executives of all people, part of the corporate community that helped mold Hollywood into an action-hero-centric fantasy universe, would think that Michael Mann’s studious 1999 slow burner The Insider, about Brown & Williamson Tobacco’s attempt to silence whistleblowing biochemist Jeffrey Wigand, would have the same traction as All the President’s Men two decades prior. Despite its seven Oscar nominations, it didn’t land a huge audience.  Circumstances were different for Erin Brockovich, the film about an energy corporation poisoning a California community that came out a year later. Julia Roberts was one of the biggest stars in the world and though she wasn’t playing a superhero, the story presented her as its clear heroine with the enemy an equally clear corporate entity (Pacific Gas and Electric) negligently harming a specific location. The film is shot warmly, the dialogue is colorful, and the narrative is propulsive. Most important, it has a happy ending. The road to Erin Brockovich’s $2.5 million bonus at the end of the film led to an Oscar for Roberts and $256.3 million in worldwide box office.

That was the last time a big screen eco-thriller saw that kind of fanfare, the dissipating attention coinciding (after September 11th) with dissipating attention to nature as a whole. A Gallup poll graph tracking Americans’ interest in environmental protection versus economic growth from 1985 to 2019 shows the former steadily decreasing to a trough around 2011 — the aftermath of the great recession of 2008 — before it starts increasing again, while the latter is almost its mirror opposite. So the more people focused on the economy, the less they did on the environment and vice versa. It’s telling that the media’s favorite climate movie of the past two decades is The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich’s 2004 B-movie in which a series of weather events coalesce into a new ice age (he had it the wrong way around). More of a grab at cash than epiphany, the Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle is essentially nightmare nature porn, the money shot a hero conquering climate change. Unfortunately, the real story is a lot less euphoric. “We’re all participating in the climate crisis — if there is an enemy, it’s us,” Per Espen Stoknes, author of What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming, told the New York Times in 2017.

An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 film of former vice president Al Gore’s 2004 global warming slideshow, sort of tried to get that across. Despite its dryness, audiences seemed to have some thirst for an updated climate checkup and upon its release, it broke box office records, got standing ovations, and won the Oscar for best documentary. It has been credited with rejuvenating the environmental movement, though the aforementioned Gallup graph questions how much it actually did. This wasn’t like Blackfish, where it was clear SeaWorld was to blame, or Super Size Me, which could point the finger at McDonald’s. Who do you hold accountable for global warming? As Stoknes said, “It’s hard to go to war against ourselves.” 

More than a decade elapsed before Sir David Attenborough shocked his audiences by finally changing his tone from wonder to dread in the Netflix series Our Planet. “I would much prefer not to be a placard-carrying conservationist. My life is the natural world,” he told TIME. “But I can’t not carry a placard if I see what’s happening.” The natural historian was able to piggyback climate change awareness off an established brand in the way HBO miniseries Chernobyl would later riff on the 1986 disaster everyone knew about. Proving that television seems to be more hospitable to climate content, the latter dominated the discourse for weeks. Part of that was the arrestingly horrific first episode, but much of the talk also heavily associated the worst nuclear disaster in history with Trump. “We look at this president who lies, outrageous lies, not little ones but outstandingly absurd lies,” show creator Craig Mazin told the Los Angeles Times. “The truth isn’t even in the conversation. It’s just forgotten or obscured to the point where we can’t see it. That’s what Chernobyl is about.”

Dark Waters isn’t so different. Though it’s based on a lesser-known disaster, this one is farther reaching. The film adapts the 2016 New York Times Magazine article by Nathaniel Rich about Bilott suing DuPont on behalf of thousands of West Virginians and Ohioans affected by PFOA (the company settled for nearly $700 million in 2017), so the events it dramatized are more recent and the ties to those in power more direct than Chernobyl would be. “I hope that the movie starts to spur bigger conversation about who our government is actually working on behalf of,” Ruffalo, who is also a producer on the film, recently told Fast Company in the rare bit of mainstream coverage. Instead we were too busy trying to figure out how autobiographical Marriage Story was or whether Martin Scorsese was right about Marvel movies not being real cinema. When Haynes’s Dark Waters was covered, the question was not why this stylish auteur had made this ambling eco-thriller, but why he hadn’t made anything else. A master of deconstruction, Haynes had in fact denatured the genre beyond its basic elements — the company, the chemical, the casualty, the turncoat — to create a film that echoes the futility of our current circumstances. Bilott isn’t a hero; he’s a human being who sees a fellow human being destroyed by a corporation, who is himself destroyed by trying to help. Every advance is only an inch, every setback a foot. When he finally, after years, uncovers the truth, when he proves DuPont has in fact poisoned people, there is no happy ending. DuPont simply rejects reality and refuses to accept responsibility, forcing Bilott to file no fewer than 3,535 personal injury lawsuits.

Haynes was inspired by Silkwood and All the President’s Men, but the world we live in is now DuPont’s. This is a year in which only 65 percent of polled Americans believe in prioritizing environmental protection at the risk of economic growth, in which the latest climate talks ultimately came to nothing because world leaders would rather quibble over technicalities; a year in which six of the top 10 grossing films were made by Disney, in which a movie like Dark Waters actually increases the stocks of the company it calls out because, as the president has proven time and again, being honest about how awful you are is more rewarding that not being awful at all.

* * *

“Here’s the thing: for many of us, climate change isn’t a disaster movie, it’s a kitchen sink drama,” climate scientist Kate Marvel wrote in Scientific American earlier this year. And though we’ll watch kitchen sink dramas, we prefer our humdrum slogs toward justice illuminated by big stars, or at least a romantic plot. Climate change is too relentlessly depressing; we need some kind of hope so that it doesn’t all seem so impossible, or at least distracts us from the allure of giving up. But I can’t think of anything less hopeful than denial. I can’t think of many things more depressing than the woman sitting next to me scrolling through her phone during our screening of Dark Waters while Bilott described how a company had put so much PFOA into the world that she almost certainly had some of it inside her body — maybe the critics who watched the movie and just wondered why Haynes hadn’t made another lesbian melodrama; maybe the wider audience that continues to go to the movies and conduct the various other aspects of their lives without focusing on the largest scale of all because it’s too abstract compared to an unpaid bill or a sick relative; maybe the part of that audience that could actually change things and doesn’t, like that scene in Dark Waters where Bilott holds up a picture of a baby with a congenital deformity and DuPont’s CEO, while affected, ultimately does nothing. As Haynes explained to The New Yorker: “There’s no way to just end corporate greed and corruption. But there are steps to take, and we just have to keep taking them.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

An Addict, a Nurse, and a Christmas Resurrection

Iknuitsin Studio / Getty, and Homestead Studio

Suzanne Ohlmann | Longreads | December 2019 | 16 minutes (4,121 words)

I once cared for a patient who looked like Jesus and, after 40 days in a coma, rose from the dead on my shift. I worked nights as an intensive care nurse on an abdominal transplant unit, and Leonard was the spitting image of the white sacred heart Son of God.

It was the week of Christmas when he became my patient, though Leonard had been hospitalized since before Thanksgiving. He was 50 years old and smelled of dried sweat, sour breath, and incontinent bowels. Before I’d been assigned to Leonard’s care, every major organ system had failed, down to his skin, his entire body covered in large, fluid-filled welts called bullae. He was dependent on the mechanical ventilator due to respiratory failure, and connected to the machine by a tracheostomy tube surgically inserted into his throat. His blood pressure and heart were sustained by three different intravenous medications, and his failed kidneys replaced with hemodialysis, the blood from his body washed by an intricate filtering mechanism the size of a Pepsi machine. He had tubes in every orifice, nostrils to anus. Alone, his family three states away, Leonard’s comatose state left him completely vulnerable to the whims of his medical team. He was incapable of closing his eyes, his stare casting an eerie spell over the room until we decided to start taping his eyelids shut for two-hour intervals. Nurses clucked their tongues upon hearing his story, shaking their heads at his plight with a combination of disbelief and indignation, whispering reactions like, “He should have known better,” or, my favorite, “People like that are the reason I’m not an organ donor.”

Leonard was an alcoholic and had Hepatitis C, most likely from IV drug use, though it’s possible he wasn’t aware of his diagnosis. When he went out with his fellow migrant construction workers to a seafood joint north of San Antonio, he should have ordered the fish and chips. But Leonard ordered a plate of raw oysters, fresh from the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe one of Leonard’s physicians had warned him about raw oysters and Hepatitis C. Maybe Leonard knew that because he had Hep C, he shouldn’t drink alcohol; that his immune system was weakened by his ailing liver; that raw or undercooked seafood from the warm waters of the Gulf can carry a monster bacteria called Vibrio vulnificus; that a person with Hep C who contracts Vibrio vulnificus faces a 50 – 85% mortality rate from infection and septic shock. Maybe Leonard knew, but I doubt it. I can’t say that he should have known better.

***

My biological father died of liver failure at age 50 from alcohol and Hepatitis C. His name was Mike, and I had just discovered him in the year leading up to my care of Leonard. My first full year as an intensive care nurse coincided with my first year of contact with Mike’s family. If Mike had known better and skipped the needles and beer, he might have lived long enough to meet me, but he didn’t, and died not knowing of my existence. A year before I met Leonard, I sent identical letters and a photograph to my father’s two siblings, Aunt Christine and Uncle Greg. I’d found their names in his obituary, and located their address on the Internet. They shocked me with emails of sudden welcome just days after I’d sent the letter. I had to lie down when I read phrases like, “You’re part of our family,” and, “Your dad would have been so proud.”

Before I’d been assigned to Leonard’s care, every major organ system had failed, down to his skin, his entire body covered in large, fluid-filled welts called bullae.

After the initial exchange of letters, Uncle Greg asked to talk on the phone. When I called, he skipped the chitchat and dove into Mike stories: that he was his big brother and best friend; that he never missed a birthday; that he loved to work with his hands and had a bit of a mail-order problem.

“He sure did love his knick-knacks from the Franklin Mint,” he said.

“How did Mike die?” I asked.

“Well, Mike liked to drink Old Milwaukee,” he said.

“Old Mill? Really?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “I never liked that stuff — got a real twang to the taste — but Mike drank it for breakfast.”

I laughed. “Breakfast?” I asked.

“Yeah, let’s see: there was the beer, and Mike partied pretty hard in the 70’s. You know how it was: live hard, die young,” he said.

“Yeah,” I lied, thinking of my parents, who spent their 70’s (and 80’s, and 90’s, amen) singing in Lutheran church choir, eating at potlucks in the church basement, or practicing recorder for their failed recorder group. We have photos documenting Dad playing a polished, wooden, tenor recorder, a bowl of black hair on his head, with my mom laughing in a hand-sewn denim suit, blonde highlights in her hair, cocktail glasses of soda within reach of each of them.

“We’re pretty sure Mike had hepatitis from all that partying, so that didn’t help with the beer,” he said.

“Hepatitis? Which hepatitis?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “we’re thinking it was probably Hep C that got Mike in the end. Hep C and beer.”
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In Jo’s Image

Columbia Pictures

Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | December 2019 | 9 minutes (2,136 words)

Some stories get inside you in that way where, later on, it’s unclear if you’ve built your life out of the seed that was the art.

To grow up queer, especially if you don’t have the language or the worldview framework for understanding queerness, can be an isolating experience. It is profoundly strange, to feel unrecognizable, beyond language, even to yourself. This can create a gravitational pull toward characters who, for the first time, hold up a mirror and say, me: you’re like me. This phenomenon of first recognition has inspired an entire category of queer art, like the song “Ring of Keys” in the Tony Award-winning musical Fun Home, sung by the child version of the protagonist (Young Alison) when she sees an older butch for the first time: “Someone just came in the door — like no one I ever saw before! I feel… I feel!

This was my experience with Jo March, the protagonist of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
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A Woman’s Work: Becoming a Home of One’s Own

All illustrations by Carolita Johnson

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | December 2019 | 24 minutes (6,000 words)

This essay began very differently a few months ago. I had started writing it at the same time as the previous one in this series, “Till death do us part,” and, just as I observed while writing the fifth one, the very act of writing it resulted in a real-time evolution of my understanding, processing, assessment, and reassessment of what I was writing about, to the point that by the end of the essay, it was obvious I was not the same person who had begun writing it. Just as I’ve changed from the beginning of an essay to the end of it, every few months I look back on my life and think, yet again, how much more like myself I feel. Three years, three months or three pages — it can be a long, slow recovery, or it can happen in shorter but exponentially more intense increments. Recent widows and widowers will either be glad to know, or be dismayed to know that, well, from what I gather, and with luck, it never really ends.

***

Immediately after my husband Michael died I found myself alone in the house we had been renting from his daughter for the last year and a half. It had been full of his relatives for a week, from the moment he came home to die. Now, it was empty. Empty except for our stuff, and not just our stuff from our life together: preparing for a future that would now never happen, for the six months of treatment and recovery we had expected to live through after his surgery, I’d stocked up on six months’ worth of toilet paper, paper towels, laundry soap, dish soap — soap and cleaners of every kind — dry goods, anything that was heavy and not available within a mile’s walk for me, since I don’t drive. Now, I felt like a stowaway on an abandoned frigate, floating along aimlessly.

I still had our dog, Hammy, with me, a 14-year-old poodle named after the noir fiction writer, Dashiel Hammett, of the “Thin Man” movies, whose dialogue Michael and I often quoted to each other. Hammy, too, was close to approaching the home stretch of his life, but for now he was there to stand guard while I cried on every floor of the house, with a preference for the one in the kitchen. Have you ever noticed that the kitchen floor is somehow the most suited for letting your knees give out before crumpling to the floor in wretched tears? I recommend it. I suppose it’s because the kitchen is where so much of coupled life happens. That’s where you will have eaten together, had coffee in the morning together, sipped hot lemon water and honey to ward off colds together, cooked for each other. If you’re going to mourn your lost partner, it might as well be in the place where the spirit of your partnership seems to occupy every cupboard, shelf, and drawer.

A friend immediately insisted on “sitting shiva” with me, which, as a modern adaptation (though I’m not religious and am unfamiliar with this Jewish tradition), took the form of bringing me my favorite coffee beverage, a cortado, from my favorite cafe so I wouldn’t have to go outside with my leaky-faucet eyes. This is exactly how the crying began to feel: tears that puzzlingly continued even when I thought I was done crying. I mused that it was as if a pipe were broken inside me and I might need to call some kind of metaphysical plumber soon.
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