‘The Imp of the Perverse’ is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), written in 1845. Of all of Poe’s stories, this is one of the strongest tales to prefigure the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Before we proceed to a summary and analysis of this […]

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Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.

But there was no body. No bloodstain. No tangle of hair caught on the coarse fallen branches, no red wool scarf damp with morning dew festooned across the bushes. There was just the note on the ground, rustling at my feet in the soft May wind. I happened upon it on my dawn walk through the birch woods with my dog, Charlie.

I’d discovered the path the previous spring just after Charlie and I had moved to Levant. We’d worn it down all spring, summer, and fall, but abandoned it during winter. The slim white trees had been nearly invisible against the snow. On foggy mornings, the birches completely disappeared in the mist. Since the thaw, Charlie had been waking me up every morning at daybreak. We’d cross the dirt road and trudge up the slow rise and fall of a little hill, and weave our way back and forth through the birches. That morning, when I found the note laid flat on the path, we’d made it about a mile into the woods.

Charlie did not slow or tilt his head or even lower his nose to the ground to sniff. It seemed very odd to me that he’d just ignore it – my Charlie, who once broke off his leash and ran across the freeway to fetch a dead bird, so strong was his instinct to ferret out the dead. No, he didn’t give the note a second glance. Little black rocks pinned the note down to the ground, each placed carefully on the page in the top margin and along the bottom. I bent down to read it again. Under my hands, the earth was almost warm, shy pale grass poking up here and there in the crumbly black dirt, the sun just starting to brighten in hue from silver to yellow.

Her name was Magda.

It was a joke, I thought, a prank, a ruse. Somebody was playing games. That was my initial impression. Isn’t it sweet to look back at how my mind jumped to the most innocuous conclusion? That after so many years, at seventy-two, my imagination was still so naive? Experience should have taught me that first impressions are often misleading. Kneeling down in the dirt, I considered the details: the paper was a page from a lined, spiral notebook, its perforated edge broken cleanly, no straggly bits from where it had been torn out; careful, small printed letters in blue ballpoint pen. It was hard to decipher much from the penmanship, and that seemed deliberate. It was the kind of neat, impersonal printing you’d use when making a sign for a yard sale, or filling out a form at the dentist. Wise, I thought. Smart. Whoever had written the note understood that by masking one’s peculiarities, one invokes authority. There is nothing as imposing as anonymity. But the words themselves, when I spoke them aloud, seemed witty, a rare quality in Levant, where most people were blue collar and dull. I read the note again and almost chuckled over that penultimate line, It wasn’t me. Of course it wasn’t.

If not a prank, the note could have been the beginning of a story tossed out as a false start, a bad opening. I could understand the hesitation. It’s a rather dark, damning way to begin a story: the pronouncement of a mystery whose investigation is futile. Nobody will ever know who killed her. The story is over just as it’s begun. Was futility a subject worthy of exploration? The note certainly didn’t promise any happy ending.

Here is her dead body. Surely there was more to say. Where was Magda? Was it so hard to come up with a description of her corpse, tangled in the brush under a fallen tree, her face half sunken into the soft black dirt, her hands hog-tied behind her back, the blood from her stab wounds leaching into the ground? How hard was it to imagine a small golden locket glinting between sodden birch leaves, the chain broken and dashed through the new, tender, hairy grass? The locket could contain photos of a young, gap-toothed child on one side – Magda at age five – and a man in a military hat on the other, her father, I’d guess. Or maybe ‘hog-tied’ would be a bit too strong. Maybe ‘stab wounds’ were too graphic too soon. Perhaps the killer simply positioned her arms behind her back so they wouldn’t stick out from under the rotting branches and catch somebody’s eye. The pale skin of Magda’s hands would stand out against the dark ground, like the white paper on the path, I imagined. It seemed better to begin with gentler descriptions. I could write the book myself if I had the discipline, if I thought anyone might read it.

As I stood, my thoughts were bleached and stunted by a terrible pain in my head and eyes, which often happened when I got up too quickly. I always had poor circulation, low blood pressure, ‘a weak heart,’ my husband had called it. Or perhaps I was hungry. I have to be careful, I told myself. One day I might faint in the wrong place and hit my head, or cause an accident in my car. That would be the end of me. I had no one to tend to me if I fell ill. I’d die in some cheap country hospital and Charlie would get slaughtered at the pound.

Charlie, as though he could sense my dizziness, came to my side and licked my hand. In doing so, he stepped on the note. I heard the paper crinkle. Pity to have that pristine page now sullied with a paw print. But I didn’t chide him. I scratched his silky head with my fingers.

Maybe I was being too imaginative, I thought, scanning the note again. I could picture a high school boy wandering the woods, thinking up some funny gore, writing these first few lines, then losing steam, discarding the story for one he found easier to conjure up: the tale of a lost sock, a fight on the football field, a man going fishing, kissing a girl behind the garage. What did some Levanteen need with Magda and her mystery? Magda. This was not a Jenny or Sally or Mary or Sue. Magda was a name for a character with substance, a mysterious past. Exotic, even. And who would want to read about that here, in Levant? The only books at Goodwill were about knitting and World War II.

‘Magda. She’s strange,’ they’d say.

‘I wouldn’t want Jenny or Sally to be hanging around a girl like Magda. Who knows what kind of values she was raised with?’

‘Magda. What kind of name is that? An immigrant? Some different language?’

No wonder he had given up on Magda so quickly. Her situation was too complex, too nuanced for a young kid to understand. It would take a wise mind to do Magda’s story real justice. Death was hard to look at, after all. ‘Skip it,’ I can imagine the boy saying, discarding these first few lines. And with that, Magda and all her potential were abandoned. However, there were no signs of neglect, or frustration, nothing revised or rewritten. On the contrary, the lines were pristine and even. Nothing was scribbled out. The paper hadn’t been crumpled up or even folded. And those little rocks . . .

‘Magda?’ I said aloud, not knowing exactly why. Charlie seemed not to care. He busied himself chasing drifting dandelion puffs through the trees. I paced up and down the path for a few minutes, scrutinized the dirt for anything that seemed out of place, then walked around the surrounding area in a narrowing gyre. I was hoping to find another note, another clue. I whistled to Charlie every time he strayed too far. There weren’t any strange new paths through the trees that I could see, but then, of course, my own shuffling around made a mess of things and confused me. Still, there was nothing. I found nothing. Not even a cigarette butt or a crushed soda can.

We’d had a TV set back in Monlith. I’d seen plenty of murder mystery shows. I could picture twin gutters etched into the dirt by the heels of a corpse being dragged. Or an impression in the ground where a body had been laid, the grass matted down, tender seedlings bent, a mushroom crushed. And then, of course, fresh black dirt covering a new, shallow grave. But the ground of the birch woods was undisturbed as far as I could tell. Everything was as it had been the previous morning, at least in that little area. It would take days, weeks, to cover the entire woods. Poor Magda, wherever she is, I thought, turning around slowly in case I’d missed something poking out – a shoe, a plastic barrette. The note on the path seemed to indicate that she was nearby, didn’t it? Wasn’t the note more of a headstone than a made-up story? Here lies Magda, it seemed to say. What’s the use of such a note, like a tag, a title, if the thing it’s referring to isn’t anywhere near it? Or anywhere at all, for that matter? The land was held in public trust, I knew, so anybody had the right to come through it.

 

*

 

Levant wasn’t a particularly beautiful place. There were no covered bridges or colonial manors, no museums or historic municipal buildings. But the nature in Levant was pretty enough to distinguish it from Bethsmane, the neighboring township. We were two hours from the coast. A big river ran through Bethsmane, and people would sail through up from Maconsett in summer, I’d heard. So the area wasn’t completely ignored by the world outside of it. Still, it wasn’t any kind of destination. There were no sights to see in Bethsmane. Main Street was boarded up. It had once been a mill town with brick sidewalks and old warehouses that, if they still existed, would have made for a charming old town. But there were no ghosts or romance left there. Bethsmane now was just a strip mall, a bowling alley and bar with glaring neon, a tiny post office that closed at noon each day, a few fast-food restaurants off the freeway. Out in Levant, we didn’t even have our own post office, not that I sent or received much mail. There was a gas station with a small general store that sold bait and essentials, canned food, candy, cheap beer. I had no idea what the few residents of Levant did for recreation, other than drink and go bowling in Bethsmane. They didn’t strike me as the type of folks to take scenic strolls. So who, then, would have found his way into my beloved birch woods and felt the need to upset things with a note about a dead body?

‘Charlie?’ I called out, when I had reached the path again.

I walked back to the note, still fluttering gently in the warm wind. For a moment it seemed alive somehow, a strange and fragile creature weighed down by the black rocks, struggling to be free, like a butterfly or a bird with a broken wing. Like Magda must have felt, I imagined, under the hands of the one who killed her. Who could have done such a thing? It wasn’t me, the note insisted. And for the first time that morning, as though it had just occurred to me to be frightened, a chill went through my bones. Her name was Magda. It seemed so sinister all of a sudden. It seemed so real.

Where was that dog? Waiting for Charlie to come bounding back to me through the birches, I got the feeling that I ought not lift my eyes too high, that there might be someone watching me from up in the trees. A madman in the boughs. A ghost. A god. Or Magda herself. A hungry zombie. A purgatoried soul looking for a live body to possess. When I heard Charlie thundering through the trees, I dared myself to look up. There wasn’t anybody there, of course. ‘Be reasonable,’ I told myself, bracing for the head rush that I hoped courage might stave off as I knelt down to collect the little black rocks. I put them in my coat pocket and picked up the note.

If I’d been alone there in the woods, without my dog, would I have been so bold? I may have left the note there on the path and run away, rushed home to drive to the police station in Bethsmane. ‘There’s been a murder,’ I might have said. What nonsense I’d describe. ‘I found a note in the woods. A woman named Magda. No, I didn’t see her body. Just the note. I left it there, of course. But it says she’s been killed. I didn’t want to disturb the scene. Magda. Yes, Magda. I don’t know her last name. No, I don’t know her. I haven’t met a Magda in all my life. I just found the note, just now. Please, hurry. Oh, please go out there right away.’ I would have seemed hysterical. It wasn’t good for my health to get so worked up. Walter had always told me that when I got emotional, it put a great strain on my heart. ‘Danger zone,’ he’d say, and insist on putting me to bed and turning down the lights, drawing the curtains closed if it was daytime. ‘Best to lie down and rest until the fit passes.’ It was true that when I got anxious, it was hard to keep my wits about me. I got clumsy. I got dizzy. Even just walking home to the cabin in my anxiety, I could have tripped and fallen. I could have broken an arm or a hip tumbling down the little hill from the birch woods to the road. Someone could have driven by and seen me, an old lady covered in dirt, trembling with fear over what – a piece of paper? I’d have waved my arms. ‘Stop! There’s been a murder! Magda is dead!’ What a commotion I could have caused. How embarrassing that would have been.

But with Charlie around, I was calm. Nobody could say I hadn’t been calm. I’d been living well the whole year in Levant, peaceful and satisfied, and pleased with my decision to make such a drastic move so many thousands of miles across the country from Monlith. I was proud that I’d had the pluck to sell the house, pack up, and leave. Truth be told, I would still be back there in that old house if it hadn’t been for Charlie. I wouldn’t have had the courage to move. It was comforting to have an animal, so consistently near and needy, to focus on, to nurture. Just to have another heart beating in the room, a live energy, had cheered me. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d been, and then suddenly I wasn’t alone at all. I had a dog. Never again would I be alone, I thought. What a gift to have such a companion, like a child and protector, both, something wiser than me in so many ways, and yet doting, loyal, and affectionate.

The worst I’d felt since getting Charlie was that day with the dead bird back in Monlith. Charlie had never been off the leash before except at the fenced-in dog park at Lithgate Greens, and watching him run off like that across the freeway, I’d felt I was losing him forever. We’d been together just a few months then, and I was still finding my footing as his master, still a little shy, hesitant – insecure, you’d say. As I stood there, I worried that the bond between us wasn’t strong enough to keep him from chasing a better life, exploring new pastures, being more of a dog than he could be with me. I was only human, after all. Wasn’t I limited? Wasn’t I a bore? But then I thought, what could be better than the life I had to offer him? Really, what? To run free in the hills over Monlith, to chase grouse? He’d be eaten by coyotes. And anyway, he wasn’t that kind of dog. He was bred for service, to fetch, retrieve, and always to return. I’d asked myself, watching him disappear across the freeway, what I could have done to make him more comfortable, feel more important, more loved, more anything. Was he not satisfied? Was he not pampered? I could have cooked for him, I’d thought. The women at the dog park had spoken about ‘the toxicity of name-brand kibble.’ Oh, there was always more one could do to keep a creature happy. I should have made him bones, sappy with marrow, I thought, and I should have let him sleep in my bed with me. It was too cold in the kitchen of that old house in Monlith, even with the dog bed and fuzzy fleece blanket. I’d wrapped him in that blanket and held him like a newborn baby in my arms that first night in the old drafty house. He’d cried and cried, and I’d soothed him and promised him, ‘Nothing bad will ever happen to you. I won’t let it. I love you too much. I promise, you are safe now, here, with me, forever.’

And a few months later – how fast he’d grown! – I took him out for a walk and he pulled and tugged and broke loose. That morning in Monlith, his leash simply snapped and he was gone, crushing through the thin crust of snow down the hill and over the freeway.

It felt like only yesterday, I thought then, over a year later, walking home through the birches in Levant with the note, my heart beating hard. What would I have done without Charlie? How close had I come to losing him that day in Monlith? I had run after him, of course, but couldn’t bring myself to step over the sharp metal guardrail that he had leapt over so effortlessly. Even at that early hour, with just a car or two passing slowly on the ice, it seemed too dangerous to step foot on the freeway blacktop. I’ve never been one to break any rules. It was not out of a sense of civic duty or pride or moral certitude, but it was the way I was raised. In fact, the only time I’d ever been admonished was in kindergarten. I stepped out of line on the way down to the music room, and the teacher raised her voice. ‘Vesta, where are you going? You think you are so special to wander off alone like a queen?’ I never forgave myself. And my mother was very keen on discipline. I was never beaten or restrained. But there was always order, and when I behaved as though there weren’t, I was corrected.

And anyway, I could have slipped on the ice. I could have been struck by a car. Would it have been worth the risk? Oh, it would have, it would have, if it meant otherwise losing my dear, sweet dog. But I couldn’t budge, stuck there behind the guardrail watching Charlie’s tail flouncing away. He disappeared down the embankment on the other side of the freeway, where there was a frozen marsh. I was much too frightened to even scream or shut my eyes or breathe. When I tried to whistle, my mouth wouldn’t work. It was like a nightmare, when the hatchet man is coming for you and you want to scream, but you can’t. All I could do was wave to the few cars driving by with my little red gloves, like a fool, tears beading at the corners of my eyes from both the cold wind and my terror.

But then Charlie returned. He came scuttling back at full speed across the ice, catching a stretch of complete stillness on the freeway, thank heavens. He carried the dead bird – a meadowlark – softly between his fangs and laid it at my feet and sat next to it. ‘Good boy,’ I said, embarrassed by my unruly emotions even in front of my own dog. I dried my tears and embraced him and held his neck in my arms and kissed his head. His breath in the cold was like a steam engine, his heart thumping. Oh, how I loved him. How much life there was rumbling in that furry thing just astounded me.

Since then, I’d taught Charlie to fetch sticks and neon yellow tennis balls that turned brown and soggy with saliva, then gray and cracked, rolling under the front seat of the car, where I’d forget them. ‘This is a retriever, some bastard combination of Labrador and Weimaraner,’ the vet in Monlith had told me. That morning with the meadowlark was, perhaps, a significant day for Charlie. He discovered his innate purpose, some instinct kicked in. But what could I possibly want with that dead bird? I hadn’t shot it down, nobody had. It was an odd thing to feel impelled to retrieve. Such are instincts. They aren’t always reasonable, and often they lead us down dangerous paths.

I whistled, and Charlie came, a crumbling red shard of rotten wood poking out from his soft lips. I put the leash on him. ‘Just in case,’ I told him. He eyed me querulously, but didn’t pull. I kept my eyes on the path on the walk home, one hand holding Charlie’s leash, the other tucked inside my coat, grasping the note, to keep it safe, I told myself.

It wasn’t me.

Who was this me? I wondered. It seemed unlikely that a woman would abandon a dead body in the woods, so I felt I could safely presume that the writer of the note, this me, this character, the I of the story, must be male. He seemed very sure of himself, indeed. Nobody will ever know who killed her. And how could he know that? And why would he bother to say it? Was it some kind of macho taunt? I know something you don’t know. Men could be like that. But was murder an appropriate occasion to be so boastful? Magda was dead. That was no laughing matter. Nobody will ever know who killed her. What a silly way to ward off suspicion. How arrogant to think people are all so gullible. I wasn’t. We were not all idiots. We weren’t all lemmings, sheep, fools, like Walter always said all people were. If anybody knew who killed Magda, it was the ‘I.’ Where was Magda now? Clearly I had been with her dead body while the note was being written. And so, what had become of her? Who had run off with her body? Had it been the killer? Had the killer come back for Magda after he, I, whatever, had written and laid down that note?

My note, I felt it was. And it was mine. I possessed it now, tried not to crinkle it in the warmth of my heavy down coat.

I’d need a name for this me, the writer of the note. At first I thought I’d need a name as just a placeholder, something lacking in personality so as not to describe the me too particularly, a name like the anonymous printed penmanship. It was important to keep an open mind. I could be anybody. But there was something to be gleaned from the serious and youthful ballpoint pen, the precise print, the strange nonadmission, the nobodyness of I. Blank. My husband’s name, Walter, was one of my favorite names. Charlie was a good name for a dog, I thought. When we were feeling regal, I’d call him Charles. He did look regal sometimes, his ears perked up and eyes cast downward, like a king on his throne. But he was too good natured to be truly kingly. He wasn’t a snobbish dog. He was no poodle or setter or spaniel. I’d wanted a manly breed, and when I’d gone into the kennel in Monlith, there he’d been. ‘Abandoned,’ they told me. ‘Discovered two months ago in a black duffel bag on the banks of the river. Barely three weeks old. The only one of the litter to survive.’ I spent a minute piecing that together. What horror! And then, what a miracle! From then on, I pictured myself as the one who had come upon the black duffel in the mud, under the bridge where the river thins, and that I had unzipped the bag to find a huddled swarm of heady, raisin-colored pups, only one of them breathing, and that one was mine. Charlie. Can you imagine abandoning such dear little creatures?

‘Who would do something like that?’

‘Times are tough,’ the woman told me.

I filled out the requisite forms, paid one hundred

dollars for medical testing and vaccines, and signed a promise to get Charlie neutered, which I never did. I also didn’t tell them that I’d be moving east, across seven states, all the way to Levant mere months later. These dog pounds, they need assurances. They want it in writing that a person will care for the animal and raise it in the right way. I promised not to abuse it or breed it, or let it run wild in the streets, as though a signature, a mere scribble on paper, could seal fate in place. I didn’t want to neuter my dog. That seemed inhumane. But I signed my name on the contract, heart racing at this, one of very few deceptions I’ve ever enacted knowingly, blushing, trembling even at the thought that I’d be found out. ‘What kind of sick person doesn’t neuter their mutt? What kind of perverse . . .’ Naive, actually, to think that a mere signature was so binding. It’s just a little ink on paper, just a scribble, my name. They couldn’t come after me, drag me back to Monlith, simply because I’d moved a pen around.

So I got away all right. After Walter’s funeral, I packed up the house in Monlith, bade farewell to the place and all it had put upon me. What a relief it was to get out of there, the house sold, and a new home in Levant ready and waiting. In the pictures it was my dream home: a rustic cabin on a lake. The land needed work. There were some rotting trees, overgrowth, et cetera. I’d bought it sight unseen for a song. The place had been under foreclosure for six years. Times are tough, yes. And there I went. I tried not to think too much of the house back in Monlith, what the new owners were doing inside of it, how the porch had withstood the winter. And what my neighbors were saying. ‘She just took off, like a thief in the night.’ That wasn’t true, though. I knew that. I was a good woman. I deserved some peace at last.

I thought some more about a name for this me. In the end, I settled on Blake. It was the kind of name parents were naming their boys those days. It had a twinge of pretension to it in that sense. Blake, as in the shaggy blond boy on the skateboard, the boy eating ice cream from the container, the boy with a squirt gun. Blake, clean your room. Blake, don’t be late for dinner. Given these associations, the name was sneaky and a bit dumb, the kind of boy who would write, It wasn’t me.

Strange, strange what the mind will do. My mind, Charlie’s mind, sometimes I wondered just what the mind was, actually. It hardly made sense that it was something contained in my brain. How could I, simply by thinking that my feet were cold, be asking Charlie to shift his chin to cover them, which he did? Were we not of the same mind at such moments? And if there was a mind I shared with Charlie’s, was there a separate mind I kept for myself? Whose mind was now at work, thinking of the note, imagining, debating, and remembering things as I walked down the path through the birch trees? Sometimes I felt that my mind was just a soft cloud of air around me, taking in whatever flew in, spinning it around, and then delivering it back out into the ether. Walter had always said I was sort of magical that way, a dreamer, his little dove. Walter and I had shared a mind, of course. Couples get that way. I think it has something to do with sharing a bed. The mind, untethered during sleep, travels up and away, dancing, sometimes in partners. Things pass back and forth in dreams. When I dreamt of Walter now, he was young again. He was young still in my mind. I still expected him, at times, to come through the door with a bouquet of roses, carrying in the sweet smell of his cigars, his hands on the rustling cellophane so tender and strong. ‘For you, my dove,’ he’d say. And if not roses, then a book he thought I’d like. Or a new record, or a perfect peach or pear. I missed his thoughtful gifts, little surprises pulled from the pocket of his overcoat.

I suppose my cabin in Levant was Walter’s final gift to me. I’d used the insurance money to buy it, and to move. Profit from the sale of the house in Monlith would keep me fed until I died. And there was also money in savings. Walter had planned well for retirement. He was always scrimping and saving, which made the little gifts he gave me all the more lovely. Roses were expensive, after all. ‘These cost an arm and a leg,’ he said. ‘I hopped home like a cripple.’ He’d have found my cabin cheap and small. He liked big, wide-open spaces. He loved it in Monlith, the plains, the metallic hills of rock, the cold river. I missed Walter. The big house became preposterous without him. When the cabin in Levant presented itself, it was a relief. I felt I needed to hide a little. My mind needed a smaller world to roam.

I thought of that dead meadowlark in Monlith again. It was yellow bellied, beautiful, like a jewel against the pale, frozen gravel. A gift. Strange, strange. Had Charlie thought it would cheer me up? I’d left it there where Charlie had dropped it, and took him by the collar and steered us back home, straining my shoulder, but there was no other way, the leash was ruined. After that, I read books on how to train him. Between packing up the house and signing more papers and so on, Charlie and I bonded and I taught him to obey me. He attuned himself to me and I to him. This was how our minds melded. The books confirmed that a dog should never sleep with its master. At first, we abided by this rule, but when we drove out east, staying in those roadside motels along the way, he crawled in and I couldn’t stop him. I worried that the move would traumatize him. A little comfort did us both a lot of good. The open road is such a lonely place. In Levant, we did tend to sleep together, Charlie even nestling down under the covers with me when it was cold. But in the summer, he’d be at the foot of the bed, or off the bed entirely, splayed out in the cool shadows of the dining table downstairs. He was better on the leash now, though I rarely used it. I carried it with me when we went for walks, in case we came upon some wild animal, and Charlie was moved to attack it. I knew that he could be vicious if he wanted to, if someone was threatening me, if something bad happened. That was a comfort, too. Charlie, my bodyguard. If there was a madman on the prowl, Magda’s killer, whoever, Charlie would attack. His head hit only about midthigh, but he was stately enough, broad shouldered, seventy-eight pounds of muscle and fine pale-brown fur. I’d seen him gnash his teeth and growl only once, at a rattlesnake back in Monlith. It took a lot to rile him up. I heard there were bears around Levant, but I didn’t believe it. I’d seen dead foxes on the road. Also rabbits, raccoons, opossums. At dawn, apart from birds and small rodents, the only other souls out were the gentle whitetail deer. They hid behind trees, stock still as Charlie and I passed by. Out of respect, I tried not to look at them in the eye, and I’d trained Charlie to leave them alone, too. It must be nice to think you can become invisible just by standing still. They were beautiful deer, some as big as horses. What a nice life they must have, I thought. It was so quiet in the woods, sometimes I could hear them breathing.

Blake must have come through in the last twenty-four hours, I figured, since Charlie and I had been there the morning before, and there’d been nothing, no note. As we headed home, I saw no strange footprints, no white fringe or confetti from the ripped-off edge of Blake’s spiral notebook. It had been a whole year now that I’d been in Levant, and those woods felt like they belonged to me and Charlie. Perhaps more than Magda’s murder, it began to bother me that there had been someone else out there, in my woods, touching my rocks, walking down the path I’d been wearing and widening through the birch woods. An invasion. It was like coming home late, going to bed, and waking up to find that at some point in the night, someone had been in your kitchen, had been eating your food, reading your books, wiping his mouth with your cloth napkins, staring at his strange face in your bathroom mirror. I could imagine what fury and fear I’d feel discovering that he’d left the butter out on the counter, a crust of bread, to say nothing of a bloody knife in the sink, or a knife that had been used and washed and set in the rack to dry. Nobody will ever know . . . It could drive a person crazy if something like that happened. You might never sleep again, might never again feel safe in your own home. Imagine all the questions you’d have, and only yourself to ask. The intruder could be in the house still. My God, he could be crouched behind the kitchen door, and there you’d be, standing in your socked feet and bathrobe, agog at the knife glinting in the rack. Had you used it to chop onions? Had you forgotten that you’d wandered down for a midnight snack, left the knife out, et cetera? Were you still dreaming? Was I?

No, no. This was real. Here was Charlie, here was the ground, the air, the trees, the sky above, the sweet green buds of leaves quaking from the branches, pushing forward into life, come what may. I knew these woods. I knew my cabin, the lake, the pines, the road. I was the only person to walk through the birch woods on a regular basis. The neighbors were far enough to have their own birch woods, their own paths. And why would anybody come all the way up here, just to walk on my path? Why would Blake have come, other than for me? It was no mistake. The note was a letter. Who else but me would have found it? I had been chosen. It may just as well have been addressed to me. Dear Vesta. I’ve been watching you . . .

Was Blake watching me even now as I hurried out of the woods? I could imagine a teenage boy, just growing out of the doughy adolescent mask that hid his deviance. Did it give him some strange pleasure to see me so alarmed? Was his mind mingling with my mind somehow, planting these thoughts, these imaginings and reasonings? Dear Vesta. I know where you live. Suppose the woods had never been mine at all. Suppose I’d been the invader, and Blake, pushed to act finally, had sent me this message to scare me off, to ruin my world so that he could have it all to himself. My mind wrangled the possibilities. As we walked, I took the note out again to read it. Her name was Magda. That much still was true.

 

The above is an excerpt from Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel, Death in Her Hands.

The post Death in Her Hands appeared first on Granta.

As I write, the Covid-19 pandemic is still ravaging the world. Doctors, nurses and other care givers on the front lines are at risk every day – and too often they are losing their lives as countries struggle to provide sufficient protective gear to keep them safe. And patients are dying for lack of sufficient ventilators. The pandemic is not only causing terrible suffering for the victims and their families, it is also wreaking havoc on world economies and has led to the loss of jobs, loss of income, loss of future stability and loss of hope for millions.

The tragedy is that we have brought this pandemic on ourselves – a nightmare of this sort has long been predicted by those studying zoonotic diseases, those that, like Covid-19, spill over from animals into humans. (And some 80 per cent of all new human diseases originate in this way). It is almost certain that Covid-19 spilled over from a wild animal in China’s Wuhan Seafood market, which sold terrestrial wildlife for meat along with chickens and fish. When wild animals are sold in such markets, often illegally, they are typically kept in small cages, crowded together, and are frequently slaughtered on the spot. Humans, both vendors and customers, may thus be contaminated with the faecal material, urine, blood and other bodily fluids of a large variety of species – such as bats, civets, pangolins, racoon dogs, rats and snakes. This provides a perfect environment for viruses to spill over from their animal hosts into humans. SARS originated in another wildlife market in Guangdong – it probably spilled over from a civet which had likely been infected by a bat. There are wildlife meat markets of this sort in many Asian countries, and then there are the bushmeat markets of Africa where live and dead animals are sold for food.

But it’s not just in markets that zoonotic diseases can spread. As we destroy more and more of the natural world, many animals are forced into ever closer contact with each other and with humans. This gives viruses and bacteria the opportunity of crossing species barriers, spilling over from ‘reservoir species’ (with which they have lived harmoniously for hundreds of years) into other species and creating new diseases – both in animals and humans. The HIV-AIDS pandemic originated in two parts of central Africa when humans slaughtered chimpanzees, infected with SIV, for food. The deadly Ebola is a zoonotic bacterial disease which crosses from animal reservoirs into apes and humans in different parts of Africa.

Another major concern is the trafficking of wild animals and their body parts around the world, which has become a multi-billion-dollar business often run by criminal cartels. Not only is this very cruel, and definitely contributing to the terrifying extinction of species, but it may also lead to conditions suitable for the emergence of new zoonotic diseases. Wild animals exported, often illegally, from one country to another take their viruses and bacteria with them. The shocking pet trade in young wild monkeys and apes, birds, reptiles and other wild animals is another area of concern. Take Parrot Fever – or Psittacosis – which was first identified in Paris in 1892. The bacteria responsible arrived with a shipment of 500 wild parrots from South America, destined for the pet trade. The disease then spread to other European countries, and also to New York and a few American cities. Its next appearance on the global stage was in 1929, when a woman was given a parrot from a shipment of wild parrots again from South America. The parrot died, and a few days later the woman got sick. She eventually recovered, but many other people were infected, and the disease spread to different parts of America and eventually to Europe. A bite or scratch from a wild animal taken into the home can lead to something much more serious than a mild infection.

Historically, one of the most impactful zoonotic diseases is the Bubonic Plague, which is delivered to humans through bites from the fleas carried by rats. And it is because our cities with their sewers and food waste provide ideal conditions for rats to multiply mightily that humans have been forced into close relations with them. It seems probable that the bacteria that causes Bubonic Plague was responsible for the Black Death that swept across medieval Europe, causing widespread terror and killing about a third of Europe’s population.

There are also many cases of zoonotic diseases that have crossed over to us from domestic animals. MERS leapt the species barrier from domestic dromedary camels in the Middle East, perhaps from people eating undercooked camel meat or drinking their milk. And an early disastrous outbreak of a bacterial disease labelled Q-fever first appeared in men working in a cattle and sheep abattoir in Brisbane, Australia. In fact, the inhumane and crowded conditions of the great factory farms that have sprung up around the world have provided ideal conditions for pathogens to jump into the human population. The terrifying Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–1919 spilled over from wild birds into a commercial duck farm in China and into an industrial pig farm in Iowa, USA. Globally, the pandemic killed some thirty-million people. Another coronavirus that is thought to have a reservoir in bats spilled over into a pig farm in Malaysia, and spread rapidly from pig to pig before spilling over into humans and leading to the disease known as the Nipah virus.

The inhumane crowded and stressful conditions of modern intensive animal farming provide ideal opportunities for pathogens to spill over into humans. Fortunately for us, only a few have lead to major epidemics, and even fewer to pandemics such as the one we are going through today. I do not intend to write about all the zoonotic diseases with which we have been inflicted over the years – anyone interested should read Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen.

It is our disrespect for the natural world and the other animals with whom we share the planet that have led to many of these diseases. We have destroyed so much of nature, and this is particularly disastrous when considering tropical forests, because they support such rich biodiversity. And not only of plants, trees and wildlife, but also bacteria, viruses and other pathogens. People move into animal habitats to expand their villages, grow crops and graze their livestock. Forests are clear-cut, often by foreign corporations. Roads are constructed allowing hunters to move ever deeper into the forests. Dams are built, mining and logging camps spring up, and as animal habitats shrink they lose more and more of their traditional forest foods, and some are forced to raid crops.

And so it goes on, only getting worse. We kill, traffic, sell and breed wild and domestic animals for food, fur and medicine. We exploit them in circuses and for entertainment. Just for a moment pause to reflect that each of these animals is not just one of a species, a statistic in a research paper or the annual report of the meat industry: no – he or she is an individual. When I went to Cambridge university in 1961 to work for a PhD in ethology, the discussion of individuality in animals was an almost taboo subject. I was told I should not talk about animals having personalities, minds or emotions as those were unique to humans. And that there was a difference of kind between us and the rest of the animal kingdom. I had learned the absurdity of this as a child, from my dog. And it was so obvious in the chimpanzees I had been studying. And so, though I was somewhat scared of the professors (I had not been to college for an undergraduate degree), I refused to bow down to the reductionist, arrogant assumption of human superiority. I had a good role model in Darwin, and luckily I had a wonderful supervisor in Professor Robert Hinde, one of the most eminent ethologists. He was originally my sternest critic – but a visit to Gombe helped to open his mind to the truth of what my dog and the chimpanzees of Gombe had already taught me!

Gradually, science came to admit that we are part of, and not separated from, the rest of the animal kingdom. Yet many people, even today, believe – or want to believe – that animals were put into this world for us to use, and that to attribute to them human-like feelings is anthropomorphic sentimentality. But while it may be convenient for those working in research laboratories and stockyards to feel that way, it is increasingly clear that animals – including octopuses and fish – have personalities and emotion such as fear, distress and despair, similar to our own. Many are highly intelligent. And they all feel pain.

This Covid-19 pandemic has led to so much human suffering and fear. But pause to think of the almost unimaginable suffering endured by the billions of sentient, sapient animals – including rodents, guinea pigs, dogs, cats, monkeys and chimpanzees – that have been sacrificed by scientists searching for cures and vaccines for our diseases.

The most frequently used animals in medical research are rats and mice. There is research showing that rats have empathy, and will go without food to allow a starving rat in a neighbouring cage to eat. And research showing how mice can understand when a companion mouse is in pain by his or her facial expressions. And a great deal of research demonstrates the almost uncanny intelligence of rats. Those of us who know dogs understand the extent to which they are capable of suffering, yet they too may be most cruelly treated in medical research. The sooner we use our amazing intellects to find ways of research into our human diseases without what amounts to the torture of innocent animal victims, each one an individual, the better human beings we shall become. For it is only when head and heart work in harmony that we can attain our true human potential.

All around the world, as governments and scientists try to control the spread of Covid-19, millions of people are being forced to stay at home. And all around the world this is so often bringing out the best in human nature. Communities are coming together to help. Close to my home in Bournemouth, in the UK, one business is making hundreds of extra pizzas daily to provide fresh food to health workers. This is possible because of the many people who have donated money and who offer to deliver. Once a week people call out their thanks to those battling on the front line. In China, during the lockdown, many volunteers were caring for the pets that had been left behind as citizen were ordered to leave for testing, and sometimes kept for days in isolation. In Italy, people went out onto their balconies and sang opera together. A man gave free yoga lessons in an empty square to those watching from their windows. People were putting their phone numbers out on social media in case lonely and frightened people needed someone to talk to. Other were delivering food to those who could not get out, or walking their dogs. Celebrities are reading books for children on social media, to entertain those not allowed to go to school. So many examples of community solidarity and acts of kindness.

And hundreds of people who live in big cities around the world have breathed clean air and seen the stars in a clear night sky, and heard the singing of birds loud and clear, no longer drowned by the roar of passing traffic. Marine life is experiencing the joy of a world no longer contaminated by the constant noise of shipping and man-made sonar technology.

There are political and business leaders around the world who only want to get back to business as usual, and the pollution and destruction and cruelty will probably continue. But I truly believe that thousands and thousands of people have been given the time to think about our place in the natural world, re-evaluate our relationship with each other, the natural world and other animals. They will not want to go back to a life of polluted air and water and noise. We can only hope that eventually there will be so many of us clamouring for change that governments and corporations will have to rethink the way they do business. And that this will happen before it is too late.

 

Image © The Jane Goodall Institute / Shawn Sweeney

The post The Covid-19 pandemic appeared first on Granta.

As I write this, it is 9 May 2020. One month has passed since the Japanese government issued a request for voluntary restraint. While the crowds have all but disappeared from the huge train stations such as Tokyo, Shibuya, Shinjuku and Shinagawa, people wearing masks still come and go as usual in the local shopping streets and station squares. I find myself off balance, seduced into the illusion that it’s just another ordinary day in early summer.

Just as foreign media have criticized the Japanese government for its slow and ambiguous response, distrust and anger at the government have been erupting from within the country in recent months. The parliamentarians and bureaucrats who run the country are almost exclusively male, and when photographs of cabinet meetings lined up with men of similar age and appearance are distributed in the media, jokes such as ‘What happened to Japan, did the coronavirus kill off all the women?’ go viral on social media. This is a country where men, who are far removed from domestic life, make all the decisions regarding women’s bodies and children. They are second-generation lawmakers who cannot let go of their analog fax machines and personal seals (hanko). It goes without saying that their responses during the nation’s state of emergency have been incompetent, but what is even more troubling is how we are at a loss as to what to make of the current state of affairs in Japan.

Take the PCR test, for example. There is still controversy among experts whether testing should be increased, or if Japan should maintain the status quo. Some argue that infection numbers and death tolls here are much smaller than those in other countries, while others argue that this is only the result of a cover-up. In any case, what is clear is that even if the direct damage of Covid-19 is kept under control, the economic collapse that has already begun will result in huge casualties. Financial relief from the government is utterly inadequate and inefficient, requiring six hours to apply, and there’s little hope that we can expect more in the future. Japan is stuck holding the ticking bomb that is the Olympic Games, which is hell if it’s held and hell if it isn’t. Even without the pandemic, we were no longer a country that could have held such a grand international enterprise.

 

I feel that these cityscapes and developments are all too typical for Japan. Even the ‘voluntary restraint,’ for example, is a mere ‘request’ from the government, with no penalty or legal consequences. Most, including the oppositional Left, have obeyed the request without any specific promise of compensation. We have no desire for a strong leader who stands out and makes grand decisions. We are used to things unfolding and being decided naturally, and do not object to following with a kind of obedience. Instead of strong leadership, what functions in our society is the all-too-familiar pressure to conform. We are constantly scrutinizing each other’s actions, and monitoring whether we are in line ourselves. As if to say – who could dare to do something different from everyone else! So it goes that, naturally, infected persons are expected to apologize here in Japan. Online, people feel justified in exposing the personal information of those who don’t conform. And, however unbelievable it might seem, healthcare professionals are routinely being discriminated against. The comments section on news sites are filled with abusive rhetoric, shaming those who get into traffic accidents during this voluntary restraint period, claiming that they deserve to die for the inconvenience they’ve caused others. It’s hard to imagine a country where a lockdown would function perfectly, but in the case of Japan, which lacks basic individualism, the current situation has bred insidious hatred and division.

This is not a new problem. We saw something similar after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. While radiation and virus are different in nature, information about both has spread primarily through the infrastructure of social media. What is happening now, happened then. In 2011 discrimination and exclusion was rampant, with radiation treated as defilement (kegare) before we even tried to understand what it was. The word ‘bond’ (kizuna) and the phrase ‘We will not forget’ were ubiquitous and shared throughout Japan. And now, these words ring hollow, as we realize that the most eloquent were the fortunate outsiders who have already forgotten, while those who remember are the ones directly affected, who are still struggling to put their grief and suffering into words.

Today, the Japanese media is full of competing discourses predicting the future, while newly coined phrases such as ‘post-corona’ and ‘with-corona’ make the rounds of magazines and the internet. There is a certain pessimism, indistinguishable from narcissism, that says we cannot go back to the way things were, that everything has been irrevocably lost. But in today’s Japan, where life seems indistinguishable from an ordinary spring day in any other year, is it possible for anything to really change? The lives and realities of those affected have, of course, changed drastically. The dead do not come back, and the everyday life of medical professionals and self-employed workers will never be the same. These are undeniable facts. But what about society as a whole? How can society absorb the pain and realities of these individuals into society’s experience as a whole – not just as a record, but as memory?

 

We are creatures of forgetting. If you imagine Japan as a single body, the Great East Japan Earthquake was like a major injury to one part of that body. The wound hasn’t fully healed, but the body narrowly survived and was able to retain consciousness. One look at the scars and we are reminded of those days. But the coronavirus pandemic leaves no scars that can be traced with the fingers. It’s like the cold you caught last year – you can’t remember when it started and when it went away. As unbelievable as it may seem to those in countries more severely affected, we in Japan may only have vague memories of the pandemic a few years from now.

In our society, there is an aspect of forgetting that functions as hope. This is why we are able to continue living in a country where a major earthquake like the Nankai megathrust could strike tomorrow, where the horrors of the tsunami that claimed so many lives and the earthquake that devastated so many cities are etched in our hearts. It is an amazing thing to consider. Skyscrapers and condominiums continue to be built on land where we know disaster may strike, and nuclear power plants have yet to be abolished. People’s lives are being built on the suspension of thought and the contradictions of survival.

The coronavirus pandemic will certainly cause concrete changes. A reconsideration of group learning, a revelation of the futility of test-focused education, and a questioning of the norms that govern working conditions. But all of that will soon become familiar – functioning like a religious system in which initiation requires the complete oblivion of all that preceded. We will even forget the fact that we have changed.

As we live under voluntary restraint, every day we think, ‘What a luxury it was to see our loved ones whenever we wanted,’ or ‘How wonderful the world was before all of this happened.’ There’s nothing wrong with that. But we should not forget that these are feelings. We tend to adapt to any problem or change, to bend to the general flow of things, and to forget. And this fact, we must not forget.

It is not a sin to feel, ‘The flowers look more beautiful now than ever.’ But flowers, in truth, were beautiful yesterday, last year, five years ago. And the same is true for the ugliness of the world. Most people now pray for vaccines, and few would doubt their value. But before the coronavirus pandemic, when rubella infection in pregnant women became a serious problem, how many middle-aged men responded to the call for free vaccination? What about the anti-vaccinationists? Has enough consideration been given to the fear that wearing masks can instill on those with hearing loss? We talk about voluntary restraint fatigue, without thinking of those who are never able to go outside.

What we must ask ourselves is – why have we been unable or unwilling to see the reality of the world until now? And what concrete actions will we take in our lives, now that it has been made visible? The only way to cope with forgetting, which has become so thoroughly integrated with Japanese life, is to keep thinking and to keep acting. We must rip hope away from the suspension of thought, and make it exist independently. To remember is to continue to think and to consciously change your behavior, even if only slightly.

Do not let this coronavirus pandemic be a mere paraphrase of the world in which we previously lived. We must be prepared, for disaster will always repeat itself. We exist perpetually in the day before – ignorant of the disaster that is to come.

 

Image © Sean Marshall

The post The Flowers Look More Beautiful Now Than Ever appeared first on Granta.

After several grueling hours of protesting against systemic injustice (no one can prepare you for long hours on your feet, long hours screaming for recognition of your humanity), we stood with our signs tucked safely under our arms as the organizer introduced some parting words. The speaker was an older Black man, the weariness of the movement evident in his face and in the way he leaned against a streetlamp for support. But his passion was clear in his speech as he declared that we were not the first to fight for our rights, and we will not be the last: he was protesting in the streets back in his early adulthood, the same way we were today. It was then that I looked at the faces of the people around me; some couldn’t be older than sixteen, and some as old as the speaker, or older. It was in the aftermath of being surrounded by these people, all aligned in our goal for the abolishment of the systemic injustices that cause Black oppression, that Nina Revoyr’s literary crime novel Southland came to mind.  

I first encountered this sweeping tale of past and present iterations of Los Angeles, of riots, looting, and the reincarnations of allyship, in my Asian American Literature class, junior year of college. My professor had casually remarked that it was her favorite novel of all the ones we read; I was too awash in pre-finals anxiety to give her remark a second thought. It wasn’t until I came home from the protest that I gave the text the attention it deserves. A story about injustice dressed up as a detective novel, Southland reminds us that activism is both an ongoing project and a deeply personal choice.

The pathway to justice in Southland is a quiet storm, at odds with the loud righteous moment going on today—but the unity in creating genuine change remains the same, predicated on the past. Southland draws on Los Angeles’s history of activism—the Watts riots of 1965 and the Rodney King riots of 1992—but also shows how that hunger for change can manifest in isolated actions, in individual lives. Today, we take to the streets, we sign petitions and start hashtags that address the various inequalities Black people face in the workplace. We are very loudly and openly discussing the systems that have led to decades long, ongoing oppression. These open discussions are no longer isolated to a single March on Washington, or even a city-localized riot: this is a national conversation gone worldwide. Southland reminds us that it must become personal, too.

‘Southland’ shows how the hunger for change can manifest in isolated actions, in individual lives.

The protagonist of Southland, Jackie Ishida, discovers in reading her grandfather’s will that he played a role in a multiple homicide decades earlier, during the Watts riots. Jackie and her acquaintance turned friend, James Lanier, a cousin of one of the victims, look into the murders and fight for a legal investigation. Along the way, Jackie learns more about her grandfather, and about the history of Los Angeles through the eyes of those she encounters along her journey. The journey Jackie Ishida goes through in uncovering her grandfather’s past, and the important weight his corner store holds to the surrounding Crenshaw community, means so much more to me now in the wake of the media’s spin on rioting and the national attention on the police state we live in. 

Jackie Ishida, a second generation Japanese American, is, like so many of us, comfortably enveloped in privilege. Much of the conversation lately has shined on the workings of white privilege and the ways it bleeds into every aspect of our livelihood, but it’s important to speak on the ways we as black and nonblack people of color have privilege, too. In order to truly dismantle systemic injustice, there must be a dedicated effort to address the variant intersections that allow for some of us to be ahead of the curve, while others struggle to even see where the curve is. One of those privileges often, is silence: the ability to not speak up on the sufferings of others worse off than you because you are doing fine. For Jackie Ishida’s family, though, this silence became a double-edged sword. 

In so many ways, Jackie Ishida’s family suffered: internment, forced participation in World War Ⅱ, constant mistreatment from white people due to their being Japanese. But rather than address the systemic injustices they faced, they secured higher positions (and profit), letting their silence wrap around them like a noose. “Her family didn’t talk,” Revoyr writes. “None of them, including her grandfather. No words laced together into a chain of intertwined stories that connected her to anyone’s past. More than gaps in the narrative; there was no narrative. Whole years, like the years of World War Ⅱ, dropped cleanly from their collective history.” This silence eventually disconnects Jackie Ishida so much that she is uncomfortable addressing race or racism in any way, which is its own privilege. If you cannot speak up for others, how can we all dismantle the system?

If you cannot speak up for others, how can we all dismantle the system?

This silence is also the reason why she knows nothing about her grandfather, or the shocking scene that lies at the core of Southland’s intrigue: four Black boys found dead in the freezer of his store in the aftermath of the Watts riots. No one cared enough even to report it. Jackie’s inability to reconcile her grandfather’s past with her concept of him is how the tale begins, but it expands into an investigation of what it means to renounce the privilege of silence and ignorance. The novel is a love letter to Los Angeles, but also a gentle takedown of Jackie’s assumptions and judgmental nature, the legacy of growing up enveloped in privilege and a genuine lack of awareness. 

Discovering the bodies is the catalyst for Jackie to start filling the silence with noise, creating a narrative with pieces of the past: through constant discoveries, old and new, of her grandfather’s role in Crenshaw and the homicides. Jackie’s insistent probing into the multiple homicide becomes her connection to a history of oppression and activism; despite his silence in life, she feels her grandfather “practically willed it.” Like myself when I stared into the eyes of the people protesting with me, Jackie feels the totality of the past, long ignored in her family, and uses her privilege to bring it to light.

The past is always rearing its head and making itself known in the present, in the future.

Perhaps it is Jackie’s recognition of her grandfather’s loneliness, or her desire to piece together the bits of noise amidst the silence, but she does everything in her power to give the murdered Black boys justice — and in doing so, discovers her family’s past. Her family’s past, the history of Frank’s store, is simply the beginning. The past is always rearing its head and making itself known in the present, in the future. Jackie’s reflection on how the Rodney King riots of 1992 were portrayed in the news, as the media described the looters, rings true to today’s 2020 media coverage: “’it’ was coming closer to ‘us’; telling their viewers —as if they couldn’t see and smell for themselves—of the smoke that hovered over the city.” The media has a history of taking whole swaths of people (often people of color) and painting them as the Other, a dangerous conglomerate threatening any source of normalcy. This “it” versus “us” dynamic echoes today as we see people who riot and loot are called “outside agitators,” as people discuss looting with more care than the fact of Black people losing their lives to police every single day.

One of my favorite moments in the text is when Jackie finally steps foot on the ground where Frank’s store used to be, though it suffered damage after the aforementioned Rodney King riots of 1992. 

Her grandfather’s money had been made and lost here. Four teenage boys had died here. It seemed to Jackie that if she could just get inside, beyond the boards, the answers would all be available to her, scattered among the ashes. … Her past was like this neighborhood—still there, intact, but she had never bothered to visit.

Frank’s store’s existence, standing through riots, looting, and death, is what drives Jackie. Frank’s store is a piece of history; a chance for Jackie’s redemption and her ability to restore a narrative otherwise lost to her. Jackie’s past, her grandfather’s past, the history of Crenshaw, is only the beginning. I spent some time protesting in the neighborhood I grew up in—the place I hung out with my friends after school, the place I grew into the steadfast woman I am today. Bringing the fight for our rights to such a local place has changed me forever, in ways I’m incredibly proud of. The same sentiment stands for Jackie, who is driven to change her present after setting foot in her grandfather’s past.

The past is prologue. The Black Lives Matter movement has existed for going on a decade, and yet it is only the beginning, a continuation of the work done by civil rights activists of the ’60s, of the Watts riots of 1965, of the Rodney King riots of 1992. We are standing on the backs of those who have fought long before us, and we all would be better if we remembered that. The news is telling one story of rage, looting, and woe, but as in Southland, we must create our own story.

The post The Novel That Shows Us How to Face Our Past to Change Our Future appeared first on Electric Literature.