Writer Sarah Hagi is said to have originated the highly relatable, often quoted, and even merchandised tweet, “Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man.” It is a phrase that many women have muttered to themselves in the midst of a bout of imposter syndrome, when some sense of self-doubt creeps in and we wonder, how do white men have the audacity? Where do they get the sheer nerve? 

Ijeoma Oluo in her new book, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, takes a deep dive into the motivations, expectations, and the root cause of why so many white men move through our society with extreme confidence and righteous entitlement. Mediocre reveals not only how dangerous it is for women and people of color to be on the receiving end of such entitlement, but how failing to meet the ingrained and deep-seated expectations sowed into the white male psyche for generations has proven to be a tragedy for white men also. Fresh off of the success of So You Want to Talk About Race, through a historical, political, and sometimes personal journey, Oluo attempts to answer one of the most mysterious questions of our time: Why in the hell are white men so mad?

I spoke with Oluo about exactly that question, the ways in which America can move away from the white male supremacy design, and if it is human nature to align yourself politically with others like yourself.

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Tyrese L Coleman: A central theme is that America is stuck in a system that is designed to uplift and reinforce white male supremacy, and that in doing so, everyone suffers, including white men. I’m curious as to whether or not you think our reliance on this design can or will ever be undone. And if so, will it be in your lifetime?

Ijeoma Oluo: Absolutely. I think it can be done. I think that right now, we are seeing with the changing racial demographics in this country is this mad, really intense effort to entrench these systems, even in non-white spaces. And so that’s something that we’re going to have to work extra hard to resist. 

But, what I’m more likely to see in my lifetime is not that the system’s gone, but seeing pockets where we’ve disengaged from it and are working and building. I think it’s gonna be piecemeal and local. The system didn’t just land on us all of a sudden, it was built up, and it’s gonna have to be torn down piece by piece. What I’m hoping people see in this book are the reflections and the choices they’re making in their cities and towns. We can start making better choices in our workplaces, our towns, our churches to start dismantling these systems all over the country. That’s how the system was built. That’s how it could be taken down. 

TLC: Do you think we are moving towards a place where this is actively happening as we sit here right now?

IO: I think that in some places it is. Well, first, I wanna be very clear, there have always been activists, right? And even people within the system fighting to try to do this work for a very, very long time. So, yeah, I do think that we see bits and pieces of it. The “defund the police” effort is a huge part of it, the fight to de-weaponize one of the more violent tools of democracy in this country. We’re seeing it in some school reforms around the country. We’re seeing it even in the election and leadership of people like The Squad in congress, you know? And so I think that it’s absolutely being done. People have been dedicated to this effort for the entirety of human history. 

But if there’s one thing that the book shows is that as hard as some of us may be working, there are other forces working just as hard to try to take back any gains we make. So, it really is going to take a larger level of awareness and a lot more dedication in order for us to make changes last.

TLC: History has shown us that, in times where this country takes steps towards the social and political progress that you mentioned, moving outside of this white male supremacy design, we then take five steps back. For example, we saw this after the Civil War during reconstruction. We saw it in the 70s and 80s after the Civil Rights Movement. We saw it with Trump after Obama. What is your take on why this happens? Why do we revert back to the status quo? Is it—and I hate to say this, but for lack of a better word—a comfort level? 

White male identity is—right now and has always been, as far as the history of this country—a reactionary identity, not a proactive identity.

IO: I think there’s a couple of things. One, for people, for many people of color, I wouldn’t necessarily call it a comfort level. But I would say there is a deep fear of the unknown. We have history to show us that pushing too far means the backlash would be even harder or that there’s really a limit to what can be accomplished. And I think that we saw a lot of this in this election where people knew we absolutely needed to get Trump out of office but also, I think that many people of color had this pragmatic idea that white people were only gonna vote for so much. But also, I think it’s really important to recognize that Black America has bought into a lot of these white male ideals. 

But I would also say it’s really important to recognize, and it’s something that I hope that the book can make clear, that white male identity is—right now, and has always been, as far as the history of this country—a reactionary identity, not a proactive identity. And that means that, where it feels like it’s being shifted or pushed or threatened, it’s stronger than it ever is. And what we see is a direct backlash when something is shifting. If your identity is only based, comparatively, on what someone else is doing or what or how much further ahead of others you are, that means that every bit of progress is a threat.

TLC: You use a quote from Woodrow Wilson, “the white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation.” And that goes to what you were just saying, the self-preservation instinct. Is that driving the reactionary response?

IO: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s driving not only the reactionary response on the right, but also the reactionary response on the left, where we immediately start hearing that things have gone too far. The immediate fear. Even now, when we talk about why there wasn’t a bigger landslide [during the recent Presidential election] and people are saying, “Oh, well, you know, you said defund the police too much.” “Things don’t center us anymore, so that must be why things are the way they are.” And so it’s not only a response on the right, it’s a response across the board that is incredibly reactionary. And that also doesn’t get investigated, because the moment white male identity isn’t under threat, it goes dormant. No one stops and goes, “Why, why did a Black man get elected and I freak out? Why did that happen?” No one does that. 

So, I think that’s the real danger. But also the fact that we then treat that response as an excuse to not push further. If we don’t push further, we don’t get the backlash. Then what? Well, then we’re stuck where we are forever, right? But people pretend like it’s not a natural response that’s going to keep happening every time we make progress. People like to pretend there’s a way to make progress that won’t threaten white male identity.  And there simply isn’t. So, in order to move forward with a society that isn’t stuck in this design, we have to actually confront the white male mediocrity that is in power. 

TLC: That reminds me of your chapter sections on Biden and Bernie. The theme I got from those sections was that, “white man is gonna white man.” They’re going to align themselves with those that are like themselves. There’s always this argument that we should move away from identity politics but that, in and of itself, is an example of identity politics, especially when you are aligning yourself with the policies and the legislation that help your particular identity. But is that a part of human nature? Isn’t it natural for them to do that?

IO: I would say no. I would say what is natural is to see affinity. And when we pick who represents us, often affinity is what we choose. Whether this person represents our interests and represents who we are. 

But there are two things I think that have been deliberately constructed. One is how white men view community and their best interests. And it’s very exclusive. Who we view as community, who I view is community, and whose futures I tie to my own is important. But also are your definition of well-being, your definition of best interest and what those interests are deliberately constructed to be harmful? That can make a huge difference.

I can look at someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is not Black, and see affinity with her because I can see the way she is fighting for poor communities. And that’s how I consider my community because my community is about bringing people together and solidarity. It is not about being on top and being more powerful. That’s where the danger is. And politically, that’s what we have with white manhood as a political construct, an identity based on power and oppression. And that means that you can never actually find an identity that reaches beyond that. You can never actually find cooperation or shared interest if it would threaten your power. 

And that’s really the difference. It is completely natural to find affinity with people to say “this is us, and you are you.” But if what defines it means that, even when it’s in your best interest, you can’t expand, you can’t bring other people in, you can’t find shared interest because your interest is always about doing better or having more than, then we have a serious problem, especially in a democracy.

TLC: In thinking about the process of transferring power or equalizing power, you write, “…yes it will offer some real benefits for you, but it will not always benefit you. Sometimes it may seem like justice is disadvantaging you when the privileges you enjoy are threatened.” Do you think that in order to create equality, there has to be a giving up of something in order to benefit others? Or is there another way of looking at it that could make it feel less like giving up? Do white men, in order to come to a reckoning with history, have to do the work of giving up some level of power in order to equalize things?

IO: I think, no matter what, the power has to be given up. When everyone is doing better, you do better, no matter what. We all do better. 

But there isn’t a one for one replacement for an identity built on being better than everyone else. And so that means that it will at times feel like a loss that has nothing to go in its place. And the only way you can value what replaces it, is if you let it go. You can’t hold on. You can’t say, “I’m gonna hold on to this power while I get used to not having power.” It doesn’t work that way. And so that’s the part that’s important. And it’s also important that we recognize this because we can’t keep saying we’re gonna wait until white men are comfortable and ready because that in and of itself is upholding white male supremacy. Their comfort is so important that we’ll continue these systems that are literally killing people because white men aren’t ready yet. We haven’t found a way to convince them yet. That in itself is saying a lot about, respectively, how we value white men compared to everyone else.

TLC: For a long time, the default has been “white” and “male.” For example, when you think about the terms “fiction” and “women’s fiction” to differentiate genres. The fact that one has to differentiate “women’s fiction” means that “fiction” is not for women. But I feel like we’re heading into a world where white men are being specifically identified as “white men,” highlighting them as individuals, whereas before, it felt like they were a conglomerate. 

You write about how angry white men are, and I’m wondering if part of the desperate anger that we see and that you experienced in your personal life as a result of white men is related to a spotlight on them as individuals, so that they’re now being required to show their worth rather than relying on being a part of the default? 

IO: I think of it somewhat in the opposite, which is that there was never any light on the system. The system was fully operating for white men and yet we had this idea that each white man was an individual and never responsible for what he did collectively. We weren’t saying, “We have a white man problem.” It was, “No, no, no, no, no. We have a problem with this one man. And this one man.” Collectively as Black people, we were always saying, “Look, white people are gonna do this shit, right? This is fucked up.” How many times have you been asked if people are racist and you say, “No, you have one racist person. People aren’t racist.” Or asked to seperate? “We’re not all bad.” Even when we talk about the police. “No, we have one bad cop. We don’t have a systemic problem.”

The problem with that is that it absolves white men from accountability. It also stops them from seeing how the system is screwing them over because it’s invisible. The system that they are a part of that is supposed to magically make them all happy, successful and powerful is invisible to that. All they know is that they’re failing. 

I do think we are seeing increased accountability in the last few years. Talking about #MeToo, talking about race. We’re seeing white men who’ve been doing what they’ve always been programmed to do, feeling like they’re being cheated. But not only are they not getting rich and famous, not only do they not feel successful, but now they’re being punished for doing what they’ve been programmed to do. And I think that, for them, it feels incredibly unfair. It feels like they’re being targeted and maligned because, as a society, we have allowed white men to not be responsible for how they participate in systemic oppression. And now that they’re being held responsible, they’re basically like, “Oh, since when?” This is a tragedy. They’re allowed to center themselves because we haven’t moved far enough away from the narrative. It’s still all about these white men. They don’t get that it’s not all about them. 

I think that’s part of what we’re seeing, this mix. White male power got to be ubiquitous for so long. It got to be the air we breathe. And now there’s suddenly some accountability. And I think white men, too, have always been angry and bitter by the failures that have been placed upon them. They aren’t as successful. They’re not as successful and powerful as they were told they should be and because we never talked about the system, they weren’t told why. And so they were told to blame us, blame women, blame people of color. And now, on top of that, they’re like, “I’m already miserable and you want to yell at me for grabbing someone’s ass at the workplace? Since when?” We’re seeing this anger and desperation because they aren’t conditioned to accept responsibility. They have refused to learn how they participated in systems of violence.

TLC: I mean, it’s funny how the stereotype is of an angry Black woman, right? But what I’ve read in Mediocre is the angry white man archetype. I can’t help but think, “What the hell do they have to be so angry about?” They’re still ahead of everyone else when you look at employment, pay, housing, education, everything. That’s what you were just addressing, this unrealistic level of expectation and then being slammed down by reality. Even yet, still, most of the world is like, “okay, and…” 

IO:  I can understand so much about whiteness, but I can’t understand what it would feel like to be 40 and realize that you’re part of an unfair system. You know what I mean? 

We need to recognize that we have been programmed to view harmful white male ideals as leadership and step away from it.

The difference is that white men have been so coddled that they don’t know they can survive this knowledge. They can grow past it. We have. We are living examples of going past the knowledge that this system sucks. We still do what we can. We still care for our families. We still try to find happiness.

But there’s this idea that a white man shouldn’t have to, and they have no practice in it. And I’m sure that’s a huge existential crisis to realize you’ve striven your whole life for something you were never ever, ever gonna get. You know, when I was a kid, no one said to me, “You could be president one day.” But we were told to strive and try our hardest, because we had to take care of our family. Because we had to be something. But not “it’s coming to you.”

White men were told they could be president someday. No matter what. Even if your kids hate politics, don’t pay attention to anything, is a total asshole. There’s still someone telling them that they could be president someday, and they will become president someday.

And there’s almost a cruelty to it—the lie that’s told to white men—because only so many of them can be president. Only so many of them can have their own company. Only so many of them are gonna be rich. There’s limited resources in the system that siphons up the majority of profits for business owners and investors. So it is a childish, oversensitive place that white male America often finds itself in. And I don’t know what it’s like, and I can’t imagine what those growing pains are because it’s just a luxury that so many of us never had.

TLC: What can those of us who aren’t white men do to help move our society forward so that everyone benefits? Specifically, how can we disrupt the design? 

IO: One is we have to be really aware of where we uphold it. This is where we do the self-audit and say, even for me as a Black woman, where do I, and in Black culture, define success as a dude, putting on a suit and talking a particular way instead of accomplishments that may be divorced from white supremacy and patriarchy? Where am I spending my money? What am I consuming? What am I supporting? What conversations am I having around that to free myself and my family and my community?

But then also it’s really important for us to look at systems that were born in these ideals and then continue to uphold the status quo and fight for change. Starting in your school district and going through your kids textbooks and see what’s in it. Look at school funding. Look at teacher recruitment. Look at what we can do at a local level because, obviously, that’s where the impact of everyday life is but it’s also the breeding ground, the training ground for our national politics. 

These national politicians don’t just appear out of nowhere. They come up through the systems and are told what to expect. I think it’s important that we look at our systems and say, “Okay, you know what? Maybe I can’t influence what’s happening in D.C., but I can influence what’s happening in my city council. I can take a look at what’s being promoted there. I can look at what businesses I’m supporting locally. I can look at what I’m saying to my kids about terrorism and manhood and how it’s being defined. I can have those conversations.” I think that that’s really where we have to start doing the work. 

And then, of course, where we do have power on a national level, where we can vote and support and make our voices heard, we have to. We have to really check ourselves and recognize that we have been programmed to view harmful white male ideals as leadership, and we have to learn to recognize it and step away from it.

The post Ijeoma Oluo on Dismantling White Male Privilege appeared first on Electric Literature.

Daisy Lafarge’s Life Without Air was published this year by Granta Books. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the collection explores states of airlessness, from ghostly asphyxiations to the toxic environments of extractive capitalism, and ensuring consequences both psychic and ecological.

Granta spoke to the poet about the zoonotic diseases, ancient processes of inoculation and resisting totalising metaphors.

 

The title of the collection is ‘Life Without Air’ – a reference to the eighteenth-century scientist Louis Pasteur’s term for fermentation. It’s a strong image. What drew you to it? And why does it introduce your collection?

Air and airlessness were already emerging as themes when my editor Rachael and I were sorting through material to include in the book, but finding the phrase in Pasteur was serendipitous, as I was reading his work in relation to my PhD research on pathogens. The duality of the phrase immediately startled me; it seemed to be a riddle at the same time as a clear, scientific description.

From various accounts I’ve read Pasteur held some pretty unsavory views – he was a huge germaphobe and this seemed to go hand in hand with his hatred of ‘the masses’ and distrust of democracy. Apparently he put his family through an ordeal every dinnertime, at which he would sit and silently ‘search’ his food and wine glass for traces of dirt or contamination. His discovery of the interaction of bacteria and yeast in fermentation overturned the classical theory of Spontaneous Generation, which held that life spontaneously appeared out of dead or decaying matter – which explained, for example, the products of fermentation, or the appearance of maggots on rotting meat.

So I imagine that Pasteur in some sense would have been less than happy to discover ‘life without air’ – unquantifiable mobs of microscopic life that wallow at the bottom of a so-called ‘chain of being’.  As I turned this phrase over I began to realise how much of the book it pulled together – an idea of life or liveliness persisting where it ‘shouldn’t’. For me this opens up a way to think about nonhuman life oppressed and overlooked by human domination, of human resilience under systemic conditions of patriarchy and capitalism, and more intimately in the experience of abusive relationships.

I also see the phrase as pulling macro and micro environments together across time – the earliest life on the planet was ‘life without air’, anaerobic bacteria that slowly died off when oxygen began to ‘pollute’ the atmosphere and create one that would be breathable for eventual animal life. I’ve read that what most closely resembles these early planetary conditions is the interior of the human body, which obviously coexists with a myriad of viruses and bacteria. I think this is what’s happening when the fictional narrator of ‘Fossil Dinner’ points to her open mouth and says ‘the natural world is in here’ to her cartographer husband (who definitely has a shade of the dinnertime-Pasteur).

 

Today we know Pasteur for his contributions to the principles of modern vaccination. In fact he created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax. Given you wrote this collection pre-pandemic, is this just a coincidence? Where did that interest come from? 

Kind of a coincidence – I started a PhD focussed around zoonotic diseases in 2016, the first few years of which involved a crash course in contemporary epidemiology, and which I supplemented with research into the history of medicine and disease more broadly. A lot of this was new to me, although it grew from an interest in ecology, the nonhuman, and relations between species in my previous studies. Life Without Air isn’t my PhD project but I think my research and experiences of the latter probably account for the references to contagion, quarantine and things generally ‘infecting’ each other throughout the book.

My research has also fanned an interest in pre-Enlightenment, and non-Western practices of medicine and healing, and how so many of these have been historically coopted, and then rebranded as Western scientific developments. Your mention of vaccination is an interesting case in point, because vaccination built on the much more ancient process of inoculation, practiced for centuries in India, Africa and China. It was introduced to the West in the early eighteenth century by an English aristocrat, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who lived for a while in Constantinople, and there witnessed the miraculous results of smallpox inoculation. When she tried to bring the practice to Britain it was widely deemed ‘barbaric’ and ‘un-Christian’. But despite these origins, it was Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch that went down in history as the ‘fathers’ of vaccination in the centuries that followed.

 

And looking at the collection mid-pandemic, do you find new connections in the work? ‘have you ever festered / in your own quarantine, afraid / that your toxins would spread’ – most people were not thinking about quarantines, diseases, infections and ‘chronic abjection’ in the years before 2020. Your collection is teeming with these things. Has your fascination with these things evolved? 

For one thing the title has definitely taken on a whole new set of associations; Rachael and I settled on Life Without Air pre-Covid and back then our only concern was that it potentially sounded like an end-of-life memoir . . . Which I think ties in to a broader anxiety that attends the newfound connections you mention: the work having a kind of currency I hadn’t prepared for. That line you quote, from the sequence Dredging the Bataou Lake, was written in 2015, which makes it possibly the oldest poem in the book. But it’s probably the page I’ve seen shared most on social media, I suppose because it seems to encapsulate the affective mire of prolonged lockdown(s).

While I’m really glad that it resonates with people this way, I guess I feel uneasy about it being read as written about this quarantine, which is so particular, real, and unevenly distributed along lines of wealth and race. I haven’t really written any poems since the pandemic started, and while long periods of not writing poems are usual for me, it feels odd to publish what appears to be a pandemic-themed book, while not yet feeling able to write about lived experience of the pandemic at all!

 

The book presents a series of toxic environments (pollution, patriarchy), and the parallel dangers to climate and psyche. There’s also a sense of faith in the power of resilience that threads through the book. Would you describe the collection as hopeful? 

Part of what appealed to me about Pasteur’s term is that it seemed to imply survival in spite of a perceived lack – which is obviously more to do with a human misconception of the conditions necessary for life. Many forms of life do thrive in airless conditions and ‘anoxic waters’, so I am interested in thinking about what perspectives are at play in our terminology. For me ‘life without air’ is a cipher for holding space for what lives beyond our comprehension at any given moment.

I really appreciate your phrasing – ‘the parallel dangers to climate and psyche’ – as this is so much what the book encapsulates for me. There’s a reductive line of thinking where any sense of emotion or psychology in writing about the nonhuman is immediately dismissed as ‘anthropocentric’. Anthropocentrism is undeniably the way we live in – and harm – the planet, but I can’t get behind the idea that pushing aside our humanity is somehow innately more attuned to the nonhuman. To me that only serves to reinforce the idea of a human/nonhuman divide and smacks of the myth of objectivity.

I really like how Wendy Wheeler, a biosemiotician who sadly passed away this year, defends the Romantic poets against accusations of dangerously ‘romanticising’ the nonhuman, by reminding us that they were actually the first wave of resistance to the Enlightenment’s mechanistic view of nonhumanity as a set of soulless resources. A romantic, experiential view of the nonhuman is obviously far from perfect and rife with anthropic projections. But it might also offer a partial way back to what was largely excised from Europe, but which still exists in other cultures: a sense of all forms of life being innately connected, mutually dependent and vulnerable, moved and gathered by a principle of cycles, rather than hierarchy or linear progress.

On an experiential level, I think of trauma sustained in relationships as being, in a very real sense, environmental experiences, which exist within a much broader and impersonal environmental crisis. I don’t want to make these things seem equivalent to each other, or claim that they have the same roots, but I suppose I see language as a place for exploring the experiential, in which resonances and slippages between categories and scales, or the personal and the impersonal, can occur.

I’m glad that a sense of belief in resilience and hope comes through the book! I wanted it to stay with difficulty without collapsing into hopelessness, which I don’t believe is a helpful political outlook in terms of climate crisis, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of oppressions we face. That said, I don’t see the book as a clear-cut manifesto. My relationship to writing (thus far, at least) is that it’s a place for moving through the murk of what I don’t understand or know how to articulate, rather than what I do.

 

At times you move into an archaic and ecological register, a botanical mode. The language feels as if it’s from another era. What does this register offer you? (You also seem wary of the past, e.g. the ballroom ‘doused in morally dubious nineteenth-century light’.)

I feel quite susceptible to different vernaculars and ways of doing language in general – moving around a lot as a child meant that I picked up a range of accents, which has now flattened into one that I can’t locate in any one place. I still catch myself slipping into other people’s vowel sounds and lilts, and I suppose the same thing happens in writing.

The different registers and modes usually come from what I am reading or thinking about at any given time, a kind of linguistic or syntactic texture that works its way into the writing. Writing poems has always been a side pursuit to what I am supposed to be doing academically, and so I think at times it has acted as a kind of slough or marginalia, a place for the unprocessed language and imagery that isn’t finished with me yet, or that I feel wants to ‘play’ in some way that it can’t in its original context.

And in relation to the last question I find poetry a way of experimenting with a sensibility in language – how do we think/speak/write of the nonhuman, without losing sight of how inescapably human we are? I love how different registers open up different ways of looking at the familiar. For example, the live culture of some fermenting processes is often referred to as ‘the mother’, which may etymologically come from the Middle Dutch for ‘dregs’. This opens up a different kind of familial scene, a way of thinking through those relations as metabolic – what can and cannot be digested by certain members, what is the necessary ‘waste’ produced by being in relation.

That said, I’m wary of too-neat or totalising metaphors which then end up drawing attention to themselves as conceits – instead I’m attracted to that murky state between, where you’re not quite sure if something is literal or figurative, and the polarity of those two things is itself called into question. I’m a fan of how Mary Ruefle describes metaphor as ‘the philosophy that everything in the world is connected.’

 

Read ‘Fossil Dinner’ by Daisy Lafarge, from the collection Life Without Air published by Granta Books.

Image © Sophie Davidson

The post Interview appeared first on Granta.

“The Hands of Dirty Children” by Alejandro Puyana

We’re called the Crazy 9, but there are not always nine of us. We were nine before la policía took Tuki. We called him Tuki because he loved to dance all weird. Every time he heard the tuki-tuki of electronic music, he flailed his arms and raised his knees like some sort of strange bird. Tuki was funny but a little mean. I miss him, but not too much.

I feared we would be seven soon. Ramoncito hadn’t been feeling well, throwing up everywhere. He smelled really bad because he pooped his pants the other day and hadn’t been able to find new ones, so we didn’t like to stand next to him. Or sometimes we made fun of him and yelled, “Ramoncito, pupusito!” and everyone laughed and laughed and laughed, but inside I wasn’t laughing too hard; inside I felt bad. When the others were asleep, I pinched my nose with my finger and thumb and went to Ramoncito. I used to bring him something to eat too, but the last two times he threw up right after, so I didn’t bring him food anymore—why waste it, is what I say—but I still asked, “How are you feeling, Ramoncito?” and “Is there anything I can do, Ramoncito?” My voice sounded funny because of the nose pinch, and sometimes he smiled. Before, he would talk to me a little, but now he didn’t talk much. He could still walk around and go with us on our missions, but he was very slow. His eyes were sleepy all the time, and they looked like they were sinking into his skull. But we also laughed at him because he’s the youngest, only seven and a half, and everyone always gives the youngest a hard time. I was the youngest before Ramoncito came along, but even if Ramoncito didn’t last much longer, the others wouldn’t treat me like the youngest because I was the one that found the knife, and I’m the best at using it.

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Here is what the Crazy 9 love.

We love our name, and we won’t change it, even if we are really eight, or seven—we love it because it sounds crazy and because we scrawl it all over the place—when we find spray cans, or markers, or pens.

We love the knife. We found it one night after running away from the lady who wouldn’t give us any money, so we pushed her and took her purse. As we gathered to inspect our loot on the banks of the Güaire River, I pulled it from a secret pocket, shiny and dangerous. We love to take turns and unfold the blade from its wooden handle and scream, “Give me all your money!” but we are just practicing. I carry the knife most of the time because I found it, but also because I can throw it at a tree and almost always get it to stick, and I can also throw it in the air and almost always catch it by the handle without cutting my hand.

We love Pollos Arturos, it’s everyone’s favorite, but we almost never get to have any, because if the guard sees us he screams and chases us away—but sometimes we will beg and someone will give us a wing. One time Ramoncito got a leg, but that was before he was throwing up. He got a leg because the youngest always does the best begging. But we have rules in the Crazy 9, so we didn’t take the leg away from Ramoncito. He ate it all by himself.

We love going to the protests. We don’t go to the front too much because that’s where the police fight the protesters—the protesters wear their T-shirts tight around their faces, or they make gas masks out of junk, or they wear bicycle helmets and carry wooden and zinc shields with the colors of the flag painted on them; they throw mostly rocks at the police, but sometimes they shoot fireworks at them. One of them holds the cohetón parallel to the ground—aimed straight at the line of men in their green uniforms and their plastic shields and their big shotguns—while another lights the fuse. They only let it go when the whistling is loud, and we think they might be holding on to it for too long, long enough for it to explode in their hands, but then we see it fly like a comet straight into the green and plastic wall of soldiers that stands down the road. We always cheer when we see that.

Sometimes we stand next to them and yell at the police. We wrap our T-shirts around our faces and scream “¡Viva Venezuela!” and “¡Abajo Maduro!” and jump and throw rocks. It’s fun, except for when the tear gas comes and we have to run away or else cough and cough and cry and cry. But we mostly stay at the back of the protests because we can beg or steal better. Because the women are there, or the older men, or the cowards that don’t want to fight in the front, like us. The begging is good at the protests. The lady will see us and tell her friend in the white shirt and the baseball cap with the yellow, blue, and red of the flag, “Our country is gone, isn’t it? Poor child. I swear, chama, I don’t remember it ever being this bad!” That’s the moment when I try them, and most of the time I get a few bolivares. But we have rules in the Crazy 9, so we always share the money we get from begging or stealing.

We love each other. We say “Crazy 9 forever!” and exchange manly hugs. I love that feeling you get when you hug someone and you mean it. But it also makes me remember things I don’t like remembering, so let’s not talk about that.

We love mangos! Mangos are our favorite because they are sweet and they are free. We walk down the nice streets, the ones that have the big trees on them, and I pull the bottom of my shirt away from my tight belly, and Ramoncito follows me, placing mangos from the ground inside it, the ones that aren’t nasty. After we are finished, when my shirt is as filled as the grocery bags the rich ladies carry when we beg outside the Excelsior GAMA, we walk all bowlegged and tired to an alley and eat mangos until night. We eat until our whole faces are yellow and mango hair grows between our teeth. We eat until each of us has a mountain of mango pits, and all we can smell is the sweet rot of the mango slime, and the flies start to go crazy. But that was before, when Ramoncito could still walk behind me and pick up mangos. When there were mangos to pick up. Now the mango trees give nothing but shade. And now we are very hungry.

---

There’s a dumpster in Chacao that is the best dumpster. It is hidden in an alley behind the old market. It is the best because there’s usually good food and there are also juice boxes and liter bottles of Pepsi that sometimes have some liquid still in them. One day we filled a whole Pepsi bottle with all of the remainders—it tasted a little bit like orange and a little bit like Pepsi, and I told the rest of the guys, I told them, “When I grow up I’m going to invent drinks. And the first one is going to be orange juice and Pepsi, and I’m going to call it the Crazy 9,” and everyone agreed that it was a great idea as we passed the bottle in a big circle.

When we woke up, Tomás, who is our leader because he is the oldest and the fastest, told us, “We are going to our dumpster today.” Whenever he talks I stare at his upper lip, with thin strands of black hair sprouting like seedlings. And it’s not the only place where his hair is coming in. When it rains, we all get naked and wash ourselves and our clothes. He’s the only one with hair down there. Well, a few of the others have some, but Tomás has at least three times as much.

It was a pretty morning, with rays coming down at us from between the openings of the highway bridge above. They made columns of light so thick I felt the urge to climb them. It felt nice after the cold night, so cold we huddled together—all except Ramoncito because Comiquita, with his cartoon-looking face, said, “Not Ramoncito Pupusito, he stinks!” We could hear the birds, even through the rumbling of the cars that rolled above us. The river was high and running fast. I liked it like that because it didn’t smell as bad. It was still brown and had trash floating on it, but if I closed my eyes and just listened to the water and the birds, I could pretend I was anywhere else.

It was a long walk to the dumpster, and Ramoncito didn’t look good. His cheeks sank into his face, his skin was flaky, like when you have mud on you and it dries and you can scratch it off with your fingernails. I sat next to him, and I didn’t have to pinch my nose anymore, because I had gotten used to the smell. I said, “Wake up, Ramoncito,” and I stroked his hair as he moaned. Ramoncito’s fallen hair tangled around my dirty fingers.

“Wake up, Ramoncito!” I pushed him harder, and he opened his eyes and looked at me. I knew he was angry, because I had seen that look on many faces. Every time a security guard chased us away. Or after we took the woman’s purse with the knife. But mostly before all that— before the Crazy 9—when my mom stumbled home early in the morning. Her eyes scratched red and tired. And even though she didn’t talk, she would stare at me. And I could hear her think, I hate you. I hate you. I wish I could go back and shake her and yell, “You don’t have much time left!” I wonder if she would have changed then, enough to like me, or at least enough to stay.

Ramoncito’s look changed quickly though—from anger, to pain, to pleading. He was like a little dog begging for scraps. I’ve always wanted a dog, but we have rules in the Crazy 9, and dogs are not allowed. Tomás says all dogs do is eat and eat, and we don’t have enough to share. And it’s true. But it’s also true that Tomás got bitten in the ass by a dog a while back and he’s scared of them, so I think there’s more than one reason for that rule. I helped Ramoncito up to his feet, and it was so easy. I crouched behind him and put my arms under his armpits, my chest resting against his back, and then just stood up. It was like lifting a bag full of bird bones. For a second I felt like I was so strong, like maybe I should be the leader of the Crazy 9. But it wasn’t that I was strong, just that Ramoncito was so light.

“No, chamo, let’s leave Ramoncito behind,” said Tomás, and the rest of the boys nodded their heads in agreement. “He’s only going to slow us down,” Tomás said, and then Pecas repeated Tomás’s words like he always did. “Yes, he’s going to slow us down, déjalo.” His voice broke as he spoke, some words deep, others as high as a little girl’s.

But I didn’t leave him. I told him, “Ramoncito, put your arm around my shoulder and try to keep up, okay?” and I ignored what the others were saying. Stuff like, “Ramoncito Pupusito smells so bad,” and, “He will throw it up anyway.”

So the Crazy 9 marched. The old market was about two hours away, but with Ramoncito it would take longer. We started on Avenida Bolivar. I liked this street because it had more people than trash. Everyone had somewhere to go. On a Wednesday morning no one walked just to enjoy it. I liked Saturdays and Sundays better, when I could see kids with their parents strolling along the wide avenue. I could imagine how it would feel for one of my hands to hold balloons or a cold raspado with condensed milk and for my other hand to be held by someone other than Ramoncito. But there were no kids except for us on Wednesday mornings. It was all busy grown-ups.

Ramoncito and I lagged behind, and for the first time I noticed how the Crazy 9 moved. They were a swarm of brown boys, brown from their skin and brown from their grime and brown from their stink. They were fast and wired, and people parted as they took over the whole sidewalk.

Everyone who walked past them turned around to watch them. The businessmen patted their pockets and jackets, the ladies rummaged through their purses to make sure no small hands had slid in. They formed a moving cloud of jokes and laughter and dangerous grins. Salvador, in his patched-together flip-flops and old Chicago Bulls cap, sprinted out of the cloud and quickly rummaged through a trash bag, looking for an easy bite, and then ran back to the rest, as if pulled by a rubber band. Tomás blew kisses at the younger, prettier women heading to work at coffeehouses or office buildings, and the other boys joined in, as I would have if I’d been with them and not holding Ramoncito up. “Mi amor, you are looking pretty today,” Tomás yelled—a wink and maybe a hand on his crotch, but I couldn’t be quite sure from way back.

As we neared the end of Avenida Bolivar—the rest of the Crazy 9 almost out of sight and with no intent to wait for us—I told Ramoncito, “Look, Ramoncito! It’s the Children’s Museum!” and I pointed at the huge logo of a boy riding a rainbow. He had long curly hair and a big smile. By the front doors we saw a group of little kids, younger than Ramoncito, in their red school shirts.

They formed a line, one behind the other, waiting to go in. They were happy and moved their heads around in awe and excitement. Two teachers tried their best to herd them. One little girl kept walking away, distracted by a planter full of flowers, or a pigeon eating trash, and I wanted to scream and say, “Little girl, obey your teachers! They’ll get mad at you and slap you!” but I didn’t, and the teachers never got mad, they just gently pushed her back in line and placed her hands on the shoulders of the boy in front of her. Her eyes still followed the pigeon, but she held on to those shoulders. The teacher was so gentle. Her hands must have felt so soft and clean.

I looked at my own hand. The one that wasn’t holding up Ramoncito. My nails were long, the tips of them as black as wet dirt. My palms were covered in stains, a landscape of brown and black. When I opened my hand and pulled my fingers apart as much as they would go, the landscape cracked and revealed the cleaner tone of my own skin, hiding underneath.

And then I heard the rumble, which shook me and gave me purpose. It came from deep in my belly—a wet groan so loud that Ramoncito could hear it. “I’m hungry,” I said. “Me too,” he said.

We turned onto Avenida México, which was narrower and dirtier. It led to Museum Square and then to Parque los Caobos, my favorite place in the world. We arrived at Plaza Los Museos, large and round, with its tall palm trees. Street vendors eyed us and no longer fell for our tricks. Today was no trick, of course, because Ramoncito was really sick, but many times one of us would pretend to be in peril or pain, or cause a scene, while the others snuck behind the vendors and stole their things. We are so crazy.

We walked past the plaza, past the Natural History Museum with its tall columns. “Let’s go see the elephant statue!” I told Ramoncito, and he smiled and the color came back to his face, but it might have just been the sun shining through the tall canopy of the caobo trees, brightening Ramoncito’s cheeks with specks of light.

The temperature was colder in the shade, with the breeze rushing through tree trunks. It smelled like wood and dirt—but the good dirt, the kind you want to stick your hands in and feel for worms. I wanted to run through the boulevard that split the park in two, veer off into the brush and pick up a stick and go hunting for dinosaur.

A few months ago they brought plastic replicas of the great beasts into the park. There was a tall one with a crest on her head, she looked like a chicken with no feathers; there was a fat green one with spikes on its back (but the spikes didn’t hurt, we knew because we surfed down its spine); there were brown ones and red ones; little baby ones hatching from plastic eggs; and there was the big ferocious one eating a stupid fat one that got caught. The short ones were already starting to wear out because on weekends the parents lifted their sons and daughters and gingerly placed them on the dinosaurs’ backs. They took out their phones and started snapping photos. But all the parents were working today, and all the sons and daughters were at school. We have no school, and we are no sons of nobody.

I helped Ramoncito walk to the statue while my mind stalked reptiles. Its gold glinted through the thick greenery as we rounded the dense bamboo, until finally his huge head greeted us. It always shocked me, his size, the way he sparkled. His ears were open, like the wings of some gold-scaled dragon. His trunk fell, curving gently inward, between two massive tusks. The elephant walked in the middle of a large shallow pool, the water lapping at his wide ankles. Only his front left foot was visible, stepping on a small hill of rocks that came out of the water.

Ramoncito let go of my shoulder, taking a few short steps toward the edge of the pool. He knelt on the ground and placed his elbows on the rim, so he could rest as he stared at the statue.

Ramoncito looked like he was praying. I stood next to him and put my arm around his shoulder. “He’s so beautiful,” Ramoncito said. “Do you think they’re mean in real life?”

I didn’t know. I knew that there were people who rode them, or at least I remembered a story my grandmother once told me about that. My abuelita never said if they were nice or mean. But I knew Ramoncito wanted to hear a good story, so I told him, I said, “They are the nicest of all animals, little boys ride their tusks like swings and fall down their trunks like slides and run races through their fat legs.”

He climbed on the edge of the pool, weak and unsure, but I didn’t pull him back, and without taking off his beat-up sneakers he walked into the shallow water. It came up to his shins, and every time he shuffled closer, the water rippled and traveled all the way to the pool’s edge in tiny little waves. Ramoncito placed his hand on the elephant’s haunches and stroked him kindly. He whispered something to him and rested his hollow green cheek on its golden surface. I was mesmerized by Ramoncito and his massive pet, this gentle giant, and I knew what I had told him was true. That somewhere far away someone like Ramoncito—someone like me, maybe—hung from an elephant’s tusk or took a shower from his trunk. But the spell was broken by a yell coming from the other side of the bamboo.

“Hey, you! Boy! Get out of there right now!”

Ramoncito’s body spun so fast that his weak legs couldn’t hold his balance, and he fell ass first into the water with a big splash. I could see the policeman heading toward us in a sprint. He was big and ugly, with a thick black mustache and hair coming out from wherever his clothes didn’t cover his skin. He held a wooden club in his right hand, and even from the other side of the pool I felt his anger in the way he gripped the handle.

I jumped into the pool quickly and ran to Ramoncito to help him up. He was sobbing, saying, “Sorry. I’m sorry.” But all I wanted was to get us out of there. The bottom of the pool was slick with green gunk, and as I pulled Ramoncito my feet flew from under me and I landed right on the small of my back, which sent a ping of sharp pain all through my spine. I tried to push my legs and pull Ramoncito’s weight toward the edge of the pool, but in the confusion I couldn’t see the man anywhere—just the huge elephant towering over us both. I wanted him to come to life, to swerve his enormous head, and lift his heavy feet, and shelter us under his golden belly. To blow his trunk at the hairy man, yelling, “You don’t mess with the Crazy 9!”

But he didn’t do anything. I felt the man lift me up. The elephant’s four massive feet stood still, indifferent to the waves from our thrashing as Ramoncito and I tried to escape the man’s grasp.

My arms and legs dangled, and I felt the collar of my shirt tighten around my neck. A big hole in my right sole let all the water that had gathered in my shoe out in a stream. I reached up with both hands and tried to pry the man’s fingers open, but they seemed made of cement. I kicked my feet as hard as I could, finding only air, water dripping everywhere. Ramoncito had slipped from his hold, and I saw him crawl to the roots of a caobo.

“¡Quédate quieto, coño!” the man screamed, but I kept wriggling. I felt his breath for the first time. It carried the warmth of fish empanadas and strong coffee. Finding no way to loosen his grip, I jabbed my fingernails into his hand, but instead of releasing me, he slammed me hard against the ground.

It was like all the air had been sucked from the world. I opened my mouth and tried to gulp in life, but my insides were a dried raisin. The back of my head felt wet, but it wasn’t the same kind of wet as the water from the pool. It was warm. Sticky.

The policeman stood like an angry ape above me. His hat had fallen on the ground, revealing all his features. A thick stubble covered his face, starting just bellow the eyes. His ears were big and meaty. His nose wide and crooked in the middle. The only place not covered in hair was his balding dome. He held his hand up to his mouth, sucking on the wound I had caused. When he removed it to talk, I could see a trickling of blood on his lower lip.

“Motherfucker, hijo de puta.” He spit blood and it landed next to me. “I hate street children, all you fucking do is make my job harder. Why can’t you just fucking disappear, huh?” He took a step toward me, but my breath had not come back yet, and my vision started to blur. I tried to crawl away but was too weak.

“Now I probably have to get a shot. God knows the filth you have in those fingers.” He lifted his booted foot and pinned my leg down. It felt like my shin would split in two, and for the first time since he had thrown me to the ground air rushed into my lungs, only to escape again in a scream. I didn’t cry, though.

The pain sharpened my thinking and I remembered the knife. I always kept it in my right pocket. My hand searched for it and couldn’t feel the wooden handle, the small metal dots that felt cold when you gripped it tight. It wasn’t there.

And then I heard Ramoncito. “Let him go!” he screamed, and stood in front of the huge man, his legs spread apart, his arms stretched out away from his chest, his two bony hands holding on to the knife—a stick figure facing off against a giant. “The Crazy 9 never give up. Never surrender!” he screamed, tears falling down his face.

The man released the pressure on my leg, but I knew why. He lifted his club and walked toward Ramoncito. The policeman’s eyes fixed on the knife and nothing else. I stood. As the man swung the weapon, I rushed him with all my strength and flung my body at him. It felt like running into a wall, but the club missed Ramoncito. He remained on his feet, holding on to the knife, and I was back on the ground, recovering from the impact.

Ramoncito was really crying now. Sobbing. But he wouldn’t move. He clung to the knife so tightly that his whole body shook except for his hands and the blade. They remained perfectly still. Park people had started to gather around. Not a lot, but a few. One woman walked toward us. She was old, her skin the blackest I’d ever seen. She had kind, sad wrinkles across her face. She wore a gray shirt and a beautiful long skirt with colorful flowers stitched on it. Two golden disks, as bright as the elephant still towering above us, hung from her ears.

“Stop!” she demanded. And the man did. He stopped and looked around as if he had awakened from a dream. His chest rose and fell quickly, but his eyes had moved from me and Ramoncito and scanned the faces around us, especially the woman’s. “Have you no shame?” she asked him softly, and I could see the man affected by her words. She knelt by me and held the back of my head. “They are just children,” she said to him. And the man finally lowered his club and let it hang from his side, the leather band clinging to his strong wrist. And I could see something happening to his face. Some transformation. Like he felt sorry for us all of a sudden, or sorry for himself, or sad at himself, rather. I didn’t have a word for it, but it felt like that one time I stole a box of leftovers from the old homeless man, and he didn’t even have the strength to yell at me. When I sat down to eat the food all I could see were his milky eyes looking at me. I ate the food, but felt really bad eating it.

Ramoncito dropped the knife. He was still so afraid. He mouthed a silent, “I’m sorry,” and ran off the way we had come. I have no idea where he found the strength. It was probably fear fueling him.

The woman sat me down and inspected my wounds. “Me llamo Belén,” she said, and she kissed me on the forehead. We sat together at a table and we talked as the dizziness passed. I wanted to go after Ramoncito, but Belén’s kindness held me near. She cleaned my wounds with an embroidered handkerchief and clean water from a plastic bottle. We shared her lunch of hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, broccoli, and sweet plantains. “I can get you help, you know?” she said. “There are places that can take you and your friends in, people who can care for you, feed you.” But I also saw how thin she was, I could recognize her own hunger behind the eyes. I recognized it because I saw it every day on the faces of my friends, because I could feel it inside of me. It had already been a sacrifice to share the little she had. Plus I had heard stories about these places that take kids like me in. They were never good stories.

“I have to go find Ramoncito,” I told her. And she didn’t try to stop me. She didn’t push. “Vaya con Dios,” she said. And as I walked away I heard her say, “I’m here most afternoons, come see me if you change your mind.”

My torn T-shirt and my shorts had already started to dry, but every time I took a step my wet shoes sploshed and left a wet footstep on the boulevard leading out of Parque los Caobos.

---

So I searched for Ramoncito. I went back the way I came. It hurt a bit to walk because of the bump in my lower back, but I also felt stronger from my lunch with Belén. I was having fun using my tongue to free the little bits of food from my teeth, and there was one piece of plantain that made me smile because it was pretty big. I asked the newspaper vendor in Avenida México if he had seen Ramoncito go by. He said he had seen a young boy walking sleepily about thirty minutes ago. He checked his pockets as I walked away, fearing my tricks.

When I got back to our spot, Ramoncito was there. He was lying in a patch of sunlight, dirt and debris all around him. He lay on his side, like he was a little baby, or still in his mama’s belly, and he faced a little yellow flower that sprouted next to him. His eyes were wide open. But when I called out, “Ramoncito!” his eyes didn’t move. His body didn’t move. He lay frozen.

I knelt next to him and shook him, and his eyes remained open like he was still staring at that little flower even though he now faced me. “Ramoncito! Ramoncito! Don’t play games,” I told him. I thought it was all just a bad, stupid joke, so I pinched his nose and counted to ten, to twenty, to thirty, to forty, and then I knew that he was dead because no way Ramoncito could hold his breath for that long. And then I let his head drop on my lap. And I told him how much I liked him, and how he had been such a good friend, and that the Crazy 9 would never be the same without him. But I didn’t cry. I didn’t even have one tear come down, even though I felt that lump in the throat I always feel when I think I’m going to cry, like I swallowed a rock that didn’t want to go down all the way.

Now I’m here with dead Ramoncito. I think maybe I should wait for the rest of the Crazy 9 to come back and help me, but I don’t know when they’re coming, or even if they’ll come at all. We have sleeping spots all over, and sometimes when we go to our dumpster we stay in the Metro station with the nice lady who lets us in after they close. And also they’ve been so mean to Ramoncito, maybe he would want it just like this. Just the two of us.

There’s a wooden pallet that floated to our spot four days ago. Tomás told us, “I’m going to build a boat with this, and then I can sail all down the Güaire. I can bring my line and hook and I can fish and bring us back food,” and we all liked the plan, so we’d been collecting supplies, more wood and nails and an old hammer so we could make him a boat that would last. But Ramoncito is more important than the boat, I think, and I don’t care if Tomás gets mad at me. So I carry Ramoncito and put him on the pallet—well, I’ll call it a raft now, because it floats. I pick the yellow flower and tuck it right behind his ear and I tell him, “Ve con Dios, Ramoncito, you were my best friend,” and I kiss him on the forehead. He tastes like dirt and old sweat, like rotting mango, like salt, like the sound my knife makes when it sticks to gray bark, he tastes like Tomás laughing in the wee hours, like sour milk, like Belén’s hard-boiled eggs, like my grandmother’s voice telling me stories before bed, like loud police sirens in the night, like a piece of meat found in a trash bag that I know is starting to rot but I eat anyway, he tastes like my mother’s hand after she’s slapped my face bloody, like a white crane flying low skimming the brown river looking for fish, like the bubbles in a just-cracked can of Pepsi, like the boy that got hit in the head by a tear gas canister and just lay there, like the sharp end of a belt, like a limp mother with a needle in her arm, he tastes like Pollos Arturos, he tastes like loyalty, and like a brother.

I let the raft go. It starts slow, but as it gets farther away, into the middle of the brown river, it goes faster and faster. And then I don’t see him. I imagine the river taking him farther and farther from me. Away from the Crazy 9. Maybe El Güaire will take him all the way out of the city and he will arrive in some beautiful meadow, with flowers, and real elephants, and mango trees that always have fruit on them.

The post Survival Strategies for Unsupervised Children appeared first on Electric Literature.

As this benighted year comes to a close, here are ten of our most popular essays from 2020, covering vegetal collaboration and generative non-fertility, queer memoir and urban ennui, along with reportage from the British Virgin Islands, East Africa, Japan and the Chinese–Indian border.

 

Qualities of Earth | Rebecca May Johnson

‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel that makes a mockery of conservative ideas of the natural. If a hack to proliferate or hybridise is possible, plants will invent it.’

Rebecca May Johnson on negotiating the interspecies politics of allotment culture.

 

 

The Pandemic: Our Common Story | Anna Badkhen

‘Folklorists say oral tradition requires variation and interpretation, that we must alter the story to match the need of our times.’

Anna Badkhen was researching Eden – the origins of humanity in the Afar Triangle of East Africa – when coronavirus broke out across the world.

 

 

The Second Career of Michael Riegels | Oliver Bullough

‘The illogicality of shell companies is a result of the fact that they emerged from an illogical system in which globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’

Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested, confusing and consequential outposts: the British Virgin Islands.

 

 

An Education | Ariel Saramandi

‘You broke protocol, my mother mouths, rocking back and forth on the bed . . . She thinks that I have brought white wrath upon my family, and now I will be castigated wherever I go.’

Ariel Saramandi on race in Mauritius.

 

 

The Death of Distance | Samrat Choudhury

‘It might take only one soldier being shot across the Chinese–Indian border for war to begin. The howitzers, tanks, missiles and fighter jets are lined up, ready and waiting for action.’

Samrat Choudhury on India and China’s disputed Himalayan border.

 

 

Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness? | Kevin Brazil

‘Is there any way of writing about happiness, queer or otherwise, that isn’t just obnoxious? Or boring? Is there any way of speaking about happiness that isn’t just a way of saying: “I’ve survived, why couldn’t you?”’

Kevin Brazil on how queer people tell stories about themselves.

 

Seeing Things | Emily LaBarge

‘The City of the city is jagged and spiky, tangled, twisted – burned down, paved over, rebuilt, unruly with wealth and poverty side by side, as they have always been.’

Emily LaBarge on London, art and the plague.

 

 

Erotics of Rot | Elvia Wilk

‘Mushrooms sprout from the bathtub grout; disintegrating apples overflow from the trash can. Insects circle. The decomposition is lively and sensorially overwhelming.’

Elvia Wilk draws on Anne Carson, Sappho, Walt Whitman, Paul Preciado, Audrey Wollen and Jenny Hval to explore generative intoxication.

 

 

Feeling Bullish: On My Great-Uncle, Gay Matador and Friend of Hemingway | Rebekah Frumkin

‘In his suit, with his pigtail and his montera, he was pure potential: he could be masculine vanquisher or gold-embroidered fairy. He was both, actually, at all times, and nobody who came to see him fight thought any less of him for it.’

Rebekah Frumkin on fame, queer identity and Ernest Hemingway. 

 

 

The Flowers Look More Beautiful Now Than Ever | Mieko Kawakami

‘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.’

Mieko Kawakami on our capacity to forget amid disasters and social segregation. Translated from the Japanese by Hitomi Yoshio.

 

Image © virtually_supine

The post Top Reads 2020 | Essays appeared first on Granta.

It’s often in the morning that the want is biggest. The want is to wake up, lazy and horizontal, and have it. Currently I sleep in a big bed, next to a square window above a fig free, which looks out at the local high school, the 110 freeway, and the undeveloped hills in the park beyond. I used to wake up early, but lately – with the want – I sleep until the light is already bright. It doesn’t feel good waking up when the sun is already at work. I feel I’ve wasted something. I feel everybody has gotten going but me, that they are all up and living their lives.

The want that makes me sleep all the time is connected to a video I watch pretty often, of a young white man on his knees, in a nondescript hotel room with silver wallpaper and silver throw pillows.

The young man’s left hand is holding himself up and his right hand is cradling another young white man’s head. They both look like they’re about twenty-five. They both have brown crew cuts and hairless chests. The young man on his knees is thrusting his penis in and out of the other guy’s mouth. His dick is too big for him, in a way, and so are his hands. Like a puppy that trips over its own paws. The way he’s fucking the other guy’s face is sort of jerky. He’s doing it like he’s being watched, assessed, like he hasn’t done this much but he wants to seem like he knows what he’s doing. And he is being watched, originally by a camera, and now by me.

It looks like work. And it might be work, though the video is grainy, the camera never moves, and the young man on his knees turns the video on and off of himself. So it could be that these two guys just like recording themselves fucking and sharing it on YouPorn.  It could also be that part of the product, which is to say part of the labor, is the possibility of authenticity. So that I can forget there was a before and after the video, or an outside during the scene, and I can take this young man as the neutral screen of white masculinity I need him to be in order to envy him for having a penis. I envy his effort, which I imagine demands total presence, and this envy is what fuels my watching of the video, again and again, at all hours of the day. I get to drain my body of all feeling, send my consciousness into the reality I project onto this young man, so I forget I have a body at all.

Truthfully, in the moment of watching, there is little speculation about the young man, who he is, and why he came to be on his knees, fucking another white boy’s mouth in a hotel room with silver accent pillows. The speculation comes after the fact, retroactively trying to make sense of and find the trouble in my fixations. In the moment, I just want to be the young man. Without the before or after, without an outside during. The wanting is its own total form of being. In the moment, it’s not a wanting that can be corrected; it lives inside me, on its own terms, without a fix.

 

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At the beginning of the year, in New York, I met a handsome guy, my age, who I ended up kissing. We didn’t kiss for long, just while dancing. The small dance floor was packed – this was still in the time when strangers pressed their bodies together indoors – and we were surrounded by men. I tried to stay focused on him, but I kept looking around at all the other men, many of them shirtless, trying to understand them, imagining how they felt in their bodies while neglecting to feel my own. Later in the night, I went to get a drink and I saw him through the crowd, dancing while kissing another man, with biceps and a barrel chest. I felt disappointed, and it seemed embarrassing to be rejected by a man. Of course, he wasn’t rejecting me; it was the culture of the place, of this mode of gay masculinity, to kiss freely. My own feeling of being passed over proved, to me, my inability to participate authentically in this economy. To not just pass as but fully be a young man in the sea of men, like the young man on his knees. I often come back to what I do not have and, thus, what I cannot be.

What I thought about most after my night with the tall handsome guy, in addition to the rejection I manufactured to prove my lack, was something he’d said earlier in the night, when we’d first met. Before the club we’d been in a crowded bar, pressed in the back corner with friends. He and I drank cans of beer, which I rarely drink, but I wanted to show him something by mirroring him, or I wanted to feel like him, or alongside him, in some way. It seems to me that when I believe someone to be a man – my head knows you never know, and yet these imagined other manhoods do magnetize me – I either ignore him, befriend him or copy him. The latter two approaches motivated by the pursuit of data regarding what they are and what they have, in relation to what I may or may not be.

So we were sitting in the corner of the bar, and we started talking about how we each spend our mornings. ‘Well I have the house to myself right now,’ he said, ‘So lately I wake up, I lay in bed for a while, I jerk off, then finally I’ll go to the kitchen and heat up some old coffee in the microwave, then I’ll drink it.’

That’s all he said. He wakes up, he lies in bed, he jerks off, he heats up old coffee in the microwave, he drinks it. He wakes up, he lies in bed, he jerks off, he heats up old coffee in the microwave, he drinks it.

I hear him say it in my head, so quiet and casual and slow, barely audible because the bar is loud. I hear him say it for weeks, when I’m back in California, every morning when I awake in bed looking over the fig tree. I want to wake up, lie in bed, jerk off, heat up old coffee in the microwave, and drink it. Slow. Unproductive but delightful. I don’t need to look at pictures; I don’t need to think about much. It’s just a lazy relief. I come on my stomach, get up, wipe it off with toilet paper. I go to the kitchen, my dick not totally soft yet, and I take a mug off the counter, half full of yesterday’s coffee, put it in the microwave, heat it up, and then drink it. Without cream or sugar, even though it’s bitter. When I leave the house I leave the mug out on the counter and I don’t make the bed. My clothes are on the floor. The wad of toilet paper I used to wipe up my cum is in the trashcan next to the toilet.

In my fantasy of the other way of being alive – of having a cock I was born with, waking up alone, jerking off, wiping the cum off my stomach, drinking old coffee, lukewarm, and not making the bed – I feel only ease, sensation, and pleasure in the present.

But I always make the bed. And my coffee, I heat it up four, five, even six times, to keep on re-having the experience of the first, too-hot sip. I rarely leave the house without cleaning the mugs in the sink. If I leave in a rush and I come back to dirty mugs I notice myself feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, then I feel shame about the frustration passing through me, because it’s exactly the kind of thing my father gets frustrated about. In this life, so far, I am someone who turns the lights off before leaving. I get all the crumbs off the countertop after cooking, I push the chairs back into the table, and I make sure that books and papers are in symmetrical, square piles, instead of scattered around.

I miss the other version of me. How can a person miss someone they never were? How can a person miss something they never had? How can the other way seem so complete, as if it once was, as if it’s what I was, and then I lost it?

Approximations of the thing I want only aggravate me further. For a while I was trying to pack. I had a beige, flaccid penis and balls to put inside my underwear. It was squishy and it grew warm from my body heat. It was hard to keep it in, unless I wore tight underwear, because it popped out like a water balloon. I experimented with wearing it to coffee shops, to the post office, to Staples and Home Depot, to a party. When I felt no one was looking I brushed my hand over my groin.

In his diaries, Lou Sullivan[1] writes a lot about sucking men dry. As if their cocks are hoses and he wraps his mouth around them and sucks and sucks and sucks until they’re empty. He seems to have some immense pleasure and power in sucking other men empty. Every time he describes this – in a bed or on the street or in a movie theater or at a sex club – I read the line again, again, three or four or five times, watching the movie of the line in my head. I’d heard that phrase a lot in the past, in porn or in bawdy conversations, and it always disgusted me. But disgust is generally a marker of desire, at least for me, and so the more I read the phrase in Sullivan’s journals the more I could locate the envy underneath the disgust. Envy for his honest, extractive, bodily wish; envy for the men on the other end. After that, wearing the flaccid dick felt disappointing, painful even. Because nothing came out. Nothing from inside of me was ever going to come out.

Soon after I read Sullivan’s diaries, I drove up to Stanford to visit a friend who was there for a few weeks doing research while staying with an old professor. Reading Sullivan’s diaries, I’d learned that he underwent phalloplasty, or penile constructive surgery, through the clinic run by Stanford’s Gender Dysphoria Program. Founded in 1968, the clinic pioneered the technology behind modern gender-affirming phalloplasty, the first medical program to make the surgery widely available.[2] This connection gave my trip some thematic resonance, and I walked around the rainy campus my first day there looking at the wet colonial buildings and manicured gardens imagining that I was there not to learn, or study, or see a friend, but to gain a penis.

I decided I’d visit the clinic’s archives while I was there, and mentioned this plan to the professor we were staying with, over coffee in the parlor of his small stucco bungalow, part of the university’s faculty housing. The professor studied and taught the history of gay memoir, and was curious what questions drew me to the clinic’s archive.

I said that I was interested in the history of phalloplasty, more specifically, how the medicalization of trans identity – the invention and management of certain procedures – creates the bodies we long for. I also said that I was interested in how colonial science and eugenics shaped the evolution of phalloplasty, creating a prototypical constructed penis rooted in white supremacist ideals of the gender binary. Those stated interests were true, at least in the realm of thought. And, yet, they did not account for my basic and bodily wish to go deeper into the lives of people who had done something I was both scared of and wanted for myself. I wanted the gory details of the surgery, voyeuristic, clinical descriptions of their genitals before, during, and after. I wanted to imagine myself as one of the patients.

At the archive, a fluorescent-lit reading room in the basement of a brutalist medical school building, I shared a similar, historically motivated pitch with the archivist, who set me up in front of a thick folder of loose papers. I read documents from the clinic’s early days: letters from the founding doctors requesting funding from the university for their research, transcripts of lectures, local reporting on the clinic’s early patients. The early documents largely supported the account that the clinic was established to perform ‘corrective’ surgeries on transsexual patients, whose condition, doctors believed, could not be fixed or suppressed. Surgery, then, was a form of risk management; the best solution to the unsolvable psychopathology of the transsexual.[3]

A few years into the chronologically ordered stack of papers, I found documentation of a grading system, used to tabulate the degeneracy of clients before and after treatment. ‘A’ meant not degenerate, ‘D’ meant very degenerate. The intent was to prove that full sex transition – sex ‘reassignment’ surgery – and ultimately passing successfully, reduced the total degeneracy score across multiple categories, ranging from employment, to economic status, to education. ‘Prostitution’, ‘arrests’ and ‘orgasm’ were also categories. For example, in the economic category, ‘poverty level or below’ was graded with a ‘D’, and making $8,000 a year or more was graded an ‘A’. Under education, ‘Less than High School’ was a ‘D’, and ‘more than BA’ an ‘A’. Arrests were a simple binary: ‘D’ for yes, ‘A’ for no. The same went for orgasm (it was good to have had one). Participation in sex work garnered the lowest marks; ‘seldom’ got a ‘B’, and ‘never’ an ‘A’. Tables of data at the end of reports affirmed that nearly all patients’ grades had improved over the course of the clinical sexual reassignment process.

I tabulated my own grades on a piece of scrap paper I’d brought in for notes. My class status and related college degree, gave me an automatic ‘A’ in education, and while I had never scored an economic ‘D’, my annual income has declined since starting hormone replacement therapy. I did get better grades in certain categories in the aftermath of my medical transition: less drug use; a stable, largely monogamous relationship; better relations with family and friends. Under the category ‘Emotional’, where I chose ‘lost and confused’, I had a steady ‘C’. Not failing marks, but not necessarily passing either. Hormone replacement therapy and a double mastectomy had not improved my grade. My process, in the eyes of the Stanford grading system, was incomplete.

As much as modern phalloplasty had developed as a means for people to become themselves, these documents also indicated that it was also the doctors’ way of taking perverts, inverts, and degenerates and turning them into approximations of ‘real men’. The men, the doctors imagined, would hold steady jobs, would wear ties, would play football for fun and marry women as prototypically feminine as they were masculine. The doctors, if all went according to plan, would build cocks as upstanding as the men. Cocks not dissimilar from the long, straight, circumcised white one I imagine for myself.

Why do I want the cock I want? Where did the cock come from and why is it so big? Will it ever be satisfied? If not, will it ever go away?

 

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When I’m in my bed, replaying what the man I kissed said, or watching the boy in the video’s effort, I’m imagining having a body I feel and, in turn, am present in my life, am in some way more alive, as if aliveness is a quality one can have more or less of. As if my current aliveness is deficient and diluted and the other life, the life of someone with the cock I imagine, is saturated with existence. And I know, in my thoughts if not in my heart, that some part of what keeps me feeling deficiently alive is the sense that someone else, out there, with a thing I don’t have, is alive in a way I’ll never be.

I used to want a flat chest. Then I had a flat chest and I wanted a low voice. Then I had a low voice and I wanted facial hair. Then I had some facial hair and I wanted more body hair. So now that I look like a man, I think if I had a cock I was born with I wouldn’t need to look so much like a man anymore. The want moves. It keeps moving. Procedures and treatments, they help me train the want, try to pin it down, but it travels into other parts of my body, creates imaginary futures based on projections of what other people have. It’s the want, so skillful at training itself on what I lack, that keeps me incomplete.

What, in the plainest, descriptive terms, do I want? A tube or a flap of skin, matched to the rest of my skin, which fills with blood when I’m turned on or excited, when I wake up, that I can hold in my hands, wrap two fists around, put inside the mouths or holes of others. An appendage that extends me, that’s soft and curled at times, rigid at others, which communicates something about my interior condition without my consent, to the world. Is this an accurate description of what I want? Don’t I know better than to think the thing I want is real, that it’s anything more than a symbol of something imaginary that I’ve absorbed from pornography and classical statues and starburst-colored plastic prosthetics sold in stores?

The feeling – the wanting, the missing, the mourning – it happens when I’m cleaning the dishes, sweeping the corners, brushing dead leaves off the front steps. When I experience the want as an intruder, something taking me over, the feeling is sharp and nauseating. I’ll lie in my bed, in the late afternoon, scrolling through clips on Pornhub, thirty seconds at a time, just looking for shots of men’s faces in the seconds before ejaculating. Clips that best capture what I imagine it’s like to be about to come, to be about to shoot your load, to be about to get what you want. And I, in my non-embodied longing for someone else’s desire, don’t want to see the dick or the hole, or the face of the one with the hole, or the desperate slobbering mouth on the dick, or the solitary hand on the dick, I want to see the Face of the One with the Dick, jaw clenched or eyes rolling back, mouth open or teeth on lips, shaking, a complete fucking baby. Then coming. Then getting the thing, the one thing, they want. I imagine if I could come like that I would get to be the kind of child I never was: one who demands things, screams and cries when the demands aren’t heeded, sleeps happy and peaceful when they are. Call that a child or a man. Either way, I’d like to know the feeling.

In glimpses, when I can honor the want for what it is, I acknowledge the fact that whatever I want lives nowhere but inside of me. But often, most often, this want exhausts me, with its chronic, searching unfulfillment.

Why do I want what I want? Where did my want come from and why is it so big? Will it ever be satisfied? If not, will it ever go away?

And then it is the morning, and it’s bright, and it’s hard to wake up, but I do. I make the bed, neatly fold my pajamas, slide into my underwear (which are all Hanes and either red, blue, black or grey), pull up my socks (which are all black with a yellow line at the bottom), step into one of my four pairs of jeans, pull on one of my six T-shirts, clean my glasses with a polka dot glasses cloth, and go downstairs to make coffee, which I reheat many times. I make the bed and I make coffee, and I go on with my want.

 

 

Image © Several Seconds

[1] Lou Sullivan was a white, gay-identified trans activist and writer. He died in San Francisco in 1991 after spending much of his life in pursuit of social and medical recognition for trans people, in particular trans people whose sexualities defied the norms of heterosexuality. His selected diaries, We Both Laughed in Pleasure, edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma, were published in 2019 to widespread acclaim.

[2] Sullivan’s phalloplasty application was originally rejected by the clinic due to his homosexuality, which doctors believed delegitimized his claims of manhood. He later successfully petitioned the clinic to perform the surgery, pushing them to expand their assessment processes to include gay-identified trans people.

[3] This is not to say that early patients of the clinic didn’t have agency in navigating and maneuvering their way through the clinic in order to gain the outcomes they wanted. This condensed interview with Sandy Stone and Jamison Green, both of whom were patients of the Stanford clinic, demonstrates as much.

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