The Paris Review's Blog, page 117

The Novel as a Long Alto Saxophone Solo

In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

Photo: Lucy Scholes.

The Flagellants, the American writer Carlene Hatcher Polite’s debut novel, is one of those out-of-print books that’s been lurking in the corner of my eye for the past few years. First published by Christian Bourgois éditeur as Les Flagellants in Pierre Alien’s 1966 French translation, and then in its original English the following year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the book details the stormy relationship between Ideal and Jimson, a Black couple in New York City. The narrative is largely made up of a series of stream of consciousness orations. Polite’s prose is frenetic and loquacious, and her characters fling both physical and verbal violence back and forth across the page. The French edition received much praise. Polite was deemed “a poet of the weird, an angel of the bizarre,” and the novel was described as “so haunting, so rich in thoughts, sensations, so well located in a poetic chiaroscuro that one [could] savor its ineffaceable harshness.” And while certain American critics weren’t so impressed—“Miss Polite’s narrative creaks with the stresses of literary uncertainty,” wrote Frederic Raphael in the New York Times, summing the novel up as a “dialectical diatribe”—others recognized this young Black woman’s singular, if still rather raw and emergent, talent. Malcolm Boyd, for example, declared the novel “a work of lush imagery and exciting semantic exploration.” It won Polite—then in her midthirties and living in Paris with the youngest of her two daughters—fellowships from the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities (1967) and the Rockefeller Foundation (1968).

Why, then, am I writing about Polite only now? Well, although the vitality and inventiveness of her prose is undeniable, there’s something about her characters’ long, drawn-out pontificating that wavers on the overwrought. For all the passion of their outpourings, Jimson and Ideal often feel one-dimensional. These reservations stood in my way, combined with the fact that Polite never really felt like my discovery. Compared, for example, to another subject of this column, Mojo Hand (1966)—J. J. Phillips’s woefully neglected Black Beat novel—The Flagellants is a book that appears regularly on lists of African American literature from the sixties. Yet, finally deciding to dig a little deeper, I realized that although Polite is widely acknowledged as one of the most important female artists to emerge from the Black Arts Movement, there’s been surprisingly little written about her or her work, especially her second novel, Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play.

Published in 1975, Sister X takes a similar shape to its predecessor in that, again, the majority of the story is told by means of a conversation between a man and a woman, though this time they’re not a couple, and the violence—or “foul play”—that’s being done to them (and the other members of their race, past and present) is an assemblage of racism as filtered through conditions that, as one character theorizes, all begin with the letter c:

First they blamed it on the lack of vitamin C, scurvy on the slave ships. Cooking, cleaning, child-raising, cotton fields, chain gangs, colonial correctional facilities … consumption … Black spots from the absence of decent clothing, and from all the scum and chilliness of coal-less cold stoves, miss-meal cramps, CCC cramps, continuous bread lines … CCC KKK (same difference).

Yet again, the New York Times wasn’t convinced. Their reviewer, Frederick Busch, decried what he termed the novel’s “sledge-hammer social protest.” And while I’ll admit that it’s not without flaws, I still found more to admire here than in Polite’s debut. The earnestness of Ideal and Jimson’s soliloquies has been replaced by something altogether more playful and sardonic. Put simply, it feels smoother, as if Polite were getting into her stride. Or, as Ishmael Reed pronounced of the novel—positioning Polite alongside the likes of Ted Joans and Babs Gonzales, practitioners of what he describes as “jazz writing”—“Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play is a long alto saxophone solo. Ms. Polite wails!!”

*

Sister X focuses on three characters, the first of whom, the titular Sister X, a.k.a. Arista Prolo, has recently died. A Black American transplant in Paris, she was working as an exotic dancer—“a tiptop tappin’ past master of the art of ‘interpretive’ terpsichore, the darling of the beau-hawg grind, a rubber sole, the chic of snake, Princess Yasmina, Lottie the Body, La Bombie, Broadway Rose, the China Doll, Little Egypt, Alberta, New Caledonia, Alabama Mama (shake it up, shake it down, shake it all over town), all rolled into one”—at the Jack of Diamonds Supper Club. Until she fell out with management, that is, when she refused to perform naked. She used to be the star of the show, but then her audience started to dwindle: “But’s that show biz. So knockers up, girls!” The club takes out a classified ad—dancer wanted, no experience needed, “Afro-American Type”—and then, in the novel’s roaring, soaring final section, which transports us back to Sister X’s last few hours on this earth, we witness her turning up at the club to collect her final paycheck only to be confronted by her replacement—Miss Ann White, from Birmingham, Alabama—blacking up in the dressing room, a “caricature in burnt sienna.”

But back to the book’s opening half. With Sister X dead, her story lies in the hands of her two friends: Abyssinia, a seamstress who acted as Sister X’s costume designer; and Willis B. Black (Black Will)—“one of the most beautiful Black Men whom a Black Woman and a Black Man ever brought into this World”—a “Travelin’ Man” originally from Detroit, Michigan (as was Sister X). The novel opens with this bravura introduction:

His beautiful black body he rubbed down with an oil and citrus cologne an ex-girlfriend had turned him on to back in 1956, down in Oriente Province. Santiago de Cuba, to tell the truth about the place.

Next, the beautiful Black Man put on some fine black pants, tailored for him by Kalik Shabazz, a Temple #1 Brother from Black Bottom, and former proprietor, during his so-called-negro-days, of an all-nite barbecue and shrimp shack on Detroit’s Twelfth Street (a few doors down from the old Klein’s Show Bar—long before the fire). Nowadays, in Brother Kalik’s ‘free’ time, he saves every dime that he can lay his hands on to make it to Mecca, plays conga drums, and recites ‘Al Fâtiha’ with so much Soul that you finally have to stop and ask yourself if, perhaps, the Good Brother hasn’t missed his true calling. Surely, Coleman, if he were still back over there somewhere in those Bottoms, would have become, during all this Time by Now, a natural-born Muezzin. Salaam Aleikum!

After getting through all of ‘that,’ the beautiful Black Man then put on: a black shirt bought in either Palermo or Port-au-Prince (or maybe it was Rio de Janeiro); some black sox picked up during those no-seconds-flat days of the Mexico ’68 Olympics, an unusual black belt with Chinese silver buckle found in a practically Peopleless village right outside of Samarkand; some awful-bad black suede boots that were guaranteed (to need no breakin’ in) by a half-blind Moorish-descent bootmaker, trying his best to make himself a living down in present-day Cordova; a black vest knitted somewhere up in aurora borealis Scandinavia; a blood-red foulard playfully gotten together by an admiring and astonishingly beautiful Ife Sister from Nigeria (before poor Biafra …)

PEACE MOMMA’FRICA

PEACE ’N PAN (Africanization) ON!

… and a black virgin-wool sports jacket sold to him by a Black Irish London junkie who hustled shoplifted clothes, too fast-movin’ trips to Ibiza, and went under the name of Belfast X.

Newly arrived in Paris—by way of an Illinois maximum-security prison (in which he was incarcerated for armed robbery and narcotics) and, most recently, Zambia—Black Will calls up his old friend Abyssinia and hotfoots it over to her apartment building, “Contemporary Catacombs” that Polite describes with raucous, rhythmical delight: “since you could easily get yourself buried by endless floors of identical doors, peepholes, coconut-straw doormats, paupers’ pine-lined elevators, plein-air terraces, dank sub-basements, and wind up resigning yourself to never seeing the likes of seedy-sleazy survival, living life, or daylight again.”

Although Sister X was written in a New York City hotel room, arranged for Polite by her American publisher—the final page is dated August 12–13, 1974, which, if it’s to be believed, is a truly incredible achievement—the book is undoubtedly the product of the eight years Polite spent living in France. “Dear Reader,” she writes toward the end of the novel, “if I’m lyin’, I’m flyin’. If you have been to Paris, you know that I’m not.” Not that Sister X is supposed to be steeped in realism. As Michel Fabre points out in From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980, the novel “was in no way directed at a French audience but made constant cartoon-like use of American stereotypes about the French.” Polite’s portrait of the city therein is a concoction of the various fantasies—both the positive and the pernicious—that are wrapped up in it.

One of the more problematic of these is the exploitation of Black women in performance spaces. From the figure of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus,” through Josephine Baker—whose biography Polite was apparently fascinated by—Polite’s depiction of Sister X draws on a long and murky history of the objectification and othering, commodification and sexualization of Black females. Her performances, including the exotic, alluring costumes that Abyssinia makes for Sister X to wear on stage, all fuel the racially charged sexual fantasies of her white French audience.

The novel also rails against capitalist culture more broadly—“be it intangible or nail-downable, everything on Earth has been rendered dead, a quantitative piece of merchandise,” states Abyssinia sagely—and Polite even plays with the idea of the commercial break. An “In Between Act” in the middle of the book takes the form of an extended ad for “Winning Smile brand toothpaste” that culminates thus:

Winning Smile brand toothpaste’s active ingredients are:

M to the 1st power …….. Masters
M to the 2nd power …….. Money
M to the 3rd power …….. Merchandise
S to the 1st power ……… Slaves
S to the 2nd power ……… Spectacles

M3 S² ……… The Way the Game is Played, folks—fair or foul!

Of central importance, though, is how this “kind of ‘merchandise and spectacle’ society” uses and abuses Black people:

In this, our “civilised” society, our entire psychological makeup is founded on violence, death, hoggish self-fulfillment, ambition, exploitation, combative chauvinism, competition, binding contracts, promises, hatred. Through snatching, grabbing, pulling, yanking, conning, slicking, gaming, piercing, enslaving, penetrating, invading, intervening, robbing, stealing, lying, po-licing, cheating, raping, attacking, bombing, gassing, burning, assassinating, kidnapping, violating, fooling, deceiving, numbing, hurting, insulting, nailing, crucifying, injuring, wounding, defaming, proselytizing, cutting, shooting, scraping, coercing, blackmailing, crusading, choking, beating, drowning, maiming, flagellating, exterminating, annihilating, aborting, rationalizing, discriminating, justifying, castrating, repressing, oppressing, suppressing, wringing (and any and all other “ings”) each other to death, into submission, or half to death, mankind has, thus far, learned to live. Pitiful…

Polite employs language in such an energetic, exciting way—which is not without risk, of course. Sometimes it’s successful, and other times it doesn’t quite work, but there’s never a dull moment along the way. And as Margo Natalie Crawford argues in Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty First-Century Aesthetics, it’s here, in the writing itself, that another element of fantasy comes into play. Crawford hails the novel as a “stunning depiction of black satire’s ability to show how the more radical forms of black nationalism were a push away from known blackness to the unimaginable and fantastic.” Polite was ripping up all the rule books, writing Blackness anew by means of employing and empowering language itself in radical, innovative ways.

“The narrative comes close to poetry,” wrote one French critic of The Flagellants, and the same can be said here. “A free form jazz text” is how A. Robert Lee described Sister X, reiterating Reed’s thoughts. Even more intriguingly, and as Crawford goes on to point out, Polite’s “interest in sound extends to what cannot be heard.” From ampersands to exclamation marks to slashes, dollar signs, hashes, and the regular use of ellipsis, she employs a variety of signs and symbols in a way that defies their pronunciation. So, too, sound interrupts language. The ringing of a telephone leaves an all-but-empty page looking like this:

“What is this supposed to be?”
“A piece of paper, I would imagine.”
“Do you see a watermark?”
“Naw.”
(Me, neither.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A French telephone can ring so loud
that it blasts not only the watermark
off the page but all the print too.
My word! aqwsxedcrftvgbyhnujimklo

 

(Now how does that sound in the light of day?)

“In this quasi-detective novel,” Crawford continues, “Polite retains mystery by not clarifying these parts.” The question of how exactly Sister X meets her death steadily worms its way to the surface of the narrative; we know that she fell off the stage at the Jack of Diamonds, but did she take an accidental tumble, or did Miss Ann White push her?

*

Intriguingly, Polite apparently didn’t regard her writing as a form of social protest, nor did she pander to what white audiences expected of Black creatives during this period. “I’m of that generation which thought that because we were Negroes we had to write or paint or dance as Negroes. To be accepted by white publishers or producers we had to be ‘Negroes’ in quotation marks,” she reportedly said. “But I’d rather divide up my writing to do creative literature and editorial protests at separate times.” She certainly dedicated much of her life to the latter. Her parents’ active participation in the civil rights and labor movements—both in Detroit, where the family lived, and further afield; her mother’s work often took her to Washington, D.C.—clearly inculcated a sense of civic duty and activism in Polite. In the early sixties, she was elected to the Michigan State Central Committee of the Democratic Party, participating in the June 1963 Walk for Freedom and the November 1963 Freedom Now Rally to protest the Birmingham church bombings. She was also active in the NAACP and organized the 1963 Northern Negro Leadership Conference. Yet at the same time, when Polite moved to New York City at age nineteen—with her first husband and their daughter, with whom she’d fallen pregnant at only seventeen—she wasn’t drawn to Harlem, as we might expect her to have been. Instead, it was Greenwich Village, the birthplace of the Beat movement, that became her home. After her marriage broke down, she lived with Allen Polite, a young Black poet who was the father of her second daughter. As she apparently told her friend and colleague Craig Centrie, she’d moved to the city “to experience all of its culture and humanity,” not just that pertaining to the Black community.

So what’s the story behind the lack of critical engagement with her work? Although, after returning to America from Europe, Polite taught creative writing at the University at Buffalo for nearly three decades—she died, in 2009, age seventy-seven—she published no other novels after Sister X, something that has surely abetted her neglect. Remember the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Carolyn Kizer’s summation of Mojo Hand as simply “too rich a mix for the time in which it appeared”? Well, the same can be said of Polite’s novels. They’ve been “largely overlooked,” Devona Mallory argues in Writing African American Women, “because of their experimental and unique nature.” Drawing on French existentialism and satire, music, dance choreography—Polite trained at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance and worked as both a professional dancer and instructor from the mid-’50s through to the early sixties—and African American oral storytelling traditions, Polite’s novels defy easy categorization. But also worth mentioning is that much of what her novels explore was still terra incognita in literature then.

It’s important to remember that the literary landscape in which these works first appeared was one still very much dominated by men. Polite’s novels paved the way for the likes of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gloria Naylor, who all take up themes in their fiction that she wrestled with first—most significantly, the often fraught sexual politics involved in romantic and sexual relationships between Black men and Black women. And if it’s even only for this, Polite deserves more widespread attention than she’s been awarded thus far. As I’ve said, neither The Flagellants nor Sister X is a masterpiece—they’re the work of a young and talented writer who’s still feeling her way—but they are bursting with promise and peppered with more moments of genius than most.

 

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the NYR Daily, the Financial Times, The New York Times Book Review, and Literary Hub, among other publications. Read earlier installments of Re-Covered.

Staff Picks: Boulders, Brushstrokes, and Bud Smith

Alice Neel, Hartley, 1966, oil on canvas, 50 × 36″. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of Arthur M. Bullowa, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the National Gallery of Art. © The Estate of Alice Neel.

Alice Neel’s paintings are a tonic for the modern world—but not for the reason one might expect them to be. At first glance the tender, vivid portraits in “People Come First,” her sprawling retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, seem refreshing in contrast to the abstract expressionist movement they developed alongside. But pausing with each painting, I realized more and more that my feeling of rejuvenation was freedom from fatigue at the dull literality of photography; though she is a twentieth-century painter, our image-saturated twenty-first needs Neel. We like to see reality represented (you already know about social media), but for some reason, portraits and still lifes are associated with the sensibility of a distant past. Neel’s deep interest in the world around her, from Andy Warhol to pregnant women to fruit in bowls of cut glass, vibrates with an intensity that also feels friendly, accessible, familiar. In her imperfect proportions, thick brushstrokes, and dreamy palette, Neel offers a rare pleasure: to experience the world mediated not by machine but by hand. —Lauren Kane 

I first encountered Ayşe Papatya Bucak’s writing as part of a course called Women in Literature. And I remember the professor asking what we thought the course was about, what kind of material should be covered—literature by women, literature about women, literature for women? And I read “The History of Girls,” which is now the opening story in Bucak’s debut collection, The Trojan War Museum, and I felt the weight of the rubble that had trapped these girls after an explosion and the pressures placed upon them apart from the rubble, and I remember thinking, This—this is what it’s about. These stories have a way of letting loose featherlight sentences that land with the heft of, well, “What’s the heaviest thing you can imagine? A boulder? A house? An airplane? In all of the world, what is the heaviest thing? Can you even imagine it?” Her writing often invokes the imagination—it doesn’t seek to replace it—asking the reader to reflect, to participate in the making of meaning. Each story in The Trojan War Museum laces contemporary social concerns with cultural research, mythic imagery, and folkloric candor to investigate ideas of womanhood, Turkish identity, and storytelling itself. “Iconography” asks, “And how would you describe hunger?” The deftly structured title story braves the question, “Who is the god of the IED and the RPG?” “An Ottoman’s Arabesque” asks, “Who can say what they saw?” And I find myself answering, This—this is what it’s about. —Christopher Notarnicola

 

Fernanda Melchor. Photo courtesy of New Directions Publishing.

 

I read Fernanda Melchor’s virtuosic Hurricane Season, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes, in a single sitting. The story revolves around uncomfortable truths and traumas that one should probably unpack slowly, but the language—sustained, glorious snarls of frustration, sorrow, and rage, infused with details of place and time that coalesce into a heavy, uneasy atmosphere—propelled me inexorably onward. The people of this book are, for the most part, terrifying in their abjection; the title could as easily refer to lives in a perpetual state of disaster as it could to the way they come together like elemental forces that end in a woman’s murder (no spoilers—the body appears on page 2). One might avert one’s eyes from such characters in the street, but Melchor renders them beautiful by looking so closely. —Jane Breakell

The poet Lee Soho’s debut collection, Catcalling (translated from the Korean by Soje), creates a kaleidoscopic effect as it shifts through forms, its poems appearing sometimes as dialogues, sometimes as illustrations, and sometimes as a photograph of a pile of notes. All of the poems included in this collection, though, explore what it means to be a woman in contemporary Korea, dissecting the layers of abuse that the narrator experiences from family, lovers, and strangers. Seven poems under a section titled “Kyungjinmuseum of Modern Art” take works by various women artists as their jumping-off point, drawing from Marina Abramović, Louise Bourgeois, Shirin Neshat, Tracey Emin, and more. The result is a bold exploration of the role of the female artist and her place within a society. “What cleans up your mess and gets tossed out like a rag?” writes Lee with acidic precision in the collection’s penultimate poem. “A woman.” —Rhian Sasseen

In the universe of Bud Smith’s fiction, things are very weird, yet, at the same time, incredibly normal. Take, for instance, his story collection Double Bird: on the one hand, cars won’t start and bills are past due; on the other, characters flee society to live in the hollow center of the earth and take off into the sky on the back of a giant eagle named Birthday. As in “Violets,” Smith’s story from the Summer 2020 issue (the briefest of summaries: foreclosure, a purple bicycle, arson, a giant jigsaw puzzle that can be seen in full only from a hot-air balloon), the unremarkable quotidian in Double Bird takes such a weird turn that it ultimately comes back full circle, and we are suddenly able to see just how unbelievable life is. Even as the characters show up to work and go to AA meetings and have sex and drink beer and do all the other mundane things the living do, life is depicted as full of magic, possibility, and beauty. There’s a disorienting quality to these stories, in the sense that the everyday appears unfamiliar, utterly brand new. Just read one character’s rumination on the day turning over into night: “Gradually the light of day got brighter—and get this—then the light got dimmer dimmer dimmer dimmer. It stayed that way for a while. And then we did it all again.” Anything and everything can be beautiful, can be full of joy, can be truly amazing, if only we could see it—and get this—Smith’s stories go out of their way to show us. —Mira Braneck

 

Bud Smith. Photo courtesy of Smith.

Cooking with Herman Melville

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual, Melville-themed wine tasting on Friday, May 7, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. For more details, visit our events page, or scroll down to the bottom of the article.

Photo: Erica MacLean.

Whenever I would tell someone I was cooking from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for my next column, they would gleefully shriek, “Whale steaks!” And I would dither a bit and explain that no, those are illegal in America, and that I was instead planning to make two forms of chowder, clam and cod, that weren’t going to be very different from each other. In our Chowhound-fueled, extreme-eating kind of world, I felt a little silly. Chowder is an easy dish, and while there’s raging conflict over the primacy of New York style (tomato-based) versus New England style (white), and the finer variations of each, the topic seems to inspire passion in inverse proportion to its importance. (Potatoes or no potatoes? Avast.) In fact, as Perry Miller reports in The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene, Melville meant for Moby-Dick’s chapter on chowder to be a sardonic response to just such an ongoing foodie feud. (Many thanks to the novelist Caleb Crain for loaning me Miller’s book and writing two excellent essays on Melville, sexuality, and cannibalism, published in A Journal of Melville Studies and American Literature.)

Moby-Dick, however, is a book in which pulling on a single thread can reveal a universe. I had some contact with it in my all-girls middle school—to my recollection, just enough to ask why this book had dick in the title and so many mentions of “sperm” in its pages—but it’s only as an adult that I’ve fallen madly in love. I understand it now as a “lifelong meditation on America,” as the Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco writes in his introduction to the edition I own. So when I looked at the book’s two main food passages—one on chowder, the other on eating whale—I found a central theme: the question of what man (specifically gendered man) is doing here in America, what he’s cooking up, and how it nourishes him. In this system, eating chowder is on the side of our better nature, and eating whale is on the side of our worst, so I felt a little better about my dinner plans.

 

Clams of this type are often referred to as “quahogs” in Moby-Dick. Boil them in a little water until they open up and you get a fragrant stock with a pearly hue. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Herman Melville (1819–1891) wrote Moby-Dick quickly: the first reference to it appears in his letters in 1850, and the novel was published in 1851. He believed he was working on a masterpiece—and he needed to write a masterpiece, too, because he was perennially short of money. (“Dollars damn me,” he famously wrote while composing it.) The married Melville was also possibly in love—and not just with Nathaniel Hawthorne, as has been suggested for decades, but with the married woman who lived next door to him in the Berkshires, a bluestocking poet and free spirit named Sarah Morewood. The biographer Michael Shelden makes a speculative but powerful case for this in his 2016 book Melville in Love. Whatever Melville’s reasons, he set out in a blaze of divinity to do nothing less than “project a vision of the world’s essential constitution,” as Richard H. Brodhead writes in New Essays on Moby-Dick.

Literary history and legions of readers say he succeeded. Moreover, the symbolic structure of the text has allowed it to keep up nearly seamlessly with the times. It’s extraordinary how the reader finds today’s themes directly present, despite how language and ideas have changed. In 1851, Melville would have had neither word nor concept for homosexuality, but Moby-Dick could be considered America’s first piece of queer literature—at the heart of America, our greatest novel, queer! Nor did he always speak of race in terminology that would seem correct today, but the ship our heroes set sail on is called the Pequod, named after an American Indian tribe massacred by Puritans in the eighteenth century. The boat’s multiracial crew is dragged, tricked, financially incentivized, and, most ominously, inspired to its doom by a deranged white man, a creature of blind will, in pursuit of an “evil” white whale. The congruence with today’s issues is clear.

Since the book is a cultural artifact more known than read, it contains many surprises for the adult reader. The first, for me, was the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. In the opening chapters, our hero—a dreamy, educated white boy who wants us to call him Ishmael, though we’ll never know if that’s really his name—is forced to share a bed at an inn with a “cannibal,” a tattooed nonwhite “savage” named Queequeg. After the terrifying moment when Queequeg discovers Ishmael in his bed and threatens him, Melville subverts expectations. Ishmael decides that Queequeg is “comely looking,” and because, as he reasons, it’s “better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian,” he’s happy to pull back the sheets. More than happy. The two achieve what now reads as a sexual union in the bed, an idyllic, mutual feeling that Melville compares to being “married.” Ishmael overcomes his hesitations about Queequeg’s difference, saying, “the man’s a human being just as I am,” which must have been provocative to some readers, since the book was published during the run-up to the Civil War. The bedmates set out as a “cozy, loving pair” to sign up for a whaling voyage. (“I have written a wicked book,” Melville said in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, “and feel spotless as the lamb.)

 

At risk of igniting another chowder war, I used carrots in my cod chowder, following the example of Sam Sifton’s “no-recipe recipe” in the New York Times. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Another surprise was the treatment of the whale. Because Moby-Dick is about whaling and betrays no modern squeamishness over the matter, it takes some time to realize that what many readers imagine to be the boring parts, the chapters on cetology, function as a meditation on the whale’s profound beauty, spiritual value, and miraculous body. Even Moby-Dick, the antagonist, “when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea,” leaves behind himself “a milky way of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings.” Melville celebrates the whale’s head, his tail, his eyes, his skin, his lungs, his skeleton, and even the composition of his spouting (is it water or vapor?). In one of the most beautiful stretches of the book, Melville observes that the whale has no skin beyond a glass-like transparent membrane, beneath which “the visible surface of the Sperm Whale … is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line-engravings.” In such passages, the whale becomes the world.

There are two main food passages in Moby-Dick: a pair of chapters on eating whale and one on eating chowder. Melville understood the tragedy of whaling. The scenes in which one of the shipmates, Stubb, kills the book’s first whale and then gobbles up fresh steaks from the small of its back are among its most terrible. The author writes that Stubb “slowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed … But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of the fish.” After this, Melville declares Stubb “a high liver … somewhat intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.” Stubb commands a Black crewmate to jump overboard onto the whale’s carcass and “cut me one from his small.” Next, he awakens another Black crew member, the cook, and humiliates him, all while stuffing himself with “reddish morsel[s].”

 

The Try Pots inn on Nantucket is the “fishiest of all fishy places,” where Ishmael and Queequeg eat chowder three times a day. Its landlady “wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebrae.” Thankfully, my cod came boned. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

In these scenes, we see a continuity of horrors: the white man’s abuse of other races, his exploitation of nature, his destructive power, his thoughtless sadism. And perhaps more significantly, Melville portrays this behavior as the white man’s destruction of himself. The next chapter, “The Whale as a Dish,” starts and ends with the suggestion that to eat a whale is akin to cannibalism. We learn that most people consider whale meat too rich, but there are some exceptions: “In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed with flour and cooked into a most delectable mess.” Viewed in the light of cannibalism, such passages are excruciating, as is the narration’s bright, reportorial tone. The author emphasizes that we accomplish our awful ends with cheerful industry, ingenuity, and vigor. D. H. Lawrence, writing somewhat feverishly about Moby-Dick in the twenties, called the whale “the deepest blood-being of the white race. He is our deepest blood-nature. And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness.”

Moby-Dick is a tragedy—Delbanco calls it an “elegy to democracy”—but it indicates alternatives. The chapter where the characters eat chowder is one of these. When Ishmael and Queequeg arrive on Nantucket, they stay at an inn called the Try Pots and, in a comic sequence, discover that the place serves nothing but two types of chowder, “clam or cod.” The clam chowder is made of “small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with a pounded ship’s biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.” The cod is just as savory but “with a different flavor.” Ishmael and Queequeg have “chowder for breakfast, chowder for dinner and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes.” This wildly abundant food is a wedding feast of sorts, celebrating a relationship that is “a critique of power in the society that Melville depicted,” writes Robert K. Martin in his groundbreaking book of queer theory Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville. Martin posits that Ishmael and Queequeg’s love represents “a democratic eros … a generalized seminal power not directed toward control or production,” which Melville opposes to Captain Ahab’s “hierarchical eros expressed in social forms of male power as different as whaling, factory-owning, military conquest.” If that’s true, then it’s also significant that chowder is a mixed, sloshy, ill-defined kind of dish, subversive in definition and structure.

 

Due to the Try Pots landlady’s taciturn ways, at first our heroes believe they’re getting only a single cold clam for supper. “But when that smoking chowder came in,” Melville writes, “the mystery was delightfully explained.” Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Thus I am firmly for eating chowder and against eating whale. Like the Try Pots, I made both clam and cod, taking one recipe from my cooking-from-literature sister Cara Nicoletti, who made the clam chowder from Moby-Dick in her 2016 book Voracious. My recipe for cod chowder comes from Sam Sifton’s “no-recipe recipe” for speedy fish chowder in the New York Times. And though the Try Pots was not a wine-list kind of place, and most beverages in Moby-Dick are quaffed from the barrel of a harpoon, I wanted to pay tribute to Melville’s time in the Berkshires by adding a wine pairing. In 1850, shortly after meeting Sarah Morewood, Melville abruptly bought an estate he could ill afford situated next door to hers in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Pittsfield was a wealthy place back then, and Mrs. Morewood was known for her picnics, dining, and entertaining. On one notable excursion with Melville, she is documented as having brought “brandy cherries,” champagne, and “extra supplies of rum and port wine.”

My interest in Sarah Morewood is more than gossip-related. What strikes me most about Moby-Dick is not that the author condemns the things we should condemn but that he was wrestling with what men are. Is man’s will itself the problem—that clever-monkey urge to expand, create, innovate, colonize, dominate, write, whale? Or is the problem will without limit, will without containment or partner? The queerness in Melville’s work, which runs through all his books, is one form of redefining power hierarchies. I see the exposure of the great white phallic symbol on the book’s title page as another—brave Melville, the penis is not so powerful when it’s hanging out there for schoolchildren to giggle at for all eternity. Placing the work of art in the context of a relationship could be a third. It might be silly to call Morewood “the muse of Moby-Dick,” as the subtitle of Shelden’s book does, but using one’s power to make something for someone is also a better use.

My chowders were delicious—and they are for you! Nicoletti’s clam chowder recipe gives instruction for making your own clam stock, a necessary step that defines the flavor of the dish. The only tricky part is adding flour and butter to the sautéed onions, then slowly whisking in the stock without creating lumps, a process similar to making gravy. The recipe calls for only small amounts of bacon, celery, onion, and potato, and I was tempted to overstuff in order to create an impression of bounty befitting Melville’s chowder chapter, but I followed the recommended quantities and was glad I did so: the broth-to-morsel ratio was just right. Nicoletti also allowed me to skip a potentially tedious step by explaining that the ship biscuit in Melville’s recipe was used as a thickener “in the days when heavy cream wasn’t so readily available.” I had considered making ship biscuit (recipes exist on prepper websites), but the heavy cream was a better choice.

 

In modern recipes, heavy cream replaces pounded ship biscuit as a thickening agent. Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

The cod chowder also lived up to the source material. The premise of Sifton’s “no-recipe recipes” is to give the home chef guidelines on how to cook while improvising. For his fish chowder, he suggests bacon, onion, potato, corn, and carrots (similar to Nicoletti’s recipe, except that hers calls for celery instead of carrots). Because the no-recipe premise allows one to make it up, and because I wanted the two dishes to be different, I made my own adjustments. When Sifton said to use fish stock, white wine, water, “or any combination of the above” to make broth, I used water, white wine, and tomato juice, making the second bowl more New York style. The wine-tomato broth was ambrosial, and the results were wonderful, though I found myself, somewhat foolishly, overriding my own cooking instincts in order to follow the words of the nonrecipe. Subverting structure is harder than it seems.

For the wine pairing, my spirits collaborator, Hank Zona, suggested an American beverage that was all the rage in Melville’s time and is currently having a revival: a bubbly rosé made from Catawba grapes. These wines, Zona said, are “light-bodied, pink, fruity, slightly funky, slightly sweet”—perfect for a picnic like those Melville went on with Mrs. Morewood. The new versions “probably taste much like they did back then.” Zona sourced two from the nearby Finger Lakes. One is from Chëpika, a collaboration between the Finger Lakes winemaker Nathan Kendall and a woman who is a pillar of the natural wine movement, Pascaline Lepeltier. The other is from Lakewood vineyards; I found it in cans at Convive Wine & Spirits in New York’s East Village, for a bargain at five dollars per can. The Chëpika is tart, floral, and light in alcohol; it has a summery flavor, like a rhubarb shrub. The Lakewood has mild, pink-fruit sweetness, balanced with florals and a foxy scent characteristic of the grape.

My picnic was wonderful, though I felt some sadness, as all Melville lovers probably do. Moby-Dick in its time was a commercial flop and mostly a critical one, too. Melville was “bitterly shocked,” Delbanco writes, by the book’s reception. His next book, Pierre, cemented his lack of commercial viability, and he eventually gave up publishing, moved back to New York City, and took a job as a clerk. Moby-Dick would be rediscovered around the turn of the twentieth century and undergo a major revival in the twenties, never to be obscure again. Melville died well before that, by all accounts an angry and broken man: he had written Moby-Dick and seen it fail. Could any amount of posthumous chowder make up for that?

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Clam Chowder

Adapted from Voracious , by Cara Nicoletti. Serves two.

Note: I divide clams into the vague classifications of quahogs and steamers. Quahogs are hard-shelled and include common supermarket varieties like littlenecks; steamers have a flatter, thinner shell and usually have the foot hanging out. In my experience, steamers have sand in them and need to be processed differently than the recipe below calls for. The quahogs I buy aren’t sandy, but do check yours once you’ve made the stock.

2 dozen clams
2 cups water
a strip of bacon, diced
1/2 rib celery, chopped
a small onion, chopped
2 tbs butter
2 tbs flour
a small potato, cubed
1/2 cup corn kernels, fresh or frozen
a sprig of thyme
a bay leaf
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup cream
oyster crackers to serve

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Carefully wash the clams under cold running water. Add them to a medium saucepan, with two cups of cold water to cover. Bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for around five minutes, until the clams have just opened. Do not overcook. Strain, reserving both clams and boiling liquid. Ideally, you’ll want to pour the clam liquid into a light-colored opaque bowl so you can see any sand. Remove the clam meat from the shells. Discard the shells.

Rinse the pot you boiled the clams in. Add the bacon, and cook over medium heat until crispy. Reserve. Turn the heat down to medium-low, add the onions and celery, and sauté until the onions are wilted and translucent. Add the butter, and let it melt. Whisk in the flour, and let it cook until it is lightly toasted and smells fragrant, like a biscuit—this should take a minute or two. Whisk in the clam liquid, a little at a time, until it is all incorporated, leaving any sand at the bottom of the bowl.

Add the corn kernels, potatoes, bay leaf, thyme leaves, and salt, and simmer until the potatoes are fork-tender, ten to twelve minutes.

Add the clam meat. Add the cream, and stir to combine. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve with oyster crackers.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Speedy Fish Chowder

Adapted from the New York Times .

a strip of bacon, diced
a small onion, chopped
a carrot, diced
a small potato, chopped
1/2 cup corn kernels, fresh or frozen
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp smoked paprika
1 cup white wine
1 cup tomato juice
a pound of cod filets, cut into one-inch chunks
2 tbs heavy cream
1/4 tsp Aleppo pepper
crusty bread (to serve)

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Cook the bacon in a medium-size Dutch oven set over medium-high heat until crispy. Remove and reserve the bacon. Add the onions to the bacon fat. Lower the heat, and cook until wilted and golden, about ten minutes. Add the carrot, potatoes, corn, salt, and paprika. Toss to combine. Add the white wine and tomato juice, and bring to a boil. Simmer, covered, until the vegetables are soft. Add the cod, and cook until it has turned white and flaky, about five minutes. Finish with the heavy cream and Aleppo pepper. Serve with crusty bread.

 

Photo: Erica MacLean.

 

Wine!

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona on Friday, May 7, at 6 P.M. for a virtual, Melville-themed wine tasting on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. We will discuss food in Melville’s work and recommend wines inspired by his life.

The wines seen in the story are the Chëpika Catawba and the Lakewood Vineyards Bubbly Catawba. The Lakewood Bubbly Catawba can be ordered through the vineyard’s website (there is a six-bottle minimum). For an alternative, we recommend any high-quality sparkling wine in a can, such as those from Underwood or Old Westminster. Anyone who would like more specific advice on choosing a wine for the tasting can email us (hank@thegrapesunwrapped.com).

 

 

Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. Read earlier installments of Eat Your Words.

Poets on Couches: Brian Tierney Reads James Wright

National Poetry Month has arrived, and with it a second series of Poets on Couches. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across distances.

“Heraclitus”
By James Wright
Issue no. 62, Summer 1975

My beautiful America, vast in its brutality, and brutal in its vastness. All the way from Paris to Vienna takes less time to find than all the way from New York to Pittsburgh, where Duquesne University had a beautiful football team when I was a boy.

One evening beside the river, only its name. Only one river, the Ohio, that is the loneliest river in the world.

Patsy di Franco sank down into the time of the river and stayed, Joe Bumbico jumped naked into the suck hole and dragged up Harry Schultz. I started to cry.

A cop gouged his fists into Harry’s kidneys. He must have thought they were lungs.

Harry couldn’t talk plain.
Harry puked.
I loved Harry, he was one of my best friends.
Harry, Harry,
Are you still alive?
Who? Me? I ain’t not.

I swam all the way across the Ohio River with my friends alone. Me and Junior and Elwood and Shamba and Crumb. We made it all the way across to West Virginia.

I was only a boy.

I swam all the way through a tear on a dead face.

America is dead.
And it is the only country I had.

Harry. Harry,
Are you still alive?

 

Brian Tierney is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the author of the forthcoming collection Rise and Float (Milkweed, 2022). His poem “You’re the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With” appeared in our Winter 2020 issue.

Xandria Phillips, Poetry

Xandria Phillips. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Xandria Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for emerging writers, Xandria has received fellowships from Oberlin College, Cave Canem, Callaloo, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Brown University Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, where they are researching and composing a book of poems and paintings that explore Black feeling and materiality. Their poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Their chapbook Reasons for Smoking won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook Contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Hull, the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, is their first book. They are working on a nonfiction manuscript titled Presenting as Blue/Aspiring to Green, about color theory, gender, and modes of making.

*

Two poems from HULL:

“Elmina Castle”

at first only the rivers and I wept
for you in your journey, like the waters’
from tropical interiors, to the estuary
slap of the ocean’s cupped hands

and then your absence became religion
as easily as creating meaning from loss of limb,
you fell into crates that rustled from within
to the tune of the wind’s phantom chorale

*

“Sex Dream in the Key of Aporia”

I half-wake in sudor, queer vernacular forgotten in the sinew of sleep.
Wetted by a man whose saunter turns

………………………………………………………..my breed diaphanous,

I fasten myself to his shared anatomies while he ascribes me
to the shades of children we’d make.

………………………………………………………..Sex, my choice

 

harness for affection, I falter before unreining curiosity.
Trans time and space,

………………………………………………………..I follow the russet roads inside

 

myself, Accra lanced into my neural system still. My intra-continent sweats
through shirts, and drinks stout,

………………………………………………………..though it tastes of displacement.

 

I still have a penchant for what misconstrued me, to live among kin in exclusion.
Awake, I don’t conflate touch with knowledge,

………………………………………………………..so my projected selves approach

 

the helm as nimbus parts me. Their mission is simple.
I buck their tether

………………………………………………………..They tighten its hold.

Ladan Osman, Poetry

Ladan Osman. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden (Coffee House Press, 2019), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), winner of the Sillerman Prize. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Cave Canem, the Michener Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Osman’s first short film (codirected), Sam Underground, profiled Sam Diaz, a teenage busker who would become the 2020 American Idol. She was the writer for Sun of the Soil, a short documentary on the complicated legacy of Malian emperor Mansa Musa. It was selected for inclusion in the Cannes International PanAfrican Film Festival and the New York African Film Festival. Osman’s directorial debut, The Ascendants, is streaming now on TOPIC. She lives in New York.

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A poem from Exiles of Eden:

“Half-Life”

Don’t turn a scientific problem into a common love story.

—Solaris (1972)

How can I fail outside and inside our home? I decay in our half-life.
How can I fail with my body? How do I stay alone in this half-life?
I started a ghazal about my hope’s stress fracture.
I require rest from your unfocused eyes, my heat,
which is becoming objective and observable.
A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?
The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
Maybe I am the straw.
Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:
bray, flay, array.
They relate to farms, decaying things,
gray days, dismay.
I am recently reckless about making a display
of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.
Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home
by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”
You know I’m fraying.
You don’t try to braid me together.
You don’t notice a tomcat wiggling his hind legs,
ready to gather all my fabric,
his paws over my accidental tassels.
I’ve learned how to be appropriate sitting on my hands
on the couch, not allowed to touch you.
“Sex?” you say, like I asked you to make a carcass our shelter.

I don’t recount my dreams to you
because you’re insulted in most of them.
Remember when I asked you to break into a building?
“Let’s have an adventure, any.”
I dreamed another man was taking me into a locked school.
“Let’s go,” he said. No face, his hand straight behind him.
He was wearing a black peacoat.
Many men wear black wool coats. You have one.
Hell, I have one. I may have been leading myself.

“How long will you live this half-life?”
my mother asks during a phone call when, so absent
of any particular emotion, I couldn’t catch my breath.
She thought I was upset, losing my temper in the street.
It’s months later, and when we talk
she says, “I was so happy today. Does that make sense?
And here I am, sleeping on a bed older than your baby sister.”
I’m not sure what bothers me but my voice gets low
and I repeat myself.
I raise and drop my palate without sound.
“Good-night,” we say, each with something unaddressed,
without allay.

I try to remember half-lives, learned in science rooms,
air dense with iron, vinegar. The process of dating old bones,
old stones. Unstable nuclei, decay by two or more processes.
Exponential death, exponential halving of a life.
My mother has given me something to pursue and solve.
I study the internet:
“The biological half-life of water in a human being is about
7 to 14 days, though this can be altered by his/her behavior.”
This makes me want to fall asleep in the bathtub.
In this house, it’s how we escape each other,
where we find another warm body, moisture,
work a sweat on our brows.

I search doubling time, a related term,
because I hate feeling fractioned.
Kitchens, bowls of water steaming under dough:
How long will it take to grow to twice its size?
Depends on rack placement, heat of the water,
type of bread, whether the house is humid.
This house is only humid in the bathroom,
after a long soak with the door closed. Or else,
in summer. But it’s winter and a long time
before our flesh can rise and get sticky
in hands, on counters, in a proper resting place.

Sylvia Khoury, Drama

Sylvia Khoury. Photo: Yael Nov.

Sylvia Khoury is a New York–born writer of French and Lebanese descent. Her plays include Selling Kabul (Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival), Power Strip (LCT3), Against the Hillside (Ensemble Studio Theater), and The Place Women Go. She is currently under commission from Lincoln Center, Williamstown Theater Festival, and Seattle Repertory Theater. Awards include the L. Arnold Weissberger Award and Jay Harris Commission and a Citation of Excellence from the Laurents/Hatcher Awards. She is a member of EST/Youngblood and a previous member of the 2018–19 Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop at the Lark and the 2016–18 WP Lab. Her plays have been developed at Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival, Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Roundabout Theater Underground, Lark Playwrights’ Week, EST/Youngblood, and WP Theater. She holds a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.F.A. from the New School for Drama. She will obtain her M.D. from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in May 2021.

*

An excerpt from Selling Kabul:

TAROON
You don’t want me to go, is that it?
You want me to stay?

AFIYA
Of course I want you to go.
Don’t be stupid.
You think I want you here?

TAROON
I can handle whatever they send, Afiya.
Good, or bad, or nothing.

AFIYA
Nothing!
Exactly.
I hate it, seeing your hope when you check for messages.
Watching it crack when there’s nothing.
There’s always nothing.

TAROON
Until one day, there’s something.

AFIYA
We repair that box and you won’t have an invitation to America.
Just a message from Jeff.

TAROON
Jeff is my friend.

AFIYA
Jeff is not your friend.
Jeff got to go home to America.
Jeff abandoned you.

TAROON
Jeff didn’t abandon me.
Listen, Afiya.
America, their word is good, okay?
So it takes some time, it takes some time.

AFIYA
He fills your head with dreams.
I don’t like it.

TAROON
You know what Jeff and I went through together.

AFIYA
Yes, yes.

TAROON
You’ve seen in my folder.

He pulls out a binder from under the floor couch.
As he opens it:

AFIYA
Taroon.

TAROON
All the letters he had them write me.
Taroon translated for us here—
Taroon came under fire there—
Taroon is a strong man—
Brave man—

AFIYA
Repetitive man,
I have heard this before, Taroon.
Please, you are making my head hurt.

He puts the binder away.

TAROON
They will get me this visa, I know it.
They will.
For me, for Bibi, for our son.
Jeff promised.

AFIYA
(Absently)
Yes, of course.
Jeff promised.

Taroon is still restless.
He watches her sew.

TAROON
Four months and suddenly this place seems so small.

AFIYA
It is small.
…
Drink your tea, Taroon.

Sarah Stewart Johnson, Nonfiction

Sarah Stewart Johnson. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Sarah Stewart Johnson grew up in Kentucky before becoming a planetary scientist. She now runs a research lab as a professor at Georgetown and works on NASA missions. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Her book, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World, was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of 2020.

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An excerpt from The Sirens of Mars:

Mars, after all, is only our first step into the vast, dark night. New technologies are paving the way for life-detection missions to the far reaches of our solar system, to the moons of the outer planets, far from what we once considered the “habitable zone.” To worlds that hold stacks of oceans amidst shells of ice, floating like a layer cake. That spew out jets of briny water through cryovolcanoes. That have pale hills and dark rivers and hydrocarbon rain. And then there are also the planets around other stars. There could be as many as forty billion planets that could support life in the Milky Way alone, belted with moons and moonlets—potentially an entire solar system for every person on Earth. The idea of knowing these places intimately, of one day touching their surfaces, may seem ludicrous. The universe has a speed limit—it’s slow, and these worlds are very far away. What could we ever know about them, besides a few details about their orbits, perhaps some spectrographic measurements of their atmospheres? They are points of light and shadow at the very edge of our sight, far beyond our grasp. Then again, that is exactly how Mars seemed only a century ago.

As much as Mars feels like a place we understand, a place like Earth, it is still the alien other. One of my favorite things inside the box, tucked in a bent folder, is a set of pictures that Opportunity took in 2010. All those years ago, it seemed like such a marvel that the rover was still working. No one would have dared to believe it would have thousands more sols of science. The dust was building, the power dropping. It had been traversing the planet for six years and was already long past its ninety-day expiration date. But then a gust of wind whistled across Meridiani Planum and cleaned some of the fine particles off the solar panels. With the unexpected spike in electricity output, the team commanded the panoramic camera to take a series of pictures that could be strung together with time-lapse photography.

The flickering images captured by the rover are unforgettable. There, on an ancient plain near the equator of Mars, against an ochre sky on a dusty day, the sun is setting. A white circle of light is drifting down over the dark desert. The terrain is bare, and the sky is still in the half-light of dusk. And on the horizon, with the dust having scattered all the red light away, the sunset glows an eerie, baffling, incandescent blue.

The color makes no sense. It rattles the mind. It rips at the seams of the physical world. Scientifically, I understand it—the properties of the light, the microphysics of the system. There is no mystery to behold. And yet the mystery, like many others in our universe, is profound, nearly incomprehensible. That blue. So recognizable, yet so foreign. Shining in a halo around our shared star, calling us like a siren.

Marwa Helal, Poetry

Marwa Helal. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Marwa Helal is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), Ante body (Nightboat Books, forthcoming 2022), and winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest. She is also the author of the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2017) and has been awarded fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, NYFA/NYSCA, Poets House, and Cave Canem, among others. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, she currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

*

Two poems from Invasive species:

“poem to be read from right to left”

language first my learned i
second
see see
for mistaken am i native
go i everywhere
*moon and sun to
ل letter the like
lamb like sound
fox like think but

recurring this of me reminds
chased being dream
circle a in
duck duck like
goose
no were there but
children other
of tired got i
number the counting
words english of
to takes it
in 1 capture
another

//

*شمسية و قمرية

*

“poem for palm pressed upon pane”

i am in the backseat. my father driving. from mansurah to cairo. delta to desert,
heliopolis. a path he has traveled years before i was born. the road has changed but the
fields are same same. biblical green.
………………………………hazy green, when i say: this is the most beautiful tree i have ever
seen. and he says, all the trees in masr are the most beautiful. this is how i learn to see.
…………..we planted pines. four in a row. for privacy. for property value. that was
…………..ohio. before new mexico. before, i would make masr
…………………….my own. but after my mother tells me to stop…….asking her what is wrong
whenever i see her staring
out of the living room window. this is how trauma learns to behave. how i learn to push
against the page. i always give hatem the inside seat.
so he can sleep. on the bus.…………………………………..his warm cheek against the cold
window. when i am old enough to be aware of leaving. it is raining hard.
…………………………………………5000 miles away, there is a palm. in a pot. its leaves
pressed. skinny neck bent. a plant seeking light in an animal kingdom.

Donnetta Lavinia Grays, Drama

Donnetta Lavinia Grays. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Donnetta Lavinia Grays is a Brooklyn-based playwright who proudly hails from Columbia, SC. Her plays include Where We Stand, Warriors Don’t Cry, Last Night and the Night Before, Laid to Rest, The Review of How to Eat Your Opposition, The New Normal, and The Cowboy is Dying. Donnetta is a Lucille Lortel, Drama League, and AUDELCO Award Nominee. She is the recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwright Award, National Theater Conference Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, the Lilly Award, Todd McNerney National Playwriting Award, and is the inaugural recipient of the Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award. She is currently under commission from Steppenwolf, The Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, WP Theater, and True Love Productions.

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An excerpt from Where We Stand:

Eyes widen as we walk the streets of this shiny unfamiliar. And Ohhs and so many Ahhs.

What’s that moment when your spirit finally sees what your children see in you? Hero. Protector. Smartest person in the room. And that wealth of responsibility and expectation washes over you … in fear. I never knew I could be as big as y’all imagined me to be. We walked the length of this town like to have all y’alls hope pressed into my chest. A hope we didn’t think possible.

A still could be?
A better than?

WE DIDN’T KNOW

And like those new gleaming buildings, that change came gunning for us too.
Here come a, “Man, we looking fit today, y’all!”
As we turned to see suited up, dressed to the nines and church hats beaming.
Seersucker, loafer, high heeled and high steppin’ all. All shades of royal set into our gaits.
Here come a, “Man! I could get used to this!”

CAUSE’ GOLD IS ALL THE RAGE
…….YES, GOLD IS ALL THE RAGE NOW
GOLD IS ALL THE RAGE
…….NOW

AM I A KING
…….AM I?

We all skip hop skip down the street. Like how we guess easy moments to be. Borrowed images of hope from some film we seen as kids maybe? Smiles curled. Sight sharpened.
Here come a, “When I step foot in my new house…”
Here come a, “Can’t nobody tell me nothin!”
Here come a, “You ain’t ate no pies like the pies I’m ‘bout to bake from the fruit in my orchard, baby!”
Here come, “Just watch me stunning in that new car. Crusin’ like what!”
Here come a, “Imma be the person I wished I could be with this new money way of living.”

AM I A KING
AM I A KING

Our imaginations set us into motion. The months pass. And gold becomes a throwaway thing like water, air or that morning kiss goodbye. We don’t even notice the unusual unusualness of it. Easy from a faucet easy.

THE DAYS MIGHT STILL PASS BY
THE DAYS THEY DO GO BY
TIP OF THE HAT
…….HELLO GOODNIGHT
THEY STILL PASS BY
THE DAYS…
BUT THIS TIME THERE’S A GLANCE
…….A SMILING LITTLE GLANCE (FOR ME)
IT’S ALL WORTH IT.

And every day there’s you. Come to me. Asking me for a little blessing here and there. Lay a hand on a new baby’s head.
Here come me saying, “Well, now, you wanna see if Cooper’s got that steed ready for breeding come May.”
Here come me saying, “Ain’t nothing the two of you can’t work out. Love will find a way.” Here come me saying, “Sell ‘em for about five cents cheaper. Seem fair enough. She’s you neighbor. Keep her.”

Admiration. Respect.

WAS IT WORTH IT?

Real friendship…

AM I A KING
AM I A KING

How high? How high? How high can a man be?
Life saver y’all say. Statue center of town. Of ME.

AM I A KING

Townsquare. Pageantry! Music! And favorite color painted faces. And all on this day to celebrate our storied walk into this…newness. Feasts of fruits without a blemish.

And as the wine flows
…….My speech goes…

A town ain’t nothing but history waiting for future!
And we turned our future to good that day.

Here come a, “Yes. Yes. You bettah preach, now.
You bettah go on! What you say!”

Towns are built by its people. That’s you. And that’s the person to ya side.

Here come a “Yes. Yes!”

I’m talking ‘bout a kind of joyful building. One that lessens the divide
Between us.
‘Cause between us…
That joyful building Is us building joyfulness from the inside.

And that edifice? It don’t just stand on joy.
It stands on our duty to one another.
An edifice built on how we call each other sister
And how we call each other brother.