A Long Curving Scar Where The Heart Should Be

by Quintan Ana Wikswo

A searing, sensual novel with photographs, A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be weaves together southern fabulism and gothic fury, pulling at the restless, volatile threads of seditious American iconoclasts Zora Neale Hurston, Patti Smith, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison. At this devil's crossroads of the King James Bible and the Egyptian Book of the Dead emerge the ghosts and realities of sex, race, violence, and hauntingly vulnerable emotion. Quintan Ana Wikswo has written an unforgettable and relentless reinvestigation of the American soul.

A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be unfolds on the unruly, mixed-race, queer-sexed margins of a conservative 1930s Southern town. In the wake of abandonment by her husband, an impoverished young midwife and her twin daughters create a hospice and sanctuary for the town's outcasts within a deserted antebellum plantation house. The twins inhabit a fantastical world of ancient resistances, macabre births, glorious deaths, ravenous love affairs, clandestine sorceries, and secret madnesses--a site where the legacies of catastrophic injustice, bigotry, brutality, and grief contend with unquenchable desires for restitution, wholeness, sexual liberty, and lives of freedom outside the chokeholds of racism, misogyny and social constraint. Overshadowed by lingering scandals of miscegenation, the persistence of searing endemic violence, and a troubling secrecy surrounding their father's disappearance, the women begin to walk into the discomforting limitations of their myths and wounds, and create their own new maps of sexual and personal fulfillment, resilience, and transformation. When the town claims that he is closer than they think, the women must decide whether his reappearance would offer wholeness, or unbearable consequences to their own hardfought, courageous journeys towards existential insurrection

Genres: Fiction

376 pages, Paperback

Published October 2, 2017

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every page is infused with intense, powerful prose that furiously and continiously blew me away. A gorgeous, gothic epic that sprawls and spills and snakes its way through three generations of an outcasted family syruped in controversy. I could not stop live tweeting passages from the book as I read. I would devour sections of it at a time, feasting on Quintan's writing in fevered hiccuppy gulps.

It is a story of fierce and wicked women.
It is a story of survival, and strength, and violence.
It is essential and ugly and wakeful.
It is your next must-read.

[Terry Pitts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in a Southern city ominously called Lynchburg, this novel tells the story of Maw and her twin daughters Whitey and Sweet Marie. Much to her regret and disgust, Maw briefly fell for a white ladies’ man known as Lafayette, who is fancifully described as “a man who lived in a dog’s house, a man with four legs, who barked at raccoons and gnawed bones.” But after the twins are born, Lafayette wants no part of parenthood and flees farther south to live with the Gulf Girls in their brothel. Men don’t come off very well in A Long Curving Scar. The male gender’s unquenchable thirst for control without responsibility, for unending sexual conquest, and for violence is thoroughly cataloged here. Nothing can erase the pain, the shame, the guilt, the grief, and anger that the three women share as a result of their relationship and kinship with Lafayette, their own version of original sin.

If I say that this is a scathing, dystopian view of America, a diatribe against male privilege, and a send-up of the hypocritical sanctimony of the church—all of which it is—you might get the wrong impression. For this is a book full of passion and compassion, with tender, beautiful, and sensuous writing that urges the reader to pause, re-read, and admire (or puzzle out) the lush sentences and the risks that Wikswo takes—risks that pay off most of the time. Her writing is a confident blend of fable, Gospel, and imagination that links to the gritty, fabulous tradition of Southern Gothic.

The book is filled with dozens of Wikswo's own photographs. As an activist artist with deeply held principles (which she writes about in an afterword), she uses "repurposed" cameras and outdated film, which combine to create color photographs that have light leaks splaying at the edges, an imprecise focus, and ghostly double exposures when the film fails to advance properly. These images are meant to suggest memory and, placed as sequences that separate the book's many chapters, they are also, perhaps, meant to serve as a respite to Wikswo's intense prose. But after a while, I found the images began to pale against the onslaught of the text. In part, that seems due to the fact that the images in the book might have been printed in colors that are too muted.

For a longer review, visit my blog.