Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2019-women-longlist‎ (16)

”You'll say we've got nothing in common, No common ground to start from …
And I said, "What about Breakfast at Tiffany's?"
She said, "I think I reme

”You'll say we've got nothing in common, No common ground to start from …
And I said, "What about Breakfast at Tiffany's?"
She said, "I think I remember the film
And I said, "Well, that's the one thing we've got"

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity …
I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure ...
Yet when I surveyed [it] all .... everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind

“We collect bones and bundles long after the river seeps back and the mud dries. We make up stories for each one. Each piece is remembered. Out of

“We collect bones and bundles long after the river seeps back and the mud dries. We make up stories for each one. Each piece is remembered. Out of sweet cherry wood, we carve our very own book. The hands bring us paper. We stitch them together. Stuff the newspapers, like bookmarks, in between. Though neither of us can read or write, each page holds a story. We remember.”

I’m researching and writing about reuniting the African American family after the Emancipation. My research explores voice appropriation, created past, memory, identity, family, rupture and repair; and community. It follows multiple narratives as emancipated slave characters develop from 1860 to 1920 as I attempt to give voice to characters who are often forgotten in literature as well as in history.

My questions have evolved to: How can my novel give voice to the silence in the Black American/African American community; the novel as therapy; where does my novel fit in and explorations of narrator point of view.

Slavery forced the separation of millions of families; I’m hoping my historical fiction can help us reunite

This thesis is in two parts. First, a novel that explores motherhood, community, silence, identity, family, stereotypes and racism to illustrate the legacy of slavery by implicitly drawing parallels between the American past and the American present. The novel explores answers to questions about silence, reuniting the Black American family after the Emancipation, representing diverse characters, ethically portraying emancipated slave characters, and writing about slavery. In 'Remembered', a framed narrative, the past haunts the present in the form of Tempe, in the structure of the novel, and in the central conflicts within the narrative …………. In Chapter Two, I discuss the power of literature to build community, the importance of writing to reclaim story and identity ….. Chapter Three of the thesis is a creative examination of my writing practice ….. The thesis concludes with Chapter Four, a discussion of motherhood that focuses on representations of black mothers in literature. The discussion examines close readings of selected texts including ‘Remembered’ ……. Overall, my thesis aims to provoke dialogue that challenges the rhetoric of oppression, that gives voice to diverse characters, and that shatters silences. Unless Americans recognize the importance of diverse stories and diverse characters both on and off the page, like Spring, we will forever be haunted by the past.

Most of what I am about to tell you ain’t in no history book, no newspaper article, no encyclopaedia. There’s a whole heap of stories don’t ever get told. What I know comes straight from my sister’s lips to my heart and to this book. Some of it I seen with my own two eyes. Some with hers. You come from free people. From right here in Philadelphia. You wasn’t born here. It was me that brought you home

“[they] all hugged on it, loved on it and in the morning, one of them would love it to death. Love it to freedom.”

“It leaves streaks of black, like words, on her palms. The paper was worn before we got it. Between chores, the hired hands gave scraps to me and Tempe. Presents with pretty squiggles from all over the world. News they been saving or thinking on, travelling with. Most of them can’t read neither but the stories they tell! Get them filled up on some of Mama’s good supper and they get to “reading”. This here say so and so did such and such, one will start up and get to saying who done what. That ain’t the whole truth. Let me tell you what really happened, another will say.”

“To pass the time I pull out the book me and Tempe made. After a while I get folks to write their name or make their mark in it. Some write a few lines. Some draw pictures. Some give me clippings to add to it. Newspaper headlines, pages from books. Wanted posters, receipts. The longer we rattle on, the more I collect. I tell stories. Grand ones about escapes and revolts and little ones about people holding on to treasures. The whole world races by.”

Each person has a story…….It goes on like that for hours. Laughing, crying, whispering, singing, shouting, we swap stories in between bumping along the road. We’re supposed to remember them, to pass them on like folks we meet. Everyone’s looking for someone. Like a bucket, I’m carrying a head full of names and stories. Older ones spill out to make room for new ones.

@SoSadToday first appeared in 2012, relaying the thoughts of an unnamed young unnamed young woman with a pronounced anxiety disorder and a dark sense of humor about it. Topics like depression, panic attacks, and feelings of romantic doom all served as fodder for the creator’s stylized expressions of feminine despair: “sometimes i remember i exist and i’m just like ‘gross’ ”; “every ten seconds a girl feels insecure and that girl is me.” She hid sudden emotional escalations inside disaffected quips (“excited to get over you by being obsessed with someone else who doesn’t want me”) and paired Internet slang ironically with feel-good clichés: “forgive and forget jk.” She celebrated cues of femininity even as she mocked them, like a taste for Diet Coke or shopping as a form of self-care…………….. She warped the lyrics of popular songs and inverted brand slogans to reflect her self-loathing

On the narrative level: It’s about a book about a woman who moves to Venice Beach and begins a romantic obsession with a merman whose tail starts below the D.

On the thematic level: It’s about the attempts to fill one’s existential hole with the narcotic of limerence, lust, and love.

In 2011 I was awarded a research fellowship at Harvard. I was a woman on a mission to make a difference. I wanted to write a novel about the tribulations of the innocent men who languish in America's prisons. I watched documentaries, read oral histories, and studied up on the law. I was horrified and angered by a justice system that criminalizes black men and destroys families. Outrageous statistics troubled my sleep.

But when I sat down to write, my old-fashioned Smith Corona was silent. I had the facts, but not the story. When I was a very young writer, my mentor cautioned me that I should always write about "people and their problems, not problems and their people." After a year of research, I felt that I understood the problem, but what about the people? I wasn't sure how to go forward. Novels, like love, can't be forced. But also like love, novels can enter your life in an instant.

When I first started writing, I was thinking of it as a book about mass incarceration, and mass incarceration is not a plot. It’s not a story. It’s not a character. I was at Harvard doing research on this subject, and I felt like I had a lot of information, but I had not yet found my story because I had to realize that I am a novelist. I’m not a sociologist. I’m not a documentarian. I’m not an ethnographer.

I feel like I left so much of the research on the cutting-room floor, and I think it’s because the research, while horrifying, wasn’t, for me, inspiring. I don’t want to say that it wasn’t interesting because I was interested. The thing about novels to me is that novels take place in a space of ambiguity. Almost all the research I did on mass incarceration, let alone wrongful incarceration—there was no ambiguity there. If you arrest and convict an innocent person and subject them to the penal system, there is no second side to that story. I realized I had to write kind of to the left and to the right of the issue.

And I found the story, actually, through eavesdropping. I overheard a young couple arguing in the mall in Atlanta. The woman, who was splendidly dressed, and the man—he looked okay. But she looked great! And she said to him, “You know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.” And he shot back, “This …. wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.” And I was like, You know, I don’t know him, but I know she’s probably right. I doubt very seriously that he would wait on her for seven years, and he is probably right that this wouldn’t have happened to her. And I realized that they were at an impasse because she’s talking about the potential for reciprocity and he’s saying this is a moot point. I was intrigued by them, and so I integrated this very personal conflict with the research I had done.

When I returned home, I wrote down everything I could remember about that encounter. I was intrigued mostly by her, as she reminded me of the women I went to college with — independent yet vulnerable, reserved and passionate all at once. I knew this woman. In many ways, she was a younger version of myself. I named her Celestial. I remembered she called him Roy. My imagination filled in the gaps. I decided that my characters were married and that Roy had been in prison those seven years — for a crime he did not commit.

I wrote this novel three times. The first time, I wrote it all from the point of view of Celestial — the wrongful incarceration of her husband is the creeping fear made real. She struggles under the pressure to stand by her man, which is exacerbated by the fact that he is innocent. She's talented and independent, and not cut out to be dutiful. These are the attributes that intrigue Roy, and me. For some reason, this approach just didn't work. After a frustrating year, I rewrote it from the point of view of Roy, the ambitious young man robbed of his liberty. This approach worked a little better — after all, a man's heroic journey is the bedrock of Western literature. Roy was like Odysseus, coming home from battle hoping to find a faithful wife and a gracious house. But this story seemed a bit too easy, familiar in a way that didn't address the questions in my mind.

As I wrote An American Marriage, I was frustrated because I did not want to make Roy, my male character, so central. The first time, I wrote it all the way through from the point of view of Celestial, his wife. I was interested in the expectations of femininity and domesticity, the way that a black woman whose husband is wrongfully incarcerated—this archetypal racial problem—would behave. What is her role in supporting him? What does it mean to be a wife? I knew that would necessarily mean that, for Celestial, any decision other than organizing her life around his comfort would be considered treasonous. As I wrote, sometimes even speaking about this topic seemed treasonous. At a party, I ran into a black man who’s a friend of mine, and he asked me what I was working on. I told him I was writing a novel about a woman whose husband is wrongfully incarcerated. He said, “Oh, it’s about how she’s fighting to get him out.” I said, “It’s about a lot of things. And she doesn’t actually ‘wait’ for him in the traditional sense.” He jerked away from me. Just even imagining Roy’s story as anything other than the center caused him to physically recoil. And I was like: Wow, it’s that deep? I’m not even allowed to think about it? I mean, I don’t actually have a husband who’s wrongfully incarcerated. I’m not not-waiting. I’m just thinking about it. So I really resisted all the feedback from my beta readers who wanted more Roy, more Roy. I felt like the project was about complicating that narrative, and nobody wanted to indulge me in it. I finally did decide to write the book having Roy, as the first point-of-view character, to be more central. But I did it in a rage. I felt like Lena in Song of Solomon—as if I, as an author, was in service to Roy now. Like I’m working for him now. I was really, really angry. And I decided that if this was the only way that the story could work, then how about I just stop writing it?

When I first started to write this book, understanding that it was a story of a marriage, I wanted to focus on Celestial. I was fascinated by her dilemma. Here’s this woman, more bride than wife, married less than two years. And now she is expected to be “ride or die” for her husband—just as her art career is blossoming, as her dream is unfolding before her. For obvious reasons, I was into it. But as I wrote draft after draft, the pushback from my beta readers was overwhelming.

People think they are interested in women who don’t play by society’s rules, but when they see it in action, it is too disturbing. A question I kept getting was why is she “like that”? My question was “like what?” After all, in my view, Celestial is a person who wants the same things that anyone wants—to live her life in a way that fulfills her. This emotional limbo of being married but not really, of having one foot in her life as an artist and one foot emotionally serving the needs of her husband—it was too much.

Anyway, so I kept trying to make plot points that would justify her right to her own life. And I was getting irritated, and the book was getting clunky. And, truthfully, I was tired of what I processed as people’s really basic understanding of the conflict. Seriously. I stopped getting feedback because it was not helping me at all.

I started thinking about other novels by women that questioned the idea that women’s first (and only) priority is to be a good wife and mother. These novels were primarily by white women. They just get tired of being domesticated and go do something else. Trigger the applause. So why couldn’t Celestial?

And here is my big revelation. The reason is that in the novels by white women, all the characters have about the same level of material comfort. The husband that the woman wants to leave is in a comfortable position. You feel that he will be alright without her. He’ll probably be remarried in 25 minutes and there might be a custody fight or something, but you don’t worry about him. I connected this dot to understand that in a story the person with the most urgent crisis will always take the reader’s eye. You can’t revise around this. I could embroider Celestial all I wanted to but as long as Roy was wrongfully incarcerated, he would be the center of the narrative.

“If you have a woman, you recognize when you have said the wrong thing. Somehow she rearranges the ions in the air and you can’t breathe as well”

No, there is no point in involving my mother. It would be the death of her, or she would flat out deny that it could have happened. She would deny it even if she was the one who had been called upon to bury the body. Then she would blame me for it because I am the older sister—I am responsible for Ayoola. That’s how it has always been. Ayoola would break a glass, and I would receive the blame for giving her the drink. Ayoola would fail a class, and I would be blamed for not coaching her. Ayoola would take an apple and leave the store without paying for it, and I would be blamed for letting her get hungry.

According to family lore, the first time I laid eyes on Ayoola I thought she was a doll. Mum cradled her before me and I stood on my toes, pulling Mum’s arm down closer to get a better look. She was tiny, barely taking up space in the hammock Mum had created with her arms. Her eyes were shut and took up half her face. She had a button nose and lips that were permanently pursed. I touched her hair; it was soft and curly.
‘Is she mine?”
Mum laughed, her body shaking, which stirred Ayoola awake. She gurgled. I stumbled backward in surprise and fell on my backside.
‘Mummy, it talked! The doll talked!”
‘She is not a doll, Korede. She is a baby, your baby sister. You’re a big sister now, Korede. And big sisters look after little sisters.”

After all, Ayoola is short—her only flaw, if you consider that to be a flaw—whereas I am almost six feet tall; Ayoola’s skin is a color that sits comfortably between cream and caramel and I am the color of a Brazil nut, before it is peeled; she is made wholly of curves and I am composed only of hard edges.

Ayoola is inconsiderate and selfish and reckless, but her welfare is and always has been my responsibility.

I thought it was hilarious: the fact that the female will mate with the male, and if she happens to be hungry afterwards and the guy is still hanging around, she’ll eat him ..... What really fascinated me about the black widow spider was that the males are not prey until the females are hungry, and if they’re not hungry, the males get away. They’re fine. That’s something I love about Ayoola — I don’t think her actions are always from a place of pain or revenge or self protection. Sometimes, she just does it because she can. There’s something freeing about that. She’s not this broken female who’s acting from a place of hurt. She has no sympathy for her victims, no remorse, no sense of consequence. She just does what she wants to do when she wants to do it. Out of every character in the novel, she’s the one having the best time.

“You’re not the only one suffering, you know. You act like you are carrying this big thing all by yourself, but I worry too.”
‘Do you? ’Cause the other day, you were singing ‘I Believe I Can Fly.’ ”
Ayoola shrugs. “It’s a good song.”

Yoruba people have a custom of naming twins Taiwo and Kehinde. Taiwo is the older twin, the one who comes out first. Kehinde, therefore, is the second-born twin. But Kehinde is also the older twin, because he says to Taiwo, “Go out first and test the world for me.” This is certainly how Father considered his position as the second twin.

Wasik’s parents had balked at a religion that only recognised one supreme being and ignored the spirits, ancestors and minor gods who tended to the sun, river, moon and animal and plant kingdoms – and so would not allow Wasik to discard his traditional religion for a white god with blond hair and blue eyes. Wasik had to wait until he was out from under his parent’s influence before he could convert. Ismae’s parents, however, bought in hook, line and crucifix.

“In my earlier works I was much more graphic with my descriptions of horrific events. I think pulling back from that had much to do with me seeing so much violence against Black people on the news and social media platforms. Subjecting my character, myself or the reader didn’t seem to serve anyone involved.”

“The revelation that her African brothers and sisters were practicing the same atrocities that white men had engaged in centuries earlier placed Taylor between a rock and a hard place. If she revived her hate and turned it on to the Africans, on the very roots of who she claimed to be, then wouldn’t she once again be hating one-half of herself”

That wasn’t to say Abeyo didn’t struggle with the hate. After Thema had shared the ugly truth with her, hate had become a constant companion. It was Taylor who had saved her from being swallowed by it. She said [quoting Ghandi] “Abeo, the weak can never forgive, forgiveness is an attribute of the strong ………. Are you weak, Abeo” …. At one time she thought she was weak, but Taylor told her that weak people didn’t survive all that Abeo had endured.

She had time to ponder her existence in the world, and realized with great awe that she was in fact living a parallel life. A descendant of generations of Ukembans sold into slavery and the, eons later, she, a born American of African descent, had returned to the continent only to suffer the same fate.

Girl, I'm in love with you
This ain't the honeymoon
Passed the infatuation phase ..
Seems like we argue everyday
I know I misbehaved and you made your

Girl, I'm in love with you
This ain't the honeymoon
Passed the infatuation phase ..
Seems like we argue everyday
I know I misbehaved and you made your mistakes ….
We're just ordinary people
We don't know which way to go

Most Played album was John Legend’s 2004 debut Get Lifted, which was a journey of a different kind. … it fIollowed, as Michael interpreted it, the odyssey of a man changing from a womanising, nightclubbing, phone-number-collecting, good-time cheat into a responsible, mature and committed life partner. It was a slow and difficult road, strewn with conflict and temptation. He loved his girlfriend but he loved his freedom also, and couldn’t his girlfriend see, he sang in She Don’t Have to Know, that just because he slept around it didn’t mean he didn’t love her? …it didn’t mean she wasn’t still his Number One? No, she did not see, and the thing was that this girlfriend, this Number One, was not just any girl. She was special, she was bombastic, she was ‘off the hizzle!’. Snoop Dogg scolded him about it in I Can Change. He said, ‘When you find one like that, you got to make that change, man, cos they don’t come too often, and when they do come, you got to be smart enough to know when to change.’ … he spent one song in an agony of uncertainty called Ordinary People, where his love was undeniable but constantly running into hardship and there were arguments every day and no one knew which way to go. There were two choices, to Stay With You, or not to stay. He stayed. And a… they walked onwards, together, So High, into a future that would repeat their parents’ lives, that is, the ones who were still married. When it was cold outside they were a Refuge for each other, a sweet washing of the soul, a sunny path. …It was one of the best soul records ever made.

London may be the centre of the world to some people,’ meaning Damian, ‘but I’m sorry, I just don’t think it’s a very good place to raise children.’

The real difference was in her life, in her history. She could never know him completely because she had not lived as he had lived. She did not belong to the brown world in which he had learned his fear, his fury and his distrust.

“Sometimes in the lives of ordinary people, there is a great halt, a revelation, a moment of change. It occurs under low mental skies, never when one is happy. You are walking along on a crumbling road. The tarmac is falling away beneath your feet and you have started to limp, you are wearing rags, a cruel wind is blowing against your face. It feels as though you have been walking for a very long time. You are losing hope. You are losing meaning, and the only thing keeping you going is that stubborn human instinct to proceed. Then, immediately up ahead, you see something, something bright and completely external to your own life. It is so bright that it makes you squint. You see it. You squint. And you stop. For Damian, this happened on the morning of Thursday 25 June ………………….. it was only now that Damian fuly understood and recognised what it meant that his father was dead”

‘Oh, listen to you, Susan Sontag or Germaine Greer or whatever your name is. Are you sure you’re not the one with the script? See, I’ve always steered clear of feminism because they’re always so het up about everything instead of just getting on with their lives and just living, you know? It might have done a lot for women in the long run, but I think an essential thing it’s taken away from us, or at least contested in us, is an innocence of instinct. They talk about choice, yet they seem to look down on a woman’s choice to prioritise her children, as if she’s been forced into it. I’m not oppressed. My children don’t oppress me. They free me. It’s the man that’s the problem.’

The wedding was lost somewhere, first in an apathy of implementation, then in a cooling of euphoria which happens generally after three years, according to research, and later in the rubble of domesticity that mounts at the door of passion when a child has come and adult life has fully revealed itself, wearing a limp, grey dressing-gown.

Marriage, it was all about the kids. He himself had accepted this a long time ago, that children claim the love, they change it, they drink it, they offer it back to you in a sticky cup and it never quite tastes the same.

On the approach to the river the roads widened into boulevards and became in fleeting moments almost Parisian, the buildings slightly smoother and the stonework somewhat grander, shaking off a downbeat southern mood and a roughness of edge like a woman with messy hair neatening it up as she walked across the water

I started writing Lost Children before I wrote Tell Me, which was an appendix that grew out of writing Lost Children. I stopped writing Lost Children for about six months when I realized I was using the novel as a vehicle for my political frustration and rage, which is not what fiction does best. So I stopped and wrote this essay instead. Once I had been able to do that, I could go back and continue writing something as porous and ambivalent as a novel.

I decided on this method because the novel is essentially about ways of documenting, ways of telling, and ways of creating an archive—whether truthful or fictitious—to hand a story down from parents to kids, from kids to kids, and from kids to parents. Everyone in this novel is creating an archive to tell a story they want to tell in their own way

I see Lost Children Archive as a book primarily about storytelling, the way we compose narratives, and how those narratives may or may not become the way we make sense of the world. We use narrative to make the world less horrifying, for example, or more beautiful. Within that, I wanted to explore the way parents hand stories down to their children, and how children unexpectedly hand those stories back to their parents.

To me, the most important part of the novel’s architecture is the fact that the boy tells his story into his mother’s tape recorder, wanting to pass it down to his sister, because she’s too young to remember. But the mother will hear the story first, since it’s her recorder. The novel is her telling the story of their trip, and then receiving it back

It has to do with the form the narration takes… like an ethics or aesthetics of storytelling. It was important for me that the woman had this conflict that arose from observing her husband engage in documentation, that she both criticizes and admires the kind of freedom he has in his way of composing stories.

He has a more atmospheric approach. He walks into a room and holds up a mic and allows things to come. Maybe he is more confident as a storyteller in that sense, as an audio or a sound artist, to record everything and allow that to slowly form a story. She is playing with a much more controlled approach.

The boy was just at the right age in terms of allowing me an entry into a voice and an imagination. He's a very smart boy, and well-read and sophisticated, but he sometimes uses words completely out of context and in many ways is still small. And because the brother is also addressing his younger sister, his voice is directed. It's almost epistolary in its nature. It's got that closeness and that warmth because he's telling his sister a story

I don’t remember when I knew, only that at some point it became very clear. I had known for a while that I wanted a different voice, not only the mother’s. I thought about the husband, but then I decided they had talked enough. Also, it’s important for the novel that you never get his perspective. His silence is a source of the kind of speculation that I’m interested in as a reader. Next I thought about the girl, but it seemed to me that giving voice to a five-year-old was really dangerous. The novel could too easily become cutesy, or chaotic. It’s hard to sustain the voice of a five-year-old for too long .. A ten-year-old boy, on the other hand, still looks at the world with the curiosity and innocence that are very specific to childhood, but is already pretending to be an adult part of the time. Not pretending. Ensayando ser adulto. Ten is an age where I could sustain the narrative while handing the book’s thematic material over to the boy’s gaze and voice.

Also, to be very honest, I had a lot of help from children when writing this particular novel. I would literally interview the children in my family about the way they would react to certain circumstances, like: What would you do if you were lost? What would you be most scared of? What would make you feel some comfort? If you ran away, what's the first thing you would do? I conducted very serious interviews in my family, with nieces, nephews, my children.

Sometimes I would read out loud to kids in my family the parts about the kids only or narrated by the boy. And I would get a lot of backlash sometimes. [Laughter] Like, "No, Mama. That wouldn't happen at all." Or my nephew would give me important instructions on how one might eat a prickly pear in the desert.

Not only that, but then I had also been talking to children in court for a very long time. I had been translating their immigration stories, interviewing them in order to find lawyers that would defend them from deportation. Now, after that, I've been teaching a creative writing workshop in a children's immigration detention space.

So I've been surrounded by children's imaginations and stories for a very long time in a very deep way, but these particular kinds of stories, as well

What ties me to where? There’s the story about the lost children on their crusade, and their march across jungles and barrenlands, which I read and reread, sometimes absentmindedly, other times in a kind of rapture, recording it; and now I am reading parts to the boy. And then there’s also the story of the real lost children, some of whom are about to board a plane. There are many other children, too, crossing the border or still on their way here, riding trains, hiding from dangers. There are Manuela’s two girls, lost somewhere, waiting to be found. And of course, finally, there are my own children, one of whom I might soon lose, and both of whom are now always pretending to be lost children, having to run away, either fleeing from white-eyes, riding horses in bands of Apache children, or riding trains, hiding from the Border Patrol.

Political concern: How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum? Aesthetic problem: On the other hand, why should a sound piece, or any other form of storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? I should know, by now, that instrumentalism, applied to any art form, is a way of guaranteeing really [bad] results: light pedagogic material, moralistic young-adult novels, boring art in general. Professional hesitance: But then again, isn’t art for art’s sake so often an absolutely ridiculous display of intellectual arrogance? Ethical concern: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering? Pragmatic concern: Shouldn’t I simply document, like the serious journalist I was when I first started working in radio and sound production? Realistic concern: Maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, anyway, because the more attention a potentially controversial issue receives in the media, the more susceptible it is to becoming politicized, and in these times, a politicized issue is no longer a matter that urgently calls for committed debate in the public arena but rather a bargaining chip that parties use frivolously in order to move their own agendas forward. Constant concerns: Cultural appropriation ............ who am I to tell this story, micromanaging identity politics, heavy-handedness, am I too angry

That was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the l

That was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our reenactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.

Now it’s full of frightened old men who think their day is over (and they’re probably right) and overexcited young men who jabber till the spit flies, though it’s only stuff they’ve read in the paper. The women have gone very quiet. It’s like the Iliad, you know, when Achilles insults Agamemnon and Agamemnon says he’s got to have Achilles’ girl and Achilles goes off and sulks by the long ships and the girls they’re quarrelling over say nothing, not a word … I don’t suppose men ever hear that silence.”

I remember how he'd held my chin in his hand, turning my head this way and that, before walking into the centre of the arena, holding up his arms and saying "Cheers, lads. She'll do"" And again, at the end [referring to Alcimus who Achilles instructs to marry Briseis so as to keep her safe after his own expected death] holding my chin, tilting my head: "He's a good man. He'll be kind to you. And he'll take care of you".”

That voice, always so dominant, drowning out every other voice"

It seems to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.

Connell couldn’t think of any reason why these literary events took place, what they contributed to anything, what they meant. They were attended only by people who wanted to be the kind of people who attended them

It was culture as class performance, literature fetished for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they made afterwards feel superior to the undereducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about

One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma where it seems like Mr Knightly is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation …………. It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is – literature moves him.

The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man. Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, ‘knew me to see but not to speak to’ and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was eighteen and he was forty-one.

I think it’s because I’ve resolved something about family issues that I can now do the “bigger” issue – which actually, for me, is the lesser issue.

At this time, in this place, when it came to the political problems, which included bombs and guns and death and maiming, ordinary people said ‘their side did it’ or ‘our side did it’, or ‘their religion did it’ or ‘our religion did it’ or ‘they did it’ or ‘we did it’, when what was really meant was ‘defenders-of-the-state did it’ or ‘renouncers-of-the-state did it’ or ‘the state did it’. Now and then we might make an effort and say ‘defender’ or ‘renouncer ….. that flag of the country from ‘over the water’ which was also the same flag of the community from ‘over the road’.

There was ma too, continuing her barrage of how I wouldn’t get married, of how I was bringing shame by entering paramilitary groupiedom, of how I was bringing down on myself dark and unruly forces, bad-exampling wee sisters, bringing in God too, as in light and dark and the satanic and the infernal.

It’s creepy, perverse, obstinately determined,’ went on longest friend. …. It’s the way you do it –reading books, whole books, taking notes, checking footnotes, underlining passages …. It’s disturbing. It’s deviant. It’s optical illusional. Not public-spirited. Not self-preservation. Calls attention to itself and why –with enemies at the door, with the community under siege, with us all having to pull together –would anyone want to call attention to themselves here?’

“Are you saying it’s okay for [The Milkman] to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre [walking about] in public?’

look[ed] at it in its proper surroundings, then Semtex taking precedence as something normal over reading-while-walking –‘which nobody but you thinks is normal’ –could certainly be construed as the comprehensible interpretation here …. So, looked at in those terms, terms of contextual environment, then … it is okay for him and it’s not okay for you.’

Take a … statelet immersed …. conditioned… through years of personal and communal suffering, personal and communal history, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger –well, these people could not, not at the drop of a hat, be open to any bright shining button of a person stepping into their environment and shining upon them just like that. As for the environment, that too, would object, backing up the pessimism of its people, which was what happened where I lived where the whole place always seemed to be in the dark. It was as if the electric lights were turned off, always turned off, even though dusk was over so they should have been turned on yet nobody was turning them on and nobody noticed either, they weren’t on. All this too, seemed normality which meant then, that part of normality, here was this constant, unacknowledged struggle to see.

After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one colour officially and three colours unofficially, a colourful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.

Teacher started again. This time it was the fugacious (whatever that meant) black appearance of street trees owing to the crepuscular (whatever that meant) quality of the sky behind them, with the others –still in their own struggle –complaining that our town didn’t have fugacity, crepuscules or street trees, black or any colour, before being made to look again and conceding that okay, maybe we did have street trees but they must have been put in half an hour earlier as nobody here had noticed them before.

And all this spelled a serious turning bad for us, for me and maybe-boyfriend –in the way that the rumour about me and the milkman in my area was affecting me, and in the way that the rumour about him and the flag in his area was affecting him.

‘You never know,’ they said, ‘what might be considered the most sought-after paraphernalia of these sadnesses in years to come.’

Ada wanted a reason, a better explanation. We were not enough. We were too strange, She had been raised b

Ada wanted a reason, a better explanation. We were not enough. We were too strange, She had been raised by humans, medical ones at hat. So instead she read lists of diagnostic criteria, things like disruptions of identity, self-damaging impulsivity, emotional instability and mood swings, self mutilating behaviour and recurrent suicidal behaviour. I could have told her it was all me, even the last one. Especially the last one. Maybe all her research was done in self preservation, because she didn’t trust me to save her. I wanted her to die, yes, but like I said before, everything I did was in our best interests. I was just trying to save her. And for the record she tried to kill me first

Brides, nymphs we were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing and so very bad at getting away.

When I passed back by the pen, his friends would stare at me with pleading faces. They moaned and squealed and pressed their snouts to the earth. We are sorry, We are sorry.

Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak but you were wrong.

Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting … I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero’s sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

By rights I should never have come to witchcraft. Gods hate all toil it is their nature. The closest we come is … smithing, but these things are skills, and there is no drudgery to them since all the parts that might be unpleasant are taken away with power … no fingers are ever chafed, no muscles strained. Witchcraft is nothing but drudgery. Each herb must be found in its den, harvested at its time, grubbed up from the dirt, culled and stripped, washed and prepared ..

I stayed and watched her dance …. This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the son. But gods are born of ichor and nectar, their excellences already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters. All that smoke and savour rising so delicately from our alters. It leaves only ash behind.

I faced it as soldiers face their enemies, girded and braced, sword up against the coming blows. Yet all my preparations were not enough … Thank the gods I did not have to sleep. Every minute I must wash and boil and clean and scrub and put to soak. Yet how could I do that, when every minute he also needed something, food and change and sleep? The last I had thought the most natural for mortals, easy as breathing, yet he could not seem to do it. However I wrapped him, however I rocked and sang he screamed, gasping and shaking until the lions fled

I thought of the hours I had carried him .. his skin against mine. I had wanted him to walk freely in the world, unburnt and unafraid and now I had got my wish …… I had not told him of its infancy, how angry and difficult it was, I had not told him of the stories of the hods’ cruelty, of his own father’s cruelty … For sixteen years I had been holding up the sky, and he had not noticed. I should have forced him to go with me to pick those plants that saved his life. I should have made him stands over the stove while I spoke the words of power, He should understand all I had carried in silence, all that I had done for his safekeeping.