What do you want from a poem? Liane Strauss asks in the second installment of her three-part series on AI and human creativity in Guernica’s October issue. The question makes me wonder about the wild and wily workings of the human mind that a poem sets in motion. To imagine meaning-making as purely an intellectual undertaking, to separate ourselves from the bodies through which we meet the world, is to overlook the profundity of our senses. Part craft lesson, part cultural inquiry, Strauss’s essay, How Do We Know? AI and I read “I felt a Funeral – in my Brain”, by Emily Dickinson considers how sensuous knowledge meets individual experience to produce ways of knowing unique to a human being. The works curated in Guernica’s October issue converge upon this meeting place, where memory, intuition, and the senses come together to render our encounters in the world legible to us.

In fiction this month, Mirza Waheed’s Willows, Cucumbers and Sunflowers, summons a vanished Kashmiri childhood into the confines of an English hospital room through its narrator’s reminiscing. The story inhabits the meeting place of thought and bodily memory, where the senses make the experience of shifting temporalities legible without resolving its contradictions. In Eighth Night, by Georgi Gospodinov, excerpted from The Man With Many Names: Stories, a narrator confronting progressive hearing loss sets out to preserve the sounds he fears losing. By turns wry and tender, the story asks what memory can retain of the familiar world when it becomes inaudible.

In nonfiction this month, Marcelle Shehwaro’s Airstrikes returns to her ‘one year’ in Eastern Aleppo under bombardment by Bashar-al-assad’s forces, where she traces how the terror prompted by the roar of warplanes gave way to numbness, and how silence that once helped her survive follows her into exile. Shehwaro’s essay brings a painful dimension to this issue’s exploration of sensuous knowledge: how the body absorbs experiences that leave one numb, and how writing may begin to assemble those experiences into meaning.

In excerpts from Robert Frost’s previously unpublished letters, collected in The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 4, we get a glimpse into the inner life behind Robert Frost’s public mythology. These letters piece together an image of Frost as someone human, susceptible to the vulnerabilities of fame and masculine performativity; they reveal how intimately artistic expression is bound to acutely personal emotions.

In this month’s interviews, nonfiction editor Martina E. Castellanos speaks to the editor of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 4. In Skirting the Hem of the Goddess, Robert Bernard Hass considers the many lives of Robert Frost: grieving father, doting grandfather, and a man deeply dependent on and appreciative of the women in his life. Alongside the letters excerpted in this issue, the conversation explores how loss, intimacy, and close attention to the world shape a poetic sensibility.

In Spotlights, Nattiya Nadaham, first published in the NORTH-EASTERN, follows a dance teacher whose lessons in Bharatanatyam intertwine with a child’s emerging consciousness of the Tamil struggle for liberation. The personal essay renders the body as a bearer of knowledge, where the discipline of dance and an inheritance of resistance gradually bloom into an orientation toward the world.

In poetry, The Wind Was Not Really and To Know Your Heart Is Failing trace how approaching death becomes known through sound, bodily sensation, and the charged spaces of medical care. Written by Melissa Studdard, these poems delineate how the senses give form to knowledge that is both intimate and terrible. In Later in the day the sky turns navy and Watching my language, by Arman Salem, color, fragrance, sound, and texture unsettle the boundaries between perception and thought. An apple’s crunch, the smell of hyacinth in the back of a car, and a faucet’s lingering echo draw memory and desire into unexpected relation. These poems explore how meaning takes shape through sensory association, at once intimate, unstable, and resistant to being rendered plain into language.

Across our October issue, understanding takes shape through sensation, memory, and intuition. Each encounter in this issue draws upon a life’s particular vault of references to create space for meaning. We are relational beings; what we know carries traces of the people, places, and objects that have touched us. To imagine thought apart from this sensuous life is to fragment ourselves, to overlook how much of the world we understand through being touched by it.

Perhaps literature returns us to the fullness of that encounter. The page permits a latitude vast enough to accommodate our whole selves, and we come away from it with more than we knew how to ask for.

Featuring, courtesy of the artists, striking original artwork by: Hicham Rahma, Zein Al-Rifai, Tricia Newell, and David Silverstein.

—Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief

[To George Roy Elliott (1883–1963), professor of English at Amherst College. ALS. ACL.]

113 Norwood Court

San Antonio Texas

January 1 1937

Dear Roy:

Just exactly when you were making that joke up there about my being Public Something No.1 [1] I was making it down here to the manager of the Saint Anthony Hotel in San Antonio Texas. He had called me up on our room telephone to tell me in a seeking policy tone of voice how glad he was to have us folks in the house.[2] For a moment I was deceived into thinking he must have heard of us. If he had heard of us it was a striking proof we were famous. I was getting on. It was the second thing within a week to swell my pride. The other was news that the English had started counterfeiting the first edi tion of my first book.[3] But the manager’s voice didn’t quite satisfy me. It rang with a false commerciality. You bastard, I thought, you say that to everybody you harbor for the night. I wont be treated with any such generalized rotarian hospitality. “Dont be too glad to have us till you look us up in Dunn [sic] and Bradstreets and find out who you have on your hands,”[4] I had presence of mind to call back before he had time to hang up in his complacency. “By some I am rated Public Something No 1.” “What do you mean” he asked with sudden reality. It took me to restore him to his naturalness. I dare say he was an honest fellow at bottom. Only calculated and none too disinterested good will on earth had made him as insincere as a bad preacher. I put that “bad” in to hold you objectionless.[5]

Luckily we are out of hotels and settled in common dwellings, or we should begin to ring untrue ourselves. I have a house on the edge of town at 113 Nor wood Court San Antonio Texas. So if you want to write me any news, you have my address. It is noisy tonight with New Years firecrackers reaching their height after a week of it. But ordinarily it will be quiet. Carols house is a mile and seven tenths away;[6] which insures exercise. Not many have found us out yet. There will be positively no dining out.

You will wonder that our southmost should be San Antonio. Well we were tired of well doing before we explored further.[7] There were too many of us to sustain the expense of long suspense. Willard and Robin got here an hour ahead of us. Lesley Elinor 2nd and Lee got here the day after us; and Carol Lillian and Prescott the day after them. Ten of us sat down to Sunday dinner on December 20. Willard went back to Montana today leaving Robin with us. Lesley went along to Mexico with the two girls three days ago.[8] We have heard from her already. She is seeing scenery. There is nothing but good soil to look at here. She was warned to expect bad and even dangerous roads after Monterey [sic] in Mexico. She doesnt scare worth a cent. These children, these children. But Lesley puts so much life into life that I can forgive her her adventurousness.

It isnt quite midnight yet; I will defer dating this till the bells ring andcan date it—January 1 1937—and wish you a Happy New Year.

Yours since about 1917 (if I am not mistaken in the year you decided I was neighborly)[9]

Robert

[December 3, 1938]

[Boston Massachusetts]

LESLEY FROST KING SMITH STUDIO SCHOOL

FINE IDEA[141] YOU WILL MAKE MOST IMPRESSION IF YOU RESTRICT YOURSELF TO FIVE BRIGHT AND PLEASANT SENTENCES

FATHER.

[To Kathleen Morrison. On Lord Jeffery Inn letterhead (see note 143). Date derived from internal evidence. ALS. DCL.]

The rest I give to pleasure[142]

[Washington, DC]

[early December 1938][143]

Dear Sew and Sow:

Here out of the crudity of the commercial we are presented by the gods with two beautiful new words for our vocabulary. Kamee to rhyme with damn me by mutual consent and Dormin that sounds almost too suggestive to be true.[144] I meant to buy bottles of the stuff [that] both represent not to take but set up in my shrine to the Goddess of Homesickness to which I find myself involuntarily dedicated.[145] Maybe it will do me some good as a release to find out though al most too late in life that the lingering sweet in my mouth is not from my last meal but on my breath from my heart. Now that I know I shall not have to be casting about for someone to blame as an explanation. It is probably what makes me weep so easily over the slightest nuance of success in art. The subtlest I mean. You may notice how I cover it up when reading aloud by some pretense or other. The artistry breaks my heart for the moment. But the fact is, the art istry doesnt deserve all the credit for breaking a heart always only too ready to break. It doesnt break from pity or compassion mind you. It breaks from a des perate admiration of one touch beyond the ultimate—and from always being as I say in a presensitised [sic] state to break. But now when I feel myself about to lose control of my voice in reading to you (I practically never have lost [it] in reading to an audience) haply I will think[146] of Dormin for repose and Damn Me for surcease from pain[147] (I don’t mean I’ll eat them) and I can go on like a man.

I am too exteriorated on a platform and too mental for an actors unreserved

emotion. For once though the other day I showed weakness in speaking of

Socrates death when on top of what he said to Xantippe’s [sic] outcry Take her

home someone, I added what he said to the Jailer’s warning that if he talked

too much it would take more poison.[148] I was publicly shaken. I am never any thing more than scared or excited by an audience. I may be a little inspired

by the thought that sometimes I am being a little clever in phrase.

Mycerinus

[To Kathleen Morrison. On Lord Jeffery Inn letterhead (see note 143). RF uses the front and back of the sheet. ALS. DCL.]

[Washington, DC]

[circa December 1938]

The rest I give to pleasure.

Dear Sow and Sew:

So to be called while your name is in suspense for revision.[149] My name

having been settled on as Mycerinus because “the rest I give to pleasure” one

will have to be found for you to go with it almost as in wedlock. Who was

his Queen I wonder? I dont remember that she appears in Matthew’s poem.[150]

[To William Sloane. ALS. Princeton.]

Ripton

May 21 1943

Dear Bill

That sounds like war. You know my sentiments: Nobody’s war effort counts much that doesn’t get him into danger.[377] Postwardens are all very well, but they dont inspire my interest. All the way to Chungking in times like these![378] I know you would take risks if you had the chance. Me, what can I do? It wouldnt take any courage for me to write articles against Hitler in this country. It would take some to write articles in his favor. But even for the sake of risking my life on an equality with the soldiers I admire so much, I can hardly bring myself to do that. There is no use in being foolhardy. And any way I never could see Hitler from the first. The best that can be said of him in history will be that he put on quite a stunt war against a world caught off its guard.

Turning now to the victories of peace, we came out pretty well in our small way with the small book, didn’t we? For the first time in his life Bliss Perry called on me and it was to tell me with apparent embarrassment what had happened. The committee of which he was a part had voted to give the prize to Have Come Am Here. For the first time in his experience the authorities at Columbia had gone over the heads of the committee and it was to give the prize to A Witness Tree.[379] That came of Louis’ praising me but not praising me too hard. He must have impressed the authorities at Columbia. He did just right. You did just right in not pressing at all. What I did was just write too. And you mustnt forget to include Kay in your all-round felicitations; for you dont need to take my word for it, you can find internal evidence in the book itself that but for her there would have been no seventh book. And but for her there will be no eighth ninth or tenth book. I’ve been a difficult person to handle in the last few years. I havent wanted to do another thing and couldnt have been induced to do another thing except with something far better than tact. Some of the poems you have seemed to like best, to judge by the jacket and by things you have said, are hers by right of that something far better than tact.[380] The dedication of the book is no ordinary acknowledgement.

Some other time separately from all this I will tell you how pleased I was with the statement I got of last years sales. It was better than you predicted.

Ever yours

Robert

[To Lillian LaBatt Frost. Date partly derived from internal evidence. ALS. UM.]

Ripton [Vermont]

May 24 [1943]

Dear Lillian

I forgot Prescott was going back so soon. I was thinking he might have time to run up here and see the old place.

Im glad you have rented the Gulley. I hope the water bars on the road in get done right. They should be pretty high. The crushed stone will make that road.

I am busy with my chickens and expect to be busier with planting in a day or two. Things dont get done very well or very fast.

I enclose the check.

[1] Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI launched a major sweep of “public enemies” in 1936. Two days before RF wrote this letter, Hoover had named the nation’s newest Public Enemy No. 1: the kidnapper/murderer of ten-year old Charles Mattson, abducted in Tacoma on December 27. The malefactor or malefactors were unknown (indeed, their identity would never be established). Coverage of the manhunt filled papers nationwide.

[2] The St. Anthony Hotel, built in 1909, was among the most luxurious in the US. In 1935, it became fully air-conditioned, a novelty at the time, and, also a novelty, had telephones installed in its guest rooms. RF and family celebrated Christmas there (an event alluded to later in this letter). Paul Everette McSween (1894–1941) managed the St. Anthony in 1937.

[3] Apparently a joke. In 1934, British bibliographers John Carter and Graham Pollard troubled the rare book world with An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (Charles Scribner’s). Using novel scientific methods, they exposed numerous “first editions” of famous nineteenth-century works as forgeries—most notably Sonnets by E.B.B. (Reading, 1847), better known as Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861). Part 3 of their Enquiry presents “dossiers” on works by fifteen eminent authors. Throughout 1936 and into 1937, librarians in the US and UK continued to comb their collections for spurious “firsts,” whose value, in many cases, now inhered in the notoriety and skill of the forgers. See RF to Melcher, March 22, 1944 (for talk of forged editions of NB, RF’s second book).

[4] Dun & Bradstreet, a credit, risk, and business analytics company.

[5] Elliott was a Christian and churchgoer, RF and his wife, not.

[6] At 947 West Agarita Avenue (sometimes given as “Street”).

[7] As Elliott would likely have recalled, the Frosts had planned to winter in Corpus Christi (LRF-3, 694). And see Galatians 6:9: “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”

[8] Willard Fraser (1907–1972) married RF’s daughter Marjorie (born in 1905) in 1933; a year later she died of puerperal fever after giving birth to their daughter Robin (for the story of their courtship, marriage, and the death of Marj, see LRF-3, 3–6, 387–404). The other family members named are RF’s eldest daughter Lesley (1899–1983), her daughters Elinor (born in 1929 and named for RF’s wife: hence “Elinor 2nd”) and Lesley Lee (1931–2026); RF’s only surviving son, Carol (1902–1940), his wife Lillian LaBatt Frost (1905–1995), and their son William Prescott Frost (1924–1989). For an account of Lesley’s trip to Mexico with her two daughters, see Lesley Lee Francis (the second of Lesley’s daughters), You Come Too: My Journey with Robert Frost (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015): 111–122. Willard and Robin lived in Billings, Montana.

[9] RF does mistake the year. See Elliott’s essay “The Neighborliness of Robert Frost,” published first in The Nation, December 6, 1919, 713–714.

[141] Likely Lesley’s introduction of her father at the Wilson Teachers College on December 6.

[142] Written at the head of the sheet, above the letterhead, and associated with the pseudonym RF assumes as author of this and the next letter: Mycerinus. RF comes to Mycerinus—the Fourth-Dynasty Egyptian pharaoh Menkaure—through the poem Matthew Arnold titled after him and collected in his The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (London: B. Fellowes, 1849). The son and nephew of long-lived rulers known for cruelty, injustice, and impiety, Mycerinus seeks to undo their wrongs. For that he’s given, rather than divine favor, six years to live, and is doomed to die in the seventh. Mycerinus therefore devotes the remainder of his life to revel, declaring, in Arnold’s phrasing, “The rest I give to joy.”

[143] Dating the Mycerinus letters—which address KM as “Sew and Sow”/“Sow and Sew”—is tricky. RF appears still to hope that KM might divorce her husband and marry him. RF’s January 20, 1939, telegram to Sloane indicates that he’d intended to subtitle “The Figure a Poem Makes” “A Letter to So and So,” making it at once a public ars poetica and a private communiqué—until KM forbade it, giving us, it may be, a terminus ante quem for the Sew and Sow letters. But they are written on letterhead of the Lord Jeffery Inn (Amherst). Why? RF had not stayed there since June 1938, when he was winding up his affairs at Amherst College and selling the house on Sunset Avenue—two to three months before he formed his attachment to KM. He may well have tossed some Lord Jeff letterhead into his valise at that time and retained it (he avoided returning to Amherst until fall 1942). The answer to the riddle is likely mundane: RF wanted quality paper for these letters, found some Lord Jeff letterhead in what he called the documentary “confusion” of his traveling bag, and used it. In any case, given that, in the surviving letters, RF never again addresses KM as “Sew and Sow,” and given her January 1939 injunction against using “A Letter to So and So” as a subtitle to “The Figure a Poem Makes,” we place the letters here, when RF was on the road and away from KM. For more, see pages 17–21.

[144] “Kamee”: Unidentified. “Dormin,” billed as the “original nighttime sleep aid” and still marketed in the US, is nonprescription diphenhydramine.

[145] RF’s dedication to “homesickness” may reflect what other letters from the summer and fall of 1938 confirm (though by October, of course, he had a place in Boston): His trouble sorting out exactly where to live, now that EF’s death had cut him loose and it had proved both infeasible and undesirable to live with any of his children; and, more lately still, uncertainty as to what his relations to KM would be.

[146] Phrasing adapted from Shakespeare (sonnet 29, of which, incidentally, RF gives a reading in “The Constant Symbol” [CPPP, 789]): “Haply I think on thee, and then my state/(Like to the lark at break of day arising/From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate”: “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings/That then I scorn to change my state with kings”—notwithstanding that in these letters RF takes the name of one (Mycerinus).

[147] With (given the heartbreak) an echo of Poe’s “The Raven”: “Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow/From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore . . .”

[148] In Plato’s Phaedo (chapter 3), Socrates’s wife Xanthippe laments that the day of his execution will be his last occasion to speak with friends. Socrates asks Crito to “let her be taken home”; she is led away weeping by his servants. In chapter 8, Crito warns Socrates that the man who’ll give him the poison advises that he ration his voice: Talking heats the body and counteracts the poison; those who excite themselves sometimes have to down it several times. Socrates replies, “Let him mind his own business, and be prepared to give me the poison twice, or, if need be, thrice” (Phaedo, trans. F.J. Church [New York: Macmillan, 1898]: 115).

[149] Some of the play involves pet names, alluding to the complex of five names/titles employed by pharaohs from the Middle Kingdom forward, and to the fact that Egyptian monarchs were known by Greek names also, “Mycerinus” being but one example. But the subtext seems plain: Would KM’s surname be changed from Morrison to Frost?

[150] RF is correct: No queen appears in Arnold’s poem. The historical Menkaure is thought to have had at least two wives: Khamerernebty II and Rekhetre. Barbara S. Lesko observes that the tomb inscriptions for Khamerernebty emphasize her closeness to the king, but her burial outside his funerary complex suggests that she may, to the contrary, have fallen from his favor. See her “Queen Khamerernebty II and Her Sculpture,” in Ancient Egyptian and Mediterranean Studies in Memory of William A. Ward, ed. Leonard H. Lesko (Providence, RI: Department of Egyptology, Brown University, 1998). Of Rekhetre’s relationship with Menkaure nothing is known.

[377] From 1943 to 1944, Sloane served as a member of the Council on Books in Wartime, Inc., whose responsibilities included the selection of titles for Armed Services Editions of books in small paperback editions (RF’s recently published Come In was one such title). In 1944, the council sent Sloane to China to assess the state of publishing in that country during a particularly perilous moment in the war.

[378] After the successful Japanese invasion of China during World War II, Chungking became the temporary wartime capital of the country. Allied forces pledged material and armaments to China, to be transported to Chungking through Burmese supply routes.

[379] For the machinations behind this decision, see RF to Untermeyer, May 6, 1943.

[380] The jacket copy reads: Robert Frost’s seventh book of poems, his first in six years, requires no introduction or encomiums from his publishers. . . . The lyrics in A Witness Tree are as sharply beautiful, as richly and surprisingly wrought, as individual and yet universal, as any which Mr. Frost has ever written. A number of them, like the magnificent Come In, are obviously destined for a permanent place in anthologies of American verse. Here, too, is the Robert Frost who is a marvelous teller of tales. The Discovery of the Madeira Islands [sic] is one of his greatest narrative poems. And, above all, the characteristic and highly personal quality of wisdom is here at its most brilliant, tender, and profound, in such poems as A Considerable Speck and Happiness Makes Up in Height What It Lacks in Length.

“Nattiya Nadaham,” translated to “dance drama” in Tamil, is set against the the Vaddukoddai Resolution of 1976, in which the Tamil United Liberation Front called for an independent Tamil Eelam, citing linguistic discrimination, political exclusion, and repeated violence against Tamil communities in Sri Lanka. The narrative follows a dance teacher whose lessons in Bharatanatyam, the ancient classical dance, intertwine with the narrator’s growing consciousness of the Tamil struggle for liberation. For the narrator’s generation, this demand for self-determination becomes an inheritance as stories of torture and pogroms pass through adults’ lowered voices into children’s listening bodies. 

Published first in the NORTH-EASTERN, the essay renders the body as a bearer of knowledge, where the discipline of dance and an inheritance of resistance gradually bloom into an orientation toward the world.

—Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

Our dance teacher sometimes paused mid-step, letting silence speak where words could not.

She adjusted our wrists. She shifted our shoulders. She tapped our feet gently with her own. In Bharatanatyam, tension in the body tells a story.

She focused on a child, struggling with a gesture, guiding, giving form to that which could not be expressed.

Sometimes, she held our limbs in place a second longer than necessary, as if she were willing the body to remember something it had not yet learned in language. As if memory could be trained into muscle before it ever reached the mind.

Before We Had the Words 

For those of us not yet living in 1976, Vadukoddai is not a memory; it’s our inheritance. An instinct of refusal and a predisposition to opposition.

I remember sitting on the floor, drawing lines in the dust with my finger, while the adults spoke above me. No one told me to be quiet. But my hand slowed. I knew not to interrupt. I learned to listen without looking up.

As children, we existed in small worlds. We were playing in the soil, shaping dolls from clay, collecting navalpazham from trees. The days were not perfect; our school days were intermittently disrupted by the roar of fighter jets and the sound of my heart pounding in my throat. My chest tightened at the sight of a vehicle slowed outside, my breath pausing halfway at a door knocked too hard.

I don’t know if we had political consciousness. I know we were conscious.

Of our fathers returning home and speaking to the neighbours in lowered voices. The gravity of the air that filled our homes. Our ears picked up the words being passed over our heads, stories of kids just like us, of torture and pogroms, bequeathed unintentionally. Coded conversations and constant caution, behaviours inscribed with fear.

My Teacher 

Our dance teacher was tall, taller than most women around her, with a long spine that made standing still look choreographed. Her skin caught the sun in a way that made people look twice: part desire, part recognition of her tenacity. Her hair was usually tied tightly, out of respect for movement. Nothing was allowed to distract from the intention.

When she danced, the air leaned in. Noise softened, and children straightened. Even fear, that constant background hum of those years, paused politely at the door.

At her feet, we were too small to understand history and too young to name injustice. I just knew that when she entered the room, everything aligned.

The Opposition 

As an adult, I’ve heard the debates as both still-alive and post-mortem.

I watch the sinister ways my community is pushed away from lands they call home, asked to contort their mother tongue across language families in the name of dignity.

The tourists swell over and through, gawking from the windows of sightseeing buses doing victory laps. They stretch borders for the sake of opportunity, holding the threat of violence over our heads as our people live in poverty.

When someone speaks about “moving on,” I feel it before I can respond. My jaw tightens before I realise it. My shoulders pull back slightly, as if I’m bracing. The anger in me does not ask for permission. The sound of my heart beating in my throat is a familiar acquaintance. I am still oriented towards opposition.

The Dance 

I remember one performance clearly.

The blue flowers on the curtains faded with age, the stage between them, tight and cramped—the smell of sand and still air. The sound system cracked when the music began.

She started seated, grounded, palms pressed to the floor.

Her first movements were restrained. Her hands were glued to her hips while her feet introduced themselves to the floor, deliberate and contained. Heel, then toes, toes then heel.

As the rhythm grew, her arms extended, spine lifting, gaze rising. Her footwork in tune with the ravenous beat.

She attempted a leap and stopped mid-motion. Her body froze. The last rings of her anklets echoing in a suddenly quiet theatre.

She turned toward the audience, eyes steady and glowering, unblinking. The outline of her body large in her outstretched arms. She resumed, this time with force.

Her feet struck the floor harder. Her movements sharpened. Precision replaced softness. It was only later that I would understand this as an assertion.

I remember sitting cross-legged, my nails digging into my palms. When the performance ended, a long pause to breathe again. Then applause, my hands jumping to meet each other before I could tell them to.

What happens to people when they are told they may dream, but not move?

Inheritance 

For the children of the struggle, historical moments split your life in two: before and after. This inheritance is not symbolic. It defines what is negotiable and what is not.

It was only later that I began reading newspapers, listening to radio discussions, and encountering texts on the Tamil struggle for liberation that fragments of my consciousness aligned. When the subconscious becomes conscious, it rearranges you.

It did not feel like learning something new. It felt like something clicking into place. Like hearing a word I had known for years, but was only now able to say out loud.

I think of her again here.

The way she would make us repeat a single movement until it settled into the body. Not perfect, not immediately — but slowly, through return. Heel, then toes. Toes, then heel.

At the time, it felt like discipline. Later, I understood it as something else. The body learning what it must hold, even when the mind wanders.

Perhaps this, too, is how something larger takes shape. Not in a single moment of arrival, but in repetition. In correction. In the quiet insistence of coming back to the same step, again and again, until it becomes natural.

Until it no longer feels like effort, but orientation.

A Different Movement 

One day, my dance teacher simply stopped coming.

No announcement or explanation.

Weeks, then months, passed.

The classroom felt emptier.

And disjointed.

Then one afternoon, I saw her.

Not in a sari.

In uniform.

Her hair was tied tighter.

Her silhouette, once draped softly by silk, now roughly cut by straight edges.

Her presence, heavier.

But her feet met the ground with practiced familiarity; the ghost of the sarpa nadai stitched to her shadow.

When she spoke to me, her voice was softer than before, choosing words gently, “Some dances are not performed on stages.”

I was a child.

But something inside me straightened.

Robert Frost has long been mythologized as the rugged New England poet “full of Cracker Barrel wit and Yankee wisdom,” a solitary genius whose reputation remains deeply contested. Yet The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 4 offer a far more complex portrait—a devoted paterfamilias, a grieving husband and father, and a poet deeply reliant, and appreciative, on the women in his life.

Robert Bernard Hass, editor of the fourth volume, calls Frost’s life “one of the most chimerical fairy tales in American literary history.” If Frost’s unlikely ascent from struggling poet to literary eminence had the makings of a fairy tale, the losses he endured made for a far less consoling story. 

Few scholars are better positioned to navigate these contradictions than Hass. His affinity for Frost began in childhood, when his parents, both scientists who loved literature, taught him to read the natural world with the same attentiveness he later recognized in the poet. In this conversation, Hass examines the Frost who emerges from the letters: grief-stricken, witty, difficult, loving, dialectical—and, perhaps, worthy of greater sympathy.

—Martina E. Castellanos for Guernica

Martina E. Castellanos: To begin, I’d like to ask you a slightly personal question. In a letter to Albert Robbins, Frost writes, “I wonder why I get better questions from the University of Florida than most places. I got some a few years ago from there that were among the best I ever had.” Given that you earned your MA in creative writing at the University of Florida, and that you, like Frost, have lived the life of a poet and a scholar, I found myself wondering: After spending so many years immersed in Frost’s letters, have there been moments when his experiences or ways of thinking have felt unexpectedly familiar to you?

Robert B. Hass: Yes, and I can tell you why I have such a personal connection to Frost. I grew up in the woods, and being the child of scientists – the woods became my playground. Of course, we (my siblings and I) were shown the ways of the woodlands, we learned how to read ecosystems the way my mother and father read ecosystems, so our education in nature was fairly profound. My parents were very interested in literature as well. My father had the opportunity to hear Robert Frost read at the University of Minnesota when he was postdocing there after he finished his PhD in 1962. He developed this great love for Frost and, as a result, would often play old recordings of the poet reciting his work, which would then become the subject of our conversations. And because of Frost’s deep engagement with the natural world and those familiar landscapes that I grew up in, I had an immediate personal connection to Frost that has stayed with me to this day. My father and I would venture into the woods together, botanizing and identifying wildflowers, much as Frost himself had done in his youth. So, in so many ways, my inclination toward Frost and my love of Frost was a kind of natural connection because his poetry seemed so familiar to me. So familiar to the way I had lived and observed the world. Thus, it was an immediate kinship, I think.Frost is also a figure who perpetually demonstrates a kind of endurance I admire: in the face of enormous personal tragedies, he finds a way to stay upright, live in the world, and persevere into old age. I think, with the exception perhaps of someone like Thomas Jefferson, no American writer suffered more personal losses than Frost. His first son Elliot died of cholera at the age of four. They lost another child after one day, named Elinor Bettina. His father had died when he was just eleven years old. His daughter Marjorie died of a postpartum infection after delivering her daughter Robin. His son Carol committed suicide. His daughter Irma is institutionalized for schizophrenia. His sister was institutionalized for schizophrenia, and so there were a lot of tragedies that Frost endured in his immediate family that were very difficult to navigate. So, he really did an awful lot to try to help his children, which I think is a story that hasn’t been told enough – and I think there’s evidence in this book for that, especially in the aftermath of Carol’s suicide. He really goes out of his way to help Lillian and Prescott.

Martina E. Castellanos: Yes, one of the relationships that I felt most deeply touched by was Frost’s and Prescott’s. I’m interested in how grief may have reshaped Frost’s role as a grandfather to Prescott. After Elinor’s death, Frost writes to Prescott, “I’m going to tell you something just this once for you to always remember. I shall never speak of it again. Not more than a month ago she told me you were a great favorite of hers” [p. 275]. Then, after Carol’s death, Frost writes to Lillian saying he feels he has “failed” [p. 468] as a father. Do you think those two losses made Frost feel a heightened responsibility toward Prescott?

Robert B. Hass: Well, that’s certainly the case. I mean, first of all, Frost admired Prescott. You have to remember that when Carol took his own life in October 1940, Lillian, his wife, was in the hospital undergoing a hysterectomy. Carol and Prescott were in the house in South Shaftesbury together when Carol took his life. And Prescott, of course, went downstairs and discovered the body. Prescott was 15 years old at the time, and he kept his composure. He called family. He called the police. I think Frost admired the way he handled the immediate aftermath of Carol’s death. If Frost admired one virtue above all others, it was courage. He saw Prescott, in the aftermath of Carol’s suicide, as a young boy who didn’t wilt in any way, but faced the situation as an adult might. Taking care of Prescott, in some ways, was a great compensation for Frost’s own self-perceived failure with Carol.

Now, you have to remember that Carol’s mental illness was an extremely difficult situation. Paranoid schizophrenia is a difficult illness, and Frost conveys a father’s anguish: he had tried every way he knew to with him, yet wished he could have just done just one more thing. So there are moments, tender moments, when Frost confesses to his most intimate associates that he just wishes Carol were still there, lamenting that every approach he had taken with his son had “failed.” No matter what Frost tried, I think ultimately, in the face of that illness and the lack of treatments we have now, it would have been difficult for even the most well-prepared father to care for Carol at this particular juncture in his life. I think some of that guilt and self recrimination was unwarranted, but I think it’s self recrimination that emerges from grief.

Frost’s also very interested in Prescott’s military career when the war breaks out. Of course, because he thinks that martial valor is one of the most important demonstrations of courage. And so he’s disappointed when Prescott’s lung conditions and history with pneumonia preclude him from serving further. Prescott was honorably discharged because of medical reasons, but Frost was also grateful that Prescott didn’t have to go to the front like his good friend Edward Thomas did in WWI as he was killed at the Battle of Arras, much earlier in Frost’s life. So he, as a father and a grandfather, I think he exerted enormous effort – and I think Elinor was right there with him.

Martina E. Castellanos: I think Volume Four is particularly consequential because of the close succession of Elinor’s and Carol’s death, and the contrast between Frost’s growing literary success and mounting personal losses. Do you think grief fundamentally changed Frost between 1937-1946? Were there particular moments in his correspondence when that sense of grief became especially palpable?

Robert B. Hass: Yes, some of the saddest letters that we’ve ever edited are in this volume. I think letters about Elinor’s death and Carol’s death – the self recrimination and guilt that you mention. I think the only other equivalent letter would have been the letter that Frost wrote to Helen Thomas, Edward Thomas’s wife, in the aftermath of Thomas’s killing in WWI.

However, we really see Frost baring his soul in some of these letters. He’s not prone to doing that. He’s very guarded about his emotional life. And of course, Elinor’s death was particularly devastating, as they were high school sweethearts since before their marriage in 1895.

As Frost said to Louis Untermeyer, she was “the unspoken half of everything I ever wrote.” So even if there were difficulties in the marriage, and I’m sure that at times there were, Frost also recognized her great contribution to his success, and after her death, he really wasn’t quite sure how he was going to stay in the world. He was really thrown by her death, and of course, shortly thereafter, Kay Morrison comes into his life and sort of bolsters and resurrects Frost.

But grief is definitely a part of these letters. What’s so interesting is that because the public knew a very different kind of Frost particularly on the days when he would give readings and public talks. He was quite jovial, very witty, full of Cracker Barrel wit and Yankee wisdom, and people gravitated toward his personality. He was quite likable, humorous. He had a knack for comedic timing, and he could make entire audiences laugh out loud during his readings. This was the Frost that everyone knew. Yet Frost and Elinor were very guarded about their personal lives. As a matter of fact, we do not have a single letter in any of the volumes that Frost ever composed to Eleanor.

And why that is, I don’t know. We’re sure that there must have been letters when they were apart from one another, but I think they were so guarded about the intimacies of their relationship, that they probably destroyed those letters so they would never come to the light of day.I think that during moments when he was alone, Frost would often ruminate. These were the times when he would feel guilty about his relationships with his family, and so he wasn’t particularly good at being alone for extended periods. I think his monumental efforts to give so many readings every year, to lecture, and to travel around the country—“barding around,” as he called it—were, in some ways, a refuge from that loneliness. Frost knew he was better around people, and he had wonderful friends who came to his rescue fairly often.

Martina E. Castellanos: It’s interesting to me that Frost seems to have both sought refuge from solitude and, at times, found comfort in it. As I read, I was curious by how often Frost seems to exist between opposing forces: the solvent paterfamilias and the financially anxious man, the grieving husband and the giddy lover, the academic who regards academia with genial contempt, the religious skeptic increasingly preoccupied with faith. Even in his letter to Bernard DeVoto, when he writes of Elinor (after her passing), he says: “She could always be present to govern my loneliness without making me feel less alone” [p. 279]. Here, he seems to define intimacy itself through paradox. Do you see this tendency to inhabit seemingly contradictory positions at once as fundamental to Frost’s character?

Robert B. Hass: Well, he was a very complicated man. Simply stated. But he was also a very thoughtful man. He had certain intellectual preoccupations that he would return to over and over again. He did think about religion, although not in any orthodox way. He did think about how best to educate young people. He often ruminated about esthetic theories and the great artistic and poetry movements that he had observed as he lived and wrote. He was deeply interested in the intersections of science and poetry, and the discord that he observed between science and religious faith. So, it’s interesting you mention that, because the title of my book is Going by Contraries.

Martina E. Castellanos: Ha! How fitting.

Robert B. Hass: Oftentimes, Frost looks at different ideas from multiple perspectives. Lawrence Thompson once described Frost as a man with an idea that is equivalent to a dog gnawing a bone. And we see Frost doing this over and over again in the letters, in his notebooks, in his life, returning to these difficult subjects to try and find answers to questions. Some of which he never found, and so it was just the habit and the quality of his mind that contributed to those oppositions that you are thinking about.

I also think that there are several people who have discussed Frost as what we call a philosophical dualist. Dualism is the idea that reality can be divided into two ontological categories. One is matter, the other is mind, for example. And he’s very interested in the relationships between mind and matter. He recognizes that evolution has designed us in one way and has a profound effect on the way that we think, our genetic predispositions, our environments. And neuroplasticity helps shape the quality of who we are and the brains that we possess. But he’s also very aware that human beings impose upon the natural world meaning, and so it’s that reciprocal relationship between these two opposing ontological categories that, in some ways, sets the stage for the oppositions. So, I think that’s the fundamental idea, and trying to find a kind of synthesis between those two ontological categories. Not to get too philosophical, but he’s a deep thinker, very indebted to people like William James and Henri Bergson and some of the instrumentalist philosophers who come of age at the end of the 19th century. Frost is something of a skeptic who believes that our capacity to perceive reality, or truth with a capital T, is limited, and that truth itself is, in many ways, ineffable.Immanuel Kant in his own philosophy suggests that we can only know phenomena. We can never know the noumena of the world, the Ding an sich, as he says in his philosophy. So there’s a world of reality that is forever being mediated by the processes of mind, and we can never escape the enclosed or egocentric systems of our mental habits to find a vantage point that transcends that enclosed system of thinking to be able to see beyond it. And so, I think Frost recognizes deep limitations in our human capacity to know ultimate truth, as he says, “We’re always skirting the hem of the goddess.”

And you know it’s funny, my thinking has been influenced by all of my colleagues, Mark Richardson, Don Sheehy, Henry Atmore and I have had long discussions and debates about Robert Frost. We don’t always agree on Frost or our perceptions of Frost. Still, when you listen to other people’s positions, you’re able to escape your own default settings and reassess. And I think that all of the editors have influenced one another in specific ways that maybe we’re not always necessarily aware of. But you know, these long discussions have just been some of the great joys of my life.

Martina E. Castellanos: At those words, John Stuart Mill must be nodding from beyond the grave. I wonder, though, about Frost’s own relationship with criticism. Throughout “A Last Spring, a Final Summer” and “Elinor”, Frost repeatedly returns to Amy Lowell’s critic that he lacked a sense of humor. First, joking that her judgment might save him from being considered “flippant in [his] old age” [p. 156], and later remarking, “It will be fun to quote her adversely on my sense of humor” [p. 164]. He seems both genuinely wounded by criticism and remarkably skilled at repurposing it to his own advantage—a pattern that recurs with other critics throughout Volume 4. How do you understand that tension between Frost’s performative handling of criticism and the private sensitivity that seems to lie beneath it?

Robert B. Hass: Frost is very sensitive about what others think of his poetry, he’s certainly interested in his legacy and his reputation, as many ambitious poets are, and I don’t think he differs from other artists who are ambitious in that way. Now, what’s interesting is that this letter has been composed in response to a book that emerges called Recognition of Robert Frost, that Henry Holt publishes, and it’s a collection of essays from a variety of critics who have looked at Frost’s career from the beginning until the present moment, in the aftermath of up to A Further Range.

And, for my money, Frost has a way of eliciting more critical disagreement than other poets of his time. I think we can consider Hart Crane and Ezra Pound polarizing figures as well, but Frost had a habit of doing that, too. So there were people who loved him, and there were people who hated him. There were critics on the political left who excoriated Frost because they saw him as being socially irresponsible during the economic crises of the Great Depression, so the Marxist critics attacked him for being something of a political anachronism of retreating into the comfortable pastoral mode of New England. But there were also critics on the right who saw him, and his skepticism, as well as his Jamesian pragmatism, as an abdication of the poet’s responsibility to commit to certain kinds of truths and judgments in the world.

In the aftermath of a lot of negative criticism, Frost’s friends would rally around him and offer articles of support, oftentimes responding to some of the negative criticism that emerged. So, for example, Bernard DeVoto, Frost’s good friend, wrote some scathing rebuttals of individuals who had criticized Frost, and seeing how DeVoto describes these critics in hindsight is very humorous. It’s a very striking thing, and I don’t know that we see that kind of criticism these days, where people seem to have such personal stakes in their judgments. But Frost was sensitive about it. At times, he even rallied people to write rebuttals on his behalf, and that was certainly the case with Devoto.

But there are other times. For example, later in his life, the great critic Lionel Trilling stands up at Frost’s 85th birthday party and calls Frost one of the most terrifying poets of the century, saying that Frost is a poet who looks into the Sophoclean horror of our existence. Then Frost, a couple days later, writes to Trinling and says, “You know, no sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body.” He takes no lasting umbrage against someone like Trilling, recognizing that Trilling’s effort was well intended.

There are other critics whose work really stings him, and sometimes he maintains a kind of private animosity towards those critics – so it runs the gamut. He’s very sensitive to his reputation. He has his disagreements over some of the movements in poetry. I mean, he’s not a big fan of high modernism. For example, he calls T.S. Eliot’s, The Wasteland, an anthology in his earlier volumes. He’s not particularly receptive to the agrarian movement as it emerges from Vanderbilt, or the New Critical Movement and John Crow Ransom, and so he has his own hobbyhorses that he prefers. Of course, he’s a product of the 19th century. He cut his teeth on Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English poetry and Quiller Couch’s anthology as well, and so he was well-versed in the historical traditions of lyric poetry.Now, Frost is deeply innovative and might have gone down in history as one of the most innovative poets of the early 20th century had Pound, Eliot, and others not begun to rupture earlier aesthetic conventions so remarkably with high modernism—the collage forms, the pastiche of allusions, and so forth. So I can’t say that Frost would always ameliorate his response to negative criticism, but there were times when he would. I don’t know that there’s a clear pattern to his critical responses. It depends on the critic and on the criticism.

Martina E. Castellanos: Though we have discussed Frost’s intellectual independence, the letters in Vol. 4 also invite us to perhaps reconsider the familiar mythology of the solitary genius. Elinor, and later Kay, albeit in a different capacity, seem essential to sustaining both the man and the poet. How should we understand the role women played in Frost’s life, not only in shaping him personally, but also in sustaining his literary career?

Robert B. Hass: Elinor and Kay were very important to Frost’s life. As I mentioned before, Frost said that Eleanor was the “unspoken half” to everything that he ever wrote. I mean, imagine being Frost’s wife, as here is a man who has landed a professorship, was doing well, and after a year of teaching at Plymouth State, he decides that he’s going to chuck that job. And they’re going to move to England (with no place to reside in London)! All so Frost could embark upon a last-ditch attempt to become a poet.

So here’s a man who sells the Derry farm, quits a good academic job, and goes to England on a whim, and it’s just amazing that Elinor has enough faith in his abilities as a poet and in his intellect to say: let’s do it. “I want to live under thatch,” as she says. It’s one of the most chimerical fairy tales in American literary history. And had Elinor balked at that proposition, we would never know the Robert Frost we know today, because he established his reputation and his career in his first two books, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston in England.

So, Frost definitely relied on Elinor, and I think the same is true with his relationship with Kay. So Elinor dies in March of 1938, and Kay comes into his life by August. And his relationship with Kay is very complicated. Kay is a married woman. She’s married to a Harvard professor and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference participant, Theodore Morrison. Meanwhile, it’s pretty clear that she and Frost have an intimate relationship. It’s not the salacious relationship that the biographer Jeffrey Myers created, but there was clearly amorous affection on the part of both of them. Frost had met Kay as an undergraduate student at Bryn-Mawr College many years earlier, and she came into his life. They had known Frost through his affiliation with the Breadloaf conference in Vermont. And in the aftermath of Elinor’s death, she both resurrected him and drove him crazy at the same time.

Kay was a very progressive woman with regard to her ideas of human sexuality, and Frost was a one-woman man his entire life. So, he was of the opinion that if they were going to be together amorously, then Kay should divorce Theodore Morrison, and that they should be married. Of course, Kay rebuked that offer of marriage.

Frost wrote a beautiful essay called “The Figure a Poem Makes,” which became the introduction to a collection of his poems. There’s something important in the DNA, the seed of every poem, that ultimately culminates in its final form. And so I think Frost saw his relationship with Kay in much the same way: that the seed of their relationship should culminate in some kind of final form, just as a poem does. When she didn’t see things the way Frost did, he became something of an irascible individual.

He started smoking and drinking more than he ever had. During one of Archibald MacLeish’s readings at Bread Loaf, I think MacLeish was reading a portion of his play Air Raid. Frost had some antipathies toward MacLeish’s poetry and politics, so he decided to set the evening’s program on fire while sitting in the audience. He lit the program, and as the smoke and flames rose, people had to evacuate the room where MacLeish was reading. So this was the sort of behavior Frost exhibited in the aftermath of Kay’s rebuff. How these things work out, I have no idea.

Martina E. Castellanos: But toward the end of the volume, Frost suggests that Kay was, in part, responsible for his continued writing. Do you think she played any direct role in his creative process?

Robert B. Hass: I’m sure Frost shared poems that he had composed with Kay, the way that he had shared just about everything he had ever written with Elinor. And obviously, he would have wanted the imprimatur of both of them as he was writing. For example, Elinor was a very crucial voice in trying to figure out which of Frost’s poems should be anthologized and so forth. So she had a fairly discerning eye for his best work as well.

But you can imagine, and I think this is true for any loving partner, and that is the idea that your partner has a way of impelling you toward becoming the best kind of person or writer that you could possibly be. So, I think it’s reciprocal nurturing, and I think that’s because of Kay’s influence on his life. Frost really wanted to become a better writer, and some of the writing after A Witness Tree is certainly a falling off from his best work. But we wouldn’t have had any writing – at least, I don’t think – had Kay not come into his life.

Kay did inspire his muse. And if you look at the letters, some of which I think are a little odd, there’s a kind of intellectual patois that is very flirtatious and fun. Each of them knows the inside jokes and the puns that they’re revealing to one another. You get the idea that Elinor and Kay were very intellectually stimulating people for Frost. Honestly, at times, I think in the letters to Kay he tries to show off a little bit. He’s making so many allusions to classical or mythological figures. Whatever language they shared worked for them, and I think worked in ways that are quite remarkable.

In the aftermath of Kay entering his life, it was almost as though Frost felt a kind of moral obligation not to write about Elinor. I find that particularly interesting because, of course, it wasn’t that he had forgotten her. He hadn’t. He continued to admire her deeply. In fact, “My November Guest” became a particularly significant poem in this regard, almost a tribute to his relationship with Elinor.

Martina E. Castellanos: On a rather comical note – Frost seems unusually invested in reading Theodore Morrison’s “The Schism” [p. 426] as evidence that Theodore and Kay’s marriage had become “platonic.” Do you see that interpretation as part of Frost’s broader masculine self-fashioning – an attempt to make emotional or moral room for his own attachment to Kay?

Robert B. Hass: Though I don’t know how Morrison intended the poem to be read, I think Frost interpreted it as creating a kind of justifiable space for him to continue his amorous affections toward Kay. Even if Theodore Morrison hadn’t intended any of that in the poem itself, this is how Frost chose to interpret it. He convinced himself, perhaps as a form of rationalization, that he had license to continue his intimate relationship with Kay.

And, as you know, Frost, Theodore, and Kay traveled together. How the dynamics of this relationship played out on a daily basis, when they were all together, sharing close quarters or riding in the same automobiles, I don’t know. As Frost says in one of his letters, there was plenty of dissembling going around. I think there was simply an agreed-upon silence, an understanding that none of them would address what they all knew.

The relationships are interesting, particularly because both Elinor and Robert Frost were quite Victorian in their attitudes toward sexuality, even prudish, if you will.

Martina E. Castellanos: My next question moves away from the romantic aspects of this volume. On page 701, Frost tells Gordon Chalmers, “Tanks are the perversion of science; propaganda is the perversion of the humanities.” That feels especially revealing given that, when his close friend Louis Untermeyer asked him to contribute to wartime propaganda during World War II, Frost refused. What does that resistance to propaganda tell us about Frost’s sense of the poet’s responsibility and about his wariness of the ways literature can be put to use?

Robert B. Hass: That’s an interesting letter. I discovered that letter at Dartmouth. It’s never been published before. And what a great line, especially in our own time right now. I think it’s hard to tell from the context of the letter whether this was an epigram that Chalmers wrote to Frost or said to Frost. But he says, “Nice epigram and maybe half true.” It sounds very Frostian to me, and I wonder whether this was one of those moments when Frost issued a statement and then went back to ruminate on whether or not it was true.

Frost’s relationship to martial valor and war is particularly interesting in this volume. He doesn’t seem terribly concerned about World War II until it begins to affect him personally after Pearl Harbor, when transportation becomes difficult and he recognizes that his ability to “bard around”, as he always had, is likely to be curtailed because of the necessity of transporting materials and troops by train. Frost never drove, and didn’t fly all that much.

When Louis Untermeyer asked him to become part of the war propaganda campaign, I think Frost balked at it. Frost was conservative in his politics (though not as conservative as Elinor) while Untermeyer was leftist in his political beliefs. And I think Frost was suspicious of the radical left, just as he was of the radical right. He sees figures like Hitler and Stalin as two sides of the same coin. Fascism and communism meet at the back door of totalitarianism, if you will.

And so I think Frost was a little bit suspicious of enlisting artists for the purposes of political propaganda. That’s not to suggest that poets shouldn’t write about war. Frost himself wrote several war poems during or in the aftermath of WWI, “Range-Finding,” for example. But Frost distinguished between what he called grievances and griefs, and he believed that the proper subjects for poetry were human griefs.If we consider the great subjects of Frost’s poetry—love, childhood, nature, our relationship with the cosmos – war occupies a relatively small place. Political complaint was not something he necessarily believed belonged within the poet’s purview. Now, that doesn’t mean he didn’t dabble in politics. In A Further Range, Frost weighs in on political subjects, expressing a profound antipathy toward Roosevelt, the New Deal, and what he considered excessive state intervention in rural life. So there are moments when Frost becomes political, even a little too didactic, and others have pointed out that this is when his poetry is least successful. So there were times when Frost didn’t necessarily heed his own advice about the proper subjects for poetry. That said, I think he was simply reluctant to become a propagandist. He didn’t believe his gifts should be used in the service of the war.

Martina E. Castellanos: There seems to be a gradual movement in these letters from Frost resisting old age to becoming almost accustomed to it. After Elinor’s death especially, age begins to mean something different: loneliness, mortality, dependence, and questions of legacy. How do you think loss changed Frost’s understanding of what it meant to grow old?

Robert B. Hass: Frost has this incredible idea that “strongly spent” is synonymous with “kept.” And in one of his more religious moments, he says, “I hope that I have done my best in God’s sight,” if you will. Whether he means that or not is a little ambiguous, but the question is whether he has done everything he could with his one great, beautiful life.

And I think as he grows older, becoming a kind of national treasure and eventually a cultural ambassador around the world, he becomes fairly secure in the knowledge that he has strongly spent himself. Frost lived to be 88 years old and was still traveling, right up until the very end. Among all American poets, no American poet with the exception of Frost, had ever dined with so many of the world’s most significant political leaders. He had lunch with Churchill in Miami, dined with Eisenhower, and frequented the Kennedys in Camelot. He was everywhere.So as Frost aged, he acquired not only a national reputation but an international one, and he was happy to enlist his services on behalf of the country as a kind of cultural ambassador. In some cases, particularly his trip to Russia, I think he considered himself more than that. Kennedy sent him because he wanted to alleviate Cold War tensions with Khrushchev, just months before the Cuban Missile Crisis emerged. But it was an attempt to begin forging some sort of détente with the Soviet Union. And both Frost and Khrushchev were lovers of poetry, and they thought this might help thaw some of those tensions.

Of course, it backfired spectacularly when Frost came home. People asked him about his interview with Khrushchev, and Frost fibbed, saying, “Well, Khrushchev thinks we’re too liberal to fight.” It incensed Kennedy. This was just as they were learning about the missile silos in Cuba, and Kennedy never spoke to Frost personally again after that comment. He was infuriated by what Frost had said.

So there were times when Frost’s tongue-in-cheek public humor could backfire. I think Frost thought he was joking, but he had no idea of the intensity and severity of Soviet-American relations at the time. In general, Frost had a pretty remarkable life. From very humble, improbable beginnings, he found a way to become one of our great literary treasures. There’s no question about it. He felt a great affinity for the country and believed American democracy was the greatest political experiment in history.

Martina E. Castellanos: What do you hope readers will stumble upon on their own as they read?

Robert B. Hass: Because some of the letters in this volume have been cited as evidence of Frost not being a particularly generous person, or even being a bad person. I think when you read these letters in the context of the entire volume, you’ll see a very different kind of person emerge from some of the standard biographical portraits that have been created.

I think the portrait of Frost that emerges is one worthy of genuine sympathy. He’s a man doing the best he can, while sometimes feeling that he hasn’t done enough. But when you look at the context, you realize that some of Frost’s self-recriminations are unwarranted because we see him exerting enormous effort, especially toward the people he really loves. And I think that’s good for others to know.

Steel pierced through the brown and green loam, metal ends thrust into it. Spades, shovels and the glinting shaft of the du-gaade, which refuses translation, swung into the soil under the wayward tufts of grass.

It had been an open ground before then, low grassy mounds as far as the eye could see, the land in robust, ruddy, gleaming health. He used to go right through it, him and his friends, on the way to English tuitions at Nazir Sir’s. On breezy summer and autumn afternoons, they would drop their satchels at the kerb and start running into the vastness, going on and on, round and round, chasing after each other. When his father bought him a new bicycle, he would trace long figure-eights, circling this way and that, climbing one slope after another, legs akimbo as he came down one mound and rose towards another.

The plain looked endless, although he knew there was a slow drop on the far side where the trees gathered in tiers—willow and birch and poplar, some wild varieties too—and then the ground gave way steeply to the wide basin where the shallow stream lay. There was no specific boundary marking the stream from dry ground, so it all seemed wet to him, the grass slippery, noisy, alive, though at one place, there was a slim wooden bridge across which they rode their bicycles in a line, the sound a low, ringing vibration because of all the layers of dried mud on the wood—the caked clay of so many feet having walked over it.

Cycling further ahead, they would suddenly come upon waving paddy fields, which was something of a marvel: bright, vivid-green, evenly carpeted fields in front of them as they reached the area where the English tutor lived. Nazir Sir’s was the last house, bordered by a low fence across which was another plot of land, probably earmarked for construction some time ago, with rusting coils of barbed wire here and there, some heaps of mossy rocks, resting, nearly grown into the land.

That this was still the environs of the city, his ‘emerald city’, fills him with wonder and a kind of extreme nostalgia that he wants to resist. It’s not good for him. “The past is full of forked paths, the ones not taken are purely hypothetical, they do not exist,” he remembers Sean the counsellor saying.

Then the ground was dug into, sliced through, and rock poured into it, deep because the foundations of houses have to be firm. Then, mortar and concrete held together by steel bars, knotted, fastened iron from which there could be no escape, the grassy mounds covered forever.

There was, he admits, a certain thrill to all the activity, even as the sudden appearance of dark pits in the field gave rise to an indeterminate unease. Watching fresh bricks cascade down from a tipper truck, licks of crimson dust on the lush grass, then seeing those pyramids of blue-green sand, suddenly risen after an overnight delivery, and the tight, bulging bags of cement piled up like the bales of cloth at Mir Clothes & Fabrics in midtown, and the smell of freshly planed wood for the doors and the windows—there was a term for it that the carpenters and owners used… he can’t remember now. The perils and the price of leaving behind a language for a borrowed tongue.

Every day, he and his friends would pass by these scenes of industry on their way to the tutor: labourers sat over a jajeer and cups of tea in the afternoon; the plinth of a new house having risen now; a bent, lonely figure watering it religiously to make sure the newly laid concrete was well irrigated, that it took hold. An inwardly proud, worry-eaten owner guarding his life’s earnings and future home.

Away from the construction site, towards the far edge of the field, the ground was still the same, low, undulating, mossy earth—it must have been some kind of estate or meadow in the bygone years, perhaps even a battleground or the frontier of a small kingdom, who knows, because rising behind a clutch of thorny bushes in one corner were the melancholic ruins of four arches, remnants of domed buildings perhaps, old brick and faded pale mortar, from back in the day when they mixed eggs into the mortar paste, he’d heard his maternal uncle say.

It was vast, the air all-enveloping, free from the confines of rooftops and walls and chimneys and the like, so that when he approached it, he sensed an anticipation of that first blast of fresh breeze, the uninhibited splash of wind on his face.

But the land was dug into, fresh, moist flesh brought up, pink earthworms and insects clinging to the lumps, crawling, scurrying away, suddenly exposed to unfavourable bright light. Those were strong men, weren’t they, sweaty, muscular shoulders and arms, rugged hands. An honest living made tough men, he thinks, hard bodies and limbs, or maybe they weren’t so strong, after all, and were, in fact, poor, and they didn’t have enough to eat but worked hard for their families nonetheless.

The thwack and squelch of the spades and shovels slicing into the soil were familiar, but the sound of the du-gaade, the heavy two-pronged hoe, was something else. It was more than a thud—it was a duggh, the sound closing off as the steel nose dug and rested in the soil-body. That’s how he refers to it: duggh. This, however, brings to mind that other word from his mother tongue, dagh, which means pain. But doesn’t it also denote sorrow somehow, he wonders?

Perhaps it was inevitable, but there soon came the day when the ground was littered with the branches and trunks of felled plants and trees. Another afternoon trek to the tutor’s house, he and his friends circling the battleground. The chopped-off branches, clusters of wilting leaves and flowers hanging off them, lined up like dead soldiers after the wars on TV. But perhaps it wasn’t all that dramatic or profound. Perhaps it was simply the case that the landowners, or the new tenants and housebuilders, were drying up all the sappy wood, crisping and shoring up firewood for the winter ahead. But for some reason, the image of the sunflower plants laid out tidily by the dirt track, like helmeted heads of dead soldiers, their bodies arranged in rows for a count or identification, has always stayed with him.

*

Why venture far, though? he wonders, as he gazes out from his window into the darkening horizon of the Hertfordshire countryside. Didn’t they, too, do the same to their little patch of land all these years ago, turn the ground inside out and pour concrete into it, then many rocks, on top of and alongside each other, like an expanding puzzle, to erect the plinth for the house he wanted to build for his parents—a large, rock-solid house—when he went abroad and for the first time in his life earned more than he needed?

Didn’t they too dig, dig and dig, and in an instant erase all that had been there before, all that had been idyllic, pastoral, verdant, beautiful—all those words—so they could have multiple bedrooms and tiled bathrooms, a veranda and a balcony, slick marbled floors, double-doors and windows, polished slabs of concrete, and tall, beautiful brick walls?

In the loamy, fragrant backyard where they built the house, there had been languorous, long-limbed willows, their leaves like oversized silverfish, forever falling on the ground—his child-feet screech, screech and rustle over them. There had been five or six of them lining the backyard to the west, a dense wall of trees, the late sun often turning the leaves into goldfish, the biggest soaring high, its trunk a youthful brown-green, round and fat like an elephant’s leg, orange strings of sap on the bark here and there. So many bird nests in the branches above, chatty insistent sparrows and suspicious mynahs—weren’t there? Or were there just a few and it looked like they were many?

There had also been the busy, thick kitchen-garden next to the willows; he and his mother worked on it, long mornings and evenings during the summer holidays, the soil dark and soft, mellow because they threw ash into it—ash was meant to be nourishing for the vegetables. They grew collard greens, tomatoes too, he thinks, green chillies—definitely—and oh, aubergines, slender curved ones, elegant purple and white ones, like jewellery things. On the low, square fence of thin sticks and twine, which they’d erected around the vegetable beds, his mother let her cucumber plants curl and tangle, the turmeric-yellow flowers beautiful and fragile, giving way to green stumps that hung low or rested on the soil below. He would be surrounded by them, their scent watery and musky.

One long summer, when he was about eleven or twelve, his mother’s bottle gourd vine just wouldn’t stop growing, it kept rising and rising, curling up high on the willow tree, the large one, and wound its way almost all the way up to the top. It was something to see, wasn’t it, unforgettable really; everybody noticed it, said something or the other, joked that these were god’s own gourd plants, all those pale flowers bobbing, swinging in the evening breeze. What happened later in the season was probably more astounding and wondrous: the flowers turned into little jade thumbs, dotted and bearing fine little baby hairs, then into small gourd-heads glistening in the morning dew, and soon, in a matter of weeks, into heavy, pregnant-looking bottle gourds hanging around the trunk and the branches like fat halwais drowsing in the afternoon sun. None fell off, they just hung around until the autumn, when some started to turn pale and crisp. That tree may have been puzzled too, probably had the inkling of an identity crisis. His mother tended to the vegetables on the ground, he marvelled at the gourd festival higher up.

Then they crushed it all; they had to, mowing down the willows, plucking out the smaller plants, smothering and swatting the rest, the herbs and the mint (he thinks they’d grown mint between the veg beds), burying all the green debris under newly purchased soil to even out the ground. They’d always wanted to build a house, where his mother now lives in comfort, at her own seat—that was the idea, wasn’t it, to make a new home for his parents? Solid, concrete, brick and rock, steel and marble staircase, glass, and oh, wood: beautiful, brown burnished wood frames all around, complementing the powdery red of the brick walls.

When he visits his mother now, he sometimes sits on the floor like the old days, in the carpeted drawing room or the TV room, touching the floor, running his hand over the ruts in the fabric, and reckons that this is where the aubergines (brinjals is what they would’ve called them—no, they would’ve said waangun because they all spoke Kashmiri) and the green chillies would’ve grown when he was a boy. They had grown so many, his open-jawed wonder still a clear memory when he witnessed seed grow into plant for the first time, and then he had seen his first aubergine—yes!—a thing of beauty formed from nothing. It was his because he had deposited the seeds in the dark, moist soil himself, or at least that’s how he remembers it now, then nursed the shoot, watering it after school, before going out for evening playtime in the grounds outside.

Mother had told him to be patient, listing the stages of growth: flower, stamens, outer leaves, tiny green-and-white baby, then the tints of purple! They had eaten them, their own vegetables, mother lean and straight, jewels of sweat on the bridge of her nose, probably satisfied with her work, certainly pleased at the savings she had made. Father was away, working in a different city, must have been, the money came every month, he once a year.

*

Outside his window, the lush green Hertfordshire countryside stretches out in long arcs of tree-lined farms and orchards, the landscape winding up and down, giving the illusion of hills in the distance. Some evenings he thinks he can discern horse and cow shapes on the low slopes. Kind of countryside that must have pastures and equestrian grounds. When he draws closer to the glass and looks down, he sees the manicured lawn area separating the two blocks of the hospital. This swatch of green, bordered by rectangular flowerbeds, runs along the driveway where his cab had parked when he came here. He doubts anybody sits on the pristine grass. Cleverly designed shrubs stand at the corners. Ornamental plants, he thinks, the phrase he’d been searching for since he first laid eyes on them.

Dark wood benches mark the landscaped space towards his side of the hospital. They are erected on concrete, probably to prevent the visitors’ shoes from getting muddy when it rains—and it does rain often here. At one corner of this relaxation area is a steel statue, a shining oval human form, its hands joined over its head, pointing upwards.

Red, purple and yellow flowers pop up from the flowerbeds, but he likes those lush bunches in the corners more; they bear a colour distinct from red and maroon—its name slips from his mind. When it’s sunny, the path below looks and feels pleasing, he admits, someone designed it with that in mind. Of course, it’s all part of a design—there’s a reason his window, his room, the section where his room is, are situated where they are. He is meant to look over this patch of manicured beauty. The scene is meant to be soothing, calming, so that an onlooker such as himself is soothed.

Has it soothed the chaos in his mind, though, the constant jumble and fizz, the loops and the criss-crosses of thought, the collisions of this and that, the electric static and weight of it all? Has any of it lightened since coming here, staying in his serene room, this wing? Maybe it has, because he’s still here, isn’t he, doing what’s expected of him, what he’s been told to do, following the routine and staying calm. Staying fucking calm.

They said it was emotional disturbance or acute stress that had brought on the panic attacks—manic is more like it—but what if it’s some kind of psychosis, schizophrenia, some madness? He doesn’t know because he hasn’t seen the papers. What have they written, what is his condition? Whatever it is, though, whatever name they have given to the unceasing rattle in his brain—rattle brain, rattle snakes in the brain—has it receded after coming here?

How long has he been at the hospital? Probably three months, or maybe a little more. He sometimes watches the clock on his wall trace the minutes and the hours, his eyes glued to the rhythmic pulse of the second hand for long moments.

What if he jumped from this window onto the concrete below, crashed into the pretty landscape and lawn, or dived straight into that statue, his body splayed open upon the conjoined steel hands, blood splattering down the polished, artistic body of the statue. Or would it splinter across the tiles and flowerbeds? But it’s not as if he’s made of plaster or glass—bodies don’t shatter and scatter. What if he landed softly on the grass and lay there forever, sleeping always? He looks down and imagines his body on the smooth green lawn, twisted, wounded and dead. Or dying.

He must stop thinking like this, it’s not helping him, his heart rate quick and fast (there’s a difference, he feels). He must have clear thoughts; he wants to have clear thoughts. Sean the counsellor had said, “You don’t have to separate the loops of thought, you simply need to pause between them, stay still, wait for the next thought, take a deep breath, then the next.” Sean is right, he knows, but it’s easier said than done. Sean the counsellor wears nice sweaters, comforting to look at…

*

There had been other plants, other trees on grandfather’s patch of land. A mature pomegranate tree that grandfather had transplanted from the front yard to a corner in the backyard—grandmother had perhaps refused to let it be turned into firewood. He doesn’t think it survived the move, though; its fruits turned out to be pale, stunted, or didn’t grow at all, but small flask-shaped baby pomegranates with hairy stamens in their hearts is an image lodged somewhere in his mind. In any case, something happened to that tree in the corner; it withered slowly; grandmother had tried at least; they all had tried.

He himself had tried, making it a personal mission for some time, crawling on all fours inside the gables of the old house to pick pigeon droppings, scraping off ancient shit, spread like miniature mercury hills, with his bare hands, and scattering it in the soil around the tree. The clayey ground under it sent up a fragrance the sensation of which he recalls acutely but cannot name.

And there had been those old willows in the front yard, their branches expansive and bent with age, some almost touching the ground, under which the sink with the brass tap that somehow always released ice-cold water was, and where they’d wash and splash water over each other after wrestling games on the supple, dusty ground. The water from the tap seemed a bluish green, probably because of the light reflected from the polished concrete of the sink enclosing it. On this ground, too, a house came up some years after he left, cottagey, with a roofed porch and a first-floor Juliet balcony. His uncle needed a new house too, demolishing the elegant and storied ancestral home, along with all the scrawls and memories, whispers and confidences of childhood. It’s the way of the world, new in place of the old, but still, all those trees and plants and vegetables and flowers, so good and lush and kind somehow. At least they are alive in his memory—thirty-five, forty years later.

To this day, he can recall Shaban, the house servant, trimming the willows in the autumn—the crusty brown bark of the thicker branches, the soft, muslin-thin green sleeves of the slimmer ones laid out on the ground—the willows given their annual haircut, yielding fuel and tinder. Or maybe that was the reason for the pruning. The chopped branches would then be spread out in batches, tied together with twine fashioned from a softer branch coiled round and round, their sap filling the air with a green forest smell. He and his sisters and cousins would rest against the batches as they enacted a play about kings and queens, the wilting leaves scattered around them. Then they would help carry the batches up to the loft for storage.

Shaban’s agile, lithe form bent over his axe as he ran it over a stone for sharpening before the ritual trimming. Even today, he feels a tingle on his back as he recalls Shaban’s glinting axe hanging from the collar of his shirt. Shaban could get cuts from the sharp edge, he worried as he saw him glide up the ridged trunk, the axe handle dangling off his back. How come he never got a cut?

“Can I get a turn?” He tries to recall the exact words he must’ve said to Shaban as he laid the freshly axed branches on the ground and started trimming their ends.

“No, it’s not for you.” Or did he say, “You won’t be able to do this”?

“Just one turn, please, nothing will happen to me.”

“Alright, but be careful, it’s extremely sharp.”

Shaban used to be full of brio on pruning days. The way he climbed up the tree trunks, the manner in which he crossed his legs around the sturdier branches to balance himself. They’d wait below, watching him make sharp incisions at angles, gashes really, then they’d scurry away as the branches started to land on the ground—it was thrilling, the sound and the scatter of it all.

Close to the boundary wall in the backyard was a different stand of trees. They were called kikkar; rugged and thorny, not always pretty, they were like neglected stepbrothers, planted there to form a shield at the back. And it was indeed a dark corner, certainly seemed so to him and the other children. But they also gave good wood, used for making fencing spikes or as fuel; trimming these trees, cutting off their branches was always a fraught affair. Their thorns were as prickly and hard—dangerous even—as their leaves were gentle. The fully grown ones posed a serious threat of injury—one pierced deep into his sole once and taking it out was more painful than keeping it lodged there in his flesh. It was a bloody affair nonetheless, but Shaban would do this too, his own body scratched, red marks on his forearms and hands, brushing off tiny thorns and sticky leaves from his skin.

After a few years, all of these trees were culled too. They had served their purpose, probably.

*

He’s back in his cool room, preparing to go to sleep. The bed is ready, the night light aglow, the linen changed, freshly folded edges. He brushes his teeth while watching his eyes in the mirror, changes into night clothes. It’s very quiet, or serene, he can’t be sure, or maybe he doesn’t want to determine the nature of the silence. It’s simply the case that everybody else in his wing has gone to bed. Outside, the slow breeze and the distant buzz of night insects on the trees and the wavy hedge on the boundary create a harmonious ambience. Is this, too, a part of the design? So what if it is.

He leans closer to the window from where he often watches the bristling orange light of the far horizon. It’s probably a motorway cutting through farmland or the night lights of a town centre. He has never ventured in that direction, even though it’s only half an hour’s drive away; London does that, it seduces you, consumes you, holds you captive.

He sees a shrunken wasp or honeybee in the corner of the immaculate white window (he could never tell the difference); it’s turned upside down, its encrusted, chocolate-brown striped belly lit up in the pale light. It must’ve been trapped here when they cleaned and aired the room, dying while trying to escape.

His bedtime rituals are set, even if bedtime may not be, and it brings a sort of composure, a kind of certainty. Sean approves of the routine too, says, “It’s all good.” He listens to the radio at this time of the night and clicks on the Podcasts app. As usual, he flicks his way through the latest history, art, culture, books, true crime, and music episodes, and chooses one of his go-to shows for sleep: In Our Time on the BBC. Something in the description has caught his attention. “Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the career of the Dutch artist celebrated after his death for his paintings of sunflowers and starry nights but selling only one work in his life.” He settles down in bed and presses play.

He learns so much from the programme, for instance that Van Gogh didn’t just paint one Sunflower painting but five, also that the sunflowers he painted in Arles in August 1888 were meant for his friend Gauguin, who was to visit him in France. Van Gogh was so prolific that he sent drawings to his friends and family all the time, in particular to his brother who, the guests on the programme agree, is the man we must all be grateful to for helping him become the great artist we know. The guests talk about Van Gogh’s ear; of course, they talk about the ear. Then, inevitably, they mention his death from a self-inflicted wound at the age of thirty-eight—how he had shot himself with a revolver. Why had he done so? He had been depressed, battled demons all his life, the guests seem to agree, that he’d searched for love too, perhaps even found it briefly in the arms of a prostitute (“of the worst kind,” one of the interlocutors says), and for some time, had hoped to have a family of his own.

The guests talk as if they have a perfect understanding of Van Gogh’s state of mind towards the end of his life, but he thinks they know fuck all about what must’ve been going on inside Vincent’s head! Vincent had spent some time in an asylum behind high walls. Then he killed himself.

The people on the podcast go on a bit. His mind veers off, he’s wondering whether all this—this room, the path, the mini-garden between the two blocks, the elegant café on the ground floor, the common room with the TV and board games, with sudoku—fucking sudoku—was all purpose built, purposely built, near the countryside, a juicy chunk eaten off the farms and the meadows that he often gazes at for long periods from his window. All so made up, so concocted and unreal! But it is real, a part of the world as it is, the real world, and this is where he chose to come, where he had been seeing Sean, in whom he found a soothing presence. It’s still funny, though, to have landed here of all places.

Outside the house he built for his parents, there too is a concrete path: pretty, well-laid red tiles, hundreds of them in some symmetrical pattern. Paved paths line the front and back of the house, with potted pink roses at intervals, one going all the way to the outer door—no dirt is ever going to creep into the home where his mother lives. Where once his grandmother lived too but in the old house, grandmother who… now it comes to him! Grandmother who collected hills of pink rose petals and sunflower seeds every summer. They would sit around her on a floorcloth in the front yard, surrounded by bulbous sunflowers, ready and ripe for picking seeds, and on long August afternoons, they all did it, watching little heaps rise in front of them, his fingertips oil tinted. Grandmother had Shaban plant rows and rows of the plant every couple of years, radiant comic suns lining the front wall all summer.

Rattle brain, brain rattle, rattle in brain!

He also learns that Van Gogh had been tormented all his life, battling the ‘black dog’ (he wishes it weren’t called that—black dog), and that his most famous Sunflowers painting is at the National Gallery in London. When he is discharged, he will go to see it.

***

Excerpted from The Man With Many Names: Stories . Copyright © 2022, 2013, 2001 by Georgi Gospodinov. English translation © 2026 by Angela Rodel. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

One night, my great-grandfather was grazing his sheep far from the village, in a secluded meadow near the grove. He had just dozed off when, after midnight, something nudged his shoulder from behind. Fear instantly struck him deaf and speechless. There was no one behind him. One of the sheep had stirred and rubbed against his back. He spent the rest of his days in deafness and muteness. 

As a child, this story always made me laugh. Just a sheep. 

Later, I recounted it as the most terrifying thing I had ever heard. Because what does it prove? – that horror has no mark on its forehead . . . Just a sheep.

One evening, I was coming home from work as usual. By that time, I was already tormented by the thought that I was slowly losing my hearing. Sometimes I couldn’t hear the clock, the phone or some softly spoken words. My acquaintances had started poking fun at this fear. I unlocked the front door and was hit by the smell of three ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts (I’d invited co-workers over the night before). I stretched out on the couch and switched on the radio next to my head. The radio lit up, but no sound came out of it. I immediately turned on the TV, where a woman was reading the evening news, but nothing could be heard. Nothing could be heard. Nothing . . .

And just then, a second before my heart stopped from horror, I very clearly heard the words Whaddaya doin’, woman, pretendin’ not to hear me, huh?, coming from somewhere up above, from the apartment upstairs, spoken by the perpetually drunk neighbour who regularly beat his wife. It was a revelation. I turned up the volume on the TV and clearly heard the news anchor say Good night. I then realised that the muted sound was just a joke played by my guests the night before. 

Seven months later, I was completely deaf. Just like that. Like a bad joke. 

But now I have work to do.

Ladies and gentlemen,

In the course of the many lectures – too many lectures – I have given, I’ve observed that people tend to prefer the personal to the general, the concrete to the abstract. 

Thus Mr Jorge began his lecture on the seventh night, referring to his ‘modest personal blindness’. The man wisely chose blindness as the topic of his seventh night, and if you ask me, as the topic of all his previous and subsequent nights. Blindness, ladies and gentlemen, as you can imagine, gives far more prerogatives to those who use it. Unlike deafness, unlike the modesty of my personal, partial deafness, which I will familiarise you with on the eighth, extraordinary night of our happily concluding 
seminar.

For, I have realised too late that throughout our lives, we insist, with inexplicable perseverance and impressive enthusiasm, upon the misfortunes that fate (or whatever name you give to that authority) grants us. I remember how, as children, we invented a game in which we had to choose between the lesser of two evils. Would you rather lose a leg or an arm? Naturally, you chose to keep your leg, although now I cannot say exactly where that ‘naturalness’ came from. The other awful choice was between the eyes and the ears. Which would you choose – to be blind or deaf for the rest of your life?

Nineteen years later, having completely lost my hearing in one ear and partially, but progressively, in the other, I realised the cruel flippancy with which I had once chosen deafness.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Think back now, haven’t you ever wished for a slow and inexorable extinction, a dignified and seemingly indifferent acceptance of what is to come, the indelible impression of your last words, the tear in the eye of the world, this time shed for you. Well, that wish will come true, ladies and gentlemen. God hears all our prayers, but rarely distinguishes between good and evil.

So, having once chosen deafness, over the course of many years I tried to fix the unfixable, to free myself from it. The diagnosis was neuritis acusticus, accompanied by constant noise in my ears, progressive hearing loss and the likelihood of eventual disruptions to the vestibular apparatus. The doctors I saw over the years fell into two categories: frank or hopeful. The former: ‘Even God can’t help you now,’ while the latter: ‘Sensory nerve endings are indeed difficult to regenerate, but we have a wide range of neurotransmitters, vasodilators and medications that help with irrigation. The human brain is . . .’ Of course, I chose the latter, despite their dubious logorrhoea. Thus, I gave my body over to long procedures with constantly changing, increasingly strong, and hence increasingly hope-sapping medications. I took them more as a series of names. I convinced myself that their power lay precisely in their names, and made them into strange meditative practices, in which I chanted endlessly: nivalin, Dusodril, dibazol, Tanakan, Betaserc, Vastarel . . . And again: nivalin, Dusodril, dibazol . . . I uttered them aloud so that they would enter directly from the outer ear into the middle ear (auris media), slide down the Eustachian tube, pass unharmed through the malleus, incus and stapes, and deliver their healing phonemes to the complexly constructed inner ear (auris interna). There, at the beginning of that membranous labyrinth, a snail (cochlea) lay in wait like the Minotaur, which must also be bypassed without any killing in order to finally reach the organ of Corti, which housed my dead auditory cells. This is where the miraculous resurrection was supposed to take place. Clearly, however, the phonological energy of those names was insufficient. So I shifted to more exotic alternatives to the above names, such as ginseng with royal jelly from the mountains of northern China, mumiyo from Mongolia, heated Greek olive oil and incense crystals, along with the geographically native dried cow dung (warmed). I went back to the seventeenth century and, rummaging through some Leechbook, I found the following: ‘If your ear is ringing, crush some fresh capers, mix them with honey and olive oil, heat it up and add some goose fat . . .’ And another, even more definitive treatment: ‘For deafness, mix goat’s blood and goose fat and pour into the ears.’

Ladies and gentlemen, 

Illness makes us look like children, running after every kite. In the seventh year of my doomed treatment, I tossed everything out and simply gave myself over to it. No one had ever wanted my body so much, and I could no longer refuse Madame Malady. My ear turned inwards, toward its own body, and, no longer disturbed by anything, continued to produce its own noises. If you press a mussel or conch shell to your ear, you’ll get a faint idea of them. Was my ear hearing something that was imperceptible to any healthy ear, or had it been transformed by the strange permutations of the disease from a receptor into a generator of some new language, new speech – a talking ear?

*

In this way, the ear, gentlemen, turns its back on society like a true dude, like a bored dandy, like a romantic overcome by ennui. It closes right up, ladies, like those tulips that retract their petals in the evening and bad weather. This orifice of the body becomes a shield, a soft pink shield, a corset for our inner peace.

I realised something else as well: the loss of hearing brings the world back into familiar, visible boundaries, to the pre-telecommunications era. The phone and the radio fall out of use, the deaf person loses their invisible sound. Consolation comes in the form of a new, ocular world whose limits extend to the visibility of lips, facial expressions and gestures. Then, ladies and gentlemen, the eye becomes the true ear.

Focused on well-articulating lips, the eye captures the sound at the very moment of its birth, just as it emerges from the womb, at the moment when it acquires a short-lived body or, more precisely, the fading contours of one.

In this way, the eye captures the well-rounded O, the slightly flattened E, the bilabial explosions of B, P and so on. An eye-ear, eyr or eaye. 

One night, shortly after I had given up on all treatments yet still had some residual hearing, I decided to devote myself to collecting sounds that I absolutely had to hear before I went completely deaf. A kind of ‘greatest hits’, a complete collection of recordings that my memory could reproduce during the long hours of deafness. Here is a small part of the list of things that must be heard:

(. . .)

autumn rain over apple orchards

two people breathing on their first night together

the sound of a ripe watermelon bursting open

the joyful gush of a man urinating 

the rustle of silk sliding away from skin 

the lazy buzzing of flies in a village house at two in the afternoon

the wheezing of a just-slaughtered pig

the clink of a spoon in a porcelain cup of Ceylon tea

my father’s yawn before going to bed

the swishing of a lizard in the strawberry patch

the bubbling of a pot on a wood stove

the scratching of a hard pencil on paper

(. . .)

Finally, what else could I possibly tell you, ladies and gentlemen, except that the sound of formal applause is not included in the list you have just heard. My ear no longer registers this sound, while my eye sees only palms coming together and parting.

It is time for us to go our separate ways, and for me to retire to the Shahriyar, the hotel that the attentive seminar hosts have so kindly provided for me. At the end of the day, we are all here to trade a few stories as a way of paying for our overnight stay. 

One night, realising that I would eventually lose my hearing entirely, I decided to get a cat. I had read that cats have finely tuned ears and keen senses overall. I spent whole days watching her prick up her ears in the direction of sounds that were now inaudible to me, and this made me feel calm and protected from surprises. I liked to say that the cat was my dog. Some time passed, and I began to imagine that it was not a cat at all, but my own lost hearing. I saw it simply as one big purring ear, my own.

One night, I would suddenly vanish along with my cat, never to be seen again. For some time, the homeless people would tell horror stories about a man with a cat’s head, or rather, a huge cat with a human body, prowling around trash dumpsters and cellars. But no one would believe these stories, and they would soon be forgotten.

*

Excerpted from The Man With Many Names: Stories . Copyright © 2022, 2013, 2001 by Georgi Gospodinov. English translation © 2026 by Angela Rodel. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Nothing about the airstrikes makes sense. And yet, as a military tactic in a world governed by impunity, they make a terrible kind of sense. Mass destruction. Mass punishment. Mass killings. Mass evacuations. In our case, the Syrian case, these acts were an attempt to completely erase those who dared to cry out for freedom. 

Not one by one. Not with bullets fired into a protest. No, al-Assad had grown tired of that prolonged process of erasing us. There were simply too many of us. As a method for a regime frightened of its own people to tame a populace, airstrikes are brutally effective. They are the ultimate visual warning for any generation that might consider returning to the streets. A monument to how far he was willing to go to maintain power.

I understand the logic of airstrikes, and yet I cannot understand it at all.

Don’t get me wrong. We expected al-Assad to kill us. We anticipated the killing. We survived it—I survived it, though not all of us did. We even composed songs about it: “A traitor is one who kills his own people.” But airstrikes on schools? No, we didn’t see that coming. It wasn’t only that we underestimated his capacity for killing. We had overestimated the world’s intolerance of such violence. We once had hope. Political hope.

Politically, airstrikes showed us how naïve and painfully ineffective our nonviolent tools were. 

Blocking streets. Organizing sit-ins. Calling for economic strikes. These were diverse tactics, but many of them rested on the same theory: if we could put enough pressure on the streets, the economy, government institutions, and daily life, al-Assad might be forced to resign, or someone high enough within the regime might bring the regime down.

Our economic pressure could never disrupt the streets, infrastructure, and daily life on the scale of those early weeks of airstrikes.

Sit in a public square until he resigned? Lobby for a larger sit-in, hoping that there would be too many of us for the bullets to kill us all? That logic collapsed once airstrikes became a possibility. A barrel bomb, maybe two, would be enough.

Nonviolence was painfully slow. Massacres were painfully rapid.

As long as al-Assad had free rein to kill from the sky, our nonviolent techniques could only succeed if they generated enough international shame to restrain him. But even that logic failed us. The world became numb to the images of our dead, to our bodies pulled from beneath rubble. Al-Assad created a narrative of the secular president killing Islamists. Within that narrative, almost nothing he did could be considered shameful.

My first experience with an airstrike happened at night. To be honest, the darkness was a small mercy. I cried, lost sleep, prayed, and thought of people I desperately wanted to tell that I loved them. Some of those on the list, truthfully, I didn’t really love, but I thought, If I am going to die — let them think I did. I also drafted yet another unsent apology to my sister for my activism, which forced her and her family into exile. It happened on my second day of moving to Eastern Aleppo, April 2013. 

But then came my second airstrike.

We were sitting on the floor, perhaps playing cards. There was no electricity and not enough chairs for everyone. Sponge mattresses served every purpose: eating, sleeping, even watching movies on one of our laptops.

There were four or five men, me and my fellow comrades, all together. I was wearing my pink, annoyingly cheerful, animated pajamas. 

When the explosion came, I jumped with the loudest “Oh Virgin Mary” I could muster. But none of them bothered to move. They might have even laughed at my reaction, followed by “Oh, Marcelle, it didn’t even hit close.”

It didn’t hit close? Are you kidding me? The bombing was so excruciatingly loud that I could not believe it was far away.

“Two or three neighborhoods away,” they claimed. That was their idea of far away.

I sometimes wondered whether the six months they had spent in Eastern Aleppo before I arrived had altered their hearing. Because, even in my final days in War-Aleppo, I was never able to extract details from the sounds around us, neither the distances nor the types of weapons used.

“No, Marcelle, this is ground shelling, not an airstrike.”

“This is far away.”

“This is just a helicopter.”

To me, it all sounded the same: the sinister noise of death.

What we could not hear ourselves, we learned second-hand. Walkie-Talkies. With no phone or internet connection, it was our most reliable way of communication, which we needed. Just in case. 

Still, I often wished my friends would turn them off. 

What made the anticipation worse was that any announcement related to airstrikes came in double, echoing from one device to another until a single threat filled the room several times over, worsening the anticipation.

“It came, it came.”

“It bombed, it bombed.”

“Warcraft in the air, Warcraft in the air.”

“Helicopter in the air, helicopter in the air.”

“Turn the lights off, an airstrike in the sky.” “Turn the lights off, an airstrike in the sky.”

But we couldn’t turn off the walkie-talkies. Not when our doctor friends could be called to an emergency at any moment. Not when those of us who had become citizen journalists might have to rush to the site of a massacre to document what had happened. So we kept them on.

I appreciated another aspect of the walkie-talkie: it was a window into the lives of others. 
On some channels, we would overhear a fighter’s wife giving him a grocery list, asking him to bring eggplants and tomatoes so she could make moussaka. We heard people congratulating a groom on getting married. On some nights, fighters on the front line talked across the channels, exchanging the dirtiest, most bizarre curses.

In the first month after returning to Aleppo, I was obsessed with finding out where the airstrikes hit. I would listen to the walkie-talkie and, against my friends’ advice, use Google Maps to locate the area. They warned that using Google Maps would consume much of our limited satellite internet, but I needed to know.

Most of those areas in Aleppo weren’t even properly named on Google Maps. In the poorest parts of a war zone, who would care to name streets that might soon be wiped out?

My obsession with knowing where the airstrike hit was immediately followed by the question, “Do we know anyone there?”

This became the only thing I could obsess over, as if understanding it would give me some control.

But then, I shifted to the other extreme. I didn’t want to know anymore. Not where. Not who. 

I began to constantly repeat a common saying: “You won’t hear the airstrike that kills you.”

I soon found myself judging those who ran from airstrikes through the streets seeking shelter. This is not a bullet. Or a huge fucking airplane. How fast can we possibly run? How random are the directions we choose? Is it safer to run toward buildings that might collapse on us or toward empty streets, risking that no one would identify us from our remains?

We lived by “rumors” about what was safer:

“You should leave your house if you live on higher floors.”

“If possible, rent an apartment closer to the front lines, as these areas are safer than those near population centers. A military front line, especially an abandoned one, presents only one risk, the possibility of the Syrian army invading before you can flee, leading to assassination or arrest,” they said. “But this, at its worst, would happen only once. Airstrikes occur at any moment, day or night.”

“The most dangerous option is to rent near a hospital.”

“If you can, choose a building surrounded by taller ones. The logic is that your neighbors would be bombed before you.”

“Avoid the slums. Avoid buildings that don’t have proper infrastructure.” Nothing like airstrikes draws class lines over the probability of being buried alive.

“Avoid buildings that can be distinguished from the sky.” (Whatever that even means exactly).

We chose when to live by those rules or when to ignore them completely. We would try for a month, or while choosing a new apartment. But the airstrikes, high above, loud and deadly, felt as godlike as fate. And we, running, anticipating the sky’s anger, felt so small.

No control, just total surrender.

You see us in the photos. We stopped running. We stood there, looking high up at the sky, hoping the strikes would pass without killing us.

I couldn’t tell if my war roommates were hiding their fear or if they had simply stopped feeling it. They didn’t jump or cry; they didn’t “make a big deal out of it.” But it was a big deal. The sky was killing us. I wondered if they concealed their fear because I was there, their female friend whom they wanted to comfort, yet around whom they hesitated to show vulnerability.  

But within a month or so, I joined them on that pretense. We made fun of those who visited us from Turkey or Western Aleppo and jumped fearfully at the sound of bombs. If they cried, we were even annoyed, labeling them melodramatic.

I was, however, melodramatic in so many other ways around the house.

I cried when “the boys” left a salt plate in the middle of the living room for a month, refusing to return it to the kitchen. In the middle of one of my hysterical fits, Haleem declared it the “salt roundabout,” like the traffic roundabouts in Syrian streets, and said he was now regulating movement in the living room. I laughed despite myself.

I cried hysterically when I smelled because we had no water for showers.

I cried hysterically because they ate rice from the same plate, digging their spoons back into it, instead of serving themselves individually.

I cried when they stained the embroidered pillow covers I had bought from Turkey to make the empty apartment feel homier.

I cried when one of them (they never confessed who) used my strawberry shower gel as shampoo and finished it.

However, I rarely cried over the massacres. Not over the dead bodies, whether I knew them or not. I didn’t cry out of fear. I never collapsed in real crises. I still rarely do.

When denial—of how terrified I was, of the exhaustion from the warnings, the anticipation, and the actual risk of dying—no longer worked for me, or for any of us, we slept.

Haleem, during those days, became so inactive that we started calling him the “Couch Party,” because he never left the couch. He ate on the couch, then slowly slid his body down to sleep for more than twelve hours, then back up again to his laptop, talking to his girlfriend (now his wife), eating while leaning against the same pillow on the same ugly yellow couch.

In the meantime, I slept, sometimes for sixteen hours, as long as the airstrikes lasted. Sometimes they persisted that long. So I slept.

But our denial of the horror of the airstrikes didn’t end in Aleppo, where perhaps we needed that avoidance to survive. The boys and I actively carried the denial with us after we survived.

Now we don’t mention it.

We don’t tell stories about it.

We don’t acknowledge the flashbacks.

We have our selected memories from that year in Aleppo: card game evenings, Christmas, movie nights, jokes, my birthday, and maybe the disgusting food choices.

But what we don’t mention is that airstrikes were the backdrop to all those stories, as random and overlooked as a change in the weather might be in a story.

It rained.

It violently rained.

We played card games while we were bombed.

We celebrated Christmas and birthdays while we were bombed.

We loved and cried over breakups while we were bombed.

I watched Grey’s Anatomy with Reem, holding hands to reassure her, or myself, that we were alive, while we were bombed.

We cooked, dressed, shopped, studied, and breathed while we were bombed.

Whatever story I remember or forget about those years, it involved airstrikes.

As long as it happened under the skies of Eastern Aleppo between 2012 and December 2016, it happened under airstrikes.

But then, once we survived, while recounting another small, ordinary, almost domestic story,  someone would accidentally break the code of denial.

“Is that the day of the Ein Jalout massacre?”

“Was that the day after the shelling in Jabal Badro?”

“Was it a barrel bomb then or a trash bin?” Yes, he even hurled metal trash bins at us from the sky.

Then there’s the awkwardness that follows when someone, a survivor, shatters the illusion that there was anything humane about our experience.

Among my Aleppian comrades, I consider myself the “lucky one.”

I even use phrases that include the word “only.”

I lived in Eastern Aleppo for “only” one year.

In a war zone for “only” one year.

But for the rest of my people, my comrades, it was not only one year. 

They were doctors, so they didn’t have the privilege of looking away from the aftermath. They were photojournalists, documenting the chaos and then sitting every night to choose the “good images” for publication. Neither could face the guilt of skipping one, of avoiding its victims. I never dared to ask, Did it ever become normal?

Most of them lived there for years, in contrast to my one.

The exile that followed, of course, only deepened our denial. We weren’t surrounded by one another anymore. 

I returned to “planet earth,” where the majority of people I met in exile couldn’t envision war. 

They watch it, fetishize it, fight it, support it, use it as an excuse to vote or not vote for their political party, use us as an excuse for everything on Earth, from environmental collapse to the war on Iraq.

Among these people, my “one year only” in war becomes overwhelmingly heavy.

I can’t mention it.

I can’t throw my heaviness on those I met, liked, or even loved.

I censored the airstrikes more.

I edited the blood from the stories.

I undermined the impact it had on me, on us, on Syria.

That one year only was heavy on new friendships, work colleagues, classmates, roommates, and possible partners.

My past was heavy on them.

I felt heavy on them.

When is it appropriate to talk about such horrors? Where? In a bar? Over dinner? Cuddling with someone we love?

What words can soothe such terror?

What should they say?

“I’m so sorry.”

How should we respond?

“It’s okay.”

But it’s not.

It never will be.

It shouldn’t be.

So the stories, the airstrikes followed by the body parts, aren’t shared among the survivors’ tribe, or outside it.

They just isolated us, haunted us, and kept us up at night.

But it didn’t, and might never, disappear.

We wrote about it online sometimes.

But even that became less frequent, censored by our concern over triggering each other or ourselves.

Silence becomes part of survival too, almost as a counterreaction to the roar of warplanes.

It took me years to be able to look back at the days we survived. But what finally made me write this was realizing that on “planet earth,” more and more people now live under airstrikes. Perhaps that’s why, after more than a decade, I decided to publish this. Before, maybe, I was consumed by the fear of burdening an imagined reader, one who had never experienced an airstrike. Nowadays, I write for the many people in the world who survive or try to survive, resist or try to resist, an airstrike.

To break the silence and find a path back to life. 

Nothing like airstrikes altered our relationship to life.

With airstrikes and their aftermath of bodies, death no longer held prestige.

It was no longer a topic approached with reverence.

It became routine.

We couldn’t dwell on it.

We couldn’t fear it.

We had to accept it.

Or we would go crazy.

We thought about death, joked about it, calculated our own deaths and those of others.

We smelled like death.

Survival? Maybe the definition of survival is the daily struggle to find our way back to fearing death, detesting death, denouncing death, and smelling like life. 

Editor’s note: This is the second installment of a serialized essay. Read the first installment here.

Maybe when AI starts having sex and fears death, it will start making great art.

— Jerry Saltz[1]

1. The Poem, and What the AI Overview Said

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” (340) by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading – treading – till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum –

Kept beating – beating – till I thought

My mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down –

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing – then –

AI Overview

Significance: The poem is a powerful exploration of a mental breakdown, using the metaphor of a funeral to depict the speaker’s descent into madness and loss of reason.

3. Rinse. Repeat.

Kept beating – beating – till I thought

I take a fresh look at the poem: Brain, breaking, beating, beating, Box, Boots, began, Bell, Being, broke. Ten B-words in twenty short lines. I’m onto something. I look again.

This time it’s the words starting with S: Seemed, Sense, seated, Service, Soul, Space, Silence, some, strong, solitary. Ten again. Now it’s the vowel digraph “ea.” Treading, treading, breaking, seated, beating, beating, heard, creak, Lead, Heavens, Ear, Reason. Twelve. And then all the words containing the short E sound (ĕ): Felt, Kept, treading, treading, Sense, when, Kept, then, Lead, again, Then, Heavens, Bell, Silence, Wrecked, then, then. Thirteen! I’m scanning the page with excitement now, and the W-words start winking up at me, like stars in a lily pond: was, when, were, was, With, were, Wrecked, World. Also the Ws tucked away in other words, which are all clustered together in that last stanza: down, down, knowing. Eleven, all told. And then, just as I’m about to give up, I notice the gerunds! “[T]reading – treading – ” followed by “breaking” in stanza one; “beating – beating – ” and “going” in stanza two; “Being” in stanza four; and finally the climactic “knowing.” Alongside the Gs in the gerunds are others: the hard, sticky Gs in “again” and “began” in that pivotal stanza three; the sinking, spongy Gs of “strange” in stanza four and “plunge” in stanza five; and the ghostly, silent Gs in “through” and “thought.”

Gerunds, to me, are evocative of train travel. It’s the way they go round and round in a clatter of metal on metal, and their jarring, jerky forward motion. I imagine the funeral in the speaker’s brain taking the form of a cortège by railway, like the one that transported Abraham Lincoln from Washington, DC, to Springfield, IL, in 1865.[2] I think about the tension between the repetition embedded in again and the impetus required to begin; and how defeating it can feel to have to begin again. I register my discomfort at the claustrophobic, even suffocating effects of plunge and strange; recall being cast into the pungent waters of unfamiliar experiences. I picture the denizens of my own brain, the thoughts, feelings, ideas, sensations, impressions, emotions, memories, meanings, preconceptions, equations, faces, places, goals, desires, numbers, stories, narratives, pictures, visions, dreams, maps, the lot, like passengers waiting on the platform for a train, the phantoms I am forever trying to catch in the arms of language, materialize in sounds in the air or words on a page. I am aware that I can see through them sometimes and in different ways. I recognize how intransigent they can be. I know that they can impede or smooth my way.

Would an AI be able to make these kinds of patterns or draw on these kinds of associations? Would it be able to combine sound with meaning and forward motion in service of the intellectual progress and emotional process of a poem as it makes its way to its finale? The way Dickinson’s brain did? The way mine is doing as it reads her poem now?

When it comes to patterns, an AI is the opposite of a poet. An AI looks for patterns as a way of reducing complexity. It sifts through massive datasets in order to detect anomalies and inefficiencies or predict outcomes. When a poet detects a pattern, she uses it to expand, to build further complexity. What do you want from a poem? Do you go to poems for facts and information, or do you seek out poems because they express singular observations in unpredictable language, stir the imagination, open up possibilities?

Poets, like all artists, make use of patterns, the visual and aural repetitions that are the elements of design, to create order. It’s a human impulse. We use natural cycles (days, lunar phases, seasons, years) and artificial systems (calendars, clocks, diaries). We are also ordered by our internal rhythms: our brains use electrical oscillations (waves) to take in and organize experiences; our central nervous system synchronizes internal functions; circadian rhythms direct our sleep patterns, hormone release, and appetite; our autonomic systems govern our pulse, breathing, and gut peristalsis. Anglophone poets like to bandy about physiological theories explaining why iambic pentameter is the ideal English meter: it imitates a human heartbeat (da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM); one breath takes five heartbeats. Artists also use patterns because of the effects they can conjure by disrupting them.

*

Sometimes, external forces disrupt those patterns for us, as in Amy Lowell’s poem “Patterns.” In the stupor of fresh bereavement, having just learned “this morning” that her fiancé has been killed in action in Flanders, the speaker in “Patterns” begins to question the designs that order and ornament her life.

I walk down the garden paths,

And all the daffodils

Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.

I walk down the patterned garden paths

In my stiff, brocaded gown.

With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,

I too am a rare

Pattern. As I wander down

The garden paths.

As the poem proceeds, the speaker registers the continuity of the patterns that constrict and impede her, from fashion to geopolitical configurations (“Fighting… in a pattern called a war”). She begins to recognize that they hide the truth from her (“in the midst of hedges grown / So thick, she cannot see”) and that they hurt her (“the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body…. I am very like to swoon / With the weight of this brocade”). By the end of the poem, every corner of her world is implicated in her tragedy. There is no escaping the patterns that, along with the sunny “daffodils” and “bright blue squills,” have led her down the garden path, promising love and life when in fact they presage death.[3]

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk

Up and down

The patterned garden paths

In my stiff, brocaded gown.

The squills and daffodils

Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.

I shall go

Up and down,

In my gown.

Gorgeously arrayed,

Boned and stayed.

And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace

By each button, hook, and lace.

For the man who should loose me is dead,

Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,

In a pattern called a war.

Christ! What are patterns for?

In the final line of the poem, she exclaims, “Christ! What are patterns for?” It’s a real question, an urgent question. By prizing the benefits of a certain kind of life, she has ceded essential parts of herself—her vitality (“stiff”), her humanity (“I too am a rare / Pattern”). The loss of her beloved points to an even larger sacrifice: “my passion / Wars against the stiff brocade.” The buildup of richness and delicacy in the poem sweeps us away, as it did her. Patterns keep her “Gorgeously arrayed.” When she leaps straight out of the poem to yell in frustration, she is also poignantly interrogating her own intentions. Am I as an artist—a maker of patterns— complicit?

*

Returning to Dickinson’s poem, my pattern antennae are signaling: something is up. “Funeral” in the first line and “Finished” in the last jump out at me. They are the only words that begin with that capital “F.” It feels like a semantic rhyme, to emphasize the finish line a funeral defines. (There are only four other words that have an f in them at all. Besides that fundamental “felt” at the top of the poem, it’s just the small, dispensable “fro,” “of,” and “lift.” Of course, any good rhyme in a poem plants a seed of doubt with the chime it sounds. Is the poem asking the reader to reconsider the seemingly obvious? What, in fact, is the function of a funeral? What exactly does a funeral finish? What isn’t finished once the funeral is over?

4. The Part the Dog Understands

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

Funerals provide a framework for the initial surge of grief that engulfs the bereaved when a loved one dies. Planning the ceremony, informing friends and family, writing the eulogy—it’s something to do. Among the things that aren’t over once the funeral ends is the grieving. The relationships the bereaved have with the deceased continue, albeit in a new form. Some of the relationships the bereaved have with each other end with the funeral, but some do not end there. And then there’s the endless paperwork.

An AI summary of Dickinson’s poem can identify the funeral as a metaphor, but the only thing it can make of the arrangement of words in the poem is a “descent into madness and loss of reason.” Once it identifies the funeral as a metaphor, it goes back to taking the text literally.

Then I realize that the AI has made the same mistake I had when I lost sight of the literal funeral behind the metaphoric one. But whereas I was able to pick up that thread and hold both literal and metaphoric senses of a funeral in my mind at once, the AI literally cannot. Once it finds the equivalence—funeral = descent into madness/loss of reason—it’s done: “the poem is a powerful exploration of a mental breakdown.” It doesn’t understand that metaphors don’t begin and end with the comparison they introduce. They’re not just a substitution of one thing for another. When I use thread as a metaphor for a thought, that equivalence is carried as by a shuttle through the shed of a loom. It sets off a cascade of suggestive effects that have implications. In a work woven of words, metaphors create patterns and tone creates texture. An AI can’t touch the fabric any more than it can feel the tone.

*

“Tone,” a fellow poet said to me the other day, “is so hard to talk about.”

“Is it?” I responded, counting on her to hear that I am both disputing her claim and teasing her.

I know she’s speaking to our shared conviction that you can’t separate the literal definition of the words from the feelings and intentions behind them, and also the challenges of correcting an understanding that is tone deaf. (The valence of “wrecked” in the penultimate stanza of Dickinson’s poem would be harder to pin down if the tone of the poem were jauntier, for instance.) In a way, my friend was taking a swipe at AI.

If asked, an AI can generate an example of irony and explain it. Here’s what ChatGPT gave me:

“A fire station burns down.”

“It’s ironic because a place meant to prevent and fight fires is destroyed by the very thing it’s designed to protect against.”

I laughed out loud at this answer, simultaneously terrible and perfect. Terrible because it’s so pedestrian and, well, unironic; it feels like a setup for a story without the story, or a joke without a punchline. Perfect because it captures exactly what AI isn’t any good at, and why it’s almost mean of us to ask it to try to leave its happy, simple-minded place.[4]

Irony is more than a reversal of expectation, more than saying “Great job!” to the driver who’s just backed into the garage door. It’s the destabilizing moment when the undertow of reversal pulls against the tide of expectation. When it comes to irony, context is everything. Every time Mark Antony calls Brutus an “honorable man,” every time Othello refers to his ensign as “honest Iago,” whenever anyone in Oedipus Rex mentions “seeing” or “knowing” or “blindness,” we feel the tug of something like dread. Is it the fear of what we, too, might naively miss? A small tear in the fabric of all that we think we know? Are we disconcerted by the reminder of how easily our certainties can be turned inside out?

Can an AI “hear” tone? It can identify his pomposity, but does it harbor the same suspicions I do when I encounter the narrator of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story Of Wall-street”? Is it both entertained by his storytelling and skeptical of the motives of the self-proclaimed “elderly… man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best”? Is it troubled by the proximity of “profound” and “easiest”; the passivity of “has been filled with”? Google AI can tell me that the tone “shifts from droll and lightly humorous to profound, elegiac, and deeply existential,” but when I ask it why, all it can do is invert the question: “The tone…reflects the narrator’s transition from comfortable ignorance to existential crisis.” It can tell me that Melville’s unnamed Wall Street lawyer is an “unreliable narrator,” but it doesn’t wonder what makes him unreliable any more than it goes through the experience of being at his mercy.

There are a lot of reasons why I read fiction. I like a good story. Who doesn’t? And traveling through time and space, here on Earth and elsewhere in the universe; becoming familiar with people I could otherwise never encounter. But I got hooked on reading by finding my own unformed perceptions put into words. (Yes! I’ve seen that, too. I know what you mean!) Books make the world more intelligible, help me hone my understanding of what makes people tick. Part of what makes “Bartleby, The Scrivener” more than a good story is my experience of “living through” the intractable relationship between the lawyer and his employee Bartleby, who famously “would prefer not” to do the job for which he has been hired, while simultaneously “preferring not” to relinquish his position as a law copyist or even to vacate the premises. I experience the narrator’s mounting frustration at his own inability to reason with Bartleby, and I sympathize with the scrivener’s strangely heroic passive resistance: curtailed though it is, his exercise of free will has not been extinguished. For a while, their dilemmas are mine.

An AI can tell me what lessons I should take away from Melville’s story, but I know that that’s not the same thing as internalizing them. It can enumerate all that Bartleby represents (the alienation of the working class, the limits of charity, etc.), but it can’t tell me what I get from my understanding of what he’s doing in this story. I get to work that out for myself. Melville is there to help me, not by feeding me themes, but by giving me the opportunity to develop my ear. As I read, I’m listening for clues: What compelled this narrator to tell this story?

An AI doesn’t have a good ear. It doesn’t have an ear at all. Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), the Austrian-born, Jewish composer and teacher credited with (or blamed for) the early twentieth-century development of atonal music, might not have been saved from the Nazis if the composer had been an AI. AI Schoenberg would not have understood his brother-in-law’s telegram, “Change of air on account of asthma urgently recommended,” nor why it prompted the real life Schoenberg to get on the next train to Paris, where the air quality was unlikely to be any better, as opposed to nearby Brandenburg, where it would have been. (Luckily, Schoenberg was atonal in a different way.)

Tone conveys a message that a dog understands, and it is the reason why you can read a baby anything from Dr. Seuss to Dr. Johnson and get the same results.

At the climax of Dickinson’s poem, right before the plank in reason breaks, the speaker hears space begin to toll. Has space merged with time? (Did Dickinson anticipate Einstein?) Is this spatial metaphor—infinite space representing eternity—a vision of death as a place where the infinite and the eternal become one?

The metaphysical moment quickly yields to a simile about feeling excluded, something we can all relate to:

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

Wrecked, solitary, here –

The simile offers the possibility that existence, “Being,” is perfectly suited to comprehending all that lies beyond our earthly understanding—a possibility the I can see, but only, as it were, from the outside. Maybe this is why we move so quickly past the allusion to the spiritual world of heaven to “the heavens,” the subject of physics and astronomy, a physical part of our world. But what keeps being from being “but an Ear”? Is “Ear” a synecdoche (a substitution of the part for the whole), standing for the senses more generally—and therefore not the brain, with all its meddling thoughts and feelings, its knowing and reasons? “It took me four years to paint like Raphael,” Picasso is said to have said, “but a lifetime to paint like a child.” He was not just being ironic.

Maybe tone is so hard to talk about because as soon as we start talking about it our words get in the way. It’s words, after all, or what they stand for—all the things we think we know, the conceptual frameworks we’ve adopted to explain things to ourselves, all the baggage, the assumptions, the stories we carry—that Picasso is lamenting, and what he says needs to be stripped away—unlearned—so we can try to regain, and learn again, that fresh, clear, unmediated connection to the world.

“Draw what you see, not what you know,” an art teacher once said to me. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. He was counting on my willingness to unlearn what I thought I knew, to see that what I called “knowing” was in fact “assuming,” and to discover in the process of drawing what it was I was really seeing. It’s sweet that AIs still have trouble with hands, a notorious challenge for artists. But the human artist’s struggle to convey all that the gesture of a human hand can express is not the same as generating people with three thumbs.[5]

We call them Language Learning Models, but an AI can’t learn, it can only “know.” An AI can produce a new discovery, but it doesn’t have that eureka moment of recognition that for humans is part of what a discovery is all about; it can’t experience what it means to make one. An AI can’t even commit things to memory, because what it calls “memory” is just another metaphor we’ve assigned it—perhaps we have made the mistake of presuming that it has a memory like our own. But human memory is not just “recall” any more than knowledge is data aggregated or recombined.[6] Our memory is an entire childhood in the bite of a madeleine dipped into lime-blossom tea; it is the ghost of a dead baby daughter; it is what that baby’s mother Sethe calls “rememory,” memories that affect others beyond those who possess them; it is the “leaden circles” of Big Ben “dissolved in the air” that cast Clarissa back to Peter Walsh’s criticisms and her fear of death, and the hallucinations and flashbacks to the trenches that assail Septimus in Regent’s Park.[7] Human memory is entwined with its context, interwoven with sensory impressions, entangled with emotion, implicated in forgetting. It has a life of its own, a will of its own. It contributes to our self-belief. It can defeat us. It is an example of how we can spin knowledge into wisdom.

Memories also, of course, console. When someone we love dies, we say that they live on in our memories. It’s more than a figure of speech. Human memory is a living system: serendipitous, fluid, malleable, metabolic, reactive, adaptive. Memories aren’t merely encoded in our cells, they change their structure at a physical and chemical level.[8] Non-brain cells also retain “memories.”[9] The body itself is an agent of memory, actively responding to, processing, and storing events, even passing them down epigenetically in reproduction.[10]

Human memory is also fundamentally creative, embodied in the images and stories we use them to form. We actively reconstruct our memories in the process of recall, reshaping them in response to current circumstances and emotions and what we have learned in the interim, consciously and unconsciously, cumulatively and unpredictably, honestly and unreliably. You could say that human memory is a lot like tone. It’s hard to talk about because you have to be able to feel it first.

5. Colorless Green Ideas

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

What does it mean to feel a Funeral? We are used to feeling sad or depressed at funerals, but not to “feeling” funerals. It’s the locution, the use of the word “funeral” as a direct object of the verb “to feel,” that is curious and unsettling. It’s also the location. In what sense is the funeral in the poem happening in the Brain of the poem’s speaker?

My first thought is of Noam Chomsky and his “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Good grammar is no guarantee of good sense, he demonstrated in his revolutionary first book, Syntactic Structures (1957). Chomsky was laying the groundwork for an understanding of language as an innate, biological, cognitive system, a structure hardwired into the human mind and governed by a universal set of rules. Before Chomsky, linguistics was a science devoted to description and classification (e.g., the study of the evolution of language families, forms and sounds, languages as systems unto themselves) and language acquisition studied as part of behaviorism (e.g., how children learn language, i.e., by imitation, trial and error, and positive reinforcement). Chomsky’s model of language as a formal, rule-based, computational system set out to account for how children learn such a complex system so effortlessly. Along the way, it provided a foundational framework, both conceptual (e.g., the brain as an operating system) and mechanical (e.g., coding), for AI.

Nevertheless, Chomsky has emerged as one of AI’s sharpest critics, fiercely eloquent when it comes to teasing out the profound differences between how machine learning programs operate and “how humans reason and use language.” As opposed to an AI, “the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.”[11] Technically, Dickinson writes clear, understandable compressed verse with abstractions built in, not unlike Chomsky’s famous meaningless sentence. By arranging words in such a way that we are required to use our brains, and our reasoning, to make meaning of it, they both remind us that there is more to language than the sense it seems, or doesn’t seem, to make.

Among the errors that AI routinely makes are prolific examples of grammatically correct nonsense, as in Google AI’s advice to put glue on your pizza (plucked from a sarcastic Reddit post) and eat at least one small rock per day for vitamins and minerals (sifted from a satirical article in the Onion).[12] These gaffes are amusing; they expose AI to be the idiot-savant we suspect it to be. Colorless green ideas is a horse of a different color.

Chomsky maintains that his most famous sentence is meaningless. But, one itches to ask him, meaningless in what sense? Whatever he might have not meant, this politically sophisticated, multilingual scholar of linguistics, analytical philosophy, cognitive science, and political criticism must know it is impossible to keep meaning out. Anyway, there’s no disputing that his Mona Lisa of a sentence has become meaningful. Linguists of a certain age remember where they were when they first heard it. It has been the subject of literary analysis by scholars across fields; it appears in John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, has made its way into pop culture as a bumper sticker; and it has inspired scores of poems, from John Hollander’s “Coiled Alizarine” and Clive James’s “A Line and a Theme” to (arguably) August Kleinzahler’s “Green Sees Things in Waves.”[13] Chomsky may not have meant anything by his sentence, but that’s not the same thing as it being meaningless.

Something that doesn’t make immediate sense, or resists our initial efforts to understand it, is different from something that makes ridiculous sense. One of the things that makes Chomsky’s sentence irresistible is its patina of poetry. It’s got an oxymoron (“colorless green”), personification (“ideas sleep”), makes substantial use of implicit antitheses—ideas vs dreams, awake vs asleep, thoughts vs emotions, serenity vs agitation. It also makes dramatic use of assonance (the long ē: green ideas sleep), seductive use of sibilance (s-sounds). It has a strong forward rhythm (it’s in iambic pentameter), and suspense (we wait for the verb and its modifier). All this in just five words.

One of the secrets of poetry’s power is that it’s a kind of language that isn’t primarily interested in telling us things, or even really showing them to us. Poems want to have a conversation. Chomsky’s sentence leaves us bursting with questions: How can a color be colorless? What does it mean for an idea to have a color—and why green? What does it mean for an idea to sleep? What does it mean to sleep furiously? Poetic expression is curious; it wants to share that curiosity. What is the difference between an idea and a dream? Can you be awake and also be asleep? Why would an idea go to sleep? Can an idea be furious? Can it be tranquil?

I can generate these questions, according to Chomsky, because I was born with an ability to formulate infinitely creative articulations of my thoughts, whereas an AI’s “mastery” of linguistics, being data-driven rather than structural, limits it to “guessing” the next word in a sequence, generating sentences as a form of autofilling. When I ask Google AI: What does it mean to feel a funeral in my brain? All it can do is regurgitate its summary of Dickinson’s poem. I understand that it’s up to me to work out what Dickinson is trying to express, which is a kind of rebuttal to Chomsky, whose model of language is also in the brain, but has no place for human feelings.

Because I am a poet, I spend a lot of my free time worrying about what our feelings do to our thoughts, what our thoughts do to our feelings, and the people (like Chomsky?) who think they can keep them apart. Not only do I feel my thoughts and think my feelings, I feel with my thoughts and think with my feelings. More than that, my thoughts are in my feelings and my feelings are in my thoughts. They form a double helix, the DNA of my linguistic process. Together, they construct meaning and shape my identity—but not in a vacuum, in a body responsive to the physical and sociocultural environments in which it finds itself. Maybe, the way memories leave epigenetic marks, altering the way our brains read our DNA, my interactions shape my meanings and my identity, in turn.

Whatever the mechanics of language acquisition may look like, our language forms us. And in my experience as a poet, and as a person, emotions are inseparable from the machinery of language. These ideas are consonant with the tenets of cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics, but I learned them from poets like Dickinson using language in ways I couldn’t have imagined, but that confirmed my own intuition that experiences like funerals are emotions, and we feel them in our brains.

References

[1] Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night (New York: Riverhead Books, 2022).

[2] It’s likely that Dickinson wrote the poem around 1861, well before Lincoln’s funeral, although the body of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was conveyed by train from Windsor to the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore in 1861. The funeral was described at length in the pages of the Boston Daily Advertiser, Boston Evening Transcript, Boston Post, and Springfield Republican, among others.

[3] The missing primary color comes in the final stanza in the “pillared roses” and “Flanders,” with its implied poppies, symbol of soldiers killed in combat. Since Lt. Col. John D. McCrae’s poem, “In Flanders Fields,” was published in Punch magazine on December 8, 1915, it has become impossible to refer to Flanders without seeing poppies. His poem became one of the most popular and frequently quoted poems about the First World War. It was also used for recruitment, propaganda, and to sell war bonds.

[4] An AI can learn to respond “ironically” in dialogue, say, but all it’s really doing is using sarcasm, irony’s adolescent cousin.

[5] Kyle Chayka, “The Uncanny Failure of A.I.-Generated Hands.” The New Yorker, March 10, 2023.

[6] Iuliia Gorshkova, “AI Memory vs. Human Memory: Cognitive Science Insights for Engineers,” Partenit. Self-Control for Robots, August 21, 2024.

[7] Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway.

[8] Kristen M Harris, “Structural LTP: From Synaptogenesis to Regulated Synapse Enlargement and Clustering,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 63 (August 2020): 189–97.

[9] James Devitt, “Memories Are Not Only in the Brain,” NYU News (New York University, November 7, 2024).

[10] Dr Michelle Weiner, “Cellular Memory: How the Body Keeps the Score,” Dr. Michelle Weiner at NeuroPain Health (NeuroPain Health, December 20, 2024). See also, Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York, New York: Viking Books, 2014).

[11] Chomsky, Noam, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull. “The False Promise of ChatGPT.” The New York Times, March 8, 2023, sec. Opinion. See also Marshall, Colin. “Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: It’s ‘Basically High-Tech Plagiarism’ and ‘a Way of Avoiding Learning’ | Open Culture.” Open Culture, February 10, 2023.

[12] Kyle Thayer, When Does AI Generate Nonsense? June 12, 2025

[13] Michael Erard, “The Life and Times of ‘Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously,’” Southwest Review 95, no. 3 (2010): 418–25.

To feel your legs 

weep for not walking, to weep like 

a willow, to will over water. 

To sit in the room—sea 

green without seasons—to sit

waiting for the mist to enter, to exit

without her, to witness your murder,

your own heart your murderer, to change

the channel the diaper the angle

of the recliner—the things you still have

control over. To know the gray thing

waiting in the corner—to open

as if an envelope—

the thing you’re afraid of.

the wind, but I heard it anyway.

It was my father

saying I am dying. It was my mother

saying I won’t let him go.

The airplane carried us

nowhere. Its windshield

was a liar, protecting us from 

nothing. Get out of here,

get lost, make yourself scarce, 

death said, and the doctors 

built a bridge of silence across 

the sky. They shoved 

my father over it, one white 

little pill at a time.

Some things are unethical if accompanied by

the incorrect fragrance

I live in a wooden house

it matters how you frame it

I live in a universe consisting of atom and void

I am splitting that atom in the etymological sense

I am in the belly of a fish

somewhere between ice

water and steam

I have nothing but contempt for the world around me

constantly articulating itself

in the Darwinian sense

I am here with the sounds of downpour and storm

I showed up to life got frustrated and left

Dark heavy boxes sit in the hazy canal late like my memory lately

a heap of hands and feet at the brasserie a lady says her actions

resemble brush strokes everything is blue at some point or

another the crunch of front teeth comes down through its

apple the branches slip along the threads of my hands

and feet on the cover of her anthology I swear

Farrokhzad’s eyes did the Mona Lisa

thing and a boy trapped between the window and shade wrote

me said he’s sorry for the backseat smelling like hyacinth thrown

from the table I promise that color’s no good for your nose it’s that

most of what people say is true they get old and lie on the floor

with vertigo for hours and even a drip from a faucet can echo

in the bathtub for hours and the boy was there and again

I wore navy the day you showed up in a puffer

all pretty

I’ve been thinking about Newton’s third law of motion after recently revisiting it for my son’s science project: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is a consoling law, built upon certainty. But human lives seldom hold such hard consolations. The leaders we elect, the borders we erect, the violence we permit produce consequences that outlive the choices that set them in motion. Mothers understand something of this. To bring a life into the world is to initiate a sequence whose consequences can never be calculated or contained. Across Guernica’s August–September double issue, motherhood appears as place, inheritance, origin, and impossible return. The works gathered here cast a look upon the afterlives of history; they ask what follows from our most intimate and collective decisions.

In fiction, Naeem Murr’s Bye-Bye Palestine traces the complex entanglements of lives back to a historical rupture whose convulsions remain present in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. “Haifa became known as Um Al Gharib, Mother of the Stranger,” Murr writes. The name holds the story’s central contradiction: a city figured as mother to those made strangers within it. In Emmy Rossum’s Tether, motherhood becomes its own law of action and reaction. In a futuristic world, a daughter uses her heightened olfactory abilities to mark the boundary between herself and her mother. Following a matrilineal inheritance through scent, she attempts to trace her way back to her own beginnings. In Yukiko Tominaga’s The Little Corner of the Factory, a child discovers the many forms love can take, and the hurt and betrayals it can contain. In a small room inside a rental hot-towel factory, the youngster is initiated into a tenderness that will outlast the people who teach it to her.

In nonfiction J. Malcolm Garcia’s narrative reportage Last Fight tells the story of a man living in the wake of his brother’s death. Nazeer, an Afghan interpreter who served alongside US forces in Afghanistan, is detained by ICE and dies within twenty-four hours of entering custody. Garcia follows a chain of consequence stretching from the war in Afghanistan to the American immigration system, tracing the afterlife of a vote, and the distance between a choice made in a voting booth and the body upon which its force eventually lands.

In A Nation Wrestles with God, excerpted from A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands, Ilan Stavans traces America’s long and unsettled relationship with the idea of God. From the use of divine authority in the service of empire to God’s persistent presence in the nation’s literature, politics, vernacular, and imagination, Stavans traces how belief becomes another force with an afterlife. The gods a nation creates continue to shape the lives over which it assumes the right to “play God.”

In Guernica’s first foray into the encounter between artificial intelligence and human epistemology, Liane Strauss and an AI read Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” together. Moving between Dickinson, Monet’s Water Lilies, and the irresolvable problems literature allows us to inhabit, Strauss discovers that an AI can identify ambiguity but cannot experience the doubt that lends it its resonant weight. The first instalment in a three-part series, the essay is a reminder that human knowledge begins in uncertain spaces.

In interviews, The Insistence of Beauty brings poets Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal into a reciprocal conversation about their new collections, LION and Roma Roam, respectively. A question becomes an invitation to step beyond the stories assigned to us, and in this exchange, each poet turns that invitation toward the other. Here, imagination creates another kind of afterlife: the freedom to move beyond violence’s last account.

In the latest installment of Guernica’s Posthumanitarian interviews series, After Development, Russell Reed speaks with Bhutanese scholar Dasho Karma Ura about the intrinsic relationship between our individual choices and communal happiness. Critiquing the humanitarian regime’s presentism, Ura suggests that our individual well-being cannot be separated from the ecological futures our present choices are already creating.

In Global Spotlights this month, Nwanne Agwu’s Faint Lines maps identity through maternal and paternal lines, and asks what it means to belong to people who came before us. Published first in Isele Magazine, the narrative reimagines home not as where one comes from, but as a place where one is recognized and held with love. 

Poetry in this issue enters the charged space where beauty and violence meet. In Tina Chang’s I’ve Gone to Look for America, Term One,  Pistil/Pistol, and I’ve Gone to Look for America, Term Two, roses tangle in the brain; a peony becomes first a woman’s cheek and then a bullet; the pistil carries within it the sound of a pistol. Within these poems, the inherited past exerts its force upon the present, but the speaker answers by naming herself—lion, flower, weapon, and “little spark”—and turning that inheritance toward another future.

Priyanuj Mazumdar’s there’s this blurry photo of me & my sister with our eyes closed moves through two family photographs taken fifteen years apart, tracing the intimate afterlives of a house, a childhood, and a mother’s love. Here, motherhood is the force exerted quietly from the edges of the image, its effects carried forward in the child.

In Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi’s Tidings of the Broken Flood, rupture becomes movement. In Feranmi’s poem, force does not meet its opposite but changes form, folding back into itself and entering whatever comes next.

Across this double issue, actions exceed the moments in which they are performed. The force may not return equally, and it may not return from the direction we expect. But it returns, nonetheless: in the stranger who still calls the lost city “mother,” in the child following a scent toward home, in the man left to fight for the meaning of his brother’s life and death, in the river continuing beneath an ash-heavy dawn.

As humans, what we set in motion outlives us. So might what we set against it.

—Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief

A son traces four versions of home across Ọkpọsị and Abakaliki, following the names through which he is recognised: those of his mother, father, grandparents, and the brother whose death preceded his birth. Written by Nwanne Agwu, “Faint Lines” maps identity through maternal and paternal lines, family photographs, and inherited stories.

Published first in Isele Magazine, the story asks what it means to belong to the people who came before us, and reimagines home not as where one comes from, but as the experience of being seen with love.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

(here’s how things are named:

1. a) like they are
2. b) like we want them to be. 

–Nwanne Agwu)

You check a dictionary and it says a name is a noun that indicates or identifies a thing or an idea. You put a name in the place of a home, a skin you don’t choose at first but can get comfortable in. A cloth you can change if you want. Your name is the home you carry around, everywhere you go. You think of home as where your parents call home. As where your siblings are. As where you belong. As a person; everyone you have loved was once your home.

Home: where you feel seen.

You do not run to the dictionary to find the meaning of home because, in this one, home is just a place. You divide it by four.

Home 1 (Mgbom, Ọkpọsị):

Here, your mother is a toddler with mucus crawling down her nose. A man asks, Who are you? You say whose child you are, thinking that he must have known your mother. That, maybe, he had also heard your mother’s first cries as a baby. This man, from whom your maternal uncles and aunts inquire the years of their unregistered births and the events your grandparents never talked about, looks at you and nods. You know your home, he says. You look like where you come from.

Where do you come from? In Ọkpọsị, a person comes from, at least, two places: the maternal side and the paternal side. The two lines are the streams that form this river that could be anybody. One is as important as the other.

Mgbom is the first stream you know out of the two most important streams of descent. Here is where you meet the cousins that you do not have on your paternal side. Here is where you call home first, even though Abakaliki has been your birthplace before anywhere else. In Mgbom, your best friend is named Ọzọemena, a plea against recurrence. Your sister says he is the reincarnation of someone who died so many times; you don’t care. He is the first boy you love, the first that makes you notice and loosen up over an erection. With skin the colour of ripe mangoes, he sits with you; your dark skin, a clear parallel to his. He is plump where you are skinny and full of laughter as against your naiveté. With him, you don’t fear other parents. And when it is time to introduce yourself to his mother, you find your place in some names.

This is how you are known here: by your mother’s name, by her father’s name. You walk into your aunt’s yard and greet the people around. She holds your hand and says: This is Uzoma’s last child. In the moment, you feel pity for yourself. Like this is it, there’s loss in a name, things evoking tears. The women look at you with a certain tenderness but curiosity arises in the words of some of them: Children! He’s already grown. Isn’t he the one she named after her brother? Ah, he’s so quick!

You think of your mother seated with all these people, making jokes. They say she danced so much, so well when she was still young, alive and strong. Your mother was the okoso of her troupe, the feet that did magic on the ground, a body that swam and flew, that broke the limits of flexibility. Some would say that she was the life of the party and others would say she was a pot of music, dancing, singing, and using the instruments like she had left the womb holding them in her hands; destiny.

You think of your mother as art. You think of her as memories: butterflies that float away, sometimes aimlessly. 

In places where you think your mother is not known, you add the name of your maternal grandfather. My mother is Uzoma, the daughter of Okorie Akpoke. Or you say, I am a grandson of Okorie Akpoke; by this, you wait for questions on whose son you are, then you break their hearts by saying you are the son of a daughter and not the son of a son as they had expected. In this way, you tell stories about two different generations, people who broke their fears with faith, people who stepped in when others walked out, people who chose tears instead of faking a smile, faking a laugh.

While alive, your grandfather would talk about choosing to walk back to Ọkpọsị from the magistrate court in Afikpo because he had refused to bear false witness against someone who didn’t know him, who would still not have much regard for him even after the event. Your grandfather would rather suffer to keep a reputable name than dine with the wealthy for the opposite.

Uzoma (your mother’s name): safe way; good road; nice path.

Okorie (your grandfather’s name): born on an Orie day, a male-given name. A name mainly originated, you think, from the Arochukwu, a migratory Igbo ethnicity that lived in Ọkpọsị and interchanged cultures for decades.

Home 2 (Mebiọwa, Ọkpọsị):

Last night, you hid one of your father’s passport photographs in a book. See, you were actually going through the photo album of your family from the twentieth century. In it, were  black and white images dating between the fifties and the nineties. In the photos, your father’s wives are belles; standing on wedged heels, legs shooting out from knee-length gowns. They scare you now with the effect of age. Contrasts: gray hair against afro wigs, wrinkled skins against perfectly smooth bodies, eyes developing bags, smiles weakened into laughter. You search for depth and think of things that do not go beyond the lips. These women should be six, you see five. Your mother is also in the picture, the sixth and last wife of your father. The first died even before the fifth was married. You think of grief and see your half-brother, a motherless toddler walking among friendly enemies called stepmothers, learning to live within boundaries, to love back when he is loved, and to loathe when loathed.

See, all these women had the names of their fathers until your father happened to them. You think of a community and remember your father’s compound. Beehive. Anthill. You are the last child, they say you never saw a thing. Child of your father’s old age.

You walk out of your father’s compound and say you are the son of Agwu Nwogo. This is the magic itself, your father’s name is a door opener here. It is respect. Man says he keeps his life holy and you see it daily when he prays before doing anything. (You are motherless so when people talk about their praying mothers, you talk about your praying father who even prays before drinking, before eating, before leaving the house, while bathing.) You see it when he would rather keep quiet or argue, scold or accuse, than lay a curse on any of his children.

They say your father is a personality. His name is his personality, his reputation. They talk about his wealth and how he was a Messiah, about how he walked into places and had them changed forever. You look around for the wealth, you don’t see it, you go back to the pictures and are reminded that he once had servants, that parents celebrated and called themselves lucky if they noticed his interest in their daughters.

This is not the real home of your father as regards the patrilocal residential system practiced in Ọkpọsị. It is the maiden home of his maternal grandmother and also the maiden home of your maternal grandmother (the mother of your mother had been married from here into Mgbom and people always said that your mother went back to replace her mother).

This place that your father calls home accepted him through his mother’s uncle who had prayed for a boy from his niece. And because he was born here, this, too, became his home as his father had died before his birth.

Home 3 (Amaechi, Ọkpọsị):

This is the real home of your father, the root of his name. His father died during his expectancy and he was thought to be his father’s quick reincarnation. He was named after his father.

Your father’s father was born here by a very popular and wealthy mother. He was given his mother’s name as his last name.

Agwu: the name of a god who is also a spirit. Spirit of art and divination. Agwu means prophecy. Agwu becomes destiny. Agwu possesses a man and makes him a spirit in flesh.

Nwogo (nwa+ogo): the child of Ogo. Your father’s father’s last name comes from his mother’s name. Your father bears the name of his father and that of his grandmother as his surname.

You think of feminism and compare it to privilege, to power. The difference wherever we are is power. Your father says that every child his paternal grandmother had taken kept her name as their last name. Even when she remarried. Even after her death. He says power means everything, and in the hands of a woman, it is the same as in the hands of a man. You smile at his name, Nwogo. A reclamation, a belonging. Was this what she wanted of her children or what they already were even before she had tried?

In a dream, your great-grandmother is a curvy woman. Though silenced by age, her beauty still smiles at you. You ask if she is the source of your father’s daughters’ curviness and she starts laughing, her cheeks breaking into dimples and her face lighting up, the colour of ripe plantain. She says no, then says maybe, then smiles. And you stop dreaming. Now age makes you ask if that dream was in black and white like old photos. Craze! You forgot to ask her about investment, about power, about names. You dream again but you don’t see her.

Home 4 (Abakaliki):

Here, your father is a figure and a personality. Since 1959, he has lived and traded from here. He talks about Cameroon and other West African countries. He talks about hospitality in Obudu, Ikom, and Ogoja. Those are places he had gone to buy achi, ogbono, ekpiri, and their likes which he brought back to Abakaliki to sell. You see Gabonese notes in his pockets and wish they are recent. There are coins, too, in a bag, from various places: Nigerian pennies, Francs from different Francophone countries all looking alike. Useless. You once thought of using the ones with holes as keyholders. Your father has been to places and has retired. You ask him if Abakaliki is home to him and he says no. But you don’t believe him.

Your father is a nonagenarian, has outlived most of his peers, and is possibly the oldest Ọkpọsị man living in Abakaliki.

People say he doesn’t age and you laugh. In the photos from many decades ago, he looks young and possesses the swagger of youth. Now it’s just a gait and a cup of happiness daily. In his bedroom, your father exercises all the time and talks about his frailty. They won’t know that. At night, your father complains of things crawling on his skin. In the morning, he exercises like a slightly older childhood friend, who is still alive but lives in Ọkpọsị, had taught him.

You write your name beside his everywhere you can think of: Nwanneka Christopher Agwu. This too is reclamation, a name given to you after the death of the original bearer, your late brother, without whose death you would never have been born.

This name you have twisted and mangled and tried stretching and straightening is also your passcode. You say it at doors and watch them open or close. You smile when you hear it and you are not sure if this is who you are or who you want to be. If your name already has enough reputation on its shoulders. If people see you when they hear your name or if they think, instead, of your name when they see you?

A boy once joked that your name sounds funny; Nwanne Agwu, Agwu’s sibling. Am I speaking with Nwanne Agwu himself or Nwanne, the brother of Agwu? your mentor’s daughter had asked the day you spoke with her on the phone. In your legal documents, it is Christopher Agwu. But you have learned to choose and to never stop choosing.

In the end, you want to be seen because that is love. Where you come from, to be loved is to be seen, even when you are not there, even when you are just another fragment of memory, a rainbow: faint lines drawn in a curvature across the sky, begging to take the place of stars.

Seen. Completely. Loved.

“Faint Lines,” written by Nwanne Agwu, and originally published in Isele Magazine which describes itself as publishing “notable fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, art/photography, and reviews from writers on the African continent and around the world.”

It’s the scent.

The rot of seaweed. The syrupy garbage a child leaves behind. The filthy underside of a gull picking at something dead. The salt.

I walk the swallowed beach, where the sea keeps taking back what we once called land.

Years ago, I sat here with my mother. The inescapable scent of her made me sick. 

Velvet. Cumin. Yeast.

The wind from the ocean swept the yeast from her skin. And I was grateful for it. 

If I am the nose, my mother is the hand. I make things from scent, and she shapes clay. Or, she did. She always said sculpting was like midwifing. You don’t make the form, you help it be born. 

My work demands control. Focus. Precision. The lab smells like nothing. Not actually nothing. Even nothing has a scent.

Air. Aluminum. Isopropyl.

The nothing makes my skin itch, like waiting for a call. And then I begin.

Strawberry. Tomato. Bark.

In the silence of the lab, the scents are loud. They even speak. They mix, change, pervert one another—until they become something new. There’s instinct at play too—something that leads to creation. Is it a gift? Maybe it’s unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Maybe it’s a little something that’s all mine.

These small experiments—if exceptional—will one day live inside a bottle, purchased by a select few who value such luxuries, who can still afford them. A faceless woman I will never know, whose neck will be taken in by strangers, lovers, passersby. 

Marina. Wood. Rope.

Time ticks, then flies, swallowed by an unknown force. And suddenly I’m in the place I call home. The scent of the lab clings to me. I stare into the fridge and see nothing exciting. I scroll past decadent meals I’ll never order—too tired, too protective of my own body.

At the STERIX, I stand under fluorescent lights to buy toothpaste. Mint that stings my gums but promises oral health. I buy a diet soda too. Fuck oral health.

Cherry. Synthetic. Sour.

In the festive aisle, shiny, ugly balloons scream Happy Mother’s Day. An indictment.

I haven’t spoken to my mother in months. Longer. Since the rupture. The fight about Carol. This is rare for us. We’ve never gone silent with each other like this before. 

Should I get her a balloon? That feels dumb. Would I hand it to her? Face to face? I’m not ready for that. Am I sorry for what I said? I don’t even remember the words. I’ve blacked them out. Adrenaline and cortisol are happy helpers. 

It’s always been like this, a seesaw. A push-pull. Get too close, get burned. 

What’s it called when you torch a field to make it grow back stronger? A controlled burn? That’s what she thinks she does. Maybe it works.

I shouldn’t have told her about Carol. But to be honest, I know why I told her. To stress-test it. To protect myself. I haven’t really had romance ever; I don’t let it get that far.

Carol was kind, quiet. I like quiet. Carol was faint. 

Persimmon. Scallion. Musk.

Worked in marketing or something adjacent. Her tattoos were fading. Her teeth weren’t straight, but her mouth crinkled when she smiled. We didn’t have much in common, but she liked me. I like you, Eva, she said softly out loud. And I guess I liked that.

I floated Carol’s name casually. Showed my mother a picture. And let her do what she does.

She diagnosed Carol as ordinary. Being ordinary is, to my mother, the worst thing that you can be. She said liking me wasn’t the same as being worthy of me. That a life built beside a Carol was worse than being alone. Was I satisfied with so little?

I let her diagnosis land, knowing at once that it was over with Carol. I was poisoned. Or protected.

And then I said it, whatever vicious thing I said in return. The bit I don’t recall. I wanted to cut her. I wanted her hurt to be bigger than mine. And then she went quiet.

I asked Dr. Day if it was childish to measure pain like that, to compare who hurts more. Am I even capable of hurting her like she’s hurt me? And who makes the first move now? I asked. The less hurt one? 

Dr. Day replied, I think you’re trying to quantify in order to understand. You’re intellectualizing—that’s a tactic of avoidance. Instead of feeling it, you’re narrating. Even now, here, I can feel you telling a story. Not really connecting.

Now, months later, I can’t tell if I am feeling a missing or a guilt. My mother is alone. But I’m alone and I’m just fine. Aren’t I? There I go again, comparing. As if we are the same. We are not. She longs for togetherness. Companionship. A tether between us. And I am fine. We are not the same, Margaret and I. I refuse to think we could be. 

As I walk back to the place I call home, I smell a patch of real grass in front of a bungalow.

Palm. Piss. Green.

The city doesn’t smell like exhaust anymore. The roads belong to the fleets—silent, obedient, green machines humming along, always ready, filled by riders in the back, eyes lit by their own little worlds. No one looks up still.

My thumb hovers over the pixels that form letters that spell my mother’s name. But even though I won’t text her, the act of not texting does something.

A buzz on my screen: Hi, Eva.

II

We are seated at a lovely table with an ivory tablecloth. I know I will pay for our meal. My mother is and always has been frugal and this will be my olive branch. She is dressed nicely, in one of her two linen A-line dresses. I have seen her in this dress many times before. She’s taken care of it for years. Hand washes and irons it herself. 

And I know her scent.

Pepper. Talc. Yeast.

As a child in our small apartment, I was often trapped with the scent of her. So I learned early on to escape it. Other scents, mixed or layered, cover or distract. The absence of the scent was the only thing that settled my young anxious body.

A strawberry-shortcake scented marker stuffed deeply in a nostril. A smear of Icy Hot menthol on my upper lip. Anything strong enough to kill the scent of her. 

Today, in the restaurant, the yeast of her is actually subtle, barely noticeable. I still smell it, of course. Children remain hyper-attuned to the warning scent of a parent. And yet, somehow, the yeast has softened.

She’s overly cordial with the waiter, performing the role of a woman who belongs in places with ivory tablecloths. Today she smiles, laughs, says the menu is decadent! Just begging to connect. He doesn’t know that she hasn’t bought new underwear in years. We used to argue about it—how little she allowed herself. Not even a new toothbrush until the bristles splayed outward like broken bones.

She orders champagne, over-pronouncing the French. The waiter grins, genuinely charmed, and says, You deserve it, Mommy.  It’s Mother’s Day! It’s your day!

She beams and says with a laugh, It is my day! But I’m only a mother because of my daughter. And Eva is a miracle. 

She talks about me to this waiter as if we haven’t been estranged. Today, to this waiter, we are close. Mother and daughter. Which, of course, we are. We cannot un-be. 

She reaches to cradle my hand in hers. It is frail and veined and I can’t help but imagine her inevitable death. I somehow manage a smile and don’t pull my hand away.

Moments later, my mother sips the champagne. I do too.

Acid. Apple. Brioche.

It calms me to see her relax. Perhaps she won’t bring up the silence. Her French toast arrives.

Custard. Lard. Brûlée.

I worry if this level of consumption is contagious. The proximity. 

She says, Not to be morbid…

Oh, no.

But I was getting my affairs in order.

Oh, no.

Relax, I’m not dying.

My body softens. She notices.

Oh, you would want to know? Got it. I didn’t know if you’d care.

I just sigh and stay silent. There’s no right answer here.

Anyway, she continues, I was going through my affairs, and there is something.

What something? I don’t want something. I don’t want anything. But I stay silent. What could I possibly inherit? Maybe one of the last pieces she sculpted but could never sell? The art market doesn’t want an old woman. She reaches into her raffia bag, the one I got her years ago when my first scent sold out. She slides her screen across the table, like it’s a napkin. Like it’s nothing.

I don’t like the not knowing. I’m scared my face won’t make the right expression when I learn whatever it is.

Read it, she says.

III

I think about it for weeks.

A child.

Not something I’ve really ever considered. Until that brunch, I didn’t even know there was another one.

There were two embryos. One became you. The other has been on ice all these years. Waiting. Just in case.

I don’t know what she imagined. I certainly couldn’t have imagined this. She doesn’t have enough money to keep it frozen anymore. So, it’s mine, if I want it.

Technically a sibling, she says. But it could be—

A child. My child.

I haven’t spent my days fixated on what I can’t have. I spent enough of my early years wanting a father who never came. What might a long-lost father smell like? I wondered for decades before I put the thought away. Dreaming of unlikely things is, at best, a waste of minutes. And we don’t know how many minutes we have been given. 

It’s common now, for couples and singles not to even try. There’s no name for us. It’s just become a default. It crept in quietly, and then, suddenly, it was.

I learn that Embryo128PRQTY is female.

I know it before I know it. A flicker. It clicks into place like a memory resurfacing.

I’m furious with her for putting the possibility in my head. Or maybe it was always there—lurking, dormant—and she only unearthed it. Now it fills me.

Powder. Tart. Milk.

I don’t even know if I want it.

Crayon. Detergent. Cloud.

The thought of it defrosting. A sticky cluster of human material coming apart. Languishing. Unfed.

Banana. Marshmallow. Linen.

This cluster of cells. Whatever it is. Or will become. Or won’t. A sibling. Child.

Lavender. Strawberry. Vomit.

I don’t know these scents. But I want to.

At our weekly session, I tell Dr. Day, The idea is outrageous. Dangerous, illogical.

He says, You’re still in your head. How does it feel? 

How can you feel the unknown? I challenge.

Imagine into it, and see how it feels, he says.

I imagine my mother on the day of my conception, thawing me. Using a pen, signing a paper, when pens and paper were still commonplace.

Would this cluster—128PRQTY—ever know the smell of paper? By the time it’s old enough, perhaps there won’t be paper anymore.

I imagine myself in the lab, trying to recreate the scent of paper:

Dust. Starch. Pulp.

I imagine myself teaching this cluster about the world that came before. I am pulled by the possibility of this sharing, of connection, of knowing and being known. My gut twists with yearning. Is this a feeling? Needless to say, it infects me.

I sit, sweating, at Pacific Cryogenetics Institute. It’s a cold place, but my body is hot. 

A screen glows as I tap:

Yes / No 

Yes / No 

Yes / No 

Yes / No

I need ownership airtight. I want protection. I can’t owe my mother anything. She will be nowhere near this cluster—no stake, no say. Already, I’m afraid. For it. For me. That she’ll find a way in.

It is on 06/06/2075. I hold my eye to a sensor and with the soundless scan of a red beam, I pay. It’s done. Mine. This small cluster of human material—claimed.

IV

I don’t tell her, which was in accordance with what she offered me. I don’t want to let her into the softness. The softness is no place for her scalpel. I want the secret.

I like secrets. They make you feel special. Like when that older man hurt me—under the guise of love. I didn’t tell my mother about that. The blooming scent of her learning of my victimization would have been unbearable.

What is motherhood? A strange, wonderful, terrifying ache? A thing that rips you open and makes you whole?

Whatever it is, it’s just within reach.

At night, alone on a kitchen stool or sitting on the cold shower floor cradling the single finger of tequila I allow myself at the end of the day, I imagine Embryo128PRQTY and me, together. There we were side by side, in frozen petri-dishes in the soft, sterile dark, comforted by the hum of electricity.

Ethanol. Ozone. Preservative.

Did we know each other? Or just sleep side by side? And when I was selected for transfer, did it feel my absence?

I wonder, would my body accept it? Would it know I wasn’t really its mother? Would it reject me? Somehow sensing the wrongness of me?

Had Embryo128PRQTY been born a sibling, it would have grown beside me, holding my hand, sharing eye rolls when our mother criticized our thighs, pinched at her own cellulite in the mirror. 

Sock. Hairspray. Grape.

Would 128PRQTY have been the favorite? Taller? More worthy? Would we have shared a room? A bed? Would we have fought over crushes?

Lipstick. Carpet. Notebook.

Would we be neighbors now, with windows facing each other’s living rooms, unable to separate, even in adulthood? Or would we be estranged, running from the shared shrapnel of our mother.

Embryo128PRQTY has taken up residence, at least in my mind. Her possibility is deafening, as if she’s already waiting, insistent, relentless, demanding to be.

V

I don’t tell my mother I’m doing it. Maybe on some level she will know. But I don’t want her opinion. I don’t want her to change my mind. And secrets are intoxicating. 

I start tracking my cycle for a doctor whose manner is strictly clinical.  Her name is hyphenated, so I assume she’s coupled, but I don’t ask.

A technician calls the day before the procedure. She wants verbal confirmation of intent. Thaw is scheduled for tomorrow. Transfer the following day. I hear my voice say yes.

VI

I swallow the pill to relax my cervix.

The technician comes in and shows me an image. Here she is, Embryo128PRQTY.

A cluster of cells, mid-thaw, under the microscope.

She’s hatching, the technician says.

And she’s right. 128PRQTY is already in motion. Growing. Multiplying.

We don’t always see that kind of viability anymore, she says. I think she smiles under her mask. 

A sharp pinch as the cluster is deposited into my uterine lining.

It should begin burrowing immediately, she says. Since it’s a hatcher.

And then I wait.

VII

When I was younger, I never played dolls or babies. My mother was industrious—she fixed things around the place we called home. Built furniture. Took the sink apart with her hands.

Being a baby maker never was a goal. I didn’t feel unfulfilled. I didn’t sit longingly, watching families at four–seat tables. Sometimes I would dream, but dreams are things we cannot control.

My mother’s generation was the last that fought for motherhood, amidst the rising regulations. That’s why she calls me a miracle. She brought me into the world alone. I think that I might be repeating the pattern. But I do it anyway.

This cluster is just a cluster. Nothing more. Not yet. It might recognize that I’m not its mother. It might revolt, slough off, and cease to be.

When the blood comes a few days later, I call Dr. Hyphenated-Name. She asks, How much blood?

Only a few drops, in my underwear, I hear myself say, waiting.

Oh great. Implantation bleeding, she suspects. I realize how little I’ve read about this. How little I let myself believe.

It’s just a little shedding as she finds a comfy spot.

She, I register.

Powder. Sock. Bandaid.

A week later, a nurse takes my blood. My stomach is knotted with wait. I scratch at my scalp and sniff at the flakes of yellow caked under a fingernail.

Botanic. Scalp. Brine.

The reliable brine of myself calms me.

And again, I know it before I know. Somehow. Even before the nurse reenters with a broad smile. 

I walk out of the office in a daze. The cluster has taken to me.

Sunlight floods the top deck of the building. My eyes strain. I can see the ocean from here. What’s left of it. Where the richest lost their fourth homes when I was three.

You need a ticket now to get on the sand. Too unstable. Too unpredictable. It can’t be shared with too many at a time.

The nurse runs after me. I’ve forgotten the shots I’ll need to administer daily.

Congratulations, Mommy, the nurse says. You can expect bruising!

I don’t have a ticket for the beach. So I get as close as I can, to see blue, to feel warm. I want the cluster to smell the salt, through me, as soon as possible.

Will her sense of smell be as keen as mine? Will I be able to explain the scent of Juicy Fruit? Our mother used to love Juicy Fruit, I will tell this sister-child. No. My child. She is my child and I will tell her about Juicy Fruit. They don’t make it anymore, I’ll say. It’s banned.

In the days that follow, I don’t feel ill. I don’t feel radiant. I don’t feel much of anything, physically.

I work as always. But before, and after, I find myself lingering, talking to strangers. There’s levity in the chatter. It doesn’t feel strained, as it usually does. It reminds me of someone I’m not: my mother. I find myself talking to a barista. I’m pregnant, I hear myself tell him. Allowing the words outside of me for the first time. I shouldn’t be having coffee, but it’s the scent, I tell him.

Burnt. Velvet. Marzipan.

The yeast too, from the bakery, I tell him. Smells like my mother. Sweet, a little rotten.

He laughs easily. Perhaps it’s just the hormones making me chatty.

I haven’t seen my mother at all. She invites me to a Passover Seder at her cousin’s house.

Matzo. Apples. Cinnamon.

Historical, familial scents that tie us together.

I examine my body for obvious signs but find none, so she won’t know. As long as she doesn’t know, it can’t hurt.

VIII

She tells me I look great.

I’ve told her for years—no comments on appearance. So when she says I look great, I feel my forehead rise reflexively, reminding. She catches herself, throws her hands up. Sorry, sorry. No unsolicited feedback, she says.

Even positive? her cousin asks, ladling the soup.

Bone. Vinegar. Wine.

No feedback at all, thank you, I say firmly. 

My mother just smiles—Got it!—and nods. That feels new. And I want to believe her.

She looks nice too, but I don’t tell her. Even the smallest moves require strategy.

IX

Days later, I dream I am spreading, multiplying, a shape unrecognized, exploding like a constellation. I wake, consumed by fear of money and ownership. I transfer $99,999 into Margaret’s account. I feel immediately better.

I need to figure out my story. A gift? An early milestone birthday? Or maybe I’ll just tell her the truth. I wait for her call. She must have noticed. It’s not every day she has a windfall. She must have seen the numbers rearranged. $99,999. But she doesn’t call. Has she not noticed my hand in there?

So I fold. I call. I tell her, I’ve done it. The transfer. The cluster. So, the money. I just want this to be clean. So, that’s that. But did you not see the money?

She tells me she saw it. She appreciates it, certainly. It will help ease my life, she says. I didn’t call because I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about it. Or at all. No unsolicited feedback, she reminds me, gently.

Oh, right, I say, suddenly on my back foot.

Then she says, Thank you for the gift. And for telling me. Though, I think I already knew.

Before the money? I ask.

I had a dream. About a child. Not a dream. A flicker, she says. She doesn’t know how to explain it.

Try, I say, desperate to be back on my front foot.

There are things we don’t understand, she says. I can often feel you. Or something of you. Even in the silence. Sometimes, I feel a door open, just a little, she says. There is a link between us. Even if you’d sometimes prefer there wasn’t, she says.

Look, I’m not telling people, I say. And anyway, it’s mine to tell—if and when I want. I’ve rehearsed it with Dr. Day—the phrasing, the calm tone. I remind myself: clarity is not cruelty.

Okay, she says simply.

I wait for the but. It doesn’t come.

So I say, Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell your cousin. 

Okay, she says.

Galvanized now, I continue: No name suggestions, no suggestions at all. No check-ins, no drop-ins, no gifts. 

Okay, she says.

I don’t know how this is going to go, I admit.

I understand, she says.

I need to find my way through this. I can’t hear myself when you’re too close, I say.

Okay, she just says again. I’m here if you need, she says. Be well.

And that’s it. The muscle I had been preparing goes unused.

X

The weeks are easy. I am well. A little tired, maybe. A little hungry. I nourish myself in ways I’ve never allowed. 

Something has awakened in me, alive. The skin between my legs will not be ignored. I touch the wet-furry-sticky.

Butter. Apricot. Brine.

I don’t dare taste it but I want to. When I climax, my uterus tightens like a vice, so perverse, so beautiful, so strange. I worry that I’m hurting you but it feels so good so I don’t stop. I’ve never been sexual. I’ve wanted to be, wondered if I could be, but have quietly accepted life without examination.

My mother is sexual. I know this because of the photographs I once found under her bed. In them, she’s holding a wire, triggering the shutter, facing up to the lens, fucking, but present enough to capture the photo. There’s a body on top of her but you can’t see the person’s face. Just skin and limbs, twisting.

Dr. Day once asked if I liked my sexual self. Not in a weird way. In a doctor way. This is a normal thing I suppose people consider. I just laughed, awkwardly. What’s a sexual self? The light was dim inside me till now.

Now I watch people fuck on the internet. Short people. Tall people. Live people. Recorded people. Old people. Fat people. Foreign people. Multiple people. Single people. Violent people. Sticky people. Animated people. Quiet people. Weird people. Anonymous people. Panting people. Screaming people. Insatiable people.

I wake myself up in the middle of the night to come. This is not me. At work, I am amazed what my body can do on a cold bathroom floor.

Ammonia. Cream. Dirt.

I watch myself in the mirror. Who is this? This back arching, mouth open, jaw unhinging sexual being.

I don’t tell my mother about the hunger. Or the mirror. Or that it feels like I’m borrowing her skin.

The cluster is no longer a cluster. It, she, you are large. I feel you twitch, turn, summersault. My elbow jerks before sleep. Your jagged elbow juts in my ribs, a warning, firing of nerves. Perhaps I need magnesium. I eat a banana but it doesn’t stop.

You are running out of room. A body inside a body pressing out against its walls. It feels like I am too. My queen bed feels small. Sheets wrap like bindings. I am tangled, overheated. The place I call home shrinks. We’re too much for this space. Your sensitivities—sunlight, fluorescence—are mine now too. I crave dark. I crave fat. I stand in my dark kitchen, eating a cold stick of butter at 3am. You are puppeting me.

XI

I have questions for the doctor. Not Dr. Hyphenated-Name. I’ve graduated. I see a birthing doctor now. She has a single last name. I assume she is single or she’s taken her partner’s name. I don’t ask about this. 

I ask about the changes. 

She says, Perhaps you’re syncing. An empathetic response.

I’m unsure if this is a thing, but Dr. Single Last Name is a legitimate doctor so I don’t question it.

Perhaps you’re channeling Baby, she says. Anything’s possible. Baby’s cells cross into your body through the umbilical cord. Some of those cells settle in your brain, your heart, your lungs. It’s called microchimerism. Your child living inside you, for the rest of your life.

I didn’t know that, I say.

Oh yes, she says. There are little bits of you floating inside your mother, lodged in her thyroid, kidneys, bone marrow, right now, she says. Pretty neat, huh?

I don’t like that at all.

Anyway, there’s still a lot about transference we don’t understand, Dr. Single Last Name says. Now, not to be alarming but I do want to touch on preeclampsia. The protein in the urine. The swelling. The blood pressure is not alarming yet but it is trending, she says. Have you been dizzy? Headaches? Flashing lights when you close your eyes?

No, I say. Although sometimes the lights come. 

Later in the STERIX, I stare at stretch mark potions.

My belly snags like a snake squeezing the life out of something powerless. Thirty weeks. Too soon for contractions. But I am on my knees. Strangers rush over, well-meaning, crowding. I don’t want them near me, near you. The scent of myself is suddenly sickening.

Lanolin. Milkrot. Brine.

What’s happening? The pain is enough to make me fold. There’s only one person I want. My mother. A stranger in the STERIX calls her. She is there almost immediately. We are back at Dr. Single Last Name’s office.

Nonproductive contractions, Dr. Single Last Name says. Tightenings. Just think of it as practice pain.

Your body is preparing. It’s not a bad thing, she offers. 

My mother stands nearby. Not overbearing. Just there.

I let her bring me to the place I call home. I sit shaking on the couch, recovering.

Did you ever get these tightenings? I ask, tentatively.

No, but we aren’t terribly alike, she says. Do you want me to stay or go?

I want her to stay. Just an hour or two, I tell her. Don’t get too comfortable.

She just nods, a soft smile. I don’t recognize this gentleness.

Thank you, I say. I don’t know what this thanking will do. What it might undo. A crack in a door for her waiting fingers.

I can’t lose myself in the vastness that is her.

I fall asleep. When I wake, she’s gone.

XII

For Margaret’s birthday, we go to the beach. We get a ticket and everything. It’s been years since we’ve done that. We are two of only a lucky few on a sunny day. The scent of her is neutralized in the salt breeze.

XIII

In the 39th week, it happens. I don’t go to the hospital right away. I want to savor these last few hours while we are still one thing. Connected by a cord. Tethered to each other. But the pain deepens until it’s something that cannot be un-started.

I am an animal. I am instinct. I am between life and death. The purest state I’ve known. I scream. And you are born.

I will never be the same. And then another tightening pushes out the after-birth.

Rancid. Tallow. Copper.

An atrocity that has been inside me sustaining you.

Death. Rot. Metal.

An organ to be discarded with the other parts of discarded people.

XIV

Then you are with me in the place I call home. The place we call home. You fill the space, even in your smallness. I feared I would not know you. But I do. You have nails, hair, bones I grew inside my body. You are delicious.

Rosewater. Chamomile. Water. 

Peas. Botanics. Honey.

Coconut. Lime. Yeast.

Yeast? But then it’s gone. I’m exhausted. My senses have diminished. Perhaps I am only imagining it.

XV

Swollen hands, shaky breath, dark urine. I don’t want to tell Dr. Single Last Name but it’s best for you that I am well.

Is there someone that can take care of Baby? She asks. You’ll be in the hospital overnight, she says. Maybe two. While we get this under control.

Then my mother comes, eagerly. Go, she says, taking you from me. And I have no choice. There’s no one else. I’m furious.

At the hospital, a round-faced nurse with a soft voice says, Relax, Mommy, for your pressure.

My mother brings you to visit. I notice a mole between your toes, like mine. Just like mine.

Are moles hereditary? I ask every medical professional who passes by. No one seems to know.

XVI

When I come home, my mother’s hands are tearing up the kitchen. Pans are clattering, scraping. The sugar in the air is cloying. 

Egg. Vanilla. Yeast.

That fucking yeast of her permeates the place we call home. But you are okay. I breathe you in.

Lanolin. Almond. Yeast.

It’s all over you. My nostrils are screaming. 

Margaret brings something on a tray.

Brioche. Maple. Yeast.

Bile springs to my throat. I say thank you.

At last, she leaves. I scrub every surface, open every window, until the yeast is gone.

I nestle beside you on cotton. 

Ozone. Neon. Jasmine.

A breeze brushes the top of your skull, soft, exposed, hurtable. I stare at you and call you Baby. I don’t know your name. It’s too important. I don’t want to get it wrong. I sniff you, forensically.

My brine. You have it. It should bring comfort. Instead, it unsettles.

XVII

I take you to the doctor for children. I have questions. This doctor has her partner’s name, a borrowed name.

See the mole between her toes? Like mine. And her earlobes? Webbed, like mine, I tell Dr. Borrowed-Name. It’s strange. The likeness. Except that my eyes are brown and hers are gray, I see no other differences. Also the brine. It’s unmistakable. My brine.

Dr. Borrowed-Name is confused. Brine?

My scent. I know my scent, I say with authority.

Well, babies usually look like their mommies, Dr. Borrowed-Name says. And you live together, so it’s unsurprising that you smell similar. But I don’t notice a distinctive odor.

Have you seen this before? I ask.

How much are you sleeping, Mommy? she asks.

I take a jagged breath. I’m not really her mother, I confess. Sure, I birthed her, but the embryo is, was, genetically my sister. Created alongside the embryo that made me.

Regardless of origin, you’re her mother, she says. And in either case, we would expect similarities. 

Down to the same moles? I say, challenging. And the brine?

I see you’re rattled, she says. And this feels very real to you. Mothers with preeclampsia are more likely to experience postpartum mood disorders. Neuro-inflammation impacts perception. We see confusion, delusion, paranoia. Lack of sleep doesn’t help. Do you have someone at home to help with Baby?

That’s not it, I say.

Dr. Borrowed Name says, Go home. Get some rest. Get some help with Baby if you can.

XVIII

I don’t go home. I don’t rest. I call Dr. Day. He’s not working but he hears the frantic cadence of my voice. We meet at a café on a street called Elm that used to have trees. Seeing him here feels special. The familiar waxy scent of him settles my anxious body.

I’m not crazy, I say. And he smiles.

So, brine, moles, ear lobe webbing, all like you, he says. You think, what, she’s you?

I shrug, scared.

Some kind of reincarnation? he asks. A clone?

No, no. I don’t think I believe in that. I don’t know what I believe, but not that, I say.

So, what? he asks. What are you thinking? 

I don’t know, what are you thinking? I say.

I don’t know, what are you thinking? And now it’s a game. Your turn, he says. 

I shake my head.

Before the transfer, you saw embryology reports? he asks.

Sure. Health testing, viability odds, I say.

What about origin? he asks. Why did you think it was a sibling?

The embryo had the same genetic contributors as are listed on my birth certificate, I say.

So you recall seeing your mother’s name? he says.

Yes, I say.

And what about a father? he asks.

Well, these reports don’t say mother and father. They say, like, genetic source, or egg source / sperm source, but no, there was no genetic source listed, it just said N/A. Like my birth certificate.

N.A. like initials? he asks.

No. N/A as in Not Applicable. That’s what my mother always said he was. It was sort of a joke. But also not. Because that’s what she actually put on my birth certificate. Margaret Caldwell and N/A. My mother said he didn’t want to be a father, so he’s not applicable. Why are we even talking about him? I don’t know who he is. And she won’t tell me, I say.

I know, he says.

I know you know, I say with an edge. 

Dr. Day takes a breath. I’m on your side. I know I can’t ever fully understand because it didn’t happen to me, but the absence of a father has always been big for you. It’s why you came to work with me. It’s what we’ve been building here. A recreation of that lost attachment. Something reliable. It’s why I met you here today. You matter, he says.

It makes me uncomfortable when he comes close.

Am I just… inflamed? Neurologically? I ask, dodging.

Maybe, he offers. But more information about Baby—or you—might help put your mind at ease.

XIX

Back in the place we call home, Baby sleeps. I open my Pacific Cryogenics portal. I scour it for anything I might have missed, any overlooked detail waiting to shift everything.

Oocyte Source: Margaret Caldwell 

Sperm Source: N/A

ID numbers, viability stats, a health certificate from SoCal Reproductive Center. No smoking gun. Nothing redacted. I try to get into Margaret’s portal, but it needs a 16-character password. And that means me needing Margaret.

I hate that I do it. Margaret picks up on the first ring. Like she’d been waiting.

I think I need help with Baby. Just for the night, I say. She arrives with a gift. My baby clothes yellowed with time. She saved them.

Cedar. Detergent. Yeast.

I explicitly said no gifts. But I need answers.

We sit over paella while I rock Baby. Margaret sips the last of some wine. I play the vulnerable, grateful mother in awe. I wanted to thank you. For the embryo, for Baby. For staying back, I say. And I think I get it now, I say, how much you loved me.

Loved?

Love. It must have been hard to stay away, I say. I can’t imagine ever being away from her.

Margaret nods, slowly.

I just want to know everything about her, where she came from, I say. I think she’s changing me. Maybe I’m tired. I mean, I know I’m tired. But here we are—three generations. It’s softening me. 

That’s good. You’ve always been a little hard, she says.

I swallow the fury. I stand to get the wine. I need to find my way to N.A. 

You know, when I was younger, I found something. I never told you, I say. 

What?

Photographs, I say. Under your bed. Of you with a man.

I pour her more wine, as if we’re friends, drinking, reminiscing.

You did? Huh. She stiffens. They’re rather explicit, she says.

Intimate, more like, I say. It was a peek at a secret side of you that I didn’t know existed. I’ve always wondered who that person was. I pause. Of course, you don’t have to tell me, I add.

She doesn’t offer anything, so I continue.

I know I say I want space, boundaries, but really… I think every child is desperate for every morsel they can gobble up about their parents’ private existences, I say gently. You can’t see his face in the photos, I say, leaning back, casual—like everything doesn’t depend on this. Was he someone important?

Momentarily, maybe, she offers.

Was he N/A? I say.

Her head straightens. What? she asks.

Was he my father? Was he not applicable? The one in the pictures? 

No, she says.

I always thought maybe he was. 

No, she says.

I nod, sipping. Well, so, what was he like? I ask. N/A, I mean.

We’re having a nice time. Don’t start this again, she says, eyes narrowing.

Okay, I say, pretending to give up. You’re right.

He didn’t want a family. He didn’t want to be included, she offers.

I know, but you didn’t think maybe he’d want to meet his daughter? I ask.

No, she says.

Or Baby, I say.

Well, she’s certainly not his daughter. She’s not anything to him, she says, draining her glass into the sink.

I try to soften my face. People change. Look at us. Maybe he’s different now too. And what if Baby wants to know one day?

You have to lay claim to someone to be family, she says. Or else it’s just genetic code. A helix in a blender. He wasn’t your father. He’s not her father. You need to rest. For your daughter. You’re tired, she says, picking up her purse.

You’re right, I say, but I don’t mean it. I need her to stay. There must be more. I’m sorry I upset you. I was intrusive. It’s the wine.

She nods, agreeing with me. Alcohol doesn’t suit you, something about your composition.

I swallow more rage. Then I swallow more wine. I ask if she can stay. I’m solicitous.

If it’s not too much of an imposition. I could use the help overnight with Baby, with the wake-ups.

XX

Baby sleeps. Margaret sleeps. I pretend to sleep. But really I’m waiting.

I open her lock screen. The code is still 3171. I look for her Pacific Cryo password but find nothing.

I pace. I don’t know what I’m looking for. But I look.

I look for names I don’t recognize in her contacts. 

I look for names with initials N.A.

I look for mentions of my name. 

I look for numbers unsaved.

I reverse look up the unsaved numbers: a hairdresser, a plumber, a hotline for political volunteering. Dead ends.

I look in photos. No one I don’t recognize. No men.

I look in folders. I find a folder inside a folder: Original Ceramics – Archive.

Two subfolders: WORKS FOR SALE / PERSONAL WORK. I open PERSONAL WORK. Photographs and the sculptures inspired by them.

Untitled, 2021.

Study, contour – neck. 

Variation in gray, 2045.

And a photograph of a face. A sharp jaw. A full mouth. A sloped nose. A webbed earlobe. Like mine.

I know this face. It has been used as a blueprint in my mother’s work. Reinterpreted, reimagined, over and over in sculpture. A jaw poured into handles. A nose in a curved vase. A face captured as inspiration, shaped and reshaped until the origin disappeared.

I upload the original photo of the face. I reverse search it. 

The engine prompts: Human/Circa/Composite/Engineered?

I input: Human. 2030–2040. Someone, anyone real who had that face. 

One match returns. With a name.

Nevin Archer.

N.A.

And an address. Cypress Knoll Road. Monterey.

XXI

I leave a note on the counter, Out for the day. Margaret will be alarmed, but I can’t manage her. Soon Baby and I are flying up the freeway to Monterey. 

To Cypress Knoll Road.

Seaweed. Balsamic. Pine.

When he opens the door, I know instantly.

Driftwood. Poppy. Brine.

His brine is my brine is hers. He is the source. I know it like a turtle knows the beach on which it was born. Baby must be his child, my sister-child, the brine seems to say. I announce who I am. I’m sorry to come like this, I say.

He doesn’t slam the door. He stands there, in shadow, waking up. Here is his child, holding a child, knocking before dawn.

We are inside now. As he makes tea. In the place he calls home.

I didn’t know you existed, he tells me. I mean, potentially, sure, but I didn’t know that you’d come into being. When were you born?

I tell him and he nods, as if making sense of time. 

I want to know more about my creation, I say. Where I came from. Where Baby came from.

He sips and says, I don’t know how much I can help. Me and Margaret were on and off for a few years. Met on an airplane. I was an architect back then. When that was a thing humans were still valued to do, he says.

Were you in love? I ask.

Oh… he kind of shrugs. No? Maybe something akin but not quite. 

Why make embryos then? I ask.

It was an easy lift, he shrugs. I’d eaten up so much of her time. I certainly didn’t think we’d end up together. No one ends up with anyone at the end anyway, he says.

So you didn’t consider the eventuality of me? I ask.

Margaret was a woman who wanted. She discontinued a pregnancy before me, he says. Regretted it. He shrugs. Sounds callous but I didn’t care one way or another. Kind of nice to think about having a legacy, he says. Especially if it’s of no consequence. Anyway, she did a – what did they call it? harvest? – and she got her embryo, he says. You. I never heard from her again.

I’m ready to open this door now. 

Embryos. I say, gesturing at Baby. Right? 

Huh? He’s confused.

Two embryos. I say. She told me this was the other one.

No, there was only one, he says. I remember because Margaret was disappointed. She only got one, he says. So if you’re suggesting that that is also my biological child, I don’t think so, he says. 

There are ants in my blood now. Crawling. 

Are you sure? She has your brine. I can smell it. Mine, hers, ours, I say desperately.

I don’t know what your mother told you, but we didn’t make that, he says.

XXII

When are you coming back? Do you have milk for Baby? Do you want me to make eggs? Margaret has been attacking my screen. I’m cleaning. Helpful? You know me. I like to be helpful. Ha ha. 

Baby and I are in a fleet car, flying south. I call Dr. Borrowed-Name. I hear myself screaming, How long does origin testing take?

Why? Take a breath. She says something about a psych eval. I hang up.

Dr. Single Last Name calls, concerned. Dr. Borrowed-Name had called her, concerned.

Are you taking the Hydralazine? I don’t tell her I’ve forgotten it. Headaches, shortness of breath, nausea?

I hang up. I override the speed limiter until we arrive. Behind glass, Pacific Cryo is closed. I lean on the bell. Ring, ring, ring. The heat rises. The tar on the road is beginning to blister. I smell myself already.

Acrid. Lemon. Brine.

Is my brine a scent Baby will come to hate?

A courier arrives. A woman inside appears. Embryo transport, I hear him say.

I get in front of her. I need help. This isn’t my baby, I say. It’s my baby, but it’s not the baby I thought Baby was. I need—you have files, my mother’s files, Baby’s files—there must be something—something that says who this is—

She says, Okay, hey, slow down. We’ll be open on Monday— 

No, I can’t, I can’t wait till Monday!

She looks at me, evaluating the threat. Come in for some water, for a moment, to let the baby cool down.

She brings me water. My eyes plead. Let’s start with your name, she says, studying me.

Eva, I say, ragged. Eva Caldwell.

Okay. Eva. This is or is not your baby? she asks. I realize she might be considering calling authorities.

Baby is my baby, I clarify, but Baby is not the baby I thought Baby was. My mother said she was my sister, a sibling embryo, but do you see her mole? And mine? I am removing my shoes and socks to show her. Her ear lobe web, and mine? And the brine. The same brine. Do you smell it?

Have you looked through the information in your portal? she asks.

Yes, but—look, Baby was an embryo given to me by my mother, so the answer must be in her portal. Please. Say I threatened you, say whatever you want, but I need to know who this is.

Okay, Eva. I won’t give you access to any files that aren’t yours. And we’re closed today. But I see your distress. And I don’t have anywhere to be. Besides admin and transport history, I won’t find more than you can access in your portal, but we can take a look together, she says.

She scans her eye. This is logging us in. Just to verify all this. She scans my eye. Okay. You are Eva Caldwell. As you said. Date of birth November 4, 2035?

Yes, I say.

She scrolls. Okay. I’m in your portal now. I see that Baby originated from Embryo128PRQTY. Here is the genetic health certificate, viability report. I also see you were registered at a cord blood bank in 2035, the year you were born.

I shrug. I don’t know anything about that.

It just means that the cord blood from your umbilical cord was stored—

What does that have to do with Baby? I say.

I’m just looking at all the information available to us here. She pauses, frowning at the screen. Hmm. That’s odd. It’s not dated.

What’s not dated? I ask.

Embryo128PRQTY, she says. The embryology report should show a date of fertilization, day 0. If Baby was a genetic sibling of yours from the same harvest made at the same time then those fertilization dates would match. Regardless, there should be some date of fertilization listed. She taps the screen. But it’s… blank.

Why would it be blank? I ask.

Could be an oversight… Her eyes study the screen. Okay, Embryo128PRQTY came to us from SoCal Reproductive, ten years ago. We inherited their inventory when they closed. We took over cryostorage. Oocyte source for Embryo128PRQTY is listed as Margaret Caldwell.

My mother, I say.

Sperm source is listed as N.A, she says.

Just like my birth certificate. So the genetic information appears to be a sibling match, I say. But I found N.A. He’s a man named Nevin Archer. He said they only got one embryo—me. 

Let’s see, she says, her fingers flying across the screen. Here’s the log. The transport history of Embryo128PRQTY goes back to 2037… 

That’s two years after I was born, I point out.

Right, and it transferred to SoCal Reproductive from… She goes silent.

Where? I ask.

EverKin, she says quietly.

What’s EverKin? I ask.

She sits back, silent, staring at the screen.

What? I say.

She pauses. I’ve never actually seen one before, she says.

Why? What do you mean? I ask.

She looks at me for a moment. Are you certain of your own lineage? she asks.

I’m not certain of anything, I say. Why?

Are you certain that Margaret Caldwell and Nevin Archer are the biological contributors to the embryo that led to your birth?

I think so, I say.

Then you would be right to think that Embryo128PRQTY was not a genetic sibling embryo.

Why?

EverKin only made same-sex donor embryos, she says. 

I blink. What do you mean?

She takes a breath. EverKin was experimental, she says. Synthetic embryo creation. A breakthrough for same-sex couples. They used stem cells. They extracted DNA and coaxed the cells into pluripotent cells. Ones capable of becoming any type of cell. They were able to make gamete-like cells – egg and sperm analogs.

Wait, I say. They made sperm?

No, she shakes her head, not traditional sperm, they didn’t need it. Just cells with the right signaling properties – enough to do the job. Same for the egg. They inserted both into a synthetic scaffold, an artificial egg casing. 

And this worked? I ask.

She nods. It was expensive. But it offered biological parenthood for those who couldn’t have it before. 

So what happened to the company, I ask. EverKin?

Government shut it down, she says. Almost immediately. Before most people even knew it was possible. “Unnatural,” they said. But that doesn’t hold water. Nature had done it already. 

I lean forward. What do you mean?

Certain animals can reproduce without any contribution from a male. Sharks. Komodo dragons. Certain birds before they were extinct. The instinct is older than we are. And scientists have done it with mice in labs for decades, she says.

I shake my head, trying to keep up. So, with Baby, where did the second DNA set come from?

I wouldn’t know, she says.

XXIII

We take shelter in a fleet car, on a dark side street near the ocean. Baby sleeps on my chest, clutching a single strand of my hair. It wraps around her finger, too tight. I unravel it. I roll down the window, just for a moment, just to breathe the salt. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours. I sink, fast and heavy. When I wake, my chest is lighter. Baby is gone.

The open window. 

I throw myself out the door, running, screaming, Baby, Baby, Baby, in the darkness, barefoot, wild. And then, a flicker.

Dune. Seaweed. Yeast.

I duck under the broken part of the barricade. The chain scratches my arms. I’m on the sand. My legs move faster than I knew possible. I am gulping air, lungs burning. Ahead, where the sea hasn’t yet swallowed the last stretch of land, I see my mother, standing at the edge, rocking Baby in her arms. Together. As if nothing is wrong. As if she didn’t take her.

Give her to me, I scream.

She tightens her grip. I just want to hold her. Just one more minute, she says.

But I’m on her. 

Brine. Yeast. Rot. 

Grabbing, clawing. Margaret twists her body so I can’t reach Baby. We fall into the surf. The shocking cold takes my breath. My knee hits a rock. Baby cries. 

You’re hurting her! I scream, fingers slipping on wet skin.

Margaret’s grip tightens. I tear at her hair, push my fingers into her eyes. Give her to me! Margaret falls back into the water. I come up with Baby and pull her close. Margaret tries to stand but a wave knocks her down. If I have to hold her under, I just might do it.

This is why! This is why I don’t want you near me, I scream.

I just wanted to share this with her, she says, the waves crashing around her. The water. The closeness. Like I held you, she says. I only ever wanted to protect you.

You’re a liar, I spit at her. I found Nevin Archer. I know he’s my father. 

Margaret pauses. And? she says calmly, wrapping her wet cardigan around her ribcage.

And I know he’s not hers. I say, I know about EverKin. 

Margaret goes still. 

So tell me who she is, I demand.

Baby is crying now, cold.

She’s yours, Margaret says.

No. Who is N/A? I ask. Who is her other half?

My mother is holding herself, shivering. It’s painful, she says. The letting go. You’ll see. 

Tell me, I plead. Who is it?

She looks at me. And I feel a flicker. I know it before she speaks.

You, she says. It was you. Baby is half-you. And half-me. We are the female contributors.

A sound escapes me. A horrible sound.

Why? Why would you do that?

I didn’t want you to be alone in the world. People can’t be counted on. My mother died when I was a child. I was alone. But after I had you, it was a feeling I didn’t know before. I was tied to you. To think that one day you and I would be separated? By death, or choice, or worse. The thought was unbearable. So, when you were two years old, I made her. For you. From us.

I stare at her, my brain gradually making sense of it. I believe her but– How? I demand, holding Baby closer.

The umbilical cord, she says. Both of our DNA was already present, side by side, in the cord. EverKin built the embryo from the cord blood.

Standing in the dark, cold, wet, clutching Baby, I feel warmth on my face. I realize I am crying. Margaret almost moves towards me, but doesn’t.

I thought if I made something that’s half-you, half-me, we’d always be together. If I was lucky, we might even raise her together. I might get to do it all over again.

Were you ever going to tell me? I ask.

I didn’t want you to reject her, like you rejected me.

It’s unnatural, I whisper.

Love is unnatural? she asks.

This isn’t love, I say.

It is. You just don’t know it yet. Somehow my love never made you feel loved. But hers will, she says. 

I should get Baby to safety. I should get her warm and dry. But I cannot resist the urge to gut Margaret one last time.

I hate you, I say. I hate you so much. It’s childish, but it’s what comes.

She shrugs, See? Rejecting. Look at how small your life was before this? she says. If not for me, you’d be alone. I made a family for you.

I didn’t ask for this, I say.

You can pretend you have no part in this, Eva, but you know your part and I know mine. You’ve always needed me to do the hard things for you, she says. 

That takes my breath. This is the last time you’re ever going to see me, I say.

Well then, I’m glad I got to see you like this. A mother. An animal that would do anything—including drown her own mother—to protect her Baby. I did my job. You’re worthy of her now.

Suddenly, police drones shred the sky. Lights sweep the beach. I clutch Baby and run.

XXIV

The new place we call home is east. No one knows us here. We can’t smell the ocean. That’s how I know Margaret won’t find us.

It’s bare, unremarkable. But each morning the sun spills through the back window. It’s where you grow. 

My love for you defines me. It is unrelenting. Wild. Desperate. 

I imagine it was like this for my mother. 

Time expands in your early years.

Aloe. Dairy. Strawberry.

But it also slips past.

Lint. Pulp. Candy.

I watch your mouth begin to make sounds. Fragments, then words, then ideas that spark and demand to be known. 

One day you will ask where you come from. I will say you come from me. It’s true. Half true. You were once a number—128PRQTY—a cluster, frozen. First hers. Then mine. Now entirely your own.

Sometimes, in the quiet of night, I imagine you leaving. The separateness. The ache twists me. But I know I must want that for you.

As you learn to run, leap, build, I open a small lab and return to scent. I had forgotten what it feels like to lose myself in the making of things. In things outside of you.

I am making something special now. A masterpiece. A particular scent.

It is you. Captured. This moment, and all the ones I imagine to come. Your whole life, in a bottle.

Dairy. Cotton. Wool. 

Lilac. Felt. Citrus.

Orchid. Sulphur. Burgundy.

Tuberose. Pine. Ash.

Women are creators. It is our purpose. A universal maternal language, passed down through centuries, across species. Whales and dolphins—when they still swam—felt it too. Bees and beetles—when they still flew—felt it too. That aching desire to create.

You are so delicate, so fierce, so small, but already you create. You draw with anything you can get your hands on. A twig, a rock, a bit of lead.

At first, wild lines. Then circles. Then faces. Faces that look like you.

XXV

Years later, I learn my mother has died. I wonder where her scent has gone. Maybe it follows her, wherever she goes. Or maybe, finally, it died with her.

There’s something for my daughter. A gift. Even in death, my mother has surprises. 

Whatever it is, it is at Pacific Cryo. I go back. It’s been years since Baby and I sat trembling in this lobby. The woman who helped us is long gone. But my daughter’s inheritance is here.

Twenty-seven EverKin embryos.

Created on the same day as she was. She wasn’t the only one. Siblings, in a sense.

It makes perverse sense that my mother made twenty-eight in total. She loved twos and eights. The roundness of them. The femininity of their shapes.

There’s nothing for me to do, they say. Margaret paid upfront for decades of storage. $99,999. A lump sum, transferred the week I sent her the exact same amount. When the money runs out—around the time my daughter comes of age—I’ll have to tell her. About who she is. About her inheritance. And the choice she will have to make. 

I try to imagine the future. As if the future is something a human mind can hold.

Until then, I let her draw faces.

These are the others, she says.

I grew up in an old stone house on Al-Salt Street in the steep, narrow maze of the Wadi Nisnas neighborhood above Haifa’s port. Not long before my birth, Haifa was a sleepy city of limestone block houses and citrus orchards squeezed between the Mediterranean and Mount Carmel, but a flood of European Jews and the strategic needs of the British during the war broke Mothra Haifa out of her chrysalis, with a steampunk head at the docks and suburban wings extending up Mount Carmel. Haifa became known as Um Al Gharib, Mother of the Stranger. 

“Yalla, Ibrahim, Habibi, take these sweets to the restaurant.” Mama calls me into our kitchen. I can smell the cool limestone and the herbs she’s drying. I’m seven, with a mop of black hair and otherworldly blue eyes. It’s early 1945.

Rossetti would have loved Mama, with her lush features and cascades of raven curls, a troubled Persephone, her dark eyes gleaming with the last light of the living world upon the Styx. Until she was thirteen, she lived in the village of Bayt Thul, where young men assessed the strength, grace, and beauty of the unmarried girls as they balanced heavy jarras of water on their heads: from the well to the wedding, as the old village saying went. 

And that village might have been her whole life, but her father married outside his clan, estranging both her parents from their families, and then a border dispute brought him to blows with a neighbor, whose heart gave out. Not only was her father jailed for murder, but the man’s family sued and won all his land and possessions. Destitute, Mama’s mother became a live-in maid for a wealthy Catholic family in Al Quds. Madam was Swedish, Sir from one of the ruling Ayan. Their son, a couple of years older than Mama, decided to play Professor Higgins and Mama emerged from this household speaking Parisian French, BBC English, and Lebanese Arabic (the family summered in the Matn mountains), though he never managed to teach Mama to read or write. Severe dyslexia, the words on the page like locusts swarming in a field.   

Mama, baking all morning, looks exhausted, ever trying to find ways to alleviate our financial straits. Taking the tray of sweets, I slalom down the winding streets, avoiding donkeys and hawker’s carts, threading through Jews and Arabs in traditional or European fashions, and beet red British soldiers in khaki shorts. 

Our “restaurant” is a food booth near the docks where Baba fries falafel palatable as rocks and serves ice cream that tastes of garlic and stale oil, delights that can only be sampled if a customer can find him. Today, presiding at his shigg under the shade of a carob tree a hundred yards from the booth, Baba hasn’t got around to opening. This is where Baba holds court every day, sitting with his cronies on olive oil cans topped with cushions. The people of our neighborhood (the men with affection, their wives with scorn) dub him the Sheikh of Salt Street.

Spotting me, he waves me over, crying out, “Ah, my little chicky’s here.” 

He and Mama are an odd couple. Baba, thirty years older and four inches shorter than she, is stocky, troll-like, with crazy eyebrows, a roguish gap between his front teeth, and a clownish halo of nappy grey curls. When he married Mama—a Moslem peasant—his Orthodox Christian family cut ties, though they provided him with several properties for income. Baba sold these properties to invest in a hotel scheme fabricated by a con man who forged the share vouchers. Baba’s too proud to ask his family for help, but a few weeks after my birth, Mama secretly snuck me to my grandparents in I’billin and agreed for us both to be chrismated. As a Levantine peasant, she’s O Positive for Gods, her animist people wisely appeasing every colonizer. In Haifa, she and I are Moslem. In I’billin, on our trips to beg money (Mama tells Baba we’re visiting her sick cousin Muna), we slip on our eight-pointed crosses and attend St. George’s.

There’s quite a crowd at Baba’s shigg. I nearly drop the tray as he pulls me into his arms. 

“My guests need tea, habibi,” he remonstrates, “and bring us a plate of those pastries.”

When I deliver the tray, Baba again snatches me onto his knees. “Is there a more beautiful boy in the world than this?”

“Alhamdulillah,” murmur several of the Moslems to save me from Baba’s vanity.

“That’s because he takes after his mother,” declares Savas Benrubi. One of the Greek Jews who made Aliyah in ’34, he resembles Mussolini and is famous for impersonating the dictator with a kitchen pan on his head.  

“Not just Um Ibrahim!” protests Abu Amir, sensitive to rumors questioning the origins of my blue eyes. “Who’s more handsome than Khalil?”

The laughter intensifies because Abu Amir, ancient, slumped, and toothless, half buried in a white dishdasha, is blind.

“The British,” interposes Rasheed Assaf, the retired bookseller, “sons of dogs though they may be, have a nice saying.” He switches from Arabic to English: “Handsome is as handsome does.” Rasheed is a slender, dignified man with a pencil mustache and lugubrious eyes, always wearing a suit and tarbush. He lost his wife, two daughters, and his faith in God during the typhoid epidemic that swept Palestine at the turn of the century.

Abu Nabil sententiously interjects, “The Hadith tells us what’s handsome. Jabir ibn Samurah said, ‘I saw the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) on a clear night. I turned my sight between him and the moon and to me he was more beautiful than the moon.’ Which is to say that the most beautiful thing in this world is faith.” 

As Abu Nabil says this, a couple of the other Moslems throw away their cigarettes out of respect for the Hadith, though Ahmed Deif, the baker, being famously tight-fisted, hands his to Savas for safekeeping.

Abu Nabil continues: “You need no other books but the Koran and Hadith. They embody all wisdom.” 

“All wisdom,” scoffs Rasheed. “To quote the great Al-Ma’arri: ‘The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: Those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.’”

And they’re off again, arguing. I love being among them, smelling the apple-scented smoke of the nargilah they share, listening to their stormy voices. 

Later that afternoon, I find Mama wiping down the whitewashed walls in her and Baba’s bedroom. She’s never idle. All the rooms are bare now. Over time she’s had to sell everything: the copper basin once used to soak wheat stalks for basketry (my baby bath!), the hand-made clay pots painted with iron oxide from the rocks of the Ghor, carpets woven by the Bedouin of Hebron. All gone, our home leached of color. All that remains is that wide-hipped, narrow-necked brass jarra sitting in the window niche opposite the bed, evoking Mama as a village girl tightroping home with every boy’s eyes upon her. 

“Mama,” I say sheepishly, “Baba has invited Savas, Marwan, and Yava for dinner.”

Baba’s always doing this, turning up late with three or four people in tow, forcing Mama to perform miracles to produce a dinner that won’t shame us. She sends me to fetch a couple of chickens from the one grocer who still affords us credit, and more sumac so she can make musakhan. When I return, reentering the kitchen, Yava is chopping parsley for tabbouleh while Mama grills eggplant. Yava, Savas Benrubi’s wife, fled Odessa in ‘41. She’s Mama’s age, 25, and petite, hardly taller than I am. She never wears makeup, dresses in shirts and trousers, her mousy hair in a pixie cut. Her face, with its tiny, retroussé nose and dimples, doesn’t suit her somber nature. She often visits during the day to catch Mama alone. I once walked in on them in my parents’ bedroom, the two of them sitting on the bed, Yava brushing Mama’s hair. It wasn’t haram for Mama to be without her hijab in front of another woman, but I felt a tightening in my chest at the rhythmic sweep of the hairbrush, the breathy silence between them. When Yava saw me, her pale skin flushed, and she shouted, “You’re like the goddamn Gestapo. Why are you always sneaking around?” Outraged, I waited for Mama to defend me, but she seemed in a dream, staring at me without recognition.

I hear the door open and run to it as it disgorges Baba, followed by Savas and Marwan clutching bottles of wine and boxes of sweets.

Marwan snatches me into his arms. “Give me those sapphire eyes. I’m going to use them for cufflinks.”

I squirm and giggle as Marwan nibbles my ear. He’s handsome as a film star, always wearing a fancy suit, with lots of rings on his fingers. A few years ago, he gave up his job as a mechanic to be Savas’ secrétaire personnel, though his education consists of a few years at the madrasa and he speaks nothing but coarse street Arabic. He now spends nearly all his time in Savas and Yava’s fancy villa up the hill near the British barracks in a neighborhood occupied by a swinging set of wealthy francophone Levantines. His wife and two girls, who live in the nearby Moslem neighborhood of Wadi Salib, are never mentioned.

My beleaguered mother, as ever, produces a masterpiece. The sumac chicken makes Marwan jump up from the table to insist someone kill him this very minute so the taste of it can be the last thing he knows on this earth. Savas rolls up a piece of pita like a fat cigar and declares, We shall eat it on the beaches, we shall eat it on the landing grounds, we shall eat it in the fields, in a strange British voice that Mama whispers to me is Winston Churchill’s. 

After we’ve eaten, Mama orders me to bed, but I slip into my usual spying place just outside, peeking at the adults through the gap above the door’s ill-fitting hinge. 

For a while the discussion is serious: the irony of Jews being rescued by Russians, and whether the Soviets will ever relinquish the land they’re conquering. Savas says that six months after the liberation of Greece, it’s clear that nearly the entire Jewish population of his original home, Thessalonica, has been wiped out.

Yava interjects that she received the good news that one of her cousins survived the Odessa massacre and is now in a place called Brighton Beach in America. 

Marwan asks Mama something I can’t hear, and she must have been evasive, since he protests, “Oh she’s so cagey. I think she must have a secret past. Is she a spy? Has she committed a terrible crime? We need to get it out of her.”

“Leave her alone,” Yava protests. I sense that Yava knows Mama’s secrets, which makes me dislike her.

“No, no,” Savas jumps in, “confession is good for the soul. We should all confess something. And no games, something serious. And since you’re so curious, Marwan, we’ll start with you.”

After thinking for a moment, Marwan says, “My confession is not going to seem like a confession, but it’s something I’ve hardly even been able to admit to myself. For the first time in my whole life, I’m happy.” He glances at Savas, and I’m low enough to catch sight of them touching hands beneath the table.

“Now it’s your turn, Savas,” Marwan counters.

“Okay.” After a sigh, Savas says, “I confess that all my life I’ve wished I didn’t look so . . . well, so much like a Jew.”

Flushing, Savas turns hastily to Yava. “You’re next, darling.”

Running her finger around the rim of her wine glass, she says quietly, “I often fantasize about killing Germans.”

“That’s hardly a confession,” Savas snorts.

“I’m not talking about soldiers.” Her finger reverses. “I’ve dreamed”—she glances nervously at Mama—“of killing every last one of those bastards.”

Everyone is quiet for a moment before Savas says, “Khalil, you’re in the dock.”

Baba looks troubled. He doesn’t like things to be serious, so he tells a story about when he was a boy and his mama locked him in the pantry as punishment for always running off to play with his friends. But he was desperate for a poo. He tells the story in his usual animated way, standing up, running around with his hands over his bottom, sending the tale in all kinds of directions before the denouement of him pooping in a big jar of pickled cucumbers.

Though Savas laughs all the way through, he insists on a real confession.

After a heavy sigh, Baba says, “When I thought Latifa had been killed by that bomb, I decided to throw myself off the steep cliff where the wheat is threshed in my home village.”

He’s talking about my birth. Mama was hugely pregnant in Haifa’s vegetable market when an Irgun bomb exploded, and she gave birth to me in all that smoke and chaos. Baba, searching Government Hospital, came upon the mangled corpse of a pregnant woman among bodies turned white by limestone dust.

“Now it’s your turn, habibti,” Marwan says to Mama.

“La, I don’t . . .” Mama looks distressed.

“Come on, what about those years in that wealthy house?” Marwan prods. “Don’t the maids know everyone’s secrets?”

“Leave her alone.” Yava slides a (hateful!) comforting arm around Mama.

“But she knows everything about us, and we know nothing about her,” Marwan protests.

Saving her, Baba snatches up her hand, kisses it, and sings:

“When the groom goes to meet her

To press to her forehead the golden coin

She’s lovely as a willow branch, fragrant as rosemary.

Praise be to God!

Listen to her. She is your life.”

Baba often sings this verse of their wedding song. Just before the wedding, the bridegroom is allowed one glimpse of his betrothed’s face. He sits opposite her, lifts her veil, touches a gold coin to her forehead and lets it fall into her lap. This symbolizes his promise always to provide for her. 

*

Late July of 1946. Jewish survivors are arriving on rusted-out ships. The British are trying to stop them, and from the house we can often hear protests at the docks. Many are making it ashore, becoming absorbed into the Jewish suburbs up the mountain or down the coast.

Mama orders me to go help Baba, but I find him conducting his shigg. Most of Baba’s old Jewish regulars are absent, but I see Laszlo Kovak, a towering, rail-thin Ukrainian. His craggy face looks pained beneath a luxurious gush of dirty blond hair. When he sweeps it back, you can see that he’s lost the tips of several fingers. Though he arrived only a few months ago he’s already learned the rudiments of Arabic and sometimes politely interrupts to ask the meaning of certain words. I’m often the one to respond, since Baba’s English is sketchy.

 When Baba pulls me into his lap, I whisper, “Shouldn’t we open the restaurant?” Saturday’s the best day, the dock area jammed with soldiers and boat passengers.

“Shall I feed them a little chicky?” he says, tickling me until I beg him to stop.

I know it’s useless and wistfully watch the crowds wandering past our shut-up booth. 

Laszlo slips away. Remembering something I’ve been meaning to say, I hurry after him.

“Mr. Kovak, sir,” I call.

When he turns back to me, stiffly, as if his bones pain him, I say in English, “I know you want to learn Arabic. I should tell you that my father’s Arabic—” I hesitate.

But he understands, and in halting Arabic says, “His Arabic not . . . high?”

“He uses a lot of village words, and his grammar is not always as it should be.”

Laszlo examines me curiously for a moment, his eyes startlingly blue, like mine. “That’s good to know,” he says. “How old are you, Ibrahim?”

“Eight.” 

“You’re a clever boy, and tall for your age, yes? I would have guessed you were twelve, thirteen.”

Despite Mama’s internalized voice murmuring mashallah and declaring for the benefit of any nearby djinn who might decide to kidnap such a paragon that I’m actually dumb as a donkey and scrawny to boot, I feel a warm swell of pride.  

“Can I buy you a slice of cake?” He leads me into one of the new Viennese patisseries appearing all over the city and orders me a soda and a slice of sachertorte.

I’ve never been into a place like this: marble-topped tables, burgundy velvet booths, chandeliers floating above us like bioluminescent jellyfish.

He retrieves a notebook and pencil. “I want to know everything about my new home,” he says. “Can you tell me about the nearby villages?”

I explain between bites of that delicious cake that the villages are all known for certain things—one for shrewdness, another for the beauty of their women, and so on—and that they all have linguistic idiosyncrasies.

“In Ram Allah,” I say, “they used hol—frightful—when something is amazing. In Bireh they’d use fok el-fok, up of the up, first rate.”

He questions me for a long while, insisting I have another piece of cake, scribbling down everything. He’s particularly interested in how the villages empty out during the six yearly harvests.

He asks, “Do you think the fellaheen feel more loyalty to this country or to their villages?”

I’m not sure how to answer this. “Well, they’re very attached to their villages. They don’t like their daughters to live among strangers, and even wealthy villagers who live in cities keep their village homes because it’s the place of their history and kinship ties.”

“What if something happened to the village?” he says.

Using my finger to scrape every last smear of chocolate icing from my plate, I say, “How do you mean?”

“Well, I heard the British sometimes destroyed villages during the revolt.”

I shrug. “I suppose they’d rebuild it.”

Laszlo narrows his eyes. I sense this isn’t quite what he’s after, but he doesn’t pursue it.

This line of questioning reminds me of the shanty towns east of the city, former tenant farmers who lost their livelihoods after the Jewish Fund bought land and threw them off, now neither city nor village people, living in homes made of crushed petrol tins.

“And what do the village people think of the Bedouin?” Laszlo asks.

I give this some thought as I suck the chocolate off my finger, recalling the Bedouin who come every year to harvest olives, women with nearly black skin, in bright thobes, with ankle bracelets and tattooed faces.

Then I remember something: “The fellaheen have a saying: ‘City people are the lords of the world; the fellaheen are the donkeys of the world.’ But Baba told me that when he was young the saying was different. It was the Bedouin who were called the lords of the world.”

Laszlo tips his head, thinking about this as I add, “Abu Nabil is always going on about them being the true Arab, free of national and colonial borders. But mostly people say they’re thieves and gypsies.” 

“Don’t you think they’re like the Red Indians?” he says. 

The similarities strike me: the Bedouin live in mobile tribes in tents, love horses, raid each other’s encampments.

“The pure and original Americans,” Laszlo murmurs, almost to himself. For a moment his face becomes so bitterly thoughtful he looks bilious. Snatching a napkin to his mouth, he hocks something out of his clotted lungs. Crushing the now soiled napkin in his large fist, he says, “Which of us is pure anymore?”

We both look out into the street, our gaze drawn by an old man in a thawb and kufiyah astride a donkey so small his sandals are scraping the ground, a sight that gives the lie to this Viennese terrarium.

He asks me to walk with him up the mountain. Soon he’s struggling for breath, the skin around his mouth taking on a bruised yellow tinge. After a half hour, he slumps with his back to the trunk of a tall pine. I hunker beside him in the wavering sunlight, breathing in the tree’s resinous smell. We look out over the city, the tumble of square white buildings and red roofs, the smoking caldrons of the oil refinery’s cooling towers, the breakwaters of the busy port.  

Pointing toward the river glittering in the distance, emptying into the taut bow of the bay that curves up to Acre, Laszlo says, “That’s the Kishon, right?”

I nod. “The Arabs call it Nahr Mukatta.”

“The river of something?”

“Of slaughter.”

“And we’re on Mount Carmel.” He pats the ground.

“My grandmother calls it Mount Saint Elias. She hates the Carmelites.”

“Hates them?”

“They’re French Catholics.”

“What’s she?”

“Greek Orthodox.”

“And who were those Nazis in the German quarter?” 

“Templars. They’re Protestants. They hated the Carmelites, too.”

He convulses with something that might have been a laugh. “This country’s crazy.” 

He points vaguely behind them. “And that way is the Jezreel Valley, right—the Emek—and the Sea of Galilee?”

I nod. “Arabs call the valley Marj Ibn Amir, which means ‘The Meadow of the Son of Amir.’ My grandmother calls it the Plain of Esdraelon, which is the Greek for Jezreel. It goes all the way to the Jordan River Valley.”

“You’ve been to the Sea of Galilee?” he asks.

“We’ve had picnics there. It’s beautiful.”

“It’s also called Lake Tiberias, right?” 

I nod. “Or the Sea of Kinneret. And some people still call it—”

“Enough, please.” He cuts me off, looking a little bilious, dipping his head between his legs and murmuring, “Doesn’t anything in this country have one name?”

When he recovers a little, he raises his head and says quietly, “Good God, we’re not much to show for thousands of years of history, are we?”

It takes me a second to realize he’s referring to us, a Jewish man and an Arab boy.

Turning his face up into the glimmering, wavering light through the branches, Laszlo says, “It’s so good to feel the sun. One day I want to own a little farm, perhaps in the Emek.”

“Where are you from?” I ask.

 “My parents were from Slovakia, and when they were kicked out, they moved to a shtetl in Ukraine called Justingrad. Most of the Jews we knew went to America, but my father insisted we stay for the pogroms. Why leave when you’re having so much fun, uh?”

Bitterness tautens his face. He turns to me, seeming to cruelly savor this bitterness, and says, “Where’d you get those blue eyes, Ibrahim?”

I know what he’s getting at. All my life, rumors have circulated that my real father must be al Inglezi or an Ashkenazi. 

“They’re in my family,” I say defensively. “Warda means Rose. It’s a name often used for people who are fair skinned, red skinned. In the past, I mean.”

The bitterness, draining, desiccates his expression, like a wadi in the summer, returning him to an arid blankness, only the shrinking blue pools of his eyes left. “They came in 1919,” he says. “I was one of a little bouquet of blue eyes blossoming in 1920.”

I can’t believe he’s only 26.

“You ever wonder who’s staring back at you in the mirror?” He spits onto the rocky dirt a phlegmy, slightly bloody effusion and then looks up through the cypress’s branches with a grimace.

“I don’t resemble anyone in my family,” he says. “Dark hair, dark eyes. Proper Jews. I don’t know how my mother or father could bear to look at me.”

I don’t understand what he means and I’m afraid to ask.

“We should have come here to Palestine or gone to America. Oh no, America’s godless, my father said, and Palestine’s full of Bolsheviks. So he moved us to Szeged.” 

He brushes the gap-toothed comb of his hand aggressively through that tawny gush of hair, mocking him with its lushness. 

I ask him if he’s ready to leave.

“I’m going to stay here a while. You go.” 

As I head down, he calls me back and pushes five Palestinian pounds into my hand. “For your help,” he says. 

Hurrying down the dusty, rocky path, I feel strange about the money, holding it like I hold a dead mouse when I find it in one of the traps Mama sets, running through the house to fling it into the street.

When I arrive home, it’s still early afternoon. I look into the small mirror that hangs beside the front door. As I wipe away the chocolate staining my lips, I become aware again of the five pounds I’m holding. You ever wonder who’s staring back at you in the mirror? 

Hearing laughter upstairs, I quietly ascend. The door to my parents’ bedroom is ajar. I look through the crack along the hinge to see Mama and Yava sitting up against the bed’s headboard. Yava’s wearing only her pants and bra. Her blouse must have lost a button. Mama is sewing it back on. Mama uses her teeth to snap the thread of the finished button and hands the blouse to Yava. But Yava doesn’t take it. Saying something I can’t hear, she jumps off the bed. She’s tiny, sprite-like, a pretty young boy. Running around to Mama’s side, she pulls Mama to her feet. Mama only feigns reluctance; she’s laughing. I feel a prickly heat that intensifies as Yava removes her pants, flinging them onto the bed, and then tugs on Mama’s dress. For a short while Mama continues to resist whatever this is, but suddenly, with an expression of mock exasperation, as if indulging the whim of an adorable child, she unzips the back of her dress and shimmies it off. She then slips on Yava’s blouse. Yava’s laughing now. Mama’s close to a foot taller, with a much bigger bust, so the blouse becomes a bolero top, and when she slips on the pants she resembles Alice after eating the cake. Yava, swamped in Mama’s dress, looks like a child playing dress-up. After also tying on Mama’s hijab, Yava retrieves the jarra from the windowsill and attempts without success to balance it on her head. Mama shows her, settling the Jarra upon her mass of black curls before walking around the bedroom with an exaggerated sway of her hips. When she returns to Yava, the two of them go very still, gazing at their reflections in the cheval mirror. Mama transfers the jarra to Yava’s head, holding it there to complete the transformation as Yava’s arm slides around the back of Mama’s exposed midriff. I can’t bear it. Sneaking quickly downstairs, I open and slam shut the front door, calling “Mama.”

I allow them a little time before ascending. When I enter, they’re dressed again, positioned awkwardly on either side of the bed. Running to Mama, for some reason I thrust Laszlo’s five pounds at her and burst into tears. Normally Mama has little patience for crying, but she falls to her knees, wrapping me in her arms.

I think Yava’s gone, but when Mama and I exit the bedroom, Yava is downstairs. Mama tells me to go to my room, but I remain on the landing, peeking down at them.

 Mama’s saying something I can’t quite make out, so I take a few quiet steps down as Yava raises her voice. “You need to make a choice.”

I can’t hear Mama’s response. 

“You deserve a life, Latifa,” she says, “What pleasure do you ever get?”

“Yava,” Mama sighs, as if this were a bone Yava has worried into splinters.

“Answer me. What life do you have here? And look at what’s happening. You’re about to be crushed, all of you.”

“What do you mean?”

Yava now takes firm hold of both Mama’s arms, as if she’s going to shake her or drag her out into the street. Becoming frightened, I hurry to the bottom of the stairs. 

“Mama.”

Yava, turning desolate eyes on me, releases her and rushes out.

I run to Mama and fling my arms around her. “What’s wrong with her?”

Mama doesn’t respond, staring at the front door with a faraway look.

“Mama?”

Suddenly, she tears herself from my grasp, shoving me away. “Why are you always sneaking around, always listening?” She smooths and tugs at her dress as if she’s infested with me before storming off toward the kitchen.

*

There has been trouble for a long time, but I can really feel it now in the restless, pre-storm breeze ruffling brows, swelling rumors, rattling newspapers. The jabberwocky of my childhood—Rothschild, Balfour, White Paper, Partition Plan—is coming to its final verse. Baba’s shigg swells so much it blocks the road, though there are no longer any Jews in it. Mama murmurs, “If you could defeat your enemies by drinking coffee and talking, the Arabs would rule the world.” 

A few days from the partition vote, I’m sitting with Baba at his shigg, surrounded by two dozen men, when Laszlo appears with a muslin sack slung over his shoulder. Baba’s happy to see him until Laszlo hefts the sack down, pronouncing gravely, “For your kindness, Khalil.” 

Coffee beans. Baba frowns, angry, injured, refusing to look at the gift, and says nothing. Laszlo turns a hard and regretful glance upon me, as if he wishes he could see through me; as if he wishes I wasn’t there.

Baba leaves the beans in the street. By morning someone has taken them.

On the 29th of November, my family is joined in our house by the stalwarts of Baba’s shigg: blind Abu Amir, Rasheed Assaf, and Abu Nabil. We listen to the radio as the votes from one country after another for UN Resolution 181 to divide Palestine into Arab and Jewish states are read out. Mama stands against the wall, throttling a tea towel. Baba looks baffled, sitting in his armchair by the log fire with a Jericho orange, flinging its peel into the flames with a fizz, the air filling with citrus. As the countries and their votes are read out, Rasheed clutches his head and murmurs an Al-Ma’arri quote about time crushing men like little pieces of glass, Abu Nabil asks for the deliverance of God, and Abu Amir, Baba’s echo, finally finds his own voice, shouting, “Bolivia, they decide what’s my country and what’s not! Iceland. Is this even a country? And they have the right to give my city to Ashkenazi Zionists? United Kingdom. What’s this ‘abstain,’ those sons of dogs?” 

The second the votes are cast, partition confirmed, gunfire begins, Arab fighters shooting at Haganah positions along Herzl Street and up into Hadar.

*

The British remain in Haifa, creating something of a buffer between the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods. Some months after the vote, in early ’48, during a period of relative calm, I’m hurrying to the food booth to retrieve kerosene and cooking oil when someone calls my name. It’s Yava, who emerges from the shadowed doorway of one of the many recently vacated houses. Beckoning me over, clearly too scared to venture further, she hands me a sealed envelope. She shocks me then by falling to her knees, gripping my arms so hard it hurts, and begging me to please hand it directly to my mother. Like most people, she has no idea that Mama, who speaks such flawless French and English, can’t read a word. Yava hurries back up the hill, and as soon as she’s out of sight I run to the booth and steam the letter open. 

It’s written in English on lavender letter paper taken from the Bat Galim Hotel. In it Yava speaks of the first time she watched my mother remove her hijab; how this gesture toward undressing devastated her. Of how she longed to press that mane of wavy black hair to her face, to smell it and to smell my mother’s beautiful neck. (I want to tell Yava, with hotly jealous self-satisfaction, that Mama’s hair smells of her chamomile conditioner, and that her neck smells of bay leaf and olive oil soap.) Yava then speaks of Adam in paradise as neither male nor female—as both—before God split him to make Eve. After the Fall, Adam and Eve’s hunger is to be one again, to rediscover Eden in each other’s bodies. But God extended his curse of division, layering upon that first nakedness not only sex, but race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, caste, and class. Yava says: How cruel God is, and it has often seemed to me that love is not our way back to God, but our only defense against Him. As my father once exhorted me to obey him and be a good daughter, so God insists we give Him our love. I will not love Him. I will love you.

I sit in a doorway and read the letter over and over, confused about it being a woman who loves Mama like this, and by these strange ideas of returning to paradise by means of a lover’s body, of disobeying God by loving each other. 

After sealing up the letter again with flour and water, I hand it to Mama when I return home. Murmuring that she’ll ask Baba to read it later, she shoves it quickly into the pocket of her apron, unable to meet my eyes.

In February, news comes that the Haganah have killed sixty Palestinians in the village of Sa’sa’ near the Lebanese border, blowing people up in their houses. A week after this, a bomb goes off in Ben Yehuda Street Market, killing about the same number of Jews. A few weeks later, a bomb explodes in Haifa near Said Khoury’s garage, killing thirty people, including Abu Nabil. Rumors then become rife about a massacre in Deir Yassin, a village near Jerusalem. It’s now the middle of April 1948. 

Mama keeps telling Baba we should leave, but he believes people will be reasonable. On Radio Cairo, they’re telling us the Arabs are winning one glorious victory after another.

Then, late one night we’re shocked out of bed by a hammering at the door. It’s Savas disguised in a thawb and Keffiyeh. If he’s caught by the Arab forces, he’ll be killed.

Sitting down, breathing hard and rubbing his forehead, Savas glances at Mama with a pained look and says, “I need to tell you . . . Yava was shot by a sniper yesterday morning while hanging washing on our balcony. We’ve already buried her.”

Mama says nothing, her eyes going glassy as Baba begins to weep softly, almost absentmindedly, and says, “The world’s going mad.”  

“It’s been mad for a long while, Khalil.” Savas tells us he’s arranged to take Marwan, his family, and all of us to Cyprus, but we have to leave in the next couple of days. He warns us that Jewish soldiers are out for blood following an attack two days before on a convoy heading to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Eighty Jews massacred, including doctors, nurses, and patients. Baba says he won’t leave his country. Baba and I cry as we hug Savas goodbye; Mama remains numb and impenetrable.

*

Only the British army now stands between us and the Jewish forces, and though the British promise to stay until May, suddenly and without warning they evacuate. The Jews have all the high ground. Loudspeakers tell us they have the atom bomb and are going to use it on us. A couple of days after Tiberias falls, a massive explosion shatters all our windows. The Haganah are rolling barrels of explosives down the hill into Wadi Nisnas. 

Just days later, during Passover, the Jews attack full force, taking the airfield and railway workshops. They’re using mortars. We can hear explosions and the pop of gunfire. People flood the docks. Mama says we should join them, but Baba stubbornly refuses. An hour later, we hear a gunbattle outside, Arab voices soon giving way to Hebrew and a babel of other tongues. A hammering at the door freezes us, but a familiar voice calls, “Khalil, open up.” 

Baba does so, and there stands Laszlo Kovak, a STEN gun in his ruined hands.

After telling the men with him he’ll join them at Najada House by the bridge, he steps in, regarding us all cooly. “Khalil,” he says in the perfect Arabic we helped him learn, “you and your family need to leave the country.” 

He retrieves a wad of British pounds from his pocket. Before Baba can take them, I run over, snatching the money and flinging it in a fluttering shower out of the door. Laszlo says nothing. Ordering Mama to fetch a sheet and a broom, he fashions a white flag, handing it to Baba. 

“Bring food and water only,” he says, “It’s going to be a long, hot walk. The docks are hopeless. Head north to Lebanon.”

After checking the road, he takes a moment to gather the scattered notes, laying them just inside our threshold. “You’ll need money,” he says. 

He glances at me. Not regret or sorrow. It’s as if he’s looking at a ghost he doesn’t want to believe in.  

I beg to bring my football, but Baba says no. Mama dashes upstairs. I stand behind Baba at the door, his hands trembling around the makeshift flagpole as he peeks into the street. He has our house deeds and key. After a few minutes, he says, “Go tell your mother to hurry up.”

I find Mama in her underwear, strapping her bridal headdress with its few remaining gold Ottoman coins around her belly. She gestures me over to help with this. The brass jarra lies on the bed, a knitting needle beside it. Once her gold is secured, she flings on a voluminous abaya and ties up her hair. We hear shouting outside and the dry rattle of a machine gun.

“Mama, we’ve got to go.” 

When I take her hand, she tugs it free to snatch up the jarra.

“Why are you bringing that?”

She doesn’t know how to answer me. “We might need it,” she says finally, hurrying out.

As we join Baba, he gestures toward the jarra. “What’s this?”

Mama stammers, “It’s not heavy.”

“Amra Majnouna,” Baba says, “who’s going to steal an old brass jug?” 

He snatches it from her, handing it to me, “Yalla, Ibrahim, put it back.”

As I run upstairs, something occurs to me. I’d wondered where Mama hid Yava’s letter. Now I tip the neck of the jarra toward the sunlight lancing in the window and catch a flash of lavender. She was trying to fish it out with the knitting needle, still on the bed, like the instrument of an abortive crime. Why would she put the letter somewhere she couldn’t retrieve it? And how strange to hide it inside that jarra she once set upon her head to show off her funambulist grace to the village boys. Returning the jarra to the windowsill, I run out.

Baba has me hold the flag while he locks our door. We head north through the streets, then up over the hills, joining dozens of other families carrying what they can in carts, on donkeys, on their backs. As we crest a hill, we encounter a troop of about a dozen Jewish women soldiers.

One says in Arabic, “Are you running away, out of the country?” 

We say yes. It’s strange. They’re holding rifles and look so happy and so pretty; and as we go by, one of them, giddy with excitement, repeats, “Bye-bye, Palestine. Bye-bye, Palestine”; and it’s awful and humiliating but it’s almost as if she’s being nice, as if we were leaving her house after dinner. 

I glance back at Haifa’s tumble of pale buildings in the bright sun, the Mediterranean exhaling and inhaling its gentle waves, plumes of smoke everywhere, gunfire crackling. This is the last time I’ll ever see it.

*

I have an American passport now. My mama was Moslem, my baba Orthodox, my biological father, Catholic. I’d like to think I was born out of love, but I suspect, with my thirteen-year-old mother served up as a living doll for the tawny-headed and blue-eyed boy of that wealthy household, that the truth is more sinister. My daughter has no idea I’m Palestinian. She thinks I’m Lebanese. On our arrival in Lebanon in ’48, Mama, ever practical, pulled off her hijab, and we slipped on our Orthodox crosses, saving us from the fate of most of the Palestinian Moslems, abortive and unwanted, stuck in those miserable camps. I received a free and excellent education at an Orthodox school, and we were quickly made citizens. Baba, the Sheikh of Salt Street, was a man too idiomatic to be translated out of his world and died within a few months of a heart attack. Mama was one of the first casualties of the Lebanese civil war, stopped in her car by a gang seeking revenge for the Kataeb massacre of 27 Palestinians on a bus in Ain el-Rammaneh. She swore she was Moslem and Palestinian, but her identity document said she was Orthodox and Lebanese, so they cut her throat. At that time, I was living in Boston. I’d met my wife, Emma Levy, while at university there. Strange to think that my daughter, Ava, could return to Israel on a Birthright trip and choose to live in Haifa. I suppose I could go back now, too, but I’m too old. I’m not sentimental. Despite everything, I’ve had a good life. But I am curious to know if our old stone house still stands in that city of strangers, and if Mama’s jarra, wide-hipped and slender-necked, remains upon its ledge, gestating in its swollen belly Yava’s lavender manifesto for a new world.

Inside my father’s factory in Tokyo, there was a tiny room that he built. Rather, it was a corner sectioned by two pieces of plywood, just enough space for two average-sized men in a stretched-out position. A single futon, a TV, a hot plate, a hotel-sized fridge, a red velvet sofa, and a karaoke machine. It was more than enough for a single adult to live a modest life. There was no washing machine, and though we were equipped with multiple industrial washing machines and dryers in the factory, regular clothes had to be washed by hand and hung on the clothing pole outside during the day. There was a public bathhouse with an open-air bath located a few bus stops away, overlooking the highway traffic lights, which they advertised as metropolis illumination in your hand. Including the Angels who lived there, the room was my favorite place.

The sign outside of our factory still read: Silk, wool, embroidered textile, all handwashed in natural detergent. Faded color brightened. No stains are tough stains. My father’s grandfather started a kimono cleaning service in a once thriving neighborhood, frequented by geishas and other entertainers. Now my parents ran a rental hot towel business, delivering them to hotels and ryotei where secret rendezvous would take place. 30cm square wet white towels rolled and packed in plastic, ready to be used to wipe off the oily faces of a politician or yakuza. The business changed, shaped by the demands of the times; but my parents kept this one idea important to them.

My father was a communist who believed in world peace and equality. And yet, he had never attended a party meeting. The communist newspaper was delivered twice a day, morning and night, but it was my mother who actually read it. My father wasn’t an artist like Dalton Trumbo either, and when I told him that we were learning about capitalism in my history class, he said, “Karl Marx? That would be a good name for a sweet that Manshiro bakery would come up with.” Still, my father nodded whenever we saw the political party campaign car, and the candidate screaming into a megaphone, “No War, No poverty, No discrimination,” without a plan for how to achieve any of it. His eyes would twinkle like a boy who had never experienced a broken heart, and he would also say, “Everyone should be guaranteed basic needs.”

Besides the handful of loyal employees, we always had a few drifters too. I was the one who often found them, standing in front of the factory in the early morning on my way to school. They were often middle-aged men in drenched workers’ uniforms as if they had just escaped from Alcatraz or from their soggy pasts. My father was the one who called them “Angels.” Someone else might have found it sarcastic, but coming from a father who was as naive as to believe in the Communist Party’s empty promises, I didn’t doubt that he meant it entirely. And I thought that it wasn’t so much of a misnomer, since the people who worked in my father’s factory all seemed to appear and vanish without a trace. It would have been more appropriate to say that they had just swooped down from the sky. 

Much of the time, these Angels took advantage of my father. They almost always stole my father’s bike (and once even mine) as a means for their escape. We coined the phrase “disposable vehicles,” because so many bikes would go missing. The month-in-advance paycheck that my father loaned out would never be repaid, and my parents started to refer to the money as the “Angel retirement fund.” “Can you add 300,000 yen, retirement money for Mr. Kimura,” my father would say to my mother. “Alright, 300,000 yen for Mr. Kimura,” my mother would answer, opening the worn-out notebook. We spent one New Year’s Eve listening to a bill collector banging on our door. One of the Angels asked my father to help co-sign for a loan. The Angel told him he needed money to buy his kids a Christmas teddy bear. This was a classic lie that even a six-year-old me could figure out, but my father didn’t seem to doubt, or maybe he knew it was a lie but he still wanted to believe that the Angel needed the money more than he did. “The bill collector must be so cold out there. Let’s bring something warm to him,” my father said. His generosity reached even the man who seemed ready to break down the door to drag him out by his throat. 

“Let him do his job for tonight,” my mother said, stopping him. 

We slurped cup noodles in the candlelight and watched the year-closing music show on mute. The three of us snapped our fingers, whispering the lyrics with the songs. I imagined we were camping and there was a bear trying to get into our cabin. Our feet touched inside the warm kotatsu, full bellies, and whispering laughter. No matter how dangerous the outside could be, I had a father who still had room in his heart for his enemy and a mother who was not startled by my father’s kindness. 

Even when they owed my father money, these Angels who lived in the corner room always had a box of cigarette chocolate sticks for me. To me, the bear bill collector or stolen bikes seemed a separate issue from the Angels themselves. 

The Angels who lived the longest in the corner room were Techan and Yui. They were also the youngest. I didn’t find them like I did the other Angels. One afternoon, when I came home from school, I found two leather bags like the one a doctor might carry neatly placed by the sofa. I was sad because the previous Angel vanished two days before on my pink bicycle. I remember how excited I was to see the brand-new soap on the sink and crisp white shirts hanging on the hook. 

Techan devoted himself to the cleaning job like it was his calling. “There is nothing more satisfying to see things get cleeeean and freeeesh.” He had the thick Kansai accent that stretched to the end of his sentences. Yui worked only two days a week and for the rest of the week, he left the room early and came home late and we had no idea what he actually did. “Yui is going to be something so biiiiig and shine like a star. One day you’ll see him on TV.” This was Techan’s response when I asked where Yui was.

Friday and Sunday were the days that they both worked at the factory. We piled the worn-out white square towels during our lunch break. Whoever rolled the most towels in two minutes won. Techan and Yui came up with the game. With a timer in my hand, I shouted, “Ready, set, go!” and they would begin rolling seriously and silently. From seventy something Mr. Aoki, whose wife left him for a thirty-year-old male host to Yasu, who lost his right hand in the electric saw, to Yuriko, the retired geisha who sent money abroad for a son who she’d never see again, everyone cheered. The days when Tanaka-kun, a college drop-out who hyperventilated in public, felt good, he, too, joined the race. When he lost, he sobbed, and Techan and Yui hugged him and told him over and over again, “Everything will be alright.”

I loved Techan and Yui just like everyone else at work. Whenever I visited them in their room, they cooked dinner and even sang karaoke with me. “If something happened to you, people would blame them, then they would have no place to go, would they?” My father used to say and didn’t allow me to stay in the room with any of the Angels after working hours. But with Tetchan and Yui, my father let me have a sleepover. Yui put a fresh bath towel and a pillow on the red velvet sofa for me, and Techan and Yui crammed into a single size futon on the floor. 

Techan’s cooking was semi-homemade. Unlike the way I learned at my home economics class—soak the kelp and drop the bonito in the boiled water—he used an instant soup stock to make miso soup; “as long as all natural ingredients, it’s fine,” he said as he sprinkled the pellets into a pot. “If you can take a short cut, take it,” he would say. The finished dish tasted just as good as my mother’s.

Born and raised in Osaka, they cooked the best Japanese pancakes. “Tell you what. The secret of cookin’ knock-out Okonomiyaki is the way you stir. Don’t mix it, just fold. Use plenty of shredded cabbage and eggs. One egg per pancake, got it?” Techan would say. Once he finished folding the mix, Yui poured the butter on the hotplate. “Tell you what, Kayo,” Yui would take over the conversation, “the secret of cookin’ knock-out Okonomiyaki is the timing. Focus on the smell and sound. When it starts to emit the scent of bonito and the interval of the sizzling gets short, you flip it in one go.” He then stared at the comedy show on the screen. While Yui flipped the pancake, Techan sang along to the music on the show. He would spin like a pop singer and pass me the ladle to take over the rest of the song. Then he danced around me, while lightly touching one shoulder to another, and went around Yui and brushed his cheek. Yui was going to shine like a star, Techan said, but to me, he was the one who was the light of everyday life. 

We often watched a midnight quiz show where a young comedian who wore only a loincloth was slapped by the MC every time he got a wrong answer. “Kayo, you should never grow up to be a person who would slap a naked man’s butt without consent,” Techan would tell me. Yui followed Techan,“That’s right. You’ve got to have permission. For everything, whether to slap their faces, butts or even to steal someone’s man. You have to ask, ‘Can I slap your ass? Can I steal your husband? If they say yes, then you can.” They told me that this quiz show meant to educate kids about sharing and politeness.

Once the sake started having an effect on them, they told me “the story of how they met.” They were on the soccer teams of rival schools. 

“Nah, nah. You’ve got it all wrong, Yui. I was the one who spoke to you first. Yui was always shy, Kayo. If I waited for him to speak to me, I’d be a bald man.” 

“But, I spotted you first.”

“How woulda have known?”

“Kayo, Tetsu’s team was hella weak. We beat you guys even after we got a red card and lost one player.”

“The red card didn’t change the fact that I couldn’t focus on the game. Seeing you run like that…how could I? It’s still the same, I just couldn’t when you move so gracefully…”

“Crazy man.”

“Infatuated man, is what I was.”

After that, they’d gulp sake and proceed with stories of the places they had been, the regional food they had hated and loved, the odd jobs they had done—the stories which I’d heard over and over and yet could not understand the source of laughter that they shared. After each gulp, their Kansai accent got thicker, and the pace of conversation sped up like a manzai comedy. As I sipped my orange juice, I’d follow their conversation; it was like a ping-pong match. The same jokes at the same time; I could have been sick of listening, but I’d never stopped them. I somehow sensed that in this little corner of my parents’ factory, they were as free as they could ever be. 

I learned from my parents a kind of love which was rooted so deep that even a 7.0 earthquake could not shake it. But I’d never witnessed a love so fragile, like a young sprout tended to with careful attention. The love which could dry out without watering every day. The love you must watch every day, not to be stepped on by anyone. A partner you could drink many shots of sake with over the same story; I decided that this was the love I wanted when I was old enough to sleep with someone on one single futon.

On Valentine’s Day, the year I turned eight, Tetsu and Yui disappeared just like others. They didn’t owe my father anything. Their comic magazines that substituted as legs for the table, the tea towels they always brought to the public bath, the wire hangers, and even the small, cracked soap at the sink were gone with them. They left nothing behind.

My father handed me a neatly folded paper. 

“If they saw you, they said, they wouldn’t have been able to leave,” my father said. 

I found an unfamiliar handwriting, big, awkward, and strong strokes like the writing of a child who just started learning how to write.

Dear Kayo,

Good Luck with your life!

from Tetsuo and Yui

I stared at the five words trying to mine a deeper meaning. The meaning I found was that this tanned letter paper was the only evidence I had that they had existed in my life up until yesterday. 

When I saw the plywood at the corner of the factory, tears welled up in my eyes and put so much pressure on my head that I thought I’d suffocate, or that I would throw up my own heart. How could they leave me like this? I wished they had died instead, so I wouldn’t have to think of the possibility of seeing them ever again. I threw the letter away and didn’t step into my father’s factory again. 

The last man who lived in the corner room turned out to be a spy, not an Angel at all. It was the year I graduated from college. The spy lived and worked at the factory for three months just like all the other Angels. During the three months, he noted down my parents’ clientele, bookkeeping records, even our clients’ favorite gift lists. Not even my mother, who was vigilant around the business and in charge of bookkeeping, thought someone would try to take advantage of a small family business already on the verge of bankruptcy. 

They closed the factory under the guise of early retirement.

My father, whose hobby has always been bonsai, now spends four days a week cleaning parks for minimum wage, a job through the senior human resource center. My mother works full-time at a dry cleaner in the next town. My father is still a communist, and my mother is still the one who reads the communist newspaper. And I am still longing for someone whom I can share many drinks with over the same story.

At the core of the humanitarian regime is a commitment to international development: the promise that poorer countries can follow a formulaic sequence to arrive where wealthy ones already are. But it is clearer than ever that the modern economic development model is based on a flawed calculus, wherein even disaster response and resource depletion count as positive growth. The model fundamentally fails in its presentism, its emphasis on short-term gain cannibalizing any thriving future. Now more than ever, the sector is failing even by its own metrics, with rising inequality, foreign aid cuts, and the growing climate crisis threatening the precarious achievements of the eight decades since Bretton Woods.

The small Himalayan nation of Bhutan has existed largely outside the reaches of the development regime. Thanks to its geographic isolation, it is one of the only nations to avoid colonization completely. When foreign presence finally arrived in the 1960s in the form of road construction, it was treated with hesitation; in 1979, on his return from the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck declared that Gross National Happiness was more important than Gross National Product. Two decades later, Dasho Karma Ura took this proclamation as his mandate, architecting a complete measurement system for Gross National Happiness through his Centre for Bhutan Studies. In 2008, the first survey was conducted, and the country has measured its success by the collective happiness of its people ever since. As a rare extant alternative, Gross National Happiness became a constant counterpoint in my development education. It was the topic of my first research paper in high school, and years later in a senior-year tutorial with Stephen Marglin, Harvard’s last remaining Marxist economist, I argued that the framework might just solve the accounting problem of modern capitalism itself. 

Born just before the first foreign interventions began, Ura watched as Bhutan’s early encounters with the development sector began to alter its social fabric. While new infrastructure and hospital development brought clear benefits, each came at a direct cost to other factors vital to the social cohesion of his country. In his Gross National Happiness index, Ura includes the standard measures of development—household income, education, health—but positions them within a much broader web of factors constituting collective happiness: community vitality, time use, psychological wellbeing, cultural resilience, good governance, ecological diversity. Importantly, Gross National Happiness also takes a much more comprehensive definition of “work,” recognizing the contributions of domestic labor and the nonhuman world as inseparable from human welfare. Since the first index, Bhutan’s national happiness score has risen in every survey round, all the while becoming the world’s first carbon-negative country and graduating from the “Least Developed Countries” category based on conventional development metrics.

But can one of the world’s smallest nations, and one of the only ones spared from colonization, offer a model for the world? Ura believes so, having built Gross National Happiness as a scalar measurement system for the universal indicators of a good life. But the system offers more than an accounting fix; it calls instead for a renewal of generosity and virtue, both having been exponentially sacrificed through the proliferation of the development state. 

— Russell Reed for Guernica

Russell Reed: You were born in the village of Ura in 1961, before Bhutan had a currency economy. What did the Bhutan of your childhood look like?

Dasho Karma Ura: Bhutan before so-called modernization is the theme of my book, Bhutan: The Unremembered Nation, which is named as such because the greatest departures occur when there is very little transmission from one society to the next generation. In brief, it was a very secure society, well-adapted to abundance at the level of self-sufficiency. The need for money arises when there is extensive trade, so it wasn’t there at all. Barter left no desire for money back then. So you felt secure within a defined social, economic, and political horizon at that time. For good or bad, it was unchanging for hundreds of years.

Winters and summers were very contrasted, because the household would move to warmer places in the winter and return to our Ura base in summer. On either end of this seasonal migration, you had hosts who weren’t your relatives but whose importance was raised above that of your kin, because they were multigenerational hosts. We would leave Ura with gifts—highland woolen textiles, buckwheat flour, mushrooms, dry spinach—and in return, we would receive food grains. During our stay, we could contribute to household work and carpentry, and we’d bring rice, maize, oil, and seeds back home. The lunar new year was the time when everyone returned home with fresh food from the warm places, welcoming the new year together and beginning the cycle all over again.

It was a highly physical society. You acquired very specific practical knowledge about the locality, geography, and ecology of the place. The presence of the state was very moderate. Things were decided, maintained, and managed at the local level; all subsistence societies are a bit like that. Literacy was limited, but it was offset by other mediums of knowledge acquisition, transmitted orally or visually. In contrast, the degree and frequency of reliance on each other, and participation in each other’s lives for events both joyful and sorrowful, were very deep. It had neither the need for nor the awareness of the world far away. Events such as colonialism, war, conflict, and missionary activities were nonexistent to us. That was the Bhutan I grew up in.

Russell Reed: When did you first learn about the concept of international development?

Dasho Karma Ura: Medical and educational interventions preceded the construction of roads as the first expression of international development. I can’t place the exact moment in time, but it must have been the late 1960s or early 1970s when we became aware of the actors behind it. The road construction sector, represented mostly by Europeans and Indians, was the first radical intervention that changed traditional life.

The first tension in my own childhood was around admission to school, and continuation through the winter breaks. We gained literacy, as we call it now, with the local Lama; kids in Ura and the surrounding villages who had a little more than the median household would start reading and writing with the nearest Lama, usually for a few hours in the morning. In our case, the Lama happened to be on a mountaintop almost three hours of serious walking away. Our traditional curriculum involved a lot of memorization, mostly of thick prayer books. It leaned toward a religious understanding and imagination of the world.

In school, I remember reading a book called The Stream of Time. It must have been imported from India, where it arrived after being imported from Europe, because it began with the founding of Rome. This European history education continued in secondary school, learning about Richard II and Julius Caesar and the great British poems. This history had nothing to do with Bhutan, with Tibet, with any Himalayan country. It was all about the First World War, the Second World War, the founding of various big European states like Italy and Germany. All the social sciences were situated in relation to the Western world. At that time, I didn’t understand that there was any possibility for alternatives. In retrospect, I realized we could have learned Himalayan history, Himalayan sociology, and Himalayan politics instead.

Russell Reed: As international presence grew, what was the development sector’s vision for Bhutan?

Dasho Karma Ura: I started working in government in 1988, and I was soon engaged as editor of the country’s new five-year development plan. I continued that kind of work for over a decade. So I knew the normal package for these socioeconomic development plans—the values, the implementation mechanisms, the legitimating devices and principles. At that time, the frame was clearly coming from the international agencies at the forefront of development, and from the government of India. 

In my nearly four decades of awareness of that field, the international development ethos became like a swimming pool, and the nations were like swimmers: They could redefine themselves a little, but the template remained basically the same. By the time I joined the civil service and was placed in the Ministry of Planning, where I became editor of the five-year plan for at least three full cycles, Bhutan had already spent 20 years executing the so-called plan.

In the 1960s, the plan was primarily focused on road-building and the development of a few schools and hospitals funded by the government of India. Once that was complete, it paved the way for broader social aspirations in the ’70s, which centered on expanding Western medicine and Western schools. The early ’80s brought the attempt for a kind of self-sufficiency in government revenue through the exploitation of hydropower. Bhutan remained quite isolated, but air services began in the 1980s and brought another gigantic step toward standard international development. Then came the time of development with globalization. By the turn of the century, foreign television and digital technology began to take hold. 

Political changes also began in the late ’90s, and by 2008 the constitution was enacted and free elections took place. Through all of this, one constant aspiration of the Bhutanese was to consolidate a new sense of sovereignty. It was already there, but our increasing interactions with big powers required us to renew our sense of sovereignty. When you become aware of the bigger players around you, you have to ask: “In what ways can I play any role in this world as a microstate, with my limited resources and other confinements?” It was about culture, but another continuous factor from the third king to the fourth to the fifth was to ensure that the Bhutanese people experienced development holistically—mentally, physically—because that was a scriptural, traditional, and historic objective. Not as a so-called nation, but as individuals and communities, that has always been a signpost.

Russell Reed: In 1979, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck proclaimed that Gross National Happiness was more important than Gross National Product. What was he seeing happen in other countries already engrossed in the development sphere that made him concerned?

Dasho Karma Ura: The compulsion for economic growth was increasing, and he knew we needed to rebalance. He must have seen the portent for himself and his country. He must have seen the omission in other countries that were heavily preoccupied with economic transformation. It is difficult to name the root cause of this observation between industrialization, export orientation, and urbanization. He may have read the signs a little earlier than others, which is no surprise because he would have been influenced by the timeless observations of Buddhism.

Russell Reed: As the story goes, he actually made that proclamation on his way home from the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana, Cuba. Was he informed by these other world leaders who were already seeing the negative consequences of development?

Dasho Karma Ura: Possibly. It is quite likely he would have seen the pictures of rural Bhutan in his mind: low technological development, yes, but an unhurried, pacified, and secure life. No great ambitions toward a bigger house or vehicle. He might have seen the nascent restlessness of modern life, the separations among family members, the diminishing ethics of international relations. We can hypothesize about this sort of history, but the only thing we know for certain is that he mentioned gakid—peace and happiness—as his desired outcome.

Russell Reed: Over time, Gross National Happiness became an alternative measure. But “happiness” isn’t the most obvious antonym for “product.” Why happiness?

Dasho Karma Ura: Though it resists measurement, subjective awareness—the awareness of being calm, feeling positive and fulfilled, sensing that you are doing nothing wrong—marks the big moments in our lives. That feeling may come at the point of exhaustion after tennis or through intellectual work or through music. But regardless of their form, these are the precious moments that compose a desired life. There are causes aligned to it and causes inimical to it. That is where the difficult choice lies, because people have choices but not everyone has the choice to choose the right causes. We have many natural choices, but they are part of the larger texture of society. If that larger fabric is against you, it is a struggle to attain such a choice.

That moment of awareness must be sustained over days and weeks, at a high frequency throughout your life. The background is ethical; it is possible that a person who has access to a lot of good choices—exercise, contemplation, meaningful connections, a meaningful job—could feel content given those choices exercised. But if one attribute of his life is that he is hugely unethical, it won’t promote societal contentment or happiness. Being unethical is, by definition, undermining someone else’s good life, whether in the past or in the future. This is the ground on which you have to stand first for collective happiness: We must maintain a broad level of ethical virtue.

It is interesting that this series names a “Posthumanitarian” order, beginning after so much humanitarian aid has been bashed out of existence entirely. That is itself an expression of collective ethics, of the virtue of generosity emphasized in both the West and the East. It is a direct dismantling of the virtue of generosity at both individual and institutional levels. That is a major concern. We can indeed find alternatives, provided we bring virtue ethics among them. One thing we need to practice on a regular basis, for the happiness of society, is virtue—especially among those who have time, because they have fulfilled their self-sufficiency and therefore have time, money, resources, and capabilities to donate to others. In this way, we have to reawaken an alternative source, and we can do so through institutional evocation. The cultivation of collective happiness begins with the cultivation of virtue ethics at the individual level, producing societal-level happiness. They go together.

Russell Reed: Gross National Happiness is presented as a sort of antidote to Gross National Product—a direct alternative even in name. Why did you approach Gross National Happiness as a measurable alternative, rather than rejecting such forms of measurement altogether?

Dasho Karma Ura: The national accounts from which Gross National Product is calculated will not be undone easily. Even if you and I wish for it, it’s simply too entrenched. There are many institutions that bank on it, which hold the Gross National Product framework as their existential mandate. Very big institutions in trade, finance, and banking feed on the numbers generated from these national accounts. The speculative part of the world is nourished by it. So it’s not going away any time soon, and we must therefore do what we can with it.

On the other hand, even within those big institutions there is an acknowledgment that other work is necessary for societal function—the work done by humanitarian agencies, within households, by nature and by wild animals. The work done by sleep, even. They may not value it, but it is all completely necessary for the workers to work. So we all have to march, and we will reach a new place where we synthesize work with a much broader and deeper perspective of life. As an accounting system, it is incomplete, and many concerns aren’t addressed in the simple numbers presented in Gross National Product.

Russell Reed: Bhutan has a constitutional mandate for perpetual forest conservation, and it was also the first carbon-negative country in the world. What is the relationship between biodiversity conservation and collective happiness?

Dasho Karma Ura: If you’re in a rural area away from markets, you know how intertwined they are. At a layman’s level it is immensely obvious. In our surroundings here and now in Oxford, almost everything is manmade, but even the manmade has to come from somewhere—a lot of it from the non-manmade, from the natural order. So it’s obvious that we are directly dependent on the land and the forest, and the more diverse that land and forest around us is, the safer and more secure we are.

But below the threshold of your consciousness, there is also the importance of biodiversity and land diversity as aesthetic experience. This is a crucial component of daily awareness. Scientists explain it in terms of simplicity and complexity at the same time: simple rules underlying complex forms, like fractals. But for us, every visual is unique, because we notice them only from the perspective of where we are. It’s full of changing diversity at every single moment. The dependence of our sensory world on keeping us in heightened awareness is beyond any measurement or estimation. In a room like this one, you are fed static colors and paintings that dominate our thinking, but the ever-changing color, tone, and value of light is what energizes you. It comes with a pacifying influence. No one is ever angered by looking at a river. There’s an intrinsic power in it to calm you—from restlessness, from aggressiveness, from melancholy. 

Russell Reed: This framework diagnoses one of the foundational flaws of the modern economic development model, which is its presentism—or more generously, its short-termism. Measurements like Gross National Product count resource depletion and even disaster response as contributors to growth. That results in a sacrifice of the longer future, and a threat to sustained happiness.

Dasho Karma Ura: Temporal blindness is built into the calculation. It’s a flow measure, not a stock measure. Of course, an investor sometimes looks at the flow over a longer period, because he has to see where the cost-benefit ratio becomes favorable. But he does so without necessarily acknowledging that he has depleted irreplaceable stocks in the process. This results in a basic underestimation of, or indifference to, the future in the flow measure of Gross National Product. Even if cost-benefit analysis is extended out—say to 30 years for discounting—the rate of discounting becomes a matter of assumption rather than science. It sits somewhere between ethics and technique. To rebalance it, we must think about what happens once our body becomes just a mortal body, and what comes after that. It can only be rebalanced by ethics, not by accountancy. 

We need methods and training to reflect our behavior and consumption on a much longer time basis. You can think in terms of the next life, however laughable that concept seems to most people. But as a belief, which eventually becomes normative, accepting it means forcing yourself to think about what your behavior will be after you pass away. It launches you into a kind of journey about yourself beyond now, developing a reflexive judgment about your present self. We need many devices to think about the future—it’s very difficult to formulate. You don’t have all the variables to make a scientific, holistic picture of yourself in 10, 20, 30 years. Your life insurance is only one dimension. So I suppose good leadership has to specialize in that: What will the median person’s life look like in X number of years? And then we must design for the aggregate.

Russell Reed: Critics might view Gross National Happiness as a backward-looking policy, romanticizing the country’s long pastoral history. But at the same time, Bhutan is one of only eight countries to exit the “Least Developed Countries” category—a measure based on Gross Domestic Product. What is the relationship between Gross National Happiness, the past, and the future?

Dasho Karma Ura: The formulation of Gross National Happiness is very plural, accounting for ecological diversity, community, resilience, time use, health, education, living standard, culture, and so on. These are necessary conditions for happiness. In my opinion, Gross Domestic Product addresses the living-standard aspect of our existence and, to some extent, health and education. But there’s no necessary relation between them; you can have high income without strong education or health outcomes across the population. The rest of the plural dimensions of Gross National Happiness—community, relationships of trust at neighborhood, local, and governmental levels, generosity practiced at local levels, safety, frequency of high-quality interactions among members—represent a timeless aspiration for all societies. It was relevant in the past, and it will be relevant as long as we are social beings. Everything flows from the platform of time and nature; all things unfold from within those two domains.

There is pressure on how we use our time, which is theoretically the most equal resource we have. We’re not in complete freedom to allocate it to valuable activities within those 24 hours. Some may not sleep at night for various reasons, including night-shift work. Some may not get time for physical activity, or they may live too far from the forest to go for a walk. So time becomes a matter of privilege. Access to nature and a balanced use of time have been relevant to all civilizations of the past, and they will always remain relevant in the future. We will always be part of the environment, and we will always be in time—objective time, and the even more complex question of subjective time. 

Gross National Happiness represents a paradigm for the future. It holds the elements that all human beings should be entitled to. They’ll be known under different languages, but the substance is the same. Gross Domestic Product addresses the objective side of our existential needs, but once those are fulfilled—and we still struggle to fulfill them in the world right now despite all these years of development—we must emphasize sufficiency levels in Gross National Happiness. A culture of ethical compromise does not emphasize maximization, but rather the attainment of sufficiency for all. Beyond that, some things may be good to maximize—but never at the cost of deprivation for someone else. 

Russell Reed: Another common criticism of Gross National Happiness is that it comes from Bhutan, which is a very small country with an exceptional history of isolation from colonization and globalization. Is Gross National Happiness a protection for Bhutan from an ever-imposing world, or is it a model others can follow?

Dasho Karma Ura: As I mentioned, the elements embodied in Gross National Happiness are things every human being would like to fulfill. Yet these intentions may not be reflected in indexes like Gross Domestic Product. We need one dashboard where all of these things are shown, a single dashboard to trace which indicators are moving forward and which are moving backward. We don’t live well when one thing moves forward at the expense of others; we’re just left with riskier and narrower options. The measurement is absolutely scalable, allowing both upward aggregation and downward decomposition all the way down to the individual level. There is an individual sufficiency level for every single variable, so it’s applicable as a measurement from the village up to the nation.

It is designed as an easy approach for governments, too. Most of the time, governments have agencies looking after each of these areas. There are still some gaps in Bhutan; we don’t yet have a program to address someone suffering from too much anger or too much jealousy, though we do have teachings and meditation. By bringing each of these agencies together, showing the cause and effect of different interventions across the full range of happiness indicators, any government can adopt the practice of Gross National Happiness in its own setting.

Russell Reed: It seems your diagnosis for the development sector is that it conflates universal values with uniformity. Does the path to rebalancing an embrace of plurality lie in recognizing that universal virtues must be enacted and embodied at local and individual levels?

Dasho Karma Ura: Yes, absolutely. You characterize it well. We cannot be intimate and contributory to everybody; we can only be within our limited life and resources. We cannot be Jeff Bezos, but we are no less than him because we contribute meaningfully at the local level. He cannot reach everywhere either. The needs outlined in Gross National Happiness are universal, and they are mediated by friends, family, community, and neighbors. Nature, animals, weather, and the cosmos all play their role, too, in fulfilling your day.

Everybody needs the full opportunity to live well, 24 hours at a time. Within that there are universals: You need sufficient sleep with beautiful dreams; you need to wake up and take care of your body; you need, within all of that, to be rooted. Only then can you try to transcend your dual awareness, though you need to be fully functional to even attempt such transcendence. For this functional body and mind to experience joy, bliss, and ordinary pleasures, we need to have them simultaneously. In order to function well, we need sensory awakening every day, and then to transcend it.

Now, we need a global order to support this, because everyone is moving toward this potentiality at a different speed. Some, as kids, have no faculties yet. Some are phasing out of existence, vulnerable and fragile. We need to do everything possible so that people at every stage of life do not feel that their life’s purpose has ended so people feel life is precious, and can interact with others at a mutually positive level. And we need immense diversity so that we don’t stress the environment. Some must be nomads, some cowherders, some goat-keepers, some tailors, some hairdressers, some paddy cultivators, even if production is low and doesn’t make a profit. In that way, the earth can support anyone who moves on it—that includes insects, plants, fungi, and trees. Not everyone should aspire to office work.

Though we’ve advanced a lot in the last 300 years technologically, we now see the cost of it front-loaded. We must not discriminate between brain workers, hand workers, and foot workers. All kinds of work that contribute to this collective happiness, this fulfillment in life, are respectable. All kinds of knowledge that go toward bearing this fruit of happiness are respectable. And it all must be done without violence and conflict, with empowerment. It is such a system that we must continually maintain—though we are not big influential states or big influential people, we are architects of our own lives. As long as we dwell on this question, there will be food for a new movement. 

Russell Reed: As the neoliberal humanitarian infrastructure continues to crumble, do you feel called to reform the institutions behind it? Or do you see this instead as an opportunity to build something entirely new from its ruins? 

Dasho Karma Ura: Disaster is not necessary to conduct change. That is very costly, to be compelled to progress only by disaster. What we do know is that states have become extremely important actors in our lifetime, rightly or wrongly. In a place like Bhutan, the state was distant, only becoming present during military conflict with border countries or during tax collection. Otherwise, life was very much managed by the grassroots—a kind of decentralized democracy not well documented in the literature, but known to have been practiced all around the world. 

In many countries, we are seeing an embrace of well-being—not happiness, but well-being—as a concept. This seems to be a slow resurgence, but an increasingly important part of the conversation. But the major global course we’ve taken in recent years has been one of arms buildup, climate breakdown, and the capture of the economy by limitless concentration allowed by laws and institutions. And those institutions have facilitated such concentration even across preexisting borders and boundaries. All of this is quite contrary to the attainment of any form of well-being.

This brings me back to my original point, which is that we must resurrect virtue ethics. We must not depend on discipline from external forces; the market is supposed to discipline itself, external checks and balances are supposed to discipline individual aggression, yet the institutions protect them completely. So we have to build on virtue ethics, societal happiness, and new ways of sharing across boundaries and generations. That is, of course, a question of environment. It is in all this work that we may find our meaning in life. Strictly speaking, it simply must be done. What writer said that we are born for rebellion? Whoever it was, I agree.

A question can be an invitation to step beyond the story others have assigned us. In this conversation, poets Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal turn that invitation toward each other. Their questions move between two new collections, Chang’s LION and Handal’s Roma Roam, allowing each book to illuminate the other. Both collections are restless in form and geography. LION moves through myth, zuihitsu, documentary fragments, visual art, and dream, tracing female lineage and Asian American life amid violence, surveillance, and erasure. In Roma Roam, cities, bodies, languages, and histories enter one another; Rome reads at once as a place, a lover, an archive, and a consciousness in flow.

Across both books, survival is set forth as the recovery of interiority, the refusal of disappearance, and the difficult freedom of imagining oneself beyond violence’s final account.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica

Tina Chang: Your newest collection Roma Roam begins with place and roaming. You write, You tell me: I’m going to another country,/another city, another body./Perhaps my heart will stay uncertain, and I will destroy my history but I am leaving. How has place transformed within your collections and how has roaming changed your idea of home?

Nathalie Handal: Place has always been one of the first languages of my work, but place is never only place. It is movement, belonging. In Roma Roam, it becomes an accomplice, lover, body, and system of thought, where empire, migration, beauty, ruin, and longing collide. Rome is the poem’s waterways, the Mediterranean’s great spirit; the Tiber one of the city’s original sentences. Place becomes an argument with time, an archive of rupture and seduction, where history and intimacy are inseparable. And roaming resists itinerary and arrival. In earlier books, I often wrote toward fractured geographies—Palestine, inherited homes. Roma Roam reimagines home as multiple and unfinished. What holds the work together is not rootedness but route: where we are continually made and unmade.

That unstable self—the self as a site of opposing forces—makes me think of the contradictions held in the central figure of LION. What does the title LION hold for you, and how does the lion move through the book? In “Heartbeat: A Zuihitsu,” you write: In the Lion dream, I am predator / and prey, two faces, one turned / toward appetite, another toward / extinction. Is the lion a metaphor for the self or a figure of female power, survival, grief, appetite, violence, loneliness or is it a way of holding all of those contradictions at once?

Tina Chang: A lion in Chinese tradition is a very powerful force. When I was a child living in Taiwan, I remember stone lions that guarded the front of my family’s home. I was taken by them as they didn’t seem like one animal but many animals. The Chinese lion is an amalgamation and a dream. It’s the composite of the lion, dog, phoenix, tortoise, snake in some versions and in other versions it has wings. I love the idea of the impossibility and hybridity which is what the lion means to me. It is a force of contradictions: predator and prey, ferocious and tender, hungry and sated. I found the animal was closely associated with the feminine muscularity of the book. I could have chosen the word lioness but I wanted to claim terrain traditionally dominated by men while holding space for the concerns of living in a woman’s body.

Likewise, can you also talk about the title for your collection, Roma Roam? One word signals specificity while the other signals a dream journey of sorts. How did you combine two unlike elements?

Nathalie Handal: “Roma” gives us the specificity of the city—its architecture, mythologies, cinema, saints, decadence, ruins. “Roam” undoes fixity, turning the city into motion, into a way of inhabiting and being inhabited. And roam echoes Rome; the city is already inside the movement. The title also reflects something fundamental in my poetics. I’ve always inhabited the unstable border between place and movement, belonging and estrangement, rootedness and drift. Rome is the place, but roaming is the consciousness moving through it—an interior state, a fever dream, a historical current. To roam Rome is to be altered by it, but also to let one’s own histories—Bethlehem, New York, the sea, exile, desire—enter and alter its meaning.

This makes me think of LION, and of the way you enter lives that might otherwise be reduced to a single public narrative. One of the emotional centers of the book is your insistence on restoring interiority to women whose stories have been reduced to the fact of their deaths. You write of Michelle Go, I want to know something about her inner life. A train heads into its own dark mouth. Is lyric imagination, for you, a form of witness against erasure?

Tina Chang: Michelle Go was an Asian American woman who was killed during the pandemic and there was so much written about the details that marked the end of her life. Her story was reduced to a few minutes of a news article and that became her singular story but if we delve deeper, research tells us she was a cheerleader and worked for a plumbing company. If we research further we may learn about her childhood. As a poet, I imagined her life beyond the reported details. The imagination allows space for that lyrical impossibility. By contemplating the potential of Michelle Go, that rumination on the music of her mind resists erasure by insisting on the power of her interior life. In this way, there’s a kind of world-building through envisioned intimacy, thereby creating three dimensional realities of women beyond the journalistic facts of their deaths. 

In Roma Roam you approach intimacy with a city and love/lover which sometimes feels one and the same. Can you talk about that?

Nathalie Handal: The first poem was “The City,” published in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets. It begins with Cavafy’s sense of the city as something we cannot escape because we carry it within us, then expands that idea: one city contains many cities, one body other bodies, one lover the traces of others.

That sense of one body carrying other bodies makes me think of LION, where familial intimacy feels like a living current—your mother’s heart, your daughter’s body, your grandmother’s hair, generations of women moving through one another. You write, “I make a promise to my mother that I will live,” and “I am knowing my mother / through this gentle body.” Is motherhood a refuge, burden, inheritance, a warning—or all of these at once?

Tina Chang: There are many kinds of lineages of which we are a part. The relationship at the forefront of the book is the relationship between the speaker and the mother. This is where all of her life’s lessons are learned; there’s growth through infancy, childhood, teen years, and into womanhood. With each phase of life, the speaker is mothered. When I first gave birth to my daughter, something shifted in me. I moved from thinking of myself as a single entity toward thinking of myself as a part of a delicate whole and, suddenly, I could see it: the wave of feminine energy that moved from my ancestors, to my grandmother, to my mother, to me, and then my daughter. While family and legacy can materialize in so many forms, this is one of them. Motherhood in its highest form is an offering. To mother is to give, to gift, to sacrifice, to restore all that was incomplete and broken. To mother is to promise to outlast the wreckage that life may bring. 

Nathalie Handal: Your collection is not a book of doom, even as it inhabits what can feel like impossible circumstances. What allowed it to remain a book of transformation rather than devastation?

Tina Chang: The heavier the emotions, the more I seek a balance, and that comes in formal and collaborative invention. After the killing of an Asian American woman, Christina Yuna Lee in 2022, I grieved her loss. This came on the heels of the killing of Michelle Go, who was mentioned earlier, who was pushed into the subway tracks as she was commuting to work. Prior to this, the Atlanta spa shootings in 2021 left eight people dead, including six Asian American women. After such colossal loss, I was filled with dread and fear. Locating the work of this collective of women artists, most of whom participated in a group art exhibition at the Eli Klein gallery to honor the life of Christina Yuna Lee, I was shaken awake. I collaborated with the work of six women artists in the making of this collection: Christina Yuna Lee, Astria Suparak, Hồng-Ân Trương, Haena Yoo, Hong Chun Zhang, and Joeun Kim Aatchim. Each of them has created language and worlds all their own and their bodies of work kept me spirited, inspired, and most of all hopeful. The power of their collective voice moved me away from doom and toward the empowered act of creation. 

Roma Roam also explores intensity of feeling, beginnings and endings, and everything in between. How do you end such a work that wishes to continue on?

Nathalie Handal: The city doesn’t end, and neither do longing, history, or water. Rivers keep moving, histories remain unresolved, longing changes form, cities keep speaking after we leave them. Roaming is not arrival but transformation—being altered by encounter and carrying that change forward. 

Tina Chang: What about the figures who roam or haunt each place? Who do you imagine is the envisioned “you” of these poems? Who do you envision is the recipient of these emotions and longing?

Nathalie Handal: The “you” is intentionally unstable. At times it is a lover, or the memory of one, becoming inseparable from the city itself. But the address keeps expanding: Rome as beloved and betrayer, Palestine as absence and inheritance, the Mediterranean as a living alphabet, or the self one has outlived.  Longing is rarely tidy enough to belong to one recipient; it spills across bodies, seas, and losses. I wanted the “you” porous enough to hold eros, grief, migration, and wonder in the same breath.

I recognize another kind of insistence in LION: not the erasure of devastation, but the refusal to let devastation have the final word. You write, “There is no greater art than to live,” and “We wonder, we begin again.” Is LION ultimately a book about survival? And if so, what kind? 

Tina Chang: The book begins in myth. The speaker is born “an ember of wanting,” and becomes visible and present in the world. Throughout, there is the myth of “the seekers” or entities of surveillance and sometimes destruction. As the speaker moves through the book, she is first invisible, or made to disappear. In the second and third sections of the book, the speaker is watched and pursued. By section four, there is a significant transition where the speaker begins to claim her own presence and that comes in the form of voice, community, and a feeling that she is most definitely not alone which causes her to claim her power. On a personal level, I arrived at the same revelation: I felt isolated and frightened during the pandemic. As I sought the work of other Asian American artists, their vision felt unstoppable to me and by leaping into that collective narrative I realized destiny was something claimed: I wasn’t working toward survival. I had already survived. 

Can we shift gears and talk about how you envisioned a structure for Roma Roam? I love “The Untouchable Waters” as its own distinctive vessel where an Italian translation appears at the base of the page while “Close-Up” draws from cinema. How did you decide on form in this newest work? How has form grown with you? 

Nathalie Handal: Form is a way of listening to what the poem wants to become. Each arrives with its own pressure, breath, architecture. One formal approach couldn’t hold a book that is cinematic, historical, multilingual, sensual, at times essayistic, at others elegiac. Rome is not one register. Neither is longing or memory. So I let the poems find the vessels they needed. “Close-Up” draws on cinema—the cut, frame, zoom, the way an image can hold emotional voltage without explaining itself. I wanted the poem to move like film: to pan, tighten, juxtapose. Rome is, after all, a film set; love and its illusions unfold frame by frame. With “The Untouchable Waters,” the two languages resonate across the page, the Tiber flowing between them—a river of history, migration, and what cannot be contained in one tongue. Form has grown with me because I trust it more now to be hybrid, intuitive, disobedient. My life has moved through languages, cities, and literary traditions; the poems do the same. I want form alive enough to hold fracture and music, documentary and dream.

That movement between fracture and dream makes me think of the formal restlessness of LION. You move through zuihitsu, lyric, documentary fragments, mythology, reportage, dream logic, and recurring visual motifs. How did you find the forms the book needed? Did fragmentation arise from the material itself, or from something closer to haunting and recurrence?

Tina Chang: There were two anchoring poems in the collection and they happen to be lengthier forms. One genre is the zuihitsu which translates from Japanese and means, “following the brush.” It’s akin to a stream of consciousness that embraces essays, poems, to do lists, emails, texts. I found this genre to be freeing yet disciplined. It offers a sense of meandering but it does hold a gravitational center. The Asian American female experience couldn’t be held in a strict form so the zuihitsu provided liberation. The second anchoring poem is a pecha kucha called “Tangle” that collaborates with Hong Chun Zhang’s visual art. Her ink paintings focus on varying emotional, familial, and political interpretations of hair. Here, the Japanese pecha kucha form encompasses twenty slides/images for twenty seconds. I responded to each image to build a long poem incrementally and this scaffolding created its own life force. 

I love your work with character. You say, “A man should know the distances between himself and home.” Can you explore this idea?

Nathalie Handal:  I’m interested in distance not only as geography but as consciousness: the distance between who we believe ourselves to be and what we do, between impulse and consequence, the self and its own truth. In Roma Roam, home is also integrity—a center within the self where one remains answerable to love, care, one’s own humanity. A man should know when he has strayed too far from that center, from the courage love asks of us. Sometimes the deepest exile is from who we might have been, had we known how to stay.

Perhaps another aspect of distance is hunger, which feels like a powerful current in LION—not only desire or grief, but a kind of famine of safety, recognition, belonging. Was hunger one of the book’s central engines from the start?

Tina Chang: I love how you phrase it, “famine of safety,” and that’s exactly right. In LION, hunger signals desire, seeking, a sojourn to find out what one is hungry for. Since LION is largely a myth, I’m not speaking of hunger for food or for materiality. Hunger is a story and a pathway to understanding human need and the lengths to which people will go to satiate themselves. When we speak of survival of the fittest, we are referencing strength, hierarchy, dominance as much as we are referencing caregiving, nourishment, community, and resilience. What the speaker is hungry for is the desire for visibility, free from judgement, gender bias, pursuit and brutality. In our current culture, to be seen is to face conflict, violence, and erasure. The ultimate hunger is to be safely seen. 

To be emotionally seen feels so central to Roma Roam. There is not only a personal rupture but also an infidelity that touches language, place, and history. How does infidelity function in the book?

Nathalie Handal: Infidelity interests me because it makes certainty impossible. The lover becomes strange, the past changes tense, memory becomes unreliable. But there is another infidelity in Roma Roam: to belong to several worlds, alphabets, and intimacies at once is to refuse the fantasy of a single allegiance. Rome understands this—it preserves and betrays its own past everywhere you look. The book doesn’t ask whether betrayal can or should be forgiven. It asks what betrayal reveals—about pleasure, power, the stories we tell ourselves to remain inside love. Perhaps the deepest infidelity is not to another person, but to the truth we already know.

If betrayal alters the past, LION makes me think about poetry’s relationship to the future. The speaker says, “We are, all of us, running toward the future,” and artist Hồng-Ân Trương writes, “The future is now.” How does time move through this collection, and what does an Asian American future mean to you?

Tina Chang: The future is a construct and a dream. It’s an invented idea that offers us consolation and hope, a way to build the present out of something unknown. Encountering Astria Suparak’s artwork showed me the face of an Asian American future from the perspective of white media and filmmakers who often envision a future complete with pseudo Asian iconography and even non-Asian actors playing roles intended for characters of Asian descent. Suparak’s work comments on these fabricated realms of future time, based on stereotypes.  I wanted to approach the poems in LION both domestically and mythically. As the book moves toward the future and the final poem, “Always More Than One of Us,” there is no more pursuit or threat of danger. In the future where we are mirrored in our own likeness, multiplied, and dictating our own outcome, we are safe.

As a global citizen—a Palestinian, Mediterranean writer shaped by the Caribbean, Latin America, Southern Europe, and Asia—you’ve lived amidst unimaginable destruction as well as extraordinary survival. What do you think we’re surviving, and what does it take to survive? When so much is being lost, how do you reach for beauty?

Nathalie Handal: We are surviving disappearance. We make archives of beauty: a poem, a gesture, a street remembered, a body loved. To make beauty in the presence of loss is to say: this, too, existed; this, too, remains. Perhaps beauty is what disappearance leaves unfinished.

Tina Chang: Yes, to survive is to be called to dream beyond erasure. When the body is restricted, surveilled, or threatened, it’s the mind that can mend the spirit and that’s what feeds us and offers us the intention to live fully, without bounds. The imagination strives relentlessly to be free. 

Tell me I am real, place your lens there.

Ensure I am rooted as safely as a gardenia,

in the aftermath of our intentions. My footprint 

steps on the neck of these tides, my grip 

shivers against the camera, a shutter moves 

with a candid eye and captures me so vividly.

The light never held me willingly, 

a participant, a gasp. When you find me, 

make sure to tell me I’m the subject. 

Simple sounds ring and record. Tell me 

who took a pen to detail the secrets of the past. 

I am the one riding through the machine, all 

the subtle parts that murmured appear now 

full of fury. I am destined for the earth, 

a ball of fire, dropping like coal into the sea, 

all the parts of me once hidden, now diamond

precious, a light to be caught. Little spark, 

little spark, call me by my name.