The Swans of Harlem

Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History

Karen Valby
Pantheon ($29)

Karen Valby’s compelling new history tells the forgotten story of Dance Theatre of Harlem, a Black ballet company that gave dancers of color the opportunity to perform and star when most doors in the industry were closed to them. Formed in 1968 by Arthur Mitchell after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the company was soon performing around the world, playing before Queen Elizabeth II and David Bowie and meeting celebrities like Mick Jagger. Celebrated as groundbreaking dancers at the time, DTH is not widely known today. During the pandemic, five of the company’s founding ballerinas reunited for regular Zoom sessions to reminisce and share their legacy with the world; Valby’s book compiles their stories.

Although all five dancers shared a love for ballet, each came from different backgrounds. Lydia Abarca grew up in the New York housing projects, having abandoned any hopes of actually performing. Sheila Rohan, from Staten Island, initially lied about her age (she was twenty-eight) and claimed she had no children in order to join the company; when she finally told Mitchell, he gave her a slight raise and was more lenient if she showed up late. Gayle McKinney-Griffith, the daughter of a mechanical engineer, grew up in suburban Connecticut; she would later become the company’s ballet mistress. Marcia Sells was from an elite Black community in Cincinnati whose family hosted DTH when they were on tour. Karlya Shelton-Benjamin, the only Black dancer in the Colorado Concert Ballet, was inspired to join DTH after seeing Abarca on the cover of Dance Magazine.

These ballerinas worked incredibly hard both on and off-stage. On tour, they would have to unload their own equipment from the bus and often prepared makeshift stages by pouring soda on the floors to make them sticky. They learned how to dye their ballet shoes and tights brown, experimenting to find shades that suited each of them.

Mitchell was a fiercely demanding personality, pushing the dancers to perfection; he was also verbally abusive, frequently berating the dancers about their weight. On one tour, he sniffed at each dancers’ hotel room door to tell who was baking their complimentary pastries. He also drove away board members and advisors who dared suggest improvements to his vision; despite his talent and ambition, he was his own worst enemy. Yet Mitchell worked well with children, letting the neighborhood kids take lessons in their street clothes, showing them how dance techniques could help them jump higher in basketball, and breaking down street dances into ballet moves.

Valby goes into great detail about the five dancers, even presenting entire chapters in their own words. Abarca, however, seems to be the main character of the book. It makes sense, as she was the “star” of DTH and her story is one of the most dramatic. After leaving the company, she taught Michael Jackson the moves for the movie version of The Wiz; following her dance career, she married and took administrative jobs, falling into alcoholism before her daughter helped her back to sobriety. Indeed, The Swans of Harlem begins with Abarca’s granddaughter confused after a school presentation where classmates honored current ballet star Misty Copeland, wondering if the stories she had heard about her grandmother’s pioneering performances were true. By spending so much time on Abarca, the book almost unwillingly turns her into a Copeland figure, a lone history-making woman, whereas the dancers of DTH shaped history as a group.

The bond between these women, even decades later, is powerful to witness. In several Zoom sessions, Abarca shares deeply personal stories, including of having an abortion in 1968 and of Mitchell once kissing her after an event. When the others are asked if they felt resentment for Abarca getting so many of the lead roles and being Mitchell’s clear favorite, they defend her, knowing it was not her intention to steal their thunder. There is also frank acknowledgement that Mitchell preferred lighter-skinned and thinner dancers; even while he wanted to promote and celebrate Black dancers, he was influenced by traditional white ballet.

In 2008, DTH went on hiatus for five years due to financial difficulties. During this time, publicity heightened around Misty Copeland as a groundbreaking Black ballerina, which contributed to the company becoming forgotten. (The dancers and Copeland meet at several events, and while Copeland gratefully acknowledges them and the dancers are gracious about her stardom, some awkwardness and resentment is evident.) The five dancers contemplate other reasons for their erasure as well, noting the tendency many women have to downplay their talents and how Mitchell encouraged them to consider their individual accomplishments as the company’s.

Well-researched and written with an easy, flowing style, The Swans of Harlem gives a platform to these talented women who have been hidden for too long. It also raises questions about race, gender, and publicity in the arts, and reminds us that even now, few dancers of color belong to U.S. ballet companies.

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Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Our Long Marvelous Dying

Anna DeForest
Little, Brown ($28)

by Xi Chen

In the opening pages of Anna DeForest’s sophomore novel Our Long Marvelous Dying, the nameless narrator, a first-year palliative care fellow at a hospital in Manhattan, speaks to a patient who claims to have psychic visions. The patient, bedbound and dying of pancreatic cancer, sees “disaster” and “catastrophe” in the world, but when asked about his future, he is afraid to look: “I want only one thing, he tells me, but I already know what it is. He wants to live forever.” But the narrator, with the aid of medical science, can envision the future too: “He will suffer a lot, and then he will die.”

This isn’t the first time DeForest has set fiction in the medical world. Their first novel, A History of Present Illness (Little, Brown, 2022), is a tale about the trials of medical school and residency told by a narrator “raised with a reverence for catastrophe.” That narrator makes a telling comment: “This fascination with disaster, both fear and fetish, I never quite outgrew. The truth is, you start to sort of wish for it.” Similarly, the narrator of Our Long Marvelous Dying trains “to be an expert in pain unto death,” surrounded at every moment by patients at the end even as the television reports pandemic deaths continuing to snowball and a cyclone hitting New York, drowning tenants in basement apartments.

But why do some people pursue a medical subspecialty always surrounded by death? This question is often levied at people going into palliative care, which prioritizes minimizing suffering over curing disease—often but not always in patients with terminal illnesses. For many, the field of palliative care means escaping, at least to some degree, the plagues of academic medicine: elitist medical students, bigoted doctors, and detachment from the lived experiences of patients. Others may have a spiritual calling, or like DeForest’s narrator, they may be seeking spiritual enlightenment themselves. As a chaplain “from a line of monks who follow in the steps of the great Buddhist saints and meditate in the charnel grounds in India” says in the novel’s last chapter, “If you get through the morning forgetting that you will die . . . the morning has been wasted.”

While DeForest’s narrator may be looking for a deeper understanding of death, however, what they find instead is PR. During orientation, the fellows are given a lecture about “talking points, branding, an early introduction to the field’s bad rap.” The problem, the lecturer claims, “is all this talk about dying. The public does not want to hear about death. Lead with life, she says, lead with what you have to offer.” The fellows are instructed to avoid words like “Hospice,” “End-of-Life,” and “Terminal Illness,” which are “too aversively death-oriented and therefore unattractive” to patients and their families.

Medical bureaucracy’s penchant for sanitizing language and “burying the lede, elevating the plus side so patients will be willing to talk to us” is the villain of DeForest’s fiction, and it rears its ugly head throughout the book. Providers shield themselves with clinical lingo; for instance, the palliative nephrologist who observes the narrator question a patient about his metaphysical visions asks, “What was the therapeutic intent?” Many characters use gallows humor; after declaring a patient dead, a nurse practitioner laughs. “I used to have nightmares that my patients would die, she says. But now I have nightmares that they will not!”

Author Danielle Spencer, a scholar of narrative medicine, has written that the medical training tale is typically a quest narrative in which new trainees lose their idealism during the demanding rite of passage to becoming a doctor, until a “humbling and epiphanic experience about the essential humanity of doctors and patients” changes them and allows them to “practice medicine with greater empathy and caring.” DeForest’s novels are unique in the world of medical fiction in that they leave out this final redemptive step. Many patient encounters are described in Our Long Marvelous Dying, but not once does the narrator perform an action that substantially helps patients in any way. If they grow, it is not in clinical acumen but rather in helplessness and vulnerability, since patient encounters are frequently used as springboards for unearthing fragments of the narrator’s past traumas.

Perhaps that is the point: the all-knowing physician only exists in the imagination. DeForest has no interest in showing their narrator being a healthcare hero, a figure whose illusory omnipotence comes from the assumption that clinical work is unambiguously empirical rather than interpretative. The narrator muses that if a doctor’s role is to save lives, then every life-saving act by a doctor is necessarily a failure because we all die. Medical crises frustrate patients and their families because seeing doctors appear powerless to help them can indeed feel like being abandoned by an uncaring god.

Existential despair about this absence of authority under the weight of the medical sublime suffuses DeForest’s work. In A History of Present Illness, the narrator contemplates theodicies in the hospital and has long conversations about early Christianity with a seminarian. In Our Long Marvelous Dying, the narrator continuously ruminates on the missing male figures in their personal life: the sudden death of their bigoted father, the disappearance of their brother into drug rehab, and their increasing distance from their possibly cheating husband Eli, who is also a pastor. Where DeForest’s debut explored academic medicine’s obsession with absolution as an analog to Christianity, however, Our Long Marvelous Dying finds a religious parallel to palliative care in Buddhism and its interest in the worldly attachments responsible for human suffering.

After witnessing a series of deaths near the start of their fellowship, the narrator escapes upstate for several weekend trips to a monastery—one where nuns and monks have names like Sister Empathy and Brother Emptiness and speak only in Vietnamese. It immediately feels like home, the narrator says. Among strangers all traumatized by recent losses, the narrator can shake the role of doctor and become an anonymous listener in communion with others. One visitor has lost his son to suicide; another reveals that she’s been diagnosed with cancer and is awaiting surgery. When it’s the narrator’s turn to unload, they simply state, “I am taking a break from work.”

In an essay titled “Narrative Medicine and Negative Capability,” physician-writer Terence Holt argues that the dominant mode of public medical writing has been confessional: Atul Gawande admitting he botched a procedure in The New Yorker in 2011, for example, or Jerome Groopman atoning for missing a fatal diagnosis in her 2007 book How Doctors Think. Here, DeForest’s narrator refuses to confess. One could read this as evidence that the narrator has been rendered apathetic by their work, or worse, that they’re a parasite, only interested in collecting other people’s stories. Even when seeing a therapist, the narrator admits that they “avoided any self-disclosures; I turned all of our talks onto him . . . his time in finance, brief work as a Baptist pastor.” But the reader has a different relationship with the narrator, who is constantly revealing aspects of their personal lives to us, including the “same tearing pain in the chest” that comes with every patient’s death. So, why doesn’t the doctor weep?

On their first day working in a clinic outside the hospital, the narrator meets a patient known as a “splitter,” a person whose judgments fall into stark binaries of good and evil. “I tend to fall on splitters’ good sides,” the narrator notes, “a tendency that points to something I know is wrong with my character: I allow too much.” The splitter has been treating her lung cancer with essential oils, and at a later visit reveals that she’s an anti-vaxxer, an anti-masker, a chem-trail believer, and a 9/11 truther. The narrator begins to “listen with two ears, two minds, one for what is real and one for what is true.” They become afraid of the splitter, to the point of canceling upcoming appointments. “She has shown me something strange inside of me,” the narrator explains, “a wound shaped like distrust and disgust and familiarity.”

Later, when the narrator hears that the splitter has died, they hardly seem fazed at all. This negative capability, or the ability to tolerate an ego divided by uncertainty, is the true endgame for both medical training and writing: It’s a way of being that allows humans to endure the daily assault of death, be it in our families, in the news, or in the dying person who needs care if you’re a medical professional—all while thinking about one’s own life and past traumas without breaking down. DeForest aims to cultivate this negative capability in the reader through their driven, elliptical prose, which even within one paragraph can shift from the practical details of organ donation to the emotional resonance of childhood trauma and calls to family members informing them of their loved one’s death. Among the most risk-taking American physician-writers working today, DeForest nimbly toes the line between fact and fiction until we find some footing in our mortality.

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Fiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

A Minnesota Book(ish) Miscellany

An essential reference for any booklover!

46 pp, perfect bound
published 2024

Minnesota is famous as a haven for literary genius. In this miscellany, you’ll find many of the puzzle pieces that explain why—from eclectic lists to booksellers of uncommon distinction to a writers hall of fame, this compilation is guaranteed to inform, annoy, and delight!

$10 plus $4 shipping (Domestic U.S.)

$10 plus $10 shipping (International)

About the Compiler:

Chris Barsanti is a writer, editor, and consultant. He is the author of several books including Six Seasons and a Movie: How Community Broke Television (co-written with Brian Cogan and Jeff Massey) and the creator of The Writer’s Year Page-A-Day Calendar 2025. A member of National Book Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society, Barsanti writes on the semi-regular for Publishers Weekly, The Minnesota Star Tribune, Slant Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and PopMatters. He also writes about movies at Eyes Wide Open and has been published in places such as the Chicago Tribune, In These Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Millions.

Who's Afraid of Gender?

Judith Butler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($30)

by John M. Fredericks

During a 2017 conference in Brazil that Judith Butler helped organize, a group of protestors burned the world-famous philosopher in effigy. They claimed that Butler’s work threatened to dissolve the meaning of gender and undercut cultural values, responding to ideas presented more than twenty-five years earlier in Butler’s career-defining book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990). Amidst the constant oversimplification of the book’s arguments outside academia, Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, has been maligned by many in the conservative movement, often unfairly cast as a feminist agitator out to destroy concepts like biological determinism not only at UC Berkeley where they teach, but around the world.

In their latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler addresses the general public as one of the leading thinkers in gender studies: They attempt to reclaim their own work, reposition themself within public discourse, and advocate for the rights of transgender and genderqueer people. Butler wants to understand how the term “gender” has come to represent all that is evil, malignant, and subversive in popular culture, as well as how national governments, political parties, and sometimes even other feminists are attempting to erase the rights of others.

For Butler, the term “gender” has become a phantasm, an emotionally charged and misdirected catch-all used to incite fears, both psychological and material, about the world around us. Butler argues that “this phantasm, understood as a psychosocial phenomenon, is a site where intimate fears and anxieties become socially organized to incite political passions.” Showing how this phantasm morphs into an “anti-gender ideology movement” around the world, Butler maps how gender has become weaponized to “call for the elimination of gender education, the censorship of texts concerned with gender, and the disenfranchisement or criminalization of transgender or genderqueer people.”

Butler’s previous works on gender can be hard to understand; their poststructuralist approach leads to occasionally impenetrable prose and a style of reasoning that is, perhaps intentionally, difficult to parse. Butler seems to be aware of this critique, however, and Who’s Afraid of Gender? is clearly written for a wider audience. Especially in the first half of the book, Butler tries to be as approachable as possible in discussing the phantasmatic effects of gender studies, using a vast constellation of research across disciplines to describe it in various contexts. The first four chapters take on global politics, the Vatican, attacks on gender studies in the United States, and the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County.

In each of these chapters, Butler presents arguments against gender studies, then uses their expert command of rhetoric to provide detailed counterpoints to (and contradictions in) the logic of the anti-gender movement. Readers might wish at moments for a more structured argument; while the phantasmatic interplay between the fears surrounding gender studies and the material consequences for transgender and genderqueer people around the world is important, Butler sometimes employs straw man arguments to stand in for entities trying to restrict our ideas about gender. This polemical approach leads Butler into uneven territory, appealing to a wider audience at the cost of complexity.

Nowhere is Butler’s argument more impassioned and polemical than when discussing trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and the movement’s attempt to contain gender under a narrow definition of biological sex. In their chapter on TERFs, Butler runs through the argument that biological sex is immutable and that transgender people, specifically those assigned male at birth, are a threat to society, taking advantage of the gender spectrum to visit violence upon women in bathrooms. Butler invokes author J.K. Rowling, an outspoken TERF in British cultural discourse, and weaves a fascinating argument about the symbol of the penis, patriarchal frameworks of being, and the need to disavow TERFs as anything but feminists: “Feminism has always been a struggle for justice, or is, at its best, precisely such a struggle, formed in alliance and affirming difference. Trans-exclusionary feminism is not feminism or, rather, should not be.” This is an important argument for Butler, because the term “alliance” is central to their argument throughout the book. According to Butler, instead of casting gender as a nightmarish phantasm that negates transgender and genderqueer people’s lived experience, feminism should be allying with everyone who investigates how gender as a framework for social, historical, and cultural discourse can help us understand our material existence.

The most interesting chapters in Who’s Afraid of Gender? come directly after Butler’s discussion of TERFs. In these chapters, Butler investigates the idea of biological sex as immutable, which forms the intellectual and ideological basis for most arguments against transgender identity and expression. Here, Butler seems to be doing a bit of rehabilitation of their arguments in Gender Trouble. They argue that biological sex and gender are not opposite ends of the spectrum, as though biology is only immutable and gender is only performative, but that both biology and the term “gender” (a troubling word that is not easily translated in every language) are products of a set of cultural processes, forever entangled. This entanglement forms the basis for how we understand both biological sex and gender in our particular social and historical moment in time; nature and culture, the environment and the body, dialectically create the processes by which we understand ourselves. As Butler writes:

The “environment” is, thus, not just “over there” at a distance from our bodies. We take in the environment as it takes us up and the environment is fundamentally altered by human interventions and extractions—and climate change is a stark testimony to how those interventions can become destructive. None of us can be formed without a set of interventions, and those external impingements become the conditions of our emergence; they become part of who we are, intrinsic to our forms of becoming, which follow no one trajectory.

Passages like this abound in the book’s later chapters; the ease with which Butler is able to present an entire field of research and apply it to another, equally complicated, field to draw conclusions about our lived experiences prompts some of the most satisfying moments in the book. Whether discussing biological sex, feminist materialism, marxist ideology, colonial power, racial theory, climate change, or the nature/culture dichotomy, Butler displays a remarkable clarity and nuance.

While the reader gets the sense throughout Who’s Afraid of Gender? that one of Butler’s main objectives is to encourage feminists to seek alliances with anyone fighting for social justice, this plea to open up the tent and encompass multiple lived experiences is also what complicates the book. Butler’s ability to tackle so many topics—some of which seem only tacitly connected to the gender debate—can make this volume both challenging and rewarding. An important work within Butler’s own canon and the field of gender studies as a whole, Who’s Afraid of Gender? will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on cultural discourse.

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Book Review, Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

JEFFREY BROWN

Saturday, November 2, 4:00 pm
Lake Monster Brewing
550 Vandalia St, St Paul, MN 55114
Download a flyer for this event!

This event is free and open to the public and a reception will follow!

Join us for some afternoon fun with the Eisner Award-winning, New York Times bestselling cartoonist Jeffrey Brown, who will treat us to a presentation on his new release this fall: Kids Are Still Weird And More Observations from Parenthood. In this book for readers of all ages, Brown offers sweet and surreal anecdotes from his life as a parent, comics that capture how curious, hilarious, and yes, weird, kids can be. When he was a kid, Jeffrey dreamed of growing up to draw comics for a living, and now he’s living that dream! Don’t miss this afternoon of fun with a comics legend. Book sales of Kids Are Still Weird and other titles by Jeffrey Brown will be available onsite thanks to Red Balloon Bookshop, and Brown will sign books in a reception after his presentation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffrey Brown is the bestselling author of the Darth Vader and Son and Jedi Academy series, as well as numerous other books, including middle grade comics (his Lucy & Andy Neanderthal was 40,000 years in the making), humorous superhero books (most recently Batman and Robin and Howard), relatable observational comics (Cats Are Weird), adult graphic memoirs (Clumsy, Unlikely), irreverent parodies (Incredible Change-Bots), and imaginative tributes (My Teacher Is A Robot).

Until August

Gabriel García Márquez
Translated by Anne McLean
Knopf ($22)

by Emil Siekkinen

Until August, a book often described as Gabriel García Márquez’s “lost novel,” was published this past March, an instant bestseller in countries around the world. The novel was never lost, however; it was abandoned by the author. The quality of the text has thus been debated—as it should be—but its mere presence in a career that includes international fame for the 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 surely calls readers to ponder both its story and its backstory.

García Márquez (1927-2014) was afflicted by dementia during his final years, and eventually he couldn’t recognize what he himself had written. The author’s last major effort turned out to be the 2002 autobiography Living to Tell the Tale, which he had intended to be the first in a trilogy, as it didn’t even reach the middle of his life. The last book of fiction he saw to publication in his lifetime was the 2005 novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

Work on that novella led García Márquez to shelve a longer, more ambitious novel he had begun; already feeling the effects of dementia, he felt it wasn’t cohering. He stated that the unfinished text should never be published, and actually that it should be destroyed. His sons, however, went against their father’s wishes in the name of posterity; drafts, notes, and chapter fragments, spread over 769 pages, ended up in an archive—the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—where the material was given the name “We’ll see each other in August.”

Nearly ten years later, the author’s sons decided to betray their father once again: Believing the unfinished text contained some noteworthy literary achievements, they tasked editor Cristóbal Pera, who had worked on Living to Tell the Tale, with compiling a publishable narrative from the archived material. Until August was released on what would have been the author’s 97th birthday, March 6, 2024, nearly ten years after his passing.

Until August is certainly recognizable to those who know the Colombian author’s works. The narrative bears resemblance to the stories in Strange Pilgrims (1992), written in the 1970s and 1980s, and to Memories of My Melancholy Whores. But while these fictions were authored by a master in complete control of his craft, Until August is uneven. At times, the book offers outstanding sentences and surroundings that live and breathe:

The tumultuous market bazaars, which she’d claimed as her own since she was a little girl and where just the previous week she had been shopping with her daughter without the slightest fear, made her shudder as if she were in the streets of Calcutta, where gangs of garbage collectors used sticks to hit the bodies lying on the sidewalks at dawn, to find out which ones were sleeping and which were dead.

Likewise, the protagonist, Ana Magdalena Bach, is filled with the contradictions of being human; as one example, she yearns for yearly one-night stands on the island where her mother is buried, yet these encounters bring not only pleasure, but also anger, grief, and confusion. Elsewhere, however, the text is thinner and unpolished, and the abrupt ending confirms that Until August is definitely an unfinished piece of fiction. The theme might be love—something his sons argue is his main subject—or it might be solitude, which García Márquez himself claimed was his writing’s main preoccupation.

So is the book worth the betrayal? Until August doesn’t display a master in his prime, but it does offer a master class in how a narrative is composed: We watch as García Márquez gives up and continues, fails and succeeds. Here he struggles with a murky passage; there he writes a sentence as bright as the sun. These are moments in a writer’s life that the reading public rarely sees.

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Book Review, Fiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Myth-Making Our Own Selves: An Interview with Milo Wippermann

by Will Corwin

The recipient of a 2023 Whiting Award in Poetry and Drama, Milo Wippermann (previously Emma Wippermann) has updated the story of Joan of Arc for the age of social media in their riveting debut book, Joan of Arkansas (Ugly Duckling Presse, $20). Formally, the book is an inventive hybrid, mixing playwrighting, poetry, and fiction into a book-length narrative that carries all the weight of the mythic figure it interrogates. Thematically, Wippermann does not shy away from unpacking Joan’s own failings, especially vis-a-vis warmongering and power; they also explore Joan’s story from the fertile ground of a trans interpretation (the book is currently a finalist for the 2024 Lambda Prize in LGBTQ+ Drama) and as a way to investigate contemporary social dilemmas, from the machinations of internet discourse and political propaganda to the climate crisis.

Will Corwin: What’s fascinating about using the story of Joan of Arc as a playwriting project is that the trial exists as a transcript already. There are a bunch of artistic precedents as well: the 1923 play Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw, Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, and plenty more in the century since. How much were you thinking about this canon as you wrote Joan of Arkansas?

Milo Wippermann: I’d add to that list Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1929-31) and the 1953 play The Lark by Jean Anouilh. The Lark was a critical text for me both because of its form and because Anouilh played with the image of the dove, a big part of Joan’s mythology; apparently, as Joan was being burned at the stake, soldiers saw a dove emerge from the flames and fly to the sky. Anouilh turned it into a lark, and rewrote Joan’s story as a bleak, postwar comedy.

So thinking about the genealogy of texts, it felt preposterous to write yet another play about Joan of Arc—and I learned a play came out in the UK a couple of years ago that is also about a trans Joan of Arc. But my feeling was, well, the Joan that we need right now is trans, and they would also be talking about war and climate change. Then while I was mashing up historical representations of Joan, I realized I wanted to mash them up with Greta Thunberg—both are figures that lack a certain nuance, just because of how visibility in the social sphere works. It took a lot of research, which at a certain point just had to stop—I felt I needed to focus on “my” Joan. That said, much of the work’s structure and moves were borrowed from other writers; the important ones are listed in the acknowledgements in the back of the book.

WC: Social media comes up often in Joan of Arkansas—for example, you constantly refer to Joan’s hand as a selfie stick. How do you see social media as a vehicle of spiritual dissemination? Do you see it as something that’s capable of that?

MW: Well, no. But I was interested in the idea of them going viral. Medieval Joan became famous by word of mouth, and I liked the contemporary parallel.

Unrelatedly, I should also point out that the historical Joan obviously used she/her pronouns, while in my book, Joan is a they/them. I think most of the engagement with the book has focused on climate change and the social media elements, but it’s very much also about trans identity. I recently saw an entry about Joan of Arkansas in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas online—it’s somehow catalogued there!—and there was a close reading of the text and thoughtful summaries of the different components, but it totally omitted anything about gender. Perhaps it’s interesting that someone could read this book and go past that—I did want it to be a bit of a Trojan horse in that way—but to omit talking about it entirely is a little weird.

WC: You also play with the pronouns of God: Joan has a sneaky way of addressing this by using neutral pronouns for God, arguing to the priest that “they” is accurate because the angels are plural.

MW: It’s playing with the idea of the Trinity, because Catholicism is kind of a polytheistic religion. The idea of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and all the saints, and the various angels and the devil—it’s a very rich world of many characters and aspects, but the doctrine is there’s only one God. I liked the idea of a nonbinary god that uses they/them, or rather They/Them pronouns—in the last section of the book, Joan asks Adrienne if it is sinful for them to use the same pronouns as God, and Adrienne says only if you capitalize them.

But to return to social media: for the plot, it seemed like a good way to convey what happened to the historical Joan. There were prophecies going around at that time that a peasant girl would save France, and as soon as Joan started to do anything, these stories proliferated: Bards sang about her and her battles, and she became really famous, a true phenomenon—but in a medieval way, through song and myth. There’s also a funny interaction that she had with another mystic—Joan was like, this lady’s a quack, she’s not the real deal—so there was that kind of competition as well. Our social media landscape isn’t that much different, except instead of bards and storytellers, we’re all myth-making our own selves. It’s like Don Quixote in that way. And then: Did Joan become famous for spreading spirituality or truth? No. Joan was famous for winning battles, for warmongering. Also: If teenage Joan was able to gain access to power and to crown Charles VII king of France because of the storytelling technologies of the fifteenth century, how would that happen today? Obviously with social media—so that was my entry point.

WC: How do you think social media has affected poetry?

MW: Not well—I think some people write poems now that look good in a square. It just seems like a shame to think in that way and to cater to that kind of reduced attention span. I feel like a bit of a Luddite, but I think social media and its algorithms are doing what capitalism wants them to do, and I am interested in working outside of that. But then, for instance, Instagram is flooded with the poems of Palestinian writers, and that is really cool; it’s beautiful that people are sharing these poems. When the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer was killed in December of 2023, his poetry was rightfully all over Instagram, but there was also a video circulating with an AI version of his voice reading his work, because someone trained AI to mimic his voice from different speeches that he had given—and I find that to be atrocious. Israel is using AI to bomb Gaza, and now AI is animating Refaat Alareer? I think things like ChatGPT and algorithmic social media are ways of habituating artists and writers to war-making technologies. There is money behind it because people are interested in war and domination.

I’ve also noticed that some writers are starting to use AI uncritically, but we can’t use this kind of technology uncritically because it is currently killing people. There’s no separation, and using it to write poems doesn’t make it any less evil. I wanted to use social media in the book and have it not seem innocent.

WC: Your Joan is positioned against Charles VII, the governor of Arkansas, who is clearly evil. They then go viral, and have 200 million followers—I think Taylor Swift probably has at least that many, if not more—it seems so of our time, yet it’s this idea of wielding influence in the same way that Joan of Arc did six centuries ago.

MW: Totally. And then what, Joan was still killed? She was still killed. Joan crowned Charles VII king in 1429, and he then betrayed her and condoned the English putting her on trial, because he was sick of her. In my book, all the followers stand by and watch as Charles VII, governor of Arkansas, reneges on every single promise to end oil drilling and give reparations, and Joan is institutionalized. People think you can wield actual power through social media, fame, and influence, as if you’re actually engaging in political action if you repost something, but it’s a false kind of power—notoriety isn’t power. Or at least not the kind that lasts.

WC: In Joan of Arkansas you call climate change “The Warmth.” What was the idea behind that?

MW: I was really influenced by Daniel Sherrell’s book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Throughout the book, instead of using the term climate change, he calls it “the problem.” I thought it was a brilliant way to engage this thing that defeats all language. Language is constantly being used against itself—it’s hard to speak if one’s language is constantly taken and then mutilated or made to mean other things. In the early months of the pandemic, for instance, a lot of anti-maskers were saying “I can’t breathe” to complain about mask restrictions, and that was right after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. They’re co-opting that language for masks? How do you even say anything after that? With climate change, I feel people hear that phrase and zone out immediately. The framing is wrong.

WC: It’s euphemistic.

MW: The climate always changes. Right now, I’m reading a book called Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen, and it goes through the history of North America, starting with the Bering Strait. People came to this continent through a series of climate changes; “climate change” means too much and too little. In writing Joan of Arkansas I wanted to find language that would feel visceral—Sherrell used “the problem,” but I wanted it to feel even more bodily—hence “The Warmth.” Finding new language is important, especially if language keeps being co-opted or euphemized. Really, that’s the job of writers: to invent more and more language. There should be so much language that it can’t all be used against us.

WC: I was recently reading your poem “The Fall.” Do you have a specific interest in discussing religion or Catholicism or sacred texts?

MW: That’s a really old poem! I wrote that in college. I think our country is deeply religious and not spiritual—we live in a fundamentalist society. The religion I was most indoctrinated into, and thus am well versed in, is Catholicism (I went to Catholic school for eight years), but in future projects, I would like to veer away from Catholicism and into fundamentalist Christian movements. These stories have been used against us for so long, but I believe they can also be reclaimed and retold. They have to be looked at anew because they are part of our collective consciousness. And a lot of it is really beautiful. I find Catholicism particularly weird and sexy and creepy—it’s bodily, there’s cannibalism . . .

WC: And the fetishization of pain . . .

MW: Totally. It’s a really carnal religion that has been sanitized over and over again in different ways. Also just aesthetically, I’m interested in it. In the book, the character “Mom of Joan” is not super into Joan’s religiosity, but she figures if Joan has to choose something, go Catholic—if you’re gonna go Christian, go hard or go home.

WC: What other poets do you look to for inspiration, or just in general?

MW: When I started writing poems, Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, and Adrienne Rich were all important to me. More recently, Douglas Kearney and Don Mee Choi, and also poets who are in my social circles: Asiya Wadud is brilliant.

WC: What are you working on next?

MW: I’m halfway through a novel. Joan of Arkansas was, in a lot of ways, a study on how to write plot, because previously I’d only written poems that were a page long at most. So I’m working on a novel about climate change and queerness and a love affair between two siblings. I want to have enough juicy stuff in it that people will stay for the climate grief. I’m also working on another play, or rather, an actual play this time. I’m kind of surprised at how much I loved writing in that form.

After the experience of a recent nine-actor reading of Joan of Arkansas, I’m never going to write the same way again. The playscript I’m working on now is of a very different scale. I think there will be three characters, and one of them is a hotshot firefighter (I can’t get away from fire and climate apparently). “Hotshot” is an actual term: there are teams of firefighters who travel across the country and fight the worst wildfires. In 2013, there was a tragedy in which nineteen people from one of these hotshot crews died in a fire; only one crew member escaped. Fires have gotten so hot that the technologies that are supposed to keep these people safe are not working. There are also the ethics of putting out fires: We should be doing more controlled burns. Anyway, I can talk about it for hours.

WC: You make Joan a firefighter at the end of Joan of Arkansas.

MW: Yeah, I’m obsessed. I’m almost like, do I really need to write another firefighter? But I think it’s a way of trying to make people care about it, because people mostly want to look away. On the subway the other day, I saw a poster advertising an exhibition of work from the 1970s to the present about environmental destruction, and I had a panic attack and had to get off the train a stop early. I can’t understand how everyone else seems fine. I kind of wish I could be fine too, but also not, because the house is on fire.

Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

A Year of Last Things

Michael Ondaatje
Knopf ($28)

by Bill Tremblay

T.S. Eliot famously said: “The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” One of the many pleasures in reading Michael Ondaatje’s new collection, A Year of Last Things, is discovering how he fictionalizes his. One senses a real first person in the poems, and not merely because he uses “I” in some poems and in the prose near the end of the book. But the voice here is largely a special third person capable of being intimate and objective at once. These poems are by Ondaatje but not about him in any limited autobiographical sense, except perhaps when he’s writing about writing; thus they evoke a poetics of the transpersonal, leaving a wake reminiscent of Dickinson’s “zero at the bone.”

This poetics takes shape thanks to Ondaatje’s ability to reach for emotional connections through objects cherished for their talismanic power to evoke the beloved. Take the volume’s opening poem, “Lock”:

Reading the lines he loves
he slips them into a pocket,
wishes to die with his clothes
full of torn-free stanzas
and the telephone numbers
of his children in far cities.

The lines carry us forward until we “reach that horizon . . . where you might see your friends.” The poem continues:

How I loved that lock when I saw it
all those summers ago,
when we arrived
out of a storm into its evening light,
and gave a stranger some wine
in a tin cup
Even then I wanted
to slip into the wet dark
rectangle and swim on
barefoot to other depths
where nothing could be seen
that was a further story.

“Lock” establishes not only the book’s jump-cut cinematic style but also its romantic sensibility. Ondaatje is all about asking what’s important in life—friendships, encounters, flirtations, intimacies. His feeling for language is set out in “Definition,” which begins “All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundred/pages of a Sanskrit dictionary”; as he wanders down this path, he brings words, vowels, and accents to

light
from that distant village
reflected in a cloud,
or your lover’s face lit
by the moonlight on a stage
Landscapes nudge the dialect.
In far places travellers know
a faint gesture can mean
desire or scorn,
just as
a sliver of a phrase thrown away
hides charms within its grammar

Throughout A Year of Last Things, Ondaatje montages stories from biographies of artists, composers, philosophers, songs, films, and paintings into “that further intimacy that comes with trusting a fiction, a non-personal truth, going towards what you do not yet know.” “A Cricket in Oplontis 79 CE” fuses the idea of “last things” with the patient work of restoring ancient frescos and mosaics buried in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius whose “fragments / wrested away from lava / to remember the end of a world / how it had all been.” “Nothing else lasted,” the poem tells us, “as if these might be the only memory / of ourselves when we are gone.” One might ponder this poem as an archeology of the present, with its endless talk of the end times; again, Ondaatje seems to suggest what matters is not the creation of “art” but of memorials to what one loved in life.

The book’s prose sections seem to have been waiting in the wings for their turn, especially the author’s memoir of school days in Sri Lanka entitled “Winchester House.” In it, Ondaatje writes about his writing process, including taking traits from real people to build fictional characters “during the hunt for your own story. As with photographs, the world is deliriously random, inarticulate.” Against this backdrop, he relates how there were “years when we learned to protect ourselves by becoming liars, being devious, never confessing to a crime—in fact, confessing to nothing, good or bad.” He goes on: “Stories, letters, films, memoirs of our youth, are nothing without some real clue or glance toward the truth.”

There is no question that A Year of Last Things is a book of major significance. In its summative penultimate piece, “Estuaries,” Ondaatje tells us,

There are places where language refuses to meet a reader, like cursive scripts that flow as if unawakened, or those lost voices of waterfalls. It can occur even where you attempt to end your story—some improbable place, as a friend once wrote, that you will walk through only after you are dead, your bare feet on an ancient mosaic in Tunis that could perhaps guide you like a terza rima towards a safe place to complete your story.

He takes us to such an improbable place in the collection’s coda-like, final poem, “Talking In A River.” Here, perhaps, a more fitting way to find completion emerges:

You journey beyond the familiar properties, find yourself
before long in anonymous water, nothing audible from shore,
only the shake of reflection like a breaking word.
Is this a different mood of the Black River?
With daylight there is the disguised location of the stars.

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Book Review, Poetry Reviews

To Hell with Poets

Baqytgul Sarmekova
Translated by Mirgul Kali
Tilted Axis Press (£12.99)

by Timothy Walsh

I first encountered Baqytgul Sarmekova’s stories last spring while driving with a friend across the endless steppe in southeastern Kazakhstan. Another friend had sent me a story by Sarmekova titled “The Black Colt,” and as we sped by vast herds of sheep and horses, usually tended by a lone “cowboy” on a horse, I read the story on my phone and was utterly charmed. Sarmekova’s acid-tongued narrator, bumptious wit, dark humor, and adroit compression made me realize at once that this was something new in Kazakh literature.

As we drove through an aul (village) near the border with Kyrgyzstan, the setting perfectly evoked Sarmekova’s story: villagers on horseback or guiding donkey carts hauling loads of dried dung past the occasional gleaming Mercedes. The old mosque and the houses where horses, cows, and donkeys grazed in the yards looked like a scene from centuries past—except for the telephone poles and power lines and a smattering of satellite dishes. It is this uneasy juxtaposition of old and new, tradition and modernity, that Sarmekova dissects in her stories.

Fortunately, a collection of Sarmekova’s stories, To Hell with Poets, is now available in an adroit and nimble first English translation by Mirgul Kali. Kali foregoes footnotes or a glossary, but smartly retains a smattering of Kazakh words that are understandable in context and impart an authentic seasoning. Her translation won a 2022 Pen/ Heim Award, which paved the way for this publication by a notable UK-based small press.

Like “The Black Colt,” each of the twenty stories in To Hell with Poets is highly compressed, distilled like cask-strength Scotch, and all the stories pack a wallop far beyond their weight class. In “The Brown House with the White Zhiguli,” we witness the downfall of a once-proud man and the distinctive house that gives him status as his n’er-do-well son arrives on the scene with disastrous consequences. In “One-Day Marriage,” a mother-and-daughter pair of grifters travel from aul to aul bilking unsuspecting families by arranging sham marriages. In “Moldir,” a vain and urbanized woman recounts a visit to her rural aul for a high school reunion, determined that her friends would see “how removed I’d been from shabby aul life since I moved to the city.” In a flashback during a pause in the conversation, we learn of the tragic fate of Moldir, who was bullied and traumatized by the remorseless narrator. “Dognity” is an unforgettably powerful story narrated by a dog. It is not a comedic tale, but a harrowing four-page noir that evokes a sordid human web of lust, murder, and treachery.

Sarmekova’s prose is direct and unadorned. Her descriptions are acid-etched, her imagery often startlingly apt. She describes a bus pulling into town: “Dragging its belly across the ground, the groaning old bus had finally reached the bazaar at the edge of the city and spat out its passengers.” Elsewhere, a wedding guest’s dress is “so tight that her breasts spilled over the top like swollen, over-proofed dough.” In “Monica,” a woman returns to her native aul and the grave of her brother, which becomes an unwanted reunion with a devoted, simple-minded old woman. Sarmekova sets the scene deftly:

Soon, the yellowish, moss-grown roofs tucked between drab colored hills overgrown with squat tamarisk bushes came into view. The squalid aul looked like a sloppy woman’s kitchen. The graveyard, which used to be nestled at the base of the hills, now sprawled out to the edge of the main road. A march of corpses, I thought to myself.

The stories in To Hell with Poets are unrelentingly bleak. The characters usually die or experience various sorts of horrible or humiliating situations with all their hopes and dreams dashed. Yet Sarmekova’s authorial voice narrates black comedy with such verve and relish the reader can’t help but feel her pure joy in the act of storytelling, and this joy shines through, almost balancing the tragic outcomes of the characters.

Here is the description of Zharbagul in “The Black Colt,” an unlikely bride-to-be:

Before long, my grandfather returned with Zharbagul, whose bucket-shaped head bobbed up and down in his sidecar as they rode along the bumpy road. This was the first time we had ever met our aunty whose huge head, dark, rough, trowel-shaped face, and stumpy legs were a strange match with her thin pigtails, wire earrings, and lacy, ruffled dress.

Alas, on the next page, Zharbagul is jilted by death as the hapless Turar

stepped carelessly on the broken end of a downed power line and died, his body burned to a crisp. The adults who had gone to look at his body said, “He was grinning ear to ear when he passed on to the Great Beyond.” No one knew if he was beaming at the thought of his beloved Zharbagul or grimacing in pain when the fatal charge struck.

Mercifully, there are a few nostalgic tales focusing on two children growing up in a rural aul that offer some respite—Sarmekova likely sensed the need for a slow movement within her Breugelesque symphony—but mostly the stories of To Hell with Poets carry the reader like a carnival ride, evoking fear and delight simultaneously. The title story focuses on a love-sick would-be poet and a gray-haired mentor who seduces her after thundering out a “long-winded epic” at a wedding reception. In Kazakhstan, poets and poet-singers (akyn, zhirau and sal-seri) are still revered as cultural treasures, so the title To Hell with Poets is provocative—as if Sarmekova is throwing down the gauntlet with these bristling stories that careen across the landscape like tornadoes.

Sarmekova comes from Atyrau in western Kazakhstan on the shores of the Caspian Sea, far from the cultural centers of Almaty and Astana—which perhaps partly explains her originality. Atyrau also has the distinction of being where the Ural River empties into the Caspian—the Ural being the traditional dividing line between Europe and Asia. The city is, in fact, bisected by the Ural, so Sarmekova is from a place that has one foot in Europe and one in Asia, which seems fitting given the between-worlds ethos of so many of her stories.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, the literary world in Kazakhstan has evolved, largely jettisoning Socialist Realism and its nation-building celebratory novels in favor of forms that encompass the complexities of an ancient nomadic culture rudely wrenched against its will into the labyrinth of the modern, commercialized, mechanized world. Literature in Kazakhstan today is thriving, but so far only a handful of works have trickled out in English translation, most notably Talasbek Asemkulov’s masterpiece, A Life at Noon, Didar Amantay’s Selected Works, and a pioneering anthology, Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan. One can only hope there is more on the horizon—and particularly one wonders what will come next from Sarmekova.

Book Review, Fiction Reviews

Volume 29, Number 3, Fall 2024 (#115)

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INTERVIEWS

Charlotte Mandell: The Immense Noise of Céline’s War | interviewed by Barbara Roether
Sally Franson: Big in Sweden | interviewed by Margaret LaFleur
Leslie Sainz: Shedding Histories: Cubans in Exile | interviewed by Olivia Q. Pintair

FEATURES

The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan
In Memoriam: Paul Auster | by Dennis Barone
In Memoriam: John Barth | by Neal Lipschutz
In Memoriam: Jerome Rothenberg | by John Bradley
A Look Back: Anthony Heilbut’s The Fan Who Knew Too Much | by Richard Kostelanetz

PLUS: Cover art by JoAnn Verburg

NONFICTION REVIEWS

Like Love: Essays and Conversations | Maggie Nelson | by Jeff Bursey
Cactus Country | Zoë Bossiere | by Erica Watson
Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World | Kate Schapira | by Anna Farro Henderson
The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony | Annabelle Tometich | by Mark Massaro
Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War | Jason K. Friedman | by Mike McClelland
Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Story | Kristine S. Ervin | by George Longenecker

FICTION/MIXED GENRE REVIEWS

POETRY REVIEWS

COMICS REVIEWS

My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two | Emil Ferris | by Paul Buhle

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