University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Body of a Woman: New Narrative; The Call is Coming from inside the House

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Body of a Woman: New Narrative; The Call is Coming from inside the House

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Content BODY OF A WOMAN: NEW NARRATIVE
THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE
by
Nikki Darling
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment of
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
LITERATURE & CREATIVE WRITING
December 2021
Copyright 2021 Nikki Darling
ii

Epigraph

What is history? We must distinguish between the unrecorded past—all the events of the past as
recollected by human beings—and History—the recorded and interpreted past. —Gerda Lerner

The political writer, then, is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and
using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives. A privatism which keeps
us back and away from each other. —Cherrie Moraga

Out of this narrative will emerge a chalk outline. It is the body of a woman. —Kate Zambreno

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

| EPIGRAPH | ii
| ABSTRACT | iv
| INTRODUCTION: ENCHANTED | 1
| CHAPTER ONE: NEW NARRATIVE | 14
| CHAPTER TWO: POSSESSION OF DESIRE | 19
| CHAPTER THREE: GIRL TALK | 29
| CHAPTER FOUR: SO HELP YOU GOD | 35
| CHAPTER FIVE: THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE | 47
| CHAPTER SIX: NEW NARRATIVE SAME STORY: AUTHORS OF COLOR AND THE
VOICES THAT ARE MISSING | 65
| CHAPTER SEVEN: GABRIELLE DANIELS IN HER OWN WORDS | 79
| CONCLUSION: MAGIA SEXUAL DEL AZUCAR EN LA SANGRE | 85
| BIBLIOGRAPHY | 99

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Abstract

Body of a Woman: New Narrative; The Call Is Coming From Inside The House is a series of
interlinked meditations, organized into six chapters, that coalesces poetry, memoir, critical
theory, and gender theory. The work explores the ever-present wound of male supremacist
trauma through an experimental lens and seeks to deconstruct this behemoth of a story piece by
piece. Influenced by experimental authors of color such as Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, and
Audre Lorde, each chapter analyzes and critiques male supremacy and how its various
incarnations have confined and repressed women throughout the ages, throughout all walks of
life. The project operates both as an interrogation of the genre New Narrative and its role in
deconstructing Literary Formalism as well as a New Narrative text in and of itself. This
interrogation is aimed at destabilizing literary cannons and Formalism, which works as a binary
between what is perceived as high and low writing. As a culture, we are taught about oppression
in small boxes, disparate issues stemming from disparate roots; we are not given the grand
landscape on which to view these losses. Like the growing AIDS blanket covering the lawn of
the White House bearing the names of each person who has died as a result of the disease, this
loss cannot be fully comprehended unless we look at it on the macro level, as a large
intersectional fabric of devastation. “Body of a Woman” likewise seeks to weave a narrative of
restorative justice.

1
Enchanted
They say she’s crazy, Fedelina, walking the streets in a small knit cap and blue western
bandana wrapped around her once-long black hair, now lightning white and tucked beneath it.
She stops me on my route to the post office, on an errand to send postcards to friends in Los An-
geles. Mi’jita, she calls. I turn. My mother has told me about Fedelina, that she wanders and
walks, that she was raised in Wagon Mound by a Comanche family who found her on the llano.
That’s the plot of Dances With Wolves, I snarl, the heat turning my brain into scrambled eggs.
No, estúpida, she says, smacking the back of my head lightly, that’s the story of Fedelina.
Every day it’s a-gettin' closer, goin’ faster than a roller coaster, love like yours will sure-
ly come my way, hey hey, a-hey hey. Every day it’s a-gettin' faster, everyone says go on and ask
her, love like yours will surely come my way.
I have come here to this place to write. It smells like Christmas and rain and I sit in the
large backyard garden cross-legged on an old wooden chair, “Indian style,” or “crisscross-
applesauce” as the small, politically correct preschoolers in the classroom of the young blond
boy I nannied, know it. But I’m here in the Land of Enchantment, not the land of Los Angeles,
PC Montessori. Giant red and black ants the color of licorice and Twizzlers cover my flip-flops
like a swarm in a horror film. Scurrying below my Indian-styled feet, there is a mob, waiting to
devour me.
Historically this is accurate and I laugh out loud at my own colonial cleverness, which is
in truth not so clever. Or accurate, as I am half-gringa and the mob ate me five hundred years
ago. It’s all I do, however, really, try to be clever, in this strange endeavor of constantly trying to
be alone to “write.” There is no explaining to those who don’t write the mysterious alchemy that
must take place in order to turn these riddles into puzzles that can be solved, stretched into the
2
ribbon called a sentence. The bow we call language. I cannot “schedule” this ennui—and that’s
what it is, a passive sadness pushing words onto a page like a fast-moving train. No matter how
many books I read on procrastination or time management, or how often I promise a friend I will
be done by 5, if the ennui strikes at 4:50, I must follow it to the end until it unravels into mean-
ing. I’ve been at this since the day I learned to tell stories, and I know myself—the writer—quite
well. It can be a selfish life.
I am surrounded on all sides by the light green mossy color of cacti, the deep rich purple
of wildflowers and fuchsia from the hollyhocks that grow like weeds from every plot of orange
earth. In the close distance are the firs, stoic and patient, hawks and whippoorwills, nose-diving
in silence.
I am also surrounded by books, most of them ransacked from my Tía’s bookshelves: The
Best of Walden and Civil Disobedience and Kate Zambreno’s electric Heroines, which I pur-
chased a week earlier in an art bookstore in Chelsea when I took an impromptu trip to visit
friends with the money I earned reading tarot at an upscale event in Hollywood. There is an old,
beat-up copy of something called Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans by a man named
George I. Sanchez (who was born and raised in the North Valley, where my people come from),
and Voices: An Anthology of Nuevo Mexicano Writers, edited by Rudolfo A. Anaya, whose own
stories of New Mexican life were all I had at one time to connect me to a past I’d never known.
Last October, while knee deep into my novel, Fade Into You, I suffered a bipolar relapse,
throwing off my equilibrium. It became a struggle just to communicate in a sane and rational
manner, much less continue the book in any sense-making way. During this period, I experi-
enced an upswing in work. Suddenly, a decade’s worth of submitting, applying, grant writing,
reading, and hosting came to roost. I had projects commissioned for me and found myself court-
3
ed by editors I’d previously stalked. It was, in all, a radical turn of events, most definitely in need
of celebration. However, I could not have been less prepared mentally to accept these fine re-
wards of my labor.
I turned down much of the work, unable to commit to the rigors of deadlines. Instead, I
dove headfirst into my experimental non-fiction, which I’d been toying with for close to two
years, yet had never gathered the courage to attack. Essays patched together like Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein. I discovered the work of Lynd Ward, specifically his beautiful 1929 woodcut nov-
el Gods’ Man and its simple yet elegantly profound way of communicating the artist’s struggle
without a single word. Ward’s book is composed entirely of images, and I felt them reverberate
inside me in a way I hadn’t experienced in many years. More specifically, I revisited my New
Narrative books, which I’d collected during the summer of 2008 upon my return to Los Angeles
after living in NY for seven years. An old friend, one of the few who still remained and with
whom I’d kept in touch, worked at Semiotext(e) Press in MacArthur Park and she’d often bring
me copies of their books. I even visited her a few times in the Semiotext(e) office on Wilshire
Boulevard, housed in a small room in a large white peeling 1940s office building. It reminded
me of a mental hospital, with its scratched peach and white marbled floors and old gold elevator.
When looking through the window of the office, you could see the Asbury building sign a block
away and the bustling park, crowded with people and litter, the sidewalks jammed with food
carts selling pupusas and knock-off sneakers. Somehow, the building was neither mid-century
modern nor overtly tacky; flanked in palm trees, it just was. To me it symbolized the entire off-
beat nature and path of its authors. I received Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, Ann Rower’s If You’re
A Girl, Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations, Eileen Myles’s Not Me and Chelsea Girls, and Kathy
4
Acker’s Blood and Guts In High School (which was not published on Semitotext(e) but was gift-
ed all the same).
I already knew of the press because four years earlier, drunk at a house party in some far-
flung corner of Brooklyn watching a band called Wikked, I’d wandered into the bedroom of my
unknown hostess and seen a copy of The New Fuck You: Adventures In Lesbian Reading, a col-
lection of New Narrative short stories, poems and essays published by the press on her book-
shelf. It was in its signature early first edition shape, handheld and pocket sized. Intrigued by the
title, I stuffed it in my pants. Going home that night, my companion Michelle grabbed my arms
and dragged me backward through the snow, both of us laughing and wobbly, and placed me on
the B43 bus. I remember her waving a mittened hand from the snowy sidewalk. As I watched her
turn and trudge away, small flurries began to enshrine her in some heavenly snow globe of urban
renewal as empty construction sites, their tarps gently and eerily flapping, lay silent in the early
morning. The book still bears the water-damaged pages of that night. In short, I had taken issue
with language and the very nature of its definition: if it was, in fact, even a consistent thing. It
was, as Kathy Acker writes in her essay Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body,
in which she examines her inability to write convincingly or adequately about the experience of
bodybuilding, “The closer I am moving toward foreignness, into strangeness, toward understand-
ing foreignness and strangeness, the more I am losing my own language. The small loss of lan-
guage occurs when I journey to and into my own body. Is my body a foreign land to me? What is
this picture of “my body” and “I?” For years, I said in the beginning of this essay, I have wanted
to describe bodybuilding; whenever I tried to do so, ordinary language fled from me.”
1
Despite
my best efforts, my brain, un-medicated and waving to and fro in whatever wind my mind blew,

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5
resisted any ability to construct meaningful narrative in the way that I had studied. Instead, books
that challenged structure and were experimental in form took on new meaning. For lack of a bet-
ter phrase, they spoke to me. I devoured videos of Acker interviewing her hero, William S. Bur-
roughs, in which he discusses everything from Dada to his cut-ups, the literary technique in
which he cuts up various curated texts, puts them in a hat, bowel, bag, or sack and then pulls sen-
tences, arranging them at random as they appear, gradually crafting a story. I tore through my
collection of Gertrude Stein and, for the first time ever—after half a decade of feigning inter-
est—nodded emphatically, mad scientist-like, exclaiming aloud to no one, Oh my god, I get it.
The nuttier and more difficult to understand, the more voraciously and enthusiastically I con-
sumed it.
It was the New Narrative texts, however, read in light of my newly disorganized and
melancholic chaotic state, that spoke the loudest and made a kind of sense that was previously
unrecognizable. My mind craved a sort of disorder to perhaps provoke a reframing of what was
happening. My body was beyond language. Language had betrayed me in its orderliness; the
wild, whipping tail of New Narrative cracked open a hole in which I could climb inside and ex-
plore. In turn, I suspiciously eyed my copies of Strunk and White, bibles commissioned for an
imagined established entity: language, another concept to be learned lest one do it the “wrong”
way.
My mother’s name was Fedencia. I was born on the llano in 1925. I don’t know how old I
am, but that’s what my bracelet says, this one here, the plastic one that’s brown and tattered. It’s
from when your mama was a wee mi’jita. They took me away on a yellow stretcher. They told me
my son had stuck a gun inside his mouth and pulled the trigger, but this I don’t believe because
mi’jito eats dinner with me every night.
6
I had a husband once and then he was lost to the war, the one in Europe with the little
man with the black mustache and blond men like fantasmas, white skin and blue eyes, ice of
night. Oh, see that Pepsi can mija? Grab it for me. I take them to Compadre Alfredo; he gives me
a nickel each. I knew your Grandma Mary; she used to pull my hair in class, but she was playful.
She went away too, to be with your abuelo in La Junta—that’s in Coloratho. I knew a boy; he
was my son, he was my mijo, and he died. He was in the other war, the green war; he was buried
on the llano near the fort where he was born. He put a gun inside his mouth and pulled the trig-
ger.
I am also surrounded by women: my mother, my forty-seven-year-old sister, and my Tía
Lily, who was my mother’s childhood best friend. My mother and sister have also planned a visit
to my aunt’s large New Mexican adobe, where our family has lived for hundreds of years, and
have descended on the family home with their bickering and late-night sangria and beer drinking.
In the morning, they rushed the chicken coop to kill a bull snake that’d been stealing
eggs. My sister points her handgun at the snake, my Tía a shotgun. That is the way of this land
still and always, it seems.
A week before I arrive, a young man—hardly twenty—walked into a Big R, a local chain
that carries riffles, hunting equipment, farming material and other such items, asked to see a gun
from the counter, loaded it with his own bullet, held it to his head and pulled the trigger. It made
the local news and not much else.
My Tía grows marijuana in her garden, and late at night her friends gather from the near-
by homes. All three hundred of the town’s residents are interlopers in one another’s histories. My
sister, ten years my senior, and I have quiet passive-aggressive battles; my mother, who sweats
profusely while cooking decadent traditional meals of buñuelos, red chile potatoes, and calabaci-
7
tas, bitches and moans about the heat that only breaks when the sky cracks open in the late after-
noon and sends down a handful of Zeus rockets and rain-filled thunder—only to be soothed later
by dark, heavy clouds floating on a blinding brightness, with rainbows shooting from every cor-
ner of the sky, leading to a deep stillness punctuated by the singing of some small bird.
My mother and sister have come unconsciously to this place, it seems, as it pulls its de-
scendants near, a continuous babbling matter of ghosts holding tight with spindly wrists, not ever
fully letting go. I am here trying to hermit away, as I have always been known to do. It is my
life’s ambition to be invited to the busiest party, only to spend the evening on a pile of coats,
staring at my phone. The people in my life seem to know this: that my deepest desire is to disap-
pear from their prying eyes. I cannot read a book inside my grandmother’s house unless I want it
hidden the next morning. Like so many of the stories I am trying to write, huddled away beneath
a tree, searching for a secret corner, I can’t seem to untangle myself from this past. For once,
perhaps, that’s the story to be told.
I think sometimes of all the Christmas cards I never saved. This was a real bustling town.
I used to have some pretty teeth. The Wig Wam was my most favorite bar. Sometimes I go inside
and have a drink.
I come from Springer, not far off. My padre was from the Boys’ Reform School. He saw
mi mamá at a dance in Roy. Do you know about Kenny McHoon? Oh, Springer is full of gringos;
they chased my padre out, the cowboys, and we came to Wagon Mound because it was friendly
to the rancheros. Kenny and some boys from town rode up the mesa in a truck with different
wheels. They were wild boys…oh, they could dance. Kenny liked me, see. He passed a note in
class and then your Mary passed it back to me; she smiled real silly ‘cause I think she knew
Kenny had written something sweet. He was like that, always doing little things. I opened it and
8
inside was a seed. I laughed, I did, I looked at him, sitting up front, and raised my shoulders and
he blushed. Hollyhock, he whispered. And I remembered. His mother had the most beautiful
blood red hollyhocks and I always said, Kenny, when are you going to give me one of those? So
he brought the seed.
Each photo album yields more treasures than the last. My Tíos in Raiders and Ozzy
shirts, hamming it up in late-seventies Polaroids; small cousins playing air guitar in Nuevo Mex-
ico alleys covered in gravel; long, dark, curly hair falling over deeply tanned shoulders. The men
in my family like heavy metal; they are vain and beautiful. Chiseled clichés of when one envi-
sions a handsome Injun, even though we are Mestizo, or “homegrown Americans,” as my Tía
Lily likes to say. Arms crossed, pillowy lips and steely black eyes. But they are also goofballs—
and drunks, artists, and deep currents of spirit, the kind that come from never having lived away
from the land. From having to grow food and pull a plow, whack a chicken and steal its eggs, or
leave an animal fur in the barn for a new litter of kittens that arrives each winter and spring with
alarming regularity.
We're stuffed into my sister’s rental car, driving out to the city of Roy, which is somehow
even smaller than Wagon Mound. We are irritable, unaccustomed to one another’s eccentricities.
We are going to see the canyon between the two small towns, which opens its mouth like a green
and purple tortoise, mossy teeth gumming the edges of the river that cuts through the valley be-
low. Turquoise silt veins run along the orange and red walls of the mesa on either side. The road
has been carved into the stone; bright wildflowers of every color and shape dot the highway
where the asphalt meets the dirt. We stop and take pictures, posing before the behemoth of Na-
ture, trying to blend in, like we belong here. And we do.
9
My mind started to unravel at an early age. Or, I guess you could say, I became aware of
its unique way of processing information and emotion. I’ve always felt a bit like a kite with too
long a tail, whipping circles in the wind. Reading helped me stay grounded.
Pictures of the men in my family cover the walls of our family home, dating back to the
advent of photography. The women, too, but they possess a more pulled-together look of dignity.
In our family, women, if not snuffed out by men, die of old age; men die of tragedy. My cousin
Cristobal, who was killed by a drunk driver in 2009 along with three other teenagers coming
home from a dance, is the latest boy to fall. The driver got off with probation. There was an un-
cle who went mad, according to the stories, and drove his truck into a bed of water, lungs filling
into darkness. The stillness of the after-rain. A puddle to make its way back to Heaven until it
rains down again. On one of our nightly walks toward the rainbow-colored mesa, my Tía informs
me that almost everyone in the town “gets a check” for bipolar. Drunks or loonies. I nod my
head, having been to rehab in 2006 at the behest of my undergrad university. I, too, am an alco-
holic crazy.
My sister eats from a bag of BBQ chips and sips a Pepsi. She laments, in the gossipy tra-
dition of our familia, that everyone we are related to is either a product of inbreeding or crazy.
Oh yeah, she smirks, we're all nuts. At first I roll my eyes at what I presume is her resident of
Phoenix, Arizona casual classism, which coats her ever so slightly. Although now, upon closer
research, I find there is more truth in that than I’m willing to admit. She has also come searching
for answers to her own project, a massive Ancestry.com effort encompassing five hundred years
of our ‘Spanish’ existence in North America, until there is nothing left but survival and adobes,
bound only to the tradition of storytelling in which no records can be found. Isolation has main-
tained the ceceo, our Spanish lisp, and she’s determined to find that missing Ferdinand, our Con-
10
quistador daddy. Having done research myself before arriving, I don’t have the heart to tell her
that her beloved Juan de Oñate, the man tasked with ‘civilizing’ el Norte, rode up on a donkey
from Mexico City, where both his parents were born. We are no more Spanish than the child of
the Indian in Zacatecas whose mother was captured and raped in the 1500s. But, like the rest of
the older generation, she drinks from that mythical Spanish Kool-Aid, and who I am to deprive
her of that Manchego missing link?
She is also a year deep into her endeavors, and although we are both engaged with our
family history, it is interesting to note that our collective research results, while the same, bear
different meanings to us—showcasing in real time how archival projects are often biased. As a
somewhat seasoned journalist weaned on the bible of Didion, I’m familiar with having a story
before you have the facts. It’s the Jeopardy way of doing things.
I was born on the llano. I don’t know how old I am, but my bracelet, this one here, says
1927. Do you know how old that would make me, mi’jita? No, don’t tell me; I don’t want to
know. See that weed there? That’s quelites, wild spinach. It grows for free. Mi mamá used to
make it with garlic and onion but you blanch it first, then chop it real fine, then toss it with man-
teca and mustard seed. During the Depression our people we were like the cattle, grazing the
llano for food. We also ate these things called ‘bird legs’; we’d have to fight the goats. The little
kids used to call them that because they look like little bird legs, see? They have leaves like feet.
You prepare them with manteca and mustard seed, but first you blanch them and cut them fine.
We ate so many beans mi’jita, because we had not anything else to eat. You see? The llano pro-
vides.
I’m surrounded by anger as well as the llano, both of which are petulant and can wail,
breaking the eerie silence like an emergency horn blaring through the streets. There’s anger here
11
to be sure; it’s sizzling under the roof around noon, when the dust and wind kick themselves into
turbulent storms the size of small houses that dance in gravel lots until they lose power, turning
back into easy breezy. The clouds have two colors: white and black. The sky has more colors
than words. There are other things to think about.
My Tía takes me to a town meeting. There is no congressional presence in town; Wagon
Mound gets an occasional Mora County officer who wanders down when one of the local wom-
en calls the policía on a drunk husband or boyfriend tearing things off the wall and delegating
purple eyes and busted lips with unyielding mercilessness. This is discussed, the lack of care the
county gives to these people, the lack of recognition even for their existence, a nuisance that they
even still exist. The town is populated mostly with the ancestors of those who held their fists
tight and would not relinquish their land when Uncle Sam came swooping in, in 1848. It was all
later taken, of course, get out or hand it over, but some of it has been repurchased through legal
channels. These people, my people, won’t let go. They are a spot on a white map, refusing to un-
smudge. The latest assault is a company from Philadelphia who wants to bring in fracking and
declare the mountains “territory of preservation”—a fancy way of removing ownership from the
shamans and rancheros who have used the land for sacred reasons and survival over centuries.
There is a lawyer here, a white one; he looks bored and then he sees me. I smile. I can be a real
snotty bitch, enlivened by my father’s white Angeleno blood. Entitlement also sits on my shoul-
ders as it similarly sits on his bored ones. He looks startled. I’m a new face, an unfamiliar white
face. I’m sitting with my ancestors. An old man stands; he’s wearing a John Deere hat and a
flannel work shirt; his jeans are worn-in. He recounts in a clear, unwavering voice why the
mountains belong to us. To his familia. We all break into applause. Fuck us once, our mistake,
fuck us twice, The United States is a bitch, try to fuck us three times and, well, fuck you. The
12
town is drunk, the town is violent, but the town is sacred, the town is liberal, the town is filled
with artists and thinkers. Libraries on the edge of town have a regular attendance. These are
clever, intelligent, rural people who will not be cast aside. The man in the suit leaves. A small
victory for today, but if the town has learned anything, it is that there will be another white man
coming soon. Always, the white man is waiting to take what is not his, armed with legal docu-
ments and degrees bought with blood. After all, we were the first white man; who knows what
the Puebla Indians called this land before we lisped our way into town and joined ribs with its
first peoples.
So the house stays cool but the heat seeps in. The old adobe mud has been patched and
re-patched more times than you can count, but the heat knows all its secret crevices and enters
like a cat. It rests above our heads when we nap in the afternoon, shades and curtains drawn,
dogs inside. Lily starts to tell us about some cousins; there are so many I can’t keep track. It
seems my mother raised me on another planet, one where family ties were balloon strings you
didn’t have to grab onto, but out here on the llano, your story is your map.
They came around the mountain, laughing and drinking like wild boys do, hanging off the
truck like those donkeys in Pinocchio. I saw that at the Zia in Springer with Jean and Norma. We
were so scared, we were! No! No! we cried, don’t turn us into burros! I was just a little bug, I
was. A woman from the tribe who was my mother took me as a baby from the other side of the
mesa and they put the cow brand to my cheek and I am branded now on this spot that no one can
see.
My sister is at her end, though. The heat has rankled her beyond comfort; we are city
girls, born and raised. We wonder how our mother ever lived here, and the story of her getting on
a Greyhound with a basket of tamales and a denim jacket and hopping off at New Buffalo com-
13
mune to intermix with hippie no-goods, in 1968, is all too believable. My sister can no longer
listen with open ears. As sweat clings to my upper lip and temple, I, too, share her desire for si-
lence. I can feel her twisting tighter, teeth clenched. She is a headache without aspirin. We can’t
escape, though. The outside is rugged and alive, and we must, it seems, acquiesce.
The boys, they came flying down the mountain mija, around the mesa, past the canyon,
through the valley, and there was a pop. The white cross remembers and so do I. Grab that can,
mi’jita, Compadre Alfredo gives me a nickel each. You see, I was flying too that night and when I
heard about Kenny I planted that seed. He planted that seed in me. Let’s go to the Wig Wam and
dance. Love like yours will surely come my way. I say, it’s an ass, not glass, so baby, shake it but
don’t break it! Look at the smoke from your cigarette; it looks like white clouds covering the
black clouds, covering the moon. And behind it, that flash? That’s God; he’s taking a picture.
Walk with me awhile, mi’jita. There’s so much more to say.

14
New Narrative
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where and when New Narrative emerged and if it has ever
officially been a cohesive movement (versus one floating on the nebulous small talk and gossip
of whoever the hip avant-garde writers of the moment happen to be, the type who more often in-
termingle with the downtown artist than their own literary peer). Some trace its origins to Bur-
roughs and the Beats, some even further back to the post-World War I Dadaists struggling to
make meaning out of violence and chaos (or abandoning meaning altogether in disgust over
where language had brought them, depending on who you ask). One thing is certain: in the near-
ly thirty-five years since the genre has occupied the imagination of the far-left radical literary
scene, it has produced a volume of books that have gone on to contribute profound change in the
way writers coming up conceive of and interpret literature. New Narrative was also a direct re-
sponse to the early AIDS epidemic in the United States and the subsequent lack of media expo-
sure and information distributed about the disease that inevitably led to the death of thousands. In
this way, the movement is and has been tied both loosely and continuously to the politics of the
zeitgeist, whatever it might be at that particular moment. At its core, New Narrative is queer and
political and by reason of deduction would align itself with evolving conversations around gen-
der, identity, and social justice.
If it were to have an origin, perhaps it’s best to start in San Francisco with Robert Gluck
and Bruce Boone in the late 1970s. To quote Steve Abbot in a 1981 article for Soup Magazine
(arguably the first time the genre is given serious consideration as an entity), he notes, “New
Narrative is language conscious but arises out of specific social and political concerns of specific
communities…It stresses the enabling role of content in determining form rather than stressing
15
form as independent from its social origins and goals.”
2
Rob Halpern, from his 2011 essay “Re-
alism and Utopia: Sex, Writing, and Activism in New Narrative from the Journal of Narrative
Theory,” asserts, “Abbott’s reference to the movement being ‘language conscious’ quietly
acknowledges New Narrative’s ties to Language writing, with whose community it intersected.
Although New Narrative evolved together with late twentieth-century avant-garde poetries, it
pushed against Language writing’s privileging of poetic form, stressing instead the value of sto-
rytelling—in both verse and prose—as the means by which to deepen the convergence of writing
and politics, while aligning that convergence with the work of gay community building.”
3

In the late 1970s, Gluck and Boone started a now-legendary writing class and workshop
at Small Press Books in San Francisco’s Mission district, from which the burgeoning scene bub-
bled up. In an essay entitled “Writing Must Explore its Relation to Power,” Robert Gluck re-
counts the early days of the genre, describing the group as a “New Narrative laboratory.” The
classes ran from 1977–1985, cementing the genre and its writers. Mike Amnasan, Steve Abbott,
Sam D’Allesandro, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Camille Roy, Francesca Rosa, Gloria
Anzaldúa, John Norton, Edith Jenkins, Richard Schwarzenberger, Phyllis Taper, Marsha Camp-
bell, and later Rob Halpern, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, and Jocelyn Saidenberg are just some of
the authors who’ve passed through the fabled group.
So much of New Narrative’s goals and ethos seem to stem from empowering the voice-
less, those lost of the early ’80s AIDS crisis, by harnessing the wild and unpredictable energy
that surrounded their plight. AIDS’ earliest victims truly lingered at the precipice of the un-
known; as such, they became unwitting sitting ducks at the mercy of a homophobic society slow
to act on their behalf. Consequently, New Narrative writing feels flippant, urgent, comical, terri-

2
Abbott, Steve. “Soup.” Soup, no. 2, June 1981.
3
Literary Hub. lithub.com/writing-must-explore-its-relation-to-power.
16
fying. It borrows from the names of its authors and slashes about structural narrative with willy-
nilly abandon. It also found co-conspirators in late-1970s Lower East Side New York poets and
authors such as Kathy Acker and the always-evolving William S. Burroughs, whose cut-ups un-
doubtedly had an influence on Acker and other New Narrative authors down the road.
New Narrative’s progression from the AIDS crisis to feminism seems like a natural oc-
currence, considering the radical left that associated themselves with the genre and scene. Chris
Kraus’s 1997 book I Love Dick, the story of a woman who becomes obsessed with a man in aca-
demia she has a crush on, might stand as the genre’s most successful offering of what it can ac-
complish when running on all cylinders. Kraus’s work invites the intimate in, allowing her quiet
neurosis, obsessions, and imaginative literary tangents to consume the reader. Her characters,
often unnamed, are loosely based avatars of herself, acting as guides into her subconscious,
where this confluence of ideas does battle and we, the reader, are a submerged witness. Kraus
also writes contemporary art criticism and autofictive essays, often in the same collection; even
New Narrative essay collections are not beholden to genre, such as 2004s Video Green, which
vacillates between art criticism and stream of conscience meandering and morose introspection
about what it is to be a woman, a single woman, an un-fucked woman, a woman who fucks too
much, a woman who goes to art openings and Chinatown bars in large groups where she sits in
the corner and peels labels off German beers while Bauhaus plays softly in the some background
fugue. Hers is a gentle ride, one made all the more comfortable by her wild admissions of des-
perate-seeming or uncouth ladylike thoughts and behaviors, in which stalking a man you have a
crush on or spending hundreds of dollars on scented candles at the magic store so you can cast a
protection spell is as normal as doing the laundry on your day off. On the page, Chris Kraus
wants things: men, answers, money, infamy, critical approval, and isolation from the world
17
scratching at her window. It is widely known that I Love Dick is based on Kraus’s real relation-
ship (or rather, desired relationship) with the academic Dick Hebdige and written in what Kraus
has since called “a delirium.” Of course, the brilliant beauty of the book is that Kraus’s protago-
nist is, without question, sexually attracted to Dick, but more than that—and more radically im-
portant—is that Dick is, of course, a muse, a male Pygmalion: from within Kraus’s protagonist’s
fantasies, she builds a man of her own making, one in which her desires—material, emotional,
physical are met. Here is where New Narrative offers leeway in terms of artistic license; Kraus
can write a disturbing book about a relationship some might find feral or perverse in which she
can use her own self as model, but really the book is not about Chris or Dick Hebdige at all—
rather, it’s about women who throughout history have served the purpose of muse for their socie-
tally dominant male counterparts. By flipping the script and becoming a predator—even one
who, on the surface, is benign and offers no real threat—Kraus destabilizes the male gaze and
puts men on the chopping block. As she writes in the book, “The sheer fact of women talking,
being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public was the most rev-
olutionary thing in the world”
4
—a sentiment that today might seem stale and obvious, but in
1997 was still fairly revolutionary and forward thinking.
New Narrative is many things, but perhaps Jean Thomas Tremblay, in his review of the
Jill Soloway’s TV adaptation of Kraus’s book, sums it up best: “Part formal experimentation,
part critical theory syllabus, and part gossip column, New Narrative borrows from highbrow and
lowbrow cultures—from canonical literature and from television, popular music, and pornogra-
phy. New Narrative writers also appropriate, with or without credit, each other’s work…New
Narrative flaunts its influences, past and present. And it intimates a context of production, a liter-

4
Kraus, C. I Love Dick. Semiotexte, 2006.
18
ary network, sometimes to the point of assimilating individual authorship.”
5
Ultimately, Trem-
blay posits that what makes the genre so electrifying is precisely the thing that is lost when it’s
taken off the page. New Narrative’s thing—what makes it electric and exciting—is the page it-
self: the sentence. Words. When put into the mouths of actors and made flesh, it loses the very
essence of what gives it life. New Narrative is about narrative. As such, its most powerful and
influential works stay close to the bone. Both I Love Dick and Dodie Bellamy’s Letters of Mina
Harker, for instance, are written as epistolary texts. Each engages through correspondence; what
emerges from the page when two people are in conversation with each other, as Tremblay notes
in his review, comprises much of what makes New Narrative so fun to read: seeing the ideas of
New Narrative authors appear in each other’s works. “Part of the thrill of reading New Narrative
consists in collecting these nuggets, of tracking the transformation of a thought from one writer’s
prose poem to another one’s play.”

5
Los Angeles Review of Books. lareviewofbooks.org/article/stories-of-new-narrative. Accessed 16 Sept.
2017.
19
Possession of Desire
A woman who writes has power and a woman with power is feared. - Gloria Anzaldúa
Reality penetrates her. The Living narrative must die. —Dodie Bellamy the character as pos-
sessed by Mina Harker, written by Dodie Bellamy

In both Dodie Bellamy’s and Gloria Anzaldúa’s books, The Letters of Mina Harker and
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, respectively, writing is described not as a series of
authorial decisions but rather as a type of possession. In Anzaldúa’s chapter “Tlilli Tlapalli / The
Path of the Red and Black Ink,” the section “The Shamanic State” describes writing as a “disso-
ciative fugue,” an act removed from the author’s control and given over to a power greater than
herself:
When I create stories in my head, that is, allow the voices and scenes to be projected in
the inner screen of my mind, I “trance.” I used to think I was going crazy or that I was
having hallucinations. But now I realize it is my job, my calling, to traffic in images.
Some of these film-like narratives I write down; most are lost, forgotten. (69–70)
6

Later, in the section “Writing Is A Sensuous Act,” she states:
Words are blades of grass pushing past the obstacles, sprouting on the page; the spirit of
the words moving in the body is as concrete as flesh and as palpable; the hunger to create
is as substantial as fingers and hand. (71)

Anzaldúa connects this ‘trance,’ or fugue, to a communion with her ancestors, using her
body as conduit to correct hundreds of years of being unheard, unseen and unaccounted for—or
inaccurately portrayed by what she refers to as the ethnocentric narrative:
Ethnocentrism is the tyranny of Western aesthetics. An Indian mask in an American mu-
seum is transported into an alien aesthetic system where what is missing is the presence

6
Gloria Anzaldua. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Spinsters/Aunt Lute.
San Francisco, CA, 1987
20
of power invoked through performance ritual. It has become a conquered thing, a dead
“thing” separated from nature and, therefore, its power. (68)

Her ritual of power is this communion and the act of writing is her body: something that
can only be taken from her by force, which for hundreds of years for her ancestral lineage has
been; she attempts to take it back, reasserting her bodily power, her autonomy. In this act of con-
sensual possession she allows her body to be used as a means to a reparative gesture. She re-
claims the narrative from a culture that aims to make her a “conquered thing.” She disrupts her
own ancestral disruption at the hands of ethnocentrism, in this case the indigenous mask having
been transported to a museum and then separated from that which imbued it with power and
meaning—essentially rendering it meaningless—and instead aspires to transform the dominant
ethnocentrist mode of learning, in this case books, by altering them into a kaleidoscope of exper-
imental formats and utilizing only her body as source authority in order to deflate the importance
of the narratives she has learned from these very sources.
She defines ethnocentrism through modes of learning (e.g., museums, studying artifacts,
looking to books as sources of knowledge) like a funhouse mirror of carnage, a system with its
proprietary road paved with blood and tears—a road that is not taught in elementary schools or
public history classes, the truth of her Borderlands, the colonial conquest of the American
Southwest. A truth that has been so convoluted, covered up and distorted by the United States
that the truth has in many ways evaporated.
Anzaldúa seeks to make meaningless that which has separated her mask from its power
and rendered it alien in its own Motherland. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is not
only an experimental text aimed at reconfiguring how we read and understand narrative, it’s also
a coup. Written partially in Spanish without offering translation, Anzaldúa creates for a mono-
21
lingual English speaker the experience of being Mexican in an ancestral homeland where nothing
reflects, honors or acknowledges your historical existence. Borderlands turns the monolingual
English speaker foreign.
In this act, Anzaldúa exposes racism entrenched in decades of polity. Alienated by lan-
guage, the original inhabitants of the Southwest were made to feel like outsiders in their own
home by laws that enforced English as the official language of the United States. For the mono-
lingual English speaker, the Spanish words in Borderlands might as well be images; they can
only be understood as words by virtue of being composed of letters. In this way, Borderlands
acts as a microcosm for the erasure of language, the denial of access, wherein efforts to move
successfully within the text have been upended by words the monolingual English reader cannot
understand. Making meaning of the text then becomes cumbersome, time-consuming and ex-
hausting. Having been published in a pre-Internet 1984, Borderlands challenges us to reconsider
what it is to ‘understand.’
The book additionally operates as a work of art. Written as a combination of memoir, lyr-
ic essay and poetry, Anzaldúa is equally invested in altering our perception of how knowledge is
accumulated as well as our understanding of what she is trying to communicate—that is to say,
the book as both a vehicle for the accumulation of knowledge and a conceptual object was pur-
posefully considered when approaching the project. The idea of an academic text as something to
deconstruct, utilizing its history, meaning and place to establish literary or academic authority, is
an integral part of Anzaldúa’s practice.
Dodie Bellamy is similarly invested in questioning the dominant narrative. As an author,
Bellamy is taken by the concept of truth and the many forms it assumes in storytelling, the im-
portance and obsession we as readers have with fact and fiction, and how we as readers so rarely
22
question whether what we are told is in fact true. As a character possessed by Mina Harker in
The Letters of Mina Harker, Bellamy tries to tell the ‘real’ story, one that negates the meddling,
mediated efforts of another writer, a translator of her truth:
For the past hundred years imitators have barged into my story and hacked out enough
sequels to fill a library bunglers with no credentials they keep shackling me to the most
insipid suitors macho types who stomp around with crucifixes and bad British accents
their acting as wooden as their stakes: these men save my soul? Dodie’s the latest intrud-
er, getting it all wrong in her attempts to be civilized—forget about them—this is The
Letters of Mina Harker THE AUTHORIZED VERSION if you want anything done right
you have to do it yourself…
7

“The monstrous and the formless have as much right as anybody else…This book is the bag. So
is my cunt.”

The Letters of Mina Harker is not just a retelling in narrative, but a retelling in form and
structure. The text skips around and takes off in tangential directions, descending into ramblings.
Just as Anzaldúa uses the book as the messenger and the message, so too does Bellamy, making
it the bag and the cunt. The book as an object is as open to critical investigation as the language
itself.
Bellamy takes on a similar endeavor of re-writing, or correcting a flawed and limited nar-
rative—one that has hampered and erased female agency and excluded the queer experience. Just
as Anzaldúa tackles ethnocentric erasure, Bellamy seeks to take on, highlight and squash misog-
yny in canonical literature. As Christopher Breu writes in his essay “Disinterring the Real: Dodie
Bellamy's The Letters of Mina Harker and the Late-Capitalist Literature of Materiality”:

7
Bellamy, Dodie. The Letters of Mina Harker. Wisconsin, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
23
Focalized through the shifting point of view of its protagonist, Mina/Dodie, the narrative
draws on popular cultural representations of vampirism in the horror and gothic genres,
including, but not limited to Dracula and its various film adaptations, in order to think
about the relationship between popular narratives of sexual contagion, the material effects
of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco in the 1980s and 1990s, and the embodied expe-
rience of women and gay men marginalized by their relationship to dominant conceptions
of sexuality. Bellamy’s narrative thus engages and reworks the conventional language of
horror as a genre in order to reveal the forms of materiality, embodiment, desire, and vio-
lence that it both dis- places and symptomatically reveals. (265)
8

In the Letters of Mina Harker, Bellamy’s character (the eponymous Dodie Bellamy) be-
comes intermittently possessed by Mina Harker, the secretary whose epistolary retellings of her
experiences with Dracula comprise the novel’s pages. Harker is determined to retell her story as
it actually happened rather than how it was written by Bram Stoker, the author. Moving between
poetry and epistolary passages and addressing the reader directly while changing font and itali-
cizing at random, the book seeks to disorient and then re-orient our starting point as readers: not
only to question the subjectivity of the page’s contents and the accuracy of what is being told,
but also to ask ourselves what has been omitted. Harker’s limited portrayal by Stoker’s hand is
freed by the character of Dodie, a woman author who, in the novel, actively resists the dominant
narrative—not by choice, but, like Anzaldúa, through possession. Mina has rendered Bellamy the
character the pawn through which she will bring her story to the world:
A century ago I sprang full-blown from Bram Stoker’s skull. In a way I am he, it’s en-
coded in our names
BRAM STOKER
MINA HARKER
ten letters each, five of them in common: M-A-K-E-R. Mina Harker the fact gatherer the
transcriber of tapes the puller together of manuscripts.

8
Breu, Christopher. “Disinterring the Real: Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker and the Late-
Capitalist Literature of Materiality.” Textual Practice, 2012, pp. 263–91,
doi:10.1080/0950236X.2011.638314.
24
Here, Bellamy the author illustrates how Stoker created the character of Harker not in any
way in line with an actual woman’s feelings, experiences or lived reality (and, through his por-
trayal of women in the novel, it is clear he has no interest in doing so), but instead much more
akin to the biblical story of Adam and Eve, in his image. Her text reveals how the dominant nar-
rative has manipulated and falsely portrayed the female experience, and, in turn, perpetuates a
society of misogyny in which women lack agency, even over their own stories. That Dracula’s
author is male serves as further evidence that accurate and honest portrayals of women’s stories
were of little interest to readers in 1897, when Dracula was first published. One need not look
further than famed author Mary Ann Evans, who used the male pseudonym of George Eliot to
get published, in order to understand that women’s stories told by women were not to be includ-
ed or taken seriously in the collective imaginary. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë went by the
pen names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, respectively, before it was discovered that they were
women. Even as little as fifty years ago, women often struggled to have their work taken serious-
ly as evidenced by Nelle Lee, who decided to go by her more masculine-sounding middle name,
Harper, in an effort to get published.
Where Anzaldúa seeks to create space for the indigenous and of-color narrative, Bella-
my’s novel aims to imagine a place in which the female author has control:
IF THE PLOT DIDN'T KILL ME THE UNCERTAINTY WOULD HAVE THAT’S
WHY I KICKED DODIE OUT OF THE DRIVERS SEAT. I WANTED TO INCITE A
RIOT OF WRITING.

One of Mina’s continual gripes is that Lucy, the coquettish and sexual young woman pur-
sued by Dracula and eventually made vampire, is the object of the book’s desire instead of Mina.
Mina in Bram Stoker’s hands is bookish and contradictory, unsure of what she wants. This Mina,
however, the ‘real’ Mina, in possession of the author Dodie Bellamy, is out to tell her own ver-
25
sion of what happened, of her desire, her agency, her disgust and her hunger. In Mina’s account,
she was actually the one in pursuit. The object of her affection was Quincey, the wealthy,
stealthy and handsome hero of Dracula who becomes entranced by Lucy, the novel’s beautiful,
sweet ingénue who is eventually pursued by three separate men, including Quincey, and made to
choose among them. To the contrary, Mina tells us she is the one aching to possess, fuck—not to
be captured or devoured, but to instead to be the capturer and devourer. For this reason, she has
been stricken from the narrative by Stoker and replaced with the Mina Harker readers have come
to know. Here she describes her torment, trapped on the page, unable to be free, in a purgatory of
banality as a result of her desires:
Literature assaults the reader without the interference of the writer—in my remake Lucy
loses—sure she’s married to Quincey but his heart belongs to Mina they fuck like de-
mons and Quincey’s sexual ecstasy binds him to her FOREVER. Lucy snaps flies in Dr.
Seward’s asylum. I think is an exciting conclusion don’t you? But those two wouldn’t let
things be—oh no—randomity made them uppity the text remains pliant, flickering, and
subject to instant evanishment, leaving nothing in its wake, no order, no dimly starred
words, simply silence and stupor, a restoration of chaos and old night RIGHT NOW I
FEEL SO SMALL…human almost, slouched in my desk chair flannel bathrobe and
white crew socks…Sing, I’m shrinking…soon I’ll be nothing but a comma…a peri-
od…then I’ll merge with the margin a vast white cryogenic crypt fast frozen I wait for the
ideal reader to stumble upon me with a cure for every terminal disease and the technolo-
gy to regenerate my body from an icy single cell.
What Bram Stoker has robbed Mina of, she argues, is her desire, her sexual agency. She
longs for a reader who sees her not as passive or at Dracula’s bidding as a result of his telepathic
connection to her forged by a bloodletting and receiving, but rather as an intact, three-
dimensional female character. Bram Stoker’s greatest authorial crime is not that women have
been erased from novels, but that their inclusion entails their reduction to passive creatures either
overtaken by hysteria or pursued as sexual conquest. When Mina places herself in the driver’s
seat, she refuses a coquettish place in the novel and instead roars into first gear, petulant and de-
manding, narcissistic and prone to outbursts of anger and revenge. Hers is not the wild insanity
26
of a woman consumed by her sexual desire but rather a sexual desire borne of clarity and sound
mind: a sexual desire that has made the decision, much like Anzaldúa, to be possessed. What
Bellamy argues is that women in the dominant narrative don’t lack for presence; what they have
been robbed of is choice, a voice.
Both Bellamy and Anzaldúa acknowledge that narrative changes according to who’s
reading. Subjectivity is the anomie of narrative; it foregrounds intent and, in this way, remains
forever wild, subject to change and unable to pin down. This as well can be counted as one of the
many narrative clichés of female desire: to be seen but not caught. To attempt to contain wom-
en’s narratives within the dominant narrative, as has been the historical practice, is to perpetuate
the idea that women can be quantified or dominated. Men desire, women are desired. Men fuck;
women get fucked. By taking back these linguistic certainties, both authors alter a syntax de-
signed to exclude them; their respective works become imbued with a radical feminist queer
agenda. Just as both women are possessed by the prose, they too shall possess us, as masters of
their craft, no matter how convoluted or wild they allow the narrative to become after the posses-
sion has ended. Both authors embrace the chaos of narrative: they resist the need to control, un-
derstand or structure their narratives in ways that can be easily understood. This is the precise
practice and intent of the dominant narrative; to create certainty, ‘truths,’ in all aspects of life.
In Anzaldúa’s chapter Tlilli Tlapalli / The Path of the Red and Black Ink, from the sec-
tion “Invoking Art,” she asserts:
The aesthetics of virtuosity, art typical of Western European cultures, attempts to manage
the energies of its own internal system such as conflicts, harmonies, resolutions and bal-
ances. It bears the presences of qualities and internal meanings. It is dedicated to the vali-
dation of itself. Its task is to move humans by means of achieving mastery in content,
technique, feeling. Western art is always whole and always “in power.” It is individual
(not communal). It is “psychological” in that it spins its energies between itself and its
witness. (67–68)

27

As Mina the character in Bellamy’s novel makes clear, she is the writer, collector and epistolary
communicator; she is the stand-in for Stoker; she is both the MAKER and the witness. Dracula
the character serves as a proxy for how male authors have treated women in literature and, by
extension, society for centuries—as an otherworldly creature that, for all intents and purposes,
appears to be human, looks human, can communicate, can entertain and charm, cause fear and
titillate. Yet underneath is Stoker’s throbbing desire to pursue the women in his company, to
‘turn’ them. In Stoker’s novel, Dracula, conflicted by his own passion and declarations of love,
settles for something else with Harker after turning her, a possession in which her only role is to
parrot and anticipate his behavior. Her psychic connection fuels the second half of Dracula, yet it
is not Mina Harker who is the rescuer, but Quincey. In debt to Quincey’s bravery, she and her
husband Jonathan name their own son Quincey. The story repeats itself.
As the novel concludes, Mina has been a collector of information, a courier of infor-
mation on Dracula’s behalf, a victim of his lust, a telepathic communicator and finally a mother,
after having carried a male child. She is, in all ways, of service to the narrative. She brings it
forth into the world, just as Stoker birthed the novel. Bellamy’s possession of Harker, and in turn
Harker’s possession of Bellamy, affords the character the opportunity she never had in text.
While it’s tempting to believe that Abraham Van Helsing is Stoker’s stand-in—they share the
same first name, after all—it is actually Mina who is Stoker’s proxy, as the novel is comprised of
her letters. She is the author and another kind of victim at the hands of Dracula; she is the voice
that never tells her own story—instead, she continues, endlessly, to tell his.
What, then, becomes of a narrative that has no order, written by authors not in control but
rather possessed, is a central question both books pose. Does the reader become less absorbed,
convinced or carried by the narrative, or are we pulled deeper into the intimacy created by a nar-
28
rative of inclusion rather than one that claims ultimate authority? When many perspectives are
possible, the dominant narrative becomes weakened. It no longer has the power to claim omnis-
cience; it must submit to the reality created by this false story, this dominant narrative that is, in
fact, the greatest fiction of them all.

29
Girl Talk

From Push From Blood and Guts in High School

30
As aforementioned, New Narrative authors found inspiration and camaraderie in the work of
Kathy Acker, who had been writing hybrid avant-garde experimental fiction since the mid-
1970s. Her deconstruction of narrative structure and stream -of-conscience poetics held an allure
for the increasingly disenchanted San Francisco scene that was invested in upending and
responding to the Language Poets, who had emerged around the same time. A societal lack of
action in response to the AIDS crisis moved them into literary action as well. Georgina Colby
quotes Acker in Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible: “TO SHOW: DIVERGENCE FROM
STANDARD FORM OF STRUCTURE; FORM HAS MEANING,”
9
from an unpublished
notebook of Acker’s. The alignment of form and content is the starting point of this book,
coalescing two interrelated axes of Acker’s practice: her continuation of radical modernism’s
preoccupation with the crisis of language and the avant-garde concern for producing art oriented
toward the transformation of society—both elements she accomplished in her many published
works, none of which is more widely read or popular than Blood and Guts in High School.
Weaving the disjointed story of Janey, a young woman who is her father’s lover, the
book is written in bursts and flashes, irreverent font, text intermixed with hand-drawn images
and pages with overlapping text and repetitive phrases that serve no outward purpose. It is a
book presented as a book written by a boundary-less young protagonist seeking solace on the
page, her disjointed thoughts and anxieties expressed in the nonsensical and elaborate stories that
unfold within, all written with a pen found in a cage where Janey tells the reader she is being
held captive. As with Bellamy, the book is the bag and the cunt. Both the object and the text are
meant to address Janey’s trauma, a fourth wall-breaking object held in the reader’s hand. In

9
Hester D. Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible by Georgina Colby Edinburgh University Press | 2016
|310pp | ISBN 9780748683505. The Critical quarterly. 2017;59(4):110-114. doi:10.1111/criq.12385

31
Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible, Colby recounts a 1984 event in which Blood And Guts in
High School was confiscated at New Zealand customs, along with a copy of Penthouse and
various other supposedly risqué pieces of writing. The Chairman of the Indecent Publications
Tribunal firstly addressed in his report Acker as an author, classifying her as lowbrow: “The
author of Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Acker, has been described by reviewers ‘as
everything.’
From Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts In High School
from post-punk porn to post-punk feminism.’” The report then proceeds to comment specifically
on the un-readability of the book, stating that it “is difficult to read and understand.” Acker
unwittingly found her perfect reader, an audience she wished more than anything to challenge
and address: a man stuck in a structural order he’d come to believe was true and salient.
Sapphire’s 1996 novel Push takes a more traditional narrative approach. Though there
is a plot (albeit one that consists primarily of the protagonist’s self-discovery), Sapphire employs
similar structural, syntactical, and narrative approaches to dealing with sexual assault among the
interior world of teenaged girls and the hurdles that befall them. Both Acker and Sapphire have
created characters for whom imagination is a balm, and the magical realism that unfolds within is
belied only by the violence that preceded it.
In Push, we are introduced to Claireece “Precious” Jones, an illiterate sixteen-year-old
about to have her second child through paternal incest. Precious is written by Sapphire using the
words of an author; she is described to us eloquently and fictively, as most characters in novels
are, but as she slowly begins to acquire language, Sapphire switches to Precious’s journal entries
and drawings as a source of authorial knowing. Precious is no longer being “told” she is telling.
Just as Bellamy allowed Mina Harker to “take back her story,” so too does Sapphire allow
32
Precious to speak, on behalf the many abused and silenced young women around the world who
have been rendered invisible. The intimacy created from this authorial choice is one of unease
and voyeurism on the part of the reader. That, however, is precisely what gives the book its
deepest moments of connection, forcing the reader to metaphorically walk in Precious’s shoes.
Sapphire lets us look in her mirror and see the face of a sad, lonely, traumatized and neglected
girl. It is uncomfortable and moving.
Many critics, however, found the shift to experimental narrative halfway into a novel that
began linearly to be jarring and a poor literary choice. In a review of the book, Publishers
Weekly
10
writes, “Sapphire falters, as her slim and harrowing novel, with its references to Harriet
Tubman, Langston Hughes and The Color Purple (a parallel the author hints at again and again),
becomes a conventional, albeit dark and unresolved, allegory about redemption. The ending,
composed of excerpts from the journals of Precious's classmates, lends heightened realism and a
wider scope to the narrative, but also gives it a quality of incompleteness.” Sapphire’s use of
what can be argued are traditional New Narrative techniques have unfortunately, along with
Push’s graphic subject matter delving into issues of bias around race and class, alienated it from
many scholars and readers. If Sapphire had been viewed early on or discussed in conversation
with the genre, or even in terms of an author invested in experimentalism, perhaps the book
might have been less confounding. As Marlo D. David writes in her essay on the book:
For years PUSH has received limited and uneven scholarly attention. The difficult
characters of Precious and Mary and, to a certain degree, Sapphire’s experimental narrative
aesthetics contribute to this critical oversight. Until recently, there have been few scholarly
articles or book chapters on PUSH, and even fewer that examine the novel as an example of a
progressive or empowering maternal narrative.
11

10
https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-679-44626-2
11
David MD. “I got self, pencil, and notebook”: Literacy and Maternal Desire in Sapphire’s PUSH. Tulsa
studies in women’s literature. 2016;35(1):173-199. doi:10.1353/tsw.2016.0019
33
But this incompleteness that has confounded critics is precisely the feeling that Sapphire
wants to leave the reader with. Precious is not singular; she is one of many, and her story will be
retold in the lives of young women daily unless we as a culture address the hegemonic
paternalistic structures that allow it to exist. The book feels incomplete because the story it aims
to tell has yet to be addressed collectively, not to mention finished.
Both Acker and Sapphire have written characters who create salvation through the
discovery of language in a world that has silenced them. Through language, their trauma is
expressed in haphazard ways as each fumbles their way through letters and sentences, seeking
some kind of light. A language borne of silence. Both books include hand-drawn images by
Janey and Precious that express their fear, disgust, and frustration. The pages, presumably
journal entries and epistolary notes between student and teacher in Sapphire’s novel, include
redacted hand-scribbled words, half-started poems, and direct address of the reader. The
characters’ invisible, crawling silence reaches for the reader and digs for intimacy, regressing
from typed print to pencil scribbling and blurring the line between page and the world beyond
that the reader inhabits, where girls like Precious and Janey walk past them on the subway or
stand on street corners as they drive by. Each book begs its reader to look more closely at the
young women in their lives and question how much they really know about the young women
they encounter, as so many young people are encouraged to be silent in the wake of trauma and
abuse.
Each character disassociates from their trauma and escapes into fantasy or self-harm.
From Push: “I fall back on the bed, he fall right on top of me. Then I change stations, change
bodies, I be dancing in videos! In movies! I be breaking! I fly.”
34
Janey similarly escapes into elaborate narratives about abduction and captivity, where
ultimately she breaks free.
In contemporary society a young woman like Precious and Janey are often rendered both
invisible and nameless, but Sapphire and Acker give their stories a face, lending a humanity to
the young women who are too often commodified and subsequently discarded by society. Janey
dies, but as Acker writes on the last page,
So the doves cooed softly to each other, whispering of their own events, over
Janey’s grave in grey Saba Pacha cemetery in Luxor.
Soon many other Janeys were born and these Janeys covered the earth.
12

Each author makes clear that neither protagonist is a unique entity or a case study of a
sexually violated and abused young woman. Rather, both stand as an example of the banal
regularity with which these stories exist and the desperate plea of young women to be seen and
heard. Janey and Precious are the ubiquitous, nameless young women for whom trauma is an
absolute, not the exception. For the many Janeys and Preciouses who are known, just as many
are invisible or disappear. Janey and Precious are and are not individuals, rendered identical by
the abuse they have survived and the many who will similarly suffer and endure. That is, both
authors contend, the true nonsense, the actual insanity that we live with daily. Indeed, nothing in
the lives of young women makes sense when you consider the world we, as a society, allow them
inhabit.

12
Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. New York, Grove Press, 1978.
35
So Help You God

“Yes, and the body has a memory. Your physical carriage hauls more than your weight. Bodies
are the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into the consciousness of your
being—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments
lived through even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside,
among, a part of the games.” —Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“What seems to happen becomes its own happening, and has to be told that way.”
—Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction

You are twelve, attending Sts. Philip and James School on White Plains Road and the girl sitting
in the seat behind you asks to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have
written. Sister Evelyn is in the habit of taping the 100s and the failing grades to the coat closet
doors. The girl is Catholic with waist-length brown hair. You can’t remember her name: Mary?
Catherine?

He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire.
He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More
than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly
chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an
English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and
roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for
Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war except to
say, Jimmy, take care of yourself.

You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you
you smell good and have features more like a white person.

They were called legs or grunts.
To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for
Martha up the hills and through the swamps.

Sister Evelyn never figures out your arrangement perhaps because you never turn around to
copy Mary Catherine’s answers. Sister Evelyn must think these two girls think a lot alike or she
cares less about cheating and more about humiliation or she never actually saw you sitting
there.

36
In its intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond
the intransitive.
And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don’t forget.

Police beating civil rights activists in the United States, South, 1960s

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried investigate the
burden of memory, the trauma of serving and the specter of truth. O’Brien’s collection of loosely
tied short stories employs what he calls ‘story truth,’ while Rankine’s experimental work, a
pastiche of memory and mixed-media imagery, is dubbed by the author herself ‘an American
lyric.’ By framing the book under the title Citizen, Rankine illustrates how, in the United States,
to be a citizen—an entity only requiring a title in order to evoke a sense of understanding as to
what that title entails—is an act of social conditioning, a role each of us plays. O’Brien, on the
other hand, has created a book in which the reader becomes witness to a “truthful” account of
37
young men socialized in the United States and drafted into a war they do not comprehend
confront what that duty entails and how it perverts and normalizes their view of the ‘other.’
O’Brien’s title refers not only to the things these young men literally carry (love letters, rations,
family keepsakes), but the psychological weight that will follow them out of Vietnam and back
home to the United States—if they survive. Although O’Brien is not considered a New Narrative
author, he employs many of its techniques, primarily the blurring of fact and fiction in order
highlight social injustice.
In The Things They Carried, O’Brien coins what he calls ‘story truth,’ a form of narrative
fabrication that effectively portrays the reality and horror of the human experience in ways that
facts cannot. From the short story “Good Form”:
Here is the happening—truth. I was a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with
real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now. twenty years later,
I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty.
He lay in the center of the red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his
throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star shaped hole. I killed him.
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present…
“Daddy, tell the truth, “ Kathleen can say, “did you ever kill anybody?” And I can say
honestly, “Of course not.”
Or I can say honestly, “Yes.”

The land was haunted. We were fighting forces that did not obey the laws of twentieth-
century science. Late at night, on guard, it seemed that all of Vietnam was shimmering—
odd shapes swaying in the paddies, boogiemen in sandals, spirits dancing in old pagodas.
It was a ghost country, and Charlie Cong was the main ghost. The way he came out at
night. How you never really saw him, just thought you did. Almost magical—appearing,
disappearing. He could blend with the land, changing form, becoming trees and grass. He
could levitate. He could fly. He could pass through barbed wire and melt away like ice
and creep up on you without sound or footsteps. He was scary. In the daylight, maybe,
you didn’t believe in this stuff. You laughed it off. You made jokes. But at night you
turned into a believer: no skeptics in foxholes. (212)
13

13
Bloom, H. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Bloom’s Literary Criticism; 2011.

38

Soldiers in Vietnam celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, 1968

The suggestion made by protagonist Jimmy Cross that the Vietnamese countryside has instilled
such fears in the heads of these young men is belied by O’Brian’s story-truth. He paints these
young men as possessors of tangible vulnerability—meaningful keepsakes—that demonstrate
how the United States has sent mostly post-adolescent boys into a foreign country and filled their
heads with propaganda and training designed to desensitize them to killing. But this regimen is
ultimately designed to do battle with the human boy who lives inside, the human boy who was
taught the white supremacist-washed Abrahamic religion of the United States, who came of age
in the Protestant glow of the TV screen behind a fabled white picket fence that was always,
ultimately, a media-generated mirage, one intended to erase the humanity of anyone who looks
and acts differently than him: To make, in essence, an enemy of the unknown. To make, in
essence, his American identity perpetually subject to attack and always worth killing for. To
make, in essence, a Citizen.
39
“because white men can’t
police their imagination
black men are dying” (135)
14

—Claudia Rankine, Citizen

O’Brien lays the groundwork for Rankine’s American lyric. A legacy of this
normalization sets the stage and perpetuates a long-lasting ethos of violence and suspicion
toward African Americans, all from the wellspring of a white supremacist ideology intended to
protect the ‘American identity.’ Black human life, asserts Rankine, is the collateral price for this
conservation. “The past is a life sentence,” she writes, “a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.”
Rankine and O’Brien enter their respective projects on trauma and memory—and the
lasting effects both have on the contemporary psyche—through the lens of “truth.” Their
disparate usages of the term, as applied to their specific works, not only highlights the versatility
of point of view but the varying meanings “truth” can embody within a work as well as the
impact it evokes in a reader. Each author creates a hybrid of fact and fiction aimed at
communicating a sociological crisis in the United States, namely the dehumanization of non-
white bodies.
Rankine engages in an investigative process of exhuming lies built through white supremacy and
held as truth. In the opening section, devoted to tennis great Serena Williams, Rankine argues
that truth is subjective and always filtered through the lens of whomever holds power. In the case
of Serena Williams, tennis umpires Mariana Alves and later Eva Asderaki repeatedly called her
shots fouls when, in fact, everyone can see—including via recorded playback—that the shots are
legal. Alves’s and Asderaki’s whims supersede fact because the truth being honored, which is

14
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyruc. Graywolf Press, 2014.
40
larger and worth more to Alves and Asderaki, asserts Rankine, is retaliation against Serena’s
black body for invading and excelling in a historically white space. Thus, their unfair calls hold.
And as Serena turns to the lineswoman and says, “I swear to God I’m fucking going to
take this fucking ball and shove it down your fucking throat, you hear that? I swear to
God,” as offensive as her outburst is, it is difficult not to applaud her for reacting
immediately to being thrown against a sharp white background. It is difficult not to
applaud her for existing in the step and breath of all these moments, for fighting crazily
against their imagined wrongness of her body’s positioning at the service line (Citizen
29).

Truth is only as relevant as its audience, and in the case of Rankine’s Citizen, truth, without the
benefit of history and unbiased mediation, is never truth at all. Facts are not truth and truth is not
factual. Truth is the place intention takes root until everyone believes the story being told. In the
United States, reality and truth rarely intertwine.
Rankine also employs varied imagery and artwork in Citizen to call attention to other
artistic mediums that tackle antiracist efforts in order to reveal the fictive nature of cultural
identity as Americans. While not included in the book, artist William Pope. L made a claim
similar to Rankine’s in his 2015 show Trinket at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
in which he interrogated the concept of truth and its impact on race relations in the United States.
Included in Trinket’s installation are short films in which actors dressed as Confederate soldiers
perform Civil War reenactments: Pope. L uses the construction of the United States and its
blistering, all-too-real tale of woe—from its bright and immediately brutal beginnings to the
mud-covered storm of violence that remains—as metaphor. Actors dress as Confederates
because this, too, is a play in which we assume the same role millions of other actors have played
before us: a macabre unfolding of human history retold via the daily subjugation and abjection of
American bodies. We are his actors. Therein lies the true brutality and genius of Trinket: Pope. L
offers us a look at our human sickness, then reminds us that it’s real; that when we exit MOCA’s
41
doors we return to the fiction of our lives. Much like Rankine, Pope. L illustrates that ‘the truths
we hold to be self-evident’ in the United States are nothing more than a manipulation of facts
created to serve a white supremacist agenda, one in which white bodies uphold their role as
‘citizen’ by maintaining the same American identity O’Brien’s characters have been conditioned
to believe is always subject to attack by non-white bodies.
Both authors execute these authorial feats through the subtle manipulation of point of
view, creating two works that, while on the surface appear as straightforward narratives, actually
employ shrewd techniques to achieve their intended goals. O’Brien writes from the perspective
of young men whose primed behavior wreaks psychological damage on its perpetrators. In the
case of the patriotic American ideology, the wounded are not the sole victims of its ire; those
taxed with enforcing it are as well.
What is immediately apparent in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is that we are
reading an account of trauma from the perspective of a young white man telling the story of
other young white men—precisely the type of person who has yet to encounter injustice at the
hands of his government. The characters pivot from a sense of shock and outrage to a place of
apathy and dull resignation as the reality of what it is to be a Citizen in the bodies of O’Brien’s
characters settles in. Their lived truth up to this point is thrown into a tumbler, with a grave
reality to encounter on the other end.
On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the
bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha’s letters. Then he burned the two photographs.
There was a steady rain falling, which made it difficult, but he used heat tabs and Sterno
to build a small fire, screening it with his body, holding the photographs over the tight
blue flame with the tips of his fingers.
He realized it was only a gesture. Stupid, he thought. Sentimental, too, but mostly just
stupid.
Lavender was dead. You couldn’t burn the blame.
42
Besides, the letters were in his head. And even now, without photographs, Lieutenant
Cross could see Martha playing volleyball in her white gym shorts and yellow T-shirt. He
could see her moving in the rain.
When the fire died out, Lieutenant Cross pulled his poncho over his shoulders and ate
breakfast from a can. (Things, 23)

By burning Martha’s letters, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross burns the innocence of the men who walk
in his platoon. He burns Ted Lavender’s patriotism and picket fence dreams; he burns the idea
that any of them can return unchanged. He resents Martha for what she represents in men like
Lavender: hope. He burns the lie. What remains is an evolving collection of stories that slowly
reveal a loosely modeled character, Tim “Timmy” O’Brien, as our unnamed narrator, as well as
the slow unraveling of his faith in the United States and his loss in coming to understand war.
What is cleaved out in the hollow of this lost innocence is a surveillance of the men around him:
they either lean harder into the lie or slowly blink awake to a grim reality. The things they carry
are not only symbols of home but symbols of the boys they left behind, boys who won’t return—
even if they come back alive.
In discovering that fictive O’Brien is indeed our narrator, it is made clear that O’Brien the
author is moving us toward a larger truth, his ‘story truth.’ As Alex Vernon notes in A
Kinetoscope of War: The Cinematic Effects of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
15
:
In a key chapter of The Things They Carried (1990), titled “How to Tell a True War
Story,” Tim O’Brien’s fictional narrator—also named Tim O’Brien—turns to the general
address of the second-person pronoun to put the reader into a character’s state of mind.
You watch the “fluid symmetries,” O’Brien writes, the “harmonies of sound and shape
and proportion.” What you see “fills the eye” and “commands you” with its “powerful,
impeccable beauty.” Afterward, “there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. [...]
You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the
human being you want to be and then become by force of wanting it. (Things 80–81)
What you have just experienced is both absolutely true and not at all true, and as you
leave it behind you feel vitalized by a universe reordered:

15
“A Kinetoscope of War: The Cinematic Effects of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.” Alex Vernon, Journal
of Narrative Theory, Vol. 48, No. 2, Summer 2018, pp. 194–224. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2018.0008
43
There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. [...] You recognize what’s valuable.
Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, and all
that might be lost. [...] [Y]ou find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel
wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for
how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.

In “How to Tell a True War Story,” the novel’s defining tale, O’Brien the author speaks
through O’Brien the character, giving readers his thoughts on the lies of the United States and
the importance of reality at the mercy of an ever-biased truth. Reality can only be understood as
‘story truth,’ a way to grapple with what it is to be human—and the human condition as a
whole—which is felt most strongly when filtered through a fictive literary lens. As I stated in a
2014 interview with the literary website Entropy when discussing Susan Sontag’s critique of
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s film Hitler: A Film From Germany,
There is no simple, concise way to solve or understand an emotional and historical
wound; it must only be worked through and then re-felt. In the re-feeling we are able to
heal, in the taking apart and reconstructing narrative, we are able, as Camus so famously
said, to see the truth within the lie. And so Syberberg tried just that: to reanimate the
insanity of Hitler; whether he was successful or not is up for debate. And of course it
could be argued that this effort was his greatest achievement, proving that history can
only be felt as meaningful if it is felt as narrative. If a reader or audience can imagine a
world with which they will hopefully never come to terms, then perhaps the deluge is
necessary. This is, Sontag asserts, a great and mighty defense of fiction’s role in history.
16

Syberberg’s film, much like O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, also addresses the atrocity of
war and fact’s inadequate ability to convey ‘the truth’—or, in this case, portray reality. For both
Syberberg and O’Brien, reality must be made fictive if it is to be made real. Just as Syberberg
subtitled his film A Film From Germany, O’Brien has subtitled his book A Work Of Fiction.
Each work seeks to achieve a layer of potent honesty about the brutality of war and the debt of
citizenship, as well as to expose the lies of perpetual propaganda and the cost of these ideologies.

16
https://entropymag.org/the-words-resemble-you-an-interview-w-nikki-darling/
44
In switching from first to second person and then finally revealing himself as the main
protagonist, O’Brien places a subtle spell on the reader, at first pulling the reader in with what
feels like a traditional narrative—it should be noted that the book, a collection of short stories, is
actually most closely organized and written as a chapter novel with examples of young men
whose ideas of self and country, in tandem with their moral compass and vulnerability, become
distorted. In reading the book as a tale of woe, one chronicling the emotional toll war inflicts on
the individual, the reader gains a sense of sympathy for the young soldier tasked with this
horrifying call to duty. In switching to a second person point of view, the reader is no longer a
bystander able to generate sympathy, but rather a part of the problem or solution. Then the
narrative turns inward for the reader: are they the soldier or the ‘other?’ O’Brien challenges us to
look at our own roles in society and ask ourselves what we believe, why, and whether we are
complicit in these roles. This shift in point of view facilitates a turning point in the book that,
once taken, cannot be undone. This is no longer simply a sympathetic American story about boys
in Vietnam, but a story about us all. In telling the story the way O’Brien feels it needs to be told,
using ‘story truth’ in order to communicate the larger truth—that we have been lied to, that you
have been lied to—he paints a portrait of an untold reality and brings us closer to a new one.
From “How to Tell A True War Story”:
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from
what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening, and has to be
told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close
your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you
look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get
jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is
always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact
represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed. (Things 71)

45
Soon after this section, O’Brien makes the official switch to second person. From this point on,
the reader is in the driver’s seat, experiencing the story first hand. A feeling of dissociation sets
in, as if the self has become unmoored. Rankine, in Citizen, evokes a similar feeling of otherness,
as if the self is no longer tethered to the body but rather to some other entity onto which all ideas
of self and perceived imperfections can be scrutinized. As Toni Morrison famously noted in her
lecture “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,”
delivered at The University of Michigan in 1988, “The trauma of racism is for the racist and the
victim; the severe fragmentation of the self and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symp-
tom) of psychosis—strangely of no interest to psychiatry.”
In Citizen, Rankine expertly navigates these microaggressions at the hands of non-overtly
racist friends and acquaintances by employing the use of second person. In an interview with
Guernica, she asserts,
The second person for me disallowed the reader from knowing immediately how to
position themselves. I didn’t want to race the individuals. Obviously [the reader] will
assume—“She’s black, he must be white,” etc.—but I wanted those assumptions to be
made. Because you know, amid this post-racial thing, sometimes I’ll have a student who
says, “I don’t really think about race. I don’t see race.” And then I’ll ask, “Well, how do
you read this?” And they say, “Oh, that’s a black person, that’s a white person.” So
clearly, you’re race-ing these people in order to understand this dynamic. I wanted that
positioning to happen for readers.
17

By forcing readers to fall back on their learned assumptions about race, or what Rankine
calls ‘race-ing,’ a sense of culpability kicks in among the opening pages; she creates an internal
system of checks and balances. If the reader is not a person of color, then they must

17
https://www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person/
46
decide who they are within the text. If they find the microaggressions horrifying, then they are
forced to examine why that is, a paranoia usually reserved for people of color and rarely
experienced by white bodies: Is this about me? Is this race-related? Rankine creates an anxiety of
uncertainty for non-black or brown readers in which they are forced to confront the reality of
their behavior in their encounters around people of color. Unlike O’Brien, who utilizes ‘story
truth’ to uncover the lie, Rankine employs concise, unfussy language, sticking to facts in order to
pull the curtain back on the lie: our learned behavior.
O’Brien writes to illustrate a truth that has been manipulated and buried, to portray the
power and importance of ‘story truth.’ Rankine uses the second person as way to implicate white
readers into confronting the truth shrouded in the casual encounter, our everyday behavior. Both
expose the horror and trauma of war, one across a vast ocean and one on our own shores, one
that, for many, is invisible and unnamed, one that Citizen puts a name to: An American Lyric.
Each paints a picture of cause and effect; each struggles to extricate themselves from the mess of
these ideologies and stand fully aware, in the reality of this American story.

47

My uncle, Danny Garcia, from Wagon Mound, New Mexico, in his training barracks after being
drafted the summer after high school and sent to Vietnam, 1968. He recalls being “terrified.”

I’m 43 years old and a writer now, still dreaming.
I can hear the even breathing that creates passages to dreams. And yes, I want to interrupt to tell
him her us you me I don’t know how to end what doesn’t have an ending.

I’m gazing into some other world, a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral
homes, where there are no bodies at all. I can see Kiowa, too, and Ted Lavender and Curt
Lemon, and sometimes I can even see Tommy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights.
I’m so young and happy. I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history,
moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high
leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s
life with a story.

Tell me a story, he says, wrapping his arms around me.

The End.

48
The Call is Coming From Inside the House
And then one day you wake up and you’re forty, scraping through life like someone half
your age, struggling through deadlines for school—you’re still in school—and making ends meet
through arbitrary checks from publishers who might pay you in the next twelve months if you
diligently stay on the case. Ideally you’d have an entire folder of reminder emails to keep tabs on
who owes you what via assorted templates: Dear so-and-so, following up on payment for the cat-
alog essay…but who are you kidding? Just like the removable sticker tiles you bought on Etsy to
make the kitchen in your small studio carriage house appear more sophisticated, you never actu-
ally get around to Making or Doing. But in your mind this file exists, just as the tiles sit in your
office gathering dust. You know they are real, a possibility.
On the one hand, you feel somewhat accomplished: you’ve done some things, a novel,
some art shows in respected galleries, “riveting” performances and some essays that received
accolades (though really just mentions). Buzzfeed put you on a “Best of” year-end list; Artforum
knows who you are. Yet money eludes you. Your procrastination is a yoke you can’t untether.
You haven’t gotten high in three years, and you spend your days daydreaming about a time when
you could spend an entire afternoon on your back staring at sunlight filter through branches of a
tall green oak, most likely in Pasadena—yes, in Pasadena, in a friend’s ramshackle mid-century
modern apartment courtyard, the leaf-speckled empty pool, very Karate Kid, each of you newly
moved out and on your own. Twenty, maybe. You turn your head and Sarah, its Sarah, of course,
smiles and her teeth sparkle, she reaches out and hands you a joint. You’re laughing, very cine-
matically, very slow-mo, colors glitter, falling from a waterfall on that hike we’ve all taken,
searching for a swimming hole, something to dive into. You’re listening to Pink Floyd on the

49

Karate Kid exterior, Reseda, San Fernando Valley, Early 1980s

needle because you’re exiting the ’90s and though your life has been an endless accumulation of
CDs, you still sort of only have three or five albums, all of them man-heavy: The Rolling Stones,
The Kinks, etc. You wake up and you’re forty. In your Spotify daily playlist, Garbage’s Shirley
Manson sings, The trick is to keep breathing.
You’re married (well, somewhat, because you don’t believe in marriage for political rea-
sons but you certainly paid marriage ceremony bills for the event—a commitment ceremony, just
the two of you, which took place in a small village on a Grecian island). Never in all your
grungy, hustling years could you have imagined. You’ve only become a slightly more polished
hustler. You find yourself referring to your partner as your husband anyway because the entire
“partner” nomenclature requires a five-minute conversation and you end up sighing at your mal-
leability in the face of convenience. And family members over sixty truly do not understand:
when you say “commitment ceremony” they say, “Are you gay?” and you sigh, because, well,
50
sort of, but not in this instance. You want to say, “No because every woman I’ve ever pursued
thinks I’m a tourist in Georgia O’Keefe country and never calls back,” but you don’t; you say,
‘No, he’s a straight man.” So you stick with what’s easiest: husband. You hate yourself a little at
the ease with which you do this and are so grossed out by the feeling of recognition and pride
that swells in you to say this, that your non-husband is your husband; it’s a craw in your side and
you become ever more determined to rip apart the entire bloody institution limb from limb. Sick-
ened at your own conditioning. In bed he says, I could marry you. Don’t you dare, you whisper,
drifting off to sleep. Interestingly enough, he does not refer to you as his wife but instead his life
partner, which you are, but for some reason the follow-up questions never seem to follow; you
chalk this up to his being a man. People are more prone to accept his word at face value, even if
they don’t understand it, questioning what they know rather than the other way around. Regard-
less, you wear rings.
You’re not sure why you hold marriage in such contempt (actually, you do, but that’s an-
other story), only that you’ve spent your entire adult life trying to unlearn all the fears and anxie-
ties and bad coping mechanisms your loving yet ungodly, demonic, life-destroying (unintention-
ally, of course) parents have taught you. All the energy and money, the false starts, the workahol-
ism, just to be free. It’s no wonder you’re a perpetual late bloomer. Starting in the second grade
when these same parents allowed you to be held back at the suggestion of the hippie-dipshit
Waldorf school because they thought you’d want more years to absorb the Rudolph Steiner way
of doing things under the auspicious and loving hand of their expensive, useless institution,
where you left the fourth grade in possession of a second-grade reading comprehension level.
But lo! You, despite all efforts to stunt your intellectual prowess, progressed under the watchful
eye of movies and television. These parents, while well meaning, are big on starting and not fin-
51
ishing. They could not hack the follow-through required of this Waldorf elf school, so no home-
work was checked, no reading was done to ensure books and chapters were accounted for. You
were placed in front of a television and here, under the light of the best minds, screenwriters, art-
ists, and performers—your true parents—you began to learn. You soaked it up: I Love Lucy, Gil-
ligan’s Island, The Facts of Life, Three’s Company, Soul Train, The Brady Brunch, The Andy
Griffith Show, Diff’rent Strokes, The Flintstones, The Jeffersons, the Saturday afternoon matinee
on Channel 13, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Cleopatra, The Philadelphia Story, Sunset Boule-
vard, etc., etc.
So you’re a writer now, is the point. You specialize in dialogue. You’ve spent eight years
of the past decade, which was your thirties, in a Creative Writing and Literature PhD program,
one of the best in the country. You’ve accumulated a fair amount of short stories, some quite
good. Try these on for size:
Movement
I was seven when my dad left. We lived in the rented Victorian attic in the house of one
of his old friend’s ex-wife; he and my dad had known each other from the Montecito car club
they used to frequent in the ’70s. They were both into building furniture, racing vintage cars, and
getting day drunk. They’d befriended one another when my mom and dad drank wine and made
pottery at Esalen. Half their crew turned crazy meth-head Grateful Dead burnouts, the other half
wealthy liberals buying up all the old bungalows in Pasadena and restoring them, sending their
kids to fancy alternative schools like Waldorf and frequenting the neighborhood Unitarian Uni-
versalist church, braving a desolate 1980s downtown to see the Philharmonic and shopping at
Trader Joes when there were still only two. My parents were kind of like that, but they were also
kind of fuckups. But after that and before my dad left, he brought a small brown girl to my
52
house. He rang our own doorbell as if he were a stranger and opened the old wooden and wire
screen, past our porch’s wood floors that were always in a state of constant renovation. Half the
walls inside the house were terra cotta pink, the other the original yellowed 1920s cracked stuc-
co. There was always a ladder open someplace and the dust of work scattered about the old,
brown, oily floors. I saw their faces from atop the staircase. I double hopped down the steps. He
stood there with her, his hand in hers. He held it up to me, like a prize. I was six. She was eight,
maybe nine. Who was this man to find young girls somewhere on the sidewalks and bring them
to the doorway, and who were they to follow him? The answer was simple: children.
“This is Margaret,” he said, and smiled at her. We’d moved in two months prior and I’d
yet to make a single friend. I had tea parties for my stuffed animals in the hollowed-out body of
an old Model T Ford, its rubber wheels disintegrating. My great grandpa, who was personally
involved in the Pasadena architectural renaissance led by the Greene Brothers and Frank Lloyd
Wright and responsible for generating the entire Arts and Crafts movement, used to own
three. This was the one my dad had kept. His friend had been holding it behind his garage, be-
neath an oak tree in a shady, moist, dark earth hideaway. It was my one and only beloved thing
in life then.
Margaret lived in a house a few blocks down. Most of our neighbors were lower-class
Latinos. We're the only black kids, she told me, telling me about her and her younger brother,
Geoff. Their mom was a secretary at JPL in La Cañada and were one of the few families on the
block to own the home they lived in. Even my parents were renting (albeit from their yuppie
friends who had been bailing them out for the past fifteen years). That my dad was the son of a
rich man saved his ass—and in turn, mine—more times than could count. I was the only half-
white, half-Latina, so it seemed right that Margaret and I would become friends. Look, she said
53
once. See those birds, up there flying? Yes, I answered, two moving in tandem. Those are blue
birds, she asserted, and let her arm drop. I remember she seemed very sure of it. I remember their
gray bellies flat against the overcast day, flying between the leaves of dark green tops. They were
silent and the sky felt heavy.
This is Amalia, said Margaret. Behind the threshold of Amalia’s door were bright bursts
of light shooting from an old glass Craftsman window covered partially by Scooby Doo sheets.
The kitchen sink in front of the window overflowed with neon souvenir takeout cups. A cup
from Magic Mountain with a crossed-arm Taz dripped onto the 1960s tiled floor that pulled and
cracked up at the sides. The house a had a new smell, unlike my house, which smelled like the
beeswax candles my mom burned and the continuous dry dust that rose up from the floor. Or
Margaret’s house, which smelled always like air freshener and some kind of meal having just
been made. It was a nice smell. But something here was different, tantalizing. The smell of not
just air freshener, a sort of sweet cinnamon scent, but of people, bodies. The smell of when you
ran in the sun a long time and then hugged a friend. It smelled thick and heavy. The house was
draped in shadows, and there was a large navy blue leather couch, old and ripped. It sat on a thin
matted forest green carpet. Chunks of the original wood could be seen in the patches that had
been torn up. Thick black spots of gum, which had since cracked white, chalked at the edges, and
the old metal floor heater had large strips of silver packing tape interlaced around an ancient
grate.
Who’s there? yelled a female voice from the kitchen. The part I couldn’t see. A man
much younger than my father, but not so much younger, poked his head out of a bedroom, be-
yond the doorway. Amalia looked at him. Some friends, Daddy, she said. It’s just some kids, he
54
shouted back to the unseen female voice. After that, there was no follow-up. Amalia opened the
door.
This is his magazine collection. She told me about a year later. We didn’t really talk to
Margaret anymore. Her mother said she couldn’t go to Amalia’s but wouldn’t say why, and she
couldn’t come to my house because she “didn’t know where my parents were.” We saw her
sometimes when we went to the park, but that was less and less.
I pulled one of the more crinkled copies from the bottom of the stack. They were hidden
under her dad Eddie’s waterbed, which had small leaks that always reopened no matter how
many times they patched it. He drove a truck cross-country and was away from home a lot. And
he wasn’t really Amalia’s dad. He was from Mexico, her mom said. And that seemed enough of
an explanation to her. He was nice and would hold us upside down by the legs, in the backyard,
which also had old cars in it that you could go inside and rip at the interior. They were junked, he
told us. He had them for “parts.” There were buckets, too, and inside, the tiny bodies of unborn
flies flicked their slimy tails. It was funny, I could stand a fly in the water, almost like a tadpole,
but when it sprouted wings I fiercely held myself against it, its entity, its presence, its being.
Mine doesn’t have hair yet, she said, opening the centerfold. I could read enough that I could
sound out Penthouse. But I will, she finished; so will you.
Later, when I did, and had waxed my pussy soft and had since appeared in an advertise-
ment in the back of that magazine, I would find myself driving down the streets of my childhood
neighborhood, long transformed into the neat clipped rows of restored precision— almost as if
my great grandpa were walking them once again. I stopped on a corner where there used be a
liquor store. I was hoping to buy some smokes. The sign always just said Liquor. We bought
Slimer ice creams on a stick there, when the ice cream man came less in the winter. And where,
55
if you were slightly older (or brave), you might walk the short distance and cross above the 210
freeway overpass holding hands in a line, the cars spitting out below, heading toward the I.E.
Where old men hung around and talked to the owner, behind the thick plastic glass, scratching
lotto tickets, and the woman selling tamales called sharply from the doorway every Sunday
morning that new tamales had been made, and where, in 1989, Margaret and her little brother
Geoff, using the pay phone out front to call their mom, were murdered on Halloween night by
the Crips, who thought they were somebody else’s children. And where now there is a vacant lot,
beneath a deep green sign that says Welcome to Bungalow Heaven.

The World
My mother loved estate sales. We’d go up and down the rich parts of Pasadena looking at
the remnants of rich people’s stuff. Usually their kids got the money, sold the house and its con-
tents, and built something ugly in Malibu. It went that way sometimes, with the rich. I guess you
could say I grew up nestled in the armpit of other people’s luxury.
Floral-patterned sofas from the 1930s, oriental rugs, beautiful Noir ceramics from the
main guys: Sascha Brastoff, Homer Laughlin. My mom had the books on them. Ad infinitum.
My weekend childhood looked like Princess Leia’s house in Ashby’s Shampoo when Warren
Beatty looks perfect and they fuck. She’s in a tennis skirt. Holding a racket. Feathered hair. Palm
trees. Beautiful stained glass hand-blown old Hollywood-era-styled houses. Stuffed snugly in the
green-lawned beauty of Pasadena. Rolling properties that were routinely used for film sets. Si-
lent-era swimming pools. Old cement lions festooned near the curly, lipped edge of the bright
blue-and-green-colored water. 1950s red English Playboy Mansion-looking houses. Wind in the
Willows Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, cottages of palatial 1920s character. Entire places shrouded in
56
large shady oaks. River rock stone driveways that went on forever like passages toward Narnia
or a Little Princess rose garden between tall, sculpted ivy hedges. Old dark pianos glistening
through clear glass windows. Rudolph Valentino Mediterranean mansions, the kind of place a
1950s Jack Parsons cult witch party might light up among the yellow and white pool umbrellas
straight out of ’70’s/’30s Chinatown.
She’s my sister and my daughter.
A beautiful fairyland of long afternoons ascending creaky oak staircases to attics shoved
full of treasures. Victorian rocking horses, old photo albums with Civil War-era tin prints. The
families were old Californians; most had Hispano blood and had been at one time Californios.
Eventually mingled with some Nor-Cal prospectors. Diluted and Anglophied. Finally dipped into
that Protestant shoe glue about one hundred years back. They had that Gold money. That railroad
money. That land grant money. A long, long time ago. The kind of California Joan Didion was
born to write about. Now they were just lawyers and doctors and products of the Ivy League
West and eaters of fine cheese and supporters of Bristol Farms. Where my mother bought us
treats. We were a couple of gypsies. Interlopers into their world. My mother filled their churches
with roses. She found them endlessly fascinating, she herself being from an old people in New
Mexico. She herself being Mexican. These people were the answer to What if? What if one thing
had gone differently? What if she had been born a thousand miles further west? What if she grew
up in the shadow of Hollywood? She worked at a high-priced floral shop in Beverly Hills. She
decorated celebrity Christmas trees. Wedding. Prom. Funeral. Weekly living room arrangements.
She specialized and had studied Ikebana at Pasadena City College in the 1970s while a maid at
the Huntington Hotel, the pink Myron Hunt-designed Sleeping Beauty-esque palace that she
loved with all her soul. Fired for dumping a steak in the lap of a man that smacked her ass while
57
hooting “Señorita!” Mom wasn’t obsessed with these people; she didn’t envy them in any real
way. Mom just liked stuff. Old, cool things. She liked romance architecture and movies. She was
pretty and friendly, talented. Had freckles. She was married to the son of one of these people.
But he was crazy and gone. Anyway, at that point she was already older and in line at the Block-
buster with me, digging at the hem of my plaid school uniform, hissing, Keep it tucked in. We
just ordered Thai. I’m stoned. But she doesn’t notice or care. Or actually, she might notice, but
can’t bring herself to care because, as I will learn when I’m older, she comes from a long line of
marijuana smokers and nothing about what I do or will do one day will ever shock her (despite
her great desire to be upset). Later when I tell her I’m an alcoholic, I will watch this information
travel across her face like a telegram until she finally sets it down, never to be picked up again.
She simply doesn’t have the stuff to take my struggle seriously. And so I get to smoke in my
closet because she’d really rather honestly just watch the movie and eat dinner and get along.
Let’s just get along, she says. It’s just nicer that way. Easier. For everyone. Let’s just get along.
Robby Bobby wants to know if I can balance stuff on my head while I dance. What now?
I ask, whipping up from taking a line he’s placed on the coffee table in the backroom office. He’s
a promoter and runs the reggae night at Short Stop. Says he might have some work for Jangle
and me. Jangle is the beer girl here and we live together, but only she pays rent; we don’t really
live together. I have my own place, but I’m never there. I haven’t paid rent this month and my
landlord—a small person, that is to say, a midget—anyway, my landlord (who photographs cat
calendars and cat food bags for a living in his home upstairs above the garage I rent but won’t let
me own a cat) has been calling on repeat since Wednesday, looking for the rent. I’ve been hiding
out with Jangle, trying to get a gig, and here we go, here we are, ready to jiggle and dance. Only
thing is, I don’t know if I can balance shit, on my head no less, while in a dance cage.
58
“Why, what for?” I ask.
Jangle shakes her head like How dare you, stupid, how dare you almost fuck this up.
“Here, have another line,” she says, pushing the dollar bill in my direction, obviously try-
ing to hush me. “She can do it, she can balance stuff on her head,” Jangle answers before Robby
Bobby can respond.
“How do you know?” he retorts, squeezing his nose and sneezing.
“I seen her do it,” she answers, grabbing the bill away from me and standing. “We can do
it. How much does it pay? When do we have to be there?”
“It’s at The World, on Hollywood.”
“I know about the World,” she states.
“I just need you guys to balance these energy drinks on your heads. That’s all. That’s it.
The drink people are paying you.”
“You want us to strip while balancing cans on our heads?” I confirm.
“Yeah,” he says, his eyes watering.
“Oh. And if we can’t, if we don’t?”
“No moola. Gig is tonight. You get paid $500 to split between you, start to finish. Get
there at 8, go home at 4. And no keeping your suit on all night, you hear me?” He’s referring to
the bikinis we start in. “You gotta take it all off, so here.” He opens his wallet and holds out two
hundred dollar bills. “Get your shit waxed, an airstrip is fine, but no Brazilian; that’s still hairy.
Are we cool?”
“Cool,” says Jangle, grabbing the cash.
“Here,” she says handing me a bikini from a plastic bag, later in the bathroom. The
World’s music thumps against the stalls, making them rattle. A Latina woman about my moth-
59
er’s age sits in the corner on a small metal folding chair. She watches us with a glazed look of
disinterest. Spread before her on the sink are an array of breath mints, bubble gum, hand sanitiz-
er, mouthwash, and Jolly Ranchers in a glass bowl alongside a small pile of napkins. A blonde
girl in a pink spandex skirt and halter top walks out of a stall and toward the sink. She turns the
faucet on and lets water drip onto her hands, as if that’s all the faucet’s got. In my mind I say,
Turn it further, harder, your hands will get more wet. Then it dawns on me that she’s not actual-
ly invested in cleaning them. Just making it appear as if she is. The Latina woman on the chair
holds out a paper napkin and the girl takes it, fishes a quarter from her purse and drops it in the
woman’s Folgers tip tin and skulks out, the door swishing behind her.
“Look,” Jangle exclaims, poking two holes on the sides of the energy drink can with her
car key. She pops the tab and empties the can into a toilet, pulls out a pair of cheap plastic head-
bands, the kind you get at Save-On, and delicately maneuvers one through the holes at the bot-
tom of the can. She places the can headband on my head. “If you can’t dance and keep that on,
then you don’t deserve the job anyway.”
“Hey, thanks. It feels secure.” She rolls her eyes and does her own. My crotch is burning
and starts to itch. Waxing has always been a challenge because my hair is thick and coarse, curly
even, and I know the next month is going to be a series of ingrown welts and pussy-spore skin
but I need the money.
We stand in front of the mirror and check ourselves. We fix our lipstick as other girls
walk in and out behind us. The woman on the chair never says anything. I wonder what she
thinks. Later, a man will reach through the cage and stick his hand inside me, the skin still
smooth; he will massage my insides and I will bend my knees and catch his hand, helping him.
The can falls off and he opens the cage. I step out and he puts a coat around me. I follow him out
60
of the club and to his car, an olive green Austin Healey behind the alley. “Get dressed,” he’ll say.
“I want to take you home.”
“Where do you live?” I ask.
“Pasadena. My parents are out of town.”
“What are you doing in Hollywood?” I ask, unbuttoning his pants.
He runs a hand along the crest of my breast. The money is Jangle’s, now that I’ve taken
off. “I wanted to see,” he says grinning, catching my face in his palm “how the other half lives.”

Regular Programming
Both of those stories contain true elements—or rather, things I remember vividly from
my childhood and young adulthood. They are, however, tangential and fragile, subject to change.
It is exactly as O’Brien says: “What seems to happen becomes its own happening, and has to be
told that way.” Facts are not pliable, in the way that truth needs to be written in order to construct
authentic meaningful communication and connection between author and reader. If I’d told the
real story of that night at the club, that I’d met the man out front before we entered and had made
a plan to leave with him that evening and in fact he wasn’t a stranger but a DJ friend I knew from
around town, and that I did not exit the club enshrouded in a coat, stepping ethereally through a
sea of people but rather that I told Jangle I was leaving and returned my drink tickets to Bobby
and that he hugged me and said “Be safe” and that he’d keep me in the loop if new jobs came up
(and he always did), the story would be far less interesting; it would lose its panache, as they
say. It would be a different story, one about how that community really did look out for its own
and that we were just young adults from suburban communities in LA County, making money in
the city. But there was a darker element, a silt of fear that covered everything, a feeling of being
61
estranged from the day-to-day people you saw when the sun rose. I wanted to write a story about
the blurry hours between nightfall and dawn, when anything could happen and the world was an
oyster holding a sometimes-rotten pearl. I wanted to write my own Wild West story, because
that’s how it felt back then: raw and wild.
How you remember is how you feel, and how you feel dictates your choices and how you
carry yourself through life. The truth can indeed be stranger than fiction, as the saying goes. For
instance, you likely have several factual happenings in your own life that strike you as surreal,
despite you knowing that they are in fact very real. Margaret’s brother really was killed Hallow-
een night in what came to be known as the Halloween Massacre, but not in 1989. It happened in
1993, and Margaret was not with her brother that night; she was trick-or-treating with neighbors
who lived between the houses that separated ours. But she was ultimately slain twenty-two years
later, stabbed to death in her home in 2015 by someone news reports referred to as “an acquaint-
ance.” In an article reporting the death, her mother is quoted as saying, “Right now I’m going
through a lot. I am really, really not together.” Three years after this article is published it is re-
ported that Margaret’s younger brother, whom you remember only as a toddler, confesses to
stabbing his mother in the home they share, that was two houses away from yours, and that you
remember being at the end of a long yard as if the house was pushed to the very back of the lot.
It had an original river rock porch. Bungalow Heaven has changed in the two decades since
you’ve lived there, but the palm trees that line the street still bend their way toward truth, be-
cause you remember them that way and because they remember everything that has passed be-
low. Margaret did look into the sky regularly, at clouds and birds; a small girl on a long sidewalk
and her real name was Angel.
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Narratives are continuously constructed in order to alter or shape our beliefs, or distract
from the powerful workings behind strengthening the collective ideology—one that Rankine so
skillfully pulls back the curtain on, like Toto exposing the Wizard and the mirage of Oz. A per-
fect example of this came in June 2018, when First Lady Melania Trump wore a green Zara mili-
tary-style jacket with the words “I really don’t care, do you?” splashed on the back. Instantly, the
internet came alive with criticism for her. How insensitive! they cried. What a slap in the face to
the spirit of the mission! The first lady was at the Texas-Mexico border to visit migrant children
locked in ICE camps. The entire stunt went down hook, line, and sinker, with nary a mention of
the absurdity of the first lady going to visit the ICE camps to begin with, positioning her in a way
that made it appear as if the children in the camps were unwitting victims of a natural disaster or
some earthly happening beyond anyone’s control—a flood, earthquake, a military attack from an
outside government, perhaps. It’s as if Hitler had sent Eva Braun to visit children at Auschwitz.
The visit without the jacket would have been too absurd to behold without the equally absurd
distraction of the jacket. The first Lady showing those children kindness is like Buffalo Bill
sending lotion down in the basket to his victims. She is their keeper and tormentor, compliant in
their imprisonment. She is the reason they are there to begin with.
As literary theorist Terry Eagleton writes in his iconic and ubiquitous book Literary The-
ory: An Introduction:
Perhaps one needs a different kind of approach altogether. Perhaps literature is definable
not according to whether it is fictional or ‘imaginative,’ but because it uses language in
peculiar ways. On this theory, literature is a kind of writing which, in the words of the
Russian critic Roman Jakobson, represents an ‘organized violence committed on ordinary
speech.’ Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically
from everyday speech.
18

18
Eagleton T. Literary Theory an Introduction . 2nd ed; Anniversary ed. Blackwell Pub, 2008.

63
If we take this idea further, then every interaction and social issue can be looked at
through a literary lens. The ‘Truth,’ the thing everyone seems to be after, as the equally iconic
and ubiquitous (if you were alive and watching television in the 1990s) television series “The X
Files” liked to remind us on a weekly basis, Is Out There. Why, then, are we as a culture so stuck
on truth when the very foundation of the United States is built on fabrication? We have rendered
literary our narrative story, constructing Jakobson’s ‘organized violence’ against our own people
by weaponizing language. We have enacted a societal fiction of such proportion that the majority
of people have no idea what the real United States history is. This agreed-upon ‘truth’ has reaped
horrific and cataclysmic results.
This, of course, is nothing new. Dozens of authors have spent immense effort crafting
great fiction in order to expose these deeply embedded lies. George Orwell’s seminal novel
1984, published in 1949, is perhaps one of the most successful and popular takes on this issue.
Orwell casts his authorial eye on the three superstates’ ever-watchful Big Brother, each acting as
stand-in for our contemporary global moment (or any moment of the past century, really). This is
the precise reason the novel resonates so powerfully with readers of each successive generation:
each of us is aware on some level, just like Orwell’s Winston, that what we are taught is most
often misinformation. After all, Winston works for the Ministry of Truth. Why is this ‘truth’ so
readily and easily digested? For the express purpose of this truth maintaining a structure of pow-
er. When capitalism is added to the mix, a fictional ladder is provided on which one can climb to
obtain it. The violence committed against the bodies of the American people in order to maintain
this structural power is not the only way in which this power is enacted: There is the belief that
the structure is real, or represents something real, and that the silent agreement we make as a so-
ciety to maintain this structure is a direct result of this carrot capitalism—that if we work hard
64
enough, we might just get what we want, to say nothing of the fact that this ‘want’ or desire is
constantly and purposefully in flux. This self-deception is, as Orwell’s Winston tells Julia, the
greatest betrayal of them all. These lies cost more than just bodies, they cost our most valuable
asset: free will.

65
New Narrative, Same Story: Authors of Color and the Voices That are Missing
It is a grounding premise of this book that the centrality of the aesthetic to the philosophies and
practical structures of liberal humanism—in this book, exemplified by Kant’s work and its
impact, and by the discipline of English and the field of American Literature—keys us into the
ways that this reigning humanism sorts people into the fit and unfit, the rational and the
unreasonable, Man and other, Man and woman, and Human and racialized subject. In this project,
aesthetics refers to the relationships among the senses and the processes and structures of value
making by which certain sensibilities become common sense and others are disavowed,
subjugated, or otherwise obscured. Aesthetics in this regard may be understood as integral to the
production of particular kinds of difference—for example, that of the racial and colonial order,
that of sex-gender regulation—as part of the naturalized visceral experience of the world. At the
same time, aesthetics are the grounds of uncommon, illiberal sensibilities. These are sensibilities
incommensurate to the epistemologies and common sense of liberal humanism: they posit
relationality and entanglement rather than individuality and autochthony as the grounds of human
ontology; they refuse bourgeois aspirations and illuminate their parochialism; and they radically
disidentify from the teleological narrative of progressive development that gives texture to liberal
humanism. The aesthetics of illiberal humanisms both emerge from and afford social formations
characterized by neither identity nor consensus, and instead by not only shared recognition and
apprehension of the damage resulting from such potent fictions, but also a fundamental refusal to
be defined or disciplined by them. (2)
19

- Kandice Chuh, The Difference Aesthetic Makes

I first encountered the work of poet, novelist, and performance artist Sapphire two days
after the theft of The New Fuck, while sitting in my room drinking a cup of mint tea, the cold
shrieking outside my loft window. My two roommates and I rented one half of an empty rice
factory in Bushwick, Brooklyn, mere seconds before rents skyrocketed and health food stores
replaced the Puerto Rican bodegas that lined the avenues of our neighborhood. A forklift that
normally hauled giant bags of rice, relentlessly beeping all hours of the day, sat dusted in
powdery white snow, like a cupcake in a pastry display. I drew a heart in the moisture on a
square of window beside my bed, wrapped head to toe in thermal and puff jacket. We had no
central heating, so sometimes I expected to wake up with icicles dangling from the warehouse

19
Chuh, K. The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities after Man. Duke University Press;
2019. doi:10.1515/9781478002383

66
pipes many feet above my head. Leon, our housecat, begged silently for a new life, rolled so
tight like his own butthole that he might disappear into himself.
The poem Neverland told the story of Michael Jackson and his inertia from never
stopping. It painted him as a devout worshipper of Hans Christian Andersen’s fabled red shoes,
forever turning, blurring away from himself until he is no more:
Still it fills me sometimes
like wanting something more than
monkeys & a ranch
& I just dance harder
Till I pass out
& I pass out every time
the semen
spirit rises up
like a shaman & takes my soul (58)
20

Published in 1995, the book predated Jackson’s death by nine years. It did not portray
him as a predator or victim, only as a human being whose extraordinary life circumstances made
him worthy of study and interest. Sapphire painted him as a gay man caught in an identity he
could not hold or handle. Sapphire’s queerness demanded more of Jackson in the poem; it de-
manded clarity of its protagonist. It asked, Michael, who are you? For yourself, not us, who are
you? It was radically arresting and made me contemplate the King of Pop in ways I never had—
less as a Judy Garlandesque abused and dissociated victim and more as a man with agency who
chose to deny his queerness. It cast Jackson as a capitalist first and a man second. Of course, I
thought, closing the book and looking back out the window at the yellow dog-peed snow that
lined the sidewalks. He’s in the closet to make money. All of this is conjecture, naturally, but
Sapphire, a queer, experimental, avant-garde writer, was now on my radar. Later, I discovered

20
Myles & Kotz, Eileen &. Liz, editor. The New Fuck You: Adventures In Lesbian Reading. New York,
Semiotext(e), 1995.
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that she was also a performance artist who, in the 1980s and early ’90s, performed quite often in
the Lower East Side and was a member of the United Lesbians of Color for Change Inc. Coinci-
dently, she moved to San Francisco in the 1970s and enrolled at The City College of San Fran-
cisco where she began taking writing classes around town.
“Instead of thinking I was talented or intelligent or intuitive when I wrote Push, well, that
couldn't be, because I'm black. They just assumed it was an autobiography,” Sapphire says in a
2011 interview with The Guardian
21
. Raised by her father, Sapphire kept in touch with her
mother and as an adolescent took ballet, poetry and art classes. “That is the same thing as
thinking Mark Twain was Huckleberry Finn. This has something to do with class and race and
the way African Americans are perceived in the world of literature. We're not often seen as
people with imagination and vision and focus and artistry.”
Kathy Acker was a performance artist who moved to San Francisco in the early 1980s,
where she also began to take writing classes around town. Acker is often credited as the grand-
mother of New Narrative. Not once, to this author’s knowledge, has it been suggested she is ac-
tually Janey and that Blood and Guts is a loosely based memoir. As a writer who has also written
a novel about a young female protagonist who in fact shares my name, even then, in interviews
did journalists ask, ‘this is novel right? It’s Obviously not a memoir.’ In fact, it is indeed an auto-
fictive bildungsroman. I am a white passing mixed-race woman.
In the opening paragraph of Rob Halpern’s 2011 essay “Realism and Utopia: Sex, Writ-
ing, and Activism in New Narrative,” he states, “The literary movement known as New Narra-
tive emerged in San Francisco during the late 1970s. The cultural moment was one of engage-
ment and conviction, agitation and uncertainty, as tensions were beginning to flare between new

21
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/08/sapphire-knew-it-was-disturbing
68
projects and old affiliations in the Bay Area literary scene—Language writing, Feminist writing,
Black Arts, Beat poetry, New American Poetics, and others—each asserting a distinct set of aes-
thetic values and social stakes.” A promising opening for a thought-provoking and enlightening
essay—looking at the list of prominent authors who have achieved success and who are associat-
ed with the movement, however, tells a different story.
I was first confronted with the whiteness of genre at the 2017 inaugural New Narrative
conference, Communal Presence, which was held at UC Berkeley and at which I was a presenter
and member of a panel entitled Bad Behavior. Previously, while reading New Narrative books,
the pages became my face for the movement, and what I imagined in those pages reflected the
experiences of my life, the people I knew and had known. In person, gathered together with the
mass of authors, thinkers, poets, and theorists that comprise New Narrative (at least the ones still
living and willing to travel to the conference), I was taken aback by a sea of white faces. I had
just returned from a month-long tour with Radar Productions’ iconic Sister Spit tour, a traveling
van of queer and BIPOC-identifying persons who specialize in performing works that challenge
white supremacy, homophobia, and misogyny. Sister Spit stopped at universities across the
Pacific Northwest and West Coast, each reading filled with diverse and radical young crowds
representing a changing face of literature and academia. At Berkeley, however, among a crowd I
had recently come to think of as ‘my people’—literary agitators—told a different story. As a
white-passing, mixed-race Latina, I am also a white face in any crowd—but I’m highly attuned
to the crowds I’m surrounded by, as much of my life has consisted of code-switching between
my family’s home and what the world sees and expects of me when I leave and walk outside that
home. Having attended both public and Catholic schools in the San Gabriel Valley during the
1990s, a richly diverse valley within Los Angeles County, I am hyperaware of when rooms lack
69
diversity. Luckily, the crowd was comprised of highly intelligent, forward-thinking queer and
queer-adjacent academics and writers, none of whom was nothing short of brilliant and open-
minded. But on the drive back to Los Angeles, the experience—and the crowd—stayed with me;
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something.
Robert Gluck and Bruce Boone held writing workshops at the bookstore Small Press
Traffic, where Gloria Anzaldúa took classes and developed friendships, but she held her own
workshops at the bookstore as well. The work and community she developed during this time
laid the groundwork for the seminal book on race and gender writing and theory, This Bridge
Called My Back, co-edited with the equally radical and groundbreaking Cherríe Moraga, another
San Francisco writer. It is quite evident that Anzaldúa was on the scene.
If Anzaldúa and Moraga not only attended the workshops led by Boone and Gluck during
the 1980s (the unofficial headquarters of New Narrative) but held their own workshops as well,
wouldn’t it make sense that their work was deeply influenced by the community in which they
wrote and workshopped? Anzaldúa is arguably one of the most influential Latinx theorists, poets,
and authors of the twentieth century; her book Borderlands has become a fixture in the Gender
and Race Theory canon, influencing thousands (if not more) academics and writers in pursuit of
their own voice. Surely, New Narrative’s reach and influence is much greater and more diverse
than one would know simply by Googling the term ‘New Narrative literature.’ The question,
then, becomes Why? Anzaldúa and Moraga are two of the more well-known writers to have
emerged from the San Francisco scene, but why have many other authors of color who moved
within the community—writers such as Barbara Smith, Francesca Rose, and Nellie Wong are
only some of the writers included in This Bridge Called My Back—remained unrecognized as
playing a role in the creation and mythology of New Narrative? All of this was happening about
70
the same time Sapphire was also meandering through the Mission District, forming friendships
and building community.
I’d like to stop here and pose a more important question, perhaps the question I should
have opened with: if Gloria were alive today, would she even want to be associated with New
Narrative? After all, the genre began to coalesce and find shape, not on the scale it has today,
there were no anthologies gearing up for publication quite yet, certainly Berkeley wasn’t sending
invites out to Eileen Myles quite yet. Or maybe? More research shall ascertain, but I digress,
people in the mix were certainly aware. Anzaldua must have known at least vicariously through
friendships and acquaintances that things were cooking and names were being tossed around.
Her opportunity to throw her sombrero in the ring — a crass nod to her own Conquistador daddy,
wherever he might exist in the liminal field — and name herself a member of this genre, existed
aplenty. Sapphire is absolutely living, writing, speaking and performing. bell hooks as I write, is
appointed Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College.
Cherríe Moraga is faculty in the English department at UC Santa Barbara. Nary a peep from any
of these incredible women demanding justice and credit for the part they played in New
Narratives creation or their erasure in its mythology.
Perhaps the question is less, why are there so few authors of color included or represented
in the genre New Narrative, but instead, why are authors of color, specially women and
female/femme-identifying authors, viewed almost exclusively through the lens of very serious
academic. To quote cultural critic, writer and queer studies scholar, Karen Tongson, during the
dissertation defense for this manuscript, “Having been at Berkeley during the 90s Judith Butler
would teach Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, you know, Sapphire, sometimes, but everyone
else would get relegated to the fields of Ethnic Studies; Ethnic literature that is much more
71
aligned with social sciences and historical materialist culture that does not afford the theoretical
and the aesthetic reach with which your work is trying to pinpoint.”
22
I could not agree more nor
have said it better. These experimental works are high theory, they are experimental, they are
both, not only because of the conscripted materiality of these authors but because of their
intentionality.
At another academic conference, the 2017 New Directions in Critical Theory Conference
at the University of Arizona, I presented a portion of the chapter “Possession of Desire.” I spoke
about Gloria Anzaldúa and her work in the context of art and experimentation, as a progenitor of
new ways to create linearity in text and poetic form. Afterward, two young Latinas who had also
been on the panel approached me. “We just want to know why you talked about Gloria that way.
We’re curious,” one of them asked. “What way?” I answered.
“The stuff about the bag and the cunt. To us, she’s sacred, an elder. She’s really an
important figure. We were wondering what your essay is about, if you could explain it more.”
“It’s about her literary experimentation, artistry, and sort-of-punk vibe,” I replied. “You
know, like, she was a literary punk. Kind of like Kathy Acker, you know, very downtown.” Two
pairs of blank faces blinked back at me.
I understood what they meant and why they asked, and am in total agreement. Gloria
Anzaldúa is a spearheading figure in race and gender theory, and, along with bell hooks, Audre
Lorde, and various other WOC writers and theorists of that era, extremely important to the
burgeoning work of identity politics as it’s discussed and studied today. But she was also a
queer, canon-wrecking poet and literary punk—very much in the style, ethos, and execution of

22
Darling Zoom defense, Body of A Woman:New Narrative; The Call is Coming From inside the House,
04/12/2021, Karen Tongson
72
other New Narrative authors with whom she worked in close proximity and with whose
communities she was in conversation.
Apprehension and protective ownership over Anzaldua’s work is understandable given
the history of cultural and intellectual theft and appropriation done by white supremacy
specifically within the United States. From Elvis to jazz, Black culture to use the most obvious
example, has been continuously looted by white bodies only then to be made palatable to white
consumers. As a result fortunes are made by white supremacy using the intellectual and artistic
properties of artists and thinkers of color whose ideas are not compensated or given credit to.
This has happened and happens still in all walks of the Humanities. Anzaladua’s brilliance and
ground breaking contributions to race and gender theory cannot be denied but often they have
overshadowed her poetic and formalist contributions to experimental and hybrid writing.
Anzaldua often saw her own work as misconstrued or under valued, not being viewed as the
multi dimensional work that it was and the multiple apparatus on which it operated. From
Borderlands:
I found that people were using "Borderlands" in a more limited sense than I had meant it.
So to elaborate on the psychic and emotional borderlands I'm now using "nepantla." .With the
nepantla paradigm I try to theorize unarticulated dimensions of the experience of mestizas living
in between overlapping and layered spaces of different cultures and social and geographic
locations, of events and realities--psychological, sociological, political, spiritual, historical,
creative, imagined. (176)
23

There is a pervasive idea among readers and to some extent academics that certain types
of writing by certain communities of writers, ahem, POC writers, is intuitive as if connected to
some ancient inner ceremony drum that beats steadily within the heart of each author and that

23
Gloria Anzaldua. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Spinsters/Aunt Lute.
San Francisco, CA, 1987
73
this inner rhythm as if entranced, eyes closed, allows the spirits to guide their fingers against
their typewriter keys.
In the fall semester of 2019 I was awarded a small grant to visit the Gloria Evangeline
Anzaldua Papers archived at the University of Austin Texas. Upon my return more than one
fellow scholar asked if her papers were archived there because that’s where she had lived and
worked. And while not right out saying it directly it was clear that the assumption was that
Anzaldua wrote by the bank of the Rio Grande, the moonlight lightening her pages, a coyote
howling in the distance as mother Coatlicue blew Gloria’s shorn wispy hairs about, her small
butch figure cloaked in a sarape. And while Anzaldua, as previously noted, employed a writing
made possible by fugue or trance states, this does not preclude her from intentionality.

What we loose when someone like Anzaldua is made deity is that she and other writers
like her, are deprived credit for the very real, long, hard difficult intellectual rigor that took place
in order to produce the complex, sophisticated writing and thinking that she accomplished. It is
similar to when people proclaim the pyramids were invented by aliens. Few things send me into
such a rage-ful frenzy, well actually when capitalism is called a pyramid scheme I get similarly
frothed at the mouth — pyramids are ancient architectural feats created by indigenous cultures
around the world, not the capitalist ideology which brought down those very same empires; I’m
personally taking the pyramid back— but yet again I digress. Pyramids are an example of
sophisticated and brilliant architectural prowess, one that engineers today still struggle to
understand, specifically how they were able to get built, so long ago. Relegating this
accomplishment to aliens, as if the Egyptians, Mayans, Aztecs, or Missipians—google it, Illinois
has a pyramid— we’re not capable of possessing such genius, as if they required supernatural
74
intervention in order to have managed such feats, once again relegates intentionality as the
sphere of western genius. Clearly it was aliens, says white supremacy, which fueled by
minsogynst superstition and a deep fear of women, my bad, witches, murdered a genocide load
worth of cats, unwittingly amplifying the speed through which the black plague swept Europe,
killing basically everybody who was anybody.
In her essay, From Borderlands and New Mestizas to Nepantlas and Nepantleras:
Anzulduan theories for Social Change, Ana Louise Keating touches both on the misconception
that Anzaldua belongs only to the identity or gender based sphere of academic theory, as well
Anzaldua’s brilliance and the public’s desire to compartmentalize her work moreover claim it for
themselves.
Anzaldua participated in a number of different worlds: the public, often specialized
spaces of academia, art, and publishing; the private spaces of family, spirits, and friends; and the
political spaces of Chican@s, Latin@s, feminists, U.S. women of colors, queers, and other
progressive social actors. Moving among these diverse worlds, Anzaldua would not be contained
within any single group or location. Although each group tried to make membership contingent
on its own exclusionary set of demands, Anzaldua refused their rules without rejecting the
people or groups themselves. At great personal risk, she exposed the limitations in the labels and
the flaws in the various forms of group-think on which such labels rely.
24

In New Mexican, Indigenous writer, theorist and cultural critic, Paula Gunn Allen’s 1986
seminal text, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine In American Indian Traditions, she
speaks to this inability to be pigeon-holed and the decision to write experimentally in spite of her
western academic training.
The methods used in American Indian Studies are various because it is an interdiscipli-
nary field. So while I employ variously the methodologies of anthropology, literary studies, folk-
lore, psychology, sociology, historiography, philosophy, culture studies, and women’s studies in
these essays, my method of choice is my own understanding of American Indian life and

24
Keating A, González-López G, Gonzalez-Lopez G. Bridging: How Gloria Anzaldúa’s Life and Work
Transformed Our Own. University of Texas Press; 2011.

75
thought. For although I am a somewhat nontraditional Indian, I grew up in the homes of Indians
and have spent my adult life in the company of traditionals, urbanites, and all the shades of Indi-
an in between…So you see, my method is somewhat western and somewhat Indian. I draw from
each, and in the end I often wind up with a reasonably accurate picture of truth. And in that con-
text I would caution readers and students of American Indian life and culture to remember that
Indian America does not in any sense function in the same ways or from the same assumptions
that western systems do. Unless and until that fact is clearly acknowledged, it is virtually impos-
sible to make much sense out of the voluminous materials available concerning American Indi-
ans. (23)
25

Allen makes plain that works by writers who have been kept separate from western
academic ideologies and literary disciplines for whatever reason; disenfranchisement, racism,
misogyny, what have you, will like her, undoubtedly and without question have a different way
of entering and occupying these academic spaces. Allen simultaneously acknowledges the long
suffering concept of Truth which was beaten to putty earlier in these pages. In Gunn’s own
estimation, in bringing together both her indigenous and western mind as well her lived
experiences, only then is she able to approximate some form of authenticity, as language, for her,
has been, as stated earlier by Eagleton, an organized violence.
It makes sense that conceptual overlap would exist between New Narrative authors and
experimental authors of color just as Allen describes her journey trying to create a language that
fits her lived experiences, so too were early New Narrative authors, as the Dadaists before them,
struggling to reconcile the dominant language of the zeitgeist; a violence operated through
silence. AIDS, yet to enter the collective cultural consciousness and remained in many ways,
nameless, formless, abstract to most while painfully real to those who suffered its realities. By
diving into language, by dissecting and fabricating language and plagiarizing language, early

25
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop : Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Open
Road Integrated Media, Inc., 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=1914394.
.
76
New Narrative authors scraped and clawed toward a mode of understanding and processing this
violence, while bodies piled up and hospitals dealt with a growing and devastating pandemic. For
authors such as Anzaldua and Allen, the trauma being experienced by communities most
vulnerable to AIDS and suffering the eventual persecution of the general public once it reached
their vocabularies, mirrored in what they had experienced since birth and indoctrination into this
country as citizens; a collective erasure that enacted violent consequences. The dominant
language of the United States, our organized violence, had also seeped through and soaked their
sentences. For Allen anything other than a hybrid or experimental approach to writing would be
a poor facsimile of a language that did not suit or fit her identity; in short, a western ideological
formalist linear narrative.
It is vitally important that we honor not just the contributions to the theoretical
frameworks authors of color helped usher in, but also the genre-bending, structure-defying
artistry and experimentation in their efforts to achieve them.
Gloria Anzaldúa was an artist. Period. She is also a multitude of other things, but being
an artist can and should never be removed from who she is. Because that’s who she was. Authors
like Anzaldúa, Bellamy, Rankine, Kraus, and Moraga write to take language to task. Just as
Anzaldúa and Bellamy made the book the bag and the cunt, literature too must be free to take
new forms, defy genre, and exist as it must, even if readers are at first hostile toward it. Writing
incoherently or experimentally in our twenty-first-century world is a much more accurate
representation of contemporary structures of power than a traditionally chaptered novel, which
comes shrouded in a cover of false linearity (pun intended). Literature is a perverse and violent
endeavor striving to make sense of the nonsensical. Eagleton asserts,

77
This focusing on the way of talking, rather than on the reality of what is talked about, is
sometimes taken to indicate that we mean by literature a kind of self-referential language,
a language which talks about itself. (Literary Theory An Introduction; Second Edition, p.
7)

And later:
The largely concealed structure of values, which informs and underlies our factual
statements, is part of what is meant by ‘ideology.’ By ‘ideology’ I mean, roughly, the
ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-
relations of the society we live in. (Literary Theory An Introduction; Second Edition, p.
7)
26

What, then, is the criteria by which writers such as Sapphire, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe
Moraga and others find themselves excluded from the mythology of New Narrative? This
question must be asked not simply because they are experimental writers, but precisely because
they were involved and worked with the New Narrative writers most often associated with the
genre. As it so happens Oakland writer Luisah Teish, author of Jambalaya: The Natural
Woman's Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals and long practicing High Priestess of
Santeria, crystals and all that good Bay Area stuff was included in the second issue of Steve
Abbot’s radical literary rag Soup, in the very same issue the term New Narrative was first coined,
and yet, Luisah Teish is missing from the genre’s lore. Not one of their names is included on the
back of Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997, the first collected anthology of
the genre. Gabrielle Daniels remains the lone black woman in the collection. Filipino poet R.
Zamora Linmark, choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones, and mixed-race artist Nayland Blake,
who makes work about passing, are the remaining three self-identifying authors of color in the
505-page-long collection. While most likely unintentional, New Narrative, in canonizing itself,
has subconsciously exhibited the very ideologies that helped initiate the movement to begin with.

26
Eagleton T. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed; Anniversary ed. Blackwell Pub, 2008.

78
If New Narrative, much like the United States, is going to evolve in the twenty-first
century, that is if the genre even wants to, then it must take a difficult, honest look at its past:
namely, not just who has influenced, but who has been excluded from, the genre and its
mythology. It must be ready to move into a new era, poised to develop and redefine what the
intersection of fiction, experimentation, and politics really means. Born partially as a response to
the AIDS epidemic, New Narrative must also acknowledge its role in shaping social justice
literature, such as Borderlands and This Bridge Called My Back, and the countless books made
possible by these two texts. It must embrace a new history, one more in line with facts—that is to
say, the truth. This honest look can only build a more robust and impressive history, one that
truly defies the notion that, ‘what is’ is because it’s supposed to be.

79

Gabrielle Daniels, in Her Own Words

The more things change, the more things stay the same. —Gabrielle Daniels

I just had a memory flash: I remember Bruce and Bob tearing out of the crowd at one point (dur-
ing the Gay Freedom Day Parade of 1980) and grabbing people like Karen Brodine and Merle
Woo, who were in the Women Writers’ Union at the time and hugging us and kissing us as we
were going past. What was the Women Writers’ Union? It was comprised of a multiracial group
of undergraduate and graduate women—like Blacks, Latinxs, and Asians at San Francisco
State—who had rebelled against the emphasis on white male writers being taught in colleges and
universities. The more things change, the more things stay the same: it is exactly what we are
80
having now with the call for “decolonizing” literature and art. By the time I joined, there were
fewer members; the group had left the university setting and was a part of both the writing and
political communities in the City and the East Bay. It contributed a lot to my political awakening.

New Narrative writers are not exactly feminist, but they are certainly gays, lesbians, and bisexu-
als and straights. And the fact that we were out there on Gay Day 1980 marching bravely and
joyfully on Market Street, when the world seemed to be against what we felt for each other, that
would stir some spontaneity—those kisses and hugs. Those embraces would resonate beyond the
barriers of color and gender and even neighborhoods that separated us from each other daily.
That was fighting back, too.

I think now that when I marched for gays and lesbians, I also marched to be out front about love
between whites and Blacks and people of color. In those days, interracial sex and love was fet-
ishized and dehumanized as a thing that happened with a john and a trick, when it isn’t. It’s try-
ing to get beyond labels and ways of seeing and living. It’s a lot more complicated, like life.

I think that my next memory comes from attending Gloria Anzaldúa’s Saturday morning course,
“El Mundo Zurdo,” or The Left-Handed World. I don’t recall who suggested it to me; I know
that I asked about it because it was on an announcement flyer in the hallway of Small Press. He
or she did say that Gloria didn’t have many women writers of color attending, and perhaps I
could give her some support by showing up, and to get what I needed as well. In those days, I
went to poetry writing groups or classes just to show my work, to make myself known, and to get
suggestions and feedback. Things were a lot more free-flowing. Sometimes you paid outright for
81
an eight-week course that was in the poet’s home. Or you just hung out and figured whether this
is where you belonged. Other times, being in a writing group was free, and El Mundo Zurdo was
free at Small Press Traffic.

That’s how I was introduced to Gloria and to her work. I think that she was still attending San
Francisco State at the time, getting her master’s degree. She was not affiliated—to my
knowledge—with the Women Writers’ Union, or its rival, the Feminist Writers’ Guild, but I am
sure that she knew individual members. There were less than ten people in the group, and white
women predominated. I remember how bright the light was in the room, illuminating not just our
work, but the writing to which Gloria was introducing us—her own as well as work by other
women of color, gay as well as straight. I think Gloria was glad that I was there, and I was glad
to be included and recognized. I either stayed for as long as the course went on, or until I got a
steady clerical job at Stanford University and relocated for a while to Palo Alto. Gloria gave me
my second reading in San Francisco at Small Press Traffic, and that is how I became aware of
another, larger world. After I joined the Women Writers’ Union, Gloria included me, along with
other women of color, in This Bridge Called My Back.

It all came together—after all those readings and talks and socializing—after I left the Women
Writers’ Union. I asked Bruce to take me on: I wanted to concentrate less on polemics and more
on including what it all meant and what the activism was based on in the writing.

Bruce recommended I try responding to films like Terminal Station, which was being re-released
at the time. (I don’t know whether you’ve seen Terminal Station or not, but it is a one-note about
82
a couple, Montgomery Clift and Jennifer Jones, who just cannot break up—and it all happens in
a train station. Oh, it drove me crazy. It drove me crazy at the time, because it could reflect my
own love life at the time. Sort of like Hiroshima Mon Amour, and they both came out within a
decade of each other!) And while those attempts may have had different outcomes, they were
training; they led to my eventually reviewing books for the San Francisco Chronicle in the mid-
eighties, and my attempting a first novel.

I also went on what I would now call “field trips” with Bruce and Steve. I recall attending an
Expressionist art exhibition with Bruce at the site of the old Museum of Modern Art on Van Ness.
I think that I was in shock seeing buxom, big-assed blue horses. It also meant that I had to do
more reading about this literary and historic period before World War I, of things breaking
down and giving way, of the apocalypse about to occur. I went to see a film with Steve about
punk music at the old York Theatre, starring groups like The Specials, Selector, and The Beat. I
also saw In the Realm of the Senses there with Steve, with the theater packed to the rafters (we
were in the balcony); I’d never seen anything like that in my life, especially since it was based on
a true story.

Eventually, I had to return home to my own writing, meaning Black literature. Before writing the
essay on Our Nig, included in Writers Who Love Too Much (and that I also reviewed for the
Chronicle), I hadn’t cracked poetry or novels or essays other than those by Alice Walker, Nikki

Giovanni, Toni Morrison, or Ntozake Shange. I had to know what I was doing, where I was real-
ly coming from. I didn’t want to be a Black white girl any longer; that is, to extol every other lit-
83
erature except my own. So I went back, all the way back to the beginning. I even read from crit-
ics like Robert Bone, Addison Gayle, and Charles Johnson, holding my nose about their antipa-
thy toward Black women’s writing. I went all the way through Wright and Baldwin, and finally
what is now known as the Black Arts Movement, that I had had such a problem with, and I found
out that I did like some of this stuff. The other stuff, some of which rejected any connection with
whites, or promoted a Black hyper-masculinist heterosexual politics, I continued to leave behind.

I was able to discover Carlene Hatcher Polite, who wrote The Flagellants; Carolivia Herron, the
author of Thereafter Johnnie; and Gayl Jones, who wrote Corregidora and Eva’s Man. These are
novels about Black people—heterosexual couples and women who are trying to deal with each
other and heal themselves beyond just racism. Some of it is very violent. A lot of it is sexually
charged. And I found that if I hadn’t been with New Narrative, I wouldn’t have been able to go
back to those things and critique them in a way that felt like I wasn’t withdrawing from them—
that they were mine, and these were documents for me as well.

If I wasn’t as clear or as productive or as courageous then, I feel that I am more so now. And, as
I am also fond of saying, I’m not dead yet. My new writing incorporates most of what I learned
and experienced between those readings, those fights, and those dinners, and between the gossip,
and especially, the laughter. If anything, all this is what I will always remember.
27

—Memories of New Narrative’s Beginnings, from Gabrielle Daniels, excerpted from her essay
“Remembering New Narrative”

27
Daniels, Gabrielle. “Remembering New Narrative.” Open Space, 25 June 2018, open-
space.sfmoma.org/2018/06/remembering-new-narrative.
84

Gabrielle Daniels and friend, early 1980s

85
Magia Sexual del Azúcar en la Sangre
After the heat breaks and once again my books have been hidden, this time by my mother
who undoubtedly learned this attention hostage getting move from my grandmother, I slip out
the back door while my sister naps, her mouth open on my tia’s large fluffy down comforter and
mattress bed. Even when my mother, sister and I are not here all together, I often escape. This is
fine with my tia as she is not my mother and graciously and regularly accepts my boundaries.
How she is with my primos, I do not know. My tia and mom are in the backyard, sucking sweat
peas from their shells and drinking the mint tea that lives year round, in a large, vintage glass tea
pitcher covered in yellow daisies, inside the fridge, brewed from my tias dried mint that she
hangs next to her marijuana on a lone burlap string and looks like a Christmas garland, inside the
porch. Their carved yellow imitation crystal glasses look like in a past life they were kitchen
86
props on The Wonder Years, if only I didn’t know for certain they had never lived on any other
kitchen shelf, except the 1960 yellow and orange wild flower patterned contact paper covered
ones in our family home, since they day they were first unboxed and unsheathed from their paper
wrappings, most likely by my grandmother, so many years ago.

My tía gardening at our family home, where she’s been the caretaker since 1998

87

Orange Martinez on the back porch steps, a stray who adopted my tía in 2006. He is the family
housecat now.

88
Afternoon rainstorm approaching. View from standing on the steps of the back porch.

89
Living room shelf and service photo of Conrad, family friend and Wagon Mound resident.

90

Fedelina Armijo, 1931–2019, holding her soda can tab for art cat collage, 2014.
https://www.rogersmortuarynm.com/obituary/fedelina-armijo

91
I walk to edge the edge of town near the abandoned Main Street and hop into the back-
yard of one of the many rotted and abandoned adobes in town. As the older generation dies, the
knowledge of how to re-patch the adobe is being lost, and younger generations buy trailers and
place them in their backyards, where they will now live, as the adobe up front slowly begins to
crumble and decay. I’ve brought one of the mason jars my tia uses to can and kneel in the moist
red soil and begin to look for old glass. It is not uncommon to find old beer cans from the 1920s
and 30s. Last summer I found a horse shoe, later I discovered this horse shoe had been ironed
when this was still Mexico, as my tia pointed out it was branded MX on the bottom. I felt a
swell of energy within me as my arms rose with goosebumps and I knew I was touching some-
thing that someone who’s stardust lived inside me, had also held and I imagine they also felt a
tingle and unconscious knowing to bury the horse shoe, here, so that one day I might come
across it and be filled with this cascading feeling, this knowing, that I cannot name. I go home
that night, spread the small lavender and green glass pieces across the eyelet comforter in my
guest room, open the my computer, and for the first time all summer, I begin to write:

Dear liminal, Mami, unknown Conquistador Papi, Señorita, Puebla, Zia madre,

I’m trying to get to the library so that I might use the internet. I know you know this but I’ll tell
you anyway: it’s 2006. I live in New York. Brooklyn to be specific. Maybe you do, too? Any-
how, I’m on the J/M/Z which I’m hardly ever on, though as we traverse the width of the Brook-
lyn Bridge and the great skyline rises like a monolith and we rise also from the dark tunnel of the
underground, I resolve to ride it more often. Am I reborn? Was this a Phoenix moment? I regret
to tell you, no.
I will realize in hindsight that the past has always packed more of a punch than it did in
the present. This will occur to me when I’m sitting in a SLAA meeting thirteen years later and I
identify myself as a Sex Love and Fantasy Addict. God is in the moment. Even now in 2006
while riding the J/M/Z, which my friends and I refer to affectionately as the Jimz, phonetically
pronounced as the Gymz, a place I will visit regularly in my late thirties and where I will spend
my tax returns on a personal trainer who is at least fifteen years younger than I am, perhaps him-
self twenty-six, and who when announcing is about to “touch my stomach” or
“correct my stance” will inspire a swell of long forgotten aliveness that rises up in me, his youth-
ful, beautiful, and gentle touch. His big muscles, his five o’clock young man shadow, his wet-
92
looking hair, which is dry but lustrous in that way that healthy hair is. God, your mother must
miss you desperately each day that she is apart from you. And when I tell my trainer, who is Ira-
nian, Happy New Year the day after the Persian New Year, Nowruz, his eyes well up with tears
and a feeling of sadness punches my gut and suddenly I recognize his invisibility amongst his
blonde co-workers, one of whom is standing beside us and guffaws, “New Years, it isn’t New
Years,” to which my trainer will reply somewhat defiantly, proudly, “Yesterday was my New
Year.” And when he asks how I knew I shrug and say, “I’m a college teacher, I have Iranian
friends,” which is true. I don’t want to say, “Because your name is Ardashir and you have an ac-
cent,” but the other stuff yes, is true also, and I am reminded that people touch each other in
many ways and that I did not and could not have foreseen his touch. Anyhow, as I was saying,
even now on the Jimz riding toward the library God is beside me, around me, in me.
But I don’t know this yet. I’m not thirty-eight on the eve of turning thirty-nine even
though one day I will be. For now, I’m twenty-six and I’ve hopped the turnstile at the Hewes
stop and even though in all my youthful imaginings and film watchings of English punks and 70s
graffiti rebels and so forth jumping turnstiles seemed exciting, I do it now in debt to poverty and
it feels fairly clunky and clumsy and I’m insecure about who might see. It’s the middle of a
weekday, let’s say 11:30 a.m., and the stop is empty and I go unbothered as the train arrives and
leaves the station. I sit now the sound of the tracks clacking beneath our feet and wonder how
poverty had not occurred to me before as the source of so much turnstile hopping. I’m twenty-six
and poor and wander cold streets pulling my coat jacket around my small hungry frame search-
ing for a face I won’t find for many years to come, my stomach gnawing at my sense of time,
and look for the address of the AA meeting I printed at the library and walk up the yoga studio
stairs and sit in a large circle and when it’s my turn say, “My name is Nikki and I’m an alcohol-
ic” and stand and walk toward the person giving chips and take a hug because they are out of
chips, and I feel the future closing in.
It will take me two years to get two years and when I return to Los Angeles in 2008 I will
use a resentment against the practice of calling AA anniversaries “birthdays” to leave the pro-
gram for nine more years until, in 2017, I find my way back, broken, thirty-six and on my last
life. A room of black walls and lungs that cough blood, each friend married off and bearing chil-
dren or breast feeding and gathering awards by the handful and I will sign my first book contract
and it will feel like nothing and nothing will ever be as hollow and devastating as this realization.
I will sob in a corner and wonder where and how I lost myself. And two years later I will stare
into the face of the face I had been searching for so many years ago in those cold and merciless
New York streets, nose running, air puffing out before me a daily reminder that I was alive, and I
will reach out and caress his high beautiful cheekbones and watch his face as we move together
and his eyes are bright like stars and dark like night blooms and he comes inside me and we
don’t discuss it and we haven’t discussed it and things are changing and something is on its way.
What can I say except life is a series of adjustments and I have no way to say what comes next or
where I’m headed.
After her grandmother’s death my aunt will anonymously receive in the mail a poem
written by that grandmother and addressed to her. In it she will refer to herself, this grandmother,
as a Skipper of Forwards. The poem goes on to make several nautical references and metaphors.
While visiting this aunt two summers ago in Mexico City, she will show me the poem and tell
me of its mysterious arrival at her doorstep. She will then say, “a skipper of forwards, she just
couldn’t wait to get to the end.” What a strange way to interpret this line, I will think quietly to
93
myself, certain it was meant as she was the navigator of her life and the skipper of her own ship,
but then again what do I know.
For now, however, I am twenty-six and on the Jimz, heading out to the Lower East Side.
I’ll be sent to rehab in two months at the behest of my university, concerned for my health, and
today I woke up in a strange place with a strange man, bruises on my thigh, and white indentions
of hand prints on my stomach, and red welts bloomed like flowers on my skin as I showered that
morning. The university will force me to endure a rape kit later this afternoon after I walk to the
health center after the AA meeting and after I get the phone number of a woman who has the
same amount of days that I do and we will meet again in LA when I go back in the rooms at thir-
ty-six and she will have then eleven years sober and I will have, again, two weeks. But for now I
am on the Jimz and I have jumped the turnstile because I am poor and I watch the skyline move,
no really, sail by and wipe away tears with a gloved hand and clutch an empty and useless purse
to my chest and shiver.
How did I get so far from home? Away from the rainbow stalagmite caves dripping with
the sound of your ghost, echoing, your handprints, a map out of the past, hair swept up in a night
prairie wind, wondering how long it will be until I arrive. We are time travelers, you and I and
not like Back to the Future or that shitty FX show Hylander, but actually, truly and I feel you
deep in my bones. White girls who look just like me arrange rose quartz and turquoise crystal
stones on an ‘ofrenda’ they learned to make at a queer craft night in which they also bought
cookbooks on decolonizing their diet. They don’t know the cleansing power of walking into the
Casino in Sinaloa at daybreak and smoking an entire pack of cowboy killers, pulling down with
the strength of an ancient rage, the cherries drunk and the lemons spinning, then emerge to the
navy spotted night, an owl hooting that’s he’s found his super, a prairie mouse that watches the
earth below him fall away, and although he is about to die, he ascends, higher, the night air cold,
the stars brilliant and he accepts this, his fate an integral part in the cycle of life.
Dear liminal, Mami, unknown Conquistador Papi, Señorita, Puebla, Zia madre, if this
were a short story and not a letter I think I would call it Late Bloomer: A Skipper of Forwards
and I would want you to know specifically that I am humming Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge
Over Troubled Water” and I love the line “sail on silver girl” and that, that might be the most
twenty-six-year-old thing about me, because it is timeless and so am I.

A few days after my mother and sister leave, my Tía Lily wakes me early, before dawn.
She gets up regularly at 5 a.m. to water and seed her sprawling garden. Her tomatoes, cucum-
bers, sweet peas, pinto beans, watermelon, and cantaloupe shine like prize-winning fruits. There
is also iceberg and butter lettuce that my grandfather used to grab handfuls of and dip into a crys-
tal bowl of vinegar and sugar water he kept on a table underneath the piñon tree. That was a sal-
ad. As a child, I remember crunching on the crisp lettuce, sitting on his lap in a diaper and dirty
shirt, messy hair stuck to my cheeks, the sweet liquid dripping down my hands and arms onto
chubby legs and bare feet covered in soil and mud.
94
Let’s walk up the mesa to the cemetery, she whispers. We can watch the sunrise. I nod,
and she heads back into the kitchen. I dress quietly in the dark, old jeans and socks. Our shoes
live in the pantry, as they are always covered in the grime of work and must be kept out of the
house. The small stove light is on and my Tía turns and hands me a cup of coffee. She pulls a
drag on a lit joint and stubs it out in the ashtray that looks like a pair of red painted lips. Plenty of
people in these parts die of liver failure and cirrhosis, so not offering substances to the abstaining
is a normal part of the everyday, no questions asked; it’s always a coin toss who ends up in the
church basement, rising from a metal chair to announce their name and affliction. She nods and
we head out to the porch, stuff our cold feet into heavy boots and let the wooden and wire screen
door squeak shut on its hinges.
As we start walking up the long incline toward the butte that resembles a covered home-
steader wagon (and where the pinche gabachos got the idea to rename the town Wagon Mound),
I can see the sun’s crest turn the horizon deep purple and mauve. For the last two hundred years,
prior to their bonneted arrival, it had been known as Santa Clara, named for many a great aunt or
grandmother, a relative somewhere back in the mix. The Santa Clara Cemetery is all that remains
of the town’s previous life, before the gabachos.
Bright orange and the dark bodily hue of insides, the silted vines of our bodies, the color
of a gunshot wound, a stabbing victim and the history of a place we pledge allegiance to, rises
blood red. Hot pink paints the sky above our eyes. It’s beautiful, says my Tía under her breath. I
feel the warmth of the mug in my hand and sip its bitter elixir, grateful for this remaining sub-
stance that gives life, and sometimes meaning, to my mornings. We continue on toward the cem-
etery. My aunt isn’t one for talking when the moment calls for silence. She is beautiful—long,
white, straight hair hanging at her shoulders—and has terrific timing. I always thought she would
95
have made a fantastic actress. Like Raquel Tejada, who later became Raquel Welch. Then, be-
fore we know it, we’re here.
The eighteenth-century metal gate hugs the contents of the cemetery, its ragged and mis-
matched headstones dotted across a small plot of land no larger than two houses on a suburban
street. Here, however, are the contents of my past, the remains of my mother’s history. Some
headstones are rotten wood crosses or old pieces of stone small and weather-beaten by three
hundred years of rain and lightning; others are newer, like my great grandmother’s, which has a
white teddy bear, its fur brown and caked, holding a now-pale red heart, placed at the headstone.
“I put that there in the eighties,” says Lily. Underneath our feet is the loose gravel, sediment and
weeds growing in every corner. There are rattlesnakes here; my uncle shot one two summers ago
when he was cleaning his parents’ graves. He brought it down in his pickup and held its busted
head while its long, limp, scaled body swung gently from side to side. Every war known to this
continent is present before us, a civil war, a body brought back from the North of a gabacho
whom had somehow befriended our people. “A fur trapper,” she says, walking past his stone, the
Mexican-American war, pinche Polk. Spoiler alert, we lost. And then we are Yankees and we die
at a frightening speed, fighting foreign wars and internal ones, caught between the will and soul.
Armijo, Martinez, Santos, Rodriguez, Valdez, Nolan, Duran. The names of our people spread
before me, a story unfolding. You should write about them, my Tía Lily says, leaning down to
wipe dust off her mother’s grave. Isn’t that why you’re here?
How can I? I ask. They’re all dead. I don’t know them.
Of course you do, she says. They’re your family.
Walking back down the hill, the red and orange sun is now a blazing ring, the yellow and
pink marbled sky pushing our Lady Majesty farther into view. In the distance, a silhouetted fig-
96
ure waves its arms and fists in rhythm and scuttles down the road, reminding me of the 1970s
Fiddler On The Roof poster, Reb Tevye hubby-biddy-dibby-dumming into the sunset.
If I were a rich man…
Fedelina, I point. I didn’t know she got up this early.
Every morning, answers Lily.
The mesa meets the dirt road and the dirt road meets the asphalt. Our adobe, now around
the corner, is shrouded in nature’s lace of pink and white hollyhocks, the shadow of the small red
wood slat schoolhouse casting long against the middle of the street. Finally the rooster calls;
everyone is up or will be soon.
There are so many ghosts, she says finally, tossing her cold coffee into the yard. They’ll
tell you what you need to know.

97

98

99
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Los Angeles Review of Books. lareviewofbooks.org/article/stories-of-new-narrative. Accessed
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Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Spinsters/Aunt Lute.
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Bellamy, Dodie. The Letters of Mina Harker. Wisconsin, The University of Wisconsin Press,
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Hester D. Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible by Georgina Colby Edinburgh University Press
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1 David MD. “I got self, pencil, and notebook”: Literacy and Maternal Desire in Sapphire’s
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2 Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. New York, Grove Press, 1978.

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101

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Body of a Woman: New Narrative; The Call Is Coming From Inside The House is a series of interlinked meditations, organized into six chapters, that coalesces poetry, memoir, critical theory, and gender theory. The work explores the ever-present wound of male supremacist trauma through an experimental lens and seeks to deconstruct this behemoth of a story piece by piece. Influenced by experimental authors of color such as Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde, each chapter analyzes and critiques male supremacy and how its various incarnations have confined and repressed women throughout the ages, throughout all walks of life. The project operates both as an interrogation of the genre New Narrative and its role in deconstructing Literary Formalism as well as a New Narrative text in and of itself. This interrogation is aimed at destabilizing literary cannons and Formalism, which works as a binary between what is perceived as high and low writing. As a culture, we are taught about oppression in small boxes, disparate issues stemming from disparate roots; we are not given the grand landscape on which to view these losses. Like the growing AIDS blanket covering the lawn of the White House bearing the names of each person who has died as a result of the disease, this loss cannot be fully comprehended unless we look at it on the macro level, as a large intersectional fabric of devastation. “Body of a Woman” likewise seeks to weave a narrative of restorative justice.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Darling, Nicole (Nikki) Felicia (author)

Core Title Body of a Woman: New Narrative; The Call is Coming from inside the House

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Degree Conferral Date 2021-12

Publication Date 08/13/2021

Defense Date 04/12/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag auto fiction,experimental hybrid fiction,Feminism,Gender Studies,misogyny,New Narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,WOC writers,women of color writers

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Johnson, Dana (committee chair), Freeman, Christopher (committee member), Serna, Laura Isabel (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email ndarling@usc.edu,write.ndarling@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC15722789

Unique identifier UC15722789

Legacy Identifier etd-DarlingNic-10038

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Darling, Nicole (Nikki) Felicia

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

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