Shortly after the Trump Administration announced it was ending Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans, the New York Times ran an article with reading suggestions for understanding the country those immigrants are expected to return to in 2019.
Of the three books suggested, only one is by a Salvadoran author. Readers are led to assume that Salvadoran storytellers simply don’t exist—a dangerous lie I myself believed for the majority of my life.
Growing up, I devoured many, many books about white people. Stories about white people turned me onto reading. Though prep school and the glamourous New York City were completely foreign to me, J.D. Salinger managed to make Holden Caulfield feel like a familiar friend, a reflection in a funhouse mirror. Ray Bradbury’s short stories introduced me to the place where nostalgia meets science fiction, an intersection I now write from often. Stories about, and by, white people gave me a voice by which to pen my own stories.
But the stories I’d begun to formulate in the margins of a high school notebook full of biology notes were hollow. The dialogue and monologues that I gifted my characters with were all mine, imbued with my teenage confusion and angst. But the characters were not like me. They were not Latinx, they were not the children of immigrants, and they knew nothing of growing up Salvadoran in Los Angeles. My first full-length draft ended up being an eighty-page young adult novel where two of the main characters were white teenagers from the suburbs of Colorado.
At another juncture in my development as a reader, with a college acceptance that relocated me across the country, the handful of non-white professors at my predominantly white institution gifted me stories that were (finally!) not about white people.
The dialogue and monologues that I gifted my characters with were all mine, imbued with my teenage confusion and angst. But the characters were not like me.
In a contemporary African American literature course, Claudia Rankine, Toni Morrison, George C. Wolfe, and Paul Beatty stunned and haunted me. Lisa Ko, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Amy Tan wrote stories about immigrants that struck a chord deep inside.
Perhaps most life-altering were the Latinx authors I hadn’t realized were so desperately missing from my own personal canon. I flipped through Drown by Junot Díaz, as if to catch up for every day I hadn’t spent reading his work. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera gave me the words to explain the feelings I knew too well, of being American but hyphenated. Achy Obejas, Luis Valdez, Julia Alvarez, Hector Tobar, and other Latinx authors unhinged my timid tongue. They offered well-crafted stories about Latinx families and enemies and lovers. Their work gave me permission to write stories as I lived them, in English and Spanglish and slang.
But El Salvador, the country of my parents’ birth, wasn’t in those stories. The conjugation of voseo, refugees labeled economic immigrants, a U.S.-funded civil war and its aftermath: it was all missing from the literature I was reading. I convinced myself that those stories simply didn’t exist and anything I wrote about El Salvador and Salvadorans was a whisper into a cultural abyss.
I convinced myself that those stories simply didn’t exist and anything I wrote about El Salvador and Salvadorans was a whisper into a cultural abyss.
It wasn’t until months later that I’d come to realize that these stories existed, but that they’d been hidden away from me. According to Arturo Arias, “the Central American population remains nearly invisible within the imaginary confines of what constitutes the multicultural landscape of the United States.” Sociologist Leisy Abrego has argued that the U.S. government’s failure to acknowledge individuals fleeing the Salvadoran Civil War as refugees created “the silence that is the large void in generations of children of Salvadoran immigrants growing up in the US being denied access to our own histories.”
The stories I so desperately needed were out there.
But because of the value placed on Salvadoran lives and xenophobic assumptions of what El Salvador offers the world culturally, they were not on my radar. The journey I’m on now is one that involves recovering Salvadoran stories, mining them out with the help of friends and colleagues who offer a title here, a poem there.
It wasn’t until my sophomore spring of college, two decades into my life, that I finally discovered literature that represented El Salvador as fully as I’d come to know it on every international trip back to San Salvador. A professor asked me if I’d ever read Roque Dalton. I hadn’t, and I told him so.
Looking back, I feel an irrational sense of shame in the fact that, as an intense lover of books, I hadn’t heard about the most famous Salvadoran writer. But the stories had been hidden from me, and it wasn’t until I picked up Dalton’s poetry that I began to see the artistic landscape that’s existed in El Salvador for decades.
Though Roque Dalton’s extensive body of work comes from the years leading up to his assassination in 1975, he understood El Salvador and its diaspora the way I’ve come to, decades after his death. In “Poema de Amor” he refers to Salvadorans as,
los guanacos hijos de la gran puta,
los que apenitas pudieron regresar,
los que tuvieron un poco más de suerte,
los eternos indocumentados,
los hacelotodo, los vendelotodo, los comelotodo
Salvadorans, particularly those “eternally undocumented,” are those that do it all: as cooks, housekeepers, landscapers, farmers, and all the jobs in between. They sell it all as street vendors in Los Angeles where they’re criminalized for their attempts to make a living. Roque Dalton’s poetry has reflected what I know about the people who’ve left El Salvador for their new homes up north. Versions of my friends and families live in the poems I spent far too long assuming didn’t exist.
Versions of my friends and families live in the poems I spent far too long assuming didn’t exist.
But Dalton was a poet, a damn good one, not an all-knowing oracle. A twelve-year-long civil war left 75,000 Salvadorans dead, 50,000 missing, and hundreds of thousands more displaced all over the world. A scissure of that degree inevitably changed the literature produced about El Salvador, especially when a three-million-person diaspora begins to pick up their pens to write stories Dalton could have never imagined.
In a stroke of luck, I was at Harvard at the same time as a Salvadoran graduate student and poet who led me to a generation of Salvadoran writers who were like me: straddling that space between El Salvador and the United States. One of her first recommendations was a Javier Zamora, whose debut collection was forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press a few months from the day of our conversation.
When it was released, Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied felt like the book I’d been searching for from the moment I’d realized that writing about El Salvador was not a hopeless endeavor. My complicated relationship with another country that is mine, though more in my nostalgia than anything else, has never been an easy thing to articulate. Yet Zamora writes tactfully, “Tonight, how I wish / you made it easier to love you, Salvador. Make it easier / to never have to risk our lives.” The poems were written in the distinctly Salvadoran Spanglish I’ve learned to speak but had yet to see in print. Reading a line like “to say sobreviviste bicho, sobreviviste carnal. Yes, we over-lived” felt like knowing a secret language, coded just for me.
When it was released, Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied felt like the book I’d been searching for from the moment I’d realized that writing about El Salvador was not a hopeless endeavor.
Roque Dalton died in 1975 and Javier Zamora’s collection was published last year. Their writing spans more than four decades. But initially, those were the only two Salvadoran storytellers I had to cling to. Only in the last few months have I begun building up my own personal canon of Salvadoran writers telling their stories, and indirectly mine, those of my parents, tíos, and tías.
William Archila conciliates the tension between American and Salvadoran by presenting them as one in the same, writing Duke Ellington into Santa Ana in his poetry.
Señor Ellington claps his hands along,
dancing in a two-step blues, stomping
in the center of everyone like a traffic cop
conducting a busy city street.
Leticia Hernández-Linares write musical poems about women who challenge the machismo of the culture they belong to, including one about a woman who shares my own mother’s name.
Sitting with Estella, Dolores conjures
cumbias with sugar on top, about women
who aren’t gonna take it anymore
Yesika Salgado guided me through heartbreak, hunger, and the presumed unknowability of our Salvadoran identity, writing:
every man I have loved does not know my country / has
not been awakened by the rooster’s crow / does not know
the swell of grass and dirt beneath June thunderstorms /
does not smell burning wood and think of home
My canon, writers from both here and there, grew little by little, like a Santa Tecla sprinkle turned tropical storm: Quique Avilés, Claribel Alegría, Cynthia Guardado, Elena Salamanca, Lorena Duarte, Karina Oliva Alvarado, Susana Reyes, harold terezón, Alejandro Córdova, Willy Palomo, Janel Pineda, Claudia Castro Luna, Roberto Lovato, Raquel Gutiérrez, Alexandra Lytton-Regalado, Gabriela Poma.
These writers, whose work has entered my life in its most recent era, give El Salvador and its diaspora shape, complexity, and dignity. Finding faithful representations of Salvadorans in literature has been a difficult process, access to texts being one of the central struggles. Personal recommendations and anthologies like “The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States,” have made the process easier.
These writers, whose work has entered my life in its most recent era, give El Salvador and its diaspora shape, complexity, and dignity.
But it’s also required hours of sifting through footnotes and hoping that the cited texts are still in circulation. Two bilingual anthologies published by Kalina Editorial, “Teatro Bajo Mi Piel/Theater Under My Skin” and “Puntos de Fuga/Vanishing Points,” have been wildly helpful for identifying contemporary Salvadoran authors. Yet, I wasn’t able to buy copies until I was physically in San Salvador last summer.
These questions of access, of who comes across our stories and why, offers me, as a reader and writer, a challenge. For the sake of a rich but overlooked literary tradition, there’s a need to archive and connect others to our stories with the hope that people will begin to acknowledge that El Salvador is more than just its social ills.
In perhaps my favorite Roque Dalton poem ever, “El Gran Despecho,” he writes:
País mío no existes
sólo eres una mala silueta mía
una palabra que le creí al enemigo
That country of mine, nestled between two Americas, is the vibrant homeland of poetry and prose. Read its literature, lest you believe the lie that it simply doesn’t exist.
Throughout my life various songs, books, and films have been crucial in teaching me how to name myself.
At ten years old, in the last singing competition I ever lost, Whitney’s “Greatest Love Of All” challenged me to find my voice, to cultivate range, and to love myself through the early hardships of childhood abuse and primary school bullying. Through reading Maya’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and watching the live action blockbuster adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple I was able to identify my traumas, to know that I have never been alone, and to seek out my kin who would facilitate my—and our collective—healing. Between Tracy Chapman’s rich timbre and searing vulnerability in “Be Careful Of My Heart” and the vibrant and flagrant descriptions of Jamaica in Fiona Zedde’s Bliss I learned that my experiences of black queer love were too pure and delicious to ever be prayed away. Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues taught me the name of my gender and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater has compelled me to learn what it is called in my mother tongue.
Beautiful
I was ten years old when I lost my first singing competition. I befriended the girl who won by singing a song I hadn’t heard until then. Because of how beautiful the song was, and because I was keen on learning how to win, I learned the song. I was both terrified and impressed by the song and the enormity of Whitney Houston’s voice. I listened to it repeatedly, overcome by the visceral shifts I experienced with each listen.
“I believe the children are our future
teach them well
and let them lead the way
show them all the beauty they possess inside.”
— Whitney Houston, “Greatest Love of All”
Whitney’s declarations about believing the children are the future made me believe there was a safer world out there for children like me. A world in which adults treated—and taught—us well and showed us all the beauty we possess inside. “Greatest Love of All” initiated the first instance in which I considered that I may be beautiful. I was ten years old and that was the first time a song made me cry. I learned to sing that song well. And when other people heard me sing it, they cried too. I learned that my voice was an instrument I could utilize to make people see my beauty, and thus treat me with even momentary kindness.
“Learning to love yourself
it is the greatest love of all.”
— Whitney Houston, “Greatest Love of All”
No one at that stage in my life had taught me that loving myself was something I could—let alone should—do. Many people who were meant to love me hurt me. Despite the many instances of abuse and pervasive bullying at school I was subjected to, Whitney taught me that I was beautiful and worthy of love, not just the love of the people around me, but also my own.
Survivor
At the age of nineteen I realized that I had endured near-constant violence for the entirety of my life and that my body didn’t feel like it wholly belonged to me. I was in a relationship with a girl who hated me but sometimes bought me thoughtful gifts. During one of our anniversaries and following one of many stormy fights she bought me a copy of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. At that point in my life,I developed the language to understand some of the things that were done to me as a child. I knew that I was a rape and molestation survivor and I recognized that that girlfriend and my first had crossed consent boundaries with me, but I struggled to name their harm as what it was.
“He held me so softly that I wished he wouldn’t ever let me go. I felt at home.”
— Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Through this sentence, in which Maya describes how her violator made her feel, I came to understand a crucial lesson about surviving intimate violence. Violators sometimes came in the form of people you trusted. This is a part of their violence: giving you a false sense of safety so that the harm they perpetuate against you feels less severe. And so that you—and not them—carry the residual shame. Maya’s vulnerability in writing about this particular element of surviving intimate violence helped me learn to start shedding my shame.
I internalized the value in Maya’s vulnerability and started telling my story and naming the various kinds of harm I had survived. This not only helped me release my shame but also resulted in me cultivating a makeshift virtual community of fellow survivors.
I internalized the value in Maya’s vulnerability and started telling my story and naming the various kinds of harm I had survived.
There is a scene in the blockbuster adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple that introduced me to reflections of myself which shifted my relationship with my survivorship. The long-suffering Celie—portrayed by Whoopi Goldberg—watches in awe as her new and eccentric friend, Shug Avery—played by the legendary Margaret Avery—enchants a crowded underground bar with a sultry blues performance.
In each woman I see parts of myself: Celie, the trauma-afflicted, perpetually dissociating survivor-victim who didn’t know that sex was meant to be consensual and mutually satisfying until she met her new ally. And the mostly triumphant survivor, Shug who—while bearing her own scars from intimate violence—has reclaimed enough of her power and sense of sacredness to facilitate the healing and ultimate freedom of her friend. Although I was—and in many ways still am—far from the almost hedonistic and decadent free-ness embodied by Shug, she was a powerful possibility model for what a healed me could look like. And in addition to showing me who I could be, Shug’s relationship with Celie reinforced the importance and possibility of collective empathy and healing.
Pure
Years before my first queer relationship I prayed that my mother’s God would rid me of my sinful attraction to women. When I was twenty, after—and during—at least three mostly disastrous queer relationships and dozens of casual encounters I found myself truly in love for the first time. Friends had introduced me to the African American, Cleveland-born folk singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman. The rich timbre of her voice and the simplicity and searing vulnerability in her music opened me up in ways I hadn’t imagined possible.
“You and your sweet smile,
You and all, your tantalizing ways.
You and your honey lips,
You and all; the sweet things that they say.”
— Tracy Chapman, “Be Careful of My Heart”
It took me a very short amount of time to collect almost her entire discography and watch damn near every YouTube video there was of her performances. She occupied my mind and senses in ways no one else had before—or since.
When I read Fiona Zedde’s Bliss that same year, I was smitten—not only with the gorgeously depicted Jamaican backdrop or the beauty of the first black lesbian love story I’d ever read, but with one of the protagonists, Hunter. Fiona described her in a way that—in my mind—conjured a very vivid picture of my sweet Tracy. I was so convinced of this likeness that I contacted the author about it.
I was smitten—not only with the gorgeously depicted Jamaican backdrop or the beauty of the first black lesbian love story I’d ever read, but with one of the protagonists, Hunter.
“Dear Fiona,” I wrote excitedly, “I can’t get this out of my head, but Hunter in Bliss looks just like Tracy Chapman to me, and that’s made this beautiful book that much more enjoyable for me.” She graciously wrote back to say she totally saw Hunter as a “young, late 90s Tracy” and we talked wistfully about the book being adapted into a film some day.
From then on, Fiona’s Hunter was my Tracy and my Tracy was Fiona’s Hunter. I kept the book for much longer than the two-week period stipulated by the queer library I volunteered at. And I read it so many times with my love’s voice as the soundtrack that it is impossible for me to listen to Be Careful of My Heart without visions of Bliss Sinclair leaving America after a torrid affair ends in mild heartbreak only to wind up in a delicious but complicated love affair in her birth country.
The fullness of my heart from marrying that story and song in my mind forever convinced me that black queer loving and desire were things too pure to ever be prayed away.
Worthy
I’d been alive twenty-one years before I learned the name of my gender. I picked up a copy of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, excited to indulge in a story about stone butch lesbian women and the pre-Stonewall bar scene. And while that brilliant book delivered on its promise of giving in depth insight into the emerging LGBT(QIA+) rights movement—it also served an immensely special and pivotal purpose.
“I felt my whole life coming full circle. Growing up so different, coming out as a butch, passing as a man, and then back to the same question that had shaped my life: woman or man?”
— Leslie Feinberg (Jess Goldberg), Stone Butch Blues
It taught me—through a stunning depiction of Jess Goldberg’s painful journey towards embracing queerness, finding community, and being forced to pass as a man to secure employment and the simultaneously isolating and liberating experience of determining their gender beyond the binary—that I too, was non-binary.
While Leslie never uses this term to describe Jess’s gender journey, that book—and subsequent internet research into who Leslie was—was the catalyst in me understanding who I was. And while the language I eventually acquired—pronouns that fit snugly and gender names (agender, genderqueer) that felt like cozy favorite jackets—brought me a bigger sense of self than anything else pertaining to my identity, there was a niggling discomfort in the back of my mind.
While the language I eventually acquired… brought me a bigger sense of self than anything else pertaining to my identity, there was a niggling discomfort in the back of my mind.
Everything about this identity seemed firmly rooted in a Western context. And while I couldn’t deny my distinctly Western outlook on the world, despite being a black person who had only ever lived in South Africa, I felt a quiet yearning to know who I was within the context of my ethnicities.
It’s Akwaeke Emezi’s breathtaking debut novel Freshwater that almost grants me permission to seek the context of who I am in accordance to my ethnicity and lineage. Emezi daringly carries their queerness, trans-ness, non-binary-ness, and neuro-divergence and places them firmly at the center of Igbo Ontology and themself in the holy yet precarious position of straddling two worlds.
“The first madness was that we were born, that they stuffed a god into a bag of skin.”
— Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater
Emezi’s work teaches me that my names—the ones I have learned, and those which I have yet to discover—have always been sacred. That the stories that introduced me and led me back to myself did so to reinforce my innate worthiness of an affirmed and hallowed existence.
I think about the passage of time a lot, and the difference time can make on our perspectives. There are moments when time doesn’t seem to make a difference at all, and there are moments when time changes our perspective completely.
In May 2012, I graduated Sarah Lawrence College on my dad’s fifty-fourth birthday. In 2012, I was bright-eyed, hopeful, and ready to attempt to make my way in a world I was unprepared for. I moved back home to Connecticut after graduation and took a job babysitting, followed by tutoring, two jobs writing, and finally another job babysitting. My goal: pay off my student loans as fast as possible.
Somehow, I managed to cobble all of these jobs together into a cohesive schedule. I was focused on work. I babysat three mornings a week, wrote in the afternoons, tutored twice weekly, and still wrote when I came home.
To decompress, I would lose myself in boxed sets of my favorite TV shows. I liked science fiction at the time. I’d been a big fan of 2003’s Battlestar Galactica and 2009’s Dollhouse; I was disappointed when Syfy cancelled Caprica, and reluctantly gave Warehouse 13 a shot.
I loved the imagination in these shows. I loved the questions they posed, and I liked thinking about where the story was going.
I loved the imagination in these shows. I loved the questions they posed, and I liked thinking about where the story was going. It was also a genre that is the epitome of shows cancelled before their time and so, in the spring of 2013, I reluctantly left my comfort zone for a new show called Defiance.
Defiance premiered on the Syfy Channel in April 2013.
Its premise was that in 2013 a group of different alien races known as the Votanus Collective arrived on Earth. The worlds that each race inhabited were dying, so they built arks that carried their people across the stars.
But this was all backstory. The series picked up thirty years later with Joshua Nolan hunting for “ark tech” with his daughter, an alien girl named Irisa, whom he saved from a cult. They run into trouble and are brought to the former city of St. Louis, which has been renamed Defiance.
As a 2013 viewer, I was drawn into the show by the complex narratives presented. Defiance was a place where both humans and Votans could live in peace, and where the different cultures were respected, but it still had its own social ecosystem which made for good stories.
I found myself coming back to Defiance each week for the complex characters with their own motivations and fallacies. No character in Defiance was just there, they all had a role to play that drove the story forward. Most importantly there was an array of women who weren’t only strong, but complex in their own right.
I found myself coming back to Defiance each week for the complex characters with their own motivations and fallacies…. There was an array of women who weren’t only strong, but complex in their own right.
There was Amanda Rosewater, the newly minted mayor who always had a plan and yet was insecure in times of stress. Then there was her sister Kenya, who ran the bar and brothel called the Need/Want. Irisa, Nolan’s daughter, was just starting to come into her own and push back against her father. Doc Yewll was a serious scientist who let nothing stand in the way of her doing her job, and still had a shady past. Christy McCawley was a young woman in love with an alien boy against her father’s wishes, and while her story was arguably the most like a teen movie, it still sucked me in.
Yet, the character that really drew me in was Stahma Tarr. Stahma’s a Castithan woman who was married to the town loan shark, Datak Tarr. Over Defiance’s three seasons the couple and their son Alak presented a story not unlike many immigrant narratives as Stahma struggled to break the bonds of their old world, while Datak held tight to them.
Looking back, it isn’t surprising that she was one of the first characters I gravitated towards. Stahma and Datak carried themselves in a way that reminded me of the Purebloods in Harry Potter. In 2012, I’d written an op-ed about Bellatrix Lestrange and how her manic tendencies were something I admired because she was unapologetic for who she was. The Black family quickly became my favorite Harry Potter characters because of their history and complexity. Stahma reminded me of Bellatrix’s sister, Narcissa Malfoy, who I was also drawn to because she walked the line of self-preservation. She wasn’t setting out to do the right thing, just to take care of her family.
Stahma had similar motivations. Throughout the first season, Stahma pulled strings and manipulated situations to serve her interests. It was selfish, but it was all for the good of her family, and she wasn’t afraid to do what was needed.
In season two of Defiance, with Datak in prison and her son running the family business, Stahma had to find a way to ensure her survival without breaking the edicts of the Castithan homeworld. On Casti, their home planet, women weren’t allowed to run businesses and they weren’t supposed to have opinions, but Stahma believed in the new world that Earth promised, and she wanted to break the cycle.
Her feminist narrative was one of the strongest of season two and one of the reasons that I kept watching the show. Yet, Stahma’s narrative always felt like she was in danger of being found out.
Defiance was cancelled in 2015 shortly after the Season 3 finale aired, but I hadn’t seen it.
I was neck deep in a redesign work project and cultivating a friendship with my brother’s girlfriend. Since moving back home in 2012, I had put up my own stasis nets. I had lived with a presumption that I could, and possibly would, move at any time, but that hadn’t happened.
I had put up my own stasis nets. I had lived with a presumption that I could, and possibly would, move at any time, but that hadn’t happened.
While I was living at home, Sunday dinners had become a ritual, with my brother and his girlfriend coming over every week—sometimes on short notice—and that meant I was often cooking dinner. Over the course of a year and a half I got to know his girlfriend and we became friends. I taught her to knit and we went to trunk shows in New York City and knitting circles together. I showed my mom and brother the sometimes-complicated world of buying yarn from independent dyers online for Christmas and her birthday, and often served as a fit guide for when my mom decided to buy her clothes.
I wanted to do it, I was happy to do it. I liked my brother’s girlfriend, but a nagging part of me thought to myself: “She’s currently my only friend. What happens if this doesn’t work out?”
Before Christmas 2015, they broke up. She disappeared from my life like a shadow in the corner of my eye. That’s when my mother looked at me and said, “She was your friend. I didn’t even think about that.”
“I did,” I replied.
Since then, the stasis nets went back up. This time, not because I was planning to move, but because I didn’t want to lose another friend that way.
When 2016 rolled around I vowed that I would start doing things for myself again. A big project at work had recently come to an end and suddenly I had free time and didn’t know what to do with myself.
I got back into reading and went to a book group at my local independent bookstore…. Yet, I also felt lonely, in the way that someone describes being alone in a crowd of people.
I started writing television reviews for Tell-Tale TV, and threw myself full-tilt into a blog. I got back into reading and went to a book group at my local independent bookstore, and I kept doing things like the weekly grocery run. Yet, I also felt lonely, in the way that someone describes being alone in a crowd of people.
It’s strange seeing a mirror of yourself when you don’t expect it.
In July 2018, I was working on an article for Tell-Tale TV. I’d been contributing to them regularly for over two years and I often credit the site with giving me an outlet to save my sanity. I had written an essay about the TV show Timeless and its place in the time travel genre, and was working on a list of shows with similarly rich narratives.
I was talking to a friend about the idea, and asking her if she knew about any other shows, when she said, “Defiance.”
I thought about it for a moment. Defiance had slipped away from me so slowly that it hadn’t even occurred to me when I made my list. I thought about it some more and searched for the show online. It had been five years since the premiere but the three seasons were on Amazon Prime.
I began to re-watch the pilot, and I came to the scene where Joshua Nolan walks into Defiance for the first time and sees Amanda Rosewater give a speech at a town celebration. Later, walking through town with the former mayor, Amanda says how she’s “genetically incapable of inspiring people.” Later, when the town is under attack, she’s struggling with how to address the citizens. She’s looking for the right words that will inspire them to take up arms against the Volge.
She compares herself to Mayor Nicky, and when she ultimately takes to the podium in front of a scared and confused town, she ditches her script and says plainly, “We’re all going do die!”
In those two scenes I started to realize that it wasn’t Stahma Tarr I should have been looking at, but Amanda. She was a newly minted mayor who was fighting for a town that she loved. In each season, the writers gave Amanda new challenges and she always approached it rationally. She didn’t have all the answers, but she always attempted to find the best way out of her situation.
In those two scenes I started to realize that it wasn’t Stahma Tarr I should have been looking at, but Amanda…. She didn’t have all the answers, but she always attempted to find the best way out of her situation.
My world is nothing like Amanda Rosewater’s. Her history and mine don’t mirror each other, but as the pilot progressed, I saw more of myself in Amanda. When Amanda is injured during the fight with the Volge she attempts to get up and keep fighting before Doc Yewll pushes her back down and tells her she’s on bed rest.
Around the time I fell behind on Defiance, I was working on an important project for work. The project was taking longer than expected and one day, I suddenly realized I hadn’t showered in three days or changed my clothes, because I was so focused on the task. Had I been Amanda, in her exact same situation, I would have tried to get up too. I would have pressed on and kept working.
Watching Amanda tend to Defiance also brought up a connection I never expected.
I moved back to Connecticut in the summer of 2012, and I was there when the Sandy Hook shooting occurred. I was home and ready to pursue the next stage of my life, but on December 14, 2012, it was like the town halted. There were memorials and services, and I was concerned about two of the kids I babysat.
“Ms. Lauren,” the older one asked me. “Do I have to talk about what happened?”
I was at the stove making macaroni and cheese. I turned and stooped down to his level. “I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “I know a lot of people are asking you questions. So, when I am here, if you want to talk about it, we can. If you don’t, that’s fine too.”
He smiled and went back to his snack. Going on six years, I remember how internally, I had promised myself that I would be there for these boys and my community. And I was, until the family ultimately moved, but I never did; I stayed in my town and watched the anniversaries pass.
Looking back, in the spring of 2013, Stahma gave me what I needed to survive. She gave me calculated exterior and the hope that I could affect change in some small way. But, in my actions, I was really Amanda. She put her own feelings and ambitions aside for the good of the town. She loved Defiance and the people in it.
In an interview, Julie Benz who played the role of Amanda broke down one of her final scenes in the season three finale, “Upon the March We Fittest Die.”
“For me, Amanda represents the heart of Defiance. She’s the only character who consistently puts aside her own feelings for the good of the town. She sacrificed her whole life for the survival of the town.”
A few weeks ago, I was conducting a phone interview with Jennifer Bartels from American Woman. We were discussing how the characters were each developed differently. Bartels, who plays Diana, said:
“I know, as a viewer and as a woman, I really look to align with different characteristics of different women. I have a little Bonnie in me, and I have a little Kathleen in me, and of course, I have quite a bit of Diana in me, so it’s nice that people can relate to different aspects of the characters.”
I’ve been thinking about both Stahma Tarr and Amanda Rosewater, and the different things I’ve liked about each of them…. Stahma gave me the armor I needed at a time when the community around me was raw and healing, but Amanda was who I was.
This quote stayed with me as I transcribed it, and finished Defiance all the way through for the first time. I’ve been thinking about both Stahma Tarr and Amanda Rosewater, and the different things I’ve liked about each of them, and I realized that I have aspects of both of them. Stahma gave me the armor I needed at a time when the community around me was raw and healing, but Amanda was who I was. I just had to take care not to lose myself in the service of others, and protect myself a little bit, like Stahma Tarr would.
For all her backstabbing, which made her a compelling character, Stahma always looked out for herself, and she valued those closest to her. Stahma might not be the best role model, but she definitely had a few personality traits that I can benefit from.
When I first read Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, I stopped only twice: once to cry, and once to squeal.
“It’s us,” I texted my significant other, my heart full of love that this existed and rage that I had never seen anything else like it. “It’s a story like ours.”
To say The Argonauts is neatly “about” something would be an oversight of its complicated, intersecting, and messy narrative structure. It is deeply personal yet persistently aware of looming social systems, informal yet theoretical. In just the first paragraph, Nelson references Samuel Beckett, queerness, anal sex, and the unexpected joy of falling into love. This, for me, is its charm. I had been looking for a queer love story that expanded upon rather than simplified what I felt, that unfolded more questions, and The Argonauts became that musing.
I had been looking for a queer love story that expanded upon rather than simplified what I felt, that unfolded more questions, and The Argonauts became that musing.
The love story is that of Nelson herself and her gender-nonconforming partner Harry Dodge. Over the book, we watch Nelson’s body change from pregnancy and Dodge’s from testosterone shots, their stories mirroring and moving between each other. But the love story is also that of myself and the person I was dating when I read The Argonauts, that of a cis woman with her own form of physical dysphoria (in Nelson’s case, maternity; in my own, chronic pain) looking over the wide expanse of what it means to live in a radically changing body while quietly caring for someone who doesn’t fit into a simple gender binary. It’s an homage to the soft moments, the internal struggles, the steps forward—knowledge that can only come from someone living the story.
It’s an homage to the soft moments, the internal struggles, the steps forward—knowledge that can only come from someone living the story.
And there’s a vivid story to be lived and told about building queer and genderqueer relationships. Recently, at the doctor’s office for an annual checkup, I was handed a survey that asked my gender and sexual orientation. The options for gender: male, female, transgender, or other. (There’s much to be said about the separation of “transgender” from the traditionally binary genders in itself, the distinction of “transgender women” and “women” as if distinct categories.) The options for genders you experience attraction towards: male, female, or unsure.
I want to say that I felt furious for all the identities left in the unspoken white space, wrote in “people of all genders,” proved that nonconforming gender and romantic attraction aren’t mutually exclusive. Instead, I felt empty—I already knew this. I already knew how many times I witnessed the small gasp of surprise on someone’s face when I used “they” for my partner, even when that someone already knew I was queer, how many times the obsession with one person’s nonconforming body usurped even the potential of imagining their body intertwined with another.
The obsession with one person’s nonconforming body usurped even the potential of imagining their body intertwined with another.
In the end, I circled only “unsure,” as in not in one defined place, as in fluid, as in genderfluid. And, in coming to the same realization that I had so many times before about our society’s inability to view gender nonconforming individuals as viable romantic partners, I thought of my favorite quote from Nelson: “One may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”
I reread The Argonauts that night, mulling not just over Nelson’s words but others, too. Some reviewers claimed to love the book but rambled on about her lyrical prose and deft handling of motherhood without ever explicitly mentioning gender. Others were more forthright that they thought her subject material was taboo and appalling, railing against a supposed loss of—ironically—family values. Mostly, they reminded me why I needed Nelson’s words: the true bias out there, the anger that emerges when someone simply tells their own truth.
But some reviews were spectacular, embracing Nelson like I did.They furthered her story, uplifted her voice, reminded me that there is and has always been more support than I could see. Black Warrior Review called her “above all… not a hidden principle or a thesis or a construct,” but instead “a living voice,” the face of queer family-making and maturity pulling you by the hand throughout her journey and the hope of your future journey, too. All together, “she takes us in… and she will take you in without questioning why you are there, too.” Because it was never just me in my room alone with The Argonauts. It was never just me alone in this narrative, in this experience, even when it felt that way. There were always more stories out there, more discussion that needed to happen, more people to be taken in. The Argonauts was the catalyst for those accounts to emerge, the one act of representation that lodged the door open and allowed me and others to represent ourselves too, to make ourselves seen to the larger world.
The Argonauts… lodged the door open and allowed me and others to represent ourselves too, to make ourselves seen to the larger world.
And I reread my old writing, my own reviews of Nelson scrawled in the margins. I had filled the book with Post-It notes and underlined phrases and exclamation points, all written to my partner about our experiences together. I don’t know if they ever read the book after I gave it to them and before they gave it back with boxes full of my shirts and other trinkets they no longer wanted around—that wasn’t the point. The point was that it was there for them to read if they did want it, there for me before I even knew it was exactly what I wanted, and there for so many others, a story that resisted expectations and carved a new space for gender nonconformity and romance not just together but as the same entity.
Which is why representation matters so much: it connects us to stories that validate our existence, stories that open new worlds and make them understandable, stories that show us our common humanity and link us together. It proves to us, in Nelson’s words, that “we are for another or by virtue of each other, not in a single instance, but from the start and always.” That we are here, and have always been here, and will always continue to love, despite everything.
It’s something I’ve heard since I was a child: Go to school, get an education, get a good job. It’s a mantra recited by Black parents to Black children ever since we were allowed to be educated and gainfully employed.
So much of Black history is about celebrating Black firsts: the first Black to reach an executive position at a corporation, the first Black head doctor at a hospital, the first Black ambassador. Reference books are full of sepia-toned photos of dignified-looking men and women of color who overcame prejudice to graduate from Ivy League schools or obtain government appointments. Education and hard work was the only approved way for respectable African-Americans to get a piece of the American dream. The background of iconic Black entertainment is all about coming up. From The Jeffersonsto The Fresh Prince of Bel-Airto Black-Ish, the message is that upward mobility is the way out of poverty and discrimination.
The flip side of that aspiration is less spoken of. It’s the unwritten but universally understood employment contract drawn up between White employers and Black employees in America: To be allowed access to the world of upward mobility, there are certain adjustments to be made. You will have to dress a certain way. You will have to speak a certain way. There are certain behaviors of your employers that you will have adapt to or overlook. That contract has undergone amendments and modifications over time, but the primary stipulation remains the same: if you’re Black and want to get—and keep—a job, you will have to compromise.
To be allowed access to the world of upward mobility, there are certain adjustments to be made.
In my early twenties, I was working the third shift at Johnny Rockets in Jacksonvillle, Florida. One night I was running the dishwasher with a coworker, a Mexican guy who had been there some months longer than me and was unofficially in charge of the night crew. The restaurant manager, a white guy, poked his head into the door, and he and my coworker went over some closing procedures. The subject of a lack of supplies came up, and the manager placed the blame on the stinginess of the district manager, whom I had to assume was Jewish from the joke the restaurant manager made about him.
I remember thinking that it didn’t affect me, as I wasn’t Jewish, but I knew it was an unprofessional and offensive remark to make in the workplace.
I wanted to say something, but I didn’t. I remember thinking that it didn’t affect me, as I wasn’t Jewish, but I knew it was an unprofessional and offensive remark to make in the workplace. I looked at my colleague and he rolled his eyes, a gesture I interpreted to mean that I was to ignore the manager’s comment, which I did.
The next year, I worked a summer job at a warehouse, and one of the foreman handed me a note to give to a shipping and receiving clerk. It said to be sure the “dago truck driver gave her an invoice.” Obviously, the foreman thought nothing of giving the note to me and had no fear of me reading it and saying anything—and he was right, as it turned out.
Both Johnny Rockets and the warehouse job paid minimum wage, and I had no intention of making a career out of either, but the idea of quitting or confronting a manager and getting fired because I felt offended was unthinkable to me at the time. Jacksonville was, and is, a very conservative southern city, and jobs were hard to get if you were Black. I wasn’t rich. I needed to work. So I decided to adopt the strategy of focusing on my job, not making waves, and working until I could do better.
I wasn’t rich. I needed to work. So I decided to adopt the strategy of focusing on my job, not making waves, and working until I could do better.
Things improved when I moved to Atlanta. In Atlanta, the Black success mantra manifests itself like no other city in America. You could say Atlanta was built on it. Here was a city where Blackness wasn’t defined by survival, but by prosperity and its display. There were Black people in positions of power, from the mayor’s office to corporate boardrooms. Black culture was Atlanta culture.
The economy was booming, and I landed an office job not long after I arrived. The casual displays of racism I saw in Jacksonville were nonexistent here. But in the “Black Mecca,” genteel condescension can be as bad as blatant hostility. In meetings, I would be interrupted while trying to speak. If I made a suggestion, it was patronizingly listened to and quickly ignored—but if a white colleague made the same suggestion worded differently almost immediately afterward, they would receive praise for it. White coworkers would make coded comments about other coworkers’ mistakes being due to their ethnicities in my presence.
In meetings, I would be interrupted while trying to speak. If I made a suggestion, it was patronizingly listened to and quickly ignored—but if a white colleague made the same suggestion worded differently almost immediately afterward, they would receive praise for it.
I hid my displeasure behind nervous smiles and shaking my head. I moved from one corporate job to the next, and very rarely did I speak up. I was making a very nice income for a single man with no kids in a major city. I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that.
I grew up proud and aware of my heritage. My immediate family shared stories with me about our ancestors from the time I was old enough to understand them. As a teen I devoured the words of Malcolm X and the music of Public Enemy. In Atlanta I was surrounded by examples of Black empowerment. Me and my friends were heavily into Afrocentrism and got into discussions about racism that would last for hours. I knew what Black people suffered and how they fought to gain access to gainful employment, and I believed in Malcolm’s strategy of confronting racism head on wherever it exposed itself.
But when I walked through office doors on Monday morning, I still made the compromises I felt I had to make to keep food on the table and a roof over my head.
I believed in Malcolm’s strategy of confronting racism head on wherever it exposed itself.But when I walked through office doors on Monday morning, I still made the compromises I felt I had to make to keep food on the table and a roof over my head.
What’s a paycheck worth? If someone makes a racist remark in a social setting, it’s easy to call them out on it. In a business environment, how do you handle that? Do you go off on the person or ignore it? Whatever you do, you’re risking a lot—your career if you address the remark, your self-respect if you don’t. It’s a choice no one should have to make, but Black employees face it every day. The results can be soul killing.
A couple weeks ago, political commentator Melissa Harris-Perry publicly parted ways with MSNBC. On the day she left, she released a statement saying that the tone of her show was being compromised and that she refused to be a “token, mammy, or little brown bobble head.” Her experience is not unique. In workplaces across the country, there’s still an expectation that people of color who rise in their chosen professions should be eternally grateful for being given the opportunity to work—as if they didn’t get there on their own merits—and that they are obligated to maintain a safe, nonthreatening image.
Whatever you do, you’re risking a lot — your career if you address the remark, your self-respect if you don’t. It’s a choice no one should have to make, but Black employees face it every day. The results can be soul killing.
Recently, I was talking to someone being groomed for a management position in a company I work with. He was a younger White guy, and he often came to me for mentorship. We weren’t close, but we got along pretty well. I enjoyed having someone to talk to about my work and exchange ideas with. One day, in the middle of one of these conversations, a client approached us. She was a Black woman, in her early forties if I had to guess. Her speech and dress gave the impression of being poor or working-class. She asked a few questions about a product, then left. Once she was out of earshot my colleague said, “Leave, and take your nappy weave with you.”
I was stunned. I’d never felt anything from him that would have made me expect a comment like that. I can only guess that he felt comfortable saying that around me because I was seen as “safe.” I felt anger rising up inside me, and right away the professional and social indoctrination about not making waves rose up to check it. This time, however, outrage won out. I pulled him aside and confronted him, and he gave me a weak half-excuse, half-apology.
Our relationship hasn’t recovered. I cut off any conversation not pertaining to work, and I stopped mentoring him. I may have betrayed my own “safe” image, but I don’t care. I’m at a point in my life where the one-sided compromise of the Black success mantra no longer serves me.
Words matter. When disrespect goes unchallenged, it only gets worse. I want to be successful, I want security. But I don’t want either at the cost of my integrity.
Words matter. When disrespect goes unchallenged, it only gets worse. I want to be successful, I want security. But I don’t want either at the cost of my integrity.
I have a pretty good professional life. I have mentors of different backgrounds in various fields, and I’ve made connections that I hope to be able to cultivate for years. But I’ve also had enough contact with clueless and casually racist people in business settings that I have my guard up, anxious for the day when someone I thought knew better makes a hateful remark couched as a joke and I’m expected to laugh about and shrug off.
I shouldn’t have to accept that, and I don’t intend to.
Rihanna released the widely anticipated video for the Drake-assisted “Work” last month, the first single off her eighth studio album, Anti. Not only were we lucky enough to receive two separate clips in a single sitting, but the Barbadian singer graciously took us into a steamy night of Caribbean-tinged twerking and whining (two dances that she executes quite well).
While the catchiness of “Work” is irrefutable and Rihanna yet again showed us her vocal versatility, her sexuality as a black woman—not her undeniable talent or almost magical pop star staying power—is at the forefront of discussion surrounding the song. In fact, anytime a black female pop star shows conceptual complexity, it is almost inevitable that mainstream criticism will soon follow. Publications and outlets balk at the idea that black women can be multifaceted—and Rihanna’s latest visuals are just the tip of the iceberg.
Anytime a black female pop star shows conceptual complexity, it is almost inevitable that mainstream criticism will soon follow. Publications and outlets balk at the idea that black women can be multifaceted.
At twenty-eight years of age, Rihanna has literally grown up right before the world’s eyes. She signed her record deal with Def Jam when she was just sixteen. Over the course of her career, she has publicly dealt with financial troubles, family turmoil, and high-profile relationships. Despite all of her setbacks, she has remained fearless when it comes to artistic reinvention and uses her music videos to convey the power of her brand and agency.
Considering the history of black women in this country, to say that Rihanna shows resilience and confidence as she navigates the music industry would be a vast understatement. It is groundbreaking to watch her become so successful by disregarding what society deems acceptable and by following her own creative impulses.
Considering the history of black women in this country, to say that Rihanna shows resilience and confidence as she navigates the music industry would be a vast understatement.
All too often, this particular narrative surrounding her career is ignored in favor of focusing in on one single aspect of her life, regardless of how irrelevant it is to her artistry. As a survivor of domestic violence, her personal life is often used to frame her every musical move; others view her as a sexual object whose sole purpose is to perpetuate male hedonism. Her cultural roots make her an exotic entity to some, and her current stint as creative director at PUMA left naysayers wondering what her credentials are when it comes to designing fashion. While her contemporaries are also subjected to unwarranted scrutiny, the words used to describe Rihanna and her professional endeavors are always harsher and often contain racist undertones.
Why is it so hard to believe that black women can occupy such visible spaces while being multidimensional?
This question has never been more prevalent than when Beyonce recently released the video for her latest song “Formation.” A departure from her signature universal love ballads and boisterous club anthems, the single celebrates her black roots while addressing police brutality and promoting sisterhood. Her Black Panther tribute at this year’s Super Bowl cemented the predictable backlash centering on Bey’s “newfound” political awareness, and a bevy of ridiculous questions and critiques soon followed: Is Beyonce now anti-police? How could a light-skinned, blond black woman be pro-black? Doesn’t her being rich make the likelihood of Beyonce experiencing racism obsolete?
Once she used her platform to voice what matters in the black community—and step outside of the comfort zones of her listeners—the adverse reactions became inevitable.
Once Beyonce used her platform to voice what matters in the black community—and step outside of the comfort zones of her listeners—the adverse reactions became inevitable.
Nicki Minaj is another talented black female musician in the limelight who is often forced to justify her sexuality, outspokenness, and drive in a genre dominated by men. Her gritty and brilliant delivery of bars is frequently juxtaposed by her choice to treat sensitive subject matter, yet her creativity and proliferation in hip hop is overshadowed by her body type and how she chooses to showcase it. Minaj is aware of the controversy surrounding her career and has stated that young women can dance and dress as provocatively as they want yet still be well educated—though society encourages us (read: black women) to choose between the two.
And earlier this year, former video vixen and model Amber Rose had to explain—in the most elementary of ways—to two grown men on a naturally syndicated television show that just because she used to be a stripper and has dated famous men doesn’t mean that she wants to be viewed as a sexual object. She is a mother, a feminist, and an author—but that seems to be lost to the mainstream, which has written her off as they see fit. Will black women ever be embraced as the complex, talented, and fascinating beings we are?
Despite the strides made by the aforementioned celebrities, the lens used to view black women in pop music and culture is dangerously narrow. What is even more disheartening is that for many, perception equals reality.
The depiction of black women over hundreds of years has been nothing short of an assemblage of conflictions. We are regarded as hypersexualized yet undesirable, simplistic but routinely analyzed, and renowned while being innately feared. While many look to pop culture to clarify, exacerbate, or extinguish these tired tropes, we are led to believe that we somehow bear the burden of disproving both historical and generational stereotypes.
However, black women are not responsible for the ignorant assumptions surrounding how we talk, what we wear, how we dance, who we date, and ultimately who we are. There was a time in this country when our bodies were sold, then literally caged and put on display. It wasn’t that long ago that there were laws concocted to remind black people of the disdain America had for us. The criticism that black women in the music industry face today is also a reminder of this contempt, although it is guised as harmless commentary instead of as thinly veiled racism.
The burden is not on Rihanna or Beyonce or Nicki or Amber to prove they can embody various principles and ideologies—it is on society to cultivate and continually harbor safe spaces for their complexities to exist in the first place.
The burden is not on Rihanna or Beyonce or Nicki or Amber to prove they can embody various principles and ideologies—it is on society to cultivate and continually harbor safe spaces for their complexities to exist in the first place.
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