Scarlet is marked as lustful, indicative of adultery, if we were to listen to Hawthorne.
JudeoChristian hegemony marks it as corporeal, sinful, lustful, degraded.
I reject that.
Red is the color of blood, pumping in our veins. It is the hue of love at first bloom, of hot pink cheeks, sweaty palms, lips swollen and chapped after hours of kissing.
It is the color of fresh neck contusions.
Blush, indeed, the portmanteau of blood + rush, the flushing of one’s cheeks after thinking of one’s lover.
It is the hue of my wedding dress, seven steps circled around a fire.
Those vows changed everything.
It is sindoor in my Thakurma’s hair part, on her beautiful forehad, on ma and jethi and kaki’s too, signifying their shaadi bonds.
It is my red wedding bangle, nestled between two reed ones.
It is the deep burnt hue of my shaadi ki mehndi, lacy adornments on my hands and feet.
They held secrets, you see, his name was on both hands.
It is the sign of life, flowing out of my body, shedding possibility of life, with the lunar cycle.
It is the color of menses, sad cephalopodesque clumps flushed away.
It is our eyes, sore and tired after comprehending rejection.
(I should have gotten that tenure track job. I wish we had been pregnant. I lost both.)
It is the color of my Kali Ma’s tongue, signifying victory in battle, ruby droplets on the edge of her trishule.
Jai Mata Di.
It is the deep ruby hue of the root chakra. Muladhara signifies safety, grounding, rootedness, survival.
And inflammation that needs healing.
It is the lucky hue of wedding dresses, globally.
These predate Victoria’s bossy, boring, basic British Becky taste.
Dirty, colonizing beast. Who was “unsivilized” again? At least we bathe, bitch. Lotas and bidets and amla and shikakai and nariyal 4ever.
Red lights signify “halt” or danger ahead. Coupled with blue and white, they signify nationalism and bacon.
FTP.
Reclaim the laal, crimson, rojo, maroon, scarlet, ruby, sanguine.
For the gore gwei lo gueras pakehas it means ruskies or gorbachev or yellow peril.
For us it signifies revolucion.
It is Fenty Stunna lip paint.
#Rihanna #BBHMM
It is M.A.C.’s Ruby Woo and Russian Red and Viva Glam IV and Urban Decay’s shame.
It is life, love, heat, breath.
Fright Night
Do you like being scared by books, films, and surprises? Describe the sensation of being scared, and why you love it — or don’t.
Fear is profitable. Fear operates on the assumption of power inequity. For some, fear is thrilling. To most, fear is undesirable. To walk into a movie theater, to watch a film about fear, without fear of being murdered, is a privilege. To make films or write about fictional narratives centering fear is a privilege. Since we have an orange, egomaniacal narcissist as our current POTUS, I am in a constant state of fear.
Fear is profitable. Fear operates on the assumption of power inequity.
We celebrate Stephen King’s oeuvre of fear. We revel in the discourses of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. We hunger for the phantastic Dementors, revolted by Voldemort but also fascinated by the Death Eaters. Jordan Peele recently penned and debuted the brilliant Get Out, an astute commentary on the cultural hegemony of whiteness, of the traumas of colonization and infections that whiteness and conspicuous consumption and the quite literal “eating the Other” has on marginalized communities.
I hate being scared by real life, actual, worldly surprises. I know some people revel in the sensations of fear and relish spine tingling and gut wrenching, but I am not one of them. When I get scared, I go into shock. I retch. I shit enormous amounts of fecal matter, several healthy, runny bowls worth. I dry heave. And worst of all, I get cold. My body shuts down. No matter the time of day or temperature, I need to crawl into bed, covered by multiple blankets. Ideally, my husband is nearby to tuck me in. Ideally, my cats are nearby, burrowing under the duvets with me, purring on me for comfort. They know. Animals always know.
My latest brush with gut-wrenching fear took place on October 7, 2017. I received an email that was time stamped 7:55 AM, PST. It was supposedly from one Cheryl Merryfield. The email was poorly written. Cheryl claimed to be formerly known as Brian, formerly a cishet white dude bro working at a construction company. Cheryl supposedly had a cousin named Heidi who took a gender studies course at an unnamed University. Cheryl was writing to thank me for teaching about toxic masculinity and white male privilege, as they had seen the light and were changing from Brian to Cheryl and wearing wigs, fake eyelashes, taking hormones, and attending protests. Cheryl wanted to know my thoughts on all of this. The tone walked the fine line between mockery and contempt.
A less astute person or intellectual might read it as complimentary, an invitation to self-congratulate. Alarm bells rang for me, though. There was nothing specific about the email or my courses, which do address white privilege, toxic masculinity, and gender politics. I surmised, correctly as it turned out, that this kind of email is usually part of a wider phishing or scam net. I suspected it was the kind of drivel produced by the scum-sucking rodents at 4chan and Reddit, perpetuated by the far right, the alt-right, Men’s Rights’ Activists, and Pick Up Artists. My husband, a straight cishet white computer scientist, looked at the headers and told me the message was from a Russian (!!!) server.
I do not have the privilege of safety. I did what any vulnerable nontenured person would have done… I made sure to tell them I was scared for my safety and well-being.
My work email address may have been scraped at random from the web. I do not speak to newspapers about my political opinions; I am not safe. I do not have the privilege of safety. I did what any vulnerable nontenured person would have done: I sent it to my department chair. She then sent it up the chain. I could not wait for their responses. I sent the message to two deans, the associate VP of academic affairs, and re CC’d my chair. I made sure to tell them I was scared for my safety and well-being.
One must be careful when sending out emails like this, if one occupies a precarious position in the academic industrial complex’s unsteady food chain. One needs to tone police oneself. Be humble but deferential. Be firm but polite. And always, always make oneself invaluable to the space. I have been a lowly adjunct for over half a decade, my teaching labor overlapping with finishing my dissertation. My one attempt at a tenure-track position was self-sabotaged by my lack of a curated publishing archive. How can one publish when one is teaching ten classes a year simply to survive? Publish or perish, indeed. For a die-hard tenure advocate, I’ve died, lost in the mise en abyme of the academic industrial complex.
One needs to tone police oneself. Be humble but deferential. Be firm but polite. And always, always make oneself invaluable to the space.
For the teaching purist, I have thrived, earning countless devotees who enroll in everything I teach, hundreds of accolades and glowing reviews, and winning every campus grant I’ve applied for with the hopes of increasing my department’s visibility. But I digress. After I sent the scary email up the chain, I got notification of a Facebook login attempt. I was on the phone with my husband while this happened. The fear elicited nasty physical reactions. The dry heaving, chills, rumbling bowels, liquid excrement. My poor bidet got a lot of action that day.
My dear husband stayed on the phone with me while I screenshot the login attempt, locked down social media accounts, changed passwords, set up two-step authentications, sent another panicked message up the food chain. He stayed on the phone with me while I crawled into bed and shut down. He stayed on the phone while I dozed in and out of consciousness. He booked a ticket from Maryland to California, coming in the next day. He has always claimed to find my snoring to be soothing, as he reads snoring as a sign of deep and full sleep. The last time I was in shock with him was when I destroyed my ankle. This was long before we were engaged or married. He took care of me for three days. (Take note: marry the person who loves it when you snore, who tucks you in bed when you are in shock, who helps you bathe and dress when you can’t walk, who cleans up your vomit, who takes on care work without comment.)
Campus police and IT determined the email was “not a threat” and came from a Russian email server, similar to Google. They advised us to not reply. I thought, no shit. There would never be any reason for me to respond to any sort of email like that. My fears were disturbingly assuaged when I was told that a colleague received the very same email. I phoned her when I found out. It was comforting to know we were not alone, but we were still uneasy. When news of the email spread to others in our department, one person replied that they get goading, inflammatory messages like that all the time, inviting response. That person keeps them in a file.
I read their response to the incident as contemptuous. I don’t know if they were minimizing my fear. It doesn’t matter anyway. The net result has been shutting down for several days. It is now October 10. I have not slept well since the incidents. I don’t know how I managed to lecture on Monday morning; the topic was Elaine Brown’s leadership in the Black Panther Party and narratives on internalized misogyny and patriarchy within social justice spaces. We were connecting Brown’s depictions of violence to what transpired with Angela Davis and the prison industrial complex, the American Indian Movement and the words of Wilma Mankiller, the life and death of Annie Mae Acquash, and the work of Asian American students at UCLA.
Patriarchy is rooted in violence. Internalized misogyny within communities of color is the worst of all.
Patriarchy is rooted in violence. Internalized misogyny within communities of color is the worst of all. It is a death drive. I am well-aware of the times we live in. Since 9/11, those of us who live in the intersections of Islamophobia, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, we have to walk every day under surveillance. We are policed in a myriad of ways. We have to be mindful of everything we say. We do not have the luxury of boredom, relaxation, or free self-expression. If you are a woman of color, the surveillance is amplified time and time again. If you are an academic, it is unbearable. The temptation of celebrity feminism, the thirst for public recognition as the means to success within a capitalist narrative, is destructive. I do not tweet publicly. My Twitter account has always been private. I use it to practice brevity.
I do not feel safe being a public figure. My Instagram is a curated archive of food photos, sunsets, cat and dog pictures, and celebrations of friends’ joy. Mine is remarkably devoid of selfies, because I fear being in front of cameras, even my own. Privately, I take selfies to remind myself that I am not a monster, even though white beauty standards would have me believe otherwise.
Me? Let me be. Let me write. Let me do my work. Let me teach my classes. Let me be with my family and friends.
It is the fear of the external gaze that I loathe most. Michel Foucault wrote of “le regard,” the penetrative lingering ocular moment of visuality, reserved for medical purposes and scientific, surveillance performed by guards and captains, nurses and jailers. bell hooks wrote of the “oppositional gaze” taken up by Black women spectators claiming their agency, those consumers of public and visual culture whose ancestors were denied the right to look back at their masters, in the context of the colonial slave plantation, of hegemonic whitewashed popular culture. Some get off on being watched, the narrative or fetish of voyeurism and exhibitionism that are so valued in what we deem as raunch culture.
Me? Let me be. Let me write. Let me do my work. Let me teach my classes. Let me be with my family and friends. Let me be free from unimportant and superficial interactions. Let me process my rage and pain and let me speak to it through the classroom. Let me survive in my cocoon of literacy and sleep and love.
Le Mepris (on contempt)
I find myself riddled with contempt.
I feel it seeping into my bones, soaking into all of my cells, and then leaking out into the world, through the snarky things I say or think or feel.
I am deeply contemptuous of things I deem inferior, or not worthy of my time. I am deeply contemptuous of white people who do not understand colonization.
I wonder, how could they, meaning the eurotrash mayonnaise populace of the globe, deem me and my ilk, as less than, simply because of our gorgeous black and brown skin?
I have contempt for the snaggletoothed fools who benefit from those legacies. I look at their pasty, dough-colored bloated bags of skin and bones and think, their mouths look like 17th century graveyards.
I feel contempt for X, a city rife with murder and violence, 3000 miles away from our beautiful Los Angeles, that has taken my beloved husband away from our bed and home and cats for 24 months.
I feel my lips curled in sneers around my own teeth, perfected after years of Amreeky orthodontia, and my body is flooded with heat and blood and rage.
Feeling contempt rush in is not always bad.
The worst is coming across people who attempt to tap into empathy, who want so desperately to help, who perform friendship or advocacy or allyship, but then who actually feel nothing, and then who feel guilt.
Your guilt is not my problem.
I am contemptuous of hyper-religious zealots, so encapsulated by their own myopia that they choose not to acknowledge the sheer, utter disbelief on my face when they tell me of their volontourism, of their journeys to the global South, to “sivilize” the “savages.”
I am contemptuous of entitled dude bro nontraditional undergrads who equate chattel slavery with indentured servitude. Not. The. Same. Thing. Bro.
Your history is taught as a requirement. Mine is taught as an elective. That is the height of hegemonic privilege.
Contempt is heady and addictive.
It is expressed asymmetrically, through the lifting of an eyebrow or the curl of a lip into a sneer. It makes my hands sweaty and my heart beat fast.
I have to reserve the full expression of my contempt for only one person, my best friend, who understands and does not judge, or if she does she doesn’t express it.
I cannot fully express my contempt to my husband, for he will be upset.
He, who is sweet and calm and so kind and loving, does not find value in expressing contempt.
But he is the beneficiary of white male science professor privilege.
He can be contemptuous and be rewarded.
I have to ask, why are we taught to disregard contempt? Why is the expression of it only reserved for those who hold hegemonic power?
In a capitalist system, the distribution of wealth is not equitable.
The owners of means of production are not given fair shares. The profits are always maximized.
I have earned the right to be contemptuous.
I have earned the right to bristle at injustice.
Generations of epigenetic trauma remain encoded inside me.
The expression of contempt must be cautious.
It must be kept under wraps, away from the prying eyes of panopticon guards.
Bentham and Foucault’s predictive models extend into the world of social media.
I fear the wrath and consequences of fully expressed contempt.
I fear the internalization of it, as it affects my health and well-being.
I am contemptuous of those who do not or cannot feel.
We are encouraged to not pay attention to our bodies, to heartbeats or sweat beads, or tears.
ANGER showcases essays and poetry featuring well-aimed anger from femme writers, writers of color, LGBTQIA+ writers, First Nations writers, and disabled writers.
I am a Black woman from a mixed-heritage background who has spent most of my life within an educational system, from nursery school to my current role as a postdoctoral researcher in the field of Respiratory Immunology.
My education and career have taken place across three countries and two continents. During this time, I have evolved into a critical thinker, independent researcher, teacher, peer mentor, and collaborator. I have had the privilege of seeing many students who were nervous first-years, when I was their laboratory demonstrator, themselves grow into independent researchers who now have postgraduate degrees. It has been a blessing to be able to present my work in conferences, peer-reviewed articles, essays, research group meetings, and informally. Over the past few months it has also been startling to discover a deep interest in remaining in academia, provided I can secure the necessary funding to carry out research that doubles up as a passion project. My years in the academy have equipped me with knowledge and skills that are transferrable in many sectors. From my perspective the future looks bright, and my dedication is paying off.
This testimony of mine is the cherry-picked truth. It is the stripped-back version of the journey that has made me the academic I am today: fully aware of my privileges, grateful for my experiences, unwilling to close my eyes to the problems within academia, and unapologetic about using routes of the least palatability to tackle these problems.
[I am] unapologetic about using routes of the least palatability to tackle these problems.
Most academics of colour I have encountered have similar stories to mine. However, depending on the generation they are part of and other factors, their outspokenness differs. Certain themes among all our experiences are overlapping and recurrent regardless of the country we currently work in, academic system, and age.
Many of us have first-hand experiences of misogynoir (racialised sexism), racism (from the subtle to the outright), tone policing, elitism, and classism—all within academia, a global body that is meant to further the development of mankind. Indeed, many of these encounters I and others have had, whether online or in person, have been with people who have also had the privilege of education and the added responsibility from exposure to know and do better. Students, researchers, and professors! The young and the old.
During my undergraduate career, trying to stay functional while suffering silently for years with debilitating anxiety meant that I was constantly shying away from any extra emotional work. Unfortunately, this also meant that issues of justice and equity were things that I did not feel bold enough to speak about all the time. Being within a system designed to make People of Colour feel like second-class citizens in itself is already hard.
I was constantly shying away from any extra emotional work. Unfortunately, this also meant that issues of justice and equity were things that I did not feel bold enough to speak about all the time.
It took me years of honest self-reflection to admit my own complicity, then throw off the shroud of palatability I had worn for years. I own my past mistakes and can readily admit that well-being has been a major confounding factor in my ability to challenge injustice. It is now my commitment to fully inhabit the responsibility of promoting equity within any academic system I find myself in.
However, over the years, there has also been an anger that I live with. Some of it is directed at my past self, but most of it is directed at the system that seeks to uphold injustice or at the very least wilfully ignore it.
Ijeoma Oluo recently asked a pertinent question: “What are we going to do with our rage?” I have asked myself this same question time and again over the years, with many different words, particularly: “How do I stop being afraid of my anger and harness that powerful energy and drive into something useful?” Immediately, I always remember Joyce Meyer’s advice for when your fears try to stop you from doing anything: just “Do it afraid!” There will never be a perfect time or a perfect plan or implementation strategy. So once I was able to identify what I wanted to achieve, I made an action plan that wasn’t too stringent but if done properly could hopefully have a positive impact within my academic community—particularly on Black people and People of Colour, and other women who don’t fall into these identification groups.
Ijeoma Oluo recently asked a pertinent question: “What are we going to do with our rage?” I have asked myself this same question time and again over the years.
There are different levels in academia which I aim for.
The first is my immediate surroundings: from everyday conversations about equality, equity, diversity, and inclusion, to being open and honest about my mental illness, appropriately signposting colleagues who come to me with a range of confidential issues (and being vocal about being accessible as a point of help), planning and organising workshops that seek to explain the benefit of inclusion in academia, and being respectful and inclusive to all levels of staff I work with.
Students I work with: reminding students that as paying customers in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), they have the right to just treatment, vocalising that they deserve my respect as much as I deserve theirs, encouraging them to question the system and question me—not just take my word as the final say—telling them there is absolutely nothing wrong with being an “average” student—because society wrongfully conflates intelligence with competence—and still encouraging them to do their best and reach out for help when needed. In spaces with Black students discussing issues that affect them specifically, I am always open about my experiences and remind them they have every right to an equal say in academia.
Black colleagues: a major part of the remit of my activism in academia involves amplifying voices and standing beside those who have something to say and need encouragement. This has been a beneficial two-way street, as in the process I have found Black women academics who have supported, encouraged, and rooted for me, as well as given me career opportunities that otherwise I would not have come across on my own.
A major part of the remit of my activism in academia involves amplifying voices and standing beside those who have something to say and need encouragement.
The system itself: I proactively sought out equality fora within my surroundings where I could voice concerns, challenge problems, and, arguably most important, suggest reparative action points that should hopefully contribute to top-to-bottom change. I cannot overemphasize the need for more marginalised voices and allies/accomplices to be proactively recruited onto HEI action groups. Even the most well-intentioned systems that lack equal or proportional representation will have certain issues slip through the cracks.
The anger I have still simmers under the surface, and for the time being I am content with this. As long as I have life, I will continue to use my anger as fuel to call out injustices and call on those who are perfectly positioned to dismantle these systemic inequities. Since it is my intention to remain in academia for a while, this is where I will continue my quest.
ANGER showcases essays and poetry featuring well-aimed anger from femme writers, writers of color, LGBTQIA+ writers, First Nations writers, and disabled writers.
“We are constantly being told not to be angry. As a black woman especially, I hear it from all corners. To be angry is to give in to stereotypes of the shrill feminist, the mad black woman. To be angry is to trade intellect for emotion. To be angry is to be irrational and violent. To be angry is to be like them. To be angry is to lose. But none of that is true. I am angry because I love. I am angry because what I love is being harmed. I know why my people matter, why the environment matters, why human rights matter, why justice matters. And I know that this all deserves love. I know that it deserves protection. And I know who is fighting to deny it what it deserves. I know that when that which we love is being harmed — to not be angry would be unconscionable. […]
What if we took that anger beyond the internet? What if we took it into the streets more than once every two years? Into our boycotts? Into our strikes? Into the voting booth? What if we took that anger to our city council meetings? What if we took it to their campaign events and press conferences? What if we took it to our school boards and our workplaces? What if we took all this anger born of righteous love and aimed it?”
Essay pitches will be reviewed and responded to within 24 hours by Brain Mill Press staff.
This call is for femme writers, writers of color, LGBTQIA+ writers, First Nations writers, and disabled writers.
If your pitch is selected, you will be given a mutually-agreed period of time to write your essay. You will receive editorial feedback on your submitted piece, a negotiable contract granting Brain Mill Press the limited right to reproduce your piece on Voices, and payment at industry-standard rates upon publication. You will retain all other rights to your work.
Contact Brain Mill Press at inquiries@brainmillpress.com with questions.
Paula Cisewski’s poetry book, The Threatened Everything (Burnside Review Books), is on the smallish size, trim-size-wise.
It fits easily in my small hands and seems to be littered with hearts—although upon closer inspection those hearts are less than sweet. None of that prepares me for the first poem, “The Apocalypse Award Goes To.” Variously, each section of the poem offers, then withdraws the award to:
First, “my newly betrothed and me . . . It was already the apocalypse, and we already felt appropriately minute.”
Next, the award is given to “most grown people,” who are described as “kaleidoscopically unsafe.” Then, the “animal kingdom,” then “doctors who specialize in treating Prolonged Apocalypse Stress Disorder,” so that finally the poem includes everybody. But these are just the bones of the poem; it’s shot through (literally, in one case) with interruptions. This is a poem for this moment, I think—which, given the time invested in writing a poem, revising, getting it into some editor’s hand, pre-production, and publication of a book, shows some strange sort of prescience on the part of the poet. That I should find it in my hands right when I needed it. Because the poet stopped me to say, “For statistically what percent of the parents pushing strollers on this sunny boardwalk have guns tucked away in holsters? For bullets rip through every modern poem, even the ones where shot or gun is not stated explicitly.”
As I was digesting that, thinking of a friend who I recently learned is nearly always packing, who I’ve begun to hug more carefully, the poem clobbered me with, “Another patient in this waiting room switched on the news and I immediately began leaking. Oh, well. It won’t be the first time a poet has leaked through her own poem.” The poem talks about the practice alarm for the apocalypse. It asks, parenthetically, “What if we need the alarm while the practice alarm’s going off?” and later, “(Those sirens are just on TV, aren’t they?)” These are the questions of worriers and I’ve embraced my suppressed worrier-self of late. This poem is the frontispiece for the entire collection—mixing technology and pop-culture references, sly jokes, relatable fears, and the constant sense of unease and disbelief that has come to characterize the current political and cultural moment for many of us. As the poem says of the apocalypse, “It’s a slow burn. Some of us have mothered whole people through it, others have died of old age in it.”
Cisewski’s book thereafter is divided into three sections: Field Guide to Austerity and Surroundings; The Wolf/Cave Problem; The Laughing Club. In the second section, twins are everywhere. There is a “good one” and a “bad one” and they are the same person, finally. The speaker of the poem “The Good One” is like that soft-sewn children’s toy that has the face of Little Red, and the Wolf, and if you flip it over, also the Grandmother, all in one. After one kills the other waiting for the “old woman” to arrive, she realizes fingerprints differ even on identical twins, so she undertakes to sever hands and sew them on, becoming all one person in one body: “whether or not I had ever been / the good one no longer mattered.” Other imagery from that tale recurs in other poems in this section—the kitchen shears, the animal inside the girl-speaker (like an echo of Carter’s retelling of the tale). All this reminds me of Carol Clover writing of slasher movies, “What makes horror ‘crucial enough to pass along’ is, for critics since Freud, what has made ghost stories and fairy tales crucial enough to pass along: its engagement of repressed fears and desires and its reenactment of the residual conflict surrounding those feelings.”
The final section of The Threatened Everything ends with laughter, a cathartic kind of laughter. It is not joyous, but the kind of laughter that occurs after too much stress, too much pain, when the body and soul is wrung out and doesn’t know what else to do. In the poem “Suddenly Laughter” it’s described as an “intersection / at terror and comfort.” Laughter is a “familiar wrecking ball” that “pummels / your heart’s hollow / business center.” The poem ends with the word “relief,” but we don’t feel any relief. Rather, we’ve decided to laugh, because we don’t know what else to do anymore.
Similarly, in the poem “Humans, Dogs, Apes and Rats” we have a description of rats and the insistence that they laugh. That they have laughed “since before / humans even resembled // ourselves.” Before our culture, or technology, before we gathered to exchange ideas, “or irony, way / before irony.” And then, for those of us uncomfortable with rats, there is the description: “a wriggling pink pile / of bald rodent babies, // the size of several / opposable thumbs.” This is laughter that rings true and unsettles, as many poems in this section ring true and unsettle. Like the poem that includes Obama’s joke about Orange not being the new Black, but of course that’s exactly what happened, and it’s not so funny after all.
But I can’t end on that note, although this was a poetry collection that seemed to meet me where I was, deliver gut-punches I wanted to receive, right in my pale fish-belly. I have to tell you about my favorite poem. In the first section is the amazing “Revolution Prairie” which takes up the imagery of weeds and root systems and limbs and desire.
Consider the right of way of weeds,the root system’s defiant grip,
that they’re only called weeds becausewe didn’t buy them with money
or decide where to plant them.A flowering without
a boss, like our lovepopping up everywhere
(I wish I could read the whole poem aloud to you . . .) Suffice it to say, the weeds burst forth; the poem concedes a mower could cut it all down—the weeds, us, the words that are weeds that burst out of us like sentences of things that need to be said, popping up everywhere. But the poem ends with a call, a promise, and a declarative: “Burst forth with me in this narrow vista / of the threatened everything.”
Portaging celebrates new writing from the Midwest with a particular focus on experimental and hybrid work from small presses.
C. Kubasta writes poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms. She lives, writes, & teaches in Wisconsin. Her most recent books include the poetry collection Of Covenants (Whitepoint Press) and the short story collection Abjectification (Apprentice House). Find her at ckubasta.com and follow her @CKubastathePoet.
When I realized I was a lesbian in the summer of 2005, I seriously thought I was one of the only ones in the wide world.
I had never read a book about a lesbian. I had never seen a movie about a lesbian relationship. I had never visited a lesbian bar, or attended a lesbian concert, or gathered in a house with a group of lesbians. I did listen to the Indigo Girls, but they were famous, and the Swamp Ophelia album only reduced me to more weeping. I was twenty-eight, married to a man, and in love with my best friend. No one anywhere had ever had my experience.
I had never read a book about a lesbian. I had never seen a movie about a lesbian relationship. I had never visited a lesbian bar, or attended a lesbian concert, or gathered in a house with a group of lesbians.
The internet told me something different. On Netflix, I found movies, which were delivered to my house in their anonymous red and white sleeves: When Night is Falling (Canada, 1995); Fire (Canada/India, 1997); Aimee and Jaguar (Germany, 2000); Tipping the Velvet (UK, 2002). On Amazon, I searched for “lesbian books,” and found Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. Somewhere out there, there were other women who loved women. Their stories, often anguished, but almost always fiercely passionate and true, became my community.
Tell me, I pleaded with these other lesbians, who I am. Tell me what to do.
In November of that year, I flew to New York to stay with a college friend who lived boldly in a civil union with her partner. They took me to The Oscar Wilde Bookshop (now closed, sadly) and to Bluestockings, and I loaded my arms with more stories, as if I could, with reading, ward off my fear and loneliness. Rebecca Brown, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Joan Nestle, Lillian Faderman, Elana Dykewomon. Tell me, I pleaded with these other lesbians, who I am. Tell me what to do.
Meanwhile, I wrote mostly about parenting and adoption, about Alaska (where I lived at the time), about climbing mountains. My own story as a lesbian was fragile, in the way a tinder-dry forest is fragile. I feared that if I wrote about my love for Lia, it would flame to ash. And of course, it did, far more violently than I ever imagined. That’s the story Grief Map tells, but Grief Map also tells the story of the lesbian who emerged from that ash, the living woman, writing now about allof her experience because she had no other choice.
But after Lia died in 2011, I once again felt like I was the only one. I crouched in my grief and wondered what it meant to be a woman who loves women all alone. And again, the community spoke to me: the movies and the books reminded me that I was not the only one to have lost, that I could survive. I wrapped myself in those stories. I breathed there. I kept writing.
And yet I still felt as much awed distance from the lesbian community as I did from the Indigo Girls. I was just an isolated lesbian writer in Colorado. When my wife Meredith and I first met in 2014, I was keeping a sad blog called “The Boulder Lesbian,” as if I was the only one. It still felt that way.
I discovered the Golden Crown Literary Society by chance one early morning, when I was taking a break from a scene I was trying to construct in a short story. I wanted connection. Where were the other lesbian writers in the world? I googled “lesbian writers” and Google offered me “lesbian writers conference.” I clicked—and GCLS was the top post. I found myself on a website offering “the premiere lesbian literary event” each year, and an ongoing mission of dedication to “the promotion and recognition of lesbian literature.” I told Brain Mill Press, Grief Map’s publisher, about it, and they submitted Grief Map for a Goldie Award in the non-fiction category. But I didn’t feel part of it. It was another famous place where lesbians gathered, somewhere else.
I wanted connection. Where were the other lesbian writers in the world? I googled “lesbian writers” and Google offered me “lesbian writers conference.”
Then I found myself at the GCLS Conference this July, listening to Lucy Jane Bledsoe and Rachel Gold and Elana Dykewomon and Dorothy Allison read from their work. I told myself, I am part of this community. And I was! For three days, I attended master classes and presentations and panels, readings and speakers in an all-lesbian space. I exchanged my card with other lesbian writers and readers. I discussed story ideas that revolve around lesbian lives. One woman told me she thinks of this annual conference as a sort of lesbian summer camp, and it did have that otherworldly shimmer. With its diversity of age and race and background and expression, the conference had the open-hearted kindness I’ve always imagined those circles of lesbians had in the 1970s communes. How wonderful, to move among these other lesbians in this lovely safe space, a literal haven from the smoke and crowds and din of Vegas.
Each morning, I walked through the Bally’s casino and breathed in relief to reach the conference rooms, where we lesbians retreated from the world awhile. Each evening, when Meredith returned to our room from her poker tournaments, I told her the stories I had heard people read during the day: a lesbian pirate, a lesbian doctor in a helicopter, a lesbian who disguised herself as a man in the 1890s, a lesbian who discovered her grandmother’s secret love had been a woman. I told her that Elana Dykewomon’s poetry made an entire room weep, and that Dorothy Allison was just as funny and wise in person as she was on the page. I told her that I had never imagined the power of an all-lesbian space, the way I literally felt all of us were embraced and held up there. Meredith smiled at me and kissed me tenderly and, because Vegas is like this, just outside our sixty-sixth floor window, the Eiffel Tower throbbed purple and blue with a party and the giant digital eyes on the Cosmopolitan reflected in the water in front of the Bellagio. We were in our own lesbian romance story.
At the GCLS Goldie awards ceremony on July seventh, I stood at the podium with Grief Map’s award for non-fiction in my hands, and I said to the gathered community of three-hundred and fifty lesbians, “Thirteen years ago, when I realized I was a lesbian, I thought I was the only one,” and a wave of loving, understanding laughter rolled toward me. I had never been alone at all. Later, when Meredith and I danced in each other’s arms on a dance floor full of only other lesbians, some in suits, some in dresses, some in wonderful ambiguous amalgamations of the two, I kissed my wife and I knew we moved, now, in the community, part of it all.
I stood at the podium with Grief Map’s award for non-fiction in my hands, and I said to the gathered community of three-hundred and fifty lesbians, “Thirteen years ago, when I realized I was a lesbian, I thought I was the only one,” and a wave of loving, understanding laughter rolled toward me. I had never been alone at all.
What’s next? At first, when I came home to Denver, the same slump threatened me that used to threaten me after summer camp when I was a kid, as if the world could never be as supportive and vibrant and connected as camp was. It really can’t. But the stories I tell in the next year can reach toward that energy. My new protagonist Sam can long for it. And then next summer, I can return to that all-lesbian space (in Pittsburgh in 2019) for a few days. I’m excited already.
The blue light from my computer screen illuminates my face as I scroll through my friends’ Facebook posts. This friend has just traveled to Hawaii with her husband. That friend has just hand-made clothes for her children. That friend has completed a Tough Mudder with his boyfriend. I click the thumbs-up icon, or I leave little encouraging comments. An hour passes. Two.
Oh, Facebook.
I joined Facebook late, considering that the company began in 2004. In 2007, the summer I decided to adopt my daughter Mitike, I created an account on the blue and white website people were talking about, and shared a photo of me, my mom, and my sister Katie tubing on the Upper Iowa River in Decorah. We are all grinning in the photo. Five people liked it, then ten. People with whom I had lost touch began to request me as their friends. At the time, I lived far away from all of them — all the way in Alaska — and my new cellphone (I was late to that trend, too) allowed me only a limited number of monthly minutes. Facebook was a free way to stay in touch.
A year later, when Mitike came home from Ethiopia, Facebook was a way I could stay sane, a way I could show everyone the sweet and astonishing little person I had promised to raise. I shared videos and photographs, and more people liked them, and more people requested friendships. I connected with adoptive parents’ groups and with Ethiopian culture groups. Every day at nap time, I checked my Facebook account — and I felt a little more connected in a life that, while beautiful, contained mostly cheese sticks and raisins and discussions about poop.
Facebook was a way I could stay sane, a way I could show everyone the sweet and astonishing little person I had promised to raise.
In 2011, when Ali died, Facebook became a place I haunted in my grief. I studied our old posted photographs for clues, and I left cryptic messages on a Facebook page that had outlived its face. The blue website no longer connected me, but encouraged my drifting, alone. For hours, I zoomed in on photographs to examine a smile, a look in the eyes, the clues I had missed. I ignored all my friends’ happy updates, and I dwelled in the darker places.
And then, still later, there were the years — the recent ones — when Facebook functioned as a joyful declaration: I survived! I have found love again! Hey, everyone, this is Meredith! We’re married! We’re happy! I posted photos and videos, links and updates. Mostly, I checked and checked Facebook. What had people said about my photo? Had people commented on my column? Had others liked my link? Facebook was part virtual scrapbook, part live feed into my life. I engaged with friends’ posts; I found and shared exciting events; I shared pictures of the dozen pink pussy hats I had crocheted; I vented my anger about the Trump administration. Morning after morning, I clicked on the little white “f” in the blue square on my phone, and it was like walking into a crowded room — look at this photo of my quinoa plants, have you seen what Trump’s done now?, can you believe how much my daughter’s grown?, there’s a rally downtown next Saturday and I plan to go.
Morning after morning, I clicked on the little white “f” in the blue square on my phone, and it was like walking into a crowded room — look at this photo of my quinoa plants, have you seen what Trump’s done now?
Oh, Facebook.
This past June, when my family and I traveled west to stay in a rented cabin on the Oregon coast for a week, I decided, on a whim, to take a sabbatical from all technology. For seven days, I did not access the internet in any way; I used my phone only as a camera, on airplane mode. And…I began to take photographs so I could remember the moment, not so I could share it with five hundred strangers. At night, I reflected purely on the conversations I had had with Mitike and Meredith, not on the chatter of that crowded blue room. My mind was clearer, like a desk I had sorted.
For the few months after that, I returned to posting and checking and liking, but my brief sobriety had taught me something essential: I didn’t need Facebook. It distracted me from living my real life. Then the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened, and former Facebook creators and executives began to admit that the site is deliberately designed to addict us to more clicking and to direct certain companies’ ads at us, and, like Montag (Fahrenheit 451 is frighteningly apt here), I shouted, “No more!”
I began to take photographs so I could remember the moment, not so I could share it with five hundred strangers.
I deleted the app. It took seconds. I stopped logging on to Facebook every morning as I ate breakfast. I stopped visiting the page when I needed a break from my writing. I stopped scrolling through the 515 “friends”’ posts at stoplights on my way home in the afternoons. I just stopped, cold turkey.
And — I missed it not at all. For the months of September and October, as I moved through my life without Facebook, I did not once wonder what all the posters were posting, or what the likers were liking. When a November New York Review of Books article revealed some of the darker, far more serious reasons we should all free ourselves from social media like Facebook, I happily breathed my free air.
Then, in mid-November, I needed a few photos so I could craft our Christmas card. Like many people, I have not printed photos to store in shoe boxes or leather albums for years; instead, I have stored them on Facebook. Until I spend hours one day downloading all those photos (and Mitike’s baby and toddler videos) and burning the files to a CD, I cannot actually delete my Facebook account. That day, when I logged on to grab the photos I needed, the 6 messages, 68 new notifications, and 2 friend requests nearly seduced me to start scrolling.
But I held to my resolve. Facebook does not improve my life. It does not connect me more deeply to anyone. It does not inform me better than my daily reading of The Guardian and The New Yorker. It may announce events, but mostly, it pulls me away from real engagement in my community. Again, I say: no more.
I held to my resolve. Facebook does not improve my life. It does not connect me more deeply to anyone.
I have been accused at several junctures of my life of Luddism, mostly because I resist texting everyone constantly, because I watch little TV, and because I have seriously restricted Mitike’s screen time (at age eleven, she still only gets three hours a week; we bought her a flip-phone for emergencies when she started middle school, but her iPhone is years away). Now I am deleting Facebook. However, like the original Luddites, I do not oppose the technology itself, but its threat to genuine human skill and human interaction. Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter claim to better connect us, and yet the hallways of the high school where I teach are crowded not with boisterous teenagers but with solitary figures hunched over their iPhone screens, shuffling forward as they scroll through friends’ Snapchats. When I pass these zoned-out kids, I call out “Look up!” to startle them back into their real lives.
Now I am deleting Facebook. However, like the original Luddites, I do not oppose the technology itself, but its threat to genuine human skill and human interaction.
The original Luddite movement began in Nottingham, England, in 1811, when a group of angry factory workers smashed textile machinery in protest against low wages and too little work. In the months that followed, the British government deployed soldiers; the Luddites set fire to factories and broke more machinery; the soldiers fired into mobs; people died. Mostly, the Luddites feared, in the words of the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle in 1829, a world in which “Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.”
In 1996-97, I lived in the Luddites’ Nottingham, in a second-story flat with eleven other American college students. There I knew a far better balance between my humanity and technology. Our flat possessed a single Apple computer that was good only for slow word-processing, a single land-line telephone, and a single television set. Sometimes, I took the bus early to the university so I could send electronic mail to my mom with my new Yahoo account, but that was it. My flatmates and I spent most of our time hanging out, attending plays, frequenting pubs, venturing into the green countryside. I wrote more, sketched a little, took photographs of crumbling walls and pubs on a film camera. When we couldn’t think of an answer or a definition, we engaged in fierce debate, because Google was still an idea in a Stanford dorm room. Except for the parents we called periodically, no one received daily or hourly updates about the pints we drank or the castles we visited.
And yes, I am saying that Luddite life was a better, healthier existence than this one.
And yes, I am saying that Luddite life was a better, healthier existence than this one. This fall, when my Nottingham roommate, Sarah, and I decided to move our friendship back into handwritten letters, I was astonished. Sarah and I have remained close for the entire twenty years since Nottingham, but these letters! In our rushed handwriting — while her kids slept, while Mitike did her homework, with early-morning coffee — we dove more deeply into reflections about our lives than we have in years on email and on Facebook. Paper and pen, actual envelope, the imprint of one page’s writing on the next: I read and re-read her letters like I have never done with her digital communication. True, I caught myself wondering why she hadn’t responded yet just an hour after I tucked my letter to her into the mailbox, but these habits are difficult to smash immediately. True, I considered posting a photo of my steaming cup of coffee next to Sarah’s letter with a caption like “Old friends, and a return to real communication,” but I resisted.
Oh, Facebook. I will not grow mechanical in head and in heart. I will not “take things at second or third hand.” I will see this world with my own eyes, experience it as it is, read more actual books of paper, connect with real friends face-to-face. I will look up.
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