Stacy Parker Le Melle

She Was a Child Bride and She Has Something to Tell Us

2013-06-13T16:20:36-04:00

"I have forgiven all--parents, husband, the government. I am happy. My baby laughs and I laugh. Life laughs, and I am happy." -Massoma from "Forgiveness: A Prose Poem"

I know that forgiveness is crucial to human harmony. I know I'm supposed to forgive my trespassers. But when called upon to actually forgive, I may be good at "letting go" and "moving on" but does anyone's name ever leave that ledger inside my mind, the one that keeps track of those who have hurt me? I'm not sure. Though I know that forgiveness is the path to peace, the operative word--still-- is know. Action is something else altogether.

Then I read a poem by Massoma, a writer in the Afghan Women's Writing Project. I am floored. I have read this poem multiple times, and each time I am struck not just by what she has been through, but her generosity--the depth of which seems hard for me to even comprehend:

"Forgiveness: A Prose Poem"
By Massoma

My head exploded, full of their talking, talking. They talked and talked and sold me. They laughed, happy. I was sad and crying, had no power over this. I played, the child I was. I played, but had to go toward the life that would be mine. My head exploded, full of new talking. They talked and talked. I was not a good bride. I was not a perfect woman, because I was thirteen. My head exploded, full of their talking. They talked and talked and beat me. Filled with pain, I was a mother, but had nothing. I had forgiven, all of my life, move now toward my future, happy. My head exploded. My head exploded. I love my infant, my family. I have forgiven all--parents, husband, the government. I am happy. My baby laughs and I laugh. Life laughs, and I am happy.

Her baby laughs and she laughs. Life laughs, and she is happy. The beauty and hard-won hope in those lines fill me with awe. I am reminded of the greatness that humans have within them--because for me, this is greatness. If Massoma can forgive those who forced her to marry as a child, who treated her as chattel, who beat her when she disobeyed, I call on all of us to look at pains we carry, at the anger we can't let go, and challenge ourselves to seek healing--to call on our reserves of love. And release.

When I first spent time focused on forgiveness, my first question was: what about justice? Is forgiveness supposed to mean that people who commit atrocity and assaults of all kinds are supposed to be off the hook? But the more I read the work of the Fetzer Institute, the organization that spearheads their own "love and forgiveness" campaign, the more I accept the wisdom that forgiveness is not about crime and punishment--it's about the hurt person putting down a terrible burden. If we accept the Buddha's teaching that holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die, forgiveness is about refusing to drink anymore of that foul brew.

Writers in the Afghan Women's Writing Project have spent the last six months digging deeply into their thoughts and beliefs about love and forgiveness. I encourage you to visit the site and read their work. You will be nourished and surprised and angered and floored again and again by their poems and stories. We may rage against a world that allows for child brides, and many of us fight to end this practice. But we can't forsake the opportunity to listen to those whom we try to help, and hear the wisdom that they have to share.

To Be Free Like Malala: The Dreams and Fears of Afghanistan's Teen Girls

2013-05-21T14:06:34-04:00

On Saturday, lawmakers in Afghanistan's parliament refused to vote on the Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. When enforced, the law protects girls from child marriages, wives from abusive husbands and rape victims from being charged with adultery. The law also bans women and girls from being traded among families to settle debts and disputes. These protections have been law since 2009, but only by presidential decree.

Unfortunately, enforcement has been rare. And now, with the parliament vote blocked, women's rights in Afghanistan are as endangered as ever. There is progress, but when a lawmaker claims men's rights are infringed upon when they face punishment for beating their wives, you know that the women and girls of Afghanistan face steep obstacles when it comes to securing equal protection under the law -- and rights within the family.

Yet, read any of the poems or stories on the Afghan Women's Writing Project website, and you will be filled with hope. There, you will encounter women and girls who are strong, who are full of dreams, who see the world clearly around them and have in no way given up or declared change impossible.

Right now, AWWP is showcasing the teen writers in their workshops. I don't think I can overstate how rare it is for Afghan girls in Afghanistan to be encouraged to write about and share their dreams and fears with outsiders. But here they are, and they shine. Shahida, 13, writes about her dreams, loves and pain in her poem "First Daughter":

I dream that I am a professor teaching mathematics/ I want to be a cancer doctor/ I worry about being a good student/ I am Shahida/I feel if my grandmother and grandfather are fine, I will be happy/ I cried when my father was sick/ I try to understand and help my friends when they are sad/ I am Shahida/ I dream that I can touch the sky/ and fly like Harry Potter/ I hope to be a leader in the future/ I am Shahida

Asma, age 13, writes of the jail sentence that the burqa can be:

I am a woman under burqa/I can't breathe/I can't catch my breath/Its color looks blue, but actually it is dark/ It is darker than the darkness of night./ If I take it off people will throw stones on me.

Near the end of the poem, Asma writes of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who was shot just for wanting to learn, for being a role model for other girls who want to learn. She writes:

I just want to go outside of this cage and/breathe as deeply as Malala./ I want to be free like Malala/ I hope all women can be like Malala/ I love freedom and I want to create it/ for myself and for my people.

Alia, 14, writes about the fear she and other students have just by trying to go to school. In "Explosions at School" she writes of a terrifying bomb experience:

I was getting out of English class on a snowy winter day, there was an explosion. All the windows in the building shattered, and students were frightened. Our teachers thought that it was the Taliban coming to kill us.

As they shouted at the guard to close the door. I waited inside near the door for my sister. I saw the explosion; the man who exploded himself changed to pieces.

I saw a piece of his body full of blood, and when I focused on it in the dust, I could tell it was an ear, which shocked me. After that I got out of the center.

I hate waiting for my sister, but it kept me from death. I thank God for saving me in that shocking explosion, but you never know -- what if I had been there?

I encourage you to click through and leave comments and encouragement for the writers. They are doing the hard work of telling their stories and imagining the future that they hope to build. We hope that all of these girls may be "free like Malala" -- free to learn, free to write, free to be known by their names, free to show their uncovered and beautiful faces to the world. We work for a future where rights for half of Afghan society are not stymied, but instead are the embraced and enforced laws of the land.

Detroit Is for Lovers: Talking Home, Family and Basketball Dreams With Poet Matthew Olzmann

2013-05-09T13:28:42-04:00

If you're not writing about love, you're not writing.
-Peter Markus

Yes, poet Matthew Olzmann writes about love in his recent debut Mezzanines, winner of the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize. But he also writes about fear, cruelty, Spock and Mountain Dew. The thing is, when Olzmann captures moments of pain, or levity, in the glass plates of a poem, there is an understanding that is only made possible by an expansiveness of feeling and thought that comes through in the writing -- or at a reading, if you're lucky enough to hear him read.

I've seen Olzmann read a few times in our hometown of Detroit, and he is the only poet I've ever heard earn big laughs -- real that was funny laughter, and not just the generous responses of friends listening to friends or acolytes listening to idols. He is one of a handful of poets I know that can win over those who think they hate poetry. I think he wins over the haters because he is funny. But also because the poems have doors that open and invite you inside. The rooms of the house may be odd, and the stairwells may lead in strange directions, but you, as the reader, remain beckoned. He hasn't invited you in just to leave you. He's got stories to tell, and they're good. He has queries. And he has revelations.

Home is important. I love how Detroit city lights blink in the white space around many of these poems. In this excerpt from "Gas Station on Second Street, Detroit," he writes about the surprising possibilities of a scary downtown moment:

Dusk. A quick stop you think, five bucks of gas/
then onward into the rest of your life./
But as you stand by the pump and look for your card,/
a stranger grabs your shoulder. His other hand hides/
in his jacket. What's in the jacket? He's got a knife/
to cut you like a piece of rib eye. No,/
he's got a nine-millimeter with holes drilled/
in the barrel to muffle the shot. No, his name/
is Kevin and he only wants to give/
you a flyer for The Blood Now Church of Christ./
Kevin emerges from twilight, silent as twilight./
Kevin almost gives you a art attack as he leans/
in to say, Hi. My name is Kevin!/

In "Man Robs Liquor Store, Leaves Resume" Olzmann gives us the unexpected backstory and desire of a man committing a violent crime:

When they review your job application,/
Perhaps they'll consider your resourcefulness,/
Your willingness to think "outside the box,"/
To take risks and be bold./
As they study the security footage,/
They might think, This one/
Is a real people person--notice/
How he earns the clerk's trust/
Before pulling the switchblade from his boot./

In other poems, Olzmann writes about the cold cruelty of power, the strange inbetweenness of being mixed-race. But in Mezzanines, we also get straight-up love poems and they are tender. An added bonus is knowing that Olzmann is married to the extraordinary poet Vievee Francis. One favorite is the ode to his beloved called "Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem." Here is an excerpt:

So here's what I've got, the reasons why our marriage/
might work: because you wear pink but write poems/
about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell/
at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,/
loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,/
gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials/
from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming./

Lately I've been thinking about love, and how one's enthusiasm, one's devotion comes through in one's art, and how important it is to think and write about love, period, in all its manifestations. When Olzmann is present, he is fully present. At least it feels that way when you read his work, or hear him live. Maybe this is why I am so enthusiastic about this collection of poems. I asked Olzmann if he would answer a few questions.

Tell us about home.
This would have been an easier question a year ago. Currently, I'm living among the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. Previously, I lived my entire life in Michigan, including the last 15 years in a town called Hamtramck. My wife and I lived in a flat above a coffee shop. Across the street was a meat-packing plant, there was an axle factory down the block, and a railroad track that ran by our place. We were used to the sights and smells and the noise of the place. Then I came down here on a teaching fellowship to teach for the year at a college, and was surprised by how quickly I adjusted.

Everything is different. The fog that rolls through these trees, enveloping whole houses and farm fields, and crawling down the mountainside is like nothing you see in the city. And this too feels like home. This presents a challenge to my notions of what "home" is. I was born in Detroit. I live in North Carolina. Which is home? Is it a point of origin, or the place where you are at the moment? Since I'm only in Asheville temporarily, part of me likes to think that both of these places are "home." Another part thinks home is the next place I land, a place where I might stay.

Every time I've heard you read, you make the audience laugh. I mean, really laugh. Have you ever been surprised by audience reactions? How important to your process is audience reaction?
I think the "idea" of an audience is important for any writer. What I mean is that it's important to remember as artists, we're not simply trying to tell the audience about an experience, but create an experience in which they are -- to varying degrees -- participants.

Take for example, something as simple as metaphor. If the poet says, "The moon is a coin," that expression is completed by the reader connecting the two parts of the expression, and determining how those parts are alike: the moon and the coin are round, they shine, they have some kind of symbolic value, etc. This happens in the mind of the reader, and if you multiply that private moment by a hundred or thousand similar moments, you have the cumulative experience of a piece of writing. For that piece of writing to be "successful," the writer has have at least some awareness about how readers might respond to each of the pieces placed before them.

Why poetry?
When I was a teenager I started reading poems. I was in high school, and the poems were those I encountered as a student. I didn't understand most of what I read, but every once in a while one would stick with me. I'd see something in the world, and some fragment of a remembered poem would come rushing back. This began happening more and more frequently -- poems would help me understand and negotiate the world around me. They tied the world together in ways I couldn't, asked questions I couldn't ask, and said things I couldn't say.

You are married to the acclaimed poet Vievee Francis. What are the benefits to being married to a poet?
The benefit: at the end of the day, it's good to come home to someone who understands you and what you do. We're definitely each others' fans.

How does your family respond to their appearances in your work? How do they feel about your work as a poet in general?
I am fortunate. My mom and dad are the most supportive people you'll ever meet. It's not easy having a son who decides to be a writer. I think I went to four different colleges over a period of 12 years before I finished an undergraduate degree. I was what might be called a "non-traditional student." So now, having a graduate degree, a book and teaching at a college -- well, I think they're just thrilled (and surprised).

There's a poem in the book that mentions my brother working as a scientist. While writing it, I happened to tell to him what I was working on. He insisted that I show him the finished draft before I sent it out in the world. He claimed that he didn't want to be associated with anything that was "scientifically inaccurate." He was joking (he says). Not that he had to worry. All my poems are scientifically accurate.

Please share five recent books that you found exciting.
Poetry collections: Centaur by Greg Wren, Pier by Janine Oshiro, and Dhaka Dust by Dilruba Ahmed. Fiction: How to Leave Hialeah by Jennine Capó Crucet, and Fires of Our Choosing by Eugene Cross.

If you were not a poet and a teacher, which vocation would you choose?
For the longest time, I wanted to be a basketball player. Specifically, I wanted to be Isiah Thomas. I grew up watching the "Bad Boys" era of Detroit Pistons Basketball, and I knew from an early age that that was what I was meant to do. Unfortunately, I entered high school at the towering height of four feet, nine inches tall. I weighed 89 pounds, wasn't very coordinated or fast, and I couldn't really shoot or dribble the ball. Thus ended my basketball career. I like to think of this early "failure" as the first of many times my dreams would grow beyond my abilities.

If you are in NYC on Thursday, May 9, Matthew Olzmann will be giving his Kundiman Prize Reading at Fordham University. For more information, click here.

Writing About Love in Afghanistan

2013-05-02T16:17:48-04:00

I have hidden a world in my small heart,
A world full of love and feelings,
With hidden desires and wishes,
Wishes that make me write.

From Hila's "Small Heart":

Don't write about love. As a young writer here in America, I heard this message often. Teachers said this. Rilke said this. Teachers quoting Rilke said this. I'm sad to admit that the only directive from Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" I remember is, well, don't write love poems. I don't remember being given a clear explanation as to why this was. But I remember one teacher going so far as to ban the word "soul" in any poetry written in her high school creative writing class. Not because she was anti-soul, but she hated seeing that word abused, knowing how often it was thrown about in attempts to be deep.

I internalized this directive. Later, as a teacher of writing in American high schools, I encouraged odes, but I never proposed love as a writing topic for fear of eliciting the kind of teen angst poems that were rarely impressive, and usually embarrassing in their earnest merge of whine and moan. I stayed away from love prompts not because I didn't want anyone to know love, or express love, but because I didn't want student writers to be so blinded by the topic that they couldn't write something with a chance to make it into the year-end literary magazine.

After reading the love poems and essays of writers in the Afghan Women's Writing Project, a nonprofit that runs online and local workshops for Afghan women writers, I am rethinking everything. I have been blown away by the work produced in the Fetzer Institute sponsored "Love and Forgiveness" workshop.

Now I think: Why on earth shouldn't we write about love? Honestly, what is more important than than how we honor and treat each other?

Afghanistan is a country whose young people have only known wartime, yet these young women write gloriously about love. They write about family love, love of God, love of nature. They write about love for friends, love for spouses. They write about forbidden love, too. This is the country of the burqa. This is a land when women are routinely forced into unwanted marriages. This is a land where women are murdered for defying their elders and refusing a marriage. Yet, the women in the AWWP workshop wrote so movingly of love, I feel compelled to share.

From Nasima's "Hurry":

I try to smile. I don't have money, power,
Or authority, but I have God who gave me
A mouth with lips for smiling. I have language for speaking.
I can use them for good,
To carry messages of peace and love and forgiveness.
I can smile to grow the root of the friendship tree.
We have such short time to do good work.
Let's hurry.

Nasima tells us to hurry. This may be the sweetest, yet most crucial demand we'll be given all day. The love we show, we share, when we help one another -- who doesn't need to think about that, to be reminded of just how crucial this kind of caring is when it comes to real success in life?

Then there's romantic love. In America, I think of how we, as girls, as women, are told again and again that love and sex are the answers. How so many of us, in so many cultures, think that if we can make the perfect love-match -- find our destined soulmate -- we will transcend whatever is terrible about our circumstances and be born anew. The promises of love and sex are whispered and shouted from nearly every song on the radio, every commercial on television, every billboard through the city. To imagine a world where women are told, that when it comes to spouses, it is shameful to choose whom to love, it feels dystopian. Yet, these are the cultural dictates that so many Afghan girls and women are forced to obey. Several women in AWWP have written eloquently about these strictures, challenging them head-on:

From Seeta's "The Problem of Love Marriages":

In my country, love is a shame on the family. But, in fact, if the couple does not know each other, how can they start a life? How can they pass the days of their lives without loving each other? Life would be very boring; men at work all day and women cleaning the house and giving birth to children. This is not a good life. There are many couples that meet for the first time on their wedding night. Very few people make love marriages, and, if they do, it is a carefully kept secret. The lives of these people are 100 percent better than those in forced marriages. Forced marriages and arranged marriages take place in most parts of Afghanistan, but I hope these marriages will be removed from our tradition.

And as Rehela plaintively asks in "Break the Rule":

Men can fall in love but women cannot
Why?
We do not have heart?
We do not have feeling?
We do not have choice?
We are not human?

This is just the beginning. In these pieces, and others on the site, and others that will be published in the months the come, the writers have so much to say about the the love they can freely give, about the emotions that they are told by their culture to hide, to ignore, to forget.

After reading their work, I know more than ever that we need to write more about love. All of us. If only because it makes us think about all of the different kinds of love in our lives, and how integral it is to our very existence.

When the Bigamist Is a Woman: Talking Love and Polygamy With Novelist Miah Arnold

2013-03-14T23:29:11-04:00

In Miah Arnold's engaging and enjoyable first novel Sweet Land of Bigamy, protagonist Helen cannot stop her husband from going to Iraq to chase big money as a contractor. Soon after he leaves, Helen falls in crazy-making love with an Indian poet. When the poet's mother falls so ill that he must return to India, he wants to leave married -- and, acquiescing, Helen finds herself a sudden bigamist. She has every stated intention of divorcing her first husband, but when he comes home maimed, and with a significant closed-head injury, her crisis intensifies. What is the solution when she loves both men deeply?

I found Arnold's themes of love and loyalty to be compelling -- but I especially loved thinking about bigamy from Helen's POV, for I have never associated polygamy with female agency. That is not to say that Helen doesn't experience strong consequences for her actions. But without revealing too much of the plot, I will say that it is a true blessing to live in a time, and a country, where a woman, even in fiction, could marry two men and when found out, not immediately led to the gallows.

Sweet Land of Bigamy kept me thinking the entire read: just how crazy, or not-crazy, is this premise? Personally, I could never imagine entering into bigamist relationship, but I can imagine how easy it might be for a woman to allow herself to be swept into such straits. And see, I used the word "straits." Part of the pleasure of Sweet Land of Bigamy is the notion that maybe, just maybe, these aren't straits. That this is how they're supposed to be -- one, um, big love. And as a reader, I enjoyed turning these notions over in my mind. So much so, I had to ask the author a few questions about her book, her youth in Utah, and the polygamous life.

Was there an idea, or an image, that sparked the creation of this story?
I am the descendant of polygamists, but that's not what sparked the story so I'll come back to that. Sweet Land of Bigamy began as a short story that was a cousin to another short story about the relationship of the narrator, Helen, with her mother, Carmen. When I was trying to flesh Carmen out -- an alcoholic woman with a bark and a bite and an indomitably charismatic personality -- the first picture that came to me was of these planters my aunt Jeri had filled with plastic flowers one year, in front of her house in rural Utah. When you put plastic flowers in a planter in a barren landscape you've given up so much, and you've refused to give up, all at the same time. In the short story it was a defiant act that broke her daughter Helen's heart -- and so the newly baptized, judgmental, twenty-something Helen spends the story trying to remedy the problem, but getting into her own kind of worse trouble, which is the story of their lives.

Kevin McIlvoy chose that story to win a big award -- it was called "The Original Carmen" -- and I loved the characters, and so when I set out on a novel I used the same cast. In the short story, Helen has an affair and when I wrote the novel I wanted Helen to go further. I decided she'd marry another man entirely, and as soon as I decided this I knew it was the story I was supposed to write. The novel takes place in Smoot's Pass, a fictional town in rural Utah. Because of Utah's association with polygamy, and my desire to write a book that confronts stereotypes about small towns without denying the truth of them, I thought a non-Mormon woman who marries a second husband would make an interesting backdrop. It sounded like the kind of story I almost hear all the time back home in Utah.

Even though the image of the plastic flowers isn't in my novel -- it is a slightly different Carmen -- the idea they represent is: of people who will neither give up their desire for beauty nor allow themselves to believe beauty can survive in the world they live in.

As a woman, I found the choice to make the female protagonist the bigamist to be a provocative one that upended my assumptions about polygamy, and who would choose such a life. Was this pure imagination on your part, or did you have any accounts that inspired you?
It was imagination, but it didn't seem very far-fetched to me. I thought, however, that a woman in a bigamist relationship would behave differently, and would treat it differently than the men we read about -- whether they're religious polygamists, or truckers, or world-travellers with families on different continents. Helen has a lot of shame for what she does and she grapples with it for a good part of the novel, but what I didn't expect to discover, is that she just really and truly loves two very different men. For very different reasons, sure, but she loves them both. The love for each of them is as pure and complicated as any other love. Plenty of polyamorous people in the world will tell you this is not only plausible, but fairly common. Helen's story is different because she's trying to hide her husbands from each other, and she's able to do so temporarily because one is at war.

Do you support polygamy? Do you support it more if the woman is the bigamist? Does it matter?
I think people should be able to love and marry who they want to, so long as they are doing so of their own free will and [are] old enough to choose. I don't think religion should be the arbiter of what loves are recognized, nor should religion dictate who a person can marry. Marriage law has a lot to do with property and child custody, and that's where legal polygamy would be hard but not impossible to implement. I do think, in terms of my book, you should not marry two people without telling them about each other.

Can the sister-wife life be good for women?
On Big Love it seemed that was the best part of their life. I've read a number of stories about bigamists and polygamists over the years, in which a group of people find each other and commit. We speak a lot about our fractured families in America. Parents pulled in so many directions they don't have time for kids and each other and their work. Certainly adding another person to the mix might ease these tensions. I read somewhere about a polyamorous family that decided to have kids, and that asked one of the women in the relationship if she would raise the kids. So there was a working mom, a working dad, and a homemaker mom. I read somewhere else about a polygamous family in which the two women had jobs -- I know one was a lawyer, the other maybe a doctor or teacher -- and the husband was a stay-at-home dad. Our world is changing so rapidly, and yet we maintain this thousands-of-year-old idea about what a family should look like. Today, most families in the United States are not "traditional," nuclear ones. Yet, we continue to create laws and economies that punish women and children and men who are not in nuclear families. In Sweet Land of Bigamy, I imagined women and men charging their ways through to another way of living.

What is it like for a child to grow up in a polygamous household? Is there a psychic toll? Are there benefits?
I don't know this. I would say that my hunch is that it depends on the household. If it is a healthy, happy, supportive, loving family that is thoughtful, the kid will be all right. There is a psychic toll on any upbringing, and a psychic boon, if you will.

What did you know about polygamy growing up in rural Utah? How did you feel about people living in those relationships?
I didn't know any polygamists, as far as I know, in rural Utah. In eighth grade, when I lived in Salt Lake City, I met a girl who was taking her last year of school before marriage. She wore an old fashioned dress, and her hair in two long braids, and insisted that she was excited about her new life. I had a hard time understanding, and I thought it was wrong that she could be married off so young. But I also marveled at her degree of conviction and purpose because I was, like most of my other peers, so confused and jumbled about my own.

The women who leave polygamist communities in Utah write about feeling exploited, manipulated and abused. In communities as patriarchal as the ones in Utah, I find it hard to support the polygamist lifestyle. I might feel better if the children there had the chance, like the Amish youth, to live away from their community for a year or two before marrying and settling down. However, if mutually consenting adults find each other within the wider society and want to form a polygamous bond, I think that's could be wonderful.

Can bigamy work? Is it a sustainable way of life?
Monogamy isn't sustainable for many. People across the planet have lived bigamous lives. Maybe we can figure out a just and fair way to accommodate different ways of being.

I am embarrassed to admit that prior to reading your novel, I assumed nearly everyone in Utah was a Mormon. Would you speak to religious diversity in the state, and how that shaped what you thought of as normal or abnormal growing up, especially regarding bigamy?
Mormonism is an issue I've thought of my whole life. I'm not Mormon, though my great-great grandparents were polygamists. They left the Church of Latter-day Saints when God told church leaders to quit polygamy just a few weeks after the U.S. government made statehood for Utah contingent on the elimination of polygamy. Polygamy was not only abandoned by the Church of Latter-day Saints, but it was made illegal and was severely punished. Men were imprisoned for visiting their families. My great-great-grandmother was forced into single motherhood. As the second wife, my great-great-grandmother and her children were abandoned by their 'husband.' This caused my family to become anti-religious overnight -- and this is a feeling you find in a lot of communities in Utah. The state has a strong but largely unrecognized secular history. My great-great-grandmother's son was a founder of the town I grew up in. He ran the trading post. That history is one of the reasons why, when I decided to make the narrator of my novel polygamous, I knew it was the story I was meant to write

My feelings for the Mormonism have always been conflicted. Some Mormon kids were pretty mean to me growing up in both Myton and later Salt Lake. But a few were very good to me -- and there are countless stories of large Mormon families taking in friends of their children in times of need. They have a whole social services system built into their church -- they look after the elderly, they aid the poor. They volunteer a lot. It's all moving to me. What is more painful is the place of women in the church: it has this vibrant history of women as leaders and idea makers that has been pasted over by traditional paternalisms. Mormon girls are pushed, like boys, to be smart and well-rounded and theatrical and fascinating people; then they're told not to use all this intelligence in a career. They use it to rear their families. For some women this is great, it's what they want; for at least as many it's pretty depressing. Utah was reported to have the highest number of women on Prozac in the nation. I find the place of women in this church born of such equalizing potentialities infuriating.

In a way, your assumption that everyone in Utah is Mormon is true. People who are not Mormon in Utah are so rampantly not-Mormon they are still defined by the religion. Meaning there is a lot of heavy drinking, drugs and promiscuous behaviors. Extreme behaviors. Sort of like there's a pendulum with proper Mormon behaviors on the right, and the exact opposite on the left. It's a curse, and it makes growing up in Utah hard. It's hard growing up anywhere that you spend your time defining yourself in opposition to the majority, especially when doing so demands you engage in harmful behaviors. How much luckier my family would have been had the Mormons been the heavy drinkers, smokers, and druggers who hated school.

For more about Sweet Land of Bigamy, click here. Miah Arnold will be reading at the Renegade Reading Series in Brooklyn on Wednesday, March 13 at 8:00pm.

When Afghan Women Write of Fatherly Love

2013-02-26T14:40:08-05:00

A father's love. Some of us are blessed to be nurtured by our fathers from birth. Some of us find this love later in life, from fathers, or from father figures. Some of us spend a lifetime chasing after this mysterious force. Some of us will never know what it's like to mean the world to the man who brought us into the world. I find this is true no matter if you are born in America or Afghanistan or anywhere else on the map.

I work with Afghan women via the Afghan Women's Writing Project (AWWP). Over the last weeks, some of our writers have focused on the themes of love and forgiveness as part of a Fetzer Institute-sponsored writing project. We've only just begun, but it already feels deeply rewarding to focus on these forces so central to peace and happiness, and the women are sharing incredible stories and poems. I've been particularly struck by descriptions of fatherly love. As an outsider, it had been easy for me to make assumptions of how fathers treated their daughters. It had been easy to assume that because one man treats his daughter like cloth, to be bought and sold, as writer Lena once described, that all Afghan fathers are like this.

But clearly this is not the case. Despite conditions and cultural attitudes that many AWWP writers decry as deeply oppressive, many find great love and comfort within their own homes. As Saifora recently wrote: "My family is my world; it is my antidote to all my miseries, hardship, and pain."

When the Taliban ruled, and Lena, then a girl, was forced to wear a burqa outside of the home, she writes of how her father tried to comfort her:

I remember when I wore my burqa and you didn't like it so you bought flowers to put in my hair. I said that the burqa hides the flowers, but you said, "No matter. When you take the burqa off, you will smell the flowers." From "My Father" by Lena

One writer, Zahra A., writes of the difficulty of accepting terrible treatment in society, especially given the respect and love she finds at home:

"I grew up in a family where I was treated the same as my brothers, and sometimes even better. My dad, my hero, always wanted the best things for my siblings and me. But we lived in the north, in Kunduz, in a society that did not accept me. It was hard for me to be a good Afghan girl.

I couldn't follow the rules, such as wearing a burqa, staying home and doing housework, or skipping school because of a party or guests. In the family I was encouraged to be outspoken, but not in public.

At school I was punished for saying what I knew was right." From "Small Reasons Add Up to Becoming a Feminist" by Zahra A.

One writer, Mahbooba, writes movingly of how her grandfather trusted her, and how this fatherly love is not rare in her society:

One day he told me, "I trust you." I said, "Why do you trust me? I am human, I can make mistakes." But he said, "We are human; therefore humans have to make mistakes. But some people make a lot of mistakes and these become sins, but they never accept that and they say "I didn't do this." He said, "You never say these things and you always admit if you have made a mistake and try to do better the next time. Therefore I trust you."

This was a special gift from my grandfather. If all people give this gift to their children the children will be lucky. Yes, we can use a car for ten years or we can use our clothes for a year, but I can use my grandfather's love like a moral compass forever. My grandfather is just one example, but many people in Afghanistan think that no one supports the women and this is not true. My father also helps me in my life. I know he loves me. I respect my family and grandfather because they show me the way to be strong and moral in my life. From "My Grandfather's Gift" by Mahbooba

However, the Afghan women writers do not hesitate to tell the terrible truths, nor to question them. They share their painful emotions. As Lena writes:

When I see a father who loves his daughter, when I see a brother struggle for his sister to earn a scholarship and study abroad, when I see a husband love his wife, I remember you. But when I see a father lock the door of the house to prevent his daughter from going to school, when I see a brother force his sister into marriage, when I see a husband kill his pregnant wife, I hate men. From "My Father" by Lena .

But the love Lena has for her deceased father shines so beautifully in this piece. I will close with this last excerpt:

When I made dinner you came into the kitchen. Your smile was the spice of my cooking. You helped me, but at the table when everybody licked their fingers and said food was so tasty, you replied, "My daughter is the best cook," and you winked at me. You provided me everything I needed. You gave me the gift of Hangama's songs. You bought me a greenish dress and said it was the color of my hopes! During that time, I hardly knew the meaning of need. But when you went to the heavens, I understood the meaning of loss.

I remember how you supported my education; you said only knowledge will recover our sick society! You encouraged me to become a leader who will speak to millions of people and say, "Nobody will give us Afghan women our rights. We must struggle and we must take our rights!" Your words shone like stars in my heart. You bought books for me and taught me to respect myself, love myself as a woman, and never give up, even when life is difficult. You, my angel father, taught me that I'm not only an Afghan woman, I belong to the world. You taught me to respect humanity because we are all created to love and there must be no hate in our hearts." From "My Father" by Lena.

I encourage you to visit the AWWP website and read more of the work by these fantastic, brave, and beautiful Afghan women writers. If you're at all like me, you will have some of your preconceptions of what it means to be an Afghan women, or an Afghan man, blown away.

Note: Some names in this post have been changed to protect of the privacy of those mentioned.

When Afghan Women Write of Gender Violence

2012-12-06T15:53:52-05:00

Don't expect victims. This is not to say that writers in the Afghan Women's Writing Project have never been abused by the men in their lives. But if you read their words, you will never imagine these writers as passive objects of male cruelty. You will envision women who see clearly, who feel deeply, and who are brave and strong enough to share their experiences with each other and with us, their global audience.

They sign their poems and essays by first name only. They are Seeta, Maryam, and Mahnaz. Norwan, Friba, and Yalda. Mariam, Farahnaz, and many, many more who work with primarily American women writers and professors in AWWP's secure online workshops. For the last few weeks, the women writers have worked on pieces for the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence campaign.

We all struggle to be safe. Every time I walk down my New York streets I am acutely aware that I am female, that I can be easily overpowered. If I see the cover picture of a tabloid, I am reminded, almost daily, of how easy it is to be battered or murdered by loved ones or strangers. Gender violence has never been one of those problems "over there." But we American women, as a whole, enjoy protection under the law and opportunities in our personal and professional lives that can feel unfathomable in Afghanistan. Read these excerpts, however, and that rumble you feel is the shudder of violent patriarchal norms questioned and resisted.

An excerpt from "Mark My Words--Spread My Word" by Seeta:

The governor comes to the stage/
and announces his support/
for the elimination of violence against women./
Ask him, Where is your wife?/
He does not let her participate./
Why?/
Obama is the American president./
His wife is known to many countries./
But where is ours?

Here is an excerpt from "Legitimizing Inequality" by Mahnaz:

They use our love for others as an
excuse to tell us we are
weak in faith, too emotional for
a prophet, imam, judge, or leader. They
betray us by twisting our nature to use against us,
then call us Najis. Nasty. Unclean.
They make a hammer from religion,
pound us in the head,
fool us with hell. We question
injustice and they tell us we
breach the quality of life so we are
infidel. We ask for equality and they
call us impious, deviant.

Sometimes, I read the writers' words, and my heart hurts, knowing how much is stacked against these women, wondering how I would cope if neither my father nor my mother supported by education, wondering how I would stomach a life where I had to serve my brothers -- not even going into the more terrible darkness: the stories of stonings and beheadings, the stories of endless war.

I read the words of a poet like Mahnaz, and I struck by the fact that despite growing up in America, I have had to fight off similar poisonous, viral ideas of what it means to be a woman. Who among us women has never, at some point, or at many points, been made to feel unclean, and less than, because of her sex?

But one poet, Norwan, let's us know that despite our kinship, there are still differences between us. That we women of the west still have privilege and significant power, whether we choose to see it or not. From "A World of Difference":

There is a world of difference/
Between me and you/
My western sister/
Not only because I have black hair/
And you have yellow/
You smell like roses/
I have the smell of bread/
I compare you and me while I am in the kitchen/
And see you with your laptop

Who can blame Norwan for resentment? I don't have blonde hair, but I am sitting here on my laptop, typing this, free to write because I choose to write. The only reason I don't lapse into despair is because I know that Norwan is a hardworking, eloquent writer, one who has the power to topple down barriers and make her way in this world. She is already doing this. Just as her other Afghan sisters are doing so, too, even if the doing so is simply speaking up. If you have any doubt, read this portion of Yalda's prescription for progress, from "Orange Day Every Day":

We need to increase the awareness of girls and women living in rural areas.

We need to encourage girls and women to get an education.

Our efforts can help to make them strong people, who have the courage to speak out and who refuse to tolerate violence against them.

We should fight for the rights of women and girls, beginning with ourselves, our families, and our friends.

I encourage you to take ten minutes and visit the Afghan Women's Writing Project website and read the full versions of these poems and essays. If you have time, leave a comment. Then read other poems, essays, and stories. Let the women writers of Afghanistan know that we here do mark their word, that we spread their word, that through this miraculous backchannel that is the internet, we listen, and we let each other know that we're not alone.

The Playwright at Work: Talking Shop, Success, and Spectacular Failure with America's Top Playwrights

2012-09-04T11:45:26-04:00

The power of a staged story, of a secret acted out before our eyes...as a kid, I was never one to say "let's put on a play," but as a young adult, I was seared deeply by the 1997 Lyttleton Theatre production of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. I suddenly knew that plays had power. That plays could knock you to the ground. I could barely understand the actors' accents, yet Pinter's visceral, startling story and the life-force that animated those actors will always be with me. How do the best productions carve their initials into our hearts like this?

I gained rich insight into the playwright's way by reading The Playwright at Work, by Rosemarie Tichler and Barry Jay Kaplan, a collection of 13 interviews with top playwrights including John Guare, Lynn Nottage and Tony Kushner. Tichler and Kaplan, with impressive theater and writing credentials of their own, go deep with these writers, talking to them about methods, inspirations, the cruelty of the business, and why it is they do what do.

I was able to ask Tichler and Kaplan questions of my own, and in the following interview they share what they learned by doing this book. They also share some hard-earned wisdom and guidance regarding theater today.

Tell us about your work in the theatre.

RT: I presently teach Audition Technique at NYU's Graduate Acting Program. I am also on the Board of Directors of Classic Stage Company in NYC and a nominator for Broadway's Tony awards and for Off Broadway's Lucille Lortel awards. So I am at the theater three to five nights per week. I was for many years head of casting for the Public Theater under Joe Papp. I started when the legendary musical A Chorus Line was in rehearsal. When Joe died in 1991, I became Artistic Producer of the Public.

BJK: I write plays and musicals and spend a lot of time trying to get them on.

Why write for the stage? Why do you think playwrights are drawn to this form, as opposed to fiction, film, or TV?

RT: I think the playwrights we interviewed went to the theater at a young age and fell in love. And there is great power in a first love. Most playwrights write film scripts, TV scripts, novels, short stories, essays but they always are drawn back to the stage.

BJK: I also write novels and short fiction and the advantage there is that you can hold the finished product in your hand. But there is nothing like the thrill of watching actors as they embody characters you've invented. All that emotion, all that intensity started in the playwright's mind.

Which shows and artists did you first know and love? Do you have to be exposed early to grow up to be a playwright?

BJK: I grew up in New York and in junior high school someone's mother got us tickets to see The Diary of Anne Frank. Afterwards I lingered in the theatre and went up to touch the stage. I saw Music Man on another school trip and sat in a box to see West Side Story. I still have vivid memories of both. I had been writing stories since I was ten and now I added people talking, so that may have been the beginning of becoming a playwright though I still didn't put it together that someone wrote the things I was seeing on the stage. Once I was in high school and college, I was going to the theatre regularly and saw Six Characters in Search of an Author. I started being attracted not necessarily to the avant-garde but to plays that were different: The Physicists, The Homecoming, The Birthday Party. I was also very influenced by certain movies, in particular Vertigo. I had never realized that something so personal could be put out there which helped me because my own stories, the ones I wasn't telling yet, were very odd and made me nervous about exposing them to the world. I was also influenced by the film version of Genet's The Balcony, for the same sorts of reasons.

You interview 13 prominent playwrights. Did you notice any similar secrets of success? Or did each playwright's method and history feel singular?

RT: I think the journey of each playwright is as singular as their work is. Methods of work may be similar: when they write, how they behave at rehearsals, with directors, do they read reviews, etc., but their histories and sensibilities make for different journeys.

Playwright John Guare recounts a story of a playwright, who, after his show bombs, takes to his bed and never gets out again. Did this story strike you as anomalous, or did it feel true? If so, how?

BJK: That was William Inge, who at the time of his greatest successes was considered in the same league as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller with plays like Picnic and Dark at the Top of the Stairs. But then things started going badly for him-- after his early successes his plays were poorly received. He was also an alcoholic and a closeted gay man, which in the fifties was a very difficult thing to be. I think a playwright has to have a pretty thick skin to survive the potential assaults the critics and public can dish out.

RT: Every playwright faces the probability of rejection. First, in no one wanting to produce the play and then if it is produced having to deal with critical response which, if negative, is not only a personal assault, but also will result in the closing down of the play's production. Actors face this rejection, I think even more powerfully. It is their being that is rejected in an audition or if they are performing, by the critics. Yet both these theater artists, the actor and the playwright, as artists need to have vulnerability. So how do you shield yourself from negative assessments of yourself and your work and yet keep yourself open and creative. Some artists are more successful than others in solving this dilemma. Joe Papp used to tell playwrights, that while their play was in rehearsal, before it opened, to start another play so if the review was negative they could go on. I used to tell playwrights that the New York Times with the review of their work would be stepped on in the street in the rain, the next day.

The title does not lie: these interviews illuminate playwrights at work. We learn much about each person's process, from first inspiration to opening night. Did any of your playwrights reveal challenges, or epiphanies, that you found surprising?

BJK: All of their work habits made me feel I wasn't working hard enough.

Did anyone's methods startle you?

RT: No, but I'm not easily startled by peoples rituals or activities.

BJK: Wally Shawn takes years to write a play, dictated for the most part by his unconscious. He is very true to himself in this and it's very impressive that he would stick to it.

Does a playwright need to be in New York City in order to be successful?

BJK: There are thriving theatre scenes in Chicago and Minneapolis and San Francisco and Philadelphia and Los Angeles, so if a writer wants to see work performed, those are places where new work is done, and often by first class directors and actors. For some playwrights, New York is the seen as the apotheosis of success but if you have a play done in New York, the pressure to have a hit is enormous. New plays are done at theatres all over the country, though. New York is tempting but it's not the only place.

RT: I agree and I would add Seattle, D.C., Atlanta and Louisville. New York City is what gets most attention in the press, but a playwright can have his work done in many other cities and get done well.

Given the cost of Broadway and Off-Broadway tickets, what advice would you give the enthusiast who wants to see more theatre, but feels she can't afford it?

BJK: Broadway ticket prices have gone over the top and there's a kind of amusement park quality to a lot of the shows, which are mostly musicals. The only way a straight play gets on Broadway is if there's a star attached and even that doesn't guarantee success. The expense of the production is visited upon the ticket price which can reach upwards of $200. But a person can go to a preview, which is cheaper but not much, or go to the TKTS booth in Times Square the day of the performance. A person can join the Theatre Development Fund (TDF) or Audience Extras and get discount or even free tickets. Off Broadway costs about half what a Broadway play does, and off off Broadway maybe half of that. There are of course exceptions to everything I just said.

RT: A few ideas. If there is a not-for-profit theater whose work you like, get a subscription. Many theaters have rush tickets which they sell inexpensively an hour or two before curtain. Join Theater Mania for discounts. Join TDF for discounts. Befriend an actor who often gets comps from their union in early previews of a show or if a show is not selling well.

Your first collaboration was Actors at Work. How different did it feel to interview playwrights?

BJK: At the risk of offending an entire category of theatre artist, I would say that it was more fun to interview the actors but that the playwrights were more articulate and thoughtful in expressing themselves. We also had to bone up on their work, or refresh our memories of plays we had seen years, even decades, ago, but that was an education and well worth it.

RT: Well, actors more easily express themselves verbally. After all, it is their work, their life's blood. I sometimes thought we should have asked writers to write their responses rather than speak them, but we did very much want the spontaneity of a conversation which I think we mostly achieved. Simply put, actors are very comfortable, more than writers are, in speaking spontaneously.

Name a playwright, living or dead, that you wish you could interview. What would you ask?

BJK: I would ask Harold Pinter how he knew that silence would be so powerful. I would ask Tennessee Williams where he got the nerve to write so nakedly about his own life.

RT: Anton Checkhov. What would his next project have been?

In your book, William Inge is quoted asking: "Isn't helping new dramatists a little like helping people to hell?" Do you agree with this sentiment? And even if you do agree, any parting advice for the aspiring playwright?

RT: I used to say there was a rung in Dante's hell for me for teaching acting. And I was only half kidding. I think that actors and playwrights should continue to write and act only if they don't want to get up in the morning unless they can write or act. It's a very difficult life and if you can be content doing something else, then do that.

BJK: I knew a playwright once who had been accepted as a member of New Dramatists, an organization that helps playwrights with readings, workshops, travel. It has a rotating membership, seven years and you're out. This playwright said that getting into New Dramatists was the worst thing that ever happened to him because it made him believe he had a chance to make it as a playwright. Personally, I would say that my heart has been broken many times in my attempts to have my plays done but if it couldn't be broken, what kind of playwright would I be?

When They Say You Have No Culture: Talking Applebee's, Passing, and Self-Acceptance With Memoirist Lacy M. Johnson

2012-08-08T12:25:30-04:00

"The problem with midwesterners is that you have no culture."

In 2006, a young male New Yorker said this to Lacy M. Johnson, author of the stunning and thoughtful memoir Trespasses (Iowa) in which she tells the stories of three generations of family making their way in the rural Missouri.

Early in her book, Johnson re-creates this encounter for us; lets us know that the New Yorker came to this conclusion after a drive through the "heartland" of America. Then she repeats the insult he believes closes his case:

"Applebee's is not culture."

In winning fashion, Johnson's memoir refutes the supposition that her hometown's culture is equal to the sum of what a stranger can see through his windshield. That despite the omnipresence of chain businesses in her town, there is a world of ritual and memory, love and struggle and creativity, that is native to her community alone.

Yet, as Johnson says and thinks in the text:

It's all very American. And by this I also mean the regional chain of grocery stores, the Wal-Mart, even Applebee's, even though that's all he sees. Like algae on the surface of a pond. To get the clean, fresh water underneath you have to break through that surface. My culture is like that, I tell him. And for the first time, I believe it.

I believe it, too. For in the prose poems, the lyric recollections and re-creations, and the family interviews that comprise Trespasses, we follow this former Wal-Mart checkout clerk back to the country, back to the daily routines. Because culture is about more than where you go for Happy Hour, we explore the family farm. We experience the vivid memories of her grandparents and parents, like the moment electricity first lit their home, or when the grandfather beheld a newborn lamb and knew God existed. We follow Johnson to church, and into the clutches of strange boys. We learn what it's like when the older sister, who loves a black man, is suddenly persona non grata. And we learn what it's like when the great fear, and sometimes the great reality, is that you will be seen as less than -- as "trash" -- and no amount of store-bought clothing will change that fact.

A powerful epiphany of the book is when Johnson learns to stop squelching her natural voice and write in the mother tongue, the one that is as authentic and real as anyone else's. For these are her stories. These are her family's stories. This is her culture. One that is unique and regional, yet very American.

I asked Johnson to share a bit more about writing Trespasses.

Could you tell us about how the encounter with the man from New York gave you fuel, and what you'd share with him, now, if you could?

This encounter gave me fuel because it made me angry, because he was an outsider and yet I saw so much of my own attitudes and beliefs in his. What does he know? I found myself thinking long after the encounter was over, even in the days afterward. It couldn't be true -- can any place be cultureless? But at the time, I couldn't think of any particular ways in which he was wrong. At the time of the argument, I had spent so much time trying to get away from my home that I hadn't really taken the time to look at it very closely.

The argument forced me then, as it still does now, to think not only about what "culture" means, but also how it is perceived and how that perception has evolved. Because the New Yorker is defining culture through the lens of his own experience: if he expects five-star restaurants, Broadway plays, museums, ethnic and racial diversity...w ell, no. He won't find that here. He won't find urban culture here at all, really. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

When I go home now, the first thing I see is the same first thing anyone sees anywhere: big box stores, fast food chains, the outposts of giant corporate conglomerates. But when I went home in 2006 to conduct the interviews that I used as material for this book, I realized that there's a pre-corporate culture that still survives there. It was there all along, but I just didn't know how to recognize it in my immaturity. The sad thing is, I'm not sure how much longer it will survive.

You write about "passing" -- that while in graduate school, you took great pains to
pretend to be something you felt you weren't. What was this experience like? Do you ever still feel like you're passing for something else?

I always feel like I'm passing a little bit. In graduate school (though also even before that, as an undergraduate) I always felt as though people were at any moment going to find me out for a fraud. Even now, I can't walk into certain restaurants, or clothing stores, or automobile dealers, or open houses without feeling like I'm getting "the look." Less and less in recent years have I caught myself trying to be something I'm not. I don't cover my tattoos when I show up for job interviews. I psych myself up before waltzing into whatever restaurant I please and try to explain my appreciation for cold hot dogs and Cool Ranch Doritos to my dinner companions, who may or may not give me "the look."

As I try to explain in the book, I don't think passing is a good thing. I think it perpetuates an unjust system of privilege and oppression. I think a tremendous part of the privileges I currently enjoy have come from the fact that I can easily pass as a middle-class white woman when I need to: I'm pretty, I have good teeth and hair, I'm well-spoken and thin. Would I be where I am today if I looked differently? I'd like to think that my success has come from hard work, but I also have to acknowledge that hard work pays off differently for different people. So, I've tried to stop using that to my own advantage, and instead use it to leverage opportunities for others.

Tell us something beautiful about your hometown. Tell us something ugly, too.

Here is something beautiful: After I'd gotten my driver's license, I used to walk home after school and drop my bag inside the backdoor, and take my dad's truck out to this abandoned dock at the lake. The narrow dirt path leading to the dock didn't look like much from the gravel road: no sign or mailbox to mark it as the way, the path itself just barely wide enough to let the truck pass between the humps of tangled brush, the knotty branches scratching both sides of the truck -- like fingernails on a chalkboard, like cats fighting in the barn -- passing just under the enormous oak tree, the branches bending and breaking against the roof of the truck, which would finally emerge into a wide grass lot. Maybe that lot was privately owned. Maybe someone owned the dock. But no one claimed it except those of us who never crossed paths, who left only beer bottles, bottle caps, cigarette butts behind as artifacts. Some days I backed the truck right up to the water. Other days I walked to the dock's edge, avoiding the boards that buckled with mold and rot, the water trying to claim them, and sat down on the last solid board, and let the lake water lap my feet as it lapped the shore. I had no purpose, no imminent chore. There was nothing between me and the water. Nothing between the water and the air. If I had a religion at the time, it was this.

Here's something ugly: there was a girl a few years ahead of me in school. After she graduated, she came out as a lesbian, and suddenly she was no longer seated in restaurants, or if she was seated no one would serve her; she was turned away at the doctor's office and the pharmacy, and the grocery store, and the bank. I think she finally moved away.

What is something we should know if we ever work at Wal-Mart?

Mostly just don't do it. Working as a cashier is a really shitty job: people are rude to you all day and your bosses evaluate you based on how quickly you move customers through your line. You're standing on your feet for eight hours with only two 15-minute breaks and a half hour for lunch. They make you memorize cheers and do them every morning before the store opens. After all, you're supposed to be very excited about your shitty job! And then no one seems to mind when the supervisors sexually harass young women, especially if the women don't make any formal complaints. And then they seem to mind a lot, but somehow it's the women who get shuffled into other departments, and the whole matter gets brushed under the rug. On the flip side, you get a 10 percent discount and a generous stock-purchasing plan, and if you express any kind of ambition at all, they'll train you to be a manager of just about anything.

Without a doubt, the best part of working at Wal-Mart is that you get to see all the weird shit people buy. Once this Mennonite man and his son came in to the store and bought a flashlight, batteries, and a pack of condoms. And I thought, "You're not even allowed to sew zippers in your pants, what are you going to do with those?" As fun as these invasions of privacy might seem, you also have to remember that you might work at Wal-Mart for years and years and never earn much more than minimum wage, which until 2007 was somewhere in the neighborhood of $5.00 an hour. Can you imagine? A whole day at the register and you've earned less than $40 bucks, and that's before they deduct for taxes and the generous stock plan. At the time, it was the best job I had available to me, but now that I've got other options, you'd better believe I take them.

This post may also be read on Harlem Bookshelf.

In Harlem, a Happy Reason to March

2012-07-20T15:51:42-04:00

When I heard that Harlem's Hue-Man Bookstore would be closing its shop and selling books only online and at selected events, I sank into a low-grade depression. Yes, I'm guilty these days of buying most of my books online, but there is nothing like a bookshop, nothing like that excitement of encountering knowledge on tables and shelves, on paper newly bound and touchable. Soon after I heard that Word Up Books in Washington Heights had lost its lease. Though both businesses are fighting valiantly for their lives, I felt punched. This 1-2 did not bode well for the reading life Uptown.

Then, I heard about this weekend's "Literacy Across Harlem March, Book Donation and Celebration." Co-sponsored by Total Equity Now! and the Harlem Book Fair, Harlemites and anyone else who wants to participate can come out this Saturday and assert the importance of real, live books. To join the march, you're asked to bring one of your favorite reads -- current or classic -- and a few gently-used books to be donated. The favorite can be held high, or snuggled in a pocket -- however you choose to show-off your selection and give credit to a writer whose words opened your eyes.

The event starts at 10:30 a.m. at three separate locations: St. Nicholas Park (135th St. & St. Nicholas); Countee Cullen Library (136th St. & Lenox Ave.); and Lincoln Playground (135th St. & 5th Ave.)). The participants will then march and join together at the main stage at 135th.

I love this. While reading is often a solitary pleasure, sharing our favorite books is not. Neither is showing those who haven't read in while what they're missing. To me, this is a beautiful shoe leather way to show our neighbors that there is so much to be gained by taking the time to read -- especially the books that have opened our hearts and minds. And the reality is that we have wonderful New York Public Library options up here, so money need not be a barrier.

That being said, I want to encourage all of you here Uptown to visit Hue-Man and Word Up. They need our support. Right now, Hue-Man is selling books at a deep discount. Liquidating will help them transition successfully to their new online life. And if anyone has a good rental lead for Word Up, let them know.

Now I'm looking at my bookshelf, thinking about which book to bring. The choices feel infinite. Without over-thinking it, here are my first three picks:

1. AMERICAN PASTORAL by Philip Roth. Picture Washington, D.C., Spring 1998, Kramerbooks bookshop. I worked in the White House then, and we were in the deep mess that was that Monica year. I'll never forget picking up a copy of the paperback, reading the story description, buying it, taking it home. After reading that powerhouse tale of perfection falling apart, I knew I wanted to use fiction to tell the truth. I'll always remember those days and nights going to Kramerbooks and feeling that sparkling sense of possibility -- of the ambition of the young and old around me who felt like what we did in D.C., and in life, mattered. That reading and writing books mattered. That the terrible tactics of political opponents could make our actions seem useless, but they weren't. We had to keep going. Keep creating. Keep trying to tell the truth. This is a feeling I never want to lose.

2. COMING OF AGE IN MISSISSIPPI by Anne Moody. I was born in Detroit, raised in her suburbs. Never traveled extensively south of the Mason-Dixon line until late in high school. I have family in the Carolinas, but that life, and that history, can feel very removed, like it happened to strangers. Reading this book, I had an expanded understanding of Jim Crow's enforced subjugation and economic exploitation. I felt fear in my bones, contemplating the life and death stakes for all blacks during the height of the civil rights struggles (and before then, too). That water fountains and buses were just the tip of the iceberg. Before I read this book, I had only a superficial appreciation for the terror that many blacks felt -- that real fear of violence if they spoke out, or simply voted, and how the activists put their lives on the line day in and day out fighting for our rights. And by activists, I don't just mean people who came from up North. I mean women like Anne Moody who grew up in Mississippi, and risked all for change. I would recommend this book to anybody. But I'd be very happy to press it into the palms of some of the young people around me, to show them a model of love and courage and deeply meaningful action.

3. THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: THE EPIC STORY OF AMERICA'S GREAT MIGRATION by Isabel Wilkerson. Every Harlemite should read this book -- for some, this will be a retelling of history intimately lived. For others, this is vital new information, a chance for us to understand our place in the river of history. Wilkerson's narratives of black Southerners emigrating to the North and to the West are utterly engaging -- and educating. All of us here came from somewhere else. Maybe we ourselves don't -- but our parents or great-grandparents do. Just different arrival dates. And while you'd only have to read Coming of Age in Mississippi to understand why someone might want to flee the only world they've ever known for "the warmth of other suns," Wilkerson's men and women help you understand why someone could be driven to make such a traumatic choice.

Now, which book from your bookshelves would you carry?

In Harlem, a Happy Reason to March has been cross-posted on the blog Harlem Bookshelf.

Seeing Past the Burqa on International Women's Day

2012-03-08T15:32:59-05:00

The burqa is a blue stop sign. We're told that it exists to stop the gaze of a strange male from landing on a woman's skin. But sometimes, it stops us others, us women and men who want to know these women, stops us from recognizing their strength, their individuality, for the cloth covers so much. If we can't see their faces, too often we fail to imagine them.

Or maybe we read an Afghan woman's story in the New York Times, and often the story is so sad, so brutal, about a stoning, or a girl given to another family to pay off a debt, that the hopelessness feels so daunting that the biggest urge is to turn the page, for what can we do to save her, when we're here and they're there, and we are strangers to her culture?

Yet, because of the work of the Afghan Women's Writing Project, an American nonprofit that connects American female writers with Afghan female writers via online workshops, those of us involved get to witness the power of these women when they share their stories on the page. Some of these women, like the medical student in Norwan's essay I Remember, have the love and support of their parents. Some women, like Frozan in Seeta's She is Gone Now, could not bear living as the forced wife of a drunk and heroin abuser, and takes her own life with a gun. We cannot save the deceased, but we can support the young writer who is bearing witness, and is sharing this story will all of us, via the AWWP blog.

I have served for two rotations as an online mentor, and it ranks as one of the most special teaching experiences I have known. These women fight invisibility every day. They have been told that their stories don't matter. Luckily, some have supportive relatives, like the beautiful women in Farida's Heroines of the Hearth. But too many must hide their writings from their family for fear of shame and punishment. Some must walk for hours through dangerous territory just to get to an internet café to post their work.
.
By going to the AWWP website, reading a piece, and leaving comments, you too will bear witness, and you will give precious support to these young women. On International Women's Day, please take a few moments to not just look beyond the burqa, but to look into the hearts and minds of these special women. You'll be reminded of what you knew all along: that these women are our sisters. And they have something to say.

When the Me Speaks for We in Harlem

2012-03-02T17:23:08-05:00

"Me. We." There it is in the Studio Museum atrium, the Muhammad Ali poem on demand as conceived by Glenn Ligon, his Me on top of We. This is Glenn Ligon, so this is also a light show. First, the Me is lit. Then the We. Then the Me. The We. Tick tock, back forth. The extinguishing of one while the other shines brightly. The moment when neither is lit at all.

I live near the Studio Museum, so I see this piece often. I think about what the me/we dynamic means for the black community, what it means for the many communities we call our own. The yin and yang that we must always be negotiating. For me, I belong to my race, which is both black and white. My family. My hometown of Detroit. My Catholicism. My schools. My friends. My block. So many circuits that brighten or dim, depending on the moment. So many collectives I claim, even though some in those groups might not claim me back. Like the man at the corner who once yelled at me "Go back downtown" though I have never ever lived downtown, and his accent revealed that he was no native to Harlem either.

We want to belong. We want others to belong to us. We want the "we" to give us meaning, to define us, just as we define ourselves against it.

Five years after arriving in Harlem, I am married, and I have a son. We live in a brownstone apartment, in a building that has been home to many Harlem emigrants. We are trying to make our way. I write when I can. And along with my writer friends who live here, I think about what it means to be here, to be us, in this place, and in this time. We think about the "we." And sometimes, we write from that POV.

It is one thing to claim a group. It is another thing to write for that group, to assume the "we" on the page and speak for everyone else. But intrepid writers do this. Recent wonderful efforts include Peter Markus's mythic We Make Mud and Justin Torres's affecting We the Animals, both told from the perspective of brothers. Then there's Julie Otsuka's National Book Award-nominated The Buddha in the Attic, which speaks in the voice of early 21st- century Japanese picture brides; I read passages and I have to stop to breathe, and sometimes to shudder, thinking about what these women went through as they made their new lives in America.

Writers may be daunted when attempting the first person plural voice. Hard enough to get individual character voices right. But the collective? Especially when audience members know what it's like to be misrepresented, to have others speak on their behalf without any true knowledge of their interior or exterior lives, especially if they may never get their story told elsewhere. When what one writes becomes the permanent record.

Yet, there are times we need leaders and artists to speak on our behalf. To witness and explain what we haven't articulated, to reveal the hurts that bleed us but may be hidden from us.

Wendy S. Walters, Amy Benson and I have spent the last year contemplating "we" and what it means to write in first person plural. We are now introducing the First Person Plural Reading Series, which will take place quarterly in Harlem at Shrine music venue. Our opening reading is on Monday, March 5, 2012.

We've invited four renowned writers, Pulitzer-prize winner Margo Jefferson, celebrated novelist Sam Lipsyte, and groundbreaking cross-genre artists Mendi + Keith Obadike, to write short pieces in first person plural and share them with our audience. They will also read from their body of work. If you are in or near NYC, I encourage you to come join us.

What Jamal Saw: Finding the Disaster Aftermath in the Face of a Child

2010-08-30T15:53:06-04:00

If anniversaries of terrible occasions are good for anything, they help us focus on not just the event in question, but its long aftermath. I continue to work with John Mutter, a Columbia University professor who studies the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The deep question has always been: how do you fully quantify, or even qualify, the effects of such a disaster? Dr. Mutter's work has focused on direct and indirect deaths, but he takes in the pain of survivors as well, be it PTSD or other mental health issues, knowing that these consequences must be accounted for, or at least witnessed -- that the human toll must be recognized as more than the initial death count and whatever insurance companies have declared lost.

Yet, a full accounting of the emotional toll can feel unattainable. As New Orleans federal judge Ivan L.R. Lemelle puts it: "For those who did not lose a loved one, a home, personal family keepsakes, photos, a business or other collateral losses, it's hard imagining the impact of our losses. Harder still is trying to express the emotional suffering in meaningful terms." In my experience, even those who can articulate their suffering may choose not to, afraid of re-traumatizing themselves or their loved ones.

Columbia University researchers have endeavored to tally some of the toll, at least for children, in their newly released report "Children as Bellwethers of Recovery: Dysfunctional Systems and the Effects of Parents, Households, and Neighborhoods." They find that 37% of Katrina children have had a clinical mental health diagnosis of depression, anxiety, or a behavioral disorder and that they are nearly five times as likely as a pre-Katrina cohort to exhibit serious emotional disturbance. Reading their conclusions, one simple statement says it all: "Children and youth are particularly vulnerable to the effects of disasters."

Indeed: children show us the damage, be it a catastrophe in the community, or a deep crisis within the home. Sometimes they show us with behavior. Sometimes they show us with their faces, especially if they have not had much opportunity to heal.

Which takes me back to Houston, post-Katrina. On September 9th, 2005, a group of us writers who taught for Writers in the Schools volunteered at the George R. Brown Convention Center. This wasn't the Superdome. This wasn't even the Astrodome. The cavernous shoebox of a building in downtown Houston was filled with evacuees, but it was as organized and orderly as could be. Later, I would interview shelter manager Lt. Col. Rick Noriega (and later U.S. Senate candidate) for my Katrina oral history project, so impressed as I was by the loving clockwork of his operations. Many people and organizations were volunteering in some capacity, and we were there to help the kids write about their experiences.

Upstairs we went, to a ballroom dedicated to children's activities. The room bustled with children and parents. They were black, brown and white. All were evacuees. Some played games, some worked with volunteers. Some looked adjusted, making the best of it. Some did not.

Jamal. This is the child whose face I can't forget. I didn't even work with him, just saw him with my friend, filmmaker Sharon Ferranti as she sat with him that late afternoon. This is what she would write of the experience:

He did not smile. He was not interested. It's just that there was nothing else to do. Jamal sat next to me on the floor of the George R. Brown Convention Center. I was there with other WITS writers to lead a writing workshop for the kids. We were having trouble drumming up participants, and one of the writers was telling a story to get their attention. A half a dozen little girls came right over. Around six or eight years old, they were more easily distracted by the promise of a "scary" story.

Jamal listened, as best he could. He was restless and rocked back and forth on his heels. He was African American and couldn't have been more than nine. He wore jeans, tennis shoes, a donated tee-shirt. There was nothing unusual about his appearance. He was wiry and strong. His face, however, stays with me. His face was aged. Noticeably. He had a look in his eyes that made him seem thirty-five. I kept looking over at him as the story wound to its end. It was anger mixed with fatigue. That is what filled his eyes and gave his face a disturbing maturity.

After the story, which he pronounced flatly "not scary," Jamal walked with me over to a round table we'd commandeered for our workshop. We'd brought blank notebooks, drawing paper, pens, and pencils. We thought we'd help them get started on a journal if they were interested. The little girls happily began to decorate their notebooks and describe their experiences to the other writers. Jamal did not smile. He was not interested. It's just that there was nothing else to do.

I asked him question after question to try to get him started. Was he from New Orleans? "Yes." Was he here with family? "Yes." Who was he here with? "His mother and little sister." Was it scary?... long pause... "Was what scary?"... (He still does not look at me. He never made eye contact with me the entire time we talked.)

The storm? Was the storm scary?

(he waited)

"No."

I was going to give up. I was prepared to fail. The room--the city--the entire hurricane Katrina thing--was so steeped in the impossible; what difference could one more failure possibly make?

Then he started to talk. He was not going to write; I could tell. So I grabbed a pen and opened his journal and took dictation.

"We were driving around and around. It was me and my mom and my little sister and my mom's boyfriend. We were driving around and around and then we went in a circle and my mom started to get mad. It was hot and she was yelling and he was yelling and we just kept driving around and around. And it was getting dark. I think we were lost. We finally made it to my grandma's and picked her up."

At this point, the chronology of his story becomes confused. I am not sure whether the next event happened that night or the next day or the following day. It did not matter to Jamal.

"They pointed a gun at my grandmother and told her to get on the bus. And she had a stroke."

Then he starts to cry. He doesn't know where his grandmother is. He doesn't know if she's alive. He doesn't cry long. When the few tears stop, he looks around the table. He sees the other kids are doing some drawing. He picks up some colored pencils. He doesn't smile. He is not interested. It's just that there's nothing else to do.

I still remember Jamal's face. I remember how I thought to myself that he looked like students I had worked with before. Boys in my Third Ward school, but also in Detroit schools. Stand apart boys. Boys that resisted my lessons, rejected my entreaties that they participate, no matter how thorough the lesson, no matter how playfully, or sternly I asked. Boys I'd pushed and pulled, until it was a tug-of-war, because I wouldn't take no for answer. Boys I sometimes turned away from as "manipulative" for having taking up so much of my time, and leaving no writing to show for it.

Then Sharon told us Jamal's story. I know we all felt heartache and rage at the same time. No boy or girl should have to live through that! Then I realized Jamal was teaching me something crucial. Hearing his story, I understood immediately why Jamal's eyes looked so dark and opaque, why his face felt closed like a door. I thought back to the "stubborn" boys and girls I'd worked with, and how so many of them looked like this. Now, I associated that look with those who had something precious and unreturnable snatched from their lives. Some of those kids had seen violent death. Some lived with violence, still. While they may not have endured Katrina specifically, they endured other kinds of home wreckage.

The Columbia University report shows that Katrina kids still need our help. They need it at 5x the rate of their peers. But their peers need it, too. We need systemic repair, but we must be on the look-out ourselves for those troubled and "trouble" kids, the ones who show us the effects of disaster on a daily basis. We should look for ways to offer some relief, or if possible, mentorship and guidance. Sharon did it by listening and recording a boy's story. What is it that you are gifted to do?

In Haiti Response, Obama Administration Rising to the Moment

2010-01-14T16:19:04-05:00

Strong words. Decisive action. A promise of "unwavering support" followed up directly by the might of the United States government. In an emergency, for us and for our neighbors, this is how we hope our government will respond. On Day 4 of the Haitian earthquake catastrophe, this is how the Obama Administration is responding. Not only are they making our nation proud, they are showing us that we are in good hands if such calamity hits us at home.

On Thursday, the President promised a first installment of $100 million in aid, and gave us this update:

I can report that the first waves of our rescue and relief workers are on the ground and at work. A survey team worked overnight to identify priority areas for assistance, and shared the results of that review throughout the United States government, and with international partners who are also sending support. Search and rescue teams are actively working to save lives. Our military has secured the airport and prepared it to receive the heavy equipment and resources that are on the way, and to receive them around the clock, 24 hours a day. An airlift has been set up to deliver high-priority items like water and medicine. And we're coordinating closely with the Haitian government, the United Nations, and other countries who are also on the ground.

Just as reassuring was Secretary Clinton's declaration that "we have a full court press going on here." And that American aid efforts would be "long-term."

Monday evening, I wrote the blog post "Obama's Haiti Moment." While our leaders said they were observing and planning, it was hard to tell just how quickly they would mobilize resources, on what kind of scale, and with what level of commitment. Now they are showing us. The President said that he "made it clear that Haiti must be a top priority" for our military, for our diplomatic and development agencies and departments. This is what a President must convey if our assistance is going to be maximized and not squandered.

Just as reassuring was Secretary Clinton's Today Show declaration that "we have a full court press going on here." And that American aid efforts would be "long-term."

This is the kind of leadership that inspires confidence in the hearts, in the bones, of Americans that have worried that in true times of national crisis, no one is at the wheel.

This is the kind of leadership that shows us that our Katrina response was not inevitable. That we can do better now and in the future.

The Obama Administration is showing the world that we know how to use our power for good, in a timely manner, in a way concerned with saving lives and creating stability. With President Obama, Secretary Clinton and Special Envoy for Haiti President Clinton at the helm, we are being shown that we have the kind of team that can truly assist the resilient Haitian people in these daunting days, months, and years ahead.

However, it is up to us to keep letting our leaders know that we care, that after two weeks we won't have disaster fatigue. I encourage you all to write the White House and your representatives, to post online as well, and let them know how you feel about aid to Haiti, and how we treat immigrant Haitians stateside. The more they know that we prioritize assistance to our neighbor in need, the more support they will feel, the better the chance we will continue to offer meaningful help.

www.stacyparkeraab.com

Obama's Haiti Moment

2010-01-13T14:30:49-05:00

Governing is a grind. Look no further than health care reform to know that what soared as rhetoric can look like confetti on the floor once the House and Senate get a hold of it. Easy for the cynic to believe that it doesn't matter who sits in the White House, that the entrenched powers will always block progress for the common good.

I once thought this was the case. I worked in the White House in the 1990s, back when Washington was obsessed with "the politics of personal destruction." Back when the push-back against the smallest of President Clinton's initiatives could give you a concussion. In the darkest of times, I wondered if smart, progressive people were wasting their time serving in government, because they would only be soured, and they'd never achieve their big dreams.

Cut to Katrina. Like the rest of the nation, I watched my TV screen and could not understand how every system of government -- city, state, federal -- could fail in the ways it did. I didn't buy the excuses about whose responsibilities were whose. In my mind it didn't matter. If city and state couldn't handle, then the feds should have taken charge. I thought back to my old colleagues. I thought back to our previous president. There was simply no way that anyone I had worked for would not have felt personal responsibility to make things as right as possible. In the White House I knew, the federal government would have stepped in fast, without hesitation, with the clear mandate to save lives.

After Katrina, I realized once and for all that you can't get so upset with politics as to disengage. There's too much at stake for us, for your neighbors, for the vulnerable in our midst.

I support President Obama because I know, now and forever, that it matters who leads us. I have trusted his judgment, and I have never doubted his compassion. I know that his staff works 18 hours a day to make his ideals reality. Even if our president fails to deliver on all of his big promises, his administration makes a thousand decisions a day that affect us all.

This brings me to Haiti.

For the last hours, I've read the coverage, and watched as friends on Facebook and Twitter have asked all of us to pray for those who are suffering through Haiti's recent earthquake. These are friends who have family there. These are friends who simply care. That is a rightful thing for us to do, for I believe prayer and intentions can sway outcomes.

But what is the White House doing? According to the NYT, the White House, the State Department, USAID, and the US Southern Command are "monitoring" the situation and have "[begun] work to coordinate an assessment." The president said we are positioned to offer humanitarian help if necessary. While this sounds hopeful, I hope their efforts don't remain watch-and-see for much longer. I have never lived through such a traumatic earthquake, but I would imagine that if I were in rubble right now, I would hope that the assessors could get their logistics in order and offer help on the ground -- fast.

Now is a crucial moment for Obama administration to show us, and the world, why it actually matters who runs the US Government. We can help care for the injured. We can help rebuild the hospital that has been reportedly destroyed. We can deliver food and water. We can do it right now. It's humbling how far our resources can go when we actually want to deliver.

I hope our president and his administration can spare us the tragedy of another black population left to fend for itself after a horrible disaster. While the affected may not be US citizens, they are US neighbors. Their stability and health affects our stability and health. As we wait to see how the White House reacts, here's hoping that his men and women are finding every way they can to turn his words into action, so we can assist the devastated in the poorest nation of our hemisphere.

www.stacyparkeraab.com