New England Review

Behind the Byline

Alyssa Pelish

NER fiction reader Mary Tharin speaks with Alyssa Pelish, whose story “Paleontology” appears in NER 43.1, about excavations, the unknowability of others, and embodied characters.

Mary Tharin: “Paleontology” begins with the painstaking excavation of the largest dinosaur ever uncovered. When I re-read those first paragraphs, it struck me that writers are constantly engaging in their own excavations, uncovering memories and distilling experiences to use in their fiction. Was that on your mind when you started this story?

Alyssa Pelish: I like that observation! That connection, though, wasn’t so much on my mind when I started the story. I had visited the dinosaur wing of the American Museum of Natural History, and I was taken by those signs that continually advise museum goers of the limits of paleontology: what we can’t in fact know about these creatures despite all the careful excavation. That continual admission seemed haunting to me—beautiful and haunting. And it made me think of the limits to what one can ever know about anyone else’s experience.

But then, of course, those museum signs no doubt also attracted my attention because I do spend so much time in that mode of excavation you describe.

MT: The story explores the limits of these excavations: the fact that we can never fully know others, or even ourselves. The narrator is vexed by these limits, and as a reader I sympathized with her. It made me wonder, though, what is behind our need to know so much about each other? What’s so frightening about the alternative?

AP: It’s a really good question. A misguided quest for intimacy? Fear of solipsism?

Miscommunication surfaces in various ways throughout the stories I write. For me, I think this recurring theme stems in part from an old, old fear of being misunderstood—and maybe working to understand others became a way of reassuring myself that I, too, could be understood, that some kind of connection could be forged.

There are, no doubt, other explanations.

I’ve been both fascinated and horrified by stories whose narrators show either an utter lack of regard for someone else’s interiority or a dangerous obsession with it. I’m thinking here of Humbert Humbert’s “safely solipsizing” Lolita, as well as Proust’s narrator’s obsession with what Albertine does when he’s not there, what he can never know about her. In either instance, the other person remains entirely unknowable. (That single, passing moment when it occurs to Humbert that he doesn’t know a thing about Lolita’s mind, that within this girl he calls Lolita there might be “a garden and a twilight”—but that he is incapable of knowing them.)

In a more heartening direction, the way the so-called problem of other minds gets handled in To the Lighthouse is soothing to me. Lily Briscoe first imagines that there exist, “in the chambers of the mind and heart” of Mrs. Ramsey, “tablets bearing sacred inscriptions,” which, if deciphered, could teach her everything she longs to know about this woman. But then Lily realizes that such information is not actually what she’s longing for: what she desires is “nothing that could be written in any language known to men”; what she desires, really, is “intimacy itself.” She recognizes that what she’s longing for is not is not an exhaustive inventory of the contents of another person’s mind. What she’s longing for is a sense of connection. It’s an idea that gets developed later in the novel, when we see how Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey understand each other not because of a strong intellectual connection but because of their shared intimacy. In that scene between them, hardly any verbal language is necessary. “She had not said it: yet he knew.”

That’s not where my narrator ends up. She’s not there yet. She’s made the mistake of thinking that knowing what her son is thinking (finding the inscribed tablets in the chambers of his mind) is the only way toward intimacy with him.

There’s a moment in that classic Thomas Nagel essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat,” that I find similarly soothing. Nagel concludes that, just because our means of apprehending the world won’t ever allow us to understand the subjective experience of being a bat doesn’t mean that bats (or any other creatures) don’t have experiences as rich as those of our own. This observation strikes me as a way of granting others a quiet dignity. There’s a garden within them, a twilight, that can just exist without our quantifying it. Maybe that’s closer to where my narrator ends up.

MT: The narrator of your story is a playwright and her husband is an actor. Is theater important to you? Has it influenced your writing?

AP: Hmmm. I’ve lived in New York for the past eleven years and have a good friend with a theater background, so I’ve certainly watched more theater and thought more about it than in any other period of my life. So, it’s there. But I don’t think of it as a big influence on my writing.

Theater emerged in this story because the narrator privileges talking as a means of knowing other people. It made sense for her to be a playwright who creates dialogues that, when performed, amount to a kind of wish fulfillment. The other elements of theater in this story then readily grew out of that: the self-excavation the Method allows, the skepticism about the correspondence between interiority and behavior that acting implies, and so on. I suppose that, in some ways, I’m interested in writing fiction as a kind of performance, as a means of inhabiting other roles while never being able to completely leave my own perspective behind.

There’s also the fact that, as a writer and reader, I love encountering a character’s interiority on the page. Where a character’s mind goes when they’re doing something in the physical world: the memories and free associations and reflections that arise, the way their particular perspective colors what they’re noticing in that physical world. Theater, of course, doesn’t allow such ready access to a character’s interiority. But that constraint has made me think more about how my characters are embodied, especially when and how to locate them in the physical space of a dialogue. So, for instance, instead of always using speech tags (she said, he asked), I like to experiment with attaching a line of dialogue to a relevant physical description (a facial expression, an action, a tone of voice) of the character or of the space. Thinking of my characters as embodied—as a particular body in a particular space—also becomes part of figuring out what they’ll do or think or feel next.

MT: The “Method” is presented in the story as a way for actors to tap into the essence of emotion. It struck me that this could be useful for writers of fiction as well. Did you have experience with the Method before writing this story? Is it a tool you yourself have used to deepen your storytelling?

AP: I actually knew very little about the Method before I began working on this story. But as I researched it, it did occur to me that it’s not unlike what I do when searching for a way to describe a given character’s perceptions and emotional reactions. Of course I want to be careful not to lend my own emotional and sensory memories to a character where it’s not relevant. But once I’ve figured out how a character should react, I definitely do some excavation of my own. So, no, I’ve never used the Method in any formal way, but writing this story made me more aware of the (lower case) methods I do use.

MT: The story contains snippets of plays that explore how words can be used to establish connection, but can also be meaningless or difficult to find. In the narrator’s play, Talking Board, two sisters use a Ouija board to confront difficult questions; while in The Bald Soprano, absurd dialogue is used to highlight the emptiness of small talk. The narrator seems to feel that words are tools essential to the project of uncovering truth and meaning, while her husband and son put less value and expectation on words. Did you aim to present both sides? Do you, ultimately, lean in one direction?

AP: I’m not sure that I present both sides equally: we see everything from the narrator’s perspective, and she’s so tethered to knowing the world through verbal language that, even when she’s made to reconsider that approach, she only comes to accept what she can’t know—not to consider what might be illuminating about other ways of knowing. It’s possible that comes next for her, but I was most interested in telling the story of her grappling with the limits of what she can know.

Mary Tharin is a fiction reader for NER. Her short stories have appeared in Sixfold, Five on the Fifth, and Collective Realms, among others. A native of California, she now lives in Italy where she teaches English.

Behind the Byline

Alice Greenway

Mary Tharin talks with Alice Greenway (above), author of the novella “Past Perfect” from NER 42.3, about the theme of uprootedness, the problem of the “white savior,” and the importance of holding back and listening.

Mary Tharin: One of the many themes woven through this novella is the sense of being uprooted. The asylum seekers in the camp have been forced to flee from their homes, while the narrator is facing an uprooting in her family life. Did you set out to write a story around this theme, or did the theme emerge from the subject of the refugee camp?

Alice Greenway: I believe I set out with this theme. Uprootedness is a fact of my life and part of what led me to volunteer on Samos. My father was a foreign correspondent and my family moved seven times when I was growing up before we returned to the US. Culture shock and uprootedness are states I know well and I naturally empathize with people of similar backgrounds. The things I don’t know and have not experienced personally are the trauma of being forced to flee, as the Saleems do in the story; the desperation of feeling unwelcome in the place where you seek safety (a place you might have idealized); and the cruel irony that, after making the heartbreaking decision to flee and surviving a dangerous journey across land and sea, your right to move and travel is then taken away from you. And you are caged up in a place very like a prison.

MT: I was struck by the line where the narrator, Nat, describes herself as “longing to save someone.” It reveals, to an extent, what drew her to volunteer at a camp. But the wording is so strong that it seems to speak to something deeper. How do you view this deep need to help? Are external forces prompting her to act, or is she responding to something more personal and internal?

AG: I distinctly remember my own impatient desire when I first arrived on Samos to immediately start saving people. What becomes clear is that Nat, like many volunteers, is also saving herself. Also that the refugees she meets have more to teach her, than she them.

The phrase raises the complicated issue of the white savior. There were American students applying to volunteer in Samos who were so torn up about subconscious motivation and possible harm they might cause that their applications read like a tortured list of reasons why not to act. Robert, in the story, expresses one extreme when he accuses Nat of collusion and argues that total breakdown is the only way to force change. 

My own experience was that treating people with kindness and respect and dignity and simply providing communal and educational activities when people were stuck in limbo for such a long time was helpful. Connection is good. So is saving oneself. As I get older, I hope I’m learning to restrain my desire to rush in and save and am learning instead to hold back and listen. 

MT: Shabnaz is such a strong character; authentic, vivacious, and very much herself despite the circumstances. The relationship between Shabnaz and the narrator in large part drives the story, as I read it. Do you agree? What do these two women have to teach each other? 

AG: The friendship between Shabnaz and Nat is the heart of the story. I honestly don’t know what the narrator has to teach Shabnaz. Certainly not the verb tenses! I’d have to rewrite the story from Shabnaz’s point of view to really know what Nat has to teach. They like each other but that is not teaching. What Shabnaz exemplifies for Nat is the power of the will to survive and a woman’s fierce desire and ability to protect her family, which includes both her children and her husband. An unabashed female strength and humor.

MT: Refugees as are often presented in the news as a nameless, faceless group. But the characters in your story are all individuals, with distinct personalities and backgrounds, who are all dealing with their circumstances in unique ways. Was it your intention to write a story that would encourage readers to engage with these characters as complex individuals? 

AG: I began my childhood in Hong Kong when there was a great surge of refugees from Mainland China fleeing the Cultural Revolution and later came the “boat people” from Vietnam. Refugees were very present and they all had faces. In fact the majority of Hong Kong people are descendants of refugees. So no, I don’t think that was a motivation for me. It was more journalistic. I wanted to capture what it was like on Samos at that particular time both at the refugee camp and for volunteers. Things changed quickly. Conditions in the camp got much worse and more overcrowded to the point where tents and makeshift shelters sprawled out over the hillside (as in 1960s and ’70s Hong Kong). When the Greek government took over management of the camp, they closed it off to volunteers and observers—though anyone could walk through the “jungle” all around and see how broken the camp was. 

I remember refugees telling me—if only the Greeks and UNHCR and others could learn to employ refugee talent. There are so many teachers and carpenters and doctors and cooks in the camp—if only this talent could be welcomed and nourished and put to use. The camp could have become a multicultural haven. Tourists might now be flooding into the town of Vathy to sample its vibrant Afghan, Syrian, Algerian, and Congolese restaurants and music. Instead it remains a down-at-the-heels port with a “refugee problem.”

MT: What is the current status of the camp on Samos? 

AG: This fall, the Greek government moved refugees to a new, modern, more sterile camp far from the port and studded with floodlights, barbed wire, and cameras. Bravely and stalwartly Samos Volunteers, the NGO I volunteered with, has constructed a new base right up against this prison, where they still provide classes and social activity and friendship. 

Many of the young volunteers who traveled to Samos for a month to help have wound up dedicating their lives to this cause, becoming social workers, teachers, human rights or immigration lawyers, and learning Arabic and Dari and Pashto. I take off my hat to each one. It’s a way I would have liked to have spent my life. Selfishly, I remain a part-time, nomadic scribbler.

Read an excerpt from the novella here.

Mary Tharin is a fiction reader for NER. Her short stories have appeared in Sixfold, Five on the Fifth, and Collective Realms, among others. A native of California, she now lives in Italy where she teaches English.

Behind the Byline

Matthew Lansburgh

Matthew Lansburgh talks with Malka Daskal about nonlinear narratives, friendship, and the inspiration behind the characters in “Hasina,” published in NER 42.1.

Malka Daskal: “Hasina” opens at a remove of “two-plus decades” from the events of the primary plot, which allows Stewart to consider his relationship with Hasina from a detached distance, one with the benefit of extensive therapy. Was this story always structured as a retrospective narrative? At what point did you determine that Stewart’s and Hasina’s paths would cross again via social media?

Matthew Lansburgh: The basic structure of the story—as well as the use of the retrospective narrative stance—did provide the spine for the first draft. It was one of those wonderful, rare instances when a story came to me (more or less) fully formed. As is quite common when I write stories, the initial draft emerged quickly during a feverish spell, and then I put the pages aside for several months and came back to them with fresh eyes. This allowed me to see areas where I’d rushed through scenes and needed to flesh things out, and other areas that needed revision. I tend to work on writing projects iteratively: I write in bursts, put drafts aside, then return with—hopefully—a new perspective. This process can take years to complete. The final section of the story always included the interaction via Facebook, but the ending was much shorter and less developed than it is in the published version.

MD: The principal characters in your story, Stewart and Hasina (not to mention Stewart’s mother, Heike), are so meticulously rendered, they seem to spring fully formed off the page. Where did you find inspiration for these convincing characters and how do you decide which details to include and which to omit when writing for authenticity?

ML: I’m so glad you think they’re convincing! Stewart and Heike are characters I’ve worked with, on and off, for a long time. On the other hand, Hasina isn’t a character I’ve worked with before. She is, I suppose, an amalgam of various people I’ve known over the years.

My goal in writing the story was to explore the ways that friendships can evolve over time. I’m interested in how people can form incredibly close bonds and then grow apart (and, in some instances, reconnect years later). One of the best things about growing older is that I’m now able to see the trajectory of my life—and my relationships—in a way that I couldn’t when I was younger. I used to think about friendships in binary terms: X person is a close friend, or X person isn’t a friend; I love Y, or I dislike Y. Over time, I’ve come to realize that most friendships are complicated and multifaceted. X can be a close friend in some, but not all, circumstances. X can be someone I can trust to keep a secret and look to for support if I’m going through a period of work stress, but if I tell X about a fight I had with my boyfriend, I need to watch out, because X will probably try to hook up with him behind my back! Friendships can be the source of so many emotions we experience: love and joy and passion; frustration, disappointment, and anger.

I’m guessing most people learn this early on in their lives. This is often how people feel about their siblings or other people in their family. But I grew up as an only child and my relationship with my parents was defined by extremes. I tended to categorize the world in simplistic terms: things were either good or bad, safe or dangerous, trustworthy or untrustworthy. I suppose that, as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to accept that most relationships are complicated and can’t be seen through a single lens.

MD: One of the most intriguing choices made in the crafting of this story is your divulgence of major plot points out of sequence—Hasina’s alleged betrayal, Geshna’s suicide, Hasina’s casual abandonment in Baja. These events are disclosed nonlinearly and then expanded upon later in the narrative. The effect makes for a hypnotic manipulation of time as well as compelling reading. Can you tell us more about your process of revealing and withholding information to create narrative momentum?

ML: This question fills me with tremendous excitement and joy! Thank you for asking it.

Like most writers, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to generate suspense and narrative momentum; and, like most writers, I find it hard to pull off. I’ve studied and taught many stories with this very question in mind—especially Alice Munro’s “Runaway,” in which she creates mystery and suspense out of small (seemingly insignificant) facts and narrative elements. From the first paragraph, she withholds key information to great strategic effect.

I’ve probably studied that story twenty times, and each time I’m in awe of how Munro turns the mundane into something mysterious and electric. Part of the way she achieves this effect is through her masterful use of time. I’m quite certain that—even if unconsciously—“Hasina” is borrowing some of these narrative tricks. Having you comment on my use of time and the way I withhold information to create narrative momentum is thrilling for me, because these are techniques I admire not just in Munro’s work but in the work of many of my favorite writers.

MD: At the heart of “Hasina” is the power dynamic between Hasina and Stewart. In the final paragraph, Stewart chooses not to Google Hasina because it would “give her more power than she deserves,” but, of course, the choice not to Google her gives her power as well, as does his mounting excitement while waiting for her phone call. It seems Stewart, for all the years and therapy, cannot quite break free of Hasina’s power—his actions and inactions determined by her influence. What do you think it is that Stewart admires so much about Hasina? Do you think Stewart’s infatuation with Hasina in some ways mirrors Heike’s clinging dependence on him?

ML: I’m intrigued by the idea that Stewart’s infatuation with Hasina might somehow mirror Heike’s dependence on Stewart. I hadn’t seen this possible connection or thought about this parallel. Of course, it makes sense that, as much as Stewart resists his mother and judges her, he does also mirror aspects of her personality. I certainly have noticed this in my own relationship with my mother.

As for what Stewart admires about Hasina, this isn’t something I’ve thought about either. I’m guessing he admires her confidence. I see her as someone who spends less time in her head than Stewart does—someone who doesn’t second-guess herself all the time.

MD: At first reading, I was appalled by Hasina’s actions and believed her to be heartless, someone reveling in her power to shock and wound others. But after giving it some thought and rereading, I feel a greater sense of sympathy for her and wonder if her actions are not more indicative of a sense of insecurity, of genuine pain over Stewart’s lack of reciprocated feelings. Do you have sympathy for Hasina? Was your intention for the reader to view her with compassion?

ML: I love the fact that you’re seeing sides of these characters I hadn’t thought about previously. It means, perhaps, that I’ve done my job as a writer by creating multidimensional characters who evoke a range of reactions in readers.

I must admit I don’t find anything about Hasina appalling—everything she does makes sense to me, even leaving Stewart behind in Baja California. I’ve always felt tremendous sympathy for her. Indeed, she embodies impulses I very much identify with. (I hope that doesn’t make me come off as too much of a psychopath!)

MD: “Hasina” captures the impressionable quality of young adults experiencing life on campus, their bid for independence and forging of identities in opposition to authority. The intensity of Stewart and Hasina’s friendship is distinctive to that place and time of life. Was your writing influenced by other literature featuring college-aged characters?

ML: Not that I’m aware of. I don’t think I’ve read much about college-aged characters I’ve found extremely compelling. I suppose I tend to be more interested in people who’ve been knocked around by the passage of time—people who’ve faced more setbacks and accumulated more wounds. (There are, of course, many exceptions. I find Nabokov’s Dolores Haze and J.D. Salinger’s younger characters, for example, fascinating and marvelous.)

MD: Stewart and Heike are characters from your linked short story collection Outside Is the Ocean, winner of the 2017 Iowa Short Fiction Award. How did writing a series of linked stories better serve the narrative than a more traditional novel form? What challenges and opportunities did you encounter by choosing to structure your book in this way? Can we expect to see more stories about Stewart and Heike in the future?

ML: When I first started writing fiction, I didn’t set out to write a book. Writing a book felt too daunting and ambitious. My goal was simply to learn how to write a short story. Gradually, over time, as I began to work with Stewart and Heike as characters, I found myself becoming obsessed—with who they were, and what motivated them, and what fueled their dysfunctional relationship. (Full disclosure: Though my stories about Stewart and Heike are fiction, elements in this work are inspired by my relationship with my mother.)

I found writing about Heike and Stewart incredibly cathartic and therapeutic, and, over time, I realized that I was amassing a corpus of work that might be shaped into a novel-in-stories. The idea that I was working on a book didn’t occur to me until several years into the process. Outside Is the Ocean has a bit of a kaleidoscopic feel. As in “Hasina,” my use of time in the book isn’t linear. I guess that allowing myself to learn about the relationship between Stewart and his mother through narratives that occur at various moments in time allowed me to tackle a project that might otherwise have felt too intimidating to take on.

As for your last question, yes, I am continuing to write about Stewart and Heike! I’ve spent the past few years working on a novel—provisionally entitled The Miraculous—that has nothing to do with them, but, recently, I’ve been writing more stories about them and am considering writing a novel that examines how Stewart’s relationship with his mother changes after she dies: If she were to come back from the dead to visit Stewart, would his attitude toward her be different? Would they be able to break free of the conflict they experienced when they were both alive? What would happen if Stewart died and went to heaven? How would their dynamic change in an entirely different world/setting?

MD: Can you tell us more about the new novel you’re currently working on? Was it a challenge or a relief (or, perhaps, both) to populate your work with new characters?

ML: It’s about a woman (Klara Ozoliņa) from a small town in Latvia who is born with wings. People believe her town was cursed, centuries earlier, when a hermaphrodite was burned at the stake, and the book falls squarely into the realm of magic realism. In the novel, Klara emigrates to the United States as a mail-order bride and is disappointed to learn, when she arrives, that the man she’s been corresponding with is neither wealthy nor handsome.

The book explores the themes of fitting in and marginalization and what it means to belong. (These are themes I notice myself revisiting in a lot of my work, but it’s been fun to explore them through characters who are completely different from Heike and Stewart.) As for how Klara materialized, I’m not sure I know the answer. Many years ago, I wrote a scene about a woman with wings who was bawdy and irreverent, and even though that project never gained traction, the character stayed with me…

Matthew Lansburgh‘s collection of linked stories, Outside Is the Ocean (University of Iowa Press, 2017), won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 30th Annual Lambda Literary Award and the 2018 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. His fiction has appeared in journals such as One Story, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, Alaska Quarterly Review, Guernica, and Epoch, and has been shortlisted in the Best American Short Stories series. Recent honors include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony.

Malka Daskal, a fiction reader for NER, received her master’s degree from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Kind Writers, december Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, and Adelaide and has been anthologized in The Bookends Review’s “Best of 2020.” Her short story “Symbology” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband and two sons.

Behind the Byline

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros talks with Megan Howell about her short story “Patriotic Sex” from her collection Una casa en los Catskills. Erin Goodman’s English translation of the story is available in NER 42.1.

Megan Howell: In “Patriotic Sex,” an Afro-Cuban woman reflects on her tumultuous relationship with Humbercito, a white Cuban American. Her allusions to slave barracks, sexual violence, and intergenerational trauma are more reminiscent of James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” or Gayle Jones’s Corregidora than, say, the euphemistic depictions of interracial sex in shows like Always a Witch and Escrava Isaura. At the same time, she’s not a complete victim; she has agency, going out of her way to seek out Humbertico.

I’m wondering how you were able to make the protagonist free-willed while also showing that a violent, terrible history is influencing her actions. How do you write about the intersections between sexual liberation and anti-Blackness in a meaningful way that doesn’t feel fetishistic?

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros: The answer is in the flesh. The flesh does not lie.

I am always suspicious of grandiloquence, of all attempts to explain a phenomenon, a feeling, especially our emotions, with only words. I know, it seems paradoxical, since, as a writer and a scholar, words are my tools. And, perhaps, this extreme familiarity with words is what prevents me from trusting them.

Aware of the impossibility of words—and the discourses woven with them—to properly express our experience, I seek to convey the unspeakable, which silently lies in the flesh. That’s why I called these “stories written from the flesh and for the flesh.” That was the leading thread when I was writing the stories included in my first book, Una casa en los Catskills [A House in the Catskills], in which the Spanish version of “Patriotic Sex” was first published, in San Juan (Puerto Rico) and Havana (Cuba).

Everything I have been writing since the publication of this book continues to explore the Black experience, particularly the Black female experience in the Americas.

Thus, under the title “Con tinta negra” [With Black Ink], goes one of my current projects, a biweekly column I write for OnCuba News, in which I gather my intimate reactions—trying to keep the writing as close to the flesh as possible—through my daily experiences. There, I teach, I walk, I love, I read, I hate, I suffer, I cry, I laugh, I am attacked and loved and misunderstood and forgotten as a human being with black flesh, which, everywhere in the Americas, means that my experience today is linked to the enslavement of my ancestors and subsequent anti-Black racism.

When I am teaching, I have to use facts, dates, well-constructed arguments. In my stories, I find the freedom to allow my flesh to talk. And I believe this is what keeps the stories from falling into that fetishism you are talking about.

MH: In many ways, your story is one of contrasts. It juxtaposes New York with Cuba; Cuban Americans with cubiches; black with white; violence with pleasure; Soviet boarding schools with a commodified, Americanized replica of a Cuban ghetto; femininity with machismo, etc. The protagonist reflects on these conflicts without explicitly saying which ones are preferable. Do you think she’s resigned? Or is she still searching for what she wants?

OCC: She is not resigned. She is not searching either. She just goes beyond the excluding polarities, the juxtapositions.

The protagonist of “Patriotic Sex” is not in the either/or dichotomy, discarded, for instance, by the Black feminist conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady. Instead, and like O’Grady, my character follows the infinite possibilities offered in the “both/and” logic, which actually gives title to her latest show, at the Brooklyn Museum. (Don’t dare to miss it if you are around, it’s exquisite.)

Why should she express her preference between concepts, institutions, and ways of thinking that, ultimately, have not been conceived to make her thrive but, rather, to systemically exclude her, as a Black Latina of Cuban origins? She does not fit in any of these structures: she is constantly shifting between them, ungraspable and slippery like a snake, maybe a little bit venomous as well. And she likes that. She prefers to be a monster rather than feel victimized.

MH: The protagonist describes herself as being “not a political animal” even though her thoughts and mere existence are deeply political. Do you think she’s wrong? Or does being political require actively participating in political revolutions and reading up on geopolitics?

OCC: Everything is political, even the unspoken expression of the flesh. But I believe there is a way of being political that doesn’t involve getting immersed in a simplistic scheme, in which everyone repeats, without thinking, the same ideas, taken from social media, dictated by obscure gurus and old politicians. This is the political plot she is trying to avoid: the superficial repetition of slogans and old mantras that unfortunately shape the leading conversations about Cuba today, in which there are, again, only two mutually exclusive sides. Two ways of being Cuban and thinking about Cuba, in favor or against the island’s regime, in favor or against the US embargo, without the possibility of introducing nuances. Each of them determined to win over the other, without concessions. Withdrawing herself from this never-ending game becomes her way of adopting another political stance—a nonconventional one, in which possibilities multiply and a real conversation would be possible. But Humbertico/Andy is too embedded in these binaries, and the conversation is precluded by a Fidel Castro–like speech that convinces our protagonist to seek pleasure, listening to her lover’s naked flesh, rather than his Manichean monologue.

MH: Rather than forming her political opinions after telling readers so much about herself, the protagonist leaves both Andy and the entire narrative for Starbucks. Do you think her passivity is sustainable for a Black woman living in America? Is the story’s ending a coda? Or a small break in her life before the next racial upheaval?

OCC: I don’t think she is passive. Passive would be to fall into Humbertico/Andy’s narrative. Instead, she acts. She knows what she wants, which is to have good sex. She gets it, avoids supporting his monologue or confronting him, and then she leaves. All that matters is her satisfaction, and this is an extremely radical position for a Black woman in the Americas. Our bodies have, since enslavement, been used, objectified, raped, discarded, exterminated. The protagonist takes agency and ownership over her body and her desire. She is her own master, and her actions do not satisfy the expectations of her white lover or most readers. Just her own.

MH: There’s been a recent resurgence of interest in socialism, especially among young Americans online. I’ve noticed that many of them do a poor job of reckoning with race when discussing a subject as nuanced as Third World socialism. On the one hand are neoliberals who continue to demonize countries like Cuba for eliminating very exploitative, corrupt, extractive economic systems that benefited only an elite (i.e., white) few. And on the other are leftists who believe that socialism is postracial. As someone who writes extensively on the myth of Cuba’s postraciality, do you believe that this new wave of socialist thinkers is less or more open to Black voices?

OCC: This is subject to their position in regards to racialization here in the United States. There is a lot of arrogance in both ranks; imperial views prevail among all of them. Again, we have these two poles that present themselves as radically divergent, although they might not be so different after all. If leftists and neoliberals allowed themselves to listen to voices coming from other contexts, particularly the voices from the Global South, the systemically silenced voices, maybe they would be able to more effectively tackle the problems they supposedly want to address. Concerning their openness to Black voices, it would require them to reflect on the White privilege that most have enjoyed and continue to enjoy. Only if they are genuinely acquiescent to doing that, and to reckoning with the fact that this is not so much a Black problem as a problem created and globally reproduced by the Eurocentric hegemony, a real talk on racialization might be possible.

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros is a Cuban-born writer, scholar, and Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of the short story collection Una Casa en Los Catskills [A House in the Catskills], published by La Secta de los Perros in 2011, she has also published a book of literary essays Utopía, distopía e ingravidez: Reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa post-soviética cubana [Utopia, Dystopia and Ethical Weightlessness: Cosmological Reconfigurations in post-Soviet Cuban Fiction] from Vervuert Verlagsgesellschaft in 2013. Focusing on the Afro-Latinx experience, she is currently completing several fiction and nonfiction book projects.

Megan Howell is a fiction reader for NER and a DC-based freelance writer. After graduating from Vassar College, she earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review and The Establishment  among other publications.

Categories