June 10, 2019 First Person Reimagining Masculinity By Ocean Vuong “No homo,” says the boy, barely visible in the room’s fading light, as he cradles my foot in his palms. He is kneeling before me—this 6’2” JV basketball second stringer—as I sit on his bed, my feet hovering above the shag. His head is bent so that the swirl in his crown shows, the sweat in the follicles catching the autumn dusk through the window. Anything is possible, we think, with the body. But not always with language. “No homo,” he says again before wrapping the ace bandage once, twice, three times around my busted ankle, the phrase’s purpose now clear to me: a password, an incantation, a get-out-of-jail-free card, for touch. For two boys to come this close to each other in a realm ruled by the nebulous yet narrow laws of American masculinity, we needed magic. No homo. The words free him to hold my foot with the care and gentleness of a nurse, for I had sprained my ankle half an hour earlier playing manhunt in the McIntosh orchard. We ran, our bodies silver in the quickening dark, teenagers playing at war. The boy—let’s call him K—had helped me up, my arm slung across his shoulder as I limped toward his house, which sat just across the orchard. The war is still going on around us, the other boys’ voices breaking through the brambles, and the larger war, the one in Afghanistan (for it is 2005), amplified what was at stake in the outer world, beyond the feeble sunset of childhood. No homo. I look away, as if it isn’t an ankle, but roadkill, in his hands. I scan the room instead, the walls lined with baseball trophies catching the streetlight outside, which has just flickered on. Do I find him handsome? Yes. Does it matter? No. “You’re really good at hiding,” he said to my foot, and though he meant at manhunt, he might as well have been talking about manhood. For isn’t that, too, a place I have hid both in and from at once? Read More
June 7, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bunnies, Berries, and Baffling Omissions By The Paris Review Mona Awad. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe. Mona Awad’s prose is dangerous. She crafts beautiful meals laced with poison; her new novel Bunny is a satirical glimpse into elite education that transforms a college into the deep, dark woods of a fairy tale. Set on the ivy-covered campus of Warren University, a monied institution gleaming at the heart of a poverty-stricken, crime-ridden city, Bunny follows the M.F.A. candidate Samantha Heather Mackey as she becomes entwined with four fellow writing students, a glittering, eerie group of women who call one another “Bunny.” The Bunnies lure Samantha into their mysterious Workshop, where “kill your darlings” is a literal practice, the creative process a twee but twisted game of playing god(dess). Awad’s words have shadows to them, dual meanings that she flexes in her surreal descriptions of the university’s faculty and in the academic jargon the Bunnies employ to justify their desires. And though Bunny is steeped in strange magic, real forces lurk throughout the novel, lying just past the confines of campus: poverty, gentrification, mental illness. The Bunnies’ creativity is equally driven by magic as it is by class; they “inherited it, like our summer houses, our grand pianos, our perfect, nuanced taste.” Awad captures the allure of these tastemakers, the desire to be part of a we, and the insidiousness that comes with power, a “necklace gleaming in the tall grass that could be a snake.” —Nikki Shaner-Bradford Read More
June 7, 2019 Summer Solstice In Summer We’re Reborn By Nina MacLaughlin In this series on the summer solstice, which will run every Friday through June 21, Nina MacLaughlin wonders what summer’s made of. Max Pechstein, Frische Brise, 1921 We start in the stars and move to the womb, which is to say water, which is to say swimming, which is the best part of summer. We’ll ease in. On the dawn of the summer solstice, rouse yourself from bed and head to the lawn or the field or the garden, kneel in the grass or the mulch, and with palms open, touch the grass or leaves or petals, get the damp on your hands, and put the wetness to your face. Power lives in the solstice dew—it gives youth, beauty, health, new glow. Especially true for maidens, it’s said, but all can take part. Take a dew bath in the solstice dawn. It makes sense somehow with the residual self-evidence of childhood—oh, of course the solstice dew holds magic—like a belief in fairies or demons. There’s a lot in this world we can’t see. Dew is the damp left behind as day is born out of night, “a child of moon and air,” according to the lyric poet Alkman, writing in the seventh century B.C. Air and moon mingle and the result is a bead on the grass blade. Haikuist Kobayashi Issa writes: The world of dew is the world of dew. And yet, and yet— Here, the dash is the haiku’s Rorschach test—how does your brain fill in what’s next? This world is real, but it won’t last long. This world exists and yet—we can’t enter it, and yet—we live right in it. And yet the world of dew is not a world at all. And yet what is a world and what are we doing? On the solstice, a baptism with these beads brings renewal, purification, a whole new life. We’re made fresh and ready. When Christianity took sway over paganism, there came a midsummer day, the midpoint between planting and harvest, known as Saint John’s Eve. It marks the feast day of Saint John the Baptist, he who dipped people in the river and washed them of their sin, he who rebirthed people in the water. Read More
June 7, 2019 Eat Your Words Cooking with Ntozake Shange By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. Ntozake Shange (1948–2018) is one of those writers who just don’t want to stay on the page. The book that made her famous was not a book, really, but a “choreopoem”: the now legendary For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which was first performed at a women’s bar outside Berkeley, California, in 1974, before it traveled to New York City and eventually ran at the Public Theater and on Broadway. Shange wrote poetry, most of which was refined in the presence of a band, and novels, including Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, which bursts with idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation, healing rituals, recipes, and gemstone lore. In its overall effect, her work feels less like something to be read than something to be experienced. This was a deliberate strategy of black American resistance, Shange tells us in her 2011 book of essays, Lost in Language and Sound. As a child of the seventies, Shange was, in her own words, an Afrocentrist, who adopted a Pan-African identity to the extent that she uses “we” in essays on places as disparate as Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil. “My house, my neighborhood, my soul,” she writes, “was immersed as far as I can recall in the accents of Togo, Liberia, Trinidad, Costa Rica, Chicago, Lagos, New Orleans, Bombay, and Cape Town, not to minimize in any way drawls of the Mississippi, clipped consonants from Arkansas, or soprano-like chisme (gossip) of Kansas City.” Due to the cross-cultural riches of the diaspora and because “most black people have some music and movement in our lives,” Shange posited an “independently created afro-American aesthetic” that was essentially multidisciplinary. She refused limitations, hated plays that were just dialogue without music and dance, and rejected English as the speech of the slavers and “the language I waz taught to hate myself in.” After all, For Colored Girls more than just a work of art, it was a spell or a ritual or a promise of aid to those on the brink of despair. Read More
June 6, 2019 The Big Picture Modernism’s Debt to Black Women By Cody Delistraty An exhibition at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay centers on a black model named Laure in Édouard Manet’s Olympia and reinterrogates the role of black people in art history. Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 51″ x 75″. Presented at the 1865 Salon. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, RF 644. Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. Around the time that Édouard Manet was painting Olympia, in 1863, a liberating politics was underway in France. Napoleon III had become so distracted with foreign affairs—handling the Second French Intervention in Mexico, breaking up a burgeoning Roman Republic in order to restore the Pope’s power, and making colonial conquests throughout Central Africa, Asia, and the South Seas—that he had little time to resist many of the political pressures back home. And so he was actually carrying out some of the promises he’d made in the run-up to his Second Empire coronation, such as reducing media censorship and allowing workers to strike. By 1870, Napoleon III, under the pressure of the Liberals, even assented to a parliamentary legislature in France, which would ultimately serve as the basis of the Third Republic. In the late nineteenth century, Paris began to seem like an integrated and relatively racially equitable city. After the 1848 Revolution, slavery had been abolished in France’s territorial colonies; Caribbean people moved en masse to the French capital. Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, and his father, Thomas-Alexandre—who was one of the most important black military men in European history—were viewed as unassailably prominent members of French society. Racism, of course, still existed, even at the highest levels of government: in 1884, Jules Ferry, who served as both prime minister and as president of the senate, was espousing his eugenics-based racism, saying things like, “The higher races have a right over the lower races … a duty to civilize the inferior races.” But for a moment, the scene seemed to be set for a fresh form of liberty and relative equality. Gustave Le Gray, Portrait d’Alexandre Dumas en costume russe, 1859, oval proof laminated on gray paper, itself laminated on cardboard, 10″ x 7 1/2″. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, PHO 1986 11. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / image RMN-GP. Art, naturally, was both driver and recipient. The poet Charles Baudelaire was dating Jeanne Duval, a French Haitian actress so beautiful she was often called the Black Venus and was painted by Manet. Manet, meanwhile, was fashioning himself as a recorder of the contemporary social scene. A number of his paintings depicted the black people who had immigrated to the northern neighborhoods of Paris. In his studio notebook, he described the black maid whom he painted standing next to the lounging white prostitute in Olympia and the black caregiver in his Children in the Tuileries Garden (1862) as “Laure, très belle négresse, rue Vintimille, 11, 3éme étage.” Manet’s depiction of Laure wasn’t exoticized—not the kind of nude caricature that had been standard of European depictions of black women. Instead, with her voguish neckline and bouquet of flowers, Laure modeled a typically “white role,” as a clerk in a department store or a server at a café. Also: whereas in Titian’s Venus of Urbino (ca. 1532), a clear forerunner of Olympia, the maid, who is white, is turned away from the nude, lounging women in the foreground; in Olympia, Laure is just as much a part of the scene, in both the amount of the canvas she takes up and her foregrounded placement. Read More
June 6, 2019 Look Beach Life By The Paris Review No one captures the colorful, blissful chaos of the beach like the British photographer Martin Parr. Some of his seaside shots swim with the verve of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Others are spare, dotted with tiny figures who are nearly swallowed up in the sprawl of the dunes. Everywhere there are stories: a seagull going about its day; surfers cresting and crashing; a couple, still wet from a dip, canoodling across their towels. Martin Parr: Beach Therapy collects and reproduces the latest in Parr’s long-running series of sandy photographs. A selection of images from the book appears below. Martin Parr, Mar Del Plata, Argentina, 2014. From the series Beach Therapy. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos. Read More