photo courtesy Harry Dodge

1. I want now to investigate bonkers (a word that strikes me as germane to our times), but the word busted (also a fine word) keeps popping into my head. Not at all interchangeable, busted suggests mechanicity and palpability while bonkers seems to indicate something mental and systemic. But they inhabit the same register; both words are punchy (is that a register or a tone?) and both words suggest mitigatability—they’re carrying little hope suitcases. Do you feel that? I wrote the word busted the other day to describe birds I saw in a book of photographs, impossibly bent-up birds captured during liftoff, during landing—weird contorted flight surfaces, tangled wings like flat hands, ruddering volte-face, cartoony dustups apparently necessary to occasion real-life avian landings. I like the word busted—not shattered, not completely demolished. BUSTED!, as in currently unusable: an ugly leg thrown out of the tub too wounded even to soak. But you know what? I’m a repairman. I’m a research assistant! Give me what is busted and I’ll take a look. Here. See how in the break or the torn area, let’s call it the rupture, something truly bent or baffling is sometimes lined with an undeniably fecund matrix, raw lamina where new stuff is now compelled to grow? Read More

I have lived outside Iran, my home country, for almost a decade, and I am yet to know what to call myself.

Australia and the U.S. have been my hosts, so the labels I have at my disposal belong to the English vocabulary: immigrant, exilé, refugee, expatriate. The term “immigrant” derives from the Latin root migrare, which means “to change residence or condition.” In its contemporary usage it refers to someone who has left one nation or territory in order to take residence in another. Exilé, from exul, or “banished person,” is a term for those banished from their native country or community. Refugee, a compound of re and fugere, to flee, describes a person, often violently displaced, seeking shelter outside of their country of origin. Expatriate, literally out (ex-) of the native land (patria), suggests a willing abandonment of one’s homeland.

All these terms have one thing in common: an intrinsic connection to the state. You have immigrant or refugee status only when a state grants it, as though proffering a token of its magnanimity. They also imply that change of status is synonymous with change of nation-state, and takes place only when an established geopolitical border is crossed. So every time one is called an immigrant, a refugee, an exilé, one is thrown into a nexus of power at the center of which the state looms large.

No wonder that, if you are not qualified for any of those labels, in English you are called “stateless.” Also, it is no coincidence that, unlike most English words that have French and Danish and Old English roots, these terms all come from Latin, the language of the Roman empire, probably the first powerful state that excelled at the cruel art of systematic, state-sponsored xenophobia.

In English, the most technically correct description for me is immigrant. I got a visa stamped into my passport, boarded a gigantic Boeing 707, and crossed the ocean to New York City, where I now live and work. But the word doesn’t fit right. It is not capacious enough for what I see as the scope of my experience. I feel the same way about these other terms for people whose movement from one place to another is a central feature of who they are.

For a long time I thought it was my obsessive, sometimes pointlessly defiant mind at work, rejecting the characterizations most people accept without a fuss. But it has dawned on me recently that maybe my obstinacy has a point. Maybe something is wrong with this available vocabulary. Maybe English, the ultimate language of colonial settlers, can’t conceive of a word that could capture what people like me experience. So I went back to Persian, the other language I know, to see if that old tongue of fallen empires and sublime poets had a better name for me. Read More

While aiming a lens at my face, the photographer whispered, “You’re striking.”

This quality lives far from pretty. Daisies are pretty. Adolescent hamsters are pretty. William Wordsworth wrote pretty poetry. It wasn’t striking. Striking poetry ambushes us. The sensory details are chosen to paralyze, discomfit, or inflict pain. When such poetry bears lilies, they fester. When such poetry harbors horses, they crush toes. When such poetry casts a fishhook, its metal sinks into an open eye.

Striking phenomena resemble beautiful ones in their force and strength. “Beauty quickens,” said critic Elaine Scarry. “It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid.”

When I was a ten-year-old tomboy, I asked my father, “Why does evil exist?”

After looking up from his watch, he replied, “Myriam, imagine how boring life would be if evil didn’t exist.”

It makes life more vivid. At the time, my father’s authority on the matter went unquestioned. In hindsight, his answer strikes me as slapdash, dangerous, and wrong.

When I was older, I lived with a man who, though he was evil, was as boring as he was dangerous. Here is an inventory of his pastimes: plucking bass guitar while buzzed, extolling the greatness of soccer player Lionel Messi, and misogyny.

He turned me into a human soccer ball, and yet I couldn’t recognize what was happening. The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin experienced this same perceptual inability, explaining that the horror of what is happening to a battered woman exists, “quite literally, beyond her imagination.” My mind could not name what he did to me. Misogyny struck me dumb.

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In our column One Word, writers expound on a single word of their choosing. For this iteration, we asked Danez Smith to write about the word that underpins their poem “my bitch!” in our Spring 2019 issue. 

I can tell who’s calling me from across the room by the pitch of their bitch. Fati goes up on the i so that it’s almost a shriek. Hieu gets a little gravelly, dark and full, bitch as precursor to some good gossip. Blaire says it flat, matter-of-fact, like a name. Franny says it like a bell, a sweet call to fellowship. I love my bitches. I love being bitched by them. It’s an insult we’ve spun into coin.

The femmes and queers I have known have saved my life. The deep wells of care from femmes; the ingenuity of queer love. Bitch is the passport to that nation. Or maybe it’s the national anthem, how we sing our love to each other. Maybe it’s our language.

When I am bitched by the homies, there is no threat on my life. There is no car following me as I hightail it home, bitch flung out the window, faggot close behind. There is no accusation like back in high school when bitch was a charge made by a fellow boy who could smell the girl in you, or a boy who loved/hated your girl-body or a boy whose only tongue was violence. I used to be scared of coming off bitch-made. You know: scary, sissy, punk, femme. All those words that I now wear as crowns lurked in the corners of boys’ mouths. I was terrified, trying to exact my walk and perfect a boy-tongue, scared someone would see through my act and spot the bitch in me.

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In our column One Word, writers expound on a single word of their choosing. 

1947 production of Romeo and Juliet (photo: Angus Mcbean)

On an international flight many years ago, I sat beside an old Eastern European man who spoke no English. He occupied the aisle seat and communicated with me by tapping my shoulder when the attendant came by, or by extending an open palm to pass my trash to her. We were eating a meal silently and, I thought, companionably in the near-dark, hunched over our trays, when he reached over and took my dinner roll. He didn’t make eye contact with me. He simply unwrapped my roll, took a bite, and then went on to eat the whole thing.

There was nothing ambiguous about it. The dinner roll was on my tray, and he’d already finished his own. Had he assumed I was done with my meal? But I’d had a fork in hand. At least half of my pasta remained.

It would be easy to riff on the idea that he took my bread because he was a man, or white, or because I was Asian and a woman. That it had to do with entitlement, with a pattern of taking. But that wouldn’t feel true, not in this case. It would feel only like the sort of thing I was supposed to say.

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In our column One Word, writers expound on their favorite words. 

Man with beer, artist unknown, c. 1920

My uncle Henry has killed a lot of people.

In spite of his dark past, and because of it, he’s my favorite American uncle. Since I cherish bilingually, in English and in Spanish, I cherish my uncles and my tíos separately. The border separates us, cleaving family from familia.

My favorite tío was Alvaro. Unlike Henry, he wasn’t a genius. He never killed anybody, though he was known to get rough with English. His favorite T-shirt was a little too tight and its stenciled letters declared LIFE’S A BEACH!

To visit Alvaro, I travel thousands of miles, to a cemetery in Guadalajara. To see Henry, I need only walk a mile from my apartment to a skilled nursing facility beside a hipster barbershop and an Irish pub.

Henry no longer speaks about the people he killed as an artillery officer, but decades ago, he often rambled about them to my father, his little brother. He shared specifics. He described GIs slicing free enemy ears, threading them together, crafting leis of shriveled lobes. He told about exploded water buffalo dripping from trees, pink rain. He talked about calling in an air strike and obliterating everyone and everything in a village, all life wiped out except for a single baby.

When Henry returned to California from Vietnam, the baby followed him. He continued to hear it crying. He looked for that baby everywhere, including underneath his mother’s house.

He couldn’t find it. Read More