December 14, 2017 First Person A Study of Kanai Mieko By Sofia Samatar Photo: Kuwabara Kineo. Kanai Mieko writes in several genres: poetry, fiction, and criticism—most notably on film and photography. We, who know no Japanese, will probably never read her criticism on film and photography, although this is what we most desire. Kanai Mieko is highly acclaimed in Japan. She has also been described as noncommittal, apolitical, and frivolous. One critic laments “that the author, whose talent is comparable to that of Salman Rushdie, would take up such a light, meaningless subject as an ordinary housewife’s uneventful life when she could, and should, be concerned with ideological and political issues of import.” Kanai Mieko ranks Jane Austen higher than Dostoyevsky. She’s not interested in describing objects; she wants to accentuate their amorphous nature. In 1997, Kanai published a novel called Karui memai, or Vague Vertigo. It isn’t available in English. I read about it in Atsuko Sakaki’s book, The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature. Sakaki gave Kanai’s novel the English title Vague Vertigo. In an earlier paper, she called it Light Dizziness. Sakaki changed the title to Vague Vertigo to emphasize Kanai’s references to Hitchcock’s film and to Roland Barthes. Barthes, who wrote: “One day I received from a photographer a picture of myself which I could not remember being taken, for all my efforts; I inspected the tie, the sweater, to discover in what circumstance I had worn them; to no avail. And yet, because it was a photograph I could not deny that I had been there (even if I did not know where). This distortion between certainty and oblivion gave me a kind of vertigo, something of a ‘detective’ anguish.” Researching Kanai Mieko gives me a detective anguish. Read More
November 23, 2017 First Person Black History By Asali Solomon The Paris Review staff is off in a tryptophan-induced haze, so we’re reposting some of our favorite Thanksgiving pieces. Enjoy your holiday! From the cover of Disgruntled, Asali Solomon’s debut novel. Back in the early 1980s, no one at the mostly white elite prep school I attended had heard of Kwanzaa, which I’d grown up celebrating instead of Christmas. This was a yearly hassle of explaining: yes, presents; no, Santa Claus. But absolutely no one had heard of Umoja Karamu, “a ritual for the black family” that we observed at Thanksgiving. This one I never volunteered to explain. Black families who celebrated Umoja Karamu (Kiswahili for “unity feast”)—and we were the only one I knew of—were to trade in the ritual of senselessly stuffing ourselves for one in which we used food and words to reflect on the grim, glorious trajectory of black people in America, to recall the crimes of the “greedy one-eyed giant” white man, and to keep the “Black Nation” energized and focused, struggling toward liberation from racism. During Umoja Karamu, which lived in a 1971 booklet (a mere two years older than I was) published by a fellow Philadelphian named Edward Sims, we sat at our special holiday table and took turns reading solemnly aloud from a pithy narrative of African American history that moved from the ancient kingdom of Mali to the Watts riots. Between readings, we ate a symbolic sequence of aggressively non-Thanksgiving foods, including black-eyed peas, rice, corn bread, and leafy greens, all served unseasoned, perhaps to make us more thoughtful. Blessedly, my mother always insisted on a normal holiday meal after Umoja Karamu. But Edward Sims was certainly about his business. Each Thanksgiving, as I waited to get to the stuffing and gravy, I did indeed taste the suffering we read about. I experienced the “bland and tasteless condition under which Black Folk lived during the slavery period” in the form of unsalted white rice and chalky black-eyed peas. But happily, enduring Umoja Karamu, unlike the suffering of the Black Nation, was a private shame, one about which my school friends knew nothing. That is, until I received a fifth-grade assignment to write an essay about family Thanksgiving traditions and to read it aloud. Read More >>
November 23, 2017 First Person The Nexus of All Despair By Jane Stern The Paris Review staff is off in a tryptophan-induced haze, so we’re reposting some of our favorite Thanksgiving pieces. Enjoy your holiday! Frances Brundage, Thanksgiving Day Greetings (detail), ca. 1913. I’ve always thought that Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday, based solely on the fact that I adore turkey. But if I were to remove turkey from the equation, I would probably realize that this holiday, for me, has been nothing but one hideous thing after another. Why Thanksgiving is the nexus of all despair is a mystery. But to prove that it is, here’s a short list of some of the things I remember. 1956, New Haven, Connecticut The table is beautifully set in the dining room of the gracious colonial house on Trumbull Street, where my aunt and uncle live. I am ten years old, and my older cousins—Eric, seventeen, and his sister, Willa, thirteen—are my teen idols. After the family takes a few snapshots of all of us smiling, the food is spread out on the table and the shit hits the fan. Uncle Henry makes a snide remark about Elvis Presley, who has just been on The Ed Sullivan Show, and cousin Willa flings herself from the table in a histrionic fit. The whole table erupts into a pro- and anti-Elvis fight. The dinner is ruined, no one is hungry, and the gravy curdles as “All Shook Up” blasts from the phonograph in Willa’s room behind the slammed door. Read More >>
October 26, 2017 First Person On Basquiat, the Black Body, and a Strange Sensation in My Neck By Aisha Sabatini Sloan Jean-Michel Basquiat, Back of the Neck, 1983, silkscreen with hand painting. While visiting Los Angeles a couple of years ago, I strained my back. My mother gave me the name of her former chiropractor. As I stood before him, I listed my symptoms, and in one quick gesture he ripped my pants down, without warning, just below the cheek. He hadn’t really looked at me while I spoke, so I wasn’t sure how to make sense of the way he’d stripped me. It was like he was going to spank or fuck me. He used a TENS machine to electrostimulate my muscles and I left with almost no back pain. A bit ambitious, I walked the several miles back to my hotel. It’s only now that I wonder what else might have prompted that need to wander so far by myself. I went to see another chiropractor in Tucson when my back froze up again. I waited for what seemed like hours, watching other walk-ins pass quickly through to the other side. I think we were ushered in based on seniority, and I was new to the place, but I kept a close eye on those who came and went, what they looked like. The chiropractor listened to my troubles. He moved my head quickly and I heard a click in my neck. After a few more adjustments, he told me to come back the following day and had the receptionist sell me a multi-visit package. The next day, I was still in pain, but my body refused to obey when I tried to drive back to claim the appointment I’d already paid for. I turned down a side street and pulled over. I will likely never see a chiropractor again. Because they know how to break my neck, I’m afraid they might. Read More
October 2, 2017 First Person Love and Badness in America and the Arab World By Diya Abdo Diya Abdo and her grandmother, on the porch of their farm in al-Libban, ca. 2002. Firstborn children are good. Saturated, no doubt, with the anxiety of first-time parenthood, firstborns are rule followers, pleasers. When I tell my firstborn, five-year-old daughter, Aidana Sabha, that she has to drink the juice covertly because the bouncy house does not allow outside food or beverages, she crouches, doubled over under the table, hiding the silver pouch underneath her arched body. Unable to go against the place’s regulations, she asks to leave; she is thirsty but would rather give up playing to go home and drink than break the rules. In Jordan, to be a firstborn female child came with added pressure—to be m‘addaleh, sitt el-banāt, btiswi thuglik dhahab, worth your own weight in gold. Whenever my grandmother uses this phrase to describe some woman or other, I keep a tally of the qualities she admires. When she uses it to describe my mother, though always in the past tense, it means that my mother had listened, obeyed, self-abnegated—the butter would not melt in her mouth. When she uses it to describe my uncle’s wife, her daughter-in-law, it means that daughter-in-law is content with her lot, her dirty laundry unaired—her secrets in a well. When she uses it to describe her neighbor, it means that the neighbor is chaste, never flirting, never yielding to men’s plying compliments and denuding gazes—as pure as yogurt. But most importantly, to be worth your weight in gold means that your seira, your narrative, your story, is not on every tongue. A woman like this is given the highest compliment—she is, ironically, a man (zalameh) or the closest approximation, the sister of men (ukht zlām). My grandmother was definitely worth her weight in gold—zalameh. An illiterate Palestinian villager, she was married at nine and divorced by sixteen. After al-Nakseh, she crossed the River Jordan with two kids in tow, knit loofahs to make ends meet, made sure her children got an education, and rejected all suitors and offers of marriage. She prided herself on never once being a piece of gum, to be chewed up by gossiping mouths and spat out. Sumʿitha dhahab—her reputation was golden. Read More
September 8, 2017 First Person Death’s Plus-One By Brian Cullman Early that fall, Amy’s cousin JJ was leaving Bertie’s Hair Salon in Fox Point and decided to try the restroom at Schuyler’s Funeral Home next door. Bertie’s facility was cramped, there was a cat box under the sink, and the loo paper was rough pink squares of construction paper. Well, it felt like construction paper, and it lent a depressingly cheap air to the place. Schuyler’s restrooms were spacious and cheerful, there were clean serviettes on a low ceramic table, and despite the scent of candles and the hushed voices outside, it felt more like a country house than a chapel. Out in the foyer, there was a pot of fresh coffee and a tray of small, star-shaped cookies. Men in dark suits and women in summer dresses looked at the floor and nodded to themselves. JJ signed the guest book and wrote, “My thoughts are with you,” then drew a small heart next to her name and address. The coffee wasn’t bad, though the cookies were too chewy and left a gummy taste in her mouth that lasted all the way to lunch downtown. She was unprepared for the check that came in the mail a few days later. The deceased was a Portuguese merchant with three ex-wives and an alarming number of children, none of whom had lived up to his expectations. More to the point, none had been very attentive during his long decline and illness. And so, he had amended his will so that anyone who showed up at his funeral would get a check for ten thousand dollars. And anyone who didn’t could go to hell. Read More