In the following excerpt from her new book Minor Feelings, out this week from One World, the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong defines the titular emotions by way of the comedian Richard Pryor.

Richard Pryor, 1969. Photo: Berk Costello. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Like most writers and artists, Richard Pryor began his career trying to be someone else. He wanted to be Bill Cosby and went on shows like Ed Sullivan, telling clean, wholesome jokes that appealed to a white audience. He felt like a fraud. In 1967, Pryor was invited to Vegas to perform at the famous Aladdin Hotel. He came onstage and there, in the spotlight, gazing out into a packed audience of white celebrities like Dean Martin, he had an epiphany: his “mama,” who was his grandmother, wouldn’t be welcome in this room. Pryor was raised by his paternal grandmother, Marie Carter, the formidable madam of three brothels in his hometown of Peoria, Illinois. His mother, Gertrude Thomas, was a sex worker in his grandmother’s brothel before she left Pryor in his grandmother’s care. In his stand-up, Pryor speaks frankly about his lonely childhood in the brothel: “I remember tricks would go through our neighborhood and that’s how I met white people. They’d come and say, ‘Hello, is your mother home? I’d like a blowjob.’ ”

His biographers David and Joe Henry write that that night in Vegas would forever mark “the B.C.–A.D. divide” in Pryor’s life, when Pryor killed the Cosby in his act and began to find his own way in comedy. Pryor faced his audience in Vegas and leaned into the mic and said, “What the fuck am I doing here?” He walked offstage.

Watching Pryor, I had a similar revelation: What the fuck am I doing here? Who am I writing for? Read More

Photo: Javeria Ali.

Javeria Ali, a twenty-six-year-old photographer, was on a walk in an Islamabad market when she spotted a man ladling out cups of milky tea. He was wearing a turquoise shalwar kameez with a white scalloped trim. His hair was slightly tousled, with a few stray locks falling above his dark eyebrows, and his cheeks were peppered with stubble. He wore a black thread looped around his wrist to protect him from the evil eye.

She took three or four pictures of the chaiwala, or tea seller, while his head was bowed, then he looked up for a split second and stared right at her. She got the shot. Ali uploaded the photograph (captioned “Hot-Tea”) to her Instagram and Facebook pages on October 14, 2016. It was soon shared on various blogs and social media pages, with users commenting on the tea boy’s looks.

By 2016, there were more than forty-four million social media users in Pakistan. Facebook had the biggest slice of the pie, with thirty-three million users, followed by Twitter with five million and Instagram with nearly four million. Arshad Khan, the blue-eyed chaiwala, had joined the ranks of a handful of viral stars in Pakistan: men and women who become household names, their images or videos spilling over from social media sites into millions of conversations on apps like WhatsApp, shared and forwarded on a loop until mainstream media outlets take notice and feature them on the news or on talk shows. Read More

Photo: James Gehrt.

The first time the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson met Emily Dickinson, he remembered five details about the way she entered the room: her soft step, her breathless voice, her auburn hair, the two daylilies she offered him—and her exquisite white dress.

Dickinson’s white dress has become an emblem of the poet’s brilliance and mystery. When Mabel Loomis Todd moved to Dickinson’s hometown in the 1880s, she gushed about the poet’s attire. “I must tell you about the character of Amherst,” she wrote her parents. “It is a lady whom the people call the Myth … She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.” Jane Wald, the executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, believes Dickinson began dressing primarily in white in her thirties, and it was common knowledge around town that a white dress was the poet’s preferred article of clothing. Dickinson realized people gossiped about what she wore, and once joked with her cousins, “Won’t you tell ‘the public’ that at present I wear a brown dress with a cape if possible browner, and carry a parasol of the same!” Read More

Anna Karina

Anna Karina’s rehearsal for her first major scene with director Jean-Luc Godard ended early. The scene was for the film The Little Soldier (1960), in which the male lead photographs Karina’s character in her apartment, asking her questions and telling her to move around so he can get at her “truth.” Godard intervened and took the mock interrogation one step further, demanding to know when she had first had sex and how many men she’d slept with. She didn’t know whether the director was asking her or her character, and Karina’s face flashed from white rage to scarlet embarrassment. “Ça ne vous regarde pas,” she replied in hesitant French, It’s none of your business. The line is included in the final cut.

This exchange between Karina and Godard launched one of the most important partnerships in the history of cinema. A year later, they married, and Paris Match called Karina “the newlywed of the New Wave.” She went on to star in six more of Godard’s feature films, becoming the icon of a movement. Her body served as the visual anchor for his films, and her own language often appeared word for word in his scripts. Was there anything about her that was not his? Godard didn’t think so. When he worked on a tight budget, Karina went unpaid for her work as an actress, with the justification that they lived together.

The kind of intellectual attracted to Godard’s cinema has often remained uninterested in Karina, beyond the superficial planes of her face. In the catalogue of the National Library of France, there are 152 critical studies taking on his work, and seem to be none devoted to Karina. In the books on Godard, she is featured exclusively during his so-called Karina Years, disappearing after their last collaboration together, Made in U.S.A. (1966). There does exist a rigorous school of feminist criticism that takes on the representations of female characters in New Wave cinema (notably the work of Geneviève Sellier), but this line of inquiry considers the women in these films through the symbolic violence enacted against them rather than considering their personhood.

In the obituaries written after Karina’s passing on December 14 last year, critics have attempted to rehabilitate her life story. But these write-ups consistently refer to Godard to do so. Karina is cited explaining how she taught him not to slam doors; he is quoted calling her a “woman of action.” I started writing this piece with every intention of “finding” Karina, but fell into the same trap in my first draft: I occluded Karina’s voice by looking for it in the images Godard made of her.

Read More