January 30, 2019 First Person The Desire to Unlearn By Chigozie Obioma Chigozie Obioma’s experiences as a Nigerian student in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus left him with a knowledge he wished he’d never gained. Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, image from Wikimedia Commons As a Nigerian young adult traveling abroad for the first time, the thrill I experienced was, at first, intoxicating. I’d dropped out of the university I had been attending in Nigeria, and was desperate to return to school, this time to study English instead of economics. My visa application to the UK had been rejected, and so I found my new destination, a university in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. It was a nation few people seemed to know much about. It was, and still is, without international recognition. After days of celebrations, prayers, and phone calls from relatives far and wide, I took off—my first plane ride—and was immediately overwhelmed. I had expected a warm welcome from the few Nigerians and Africans—about ten or so, mostly young men, along with four young women—who were already there. But they treated my arrival with discomfort and wondered why I had chosen to come. Seeing that their question didn’t make logical sense, since they were in Cyprus as well, they’d always end the discussion by telling me I’d soon discover why they had asked. Read More
January 30, 2019 At Work Element of Sacrifice: An Interview with Maurice Carlos Ruffin By Peyton Burgess Maurice Carlos Ruffin. Photo: Clare Welsh. Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel, We Cast a Shadow, is narrated by an unnamed black father who is desperate to protect his mixed-race son from white supremacy. His solution is to erase his son’s blackness. He applies whitening cream on the boy’s skin to burn out birthmarks, causing young Nigel to double over in pain. In the father’s mind, the son’s birthmarks are spreading, and his attempts to erase his son’s identity become increasingly frantic. I grab his shoulder and spin him around. The dark medallion of skin on his tummy is bigger. Nigel’s other blemishes cover his body. The greatest concentration of marks: belly and back. A dark asterism. Some flaws approach the size and complexity of the stigma on his face … My fear is that these islands will merge to form a continent. The boy’s white mother is vehemently against the treatments, and so they remain a secret between father and son. Almost everything the narrator does—his aspirations in the powerful, mostly white law firm where he works, his deception of his wife—is done in the hope of providing a better life for his son. At the firm, in order to get a promotion, he engages in disingenuous outreach to people of color, selling out his community while civil unrest in the city intensifies. At times the reader might despise the narrator, but Ruffin deftly reminds us that the real culprit is white supremacy. The world is a centrifuge that patiently waits to separate my Nigel from his basic human dignity. I don’t have to tell you that this is an unjust planet … A dark-skinned child can expect a life of diminished light. This is the truth anywhere in the world and throughout most of history. Ruffin and I are friends whose paths sometimes cross in New Orleans. About once a year, we attend an odd expo event together on the city’s outskirts. Last summer we attended the National Preppers and Survivalist Expo, which was a convention room filled with mostly white men preparing for what they thought might be the next civil war. More recently, we went to the New Orleans Oddities and Curiosities Expo, where the tiny bones of animals were arranged into art. A couple weeks later, we met for lunch at a popular Mid-City restaurant called Juan’s Flying Burrito and discussed the inspiration for his complex narrator. Read More
January 30, 2019 Arts & Culture Schizophrenia and the Supernatural By Esmé Weijun Wang The Rider-Waite tarot deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. One winter morning I shuffled a deck of oracle cards with my eyes closed, and I realized that despite the blackness, I could still see what was happening in front of me. Here were the details of my hands, with the movements of each finger, every twitch of every narrow knuckle, made plain; I could see the cards, which were not clear enough to distinguish completely, but showed their blurry, colorful faces in broad strokes. I decided to further test this ability by holding colored pens, randomly chosen from a pouch, before my shut eyes. The pen test indicated that I could also “see” the colors behind my lids—imperfectly, yes, but well enough to grasp whether I was looking at a light color or a dark one, and I called out the hot-pink one immediately. Journaling and drawing divinatory cards had both become routine parts of my life earlier that year, when I was fighting psychosis and struggling to make the world cohere; I’d found that tarot and oracle cards offered a decent framework for structuring a fractured existence. Tarot cards vary from deck to deck, depending on the artist and/or creator, but typically follow a seventy-eight-card structure of Major Arcana, consisting of twenty-two archetypes, from The Fool to The World, and Minor Arcana, consisting of four suits of fourteen cards each (Wands, Pentacles, Swords, Cups), from Aces to Kings. Oracle cards offer more variety; their content and theme depend entirely upon the creator. The one I primarily used that winter had watercolor illustrations: “Redefine Boundaries,” read one card; “Higher Self,” read another. Whichever card I drew served a double purpose, foreshadowing how the day might take shape and also giving me a shape with which to understand the events of the day. And on that day in 2013, I could see with what some call clairvoyance. But the day went on, and the strange ability left me incrementally, as though a heavy curtain were dropping, until when I closed my eyes there was only darkness. If I close my eyes right now, I still see only this ordinary darkness. At first I mentioned this only to C., and then to one or two of my closest friends. I joked with them that as far as superhuman abilities go, being able to see what’s in front of me with my eyes closed is a rather pathetic one. I certainly couldn’t take that show on the road. And my “sight without sight” happened only one other time, on September 29, 2014, when I was not psychotic: again, I realized that I could see the world with my eyes closed. Again, I tested myself with colored pens and found myself to be accurate. I asked a new friend, a mystic, for advice, and she told me to contemplate whatever seemed unclear to me at the time. My response: So after a bunch of fleeting images—a girl clutching a book to her chest and plummeting into the ocean—sinking for a really long time, hair floating—hits the bottom and then ricochets back up to the surface, gasping, still clutching the book, in the middle of nowhere—looking around—a buoy appears and she struggles to climb onto it—she climbs onto it, drops the book, grabs it—sits on the buoy for a long time—the buoy eventually crashes against an island & she climbs onto the island, which is basically a large, pointy mound—when she reaches the top, the book explodes out of her arms as a white bird and flies upward—the bird goes up for a really long time (at this point I wasn’t sure how it was going to go, because it felt like the bird was just going to keep going up forever)—eventually it explodes into a white light that spreads over the entire sky, enveloping the universe. The curtain dropped again a few hours later. I haven’t experienced the ability since. Read More
January 30, 2019 On Poetry Where Stevie Smith’s “From the Greek” Is From By Anthony Madrid Anthony Madrid uncovers the source text of a small poem by Stevie Smith Poet Stevie Smith/Wikimedia Commons Stevie Smith’s first book of poetry was called A Good Time Was Had by All. It came out in 1937; she would have been around thirty-five at the time. That book happens to contain one of my favorite four-line poems in all the galaxies; it deserves to be better known. Here it is: From the Greek To many men strange fates are given Beyond remission or recall But the worst fate of all (tra la) ’s to have no fate at all (tra la). Allow me to spell out why this is good. Read More
January 29, 2019 Redux Redux: The Seismographic Ear By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we bring you Alice Munro’s 1994 Art of Fiction interview, Shelley Jackson’s short story “Husband,” and Laurance Wieder’s poem “The Seismographic Ear.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137 Issue no. 131 (Summer 1994) The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn’t fail. That it might is the danger. This may be the beast that’s lurking in the closet in old age—the loss of the feeling that things are worth doing. Read More
January 29, 2019 Listen Mercilessness Clarifies: On Bernard Malamud By Chris Bachelder Bernard Malamud and Cynthia Ozick, backstage at the 92nd street Y “75 at 75: Writers on Recordings,” a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s seventy-fifth anniversary and beyond, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center’s archive and write a personal response. Here, Chris Bachelder reflects on Bernard Malamud’s reading from 1972, which was introduced by Cynthia Ozick. You can listen to the recording below. I’ve been talking to students about what a short story is, what it does, for about two decades. I’ve spent a lot of words. It occurred to me, while listening to this recording, that my entire teaching career has primarily been an attempt to say what Cynthia Ozick says—in just two words!—during her introductory remarks for Bernard Malamud. Of Malamud and his work, Ozick says, “Mercilessness clarifies.” Subject, verb. Read More