October 2, 2018 At Work The Adoptee’s Perspective: An Interview with Nicole Chung By Julie Buntin Nicole Chung (photo: Erica B. Tappis) By the time I received Nicole Chung’s proposal for All You Can Ever Know on submission at Catapult, I was already—like so many others—a fan of her work. Her essays about identity and family in places like the New York Times, Longreads, and The Toast had left a permanent groove in my imagination. When something happened in the news, I’d wonder what Nicole thought about it. To read one of her articles was like diving into clear water after months of wading through flotsam: here was moral and stylistic clarity, and writing with purpose. Nicole’s sentences have led me to a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be human. You can imagine how I felt when I learned our bid for her debut memoir had been accepted. Even as a proposal, All You Can Ever Know had an urgency of intention that can take years to wrest from a manuscript. Nicole’s voice is so distinct, she could write compellingly about pretty much anything. But in making the story of her transracial adoption and the search for her biological family her subject, she has done us all a great service. There are so few narratives of adoption from the adoptee’s perspective. Despite having known many adopted people, I had never read or heard anything quite like Nicole’s story before. After years of working together, Nicole and I sat down to have a formal conversation about her story, the evolution of her book, and what it means to both of us to be both writers and editors. INTERVIEWER I know that as a child you struggled to find stories that matched your experience of growing up adopted. Did this absence of comparable stories present a challenge for you as you worked on the book? CHUNG Yes—people ask me for recommendations all the time, and it’s difficult to know what to say, especially if they’re looking for books that kids and teens could also read. The majority of the books that deal with adoption—both fiction and nonfiction—are written by non-adoptees. I don’t think I read any adoption stories when I was growing up, except for Anne of Green Gables and a few others from a different era, when adoption wasn’t the institution it is today. I certainly never got to read anything about transracial adoptees like me. Read More
October 2, 2018 Arts & Culture My Mother and Me (and J. M. Coetzee) By Ceridwen Dovey I was born the year J. M. Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. My mother read this dark, disturbing novel, with its many scenes of torture, as she breastfed me at night, while my older sister slept and the house was quiet. It was 1980. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency in the face of growing internal revolt, and my parents were thinking of leaving South Africa again. My mother nursed me in the spare room so the lamplight wouldn’t wake my father, and as she read, her somatic response to the words on the page would have coursed through her into me: elation and despair, trepidation and longing. I feel I’m still marked by that embodied encounter with Coetzee’s writing, via my mother, as a newborn. Coetzee, who anticipates everything, would say I am inhabiting action in imagining my way back to my neonate self, though even he allows for the possibility of flickerings of insight into other selves or our own younger selves. Several years later, when I was no longer a baby and my mother was on her way to becoming the first scholar to publish a book on Coetzee’s work, I formed one of my earliest visual memories. It is of the striking cover of this same novel, which lay on the kitchen table in our home in Melbourne, Australia, surrounded by the detritus of a midday meal: half-eaten sandwiches, apple cores. A picture of a white man on his knees, washing a pair of jagged black feet that have been sawed off at the ankles. Read More
October 1, 2018 Arts & Culture Schiele, Shoes, and Kavanaugh By Larissa Pham “Old World Bootie” for sale at Modcloth If you arrived at your formation of taste in the late aughts to the early teens—right around the time that hipster became a social category and twee was a kind of music and it was conceivable that an attractive stranger might ask whether you wanted to come back to their place and listen to their records—then you might know this shoe, if you don’t already have a pair lying around. Surely you have seen it on the feet of models or mannequins in Anthropologie, Modcloth, or any other retro-leaning, trendy store. Black or brown leather, with a tidy, stacked heel, fastened up with buttons or more often tightly laced in a neat bow, these boots—booties, in cutesy copywriter parlance—hug the shape of the foot, making for a pretty, petite, old-fashioned silhouette. Sometimes known as an Oxford heel, they’re self-consciously vintage yet contemporarily ordinary—not out of place in 2010, 2014, 2018, though they might strike some as a little … twee, these days. They’re Wes Anderson boots. Indie-pop boots. You-used-to-buy-graphic-tees boots. Imagine my surprise, then, while visiting the Met Breuer’s latest drawing show—“Obsession,” an exhibition of nudes by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso, closing October 7—to see these very shoes preserved in time, in their first incarnation, an instant of fashion history trapped in amber. Though the show ostensibly features three artists, all household names, it’s Schiele who steals the show, taking up most of the exhibition’s wall space as he links Klimt—albeit tenuously, and really only chronologically—to Picasso, who’s shunted to the exhibition’s last room. The show, intended to showcase the collection of the aesthete Scofield Thayer, tracks a loose narrative of figurative drawing and, within its selection, the entirety of Schiele’s blazing, short career. Read More
October 1, 2018 Arts & Culture The Surprising Story of Eartha Kitt in Istanbul By Hilal Isler Eartha Kitt in Istanbul, 1949 One month into their marriage, my parents leave Turkey for good. It’s my mom’s first time on a plane. They fly from Ankara to Brisbane, an Australian city where they don’t know anyone. The trip takes two days. Their tickets are one way, paid for in cash. The year is 1975, and Australia has recently rescinded its White Australia policy. My parents are among the first nonwhite immigrants allowed into the country. British Airways tells them they can bring up to forty kilograms’ worth of things. When they pack, my parents are more strategic than sentimental. They pack clothes, bedding, albums—but only a few, because photo albums are strangely heavy, and the other kind, the kind on vinyl, too fragile to make the trip. The first record my parents purchase in Australia has a picture of a black woman on the cover: just her face, a hint of cleavage, painted lips but no smile. Her hair is pulled back, coiled against the nape of her neck, and she’s looking away from the camera, wistful. I am five, maybe six years old, and I enjoy staring at that album cover. I believe the wistful woman is Turkish. She sings in Turkish. She sings this one song,“Üsküdar’a Gider İken” or, as the track is listed incorrectly on the front, “Uska Dara.” It’s an old Turkish/Macedonian folk song. At the time, I don’t wonder why Eartha Kitt, who was born into extreme poverty on a plantation in South Carolina, is singing about sailing up and down the Bosphorus with her male secretary. I just know that those nights on which my parents, tipsy off cheap Australian red, dance to her voice in our apartment are the best kind. Read More
October 1, 2018 Arts & Culture Alain Mabanckou’s Masterfully Unstructured Novel of Addiction By Uzodinma Iweala Alain Mabanckou’s Broken Glass was first published in France under the title Verre cassé in 2005. It immediately received massive attention. Mabanckou, a French citizen and lawyer born in Republic of the Congo, was already a known talent in Francophone literary circles, having won the Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire for his book Bleu-blanc-rouge and critical acclaim for African Psycho. At the time of Broken Glass’s French publication, Republic of the Congo, where the book takes place, was only six years out of violent political conflict that saw the return of a former military head of state. The Democratic Republic of the Congo endured another paroxysm of internal fighting, while Sudan’s civil war and Darfur’s crisis raged. Sierra Leone and Liberia had just turned the corner after years of brutal war. Despite a new hope for African economies due to a commodities boom, poverty was still the central story in nearly every journalistic piece about Africa. The continent was very much defined in the international consciousness as a place of violence and instability. Critics and scholars would perpetuate their own position that African literature was overly explanatory, anthropological, and only a thinly veiled fictionalization of the lived African world by focusing their attention on works that portrayed Africa as suspended between the poles of suffering and resilience, concerned primarily with survival. Then there’s Broken Glass, a book so irreverent in its approach to the revelation of the African soul, so brutally satiric in its battle against stereotypes of African literary characters’ search for meaning, that upon its first translation into English, in 2009, critics could not ignore its ferocious difference. Kirkus Reviews calls it an “idiosyncratic and raucously impertinent tour of the Western canon.” The Independent views Broken Glass through the tried-and-true lens of backward Africa, saying Mabanckou’s words are spears that “aim their shafts at a parlous society dominated by poverty, corruption and an incorrigible faith in magic.” To be clear, these are both overwhelmingly positive reviews, as were most. But could it be that these critics, even in their enthusiasm, miss something crucial about Broken Glass, a masterfully unstructured work that follows a drunken former schoolteacher named Broken Glass through meandering stories of his life and the lives of other customers who frequent the Pointe-Noire dive bar called Credit Gone West? I ask because the answer is a resounding yes. Attempts to place Broken Glass as a commentary on relationships between the African and the Western literary imaginaries or on Africa’s social ills are blind to the central theme underpinning this multifaceted work: a layered exploration of addiction. Read More
September 28, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Museum Heists, Midsixties Teens, and Munchesque Prisoners By The Paris Review Photo: Lucas Marquardt. Ada Limón’s poetry is like staring into a cloudy night sky and searching desperately for any signs of a star. Just when you’re about to give up, you find a single pinprick in the dark, enough light to remind you that something’s out there. With each poem in her new collection, The Carrying, Limón counterbalances her most paralyzing fears with her ability to find small twinges of hope. Much of Limón’s pain originates in her body: her twisted spine, her inability to conceive. “What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?” she despairs in “The Vulture and the Body.” But Limón’s pain supersedes the physical; through verse, her body becomes a simulacra of the political dread that has been sowed across the country. In the chilling lines of “A New National Anthem,” Limón wonders, “Perhaps / the truth is every song of this country/ has an unsung third stanza, something brutal / snaking underneath us … ” The only way Limón can face the overwhelming aspects of her existence is with her most personal comforts. She grows tomatoes in her garden. She finds beauty in dandelions and leaves. She relies on the durability and the persistence of nature. Each poem is a widening lens of the world, an unburdening of the things we carry deep within ourselves. “Look, we are not unspectacular things,” she reminds us. “We’ve come this far, survived this much.” —Madeline Day Read More