—Joan Johnson, President, Tampico Historical Society

***

Heavy rain fell on Tampico, Illinois, on November 3, 1980, and by late afternoon, when it cleared up, a majestic double rainbow materialized in the sky above the quiet prairie village. Lloyd McElhiney, manager of the Tampico grain elevator, noticed it first—how it swooped from the clouds onto Main Street’s single-block stretch, and how its luminous arc seemed to point, decisively, to the walkup apartment where Ronald Reagan was born. So he darted home for a camera, just fast enough to capture the scene on grainy Polaroid.[1]

The next day, Reagan was elected president by a landslide, the most decisive non-incumbent upset since 1932.

The election spelled triumph for conservative intellectual circles, still reeling from the trauma of Goldwater’s defeat in 1964. It signaled victory for the Religious Right, freshly mobilized by the emergence of the Moral Majority in 1979. It restored prestige to a GOP that had been wounded by Watergate’s lingering disgrace.

And it brought a rich tumult of unnamable emotion to Tampico, Illinois, where locals recall watching Reagan’s victory speech on TV that night and tearing up when he spoke the name of their town. “That guy,” muttered an older gentleman at the time, a lifelong Democrat, “he’s just one of us.”[2]

Someone mailed the photo of the Reagan Rainbow to the president-elect, who pasted the copy into a personal scrapbook and kept it in an Oval Office desk drawer for eight years. As townspeople tell it, he would turn to the image for inspiration. To their delight, he mentioned it in his memoir.

“Ronald called the postcard eerie,” says Amy McElhiney, the photographer’s widow, who led visitors through the birthplace for twelve years before growing too frail. “We like to call it prophetic.”

Tampico is like a thousand other Midwestern prairie towns. But Tampico is like no other Midwestern prairie town. The village lies about 115 miles west of Chicago, closer to the Iowa border, in the vast cornfield flats of northwestern Illinois. Its industry remains chiefly agricultural in nature, its historic Main Street only a single-block stretch. There is a diner, a park, a funeral home, the birthplace, two churches, all tightly packed redbrick structures with vertical windows and awnings lining the brief expanse. At the end of the block sits the Tampico Farmers’ Elevator from which Lloyd saw the rainbow, a cluster of white domelike structures offering themselves up into the Midwestern sky.

There’s no law firm, no bookstore, no sleek visitor center or river for the farms in town. Hold McElhiney’s photo up against Main Street—you’ll spot where the rainbow sloped down to Reaganville, USA. In a town of 790 people, what else is there to see?

Ronald Reagan was born on the second level of the Graham Building at 111 South Main Street, a cramped walkup apartment above what still proclaims itself to be the FIRST NATIONAL BANK. “He looks like a fat little Dutchman,” his father was said to have remarked on first glancing the newborn, “but who knows, he might grow up to be president some day.”

Built in 1895, the building was home to the Reagan family from 1906 to 1911, when they moved into a house nearby just a few months after the future president was born. Below the apartment then was a saloon, though Tampico claims it was a bakery (it became one in 1915) for the sake of respectability.

There are three bedrooms in the apartment above the museum, and they are cramped and musty, airless in summer, with yellowing Reagan family photos ornamenting the shriveled flower wallpaper. There is a tight kitchen, a long hallway containing an ironing board and a birdcage, and a modest collection of vintage furniture all amassed by the curator during the Reagan presidency. To the right is the especially stuffy bedroom where Ronald Wilson Reagan was born—a small bed in the corner and a window on the right opening into the adjacent apartment. Jack and Nelle Reagan were close with the couple who lived next door. Often, for convenience, they would babysit each other’s children, and instead of climbing up and down the impossibly narrow staircase, they would hand off Baby Ronald like a football back and forth through the window.

“When [Reagan] visited us in 1992, he went through the Reagan Window as an adult,” a guide tells me. “And both his sons, Michael and Ronald, were here last year, and they got to climb through the window as well. And Newt Gingrich has gone through it. And Ed Meese.”

When Reagan first ran for president in 1976, one Paul Nicely still rented out the apartment. By then, Nicely, a one-armed Tampico native and retired schoolteacher with a particular reverence for the president’s mother, had converted the bank level downstairs into a small memorabilia shop. After the 1980 win, he spent his life savings collecting artifacts, restoring the apartment to its 1911 appearance, and opening it as a locally run museum.

Nicely died of a heart attack in 1994, and his wife soon succumbed to dementia, so the McElhineys—Lloyd, the photographer, and his wife Amy—took over, shepherding visitors through the museum on a volunteer basis, canes in hand, and organizing annual birthday bashes for Ronnie. When Lloyd died in 2006, Amy pooled all of his memorial donations for a bronze Reagan boyhood statue in the children’s park. There wasn’t enough money for the statue, and she was too frail to continue alone with the tours.

Today the birthplace is managed by Joan Johnson, the sprightly, white-haired president of the Tampico Historical Society. She comes armed with postcards, brochures, and complimentary jellybeans—the president’s favorite snack. Her uniform: faded black shorts and an oversized, messily tucked “Reagan’s Rainbow” t-shirt.

Joan tells me about the Reagan Window, about the annual Reagan-themed parade. In fact, Tampico receives visitors from all over the world. Once, there was a bus of sixteen farmers from Bulgaria, eager to pay their thanks to Reagan for fighting the Soviet Union.

“It’s a pleasant place for people to come,” says Joan. “But we really don’t have industry or anything anymore.” She shrugs. “We do have a doctor. And that’s a big plus.”

Her pet peeve: people who claim the president was born in Dixon, IL—30 miles northeast of here, where he spent much of his boyhood.

“No, he was actually born here,” Joan retorts, indignant, pointing at the ground. “This is where the story started.”

And this is where Reagan returned, three times in 42 years, as an adult, first, in 1950, as his acting career wrapped up. He served as grand marshal of the 1950 cheese festival. Shortly after, the town creamery shut down, and that was the end of that.

Then, in 1976, during his first bid for the Republican nomination, he spent a day campaigning in Tampico. Joan recalls seeing him speak at the local school. Grudgingly, Nancy accompanied him. Her husband wanted to see the room where he was born, but there were still tenants occupying the apartment, which was not yet a museum, and security detail vetoed the plan.

He never visited as sitting president. When he came as close as Dixon for a birthday reception in 1984, locals were peeved. “Before he left, he said he’d be back,” griped Mr. Nicely, who had spent thousands of dollars since Reagan’s 1976 visit restoring the birthplace, “but he’s never been back.”[3]

Finally, in 1992, the president expressed an inexplicable desire to return home. His presidency was over. His Alzheimer’s diagnosis two years away, but the signs—fleeting memory lapses, sudden pauses in speech—were firmly there. They were there, some say, as the second term ended.

Stumbling, lost, did the aging president remember his roots? Never known for his memory, Reagan had always favored witticisms, stories, over facts and detail. So Edmund Morris, his biographer, escorted him and Nancy on the trip. An unmarked black rental car shuttled the party from a Rock Falls airport to the Tampico Church of Christ. “We belong to the Methodist church in Tampico, and halfway through the service, someone came running in crying, ‘He’s here, he’s here!’” Joan recalls.

After the service, the Reagan party made its way to 111 South Main. “You don’t have to pretend to remember this place,” Morris assured the Dutch. “You were only three months old when your parents checked out.”[4]

“Yes,” said Reagan, confusing his birthplace with the residence his family occupied eight years later, “we went to live over the store where my father worked.”

By 1992, the Reagan Birthplace was a teeming, ridiculous shrine of a museum. I imagine the 81-year-old president eying the homespun, hand-painted signpost out front: “PRES. REAGAN BIRTHPLACE,” it reads in red, white, and blue block lettering, peeling cheaply below a plain “OPEN” banner. “Ronald Reagan ‘Stept’ Here,” proclaims the doormat inside.

He enters: a dizzying array of memorabilia, artifacts, and Reagan-themed miscellanea. The material bric-a-brac of political life, from the curiousto the useless and everything in between—old letters, report cards, movie posters, model photos, presidential seals, portraits, news clippings, postcards, fan mail, stamps, bobble heads, caricatures, Ronald-and-Nancy coloring books, jellybeans, a “World’s Best President” certificate that appears to belong in a third-grade classroom in northwestern Illinois. The novelty pours out from the walls, from the desk drawers, from the welcoming hands of the sweet old ladies who hand you jellybeans before you sneak out to the road. These are memories, packaged, dusted, shrink-wrapped, and worn. How strange are they for the man to whom they belonged?

So they take him upstairs, spin him around to the darkly lit bed where he began, and—

“This, Mr. President,” says Mrs. Nicely, “is where you were born.”

Cold silence. He sucks in his breath.

“He wheeled his big body, faced away from the past, and began to tell jokes,” Morris writes. “The bed had shocked him into temporary lucidity.”

Reagan’s memory was fading, or had it been anchored, dreamlike and bent, onto some other figure?

Two doors down from the birthplace is the Dutch Diner, and when I enter for lunch, there sits an animated group of six or seven locals, apparent old-timers, in discussion at a round table. Their argument revolves around how to improve the street sign proclaiming the birthplace. I’m distracted by the graying Reagan movie posters glaring from the walls—Hell’s Kitchen, Night Into Night.

I work up the nerve to approach the table. They seem thrilled to have a new listener, and somehow the subject turns to the week after Reagan’s death.

“They were in town interviewing people, and the whole week after he died, they had so much equipment in the birthplace that you had to walk around cords and big lights and everything!” a boisterous woman, about 60 or 65, raves. “Amy and Lloyd were so busy with people visiting that they didn’t even have time to eat lunch. And there were all kinds of people outside, inside, everywhere—and you had all kinds of radio stations, TVs, everything was here!”

When the plane carrying the president’s body flew over Illinois en route to California, Tampico received word that it would pass over at 3:07 p.m. The woman talks faster, her eyes wild.

“When they came, the WGN had their camera up there and as they flew over the town, they tipped their wing. And that was kind of exciting—they were saying, ‘Look at all the corn below!’ and we were saying, ‘Oh my gosh, there goes Ronald Reagan’s body, isn’t that exciting?’”

I think of Lloyd McElhiney with his Polaroid, peering up at the Illinois sky.

“Well, that was the first time Ronald Reagan’s body ever flew over Tampico,” a man across the table interjects, and at once they roar.

I’m reminded of another conversation entirely. A few weeks before visiting Tampico, I got in touch with George Cleveland, a boisterous grandson of Grover Cleveland, and his wife, Frances Folsom. The 58-year-old heir runs a senior service center by day but trots his grandfather’s stomping grounds in his spare time, impersonating the president as “warm-up entertainment” at local events.[5] I emailed him (I was just back from Grover’s birthplace in Caldwell, NJ), and he dashed off a quick reply in bright purple Georgia typeface:

If you can, give me a call before 10 this evening. Tomorrow is going to be wild and life gets perkier after that. 

So I did, and if I expected a dry explication of a 179-year-old manse, I received instead a colorful 45-minute ramble on the life and times of a presidential descendant—on fighting off biographers who insist his grandfather was a “big rapist child-eating monster,” on shocking Buffalo townspeople with his family resemblance, and on being related to the “first lesbian First Lady.”[6] But what he really wanted to tell me about was the Marshfield Cherry Blossom Festival and Presidential Family Reunion, an annual gathering of the bizarre in Marshfield, MO, “the only place on earth you’ll get Elly May Clampett from Beverly Hillbillies and George McGovern in the same room.”

“It’s kind of like all reality is suspended for about five days,” Cleveland continued, hoarse and frenzied over speakerphone. “I met one of the original munchkins, and I almost got him to run for president in the New Hampshire primary.” That was the same day he watched descendants of Jefferson Davis and Dred Scott warmly embrace.

And then: “It’s beyond Americana! A world all unto itself.”

It’s what? It’s where?

Cleveland’s words lingered. When I pulled into Tampico’s storybook Main Street a month later, they fell strangely into place.

“THIS IS REAGAN COUNTRY,” offers a wizened sign atop the roof of the town convenience store. This is Reagan’s country. Yes, but this is Reagan Country. It’s not political, not a GOP slogan. Nothing to do with tax reform, Grenada, supply-side economics. It’s a beckoning, a greeting—a suspension of reality. A 0.4-square-mile fantasy, or a national subconscious.

There is a space that lies beyond Americana, that exists outside—apart from—the borderlines of memory and narrative and withered material artifact, where history tangles toward mythmaking until their threads seamlessly intertwine. It is a place where double-curved rainbows signal divine purpose, where saloons are bakeries and birthplaces nostalgia shops, where babies are born fat little Dutchmen, but who knows, they could grow up to be president, and tell stories, and forget.

Ronald Reagan never regarded himself as a career politician. When he entered politics at the seasoned age of fifty-five, he did so as an ordinary citizen called into office with certain core principles and convictions about how government ought to work. So why have we elevated the Gipper beyond personhood and into the realm of figment and myth? Where do man and memory collide, and who decides?

Fogged by history, swamped in contradiction, Reagan’s is an unusual legacy. Certainly no other president since Kennedy begs the same shimmering reverence as the Gipper.[7] On paper, it’s simple. Reagan matches just the criteria for an American presidential mythmaker-in-chief. Born to humble circumstances, he rose to public service through unyielding conviction and fierce oratorical skill. He came from Illinois, was affable, well-spoken, folksy, warm. He served during the war. He assumed the presidency during a time of crisis; he freed the hostages (that was the beginning) and tore down the wall (that was the end). He united the party (never in the twenty-odd years since has the GOP rallied around a candidate like they did Reagan) and shifted the conversation decisively to the right. He ended the war. Can’t you remember?

He was shot, too, by a crazed gunman. The bullet ricocheted against the presidential limo and into the president’s underarm; it lodged itself in his lung, less than an inch from his heart. When he survived, he called it divine intervention. He had been spared, he thought, to reduce the threat of nuclear war.

In practice, it’s rather more complex. Reagan’s personality offered what historian George H. Nash terms “the ineffaceable example of optimism, grit, serenity, wit, and constructive use of the life he had been given to live”[8] needed to capture and inspire not just voters but the people themselves. He could, it was said, get a standing ovation in a graveyard if he tried. And he radiated, somehow, the political gymnastics of seeming not to try.

There were other things, too. There were AIDS, the four-letter word Reagan did not publicly utter until 1987, and Grenada, the teeny 132.8-square-mile Caribbean Commonwealth realm that he did—and how—in 1983. There were the homeless, the parents and veterans and children living in cars, on the streets, in Salvation Army relief centers, who were the subject of 1,585 New York Times articles published between 1981 and 1988.[9] There was Alzheimer’s, confusion, the tenuous grasp of policy details that set in quietly between the Iran-Contra scandal and the swearing in of George H. W. Bush. There were welfare cuts, the income gap, skyrocketing debt, the budding revelation that in Reaganland, federal deficits are of no matter at all.

These things happened—they were real—miles from Tampico, in places like D.C., Detroit, California. They happened outside of this sleek mural, beyond these six streetlights, without the Dutch Diner lunch crowd’s buzzing consent. By the mid-1990s, historians were in question about what the Reagan Revolution had meant, if it was a revolution at all. By the mid-1990s, Ronald Reagan was in the throes of memory deterioration, in question about anything he had done during his presidency or before. Who is to say he recalled Tampico at all?

What was it, anyway, he was supposed to recall? A mural, a diner, a convenience store, a bank? A rainbow that flashed and once bore his name? Ronald Reagan “stept” here; he was passed through the window enough times, and finally he made it to the other side.

This, Mr. President, is where you were born.

But you don’t have to pretend you remember. These people—they do it for you, and there they go again.

***

[1] Most of my specific details regarding the Reagan Rainbow are via oral testimony from residents of Tampico, which I visited on July 21, 2011. I an especially grateful to Joan Johnson, who runs the Ronald Reagan Birthplace and kindly gave me postcards adorned with the famous photo, and to Amy McElhiney, who previously ran the site with the late Lloyd, her husband of 62 years. You can view the image for yourself at http://bit.ly/H72lRz.

[2] Martens, Steven. “Reagan’s Mark Remains on Town He Called Home.” Quad-City Times [Davenport] 6 Feb. 2011. Quad-City Times. 6 Feb. 2011. Web. 31 Mar. 2012.

[3] 16, January. “Reagan Birthplace Never Won Fame : Town Waiting for Favorite Son to Visit.” The Los Angeles Times Jan. 1989. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 16 Jan. 1989. Web. 02 Apr. 2012. <http://articles.latimes.com/1989-01-16/news/mn-532_1_favorite-son>.

[4] Morris, Edmund. “When Reagan Went Home to Tampico.” The New York Times 5 Feb. 2011, Op-Ed sec.: WK10. The New York Times. 5 Feb. 2011. Web. 30 Mar. 2012.

[5] “It’s not like you walk down the street and somebody says, ‘Oh my god, you look like Grover Cleveland!’” the presidential heir explained. But “from the neck up, it’s friggin’ scary.”

[6] It’s true, sort of. Grover Cleveland was unmarried when he entered office, so his sister Rose served as First Lady for White House functions. For extensive information on Rose’s sexuality, see http://www.outhistory.org/wiki/Rose_Cleveland_and_Evangeline_Marrs_Simpson_Whipple:_1889-1918.

[7] I exclude from this judgment Barack Obama, whose legacy remains pending in more ways than one.

[8] Nash, George H. Dunn, 69.

[9] Critchlow, Donald T. The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Print. 214.

***

Rumpus original art by Mark Armstrong.

Listen to Zach read his essay:

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***

Loitering is not particularly difficult or physically demanding. It doesn’t, at first blush, appear revolutionary or even criminal. Consider that “loiter” is an intransitive verb. There is no object to it. It is all subject and subjectivity. To loiter requires simply that you stand around or sit aimlessly, without purpose, to choose a space because it happens to be in the shade, or just happens to be there. Anywhere. The key to pure loitering—the most honest embodiment of the word’s spirit—is of course to do nothing. Absolutely nothing.

But it has become bigger than that. Revolutionary. To do nothing now in the name of loitering is also to repurpose in the name of purposeless an otherwise purposed space. And we are surrounded by purposed spaces. To loiter then is a kind of zen-like appropriation, a subjective possession of objective, though often marginal space; and perhaps this is enough to make it revolutionary, enough to threaten those who are invested in the purposing or owning of such space. It worries us when someone does nothing, even when they seem to be doing nothing on a street corner, a roadway median, an alley or some other marginal space. We’re so busy, so purposeful; and in our world of increasing technological connection, we’re always engaged in some activity. It’s hard for us to understand the nothingness of loitering.

Part of the trouble is that it is nearly impossible to define “doing nothing” from “doing something,” so people who truly loiter assume a kind of vague, dangerous amorphous potentiality. The ambiguity of their physical and moral position frightens us. After all, when is any one of us actually doing nothing in any space? Have you ever truly done nothing?

Even when I putter around my yard or sit on my front porch, thinking about whatever I’m currently writing or reading, aren’t I still doing something, even if that something is only thinking? I’m still using the space with an intent that seems to fit the space. I wonder how long I could loiter on my street corner, just stand around thinking and watching people and traffic without drawing unwanted attention to myself. I wonder if that time would be different if I lived in a wealthier, gated community on the North side of town, one of those places where they don’t really have street corners. What if I just stood around in the middle of a cul-de-sac? Or if I lived in a more poverty-stricken, gang-controlled neighborhood in a different part of town would my loitering embody a different potentiality? Of course it would. The objective nothingness in my loitering allows my subjectivity to be shaped to the expectations of the context.

Loitering then as an idea is as undefined, abstract, and subjective as happiness or suffering. It can be adapted and appropriated, shaped to fit the situation; and then laws or ordinances or signs that attempt to regulate loitering are the ontological equivalent of ordinances regulating or controlling happiness or suffering. They are perhaps the most common legislative manifestations of the conflict between subjective intent and attempts at objective measurement of said intent.

Sometimes I think about this when I visit the Food King market in my neighborhood, a subjectively happy place, a true neighborhood convenience store. It feels like home to me. I don’t even care that it costs me nearly twenty dollars for two six-packs of beer. The brothers, Mo and Najib, who own the Food King, emigrated to the U.S. from Yemen and are exceedingly nice to me, always calling me by name. They know most of their customers by name; sometimes Najib’s bespectacled son sits behind the counter working on his homework. Mo and Najib often talk about the weather and they’re usually listening to NPR on the radio. But they also have prominent “No Loitering” signs posted on the front of the store and a bank of video monitors that allow them to keep and eye on every part of their property. You have about as much time to linger in front of the Food King as you do in front of an airport. Pause too long and you will be hustled along.

Mo and Najib have to deal with challenges I can barely imagine. Fresno is a dangerous place filled with desperate people. Nobody really denies this reality. We just live with it. But Mo and Najib run a tight ship, more than most places. They keep their store clean and free of the crowds that loiter around elsewhere. They never hesitate to chase off the street-kids and panhandlers, the tweakers or the prostitutes; and I have to admit that I appreciate this, that it makes me feel somewhat safer as a consumer.

When I asked Mo one day about his “No loitering” signs and how he enforces the rule, he told me that he just tells any loiterers to move along, and if they don’t move, he might threaten to call the police.

“But would they come?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. Maybe. But if you just mention the police, they mostly move along.”

“And if they don’t?”

“If they don’t, I take my stick out there and I tell them I’m gonna count to three and then I’m gonna hit you with this stick.”

Mo didn’t show me his stick but I guessed it was some kind of baton. I didn’t doubt his conviction. Mo meant business. To him the issue was all black-and-white, no gray area, no room for interpretation. This was his property, his Food King, and he was in charge of defining loitering in this subjective space. He also told me he had a gun under the counter if it came to that.

The Food King. Fresno, CA 2013

***

Perhaps the most extreme example of the threatening potentiality of loitering is in the context of an elementary school, an exaggeratedly purposed and morally charged public space. If you stand around outside the playground fence of a school, just stand there long enough, most likely your loitering will be seen as a threat and you will most likely be confronted by authority figures. In Fresno all the schools are surrounded by six-foot chain-link safety fencing. If you’re loitering around a school, regardless of your intent (maybe you’re studying the architecture of schools for a class) you might be arrested or at least just hassled and hustled along. There are signs posted everywhere forbidding all manner of activities, including dog walking, golfing, model-airplane flying, and loitering; and as a parent of elementary school children, I’m glad to see those signs when we take our dog there for walks. I don’t really care if you’re flying model-airplanes at my daughter’s school, but I do care if you’re loitering there. It doesn’t matter to me if you’re innocently researching something for a novel or an essay, maybe snapping photos with your IPhone, I just want you to move along and take your subjectivity elsewhere. An elementary school is a place where the objective truth of the context overwhelms the subjective truth of anyone who moves through the space. Your rights are necessarily limited there, and it doesn’t end at the fence. The rights-defining power of an Elementary School space extends well beyond the fences, past the sidewalks, into the streets, where the rules of driving are more stringent and more morally charged, and even further beyond into surrounding neighborhoods, where legal penalties for things like narcotics trafficking are increased. In such spaces the objective meaning of the place overwrites your subjective intent.

Hamilton Elementary School, Fresno, CA 2013

***

It is also the vague undefined nature of loitering combined with the impossibility of truly knowing or measuring subjective intent that has allowed anti-loitering laws and ordinances to be used as a weapon against civil disobedience. Martin Luther King was arrested because anti-loitering laws on the books in Montgomery allowed the police, regardless of the facts of that day, to define King’s presence, to shape his intent into something criminal, something they could use to control him. He was just attending a public trial. But anti-loitering laws allowed the police to arrest him for being black in a white space.

Attempts to criminalize loitering have been used more recently to try and control gang activity, drug sales, panhandling and prostitution, as well as to control populations of homeless people and protesters in the nationwide “Occupy” movement. These efforts, though often temporarily successful, are often doomed to failure, perhaps because of the very nature of loitering itself. Courts have recognized that anti-loitering laws often encourage racial profiling and police abuse of marginalized groups. Legislating loitering is like legislating nothingness.

In February 2012, New York City settled a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of thousands of citizens arrested over the years on anti-loitering charges that had been deemed unconstitutional. The city’s efforts to control loitering over a span of thirty years will ultimately cost them fifteen million dollars and require them to expunge thousands of arrests and convictions. There is little evidence to suggest, however, that this will change the way anti-loitering laws and ordinances are used to control marginalized populations in this country. We are simply too purposed and possessive of our objective spaces, too frightened by the potential of loiterers.

In other communities, perhaps due to the challenges of defining and enforcing anti-loitering ordinances, business owners are turning to less obviously confrontational, more passive, subjective, and subliminal deterrence methods. They’re turning to sound warfare as a way to avoid the whole messy enterprise of objectively measuring and legislating against subjective intent. Perhaps they’re doing this because it protects them from images of abuse and violence and the cultural resonance created by such pictures.

***

The Mosquito was invented in Wales several years ago.

Moving Sound Technologies has been marketing and selling the Mosquito throughout North America.  Many cities, municipalities, school districts, and parks boards use the Mosquito to combat vandalism 

The patented Mosquito is a small speaker that produces a high frequency sound much like the buzzing of the insect it’s named after.  This high frequency can be heard by young people 13 to 25 years old.

The latest version of the Mosquito is called the MK4 Multi-Age. It has two different settings one for teenagers 13 – 25 years and one setting for all ages. 

When it is set to 17KHz the Mosquito can only be heard by teenagers approximately 13 to 25 years of age. 

When set to 8 KHz the Mosquito can be heard by all ages.

In case you thought Mosquito is all about annoying sound that would force the loiterers to run for cover you would be in for a pleasant surprise!

The Music Mosquito is a complete music system that will relay Royalty free Classical or Chill-out music that would keep the teenagers away to some extent.

Mosquito has a strong steel body .  .  . 

Mosquito anti loitering device is a handy option to suppress vandalism and the issues of graffiti aggressively.

The Mosquito Device can help with Teen Loitering Problems.

Mosquito has a strong steel body .  .  . 

The Mosquito Device can help with Gang Loitering Problems 

Mosquito has a strong steel body .  .  .

The Mosquito Device can help with Vandalism Problems

Mosquito has a strong steel body .  .  .

The Mosquito Device can help with Grafitti[1] Problems

Mosquito has a strong steel body .  .  .

The Mosquito

***

At night now in Fresno or in your city they might gather beneath the glow of street-lamps, lurking around its penumbral cone of light. Packs of teenagers. Black kids. Brown kids. White kids. Brawny boys in baggy clothes, hats and team jerseys; pale, inked kids wearing white wife-beaters; girls in skinny jeans, high-heels and higher hair; or a population of bearded men smiling through meth-snaggled teeth, shuffling burnouts and tweakers with face tattoos, gang bangers with bulldog paws or red lips painted permanently on their necks; or maybe it’s those ubiquitous kids at a suburban mall wearing Polo shirts and skinny jeans, high-top sneakers, and puffy Tommy Hilfiger jackets and they’re loitering around Jamba Juice or the movie theater, around your neighborhood school, or outside your business every night. These are the loiterers, the idle enemies of consumption and purpose. These are the targets of subjective warfare.

In my hometown, the high school kids from outlying rural communities used to drive to downtown Lawrence, park their trucks backwards in the diagonal spaces along Massachusetts St. and set up lawn chairs in the beds. They watched the rest of us stroll past as if we were specimens in museums. Often we looked the part. Often things were said. Often there were fights. Often there was litter and vandalism. Several merchants installed strobe lights in the windows of their stores, leaving them on all night long as a kind of light-deterrent, a passive form of loitering enforcement. It worked, too. After a while nobody wanted to park or linger in front of those shops. There were fewer fights there, less litter and vandalism. But the lights also just made the business owners seem kind of mean and intolerant.

It doesn’t matter, really, what loiterers look like for the purposes of the Mosquito or for a strobe light. Such passive forms of loitering deterrence don’t discriminate on the basis of color, class, caste, or clothing choice. They cannot violate rights in part because we have few clear legal protections against noise or light pollution, despite its obvious influence on subjective experiences of happiness or suffering. Noise might not violate your rights. It can’t bend you over a counter and handcuff you, but it can violate your space and subjectivity. It can make it hard to think, even hard to do nothing.

What matters to the Mosquito is not the motivations of the loiterer, but simply that the subjective loitering body courses with blood and has ears with which to listen. In this way it is much like a bomb. A very smart bomb. What makes the Mosquito insidious is how it targets the age of the loiterer, his youth and the way his brain processes sound. Imagine a bomb that only wipes out people of a certain age, a bomb that targets only the young. The mosquito doesn’t care about the kinetic potential for chaos, for unpredictable behavior inherent in their stasis. It doesn’t care about anything because the mosquito is a machine designed to create an automatic physiological response, because its intrusion into your subjective internal space is silent, indiscriminate, and subtly violent.

The danger of loiterers at rest is that bodies will remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force. The danger is the malicious pull of idle hands toward evil deeds. And the popular imagination associates loitering—a behavior defined specifically by its purposelessness—with all sorts of bad or illicit purposes; most notably property crimes like vandalism and graffiti, as well as with gang activity and prostitution. And because there is often little else for them to do, no other place for them to gather, teenagers—the ultimate in-betweeners—are regular offenders of anti-loitering efforts and ordinances. By their very nature, teenagers embody the conflict between objective rules and expectations and subjective intent. They live perpetually in the liminal space between outside rules and their internal wills. Teenagers are all subjectivity, all solipsistic fervor; they are in essence loitering between childhood and adulthood, embodying that marginalized space with intent that is often inscrutable to those of us living outside that space.

In my neighborhood, the loitering teens move between a series of spots, these odd sort of in-between places like the island of a parking lot behind Starbucks and Bobby Salazar’s Mexican restaurant, or someone’s yard, perhaps the community garden, up against the brick wall of the Brass Unicorn and the Starline or in the side-yard of an apartment building on Moroa Ave. You won’t find them outside the Food King, but nearby in side-streets and alleyways, lounging in various liminal spaces.

Much to the chagrin of many Fresno shoppers, we also find loitering teens on the wealthy, north side of town at the clay-colored strip mall called River Park, a palace to consumerism and multi-national corporations that, in effort to curb loitering, not long ago tried to ban unaccompanied teenagers from the premises. That didn’t work so well.

A parent or other objectively recognized adult had to be with any teenager on the premises. It wasn’t clear how the mall intended to enforce this, if they planned to randomly ID anyone who looked young enough to be a teenager. Perhaps they simply should have installed Mosquito anti-loitering devices in the same places they’ve installed Musak speakers and security cameras. We fear teenagers not because of their loitering itself—that gray penumbral area between right and wrong—but because the act of doing so suggests, by its mere existence, the possibility for harm, for mayhem and destruction. We fear their unbridled youth and all of its sublime potentiality. We fear their marginalization because it lives outside the boundaries of our control.

Banksy, Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, LA

 ***

One day not long ago as I was driving home from lunch with a friend, I took a side street that parallels a major thoroughfare, a street known as a popular hangout for the Fresno street kids and the homeless. A homeowner who has been working on remodeling a large house that backs up to the street recently installed a painted wooden fence and stacked-stone planters surrounding mature pomegranate trees. He’s created a lovely little oasis of landscape architecture that would appeal to nearly anyone’s aesthetic; and as I drove past this oasis, I saw a loose pack of loitering teens lounging around the planters, smoking, pawing at each other, laughing, and doing nothing. All of them. Loitering. Just sitting there, doing nothing. And I felt this momentary urge to yell at them or drive them away somehow, but I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was jealousy. Perhaps it was fear.

Unless I’m writing or reading, I have trouble sitting still for ten minutes. I can’t imagine doing it for 2 or 10 hours. I wondered if the homeowner might want to think about getting the Mosquito anti-loitering device, if he might want to agitate their space and send out high-pitched squeals of deterrent noise. I thought this might be something that I would do if I owned the house; but even as I thought it, I cringed at the idea, the invasion and violation of space, as well as at the aesthetic and moral cruelty of creating an otherwise appealing place that would be simultaneously physiologically repulsive, a space whose 17 MHz of Mosquito noise would hurt the ears of young people.

These days when teenagers loiter across the street from our house, making-out or smoking weed from a can or a pipe or a blunt-wrap, I mostly ignore them. Some days I want to tell them to move along or to just smoke somewhere else. Some days I want to warn them that other people aren’t so understanding, that the police often patrol our street since it’s so close to the high school. But the most I ever do, if I’m out front with my kids, is give the teenagers a hard stare, maybe a wave to let them know I see them, to suggest they might move along.

I’ve thought about calling the police, but the Fresno police frighten me more than loitering teenagers. They shoot people. Pretty regularly. I don’t want these kids to get shot or even arrested. And besides I don’t really want to be that guy–the asshole neighbor who calls the cops on kids. The truth is they’re not hurting anyone except maybe themselves. They’re just hanging around because they can, because they have nowhere else to go. My friends and I did similar stuff in high school. We used to drive out into the Kansas countryside, down empty gravel roads, to find space where we could smoke or drink. These kids like to linger against the tall fence along my neighbor’s side yard and sit beneath the overhanging tree on the stacked railroad ties. It’s only a block from Fresno High School, away from the crush of other kids and just beyond the boundaries of school space. It seems safe enough, like a place where they can loiter in peace.

Who am I to deny them this space?

I watch them sometimes and I think about Mo and his stick, his gun under the counter. I think about the Mosquito and I wonder how I would react if the teenagers crossed the street, crossed the line and started loitering in my yard, if they even got close to my daughter and invaded my subjective space.

I’m not sure I would even count to three.

I like to think I’m a long way from those white officers in Moore’s photograph, those agitated and frightened white men who pressed King against the counter, twisting his arm behind his back, arresting him for eternity in the objective space of that everlasting image. But I realize I’m also guilty. I’ve let my own subjective fear shape the way I define loitering. I’ve let my imagination carry me away, let my own context—home and family, children and dog, yard and garden—condition the meaning of the teenagers’ nothingness and I’ve let it color their lingering at the periphery of my space. The street is the line, I tell myself. It’s a wide and fuzzy boundary between us. But it is a boundary.

One day a boy crossed the line. He approached the house. The kids were in the front yard. My girlfriend met him at the driveway. I’d gone inside for a minute and came out to see her walking back toward the garage. She moved with purpose. I followed her. The boy waited at the end of the driveway.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“He wants to borrow a soccer ball,” my girlfriend said as she smiled and walked past me, down the driveway and tossed him the ball. I felt my blood cool, retreating from full-boil. There was no danger, no threat. There was nothing for me to fear.

“It’s OK,” she said.

The boy and his three friends, another boy and two girls, set up “goals” in the middle of the street made of wadded-up fast-food bags and wrappers. They played soccer on the asphalt for a while, darting out of the way when cars came. They were out there long enough for my kids and I to drift back inside. The boys flirted shamelessly with the girls and showed off with the ball. All of them laughed a lot. They seemed so happy. I watched them through the windows near the front door, listening to the sounds of their youth. They moved with ease and grace between the curbs, lingering in the in-between spaces with such sweet purpose.

***

[1] Sic. All italicized passages taken from the Moving Sound Technologies website.

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In a museum in Havana there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, “one when he was a boy and one when he was a man.”  –Mark Twain

The man in the corner won’t drink the rum. He wears a leg cast and beneath him the chair groans uneasily. He resembles a villain from the silent film era, his face oblong and his hair exceptionally dark, his expression crumpled from years of heavy brooding. One of Lesley’s cousins brings me the bottle, miming a drink with the cap still on. I take a sip of the clear hot liquid then pass the bottle to the man. I am an American in Havana and I’m sitting in a corner with a cocktail-eyed man who won’t drink.

His name is Tony. He is one of Lesley’s tios, or uncles on her mother’s side. He was recently nipped by a car while walking near Parque Central in Havana. The driver, a Cuban, now resides in Miami, a person for whom the state-sponsored slur is gusano, meaning worm or maggot. The driver was drunk, but there is little consequence in this. Of greater concern is his status as a defector.

Thirty years ago, as Lesley and her parents prepared to defect, Tio Tony passed her in the street with a newspaper held to his face. Tony was sworn to El Líder, Fidel Casto, whose regime would outlast Communism itself. On Lesley’s final day in Cuba, their housekey surrendered to the state—the home and its contents relinquished forever—there was no sign of Tony. This was a time of mass defections, but to Tony their departure was the great indignity of his life. Now, all these years later, Lesley and her mother have returned to Cuba for the first time, bringing friends and family with them.

The family eases Tony to the middle of the couch. Amelia, Lesley’s mother, takes a seat near the balcony. Someone asks for a little dark rum, or añejo, for Tio Tony, but Tio Fernando only has ron blanco, the Havana Club brand with which we are about to become familiar.

Fernando’s house in the Luyano district is a limestone beauty amid Soviet-era fortresses of concrete. His paneled front doors, easily 12 feet high, are muddy brown and no wider than window shutters. While trying to enter, my backpack caught the door sill and trapped me, sending Lesley’s cousin Randy into a laughing fit. The smell of rich, unfamiliar food fills the house. Lesley says there will be little or no meat during our stay, but these aromas raise other possibilities.

Fernando speaks with a round, sandpapery voice like he’s speaking through a pipe stuffed with burlap. He is an engine room mechanic for a cargo vessel in the state shipping company, making him the rare Cuban who’s actually seen the world, from Osaka to Buenos Aires. He is warm, generous and weary. He can point at ships in the Havana harbor and identify the cargo by their size and shape: Rice. Oil. Machinery. Medical supplies. “But where does it go?” he asks, as much to himself as to us.

Our trip has been timed to coincide with Fernando’s shore leave. He is Lesley’s closest and dearest uncle, and he is to be our tour guide. Already, however, there are complications: Fernando has sold the family car to finance his oldest son’s passage to Chile, a one-way trip for which papers were expensively prepared. We will be renting a car the next day, a transaction that is anything but straightforward in Cuba. Even, as it turns out, for Cubans.

The rules of defection are brutally unsentimental. The youngest and strongest leave first and, once settled, return their earnings to the family, who begin making arrangements for the next defection. For some families, the process takes years to complete; others never complete it at all. Randy, Fernando’s son, will join the military in two years, which is compulsory for Cuban males at age sixteen. But Fernando is in all likelihood the next one to defect.

Nodding at Tony’s cast, now supported by a footstool, I say, “At least in Cuba, he has the best care available.” Lesley translates for those nearby. I recently revisited Sicko, Michael Moore’s boisterous documentary on health care, paying particular attention as Moore infiltrates Cuba with a handful of sick Americans. There are snorts and a few of Lesley’s cousins smirk good-naturedly.

As it turns out, Cuba possesses a shortage of virtually everything but doctors. During his hospital stay, Tony was required to provide his own bedsheets. In his bag, he carried light bulbs and syringes. The syringes aren’t mandatory for treatment, but most families consider disposable syringes a necessity. The steel syringes still used in Cuba are notorious for the plum-sized bruises they inflict.

Fernando’s wife Mayra, pronounced Mida, ushers me into her kitchen. She hands me a plate of chicharrónes, the chunks of seasoned, deep-fried pork rinds still warm. This is a far cry from the fried dough labeled as chicharrónes in convenience stores. The fat has a light, airy texture that is salty smooth and slightly nauseating. I eat three of them under the expectant gaze of Mayra. Lesley’s husband Eric, a gourmet cook who enjoys exotic (and once, illegal) food, looks restless. He later asks, his eyes like grey dysenteric pools, if it’s customary to eat pork with its hair attached.

Mayra is trying to tell me something. I find one of Lesley’s aunts to translate. “’She says she’s sorry, but for two days, there’s no bread in the markets.’” We all shrug. There is nothing to be done. The freest people in history, as Fidel calls them, turn out to be short of the barest necessities.

From the roof, which we access by scrambling up a ladder, it looks like the aftermath of war. The buildings, some of them roofless, are ashen, the standing walls cracked and crumbling. In a few cases I can see directly into living rooms, the exterior walls collapsed in piles on the floor. Having come to the roof for some air, the view leaves us momentarily breathless. Somewhere we can hear the son beats revived by Buena Vista Social Club.

“It’s like Beirut with better music,” says Eric.

We descend the ladder to dancing. Someone has brought out a small cd player. The music is bassa nova and the dancing is provocative, at least by American standards, the family members nesting and cradling each other to the music. Even Tony is taking part, crutching around as ably as anybody. Maybe it is the añejo, a bottle of which now sits half empty on the table.

From the balcony I watch uniformed soldiers with fumigation tanks knocking on doors below. Randy says they’re spraying for mosquitoes. Dengue, he says slowly, each syllable its own word. A loosely organized stickball game is suspended to accommodate the soldiers. I mean to ask Randy if he has heard from his older brother, now working as a chef in Chile. Then I see what looks like a baguette jutting from a grocery bag against a woman’s shoulder. I hurry inside to find Mayra. There is bread in Havana again.

Turning down the hall, I find Lesley’s mother Amelia seated on a bed in a half-darkened room. She is locked in a spell-breaking embrace with Tony.

 ***

In 1983, when she was ten, Lesley and her family emigrated to Miami via Panama, Mexico and Texas. The year Lesley spent in a Panama City apartment, her father carefully arranging for their emigration to El Paso, is among the most courageous stories I’ve heard. Their transit to and across the U.S. border is reminiscent of the great American epics of flight, from Huck Finn to All the Pretty Horses, except Lesley was escaping into, not through or beyond, America. A girl more brittle than Lesley might have been cauterized by the conditions, by the months of scarcity and uncertainty. Having always felt safe in Havana, she imagined herself among her neighborhood friends, as well as the tias and tios who’d been a part of her daily life.

Lesley grew up next door to Funeria La Moderna, the funeral home in Havana where her father worked. Down the street was a movie theater with an arched roof like a Quonset hut. Sandwiched between the mortuary and the flickering world of the theater, she would dream at night of corpses coming to life, the slow, benign zombies spilling out of Moderna after dark. The theater’s projectionist was a one-legged man prone to day-drinking and passing out by early evening, usually after loading the last film reel. At times he would drift off prior to the reel transfer, the unattended film stock once catching fire. More often, the next film simply wouldn’t start, prompting the kids below to yell, in the cruelly direct way of children, “Hey limb!” or “Drop the bottle!”

Like Lesley, Eric grew up down the street from a movie theater. When they were dating, they spent hours talking about Bonnie and Clyde or Breaking the Waves, or where to find the best ropa vieja or bulgogi in the sprawling basin of LA. But it was Lesley’s experience as a Cuban American that immediately intrigued Eric, whose father had worked all over the world for the defense industry, including Saudi Arabia and Japan. Eric and Lesley married four years ago. While Eric is beloved by Lesley’s family in Miami—sister, mother, stepfather and father—meeting her extended family in Havana would involve risks for which they needed to prepare.

After their daughter Maya was born, the prospect of returning to Cuba became more meaningful and more complicated. Lesley’s Cuban passport, which she keeps current, took almost a full year to renew, an episode with so many rule changes and setbacks that comparisons to Kafka fell hopelessly short. The Cuban consulate required Lesley to carry a letter written by Eric, stating his permission for her to take Maya into Cuba; lose the letter and Lesley might be arrested. Lesley remained in occasional contact with Tio Fernando, more so after cell phones recently became legal, but their connection only reinforced the dismal state of affairs in Cuba. During her last phone call to Fernando before she left for Havana, Fernando inexplicably asked her if she thought Russia would accept his defection.

My role was never made explicit. As a writer and friend of Eric’s from childhood, it was understood that I would try to document their visit to the extent possible. “To make sure it really happened,” I said. This was two weeks before we left. Lesley shook her head as if something more demanding lay ahead. She said, “In Cuba, the truth is more vulnerable than that,” which I took to mean that if visiting her relatives was one thing, finding her family would be another. Family, it should be added, who in some cases she’d never met.

My secondary role was to escort Eric into Cuba, which is suspiciously easy for U.S. citizens to enter, and then accompany him from Cuba through U.S. Customs, a more difficult assignment by far. In contrast to Cuba, I can travel to Iraq, North Korea or Afghanistan, provided I follow the labyrinthine policies for attaining an entry visa. I can travel to Iran, Syria and Sudan, three of the four State Sponsors of Terrorism according to the U.S. State Department. The fourth terrorist state—Cuba—is the one place in the world to which I cannot legally travel without a license from the government.

Two days before our departure, the U.S. Treasury eased the Cuban-American travel restrictions put in place by the Bush Administration. It was, for the first time in ten U.S. administrations, a first step toward a partial lifting of the embargo. Effective immediately, Cuban-Americans could visit Cuba once per year, even to visit relatives by marriage.

Curious about the definition of “relatives,” I visited the Treasury website. Scanning the regulations, I had my first glimpse of the absurdity so endemic to modern Cuba. In an attempt to define a “close relative,” the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) unleashed this Pythagorean gem:

Your mother’s first cousin is your close relative for the purposes of this section, because you are both no more than three generations removed from your great-grandparents, who are the ancestors you have in common. Similarly, your husband’s great-grandson is your close relative for the purposes of this section, because he is no more than three generations removed from you. Your daughter’s father-in-law is not your close relative for the purposes of this section, because you have no common ancestor.

Given the Orwellian tones of these restrictions, it’s understandable that among Americans, the lack of expertise regarding Cuba is staggering. To the world, Cuba beckons as a well-preserved tropical outpost, an island with more tidal coastline than the state of California. For Americans, Cuba is the last closed-market communist dictatorship on earth, a refuge, in the words of Pico Iyer, of “army fatigues, Marxist slogans and bearded threats to our peace.” What it turns out to be is a modern-day dystopia on the order of the film Brazil, a place so overwhelmingly bureaucratic that it would be terrifying were it not so incompetent.

Lesley, Maya and Lesley’s mother Amelia would travel to Havana via Miami. The chartered flight would take a mere 40 minutes, shorter than a flight from Portland to Seattle, and not nearly enough time to adjust to what lay beyond the Straits of Florida. Eric and I would travel to Cancun, arranging for passage to Havana from there.

 ***

Arriving in Havana by day, the first thing you notice, apart from the mild pressure of the warm weather, is the ubiquity of neighborhood murals. Comprised of inspirational or inflammatory slogans and occasionally, but not always, accompanied by cartoon figures, the state-sponsored murals exclaim in deep red letters the ideological (Socialism or Death!) and the universal (Without Education, No Revolution). It’s a paranoid form of patriotism, the constant reassurance creating the impression that people need reassuring.

Graham Greene’s observation in Our Man in Havana that Havana “is a city to visit, not a city to live in” is perhaps more true today, what with the choking fumes, the pocked streets, and the occasional rockfall of limestone blocks from overhead. Greene adopted Havana during the city’s pre-Revolutionary heyday, when its tawdriness was chiefly expressed in a riot of “bright crude colors.” Today, the absence of color is the problem. Passing a state-sponsored billboard with giant letters—translated by Lesley as Revolution Means Construction—Eric replied, a little gloomily, “Obviously, it doesn’t mean ‘Paint.’”

We would be staying in the Santo Suarez neighborhood one block off Avenida Santa Catalina, a leafy, sleepy boulevard with baseball fields at both ends and a church occupying the middle. Long and straight, reminiscent of Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans, Santa Catalina traverses what was once an affluent neighborhood. Today, Suarez is a relatively tidy suburb where, even after 30 years of neglect, only every third house looks abandoned. At night men come out to smoke and work on their cars, while women walk unhurried along its wide but cracking sidewalks.

Our host was Tia Sonia, the sister of Lesley’s father, who was keeping his promise never to return to Cuba while El Comandante was still in power. Sonia’s husband was Romero. The residence belonged to the parents of Sonia and Romero’s daughter-in-law, both magazine writers living in Spain for the year. Romero was a slight but sinewy man with a narrow face and neatly combed grey hair. He would dress down into clean white t-shirts and cargo shorts after work, when he’d relax on the porch smoking Popular cigarettes, the strongest and cheapest available in Cuba. Thin and loose-limbed, another foot taller and he would have been stately, even elegant. He smiled often and he teased a lot, more than once stumbling around the house, pretending to be drunk with my water bottle in his hand, never quite understanding why a person would drink water outside of mealtimes.

The sense you got from Romero was that if Cuba would simply adopt limited free market reforms, including property and business ownership, while still retaining a heavily nationalized state similar to China or Vietnam, Cuba would surely thrive again. “Lifting the embargo is part of the solution,” he said. “But the solution to Cuba is Cuba.”The problem, according to Romero, was that in Cuba there are two answers to almost every important question.

By all signs, Romero enjoyed the simplicity of his life. He had a clean home, a tiny working car, and a television on which he watched beisbol. But to appreciate the confusion of Cuba, he said, I needed to think like a Cuban. For example, Is there home ownership in Cuba? It’s a question the average American wouldn’t ask. The answer, as it turns out, is Yes. And no. A person can’t buy or sell their home, meaning they “own” it only as long as it remains in their family. What about religious freedom? Again, yes and no. Officially atheist, Cuba overlooks religious practices until the state finds it necessary to discredit or imprison you. How about access to social services? Yes and no. The primary obstacles to health care for a Cuban, other than supplies, are the all-day lines, but don’t bother trying to get into the Hotel Nacional, or any other restored landmarks, if you at all resemble a Cuban. Hotels and restaurants are reserved exclusively for tourists.

For every system in Cuba there is a parallel system which clarifies or cancels it. Havana streets have two names, the one locals use and the one in the tourist maps. There are dual currencies in Cuba, the result of a retaliatory move by Castro to eliminate U.S. dollars from the economy: There is the local peso reserved for Cubans and its convertible cousin, nicknamed “cu”, for non-Cubans, which means that to avoid overpaying, you’re constantly reaching for the wrong money. There are two economies, the largest and most profitable being the tourist economy, the other being everything else (the state-run industries like agriculture, health care and education), which results in a divided society in which professors and lawyers, who might make $30 per month, turn to driving cabs or playing music to make $30 per night.

Romero was in many ways typical of his generation: He was both a supporter of the Regime and a casualty of it. He was highly educated, relatively poor and deeply loyal to the Revolution. Despite being trained as a lawyer, he served for years in the Ministry of the Interior, after which, instead of retiring, he took a job managing the maintenance and cleaning crew at the Havana airport. He was, in other words, both a lawyer and a janitor, a combination that is not unusual in Cuba.

Romero’s faithful service had provided him a limited number of perks, including a small car and the ability to purchase Serrano coffee at $13 a bag, the equivalent to half a month’s wages. Romero worked harder in retirement than most people in their prime, working his post at the airport 13 days out of 14. Yet it was Romero, more than anyone I spoke to, who still believed in the promise of socialismo. His wife Sonia seemed more agnostic.

Short and stocky, but highly elastic, Sonia would rotate her hips or her arms dramatically, gliding more than she walked. Her hair was a muted but completely unnatural shade of red. She had a dirty mind and a foul mouth, constantly asking me, via Lesley—Sonia spoke no English whatsoever—whether I was keeping my private parts clean. She had the vocal range of a trained singer and the theatricality of an actress. She could be quiet and sweet one minute, firm and defiant the next, such as when a stranger approached her gate while Maya was playing in the garden. She could sit for hours listening to us talk about America, not comprehending a single word, yet a simple hug could make her cry. I’ve never felt closer to anyone to whom I couldn’t speak. Of all the people I met in Cuba, she was the most distinct.

Fefa, short for Stephanie, was Sonia’s mother and Lesley’s grandmother. She was a tiny, silent matriarch. Although she lived nearby, she slept on a cot in the dining room every night during our visit, so as to increase her time with Lesley. She had the skin of a teenage girl, the color like heavily-creamed coffee, but her hair was as white and fluffy as a dandelion. She resembled the actress Estelle Getty, the fourth member of the Golden Girls. Like Sophia, the character played by Getty, Fefa was an unhinged, back-of-the-classroom wiseacre prone to addressing nobody in particular. She not only didn’t seem to mind my lack of Spanish, she appeared to find it helpful. She never once asked me “Entiendes?” the ubiquitous response to my puzzled looks. She knew in advance I wouldn’t understand. She either didn’t have the energy to communicate for the both of us or she was wise enough to know the language barrier didn’t matter. We rarely spoke more than a few phrases together, but more than once, while sitting together, she would talk to me just for the sake of it.

I caught her peeing one night in the darkened bathroom. She didn’t so much as flinch.

Our only conversation of any duration was the one I actually understood. As the tv played images of potatoes being trucked off a farm, she explained that given the size of the papas harvest, potatoes would start showing up in ration boxes any day now. Her interest in the potato was almost youthful, like a pre-teen awaiting the release of a new iPod.

Our second night, with Fefa asleep in a chair and Sonia and Romero in bed, Lesley described her flight from Miami. She likened the 35 minutes to an out-of-body experience. “Once we took off, I was so exposed emotionally,” she said. ”It was like I was clinging to the wing outside.” It was the experience of reverting to her ten-year-old self. “The adult part of me, everything I’ve become since leaving Cuba, was evaporating,” she said. “I couldn’t stop it. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.”

She was delayed for more than an hour in baggage claim. During that entire time, through a set of bay doors, Lesley could see her family in the terminal, their arms around each other, the wait intensifying their tension. When she finally entered the terminal they burst into tears. Romero later said these reunions are a daily event at the airport.

Lesley’s arrival at the airport was recorded on video. The footage, which I watched at Fernando’s apartment, is a revelation. What comes through—when Randy’s camera isn’t lingering a fraction too long on the cleavage of passing women—is a sudden and prolonged release of tension akin to a goal in world cup soccer. There’s so much crying, so much gripping and grabbing, the camera shakes and skitters. It is mayhem. It is an uncontrolled release of regret and sorrow unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

What you cannot see on the video is how, over the course of the next few hours, Lesley realizes she’s lost the 25 years for good. That after all this time, the history they shared is too too faint or too slight to be recovered. Entering the terminal, she felt a brief but overwhelming sense of familiarity. But after the hugs and tears subsided she felt tentative and swept up by family in name only.

It was different for Amelia, who’d left Cuba at age 29. Amelia had been married and given birth to children in Cuba. She’d spent the initial part of her adulthood among her parents and siblings and friends. To Amelia, Cuba was synonymous with disappointment; it had provided and taken away. Lesley had left during a time of relative prosperity and, more importantly, at an age when every relative, however distant, felt like immediate family. Lesley knew to expect the crumbling architecture, the shortages of everything from food and fuel to soap. But she’d also expected the occasional face, the stray voice, to rekindle that sense of immediacy.

If the flight from Miami was time in reverse, her arrival in Havana lurched her forward into the unexpected present. She had crash-landed in an alternate reality. While her aunts and uncles looked older and thinner, if more wary than she imagined, it was the cousins she wasn’t prepared for, in particular the reflexive way they fingered her jewelry and clothing with a mix of reproach and jealousy. The reception forced Lesley into a narrow crawlspace emotionally. She had not expected her cousins to so openly covet her belongings—items she started giving away within hours of her arrival—and yet she still craved their interest and sympathy, so they might understand the person she’d become in America.

Over the next few days, as the depths of her family’s financial and emotional needs were revealed, the mass unburdening slowly unraveled her, causing her to question why she had come back at all. It wasn’t simply inconvenient or uncomfortable. It was the heartbreak of survivor’s guilt. It was like discovering your family had been prisoners of war while you’d been living a comfortable existence all your life, and with that discovery came obligations that were beyond her.

As our arrival date neared, all she could think about was Eric. We were only two days behind her, but Lesley, by sparing Eric the blow of the initial reunion, had cut herself off from the only person who could help. “I needed my present life with me almost immediately,” she said. “I desperately needed Eric.”

 ***

Although we were staying with Sonia and Romero, who provided us coffee and meals to the point of extravagance, I was always hopeful our days would end with dinner at Fernando and Mayra’s. Mayra made us Cuban tamales, rich beef stews and breaded pork chops, not to mention an imitation saffron rice called priose that was light and delicious. She made us potato and garbanzo soup with white-hot segments of spicy corn. (Garbanzos provoke a truffle-like fascination for Cubans; for days we heard the next meal might—might—contain them.) She made us bread pudding and fried plantains, the pithy crisps fruity and savory at once. Each dish was far beyond their means but Mayra and Fernando were driven to feed us.

During meals, we would fantasize about Mayra someday opening a restaurant in Los Angeles, where currently only El Comao is adequate. Mayra would refer to her future enterprise, her hand sweeping the air as if indicating the sign: “Mayra’s Restaurante.” At which point Eric would shake his head and say, “No ‘Restaurante’. Just ‘Mayra’s’. Solamente.”

Her family rarely, if ever, ate this well, Lesley said, a fact we understood from the way they saved scraps of soap, stray bags, empty bottles and the like. Knowing these meals were solely for our benefit, we struggled to avoid the greater indignity: refuse seconds and show our solidarity with the rationed life, or accept seconds (and sometimes thirds) to honor their special effort. Ultimately we had little choice. Food would be ladled or piled onto my plate before I could sign-language I was too full to continue. While Cuban food is largely about subsistence eating, Mayra’s offerings were too delicious to pass up. And between meals, food was scarce.

I grew accustomed to tucking away whatever food was at hand—a cracker, a bit of pastry—for those between-meal times when no food could be found. Other than ice cream, which is enjoyed to a fanatical degree in Cuba, the two foods readily available in Havana are cakes (in the display cases of beer-and-soda markets) and peso pizza, so named because it is cheap and abundant. Abundant, perhaps, but not always easy to locate, what with the general lack of signage and a network of vendors who seem to take pride in their invisibility. In fact, the most highly regarded peso pizza in Havana is made atop a roof and lowered to you in a basket. The only sign is the large crowd mingling in the street.

Food is complicated in Cuba. There is one system for rationing meat, which is vanishingly scarce on the island, and another for staple foods like flour, sugar and potatoes. The supply system is so chaotic and idiosyncratic that it requires yet another system to control how lines will be formed to prioritize access for the elderly and pregnant. More than one observer has noted what’s fairly obvious if you happen to visit, which is that Cuba has been sliding back to pre-Revolutionary divisiveness for close to 20 years.

Cuba recently emerged from an economic depression so profound that Cuban society has been altered for generations, if not forever. The rebound has been, fundamentally speaking, a second revolution, and in many ways the ongoing recovery is the greater achievement. Precipitated by the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s largest trading partner by far, the break was like the sudden death of a rich uncle who’d acted as a benefactor for 30 years, and under whose tutelage Cuba failed to diversify economically.

The immediate loss of Soviet oil subsidies sent the country into a freefall. Without oil, Cuba’s transportation network collapsed. Without transportation, entire industries dwindled. There were shortages of everything, from medicine to machinery. In a country of eleven million, more than a million jobs were lost. According to historian Louis A. Pérez, “Shipments of …consumer goods, grains, and foodstuff declined and imports of raw materials and spare parts essential for Cuban industry ceased altogether.”

Cuba entered, abruptly and without preparation, an historic period of forced conservation. Fidel consecrated it, with bottomless optimism, the “Special Period in the Time of Peace.”It may have been the largest belt-tightening effort in history. Like Leningrad in 1941, anything non-essential was requisitioned for heat, fuel or food, although unlike Leningrad the dead weren’t piled like cordwood. Still, mortality among the elderly increased by 20%, while getting pregnant, due to a severe lack of medicine, suddenly became a life-threatening act.

The immediate effects of the Special Period were caloric. Cuba plunged into a famine. Suddenly, the average Cuban consumed 1,000 fewer calories per day, meaning that virtually an entire country went on a diet overnight. During the early part of the Special Period, Cubans lost between 20 and 25 pounds each. Nobody would ever be fat again, Cubans said, and these were not obese people to begin with. The ration boxes, already lean, became leaner. According to Lesley’s uncle Romero, there were always cigarettes to be found—this is Cuba, after all—but there was never any meat.

Animals from the Havana zoo, including peacocks and buffalo, disappeared, presumably for their flesh. Then neighborhood cats began to vanish. Larger dogs starved to death for lack of available food. While at one time beef cattle were widespread in Cuba, cattle began disappearing, a development which prompted severe cattle protection measures. It is still a more serious crime in Cuba to kill a cow than it is to kill a person.

As a secondary effect, Cuba as a nation went vegetarian, focusing on grains, fruits and vegetables. They transitioned to a series of what Pérez calls “austerity measures” developed for times of war.

Without petroleum for fertilizer or fuel, the Cuban government radically overhauled the nation’s agriculture and transportation sectors. Prior to 1991, pesticide use per acre was greater in Cuba than in the United States. After 1991, farmers converted to organic farming methods and embarked on a course of reverse industrialization—a return to manual and animal labor. Urban gardens sprung up on rooftops and discarded lots, remnants of which are still visible today. But perhaps most profound was the change in transportation habits. Cuba, the most car-crazy country on Earth—in 1959, Havana boasted the most cars, per capita, of any city in the Northern Hemisphere—reverted to buses, bicycles, taxis and horse carriages. Today, government vehicles must stop for hitchhikers if space permits, a system referred to as the “yellow” for the garb worn by the roadside agents who oversee it.

In a move that would have far-reaching consequences, the government reluctantly committed to tourism as a means of bringing hard currency into the country. Restoration of Old Havana commenced in 1982, the same year Havana was declared a World Heritage site. To consolidate the recovery effort, the titles to every significant building in the city were transferred to Eusebio Leal, the city historian, meaning that today, all of Old Havana is owned by a single, elderly gentleman. Each day, Leal walks the streets of Havana dressed only in shades of gray, as if in sympathy for the denuded landscape he’s bringing back from the dead.

 ***

In my bedroom in Santo Suarez a number of books had been tenderly consolidated. Nestled together were Lorca, Borges and Dos Passos; Woolf, Kafka and Zola; as well as Rilke, Conrad and—rounding out the giants of modernism—Danielle Steele’s Kaleidoscope in French. The library was something not hermetically Cuban, a rare breach of the island’s borders. In the small but defiant collection I could glimpse an awareness of the outside world, a relatively uncommon display of traditions not related to Cuba. Then I noticed the bookends. Mixed among the books were urns in devotion to Santería, the primary religious tradition in Cuba, the vessels doubling as ballast for the literary notions gathered there.

Shortly before bed one night, reaching out to touch an urn, I was stopped by the sudden appearance of Sonia, who wagged her finger gravely.

I would awake each morning to the rhyming poems of street vendors singing their wares—cut flowers, a bath spray called ambience, gardening services, even haircuts—their immense, operatic voices penetrating deep into the house. Dragging myself to the porch, I would discover not full-figured mezzo-sopranos, but a succession of child-sized women towing their wagons down the street. With voices that could fill auditoriums, the effect was one of ventriloquism. Their slogans varied little, like live versions of television commercials. By the mid-day heat, the vendors were gone.

Roosters were a regular and hourly alarm. Raised in the suburbs, I have no prehistory with roosters, and thus I will forever associate rooster crows with the outskirts of La Habana. So pervasive were their cries, I can easily recall them now, each chanticleer alarmingly distinct from the others. For it wasn’t a single rooster, or even a small, energetic flock. To my ears, the roosters outnumbered the residents on this, a street already crammed with people.

By the third day, I’d isolated the primary offender, an ear-spearing culprit dwelling two or three houses south. Like the neighborhood dog who sets the entire street to yelping, this animal drew answering calls from dozens of his brethren—far worse than barking dogs, actually, because a rooster’s crow resembles a thing being strangled while trying to ingest a noodle.  But gently strangled, without even the courtesy of dying.

I had more than a passing fantasy of hunting down the offensive rooster—without a spark, there’s no fire—but eventually I learned to tolerate it. It reminded me of living across the street from a train crossing, years ago, after college. Eventually your spine stops wrenching at the massive intrusion of sound. Eventually, the world seems louder without it.

Speaking of tolerance, a person does adjust to cold showers, particularly when the alternative is no shower at all. Due to a lack of water pressure, showering at Romero’s involved a two-bucket system, which (due to the lack hot water) at least meant cold water touching your body less often. The larger bucket acted as the cistern, while the other, smaller bucket was to douse with. All we lacked was a stabilizing bar to grip during the initial, full-body convulsions, but eventually the shivering subsided. As with the roosters, I soon accepted the chilly water as normal, virtuous, even necessary.

There was a cold shower following a long night of mojitos that I would describe as a necessary procedure. But apart from the discovery that kneeling facilitated the showering process—the folded body creates numerous traps for water—I only became less adept at these showers, using more and more water each time. Eric suggested we were accumulating a Caribbean crust, against which the cold water was progressively less effective. Or maybe I’d Americanized the simple act of bathing, turning even the coldest shower indulgent.

Romero’s coffee, with its sweetly addictive flavor, acquired a religious significance. When I learned he was cutting it with sugar, a surplus crop, at roughly one-to-one proportions, I didn’t think any less of it, or of Romero. We served ourselves from a small white thermos that, in two weeks, was never once empty. We referred to the bottomless carafe as the coffee miracle, an abundance on par with Jesus feeding the 5,000 with a few fish and a loaf of bread. Granted, we drank it by the thimbleful, although I did manage to find a double-thimble cup, about ¼ the size of a coffee mug, a vessel I was nostalgic for even before I left Cuba.

Listening to the guayabas drop from the tree beside the porch, it wasn’t hard to fall into the rhythms of the neighborhood. In the early afternoon, after everyone had found their way to work, old men would emerge from the shadows into the sunlight of their modest yards. Wearing fitted tank tops and smoking constantly, they mixed easily with passersby of any age. Only one man was ignored, a strikingly old man with an evil countenance, his hair like Samuel Beckett in a windstorm, his garden a scorched ruin. But I didn’t pity him. In America, I thought, he’d be living in a nursing home.

Everybody came and went on foot. Romero’s car was the only neighborhood vehicle that wasn’t undergoing some form of restoration—it was a microcar, a little Polish Fiat he called Polacki—and it was the only car I ever saw leave the neighborhood. (There was no shortage of motorbikes lining the street, most of which had sidecars slung to them.) Not that there wasn’t traffic along Milagro. One could hardly make consecutive pitches in a stickball game for all the city buses, tour buses, motorcycles and utility vans traversing the basepaths we’d established, the bases themselves usually chunks of concrete or metal, heavy enough to support a child’s foot, light enough to remove at a car’s approach.

Like Cuba itself, our time at Romero’s house was idyllic and disarming. We spent entire days in the neighborhood, walking to the store for ice cream or a beer, occasionally getting a ride into Havana to eat or shop or take pictures. Sometimes I’d pretend to read a book in the dining room so that I might watch Sonia and Fefa prepare dinner. The temptation was to project the comfort of the house onto the neighborhood as a whole. But on a few occasions, the simple act of venturing outside resulted in awkwardness and confusion.

One morning, Sonia walked me to the post office to help me send postcards to the U.S. Among these was a postcard to myself, as if someday I might need reminding that I’d been to Cuba when Cuba was off-limits. In the post office, we determined I was carrying the wrong currency, raising eyebrows among the postal clerks. It was the only time I saw Sonia panic. Housing a foreigner without a permit is a criminal offense in Cuba; should someone have chosen to make an example of her, Sonia could have been fined or worse. I shook out more pesos, among which we found the local coinage. On the way home, Sonia took my arm, no longer agitated. It was our only trip out together in public.

Passing a hunched woman carrying a greasy box, Sonia motioned for me to stop. The woman spoke softly. Hands on her hips, Sonia interrogated the maven, who opened the box like a well-kept secret. Inside were homemade guayaba pastries, or popovers with sweet jam inside. We bought six, or I did.

One afternoon, Lesley returned from a walk with Tia Sonia seeming solemn and distracted.  Walking Santa Catalina, they came upon a group of neighborhood boys seated on a low wall in the shade of some street trees. Shirtless, the boys exuded idleness and curiosity. They knew Sonia, and they seemed to have expected Lesley’s arrival, asking Sonia if this was the niece from America. They stepped aside but wouldn’t take their eyes off Lesley. A few gasps and low groans backfilled the air in their wake. Then the whistles and catcalls started.

On the porch that night, Lesley described for Eric her intensely mixed emotions. On the one hand, she hadn’t felt fully Cuban again before that strange encounter. Politically, she will always be Cuban-American, but the come-ons were the enactment of a Cuban ritual, a street drama that made her feel attractive and sexy. Even by Latin and Caribbean standards, flirting is a favorite pastime in Cuba. Unlike, say, flirting in Mexico, which can devolve into a staring contest, flirting in Cuba is such a highly developed ritual that its absence is offensive. In Our Man in Havana, Wormold resigns himself to the catcalls showered upon his daughter, saying, “Silence would have seemed like an insult to her now.”

To experience boys parting like dust motes at your approach is no meager complement, but the Norteamericana in Lesley, specifically the married part, found it disgusting and an invasion of her privacy.

From time to time, Sonia and Romero’s daughter Alina would visit the house. I don’t believe I met a more attractive woman in Cuba. Inhibited and graceful, frequently averting her eyes, she had a narrow, unlined face, yet she bore the same fatigue I’d recognized as intrinsically Cuban. It was a tiredness of spirit, a weariness in the eyes. But some nights, when her son Andy—an adorable but hyperkinetic baseball fanatic, aged 11—was staying with his father, Alina would join us for our nightly porch recap, an open beer in one hand and one of Romero’s cigarettes in another.

With her cousin Alina present, Lesley was more likely to discuss the catcalls, or the requests her maternal cousins had been making. Around Sonia, these conversations wouldn’t progress very far, Sonia tending to get upset on Lesley’s behalf, but Alina was more philosophical. By our trip’s midpoint, Lesley had been asked—directly or indirectly—for a cell phone, a bank loan, clothing, a camera, an apartment (or a room in her house in LA), and for contacts for an import/export business between Costa Rica and Cuba. When she wasn’t asked for goods outright, she was sought for her expertise, which family tended to regard as just short of an oracle, although her typical response was, “I don’t know, but I promise to look into it.” Alina seemed only to want Lesley’s company, and with Alina she could relax, if just a little.

“Can we go to the beach?” Lesley asked at one point. It was agreed that the day after next, we’d leave Havana with Fernando as our guide.

Sometimes, Alina’s son Andy would leave his notebook on the stand next to the television. Eric and Lesley were the first to see it. Then they asked me to take a look.

The notebook contained a test on the earth’s atmosphere. The test included a series of multiple-choice and short-answer questions. What is important about the troposphere? What are the gasses in the air? Describe evaporation. Define condensation. More than two decades removed from primary school, I’m no expert on middle-school curriculum. But it seemed advanced to me.

***

Havana is immense in its crumbling authenticity, a fact reinforced by fleets of 1950s automobiles trundling defiantly all around you. Like Cuba itself, Havana is massively corroded here, breathtakingly beautiful there. Near Plaza de Armas, or adjacent to the Malecón seawall, entire districts lay in ruin as if struck by an earthquake or bomb, the paint scoured and the masonry shredded to nonexistence.

As withered as Cuba has become, Cubans believe their country to be uniquely providential, a place so exceptional in its location, geography and climate that Spain would not release it, Russia tried to adopt it and the United States, evicted and then humiliated at the Bay of Pigs, spent fifty years trying to destabilize it. (There are reports of more than 600 assassination attempts on Fidel, and several lesser efforts to humiliate him, including the removal of his trademark beard by adding hair removal cream to his shaving kit.) That kind of confidence creates a sense of indefatigability even as it invites a special kind of scrutiny.

Unlike Panama City’s Casco Viejo, the dormant district Havana Vieja resembles architecturally, Havana is a thriving hub of commercial activity, dense with coffee shops, pizza counters, rum joints and cigar stalls. Bicyclists rattle by two and three to a bike. Horses pull supplies along with loads of turistas. People shout up to windows with abandon, asking after loved ones or checking on the electricity. Conversations drift down from balconies to the street. This is the romantic Havana, where time is trapped in a bottle, a delicately ambered world preserved by stubbornness and neglect.

What Cuba feels like, despite everything, is what you might call the Cuban miracle. From Old Town at last call to the fume-choked wreckage of Luyano after sunset, I have never felt as safe as I did in Havana.

Late one night, trying to escape a guitarist bent on serenading our party for pesos, we encountered a regiment of uniformed police officers in the park at Plaza de Armas. I felt for my passport; my instincts told me to have it ready. Within minutes I was dancing with the only female officer—or at least, I was moving in proximity to her—while the male police hammered out steady percussion by whapping their night sticks against a fence. In the college town where I live, such a thing could never happen.

In an effort to see more of the “real” Havana one afternoon, I suggested we visit Coppelia. Also known as Havana’s Cathedral of Ice Cream, Coppelia is a creamery theme park without rides. Like Cuba itself, it is years removed from its heyday, when it might have offered 30 or 40 flavors to choose from. Today, you might find three or four. Confusing, disappointing and magnificent all at once, the downtown landmark is Cuba in microcosm. It is as much a Havana tradition as running behind just-departed city buses, a practice on full display along the busy sidewalk outside Coppelia.

Standing outside, I was aware of Lesley struggling with her expectations, and Cuba’s ongoing failure to meet them. Her face reflected the difference between her memory of Coppelia and the reality now sprawled before us. Today’s Coppelia, surrounded by gates with chipping paint, promises little, and now resembles the fortress it actually is. The disarray, the shrinking of another ideal, proved too much for Lesley, who asked to go home to get some sleep. Eric went to hail a cab. I said goodbye to them—even Maya was too tired to plead for ice cream—and turned to face the lines of Coppelia.

While Coppelia is a revered tradition among locals, it is hard to imagine a less efficient way to deliver ice cream. Dry and understaffed, with no less than six separate entrances, Coppelia is like Disneyland on a very bad day. In appearance, it resembles the drabness of the Tomorrowland of my youth, a lazy mid-century representation of a period when the future, sleek and white, was right around the corner. The rules at Coppelia are childishly, even defiantly bureaucratic: You must walk the perimeter of the park, taking note of the flavor signs at each entrance, because each entrance stubbornly refuses to reveal the flavors at other entrances. Once you commit to a flavor, you can count on waiting up to two hours in line. In other words, it’s no longer a place for children.

I found the shortest line and fell in, ignoring the flavors listed, some of which I couldn’t translate. The mood was light, the locals chatting and smoking in the sun. After an hour, a bored, handsome youth—a Coppelia employee—approached my flavor sign from inside the park. The boy hopped the low fence easily, landing with a thud in the dry earth. The line tensed, contracting and coiling like a snake to better view the sign. I felt the first upwellings of a mob mentality, something I didn’t think possible in Cuba, given the heat and the dependable military presence. Then the line relaxed and lengthened. Word came back, eventually translated for me, that orange-pineapple had been replaced by avenil. Avenil is vanilla. We’d hit the jackpot.

After two hours in line, we were ushered inside. Having waited, briefly, in a second line, I was ushered to a long arc of stools in what amounted to an open-air soda fountain. A cash register was being beaten by a woman to my left. Presumably the drawer wouldn’t open, a situation the beating only seemed to make worse. Clear water ran from a spigot in the wall directly into a drain. Dishes sat unrecovered on the counter. Cake pans, the basis for a la mode orders, were stacked nakedly without any covers in the heat. Flies, as you might expect, speckled the exposed cakes. It was a high school cafeteria from Hell.

I was brought a tiny glass of water, my first such delivery in Cuba. A man with an empty tub appeared next to me, his distraught disposition that of someone who’d just recently buried his best friend. I steadied myself on my stool. When the stranger finally commandeered the waitress, she refused to give him any quantity of vanilla, the news of which predictably set him raving. They argued for awhile, which rendered me invisible. He finally relented, mostly at the urging of his wife, who approached with a worried face from where she’d been hiding behind a pillar. Give me strawberry, he said, or something to that effect, then unmistakably gestured—there could be no mistaking it—for the counter girl to pack it tight.

I ordered a dish of strawberry and a dish of vanilla a la mode. The waitress seemed confused, then impressed, then confused again. Ten minutes later, I was brought a single cup containing one scoop of each flavor. I finally got my a la mode; the cake was bricklike in flavor and texture and the vanilla was merely average. The strawberry was the best strawberry ice cream I’ve ever tasted.

 ***

The beach trip, which began so promisingly in terms of the weather and manageable crowds, was for Lesley another example of Cuba’s ability to confound and humiliate. While at Playa Este, the fabled beaches east of Havana, Fernando’s papers were checked while we were swimming in the water. They asked him to move down the beach. At first he refused, indicating he had many guests with him. It was a brief scene that could have turned ugly had Fernando not submitted. Left alone in an area reserved for tourists, he was a target in his own country. It reminded me of the lunch counters in the American South in the 1960s.

Driving back to Luyano, the mood was somber. At one point Fernando’s son Randy said something inaudible in the darkened car. The shapes around us were dim and formless, the occasional streetlight barely bright enough to drive by. Fernando groaned but didn’t reply. I asked Lesley. “He said ‘We’re almost home,’” she said. “He can tell by the holes in the street.”

That night, Lesley told us she was ready to leave Cuba. Without a way to account for lost time, without a means to find common ground, she and her family could only reminisce over what few memories they still had, which by now were thin and worn. As for the present, Lesley considered it off-limits.

“Since Eric and I are comfortable by Cuban standards, I don’t feel like I can talk about my current life,” she said. “I want to, but it doesn’t feel fair to talk about life in California. They all assume we’re more comfortable than we are.” Lesley was caught between constantly checking herself and wanting to describe their neighborhood of Los Angeles and the bungalow they’d managed to buy.

She became what Eric called the family priest. Each relative, no matter how distant, expected a miracle from her. The more family she met, the more problems she heard about, the more she felt herself shrinking from them. “My family in Miami warned me that when the trip was over, ‘You must be sure to leave Cuba behind.’ And that’s just impossible. Anything I say that’s remotely sympathetic is taken as a promise.” In addition to the requests for money, clothing and cell phones, she was asked for the names and phone numbers of anyone who could help get them to America. “I’m going to be leaving with everyone’s problems on my shoulders, but without the means to help,” she said.

When Fernando returned the rental van, he caught the rental car agent overcharging us. It was only by a single day, but the agent, who tried to pocket the extra fees, had initially seemed sympathetic to Lesley’s story. Fernando looked sick over it. His mood never really recovered. To Lesley, he still spoke volumes, and during our stay Lesley’s accent was transformed: It now resembled the Cuban high-speed squawk, the magpie quality of dropped syllables so unique among Latin dialects. To me, Fernando would only shrug and say, “You see? Cuba is very complicate.”

For our last meal at Santo Suarez, the stew was so thick, so rich with meat, it snapped a cracker as I tried to scoop a bite. That night, we sat roughly in a circle on the porch, the night cooler than usual, everyone wrapped in shawls. Even Fefa stayed up later than usual.

After Sonia, Romero and Fefa all said goodnight, I described for Eric and Lesley watching tv earlier that evening with Fefa. Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, appeared on screen, prompting Fefa to point and say, “I like him” and “I support him” with more passion that I would have expected.

During the 1980s, in retaliation against anti-Castro demonstrations, a network of neighborhood watch groups developed in and around Havana. They were called the CDRs, or Committees in Defense of the Revolution. Their purpose wasn’t to keep undesirables out. The intent was to ferret out undesirables from within. Fefa, said Lesley, helped coordinate the spy network. The CDCs led to the arrest and imprisonment of gays and artists and other so-called dissidents, men and women who weren’t in line with traditional Cuban values.

Fefa’s husband Alberto, Lesley’s grandfather, was the commander of their CDC. Their house was the hub of neighborhood spying activity. In their living room they organized raids on the homes of homosexuals, creating a threatening situation for Lesley’s father, who is gay. As a younger man, he turned the sacrosanct pictures of Fidel and Che—hung by Fefa—to face the wall. Then he started taking them down. They sent him to the military, but the experience only emboldened him further, galvanizing his beliefs that the regime was corrupt and oppressive. Six months after returning from military service, Lesley’s father burned his uniform in the living room of Fefa’s house in front of Alberto and CDC official.

 ***

Alongside Cuba, people will tell you, is another Cuba, like the dual skulls of Columbus once displayed in a Havana museum. The second Cuba is destabilized and dissolving. It is a foundation being slowly washed away, a flickering thing visible or admissible only to the Cuban or an embedded gringo. Cuba is hope and hopelessness at once, a fire burned to its embers—and without reserves of wood. Graham Greene, who embraced Cuba almost as rhapsodically as Hemingway, wrote famously, “Two countries just here lay side by side,” but the line is understated, a mere starting point. You can escape time in Cuba, but only because the clocks have stopped.

Stephen Smith, in his indispensable Cuba: The Land of Miracles, makes frequent reference to the split existence of the “bureaucratic, exasperating country familiar to the Cuban in the bus-queue, and the magical island, shaped like a crocodile, which the foreigner recognized as Columbus’s paradise.”

At José Martí International Airport, the aging Terminal 1 is for Cuban residents, a final but lasting image of the tourist apartheid in Cuba. Terminal 3, the tourist terminal, is a modern—or at least, recent—edifice of glass and steel. By comparison, Terminal 2 is nothing more than a hangar, a prefab structure at risk of removal by a stiff wind or a company of motivated men. Terminal 2 is for Cubans now residing in Miami.

The taxi dropped Lesley and Amelia at Terminal 2, where Fernando and the entire family were waiting. It was still dark. The family converged on Lesley and her mother and Maya. Before we knew it, at Lesley’s request, the cab whisked Eric and me away to the new terminal. We never did see her final goodbye. Inside the terminal was a list of prohibited articles which included, along with firearms and sabers, No catapults. “Tell that to my stomach,” Eric said.

The flight from Havana to Cancun, like the flight from Miami to Havana, is so brief that there isn’t time to worry about whether your passport will be stamped. Leaving Cuba, the goal for Americans is simple: You must avoid a second entry stamp from the country you entered previously. In my case, a second stamp would certify that I had left Cancun for a country not prone to stamping U.S. passports. A country, for example, such as Cuba.

Aboard the plane were several U.S. citizens, by accent if not appearance. The flight was barely half full. One man, a photographer, was traveling legally from the U.S. for what he said was his twelfth visit. I decided to stay as near as possible to him as we disembarked the plane. Should he reveal some crucial bit of expertise—a favorite customs official, a spellbinding phrase—I wouldn’t want it to go unnoticed.

On the articulated bus, in full view of other passengers, Eric and I slipped $20 bills into our passports. Two young men seated nearby asked us in English if they should do likewise. One was a student at Boston University and the other a BU professor on a teaching visa from Germany. They had split off from their main group in Cancun the week prior. I looked at Eric. “We read on the internet to use $10,” Eric said sheepishly, “so we doubled it.” His smile betrayed how ridiculous we felt.

The professor was a German who spoke perfect English. He was thin with reddish blonde hair and a gnomish beard and a sport coat one size too large for him. If he were to get caught, he would probably lose his visa, an outcome which would cost him his job at BU. It was clear he’d taken an enormous risk without fully considering the repercussions of the trip.

We walked single-file into the Cancun customs hall. It was 8am and the hall was deserted. In the far corner, across rows of stanchions and retractable belts, four agents, all male, sat quietly at their kiosks. The nearest agent was the one I wanted, a large, soft gentleman who sat lightly on his stool. Even from the back of his head I could imagine the man was smiling. This was a good man, a not-too-thorough man. Then I spotted the agent I didn’t want, a dreary, bitter, lacerating man with a square head and painful-looking crew cut. In other words, a bureaucrat.

We caterpillared through empty lanes until we formed a small queue near the agents, who waved us forward even before the preceding traveler had left the kiosk. The effect was like intruding on an ATM transaction before the previous banker vacated the space. As I reached the front of the line, the bureaucrat waved me forward.

I placed my passport on the counter in front of him. It was too late to remove the money. I recited a simple plea about the stamp, carefully rehearsed for more than two weeks, the one that elicited a gentle smile and a “No worry” from the young female agent in Havana: Por favor no le ponga en el cuño en mi pasaporte. Before I finished the agent gestured abruptly, a low flat wave like the pass of a magician’s hand just prior to his next trick.

When he found the money he paused. I knew at once I’d deeply offended him. I say this because he slid the money back to me with much more effort than it required. He reached for the stamp with a practiced motion and applied what I thought was an unnecessarily vivid stamp. The entire exchange took all of sixty seconds. He never once looked at me.

Eric had been summoned by the agent I’d wanted. I could tell from the way he was walking—a slow, easy, guilt-free amble as he organized his passport wallet—that his passport had not been stamped.

“That was easy,” he said quietly. He still hadn’t looked up.

We rejoined the BU student and the German professor in baggage claim. The BU student’s passport had been stamped. He was alert but not visibly nervous. He wasn’t clear what to do next. His flight to Boston wasn’t for three days, so there was nothing to do but try to enjoy what remained of his trip. He said was going to find a bar.

We had six hours before our flight to Denver, which was beginning to feel like my final destination. Or rather, the place I would part with my passport, which would certainly be revoked. Six long hours to worry the issue. Six long hours of syrupy cocktails at a bar owned, however distantly, by the singer Jimmy Buffet. We started drinking. There was very little to say and absolutely nothing we could do.

On the flight to Denver I sat next to a woman from Winnipeg. When the woman asked what I was doing in Cancun, I almost unraveled in the presence of her sympathy. I told her about my passport and the trip to Havana. I told her about Lesley and Amelia and Maya, about Fernando and Sonia and Romero. All she could say was she was sorry. By all indications she meant it, but, being Canadian, it wasn’t a problem she was familiar with.

I was one of the last to deplane in Denver. It was a blindingly sunny day outside, a fresh ten inches of snow on the ground. I walked the long causeways of Denver International within earshot of the flight crew. As we approached a narrow hall, an ominous sign warned us of “up to $50,000 in fines” for certain customs violations. Nothing about Cuba specifically, although one of the attendants pointed to the sign and, in a voice of mock concern, said to the captain, “See that, Jim? Notice the fine print. It’s five hundred bucks an apple.”

At each customs station were two seated agents, one fore and one aft, an integrated check-out model common to high-end supermarkets. I scanned the agents, watching their body language. It was clear I had no chance. Aisles 11, 12 and 13 held the following personality types, respectively: retired cop, soon-to-be-retired cop, young cop with everything to prove, tired cop, wired cop and cop’s cop. I was done for. Then I noticed something: I’d missed an aisle, number 14, where the woman in the foreground resembled, of all people, Tia Sonia.

When I reached the front of the line, a nearby guard turned his back to me. I slipped into the chute for number 14. I made sure I was smiling as the female agent waved me forward.  I think I said something about the snow outside. I had a brief statement prepared for when she asked me about the stamp. It was neither a lie nor an admission. When she looked at me, she asked me about Cancun. To my utter surprise, she scanned my passport without leafing through the pages, despite the fact that, contrary to my own best interest, my eyes kept watching her hands. Belatedly, I replied that I was ready to be home.

Ten minutes later, Eric hadn’t entered baggage claim. I circled the enormous room twice. I wondered if he’d been detained as a sophisticated way to entice me back for another passport check. Then Eric appeared, dragging his bag and looking stricken. He had been checked by the young cop with everything to prove, who examined every inch of his passport.

“He had me,” Eric wheezed. “I almost said we were in Cuba.”

“We?”

 ***

Sometimes, I’ll imagine the Havana I didn’t see, the Havana built for tourists like me. In a city that once had more cinemas than New York, I never went to the movies. I never drove a car. I didn’t even smoke a cigar. I skipped the Museo de Ron and Museo de la Revolucion and entered exactly one cathedral. But I did find orange juice that tasted like oranges, not to mention strong coffee and strawberry ice cream, and one night I thought I had the stamina for Hemingway’s daiquiri record of 13 doubles at El Floridita. (Hemingway, at his heaviest, outweighed me by 80 pounds.)  But I lost my command, not to mention my cash, around the sixth or seventh drink.

The day we visited Lesley’s childhood home, Amelia and Fernando left on foot to find Lesley’s grammar school. Lesley and Eric left with Maya in the rental car. I said I’d walk with Amelia and Fernando, brother and sister now arm in arm a few meters ahead. They had the look of mourners. When I caught up, Amelia smiled at me. “It was good of you to come,” she said, nearly reducing me to tears.

We walked through cratered streets embroidered by brightly colored houses and deep green cicada bushes. Every block seemed to contain a school of some kind, their courtyards filled with uniformed kids running in circles or huddled to the side. It struck me as deeply peaceful and reassuring, this tranquil neighborhood of small schools and modest houses. The emphasis on education, on the future, still persists in Cuba, even in the midst of crumbling buildings and blasted streets. The abundance of schools is one of the few clear expressions of the regime still consistent after 50 years.

I stopped to photograph some children at play. Amelia and Fernando drifted ahead. On the wall near the school was painted Muerte a Traidores. Even I could translate that. Seeing my camera, a young boy pulled something small and black from his back pocket and with his other arm, quickly cuffed a classmate’s throat. It was a handgun made of plastic. He pushed the gun into the boy’s neck, both of them still smiling. A clamor went up. I lowered my camera. Mothers were emerging from doorways as if a silent alarm had been triggered. The teacher pushed toward them, reaching for the replica gun. I slipped away, my role unnoticed.

Amelia and Fernando were stopped at the next block. They had missed the incident entirely. Amelia had tripped while stepping around a bache, a small hole, and fallen down. She was shaken. She gestured to the ground, smiling weakly, but clearly overwhelmed.

Quietly, searchingly, Amelia said, “The situation is no…” She might have been about to express some great sadness, or the hope that things could still change.

Then she said, getting to her feet, “The situation is no.”

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• 90 Miles from Home
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If Earth overheats and crops and fuel become scarce, guess what? I know good bartering supplies include tampons, mercury fillings, eyeglasses. One particularly anxious day I read instructions on how to cook on my woodstove—so in the early days of environmental apocalypse and culture collapse, my family will enjoy bygone potatoes roasted over hot coals and underdone loaves of bread. We might be going down, but we are going down with half-assed gourmet edibles. I’d tell you to come on by for a piece of wild turkey jerky, but culture collapse might be hard on hospitality.

Did you know there are Self-Reliance Expos, where they give prizes to the best “preparedness pail” or survival bucket? Did you also know if I read about those buckets in the right melancholy mood I’m tempted to buy five of them?

No, I don’t own any semi-automatics or live in a bunker. But something happened to me this year. The little bud of hopelessness that I have worked most of my adult life to stamp down blossomed inside of me and became full-fledged environmental anxiety. I used to think about climate change once a month; now I think about it multiple times a day.

I can’t help but feel that the inevitable is here, that we’ve passed some sort of tipping point, both behavioral—some sort of bizarre human acceptance of environmental degradation—and CO2-related. Following fellow Vermonter and climate change activist Bill McKibben on Twitter means a daily dose of reality, and for me, melancholy. I follow his links to places like The Atlantic’s Five Charts About Climate Change That Should Have You Very, Very Worried, and the heat maps and rising red temperature lines mirror my rising panic.

I think: maybe we’re not getting out of this one.

I was an earnest child. I craved approval and, perhaps thanks to being brought up in the southern brand of religion, admired moral rectitude. If good people recycled, I wanted to recycle.  These were the days of D.A.R.E. and over-simplified water cycle charts; the Thanksgiving narrative in social studies class hadn’t even been revised for political correctness.  When I first jumped on the recycling wagon and heard the word ozone, I believed in America’s greatness, as evidenced by Ruffles potato chips, ET, and Bruce Springsteen. I knew nothing of political parties. I assumed that if a serious problem like global warming was facing the United States, someone would approach the President, tug on his sleeve, and whisper in his ear:  It’s time. Roll out the Teslas and solar panels. NASA would press a button and deploy an atmospheric fix. Americans would make sacrifices: driving-free days, a home garden movement, lights-out time. If there was a serious problem like global warming, the right people would step up and solve it.

Who are the right people? Where are they? What are they doing? Is it enough? Is what I’m doing enough?

Recently a UN report indicated that Permafrost is melting across Siberia and Alaska, resulting in a significantly higher release of carbon. If this rate of melting continues, the carbon emitted would accelerate global warming, and result in an “irreversible, runaway effect.” As I’m writing this, McKibben tweets “Warming could lead to 100% rise in Mega-Storms for East Coast.” A few weeks ago, one of his tweets lodged in my memory:  “An area larger than the US melted in the Arctic this year…UN climate conf. plans ‘baby steps.’” While I’m thankful for real talk, and McKibben is one of my personal heroes, his unsentimental facts are a black cloud over my head. If you’re listening, there’s no shortage of gut-wrenching news on the climate front. Sometimes I wonder if I should be listening. It makes me glum, judgmental, and anxious.

I see statistics—for example, that by the year 2100 we’ll endure rising seas, increased disease and hunger—and find myself calculating my life span, my daughters’ life spans, lamenting the fact that it may not be a good choice for them to have children of their own. I hurt a little when my three year old starts a sentence with “when I’m a mommy.” What will it be like growing up knowing that the best isn’t yet to come? That the world isn’t yours to conquer and explore?  That it has lost most of its freshness and mystery?

God Bless America…from the mountains, to the prairies, to the…anoxic, overfished oceans re-claiming our coastal cities?

How bad can it really be? This is where a fiction writer’s imagination is a curse, where empathy and easy feeling are a daily liability. I imagine digging a bunker in our backyard and filling it with canned goods, living in a world that looks something like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. You know—marauding cannibals, abandoned buildings, limited resources. Perhaps there’s a reason we see an uptick in apocalyptic literature; fiction distracts us from the immediate, but also models Worst Case Scenario in a way that enlists our senses, tugs at our heartstrings. But, from what I can see, digesting fictional and compelling apocalyptic landscapes is not enough to pull us over into a course of real action, though denial and distraction are helpful coping mechanisms.

I dive after recyclable containers in the trash, hyperventilate over people running the faucet aimlessly. I purchased a TerraPass to offset part of the carbon footprint of my book tour. We got an energy audit on our ancient farmhouse and are planning to go solar. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was twelve (livestock contribute considerably to emissions and land degradation). We drink water out of old salsa jars. I grow a big garden and put up my own food. I saved seeds this year. I vote for progressives who believe in global warming. Do you see what I’m doing here? I’m trying to convince you and myself that as an individual I am less culpable, that my hysteria makes a difference. I’ve made an effort to reduce, re-use. The blood is not on my hands.

But I know it is. I drive a hybrid car, but I drive it a lot. My husband and I made two more carbon-producing life forms, beautiful ones. We meant to employ reusable diapers, but have done our share filling landfills with Huggies. Almost daily the UPS truck backs up to my door, delivering yet another purchase I’ve made online. Sure I make my own maple syrup, but I also buy off season avocados and vanilla from Madagascar. We pollute and consume just as much as anyone else. My righteousness feels shrill and useless, an earnest drop in the bucket. There’s an enormous gulf between the principled action I believe I should take, and how I honestly live.

My wheels are spinning. I don’t know where to start, or where to stop. I want a mandate, guidelines, someone to force my hand. I want rules, shared sacrifice. I want greenhouse gas emissions and industrial pollutants managed. I want the degradation of our planet more often framed as a solvable problem, not a politicized one. But we’re only asking the world to reengineer the global economy, to make presumably enormous economic sacrifices in the name of sustainability, right?  Billions of dollars, billions of lives. I don’t deny that the situation is mired in economic and political complexity—but tell me, will any of that matter if we lose our quality of life?

David Ropeik wrote a column in the Times about the subjective and often irrational nature of our “eco-angst”, that individual worry does not necessary correspond to likelihood or magnitude of a potential catastrophic event. He writes about “the tangible health risk from eco-anxiety itself. When we worry more than the evidence warrants (about any kind of threat, not just environmental), and those worries last for a couple weeks or more, we live in a persistent low grade fight-or-flight response with various biological systems turned up or down to protect ourselves.”

Yes. That sounds true to me. Here I am, mothering and writing and trying to be a semi-normal human being, while under a “low grade fight-or-flight” response. This is why I can’t reach for Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring at night; it’s damning and makes me restless:  “Future generation are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.” This is why I knit, badly, in bed until I pass out. This is why I embark on long runs. I can feel this useless, neurotic worry and I have to do something to keep it at bay. I’m jumpy. Run the faucet too long in my kitchen and I’ll slap you with the spatula.

My husband calls for a little more optimism. I want to be hopeful. On good days, I go to 350.org and am heartened by their belief that we can make large-scale changes in the human activity that results in global warming. Not that we can, but we will. But most days, I don’t think we’re going to save this planet. I don’t think, as humans, we’re going to do the right thing. Is that constructive to say? No. Is it subscribing to the very unhelpful school of shaming the enemy, even if that enemy is yourself?  Yes. But if I knock the moral sieve out of the way and give it to you straight, that’s what keeps me up at night. Our inevitable failure.

We talk so much about life after death, heaven, whatever you call it. I happen to think we already live in a sort of paradise, or we can opt to. Like the writer Allan Gurganus says:  “despite our constantly poisoning this planet, who can deny it’s stayed stubbornly beautiful?” But I wonder for how long.  I really do.

Unseasonably warm days bring me no joy. I led my girls out to the swing set on a hot November day last fall, and trailing behind them all I wanted to say was:  I’m sorry we couldn’t do better. I’m sorry I didn’t make the right sacrifices. I’m sorry for my intellectual impotence, the fact that I couldn’t write the novel or the op-ed that changed the way this is all going down.

Ultimately, I’m riddled with human guilt.

Surely some of you also feel this way? If it has not yet, will the worry get us? Fear of the unknown or the scientifically predicted? Humans—and I hope you don’t mind me saying this—are wasteful, selfish, indulgent beings, but also sensitive. Ropeik writes, “Human-made risks upset us more than risks which are natural.” Not only will we have to stomach that we’ve irrevocably destroyed our planet, but that it’s our fault. Just before Christmas, Lydia Millet wrote a compelling op ed in the Times about the place in our hearts and imagination for extinct animals. “What of the children of the future?” she writes. “When the polar bears and penguins are gone, the gorillas and elephants and coral-reef clown fish like Nemo — what diverse and lovable army will be their close companions?” I think it’s only our mass estrangement from nature that has delayed our spiritual falling out so far.

The extinction of beloved, necessary species is already happening. But say we risk extinction ourselves. Say we reach the “irreversible, runaway” point and are forced to admit it. What’s that going to feel like? Waiting? Have you ever seen those videos of Doomsday preppers, with their underground bunkers and weapons cache, making their children do survival drills every week?What’s it like to live with the knowledge that our environmental stability is collapsing? Does that reshape our sense of consequence, and perhaps what matters?

There are therapists who specialize in managing environmental anxiety. But you know what? Let me suffer. I’m not sure I deserve to be psychologically comfortable on this front.

I know my cynicism and free-wheeling fear are completely unconstructive. On its worst days, my environmental anxiety makes me a somber spouse, frightened mother, and sometimes a shitty writer who can’t keep her fear off the page. You think I could find something constructive to do about it.

Except most of what I end up doing amounts to armchair activism. I, along with 300,000 of you, liked an indignant post on Facebook. I forwarded a pre-worded email about the Keystone Pipeline to Grandma or signed a petition some non-profit organization spoonfed to my inbox. Ninety-seven percent of Greenland’s surface ice sheet melted in 4 days in July. This is happening, and I’m letting it.  We’re letting it.

Every time I try to write something constructive about climate change, like this, I feel earnest. Well so be it. I am fucking earnest.

Related Posts:

• Climate Change Fiction
• Morning Coffee
• Derrick Jensen’s Essay from The Time After
• The Rumpus Long Interview with Doug Fogelson
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But poets caught up in violent political events are brethren. I believe it is essential for fellow poets to honor their struggle.

Take the Syrian Civil War that began three years ago when local protests turned into national demonstrations. Opposition, as we all know, has evolved into a violent rebellion against the government of President Bashar al-Assad and his Ba’ath Party that has ruled the nation tyrannically for four decades. To date, nearly 70,000 people have been killed.

What of the fate of Syria’s poets?

In June 2011, exiled Syrian poet Adonis wrote an open letter to President Assad calling for him to end the violence and abdicate. Many praised Adonis’ firm opposition to any religious takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood after the Assad regime falls. Adonis favors secular democracy. But some critics called his letter far too muted in opposing Assad, primarily because Adonis belongs to the same Alawite religious ruling minority as the besieged president.

Inside Syria, one of the Free Syrian Army commanders is led by poet Abu Azzam, a commander of the rebel Farouq Brigades. “I picked up my gun but did not put down my pen,” he says in an interview with the BBC. “During the battle there I wrote poems about the suffering of civilians in the area.” Earlier this year Azzam was seriously wounded. Rania Abouzeid’s account in Time magazine of the day Azzad was shot and wounded is a riveting piece of wartime journalism and a must read. It’s a day that begins with Azzam sharing tea with his mother and ends with him writhing on a gurney in a local hospital

“Abu Azzam grabbed a BKC machine gun and ran out the door to intercede on behalf of his men. According to Em Mohammad, he didn’t ask any of his men to come with him but two followed him anyway. He had just reached the roundabout and stepped out of his car when a member of the Jabhat reportedly tossed a hand grenade in his direction before others opened fire.”

PEN International has been conducting a campaign to raise awareness of killed and imprisoned Syrian writers, poets, and journalists. Through a postcard protest, PEN highlights the writings of three Syrians:

Poet Dia’a Al-Abdulla was arrested from his home in February 2012, who remains missing.

Poet Tal Al-Mallouhi, jailed since September 2009 and who has remained in prison throughout the war.

Poet Ibrahim Qashoush, who was kidnapped and killed in July 2011.

Not all the news regarding poetry and Syria favors the opposition. The Syrian actress known as Raghda was attacked two months ago at a conference in Cairo after she made a statement explicitly supporting the Assad government and reading a poem that criticized Islamists in the Middle East. According to one report, “the 55-year-old actress angered some attendees at the Arab Poetry Conference held in the Opera House after reciting some poetry to show her support of the embattled Assad.”

Good to remember, in the face of this difficulty, something Christopher Hitchens says in Love, Poverty, and War: “The messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment.” It’s an apt definition for poets, no? Messengers of discomfort and sacrifice.

Here is a poem by Dia’a Al-Abdulla (reprinted from PEN).

The Crypt

Violence is
the means of people:

The jailor kills me with a sword
I answer with a word,
and he sets my pages alight

Oh God
I burn the cigarettes of these days
in my cell
My heart is the fifth wall;
I set it alight

Eid is coming
And it will bring
Only bad tobacco to smoke,
so I leave it aside

You promised
my heart would be made only for love;
now I am so enraged
– save me,
cover my heart with tenderness
Make it strong,
Offer him a touch
… a laugh …

The world has passed beneath me
And this place is the most terrible of all
I have begun to embrace
the sun of exhaustion

So, this is my homeland;
I became its enemy
by speaking out

Speaking out brings pain –
but how can we not?

My homeland,
if it were not for you
I would not be so brave,

and so:
they will not break me

My homeland,
I touch your hands
from behind bars

This child is a prisoner now,
and my mother screams:
Will no one bring down this oppressor?
I am strong
I scream
My mother

Related Posts:

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These issues are of particular interest to both of us because we are both writers. As new parents of a half-Indian daughter, we’re thinking not only about our individual experiences of the collision between American and Indian (or more accurately, Tamil) culture, but our daughter’s future experiences. We perceive issues of representation so differently at times that we seem to be talking about entirely different objects or events.

My husband is a fair-skinned Chicagoan writer of mixed Italian descent who feels comfortable voicing whatever is on his mind and does not worry about the reaction. Without speaking for him (his viewpoint is more sophisticated than I’m able to capture here), I gather he doesn’t find it offensive when Americans emphasize exotic aspects of Indian culture.

I am an Indian-American immigrant writer who often feels torn about whether my experience is too small, too unique, to have any bearing on what other people think or should think, but nonetheless feels a deep need to voice opinions no matter how unpopular they are. In my view, writing and other art forms that don’t conform to exotic stereotypes Americans have about India and its diaspora remain mostly invisible, creating a narrow public impression of Indian culture and people of Indian descent.

Our latest discussion, over candlelight and fondue, was about the American and British news coverage of the gang rape in India. Specifically, I was interested in an article called My life behind India’s Purdah that ran in Salon on January 4, 2012, in which Mira Kamdar wrote, “India’s purdah mentality permeates every level of Indian society,” as remarks made after the gang rape by members of Delhi’s police force and political leaders make abundantly clear.

Salon picked up the piece from Asia Society, retitling it to suggest (erroneously I believe), that Kamdar, who grew up in America like me, was writing as a voice for all Indian women in India. The piece is packaged as an inside scoop on Indian society, rhetorically connecting the fear of violence that Kamdar learned from her grandfather with the argument that India is in its entirety a rape culture, the worst culture in the world for women.

Later, Kamdar tweeted that she had asked Salon to retitle the article. They retitled it “Behind India’s cultural purdah”.

***

Following on the heels of the news about the horrific gang rape in India was a false news story accidentally spread by Alternet and picked up by Salon, “Saudi religious leader calls for gang rape of Syrian women.” I noticed this article on a friend’s post on Facebook. It received twenty-eight comments expressing horror.

The sole commenter who pointed out that the story was link bait put out there for the purpose of fomenting outrage, that this ‘news’ might be the result of Islamophobia rather than reality, was denounced and shouted down. To critically question the legitimacy of shaky news pieces about the Middle East or India is apparently to be a vile and reprehensible person in American culture right now.

By the time Alternet responsibly retracted the story about the Saudi cleric, the damage had already been done. As far as I could see, Americans read the original article and reinforced their stereotypes about brown people “over there” in those terrible foreign countries. There was no consideration about what it means when Americans react with social media outrage to a story about a Saudi cleric or an Indian physical therapy student, but virtually ignore similar violence at home.

I am referencing here an event from last August: the sexual assault of a sixteen-year-old by two Steubenville, Ohio high school football players that was followed with people urinating on her and dragging her around by the ankles and wrists, which was followed by onlookers sharing photographs of her and tweeting about the “drunk girl” and the “dead girl.”

The town, which reminds me of the one in Friday Night Lights, was reluctant to help in prosecuting this crime because of its potential to damage a chance to win the championships. It took the work of an industrious blogger, the hacker group Anonymous, and four months for The New York Times to break the news of this rape. There are many people who are as disgusted by the Steubenville rape as the Delhi rape, but the Delhi rape made global headlines almost immediately generating outrage, whereas the Steubenville rape, which occurred in August 2012, registered widely in American consciousness at the start of the new year.

***

With twenty-two mother tongues, twenty-eight states, and seven union territories, India is too heterogeneous a nation, and frankly too diverse in the experiences it offers, to argue with legitimacy from the personal, as Kamdar and other commenters discussing “the conspiracy of silence” in India do. Of course, all I can offer to explain the reason these articles hit me the wrong way is my own personal experience with India, which has been different, and less sensationalistic.

If I were to argue from my personal experience, I would reach an entirely different result from Kamdar. But you won’t see my viewpoint on this topic in a mainstream or even a progressive news magazine because my viewpoint doesn’t fit the sacred or profane dichotomy by which the West categorizes Indian experiences.

The Indian women I know are not silent, nor any more vulnerable than any non-Indian woman in the West. Whether they are children of the diaspora in California or Sydney or Johannesburg, or living where they were born in Chennai, they happen to be among the most outspoken of my friends. They happen to be the quickest to offer an opinion or give help or ask a question or participate in an event.

Kamdar talks about the fear her grandfather instilled in her in order to argue that the same fear permeates all of Indian culture. The first Indian man I ever knew (my father) encouraged me to feel comfortable dissenting from popular opinion and taking a stand against injustices. I do not believe he is unusual for an Indian man. Jyoti Pandey’s father, for example, described his daughter as courageous, not transgressive.

***

During my visits over a thirty-year period to Chennai, the most salient aspect of the culture I’ve encountered has been liveliness in both genders, not a pervasive silencing of women. Women talk over men to get heard. Women visit nightclubs. Women work out at gyms. Women work in positions of power. Women protest injustice in the face of rising violence. Following the rape victim’s death thousands of outraged women took to the streets of India to protest the government’s inaction toward the perpetrators of the gang rape.

It is fair to say that India is deplorably behind the curve when it comes to Indian women’s rights. Yes, misogyny and brutality exist in India. In the American rush to condemn a foreign culture, however, let’s not forget that women brave, bold, and strong enough to protest the rape exist in the culture, and are emblematic of India’s culture, as well.

There is a total silence in the West on India’s culture of dissenting women in the face of severe patriarchy and authoritarianism. It doesn’t quite fit, does it, into the dichotomy carved out for Indian women by Americans and the British, being neither sacred nor profane, but a bit heroic.

Discussion of the protests, if any, is embedded in articles about how India’s entire culture, one composed of multiple nations bound together by British colonialism, is a conspiracy of silence, all of which fits rather nicely into the stereotype of the “quiet, good Indian girl” that I experienced while growing up and while dating in my early twenties. I don’t know where this stereotype originated because Indian women were rarely seen in mainstream television or movies before the nineties, but it was an expectation of silent obedience I encountered regularly while growing up into my mid-twenties. A prime example can be found in Madhuri, an Indian woman shown in the first ten minutes of the pilot for the cancelled series Outsourced.

One literary representation of the quiet Indian woman is V.S. Naipaul’s portrait of Shama in The House of Mr. Biswas. Another literary line referencing the perception that Indian women are inconsequential is referenced at the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway when Clarissa calls Indian women “silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops”. After Mindy Kaling grew in popularity on The Office, Kelly Kapur transformed from quiet background character strategically placed to show what a bumbling politically incorrect guy Michael Scott was, to loudmouthed airhead in her own right.

***

Last year, a Bollywood actress, Sherlyn Chopra, decided to become the first Indian woman to pose for Playboy. She told BBC Hindi,

“I have become the first Indian to pose naked for Playboy, and nobody can take away that achievement from me.”

I don’t know why, but I feel a lot of sympathy for Sherlyn Chopra who thinks that being the first Indian to do something this banal and absurd and simultaneously this transgressive, is somehow an achievement. She has escaped the sacred and profane by being in Playboy.

Or is that still profane? Given the ubiquity of Internet porn and the rise of Hustler’s image via The People v. Larry Flynt, I don’t think that America still sees Playboy as profane, but the magazine is banned in India, which suggests that Chopra was seeking a way to make a name for herself by working within the sacred/profane dichotomy.

***

In a back issue of an Indian-American magazine I read regularly, I notice that one of the reviewers of books and films is white. I am irritated when she says, in her review, that she wishes she were Indian, too, that she would change her name to sound like an Indian writer, because it would be easier to get published by one of the big six—Indian fiction is hot right now!

Um, no, not unless you want to write sari and mango novels. Not unless you want to play into the stereotypes of what American people seem to want to read about India and Indians: that it’s all rape, poverty, plucky slumdogs, arranged marriages, mystical, yoga retreats, spiritual revelations, corruption, and elaborate descriptions of North Indian food. A hodge-podge of the sacred and profane packaged for easy consumption, rather than serious consideration.

Later, I’m surfing the Internet again, and stumble upon an essay in The Millions about Indian fiction gaining popularity and mainstream acceptance. I read an Indian writer’s comment to the article: “not writing about my grandmothers reminiscing about baking chappatis in some dusty back court in India, has made some of my work a very difficult sell.” I’m divided. Me, too, I think. I relate, and yet I don’t want to relate because it seems ungenerous and presumptuous to think that readers are motivated to read a book or watch a movie solely by how well it conforms to stereotypical images of my culture that seem “authentic” to them.

Surely those of us Indian-Americans who feel this way have sour grapes? Maybe our work just isn’t good enough to pique interest, having nothing to do with what kind of imagery is expected of us. If Mindy Kaling can write and star in the ultra-popular The Mindy Show without a whiff of exoticism, doesn’t that disprove that you need to write about India or the Indian-American experience in a particular way in order to be successful as an Indian-American writer?

I read interviews with Mindy Kaling in New York Magazine and The Boston Globe. In the latter she says,

When you’re a minority and you’re writing a show for yourself you don’t know that people are pinning hopes and dreams on you in a way and, like, if this fails, does this mean they won’t take chances on Indian-American actresses?

And then she says,

That would be a bummer. I’m not one of these people that’s like, ‘I didn’t get into this to be a role model.’ . . . We’re all role models to a certain extent. You have that responsibility to not do things or say things that you wouldn’t want to perpetuate. But at the same time it’s like I didn’t go into politics, I came out to Hollywood to write and act in earnest. I feel it’s a balance.

She didn’t ask for the responsibility—as she says, television is not politics, though it also functions on popularity—but she has it. When you’re a minority who is not as successful as she is in her field, you see that opportunities are few and far between for minorities in the arts.

It also turns out Kaling’s writer’s room is mostly men. And then I see the show a bit differently, thinking that what Kaling seems to have intended as part-homage, part meta-romantic comedy is being scripted by a bunch of men who are probably mocking, who don’t love romantic comedies at all, who are doing what Jane Austen and Henry Fielding did with sentimental fiction, punishing their heroines for being girls.

Before I learned those factoids, I thought The Mindy Project might counterbalance the whiteness of Girls. Unlike some other writers of color, I didn’t have a problem with Lena Dunham not casting nonwhite women in significant roles in Girls. It’s her fictional world and she should write it how she believes it should be written, I said to myself.

The responsibility lies with networks like HBO or Showtime to green-light projects that are closer to the experience most of us have—a real world in which (gasp) even women of color have bodies that are imperfect and egos that are even more imperfect, who say stupid, earnest, funny things. Mindy Kaling says she isn’t interested in having ethnic humor, or her skin color, or her gender define her: “I never want to be called the funniest Indian female comedian that exists…I feel like I can go head-to-head with the best white, male comedy writers that are out there. Why would I want to self-categorize myself into a smaller group than I’m able to compete in?”

At the start of the day all writers face the same problem: how best to express what you want to express, which might prove to be inexpressible, in the face of a glaringly blank page and an audience that doesn’t care (hopefully, yet). The tick-tick of the clock, the patch of the great green outdoors you can see from your window, the siren song of the Internet or the television. The experiences that have shaped your ontology.

So although I am an Indian-American woman who loves stupid romantic comedies and finds Kaling very funny, I find it troubling that she separates herself from other Indian American women writers because she can compete in a bigger pool. Not because she’s wrong. She can compete outside her racial group, so why shouldn’t she? But so can many other Indian women writers whose voices must fit into the sacred-profane paradigm in order to be published in mainstream outlets at all. Would Kamdar’s essay have been picked up by Salon if she articulated that no, the stereotypes about India are not true? I don’t believe so.

Maybe Kaling wants to separate herself because she doesn’t want to fall into a race trap, the trap that you are a writer who, in writing for Indian-Americans, writes only for Indian-Americans or for people who see India as a bit of a promised land (a land of yoga or spiritual retreat), whose concerns are only racial or ethnic, as opposed to  the broader human experience.

How a writer asks and how she answers questions of race and identity and gender and culture are crucial in a time when the vast majority of women of color working in entertainment, literature, or the arts still have to package and commodify their “exoticness” or experiences of “otherness” as an “Indian-American writer”, a “black writer”, “a Chinese-American writer” etc. in order to have anyone even be interested in what they have to say.

As Kaling seems to realize, there’s a trap here, which she dodges. If you choose to market yourself this way in America, you are only that. You are the writer or artist or entertainer that many people still elect not to read because your experiences are too exotic, too alien, too other.

“I’m not really in the mood for an Indian novel,” I’ve heard readers say. And I am ashamed that I have been guilty, too, of choosing not to read particular books that I have ethnically pigeonholed without reading word one of them.

What would be the cost to me of pretending I am not an Indian-American writer, but just an American writer? Having taken my husband’s name, I might get away with that.

But a heightened experience of otherness is what I’ve experienced. It’s part of my artistic makeup, not only because I grew up learning Tamil, going to Bharatanatyam classes every Sunday, eating thair sadam and lime pickle at dinner each night, reading Hindu mythology comic books, visiting India as child, but because of how other people have responded to me.

No matter how many Babysitters Club books I read to fit in as a child or the law degree I acquired or other markers of social acceptance I’ve sought out in the hopes of belonging. I was always other in American society. I could not help it. My otherness has become part of my ontology.

On the other hand, if I chose to pull a Lena Dunham in reverse, writing only about Indians, is my work automatically to be sneered at (as the writer of The Millions article on the New Wave of Indian fiction put it) as “ethnic fiction”? As fiction that is assumed to have no value to broader America except to the extent it addresses the sacred or the profane?

***

My daughter is half-Indian, but like her father has fair skin and the question for me everywhere I go now, from pizza parlors to doctors’ offices is, “Are you her nanny?” or “Is she yours?” When I told my husband about the latest episode at a pizza parlor, he was quite surprised. From his perspective, most people don’t talk like that anymore.

My mother told me to ignore it. For some reason, perhaps because it is my daily experience, perhaps because I’m sensitive, I can’t. Every incident reverberates, vibrating with every other experience of otherness I’ve had.

When I was a teenager, a boy I liked who knew that I liked him compared my skin to the color of shit as the reason he didn’t find me attractive. Five years later, I learned that my brother had the same experience with some elementary school bullies. Ten years later, a half-Iranian male reading some of my fiction mentioned the experience of being called “sand nigger,” while growing up in Arizona.

What does it mean that this is not the unique experience of a few kids in the suburbs, but also the experience of our president? President Obama had the skin color publicly compared to shit by Lesley Arfin, a writer for the popular television show, Girls. For me, this is something we shouldn’t ignore about American culture: that people of color are compared to waste products and very few people are outraged. Bullies who talk trash like this are not boycotted and shunned and fired; instead, people of color are expected to stay quiet and ignore it.

When I talk about a racist episode, people assume it is limited to one instance with an ignorant person—one instance in a pizza parlor or one instance at the doctor’s office where somebody assumed I was the nanny. However, in my experience, it is a lot of instances, with a lot of ignorant people.

I can’t help but think that these instances are connected to the issue of representation in art, film and literature. The more we see life from the perspective of someone outside the majority culture, the more empathy we are likely to have for the targets of this kind of abuse and the more likely we are to talk differently ourselves.

Girls is a show I enjoyed last year and now feel maybe I shouldn’t. A show that feminist writers gush over as “honest” and “realistic”, comparing it to Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines.

Women writing about their experiences in their own form, women writing about their experiences in the face of a world that wants them to be quiet, women writing in a world that trivializes the seriousness of writing about one’s personal experience when the writer is a woman like Sheila Heti or Kate Zambreno, but elevates that same ambition when the writer is a male like Philip Roth. However, nobody to my knowledge suggests that Girls, How Should a Person Be, or Heroines is actually interchangeable with the other and that you only need consume one to consume them all. Perhaps you’ve noticed, too, that this cultural conversation about silencing, which takes place in both alt lit and mainstream publications, is almost entirely silent on women writers of color.

Zambreno’s book, which I liked a lot, contains a line that scorns a woman who suggests Zambreno write a “multicultural novel.” I’ve heard that scorn from many fiction writers not of color over the years: that to write a book that is actively multicultural (which registers to me as a simple fact about American society today) is not to write seriously, but to write to a trend that will pass. I think this opinion is motivated by the same thought process that motivates the woman who wished she had an Indian name because Indian fiction is hot, just like vampires, BDSM, and post-apocalyptic dystopias.

For some of us, however, multiculturalism is not merely a trend; it is not written because it is hot; it is a serious engagement with our reality.

***

In a smart essay for The Millions, Thea Lim wrote that,

Since 1917, a total of four men of color have won the Pulitzer: N. Scott Momaday, Oscar Hijuelos, Edward P. Jones, and Junot Díaz. Thirty women have won the Pulitzer, almost half of them condensed in the last 30 years, and three of those women were women of color. Since 1950 two men of color have won a National Book Award in Fiction (Ralph Ellison and Ha Jin), and 16 women have won an NBA, one of them a woman of color.

She goes on to mention two white writers, Mary Gaitskill and Alice Munro, as female writers that write as gracefully as Diaz about their own lives. Then notes that Zadie Smith and ZZ Packer are also possible counterparts.

Within this mainstream literary fiction, there is also Jhumpa Lahiri, a writer who somehow manages to break free from the sacred/profane dichotomy, but winds up writing books in which the saris could be exchanged for jeans, where the Indian-ness is frequently bound up in name brands rather than Bengali culture per se. And yet after three such books, a common criticism of Lahiri (that I find annoying) is that she only writes about Bengali-Americans: why doesn’t she write about something else?

Other Indian-American writers who are far more prolific than Lahiri are sidelined for their social engagement in the same way that Barbara Kingsolver is, as described in a 2011 essay on Slate by Michelle Dean: not taken as seriously in the literary world. Chitra Divakaruni. Bharati Mukherjee. There are more.

Part of their relegation to a literary status below that of Lahiri’s might be bound with literary merit and use of language, but another part, from my perspective, is that these “multicultural” or “ethnic” writers write to Indian-Americans familiar with Indian culture about the Indian-American experience. I don’t think they write only to that audience, but that audience is included. Whereas Lahiri’s work, brilliant and graceful as it is about the Bengali-American experience, does not really require the reader to adopt the same familiarity with Indian culture(s). By not making that assumption, by not being “ethnic,” Lahiri more properly takes her place in the pantheon of literary greats.

***

Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton is told in the third person, which does not satisfy my hopes of getting closer to a real person in his situation, but which produces an interesting literary effect. The third-person device forces me to think about how a fatwa forced Rushdie to assume another identity that made him foreign to himself.

I relate enormously to Rushdie’s account of his life in the 1960s at boarding school in England, which weirdly enough, sounds in some respects not all that different from life for an Indian girl in secondary school in Palo Alto in the 1980s and 90s.

At the end of Rushdie’s time at Cambridge, someone throws gravy and onions all over the walls and furniture of his room. He is held responsible and told that unless he pays for the damages, he won’t be allowed to graduate. He pays. Then, when he wears brown shoes to his graduation, he is ordered to change to black shoes and also required to supplicate himself to the vice chancellor, begging in Latin for a degree that he earned.

He obeys.

He writes in third person,

Looking back at those incidents, he was always appalled by the memory of his passivity, hard though it was to see what else he could have done. He could have refused to pay for the gravy damage to his room, could have refused to change his shoes, could have refused to kneel to supplicate for his B.A. He had preferred to surrender and get the degree. The memory of that surrender made him more stubborn, less willing to compromise, to make an accommodation with injustice, no matter how persuasive the reasons.

The insight that I like there is that these personal experiences of abjection and passivity turn him into someone who eventually does fights—with his whole being—for his right to speak the truth as he see it.

Some people might laugh at my juxtaposition. Rushdie? That’s who makes things bearable for you? Mindy Kaling, not the feminist icon Jezebel makes her out to be? What?

But Rushdie’s personal passages contain a level of fight born of supplication, that I think has something important to say to me as a female, as a woman of color, as a writer. And maybe he can get away with talking about this because he is not a woman and because something so profoundly political and disturbing happened to him that nobody (except perhaps Zoe Heller) can trivialize the fact that he is writing about the personal aspects of the crisis now.

Maybe, also, he can write these personal passages because he didn’t grow up in America, believing that he’s supposed to be able to succeed at whatever he wants, but unable to, and because, in fact, he has succeeded by all measures. As someone who does not find herself in a post-racial America, I take solace in a passage about Rushdie’s tendency to supplicate himself as a youth finally turning into a refusal that launched one of the most powerful battles of free speech of our times.

***

Back in the nineties, my first boyfriend, an Israeli-American, mansplaining that being a Jewish male in America is much harder than being a woman of color, finally threw up his hands in exasperation saying, “But you were just born in India. You’re American. You’re not really Indian. You don’t know what racism is.”

It is twenty years since that invalidating conversation. We have a black president, and Indian women are marching against misogyny without applause, but the most popular progressive magazines are not fact-checking stories that perpetuate lies about foreign brown people and publishers are reluctant to put teens of color on the front of YA books because those books won’t sell as well. Shortly after the Delhi gang rape in 2012, a thirty-one year old woman pushed a Hindu man onto the tracks of a subway stations in Queens, New York later saying, “I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.”

Ignore it. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

If I must ignore these disturbing facts; or produce writing about Indian culture that fits into the sacred and profane dichotomy such that my words are familiar to everyone but me; or worse, never engage in conversations about these facts for fear of being disliked, the answer that comes to mind nowadays is different from the silent acquiescence or self-directed anger I experienced twenty years ago. I would prefer not to. 

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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I biked home down Massachusetts Avenue. The air smelled like rain and the lights of a police motorcycle blocking off Vassar Street flashed blue on the wet pavement. A helicopter drifted overhead, closer to the ground than I’d ever seen, and then another one. Something was off. The cars around me drifted from lane to lane like boats that had lost their bearings.  I could hear sirens coming from all directions, converging on this point. I kept biking.

I would be home before I learned that Sean Collier, a goofy, much loved, campus police officer was already dead, shot less than a block away from the intersection I had just biked past. The brothers who shot him, Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had already hijacked a Mercedes SUV and fled. I would be home before I learned that two of my roommates, working late on campus, had followed shelter in place directions and locked themselves into a windowless room with the lights turned off. They would stay there until 2:30 a.m., and return home with another student too terrified to go back to her apartment alone.

I had written a letter to a friend earlier that day wondering if the bombers felt some sense of accomplishment in killing an eight-year-old, a grad student in statistics, and a restaurant manager who loved sports and her dog. In what story was this heroic?

The three deaths at the marathon felt miscast, and so did Collier’s. He was a classic small-town cop, so friendly that his policing blurred the line between “policing” and “hanging out.” He went on student camping trips, unlocked doors and led students onto roofs to see forbidden views. The story set into motion by the bombers was dramatic but the characters weren’t. This was a school pageant: intensely felt but poorly written. Now we were a part of it. The townspeople whose fear would be the necessary backdrop for the heroics of others.

I woke up Friday morning to the sound of helicopters and birdsong. Everything else was silent. No cars. No sound of squealing children from the school down the street. Noisy, obstreperous Boston had ground to a halt on account of one 19 year old. The Boston Globe reported that police were handcuffing people found wandering outside. We stayed put.

At one point I stood on the lawn, talking to another roommate who was weeding the garden, and looked over to see our neighbors staring at us through their window. We waved. We’d met them during the big snowstorm a few months ago. Like today, the city had ground to a halt, but the neighborhood was alive with skiers and snow forts and neighbors shoveling their sidewalks.

The neighbors turned away from the window. They didn’t wave back.

It was a day of contradictions. The schools were closed. The Dunkin’ Donuts were open, at the request of the police department, who had a history of receiving free donuts and coffee from the chain. I turned to the internet. Would it even have been possible a few years ago to shut down a city without a thing like this: something that made us feel so connected without actually being near each other? I, along with hundreds of other people, found Dzhokar Tsarnaev’s Twitter account. “I really don’t like it when I have one ear pressed against the pillow and I start to hear my heart beat,” he wrote. “Who can sleep with all that noise.”

His last post, two days after the bombing and a day before the death of Sean Collier read, “I’m a stress free kind of guy.” Humans of the present day posted replies to the Dzhokar of the past. “When you’re not terrorizing,” wrote one, “sure…why not?” “After he’s found guilty,” wrote another “he should die by pressure cooker.”

The curfew was lifted at 6pm, as though the city had put in a full workday of staying put, and was now free to enjoy the weekend. A few minutes later a Watertown resident named David Hennenberry walked outside for the first time that day. He saw that the tarp covering the boat parked in his driveway was blowing in the wind. The cords holding it down were cut. Hennenberry  looked inside and saw a pool of blood and a figure huddled in the shadows. He called the police.

And with that the ordinary people of Boston and Cambridge had a role in this story beyond that of “victim.” A metropolis of 625,087 sheltering in place while thousands of police combed the streets and searched houses, and it turned out that we were more useful outdoors than in.

After 9/11 America became a fussy and overprotective parent, tapping phone lines, shutting down protests, classifying documents, scrutinizing visitors and immigrants as if daring them to do something wrong.  To deal with crisis, to recover from trauma, to absorb uncomfortable and complicated information. America does this, we are told, to keep us safe.

But this has never stopped us from saving each other. The passengers on American Airlines flight 63, who stopped a man from detonating the explosives he’d packed into his shoes by tying him up with their seatbelts and headphone cords. Or the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, who broke through the door of their hijacked plane by using food cart as a battering ram.

These stories have faded in American history in comparison to the tragedies that came before and after them. But if we have the presence of mind to remember it, and to keep remembering it, the end of this manhunt was another vindication of the average Joe. Also: for being in the world, instead of being protected from it.

The police arrived in Hennenberry’s accompanied by a helicopter equipped with a thermal camera, and a robot. The helicopter flew over the boat and confirmed that there was a living body inside, or at least something warm and human-sized. The robot trundled over to the boat and pulled off the tarp, so that they could get a better look inside.

The police yelled to Tsarnaev to get out of the boat. They weren’t sure if he was armed, and so they shot at the boat, and threw flash-bang grenades. When Tsearnaev finally stood and pulled up his shirt to reveal that he wasn’t wired with explosives, they moved in. He was unconscious at this point, and the Department of Justice stepped forward to reveal a new twist to the story that engrossed us for so many hours. When Tsarnaev recovered, he would not be read his Miranda rights.

“There will always,” a friend of mine said to me that day, “be a man with a gun.” And there will. But the man with a gun is just another character in a story, and that story is one that we, as a country, write together.

***

Top photo by Vjeran Pavic. Second photo by Brian Birke.

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The few North Koreans who defected in the harsh light of the post-Korean War years, for example, were primarily respectable adults, often with military ties. Now contrast those with the underprivileged civilians and families who began to defect from North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s—many of them spending impecunious stints in China or Southeast Asia before finally settling in South Korea. And now consider all of the children who got wrapped up in their parents’ planned defection at that time, and suddenly “many cultures” seems like an understatement. By the 1990s, it was quite apparent just how broad and sweeping the defector portrait had become in the short span of a few decades.

But if there was one commonality, it was that all the North Korean defectors were risking their lives to get to South Korea, and that any hazards were preferred to the chaos they knew in their homeland.

It’s difficult to comprehend widespread famine like the one that hit North Korea at the end of the 20^th Century, spurred by years of disintegrating economic support from the Soviet Union. The food shortage ripples affected nearly every aspect of peoples’ lives. For starters, the North Korean government flat-out did not have enough food to distribute to its population. But as a result, families were forced to travel great distances in hopes of obtaining food—or money for food. And what followed was an apocalyptic picture of deprivation—fathers turned to panhandling or thievery, mothers and young girls turned to begging or prostituting, and the whole lot scouring the corners of the country for anything edible. Or in some cases, inedible things like trash or cattle manure.

The extensive famine also sent record numbers of North Korean citizens fleeing their impoverished homeland, and these are some of the first memories of Lee Na-rae*, student and defector. Long before she had hopes of making it to South Korea, long before her dream of someday working for the United Nations, she was a hungry child in North Korea.

 ***

Na-rae first learned about defecting from her home in North Korea when she was 8-years-old. Her entire family was going hungry in the midst of the famine in North Korea during the 1990s. Her father had separated from the family and distanced himself. Her mother was an acupuncturist by trade, and got the idea—along with Na-rae’s grandmother—to sneak into China to seek work and earn money for food. The plan was simple: Na-rae’s mother would slip across the North Korean border into China by crossing a river in Hamgyong. The region, located in the northernmost wing of North Korea, is extremely rugged; the trip would be hazardous, and its simplicity didn’t necessarily mean there weren’t great risks. “It was dangerous,” Na-rae says. “Many North Koreans die trying to cross that river because it is actively patrolled by army soldiers with guns.”

Still, the payoff could have been huge. Na-rae’s mother could have made a few dozen acupuncture appointments in China, and then snuck back to North Korea with enough money to sustain her family. And if there was any saving grace to the idea, it was that the North Korean government had its hands full at the time, dealing with the country’s rampant starvation. If there was ever a time to sneak into China, now was that time. “It was a very confusing period in North Korea,” Na-rae says. “It was almost like the [North Korean] government didn’t care about people going to other areas.”

And by all initial accounts, Na-rae’s mother and grandmother successfully snuck across the river into China and were presumably earning money.

But then a month passed, and they didn’t return to North Korea. Then another month, and still Na-rae had heard nothing from her mother or grandmother. And given the tightly-controlled communication system of North Korea, it wasn’t possible to make outgoing international phone calls to China or mount any type of homegrown search.

“We waited for them for six months,” Na-rae says. “But they never came back. We never even got a phone call from them.”

Na-rae recalls her family discussing the next course of action, as the food supply in North Korea continued to dwindle. Eventually Na-rae’s uncle and grandfather decided  they would sneak into China to search for her mother and grandmother—a risky family reconnaissance mission, but one of the few options that offered any hope of the whole family reuniting.

So her uncle and grandfather set out on much the same route—secretly crossing the gun-patrolled river into China, leaving Na-rae in North Korea to continue waiting.

However, the outcome was not promising. “We waited and waited, and another six months passed without any call from my uncle or grandfather either. They didn’t return to North Korea,” Na-rae says. “Now the situation was a lot worse—it had been a full year of waiting. My mother, uncle, and grandmother and grandfather were now missing; they were somewhere in China.”

As a last ditch effort to find the missing family members, Na-rae’s other aunt snuck across the river into China. And, miraculously, she made contact with her long-lost family. More miraculous still was that her aunt was able to make the secret return trip to North Korea—essentially a reverse defection—and report back to then-9-year-old Na-rae and the other family members about the situation.

“My aunt told us, ‘We have to all go to China now. It’s too dangerous for any of the other family to return to North Korea, because they have been in China for so long now.’” Indeed, by this time, North Korea was emerging from the famine, which meant the government could go back to cracking down on families that had taken advantage of the disorder by planning escapes. Defecting became more dangerous than ever, according to Na-rae, but staying in North Korea looked equally foreboding.

“I was OK with the idea of leaving because I knew my mother was already waiting for me in China,” Na-rae says.

By early 1998, Na-rae and her remaining family members in North Korea were as ready as they’d ever be to leave, but there was some strategizing to do. “I was a young child, and my younger brother was 4-years-old, and my cousin was a baby at the time—only 10-months-old. We were going to [defect] with my two other aunts, but we had to find one more person to go. There had to be three adults and three children. The adults carry the children across the river. One adult carrying two children is too dangerous, too difficult. One adult carries one child.”

One of Na-rae’s aunts convinced another uncle to join the clandestine journey, but it took some persuading. “My uncle left behind his family to join us,” Na-rae remembers. “He left behind his wife and his daughter. To this day, I don’t know why he chose to leave them, but I think maybe part of him thought he would just earn money in China and then return to his family in North Korea. But you can’t do that. It’s just too dangerous.”

On the actual night they defected, Na-rae vividly remembers the darkness and the frigid air, the lack of certainty that shrouded the event. “It was April 22 when we left North Korea, but the river was still cold,” she says. “The North Korean border army along the river separated itself every 100 kilometers. My aunt had saved a little money, so she gave it to a man who lived near the river.” The bribe was for the most basic advice, Na-rae recalls. “My aunt asked the man, ‘Which area of the river is safest? What time is safest to cross it?’”

If there was any advantage in bribing the man along the river, it was that he also happened to know, by long-time association, the North Korean soldiers who were stationed nearby. If things got tense, he could potentially talk to the soldiers and bribe them as well. In fact, it’s a subtle perk for some North Koreans who live along the border rivers—secretly earning extra income, according to Na-rae’s recollection, by providing insight to wannabe defectors. “Also the soldiers near the river were low [rank],” Na-rae says. “So they didn’t have much money or food either. But if any high [-ranking] soldier found out about the man by the river taking money, the [high-ranking] soldier would probably kill the man.” She pauses. “Or ask him for money.”

Finally stepping into the thigh-deep river while cloaked in darkness was a methodical ordeal. The river itself would not have been as daunting under different circumstances, Na-rae says. She estimates that an able-bodied person in full midday clarity could have probably waded and crossed their same spot in about 20 minutes. But the blackness of the night was heavy, and the terrain on each bank was rocky.

Surprisingly Na-rae dismisses the assertion that she must have been afraid. “I don’t remember being scared then,” she says. “My family had told me for a long time, ‘You cannot talk to your friends about this.’ And, ‘What we will do will be a secret.’ So it was like I had already been trained for that situation.”

Na-rae was not, however, blind to the magnitude of what she was doing. “If someone asked me to do it again now, I’m not sure I could,” she says. “It’s so dangerous. I have a friend here in South Korea who also came from North Korea—and he was shot in the leg by the army while crossing the river. But we had to do it. We knew cases of success—like my mother and aunt and grandparents, who would be waiting for us in China.”

But going methodically took time, and the longer everyone was wading in the open water, the greater the risk of being detected by the soldiers. “We all had to be quiet and go slowly. We didn’t know the exact route, so it took a long time to cross the river—more than three hours. Once we successfully got to China, we could see the sun starting to rise, so we knew we had to hurry.”

Even once out of the river and on solid Chinese ground, Na-rae and her family weren’t safe. Chinese guards patrol the river on China’s side and keep an eye out for defectors as well.

Wet, dirty, tired, freezing to the bone, and with nerves heightened, Na-rae and her relatives eventually saw houses in the distance. They didn’t know if the houses would be safe or not. There was no way to know. “My aunt knew three or four Chinese words, so she just chose a house and said, ‘Help me.’”

***

Whoever lived in the random house along the river in China was the last wild card of the night’s journey. It could have easily been a straight-laced Chinese citizen who would report the defectors to the proper authorities, or worse, he could have been in cahoots—possibly financially—with the Chinese police or patrolling guards and have no sympathy for a haggard bunch of North Koreans. Or he could have been armed himself. There was no way of knowing; it was a life-or-death gamble that came down to a knock on a door and the desperate plea from Na-rae’s aunt.

“I remember the Chinese man taking us inside his house,” Na-rae says. “His wife had abandoned him a year earlier, but a lot of her clothes were still in the house. So he gave us some of her clothes. He gave us food. He let us use his shower. He let us use his phone—we could finally call my mother. And he said if we ever came through his way again, to please introduce him to a nice North Korean woman.” Na-rae smiles at that memory.

There was more good fortune. The Chinese man owned a 3-wheeler taxi service, and drove Na-rae and her aunts to meet her mother and extended family: 10 people in total—finally reunited. “I was happy because I hadn’t seen them for a full year. And I felt safe. But I didn’t cry. I had been trained for that situation,” she says.

 ***

Part of why some people criticize organizations that help North Korean youth defectors has to do with handouts. Free education and college tuition, family housing, loans, living stipends (“resettlement funds”), and other awards are often given to defectors upon their arrival to South Korea. There were less than 50 North Korean defectors annually coming to South Korea in the early-1990s; but compare that to the nearly 3,000 documented defectors two years ago, and you begin to realize the sheer volume of necessary gratuity from the South Korean government. Such perks—special treatment in every sense of the word—irks and bewilders critics who deem such subsidies from the government as contrary to the basic objective: To get these defectors blending in and living normal lives like everybody else.

Their lives can’t be normal, however, at least not right away, and that’s the counter-argument to all the criticism. A North Korean who has fled to South Korea often enrolls at a multi-month “social adjustment” facility known as a hanawon. Once a stint there is completed, there’s the very real threat of being discovered by North Korean spies or sympathizers. Drastic measures to maintain secrecy or anonymity, like forging documents and changing one’s name, are sometimes done by the North Korean defectors to slide under the radar. But on a more communal scale, they often handle this in a more understated way: living extremely low-key lives and hanging out with only a close-knit group of other defectors in South Korea, a ragtag clutch that makes it difficult for an ambitious, wide-eyed kid like Na-rae to have the rambunctious, free-spirited childhood that most kids have.

“In China,” Na-rae recalls, “my family was always stressed because we didn’t speak Chinese, and we were still near the river. So my grandmother urged all of us to study Chinese because she knew that people would know we weren’t’ from China if we couldn’t speak the language.”

So began Na-rae’s arduous, self-driven process of becoming a language and cultural sponge. China was like a revelation to her—it was the first time she had seen so many lights at night, or reliable electronics—refrigerators or electric sewing machines in particular. It was also the first time she had seen so many people “wearing good clothes, eating good food, and speaking other languages.” But it was a rigorous, challenging clump of years living there—years of struggling to make ends meet and staying constantly on the move to dodge the authorities. “We lived in 40 different places in 4 years,” she says.

Eventually Na-rae and her family landed in a home near the Mongolian border. From there, they were able to take a train into Mongolia and gain refuge at the Korean embassy, and ultimately catch a flight into South Korea.

The journey was complete, at least in a geographical sense. But it was still an uphill battle. In her first year of middle school assessment exams in South Korea, Na-rae scored an abysmal 42 out of 100 because so many subjects (music, history, math) were too advanced for her. She also faced the taunts of other students: “At first, many students wouldn’t come close to me, and they’d point and say, ‘Ah, North Korea, North Korea!’”

It was only after extensive after-school tutoring that Na-rae’s scores improved, thanks greatly to organizations that aid North Koreans. She also slowly developed a network of friends, particularly other students who were ostracized. For many young North Korean defectors large gaps remain once the defection is complete. Studying academics is one thing, but many know nothing concrete about things like contraception—or really about sex, for that matter. “You don’t need to know it in North Korea,” Na-rae says. “People don’t kiss [in public], people don’t hug, don’t hold hands.” And there is uniquely 21st century knowledge like how to use the Internet or a smartphone that is often absent as well.

That’s where Na-rae found a calling. A teacher was searching for young North Korean refugees willing to travel around Seoul and lecture to other North Korean students who were struggling. The teacher asked Na-rae if she’d be interested in joining the tour.

“The North Koreans kids who have defected need real experiences—how to take the bus, how to use the ATM or bank,” Na-rae says. “They need other North Koreans to help them. They need North Koreans who understand them.”

Around the same time, in 2007, the Rainbow Youth Center, a foundation that provides integration support for North Korean youth refugees, was just getting off the ground and starting to publish pamphlets for defectors—FAQs about adjusting to South Korean culture, essentially. The Rainbow Youth Center caught wind of Na-rae and her little lecture circuit and asked if she’d help write their pamphlets. The idea blossomed, and eventually the Rainbow Youth Center was printing thicker pamphlets (“How to Use a Cell Phone,” “How to Find a Job,” “Parenting”), and then full-fledged books, all to teach the North Korean defectors about anything and everything from the reproduction to shopping and geography. It’s a practice that continues to this day, and every few months the Rainbow Youth Center holds discussion forums for defectors and anyone else who wants to get involved. The books are more than self-help guides—more along the lines of aids in the youths’ donning of entirely new functional identities, and they have been wildly popular.

And at the core of the books was what Na-rae is most enthralled by, easing other North Korean defectors into a more global worldview. “The North Korean experience, the China experience—it was all very good for me,” she says. “If I had a choice to change my life, I wouldn’t change it. The experiences helped me a lot, made me think about differences with other people, and think about how the world is very big, and that I need to study many things. And in my case, I enjoy that.”

Some defectors never seek out the Rainbow Youth Center, browse its books or grow entirely comfortable with the transition into 21st Century ultra-urban life. But that’s just more impetus for the center to persevere.

The Rainbow Youth Center is always looking for ways to broaden its outreach. Currently it operates with four main divisions—initial entry support, integration support through counseling and other services, advocacy, and research. Last year, Na-rae was the inaugural recipient of a scholarship that allowed her to attend a university in Seoul, and she has also had opportunities to visit the United States and Israel. In the previous year alone, the Rainbow Youth Center took more than 100 North Korean defectors under its wing. An extracurricular sports program is in the works, as well as a summer camp for North Korean defectors, and possibly more books to publish.

The teenagers who visit the Rainbow Youth Center now all share some of Na-rae’s challenges—language barriers and taunts at school since arriving in South Korea—despite the fact that they aren’t all North Korean defectors. Some are the ethnic-Chinese who have immigrated to Seoul. But the center caters to their needs not because they all share parallel backgrounds, but because they all could use their circumstances to industriously impact their futures. A good example of the breadth of possible self-improvement: While obtaining asylum at Mongolia’s Korean embassy, Na-rae was driven to safety by government authorities in a van. But she suddenly began to feel woozy and nauseous. It was carsickness—in fact, it was the first time she had ridden in a motorized vehicle. Her travels in North Korea had been either by foot or oxcart.

Now, years later and thanks to protection, tutoring, and scholarship, she is literally traveling the world.

***

*Not her real name.

***

Listen to John read his essay:

Rumpus original art by Liam Golden.

Related Posts:

• “I Was Very Afraid of Failing, Because I Knew I Would Be Shot”
• Jason Novak’s Lowdown on North Korea
• The Rumpus Interview with Adam Johnson
• Prepare Yourself Citizens!
• Hoping Things End Safely: The Rumpus Interview with Hyejin Kim

That’s because they support same-sex marriage, and the Supreme Court is hearing arguments today and tomorrow regarding the constitutionality of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.

Here are some links to help you stay informed:

SCOTUSblog, whose subject material you can probably surmise from its name, has a couple posts summarizing and analyzing the arguments here and here.

Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker‘s primary jurisprudence writer, offers his thoughts here.

Slate‘s William Saletan enumerates the increasingly desperate conservative arguments against gay marriage, while the Atlantic‘s Garance Franke-Ruta chronicles the history of the movement that led to this case.

Mother Jones has both a timeline of gay-marriage legislation and a collection of Justice Antonin Scalia’s homophobic remarks.

You can hear audio of the actual arguments and read a transcript here.

And, of course, no roundup would be complete without the Onion‘s take.

Related Posts:

• Multiplicity
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl meets Gay Marriage
• The Rumpus Interview with Michael Lowenthal
• The Little Tolls and Pitfalls of Modern American Racism
• Blame Game

I’ve done the math and it turns out that I’m part of the problem. That’s an awful realization. I can’t even tell you how heartbroken I am.

Since 2009, the grassroots organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has taken on the enormous task of addressing the deep-rooted and endemic sexism in the publishing world. Its primary goal is to “explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities,” and it does great work.

VIDA is best known, I think, for its blistering annual report, called simply “the Count.” The Count looks at the gender disparities in some of our better-known periodicals, and the 2012 edition is discouraging to say the least. Instead of cherry picking some convenient statistics from the Count to cite here in support of some argument, or make myself look good, I’ll simply share the numbers for the four publications they analyze and which I currently subscribe to.

In 2012:

• Harper’s reviewed 54 books by men and 11 by women (17%)
• The New Yorker reviewed 583 by men and 218 by women (27%)
• New York Review of Books reviewed 316 by men and 89 by women (22%)
• New York Times Book Review reviewed 488 by men and 237 by women (33%)

These statistics are sobering. They’re also indictments—calls for those of us who review books to look at our own habits, biases, and presumptions. Inspired by the 2012 edition of The Count, I went back and looked at my own history as a book critic, and what I found was tremendously embarrassing. I was both surprised and mortified by what I discovered.

Since 1996, I have reviewed 280 books for various publications.[1] The complete list can be found at my web site.[2] I’m ashamed to say that of those 280, only 66 were written or edited by women. That’s a dismal 23.5%.

And it gets worse, simply because I should know better.

Before doing this self-evaluation, I would have said that I’m a champion of and activist for literature by women. I’ve successfully pitched and written up radical books like Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine and From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism by Patricia Hill Collins. I graduated from a college that went co-ed shortly before I arrived and which maintains a proud, feminist tradition. I love the fact that my undergrad degree in philosophy and religion was so steeped in feminist thought, and I continue to reread (and, now, teach) essays like Linda Nochlin’s classic “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” I’ve written a fair amount about my own white, male privileges.[3] My wife’s doctoral dissertation was on women composers and their lack of representation on concert programs, for crying out loud. I’m someone who gets it—or so I thought. The glaring distinction between my (deluded, as it turns out) self-image as a progressive, pro-feminist critic and the reality of my track record is extremely upsetting.

The big question I face now is: What can I do to change this? I don’t want to be part of the problem any longer.

Again, the VIDA report raises two separate concerns: (1) the number of book reviews written by women, and (2) the number of books written by women that get reviewed. In my own writing life, I plan to address both of these. Please understand that I’m not out to tell anyone else what to do. Every critic and book-review editor and publisher has to remain true to his or her own vision.[4] My concern here is the personal responsibility I feel.

2. The Number of Book Reviews Written by Women

It would appear, on the surface, that the number of book reviews written by women is beyond my immediate control. Sure, I understand that every review I write will take precious and steadily diminishing review space away from a woman who could have contributed, but I’m not going to stop reviewing books in the hope that my assigning editors will hire more women. I wish they would hire more women, of course, but I plan to keep reviewing books too. One terrific potential consequence of the VIDA report, I hope, is that it will encourage every editor who assigns review coverage to split the review assignments equally among women and men. Were that to happen, it would present me with fewer opportunities to review books in print, which on one hand would be disappointing and financially problematic, but it would also provide me with more new voices to read, and I love the sound of that. A healthier literary community is good for everybody, even if it costs critics like me a bit of work and a few bucks.

I’ve also recently accepted the position of contributing editor at the new Philadelphia Review of Books. I don’t have a firm job description or much authority or anything like that, and it’s unpaid, but I will attempt to use that platform to assign more reviews to women writers.

3. The Number of Books Written by Women that Get Reviewed

Although I don’t review nearly as many books as I used to, this is where I can make an immediate impact.  My book-review assignments come two ways: either a book-review editor suggests a title, or I find a book that appeals to me and I pitch around a review.

When an editor does contact me about reviewing a book, I almost always say yes. It’s very rare that I turn down paying work.[5] Historically, I have had little say in what books my editors have asked me to review. The vast majority of the time, I’m asked to review books written by men, but I can certainly better communicate with my editors about my preferences and about my desire to review more books by women. I once did just that with a now-departed book review editor at the Believer, but even then, for some reason, it took months for the two of us to come up with a good assignment. It ended up being a review of Anne Carson’s Nox.[6]

When I find a book that appeals to me, I like to pitch it around to a few different book-review editors. That’s precisely how I now plan to address the gender disparity in my own reviewing record. Thanks to the wake-up call of the VIDA report, I will actively look for and pitch more reviews of books by women. It is a responsibility I’m glad to take on, even if I’m doing so a bit too far along in my career.[7] I can’t guarantee that my newspaper editors will accept more pitches for reviews of books by women, but I will certainly try harder to bring worthy titles to their attention.

4. Looking Forward

One last sticking point comes to mind, and I really don’t know what to do with this. It’s fairly obvious, or it should be, that treating a person differently because of her gender is sexist and offensive. What I’m proposing to do here in attending to authors’ genders strikes me as slightly disconcerting. I don’t want to treat books by women differently than I do books by men. Maybe that’s naïve. Something has to change, right? I have to change. Is there such thing as benign sexism? I wish our society didn’t have a need for affirmative action, but it does and will continue to do so until things improve and there’s genuine equality.

What I’ve come to realize, thanks to VIDA and the Count, is that my feminist convictions do not make up for the low number of books by women I’ve reviewed. Not yet. Good intentions are not enough. It’s people like me, people aware of the persistent sexism of our society, who need to do a better job of promoting books by women. To ignore the gender disparity in publishing is to perpetuate it. I can’t do that any longer. Instead, I will continue to champion all of the books I love in every way I can—only now I will do so with a clearer understanding of just how far we still have to go in building the literary community that we all deserve.

Related Posts:

• What VIDA Stats Mean on A Personal Level
• Props from a Fellow Funny Woman
• Don’t Worry Too Much About Goodreads, Says Steve Almond
• Rumpus Women Should Be Writing for Harper’s!
• Making VIDA Count