I have always loved romantic books. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, books like that. The stories in my collection Katy Family were inspired by romanticism, by which I mean a romantic idea of the world, a yearning for something else.
Great romance is about suffering, about unbearable pain, bursting with love for all. Romance involves great tragedy and drama. To be romantic is to desire the impossible—a one in a million chance of finding true love. Romance is unrealistic, out of this world, rare and precious, a windfall!
A lot of my romance with romantic literature comes from the British Romantic period, marked by a revolutionary desire for a different world, inspired by the French revolution, a revolution against the monarchy and the new industrialists. There is the lonely figure, Heathcliff or Frankenstein, wandering alone among the moors or snow, outside of society and laws and the circles of power. Women’s desire for the forbidden is stuffed in the hidden recesses of Gothic literature. By comparison, Jane Austen’s and even Charlotte Bronte’s 19th century aspirations toward property marriage, inheritance, and the English drawing room appear civilized and somehow less than romantic (I don’t consider them to be part of the Romantic period, but rather, the reactionary period following Romantic aspirations). Both in revolution and in literature, there is a push and pull. Rebellion and dissidence are followed by a reactionary force and violent repression of the people. For me, true romance is dissident (love is a Gypsy child!) rather than desire that is ordered by society’s laws.
When I was young, I had an aunt who read Mills & Boone romances, and she passed these on to me. In these romances, the hero was strong and tough, handsome and rude, and he said things like, this is my wife. We grow up, and we no longer like the brute, strong, silent man, but we still believe in heroes. We want a hero who can win against an unjust world. We stand with them as they suffer. That yearning for something else, a different kind of world, expands our hearts, with all that feeling!
The short story form is romantic in the sense that it offers this brief glimpse, a striving toward something signified in an end gesture. It is idealistic, innocent, and full of hope for revolution. As Shelley said, the good time will come.
Throughout history, the marauding aristocracy has torn away people from their land and community, most recently in the formation of the modern industrial nation. The Romantic as a literary form is the desire for a different possibility, where ordinary people, peasants, and workers, can have back their lives. I like stories that are inscribed by political events, by the chaos and danger of powerful structures, dealing with things as they are but yearning for things as they might be, a peek into another world. The world is bad, but a short story creates a moment of arresting beauty, moving the reader to understanding or feeling.
Sometimes I feel frustrated that fiction is inured from politics. Contemporary, living writers will often proclaim that they are not political and willingly reduce their fiction to a commodity, an item that readers will buy if they think the writer has no politics! Usually, writers express themselves in the aesthetic forms of literature, poetry, theater, and academic work without much notice or consequence for their courage, so that sharp words on paper have no edge, standing only as aesthetic beauty. But at times when these forms of expression and protest are challenged and protections that we took for granted are taken away, literature can become truly dangerous and dissident, and thereby all the more meaningful. Perhaps in these chaotic times, literature will become romantic and risky again.
The short stories in Katy Family are about a bad world, shaped by capitalist interests, with bad consequences for its characters, brimming with feeling, a desire for a different world. Here are some books that I read recently and others I read again and again, both old and new, that fill me with romanticism. They might also be called books about a very bad world.
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Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici
Silvia Federici writes about the witch trials that dragged women to the bottom of society. At one time, women used to practice medicine. They used to be involved in births. The forces that demoted and denigrated women, unleashing centuries of violence, were none other than capitalists. This is not to say that women were not oppressed before modern industrialization, but capitalism built on preexisting patriarchy in the societies on which it descended and absolutely intensified and worsened women’s condition in its relentless quest to drag peasants from their land and community to become freed proletarians for capital.
Women’s steep fall in society coincides with capitalists’ frenzy to fight back against organizing by workers, by tearing men and women apart, at times by throwing women into destitution and prostitution, and in other times and places by imposing strict codes of conduct on women to discipline them. This violence took many forms over many centuries, through colonization and imperialism across the world, from Africa to America to Asia, and goes on till this day. There is a nice reference to Shakespeare in this book, as the mother of Caliban in Twelfth Night was a witch. Paradoxically, the brutal history of how power was wrested away from women filled me with the possibility of what could be, a different world, and so much love for the strong, powerful women who fought back against the imperialists and capitalists, by taking on violence on their backs. The book is a celebration of all our predecessors, our witch ancestors.
Nadine Murshid’s nonfiction book Intimacies of Violence is based on research with thirty middle-class Bangladeshi women living in America who experienced violence in their intimate relationships. This location of violence becomes an opening for the interviewed women to discuss what they desire rather than what society desires of them. The book is romantic in that it pitches women’s desire against the violent and disciplining forces of society. The women break free of their shackles by understanding the structures that seek to hold them down. The women discuss how they were raised in their parents’ homes to behave as women, the way everyone from their mothers to neighborhood aunties governed their bodies and behaviors and dress, and how the Bangladeshi men they dated see women, behaving with possession and jealousy in their romantic relationships. Once they become part of the criminal legal system in the US as a result of their domestic abuse, they also face the violence of the US criminal legal system, immigration, and capitalist employers.
The research is collected through adda, a Bengali word for conversations, which itself is romantic. What could be more alluring than women sitting around talking about their desires, their ambitions, and reflecting on their lives? The women are living in America as part of the global labor force, brought here by the desire inspired by the American capitalist dream. Having passed through violence, the women find themselves finally liberated from the multiple forces and gazes of patriarchy, able to think about who they want to be outside of the confines of what society wants them to be. One of my favorite lines from the book is when one woman tells her mother that she is getting a divorce. Her mother wails, who will marry you now? The woman says, hopefully, no one.
Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine
In these stories, the residents of Dearborn have fallen out of the American dream. Its characters devise fantastic schemes of getting rich and harbor passionate dreams, or are haunted by their past memories of the Lebanon they left behind, forced out by Israeli invasion. In “The Actors of Dearborn,” Youssef is a census taker who interviews his Arab neighbors of East Dearborn. Youssef had big dreams of becoming an actor and had even traveled to New York to work on Broadway, but he had returned defeated. We learn that Youssef works this temporary job because he was laid off from his job at Ford. The other residents are also defeated in their dreams, interrogated by FBI agents after 9/11, harassed by ICE agents, the destruction of their home village Bint Jbael and their homeland Lebanon, and always trying hard, acting American, changing their names and planting American flags and sports logos as patriotic symbols in front of their houses. When Youssef meets an undocumented youth who wants to make it as an actor in Hollywood, a desire fed by watching Rocky and Rambo movies, he is moved by Rocky’s naivete and blithe ambition, while knowing that like him, Rocky, too, will be defeated. The failure of the auto industry, FBI agents, and ICE agents plague the residents, narrowing their present, while they continue to dream about the past.
Varieties of Exile and Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant
When I was in graduate school, Antonya Nelson introduced me to this book. Therefore, it marks an important place in my own romance with the short story and craft. In linked three stories, the “Montreal Stories,” which are all included in Varieties of Exile, two young sisters Berthe and Marie are alone with their widowed mother in a women’s world where all the men are at a distance. The pages are tense with the absence of men, and the great gulf between men’s worlds and women’s worlds. In “The Chosen Husband,” when the two sisters are old enough to be married, the mother Mme Carette is desperate to get Marie married, while Berthe works in an office and knows the behavior of men all too well. Mme Carette herself is a romantic, preserved in her childishness by widowhood, who shuts her eyes and dreams of her funeral. In these stories filled with so much longing for men, this is what a husband represents: “Mme Carette still felt cruelly the want of a husband, someone—not a daughter—to help her up the step of a streetcar, read La Presse and tell her what was in it, and lay down the law to Berthe.” When Louis Driscoll calls on Marie, every aspect of his appearance described in romantic, greedy detail, the three women are tense as they wait for him to marry her, but the prospect of Marie and domesticity frighten him away. In a twist of fate, the war in Korea starts, and he returns to marry Marie to escape being shipped to England and going to war. The men are never reliable in these stories. They die, they seem feckless, they make women cry, and they seem wholly unable to understand what women want.
My Mother’s Boyfriends by Samantha Schoech
The young women and their mothers in these stories are searching for love, but the men cannot give back such love. In the title story, a brother and sister live through the ordeals of their mother’s boyfriends and her attempts to shield her children from them. In a haunting image, the young girl has a dream in which all the men are crying to her mother not to leave, and she is among them. These are stories of women searching for love, leaving men and being left by men, bruised and getting up again, single mothers abandoned by men, and the impossible bond between children and their mothers. While the characters look desperately for romantic love, filial love burns the brightest, a young girl’s pangs for her single mother or for her brother who was abandoned like her by their father.
Romantic Comedy by James Allen Hall
I have always, always loved James Allen Hall’s poetry. His words fill me and give me language. I will often pick up a poem, read it, and then start writing. But this book is heartbreaking. There are stories of great violence, of a young boy raped, but also heartbreak in other ways, like the great love between brothers, concentrated in a single moment of childhood, seared forever in “Blackberries” when two little boys go to pick blackberries with their grandmother, the poet tries to carry his brother, and when the grandmother says to his brother “someone ought to toughen you up,” the poet curses his grandmother Goddamn you and is punished: “Suddenly I knew what I was capable of and for whom” (42). Later, the poet and his brother are picking blackberries from a ladder on a white van, “my brother calling up, high climbing/notes, his voice yet to drop, someone ought to…And I call down, Goddamn you, then we’re taking turns,/reversing the parts, relishing the tart sting on our tongues (42).” This is the most perfect moment of love in all of the poems in this book, and in any of the books listed here.
These young memories of a boy growing up, learning who he is, and learning to love himself is full of tenderness and honesty and trying to capture a moment in the past. It breaks me down and fills me with tears and love. In some poems, there is an effort to describe the pain within (“I was dolled, posed/ for every eye”), in others, there is a yearning for the love of others. “But a body wants a darkness it doesn’t face alone,” says the poet of an abused woman who returns to her husband. And here is rejection again: “I would love, he says, to see your face again, commandeered by broken orange wing. His smile is tight, crooked, like italics on paper.” Love is painful, no matter on what page: “You undress me gently. I close my eyes/and try to imagine anything/ but the corn slid like knives/ into their hardened block of field.” In this book, romantic comedy is really tragedy.
The In-Betweeners by Khem Aryal
In this book of short stories about Nepalese immigrants in America, husbands and wives are stuck together in a tense situation, trapped in America, unable to move back to their homeland Nepal. They fight, they argue, one is miserable, while the other assimilates, one thrives, the other complains. The dialogue is intimate, as if the writer is eavesdropping on the conversations, a fly on the wall. It makes me think of marriage, especially immigrant marriage, and how it’s so hard because inevitably one partner or the other isn’t doing well. Throbbing with desire about what life could have been back home and how they could have reached their potential had they remained in Nepal, the characters bask in self-indulgence, misery, and self-pity, at once comical and tragic, in these wistful, romantic stories.
Pan carries us from ancient China through Maoist revolution and industrialization to the Chinese workers who came to California to build the Transatlantic railroad and the Chinese immigrants in America to present-day America, maligned and stigmatized for COVID. Here, romance is for revolution, for the railroad workers who toiled and died, under the cruelty of the masters, and the peasants, and the factory workers in Chinese towns. In “Poems to Survive the Summer,” the poet reminds us the summer is the time of revolution, that takes us through revolutions in history, cycles of renewed hope, followed by disappointment, leading to another summer, another revolution. In “Peppered Path”, Pan describes the cruelty of using pepper spray from anti-riot vehicles against protesters, comparing this brutality of the government to an earlier time when they sprinkled pepper on a path to make it straight and firm, to make it smell good, as a goodwill. But even as the rioters run away, “another pepper tree grows/solid, shielding/up the soul/from anti-riot vehicles.” In “The Peasantry,” Pan both quotes Mao Zedong (“the people and the people alone are the motive force of world history”), but also bemoans that even the communists betrayed the peasants. In the end, the factory worker in the city, put to work to create an industrial China, and the peasant forced to give to the tax collector, realize that they must unite, “But I always fall back to thinking about you/and you will have to learn to become we:/When we finally organize ourselves,/even the masters in the city will invite us to tea.” In “On the Railways: A little Song,” the poet tries to tell the tragic song of the Chinese workers who built the Transatlantic railroad in 1885 under brutal conditions (“Our numbers dwindle. We came from different/ provinces, but die the same.”), but words fail the poet and “the rest is blurred,/ tapering along the riverbed.” In these poems, the ordinary people suffer and toil, while the masters thrive and kick and whip them, throughout history, in China and in America.
Capital, Volume I, Part VIII by Karl Marx
Part VIII of Volume I delves into the history of what Marx calls so-called primitive accumulation, a story of the birth of capitalism, a process which is renewed again and again to maintain the structure of capitalist and the proletariat. In Marx’s romantic telling, in language throbbing with lyricism (no one writes more beautifully than Marx!), capitalism began through a violent process in which peasants had to be “freed” from their land to be made available as labor for the capitalist. Before capitalism, there were serfs and slaves, but as soon as peasants were freed, capitalists swooped in and rounded up the newly freed bodies for labor. “In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course of its formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are forcibly torn from their means of subsistence and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”
This violent creation of wage labor continued through other modes after the violent expulsion of the people from land, to, in Marx’s words, the use of “Bloody legislation against the expropriated.” While it seems natural to us today that the worker is dependent on capital for his livelihood, Marx reminds us how the capitalist made sure of this reliance, in his story of “the historical genesis of capital”: “The rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state, and uses it to ‘regulate’ wages, i.e. force them into the limits suitable for making a profit, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker himself at his normal level of dependence.” This understanding of the beautiful connection of simple people with their communities, common lands, plants, and animals, and the evil nature of the masters who wrest people away from these bonds to put them to use for making profits, is what seems to imbue all of the writing that is so romantic to me, throbbing with the physical pain of those who are powerless, dreaming with shut or open eyes, looking out through frosted windows.
